Will ISIS Create Al-Sham Caliphate & Liberate Palestine?

Not What the Neocons Planned…

One need not be prescient to understand the unfolding “Jihadi Spring” is fueling the plans and perhaps destiny of ascendant Islamists in this region with the increasing help of in-country nationalists, including remnants of the Iraqi Baath Party. This, according to more than a dozen ardent supporters of The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (), known locally as DAASH whose representatives allowed this observer over the past six months to interview some of its supporters to discuss what they found inaccurate in a piece I wrote about DAASH actions in Raqqa, Syria. In that article I claimed that DAASH was selling Syria’s archeological treasures, just as they are selling Syria’s oil and in some instances, food warehouse contents, to the highest foreign bidder. There is no paucity of the latter.

The final “S” in the acronym “ISIS” relates to the Arabic word “al-Sham” which itself is variously used to refer to the Levant, Syria or even Damascus. But DAASH (ISIS) means the Levant or Eastern Mediterranean including Cyprus, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and southern Turkey. ISIS has just announced that Raqqa, the only one of 14 Governorates its controls in Syria, is now the “Capital” of their emerging “Caliphate” which so far is a swathe of territory encompassing much of eastern and northern Syria and western and northern Iraq. The Emir is to be their military strategist and leader and successor of Abu Mus‘ab Zarqawi, Dr. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Those interviewed at length include sympathizers, students of politics and of the Islamist ‘spring’ in Syria and Iraq, as well as a few shadowy claimed jihadist recruiters, some working with a claimed new specialized DAASH unit organized at the beginning of 2013 and which focuses exclusively on destroying the Zionist regime occupying Palestine. DAASH’s “Al Quds Unit” (AQU) is currently working to broaden its influence in more than 60 Palestinian camps and gatherings from Gaza, across Occupied Palestine, to Jordan, and Lebanon up to the north of Syria seeking to enlist support as it prepares to liberate Palestine.

DAASH believes, according to one of its claimed academic advisers, that the ummat al-Islamiyah (Islamic community), as a US Foreign Relations staffer, on 6/18/14 advised this observer, that the White House estimates that approximately six million Iraqi Sunni have recently become supportive of the armed action by DAASH. The support excludes its strict, indeed anti-social societal mores and abhorrence of current harsh realities of life in DAASH territory. The Islamist organization believes it currently has massive regional support for it rapidly expanding “revolution of the oppressed.” Large numbers in this region do appear to appreciate its recent successes, despite its history of calculated brutality for political purposes.  DAASH urges the public to study its remarkable history that reaches back to 2003 when Abu Mus‘ab Zarqawi got out of prison in Jordan and headed to Afghanistan, gained valuable experience from if the trust of Osama Bin Laden, and then crossed over to Iraq to wage jihad against America. DAASH appears to be using sectarian appeals in Iraq and Syria much the same way Zawqawi did when he confronted the ascendant Shia militia following the US invasion and occupation.

DAASH supporters claim that it has been joined by more than a dozen Sunni groups such as one called Men of the Army of the Naqshbandia Order.” JRTN as it is known locally, was established in 2007 following the execution of Saadam Hussein and is made up of former Hussein regime loyalists, including intelligence officers and soldiers from his Republican Guards. If its alliance with DAASH holds, JRTN can contribute thousands of fighters with strong social roots in the community. One JRTN interlocutor explained to this observer, “As Sunni Muslims, DAASH can resolve differences between its views of Islam and those of the Ummah. First we need victory and to achieve that we need each other and if our Baathist partners decide to position themselves to be secular guardians of Sunni Arab nationalism that can be discussed   later. The official website of the Naqshbandi Army includes a 1/1/2014 announcement: “To all our brothers and families of the tribes and factions we tell you, you are not alone in this battlefield.”

DAASH insists that it has become less active in killing anyone who works for the government of Syria or Iraq including rubbish collectors, a barbaric practice that alienated the Sunni population and that their support is growing as they increasingly provide the essential social services in the forming proto-Caliphate. “Zionists call us masked, sociopathic murderers but we are much more complicated and representative of those seeking justice than they portray us.  Are we more barbaric than the Zionist terrorists who massacred at Dier Yassin, Shatila twice at Qana, and committed dozens of other massacres?  History will judge us after we free Palestine.” A few years ago the CIA and others estimated that the Zionist occupation of Palestine will collapse in less than a decade.  DAASH claims it can do the job in 72 months.

With respect to events surrounding its takeover of Mosel and other social media broadcast exhibitions of mass brutality, ISIS claims it was done for a purpose, the same purpose that other state and non-state actors have used over the past two decade and that is for 90% of the world 1.5 billion Muslims (Sunni) to free themselves from the oppression of the 10% (Shia).

Several reasons were given as to why Palestinians should hold out hope for ISIS succeeding in their cause when all other Arab, Muslim, and Western claimed Resistance supporters have been abject failures and invariably end up benefiting the Zionist occupation regime terrorizing Palestine. “All countries in this region are playing the sectarian card just as they have long played the Palestinian card but the difference with ISIS is that we are serious about Palestine and they are not. Tel Aviv will fall as fast as Mosul when the time is right”, a DAASH ally explained. Another gentleman insisted, “DAASH will fight where no one else is willing.”

ISIS appears uniformly contemptuous of the Zionist regime and its army and also appears eager to fight them in the near future despite expectation that the regime will use nuclear weapons. “Do you think that we do not have access to nuclear devises? The Zionists know that we do and if we ever believe they are about to use theirs we will not hesitate.  After the Zionists are gone, Palestine will have to be decontaminated and rebuilt just like areas where there has been radiation released.”

DAASH supporters claim that it reaches out to local notables and tribal leaders and discuss their differences and seek their tribal counsel. DAASH claims that the Roman Catholic Vatican supports its own claims that when they captured Mosul last week they did not harm Christian residents or desecrate churches. In this they are supported by Archbishop Giorgio Lingua, the Apostolic Nuncio (Pope’s envoy) in Iraq who this week told the media: “The guerrillas who are in control of Mosul have to date not committed any violent act or damaged the churches there.”

It is becoming clear that DAASH has set up well organized local administrations in areas it controls, including an Islamic court system and a local non-hostile police force which support public safety with measures such as closing shops for selling poor products in the souks and supermarkets and on the street, destroying cigarettes and whipping some individuals for disrespecting and insulting their neighbors, confiscating counterfeit medicines in addition to some death sentences for apostasy.

DAASH supporters claim that as soon as they ‘liberate” an area  they invest in public works such as the  new souk in Raqqa, installs new power lines and conducts training sessions on how citizens can do-it-yourself  for more self-reliance with fixing infrastructure problems. In addition DAASH claims that it quickly fixes potholes, runs a low fare bus system, has established a ‘green’ program to build parks and plant trees and flowers, helps farmers with harvests and runs a zakat (alms-giving) organization. Moreover, ISIS has established a number of religious schools for children, including ones for girls where they can memorize  the Koran and receive awards if successful, while also holding ‘fun days’ for kids including all the ice cream they can eat and inflatable slides. For their older counterparts, ISIS has established training sessions  for new imams and preachers. Schedules for prayers and Koran lessons are posted at mosques. In a more worrisome development, ISIS runs training camps  for “cub scouts” and houses these recruits for ‘instruction’. Several social media reports and a few eyewitness accounts appear to confirm that DAASH has developed health and welfare programs, operates bread factories and distributes free fruits and vegetables to needy families, passing the goods out personally as well as setting up a free food kitchen in Raqqa and an adoption agency to place orphans with families in their areas. Unlike the Taliban and some other regimes which exhibit paranoia about vaccination campaigns, DAASH claims to be more ‘modern” and actively promotes polio-vaccination in its areas to try stop its spread.

The social services that DAASH provides obviously do not ameliorate the deadly violence it carries out, but does suggest it is well-organized and has caught the interest of the Sunni Muslims who feel besieged by Shia. According to an al-Bagdadi relative, nearly the half a billion dollars that was snatched from Mosul’s central bank this month will help to win hearts and minds and correct some of its “bad press”. DAASH appears to ascribe to the cliché that half of any war is a rumor. It condemns the project of many satellite channels and claims that they do not objectively report the news but mainly spread rumors with sectarian instigation as the goal. On this point who can refute them?

DAASH supporters deny any interest in training and directing foreign fighters to attack Europe and other places, claiming that their goals are to establish an al-Sham Caliphate and liberate Palestine. With respect to exactly how DAASH intends to liberate Palestine, the Iraqi’s and now the Obama administration ar3 in possession of an encyclopedia of information about detailed DAASH plans, and tactics it will confront the Zionist occupiers with,  according to a congressional staffer via email with this observer. Reportedly the employment of large numbers of militarily untrained foreign volunteers as suicide bombers, moving on foot wearing suicide vests, or driving vehicles packed with explosives is just the tip of a deep iceberg of what DAASH is planning.

The trove reportedly came from Iraqi intelligence sources that came upon it less than 48 hours before Mosul fell. Apparently a fellow known as “Abu Hajjar” a captured trusted DAASH messenger broke under Iraqi torture and turned over more than 160 computer flash sticks which contained the most detailed information to date about DAASH. The US intelligence community are still decrypting and analyzing the flash sticks.

Predictably, no sooner that this information reached the US Congress, than Congresswoman and Israeli agent, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen former Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and her partners at AIPAC went to work trying to get ahold copies of the flash sticks and share them with the Israeli Embassy and no doubt the Mossad. The current sense on Capitol Hill is reported to be that the Obama administration in not in the mood to share anything with Israel these days and certainly not with the Netanyahu regime which it loathes.

Time will reveal if DAASH achieves one or both of its objectives.  Many believe if they eject the Zionist regime from Palestine, the expanding Islamist group will set in motion historic currents that in all likelihood will be rather different from the Ehud Omert-Condeleeza Rice fantasy of “a New Middle East.”

In any event, it is unlikely that Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, among other countries in this region, are going to look much like what George Bush and Dick Cheney and their still active neocon advisers had in mind when they were beating the drums for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libya,  and now Syria and Iran.

The ISIS Fiasco: It’s Really An Attack On Iran

There’s something that doesn’t ring-true about the coverage of crisis in Iraq. Maybe it’s the way the media reiterates the same, tedious storyline over and over again with only the slightest changes in the narrative. For example, I was reading an article in the Financial Times by Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, where he says that Maliki’s military forces in Mosul “melted away”. Interestingly, the Haass op-ed was followed by a piece by David Gardener who used almost the very same language. He said the “army melts away.” So, I decided to thumb through the news a bit and see how many other journalists were stung by the “melted away” bug. And, as it happens, there were quite a few, including Politico, NBC News, News Sentinel, Global Post, the National Interest, ABC News etc. Now, the only way an unusual expression like that would pop up with such frequency would be if the authors were getting their talking points from a central authority. (which they probably do.) But the effect, of course, is the exact opposite than what the authors intend, that is, these cookie cutter stories leave readers scratching their heads and feeling like something fishy is going on.

And something fishy IS going on. The whole fable about 1,500 jihadis scaring the pants off 30,000 Iraqi security guards to the point where they threw away their rifles, changed their clothes and headed for the hills, is just not believable. I don’t know what happened in Mosul, but, I’ll tell you one thing, it wasn’t that. That story just doesn’t pass the smell test.

And what happened in Mosul matters too, because nearly every journalist and pundit in the MSM is using the story to discredit Maliki and suggest that maybe Iraq would be better off without him. Haass says that it shows that the army’s “allegiance to the government is paper thin”. Gardener says its a sign of “a fast failing state.” Other op-ed writers like Nicolas Kristof attack Maliki for other reasons, like being too sectarian. Here’s Kristof:

“The debacle in Iraq isn’t President Obama’s fault. It’s not the Republicans’ fault. Both bear some responsibility, but, overwhelmingly, it’s the fault of the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri Kamal al-Maliki.”

Of course, Kristof is no match for the imperial mouthpiece, Tom Friedman. When it comes to pure boneheaded bluster, Friedman is still numero uno. Here’s how the jowly pundit summed it up in an article in the Sunday Times titled “Five Principles for Iraq”:

“Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has proved himself not to be a friend of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq either. From Day 1, he has used his office to install Shiites in key security posts, drive out Sunni politicians and generals and direct money to Shiite communities. In a word, Maliki has been a total jerk. Besides being prime minister, he made himself acting minister of defense, minister of the interior and national security adviser, and his cronies also control the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry.

Maliki had a choice — to rule in a sectarian way or in an inclusive way — and he chose sectarianism. We owe him nothing.” (Five Principles for Iraq, Tom Freidman, New York Times)

Leave it to Friedman, eh? In other words, the reason Iraq is such a mess, has nothing to do with the invasion, the occupation, the death squads, Abu Ghraib, the Salvador Option, the decimated infrastructure, the polluted environment, or the vicious sectarian war the US ignited with its demented counterinsurgency program. Oh, no. The reason Iraq is a basketcase is because Maliki is a jerk. Maliki is sectarian. Bad Maliki.

Sound familiar? Putin last week. Maliki this week. Who’s next?

In any event, there is a rational explanation for what happened in Mosul although I cannot verify its authenticity. Check out this post at Syria Perspectives blog:

“…the Iraqi Ba’ath Party’s primary theoretician and Saddam’s right-hand man, ‘Izzaat Ibraaheem Al-Douri, himself a native of Mosul…was searching out allies in a very hostile post-Saddam Iraq … Still on the run and wanted for execution by the Al-Maliki government, Al-Douri still controlled a vast network of Iraqi Sunni Ba’athists who operated in a manner similar to the old Odessa organization that helped escaped Nazis after WWII … he did not have the support structure needed to oust Al-Maliki, so, he found an odd alliance in ISIS through the offices of Erdoghan and Bandar. Our readers should note that the taking of Mosul was accomplished by former Iraqi Ba’athist officers suspiciously abandoning their posts and leaving a 52,000 man military force without any leadership thereby forcing a complete collapse of the city’s defenses. The planning and collaboration cannot be coincidental.” (THE INNER CORE OF ISIS – THE INVASIVE SPECIES, Ziad Fadel, Syrian Perspectives)

I’ve read variations of this same explanation on other blogs, but I have no way of knowing whether they’re true or not. But what I do know, is that it’s a heckuva a lot more believable than the other explanation mainly because it provides enough background and detail to make the scenario seem plausible. The official version–the “melts away” version– doesn’t do that at all. It just lays out this big bogus story expecting people to believe it on faith alone. Why? Because it appeared in all the papers?

That seems like a particularly bad reason for believing anything.

And the “army melting away” story is just one of many inconsistencies in the official media version of events. Another puzzler is why Obama allowed the jihadis to rampage across Iraq without lifting a finger to help. Does that strike anyone else as a bit odd?

When was the last time an acting president failed to respond immediately and forcefully to a similar act of aggression?

Never. The US always responds. And the pattern is always the same. “Stop what you are doing now or we’re going to bomb you to smithereens.” Isn’t that the typical response?

Sure it is. But Obama delivered no such threat this time. Instead, he’s qualified his support for al-Maliki saying that the beleaguered president must “begin accommodating Sunni participation in his government” before the US will lend a hand. What kind of lame response is that? Check out this blurb from MNI News:

“President Barack Obama Friday warned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that the United States wants him to begin accommodating Sunni participation in his government, or see the United States withhold the help he needs, short of U.S. troops on the ground, to ward off an attack on Baghdad.

Obama added the emphasis of an appearance before TV cameras to his midday message, that while he will be considering options for some military intervention in the days ahead, the next move is up to Maliki.”
(Obama Warns Iraq’s Maliki,Looking for Sunni-Shia Accommodation, MNI)

Have you ever read such nonsense in your life? Imagine if , let’s say, the jihadi hordes had gathered just 50 miles outside of London and were threatening to invade at any minute. Do you think Obama would deliver the same message to UK Prime Minister David Cameron?

“Gee, Dave, we’d really like to help out, but you need to put a couple of these guys in your government first. Would that be okay, Dave? Just think of it as affirmative action for terrorists.”

It might sound crazy, but that’s what Obama wants Maliki to do. So, what’s going on here? Why is Obama delivering ultimatums when he should be helping out? Could it be that Obama has a different agenda than Maliki’s and that the present situation actually works to his benefit?

It sure looks that way. Just take a look at what Friedman says further on in the same article. It helps to clarify the point. He says:

“Maybe Iran, and its wily Revolutionary Guards Quds Force commander, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, aren’t so smart after all. It was Iran that armed its Iraqi Shiite allies with the specially shaped bombs that killed and wounded many American soldiers. Iran wanted us out. It was Iran that pressured Maliki into not signing an agreement with the U.S. to give our troops legal cover to stay in Iraq. Iran wanted to be the regional hegemon. Well, Suleimani: “This Bud’s for you.” Now your forces are overextended in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and ours are back home. Have a nice day.” (5 Principles for Iraq, Tom Friedman, New York Times)

Interesting, eh? Friedman basically admits that this whole fiasco is about Iran who turned out to be the biggest winner in the Iraq War sweepstakes. Naturally, that pisses off people in Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh to no end, so they’ve cooked up this goofy plan to either remove Maliki altogether or significantly trim his wings. Isn’t that what’s going on? And that’s why Obama is holding a gun to Maliki’s head and telling him what hoops he has to jump through in order to get US help. Because he’s determined to weaken Iran’s hegemonic grip on Baghdad.

Friedman also notes the Status of Forces agreement which would have allowed U.S. troops to stay in Iraq. Al Maliki rejected the deal which enraged Washington setting the stage for this latest terrorist farce. Obama intends to reverse that decision by hook or crook. This is just the way Washington does business, by twisting arms and breaking legs. Everybody knows this.

To understand what’s going on today in Iraq, we need to know a little history. In 2002, The Bush administration commissioned the Rand Corporation “to develop a Shaping Strategy for pacifying Muslim populations where the US has commercial or strategic interests.” The plan they came up with–which was called “US Strategy in the Muslim World after 9-11”– recommended that the US, “Align its policy with Shiite groups who aspire to have more participation in government and greater freedoms of political and religious expression. If this alignment can be brought about, it could erect a barrier against radical Islamic movements and may create a foundation for a stable U.S. position in the Middle East.”

The Bushies decided to follow this wacky plan which proved to be a huge tactical error. By throwing their weight behind the Shia, they triggered a massive Sunni rebellion that initiated as many as 100 attacks per day on US soldiers. That, in turn, led to a savage US counterinsurgency that wound up killing tens of thousands of Sunnis while reducing much of the country to ruins. Petraeus’ vicious onslaught was concealed behind the misleading PR smokescreen of sectarian civil war. It was actually a genocidal war against the people who Obama now tacitly supports in Mosul and Tikrit.

So there’s been a huge change of policy, right? And the fact that the US has taken a hands-off approach to Isis suggests that the Obama administration has abandoned the Rand strategy altogether and is looking for ways to support Sunni-led groups in their effort to topple the Al Assad regime in Damascus, weaken Hezbollah, and curtail Iran’s power in the region. While the strategy is ruthless and despicable, at least it makes sense in the perverted logic of imperial expansion, which the Rand plan never did.

What is happening in Iraq today was anticipated in a 2007 Seymour Hersh article titled “The Redirection.” Author Tony Cartalucci gives a great summary of the piece in his own article. He says:

“The Redirection,” documents…US, Saudi, and Israeli intentions to create and deploy sectarian extremists region-wide to confront Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hersh would note that these “sectarian extremists” were either tied to Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda itself. The ISIS army moving toward Baghdad is the final manifestation of this conspiracy, a standing army operating with impunity, threatening to topple the Syrian government, purge pro-Iranian forces in Iraq, and even threatening Iran itself by building a bridge from Al Qaeda’s NATO safe havens in Turkey, across northern Iraq, and up to Iran’s borders directly…

It is a defacto re-invasion of Iraq by Western interests – but this time without Western forces directly participating – rather a proxy force the West is desperately attempting to disavow any knowledge of or any connection to.” (America’s Covert Re-Invasion of Iraq, Tony Cartalucci, Information Clearinghouse)

So, now we’re getting to the crux of the matter, right? Now we should be able to identify the policy that is guiding events. What we know for sure is that the US wants to break Iran’s grip on Iraq. But how do they plan to achieve that; that’s the question?

Well, they could use their old friends the Baathists who they’ve been in touch with since 2007. That might work. But then they’d have to add a few jihadis to the mix to make it look believable.

Okay. But does that mean that Obama is actively supporting Isis?

No, not necessarily. Isis is already connected to other Intel agencies and might not need direct support from the US. (Note: Many analysts have stated that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) receives generous donations from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both of whom are staunch US allies. According to London’s Daily Express: “through allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the West (has) supported militant rebel groups which have since mutated into ISIS and other al‑Qaeda connected militias. ( Daily Telegraph, June 12, 2014)

What’s important as far as Obama is concerned, is that the strategic objectives of Isis and those of the United States coincide. Both entities seek greater political representation for Sunnis, both want to minimize Iranian influence in Iraq, and both support a soft partition plan that former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie H. Gelb, called “The only viable strategy to correct (Iraq ‘s) historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.” This is why Obama hasn’t attacked the militia even though it has marched to within 50 miles of Baghdad. It’s because the US benefits from these developments.

Let’s summarize:

Does the US Government “support” or “not support” terrorism depending on the situation?
Yes.

Have foreign Intel agencies supplied terrorist organizations in Syria with weapons and logistical support?
Yes.

Has the CIA?
Yes.

Has the Obama administration signaled that they would like to get rid of al Maliki or greatly reduce his power?
Yes.

Is this because they think the present arrangement strengthens Iran’s regional influence?
Yes.

Will Isis invade Baghdad?
No. (This is just a guess, but I expect that something has been already worked out between the Obama team and the Baathist leaders. If Baghdad was really in danger, Obama would probably be acting with greater earnestness.)

Will Syria and Iraq be partitioned?
Yes.

Is Isis a CIA creation?
No. According to Ziad Fadel, “ISIS is the creation of the one man who played Alqaeda like a yo-yo. Bandar bin Sultan.”

Does Isis take orders from Washington or the CIA?
Probably not, although their actions appear to coincide with US strategic objectives. (which is the point!)

Is Obama’s reluctance to launch an attack on Isis indicate that he wants to diminish Iran’s power in Iraq, redraw the map of the Middle East, and create politically powerless regions run by warlords and tribal leaders?

Yes, yes and yes.

Benedict Obama’s Invasion of America

If millions of soldiers from south of the border were flooding our nation for the purposes of colonizing our land, we would easily recognize the threat. And if some amongst us were aiding and abetting this invasion — purposely lowering border security to facilitate it — we’d know what to call them. And we’d know how they should be dealt with.

This comes to mind when considering the flood of humanity that does continually pour across our border, a phenomenon whose most recent manifestation is the children’s crusade (which includes many teens, some of whom are gang members) currently in the news. Oh, the people trespassing on our land aren’t wearing uniforms; they aren’t wielding cold steel. But this isn’t always necessary. As Muammar Gaddafi once pointed out, some invasions are prosecuted “without sword, without gun, without conquest.” “We don’t need terrorists; we don’t need homicide bombers,” he said. “The 50 plus million Muslims [in Europe] will turn it into the Muslim Continent within a few decades.” Of course, in the waning West, we call this “diversity” and “demographic change.”

And as we’re being diversified into a country definitely not Western via demographic warfare, as we euphemize from sunrise to the sunset of our demise, something is exactly the same as in my opening example:

There are those amongst us aiding and abetting this invasion.

We can start with the fact that Barack Obama and his fellow travelers have sparked this most recent human wave with promises of amnesty for young illegals. Obama has also hobbled immigration enforcement, which itself is a euphemistic way of saying that he has, like a fifth column, cleared the way for an invading force. Adding insult to injury, not only is there no effort at deportation, but his administration’s first response to the children’s crusade was to provide lawyers for the illegals — paid for with your tax money — to help make these reinforcements permanent.

In fact, Obama is so intent on aiding the invasion that he has served notice that if Congress won’t be complicit in his scheme, he will use an executive order to help the foreign boots on the ground.

Question: what do you call such a person?

Of course, this is nothing new. We have had seven amnesties in recent decades, and all the way through there were promises to secure the border. It never happened. Fool me once, shame on you. And if they can fool you seven times?

You’re a doormat.

There’s only one thing foreign boots on the ground do to doormats, mind you — and it isn’t to show respect and gratitude.

It’s obvious why leftists such as Obama have long facilitated immigration: they are importing voters. Upwards of 80 percent of the new arrivals will vote Democrat upon being naturalized. And is this any surprise? Most all illegals — and a majority of legal immigrants — hail from Hispanic nations, which are notoriously socialist (only the degree varies). And people don’t suddenly change ideology just because they change location.

This brings us to Republicans who claim that Hispanics are a “natural conservative constituency” and that all the GOP need do is offer the olive branch of amnesty. Theirs is an imagination that could put Gene Roddenberry to shame.

While Hispanics do generally favor amnesty, the main thing the majority of them want is what they voted for in their socialist homelands: big government. Don’t believe me, Karl? Just consider recent Pew research (hat tip: American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson) showing that only 19 percent of Hispanics favor a smaller government while a whopping 75 percent prefer a bigger one. Of course, assimilation is the answer, right? Take a gander at the rest of the Pew data:

And what does this equate to once Hispanic majority status is reached (along with the leftward drift of non-Hispanic whites)?

• 19- 75 = government of Venezuela
• 36-58 = government of Mexico

In other words, modern immigration = death of America.

And to reiterate, this doesn’t mean just illegal migration. Ever since Ted Kennedy’s immigration act of 1965, 85 percent of our legal immigrants have hailed from the Third World and Asia. So in terms of demographic and ideological change, there is no difference between legal and illegal migration.

Yet it isn’t just Hispanic immigrants. One reason I favor a moratorium on all immigration is that we face a largely socialist world. Where would we find immigrants amenable to authentic Americanism? Europe? China? Africa? The Middle East? The only exception may be Russia, but I wouldn’t want to bet my culture on that, either.

While I’ve framed this ideologically, it can be defined culturally and racially (gasp!), too. And I won’t shrink from this since it is exactly what the left is doing.

There’s an old saying, if you can’t get the people to change the government, change the people. Here’s a simple fact: what we call traditional conservatism is a phenomenon of Christian, European-descent people (modern Europeans no longer qualify because of their secularism). One can debate the reasons for this, but it is plainly true. It’s why almost 90 percent of GOP voters are white and almost 90 percent are Christian; it’s why church attendance is one of the best predictors of voting patterns. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that other groups won’t contain some conservatives, but the fact is that no other major group is majority conservative.

Then there is that uncomfortable truth: Obama and many other leftists hate what they see as “white America”— Obama described white culture as “alien” in his book Dreams from My Father — and they want to destroy it as fast as possible. This is why, while giving the 1998 commencement address at Oregon’s Portland State University, Bill Clinton spoke glowingly of the day when whites become a minority in America (to the uproarious cheers of the mostly white students).

Of course, this is where Obama, Clinton and the rest of the fifth column will say that if you’re not cheering, you’re a bigot.

If the Joneses were somehow gaining access to the Smith’s home, squatting there and slowly taking over while the police refused to enforce trespassing laws, no one would wonder if the Smiths objected. The fact that Joneses aren’t Smiths would be explanation enough. Or let’s say that millions of Chinese were flooding the Ivory Coast, were supplanting African culture and threatening to soon outnumber the Africans. Would we be surprised if the Ivorians were up in arms? Would anthropologists call the transformation anything but cultural genocide?

Again, though, we call this diversity. But there’s a funny thing about that oh-so necessary quality:

It’s only encouraged in Western lands.

If diversity is such an imperative, why don’t we push it in Saudi Arabia, Japan, Tunisia or Rwanda? And don’t tell me we’re just minding our own business, as Obama thought nothing of parading around Africa last year preaching about homosexual rights.

The truth is that when liberals say “Our strength lies in our diversity,” they really mean their strength. They’re building a solid socialist majority that won’t blink at leftist corruption because these new arrivals are inured to it — corruption is status quo in their native lands.

And what else can we say about these migrants? Most are just coming to the US to make money, while some have criminal designs. But what is certain is that even if they were capable of shedding deep-seated socialist instincts, they’re not coming here to become American — in spirit. And they’re casting votes Americans won’t cast.

Back in 2009, a former Labour (Britain’s liberal party) speechwriter created a firestorm by revealing that the UK government had encouraged unfettered immigration “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity.” This prompted The Telegraph’s Ed West to call the leftists’ plan “borderline treason.”

Borderline? I think that’s another border that was brazenly crossed. And does this kind of behavior deserve any less damning a characterization on our side of the pond?

Eye-Witness Syria: (America’s) Barbarians At The Gate

Now that I’m back here in America after personally observing Syria’s recent presidential elections, I’ve been totally amazed at some of the fabrications, gross exaggerations and out-right lies that my country’s mainstream media has come up with regarding these vote results.

“Election fraud in Syria!” the newspapers cry over and over again.  “Assad forces Syrians to vote for him!  The elections were coerced!” plus many many other words to that effect.  And even President Obama jumped on the band wagon — after even he himself has committed election fraud of a sort, having run on a ticket of peace and more jobs and then giving us war and no jobs instead.  To say nothing of when G.W. Bush stole the Florida and Ohio elections.  Twice!

Well. I am here to tell you that what they are saying about the Syrian elections is just so much bull dookie.  And how do I know?  I was there.  In Syria.  They weren’t.  Eye-witness accounts always trump outsourced fabrications.  Hopefully.

And so in the name of setting the record straight, I’ve decided to type up all of my various 50 pages of notes that I took over there in order to show you, step by step, minute by minute, what actually happened over in Syria — to me personally.

This eye-witness account is going to be a long read — but an accurate one.  Some good stuff happened.  And some bad stuff.  And some fun stuff too (fun stuff in a war zone?  Huh?)  But I dare you to read it.  And if you do, I’m sure you will find that it will be just like you came along to Syria with me.

Here is the link.

PS:  How much do you know about America’s new “Army of One”?  It’s just not your father’s Army any more.  Or even your son’s (or your daughter’s).  The new U.S. Army appears to have gone totally mercenary — and its new source of recruits goes way far beyond just hiring some Blackwater guys sporting AK-47s or a Bangladeshi kitchen crew.

Under America’s new rules of war, recruiters don’t have offices on Main Street USA any more.  Instead they have offices in poverty-stricken countries like Chechnya, Afghanistan, Somalia and South Sudan — any godforsaken hell-hole where there is over 50% employment.  “Wanna interesting job with good pay,” American recruiters whisper into future soldiers’ ears.  But the good pay these recruiters are offering is this:  When these new soldiers come home in a box, their families might possibly be given burial expenses.

And, trust me, these new recruits are a whole different breed from your traditional G.I. Joe.  They are angry.  They are far from home.  They have had a grueling hand-to-mouth childhood.  Many of them are wingnut religious fanatics who think that the Bible and the Koran are all about slaughter and vengeance, not compassion and justice.  And they truly do not care who they kill.

And did I already mention that these new recruits work for cheap?  No need for pensions plans or VA hospitals or none of that other slacker stuff for them.  These guys are the ultimate outsourcing/cheap labor Republican wet dream.

Too bad that the neo-Nazi blood-thirsty recruits that Wall Street and War Street have hired in Ukraine are refusing to work as cheaply as the ones that they send to Syria.

However, thanks to this new recruiting policy, no one back home in America whines and bellyaches any more because their sons and daughters have been killed while defending America’s military-industrial complex’s oil either.  This is a win-win situation for American war mongers.  The Bush dynasty and Mr. Cheney must be ecstatic right now.  But Eisenhower must be rolling over in his grave.

In addition, these new fanatical terrorist jihadi wingnut recruits are actually really really good at doing what they have come to love best:  Killing and looting.  They just took over Mosul and Tikrit in Iraq, no small feat.  And they have been driving Syria bananas over the last three years, like so many psychotic bedbugs.  Forget the Marines!  These new recruits are always Semper Fi — to whoever pays them peanuts to behead civilians and rape women.  And Americans like you and me are paying billions to keep these wannabe butchers in the field.

Welcome to the new “Army of One”.

PPS:  Perhaps I may be wrong about all those crazy-eyed jihadis and wingnut foreign fighters earning almost nothing in their American paychecks.  I just read an article about how ISIS (the main jihadi gang of thugs operating in Syria) has pretty much sacked a lot of Syria’s wealth.

Basically ISIS has just swooped in and looted Syria like so many pirates — and now, with American and Saudi help, it is also looting Iraq too.  Let me make one thing clear:  These barbarians do not want to start an Islamic civil society in the Middle East.  They just want to plunder.  “Argh.”

According to Alakbar English, “ISIS currently controls many [oil] fields and is battling for control for more fields still.  According to al-Nusra sources, one oil well south of Raqqa brings in up to $1.3 million per day, while other fields in and around Raqqa like Zamla, al-Tabaqa, and Kuniko bring in $500,000 per day, in addition to unknown revenues from the Jazal and Shaer oil fields, and al-Jafra (oil and gas)

“ISIS also profits from thousands of kidnappings and ransoms involving locals and foreigners, including journalists, as well as robbery and looting, including of archaeological sites and factories.  For example, ISIS seized control of large factories in Aleppo, including the government-owned railway and cables factory, a batteries factory, and a tractor factory.  In some cases, ISIS dismantled and sold their equipment and machinery.  Al-Nusra sources put the resulting revenues at $1 million per month.

“In addition, ISIS has taken control of grains and cotton production in the eastern regions.  For instance, al-Nusra accuses Amer al-Rafdan, one of the most prominent figures in ISIS, of stealing $5 million worth of cotton in Deir al-Zour alone.  Meanwhile, al-Nusra sources say that ISIS has earned more than $25 million from al-Alia grain silos in Al-Hasakah.

“The conflict in Syria has also allowed ISIS to put its hands on a large arsenal of weaponry, consisting of both weapons seized in combat and weapons purchased directly from arms dealers, who are always willing to sell weapons to just about everyone.”

This is just plain scary.  This is just like when the barbarians sacked and burned ancient Rome.  And now the same Middle Eastern jihadi wingnuts who tried to sack and burn Syria have gone on to sack and burn Mosul and Tikrit too (not to mention Benghazi et al.)  And Baghdad is next.

And one election observer I met in Damascus also brought up another good point.  “Something about this advance does not add up.  How could 1,500 fighters hold a town or a province?  How come American satellites did not see this coming?  Major advances like that are not easily done.”  Not unless America and Saudi Arabia are offering up the technology and footing the bill.  Duh.

Wall Street and War Street should be ashamed for supporting these kinds of hoodlums.  And what if they come over here to sack and burn us next?  “Sorry, I plan to be out of town that weekend,” just isn’t gonna wash.  But, oops, too late now.  The FBI has already claimed that Saudi and Chechen barbarians have already been active in Boston and New York.

These pirating wingnuts in ISIS are psychotic.  The American military-industrial complex may think that their pirate crews in the Middle East are controllable — but, guys, this is not Halloween.  You are playing with fire.

Zionists vs. Veterans: American Tragedy

Why do Zionists hate veterans?  That is the question many Americans are asking after witnessing the Israel lobby’s media mugging of released prisoner-of-war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Since 2001, American soldiers have been risking their lives in a crusade whose main beneficiary is the Israeli regime. Nearly 5,000 US troops have been killed in Iraq – almost 4,500 of them since Bush declared “mission accomplished.” Another 4,000 US troops and contractors have died in Afghanistan. An estimated 320,000 veterans have brain injuries, and about 18 commit suicide every day according to Dr. Ira Katz, the VA’s head of Mental Health.

But as the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper admitted, only 0.64 percent of America’s “war on terror” casualties are Jewish Americans. That means that Zionists, the backbone of the Zionist lobby, who represent about 2.5% of America’s population, are massively underrepresented among those doing the bleeding, suffering, and dying in the Zionist-driven War on Islam for Israel.

Meanwhile, hard-core neoconservative Jewish Zionists are massively OVER-represented among the PNAC policy elite that set up the 9/11 “New Pearl Harbor” and launched America’s endless, futile war on the global Muslim population. And they are equally over-represented among big media owners and their pet presstitutes of the punditocracy.

One would think neocon-Zionist media voices would shower honor and gratitude on Sgt. Bergdahl, a good-hearted goy who suffered and sacrificed in a cause that was theirs, not his. Instead, they are showering him with abuse.

Fox News, the unofficial voice of the Netanyahu neocon nutball brigade, recently published the screaming headline: “EXCLUSIVE: Bergdahl declared jihad in captivity, secret documents show.” The story’s author is James Rosen, a Jewish Zionist neocon propagandist. Its source is a proven liar: CIA drug smuggler and convicted perjurer Dwayne “Dewey” Claridge, a notorious asset of the Bush crime family. And its thesis – that Bergdahl “declared jihad” – is an absurdity. (Only a legitimate Islamic head of state can declare jihad.)

Fox – Israel’s stealth beam weapon targeting the American mind – stooped to an even more disgusting low when it began persecuting Sgt. Bergdahl’s family. The rabid Zionist “news channel” ripped Obama for embracing Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents at the White House, and insulted Sgt. Bergdahl’s father for growing a beard and “looking like a member of the Taliban.”

Comedian Jon Stewart responded: “First of all, who the **** are you to judge what a guy does if he thinks it might help him get his son back? And I don’t want to complicate your hatred of facial hair there, friend, but my guess is if you gave Bob Bergdahl a bandana and a duck, you’d like him just-****ing-fine.”

The Islamophobe extremists behind Fox’s Orwellian theater of hate are ranting that Sgt. Bergdahl was a “deserter” and a “collaborator with the enemy.” Why? Because Sgt. Bergdahl, like the majority of Americans, knows that the 9/11 wars were launched on lies…and that the biggest liars were Fox News and the rest of the neocon-infested lamestream media.

It is Fox News and the whole Zio-con “mighty wurlitzer” who are deserters, collaborators, and traitors. By trumpeting the 9/11 big lie, and the endless Islamophobic little lies it spawned, they deserted from the USA to join the worst elements of Israel. They have collaborated in the destruction of the American Constitution.  As I told Sean Hannity on his show on July 10th, 2006, Fox should be taken off the air. I should have added that he and the other Fox traitors should be tried, convicted, and lined up against the wall.

On second thought, humane execution might be too gentle a fate for Hannity, media mouthpiece of 9/11 treason. His latest outrage: On June 3rd Hannity invited a friend of Sgt. Bergdahl on his show and brutally bullied the man for resisting Hannity’s sleazy attempts to label Bergdahl a traitor. No wonder so many people watch Fox News purely for the entertainment value of watching imbeciles like Hannity wallow in filth and degradation.

The day before Hannity’s disgusting attack on Bergdahls friend, Fox brought on one of the most maniacal Zionists in Congress, Sen. John McCain, to bolster its attacks on Obama’s prisoner swap. McCain’s father, Admiral John S. McCain, supervised the coverup of Israel’s slaughter of American sailors in the botched false flag attack on the USS Liberty in 1967. Surviving USS Liberty sailors were informed their families would be murdered if they spoke out about Israel’s deliberate butchery of the crew of the unarmed American spy ship. The man behind those threats was the treasonous Admiral McCain.

Senator John McCain has followed in his traitor father’s footsteps. Shot down in Vietnam, McCain’s enthusiastic cooperation with his North Vietnamese captors earned him the sobriquet “the Hanoi Songbird.” After his release, McCain launched a political career whose distinguishing characteristic has been its service to the Israeli flag and the Zionist crime syndicate behind it. McCain covered up the 9/11 inside job by endorsing and introducing the Popular Mechanics book attacking the truth movement – an act that, by itself, should get him hanged for treason. Senator McCain’s favorite post-9/11 refrain: the Beach Boys karaoke number “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran.”

In his interview with the Fox News anti-Bergdahl witch hunters, McCain incoherently attacked General Martin Dempsey, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who reportedly backed the prisoner swap: “I won’t comment on General Dempsey. The point – because I – he has become irrelevant to me, and the whole scenario of talking about national security.”

Let’s be honest here. McCain doesn’t like General Dempsey because Dempsey is pro-American, while McCain is an agent of Israel. McCain and his AIPAC overlords have been lobbying frantically to drag America ever-deeper into the Middle East quagmire; Dempsey has been quietly but effectively blocking those efforts. McCain and his Zionist godfather, Sheldon Adelson, want to “bomb-bomb Iran,” while Dempsey says the era of US wars for Israel is over.

It is McCain and the rest of the neocon armchair-warriors-for-Israel – not Gen. Dempsey – who are becoming irrelevant.

Obama and Dempsey should have traded McCain for Sgt. Bergdahl. And they should have thrown in Hannity and a few dozen more chicken-hawks from Fox News. Five years in a Taliban compound in Eastern Afghanistan would give these cretins time to reflect on their role as genocide propagandists in service to a foreign power.

America’s veterans are gradually realizing how badly they have been misused by the Zionist architects of the 9/11 wars. They are beginning to see through the toxic smog of Fox News propaganda. More and more are turning to alternative media outlets like VeteransToday.com, the most-read veterans publication in America, which takes no prisoners in its unflinching critique of the Israel lobby’s mendacious and malignant crusade against the Muslim world.

For this growing throng of angry veterans, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is a hero in the mold of Gen. Smedley Butler, America’s all-time greatest military leader. Butler’s book War is a Racket exposed the fact that,  as Michael Rivero puts it, “all wars are bankers’ wars.” Sgt. Bergdahl, like Gen. Butler, has rejected the lying wars and coups of the banksters and Zionists. Like Pat Tillman, Bergdahl rejected a criminal war and paid a price. Now the same forces that assassinated Tillman are performing a character-assassination on Bergdahl.

The media lynching of Sgt. Bergdahl must stop. And if Rupert Murdoch and his genocidal propagandists are not prosecuted soon, America’s patriotic truth-loving veterans may decide to march on Fox News headquarters and give the phrase “media lynching” a new and literal meaning.

KB/NN

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com. More articles by Dr. Barrett

Source: PressTV

Madness, I Tell You: Saber Rattling At West Point

President Barack Obama delivered his most belligerent and menacing speech to date at the US Military Academy at West Point. Aside from the lofty rhetoric we’ve come to expect in every Obama presentation, the president’s commencement address was a defiant restating of the Bush Doctrine of unilateral intervention, executive authority and endless warfare. The speech contained no new initiatives or surprises, but emphasized Obama’s unwavering support for the policies which have plunged large parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Eurasia into civil conflict, economic collapse and war. Obama defended US aggression on the grounds of “American exceptionalism”, the dubious idea that Americans are special and cannot be held to the same standards as others. The theory implies that Washington’s relentless war-mongering and killing of civilians cannot be prosecuted under international law because the US is a law unto itself.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”

Obama’s statement is deliberately misleading. As the president knows, the Bush administration notified U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the US would withdraw from the International Criminal Court Treaty in May 2002 just prior to the invasion of Iraq claiming that the ICC treaty put U.S. service members and officials at risk of prosecution by a court that is “unaccountable to the American people.” In retrospect, we can see that Bush and his lieutenants wanted to remove themselves from any accountability for the atrocities and crimes against humanity they planned to perpetrate in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thus, exceptionalism does not affirm Washington’s willingness to comply with “international norms and the rule of law” as Obama says, but to absolve US leaders from any responsibility for their habitual war-making. As policy analyst Noam Chomsky has said many times, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

Here’s Obama again: “Let me repeat a principle I put forward at the outset of my presidency: The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it… International opinion matters, but America should never ask permission to protect our people, our homeland or our way of life.”

In other words, the United States will do whatever the hell it wants to and if you don’t like it: “Too bad”. This is the Bush Doctrine verbatim. The West Point oration proves that the new administration has simply modified the Bush credo to suit Obama’s pretentious speaking style. Strip out the visionary formulations, the grandiose bloviating, and the sweeping hand gestures and the ideas are virtually identical; unilateralism, preemption, and exceptionalism, the toxic combo that has spurred 13 years of war, occupation, regime change, black sites, extra-judicial assassinations, drone attacks, and hyperbolic state terror most of which has been directed at civilian populations whose only fault is that they occupy regions where vast petroleum reserves have been discovered or which have some fleeting strategic importance to Washington’s war planners. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the World Socialist Web Site titled “Obama’s West Point speech: A prescription for unending war” by Bill Van Auken:

“Obama is not elaborating here a policy of defensive war to be waged only in response to an attack or the threat of an imminent attack. He is spelling out that the US reserves the right to intervene militarily wherever it believes its “core interests”—i.e., the access of its corporations and banks to markets, raw materials, cheap labor and profits—are involved.

When he speaks of “our livelihoods” and “our way of life,” he is referring not to the ever-declining living standards of the American worker, but to the eight-figure compensation packages of American CEOs, whose fortunes are founded on the exploitation of the working populations and resources of the entire planet…

Everything put forward by Obama is a repudiation of international law and an endorsement of the policy of aggressive war practiced by the Nazis three-quarters of a century ago.” (Obama’s West Point speech: A prescription for unending war, Bill Van Auken, WSWS)

Here’s Obama again defending his malignant foreign policy in terms of “leadership”:

“America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.”

Obama finds it easy to praise the people who fight his wars, even while he stealthily carries out a plan to privatize the Veterans Administration. Check out this blurb from an article titled “VA secretary resigns amid push to privatize US veterans’ health care”:

“Obama and members of Congress have responded to the VHA scandal with a breathtaking level of cynicism and hypocrisy, even by Washington standards … according to many lawmakers, the answer to this crisis is not the appropriation of funds to hire new doctors and other medical professionals, but the dismantling of the government program in order to provide a profit windfall to private insurers and health industry firms. The result of this policy will be less care at greater cost to veterans…

Under the “Veterans Choice Plan” being promoted by Rep. Andy Harris (Republican of Maryland), veterans could either choose to continue receiving care through the VHA or go to a private provider of their choosing. In what amounts to a voucher system, the federal government would cover the cost of insurance premiums and some out-of-pocket costs, depending on a veteran’s priority ranking…

The moves to privatize veterans’ health care underscore the hypocrisy of the bipartisan glorification of soldiers and veterans. It also sets a precedent for privatizing Medicare and Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor.” (VA secretary resigns amid push to privatize US veterans’ health care, WSWS)

Is there any doubt that Obama forced General Eric Shinseki to step down so he could start to dismantle the VA? And if Obama cares so much about veterans, then why hasn’t he spoken out before about other veteran-related issues like the epidemic of suicides, rapes, traumatic brain injury or PTSD? Obama’s phony outrage is just a headline-grabbing gimmick to conceal what’s really going on, which is the VA is being handed over to America’s insatiable health care tycoons on a silver platter.

Obama again: “For the foreseeable future, the most direct threat to America, at home and abroad, remains terrorism, but a strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naïve and unsustainable. I believe we must shift our counterterrorism strategy, drawing on the successes and shortcomings of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, to more effectively partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold.”

Obama’s comment absurdly implies that the US has learned from its past mistakes and has fine-tuned the art of counterterrorism so it doesn’t involve the squandering of valuable resources. What a joke. It’s like listening to a Mafia hit-man boast that he ‘s learned how to save money on ammo by strangling his victims with his bare hands. This is also a good example of how the Dems think they’re more effective (and discreet) in executing the elitist/corporate agenda than their rivals in the GOP. As if that was the purpose of the party!

Obama also made a few perfunctory remarks about closing Guantanamo, ending indefinite detention and taking steps to address climate change. But clearly these had nothing to do with the main thrust of the speech which was to announce his intention to expand the wars abroad. Citing hotspots in Syria, Ukraine and the South China Sea, Obama promised to “lead” with the military, asserting, by implication, dominion over these regions where the US claims to have “national interests”. Obama is as committed as his predecessor, Bush, to rule by force of arms even though his current adversaries (Russia and China) are not ragtag militias in sandals, but nuclear-armed nation-states who could level the better part of the planet with a flip of the switch. Even so, Obama is determined to pursue the same provocative strategy whatever the risks increasing the probability of a miscalculation that ends in a mushroom cloud.

It’s madness.

Tyranny And Confusion

The World Has Lost Understanding…

“We regard killing on United Nations ‘peace-keeping-missions’ as ‘necessary’ and to be accepted as a fact of life.  At the same time, our murderous century views with horror God’s law.  God has no right, they hold, to require judgment.  Modern theology believes God should represent love and ‘niceness,’ never justice and judgment.  Humanistic sentiment wants evil-doers to be dealt with gently.  As a result, we have a culture which tolerates criminals, hoodlums, and exploiters of welfare who believe that they have a ‘right’ to pursue their evil ways.  Men are intolerant towards the claims of God and tolerant towards evil.”  R. J. Rushdoony, “Deuteronomy” Pg. 205

Ninety nine percent of the world’s population is controlled by a small group of elite oligarchs that compose less than one percent its inhabitants.

Tiny, high flying aircraft cover the sky with mysterious trails that expand into long, thin, vaporous clouds which are even more mysteriously ignore by the people, the media, and the government – no one seems to know who sponsors the flights, what they are spraying or why they are spraying it..  When it started, those that noticed were called “conspiracy theorists” so comments on the beginning of the spraying were quickly squelched.  Now everyone sees the mysterious chemtrails but no one challenges them.

The price of gasoline has followed a similar pattern.  When gas went to $3.00 a gallon there was a considerable outcry but now that it is approaching $4.00 a gallon no one is complaining.

When rumors of the intended overlay of the laws of the world’s nations with world government there was lots of consternation but now that it was begun in earnest during the Twenty-First Century it is quickly progressing with little resistance.

When President Clinton’s Administration was responsible for the deaths of over 80 innocent men, women, and children at the Koresh Compound in Waco, Texas and no one was held responsible it set the stage for what happened under the administrations of President Bush and President Obama; Executive Orders have virtually abolished the Bill of Rights setting in place the structure for a police state far worse than in Russia or Germany..

There was lots of publicity when President George W. Bush’s mendacity led us into war in Iraq.  But now that our armed assault in the Middle East has gone on for over ten years and amassed debt in the trillion dollar range people are disgruntled but are seemingly unaware that debt is an obligation and eventually the citizens of the United States will be forced to pay it.

Hundreds of thousands of nominal, naïve Christians have spent the last several decades trying to defy the Word of God by predicting the Second Coming of Christ.  It has not happened.  A lessor number of those who acknowledged the Conspiracy have been predicting a national catastrophe for several decades. That has not happened.

People know that the world is being drastically changed.  They know that the governments of the individual nations are involved in ominous events that are happening on a daily basis.  They are beginning to realize that governments are part of the problem and therefore cannot become part of the solution.

While the closely controlled media censors the news so that nothing about the dangers to our freedom is leaked to the public the internet has innumerable speculative and prophetic articles that contain kernels of truth but are tragically surrounded by borders of speculation.

We know that the threat to our freedom is real but like the chemtrails we do not know who is giving the orders or when a particular event will occur.

There is very little that can be done about the clouds of tyranny that are falling over us.  The gun packing patriots that flocked to the Bundy Ranch can resist the government but they are fighting against a far superior force that is fully prepared to overcome such resistance.

The American people do not vote on pernicious legislation. The men and women they elect pass these bills even though they often failed to read them.  Major legislation like NAFTA and GATT passed with unknown content.  This procedure allows the veiled authors of inimical legislation to rule the nation as invisible kings.

Our nation has been infused with immigrants who know little or nothing about our culture and are intent on accumulating as much money and power as possible.  Already defiled by the destruction of voter qualifications our electoral system has been destroyed by allowing the wisdom of informed, long term citizens to be destroyed by the ballot of stupid voters and recent immigrants.  The hope that participation the political process will bring us peace and freedom is futile.

C-Span recently hosted a consortium of female power brokers who discussed what could be done about sexual harassment in the armed services.  This group of very smart women never touched on the fact that men were created with a desire to have sex with women and women were designed to succumb.  Instead, they spent the entire house discussing how they could force men and women into close proximity and then force them to control their desires.  They never considered the fact that forcing different sexes to live together and remain chaste is like setting a building on fire and hoping is doesn’t burn.

Fantasy has overtaken our world.  Someone on the internet wondered if chemtrails were real!  The entire government has accepted as fact that our nation is threatened and must sacrifice freedom for safety.  They assume that the attack on the world trade center was perpetrated by Muslim enemies and ignore the sizeable block of evidence that it was a false flag.  Everyone seems to believe that Blacks and Jews are oppressed races and must be protected by sacrificing our right to free speech.  Large segments of our population support our troops and the killing and maiming of innocent people a product of U.S. imperialism.

“In the 21st century it is difficult to find a significant statement made by Washington that is not a lie. Obamacare is a lie. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is a lie. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is a lie. Iranian nukes are a lie. Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea is a lie. No fly zones are a lie. Russian aggression against Georgia is a lie. 9/11, the basis for Washington’s destruction of civil liberty and illegal military attacks, is itself a lie. The fantastic story that a few Saudi Arabians without government or intelligence agency backing outwitted the entire national security apparatus of the Western world is unbelievable. It is simply not credible that every institution of the national security state simultaneously failed. That Washington would tell such a fantastic lie shows that Washington has no respect for the intelligence of the American people and no respect for the integrity of the American media. It shows also that Washington has no respect for the intelligence and integrity of its European and Asian allies. Paul Craig Roberts, ”Gangster State America”

Read Robert’s article on the coming nuclear war.

When serious problems are evaded they fester and create bigger problems.  Peace is jeopardized when reality is ignored.  Blacks and Whites cannot live together when bad Black behavior is ignored or erroneously blamed on Whites.  We cannot have peace when the controlled press fails to publish black crime against White citizens and allows denigration of White citizens by both Blacks and Jews; sooner or later this persistent inequity will cause problems.

It would be hard to find another nation that showcases the tragedy of allowing humanist government to erase immutable Law than the United States of America.  Mutable human opinion has reduced the social, legal, and governmental factions of our nation to an absurd jumble of cognitive dissonances that are impervious to order.

Human beings are not gods and their governments are not sovereign.  We live in a created world that is controlled by an Entity Who requires our obeisance.  We were created to live in that world and to obey that Deity, the One True God.  Confusion and tyranny are often results of our disobedience and signs of God’s judgment.  It is time the Christian Church acknowledges the fact the God is indeed still on His Throne and is the Sovereign ruler to this fast deteriorating world.

“It is not lonely man but all the nations that have fallen prey to original sin, to the desire to be as God (Gen. 3:5).   Each makes itself its own source of law, a clear usurpation of God’s prerogative.  Each seeks to limit or prohibit the freedom of God’s Word.  The nations without exception claim sovereignty, a plain assertion of their own lordship or deity.  Every nation is and has been a religious entity.  Moreover, the nations, as they now exist and function, are members of the fallen world of Adam and fanatic advocates of Adam’s faith and rebellion.” R. J. Rushdoony. “Systematic Theology” Vol.1, Pg. 234

Crime Pays And The American Gulag

Ever wonder why nobody (except Kareem Serageldin) went to jail for all the crimes committed during the financial bubble that popped in 2008?

If you think back to the 2000-era bubble, lots of people went to jail for the fraud perpetuated at Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, and other firms. Plus, the law back then destroyed a whole accounting firm — Arthur Andersen, you may remember — and 28,000 jobs along with it, in the wake of the bust.

Yet post-2000, firms with far more brazen crimes got off by paying a mere fine.

Take HSBC.

Its U.S. subsidiary committed, as Taibbi writes, “an astonishing list of crimes — a laundry list that included pretty much every kind of crime a bank can possibly be charged with.”

Such as:

• Laundering billions of dollars for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia
• Washing money for terrorist-connected organizations in the Middle East
• Allowing “rogue states” under formal sanctions by the U.S. to move billions freely through the bank
• Helping Russian mobsters wash money under an elaborate traveler’s check scheme
• Etc.

And what was the penalty for all this?

$1.9 billion.

At the time, it was the biggest fine in history. But in context, for a firm that made $22 billion per year, it was not much at all. In fact, looked at in a cold calculating light, the message clearly is: Crime pays.

Note there was no jail time for anybody. Everybody at HSBC got paid. Well, HSBC agreed to partially — partially, mind you – defer (!) bonus payments to its top executives.

Oh, and HSBC had to say it was sorry. “We are profoundly sorry,” said CEO Stuart Gulliver.

But how did we get here?

Matt Taibbi explores the reasons in his book The Divide. Taibbi used to write for Rolling Stone. He was the guy who famously called Goldman Sachs a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” (I wish I had written that line.)

He’s a very good investigative reporter and a fine writer. He’s mellowed out a bit in this book and you won’t find much of the usual Taibbi name-calling and profanity. Taibbi, for good or ill, plays this one straight.

He covers a lot of ground, but the central thesis is one most people will intuitively grasp: If you are rich and powerful, you can get away with almost anything. Rights exist on a sliding scale. And if you are on the bottom, you can do time for loitering.

Taibbi writes:

“The cleaving of the country into two completely different states — one a small archipelago of hyper acquisitive untouchables, the other a vast ghetto of expendables with only theoretical rights — has been in the works a long time.”

But to answer the question posed up top about why nobody’s going to jail, there’s more to the story. You have to go back to a memo written by Eric Holder, the current attorney general, back in 1999, when he was an official in the Clinton White House.

He articulated a concept called “collateral consequences.”

It meant, in essence, that the government could take into account all kinds of factors like job losses and such in deciding whether to press criminal charges against a big company. “If the math isn’t there,” Taibbi writes summing things up, “hold the charges. Seek other forms of justice instead. Fines. Civil sanctions. Cease and desist orders. Deferred prosecutions. There are other ways, Holder wrote, to get the job done.”

In other words, there would never be another Arthur Andersen. Firms had new ways to wiggle out of criminal charges. Hence, we have the monster we have today. Companies too big to jail.

Meanwhile, in other aspects of life, a culture approximating a police state grows apace. Taibbi points to the record levels of incarcerations in the U.S. “Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization,” Taibbi writes. The U.S. has more people behind bars today “than there were at any time in Stalin’s gulags.”

The story here is nasty. He tells the story of private prisons, such as those of Corrections Corp. of America. They get, “depending on whom you believe,” upward of $166 per day from the federal government per inmate. This is four times what it cost back when the government took care of its own detainees.

“The big influx of cash impressed investors on Wall Street,” Taibbi writes. From 2000-2011, CCA’s stock went up 34-fold. Sales went from $300 million to $1.7 billion by 2011. “Overall, the corrections industry is one of the soundest stock/equity bets in the world, with soaring revenues — the industry as a whole pulled in more than $5 billion in America in 2011.”

Needless to say, that didn’t just happen. CCA and others donate generously to politicians. They support anything that might lead to more people spending time in their cells. They particularly like anti-immigrant bills. And Taibbi has harrowing tales about the mistreatment of immigrants in this country. He calls Hispanic immigrants “one of America’s last great cash crops.”

“And someone else wins, too,” Taibbi writes. “Wall Street. Some of the biggest investors in private prison companies are, you guessed it, the too-big-to-fail banks.”

Taibbi writes about an analysis from Zacks that gleefully revels in the lack of economic sensitivity in the business. And then cites a chart with shows a hockey stick increase in the number of incarcerated Americans.

So the country is turning more and more into a dragnet… but only for the poorest. There is no HSBC banker sitting in a CCA cell. It is symbolic of the kind of economy we have today:

“Like too-big-to-fail banking itself, private prisons are an industry that depends not on the unpredictable economy but upon political connections. It’s the perfect kind of business in the oligarchical capitalism age, with guaranteed profits to provide a low-cost public insurance against the vagaries of the market.”

The economy is riddled with corruption like this, a marriage between big business and Big Government. And a recurring theme in this book is the offspring this marriage creates: a relentless, insatiable bureaucratic force that grinds up individuals fed into its maw.

“These bureaucracies accomplish just two things,” Taibbi writes. “They make small piles of money smaller and big piles of money bigger… It just relentlessly creates and punishes losers, who get to sit beneath an ever-narrowing group of winners, who may or may not stay on top for long.”

Legal rights are not absolute. Those with money who can tirelessly throw lawyers and lawsuits and counterlawsuits at any problem can survive almost anything. For the rest, it’s a matter of attrition. And those at the bottom have no chance.

I can’t do justice to all the journalistic fieldwork and stories Taibbi has put in his 416-page book. It is a gripping read and will infuriate you and frighten you, and maybe even make you sad for what’s happened to the “Land of the Free.”

The book does not have a happy ending. The good guys don’t win in the end. But I encourage you give it a read. What it describes is life in these United States. Those of us who cherish liberty have quite a job ahead of us.

Sincerely,

Chris Mayer

Chris Mayer studied finance at the University of Maryland, graduating magna cum laude. He went on to earn his MBA while embarking on a decade-long career in corporate banking. Chris is the editor of Capital and Crisis and Mayer’s Special Situations, a monthly report that unearths unique and unconventional opportunities in smaller-cap stocks. In 2008, Chris authored Invest Like a Dealmaker: Secrets From a Former Banking Insider.

Source: Laissez Faire

Syrians Working To Preserve Jewish Cultural Heritage

Jewish Quarter, the Old City, Damascus…

It’s always encouraging when one comes upon some inspiring human enterprise, here in Syria or elsewhere, that refutes the worn shibboleths and clichés about how this or that group, or this or that religion, hates others and won’t cease targeting them until they are destroyed and burning in Hell.

In Syria today there is much evidence to refute the claims, often politically motivated, that Jewish cultural heritage sites are being singled out for destruction by rabid anti-Semites. One example of this is the Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue in the neighborhood of Jobar, on the outskirts of Damascus. For centuries, Jobar has been inhabited by a peaceful, mixed community of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, many of whom often attended events together at the synagogue.

Reports this week in Zionist media about the destruction of the 400-year-old (not 2000-year-old, as claimed, erroneously, by one report in Israeli media) synagogue, along with the loss of all its contents, are similar to reports over the past three years which turned out to be patently false. This observer has been waiting for clearance to visit the site, to learn exactly what happened there this week, to assess its current condition and inventory its religious artifacts, which comprise part of Syria’s, and humanity’s, collective heritage.

One of the more virulent charges to come forth this week, particularly from the colonial Zionist regime occupying Palestine, is the mantra of ‘see what the hatred of those Arabs for the Jewish people has done.’ Admittedly it’s an effective fund-raising mechanism—as well as a handy intimidation tool—for the Zionist lobby, as it scrabbles to retain control of the US government and American public sentiment, a public which seems to be growing increasingly vexed by the lobby’s actions and which are finally pulling back from rubber-stamping the crimes of the apartheid regime.

Jobar is a suburb of Damascus, and location-wise the Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue (measuring approximately 17 meters long by 15.7 meters wide) sits undeniably at a crossroads, in an area that has been occupied by rebel forces since the beginning of the Syrian conflict—which means it was sure to get damaged. With each shelling of the district over the past three years, claims were made that the synagogue had been destroyed by government forces. One such report, published on April fool’s day in 2013 by the Times of Israel and widely circulated by Zionist media outlets, claimed that, “The 2,000-year-old Jobar Synagogue in the Syrian capital of Damascus—the country’s holiest Jewish site—was looted and burned to the ground by government forces.” The report was patently false but got spread far and wide, despite the fact that there have been no government forces in Jobar since the conflict began. Two copy-cat reports followed later in 2013, but they were equally false. Nearly a year later, however, in March of 2014, media reports conceded that the synagogue was still standing, with only minor damage, and that its contents appeared to be in good condition.

This observer has received credible reports about certain stolen artifacts, including gold chandeliers, from the Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue being offered for sale. It is well known in Syria that certain militia and other opportunists have been financing themselves by selling this country’s cultural heritage whenever and wherever they get the opportunity. There is in fact a multi-million-dollar black market in this type of illicit trade. Security agencies in Syria, in coordination with INTERPOL, have been alerted to the thefts of Jewish property, just as with thefts of other antiquities, and they periodically issue what are referred to as “watch for and confiscate” lists of stolen artifacts.

It is not true…based upon this observer’s many personal experiences in Syria…that Arabs hate Jews, although they would have plenty of reasons to, or that animosities between the two peoples are irreversible and irretrievable, and the reason I say this is that increasingly, in the Middle East as well as globally, people are beginning to distinguish between Jews as individuals (as “people of the book” and basically more or less like the rest of us) and fascist Zionism—an ideology being exposed as the greatest enemy and threat to Jews everywhere.

The latest, but so far unverified, information received by this observer from rebel sources claiming to have “contacts” in the Jobar Synagogue indicate that some early 20^th century artifacts, including gold chandeliers and icons, were stolen early on in the conflict, and also that the area surrounding the synagogue has been shelled sporadically over the past nearly two years, resulting in modest damage to the exterior walls. This information was obtained as of last month. Conditions may well have changed this week. Other Syrian sources indicate that there has been interior damage with some scattered rubble in the nave and prayer rooms of the temple. But there has been no confirmation to claims of thousands of manuscripts, including Bibles, being looted from Jobar. On the contrary, many documents, including Bibles and other artifacts, were transferred by the local Jobar Council, with the full cooperation of the Syrian government, to an Ottoman-era synagogue in the Old City of Damascus for safe keeping. The location, which this observer has visited and where many Jobar Synagogue artifacts are today in storage, is one of six areas in Syria currently listed on the World Heritage List of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The site currently has round-the-clock government security that continues to guard the Old City of Damascus. It is also one of the 11 synagogues that President Assad had promised in 2011 to repair and restore, but alas that’s a project that the rebellion has put on hold.

In light of all the unverified claims about the synagogue in Jobar, one is reminded again of the decade-long US/UK War against Iraq and the false reporting about what happened at certain archaeological sites in that country. Specifically we might recall the Iraqi Jewish artifacts that Ahmad Chalabi claimed he was able to ‘rescue’ for the Coalition Provisional Authority. Chalabi, of the ill-fated Iraqi National Congress, along with the Bush administration’s Coalition Provisional Authority, sought to gain some much needed good press for himself and pals Richard Perle, Nathan Sharansky, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, this after April 2003 reports of thousands of priceless ancient artifacts being looted from Iraqi museums. The war planners were being castigated for their failure to protect Iraq’s cultural treasures, and it soon became clear that some of Chalabi’s pronouncements regarding the fate of Jewish artifacts were false and politically self-serving. Discredited, Chalabi’s party did not win any seats in the December 2005 election.

Some suspect similar political grandstanding motives in the current reports about Jobar, and it may be a while before credible eyewitness accounts from the scene are gathered. At that point we will we know the truth about the fate of the Eliyahu Hanabi Synagogue and the whole of Jobar. A delegation, including a Jewish representative from Damascus as well as this observer, has been trying to visit the area, but armed conflict and the continued occupation of the synagogue by rebels has prevented us so far from gaining entry.

What’s important to note, though, is that the people of Syria and their government have made herculean efforts to avoid what happened in Iraq, and to assure the preservation of their global cultural heritage, of which Jewish antiquities is an important pillar. One example of these efforts is the fascinating case of the Dura-Europos Synagogue, discovered in 1932.

The synagogue in Dura Europos had survived in such good condition because of its location, near a small Roman garrison on the Euphrates River. Parts of the building, which abutted the main city wall, were requisitioned by the Roman army and filled with sand as a defensive measure against northern and eastern marauders. The city was abandoned after Rome’s fall, never to be resettled, and the lower walls of the rooms remained buried and largely intact until excavated. The archaeological dig discovered many Jewish wall-paintings and also Christian texts written in Hebrew. Especially interesting perhaps was the discovery of paintings in the synagogue depicting limited aspects of Mithraism, a religion practiced in the Roman Empire between the first and 4^th centuries and that was especially popular within the ranks of the Roman legions. Named for the Persian god Mithra, many Syrians followed the cult, as did some Roman senators who resisted the ‘new’ Christianity.

Itemized in the list below are specific Jewish-Syrian antiquities, including Old-Testament-themed paintings, this observer has verified as being under protection. Keep in mind, these are only a few examples, among many thousands, that I have been advised appear to be in excellent condition as of late May 2014:

• The Torah niche from the ancient Synagogue of Dura Europos on which are drawings of the Prophet Abraham, including the scene of his offering his son. Also beside them a drawing of the candle stick and the temple façade.
• A drawing featuring the Prophet Ezra reading a papyrus, Prophet Moses in the flames of boxthorn, the Ark of the Covenant in the hands of Philistines, and David anointed as a king by Samuel.
• A number of paintings with themes from the Old Testament
• A drawing of the pharaoh and Moses as a child, and a beautiful painting of Abraham between the two symbols of the sun and the moon.
• A drawing representing the story of Mordechai and Esther and Elijah bringing life back to a baby.

Despite the current and legitimate focus on Jobar, the record of the Syrian people on preserving their cultural heritage, especially during the current crisis, is admirable. Two weeks ago this observer visited the old city of Homs, and spent a fair bit of time at the Um Al-Zenar Church of Saint Mary, Church of the Holy Belt, which dates from 52 AD. Tradition has it that this seat of the Syriac Orthodox archbishopric contains a venerated relic, and indeed the Bishop spoke to me about it one day as he shoveled rubble from around the altar. The relic is claimed to be a section of the belt of St. Mary, the mother of Jesus, and is said to be hidden near a below-ground spring. One arrives at the spring by walking down a long, very narrow, pitch black set of stone steps. The Holy Water that can be found there, a small pond in essence, is filled with fragments of stone and wood chunks from the fighting, yet supposedly this water has curative powers. I scooped up a couple of handfuls, and it was indeed very refreshing, but did nothing, so far, to cure my leg problem.

Be that as it may, this observer was struck by the number of parishioners, along with volunteers from the neighborhood, mostly Muslims, covered in dust and soot as they worked at cleaning out the rubble. In the courtyard in front of the church this observer stoked a still smoldering heap of burned bibles and other church documents and icons which I was told rebels had torched as they prepared to vacate the compound earlier this month. Two days after I departed Homs, the Um Al-Zenar Church, though a partially burned out shell devoid of pews and religious artifacts, held its first Holy Communion since the conflict began.

From my experience, Syrians, without exception, are deeply connected with their cultural heritage and do not distinguish all that much among its origins. Many Syrians are proud to help others protect and rebuild their damaged religious and cultural sites, and in fact it seems to be a unifying factor among this besieged population. People this observer speaks with as he travels around Syria to visit archeological sites seem to blame both sides for the damage, but they tend to focus more on the task of restoring their heritage sites. Space does not allow me to enumerate the countless examples of this, but I will mention one.

This observer was served tea one day by some members of the Jewish community in the old City of Damascus, including my friend Saul, who claims to be the last Jewish tailor in Syria, as well as the lovely elderly ladies known as ‘the Jewish sisters’ and whose apartment is near where St. Paul, according to tradition, converted to Christianity. The view expressed by my hosts that day—and I believe them—is that Jewish cultural heritage in Syria is being respected, protected and preserved with the same care as Muslim, Christian, and pagan antiquities.

Christians’ Love of The Warfare State Is Killing Other Christians

When Will Evangelical Christians Start To See Through This Charade?

Ever since the George W. Bush administration, evangelical pastors and churches have been America’s loudest cheerleaders for virtually every act of war the U.S. has waged against foreign countries. For pastors such as John Hagee, wars of aggression in the Middle East are predicated upon the notion of protecting Israel–even though military meddling by the United States has only served to make life more dangerous for Israel. But leaving Israel out of the equation, evangelicals are the first to trumpet U.S. wars of aggression. I would even suggest that the favorite hymn of most evangelical churches these days is no longer John Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” but John McCain’s “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

I would go even further to say that evangelical churches have become the very best friend that the military/industrial complex has ever had. It is congressmen and senators from districts and states heavily-laden with evangelical churches that continue to pump unlimited tax-dollars into the Warfare State. One could even make the argument that in most evangelical churches, Jesus’ adage “Blessed are the peacemakers” has been changed to “Blessed are the warmongers.”

Let’s set the record straight: perpetual war is a tool of elitists and globalists to enslave the U.S. citizenry. While we are killing thousands of people abroad (most of whom are innocents)–all in the name of “liberating” them–we are tightening the tyrannical noose around the necks of the American people. In the name of the “War on Terror,” the most sophisticated surveillance society in the history of mankind has been created right here in the continental United States. With the advent of the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under G.W. Bush, Washington, D.C., has constructed (and is continuing to construct) a burgeoning police state the likes of which Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Adolf Hitler could have only dreamed about. And for the most part, evangelicals are fine with it.

But what is really happening in those countries that these endless wars are supposedly “liberating?” And specifically, what is happening to the thousands and millions of Christians within those countries after having been “liberated” by Uncle Sam? After all, America’s evangelical churches of every denomination spend millions of dollars every year sending missionaries around the globe to evangelize folks. How many missionary slides have we seen? How many passionate, tearful sermons have we heard imploring us to get a burden for missions? One of the most sacred elements of any Christian church is its missions program.

So, on the one hand, evangelicals are weeping, praying, and giving millions of dollars to make Christians out of the peoples of the world and on the other hand, they are leading the charge for America’s efforts to rain death and destruction down upon those same people.

Aside from the utter inconsistency of the above, what are all of these endless wars accomplishing for the Christians who live inside the countries that we are “liberating?” What is all of these Christian-endorsed wars doing to the people of God around the world? The answer will shock most believers.

According to an Infowars.com report, “In areas where we spent hundreds of billions of dollars and where thousands of precious American lives were sacrificed, churches are regularly being bombed, Christians are being brutally beheaded, and laws have been passed to make it illegal for a Muslim to convert to Christianity.  If we were not even able to provide the most basic of liberties and freedoms to the people living in those nations, what in the world did we actually accomplish by ‘liberating’ them?

“Just look at what has happened in Afghanistan.  We have been at war in Afghanistan for more than a dozen years, and yet things are so bad for Christians in that country at this point that there is not a single church left . . .”

The report goes on to say, “We find a similar story in Iraq. It is estimated that before the invasion, there were up to 2 million Christians living in Iraq. Now that number is down to less than 450,000, and it is falling fast.

“In fact, things are so dire for Iraq’s Christian community that some Iraqi Christian leaders are warning that Christians may soon become ‘extinct’ in that nation…”

The report continues, “In Syria, the Obama administration is shamelessly allying with radical al-Qaeda jihadists in a desperate attempt to overthrow the Assad regime.

“As these jihadists torture, behead and even crucify Christian believers, the mainstream media in the United States is virtually silent about it.

“Why is the media being so quiet?

“Well, because exposing what is going on would make the Obama administration look bad.

Those carrying out this persecution of Christians in Syria are being directly funded and aided by the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia.”

See the report at:

The same could be said for Christians in the country of Libya.

But remember that these wars of aggression began in earnest under the “Christian” George W. Bush administration and have been ongoing throughout the Barack Obama administration. In fact, Obama’s continuation of the Bush preemptive war policy is the one thing about the Obama administration that most evangelical Christians actually support.

And please understand that what has happened to Christians in Middle Eastern countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has happened in every other country that U.S. government has chosen to pressure–either by military intervention or economic sanction–including Nigeria and The Sudan.

A report in National Review Online states, “Prominent indicators confirm that the U.S. is the chief facilitator of the persecution of Christians around the world today.

“According to the recently released 2014 World Watch List, which ranks the 50 nations where Christians are most persecuted, Syria is the third worst nation in the world in which to be Christian, Iraq is fourth, Afghanistan fifth, and Libya 13th. All four countries receive the strongest designation, ‘extreme persecution’ (other designations are ‘severe,’ ‘moderate,’ and ‘sparse’ persecution).

“Aside from being so closely and harshly ranked, these four nations have something else in common: heavy U.S. involvement. Three–Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya–were ‘liberated’ thanks to U.S. forces, while in the fourth, Syria, the U.S. is actively sponsoring ‘freedom fighters’ against the regime, many of whom would be better labeled ‘terrorists.’”

The author of this report, Raymond Ibrahim, concludes by saying, “I am often asked, ‘How can we help persecuted Christians?’ At this point, one must respond: ‘How about starting with getting the U.S. government to stop being the chief facilitator of Christian persecution?’ Altruism aside, it would be in the interests of all freedom-loving people–and especially their descendants.”

See the report at:

I wonder what the vast majority of evangelical Christians would think if they realized that their support for all of these preemptive wars around the world–especially in the Middle East–are actually the major cause of much of the persecutions against their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. I shudder to think what America’s Christians will say to their fellow-believers in Heaven who were savagely martyred due to the wars of aggression that they, America’s Christians, so enthusiastically supported.

America’s Warfare State, complete with the military/industrial complex, is facilitating the most egregious persecution of Christians since the days of Stalin, Hitler, and Chairman Mao and is turning the land of the free into a giant police state. When will the American people start to see through this charade? When will America’s pastors and Christians start to see through this charade?

If America’s evangelical pastors and churches would end their constant support for all of these foreign wars, if they would recognize the danger–globally and domestically–that the military/industrial complex poses, and if they would start putting the interests of this country above their parochial preoccupations with favored foreign states and personal eschatological opinions and interpretations, the Warfare State would collapse.

The Church has always been the compass of the country; and right now, the compass is broken, and the ship of state is way off course.

The Basis of Mass Mind Control

“Aliens visiting Earth would report back to their superiors: ‘It’s quite amazing, those people worship images. They know it and they pretend not to know it.’” — Hypnotherapist Jack True.

This is a backgrounder for my mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, which contains many exercises designed to liberate an individual from the standardized perception of reality—and usher in his own creative reality.

Mass mind control focuses on two elements: image and feeling.

By linking the two primary elements, it is possible to short-circuit thought and “cut to the chase,” when it comes to enlisting the allegiance of huge populations.

Two seemingly unrelated events spurred my interest in mass mind control.

On the evening of April 12, 1945, I listened to a radio report on the death of Franklin D Roosevelt. I was seven years old.

I became upset. I didn’t know why. I was angry at my own reaction.

Forty years later, I pulled into a gas station near my apartment in West Los Angeles. I got out of my car and took the cap off my gas tank. I looked to my right and saw Tony Curtis sitting in his car. I was shocked.

A few days later, I began making notes under the heading of “image-emotion cues.” At the time, I was working as a reporter, writing articles for LA Weekly. I knew next to nothing about mind control, MKULTRA, Soviet psychiatric gulags, Chinese re-education programs, or US psychological warfare operations.

But because I had been painting for 25 years, I knew something about the power of images.

I remembered my first exhibition of paintings in LA, at my friend Hadidjah Lamas’ house. We had hung my work in her large living room and dining room. Hadidjah had enlisted the services of a friend who had videotaped me painting in my studio, and at the exhibition she set up a television set out on her patio and continuously played the videocassette.

People came through her front door, almost automatically walked through the house to the patio, as if guided by an unseen hand, and watched the video; then they came back inside and looked at the paintings.

They would stop at a painting and say: “That picture was in the video!” It excited them.

My first note on “image-emotion cues” was, “Investing an image with importance. Projecting emotion into an image.”

Projecting emotion into a newspaper image of the president, FDR. Projecting emotion into the screen image of Tony Curtis. Projecting emotion into a video of a painter working in his studio.

When people encounter an image, when they invest it with importance, they project feeling into the image—and this all happens in a private sphere, a private space.

If this didn’t happen, there would be no way to control populations through images. It wouldn’t work. It all starts with a person setting up his own personal feedback loop that travels from him to an image and back again.

Coming out of World War 2, US psychological warfare operatives knew they could turn their skills to political purposes. They had just succeeded in making Americans believe that all Japanese and German people were horribly evil. They had been able to manipulate imagery successfully in that area. Why couldn’t they shape America’s view of a whole planet that lay beyond personal experience?

They could and they did. But the power to do that emanated from the fact that every person invests images with feeling. That’s where it really starts.

I had seen the 1957 film, Sweet Smell of Success, a number of times. I admired it. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis gave tremendous performances. When, decades later, I saw Curtis sitting in his car at that gas station, I was “working from” the emotion I had invested in his onscreen image. It produced a sense of shock and paralysis for a few seconds.

Other people might have rushed up to Curtis and asked for his autograph. With me, it was shock, cognitive dissonance. Ditto for the death of FDR. I was working off newspaper pictures I’d seen of him, and the feeling I’d invested in those presidential images. Other people, when FDR died, went out into the street and hugged their neighbors and wept openly. For me, it was upset and shock and anger.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with investing emotion in images. It can be exhilarating. It can be uplifting. As a painter, I know this in spades. Putting emotion into images can, in fact, vault you into a different perception of reality.

But on the downside, it can also take you into lockstep with what media/propaganda operatives want you to experience, second-hand.

We focus to such a degree on how we are being manipulated that we don’t stop to consider how we are participating in the operation. And our own role is clear and stark: we invest images with feeling.

So how does one individual’s projection of feeling into an image become a uniform projection of the same feeling into one image, by millions of people? How does what one person invests privately become mass mind control?

Through external instruction or cues. And also, by engendering the idea that there is only a limited palette of emotions to work with in the first place.

Why do millions of people fall into line?

Because they don’t realize they started the whole ball rolling themselves. All they know is: images are connected to feelings.

If they knew they were the real power in the whole operation, if they knew they were investing feelings into images all day long, if they could actually slow down enough to see how they do this….then they would be far less prone to taking instruction about what feelings they “ought to” invest in second-hand images.

Hypnotherapist Jack True unceremoniously put it to me this way: “If a dog could analyze how he got from eating meat to drooling at the sound of a bell that came at feeding time, he could stop drooling.”

(If Chris Matthews could analyze how his own voluntary investment of feeling in the image of Barack Obama sends a tingle up his leg, he could stop tingling.)

We see images of people rioting all over the Middle East. We see burning flags and crowds outside embassies. We’re supposed to invest our own anger and resentment into those images. Unless we’re suddenly told those rioters are actually “the good rebels,” in which case we’re supposed to invest our joy in the images.

We see a picture of miles of flat farmland and (GMO) corn waving in the breeze. We’re supposed to invest that image with feelings of happiness and pride.

Nowhere are we told we can back up a step and realize that we are the ones who begin the whole process, by projecting feelings into images. Any images.

When I was 19, I was sent to a trained expert in New York to take a Rorschach (ink-blot) Test. I was displaying signs of what would now be called Oppositional Defiance Disorder.

The expert said he wanted me to tell him everything I saw in each ink-blot. I took him at his word.

An hour later, I was still working on the first blot. I was describing everything from bats and owls and chickens to space ships and buckets of hidden treasure in caves.

Well, I was cheating a little. I wasn’t really describing what I saw. I was imagining. I was taking off from what was on the page and improvising. This was outside the bounds of the Test.

The expert was seething. He was sweating, because he had many other blots to show me, and it was late in the afternoon, and he was looking at spending the entire evening with me. Finally, he held up his hand and put an end to the Test.

I wasn’t playing his game. Among other sins, I wasn’t investing a limited palette of feelings in the images. Therefore, my choices of “what to see” in the blots expanded greatly.

When I go to a museum, I like to watch people stand in front of abstract paintings. Many of them are stumped. They’re trying to figure out what feelings they “are supposed to” project into the painting. They’re looking for “instruction,” and there isn’t any. They’re asking for mind control, and they’re not getting it.

Fanaticism of any kind begins with individuals projecting feelings into images. This is harnessed by leaders, who then choose the images and direct which feelings are permitted. The tempting prospect for the follower is: participation in a drama that goes beyond what he would ordinarily experience in life. This is bolstered by the idea that what he is doing is moral.

In an election season, people on the left are urged to project messianic feelings into images of X. People on the right are cued to invest feelings of pride, hope, and “tradition” into images of Y. The real candidates aren’t actually experienced.

Since Vietnam, shooting wars have been more difficult to sustain among soldiers. “In the old days,” feelings of hatred could be projected into images of enemies that included civilians, so overtly killing everybody on foreign soil was easier to accept. Now, soldiers are taught “enemy combatant” and “civilian” are two different images that require the injection of two different feelings.

Here at home, police and military are taught, more and more, to invest feelings of suspicion into images of American civilians. This is an acceleration of mass mind control for law enforcement.

The astonishing number of civilians who participate in government and corporate surveillance of the public, through technological means, learn to invest “dead empty feelings” into images of citizens, as if these targets are nothing more than ciphers, units.

Bizarre instances of police detaining and questioning parents who allow their children to play unsupervised reveal another accelerating trend. These confrontations start with neighbors snitching on the parents. The neighbors have learned to invest feelings of panic, suspicion, and anger in images of “free children.”

In all these cases, there is no real experience. It’s all second-hand. It’s all feeling-projected-into-image.

In the medical arena, countless advertisements and news stories are geared to convince people to invest feelings of trust in images of doctors. The suggestion, “Ask your doctor if X is right for you,” is framed as the solution to a little problem. The problem is set this way: Drug X is wonderful; drug X has serious adverse effects; what to do? Solution: ask your doctor; trust him; he knows.

As the class of victims in society has grown by leaps and bounds, including any group that can organize and promote itself as needing help or justice—going miles beyond the people who really do need assistance—citizens have been trained to invest feelings of sympathy and concern for all images of victims everywhere, real or imagined. This, too, is mass mind control.

Pick an image; invest feelings in it. Facts don’t matter. Evidence doesn’t matter.

You’ve heard people say, So-and-so (a celebrity) has become a caricature of himself. Well, that’s what it means. The celebrity has projected massive feelings of approval into a concocted, cartoonish image of himself.

As a society, we can go on this way until we become a horrific cartoon of a cartoon (well, we’re already there), or we can step back and discover how we invest emotion into images, and then use that process to pour feelings into visions of our own choosing and invent better futures.

Since the dawn of time, leaders have portrayed themselves as gods. They’ve assembled teams to promote that image, so their followers could project powerful emotion into the image and thereby cement the leaders’ control and power.

The game isn’t new. Understanding the roots of it within each individual could, however, break the trance of mass mind control.

During the first West Nile fake outbreak of 1999, I spoke with a student who had just dropped out of medical school. He told me he’d been looking at electron-microscope photos of the West Nile Virus, and he suddenly realized he was “supposed to” invest feelings of “great concern” in those images.

Somehow, he broke free from the image-feeling link. He was rather stunned at the experience. His entire conditioning as a medical student evaporated.

Parents all over the world are having the same experience vis-a-vis vaccines. They realize they’re supposed to invest fear in images of germs and disease, and they’re also supposed to invest feelings of hope and confidence in images of needles and vaccines. They see the game. They’re supposed to remain victims of mass mind control.

But they’ve awakened.

We’ve all been taught that what we feel is always and everywhere out of our control. These feelings are simply part of us, and we have to act on them. The alternative would be to sit on them and repress them and turn into androids, robots.

This is simply not true. There are an infinite number of feelings, and as strange as it may sound, we can literally invent them.

This, it is said, is inhuman. It’s a bad idea. It’s wrong. It would lead us to “deserting the human community.”

Nonsense. That’s part of the propaganda of mind control. If the controllers can convince us that we’re working from a limited map of emotions and we have to stay within that territory, they can manipulate that limited set of feelings and trap us.

The power of art is that it shows us there are so many more emotions than we had previously imagined. We can be much freer than we supposed.

The synthetic world of mind control and the handful of feelings that are linked to images is what keeps us in thrall.

The world—the world of what we can be—is so much wider and more thrilling and revealing.

The author of three explosive collections, , EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon Rappoport was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails atwww.nomorefakenews.com

Source: Jon Rappoport  |  No More Fake News

US Secretly Selling Nukes Worldwide Via Israel

In 2008, Houston police pulled over CIA agent Roland Carnaby on what appeared to be a routine traffic stop. A few seconds later, Carnaby was dead.

It is illegal to detain a CIA agent under any circumstances. They may carry any weapon, anywhere, anytime, and request assistance from any law enforcement official with more than certainty.

Why then would this incident be part of a highly classified Russian intelligence report? Could it, perhaps, be that Carnaby, answering directly to former President and CIA Director, George H.W. Bush, was murdered to silence his participation in the theft and sale of American nuclear warheads?

Carnaby was holding a trove of documents outlining the theft and transfer of hundreds of nuclear warheads from the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. Weapons sent there for disassembly were transshipped to Israel and, from there, refurbished, their cores remachined and then sold around the world or stored in Israeli embassies and consulates around the world.

The Russian report outlines a very different view of the past 30 years, a “view” that “fits like a glove.”

DIMONA OUT OF ACTION

The report not only confirms Israel’s nuclear weapon inventory but outlines the program of subterfuge and piracy required to keep Israel as a nuclear power after their facility at Dimona suffered a critical “event” in 1988.

“Dimona is a standard 75-megawatt thermal open top reactor as used in France for their plutonium weapons production program, their version of Stanford (Editor’s note: Probably “Hanford”).

Due to overuse as a fast breeder reactor by the Israelis, Dimona suffered a “steam explosion” IE a flash over indecent due to neutron criticality back in the late 1980’s under Bush 1. This shut down its operation for many years until repairs could be made.

It know only operates at very low power levels due to neutron absorption damage to the containment vessel. Now mainly use for isotope production. This forced the Israelis to turn to stolen nuclear stockpiles from the US for the continuation of their nuclear program.”

The highly classified Russian report, released, experts believe, to demonstrate American hypocrisy over recent events in the Ukraine, is a litany of horror stories. If this is a “first shot over the bow” by Russian intelligence, American officials can only dread what may be to come.

BACKGROUND

48 hours ago, the retired chief of Russia’s counter-intelligence effort for the Middle East released a highly classified report designed to embarrass the United States and demonstrate their servitude to Israel and complicity in broad acts of nuclear proliferation.

The report, loaded with “shock value” intelligence and backed by reams of supporting documents including classified nuclear weapons plans demonstrated that Russia has been able to maintain a high level of penetration of not just American nuclear weapons labs but security agencies as well.

ROUND ONE, 9/11

The report, carefully structured for maximum shock value, begins with 9/11, the watershed event of our era:

“The type of nuclear devices used on 911 were a modified version of the W-54 nuclear artillery shells that were covertly provided to the Israelis between 1988 and 1998 from US surplus stockpiles illegally exported during the Bush/Clinton era.

Chemical analysis done by DOE Sandi was able to identify the chemical/radiation footprint or fingerprint of the warheads based on samples taken after 911 of the fallout at ground zero.”

According to the report, 911 was an Israeli operation facilitated by blackmail of Bush 41 and 43, threatening them with “outing” for their personal financial involvement in the sale of 350 primarily w54 nuclear artillery rounds, sold through Israel but distributed to a number of nations.

The Russian report further outlines that NATO partners, particularly Britain and France, were involved every step of the way. 911 was cover for stolen gold, stock fraud and the looting of the American economy. The “wars for profit” were the Bush boys cashing in on their own.

THE “HOW” OF 911

A number of theories have been introduced to explain the mysterious effects seen at ground zero on 9/11. In an article on the Press TV website, evidence of a widespread cover-up of an epidemic of radiation exposure-related cancers tied to 9/11, was presented.

Not only has Russia confirmed the Press TV findings, they present evidence of nuclear weapons use, evidence from a suppressed report based on findings by the Department of Energy’s Sandia Laboratories.

“Only a 2 kiloton device was needed to drop the buildings. A 2 kiloton device will produce a fireball of apx 150 to 200 feet in diameter at over 4000 degrees Centigrade. Just large enough to melt the I beams of the central core of the building and drop them in place. The light flash would last less than 1 second and primarily be in the UV light range. Overpressure would only be at 60PSI max and directed upwards with the blast.

Fallout would be minimal and located to within ground zero range only. Radiation would drop to acceptable levels within 72 hrs. after the blast. Most fall out was trapped in the cement dust thus causing all of the recent cancer deaths that we are now seeing in NYC amongst first responders.”

The report continues with details that close the door on speculation about 9/11, putting an end to conspiracy theories and, in particular, the wildest one of all, the pseudo-science fairy tale broadly rejected by the 9/11 Commission but allowed to stand as America descended into an Islamophobic frenzy.

“Fallout would be minimal and located to within ground zero range only. Radiation would drop to acceptable levels within 72 hrs. after the blast. Most fall out was trapped in the cement dust thus causing all of the recent cancer deaths that we are now seeing in NYC amongst first responders.

Melted steel and iron oxide or “nano thermite” is a byproduct of the very high gamma ray / Neutron flux induced into the central steel core. The radiation dissolves the steel into iron oxide consuming the carbon and silicone in the steel.”

This explains the missing steel columns and the very important clue of the “vaporized” 20 ton antenna tower atop the south tower. The upward blast of radiation literally vaporized it. Video evidence proves this to be true.

The total (redacted) data file from DOE Sandia on the 911 event is well over 72 MB. “P.S. Snowden didn’t have a Q clearance so he missed this one.”

The scope of the Bush/Cheney/Israeli nuclear proliferation operation, according to the report, is well beyond anything imagined. Here, Russia places the blame, naming not only Vice President Dick Cheney and former White House Chief of Staff Ram Emanuel but Tom Countryman, tasked, according to Russian sources, with actually managing the program that spread nuclear weapons to Brazil, North and South Korea, Saudi Arabia and a number of other nations.

“Illegal distribution of US nuclear material to foreign allies was not limited to Israel. Virtually all NATO allies were in on this scam too. Dick Cheney was the bad guy on this one. Bush2/Cheney traded nuclear pits to foreign country as IOU’s in order to get what they wanted. Tom Countryman a well-known Israeli operative is curiously now in charge of N.N.P. at the State Department under Obama. He was put there by Ram Emanuel.”

REACTIVATING “DEAD NUKES”

Only nuclear weapons that had deteriorated but could be recommissioned were of use to Israel. The Russian report outlines the basis for selecting the W-54 warhead and exacting details on how weapons were created out of America’s “nuclear scrap heap.”

“A total of over 350 pits were transferred to the Israelis over a 10 to 20 year period of time. The W-54 type of pit design were the most desirable due to the 2 point implosion pit design. This is the easiest to re manufacture and modify as compared to other circular pit designs.

The pill shaped design of the W-54 type weapon contains over 1.5 times more plutonium than a standard pit. This would allow enough Plutonium to be recovered that was still of weapons grade use even after 32 plus years of age. Americium build up in the pit over time eventually makes the Pit unusable as a weapon so they have a limited shelf life based on how fast or slow the Plutonium was produce in the reactor at Stanford.
Usually it was about 150 days max. Irradiation time in the reactor during production determines the shelf life of the pit as weapons grade material. All of the micro nukes used by the Israelis are re-manufactured W-54 type series devices.”

CONCLUSION

According to the Russian report, Israel used remanufactured W-54 warheads, reconfigured as micro-nukes, for terror bombings in Bali, London and to destroy the Fukashima nuclear reaction site in Japan.

With weapons around the world, stored in embassies and consulates, and their powerful friends in the American “right,” Israel has managed to maintain nuclear superpower status without a real production facility, using only pirates and traitors, something America, according to our Russian sources, seems to have no shortage of.

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, a combat infantryman, and Senior Editor at Veterans Today. His career has included extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic representative for UN humanitarian and economic development efforts. Gordon Duff has traveled to over 80 nations. His articles are published around the world and translated into a number of languages. He is regularly on TV and radio, a popular and sometimes controversial guest. 

Source: Veterans Today | Press TV

Showdown In Ukraine: Putin vs. Comrade Wolf

“Comrade Wolf knows who to eat, and he eats without listening to anyone.” – Russian President Vladimir Putin referring to the United States…

The Ukraine crisis has its roots in a policy that dates back nearly 20 years. The origins of the policy can be traced to a 1997 article in Foreign Policy magazine by Zbigniew Brzezinski, titled “A Geostrategy for Eurasia.” The article makes the case that the United States needs to forcefully establish itself in Central Asia in order to maintain its position as the world’s only superpower. While many readers may be familiar with Brzezinski’s thinking on these matters, they might not know what he has to say about Russia, which is particularly illuminating given that the recent uptick in violence has less to do with Ukraine than it does with Washington’s proxy-war on Russia. Here’s what Brzezinski says:

“Russia’s longer-term role in Eurasia will depend largely on its self-definition…Russia’s first priority should be to modernize itself rather than to engage in a futile effort to regain its status as a global power. Given the country’s size and diversity, a decentralized political system and free-market economics would be most likely to unleash the creative potential of the Russian people and Russia’s vast natural resources. A loosely confederated Russia — composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic — would also find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbors. Each of the confederated entitles would be able to tap its local creative potential, stifled for centuries by Moscow’s heavy bureaucratic hand. In turn, a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997.

So is this the goal of US policy, to create “A loosely confederated Russia” whose economy can be subsumed into America’s market-based system?

Notice how easily Brzezinski chops Russia into smaller, bite-size statelets that pose no threat to US imperial expansion. Brzezinski undoubtedly envisions a Russia that will sell its vast resources in petrodollars and recycle them into US Treasuries further enriching the corrupt rent-skimmers in Washington and Wall Street. He foresees a Russia that will abdicate its historic role in the world and have no say-so in shaping global policy. He imagines a compliant Russia that will help facilitate US imperial ambitions in Asia, even to the point where it will pay to police its own people on behalf of US oligarchs, weapons manufacturers, oil magnates, and 1 percenters. Here’s the paragraph in Brzezinski’s piece that sums up Washington’s objectives in Ukraine, Russia and beyond. It is fittingly headlined with the following words in bold print:

TRANSCONTINENTAL SECURITY

“Defining the substance and institutionalizing the form of a trans-Eurasian security system could become the major architectural initiative of the next century. The core of the new transcontinental security framework could be a standing committee composed of the major Eurasian powers, with America, Europe, China, Japan, a confederated Russia, and India collectively addressing critical issues for Eurasia’s stability. The emergence of such a transcontinental system could gradually relieve America of some of its burdens, while perpetuating beyond a generation its decisive role as Eurasia’s arbitrator. Geostrategic success in that venture would be a fitting legacy to America’s role as the first and only global superpower.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs

Translation: The United States will police the world, dispatch troublemakers, and eliminate potential threats wherever it finds them. It will impose its neoliberal dogma (Austerity, privatization, structural adjustment, anti labor reforms, etc) across-the-board and on all participants. Also, minor partners–”Europe, China, Japan, a confederated Russia, and India”–will be expected to provide security for their own people at their own expense in order to “relieve America of some of its burdens.”

Nice, eh? So you even have to pay for your own jailers.

And what is “Transcontinental Security” anyway? Isn’t it just a fancy way of saying “one world government”?

Indeed, it is. It’s the very same thing. Here’s more from Brzezinski:

“Failure to widen NATO…would shatter the concept of an expanding Europe… Worse, it could reignite dormant Russian political aspirations in Central Europe.”

This is an oddly convoluted statement. In the first sentence, Brzezinski supports the idea of an “expanding Europe”, and then in the next breath, he worries that Russia might want to do the same thing. It’s another case of the pot calling the kettle black.

What’s clear, is that –in Brzezinski’s mind– EU and NATO expansion will help Washington achieve its hegemonic aspirations. That’s all that matters. Here’s what he says:

“Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead in Eurasia…A wider Europe and an enlarged NATO will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of U.S. policy… A politically defined Europe is also essential to Russia’s assimilation into a system of global cooperation.”

“Bridgehead”? In other words, Europe is just a means to an end. But what would that “end” be?

Global domination. Isn’t that what he’s talking about?

Of course, it is.

What makes the Ukrainian crisis so hard to understand, is that the media conceals the policy behind the impenetrable fog of daily events. Once the fog lifts though, it’s easy to see who’s causing all the trouble. It’s the party that’s calling the shots from abroad, the good old US of A.

Putin doesn’t want this war and neither do most Ukrainians. The whole thing was conjured up by Uncle Sam and his minions to stop the flow of Russian gas to Europe, to push NATO further eastward, and to break the Russian Federation into little pieces. That’s what it’s really all about. And these madmen are willing to raze Ukraine to the ground and kill every living organism within a 3,000 mile radius of Kiev to get their way. After all, isn’t that what they did in Iraq? They sure did. And did I mention that, according to this week’s Wall Street Journal, “Iraq’s Oil Output Surged to Highest Level in Over 30 Years” with all the usual suspects raking in hefty profits.

The point is, if they’d did it in Iraq, they’ll do it in Ukraine too. Because what Washington cares about is constituents not carnage. Carnage they can handle.

Brzezinski is not the only one supporting the current policy either. There’s also fellow traveler, Hillary Clinton. In fact, it was Secretary of State Clinton who first used the term “pivot” in a 2011 article in Foreign Policy Magazine titled “America’s Pacific Century”. Clinton’s op-ed described a “rebalancing” plan that would open up new markets to US corporations and Wall Street, control the flow of vital resources, and “forge a broad-based military presence” across the continent. Here’s an excerpt from the text of Clinton’s seminal speech:

“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.

As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise — in the Asia-Pacific region…

Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology…..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia…The region already generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama’s goal of doubling exports by 2015, we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia…

…as I talk with business leaders across our own nation, I hear how important it is for the United States to expand our exports and our investment opportunities in Asia’s dynamic markets.” (“America’s Pacific Century”, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton”, Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)

“Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama”?

Does that sound like someone who wants to cultivate a mutually-beneficial relationship with their trading partners or someone who wants to move in, take over and run the show?

Washington’s plan to shift its attention from the Middle East to Asia is all about money. Clinton even says so herself. She says, “The region generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade…Asia’s markets … provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and…a vast and growing consumer base.”

Money, money, money. The upside-profit potential is limitless which is why Madame Clinton wants to plant Old Glory right in “the center of the action”, so US corporations can rake in the dough without fear of reprisal.

Brzezinski says the same thing in his magnum opus “The Grand Chessboard” Here’s an excerpt:

“A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It’s Geostrategic Imperatives”, page 31)

Get the picture? It’s a gold rush! Having successfully looted every last farthing from the battered US middle class and left the economy in a ghastly shambles, Brzezinski, Clinton and Co. are headed for greener pastures in Central Asia, home of the world’s largest oil producing nation, boundless reserves in the Caspian Basin, and zillions of voracious consumers who’ll need everything from I Pads to leisure wear, all graciously provided by US-owned corporations. Cha-ching!

So don’t get tripped up on the daily events in Ukraine. This isn’t a clash between pro-government forces and anti-government activists. This is the next big phase of Washington’s plan to conquer the world, a plan that will inevitably pit Moscow against the amassed military power of the United States of America. This is David vs. Goliath, Mother Russia vs. the Great Satan, Vladie Putin vs. Comrade Wolf.

Ukraine is just Round 1.

“Engineering Chaos”: Mother Agnes-Mariam Lectures Elites On Their Bad Behavior

I just went to hear Mother Agnes-Mariam, a Syrian nun dressed in a serious nun outfit, give a talk on the horrible situation that her country finds itself in today — and I ended up with ten pages of notes on the shocking details of what she said. However, the main gist of her talk can be summed up in just a few words. “[Western neo-colonial] powers have been engineering chaos in Syria — and they need to stop this disruptive behavior right now so that peace and reconciliation can safely proceed.”

According to Mother Agnes-Mariam, these Western powers-that-be have been “engineering chaos” in Syria quite successfully over the last three years. But I would also like to add that Western neo-cons haven’t just been engineering chaos in Syria — oh no. They’ve also been doing it everywhere that they can, all across the Middle East. And then it also suddenly dawned on me that said neo-cons have been following a similar step-by-step pattern all over the world, not just in the Middle East:

Step 1: Find yourself a resource-rich country where a percentage of the population is unhappy — for whatever reason (and if you can’t find any unhappy people there, then just make some up).

Step 2: Begin to foment revolution in the name of “Freedom and Democracy”. Make F&D sound really really good!

Step 3: Start the killing — or “Shock and Awe” or whatever you want to call it. Use terms like “freedom fighters” and “rebels” and “no-fly zones” and “humanitarian relief”. And also be sure to throw in scare-words like “WMDs” and “Chemical Weapons” and “Nuclear Proliferation” whenever humanly possible. But it doesn’t really matter what you call anything as long as chaos results. Or another Benghazi. Or another Maiden Square.

Step 4: The most imperative goal in Step 4 is to make sure that an impressive number of civilians are killed (See Step 3)

Step 5: Disassemble the mechanisms of state. Bomb the hospitals. Bump off the water supply. Destroy the infrastructure. Blow up city hall. Replace the strong-arm guy who is holding the country together with a thousand factional groups who all hate each other and everyone else — and are willing to kill to prove it too. Think Iraq. Think Libya. Think Yugoslavia.

Step 6: Move into the void that’s created and steal land and resources to your heart’s content. “Good job, Brownie!”

But enough of this. Let’s get back to Mother Agnes-Miriam’s talk. She spoke for over an hour on peace and reconciliation in Syria — by and for Syrians. It was a hopeful speech; sadly informative but also rational and inspiring.

And then suddenly five or six people popped up from the audience as if on cue and started shouting at Mother Agnes. “What about the use of chemical weapons! What about that dictator Assad!”

I at first thought that the ushers at the venue had over-reacted a bit by telling those guys to either be quiet or leave. But later I learned that these same guys have been following Mother Agnes-Miriam all around America and trying to disrupt all of her talks.

And at another one of her talks, I later found out, Mother Agnes had welcomed their participation and attempted to answer their questions — only to discover that they had no valid evidence, no real POV and nothing really to say.

These guys were simply trying to “engineer chaos” too!

And afterwards, outside on the front steps, one of these guys (wearing a really expensive-looking suit) handed me his card. He was from Washington DC, of course. That figures.

For those of you who still want to soldier on and read more about what Mother Agnes-Mariam had to say, here are some of the quotes that I wrote down. I think I copied most of them correctly, but I was writing pretty fast:

“In Syria today, the horrendous reality is of thousands and thousands of mercenaries who enter historic city complexes to turn them into battlefields. They are terrorists and bandits who spread agony among the residents.

“Sponsored by foreign powers, these ‘Tafiri’ [self-appointed inquisitionists] ‘liberate’ towns by forcing the residents out of them. The majority of Islamic clerics throughout the world denounce the Tafiri, however.

“Syria is a cauldron of chaos — designed to dismantle a country. It is engineered by neo-colonials to divide and reign — and to dismantle and gain.

“All of Syria used to be middle-class. No homeless people in Syria. And now they are obliged to beg; living in slums where the violence has followed them. Mosques, churches and synagogues are also being systematically destroyed. Factories, hospitals, residences. Homs now looks like Stalingrad. Apocalyptic. The economic and production heart of Syria has also been destroyed. The engineers of chaos destroyed it.

“A young woman wakes up with no legs. And her friend is now blind. In some places, only 3% of the population remain — and the Takfiri ‘rebels’ still shell them. We are living among vampires — where beheading is getting very normal. We are seeing heads everywhere. They play football with them. One Takfiri leader is said to have beheaded 350 people.

“What happened to the Arab Spring? That striving for freedom and democracy has been highjacked by the engineers of chaos. The Free Syrian Army lacks money, its members are starving. But the Takfiri faction is receiving all kinds of money and weapons. The Takfiri are in direct opposition to reconciliation. They come from 80 countries — and Syrians are their victims.

“There are seven million refugees inside of Syria and two more million outside of the country. They are starving. Out of a population of just 22 million, each day 9,500 more civilians are forced to leave their homes. Soon all 22 million will be displaced. We are back to the barbarian era.

“When you see something like this in your city — thousands beheaded, children pushed off roofs, people roasted in ovens — there will be more and more violence. But there is a third way. We have to build bridges. That is the challenge of reconciliation among Syrians. We have to develop trust. We have a lot of martyrs [to the non-violent cause], but we will not stop because the bloodshed must stop!

“Saddam was killed. Gaddafi was killed. Has it gotten any better? If Assad is gone, who will take his place? The 2000 factions? No. How can I reconcile with a group who wants to behead me? We are now talking to former [FSA] fighters who go back to protect their neighborhoods from the Takfiris. The FSA is willing to talk. Even Syria’s Al Qaeda is upset that ISIS Takfiri are killing everyone and burning factories.

“We are accused continuously, especially by people in the US, of being political. This is preposterous. We are talking only out of a position to stop the bloodshed. Alternative media can now go deeper and not just repeat mainstream media [brainwashing] ad nauseam. Go and hear everyone. I am not an oracle — but do not put me to death if I disagree. This is not the way to truth.

“If a solution to Syria’s problems is imposed from outside, we will be worse off than before. We must be free from foreign intervention. Change will not come from violence. Violence has just strengthened [Assad's] regime. All the Takfiris have done is to get rid of the infrastructure of the state instead. The state itself is the sole hope for Syria. That, and a dialogue of symbiosis and reconciliation among Syrians themselves.”

Vladimir Putin Caesar And Our Great Geo-Political Turning Point

We are witnessing, I believe, a turning point in geopolitical history, one future historians may analyze as we have the Roman Empire’s fall. Vladimir Putin is making a move — and it’s not just against Ukraine. It may not be just a move against Eastern Europe. It’s not even, perhaps, just a move against US world dominance.

There was a time when the USSR was the “evil empire, a godless Golgotha. But that was then. Now, in 2013-14, Putin has seen fit to say, in his December State of the Nation speech, “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values. …Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.”

This roughly coincided with Russia’s enactment of laws prohibiting homosexual propaganda and was a salvo against both the West’s Great Sexual Heresy and what enables it: moral relativism.

In another shot at relativism, Putin averred, “Society is now required…to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning.”

The Russian president then took aim at multiculturalism: “Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures.”

And now we’re seeing the release of Russian Culture War 2.0. In a document called “Foundations of the State Cultural Policy,” the Kremlin is doubling down and writes, “Russia must be viewed as a unique and original civilization that cannot be reduced to ‘East’ or ‘West.’ …A concise way of formulating this stand would be, ‘Russia is not Europe.’” The document goes on to state that Russia rejects “such principles as multiculturalism and tolerance” and “projects imposing alien values on society.”

No, this is not your grandfather’s Russia.

But it very well may be your great-grandfather’s.

There are a few different things, I suspect, going on here. The 20 years after the Cold War’s end had been a period of relative co-operation between Russia and the West, but you can’t define yourself by going along (to get along) with the world’s cultural hegemon; you can’t be band leader by playing second fiddle. So Putin is defining his nation as the un-morally-wild West. In addition, he knows that to rally a people behind you, you need a boogeyman, your Eurasia, the “Nappy” (Napoleon) who will “get you,” British children, if you’re not good.

Yet it isn’t just that Putin is restarting the Cold War. Nor is he just an old-line KGB Bolshevik, as some stuck in commentary amber have suggested. He’s smart enough to realize that Marxism is, as the kids today would say, just so “played.”

He more likely wants to be the next czar.

What’s my theory? Try this on for size: It isn’t just that Putin wants to restore lost Russian glory.

He sees a chance to be a historic figure.

Note here that you don’t have to be good to be historic; Roman statesman Cicero called Julius Caesar an “ambitious villain,” but Caesar’s name is far better known than Cicero’s. And let’s consider what might be Putin’s calculation: the West has long been the world’s cultural trend-setter, spreading an increasingly un-Christian creed to all corners of the Earth. Of course, not everyone is on board. The Islamic abode wants nothing to do with it, but it’s Muslim; sub-Saharan Africa is largely opposed, but it lacks clout. As for South America, in addition to lacking clout it’s confused; and while China is gaining power, it’s largely pagan and non-committal on the culture war.

Enter the second Vladimir the Great.

Putin doesn’t just see a chance to define himself — and to unite the Russian people behind him — via opposition to the West, as his Marxist comrades once did.

He sees a chance to do it as today’s Charlemagne.

There’s an unsatisfied market for Christendom’s standard bearer, and Putin perceives an opportunity to exploit it. China won’t do it, Africa can’t, South America wouldn’t and couldn’t. But just as the original Vladimir the Great Christianized the Kievan Rus’, just as Charlemagne forged and helped Christianize modern Europe, Putin has a chance to lift the cross — and himself — high.

And the West is a gift that keeps on giving insofar as this goes. Our cultural Marxists are on the march, smell blood and will not stop. They will continue spending us into insolvency, perverting us into prone position, relativizing us into risibility and “immigrationizing” us into irrelevance. Even now, not satisfied with placing another great nail in marriage’s coffin, our militant secularists are making moves to legitimize pedophilia and bestiality. It’s onward Luciferian soldiers.

And for Putin, it’s onward Christian soldier. As our degradation advances, Russia’s star can rise commensurately. Putin knows the West is in decline. He sees the demographic trends, that the US is transforming into a Third World/Hispanic nation and Western Europe into a Third World/Muslim continent. He knows that if there is another superpower in the near future, it will be Russia or China. And he knows what card he has to play to win this game.

Of course, while we could argue about whether the Christian-soldier solution is tactic and strategy or just tactic, it is so obviously prudent that it’s inconceivable Putin wouldn’t have pursued it. Just consider the benefits, starting with justification of Russian expansionism. If you’re a typical Russian, might not the idea that “the West is decadent, debauched, exhausted and effete” justify, in your mind, a Russian manifest destiny? Might it not be natural and wholly in accordance with man’s nature to believe that your moral superiority gives you the right to dominate? Note that this is the theory that helped justify the colonial powers’ imperialism: they were bringing civilization to a world of darkness. And it’s what we do to this day, applying secular values as standard. How often have we heard intervention in the Islamic “stan” du jour justified by pointing out that its rulers oppress women and are intolerant? The judgments are different, but the desire to claim the moral high ground is the same.

Then consider foreign relations. The USSR used to jockey for world influence with us; whereas before they had to market Marxism, however, now they can peddle purity. Standing against decadent Western secular-imperialism can win Russia many friends in Africa and even the Middle East, and most of the Far East will go with the dominant power.

Lastly, even if Putin is a functional atheist — even if his road to Heaven is paved with bad intentions — he surely knows that if Russia wants to prosper, Western secular/hedonist isms must be rejected. And why wouldn’t he know? As Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov and others have , it was his erstwhile Marxist buddies who encouraged those movements in the West for the purposes of undermining our civilization.

But we’re doing a very good job of undermining it ourselves, and Putin is more concerned with building his own. Pat Buchanan recently wrote about this and pointed out that Putin may very well view his realm as “The Third Rome:”

The first Rome was the Holy City and seat of Christianity that fell to Odoacer and his barbarians in 476 A.D. The second Rome was Constantinople, Byzantium, (today’s Istanbul), which fell to the Turks in 1453. The successor city to Byzantium, the Third Rome, the last Rome to the old believers, was — Moscow.

Putin is entering a claim that Moscow is the Godly City of today and command post of the counter-reformation against the new paganism.

…Putin is saying the new ideological struggle is between a debauched West led by the United States and a traditionalist world Russia would be proud to lead.

Note here that the term “czar” is derived from the Latin word Caesar. And while Putin may be just as satisfied to be Julius or Augustus as Constantine, I’m quite sure that Marxism is no longer his bag. That would be playing second fiddle again — and the last thing the Russians want to be is like us.

Willful Blindness: Abraham Foxman And The Armenian Genocide

Few would expect a survivor of the Holocaust to be the face of genocide denial. Imagine the surprise of Suffolk Law School’s student body when its administration’s chosen commencement speaker turned out to be just that.

Abraham Foxman, the long-time director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization dedicated to eradicating anti-Semitism and bigotry and protecting civil rights, seems a figure beyond reproach. Yet Foxman has invited controversy to Suffolk University for his unwillingness to recognize the 1915 Armenian Genocide – an event which saw an estimated 1.5 million Armenians massacred by the Turks – and his campaign to defeat Congressional acknowledgement of said genocide.

Criticism of Foxman has centered on this disconnect, that a man who lived through the attempted extermination of an entire race now denies that truth of another. Many at Suffolk are unwilling to participate in that hypocrisy.

Suffolk’s Students Speak Out

Shortly after Foxman was announced as their 2014 speaker, Suffolk Law students . Amy Willis, President of the university’s National Lawyers Guild chapter, told the Boston Globe that “Suffolk claims to embody diversity and be a place for all people, but this clearly is a speaker who does not embody those values.”

This stance was reflected in  as the keynote speaker, as well as to deny him the honorary Juris doctorate he is slated to receive. The petition states that Foxman’s presence “not only insults students and their families, but also insults the very foundation of Suffolk Law as a safe place of diversity and acceptance.” As arguments for his removal, the petition enumerates Foxman’s refusal to explicitly label the Armenian Genocide as a genocide as well as his support for  in the interest of “national security.”

What Is Genocide?

Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe the magnitude of premeditated racial extermination, citing  as the prime example. After the war, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, .

In the Convention, genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” which includes “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The mention of “intent” is significant in this definition. Foxman’s 2007 statement (described below) would go out of its way to avoid labeling the Turkish pogrom as intentional, admitting only that its “consequences” were “tantamount” to genocide. To the casual observer, it is perhaps a negligible distinction. From a legal standpoint, it is strategically evasive.

What Is the Armenian Genocide?

This definition applies to the systematic slaughter of Armenians by the Turkish government that began in 1915. To understand how this genocide came to be, a brief summary of the two nations’ history is required.

Existing in various forms for approximately 3,000 years of recorded history, Armenia was the first nation to declare Christianity its national religion. It remained Christian under the several empires that conquered it, including the Muslim caliphate of the Ottoman Turks. From the 15th century onward, Armenians and their fellow “infidels” were allowed to continue their religious practices, though subjected to higher taxes, fewer rights and ethnic discrimination. For the Armenians, this culminated in the Hamidian Massacres of 1894-1897. This state-sponsored pogrom was instituted by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in retaliation for Armenians’ attempts to win civil rights.

By the start of World War I, political tensions between Armenians and a new Turkish government were even more strained. Armenia itself had been divided by warring empires, with Russia claiming the east and Turkey claiming the west. Duty-bound, both sides fought for their respective empires.

This dichotomy of loyalty enabled the Turks to concoct a pretext that veiled their ultimate goal of an ethnically and religiously uniform empire. A purge would enable them to  the “Christian element” and seize the wealth and property of suspected insurgents. On April 24, 1915, the Turkish government authorized the arrest and execution of several hundred Armenian intellectuals. From that point, the executions would continue for eight years, shrouded under the fog of the Great War.

Turkish soldiers and mercenaries acting under the general outfit of “Special Operations” murdered hundreds of thousands of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks, marching them through the Anatolian and Syrian deserts without food, water or clothing. “Infidels” not sentenced to hard labor camps were drowned in rivers, thrown off cliffs,  and burned alive. Property was seized, women were raped and dispatched to Turkish harems, and many children were kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam.

The number of survivors is a matter of debate, but of a population of 2 million indigenous Armenians, it is estimated that upwards of 1.5 million were slaughtered in Turkey between 1915 and 1923. Even today, almost a century later, the Euphrates River is filled with the bones of dead Armenians, as author Peter Balakian, , can attest.

Stark,  exist to document the savagery of the Armenian massacre. Yet still Turkey denies its own legacy.

Turkey and Foxman’s Denials

Article 301 of the Turkish penal code  to insult Turkey, the Turkish nation or the Turkish government. To acknowledge an “Armenian Genocide” is the most egregious insult possible.

Because Turkey was the first nation in the Middle East to establish diplomatic relations with Israel and remains an instrumental ally of the West, the United States is unwilling to rock that political boat. Even when a resolution was proposed by the 110th Congress to recognize the Armenian Genocide, then President George W. Bush publicly opposed the measure. He was not the first, and current President Barack Obama’s silence on the issue suggests he will not be the last.

And this has been . His public opposition to Armenian recognition has been out of loyalty to Israel. “Our focus is Israel,” he has said. “If helping Turkey helps Israel, then that’s what we’re in the business of doing.” It seems absurd to the point of tragedy that a man who lived under Nazi oppression can answer the question of Armenian genocide with, “It was wartime. Things get messy.”

But in 2007, . Speaking for himself and the ADL, he stated that, “We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against Armenians as massacres and atrocities,” ending with decision that “the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide.”

But “tantamount to genocide” without intent is not genocide. This calculated elision of “intent,” its palpable absence, is an insult to the Armenian community. The ADL’s defenders decry this as splitting hairs, but they overlook the importance of legacy and how powerfully a single word can affect it. It was important enough to prompt a dozen Massachusetts cities to pull out of the ADL’s “No Place for Hate” anti-bias program. It was important enough that when Andrew H. Tarsy, a regional director for the ADL, acknowledged the genocide as true genocide, .

Unfortunately for Suffolk Law School, and all those who expect the ADL to uphold its own morality, Abraham Foxman represents a willful blindness – to look the other way on a hundred-year-old crime – for the sake of political expediency.

It is the opinion of Suffolk University President James McCarthy that Foxman, despite students’ protests,  Moreover, it is the University’s hope that Foxman’s “life of public service will inspire our graduates as they embark on their professional careers.”

This does beg the question of what recognition the Syrian desert’s uncounted dead deserve, or what their lives may have inspired, but the answers are unlikely to be found in Foxman’s commencement speech.

« Previous Page — Next Page »