Important message from Tulsi Gabbard

Source

October 10, 2019

I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate and I want to tell you why:

There are so many of you who I’ve met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be.

I share your concerns, and I’m sure that all our supporters throughout the country do as well.

The 2016 Democratic Primary election was rigged by the DNC and their partners in the corporate media against Bernie Sanders.

In this 2020 election, the DNC and corporate media are rigging the election again, but this time against the American people in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

They are attempting to replace the roles of voters in the early states, using polling and other arbitrary methods which are not transparent or democratic, and holding so-called debates which are not debates at all but rather commercialized reality television meant to entertain, not inform or enlighten

In short, the DNC and corporate media are trying to hijack the entire election process.

In order to bring attention to this serious threat to our democracy, and ensure your voice is heard, I am giving serious consideration to boycotting the next debate on October 15th. I will announce my decision within the next few days.

With my deepest, and warmest aloha, thank you all again for your support.

– Tulsi

Advertisements

From Karbala to al-Sham: “I Did not See Except Beauty”

October 07, 2019

by Mansoureh Tadjik for the Saker Blog

We have many well-known and universal concepts that, over times, places, and people, have gone through expansions and contractions in meaning and connotation. One such concept is that of beauty. To return this concept to a level of transparency it requires and afford it a deeper understanding, we must first launder it clear of all that which is not. What is meant here is not that concept of “beauty” which toxifies bodies and the planet^[1] by courtesy of L’Oreals, Proctor & Gambles, Estee Lauders, and Johnson & Johnsons of the world. Nor is it the concept of “beauty” that is savagely carved on vulnerable bodies of misguided souls using sharp scalpels and laser beams^[2], poison injections^[3], and leaky augments^[4] performed by medicine wo/men who took the oath^[5] to uphold the principle of non-maleficence—first, do no harm—expunged away by pharmaceutical and bio-tech giants. It could be safely assumed, as well, that it cannot be that concept of “beauty” which commits celebrities to suicide,^[6,7] drugs superstars to overdose, and liquors personalities up into a semi-permanent state of inebriety at best, and death at worst.^[8,9] None of the latter, sadly enough, remains an exclusive domain of Bollywoods, Hollywoods, Jollywoods, Mollywoods, and Nollywoods of the current times. Rather, they act as vectors of contagions affecting the general public.^{[10, 11]} An insider, motivated by an unfortunate event, once described things quite candidly,

“[Demi] Moore is a product of our youth-obsessed culture which teaches women from when they are girls that we are valued by our beauty. We are taught to stay young and thin at any cost, and there is no other industry that consistently reinforces that message more than Hollywood. It is clear that we are all buying and believing this message.

The fact of the matter is the film industry, in the US and around the world, have pitted women against Mother Nature. It’s an impossible battle to win and we all know it.

Abandonment coupled with age in a town like Hollywood makes us feel sorry for Moore, but deep down we are actually terrified because we know what happened to her can happen to us. We are all equally vulnerable to our insecurities. Every one of us fears rejection and heartbreak.

We are all products of our society and that society is obsessed with staying young. Demi Moore embodies that obsession. Can there be a worse place to grow old than in Hollywood where as a woman you can literally find yourself out of work because you had the audacity to age? The sad fact is as we grow older, women around the world, but especially those working in films, are told that they are worthless. How ridiculous and wrong is that?” ^[12]

Just to put a couple of final nails in the coffin of misnomers, neither is it that concept of “beauty” which is actualized by moguls of soft porn masquerading as fashion, music, and sports industries; nor is it the one that motivates the profiteers to add all sorts of carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic colors and dyes to our food, beverages, toys, wall paints, packaging, and more^[13] to “beautify” things.

A dizzying chain of dismissals all in a one-paragraph breath. What contemporary human enterprise, one might be curious to ask, is left then that was not held in contempt in the prologue? In truth, quite a lot but they are in stealth mode and our task is to identify and safely land just a fraction of one here. Perhaps we could intellectually indulge ourselves for a few minutes and regard the above section as a filtering or damping technique to sift the concept of beauty and isolate all sorts of non-random and purposefully engineered noises that have inundated it. This is just an exercise to expand our horizon far enough and our range of view wide enough for a different vision of beauty to emerge. It is a necessary preliminary step in order to find, to listen, and to look at the actual and truthful signals emitted from this most familiar yet well-concealed concept. It might also prove useful in achieving excellence in our souls as well as in our bodies.

«مَا رَأَیْتُ‏ إِلَّا جَمِیلًا» “I did not see except beauty”^[14] is perhaps one of the most well-known phrases narrated in Shi’a remembrances and sermons about the aftermath of Ashura in Karbala. The phrase is attributed to Hazrat Zainab (s.a.), Imam Hussain’s (a.s.) sister, the very lady whose Al-haram— tomb, sanctuary or holy shrine— in the southern part of Damascus, draws fighters from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, and other places from around the world to come to Syria to defend and protect it. The warriors call themselves “مدافعین الحرم”, the Defenders of Al-haram. When they are killed, they are referred to as “Martyr Defender of Al-haram.” Exploring the context for Hazrat Zainab’s statement may help facilitate seeing a lot more than just another way of looking at beauty.

Petty, inferior, and two-bit victors, when intoxicated by their own peculiar brand of triumph, often act in ways that betray the vulgarity of their minds and infirmity their souls. Some incinerate masses of unarmed and defenseless people in a span of three weeks, land on an aircraft carrier, attired in a green flight suit strategically strapped, to photovoice their “Mission” as “Accomplished.”^[15] Calling it a lampoon would be embarrassing; for a lampoon, that is. Others capture, sodomize, and kill their own ex-partners, murder thousands of yet other defenseless people, loot their resources then channel their muse and deliver their own version of veni, vidi, vici interviews to crow.^[16] Yazid ibn Mu‘awiya, that junior in Umayyad Dynasty, ordered Ubayd Allah Ibn Ziyad, his sycophant in Iraq to finish Imam Hussain (a.s.) and his companions off so that he could have free hand in his corruption, transgression, and oppressive rule. Ibn Ziyad did as ordered on the day of Ashura in Karbala. He then took the survivors of Imam’s household as prisoners, among them was the matriarch, Hazrat Zainab Al-Kubra (s.a.).

Yazid and Ibn Ziyad, too, did not behave any better than their colleagues, in our contemporary era, who just got dishonorable mentions. They decapitated those who had been killed and put the heads on spears. They tied ropes and chains around women, children as young as three years old, the ill, and the injured prisoners. They then paraded them in towns and cities, all before the eyes of a dis-informed and propagandized public who had been duped to believe they were witnessing a defeated group of non-believers gone rogue who had turned their backs to God, the Prophet ﷺ, and Holy Quran. Now that is what one might call an extremely effective, although transient, propaganda campaign. The prisoners were taken along a path from Karbala to Ibn Ziyad’s palace in Kufa, and onward to al-Sham (Damascus, Syria) where Yazid lived and ruled. A trail of more than a 1000-kilometer, mostly on foot, sometimes on bare-backed camels.

The concept of beauty. Surely somewhere along the way, this essay must have forgotten what it was supposed to be about. A bit of leeway, I request. The above demonstrates how small, petty, inferior people without vision act when they achieve an apparent victory. A victory that is already on its way to obsolescence. It does take a true stretch of imagination, especially for an unaware mind, to explore the concept of beauty in any of these. Most imaginations do not have that much spiritual elasticity. So, let us go back to the lady who led us this way in the first place: Zinab Al-Kubra (s.a.). She was taken as a prisoner of a battle in which she had just witnessed her brother and Imam and seventy two plus of her closest loved ones and allies including her other brothers, her sons, nephews, and cousins to get killed, their heads chopped off and raised on spears. She is witnessing more than twenty five heartbroken mourning women, small children who have just become orphans, and an unwell nephew, Imam Sajjad (a.s.), who must now carry on the leadership of Shi’a (whoever is left of it) all being dragged as prisoners from place to place and paraded in front of a propagandized public who are committing all sorts of dishonorable, disgraceful, and despicable acts against them. And, she “did not see except beauty”? Seriously?! On what grounds? Through what sort of a cognitive filtering were these events processed? What basic principles for beauty is she using? I, for one, am dying to know and will follow the clues to wherever they lead me.

The statement «مَا رَأَیْتُ‏ إِلَّا جَمِیلًا» “I did not see except beauty” was extracted from the following excerpt of an extended dialogue that took place inside Ibn Ziad’s palace in Kufa, two nights after the battle of Karbala. It was an exchange between Ibn Ziyad and Hazrat Zainab (s.a):^[14]

Ibn Ziyad, “Praise God Who exposed you by killing and disgracing you that shows what you people were saying was nothing by falsehood.” [Tries to imply that if God were on your side, He would have protected you from getting killed and captured.]

Hazrat Zainab Al-Kubra (s.a.), “Praise God Who graced us with dignity through Muhammad ﷺ and purified us from all impurities and corruptions. Only the immoral are disgraced and only the corrupt falsify. And we are neither.”

Ibn Ziyad, “How did you see what God did to your household?”

Hazrat Zainab Al-Kubra (s.a.), «مَا رَأَیْتُ‏ إِلَّا جَمِیلًا» “I did not see except beauty. They were people ‘upon whom it was decreed to be killed and go to their places of death’^[17] therefore ‘they surely went’^[18]. Very soon, God will bring you and them face to face [in the Day of Judgment]; and they will censure you and litigate against you [before God] and you will see who prevails. May your mother mourn you, Son of Majaneh.”

Hazrat Zainab (s.a.) is given the title of the Messenger of Karbala. She delivered many powerful, frank, and compelling speeches and sermons to make sure the message of Karbala remains alive and does not get distorted. Numerous books, speeches, and articles are written and/or delivered that try to explain just this one phrase «مَا رَأَیْتُ‏ إِلَّا جَمِیلًا» “I did not see except beauty” and what she might have meant. Many of them are quite insightful and interesting but I would like to take the simple way and see what Hazrat Zainab (s.a.) may have meant in her own words. She immediately states, “They were people “upon whom it was decreed to be killed and go to their places of death’^[17] therefore ‘they surely went’^[18]. Very soon, God will bring you and them face to face [in the Day of Judgment]; and they will censure you and litigate against you [before God] and you will see who prevails.”

She actually references and recites parts of a verse from Quran (Chapter 3, Verse 154) to describe, or perhaps qualify what she had seen/witnessed in the killing field of Karbala. The verse, in its entirety, reads:

“Then after that affliction, He sent down upon a group among you a peaceful sleep to soothe you. Others, however, who were preoccupied more by concerns about their own lives, they were harboring thoughts about God that were unjust/untrue, similar to those of the time of Jahiliyyah, the age of ignorance. They would say, ‘Are we not supposed to control everything?’ Say, ‘Everything is controlled by God.’ Thus they harbored wrong thoughts and concealed them from you. They said, ‘If it were really up to us, none of us would have been killed here.’ Say, ‘Had you stayed in your homes, those decreed to get killed would have certainly gone to their places of death.’ God thus tests the intentions in your heart and thoroughly purifies your inner most convictions. And God fully knows innermost thoughts.”

For the sake of clarification, we will open up the verse just a bit. This verse addresses the circumstances after the battle of Uhud, in which Muslims were on their way to victory but then lost the battle. Earlier, when the unbelievers of Mecca had been defeated in the battle of Badr, they vowed to take revenge and began to prepare themselves for a major attack against Muslims in Medina. In Medina, a division was created among Muslims under the leadership of someone by the name of Abdullah Ibn Ubay, who was later revealed to be a hypocrite, in terms of the strategy for defense and the location of the battle. He taunted the idea that Muslims should bring the battle inside Medina and fight within the city’s perimeter. The majority were against this idea and fully believed the best location for the battle would be outside of the City limit at the foothills of Uhud Mountain. The decision, by a majority vote, was made for the latter strategy. Of the thousand fighters on their way to Uhuh, Abdullah Ibn Ubay was able to deceive about three hundred fighters and have them turn their back to their brothers and return to Medina.

In Uhud, prior to the start of the battle, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ assigned a group of fifty fighters, under the command of Abdullah Ibn Jubair to guard the Uhud Pass to prevent any infiltration of the enemy forces through the Pass. The group was under a strict order not to leave that position until and unless they have received words directly from the Prophet ﷺ himself to return. Toward the end of the battle, when the group saw that Muslims were winning, majority of those fifty people guarding the pass left their position and rushed to collect the spoils. Only twelve remained obedient to the order of the Prophet ﷺ but a false news was circulated that the Prophet ﷺ had been killed. This led to more fighters leaving their position and a weak defense of the pass ensued resulting in an infiltration path into the Muslims fortifications. A surprise attack by the enemies through the Uhud pass led to Muslims’ defeat in that battle. That battle was an important and critical lesson for Muslims, some of who had acted based on greed, some based on ignorance, and some based on hypocrisy.^{[19, 20, 21, 22]} So it seems the real and true battle was a battle of belief authentication. This time, it had taken the shape of the battle of Uhud. Another time, another place, it would take another shape. The essence remains the same though.

Perhaps we might be getting a bit closer. Zainab (s.a.) may have seen this: The Most Beautiful Beloved of Hussain (a.s.) and the Creator of all beauties that ever were, are, and will ever be, decreed that Hussain (a.s.) and his loyal companions must go to the battle of Karbala. The outcome of the battle was up to God and only God. The outcome of their test, was up to them and only them. They heard their decree; they obeyed without waiver, they passed their test. Their blood sealed the deal. Perhaps this is an operationalization of the concept of beauty in its most exalted and divine form. Something that perhaps only Zainab (s.a.) could see and narrate.

Now, travelling through time and space and returning to Iran. For certain, we have had a long and perilous road before us. On one hand, ridiculously absurd amount of money and resources are being spent to bombard us by all sorts of books, films, games, shows, media messages, disinformation, advertisements, and more that have one single goal: to convince our young, old, man, and woman, to turn their back to concepts of beauty that bring with them salvation, serenity, and positive authentication by God. Instead, they should embrace concepts of beauty that bring with them sadness, insecurity, disease, pain, immorality, injury, toxicity, and misery. On September 12, 2002, B. Netanyahu addressed the United States’ House Representatives. Here is a fragment^[23] of his speech,

“Yes. Now the question you have is this: This is now a question of not of values. Obviously, we would like to see a regime change, at least I would like to, in Iran, just as I would like to see in Iraq. The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed? It is not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out, but when should it be taken out. It is not a question of whether you would like to see a regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it.

Iran has something that Iraq does not have. Iran has, for example, 250,000 satellite dishes. It has Internet use. I once said to the heads of the CIA when I was Prime Minister that if you want to advance regime change in Iran, you do not have to go through the CIA cloak-and-dagger stuff. What you want to do is take very large, very strong transponders and just beam Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 into Teheran and Iran.

That is subversive stuff. The young kids watch it, the young people. They want to have the same nice clothes and houses and swimming pools and so on. That is something that is available, and internal forces of dissention that are available in Iran–which is paradoxically probably the most open society in that part of the world. It is a lot more open than Iraq, which is probably the most closed society, and therefore you have no ability to foment this kind of dynamic inside Iraq.

So the question now is choose. You can beam Melrose Place, but it may take a long time. On the other hand, if you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people and many others will say the time of such regimes of such despots is gone. There is a new age.”

That speech was delivered seventeen years ago. The resources could have been used more wisely. But wisdom, too, is one of those intangible beauties. For decades, sponsoring of a chain of inauthentic publications that lack quality substance, grace, intellectual honesty ^{[24, 25, 26]} has been the hallmark of the western push to impose on us their conceptual understanding of beauty. On the other hand, we are not empty-handed defenseless bunch. We have our Zainab (s.a.), Zahra (s.a.), Khadijeh (s.a.), Ma’asoumeh (s.a.), and more. Once again, let’s see whose version of beauty outlasts all others. We hear our decree; we obey without waiver. Insha’allah, God will help us pass the authentication process. السلام علیکم.

Mansoureh Tajik lives in Alborz Province in Iran. She has a background in teaching and research in the areas of community and environmental health, environmental justice, and media literacy. She collaborates with various local community members, groups, and organizations to provide support in addressing health and environmental problems, sustainable agriculture, and in design, implementation, and evaluation of relevant improvement projects.

References

[1] Lisa Gue (2010). “What’s inside that counts: A Survey of Toxic Ingredients in our Cosmetics”; Research sponsored by David Suzuki Foundation in Canada. ISBN 978-1-897375-33-4. The report can be downloaded free of charge at www.davidsuzuki.org/publications

[2] American Society of Plastic Surgeons (2018). “2018 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report.” ASPS National Clearinghouse of Plastic Surgery Procedural Statistics. Available online at: https://www.plasticsurgery.org/documents/News/Statistics/2018/plastic-surgery-statistics-full-report-2018.pdf

[3] S. Samizadeh and K. De Boulle (2018). “Botulinum neurotoxin formulations: overcoming the confusion.” Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, Vol. 2018:11, Pgs. 273-287,

DOI https://doi.org/10.2147/CCID.S156851

[4] Woo Yeol Baek, Dae Hyun Lew, and Dong Won Lee (2014). “A Retrospective Analysis of Ruptured Breast Implants.” Archives of Plastic Surgery, 41(6): 734–739. DOI:10.5999/aps.2014.41.6.734

[5] Erich H. Loewy (2007). “Oaths for Physicians – Necessary Protection or Elaborate Hoax?” Medscape General Medicine, 9(1): 7; PMCID: PMC1925028

[6] Mary V. Seeman (2019). “Celebrity Suicide.” Psychiatric Times. Available online at: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/portraits/celebrity-suicide

[7] Steven Stack (1987). “Celebrities and Suicide: A Taxonomy and Analysis, 1948-1983.” American Sociological Review; DOI: 10.2307/2095359

[8] Johannes M. Just et al (2016). “Drug-related celebrity deaths: A cross-sectional study.” Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy; 11: 40. doi: 10.1186/s13011-016-0084-z

[9] S. Robert Lathan (2009). “Celebrities and Substance Abuse.” Proceedings of Baylor University Medical Center, 22(4): 339–341. PMCID: PMC2760168

[10] Myung, Woojae, Hong-Hee Won, Maurizio Fava, David Mischoulon, Albert Yeung, Dongsoo Lee, Doh Kwan Kim, and Hong Jin Jeon (2015). “Celebrity Suicides and Their Differential Influence on Suicides in the General Population: A National Population-Based Study in Korea.” Psychiatry Investigation 12 (2): 204-211.doi:10.4306/pi.2015.12.2.204. http://dx.doi.org/10.4306/pi.2015.12.2.204.

[11] King‐wa Fu and Paul S F Yip (2007). “Long‐term impact of celebrity suicide on suicidal ideation: results from a population‐based study.” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health; 61(6): 540–546. doi: 10.1136/jech.2005.045005

[12] Anushay Hossain (2012). “No Country for Old Women: Demi Moore And Our Fear of Aging,” Women @ Forbes, World with a View Contributor Group. Available Online at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldviews/2012/02/08/no-country-for-old-women-demi-moore-our-fear-of-ageing/#287f41064516

[13] House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (2019). “Toxic Chemicals in Everyday Life,” HC 1805, Published on 16 July 2019 by authority of the House of Commons. Available online at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvaud/1805/1805.pdf

[14] Ibn Nama Helli (1950). “Mathir Al-Ahzan,” Page 90, Trans. from Original in Arabic. Digital Copy Published by Center for Computerized Research in Islamic Studies in Isfahan. Available Online at: http://www.ghbook.ir/index.php?option=com_dbook&task=viewbook&book_id=2600&Itemid=167&lang=fa

[15] CNN (2003). “Commander in Chief lands on USS Lincoln,” CNN International, Inside Politics. Available Online at: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/01/bush.carrier.landing/

[16] Glynnis MacNicol (2011). “Hillary Clinton On Qaddafi: We Came, We Saw, He Died.” Business Insider, Oct 21, 2011. Available Online at: https://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-qaddafi-we-came-we-saw-he-died-2011-10

[17] Holy Quran, Chapter 3, Verse 154 Words 57-60.

[18] Holy Quran, Chapter 3, Verse 154, Words 56.

[19] Abulfazl Bahrampour. Nasim Hayat: Al-tafsir Quran Karim, 14^th Edition, Vol. 4, Page 49-51. Hijrat Publishing Institute, 1390.

[20] Muhammad Javad Muqniwh, Al-tafsir Al-Kashif, Vol. 2, Page 148. Dar-al-Kitab Al-Islami Publishing, 1424.

[21] Muhammad Hussain Tabatabai, Tafsir Al-mizan, Vol. 4, page 11. Available online at: http://elmvadin1395.ir/fa/page.php?rid=45

[22] A.A.F. Hasan Tabarsi, Majma’ol Bayan fi Tafsir al-Quran, Vol. 2, Page 497. Available online at: http://lib.eshia.ir/12023/1/0.

[23] House Hearing, 107 Congress (2002). “Conflict with Iraq: An Israeli Perspective.” Hearing before the Committee on Government Reform, House of Representatives One Hundred and Seventh Congress, Second Session, September 12, 2002, Serial No. 107-139.

[24] A. Nafisi (2003). “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.” Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, 2003.

[25] A. Moaveni (2006). “Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran.” Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a member of Perseus Book Group, 2006.

[26] P. Mahdavi (2009). “Passionate Uprising: Iran’s Sexual Revolution.” Stanford University Press. 2009.

 

Here is the dirt Trump wanted from Zelensky about the Bidens and why Zelensky doesn’t want to give it to him — hidden by rampant falsehoods in the press

September 28, 2019

by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog

In order to understand why Ukraine’s President Voldomyr Zelensky doesn’t want the dirt about Joe Biden to become public, one needs to know that Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma Holdings was, at least partly, Zelensky’s boss and benefactor until Zelensky became Ukraine’s President, and that revealing this would open up a can of worms which could place that former boss and benefactor of both men into prison at lots of places.

First, the falsehoods in the press have to be documented here, since this article will go up against virtually all U.S.-and-allied reporting on these events. And, in order to do such a thing, the bona fides of my main sources need to be presented:

Naked Capitalism is, as the article about it at Wikipedia, says, the blog of Susan Webber, pen-named “Yves Smith,” who “graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. She had 20 years of experience in the financial services industry with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Co., and Sumitomo Bank.[3] She has written articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Roosevelt Institute.[4][5]” “The site has had over 60 million visitors since 2007, and was cited as among CNBC’s 2012 top 25 ‘Best Alternative Financial Blogs’, calling Smith ‘a harsh critic of Wall Street who believes that fraud was at the center of the financial crisis’.[2]” “The New York Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson cited Naked Capitalism as one of the ‘must-read financial blogs’ she reads regularly.[9]”

Her blog is widely respected amongst both scholars and experts in the field of finance, and is among the top go-to sites for trustworthy investigative news reporting in their highly complex field. So as to be able to achieve this high degree of respect, day in and day out, for decades, she carefully selects and relies upon the expertise of a small team of investigators, one of whom is Richard Smith, who has done around 200 articles for her site. One of these was dated 21 May 2014 and headlined “R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings”, and it reported that the U.S. Vice President’s son had become “a new member of the board” and that this “Ukrainian energy company has retained the counsel of the vice president’s son and the Secretary of State’s close family friend and top campaign bundler.” Since these men were being paid by the corporation’s owner, Mr. Smith researched extensively to find out who that was, or they were. He reported “what one careful Ukrainian journalist dug up in 2012”:

“Burisma changed owners last year [in 2011]: instead of Zlochevsky and Lisin, the company was taken over by a Cypriot off-shore enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd. Pari and Esko-Pivnich” and a “third company was already waiting for them in the same building – the above-mentioned Ukrnaftoburinnya,” and “The Privat Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat Group,” which “is a conglomerate controlled by the ferocious Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky,” who “is one of the oligarchs charged with holding down the Eastern provinces of Ukraine,” and who “is far too ebulliently Jewish to look like a neo-Nazi. A US connection with Kolomoisky might play well in circles keen to counter Russian complaints that the interim Kiev regime is dominated by ‘fascists’.” Those quotations are from Mr. Smith’s article, but the following is not. Examining the documents myself, I note especially that at their end is the conclusion: “Thus, Ihor Kolomoisky managed to seize the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.” This was the conclusion of the “careful Ukrainian journalist,” which was actually not one but a team of three, who were employed at a Ukrainian non-profit, the Anticorruption Action Centre, which specialized in tracking down the actual persons who controlled corporations and which had a particular focus on finding “Offshore fronts for Yanukovych.” Yanukovych was the democratically elected Ukrainian President, who took office on 25 February 2010. So: this non-profit was an anti-Yanukovych organization, writing more than two years into his Presidency, on 28 August 2012.

A certain historical background is essential here; and this, too, goes up against American ‘news’-reporting and will therefore be linked to articles that, in turn, link to ultimate sources that are of unquestioned reliability on each of the particulars that are in question: There was a coup in Ukraine in February 2014, which is portrayed in the West as being a democratic revolution (but was actually a coup hidden behind anticorruption demonstrations, and that was entirely illegal), and it replaced the democratically elected President by a ruler who was selected by Victoria Nuland, whose boss was Secretary of State John Kerry, whose boss was Barack Obama. Nuland had been originally a protégé of Vice President Dick Cheney, and then of Kerry’s immediate predecessor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama assigned Nuland to carry out his plan for Ukraine, which plan was to turn its government away from being friendly toward its next-door neighbor Russia to becoming instead a satellite of the United States against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor. Consequently, fascists, and even outright racist-fascists (nazis), people who came from the groups that had supported Hitler against Stalin during World War II, were installed into this new government, such as the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy. (The CIA instructed that Party, which was Ukraine’s main nazi party, to change its name to “Freedom Party” — Svoboda — so as to become acceptable to Americans; and Paribuy and his colleagues did it, in order to help the U.S. Government to fool the American people about what the U.S. was doing in Ukraine.)

At least until Zelensky was elected, Ukraine’s Government remained fascist. And so is Kolomoysky himself, as I had reported about him on 18 May 2014. As I reported there,

On 12 May 2014, Burisma Holdings announced, “Hunter Biden Joins the Team of Burisma Holdings,” and reported that, “Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director. R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations.”

Promptly, Burisma’s website started presenting Burisma as if if were a Ukrainian-American if not outright American corporation. Devon Archer, shown there, was a business-partner of Hunter Biden. As the Washington Examiner  reported, on 27 August 2019:

At the time, Hunter Biden, now 49, and Christopher Heinz, the stepson of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, co-owned Rosemont Seneca Partners, a $2.4 billion private equity firm. Heinz’s college roommate, Devon Archer, was managing partner in the firm. In the spring of 2014, Biden and Archer joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was at the center of a U.K. money laundering probe. Over the next year, Burisma reportedly paid Biden and Archer’s companies over $3 million.

Subsequently, both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer were removed from Burisma’s board and replaced by a four-person board, which mysteriously had included ever since May 2013 (which still was after Zlochevsky no longer controlled the company) Alan Apter, of Sullivan & Cromwell, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and Renaissance Capital. Apter now became the “Chairman of the Board of Directors”. Here are the other three Directors: Aleksander Kwaśniewski was the President of the Republic of Poland from 1995 to 2005 when it was being taken over by America, and when Kwaśniewski was also a member of the Atlantic Council (NATO’s PR arm), and of the Bilderberg Group. Joseph Cofer Black was the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (1999-2002) and Ambassador at Large for counter-terrorism (2002-2004), while President George W. Bush was lying America into invading Iraq, and Black subsequently became the Vice Chairman at Blackwater Worldwide (now Academi), which the Bush Government hired to train and arm mercenaries to help conquer Iraq. (Blackwater/Academi is owned by Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune, who is the Trump Secretary of Education, and Prince also is a personal friend of Trump. Obama’s Government also hired Blackwater/Academi to kill independence fighters in the Dnieper Donets Basin, where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas.) And the fourth Director is Karina Zlochevska, whom the site identifies hardly at all, but is actually the daughter of Mykola Zlochevsky. In other words: Zlochevsky probably does remain as a minority owner of the company, and she represents his interests there.

Virtually all of the Western press simply alleges that Mykola Zlochevsky owns Burisma Holdings and brought Biden on board and was his boss; however, I have never seen from any of those ‘news’-reports any evidence or documentation that it’s true — nothing like the sources that Richard Smith relied upon and linked to documenting that this was Kolomoysky’s company. Nothing, at all.

This is important — is it Zlochevsky or Kolomoysky? — because Zlochevsky was associated with the prior Government of Ukraine and its President Viktor Yanukovych, whom the U.S. Government had overthrown in an operation that started in 2011 and that ended very successfully in February 2014 with the American Government’s Victoria Nuland on 27 January 2014 telling the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine to get “Yats” Yatsenyuk appointed to run the country as soon as Yanukovych becomes successfully overthrown — which happened less than a month later, during February 20-22 — and Yatsenyuk then received the appointment on February 26th to run the country, just as Obama’s agent Nuland had instructed. Zlochevsky fled the country, because he had been politically allied with Yanukovych, who also fled the country. Obama’s Government constantly tried to get Zlochevsky prosecuted for alleged corruption, but Zlochevsky had sold the company to Kolomoysky even before Obama took over Ukraine. It’s not at all clear that Hunter Biden had ever so much as just met Zlochevsky.

Joseph Biden, as is well reported in the press, instructed the new Ukrainian Government to fire and replace the General Prosecutor of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who had failed to prosecute Zlochevsky, and this action by Joe is reported as indicating that the senior Biden granted his son’s employer no favor but instead the opposite — that Joe insisted upon Hunter’s boss’s prosecution.

For example, James Risen, of The Intercept, which is owned by one of the financial backers of the overthrow of Yanukovych, Pierre Omidyar (see this and this and this and this and this and this), headlined on September 25th, “I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.”, and Risen reported that:

The then-vice president issued his demands for greater anti-corruption measures by the Ukrainian government despite the possibility that those demands would actually increase – not lessen — the chances that Hunter Biden and Burisma would face legal trouble in Ukraine.

Risen reported there that V.P. Biden’s “anti-corruption message might be undermined by the association of his son Hunter with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.”

However, none of that press says Kolomoysky owned the company and was its boss. The presumption there is always that Zlochevsky needed to be prosecuted — not that Kolomoysky did. Kolomoysky is simply being written out of the picture altogether — whited-out from it

Also as is typical, the New York Times reported, on 1 May 2019, that Mykola Zlochevsky is the “owner of Burisma Holdings” and that “Mr. Lutsenko initially continued investigating Mr. Zlochevsky and Burisma, but cleared him of all charges within 10 months of taking office. The prosecutor general reversed himself and reopened an investigation into Burisma this year. Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration.” For some mysterious reason, that article not only says that the replacement Prosecutor tried and failed and now tried again to prosecute Zlochevsky but that “Some see his decision as an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration,” though, actually, it was the Obama Administration that had been pressing Ukraine’s Government to prosecute Zlochevsky, who wasn’t Hunter Biden’s boss and didn’t control Burisma and was associated not with the 2014 Obama-installed Government of Ukraine but instead with the Government that had preceded it and was the last of all Ukraine’s democratic Governments, having been democratically elected by all of Ukraine including the two regions (Crimea and Donbass) that broke away from Ukraine when Obama in February 2014 overthrew the Government that those two now-breakaway regions had voted for, by over 75% in that 2010 election.

And here is from Wikipedia’s article on “Viktor Shokin”:

The Biden connection[edit]

Since 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general had been investigating oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the oil and natural gas company Burisma Holdings, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption.[15] In 2014, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden‘s son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings.[16] In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as “an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts”.[17] Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.[15]

In March 2016, Joe Biden threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that if he did not fire Shokin, that the US would hold back its $1 billion in loan guarantees. “I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.” Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”[18] Shokin was dismissed by Parliament later that month.

Shokin claimed in May 2019 that he had been investigating Burisma Holdings.[19][20][21][22] However, Vitaliy Kasko, who had been Shokin’s deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, provided documents to Bloomberg News indicating that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.[23] Hunter Biden’s ties to Burisma Holdings was criticized as a conflict of interest in a New York Times editorial, though Amos Hochstein has claimed to have never seen coordination between Joe Biden and his son on the matter.[24][25]

And here is from Wikipedia’s Article on “Burisma Holdings”:

History[edit]

Burisma Group was founded in 2002 by Ukrainian businessman Mykola Zlochevsky and Nikolay Lysin [uk]. Now it is owned by Mykola Zlochevskyi [uk], who was minister of natural resources under Viktor Yanukovych.[2] Zlochevsky returned to Ukraine in February 2018 after the corruption investigations into his Burisma Holdings had been completed in December 2017 with no charges filed against him.[3]

So, the myth that Zlochevsky was Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at Burisma isn’t only in the ‘news’-media that are controlled by U.S. Deep State that controls the CIA, which controls America’s major ‘news’-media, but it is also in the Web’s main encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which is not only edited by the CIA, but also, to some extent, written by the CIA.

Furthermore, the CIA was the ‘whistleblower’ that made the impeachment-charge to the Democratic Party head of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Adam Schiff, who is the lead proponent of impeaching Donald Trump so that Trump can then become tried in the U.S. Senate, which then would possess the power to replace Trump and make President the current Vice President, Mike Pence, which Democrats, for some unexplained reason, seem to hope will happen. As Reuters reported on September 26th, “The whistleblower is a CIA officer and was assigned at one point to work at the White House, two sources familiar with the probe into his complaint said. The New York Times first identified the whistleblower as a CIA officer, which Reuters confirmed.” That report also asserted:

The call occurred after Trump had ordered a freeze of nearly $400 million in American aid to Ukraine, which was only later released. Before the call, Ukraine’s government was told that interaction between Zelenskiy and Trump depended on whether the Ukrainian leader would “play ball,” the whistleblower said.

The report said Trump acted to advance his personal political interests, risking national security.

“I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute ‘a serious or flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or executive order,’” the whistleblower complaint, dated Aug. 12, said.

The same CIA whose lies had ‘justified’ America’s invading Iraq in 2003, and invading Libya in 2011, and invading Syria starting in 2012 (and extending there up till at least 2018), is now ‘justifying’ congressional Democrats to replace Trump by Pence if they possibly can.

And Kolomoysky might be one of the world’s biggest thieves. On 19 April 2019, Graham Stack reported for OCCRP, a U.S.-and-allied-funded nonprofit anti-corruption investigatory organization that

“‘Large-scale coordinated fraudulent actions of the bank [PrivatBank] shareholders and management caused a loss to the state of at least $5.5 billion,’ [Valeria] Hontareva [former chair of Ukranie’s central bank] said in March 2018. ‘This is 33 percent of the population’s deposits … [and] 40 percent of our country’s monetary base.’ … By the time regulators took over PrivatBank, the $5.5 billion had already been transferred to banks in Austria, Luxembourg, and Latvia. From there, the trail goes cold. … This account is based on a forensic audit by Kroll, the U.S.-based corporate investigation and risk consulting firm. The report … is based on PrivatBank’s own records and was obtained exclusively by OCCRP. … Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank in December 2016, saddling taxpayers with a $5.9 billion bailout.”

There’s nothing that Zlochevsky was even accused of which exceeded tens of millions  of dollars in losses. In Ukraine, that’s tiny.

Furthermore, the estimable and reliably accurate Moscow investigative journalist John Helmer reported on 19 February 2015 that “In March 2014, days after the ouster of Yanukovich in Kiev and the installation of a new regime, the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) started investigating Zlochevsky. According to the evidence it presented to the Central Criminal Court between March and December of 2014, and according to Justice Blake, who assessed the evidence, there is no mention of Lisin, Deripon, Burrard or Kolomoisky.” Obama’s people (there via the U.S. regime’s lap-dog UK) were targeting Zlochevsky, certainly not Kolomoysky, who was instead on their team.

Zelensky, prior to becoming Ukraine’s President, had been the star of a popular comedy series on Ukrainian television that was telecast by Ihor Kolomoysky’s 1+1 Media group. On 19 May 2014, Forbes published a shockingly honest article, by Vladimir Golstein, “Why Everything You’ve Read About Ukraine Is Wrong”, which mentioned, about Kolomoysky, that,

His business holdings include the largest Ukrainian media group, “1+1 Media,” the news agency “Unian,” as well as various internet sites, which enable him to whip public opinion into an anti-Putin frenzy. Andrew Higgins of The New York Times published a story with the headline, “Among Ukraine’s Jews, the Bigger Worry is Putin, Not Pogroms,” which praises Kolomoisky for adorning Dnepropetrovsk with “the world’s biggest Jewish community center” along with “a high tech Holocaust museum.” Higgins notes, however, that the museum “skirts the delicate issue of how some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with Nazis.

Kolomoysky himself had become installed by the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian agents as the Governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine where his approximately $5 billion financial empire was based, and which in its north extends into the Dnieper Donets Basin where Burisma owns the drilling rights for gas. As this last link indicates, that Basin “is the major oil and gas producing region of Ukraine accounting for approximately 90 per cent of Ukrainian production and according to EIA  may have 42 tcf of shale gas resources technically recoverable from 197 tcf of risked shale gas in place.” That article, from the investment-oriented website Zero Hedge, sums up:

In a nutshell, Ukraine (or rather its puppetmasters) has decided to let no crisis (staged or otherwise) or rather civil war, go to waste, and while the fighting rages all around, Ukrainian troopers are helping to install shale gas production equipment near the east Ukrainian town of Slavyansk, which was bombed and shelled [by the Obama-installed Government] for the three preceding months, according to local residents cited by Itar Tass. The reason for the scramble? Under peacetime, the process was expected to take many years, during which Europe would be under the energy dictatorship of Putin. But throw in some civil war and few will notice let alone care that a process which was expected to take nearly a decade if not longer while dealing with broad popular objections to fracking, may instead be completed in months!

Ukraine’s bombing of that region (for examples, this and this and this) was in order to clear the land for a massive fracking operation. However, it turned out that not only Kolomoysky’s operation with Shell in the Dnieper Donets Basin in Ukraine’s far east, but also the Ukrainian Government’s own gas-exploration operation with Chevron in western Ukraine’s Olesska field, were uneconomic; or, as I headlined about them on 16 December 2014, “Ukraine’s Two Big Gas Deals Are Now Both Dry”. It seems that if Hunter Biden is to become a billionaire, it won’t come from Ukrainian gas. (Nor, of course will it have come from Zlochevsky, which the news-media would have it to be.)

As was reported on 20 May 2014 by Israel Shamir at the website of Paul Craig Roberts, under the headline “The Ukraine in Turmoil” (and his article there was the first comprehensive and accurate summary of what had recently happened to Ukraine):

These people had brought Ukraine to its present abject state. In 1991, the Ukraine was richer than Russia, today it is three times poorer because of these people’s mismanagement and theft. Now they plan an old trick: to take loans in Ukraine’s name, pocket the cash and leave the country indebted. They sell state assets to Western companies and ask for NATO to come in and protect the investment.

They play a hard game, brass knuckles and all. The Black Guard, a new SS-like armed force of the neo-nazi Right Sector, prowls the land. They arrest or kill dissidents, activists, journalists. Hundreds of American soldiers, belonging to the “private” company Academi (formerly Blackwater) are spread out in Novorossia [Donbass, the far-eastern region that became independent after Obama’s coup], the pro-Russian provinces in the East and South-East. IMF–dictated reforms slashed pensions by half and doubled the housing rents. In the market, US Army rations took the place of local food.

The new Kiev regime had dropped the last pretence of democracy by expelling the Communists from the parliament. This should endear them to the US even more. Expel Communists, apply for NATO, condemn Russia, arrange a gay parade and you may do anything at all, even fry dozens of citizens alive. And so they did.

The harshest repressions were unleashed on industrial Novorossia, as its working class loathes the whole lot of oligarchs and ultra-nationalists. After the blazing inferno of Odessa and a wanton shooting on the streets of Melitopol the two rebellious provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk took up arms and declared their independence from the Kiev regime.

And then, to top it off, there is the brilliant pewreport blogger, who, on 27 July 2014, headlined “USAID to Help Young Biden: The Burisma File”, and that anonymous person succinctly laid out the use of the U.S. Government to enable the families of some of its top officials to join America’s aristocracy, the billionaire class. It’s something that Trump himself is intimately involved with and exploits, but if America’s national and international police-agencies such as the FBI and CIA are trying (first with Russiagate, and now with Ukrainegate) to replace him by Pence in order to enable another friend of Obama to become installed (like Hillary was supposed to have been) as President and Commander-in-Chief, then this struggle between the agents of America’s Democratic Party billionaires versus those of its Republican Party billionaires could end up having consequences that no one is predicting.

It’s also important to point out here that Zelensky’s predecessor, Poroshenko, was not Obama’s first choice to win the 25 May 2014 Ukrainian election that followed the February 2014 coup and installation of Yatsenyuk to run the country on an interim basis. Yatsenyuk was supposed to run it until that election (after which Yatsenyuk still continued long in office, and Obama pushed as hard as possible for President Poroshenko to continue Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s policies). Obama’s first choice — and the planned winner — in the 25 May 2014 election, was an intense hater of Russia, Yulia Tymoshenko. Yatsenyuk had actually been her agent. Kolomoysky was perhaps her main financial backer. But she lost the election to Obama’s second choice, Poroshenko. Kolomoysky was enough of a supporter of Tymoshenko so that even after he returned to Ukraine on 16 May 2019 just prior to the latest Presidential election, he backed her even above Zelensky. But above all, he opposed Poroshenko, because Poroshenko had been forced by the main lenders to his Government to fire Kolomoysky as governor of Dnipropetrovsk and to nationalize his bankrupt PrivatBank due to Kolomoysky’s having been looting from Ukraine’s Government too much money via his bank and via his minority ownership of the Government’s gas company. Obama had wanted that money to go toward the war against Donbass, not into Kolomoysky’s pockets. (However, America’s Democratic-Party propaganda ‘non-profit’ Public Radio International gave a positive spin to Obama-team-member Kolomoysky even at the time of his firing by Poroshenko on 28 March 2015, saying of him, “He offered $10,000 bounties for captured pro-Russian insurgents. ‘People understand that this person came here to ensure stability,’ said Stanislav Zholudev, a local political analyst.” The euphemism “captured pro-Russian insurgents” was actually referring to their corpses — Kolomoysky was paying only for their corpses. Maybe for Obama-ites that’s “stability.” Kolomoysky was already paying the nazi Azov Battalion more than that per pro-Russian corpse, and now the Trump Administration wants Kolomoysky to be prosecuted for financial crimes instead of Zlochevsky to be prosecuted, and so Zelensky is being pushed one way by Democrats, and the opposite way by Republicans.) Kolomoysky has many enemies. The main holders of Ukraine’s debt are unknown, but besides Russia which had lent to the pre-coup Government (and were thus trying to get their senior money that’s owing from Ukraine to be paid to Russia before the newer creditors get theirs), they were said to be the IMF, America’s Franklin Templeton Fund, and Blackstone Group, the World Bank, and a group of mainly American billionaires “and private Eurobond holders” who are represented by the law firm of Weil Gotshal & Manges. The U.S. Government and EU countries were also said to be indirectly such holders via their ownership shares in the IMF and World Bank, but also perhaps more directly. (If Trump were a decent President, he’d be publicly pressing for the exact numbers on all of this.) Kolomoysky’s siphonings from Ukraine’s Government were at the expense of all of them. The pressures upon Poroshenko to halt it were mounting. And, so, Kolomoysky was fired; and, now, to the extent that Zelensky has to satisfy Kolomoysky, Zelensky (who publicly said of Kolomoysky “He is my business partner”) needs to resist some of the demands of the U.S. regime and of many other billionaires. Without their continued support, Ukraine’s Government will collapse in the short term instead of only (which is inevitable) in the long term. It’s no longer just a question of the Ukrainian regime’s war against Donbass. The change that Obama wrought is permanent, and Trump dithers back and forth about how to deal with it. He apparently has no strategy on that.

Zelensky might fear that if he complies with Trump’s request, then his own major benefactor, Kolomoysky, could end up in prison somewhere; and Trump might fear that if he presses Zelensky on that (as he did not do but Democrats say he did), then the entire Deep State — not only Democratic Party billionaires, but also now Republican ones — will become Trump’s enemies, and his 2020 re-election chances will therefore go to zero. Consequently: Trump will probably abandon the matter, and the till-now-unsupported and maybe unsupportable mere assumption, that Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian benefactor was Zlochevsky instead of Kolomoysky, will continue to be asserted virtually everywhere throughout the U.S. empire, for as long a time as the matter continues to remain in the ‘news’. Of course, if that turns out to be the case, then Joe Biden will continue to be portrayed in this matter as having been a crusader against corruption in Ukraine, instead of as having been the aspiring founder of yet another billionaire American dynasty.

Basically, the new Russiagate charges to replace Trump by Pence, Ukrainegate (as those charges were presented by the CIA ‘whistleblower’ on August 12th and published on September 26th), represent all of the Democratic Party’s billionaires, and many of the Republican Party’s ones, as well. It’s the pinnacle of the Obama-versus-Trump feud, because it represents the Democratic Party’s position on what was Obama’s top international achievement — his conquest (via a coup) against Ukraine. Trump refuses to condemn Obama’s coup against Ukraine, but if he cared about the truth, he would, and the worst that could happen to him then would be that, for once in his life, he’d be fighting for truth, and not just for himself. Apparently, that’s too big a leap for him to take.

What’s especially pathetic in all of this is that whenever the U.S. Government overthrows and destroys a country, it’s trumpeted as reflecting America’s standing-up for rule-of-law and opposition to corruption, and for support of democracy and protection of human rights; but whenever Russia or a nation that’s friendly toward Russia resists control by the U.S. and its allies, it’s portrayed as being a dictatorship and an opponent of democracy and of human rights. So, go figure.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Back to French tear gas in the morning: smells like austérité

September 22, 2019

by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog

September 21 (hello autumn) was the worst day of violence in Paris since May 1st. That day is best remembered for when “centrist” politicians and citizens were enraged that Yellow Vest/union/old lady demonstrators would dare to seek refuge in a hospital rather than stand there and get tear gassed prior to getting charged and beaten by cops.

President Emmanuel Macron knew a black mark day was coming – not just Yellow Vests but unions and climate change protesters would also be marching – so he made a major concession: he gave a public interview. Noblesse oblige!

Macron waited two years before giving his first press conference, so we shouldn’t have expected a miracle, but France’s #1 public servant could have considered to talking to French media, at least. Instead he spoke with US magazine Time.

In the land of Ayn Rand, where the petit bourgeois boss is the undisputed chief in a million hillbilly fiefs, Macron may have been playing to his audience when he said: “In our country, we want leadership, but we also want to kill the leaders.” Who can forget Louis XVI?

However, I thought of all the French leaders who weren’t hacked to death by a vengeful populace. Louis I, for example. Louis II – there’s another one. Louis III, him too. In fact, Louis IV through Louis XV all were not assassinated, so why is Macron so worried about public retribution?

Look deeper into French history – despite #MeToo claims of universality it’s not even a gender thing: (2018’s 43,434th-most popular name) Ermentrude of Orléans, (don’t call me “Big”) Bertha of Burgundy and that lousy job-stealing immigrant Clementia of Hungary all escaped assassination despite being the nation’s #1 lady. Joan the Lame was a regent, and thus held the real power, and yet she wasn’t beheaded even though she must have been pretty easy to catch. They did destroy Joan’s tomb during the French revolution – she couldn’t run forever.

I also note that way back in the Merovingian era Engelbert the Humperdinck was not assassinated either, despite his many crimes which fell harshly on the ears of his suffering subjects.

To clarify for Macron: France wants leadership but they also want to kill their leaders sometimes. Other times they build huge statues to their leaders, like Charles de Gaulle and Joan of Arc. It seems to rather depend on the leader, and I thus think this allegedly French sentiment may actually be universal.

Jokes aside, Macron is obviously not trying to get re-elected, and thus he shows the biggest loophole in Western bourgeois democracy: the one in which opportunists temporarily accept public service in order to exploit it for personal gains.

(Contrarily, I’m not sure Iran’s Supreme Leader is even allowed to resign? He is there expressly to be a permanent patriotic force within a democratic system – presidents came and go but the Leader does not – and to mediate among different societal groups for the good of the national well-being.)

I look at Macron’s cover of Time and I see Brazil’s Michel Temer.

There is a clear contradiction between the image and caption on the cover of Time: Macron is frankly and aggressively rolling up his sleeves, yet the words about his “troubled presidency” indicate contrition, guilt and a desire for reconciliation. Anybody need to roll up their sleeves before a fraternal embrace? Anyway, Time got it fundamentally wrong: In June Macron declared he was on “Act 2” of his presidency, which is not at all a reset but an advance, a progression. Macron is rolling up his sleeves because his current pension and unemployment system rollbacks are the most divisive and most sweeping of his presidency. Like Temer, he couldn’t care less about the consequences – he has work to do, and the work is the social dismantling ordered by neoliberal austerity ideology and Brussels. Both Macron and Temer act on the orders of their 1% friends – the only reset for them is personal and after their terms, when they get the cushy lives and private, ego-stroking conferences where their hurt, under-appreciated egos can be revived.

But why should Time journalists have any real idea about what the “French Street” thinks? They aren’t there, haven’t been there and ain’t gonna be there – they hold the Yellow Vests in the same contempt as US Zionists do the “Arab Street”.

What Time would have seen on the worst day of violence since May 1

The tear gas and police brutality started at 10 am. I’m not sure what time it was in Hong Kong?

The first tear gas always provokes the most dramatic symptoms – I imagine it is because your body is telling you, “What the hell is this you’re inhaling now? Get it out of here.” Your skin burns more, you are expectorating excessively via the mouth and nose, your heart rate is elevated well after the “conflict adrenaline” has worn off. The next gassings are much easier, provided you are not at ground zero of course.

I have taken so much tear gas in “the birthplace of human rights” I wonder just how much poison I have built up in my bloodstream? I wonder if I can sue the French government for creating a hazardous work environment after organ failure from cyanide poisoning? Probably not.

Tear gas was falling from the skies regularly, and especially loud Yellow Vests were being individually targeted for violent arrest, but for whatever reasons – programming, shift change, etc. – after my 12pm live interview PressTV didn’t want another interview until 2pm. Being the die-hard activist journalist me and my cameramen are, we went on lunch break.

Hey, we gotta eat sometime. We’re workers, and Macron hasn’t revoked our right to a lunch break yet. And we can’t be there for every gassing/beating/rubber bullet – it’s not possible; furthermore, if we, did eventually our time would come and then there’d be no more reports at all. Gotta play the long game.

By the time we returned the Champs the crowds had really thinned out, after looking like there would be enough to hold it all day. Cops were being totally brutal: gas, confuse and punish, push people off the Champs, and then don’t allowing them back in, thus locking down the world’s greatest mall/boulevard. But we had an interview scheduled, so we stuck around with the perhaps 500 die-harders still hoping unionists, climate changers and Black Bloc would show up to retake this iconic mall-evard from the hated regime.

So we go live and do our interview, and we probably contributed to the violence. This is what often happens: The Yellow Vests know they’re on TV all of a sudden, cuz some monkey with a microphone is yammering in front of a camera, and they want to represent. They get loud and rowdy. In this way the presence of journalists hypes up the crowd in a way similar to, but actually very different, the presence of hyper-armed cops agitates a crowd. For political protesters journalist coverage is a sign that they matter and that they are doing something right and worthy of comment: that’s what makes it so sad that my French media colleagues are never covering the Yellow Vests – if they were, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people would join the protests again. Of course, the vast police repression since late March is the main reason the average Frenchmen isn’t showing up.

We finish live French protest interview #481 (I truly and humbly contend that no journalist in France has covered as many demonstrations as I have in the past decade – that number I gave is my honest estimate) and the little crowd is back to being the Yellow Vest engine that could.

Heartwarming… let’s get out of here. And we left because we had to go find another demonstration to cover – newsroom bosses want you to be where the action is, and there was a huge climate change protest there. Frankly, and sadly, I think much of the crowd had dissipated because they wanted to go join the eco-nuts, who are have as much backbone for a political fight as tofu.

Why was I going to the climate change protest and not the union demonstration? Because only one of the nine major unions ultimately decided to demonstrate that day – total betrayal of a day which was supposed to be so huge, but that’s the “virtue” of “independent” trade unions, right?

As we are leaving and I take one last look and – the tear gas is flying again. Of course it was: cops fear rowdy protesters whom they haven’t totally beaten into silence and submission, thus – launch some more gas.

Nothing we can do for ya, Vesters. We gotta think of where the action will be 45 minutes from now, and y’all had been kettled (boxed in by cops) and y’all knew they were going to gas you, drive you out and put the Champs on lockdown and if ya didn’t know then now ya know.

What teases we journalists are! Get ‘em all excited, and then leave ‘em in their moment of need. Don’t blame me, lady – blame the system.

The alternative hypothesis is that the cops saw that the only camera-wielding journalists around were leaving, and that the coast was clear for more gassing. Then it is still our presence which provoked it, and more shame on my well-heeled French media colleagues for not being there.

The final hypothesis is that the cops were about to gas them anyway and the timing of our leaving was purely coincidental. That is certainly mathematically logical, given the rates of tear gassing by French cops on Saturdays.

Regardless, that was an interesting anecdote which proves the journalistic corollary to quantum mechanics – the mere observation of a phenomenon inevitably changes that phenomenon. Again, what would the effects be if the French media were actually there? Or even journalists from Time?

The eco-kooks: fake-leftist politics at its most pathetic

I can’t stand covering ecological protests – what a waste of time.

Firstly, climate change requires a cooperative solution on an international level, and obviously capitalism is predicated on competition at an international level. Therefore, there is no reason at all to do a damned thing about environmental issues – the only solution is to get socialism first. No socialism? Then no possible climate solution.

Secondly, is climate change a news beat which is not being covered enough already? Hardly – there are 900 billion Western journalists who simply adore covering this story. I note that the roughly 900 billion climate change articles in Western media on any given Tuesday hasn’t done much good. Don’t tell that to the eco-freaks, though – they think they’re God’s favourite servants.

Definitely don’t point out to them that the 1% just adores you wasting your political energy on climate change instead of class issues. Climate change is inherently neutered of any class aspect: billionaires and homeless alike all litter or leave a “climate impact” (or whatever) or don’t compost properly.

Climate change protests are thus so very, very useless that I cannot give a damn, and the protesters directly acknowledged this: they had one big ballon, which read “Give a f***”. Classy. And they’re the only ones who give a f***, right?

Smug punks. And climate change protesters are punks with a capital P – too many examples to list, but here’s a quick few:

The presence of alcohol at French political demonstrations is lamentable – this is not a party – but only at eco-protests do you see Champagne.

The presence of loud music at protests – instead of loudly-chanted slogans or even silence – is… acceptable, I guess. But for many people Saturday wasn’t a protest but a rave, celebrating Mother Earth – techno music boomed it’s 4-on-the-floor “pound my tiny soul into submission” with the idiot hipster/bobo DJ calmly, slowly saying (for the people there on ecstasy or MDMA) “Feeeeeeeeeeel the earth…. don’t let it die.” Nothing says “I protest” like dancing during a protest march.

The presence of mimes at protests… can only happen in France, of course. I have no idea what political purpose they served, but I must admit they were amusing. I must also admit I was hoping they would also be tackled by cops for their very minor vandalisms, because they they would have to say something. Mimes are a good symbol for ecological protesters in general: they are there to be seen. And, I’d add, to feel good about and receive praise for their nonsensical works.

The presence of tear gas at ecological protests is not expected because WHAT a buzzkill, amirite? When the first tear gas flew the eco-warriors were so panicked thousands of them all ran in the wrong direction… and just kept marching that way. LOL, later comrades!

That was a new one. But I was hopeful, because instead of heading in the exact opposite direction of the Champs (as the eco-route had planned), they were now heading toward it – let’s retake the Champs, yes!

No, eco-warriors planned to march in the exact opposite direction of the Champs (east, not west) and they were determined to make sure they stayed away from any possible conflict with cops that could create bad karma/force them to shower (the tear gas off) later. Eventually, the thousands all just turned around and marched in the proper direction. Inwardly, they were likely too egotistical to ask themselves if they looked like idiots.

Black Bloc must have got the address wrong

The violence which spooked the eco-kooks was provided by Black Bloc. We had arrived just in time to see it happen:

The usual. Targeted vandalism against banks, real estate agencies (10,000 euros per square meter now in Paris, so believe me when I say that my landlord – whom I have made rich – can take a long walk off a short pier), and sexist ads (lotta Black Bloc are women).

There was a twist, and you gotta admit Black Bloc is up on things: they attacked the Egyptian Central Centre… obviously in solidarity with the anti-Sisi protests in Egypt going on that day. These Blocers were up on the news, found out the Egyptian Cultural Centre was on the eco-route, and took action. I got that wrong in this live interview from the scene among the debris – maybe Black Blocers could do my job better? Cut me some slack – live interviews are hard: I got it right in time for the day’s official report.

(I talked with the lone Egyptian worker at the Centre, and whom you can see in that video – he said the Centre was clearly targeted. He showed me an empty vodka bottle they had thrown inside, but Black Bloc isn’t a bunch of drunks. I felt bad for the poor guy – who knows if he supports Sisi or not? He’s just manning a cultural centre in some far away place – Egyptians need cultural centres, after all.)

Ok, there was some damage which was not purely political – two motorcycles were set on fire. However, when I claw my way to the top and become dictator of France the first thing I will do is ban those damned loud lawnmowers they call transportation. You have to live in Paris to understand just how much extra reverberations motorcycles make in this walled city – noise pollution is a much bigger problem than regular pollution (which is also a problem) – so I personally view anti-motorcycle actions as 100% justified; it is social, if not necessarily political. On top of their annoying and perpetual noise, motorcycle riders do nothing but drive between car lanes and break every law imaginable. I truly believe Paris has become more dangerous to drive in than Tehran, and that is pretty amazing. (Of course, in the past few decades Iran has actually invested in driver infrastructure whereas Paris just makes more bike lanes; Iran now has many more traffic cops, which is a type of public worker you’ll never seen in Paris – maybe they were there pre-austerity?)

Seeing as how our job is to be at the front line, we had to be at the front line fire. I made a rookie mistake – never be in a situation where you have to flee down a side street, always stay on the main thoroughfares and close to the wall. So, they gassed us (women, elderly, children) to clear way for the fire trucks to put out the fire. Here’s the thing: the crowd was already moving back to clear a way – the gassing was not at all necessary but punitive. The tear gas cans exploded mid-air so close to me I could see them ignite clearly, and that’s when you lose an eye. Alhamdulillah, me and my colleague were ok. Pretty badly gassed, but we’ve had worse. The worst part? I was only so close because I was scheduled to do a live interview from the craziness, but our damned connection wasn’t good enough! So I was gassed, crying, running and yelling at Tehran to put me on the damned air all at the same time. It happens.

But I admit it humbly: with my awesome-sounding French in my PressTV Français recap at the end of the day (not posted yet), I was not critical enough of Black Bloc – they can do more harm than good. Mainly when they go where they are not wanted – like that ecological protest instead of the Champs.

Immediately after the violence and mid-demonstration Greenpeace and Youth for Climate tweeted that they were revoking their leadership of the march and that everyone should leave the protest. Tough kids, eh?

I talked with a Black Blocer just prior to the gassing: a woman who was very voluptuously built. She was probably one of those defacing sexist ads, as she is likely subject to constant objectification when walking down the street (a hejab undoubtedly gives women a break from that, but let’s leave that issue there): heaven forbid she violently object to female nudity in public advertising, because that’s proof France is so “sexually progressive” and “respectful of women”, right? She took off her mask when she saw I was one of the good journalists – her pretty young face was flushed from leftist exertion. Dressed head to toe in black, she said she wasn’t Black Bloc but merely rocking the “Goth” look. A lovely figure, pretty face, guts and a sense of humour? Of course I was so smitten I could not identify her to authorities if ever forced to do so, such was the mass of stars, hearts and bright lights swirling around her.

I would have talked to a Youth for Climateer but they were retreating too fast… yet somehow they were able to tweet at the same time? Millennials – so talented!

Another Saturday in France, more long-term lung damage

The reality, which is still difficult to grasp as we left Yellow Vest #45 and filmed an old man whose face was red and bloodied from cops, as well as a bleeding, handcuffed old woman, is that things are only going to get worse: As I wrote, the pension and unemployment systems will have the broadest immediate impact of any of Macron’s “deforms”, thus they will provoke the broadest protests.

Such protests go beyond the Yellow Vests’ capability. September 21 was significant because it was the “Yellow Vest Day Without the Yellow Vests” – most did not wear them. The idea was to finally converge the Vesters with the various social struggles (unions, NGOs, mainstream leftist political parties, even eco-kooks, etc.). After 10 months, they have to join forces with the right groups.

They are talking about an unlimited transport strike in December, and I never recall hearing that before. No Christmas vacation for me, I guess.

The only TV media openly covering the Yellow Vests remains Iran (in English, French, Spanish and Farsi) and RT. I have seen France’s LCI (the government channel) openly there for about 6 weeks, and once or twice last month I saw TF1, but that’s it. I’m sure the fake-leftist MSM was all over the climate change march – because they always are – and I hope they got more tear gas than I did.

However, the process of lasting revolution is long – it takes years of struggle, and victory is not assured until households and families are forced to choose sides against each other. I am not promoting familial disharmony, just reporting what I have read of previous revolutions – the simplest, most moral and most effective choice, of course, is to side with the lower classes.

The thing about a “reset” in a video game is that you just go right back to the same beginning, and you have totally erased from memory all the bad you did. Why would Macron deserve a reset from the French public?

Too bad for Macron that civil service and politics are not a video game, or a hippie rave. Too bad for everyone in the global economy that austerity continues.

The reality is that Macron doesn’t even know his own country’s history: since the 9th century less than five of France’s just over 100 leaders have been killed. France doesn’t kill their leaders – they exile them, even those of the First Republic (1792-1804). This is another false cliche Macron has accepted as fact which is mainly promoted by fearful, reactionary English monarchists. Beheadings aren’t necessary – just ask any Frenchman: what could be a worse fate than to not live in France?

Macron will likely wind up exiled as well – who doesn’t imagine the young Macron being feted like an emperor in the Anglophone business world after he isn’t re-elected in 2022?

So Macron needn’t worry – he’ll probably just have his tomb desecrated like Joan the Lame. Probably a lot of other similarities between Macron and Joan the Lame, I imagine….

The question Macron should ask himself is: what is it that he is doing which is causing him to have regicide on his mind?

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of “I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China”.

Cynthia McKinney to ST: Peace has a chance only with a peace leader in national security adviser position or no one at all in it

ST

Wednesday, 11 September 2019 12:03

Former US congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has said that it might be better for the position of the national security adviser to remain vacant, hoping that President Donald Trump is about to begin to keep his campaign promises about the folly of the US fighting wars for Israel.

In a statement to the Syria times e-newspaper on the effect of the defenestration of John Bolton as President Trump’s third national security adviser, McKinney said: “Given the President’s poor staffing choices, it might be better for the position to remain vacant. Any appointment from the swamp will continue the same pro-Israel, warmongering, swamp policies.”

She believes that peace has a chance only with a peace leader in that position or no one at all in it.

“Even then, the Lobby for war spans both sides of the aisles, both Republicans and Democrats. I have repeatedly made suggestions for Trump of individuals who understand the swamp and are repulsed by what it is today,” she added.

Asked about the reason behind the defenestration of Bolton, McKinney replied:

“Bolton blew the President’s peace initiatives with North Korea, Syria, and Afghanistan. Let’s hope that the President is about to begin to keep his campaign promises about the folly of the US fighting wars for Israel.”

Yesterday, President Trump pushed out John R. Bolton, his third national security adviser.

Cynthia McKinney is an international peace and human rights activist, noted for her inconvenient truth-telling about the U.S. war machine. She was held for seven days in an Israeli prison after attempting to enter Gaza by sea and traveled to Libya during U.S. bombing and witnessed the crimes against humanity committed against that country’s people. In addition to Libya, she has traveled to Cuba, Syria, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and as she puts it:

“Wherever U.S. Bombs are dropping or U.S. sanctions are biting.”

She is the author or editor of three Clarity Press books: she has written one book Ain’t Nothing Like Freedom and edited The Illegal War On Libya and the 2018 book, How the U.S. Creates Sh*thole Countries.

In 1992, McKinney won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. She was the first African-American woman from Georgia in the U.S. Congress. She was the first Member of Congress to demand an investigation of the events of 9/11/2001. McKinney was criticized and as a result, she was defeated in 2002; however, she ran again and was re-elected in 2004.

In December 2008, Cynthia made international headlines when her boat was rammed by the Israeli military as she was attempting to deliver medical supplies to Gaza. In 2009, Cynthia attempted to reach Gaza again, this time armed with crayons, coloring books, and school supplies. Her boat was overtaken in international waters by the Israeli military and she was kidnapped to Israel where she spent 7 days in an Ramleh Prison. Finally, Cynthia entered Gaza by land in July 2009 with George Galloway’s Viva Palestina USA.

She has over 100,000 followers on FaceBook and more than 30,000 followers on Twitter who live in countries all over the world—from Argentina to Zimbabwe, according to Tweetsmap as of January 2019.

Interviewed by: Basma Qaddour

It’s HEZB ALLAH…& “Middle East” is Brit Empire’s Colonial Description

Source

Better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt is an adage that belongs back in the conversation, as an essential antidote to the Lilliputian mind among the social media freaks stoned the synthetic power of “administrators” in cyber-groups.

Awards for stupidity and ignorance should not be given; those flouting stupidity and ignorance should be placed into remedial education.

Recently, an article on Hezb Allah was posted to such a group, a “closed” group, and one with over 10,000 members. It was almost immediately rejected, based on stupidity and ignorance, or perhaps, something a bit more nefarious.

The author re-posted, with the following preface:

This is a message to the admins in this group: I’m a Syrian by birth, Arabic is my mother language, English is another language I dare to say I know enough to write an article with it that most people would understand. This post of mine was removed because an admin said there’s no such thing as ‘Hezb Allah’, and I’m welcomed to re-post using the correct name, I beg to differ:

Hezb Allah means the Party of God – حزب الله it’s two words and not one word. Previously, even myself was using the ‘Hezbollah’ name, this I’ve started to fix in my writings all over the net, this name doesn’t have a thing related to the party and it’s humiliating by all levels. Why don’t we call things by their real names instead of finding what suits others? ‘Hezbollah’ removes the name of God from the party’s name and doesn’t have a meaning in Arabic, Saudi bots and other haters of the party are translating this name literally to Arabic to read as: Hezbola: in Arabic it’s two syllables: He Zobala: He Garbage.

So thank you for your attention but let’s try to call Hezb Allah by their real name which I also included in the quotation marks to make the pronouncing connected, and not how their enemies like to call them.

Most of us have been brainwashed since gestation; taking out the garbage from our minds, and hearts, and souls is an ongoing process. It is helpful to realize we do not know everything and need the assistance of others in this process — which requires gratitude to our teachers, and humility as students. We all have something to offer, and especially in current geopolitical times, most of us engage in both activities.

Let us use the correct English translation for Hezb Allah.

Let us also cease in perpetuating the use of “Middle East.” ME was the description that the British Empire used to denote its areas of occupation in the Levant, before leaving its various settlements with the ‘freedom and liberty’ to slaughter each other, via the military strategy of divide and conquer.

---

To help us continue please visit the Donate page to donate or learn other ways.
Follow us on Telegram: http://t.me/syupdates link will open Telegram app.

Related Posts:

• Hezb Allah Didn’t Target an Earlier IDF Vehicle Manned by a Falashas Jew
• ‘Hezb Allah’ and Gaza Downed Two Israeli Drones in 24 Hours
• Netanyahu Played with Fire, Now for the Burning Hands Part

Did Russia really prevent Israeli airstrikes in Syria?

Russia prevented Israeli airstrikes in Syria, Putin warned Netanyahu: Report

Sat Sep 14, 2019 08:32AM

This file handout obtained from the Russian Defense Ministry’s official Facebook page on November 26, 2015 shows Russia’s S-400 air defense missile systems at the Hmeimin airbase in the Syrian province of Latakia. (Photo by Russia Defense Ministry)

Moscow has reportedly moved to prevent Israeli airstrikes in Syria, with Russian President Vladimir Putin warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the strikes.

Putin told Netanyahu that allowing Israeli strikes on Syrian military assets would undermine Moscow’s relations with Damascus, the Arabic edition of the UK-based Independent newspaper reported on Friday.

The report comes after Netanyahu met with Putin in the resort city of Sochi on Thursday to discuss “security coordination” in Syria.

According to an unnamed Russian source cited in the report, Moscow has also threatened to use its “fighter jets or the S-400 air defense system” in order to counter any Israeli aircraft striking Syria.

In August, Moscow stopped an airstrike on the strategic Qasioun region near Damascus, where a Syrian S-300 missile battery is said to be placed, according to the report.

Moscow allegedly prevented another airstrike later on a Syrian outpost in the southwestern province of Quneitra and a third in the western coastal province of Latakia.

The report comes as Syria has intercepted several Israeli missile attacks in the past month, casting doubt on the extent of Russian commitment to counter Israeli ambitions.

PressTV-Syria downs Israeli missiles flying over Damascus

Syrian army intercepts Israeli missiles flying over Damascus, says a report by official news agency SANA.

The Israeli regime has acknowledged repeatedly launching attacks against Syria in recent years, some of which have been carried out from Lebanese airspace.

Such aggressive moves have been viewed by observers as attempts to weaken the Damascus government as it increasingly gains the upper hand fighting terrorist groups which have plagued the country since 2011.

‘A failed meeting’

The Independent report also cited unnamed Israeli sources who described Netanyahu’s meeting with Putin as “a failure”, falling short of reducing any Syria policy disagreements with Moscow.

Israeli sources added that Israel airstrikes on Syria had “embarrassed” the Russians from failing to protect its allies.

During the “failed” meeting, Netanyahu had also called for Tel Aviv to be given “freedom of action” against Iran by Russia.

The Israeli prime minister had even sought to use the meeting to “present positive message of the cooperation between the two countries” for his election campaign but failed, the report wrote.

According to the Russian source, Putin’s disagreements with Netanyahu also went as far as Putin condemning Tel Aviv’s recent actions in Lebanon, with the Russian president saying that he “rejects the aggression towards Lebanon’s sovereignty.”

Israel launched a number of drone attacks into Lebanon last month.

Following the drone raids, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, vowed in a televised speech that fighters of the movement would counter any further violation of the Lebanese airspace by Israeli drones, warning the Tel Aviv regime to immediately halt such breaches.

PressTV-Hezbollah shoots down Israeli drone over Lebanon

Hezbollah says it has shot down an Israeli military drone outside the southern Lebanese town of Ramyah.

Last week, Hezbollah fired two anti-tank guided missiles at a moving Israeli armored vehicle at the Avivim base north of the occupied territories, killing and wounding its occupants.

Also Read

• دلالات الاستقبال «البارد» لنتنياهو في سوتشي