Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.
CIA operative Donald Rickard admitted to role in capture of African hero
On August 5, 1962, Nelson Mandela was apprehended by South African authorities while driving with Cecil Williams, a white Communist theater director, from Durban to Johannesburg.
At the time, Mandela, a leader of the military wing of the anti-Apartheid African National Congress (ANC), was a fugitive from South Africa’s Apartheid regime.
After his arrest, Mandela was tried for treason and served 27 years at the infamous Robben Island prison, before being freed and becoming South Africa’s first Black president after the fall of the Apartheid regime in 1994.
Details have since emerged indicating that the South African police who arrested Mandela had been tipped off about his whereabouts by the CIA.
August 1962 was during the height of the Cold War—Mandela’s capture occurred only a few weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis—and the American intelligence community believed that Mandela and the ANC were secret allies of the Soviets—which indeed they were.
The U.S. government was also intent on keeping South Africa open to U.S. corporations—the U.S. signed a military cooperation agreement with South Africa, an important source of uranium and other strategic minerals—and did not like the left-wing character of the ANC and the prospect of it destabilizing the country.
This past February, Richard Stengel wrote in Time magazine about his quest to uncover the truth about Mandela’s arrest.
Stengel noted that, in 1986, while Mandela was still in prison, when the U.S. Congress was contemplating putting anti-Apartheid sanctions on South Africa, the Johannesburg Star printed an un-bylined news story that said, according to a “retired senior police officer,” the South African police had been tipped off to Mandela’s whereabouts by an American diplomat at the U.S. consulate in Durban who was “the CIA operative for that region.”
In 1963, the diplomat, according to the Star, had revealed his role while drunk at a party at the Durban apartment of “Mad” Mike Hoare, a well-known Anglo-Irish mercenary.
Four years after the Star article, at the time of Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 when he was about to visit the U.S. and get a hero’s welcome, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a piece reporting that a “retired [American] intelligence official” said that, within hours of Mandela’s arrest, a “senior CIA operative” named Paul Eckel walked into his office in Washington and said, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.”
The article further quoted a former South African intelligence official named Gerard Ludi as saying the CIA had a paid informant in the ANC Durban branch who told the local case officer where Mandela would be.
Then, in 2016, a long-retired CIA officer named Donald Rickard, then 88 years old, gave an interview to British film director John Irvin in which he said he had informed the South African police about Mandela.
Speaking to Irvin for his dramatized documentary, Mandela’s Gun, Rickard confirmed that he had been operating under cover as a State Department vice-consul in Durban.
He described the city as a “cauldron” of anti-Apartheid activity and that the ANC was riling up the city’s substantial Indian community.
Rickard stated further that “Mandela was going to come down and incite the Indians and I found when he was coming down and how he was coming, and he came in a black limousine with a guy sitting in the back as the passenger and he was the driver. That’s where I was involved and that’s where Mandela was caught.”
When I was a professor at Bucknell University from 2006 to 2009, my office was next to Donald’s nephew, a popular English professor who had been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement who had told me about his Uncle and Mandela.
Reached for this article, he said he could not add anything more to what was reported by Stengel in Time magazine.
A 2018 biography of mercenary Mike Hoare quotes him confirming Donald Rickard’s story.
Rickard was personally unrepentant about assisting in Mandela’s capture, saying:
“Mandela was completely under the control of the Soviet Union. He was a toy of Moscow. He could have incited a war in South Africa. The United [States] would have to get involved, grudgingly, and things could have gone to hell…The Soviet Union would have done anything to get its hands on the mineral chest—anything—and Khrushchev said: ‘When we get it we’ll dictate the terms of surrender for the West.’ We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it.”
Donald Rickard died two weeks after his confession. His only regret was that he had been indiscrete. Rickard said “the biggest mistake of my life” was boasting about it at Mike Hoare’s party. “I was never promoted again after I came back from South Africa. They were embarrassed that I embarrassed them.”
Richard Stengel has recently reviewed declassified documents, which point to the U.S. government’s concern about Mandela being a Communist organizer, and the CIA’s role in tracking him.
Stengel filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to see if they would confirm any details surrounding Mandela’s capture, which they refused to do.
Nevertheless, the evidence seems clear from Rickard’s testimony and other revelations that the CIA was behind the capture and long-term imprisonment of one of the 20th century’s greatest historical figures.
Armstrong begins this lecture by discussing the Islamic Golden Age, in which Islamic scholars made major discoveries and innovations in science, math, medicine, astronomy, art, poetry and architecture. At a time when most of European society was a backwater, interaction with the Islamic world significantly advanced European knowledge of math and medicine.
Europeans owe their numbering system (with Arabic numerals replacing Roman numerals), the concept of zero (which derives from Hindu culture), algebra, trigonometry and calculus to their interactions with Muslim scholars.
Islamic scholars also revived the philosophical teachings of Aristotle, which had been lost to European society. In medicine, they also revived the teachings of Galen and other Greek physicians, as well as performing the first surgical treatment of breast cancer and the first thyroidectomies.
The first European medical school, founded in Italy in the 9th century, was based on the precepts of the Islamic physician Avicenna.
Shortly after Muslim warriors defeated most of the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, it began splitting into rival factions: the Fatimids (mainly associated with Shi’ite Islam), the Umayeds and the Abbasid (both mainly associated with Sunni Islam). The Umayeds were were largely responsible for the conquest of Spain, The Abbasid, who conquered Iraq, moved the capitol of the Islamic caliphate from Mecca to Baghdad in the 8th century. In the 9th century, they founded the first Islamic House of Wisdom. The latter employed numerous Jews and Christians, as well as Arabs, in its translation centers because they could read Hebrew and Greek. There were also major centers of learning in Cordova (on the Iberian peninsula).
In 1171 the Kurdish Sunni Salahuddin, who would retake Jerusalem from the Christians in 1187, overthrew the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt, establishing the Ayyubid Dynasty (subsequently recognized and allied with the Abbasid Caliphate).
During the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, the Mongols burned all the books in the House of Wisdom, slaughtered the scholars and destroyed the city’s advanced irrigation and public water supply. Viewing the destruction of Baghdad as a punishment from God, leading Islamic scholars adopted increasingly rigid religious beliefs, replacing schools devoted to scientific inquire to those focusing on religious study (Madrasa).
In 1212, the Islamic armies in Iberia (who were mainly Berber converts from North Africa) were defeated by a coalition of rival kings: Sancho VII of Navarre, Peter II of Aragon and Alfonso II of Portugal and driven out of northern Iberia to southern Spain.
Film can be watched free with a library card on Kanopy.
Danny Casolaro’s Death in August 1991 Was Ruled a Suicide But Overwhelming Evidence Indicates That He Was Murdered—Likely by Rogue Elements of the CIA in Collaboration with the Kuwaiti Royal Family
When a housekeeper at the Martinsburg, West Virginia, Sheraton Hotel entered Room 517 on the morning of August 10, 1991, she found journalist Danny Casolaro of Fairfax, Virginia, lying dead in a tub of bloody water.
Casolaro’s wrists were slashed twelve times with one of the cuts being so deep that it severed a tendon. Within 24 hours, Casolaro’s body was embalmed—without authorization from his family, which was only notified of his death two days afterwards.
The death was ruled a suicide, which his family knew to be untrue.
This cabal included the major players in the Iran-Contra scandal involving illegal arms smuggling to counter-revolutionaries (Contras) in Nicaragua.
Their criminal activity extended into drug trafficking, money laundering, and acts of international terrorism, carried out in collaboration with the Gambino and other crime families.
Thirty-two years after Casolaro’s death, his son Trey is calling for the reopening of the case and reclassification of his death as a murder.
Trey told CovertAction Magazine that he was 22 years old and living in Colorado when his father was killed.
He said that the day before his father was found dead, he made a collect call to his dad who told him about the research that he had been undertaking. He told Trey that he was meeting a guy from Iraq in Martinsburg, and also meeting with someone who worked for the Defense Department.
Unfortunately, that was the last time that Trey would speak to his father.
The forensic evidence points very clearly to Danny being murdered. The razor-blade cuts were too deep on both arms for a suicide, particularly for a man squeamish about blood.
There was one bruise on Casolaro’s arm and another on his head that were never accounted for and signs that an assailant had tried to asphyxiate him.
Three of Casolaro’s fingernails were missing, and a housekeeper saw two bloody towels, which indicated that blood had been cleaned up by someone else.
According to confidential sources Casolaro had been found with Ethyl Alcohol, Absolute, in his system that had been injected into his spine to “deaden the nerves below his head.”
An unnamed Sheraton Hotel maid told the Martinsburg police she saw a man leaving Casolaro’s room the morning of his death.
Down to the sports clothes the maid said he was wearing, the man resembled Major Joseph Cuellar, a CIA and Special Forces operative who worked at Business Risks International, a private security company functioning as a CIA front.
In the days before his death, Casolaro had received death threats and been warned by intelligence professionals that he was in over his head and that his life was in danger. Strangers in military uniforms appeared at his funeral. Casolaro had told his brother, “if anything happens to me, don’t believe it was an accident.”
After his death Danny’s car was found empty at the hotel car park when it had previously been stacked with papers from his investigation. A briefcase, bag and two envelopes in his possession were missing.
The briefcase was filled with incriminating, highly classified documents delivered to Casolaro in Martinsburg the day before his death by William Turner, a former Hughes Aircraft employee. The briefcase has never been accounted for.
Turner stated the documents included “computer printouts and other documents [Casolaro had] received from un-named sources and from Alan Standorf [a National Secrutiy Agency (NSA) employee who was found beaten to death in the back seat of his car in a parking lot at Washington National Airport in January 1991] and documents relating to the sale of modified PROMIS [Prosecution Management Information System] software…to Canada, Australia and Israel.”
The PROMIS software had been developed by a former NSA staffer named Bill Hamilton and his wife Nancy to help law enforcement agencies collect money and to track criminals.
The Hamiltons’ company, Institute for Law and Social Research (INSLAW), was forced into bankruptcy and seized in the early 1980s by officials in the Justice Department working under then-Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Meese provided the PROMIS software to the CIA and foreign intelligence services so they could track wire transfers from banks, move black funds more easily, and enhance surveillance operations.
The software modifications were undertaken by Michael Riconosciuto who was working for Wackenhut, a CIA-front corporation at the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Riverside County, California, from where arms were smuggled to the Nicaraguan Contras, the right-wing group mobilized by the CIA to fight the left-wing Sandinistas, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979.
Riconosciuto testified in U.S. federal court that the PROMIS software was modified for covert SWIFT Banking and it was installed at Transaction Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Citibank. Riconosciuto also testified that the modified PROMIS software was renamed the “LEAN” software and was sold to Australia.
Further modifications were undertaken by Hadron, Inc,, owned by Dr. Earl Brian, a veteran of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and former California Secretary of Health Care Services, who was involved in the “October Surprise” where the Reagan campaign paid the Iranians to delay the release of American hostages during the 1980 election to make incumbent Jimmy Carter look bad and help Reagan win the White House.
Investigative authors James Ridgeway and Doug Vaughan revealed that the mysterious Robert Booth Nichols, known by the FBI and the Australian Federal Police to be associated with the CIA and the Gambino crime family, had returned from Kuwait to assist Casolaro with his investigations into the PROMIS software and monitor what he was uncovering.
Nichols owned Meridian International Logistics and had negotiated the sale of his G77 machine guns to the Kuwait government. Nichols told Casolaro that he was assisting the Kuwaiti royal family to recover gold bullion and art artifacts that had been stolen by Saddam Hussein’s forces when invading Kuwait.
A month before Casolaro’s death, Casolaro met CIA operative Theodore Shackley’s girlfriend at a party—obviously not by coincidence—and caught her going through his research files when she went to his home.
Theodore Shackley was the former CIA station chief in Saigon who coordinated the Phoenix Program, which resulted in the murders of 40,000 suspected Vietcong insurgents. Shackley had also run drugs in Laos with General Vang Pao and coordinated anti-Castro terrorist operations in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs landing.
When Shackley was fired from the CIA during the Carter administration, George H. W. Bush helped him set up private security companies, among them TGS International and Research Associates International, that received lucrative military and intelligence contracts with the Kuwaiti royal family, a key U.S. proxy in the Middle East which played a crucial role in the Iran-Contra affair.
Casolaro had in his briefcase copies of two checks—for $1 million and $4 million—made out by members of the Kuwaiti royal family to arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar through the Monte Carlo branch of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) for the purchase of TOW missiles from Iran.
The TOW missiles purchased by the Kuwaiti royal family through BCCI were sent to Iran and the profits were used to purchase arms that were sent to Nicaraguan Contras in violation of the 1984 Boland Amendment forbidding U.S. military support to the Contras who had carried out terrorist acts inside Nicaragua.
Theodore Shackley at the time was negotiating the deal with Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar along with other rogue CIA officers known as the “secret team” who helped coordinate the Iran-Contra drugs and arms smuggling operations. Members of the secret team included Oliver North, Richard Armitage, Michael Ledeen and Richard Secord, the latter of whom was in contact with Danny Casolaro.
The funds from the checks for the TOW missiles were transferred by Robert Sensi, who worked for the secret owner of BCCI and former Kuwait Airways Chairman Faisal Saud Al-Fulaij, and worked directly also for CIA Director William Casey as a CIA asset.
Sensi also worked for William Wilson, U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, and Robert Gray, Chairman of Hill & Knowlton representing the Kuwait Government and the Nicaraguan Contras.[1]
Casolaro’s last girlfriend, Wendy Golden, was invited by the Crown Prince of Kuwait while Casolaro was in Martinsburg to spend one week at the Watergate Hotel, where Robert Sensi worked in the Kuwait Embassy.
Golden was never interviewed by the Martinsburg police or FBI, which reaffirmed the suicide ruling based on the spurious reasoning that Casolaro had brought a shoelace with him to Martinsburg—supposedly to hang himself—while leaving a suicide note that Trey believes was fabricated.
At the time of Casolaro’s death, Senator John Kerry (D-MA), Chair of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was heading an investigation into BCCI, which laundered funds for the CIA and organized crime networks.
Kerry was demanding that attorney Robert Altman provide copies of all BCCI payments made to Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar through the Monte Carlo branch, the same checks and transaction records Casolaro had in his possession, which would have opened his investigation and put powerful people in jail.
[…]
According to William Turner, Robert A. Altman, a BCCI attorney who had power of attorney to represent Faisal Saud Al-Fulaij, had reluctantly agreed to meet with Casolaro in Martinsburg because Casolaro was threatening to give the checks to Senator Kerry’s investigation along with two folders of documents exposing a Pentagon fraud involving Hughes Aircraft.
[…]
Casolaro was hot on the trail of illegal sales of chemical weapons to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by members of the “secret team” who helped their friends make billions from construction and oil contracts after the first Persian Gulf War, for which the Kuwaitis had helped lobby.
A lot of what we know now about Casolaro’s research into what he called “The Octopus,” or CIA-organized crime networks, has resulted from a 21-year investigation carried out by Osborne, who was science adviser to the Australian Federal Liberal Party in 1995.
[…]
Osborne has developed a webpage dedicated to the memory of Casolaro and a podcast series that offers a treasure trove of information on Casolaro and the corruption in the CIA and government that Casolaro was helping to expose.
[…]
“Casolaro was a wonderful investigator who was linking all the major scandals of the 1980s—PROMIS software, Iran-Contra, BCCI, October Surprise, Nugan Hand Bank, Iraq-Gate, Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and others—together,” Osborne said. “He was ahead of all other journalists and died for it. He deserves to be honored and to receive a prestigious journalistic prize.”
In an astonishing statement at a press briefing Wednesday, National Security Department spokesperson John Kirby admitted the US is running out of interest in weaponizing Ukraine for the long term. Since Ukraine is on US life support to continue fighting their lost cause to recapture Crimea, Donbas and join NATO, it’s clear ‘game over’ for Ukraine looms.
“I think in the immediate term, right now, we can continue to support Ukraine – with the authorities in the appropriations we have. But, you know, we’re … certainly running out of runway.”
Kirby then shifted from the runway metaphor to one even starker. “The US administration had the means to support Ukraine in the near term. But you don’t want to be trying to bake in long-term support when you’re at the end of the rope,” And on the Ukraine funding, we’re coming near to the end of the rope. I mean, today we announced $200 million, and we’ll keep that aid going as long as we can, but it’s not going to be indefinite”
Is Ukraine President Zelensky listening to Kirby’s ominous warning? If he had an iota of understanding of Ukraine’s rapidly deteriorating plight, he’d immediately partner with responsible countries such as Turkey to initiate negotiations with Russia to end the war. He did that 18 months ago, Marcy 31-April 1, 2022, inking a tentative deal with Russia to end the war without losing any territory in Donbas, albeit giving Donbas regional autonomy under Ukraine sovereignty. The agreement would also have ended Ukraine’s self-destructive NATO aspirations.
To sum up: The US provoked the war by championing Ukraine NATO membership and weaponizing their civil war that killed thousands in Donbas. When Russia invaded to prevent both, the US sabotaged every effort to end the war quickly and peaceably, prolonging it with $113 billion in weapons and other aid. Result? Hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians with no chance of victory.
It’s not just the US that is “certainly running out of runway” and “coming near to the end of the rope.” The US is moving on to enabling and supplying the ongoing destruction of Gaza. No more runway and no more rope are much more appropriate to the former comedian staring in ‘Tragedy in Ukraine.’
But Cairo won’t let Palestinians enter from its Rafah crossing.
Israel’s defensive operation in Gaza will be difficult and bloody, as the military tries to weed Hamas terrorists out of a densely populated urban environment. Lest American or European politicians or commentators suffer any confusion about who is ultimately responsible for what comes next, here are a few facts:
Israel’s military on Friday warned roughly 1.1 million civilians to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza strip. The hope is to minimize civilian casualties as much as possible. This is the opposite of Hamas’s strategy in its invasion last weekend, when terrorists staged a surprise assault with an explicit goal of killing or abducting as many Israeli civilians as possible, including women and children.
If Hamas cared about Palestinian civilians, it would encourage them to leave Gaza. But instead it is demanding that they remain. The terror group intends to use its own people and the hostages it abducted from Israel as human shields. Their hope is that either Israeli concern about causing collateral damage or global opprobrium will force Israel to scale back its counter-invasion.
Egypt is the only place to which Gaza’s civilians can flee for now. Yet Cairo insists on maintaining its strict quota for entries from Gaza via the Rafah crossing—with only 800 able to leave on Monday, and the crossing reportedly closed in recent days.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi bears no warm feelings toward Hamas, which is allied with the Muslim Brotherhood that tried to impose an Islamist regime in his country not too long ago. He’s concerned that Hamas terrorists might slip across the border into Egypt with a tide of civilians.
One way to reduce that possibility would be to house refugees in camps while they’re vetted for Hamas ties. The rest of the world should support a United Nations effort to help. But taking on this practical and financial burden is a risk Mr. Sisi may not want to take two months before Egypt holds what pass for elections there.
The timing is bad for Mr. Sisi, but unless he budges Egypt will become partly responsible for what could become a terrible humanitarian crisis—and that’s if Israel succeeds in rooting out Hamas. If Hamas’s strategy succeeds and Israel is forced by international pressure to scale back its defensive operations, Egypt will have to live with an entrenched and emboldened Hamas on the other side of the Rafah crossing.
That also is a good reason for Egypt’s international partners to encourage Mr. Sisi to open the crossing. The U.S. supplies billions of dollars in aid to Cairo each year. It’s reasonable for Washington to expect such a large aid recipient to help break Hamas’s stranglehold over Gaza’s civilians when doing so is in Egypt’s, Israel’s and America’s interests.
As for the situation in Gaza, leaders in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere owe their public honesty about whatever happens in the coming days—including who bears responsibility for civilian casualties.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Friday offered a template for her peers:
“Hamas brings nothing but suffering and death to the people—in Israel and in Gaza. It is Hamas’s perfidious strategy to use the civilian population as a human shield. Terrorism’s cynical plan must not be allowed to take hold. Civilians need safe spaces where they can find protection and have their essential needs met.”
Scott Horton, the editorial director of the Antiwar website, has found further evidence that Hamas is an Israeli-controlled terror organization. Horton points to a recent post at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The article is locked up behind a paywall. However, it is posted on the Archive.org website.
During Netanyahu’s fraud trial, writes Gidi Wewitz, the prime minister is quoted as declaring,
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” (Emphasis added.)
In addition, Bibi admitted (and this is well-documented; see below) that Israel is in the business of undermining its neighbors.
“We have neighbors,” he said, “who are our bitter enemies … I send them messages all the time … these days, right now … I mislead them, destabilize them, mock them, and them hit them over the head.” The suspect then continued his lecture: “It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them … Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”
Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, based on the personal diary of the second prime minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett, reveals how Israel “never seriously believed in an Arab threat” and engaged in “aggressive policies and continuous acts of harassment” against its Arab neighbors.
Israel’s policy “in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion.”
Specifically, Israel has engaged in “Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza,”
These operations had a double purpose: to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization… New territorial conquests through war… Political as well as military efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims to Palestine… (and) Subversive operations designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, is quoted in the text as stating,
“I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men—all of which brought grave disasters and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security crisis.”
In 2002, United Press International correspondent Richard Sale wrote “Analysis: Hamas history tied to Israel” after a suicide bombing on a crowded Jerusalem city bus, killing 19 people.
Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years… One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said… Hamas [was] being funded as a “counterweight” to the PLO.
According to Hassane Zerouky, writing for L’Humanité and Global Research, the Israeli military authority in charge of the civilian administration of the West Bank and Gaza allowed Palestinian Islamic groups to receive funding from abroad.
“The military authority was convinced that these activities would weaken both the PLO and the leftist organizations in Gaza.” At the end of 1992, there were six hundred mosques in Gaza. Thanks to Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad (Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks) , the Islamists were allowed to reinforce their presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, the members of Fatah (Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine) and the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression.
It would be naive to believe Israel’s Mossad, Shin Bet (Shabak), and Aman (Military Intelligence Directorate) decided Hamas was no longer a valuable asset and thus discontinued its intelligence operations.
Recall the operating motto of Mossad: “For by deception thou shalt do war.”
Finally, to reiterate, one needs to look no further than the remarks of PM Netanyahu to fully comprehend the Zionist plan for ethnically cleansing the Palestinians remains the primary objective of the Israeli apartheid state.
The moment of truth has come, according to Putin, and the global elite’s plans for a New World Order are receding in front of our eyes while a new multipolar world, in which traditional cultures retain their heritage within their own borders, is rising like a phoenix.
Translations of Putin’s speeches at the Valdai debates in Sochi show he is no longer supports The WEF ‘World Coup d’Etat for the Rich ‘led by geriatric dictator Klaus Schwab.
Western “fact checkers” deny that Putin said in so many words that World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab is a “globalist terrorist” who is “holding humanity to ransom”but in any case the meaning of his arguments are crystal clear.
Schwab, author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution and COVID-19: The Great Reset, has controlled the WEF since its founding in 1971. Putin’s move against his ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy is clearly supported by Russian diplomatic and media sources, and feeds into worldwide concerns at western sanctions, monetary blackmail and the Covid scandal.
“82 year 0ld Klaus has been at the helm of the WEF for 52 years but like Biden he suffers lapses and confusion”.
“Klaus has surrounded himself with such a group of nobodies at the top that it’s hard to see how any of them could be taken seriously,he will die without his boots on and the WEF may fall apart” according to insider whistleblowers (Sputnik)..
“He is completely unaccountable to anyone inside and outside the organisation.”
Indeed, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is one of the names reportedly tipped as Schwab’s eventual replacement.
But lets get back to what Putin said in his revolutionary speech.
Putin Outlines Six Civilizational Principles For the Post-NWO World
During his Valdai speech, Putin outlined six principles Russia wants to adhere to and offers other nations to join it. Via Sputnik:
“First, we want to live in an open, interconnected world, in which no one will ever try to erect artificial barriers to people’s communication, their creative realization, and prosperity. There must be a barrier-free environment,” Putin said.
The second principle is the diversity of the world, which should not only be preserved, but should also be the foundation of universal development.
The third principle, according to the Russian head of state, is maximum representativeness: “No one has the right or can rule the world for others or on behalf of others. The world of the future is a world of collective decisions,” the president emphasized.
Putin Warns 'Globalist Terrorist' #KlausSchwab His 'Days Are Numbered' As people all over the world wake up to the strange cult leader who has groomed young people using guile and corruption and inveigled them into power. World Economic Forum is losing https://t.co/EaGO7XGeSV
Fourth is universal security and lasting peace that takes into account the interests of great states and small countries equally. To achieve this, it is important to free international relations from the bloc mentality and the dark legacy of the colonial era and Cold War, according to Putin.
The fifth principle is justice for all: “The era of exploitation of anyone – I have already said this twice – is a thing of the past. Countries and peoples are clearly aware of their interests and capabilities and are ready to rely on themselves, and this multiplies their strength. Everyone must be provided with access to the benefits of modern development,” Putin emphasized.
The sixth principle is equality: no one should be forced to obey those who are richer or more powerful at the cost of their own development and national interests, according to the Russian president.
“The ‘civilizational model’ referred to in Putin’s speech seems anchored on ‘principles’ – such as non-colonial relations; non-patronizing attitudes; respectful of diversity rooted in the diverse traditions – that will require a huge work to generate new shared international norms,” according to Paolo Raffone, a strategic analyst and director of the CIPI Foundation in Brussels.
“The Western ‘rules-based liberal international order’ is unilateral, and it could be imposed in a specific time in history leveraging on the power and prominence of a small group of colonial powers that after the liberal model crisis and civil war (1914-1945) has been inherited by a distant but super-powerful country (US).
“In a nutshell, I can say that the ‘civilizational model’ approach probably aims at structuring a shared world ‘software,’ while the ‘liberal rules-based order’ has been aiming at building an imposed ‘hardware’ defended by ‘rules’ serving the financial and military hegemony.”
I approached this lecture very curious to learn who, exactly, was reading European literature 300 years before the printing press, when all manuscripts had to be copied repeatedly by hand (by monks?). My question on exactly how Snorri Sturluson and Geoffrey of Monmouth managed to copy and widely distribute enough manuscripts to become “popular” was never answered.
Armstrong divides 13th century literature into three trends:
religious writings
Scandinavian epics
Arthurian romances
Religious writings
The specific religious writing she describes in this lecture is the Ancrene Wisse, the rules laid down by church authorities governing the behavior of Anchorites, the religious women who voluntarily self-incarcerated themselves in tiny cells attached to cathedrals. Many had no doors and were barely big enough to lie down in.
Specific rules set down for Anchorites were
No meat or fat unless the woman was ill
No fasting on bread and water without permission
Minimal use of windows – no talking or conducting business through them
No holding possessions for other people
A cat was allowed for companionship, provided the Anchorite didn’t fixate on it or let it bother other people.
Scandinavian Epics
Armstrong describes how Norse raiders known as Vikings sailed away from Scandinavia targeting French and English monasteries (for their gold and jewels) and sailing up inland rivers as far east as Russia. In the 9th century a group of Vikings kidnapped brides from Ireland and settled Iceland, where they spent the long winters nights retelling early Norse sagas. By the 10th century, Iceland had a body of laws that would be repeated every year in what became the world’s first Parliament.
The advent of Christianity to Scandinavia in the 9th century introduced written language to the region.
Snorri Sturluson, historian, poet and politician, was the first popular Icelandic writer. He specialized in recording oral sagas about historical and mythological Norse kings.
Arthurian Romances
Although the Welsh king who became known as King Arthur lived in the 5th century, he only became popularly known in the 12th century, when a Catholic cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed to have discovered a (likely fictitious) ancient Welsh manuscript which he translated into Anglo-Norman.
The first tales of King Arthur appeared in English in the 13th century.
The French writer Chretien de Troyes was even more important in popularizing the Arthurian legend (1215-1235), when tales of King Arthur appeared in prose (rather than verse) for the first time. It was de Troyes who introduced Lancelot, the Grail, Guinevere, Camelot and Arthur’s illegitimate son Mordred to the legend.
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The Most Revolutionary Act 