Obama, from Hawaii Issued Formal Sanctions Against Russians

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a Joint Analysis Report (JAR) that details Russian malicious cyber activity, designated as GRIZZLY STEPPE. This activity by Russian civilian and military intelligence services (RIS) is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and private sector entities.

DHS recommends that network administrators review the Security Publication for more information and implement the recommendations provided.

Barack Obama says US shutting down two Russian compounds in Maryland and New York and declaring 35 Russian intelligence operatives “persona non grata.”

Issuance of Amended Executive Order 13694; Cyber-Related Sanctions Designations

Today, the President issued an Executive Order Taking Additional Steps To Address The National Emergency With Respect To Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities.  This amends Executive Order 13694, “Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities.”  E.O. 13694 authorized the imposition of sanctions on individuals and entities determined to be responsible for or complicit in malicious cyber-enabled activities that result in enumerated harms that are reasonably likely to result in, or have materially contributed to, a significant threat to the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States.  The authority has been amended to also allow for the imposition of sanctions on individuals and entities determined to be responsible for tampering, altering, or causing the misappropriation of information with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions.  Five entities and four individuals are identified in the Annex of the amended Executive Order and will be added to OFAC’s list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN List).  OFAC today is designating an additional two individuals who also will be added to the SDN List.

 

Specially Designated Nationals List Update

The following individual has been added to OFAC’s SDN List:  
ALEXSEYEV, Vladimir Stepanovich; DOB 24 Apr 1961; Passport 100115154 (Russia); First Deputy Chief of GRU (individual) [CYBER2] (Linked To: MAIN INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE).
 
BELAN, Aleksey Alekseyevich (a.k.a. Abyr Valgov; a.k.a. BELAN, Aleksei; a.k.a. BELAN, Aleksey Alexseyevich; a.k.a. BELAN, Alexsei; a.k.a. BELAN, Alexsey; a.k.a. “Abyrvaig”; a.k.a. “Abyrvalg”; a.k.a. “Anthony Anthony”; a.k.a. “Fedyunya”; a.k.a. “M4G”; a.k.a. “Mag”; a.k.a. “Mage”; a.k.a. “Magg”; a.k.a. “Moy.Yawik”; a.k.a. “Mrmagister”), 21 Karyakina St., Apartment 205, Krasnodar, Russia; DOB 27 Jun 1987; POB Riga, Latvia; nationality Latvia; Passport RU0313455106 (Russia); alt. Passport 0307609477 (Russia) (individual) [CYBER2].
 
BOGACHEV, Evgeniy Mikhaylovich (a.k.a. BOGACHEV, Evgeniy Mikhailovich; a.k.a. “Lastik”; a.k.a. “lucky12345”; a.k.a. “Monstr”; a.k.a. “Pollingsoon”; a.k.a. “Slavik”), Lermontova Str., 120-101, Anapa, Russia; DOB 28 Oct 1983 (individual) [CYBER2].
 
GIZUNOV, Sergey (a.k.a. GIZUNOV, Sergey Aleksandrovich); DOB 18 Oct 1956; Passport 4501712967 (Russia); Deputy Chief of GRU (individual) [CYBER2] (Linked To: MAIN INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE).
 
KOROBOV, Igor (a.k.a. KOROBOV, Igor Valentinovich); DOB 03 Aug 1956; nationality Russia; Passport 100119726 (Russia); alt. Passport 100115101 (Russia); Chief of GRU (individual) [CYBER2] (Linked To: MAIN INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE).
 
KOSTYUKOV, Igor (a.k.a. KOSTYUKOV, Igor Olegovich); DOB 21 Feb 1961; Passport 100130896 (Russia); alt. Passport 100132253 (Russia); First Deputy Chief of GRU (individual) [CYBER2] (Linked To: MAIN INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE).
 
The following entities have been added to OFAC’s SDN List:
 
AUTONOMOUS NONCOMMERCIAL ORGANIZATION PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION OF DESIGNERS OF DATA PROCESSING SYSTEMS (a.k.a. ANO PO KSI), Prospekt Mira D 68, Str 1A, Moscow 129110, Russia; Dom 3, Lazurnaya Ulitsa, Solnechnogorskiy Raion, Andreyevka, Moscow Region 141551, Russia; Registration ID 1027739734098 (Russia); Tax ID No. 7702285945 (Russia) [CYBER2].
 
FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE (a.k.a. FEDERALNAYA SLUZHBA BEZOPASNOSTI; a.k.a. FSB), Ulitsa Kuznetskiy Most, Dom 22, Moscow 107031, Russia; Lubyanskaya Ploschad, Dom 2, Moscow 107031, Russia [CYBER2].
 
MAIN INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE (a.k.a. GLAVNOE RAZVEDYVATEL’NOE UPRAVLENIE (Cyrillic: ГЛАВНОЕ РАЗВЕДЫВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УПРАВЛЕНИЕ); a.k.a. GRU; a.k.a. MAIN INTELLIGENCE DEPARTMENT), Khoroshevskoye Shosse 76, Khodinka, Moscow, Russia; Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, Frunzenskaya nab., 22/2, Moscow 119160, Russia [CYBER2].
 
SPECIAL TECHNOLOGY CENTER (a.k.a. STC, LTD), Gzhatskaya 21 k2, St. Petersburg, Russia; 21-2 Gzhatskaya Street, St. Petersburg, Russia; Website stc-spb.ru; Email Address [email protected]; Tax ID No. 7802170553 (Russia) [CYBER2].
 
ZORSECURITY (f.k.a. ESAGE LAB; a.k.a. TSOR SECURITY), Luzhnetskaya Embankment 2/4, Building 17, Office 444, Moscow 119270, Russia; Registration ID 1127746601817 (Russia); Tax ID No. 7704813260 (Russia); alt. Tax ID No. 7704010041 (Russia) [CYBER2].
****

 

Waging a guerrilla war

One announcement came from Berlin. Another came from Washington. And they came weeks apart.

German intelligence warned in late November that Russia had launched a campaign to meddle in upcoming elections to the Bundestag. And in early December, the CIA said it concluded that Moscow had already interfered in the U.S. presidential election.

In any other year, either of these claims would probably have been astonishing, sensational, and even mind-blowing.

Not in 2016.

This was the year such things became routine as the Kremlin took the gloves off in its nonkinetic guerrilla war against the West.

It was the year Russia’s long-standing latent support for the xenophobic and Euroskeptic far right became manifest, open, and increasingly brazen.

It was the year cyberattacks moved beyond trolling and disruption and toward achieving specific political goals.

It was the year long-cultivated networks of influence across the West were activated.

It was the year the Kremlin expanded its disinformation campaign beyond Ukraine and the former Soviet space and aimed it at destabilizing the West itself.

It was the year Moscow turned Western democracy into a weapon — against Western democracy.

And most importantly, with the West suffering from one of its worst crises of confidence in generations, 2016 was the year Moscow began to see results.

It was the year of the perfect storm, when the Western angst and malaise from the 2008 financial crisis, the eurozone crisis, and the migrant crisis crested and dovetailed with a concerted Kremlin campaign to undermine Western institutions.

And with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, with the election of Donald Trump in the United States, with one pro-Moscow candidate or another likely to win the presidency in France, and with antiestablishment populism on the rise throughout Europe, this perfect storm has produced a markedly more favorable environment for the goals of Vladimir Putin’s autocratic regime.

It has left the independence of countries seeking to escape Moscow’s orbit — like Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova — more precarious than at any moment since the Soviet collapse.

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote recently in The Atlantic that the Kremlin has launched “an opportunistic but sophisticated campaign to sabotage democracy and bend it toward his interests, not just in some marginal, fragile places but at the very core of the liberal democratic order, Europe and the United States.”

“We stand now at the most dangerous moment for liberal democracy since the end of World War II,” Diamond added.

An Early Harbinger

The warnings that 2016 would be different came early, in January, when Moscow escalated its information war against the West with the infamous case of Lisa F. in Germany.

By relentlessly pushing a false story that an ethnic-Russian teenage girl was sexually assaulted by migrants in Berlin at a time when Germans were getting increasingly nervous about the mounting migrant crisis, the Kremlin appeared to be actively attempting to undermine the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Incited by Russian-language media reports, thousands of Russian-speaking protesters took to the streets carrying banners with slogans like “Our Children Are In Danger.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave the “scandal” an official stamp, accusing the German authorities of “sweeping problems under the rug.”

The story was soon proven false, but the damage was done — and a message was sent that the Kremlin intended to play hardball.

And play hardball it did, with a dizzying and almost nonstop barrage of hacking, doxing, fake news, support for fringe political forces, and other mischief.

The most high-profile example of this, of course, was the emerging consensus that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election with the apparent goal of harming Hillary Clinton and/or helping Trump.

But while the hacking of the U.S. election garnered the most attention and headlines, it was far from the only case of Russia seeking to destabilize Western democracies.

“Putin is not done yet. He seeks to promote anti-establishment candidates in next year’s elections in the Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany,” Michael Khodarkovsky, a professor at Loyola University Chicago and author of the forthcoming book Russia’s Twentieth Century, wrote in The New York Times.

And Then We Take Berlin

In a letter to EU foreign-relations chief Federica Mogherini, 51 lawmakers from the European Parliament warned that more than $200 million of Russian black cash has been laundered through Europe and “there is information that shows that the money has been used to influence European politics, media, and civil society.”

In the United Kingdom, Russia’s propaganda machine worked overtime to cheerlead for the Brexit campaign and its leader Nigel Farage.

In Italy, Kremlin-funded news outlets RT and Sputnik fed a barrage of fake news to a network of websites run by the far left Five Star Movement, spreading Euroskepticism, and anti-Americanism, and undermining a constitutional referendum that led to Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s resignation.

The Kremlin also continued to support Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigrant National Front in France which was granted a 9 million euro loan from a Russian bank in 2015.

And Le Pen’s likely opponent in the second round of next year’s presidential elections, former prime minister Francois Fillon, is also openly pro-Moscow.

And in December, the ruling United Russia party signed a cooperation agreement with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party.

“Despite being much weaker than the Soviet Union, Russia today nevertheless has a greater ability to provoke mischief than the communist empire ever did, while western debates on how to contain (or engage) Russia have an air of helplessness,” political analyst Lilia Shevtsova wrote in The Financial Times.

The legacy of 2016 is a weakened, divided, and disillusioned West; and an emboldened Kremlin.

“If December 7, 1941, is a date which will live in infamy,” Brian Frydenborg wrote on the blog War Is Boring, in reference to the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II, “then 2016 is a year which will live in infamy.”

GW Bush Doing the Work Kerry Should on N. Korea

Sometimes when a panel is mobilized that includes media, negotiators, diplomats and legislators, interesting facts emerge. Such is the case where President George W. Bush convened a panel at the George W. Bush Institute on the matter of North Korea. Going beyond the proven human rights violations by the Kims, there is more to understand when it comes to relationships including the DPRK, China, Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, Iran, Syria and more.

There is a U.S. citizen currently in prison doing slave labor in N. Korea but John Kerry voids his failure to get Otto Warmbier released. Kerry deferred the process to former governor Bill Richardson and there has been no progress.

The DPRK is in fact developing technology and weapons systems that are not only being tested but being sold to rogue nations for revenue purposes.

GW Bush has reached out to North Koreans that have escaped and made their way to the United States in a manner where they provide information and continued work for the benefit of Congress, the State Department, diplomatic objectives and policy to address the Kim regime going forward.

This is a fascinating discussion where real truths are revealed pointing to labor, human rights violations, military and nuclear operations, trade and more. North Korea is stacking missiles on launch pads and working on miniaturized nuclear weapons. The objective is to reach the United States. What has John Kerry done for deterrents? Nothing….

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North Korea’s Rockets and Missiles

Space/2013: North Korea’s missile program is shrouded in secrecy, which helps the outlaw nation keep the rest of the world guessing.Still, Western experts have learned a fair bit about Pyongyang’s stable of rockets and missiles over the years by analyzing test flights, satellite photos and other data. Here are five of the most interesting things they’ve figured out.

FIRST STOP: Soviet Origins of Missiles

Soviet Origins

The Hermit Kingdom’s missile program is based primarily on Soviet Scuds, which apparently entered the country via Egypt in the 1970s. North Korea was building its own Scud version, called the Hwasong-5, by the mid-1980s, and moved onto bigger and more powerful missiles after that. [North Korea’s Missile Capabilities Explained]NEXT: Poor Accuracy

Poor Accuracy

North Korea’s missiles have lousy accuracy compared to those developed by the United States, experts say. Pyongyang’s Hwasong line, for example, can reach targets a few hundred miles away, but with an accuracy of just 0.3 miles to 0.6 miles (0.5 to 1 kilometer).A missile called the Nodong can fly 620 miles to 800 miles (1,000 to 1,300 km), but its estimated accuracy is even worse — 1.8 to 2.5 miles (3 to 4 km). Such missiles can’t reliably hit military targets, but they can certainly strike larger targets such as cities.

NEXT: Iran’s Help

Cooperation with Iran

North Korea has apparently cooperated extensively with fellow pariah nation Iran on rocket and missile technology. For example, the third stage of Pyongyang’s Unha-2 rocket is very similar to the upper stage of Iran’s Safir-2 launcher, physicists David Wright and Theodore Postol noted in a 2009 report.NEXT: Satellite Success

Satellite Launch Success

North Korea joined the ranks of satellite-launching nations last December, when its Unha-3 rocket launched a small satellite to Earth orbit.This breakthrough came after three consecutive failures — one in 1998, one in 2009 and another in April 2012. North Korean officials didn’t always admit to these mishaps, however. For example, they claimed that the Kwangmyongsong-1 (“Bright Star 1”) satellite reached orbit in 1998 and broadcast patriotic songs into space. [Unha-3 Rocket Explained (Infographic)]

NEXT: Nuclear Warheads Possible

Nuclear Warheads Possible

North Korea has been ratcheting up its bellicose rhetoric lately, threatening to launch nuclear strikes against Washington, D.C. and other American cities.While the rogue nation’s nuclear-weapons program is thought to be at a relatively primitive stage, Pyongyang may indeed already possess warheads small enough to be carried large distances by a ballistic missile, experts say. “Having something that’s around 1,000 kilograms, or maybe somewhat smaller than that, unfortunately does not seem impossible,” Wright told SPACE.com. “We don’t really know, but I think you have to take seriously that they could well be there.”

Most analysts doubt, however, that North Korean missiles are powerful enough to deliver a nuclear weapon to the American mainland. The tough talk from Pyongyang is primarily bluster aimed at wringing concessions out of the international community and building support for young leader Kim Jong-Un at home, they say.

Ah…Rex Tillerson has Another Special Friend in Russia

We are supposed to dislike the NYT’s for many reasons, but there are times when researchers do good work even if some truths hurt. Such is the case with Rex Tillerson and Igor Sechin.

 HuffPo

MOSCOW — It’s June 2014. War is underway in eastern Ukraine, and Russia has recently annexed Crimea. Western countries are introducing sanctions against Russian companies and the people in President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner circle. It seems that Russia will soon be completely isolated from the rest of the world.

But the 21st World Petroleum Congress is taking place in Moscow. The atmosphere at the Crocus Expo International Exhibition Center, where the congress is being held, is decidedly nonconfrontational. On a stage, two men in suits hold an amicable conversation, addressing each other as “my friend.” The men are captains of the global petroleum industry: Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, and Igor I. Sechin, the head of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, and one of Mr. Putin’s longtime allies.

Mr. Sechin is not just the chief executive of Rosneft, he is also one of the heroes of contemporary Russian politics. He is believed to have served as a K.G.B. agent in Africa and had no real experience in the business world until he was over 40. He didn’t come to lead the state oil company because of his business acumen; he earned his position through his loyalty to Mr. Putin.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Sechin aligned himself with Mr. Putin, another former K.G.B. officer, as he began consolidating power in post-Soviet politics. Everywhere Mr. Putin went, Mr. Sechin was by his side as a trusted aide and adviser.

In 2003, Russian authorities arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the owner of Yukos, a huge oil company. At the time, Mr. Sechin was working as Mr. Putin’s deputy chief of staff, and though he had no formal judicial or investigatory authority, Mr. Khodorkovsky accused him of initiating his arrest — and the campaign that followed to nationalize Yukos. It’s impossible to know, but it seems likely. Following Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest, Rosneft absorbed Yukos’s assets. In 2004, Mr. Sechin was appointed to head Rosneft’s board.

Mr. Sechin isn’t just a businessman, though. He’s an influential political figure and a crucial Putin ally who has demonstrated his power. The arrest last month of Aleksei Ulyukayev, the minister of economic development, on charges of bribery was widely viewed as an act of revenge by Mr. Sechin. With the arrest, the first of an active government minister in post-Soviet Russia, he again confirmed his image as the most sinister man in the president’s inner circle.

Earlier this year, Mr. Sechin’s expansion was so aggressive that it seemed plausible that Mr. Putin himself would get tired of him, and would try to rid himself of such an odious comrade in arms.

Now Mr. Sechin has nothing to fear. A gift has arrived from across the ocean. This man, whose international experience up to this point has been limited to his friendship with Hugo Chávez, the deceased president of Venezuela, has an exclusive international trump card that even Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov lacks. More here.

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Judicial Watch says it this way, ‘Rex and the Russian Swamp’:

Amid controversy over the extent of Kremlin penetration into the American electoral system (detailed last week in Investigative Bulletin), Donald Trump has doubled down on the Russian connection with his nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to become the next secretary of state.

Mr. Trump has been signaling a new Russia tilt for months and Mr. Tillerson seems an excellent candidate to carry it out. Whether this is sound policy or sheer folly remains to be seen, but from an anti-corruption perspective—taking Mr. Trump at his pledge to “drain the swamp”—the Tillerson nomination is strange indeed.

Mr. Tillerson is up to his eyeballs in Russian oil deals with Vladimir Putin, whose kleptocratic regime makes the Washington swamp look like the pool at Mar-a-Lago. Last week, U.S. intelligence leaked a new estimate of Mr. Putin’s personal wealth: $85 billion.

His Kremlin salary: $144,444.

You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Mr. Tillerson’s role in the Rosneft oil deal is a case in point. Rosneft is a Russian energy giant closely allied with Mr. Putin. Mr. Tillerson negotiated a deal with Rosneft giving ExxonMobil access to vast Russian oil reserves in the Arctic and Black Sea. ExxonMobil pledged millions to provide the technology and expertise for exploration and drilling. In return, it received a one-third stake in the venture. Successful exploitation of the oil fields could bring more than $100 billion into ExxonMobil coffers.

Rosneft was formerly known as the Yukos Oil Company, Russia’s largest energy enterprise. In 2003, Mr. Putin decided he wanted it.

Yukos’s founder, the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was becoming a threat to Mr. Putin. He jailed Mr. Khodorkovsky on bogus fraud charges, seized Yukos assets and bankrupted the company. Mr. Khodorkovsky served ten years behind bars. Other Yukos officials were jailed or fled the country. American and Russian investors were robbed. The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague awarded investors $50 billion in damages, but the decision was later overturned.

Some might say Mr. Khodorkovsky got off easy. Here’s a list of Putin critics who ended up dead.

Yukos was raped and pillaged and its assets were transferred to Rosneft. Control of the company was given to a key Putin lieutenant, Igor Sechin. Like Mr. Putin, Mr. Sechin is a former KGB agent. Mr. Sechin is a leading figure in the siloviki—literally, “strongmen”—faction of former law enforcement, military and intelligence figures around Mr. Putin.

In 2012, Mr. Tillerson struck his deal with Rosneft. “Today really is a historic day,” Mr. Tillerson said at the signing ceremony.

Former Yukos officials and shareholders felt differently. When the Mafia or a drug cartel washes its ill-gotten gains into a new, “clean” financial entity, that’s called money laundering. “Through today’s agreement with Exxon,” the Committee for Russian Economic Freedom declared, “Rosneft has finally managed to give an aura of legitimacy to the theft of assets stolen from Yukos.” The former CFO of Yukos wrote in the Moscow Times that “Exxon is investing with a company whose largest assets were stolen from Yukos shareholders by the Russian government.”

Mr. Tillerson has a long history with Mr. Sechin. In 1998, Mr. Tillerson ran ExxonMobil’s oil and gas enterprise on Sakahalin Island, off the coast of Siberia. Mr. Sechin took over the Russian side of the project in 2004. Mr. Tillerson’s ExxonMobil predecessor as CEO tried to buy into Yukos but was driven off by the jailing of Mr. Khodorkovsky.

Mr. Tillerson persisted. The Rosneft deal giving ExxonMobil access to Arctic and Black Sea oil fields elevated the relationship between Mr. Tillerson and the Kremlin leadership. Mr. Tillerson calls Mr. Sechin a “friend.” Mr. Sechin says he wants to come to the United States to ride motorcycle with Mr. Tillerson. In 2013, Mr. Putin awarded Mr. Tillerson the Russian Order of Friendship for his “big contribution to developing cooperation in the energy sector.”

The bromance hit a rough patch in 2014 when the U.S. government sanctioned Russian officials and entities—including Mr. Sechin and Rosneft—for annexing Crimea and sending forces into Ukraine. The Rosneft deal was put on hold. Losses to ExxonMobil are estimated at more than $1 billion. In 2015, Mr. Tillerson declared at a conference, “We’ll await a time in which the sanctions environment changes or the sanctions requirements change.”

He may not have to wait much longer.

Obama/Kerry: Diplomatic Terrorism on Israel

Israel was on the edge at least last October, they knew that Obama and Kerry had something in the pipeline against Israel. So it comes down to who wins the debate over Jerusalem? Should there even be a debate and Israel is fighting back on the never-ending use of the words ‘occupy’ and ‘settlement’s and should.

 CBS

Bloomberg: When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected last year, the White House threatened to reconsider long-standing U.S. policy to veto U.N. Security Council resolutions on Israel’s presence in the West Bank. At issue was a last-minute interview in which Netanyahu said there would be no Palestinian state as long as he was prime minister. He took back that statement after the election. Nonetheless, the White House directed policymakers to draw up a set of options for how Obama could “preserve the two-state solution,” according to one U.S. official privy to the process.

So far, nothing has come of Obama’s threat. Indeed last month, Obama signed an agreement with Israel to extend the U.S. subsidy of its military for another ten years. In foreign policy, Obama is focused on the collapse of U.S. policy in Syria, which has become an even greater humanitarian emergency in the last month with the Russian and Iranian-led siege of Aleppo. Politically, the White House is working to elect Hillary Clinton as Obama’s successor.

Yet with a little more than three months left of his presidency, Israeli officials privately say they worry Obama intends to try to level the playing field between the Palestinians and Israelis before he leaves office. The threat of a last-minute speech, executive order, or U.N. action has stirred some of Israel’s friends in Washington. Last month, for example, 88 senators signed a letter to Obama urging him to restate “long-standing U.S. policy” to veto one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the U.N.

The Obama administration has not made such a statement. This week, however, White House spokesman Joshua Earnest “strongly condemned” Israel’s approval of 98 new housing units in the West Bank settlement of Shilo. A CBS correspondent noted that this phrasing is “usually reserved” for terrorist attacks.  More here.

**** So Israel put some assets into the system and worked to determine who, what and when such actions would happen. Since the UN vote, Israel says it has iron clad evidence of the United States complicity in the text for the vote.

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Haaretz: he Egyptians distributed a Security Council resolution on the settlements last week, and demanded a vote within 24 hours, only to withdraw it after pressure from the prime minister’s bureau in Jerusalem and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

Israel’s UN ambassador, Ron Dermer, said Monday that Israel had evidence that the Obama administration was behind the wording of the resolution and had cooperated with the Palestinians behind Israel’s back. The document published on the Egyptian new site might be the evidence Israel has. On December 22, the day the original Security Council vote was to have taken place, the Israeli news site Walla published a report almost identical to the one on the Egyptian news site. Walla quoted a senior Israeli official as stating that in a meeting between Kerry and a Palestinian delegation to Washington headed by Palestinian Liberation Organization Secretary General Saeb Erekat, agreement was reached on the matter of a resolution against the settlements, and that Kerry said the United States would not veto it. More here.

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What else was Israel watching?

On December 23, 2016, the UN General Assembly approved spending $138,700 to create a “database” of all companies that conduct business – directly or indirectly – relating to Israeli “settlements” in Arab-claimed territories. The idea of a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) blacklist came from a March 2016 resolution of the UN Human Rights Council. According to UN documentation, the $138,700 will be used “to pay for one staff member to create the database over a period of 8 months and present a report” to the Human Rights Council in March 2017. In other words, the December authorization backdated approval of an expenditure for an operation already underway.

When the General Assembly’s Budget Committee met to approve the UN budget, Israel proposed to delete approval specifically for funding the blacklist.The Committee rejected the Israeli amendment 6 in favor (Australia, Canada, Guatemala Israel, Palau and the United States), 151 against, with 6 abstentions (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Georgia, Honduras and Ghana).

After Israel lost the vote on funding the BDS item, it declared it was “disassociating” from the General Assembly’s subsequent approval of the UN budget as a whole. Despite the U.S. voting against funding the blacklist initially, it voted in favor of the UN budget, and made no mention of any problem funding BDS.

Date
December 23, 2016
Title
Fifth Committee Vote on Israeli Proposed Oral Amendment to Resolution on Programme Budget Appropriations for 2016-2017 Biennium, UN Meeting Coverage
Note
Israel’s oral amendment was rejected by a vote of 6 in favor (Australia, Canada, Guatemala Israel, Palau and the United States), 151 against, with 6 abstentions (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Central African Republic, Georgia, Honduras and Ghana)

So, here is Kerry on 12/28/2016 speaking while Obama is on vacation in Hawaii:

AP: Secretary of State John Kerry says that if Israel rejects a two-state solution for peace with the Palestinian people, “it can be Jewish or it can be democratic.”

Kerry was responding to withering Israeli criticism of the United States’ abstention from a vote condemning Israeli settlement construction. He reiterated the American position that a two-state solution giving both Israelis and Palestinians a home state is the best roadmap to peace. He also made it clear that despite recent differences in policy, the United States continues to be Israel’s closest ally.

Israel has been furious at the United States since the UN vote late last week. But Kerry said in a farewell speech at the State Department on Wednesday that the vote was “in keeping with” American values for democracy.

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The full text of his speech is here, but while he ways that Israel has to be either Jewish or a democracy and not both, Kerry also suggests that Israel pay restitution to the Palestinians. In 2009, the United States gave Gaza $900 million, which is under the control of Abu Mazen.

 

More here.

Obama’s Position is Jews Cannot Pray at Wailing Wall

How about the first item of order in this decades long debate is eliminating 2 words: ‘occupation’ and ‘settlement’. Beyond that, read on.

Threats to Israel Posed by Resolution 2334

  1. In terms of Israel, the approach underlying Resolution 2334, whereby “the Western Wall is tantamount to the Yitzhar settlement,” or “the Ramot neighborhood in Jerusalem is equivalent to the settlement of Elon Moreh,” eliminates any chances of negotiations toward a two-state arrangement.
  2. The resolution rewards Palestinian obduracy, the Palestinian strategy of avoiding negotiations with Israel, and the expectation that the international arena will dictate the parameters for the arrangement. Therefore, the resolution will encourage the Palestinians to adhere to their refusal to return to the negotiating table and exhibit the flexibility required in any genuine negotiation.
  3. The resolution increased the risk of Israelis at certain political and military echelons being brought to trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It will be difficult to conduct peace negotiations in an atmosphere of “a legal witch hunt” of Israeli leaders and commanders.
  4. The delegitimization movement and the boycott of Israel will become stronger and receive moral and political encouragement, which can be translated into legal, political, public, and economic measures.
  5. The resolution places the Israeli issue as a bone of contention between American Democrats and Republicans and threatens America’s longstanding bipartisan support of Israel.
  6. The resolution damages Israeli deterrence, since a significant portion thereof is based on the strategic alliance with the United States and its support of Israel.
  7. The report on issues referred to in the resolution, which the UN Secretary-General is requested to release every three months, will guarantee constant preoccupation with these topics at the expense of more important issues and will nourish an ongoing anti-Israeli campaign.

At the same time, Resolution 2334 was not passed pursuant to Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, and, therefore does not allow the UN to impose sanctions and other practical measures against Israel without a further resolution. One can assess that the new administration in the United States, which is more sympathetic toward Israel than the Obama administration, will veto any attempt to pass resolutions pursuant to Chapter 7.

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CR: Here we go again with the U.N. peddling the biggest geo-political hoax of all time — that Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria is illegal, that it belongs to a distinct Arab people called “Palestinians,” and that the source of Islamist mayhem across the globe is a smattering of Jewish homes being built in their ancestral land. Land, which by the way, is virtually invisible on a map compared to the mass of land controlled by Islam.

While Islamic jihadists are blowing up every corner of the world, what is “the international community” focused on? Yup, those pesky little Jewish homes built in their ancestral home on a parcel of land not even visible on the map. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution before the Christmas weekend that “reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

Obama instructed the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to abstain from vetoing that resolution, an unprecedented step given our history of vetoing anti-Israel resolutions. Worse, it appears that Obama was likely the ringleader behind the resolution because, according to Israeli sources, Vice President Joe Biden convinced Ukraine to support the resolution, a move that shocked Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Actually, Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria is enshrined into international law

The notion that there is any moral equivalence between Jews building homes in their homeland that they won back in a defensive war (after it was illegally occupied by Jordan) and brutal terrorists illegally occupying land that was never given to them, is reprehensible. But first, a brief history lesson …

The only binding resolution of international law, a resolution which has never been countermanded to this very day, is the July 1922 Mandate for Palestine. Adopted by the League of Nations, that resolution recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” It called for the creation of a Jewish national homeland anywhere west of the Jordan River.

Once the League of Nations was disbanded and the United Nations formed in its stead, the international community agreed to maintain all agreements and not “alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” [Article 80, UN Charter, emphasis added] This provision wasn’t inserted by accident; it was known as “the Jewish People’s clause” at the time it was adopted in 1945 in order to enshrine the 1922 Mandate into international law.

The Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations was the last legally binding document delineating regional borders. In Article 5 of the Mandate it explicitly states “The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the Government of any foreign Power.”

The Palestine Mandate (and Iraq) was given to Britain to serve as a temporary trustee based on the resolution between the four principle Allied Powers in April 1920 at the San Remo Conference in Italy, which was signed by 51 nations. It was at that conference where the world powers adopted the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which originally allocated the eastern part of the Mandate for a Jewish state as well) creating a Jewish state. This same conference that created the Jewish state west of the Jordan River also created Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq as Arab states.

The legality of the 1922 Mandate was adopted that same year by the U.S. Congress in H.J. Res. 360 and signed by President Warren Harding. The newly created Arab country of Jordan attacked Israel in 1948 seeking to annihilate its inhabitants and illegally occupied Judea and Samaria until 1967. That year, Israel won back the territory originally allocated for a Jewish State as part of the 1922 League of Nations agreement.

There is no such thing as “’pre-67 borders.” They were merely 1949 armistice lines between Israel and neighboring countries after they launched an illegal war of extermination. It has nothing to do with the notion of a unique Arab “Palestinian” entity west of the Jordan River. There was never any internationally recognized legal sovereign occupying Judea and Samaria from the time the British Empire fell until 1967. Jordan’s occupation of the area west of the Jordan River was never recognized. To the extent there is an Arab Palestinian state it is the modern state of Jordan, which already sucked up 77% of the original Mandate of Palestine allocated for a Jewish State under the first plan of the Balfour Declaration.

In many respects, this is the biggest global fake news story of our time.

Although the U.N. has bloviated time and again about Israel “withdrawing” from the region, those are merely recommendations and political arguments. They are not legal arguments because once that land was allocated for the Jewish state by the binding charter of the U.N., it cannot be rescinded without Israel’s consent any more than Florida can be taken away from the U.S. and be returned to Spain without our consent.

Until fairly recently, even the Left was forced to admit this legal and historical reality. During an interview with Matt Lauer on October 1, 1997, then-Secretary of State Madelaine Albright reluctantly admitted that although she was unhappy about recent construction in Judea, it was indeed legal:

SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: I wasn’t happy. We had had a conversation, and I felt
that going forward with those kinds of buildings was not helpful. It is not
in any way not part of what they can do, but they shouldn’t do it.MR. LAUER: It’s legal.SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: It’s legal. But I think that, in this kind of an
atmosphere, it’s very important not to take actions that are viewed by the
other side as creating more difficulties.

Unfortunately, over the past generation the geo-political elites and the media has repeated the lie about an Arab “Palestinian state” and “illegal Israeli settlements” so many times that it has become true in the minds of so many people. It’s a classic strategy domestic liberals employ when they conflate political arguments with legal arguments. In many respects, this is the biggest global fake news story of our time.

The reality is that Arab squatters living in that region have no legal right to a state in that land, much less a right to murder Jews who build homes in the rightful territory of their state duly adopted by international law. But even those who subscribed to this nonsense over the past few decades must wake up and smell the Jihad. The fact that Jihad has spread to every corner of the world, including in the West itself, should demonstrate incontrovertibly that the source of the problem is not a few homes built in the Samarian hills by Jews. The problem is global Islamic supremacism.

It was heartening to see Donald Trump release a statement opposing the U.N. resolution and threaten their funding. But he needs to take it a step further and end the entire policy of promoting a second Palestinian State (the first being Jordan) altogether. Pursuit of an Arab “Palestinian” state has been one of the most wrongheaded failed policies in modern history and it’s time for the Republican Party to formally abandon it forever.