English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For January 08/2022
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

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http://eliasbejjaninews.com/aaaanewsfor2021/english.january08.22.htm

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Bible Quotations For today
This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Matthew 03/13-17: "Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Question: "What are the different names of God, and what do they mean?"
GotQuestions.org?/January 07/2022
Answer: Each of the many names of God describes a different aspect of His many-faceted character. Here are some of the better-known names of God in the Bible:
EL, ELOAH [el, el-oh-ah]: God "mighty, strong, prominent" (Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 139:19) – etymologically, El appears to mean “power” and “might” (Genesis 31:29). El is associated with other qualities, such as integrity (Numbers 23:19), jealousy (Deuteronomy 5:9), and compassion (Nehemiah 9:31), but the root idea of “might” remains.
ELOHIM [el-oh-heem]: God “Creator, Mighty and Strong” (Genesis 17:7; Jeremiah 31:33) – the plural form of Eloah, which accommodates the doctrine of the Trinity. From the Bible’s first sentence, the superlative nature of God’s power is evident as God (Elohim) speaks the world into existence (Genesis 1:1).
EL SHADDAI [el-shah-dahy]: “God Almighty,” “The Mighty One of Jacob” (Genesis 49:24; Psalm 132:2,5) – speaks to God’s ultimate power over all.
ADONAI [ˌædɒˈnaɪ; ah-daw-nahy]: “Lord” (Genesis 15:2; Judges 6:15) – used in place of YHWH, which was thought by the Jews to be too sacred to be uttered by sinful men. In the Old Testament, YHWH is more often used in God’s dealings with His people, while Adonai is used more when He deals with the Gentiles.
YHWH / YAHWEH / JEHOVAH [yah-way / ji-hoh-veh]: “LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4; Daniel 9:14) – strictly speaking, the only proper name for God. Translated in English Bibles “LORD” (all capitals) to distinguish it from Adonai, “Lord.” The revelation of the name is given to Moses “I Am who I Am” (Exodus 3:14). This name specifies an immediacy, a presence. Yahweh is present, accessible, near to those who call on Him for deliverance (Psalm 107:13), forgiveness (Psalm 25:11) and guidance (Psalm 31:3).
YAHWEH-JIREH [yah-way-ji-reh]: "The Lord Will Provide" (Genesis 22:14) – the name memorialized by Abraham when God provided the ram to be sacrificed in place of Isaac.
YAHWEH-RAPHA [yah-way-raw-faw]: "The Lord Who Heals" (Exodus 15:26) – “I am Jehovah who heals you” both in body and soul. In body, by preserving from and curing diseases, and in soul, by pardoning iniquities.
YAHWEH-NISSI [yah-way-nee-see]: "The Lord Our Banner" (Exodus 17:15), where banner is understood to be a rallying place. This name commemorates the desert victory over the Amalekites in Exodus 17.
YAHWEH-M'KADDESH [yah-way-meh-kad-esh]: "The Lord Who Sanctifies, Makes Holy" (Leviticus 20:8; Ezekiel 37:28) – God makes it clear that He alone, not the law, can cleanse His people and make them holy.
YAHWEH-SHALOM [yah-way-shah-lohm]: "The Lord Our Peace" (Judges 6:24) – the name given by Gideon to the altar he built after the Angel of the Lord assured him he would not die as he thought he would after seeing Him.
YAHWEH-ELOHIM [yah-way-el-oh-him]: "LORD God" (Genesis 2:4; Psalm 59:5) – a combination of God’s unique name YHWH and the generic “Lord,” signifying that He is the Lord of Lords.
YAHWEH-TSIDKENU [yah-way-tzid-kay-noo]: "The Lord Our Righteousness” (Jeremiah 33:16) – As with YHWH-M’Kaddesh, it is God alone who provides righteousness (from the Hebrew word tsidkenu) to man, ultimately in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, who became sin for us “that we might become the Righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
YAHWEH-ROHI [yah-way-roh-hee]: "The Lord Our Shepherd" (Psalm 23:1) – After David pondered his relationship as a shepherd to his sheep, he realized that was exactly the relationship God had with him, and so he declares, “Yahweh-Rohi is my Shepherd. I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1).
YAHWEH-SHAMMAH [yah-way-sham-mahw]: "The Lord Is There” (Ezekiel 48:35) – the name ascribed to Jerusalem and the Temple there, indicating that the once-departed glory of the Lord (Ezekiel 8—11) had returned (Ezekiel 44:1-4).
YAHWEH-SABAOTH [yah-way-sah-bah-ohth]: "The Lord of Hosts" (Isaiah 1:24; Psalm 46:7) – Hosts means “hordes,” both of angels and of men. He is Lord of the host of heaven and of the inhabitants of the earth, of Jews and Gentiles, of rich and poor, master and slave. The name is expressive of the majesty, power, and authority of God and shows that He is able to accomplish what He determines to do.
EL ELYON [el-el-yohn]: “Most High" (Deuteronomy 26:19) – derived from the Hebrew root for “go up” or “ascend,” so the implication is of that which is the very highest. El Elyon denotes exaltation and speaks of absolute right to lordship.
EL ROI [el-roh-ee]: "God of Seeing" (Genesis 16:13) – the name ascribed to God by Hagar, alone and desperate in the wilderness after being driven out by Sarah (Genesis 16:1-14). When Hagar met the Angel of the Lord, she realized she had seen God Himself in a theophany. She also realized that El Roi saw her in her distress and testified that He is a God who lives and sees all.
EL-OLAM [el-oh-lahm]: "Everlasting God" (Psalm 90:1-3) – God’s nature is without beginning or end, free from all constraints of time, and He contains within Himself the very cause of time itself. “From everlasting to everlasting, You are God.”
EL-GIBHOR [el-ghee-bohr]: “Mighty God” (Isaiah 9:6) – the name describing the Messiah, Christ Jesus, in this prophetic portion of Isaiah. As a powerful and mighty warrior, the Messiah, the Mighty God, will accomplish the destruction of God’s enemies and rule with a rod of iron (Revelation 19:15).

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 07-08/2022
Lebanon’s General Security Head Faces Lawsuit in Washington
Lebanese Hezbollah 'threatens Arab security,' says Saudi envoy
Corona - Health Ministry: 7,974 new Corona infections, 19 deaths
Aoun Meets Miqati over National Dialogue Proposal
President Aoun receives PM Mikati as part of preparatory consultations for National Dialogue Conference
President Aoun meets French Senator, receives copy of French Senate President's speech
Hariri informs Aoun he will not partake in national dialogue session
Mikati discusses WB projects in Lebanon with Kumar Jha, meets French Ambassador
Starting over/Nicholas Frakes/Now Lebanon/January 07/2022

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 07-08/2022
Canadian Human Rights Activist Firas Al-Najim At Vigil For Qasem Soleimani Outside U.S. Consulate In Toronto: We Will Set Out To Defend Islam In The Martyrdom-Seeking Style Of Karbala, At The Behest Of Khamenei, Sistani; Death To America! Down, Down Biden!/MEMRI/January/January 07/2022
US, Israel Reaffirm Pressure on Iran to Stop ‘Nuclear Enrichment’
Iran Displays Missiles Amid Nuclear Talks
Canada, Other Nations Vow Action Against Iran over Downed Jet
France Sees Progress in Iran Nuclear Talks, but Time Pressing
Assad Calls for Expanding Iran-Led ‘Axis of Resistance’
Dutch Government Ends Funding for Palestinian NGO over Links to PFLP
Biden Taps Kurilla to Become Top US Commander for Mideast
UN Security Council to Meet Monday on N.Korean Missile Launch
Kazakhstan Leader: Constitutional Order Restored amid Unrest
Japan Extends US Military Support amid China, N.Korea 'Challenges'
Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood's first Black movie star, dies at 94
Canada/Statement on protests in Kazakhstan
Government of Canada honours victims on the second National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Air Disasters

Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 07-08/2022
The Imponderables of a Reconstructed Political Order in the Middle East/Charles Elias Chartouni /January 07/2022
Four Mideast trend lines to watch in 2022/Jonathan Spyer/Jerusalem Post/January 07/2022
Exposing the Lie of Israel Apartheid/Richard Kemp/Gatestone Institute/January 07/2022
Syria’s Children 2022/Akram Bunni/Asharq Al-Awsat/January, 07/2022
World Order: Back to the Future/Amir Taheri/Asharq Al-Awsat/January, 07/2022
‘Putin Doctrine’ Becomes Clear in Ukraine and Kazakhstan/Hal Brands/Bloomberg/January, 07/2022

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 07-08/2022
Lebanon’s General Security Head Faces Lawsuit in Washington
Major Washington - Muath Alamri//Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
The family of Amer Fakhoury, who had worked with the South Lebanon Army (SLA) during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, is now suing Lebanon and its General Directorate of General Security before a US district court in Washington. According to Fakhoury’s grieving relatives, “high-ranking” officials in the Lebanese intelligence were involved in his arrest and torture two years ago, which subsequently led to his death. Fakhoury was a US citizen and a former resident of New Hampshire.
His family accused the Lebanese government of arresting Fakhoury in September 2019 in Lebanon while he was on a family visit and said that he was subjected to “brutal treatment” in prison at the hands of the Lebanese General Security. In a statement, the lawyer for the US-based family, Robert Tolchin, confirmed that the Fakhourys were suing Iran in a US federal court.
 The family accuses Iranian officials and Tehran of using their arm in Lebanon, the terrorist Hezbollah group, which has a firm grip on the country’s political system, of orchestrating the order by which Lebanese intelligence detained and tortured Fakhoury in 2019. “The Iranians were hoping to pressure the Trump Administration to trade the captive American for a Hezbollah operative, Kassim Tajideen, a Lebanese national who was imprisoned in the US for his role in financing Hezbollah terrorist activities around the world,” a statement from Fakhoury’s family and lawyer said on Wednesday.
Fakhoury was a member of the Israeli-backed SLA in the 1970s and 1980s. When the Israeli army, which had occupied southern Lebanon since 1982, decided to withdraw in 2000, many members of the SLA feared for their lives, including Fakhoury, who made the decision to flee to the United States.
He did not return to Lebanon for over two decades.
According to the lawsuit, which was reviewed by Asharq Al-Awsat, after Fakhoury was arrested in Lebanon and tortured by General Security agents in Beirut, he developed lymphoma and was not treated by his Lebanese captors. He was eventually released in a dramatic US military rescue operation in Beirut and returned to the US in 2020. He died of cancer in August that year. Tolchin notes that although it would not have been possible to sue the Lebanese government because it enjoys sovereign immunity, the family can sue the government of Iran. This is because Iran’s activities fall under an exception in US law, which allows US citizens to file civil claims against regimes the US designates as “state sponsors of terrorism.”While Lebanon enjoys sovereign immunity, making it illegal to be named as a defendant in US courts, a move by the General Security head Abbas Ibrahim may have upended the privilege.
On December 12, Ibrahim filed a motion to strike his name and his agency from the lawsuit against Iran. The fact that he filed the motion on behalf of General Security, which is a state institution, has allowed Fakhoury’s family to pursue him and Lebanon legally. Tolchin voiced his shock over the Lebanese government’s decision to intervene in the family’s case against Iran and said that the move allows for a significant opportunity to expose Ibrahim’s relationship with Hezbollah.
Asharq Al-Awsat contacted the Lebanese embassy in Washington to comment on this issue but received no response.
For her part, Fakhoury’s daughter, Zoya, accused the Lebanese General Security institution of threatening her family for shedding light on her father’s case in the media. “Since our father’s death, we have received threats for talking about the torture and injustice our father was subjected to,” she told Asharq Al-Awsat, adding that the lawsuit against Lebanon and Ibrahim was the first step towards achieving justice for her late father. “Through this lawsuit, we shed light on human rights violations in Lebanon and the great impact of (Hezbollah) on the country,” she noted. Fakhoury, according to the lawsuit, met with Lebanese President Michel Aoun during a visit to Boston before traveling and being tortured in Lebanon in 2019. He was also in contact with a member of Aoun’s presidential office.

Lebanese Hezbollah 'threatens Arab security,' says Saudi envoy
MEM/January 07/2022
Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Lebanon accused Hezbollah of threatening Arab national security, Anadolu News Agency reports. Speaking to the Saudi Okaz newspaper on Thursday, Walid Bukhari said the Lebanese group's "activities and behaviour constitute a threat to the Arab national security." "The insistence of the terrorist Hezbollah to impose its control over the will of the (Lebanese) state and its constitutional institutions disrupt peace and security in Lebanon," Bukhari added. He underlined the need to stop Hezbollah's hegemony over the Lebanese state and to end its possession of arms which it uses outside the scope of the State. Hezbollah has yet to comment on the Saudi envoy's remarks. On Monday, Hezbollah Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, attacked Saudi Arabia's monarch and accused the Kingdom of exporting and spreading "Islamic extremist ideology." "The terrorist is the one who sent thousands of Saudis to conduct suicide operations in Iraq and Syria, and it's you," Nasrallah said, referring to King Salman bin Abdul Aziz. Nasrallah's comments came in response to comments by King Salman, who also described Hezbollah as a "terrorist" group and called for an end to its control of Lebanon. For his part, Lebanese Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, distanced his government from Nasrallah's remarks and said they did not reflect the Lebanese government's official position, nor that of a broad part of the Lebanese population.

Corona - Health Ministry: 7,974 new Corona infections, 19 deaths
NNA/January 07/2022
In its daily report on the COVID-19 developments, the Ministry of Public Health announced on Friday the registration of 7,974 new infections with the Corona virus, thus raising the cumulative number of confirmed cases to-date to 761,853.
The report added that 19 deaths were recorded during the past 24 hours.

Aoun Meets Miqati over National Dialogue Proposal
Naharnet/January 07/2022
President Michel Aoun held talks Friday afternoon in Baabda with Prime Minister Najib Miqati. Speaking after the talks, Miqati said Aoun requested the meeting to discuss his call for holding a national dialogue conference.
“I informed him of my opinion and the discussions will be continued later,” the premier added. In a speech on December 27, the President had proposed “urgent” national dialogue over a host of key issues, mainly "broad administrative and financial decentralization, a defense strategy to protect Lebanon, and a financial and economic recovery plan that would include the necessary reforms and a fair distribution of losses."

President Aoun receives PM Mikati as part of preparatory consultations for National Dialogue Conference
NNA/January 07/2022
As part of the consultations initiated by the President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, with heads of the parliamentary blocs in preparation for the national dialogue conference, President Aoun received Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, this afternoon at Baabda Palace. The President discussed the invitation to dialogue to discuss a number of basic issues which he referred to in his last speech, and what could be raised of other issues that fall within the framework of the national consensus required at this critical stage.
After the meeting, PM Mikati told reporters:
“Within the framework of the President's invitation for national dialogue, His Excellency called me and asked me to meet together to discuss this issue. I gave my opinion, which I would like to keep with His Excellency, and deliberations are ongoing”. -- Presidency Press Office

President Aoun meets French Senator, receives copy of French Senate President's speech
NNA/January 07/2022
President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, met French Senator, Ronan Le Gilt, and French Advisor Abroad for Lebanon and Syria, Lucas Lamah, today at Baabda Palace. The French Senator conveyed the greetings of the President of the French Senate, Gerard Larcher, and his warm wishes for the beginning of the new year, in addition to his constant keenness to strengthen friendship bonds between Lebanon and France. The President of the French Senate also hoped for an internal Lebanese-Lebanese dialogue to address the challenges of sovereignty.
Statement:
After the meeting, Senator Le Gilt made the following statement:
“Today, as the French Senator who represents the French residing outside France, I had the honor to meet His Excellency President Michel Aoun, and this is a cause of great pride for me, because Lebanon wears a unique and exemplary character in relation to the relations that France can establish with other countries.
All our work comes from here, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate in general, and what I do in particular within the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Defense and Military Forces, consistently emphasizes that Lebanon has a unique, distinctive and important position in our interests.
In addition, I am a member of the Senate, and I represent the French residing outside France, that is, in various parts of the world. In Lebanon, in particular, there are about twenty thousand French who constitute a very important and strong community. The French-Lebanese relations are personal and individual, and for this reason I think that meeting with His Excellency the President is of great importance to the French Senate. I handed President Aoun a copy of the speech delivered by the President of the Senate, Gerard Larcher, during the month of November, in which he hoped to hold a Lebanese-Lebanese meeting to discuss the challenges of sovereignty”.
Questions & Answers:
In response to a question about the content of President Larcher’s speech, he replied: “You know the extent of President Larcher’s attachment to Lebanon, and the depth of his love for this country. Throughout his life, and in any position in which he worked, he focused his interests in order for the French-Lebanese relations to be deep, special and lively. I am thankful to the President for reminding me of this, especially in terms of the depth of his relations with President Larcher, especially since he lived part of his life in France, which he knows amazingly, which we also discussed”.
Asked about the importance of the current election year that France is going through, which will culminate in the election of a new President, and whether the result of French interest will witness a temporary decline for this reason, and what about the post-election period, Le Gilt replied: “France will decide in April its fate for the coming years, through the presidential elections. What I can tell you about the French Republican Party to which I belong is, our candidate for this election, Mrs. Valerie Pecresse, also worked, in turn, to strengthen the friendship between France and Lebanon, in a lively way, as Minister and also as President of the Ile-de-France region. She was elected President of the French Republic, and I can assure you that the strong ties between France and Lebanon will strengthen Mrs. Pecresse, and with her there will be no doubt about the depth of French-Lebanese relations in the future”.
Regarding the possibility of Mrs. Pecressevisiting, as a candidate, to Lebanon, according to the tradition of presidential candidates, he answered: “I am not in the position to specifically answer this question, but as soon as information is available on the subject, it will be known”.
Dr. Yammine:
The President met Lawyer, Dr. Adel Yammine and his wife Nadine.
Dr. Yammine presented his new book, Sharing the Lebanese Constitutional System”, to President Aoun. For his part, the President congratulated Yammine on the content of his book, and the efforts he made to achieve it, considering that it would constitute a reference for researchers and those in public affairs.
New Year Congratulations:
President Aoun received a New Year-Greeting card from Spanish King, Philippe VI. -- Presidency Press Office

Hariri informs Aoun he will not partake in national dialogue session
NNA/January 07/2022
Former Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, contacted by phone President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, after the call received by the Center House from the presidential palace regarding President Aoun’s invitation to a national dialogue conference. In this connection, Hariri apologized for not partaking in the national dialogue session, “because any dialogue at this level must take place after the parliamentary elections,” according to Hariri’s Press office.

Mikati discusses WB projects in Lebanon with Kumar Jha, meets French Ambassador
NNA/January 07/2022
Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, on Friday welcomed at the Grand Serail Saroj Kumar Jha, the World Bank’s Regional Director of the Mashreq Department (Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Iran), with whom he discussed the World Bank’s projects in Lebanon. “We’ve followed up on the registering process of the social protection program’s beneficiaries, which has witnessed huge progress,” the WB’s Kumar Jha said. “We’ve agreed to speed up all remaining steps, so as to start transferring funds to the families mostly in need as soon as possible,” he added. “We’ve also discussed reforms in the electricity sector, and the other pressing reforms that the government must adopt before the World Bank finances the electricity sector. The meeting was generally good,” Kumar Jha concluded. Mikati separately met with French Ambassador to Lebanon, Anne Grillo, with whom he discussed the most recent developments in Lebanon and the region.

Starting over
Nicholas Frakes/Now Lebanon/January 07/2022
Lebanese who emigrated to Turkey amid the ongoing economic crisis recount their experiences and struggles of starting a new life in a new country as they continue to try to navigate the challenges posed by leaving.
People sit near the shore of the bosphorus strait near Karakoy port on December 6, 2021 in Istanbul. Photo: Ozan Kose, AFP.
Soha Fawaz says she often lies in bed trying to sleep, her thoughts moving through her head at a lightning-fast pace, forcing her to stay awake.
The 30-year-old NGO worker had moved to Gaziantep, a city in southern Turkey near the Syrian border, a little less than a month ago and was still trying her best to adjust to life in Turkey.
She did not speak the language. She did not have an apartment of her own. She was even still finding her favorite path to walk to work every day.
Still, she did not regret her decision to move to Turkey after she finished her Master’s program in Crete, Greece. It was a better choice than returning to her native Lebanon. “I miss [my family] a lot but I don’t miss Lebanon because when I returned during summer, I felt like I didn’t belong to that place,” Fawaz told NOW. “[My family] lives on a street very close to Hamra and one time I returned by walking and it was at night and I was so afraid because there was no electricity. There was nothing.”Just like Fawaz, many Lebanese left their collapsing home country to find a more secure place to live, despite the inevitable struggle that comes with starting over in a new country.
Searching for stability
Lebanon is no stranger when it comes to emigration. For years, Lebanese who feel like there are few opportunities for them at home have looked abroad to start a new life, chased out by civil wars, sectarian strife and constant economic instability. Lebanon has a domestic population of around 6.8 million, although exact numbers are hard to produce as Lebanon has not held an official census since 1932, the Lebanese diaspora vastly outnumbers the total Lebanese in Lebanon, with an estimated 16 million living outside of their home country.
Since the start of Lebanon’s economic crisis in October 2019, the number of Lebanese leaving their country increased dramatically. In 2o21 alone, around an estimated 78,000 Lebanese left to seek stable lives abroad. According to Beirut-based Information International consultancy firm, almost 200,000 Lebanese have emigrated since 2018. Many Lebanese who hold a second passport or who are working on their postgraduate degrees have been able to leave for European countries or the US. But those who only hold the Lebanese nationality have few choices left.
Many chose to move to Turkey or travel between Istanbul and Beirut because they do not need a visa to enter the country and the flight is only one hour and a half. Turkey also makes it easier than other states for Lebanese citizens to obtain a short-term residency permit which costs between $130-$160.
According to the Turkish Directorate General for Migration Management official statistics released in December 2021, Lebanese are not among the top 10 nationalities that sought and were granted residency permits in Turkey. But the numbers of residencies issued by Turkish authorities were significant. Turkey only returned 7 Lebanese citizens to their country last year.
Ali Hamdar, 38, from Sidon, a city south of Beirut, moved to Istanbul in November 2021 with his wife and two young children after working for several years as a salesperson. “There is nothing good in Lebanon [at this point],” he explained. “I would prefer a European country because it would be better for sure. But they will never let me into these countries.”
After Fawaz finished her degree in Greece, she could only find work in Lebanon or Turkey, so she chose Turkey because it felt more stable.
“I didn’t stop applying for [work with] NGOs abroad other than applying in Lebanon because I didn’t want to come back and work there,” Fawaz said.
The hurdles of relocating
One of the biggest shocks for Fawaz and Hamdar has been their lack of ability to communicate with people in Turkey. While Turkish citizens might study English, it is not widely spoken. The vast majority of the population speak very basic to no English. “In Greece, we used to speak in English so it was okay. Even at my university. A lot of young people know English,” Fawaz stated. “[In Turkey], young people or teenagers, it is difficult for them to speak [English].”
Fawaz says she has had to rely on Google Translate to communicate with people. However, since Gaziantep is by the Syrian border, Arabic is more commonly spoken than in other parts of the country, which allows her to communicate with more people than Hamdar who lives in Istanbul.
Hamdar says he speaks four languages, but Turkish is not one of them. He recently started taking courses so that he can learn the language.
The hardest part of moving for the two Lebanese has been finding a place to live. Upon their initial move to Turkey, they both lived in hotels, forcing them to spend more money. “I spent $8,000 since I came because I didn’t know anything,” Hamdar recalled. “I faced many scammers who made me lose a lot of money. Here you can face a scammer with anything, even if you want to rent a flat.”Eventually, Hamdar was able to find an apartment for him and his family.
I faced many scammers who made me lose a lot of money. Here you can face a scammer with anything, even if you want to rent a flat.
Fawaz, though, is still trying to find a place to live. She stayed in a hotel for about a week and, during that time, she went to social media in the hopes that someone would be able to help her find an apartment.
She got lucky, finding a Lebanese man also living in Gaziantep who introduced her to another Lebanese woman who insisted that she move in with her for the time being so that she could save some money instead of spending it on a hotel.
“She told me that after one week of staying in the hotel that I was moving out from there because I’m paying [a lot] and it was costly for me and until I could find an apartment, I could stay with her,” Fawaz said. “Now, I’m still staying at her place and the anxiety and my stress levels have dropped by like 80 percent because I don’t have to pay since I’m just staying with her. She’s supporting me a lot and she’s helping me whenever we go out such as where to buy and where not to.”Her new friends have also told her that she needs to find an apartment nearby so that they were in reach if she ever needed help.
Hamdar was eventually able to find a job working 10 hours a day at a cafe where he makes 4,000 Turkish lira a month ($290 at the current exchange rate), while his wife is looking for work online. However, this is far less than the around $1,000 that he needs to make to ensure that his family can live comfortably, forcing him to use the money that he had saved up.
But he remains hopeful and added that he is waiting on the Turkish authorities to issue him a residency permit which, from what he was told, should only take around another month. His children are currently at home as it was too late for them to register for school, but he plans on doing this upon the next enrollment as soon as they receive the residency permit.
“I will never regret that I took the decision to leave Lebanon,” Hamdar said. “It was a choice between bad and worse.”While they might have left Lebanon, in some cases the trauma and anxiety that they experienced while living in Lebanon followed them.
Gone but not forgotten
When Fawaz first moved to Turkey, the country was in the midst of its own economic crisis, caused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s economic policies, with the Turkish lira going from just over six lira to $1 to nearly 17 in the span of a month. I think that one of the challenges from Lebanon and living in Lebanon is that you are always anxious about everything. You move your anxiety with you even after you move to another country. Even if it’s super safe. For the Lebanese who had moved to Turkey in order to escape the financial meltdown in Lebanon, this was an all too familiar scenario.
“I tried to ask locals and people who have lived here more than me about the situation. Is this going to escalate where things get worse,” Fawaz stated. “The economy here is not stable but, now, I’m pretty sure that they won’t reach the situation in Lebanon. I hope not.”
Although the economic situation in Turkey has somewhat stabilized, the fact that she went from one economic crisis to another terrified Fawaz, who feared that she would have to look for yet another country to move to.
This was not the first time that her anxiety was triggered since moving to Turkey.
She was having trouble falling asleep.
“Whenever I try to sleep, I feel like my brain is still active,” she said. “It’s like these moments when you sleep but you are still awake and you need to rush things as if you are not settling down and as if you are not stable. I think that one of the challenges from Lebanon and living in Lebanon is that you are always anxious about everything. You move your anxiety with you even after you move to another country. Even if it’s super safe.”
Fawaz continues to worry about her parents who are still in Lebanon, and hopes that they will also decide to move, even though she knows deep down that they will never leave.
“I just wish that my family could leave also, but, of course, they won’t,” she stated. “Right now, I have all of my cousins outside of the country. Two of them left now. I left. Another one left one month ago. We are leaving. Only our families, like my mom and dad, are staying and it’s frustrating for them after all of these years. Their children are leaving this country.”
*Nicholas Frakes is a multimedia journalist with @NOW_leb. He tweets @nicfrakesjourno.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 07-08/2022
Canadian Human Rights Activist Firas Al-Najim At Vigil For Qasem Soleimani Outside U.S. Consulate In Toronto: We Will Set Out To Defend Islam In The Martyrdom-Seeking Style Of Karbala, At The Behest Of Khamenei, Sistani; Death To America! Down, Down Biden!
MEMRI/January/January 07/2022
Source: The Internet - "DARS TV on YouTube"
https://www.memri.org/tv/candian-human-rights-activist-firas-najim-vigil-memory-qasem-soleimani-consulate-america-toronto-martyrdom-khamenei-death-biden
Canadian human rights activist Firas Al-Najim of CD4HR pledged to set out in the "martyrdom-seeking style of Karbala" in response to a fatwa by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei or Ayatollah Sistani. He spoke in a vigil in commemoration of Qasem Soleimani held in front of the U.S. consulate in Toronto, which he referred to as the "representative of the Great Satan," on January 2, 2022 and which was posted on Dars TV on YouTube. Al-Najim added that Soleimani is "one of us, the people of Iraq," and that "Iran is our ally." He said: "We will continue to fight alongside the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance axis – the PMU, Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, and Hizbullah in Lebanon." Al-Najim led the vigil participants in chants such as: "We respond to your call, oh Qasem Soleimani!" "We respond to your call, oh Abu Mahdi Al-Mahandis!" "Allah's curses upon America!" "Death to the U.S. administration!" "Death to America!" "Down, down Biden!" For more information about the vigil, see MEMRI TV clip no 9279.
Firas Al-Najim: "Today, we are saying: Soleimani is one of us, the people of Iraq. We will not agree to any attack on the sovereignty of either Iraq or Iran. Iran and Iraq constitute one body, one soul, one nation.
"If Sayyid Ali-Hosseini Khamenei or Sayyid Ali-Husseini Al-Sistani issue a fatwa calling to set out to defend the Islamic nation, we will set out in the martyrdom-seeking style of Karbala. I am saying this from Canada, from the land of the West. We say this from any place. We are not afraid. Away with humiliation!
Crowd: "Away with humiliation!"
Al-Najim: "Away with humiliation!"
Crowd: "Away with humiliation!"
Al-Najim: "We will bow down to no one but Allah!"
Crowd: "We will bow down to no one but Allah!"
Al-Najim: "We will bow down to no one but Allah!"
Crowd: "We will bow down to no one but Allah!"
Al-Najim: "I have a message to the Saud clan and to the criminal 'normalizers,' who stand by Israel and America. This is also a message to the supporters of Saddam, and to the anarchists who demonstrate in Iraq, shouting: Iran out!
"Iran is our ally and it will remain our ally. We will continue to fight alongside the Islamic Republic of Iran and the resistance axis — the PMU, Ansar Allah in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Their blood is our blood, their women are our women, their honor is our honor, the honor of their women is the honor of our women, and their lands are our lands. We are one nation. The Quran says: 'This nation of yours is one nation.' We all want to liberate Palestine. We respond to your call, oh Palestine!"
Crowd: "We respond to your call, oh Palestine!"
Al-Najim: "We respond to your call, oh Jerusalem!"
Crowd: "We respond to your call, oh Jerusalem!"
Al-Najim: "We respond to your call, oh Qasem Soleimani!"
Crowd: "We respond to your call, oh Qasem Soleimani!"
Al-Najim: "We respond to your call, oh Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis!"
Crowd: "We respond to your call, oh Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis!"
Al-Najim: "Brothers and sisters, everybody turn towards the American consulate. This is a representation of the Great Satan. It is a representative of Pharaoh, of Yazid, of Namroud. Allah's curses upon America! Everybody say it!
Crowd: "Allah's curses upon America!"
Al-Najim: "Death to the U.S. administration!"
Crowd: "Death to the U.S. administration!"
Al-Najim: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Al-Najim: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Al-Najim: "Death to America!"
Crowd: "Death to America!"
Al-Najim: "Down, down U.S.A."
Crowd: "Down, down U.S.A."
Al-Najim: "Down, down Biden!"
Crowd: "Down, down Biden!"
Al-Najim: "Down, down Biden!"
Crowd: "Down, down Biden!"
Al-Najim: "Down, down Trump!"
Crowd: "Down, down Trump!"
Al-Najim: "Down, down Obama!"
Crowd: "Down, down Obama!"
Al-Najim: "Down, down Bush!"
Crowd: "Down, down Bush!"
Al-Najim: "Down, down Clinton!"
Crowd: "Down, down Clinton!"

US, Israel Reaffirm Pressure on Iran to Stop ‘Nuclear Enrichment’
Washington - Muath Alamri/Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
The United States and Israel affirmed that the challenges posed by Iran in the region are going to be confronted, as Washington emphasized commitment to the "security and safety of Israel". The US position came as major countries are meeting in Vienna for indirect negotiations between Iran and the United States, aimed at saving the 2015 nuclear agreement. The State Department said in a statement that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, discussed, in a phone call, Wednesday evening, a set of regional and global issues, including "the challenges posed by Iran."
The two sides also discussed "the dangers of Russian aggression against Ukraine," noting that "Blinken reiterated the administration's firm commitment to Israel's security." In a tweet, Lapid said he discussed the regional and global challenges with Blinken, and the need to “pressure Iran to halt its nuclear weapons race.”Lapid and Blinken did not mention the exact nature of the "pressure on Iran."
The call came a few hours after Axios reported that US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, during a visit to Jerusalem last month, informed Israeli officials that the “snapback” mechanism in the nuclear agreement, was an effective way to "deter Iran from enriching weapons-grade uranium.”
Sullivan said he was very concerned that the Iranians felt they were getting closer to the possibility of breaking out toward a nuclear weapon. The sanctions would be particularly devastating to Iran's economy because all UN members would be bound to comply, the report said.
In turn, Israeli Foreign Ministry officials told Sullivan they believe the United States and the European troika (France, Germany, and Britain) should move forward with the “snapback” mechanism if the Vienna negotiations yield nothing, regardless of Iran’s enrichment levels and uranium production.
“Only the UK had shown any openness to the snapback idea so far,” Israeli officials say after Iran abandoned all of its commitments under the agreement and increased its uranium enrichment from less than 4 percent to 60 percent, a "technical short" step from weapons levels seen by some observers, as international inspectors face challenges in monitoring progress.
Israel strongly opposed talks aimed at restoring the agreement; but in recent weeks, officials have indicated a shift toward "accepting an agreement in some form." State Department spokesperson Ned Price said there had been “some modest progress” in recent days. Meanwhile, several Republican lawmakers accused the Biden administration of opposing a provision in the Department of Defense budget law for 2022, which requires the administration to provide Congress with "detailed reports" on Iran's military capabilities, funds, and related activities. According to the law's provisions, it requires a "detailed description" of Iran's military progress, all arms sales and transfers to and from Iran, all missile launches by Iran, and changes in the capabilities of Iranian-backed military groups. The American Free Beacon website quoted foreign policy leaders of the Republican Party in Congress, criticizing the Biden administration's decision not to comply with the legal mandate, by providing details to Congress about Iran's capabilities, and how easing sanctions on Iran would not enhance the regime's ability to launch terrorist attacks.
“Biden’s administration does not want Congress to know how much money Iran's terrorist allies are getting because of sanctions relief, while negotiations continue with Tehran on a new nuclear deal,” Republicans say.
The "strict reporting" requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act, is the first of its kind and will compel the administration to "provide details about how sanctions relief will support Tehran's terrorist allies," and strengthen the capabilities of the militias, referring to Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Hamas movement.

Iran Displays Missiles Amid Nuclear Talks
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
Iran displayed three ballistic missiles at an outdoor prayer esplanade in central Tehran on Friday as talks in Vienna aimed at reviving Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers flounder. The missiles — known as Dezful, Qiam and Zolfaghar — have official ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) and are already-known models, the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard said. Diplomats from countries that remain in the 2015 nuclear deal — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — are working with Tehran to revive the accord, which had sought to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions in exchange for lifting of economic sanctions. American diplomats are present at the nuclear talks in Vienna but they are not in direct talks with Iranians. The accord collapsed in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal and re-imposed sanctions on Iran. According to The Associated Press, a report by Iranian state television said the missiles on display were the same types as those used to strike US bases in Iraq. The display came on the second anniversary of a ballistic missile attack on bases housing American troops in Iraq in retaliation for the US drone strike that killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020.

Canada, Other Nations Vow Action Against Iran over Downed Jet
London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
Canada, Britain, Sweden and Ukraine on Thursday said they had abandoned efforts to talk to Tehran about reparations for an airliner downed by Iran and would try to settle the matter according to international law.
Most of the 176 people killed when Iran shot down the Ukrainian jet in January 2020 were citizens from those four countries, which created a coordination group that seeks to hold Tehran to account. "Despite our best efforts over the past two years and multiple attempts to resolve this matter through negotiations, the Coordination Group has determined that further attempts to negotiate with Iran ... are futile," Reuters quoted it as saying in a statement.
"The Coordination Group will now focus on subsequent actions to take to resolve this matter in accordance with international law," it continued, but did not give details. Tehran says Revolutionary Guards accidentally shot down the Boeing 737 jet and blamed a misaligned radar and an error by the air defense operator at a time when tensions were high between Tehran and the United States. A court in Ontario, Canada, this week awarded C$107 million ($83.8 million), plus interest, to the families of six people who died. In June, Canada said it had found no evidence that the downing of the plane had been premeditated.

France Sees Progress in Iran Nuclear Talks, but Time Pressing
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
Progress has been made regarding the Iran nuclear talks although time is running out, France's foreign minister said on Friday. Indirect talks between Iran and the United States on salvaging the 2015 Iran nuclear deal resumed on Monday, reported Reuters. Western diplomats have indicated they are hoping to have a breakthrough by the end of January or early February, but sharp differences remain with the toughest issues still unresolved. Iran has rejected any deadline imposed by Western powers. "I remain convinced we can reach a deal. Bits of progress have been made in the last few days," Jean-Yves Le Drian told BFM TV and RMC Radio. "We have been reading in a positive direction in the last few days, but time is of the essence, because if we don't get an accord quickly there will be nothing to negotiate."The eighth round of talks, the first under Iran's new hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, resumed on Monday after adding some new Iranian demands to a working text. Another positive sign this week was the arrival in Vienna of South Korea's Vice Foreign Minister to discuss with Iran, the United States and other parties the possible release of $7 billion of frozen Iranian assets held in the Asian country because of US sanctions. Any release would need to be approved by Washington. The ministry said in a statement that the vice minister had agreed with the Iranians that the release of the frozen assets "should take place in an urgent manner." "It will be discussed at the sanctions removal working groups in Vienna," an Iranian official said, clarifying that the funds would not be released immediately. Western powers have said progress was too slow and negotiators had "weeks not months" left before the 2015 deal becomes meaningless. Iran refuses to meet directly with US officials, meaning that other parties - Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, must shuttle between the two sides. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian also suggested the situation was positive, but repeated Tehran's position that all sanctions must be lifted and that Washington should provide guarantees that it will not pull out again. Little remains of that deal, which lifted sanctions against Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its atomic activities. Then President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of it in 2018, re-imposing US sanctions, and Iran later breached many of the deal's nuclear restrictions and kept pushing well beyond them.

Assad Calls for Expanding Iran-Led ‘Axis of Resistance’
Damascus - Beirut - London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022 -
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has called for the expansion of the “axis of resistance” led by Iran, to include Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and other local militias. The official Syrian News Agency (SANA) quoted Buthaina Shaaban, Assad’s special advisor, as saying in a speech she gave on his behalf, that relations must be established and developed between Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine. Shaaban delivered the speech during a ceremony held in Damascus on Thursday, on the second anniversary of the killing of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in a US raid in Iraq.
Assad underlined the need to “work to strengthen communication, harmony and integration in this axis.”“The rail and power network between Iran, Iraq and Syria may be a good start to link the countries of the region with open relations,” he said, according to the speech conveyed by Shaaban.
Damascus commemorated the second anniversary of Soleimani’s killing in an official ceremony, and unveiled a memorial in his honor in the countryside of Aleppo, while no events were held on this occasion last year. Meanwhile, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Thursday that Iran-backed militias continue to train Syrian fighters in military sites affiliated with the Fourth Division, which is led by Assad’s brother, Major General Maher al-Assad. Sources quoted by SOHR noted that the exercises “began three months ago...The military drills are held under the supervision of Iranian officers and military personnel.” “Nearly 390 Syrian fighters loyal to regime forces and Fourth Division have conducted military exercises. However, there has been no confirmed information about the real aim behind these drills, whether it is a new way of recruiting Syrians into the ranks of Iranian proxies or for involving them in fighting and battles for Iranian interests in Syria,” the Observatory said on its website. On Dec. 31, the Observatory reported that eight Russian helicopters arrived at Palmyra military airport from Russia’s Hmeimim base in Lattakia province. It added that a convoy of joint forces of the Fifth Corps and Liwaa Al-Quds, comprising one hundred soldiers, armored vehicles, and tanks, headed from Deir Ezzor to Palmyra in eastern Homs countryside, at Russia’ orders. The convoy was escorted by Russian helicopters. According to SOHR sources, “Russian forces intend to establish new military posts for the Russian-backed Fifth Corps and Liwaa Al-Quds in Palmyra city and its desert, with the aim to compete with Iranian-backed militias, which are also deployed in that region in large groups.”

Dutch Government Ends Funding for Palestinian NGO over Links to PFLP
The Hague, London- Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
The Netherlands has suspended funding for the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) after an investigation found individuals’ links to an EU and US-designated terrorist group. The UAWC, which provides hands-on aid to Palestinian farmers, is one of six Palestinian civil society groups that Israel labeled as terrorist organizations in October over accusations of being affiliated with the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). It issued a statement in which it said it was “shocked” and “saddened” by the Dutch government’s decision, which was welcomed by Israel. It stressed that “this is the first time a government ends its funding for Palestinian civil society based on political conditionality.” In a letter to the Dutch parliament, the government said 34 employees of the UAWC were shown to be active in the PLFP from 2007 to 2020, during which the UAWC received Dutch funding. It conducted an investigation and found links “at an organizational level,” yet it did not find any financial connections or “organizational unity with or control by the PFLP.” It also found that 12 UAWC employees held leadership positions with both UAWC and PFLP over the same period. The government considered the large number of board members of UAWC with a dual mandate “particularly worrying.”In July 2020, the Dutch ministry for foreign trade and development cooperation had ordered a review following the arrest of two Palestinian employees of the organization. The now-former employees were accused by Israel of being responsible for an August 2019 roadside bomb attack that killed a 17-year-old Israeli girl in the West Bank. They received part of their salaries from the Dutch-funded overhead costs.

Biden Taps Kurilla to Become Top US Commander for Mideast
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
A senior Army three-star general with extensive experience in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has been nominated to become the top US commander for the Middle East. President Joe Biden has nominated Army Lt. Gen. Erik Kurilla to head US Central Command and be promoted to four-star general, according to multiple US officials. The Senate Armed Services Committee notice says only that Kurilla has been nominated to become a general, and does not detail which job he would get if confirmed. But his nomination for US Central Command has been expected for several months. US officials confirmed the planned job on condition of anonymity because it has not yet been made public, The Associated Press said. If confirmed by the Senate, Kurilla would replace Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, who has led the command for the past three years and is expected to retire. Kurilla would take over as the Pentagon continues to try and shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific and counter a rising China, and to bolster defenses against Russia in Europe, where Moscow is massing troops near the Ukraine border, fueling fears of an invasion. The US has withdrawn all forces from Afghanistan and has now formally shifted its role in Iraq from combat to advising and assisting the Iraqi forces. But the US strategy to put more emphasis on China and Russia has been repeatedly stymied by Iran, forcing the Pentagon to maintain a significant troop presence across the Middle East and cultivate strong relations with allies in the region.
Kurilla, who is from Elk River, Minnesota, is currently commander of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, but previously served as the chief of staff at Central Command, working for McKenzie and, before that, Gen. Joseph Votel. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1988, and has served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanding conventional and special operations forces. He commanded a Stryker battalion in Iraq in 2004, and was shot and wounded. He later was commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment, overseeing combat teams deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. He also served as director of operations at the Joint Special Operations Command and was commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

UN Security Council to Meet Monday on N.Korean Missile Launch
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
The UN Security Council will meet behind closed doors Monday to discuss the testing of what North Korea said was a hypersonic missile, according to diplomatic sources. The meeting was requested by the United States, France and the United Kingdom -- three of the five permanent members on the Security Council -- as well as Ireland and Albania, the sources said Thursday. In 2017, the Security Council unanimously passed three sets of economic sanctions after North Korea carried out nuclear and missile tests -- a rare showing of unity for the often gridlocked body, AFP reported.
No joint declaration is expected after Monday's meeting, one diplomat said, although another added that statements are likely to be issued before or afterwards. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), a state media outlet, said Wednesday's missile carried a "hypersonic gliding warhead" that "precisely hit a target 700 km (435 miles) away," without identifying the launcher. The warhead also demonstrated a "new" capability, moving 120 kilometers laterally after it detached from the launcher to strike the target, it added. The launch was the second reported test of what Pyongyang claimed were hypersonic gliding missiles, after a similar trial last September. The United States, Japan and Canada were among those quick to condemn Wednesday's launch, stating that it violated multiple Security Council resolutions and threatened safety in the region as well as the international community. Pyongyang has argued that the continued development of its weapons technologies is necessary to defend itself against a possible American invasion.

Kazakhstan Leader: Constitutional Order Restored amid Unrest
Asharq Al-Awsat/January, 07/2022
The president of Kazakhstan on Friday declared that constitutional order was “mainly restored” after the country was engulfed in unprecedented unrest in recent days. “An anti-terror operation has commenced. Law enforcement agencies are working hard. Constitutional order has been mainly restored in all regions of the country. Local authorities are in control of the situation,” Kassym-Jomart Tokayev was quoted by his spokespeople as saying Friday. The president added, however, that “terrorists are still using weapons and are damaging people’s property” and that “counterterrorist actions” should be continued, said AFP. Kazakhstan is experiencing the worst street protests since the country gained independence three decades ago. The demonstrations began over a near-doubling of prices for a type of vehicle fuel and quickly spread across the country, reflecting wider discontent over the rule of the same party since independence. Protests have turned extremely violent, with government buildings set ablaze and dozens of protesters and more than a dozen law enforcement officers killed. In a concession, the government on Thursday announced a 180-day price cap on vehicle fuel and a moratorium on utility rate increases. Tokayev has vacillated between trying to mollify the protesters, including accepting the resignation of his government, and promising harsh measures to quell the unrest, which he blamed on “terrorist bands.”
In what was seen as one such measure, the president has called on a Russia-led military alliance for help. The alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, includes the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and has started deploying troops to Kazakhstan for a peacekeeping mission. Kazakh officials have insisted that the troops will not be fighting the demonstrators.

Japan Extends US Military Support amid China, N.Korea 'Challenges'
Asharq Al-Awsat/Friday, 7 January, 2022
Japan moved ahead with an expansion of support to US troops as the allies held top-level talks on Friday over tensions with China and North Korea. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the two nations were signing a five-year extension of the support package provided by Japan for the hosting of around 50,000 US troops on its soil, AFP reported. The new agreement "will invest greater resources to deepen our military readiness and interoperability," Blinken said at the opening of four-way virtual talks between the allies' foreign and defense chiefs, held Friday Tokyo time.
"Our allies must not only strengthen the tools we have but also develop new ones," Blinken said Thursday in Washington. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, appearing from isolation after a mild case of Covid-19, said the allies were "evolving our roles and missions to reflect Japan's growing ability to contribute to regional peace and stability." Japan renounced its right to wage war after World War II and has since developed a close alliance with Washington, which is treaty-bound to defend the world's second-largest developed economy. Tokyo pays the costs of the US forces in the country as well as utilities. A previous agreement was set to expire in March 2021 but was extended for a year amid a change of administration in Washington. According to Japanese press reports, the new five-year package will amount to 211 billion yen ($1.8 billion) per fiscal year, an increase of about five percent. The package comes amid growing tensions with China, which has stepped up incursions near Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy that enjoys close ties with Washington and Tokyo but which Beijing considers a province awaiting reunification. "Beijing's provocative actions keep raising tensions across the Taiwan Strait and in the East and South China Sea," Blinken said. He also described North Korea's missile programs as an "ongoing threat" after Pyongyang fired a suspected ballistic missile into the sea. A joint statement issued after the talks took aim at "efforts by China to undermine the rules-based order," with specific reference to activity in the East and South China Seas. The allies also expressed "serious and ongoing concerns" about rights violations in China's Xinjiang region and Hong Kong, and called for "peace and stability" in the Taiwan Strait. Japan's Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters later that he again raised the issue of Covid clusters on US bases, which are believed to have spilled over into local communities in several areas. Japan's government is expected to approve Friday new virus restrictions in three regions that host US bases, and Hayashi said he had urged "the US side to strengthen anti-infection measures including efforts like introducing limits on off-base outings".

Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood's first Black movie star, dies at 94
CNN/January 07/2022
Sidney Poitier, whose elegant bearing and principled onscreen characters made him Hollywood's first Black movie star and the first Black man to win the best actor Oscar, has died. He was 94. Clint Watson, press secretary for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, confirmed to CNN that Poitier died Thursday evening.Poitier overcame an impoverished background in the Bahamas and a thick island accent to rise to the top of his profession at a time when prominent roles for Black actors were rare. He won the Oscar for 1963's "Lilies of the Field," in which he played an itinerant laborer who helps a group of White nuns build a chapel.

Canada/Statement on protests in Kazakhstan
January 6, 2022 - Ottawa, Ontario - Global Affairs Canada
The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs, today issued the following statement:
“Canada is closely monitoring the situation in Kazakhstan. We emphasize the importance of upholding democratic values, respecting human rights, and refraining from violence and destruction.
“We extend our condolences to those grieving the lives that have already been lost.
“Canada calls for restraint and de-escalation. We urge that the situation in Kazakhstan be resolved quickly and through peaceful dialogue.

Government of Canada honours victims on the second National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Air Disasters
January 7, 2022 - Ottawa, Ontario - Global Affairs Canada
Tomorrow marks two years since the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 (Flight PS752), as well as the second National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Air Disasters. On this solemn occasion, we remember the victims of all air disasters, including Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (Flight ET302), Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and Air India Flight 182, and stand in solidarity with all those who have lost loved ones to air disasters.
Canada continues to work with our International Coordination and Response Group partners—the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Ukraine—to ensure justice and accountability for the victims of the passengers and crew aboard Flight PS752. We stand in solidarity with the victim’s loved ones and are determined to hold Iran accountable for the downing by their military forces and to ensure Iran makes full reparations for the acts and omissions that led to the deaths of 176 innocent people.
Today, the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs; the Honourable Omar Alghabra, Minister of Transport; the Honourable Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, along with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and High Commissioner Ralph Goodale, met with family members of victims of Flight PS752 to reiterate their commitment to justice and inform them of progress made to date.
In support of the families of victims of air disasters, the Government of Canada is delivering on several commitments.
Building on previously implemented measures to support families of the victims of Flight ET302 and Flight PS752, the government is developing a new pathway to permanent residence for certain family members that are outside Canada. We recognize that victims who were Canadian citizens, permanent residents or were approved to become permanent residents would have had the opportunity to build a life here in Canada with their families. The two permanent residence pathways honour their memory and support family members in Canada who have lost their loved ones.
Based on the feedback received during the consultations with family members and loved ones, the government will proceed with the formal establishment of a scholarship program in memory of victims of Flight PS752. The program is expected to disburse 176 scholarships averaging $25,000 for each beneficiary. This program will also strengthen the bonds between people through international academic exchanges. Open to both international and Canadian students, the program will aim to launch its first call for applications in the fall/winter of 2023 to 2024. In the coming weeks, the government will consult Flight ET302 family members on the scope and details of a similar scholarship initiative to honour those lost in this air disaster.
Additionally, the Government of Canada is launching a public consultation on a memorial in remembrance of those who have lost their lives in air disasters. Families and members of the public are invited to share their thoughts on the creation of a physical tribute for meaningful commemoration.
Finally, the Government of Canada is advancing the Safer Skies Initiative, working with our international partners to ensure the safety of civilian aircraft travelling in conflict zones. Canada is also working with its partners to review the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) aircraft accident investigations framework.
Together, these actions pay homage to the victims of air disasters and help to ensure that no one suffers such loss in the future. Canada will continue to remember those who were lost, and stand in solidarity with the people they loved. They will not be forgotten.
Quotes
“Too many Canadians’ lives were forever changed by the loss of a loved one in an air disaster. Most recently, Canadians were amongst the victims of the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 and the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash. We will continue to stand by the families of victims, and through the scholarship program and commemoration tribute, we will continue to remember and honour their legacies.”
– The Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Foreign Affairs
“Canada honours the victims of air disasters and continues to support the families of those who perished in Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752. To help families of the victims, we have implemented a new permanent residence pathway for certain families in Canada, and we continue to work on establishing a pathway to permanent residence for certain families who are outside Canada. More details on this new pathway will be announced in the coming months.”
– The Honourable Sean Fraser, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship
“Air disasters have taken the lives of too many Canadians and left many families grieving the loss of their loved ones. Today, we are announcing a public consultation on how we can best pay tribute and remember those who have lost their lives in an air tragedy. Participation in this survey will ensure we create a meaningful and permanent place where families and those impacted by air disasters are able to find some comfort and peace.”
– The Honourable Pablo Rodriquez, Minister of Canadian Heritage
“We are working with our partners to help ensure air disasters, like Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, never happen again. At the same time, we need to honour the memories of those who lost their lives. As we mark the second National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Air Disasters, we continue to grieve with their families and remember the loved ones lost.”
­­– The Honourable Omar Alghabra, Minister of Transport
Quick facts
Following the air disaster of flight PS752, the government enacted policy measures to issue temporary resident visas to victims’ families who needed to come to Canada to settle affairs. Given the COVID‑19 pandemic, and the inability of some to travel, the government extended this policy. As of November 30, 2021, 240 individuals have been issued temporary resident visas under this public policy.
On May 13, 2021, the government announced a permanent residence pathway for in-Canada families of victims of air disasters ET302 and PS752. As of November 30, 2021, 75 individuals have been approved for permanent residence under this pathway. A new permanent residence pathway for certain families who are outside Canada will be launched in the coming months.
The Safer Skies Initiative allows countries to work together to share information, advice, warnings, and best practices to better identify and manage risks to civil aviation in or near conflict zones. The initiative aims to develop better risk assessments, effective safeguards, and clear accountability for authorities who manage airspace.
From March 29 to 30, 2022, Canada will host the second Safer Skies Forum, bringing together experts from many countries, international organizations, and the civil aviation industry.
The public consulation on the physical tribute will run from January 7 to February 7, 2022. A summary of the results will be made available on the Canadian Heritage website. It will inform the vision and objectives of the commemoration.
Physical tributes can take many forms—monuments, plaques, commemorative gardens, and more—and should resonate with the affected citizens and be a permanent public space for reflection and contemplation.
In October 2021, Canada secured the support of 55 contracting states on our proposal to review the investigation framework through a dedicated ICAO panel. In addition, Transport Canada recently established a dedicated unit to review and identify other opportunities to reform protocols for aircraft accident investigations and to secure broader international support in these efforts.
Associated links
Consultation on physical tribute in remembrance of those who have lost their lives in an air tragedy
In-Canada families of Canadian victims of recent air disasters public policy
Canada’s response to Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 tragedy
Statement by the Prime Minister announcing National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Air Disasters

The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 07-08/2022
شارل الياس الشارتوني : الأمور المستحيلة لإعادة بناء النظام السياسي في الشرق الأوسط
The Imponderables of a Reconstructed Political Order in the Middle East
Charles Elias Chartouni /January 07/2022
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/105405/105405/
Observers of the Middle Eastern political scenery have to reckon with the inability of this region to rebuild its systemic equilibriums, recast the matrix of Statenness, recover a modicum of self determination away from crashing imperial politics, address effectively the problems of national cohesion, diffuse political unruliness, functional governance, and inherent incapacity to manage the dilemmas of ethno-political pluralism and its political imperatives, let alone the aporias of democratization. Lebanon, two and a half years after the unleashing of the severest crisis of governance it has ever experienced, is still struggling with deliberate oligarchic foreclosures, malevolence insofar as tackling the interlocking financial, economic, social and environmental muddle, and its instrumentalization by a vocal subversion policy structured on the intersection between Iran’s Shiite imperial policy all across the larger Middle East, the disintegration of the centennial regional order which succeeded the demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the spawning patterns of economic delinquency and underground economies steered by Muslim autocracies, criminal oligarchies and terrorist movements (The cases of Iran, Turkey, ISIS, Hezbollah, autocrats and political oligarchs throughout the region….).
Syria has become a typical case study of State failure, protracted conflicts, irreconcilable differences and a platform for clashing power politics, Iraq, Lybia and Yemen are camping on the thresholds of combustible ethno-religious, strategic and ideological faultlines, and the chances of negotiated conflict resolution, moral atonement and reconciliation politics are not only remote and idle yearnings, but have no incidence whatsoever on the nuts and bolts of clashing power politics, where none of the aforementioned predicates has an incidence. The ethno-political differences and their dynamics are unlikely to adjust around the norms of democratic conflict resolution and nomothetic rules of politics, and convey a scenario of rowdy power politics and raw brutality with no alternative perspective whatsoever. The overlapping political, financial and economic crises and their overall deleterious impact on the respective societies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, coupled with the colliding Islamic imperialisms and the disarraying dynamics of the monumental unraveling which undermined the interstate system and its widespread geopolitical reverberations, have left no room for political rationality, discursive arrangements and ethical considerations, and led inevitably to the nihilistic drifts that prevail over the region.
The militarization scenarios are functional equivalents of political failures, rampant strategic voids, expanding anomie, and the destruction of the rudiments of a civilized political order which account for this state of institutional violence and lingering warfare.The resurgent Cold War, its geopolitical mapping and projected evolutions (e.g, Ukraine, Iran, Taiwan, Venezuela, Turkey, Iraq, Yemen, Lybia…), strategic black holes, subversion politics and attempts at creating a countervailing international political order have complicated the configuration, disrupted the order of priorities and prompted various scenarios of chaos, structural instability, open ended violence, demographic shifts through forced migration and displacement, whose compounded effects have yielded the rise of Islamist terrorism, the regeneration of Islamic imperialism and their detrimental impact on the Western hosting countries and their underlying social contracts, normative and institutional consensuses. The state of void cannot perdure without putting at stake the future peace regionally and across various geopolitical divides (extending between South and Central Asia and the European limes), consolidating the disarraying dynamics, and yielding a context of endemic instability that compromises the ultimate need for a viable geopolitical political order.

Four Mideast trend lines to watch in 2022
Jonathan Spyer/Jerusalem Post/January 07/2022
BEHIND THE LINES: The perception that the US is drawing down in the region is leading to cracks and fissures in the pro-Western camp.
As 2022 begins, the Middle East strategic picture is in a state of flux and change. Stable and long-held assumptions about the region – its dynamics, its main players and its power structures – are being challenged.
So what are the main points of friction? Here are four emergent trend lines worth watching.
In Israel, it became customary in recent years to identify a number of rival camps operating against one another in the Middle East. Four main blocs or alliances were identified.
These were: 1. the Iranians and their allies and proxies; 2. a loose gathering of US-aligned countries, including Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and a number of smaller players; 3. a gathering of countries and movements identified with conservative Sunni political Islam, including Turkey, Qatar, the Government of National Accord in Libya and the Hamas enclave in Gaza; and 4. the regional networks of Salafi jihadi political Islam – namely, al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
With the start of 2022, however, it is clear that this picture no longer conforms in its entirety to the observable dynamics of the region. What has changed?
THE PERCEPTION that the US is drawing down in the region is leading to cracks and fissures in the pro-Western camp.
The picture here is not a simple one. The Abraham Accords signed in August 2020 between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain were a breakthrough of profound importance for regional diplomacy. On the economic level, the accords have been a success.
Trade between Israel and the UAE moved forward at an impressive pace, standing at $610 million at the half-year point, and nudging $1 billion by the end of the year. Flagship and groundbreaking initiatives, such as the Emirati-brokered cooperation agreement between Israel and Jordan in November 2021, were made possible through the accords.
But on the strategic level, things aren’t quite so rosy. US regional drawdown is the key issue here.
The Emiratis and other Gulf countries noted in recent years the US failure to back allied governments in Egypt and Tunisia at the start of the Arab Spring; failure to enforce redlines and back allies in Syria from 2012-19; failure to respond to Iranian harassment of Emirati and Saudi vessels in the Gulf of Oman in 2019; nonresponse to the drone and missile attack on Saudi oil processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais on September 14, 2019, and to the downing of a US drone in June of that year.
The hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 confirmed the picture. The US wishes to avoid further major commitments in the region.
The response of Gulf countries has been to abandon notions of a power bloc to rival the advance of the Iranians – the main anti-status quo force in the region. Instead, efforts were underway in 2021 by the UAE and Saudi Arabia to repair relations with Tehran, and thus “hedge” between Tehran and its enemies.
Israel, which also observes the process of US drawdown with concern, does not have the option of appeasing Iran. Tehran is committed to the Jewish state’s destruction. As 2022 begins, with negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program going nowhere in Vienna, the emerging picture is one in which Israel is somewhat isolated as it prepares a possible military option against Iran’s nuclear program, and continues its shadow war against Iranian influence building across the region.
Will this solitude continue across the coming year, or will the Gulf countries, disappointed in their overtures toward Iran, form up with Israel for confrontation with Tehran?
The issue has relevance for Syria, too, where Israel’s campaign against Iranian advances continues, even as the major Arab countries seek the rehabilitation of the Assad regime.
THE IRANIANS are facing dilemmas of their own.
The years 2020 and 2021 showed the limits of the IRGC/Quds Force’s model for building influence through proxies in the Arab world.
Iran’s militia franchises remained dominant in Lebanon, ascendant in Iraq and active on the ground in Syria and Yemen. But the results of the presence of these militias for social and economic development were also becoming apparent.
In Lebanon, the withdrawal of economic engagement as a result of Hezbollah’s domination of public life is bringing the country close to collapse.
Iraq, and Iran itself, in Isfahan and elsewhere, witnessed major protests against economic mismanagement and impoverishment over the last year.
Iran has no economic model to propose, and no clear answer to the identifiable economic decline and disruption that its political model brings.
Will this lead to further protests and instability in the Iranian zones of influence in 2022? Worth watching carefully.
FOR THE Salafi jihadis, it has been a lean couple of years.
The “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq is already a fading memory – destroyed by US airpower and Kurdish and Iraqi ground forces in 2019. ISIS remains a disruptive presence in remote Sunni areas of both countries, but little more.
The erstwhile al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, meanwhile, has been co-opted by the Turks and is today dependent on their presence for its survival.
But the West’s withdrawal from Afghanistan may offer a glimmer of hope to the Salafists. Taliban rule in Kabul opens up the possibility of a new center for recruitment, organization and planning for both al-Qaeda and, in particular, Islamic State.
The latter maintains a powerful franchise in Afghanistan, known as Islamic State – Khorasan Province, or IS-K. This structure is currently engaged in a campaign of daily bombings and attacks against the Taliban authorities. It now has a presence in all of Afghanistan’s provinces.
Testifying to the US Congress in late October 2021, Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, predicted that IS-K could develop the capacity for carrying out attacks on foreign targets within “six or 12 months.”
Large and disaffected Sunni populations remain in the important countries of the Arab world. Political Islam has been tarnished over the last decade by its disastrous experiences in government in Egypt, and as a quasi state in parts of Iraq and Syria. At the same time, no rival ideology has emerged to replace it on the popular level.
Afghanistan’s reemergence as a possible incubator for a revived transnational-terrorist force is a significant development.
LASTLY, AND perhaps most fatefully, the question of China and its preferred path in the Middle East looms over the region.
Geopolitics abhors a vacuum. As the US lightens its regional footprint, China is emerging as an increasingly significant source of power and influence in the Middle East. The region is a vital hub in Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, intended to create a series of interlinked, China-dominated trade routes across the globe.
The question is: what form will Chinese regional engagement take? Will Beijing continue to trade with all sides, confident that its size and power precludes the need for picking allies among the competing elements? Or will the emergent US-China Cold War find its way inevitably into the Middle East, too?
There is no definitive answer yet. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the UAE all enjoy burgeoning trade relationships with Beijing. A new terminal at Haifa Port, operated by the state-owned Shanghai International Port Group, was inaugurated in September 2021.
But there are warning signs on the horizon, too – 2021 saw Iran gaining approval for its full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. On March 27, 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year strategic agreement, intended to lead to $400b. of Chinese investment in the Iranian economy.
In Israel, the emerging area of deep concern is increased military cooperation between Iran and China.
In a recent article published at the INSS think tank in Tel Aviv, Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Assaf Orion noted: “The strategic agreement between China and Iran, to the extent that the draft reflects the final version, outlines a zone of agreement on cooperation in intelligence, cyberwarfare, precision navigation systems, weapons research and development and military training and instruction.”
Orion described this prospect as “alarming” for Israel. This trend, too, is one to carefully watch in 2022.
The global strategic pillars are currently in motion. Will the coming period bring renewed equilibrium or further crisis? An interesting year lies ahead for the Middle East.

Exposing the Lie of Israel Apartheid
Richard Kemp/Gatestone Institute/January 07/2022
The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel's defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored, trained and equipped by the USSR had been humiliated, and so had Moscow. Thus the Soviets progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West.
"We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States." — Yuri Andropov, Chairman of the Soviet KGB, later General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, as reported by General Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romania's intelligence services.
As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.
To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.
The details of Moscow-sponsored terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere are set out in 25,000 pages of KGB documents copied and then smuggled out of Russia in the early 1990s by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and now lodged in the UK, at Churchill College, Cambridge.
The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for "Palestine". In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.
Moscow first took its campaign to brand Israeli Jews as the oppressors of their invented "Palestinian people" to the UN in 1965. Their attempts to categorise Zionism as racism failed at that attempt but succeeded nearly a decade later in the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379.
Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977: "The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons."
The Mitrokhin documents show that both Yasser Arafat, and his successor as PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian Authority, were KGB agents. Both were instrumental in the KGB's disinformation operations as well as its terrorist campaigns.
For his dealings with Washington, Ceaușescu told Arafat in 1978: "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over."
Ceaușescu's advice was reinforced by North Vietnamese communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Arafat met several times: "Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand".
Like his predecessor Arafat, Abbas's consistent rejection of every offer of peace with Israel, while concurrently talking the talk about peace and while sponsoring terrorism, shows the continuing influence of his Soviet masters.
Meanwhile the Palestinian movement created by Moscow, in the words of American historian David Meir-Levi, is "the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d'être."
Moscow's campaign was significantly undermined by the 2020 rapprochement between Israel and Arab states. The lesson here is the importance of American political will against authoritarian propaganda, which led to the game-changing Abraham Accords.
The Soviet Union progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West. To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to General Ion Pacepa, former chief of Romania's intelligence services, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s. Pictured: PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat (right) lays a wreath at the Lenin Mausoleum during his 12th visit in Moscow, on August 30, 1977.
Last month the UN General Assembly re-affirmed its implacable hostility to one of its own member states. It voted overwhelmingly — 125-8, with 34 abstentions — to fund an unprecedented permanent Human Rights Council (UNHRC) commission of inquiry (COI) into allegations of war crimes and human rights abuse by Israel. Taxpayers' funds will pay an eyewatering $5.5 million budget in the first year alone, well over twice that of the UNHRC commission investigating the Syrian civil war.
Since its creation in 2006, the council has established 32 inquiries, nine of which — one-third — have focused entirely on Israel. But this latest COI is the first open-ended inquiry it has set up. It has no time-limit and no restriction on its scope. The US voted against the move, saying it "perpetuates a practice of unfairly singling out Israel in the UN". Among the abstainers was Australia, whose representative said, with characteristic plain-speaking: "We oppose anti-Israel bias".
As the US, Australia and others fear, it is inevitable that Israel will be falsely pronounced guilty of the "systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity" that the COI says it will probe.
I understand the COI plans to explicitly brand Israel an "apartheid state". This lie will be taken up across the world, fuelling antisemitic hatred against Jews everywhere. It will contribute to what Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid described this week as an imminent debate "unprecedented in its venom, or in its radioactivity, around the words, 'Israel as an apartheid state'."
The lie of "Israeli apartheid" was dreamt up in Moscow during the Cold War and driven home by a relentless Soviet propaganda campaign until it took hold in the UN and across the Middle East and the West. This included the repeated comparison of Israel with South Africa in the Soviet media and in books such as "Zionism and Apartheid", an official state publication of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union.
The sometimes naive, sometimes malign students who will again be holding their poisonous "Israel apartheid week" at universities across the globe this year will be parroting the same Soviet propaganda as their predecessors have done for decades. They, and many other Israel-haters use the apartheid slogan regardless of the reality that under no rational measure can Israel be considered an apartheid state. They do so because its meaning is easily understood, it disgusts people and rallies them to the anti-Israel cause. That is why it was invented by Moscow.
The apartheid smear is just one part of the greatest slur campaign in history, organized over many years against Israel by the Kremlin with the KGB in the lead, utilising the formidable resources of intelligence services of the USSR. It was perhaps the most successful disinformation campaign — of many — in Soviet history. It endures and gains strength even today, more than 50 years after it was first conceived and 30 years after the USSR collapsed.
It is worth understanding how this malevolent project originated and evolved, not only to help defend against the continuing political warfare waged on Israel and Jews, but also as a case study for the ongoing disinformation campaigns against the West by authoritarian states such as Russia, China and Iran. To gain even a superficial insight into this carefully contrived scheme we must take a trip back into history.
When Israel was re-established in 1948, following UN General Assembly Resolution 181, the new state initially pursued a policy of non-alignment. Surrounded by enemies, it needed economic support and arms from either or both the USA and USSR or their allies. Given the socialist political influences in Israel, the Soviet leadership expected the country would turn towards communism and align with the USSR, thus strengthening Soviet power in the Middle East and its wider competition with the West. One of Stalin's main reasons for quickly recognising Israel in 1948 was the intention to use it to undermine British dominion in the Middle East.
Even with significant Soviet covert and overt efforts to lure Israel into its fold, this may have been a vain hope from the beginning. In any case, the pressures of the Cold War in the 1950s, as well as domestic political considerations and concerns over antisemitism inside the Soviet Union, led Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion to align his country with the West, beginning with support for US-led UN intervention in Korea, against the Soviet will.
Israel's participation with the UK and France in the 1956 Suez campaign further alienated the Soviet government, which wrote a letter to Jerusalem (as well as to Paris and London) threatening rocket attacks and promising direct military support to the Egyptian army.
The breakdown in Israel-Soviet relations was later compounded by Israel's defensive victories against the Arabs in 1967 and again in 1973. Over this period, all hope of Israel becoming a Soviet client had steadily evaporated. Arab armies sponsored, trained and equipped by the USSR had been humiliated, and so had Moscow. Thus the Soviets progressively developed a policy of undermining Israel. Their primary objective was to use the country as a weapon in their Cold War struggle against the US and the West.
The Kremlin understood that conventional attacks against Israel could not succeed, so instead focused on using Arabs as terrorist proxies, directing, training, funding and arming groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC), Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and Fatah to carry out attacks against Israeli and Jewish targets, including wave after wave of aircraft hijacking.
The Soviets employed the same terrorist tactics elsewhere, including in Europe, using proxies such as Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Factions. The details of Moscow-sponsored terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere are set out in 25,000 pages of KGB documents copied and then smuggled out of Russia in the early 1990s by senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and now lodged in the UK, at Churchill College, Cambridge.
General Ion Pacepa, chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service, played a significant role in Soviet bloc operations directed against Israel and the US. In 1978 he became the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet sphere and, among many secret revelations, provided details of KGB operations against Israel.
Pacepa says the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov (later Brezhnev's successor as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party), told him:
"We needed to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States."
An important element of Moscow's anti-Israel/US campaign in the Middle East was a propaganda war. Andropov told Pacepa:
"Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels' occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the US Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom."
In other words, he knew that the Arabs would be easy tools in the anti-Israel propaganda war and were already playing their part. Their work only needed to be focused, intensified and funded.
To achieve its objectives, the Kremlin devised Operation SIG, a disinformation campaign intended "to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the US". Pacepa reported that by 1978, under Operation SIG, the KGB had sent some 4,000 Soviet bloc "agents of influence" into Islamic countries to help achieve this. They also printed and circulated vast amounts of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda, translated into Arabic.
This included the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a fabricated antisemitic text setting out supposedly secret plans of the Jews to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media and fostering religious conflict. It was written by agents of the Tsarist secret police and subsequently used by the Nazis in their antisemitic propaganda.
As well as mobilising the Arabs to the Soviet cause, Andropov and his KGB colleagues needed to appeal to the democratic world. To do so, the Kremlin decided to turn the conflict from one that sought simply to destroy Israel into a struggle for human rights and national liberation from an illegitimate American-sponsored imperialist occupier. They set about transforming the narrative of the conflict from religious jihad — in which Islamic doctrine demands that any land that has ever been under Muslim control must be regained for Islam — to secular nationalism and political self-determination, something far more palatable to Western democracies. This would provide cover for a vicious terrorist war, even garnering widespread support for it.
To achieve their goal, the Soviets had to create a Palestinian national identity that did not hitherto exist and a narrative that Jews had no rights to the land and were naked aggressors. According to Pacepa, the KGB created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the early 1960s, as they had also orchestrated so-called national liberation armies in several other parts of the world. He says the 1964 Palestinian National Charter was drafted in Moscow. This document was fundamental to the invention and establishment of an artificial Palestinian nationhood.
The initial charter did not claim the West Bank or the Gaza Strip for "Palestine". In fact, it explicitly repudiated any rights to these lands, falsely recognising them respectively as Jordanian and Egyptian sovereign territories. Instead, the PLO claim was to the rest of Israel. This was amended after the 1967 war, when Israel ejected the illegal Jordanian and Egyptian occupiers, and the West Bank and Gaza for the first time were re-branded as Palestinian territory.
The first mention of a "Palestinian people" to mean Arabs in Palestine appeared in the 1964 charter. Previously, and particularly during the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine 1919-1948, "Palestinians" had been commonly used to describe Jews living in the territory.
Zuheir Mohsen, a senior PLO leader, admitted in 1977:
"The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity... Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons."
This reality has been publicly supported, sometimes inadvertently, in statements by several other Palestinian leaders. Quoted by Alan Hart in his 1984 book, "Arafat: A Political Biography", PLO leader Yasser Arafat himself said:
"The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasir Arafat, man of destiny, will give them that identity through conflict with Israel."
Moscow first took its campaign to brand Israeli Jews as the oppressors of their invented "Palestinian people" to the UN in 1965. Their attempts to categorise Zionism as racism failed at that attempt but succeeded almost a decade later in the infamous UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. Its determination that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" was revoked under US pressure in 1991 but by then had gained great traction and is frequently cited today by anti-Israel campaigners.
The Mitrokhin documents show that both Yasser Arafat, and his successor as PLO chief, Mahmoud Abbas, now President of the Palestinian Authority, were KGB agents. Both were instrumental in the KGB's disinformation operations as well as its terrorist campaigns.
Moscow, through Egypt, had installed Arafat as leader of the PLO in 1969 and its support kept him there in the face of internal dissent following the PLO's expulsion from Jordan in 1970. According to Pacepa:
"In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American 'imperial-Zionism'... It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, 'imperial-Zionism' was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti-imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism...."
Moscow had assigned to Romania the task of supporting the PLO, and Pacepa was Arafat's handler during his KGB career. He provided Arafat with $200,000 of laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. Pacepa also facilitated Arafat's relationship with Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu, a master propagandist who had been given the job of schooling him in hoodwinking the West. For his dealings with Washington, Ceaușescu told Arafat in 1978: "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel — over, and over, and over."
Ceaușescu's advice was reinforced by North Vietnamese communist General Vo Nguyen Giap, whom Arafat met several times: "Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand". (David Meir-Levi, "History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression")
An internal KGB document among the Mitrokhin archives reported: "Krotov [Mahmoud Abbas's cover-name] is an agent of the KGB." The KGB definition of agents is: those who "consistently, systematically and covertly carry out intelligence assignments, while maintaining secret contact with an official in the agency."
Among other tasks, Abbas was used by the KGB to spread propaganda accusing "Western Imperialism and Zionism" of cooperating with the Nazis. He attended a Moscow university controlled by the KGB in the early 1980s.There, under the supervision of his professor who later became a senior communist politician, Abbas wrote a doctoral dissertation denying the Holocaust and accusing Zionists of assisting Hitler.
Abbas is now entering the 18th year of his four-year elected term of office. Like his predecessor Arafat, his consistent rejection of every offer of peace with Israel, while concurrently talking the talk about peace and sponsoring terrorism, shows the residual influence of his Soviet masters.
The KGB disinformation campaign transformed the image of Israel from regional underdogs, surrounded by powerful enemies, into widely hated colonialist oppressors and occupiers of the downtrodden Palestinian people, a narrative that remains as strong as ever today.
Meanwhile the Palestinian movement created by Moscow, in the words of American historian David Meir-Levi, is "the only national movement for political self-determination in the entire world, and across all of world history, to have the destruction of a sovereign state and the genocide of a people as its only raison d'etre." This remains explicit in Hamas's charter, while somewhat more opaque in the Soviet-influenced utterances of Abbas's Palestinian Authority, especially those directed towards the West.
Moscow's campaign was significantly undermined by the 2020 rapprochement between Israel and several Arab states. The lesson here is the importance of American political will against authoritarian propaganda, which led to the game-changing Abraham Accords. Had this project been vigorously pursued after its initial success, it might have eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet-initiated Palestinian project and perhaps a form of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. It might yet achieve that if the US again musters the resolve to carry it through.
Meanwhile the December UN General Assembly vote and the Human Rights Council's determination to brand Israel a racist, apartheid state prove that the Soviet Cold War narrative remains alive and well. Most Western nations also still slavishly follow the Soviet programme.
Britain, for example, already aligned with Arab states against Israel because of both oil and antisemitism among influential politicians and officials, was more than willing from the start to swallow the Soviet invention of a struggle between Palestinian nationalism and Jewish oppression, hook, line and sinker. Today you will not hear any statement about Israel from any government official or minister that does not echo the KGB's line.
Increasing media-driven erosion of popular support for Israel in the US, and the suppurating divisions it causes, are evidence of the Soviet ghosts' success against their primary target: America.
The chief victims, however, have been Palestinian Arabs, whose lives have been worsened; and Jews in the diaspora who have suffered immeasurable antisemitism based on Soviet-initiated propaganda. The former may not have been intended but would have been of no concern to Moscow; the latter was very much part of the plan.
Israelis of course have paid a great price from KGB-inspired terrorism and propaganda, but have survived and flourished even under such enormous pressure. North Vietnamese General Giap, who once advised Arafat as we have seen, has an explanation for this, as recounted by Dr Eran Lerman, former Israeli deputy national security adviser. According to Giap:
"The Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, 'You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?' I tell them that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them."
*Colonel Richard Kemp is a former British Army Commander. He was also head of the international terrorism team in the U.K. Cabinet Office and is now a writer and speaker on international and military affairs. He is a Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
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Syria’s Children 2022
Akram Bunni/Asharq Al-Awsat/January, 07/2022
“A tent”… is this new year’s wish. The word was repeated by a 10-year-old girl, Shahad, from a camp in the northern countryside of Idlib after wind and heavy rain ripped her family’s tent apart. Samer’s (11 years old) wish was to escape the camp’s mud and resume his studies in order to become a doctor who treats people’s wounds. Lara (8 years old) from Aleppo wished to live in any country other than Syria, one where she could be safe, go to school and play games. Issam (9 years old) teared up as he wished for his father and two brothers’ release from prison so his life would change…
Simple, heartbreaking wishes voiced by hungry and exhausted children whose lives and dreams were crushed by the devastation left by a war whose belligerents want to perpetuate and make more destructive. United Nations reports have indicated that the Syrian war is among the biggest crises and challenges the country has faced in modern history. According to its figures, children have been the most vulnerable to the agonies of the protracted war that has not only deprived them of their innocence but also their most basic rights, the right to grow up and develop, be safe and healthy, and receive an education.
This year will not grant the millions of Syrian children a chance at a safe and secure life. Many are at risk of dying. Those in regime-controlled areas are facing displacement, the deterioration of medical services, and life in a family too poor to afford basic necessities and the cost of medicine and medical treatment. Those in camps are in danger because of the paucity of humanitarian aid, which is on the decline, mother nature’s fury, the health care system’s total collapse, diseases that had been forgotten spreading among children, and the lack of access to the vaccines used around the world.
The reasons are multiple, but death is one and the same… Thousands of Syrian children were killed by airstrikes and weapons that are banned internationally. Thousands of others lost their lives to hunger and grief in besieged areas, and thousands were detained for various periods of time to pressure family members who had fled or because the children had spontaneously decided to take part in protests. Hundreds of these child detainees were tortured to death or died because of detention centers’ depraved conditions. A higher number of little ones, some of whom had not been a day above 10 years old, were killed, maimed or disabled after being forcibly recruited to fight the wars of grown men by various parties and armed groups.
Over 50 percent of Syrian children lack a minimal degree of safety and food security amid skyrocketing prices and plummeting living conditions, with the war having displaced millions of these children, be they internally displaced or refugees living in neighboring countries... Hundreds of thousands have been separated from their families, falling victim to subjugation, becoming orphans, and living in deprivation. They look for shelter and a way to quell their hunger, and tens of thousands of them, the lucky ones, live with their grandfather or grandmother and have lost most of the members of their families. The families of others who were born outside the country do not possess the documents necessary for registering them and proving their lineage and nationality.
With the new year approaching, millions of Syrian children are still deprived of their right to receive an education and continue their studies. The first time, because of the deliberate or arbitrary bombardment of their schools... One school out of three is no longer operational today because it has been destroyed or heavily damaged, has been transformed into a shelter for displaced families, or is being used as a hospital or as a military site.
The second time, because many children are unable to attend school, either because they don’t have the required official documents and certificates after they had been burned or lost under the rubble of what had previously been their home, or because of the insecurity in the country and the damages to infrastructure and transportation routes, which is especially relevant to children residing in villages and girls, who are most vulnerable to being harassed, kidnapped and raped.
This problem is worse in areas that the state has retrieved control over. Neither is there a sufficient number of schools nor are there enough teachers, as most of them there were either recruited to fight in the war or fled for safety after receiving threats. Meanwhile, in the areas they control, Islamist groups have imposed particular religious curricula, and nothing can protect those who dare to go beyond those curricula from the Islamists’ fury!
While it is true that no one can argue against the fact that education is a basic right and the urgency of developing children’s awareness and knowledge, it is also true that the war has imposed a new formula on these children. It renders staying alive and surviving the priority, even if that comes at the expense of education and other needs.
“I have to feed my mother and brothers,” Khaled, 12, replies firmly when asked about his schooling. Many others, like him, suffered the loss of their family’s breadwinner to death, arrest, injury, or familial disintegration and were forced to support themselves and their families by working menial jobs that are sometimes extremely taxing and not suitable for children their age. These jobs, be they in bakeries, restaurants, construction sites, car mechanics, or on the street, leave them vulnerable to physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
It is a scene that has become commonplace in most Syrian cities or areas where Syrians had migrated and fled to, children as young as ten years old either mortifyingly begging for money or roaming streets and residential areas to sell tissue boxes or bundles of bread, wipe car windows, or collect leftover food and plastic cans from heaps of rubbish. There, you see young Syrian girls, whom poverty forced into working as housemaids in return for accommodation and a puny wage, leaving their innocent bodies victimized by sexual harassment and rape. Those who married off at an early age, and there are many, have it the least bad, with no attention paid to the effects this has on their mental and physical health.
Worst of all is the spread of disturbing behavior and a proclivity for reckless cynicism and violence among Syrian children. These tendencies became widespread because of loss, oppression, orphanhood and extreme destitution, which have made Syrian vulnerable to being recruited to engage in all kinds of illicit activity, as well as becoming hooked on drugs, forced into child prostitution, and having their organs sold on the black market. The prevalence of this phenomenon has become apparent in some everywhere Syrian children are found, both inside and outside the country.
“Do not forget us” is the slogan of “Amal,” a giant doll of a Syrian child searching for her mother. She began her journey towards Western capitals months ago, passing through Berlin, Paris and London. It could perhaps draw the attention of the world’s governments and peoples, reminding them of their duty to address the extreme suffering of children like their own. Like them, Syrian children also deserve a future and a secure life.

World Order: Back to the Future
Amir Taheri/Asharq Al-Awsat/January, 07/2022
In the next few days we will witness a tsunami of diplomatic agitations spanning over Geneva and Brussels as American, Russian and European leaders try to create the impression that they know what is going on and what must be done about it.
The diplomatic marathon is set to start on 9 January with a US-Russia summit, something Russian President Vladimir Putin for weeks has been building up as a major event. It will be followed by a Russia-NATO encounter on January 12, reviving a process that began almost 30 years ago and abandoned in the last decade. The final bouquet will come with a conference of all member states of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) with memories of the love-fest known as the Helsinki Accords.
The question is what each of the participants expects to gain from an exercise that is manifestly improvised in a rush and lacking a clear agenda.
The Russians say they will be seeking “security guarantees”, whatever that means. The Americans and Europeans talk of “persuading Putin not to invade Ukraine”, knowing that he neither wants nor can do so.
Putin is seeking a return to the power play formed in the 20th century when summit conferences first started with the so-called “Big Five” that is to say the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the US, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and pre-Communist China.
It morphed into the “Big Four” when China was excluded before becoming the “Big Three” when France, under General De Gaulle decided to go “tous azimuth”. Next, Great Britain, massively by the loss of empire and economic decline was pushed aside, leaving the US and the USSR as the “superpower” couple. It is that “couple” that Putin hopes to bring back.
This is why he is talking of “raising issues of global concern” in a summit with US President Joe Biden who, on the other hand, hopes to cut Russia down to size as a middling power that could cause occasional nuisance but could never be regraded an equal partner in global leadership. The whispering in Moscow is that Putin will try to tempt Biden with a number of promises.
These include persuading the Islamic Republic in Iran to re-endorse the Obama “nuke deal” which President Donald Trump denounced as a sham. Tehran’s acceptance of a new version presented by the US would give Biden his first diplomatic victory. Putin may be exaggerating his influence with the Tehran mullahs but is certainly in a position to persuade them to tone down their aggressive behavior, something which could help reduce tension in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen where the mullahs play perturbation through proxies.
Next, Putin is also offering cooperation in Syria as part of a broader scheme to stabilize the Middle East.
Other promises would include taming Belarussian President Lukashenko and lowering the flame of conflict in Ukraine. In exchange Putin wants the removal of sanctions, a promise not to extend NATO to Ukraine, and to gradually accept the annexation of Crimea and South Ossetia, the virtual occupation of Abkhazia, and Russia’s military presence in Transcaucasia, as so many faits accomplis. The problem is that Putin’s hope of reverting to the status quo ante, a balance of power that no longer exists sounds more like a fantasy than a serious strategy. This is no longer a bipolar system in which a US-USSR accord could have an immediate impact on a crisis.
We know how the US persuaded Britain, France and Israel to halt the Suez War with a few telephone calls. Yevgeny Primakov, the senior Soviet politician who played multiple roles during the Cold War, recalls in his memoirs how he was sent to Cairo in June 1967 to tell Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul-Nasser to accept a ceasefire with Israel. Nasser immediately complied although, as a military man, he must have known that no war is actually won until one side accepts defeat.
In the old world that Putin hopes to revive the US could count on almost unconditional support from its European, Japanese and other allies. This is no longer the case as even small European powers, not to mention Arsb and other Asian allies try to shape policy options of their own on a case by case basis.
This is why Turkey, still a NATO ally, is gyrating in different directions while a bunch of European Union members, including Germany, preach leniency in dealing with Moscow.
In the same old world, the USSR could bluff with the claim of influence in Communist China. That, too, is no longer the case. In fact, in next week’s diplomatic marathon China will be the elephant in the room.
While Putin’s back-to-the-future gambit is aimed at reviving the last century, his Chinese counterpart, President Xi Jinping, takes 19th century imperialism as model for global power projection. Forging a neo-nationalist narrative that reminds us of British jingoism in the heyday of empire-building Xi speaks of acquiring a blue-water navy and an ultra-modern nuclear arsenal while planning a network of bases, similar to the” coal stations” the British made for their empire, across the globe.
Last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited the first of those bases in Djibouti and encouraged musings on acquiring other bases in Eritrea and the Comoros. Beijing has also built numerous “platforms” on South China Sea islands and is working on securing a base in The Solomon Islands in the Pacific.
What Xi may want to ponder is that all those “coal stations” and bases didn’t save the British Empire while the biggest nuclear arsenal in history didn’t save the USSR from collapse. For their part the Europeans, their lip-service to EU unity notwithstanding, are back to the 17th century and the Westphalian Treaties with the emphasis on “each for himself, in some cases reflecting the chauvinist mood in many European societies, dramatically illustrated by Brexit.
What about the US? If the current isolationist mood is as dense as some claim, the US is trying to crawl back to the old times when the Monroe Doctrine shielded it against troubles caused by others. We may be witnessing what Montaigne called “branler” or jaywalking or dodging all problems without solving any.
With so many players trying to deal with the problems of the 21st century with solutions shaped in 17th, 18th, 19t and 20th centuries we are unlikely to witness the emergence of a new world order anytime soon, certainly not through next week’s diplomatic razzmatazz.

‘Putin Doctrine’ Becomes Clear in Ukraine and Kazakhstan
Hal Brands/Bloomberg/January, 07/2022
For most Westerners, the news that Russia has sent troops to quell a popular uprising in Kazakhstan may seem like a minor event in a far corner of the world. But seen in the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, and of his coercion of Ukraine, it takes on a more sinister significance. Thirty years after the Soviet collapse ushered in the post-Cold War era, Putin has articulated a vision — call it the Putin Doctrine — meant to bring that era decisively to a close.
Putin’s vision is most evident from the draft treaties his government proposed as its price for not (again) invading Ukraine. Those proposals amount to a demand for an internationally acknowledged Russian sphere of interest encompassing the former Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization would be required to cease all further expansion to the east, and to foreswear assistance to countries, such as Ukraine, that are presently outside the alliance. It would have to severely circumscribe training and exercises in areas that Moscow deems sensitive, and refrain from deploying American nuclear weapons anywhere in Europe. Most striking, it would have to commit to leaving the Eastern European countries that joined the alliance after 1997 virtually defenseless.
The upshot would be a badly weakened NATO and an Eastern Europe in which countries must defer to Russian wishes or suffer the consequences.
Putin’s demands have led to suggestions that he is a 19th-century man living in the 21st century. In reality, coercion and geopolitical aggrandizement never really go out of style. Yet Putin is indeed trying to turn back the clock by rolling back the post-Cold War order.
After the Soviet collapse, the animating theme of US policy was promotion of an expanding liberal international order that would relegate autocratic spheres of influence to history. Within Europe, America sought a continent whole, free and at peace — one in which all countries could choose their own geopolitical alignments and political systems.
This vision combined soaring idealism with cold strategic calculus. It was meant to allow the countries of Eastern Europe to determine their own fates after decades, or even centuries, of subordination to larger powers. At the same time, allowing former Soviet allies or even countries that had once been part of the Soviet Union to join NATO would strengthen Washington’s hand in any future confrontation with Russia.
This project reached its apogee between 2003 and 2005, when NATO completed its second and largest round of post-Cold War expansion and “color revolutions” replaced corrupt rulers with Western-leaning leaders in Georgia and Ukraine. In retrospect, however, this was also when a once-prostrate Russia began recovering its geopolitical strength, and when Putin began pushing back. The Russian leader gave fair warning at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, in an angry tirade accusing a hegemonic America of overstepping boundaries in Europe and beyond. The same year, Russian hackers launched a major cyberattack in Estonia after its government removed a Soviet-era monument — a symbolic reminder that the Baltic states could not so easily escape their past. In the years since, Putin has developed a multipronged approach to restoring Russia’s dominance in its “near abroad.”
The modernization of a once-decrepit military gave Putin the ability to prevent nearby states from drifting into the Western orbit: In 2008 and 2014, Moscow vivisected Georgia and then Ukraine when they appeared to be slipping away. Russia has simultaneously used cyberattacks, disinformation and other destabilization programs to keep vulnerable neighbors in disarray, and to undermine the institutions — NATO and the European Union — that Putin sees as encroaching on his flank.
Putin also formed the Eurasian Economic Union, a free-trade pact of five members including Kazakhstan, as a way of binding former Soviet states to Moscow, and invested more heavily in the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a loose military alliance with similar motives. Putin has accompanied these measures with ideological and historical justifications for coercing small states. In 2021, he published an essay arguing that Ukraine is an artificial entity with no right to political or geopolitical autonomy.
As all of this indicates, the Putin Doctrine has become more assertive over time. A country whose influence recoiled rapidly after the Cold War is now calling for a bipolar division of Europe and using force along its periphery.
Whether the Putin Doctrine will succeed is another question. Putin grabbed large chunks of eastern Ukraine in 2014 but drove the western half of the country toward a NATO that was finally getting serious about defending its eastern members. Today, Finland and Sweden are openly flirting with joining, or at least moving closer to NATO if Russia once again invades Ukraine. The US has warned that it would respond to a Russian attack by putting more military assets in Eastern Europe, in addition to imposing economic sanctions.
These costs may not deter Putin, who appears ever-more committed to breaking the resistance of Ukraine and unraveling the post-Cold War order in Eastern Europe. But the chief legacy of the Putin Doctrine could be ironic: The harder Russia pushes to restore a sphere of influence, the more strategically encircled it will become.
*Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. His latest book is "American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump."