But the freed Belarusian prisoners are protesting that they were expelled to Lithuania in the US-brokered deal and not given the choice to remain in their own country. Additionally, many have noted that they were almost due to be freed anyway. Veteran dissident and one-time Belarusian presidential candidate Mikola Statkevich, released from prison on Sept. 11 as part of the deal, has been returned to a penal colony at Hlybokaye after refusing to accept exile to Lithuania. (The Guardian, The Insider)

The military maneuvers follow an alarming rise in brinkmanship on NATO’s eastern flank.

Poland requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty—mandating urgent talks among alliance members—after an incursion of at least 19 Russian drones into the country’s airspace on Sept. 10. The drones were intercepted by Polish and Dutch fighter jets, but not before a private home was struck and damaged in Lublin province. Russia denied targeting Poland, while Belarus, where some of the drones entered from, said they had “lost their course” because they were jammed. Poland is calling for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over its territory. (AP, CNN, Politico, TVP World)

“Russia’s war is escalating, not ending,” European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters in Brussels after the drone incursion. “What Putin wants to do is to test us. What happened in Poland is a game changer.” (AP)

Three days later, Romania scrambled two F-16 fighter jets after detecting a drone that had breached its airspace during a Russian attack on Ukraine. The jets followed the drone until it returned to Ukrainian airspace. (France24)

This, in turn, followed new outbursts of Russian threats to use nuclear weapons.

Photo of Russian T-14 Armata tank via National Security Journal

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Also June 1, seven were killed when a passenger train derailed in Russia’s Bryansk oblast, near the border with Ukraine, after a bridge collapsed as a result of an explosion—possibly in a drone strike. A second bridge reportedly collapsed in Kursk oblast, also on the Ukrainian border and recently retaken by Russian forces following a Ukrainian incursion launched last year. (DW)

Meanwhile, as Russian nuclear threats escalate, so do Russian air-strikes on Ukrainian cities.

Image via Kyiv Independent

But the conference, hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs & Combating Antisemitism, revealed a systemic alliance between Netanyahu’s Revisionist Zionism and the neo-fascist right. Even Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt (whose organization faced criticism over its exoneration of Elon Musk’s Inauguration Day Nazi salute as an “awkward” gesture) and the increasingly Islamophobic French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy boycotted the event in protest of the prominent place given to far-right figures. To his credit, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis also cancelled.

Jordan Bardella, president of the French National Rally party, gave a keynote address at the confab, in which he blamed rising anti-Semitism in Europe on migration, and more specifically Muslim migration, saying: “Islamism is the totalitarianism of the 21st century.” This formulation (and especially use of the article “the”), of course, seeks to dismiss the threat still posed by the totalitarianism of the 20th century—fascism.

Panels had predictable names like “How Progressivism Fell Captive to Antisemitism” and “How Radical Islam Fuels Antisemitism in the West.”

Also on hand was Marion Maréchal, grand-daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Rally’s predecessor party the National Front—and a notorious Holocaust revisionist. This of course comes as Marine Le Pen, the old man’s daughter and (alarmingly) frontrunner in the 2027 French presidential race, has been barred from running upon her conviction on charges of embezzling EU funds for her campaign. (Yet another case of a European country taking pre-emptive legal action to prevent a far-right authoritarian from coming to power, which the United States so dramatically failed to do last year.) Unless she prevails on appeal, Bardella is likely to take her place as the National Rally candidate.

Also prominently featured was David Friedman, US ambassador to Israel during Trump’s first term. Asked by the moderator about Trump’s plan to remove Palestinians from Gaza, Friedman said: “I love it! I love it. And I think it’s doable.”

Other figures from the European far right attended from the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Hungary. Most telling was the appearance by Milorad Dodik, president of the Bosnian Serb Republic—just after a Bosnian court requested an international arrest warrant for him over his separatist policies and defying orders of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia’s central government.

During the conference, Dodik spoke out defiantly against the warrant, telling reporters: “The Muslims from Sarajevo, they want to punish me because I came here to Israel, supporting Israel. They are misusing the judiciary and the prosecutor’s office…”

True to fascistic form, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli demonized internal dissent to the conference, calling Israel’s center-left Haaretz newspaper a “beacon of lies and anti-Zionist propaganda,” adding that “Haaretz and others like them do not represent the Jewish people.”

Even former ADL head Abe Foxman, for whom criticism of Israel has been heretofore virtually verboten, said: “I don’t think it is appropriate to have representatives of far-right parties in Europe coming to Jerusalem to meet with the Jewish community and together develop a strategy to fight anti-Semitism when they are part and parcel of the problem of anti-Semitism.” (Reuters, NBC, The Media Line, ToI)

In an attempt to appease criticism of the conference, President Isaac Herzog offered a compromise—a private meeting with world Jewish leaders at his home the night before the main event, without the far-right figures. Fortunately, this failed to mollify the boycotters. (ToI)

Is it necessary to point out the multiple converging ironies here? The Islamophobic anti-immigrant invective spewed forth by Bardella perfectly mirrors that employed against Jews in Western Europe and the US yestercentury. Friedman’s enthusiasm for forced relocation of the Palestinians has obvious echoes in what was inflicted on the European Jews in World War II and its prelude. And have we really already forgotten how Serb “ethnic cleansing,” forced internment and massacre of the Bosnian Muslims in the war of the 1990s was at the time assailed as redolent of the Holocaust?

Dodik presumably didn’t even return to Bosnia from Israel before arriving in Moscow to seek Putin’s shelter from the arrest warrant against him in his own country. (This was reported by Radio Free Europe, which the Trump regime is now conveniently seeking to shut down.)

And Netanyahu himself immediately after the conference flew to Budapest to meet with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, darling of Putin, Trump and the re-emergent forces of international fascism (yes). Orban hosted Bibi over the protests of both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which urged that the Hungarian leader have his guest arrested, in compliance with the warrant against him issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza. (DW)

Image via frgdr Blog. Hebrew lettering in background spells names of places in Europe where Jews were exterminated.

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Image: Chris Rywalt/CounterVortex, after “Rendezvous” by British cartoonist David Low, 1939

Fighting has now subsided, but the rebels’ hold on the city remains firm. A humanitarian crisis is fast deepening in the city, with hospitals overwhelmed and food running out. This is not the first time M23 has captured Goma. In 2012, the group briefly occupied the city before retreating to allow peace negotiations. The M23, named after a failed March 23, 2009 peace agreement with the Congolese government, claims to fight against persecution of Kinyarwanda-speaking Tutsi Congolese, many of whom have lived as refugees for over 30 years. Rwanda currently hosts nearly 100,000 of these refugees.

The current conflict pits M23 against a coalition of Congolese government forces (FARDC), the FDLR (a UN-sanctioned terrorist group linked to the 1994 Rwanda genocide), Burundian soldiers, European mercenaries, a South Africa-led SADC mission, and local militias known as Wazalendo. The FDLR and allied militias like the Mai Mai–Nyatura have for decades persecuted Congolese Tutsi communities.

The fall of Goma has sparked protests in the DRC capital, Kinshasa, with foreign embassies vandalized and set on fire, including those of Rwanda, South Africa, the US, Belgium and France. Amid the turmoil, President Felix Tshisekedi has promised a counter-offensive to retake Goma. He has appointed Maj. Gen. Somo Kakule Evariste as the new military governor of North Kivu, replacing Maj. Gen. Peter Cirimwami, who was killed by rebels on Jan. 23.

The DRC’s reliance on foreign mercenaries in the war in the east has drawn sharp criticism. Reports indicate that around 2,000 mercenaries, mostly from Eastern Europen countries such as Romania, have been hired to fight the M23. Nearly 300 of these mercenaries surrendered to M23 during the recent escalation and were handed over to Rwanda before being repatriated. (Great Lakes Voice, Jurist, Romania Insider, BBC News, UN News)

Map: PCL

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The Electoral College has now confirmed Trump’s victory, but the electoral votes still await certification by Congress on Jan. 6. There is still time for what is urgently mandated for the survival of American democracy—nullification of the election.

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Photo of protest in Tbilisi, Georgia: DerFuchs via Wikimedia Commons

Furthermore, some cybersecurity experts are calling for a forensic audit of the election, citing evidence of software breaches, bomb threats on poling places, and other irregularities. Some voices in the progressive blogosphere, such as Gaslit Nation, have noted these calls. In Romania, where a Putin-favored right-wing populist has won the first-round vote in the presidential election, a recount has been ordered by the courts in response to a public outcry. And protests continue to mount in the Republic of Georgia, following a contested election in which a Putin-favored right-wing populist party cemented its majority. Why is everyone so quiet here in the United States, the seat of the empire, where the stakes are the highest?

We need to demand a halt to the presidential transition process, and #ElectoralNullification. Make the hashtag go viral!

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Image: WTFA

From The New Humanitarian, Oct. 11

Note: While the Chagos Islands as a whole are to be ceded to Mauritius, the UK will be “authorised to exercise the sovereign rights of Mauritius” on the central island of Diego Garcia for at east 100 years.

Photo via TNH