ARABINFOCUS

                           BLINKEN WITH ISRAEL AND FOUR ARAB COUNTRIES US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the heads of diplomacy from Israel and four Arab countries held an unprecedented meeting on Israeli territory on Monday to discuss peace in the Middle East and Iran's nuclear program. This summit in the locality of Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert (south) where the remains of the founder of Israel David Ben-Gurion rests, takes place the day after an attack claimed by the jihadist organization Islamic State (EI) which claimed the lives of two policemen in Hadera in northern Israel. At the start of his tour on Sunday, Antony Blinken spoke in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, before meeting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank. He then dined at Sde Boker with his counterparts from Israel, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco, four Arab countr...

                                      WORSE THAN THE FASCISTS This is the lament that launches, between sobs, an old man in the besieged city of Mariupol, according to the testimony presented by the North American chain CNN. The people with him nod their heads. Another of the most devastating impacts has been knowing the death, in a bombing, of a former survivor of the Nazi death camps during the Second World War. Boris Romanchenko, 96, managed to survive the Buchenwald Nazi camp, but died last Monday in the town of Kharkiv, where he lived. Russian forces killed him in a bombardment where half a dozen of his companions were injured. President Zelensky posted a photo of Romanchenko dressed in the striped pajamas of boarding schools in Buchenwald on social media. Zelensky asked the Israeli president, Bennet, to intervene with Putin to stop the war, but the Russian tyrant ignored this requirement...

                                      THE BARAKA Maintaining close relations with Morocco has always been a constant in Spanish foreign policy. Even Franco understood it that way and maintained that position until his death. He ceded the Sidi-Ifni enclave to Rabat because it was not worth keeping. But at the same time he established two red lines that Morocco religiously respected while the dictator was alive. One was the inviolability of the two autonomous Spanish cities, and the other that of the “Spanish” province of Western Sahara, whose inhabitants he provided with a regulatory DNI. There is an anecdote confirmed by people who attended an interview between Franco and King Hasan II in El Pardo. The monarch asked him to cede Western Sahara to him, and in return Morocco would give him all its support "to defeat communism and Freemasonry". Franco looked at him with a stony gaze without moving...

FOX NEWS AND ITS PRO-PUTIN SPOKESPERSON  Tucker Carlson is one of the presenters of the conservative North American network Fox News, whose audiences are considered among the best in Prime-Time. Known is also his defense of former President Trump, to whom he lavishes his best praise again and again.  In reality, Carlson is part of the triumvirate of presenters (with Hannity and Laura Ingraham) who daily put all the tares they can to discredit the president, Joe Biden, and ensure that the United States was never better governed than during Trump's only term. . The most conservative society in America feels well represented by this trio of journalists that allows the network to obtain substantial profits from the big advertising companies. It goes without saying that the Murdoch family, owner of the largest Anglo-Saxon audiovisual empire, allows Carlson to maintain a radical line of the extreme right in accordance with the results of listening.  But what some Fox supporters...

  THE SECOND MISTAKE In politics and in the real world, it is known that mistakes are paid at a high price. The EU was dead wrong in taking for granted Putin's claim that he would not attack Ukraine. The Europeans believed it. The US, on the other hand, warned that Russian forces would invade the neighboring country "in a matter of weeks, days or hours." And the Europeans tended to ridicule this statement, accusing the president, Joe Biden, of alarmism. But it was Biden who told the truth in the end. In the weeks preceding the aggression, the EU and the US had the opportunity to rearm the Ukrainian army, supplying it with large quantities of surface-to-air missiles (Stinger) and anti-tank missiles (Javelin). They were able to move Poland's MIG-29 planes to Ukrainian bases that had not yet been attacked. The US was even able to install Patriot anti-missiles in the west of the country that was going to be invaded. None of this was done before the invasion. The second er...

                                          CYNICISM AND LIES Vladimir Putin and his right-hand man, Serguei Lavrov, have many things in common, but what distinguishes them all is their enormous cynicism and the trail of lies with which they have tried to justify a war, already bordering on genocide. Putin lied blatantly when he claimed over and over again that he would not invade Ukraine. Shortly after he lied again, assuring that it was not a war but a "special operation". But this is a war, a war of devastation; of desired destruction of a country; of more than two million refugees; and so far more than a thousand dead: elderly, women and children. That is the history that the Russian dictator will not be able to erase and that places him among the great criminals of this world. Lavrov is not far behind. He has also denied that they have unleashed the war; he has lied miserably sayi...

                                MONEY DOESN'T MAKE GOOD FOOTBALL The Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying soccer players for the Paris-Saint-Germain club. And that has been a big mistake.  The players Neymar, Messi and Ramos have cost hundreds of millions, but they are spent, they have aged, they are more interested in money than sport. They should never have been bought.  The club does not win the Champions with them. The only good, young player is Mbappe, who loves the sport more than money.  The Emir has lost hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been used in humanitarian actions. Our advice to the Emir is: Don't spend another dollar, sell the French football club, help sports where money doesn't say everything. Don't get obsessed with a club that doesn't work, that has players who are millionaires in dollars but useless in s...

                                                             THE HERO An 11-year-old Ukrainian boy walked 600 miles alone from his town of Zaporizhzhia, savagely bombed by Russian forces, and the Slovakian border. He was carrying only a plastic bag with his passport and his mother had written on his hand the telephone number of some relatives living in Slovakia. His mother couldn't come with him because he has to take care of her paralyzed mother ptopia. The social services of this country welcomed the child as a hero. They called his mother to tell her that he was safe, and to tell his relatives that they would come pick him up to take him to Bratislava, where they live. This is the face of a hero, while the Russian military does not stop bombing Ukraine, killing hundreds of civilians. On Sunday, when the boy was on his way to the bo...

                                                                         THE NEW BERIA   Vladimir Putin lied to us when he stated that he would not invade Ukraine, hiding that he was preparing the aggression and had already designated the day on which he would unleash it; he lied to us by telling us that he would not attack the civilian population; that he would not destroy their homes or infrastructure.  Instead he has embarked on a strategy that has ranged from tension to destruction, just as it appears in the images that we have been able to see and continue to see on the small screen. For the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Russian dictator is the new Beria; the sinister man who coldly carried out Stalin's orders and ordered the shooting of thousands of Russians whom he considere...

                        ARAB COUNTRIES CONDEMN RUSSIAN AGGRESSION Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have condemned Russia's aggression against Ukraine, in a vote at the United Nations General Assembly. The neutral position has seemed insufficient to them in the face of the horror of the bombings, which have caused hundreds of civilian casualties, destroyed infrastructure and buildings, and even attacked one of Ukraine's nuclear power plants. The dictator Putin continues with his intention to engulf Ukraine in a bloodbath, while the world isolates him more and more. The Russian army would cover itself with honor if it neutralized the dictator, who, due to the nature of his war crimes, deserves to be eliminated.  Unfortunately, other Arab countries like Algeria maintain a neutral position, which is a shame

  PATRIOTISM The European left and right, with rare exceptions including, unfortunately, the Spanish UP and IU, do not stop praising the heroic patriotism of the Ukrainian president, Wolodimir Zelensky, a man of the theater turned into a political leader of a country martyred by the aggression ordered by Putin. The president, Joe Biden, calling him a dictator; British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, accusing him of war crimes, have chosen very strong words, even unusual in diplomacy. Of course, the aggressor is ultimately Putin; The one who orders the bombings that have destroyed buildings and infrastructures is Putin; the one who has drowned Ukraine in rivers of blood, is Putin. We believed him when he assured that he would not invade the neighboring country; we understood him when he referred to Russia's security so that NATO would not spread to Eastern Europe; we understood that it was best for Ukraine to adopt the status of a neutral country. And suddenly we discovered that Putin...