The GREAT OLIGARCH TRAP: How Only Israel's Naftali Bennett Can Bring Peace.
Conflicts of interests and "journalism"
I am often accused without evidence of hating on the Jooz.
In point of fact I am a fan, mostly, though every group has its faults and none are above criticism. I repeat none are above criticism. And yes, that does include me. I agree with sci fi author (and Jewish-American) David Brin — criticism is the only known antidote to error.
Different groups have different behavioral characteristics and I make no apologies for noticing. Vive la difference! Celebrate diversity and all that jazz but dare to be true most of all.
Still, I thought I’d take a moment to praise one of the more important Jewish leaders right now. And no, I’m not talking about the mobbed up President Volodymyr Zelensky but about Prime Minister Naftali Bennett — the man who may yet bring peace to the Russian-Ukrainian war and who remains one of the most impressive figures in the world.
We need the Jewish state to rescue us from the Jewish criminal state.
Now is the time for Jewish statesmanship and to assure the doubters that Israel can still be a valuable ally for America and for world peace. The stakes are high. Throughout its history Israel has often been able to go to the places that America can’t.
When the Soviet Union collapsed many of the Russian Jews immigrated to Israel and essentially took over the country. Their leader was none other than Bibi Netanyahu, the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history. Backed by Chinese cash through Sheldon Adelson, Netanyahu engaged in a campaign of corruption and espionage that really undermined the world. His defeat in a coalition government was welcome indication that Israel had not descended into a mobbed up corrupt state like Ukraine.
This is what statecraft is needed.
You might think that this doesn’t concern you but it very much does.
The butterfly effect is real and the flapping of gums in the Old USSR evidently affects the price of oil a continent away.
There’s Lev Parnas who met Kholomoisky wearing a bullet proof vest. What happened next isn’t well known — who was shaken down whom? — but it is true that Kholomoiskyi threatened to kill him and Rudy wanted him arrested.
In any event Parnas became a donor to the Trump campaign and he just recently pled guilty to a conspiracy charge after admitting campaign violations.
Kholomoisky is famous for using fronts to achieve his objectives. He more or less destroyed large industrial facilities throughout the Midwest and especially downtown Cleveland through his money laundering operation as detailed in technical color in Casey Michel’s new book, American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History (2021).
Kholomoisky stole over $5B from depositors in his bank in what was the largest bank theft in history. He began a process of laundering billions more all throughout the West. His targets were not flashy real estate but America’s industrial might and he used his banks loan department to great and corrupt effect.
“In time, investigators would discover that Kholomoisky and his team had potentially laundered nearly half a trillion dollars with this playbook,” writes Michels.
I’m more or less convinced that the reason Kholomoisky did this is as a favor to his ultimate benefactor — the Chinese.
His crimes seems less about making a return and then about sending a message to America. It smacks of warfare. Indeed Michel makes clear that the Ukrainian and his Chabad Jewish allies had no interest in actually keeping up the properties and many of his purchases now may need to be condemned. Such an effort can only be seen as reducing the industrial capacity of the United States.
You simply must read all about Kholomoisky’s gangster style in Michel’s book but the scale of it is really disturbing. He even funded his own private army which has its own neo-Nazi ties. (Yes, a Jewish oligarch funds Neo-Nazis. We might wonder how common throughout history such a thing is, or how deeply cynical it is.)
Kholomoisky is the first oligarch to become a warlord, Michel writes.
Kolomoisky told Ukrainian media that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two business associates of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, then a top political advisor to former U.S. President Donald Trump, had visited him in Israel and wants to arrange a meeting between Giuliani and Zelensky.
Interestingly Parnas and Fruman acted as go between between Trump and Kholomoisky.
The more interesting question is whether or not the global-political-financial coalition that sat behind Trump-Netanyahu and Zelensky were all connected.
Perhaps the reason President Donald Trump wanted Zelensky to do him a favor is because he thought they had the ultimate benefactors?
If that’s true then we are in for a long conflict. That is, until President Xi Jinping calls for it to end.
Might it be that the war lords want it to continue? Chaos is their business model, after all.
Maybe Zelensky wants the war to continue. After all, isn’t it the role of a lifetime?
Among the more interesting things that happen during a war is who emerges as the face of the conflict and who does not, who are the approved interpreters of events and who are not.
Rarely, if ever, are the experts or advocates disinterested players merely trying to make sense of the situation. They become brands and seek to sell books and get speaking gigs. This is always the way but we have hitherto not explored the problems for the collective good of these efforts.
We can dismiss Anne Appelbaum relatively quickly. Her husband is a Polish politician who has been left out of the current government. For years she’s claimed that the Polish government is another Orban or Putinist government. And yet, its willingness to help Ukraine stands against her claims. I suspect that what she really resents is she’s not calling the shots.
Now I don’t mean to single out Anne Appelbaum.
There are lot of instant experts I could talk about Julia Ioffe, who once worked for AIPAC, and who claimed that Putin’s speech about Ukraine barely mentioned NATO. In fact it mentioned NATO nearly forty times.
Ioffe was also palling around with Richard Spencer, a friendship which raises the tantalizing possibility that something more weird was going. Ioffe wrote in Slate in early 2017 that Paul Manafort was like “any other lobbyist.” Not exactly.
We could talk about how both Appelbaum and Ioffe are Jewish partisans whose Russophobia is quite recent indeed. And so, too, is Browder whose Magnitsky Act was based on a lie, but perhaps more a half truth. I bet you didn't know that Browder worked for Edmond Safra and Robert Maxwell, father to Ghislaine Maxwell. Whatever the truth of the death of Magnitsky, the Magnitsky Act gave the Anglo-American deep state the fake because it needed to rein in the Russia misbehavior.
Ask yourself. If Russia is sanctioned where will they be forced to sell their oil? China. And in so doing, they become China’s problem. (And within seconds of publishing this article, the Russians asked China for help.)
I’m also more than a bit suspicious of Sean Hannity whose own financial ties to the late Sheldon Adelson he once articulated to me over the phone. He often called me “Mr. CIA” and introduced me to a number of shady characters around himself and Trump.
These suspicions extend to others and include senators too.
An Israeli mobster in L.A. told me in no uncertain terms that he “owned” Senator Lindsey Graham. He is a major funder of the Canary Project, which sought to build biometric profiles of every American (and indeed, everyone) who opposed the Israeli settlements. When Congressman Dan Crenshaw threatens young Americans for opposing Israeli policies he’s part of that same network.
And also I wonder how sincere Mitt Romney can be in his anti-Russian pose when he owns much of his success to his financial backing from none other than Robert Maxwell.
Are we allowed to probe these questions with all the attention they deserve? Or is it simply the correct moral frame to bray “Russia bad”?
I have no special brief for the Russians but I can’t help but feel as if they might be a scapegoat.
Might the zealous hunting down of assets of Russian oligarchs prefigure our own angst and anger over our own oligarchs and what they’ve done to our middle class? Or rather, what we’ve allowed them to do?
Don’t wonder that too loudly.
I turn, instead, to the hidden world — the mob and intelligence world, a world I have come to know all too well, thanks in part to family ties and business relationships.
A friend of mine is a CIA informant. He middle mans between the Ukrainians, Israelis, and, of course, the United States, where he has immigrated and naturalized.
He actually has met Ihor Kholomoisky and Volodymir Zelensky in Israel.
He has taught me some interesting things. I didn’t know, for example, that Kholomoisky that owned a home in Herzilya and that the war lord is free to come and go between Ukraine and Israel whilst he and his family are barred from the United States.
“I spent about 1.5 hours one-on-one with Zelensky in Kholomoisky’s home,” my source said. “He was not impressive. Yet, now his popularity is skyrocketing.”
Another way of calling someone an actor is to call them a construct. Constructs are all around us. They just need a good script writer.
Mindich and Bogolyubov also own homes in Israel. Why hasn’t Naftali Bennett seized these assets? He may just yet. Ever since the latest round of sanctions some 14 private jets have flown from Russia to Israel, including Russian-Israeli billionaire Roman Abramovich whose plane landed from Moscow in Israel.
The State Department’s Victoria Nuland — yes, her — is trying to force Bennett to sanction the Russians. “Don’t be last haven for dirty money fueling Putin’s war,” she says.
Maybe. But maybe we want Israel as their last refugee so that we can monitor them in their new habitat.
Indeed, one wonders: Could Naftali Bennett be setting a trap on our behalf?
Meanwhile the refugee situation into Israel continues to be dire.
Part of the problem is that until very recently Israel had no notions of anti-money laundering or sanctions law. It’s gauche to ask newly minted Israelis where they got their money. An Israeli friend of mine said that if you ever want to make a small fortune in Israel arrive with a large one.
My source continues.
“I think it is the fact that many Ukrainians have Israeli citizenship and there is a legacy going back to the founding fathers of Israel,” he notes. “Also Chabad [closely connected with Russian intelligence] has a deep foothold in Ukraine. Between Soros affiliated groups and Chabad, Ukraine is spoken for.”
My source’s analysis jibes with my own, save for the overstating of Soros’s involvement. Soros has his own CIA connections and I’m eagerly awaiting the true story of Soros’s life to be fully told. Soros’s foundation recently changed its leadership from one of Obama’s guys to The Lord Malloch-Brown. A hand off to the British deep state, perhaps?
In addition to Kholomoisky’s legal woes, my source discussed the Zelensky campaign, Vadim Schulman (whose Malibu home recently sold for $40 million), Pavel Fuks (close to Giuliani) and Vitaliy Khomutynnik (a guest at the Trump hotel).
The tantalizing question begins.
What’s to be done with all these assets seized?
Who gets them when it’s all said and done?