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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was murdered on October 20, 2011, and to mark the thirteenth anniversary of his death, the Russian Foreign Ministry received Qaddafi’s daughter, Aisha Qaddafi, in Moscow on Friday. This is the first open meeting in Russia between high-ranking Russian officials and the Qaddafi family.

The political significance was buried in the communiqué. “On October 18, the Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation for the Middle East and Africa, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Mikhail Bogdanov received Libyan public figure and artist Aisha Gaddafi, who is in Moscow in connection with the opening of an exhibition of her paintings at the State Museum of the East. During the conversation, issues of further strengthening historically friendly Russian-Libyan ties in the scientific, cultural and educational spheres were discussed. At the same time, the Russian side confirmed its unchanged position in support of achieving Libyan national accord in the interests of ensuring the unity, territorial integrity and state sovereignty of Libya.”  

The official reason for Aisha Qaddafi’s visit to Moscow to open the exhibition of her paintings omitted that the paintings are in memory of her father, brother and other members of her family assassinated by the US and its proxies in Libya. “I show these works for the first time to honour my father and my brother on the anniversary of their deaths,” Qaddafi said in Moscow. “I can tell you that these pictures are painted not with my hand but with my heart.”  

Assassination of Qaddafi had been a secret US Government policy during the Carter Administration and then an open policy of the Reagan Administration.  Assassination of  the Arabs of Palestine, including the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, is the open policy of the current US and Israeli governments.

In this context, the unofficial reason for Aisha Qaddafi’s visit to Moscow is that the Russian Foreign Ministry is signaling its opposition to this decades-old US and Israeli policy. The signal also hints through several years of rumour and disinformation  at fresh Russian support – that means armed protection – for Saif Qaddafi’s campaign to become the end-of-civil war president of Libya.  “If the Libyans choose a strong president,” Saif told the New York Times in 2021, “the only thing is a strong president. That’s it. The Libyans will choose a strong one. Everything will be solved automatically.”  

For the story of US policy to kill Qaddafi, read the book, Chapter 7: 

Left: https://www.amazon.com/
Centre: Qaddafi hosts Putin in Tripoli in April 2008. Right: Putin’s support for Qaddafi was reinforced by oligarch interests such as Rusal’s Oleg Deripaska.   His interest, backed by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, was to combine and revolutionize the economies of black West Africa and the Arab Maghreb through the Guinea-Libya bauxite, alumina and gas project.  That project was a strategic threat to the US and European Union metal industries, but not only them.  The US assassination attempts against Qaddafi precipitated an argument among President Dmitry Medvedev and other policymakers in Moscow, including then prime minister Putin, which was reported openly at the time. “ ‘What kind of no-fly zone is this if they are striking palaces [Qaddafi’s family compound] every night?’” Putin said. ‘What do they need to bomb palaces for? To drive out the mice?’”   

Russian policy towards Qaddafi has been chronicled here. Then as President Dmitry Medvedev issued the collective Russian decision to make its  lethal break with Qaddafi in February 2011 – the first such break by the Kremlin since Qaddafi took power in 1969 – Medvedev called “on Libya’s current authorities and all responsible political figures in the country to show restraint in order to prevent further deterioration of the situation and deaths of civilians.”

In Russian diplo-speak, “restraint” means “Russia will not intervene if you do your worst”.

When Ismail Haniyeh, head of the political bureau of Hamas was assassinated in Teheran on July 31,  the official Russian government statement called for the “all the parties involved to exercise restraint and avoid any steps that could dramatically worsen the security situation in the region, leading to a large-scale military confrontation.”  

“It is obvious”, to use the official language, that it had been Israel which had directed Haniyeh’s assassination. Equally plain is that the Foreign Ministry refused to say so. “It is obvious that those who organised this political assassination understood that these actions were fraught with dangerous consequences for the entire region. There is no doubt that Ismail Haniyeh’s killing will have an extremely negative impact on the indirect contacts between Hamas and Israel, which offered a framework for achieving a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip on mutually acceptable terms.”  

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov crept closer to the obvious a month later, telling a Russian state television documentary aimed at the Arab audience, “the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Teheran during the inauguration ceremony of the new president is, without a doubt, a provocation. Iran chose not to respond, but made it clear that it reserves the right to do so because its territorial integrity and sovereignty had been violated. It was a premeditated assassination of an Iranian government guest. When Teheran stated it reserved the right to respond, the Americans tried to tell Iran that it probably shouldn’t. Even President Macron and other EU figures started saying they were urging Iran… They’ve turned everything upside down. It’s no longer Israel that needs to be calmed down and to stop committing political assassinations; instead, Iran is expected to swallow this and to gear up for more provocations that might push it to make rash decisions, while it is supposed to keep quiet about everything and just acquiesce to it.”   

Lavrov is identifying Israel as “committing political assassinations”; he and the ministry have  not identified the US and Israel as committing genocide in Gaza. The official ministry term is “collective punishment”.  

Source: https://mid.ru/en/
The Ministry archive indicates that Russia officially recognizes genocide attempted by the Germans against Russians and Jews; by the Turks against the Armenians; by the Ukrainians against Russians in the Donbass.

The Russian terminological problem, and the official restraint this reflects towards Israel’s policy of assassination, are the outcome of efforts to bridge the sharp differences between the Kremlin and other decision-makers in Moscow over the right of the Arabs to conduct armed resistance against Israel and the US – the Arabs’ special military operations, to use the Russian term.  In the Moscow debate, national liberation on the battlefield, including pre-emption, is reserved to Russia in the Donbass.  

“In wars for national liberation and in civil wars, the terrorism label is one side’s propaganda against the other – this is the consensus of the Russian sources, unspoken and unpublished for the time being.  Russian public policy has yet to resolve the contradiction between Russian support for Palestine’s national liberation and opposition to Hamas’s ‘terrorism’ – this can’t happen, the sources say, before the presidential election in March [2024], and the success of the Russian military offensive in the Ukraine by then too. ‘There’s nothing new here. Putin is following the old Soviet line on exercising ‘the greatest possible caution’ towards the ‘frightful collisions’ which Stalin’s famous speech on revolution and tactics  spelled out a century ago.’ ”  

Accordingly, it is unclear whether Russian policy aims to do anything to deter US and Israeli escalation of violence, and thus whether “restraint” means no more than it says — nothing. “The [Hamas] terrorist attack that took place on October 7, 2023, was outrageous. All sensible people condemn it,” Lavrov told Sky News Arabia last month,  implying that he condemns Arabs for disagreeing with him.

“However,” Lavrov went on, “it is unacceptable to respond to a crime with another crime, especially through the prohibited method of collective punishment of civilians. We are against any escalation. Unfortunately, there are those seeking to heat it up to the maximum, in particular, to provoke the US Armed Forces’ interference in the region. This is totally obvious. Just recall the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh during the funeral ceremony for President Ibrahim Raisi [sic] in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I cannot imagine anything more cynical. I appreciate the fact that the Islamic Republic of Iran did not have a breakdown, as they say, or slide into full-scale response military actions. They counted that Iran would do something that would make the United States’ armed forces interfere in the situation. Perhaps the developments around Lebanon are similar. I believe that Hezbollah is behaving with restraint considering its capabilities. They want to provoke it with the same goal of making the United States’ interference in the war inevitable. I think that the Biden administration is aware of this danger. Obviously, we do not want a major war to break out. At this point, the main thing is to achieve a full ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and all Palestinian territories, promptly solve the humanitarian issues, resume aid supplies in the required volumes, and, obviously, commence substantial negotiations on the creation of a Palestinian state as the third necessary step. Without this, outbreaks of violence in the Middle East will continue.”  

The conflation of the Russian and international legal doctrines on homicide, war crimes, genocide, and self-defence on display here leave only one interpretation of what “restraint” means in all cases of special military operations —  except for the Russian one. Deterring the US and Israel from killing the Arabs at will was Soviet policy at the time of Qaddafi’s takeover of power from the US-backed Libyan King Idris as-Senoussi in 1969; the Soviet Mediterranean fleet protected Qaddafi and deterred an Anglo-American air and naval operation to restore Idris.

SOVIET NAVAL FLEET DEPLOYMENT BETWEEN CRETE AND LIBYA DETERRING US NAVAL AND AIRBORNE (EX-CYPRUS) ATTACKS ON QADDAFI, SEPTEMBER 1969

Click on the book, page 603,  for the enlarged map and analysis of what happened: https://www.amazon.com/Jackals-Wedding-American-Power-Revolt/

Soviet policy was that force deters, and restraint will be the outcome.  This was not Medvedev’s (and Putin’s) policy towards Qaddafi in February 2011 — the outcome was Qaddafi’s murder eight months later. On Friday last, Aisha Qaddafi heard from Russia’s leading Arabist, Deputy Foreign Minister Bogdanov, what Russian restraint means for Libya’s future — with and without deterring force.

In this context, read this newly published analysis of assassination as Israeli policy by Yevgeny Krutikov, a former GRU field intelligence officer in the Balkans who  is a regular security analyst in Vzglyad.  Krutikov is intending his analysis to be interpreted by the GRU and General Staff, as well as by the Kremlin and Foreign Ministry, in their argument over what is achieved for Russian state objectives in the Middle East from “restraint” in support of Israeli strategy.  Krutikov’s  loyalty to Putin was also displayed with his Telegram birthday salute.   

The text has been translated verbatim; URL links, illustrations, and captions have been added for reference and reader clarification.

Source: https://vz.ru/world/2024/10/18/1293100.html 

October 18, 2024
Why are the assassinations of Hamas leaders not producing results for Israel

By Yevgeny Krutikov

Israel is destroying the leaders of the countries and organizations opposing it one by one. The latest such example was the assassination of Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar in the city of Rafah (Gaza Strip). How does the Israeli intelligence service (MOSSAD) and the army (IDF) manage to successfully find and destroy these people, and will Tel Aviv achieve victory over the Palestinians as a result?

Israel has historically used three methods to eliminate the leaders of its opponents. Classic, with the use of agent intelligence and with the use of targeted means: from the explosion of a telephone handset to poison – this is the handwriting of the Mossad.

The assassination attempt on the head of the Hamas politburo, Khaled Mashaal, in the Jordanian capital Amman in 1997 is noteworthy here. Israeli agents tracked him down and attacked him right on the street, pouring some poison into his ear. It looked extremely mysterious: in the middle of the day, a man is attacked and something is shoved into his ear. At the same time, Mashaal walked with his bodyguards who recaptured him from the attackers and pinned them down. Why this particular method of assassination was chosen, when it was much easier to shoot Mashaal, is unknown.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

It ended up being almost a disaster for Israel. It is still unclear what the Jordanian King Hussein threatened Tel Aviv with at that time, but Israel was not only forced to deliver the antidote to Amman, but also additionally release Sheikh Yassin and a dozen other prominent Palestinian prisoners.

But the Israeli army, the IDF, unlike intelligence, is not inclined to such experiments and uses high–tech and heavy weapons of destruction. The handwriting of the IDF: tracking the movements of enemy leaders using technical controls (intercepting telephone messages, messengers, Internet traffic), choosing the right moment and striking with the help of the Air Force, bombs or missiles.

The Shin Bet Internal Security Service is also involved in this, but its operational methods  include infiltration into the ranks of the enemy or the recruitment of Arabs. This is necessary to select the location and time of the target’s destruction.

For example, it is not enough to know approximately the schedule of a target’s movements based on the analysis of his correspondence or telephone conversations. It is necessary that someone next to him physically confirms the intelligence. For this purpose, Israeli counterintelligence has been recruiting “mashpatim”, that is, decades-long sympathizers from among the Arabs.  By the way, it was the identification and destruction of these Israeli informants that Sinwar was engaged in at the time as head of the Hamas security service, for which he received several life sentences.

Another form of agent infiltration: special squads of Jews or Bedouins mimicking Arabs (“mistaravim”). It’s all very difficult and requires special skills and training.

And finally, the third and last method: chance, luck, God’s providence. That’s what happened, it seems, to Yahya Sinwar. According to the incoming leaks to the Western press, the Israelis only knew approximately which tunnel Sinwar could be in, but no more.

The IDF squad spotted a group of six unidentified Palestinians on one of the streets of Rafah and opened fire on them. The Palestinians took refuge in a nearby house. The Israelis drove up a tank and mortars and leveled the house to the ground for a time. A reconnaissance quadcopter with a video camera was used to investigate the results. Then the Israelis realized that the man in the house waving a stick at the drone was Yahya Sinwar.

“Israel’s killing of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is the newest manifestation of that century-old premise, Israeli analysts said on Friday. It reflects Israel’s decades-old policy of killing enemies in order to exact revenge, undermine its foes or establish deterrence… It was also a way of proving to Israelis themselves that the central assumption of Zionism — that Jews would be safer in a Jewish state than in the diaspora — was still valid.”   

Sinwar is the third Hamas leader in a row to be killed by Israelis. The tactics of eliminating the enemy’s top officials have been one of the foundations of Israel’s military intelligence behavior for decades. And, as you can see with the naked eye, it has not proven its effectiveness in a strategic sense.

The new leader of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, has been very attentive to his safety since the assassination attempt in 1997. Moreover, Mashaal even tried to ban the names of Hamas leaders and leaders from being mentioned at all. This was attributed to the fact that in 2004, after the assassination of Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi,  then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: “The destruction of terrorist leaders will continue.”

But it was not possible to completely classify the leadership of the organization, since in many ways its authority was based on public activities in Gaza. In this sense, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah in Lebanon are conventional “underground fighters.”

In Tel Aviv, they proceed from the idea that movements opposing Israel and even entire countries are at a more primitive level of social development and therefore prone to top-down leadership. The next link in this logical chain: if you destroy the leaders, then everything will fall apart. However, since 1947, the confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis has only intensified, which means that this logic does not work.

People who are inclined to a Marxist view of the world believe that Arab movements and organizations are the product of a socio–economic catastrophe in which the Middle East has been living for hundreds of years. And if the poor are given food and money, the crisis will be resolved. This point of view is very popular in Europe, as well as among the Israeli left. It also implies the tactics of destroying Arab leaders. Only in Europe they are silent about this, but in Israel they speak openly.

In Israel, it is believed that the destruction of the leaders of the opposition is not only an effective military and political measure, but also a righteous act. There is a complex religious foundation behind this call for revenge, but periodically it faces the practical need to negotiate.

On occasion people came to power in Israel who partially recognized the need to discuss the future with the Arabs, but each time all these attempts came to naught. There have been precedents for negotiations with Yasser Arafat, Sheikh Yassin, [Mousa Abu] Marzouk, and many other Palestinian, Lebanese, and Jordanian leaders. Then, when the political and ideological vector changed, they were killed. And nothing has changed in the Middle East.

Source: https://www.haaretz.com/ 

The left is wrong: the Arab movements are not built on the principle of leadership. A strong leader is always a good thing. But for decades, Arab movements have demonstrated the ability to regenerate along with the so-called social [mobility] elevator, although that is more complicated than the term is commonly understood in Europe. The Arab movements demonstrate an extreme degree of hatred towards Israel, which is not to be explained, neither by their “proletarian” origin, nor even by the peculiarities of religious thinking.

The right in Israel drew two conclusions from this conclusion. Firstly, nothing can be done with the Arabs — such organizations will pose a threat to the inhabitants of Israel and its security for centuries. Therefore, they just need to be destroyed. And as organizations, as structures on earth, and as people. Secondly, it is necessary to chop off the hydra’s head, not its limbs. Iran has been declared a hydra, which Israel has been trying for several years to provoke into a big war in which it will be possible to hide behind the Americans.

This “action plan” has many potentially unpleasant consequences. For example, no one has been conducting real negotiations on the release of hostages for a long time. The constant assassinations of Hamas leaders and other commanders simply close such a window of opportunity. And the IDF doesn’t seem to know any other military tactics at all, except carpet bombing.

Yes, the decrease in the military potential of Arab organizations opposing Israel is really happening. However, the main thing is not happening – their loss of moral, religious and political authority among the inhabitants of Palestine and other Arabs. Consequently, over time, the lost military potential will also be restored.

In this context, even if you kill several dozen Hamas leaders in a row, nothing will change strategically for Israel. But the specific ideological and religious attitudes prevailing in the right-wing part of Israeli society repeatedly push them to kill their opponents, and not to resume the negotiation process. 

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