Tag Archives: #Russia

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The West are about out of non-military actions to take against Russia Economic sanctions are hurting democracies as much as Russia

The recent Supreme Court decisions in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization have pushed almost all discussion of other issues off the front pages, but there is still that nasty little war going on in Ukraine. I have made my position clear: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was very wrong, and almost everyone wants to see Ukraine win against the Russians. But I, at least, do not think it is worth risking what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.”

President Joe Biden and the leaders of the NATO nations have all said that Russia’s invasion is wrong, wrong, wrong, and that something ought to be done, but reality has a way of biting people in the gluteus maximus, and as the G-7 leaders meet in Berlin to decide just what to do, that reality is staring them dead in the eye. From The Wall Street Journal:

G-7 Summit Exposes West’s Challenges in Tackling Russia

Economic fallout is hampering further sanctions against Moscow as Ukraine demands more weapons to halt the Russian advance

By Bojan Pancevski | Tuesday, June 28, 2022 | 9:31 AM EDT

The original picture caption is: “G-7 leaders displayed some unity during their summit as they pledged their unwavering support to Ukraine.
Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.” Click to enlarge.

BERLIN—The Group of Seven rich democracies ended their summit with an agreement to discuss a batch of new sanctions against Russia, but the gathering underlined the limits of using economic tools to punish Russia four months after its invasion of Ukraine.

While weapons deliveries have made an immediate difference on the battlefield and Ukraine has been clamoring for more equipment to repel Moscow’s forces, sanctions have proven slow to take effect, some of them have backfired against the West, and new ones have so far been too complex to deploy quickly.

G-7 leaders displayed some unity during their three-day summit in the German Alps as they pledged their unwavering support to Ukraine, with no sign of dissent on public display. Yet Kyiv and some Western experts said the Russian advance could only be halted in the short term with more heavy weapons.

The unprecedented sanctions against Russia implemented by the G-7 and other nations—targeting Moscow’s economy, energy exports and central-bank reserves—have caused global market volatility and raised energy costs.

Now high inflation, slowing growth, and the specter of energy shortages in Europe this winter are damping the West’s appetite for tougher sanctions against Moscow.

The photo caption originally said that the G-7 leaders “pledged their unwavering support to Ukraine,” but, of course, that support is wavering, because the sanctions imposed so far are hurting their own people. The only thing I see in the photo is further evidence that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson still doesn’t know how to brush his hair. Continue reading →

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Max Boot, the neo-conservatives, and endless war

Max (Maxim?) Aleksandrovich Boot was born on September 12, 1969 in Moscow, the son of two Russian Jews. They were lucky: they were able to emigrate to the United States in 1976, bringing young Max with them. Mr Boot, whose parents fled a strongly antisemitic regime in the USSR under Leonid Brezhnev, once said, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” even though the USSR under Comrade Staling might well have sent Mr Boot and his family to a concentration camp; the Soviet leaders really didn’t like Jews very much.

In other words, Mr Boot has all of the intuitive judgement of a mud clod.

We have previously noted how Mr Boot specifically, and many of the neo-conservative in general, don’t think much of our individual liberties, or certainly didn’t when it came to mandating vaccinations against COVID-19. Mr Boot, who dearly loves having American troops all over the globe and has been a student of military history and strategic studies but has never served in the military himself, fretted that it would be a disaster for the United States to pull out of Afghanistan, though what more could be accomplished in that fetid and festering sewer that we hadn’t been able to accomplish in the 19½ years we had already been there he could not articulate.

And here he goes again!

We can’t let Ukraine lose. It needs a lot more aid, starting with artillery.

by Max Boot | Monday, June 13, 2022 | 7:00 AM EDT[1]If you are stymied by The Washington Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing here, for free.

Max boot, trying to look all journalist-like in his fedora. From his Twitter biography.

The battle of Donbas — with momentous implications for the future of Ukraine and the entire postwar world — is poised on a knife edge.

The Ukrainians are resisting bravely, but they are suffering terrible casualties and slowly losing ground. They are able to fire only 5,000 to 6,000 artillery rounds a day, compared with 50,000 rounds a day from the Russians. The Ukrainians are running out of ammunition for their old Soviet artillery, and they don’t have enough Western artillery tubes to make up for the shortfall.

I am reminded of the old poem about how “for want of a nail a shoe was lost,” then a horse, then a rider, then a battle, then a kingdom. We cannot afford to see Donbas lost for want of artillery shells.

If Russian dictator Vladimir Putin captures this region, after having already secured a land corridor from Crimea to the Russian border, he will hold roughly a fourth of Ukraine, including its industrial heartland and most of its Black Sea coast. The Ukrainian economy is already in dire shape (estimated to shrink by 45 percent this year). Putin will then be in a position to further squeeze the rump state, while preparing a final offensive to finish it off.

Even a limited Russian victory will send a dangerous signal to the world that the West is weak and aggression pays. We must send lots more aid to Ukraine now to avert the loss of Donbas and to enable a counteroffensive to retake ground already occupied, but not yet fortified, by the invaders.

Emphasis in the original.

The most obvious Ukrainian need is for more artillery tubes and shells. The Biden administration has already provided 108 M777 155mm howitzers and more than 220,000 artillery rounds. More recently, it promised to send four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) and ammunition with a maximum range of roughly 45 miles. That is wholly insufficient; even the 220,000 rounds would not last five days at current rates of use.

Huh? If, as Mr Boot stated just a couple of paragraphs previously, that the Ukrainians are able to fire only 5.000 to 6,000 artillery rounds per day, 220,000 rounds would last a whole lot longer than 4½ days. He’s actually talking about the Russians’ rate of fire, not the Ukrainians’.

The West should be sending hundreds of howitzers and multi-launch rocket systems, thousands of rockets and hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds. This should include Excalibur GPS-guided rounds for the M177 (range: 24 miles) and Army Tactical Missile Systems for the Himars (range: 186 miles). Those longer-range munitions would enable the Ukrainians to target Russia’s artillery, rockets and supply lines without risking their new weapons close to the front lines. Of course, it will take time to train Ukrainians on these systems, but they have shown they are fast learners.

That, of course, is not all Mr Boot wants to send to Ukraine to fight the Russians: he also called for sending  MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, F-16 fighter jets, A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft and Patriot air-defense systems.

An obvious question: if “we can’t let Ukraine lose,” as he claims in the column title, what does he want to do if Ukraine is about to lose even after such arms are sent to them?

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

In 1939, President Roosevelt started sending military equipment to the United Kingdom, covertly at first, then more openly, to hold off the Third Reich. Following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, we started sending military aid to the USSR as well. There were worries that Adolf Hitler would see this as the United States being at war with Germany, and it was bandied about that that was exactly what the President wanted, for Germany to declare war on the United States. After all, we had 3,600 miles of deep, blue water between the United States and German-occupied France, so there was really nothing Der Führer could do to us!

But if we start sending more and more supplies and weapons to Ukraine, we will be putting American troops and contractors on the ground in Poland . . . and Russia has the weaponry to strike Poland. Perhaps Mr Boot thinks that Vladimir Putin would never dare to strike an American installation, especially one on the soil of a NATO member nation, and I will admit that it would seem to be a stupid, stupid move. But we need to remember: Mr Putin is perfectly capable of stupid moves!

Yes, I have a vested interest in this: my older daughter is, as I type, preparing for a year-long deployment to Kuwait with the Army Corps of Engineers. While it seems unlikely, increased American presence in Poland, to ship more weapons to Ukraine, could very well result in a change of orders; the first people needed for an American installation in Poland would be the Corps of Engineers, and surveyors, and my daughter is a surveyor!

Russia has thousands of battlefield range and short range nuclear weapons. Just how would the United States, and NATO, respond if, feeling his back against the wall, Mr Putin used one, just one, lower-yield nuke against a shipping point for American and NATO weapons to Ukraine? He might well believe that such a tactic would so scare the US and NATO about a potential all-out nuclear war that we’d just stop and back off.

And, quite frankly, that should be the response. Ukraine is not worth a nuclear war!

Mr Boot and the neoconservatives have spent a lot of time and ink and bandwidth arguing for an aggressive, muscular, and interventionist American foreign policy, with the second Persian Gulf War against Iraq being the most obvious example. The first was started by Saddam Hussein, and if the ender President Bush had not been so eager to limit that war, and just gone a couple of days more, we could have eliminated Saddam Hussein in 1991. Because we didn’t do that, his son got in his head to rectify that, and we had the debacle of the second Iraqi war, which did topple President Hussein, but Iraq today is hardly a democratic paradise. We went into Afghanistan because we had to, to respond to al Qaeda’s attack on the United States, but we stayed and stayed and stayed, far beyond the mission to destroy al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden, stayed 10½ years after Mr bin Laden was sent to his eternal reward, and what was accomplished? Afghanistan is once again ruled by the Taliban, who have been reimposing the same policies that they had during their first reign.[2]Full disclosure: on my daughter’s previous deployment to Kuwait, she wound up in Afghanistan, though she was apparently in little danger.

I get it: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was very wrong, and almost everyone wants to see Ukraine win against the Russians. But I, at least, do not think it is worth risking what Major Kong called “nuclear combat, toe to toe with the Russkies.” The neo-cons, most of whom never spent a day in uniform, seem to have a romantic vision of the combat which they’ve only seen in the movies. If Mr Boot wants to see more American and NATO equipment sent to Ukraine to fight the Russians, then he needs to be on one of those convoys, in uniform, carrying an M4 rifle, and ready to fight himself. After all, he did note that there are “foreign volunteers” fighting with Ukraine’s ground forces. He needs to sign up himself.

References

References
↑1 If you are stymied by The Washington Post’s paywall, you can read the whole thing here, for free.
↑2 Full disclosure: on my daughter’s previous deployment to Kuwait, she wound up in Afghanistan, though she was apparently in little danger.
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Sanctions against Russia go up in gas

It seems that the Europeans, who are angry, angry, angry! at Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin aren’t angry enough to do without Russian natural gas. From The Washington Post:

Europe accepts Putin’s demands on gas payments to avoid more shut-offs

By Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli | Tuesday, May 24, 2022 | 1:22 PM EDT

ROME — European energy companies appear to have bent to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand that they purchase natural gas using an elaborate new payment system, a concession that avoids more gas shut-offs and also gives Putin a public relations victory while continuing to fund his war effort in Ukraine.

The system, which involves the creation of two accounts at Gazprombank, enables Europe to say it is technically paying for natural gas in euros, while Russia can say it is receiving payment in rubles — a requirement Putin imposed on “unfriendly” nations.

Putin’s insistence on rubles may be more about forcing European countries to scramble at his behest than about shoring up his country’s currency, some economists and energy experts suspect. European Union countries have been touchy about the notion they might violate their sanctions on Russia, and questions about the arrangement tested European unity, leading to weeks of chaos and contradictory guidance from Brussels. It also got countries talking about how much they still need Russian gas, even as they debate a Russian oil embargo.

Well, of course they need Russian gas! And they’ll continue to need Russian gas, especially as worsening economic conditions force reductions in investments on alternative energy sources. In the end, Mr Putin has them in a place in which their hearts and minds will follow.

But that also means sending money to Russia even as they condemn the Kremlin-launched war, sanction oligarchs and supply weapons to Ukraine.

Russia had already used strict capital controls and a massive interest rate hike to stabilize the ruble. With Europe now signaling that it will use the payment system as bills come due this week, the currency is strengthening all the more.

The system set up is a face-saving one, but it really doesn’t save a lot of face, not to anyone who has even a remote understanding of what is being done. The Europeans will pay their bills in euros, not the rubles President Putin had demanded, and then a special account at Газпромбанк will take the euros and convert them to rubles.

On February 24, 2022, the White House announced severe sanctions against Russian banks:

Today, the United States, along with Allies and partners, is imposing severe and immediate economic costs on Russia in response to Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine. Today’s actions include sweeping financial sanctions and stringent export controls that will have profound impact on Russia’s economy, financial system, and access to cutting-edge technology. The sanctions measures impose severe costs on Russia’s largest financial institutions and will further isolate Russia from the global financial system. With today’s financial sanctions, we have now targeted all ten of Russia’s largest financial institutions, including the imposition of full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions, and debt and equity restrictions, on institutions holding nearly 80% of Russian banking sector assets. The unprecedented export control measures will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, restricting Russia’s access to vital technological inputs, atrophying its industrial base, and undercutting Russia’s strategic ambitions to exert influence on the world stage. The impact of these measures will be significantly magnified due to historical multilateral cooperation with a wide range of Allies and partners who are mirroring our actions, inhibiting Putin’s ambition to diversify Russia’s brittle, one-dimensional economy. The scale of Putin’s aggression and the threat it poses to the international order require a resolute response, and we will continue imposing severe costs if he does not change course.

It appears, however, that “full blocking and correspondent and payable-through account sanctions” are somehow less important when it comes to Europe’s need for natural gas!

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Mitt’s madness

Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, after having said that Russia was (then) the biggest geopolitical threat facing the United States, then-President Barack Hussein Obama, in their third presidential debate, hit back:

A few months ago, when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al Qaeda. You said Russia. And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.

I’ve got to admit it: that was a great political quip!

Now, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — along with the invasion of the eastern portion of Ukraine in 2014 — the media are starting to acknowledge that Mr Romney was right.

The problem is that while Mr Romney was right, so was Mr Obama, about 1980s foreign policy, which the now Senator from Utah seems to still embrace: Continue reading →

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The war mongers keep beating the drums Do you want to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia?

I get it: almost everyone wants to help Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion. Helping Ukraine is good and noble, and something people just want to do. But there are some good and noble things which might not be all that wise.

My good friend, and contributor to this poor site on days when I cannot, William Teach, noted that there are some people who want the United States to get much, much more involved in the war in Ukraine:

Good Grief, Now They’re Advocating Giving Ukraine Three Squadrons Of A-10s

By William Teach March 4, 2022 – 6:45 am

There have been lots of memes about the coming WWIII. We’ve had people, such as Excitable Adam Kinzinger, push for a no fly zone. I certainly agree with Vox that it would be a monumentally bad idea. Thankfully, NATO and Let’s Go Brandon agree. Sending all those troops over to Europe isn’t the brightest idea. What are a few thousand going to do, when the U.S. already has over 50k in the European theater? Here’s another staggeringly foolish idea:

Transfer three A-10 aircraft squadrons to Ukraine now

“Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,“ spoke U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill in February 1941. Following this powerful speech, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed and Congress approved the lend-lease program. This provided the U.K. equipment and access to United States production capacity. This action was essential to stopping the Nazi advances.

Zelenskyy has been asking for planes. So far, NATO nations have said “nope.”

Sanctions must be accompanied by military success.

Zelenskyy has requested weapons and support in line with Churchill’s philosophy. Ukrainian soldiers have proved their courage and bravery. There is one more step that could be decisive: the transfer of three squadrons of A-10 aircraft to the Ukrainian Air Force.

This aircraft and its gun system were designed to counter an armored assault in Europe. They proved effective in Desert Storm’s target-rich environment, quite similar to the current advancing Russian force. They also became the infantry’s friend in close-air support missions.

The United States Air Force has deployment packages ready to go. The whole transfer to the Ukrainian Air Force could be completed in days after congressional authorization.

If you want to start WWIII, this would be a good way to do so. How do you get the planes there? Who flies them in? How does Russia react when A10’s which were the property of the United States just days before start blowing up Russian military equipment and troops? Furthermore, who will fly the planes? American pilots? WWIII. Ukrainian pilots? Are any trained on them? They aren’t bicycles. What about all the armaments? Shooting American made depleted uranium slugs would be WWIII.

Mr Teach then cited Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4th District) and his tweeted series as to why he has not supported the resolutions moving through the House to support Ukraine.

Mr Massie’s twitter thread is seven tweets long:

  • (2 of 7)The resolution contains an open ended call for additional and immediate “defensive security assistance.” This term is so broad that it could include American boots on the ground or, as some of my colleagues have already requested, US enforcement of a no-fly zone.
  • (3/7) It expands the geographic scope of the US commitment to the conflict in Ukraine by condemning the country of Belarus. We should not be seeking to name new enemies or committing to overturning other governments.
  • (4/7) It calls for “fully isolating” Russia economically. This would hurt low-income US citizens who are already reeling from inflation. Innocent people in Russia, many of whom oppose Putin’s aggression, would suffer under crippling sanctions, possibly turning them against us.
  • (5/7) Crippling sanctions could also drive Putin to become more desperate, inciting him to resort to drastic measures such as escalating the weapons employed or the people targeted.
  • (6/7) The resolution contains a gratuitous statement that Ukraine and NATO will determine the relationship between the two of them. Of course this is true, but why should Congress assert this now when the goal is to de-escalate the conflict?
  • (7/7) It calls for continuing support “as long as the Russian Federation continues to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty.” Depending on the definition of “violate,” this could be a US commitment to forever be actively engaged in a conflict with another nuclear country.

Mr Massie is, alas! not my district’s representative — I live in the 6th District — but he’s one of the best men in Congress. He understands that, emotion aside, starting a war with nuclear-armed Russia isn’t exactly the brightest idea in the world.[1]Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already … Continue reading

As World War II raged in Europe, but before we entered the war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States engaged in some pretty blatant war moves against the Third Reich, sending war materiel to His Majesty’s Government, and later, even to Comrade Stalin’s. Our neutrality was hardly neutral!

It didn’t matter: there was nothing der Führer could do about it. His U-boats went after the convoys, and sent a lot of American Lend-lease largesse to the bottom of the Atlantic. President Roosevelt began “neutrality patrols” to convoy the cargo ships as far as Iceland, and for a while, Germany was deterred from attacking US Navy ships.

Following Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan . . . but not on Germany. Adolf Hitler, in yet another moment of his madness, decided that, on December 11, 1941, Germany would declare war on the United States, a colossal mistake, at a time in which the US, then at war only with Japan, could have concentrated our might in the Pacific.

But, just as the United Kingdom and France, despite their guarantees, could do nothing to help Poland, Germany could do nothing to strike at the United States. When Prime Minister Churchill said, “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,” he was speaking to a nation untouched, and untouchable, by war, a nation which risked little by ramping up its factories to build tanks and airplanes and rifles.

That isn’t the situation today. Unlike 1939, unlike 1941, the enemy can strike us, can literally kill hundreds of millions of Americans in less than an hour, can destroy every one of our major cities and irradiate our rural areas with a deadly fallout. Yes, that would mean that Russia was destroyed in turn, as the US could and almost certainly would launch an equally devastating nuclear response against the Soviet Union Russia, meaning that Russia would not somehow ‘win’ the nuclear war, but we would just as certainly lose. It would seem most probable that President Putin wouldn’t be insane enough to order a nuclear strike, but, then again, it would seem most probable that he wouldn’t have his troops fire on a Ukrainian nuclear power plant, but that’s exactly what happened. It wound up being a bold and successful move, because after Russian artillery started fires at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians rushed to put out the fires, and Russian troops then occupied the plant, but it was a plan that could easily have gone very, very wrong. Counting on the former подполковник in the Комитет государственной безопасности to see things the way Westerners do is not a particularly wise strategy. What a man with a strategic nuclear arsenal, if pushed to the brink of military defeat in Ukraine, might do is something which ought to worry us.

Wanting to do more, wanting to do what we can to help Ukraine is not the same thing as wanting to help the United Kingdom, and later the Soviet Union, against Germany, because what we were doing in 1939 and 1940 and 1941 was with little risk to us. It took no real courage for us to give assistance to the UK and USSR then.

Now, it does. But there is a point at which courage stops being courage, and devolves into pure madness, and that point is when you go to war with an enemy with a strategic nuclear arsenal. Just one Soviet Russian Проект 955 Борей SSBN could obliterate every major city on our east coast.

In the movie War Games, the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) computer, initially tricked into starting a Global Thermonuclear War, analyzes all of the variants, and finally says, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Yup, that’s right!

References

References
↑1 Representative Massie also voted against the virtue signaling ‘anti-lynching’ bill, noting that the crimes involved in lynching — murder, assault, and kidnapping — are already against the law in every state in the union.

I am reminded of the federal ‘hate crimes’ trial against the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. The georgia state court had already sentenced them to life in prison, two without the possibility of parole, and the third ineligible for parole for thirty years. How much more punishment could we give these guys with the federal hate crimes convictions? It’s not like we can keep their corpses in prison for years and years after they’ve already died.
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The new complaint from the left: we are treating Ukrainian refugees differently from Middle Eastern ones

Robert Stacy McCain noticed this before I did, but I have an excuse: I was working in my shop, finally repairing a small sidewall workbench in my shop. It’s narrow, primarily used as a sanding station — and too often, a flat surface on which to stack things — and had been damaged and sagging due to last year’s floods. The bench is narrow because I had to leave room for vehicles to pull into the garage. I added support where the plywood bench was sagging, leveling it out, and then added some edge banding using scrap hardwood I had, and if you really care, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Mr McCain noticed that Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times was making the Russian invasion of Ukraine about race, because that’s just what she does.

    Infamous Race Hustler Uses Ukraine War to — You Guessed It — Hustle Race

    by Robert Stacy McCain | March 2, 2022

    The brilliance of Critical Race Theory is that it enables practitioners to see racism literally everywhere:

      Left-wing New York Times reporter and controversial 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones was slammed online after accusing journalists covering the Russian invasion into Ukraine of “racialized analysis and language” in their reporting, indicating their “sympathy” for white victims of conflict and refugees in particular while claiming Europe is a fictional continent intended to separate it from non-“civilized” nations.

      On Sunday, Hannah-Jones, author of the debunked New York Times 1619 Project, called on fellow journalists to “look internally” regarding acknowledging their racial biases in their coverage of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      “Every journalist covering Ukraine should really, really look internally. This is why I say we should stop pretending we have objectivity and in instead acknowledge our biases so that we can report against them,” she wrote. “Many of us see the racialized analysis and language.”

      She added, “And honestly, these admissions of shock that this is happening in a European country are ahistorical and also serve to justify the lack of sympathy for other invasions, other occupations and other refugee crisis involving peoples not considered white.”

      Later in the day, Hannah-Jones called the European continent a “geopolitical fiction” intended to separate it from Asia and which led to the “alarm” over an invasion of people who “are like us.”

Further down:

    Would you like me to tell you the most perfect thing here? The author of this Breitbart article is Joshua Klein. You know that this race-hustling stuff has become a losing game for the Left when you see Jews calling it out. And while we’re on the subject of ethnic politics, why do you think there was such a shift of Latino voters to the GOP in 2020? It’s because they are likewise getting fed up with this BLM/CRT nonsense.

    Keep in mind that it’s not as if prejudice against Jews and Latinos doesn’t exist in America, or in the Republican Party for that matter. It’s just that sensible people, whatever their ethnicity or position within the Universal Oppression Matrix, can recognize a scam as obvious as the one being foisted upon us by such “intellectuals” as Nikole Hannah-Jones.

    At a time when we’re teetering on the brink of World War III, nobody wants to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling.

Well, it seems that Mr McCain was wrong: at least the editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer thought people would want to listen to this kind of blatant race-hustling:

    Infuriated, not shocked: People from the Middle East are noticing that now you care about war in Ukraine | Opinion

    A Syrian refugee and Palestinian in Philadelphia hope the Russian invasion to Ukraine will make people care about their people’s suffering.

    by Abraham Gutman | Thursday, February 3, 2022 | 9:24 AM EST

    The horrific Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to an outpouring of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. But Ukrainians are not the only people who suffer under oppression. And people from the Middle East, who are used to their plight for justice going ignored, are noticing the difference.

    Moumena Saradar, now 45, was born and raised in Damascus. In 2011, when a brutal civil war started, she was too worried about the safety of her five children to stay. One morning, a sniper started shooting in her neighborhood. “The bullets were just a few feet away from my kids when they were going to school,” she recalled over the phone this week. “We are lucky that they are still alive.”

    Her family went to Egypt in 2012. It was hard starting a new life, especially after they left everything back home. They registered as refugees with the United Nations, and were chosen to come to the United States. But her struggle was not over. “It wasn’t easy at all. We were going through one year of interviews with different agents, officers, background checks — but luckily we made it and we came here in summer 2016.”

    Philadelphia has been her home ever since. She works as a medical translator and as a part-time Global Guide in the Penn Museum, walking visitors through the Middle East exhibit.

    While Saradar waited for refuge, people didn’t talk about Syrian refugees the way they talk about the people leaving Ukraine. On the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump suggested Syrian refugees might be terrorists in disguise, and promised, “If I win, they’re going back.” The sentiment wasn’t his alone. By November 2015, governors in 30 states publicly demanded that resettlement of Syrian refugees halt, and the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution — with the not-so-subtle title American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act — to limit the number of refugees from Syria.

    Today, the refugee discourse feels completely different. A recent Data for Progress poll found that 63% of voters — including half of Republican voters — believe the United States should accept Ukrainian refugees. When the White House announced that it was prepared to do that, right-wing politicians and media didn’t pounce — as many did just a few months ago, when the refugees the United States was preparing to accept were from Afghanistan.

There’s more at the original, but the article fails to consider the obvious: the invasion of Ukraine is categorically different from the internal strike that has afflicted so many nations in the Middle East. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, that was invaded by the military forces of another sovereign nation, and the nearest equivalent we have to that was the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Ukraine, though there were Russian separatists in control of parts of two eastern provinces, was not an internal civil war, marked by multiple groups, using terrorism against civilians as one of their primary weapons, and Ukraine didn’t have an equivalent of Da’ish, more commonly known as the Islamic State, trying to impose a radically harsh version of Shari’a, Islamic religious law, on the lands it controlled.

Syria, from where Moumena Saradar came? That was a civil war, encouraged at least in part by the United States during the Obama Administration, and its then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, as part of the Arab Spring. The Arabic revolts toppled many authoritarian rulers, only to see them mostly replaced by other authoritarian rulers, but Bashir al-Assad managed to hang on to power in Damascus, leading eventually to the Syrian Civil War, which is still going on today, eleven years after it began. Given the chaos of the civil war, the poor record-keeping in the country, and the difficulties in getting records from the Syrian government, is it any particular surprise that the United States was being cautious concerning the Syrian refugees allowed to enter?

Of course, the United States was involved: the US had several units in Syria, troops sent in under President Obama, though it was supposedly a secret, a secret that isn’t a secret any longer. President Trump wanted to pull all American forces out of Syria, but met with some resistance by the Pentagon, and he didn’t get all American troops out by the time he left office.

Ukraine is part of Europe — the Europe that Miss Hannah-Jones claims is a fictional entity — and Ukraine is right next door to Poland. When the refugees escape Ukraine, they are directly escaping into a NATO nation. If the European nations don’t accept the Ukrainian refugees, they would be bottling them up in Ukraine, in the path of Russian troops.

    One reason for the difference, Saradar says, is the way the crisis is covered by the media. And she has a point. Pundits and reporters have drawn a racist contrast between Ukraine and places in the Middle East that suffered war. News viewers have heard that Kyiv is a “civilized city” and that the civilians at risk have “blue eyes and blond hair.” An article in the British newspaper the Telegraph about the war in Ukraine opened with: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. Ukraine is a European country. Its people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts.”

Kyiv absolutely was a civilized city, a European civilized city, in ways that Damascus and other Middle Eastern capitals simply are not. Many of the European nations which have accepted Middle Eastern refugees are experiencing significant cultural shocks, as Arab Middle Easterners are bringing in customs and morés which are far more different from those of Europeans than would be those from Ukrainian refugees.

    Jude Hussein, 24, has also noticed the difference. She is a member of the Philadelphia Mayor’s Millennial Advisory Commission who was born in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the territory of the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. I asked her how it felt to see an outpouring of support to Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. “It wasn’t shocking, but it was infuriating,” Hussein responded. “The same human-rights violations that are happening now in Ukraine have been happening for decades in Palestine.”

    This is a dynamic Hussein has gotten used to. “When Europe is on the line, whether it is a violation of human rights or international law, the world has their eyes wide open and they are willing to act on such violations. But when it comes to the Middle East, and Palestine, especially as brown people, the world always shies away.”

The Inquirer article included a photo of Miss Hussein, who certainly doesn’t look all that “brown” to me! The caption on the photo shows Miss Hussein, “a Palestinian American, celebrating International Palestinian Solidarity Day in Philadelphia on November 29, 2021.” In other words, she was demonstrating against Israel, an American ally, and the only truly democratic and civilized nation in the Middle East.

    She’s right: Less than a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pennsylvania started looking at ways to divest from Russian companies — including removing Russian vodkas from state liquor stores. Gov. Tom Wolf called the removal of Russian products “a show of solidarity and support for the people of Ukraine, and an expression of our collective revulsion with the unprovoked actions of the Russian state.”

    This was the same Tom Wolf who in 2016 signed a bill that prevents the state from contracting with businesses that boycott Israel. At the time, the governor said that Pennsylvania “will not encourage economic punishment in place of peaceful solutions to challenging conflicts.”

Let me be frank here: the United States does, and should, favor Israel, and ought to disfavor her enemies. The Arab nations and cultures sponsor terrorism and anti-Americanism, as part of their cultures, and we ought to be much more suspicious about admitting refugees from those nations — were I President, the number of such refugees admitted to the United States would be zero — into the United States. They do not add to our nation, but increase division, just as Miss Hussein was doing when she was demonstrating against Israel.

Ukraine is not our enemy, and Ukrainians don’t hate the United States and the West. The Ukrainian refugees ought to be settled in Europe, not the United States, and this ought to be seen as a European problem, not ours. But I have no problem at all with Western democratic governments, and people, recognizing that Ukrainian and Middle Eastern refugees are not identical.