New Coup in the Making? Russian Generals Under Scrutiny
Dear subscribers and guests of the channel! Yesterday, Russian presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev held an online meeting with representatives of the leadership of the security bloc. During the meeting, Patrushev was… https://t.co/x7NPuYY0Ns pic.twitter.com/8HBpXGmuRn
— generalsvr_en (@generalsvr_en) May 23, 2024
Day: May 23, 2024
According to Sapir Lipkin, a reporter who deals with Arab affairs, the Arab world is reacting strongly to the video of the Israeli female hostages.
The reactions include condemning Hxmas, with some comparing their actions to those of IS*IS, describing the kidnapping and… https://t.co/I2gM8wuizO pic.twitter.com/cRtyOLXPqS
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) May 23, 2024
Продолжается зачистка Минобороны #России от кадров Шойгу. В отставку ушла личная пресс-секретутка бывшего министра обороны Сергея #Шойгу Россияна #Марковская.
Она написала в своей инсте: «Перехожу на другую должность. Почти 7 лет на посту пресс-секретаря Министра обороны… pic.twitter.com/9srpKGydWW— Я Русский! (@russki845) May 23, 2024
⚡️ NYT: Blinken supports lifting ban on Ukrainian strikes inside Russia with US arms.https://t.co/cDX7WsiCot
— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) May 23, 2024
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VOA Newscasts
MARTHA NEFF KESSLER WAS DYING OF LUNG CANCER, and she had a secret to tell.
Kessler’s life was full of secrets. She spent nearly 40 years at the CIA and was an expert on the Middle East. With her daughter at her bedside, she needed to say something.
“I told Dad I didn’t want to raise you Jewish,” Kessler said to her daughter a few weeks before her death on Dec. 4 last year. “He wanted to, but I was afraid of what might happen to you if you identified that way.” She begged her daughter not to raise her children as Jews. “It’s too dangerous of a religion,” Kessler said. “I don’t want that target on their backs.”
A widely admired Middle East specialist, Kessler spoke about the CIA’s role in the Camp David Accords at a 2014 conference. Upon her retirement, she was awarded the CIA’s Medal of Distinguished Service and the National Intelligence Community’s Medal of Achievement. (C-SPAN)
Kessler’s daughter was stunned. Justine El-Khazen (she took the name of a Lebanese Catholic immigrant she married in 2001) had never suspected that her mother had any anxiety about her father’s religion or that her secular upbringing had been chosen for her. The question was, why was her mother so anxious about it? Did it have something to do with her mother’s job at the CIA? Her effort to answer that question became the subject of a moving and thought-provoking article in Tablet, a Jewish magazine about world events, that explored the pro-Arab bias of her mother’s aging colleagues and stirred up an age-old debate about antisemitism at the CIA.
In Kessler’s final weeks, she began to despair as TV news broadcast scenes of angry protests against Israel and Jews on U.S. college campuses. As a Middle East expert, she was not surprised by the explosion of anti-Israel hatred and pro-Hamas sentiment across the region, but the appearance of it here left her bereft. The Israeli military’s pounding of Gaza had unshackled rank antisemitism lurking beneath the surface of American life. “She was totally beside herself,” her daughter says.
She wasn’t alone. Hamas’ savage Oct. 7 attack against Israel and the war in Gaza has inflamed passions at the CIA, just as it has in the rest of American society, news reports and our own interviews have found. The agency had to admonish employees to keep their politics to themselves after The Financial Times reported that a senior CIA analyst changed her Facebook cover photo on Oct. 21 to an image of a man waving a Palestinian flag.
The analyst’s gesture was loaded with meaning at the CIA. In its early days, the spy agency was squarely in the pro-Arab camp, even as the United States quickly recognized Israeli statehood in 1948 and, over the decades, cemented the alliance.