Saturday 13 January 2018

إيران تربح الجولة


Nuclear deal

يناير 13, 2018 

ناصر قنديل

– قبل ثلاثة شهور قرّر الرئيس الأميركي دونالد ترامب تمديد رفع العقوبات عن إيران لتسعين يوماً، وهي مهلة يحدّدها قانون رفع العقوبات ما لم يوقّع الرئيس على تجديد العمل بالتفاهم النووي. وفي نهاية المهلة التي سبقتها توقعات عالية بإعلان الخروج من التفاهم النووي، جدّد الرئيس الأميركي تمديد رفع العقوبات لمرة أخيرة ما يعني وفقاً للقانون الأميركي نفسه الذي أبرم الاتفاق على أساسه، أنّ على الرئيس خلال مئة وعشرين يوماً أن يقرّر البقاء ضمن التفاهم أو الخروج منه.

– كان يمكن للرئيس الأميركي قبل ثلاثة شهور إعلان الخروج من التفاهم الذي وصفه بأنه سيّئ ويعمل ضدّ المصلحة الأميركية. وكان موعد تقرير الرئاسة السنوي للكونغرس مناسبة ليترجم دونالد ترامب وعوده الانتخابية بالخروج من الاتفاق. وها هو مرة بعد مرة يتهرّب من الخروج من التفاهم ويبتكر أسباباً يعلم أنها لن ترتب تغييراً يجيب طلباته، ليدّعي أنه جعل التفاهم مختلفاً ومستجيباً للمصالح الأميركية كما يراها ترامب.

– في المرة الماضية، وهذه المرة أوحى ترامب وإدارته بأنه ذاهب لإلغاء التفاهم ولم يفعل، وفي المرتين قال إنه يريد تعديل التفاهم ووضع بنوداً يعلم أنّ إيران لن تقبلها، فلا دمج للصواريخ البالستية بالاتفاق النووي، ولا لما يسمّى بالنفوذ الإقليمي، ولا استعداد إيرانياً لتعديل بنود دار حولها التفاوض أصلاً، وكاد الرفض الإيراني لما طلبته واشنطن يطيح التفاهم، من دون أن تتراجع إيران، كمثل زيادة مدة التفاهم، أو التفتيش المفتوح.

– يرمي ترامب الكرة في الملعب الأوروبي إعلامياً، لكن الجواب الأوروبي واقعياً بسيط، وهو أنّ أوروبا لا تمانع بجولات تفاوض مع إيران حول الطلبات الأميركية، لكن ماذا لو تتمكّن عملية التفاوض من بلوغ نتائج مرضية للأميركيين والأوروبيين، هل نخرج من الاتفاق الأصلي، والجواب الأوروبي هو النفي بالمطلق، لأنّ الخروج من التفاهم سيعني عودة إيران للتخصيب وسرعة بلوغ عتبة القنبلة النووية، فماذا تفعل أميركا وأوروبا، وهل الذهاب للحرب هو وصفة عاقلة ومفيدة؟

– المعادلة الثانية تنطلق من أنّ سقوط التفاهم النووي يعني عملياً سقوط لغة التفاوض والتفاهمات، التي يشكّل التفاهم النووي إثباتاً لكونها فرضية ممكنة لحلّ المشاكل والقضايا الخلافية وسقوطه يعني إغلاق باب التفاوض والذهاب للتصعيد في قضايا الخلاف الإقليمي والدولي كافة، وأوروبا تشارك أميركا وحلفاءها القلق من برنامج الصواريخ البالستية أو من أشياء أخرى، لكنها تشارك إيران رفض الربط بينها وبين التفاهم على الملف النووي، والدعوة لإعلان تثبيت التفاهم الأصلي كمقدمة لفتح تفاوض منفصل حول ملفات خلافية أخرى.

– ماذا سيفعل ترامب بعد أربعة شهور، هل سيعلن الخروج من التفاهم النووي، وهل ستلتزم أوروبا بنظام العقوبات الأميركية، وكلّ الوقائع الخاصة بالملف معلومة سلفاً، الشهور الأربعة ستكون شهور تصعيد في المنطقة من بوابة فلسطين إلى اليمن إلى سائر الساحات، بما فيها الداخل الإيراني وربما الداخل الروسي أملاً بتغيير المعادلات لترضخ أوروبا لقرار واشنطن بالضغط لتعديل التفاهم النووي تحت طائلة التهديد بإلغائه، لكن الذي جرى في طهران ويجري في القدس واليمن يقول إنّ الزمن المقبل سيكون أسوأ لأميركا، وأنّ إيران التي ربحت الجولة مرتين تتّجه لربح الحرب.


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The U.S. Role in Turning Countries Into 'Shitholes'


Demonstrators wrapped in a Salvadoran flag during the “A Day Without Immigrants March” in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 17, 2017. (Lorie Shaull / CC 2.0)
Donald Trump just can’t help letting the cat out of the bag. And boy does his administration have a lot of cats in bags. The line of the Republican Party right wing has been that voter suppression laws are necessary for the integrity of elections. In fact, they are crafted to prevent racial minorities from voting, by making it hard and/or expensive to register. Race drives the policy, not a search for fair elections. Likewise, Trump’s policies on immigration have been portrayed as a matter of law and order. But they aren’t about lawlessness. They are about racial hierarchy.
That is, in some key areas—corporate power, racial hierarchy, militarism—the Trump wing of the Republican Party are Franco or Mussolini fascists in ideology.
Trump could go along with the polite fiction that he is worried about criminality when he addresses immigration. But yesterday, according to the Washington Post, he launched a tirade at Sen. Dick Durbin asking why we have to have people here from “shithole” countries and why we can’t have more Norwegians. Trump always used to say on the campaign trail that countries are not sending us their best citizens (as if countries are sending anyone at all intentionally). But now he is admitting that the real problem, in his view, is that it isn’t the best countries that immigrants are coming from.
Trump was badmouthing a whole range of countries including Haiti, El Salvador and some African states, but for the sake of clarity let me home in on El Salvador here.
Since Trump is a racist, he thinks that countries get to have poor economic and security situations because of the race of the people that inhabit them. That is silly (and dangerous) as history and social science. Central Americans were among the more civilized people in the world when German tribesmen were raiding the Roman Empire.
The United States has about 1.5 million Salvadorans, some of the people at issue in Trump’s conversations with Durbin and other lawmakers. Most of them came to the United States because of a right-wing dirty war against liberals and leftists backed in the 1980s and early 1990s by the U.S. Republican presidency (Reagan and Bush senior) and the U.S. military. The right-wing government and military and death squads of El Salvador, with American help, murdered 70,000 civilians in the 1980s, in the course of crushing a leftist insurgency. They included Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero (who will likely end up being made a saint), four American nuns, 800 villagers (children, women, noncombatant men) in El Mozote and environs, and tens of thousands of others. U.S. politicians such as Ronald Reagan, Elliott Abrams, and the joint chiefs of staff and the CIA station chief actively collaborated in this mass killing. The stated purpose was to roll back the Soviet Union (which I doubt was much involved).
The actual purpose was to make the country safe for U.S. corporations, which had virtually run the place. United Fruit owned 80 percent of the banana crop in the early 20th century along with much of the prime land. Then came the rise of the coffee oligarchy. The International Land Coalition notes,
In El Salvador, the history of land ownership has been marked by coffee cultivation. After production of that crop peaked at the end of the 19th century, the Salvadoran oligarchy of the period concentrated land ownership and dispossessed campesino and indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands. During the first half of the 20th century, the alliance between the military government and the United States went hand-in-hand with landed power linked to coffee cultivation. In 1971, the Agricultural Census identified the persis-tence of an unequal distribution of productive land in the country, with 0.3% of owners owning real estate of more than 200 hectares, which represented 28.2% of the total land area, while 92.5% of owners had real estate of less than 10 hectares, representing 27.1% of the country’s total surface area.
Thus, the U.S. corporate shaping of the country’s political economy had left it with a small landlord class that owned most of the good land (a common colonial outcome) and millions of impoverished sharecroppers, and as even right of center analysts recognize this class conflict fueled much of the civil war. But it was also fueled by the sheer viciousness of the government death squads, which weakened the otherwise positive effect of the land reform instituted in the 1980s.
The Reagan civil war in El Salvador provoked massive out migration, to Honduras and to the United States. Many Salvadorans got citizenship in the 1980s via the 1986 congressional amnesty.
In the 1990s, very large numbers of Salvadoran refugees were deported from the United States. The war-racked economy could not absorb them, and some of them founded Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street Gang which became major criminal cartels that Trump now complains about endlessly. (They are a big problem, especially in El Salvador where they have a support base of eight percent of the country, but very few of the 16,000 murders a year in the U.S. are committed by them).
In the early 1990s about 200,000 Salvadoran refugees of American foreign policy were given Temporary Protected Status. They have high rates of employment and are raising 275,000 U.S.-born children.
So now, having messed up their country, in part for the sake of U.S. corporate greed and American hegemony, the U.S. president is declaring them to be from a “shithole” and is set to deport all 200,000 of the adults, raising the question of what will happen to a quarter of a million American children that they are raising.
The Crisis Group is deathly afraid that the Salvadoran-American children, on being sent forcibly from their country of birth to a foreign land and left without resources are jobs, will be recruited by…MS 13.
By the way, the current government of El Salvador, which runs a country the size of Massachusetts with a population of about six million, has some achievements despite the severe challenges of pervasive gang violence. Poverty has been significantly reduced in the past decade, leading to a lower Gini coefficient and one of the more equal societies in Latin America. The environmentally conscious government has banned predatory metals mining, against which villagers had been protesting. But one of the country’s big assets economically has been remittances from workers abroad, into which Trump is about to take a big bite by deporting 200,000 of them from the U.S. And economic growth, at two percent a year, was already among the lowest in the region and is one of the reasons for the ongoing violence.
The World Bank notes,
Immunization rates have also increased from 76 percent in the 1990s to 93 percent in 2016. Similarly, the share of the population with access to improved water sources increased from 79 percent to 89 percent, and the share with access to improved sanitation expanded from 56 percent to over 95 percent during the same period. In education, both access (particularly at the primary level) and literacy rates have increased.
Crime and violence are still an enormous problem. If Trump wanted less immigration from El Salvador he could get it by directing some productive investment to that country much more efficiently than throwing people out of their homes of 20 years.
One short answer to Trump’s question about Norwegians (and could you get more American Nazi Party than that preference?) is that Norwegians are wealthy and have a much better run country than the U.S. and they mostly have no particular reason to leave home. It isn’t the nineteenth century any more, Donald. The U.S. takes in about a million legal immigrants every year. In the past two decades roughly 61,000 a year have come from Europe. And Norway ain’t in the picture.
The alternative to taking in immigrants is to shrink demographically, as Japan is doing and as Germany was doing before the recent change in immigration policy. Urban, educated people don’t want a house full of children usually, and so the Japanese are not replacing themselves, and nor would Americans without immigration. A big shrinkage of the population of the sort in which Japan is engaged is an unprecedented social experiment. Who will support the growing ranks of the elderly and retired? Who will build new buildings? What will happen to property prices as houses and schools empty out? Who will serve in the military? Who will invent new technology? Wouldn’t the country become weak economically and militarily and perhaps prey for a younger, more dynamic neighbor? And, no, Trump, Norway is not going to save you from all that. Salvadoran Americans might, if you let them.
Juan Cole / Informed Comment


Juan Cole

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The Post that Made Me More Enemies – Steemit Blog

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It’s been four years and four months since we lost Meng (Minnagh – Mingh) Airbase in northern Aleppo countryside to the NATO-sponsored terrorists, and since then the Syrian Arab Army is struggling to clean the massive parts of land taken by the evil empire and its mercenaries in Syria.
We can’t count the repercussions of that loss, in lives of innocent souls slaughtered, in massive areas of land, in direct incursions by the different NATO member states to the holy land of Syria, to the fall of other important cities, towns, and suffering of millions of internally displaced and fled away Syrians. It’s just too enormous.
I tried to outline the importance of that loss in my post ‘Meng Battle a Big Loss for the Axis of Resistance‘, and instead of many of the supposed to be pro-Syrians agreed to this loss and my anger towards all of assumed Syria’s allies, the Western operatives took it as an opportunity and a platform to attack me to the extent of once an Australian Intelligence agent described me as a “Traitor not only to Syria but to the whole world”…! They run a Facebook Group called ‘Syrian Revolution Untold Story’, led by a ‘High Ranking Freemason’ (in his own words), which they stole from its original creator, a Syrian lady activists, who made them admins to the group and they evicted her from her own group!
The reason behind their attacks was very simple. It’s the oldest tactic of divide and conquer. Create a schism among the pro-Syrian camp and then blame it on the members of the camp themselves. Well, have to admit, they did succeed for a while in that but with my insistence and the diligence of the Syrian activists, we managed to expose those planted foreign agents and enemies of Syria.
Last year 2017, we were shocked by a decision taken by YouTube, a subsidiary owned by Alpha (Google’s parent company), to suspend our YouTube channel, effectively deleting hundreds of our very important video reports I personally worked hard to translate to English and add the English subtitles to each one of them, and many of them were more than 40 minutes long.
Since we are a very small group of individual and independent activists, we are already struggling enough to maintain this website itself, we couldn’t maintain our own platform to host our videos, as even the case with many established news outlets who need a powerful platform to host their video libraries. And since Google decided to cut our earnings from ads published on our website, mind you, we barely make few cents a day from these ads, I was searching online for an alternative platform to at least host our videos there.
I did find a video hosting platform called Vidme (http://www.vid.me), which after uploading many of the videos I managed to find from our deleted library still stored in one of my Hard Disks, and updated many of the posts here with the relevant videos, Vidme platform went bust and ceased to exist. Seems they didn’t expect many people to use their service.
Finally, and thanks to James Corbett of The Corbett Report who posted a video promoting some alternative sites I found BitChute and Steemit. Two, so far, seems to be independent alternatives to the masters of censorship in Google, Facebook, Twitter and their subsidiaries and ilk.
I’m on Steemit since September 21, 2017, and managed so far to post 286 posts there including many videos as a backup and main new video clips through their amazing Dtube platform. I urge the readers here to check them out, and they do have an interesting reward scheme there for writers. However, I posted a recent post on Steemit revisiting the Meng Battle post and discussing how the Syrian Arab Army was overwhelmed by tens of thousands of anti-Islamic Wahhabi suicide terrorists, and how just recently I proved that Syrians can differ with their assumed allies openly and publicly and criticize their moves.
To my surprise the latest two posts were hit with a ‘Spam Warning’ and one of them suggested my ID there could be an attempt of an ID theft. I can highly commend them for their efforts to fight ID theft, but it could have been put in a nicer way though. An admin from Steemit asked me to prove my ID by a post here on Syrianews.cc to prove authorship of the content, so why not do both? Prove authorship and at the same time add a few thoughts.

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I hope this will prove the authorship and I ask once again our dearest readers to share more of our posts, visit the ads placed by Google on our site here, you know every 100 cents make a dollar, and we highly appreciate any donation whether through PayPal you can use the button on the right side and top and bottom of any post, we even accept donations in any cryptocurrency, our Wallet ID is also placed on the side (1MPkajkNGbBU13XxwbTKcTpBKGJFiZjPZR).

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The US’ Kurd Project: Iranian intelligence has declassified data on 14 American bases in Syria

The US’ Kurd Project: Iranian intelligence has declassified data on 14 American bases in Syria
At the very end of last year on the 31st of December, the Pentagon once again acted out an intrigue around its military bases in Syria. US defence minister James Mattis warned, that any attack on US bases would be repelled and the attackers would be punished.
The media agencies ‘Russia Today’ and ‘Sputnik’ proved the existence of 10 American military bases in the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic. However, Iranian intelligence agencies have provided more detailed data, which suggests that there are 14 American bases in Syria, of which 12 are located in the north of the country and 2 in the south. What is more, Turkish media outlets have reported about the existence of 13 US arms depots in Kurd territories, which are located in close proximity to American bases.
  1. The Dirik base
The Dirik base is the furthest point of American presence in Syria. It is located on the Turkish-Syrian border and includes two military bases from which groups of American paratroopers provide help to the Syrian Democratic Forces. The Dirik base also serves an airbase for American logistic flights.
  1. The Sabakh-al-Khair base
The Sabakh-al-Khair base is located is located to the south-west of the city of Al-Hasakah and is especially important because of its proximity to the Syria-Iraq border. This base only holds American combat helicopters, which transport arms and assistance to the Syrian Kurds.
  1. The Ayn-Issa base
The Ayn-Issa base is located between the Turkish border and the Syrian city of Raqqa. It is from this base that arms and ammunition are supplied to troops of the Kurdish ‘Democratic Union Party’.
  1. The Tal al-Saman base
The Tal al-Saman base is the second American base located between the Turkish border and Raqqa. It is the most important espionage and bugging station in Syria.
  1. The Al-Tabka base
The Al-Tabka base is located to the south of Raqqa and serves as an airport for US aircraft.
  1. The Al-Djalbiat base
The Al-Djalbiat base, which is located to the northwest of Raqqa, is an unsanctioned military zone and is the location of 40 modern military-logistical aircraft, a landing strip, launch platforms for several kinds of complex missile, and several other types of aircraft.
  1. The Kharb Ishk base
The Kharb Ishik base is part of eight bases close to the northern border between Turkey and Syria. It holds American military units.
  1. The Jebel Mashnur base
The Jebel Mashnur base is the most northern in Syria. Its defining feature is a radio relay used by American and French special forces.
  1. The Sirin base
The Sirin base is located to the east of the city of Manbij. It is from this base that American paratroopers leave to execute various missions in Syria.
  1. The Al-Talf n0 1. and 2 bases
The two bases in Al-Tanf are shared by American and British forces, as well as soldiers from the new ‘Syrian Free Army’.
  1. The Tal-Tamir base
The Tal-Tamir base is also used by British, American, and SFA forces. It is located in north-eastern Syria not far from the city of Al-Hasakah. 200 American and 70 French soldiers are located at the base, as well as training barracks for the FSA.
  1. The Manbidj base
The Manbidj base has the most strategic importance as it is located in an area with a high risk of confrontations between the Kurds and the FSA. It appears that this base was opened in order to avert conflicts and prevent the area from being accessed by Syrian forces.
  1. The Aleppo base
The Aleppo base was created in a strategic region to prevent conflict between the SFA and Kurd forces and to deny the area to Syrian forces. The Americans are planning to monitor the region from this base.
The presence of American military infrastructure in northern Syria is evidence, that the Americans are stabilising their position in the region for a long time. The bases’ geographical locations correspond with the widened territory of Syrian Kurdistan, the autonomy of which is secured by the Pentagon by deliveries of light and heavy armaments and military vehicles to the Kurds. The arming of Syrian Kurds and the breakaway of this territory corresponds to the new plan of proxy warfare to contain Iran in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean.
Source: Alena Bajowa, Курдский проект США: иранская разведка рассекретила 14 американских баз в Сирии, published on 11.01.2018 at Politikus.ru, accessible via: https://politikus.ru/events/103575-kurdskiy-proekt-ssha-iranskaya-razvedka-rassekretila-14-amerikanskih-baz-v-sirii.html
Translated from the Original Russian by Edvin Buday.

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Syria – Erdogan (Again) Switches Sides, Delivers New Supplies For Terrorist Attacks

Turkey, in line with U.S. services, decided to block the current Syrian advance in south-east Idleb. Yesterday an ad-hoc alliance of jihadi “rebels” launched a counteroffensive to stop the Syrian army from cutting off a big chunk of “rebel” held territory in east-Idleb.
The Syrian army attack

—The area of the “rebel” counterattack (green)

biggerThe Turkish and U.S. supplied “rebels” (see below) made a few local advances capturing some 12 villages of the 150 villages the Syrian army had recently liberated. They were soon beaten back. Some 50 Ahrar al-Sham fighters were killed or woundedafter they ran into a trap. Some 10 Syrian soldiers have been captured by the enemy. Syrian and Russian air support is very active in the area and the Syrian army is again moving forward.
There is no mention or picture (yet) of al-Qaeda in Syria, currently labeled HTS, taking part in the “rebel” counterattack. Four days ago HTS published photos of its leader Joulini meeting with his military commanders to assess the situation. It looked bad for them. The squabble with other “rebels” increased. Two days ago Jouliani issued a statement that HTS would stop fighting other factions in Idleb to enable all to confront the advancing Syrian government forces. It seems that this was a condition for the renewed Turkish/U.S. support.
The counteroffensive could only proceed because Turkey (again) delivered hundreds of tons of weapons to the jihadis. New supplies of TOW anti-tank missiles, distributed exclusively by the CIA, have also been seen. (Turkey is also again supplying jihadists in Libya. The Greek navy just caught a ship going from Turkey to Libya with 29 containers full of bomb precursors, detonators and other bomb making parts.)
Here are some relevant tweets from the last few hours:
Terrormonitor.org‏ @Terror_Monitor 9:54 AM – 11 Jan 2018 #SYRIA #AlQaeda Affiliate #Uyghur #Jihadi Group Turkestan Islamic Party (#TIP) Releases Pictures Showing Its Fighters Against #SAA In Southern #Idlib. #TerrorMonitor(pictures attached)
The Uygur terrorists were brought from west-China to Syria on official Turkish passports issued by the Turkish embassy in Thailand. On September 18 2015 al-Qaeda (Nursra, HTS) and the Uyghur jihadist group Turkistan Islamic Party stormed the long besieged Abu al-Duhur airbase and executed 56 Syrian soldier. It is this airbase the current Syrian attack in east-Idleb is aiming at. This time it will be the Uygurs who will lose their lives.
More on the today’s events:
Ali Özkök‏ @Ozkok_ – 10:06 AM – 11 Jan 2018
#Turkey supplied Feylaq el-Sham militia with at least six armoured vehicles. This is a major indicator that Turkey also supports the massive counter offensive of rebels and islamists in #Idlib and #Hama against Syrian army and allies! I guess we will see soon some ATGM strikes.
Carl Zha @CarlZha – 1:36 PM – 11 Jan 2018Syria: Jihadists launching the counter-offensive against the Syrian government forces in Southern Idlib with APCs, heavy artillery and rockets this morning. APC were provided by Turkey earlier(video attached)
The Syrian army captured one of the the new armored personal carriers. The various pictures and videos show a variant of the Armored Panthera F9 produced by the company Minerva SPV which resides in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Ali Özkök‏’s remark, “I guess we will see soon some ATGM strikes,” was prophetic:
Carl Zha‏ @CarlZha – 1:58 PM – 11 Jan 2018 #Idlib: Syrian Rebel group Jaish Nasr TOW attack on Syrian Army Tank in Maraq Hill this morning. Wonder who provided them with TOW missiles?🤔CIA is suppose to account for all TOW missiles supplied by Saudi 🧐(video attached)
Carl Zha‏ @CarlZha – 2:38 PM – 11 Jan 2018 #Syria Al Zenki Movement (Jihadist who beheaded a Palestinian child in Aleppo) firing ATGM hitting T72 tank today. Turkish support have been crucial for this rebel counter-offensive against #SAA(video attached)
There was some early announcement of new Turkish and U.S. supplies by the Gulf propagandist Charles “Jihad” Lister:
Charles Lister @Charles_Lister – 5:58 AM – 11 Jan 2018
Sources – #Turkey has provided new supplies of: – Turkish armored vehicles – SALW ammo – RPGs – Mortars – Grad rockets & launchers – Tank shells & more… … To all major non-#HTS factions, for the express purpose of today’s new offensive vs. #Assad/#Iran/#Russia.
Two days ago Turkey protested to the Russian and Iranian ambassadors against the Syrian army moves in Idleb. According to the deescalation agreement it is Russia and Iran that are responsible for the south-eastern third of the Idleb deescalation zone while Turkey is supposed to control the north-western part. That Turkish part was recently used to attack the Russian bases in Syria though the Russians believe that the attack itself was launched not under Turkish but under U.S. command:
Russia said it held Turkey accountable for the drone attack, calling it a breach of their cease-fire agreement in northern Syria, while Turkey accused Russia and Iran of jeopardizing the entire peace process by launching an offensive to take control of an opposition-held air base in the area.The Russian Defense Ministry named the opposition-controlled village of Muwazarra in southern Idlib province as the location from which a swarm of at least a dozen drones armed with crude explosives was launched Saturday, attacking the Hmeimim air base and the nearby naval base of Tartus in northwestern Syria. Under the cease-fire deal, Turkey is supposed to restrain opposition forces in Idlib province. …The [Muwazarra] village remains loyal to the moderate opposition, but military positions surrounding it belong to the Nusra offshoot Harakat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, said another man who lives in the village and did not want his name to be used. The closest HTS base, lying in a valley to the east of the village, was destroyed in a Russian airstrike earlier this week, he said — after the attacks on Hmeimim….
Many Syrians and also Russians have speculated that foreign intelligence agencies with reasons to provoke the Russians may have helped a local group conduct the attack. “There’s a lot of fishy stuff going on in Idlib — agents running around, and groups working with groups they shouldn’t work with,” [Aron Lund, who analyzes Syria for the Century Foundation,] said. “It’s very, very murky.”

The “rebels” in Idleb also set up a website with 150 pre-scripted tweets about killed children and barrel bombed hospitals which their fans can distribute at will. In the next few days we will hear news of the destruction of at least eight “last hospitals” in the Idleb governorate …
One wonders what the wannabe-Sultan Erdogan is thinking. He had tried to provoke Russia before by shooting down a Russia jet. Turkey paid a huge price when Russia stopped all tourism and trade with it. A year later Erdogan had to go to Moscow to apologize and to beg for relief. Does he believe that Russia will react less sharply now when he allows attacks on their bases and again supplies their enemies?
What was he promised by the White House or the Pentagon for taking that risk and for again changing sides?

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

Emboldened israeli Ministers Openly Call for Killing Palestinians With More Genocide

Source
Israeli Agriculture Minister, Uri Ariel. (Photo: via MEMO, file)
By Ramona Wadi
Israeli Agricultural Minister Uri Ariel wants more injured and dead Palestinians in Gaza. “What is this special weapon we have that we fire and see pillars of smoke and fire, but nobody gets hurt?” he said on local radio. “It is time for there to be injuries and deaths as well.” This was reported by Haaretz.
Ariel’s comments come at a time when, bolstered and emboldened by US support over Jerusalem, Israel is seeking to increase ways in which Palestinians are restricted even further in terms of politics, freedom of movement and resistance to its military occupation. The increasingly threatening rhetoric, combined with its often resultant violence, is a clear message that Israel wants Palestinian existence to be determined according to its own colonial needs.
Indeed the minister’s remarks are indicative of Israel’s need for violence and conflict to sustain its existence. Framing his penchant for more deaths against the narrative of the purported “Palestinian terrorist”, he also amalgamated his demands with Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s comments from 2016. At that time, far-right extremist Lieberman recommended the further fragmentation of Palestinians by suggesting that the homes of those involved in resistance should be demolished, and that those who “desire coexistence” should be rewarded.
Lieberman’s differentiation of Palestinians, particularly the latter group, is a simplistic approach which negates many of the reasons why not all Palestinians are visibly involved in resistance. One obvious reason which Israel has perpetrated is the juxtaposition of survival due to extreme poverty and lack of basic necessities, and the struggle against several forms of state violence. It also refutes the fact that most Palestinians, unlike the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, do not want to live under colonial rule.
Whether Ariel’s statement suggests yet another military offensive against the Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip remains to be seen. However, there is no doubt that demands for state violence against civilians will become more brazen, as Israel basks in the impunity which is sustained on two levels: that generated by its own actions and absence of accountability under the pretext of “security concerns”; and the international community’s endorsement of this false narrative.
Another ramification of Ariel’s words is the separation of the visible injuries and killings in the occupied West Bank and the silent forms of slow extermination in Gaza as a result of Israeli-imposed deprivation. Clearly, he prefers the macabre spectacle of multitudes of injured and dead Palestinian civilians in Gaza and, what is more, he is allowed to express himself in such a manner without censure of any kind, safe in the knowledge that killing Palestinians has not only become normalised, but also expected.
The dehumanization of Palestinians in the Israeli minister’s words is also reflective of how statistics contribute to the absence of Palestinians in terms of collective memory. For Israel, the numbers serve to boost the false claims of self-defense. Conversely, statistics for Palestinians depict the cycles of murder by Israeli institutions. The international community, on the other hand, is partial to the anonymity of numbers, particularly when there is no requirement other than for it to turn a blind eye until Israel decides upon the next phase of Gaza’s destruction, whereupon the UN will exhort the colonial entity’s “right” to defend itself against the colonized. In doing so, it will also affirm its contempt for human rights and resolutions by refusing to uphold the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and, indeed, their right to resist military occupation by any means available.
– Ramona Wadi is a staff writer for Middle East Monitor (MEMO) in London, where this article was originally published. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. 

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It’s Nato that’s Empire-building, not Putin

Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is presented. In Britain, the spreading of false information via the mainstream press and national broadcast media is universally accepted on topics such as bringing down the NHS for privatisation purposes, trashing foreign so-called enemy nation states such as Iraq, Libya et al and of course the really big foe of our time – Russia.
Unlike many so-called experts and commentators on Russia, Peter Hitchins was a former foreign correspondent in Moscow and Washington and understands the tension strings of the geo-political power plays being made against it.
Peppered with obligatory obeisances to western official narratives about Nato empire-building since 1990, Peter Hitchins – the self confessed reformed Thatcherite, deconstructs official state propaganda and gives clear personal insight into the realities and truth of these power plays.
The article below was originally published in March 2015 and as you will read, nothing for the better has changed but at least you get a sense that what you are being told officially – is a deception.

It’s Nato that’s empire-building, not Putin

by Peter Hitchins
March 2015
Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles. Which of these powers is expanding?
There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous, irretrievable loss. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the canniest of the old Cold Warriors, wrote back in 1997,
‘Ukraine… is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’
This diminished Russia feels the spread of the EU and its armed wing, NATO, like a blow on an unhealed bruise. In February 2007, for instance, Vladimir Putin asked sulkily,
“Against whom is this expansion intended?”
I have never heard a clear answer to that question. The USSR, which NATO was founded to fight, expired in August 1991. So what is Nato’s purpose now? Why does it even still exist?
There is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet Europe. Even if Russia wanted to reconquer its lost empire, as some believe (a belief for which there is no serious evidence), it is too weak and too poor to do this. So why not invite Russia to join the great western alliances? Alas, it is obvious to everyone, but never stated, that Russia cannot ever join either NATO or the EU, for if it did so it would unbalance them both by its sheer size. There are many possible ways of dealing with this. One would be an adult recognition of the limits of human power, combined with an understanding of Russia’s repeated experience of invasions and its lack of defensible borders.
But we do not do this. Instead we have a noisy pseudo-moral crusade, which would not withstand five minutes of serious consideration. Mr Putin’s state is, beyond doubt, a sinister tyranny. But so is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, which locks up far more journalists than does Russia. Turkey is an officially respectable Nato member, 40 years after seizing northern Cyprus, which it still occupies, in an almost exact precedent for Russia’s seizure of Crimea. If Putin disgusts us so much, then why are we and the USA happy to do business with Erdogan, and also to fawn upon Saudi Arabia and China?
Contrary to myth, the expansion of the EU into the former communist world has not magically brought universal peace, love and prosperity. Croatia’s economy has actually gone backwards since it joined. Corruption still exists in large parts of the EU’s new south-eastern territories, and I am not sure that the rule of law could be said to have been properly established there. So the idea that the recruitment of Ukraine to the ‘West’ will magically turn that troubled nation into a sunny paradise of freedom, probity and wealth is perhaps a little idealistic, not to say mistaken.
It is all so much clearer if we realise that this quarrel is about power and land, not virtue. In truth, much of the eastward expansion of Nato was caused by the EU’s initial unwillingness to take in backward, bankrupt and corrupt refugee states from the old Warsaw Pact. The policy could be summed up as ‘We won’t buy your tomatoes, but if it makes you happy you can shelter under our nuclear umbrella’. The promise was an empty assurance against a nonexistent threat. But an accidental arrangement hardened into a real confrontation. The less supine Russia was, the more its actions were interpreted as aggression in the West. Boris Yeltsin permitted western interests to rape his country, and did little to assert Russian power. So though he bombarded his own parliament, conducted a grisly war in Chechnya, raised corruption to Olympic levels and shamelessly rigged his own re-election, he yet remained a popular guest in western capitals and summits. Vladimir Putin’s similar sins, by contrast, provide a pretext for ostracism and historically illiterate comparisons between him and Hitler.
This is because of his increasing avowal of Russian sovereignty, and of an independent foreign policy. There have been many East-West squabbles and scrimmages, not all of them Russia’s fault. But the New Cold War really began in 2011, after Mr Putin dared to frustrate western — and Saudi — policy in Syria. George Friedman, the noted US intelligence and security expert, thinks Russia badly underestimated the level of American fury this would provoke. As Mr Friedman recently told the Moscow newspaper Kommersant, ‘It was in this situation that the United States took a look at Russia and thought about what it [Russia] wants to see happen least of all: instability in Ukraine.’
Mr Friedman (no Putin stooge) also rather engagingly agrees with Moscow that overthrow last February (2014) of Viktor Yanukovych was ‘the most blatant coup in history’. He is of course correct, as anyone unclouded by passion can see. The test of any action by your own side is to ask what you would think of it if the other side did it.
If Russia didn’t grasp how angry Washington would get over Syria, did the West realise how furiously Russia would respond to the EU Association Agreement and to the fall of Yanukovych? Perhaps not. Fearing above all the irrecoverable loss to NATO of its treasured naval station in Sevastopol, Russia reacted. After 23 years of sullenly appeasing the West, Moscow finally said ‘enough’. Since we’re all supposed to be against appeasement, shouldn’t we find this action understandable in a sovereign nation, even if we cannot actually praise it? And can anyone explain to me precisely why Britain, of all countries, should be siding with the expansion of the European Union and NATO into this dangerous and unstable part of the world?
*
Featured image is from TruePublica.
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“The Enemy Within” The Role of The Pro-israel Lobby in US Politics

“Speaking Your Truth Is the Most Powerful Tool We All Have”, Oprah Winfrey. And we know that one such truth is that the pro-Israel lobby has corrupted American democracy, absolutely!
Oprah Winfrey in her powerful speech at the 2018 Golden Globes awards said that ‘Speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have’.
And the truth for America today is that our legislative assembly, the Congress of the United States of America and the US Presidency, have both been corrupted by the pro-Israel lobby to an extent that it impacts not only the life of every ordinary American citizen but also that of hundreds of thousands in states around the world.
The millions of dollars that are expended in ensuring that only those who profess allegiance to the Israel lobby will succeed in election to Congress is the defining practice that has corrupted American politics and successive White Houses ever since President Harry S Truman was persuaded by Bnai Brith to go against his natural instincts and to support a Zionist state in Palestine.
Now, however, it has reached a peak with millions of dollars from casino profits having been used to swing the last presidential election for Trump in exchange for a promise from him to declare Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city, in defiance of the will of the United Nations which has declared the Holy City to be an international metropolis with free access to all faiths, in perpetuity.
A lot of water, guns, planes, bombs, missiles and American money has flowed under the bridge since then, totalling well over 100 billion dollars – enough to build and operate a new hospital for every city in every one of the fifty states of the Union!
Image on the right is Oprah Winfrey at the 2018 Golden Globes Awards
Image result for oprah winfrey speech
The Israel lobby has a far-reaching influence on foreign policy concerning countries throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the Americas – notwithstanding that it is an unelected political pressure group that operates through agents in major capital cities worldwide, from London through Paris, Berlin, Nairobi, Lagos, Dubai and Toronto to Buenos Aires, Beijing, Delhi and Melbourne who infiltrate national governments in order to promote its own political agenda.
The impact on global affairs is enormous – but no one person is ever held to account. It is political corruption on an epidemic scale, perpetrated by powerful figures from the worlds of gambling, share dealing and international banking: all conducted without any official or public scrutiny or inquiry.
The first political act of any US President in recent times is not to appear before their electorate but to address a meeting of AIPAC,  a powerful, pro-Israel, unelected political pressure group. That one fact speaks volumes and says everything on how democracy in America has been subverted for the benefit of a single political entity acting for a foreign state.
When Theodor Herzl envisaged a Jewish Homeland to end centuries of antisemitism, it was an altruistic vision. Today’s reality of the Likud/US Zionist Movement is a sombre indictment of personal greed and ambition that has the reverse effect.

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