As Craig Murray notes in his summary of the proposal, the Kushner plan, and the responses to it from Western governments, underscore the long-term hypocrisy of Western nations and particularly the United States ( as the ‘honest’ broker) in pretending to support the much brutalized Palestinian people into believing there could ever be such a thing as a viable ‘two state solution”.
Mountains & Cliffs
If it were not for the fact that successive Israeli governments since 1948, have terrorized, stolen, destroyed houses, lands and property, tortured and imprisoned many thousands of Palestinians (including many children) for the crime of wanting to retain their own homes and lands, then this could almost be some stupid farce; a joke by puerile amateurs who know nothing of history, and certainly nothing about human rights or even compassion.
If you have the stomach for it, read the daily litany of extreme abuse, racism and terror inflicted by Israeli army soldiers and “settlers” on the Palestinian people at https://imemc.org/
The news outlet IPSNews, notes: The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has described the much-ballyhooed US Middle East peace plan as “more like Swiss cheese– with the cheese being offered to the Israelis and the holes to the Palestinians”.
There is now only one solution; and that is a single state entity which recognizes all peoples in the lands of what is now Israel/Gaza and the West Bank as having equal rights: which recognises the right of return of those millions of Palestinians dispossessed of their lands and liberty since 1948 by the Israeli machine, and which provides appropriate compensation for those losses….
Lieutenant-General Soleimani; leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, was, as Soleimani himself expected, assassinated by United States drone or helicopter rockets on the morning of Friday 3rd January 2020, while leaving Baghdad Airport by car after a civilian flight in to Baghdad from Tehran to meet with the Iraqi prime minister.
Soleimani was revered by many Shiite Muslims around the world for his military successes in helping Shiite Hezbollah protect and defeat an Israeli invasion of Lebanon (part of Israel’s ‘grand’ strategy of building a mythic “Greater Israel”), but more importantly, for his work in both Iraq and Syria coordinating the largely successful battle against Al Qaeda in Syria (or HTS) and ISIS (otherwise known as Daesh).
As Iran has consistently and publicly stated, and the evidence confirms, both Al Qaeda and ISIS, were not only funded and supported by the lunatic Wahhabist Saudis, but also by the United States and other Western countries, particularly the U.K. (long a mercenary supporter of the Wahhabist Saudi tribe since Lawrence of Arabia in the First World War. Also note the very apt comment from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson that Soleimani was a ‘threat to our interests”.
The Wahhabist Muslim sect believes that all non Sunni Muslims are ‘heretics’ and should either be forcibly converted or killed . General Soleimani was therefore following the lineage of the great Shiite Imams of medieval times, in protecting all Shiites -this time from the scourge of Wahhabism.
In collaboration with the Russians, a revitalized Syrian Arab Army (Assad’s forces), a re-armed Iraqi Army, and Shi-ite militias under his command, Soleimani had at the time of his death largely succeeded in defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq. The jaws are rapidly closing in on the remnants of Al Qaeda, HTS, ISIS and other Saudi and Western backed jihadists in Idlib in Northern Syria and Iraq. There is real fear in Washington “intelligence” circles that mainstream media will finally be forced to expose the direct linkage between Washington and the head-chopping jihadists.
The recent death in Ankara of James Le Mesurier, leader of the White Helmets, supposedly humanitarian aid workers in Syria, but in reality well funded propaganda units for the jihadist groups and their backers, is likely to be directly linked to the imminent exposure of the White Helmets as fakes, and the revelation of Western governments’ manipulation and likely bribery of senior staff at the OPCW to create a ‘scientific finding” that the Assad government had gassed civilians. Western governments will consequently be finally forced to acknowledge their appalling collaboration and support of pyschopathic jihadist killers in the Middle East- all in the name of oil and support for the Israeli entity.
American intelligence agencies consequently panicked and reasoned that a decisive provocation against Iran, would ensure that Iran would ‘over-react”, and could thus be seen by the world as the crazed religious pariah state that the United States has always tried to portray Iran as being since the Islamic revolution.
It might be useful at this point to list just some of the legitimate grievances Iran has against the United States.
The arming and support for Saddam Hussein’s attempted invasion of Iran which cost at least a million Iranian lives (and in which ferocious war, Soleimani learnt his battle skills)
The shooting down of a civilian Iranian Airbus A300 by a US warship in the Persian Gulf , with 290 resultant deaths. There was no official apology from the United States although some compensation was paid out belatedly.
Ongoing promotion of Iran as a pariah state at the UN and with other Western governments, which resulted in severe sanctions and the deaths of many innocent Iranians because of Iran’s non existent nuclear weapons programme.
Unconditional support by the United States of the Wahhabist Saudi clan who have funded and managed Sunni jihadist groups, killing many Shi-ite across the world, but particularly in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
United States unconditional support for the Israeli entity, in their desire to create a “Greater Israel” by the theft and extremely brutal occupation of land from (largely Sunni) Palestinians, Shi-ite Lebanese and Syrians.
Perhaps it might therefore be understandable why Iran’s leadership calls the United States, the “Great Satan”.
Iran is, unlike many of the United States’ allies in the Middle East, a democracy of sorts. However the rules for democracy are managed and controlled at a central level by its Shi-ite Islamist leaders, and democratic choice is very limited (not too dissimilar in fact to the U.S. presidential election process).
While there are undoubtedly many in Iran who long for what Western democracy appears to promise, most are also fiercely patriotic; proud of their many thousands of year’s history as Persians. Faced with ‘existential” external threats, as Iranians have been since the Islamist revolution in 1979, few Iranians would support an overthrow of their current government.
Soleimani’s death was mourned by hundreds of thousands of Shiites in Iraq and Iran. Memorials in Tehran had to be postponed because of the size of the crowds mourning him in other cities in Iran, but the most crucial memorial was held for him in the Iranian city of Qom . “Qom is considered holy by ShiʿaIslam, as it is the site of the shrine of Fatimah bint Musa, sister of Imam Ali ibn Musa Rida[6] (Persian Imam Reza, 789–816 CE). The city is the largest center for Shiʿa scholarship in the world, and is a significant destination of pilgrimage, with around twenty million pilgrims visiting the city every year..” -Wikipedia.
The red Shi-ite flag of the blood of the martyrs and revenge, was raised in Qom at his funeral procession. According to local reports it is the first time in the Qom mosque’s history – a holy site since the Middle Ages – that the red flag has been raised over the building.
It should be noted that the raising of the red-flag over Qom is not simply an Iranian government contrivance, but a religious appeal to all Shi-ite believers around the world to avenge Soleimani’s death -one who battled with the forces of evil to save Shi-ites.
Albawaba .com notes that ‘Last night Khamanei and Rouhani consoled Soleimani’s family.
‘Who is going to avenge my father’s blood?’ One of the commander’s daughters asked.
In response, Rouhani promised her that ‘everyone will take revenge’ and assured her as she wept, ‘we will, we will avenge his blood, you don’t worry.’
‘The Americans did not realize what a grave mistake they have made. They will suffer the consequences of such criminal measure not only today, but also throughout the years to come,’ Rouhani said.
‘This crime committed by the US will go down in history as one of their unforgettable crimes against the Iranian nation.’
Is it possible that United States intelligence officials were unaware of the paramount importance of Soleimani to the 112 million people in the Shiite world? Did they not understand that his killing would provoke a desire for revenge against the United States which would be unstoppable?
No matter whether President Trump carries out his threats to bomb 52 targets in Iran including “cultural sites”. (which would of course be a war crime, but nothing new to the United States, which has been guilty of horrendous war crimes and genocide in so many parts of the world since the U.S began: see our blog article; America’s Exceptional Interest in Wars) or whether the United States might lose its residual sanity and nuke Tehran, the revenge would continue .
The United State’s only option now is to seek forgiveness from the Iranians and negotiate a deal which allows their soldiers to leave safely from their many many bases circling Iran.
In just one example, the United State’s main military base in the Persian Gulf is located on the island of Bahrain. Bahrain is ruled by an autocratic and brutal Sunni ‘prince” over a population which is 62% Shi-ite. It would not require any intervention on the part of the Iranians for a rebellion to once again boil over to depose the Bahrain Al Khalifa royal family and for Shi-ites in Bahrain to destroy the U.S. base there and its occupants.
While Western media choose to portray any actions by Shi-ite groups around the world as being by “Iranian proxies”, Shi-ite groups, whether military of otherwise, will seek to avenge the death of Soleimani; they have now been called to do so.
It would be timely for someone in Washington who is sane, and with more than the level of intelligence currently displayed, to seek the mediation skills of someone with credibility to both sides, like Russian Federation Foreign Minister Lavrov- who may be able to help forestall what currently looks like the inevitable tragedy for the 60,000 plus United States soldiers stationed in the Middle East, as a result of General Soleimani’s killing.
As Craig Murray has eruditely noted, even the greatest of scoundrels who die, have wives, children and other people who love and care for them and who mourn their loss.
What however we do get from that obituary is an acknowledgment of the close ties that Le Mesurier and MI6 had and continue to have with Israeli secret police and military in brutally putting down what Churlov describes as the Gaza “insurgency” ( a curious but telling name for an uprising against the disgusting barbaric ( and internationally illegal) Israeli occupation and imprisonment of Gaza’s population). But again; this should not come as a surprise; we know the U.K. intelligence community’s and UK Military’s longstanding and ongoing involvement with corruption, torture and murder across the Middle East , and its mercenary longstanding involvement with the Saudi regime’s jihadist terror and genocidal campaigns against Shiites.
If you believe Martin Churlov, Le Mesurier was able to somehow mysteriously access large amounts of Western government money to establish and maintain and provide Western logistics to a band of humanitarian workers who operated in areas where the officially recognised Syrian Red Cross could not access because the jihadists would have killed them.
In Wikipedia we are told (without any hint of sarcasm) that: The Times reported that Le Mesurier was “the subject of an intense black propaganda campaign for years by pro-Assad activists and Russian diplomats”.[28][29]The New York Times reported that the group and Le Mesurier were the target of “unfounded conspiracy theories”.[3] It was alleged that Le Mesurier’s British Army background meant that he was effectively operating as a British state agent.[30]Janine di Giovanni has written the claim he was a spy lacks any evidence.[31] The accusations, from those who are opposed to any Western involvement in Syria and are backers of the Assad regime, include bloggers connected to the English-language Russian media who claim the White Helmets and Le Mesurier were intending to push for regime change in Syria.[32][33]
One of the White Helmet’s key functions ( unlike any other internationally recognised humanitarian mission), was to publicise itself and the supposed military actions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) under Assad. The recent expose of reports made by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) after the allegations by the White Helmets of SAA chemical weapons use in Douma, clearly show corruption at a senior level in the OPCW to manipulate evidence and come to conclusions not supported by their investigators .
Le Mesurier died mysteriously; somehow falling from his balcony at his home in Ankara to his death in the middle of the night without his wife hearing anything. And yes, security cameras reveal no breach of security at his home- so presumably-no evidence of murder.
Did Mesurier jump because he knew he was soon to be exposed to the world as the charlatan he was, and not the humanitarian portrayed so well in the White Helmet’s expensive movie and Western mainstream media?
Or was he pushed because he knew too much? Perhaps we will never know.
We do know from TASS however that the British have been getting increasingly concerned about the ongoing ever-deeper incursions into Idlib in Northern Syria by Russian and SAA troops, where most of their intelligence operatives are working alongside the jihadists and particularly Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) , the Al Qaeda affiliated group funded by the Saudis. A captured British operative in Idlib could reveal much of the very embarrassing support by the British French, US and Turkey of the jihadists (including the White Helmets), and their links to Israeli operatives.
In addition, “Old Boy” Boris Johnson’s Etonian and City of London links might be put even more at jeopardy if any of this little escapade comes to light during the current British General Election…
As with U.S. foreign policy, we need to understand that British realpolitik is simply about the money. How much can I or my cronies get out of this next little war?
We have witnessed the incredible barbarity shown by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinian protesters in the last few weeks of the “Day of Rage” and the marking of 70 years of theft and violence by the Israeli population against Palestinians since the Nabka: 70 years of murder, terror, torture and imprisonment, for the crime of not giving away the lands of their ancestors to the settler invaders.
Penned in Palestinians who are , as one journalist put it, “like sheep for the slaughter”.
Despite the dictatorial behaviours of the Turkish President, and his many other shortcomings , President Erdogan is quite specifically accurate in calling Israel an ‘apartheid state”. Israel has, over the past 70 years, progressively ‘acquired’ former Palestinian land and walled in those remaining who dared to stand up to the U.S. funded military might of Israel. Arabs in Israel, (who have the exactly the same genes as the original Jewish inhabitants of Israel); are discriminated against in a very systematic and ‘legal’ way by the Israeli state. Settler extremism, violence and bigotry reinforce those laws. We only need to look at the extreme racist rants of Israelis in leadership positions in Israel, to convince ourselves of the obscenity of their stance. Or perhaps you might like to endure this list of disgusting anti-Palestininan behaviours and statements from a series of Israeli ‘leaders” by the Angry Arab
Thus the latest targeted killings of largely defenceless ( apart from stones and a few molotov cocktails) Palestinians protesting their illegal walling in by Israel, are just one more example of the barbarism that is the state of Israel. A systematic, crude and vicious attempt to destroy the Palestinian people in order to acquire their lands. The extraordinary bravery and tenaciousness of generations of Palestinians since the Nabka , should never be forgotten.
As Jonathan Cook notes: the Wests’ direct and implicit endorsement of Israeli very literal terrorism towards Palestinians over the past 70 years , will result in further atrocities by Israeli troops and settlers.
And as the former UN Rapporteur for Palestine puts it ‘The feeble Israeli claims of its right of self-defense or attributing Palestinian martyrdom to Hamas are so shallow and lacking in credibility as to discredit further rather than provide justifications for this exhibition of homicidal violence on a massive scale not as isolated incident but as a series of arrogant reenactments.”
Nine-year-old Mohammed Jaber remembers how he took his pocket money and went out with his 5-year-old sister Ghina, as the long summer day of fasting came to an end, in the month of Ramadan. “My parents try to keep me indoors, but I was bored, so we went to buy jellybeans and chips,” he says. Once on the street, in the densely populated al-Bureij refugee camp, he heard that the neighbours had received a call warning of an air strike. Mohammed rushed back home. There are no shelters in Gaza, so his parents and their six children took cover in a bedroom.
“Mohammed remembers the last war two years ago. He knew what was going to happen,” his mother Mariam explains, recalling how the child, white with fear, ran and picked up a pillow to cover his face and ears. “I thought he was going to suffocate himself,” she says. Suddenly, the deafening explosion sent pieces of shrapnel and glass flying through the room. “All my children started screaming. I managed to calm them down, but after that they were in shock; they would not speak.
“Since then, Mohammed has started bedwetting again, and my 5-year-old daughter Ghina keeps saying, ‘Mama, people will bomb our house.’ Whenever her father goes out, she clings to him. She thinks he will not come back if she lets him go.” Mariam does not know what to tell her young children. “I cannot tell them the truth, that there is no safe place, and we cannot leave.”
With specific demeaning laws for ‘Arabs” as opposed to Jewish settlers. With walls constructed to keep out the rightful Arab occupiers of their own lands in Palestine. With the evil brutality of Israeli settlers against the people and children they have stolen their lands from ( and Israeli laws which allow that brutality to be wiped away) – with the ongoing imprisonment of children without trial (or a “Military” ( read show-trial) trial for those Arab adult and children captured or killed or tortured for their ‘misbehaviour’ against Israeli troops on their own lands -it is small wonder Palestinians remain angry against their oppressors.
One day soon perhaps, the Israeli population will begin to understand that their continued oppression of the rightful owners of Palestinian lands can only lead to the destruction of Israel. Continued fictional presentations of Arabs as lesser beings by a bigoted society only exacerbate the inevitability of that end.
Only negotiation with real truth and honesty by the Israeli entity with Palestinians, and and an acknowledgment and compensation for the dreadful wrongs committed by that entity over the last 70 years , will allow a one state solution to occur ( the only viable solution) , where Jews and Arabs can once more live harmoniously together in Palestine/Israel.
In the last few months we have seen the Trump administration reeling from one extraordinarily stupid move in foreign policy, to another.
Firstly we have the tragedy and farce of the declaration that the US will ‘accept’ Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; somewhere that all Western nations have been loathe to go (officially) whilst fully accepting and unconditionally supporting the reality of the triumphalism of the apartheid racist Israeli entity. A two state solution has, since 1948, been known to all parties as a totally non-viable option, and will never happen.
It is of course possible that the Israelis finally realise that the nation of Israel has no future in the long term , unless it grants full right of return to all Palestinian and full compensation for lands stolen since 1948 and lives destroyed… The alternative for Israel does not bear thinking about.
It is not that Trump’s declaration changes anything; what is upsetting for the West and for China and Russia, is that it makes plain that there never was a two state option- and that the United States has always been the Dishonest Broker in the ‘peace process’ .
Now we can start to face reality in Palestine- and it is not a pretty picture for the Israelis.
The ludicrous aspect of this, is that for those modern day Israelis whose ancestors came from the Levant; they are of exactly the same ethnic Semitic lineage as the ‘dirty Arabs’ they despise . We have seen more than 60 years of completely farcical “peace’ negotiations; the Israelis have never had any intention of returning any of the lands stolen by war or genocide, and both the ‘disinterested” broker and the Palestinian negotiators have always known that.
Then we have the ongoing playground bully tactics to North Korea by the United States president and his policy advisors and chiefs of staff. A country that knows full well the epic scale of barbarity the American nation is capable of; having endured American genocide in the Korean War and the continuous threats from various U.S. presidents and US generals since that time to blast them back into the stone-age. With its back against the wall, North Korea has only one option- to continue to develop enough nuclear ICBMs to substantially debilitate the American economy ( Given that of course from the American side, there will be no negotiations with North Korea until they ‘behave’ )
And then we have dear Nikki Haley the United States ambassador to the United Nations displaying bits of what are supposedly Iranian made missiles launched by the Yemenese Houthis against their Saudi aggressors ,who are currently killing thousands of Yemen citizens with cholera and millions through starvation…
But hey Nikki!- what ‘s more important? -the lives of a few million Yemenese? Or the need to destroy Iran to serve the interests of the Israeli supporters and Saudis who pay Congress and the Washington ‘think-tanks’ ? One hopes that karma is not for real:- Nikki’s future lives are not going to be exactly pretty…nor will it be in this life should true international justice be finally served.
The facade has been removed…We have seen a dramatic transition from a President able to so plausibly lie through his teeth (and win a Nobel peace prize for it), to one who seems to say (or tweet) whatever fleeting thought is on his mind at the time , but whose sole immediate directive for decision-making is money and power, rather than a longer term strategy of deceit to reach the desired same end.
It is disturbing to think that these great leaders of the ‘Free World’ are supposedly the best of humankind- a sad indictment on us all
The British High Court judges claimed that the Saudis had “sought positively to address concerns about International Humanitarian Law”…..”Saudi Arabia has been, and remains, genuinely committed to compliance with International Humanitarian Law; and there was no ‘real risk’ that there might be ‘serious violations’ of International Humanitarian Law (in its various manifestations) such that UK arm sales to Saudi Arabia should be suspended or cancelled,” the court said. “
One wonders whether judges can be indicted for perjury? Those judges would have known full well that their legal judgement was a total and outright lie. The Saudis have in fact done everything possible to exacerbate the suffering of the Yemen population over the past two years, with massive starvation and typhoid outbreaks the consequence of Saudi bombing of civilian infrastructure and a blockade of aid and food to Yemen (using British and U.S. aircraft ordinance, guidance and coordination) .
One might put this ruling alongside the eagerness of the U.K. to continue to pour millions into the Israeli military, which has for the past 60 years engaged in a war of not-so- slow motion genocide of the Palestinian people, for whom it has legal responsibilty as the occupying entity . One has only to read John Pilger’s account of the horrendous ordeal of the Palestinian people, to be shamed by our complicity in Israeli war crimes. What do these two delightful pariah states have in common?- firstly an overweaning desire for expansion and power; secondly the destruction of the Iranian state, and thirdly the use of religion to justify their expansionist goals; with the Saudis using their Wahhabist dogma to promote sectarian violence against those who do not subscribe to their bizarre version of the muslim faith, while the Zionists use the Jewish religion as a weapon against all those who defy their expansionist policies and appropriation of other people’s lands. As the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement gathers steam against the Israeli entity, having at least some friends Israel can rely on, may prove rather useful…
It is no wonder then that the long-standing secret alliance between the Saudis and Israel is now becoming visible, as political and moral pressure continues to escalate against both of them. The Saudi ‘princes’ have continued to publicly preach their opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands , whilst clandestinely supporting Israel. As the article in Investigaction notes: With some exceptions, support for the Palestinian cause in the Arab world is overwhelming. And regimes like Saudi Arabia have happily betrayed the Palestinian cause over and over again because they are aware that key to their survival is subservience to the United States, and that an alliance with Israel may boost their regional hegemony prospects. But because their legitimacy to rule is incredibly thin to say the least, royals and officials need to keep pretending in public that they are defending and fighting for the Palestinians.
As the economic and military power of Iran continues to grow, (despite the best efforts of most of the Western world; with sanctions and attempted coups and assassinations and wars), the anti-Iran hysteria within the ruling classes in these two regimes continues to escalate. For the Saudis, Iran , a largely Shi-ite theocracy ( i.e. decidely more democratic than the Saudis, but with brutal political oversight by its religious governing bodies) is a complete anathema to Saudi Wahhabist Sunni ideology, which holds that all non-Sunni muslims are in fact not muslim at all. In addition Iran’s rapid development of an internal arms industry (particularly in missile development) totally unreliant on Western imports, along with an economic structure largely independent from the West ( largely as a result of Western sanctions based on fraudulent claims of its development of nuclear weapons) has allowed it to pursue a totally independent foreign policy line- unlike the Saudis who remain completely reliant on U.K. and U.S. weaponry and therefore required to be largely compliant to U.S. and U.K military and political objectives in the Middle East.
For the Israelis, Iran remains the one major threat to its goals of a larger and all-powerful Israel; the Middle East country with the largest military (courtesy of the United States) and a nuclear arsenal . Iran continues to support fund and train Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to some degree Hamas in the Occupied Territories of Palestine itself. Both Hezbollah, with its devastating victory over the Israeli Army in Lebanon in 2006, and to a smaller degree Hamas, with its ongoing resistance to Israel’s brutal military incursions into the West Bank, have been a thorn in the side of Israeli expansionism, and hence have been deemed ‘terrorist organisations’ by the West. Hezbollah has again played a significant role against Al Qaeda (Al Nusra) and ISIS ( funded and armed by the Saudis and to some degree by Turkey, Qatar and Israel in the Syrian war, with coordination and logistics provided by British and United States intelligence agencies). And while Israel knows that Iran is not going to acquire nuclear weapons, it is fearful of the increasingly advanced home-grown missile technology that Iran posseses which now poses a significant deterrant to Israeli expansion.
Thus Israel and the Saudi regimes; both rapidly becoming pariah states, have increasingly cosied up to each other, (just as Israel did with apartheid South Africa in the 1960s) with Israel providing overt support to the Saudi war in Yemen, along with the British and Americans, on the premise that somehow/somewhere the Iranians must be supporting the Yemenese Houthi forces there. This most un-holy of alliances will inevitably be the undoing of both regimes…
As Christopher Davidson makes clear in his 2016 book ‘The Shadow Wars’; the extremist ideology of wahhabism – an ‘offshoot’ of Islam, is deeply imbedded in the Saudi regime. That sectarian brutal regime could not have come to power and retained its military domination over the Arabian peninsula, without the unconditonal support of first the British and latterly the United States. Their Wahhabist dogma states that all who don’t believe in their version of Islam are heretics and should be forcibly converted or put to death.
This dogma is the foundation of Al Qaeda and ISIS ; and these groups, along with fanatical wahhabist ideology promoted in many Saudi funded Sunni mosques around the world, has been actively promoted by those in power in Riyadh since they were effectively installed by the British in the First World War to counter the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s reach..
As Davidson meticulously notes in his book, the support of the British and then the Americans for this fanatical regime, has never wavered; even after the 9/11 terror attack and now the genocide occuring in Yemen. The ongoing U.S. and British support for wahhabist terror to further Western agendas can be taken as a given.
As Human Rights Watch notes (2017) Saudi Arabia does not tolerate public worship by adherents of religions other than Islam and systematically discriminates against Muslim religious minorities, notably Twelver Shia and Ismailis, including in public education, the justice system, religious freedom, and employment. Government-affiliated religious authorities continued to disparage Shia Islam in public statements and documents.
And now we see a Saudi attempt to completely eliminate any Shia influence within the ‘kingdom’ in their ongoing brutal crackdown of the minority Shia population in Awamiya on the Arabian peninsula.
Because of the huge amounts of money flowing from the Saudis into Washington and other Western ‘think-tanks’ ( ie propaganda outlets) , both Western media mainstream media and the Washington and London ‘intelligence’ communities are largely uncritical of this despotic regime and its outpourings of hatred and violence to any Muslims and other Middle Eastern religions who do not espouse their Wahhabist ideology. As long as the Wahhabists remain useful in the cause of eliminating any threats to Israel, countering an independent Iran or eliminating other Middle Eastern states critical of the United States or the United Kingdom- then that is all good!- regardless of the loss of lives or the devastation left behind…The destruction of the Shi-ite state of Iran is a priority of both the Saudis, Israel, as well as the U.S. and U.K. The re-appropriation of Iranian assets and oil by Western interests is looked upon longingly.
Saudi Arabia funds many wahhabist sect mosques throughout the Western world; whose aim is to preach hate and sectarian discord and promote the killing of others who do not accept their extremist views. Given that this sectarian dialogue is visible open and blatant, how is it that those western mosques have not been closed and the Saudi funnelling of money towards Wahhabists has not been blocked?
Or is this ‘minor’ irritant of localised terrorism and hate in Western states ‘worth it’, when the majority of the mosques’ gullible and disenfranchised indoctrinated young adherents can be shunted off to the Middle East with the assistance of Western intelligence agencies, so that Shi-ite or non secular non U.S. aligned states can be destroyed?
We have reached a rather surrealist situation where the previously hidden long term ‘agreement’ to divide the Middle East according to their respective spheres of influence between Israel and Saudi Arabia has now become completely visible, and now means that ISIS has needed to apologise to Israel for their unintended attack on Israeli ‘Defence’ forces. For many Arabs this apology is a clear signal of the betrayal by the Saudis of the Palestinians and their 60 year brutal occupation of Palestine by Israel military forces. Taken in conjunction with their genocidal war against the impoverished Yemen people by massive Saudi military forces, and with the total support of the U.K. and U.S., Saudi credibility has reached an all time low amongst Arab populations across the Middle East.
Once can only hope that the end of the brutal ‘reign’ of the House of Saud is nigh.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar have put huge resources, not only into funding and paying for anti-Shiite Salafist soldiers in Syria, but also into resourcing a vast media campaign to attack Iran and the IRGC for its role in supporting the Assad regime.
With the imminent defeat of the Saudi funded jihadists in Aleppo, the Saudis are facing a huge hit to their morale and international standing- especially when taken alongside their disastrous war in Yemen, which increasingly is seen to be a humanitarian human rights genocidal campaign against the Yemen people. The anti-Iran campaign now means that it will be considered internationally that Iran has in effect, defeated the Saudis in Syria. This is however, not the true state of affairs; while Iran’s IRGC has played a significant role in Syria over the past two years, their role does not appear to have been a game changer- despite the Iranian hype about the famed General Suleiman and his soldiers.
With the likely defeat of all opposition forces in Eastern Aleppo in the next few weeks, those 25,000 battle-hardened SAA (Syrian Government) soldiers in action there can now be deployed elsewhere in Syria. This re-deployment will likely result in the final defeat of the majority of forces aligned with the Saudis and Qataris and trained by Western governments in the Jordanian ‘rebel’ camps. The “King’ of Jordan will now have to make some considerable contortions in order to ‘make up’ with Assad – but it’s quite possible that those jihadis escaping back over the Jordanian border will now make a serious attempt to overthrow another of the West’s pawns in the Middle East. Additionally, those rebels of European origin, which Western intelligence agencies have been facilitating into Syria for the past five years, are also likely to return to their native European countries bringing their carefully honed military skills and sectarian hatreds with them.
Should the Assad regime succeed in pacifying the majority of Syria , the huge resources put into destabilising Syria by the George Soros business empire, the French, the U.K., Turkey and the U.S., means that their corporate intent to profit from re-building the Syria they have destroyed, will have come to nothing. Chinese and Russian businesses are now well placed to do that.
And Saudi Arabia, has by its attempts to play Iran as the key evil agent in Syria , almost literally, shot itself in the foot- with a consequence that the whole Saudi regime is now likely to go gangrenous in a relatively short space of time. No wonder the UK is panicking in its absurd manipulation of MSM media coverage of the Syrian war! The loss of the Saudi ‘kingdom’ to UK control and arms sales, would be a catastrophic loss for those who hold the puppet-strings of power in Whitehall and ‘The City’. Should the Qatari regime also be brought down in the aftermath of a SAA victory, the implications for Western influence in the Middle East will be huge.
Given that Egypt now appears to be wavering towards supporting the Assad regime and the Russians, there are serious international re-alignments happening. Even the wily but somewhat deranged President Erdogan of Turkey is admitting that his long-term interests no longer lie with being antagonistic to Russia – particularly if the oil pipeline from Russia to Europe can run through his backyard!
Early prognostications were that the EU and US sanctions against Russia, (ostensibly for their Crimean ‘invasion’) would cripple the Russian economy. With the shift of economic focus of Russia towards the East and China’s One Belt Road, the impacts of the sanctions have been somewhat reduced, and the medium term economic outlook for Russia now looks considerably more rosy than even the worst dreams of U.S. neocons .
For the Chinese, the increasing hysteria coming from the US about China’s growing power, economically and militarily, is now being mitigated by the rapid development of the ‘One Belt Road’ This new high-speed overland trade route to Russia and the West means that China will, in the near future, be somewhat insulated from the increasing risks of Western warships blockading its trade routes to the outside world. Bizarrely the U.K. government in London is now also sending its aging warships to the South China Sea (shades of the ‘Opium Wars’). Commercial engagement in a revitalised Syria is just one part the Chinese are likely to play in their resurgent role in the Middle East.
In short, the battle for Aleppo is one symptom of the shifting power alignments in the world. A victory for Assad and his allies implies a significant change in the ways of the world for the medium to long term.
The blog heading is one of Mark Twain’s quotes. But here is a much better one from Mr Clemens.
Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people’s countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood of his hands and works for “the universal brotherhood of man”- with his mouth. – “The Lowest Animal”- Mark Twain
Today, in my little part of the world; it is once again Anzac Day, originally commemorated to mark the bloody failure of the British Empire’s coordinated attack on Turkish positions in the Dardanelles at Gallipoli in World War One, but now, ( supposedly) it ‘acknowledges the sacrifice of all those who have died in warfare, and the contribution and suffering of all those who have served.” Strangely however this commemoration of all who have died in wars is marked by artillery salutes, marching uniformed men and much fanfare about this country’s patriotism. We are encouraged to believe that Anzac Day now promotes a sense of unity, perhaps more effectively than any other day on the national calendar. People whose politics, beliefs and aspirations are widely different can nevertheless share a genuine sorrow at the loss of so many lives in war, and a real respect for those who have endured warfare on behalf of the country we live in. (New Zealand Government).
I for one, am appalled that the majority consensus in New Zealand appears to be that ‘plucky little New Zealand’ became a real country with its own identity, and not just a member of the British Empire, by maiming and killing its way through a series of foreign “adventures”. The one possible exception to this catastrophic jingoistic litany of murder and mayhem, is New Zealand’s very real contribution to the war against Nazi Germany and Japan during the Second World War, when a New Zealand invasion by the Japanese Imperial Army was a high probability at one point.
Every other war we have fought, we have fought at the behest of others- from the genocide inflicted on the Boers during the Boer Wars as part of the British Imperial Army’s need to maintain control of South African assets, the First World War’s bizarre clash of European monarchies , the staggering level of genocide inflicted on Koreans by the “Allies’ (including New Zealand naval bombardment of civilian areas) during the Korean War, our implicit involvement in American genocide in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, our explicit connection to rendering of Afghan suspects to U.S. torture centres in Afghanistan, and our ongoing complicity in the Five Eyes intelligence project, which currently serves American and U.K. interests in promoting terrorism around the world and destroying human rights.
All in all, it is not a record I for one am proud of. Our ongoing subservience to the paranoid and psychopathic American war machine and its business interests, serves no-one’s interests on this planet, other than a few crazed right wing American idealogues and the military/industrial complex.
Despite successive New Zealand governments’ posturings that we are now a sovereign nation because of Anzac Day, when are we truly going to be a proud and independent nation who stands in truth for peace and international justice?
New Antarctica 