06/30/15

Scholar Speaks on Obama’s Red Mentor

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

The black scholar who previously revealed Obama’s personal relationship with Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis is now speaking in detail on the record. Professor Gerald Horne says that while the relationship is noteworthy and should have been uncovered by the press, there is no evidence that Davis turned Obama “into some sort of Manchurian candidate.”

However, Professor Paul Kengor’s book about Davis, The Communist, argues that Davis had a significant influence on the formation of Obama’s Marxist views and policies as President.

Horne, who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, is a contributor to Communist Party USA publications such as Political Affairs magazine. He spoke at a March 23, 2007, event at New York University’s Tamiment Library to celebrate the donation of Communist Party materials to the library.

It was at that event that Horne, speaking before an audience that included Communist Party leaders, discussed then-Senator Barack Obama’s relationship with a Communist Party figure in Hawaii, Davis, who died in 1987.

The revelation that a U.S. senator preparing to run for president was linked to a high-level official of the Communist Party, a party which had been funded by Moscow and used to infiltrate the U.S. government, seemed like big news. Yet, despite coverage of Horne’s remarks by blogger Trevor Loudon and Accuracy in Media before Obama won his first presidential term in 2008, the major U.S. media ignored the relationship and the matter of whether Davis had influenced Obama’s politics, and even had recruited him to the Marxist cause. It was apparent that the media did not want to publicize anything that might inhibit the election of the first black president in the U.S.

In my interview, Horne said he came across the activities of Davis while researching his book on labor unions in Hawaii, Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii, 2011.

“So as I was reading about Frank Marshall Davis there was the simultaneous ascension to influence of then-Senator Barack Obama and I read his memoir [Dreams from My Father], where he talks about a character by the name of Frank and I just put two and two together,” Horne told me. “I don’t think it took a great logical leap.” He added, “The press should have uncovered this, not some obscure professor in Houston.”

In that 2007 speech at Tamiment Library, entitled, “Rethinking the History and Future of the Communist Party,” Horne had referred to Davis as “an African-American poet and journalist” who was “certainly in the orbit of the CP—if not a member …” and had become a friend to Barack Obama and his family in Hawaii.

Horne also noted that Obama, in his memoir, spoke “warmly of an older black poet, he identifies simply as ‘Frank’ as being a decisive influence in helping him to find his present identity as an African-American…”

The Horne speech was subsequently published in the Communist Party newspaper People’s World.

New Zealand researcher Trevor Loudon, who has written two books on Marxist influence in the Obama administration and Congress, discovered the Horne speech identifying “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis and treated the revelation as a significant fact regarding Obama’s presidential run. We confirmed the information in a February 18, 2008, column, “Obama’s Communist Mentor.” Later that year we obtained the 600-page FBI file on Davis, confirming his actual membership in the CPUSA and raising suspicions that Davis was a Soviet espionage agent.

But the major media refused to treat the information as a serious impediment to Obama’s fitness for office. The Obama campaign lied about Davis, portraying him as just a civil rights activist.

I argued in the interview with Horne that the failure of the press to uncover or publicize the evidence of the Obama-Davis connection was the result of liberals or “progressives” thinking that the relationship would hurt Obama’s chances to be president.

Horne said he wasn’t convinced that was the case, at least in terms of how the black community would react, since Davis had a reputation as a noted black literary figure who had been an associate of the prominent black novelist Richard Wright, a former CPUSA member. Horne said membership in the CPUSA did not “carry as much opprobrium” in the black community “as it might carry in other communities.” In addition, he argued, “if you start digging deep in terms of the public and published record about Obama and Davis, you quickly find there’s not much there. I mean we know that Obama mentioned him. We know that Davis was a radical. But we’re not able to make the link that Davis turned Obama into some sort of Manchurian candidate.”

In fact, however, Obama makes at least 22 explicit references to “Frank” in his memoir, talks about how Davis influenced his thinking on race and other matters during eight years in Hawaii, and in a recently discovered 1995 speech promoting his book acknowledged that Davis had “schooled” him on the subject of white racism.

Horne countered, “Some of my friends on the left who are quite hostile to Obama would say that if Davis schooled Obama, he didn’t do a very good job.”

Back in 2007, however, Horne had predicted that Obama, then a somewhat obscure political figure, would go down in history.

Horne said, “At some point in the future, a teacher will add to her syllabus Barack’s memoir and instruct her students to read it alongside Frank Marshall Davis’ equally affecting memoir, ‘Living the Blues’ and when that day comes, I’m sure a future student will not only examine critically the Frankenstein monsters that U.S. imperialism created in order to subdue Communist parties but will also be moved to come to this historic and wonderful archive in order to gain insight on what has befallen this complex and intriguing planet on which we reside.”

The role of Communist parties here and abroad is a favorite subject of Horne, who has written more than 30 books. These books include:

  • Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014).
  • Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African-American Freedom Struggle (2014).
  • From the Barrel of a Gun: The U.S. and the War Against Zimbabwe (2001).
  • The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten (2005).

The Communist Party USA backed Obama for president in 2008, and in 2012 said his re-election was “absolutely essential.”

Current policies and programs of the CPUSA include support for Obamacare, rights for homosexuals, and Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change.

06/28/15

America’s only remaining choices – civil disobedience or collapse

Doug Ross @ Journal
By Lawrence Sellin

The United States no longer has, as the Constitution designed, a government composed of executive, legislative and judicial branches, separate, but equal in power.

The federal government is now an alliance of branches, devoted to the preservation of government itself, separate, not from each other, but from the American people and dedicated to tyranny.

The policies pursued by the Obama Administration and facilitated by cowardly politicians and a compliant media are not simply the intersection of radical ideology and incompetence, but a dangerous subversive element of an anti-American and anti-Western strategy.

Cultural Marxism and its many variants, such as political correctness and multiculturalism, is now firmly ensconced in the White House and the Democrat Party, while the Republican Party, dominated by eunuchs and the avaricious, continuously accommodates its “principles” to match an ever-shifting leftward movement of the “conventional wisdom.” It does so solely in to maintain its place as the token opposition and grifter at the federal tax-revenue trough for the personal financial benefits that it provides.

After the successful 1917 communist revolution in Russia, it was widely believed that a proletarian revolt would sweep across Europe and, ultimately, North America. It did not.

As a result, the Communist International began to investigate other ways to create the state of societal hopelessness and alienation necessary as a prerequisite for socialist revolution – in essence, to destroy western democracy from within.

The single, most important organizational component of this conspiracy was a Communist think tank called the Institute for Social Research, popularly known as the Frankfurt School. The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilization that emphasized the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the disaffection of and division among the population.

Just as in classical economic Marxism, certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil; in Cultural Marxism feminist women, racial and ethnic minorities and those who define themselves according to sexual orientation are deemed good and “victims” of societal injustice. Similarly, white males and “privilege” and, by extension, Western civilization, are automatically and irredeemably malevolent.

Sound familiar? It has been the playbook of the American left for over sixty years. The aim is not to solve social injustice or protect “rights, “of which the left can concoct an endless supply, but to undermine and topple Western democracy.

The new element in this formula, using the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” paradigm, is what David Horowitz described as an unholy alliance between leftists and radical Islam. They have been brought together by the traits they share – their hatred of Western civilization and their belief that the United States is the embodiment of evil on earth. While Islamic radicals seek to purge the world of heresies and of the infidels who practice them, leftist radicals seek to purge society’s collective “soul” of the vices allegedly spawned by capitalism — those being racism, sexism, imperialism, and greed.

That combination of these ultimately mutually exclusive, but temporarily useful, ideologies is arguably the modus operandi of Barack Hussein Obama and his inner circle with a larger cast of fellow travelers and useful idiots.

It is no surprise, then, that lying and secrecy have become the hallmarks of an administration immune both to facts and reason, plagued by contradictions and led by an individual with the impatience and petulance of an insecure adolescent from a political party with the emotional stability of a disgruntled postal worker.

Obama’s transformation is fundamentally the degradation and humbling of a great nation he considers venal and corrupt, but is, in reality, merely a description of the content of his own character.

He and his present anointed successor and Mini Me, Hillary Clinton, are manifestations of modern-day, totalitarian Liberalism, in its insatiable thirst for power, where persuasion is replaced by coercion to implement policies that are inherently damaging to liberty and the national interest.

Unfortunately, the federal government, as an institution, has largely come to reflect those same characteristics, the tyranny that led the Founding Fathers to declare independence.

In their effort to make the central government “too big to fail,” the political-media complex has made it too corrupt to reform.

It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government – Thomas Paine

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of “Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution “. He receives email at [email protected].

04/12/15

Obama Strangles the Monroe Doctrine and Embraces Latin Dictatorships, Communists and Fascists

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

I wrote some time ago on how John Kerry went to Latin America and declared the Monroe Doctrine dead. Obama just finalized it in Cuba. The Monroe Doctrine has been in place since 1823 and has long warned America’s enemies to not even THINK about using South America as a back door to bring Communism and aggression to our doorstep. Well, Obama has thrown that proverbial door wide open to South America and has invited in every enemy we have. Hell, he’s thrown our door at the borders open inviting them into the US as well. He wants America at war and brought to her knees and he’s really going for it now.

As Doug Ross pointed out, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought us to the very brink of nuclear war. The Monroe Doctrine stopped that apocalyptic nightmare from becoming a reality. Kennedy “cited the Monroe Doctrine as a basis for America’s ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ confrontation with the Soviet Union that had embarked on a campaign to install ballistic missiles on Cuban soil.” That was before the Democrats went full blown Marxist and decided to destroy America from within her own shores. Obama has now stated for the world that the US will no longer act to resist overseas influence in the Western Hemisphere.

During the seventh Summit of the Americas, our enemies took turns swinging at American foreign policy. From 19th century territorial raids on Mexico to US support for the overthrow of Chile’s socialist government in 1973 and the 1989 invasion of Panama that removed Gen. Manuel Noriega, Washington’s interventions in Latin America were targets of rebuke during long speeches by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his allies. Obama quipped, “I always enjoy the history lessons that I receive when I’m here.” I’ll bet he does. He’s also meeting with Maduro and cuddling with him while he’s there. Dictators of a feather. Next, it will be Obama’s ongoing bromance with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, who is a hardline Leftist and a long time ally of South American socialists Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales. Last week Correa tweeted “¡Heil Hitler!” in response to a Twitter user posting an article reporting that ex-Ecuadorian President Osvaldo Hurtado had called him a “fascist” for his repeated crackdowns on journalists. I’m sure Obama can relate. Remember, no matter the propagandic rhetoric from Correa on Obama being an “afro American,” Obama held hands with the Ecuadorian president to bring in as many illegal immigrants as he could and the two were aligned on common agendas. Things are never what they appear.

From the White House Dossier:

Obama, who spoke Friday during a “civil society” forum in Panama City, Panama, disparaged past efforts by the United States to forestall the spread of Communism in Latin America and suggested similar missions would no longer be undertaken.

“The days in which our agenda in this hemisphere so often presumed that the United States could meddle with impunity, those days are past,” Obama said.

Civil Society forum? How very George Soros… how very Progressive/Marxist. This condones Communism in our hemisphere – here on our turf, for our neighbors with our blessing. Virtually every country in South and Central America is now controlled by Communists and dictators because we decided to stay out of it. Regardless of the threat to America. Now, you’ve got Russians, Chinese and Iranians down there and I very much doubt they are on a goodwill tour. We are blatantly inviting an attack on America and Obama is welcoming it. He is not naive or clueless to the evil down there – he revels in it. He just apologized for the US’ intervention over the last 200 years – that intervention kept us safe and free, but no more.

James Monroe was a wise man who has now been undone by the enemy within here in America:

The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.

We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety . . .

With the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.

The US now finds itself the one restricted in the Americas – but our enemies are free to roam, plot and attack. This is a recipe for suicidal disaster of historic proportions and Obama knows it.

Obama is about to remove Cuba from the list of states sponsoring terrorism:

Sometime during this weekend’s Summit of the Americas in Panama, President Obama is expected to grant one of Cuban President Raul Castro’s top demands and remove his country from the Unites States’ list of governments that sponsor terrorism.

That, as Sen. Robert Menendez warns, not only flies in the face of all evidence, but removes critical leverage in Washington’s efforts to bring scores of fugitive American terrorists to justice.

The latest State Department report on state sponsors of terrorism — a list that has included Cuba since 1982 — notes that Cuba’s longstanding ties to the Basque terrorist group ETA “have become more distant,” though it still provides “safe haven” to its members.

Havana also harbors terrorists who struck in the United States, such as cop-killers Joanne Chesimard and Charles Hill (who also hijacked a plane), FALN bomber Guillermo Morales and scores of others who’ve avoided accountability for their crimes. (Many of those crimes, incidentally, were committed in the tri-state area.)

Weasel Zippers calls it his “reach out to terrorists” initiative. That’s right on the money.

Obama never lets a political platform go to waste and this Summit of the Americas in Panama City was no exception. President Obama expressed his anger and frustration over Iran with those “trying to short-circuit the actual negotiations,” insisting that “it needs to stop” and pointing the finger squarely at the GOP. I’m sure his aggressive sentiments were roundly approved of by all the dictators in attendance.

Raul Castro generously absolved Barack Obama of America’s past imperialism. That’s what Communist families are for right? Better have a barf bag ready – the crap speweth:

Castro, whose country was invited to the gathering for the first time this year, received an ovation when he began his speech by saying the “time had come for him to speak here” on Communist-ruled Cuba’s behalf.

He referred to the United States’ “wars, conquests and interventions” in the region, saying through an interpreter that the country has been a “hegemonic force that plundered territories throughout the Americas.”

Castro recalled that the U.S. Congress authorized military intervention in Cuba in the late 19th century and that led to the establishment of a military base in Guantanamo that still “occupies our territory.”

In the 20th century, the United States carried out a series of “interventions to overthrow democratic governments” in Latin America, where “dictators were installed in 20 countries, 12 of them simultaneously.”

“In South America alone, hundreds of thousands of people were killed,” Castro said, adding that the most “brutal” episode was the 1973 U.S.-backed coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government.

But after finishing his review of Latin American history, Castro issued an apology to his U.S. counterpart.

“The passion comes out of my pores when the revolution is involved, but I want to apologize to President Obama because he doesn’t have anything to do with all of that,” Castro said, eliciting another round of applause.

“All (of the previous U.S. presidents) are indebted to us, but not President Obama,” who is an “honest man … with a manner about him that speaks to his humble origins,” the Cuban leader said.

So, Obama strangles the Monroe Doctrine and embraces Latin dictatorships, Communists and fascists, while decreeing long live Communism in the Western Hemisphere. Is there anyone out there that still laughably thinks Obama is not an enemy from within? Once again, I join with Doug Ross in longing for a true conservative president. The question is, will we make it to the next election before the Communist crap hits the fan? How can our military leaders not see the impending attack on America that is all but certain when you throw our borders wide open and actually bring in massive amounts of illegal aliens, kill off the Monroe Doctrine, then cozy up to every Communist dictator and fascist in Latin America and as a finale, invite in the Axis of Evil: Russia, China and Iran into your midst… just what do you think is going to happen? Is America truly that suicidally oblivious to our enemies?

Obama, his lieutenants and minions have spent months — even years — crafting a narrative of harm done to Cuba by our embargo of trade with them. What’s missing from this narrative is this almost-never-mentioned fact: “Despite the Spanish term bloqueo (blockade), there has been no physical, naval blockade of the country by the United States after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The United States does not block Cuba’s trade with third parties: other countries are not under the jurisdiction of U.S. domestic laws, such as the Cuban Democracy Act […]. Cuba can, and does, conduct international trade with many third-party countries; Cuba has been a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) since 1995.” (Quote from above link.) So, ponder that for a moment. Cuba is today and has been for decades a cesspool of human rights denial, a commercial and industrial failure, and a place from which natives fled to have any chance of a decent life. This despite the fact that Cuba has been free to trade with the entire rest of the world. It is clear from this that Cuba’s problems do not, even in the smallest degree, originate with America’s refusal to support or endorse the tyranny enforced by the brothers Castro. They did this entirely to themselves.

Obama said of his critics of a potential Iran deal: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of narrow minds.”(*see footnote) So, chaos would be the justice warrior of an open society? Obama is pumping his fist in the air and a la Che Guevara is shouting “Viva la revolucion!” while proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine is dead, long live the dictator.


Unsavory Agents

*(Obama’s familiar sounding “quote” is actually a misquote of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous statement:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Emerson’s actual quote illuminates the small-mindedness of the man who, in an effort to project sophistication, instead utters the bland, repetitious and fallacious consistencies so thoroughly woven through the fabric of his life and administration: that socialism will cure all of Man’s ills. Obama’s attempt to appear the scholar reflects instead Emerson’s “little statesman,” as he dissembles once again.)

03/2/15

Israel’s Enemies in America and Russia

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington and speaks to Congress, bypassing the Obama administration, the stakes could not be higher. But President Obama is not the only, and certainly not the most significant, opponent of Israel. The important new book, “The USA and The New World Order,” features a debate in which one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key advisers, Alexander Dugin, criticizes Israel’s “imperialist” role in the Middle East and America’s role in the world as a whole.

A careful reading of this important debate, which occurred in 2011 and has recently been published in book form, demonstrates that it is Russia which is the main threat to Israel and the United States.

Dugin’s debate opponent, the anti-communist Brazilian writer and philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, sees Dugin as the brains behind Putin’s geopolitical strategy that embraces “genocidal violence.” He notes that Dugin has “advocated the systematic killing of Ukrainians—a people who, according to him, do not belong to the human species.”

As for Israel, the debate transcript shows that Dugin regards the Jewish state as “a modern capitalist and Atlantist entity and an ally of American imperialism.” This is a rather straightforward view of how the Moscow regime views Israel today, and why it backs the government of Iran with weapons, nuclear technology, and diplomatic support.

The term “Atlantist” or “Atlanticist” is meant to refer to trans-Atlantic cooperation between Europe, the United States and Canada in defense and other areas.

Iran is a key part of the anti-American alliance. Dugin has explained in the article, “Eurasianism, Iran, and Russia’s Foreign Policy,” that a “strategic alliance” exists between Iran and Russia, and Russia “will not cease its efforts to reduce sanctions against Iran” over its support for terrorism and pursuit of nuclear weapons.

In the debate with de Carvalho, Dugin proclaims, “I have nothing against Israel,” then quickly added, “but its cruelty in repressing the Palestinians is evident.”

To which de Carvalho counters, “The rockets that the Palestinians fire practically every day at non-military areas of Israel are never reported by the international big media, whereas any raid by Israel against Palestinian military installations always provokes the greatest outcry all over the world.”

He tells Dugin, “I know the facts, my friend. I know the dose of violence on both sides. I know, for instance, that the Israelis never use human shields, while the Palestinians almost always do it. I know that, in Israel, Muslims have civil rights and are protected by the police, while, in countries under Islamic rule, non-Muslims are treated as dogs and often stoned to death.”

This exchange is only part of a debate that puts Israel in the context of a global conflict that Dugin sees as “The West against the rest.” The world is going through a “global transition,” away from dominance by the U.S. and its allies, he asserts.

De Carvalho commented that Dugin, himself the son of a KGB officer, is “the political mentor of a man [Vladimir Putin] who is the very incarnation of the KGB.” He said that Dugin has emerged as “the creator and guide of one of the widest and most ambitious geopolitical plans of all time—a plan adopted and followed as closely as possible by a nation which has the largest army in the world, the most efficient and daring secret service and a network of alliances that stretches itself through four continents.”

De Carvalho describes Eurasianism as “a synthesis of the defunct USSR and the Tzarist Empire” that includes philosophical elements of Marxism-Leninism, Russian Messianism, Nazism, and esotericism. The last element is a reference to certain occult influences in Russia.

“In order to fulfill his plans,” de Carvalho explains, “he counts on Vladimir Putin’s strong arm, the armies of Russia and China and every terrorist organization of the Middle East, not to mention practically every leftist, fascist and neo-Nazi movements which today place themselves under the banner of his ‘Eurasian’ project.”

He says the historical roles played by Russia and China in sponsoring and arming terrorist groups help explain why global Islam has targeted the United States and Israel. “Some theoreticians of the Caliphate allege that socialism, once triumphant in the world, will need a soul, and Islam will provide it with one,” he notes.

In this global war for domination, however, he also identifies a “globalist elite,” including in the U.S. Government and society, which wants to destroy traditional Christianity and share in “the spoils” from the decaying West.

What we are witnessing, he writes, is an “alliance of Russia with China and the Islamic countries, as well as with part of Western Europe,” that has come together in a “total war against the United States and Israel,” which is to be followed by “the establishment of a worldwide dictatorship.” It is the replacement of an “Atlanticist Order” by the “Eurasian Order.”

For those who doubt such global schemes could come to pass, de Carvalho says that Dugin “is not a dreamer, a macabre poet creating imaginary hecatombs in a dark dungeon infested with rats.” Rather, he is “the mentor of the Putin government and the brains behind Russian foreign policy,” whose ideas “have long ceased to be mere speculations.”

De Carvalho identifies among these “material incarnations” of the Dugin vision the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a group founded by Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which “intends to be the center of a restructuring of military power in the world.” Iran has been an observer state at the SCO since 2005. He also cites the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, a geopolitical term for countries which are seen as developing a mechanism to replace NATO, the one-time anti-communist alliance.

Another such international organization is the BRICS alliance of nations, incorporating Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Iran is also discussing joining BRICS.

On January 20, Iran and Russia signed an agreement expanding their military ties. Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu said Moscow wants to develop a “long-term and multifaceted” military relationship with Iran. Just a few days ago Russia offered to sell the Antey-2500 anti- aircraft and ballistic missile system to Iran. “The United States and Israel lobbied Russia to block the missile sale, saying it could be used to shield Iran’s nuclear facilities from possible future air strikes,” Reuters reported.

For its part, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been warning about Iran while simultaneously conducting cordial relations with Russia and refusing to condemn Putin for invading Ukraine. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman says Israel will maintain “neutrality” in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. “Maintenance of good relations with Russia is a priority moment for Israel and its principal stance,” Lieberman said.

It has been estimated that more than 6,000 people have died in eastern Ukraine since Russia’s invasion of the country. The Obama administration has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons for its own self-defense.