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Baroness Deech, Parliament, United Kingdom, 29 January 2015
30 Friday Jan 2015
Category Archives: Regions
Links – On Iran’s War by Proxy
28 Wednesday Jan 2015
In an interview that was broadcasted on Lebanon’s Murr TV that was translated into English by MEMRI, Ahmed Al Asaad, the chairman of the Lebanese Option Party and a member of the Shiite community, declared: “The Iranian regime still believes that things are like they were in the Middle Ages; it sponsors militias, here, there and everywhere, and these militias exert pressure from within on their countries. In this primitive manner, Iran tries to gain a foothold there.”
Related:
Mumford, Andrew. Proxy Warfare. Wiley (2013). (I haven’t read this volume yet, but have read a portion via the Google project that has put book data online. That didn’t show up on the latest search, so it may soon be a volume incoming for the library).
While the mainstream media has focused solely on Hamas and Israel in the current ongoing war, there has been less attention given to the major role that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been playing in ratcheting up the conflict with its military assistance to Hamas fighters, including Iranian-built Fajr 5 and M-75 with ranges of approximately 75 kilometers.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/majid-rafizadeh/irans-proxy-war-against-israel/ – 7/29/2014.
The Houthis are trying to take advantage of Hezbollah’s experience, and the Houthi-affiliated Al-Maseera Channel broadcasts from Beirut’s southern suburbs with technical support from the Lebanese Shiite party. Recently, relations between the two sides have grown deeper. This comes amid repeated accusations from the Yemeni state that Iran is supporting the Houthis, and after the United States put in place new sanctions in August 2013 against some Lebanese who were accused of providing funds to the Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis usually do not deny this strong link with Hezbollah, which is reinforced by common factors between the two sides, such as their presence in the same regional alliance with Iran at the political level. In addition, both groups have armed militias to support their political positions, which they use when necessary. Yet, for the Houthis, the militia is their most prominent — if not exclusive — tool and not the exception, as is the case with Hezbollah.
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/11/yemen-houthis-differences-hezbollah-lebanon.html#ixzz3Q8V08ACR – 11/19/2014.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139643/akbar-ganji/who-is-ali-khamenei – September / October 2013.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/10/while-you-were-watching-isis-iran-took-yemen/ – 10/8/2014
In his resignation letter, Prime Minister Khaled Bahah said the cabinet did not want to be dragged into an “unconstructive political maze”.
Earlier this week, Houthi gunmen fired on Mr Bahah’s convoy and then laid siege to the presidential palace, where he was staying.
Then on Wednesday the home of President Hadi was shelled, shattering a ceasefire that had been agreed only hours earlier.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-30936940 – 1/22/2015.
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Links – Tehran Connection – Argentinian Prosecutor’s Death May Be Linked to Washington Policy
26 Monday Jan 2015
LONDON — The United States pressed Argentina to end its investigation of Iranian complicity in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in which nearly 100 people were killed.
Western diplomatic sources said the administration of President Barack Obama urged Argentina on several occasions to either stop or limit the investigation into the bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association in Buenos Aires. The sources said the U.S. appeals marked one of the demands by Iran for a reconciliation with Washington, Middle East Newsline reported.
“Argentina had hard evidence against at least one Iranian leader, which prevented him from traveling abroad,” a source said.
Earlier this month Nisman filed a criminal complaint in an Argentine court, alleging that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman had crafted a secret agreement with Iran to let the terrorists off the hook in exchange for Iranian oil largess and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-anastasia-ogrady-who-killed-alberto-nisman-1422232647 – 1/25/2015.
In an exclusive column, Jewish journalist Damian Pachter – who first reported on the death of the special prosecutor – recounts the intimidation, the sleepless nights, the agent who stalked him and his ultimate decision to head for Israel.
I knew Alberto Nisman from years researching Hezbollah activities in South America for my book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God. The idea that he would commit suicide just as the investigation into the 1994 attack is finally making headway simply does not comport with the man and his years-long, dogged commitment to bringing the perpetrators of this horrific act of terrorism to justice. After Nisman filed his complaint last week, Kirchner’s administration insisted that the charges “have no foundation,” but neither those charges nor the sudden, suspicious death of the prosecutor who brought them would be the first time the case was marred by political corruption and illegal activities at the highest levels.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/22/can-argentina-find-justice-without-alberto-nisman/ – Matthew Levitt – 1/22/2015.
In which world would you wish to live? The one of state mafia loaded strong with every criminal method of manipulation imaginable (to list a few: constituent infantilization, pandering, patronage; bribery, intimidation, jailing, murder; libel, slander, and theft; pervasive lying, nepotism, and secrecy) — or some other dragged out into the sun for a good look?
The Alberto Nisman murder story — it appears as I type that the state is changing its story — may accompany the sea monster surfacing of a new global fascism, the same that this blog has been suggesting with “Putin-Assad-Khamenei”, “Putin-Orban”, “Putin-Erdogan” — submitted to search engines, each pair will produce some cogent and interesting coverage — as well as the blog’s psych-lite approach to “malignant narcissism” and it’s weaving with what has been observed in relation to bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders and their extension into leadership and political psychology.
Additional Links
Mohsen Rabbani, an Iranian mullah and a former cultural attaché in Argentina, is a leading figure in spreading Islam in Latin America, particularly in Brazil. Rabbani, while in the service at the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, was involved in the planning and implementation of the deadly terrorist attack on the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish cultural center of 1994 that resulted in 85 dead and more than 150 injured. Rabbani’s involvement in the bombing was persistently denied by Iranian authorities. In 2007, however, Interpol finally decided to issue a Red Notice for Rabbani, which is an arrest warrant with a view to extradite.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2222/iranian-terrorist-attacks-argentina – 6/24/2011.
http://interamericansecuritywatch.com/tag/mohsen-rabbani/ – Current.
The man directly responsible for this cell-building operation in Argentina was the cultural attache of the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires, Mohsen Rabbani. His job was supposedly to provide cultural and religious information. His real job, however — like that of the Iranian ambassador to Syria in 1983, Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi — was building the local terror network.
A Shiite cleric, Rabbani gave a 1991 speech in a Buenos Aires convention hall before an audience of about 100 Argentinean right-wing advocates and Shiite Muslims. The front row was reserved for officials of the Iranian embassy, who beamed as Rabbani declared in schoolboy Spanish, “Israel must disappear from the face of the earth.
http://books.google.com/books?id=KXa6qOt86OwC&pg=PA123
http://www.danielpipes.org/comments/190074 – 10/16/2011.
The “second row seat to history” gets a little bit incestuous digging out quotations quoting other quotations, so here BackChannels may rest on the Alberto Nisman murder mystery.
One more thing . . .
Argentina president Cristina Kirchner reversed her government’s position on the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, saying now that his death was not a suicide.
The reversal comes as evidence gathered by Nisman proving that the government covered up Iranian involvement in the 1994 suicide bombing of a Jewish community center was released on Thursday. Kirchner is saying that Nisman was killed to discredit her government and that the prosecutor was “misled” by people posing as intelligence agents who fed him wrong information.
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Link – On Pakistan’s Troubled Dream
26 Monday Jan 2015
The country’s founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech is mentioned and quoted so liberally among the moderate circles that it has become something of a cliché.
However, what is not often related is how a federal secretary arbitrarily decided to censor it before its release. It proves that even as early as 1947 there were souls who desperately wanted to give the country a religious character.
Pitafi, Farrukh Khan. “How Do We Reinvent Pakistan’s National Dream?” Dawn, January 26, 2015.
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Link – Yarmouk – Word of Torture and Execution – Regime and Opposition Blamed
25 Sunday Jan 2015
Posted in Islamic Small Wars, Links, Syria
Tags
A man from the Yarmouk camp tortured to death in regime prisons. Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic battalions executed a man in the Yarmouk camp in the charge of insulting “Allah”
http://syriahr.com/en/2015/01/shells-and-casualties-in-damascus-and-air-strikes-on-its-countryside/ – 1/25/2015.
What began in 2011 as an effort to hold a government accountable and to expand administrative power to the people, i.e., a true people’s revolution, has become by design, and one may think Putin-Assad-Khamenei for this, a civil war defined on both sides by despotic and sadistic personalities. Neither side appears to have an off button, or a noble humanitarian switch, for that matter, and between them, Yarmouk Camp has been played like a poker chip.
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Diminished Syria
20 Tuesday Jan 2015
The playing in Syria of a bloody chess match — or poker with three jokers wild — has produced a humanitarian catastrophe now coldly reflected in big numbers: more than 200,000 dead; more than 9 million internally displaced and refugee.
As a stalemate from the git-go — post-Soviet Russia vs NATO, the feudal world vs the modern — and held there by nuclear danger, Putin-Assad-Khamenei’s hands have transformed an authentic people’s revolution — call it a democratic socialist revolution, an anti-totalitarian revolution for classical liberalism — into an immensely tragic put-on featuring on the state’s side a tyrant and in much of the opposition the tyrants of the al-Qaeda-type organizations.
(On this blog, ISIS is a Khamenei proxy by way of direct bribes or subterfuge, and, one way or the other, its presence may be maintained as long as it serves Iranian diplomacy, war strategy, and the business that has been made of the want of infinite “narcissistic supply” — i.e., contemplated later glory).
Perhaps this way an endgame comes:
- US-NATO has cut the revenues of oil-dependent states and their proxies;
- US-NATO appears to have gotten Hezbollah consumed with striking Israel, which perverse shift in focus may signal gathering weakness in Assad’s military outlook (perhaps if he’s going down, he wants to see Israel hurt while he’s falling);
- US-NATO has laid some groundwork for rebuilding a moderate army for Syria, one capable of destroying both the fattened red-brown capitalists and the jumpy green meanies of jealousy’s jihad that have made Syria the world’s capital of limitless suffering.
By when?
Not so fast.
It takes time to assemble parts, build machinery, and move the machinery around — and not only for the “small war” — always: if it’s in your own neighborhood, it is all the war in the world! — but for greater and more dismal possibilities as well.
Excerpts and Reference
The consequences of missing oil revenue for IS are severe. IS is unlikely to decrease funding for its military operations so it will have to find ways to simultaneously cut costs elsewhere and raise new revenue — and both methods are likely to jeopardize popular support for the group.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-impact-of-the-oil-collapse-on-isis-is-severe-2015-1 – 1/15/2015.
But the good times may now be over for Hezbollah and its supporters. Iranian oil profits, which have lubricated the proxy group with hundreds of millions of dollars a year, appear to be drying up. Western sanctions, imposed on Tehran due to its nuclear program, coupled with falling oil prices, have emptied the coffers of the Islamic Republic.
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/23/hezbollah-going-broke-299139.html – 1/15/2015
Hezbollah’s fear is that all that weaponry will be lost if Assad falls. One wonders, lost to whom? The Muslim Brotherhood? Al-Qaeda operatives in Syria? Since both the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda are reported moving quickly into the mayhem and becoming part of the opposition mix, this strategic weaponry, including stockpiles of chemical weapons and long-range missiles, could fall into the hands of any of these terrorist groups, as the Syrian regime disintegrates.
http://www.maozisrael.org/site/News2?id=9174 “Why Syria’s Assad Can’t Stop Killing His Own People.” – March 2012.
With no American combat boots on the ground and limited intelligence, the U.S. is struggling to have an impact there against Islamic State militants or the Assad regime.
One of the biggest hurdles for the U.S. training program for Syrian rebels is identifying and vetting individuals to train. Defense officials said earlier this month that the U.S. is working closely with other U.S. government agencies as well as partner nations to find rebel fighters who would be candidates for the program.
Jihad Mughniyeh, son of former Hezbollah chief Imad Mugniyeh, as well as 11 others were killed in the airborne attack, including six Iranians, one of them a general. Iranian state sources confirmed the identity of the senior Revolutionary Guard officer, naming him as General Mohamed Allahdadi. Another key figure killed in the attack was identified as Mohammed Issa, the head of Hezbollah’s operation in war-torn Syria and Iraq.
Assad’s war against his people, attacks of terrorist groups, and the trauma of ordinary Syrians have gone unnoticed while the global leaders quickly gathered in Paris to condemn the killing of 12 journalists, which is of course an atrocious and condemnable act, but the same world is turning a blind eye and is not reacting to the daily killings by poisonous gases, explosions and missiles.
The inability of the international community to act has turned the Syrian issue into a huge humanitarian crisis.
http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/views/editor-in-chief/317263/the-suffering-of-syrian-refugees – 1/18/2015.
Additional Reading
http://nypost.com/2014/12/07/an-iran-russia-axis/ – 12/7/2014.
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Syria – False Picture – Irrelevant Praise
19 Monday Jan 2015
UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said on Jan. 15 that the continued violence in Syria is a “disgrace” and that the Syria conflict is “the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War.” Syrians have replaced Afghans as the world’s largest refugee population, with 7.6 million displaced and 3.3 million refugees, in addition to a death toll estimated at 200,000, and the return of typhoid, measles and polio to the country.
On Jan. 14, de Mistura got a boost from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who praised UN and Russian efforts to broker a settlement in Syria.
This blog has supported the notion that yesterday’s communist elite are today’s state capitalists backed and defended by security fascists motivated by money and a new fascist nationalism. That’s a complicated way of suggesting that “Old Red has met New Brown” — and the old Soviets are today’s New Nationalists.
Add the Old Red-Green Arrangement.
Along that line, and while scanning, collecting, posting, and commenting on news from journalism’s “second row seat to history”, one cannot help but note that certain relationships seem defined by common interest in “political absolutism”: Putin – Assad – Khamenei | Putin – Orban – Erdogan – (Khamenei). The dry outer skin of the onion wants another story: secular vs religious power; Sunni vs Shiite teleology; Iran vs Iraq. However, lo and behold, as the Internet helps political wonks tear back the layers of the onion, Iran is in Iraq in a large evident way (and given the malignant psychology involved in men who would be as if gods — or just one — themselves, the Russo-Syrian-Iranian alliance may be what was in back of Daesh, for if one is to be as God, one would naturally manage the entire battle, not just one side of it.
As Putin was in the business of spending about $51 billion on the winter olympics in Sochi (the figure is disputed but still well into the tens of billions), he appears to have been thoroughly out of the business of tempering Assad’s response to a moderate, modern, and democratically updating revolutionary “Arab Spring” challenge or, Mr. Nice Guy, offering Russian aid to ameliorate the damage, displacement, and injury brought to millions of innocents. After all, it really wasn’t his concern, was it, whatever happened to Syrians.
The suggestion that Assad chose to bomb the daylights out of noncombatant zones while holding off on the al-Qaeda-types who came into theater of war may be borne out in the casualty, IDP, and refugee figures created in the monstrosity that is today the deeply polarized and globally signal “Syrian Civil War”, for while NATO and the western world press for classical liberal values in governance, it appears Putin, Assad, and Khamenei together press for immense systems of abuse, coercion, enslavement, and exploitation on the mighty piers of fear and patronage.
Call Syria an “axle of power” 🙂 — if the three dictators get away with driving over the state’s constituents to an inherently fascist conclusion, they might well drive the same anywhere else — and the end of that kind of power: the power to make others suffer capriciously, with impunity, without heart, without justice, without limits.
Still, Secretary of State John Kerry declared on Wednesday that the United States welcomed both initiatives. He made no call for Mr. Assad’s resignation, a notable omission from Mr. Kerry, who has typically insisted on it in public remarks. Instead, he spoke of Mr. Assad as a leader who needed to change his policies.
“It is time for President Assad, the Assad regime, to put their people first and to think about the consequences of their actions, which are attracting more and more terrorists to Syria, basically because of their efforts to remove Assad,” Mr. Kerry said.
Name the tyrants — communist, nationalist, Islamist (red-brown-green) — who have with grace backed away from or stepped down from power.
The Kremlin may be the main winner in the Lebanon war. Israel has been attacked with Soviet Kalashnikovs and Katyushas, Russian Fajr-1 and Fajr-3 rockets, Russian AT-5 Spandrel antitank missiles and Kornet antitank rockets. Russia’s outmoded weapons are now all the rage with terrorists everywhere in the world, and the bad guys know exactly where to get them. The weapons cases abandoned by Hezbollah were marked: “Customer: Ministry of Defense of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/218533/russian-footprints/ion-mihai-pacepa – 8/24/2006
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Link – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – Cruelty, Injustice, Sociopathy
19 Monday Jan 2015
Posted in Saudi Arabia
The second story, and this is far more disturbing, is of a Burmese-origin lady, Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, who was dragged in the streets of the holy city of Makkah and brazenly beheaded for allegedly sexually assaulting and murdering her step-daughter. A charge the lady vehemently denied right up until her demise, with her screaming “I did not kill, I did not kill” and three police officers holding her down while the punishment was carried out in an extremely sadistic manner. According to The Independent, a video showing how the execution took place has now been removed by YouTube as part of its policy on “shocking and disgusting content”. No evidence of her involvement in the death has ever been provided.
http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/25814/saudi-arabia-the-holy-hypocrites-of-sharia-law/ – 1/17/2015.
