In my September report (LINK), I explained how Moscow had regained the upper hand in the media, thanks in particular to the campaign launched by Nicolas Sarkozy, and then to the shady game played by Berlin. October is shaping up to be an even better month for Putin's regime, which is on course for a major strategic victory due to the disappearance of Ukraine from the headlines and a new rift between the West and the Muslim world. Some will say that this perfectly orchestrated campaign over the last two months is a coincidence of calendars, but in any case it is particularly profitable for Russia.
France has the distinction of being the country in Europe with both the largest Jewish community (around 500,000 people) and the largest Muslim community (around 5-6 million people). So the massacres perpetrated by Hamas and the Israeli response, which promises to be cataclysmic, are the major news item in France. The authorities fear that this external conflict will turn into an internal one. It is true that many Islamic attacks in France have been justified by the Palestinian struggle, and that many Jews have fled the suburbs because of the Muslim anti-Semitism prevailing there. Some French Jews have gone to live in Israel and its colonies, where they are displaying their hatred of Islam. Apart from the radical left of “La France Insoumise” (LFI), a large part of whose electorate is Muslim or of Muslim culture, the pogrom committed by Hamas was condemned by all the parties in the French Parliament. It allowed the three main French right-wing parties, compromised by their pro-Russian bias, to regain their media virginity with the French population, which, like all Western populations, was horrified by the barbarity of Hamas, just as it was by the crimes of Putin's soldiers.
As I explained in my analysis (LINK), the Russian party in France is essentially made up of right-wing party cadres, sovereigntists and a nebulous collection of small groups inherited from the old anti-Semitic French right and the anti-Zionist left. The right-wing parties declare their support for Israel, the national revolutionary nebula is pro-Palestinian, and its main guru, Alain Soral, a friend of Alexander Dugin and fervent supporter of Putin, is even a supporter of Iran. Sovereigntists, on the other hand, support neither side and are only pro-peace. True, one might rejoice at these divisions within the Russian party in France. Yet in fact they are perfect for Moscow, which can now once again broadcast its narrative to all French people. Pro-Russian influencers, now also pro-Israel, are back in the mainstream media. Better still, there is no longer any talk of Ukraine, and the French Right's compromises with Putin. The pro-Israel French Right has not changed its position on Russia; worse, it is silent about the fact that Hamas has very good relations with Putin. They vilify Iran for arming Hamas, but never point out that it is Russia's military ally, or that Hamas benefited from the Russian transfer of new practices from the Ukrainian battlefield, which enabled it to cross the Israeli defence line and massacre Israelis. They will all tell you that Russia has no interest in its attacks, that it is ridiculous, while the Russian propagandists themselves are delighted that the Hamas pogrom, launched on Putin's birthday (7 October), is a real gift for Russia. Ukraine is no longer the main preoccupation of the West; it has disappeared from the news at the same time as a rift emerged between the West and the Muslim world. A rift that of course serves Russian interests and the interests of the French Right, which is completely intoxicated by the Russian narrative.
You will notice that Hamas did not stay content with massacring Israeli children. It also took great care to film and broadcast horrific images of its atrocities on women, children and the elderly. The aim was not only to spread terror, but also to provoke legitimate indignation and feelings of identification in the West. In the face of such horror, the West, as we have already seen, is rising as one to show its solidarity with the Israeli people. The whole Hamas attack was very well organised. Hamas knew that massive action against civilians would provoke a cataclysmic response from Israel, which would bomb and destroy part of Gaza, affecting Palestinian civilians in the process. The Arab populations of Africa, the Middle East and the West would then naturally show solidarity with the Palestinians and oppose the Westerners who support the Israelis. This is all to Putin's advantage, especially if we take into account the fact that Russia, with its allies in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mali and Libya, is in a position to control the African migratory corridors (LINK) and to unleash waves of migrants in the Mediterranean to destabilise us. The attacks on the Polish border by Belarus, using migrants in 2021, show us that this is not a science fiction scenario. Which parties would benefit? Those that are the most divisive on the subject, i.e. those that Moscow has been infiltrating from the bottom up for the past 20 years.
Some people wonder why Israel, a country renowned for the excellence of its intelligence, did not see this coming. And why did we see nothing of Putin's attack on Ukraine despite all the evidence before us? Because Russia has not only poisoned and corrupted our politicians, but also our diplomats and intelligence services. In Israel, the Russian community is the largest Jewish community in the country, accounting for one in nine inhabitants. And of course this population is to be found in the army and the intelligence services. The Prime Minister himself claims to be a friend of Putin. What happened to Israel must be a lesson to us. Don't believe for a second that we are safe, as the Israelis thought. By listening to the "reassuranceists" crowing about our military superiority, we refuse to see the determination of our enemies and deny them any ingenuity. We fail to see our main weakness: our naivety. Imagine that the Israeli operations last. That the Arab populations become increasingly mobilised and indignant. That in the Sahel, Algeria, which has infiltrated the jihadist groups, does everything it can to cause chaos and that the civilian populations flee en masse, provoking a great wave of migration into which jihadists will infiltrate en masse to avenge the Palestinians in the middle of the Paris Olympics. Who would benefit? Since we have abandoned all ambition for power, we can no longer understand the level of determination of our enemies.
In his Valdai speech at the beginning of October, Putin set out his conception of the world through the example of the Russian "civilisational state". Alexander Dugin (a Russian intellectual who provides the ideological framework for Putin's brutal, mafia-style imperialism) explained the term "civilisational state", which was introduced by the work of Zhang Weiwei in China and actually means "empire". More precisely, it is a form of supranational political organisation with a single strategic decision-making centre (the Emperor) and a wide variety of local subjects (from communities to ethnoarchies and fully-fledged political regimes), uniting a 'Greater Space' and exerting a pronounced influence (religious, cultural, ideological) on its surroundings. For Putin, the world needs to coalesce into civilisational states, or empires (Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Iranian, Arab/Muslim, etc.), and to enable this, the West needs to be defeated, because its hegemony is preventing the above from happening. To achieve this, Putin is prosaically proposing that China, Turkey, Iran and Algeria take advantage of the West's current weakness to outflank it by all simultaneously re-establishing their authority over their civilisational areas. It is interesting to note in this context that Alexander Dugin recently declared that:
"Muslims were not the enemies of Ukraine and the allies of Russia (with the exception of eschatologically awakened Iran and Syria), but they will be from now on. Russia is a pole in a multipolar world. Islam is a pole in a multipolar world. These two poles stand in opposition to the West's desperate attempts to salvage unipolarity and world domination at any price - even at the cost of a world war. The Palestinians’ conflict with Israel did not use to be the front line in the clash of civilisations. Today it is. Just as the friction between Russia and Ukraine was regional until the West backed the Nazis in Kiev. The war in Ukraine then became the front line in the global confrontation between multipolarity and unipolarity."
Putin is opening up a new front against us at a low cost. Refusing to see the determination of Russia and its allies (Iran, Algeria, etc.) to defeat us will not prevent them from succeeding, quite the contrary.
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