Worrying Alliances

"[Russia is offering Iran] an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defence partnership."

"These fighter planes [Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets] will significantly strengthen Iran's air force relative to its regional neighbours."

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby

"Iran is now one of Russia's top military backers."

"Their sordid deals have seen the Iranian regime send hundreds of drones to Moscow which have been used to attack Ukraine's critical infrastructure and kill civilians."

"In return, Russia is offering military and technical support to the Iranian regime, which will increase the risk it poses in our partners in the Middle East and to international security."

U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly

"What we are seeing is – frustrated on the battlefield, Russia has resorted to destroying Ukraine's critical and energy infrastructure from afar, causing immense suffering to civilians as we heard just three days ago, and defying the international community's call to end its aggression."

"It is Russia that has cynically called for this meeting, alleging an illicit conspiracy of weapons transfers from Ukraine. When in fact, as others around this table have noted, it is Russia that is complicit in Iran's illegal transfer of unmanned aerial vehicles to Russia."

Richard Mills, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N.

Police officers look at collected fragments of the Russian rockets that hit Kharkiv, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Dec. 3, 2022.  AP

Russia is in the crosshairs of the Biden administration, accused of making alliances to provide advanced military assistance to Iran. Air defence systems, helicopters and fighter jets to be made available to the Islamic Republic of Iran constituting in part deepening cooperation between the two at a time when Tehran has been providing drones in support of Russia's violent conflict imposed on Ukraine. 

These declarations by the U.S. constitute part of an effort to continue to deepen Russia's global isolation in the wake of intelligence reporting that Russia and Iran were consulting on installing a drone assembly line in Russia to accommodate the Ukraine conflict's needs of Russian attacks more efficiently. In addition to which Russia was training Iranian pilots on the Bukhoi Su-35 fighter.

This dismaying but inevitable collaboration between Russia and Iran offers the U.S. an opportunity to impress on Saudi Arabia the threat contained to its own well-being after the U.S. accused Saudi Arabia of siding with Russia by moving toward production cuts by the OPEC+ cartel to benefit Russia by increasing the price of oil, thus further funding Moscow's war in Ukraine. A tangled web that also benefits Iran, Saudi Arabia's nemesis, funding the Houthis in Yemen.

Another message is getting through to U.S. Intelligence that Iran has supplied hundreds of attack drones over the summer, and is now considering the sale of hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia as well, effectively re-supplying Moscow's exhausted missile store capacity. North Korea has also become a potential source for Russia of artillery. 

There have been repeated accusations by the Kremlin that NATO allies have themselves become a party to the conflict through their provision to Ukraine of weaponry, troop training and providing military intelligence to the Ukrainian military enabling them to attack Russian forces. "Speaking about a disarming strike, [the U.S. concept of a 'preemptive' strike], maybe it's worth thinking about adopting the ideas developed by our U.S. counterparts, their ideas of ensuring their security", offered Russian President Vladimir Putin 

 

A Sukhoi Su-35 military fighter jet at the International Military-Technical Forum at Kubinka military training ground in Moscow, Russia, on Aug. 18, 2022. Pavel Pavlov/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

"If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong. It is a terrible war in Ukraine. It is also a war that can become a full-fledged war that spreads into a major war between NATO and Russia."

"We are working on that every day to avoid that."

"There is no doubt that a full-fledged war is a possibility.  [It is important to avoid a conflict] that involves more countries in Europe and becomes a full-fledged war in Europe."

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg

Betrayal of National Security

The Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Lab is the only Level 4 lab in Canada, enabling its scientists to work with highly dangerous microbes. (John Woods/The Canadian Press)

"The fact that we're a net consumer of intelligence means we need to be extremely careful in how we handle this material."

"There seems to be no reflection on any of these issues whatsoever in this demand for information."

Stephanie Carvin, professor, Carleton University Norman Paterson School of International Affairs

"The research culture seems to have taken priority over the national security culture."

"There's only so many of these labs [level-4 security laboratories equipped to handle deadly pathogens] around in t he Western world, let alone among the Five Eyes."

"So if you're going to try to infiltrate one, you're going to try to pick the weakest link. And so once again, it turns out, that Canada was the weakest link."

"China has a very active, very aggressive and extremely dangerous bioweapons program,. So all the research that's being generated here could easily be reappropriated by the Chinese authorities to advance rather nefarious causes."  
"This would also explain why you haven't charged them, because once you charge them, then eventually you have to put people on trial. And when you put people on trial, then you have to disclose the evidence that you have. So the government might quite intentionally be trying to keep this sort of relatively below the radar as much as it can."   

"This needs to be a wake-up call for Canada about how aggressive the Chinese have become at infiltrating Western institutions for their political, economic and national security benefits." 

Christian Leuprecht, professor, Royal Military College of Canada and Queen's University

When asked about the case during a daily briefing in Beijing, Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: 'China and Canada have some scientific co-operation, which is quite normal and should not be politicized.' (Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press)

 

In the Canadian House of Commons a battle royale is taking place against the federal government's complacency over permitting arms of the Chinese Communist Party access to some of Canada's most shielded technical, scientific, military, political, industrial secrets. Opposition parties in Parliament are insistent that the reason why two top-flight scientists were dismissed from their work in the nation's high security infectious disease laboratory be disclosed to them. 

A vote on Thursday to declare the Public Health Agency of Canada in contempt of Parliament was passed. It had declined to provide top-secret details relating to the two Chinese scientists being ushered out of the laboratory along with a handful of Chinese bioscience students, without explanation. A parliamentary deadlock has ensued; the Liberal government refusing to hand over documents related to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg's collaboration with Chinese military researchers.

The two scientists -- Dr.Xiangguo Qin and her husband, Keding Cheng, were fired in January for undisclosed reasons even while an RCMP investigation is underway. Tabling such sensitive information would result in a breach of national security and might interfere with an ongoing police investigation, responds the Public Health Agency of Canada under whose aegis the laboratory operates.

 

Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, a prominent virologist at the forefront of an ongoing RCMP investigation, is seen in an undated screengrab at the Winnipeg-based National Microbiology Laboratory. She was fired from her post in January, but officials won't say why. (CBC)

 

Experts for the most part share agreement that the Winnipeg high-security laboratory breach represents proof=positive of an overly relaxed attitude in Canadian government circles and academia with respect to actions by Beijing to secure foreign intellectual property in the region of biological or technological research. China is well known to infiltrate foreign powers using a wide range of avenues, among them its Thousands Talents Program, where leading scientists of Chinese origin and engineers working overseas are reminded of their obligations to China.

Security authorities in the United States arrested a number of researchers with connection to the Thousand Talents under the charge the program's ultimate goal is to take possession of sensitive intellectual property, then made use of by the Chinese government and its military. No fewer than seven scientists at the Winnipeg facility have conducted experiments and co-authored studies on infectious diseases in coordination with Chinese military researchers.

 

Qiu, a medical doctor from Tianjin, China, came to Canada in 1996 for graduate studies. (CBC)

 

Chinese scientist Fethu Yan from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences of the People's Liberation Army operated out of the Winnipeg laboratory for a time, occasionally listed as an affiliate of the facility. Countless research agreements have been signed by Canadian academics with Chinese researchers, accompanied most frequently with sizable funding arrangements. If there's one thing scientists working on projects respond to, it is operations funding.

 

The Winnipeg laboratory transferred Ebola and Henipah viruses to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, under the direction of then-chief scientist at the lab, Dr.Xiangguo Qin; a transfer held to have been unauthorized. Several months later, the two scientists were ushered out of the Winnipeg laboratory by Canadian authorities. Mystery upon mystery, lacking explanation on the basis of their release's potential betrayal of national security. 

"Why did our security procedures not identify that this was not a good idea, that these individuals, given their background, should not be given security clearances?"   

"No news is good news, is how we often refer to it." 

"There are important security issues — and not just for us, but for all the other countries that we partner with as well — because if there's information that's going from us to a hostile foreign state, that is something that has significant ramifications."

Scott Newark, former Alberta crown prosecutor, executive officer, Canadian Police Association, policy adviser to the Ontario and federal governments

CBC News previously received hundreds of pages of documents through an access-to-information request, detailing a shipment of Ebola and Henipah viruses sent from the Winnipeg lab to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. (Karen Pauls/CBC News)

The Evil Men Do . . .

"'Himmler was extremely interested in the development of a cheap and rapid sterilization method which could be used against enemies of Germany, such as the Russians, Poles, and Jews . . . . The capacity for work of the sterilized persons could be exploited by Germany, while the danger of propagation would be eliminated', wrote Dr. Brack, Chief Administrative Officer in the Chancellery of the Fuehrer of he N.S.D.A.P."
Letter from Brack to Himmler:
"Among the 10 million Jews in Europe there are, I figure, at least 2 - 3 million men and women who are fit enough to work. Considering the extraordinary difficulties the labor problem present us with, I hold the view that those 2 - 3 million should be specially selected and preserved. This can, however, only be done if at the same time they are rendered incapable of propagating . . . . Castration by X-ray, however, is not only relatively cheap, but can also be performed on many thousands in the shortest time. I think that at this time it is already irrelevant whether the people in question become aware of having been castrated after some weeks or months once they feel the effects. Should you, Reich Fuehrer, decide to choose this way in the interests of the preservation of labor, then Reichsleiter Bouhler would be prepared to place all physicians and other personnel needed for this work at your disposal."
Human Behaviour in the Concentration Camp, Dr. Elie A. Cohen, c.1952

Prisoners break up clay for the brickworks at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, in 1939.

Photograph from Akg-Images

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Westfaelische Nachrchten newspapers quoted German officials stating that Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who had been deported last year to Germany died while in an elderly care home in the town of Ahlen, Germany. Mr. Jakiw was an ethnic Ukrainian born in part of Poland now Ukraine. He entered the United States under the Displaced Persons Act, in 1949. He became an American citizen in 1957.

A 1949 photograph of Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who had been living in New York. Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Justice via AP

According to the U.S. Justice Department, Jakiw Palij served in a  unit that "committed atrocities against Polish civilians and others" and again, in the notorious SS Streibel Battalion, "a unit whose function was to round up and guard thousands of Polish civilian forced labourers". Most of those Polish civilians were part of Poland's pre-war three-million Jewish population. There weren't enough German troops stated in the area at the time to carry out the required work.

The occupying Nazi power found enthusiastic support among ethnic Ukrainian men more than happy to serve in the capacity of a special military unit to round up slave labour; they became, in fact, part of the SS machinery of military personnel specializing in solving Europe's Jewish 'problem'. Needless to say Mr. Palij did not declare his wartime activities when he applied to enter the U.S. in 1948.

"I would never have received my visa if I told the truth. Everyone lied", he told the investigators who first came knocking on his Queens-area door in 1993. Citizenship can be revoked as a result of false or incomplete declarations on visa applications. He had informed immigration officials his work during the war was in a wood shop and a farm in Nazi-occupied Poland; another farm in Germany and in an upholstery factory there.

Well surely, there is a modicum of truth in there; the crematoria produced fertilizer for agricultural fields after the bones of the dead had been burned to ashes; soap too was derived from the ashes of the gassed Jewish 'scum'. There were some Jews whose epidermis was flayed and cured and lamp shades made of the quite unique product. There may have been some Nazi elites who might delight at possession of a chair or two upholstered in human hide.

Former Nazi guard Jakiw Palij seen at his home in Queens, New York City. (Screen capture: YouTube)

The U.S. Justice Department, however, stated that the man had played an essential role in the Nazi program to exterminate Europe's Jews. His true work was as an armed guard at the Trawniki training camp, southeast of Lublin in German-occupied Poland. He had, in fact, served at Trawniki in 1943, the year six thousand camp prisoners and tens of thousands of others held in occupied Poland were rounded up for slaughter.

This man represents the last Nazi facing deportation from the United States. Although his past had been revealed years ago, for 25 years no move was made to deport him irrespective of political pressure and protests taking place outside his New York home. "It would have been upsetting to many Americans if he had died in the U.S. in what many viewed as a comfortable escape", stated U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.

Ambassador Grenell had lobbied Germany to take Mr. Paljj. He credited U.S. President Donald Trump with finalizing the August 2018 deportation of this old Nazi, taken from his Queens home on a stretcher, and forthwith placed on a plane to Germany. Germany did not prosecute him, placing him in a nursing home for the last months of his life.

Though he was most helpful to the Nazi regime in their hugely successful bid to exterminate the entirety of Europe's Jews, he was himself given the opportunity to live a complete and satisfying life in a country unaware of his past. And when his past was revealed, content to let matters lie. Then came the final push to have him die elsewhere. He was 95 years of age at death.

Ravensbrueck, Germany, Female prisoners performing forced labor

Activist Says Historical Black Struggle ‘Hijacked’ After ‘Black Lives Matter’ Activists Endorse BDS

August 19, 2015 

Author:

Shiryn Ghermezian

Tags:

African American civil rights BDS movement Israel Chloe Valdary civil rights activists

Over 1,000 activists, artists, scholars, students and organizations signed the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

An African-American pro-Israel activist on Wednesday blasted a group of 1,000 civil rights activists who sought to connect the “Palestinian struggle” to the plight of blacks in the U.S., with a statement endorsing the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“Quite frankly, it is a shame that the BDS movement has hijacked the historical black struggle in an attempt to build solidarity with a blatantly antisemitic campaign that seeks to strip Jews of their rights to their homeland,” Chloe Valdary told The Algemeiner. “That one would protest police brutality against a minority on the one hand and promote the disenfranchisement of another historical minority on the other — namely the Jews — is philosophically inconsistent and morally bankrupt.”

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The group of black activists, scholars, artists and students, some tied with the Black Lives Matter movement published their statement on Tuesday offering a “wholehearted” endorsement of “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel” and proclaiming their “solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and commitment to the liberation of Palestine’s land and people.”

Linking their cause with that of the Palestinians, the activists said, “We continue to see connections between the situation of Palestinians and Black people. Israel’s widespread use of detention and imprisonment against Palestinians evokes the mass incarceration of Black people in the U.S., including the political imprisonment of our own revolutionaries.”

The statement also accused Israel of racism in its treatment of Palestinians and claimed that the Jewish state is guilty of mistreating its African population.

Signatories included political activist Angela Davis; philosopher Cornel West; journalist Rosa Clemente; death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal; rapper Talib Kweli; Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors; and 39 affiliated organizations.

Valdary, currently a Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, expressed dismay at the activists for falling prey to such anti-Israel sentiments.

“That the youth would fall into the trap of parroting a blatant colonialist narrative wherein the ancient and now reborn state of Israel is referred to ‘Palestine’ is particularly upsetting given our people’s tradition of championing the rights of indigenous people,” she said

The Political Nature of Today's Middle East Studies

by Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Online
August 10, 2015

This article was commissioned by Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
^{Originally published under the title, "Modern Middle East Studies vs. Scholarship."}

Edward Said's lifelong journey from boarding school in Mount Hermon, Massachusetts, to Columbia University takes about three-and-a-half hours, depending on traffic.

It would be a mistake to say Middle East studies have been corrupted. For the program's very purpose has been to serve as a corrupting agent. Specifically, it puts the essence of study — the objective pursuit of knowledge — in disrepute.

Here, of course, I am referring to the modern incarnation of Middle East studies: an amalgam of leftist and Islamist political dogma that masquerades as an academic discipline. By contrast, the actual study of Middle Eastern history, like the intimately related study of Islamic civilization, is a venerable and vital pursuit — and is still pursued as such by, to take the best example, ASMEA, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Alas, in our hyper-politicized society, the traditional notion of study seems quaint: a vestige of a bygone time when the designations "Orientalist" and "Islamist" referred to subject-matter expertise, not political activism, much less radicalism.

Caricature of real study as engine of colonialism paved the way for a reconstruction of "study" as agitation to empower have-nots.

Yet, for Edward Said, the seminal figure in modern Middle East studies, the object of the game was to slander knowledge itself. Joshua Muravchik nailed it in a 2013 profile of the renowned academic. Said's animating theory held that "knowledge" was the key that enabled the West to dominate Orientals: The point of pursuing knowledge about "the languages, culture, history, and sociology of societies of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent," Said elaborated, was to gain more control over the "subject races" by making "their management easy and profitable." With real study caricatured as the engine of colonial exploitation, the way was paved for a competing construction of "study" — political agitation to empower the have-nots in the struggle against the haves.

Said was a fitting pioneer for such a fraud. To begin with, he was a professor not of Middle East studies but of comparative literature. Moreover, the personal history he touted to paper over his want of credentials was sheer fiction: Far from what he purported to be (a Palestinian victim exiled by Jews from his Jerusalem home at age twelve), Said was actually a child of privilege, raised in Cairo and educated in top British and American schools. His Palestinian tie of note was membership in the PLO's governing council. Like Rashid Khalidi — his protégé, who was later awarded the chair in Modern Arab Studies that Columbia University named in Said's honor — Said was long a reliable apologist of Yassir Arafat, the indefatigable terrorist who infused Palestinian identity with a Soviet-backed Arab nationalism.

To thrive in an Islamic culture, it was not only useful but necessary for Palestinian militancy to accommodate the Islamist sense of divine injunction to wage jihad. From its roots, then, modern Middle East studies is a political movement aligning leftism and Islamism under the guise of an academic discipline. It is not an objective quest for learning guided by a rich corpus of history and culture; it is a project to impose its pieties as incontestable truth — and to discredit dispassionate analysis in order to achieve that end.

Where the leftist frames Western reverence for reason as imperialism, the Islamist attacks it on theological grounds.

The embrace of Islamism usefully advances this project because Islamist ideology similarly stigmatizes the pursuit of knowledge. Where the leftist frames the West's reverence for reason as imperialism, the Islamist attacks it on theological grounds.

Sharia, they maintain, is the complete and perfect societal framework and legal code, the path to human life lived in conformity with Allah's design. Thus, what the West calls "reason" or "the objective pursuit of knowledge" is merely a rationalization for supplanting Allah's design with the corrupting preferences of Western civilization.

We see how this teaching plays out in practice. Muslim countries that supplement sharia with other legislation add the caveat that no man-made law may contradict Islamic principles. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation — a group of Islamic governments that form a large bloc in the United Nations — even found it necessary in 1990 to promulgate a Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, because Islamists could not accept the Universal Declaration of Human Rights spearheaded by non-Muslim governments after World War II.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the world's most influential Islamist organization, refers to this enterprise as "the Islamicization of knowledge," the weaving of historical events and cultural developments into Islamist narratives that confirm sharia-supremacist tenets. The "Islamicization of knowledge" is the express and unapologetic mandate of the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), the Virginia-based think tank established by the Brotherhood in 1981.

There are two pertinent observations to be made about the IIIT. First, it has provided an enthusiastic endorsement of Reliance of the Traveller, the English translation of Umdat al-Salik, a classic Arabic sharia manual. The publisher found this seal of approval sufficiently significant to be included in the manual's preface, along with an endorsement from scholars at the ancient al-Azhar University in Cairo.

The manual is an eye-opener. In addition to detailing sharia's gruesome hudud penalties (e.g., scourging and death for such offenses as extramarital or homosexual relations), it provides instruction on Islam's brutally enforced proscriptions against blasphemy and apostasy. These are salient to our consideration: They include prohibitions not only against renunciation and ridicule of Islam but even against objectively true statements that contradict sharia, promote other belief systems, or might otherwise sow discord in the Islamic community.

The Islamicization of knowledge is possible only if the objective pursuit of knowledge is not permitted to compete.

Obviously, the animating purpose of these principles is to discourage severely the robust exchange of ideas, and even more the scholarly examination of Islamic doctrine and culture. The Islamicization of knowledge is possible only if the objective pursuit of knowledge is not permitted to compete.

That brings us to the second noteworthy observation about the IIIT: It has longstanding ties to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Several of these were traced by Cinnamon Stillwell in a 2014 American Thinker essay.

This alliance, the sponsorship by the IIIT of Middle East studies programs throughout North America, the collaborations between the IIIT and MESA scholars — these are easy to understand. Modern Middle East studies is a counter-scholarship enterprise that subverts truth to the ends of leftist and Islamist politics. To be clear, it is not an alternative interpretation of reality competing in the marketplace of ideas; it is an anti-Western program that is oblivious to reality and seeks to shut down the marketplace.

We do ourselves and the search for truth great harm by indulging the fiction that anti-American power politics is credible American scholarship.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.