Throwing Down the Oil Card

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“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.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-29/iran-oil-revenue-shrinks-30-percent-on-price-drop-rouhani-says.html – 10/30/2014


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.

http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/economy/17510-iranian-regime-s-cash-crisis-as-oil-price-plunges – 11/12/2014


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.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-14/putin-says-russia-preparing-for-catastrophic-oil-slump.html – 11/14/2014


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.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/oils_well_for_american_energy_independence.html#ixzz3J2wnCdTE – 11/13/2014


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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In fact, the present-day phenomenon in this context has become an obligatory part of populist rhetoric in which American involvement is blamed for everything — from terrorist attacks, to the energy crises, to perhaps even the outbreak of dengue fever!

“Anti-Americanism in Pakistan: A brief history”
Nadeem F. Paracha

http://www.dawn.com/news/1144214


Reading highly recommended.

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The US administration must candidly introspect whether it is the St John Philby type converts in its policymaking circles, sheer naiveté and skin-deep understanding of the regional dynamics or pure political expediency that the mother load of jihadists still survive and thrive in Pakistan. What the era after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan portends for that country and South Asia will depend a lot upon such soul searching.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/13-Nov-2014/robin-raphel-the-female-philby – 11/13/2014

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Once again Ukraine finds itself in a state of revolution and war, and the outcome may affect all Europe and the United States. As accomplished author and Ukraine scholar Wendy Lower notes, the conflict over who controls Ukraine’s future is also a conflict over the interpretation of its history. With the intent of informing, and perhaps narrowing the gap between historical facts and inflammatory rhetoric, the editors of Holocaust and Genocide Studies have issued this special edition on the Holocaust in Ukraine, featuring selected articles from the past ten years. Read as a whole, these essays begin to fill in the bigger picture of the history of Holocaust in Ukraine and the Nazi occupation.

Read the issue online for a limited time.

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/holgen/ukraine.html

FTAC – There Are Handlers . . . .

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There are . . . “handlers”. The adversely aligned organizations are their tools. The power and wealth involved are immense — look up “Setad”; enjoy Karen Dawisha’s still new book — and the traceback from street violence to a number of palaces should start to become clear. Perhaps: confront not the UN but 21st Century Neo-Feudalism.


“Adversely aligned” to Israel, the west, rule of law, human rights, dignity, autonomy, freedom : aligned to barbarism, criminality, mafia, rule of might, and malignantly and viciously narcissistic aggrandizement.


I think N’s on the right track as regards the relationship between corruption at the top and the driving of ideological, nationalist, or religious violence in the field or on the street except where the violence is counter to political mafia and manipulation.

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FTAC – MEC – Final Chapters

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Israel’s defense doctrine has the People going their own way until forced to responds. Biblically: the Jews leave Egypt; they don’t conquer it. 🙂 As an ethnolinguistic cohort — that is in large part what a “people” is — the Jews have had a homeland — the “Land of the Hebrews” — and they have it again. The adversarial Arab spin has been to invert and mirror the legitimate in an astonishing attempted theft using very people left scattered on the field as their armies retreated, and the same, armies and states, have treated the refugees as aliens ripe for exploitation, manipulation, segregation, and, most evil, weaponization.

When an AQ-type group infiltrated Nahr al-Bared (2007) to defend all of Lebanon from “Israeli aggression” — a good example of the “paranoid delusional reflection of motivation” — Lebanese Defense Forces had the camp filtered and bussed while it attacked and razed the same right down to its underground where the last holdouts were finally pinned.

More recently, neither Arab Nationalist al-Assad nor Arab Islamist al-Nusra appeared much interested in the wellbeing of the Palestinian residents of Yarmouk, which were cordoned, starved, used as human shields. http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk Arafat managed to leave this world with millions of dollars for his widow; Mashaal remains in it with an estimated fortune above $2.5 billion.

Tyrants are not leaders.

Tyrants are takers.

Call them “kleptocratic”:, “piratical”, “autocratic”, “authoritarian”, their profession of being about “their people” (who confirms them?) effectively screens the deepest exploitation of the same. For deflection, anti-Semitism works, for if the tyrant can get his people to blame the Jews, for a while or a long time — especially if the press is controlled and critics are eliminated — the people won’t turn around to dwell on the evil of those who led them astray.

In peace, inhabitations, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other become normal commercial and tax generating centers _for those lucky enough to live in peace with their near neighbors_. That’s where the true end of the Gaza City and Ramallah stories reside. The surrounding Arab world has an even larger and more difficult story to outgrow, and it’s suffering between the ghosts of national socialism and a darkly romantic yearning for a long ago yesterday.


The presence of Israel is not on “Arab lands”, much less Persian ones.

The hatred of the Jews is not what drives the “middle east conflict”.

Sorry.

It only looked that way for a long time.

“Assad or Burn It” — Bashar al-Assad’s message to his subjugated people is what one sees across the collection of Arab interlocutors for the refugees of 1948: excessive cruelty and heartless, call it “sociopathic”, greed and venality on the part of leaders who make a lot of money — Arafat’s millions, Haniyeh and Mashaal’s billions, Khamenei’s Setad (estimated value: +$90 billion) — manipulating the emotions of vulnerable, infantilized, ultimately enslaved constituents.

Take the few leaders who most sustain the middle east conflict, and survey their behavior and their state governments for corruption, cruelty, injustice, inhumanity, piracy and tyranny.

As much appears to be on the web to be seen by way of news every day, numbers reported by the watching organizations, the blogs of some daring Arab souls.

In addition to http://www.unrwa.org/crisis-in-yarmouk, which is up to date (as of the posting of this piece):

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/arafats-billions/ – 11/7/2003

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 – 11/11/2013 (this story broke one year ago today)

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/28/gazas-millionaires-and-billionaires-how-hamass-leaders-got-rich-quick/ – 7/28/2014.

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/180400/hamas-killed-160-palestinian-children-to-build-terror-tunnels#undefined – 7/25/2014.


I am an authentic pro-Palestinian Arab reaching out to Israelis. I do not white-wash Israeli settlements or say that Islamophobic bigotry doesn’t exist among some members of the Jewish community. But I also acknowledge that Israel helped Syrians when the world abandoned them and that much of the hate toward Israel comes from Russia, Assad, and Iran’s attempts to rally support for their empire. I acknowledge CIJA for being extremely helpful when I reached out. I learned that many of my non-Arab allies weren’t friends at all. They hate Israel more than they loved Arabs; they are simply antisemites riding on the coattails of our tears.

By Maria al-Masani:

http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-1/ – 10/21/2014.
http://www.cija.ca/antisemitism/rising-antisemitism-2/ – 10/22/2014.

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