DON HANK—During the early days of the ISIS’s rise, Turkey’s open border policy was instrumental to foreign terrorists flooding into Iraq and Syria. In fact, Turkey’s involvement with ISIS runs so deep that in 2016 David Phillips, an ex-State Department and Columbia University researcher, published a comprehensive study on Turkey’s support for ISIS. The study found evidence of Turkey providing military equipment, transport and logistical assistance, training, medical care to ISIS fighters. But that’s not all. The study determined that Turkey supports ISIS financially through purchasing oil and assisting ISIS recruitment. The report also said Turkish forces fight alongside ISIS fighters (specifically referring to the Battle for Kobani). Phillips attributes all this to the idea that Turkey and ISIS share a common worldview. Saudi Arabia — another U.S. ally — covertly supports ISIS while publicly opposing the terror group.
RUSSIA & NOVOROSSIYA
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RICHARD MEDHURST—Hezbollah is gradually expanding its operations. Its missiles and rockets are beginning to zero in on more targets of importance in Israel, and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, which remains a piece of Syrian territory. The probable upcoming presidency of uber Zionist Donald Trump will NOT fix the situation with the Israelis and may very well aggravate it. Trump and his in-laws, the Kushners, a notorious Zionist-American clan, will likely put US soldiers on the ground to further assist Israel in its battles with the anti-Zionist/imperialist alliance and Hamas itself. How that will play with Trump’s “antiwar” image in many quarters is still anybody’s guess.
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JOE LAURIA—The issue at hand is the fundamental difference between imperialism and revanchism. Western critics purposely or ignorantly confuse the two to serve their interests.
Succinctly, the difference is this: imperialists take control of a country that does not want them there and resists. A revanchist wants to absorb former imperial lands where the population is largely the same ethnicity and welcomes the revanchist power to protect them from an outside threat.
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PEPE ESCOBAR—It’s a cold, rainy, damp morning in the deep Donbass countryside, at a secret location close to the Urozhaynoye direction; a nondescript country house, crucially under the fog, which prevents the work of enemy drones.
Father Igor, a military priest, is blessing a group of local contract-signed volunteers to the Archangel Gabriel battalion, ready to go to the front lines of the US vs. Russia proxy war. The man in charge of the battalion is one of the top-ranking officers of Orthodox Christian units in the DPR.
A small shrine is set up in the corner of a small, cramped room, decorated with icons. Candles are lit, and three soldiers hold the red flag with the icon of Jesus in the center. After prayers and a small homily, Father Igor blesses each soldier.
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EDITOR—The panel discusses the outstanding aspects of Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview, what it signifies in the context of US imperial propaganda in an age of challenges and decline, whether the format of the interview itself—one of unusual depth and length—will help or harm the ultimate aim of educating Westerners, especially Americans, about the realities of the world so that peace can be secured, warmongers defeated once and for all, and a nuclear war can be averted.