(Reuters) – The Iraqi soldier says he abandoned the army last week in despair. And while he still plans to fight he will not rejoin the unit he deserted in the western city of Ramadi.
Instead, he wants to sign up as a volunteer, alongside tens of thousands of others, to help defend Shi’ite shrines against Sunni insurgents who have swept the country’s north and west and who he believes now threaten his sect.
Clashes in the mixed Muslim-Christian city, usually last for at least four hours every night and in recent days have pushed Palestinian Authority police to appear. When they do, however, they are able to do very little and stand armed but largely impotent against young men wielding rocks. This is in sharp contrast to the Israelis who have moved increasingly from utilising tear gas and rubber-coated-steel-bullets, to instead shooting off deadly live ammunition. In recent days, at least 20 protestors have been shot with live fire, mostly in the feet and legs.
Hamas has embraced a genocidal mission based in the theft of religious precepts and related successionary ambition. It’s very flattering to itself, and while it has gotten fat and built mansions on skimming funds and collecting tunnel tolls and various forms of taxation, it has demonstrated its love of people by making sure to put noncombatants between its operations and “blast and battle”.
The New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left (see “International Solidarity Movement” for example) has been getting money from somewhere and puffing itself up for just this kind of glorious man-the-barricades moment. It too doesn’t offer much beyond the grandstanding.
As I have read that Allah favors those who restrain themselves, I may do just that and refrain a while from posting my own opinion from elsewhere, which practice has just gotten weird.
I have a blog, for pete’s sake!
My prayers to Gaza noncombatants, non-Hamas residents who have asked for jobs, built businesses, taken care of their homes, and lived peacefully and would go on doing so were it not for the fire starters among them who literally bring war into their homes.
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Warning tactics used by the Israel Defense Forces to apparently avoid civilian casualties in Gaza have been captured on camera. In a video published on LiveLeak, an IDF aircraft fires a loud, nonlethal bomb on a building to alert residents that they’re in the area of a target, allowing them to leave quickly.
. . . as Israel has stepped up its efforts to try and spare civilians even as it seeks to silence the terrorist fire, Hamas has also increased its efforts to ensure that as many inhabitants of Gaza as possible are hurt in the fighting.
Smuggled Syrian-made rockets based on a Chinese design have boosted Hamas’ 10,000-strong arsenal which is dominated by crude homemade devices, officials and experts say.
A surface-to-surface weapon that struck the coastal town Hadera – 30 miles north of Tel Aviv and 70 miles from the Gaza Strip – is an “M-302 type rocket” similar to a shipment of rockets Israel intercepted at sea in March, the Israeli Defense Forces said Wednesday.
Hamas faces an unprecedented economic and political crisis. The Egyptian government regards it as an enemy, has clamped down on smuggling activity, and kept the Rafah border crossing mostly closed. It has lost its Syrian base and Iranian support as a result of the Syrian civil war. Now its authority is weakening inside Gaza: it is on the point of bankruptcy and has been challenged by jihadist groups buoyed up by the success of Isis.
Hate, mindless hate, manipulated, ignorant, pointless would seem to course through East Jerusalem at the moment.
While police continue to investigate the murder of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, rioting crowds have erupted in East Jerusalem on the assumption — no evidence — that the crime must relate directly to revenge associated with the murder of three Israeli teens.
Posted to YouTube yesterday:
By AFP yesterday:
Posted to YouTube about an hour ago.
The basis: martyrdom, for the sake of martyrdom.
Without investigation, without process in the courts, the explanations for the murder are many, including a Palestinian false-flag operation to provoke and condone today’s rioting.
Prove it’s not so.
Prove the Palestinians now rioting are not being played into doing just that by their own handlers.
But it is obvious that this self-policing isn’t what floats the boat of Muslims politically. There’ll be the occasional good statement, but if, say, Israel bombs Gaza, then suddenly social media will fill up with Islamic outrage, careful commentators will become passionate, marchers will hit the streets. Why is there no Muslim Peace Movement campaigning for an end to violence in Muslim countries, where the victims are Muslims and the perpetrators are Muslims? Where it might make the most difference.
I posted this for click-through to the Aaronovitch op-ed, but thought to update with the note there is most certainly a core global new intelligentsia campaigning for peace and against Islamic Jihad, and it is doing so — and has been doing so — with active Muslim participation in every facet.
Unfortunately, a socially networked “new global intelligentsia” doth not a political movement nor party make.
However, to suggest there is “no Muslim Peace Movement” is wrong.
Perhaps between Islamic Humanist efforts on personal pages and in forums across Facebook, my main hangout, they’re just not seen in aggregate.
A week before the vote just 41 percent of Crimeans wanted their land to be a part of Russia, yet the returns came back showing 96.6 pecent approval. The electoral commission, such as it is, released numbers indicating 474,137 people voted in the port city of Sevastopol, which would be 123 percent of the registered population there.
Over the weekend about 5,000 pro-Russian protesters roamed central Donetsk in eastern Ukraine smashing doors and windows and forcing entry to government buildings.
By late Monday afternoon, Crimea’s leaders had stripped all references to Ukraine from the government’s website and made it clear that Ukrainian institutions, assets and state agencies in the peninsula now belonged to the Republic of Crimea.
I’ve doubts about the “long way around” — appeals for “diplomatic measures”, years to decades of protracted hot air (“negotiations”), the tolerance, first, then institutionalization of barbaric Russian imperial expansion.
Dictators are machines without brakes: they don’t stop on their own as self-restraint would seem not to become them.
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The main alarming uncertainty of this day is the fate of the Ukrainian military in Crimea. They are being presented with ultimatums and coerced into betrayal, but they keep standing firm. But their future is unknown, which is particularly frightening.
. . .
The good news:
1. The Ukrainian authorities finally announced partial mobilization. It came as a response both to the Crimean “referendum” and to the Moscow-provoked events in the Southeast of Ukraine.
Mobilization will simultaneously strengthen two armed formations with considerably different tasks – namely, the army and the National Guard. The former would be used to fight the enemy’s regular army, and the latter, to destroy gangs. This means that Kyiv is demonstrating that it’s preparing for all possible operations of Moscow, be it an armed invasion or the “Crimean scenario” (actions of the so-called “self-defense” supported by mysterious “little green men”). Such foresight on the part of Kyiv is reassuring.
The revolutionary government in Kiev knows well Russian duplicity, and, perhaps, it is learning about the relationship between post-WWII, post-Hitler European comfortableness, productivity, and to this date largely unchallenged security.
Apart from the infiltration of Islamic Jihad within overall Muslim migration, Europe has seen nothing like an old fashioned 19th Century military invasion — but it would seem its radars detect something like it now.
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As anger at the corrupt government expands through Russian society, the experience of Ukrainian revolutionaries could prove invaluable. It revealed that demonstrations led by activists willing to risk their lives can topple a regime that looks impregnable. Ukraine’s success might encourage similar attempts to unseat a corrupt Russian regime.
STUTTGART, Germany — NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove asserted Tuesday that soldiers surrounding Ukrainian bases in Crimea are Russian forces, dismissing accounts that the troops are pro-Russia local militia.
“After extensive review of multiple information sources, we believe these are Russian military forces acting on clear orders to undermine Ukraine forces in Crimea,” Breedlove wrote in his blog, From the Cockpit.
It’s hard to believe that it has been a quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan began to dismantle the ideological wall that divided Europe. Harder still to believe that American politicians, Right and Left, are trying to resuscitate the Cold War — or something hotter. Recent events in the Ukraine seem to be giving the citizens of Europe and America hot flashes of deja-vu.
As with the Islamic Small Wars, of which Putin has made himself a part in the middle east’s unholy troika that is Putin-Assad-Khamenei, the European Theater with the curtain coming up on the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine revolves around the simplest of democratic open society concepts: integrity.
Putin, who appears to fit well the concept that is “malignant narcissist”, invests in deceits and lies, in under-the-table (“behind the curtains”) dealing, in control of entire information atmospheres. In the post-Soviet, post-KGB era, the ideology may have been thrown out the window but not the unbridled urge for absolute control and power over all others (and for the purpose of, yawn, obtaining unlimited “narcissistic supply”).
Today’s post-KGB FSB employs more staff per capita than the KGB; the media of Glasnost has returned to “glass? No!” as regards independence and rendering key elements within the state transparent.
Putin’s Russia is no more a benign dictatorship than would be a pirate’s cove dominating the Caribbean — or, look to that mansion in Marbella, Gibraltar.
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MOSCOW —Russia effectively absorbed Crimea Tuesday afternoon, moments after President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia has no designs on any other parts of Ukraine.
As Russia and the rest of the world move ever closer to a cold war footing over Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised Crimean invasion, an important dimension of this conflict has received scant coverage, in both Western and Russian media: how do Russian citizens feel about this escalating conflict?
Now, as Vladimir Putin sends troops into Crimea and hints at following up on this cruel gambit with further moves into eastern Ukraine, he is, step by step, turning back the clock on information. It is a move of self-protection. The latest step came on Wednesday, with the announcement that Galina Timchenko, the longtime and much admired editor of the news site Lenta.ru, has been fired, and replaced by Alexei Goreslavsky, the former editor of Vzglyad.ru, a site that is far more sympathetic to the Kremlin.
THE outcome of the “referendum” in Crimea was never in doubt. With Russian troops occupying the peninsula and anyone who does not want to join Russia staying away from the bogus procedure, the 97% vote in favour of becoming part of Russia is not a surprise.
The government in Kiev has accused Moscow of deliberately stirring up tensions in the east by bringing in professional activists and provocateurs from across the border. In a series of ominous statements, Russia’s foreign ministry has said it may be forced to act to “protect” ethnic Russians – an expression that appears to provide a rationale for future military incursions.
The Kremlin describes last month’s uprising in next-door Ukraine as an illegitimate fascist coup. It says dark rightwing forces have taken over the government, forcing Moscow to “protect” Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority . . . With Ukraine on the brink of invasion and division, most people in Kiev blame the country’s troubles on the former president. “This is Yanukovych’s fault,” Zhenia, a pensioner, said, surveying the battleground in Institutska Street, where many were gunned down. She was crying.
Links between Yanukovych, the Party of Regions and crime have been long known to policymakers as seen in U.S. cables from Kiev available through WikiLeaks.
At least 18 Party of Regions deputies have criminal ties, according to Hennadiy Moskal, deputy head of Parliament’s Committee on Organized Crime and Corruption.
When one wants something one shouldn’t have, when one wishes to hide something with which one doesn’t wish to be associated, one may resort to lying but not always, much less inevitably, erase the trail.
In fact, the trail follows in the kept anger of those wronged by criminal behavior, in the bent verdicts and forged documents attending sophisticated theft, or, in Yanukovych’s case, which journal keeping may be likened to the records of plunder and murder maintained by benumbed Nazi officials, the diary of bribes and of breathtaking sums acquired and spent across multiple estates and headier symbols of wealth.
A liberal socialist myself, somewhat, I’d nonetheless offer the problem of whether men shouldn’t be wealthy, filthy rich, swimming in moolah — I think private wealth is great but legally obtained, earned or inherited for a generation or two.
The truth is simple: I’d rather the rich man were the audited owner of a Fortune 500 company than a dumb mafia boss or vicious — and equally vacuous — pirate.
Stalin engineered the famine to rid himself of a stubborn enemy. Ukrainians had fought for their independence during the Russian Revolution, and for a short time, they had beaten back the Reds. What’s more, Ukraine, being the “bread basket of Europe,” had a rich and ancient culture of farmers, who wanted to hold on to their language, their land and their identity. As a civilization, Ukraine is a thousand years older than Moscow. For Stalin, as for Putin today, this would be a very hard back to break.
The combination of military adventurism and domestic crackdown is not a well-advised recipe for stabilizing the regime. This Saturday’s planned march in downtown Moscow against the war on Ukraine will now be joined by people outraged at the imposition of censorship. Putin’s Kremlin, not opposition leaders, remains the best recruiter for the Russian protest movement.
The Israeli military said a total of four rockets were fired Thursday from Gaza. Israeli officials previously refused to confirm any cease-fire deal was in place.
“Our mujahedeen responded to the Zionist aggression by firing tens of rockets,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement to the BBC.
“The rockets fired today came in response to the occupation aggression against us and does not mean the collapse of the ceasefire agreement [with Israel],” it said.
End the brutal and senseless preoccupation with the Jews!
Because impotence and obsession are what Hamas and companies are all about: if only Israel didn’t exist; if only the Jews disappeared (after being plundered — let’s not be in too much of a hurry about this); if only the “occupation aggression” did not include trade throughput, medical assistance, basic utilities deliveries, employment, and so on, then the Arab mind (of the Islamic Jihad) might find itself at peace.
If as much was true then, it’s certainly true now. Hamas may value its post-Cast Lead (2009) truce with Israel, but it evidently cannot contain either itself or less encumbered — for being less governmental — Islamic Jihad movements on its own block.
Last night, Israel returned like fire in response to yesterday’s rocket and mortar barrage (the latest news reports four more rockets fired from Gaza today). That tit-for-tat is an old show: curtain up, please, on the mindlessness, the essential empty thoughtlessness, of Islamic Jihad and the whole bogus mission that has proved convenient for shielding the destruction of other cultures and the theft of wealth (for Gaza, start with the UNRWA annual contribution intended to secure some benefits in qualities of living, and then move swiftly on to Arafat and funds never accounted).
Because of what it really represents, because of what it does to its own constituents and others, because of its self-serving and grandiose delusions, Hamas finds itself in trouble today.
An Egyptian court ruled on March 4 to forbid all activities in Egypt by Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas. The court ruling cuts off all official Hamas-Egyptian ties and closes all Hamas offices and infrastructure within Egypt.
It would appear that when it comes to attacks against Israel, which it falls to Hamas to police, Hamas has found itself between a fiercely active and impossibly passive place: it either can’t or won’t stand up to or stall “Gaza’s secretive jihadist groups”; it won’t itself step out from beneath the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella; it won’t step forward to make peace with the Jewish State of Israel but it will allow itself to be cajoled and dragged into fairly begging Israel for incursion and real occupation on the turf it was supposed to govern (x suspect election followed by civil war with Fatah) independently.
In fact, Hamas has gotten itself so into trouble, so isolated between worlds, so caught between al-Qaeda, the Ayatollah, Egypt, and Israel, that I would not be surprised were it to look to the IDF to defend its interests from the local competitors that have infiltrated its writ and compromised whatever integrity and self-possession it once may have had.
Salafi groups have been suspected in the bombings of Internet cafes and music stores, intimidation of Gaza’s small Christian community, the kidnapping of a BBC journalist in 2007 and more recently, the death of an Italian activist in 2011. Salafi groups are also believed to cooperate with militants in the neighboring Sinai Peninsula in Egypt to attack Egyptian and Israeli targets.
Gaza’s Salafis support al-Qaida’s campaign of global jihad, but are not believed to have direct links with the global terror network. In contrast, Hamas says its struggle is solely against Israel.
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