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In this mailing:
* Giulio Meotti: The Great Russian Energy Scam
* Daniel Greenfield: Biden Sends Nearly $1 Billion to Afghanistan Since Taliban Takeover


** The Great Russian Energy Scam ([link removed])
Russian 'Dark Money' Funding 'Green' Groups in West
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by Giulio Meotti • April 6, 2022 at 5:00 am
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* "Germany and several other European countries have largely banned fracking. This has transformed European leaders into the equivalent of 16th-century naval explorers, praying for favorable winds and weather as energy prices rise and fall ([link removed]) depending on cloud cover and wind conditions." — Wall Street Journal editorial, October 20, 2021.
* In the autumn of 2021, COP26, the UN climate conference, was setting up its grotesque spectacle: a kind of ecological Versailles. The rich, powerful and virtuous of the planet gathered in Glasgow to pontificate to the citizenry of Western countries about how much we are harming the planet with our way of life. They arrived in their private jets to complain about the plague of air industry emissions. The British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, said that everyone should eat less meat and fly less. Then came the news that 400 private jets would be flying to the UN climate conference...
* While the Germans pontificated about the climate, the Washington Post informed ([link removed]) us of their hypocrisy: "Germany portrays itself as a climate leader. But it's still razing villages for coal mines... The yawning black-brown scar in the earth that is Germany's Garzweiler coal mine has already swallowed more than a dozen villages. Centuries-old churches and family homes have been razed and the land they were built on torn away. Farmland has disappeared, graveyards have been emptied." The Lützerath mine alone is twice the size of Manhattan. That is why Germany has been labelled as the most polluting country in Europe.
* Thus, the progressive American pundits until October dreamed of an alliance between the West, Russia and China against global warming. Now that the West has isolated Russia, the largest supplier of energy for Europe, no one is talking about that anymore.
* Russia, it turns out, has reportedly ([link removed]) been promoting, often through "dark money" via Bermuda – which does not require countries to be named ([link removed]) -- "green" campaigns against nuclear power to ensure dependence by the West on Russia's fossil fuel.
* A German organization, The Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation, which received more than 17 million euros from Gazprom has also been accused of being a Moscow-funded "puppet." -- the Times ([link removed]) revealed.
* The Foundation for Climate and Environmental Protection was established last month in Mecklenburg-Pomerania by Manuela Schwesig... an ally of former German Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder ([link removed]) , president of Nord Stream II Russian gas pipeline. He is still serving on the boards of state-backed Russian energy companies.
* "Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas". -- Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2022
* "We discovered that Gazprom financed environmental NGOs who acted as consultants to ministers to various governments, such as Belgium, which then supported the abandonment of nuclear power." -- Dominique Reynié ([link removed]) , professor of political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, in an interview with CNews.
* China (now allied with Russia) is also funding Western environmentalists. - Unherd ([link removed]) investigation, December 15, 2021

Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at the Energy Club Summit during an International Economic Forum meeting in St. Petersburg on June 21, 2013. (Photo by Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA-Novosti/AFP via Getty Images)

"With winter fast approaching, Europe finds itself in an energy crisis—and reliant on the tender mercies of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. It's a self-induced disaster years in the making".

That was how an October 2021 editorial in the Wall Street Journal began, before Russia amassed its troops on the Ukrainian border and no analyst or think tank imagined that the unthinkable was around the corner. The editorial continued:

"European leaders have handicapped themselves on energy in the name of pursuing a climate agenda that will have no effect on the climate but is raising energy prices, harming consumers and industry, and is now empowering the bullies in the Kremlin.

Continue Reading Article ([link removed])


** Biden Sends Nearly $1 Billion to Afghanistan Since Taliban Takeover ([link removed])
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by Daniel Greenfield • April 6, 2022 at 4:00 am
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xchange/0.8/forward/email/offer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gatestoneinstitute.org%2F18400%2Fbiden-afghanistan-aid&pubid=ra-52f7af5809191749&ct=1&title=Biden+Sends+Nearly+%241+Billion+to+Afghanistan+Since+Taliban+Takeover [link removed]
* After Biden's retreat, the Taliban have consolidated control over Afghanistan. And over all the hungry children, the girls deprived of an education, and all the other sob stories that kept a river of private charity and taxpayer money flowing into a hellhole in which nothing ever got better.
* That's on top of the $782 million in "humanitarian aid" allocated to Afghanistan last year since the Taliban took over. This year, Biden signed an executive order allocating $3.5 billion of the Afghan assets held in the Federal Reserve for the same purpose. But even not counting those funds, Biden has dedicated $986 million to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over.
* That's nearly $1 billion in taxpayer money and nearly $4.5 billion in total funds.
* The Biden administration keeps insisting that the money won't go to the Taliban. That's as plausible as its previous claims that the Afghan government wouldn't collapse, that if it did we would be ready, and that all Americans would be evacuated before Kabul fell to the enemy.
* There's no one with less credibility on Afghanistan than a member of the Biden administration.
* The Taliban have been hungry to get their hands on foreign aid, but, likely guided by their Qatari backers, they've also been clever about it. They proposed a joint body with the international community to dispense aid. When that didn't work, they went back to their usual strategy of pressuring NGOs to hire Taliban members to determine where the aid should go and who should distribute it. But that's just a matter of cutting out the middleman for more direct control.
* Since the NGOs rely heavily on local labor, all the Taliban have to do is intimidate Afghan employees into following their orders. And for a terror group that practices mutilation and beheading, that's not hard. Does anyone really believe that an Afghan with a wife and children living under Taliban rule is going to follow our aid guidelines rather than those of the gunmen
* The Taliban, like the Houthis in Yemen and other Islamic terror groups who both cause and profit from famines, have already been distributing and taking credit for humanitarian aid.
* Portions of the nearly $1 billion in foreign aid stolen from the paychecks of American workers and the mouths of their children will be used to finance a new Jihad against Western nations.
* A generation after 9/11, Americans are once again funding the terrorists who are out to kill them.

The Taliban, like the Houthis in Yemen and other Islamic terror groups who both cause and profit from famines, have already been distributing and taking credit for humanitarian aid. A generation after 9/11, Americans are once again funding the terrorists who are out to kill them. Pictured: A Taliban soldier stands guard at the venue for a flag hoisting ceremony in Kabul on March 31, 2022. (Photo by Ahmad Sahel Arman/AFP via Getty Images)

Over two decades, the United States and its international partners poured billions in humanitarian aid into Afghanistan. Much of that aid went into the pockets of the Taliban.

After Biden's retreat, the Taliban have consolidated control over Afghanistan. And over all the hungry children, the girls deprived of an education, and all the other sob stories that kept a river of private charity and taxpayer money flowing into a hellhole in which nothing ever got better.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

At an aid conference hosted by the UN, the UK, Germany and the Islamic terror state of Qatar, which backs the Taliban, $2.4 billion was raised for Afghanistan. The hosts had demanded over $4.4 billion, which would have been the largest amount ever raised for any nation.

The Biden administration kicked in another $204 million.

Continue Reading Article ([link removed])

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