Saturday 21 November 2015

Saudi Arabia, an ’ISIS’ That Has Made It

Saudi Arabia, an ’ISIS’ That Has Made It

 Kamel Daoud


Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity's common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. 

The "ISIS"; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: 
preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

Saudi Arabia, an

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

The West's denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world's chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born "jihadists". They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of "Islamist" Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

One might counter: Isn't Saudi Arabia itself a possible target of Daesh? Yes, but to focus on that would be to overlook the strength of the ties between the reigning family and the clergy that accounts for its stability - and also, increasingly, for its precariousness. The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.

One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women, rural areas. "Islamist" culture is widespread in many countries - Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mauritania. There are thousands of "Islamist" newspapers and clergies that impose a unitary vision of the world, tradition and clothing on the public space, on the wording of the government's laws and on the rituals of a society they deem to be contaminated.

It is worth reading certain "Islamist" newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of "infidels." The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews. The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime against humanity. This totally schizophrenic situation parallels the West's denial regarding Saudi Arabia.

All of which leaves one skeptical of Western democracies' thunderous declarations regarding the necessity of fighting terrorism. Their war can only be myopic, for it targets the effect rather than the cause. Since "ISIS" is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to "jihadism" when the influence of "Fatwa Valley" and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?

Is curing the disease therefore a simple matter? Hardly. Saudi Arabia remains an ally of the West in the many chess games playing out in the Middle East... And there's the trap. Denial creates the illusion of equilibrium. "Jihadism" is denounced as the scourge of the century but no consideration is given to what created it or supports it. This may allow saving face, but not saving lives.

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. "Jihadists" will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

The attacks in Paris have exposed this contradiction again, but as happened after 9/11, it risks being erased from our analyses and our consciences.

Source: The New York Times, Edited by website team

21-11-2015 | 14:01

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HELLy Land


Holly Land? HELLy land is what Israel is for the children of Palestine. The bestiality of the Israelis’ treatment of the hundreds of Palestinian children they imprison provokes “official complaints” by rights groups, complaints that are met with contemptuous dismissal by the Israeli authorities. No reports of it make it into the Western MSM. The Pope does not mention them either for fear of hurting the sensitivities of his “elder brothers.” In most European countries criticism of Israel has been designated “anti-semitism” and “incitement to hate,” which is punishable with prison sentences. America does not have such laws (yet) but the American people are largely unaware of what their tax money supports and brain-washed by the “war on terror” hasbara. The nickname of the land where this abomination goes on is apt and must be said out loud until everyone hears it: IsraHell.



Number of Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons doubles

By Noam Rotem



There are so many new Palestinian minors being sent to Israeli prisons that authorities had to open a new wing to house them. Rights groups report numerous cases of mistreatment, and that the children are moved outside of the West Bank in violation of international law.
Israeli authorities have arrested hundreds of Palestinian minors since the latest uprising began in the start of October. They have been sent to four different facilitates run by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) on both sides of the Green Line.

When the pace of arrests picked up, the IPS decide to open a new, temporary wing for minors at the Giv’on prison in order to ease overcrowding at existing facilities. Until that time, Giv’on only housed “light” criminal offenders with sentences under five years, including asylum seekers and Palestinians who entered Israel without the proper permits.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners Club, 62 Palestinian minors are being held in the facility. Attorneys for Palestinian prisoners’ rights organization Addameer who visited the facility a few days earlier counted 56.

Lawyers from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) met with a number of Palestinian minors being held in Giv’on, none of whom had criminal records, some of whom were just 14 years old and stood accused of various crimes. They said they were being held in small cells, two meters by one meter, three boys to a cell. Some of them still hadn’t seen any of their family members since their arrests several weeks ago.
Electronic Intifada interviewed the families of some of the Palestinian minors being held in Israeli prisons, and reported that some families were not even notified where their children were being held. Only days later, and with the help of the Red Cross, did they manage to find their children in the new Giv’on prison wing.

“Once they were allowed to enter the facility, the families had to divide among themselves the 30 minutes they were allotted to speak to their children on a phone through a plexiglass screen,” EI reported.

The story doesn’t end with overcrowding and a lack of communication with the minors’ families, however. The minors imprisoned in Giv’on complain of theharsh and humiliating treatment they receive from the guards. Members of the Public Committee Against Torture say that in one case, guards entered their cell with batons and beat them for nearly an hour, as retribution for setting off a smoke detector. When they finished up, PCATI members say, one minor was taken out of his cell and a guard strangled him until his vision became blurry. He was then put into an isolation cell, his hands and legs shackled, and left there from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. in drenched clothes and with no food or water. When he asked to go to the bathroom, it took two hours before he was taken. “There is a basis for believing that other minors were shackled and beaten in the same incident,” PCATI said, noting it planned to file an official complaint.

The Prison Service confirmed that the incident took place, adding that “a number of minors caused a disturbance and intentionally broke the fire sprinkler in their cell, which flooded the cell and caused thousands of shekels of damage. To prevent further disturbances, four of them were restrained and shackled for the rest of the night, after which they were returned to the [prison] wing. All those involved were charged and the process was documented. The complaint received about violence on the part of the guards was passed along to the [internal affairs division].”

Addameer claims that on November 1st one of the minors was taken to the bathroom, where he was stripped, restrained and searched. The same day, according to the organization’s lawyers, guards attacked a number of minors as they searched their cells. Lawyers for the Prisoners Club reported the case of “Z”, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy from Jerusalem, who says he was hit on his arms and legs and forced to kneel facing the wall for hours on end during which time he was periodically struck on his neck.
The organizations also say that the minors have complainted about the food their are being given in the facility. According to their attorneys, they complained they are not receiving enough food, that it is cold and inedible.

The Prison Service rejected the claims about the quality and quantity of food, saying that: “the youths receive (nutritionally) fortified food, according to the IPS menu suited for their age, five meals a day. The food is transported to the [prison] wing in heating devices so claims that it is cold are not logical. That said, as a result of their request, pita bread is now distributed during every meal.” The IPS added that in recent weeks third-parties have inspected the facility and did not discover any violence or issues with the food.
According to IPS figures, as of the end of September it was holding 182 Israeli minors (Jewish and Arab citizens and residents) and 187 Palestinian “security prisoners” under the age of 18, mostly from the West Bank. Since the start of October the number of Palestinian minors who have been sent to Israeli prisons has more than doubled. The Palestinian Prisoners Club reported that as of November 20, Universal Children’s Day, more than 400 Palestinian minors were being held in Israeli prisons.

Many of the Palestinian minors being held in Israeli prison facilities are disconnected from their families, who must apply for permits to enter Israel where those facilities are located. (Moving prisoners out of occupied territory is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, partly for this very reason, but that’s another story.) They are under the supervision of guards who often times don’t speak their language, they are often denied rehabilitation services, an education and social activities. There is television, PCATI says, but that’s all.

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Outside powers must end their proxy wars in Syria

EDITOR'S CHOICE | 21.11.2015 | 10:07 

A FRENCH NEWS CAMERAMAN burst into the bar of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, where his colleagues gathered most evenings, on November 17, 1983. “At last,” he shouted, cupping both hands upward, “someone with balls!” French warplanes had just bombed the town of Baalbek, site of magnificent Roman ruins but also of a Shiite Muslim militant barracks. This was France’s revenge for the killing of 58 French troops by a suicide bomber four weeks earlier. On the same morning the French died, the United States had lost 241 American service personnel, most of them U.S. Marines, to another suicide bomber. So far, Washington had not responded. We learned later that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was against sending Marines to Lebanon in the first place, had dissuaded President Ronald Reagan from bombing Lebanon until there was evidence to prove who had done it.

France’s bombardment satisfied one French cameraman. It changed nothing, except for the civilians and militants who died in Baalbek. When the U.S. finally bombed eastern Lebanon in December, Syrian air defenses downed a Navy A-6 Intruder. The pilot, Lt. Mark Lange, died when his parachute malfunctioned. The navigator-bombardier, Lt. Robert O. Goodman, became a prisoner for 31 days until the Syrians released him to Reverend Jesse Jackson. And that was that.

By April 1984, the French and American forces of the ill-advised Multinational Force had left Lebanon. French President Francois Mitterrand’s promise to remain in defiance of those who had murdered his soldiers was forgotten, as was President Reagan’s commitment to peace in Lebanon. The civil war, already in its eighth year, did not end until 1990. The parties behind the bombing of the French and American troops, the Hezbollah militia and its backers, Iran and Syria, emerged more or less victorious. In fact, Syria had proven itself so powerful in Lebanon that the U.S. approved its military occupation to keep order. Syria went too far by assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005, and its troops were forced to evacuate the country two months later.

Supporters of American, French, and British bombing in Syria at this time may exult that these Western powers are displaying their “balls,” but there is every probability that they will balls it up. They have made a mess of Syria since they involved themselves there in the vain attempt to bring down President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Islamic State fanatics emerged as the dominant power within the anti-Assad forces. They are not anti-dictatorship so much as anti-minority, particularly the ruling quasi-Shiite Alawite minority. The Western powers tolerated ISIS’ crimes, until ISIS turned from its bases in Syria and seized about a third of the American protectorate of Iraq. It was then that the U.S., to save the Kurdish capital at Erbil and the national capital of Baghdad, first bombed ISIS positions. Since then, other countries, including the Russians who sought to save their Syrian protectorate, have joined the crusade against the Islamic State.

ISIS has turned around and murdered people from most of the countries that have challenged it: Shiite civilians in Iraq and Syria; Kurdish and left-wing Turkish peace demonstrators in Ankara; passengers on a Russian airliner over Egypt; Shiites, because of Hezbollah’s involvement, in Beirut; and more than 120 innocents in Paris.
These international attacks, as well as the oppression and terror that ISIS has inflicted on large parts of Syria and Iraq, do not call for a response.
They do not call for revenge. They do not call for gestures of the kind that British Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to ram through Parliament in Westminster. They do not call for Europe and the U.S. to deny shelter to refugees who are fleeing from ISIS terror that the world ignored when it was confined to Syria. They do not call for further erosion of privacy and other rights.

The Islamic State’s international attacks call for a strategy. If the goal is to eliminate ISIS from territory it rules in Iraq and Syria, and from which it plots murder elsewhere, the forces opposed to it must come together. It took more than 100 dead in Paris and 224 passengers on a Russian airliner for France and Russia to coordinate their airstrikes in Syria. What will it take for the U.S. to do the same?

Airstrikes, however, do not win wars. Warplanes drop bombs, meaning they function as airborne artillery. No military doctrine holds that artillery alone can conquer territory. That takes forces on the ground. The ground forces exist in both Syria and Iraq, and they are not from the Western world. The Syrian Army, though odious to many Syrians and to the Western powers, is the strongest of these and has weathered four-and-a-half years of war without breaking up. It lost territory to ISIS in northeast Syria and at Palmyra, and it has reclaimed some of it with Russian air support. The Kurds of Iraq, supported by Kurds from Turkey and Syria and by U.S. airstrikes, have clawed back most of the territory that ISIS seized from them last year. The Shiite militias in southern Iraq, which filled the vacuum left by mass desertions from the U.S.-created Iraqi Army, with Iranian support and American air cover saved Baghdad from ISIS conquest and regained lost ground. The war requires infantry, but not American, British, and French troops. Nothing would turn Iraqis and Syrians to the jihadis more quickly than a Western invasion.

Those of us who witnessed the Iraqi uprising of 1991, when Kurds and Shiites used the demoralization of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait to liberate 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, know that it had more potential to save the country than the American-led invasion of 2003 did. The U.S. pulled the plug on that rebellion in March 1991, and launched its own bid to control Iraq in 2003 that it is still paying for.

One step would not involve any combat at all: Close the open supply line between ISIS and the outside world through Turkey. Turkey is an ally, but no friend. Its open border with Syria is the jihadis’ lifeline. Without it, the weapons and ammunition the jihadis seized from the Iraqi Army last year would not be enough for them to defend all their territory. Without it, jihadis trained in Syria would not pass easily into Europe to murder civilians. Without the Turkish supply line, the local forces whose shared hatred of the jihadis — who include the Syrian Army, the Kurds and all of Syria’s and Iraq’s other minorities, Iraq’s majority Shiite population, secular Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — would stand a better chance of defeating them.

Diplomacy is better than war, and the outside powers who have been using Syria to fight their proxy wars must agree in Geneva or Vienna that enough is enough. The U.S., Russia, Iran, Turkey, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have all played their parts in destroying Syria. It is up to them to end this war that has cost as many as 310,000 lives. No one is winning. No one can win. They provide their clients with the means to fight the war. And they can cut them off.

The question since March 2011, when the first protests began in Syria, is what to do with President Bashar al-Assad. The reason the West, Saudi Arabia, and Israel wanted to dispose of him had nothing to do with dictatorship or repression. Nearly all Arab governments are repressive dictatorships, but only Syria was not a U.S. satellite. Only Syria had a strategic alliance with Iran, dating to Hafez al-Assad’s decision to support Iran against Saddam Hussein in 1980, long before the West declared him a pariah. Syria supported Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it repelled Israel’s invasion in 2006. And the U.S. still had a score to settle with Hezbollah, which turned out to have staged the bombing of the Marines in 1983 and to have kidnapped American citizens like myself in the years that followed.

Last July, on this site, I wrote:
A friend of mine in Aleppo, who refuses to leave despite the battles in his once beautiful city, told me over the telephone, “You have sent hell to us.” That is, he blames me as a Westerner for putting the jihadis in his midst. The day cannot be far off when the jihadi militants, like the poor refugees whom they and the regime have displaced, will bring that hell back to us.
And so the jihadis did. Among the targets ISIS has hit since July have been Beirut and Paris, two cities where I lived for years and where I still have friends and family. It is only chance that spared those relatives and friends from the ISIS suicide bombings. No one can guarantee there will not be more.

And so the jihadis will again, until peace is restored to Iraq and Syria. Peace, not war, will be the downfall of the Islamic State.

Charles Glass, theintercept.com
EDITOR'S CHOICE | 21.11.2015 | 10:07
A FRENCH NEWS CAMERAMAN burst into the bar of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, where his colleagues gathered most evenings, on November 17, 1983. “At last,” he shouted, cupping both hands upward, “someone with balls!” French warplanes had just bombed the town of Baalbek, site of magnificent Roman ruins but also of a Shiite Muslim militant barracks. This was France’s revenge for the killing of 58 French troops by a suicide bomber four weeks earlier. On the same morning the French died, the United States had lost 241 American service personnel, most of them U.S. Marines, to another suicide bomber. So far, Washington had not responded. We learned later that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was against sending Marines to Lebanon in the first place, had dissuaded President Ronald Reagan from bombing Lebanon until there was evidence to prove who had done it.
France’s bombardment satisfied one French cameraman. It changed nothing, except for the civilians and militants who died in Baalbek. When the U.S. finally bombed eastern Lebanon in December, Syrian air defenses downed a Navy A-6 Intruder. The pilot, Lt. Mark Lange, died when his parachute malfunctioned. The navigator-bombardier, Lt. Robert O. Goodman, became a prisoner for 31 days until the Syrians released him to Reverend Jesse Jackson. And that was that.
By April 1984, the French and American forces of the ill-advised Multinational Force had left Lebanon. French President Francois Mitterrand’s promise to remain in defiance of those who had murdered his soldiers was forgotten, as was President Reagan’s commitment to peace in Lebanon. The civil war, already in its eighth year, did not end until 1990. The parties behind the bombing of the French and American troops, the Hezbollah militia and its backers, Iran and Syria, emerged more or less victorious. In fact, Syria had proven itself so powerful in Lebanon that the U.S. approved its military occupation to keep order. Syria went too far by assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005, and its troops were forced to evacuate the country two months later.
Supporters of American, French, and British bombing in Syria at this time may exult that these Western powers are displaying their “balls,” but there is every probability that they will balls it up. They have made a mess of Syria since they involved themselves there in the vain attempt to bring down President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. Islamic State fanatics emerged as the dominant power within the anti-Assad forces. They are not anti-dictatorship so much as anti-minority, particularly the ruling quasi-Shiite Alawite minority. The Western powers tolerated ISIS’ crimes, until ISIS turned from its bases in Syria and seized about a third of the American protectorate of Iraq. It was then that the U.S., to save the Kurdish capital at Erbil and the national capital of Baghdad, first bombed ISIS positions. Since then, other countries, including the Russians who sought to save their Syrian protectorate, have joined the crusade against the Islamic State.
ISIS has turned around and murdered people from most of the countries that have challenged it: Shiite civilians in Iraq and Syria; Kurdish and left-wing Turkish peace demonstrators in Ankara; passengers on a Russian airliner over Egypt; Shiites, because of Hezbollah’s involvement, in Beirut; and more than 120 innocents in Paris.
These international attacks, as well as the oppression and terror that ISIS has inflicted on large parts of Syria and Iraq, do not call for a response.
They do not call for revenge. They do not call for gestures of the kind that British Prime Minister David Cameron has promised to ram through Parliament in Westminster. They do not call for Europe and the U.S. to deny shelter to refugees who are fleeing from ISIS terror that the world ignored when it was confined to Syria. They do not call for further erosion of privacy and other rights.

The Islamic State’s international attacks call for a strategy. If the goal is to eliminate ISIS from territory it rules in Iraq and Syria, and from which it plots murder elsewhere, the forces opposed to it must come together. It took more than 100 dead in Paris and 224 passengers on a Russian airliner for France and Russia to coordinate their airstrikes in Syria. What will it take for the U.S. to do the same?
Airstrikes, however, do not win wars. Warplanes drop bombs, meaning they function as airborne artillery. No military doctrine holds that artillery alone can conquer territory. That takes forces on the ground. The ground forces exist in both Syria and Iraq, and they are not from the Western world. The Syrian Army, though odious to many Syrians and to the Western powers, is the strongest of these and has weathered four-and-a-half years of war without breaking up. It lost territory to ISIS in northeast Syria and at Palmyra, and it has reclaimed some of it with Russian air support. The Kurds of Iraq, supported by Kurds from Turkey and Syria and by U.S. airstrikes, have clawed back most of the territory that ISIS seized from them last year. The Shiite militias in southern Iraq, which filled the vacuum left by mass desertions from the U.S.-created Iraqi Army, with Iranian support and American air cover saved Baghdad from ISIS conquest and regained lost ground. The war requires infantry, but not American, British, and French troops. Nothing would turn Iraqis and Syrians to the jihadis more quickly than a Western invasion.
Those of us who witnessed the Iraqi uprising of 1991, when Kurds and Shiites used the demoralization of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait to liberate 14 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, know that it had more potential to save the country than the American-led invasion of 2003 did. The U.S. pulled the plug on that rebellion in March 1991, and launched its own bid to control Iraq in 2003 that it is still paying for.
One step would not involve any combat at all: Close the open supply line between ISIS and the outside world through Turkey. Turkey is an ally, but no friend. Its open border with Syria is the jihadis’ lifeline. Without it, the weapons and ammunition the jihadis seized from the Iraqi Army last year would not be enough for them to defend all their territory. Without it, jihadis trained in Syria would not pass easily into Europe to murder civilians. Without the Turkish supply line, the local forces whose shared hatred of the jihadis — who include the Syrian Army, the Kurds and all of Syria’s and Iraq’s other minorities, Iraq’s majority Shiite population, secular Sunnis in Syria and Iraq, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah — would stand a better chance of defeating them.
Diplomacy is better than war, and the outside powers who have been using Syria to fight their proxy wars must agree in Geneva or Vienna that enough is enough. The U.S., Russia, Iran, Turkey, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have all played their parts in destroying Syria. It is up to them to end this war that has cost as many as 310,000 lives. No one is winning. No one can win. They provide their clients with the means to fight the war. And they can cut them off.
The question since March 2011, when the first protests began in Syria, is what to do with President Bashar al-Assad. The reason the West, Saudi Arabia, and Israel wanted to dispose of him had nothing to do with dictatorship or repression. Nearly all Arab governments are repressive dictatorships, but only Syria was not a U.S. satellite. Only Syria had a strategic alliance with Iran, dating to Hafez al-Assad’s decision to support Iran against Saddam Hussein in 1980, long before the West declared him a pariah. Syria supported Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it repelled Israel’s invasion in 2006. And the U.S. still had a score to settle with Hezbollah, which turned out to have staged the bombing of the Marines in 1983 and to have kidnapped American citizens like myself in the years that followed.
Last July, on this site, I wrote:
A friend of mine in Aleppo, who refuses to leave despite the battles in his once beautiful city, told me over the telephone, “You have sent hell to us.” That is, he blames me as a Westerner for putting the jihadis in his midst. The day cannot be far off when the jihadi militants, like the poor refugees whom they and the regime have displaced, will bring that hell back to us.
And so the jihadis did. Among the targets ISIS has hit since July have been Beirut and Paris, two cities where I lived for years and where I still have friends and family. It is only chance that spared those relatives and friends from the ISIS suicide bombings. No one can guarantee there will not be more.

And so the jihadis will again, until peace is restored to Iraq and Syria. Peace, not war, will be the downfall of the Islamic State.

Charles Glass, theintercept.com

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

New Palestinian Intifada Perplexes Zionist Entity


Local Editor

Zionist analystsThe Zionist political and security analysts considered that the new Palestinian Intifada can never be faced as it follows non-traditional operation patterns.

The Zionist analysts added that the participation of Fateh movement in the operations as well as the weakness of the Palestinian services complicated the scene.
According to the Israeli analysts the new Intifada is not a mere response to the Zionist aggressions against al-Aqsa Mosque, noting that it reflects the formation of a new Palestinian situation and conditions.

The Zionist entity is unable to prevent the Palestinians from carrying out their attacks, especially if they use firearms, the analysts stressed.

Source: Al Manar TV
21-11-2015 - 16:14 Last updated 21-11-2015 - 16:16


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Uprising against Assad was Engineered in Washington


Eric ZUESSE | 10.11.2015 | 00:02 

A terrific news report by Jonathan Marshall at Consortium News provides the first-ever presentation in the West of the event that sparked the demonstrations that sparked the Syrian civil war, and of the entire origin of that war.

Unlike so many online ‘news’ reports that are merely authoritarian trash because they don’t link to any of their sources (they rely instead upon dumb readers’ faith or trust in the ‘reporter’ or in the publisher, such as The New York Times or Fox News), this one from Marshall is top-notch: not only does it provide intelligently skeptical readers with instantaneous access to documentation for each one of its key points, but those sources are credible ones. Taken all together, the sources, and Marshall’s presentation of them, constitute a solid historical account of how the war to bring down Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, actually started. It didn’t start by Assad’s dumping (as U.S. President Barack Obama loves to claim) “barrel bombs,” upon merely peaceful protesters in Syria. It started actually in Washington, years before that. The Obama Administration itself was taking advantage of not only the “Arab Spring” protests throughout much of the Arab world, but, specifically, of an ongoing economic catastrophe in Syria that had started five years before the anti-Assad demonstrations did: an extended drought. Here is how the source that Marshall linked to describes it, two years before the “Arab Spring” even began:

In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years.
That source had been published on 16 January 2010. The drought continued on; the situation only got even worse right into 2011 and up through the public demonstrations in Aleppo that started the war. There were no “barrel bombs” then. There was instead surging economic dislocation. Obama merely took advantage of it. He knew that it was coming, and he planned so as to exploit it.

In fact, a wikileaked confidential 26 November 2008 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to the CIA and other associated agencies referred to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization by saying:

UNFAO Syria Representative Abdullah bin Yehia briefed econoff and USDA Regional Minister-Counselor for Agriculture on what he terms the "perfect storm," a confluence of drought conditions with other economic and social pressures that Yehia believes could undermine stability in Syria. Because he is working with such limited resources, Yehia plans to target FAO assistance to small-holding farmers in the hardest-hit province of northeast Syria, Al Hasakah. (Note: This province shares a northern border with Turkey and a southern border with Iraq. Mosul is approximately 100km from Al Hasakah province.) Because the UN appeal has, thus far, not been entirely successful, Yehia has had to prioritize aid recipients.

That was institutional U.S. federal government knowledge three months prior to Obama’s becoming President. Obama as the President-elect at the time was privy to such information. Once he got into the White House, he needed to understand what was going on in Syria. Was it dumb of Yehia to trust the U.S. government with this information? Was he naive about the type of people who sit in America’s Oval Office nowadays? Is a deer in the forest naive to move when a hunter is stalking it? Is the deer supposed to just stand still, instead? Barack Obama during his electoral campaign had provided the public with no reason to suspect that he might have been harboring aggressive designs against the Syrian government, nor even against the Russian government that has been supporting it. Yehia was just seeking help, like the deer in fear.

Obama knew what was going on. He knew that the Syrian situation wasn’t just “barrel bombs” showing up suddenly out of nowhere, from no cause, and for no reason. He knew more than was published to the public in the American press. His repeated references to “barrel bombs” after the situation in Syria blew up, suggests that he takes advantage of the fact that the American public isn’t aware of such facts. It suggests that he’s playing the American public as trusting gulls, rather than as citizens.

In fact, America’s own National Academy of Sciences recently published a study (17 March 2015), “Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought,” which opens (though propagandistically blaming Assad as having contributed to the drought): “Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011, the greater Fertile Crescent experienced the most severe drought in the instrumental record. For Syria, a country marked by poor governance and unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies, the drought had a catalytic effect, contributing to political unrest.” (Of course, Obama doesn’t claim to be bombing Assad’s forces because Assad had ‘unsustainable agricultural and environmental policies.’) In the section of that report “Significance,” the investigators-propagandists close: “We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict.”

So, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in this recent study, is arguing, in effect, that Syria should have a different government. Perhaps the failed state that Obama insists upon producing there would be the ‘solution’? To what extent is the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (its PNAS) nowitself  politicized, nationalistic, propagandistic — that they are retrospectively publishing something like this, which fails to criticize the U.S. Government itself for having turned down the Syrian Government’s years-long pleadings for assistance on the matter? The PNAS study ignores this. Instead, it argues only that, “The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria, marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment, and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.”

Wow, the NAS argues that Assad should have been more dictatorial! That would have helped prevent the effects of the drought? Does nothing that comes from the U.S. Establishment possess credibility anymore — publishing garbage like this inPNAS?  Is Assad more of a dictator than Obama? Does the U.S. National Academy of Sciences really think he should have been? How absurd does the propaganda need to be in order for the U.S. to become a laughingstock to the entire world for its ‘democratic’ pretensions? After all: it’s not a democracy. And the one scientific study that has been done of that has confirmed that it’s not. So: the U.S. now insists upon installing ‘democracy’ in Syria, where all polls show that Assad would win any free election (and the latest polled finding is that he’d win at least 55% of the votes) but Obama insists that he must be ousted, so that there can be ‘democracy’ there?

Marshall’s news report about the origin of the Syrian war was published at Consortium News on 20 July 2015, but was picked up and reported to a broader audience only at a very few news-sites, each no larger (or even smaller) in audience-size than is the publisher (Consortium News) itself. Only RINF, CommonDreams and Truthout republished it. Reddit posted that story’s headline, “Hidden Origins of Syria’s Civil War,” linking to the Consortium News report, but no one up-marked it there, and still no reader-comments have been posted to it there. It was just another voice of real news unheard in the wilderness of propaganda that causes an individual tree to be ignored among the forest.

Thus: This blockbuster three-month-old news-report still remains news in the U.S., even today.

Marshall’s news report was one of the most important of all news reports on the Syrian war, and it certainly deserves larger public distribution than that. So:
Here is his historical account of the origin of the Syrian war.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
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Russian Girl’s Response to ISIS Threats to Attack Russia

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A Russian girl has posted her own response to an extremely graphic video purportedly produced by ISIS and threatening attacks on Russia.  While the original video included special effects and massive amounts of blood and violence, in this video we see  just the girl by herself, standing on a street, reciting her poetry. (Translation is below.)
The young lady is reportedly an employee of the killigil.ru site. The original video–i.e. the spewing volcano of hatred and gore she is responding to–was “discovered” by SITE and made public in the media on November 12. The Russian girl’s response was posted one day later.
SITE and Katz have of course been perceived by some as the real producers of the ISIS videos. I won’t bother getting into that here, as I think in some ways it would be a distraction. The real value here, and why I am posting this, is simply the Russian girl herself–a beautiful and fearless young woman giving her response to the deranged and demonic psychopaths threatening her country and her people.
But the poem she recites, as you will see, is quite interesting as well, particularly the last line where she makes mention of the “double-headed eagle.” It’s almost as if she’s naming the US and Israel as being among the chief backers of ISIS, or that’s the interpretation I give to it anyway.

Her poem…

«Скоро, очень скоро
От русского напора
Игиловская свора
Сбежит в одном белье!
Скоро, очень скоро
Рёв авиамотора
Над вашей головою
Послышится во тьме.
Вы нас не напугали —
Мы всё превозмогали
И вечно побеждали
В сражениях и боях.
А тут игра простая —
Для нас вы просто стая,
Песок пустынь глотая,
Потерпите вы крах…
Скоро, очень скоро
Придет конец террору
Сирийские просторы
Воскреснут навсегда
Скоро, очень скоро
Мы вас как мухомора,
Как пойманного вора
Раздавим без труда.
Родина святая
Без конца и края,
С земли с своей
Изгоним игиловских химер
И ваших злых солдатов
Из их же автоматов
Мы вежливо отучим
От всех плохих манер.
Скоро, очень скоро
Не смоете позора,
Одним щелчком затвора
Избавим мир от зла.
Скоро, очень скоро
Мы вас возьмем измором
Не скрыться вам от взора
Двуглавого орла».

Auto-translation…

“Soon very soon
From the Russian head
ISIL pack
Flee in his underwear!
Soon very soon
The roar of aircraft engine
Above Your Head
Is heard in the darkness.
You do not scare us –
We still prevailed
And ever won
The battles and battles.
And then the game is simple –
For us, you’re just a pack,
Sand desert swallowing,
Bear with you crash …
Soon very soon
There will come an end to terror
Syrian expanses
Will rise forever
Soon very soon
We have you as a bad mushroom,
How to Catch a Thief
Crush easily.
Motherland
With no end in sight,
On land with his
Banish ISIL chimeras
And your evil soldiers
From their own machines
We politely break with
From all the bad manners.
Soon very soon
Do not wash away the shame
With a click of the shutter
Rid the world of evil.
Soon very soon
We’ll take you into submission
Do not you hide from view
Double-headed eagle. ”
(hat tip to Nina Sidorova)
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

WHAT THE FRENCH AREN’T TELLING YOU; AND WHAT SYRPER IS TELLING YOU

Algerian citizens massacred by the French in Algeria during that country’s war with Colonial France.  The French killed over One Million Algerian Muslim Arabs.

Nobody wants to say it, but, I will: The French do not have a long memory at all.  And neither do the British when it comes to the more hideous crevices in their mutually oppressive histories.  Gee, 129 citizens were killed by some Islamist militants.  How does that compare to what France did in Algeria?  Heck, the British oversaw the implantation of European Jews in Palestine and the extirpation of the autochthonous people of Arab Palestine, essentially dooming our region to eons of instability and conflict.  So, when the French get hit, I feel for their innocents – but, I feel nothing but contempt for the political leaders who deliberately nurtured the various terrorist groups who, most conveniently, operated out of those countries which feel the most gratitude to the French and British, i.e. Jordan and Turkey.  It is pure Schadenfreude.  Sorry. But, that’s how it is.
The Turks love the French.  After all, the French gave them a chunk of Syrian land where everybody spoke, amazingly, Syrian Arabic!  They gave Hatay to them, along with Iskandaroon and Rayhaaniyya without so much as a twitch of shame.
And the Jordanians love the English who gave them a piece of Southern Syria and called it Transjordan.  They gave the land to a race of grubs from the Hijaaz by the name of The Hashemites…a clan at odds with the Wahhabist Saudi riff-raff who took the entire peninsula with all its oil, sand and horse flies the size of sparrows.  Today, it gets even better; the Jordanian king, ‘Abdullah II, has a mother who is really English (Antoinette Avril Gardiner) and he can hardly speak Arabic without a hint of aphasia.  He can’t wait to help his brethren in Old Blighty.  The Brits have got to stick together, after all.
What the French won’t tell you is that all the while, as they served the interests of the Saudi Arabian cockroaches, they were looking aside at the fanatical preaching of Muslim clergymen who received monthly stipends from the KSA embassy in Paris to organize young men and women into potential terrorists.  The terrorists who perpetrated the monstrous act last Friday in the French capital were all students of the same clique of rabblerousing, hypocritical and nihilistic shamans.  And Hollande, who is more engorged with Syrian blood than even ‘Abdullah of Jordan, knew full well that the French Surete was only keeping an “indifferent eye” on these murderous gangsters.  The French government is steeped in the blood of the Syrian people and the people of France.
Francois Hollande is now the odd man out in Paris.  He is regularly ignored by French parliamentarians who are flocking to Damascus in an effort to meet with and cajole our president.  Suddenly, French politicians are suggesting the formerly unspeakable: a relationship with Ba’athist Syria which is sensible and rational.  In a recent poll conducted by Le Figaro, 70% of those French men and women who participated insisted that Dr. Assad remain the president of Syria.  Hollande would do better if he looked at his own polls to see how he fares in the minds and hearts of his citizens.  It is well know that his approval rating is about the number of American football players on one team.  Given this new atrocity, which would have been prevented had Hollande and his security chiefs placed the interests of their countrymen above those of the quasi-simian Arabian savages, Marine Le Pen is a virtual shoe-in for president when the elections come around.  She has been speaking sensibly for years about this problem of France qua “refuge for terrorists”.

France is not over the failure in Syria.  Even though French members of Parliament are seeking the friendship of Dr. Assad, the Parisian policy of unseating the legitimate president of a member state of the U.N.,  with all the echoes of international illegalisms, remains the purpose of Hollande and his coterie of sycophants.   As long as he desperately needs Saudi money to keep his failing economy afloat, he will not resist the repugnant Saudi idee fixe of overthrowing Dr. Assad’s government.   This is why Hollande has become a gangster.  He, as I wrote 2 years ago, was complicit in the assassination of Sakine Cansiz in Paris.  He personally had knowledge that Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s imprisoned leader,  wanted her silenced before she made her trip to Germany where it was expected she was going to reveal what she knew about the defalcations of the PKK under Ocalan’s leadership.  She was also going to pull the veil off what Ocalan was negotiating with Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s all-seeing Gestapo.   When Hollande was contacted about this matter, he gave the okay for the hit on French soil.  To this date, investigation into Cansiz’s murder has been half-hearted and has bore little fruit.
Hollande is desperate to prove his credentials as a war-time leader.  Don’t pooh-pooh those who believe Hollande knew about this operation which resulted in 129 victims.  He knew about the clergymen who regularly preached hatred and jihad in his own country with the financial aid of the Saudi Arabian mass murderers.  The French had an S-list which contained the names of over 10,000 individuals suspected of sympathizing with international terrorism, yet, did nothing to interdict their movements and operations.  The mastermind of the attack on Friday, a Moroccan by the name of ‘Abdul-Hamid `Abaa-‘oud, boasted that he had slinked through Europe without a hitch, sniggering at the security organizations there, snorting at their incompetence.  But what that dung beetle was not telling you was that the French government was in cahoots with the Saudis to permit precisely that kind of maneuvering. `Abaa-‘oud and his cohorts were a protected species which could not be touched lest Hollande rile the Saudis.

Abdelhamid Abaaoud: the suspected mastermind in Paris attacks
The Moroccan “mindermast” who masterminded the Friday, November 13, 2015, attacks in Paris is seen here snickering at Gallic incompetence.  He may have had no idea he was operating with the full cooperation of Hollande’s government.

The French president is now in the cross-hairs.  How much did he know about the activities of Islamist militants in his own country?  He clearly has been a willing participant in the carnage across Syria.  His agents were running operations in Northern Lebanon with the extremists as of 2012 when NATO made the decision to extend help to the doomed insurrection against the legitimate government of Syria.  France was as neck-deep in the plot to overthrow the Damascus government as Turkey or Saudi Arabia or, certainly, Qatar, for that matter.  So why is it so hard to comprehend how the massacre of last Friday took place?
This whole mess is centered around the belief, early on, that President Assad would fall quickly after the start of the Der’ah “revolution”.  When that did not happen, the NATO countries, complicit in this scheme,  found themselves stuck in an operation which engendered the same dangers which they hoped would be foisted only on Syria.  But the stench came back to their own sewers eventually and now they have to deal with that problem – with all the perils inherent in treating with confirmed sociopathic murderers like the terrorist pictured herein-above.  The terrorism enablers found that the black magic had careened back to the sorcerer.
All this begs this question which the French people must as themselves:  Was the attack of November 13, 2015 terrorism?  Or was it state-sponsored terrorism?  Maybe Hollande has an answer.   Ziad Abu Fadel.
  
 (From Nikola Proevski)

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River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!