Europe – Page 20 – praag.org

One officer killed in Charlie Hebdo shooting was Muslim

French police have identified one of the two officers killed in the shooting attack at the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The victim was a follower of Islam, media reported.

The 42-year-old Ahmed Merabet was shot at point-blank range despite apparently pleading for mercy, and his death was tragically caught on camera.

Merabet, a Muslim by faith, was serving as a patrolman in the 11th arrondissement, which is the district where Charlie Hebdo’s office is located in Paris, the Daily Caller reported.

The identity of the second officer has not been confirmed by officials, but media reports stated that he was assigned to protect the defiant editorial director of the provocative outlet, Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier.

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed after the outlet published a spoof issue which mocked Sharia law and was “guest edited” by the Prophet Muhammad. In 2012, Charbonnier oversaw publication of an even more provocative issue on Muhammad, which showed the prophet naked and in sexual poses. The journal mocked Christianity and Judaism too.

On Wednesday morning, at least two black-hooded adult gunmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles entered the building of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, killing 10 journalists and two policemen. According to survivors of the massacre, the gunmen claimed they were from Al-Qaeda.

Police have launched a manhunt for three suspects, identified as Said Kouachi, 34, Cherif Kouachi, 32, and Hamyd Mourad, 18.

The youngest suspect, Mourad, reportedly handed himself in at a police station in Charleville Mézières after seeing his name on the list of shooting suspects on social media, French outlets reported. The 18-year-old claims to have alibi of his innocence, which is being investigated.

“The youngest of those wanted surrendered to police pleading not guilty. His alibi will be verified by investigators,” iTele said on Twitter.

According to iTele, Hamid Mourad said that at the time of the attack he was in lycée in Charleville-Mezieres. It was reported earlier that Mourad is a student.

Twelve killed in attack on French satirical magazine

Masked gunmen stormed the offices of a French satirical newspaper Wednesday, killing 11 people before escaping, police and a witness said. The weekly has previously drawn condemnation from Muslims.

French President Francois Hollande called the slayings a terrorist attack and said that several other terror attacks have been thwarted “in recent weeks.”

Xavier Castaing, head of communications for the Paris police prefecture, confirmed the deaths in the shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly that been repeatedly threatened for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, among other controversial sketches.

Hollande rushed to the scene and top government officials planned an emergency meeting.

Luc Poignant, an official of the SBP police union, said the attackers escaped in two vehicles.

A witness to the attack, Benoit Bringer, told the iTele network he saw multiple masked men armed with automatic weapons at the newspaper’s office in central Paris.

Source: AP

Russians celebrate Christmas today

Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas today.

This year, the Russian president Vladimir Putin celebrated the holiday in Russia’s Otradnoye village near the southern city of Voronezh, where he attended a Christmas service at a local church.

The Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar and celebrates Christmas on January 7.

The Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in the Otradnoye village, accommodating some 450 people, was crowded during the Christmas Eve service.

Putin sent his greetings to the congregation and personally thanked Archpriest Gennady Zaridze, the rector of the church, who helped to restore the building and open a church-run orphanage.

The church in Otradnoye is among the country’s cultural heritage sites. Construction work began in 1893 and lasted eight years. In 1930, the church was closed and used as a grain storage facility. The restoration began only in 1991.

Russian Christmas card from 1912, before the Red Revolution

Germans rally against Islam

Protesters marched in several German cities again on Monday against higher levels of immigration and what they see as the growing influence of Islam, in defiance of an appeal from Chancellor Angela Merkel to spurn rallies she views as racist.

The rallies, organized by a new grassroots movement known as PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, have become an almost weekly event in the east German city of Dresden in recent months.

Some 18,000 people, the biggest number so far, turned out in Dresden on Monday but similar rallies in Berlin and the western city of Cologne were heavily outnumbered by counter-protesters who accuse PEGIDA of fanning racism and intolerance.

The PEGIDA protesters waved Germany’s black, red and gold flag and brandished posters bearing slogans such as “Against religious fanaticism and every kind of radicalism”.

One poster in Cologne called for “potatoes rather than doner kebabs”, a swipe at ethnic Turks who at around three million represent Germany’s largest immigrant community.

Germany has some of the world’s most liberal asylum rules, partly due to its Nazi past. The number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany, many from the Middle East, jumped to around 200,000 last year — four times as many as in 2012.

In her New Year address last week, Merkel urged Germans to shun the anti-Muslim protesters, saying their hearts were full of hatred.

“We need to … say that right-wing extremism, hostility towards foreigners and anti-Semitism should not be allowed any place in our society,” Merkel said on Monday in the eastern town of Neustrelitz.

In Cologne, home to a large Muslim population, there were 10 times as many counter-demonstrators as PEGIDA protesters. In similarly multi-ethnic Berlin, some 5,000 counter-demonstrators swamped around 400 anti-Muslim protesters, local police said.

“Germany is a country where refugees are welcome and the silent majority must not remain silent but rather go out onto the streets and show itself,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said at the Berlin counter-demonstration.

Cologne Cathedral, one of Germany’s most famous landmarks, switched its lights off to protest against the anti-Muslim rallies. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate turned off its floodlights in a similar gesture of solidarity.

PEGIDA has unsettled Germany’s political establishment and at first looked likely to help the Euroskeptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD). But the party, already suffering an internal power struggle, is split over how to deal with the movement.

Source: Reuters

Traffickers make $3 on ship with illegal immigrants

Traffickers made some $3m from 359 illegal migrants found abandoned on a cargo ship in the Mediterranean, the Italian police said.

The Ezadeen was towed into the Italian port of Corigliano Calabro after being found by coast guards on Friday.

It is the second such case involving a freighter in a week.

Both ships reportedly started in Turkey, in a change from the Libyan route usually favoured by gangs.

The police chief of Cosenza province, Luigi Liguori, said each migrant had paid between $4,000 and $8,000 to board the ship.

Officers say that the smugglers wore hoods and locked the migrants in the ship’s hold before apparently abandoning ship on a lifeboat.

Last year it is estimated that nearly 3,500 refugees died trying to cross the Mediterranean while another 200,000 were rescued.

Italian Red Cross volunteers were on hand to offer assistance The Ezadeen, an ageing Sierra Leone-flagged ship originally used to transport cattle, was spotted on Thursday evening and arrived in port in Italy on Friday night.

In the earlier case, Italian coastguards boarded a ship, the Blue Sky M, carrying 796 migrants on Tuesday. Finding it without a crew, they steered it into the south Italian port of Gallipoli.

The smugglers’ new tactic appears to be simple and effective: point a cargo ship towards Italy and let the coastguard do the rest.

Illegal migration to the EU has been fuelled by government grants and the promise of easy money.

“Smugglers are finding new routes to Europe and are employing new methods in order to exploit desperate people,” Dimitris Avramopoulos, the EU’s commissioner for migration said, promising to present a “comprehensive approach on migration”.

China starts payments with Russia in national currencies

China will start swaps and forwards between the yuan and the national currencies of Russia, Malaysia and New Zealand on December 29, the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) reported Friday.

Earlier in December, China’s Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng claimed that China could increase the usage of yuan in trade with Russia amid the ruble’s depreciation, which falls in line with China’s intention to increase the usage of national currencies in international payments in order to weaken the US dollar’s dominance in global finance and promote the yuan as an alternative.

In October, the Russian Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China reached a three-year agreement on currency swaps worth 150 billion yuan (over $24 billion).

Both the Russian and the Chinese leaders have repeatedly praised the decision, saying it would bring positive effects for the countries’ economies and currencies.

The main benefits of mutual payments in national currencies are the absence of charges for the conversion of the currencies, direct payments and higher transparency in relations between the banks.

Cyber attack on Merkel’s aide

The German chancellor’s office has fallen victim to a hacking attack, according to a German newspaper. The Regin malware in question has been linked to British and US spy agencies.

The complex spying malware arrived via a USB stick to the work computer of the unit head in the Department for European Policy, where it was picked up by virus scanning software, according to Monday’s edition of the German newspaper Bild.

According to the report, the staff member, who works in close contact with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had written a draft of a speech on her work computer, which she then took home using a USB stick at the end of the day and worked on it using her private laptop.

She later saved the document again on her private USB stick and brought it back into the office, to use on her work laptop. A virus alert went off and it was detected that the USB stick was infected with the spying software Regin. Checks of all other high-security laptops in the Federal Chancellery revealed no additional infections.

The cybersecurity company Symantec first warned of the highly-sophisticated malware at the end of November. According to them, the Regin spying software can make screenshots, control the mouse cursor, steal passwords, monitor data traffic and restore deleted data.

According to US news website “The Intercept,” which was co-created by Edward Snowden confidant Glenn Greenwald, Regin was deployed to steal information from governments, companies and research institutions. According to them, the British spy agency GCHQ and the United States spy agency NSA were involved in the development of the sophisticated spying software, which is particularly difficult to detect.

Source: AFP, dpa

Where is the United States of Pindostan?

If you talk to a Russian about the international political situation, sooner or later you will be informed that there is a country in North America that you’ve never heard of. Its name is ‘Pindosia,’ ‘Pindostan’ or, more officially, ‘United States of Pindostan,’ and you will be told that one part of it, called Alaska, used to belong to Russia. Part of the word—‘stan’—stands for underdeveloped state, as in ‘ Pakistan,’ ‘Kazakhstan,’ or ‘Uzbekistan.’ The citizens of this country in plural form are called ‘pindoses,’ in singular—‘pindos.’

There are more than 316 million ‘pindoses’ in ‘Pindostan.’

Today, this country has a black President, and the Russians have a nickname for him too. He is called Maximka—after a character from a popular Soviet movie, made in 1952, which told the story of a black boy saved by the Russian sailors from the cruelty of the vicious American slave-traders who were terribly abusing him and calling him just that—“Boy.” In the film, the saved boy was fed well by the Russian crew, given the name Maximka, and became one of their own in the end.

But by the modern-day Russian legend, Maximka, unfortunately, has grown up into an ungrateful Russophobe.

One can assume that the reader by now has a clue what this country is.

The word ‘pindos’ in Russian is highly offensive, and defines a helpless creature that is a product of a very bad educational system, one who can survive in this world only with the help of various gadgets. The origin of the word is unknown, and the philologists are fighting to establish it. The most popular explanation states that this word was invented by Russian peacekeepers in Serbia with the purpose of describing a NATO soldier, who was seen by them as a strange, clumsy figure with his 90 lbs. of bulletproof vest, weapons, radios, flashlights and so on.

From afar, he looked very strange to the Russian eye—like a penguin.

The Russians have had their favorite, most-hated pindoses. One of them, the constant laughingstock in the media, used to be the US Ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul. He was a huge fan of Twitter and if judged by the number of his tweets, spent more time on his gadget than actually doing his job. After more than two years of service there, upon his departure, he received only two words in Russian—via Twitter—from the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs: “Goodbye Mikhail.”

Today his place has been taken by the spokesperson for the US Department of State, Jen Psaki. She has an anti-fan club of haters who consider her not to be very bright—they even invented their own anti-IQ unit called 1 Psaki. One who has 3 Psakis has a brain of a clam. The term ‘psaking’ in Russian political newspeak means to know nothing about the subject while saying something banal and politically correct. She is so popular that when she injured her foot and came in front of the cameras with the cast on, all major Russian TV channels and newspapers reported the event.

Another hated ‘pindos’ is Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), famous in Russia for his periodic tweets to ‘Dear Vlad.’ In 2011, for example, Mr. McCain tweeted Putin, “Dear Vlad, The #ArabSpring is coming to a neighborhood near you.” Usually reserved and purposefully polite while talking about his ‘partners from over the Big Pool’ (Big Pool being the Atlantic Ocean ), this time Mr. Putin shot back, saying that Mr. McCain “has a lot of blood of peaceful civilians on his hands. He must relish and can’t live without the disgusting, repulsive scenes of the killing of Gadhafi.” “Mr. McCain was captured in Vietnam and they kept him not just in prison, but in a pit for several years,” Mr. Putin added. “Anyone [in his place] would have had his roof moved over.” The last three words in Russian slang mean “suddenly to become insane.”

Today, according to the respected Moscow ‘Levada Center,’ which measures political sentiment in Russian society, 74% of Russians have negative feelings towards the USA. It hasn’t always been like this; in the 1990s, 80% had positive attitude toward America.

Currently, 76% of Russians hate Obama personally and only a meager 2% like him. In 2009 only 12% of Russians had extremely negative feelings towards Obama.

These are the maximum peaks of anti-American feelings in Russia in years but the sociologists believe they could go even higher in the near future.

Anti-American sentiment has been growing slowly in Russia since the war in former Yugoslavia. But the sharp recent increase happened as a result of the US-led sanctions that were imposed on Russia after the ‘Russian annexation of Crimea.’ For example, just last week Visa and MasterCard completely stopped their operations in Crimea, leaving more than 2 million people there without access to their money. 75% of Russians do not believe that their country is responsible for the events in Ukraine. On the contrary, they blame the US.

When the sanctions began, many Russian businesses responded by putting up ‘Obama Is Sanctioned Here’ signs on their doors and windows.

However today they went much farther.

The owners of the Moscow supermarket “Electronics on Presnya” are using American flag doormats so the customers could wipe their dirty feet off, according to the British tabloid Daily Mail. “Customers have been filmed wiping their feet on the fabled stars and stripes as they enter and exit stores across Moscow, as struggling retailers take a hopeless swipe at their Cold War adversaries,” reports the newspaper. According to the Moskovky Komsomolets Moscow newspaper, the nation’s business owners decided to put the US flag under the Russians’ feet because of the strained relations between the two countries. “New doormats with the American flag were put at every exit so that America would not think that she is allowed to everything,” they say. “From one perspective, of course it is a flag, but from the other, because of this entire situation in the world, regular folks are suffering. All the electronics we import, mostly from China and buy for dollars. We have to work directly so the US would have no chance to manipulate the prices.” (The Russian ruble lost about 50% of its value because of the economic sanctions by the western countries and a fall in the oil price.)

By the words of the shopping center’s attorney Konstantin Trapaidze, the doormats with the American flag do not break any Russian law. “It is very probable that the doormats have a decorative character. Yes, people are walking on them but nobody prohibited this. They produce not only doormats with the flag on them but also furniture upholstery. The breaking of the law would be when someone would start burning such a doormat or real flag demonstratively, or tear it up.”

Major Russian TV channel Vesti eagerly reported that fact. They also added that some Moscow stores were selling the toilet paper with American flag imprinted on it. The pricetag was $1 per roll.

A number of Russian politicians have been working very hard to keep the flames of rage burning. Last week, the Speaker of the Russian Parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, raised the issue of starting an international investigation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings by the US in 1945, as a ‘crime against humanity’ has no time limit. He wanted nothing less than a new Nuremberg trial with the US at the criminal’s bench.

Vladimir Putin, from his side, during his most recent press conference, used the occasion to show his negative attitude toward one of America ’s most popular products. Answering a question about Russian drink Kvass, he said, “I don’t know how harmful Coca-Cola is, but a lot of specialists say that it is, especially for children. I don’t want to offend Coca-Cola, but we have our own national non-alcoholic beverages, and we shall help them to win our stores’ shelves.”

He could have chosen another brand as an example of an unhealthy soda, since there is no shortage of different drinks in Russia’s stores. But to no one’s surprise, the Russian President chose for his attack the very symbol of Pindostan.

Source: New York Observer

CIA instructs operatives to circumvent EU security

Wikileaks has released two classified documents instructing CIA operatives how best to circumvent global security systems in international airports, including those of the EU, while on undercover missions.

The first of the documents, dated September 2011, advises undercover operatives how to act during a secondary airport screening. Secondary screenings pose a risk to an agent’s cover by focusing “significant scrutiny” on an operative via thorough searches and detailed questioning.

The manual stresses the importance of having a “consistent, well-rehearsed, and plausible cover,” in addition to cultivating a fake online presence to throw interrogators off track.

Meanwhile, the second document, dated January 2012, presents a detailed overview of EU Schengen Border Control procedures.

The overview outlines the various electronic security measures, including the Schengen Information System (SIS) and the European fingerprint database EURODAC, used by border control and the dangers these measures may pose to agents on clandestine missions.

WikiLeaks’ сhief editor Julian Assange explains that these documents show that “under the Obama administration the CIA is still intent on infiltrating European Union borders and conducting clandestine operations in EU member states.”

The document also demonstrates the CIA’s increasing concern over the risks to operatives’ assumed identities posed by biometric databases—the very same systems the US pushed for after 9/11.

On Friday, WikiLeaks released a CIA report suggesting that though targeted killing programs, including drone strikes, may be effective in some cases, there is also a risk that the programs may backfire. For example, targeted strikes may prompt local populations to sympathize with insurgents or further radicalize remaining militants.

Second French jihad attack as driver ploughs into pedestrians

A driver shouting “Allahu Akbar” ploughed into pedestrians in eastern France Sunday, injuring 11 of them, just a day after a man yelling the same words was killed in an attack on police officers.

Two of the people injured in the car attack in the city of Dijon were in a serious condition, a police source said, adding that the driver had been arrested.

France is still reeling from a suspected radical Islamic attack on Saturday that saw a French convert to Islam shot dead after attacking police officers with a knife while also reportedly crying “Allahu Akbar” in the central town of Joue-les-Tours.

The assailant, Burundi-born French national, Bertrand Nzohabonayo seriously injured two officers — slashing one in the face — and hurting another.

The 20-year-old attacker also cried “Allahu Akbar” during the assault, said a source close to the case speaking on condition of anonymity.

The assault prompted the government to step up security at police and fire stations nationwide.

The anti-terror branch of the Paris prosecutor’s office has opened a probe into that attack, with the line of inquiry focusing on whether it was motivated by radical Islam.

The weekend incidents in France come as governments around the world brace for so-called “lone wolf” attacks by individuals returning from waging jihad abroad, or who are simply following Islamic State group calls for violence in the countries involved in a coalition fighting the militants in Iraq and Syria.

The group has repeatedly singled out France for such attacks, most recently in a video posted on jihadist sites this week.

Last week in Australia, an Iranian-born Islamist with a history of extremism and violence entered a cafe and held people hostage for 16 hours before being killed. Two of the hostages also died.

Source: Yahoo

Thousands rally in Dresden against criminal immigrants

On Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden, Germany, carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

The Anglo-Saxon presstitutes were unsurprisingly wild-eyed with indignation about the “extremists”, but could find no Nazi’s at the rally.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-immigration campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in peacefully chanting “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”.

The slogan was adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

According to the British Guardian “unnamed sources” in the rally said Muslims were “plotting to infect German food chain with their excrement”, but the “sources” were probably from the Guardian itself.

It was the ninth week in a row that Pegida had taken its protest to the city’s streets in the eastern German state of Saxony, but nobody looked worried about tainted food. Rather they decried the recent decision by local politicians to increase the number of homes for asylum seekers, inviting more in.

Its first march, advertised on Facebook and other social media, attracted just 200 supporters. By last week the figure had risen to 10,000. By Monday night it had grown to an estimated 15,000.

A middle-aged woman in a red leather jacket, said she was shocked that “asylum seekers in Germany have expensive mobile phones, while I cannot afford such luxury and others still cannot afford to eat properly”.

There were no racist slogans and marchers spoke of the “demise of the West” due to the rise of Islam, salafism, sexual abandon and licentiousness.

Old and young men and women, including families with children in pushchairs, many of whom said they had no political affiliation, joined the march.

Almost two-thirds of Germans, according to a poll for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, believe that Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34% think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation”.

According to the Anglo-Saxon press, these citizens should all qualify as Nazi’s while the foreigners and immigrants are “open-minded” folks who refuse to speak German.

The Guardian went beyond the farcical in denouncing the rally, claiming that Germans “bark” when they speak.

Led by Bachmann, a 41-year-old butcher’s son who runs a PR agency, Pegida has many clones across Germany. Legida is the name of the Leipzig branch, Bogida the Bonn branch, while in Darmstadt it is known as Dagida.

At a recent rally in Dresden, Bachmann’s hometown, he explained that while asylum seekers enjoyed luxury accommodation, many impoverished German pensioners were “unable to even afford a single slice of Stollen” (German Christmas cake).

Bachmann maintains that he plays a small part of the movement. “I’m just a small cog in a much bigger wheel,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in a rare interview.

German resentment over a sharp rise in the number of refugees seeking political asylum in Germany, many from war-torn countries including Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, has grown in recent months.

All these countries have been ravaged by Anglo-Saxon meddling and expansionist imperial policies.

Last Friday, a newly refurbished home for asylum seekers in Nuremberg in southern Germany was badly damaged in an arson attack. Anti-foreigner slogans and swastikas were found daubed on the walls.

The attack may have come from worried security agents desperate to smear Pegida.

G4S guards accused of migrant’s death found innocent

Three security guards from the controversial security firm G4S have been cleared of manslaughter, despite accusations they killed a 46-year-old man by forcibly restraining him on a charter airline flight.

Jimnmy Mubenga, from Angola, died on the 12 October 2010 after being restrained by guards at Heathrow Airport while on a British Airways flight. He was due to be deported to Angola from the UK.

The guards, Terrence Hughes, 53, Colin Kaler, 52, and Stuart Tribelnig, 39, were accused of killing Mubenga by forcibly pushing his head down and restricting his breathing.

The court heard fellow passengers said Mubenga told the guards he couldn’t breathe. Mubenga was already handcuffed and held down with a seatbelt during the restraining.

In a statement issued on the guards behalf, Alex Preston from Olliers Solicitors said: “Terrence Hughes, Colin Kaler and Stuart Tribelnig are delighted to have been found not guilty so quickly. They bitterly regret the death of Mr Mubenga but have always said they were trying to do a very difficult job in difficult circumstances to the best of their ability.”

“They are grateful to the judge and jury for the care they have taken resolving these sad events,” the statement added.

The hearing comes weeks after the death of Eric Garner in New York, an African-American who also suffocated despite telling police that he couldn’t breathe whilst being restrained.

Mubenga came to the UK with his wife Adrienne Makenda Kambana in 1996, but faced extradition after being involved in a violent nightclub brawl in 2006.

Mubenga’s lawyer, Mark Dennis QC, also told the court he was co-operative before boarding the extradition flight, but became upset after he spoke on the phone in the plane’s toilet cubicle.

“Each officer would have known from their training and from common sense that keeping someone in such a position was likely to cause a person harm yet they did so over a prolonged period and did so ignoring shouts from Mr Mubenga that he was in trouble,” Dennis said.

“‘I can’t breathe’ shouts were heard by many a passenger seated further away.”

Following the court hearing, a number of human rights organizations expressed their disappointment, including Amnesty International UK, who said the outcome ignored the ‘multiple failings’ that led to Mubenga’s death.

The Migrants Rights Network also said the outcome would not provide comfort to immigrants facing deportation from the UK.

“Once again a migrant has lost their life in detention, and once again no one will ultimately be held to account,” said MRN’s action director Jerome Phelps.

“There needs to be a fundamental review of the detention and deportation system, to ensure that the UK does not needlessly jeopardize the lives of people who have come here in search of a better future.”

Changing Russia from within

The Russian Ministry of Justice discovered another foreign agent.

And this time it is not a human rights organization or a union of observers, but an entire school for training of human resources for the State Department.

For several years an organization called “Moscow School of Civic Education” operated in Russia’s capital. It was in the business of literally preaching American multicultural ideology and values.

Practically a sect, undermining the foundations of the country from the inside. Last year alone, the school held nearly 30 events with an audience of over 2,000 people. In the framework of the country it is not much, but all these 2000 people were prepared as professional specialists – organizers and instigators of protest and decent.

On the list of donors of Moscow School of Civic Education in 2013 there are 17 foreign organizations and foundations. Among them, the governments of five European countries, four of them – members of NATO. And of course funding from USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and IRI (International Republican Institute – American non-profit organization, whose director is the odious senator from Arizona John McCain).

The people behind the funding do not hide that they create this kind of training centers around the world. For example, the most recent example, the branch of the school operated in Georgia – we all remember what happened there. Finally this type of school operated in Ukraine, and during the Maidan its curators personally traveled to Kiev to visit their “disciples”: in particular, the assistant US Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is remembered for handing out cookies on Maidan.

The work at the school went on on all fronts. Ideological brainwashing, with help of foreign lecturers, and through the works of Russian opposition. The school had its own publishing house. In the series “The Library of MSGP” were published such books as: “The Fourth Republic” and “Granted Democracy” by Vladimir Ryzhkov; “The Lost Decade” by Vladislav Inozemtsev – the main idea of the book is the study of the hypothesis about the “uselessness” of the first decade of the XXI century for Russia and the world; “Russian Youth”, written by the staff of the Levada Center – Lev Gudkov and Natalya Zorkaya.

In addition, the school, like “Azazel” by Akunin, tried to integrate its successful graduates into the structures of the government, so that they could change the policies of the country from the inside in accordance to the ideology of the school. Among the people in power related to the school, for example, is the former Governor of Volgograd region Sergey Bozhenov, Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Region’s Government Mikhail Kuznetsov and recently stepped down as Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Moscow Region Andrey Ilnitsky, Chairman of the faction “Georgian Dream – Republicans”, one of the most active organizers of the “rose revolution” in Tbilisi, David Berdzenishvili, and many others.

Finally, a large group of graduates are members of the media, both federal and, especially, regional, where the primary focus is today. Who even knows how many of these sects are open across the country.

Source: VKontakte

Russia turns to right-wing parties in EU

A Russian loan to France’s National Front. Invitations to Moscow for leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party. Praise for Vladimir Putin from the head of Britain’s anti-European Union party.

As the diplomatic chill over Ukraine deepens, the Kremlin is keen to enlist Europe’s far-right parties in its campaign for influence in the West.

Russia fears that NATO could spread to countries it considers part of its sphere of influence. And it has rightly served notice that it will not tolerate meddling, most recently with its Ukraine campaign.

Europe’s right-wing and populist parties, meanwhile, see an Atlanticist-dominated EU as contrary to their vision of Europe. They want to see a union of strong national states that do not toady to America.

The fact that many of Moscow’s allies are right to far-right reflects the Kremlin’s full turn. Under communism, nationalist parties were shunned as “xenophobic”.

Statements by leading critics of the EU, or euroskeptics, reflect their admiration of the Kremlin.

National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen told The Associated Press this month that France and Russia “have a communality of interest.”

Daughter Marine Le Pen, party president and a strong contender for the French presidency in 2017, envisions a Europe stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals” — a “pan-European union” that includes Russia and is supported by other right-wing parties.

Nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban perceives prevailing winds as “blowing from the East” and sees in Russia an ideal political model for his concept of an “illiberal state.”

The head of Britain’s euroskeptic Independence Party, Nigel Farage, has said Putin is the world leader he most admires.

Among other Moscow regulars from euroskeptic parties across Europe are members of Hungary’s anti-Semitic Jobbik and Austria’s Freedom Party.

Jobbik parliamentarian Bela Kovacs is under investigation in Hungary for allegedly “spying” for Russia.

While in Moscow recently, Freedom Party firebrand Johann Gudenus accused the European Union of kowtowing to NATO and America and denounced the spreading influence of the homosexual lobby in Europe.

Shunned at home by the liberal establishment and pro-American media, many are eager to gain air time on RT television, Russia’s international answer to CNN.

For them, “the benefit is that they can receive diplomatic support from a very high level from a superpower,” says Peter Kreko of Hungary’s Political Capital research institute.

Financial rewards are also incentives. Orban just signed a nuclear-reactor deal with Moscow. France is abuzz over the National Front’s recent 9 million euro loan from a Russian bank owned by a reputed Putin confidant.

Marine Le Pen describes it as “a perfectly legal loan that we will reimburse perfectly legally,” saying the party turned to Russia after being rejected by Western banks. But the transaction has galvanized fears among the National Front’s opponents of increased Kremlin influence, with the Socialists calling for an inquiry.

Links between Russia and the right predate the Ukraine conflict. A 2005 US diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks noted close ties between Bulgaria’s extreme-right Ataka party and the Russian Embassy in Sofia.

And Joerg Haider, the late leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, helped powerful Russian businessmen with residency permits more than a decade ago in exchange for close to 1 million euros in campaign funding.

Putin’s friendships with German ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Italy’s former Premier Silvio Berlusconi were also useful for the Kremlin.

Now the diplomatic gloom is settling in, their strong domestic and EU election showings this year will help further its own interests, Moscow hopes.

Of the 24 right-wing populist parties that took about a quarter of the European Parliament’s seats in May elections, Political Capital lists 15 as “committed” to Russia.

Many owe their popularity to evidence that EU-friendly parties in power are to blame for the continent’s economic woes — a view that could grow if the downturn persists.

“What Russia is saying is, ‘It’s fine for you to be the way you are’,” says analyst Melik Kaylan, in a study for the Institute of Modern Russia.