And you wonder why Russia is helping fund terrorists

Just as the Soviet Union’s fingerprints were all over the local wars that were the testing areas for the Cold War, it’s becoming apparent that both the Soviet Union’s and Russia’s fingerprints are all over the Middle Eastern wars that the testing areas for World War IV (the War Against Jihadism). Here’s some of what Ion Mihai Pacepa has to say about Russia’s involvement in today’s turmoil:

Today’s international terrorism was conceived at the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, in the aftermath of the1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East. I witnessed its birth in my other life, as a Communist general. Israel humiliated Egypt and Syria, whose bellicose governments were being run by Soviet razvedka (Russian for “foreign intelligence”) advisers, whereupon the Kremlin decided to arm Israel’s enemy neighbors, the Palestinians, and draw them into a terrorist war against Israel.

Pacepa then gives names, dates and places to support this strong accusation.

Given Russia’s decade’s old investment in destroying Israel, and her centuries’ old investment in destroying the Jews, I shouldn’t be surprised by Pravda’s decision to run the following virulent editorial by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey in today’s edition:

Exactly when Israel’s international image hits rock-bottom and when the international community sees for itself the depths to which Tel Aviv will sink while claiming it is a State yet acting like a terrorist organization, a new militant group pops its head up in Gaza, kidnapping western journalists. In a flash, the 1-0 victory becomes 2-1 against in the hearts and minds of the western international community.

Curiously, exactly when Israel had proved once and for all beyond any doubt whatsoever that it is incapable of behaving like a State but rather like a terrorist organization, losing any little sympathy it had left in the international community (what after all is the difference between Hezbollah launching rockets against Israeli civilians and Israeli military forces blasting civilian homes and then claiming the civilians should not have been there?) an unheard-of militant group called Holy Jihad Brigades appears in Gaza and says it is behind the kidnapping of two western journalists on August 14th.

The Fox correspondent Steve Centanni and his cameraman Olaf Wiig were seized by masked raiders in Gaza City on August 14th. The Holy Jihad Brigades now demand that the Moslems held by America be released within 72 hours: “Release what you have and we will release what we have”, reads the fax.

If the Palestinian cause wanted anything which could so rapidly neutralise the propaganda victory in the aftermath of the Israeli massacres in the Lebanon (strafing funerals, slaughtering children in their homes, targeting power stations, committing acts of environmental terrorism, targeting civilian structures with military hardware) it is this.

There’s more, but it’s sickening and it’s all to the same point: Israel is a terrorist nation that murders people en masse and the foolish Palestinians obscured this fact — just when the world was finally figuring it out — by kidnapping those inconvenient reporters.

I’ve done just a little digging, by the way, and was able to discover the following about Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: He’s a permanent member of Pravda’s editorial staff although, as his name demonstrates, he’s not Russian. In fact, he’s a British songwriter with a degree from Leeds (which clearly makes him qualified to write on all matters political). Although the link for his bio is dead, nothing really dies in cyberpsace, and I was able to find that “USS Clueless” provides extensive quotations from Bancroft-Hinchey’s defunct biographical site:

I incidentally became involved with the world of music and even became one of the leading English song-writers of the 1980s. I took part in three Eurovision contests, released three albums, two maxi-singles and five singles. That was the time when I started establishing contacts with the press. “I had to give a lot of interviews for television and newspapers. I noticed that facts were reinterpreted on numerous occasions, almost always, in order to make an article correspond to ideas of a reporter. One fine day I realized that there was only one way to strive for the truth: to write a true story and to send it to mass media outlets. That’s what I did.”

I showed my first articles to a friend, a reporter, who expressed his interest in them and asked my why I did not take up journalism seriously. After that, I finished journalism courses, and worked as a freelance journalist at Portuguese, Spanish, Latin American, English and Romanian media outlets. However, journalism was not my only occupation. “I believe that there is nothing more boring for a journalist than to sit at table, working on the so-called news, which has already been picked out from the Internet by someone, retelling someone else’s stories. In addition to that, it is proof of the absence of professionalism, it is not worth it, in the long run. I like to visit new places, to collect new material for my own articles.”

As USS Clueless points out, it’s very bizarre for someone in his own bio to include quotations around his own statements. I’m sure Bancroft-Hinchey is one of those who, when speaking, refers to himself in the third person. USS Clueless also provides links to some of B-H’s past articles, all of which display a startling animus towards America — which sort of makes for a matched set when paired with his animus towards Israel. (If you type B-H’s name in Google, you’ll get a million more articles hostile to America and Israel.)

I’m sure a little more digging would reveal plenty more dirt about this man. It’s sufficient, though, that he has Pravda (which is still Russia’s leading newspaper) as his forum for spouting off his vile political opinions to a nation that is still one of the major weapons dealers in the world.

UPDATE: Although I suspect B-H’s savage antipathy towards Israel arises because he is a Brit educated at a Leftist University (as they all are in England), one can’t help but believe that part of his hostility is because he accepts at face value the propaganda that poured out of Lebanon. Even though it’s too late to remedy the damage — damage that resulted in a ridiculous ceasefire — two websites have done yeoman’s work at exposing the falsehoods the press swallowed hook, line and sinker (or that the press created), and that the world media willingly promulgated. The first is the EU Referendum, which has dragged apart and exposed the rot in the supposed Qana massacre (which will join the supposed Jenin massacre as one of the great anti-Israel frauds); and the second is Zombie’s deconstruction of the totally false “Red Cross Ambulance Incident.” As Michelle Malkin rightly says (and it was from her site that I got these links) these two posts deserve whatever the Internet equivalent is for the Pulitzer — only something more worthy, since the Pulitzer has become too debased to remain as a standard for quality reporting.

Talking to Technorati: Russia, Pravda, Israel, Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey