Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Petr Akopov
[REGNUM] The US and UK introduced new sanctions against Iran in response to the Islamic Republic's attack on Israel. It is unnecessary to clarify that no Western country is going to impose any sanctions against Israel, which provoked the Iranian attack with its strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
Sanctions are imposed against those who are considered their enemies - Russia, Iran, North Korea, even China - and allies are, at best, slightly scolded. The war of sanctions has long become a continuation of a conventional war—or its replacement, or even simply a preparation for it.
At the same time, the economic and political effectiveness of sanctions is no longer a determining factor in their announcement. If previously it was believed that with the help of restrictions they wanted to force the enemy to change policy, make various concessions, or achieve his collapse, now sanctions wars are being waged under new circumstances.
The paradox is that sanctions primarily affect the interests of the West itself, because they destroy the rules of the game in the global market, in a globalizing world. Namely, building such a world was the main goal of the West. Built according to its rules and with the help of its institutions - financial, trade, etc. - a single world organism was supposed to ensure the dominance of the Western world.
Sanctions against small or fairly isolated countries like North Korea did not cause much damage to the reputation of the West. And even sanctions against such prominent states, including in the oil market, as Iran and Venezuela, did not have a fatal impact on the functions of the West as a global helmsman.
However, sanctions against Russia became a turning point, primarily due to the seizure of quite large Russian foreign assets. And although they have not yet been confiscated, constant conversations and votes on this topic only strengthen the entire non-Western world in the belief that the West will stop at nothing to defend its dominance.
That is, the West, while causing undoubted damage to the Russian economy, is simultaneously causing much more serious and strategically important damage to its own reputation and its global project.
But these are the problems of the West. How should those countries that are subject to sanctions pressure, and primarily Russia, counteract it? Not only because it is the largest of the countries against which the West is waging a sanctions war, but also because the rest of the world is looking at us, assessing the effectiveness of our response to Western pressure.
So far, Russia is trying to take a middle path - at the same time, together with other non-Western countries, building alternative systems and mechanisms to Western ones (financial, trade, logistics, etc.), and respecting the rights of Western producers and copyright holders.
Despite the departure of a huge number of Western companies from Russia, we do not continue to produce familiar goods using their equipment or under their brands: new Russian brands are produced or foreign ones are attracted, for example, Chinese ones. Why don't we just start exploiting the Western capacity, know-how and intellectual capital left behind?
Of course, in some cases this is simply impossible due to the cessation of supplies of certain components. But the main reason is that Russia considers it necessary to comply with international law - copyright, trademark and others. That is, we do not want to create a precedent and scare the rest of the non-Western world.
Yes, we are in conflict with the West, it imposed sanctions against us, left our market, but we still comply with international law, do not engage in piracy and theft of intellectual property (officially, because copying and, especially, industrial espionage have not been abolished).
So the Global South need not worry; in relations with it, no matter how they develop, we will certainly never stoop to violating agreements and stealing. But the West is just ready for it - we return to the situation with our same hundreds of billions of dollars and euros frozen in unfriendly countries.
The position is understandable and, when playing for a long time, generally justified. Russia sees itself not as a victim of the West, not as a fortress country, but as part of the world community. Only built not on Western rules, but on new ones, developed through the consensus of all leading centers of power.
Strategically, it is much more profitable for us to comply with even the current Western-centric rules than to abandon them altogether. Because our role and our weight in the process of forming a new world order - both trade and economic, and geopolitical in general - directly depends on relations with the non-Western world.
A world that, like us, is aimed at transitioning from the current world order to a new, multipolar one, but does not want and cannot break the existing rules before the supporting pillars of the new global architecture are built.
This concerns not only the financial system and the economy, but also security, that is, military alliances. Everyone understands that the era of Western dominance is ending, but no one wants its completion to take place in the form of the collapse of the entire system at once.
That is why the question of our response to sanctions has not a country-specific, but a global dimension. Sanctions not only will not help the West break us or extract concessions from us, but will also not lead us astray from our main goal - building a new multipolar fair (that is, taking into account the real balance of power) world order, beneficial both for Russia and for the absolute the majority of humanity.
[NYP] The United States’ top institutions and assets for higher education are being lost to extremists.
At the University of Pennsylvania, we are no longer known as the birthplace of the mRNA vaccine or the computer. Any quick Google search over the past six months will find that our university has been overrun by extremists who hate America, hate Israel and hate Jews.
Columbia University has devolved from the birthplace of more than 100 Nobel laureates to a war zone where Jewish students have been advised to go home.
Students across the country glorify the first woman to hijack an airplane, Leila Khaled, rather than the women who graduated from their own universities.
Students and faculty are at the center of this unfortunate fall from grace.
On Oct. 7, while Hamas was brutally murdering, raping and kidnapping innocent civilians in southern Israel, Penn professor Huda Fakhreddine tweeted in Arabic: "while we were asleep, Palestine reinvented a new way of life" and reposted "armed struggle by the Palestinian resistance against the occupier is legal under international law."
An Israeli assistant professor at Columbia University’s business school has been denied entry to the main campus, according to posts on social media, amid a week of tense anti-Israel, pro-Paleostinian protests.
In a post on X, formerly, Twitter, Shai Davidai says the reason he was refused entry to campus was because the university "cannot protect my safety as a Jewish professor."
"This is 1938," he adds, referring to the dismissal of Jewish staff from universities in Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the Holocaust.
In video footage of a confrontation between Davidai and Columbia University COO Cas Holloway, the assistant professor claims he is being denied entry because of his Jewish identity.
"I have not just a civil right as a Jewish person to be on campus, I have a right as a professor employed by the university to be on campus," he says.
"You cannot let people that support Hamas ...a regional Iranian catspaw,... on campus and me, a professor, not go on campus," he can be heard saying in the video.
Davidai broke into public view in the weeks after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, which triggered widespread anti-Israel protests on college campuses, when a video of an impassioned speech he gave went viral.
Since then, he has emerged as a leading voice criticizing universities for permitting anti-Israel sentiment to flourish and bleed into antisemitism.
The incident follows antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents at the New York City university which sparked a rabbi linked to the Columbia to urge Jewish students yesterday to remain at home.
US President Joe The Big Guy Biden ...46th president of the U.S. We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created ... by the — you know — you know, the thing... has blasted the "blatant antisemitism" during the protests on campus.
Blasting the behaviours out of one side of his mouth while enabling them with both hands. They aren’t fooling anyone anymore.
"MY card has been deactivated? Why?" - Shai Davidai, Pro-Israel professor at Columbia attempted to swipe his card to go inside the 'Liberated Zone' encampment with his supporters.
#5
I went to a liberal prep school north of Boston with a large endowment. I mostly ignore them. Now I am scared to visit their website.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/23/2024 10:48 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Cultural Entropy accelerated by the gradual introduction of the Religion of Peace into academic institutions. Voila.
The mainstay demokrat coalition has more rapidly shifted since the Lightbringer took the helm and the core Jewish constituency seems to be being displaced with new, more ROP-oriented leaders/money/policies. Oct 7th reaction by reactionary Islamists has drastically spiked visibility and awareness of the change I suspect.
[AmericanGreatness] Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives?
Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity.
Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped.
Given Iran’s and its surrogates’ incompetence, the administration, then, must extend the theocracy some allowances "to level the playing field." Biden does not believe in an equality of opportunity in war, when an aggressor does its best to attack or indeed destroy a defender, who in turn does its own best to retaliate and achieve victory.
Posted by: Grom the Reflective ||
04/23/2024 05:51 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[130 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran Proxies
#1
To me it looks like there is a deal between Iran and whoever is controlling Biden for one of two things or both:
1. Kickbacks
2. Declaring their nukes when a Republican is in the White House.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/23/2024 10:52 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a regional Iranian catspaw,...
