These days in our country, news is not good: to be a communist, to be a Christian (especially a Moslem converted to Christianity), to be a Zoroastrian or a Jew, to be a liberal or a secular … they are all castaway.
Even Moslems don’t have much security. The only accepted Moslems are those who are not reformist, not followers of Interuniversalism, not a Gonabadi Sufi, not an independent journalist, not a Moslem wanting separation of religion and politics, not an independent lawyer, and not anyone critical of state policies…
Indeed, with these designations, is there any Iranian who is safe from being detained for sure?
Quite possibly, the rejection of the bannered anti-Semitism of the piratical bastards who have infantilized, intellectually poisoned, suffocated and subjugated millions of their own constituents by lying — by way of deception and pandering — and by applying mafia methods in service to their own breathtaking criminal aggrandizement.
The world’s unrelenting focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an injustice to tens of millions of victims of tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East. As we speak, Yazidis, Bahai, Kurds, Christians and Muslims are being executed and expelled by radical extremists at a rate of 1,000 people per month.
How many resolutions did you pass last week to address this crisis?
I telegraph online impression via schematics like “mouth –> ear –> mind –> heart system” to get a much larger constellation in thought down to something almost memorable.
🙂
Nonetheless, reduction goes only so far: “overviewing” picks up some of the slack, which is often what happens here, and then, well, one must turn off the computer in favor of lengthier reading, which lately for me has been Pacepa & Rychlak’s Disinformation, an account of KGB’s accomplishments in the black arts accompanying libel, misdirection, misguidance, slander, and — I say this with “malignant narcissism” in mind — theatrical production.
Writing for The Guardian, Simon Tisdale recently commented on Putin and “The New Cold War” (11/19/2014) — “Last weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, showed just how raw nerves have become – over Ukraine and, more broadly, over what the west has come to see as a pattern of expansionist, confrontational and often illegal behaviour by the Putin regime . . . ” — but perhaps not (yet) as aggression on two fronts.
In fact, my sources suggest that PFLP representatives met with Mikhail Bogdanov, the Russian President’s Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister, earlier in November (possibly Sunday, November 2, 2014) and discussed, among other things, S300 missile shipments placed on hold in 2013.
“I suggested to Foreign Minister Lavrov that we intensify intelligence cooperation with respect to ISIL and other counter-terrorism challenges of the region and we agreed to do so,” Kerry said just after the meeting, using an alternative name for IS jihadists.
As Sarajevo would ultimately like to join NATO and the European Union, they understand that every few years the Americans and the EU will put pressure on them to reduce their ties to Iran, particularly to its intelligence services. A sort of Balkan kabuki theater inevitably follows, with promises by the SDA to crack down hard, this time. A few Iranian “diplomats” are discreetly asked to leave the country, some of the more overt Iranian intelligence fronts in Bosnia shut their doors, usually only temporarily, and the Americans and Europeans are bought off for a couple years. And the Iranians remain.
It is believed that MOIS cooperates with other intelligence agencies. One of these agencies is the Russian SVR, the KGB’s replacement. Despite the two agencies’ dissimilar doctrines and the complicated relationship between Iran and Russia in the past, they managed to cooperate in the 1990s, based not only on their intention of limiting U.S. political clout in Central Asia but also on their mutual efforts to stifle prospective ethnic turbulence. The SVR trained not only hundreds of Iranian agents but also numerous Russian agents inside Iran to equip Iranian intelligence with signals equipment in their headquarters compound. It is unclear whether this relationship is ongoing and whether the two intelligence agencies continue to cooperate.
From page 41 of the above cited piece: “Bin Laden’s phone records, obtained by U.S. investigators working on the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, show that 10 percent of phone calls made by Bin Laden and his lieutenants were to Iran.”
Khamenei, South America
The Mexican law student was surprised by how easy it was to get into Iran two years ago. By merely asking questions about Islam at a party, he managed to pique the interest of Iran’s top diplomat in Mexico. Months later, he had a plane ticket and a scholarship to a mysterious school in Iran as a guest of the Islamic Republic.
Next came the start of classes and a second surprise: There were dozens of others just like him.
While Iranian South American “feed and seed” programs may be continuing, the gist of a 2014 Congressional Research Service summary (by Mark P. Sullivan and June S. Beittel) suggests Khamenei’s regime may not be making as much progress as it would like. Rather than excerpt, I’ll leave it to the reader to look-see on this document: Latin America: Terrorism Issues. August 2014.
Dawisha, Karen. Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Pacepa, Ion Mihai and Rychlak, Ronald J. Disinformation. Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013.
Soldatov, Andrei and Irena Borogan. The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB. New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
The delegation stressed that Syria has been exposed to a U.S.-western-Zionist conspiracy, which is backed by some regimes in the region with the aim of liquidating the Palestinian issue since Syria is the main supporter of the cause.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán openly admires the ‘illiberal’ models of Russia and China. Critics say his Fidesz party is using Putin-like tactics to cut the funding of newspapers and NGOs that conflict with the Orbán government.
Putin is clearly the dominant force in the relationship. Orban may be currently the master of all he surveys within his own borders but externally, he looks increasing like the leader of a client state that is gently but perceptively gravitating towards Moscow’s sphere of influence. Which in itself is a remarkable state of affairs considering the residual concerns over the 1956 invasion by the Soviet Union.
The radicals, of course, are most vocal. Nigel Farage, leader of UKIP, the U.K.’s anti-immigrant, anti-EU party, has expressed his admiration for Putin “as an operator, not a human being.” Farage has demanded that the West stop opposing Russian actions in Ukraine and ally itself with Putin in the fight against Islamic extremism. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ultranationalist Front National, is another Putin admirer. And Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, has praised the Russian leader as a “pure democrat.”
I want to confess that I did something foolish once when I was young. Back in 1993, I abandoned my university studies in California and returned to Moscow. European nations had signed the Maastricht Treaty and I dreamed that Russia would join the European Union.
While the U.S. and Russia have pledged to share intelligence on the group, Russia—one of the main international backers of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government—is not a member of the U.S.-led “broad coalition” against ISIS announced last month. As one Russian foreign ministry official recently put it, “We do not expect any invitations and we are not going to buy entry tickets.”
Like others of his generation, he is part of a cadre of men who came of age in a massive, multinational, nuclear-armed superstate in the early 1970s. The faceless cogs who made this system work were unremarkable people like Putin, trained in ideology and imbued with the false faith that the USSR’s greatest days were yet to come.
In their later years, these men have experienced the normal anxieties and embarrassments of middle age. (In Putin’s case, she’s a gymnast young enough to be his daughter.) But middle age for the sovoks also brought many to realize they spent their lives serving a state based on lies and held together almost entirely by force.
So spend a moment imagining the better time for which these men yearn.
As long as Israel acknowledges that the Palestinian Arabs’ national claims to statehood in Judea-Samaria are authentic and legitimate, Israel can never be secure externally, or internally.
For complying with those claims will make the country indefensible over time against threats that emanate beyond the Green Line, and ensure that the embers of incipient domestic revolt within it will continue to glow menacingly, capable of bursting into flames at any moment in response to legitimate actions taken to deal with those threats.
On Monday, we awoke to news that four worshipping Jews, one of them a British national, were murdered by Palestinian terrorists as they prayed in their Jerusalem synagogue. Hamas praised this atrocity, as it praises every terror attack in which the victim is an Israeli Jew. There should be absolutely no doubt: Hamas’s recent statements celebrating terror attacks are entirely consistent with its charter, which calls for the murder of Jews.
Khaled Mashaal has accrued wealth estimated above $2.5 billion in this business.
Ismail Haniyeh similarly now enjoys a reputation as a billionaire.
Gaza’s residents and those settled around Ramallah should understand this criminality pursued in their name diminishes their name.
Given political intimidation under the rules promoted by political mafia, have any choice?
Perhaps “any” have choice every morning, every minute, every day, and every day becomes more clear, more informed, more truthful.
Do books get in to the Arab enclaves within Israel?
Conversation?
Blog posts?
I don’t know.
However, unless our communicating systems are closed or deeply filtered, they are open and free – and free of manipulation. Curiosity may face a wilderness in information, but all the parts and particles of authentic stories — not the manipulations calculated with libels, obfuscations, omissions associated with lies that either pander or threaten — about themselves are there for looking. Fear should not direct the eyes or conscience.
What are the ghosts of skyjackers doing back on the front pages of the world’s news?
Along that axis I call “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” (or, possibly more accurately, Khamenei-Putin, given the way wise guys get power over one another), the post-Soviet still pan-Arab socialist whizbang PFLP believes it has a cause worth killing for, and while we can’t see the Big Money that helps move the mouths that incite the crime, one may suspect it’s there: plainly, “Jew hate” cloaks the piratical among leaders, Russia, for the time being excepted although Putin may be working an “anti- anti-Semitism” look-good cardas players around the “vertical of power” continue to accrue corrupt treasure for burial or cleaning safely in the rule-of-law west.
For the regime hated by Persians in Tehran, today’s murderous act fits with its promise of the destruction of the “Zionist Entity”, which has been the best cover (by deflection of attention) for thieving on behalf of Ayatollah Khamenei.
It may be broad connecting today’s attack (on the pious before God) with Moscow and Tehran and, by way of suggestion, perhaps others profiting from the promotion of chaos and conflict in the world, but nonetheless — and with mention of the PFLP — today’s act stinks of an old grave dug open and left to foul the air.
Yossi Dagan, the head of media relations for the Samaria Regional Council, filed a formal complaint Tuesday with the Government Press Office (GPO) against a CNN reporter for equating the terrorists involved in the Har Nof massacre with the victims.
According to Dagan, American CNN reporter Ben Wedeman was responsible for the headline describing the massacre under the headline, “Israeli police shot dead two Palestinian civilians” – when, in fact, the shooters were Palestinian terrorists who killed four Jews and wounded eight others as they prayed the morning service before being killed in a gun battle with police.
“We are proud of our sons who act fearlessly in the face of terrorist attacks,” Tarif said. “This is a black day for Israeli society and the State of Israel, when its citizens are murdered just for being Jewish.
“The Druze community condemns with revulsion the act of terrorism in which a Palestinian terrorist massacred and slaughtered innocent civilians. Such a situation, in which the country’s citizens are murdered on a daily basis, cannot continue,” Tarif said, and praised Israel’s security forces.
One of the most shocking aspects of the murderous attack on a Jerusalem synagogue this morning by men with guns and axes is not the attack itself—we’ve seen, from time to time, this sort of sectarian barbarism take place in places like Jerusalem, and Hebron. The most shocking aspect is the wholesale endorsement of this slaughter by Hamas, a group that, during this summer’s war in Gaza, half-succeeded in convincing the world that it wasn’t what it actually is: a group with actual genocidal intentions.
The first is that Jews can be forgiven for thinking that the world sees them as sacrificial pawns. Today’s victims are of course not the first deaths in the Palestinians’ latest not-quite-intifada. And they were not the first Americans killed either. And they were not the first victims of Abbas’s incitement or his directive to take action against Jews in Jerusalem. The sad fact is that the world regards a certain amount of Jewish blood as the cost of doing business–not worth getting all worked up about.
The word for that is “expendable.” And that’s what the families of victims and those who survived previous attacks understand all too well: their loved ones were expendable to the international community and, most painfully, to the government of the United States of America. A line has now been crossed, apparently, and the Jews under attack are no longer considered expendable. But it’s unfortunate that the line was there to begin with.
Neighbors make the neighborhood. When the neighbors have to count among themselves either secular or religious mafia — post-Soviet Putinism, retrograde Islamism — the good neighbors (e.g., “moderns” and “moderates”) disappear beneath the flashings of malignant egos who have as their chief concern themselves at the center of a universe they control and from which they derive adulation and love in abundance — that they have to rig everyone else’s reality is something easily overlooked — or hushed — by the same.
Gaza should be liberated from Hamas; Ramallah should be cleared of the hypocrites and liars of old PLO, PFLP, “solidarity” anti-Semites and lunatics and the basis in thought (the “information space”) for existing at all. We should know the names of families tied to terror by financing it; we should know how money moves into these streams that flow against humanity and see that law and military and paramilitary force cut them off and ruin them. Every facet sustained in sustaining the middle east conflict needs to be taken apart and taken down to its language — and then the language needs to be exploded never to be put back together again.
The neighbors make the neighborhood.
The problem with the middle east conflict resides with who has been running it, profiting from it, murdering for it (160 children in tunnels; the destruction and continuing suffering of Yarmouk in Syria [while Mashaal dances off to Tunisia with $2.5 billion in estimated wealth]) — it never was about the “poor Palestinians”, the Arab abandoned refugees of wars undertaken in the glorification of contempt for others, exclusiveness, and unbridled hate.
What is really challenged — all that is challenged — is the “malignant narcissism”, the domains of the “control freaks”, the feudal estates of the politically criminal.
Related
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.
The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
According to Forbes, the Islamist terror group, also known by the acronyms ISIS or ISIL, has an annual income of $2 billion. Hamas comes in second, with a yearly revenue of $1 billion. Colombia’s FARC is ranked third with a $600 million annual turnover, while Hezbollah is fourth with $500 million. Fifth on the Forbes list is the Taliban with $400 million, followed by Al-Qaida and its affiliates with $150 million; Pakistani-based Lashkar e-Taiba with $100 million; Somalia’s Al-Shabaab with $100 million; Real IRA with $50 million; and, closing the top-ten list is Boko Haram, with a $25 million annual revenue.
“In the issue of oil, the economy has not been the sole important factor,” Rouhani said. “International politics and plots” have also affected prices, he said, without elaborating.
NCRI – The Iranian regime is facing a deepening financial crisis as the price of crude oil plunges on international markets.
The regime’s budget deficit was reported by the state-run Ebtekar daily newspaper on November 8 issue as totalling 1.5 billion dollars. But economists believe the true figure is much higher.
Russia, whose economy is forecast by the central bank to run zero growth next year, is struggling under the weight of a plummeting ruble and sanctions imposed over the conflict in Ukraine. Brent crude, the grade that underpins prices for Urals, Russia’s main export blend, is set for a record losing streak amid speculation that OPEC will refrain from cutting production to ease concern of a supply glut.
A pressing question lies in determining what effects considerable cuts in the price of oil, the glut in oil supplies, and the remarkable growth of the U.S. oil industry, has and will have on international politics as well as on the global economy. Almost certainly, the United States and Western countries will benefit both politically and economically, while most of the members of OPEC, and countries including Russia, Iran, and the Islamic State of Iraq, and Syria, will be hurt. More broadly, there will be a global economic benefit as lower energy costs will help both producers and consumers.
Abductions, beheading, mass slaughter — headline grabbers!
Commodity pricing?
Squint.
While post-feudal North America has been working on greater achievement in energy independence, it appears some oil cash flow addicts have puffed and bluffed their way into an anticipated but unaddressed cash crunch with consequences looming on the near horizon, this perhaps despite deep pocket brags.
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