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An American couple was caught smuggling 650 pounds of Fruit Roll Ups into Israel after stocks of the confection ran out after it became part of a viral TikTok trend.

Only a day later, Israel Post nabbed a further 350 pounds of the American snack in cartons.

A TikTok trend shows people eating ice cream wrapped in a Fruit Roll-Up, which hardens from the cold, making the snack crunchy.

The post WATCH: Americans caught smuggling hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

“There won’t be a situation in which the coalition chooses judges for itself. This won’t happen, not on our watch.”

By World Israel News Staff

Hundreds of thousands of people protested in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities against the government’s judicial reform plans for the 18th consecutive Saturday.

Referencing the suspended legislation, former justice minister Tzipi Livni addressed protesters in Tel Aviv, where an estimated 180,000 people gathered in Kaplan Street.

“We must understand the threat hasn’t been removed and hangs over us. If we blink for a moment they’ll exploit the opportunity,” she said.

Protest organizers called on opposition figures to “make decisions” or cease negotiations. “We demand that opposition leader [Yair] Lapid and MK [Benny] Gantz come together to make a decision in the coming week, and if not, to end the negotiations. It’s either judges beaten into submission or democracy.”

In Rehovot, Lapid said: “We’ll leave no stone unturned to see if there’s a chance to reach a historic agreement that will be with us for a hundred years into the future, but we won’t let them just stall for time to save their government.”

“This government can’t hold negotiations at the President’s Residence while at the same time slandering the High Court and sending thugs to the streets,” he added.

“There won’t be a situation in which the coalition chooses judges for itself. This won’t happen, not on our watch.”

The post Hundreds of thousands protest judicial reform for 18th consecutive week appeared first on World Israel News.

The U.S. Treasury Department last year disclosed that Islamic State had received crypto donations it later converted to cash.

By Ben Cohen, Algemeiner

The Israeli authorities have seized nearly 200 accounts located at the Binance cryptocurrency exchange that are allegedly linked to Palestinian and Islamist terrorist organizations, among them ISIS.

An investigation by the Reuters news agency on Friday stated that several of the accounts were owned by Palestinian firms connected to Hamas, according to documents obtained from Israel’s National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing (NBCTF).

One of the NBCTF documents — an Administrative Seizure Order (ASO) — was published alongside the report. Dated Jan. 12, 2023 and signed by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant, the ASO specified two Binance accounts owned by a 28-year-old Palestinian named Osama Abuobayda who is allegedly linked to ISIS. The text of the ASO noted that Galant had ordered the seizure in order “to thwart the activity of the terrorist organization the Islamic State (ISIS).”

The ASO omitted critical details, including the dollar value of the accounts owned by Abuobayda. The volatile cryptocurrency sector is presently valued at more than $1.2 trillion globally, about half of which is contributed by the leading digital currency, bitcoin. The ASO did not say whether Abuobayda had purchased bitcoin, one or more of the hundreds of “altcoins” flooding the market or a mix of the two.

According to Reuters, the US Treasury Department last year disclosed that Islamic State had received crypto donations it later converted to cash, accessing funds via unspecified crypto trading platforms.

Regulators globally have long called for tighter controls on crypto exchanges to prevent illegal activities, from money laundering to the financing of terrorism. “The seizures by Israel’s NBCTF highlight how governments are targeting crypto companies in their efforts to prevent illegal activity,” Reuters noted in its report.

Binance, founded in 2017 by CEO Changpeng Zhao, says on its website it reviews information requests from governments and law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis, disclosing information as legally required.

In an angry response on its company blog to the claims advanced by Reuters, Binance accused the news agency of “deliberately leaving out critical facts to fit their narrative.”

The exchange observed that an “often overlooked fact (or perhaps in this case, deliberately ignored) is that it’s not possible for a crypto exchange (or anyone) to block or reverse a digital asset deposit once a transaction has been verified on the blockchain. This is a fundamental feature of all digital asset transactions.”

The blog entry additionally pointed out with reference to ISIS that “it’s important to clarify that bad actors don’t register accounts under the names of their criminal enterprises. This is why our team collaborates with law enforcement, and leverages information that is only available to them in order to identify individuals operating accounts for illicit organizations.”

The post Israel seizes nearly two hundred crypto accounts linked to ISIS and Hamas terror groups – report appeared first on World Israel News.

A Twitter tiff ended with a Haaretz journalist reporting Guy Hochman’s joke tweet to US immigration police. 

By World Israel News Staff

An Israeli comedian and his pregnant wife were deported from the United States this week after a tweet joking that the couple would soon “give birth to an American citizen” was reported to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by a journalist for the left-wing Haaretz daily.

The tweet in question revolved around Guy Hochman’s experience with his seventh-grade English teacher, who had doubted his mastery of the English language. Hochman expressed gratitude for being able to perform in Miami, albeit not in English, before praising his wife. “Kudos to my pregnant wife who goes with the flow and agreed to stay with me here, five months until an American citizen will be born to us.”

Chaim Levinson responded to the tweet, questioning Hochman’s decision to bring his pregnant wife to the US for the purpose of giving birth and securing American citizenship for their child. The journalist tweeted, “Guy Hochman really drags his pregnant wife to give birth in America so that the child gets citizenship and then preaches to the whole world and his wife about patriotism from Miami?”

Hochman retaliated by accusing Levinson of throwing a tantrum and referencing the journalist’s history of criticizing IDF soldiers. The Twitter exchange escalated when, five hours later, Levinson tweeted that he had informed immigration authorities about Hochman’s intention to have his wife give birth in the U.S. for the purpose of obtaining American citizenship for their child. Levinson encouraged others to do the same by providing a link to the ICE tip form.

Following the tip-off, Hochman and his wife found themselves facing inquiries at the airport upon their departure from the US.  In another tweet, Hochman wrote: “Listen, remember the post about Miami where I joked that if we stay here a little longer then we would give birth to an American citizen? So Haaretz reporter Chaim Levinson took it seriously and simply tipped off the American authorities to arrest me and even called on his followers to report me. Now I’m in the airport and they’re starting to ask questions. What a crazy man!”

On Friday, only a day after the initial tip-off to ICE, Guy Hochman and his wife landed in Tel Aviv, Israel. Hochman posted a sarcastic tweet calling on Levinson to report that they were smuggling a fetus into the country.

The post Israeli comedian deported from US after joking that his pregnant wife was there to give birth appeared first on World Israel News.

Despite Jewish law forbidding Jews to enter churches, the UK Chief Rabbi was permitted to enter Westminster Abbey since it was the behest of the king.

By Associated Press and World Israel News Staff

King Charles III was crowned Saturday at Westminster Abbey, receiving the bejeweled St. Edward’s Crown in a ceremony built on ancient traditions at a time when the monarchy is striving to remain relevant in a fractured modern Britain.

Trumpets sounded inside the medieval abbey and the congregation shouted “God save the king!” at a ceremony attended by more than 2,000 guests, including world leaders, aristocrats and celebrities. Outside, thousands of troops, tens of thousands of spectators and a smattering of protesters converged.

To the royal family and government, the occasion — code-named Operation Golden Orb — was a display of heritage, tradition and spectacle unmatched around the world. The rite was expected to be watched by millions, though the awe and reverence the ceremony was designed to evoke are largely gone — and many greeted the day with a shrug.

Some even met it with disdain. Republican protesters gathered outside to holler “Not my king” for a celebration of an institution they say stands for privilege and inequality, in a country of deepening poverty and fraying social ties. A handful were arrested.

Nonetheless, thousands of people from across the UK and around the world camped overnight along a 1.3-mile (2-kilometer) route that the king and his wife, Camilla, traveled to reach the abbey in a gilt-trimmed, horse-drawn carriage.

The church buzzed with excitement and was abloom with fragrant flowers and colorful hats as the congregation of international dignitaries and nobles arrived. Among them were US First Lady Jill Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, eight current and former British prime ministers, and celebrities, including Judi Dench, Emma Thompson and Lionel Richie.

At a traditional Anglican service slightly tweaked for modern times, Charles, clad in crimson and cream robes, swore on a Bible that he is a “true Protestant.”

But a preface was added to the coronation oath to say the Church of England “will seek to foster an environment where people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely,” and the epistle from the King James Bible was read by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first Hindu leader.

A gospel choir performed a newly composed “Alleluia,” and, for the first time, female clergy took part in the ceremony. It was also the first to include representatives of the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh faiths.

At the end of the ceremony, faith leaders will recite a blessing to the newly anointed king. In deference to the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, who will be observing Shabbat (the Sabbath), a microphone will not be used.

Rabbi Mirvis was invited to stay at the King’s palace so that he could walk to Westminster Abbey by foot. He also prayed Shabbat morning services at 6am at a nearby synagogue in order to make the coronation on time. According to a rabbinic ruling, Jews, who are usually forbidden from entering a church, are permitted to enter Christian houses of worship if it is at the behest of the king.

In an ancient display of kingly power, Charles was anointed with oil from the Mount of Olives in the Holy Land and presented with an orb, swords and scepters, before Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby placed the solid gold crown bedecked with more than 400 precious stones on the monarch’s head. As trumpets sounded, gun salutes were fired across the UK.

The verse that was used when anointing the King finds its roots in the bible, when Moses used oil to anoint his brother Aaron as High Priest, and again when both King David and King Solomon are anointed.

Most British Jews are royalists, according to several prominent rabbis who spoke to World Israel News Staff.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog was one of few international statesmen invited to the coronation.

For 1,000 years and more, British monarchs have been crowned in grandiose ceremonies that confirm their right to rule. Charles is the 40th sovereign to be crowned in the abbey — and, at 74, the oldest.

These days, the king no longer has executive or political power, and the service is purely ceremonial since Charles automatically became king upon death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, in September.

The king does remain the UK’s head of state and a symbol of national identity — and Charles will have to work to bring together a multicultural nation and shore up support for monarchy at at time when it is waning, especially among younger people.

The anti-monarchy group Republic said six of its members, including its chief executive, were arrested as they arrived at a protest. Police have said they will have a “low tolerance” for people seeking to disrupt the day, sparking criticism that they are clamping down on free speech.

A protester holds up a placard reading ‘Not My King’ in Trafalgar Square close to where Britain’s King Charles III and Britain’s Camilla, Queen Consort will be crowned at Westminster Abbey in central London Saturday, May 6, 2023. (Sebastien Bozon/Pool Photo via AP)
The multimillion-pound cost of all the pomp — the exact figure unknown — also rankled some amid a cost-of-living crisis that has meant many Britons are struggling to pay energy bills and buy food.

Still, Charles has sought to lead a smaller, less expensive royal machine for the 21st century. His was a shorter affair than Elizabeth’s three-hour coronation, with fewer guests and an abbreviated procession — though there was still plenty to see: judges in wigs, soldiers with gleaming medals attached to red tunics, members of the House of Lords, world royalty, heads of state, public servants, key workers and local heroes.

The notoriously feuding royal family put on a show of unity. Heir to the throne Prince William, his wife, Kate, and their three children were all in attendance. William’s younger brother Prince Harry, who has publicly sparred with the family, arrived alone. His wife Meghan and their children remained at home in California.

Towards the end of the ceremony, William knelt before his father and pledged loyalty to the king — before kissing him on the cheek.

Then Welby invited everyone in the abbey to swear “true allegiance” to the monarch. He invited people watching on television to pay homage, too — though that part of the ceremony was toned down after some criticized it as a tone-deaf effort to demand a public oath of allegiance for Charles.

Today’s public is very different from the audience that saw Elizabeth crowned. Almost 20% of the population now comes from ethnic minority groups, compared with less than 1% in the 1950s. More than 300 languages are spoken in British schools, and less than half of the population describe themselves as Christian.

The post King Charles III crowned with Jerusalem oil in presence of UK Chief Rabbi appeared first on World Israel News.

The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations responded to the congresswoman’s tweet accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”

By JNS

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan responded to a tweet on May 3 from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who wrote that “Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy wants to rewrite history but the apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

“Tlaib’s ignorance and hate toward Jews and Israel know no bounds. The facts are clear: the Arabs rejected the U.N.’s resolution to establish a Jewish state and started a war to annihilate it,” wrote Erdan. “Palestinian leadership is leading its people to catastrophe by inciting hate/terror and rejecting peace.”

The Israeli diplomat went further in an interview with Fox News.

“Tlaib is rewriting history, and her antisemitic lies ignore the fact that the only ethnic cleansing took place against the 850,000 Jews, who were expelled from Arab countries following Israel’s establishment,” he said.

One of nine House members to vote against funding Israel’s Iron Dome air-defense system, Tlaib has often attacked Israel on social media, including a recent post that slandered Israeli police.

The post Erdan: ‘Tlaib’s ignorance and hate toward Jews and Israel know no bounds’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Ukrainian-born Armin Konn finally fulfilled a religious ritual that was denied to him due to the anti-Jewish ideology of the ruling communists.

By World Israel News Staff

In a historic event that has garnered attention from the Jewish community around the world, a 96-year-old man was recently circumcised in Canada, with the Chabad organization describing him as the “oldest man since Abraham” to undergo the age-old Jewish ritual of the brit milah.

The elderly man, Armin Konn, who grew up in Ukraine in a Jewish family, finally fulfilled a religious tradition that was denied to him due to the anti-Jewish ideology of the ruling communists at the time.

Armin Konn was born in Zhvil, Ukraine, in 1926 during a period when the communist rulers were actively suppressing the Jewish religion. According to the Jewish Russian Community Center of Ontario in Toronto, Konn’s parents, out of fear for their son’s safety, decided not to have him circumcised. This decision was driven by the oppressive atmosphere that made it unsafe for Jewish families to openly practice their faith.

During World War II, Konn enlisted in the Red Army’s Air Force. His aircraft was shot down over Lithuania, leading to his capture and subsequent imprisonment in a German POW camp. But he survived the remainder of the war and eventually made his way to Canada after the conflict ended.

In recent years, Konn developed a stronger connection to the Toronto Jewish community and began engaging in conversations with rabbis and doctors about the significance of circumcision.

On Thursday, at Chabad’s Jewish Russian Community Center of Ontario, Armin Konn underwent the circumcision ceremony alongside the newborn son of a local rabbi, Yisrael Zaltzman. The 96-year-old man and the eight-day-old baby were both given their Jewish names during the ceremony, as per tradition.

The Chabad organization expressed their admiration for Armin Konn’s bravery and commitment to reconnecting with his Jewish heritage. They acknowledged that he now holds a unique position in history as the “oldest man since Abraham” to undergo circumcision, a practice that traces its roots back approximately 3,700 years to the biblical figure commanded by God to be circumcised at the age of 99.

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I noted in the previous essay that one of the justificatory catalysts for entering into war against an aggressor is retributive, the punishment of evil. This is not without controversy.

International Law is, often enough, particularly uncomfortable with the idea. It much prefers self-defense to be the primary—essentially sole—just cause for fighting. Allowance is made, under Responsibility to Protect and other frameworks for intervention, for something more—though akin—to purely self-defense: the defense of other innocents elsewhere. In this, you’ll recall, International Law is simply catching up with the classic just war tradition’s first cause for war—protection of the innocent. One reason self-defense is sanctioned while punishing evil is prohibited hinges on the fact that, most often, self-defense is an urgent matter that cannot wait. When the beasts are beating in your gates, even the most pie-in-the-sky idealist knows now is the time to drive them back. Punishment, however, focused presumably on retributing wrongs already committed and not currently underway, enjoys a seeming lack of urgency. Other measures can, in principle, be employed to rectify past wrongs. Punishment by force, then, smells not of justice but merely of the quid pro quo of retaliation.

So, in 1993 when President Bill Clinton ordered the missile attack on the Mukhabarat—the Iraqi Intelligence Service—headquarters in Baghdad in response to the Mukhabarat’s attempted assassination of former President George H.W. Bush, the attack was condemned by some on the grounds that the assassination attempt had occurred more than two months previous. Clinton tried to justify the attack in the language of international law. He would have done better to use just war language. The reason that the just war tradition—following Thomas Aquinas who followed Augustine—posits punishment of evil as a cause of war has much to do with the nature and consequence of evil and the regard the Christian ought to have for the good. The assertion is rather simple: when encountering an act of injustice, any act of injustice, the Christian, because of the dominical command of neighbor love, cannot avert his eyes. Because an evil act deprives some particular good of some measure of its goodness, love, because it is love, will hate both the act and the deprivation. Clear-sighted love, thereby, necessitates requiting injustice with some measure of retribution with an eye toward the restoration of justice. Retribution—payback—ranges in degree in correspondence to the offense along a spectrum from the simple expression of opprobrium to restraint to punishment to threat of force to lethal restraint.

In the case of punishment under the guidance of just war, the nation taking retributive action will likely have one or more of three immediate objectives: 1) the punishment of private or particular individuals outside of their own nation; 2) the punishment of political or military leaders of another nation; 3) the punishment of another nation as a collective. Of course, the question of jurisdiction is important. By what right does President Clinton have for punishing the citizens of another nation who no longer threaten immediate harm? Here, I’ll name just two. The first is the basic responsibility a political authority has for protecting the order, justice, and peace of the political community over whom they exercise authority. For instance, in 1916 when President Wilson ordered General Pershing to lead a contingent of Marines into Mexico to punish Poncho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, it can be credibly asserted that this punitive expedition was self-defensive in nature. It had as its first goal the capture of Villa—ending his ability to torment Americans living near the border. Additionally, Pershing’s efforts to seek, attack, and destroy Villa’s militia similarly served in the first place as a direct means of protecting Americans from further attack—dead men don’t launch cross-border harassments—and, in the second, of deterring other would-be militias from attacking the United States. Similarly, Clinton’s attack against the Iraqi intelligence community served to issue the same kinds of warnings. In this case, punishment and self-defense significantly overlap.

Incidentally, it will be worth noting here that given modern tendencies, there are some today who would push against calling actions such as Clinton’s launching of a few dozen Tomahawk missiles war. Such acts are not acts of war per se, but something else—call them, perhaps: force short of war. A niche is developing within the academic study of just war therefore that would analyze such actions under the rubric of jus ad vim—or, essentially, an analysis of “just force.” I don’t want to have that debate here. I’m content to follow the UChicago political theorist Quincy Wright—who knew a bit about war—and his definition (or one of his definitions) of war simply as “an act or series of acts of violence by one government against another.” That definition allows the term “war” to capture a good number of things that that I’m perfectly happy to have the term capture.

The question of authority in international relations is exacerbated, of course, by the simple fact that—pace the United Nations—there is no “head” of the international community. The just war tradition understands war—in the manner in which I’m using the term—therefore, to be a paradigm case of iudicium cessans, or ‘judgment unavailable,’ a situation in which, as Oliver O’Donovan says in his magnificent The Ways of Judgment, “the appropriate judicial authority is unavailable or unable to function” and in which, therefore, “authority for judgment reverts to the holder of provisionary power…on the spot, who becomes, as it were, a primitive monarch…exercising all the powers of judgment necessary for the emergency.” TL;DR: self-help is the order of the day.

All of this is to say that just war is part of a tradition of retributive justice. Punishment—retribution—is, properly understood, the proportionate and discriminate giving of what is owed to the one to whom it is owed.

The observant reader might now offer a challenge. While it might be clear how, say, a war launched against Hitler’s Germany could serve as an act of retributive justice in punishing Hitler and his regime of evil thugs, what are we to do about the simple German conscript who is no idealogue, who has no love of the Nazi party, and who would really rather be anywhere else? Monsters, even in war—and even in the military of the aggressor—are few. Most of those who fight their nation’s wars are not monsters. Is war really a punishment—an act of retributive justice—against them?

There’s much more to be said here than can be. Sufficient for now is simply to turn to the idea of distributive justice. Used in the context of the moral analysis of harms done in warfare, distributive justice is the unsettled recognition that a certain quantity of harms are necessarily going to be done in the pursuit of even justified war aims. The just warrior, in the prosecution of a just war, must distribute those harms in the most justified manner possible. Happy—enough—is the occasion in which those harms can be distributed directly and solely to those who truly deserve them. War rarely allows so pure a luxury.

One might think here of the British mining of Norwegian waters in 1940 to prevent Hitler’s Germany from transporting iron ore through neutral Norwegian waters to sustain his war effort or, later that year, of the British attempt to sink the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir near Oman so that it didn’t fall into German hands. In cases such as these—and in the case of the poor German conscript—the justification for the harms done against nations or persons who do not directly deserve those harms is not—as Prov-friend Joe Chapa puts it in a magnificent little essay at The Strategy Bridge—retribution for past wrongs, but “forward-looking defense against future unjust harms.”

If this sounds grim and even rather tragic it is only because it is in fact rather tragic and grim. Resolutions to moral conflicts—the dilemma that ensues when two or more goods are in competition—usually are. Ethics in war are not always—nor perhaps often—akin to mathematical proofs that lead to easy and incontrovertible answers. Moral conflicts don’t always tally neatly, without remainder.

The post Just War 101: E7 — Retributive and Distributive Justice appeared first on Providence.

Almost none of the reports about Thursday’s conviction of four Proud Boys members mentioned the fact that the far-right group was riddled with FBI informants. But this kind of law enforcement collusion with the far right is a profound threat to democracy.

Enri­que Tarrio, former chairman of the Proud Boys, was found guilty Thursday, May 4, 2023, of seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. He is seen here in Miami, where he lives, on July 16, 2021. (Pedro Portal / Miami Herald / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

The news that four members of the far-right organization the Proud Boys were just convicted for seditious conspiracy, including their former leader Enrique Tarrio, has made the rounds this week. But if you only tuned in to the proceedings a few days ago to read about the verdict, there’s something you almost certainly haven’t heard: that both Tarrio and as many as eight other Proud Boys were secretly FBI informants, in part helping law enforcement to target Black Lives Matter protesters and other left-wing activists.

That’s because, after a non-exhaustive survey of reports covering the verdict, I discovered that only two news outlets, the Associated Press (AP) and the Washington Post, mentioned that government informants were present within the Proud Boys’ ranks, even though this fact was among the most shocking revelations that came out in the course of the trial.

That fact doesn’t just make the FBI’s failure to detect and prevent the Capitol riot even more baffling. Revelations from the trial suggested that the FBI’s historical and ongoing fixation on left-wing protests potentially blinded it to the threat of the far right, and that the bureau is even happy to collaborate with far-right groups as a way of neutralizing what it sees as a greater threat from the Left.

The AP’s reference was perfunctory — contained in a single line about how “revelations of government informants in the group” prolonged the trial — leaving the Post as the one and only news outlet that specified that Tarrio himself was a longtime informer for law enforcement in a wide range of groups beyond and before the Proud Boys. His own lawyer called him a “prolific” informer in a 2014 court proceeding.

That includes mainstream outlets like CBS, ABC, NBC, and USA Today, as well as Forbes, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Business Insider. This fact was also absent from both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s reports, as well as Politico’s, nor was it mentioned by the BBC or the Philadelphia Inquirer. Even Al Jazeera failed to inform its audience about this key piece of information, as did outlets like NPR and CNN, the latter of which only offhandedly and vaguely mentioned “newly unveiled evidence and informants” in a list of factors that had led to “countless delays” in the trial. The only reference to be found in Rolling Stone’s report was a sentence about how “the trial was not a bonanza of new information,” aside from “a witness that the defense hoped to call [being] revealed at the last moment to have been an FBI informant.”

But this is a misleading description of the trial. As the Washington Post — the only one of these outlets that seemed to consider the Proud Boys’ law enforcement links important enough to inform readers about — reported a month ago, government informants were not only rife within the far-right organization, but the “evidence shown in court indicates that many of the FBI sources inside the Proud Boys were asked only about their ideological opponents on the left.”

Explicitly progressive or liberal-leaning outlets were no better than the mainstream. Tarrio and other Proud Boys’ status as FBI informers was absent from Mother Jones’s write-up on the verdict, as well as those of the Guardian, Vice, Huff Post, and Salon. Democracy Now! stated that one police officer “had a relationship prior to January 6th with Tarrio, because he was gathering information from the extremist groups amassing there.” Besides ignoring the revelations, MSNBC went further and turned its reporting into something of a defense of the entities that had collaborated with the Proud Boys, calling the verdict a “massive win for the government” and warning that a failure to convict “would have emboldened the nation’s militia movement and congressional firebrands” who wanted to challenge federal law enforcement.

What’s particularly bizarre about this is that many of the outlets listed above — including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Associated Press, and Vice — have reported previously on the trial’s exposure of the extent of FBI infiltration into the Proud Boys, as well as Tarrio’s work with law enforcement specifically.

It could be that these outlets are loath to mention just how extensively law enforcement worked with the group lest they be viewed as assisting the Proud Boys’ defense, which had pointed to the FBI’s failure to prevent the incident despite having infiltrated the group as proof that the storming of the Capitol had been unplanned. They may also be wary of appearing to side with right-wing allegations that January 6 was a “fedsurrection” organized wholesale by federal law enforcement, a conspiracy theory circulated on the Right that has revolved around dubious and unproven claims that a rioter named Ray Epps was an undercover agent — claims Epps himself has strenuously denied.

But the failure to mention the FBI’s infiltration into the Proud Boys cuts across ideological lines. Neither Fox News nor the right-leaning New York Post included the Proud Boys’s FBI connections in their reports, despite both outlets having taken an increasingly adversarial stance toward the bureau since the 2016 election.

This failure isn’t trivial. As the Washington Post put it in March, the FBI’s presence within the Proud Boys “underscores the intelligence failures in advance of January 6, as the FBI was unprepared for the riot despite having inroads into the groups now accused by the Justice Department of plotting the violence.” Those failures are as copious and serious as they are still mysterious: one of Liz Cheney’s last acts in office was to block the January 6 committee’s investigation into law enforcement failures regarding the event, and several disclosures have raised the specter of Trumpist sympathies within both the Secret Service and the FBI.

Whether intentional or not, the media’s failure to mention the FBI’s link to the Proud Boys ensures that law enforcement agencies face no accountability for their stunning failures on the day, ironically making a repeat of the Capitol riot far more likely. More alarmingly, it means the long-standing and well-documented sympathies toward the far right that exist to a concerning level inside US law enforcement won’t be cleaned up, but stay unexamined and sealed away from public scrutiny — until, at least, the next time it threatens US democracy.

Putin does not want Washington’s nuclear missiles parked on his western border in the Ukraine. For security reasons, he cannot allow this. He has made this excruciatingly clear over and over again. “If US and NATO missile systems are deployed in Ukraine, their flight time to Moscow will be only 7–10 minutes”

The post The War in Ukraine: Made in Washington Not Moscow appeared first on Global Research.