31 Sunday Aug 2014
I cannot vet field videos from the Ukraine conflict but may note that they’re popping online rapidly from wherever there has been activity. Of course, people post as today’s video yesterday’s destroyed bridge. 😦
Related:
http://news.sky.com/story/1327779/ukraine-navy-vessel-attacked-says-kiev-military – 8/31/2014.
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31 Sunday Aug 2014
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Using the UK as a case study, Ms. Phillips addressed the prejudiced attitudes towards Israel from both Muslims and left-wingers and so-called liberals before criticizing the UK Jewish community for failing to respond adequately and preferring to keep their heads down.
She also criticized Israel’s failure “to grasp that information is a strategy of war on the battleground of the mind, and a strategy that has been used to enormous effect against Israel, and against which it doesn’t even seem to know that it is fighting.”
http://honestreporting.com/melanie-phillips-calls-for-new-strategy-to-present-israels-case/ – 8/31/2014.
31 Sunday Aug 2014
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“Rather than falsely accusing Israel,” the letter continued, “one might have expected that as the executive head of the UN, you would have admitted responsibility of the UN for such abuse of its facilities, and instituted a thorough inquiry as to how and why UNRWA facilities were placed at the disposal of the Hamas terror organization, how and why the UN officials responsible for such facilities permitted this situation to occur, and why those rockets and other weapons that were discovered in such facilities were transferred to Hamas, for their continued use against Israel’s citizens.
“In permitting the storage of weapons, and in transferring such weapons into the hands of Hamas,” the letter asserted, “the UN has in fact permitted itself to become accessory to the commission of war crimes.”
http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/20841/unrwa-aiding-terrorism/#MxaSrOKRGtDwAy43.99 – 8/31/2014.
The above passage has been added to the piece on this blog titled “United Nazis Workers Relief Agency (UNRWA)”, which appears to have been abused by Hamafia and Associates, and that to allowing its budget and facilities to abet the terrorist organization with its assaults against Israelis and, in essence by way of its tactic of putting noncombatants and civilian assets directly in the line of fire, Gazans as well.
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30 Saturday Aug 2014
Scrolling news for Donetsk at ostro.org, 8/30/2014/1833 ET.
“The mindset of war must change,” Mr Bush said on Wednesday. “It is a different type of battlefield. It is a different type of war.” The battles, he said, “will be fought visibly sometimes, and sometimes we’ll never see what may be taking place”.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september1113 – 9/21/2001.
Thirteen years and less than 11 months later, it is turning out that the full suite of contemporary wars are “a different type of war”.
Syria’s frustrated revolt cum civil war has turned out a battle between autocratic personalities, or a frankly whacked out dictator against equally savage Islamists, in large part, and the country and its people be damned, which they have been.
Ukraine’s revolt against Russomafia don Yanukovych played to the script but — this as infant governments often do — invited obvious nibbling by the colonel president emperor chief in Moscow, who also appears to have programmatically returned the once modern RT to old Pravda days (while also creating an FSB internal security service more populated per Russian than the old KGB), and today we’re almost back to “conventional war”, except that learning about the Severtsky Donets River, which first entailed learning about its existence, I have well out in the provinces outside of Washington, D.C., broadband, Google Maps, some kind of translator, and instant access to Russian language publications online.
This “different type of war” has created a different type of war tourism, also commentary, and reportage.
Where are we going?
More toward the despotic than democratic, I would say given that there are simply more governments internally operating along feudal rather than modern democratic lines, and these may have recognized in one another — as with the dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei, an axis in conflict if ever there was — mutual interest in the defense of political absolutism.
Last week, in what strikes me as an echo of Putin-Medvedev, former Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan became President Erdogan in the presence of a cooperating Prime Minister Davutoglu. Such personalities would seem other than get-along, compromise, facilitate, and cooperate kind of guys. They’re more “or else!” in the way of malignant narcissists elsewhere and, unfortunately, everywhere.
The shades and shadows of the former Soviet Union may be living on in Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The deception and lying on the part of the Kremlin, which denied a military presence in Ukraine up to the moment (and beyond) in which the same became implausible, and since I have read that “Novosvitlivka”, about an hour west of the Severtsky Donets River that serves as a border between Russia and Ukraine, has been flattened by tanks — every house shot at — I should hope the “implausible denial” stage has been passed and Russia’s Putin may admit plainly, but with his customary charm, to playing at war — and not just war as usual, but his own “different kind of war”.
While that different kind of war takes shape, this perhaps different kind of writer will be watching it with you . . . on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (perhaps), the World Wide Web (where else?), and across numerous foreign publications either in English or roughly translated to it.
We’re getting close to real-time reportage too, i.e., from battlefield to me to you inside of 30 minutes. The big guys get to do that. We little guys still get to figure it out.
http://www.ostro.org/donetsk/culture/articles/221448/ – 7/28/2011: “Seversky Donets, Ukraine and Russia will clean together.”
Novosvitlivka, Luhanski Oblast, Ukraine, and Russian Border:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/08/29/turkey-new-prime-minister-davutoglu-announces-government/ – 8/29/2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september1113 – 9/21/2001.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-27/how-team-ukrainian-journalists-rescued-documents-yanukovych-s-house – 2/27/2014.
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29 Friday Aug 2014
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“As the dust clears from the conflict I’m sure many people in Gaza will be asking why did Hamas reject a month ago what it accepted today, and if it had accepted then what it accepted now, how much bloodshed could have been avoided.”
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/08/29/hamas_needlessly_prolonged_gaza_war_says_abbas.html – 8/29/2014.
29 Friday Aug 2014
Colonel President Emperor Putin has placed self-propelled artillery in several locations around Ukraine’s border, and with paratroopers, among other methods, he has probed Ukraine’s and NATO’s defense reflexes. Probably, he has found the knees weak in response to and by comparison with his ambitions.
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As I type: Russia has launched its invasion of Ukraine beyond question.
Related:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28966679
Although most world leaders have not actually come out and said so, Ukraine is being invaded. That’s according to Ukrainian politicians and military officials, NATO representatives, and, privately, officials in Washington.
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/08/invasion-ukraine-maps-satellite-photos-and-video/92813/ – 8/29/2014.
Mr Putin does the big lies, while his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, trudges on a treadmill of deception that never stops. He was labouring along as usual yesterday, dismissing reports that Russian regular troops were fighting in Ukraine as “conjectures”. Not once, he continued in his po-faced way, “have any facts been presented to us”. Why Europe and America have to some extent gone along with this chicanery is not that mysterious.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/29/guardian-view-on-russian-incursions-ukraine – 8/29/2014.
The presence of Russian military personnel in Ukraine is now beyond dispute, everywhere except in Russia. On Thursday, NATO released satellite imagery of Russian combat troops operating inside Ukraine’s borders, prompting mild international expressions of concern about the deteriorating situation. Russian paratroopers have been filmed discussing their operations in Ukraine. In a press conference on Wednesday, captured Russian soldiers said they entered Ukrainian territory “in convoys. Not on the roads but through the fields.”
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119260/russias-invasion-ukraine-evidence-convincing-putin-denies
I may suggest this: the dictators Putin, Putin-Assad-Khamenei, Putin (Yanukovich yesterday, perhaps Orban tomorrow) do not come equipped with off switches or reverse gears: they will run their interior programs and scripts forward until impeded, stopped, reversed, and destroyed while their enterprises are transformed.
If enabled forward, their programs will end in the control and subjugation of others and that too, as with ISIS, will end in the destruction of humanity with unbridled sadism.
It may not look so bad at first, but cast a glance at Syria with Sochi by its side: tell me what you see.
(Russia pledged $10 million for Syrian humanitarian relief during the run up to the Olympic Games; Putin then spent $51 billion on the games).
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said that Crimea is “indispensable to Russia,” reminding listeners that “Russia is one of the most powerful nuclear nations.”
“This is a reality, not just words,” Putin said.
http://mashable.com/2014/08/29/putin-crimea-ukraine-invasion/ – 8/29/2014.
” . . . regulars . . . Russian troops with Russian weapons . . .” (CNN, YT poster James Nguyen – 8/29/2014).
Ukraine’s president today declared that a “Russian invasion” of his country was underway and the United Nations’ Security Council called an emergency session to discuss the latest crisis involving allegations of Russia’s overt support for Ukrainian rebels.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-invasion-ukraine-prompts-emergency-meeting/story?id=25156827 – 8/29/2014.
“There is no doubt that this is not a homegrown, indigenous uprising in eastern Ukraine. The separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia,” Obama said.
Russian actions will be a main topic for the summit of NATO leaders next week in Wales, Obama said.
For the bully, social interaction is all about proving himself a winner by making other people feel that they are the losers.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/vladimir-putin-narcissist/360544/ – 4/15/2014.
“Russia doesn’t make anything,” Mr. Obama went on. “Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow for opportunities. The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The population is shrinking.”
Levada polls conducted in the second week of March show just how effective the state propaganda machine has been: A majority of Russians believe that Ukraine has no legitimate government, that Russian speakers in Ukraine are in danger and that blame for the crisis in Crimea lies squarely with Ukrainian nationalists. Only 6 percent of Russians are “definitely opposed” to a military invasion of Ukraine.
Despite the fact that 70% of respondents admit that they do not understand, do not understand the essence of the processes taking place in Ukraine, the majority (63%) believe that “the federal Russian media as a whole or for the most part objective coverage of events taking place in Ukraine or the Crimea.
http://www.levada.ru/13-03-2014/situatsiya-v-ukraine-i-v-krymu – 3/13/2014.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-propelled_artillery
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)61424-0/fulltext – 8/30/2014 – “Ukraine: health workers fear for their safety”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28978699 – “Ukraine to seek NATO membership, says PM Yatsenyuk. – 8/29/2014.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/03/11/inside-mind-vladimir-putin-russian-president-no-simple-thug/ – 3/11/2014.
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28 Thursday Aug 2014
But this “cultural revolution” was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab’s Jacobin-like hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him — hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html – 8/27/2014.
28 Thursday Aug 2014
Kasim Hafeez understands hate. Growing up with a father who believed “Hitler was a great man whose one mistake was that he did not kill enough Jews,” the British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent has experienced firsthand how an innocent child becomes an Islamist dedicated to the death and destruction of those who are different.
Hafeez, who intended to become a Jihadist, was “saved” after reading The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz and then taking a trip to the Jewish State to justify his life by proving the Harvard professor wrong.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/08/20/Muslim-works-with-Jews-to-save-Christians-in-the-Middle-East/ – 8/20/2014.
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