Rouvikonas accused Israeli investments of serving as part of the Jewish state’s “soft power” strategy.

By Ailin Vilches Arguello, The Algemeiner

Greece’s Jewish community has denounced “anti-Zionist patrols” that harassed and intimidated Jews and Israelis on the streets of Thessaloniki, calling the incident a disturbing echo of one of the city’s most violent chapters nearly 95 years after assault squads first targeted its Jewish population.

Last weekend, the left-wing anarchist group Rouvikonas organized what it called “anti-Zionist patrols” through the streets of Thessaloniki—Greece’s second-largest city in the country’s north—saying the demonstrations were intended to confront a growing “Israeli and Zionist infiltration” across the city.

Joined by members of the “Permanent Struggle for Class Liberation” and the “Thessaloniki Liberation Initiative,” individuals were seen marching through the city wearing black T-shirts featuring Palestinian flags.

According to the anti-Israel group, Thessaloniki has become part of a wider process of “colonization” driven by domestic and foreign capital, alleging that Israeli and other investment funds are increasingly buying up beaches, neighborhoods, and villages and displacing local residents in the process.

“Israelis are rushing to invest their money, bloodied by the genocide, into Airbnb and other accommodations, or into plots of land that the Greek state is selling off at bargain prices,” the statement reads.

“While the people of Palestine and Lebanon are being massacred, Zionist tourists, [Israeli] soldiers and their families arrive by the thousands on cruise ships, turning their investment properties into sources of income or holiday homes far removed from the rapes and murders of civilians and children in Gaza,” it continues.

Rouvikonas also accused Israeli investments of serving as part of the Jewish state’s “soft power” strategy, alleging they are used to expand Israel’s economic and political influence abroad while generating profits that are “used to maintain Israel’s expensive, international propaganda machine.”

As long as the Greek government continues military and commercial cooperation with Israel, the group vowed it would continue efforts to ensure that “the genocidaires and Zionists are not welcome in our cities.”

The Central Jewish Council of Greece condemned the demonstrations as a chilling reminder of one of the darkest chapters in the country’s Jewish history, warning that those involved evoked the “assault battalions” that hunted Jews through the streets of Thessaloniki nearly a century ago during the Campbell pogrom.

“In both cases—then and today—hatred against Jews prevails. And today a new climate of Jew-hatred is taking shape that threatens not only Greek Jews but also the well-being of all citizens. Because history teaches that antisemitism begins its course targeting Jews but never stops with Jews,” the statement reads.

“We observe with sadness the tolerance shown by state authorities and social institutions towards this new wave of fanaticism that is manifested against Jewish citizens of the State of Israel,” it continues.

“These ‘assault battalions’ and their followers seek to undermine the strategically important relations between Greece and Israel in a period of instability in the eastern Mediterranean that threatens the security of both countries,” it further says.

Now, local authorities have reportedly launched a preliminary investigation into whether the actions of Rouvikonas and its supporters amounted to public incitement to violence or hatred before taking any further legal action.

Thessaloniki was once home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, with Jews making up more than half the city’s population for centuries—so much so that locals called it “the Mother of Israel.”

That world ended in 1943, when Nazi forces deported nearly 50,000 Thessaloniki Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau. More than 90% were murdered in the Holocaust.

Today, fewer than 1,000 Jews remain in a city that once thrummed with synagogues, Sephardic culture, and Ladino-speaking street life.

In 1931, the Campbell pogrom erupted in Thessaloniki after false accusations that local Jews were collaborating with Bulgarians and Communists fueled antisemitic violence.

Nationalist mobs attacked the city’s Campbell neighborhood, home to a large Jewish community, torching dozens of homes and businesses and forcing many families to flee.

Although much of the neighborhood was destroyed, those responsible were ultimately acquitted, while government assistance for the devastated Jewish community remained limited.

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It is impossible to see the invasion at the border as anything other than planned by the Biden administration.

By Robert Williams, Gatestone Institute

More than half a million Venezuelans have entered the US illegally since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Until Biden became president, few Venezuelans arrived illegally. Only around 4,500 arrived in 2020. After Biden’s inauguration, however, numbers exploded: 50,499 Venezuelans illegally entered in 2021, another 189,520 in 2022 and a whopping 334,914 in 2023.

This means that Venezuelans now rank second in illegal immigration into the US, after Mexicans, who still take the number one spot.

For more than two decades, Venezuela has been a close ally of Iran, and a regional home base for Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in the Middle East. Hezbollah, according to one 2020 Atlantic Council report, helped to “turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.”

Iran’s Quds Force is a subsection of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Quds Force runs Iran’s terrorist operations abroad, and it established operations in Latin America with Venezuela’s support during the Hugo Chávez regime (1999-2013), noted Jorge Serrano, a security expert and member of the team of advisors to Peru’s Congressional Intelligence Commission.

Quds Force has a local unit in Venezuela, Unit 840, which recruits and relies on local criminal groups to conduct assassinations and kidnappings. (The practice of hiring local criminals to do Iran’s bidding has also spread to Europe.)

According to Alejandro Cassaglia, an expert in terrorism and organized crime and professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina:

“It’s crucial to recognize that these groups are dedicated to hybrid warfare, cyber-intelligence, and terrorist attacks… The presence of Iran and the Quds Force [in Latin America] is not just a potential risk, but a palpable reality. These criminals have total freedom of movement in the region, they have Venezuelan passports and are usually of Lebanese or Persian origin.”

One of these groups is the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, described as a “mega-gang” or a conglomerate of different criminal groups, by Transparencia Venezuela, an NGO that notes the gang is the “largest and most powerful organization in Venezuela” with more than 4,000 criminals. It has been described as “MS-13 on steroids.”

The state of Texas has designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. According to Serrano, the gang “has Iran’s support” and have forged “strategic alliances with Russia, China, and North Korea.”

In July, a federal memo said that the Tren de Aragua gang had been given the “green light” by its leaders to “attack and open fire on cops in Denver,” according to the New York Post.

The gang has “a history of flooding other countries with military-aged Venezuelan males to establish a base of operation to carry out violent crimes in those countries,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in September.

The Biden administration, knowing this, nevertheless allowed Tren de Aragua to come into the US, where they are now have set up shop in at least 16 states, and have already been tied to hundreds of crimes, including the shooting of two New York Police Department officers in June.

How did the Biden administration do that? According to the Center for Immigration Reform:

“The major driver of Venezuelan migration to the U.S. has been policies that allow illegal aliens to enter, be released, and work in the United States. Many Venezuelan nationals are taking advantage of the Biden Administration’s illegal categorical parole program, announced in late 2022. Under this program, Venezuelans and dual citizens of Venezuela can fly directly into the U.S. without a visa. Furthermore, the Biden Administration has designated and re-designated Venezuela for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which blocks the government from deporting Venezuelan nationals and offers them work permits. This has incentivized more Venezuelans to come to the U.S. because they anticipate similar treatment.”

Former director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan, tapped by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be the US “border czar”, has stated that Biden is the only president in U.S. history to “unsecure the border on purpose.”

It is indeed impossible to see the invasion at the border as anything other than planned by the Biden administration.

When Venezuela began to empty its prisons of criminals two years ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, aware that the criminals were heading to the U.S. border, gave the United States Border Patrol instructions to look for violent criminals from Venezuela entering the country.

If the Biden administration had wanted to stop the invasion, in the words of U.S. House Representative Troy Nehls:

“For starters, he can use Section 212 (f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states, ‘Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.’ Simply put, Biden could end the entry of illegal aliens, or specifically Venezuelans, today. Instead, he is callously and consciously refusing to do so.”

Aaron Heitke, a retired chief patrol agent for the San Diego Sector of the U.S. Border Patrol, gave testimony on September 18 to the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, revealing that “Biden and Harris’ policies so overwhelmed the Border Patrol that upwards of 80-90% of agents were completely pulled away from the border to process and release historic numbers of border crossers.” Heitke testified:

“Sectors were ordered to take in and process all the illegal aliens encountered on the border. The Border Patrol saw groups of hundreds and thousands coming into the United States and turning themselves in. These numbers pulled 80-90%, sometimes 100% of the agents on duty away from the border. Border Patrol zones across Texas, Arizona and California had no agent presence for weeks and months at a time. Those who did not want to be caught could simply walk in. We have no idea who and what entered our country over this time. Throughout 2022 and 2023 I sent agents to Texas and Arizona to count gotaways. Those sectors could not even put enough agents in the field to see what they had missed.”

As evidence of the national security risks caused by the Biden administration, it told Border Patrol agents to lie about the number of terrorists entering the country, according to Heitke.

“Simultaneously, in San Diego we had an exponential increase in [Special] Interest Aliens (SIAs). These are aliens with significant ties to terrorism. Prior to this administration, the San Diego sector averaged 10-15 SIAs per year. Once word was out that the border was far easier to cross, San Diego went to over 100 SIAs in 2022, way over 100 SIAs in 2023 and more than that this year. These are only the ones we caught. At the time, I was told I could not release any information on this increase in SIA’s or mention any of the arrests. The administration was trying to convince the public that there was no threat at the border.”

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