Russia and Fatima: Israel and the Jews are the key link

In my last post, I referenced Henry Kissinger's assessment that the US must now rebuild its role in the Middle East, which Russia's intervention in Syria has reduced to rubble...indeed, Russia is now coming back full circle in terms of its historic relationship with Israel and with the Islamic world. Our Lady of Fatima not only links Russia to Iran, Syria, and the wider Shia Muslim Middle East, but it's also important to remember that the Virgin Mary is Jewish (like her Son, of course), and it's hardly a surprise that this Russian link to the region runs through the nation of Israel, whose rebirth as a powerful state since the 1970s was the direct result of the interaction between American and Soviet Jewry in the late Cold War.

Back in 1973, it was none other than Kissinger - the Jewish childhood refugee from Nazi Germany who is best known for engineering Nixon's historic opening to China - who played a central role in laying the foundation for US-Israeli domination of the Mideast at Russia's expense. That October, the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt and Syria brought the two sides' respective superpower patrons, the US and USSR, to the brink of all-out nuclear war.

The ejection of the Soviet military from the Mideast in the aftermath of that conflict coincided with the mass exodus of Russian and other Soviet Jews to Israel, the US and UK over the remaining 18 years of the USSR's existence; by the USSR's collapse in 1991, international Jewry, bolstered by these Soviet transplants, had attained a dominant position in the so-called "New World Order" of globalization, spearheaded by disproportionately Jewish banks and financial networks centered in New York and London.

In the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia descended into economic ruin as a small clique of Jewish "oligarchs" with deep links to organized crime privatized vast swathes of the national wealth; their greed and corruption made enough of a mockery of the young post-communist Russian democracy that it paved the way for the rise of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000, i.e. the rise of a new strongman.

Putin's consolidation of power since first assuming the presidency 15 years ago has coincided exactly with his string of victories over Jewish oligarchs and disproportionately Jewish political liberals. He first kicked out Yeltsin-era Kremlin power broker Boris Berezovsky; then in 2004 he jailed young oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky for 10 years, seizing and nationalizing the latter's conglomerate Lukos to tighten his own grip on the strategically crucial energy sector; last February's mysterious assassination of Jewish liberal Boris Nemtsov marked perhaps the final nail in the coffin of any credible Jewish opposition to the Putinist neo-autocracy.

Having attained such security at home from potential Jewish efforts to undermine him, Putin is now supremely confident in his dealings with the Jewish state of Israel, about a quarter of whose citizens are Russian or ex-Soviet Jews. The 40-year process of Jewish emigration out of the former USSR is now complete, but it has inevitably left deep social and cultural links between contemporary Russia and Israel which also translate into political ties.

Needless to say, Russia's relationship with Israel is a love-hate one: there's plenty of baggage in this relationship, but with ex-Soviets such a large segment of the Israeli population, it's all outweighed by the thicker-than-water ties of blood and marriage.

Russia and Israel now need each other's cooperation very badly in the Middle East. It's not a comfortable position for either of them to be in, but Our Lady of Fatima is their common mother whose very lifeblood, spiritually speaking, runs through their veins.

And Our Lady of Fatima will lead them to Fatima: the grand bargain with Shia Iran that will stabilize the region between Christian, Jew, Sunni and Shia Muslim once and for all.