For the 6th year, Yemenis never Know the Holiday أضحى سادس في ظلّ العدوان: العيد لا يعرف اليمنيين

By Rashid Haddad – Al-Akhbar Newspaper

Translated by al-Ahed Staff

The Yemeni capital, Sanaa, welcomed Eid Al-Adha this year, with a stagnation that dominated both the popular and modern markets.

This comes as most of the streets are almost empty of cars and pedestrians due the lack of oil derivatives. The crisis has begun since a month and a half, when the aggressive [Saudi] coalition arrested 17 ships loaded with more than 320 thousand tons of gasoline and diesel.

And it is not the only fuel crisis that the Yemenis are suffering this holiday.

According to the latest United Nations report, as the aggression and the blockade continue for the 6th year on a country where more than 20 million are under the poverty line, many are struggling to provide basic life necessities, in light of the rise in food prices by 15.

It is a hike that the sacrifices [sheep] were not far from. Its prices in local markets – just days before the holiday – increased by 50% compared with last year.

In an attempt to alleviate the suffering, Sanaa authorities announced the disbursement of half salary for state employees, in an attempt to bypass the pressure exerted by the United Nations to end this process, which is funded by Al-Hudaydah’s Central Bank branch.

Meanwhile, the matter is still a dispute between The Rescue Government and the Government of the Outgoing President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

During the past few days, the Finance Ministry in Sanaa withdraw more than 8 billion riyals from the aforementioned account and disbursed it as half salary, which was met with more international dissatisfaction.

An official source in “The Rescue Gov’t” denounced the pressure exerted by the international sides on the government. In parallel, he revealed that the “Supreme Political Council” received UN offers to halt the half salary payment in exchange for the release of the seized fuel shipments. This was rejected by the Council President, Mahdi Al-Mashat. The government called on the United Nations to supervise the disbursement process, calling on it to work hard to stop the employees suffering. It further accused the UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths’ office of failing to resolve this file two years ago despite the concessions made by Sanaa leadership. Moreover, the “The Rescue Gov’t” renewed its willingness to pay the salaries of all state employees according to the statements of 2014 if the problem of oil and gas revenues, taxes and customs, which are supplied to the Hadi government account, is addressed.

Sanaa, along with it the governorates under the control of “the Rescue”, suffers from a crisis in gas supplies as well, due to the custody of a tribal sector, with coverage from the Hadi government, the trailers coming from the Safer facility, in the Juba region between the governorates of Maarib and Al Bayda.

Meanwhile, the damage caused by the floods in the past days worsens the situation, especially in Al-Hudaydah and Hajjah governorates. According to local sources, more than a thousand poor families in the countryside of Al-Hudaydah were affected by the torrents, which destroyed dozens of homes and buried others, and washed away their farms and thousands of sheep, as well as the IDP camps in the Abas region in Hajjah Governorate. Because of the severe damages, dozens of activists launched a call to implement a popular relief campaign for coastal residents in the two provinces.

اليمن رشيد الحداد الخميس 30 تموز 2020

صنعاء | تستقبل العاصمة اليمنية صنعاء عيد الأضحى، العام الجاري، بركود تجاري يطغى على الأسواق الشعبية والحديثة، فيما تكاد غالبية الشوارع تكون خالية من السيارات والمارة بسبب أزمة المشتقات النفطية التي تعانيها المدينة منذ أكثر من شهر ونصف شهر، بفعل احتجاز تحالف العدوان 17 سفينة مُحمّلة بأكثر من 320 ألف طن من مادّتَي البنزين والسولار.

وليست أزمة الوقود الوحيدة التي يعانيها ملايين اليمنيين في هذا العيد. فمع استمرار العدوان والحصار، للعام السادس على التوالي، على بلد يعيش أكثر من 20 مليوناً من سكّانه تحت خطّ الفقر، يكافح الكثيرون من أجل توفير أدنى متطلّبات الحياة، في ظلّ ارتفاع أسعار المواد الغذائية بنسبة 15% بحسب آخر تقرير رسمي صادر عن الأمم المتحدة. وهو ارتفاعٌ لم تكن الأضاحي بعيدة عنه، إذ ازدادت أسعارها في الأسواق المحلية – قبيل العيد بأيام – بنسبة 50% عن العام الماضي.

وفي محاولة منها لتخفيف حدّة تلك المعاناة، أعلنت سلطات صنعاء صرف نصف راتب لموظفي الدولة، متجاوزةً بذلك الضغوط التي تمارسها الأمم المتحدة عليها لوقف هذه العملية التي يتمّ تمويلها من الحساب الخاص برواتب الموظفين في فرع البنك المركزي في الحديدة، والذي لا يزال مثار خلاف بين حكومة الإنقاذ وحكومة الرئيس المنتهية ولايته عبد ربه منصور هادي. وخلال الأيام الماضية، وَجّهت وزارة المالية في صنعاء بسحب أكثر من 8 مليارات ريال من الحساب المذكور وصرفها كنصف راتب، وهو ما قوبل بمزيد من عدم الرضى الأممي.

إزاء ذلك، استهجن مصدر مسؤول في «الإنقاذ» الضعوط التي تمارسها المنظمة الدولية على الحكومة، كاشفاً تلقّي «المجلس السياسي الأعلى» عروضاً أممية بوقف صرف نصف راتب للموظفين مقابل الإفراج عن شحنات الوقود المحتجزة، وهو ما قابله رئيس المجلس مهدي المشاط بالرفض. ودعت الحكومة، الأمم المتحدة، إلى الإشراف على عملية الصرف، مطالِبةً إيّاها بالعمل الجادّ على رفع معاناة الموظفين، مُتّهمة مكتب المبعوث الأممي إلى اليمن مارتن غريفيث بالفشل في حسم هذا الملف منذ عامين على رغم التنازلات التي قدّمتها قيادة صنعاء. وجدّدت «الإنقاذ» استعدادها لصرف رواتب موظفي الدولة كافة وفق كشوفات عام 2014 في حال عولجت مشكلة إيرادات النفط والغاز والضرائب والجمارك التي تُورّد إلى حساب حكومة هادي.

تعاني صنعاء أزمة حادّة في المشتقّات النفطية والغاز المنزلي

وفيما تعاني صنعاء، ومعها المحافظات الخاضعة لسيطرة «الإنقاذ»، أزمة في إمدادات الغاز أيضاً، جرّاء احتجاز قطاع قبلي، بتغطية من حكومة هادي، المقطورات القادمة من منشأة صافر، في منطقة الجوبة بين محافظتَي مأرب والبيضاء، تأتي الأضرار التي تسبّبت بها السيول في الأيام الماضية لتزيد الطين بلّة، وخصوصاً في محافظتَي الحديدة وحجّة. ووفقاً لمصادر محلية، فقد تضرّرت أكثر من ألف أسرة من الأسر الفقيرة في ريف الحديدة من جرّاء السيول، التي دَمّرت عشرات المنازل وطمرت أخرى، وجرفت مزارعها ومعها الآلاف من رؤوس الأغنام، فضلاً عن تضرّر مخيمات النازحين في منطقة عبس في محافظة حجة. وبفعل جسامة تلك الأضرار، أطلق عشرات الناشطين دعوة إلى تنفيذ حملة إغاثة شعبية لسكان المناطق الساحلية في المحافظتين.

Foreign Interference in Elections: Is it Real or Just Political Noise?

Philip Giraldi

July 30, 2020

A recently concluded British Parliamentary inquiry has determined that Russia may have interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum, which resulted in the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. But, ironically, it also concluded that Russia might not have interfered given the fact that the British government never bothered to try to find out if there had been any attempt made by the Kremlin to manipulate the voting.

The Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is reportedly perplexed by the lack of official interest in what might have been a foreign intelligence operation that had major impact, all too plausible given that it is assumed that Moscow would have welcomed Brexit as a first step that will eventually put an end to European political and economic unity.

So, no one knows if Russia or anyone else interfered in Britain, which is perhaps just as well as inquiries into voting in the U.S. also in 2016 have likewise created nothing but confusion and no smoking pistol. And, of course there is a question of definitions of interference. Millions of pounds were spent on advertising by those pro- and con-Brexit, just as billions were spent in political adverts in the United States. Much of the “information” provided in that fashion was deliberately misleading, often fearmongering, both in the U.K. and the U.S., suggesting that the problem is much bigger than one country’s possible attempt to influence the vote, if that even took place.

There were similar claims about Russian generated fake news and “a massive hacking attack” in the French presidential election in 2017, while Germany’s Federal Election was notable for a lack of any identifiable Kremlin interference in spite of warnings from some observers that Berlin would be targeted.

So, while claims of Russian interference in elections are fairly common, they are difficult to prove in any serious way. And one should recognize that the “victimized” governments and political parties have strong motives to conjure up a foreign enemy to explain to the public why things are going wrong, be it for coronavirus fumbling or for general political ineptitude. To be sure, as the allure of blaming Russia has faded China is increasingly being targeted by American politicians as a scapegoat, indicating that there must always be a foreigner available to blame for one’s problems.

The most recent nugget to come out of the U.S. Congress on foreign interference in elections originates with Adam Schiff, the sly head of the House Intelligence Committee. In an interview with MSNBC, Schiff revealed that U.S. intelligence has obtained information suggesting multiple nations could be trying to meddle in the 2020 U.S. elections, to include feeding or “laundering” possible disinformation through Congress.

Schiff explained how various nations us different tactics to get “fake news” messages through to the American voters. Some governments openly support a particular candidate or policy, while others like the Chinese provide misinformation during their trade negotiations with Washington. He observed that “The Russians may get involved in hacking and dumping operations or social media campaigns. The Iranians may have their own tactics and techniques like the North Koreans may have theirs.”

A letter signed by Schiff, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va has asked for a counterintelligence briefing for Congress regarding foreign efforts to interfere in the upcoming election. It includes “We are gravely concerned, in particular, that Congress appears to be the target of a concerted foreign interference campaign, which seeks to launder and amplify disinformation in order to influence congressional activity, public debate, and the presidential election in November.”

Democratic Party presidential candidate presumptive Joe Biden also has confirmed that he has received briefings about Russian alleged plans to interfere in November saying “The Russians are still engaged in trying to delegitimize our electoral process. China and others are engaged as well in activities that are designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome.”

Of course, there are a number of things to say about the claims that other nations are possibly planning to meddle in the voting. First, the list of possible players being presented by Schiff and others is all too convenient, kind of like a Congressional dream list of bad boys. Russia pops up because of longstanding claims about it, but China is a new entry in the game because it all ties up into a neat package, including the “Wuhan virus” and its challenges both to American economic supremacy and to U.S. naval power in the South China Sea. And of course, there are Iran and also North Korea.

One should ask what exactly China, Iran and North Korea stand to gain by attempting to “interfere” in the election? What message could they possibly be sending and what would be the mechanisms they would use to get their points of view across to a skeptical American public? In a campaign that will undoubtedly cost hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising and other “messaging,” what exactly is the possible place of Iran and North Korea?

There is also a lack of “realism” in the Schiff comments. By far the country that interferes the most in U.S. politics is Israel. Israel and its domestic Lobby initiate legislation relating to the Middle East and Israeli diplomats, lobbyists and soldiers all have free access both to Capitol Hill and to the Pentagon. If a Congressman dares to speak up against the Jewish state’s crimes he or she is smeared in the media and eventually forced out of office by a well-funded pro-Israel opponent. No other country gets away with all that. As it is highly likely that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be pulling out all the stops to reelect Donald Trump in November, why isn’t the Jewish state included on Schiff’s list?

And then there is the tantalizing bit about concerns over disinformation being “laundered” through Congress. It is difficult to imagine what exactly Schiff is referring to as the corrupt gasbags in Congress already constitute one of the world’s biggest sources of false information, second only to the fully coopted U.S. mainstream media.

In any event, if some countries that are accustomed to being regularly targeted by the United States are taking advantage of an opportunity to somehow diminish America’s ability to meddle globally, no one should be surprised, but it is a politically driven fantasy to make the hysterical claim that the United States has now become the victim of some kind of vast multi-national conspiracy to interfere in its upcoming election.

Iran’s Future Will Be Prosperous: A 150-Year Fight for Sovereignty From Oil to Nuclear Energy

Cynthia Chung July 28, 2020

This is Part 3 of the series “Follow the Trail of Blood and Oil”.

 Part 1 is a historical overview of Iran’s long struggle with Britain’s control over Iranian oil and the SIS-CIA overthrow of Iran’s Nationalist leader Mosaddegh in 1953. 

Part 2 covers the period of the Shah’s battle with the Seven Sisters, the 1979 Revolution and the Carter Administration’s reaction, which was to have immense economic consequences internationally, as a response to the hostage crisis.

In this article it will be discussed why, contrary to what we are being told, Iran’s fight for the right to develop nuclear energy will create stability and prosperity in the Middle East rather than an “arc of crisis” scenario.

From Arc of Crisis to Corridors of Development

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became President of Iran on August 16^th 1989 and served two terms (1989-1997). Rafsanjani, who is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the Islamic Republic, began the effort to rebuild the country’s basic infrastructure, after the ravages of the Iran-Iraq War and launched a series of infrastructure projects not only domestically but in cooperation with neighbouring countries. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Rafsanjani moved to establish diplomatic relations with the newly independent Central Asian Republics, forging economic cooperation agreements based on building transportation infrastructure.

The major breakthrough in establishing this network came in May 1996 (after a 4 year construction) with the opening of the Mashhad-Sarakhs-Tajan railway, which provided the missing link in a network connecting landlocked Central Asian Republics to world markets, through Iran’s Persian Gulf ports.

At the historical launching of the railway, Rafsanjani was quoted as saying the expansion of communications, roads and railway networks, and hence access to world markets can “enhance amity, confidence and trust among governments and lead to mutual understanding and greater solidarity…The recent global developments demonstrate the world is moving toward greater regional cooperation, and regionally coordinated economic growth and development will consolidate peace and stability and pave the way for enhancement of international relations.”

In addition, at the end of Dec 1997, a 125 mile pipeline between Turkmenistan and northeast Iran was opened, gaining access to one of the largest untapped energy reserves in the world, the Caspian Sea Basin, designed to carry 12 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year.

Rafsanjani was fully aware of the Arc of Crisis prophecy that the U.S. was trying to convince the international community of, that basically, the Middle East was full of savages and would become a hot-bed for Soviet terrorism if left alone. It was also understood that Iran’s geographic location was the linchpin in determining not only Middle East geopolitics, but Eurasian relations.

To counteract this “prophecy”, which was in fact a “vision” for the Middle East, Rafsanjani understood that economic development and cooperation with Iran’s neighbours was key to avoiding such chaos.

In 1996, Rafsanjani founded the Executives of Construction of Iran Party, along with 16 members of cabinet, dedicated to Iran’s increasing participation in world markets and industrialization with emphasis on progress and development. The party’s view is that economic freedom is linked to cultural and political freedom.

Rafsanjani publicly supported Khatami as the next president- a highly influential and significant move.

Khatami’s Call for a “Dialogue Amongst Civilizations”

Mohammad Khatami became President of Iran on the 3^rd August 1997 and served two terms (1997-2005). He was elected by an overwhelming majority (69% in 1997 and 77.9% in 2001) with a record voter turnout and was extremely popular amongst women and young voters. There was much optimism that Khatami’s presidency would not only bring further economic advances for Iran, but also that Iran’s international relations could begin to mend with the West and end Iran’s economic isolation.

It was Khatami who would first propose the beautiful concept “Dialogue Amongst Civilizations” and delivered this proposal at the UN General Assembly in September 1998 with the challenge that the first year of the millennium be dedicated to this great theme. It was endorsed by the UN.

You may be inclined to think such a concept fanciful, but Khatami was actually proposing a policy that was in direct opposition to the “crisis of Islam” and “clash of civilizations” geopolitical theories of Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington. Khatemi understood that to counteract the attempt to destabilise relations between nations, one would have to focus on the common principles among different civilizations, i.e. to identify a nation’s greatest historical and cultural achievements and build upon these shared heritages.

This is the backbone to what China has adopted as their diplomatic philosophy, which they call win-win cooperation and which has led to the creation of the BRI infrastructure projects, which are based on the recognition that only through economic development can nations attain sustainable peace. Italy would be the first in Europe to sign onto the BRI.

In 1999 Khatami would be the first Iranian president, since the 1979 Revolution, to make an official visit to Europe. Italy was the first stop, where Khatami had a long meeting with Pope John Paul II and gave an inspiringly optimistic address to students at the University of Florence.

Khatami stated his reason for choosing to visit Italy first was that they shared in common renaissance heritages (the Italian and Islamic Renaissances). Since the two nations had made significant contributions to contemporary civilization, an immense potential existed for a strategic relationship. It was also significant that Italy had never had a colonial presence in the Middle East. During his visit, Khatami had suggested that Italy could function as the “bridge between Islam and Christianity”.

Khatami further elaborated on the concept of a “bridge between Islam and Christianity” in an interview published by La Republica:

“To delve into past history without looking at the future can only be an academic diversion. To help human societies and improve the condition of the world, it is necessary to consider the present state of relations between Asian, in particular Muslim, countries, and Europe…Why do we say, in particular, Muslim? Because Islam is Europe’s next door neighbor; unlike individuals, nations are not free to choose or change neighbors. Therefore, apart from moral, cultural, and human reasons, out of historical and geographical necessity, Islam and Europe have no choice but to gain a better and more accurate understanding of each other, and thus proceed to improve their political, economic, and cultural relations. Our future cannot be separated from each other, because it is impossible to separate our past.”

In June 2000, Khatami made a state visit to China with a 170 member delegation. In a lecture delivered at Beijing University Khatami stated:

“Even if one were to rely solely on historical documents we can still demonstrate the existence of uninterrupted historical links between China and Iran as early as the third century BC. [The historic Silk Road was the vehicle of cultural exchange where] we can observe a striking spectrum of cultural and spiritual interchanges involving religions, customs, thoughts, literature and ethics, which on the whole, added to the vitality and vivacity of eastern culture and thought…[and that] the Chinese outlook has been instrumental in opening up the way to the fruitful and constructive historical discourses throughout the ages, due to its emphasis on the intellectual over the political, in an attempt to epitomize wisdom, temperance and parsimony…Emphasis on our long standing close historical ties and dialogue among the great Asian civilizations, is a valuable instrument for the regenerating of thought, culture, language, and learning…in Asian civilizations, culture has always been the core of the economic and political process…[and] therefore, we are compelled to give a more serious thought to the revival of our cultures…”

Khatami concluded with “The future belongs to the cultured, wise, courageous and industrious nations.”

Dr. Strangelove and the “Islamic Bomb”

The U.S. was not always so antagonistic to Iran’s right to sovereignty. In 1943, President Roosevelt created the Iran Declaration which was signed by both Stalin and Churchill at the Tehran Conference, effectively ending Iran’s occupation by foreign powers.

In 1957, following Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative, the U.S. and Iran signed the “Cooperation Concerning Civil Uses of Atoms” which led to the 1959 creation of the Tehran Nuclear Research Center. And in 1960, first generation Iranian scientists were trained at MIT. In 1967, the U.S. supplied Iran with a 5 megawatt research reactor and enriched uranium fuel!

The reason why the relationship went sour, as Washington incessantly repeats, is that Iran is no longer trustworthy after the hostage crisis debacle shortly after the 1979 Revolution. The U.S., confident on their high horse, has felt justified ever since to dictate to Iran how they should run their nation.

Funny that it is hardly ever mentioned in the same breath that the U.S. was directly involved in the illegal removal of Iran’s Prime Minister Mosaddegh in 1953 who had successfully nationalised Iran’s oil and purged the nation of its British imperialist infestation.

Iran had proceeded in accordance with international law and won the case for nationalising Iran’s oil at The Hague and UN Security Council, against the British who were claiming their company “rights” to Iran’s resources. When Britain humiliatingly lost both high profile cases, Britain and the U.S. proceeded to implement TPAJAX and illegally overthrew the constitutional government of Iran, removing Mosaddegh as Prime Minister and installing an abiding puppet in his place.

Despite this, the U.S. acts as if it were justified in its incredibly hostile 40 year foreign policy towards Iran, largely over a hostage crisis (to which all hostages were safely returned home), and which was likely purposefully provoked by the U.S. as a pretext to sabotaging the European Monetary System (see my paper on this).

If Iran can forgive what the U.S. did to throw their country into disarray and keep their beloved leader Mosaddegh locked away as a political prisoner for the rest of his life, who was even refused a proper burial (1), then the U.S. government is in no position to harbour such distrust and hatred over the distant past.

Although Iran is also incessantly accused of alleged terrorist activity, there is not one international court case to date that has actually provided evidence to follow through with such charges. What is standing in the way of this occurring if Iran’s crimes are apparently so immense and far reaching and are a matter of international security, as the U.S. government frequently protests?

These alleged terrorist accusations seem to be based in the same form of “reasoning” behind the incessant accusations that Iran is planning on building an “Islamic Bomb”. In 2007, under the fanatical neoconservative Dick Cheney (via operation Clean Break), the U.S. came very close to invading Iran on the pretext that Iran was actively working towards such a goal.

These threats occurred despite the Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), ElBaradei, insisting that Iran was cooperating with the IAEA demands in accordance with NPT standards and that there was no evidence to support that Iran was working on nuclear weapons. In fact, ElBaradei was so upset over Washington’s threats of war that he took to the press daily to emphasise that Iran was cooperating fully and there was no evidence to justify an invasion.

However, it wouldn’t be until the release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Dec 3, 2007 that Cheney’s fantasy was finally dashed against the rocks. Within the NIE report, which was produced by American intelligence agencies, it was made crystal clear that Iran in fact had no military nuclear program since at least 2003 but possibly even further back. It was also no secret that the only reason why the report was made public was because members of the American intelligence community made it known that they were willing to go to the press about it, even if it meant ending up in prison.

Incredibly, Bush’s response to the press over this news was “Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will continue to be dangerous…”

Looking past the absurdity of Bush’s statement that Iran is dangerous, only 5 years after the illegal invasion of Iraq, justified by cooked British Intelligence, and the very real attempt to invade Iran in turn over fabricated accusations, the issue is in fact nothing to do with what Washington is claiming is their problem with Iran.

Atoms for Peace or Nuclear Apartheid?

The real “problem” with Iran is that it has become a great thorn in the “arc of crisis” game-plan. Despite Iran once being flooded with MI6, CIA and Israeli Mossad operatives, the Iranians have been largely successful in purging their nation of this infestation. Iran is thus refusing to be the west’s geopolitical linchpin. The more autonomous and prosperous Iran becomes, the greater the thorn.

The assassination of Gen. Maj. Soleimani in Jan 2020, was meant to be nothing less than a blatant provocation, as Bolton giddily tweeted, to cause Iran to take a misstep that would have justified a U.S. invasion and allowed for a reboot of the “arc of crisis”, flooding the country with actual terrorist groups, following the Iraq and Libyan models.

The real “threat” of Iran was expressed clearly when then President Bush Jr. visited the Middle East in Jan 2008 in an attempt to organise Arab states to offer their territory for U.S. military aggression against Iran. What he received as a response whether in Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE or Saudi Arabia was a resounding no.

The Al-Riyadh newspaper, which represents the views of the Saudi government, went so far as to state “We refuse to be used to launch wars or tensions with Iran…If the president [of the U.S.] wants to obtain the solidarity of all the Arabs…he must focus, rationally, on the most important issue which is the question of peace.”

Overlapping Bush’s visit, the Foreign Minister of Iraq joined with the Iranian Foreign Minister at a Tehran press conference to announce: “My country knows who is our friend and who is our enemy, and Iran is our friend.”

It is clear that despite the attempts to bring these nations to each other’s throats, the jig is up, and the tyrannical presence of the U.S. military in the Middle East is only going to unite these countries further. There will be no T.E. Lawrence organising of a Bedouin tribe this time around.

It is understood that if Iran were permitted to enter the world markets unhindered and to develop nuclear energy to sufficiently provide for its people, then Iran would become one of the top countries in the world. And as their Arab neighbours recognise, this would bring not only wealth and prosperity to their nations in turn, but the very much desired peace and security.

Iran as an economic powerhouse would also certainly align itself with Russia and China, as it has already begun, due to their common philosophy oriented in a multipolar governance frame emphasised by a win-win idea of economic cooperation. This alliance would naturally draw India, Japan and notably western Europe into its economic framework like the gravitational pull of a sun, and would result in the termination of the NATO-U.S. military industrial complex by ending the divide between east and west politics.

The fight for nuclear energy has always been about the fight for the right to develop one’s nation. And economic development of regions, such as the Middle East, is key to achieving sustainable peace. The reason why most countries are not “granted” this right to use nuclear power is because they are meant to remain as “serf” countries under a unipolar world order. Additionally, amongst the “privileged” countries who have been given the green light to possess uranium enrichment facilities, they are being told that they now need to shut down these nuclear capabilities under a Green New Deal.

This unipolar outlook was made evident by the Bush Administration’s attempt to assert guidelines that no country should be allowed to enrich uranium even to the low levels required for fuel for nuclear electric power plants, unless it is already in the U.S. dominated “Nuclear Suppliers Group”. All other nations would only be permitted to purchase power plant fuel from these “supplier” countries…with political conditions of course.

Everyone knows that oil revenues are not reliable for financing economic growth and Venezuela is a stark example of this. By limiting countries in the Middle East to oil as the main revenue, an incredibly volatile economic situation for the entire region is created, in addition to a complete subservience to “oil geopolitics”. Every nation has the right to defend itself against economic warfare by diversifying and stabilising its economy, and nuclear energy is absolutely key.

In British-based financial oligarchism, which is what runs the City of London (the financial center of the world for over 400 years to this day), the essential policy outlook which lurks behind the international oil cartels, is that who controls the oil, gas, strategic minerals, and food production will ultimately control the world, after the mass of paper values of a dying financial system have been swept away.

Also by this author

Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).

How to Take Back Control of Your Mind

A Historical Reminder of What Defines the United States, As Told by a Former Slave

The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence

The Sword of Damocles Over Western Europe: Follow the Trail of Blood and OilTo Understand Iran’s 150-Year Fight, Follow the Trail of Blood and Oil

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

Authorities Confiscate Large Stash of Weapons and Munition Heading to Idlib

July 31, 2020 Arabi Souri

The law enforcement authorities discovered and confiscated a large quantity of weapons and munition heading to the NATO-sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists in Idlib.

In its ongoing intensive work and thanks to the ever-vigilant Syrian security personnel and with the help of locals, the law enforcement units in Homs monitoring smuggling networks found one of the storing places used by the smugglers at the Homs – Hama administrative borderline packed with a large number of assorted weapons and their munition on its route to terrorists in the Idlib province further in the northwest.

This seizure included automatic rifles, medium machine guns, shoulder-fired missiles, RPGs, various-caliber mortars, a mortar, grenades, and a large amount of light and medium ammunition.

Just a week earlier on the 22nd of July, Syrian law enforcement authorities confiscated a shipment of a large number of weapons and munition heading to the terrorists in northern Idlib countryside. That shipment included mainly medium and light ammunition, machine guns, ammunition, RPGs, medium machine guns, and propellers.

Due to the huge quantities confiscated by the Syrian law enforcement agencies all over the country, the Syrian Arab Army’s engineering unit has to destroy the found quantities as it ran out of storage places. Weapons and munition need to be stored in specially-designated high-security depots. Almost weekly, the engineering corps carry out such a procedure to destroy these weapons all over the country, they also have to notify the public beforehand and make sure the destruction site is as much far as possible from residential or farming areas.

See also:

SAA Units Discover a 20 Meters Depth Tunnel in Hama Countryside

https://www.syrianews.cc/saa-units-discover-20-meters-depth-tunnel-hama-countryside/embed/#?secret=OFr6CNGuWk

SAA Units Find Weapons, Caves & Tunnels in Cleanup; Erdogan’s Terrorists Breach CoH 19 Times

https://www.syrianews.cc/saa-units-find-weapons-caves-erdogans-terrorists-breach-coh-19-times/embed/#?secret=Y0zrHdTzeJ

NATO terrorists do not only rely on the direct supply route they have with NATO member state Turkey providing them with personnel, weapons, and logistics essentials, they have a number of supply networks established during the years when they were controlling much larger territories throughout the country. Routes from Lebanon, from the open Syrian desert connecting with Iraq and Jordan in the east and south, and naturally through the very long borders with Turkey in the north.

Our question to the citizens of the NATO member alliance, especially when a country like Germany, the locomotive of the European economy, fails to pay its dues to the NATO alliance which lead to Trump withdrawing a big number of his forces from there, wouldn’t investing in more useful things in your own countries, say healthcare, education, infrastructure, research and development…etc., be more beneficial to you and your children than investing in these terrorist groups killing and maiming Syrians? Just think about it, weapons and also its munition are not cheap, let alone the billions spent by the Pentagon and each of the NATO war ministries from your tax money as part of their contribution to the invading and destruction of other countries.

SAA Seizes 2 Shipments of NATO Weapons to Al-Qaeda Near Damascus

https://www.syrianews.cc/saa-seizes-2-shipments-nato-weapons-al-qaeda-near-damascus/embed/#?secret=Za0C2S9Z9s

Large Quantities of Weapons and Drugs Left behind by NATO Terrorists in Southern Syria

موسكو طهران وبكين… نموذج اقتصادي متكامل

د. حسن مرهج

من الواضح أنّ السياسية الصينية في المنطقة تسير وفق مسارين:

الأول – تسعى الصين إلى الالتفاف على العقوبات الأميركية وبناء تحالفات استراتيجية مع دول عديدة تناهض السياسات الأميركية في المنطقة، في محاولة لإنشاء منظومة سياسية وعسكرية واقتصادية، توازي شبكة العلاقات الأميركية قوة وتنظيماً وتأثيراً في سياسات المنطقة.

الثاني – هناك رغبة صينية واضحة لوضع حدّ للتحكم الأميركي في السياسات الدولية والإقليمية، ولا سبيل لوضع آلية تُقيد السياسات الأميركية، إلا بتحالفات مع دول قوية في المنطقة، وعلى رأس تلك الدول الجمهورية الإسلامية الإيرانية.

انطلاقاّ من هذين المسارين، ترى الصين أنّ إيران واحدة من أهمّ الدول لربط آسيا بأوروبا من خلال مبادرة الحزام والطريق، التي تمثل المحرك الأساس للسياسة الخارجية الصينية منذ أعلنها الرئيس الصيني شي جين بينغ في العام 2013، ولاعب أساسي في الحفاظ على استقرار منطقة الخليج العربي التي تعدّ الشريان الرئيس لوصول النفط إلى الصين.

وعليه، بات واضحاً أنّ أحد أهمّ أوجه العلاقة الصينية الإيرانية، تعزيز المصالح الاقتصادية والاستراتيجية، بُغية تقويض الأهداف الأميركية في المنطقة، إذ يبدو واضحاً أنّ الصين وإيران تعملان منذ مدّة على شراكة استراتيجية لمدة 25 عاماً، والواضح أيضاً أنّ الشراكة ستسمّى شراكة استراتيجية شاملة بين الصين وإيران.

وبما أنّ علاقات إيران مع الصين جادّة وتشكّل أساس التعاون الاقتصادي والاستراتيجي بين البلدين في شكل وثيقة مدتها 25 عاماً، فمن الطبيعي أن تهتمّ الدول الغربية بهذه العلاقات، وبشكل أساسي فإنّ السياسة الأنجلو ساكسونية للأميركيين والبريطانيين هي التركيز على الضغط على إيران من أجل إبعادها عن الصين وروسيا، لكن فشلت هذه السياسة، وفشلت معها السياسة الأميركية لاستعمار إيران، وما يؤكد هذا الأمر أنّ الصين ستُشارك في “بناء البنية التحتية الأساسية لإيران” كجزء من مبادرة “حزام واحد وطريق واحد”؛ هذا المشروع الذي يُعدّ مشروعاً للتكامل الاقتصادي بين البلدين.

فقد أدركت الصين وإيران وضمناً روسيا، أنّ الاتحاد والتعاون هما الوسيلة الوحيدة لتعزيز التبادل على المستويات كافة، وبات ضرورة لمحاربة المشكلات الداهمة التي يمثلها تنامي النفوذ الأميركي في الشؤون الداخلية للدول، حيث أن النفوذ الأميركي أجبر طهران وبكين وموسكو على تحييد الخلافات الثانوية، وتبني استراتيجية موحدة من أجل المصلحة المشتركة للدفاع عن مصالحهم في المنطقة.

والواضح أن أحداث مثل الحرب على سورية، والأزمة في ليبيا، والإطاحة بالنظام الديمقراطي في أوكرانيا، والعقوبات على إيران، والضغط المباشر على بكين في بحر الصين الجنوبي، كلها عوامل سرّعت في التكامل بين الصين وإيران وروسيا.

في جانب آخر مُتعلق بعمق العلاقة الإيرانية الصينية، نجد أنّ جوهر هذه العلاقة يرتكز على الاقتصاد، في المقابل ومن خلال تحليل القوة الاقتصادية نجد أن المنظمات العابرة للحدود مثل منظمة التجارة العالمية وصندوق النقد الدولي والبنك الدولي، تضمن دور واشنطن كزعيم اقتصادي، والركائز التي تدعم مركزية الولايات المتحدة في الاقتصاد العالمي يُمكن أن تُعزى إلى السياسة النقدية للبنك الاحتياطي الفيدرالي ووظيفة الدولار كعملة احتياط عالمية، خاصة مجلس الاحتياطي الاتحادي لديه قدرة غير محدودة لطباعة النقود ولتمويل القوة الاقتصادية للقطاعين الخاص والعام، وكذلك لدفع الفاتورة الواجبة للحروب المكلفة جداّ، وضمن ذلك فإنّ الدولار الأميركي يلعب دوراً رئيسياً كعملة احتياطية عالمية، وكذلك يستخدم كعملة للتجارة، وهذا يُحتم على كلّ بنك مركزي امتلاك احتياطيات بالعملة الأميركية، وتكريس أهمية واشنطن في النظام الاقتصادي العالمي. من هنا فإنّ إدخال اليوان الصيني والتومان الإيراني في التعاملات التجارية بين بكين وطهران، ومن الممكن أن تتسع مروحة هذه التعاملات بالعملات المحلية للبلدين، لتشمل دولاً عديدة ترغب بالابتعاد عن مخاطر التعامل بالدولار الأميركي، كلّ ذلك وسائل وأجراس إنذار الاستراتيجيين الأميركيين حول خطر تآكل مكانة العملة الأميركية.

في المحصلة، فإنّ الصين وإيران وضمناً روسيا بحاجة لإيجاد نظام اقتصادي بديل، لتأمين الجوانب الحيوية للاقتصاد المحلي، فقد لقد لعب انهيار سوق الأسهم في الصين، وانخفاض قيمة الروبل في روسيا، والعقوبات غير القانونية المفروضة على إيران، دوراً عميقاً في تثبيت أهداف موسكو وطهران وبكين، لإيجاد نقاط التلاقي بين البلدان الثلاثة، ولتشكيل منظومة اقتصادية قادرة على ضعضعة الهيمنة الأميركية على العالم.

The heart of the matter in the South China Sea

July 30, 2020

by Pepe Escobar for The Saker Blog and originally posted at Asia Times

When the Ronald Reagan and Nimitz carrier strike groups recently engaged in “operations” in the South China Sea, it did not escape to many a cynic that the US Pacific Fleet was doing its best to turn the infantile Thucydides Trap theory into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The pro forma official spin, via Rear Adm. Jim Kirk, commander of the Nimitz, is that the ops were conducted to “reinforce our commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific, a rules-based international order, and to our allies and partners”.

Nobody pays attention to these clichés, because the real message was delivered by a CIA operative posing as diplomat, Secretary of State Mike “We Lie, We Cheat, We Steal” Pompeo: “The PRC has no legal grounds to unilaterally impose its will on the region”, in a reference to the Nine-Dash Line. For the State Dept., Beijing deploys nothing but “gangster tactics” in the South China Sea.

Once again, nobody paid attention, because the actual facts on the sea are stark. Anything that moves in the South China Sea – China’s crucial maritime trade artery – is at the mercy of the PLA, which decides if and when to deploy their deadly DF-21D and DF-26 “carrier killer” missiles. There’s absolutely no way the US Pacific Fleet can win a shooting war in the South China Sea.

Electronically jammed

A crucial Chinese report, unavailable and not referred to by Western media, and translated by Hong Kong-based analyst Thomas Wing Polin, is essential to understand the context.

The report refers to US Growler electronic warplanes rendered totally out of control by electronic jamming devices positioned on islands and reefs in the South China Sea.

According to the report, “after the accident, the United States negotiated with China, demanding that China dismantle the electronic equipment immediately, but it was rejected. These electronic devices are an important part of China’s maritime defense and are not offensive weapons. Therefore, the US military’s request for dismantling is unreasonable.”

It gets better: “On the same day, former commander Scott Swift of the US Pacific Fleet finally acknowledged that the US military had lost the best time to control the South China Sea. He believes that China has deployed a large number of Hongqi 9 air defense missiles, H-6K bombers, and electronic jamming systems on islands and reefs. The defense can be said to be solid. If US fighter jets rush into the South China Sea, they are likely to encounter their ‘Waterloo.’”

The bottom line is that the systems – including electronic jamming – deployed by the PLA on islands and reefs in the South China Sea, covering more than half of the total surface, are considered by Beijing to be part of the national defense system.

I have previously detailed what Admiral Philip Davidson, when he was still a nominee to lead the US Pacific Command (PACOM), told the US Senate. Here are his Top Three conclusions:

1) “China is pursuing advanced capabilities (e.g., hypersonic missiles) which the United States has no current defense against. As China pursues these advanced weapons systems, US forces across the Indo-Pacific will be placed increasingly at risk.”

2) “China is undermining the rules-based international order.”

3) “China is now capable of controlling the South China Sea in all scenarios short of war with the United States.”

Implied in all of the above is the “secret” of the Indo-Pacific strategy: at best a containment exercise, as China continues to solidify the Maritime Silk Road linking the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

Remember the nusantao

The South China Sea is and will continue to be one of the prime geopolitical flashpoints of the young 21^st century, where a great deal of the East-West balance of power will be played.

I have addressed this elsewhere in the past in some detail, but a short historical background is once again absolutely essential to understand the current juncture as the South China Sea increasingly looks and feels like a Chinese lake.

Let’s start in 1890, when Alfred Mahan, then president of the US Naval College, wrote the seminal The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. Mahan’s central thesis is that the US should go global in search of new markets, and protect these new trade routes through a network of naval bases.

That is the embryo of the US Empire of Bases – which remains in effect.

It was Western – American and European – colonialism that came up with most land borders and maritime borders of states bordering the South China Sea: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam.

We are talking about borders between different colonial possessions – and that implied intractable problems from the start, subsequently inherited by post-colonial nations.

Historically, it had always been a completely different story. The best anthropological studies (Bill Solheim’s, for instance) define the semi-nomadic communities who really traveled and traded across the South China Sea from time immemorial as the Nusantao – an Austronesian compound word for “south island” and “people”.

The Nusantao were not a defined ethnic group. They were a maritime internet. Over centuries, they had many key hubs, from the coastline between central Vietnam and Hong Kong all the way to the Mekong Delta. They were not attached to any “state”. The Western notion of “borders” did not even exist. In the mid-1990s, I had the privilege to encounter some of their descendants in Indonesia and Vietnam.

So it was only by the late 19^th century that the Westphalian system managed to freeze the South China Sea inside an immovable framework.

Which brings us to the crucial point of why China is so sensitive about its borders; because they are directly linked to the “century of humiliation” – when internal Chinese corruption and weakness allowed Western “barbarians” to take possession of Chinese land.

A Japanese lake

The Nine Dash Line is an immensely complex problem. It was invented by the eminent Chinese geographer Bai Meichu, a fierce nationalist, in 1936, initially as part of a “Chinese National Humiliation Map” in the form of a “U-shaped line” gobbling up the South China Sea all the way down to James Shoal, which is 1,500 km south of China but only over 100 km off Borneo.

The Nine Dash Line, from the beginning, was promoted by the Chinese government – remember, at the time not yet Communist – as the letter of the law in terms of “historic” Chinese claims over islands in the South China Sea.

One year later, Japan invaded China. Japan had occupied Taiwan way back in 1895. Japan occupied the Philippines in 1942. That meant virtually the entire coastline of the South China Sea being controlled by a single empire for the fist time in history. The South China Sea had become a Japanese lake.

Well, that lasted only until 1945. The Japanese did occupy Woody Island in the Paracels and Itu Aba (today Taiping) in the Spratlys. After the end of WWII and the US nuclear-bombing Japan, the Philippines became independent in 1946 and the Spratlys immediately were declared Filipino territory.

In 1947, all the islands in the South China Sea got Chinese names.

And in December 1947 all the islands were placed under the control of Hainan (itself an island in southern China.) New maps duly followed, but now with Chinese names for the islands (or reefs, or shoals). But there was a huge problem: no one explained the meaning of those dashes (which were originally eleven.)

In June 1947 the Republic of China claimed everything within the line – while proclaiming itself open to negotiate definitive maritime borders with other nations later on. But, for the moment, there were no borders.

And that set the scene for the immensely complicated “strategic ambiguity” of the South China Sea that still lingers on – and allows the State Dept. to accuse Beijing of “gangster tactics”. The culmination of a millennia-old transition from the “maritime internet” of semi-nomadic peoples to the Westphalian system spelled nothing but trouble.

Time for COC

So what about the US notion of “freedom of navigation”?

In imperial terms, “freedom of navigation”, from the West Coast of the US to Asia – through the Pacific, the South China Sea, the Malacca Strait and the Indian Ocean – is strictly an issue of military strategy.

The US Navy simply cannot imagine dealing with maritime exclusion zones – or having to demand an “authorization” every time they need to cross them. In this case the Empire of Bases would lose “access” to its own bases.

This is compounded with trademark Pentagon paranoia, gaming a situation where a “hostile power” – namely China – decides to block global trade. The premise in itself is ludicrous, because the South China Sea is the premier, vital maritime artery for China’s globalized economy.

So there’s no rational justification for a Freedom of Navigation (FON) program. For all practical purposes, these aircraft carriers like the Ronald Reagan and the Nimitz showboating on and off in the South China Sea amount to 21^st century gunboat diplomacy. And Beijing is not impressed.

As far as the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is concerned, what matters now is to come up with a Code of Conduct (COC) to solve all maritime conflicts between Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and China.

Next year, ASEAN and China celebrate 30 years of strong bilateral relations. There’s a strong possibility they will be upgraded to “comprehensive strategic partner” status.

Because of Covid-19, all players had to postpone negotiations on the second reading of the single draft of COC. Beijing wanted these to be face to face – because the document is ultra-sensitive and for the moment, secret. Yet they finally agreed to negotiate online – via detailed texts.

It will be a hard slog, because as ASEAN made it clear in a virtual summit in late June, everything has to be in accordance with international law, including the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS).

If they can all agree on a COC by the end of 2020, a final agreement could be approved by ASEAN in mid-2021. Historic does not even begin to describe it – because this negotiation has been going on for no less than two decades.

Not to mention that a COC invalidates any US pretension to secure “freedom of navigation” in an area where navigation is already free.

Yet “freedom” was never the issue. In imperial terminology, “freedom” means that China must obey and keep the South China Sea open to the US Navy. Well, that’s possible, but you gotta behave. That’ll be the day when the US Navy is “denied” the South China Sea. You don’t need to be Mahan to know that’ll mean the imperial end of ruling the seven seas.

An Attack on Edward Said’s Legacy

Source

by Lawrence Davidson

Part I—Meeting Caroline Glick

I traveled to Israel and the Occupied Territories in the early 2000s with the progressive group Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. We made an effort to gain insight into most of the players in the conflict, and so a series of interviews was arranged with members of the Israeli right wing. I remember that one of them was Caroline Glick, an ardent American-Israeli Zionist. She lectured us on the positive personal relationships allegedly prevalent between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. 

It was an interesting and somewhat embarrassing experience. Glick and I are both American and both Jewish. Growing up, I had this understanding that American plus Jewish always meant being anti-racist. To be so was, in my mind, the prime lesson of modern Jewish history. What being anti-racist meant to Glick was unclear. She spent the better part of an hour giving us a defense of Israeli-Jewish treatment of Palestinians based on the classic “some of my best friends are Black” (read Palestinian) defense. In the words of the New York Times journalist John Eligon, this line of argument “has so often been relied on by those facing accusations of racism that it has become shorthand for weak denials of bigotry—a punch line about the absence of thoughtfulness and rigor in our conversations about racism.” And so it was with Glick, who explained that she, and many other Israeli Jews, had Palestinians who do small jobs for them and are treated well, and that this proves a lack of cultural and societal racism. It was such a vacuous argument that I remember feeling embarrassed for her. 

Things haven’t gotten much better when it comes to Ms. Glick’s worldview. She is now a senior columnist at Israel Hayom (Israel Today, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper owned by the family of Sheldon Anderson) and contributor to such questionable U.S. outlets as Breitbart News. Shealso directs the Israeli Security Project at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. There can be little doubt that she continues to see the world through the distorting lens of a particularly hardline variant of Zionism.  

Part II—Glick’s Attack on Edward Said’s Legacy 

Recently, Caroline Glick launched an attack on the legacy of the late American-Palestinian scholar and teacher Edward Said. Entitled “Edward Said, Prophet of Political Violence in America,” it was recently (7 July 2020) published in the U.S. by Newsweek—a news magazine with an increasingly pro-Zionist editorial stand. As it turns out, one cannot find a better example of how ideology can distort one’s outlook to the point of absurdity. Below is an analysis of Glick’s piece in a point-by-point fashion. Ultimately, the ideological basis for her argument will become clear. 

1. Glick begins by resurrecting a twenty-year-old event. “On July 3, 2000, an incident occurred along the Lebanese border with Israel that, at the time, seemed both bizarre and … unimportant. That day, Columbia University professor Edward Said was photographed on the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese side of the border with Israel throwing a rock at an Israel Defense Forces watchtower 30 feet away.” She goes on to describe this act as “Said’s rock attack on Israel” and the “soldiers protecting their border.”

We need some context to put all of this in perspective: Israel is an expansionist state, and the original Zionist aim (as presented to the Paris Peace Conference following World War I) was to incorporate parts of southern Lebanon into what is now Israel. Southern Lebanon also briefly became a staging area for Palestinian retaliatory attacks into Israel. Thus, Israel invaded Lebanon multiple times only to be forced to withdraw in the face of resistance led by Hezbollah, a strong Lebanese Shiite militia in control of much of southern Lebanon.  

Said relates that during his 2000 visit to the Lebanese border with his family, he threw a pebble (not a “rock”) at a deserted Israeli watchtower (no Israeli soldiers were “defending their border”).  Said saw this as a symbolic act of defiance against Israeli occupation. Over the years stone throwing by Palestinian youth had become just such a symbolic act. And, it was from their example that Said might have taken his cue.

2. However, Glick wants to draw highly questionable consequences from Said’s act. She tells us that “with the hindsight of 20 years, it was a seminal moment and a harbinger for the mob violence now taking place in many parts of America.” By the way, the “mob violence” in America she is referring to is the mass protests against police brutality that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020.

3. Now that sounds a bit odd. How does Glick manage this segue from Edward Said’s symbolic stone toss in the year 2000 to nationwide inner-city rebellions against police brutality in 2020 America? Here is the contorted sequence she offers: 

a. Said was a terrorist because he was an influential member of the alleged “terrorist organization,” the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). “Terrorist organization” is a standard Zionist descriptor of most Palestinian organizations. Actually, the PLO is the legally recognized representative of the Palestinian people and as such has carried on both a armed and a diplomatic struggle to liberate Palestine from Israeli Occupation. In 1993, the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist. This made little difference to the Zionist right wing who, like Glick, continued to use the terrorist tag for propaganda purposes. It is to be noted that all liberation movements are considered to be “terrorist” by those they fight against. And, indeed both sides in such a struggle usually act in this fashion on occasion. Certainly, Israel is no innocent in this regard. 

b. For Glick, Said’s alleged terrorist connection transforms his “rock attack” into a terrorist act. This is simply an ad hominem assertion on Glick’s part. There is no evidence that Said ever engaged in any act, including the tossing of stones, that can sanely be characterized as terrorism.

c. Glick tells us that, at the same time Said was ‘committing a terrorist attack’ on Israel, he was also “the superstar of far-Left intellectuals.” It is hard to know what she means here by “far-Left.” It is seems to be another ad hominem slander. Said was a scholar of Comparative Literature and, when not in the classroom, he advocated for the political and human rights of oppressed Palestinians—how “far-Left” is that?

d. Nonetheless, Glick goes on to assert that as a “far-Left” academic, Said waged a “nihilistic” and “anti-intellectual” offensive against Western thought. He did so in a well-known work entitled Orientalism published in 1978.

What does Orientalism actually say? Using mostly 19th century literary and artistic examples, the book documents the prevailing Western perception of the Near East and North Africa, which stands in for the Orient. This perception reflects a basically bipolar worldview—one which, according to Said, reserved for the West a superior image of science and reason, prosperity and high culture, and for the Orient an inferior somewhat mysterious and effeminate image of the “other” fated for domination by the West. Over time this view became pervasive in the West and influenced not only literary and artistic views of the Orient, but also impacted political, historical, anthropological and other non-fictional interpretations. Having helped create a superior sense of self, this orientalist perception served as a rationale for Western world dominance. It should be said that whether one agrees with every one of Said’s details or not, there is no doubt his well researched and documented work has made most scholars more aware of their biases.

e. Glick refuses to see Orientalism asjust an influential academic work. Instead, in what appears to be a pattern of illogical jumps, she claims that “in Orientalism, Said characterized all Western—and particularly American—scholarship on the Arab and Islamic worlds as one big conspiracy theory” designed to justify empire. This then is the heart of Said’s alleged “nihilistic” repudiation of Western scholarship. She particularly points to Said’s claim that “From the Enlightenment period through the present every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric.” While this is a far-reaching generalization, it basically reflects an equally pervasive, very real Western cultural bias. What Glick describes as a “conspiracy theory” is Said’s scholarly demonstration of how that bias has expressed itself. And, it should be noted that such pervasive biases are not uniquely American nor even Western. Chinese, Japanese, Arab/Muslim, Hindu and Jewish civilizations have their own variants of such biases. Yet, it is Said’s effort to expose and ameliorate the orientalism of the West that seems to madden Caroline Glick.

f. For Glick, Said’s suggestion that both past as well as many present scholars have culturally biased points of view of the Orient becomes an accusation that any “great scholar” with a classical Western worldview “is worse than worthless. If he is a white American, he is an agent of evil.” Glick is now building a real head of steam and her account becomes more and more grotesque. She now claims that Said’s work is “intellectual nihilism.” How so? Because it “champions narrative over evidence.” What Glick is implying here is that Said’s work is an anti-Western screed presented without evidence. This is demonstrably wrong, but nonetheless provides a platform for Glick’s further assertion that Said’s fantastical narrative is told in order to “manipulate students to engage in political violence against the United States.”

Part III—What Is This All About?

Caroline Glick makes repeated illogical jumps. As egregious as these are they actually point the way to her larger ideological agenda.

1. Said is a terrorist because he opposes Israel and supports the Palestinians. Participation in the PLO is her proof of this. 
2. Because Said is a terrorist, his throwing of a stone at the southern Lebanese border is a terrorist attack against Israel and its defense forces. 
3. Somehow, Said’s throwing the stone was also “a harbinger for the mob violence now taking place in many parts of America.” The connector here is Said’s tossing of an intellectual “rock”—his thesis presented in Orientalism.
4. Just as his “rock attack” was terroristic, so Said’s book, Orientalism, is itself an act of terrorism as well as a “nihilistic” project. 
5. It is all these nasty things rolled into one because it calls into question established cultural assumptions that had long underpinned colonialism and imperialism, and which also just happens to underpin Israel’s claim to legitimacy.
6. But there is more. Glick tells us, “Said’s championing of the Palestinian war against Israel was part of a far wider post-colonialist crusade he waged against the United States. The purpose of his scholarship was to deny American professors the right to study and understand the world [in an orientalist fashion] by delegitimizing them as nothing but racists and imperialists.”
7. And finally, “Orientalism formed the foundation of a much broader campaign on campuses to delegitimize the United States as a political entity steeped in racism.”

Part IV—Conclusion

Glick’s attack on Edward Said’s legacy is beset with leaps of illogic. So let me conclude this analysis with my own leap, hopefully a logical one, to an explanation of what may be Glick’s larger agenda. Glick is attempting to turn the ideological clock back to a time before decolonization. Specifically, she wishes to resurrect an overall acceptance of Western colonialism as a benevolent endeavor whereby progress and civilization was spread by a superior culture. 

Why would she want to do this? Because if we all believe this proposition, then Israel can be seen as a legitimate and normal state. After all, Israel is the last of the colonial settler states—the imposition of Western culture into the Orient. It rules over millions of Palestinian Arabs as the result of a European invasion made “legal” by a colonial document, the Balfour Declaration, and its acceptance by a pro-colonial League of Nations. Our post-colonial age in which Edward Said is a “superstar intellectual,” is seen as a constant threat to Zionist Israel’s legitimacy. 

Edward Said’s legacy provides a strong theoretical foundation for understanding why the Western imperialists thought and acted as they did, and hence helps both Western and non-Western peoples to confront their own modern historical situation. However, Glick cannot see any of this except through the Zionist perspective. Thus, Said’s legacy is just part of an anti-Israeli conspiracy—an attack on those scholars who support the legitimacy of an orientalist point of view and of the Zionist state. 

She also suggests that Said’s undoing of historically accepted biases lets loose the “mob violence” seen in the U.S. There is no evidence for this, but it may be Glick’s  roundabout way of undermining student support for Palestinian rights on American campuses. 

Ultimately, what Glick is interested in is preserving the image of Israel as a Western democratic enclave in an otherwise uncivilized sea of Arab and Islamic barbarians. That fits right into the traditional orientalist belief system and justifies the continuing U.S.-Israeli alliance. Said has successfully called that perspective into question. Hence Glick’s assault on his legacy. 

Finally, Glick’s present attack on Said, and her attempt to tie his work into the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder, shows how frightened the defenders of one racist state, Zionist Israel, become when their principle ally, the United States, comes under attack for racist practices. Said as a “superstar” foe of all racism becomes the lighting rod for that fear. 

Germany likely to benefit from US troop withdrawal, says Russian envoy

Source

July 30, 2020

US President Donald Trump announced on June 15 that Washington would reduce the number of US troops in Germany from 34,500 to 25,000 unless Berlin agreed to pay for their deployment and raise defense spending in accordance with NATO agreements. Trump has repeatedly demanded that all NATO countries spend at least two percent of their gross domestic products on defense.

The envoy noted that the US administration’s decision on relocating part of its forces could impact only economic situation in the areas located near the US military bases

https://tass.com/politics/1183981

IMPRESSIONS FROM AN INFORMAL MEETING WITH ASMA AL-ASSAD, SYRIA’S FIRST LADY

By Eva Bartlett

*(All photos taken from the Facebook page “Asma al Assad – Syria’s First Lady“)

I had been sitting in a small entrance room for what seemed less than a minute when the door opened and Syria’s first lady, Her Excellency Asma al-Assad, greeted me with a warm smile, welcoming me inside a slightly larger sitting room. In official meetings I had had over the years in Syria, I was accustomed to a secretary or assistant escorting me into the meeting room. Asma al-Assad, however, does things up close and personal.

Over the years in Syria, I had heard from people I encountered that she and President Assad routinely meet with their fellow Syrians in crowded venues, mixing and engaging with the people. I had also seen countless photos and videos of the Assads visiting Syrians in their homes around the country.

While I have been to Syria over a dozen times in the past seven years, it had never occurred to me to request a meeting with the first lady. But when that opportunity recently presented itself, I leapt at the chance to speak with one of the most beloved figures in Syria, and to hear her thoughts on her country, her fellow Syrians, and on the plights they are all in. And as it turned out, it was a chance to hear her poignant insights on her role as a mother, a citizen, the wife of the President and a leader in her own right.

Even before assuming the role of Syria’s first lady, Asma al-Assad made it a priority to focus on the development of Syria, and over the years since she’s headed organizations focusing on a range of development issues, including financial, educational and vocational. To effectively work on the many issues she does, her level of awareness of Syrians’ situation on the ground is crucial.

She has travelled widely around Syria, to the smallest villages, to meet with those who could benefit from the various organizations she heads. Videos abound of the first lady, and also the president, visiting wounded soldiers, families of martyrs, cancer patients, and impoverished Syrians, greeting them with hugs and kisses to their cheeks. They often sit with them on the floor of their homes, listening to them talk about their experiences.

In fact, in an interview she gave in 2002, Asma al-Assad explained:

“I wanted to meet [ordinary Syrians] before they met me. Before the world met me. I was able to spend the first couple of months wandering around, meeting other Syrian people. It was my crash course. I would just tag along with one of the many programmes being run in the rural areas. Because people had no idea who I was, I was able to see people completely honestly, I was able to see what their problems were on the ground, what people are complaining about, what the issues are. What people’s hopes and aspirations are. And seeing it first-hand means you are not seeing it through someone else’s eyes. It was really just to see who they are, what they are doing.”

As I already had an appreciation for what she’s accomplished I approached our recent meeting with a great degree of admiration for the person she is and the compassion she exudes.

Since this meeting was not a formal interview, I did not seek to record the over two hours of conversation with Her Excellency. Immediately after leaving, however, I did jot down as many notes about our conversation as I could recall, and will do my best to do justice to what Asma al-Assad said, sometimes quoting her but in general paraphrasing her words.

Also, while I wish to express the respect she deserves in her role as the first lady, and whereas most would call her Your Excellency, I’m also aware that she isn’t fond of titles and fanfare, one of many traits evidencing her humility. Thus, to find middle ground I will either refer to her as the first lady or Asma al-Assad.

Finally, although I’ve begun this essay with focus on Asma al-Assad and her character, what follows is really about Syria, through her eyes, and at some points my own. From the way she spoke, it is very clear that everything she does for her country is for her country, and she does so with an admirably passionate commitment.

I was admittedly anticipating our meeting, wondering how it might unfold. As it turned out, from the initial greeting, conversation flowed naturally and comfortably, which I attribute not only to Asma al-Assad’s ability to put those she meets with at ease very quickly, but also to the genuine interest and attention she pays everyone she meets.

She asked about my family, and was concerned about my own well being—to which my answer was something along the lines of: I’m very gratefully in the place I would most want to be right now. She asked about my experiences in Palestine in general, and my years in Gaza specifically. This was not feigned interest, as the first lady has consistently shown support for Palestine.

In late 2008/early 2009, when Israel was committing a massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza who had nowhere to flee, I was living in Gaza, and during the war riding in ambulances, documenting Israel’s war crimes. For three weeks, civilians were bombarded relentlessly—including with White Phosphorous, DIME, dart (flechette) bombs, drone strikes, Apache and tank shelling, and the massive one ton bomb airstrikes. In the end, Israel’s assault killed over 1400 Palestinians.

During an interview she gave to CNN at the time, Syria’s first lady spoke on the horrors which Palestinians were enduring during the massacre and also due to the inhumane Israeli siege on Gaza, rendering Gaza a prison. She spoke movingly of the over 80 percent of Palestinians in Gaza reliant on food aid to merely survive, the nearly 1 million (there are far more now) who don’t have access to clean water, and on many of the other sordid realities about life under siege in Gaza.

“This is the 21st Century. Where in the world could this happen? Unfortunately, it is happening. Just imagine your children living in Gaza. Mothers in Gaza can’t cook. Why can’t they cook? Because they don’t have access to fuel, they don’t even have access to the basic foodstuffs that are required to get a meal together, so children don’t eat. You put your children to bed at night and you expect to see them in the morning. That’s a luxury that people in Gaza just do not have. So what would it be like for you, living under those circumstances?”

WORKING FOR SYRIANS

During our meeting I commented on her work drive, knowing that throughout the past months when around the world things have slowed to a halt she has continued working on issues related to Syria’s development and empowering Syrians from all walks of life.

In May she participated in a workshop with staff of Jarih al-Watan (The Nation’s Wounded), a national veteran support program created in 2014 to help injured soldiers rebuild their lives and reintegrate back into society. The program provides support in several key areas including physical rehabilitation, mental health, education grants, vocational training and financial aid for small and medium enterprises.

The first lady explained that working hard is natural for her. She graduated from university quite young and started working professionally at age 21. When it comes to her work for Syrians, it’s more than her natural drive, it is something she is compelled to do for her country.

She talked to me about her cancer treatment (2018-2019), saying that people likely expected her to stay home, to discontinue work or at least work less because she was ill and undergoing treatment. But for her, how could she, for example, delay a child from getting treatment for a hearing aid, or delay a patient from getting medical care, “simply because I was feeling tired.”

Most people who have had a cold or flu would stay home during their illness, justifiably so. That Asma al-Assad refused to do so while enduring cancer treatment and all of the painful and exhausting side effects speaks volumes to her devotion to her people, a point worth stressing given that Western media has done their utmost to vilify her and the President.

Apart from her development work, the first lady quietly works to change antiquated mindsets on how to do things in Syria. She is also keen to encourage people in general, especially children, including her own, to think for themselves.

“We are trying to encourage young people to ask questions and think critically, which should be in line with democracy and freedom of opinion…”

Encouraging critical thinking and questioning of everything are traits that make for a more open society. For at least the past decade, the US and allies have preached about wanting freedom and democracy in Syria. But while gushing about freedom, they were funding and supporting terrorism, illegally occupying Syrian land, stealing Syrian oil, and prolonging terrorism in the country.

The forward-thinking approach Asma al-Assad embodies could lead to changes for the better in Syria. Yet, because the West is on a mission to impose a government which will do America’s bidding, people and policies that are actually good for Syria are dismissed and ridiculed by America and her allies.

Meanwhile, ironically, in Western countries, censorship has become increasingly rife, with dissenting voices being deleted from Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook, and with critical articles on current events being labelled as “fake news” by Western-government affiliated so-called “fact checkers”.

The first lady noted, “People are being steered by a narrative. They are not allowed to have an opinion any longer. There’s now no freedom of speech in the West.”

IMPACTS OF AMERICA’S DEADLY SANCTIONS

In June, America again ratcheted up its decades-old sanctions on Syria, adding a new round of sanctions meant to utterly debilitate the people of Syria— who’ve already suffered nearly ten years of war.

Every day where I am now in Syria, I hear and see things that drive home just how utterly brutal the US sanctions are: a friend whose aunt can’t get the medications needed for her cancer, another friend whose cousin died as a result of not getting the medications he needed for his chronic illness.

The sanctions are deliberately targeting Syrian civilians, and that is the intent of the United States. The US pretext of “helping Syrians” by sanctioning their country is sociopathic double-speak. The reality is they are slowly killing Syrians.

Under the latest sanctions, civilians are denied medicines, access to up to date medical equipment, and as a consequence, denied medical treatment.

The first lady spoke on how much harder life has gotten for Syrians.

“The medical equipment in Syria (like radiotherapy) needed to treat cancer patients is outdated and it is getting harder and harder to maintain these machines and keep them working. With the sanctions, chemotherapy drugs have become harder to source decreasing the likelihood of patients surviving cancer. If I was facing cancer now instead of two years ago, I wouldn’t be able to get the needed treatment. This is the case for Syrians now.”

I asked about importing the materials needed for local manufacturing. But the problem is, she told me, companies cancel contracts for fear of being punished by the US for violating sanctions.

The first lady asked me what I noticed in recent visits to Syria. I said that I had imagined things would be better after the 2018 liberation of eastern Ghouta and other areas occupied by terrorists and the cessation of their daily mortar and missile attacks on residential areas of Damascus.

But although there is peace, people I meet are despondent about the future. Young people want to leave, to find work or study abroad. And while Syria has started to rebuild, the truth is we don’t know how long that will take, particularly given that the latest sanctions target reconstruction as well. Nor do people know how or when the economy will improve.

The shattered economy is largely a product of ten years of terrorism, war, the sanctions, and the US-Turkish theft and destruction of Syria’s resources, particularly oil. The Syria-wide bout of crop fires in wheat and barley growing regions has devastated farmers and contributes to the country’s economic woes. Farmers blame US and Turkish occupation forces for deliberately setting some of the fires, with Turkish forces even allegedly firing on farmers to keep them from extinguishing the flames.

Destroying the economy, starving the people, bringing people to their knees, in hopes they will vote against their president. That is the US strategy.

However, the US and allies have from day one underestimated the Syrian people. Syrians have shown the world the meaning of steadfastness, facing the most powerful nations and their terrorist proxies, and rising undefeated. But doing so with untold, tragic losses.

HONOURING THE SACRIFICES OF SYRIAN SOLDIERS

The first lady spoke of supporting micro businesses as a long term strategy to improve the economy for all, not just for some. This is something she’s been doing for nearly twenty years in Syria, with a variety of initiatives on microfinance, funding and training.

Tied into this is the vocational training that enables startup projects.

This June, at Nasmet Jabal, in a mountainous area in northwestern Syria, I saw wounded former Syrian soldiers receiving vocational training, learning cheese and yogurt making, staples of the Syrian diet. In previous years, at a Damascus community centre supported by the Syria Trust, I saw women learning sewing skills, likewise to enable them to be employed or start their own businesses.

When speaking of her and her husband’s approach to raising their children, Asma al-Assad noted the importance of their children knowing the sacrifices of Syrian soldiers, stressing that her children are able to do the most basic things in life—walk, study, even just be alive—precisely because the army has defended Syria, and in many cases with soldiers paying a deep price in doing so.

This is one reason their three children frequently appear with the first lady and president in their visits to wounded soldiers.

Last month at the vocational training, I heard the testimonies of a number of such wounded soldiers, suffering injuries that should be life-shattering. But like wounded soldiers I’ve met over the years, they shared an inspirational drive to rebuild their lives, physically, materially and emotionally

In February 2011, Vogue published a surprisingly honest article on the first lady and her work for Syria, titled “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.” Although Vogue later removed it from their website, I would encourage people to read the archived copy. It gives a detailed sense of the work and life of the first lady. The author spent several days with Asma al-Assad, getting informative glimpses into the workings of her foundations, and of the first lady herself.

I was told some months ago that when the first lady learned of the title, she was not pleased as one might have expected.

“I am not the only rose, you are all roses,” she said to a room of women at the Syria Trust for Development.

Throughout Syria’s history women have played prominent roles, from Queen Zenobia in the 3rd century AD, to women defending Syria against terrorism, to Nibal Madhat Badr first female Brigadier General in the Syrian Army, to the mothers of martyrs.

Syria’s Vice President, Najah Al-Attar, is a woman, as is Bouthaina Shaaban, media and political advisor to the president. Armenian MP Nora Arissian and former independent MP Maria Saadeh are among countless others.

Asma al-Assad also balked at the portrayal of Syria as a desert, a portrayal physically depicting the country as a vast sandy region, but also incorrectly implying a lack of culture and education, a sense of backwardness.

Just as the cultural mosaic is vast and varied, so is Syria’s landscape, with snowy mountains, steaming coastal areas replete with citrus and banana trees, rolling hills in the northwest, and yes desert areas to the east.

Anyone who has had the fortune to come to Syria likewise is aware of how empowered women are, how rich the culture is, and how valued education is. Art and music flourish here. Teenagers participate in science Olympiads.

In the past four months, I’ve had some opportunities to see more of Syria’s beautiful landscapes that I’ve described. Prior to the war, Syria was a popular tourist destination, particularly for its rich culture and landscapes, as well as for its ancient areas and cities and historic sites.

But historic and cultural sites aside, there is an aspect of Syria’s history and culture that the first lady is extremely worried about losing: the intangible culture, customs passed down through generations. A dialect gets lost because people who fled an area sometimes will not return.

She told me of a village woman who still hand makes Freekah (whole grains of wheat harvested while still green) in the traditional way. But most young people in the village have left, so that tradition won’t be passed down.

Syria is trying to document its intangible culture, a monumental task considering how much there is to document.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ll conclude by saying that whereas over the past decade there has been a systematic effort by Western media, politicians and government-aligned “human rights” groups to vilify the first lady, president and army, the reality on the ground is in stark contrast to the propaganda emanating from Washington.

Anyone who has followed the war on Syria, and the Western aggression against so many nations, will be aware that one of the first things America and allies does is to vilify the leadership, those same leaders they may have previously praised as being moderate.

The abrupt removal shortly after publication by Vogue of its feature on the first lady is a perfect example of the media being directed to not allow any positive reflections on Syria’s key figures. Only cartoonish denominations are allowed in Western media now. The 2002 interview with Asma al-Assad which I referenced at the start was published in the Guardian, an outlet which has since become a prime source of the most vile war propaganda against Syria and the whitewashing of terrorists’ crimes.

Meeting Syria’s first lady confirmed what I already knew from speaking with countless Syrians over the years, and from observing from afar the work she does: she is a strong, intelligent, down to earth, and compassionate woman dedicated to empowering and helping her fellow Syrians.

I am extremely grateful for the time I had with her. At a time of global instability, sitting with Asma al-Assad was calming and inspiring.

The Unconscious is Wiley’s Discourse

JULY 30, 2020 BY GILAD ATZMON

By Gilad Atzmon

 If Britain were a healthy society the #Wiley saga would have triggered an open discussion about race and privilege. Wiley would be invited to BBC Newsnight, he would be challenged by one of BBC’s anchors, he would be confronted by one or two representatives of the Jewish community, he would have a chance to explain where he comes from. We would be better able to understand the emerging clash between Jews and Blacks.

But Britain is not very healthy at the moment and none of the above has happened. 

What happened instead was George Floyd all over again, but with a few major and significant differences. In the case of George Floyd a few policemen engaged in a deadly brutal and insidious act. In the case of Wiley, the entire Zionist league and its allies used a collective public knee to attempt the annihilation of the Black music icon. Another difference reflects on all of us. Following the Floyd murder thousands of Brits went to the streets to loudly proclaim that Black Lives Matter. They confronted the British police, they destroyed statues of slave traders. Who took to the streets to support Wiley?  Do Black Lives Matter only so long as Blacks do not open their mouths?

Watch Wiley in action:

Wiley’s comments didn’t trigger the desirable, if heated, debate because Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to silence criticism of Jewish power. Every means that serves this cause is considered legitimate. Interestingly, the disabling of speech is so extreme that one can’t find out what  it was that Wiley said that was so offensive. His tweets were initially removed by Twitter and as his twitter account is suspended.

Every news outlet in Britain and beyond has told us that Wiley’s tweets were horrid and anti-Semitic but no one dares to provide an example. It seems we are not even allowed to know what it is that we shouldn’t say. Possibly the censorship is even more sinister, they don’t want Wiley quoted only to find out that a large number of  Brits, possibly including prominent Jewish voices,  actually agree with the gist of Wiley’s statement.    

Wiley is accused of promoting “Conspiracy Theories” about Jews and their power. This is slightly confusing because Jews often brag about their power and success. According to the Jewish site Israelunwired, Alan Dershowitz’s message to the Jews reflects a celebration of the power of Jews:  “Why is it that Jews feel they need to apologize? Why do they feel that because they are strong and have contributed so much to the world, that deserves an apology? On the contrary! Jews should feel proud that God has given them such strength. And they have used it to help others. It is crazy that the world still has such negative beliefs about the Jewish people!”

On its face, it seems as if today’s Number One  ‘Amalek,’ Wiley, a Black celebrity rapper and our prime Zionist mouthpiece, Dershowitz, agree on the significance of Jews in different domains. However, Dershowitz is entitled to brag about Jewish achievements, the Black voice Wiley is reduced to dust and declared public enemy number one.

Back in 2018 Dershowitz admitted in an  Washington Examiner article that “it is true that Jews are represented in large numbers in various professionals such as the academy, finance, and the media.” Dershowitz also believes that Jewish prominence  “is not because they are given preferential treatment. It is because they have proved to be successful at these enterprises. Should they be blamed for that?”

Like Dershowitz I believe that some Jews are gifted in certain areas, I also believe that people who work hard deserve acknowledgment. I am pretty sure that Wiley also agrees with that.  So where is the dispute? 

In both my writing and talks I keep insisting that there are no “Jewish conspiracies,” all is done in the open, whether it is AIPAC domination of  USA foreign policy or Epstein flying world leaders on his Lolita Express, but you can’t talk about it.  Dershowitz can brag about Jewish achievements: the rest of us can’t. Maybe we are tapping here into the true meaning of Jewish privilege. 

In the last two days I searched the net to find out what words Wiley said.  I found no trace, but the BBC, the failure news outlet, was proud to provide us with an extended  monologue delivered by Emma Barnett.

Tweet

Emma Barnett told her BBC listeners that she went through Wiley’s tweets and they where “straight out of the Hitler playbook of 1930s Nazi Germany.”

According to Barnett, Wiley tweeted that “Jewish people are cowards do something to me, I am waiting.” This doesn’t sound like Hitler to me.  It is crude, it is a challenge, it involves an essentialist generalization but contains nothing that echoes Hitler or Nazi Germany. However, they still came at Wiley as hard as they could.  Maybe Wiley should be recognized as the last prophet. They may want to consider integrating his tweets into the Hebrew Bible.

“They act rough,” she quotes Wiley as writing,  “but they hide behind the police” – in fact, this  sounds to me like a tweet by a Jewish pressure group bragging about its intimate “partnership”  with UK police (also look here and here).

Barnett quotes Wiley,  “who writes the laws, who changes the law, who implements the laws?”  80% of our conservative MPs are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel so the priorities of our ‘lawmakers’ are obvious.  Maybe Barnett should use this opportunity and tell us how many Conservatives are friends of Hartlepool, Liverpool or any other Pool in the Kingdom.

“Who runs the world?” Wiley asks. I guess that when Epstein, Maxwell, Wexner and Weinstein are constantly in the headlines, this question may be rhetorical.  Does Mrs. Barnett need me to introduce her to the work of Jared Kushner and his role in the Trump administration? Maybe the name Rahm Israel Emanuel rings a bell? Do I have to tell Barnett about AIPAC, CFI, LFI or the Crif?

“Who runs banking?”  Barnett quotes from Wiley’s tweet. Maybe Dershowitz could help defend Wiley as he calls upon Jews to be proud of their achievements in this domain. Barnett can also look at George Soros and Black Wednesday. She  can look at  Goldman Sachs, Greenspan, Yellen… the list is pretty endless and growing by the day.  

I guess that Barnett is sincere when she complains that  “these words play of a very deep Jewish hidden fear that anti-Semitism rises up.”  Yet, is “hidden” the right term? I ask because we are blitzed day and night by repetitions of this very specific Jewish fear. If there is anything that isn’t ‘hidden’ in Britain it must be the ‘Jewish fear of anti-Semitism.’

Emma Barnett doesn’t want us to talk about #Jewishprivilege.  I am afraid that pushing all of social media to blacklist  a Black cultural hero just  a month after George Floyd, with No 10 and Priti Patel  also pushing  on behalf of Zion, is a privilege no other ethnic minority enjoys, certainly not the bronze community of former world leaders that were toppled one after another in recent weeks.

I do partially agree with Emma Barnet when she says  “Jews don’t run the law.” Absolutely correct Emma, Jews don’t run the law,  but Jewish pressure groups do and they  boast about it 24/7.

Barnett declares, “Jews do not run the banks,”  True again Emma, but Jews are vastly over represented in every banking and investment sector as Dershowitz  boasted above.

“Jews do not run the world!” Absolutely true but AIPAC dominates American foreign policy and is proud of it. 

“Where did it get his anti-Semitic memo from?” Barnett asks. I find this question slightly perplexing since statistics confirm that a large segment of Europeans may agree with Wiley.  A  recent major survey of public attitudes for CNN found more than a fifth of the 7,000 people polled in seven countries believed Jewish people have too much influence in finance and politics. The ADL is telling us in its latest survey that 1.09 billion “People in the world harbour anti-Semitic attitudes” out of 4 billion surveyed. Once again we are talking about 25%. To answer Barnett’s question, If Wiley was really looking for an educational source he had more than a billion people to choose from. It seems as if according to the ADL, one out of four people admit to their feelings about Jews as long as they stay anonymous. This may reveal what Wiley’s ‘crime’ was. He uttered that which most people are trained to keep to themselves.   

Wiley gave us an opportunity to meet our demons, to understand what we are for real. The picture that is unfolding from that saga is grim and points to a darker future.  We are terrified of our rulers and we are tormented by our own thoughts which we are scared to admit to ourselves. We are living in a world where maintaining a social media account is way more important than our own truth. This is how far we are removed from our Athenian cultural, spiritual and intellectual ethos that made the west into a distinct civilization.  

For those who are confused by the Jewish institutional reaction to Wiley,  the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offers an explanation. “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other,” was, I believe, Lacan’s most important insight. The unconscious is the fear that everybody out there sees you as you are and even worse, discusses you with others behind your back. The unconscious is the fear that if you fail in bed tonight; tomorrow your neighbours will refer to you as ‘the impotent.’ In Lacanian perspectives, for self identified Jews, it seems the unconscious is the discourse of the Goyim, it is the fear that those one billion identified by the ADL as ‘anti-Semites’ will start to explore their views in the open.  It is the unbearable fear that the ‘Goyim Know.’  

Lacan’s insight helps us grasp the hysteria around Wiley and anti-Semitism. Self-identified Jews are very happy to brag about their successes but the idea that the same success is scrutinized by others devastates their entire existence.

If Britain were an open space, we could openly discuss all of this and move our society forward towards harmony and reconciliation. Both Jews and gentiles would benefit from such a discourse. But Britain is an occupied zone and for more than a while. It is invaded by fear and dominated by the politics of fear. This type of politics, when it appears in other countries, is called ‘terror,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘totalitarianism,’ and ‘tyrannical conditions.’ Maybe time is overdue for Jews and Goyim alike to decide if these are the conditions they want to live in.   

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مشروعان متناقضان… بينهما حرب وجود ونحن واثقون من انتصارنا

د. ادمون ملحم

ما نشهده في بلادنا من قتل ومجازر ودمار وتهجير في فلسطين والشام ولبنان والعراق والأردن ليس إلا مشاهد من حرب طويلة الأمد مفتوحة على أمتنا وعلى وجودنا الإنساني الحضاري. هذه الحرب فُرضت علينا منذ تأسست الحركةُ الصهيونيةُ العالميةُ بهدفِ إيجادِ وطنٍ قوميٍ لليهود في فلسطين مرتكزةً على فكرةِ «أرضِ الميعاد» الممتدةِ بين الفراتِ والنيلِ التي منحَها يهوه السمسارُ لشعبِه «المختار» من دونِ سائرِ الشعوبِ لتكونَ له ملكاً أبدياً كما جاء في قولِه لإبراهيم في سفر التكوين 7:17: «… أعطي لك ولنسلِك من بعدِك أرضَ غُربتِك، كلَ أرضِ كنعان، ملكاً أبدياً، وأكون إلهَهُم».

وهذه الحرب المصيرية أفرزت مشروعينِ متناقضينِ لا يمكنُ التسويةُ بينهُما:

المشروعُ الأولُ هو المشروعُ الصهيونيُ العدواني الذي يريدُ أن يُقوّضَ مُجتمعَنا من خلالِ طمسِ هويتِنا القوميةِ وتراثِنا المناقبيِ الإنسانيِ وتزويرِ تاريخِنا الحضاريِ وأساطيرِنا الجميلِة وسرقِة ثرواتِنا وكنوزِنا وآثارِنا الخالدةِ والحطِّ من قِيمِنا الأخلاقيةِ والدينيةِ الساميةِ وتشويهِ كلّ إنتاجِنا الحضاريِ ومسيرتِنا الثقافيةِ والسياسيةِ والإبداعية.

المشروع الثاني فهو المشروعَ القوميَ الوحدوي الواضح، مشروعُ سوريةَ الطبيعيةَ الحضاريةَ العريقةَ في جذورِها التاريخيةِ والغنيةِ في معطياتِها الإنسانيةِ والثقافيةِ الماضية.

المشروع الصهيوني هو مشروع استعماري سرطاني مدعوم من الغرب الرأسمالي ومتسلحٌ بأعنفِ الوسائلِ الماديةِ والعسكريةِ المدمّرةِ ويرتكز على مزاعم وهميّة خرافية.

أما المشروع القوميّ فهو مشروعٌ مجتمعيٌ إنسانيٌ راقٍ يرتكزُ على مبدأِ الاشتراكِ في الحياةِ والتفاعلِ الاجتماعيِ الطبيعيِ في البيئةِ الواحدةِ وعلى ملكيةِ الأمةِ التاريخيةِ لِوَطنِها وما فيه من ثرواتٍ وخيرات..

المشروع الصهيونيّ يعتمد البطش والإرهاب ولا يمثل إلا الباطلَ العنصريَ والنفسيةَ الهمجيةَ المتحجرةَ في مُعتقداتِها ومزاعمِها التاريخيةِ الخرافيةِ والمُفعمةِ بالحقدِ واللؤمِ والظلمِ والكراهيةِ والعداءِ للشعوبِ..

أما المشروع القومي فهو مشروعٌ حضاريٌ يمثّلُ النفسيةَ الجميلةَ الخلاّقةَ والمفعمةَ بالفضائلِ والقيمِ الساميةِ ويهدف إلى تحسينَ حياتِنا القوميةِ والمساهمة في رقيِ الإنسانيةِ جمعاء. وهذا المشروع تنهضُ به قوةٌ خلاَّقةٌ مؤمنةٌ بحياةٍ جميلةٍ تشعُّ فيها قيمُ الخيرِ والحقِ والجمالِ والحريةِ والسلام..

إنّ نتائج الحرب المصيرية تتوقف علينا نحن وعلى قدرة هذا المشروعُ القومي الطبيعي. فلكي ينهضَ هذا المشروع وينتصرُ يستوجبُ منا جميعاً الخروجَ من حالةِ الفتنِ المذهبيةِ والشرذمةِ والانقساماتِ إلى حالةِ الوحدةِ الاجتماعيةِ والتسامحِ القوميِ، حالةِ الوضوحِ واليقينِ والثقةِ بالنفسِ والعملِ بإرادةٍ واعيةٍ وخطةٍ نظاميةٍ واضحةِ الأهداف.

لا يمكنُ لنا أن نتغلبَ على الخطةِ الصهيونيةِ النظاميةِ الدقيقةِ ونحن نتبادلُ الأحقادَ الدينيةَ ونتقاتلُ على الجنةِ السماويةِ ونتخبطُ بقضايا الفئويةِ والمذهبيةِ والعشائريةِ والخصوصياتِ.. بل نتغلبُ عليها بعقيدةٍ جلّيةٍ واضحةٍ تُحيي حقيقتَنا التاريخيةَ الحضاريةَ وتعملُ لتأسيسِ مجتمعٍ مدنيٍّ ديمقراطيٍّ راقٍ يعي هويتَه وتاريخَه وقضيتَه القوميةَ ومقاصدَه الكبرى في الحياة.

لا يمكنُ لنا أن نتغلبَ على الخطةِ الصهيونيةِ بأنظمةِ الطائفيةِ والجهلِ والتخلفِ والفسادِ، أنظمةِ الهرولة وكبتِ الحرياتِ..

ولا نتغلَّبُ عليها بالسياساتِ الضيقةِ، بسياسةِ المماحكاتِ والخصوماتِ وبنهجِ التخاذلِ والتسكعِ والمساومات… بل نتغلبُ عليها بخطةٍ نظاميةٍ أشدُ نظاماً وأدهى، خطةٍ عقلانيةٍ واضحةٍ في الرؤيا والأهدافِ ودقيقةٍ في التخطيطِ والممارسةِ والإنجاز.. خطةٍ تعملُ لبناءِ الإنسانِ الجديدِ في فكرِه وقلبِه ووجدانِه، الإنسانِ الحرِ المؤمنِ بنفسهِ وإنسانيتِه، الممتلئ بقيمِ الحياةِ الساميةِ والمتسلحِ بقوةِ العلمِ والمعرفةِ والوجدانِ القومي، الإنسانِ – المجتمعِ الذي يعملُ لخيرِ مجتمعِه ورقيِه والذي يرفُضُ العيشَ الذليلَ ويحيا لقضايا الحياةِ العالية، حياةِ العزِ والشرفِ والانتصار.

ولا نتغلبُ على الخطةِ الصهيونيةِ بثقافةِ الهزيمةِ ولغةِ الإحباطِ، بنفسيةِ الخوفِ والصمتِ والخنوعِ وبأساليبِ الفوضى والتبعيةِ والاتكاليةِ والارتجالِ بل نتغلبُ عليها بخطةٍ ساهرةٍ وراصدةٍ وُمحرِّكةٍ إمكانياتِ المجتمع… خطةٍ هجوميةٍ ومصارعةٍ عواملٍ الضعفٍ والانحطاطٍ والفناء.. خطةٍ تُفكرُ برويةٍ وتستشرفُ المخاطرَ والتحديات.. تراهنُ على إرادةِ الحياةِ فينا وعلى ما يكمُنُ في نفوسِنا من قوةٍ مناقبيةٍ ومن خلقٍ وإبداع.. توقظُ النيامَ وتخاطبُ العقلَ والوجدان.. تنفخُ في الشعبِ روحَ البطولةِ والصراعِ والمقاومةِ وتُنَمِّي فيه روحَ الوعي والمعرفةِ العلميةِ والثقافةِ القوميةِ الصحيحةِ التي تزيلُ الغشاواتِ وتَقْضِي على المبادئ الفاسدةِ والثقافاتِ الرجعيةِ المسؤولةِ عن الكوارثِ القوميةِ التي حلَّتْ بنا.

في مواجهةِ المشروعِ الصهيونيِ لا خيارَ لنا إلا خيارَ المقاومةِ والصمودِ، خيارَ الصراعِ والبطولةِ المؤمنةِ دفاعاً عن الكرامةِ القوميةِ والوجودِ القوميِ والحقِ القومي. بفضلِ هذا الخيارِ فقط يمكن ان ننهي زمنَ الهزائمِ المتعاقبةِ على أمتِنا ونبدأ زمناً جديداً هو زمنُ الانتصاراتِ المشهودة، زمنُ المقاومينَ المؤمنينَ والشهداءِ الأبرارِ الذين بهم وحدهم نهزم المشروعَ الصهيونيَ – الأميركاني وسنهزمه حتماً لأن فينا قوة، كما يقول سعاده العظيم، لو فعلت لغيّرت وجه التاريخ.

The Sword of Damocles Over Western Europe: Follow the Trail of Blood and Oil

Cynthia Chung June 3, 2020

In Part 1, we left off in our story at the SIS-CIA overthrow of Iran’s Nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. At this point the Shah was able to return to Iran from Rome and British-backed Fazlollah Zahedi, who played a leading role in the coup, replaced Mosaddegh as Prime Minister of Iran.

Here we will resume our story.

An Introduction to the ‘Shah of Shahs’, ‘King of Kings’

One important thing to know about Mohammad Reza Shah was that he was no fan of British imperialism and was an advocate for Iran’s independence and industrial growth. That said, the Shah was a deeply flawed man who lacked the steadfastness to secure such a positive fate for Iran. After all, foreign-led coups had become quite common in Iran at that point.

He would become the Shah in 1941 at the age of 22, after the British forced his father Reza Shah into exile. By then, Persia had already experienced 70 years of British imperialism reducing its people to near destitution.

Mohammad Reza Shah had developed very good relations with the U.S. under President FDR, who at the behest of the Shah, formed the Iran Declaration which ended Iran’s foreign occupation by the British and the Soviets after WWII.

His father, Reza Shah came into power after the overthrow of Ahmad Shah in 1921, who was responsible for signing into law the infamous Anglo-Persian Agreement in 1919, which effectively turned Iran into a de facto protectorate run by British “advisors” and ensured the British Empire’s control of Iran’s oil.

Despite Reza Shah’s problems (Mosaddegh was sent into exile during his reign), he had made significant achievements for Iran. Among these included the development of transportation infrastructure, 15 000 miles of road by 1940 and the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway which opened in 1938.

Mohammad Reza Shah wished to continue this vein of progress, however, he would first have to go through Britain and increasingly the U.S. in order to fulfill Iran’s vision for a better future.

In 1973, Mohammad Reza Shah thought he finally found his chance to turn Iran into the “world’s sixth industrial power” in just one generation…

OPEC and the European Monetary System vs the ‘Seven Sisters’

In 1960, OPEC was founded by five oil producing countries: Venezuela, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait in an attempt to influence and stabilise the market price of oil, which would in turn stabilise their nation’s economic return. The formation of OPEC marked a turning point toward national sovereignty over natural resources.

However, during this period OPEC did not have a strong voice in such affairs, the main reason being the “Seven Sisters” which controlled approximately 86% of the oil produced by OPEC countries. The “Seven Sisters” was the name for the seven transnational oil companies of the “Consortium of Iran” cartel which dominated the global petroleum industry, with British Petroleum owning 40% and Royal Dutch Shell 14%, giving Britain the lead at 54% ownership during this period.

After 1973, with the sudden rise of oil prices, the Shah began to see an opportunity for independent action.

The Shah saw the price increase as a way to pull his country out of backwardness. To the intense irritation of his sponsors, the Shah pledged to bring Iran into the ranks of the world’s top ten industrial nations by the year 2000.

The Shah understood that in order for this vision to become a reality, Iran could not just stay as a crude oil producer but needed to invest in a more stable future through industrial growth. And as it just so happened, France and West Germany were ready to make an offer.

In 1978, France and West Germany led the European community, with the exception of Great Britain, in the formation of the European Monetary System (EMS). The EMS was a response to the controlled disintegration that had been unleashed on the world economy after the fixed exchange rate became a floating exchange rate in 1971.

French foreign minister Jean Francois–Poncet had told a UN press conference, that it was his vision that the EMS eventually replace the IMF and World Bank as the center of world finance.

For those who are unaware of the devastation that the IMF and World Bank have wreaked upon the world, refer to John Perkins’ “Confession of an Economic Hit Man”… the situation is 10X worst today.

As early as 1977, France and West Germany had begun exploring the possibility of concretizing a deal with oil producing countries in which western Europe would supply high-technology exports, including nuclear technology, to the OPEC countries in exchange for long-term oil supply contracts at a stable price. In turn, OPEC countries would deposit their enormous financial surpluses into western European banks which could be used for further loans for development projects… obviously to the detriment of the IMF and World Bank hegemony.

The Carter Administration was not happy with this, sending Vice President Walter Mondale to France and West Germany to “inform” them that the U.S. would henceforth oppose the sale of nuclear energy technology to the Third World…and thus they should do so as well. West Germany’s nuclear deal with Brazil and France’s promise to sell nuclear technology to South Korea had already come under heavy attack.

In addition, the Shah had started a closer partnership with Iraq and Saudi Arabia cemented at OPEC meetings in 1977 and 1978. In a press conference in 1977 the Shah stated he would work for oil price stability. Together Saudi Arabia and Iran at the time produced nearly half of OPEC’s entire output.

If an Iran-Saudi-Iraq axis established a permanent working relationship with the EMS it would have assembled an unstoppable combination against the London world financial center.

Recall that France and West Germany had already ignored British calls to boycott Iranian oil in 1951 under Mosaddegh, and therefore, there was no indication that they were going to follow suit with Britain and the U.S. this time either.

As far as London and Washington were concerned, the Shah’s reign was over.

British Petroleum, BBC News and Amnesty International as Servants to the Crown

Were we to select a date for the beginning of the Iranian revolution it would be November 1976, the month that Amnesty International issued its report charging brutality and torture of political prisoners by the Shah of Iran.

Ironically, the SAVAK which was the secret police under the Shah from 1957 to 1979, was established and pretty much run by the SIS (aka MI6), CIA and the Israeli Mossad. This is a well-known fact, and yet, was treated as somehow irrelevant during Amnesty International’s pleas for a humanitarian intervention into Iran.

For those who haven’t already discovered Amnesty International’s true colors from their recent “work” in Syria… it should be known that they work for British Intelligence.

Gruesome accounts of electric shock torture and mutilation were printed in the London Times, the Washington Post and other respected press. Within a few months, President Carter launched his own “human rights” campaign. With this, the international humanitarian outcry got bigger and louder demanding the removal of the Shah.

The Shah was caught between a rock and a hard place, as he was known not to be strong on “security” matters and often left it entirely up to the management of others. Once Amnesty International sounded the war-cry, the Shah made the mistake of not only defending the undefendable SAVAK in the public arena but continued to trust them entirely. It would be his biggest mistake.

With the international foment intensifying, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Persian language broadcasts into Iran fanned the flames of revolt.

During the entire year of 1978 the BBC stationed dozens of correspondents throughout the country in every remote town and village. BBC correspondents, often in the employ of the British secret service, worked as intelligence operatives for the revolution.

Each day the BBC would report in Iran gory accounts of alleged atrocities committed by the Iranian police, often without checking the veracity of the reports. It is now acknowledged that these news reports helped to fuel and even organise the political foment towards an Iranian revolution.

In 1978, British Petroleum (BP) was in the process of negotiating with the government of Iran the renewing of the 25 year contract made in 1953 after the Anglo-American coup against Mosaddegh. These negotiations collapsed in Oct 1978, at the height of the revolution. BP rejected the National Iranian Oil Company’s (NIOC) demands, refusing to buy a minimum quantity of barrels of Iranian oil but demanding nonetheless the exclusive right to buy that oil should it wish to in the future!

The Shah and NIOC rejected BP’s final offer. Had the Shah overcome the revolt, it appeared that Iran would have been free in its oil sales policy in 1979 – and would have been able to market its own oil to the state companies of France, Spain, Brazil and many other countries on a state-to-state basis.

In the American press hardly a single line was published about the Iranian fight with BP, the real humanitarian fight for Iranians.

The Sword of Damocles

The “Arc of Crisis” is a geopolitical theory focused on American/western politics in regards to the Muslim world. It was first concocted by British historian Bernard Lewis, who was regarded as the leading scholar in the world on oriental studies, especially of Islam, and its implications for today’s western politics.

Bernard Lewis was acting as an advisor to the U.S. State Department from 1977-1981. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor, would announce the U.S.’ adoption of the “Arc of Crisis” theory by the American military and NATO in 1978.

It is widely acknowledged today, that the “Arc of Crisis” was primarily aimed at destabilising the USSR and Iran. This will be discussed further in Part 3 of this series.

Egypt and Israel were expected to act as the initiating countries for the expansion of NATO into the Middle East. Iran was to be the next link.

Iran’s revolution was perfectly timed with the launching of the “Arc of Crisis”, and NATO had its “humanitarian” cause for entering the scene.

However, the fight was not over in Iran.

On Jan 4th, 1979, the Shah named Shapour Bakhtiar, a respected member of the National Front as Prime Minister of Iran. Bakhtiar was held in high regard by not only the French but Iranian nationalists. As soon as his government was ratified, Bakhtiar began pushing through a series of major reform acts: he completely nationalised all British oil interests in Iran, put an end to the martial law, abolished the SAVAK, and pulled Iran out of the Central Treaty Organization, declaring that Iran would no longer be “the gendarme of the Gulf”.

Bakhtiar also announced that he would be removing Ardeshir Zahedi from his position as Iran’s Ambassador to the U.S.

An apple that did not fall far from the tree, Ardeshir is the son of Fazlollah Zahedi, the man who led the coup against Mosaddegh and replaced him as Prime Minister!

Ardeshir was suspected to have been misinforming the Shah about the events surrounding the Iranian revolution and it was typical that he spoke to Brzezinski in Washington from Teheran over the phone at least once a day, often twice a day, as part of his “job” as Ambassador to the U.S. during the peak of the Iranian revolution.

With tensions escalating to a maximum, the Shah agreed to transfer all power to Bakhtiar and left Iran on Jan 16th,1979 for a “long vacation” (aka exile), never to return.

However, despite Bakhtiar’s courageous actions, the damage was too far gone and the hyenas were circling round.

It is known that from Jan 7th to early Feb 1979, the No. 2 in the NATO chain of command, General Robert Huyser, was in Iran and was in frequent contact with Brzezinski during this period. It is thought that Huyser’s job was to avoid any coup attempts to disrupt the take-over by Khomeini’s revolutionary forces by largely misleading the Iranian generals with false intel and U.S. promises. Recently declassified documents on Huyser’s visit to Iran confirm these suspicions.

During the Shah’s “long vacation” his health quickly deteriorated. Unfortunately the Shah was never a good judge of character and kept a close dialogue with Henry Kissinger as to how to go about his health problems. By Oct 1979, the Shah was diagnosed with cancer and the decision was made to send him to the U.S. for medical treatment.

This decision was very much pushed for and supported by Brzezinski and Kissinger, despite almost every intelligence report indicating this would lead to a disastrous outcome.

In Nov 18th 1979, the New York Times reported:

‘The decision was made despite the fact that Mr. Carter and his senior policy advisers had known for months that to admit the Shah might endanger Americans at the embassy in Teheran. An aide reported that at one staff meeting Mr. Carter had asked, “When the Iranians take our people in Teheran hostage, what will you advise me then?” ‘

On Oct 22, 1979, the Shah arrived in New York to receive medical treatment. Twelve days later, the U.S. Embassy in Teheran was taken over and 52 American hostages would be held captive for 444 days!

With the taking of the hostages, the Carter Administration, as preplanned under the “Arc of Crisis”, set into motion its scenario for global crisis management.

The hostage crisis, a 100% predictable response to the U.S.’ decision to accept the Shah into America, was the external threat the Carter Administration needed to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, authorising the President to regulate international commerce after declaring a national emergency in response to an extraordinary threat

With this new authority, President Carter announced the freezing of all U.S.-Iranian financial assets, amounting to over $6 billion, including in branches of American banks abroad. Instantly, the world financial markets were thrown into a panic, and big dollar depositors in western Europe and the U.S., particularly the OPEC central banks, began to pull back from further commitments.

The Eurodollar market was paralyzed and most international lending halted until complex legal matters were sorted out.

However, the most serious consequence by far from the Carter Administration’s “emergency actions,” was in scaring other OPEC governments away from long-term lending precisely at a time when West Germany and France were seeking to attract deposits into the financial apparatus associated with the European Monetary System (EMS).

In addition, the Carter Administration’s insistent demands that western Europe and Japan invoke economic sanctions against Iran was like asking them to cut their own throats. Yet, the raised political tensions succeeded in breaking apart the economic alliances and the slow blood-letting of Europe commenced.

Within days of the taking of the hostages, the pretext was given for a vast expansion of U.S. military presence in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.

Sound familiar?

The message was not lost on Europe. In a Nov 28, 1979 column in Le Figaro, Paul Marie de la Gorce,  who was in close dialogue with the French presidential palace, concluded that U.S. military and economic intervention into Iran would cause “more damages for Europe and Japan than for Iran.” And that those who advocate such solutions are “consciously or not inspired by the lessons given by Henry Kissinger.”

During the 444 day hostage crisis, a full-scale U.S. invasion was always looming overhead. Such an invasion was never about seizing the oil supply for the U.S., but rather to deny it to western Europe and Japan.

If the U.S. were to have seized the oil supply in Iran, the body blow to the western European economies would have knocked out the EMS. Thus, during the 444 day holding of American hostages, this threat was held over the head of Europe like the sword of Damocles.

It is sufficed to say that today’s ongoing sanctions against Iran cannot be understood in their full weight and international ramifications without this historical background.

What happened —and didn’t happen— at the Israel-Lebanon border?

By Sayed Hasan for The Saker blog

On the night of Sunday, July 19^th, airstrikes hit Damascus International Airport. Though Israel didn’t claim responsibility for them, sticking to their longtime “zone of denial” policy, no one doubts they were the perpetrators. On Monday, the Syrian Army announced 7 soldiers were injured. It could have been one strike among hundreds of others, soon forgotten because of the lack of Syrian retaliatory measure. But the day after, Hezbollah announced the martyrdom of one of its combatants, Ali Kamel Mohsen, killed during the Israeli raid. As an Israeli commentator on Arab affairs put it in a tweet, this announcement “certainly changes the picture”. In fact, it is an understatement: it turned a tactical success into a PR disaster for the Netanyahu government, and a nightmare for the Israeli’s Army Northern Command and settlers living close to the Lebanese border. Because as everyone knew, a Hezbollah retaliation was inevitable.

We cannot understand what is happening now if we don’t put it in its broader context. Hezbollah’s rules of engagement against Israel in Syria were spelled out in January 2015, after Israel targeted two of their vehicles in Syria’s Quneitra region, killing 6 Hezbollah fighters (including Jihad Moghniyeh, son of Hezbollah’s martyred commander Imad Moghniyeh), along with an Iranian IRGC colonel. Back then, Nasrallah didn’t make any speech until the retaliation, which came out 10 days later, on January 28, when Hezbollah destroyed 3 vehicles in an Israeli convoy patrolling the occupied Shebaa farms, killing 2 to 5 soldiers —the sources differ— and wounding seven others (Israel retaliated by symbolic strikes, harming no Lebanese life or property but killing a Spanish UN soldier). Here is what Nasrallah stated in a speech two days later: https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7v64pq

“The Resistance operation happened in broad daylight (just before noon), at the highest state of alert of the Israeli enemy, who until now is incapable of understanding how it happened. […] Because they are cowards and not (real) men, and because “They will not fight you (even) together, except in fortified townships, or from behind walls” (Quran, 59, 14), they struck us treacherously and didn’t dare to claim responsibility for the attack. As for Hezbollah fighters, because they are (real) men who don’t fear death, they attacked them frontally, face to face, and we claimed responsibility for the attack immediately after it happened. […] My message today is the following: from now on, any Hezbollah cadre or commander, any young Hezbollah (combatant) who will be assassinated (in Lebanon or in Syria), we will blame Israel for it, and we will consider it our right to retaliate anywhere, anytime and in any way we see fit.”

This equation was put in practice and even broadened in August 2019, after Yasser Dhaher and Hassan Zbib, two Hezbollah combatants, were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Damascus suburbs, and an Israeli drone attack against Beirut’s southern suburb, a Hezbollah stronghold, was foiled. Here is what Nasrallah stated in an August 25th speech:

“We will retaliate from Lebanon, and not (necessarily) from the Shebaa farms! I declare to the Israeli soldiers at the border tonight: wait for us against the (separation) wall (standing) on one foot and a half (be ready to flee for your lives)! Wait for us on one foot and a half! Wait for us (because we’ll certainly come at you)! In one day, two days, three days, four days… Just wait for us!”

While Hezbollah used to attack Israel exclusively in the Shebaa farms, a Lebanese territory occupied by Israel, they now vowed to strike anywhere, a dramatic development which put tremendous pressure on the Israeli side, for whom any human loss is a national disaster. Drastic & unprecedented measures were taken to foil Hezbollah’s retaliation: Israeli forces didn’t “hole up” in their bases as Nasrallah had advised them to, but went as far as evacuating all their positions close to Lebanon, in a width of 5 to 7 kilometers, and along the whole length of the border line. All Israeli defenses were activated. Strict security measures were taken to evacuate some settlements and forbid the remaining settlers to perform most daily activities —video footage showed empty streets & closed shops, most people being holed up in their house all day long.https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/x7kl8ej

For 8 days, the mighty Israeli army appeared as the “spider web” it was, frightened and terrorized, its border barracks and outposts left deserted —as was shown by an RT crew who got inside—, its vehicles abandoned with dummy soldiers inside, with tanks scattered everywhere for days hoping to lure Hezbollah to attack an empty target (see all security measures Israel took detailed in Nasrallah’s speech back then).

Psychological warfare, perfectly mastered by Hezbollah, is a key element to understand what is happening —and not happening— right now, even before we speak of the retaliation itself. As Nasrallah put it in his 2019, September 2^nd speech,

“We warned the enemy that he had to expect us (any time) from now on. This is a strength point of the Resistance. We could have remained silent, refrained from threatening (Israel of an imminent retaliation), not revealing our intentions, keeping quiet as we say, for 1, 2 or 3 days, then hit them by surprise. The military know that one of the most important aspects of a military operation is the element of surprise. But we have not done so, because our fight against the Zionist entity has a major psychological component, affecting the morale and soul of the enemy (which we strive to undermine). So we told them from the beginning to wait for us, because we were coming. In itself, it is an enormous challenge issued by the Resistance.[…] [This high alert of the enemy and the evacuation of the border outposts] are part of the punishment (we inflicted on Israel). Before we retaliated with our military operation, some people were (ironically) asking: where is your response? But (this terror situation on the Israeli side) was already a punishment and a retaliation. […] [The whole world saw the staggering difference between] our good Lebanese people (who) was normally moving in border areas, whether in villages or fields, and led a completely normal life, [while Israeli settlers were forbidden to approach “their” fields in occupied Palestine and where holed up in their houses].”

Thus, Israel seemed humiliated and defeated even before the retaliation came. It did happen on September 1st, when a moving Israeli military vehicle was destroyed in broad daylight by two anti-tank missiles near Avivim barracks, killing or wounding its occupants. While Israel had promised to hit Lebanon hard and return it to the Stone Age via all channels (diplomatic, media, etc.) in case of retaliation, the IDF didn’t hit back at all, merely firing “defensive phosphorous strikes aimed at building a smokescreen to protect themselves from further strikes”, as Nasrallah put it. Israeli TV channels showed the evacuation of a seemingly badly wounded soldier by helicopter, and his arrival at a Haifa hospital.

But Netanyahu claimed there was not as much as a scratch in the Israeli side, and that everything had been staged in order to convince Hezbollah they had avenged their martyrs and avoid any further escalation. While this seems like a PR stunt aimed at damage control (especially when we consider that at the same time, Israeli media reported that a soldier stationed in the North was severely injured by a bizarre game of stone-throwing, suggesting a ludicrous cover-up only made possible by the strict military censorship), Nasrallah didn’t rule it out, and stated in a September 10^th speech:

“Everything that was done by the Israelis in recent days, for example the Israeli dummy soldiers (in their vehicles), this shows the weakness of the Israeli army. And when things have come to what they called “the deception operation”, in which they allegedly staged the evacuation of soldiers with fake injuries that they carried on stretchers, covered in fake blood, and would thus have deceived Hezbollah (into believing that his goal was reached, to prevent him from launching new strikes). Let us imagine that you really tricked us: all that would prove is, in few words, that your renowned legendary and invincible army has turned into a Hollywood army, which makes movies for the cinema, because it became helpless on the ground, incapable, weak, fearful and cowardly, withdrawing from the border to a width of 5 to 7 kilometers (for fear of the promised response by Hezbollah.”

It would be difficult to conclude that this 2019 round ended in anything but a crushing defeat for Israel, be it on the military, psychological or PR level. Though all of this is little known to the Western public, where the media is but an echo chamber of the Israeli Army’s propaganda (even RT, Sputnik and most alternative media often take their claims at face value), there is no doubt that it was strongly present in the mind of Israel’s political & military leaders when they heard of a Hezbollah operative killed in their latest strike on Syria ten days ago. Israeli media reported the high alert status of the Army in the North, where military drills were canceled, reinforcements sent and units & defenses put in high alert in the expectation of an imminent Hezbollah attack. The usual huff and puff about Israel’s forceful response in case of an attack was heard from Netanyahu & Gantz. But as Israel is in the eye of the storm because of the coronavirus crisis & current civil unrest and daily & violent protests against Netanyahu, another round against Hezbollah, Israel’s most dreaded enemy, is the last thing they’d want. That’s why Israel took the unprecedented step of sending an apology letter to Hezbollah via the UN representative in Lebanon, as was reported by Lebanese & Israeli media, and confirmed by Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassem, though the latter wouldn’t speak of its contents, and only stated that Hezbollah didn’t and wouldn’t reply to it.

Commenting on this development, Senior Lebanese political analyst Anis Naqqash, closely linked to Hezbollah, stated the following in an interview to Al-Mayadeen on July 26:

Anis Naqqash: This letter is the greatest proof of Israel’s weakness and fear of Hezbollah’s response. (Recall that in the past) Israel slaughtered (civilians) by the hundreds, and did not apologize or send (explanatory) letters. Israel committed aggressions and occupied territories, and did not apologize or send (explanatory) letters. (But) today, fearing Hezbollah’s reaction, Israel sends an urgent letter via the UN as an apology, because they are afraid of the reaction.

First, the fact that Hezbollah did not make the contents of the letter public helps to make it irrelevant. If they had published it, they would have given the impression of wanting to make public what Israel said. Second, the fact that Hezbollah did not respond to the letter confuses Israel. Despite their apologies and asking for forgiveness, what is Hezbollah’s response? Absolute silence. This leaves Israel in a state of great disarray. (Hezbollah) has also confirmed (via its Deputy Secretary General) that Hezbollah will do what they have to do when the time comes, which also leaves more to fear (in Israel).

Therefore, today Israel is clearly in a state of continued confusion and fear, and the statements of Sheikh Naim (Qassem) today will not allow them to sleep peacefully, on the contrary, they are even more worried (after hearing him).

Journalist: Israel therefore stands on one foot and a half (Nasrallah’s formula to designate the fear and terror of Israeli soldiers, ready to flee at full speed at the slightest alarm) without even the Hezbollah Secretary General needing to speak (and warn them of an imminent response)?

Anis Naqqash: The last time he warned them, but this time they (already) know what to expect. It’s like an unruly pupil standing up and facing the wall on his own every time he does something silly. Today Israel stands up and faces the wall, and does so on one foot and a half, taking (drastic) precautions. No one can say if the response will come before the Eid-el-Kebir (on July 31st) or after, or even if the response will take the Eid festival into account or not. Everything is possible on the part of the Resistance.

Journalist: But isn’t the fact that Hezbollah has not made public the contents of the letter a sign of seriousness, respect and responsibility given that it is an official letter that has been delivered via the United Nations? Isn’t that an important sign (of maturity)?

Anis Naqqash: This can only be understood by comparison with what the Arab leaders and Presidents, and even the former leaders of the Palestinian resistance factions, used to do when they received such marks of attention from the (Israeli) enemy, or from the United States or Europe. The mere fact that one of these countries paid attention to them, made a mere gesture of consideration towards them, they were quick to show it to everyone (as a sign of pride), (boasting) that they had received a glance, a letter from such or such country, an apology, etc. Their opponents saw them as eager for any sign of recognition from the enemy.

As far as Hezbollah is concerned, it is quite the opposite. Hezbollah does not attach any importance to the enemy and its stances. Of course, they study them closely (one has to know its enemy very well), but they do not give them this importance; they don’t manifest this avidity (towards any sign of respect from the enemy). Hezbollah doesn’t rush to their people telling them, “Look, look, they’ve apologized to us!” The confidence of Hezbollah’s grassroots in the Resistance is much higher than that, and they know Israel is afraid of it regardless of what they can say in any letter. This is why Hezbollah does not attach importance to it and does not bother to respond to it, making it clear that for them, whether Israel sent the letter or not, it is the same thing and it will not change anything (about the inevitable response). We have to analyze this from the point of view of psychological warfare, of politics, in order to correctly assess the strategic capacities of the Resistance with regard to political, security and media battles. […]

While Israel’s “apologies” to Hezbollah are pathetic and can prevent in no way the inevitable retaliation, it must be emphasized that Israel certainly does everything it can to avoid hitting Hezbollah operatives when it strikes Syria —and therefore tries hard not to kill anyone at all—, going so far as warning them before hitting one of their vehicles, as we can see in this video from last April.

Israel was therefore left with the crushing pressure of the unknown, especially that Hezbollah didn’t comment on what it would do or not do, Naim Qassem merely stating that the rules of engagement previously stated were still in force, and that the coming days would answer everyone’s questions. There were no doubts in Israel & Lebanon that an imminent Hezbollah retaliation was coming. The pressure & nervousness —and downright panic— at the border are probably the cause of the death of an Israeli soldier on July 22 when his car crashed in the Shebaa farms, near the Lebanese border. As a Koweiti put it on Twitter, “Hezbollah’s silence is sometimes more powerful and painful to the Zionist enemy than their missiles, because they live hours, days and weeks in a state of fear, terror and high nervousness. Silence is a destructive weapon of psychological warfare against the Israeli entity, both at the political and psychological levels.” Avigdor Lieberman, former Israeli Defense Minister, stated that “I am still worried because the North is paralyzed by the killing of one single Hezbollah member in Damascus. Unfortunately, Nasrallah proved that he does what he says, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

In this extremely tense situation, on July 27^th, the Israeli Army, parroted by the Western media (both mainstream and alternative), stated that it had foiled a Hezbollah attempt to infiltrate the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms, killing and wounding the operatives in the following skirmish while suffering no death or injuries itself. Later reports made no mention of Hezbollah casualties, alleging that their lives were willfully spared as a de-escalation measure. Here is the account of the “battle” by Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel:

“While some of the details are still shrouded in fog, it’s clear that the IDF forces – soldiers from the Nahal Brigade, the elite Egoz unit and a tank crew – weren’t taken by surprise and were well prepared for their mission. An IDF lookout spotted the Hezbollah cell while it was still moving toward Har Dov (Shebaa Farms). When the cell had made it about 20 meters into Israel, in a hilly, wooded area where there’s no border fence, tanks and machine guns opened fire at it from a few hundred meters away.The Shi’ite militiamen quickly left the area.

There have been no reports of them taking casualties.

They entered Israel not that far from an IDF outpost and a road that serves troops in the area. (Har Dov is always closed to civilian traffic.) Their goal was presumably to carry out an attack – via sniper fire or bombs – on the IDF forces posted there. But given what has been reported about how the cell operated, the attempt does not seem to have been particularly sophisticated.

Thick vegetation makes it hard to hit an enemy moving cautiously even in broad daylight. The IDF has refused to say whether the soldiers were ordered to shoot to kill, or whether the plan was always to drive off the Hezbollah cell without causing casualties.

Nevertheless, there are fairly solid grounds for assuming that Israel deliberately decided on the latter course of action. Any such decision would have had to be made at the highest levels.

Had Hezbollah suffered losses in the incident, it might have felt compelled to mount an additional retaliation, and that could have escalated the situation along the border. Thus what looks like a tie with no casualties appears to be very convenient for both sides.”

This scenario makes Israel look good: according to this report, not only did they successfully foil an attack, but they did it with a concern for enemy human lives in order to avoid an escalation. Hezbollah’s “unsophisticated” attack, for a change, is supposed to make its outcome more plausible, and more acceptable to the Party of God, who can go along with it, claim he retaliated somewhat and climb down the ladder. Thus, this alleged round would give a military & PR victory for Israel, while allowing Hezbollah to save face, and Netanyahu & Gantz wasted no time in collecting their medal and warning Nasrallah that he was “playing with fire”, and that any further Hezbollah operations against Israel “would be a mistake and would be followed by a harsh military response”. Interestingly, both Netanyahu and Gantz left directly after reading their short statement, without taking any questions from the journalists. One wonders why they wouldn’t enjoy their “victory”.

In reality, this story is very unlikely, as the Israeli media themselves were quick to point out. In an article titled ‘Was Mount Dov incident another Hollywood show for Hezbollah?’, the Jerusalem Post recalled the Avivim mascarade and asked:

“In this day and age, everything is filmed. So where is the footage of the infiltrators crossing into Israel? Where is the drone footage of the area at the time of the incident?”

The IDF stated that they had footage of the incident and were considering releasing it, but haven’t done so far, which adds to the skepticism. Even Naftali Bennett, former Defense Minister, seemed to indirectly deny that any skirmish happenned, stating to Israel’s Channel 13 that in the region of the incident, one can get the impression that something is moving while there is nothing at all.

As for Hezbollah, they denied that any skirmish had taken place in the following statement:

“It appears that the state of terror in which the Zionist occupation army and its settlers on the Lebanese border find themselves, the high alert status and the extreme concern over the Resistance’s reaction to the enemy crime which led to the martyrdom of our mujahid brother Ali Kamel Mohsen, as well as the enemy’s complete inability to know the intentions of the Resistance, all these factors made the enemy extremely nervous on the ground and in the media, and he behaves as someone afraid of his own shadow.

Everything that the enemy media claim about Israel thwarting an infiltration operation from Lebanese territory into occupied Palestine, as well as their claims that there were martyrs and wounded on the Resistance side as a result of the bombardments which took place near the occupation sites in the Shebaa farms, is absolutely not true. This is just a futile attempt to forge illusory & bogus victories.

The Islamic Resistance affirms that there has been no clash or shooting on its part in the events of the day so far. Rather, it was one single part, meaning the frightened, anxious and nervous (Israeli) enemy, who fired all the shots.

Our response to the martyrdom of our mujahedin brother Ali Kamel Mohsen, who found martyrdom in the Zionist aggression on the outskirts of Damascus International Airport, will inevitably come, and the Zionists have only to await punishment for their crimes.

Moreover, the strikes which took place today on the (Lebanese) village of Al-Habaria and hit a civilian’s house will not go unpunished.

The next few days will soon deliver their verdict (our response to all of this is imminent).

Victory comes only from Almighty God.

Islamic Resistance in Lebanon”

Even if it was a matter of Hezbollah’s word against Israel’s, given their respective PR record, it would be safe to trust Hezbollah’s account. In fact, the Israelis themselves believe Nasrallah more than their own leaders, as was shown by polls held in Israel, Hezbollah’s huge credibility being one of its great achievements —as Norman Finkelstein stated, “Israeli leaders carefully scrutinize Nasrallah’s every word”. Anyway, Israel has gained nothing from what is most likely a new PR stunt. Whether the incident started as a mistake of Israeli troops firing at inexistent Hezbollah combatants conjured by their panicked imagination (IDF soldiers are world-class cowards), or whether it was all staged from the beginning in order to claim a fake victory before the inevitable, real retaliation, it is safe to believe that no Hezbollah attack happened, and that Israel further humiliated & discredited itself with this umpteenth lie.

However, it would be a mistake to think that all this show was futile. First, Hezbollah stated for the first time that the retaliation was coming indeed, though it was pretty much a given anyway. Second, they now have two reasons to strike back: their combatant killed in Damascus, and the attack against a civilian house, which puts all the Israeli settlers in the line of fire. Thus, Israel went from a bad situation to an even worse one. Back in August 2019, Nasrallah had already stated that the failed drone attack against Beirut’s southern suburb meant that from now on, the settlers would be seen as fair game:

« I declare to all the inhabitants of northern Israel and everywhere in occupied Palestine: do not live (normally), do not be in peace, do not feel safe, and do not think for one second that Hezbollah will accept such a scenario (where he would suffer such attacks in his neighborhoods without retaliating against settlers). »

Hezbollah still refrained from attacking settlements back then, focusing on military targets, but the latest escalation, even if it was likely accidental, could very well change their mind.

The only remaining question is when and where Hezbollah’s retaliation will come, and how will it unfold? As surprise is a major component of Hezbollah’s strategy, it would be vain to speculate, even if one can think that Hezbollah will take its time, in order to keep the enemy on tenterhooks. But Nasrallah gave us an interesting hint in his ‘Hollywood Army’ Speech:

“O Hollywood army, the lesson we draw from this experience, if indeed it is real (it remains to be proven true that you tricked us), is that the next time, you invite us not be content to hit one vehicle or one place, but several vehicles and several positions, so as not to be fooled by new Hollywood movies. (This comedy simulating injuries so that we’d stop hitting you) is a demonstration of weakness and helplessness (and not a sign of strength or intelligence).”

Also, many wonder if Hezbollah’s inevitable retaliation can lead to a war. It is most unlikely, and this idea has been dismissed by Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General, though he stated that they were always ready for war. But the daily threats from Netanyahu or Gantz should fool no one: Israel’s bite has never been a match for its bark, and their threats towards Hezbollah always turned out to be a damp squib. Netanyahu boasted of having won an imaginary round only because he knew that he had already lost the real one at all levels —military, psychological, PR—, and that when the deterrence & rules of engagement between Hezbollah and Israel change, it is only at the latter’s expense.

Donate as little as you can to support this work and subscribe to the Newsletter to get around censorship.

“Any amount counts, because a little money here and there, it’s like drops of water that can become rivers, seas or oceans…” Hassan Nasrallah

Hezbollah denies carrying out attack on Israel, vows imminent retaliation

Date: 28 July 2020

Author: lecridespeuples

Source: Al-Manar, Hezbollah TV channel

Translation: resistancenews.org

Commenting on the events that took place today, July 27, 2020, in the occupied area of ​​the Shebaa Farms on the Lebanese border with occupied Palestine, and the information and statements released about these events, the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon (Hezbollah) released the following statement:

“It appears that the state of terror in which the Zionist occupation army and its settlers on the Lebanese border find themselves, the high alert status and the extreme concern over the Resistance’s reaction to the enemy crime which led to the martyrdom of our mujahid brother Ali Kamel Mohsen, as well as the enemy’s complete inability to know the intentions of the Resistance, all of these factors made the enemy extremely nervous on the ground and in the media, and he behaves considering that any wind blowing the bushes announces an (imminent) attack on him (Israelis are afraid of their own shadow).

Everything that the enemy media claim about Israel thwarting an infiltration operation from Lebanese territory into occupied Palestine, as well as their claims that there were martyrs and wounded on the Resistance side as a result of the bombardments which took place near the occupation sites in the Shebaa farms, is absolutely not true. This is just a futile attempt to forge illusory & bogus victories.

The Islamic Resistance affirms that there has been no clash or shooting on its part in the events of the day so far. Rather, it was one single part, meaning the frightened, anxious and nervous (Israeli) enemy, who fired all the shots (against imaginary targets).

Our response to the martyrdom of our mujahedin brother Ali Kamel Mohsen, who found martyrdom in the Zionist aggression on the outskirts of Damascus International Airport, will inevitably come, and the Zionists have only to await punishment for their crimes.

Moreover, the bombardments which took place today on the village of Al-Habaria and hit a civilian’s house will not go unpunished.

The next few days will soon deliver their verdict (our response to all of this is imminent).

Victory comes only from Almighty God.

Islamic Resistance in Lebanon”

See also Israeli strikes in Syria: fearing imminent retaliation, IDF sends apology letter to Hezbollah

Donate as little as you can to support this work and subscribe to the Newsletter to get around censorship.

“Any amount counts, because a little money here and there, it’s like drops of water that can become rivers, seas or oceans…” Hassan Nasrallah

Syrian Diaries: 9 Years of War

Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 24, 2020

It’s now the tenth year since protests turned into war in Syria. Veterans and a TV cameraman look back on how they first got caught up in a conflict they didn’t understand. They share with RT Documentary the memories of bullets and explosions they live with, the losses they’ve experienced, and how their homeland has been changed by violence.

Huge number of human organs found in one of terrorists’ hideouts in Syria

Source

Wednesday, 29 July 2020 16:34

Syrian army units in cooperation with residents found a huge number of human organs  saved inside transparent bottles including chloroform in one the hideouts of terrorists in Ghadfeh village in Maarret al-Noaman region in south Idlib.  According to the Syrian News Agency (SANA), one of the doctors turned a home, located 10 km to the east of Maarret al-Noaman into a laboratory where human organs, including heads, eyes, hearts and other organs were saved in bottles.  Names of men and women were written on the bottles.  Terrorist groups have used the sale of human organs as a way to finance their terrorist acts, especially in norh Syria.  Western media reports have talked about the abduction of dozens of children and women with the aim of stealing their human organs. Turkish brokers are running the sale of organs, according to media reports. 

Basma Qaddour

More

The hideout included a room detected for religious studies with radical books and publications. This indicates that the militants were not members of a gang, but rather of a Jihadi group.

Al-Ghadfah, which is located in the vicinity of the city of Ma`arat al-Nu`man, was controlled by al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. The town was liberated by the SAA and its allies a few months ago.

Greater Idlib is known to be a hub for organ traders in Syria. Turkey is the main market for this horrific trade. Militants in the region rely on organ trading, among other criminal activities, as a means to finance their terrorist operations.

Turkey, which deployed thousands of troops and loads of equipment in Greater Idlib over the past few months, is turning a blind eye to illicit activities in the region.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC:

• ’ISIS’ Sanctioned Organ Harvesting in Document Taken in US Raid
• Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham Arrested Terrorist Commander For Refusing To Go To Libya – Report
• Israelis detained for organ harvesting in Romania
• Israelis caught in organ harvesting: Again!
• TISSUE, SKIN, BONE AND ORGAN HARVESTING AT ISRAEL’S NATIONAL FORENSIC INSTITUTE
• From ‘Blood Libel’ to ‘Organ Harvesting’
• THE NEW “BLOOD LIBEL”? …. WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING ABOUT ISRAELI ORGAN HARVESTING
• History of Israeli Organ Harvesting
• Israel admitted at least one case of organ harvesting and more
• Swedish Daily Publishes 2nd Article on ‘Israeli Army Organ Harvesting’
• ’Israel’ Harvesting Palestinian Martyrs’ Organs!
• Like Israel, ISIS terrorists accused of Harvesting and Trafficking Human Organs

Wanting War but Fearing It vs Not Wanting War and Not Fearing It: A Juxtapositionby Nasser Kandil مَن يريد الحرب ويخشاها مقابل مَن لا يريدها ولا يخشاها!

207 views•Jul 30, 2020

by Nasser Kandil

Wanting War but Fearing It vs Not Wanting War and Not Fearing It: A Juxtaposition by Nasser Kandil Real psychological warfare is the truest expression of the balance of power between two opponents. Real psychological warfare is the one which goes through the minds and hearts of soldiers and officers on opposing sides of a conflict, and not the one which aims at influencing minds and hearts. A moment of confrontation of a different kind circulating in the hearts and minds of the opponents comes at the end of both opponents’ exertion of the utmost of their power to influence hearts and minds, and before the firing of arms. It is this moment which provides a true sampling of the balance of power, which becomes even more evident at the moment of reciprocal fire exchange, and not at the firing from the sense of isolation and terror overtaking one of the opponents, as had occurred in Mazarih Shibaa and recurred in Sahl Al Khiyyam and Aita Al Shaa’b in the very few recent days. The balance of deterrence based on the balance of terror, namely the terror of a bloody and costly war feared by both opponents, is greater than the balance of firepower. What Al Mukawama established in the 2006 war, after having succeeded as a resistance force against an occupying army and forcing it to a humiliating retreat in 2000, was an equivalence in an equation consisting on one side of a higher ratio of elevated morale to a lower ratio of fire power, and a higher ratio of firepower to a lower ratio of morale. In the current confrontation, Al Mukawama, following its achievement of a significant increase in its firepower capacity which has become equivalent to that of its opponent, is heading towards make a big change. The former equivalence it had established has now the possibility of transformation into superiority when the destruction accomplished by air strikes in a confrontation is compared to the destruction precision missiles are capable of achieving. In parallel, the chasm in morale has deepened with the big surplus in high morale on one side, and the profoundly defeated morale on the other. This means a transition from the balance of deterrence based on the balance of terror, to terror on one side and deterrence on the other. A comparison between what has been consistently reflected in the Occupation’s state of being which includes its settlers, political leaders, and its army: officers, commanders, and soldiers, and Al Mukawama, her milieu, and surrounding interior, tells of an equivalence in the negative consequences of COVID-19 and of political and economic fragmentation. It tells of the Occupation’s desire for war, a desire in opposition to its internal conditions and unaccompanied by determination and capability, in absence of which “wear out” will be the leading descriptor, and everything will deteriorate and fall apart. It also reveals that on the opposite side, Al Mukawama, who is considerate of its surroundings, and despite of what she possesses in terms of capability, morale, and cohesiveness in her supportive environment, decides that she does not want a war. The absence of capability puts a restraint on the materialization of the desire for war, because all calculations reveal a fear of war by the Occupation at its popular, political, and military levels. Its counterpart, Al Mukawama, is confident that all will be in her favor, and that she will prevail, should matters slip into a war. In view of her capabilities, she is confident about her readiness to engage in a war and her ability to impose her will on its all fronts, when war becomes an inevitable certainty. For those reasons, she does not fear war. The outcome of what we are witnessing by the minute, hour, and day of this rapidly developing scene is the real psychological warfare taking place in the hearts and minds of commanders, elites, and soldiers of an Occupation strongly desirous of a war but fearing it even more strongly, and its opponent totally undesirous of war and yet totally unafraid of it. A graph depicting battlefield conditions drawn through these points will reveal one section on the graph living a reality of terror, confusion, and hallucination, in juxtaposition to the other section living a state of confidence, security, and steadfastness.

مَن يريد الحرب ويخشاها مقابل مَن لا يريدها ولا يخشاها!

ناصر قنديل

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تشكّل الحرب النفسية الواقعية التعبير الأعلى عن مصداقيّة موازين القوى بين المتحاربين. والحرب النفسية الواقعية هي تلك الحرب التي تدور داخل عقول وقلوب الجنود والضباط والقادة على طرفي المواجهة، وليست تلك التي تدور للتأثير على هذه العقول والقلوب. فبعد أن يُدلي كل من الفريقين بدلوه ويفعل كل ما يستطيع ويرمي بثقله للتأثير على موازين العقول والقلوب، تبدأ لحظة المواجهة قبل إطلاق النار، بحروب من نوع آخر تدور في العقول والقلوب على الجبهتين المتقابلتين، وتقدّم لنا عيّنة عن موازين قوى ذات صدقية سنشهدها بوضوح أشدّ عندما يبدأ إطلاق النار المتبادل، وليس إطلاق الوحشة التي تصيب أحد الطرفين تعبيراً عن حال الذعر التي تسيطر عليه، كما جرى أول أمس في مزارع شبعا وتكرّر ليل أمس قرب سهل الخيام وعيتا الشعب.

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توازن الردع، الناتج عن توازن رعب، الرعب من حرب مكلفة ودامية يخشاها الفريقان، هو أكبر من توازن في القوة النارية، فبعدما تفوّقت المقاومة بكونها مقاومة على جيش احتلال وفرضت عليه الانسحاب الذليل من جنوب لبنان عام 2000، خاضت في حرب تموز 2006 معركتها لصناعة معادلة التكافؤ الردعي بين منسوب مرتفع من القوة المعنوية مع منسوب منخفض من القوة النارية، من جهة؛ وفي الجهة المقابلة منسوب معاكس، مرتفع في القوة النارية ومنخفض في القوة المعنوية، وهي تتجه في المواجهة الراهنة لتغيير كبير في المعادلة، حيث تحققت نسبة عالية من التعادل في القوة النارية قابلة للتحول إلى اختلالها لصالح المقاومة عندما تصير المواجهة بين ما تفعله غارات الطيران وما تحققه الصواريخ الدقيقة. وبالتوازي تعمّقت الهوة المعنويّة، بين منسوب فائض في المعنويات المرتفعة، وحضيض المعنويّات المنكسرة. وهذا يعني الانتقال من توازن الردع المؤسس على توازن الرعب، إلى رعب من طرف واحد، وردع من طرف مقابل.

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الصورة التي عكستها وتعكسها حال كيان الاحتلال مستوطنين وقادة سياسيين، وجيشاً ضباطاً وقادة وجنوداً، تقول بالمقارنة مع المقاومة وبيئتها والساحة المحيطة بها داخلياً، إن هناك توازناً في التأثيرات السلبية لكورونا، والتشظي السياسي الداخلي، تقابله في الكيان رغبة معاكسة للظروف والمناخات الداخلية وغير مشفوعة بعزيمة وقدرة، عنوانها الرغبة بالحرب، لأنه من دونها كل شيء يتداعى، وكل شيء ذاهب للمزيد من التدهور، والاهتراء سيد المواقف. وعلى الضفة المقابلة تقف المقاومة المراعية لما يحيط بها، رغم ما لديها من مقدرات وروح معنوية وبيئة حاضنة متماسكة، وتقرر أنها لا تريد الحرب، ومقابل الرغبات المتعاكسة نحو الذهاب للحرب، كابح غياب القدرة يحول دون ترجمة الرغبة لدى كيان الاحتلال، حيث كل الحسابات الميدانية تقول إن الكيان بمستوياته الشعبية والسياسية والعسكرية يخشى هذه الحرب، يوازيه لدى المقاومة شعور بالثقة بأنه إذا انزلقت الأمور نحو الحرب فكل شيء سيكون لصالحها وستفوز بنتيجتها، وبالنظر لما لديها من مقدرات فهي واثقة من أنها جاهزة لخوض غمار الحرب إذا صارت خياراً حتمياً، وفرض إرادتها في ميادينها، ولذلك فهي لا تخشاها.

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حاصل الحرب النفسية الواقعية الذي نشهده كل يوم وكل ساعة وكل دقيقة في هذا الظرف المتسارع، بما هي حرب داخل العقول والقلوب، على مستوى القادة والنخب والجنود، يقول، إننا أمام طرف يريد الحرب بقوة لكنه يخشاها بقوة أكبر، ومقابله طرف لا يريد الحرب بالمطلق، لكنه لا يخشاها بالمطلق، وعلى هذه النقاط البيانية يرتسم خط بياني للأوضاع الميدانية، تظهر وقائعه بطرف يعيش حال الهلع والارتباك والهلوسة، ويقابله طرف يعيش حال الثقة والطمأنينة والثبات.

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Israel’s Jewish National Fund Is Uprooting Palestinians – Not Planting Trees

By Jonathan Cook
Source: Jonathan Cook

The Jewish National Fund, established more than 100 years ago, is perhaps the most venerable of the international Zionist organisations. Its recent honorary patrons have included prime ministers, and it advises UN forums on forestry and conservation issues.

It is also recognised as a charity in dozens of western states. Generations of Jewish families, and others, have contributed to its fundraising programmes, learning as children to drop saved pennies into its trademark blue boxes to help plant a tree.

And yet its work over many decades has been driven by one main goal: to evict Palestinians from their homeland. 

The JNF is a thriving relic of Europe’s colonial past, even if today it wears the garb of an environmental charity. As recent events show, ethnic cleansing is still what it excels at.

The organisation’s mission began before the state of Israel was even born. Under British protection, the JNF bought up tracts of fertile land in what was then historic Palestine. It typically used force to dispossess Palestinian sharecroppers whose families had worked the land for centuries.

But the JNF’s expulsion activities did not end in 1948, when Israel was established through a bloody war on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland – an event Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Israel hurriedly demolished more than 500 cleansed Palestinian villages, and the JNF was entrusted with the job of preventing some 750,000 refugees from returning. It did so by planting forests over both the ruined homes, making it impossible to rebuild them, and village lands to stop them being farmed.

These plantations were how the JNF earned its international reputation. Its forestry operations were lauded for stopping soil erosion, reclaiming land and now tackling the climate crisis.

But even this expertise – gained through enforcing war crimes – was undeserved. Environmentalists say the dark canopies of trees it has planted in arid regions such as the Negev, in Israel’s south, absorb heat unlike the unforested, light-coloured soil. Short of water, the slow-growing trees capture little carbon. Native species of brush and animals, meanwhile, have been harmed.

These pine forests – the JNF has planted some 250 million trees – have also turned into a major fire hazard. Most years hundreds of fires break out after summer droughts exacerbated by climate change.

Early on, the vulnerability of the JNF’s saplings was used as a pretext to outlaw the herding of native black goats. Recently the goats, which clear undergrowth, had to be reintroduced to prevent the fires. But the goats’ slaughter had already served its purpose, forcing Bedouin Palestinians to abandon their pastoral way of life.

Despite surviving the Nakba, thousands of Bedouin in the Negev were covertly expelled to Egypt or the West Bank in Israel’s early years.

It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the JNF’s troubling role in these evictions was of only historical interest. The charity, Israel’s largest private land owner, is actively expelling Palestinians to this day.

In recent weeks, solidarity activists have been desperately trying to prevent the eviction of a Palestinian family, the Sumarins, from their home in occupied East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers.

Last month the Sumarins lost a 30-year legal battle waged by the JNF, which was secretly sold their home in the late 1980s by the Israeli state.

The family’s property was seized – in violation of international law – under a draconian 1950 piece of legislation declaring Palestinian refugees of the Nakba “absent”, so that they could not reclaim their land inside the new state of Israel.

The Israeli courts have decreed that the Absentee Property Law can be applied outside Israel’s recognised territory too, in occupied Jerusalem. In the Sumarins’ case, it appears not to matter that the family was never actually “absent”. The JNF is permitted to evict the 18 family members next month. To add insult to injury, they will have to pay damages to the JNF.

A former US board member, Seth Morrison, resigned in protest in 2011 at the JNF’s role in such evictions, accusing it of working with extreme settler groups. Last year the JNF ousted a family in similar circumstances near Bethlehem. Days later settlers moved on to the land.

Ir Amim, an Israeli human rights group focusing on Jerusalem, warned that these cases create a dangerous legal precedent if Israel carries out its promise to annex West Bank territory. It could rapidly expand the number of Palestinians classified as “absentees”.

But the JNF never lost its love of the humble tree as the most effective – and veiled – tool of ethnic cleansing. And it is once again using forests as a weapon against the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian, survivors of the Nakba.

Earlier this year it unveiled its “Relocation Israel 2040” project. The plan is intended to “bring about an in-depth demographic change of an entire country” – what was once sinisterly called “Judaisation”. The aim is to attract 1.5 million Jews to Israel, especially to the Negev, over the next 20 years.

As in Israel’s first years, forests will be vital to success. The JNF is preparing to plant trees on an area of 40 sq km belonging to Bedouin communities that survived earlier expulsions. Under the cover of environmentalism, many thousands of Bedouin could be deemed “trespassers”.

The Bedouin have been in legal dispute with the Israeli state for decades over ownership of their lands. This month in an interview with the Jerusalem Post newspaper, Daniel Atar, the JNF’s global head, urged Jews once again to drop money into its boxes. He warned that Jews could be dissuaded from coming to the Negev by its reputation for “agricultural crimes” – coded reference to Bedouin who have tried to hold on to their pastoral way of life.

Trees promise both to turn the semi-arid region greener and to clear “unsightly” Bedouin off their ancestral lands. Using the JNF’s original colonial language of “making the desert bloom”, Atar said his organisation would make “the wilderness flourish”.

The Bedouin understand the fate likely to befall them. In a protest last month they carried banners: “No expulsions, no displacement.”

After all, Palestinians have suffered forced displacement at the JNF’s hands for more than a century, while watching it win plaudits from around the world for its work in improving the “environment”.

US-ISRAEL MEETING: WHEN IS THE HEZBOLLAH RESPONSE EXPECTED?

Posted on 28/07/2020 by Elijah J Magnier

By Elijah J. Magnier: @ejmalrai

The last time that the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, visited Israel was shortly before the assassination of Major General Qassim Soleimani at Baghdad Airport. General Milley re-visited Israel a few days ago and met with Defence Minister Benny Gantz, the chief of staff Aviv Kochavi, and Mossad Director Yossi Cohen. The visit, which lasted for a few hours in the context of “confronting Iran and its allies in the Middle East, especially the threat posed by the Lebanese Hezbollah”, may be announcing a “hotter” summer. The topics were Iran but also the dangerous escalation between Hezbollah and Israel. Israel has removed forces along the Lebanese borders and deployed tanks and artillery brigades. Is this an act of intimidation or a mere precaution? Are the US and Israel preparing to ignite a war and change the rules of engagement? Are these defensive or offensive measures? And when will Hezbollah respond by selecting an IDF target to kill?

On Monday, Israel opened fire against a suspected movement in the occupied Shebaa Farms that turned out to be the apprehension and the excess of security procedures by the Israeli deployed troops along the Lebanese borders. It is inevitable for a nervous army waiting to be attacked, knowing that this government will accept the losses and turn the page, to fire against an non-existing enemy.” Hezbollah said “Israel was firing against an imaginary enemy and will be held accountable for damaging a Lebanese house during the Israeli artillery bombing of Lebanese territory, triggered by fear of a Hezbollah’s retaliation”. Hezbollah ended its communique’ saying to Israel: “Wait for the punishment”.

However embarrassing the incident is, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked “all ministers should avoid releasing any information about the event”. Netanyahu also stated that he would hold “Lebanon and Syria responsible for any attack,” and that he is “ready to respond if soldiers are hit.” Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said, “any action that violates our sovereignty will be met with a strong response. We advise our enemies not to test us.” Israeli chief of staff Kochavi visited the border with Lebanon and told the commanders of the 91st Brigade, preparing for a possible retaliatory operation (reinforced by the Golani Brigade), that “tensions will continue in the coming days; Hezbollah will respond before Eid al-Adha,” celebrated by Muslims this Thursday.

Kochavi’s words are mere speculation: in fact, the decision is in the hands of Hezbollah, not Israel. The Chief of Staff is attempting to reassure Israeli soldiers that the state of alert, with them hiding inside their barracks, will not last long. According to a well-informed source, Hezbollah’s response will not follow Kochavi’s timing, thus excluding this week. It

By sending a message through UNIFIL, Israel not only recognized the superiority of Hezbollah but that it has definitely lost the balance of deterrence, probably permanently. Israel admitted that it was unable to impose its own rules of engagement and is being subjected to the balance of terror imposed by Hezbollah. The Israeli intensification of sorties by drones and warplanes is a psychological effort to dissuade Hezbollah from striking “comfortably”, and to avoid heating up the frontline. However, speaking from decades of experience, the source considers that “when the decision is taken to hit an Israeli target, all these Israeli measures will be disregarded. “

For now, Hezbollah has decided … to remain silent.

Proofread by:   Maurice Brasher and C.G.B.

Copyright © https://ejmagnier.com   2020 

US Forces Ordered to Stay in Bunkers During IRGC Drills – Reports

By Staff, Agencies

US military forces deployed to the Gulf kingdoms were reportedly ordered to stay in bunkers as Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps [IRGC] fired ballistic missiles during normal military drills off the strategic Hormuz Strait.

Citing her “sources” and those of the CNN, a reporter for the BBC wrote in a post on her official page on Tuesday that US troops based in the United Arab Emirates [UAE], Kuwait and Qatar had been briefly put on “high alert” due to “concerns” over Iran’s missile activities.

Other sources identified the facilities as al-Dhafra base in the UAE and al-Udeid air base in Qatar, saying the American troops deployed there had been asked to stay in bunkers.

US forces in Qatar and the UAE “went on high alert early Tuesday and were asked to stay in bunkers, due to intelligence indicators showing an Iranian ballistic missile had been fired and possibly headed their way, US officials tell CNN,” a Twitter user said, indicating that the US forces had misread the trajectory of Iranian missiles.

The reported high-alert notice came as the IRGC started the final phase of large-scale aerial and naval drills, codenamed Payambar-e Azam [The Great Prophet] 14, involving the elite force’s Aerospace Division and Navy.

The maneuvers were held in the general area of the Hormozgan Province, west of the strategic Hormuz Strait, and the Gulf.

The drills featured missiles, vessels, drones, and radars, and are designed to practice both offensive and defensive missions.

Tuesday saw the Corps stage strikes against the life-size replica of a Nimitz-class US aircraft carrier, which the American navy usually sails into the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.

The high-alert notice came a week after Leader of the Islamic Revolution His Eminence Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei said Iran would definitely deliver a “counterblow” to the United States over the assassination of top anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani in January.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will never forget this issue and will definitely deal the counterblow to the Americans,” Imam Khamenei said while receiving visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Tehran last week.

General Soleimani, former commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force, was assassinated in a US airstrike at Baghdad airport on January 3 upon an order by US President Donald Trump.

US bases in Middle East were on high alert over Iranian missile fire: report

By News Desk -2020-07-29

The first batch of Rafale fighter jets are set to arrive in India’s Ambala Air Base on Wednesday afternoon after covering the 7,000 kilometers from France. The jets were stationed overnight at the Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE. The same air base houses US and French troops and aircraft.

An alert was sounded at the Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) late Tuesday after intelligence indicators hinted at an incoming “Iranian missile possibly headed that way”. The Rafale fighter jets bound for India were also at the UAE base as part of an overnight stay.

Barbara Starr from American news channel CNN reported that there was intel on Iranian missiles, but US officials confirmed that no missile struck the facility. Three Iranian missiles reportedly splashed down in the waters near the base as part of Iran’s current military exercises. More

Watch: Iranian ballistic missiles fired from underground sites

BEIRUT, LEBANON (4:45 P.M.) – The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) fired ballistic missiles from underground platforms during the second day of the massive ‘Great Prophet-14’ military drills in the southwestern part of the country on Wednesday.

The successful firing of ballistic missiles fully hidden in camouflage deep under the ground is an important achievement that could pose serious challenges to enemy intelligence agencies, the Fars News Agency reported.

In the final stage of the IRGC’s drills, which took place in the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, the IRGC Aerospace Force’s drones attacked a mock enemy aircraft carrier and targeted its command tower and bridge.

Also, the IRGC’s Sukhoi-22 fighters bombed and destroyed pre-determined targets in Faror Islands with winged bombs.

The IRGC Aerospace and Naval Forces’ joint exercises played an important part of the drills and demonstrated surprising tactics, including the establishment of joint command systems, joint control, combined tactics and combat methods.

Iranian forces conduct naval operation against mock US aircraft carrier: video

Successful missile combat operations were carried out by firing two surface-to-surface Hurmoz and Fateh missiles, and a ballistic missile at specific targets, as well as launching precision-striking air defense missiles.

Also, Shahed 181, Mohajer and Bavar drones successfully attacked and destroyed hypothetical enemy targets and positions at this stage of the drills.

Related

• Iran releases satellite photos of largest US base in the Middle East
• US slams Iran over military drills in strategic Strait of Hormuz
• ran launches ballistic missiles from underground base

Russia and the next Presidential election in the USA

Source

Intro: not a pretty picture

Let’s begin with a disclaimer: in this article, I will assume that there will be a US Presidential election in the Fall. Right now, it appears to be likely that this election will take place (there appear to be no legal way to cancel or delay it), but this is by no means certain (see here for a machine translated and very interesting article by one Russian analyst, who predicts a diarchy after the election). Right now, the state of the US society is both extremely worried (and for good reason) and potentially explosive. It is impossible to predict what a well-executed false flag attack could do to the US. There is also the possibility of either a natural disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc.) or even an unnatural one (considering the condition of the US infrastructure, this is almost inevitable) which could precipitate some kind of state of emergency or martial law to “protect” the people. Finally, though at this point in time I don’t see this as very likely, there is always the possibility of a coup of some kind, maybe a “government of national unity” with the participation of both parties which, as Noam Chomsky correctly points out, are basically only two factions of what could be called the Business Party. There might come a point when they decide to drop this pretense too (just look at how many other pretenses the US ruling elites have dropped in the last decade or so).

Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to explain that all governments can be placed on a continuum ranging from, on one end, “states whose power is based on their authority” to, on the other end, “states whose authority is based on their power“. In the real world, most states are somewhere between these two extremes. But it is quite obvious that the US polity currently has gone very far down the “states whose authority is based on their power” path and to speak of any kind of “moral authority” of US politicians is really a joke. The (probable) upcoming “choice” between Donald “grab them by the pussy” Trump and Joe “creepy uncle” Biden will make this joke even more laughable.

Right now, the most powerful force in the US political system must be the financial sector. And, of course, there are many other powerful interest groups (MIC, Israel Lobby, the CIA and the ridiculously bloated Intel community, Big Pharma, the US Gulag, the corporate media, Oil, etc.) who all combine their efforts (just like a vector does in mathematics) to produce a “resulting vector” which we call “US policies”. That is in theory. In practice, you have several competing “policies” vying for power and influence, both on the domestic and on international front. Often these policies are mutually exclusive.

Last, but certainly not least, the level of corruption in the US is at least as bad as, say, in the Ukraine or in Liberia, but rather than being on the street and petty cash level, the corruption in the US is counted in billions of dollars.

All in all, not a pretty sight (see here for a good analysis of the decline of US power).

Yet the US remains a nuclear power and still has a lot of political influence worldwide and thus this is not a country anyone can ignore. Including Russia.

A quick look at Russia

Before looking into Russian options in relation to the US, we need to take a quick look at how Russia has been faring this year. The short of it would be: not too well. The Russian economy has shrunk by about 10% and the small businesses have been devastated by the combined effects of 1) the economic policies of the Russian government and Central Bank, and 2) the devastating economic impact of the COVID19 pandemic, and 3) the full-spectrum efforts of the West, mostly by the Anglosphere, to strangle Russia economically. Politically, the “Putin regime” is still popular, but there is a sense that it is getting stale and that most Russians would prefer to see more dynamic and proactive policies aimed, not only to help the Russian mega-corporations, but also to help the regular people. Many Russians definitely have a sense that the “little guy” is being completely ignored by fat cats in power and this resentment will probably grow until and unless Putin decides to finally get rid of all the Atlantic Integrationists aka the “Washington consensus” types which are still well represented in the Russian ruling circles, including the government. So far, Putin has remained faithful to his policy of compromises and small steps, but this might change in the future as the level of frustration in the general population is likely to only grow with time.

That is not to say that the Kremlin is not trying. Several of the recent constitutional amendments adopted in a national vote had a strongly expressed “social” and “patriotic” character and they absolutely horrified the “liberal” 5th columnists who tried their best two 1) call for a boycott, and 2) denounce thousands of (almost entirely) imaginary violations of the proper voting procedures, and to 3) de-legitimize the outcome by declaring the election a “fraud”. None of that worked: the participation was high, very few actual violations were established (and those that were, had no impact on the outcome anyway) and most Russians accepted that this outcome was the result of the will of the people. Furthermore, Putin has made public the Russian strategic goals for 2030,which are heavily focused on improving the living and life conditions of average Russians (for details, see here). It is impossible to predict what will happen next, but the most likely scenario is that Russia has several, shall we say, “bumpy” years ahead, both on the domestic and on the international front.

What can Russia reasonably hope for?

This is really the key question: in the best of situations, what can Russia really hope for in the next elections? I would argue that there is really very little which Russia can hope for, if only because the russophobic hysteria started by the Democrats to defeat Trump has now apparently been completely endorsed by the Trump administration and the all the members of Congress. As for the imperial propaganda machine, it now manages to simultaneously declare that Russia tried to “steal” COVID vaccine secrets from the West AND that Russian elites were given a secret COVID vaccine this Spring. As for the US Dems, they are already announcing that the Russians are spreading “disinformation” about Biden. Talk about PRE-traumatic stress disorder (to use the phrase coined by my friend Gilad Atzmon)…

Although I have no way of knowing what is really taking place in the delusional minds of US politicians, I am strongly suspecting that the latest hysteria about “Russia stealing COV19 vaccine secrets” is probably triggered by the conclusion of the US intel community that Russia will have a vaccine ready before the US does. This is, of course, something absolutely unthinkable for US politicians who, (sort of) logically conclude that “if these Russkies got a vaccine first, they *must* have stolen it from us” or something similar (see here for a good analysis of this). And if the Chinese get there first, same response. After all, who in the US legacy media would ever even mention that Russian or Chinese researchers might be ahead of their US colleagues? Nobody, of course.

I would argue that this mantric Russia-bashing is something which will not change in the foreseeable future. For one thing, since the imperial ruling elites have clearly lost control of the situation, they really have no other option left than to blame it all on some external agent. The “terrorist threat” has lost a lot of traction over the past years, the “Muslim threat” is too politically incorrect to openly blame it all on Islam, as for the other boogeymen which US Americans like to scare themselves at night with (immigrants, drug dealers, sex offenders, “domestic terrorists”, etc.) they simply cannot be blamed for stuff like a crashing economy. But Russia, and China, can.

In fact, ever since the (self-evidently ridiculous) “Skripal case” the collective West has proven that it simply does not have the spine to say “no”, or even “maybe”, to any thesis energetically pushed forward by the AngloZionist propaganda machine. Thus no matter how self-evidently silly the imperial propaganda is, the people in the West have been conditioned (literally) to accept any nonsense as “highly likely” as long as it is proclaimed with enough gravitas by politicians and their legacy ziomedia. As for the leaders of the EU, we already know that they will endorse any idiocy coming out of Washington or London in the name of “solidarity”.

Truth be told, most Russian politicians (with the notable exception of the official Kremlin court jester, Zhirinovskii) and analysts never saw Trump as a potential ally or friend. The Kremlin was especially cautious, which leads me to believe that the Russian intelligence analysts did a very good job evaluating Trump’s psyche and they quickly figured out that he was no better than any other US politician. Right now, I know of no Russian analyst who would predict that relations between the US and Russia will improve in the foreseeable future. If anything, most are clearly saying that “guys, we better get used to this” (accusations, sanctions, accusations, sanctions, etc. etc. etc.). Furthermore, it is pretty obvious to the Russians that while Crimea and MH17 were the pretexts for western sanctions against Russia, they were not the real cause. The real cause of the West’s hatred for Russia is as simple as it is old: Russia cannot be conquered, subdued, subverted or destroyed. They’ve been at it for close to 1,000 years and they still are at it. In fact, each time they fail to crush Russia, their russophobia increases to even higher levels (phobia both in the sense of “fear” and in the sense of “hatred”).

Simply put – there is nothing which Russia can expect from the upcoming election. Nothing at all. Still, that does not mean that things are not better than 4 or 8 years ago. Let’s look at what changed.

The big difference between now and then

What did Trump’s election give to the world?

I would say four years for Russia to fully prepare for what might be coming next.

I would argue that since at least Russia and the AngloZionist Empire have been at war since at least 2013, when Russia foiled the US plan to attack Syria under the pretext that it was “highly likely” that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians (in reality, a textbook case of a false flag organized by the Brits), This means that Russia and the Empire have been at war since at least 2013, for no less than seven years (something which Russian 6th columnists and Neo-Marxists try very hard to ignore).

True, at least until now, this was has been 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic, but this is a real existential war of survival for both sides: only one side will walk away from this struggle. The other one will simply disappear (not as a nation or a people, but as a polity; a regime). The Kremlin fully understood that and it embarked on a huge reform and modernization of the Russian armed forces in three distinct ways:

1. A “general” reform of the Russian armed forces which had to be modernized by about 80%. This part of the reform is now practically complete.
2. A specific reform to prepare the western and southern military districts for a major conventional war against the united West (as always in Russian history) which would involve the First Guards Tank Army and the Russian Airborne Forces.
3. The development of bleeding-edge weapons systems with no equivalent in the West and which cannot be countered or defeated; these weapons have had an especially dramatic impact upon First Strike Stability and upon naval operations.

While some US politicians understood what was going on (I think of Ron Paul, see here), most did not. They were so brainwashed by the US propaganda that they were sure that no matter what, “USA! USA! USA!”. Alas for them, the reality was quite different.

Russian officials, by the way, have confirmed that Russia was preparing for war. Heck, the reforms were so profound and far reaching, that it would have been impossible for the Russians to hide what they were doing (see here for details; also please see Andrei Martyanov’s excellent primer on the new Russian Navy here).

While no country is ever truly prepared for war, I would argue that by 2020 the Russians had reached their goals and that now Russia is fully prepared to handle any conflict the West might throw at her, ranging from a small border incident somewhere in Central Asia to a full-scaled war against the US/NATO in Europe.

Folks in the West are now slowly waking up to this new reality (I mentioned some of that here), but it is too late. In purely military terms, Russia has now created such a qualitative gap with the West that the still existing quantitative gap is not sufficient to guarantee a US/NATO victory. Now some western politicians are starting to seriously freak out (see this lady, for example), but most Europeans are coming to terms with two truly horrible realities:

1. Russia is much stronger than Europe and, even much worse,
2. Russia will never attack first (which is a major cause of frustration for western russophobes)

As for the obvious solution to this problem, having friendly relations with Russia is simply unthinkable for those who made their entire careers peddling the Soviet (and now Russian) threat to the world.

But Russia is changing, albeit maybe too slowly (at least for my taste). As I mentioned last week, a number of Polish, Ukrainian and Baltic politicians have declared that the Zapad2020 military maneuvers which are supposed to take place in southern Russia and the Caucasus could be used to prepare an attack on the West (see here for a rather typical example of this nonsense). In the past, the Kremlin would only have made a public statement ridiculing this nonsense, but this time around Putin did something different. Right after he saw the reaction of these politicians, Putin ordered a major and UNSCHEDULED military readiness exercise which involved no less than 150,000 troops, 400 aircraft & 100 ships! The message here was clear:

1. Yes, we are much more powerful than you are and
2. No, we are not apologizing for our strength anymore

And, just to make sure that the message is clear, the Russians also tested the readiness of the Russian Airborne Forces units near the city of Riazan, see for yourself:

This response is, I think, the correct one. Frankly, nobody in the West is listening to what the Kremlin has to say, so what is the point of making more statements which in the future will be ignored equally as they have been in the past.

If anything, the slow realization that Russia is more powerful than NATO would be most helpful in gently prodding EU politicians to change their tune and return back to reality. Check out this recent video of Sarah Wagenknecht, a leading politician of the German Left and see for yourself:

The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.

But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right behind a “gay pride” one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the cause, as this article entitled “Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror” shows (designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).

Russian options for the Fall

In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore, while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons, Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the US like this one, have very little influence or even relevance.

Banderites marching in the US

However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe: All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: “the US is sinking – do you really want to go down with it?”.

There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could call “European suicide politics”, but there are many, many more.

Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. “Forward deployment” is really a thing of the past, at least against Russia.

With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for “popular diplomacy”, especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already.

The example of Sahra Wagenknecht is interesting, because she is from Germany, one of the countries of northern Europe; traditionally, northern European powers have been much more anti-Russian than southern Europeans, so it is encouraging to see that the anti-Putin and anti-Russia hysteria is not always being endorsed by everybody.

But if things are very slowly getting better in the EU, in the bad old US of A things are only getting worse. Even the Republicans are now fully on board the Russia-hating float (right behind a “gay pride” one I suppose) and they are now contributing their own insanity to the cause, as this article entitled “Congressional Republicans: Russia should be designated state sponsor of terror” shows (designating Russia as a terrorist state is an old idea of the Dems, by the way).

Russian options for the Fall

In truth, Russia does not have any particularly good options towards the US. Both parties are now fully united in their rabid hatred of Russia (and China too, of course). Furthermore, while there are many well-funded and virulently anti-Russian organizations in the US (Neo-cons, Papists, Poles, Masons, Ukrainians, Balts, Ashkenazi Jews, etc.), Russian organizations in the US like this one, have very little influence or even relevance.

Banderites marching in the US

However, as the chaos continues to worsen inside the US and as US politicians continue to alienate pretty much the entire planet, Russia does have a perfect opportunity to weaken the US grip on Europe. The beauty in the current dynamic is that Russia does not have to do anything at all (nevermind anything covert or illegal) to help the anti-EU and anti-US forces in Europe: All she needs to do is to continuously hammer in the following simple message: “the US is sinking – do you really want to go down with it?”.

There are many opportunities to deliver that message. The current US/Polish efforts to prevent the EU from enjoying cheap Russian gas might well be the best example of what we could call “European suicide politics”, but there are many, many more.

Truth be told, neither the US nor the EU are a top priority for Russia, at least not in economic terms. The moral credibility of the West in general can certainly be described as dead and long gone. As for the West military might, it is only a concern to the degree that western politicians might be tempted to believe their own propaganda about their military forces being the best in the history of the galaxy. This is why Russia regularly engages in large surprise exercises: to prove to the West that the Russian military is fully ready for anything the West might try. As for the constant move of more and more US/NATO forces closer to the borders of Russia, they are offensive in political terms, but in military terms, getting closer to Russia only means that Russia will have more options to destroy you. “Forward deployment” is really a thing of the past, at least against Russia.

With time, however, and as the US federal center loses even more of its control of the country, the Kremlin might be well-advised to try to open some venues for “popular diplomacy”, especially with less hostile US states. The weakening of the Executive Branch has already resulted in US governors playing an increasingly important international role and while this is not, strictly speaking, legal (only the federal government has the right to engage in foreign policy), the fact is that this has been going on for years already. Another possible partner inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.

What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait for new forces to appear on the US political scene.

Another possible partner inside the US for Russian firms would be US corporations (especially now that they are hurting badly). Finally, I think that the Kremlin ought to try to open channels of communication with the various small political forces in the US which are clearly not buying into the official propaganda: libertarians, (true) liberals and progressives, paleo-conservatives.

What we are witnessing before our eyes is the collapse of the US federal center. This is a dangerous and highly unstable moment in our history. But from this crisis opportunities will arise. The best thing Russia can do now is to simply remain very careful and vigilant and wait for new forces to appear on the US political scene.