Did You Fall For The CIA's Fake Letter To The Jews Of Donetsk?

I'm not sure if my friend Adam is still addicted to drugs but I do know he's still addicted to the drug addicts on Hate Talk Radio who get all hopped up on coke or speed and just let it rip. Adam took it on himself last week to spread the latest set of meticuloulsy-crafted right-wing propaganda about the woeful fate of the Jews of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. He cited the now debunked USAToday fantasy by Oren Dorell, a shady Beltway journalist. When I told him that the whole thing was probably just right-wing propaganda designed to push Americans towards a pro-war mentality, he balked.

"I have been reading comments from Jews in Israel who speak Russian," he wrote, "and really looked into it. It seems that some have tried to torch synagogues. Putin admitted his organization distributed the flyers but was unaware of their content (one person wrote). I have a client in Crimea, and from what I was told, they are terrified and want Putin out. Either way, Putin is a liar, and it doesn't look good, he has already (as you know) targeted gays."

  Sensing a kindred spirit-- anti-gay, authoritarian-- the American right had drifted deep into the Putin orbit. The problems in the Ukraine gave them second thoughts. The opportunity to exploit the Donetsk Jew letter was something they just couldn't resist. Kerry was pushing it big time. And the monkeys at CNN and the rest of the mainstream media bit-- big time… just like my drug-addicted (or ex-drug-addicted) friend, Adam. This morning, Haaretz reported that the letter is a fake.

The pro-Russian separatist leader of Donetsk, whose alleged signature is on the now notorious fliers calling on the eastern Ukrainian city's Jews to register on pain of deportation, said the documents were fakes, the ThinkProgress website reported Thursday.

“Some idiots yesterday were giving out these fliers in targeted areas,” said Denis Pushlin, head of the self-proclaimed People's Republic of Donetsk, whose forces have taken over Ukrainian government buildings in the city. Pushlin said he didn't sign the documents and the People's Republic, whose name is stamped on the fliers, didn't produce them.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League said it was "skeptical about the … authenticity" of the fliers, which have been widely reported and accepted as authentic, including by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who denounced them as "grotesque."

Also, Julia Ioffe, who covers Russia for The New Republic, wrote: "The Donetsk Jewish community dismissed [the fliers] as 'a provocation,' which it clearly is. 'It's an obvious provocation designed to get this exact response, going all the way up to Kerry,' says Fyodr Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs. 'I have no doubt that there is a sizeable community of anti-Semites on both sides of the barricades, but for one of them to do something this stupid-- this is done to compromise the pro-Russian groups in the east.'"

According to the original report from Novosti Donbassa news agency, the fliers were handed out by three men wearing balaclavas and carrying Russian Federation flags on Monday, Passover eve, to Jews leaving synagogue in Donetsk.

The fliers order all Jews over the age of 16 to register at the government building, which has been occupied by pro-Russian insurgents in defiance of Kiev rule. Jews would also have to pay a registration fee of $50 before May 3 and list all real estate and vehicles owned.

The notice explained the measure as being due to the alleged support of Jewish leaders for the "nationalist junta of [Stepan] Bandera in Kiev" and their hostility "to the Orthodox Donetsk republic and its citizens."

Failure to register, the notice said, would result in people being "stripped of their citizenship and deported forcibly outside the country with confiscation of property."

So who perpetrated this? Most people who denounced it as inauthentic from day one, are pointing to the CIA, which is not hard to believe, since the organization was key to toppling the former regime in Kiev and installing the new one which, understandably, has the Russians concerned. And this attempt to stampede Obama into a confrontation with Russia isn't their first-- and is certainly being applauded by the right-wing media.

It isn't the kind of analysis you'll ever see in the USA Today or on CNN or CBS or any of those news sources-- who are to busy with fake Jew letters-- but last week Naomi Klein, writing for The Guardian, went a long way towards explaining why the U.S. is so busy meddling in Ukraine.

The way to beat Vladimir Putin is to flood the European market with fracked-in-the-USA natural gas, or so the industry would have us believe. As part of escalating anti-Russian hysteria, two bills have been introduced into the US Congress-- one in the House of Representatives (H.R. 6), one in the Senate (S. 2083)-- that attempt to fast-track liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, all in the name of helping Europe to wean itself from Putin's fossil fuels, and enhancing US national security.

According to Cory Gardner, the Republican congressman who introduced the House bill, "opposing this legislation is like hanging up on a 911 call from our friends and allies." And that might be true-- as long as your friends and allies work at Chevron and Shell, and the emergency is the need to keep profits up amid dwindling supplies of conventional oil and gas.

For this ploy to work, it's important not to look too closely at details. Like the fact that much of the gas probably won't make it to Europe-- because what the bills allow is for gas to be sold on the world market to any country belonging to the World Trade Organisation.

Or the fact that for years the industry has been selling the message that Americans must accept the risks to their land, water and air that come with hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in order to help their country achieve "energy independence." And now, suddenly and slyly, the goal has been switched to "energy security," which apparently means selling a temporary glut of fracked gas on the world market, thereby creating energy dependencies abroad.

And most of all, it's important not to notice that building the infrastructure necessary to export gas on this scale would take many years in permitting and construction-- a single LNG terminal can carry a $7bn price tag, must be fed by a massive, interlocking web of pipelines and compressor stations, and requires its own power plant just to generate energy sufficient to liquefy the gas through super-cooling. By the time these massive industrial projects are up and running, Germany and Russia may well be fast friends. But by then few will remember that the crisis in Crimea was the excuse seized upon by the gas industry to make its longstanding export dreams come true, regardless of the consequences to the communities getting fracked or to the planet getting cooked.

I call this knack for exploiting crisis for private gain the shock doctrine, and it shows no signs of retreating. We all know how the shock doctrine works: during times of crisis, whether real or manufactured, our elites are able to ram through unpopular policies that are detrimental to the majority under cover of emergency. Sure there are objections-- from climate scientists warning of the potent warming powers of methane, or local communities that don't want these high-risk export ports on their beloved coasts. But who has time for debate? It's an emergency! A 911 call ringing! Pass the laws first, think about them later.