(We) can do better

Friday 17 April 2015: The Animal Justice Party has won in a race against the No Land Tax Party for the last seat to be finalised in the New South Wales Upper House. Mark Pearson, a former psychiatric nurse, now holds the seat. What an incredible win for animals everywhere, but especially in New South Wales. Now they have a champion in government with a knowledge of human psychology.

"Mark Pearson is Executive Director of Animal Liberation in Australia. He is employed full time via funds from the Christina Fitzsimons Trust. Before this he had been Team Leader of the Newcastle Community Mental Health Service in Newcastle and worked as a Clinical Acute Adult Psychiatric Nurse Specialist. In his current position the main focus is on farm animals – particularly factory farming for the past 21 years and recently kangaroos.

Two recent successes have been in relation to sheep and kangaroos. The phase out of the most invasive mutilation of any animal without analgesia – ‘mulesing’ in sheep and convincing the Russian Federation to ban imports of kangaroo meat by exposing inherent cruelty and hygiene problems. He enjoys opera – even trying to sing some- and stopping live export death ships from entering Australian ports." http://animaljusticeparty.org/about/committee/.

Animal Justice Party National President and founder Professor Steve Garlick revealed that the party's total budget for the election was a tiny $12,000.

Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc. Annual General Meeting, Saturday 18 April 2015 Flemington Community Centre. 2:15 pm Saturday 18 April 2015 Flemington Community Centre, 25 Mt Alexander Road, Flemington. On Debneys Park. Speaker Kelvin Thomson MP, population campaigner and Victoria First president will speak on Intergenerational Equity: How we are failing future generations.

Transport: Tram along Flemington Road and Mt. Alexander Road; Train station - Upfield line - nearby; Capital City Trail  for cyclists next to Centre; carparking at front door of Centre. Melways 29 B12  

See also: VoltaireNet | Western wars have killed four million Muslims since 1990 (11/4/15), Land Destroyer | Syria: America's Democratic Terrorists? (10/4/15), other related articles.

Those rightly outraged at the murder of Tori Johnson and the death of Katrina Dawson on 16 December at the end of the Martin Place siege and at the murder of 11 people on 7 January 2015 in Paris by terrorists (see embedded Syrian Girl video) should also contemplate the fact that, since March 2011, the people of Syria have suffered terrorism on a scale which is vastly greater than these two tragedies. Since March 2011, they have faced an invasion by hordes of foreign terrorists coming from almost every corner of the globe and not just the Arab world. These invaders have been paid for and supplied by the United States, its European allies and its allies amongst the Arab dictatorships including Saudi Arabia and Qatar. So far, over 200,000 Syrians have been killed at the hands of these terrorists. As a consequence, the Syrian government has demanded of the United Nations act against the terrorists' sponsors.

The article below was previous published in SANA (12/4/15).

Damascus, SANA – Syria demanded deterrent measures by the United Nations against the terrorist organizations and the states backing and sponsoring them.

The Syrian demand was expressed in two identical letters which the Foreign and Expatriates Ministry addressed to Chairman of the UN Security Council and UN Secretary General on Sunday.

It was prompted by the bloody terrorist rocket attacks which hit Aleppo city yesterday, leaving heavy casualties of at least 19 civilians dead and scores of others wounded and causing massive material damage.

The new crime, the letters said, came as a response from the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan to the "important" outcomes that were reached at the latest Moscow inter-Syrian talks.

In their "clear message" delivered by their agents of the so-called "moderate opposition", those regimes have sought to foil any political solution that could be reached by the Syrians themselves without foreign interference, the letters added.

The Foreign Ministry dismissed the claim of those and other countries of them sending "non-lethal" weapons to the terrorists, stressing that a new type of destructive weapons seemed to have been used in Aleppo attack.

Several four-story buildings were completely demolished, falling on their inhabitants’ heads, according to the letters.

The Ministry blamed the continuation of terrorist acts on those countries which have not ceased providing direct support to the Takfiri terrorist organizations, including the notorious Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra, in addition to the so-called "Free Army", "Islam Army", "Islamic Front", "Liwa al-Fateh", "Ahrar al-Sham Movement", "Al-Ansar Front", etc.

Striking out at this continued support, the Ministry said the terrorist organizations would not have been capable of launching such bloody attacks, was it not for those countries shielding these organizations against punishment and continuing to supply them with weapons and explosives.

It named France, Britain, Jordan and the US as accomplices in backing the terrorists.

The Ministry demanded a Security Council non-politicized action towards enforcing counterterrorism resolutions in deeds not only in words.

The Security Council, it said, is also called upon to cooperate and coordinate with the Syrian government, which "has been combating terrorism for years on behalf of the entire world people."

The Syria government, the Ministry said, stresses dodged determination to continue fighting terrorism in Syria and defend its people by virtue of its constitutional responsibilities.

Haifa Said

Appendix 1: "The Charlie Hebdo Attacks Exposed" by the Syrian Girl

Appendix 2: Other related articles

Land Destroyer | Syria: America's Democratic Terrorists? (10/4/15), VoltaireNet | Western wars have killed four million Muslims since 1990 (11/4/15), Global Research | Syria at the UN: US, Britain, France, Jordan Refuse to Name ISIL as “Separate Terror Group" (11/4/15), Global Research | Syria: "Al-Qaeda Linked Rebels" Are Al-Qaeda (13/4/15), Global Research | Israel moves to Cover-up its alliance with al-Qaeda in Syria (14/4/15), PressTV | Turkey, Saudis to form anti-Syria military alliance: Report (14/4/15).

Syrian Fee Press | Israeli [occupation] army admits aiding al-Qaeda in Syria (12/4/15) – Asa Winstanley. Whilst informative it dismisses some 'conspiracy theories' about the Syrian conflict:

Popular conspiracy theories have it that al-Qaeda and the “Islamic State” (also known as DAESH, ISIS or ISIL) are Israeli- and/or US-intelligence creations.

Ash continues:

While there’s no evidence for that, it’s certainly true that the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its consciously sectarian occupation regime of the country thereafter, created the conditions in which al-Qaeda in Iraq (later known as ISIS) was formed and thrived. Veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn demonstrates this most convincingly in his essential new book The Rise of Islamic State, which I have previously lauded here.

From my recent viewing of some of the articles about the Syria conflict to which Asa seems to be referring, a conspiracy by the United States and its allies to set up ISIS as a bogus extremist 'anti-west' army to undermine popular domestic opposition to war seems to be a highly plausible explanation of the recent course of events. However, having read these words by Asa Winstanley, I will have to re-examine these articles more closely.

Another irritating feature of this article and so much other material which otherwise seems to be strongly opposed to the United States' planned aggression against Syria, is its insistence on labeling of the Syrian government a 'regime' :

Hizballah (my spelling is 'Hezbollah' - Ed) and Iran, allies of the Bashar al-Assad regime, are aiding the government in Syria and fighting on the ground alongside Syrian army troops against al-Qaeda, the “Islamic State” and other Sunni rebel groups.

Could Asa be truly unaware that on 4 June 20914, Syrians overwhelmingly endorsed President Bashar al-Assad in presidential elections, as attested to by four International observers at a United Nations Press conference. See Global Research | Syria's press conference the United Nations doesn't want you to see (20/6/15) with embedded 52:45min video, republished on Candobetter.

The Intergenerational Report's (IGR) predecessors assume that the answer to our future prosperity lies in the combination of population growth, productivity and participation. After an almost unprecedented 24 consecutive years of economic growth, we certainly have achieved population growth, productivity is declining, there's record high unemployment, but where's the prosperity?

Download the summary

The report says that to drive higher levels of prosperity through economic growth, we must increase productivity and participation. If we are to achieve these goals we need to encourage those currently not in the workforce, especially older Australians and women, to enter, re?enter and stay in work, where they choose to do so.

Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey laments that by 2055 around 22.6 per cent of the Australian population will be aged over 65 and that there will only be 2.7 people of traditional working age to support the older population.

... the Intergenerational Report shows the growth in the costs of many services, especially in health, that will put pressure on the budget and threaten the sustainability of those services. Every day our spending exceeds Government revenue by more than $100 million. To make up the shortfall we have to borrow that $100 million per day.

If spending exceedes revenue, surely it's time to reconsider and redefine what's meant by "economic growth"? Family or individual households can't be maintained in this manner, and neither can businesses.

Income tax and goods and services tax, and taxes on superannuation – the taxes that affect us – will have to climb in order to fund the things we are going to need!

Beyond 2017-18 Commonwealth grants to states for hospitals will increase only in line with the population and the consumer price index. But the cost of running hospitals is continuing to climb. Not meeting that cost is unrealistic (unless the states meet it by doing something such as lifting the goods and services tax) but it holds back the projected deficit.

SMH> Intergenerational report how labor was framed

Australians could face record taxes in order to balance the budget if the full suite of government’s economic measures are not put in place, according to the recent intergenerational report!

But the future of the Australian workforce will mean Australians will need to work longer and harder over the next 40 years in order to sustain the nation’s economy.

Productivity

David Richardson from the Australia Institute questions our Treasurer Joe Hockey on the importance of workforce participation and technology and the role that health technology. By implication, education is going to play in economic growth into the future productivity, but none of those things are in the Intergenerational Report. It's assumed that productivity growth is 1.5 per cent for now and for ever, no matter what. Tertiary education, and skill training, is becoming prohibitevely more expensive, and based on a business model - hardly encouraging productivity and cutting-edge innovation!

While the recent Intergenerational Report references how technology is changing our lives it failed to properly quantify the shrinking correlation between future productivity gains and job growth. The Intergenerational Report expects Australia's past level of productivity growth to carry on into the next 40 years, largely on the back of technological change and innovation. On the contrary, our big exports of education and housing are hardly productive, and manufacturing is declining.

High immigration may have no effect on productivity, as data shows, or as the Australian experience suggests, may reduce it. And it can be irrelevant to participation.

Participation
Participation refers to how the workforce can allow people to work later in life, as well as how workforce options and flexibility can build the participation of more young people and women. So apart from population factors, participation and productivity hold the key to future economic prosperity.

Currently, three fifths of our population increase is through migration with only two fifths from natural increase, so it’s already pretty high by historic levels.

The IG report notes the importance of migration to the country's economic performance acknowledging over the years, migrants "tended to be younger" than the resident population and therefore "helped push labour force participation rates". On the contrary, unemployment within migrant groups is higher than averate, and migrants actually don't stay "younger" but age at the same rate as everybody else- one year more per year!

Population

Australia's population growth rate has increased above historic trends, largely due to immigration. Since the Sydney Olympics in the year 2000 the population of Australia has grown by 25 per cent. The ABS predicts population will be around 40 million in 2061 and up to 70 million by 2101.

Dr Jane O’Sullivan, of Queensland University, makes the point that each new person we need to spend at least $200,000 on infrastructure. (Some would say more like $500,000). Rather than producing prosperity, our unwieldy economy is costing more to maintain.

Australia will become even bigger, denser, and more multicultural over the next 5 years. Some ‘Aussie Dreams’ may start to disappear such as the ‘quarter acre block’ and along with it the Hills Hoist garden shed and enough space for a game of backyard cricket. People are to be more crammed together, for the benefit of "economic growth"? If lifestyles can't be maintained, then who benefits?

McCrindle- population growth in the media

Our economy is staggering under the weight of heavy demands, yet illogically it's assumed that we can "offset" our ageing population's costs through high population growth?

A growing number of voters say they would now support an increase in the rate of the GST, following a year in which the tax has been a simmering political issue. The Abbott government on Thursday revealed plans to subject downloaded music, movies and books to the GST in what Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey calls an 'integrity' measure, not a broadening of the GST. So, welfare is being cut, piece by piece, and taxes are increasing. Where's the prosperity?

Experience shows us that rapid population growth is no guarantee of economic prosperity, and conversely a stable population does not doom a country to economic failure.

Koalas and other iconic wildlife are vanishing from our bushland as the trees they call home continue to be cleared for farmland. They’re plastered across our tourism brochures, yet government policies are putting them at risk.
The NSW Baird government is scrapping the Native Vegetation Act – one of the most important protections for koalas in our state.  While the focus remains on native vegetation, a real and important issue is the wildlife, and ecological systems, that inherently belong to these habitats.  It’s assumed they will just “move on” and re-home themselves conveniently elsewhere!   The “elsewhere” is getting harder and harder to find. Article from Australian Wildlife Protection Council

The Native Vegetation Act 2003 (the Act) frames the way landholders manage native vegetation in NSW by preventing broadscale clearing unless it improves or maintains environmental outcomes.

Data collated by the Productivity Commission for their review of native vegetation regulation found that a decline in overall clearance did take place from the early 1980s to the early 2000s in all Australian states and territories (Productivity Commission 2004)  However, of the 74,000 hectares of land cleared in New South Wales in 2005, 40 percent (ie 30,000ha) was cleared illegally (ie without prior approval; NSW AOG 2006).

In 2003, the NSW Government pledged $3.5m to establish a satellite monitoring system in the state (although some parties have claimed the receiving department did not end up using the money for this purpose; The Wilderness Society 2008).

A biodiversity report released last December contained 43 recommendations for significant change, including repealing the Native Vegetation Act and other legislation that had been plaguing farmer productivity for decades.  It also recommended streamlining of development assessment where land use change can occur, which places farming development on an even playing field with other types of development.  It’s commercial interests, of profit-increasing, over conservation and protection of biodiversity.  Instead of a triple bottom-line, the bottom line will be profits, developments and economic progress!

Key to the proposal is the removal of the requirement that land clearing only be allowed if it improves or maintains environmental outcome, and shifting approval for vegetation clearing to the planning system.  North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) spokesperson Dailan Pugh said most rural councils had yet to identify or map high-conservation value vegetation for protection and, where they had ,the National Party had intervened to stop it.

A host of environmental groups, including World Wildlife Fund  and the National Parks Association, condemned the review of the state’s biodiversity legislation for neutering the office of environment and say it will lead to wide-scale land clearing and loss of species.

The review panel report that recommended this backward legislation also recommended conserving habitat at a regional or even state scale. Farmers, it said, had been left to carry an unfair share of responsibility for preserving nature in the state. “Regional or State” level is a way of leaving it up to individuals, who will probably be loaded with conflicts of interests! It’s political abandonment, to make way for housing and urban growth.

Of course the National Party and the farmers will welcome this news, and gives them more license for land clearing and short-term profits.
Mr Evans, chief executive of NSW National Parks Association, said the rate of land-clearing from agriculture had fallen 68 per cent since the Native Vegetation Act was passed in 2003. So, the Act was working!

The Wilderness Society NSW Campaign Manager Belinda Fairbrother said: “Weakening wildlife protection laws will place our threatened species in peril at a time when bold action is required to reverse the ongoing decline in our state’s rich biological diversity… We are resolutely opposed to any weakening of our state’s wildlife protection and land clearing laws”. Backward Australia will be more cleared at a time of multiple environmental and climate change threats, and will be a the cost of long term sustainability, and ultimately more food security threats.

“The Native Vegetation Act is among the most important nature conservation laws in NSW because it protects so much of the state’s wildlife like koalas and gliders from indiscriminate destruction. “If new laws weaken protections for land and wildlife, Mike Baird will be remembered as the Premier who took us back to the dark days of broadscale land clearing” said Nature Conservation Council CEO Kate Smolski.

(image: paddock containing remnant native vegetation:CSIRO )

Labor leader Luke Foley said native animals, birds and native bushland would be the losers after the Government said it would implement all 43 recommendations of a review of the state’s biodiversity legislation, completed last year.

Sydney’s urban sprawl had wiped out market gardens on peripheral land since first settlement. The problem now is Sydney’s expansion has reached the last phase, where in 20 to 50 years the sprawl will eradicate unprotected farms. So, instead of containing the limits of population growth, more land clearing will “fix” the problem, and mow down the constraints of trees, grasslands and bush in the path of “progress”.

Australia continues to have a net loss of biodiversity and the United Nations reports that we are entering an extinction crisis. What does this government and some farmers have against a healthy environment?
Contradictorily, at the same time as the government is establishing a $100 million survival fund to stop a ‘race to extinction’! The commitment was made after Opposition Leader Luke Foley promised $150 million to create new national parks including a Great Koala National Park on the north coast — as a nod to the NSW Labor Party’s preference allies the Greens. It’s easy to make political promises, throw out spin, and money to environmental problems, but actually have tight laws and policies protecting native vegetation and wildlife is far to holistic and intrinsic for slippery politicians who pander to lobby groups.

See also: SANA | Palestinian factions’ alliance condemns PLO climb-down on situation in Yarmouk (12/4/15)

Many refugee advocates seem to be entirely unaware that Syria - constantly damned by the mainstream media - is the only country which has given permanent status to the Palestinians who lost their country to Israel. Knowing this gives us a perspective on why US/Israel/NATO is so keen to destroy Syria: their chief target is to destroy any chance of Palestine reestablising itself from Syria. In this article the author, a former resident of Aleppo, with relatives still in Syria, describes some of the history of Palestine-Syrian cooperation and how recently foreign 'Arab Spring' money has religiously radicalised resistance movements in Palestinian refuges in Syria to turn against the secular Syrian Government, to the great satisfaction of Palestine's enemies. Author's name updated 12-4-2015

Original source of image

The situation in Yarmouk (if not in all the region) is so surreal, that I neither can imagine nor describe it without feeling as if I'm drunk or having drug-induced hallucinations. It all looks incoherent to me.

The Syrian government helped "Hamas" for decades, and had suffered international sanctions because of this. It supported them, and gave them safe haven when every other Arab nation refused.

The Syrian government trained Hamas in digging underground tunnels to fight Israel, as a resistance movement. Then the "Arab Spring" started, and the leaders of "Hamas", who are "Muslim Brotherhood" in origin, changed loyalties, thanks to the temptation of the money of Qatar; the allurement of the Great Neo-Ottoman Erdogan; and the glamour of ruling the whole Middle East, starting with Egypt and Tunisia (by their fellow Muslim Brotherhood). They thought they had become a Super Power that didn't need Iranian aid anymore, nor a haven in Syria, nor Hezbollah's training.

It would have been way better if they had just left Syria when it needed friends to stay with it in this time of crisis, or if they had just become neutral and not joined the government or the rebels.

Instead, they stabbed the government in the back! Using all the techniques that had been taught by Syrians, Lebanese, and Iranians to use against the Israelis, they used them against Syrians! They spread the "knowledge" of digging tunnels and taught it to the Free Syrian Army and all those crazy rebels; they taught them how to make bombs in a certain way which both Hezbollah and Syrian intelligence knew that no other Hamas knew!

Then, they created a military faction called "Aknaf Beit al-Maqdes # The Environs of Jerusalem" (ABM), between 26th of Dec 2012 - early Mar 2013, who occupied Al-Yarmouk Refugee Camp and used it as their base against the Syrian government. Their name should mean that they would fight in Jerusalem, not in a refugee camp in Damascus, but that is logic, and we are talking about living a surreal nightmare where nothing makes any sense! That ABM prevented any relations with the Syrian government on grounds that it was going to fall sooner or later, or because it was "infidel", and they don't need its help! People in the camp started to starve, and many died because of extreme starvation as there was no way for food to come in!

Dozen of conciliation attempts had been rejected at the last minute because of the moody and elusive ABM militia, while blaming it on the "murderer regime" of the mainstream media. The Syrian Government chose to use other Palestinian movements to try to regain the camp from the ABM, and the Syrian Arab Army (Syria's army) besieged the whole camp to keep it isolated from Damascus, although it's not that easy because the camp is almost a part of the greater Damascus today. Before these crises, unless you were one of the camp's inhabitants, you would not have known whether you were inside or outside the camp's borders.

In 1948 and 1967 Yamouk was 8 km away from Damascus, but not anymore because of the urban expansion through the intervening decades. The Syrian president didn't want to be involved in a war against any Palestinian movement, because he didn't want history to say that he had once killed a Palestinian refugee. They were defending Damascus city when necessary, and they preferred other loyal Palestinian movements to do the work. (A minor scale proxy war? So be it).

All that time though, Hamas refused to admit their relationship with the ABM militias, claiming that they were individuals from Hamas who took their own decisions, and that they weren't coordinating with the head of Hamas. Everyone though knew that no other than the notorious Khaled Mish'al, one of the main heads of Hamas, who lived in Syria for more than a decade (2001-2012) and who is living today in Qatar, was the creator of the ABM! A few days ago, Mesh'al reportedly made contact with one the leaders of loyal Palestinian resistance movements in Damascus, Ahmed Jibril, asking for them to assist the ABM against ISIL! For 2 years, he maintained that ABM were not part of Hamas, but lately, he seems more responsible and aware.

'Rebels' refused to use allocated battlefields, preferred civilian areas

Many other nearby towns and small cities had succeeded in conciliation attempts, agreeing that all the armed gangs of "al-Nusra / al-Qa'eda" could leave peacefully to go to other areas. There was a government plan to push them out to some arid areas where there were no civilians, where fighting would be easier and civilian causalities would not be involved.

So, where did these armed gangs go? Right to Yarmouk Refugee Camp, where the ABM greeted them like brothers!

Well, those very "brothers" (who included Palestinians, Syrians, and multinational foreigners) pledged allegiance to no one but the wealthy ISIL, which pays way more than any other terrorist group these days, and which was in the nearby town of el-Hajar el-Aswad.

From el-Hajar el-Aswad, 400 ISIL militants invaded the Refugee Camp at night, in the early hours of April the 1st, where another 200 Nusra fighters joined them, and started their usual orgy of killing against whoever remained of the unfortunate people and the elusive ABM fighters.

The outcome was that ABM fighters divided into 3 factions: One division joined ISIL; the other resisted it and fought it; and the third surrendered to the loyal Palestinian parties who besieged the camp, and therefore, to the Syrian Army.

ISIL had invaded most of the camp, and its members beheaded the very elusive heads of ABM militias. They removed the Palestinian flags from the tops of the buildings and trampled them!

The population of Yarmouk before the Syrian crisis was around 150,000. Although mostly Palestinians, many Syrians lived there as well, as individual Syrian families or through intermarriage with Palestinians. Most of them fled within the last few years. Some even made it all the way to Gaza. There they suffered in the last war with Israel, so that they said wherever they go the war is running after them. Some of them left for other areas in Syria. Some left Syria completely. Some went to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where they discovered the great difference between Palestinian Refugee camps in Syria and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In Syrian refugee camps they lived well, with full rights except for voting and citizenship, just like the holders of Green Cards in the U.S., or Permanent Residence in Canada, and a special passport which permitted them to travel. They were entitled to free education and health care, like any Syrian citizen. In the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon they had only minimum rights as human beings, not including the right to work They suffered from the double racial stigma of being both Syrian and Palestinian - the very two nationalities that are so hated by half the Lebanese. (That is another long story for another time.)

After all these events, the number left in Yarmouk before ISIL invasion was less than 20,000.

Now, because ISIL is in the camp, it's a completely different story for the Syrian Arab Army. They won't wait until ISIL becomes a threat to Damascus. The Palestinian authority in Ramallah has told the Syrian government to do whatever they need to do. [ 1 ] That means the refugee camp is likely to be flattened like a parking lot very soon, unfortunately.

Hamas has a different attitude. They are asking all fighting parties in the camp to stop the bloodshed between the "brothers"! I bet they are still going to use any Syrian attack against the camp as another smear to demonize the Syrian "regime"!

As PLO Secretary Khaled ‘Abdel-Majeed reportedly said, "If the Syrian Arab Army were dropping perfume they would probably be accused of using chemical weapons". Those mysterious "Barrel Bombs" sound as if they are way more dangerous than any atomic bomb in the mainstream media! Like parrots, they keep talking about that elusive weapon as if it was the most dangerous weapon ever used in wars!  [ 2 ]

Syria's Palestinian refuges major target of Israel, US NATO war on Syria

Israel is living its real Spring! One of the main goals of that war on Syria, was to destroy the Palestinian refugee suburbs (known as camps) in it, and to create hatred and enmity between Palestinians and Syrians. Each Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and other surrounding states is a memory for the people. They are stubs and seeds for future resistance against Israel, a motivation for all Palestinians to go back home one day in the future.

No wonder that those camps have been attacked everywhere in Syria, for no reason but to scatter their inhabitants and turn them into double and triple refugees, and maybe, to leave that land and go as far away as Latin America, where they do indeed accept Palestinian refugees !!!

Israel's proxy war against Palestinians

But, Israel didn't carry out these acts itself. It had a proxy war. Coordinating with the entire Axis (NATO, Gulf states, ISIL), they succeeded in one of their goals. Whether Hamas knew that and didn't mind because it was drunk with sectarianism and filthy petro-dollars; or they didn't know and thought that they were doing the right thing for their people: the result is a complete catastrophe for Palestinians!

Today, most Syrians say that they don't care about Palestine anymore, and to let them go and liberate their country themselves! I refuse to say so, because I know that this is exactly what Israel wants, however I have a real problem with few of Hamas's corrupted heads and leaders. If the movement doesn't kick them out, or split from Hamas and create another group under another name, there will be no solution for that complex problem.

The wound is so deep, and such treason usually has no cure for many generations to come. I heard for the last eight months that a split has already happened inside Hamas, as the people fighting on the ground in Gaza are very upset with their corrupted leaders in Qatar and Turkey. The fighters in Gaza still have good relations with both Iran and Hezbollah, while their leaders do not, and still have a dream of the Muslim Brotherhood controlling states and countries, thinking this to be an opportunity that comes once a century. They can't let it go without gambling all their resources on it. Turkey and Qatar would make Khaled Mesh'al live in five star hotels with a seven digit bank account, way better than the life of Yarmouk Refugee Camp.

But neither Turkey or Qatar will give him a bullet to fight Israel.

Plus these states are blackmailing those leaders and putting pressure on them by using the People Cards: They are ready to rebuild Gaza, and to feed the Palestinians, but that is not for free. In exchange, I guess, they have to turn into a political authority, just like the one in Ramallah, and get rid of their arms and missiles. More illusions, more promises, more wishful thinking and blah blah blah.

We all saw what happened after the Oslo Accords in the early 90's till today: NOTHING! Or let's say, nothing for the Palestinians, while ongoing benefits for the Israelis.

It's a surreal situation that shows how stupid humans can become. On the subject of Palestinians, the Israeli-Gulf-NATO axis has won and succeeded 100%, unfortunately.

NOTES

1. ↑  See "PLO: Syrian leadership deals with Yarmouk Camp with sensitivity, any decision will be jointly made."

3. ↑ 
With regard to the mythical and legendary weapon of "Barrel Bombs"! It seems that everyone in the whole world is talking about these weapons, and I wonder why, if such a powerful weapon exists in Syria, why the Syrians didn't use it against Israel to liberate the Golan Heights at least? Or is this mythical weapon a pretext to try to prevent he Syrian army from using its airforce against the terrorists? What should the Syrian army use? Swords and Daggers ? It's a war, and it's a very dirty one, against criminal terrorists that have no mercy in their hearts. Those terrorists are launching daily random shells from what they called "Hell Cannon". Hell Cannon is a weapon used against civilians, as a punishment because they didn't join the "Blessed Revolution", and because they supported the "Infidel Regime"! The UN doesn't see those arms, nor the slaughtering, nor the massacres, nor the suicide bombers in children's schools and busy markets. It sees only the mighty "Barrel Bombs"!

‘I was to play Rachmaninoff, not preach politics’ – fired pianist Valentina Lisitsa to RT. This article first published April 07, 2015 22:19 http://rt.com/news/247297-canada-orchestra-pianist-ukraine/ The Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa has become even more famous than she's already been among the online community, after her political views cost her a job with a Canadian orchestra. And she doesn't plan on being silenced, she told RT.

See also: Toronto Symphony Bans Pianist Critical of Kiev Regime (9/4/15), twitter.com/ValLisitsa, Canada's Immigration Minister Delivers Pro-War Speech against Russia (18/3/15) and Kiev Becomes First European Capital to Openly Glorify Criminal Ideology (10/4/15).

"I always separated music from politics and tried to keep enormous distance between the two," the pianist told RT's 'In the Now' host Anissa Naouai on Tuesday, after news of how she's been treated by Canada's Toronto Symphony Orchestra has spread globally.

The hashtag #LetValentinaPlay surged in popularity on social media, and thousands of supporters spoke out for the artist, who was offered to be paid not to play.

READ MORE: Canadian orchestra drops Ukraine-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa over anti-Kiev posts

"I was about to play Rachmaninoff concertos with the orchestra, not to preach politics," Lisitsa, who was fired allegedly for her political views rather than lack of skill, told RT. The orchestra hasn't returned RT's requests to comment on the situation so far.

"I never expected my music to be silenced," the pianist said, adding that she's "totally for freedom of speech, freedom of discussion and freedom of heated argument."

"That's what I've been doing on Twitter," she said, explaining her extensive tweeting on Ukraine on the social platform, with her point of view not falling in line with the popular Western narrative, allegedly costing her a job.

This article is based on a press release dated 9 April 2015 from Ahmed Majdalani of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), published by the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) in Damascus. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said any decision about the terrorist-besieged Yarmouk Camp neighborhood will be coordinated with the Syrian government. According to this information, the Syrian government has so far evacuated 12,000 people from Yarmouk (which is a permanent suburb) to temporary shelters in Damascus in order to protect them from ISIS. It is thought that the ISIS attack on Yarmouk may be part of a plot by enemies of the Syrian government to reduce the Palestinian population whom Syria has given a safe home now for years, in order to make the Palestinian 'problem' disappear. Candobetter.net comment: If this were true then the major beneficiaries would be Israel/US and their allies. See Voltaire.net article alleging Mossad involved in these attacks. http://www.voltairenet.org/article177039.html

Terrorists, mostly from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in cahoots with Jabhat al-Nusra, entered the neighborhood recently and have been committing terror acts against its inhabitants, which include Palestinian refugees and Syrian citizens.

Any future steps to be taken in Yarmouk Camp will be coordinated between Syria and the Palestinians, Member of the PLO Executive Committee Ahmed Majdalani told a press conference on Thursday.

“The decision will be jointly made by the two sides to retake the camp from the obscurantist terrorists who seize it now,” added Majdalani, who is on a visit to Syria.

He stressed that the Syrian leadership has been dealing with the situation in the neighborhood, which is located in southern Damascus city, with a high level of sensitivity given its special status as it symbolically stands as “the capital of Palestinian Diaspora” in terms of its size, the population and the national and historical role it has played for the launch of “the Palestinian revolution of today.”

Stemming from this sensitivity, Majdalani said, there has not been “any Syrian security solution” in order not to look as if there is a Syrian attitude to liquidate the Palestinian cause.

“Nor has there been Palestinian intervention so that it wouldn’t appear as a Palestinian infighting,” he added.

Terrorists have aborted attempted political solutions

Speaking about the options for the coming period, Majdalani said former options of reaching a political solution were aborted by the terrorists and their criminal acts of killing, kidnapping and rape against civilians.

He said, "This leaves us with other options of going for a security solution that takes into consideration the partnership with the Syrian state in view of its sovereignty over its territories.”

He made it clear that the issue is first and foremost in the Syrian state’s hands in terms of preserving the security and stability of the Palestinians and Syrians alike.

About the results of calls made with the Syrian government and Palestinian factions regarding the arising situation, Majdalani said it has been agreed with the Ministry of Social Affairs to secure the requirements of “safe evacuation” for residents who want to leave Yarmouk Camp.

Makeshift residential centers will be secured for those in Qudssaya area, along with garnering the necessary humanitarian and relief support, in addition to the support provided by the Syrian government, he added.

Out of the 17,500 residents who were in the neighborhood before ISIS entered it, approximately 12000 Palestinians have been evacuated in cooperation with the Syrian government.

Over the past two days, Majdalani has met with a number of officials and stressed that implicating the Palestinian refugee camps in the current events in Syria is aimed at attempting to liquidate the Palestinian issue and ending the refugees’ right to return home.

Qabas/ H. Said

About three years ago, I made the big mistake of looking too closely into my bathroom mirror. Yuck! All I could see was nothing but wrinkles and gray hair. But wait -- I was never supposed to have actually ever gotten old! This was never supposed to have happened! But it did -- at least to my body if not my mind.

"So," I said to myself, "what the freak can I do with OLD?" I know! I'll become an actor! And so I did.

Fortunately, there are several film schools in my city where student directors are always looking for talent to use in their films -- especially talent that will work for free just to have an excuse to get out of the house. And so suddenly I found myself in big demand. I mean really. How many little old ladies do you know who are willing to throw themselves into an acting career? Not all that many. So I seemed to have pretty much cornered the market. Because there's really not all that much competition.

At auditions even for non-paying student-film roles, believe it or not, there are usually scores of child actors, ingenues and even beautiful leading ladies, all dying to try out for a part. But there just aren't that many little old ladies out there to compete with, thank you very much.

And so now I have found one very successful way of taking advantage of the age factor that is currently barreling down on all of us like a steam-roller with no way to avoid. And there are also bound to be other ways to make the most of our "senior" years too (such as finally realizing that "war" is a racket, an obscenity and a con-game, something that most people apparently have not reached the age of having finally acquired enough wisdom to realize at all -- and then working our hearts out to stop all "war" from ever happening again).

In the past three years, I have been in over one hundred student films, playing all kinds of grandma roles -- sweet loving grandmas, for instance. And society grandmas, dying cancer patient grandmas, cowgirl grandmas, evil grandmas, war-correspondent grandmas, psychotic grandmas, ghostly grandmas, college-professor grandmas and corpse grandmas, as well as grandmas who are doctors, lawyers and judges.

But my favorite grandma role of all time is playing a grandma zombie!

PS: Let's face it. Getting old sucks eggs. Nothing fun at all about having creaky joints, being mostly ignored for not being sexy enough, having trouble sleeping, facing possible dementia, living on cat food, facing multiple surgeries, having one's teeth fall out, etc. So we gotta always be constantly looking for ways to make growing older more fun on some level or another.

Turning into a grumpy frump, believing the lies and hatred being constantly broadcast on Fox News, and/or just plain giving up on life are definitely three ways not to have fun!

PPS: "Some will rob you with a shotgun, some with a fountain pen." Elders these days are being targeted as victims by bad guys in several different ways. Street thugs may mug elders for their pocket money -- but probate thugs can mug our elders for their life savings as well. http://marygsykes.com/2015/03/27/in-chicago-what-does-a-nursing-home-do-when-its-understaffed-break-out-the-chemical-restraints/

In Chicago, for instance, probate sharks seek out rich widows, get them declared incompetent, throw them into stark "assisted care" institutions where they are medicated into submission, clean out their safe deposit boxes and then throw them out into the streets to die when there is no money left. http://marygsykes.com/about/

Or else your sleazy relatives rob your rightful heirs of their rightful share of your estate after you're gone: First published here.

But nobody messes with zombie grandmas!

This article about fellow Australian Julian Assange has been adapted from the original Sputnik International article of 7 April 2015.

April 5 marked the five-year anniversary of the release of the Collateral Murder video by WikiLeaks (embedded within). The shocking footage showed the entire world the 2007 US Apache attack helicopter airstrike on Baghdad that killed 12 people - including two Reuters staff members - and injured two small children.

Ironically, the only ones imprisoned for the crime were those with the courage and compassion to attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice.

See also: l'Espresso interview | Julian Assange: 'I still enjoy crushing bastards' (2/4/15).

Assange took part in a Reddit AMA on Monday, along with journalist and Assange’s closest adviser Sarah Harrison, to discuss the many things the duo have been involved in.

Massive bust honouring Edward
Snowden appears in New York City

The Collateral Murder video was part of a massive trove of confidential evidence of US wrong-doing, collected and released by whistleblowing army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, in an attempt to show the world the “true costs of war.”  The collection was deemed the largest release of confidential documents ever leaked to the public.

Manning equated actions she witnessed in the video to “children torturing ants with a magnifying glass,” except these ants were human beings, who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Manning was charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy, a charge that  could have lead her to death row over an act of conscience. She was ultimately acquitted of that charge, but was found guilty of 17 others, and is currently serving a 35-year sentence in a maximum security military prison.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange remains under investigation by the US government for publishing their criminal secrets, and has been granted political asylum by Ecuador. Unable to safely travel to South America, he has remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012.

The city has had officers from the Metropolitan Police Service continuously stationed outside the building, prepared to arrest him should he ever try to leave ever since.  The total cost for the first two years of this patrol has cost the city £6.5 million.

But an undeterred Assange has remained active even from inside the embassy. The publisher has continued to release information and has helped to raise money and support for political prisoners and whistleblowers through the Courage Foundation.  Manning has also been writing — and now tweeting — from prison.

During an AMA with Sarah Harrison, Renata Avila, Andy Müller-Maguhn of the Courage Foundation and Julian Assange on Reddit Monday evening, Reddit user Josiah_Bartlet1 asked Assange: “do you think that the work you have done will lead to a radical shift slowly in the government and society as we know it, or do you think the instruments of the government are enough to throttle any such efforts (based on your personal experiences)?”

Assange responded saying, “These are cascading effects with geometric amplifiers in both directions. It's hard to say, but at least we can say we fought and gave people a choice to know themselves and their civilization.”

Another user, Militaria, asked, “What would you say to people like my parents, who believe that leakers and whistleblowers are dangerous traitors who are supporting ‘the enemy?’”

“This propaganda happens a lot. What is very important here is to explain that throughout the whole of the Manning trial the US government was desperate to prove that some "harm" had come. In fact if could prove none. What did happen, is that the US troops began to withdraw from Iraq. What has happened since Snowden's revelations is that citizens around the world began to protect their communications. And still not one reported "harm". In fact we still get bombs by known person's of suspect. It is a matter of US interests the government is protecting, not US security,” Harrison responded.

WikiLeaks Exposes Most Controversial
Part of Obama-Led Trade Agreement

“What legal protections would you recommend for intelligence whistleblowers?” another user asked.

“The reality of the situation is that alleged journalistic sources like Snowden and Manning will rarely, if ever, be fully protected regardless of domestic laws. At the very least all cases of whistleblowing, publishing and journalistic sources should have the ability to have a public interest defence. I think the real solutions in such cases will always rely on international measures though. However, these will always also still rely on the reality of international politics — few countries have the balls to stand up to the US,” Harrison wrote.

When asked what the average citizen can do to stop illegal breaches of individual privacy by the US government, Julian responded with, “Nothing. There's nothing you can do. As soon as you do something you'll no-longer be average. Do that. Don't be average.”

“How has Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning's whistleblowing affected other potential whistleblowers? Do you get a sense that they are emboldened by their efforts, or more apprehensive after seeing the response to it?” user raihan42 asked.

“Edward Snowden has said that he was inspired by Chelsea Manning. The US government wanted to publicly destroy Manning, in a grotesque way, as a warning. They did not succeed but I realised we can do even better! This is part of the reason why we put a lot of resources and risk into getting Edward Snowden asylum. He is now mostly free, living a fulfilling life of respect, an inspirational symbol for whistleblowers world wide and not a general deterrent suffering in a US prison unable to defend himself or promote his cause in public,” Assange wrote.

“Obama and the US government generally have tried to offer each truthteller as an deterrent. Manning was sentenced to 35 years, Hammond to 10 years, Brown to 5 years, WikiLeaks secret Grand Jury is ongoing in its 5th year. Yet, their deterrent method is clearly failing. Snowden came forward,” Harrison continued. “I look forward to when the next truthteller comes forward. Courage is building the safety nets for when they do.”

Related

Assange Demands Full Access to Swedish Investigation Materials on Rape Case
Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Joins Twitter
Whistleblower Chelsea Manning Scores a Legal Victory
Assange To Stay in London Embassy as Long as US Pursues WikiLeaks Probe
Mexico Launches Own Wikileaks to Fight Corruption

To: Ambassadors of nations on the UN Security Council including Samantha Power of the United States, Francois Delattre of France, Mark Lyall Grant of the UK, Vitaly Churkin of Russia, Liu Jeiyi of China and the non-permanent members

Condemn the war planned and waged by Saudi Arabia against the people of Yemen on behalf of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi the deposed president of Yemen. Demand that Saudi Arabia disband their coalition and immediately cease making war on the people of Yemen and end their 'humanitarian' bombing campaign which is creating a humanitarian disaster in Yemen.

If Saudi Arabia does not immediately comply, refer Prince Mohammad bin Salman, son of King Salman and current Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia, who initiated this brutal and illegal assault on Yemen and it's people to the International Criminal Court.

Sign petition

Why is this important?

How it will be delivered

Thomas Mulcair, MP
Leader of the Opposition

Dear Mr. Mulcair:

Thank you for opposing Harper’s extended and expanded war in Iraq and Syria, and for pointing out in parliament that conducting a military intervention in Syria, without the permission of the Syrian government and the UN Security Council, is a flagrant violation of international law. It’s reassuring to know that “an NDP-led government will end Canada's involvement in this war immediately.”

I am writing today to make three comments on your e-mail message to me, entitled “New Democrats on War in Iraq and Syria.”

First, I would like to draw to your attention that Tunisia is the latest of several countries to re-establish diplomatic ties with the government of Syria. (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-32172974) The Tunisian government went so far as to invite its Syrian counterpart to send an envoy to Tunis.

I feel that it is now incumbent upon you and the New Democratic Party to call upon the government of Canada to re-establish diplomatic relations with the Syrian government as well. This move would help pave the way for a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis. It would assist in ending over four years of terrible violence and the suffering of millions of Syrian refugees. It could contribute to the peace process under UN auspices at Geneva, as more and more countries realize that there is no military solution to the tragedy in Syria.

My second comment is that, to the best of my knowledge, neither you nor the NDP caucus have ever publicly declared that you are in favour of the UN-sponsored peace process for Syria. If I am wrong, please correct me. Canadians need to know that the opposition is indeed in favour of the peace process.

Instead, you and other members of the NDP caucus have raised unsubstantiated allegations about the conduct of the Syrian government, namely that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its own citizens and that it cooperates with ISIS. Repeating these allegations, which are not supported by the facts or by various UN investigations, is counterproductive to the peace process, since it impedes opening a dialogue with the Syrian government, without whose participation no peace process is possible.

If you have concerns about the conduct of any of the warring parties in Syria, the appropriate place for these concerns to be raised is at the peace conferences at Geneva. Raising these allegations at other times only serves to reinforce the demonization of the Syrian government, which is part and parcel of the Harper government’s determination to have a military, rather than a humanitarian, mission in Iraq and Syria. We all know that this extended and expanded military mission in Syria could easily morph into a regime change operation.

My third comment is that your job as leader of the opposition requires that you hold the Canadian government to account. You might ask why the Harper government saw fit to help the USA organize the pre-conference in Tunisia (in December 2011) for the founding conference in Tunis in February, 2012, of the Friends of Syria Group of Countries (FSG), which group, in turn, organized a covert war for regime change in Syria – partly with Canadian tax dollars. You might demand an accounting for the several millions of our tax dollars that the Harper government donated directly to Syrian “rebels”, who are, in fact, the terrorist mercenaries who morphed into ISIS and invaded Iraq in 2014. You might question the wisdom of the Harper government’s hosting in Ottawa in June of 2013 – with our tax dollars - of a meeting of FSG countries for the purpose of co-ordinating economic sanctions against Syria - again without the approval of the UN Security Council.

Please focus your criticism on the Harper government of Canada and seek positively to influence public opinion for a resumption of diplomatic relations with the government of Syria and the continuation of the UN-sponsored peace process at Geneva.

I look forward to your reply on this very important matter,

Ken Stone
member, Hamilton Mountain Federal Riding Association
exec member, Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War

Order The Kapetanios (1772) by Dominique Eudes from Monthly Review Press for US$20.00 + postage.

I think the ABC Radio National program, Rear Vision, (see inside) owes to the Greek people and to its Australian audience to tell the truth about Greek history. The account of the Greek Civil War (see Appendix 1) is untrue. The Greek Communist Party led the resistance to the German occupation and had overwhelming support of the Greek people. In 1944, the British tricked the Communist partisans into disarming whilst they secretly re-armed those who had collaborated with the Germans against fellow citizens. They were able to do this because of the betrayal of the Greek Communist Party and the unquestioning support for Stalin by the Greek Communist Party. The Greek Communist Party abused its support from the Greek people to convince then to lay down their weapons. The result was a massacre of the most patriotic Greeks by former German collaborators whilst the British looked on. At this time, the heroic partisan leader Aris Velouchiotis was murdered by collaborators. He died in the knowledge that the Greek Communist Party leaders that he supported had denounced him as a traitor for refusing to lay down his arms.

This was originally posted to the ABC Radio National Rear Vision website on 17 July 2011 as a comment in response to a documentary "Greek Tragedy". This article was originally posted to candobetter, but not on the front page, on 14 Nov 2014. See also: IMF vs Greece: History of the Greek Civil War (part iii) and Episode 055 (6/12/14 - 25 min) of Sputnik by George Galloway on RT. ₂

One of the placards at the mass Greek protests in October 1944 against the British read: "The Germans are back".

Patriotic Greeks could have so easily beaten the British and the former German collaborators in the war of 1944 and the subsequent civil war from 1946-1949 if they were not so appallingly misled by the Greek Communist Party (KKE).

For a truthful account of the Greek Civil War please read "The Kapetanios - Partisans and the Civil War in Greece, 1943-1949" written in 1973 by Frenchman Dominique Eudes. Copies can be order from The Monthly Review Press, "Alibris, or Amazon

Update, 31 dec 2014: The transcript of the program, copied from the ABC Radio National page, to which the above is a response, has been moved to this page. An excerpt is below in Appendix 1 - JS

Appendix 1: ABC Rear Vision's "Greek Tragedy" misleading account of the Greek Civil War

"Greece fought the Italians and then the Germans during World War II and when the war ended in 1945, a bitter civil war between communists and anti-communists, ultimately won by the right, created social tensions that would last in Greece for the next 30 years. Dr David Close is a historian in the School of International Studies at Flinders University."

David Close: "1945 was Year Zero in Greece, like in much of Europe, because under the German occupation everything had been destroyed: the whole economic system, the physical infrastructure, the political system. The Germans had encouraged a growing civil war, as well, which got worse in the few years after the war. The driving force was a pro-soviet communist party, which grew very powerful under the German occupation, because it dominated the Resistance. And the opposing forces were backed first by the British and then by the Americans, and American backing enabled them to triumph in the end, so they won a decisive victory in 1949."

James Sinnamon's comment: The principle 'driving force' of the Greek Civil war was not the Greek Communist Party (KKE). It was the British Army led by General Scobie and Greeks who had collaborated with the Nazi collaborators.

Josef Stalin had instructed the KKE to welcome his British allies as liberators and to follow their instructions. After they landed the British demanded that the partisans disarm. The Greek Communist Party leaders did their utmost to ensure that resistance fighters disarmed. For its part, the British army protected former collaborators from a vengeful Greek population, claiming to have put them in custody, whilst secretly re-arming them.

This made possible the bloody civil war which was won by the fascists. This defeat caused Greece to remain a dictatorship for more than three more decades. As Nana Mouskouri explained tonight on Q and A, parliamentary rule was not re-established until 1975.

Appendix 2: Other pages about the Greek Civil War

Episode 055 of George Galoway's Sputnik ₂ program on RT referred to in footnote 1.

#GreekCivilWar Twitter pages.

Athens 1944: Britain’s dirty secret (30/11/14) on The Guardian - linked to from the Twitter page above. 1010 readers' comments are included.

Footnotes

1 ↑ The Greek Civil War is discussed in the first half of that episode of Sputnik. In that segment Galloway interviews Judy Cotter, a British woman, who as a student activist in 1973, courageously helped Greek students being imprisoned and tortured by the Greek military junta. That was the same junta which came to power in 1944 as a result of the betrayal of the resistance fighters in 1944 by Stalin and Churchill. The above article was also posted as a comment on Jan 2014 to Sputnik.

2 ↑ George Galloway's Sputnik program on RT should not be confused with the Russian Sputnik International web-site.

On April 4, 2015 the ABC and other new services reported on fierce 'clashes' as a newly formed organisation turned up in large numbers to oppose rallies in several states by a political group called Reclaim Australia.

"Organiser Mel Gregson [1] said No Room for Racism was formed with the express purpose of shutting down the 16 rallies across Australia planned by Reclaim Australia. The Reclaim Australia members, on their facebook page, describe their mission as "We as patriotic Australians need to stand together to stop halal tax, sharia law & islamisation.""

Gregson also campaigned against the Melbourne Tunnel Project.

Reclaim Australia.

So is Gregson, and all who support her, denying people the right to demonstrate peacefully about something they believe in, thereby displaying intolerance and bigotry? If she was at an anti-nuclear demonstration, would she cry "evil capitalism" if thugs hired by the nuclear power lobby turned up for a hostile confrontation against her?

Oxford Dictionary Definitions: (Additional observations in bold)

Racism:
Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Xenophobia:
Dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries. Does this mean the Aborigines who threw spears at the invaders of the First Fleet were xenophobic?

Does the banner "No Room for Racism" prejudge that Reclaim Australia is made up of racists without even understanding the meaning of the word? Is denying people the right to peacefully express a (non racist?) point of view in a public gathering analogous to autocratic imposition of martial law denying those people their rights?

This is not an argument about one side being right and the other side being wrong. This is an objective criticism of the motives and moral legitimacy of No Room for Racism.

No Room for Racism was chanting:
"The Reclaim members sang renditions of Advance Australia Fair, but the anti-racism protesters’ chants of “immigrants are welcome, racists are not” could also be heard throughout the CBD."

2014-15: Migration program set at 190,000 places; humanitarian intake 13,750 places. SOURCES: Department of Immigration; Australian Bureau of Statistics.

So is No Room for Racism not only confused about the meaning of the term racism but also confused about immigration and its impact on infrastructure expansion and the capacity to accept refugees in preference to relatively wealthy migrants? Isn't lack of population growth management driving the infrastructure expansion that Mel Gregson also opposes? Are Gregson and her supporters totally confused about the differences between refugees, mass migration and population growth management? Is this the kind of confusion that is endemic in Australian society as a direct result of the ABC (and other media) suppressing public policy debate of population growth management? Is this a form of confused "socialism" which is actually acting against global social equity by supporting exactly the same values as globalisation and right wing extremism?

Is a valid conclusion that Australia should have "No Room for Duplicitous, Self-Righteous, Incoherent Bigots" whose confused logic is carefully nurtured by dishonest taxpayer funded ABC broadcasters?

NOTES

[1] Mel Gregson is a member of the Socialist Party of Australia. See http://fightback.org.nz/category/general/events/page/3/ and http://links.org.au/node/3095

Why do Medecins Sans Frontieres (MFS), Avaaz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation push the claims of insurgents and their supporters?

On 19 March 2015, Al-Jazeera provided details about the alleged attack from Sarmin’s ‘local coordinating committee’, which claimed three children, their parents and grandmother suffocated to death after a ‘barrel bomb attack in the town’. The activist group ‘said chlorine gas had been used’.

The “National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces” draws attention to the call for a no-fly zone by Avaaz, following the alleged attack.

It is vital that detective work is done in regards to allegations such as these since they can be used to support an escalation of the war and terror in Syria.

Contributors to the website "A Closer Look on Syria" probe the claims and the 'evidence' in regards to this 16 March 2015 ‘chlorine attack’.

Below is some of the discussion from the "A Closer Look on Syria" page. This discussion relates to a video purportedly showing a helicopter dropping a barrel bomb with chlorine onto Sarmin. Like so much of the video 'evidence' presented by the militarized opposition in Syria or their supporters, the evidence in this video is questionable.
.

Extract from Closer look on Syria list discussion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apH795JpL7I Claims to show a barrel bomb attack, posted March 17, filmed in full daylight. Looks legit. Helicopter, right-shaped bomb, large blast. Might well be a recycled video, apparently too late to matter directly to the attack on the night of the 16th. I was tempted to try and geo-locate it in Sarmin, but only if it seems worthwhile (partly because I may only be able to rule it out, after lots of looking) --Caustic Logic (talk) 08:34, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

The video is titled "Throw explosive barrels on the city of Daraa Angel 17 32 015". Uploader LCCMedia seems to show videos from all over Syria --Charles Wood (talk) 20:00, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
Okay, will leave that to illustrate the dangers of taking suggested videos without proper scrutiny. :) --Caustic Logic (talk) 22:38, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
There are plenty of structures there to cue on, so if it's Sarmin, geo-locating might be easy. A couple of points—

1. Is that a barrel? Maybe the term has a broader definition in Syria.

2. It's falling through a slate-grey sky, but the ground shots show a complex sky w/ cumulus clouds against bright blue.

3. The camera is very steady but begins jerking around at 0:21 but the bomb doesn't land until 0:26. I don't have ear buds w/ me at the moment -- maybe the audio explains why all the pre-impact jerking.

4. There have been so many airbases over-run or almost over-run in the last 3 years. Does anybody have an inventory or guess as to what type aircraft and how many the insurgents (incl IS) are flying now? Pierpont (talk) 20:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
Just to reiterate the video is completely unrelated to the alleged attack in Idlib. The video is from Daraa. Given that I think it's two spliced videos that may not be related.

The currents state of play with the insurgent 'airforce' is they have got two L-39 trainers to the point of being able to taxi on a runway, but there is no evidence they have ever flown. I've not seen any helicopters that have been repaired enough to fly. As I recall, the two L-39s have now been captured from moderates by either DAESH or Jabhat al-Nusra. I forget which. Expect perhaps a suicide bombing at some stage -- Charles Wood (talk) 01:20, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

On the webpage, there is more discussion and analysis of the victims of this alleged attack as well as mention that some of the videos related to the attack have been uploaded by Al-Nusra.

There is also reason to question the objectivity and intentions of MFS and Avaaz, two prominent NGOs disseminating the allegations about chlorine or gas attacks. Both NGOs have much closer links with insurgents and their supporters than with Syrian people who support the Syrian army.

For example, in August 2013, MFS worked with doctors in rebel-held Ghouta, Damascus, and it was those doctors through MFS that provided details about hundreds of alleged victims of a sarin attack, allegedly by the Syrian army. MFS presentation of the allegations gave the claims some credence, yet later investigations and reports by highly regarded professionals in the west raise serious doubts about the Syrian army being responsible.

By working with doctors and medical personnel who operate only in rebel-held territory in Syria, MFS presents a blinkered and partisan view of the war. It should be noted that a co-founder of MFS, Dr Bernard Kouchner, was French Minister for Foreign and European Affairs Minister (2007 – 2010) under President Sarkozy, a president who was to give strong backing for foreign intervention in Syria. (In 2010, Kouchner was listed by The Jerusalem Post as number 15 in their list of the 50 most influential Jewish people in the world.) And interestingly, Dr Kouchner and MFS were involved in controversy in October 2008 when MFS protested comments made by Kouchner in Jerusalem. Kouchner said at a press conference, “Officially, we have no contact with Hamas, but unofficially, international organization working in the Gaza Strip – in particular, French NGOs – provide us information.”

As for Avaaz, a Guardian article indicates how heavily involved Avaaz is on the ground in Syria to support the insurgents. Another article by Jillian York, who heads the Electronic Frontier Foundation, provides another critique of Avaaz and its man in Syria (who is Lebanese), but it should be noted that Jillian York and the EFF actively support the insurgency in Syria, so her article is not as damning as it could be.

MFS, Avaaz and EFF seem to have the same Syrian brief: support the insurgents, damn the army and government, and ignore millions of Syrians who want peace and no foreign interference.

It should be noted that the sources of funding for both Avaaz and EFF are similar in that they are mostly 'establishment' sources, and there are links between George Soros / Open Society and both EFF and Avaaz, (This could be researched a lot deeper than is done here. One link between Avaaz and George Soros that is noted in articles involves Res Publica .)

A simple web search shows Soros has close ties with MSF , even if they are only socially and professionally supportive ties.

It is pertinent if Soros has links with groups such as Avaaz and MSF as he is a supporter of the 'revolution' in Syria and funds many other NGOs that take a partisan stand on Syria, e.g. HRW, Amnesty, Reporters without Borders).

The 2012 Guardian article "the Syrian Opposition: Who's doing the talking?" is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the war against Syria and the role of the US State Department, NGOs and other groups and individuals such as Soros who provide funding and support for opponents of the Syrian government (and the secular state?).

This article in New Republic is interesting in regards to the conclusion it draws after examining some of the actions Avaaz has purportedly taken in Syria:

…the temptations of power and fame seem to have encouraged Avaaz to sacrifice one of its most fundamental principles: That truth is an activist’s greatest weapon

The New Republic article also makes mention of the inevitable rivalries between activist groups.

Another more critical report on Avaaz is this one: "Avaaz: Empire Propaganda Mill Masquerading as Grassroots Activism".

CONCLUSION

Are there any humanitarian groups in the west that support peace and present the viewpoints of the general public in Syria, i.e. over 20 million people?

Presumably the vast majority of Syrian people put their trust in the Syrian Army to defend the state, as Syrian activist Edward Dark attested in a recent article. (Dark had originally supported the ‘revolution’.)

If Syrians don’t support their army, what is the alternative? Anonymous 'activists' and insurgents funded by the US, Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Yet it is insurgents and their supporters whom MFS, Avaaz and EFF support. Why?

For any chance of peace, such questions must be asked by us.

On Wednesday April 1, 2015 at Yarmouk Palestinian camp in the outskirts of Damascus, a ceremony was held, organized by the Syrian Ministry of Reconciliation. However, the camp was attacked by elements from the nearby village of Hajar al-Aswad, allied with some ex-militants of Hamas who first joined the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda) and who have now joined Daesh. [ISIS.]
During several hours, heavy fighting between Daesh and the various Palestinian militias, including their former comrades of Hamas. By late evening, the jihadists controlled most of the camp. But during the night, the Syrian Arab Army deployed reinforcements and Daesh withdrew completely.This article republished from Voltaire Network, 3 April 2015 Underneath is a second Voltaire.net article which alleges the presence of Israeli Mossad agents provocateur in Yarmouk.

The "Yarmuk" and "Palestine" camps are not tent camps or slums as in other Arab states, but concrete cities, built to Syrian standards. Traditionally, the Syrian Arab Republic administers them in link with Palestinian political parties.

At the end of 2012, militiamen loyal to Hamas Khaled Meshaal allowed jihadists from the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda) and Israeli Mossad officers into the camp in an attempt to assassinate the leaders of Fatah and the PFLP [1] . The Syrian Arab Republic immediately, via SMS, called the 160 000 inhabitants to flee. 120,000 of them had been relocated within 48 hours in schools and hotels of the capital. The Syrian Arab Army had then stormed the camp with the support of the Palestinian Authority. Ultimately, as a result of heavy fighting and a terrible siege, a political agreement had led to "freeze" the camp where 18 000 people remained. Yesterday’s ceremony should have marked the reconciliation between firstly the Syrian Arab Republic, the PFLP and Fatah and the other branch of Hamas and the al-Nosra elements.

For two years, Palestinian groups opposed to the Syrian Arab Republic attacked any food supply convoys entering the camp, confiscated the goods and then sold them at 3.5 times their price to the other inhabitants of the camp. To feed itself the population is thus forced to join these groups which then pay them a salary in dollars.

The Gulf press has launched a propaganda campaign accusing the Syrian Arab Army of starving and bombing the Palestinians, as Israel does in Gaza.

Syria is the only Arab state to provide absolute legal equality for Palestinians and free access to its schools, its universities and its social services. Several generals of the Syrian Arab Army are Palestinians.

Translation: Roger Lagassé

Mossad agents in the Al-Qaeda unit that attacked the Yarmouk camp

Source: http://www.voltairenet.org/article177039.html Voltaire Network | 2 January 2013.

The battle that raged starting December 9 in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp (south of Damascus) has revealed new alliances.

The strategic objective was to involve Palestinians in the war in Syria, mobilizing them on a sectarian basis (they are mostly Sunni) against the secular regime. But the refugees did not allow themselves to be manipulated, no more than in Lebanon in 2007, when the mercenaries of Fatah al-Islam tried to mobilize the Palestinians of Nahr el-Bared against Hezbollah.

Elements of Hamas loyal to Meshaal allowed fighters of the Al-Nousra Front (Levantine branch of Al-Qaeda) to enter the camp where they mainly clashed with men of the PFLP (nationalists and Marxists).

It now appears that the al-Qaeda fighters were not only made up of Muslim extremists, but also included Israeli Mossad agents. They had specific plans to corner the leaders of other Palestinian factions and eliminate them. Not finding them, they allowed the other members of Al-Qaida to systematically loot the empty apartments of these leaders.

After a week of heavy fighting, elements of al-Qaida, Mossad-included, retreated and the camp was declared a "neutral zone." Of the 180 000 inhabitants, about 120,000 had fled the camp at the request of the Syrian authorities and were relocated by them to Damascus.

Video and transcript inside: Three days ago I heard a casual report, lasting maybe two lines, on SBS or ABC news, that ISIS militants had taken over a suburb of Damascus six kilometers from the Presidential Palace. Although this sounded really awful, the lack of detail was suspicious. One could imagine the United States using such a half-baked report as an excuse to attack the area from the air and kill the Syrian president, so I tried to find out more by going outside Australian and US/NATO news sources. The Syrian government has since driven ISIS out of the area. [1] Below this introduction is a video interview with Alaa Ibrahim, and my transcript of it. From Voltaire.net [1] I learned were that Yamouk refugee 'camp' is not a camp with tents but a fully fledged built-up suburb of Damascus, mostly inhabited by Palestinian refugees, to whom Syria grants full rights to housing, free education and health, like ordinary citizens. Palestine, as readers would be aware, no longer exists on the map, but it used to be next door to Syria, on its southern border, in the area now occupied by Israel. Syria is the only Arab state that provides legal equality to Palestinians and it administers their areas in conjunction with Palestinian leaders. Something like seven million of Syria's population before the current war were refugees from, as well as Palestine, the nearby war-torn states, notably Iraq. (It is amazing that the Australian refugee advocate movement and our anti-war movement - such as it is - does not appear to have realised this.)

On 2 April 2015, political analyst Alaa Ibrahim was interviewed by RT news about how Islamic State fighters seized Yarmouk Refugee area in South Damascus, 6.4km from the city center.

Alaa Ibrahim: "We now have an effective ISIS presence in that area. The camp has been under rebel control since 2012 and it has been under the control of two rebel factions, ... ? and Moktus. Two of these groups have very radical Islamic ideology, but nonetheless, the presence of ISIL has a political significance because it is the first time we have seen a stronghold of ISIL (or ISIS) so close to the Syrian capital.

Yarmouk has been the closest point the rebels have ever got to the Syrian capital, Damascus. If you have a look at the geography of the place, areas around the Yarmouk camp which were all under the control of rebels, have recently in the past few months had signed settlements - which the Syrian government calls a 'national reconciliation agreement' - between the Syrian Government and the local rebel factions in these areas and, as a result the Syrian government has fortified its presence south of Damascus and further secured the perimeter of the capital.

The only real chance to achieve a breach in this perimeter of Damascus is through the Yarmouk area. The Syrian government has been avoiding attacking the Yarmouk camp because it knows many - estimates say between 15 and 20,000 - Palestinian refugees live in that area, so it would be a political embarassment for the Syrian government if it carries attacks there and surely civilians would die as a result of these attacks so I think they [Syrian Government] decided to avoid the camp, which created a weak point in their parameter around the capital, Damascus.

Also, there's another development that comes into play: the fact that the Nusra Front, which is very strong in the camp, wanted to fortify its position against the other rebel factions, so it brought in ISIL in a rear alliance between the two organisations, hoping to prevent any local rebel factions from signing any agreement or agreeing with the Syrian government to surrender or give the camp back to the control of the Syrian government."

Interviewer: " The logistics of what has happened aside, what is it going to mean for these many thousands - as you've just been saying - of the refugees inside this camp? What's it going to mean for their safety and security? "

Alaa Ibrahim: "Well, they don't have a very good situation to begin with. The camp is completely dependent on humanitarian aid delivered to the camp on a monthly basis by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees ... and by the Syrian government. The situation in the camp was very bad to begin with. There is an infestation of diseases ..."

Interviewer interrupting: "Are they safe from ISIS?"

Alaa Ibrahim: "No, they're not safe from ISIS/ISIL. They were not safe in the first place, when they lived under battling rebel factions, including al Queida and Syrian Muslim Front."

[1] ISIS driven out of the area per a report from Voltaire Network, 3 April 2015, republished at http://candobetter.net/node/4354.

Originally published under the title of "Iran's deputy FM: Yemen's president uses terrorists to fight rebels," this is the transcript, with links to the video, of Sophie Shevardnadze's interview with Iran Deputy Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. The beginning of the video is particularly instructive, as Hossein Amir-Abdollahian gives a run-down on what is happening from Iran's very close perspective. Among other things, it becomes clear that Iran does not believe that the United States is trying to stop IS. Saudi Arabia has said that it is going to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says it will not let this happen. It also says that it will not let Syria fall. The Minister says that the reason the United States wants to wreck Syria is that then it will have destroyed the main Russian foothold in the Middle East and that will allow the United States to dominate the region and maintain world hegemony. See also this Crosstalk episode where US realpolitik intentions and consequences and rhetoric are discussed in a very informed manner, particularly in relation to Yemen.

Iran's deputy FM: Yemen's president uses terrorists to fight rebels

Date of publication on RT at http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/245101-yemen-terrorists-rebels-isis/ March 30, 2015 08:30.

Transcript and Video

Yemen has turned into another battlefield, raging across the region. ISIS is prospering on the ruins of state. The flames of war grow brighter with Saudi Arabia and its allies joining the combat on the side of the Yemen’s government forces. But is that a solution? Hasn’t the method of intervention discredited itself - just inspiring more violence? We look at the issue with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on Sophie&Co.

Follow @SophieCo_RT

Discussing a possible pre film lunch with a friend tomorrow, I pointed out that there will probably be no cafes open because it is Good Friday. My friend answered that she thought that it was completely ridiculous in our “multicultural “ society for shops and cafes to be closed on Good Friday. I have heard this multicultural argument before and I don’t buy it.

I took the opposite viewpoint, saying that if we do not have days that are different from others, then every day will ultimately be the same, and every hour in the day will also. I am taking advantage of the cinema being open but I would not object if it were closed for the day. Although I am not religious, I have sufficient relevant education to know that “Good Friday” is the most sombre day in the Christian calendar and one which some Christians may want to observe and they may welcome the opportunity to have a break from commerce.

"Australians take too many holidays"

My friend did not accept this and said that she thought people in Australia had too many holidays (!) I said I did not agree and that I believed that people worked more now than they did in the past because now two breadwinners and mortgage or rent payers are needed in most households, whereas 50 years ago, one was enough. She answered that couples are doing this in order to purchase more luxuries. I said that they are forced to do this because of the burden of housing debt or rent payment. She finally acknowledged this was true.

What was interesting to me was that multiculturalism in my friend’s mind was the reason that “Good Friday” should not be observed by businesses (well at least not by places that should be serving us lunch!!) One could argue that multiculturalism should mean more closures of work places as more and more different festivals and holy days need to be observed and acknowledged, not fewer!

Where would my friend’s idea have come from?

Easter penalty rate complaints

Recently there has been a debate in the media about penalty rates for working over Easter. Businesses have complained how expensive it is for them to pay staff to work at double rates or whatever they get. But take away penalty rates and then every day is the same. Should this be so? Should every hour of every day be treated the same? Should a person working on night shift which is very hard on the body be paid the same as someone on day shift which is congruent with a natural diurnal rhythm ?

I think it is a mistake to dismiss the pause that holidays such as Easter allow the nation as simply part of an arcane observance for only part of the community and which has an element of political incorrectness. Seasons are what give daily life an awareness of the passing of time. Easter is said to have its origins in Pagan festivals around the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. It’s the autumn equinox in Australia, but it’s still the equinox and thus a change of season. I believe it is commercial interests that would seek to abolish deference to Good Friday and absolutely nothing to do with inclusiveness of those to whom the Easter festival is not relevant.

Multiculturalism should mean more holidays, not fewer

Let’s claim all the additional holidays that different cultures have on offer rather than abolishing the ones we have enjoyed for over 200 years in Australia. Let’s not allow anyone to persuade us to create an undifferentiated, unending total focus on work, business and profit - year in, year out.

Candobetter.net Editor comment: Employees in Japan and India have the highest number of public holidays while those in the UK, Netherlands and Australia, the least, according to a global comparison of statutory public holidays. See http://totallyexpat.com/articles/global-comparison-employee-statutory-and-public-holiday-entitlements/

The function of Australian mass media seems to be to inveigle listeners into complicity in the terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to 'choose' between distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B.

I am fed up.

I am fed up with the fact that nearly all the air time on local ABC radio is filled with discussion of the symptoms of rapid population growth and human overpopulation with scarcely a passing reference to the actual cause. For example, today I caught a discussion of wind farms on the Basalt Plains in Western Victoria. A woman called Jon Faine’s program with a concern that there are only 500 brolgas left in the area and that wind farms impinge on the birds’ territory by around an 8kms margin from each wind farm. Host, Jon Faine as devil's advocate pointed out that the brolgas could go somewhere else as the wind farms were not really taking up a lot of space. The next caller ridiculed the brolga advocate with the opposite argument that if coal continued to be used to generate electricity then there would be no environment for brolgas or anything else. Neither caller mentioned that with increasing population, more and more electricity needs to be generated either by coal or by wind farms or whatever will do the trick. The human environmental footprint in Victoria is growing from a size 10 to a size 14 with no end in sight.

I’m also fed up that the Leader newspaper was delivered to my letter box this week with the front page headline “Please ease squeeze” plastered over a photo of South Yarra railway station exit/entrance presumably at peak hour in the afternoon as the crowds are walking away from the station. According to the article the station is a daily bun fight with too many passengers for the capability of the station. Prahran State Greens MP, Sam Hibbens “has lodged a Freedom of Information request with the department of transport to find out what improvements are being considered for the bustling hub.” This same MP in 2010 as a Federal candidate was invited to reply (both in writing and by phone) to a questionnaire on population for Sustainable Population Australia but no reply was received. In a nutshell, Hibbens is calling for improvements in the station to accommodate an “extra 5000 people expected to move into the Forest Hill precinct adjacent to the station in the next 15 years.” I feel exasperated to know that it is already overcrowded, so the improvement would have to provide an enormous increase in capacity if it were to accommodate the continuous increase in population which is expected. This increase in population ensures continued discomfort and stress for passengers. This is a big deal as it is an essential part of their daily lives and we only get one life each, as far as I know. Governments don’t seem to be about improving lives at all, only talking about it, staving off complaints, and controlling what should be uproar about the completely avoidable destruction of the reasonable lives we used to lead and could have continued to have led.

I am equally fed up with the articles in the daily media such as The Age in Melbourne (several this week) about booming population growth as though it is news. To me it is just a constant feed of reminders to the readership of a decreasing quality of life due to socially engineered population hyper-growth.

Turning to the radio, the function of chat shows especially on the ABC seem to be to inveigle the audience into complicity in this terrible transformation that is being visited on us in Australia (turning what were once pleasant capital cities where most of us now live, into dystopian megalopolises) by inviting them to feel they are being heard by calling in with suggestions and their views on whether they’d like distasteful solution A or unpleasant solution B. Alternatively, the programs feature trivial topics as a brief distractions from the reality of where we are heading. (As I write this, the program I can hear is dedicated to personal coincidences.)

I’d love to know what instructions the columnists of the daily newspapers are given to guide them in their articles on population growth. It must be something like “Make sure that you don’t let anyone know that high population growth is a government choice. Make it sound like a trend you are following and reporting on that has no rhyme or reason."

The full transcript in this article has been republished from the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA). (On occasions, in recent days, it has not always been possible to view SANA from Australia. - Ed) another full interview (behind paywall) (20/1/15), by of the American magazine Foreign Affairs, has been republished as President Assad’s Full Text Interview on American Journal: Israel, Turkey Supports Terrorist Organizations in Syria (26/3/15) on Islamic Invitation Turkey.

In this unedited 57 minute interview, much of the lying narrative which has been fed to the public in recent years as a pretext for the United States' proxy terrorist war and planned military aggression against Syria was put to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by the CBS's Charlie Rose. Examples of this narrative include How Will Syria's Assad Be Held Accountable For Crimes Against Humanity? (28/3/15) by the supposedly liberal, progressive Huffington Post and Thousands in Syria face death as Assad regime prevents aid distribution (28/3/15) republished in the Melbourne Age from the UK Telegraph. Each of the fabrications, such as are to be found in these two articles, which was put to the Syrian President by Charlie Rose, was torn to shreds – a feat even more remarkable, given that English is not even Bashar al-Assad's native tongue.

This interview shows the Syrian President to be a moral and intellectual giant. Nonetheless, even a people so resilient and resourceful as the Syrians, cannot indefinitely defend themselves against hordes of killer sociopaths from every corner of the globe. If Syria is to survive, the people of the United States, Australia and their allies must hold their leaders to account for their shameful actions. Then Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, for his part, imposed additional sanctions against Syria and expelled the Syrian ambassador in June 2012 using the fraudulent claim that the Syrian government had massacred its own citizens at Houla in May 2012 as a pretext.

Damascus, SANA – President Bashar al-Assad made an interview with Charlie Rose of the U.S. CBS News. Following is the full text, which was not made available by CBS The YouTube video Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on 60 Minutes, which presumably, is what 60 Minutes broadcast on 29 March 2015 is only 13:34 minutes long. The following is copied from the Syrian Arab News Agency. It has also bee published on the Free Syrian Free Press and the embedded YouTube video is the full interview of length 56:43 minutes.

Question 1: Mr. President, thank you for allowing us to come here. We asked for this interview because your country's been at war for four years. It is a humanitarian crisis, perhaps the worst on the planet right now. 200,000 Syrians have died, four million refugees, ten million have left their homes, life expectancy is down, 50% of your country is occupied by hostile forces. It's become a battleground for outside forces. What's next? Because we have seen since I last visited you the rise of ISIS, we have seen Hezbollah in here, we have seen the United States becoming increasingly concerned about ISIS, so much so that the President, and especially the Secretary of State, have said that there's a need for a negotiated settlement.

President Assad: Actually, the beginning of your question is exaggerating the number a little bit, but that's not the issue. I always invite the media and the West and the officials to deal with those numbers not as spreadsheets and numbers and counter; actually it's bereaved families who lost their dear ones. It's a tragedy that's been going through, every Syrian family lost someone, lost their livelihood, and so on. Whether it's a few thousands or hundreds of thousands, it's a tragedy. What's next? Actually, every conflict should end up with dialogue, with a political solution between the different parties, and that's what we have been doing in Syria for the last two years; dealing directly with the militants, and we succeeded in making some reconciliations.

Regarding the rise of ISIS, in the context of events in Syria during the last four years, ISIS didn't rise suddenly. It's impossible for such – bigger than what we call an organization and smaller than a state – to appear suddenly with all these resources, financial resources, human resources, without support from the outside and without being prepared gradually or incrementally for a long time before the sudden rise during last summer. So, the rise of ISIS is not a precise word because it didn't happen suddenly; it was a result of events that happened at the beginning of the conflict that we mentioned in our statements many times, but no-one in the West has listened to. If we want to mention the statement of Kerry regarding the dialogue, I would say that we have in Syria so far is only a statement, nothing concrete yet, no facts, no new reality regarding the political approach of the United States towards our situation, our problem, our conflict in Syria. But as a principle, in Syria we could say that every dialogue is a positive thing, and we're going to be open to any dialogue with anyone including the United States regarding anything based on mutual respect, and without breaching the sovereignty of Syria, and as a principle I would say that this approach, the new approach of the United States towards not only Syria, towards anyone, to make dialogue regarding any issue, is a positive thing, but we have to wait for the reality.

Question 2: What kind of communication is there between your government and the American government?

President Assad: There's no direct communication.

Question 3: None at all?

President Assad: No, no.

Question 4: No kind of conversation about what kind of settlement might take place, no conversations about how to fight ISIS?

President Assad: Nothing yet. That's why the United States-

Question 5: Nothing yet?

President Assad: Nothing yet. Till this moment, no.

Question 6: Would you like to have that happen?

President Assad: Any dialogue is positive, as I said, in principle, of course. Without breaching the sovereignty of Syria, especially regarding the fighting of terrorism. The way we defeat terrorism, that's an important issue for us at this moment.

Question 7: But the question is what are you prepared to do? It is your country that is suffering. What are you prepared to do in terms of negotiations? If part of that is to see a transition government, of which you would give up power, would you be willing to do that?

President Assad: Anything regarding the Syrian internal politics should be related to the Syrian people, not to anyone else. We're not going to discuss with the Americans or anyone what are we going to do regarding our political system, our constitution, or our laws, or our procedures. We can cooperate with them regarding fighting the terrorism and making pressure on different countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and some of their allies in Europe that support the terrorists politically and financially and by military means.

Question 8: This cannot end militarily. Do you agree with that?

President Assad: Yeah, definitely. Every conflict, even if it's a war, should end with a political solution.

Question 9: But then draw me a roadmap that you have for a political solution. What does it look like?

President Assad: You have different levels. You have the internal levels, you have the regional, you have the international, and you have different means at the same time. The most important part is the local. The local part should have two things: a dialogue between the Syrians about everything; the political system, and any other details that could be beyond this, about the future of the country, of course. Second, make direct dialogue with the militants as we did during the last two years in order to give them amnesty and to give up their armaments and go back to their normal lives.

Question 10: When you say militants, who do you mean?

President Assad: Some of them are terrorists, some of them are people who were implicated by the events for different reasons, so, whoever carries a gun and tries to destroy the public infrastructure or attack the people or cause any harm or breach the law in Syria. That's the militant.

Question 11: But so much of the power is in your hands to engage in the process. I mean, if they demand that you step down before they negotiate, that's unacceptable to you.

President Assad: By the militants, you mean?

Question 12: No, I mean by the United States, and Russia, and parties to the conversation.

President Assad: No external party has anything to do with the future of Syria, with the constitution or president or anything like this. We're not going to discuss it with them. This is a Syrian issue. Whenever the Syrian people want to change their president, it should be changed right away, in the same day… even if we exaggerate, it should be through a political process, through a constitutional process. That's how we change presidents, not through terrorism and external intervention.

Question 13: Some say that ISIS was the best thing that happened to you, and that even some of the things that you have done have benefitted ISIS, that because of what ISIS has done and because of your fight against the moderates in your country who, in terms of the Arab spring, wanted to see more democracy here. That you, in the effort to crush them, allowed ISIS to grow.

President Assad: Let's go back to what President Obama said in one of his interviews recently; when he said that the moderate opposition in Syria is illusive. That's very clear by President Obama, and we always said there's no moderate opposition. So, the rise of ISIS wasn't sudden, again. The evisceration, the amputation, eating the hearts of the victims started from the very beginning, and even beheading started from the very beginning of the conflicts. It started with what they called moderate opposition, then it continued with al-Nusra, then with ISIS. So, what happened with those three, including ISIS, they attacked military bases, they killed our soldiers, and they destroyed our economy. According to this logic, how could that be the best thing that happened to me? In what logic? To lose? To destroy the country? To kill your supporters and to kill others, and to kill civilians? In what sense could that be the best thing that happened to me or to the government? That's illogical, that's unrealistic, that's unpalatable.

Question 14: Again, I come back to the idea of how, now, with the new reality of ISIS, how it's changed the circumstances. As they have gained in strength, what new changes do you see in attitude towards you and staying and the Syrian government?

President Assad: Regarding the West, you mean?

Question 15: Yes.

President Assad: I think the West has changed its calculations after the rise of ISIS, but that doesn't mean that they changed their approach to the conflicts in Syria, in Iraq, and in our region. I don't think they've learned the lesson well, and that, as a result, will not change the course of events, because, the very beginning of the problem, from the Western perspective, is to change the system or the president or the government that they don't like, and they're still moving in the same direction. That's why nothing concrete has changed yet; only the appearance and the priority. Their priority is to fight ISIS, but that doesn't mean that their priority is to get rid of ISIS.

Question 16: How can you see the United States cooperate with Syria regarding ISIS?

President Assad: There's no direct cooperation.

Question 17: But how do you see the future?

President Assad: The future, you mean. In the future, there must direct dialogue to fight terrorism, because the terrorism is on our ground, on our soil, they cannot defeat it without our cooperation, without having our information, because we lived with this and we know the reality and how to defeat it.

Question 18: Most people believe there is cooperation unofficially, and it goes through Iraq, and that somehow Syria knows when airstrikes are taking place by the United States, because they get that information from Iraq.

President Assad: From another third party, not only Iraq. More than one country told us that they're going to start this campaign.

Question 19: How does that work?

President Assad: What do you mean?

Question 20: You do you get information?

President Assad: In the campaign?

Question 21: Yes.

President Assad: How does it work on the ground regarding ISIS?

Question 22: Yes. How do you get information, about American airstrikes, so that it can coordinate with what you're doing, so that they're not bombing Syrian troops.

President Assad: Through a third party, and it was very clear that their aim is to attack ISIS, not the Syrian Army, and that is what happened so far.

Question 23: A third party means Iraq, and who else?

President Assad: Iraq, another country, Russian officials.

Question 24: Russian officials, Iraqi officials?

President Assad: Iraqi officials.

Question 25: Communicate to you the American intentions?

President Assad: Exactly. In the details that I mentioned now.

Question 26: What's the level of that information? Is it just about airstrikes, is it about other activities on the ground that are taking place?

President Assad: No, no details, only the headlines, and the principle that they're going to attack ISIS in Syria and Iraq during the next few days. That is what we have heard, nothing else.

Question 27: When you shot down an American drone, did you know it was an American drone?

President Assad: No, because any drone, any airplane, any aircraft, will not tell you that “I'm American.” So, when you have a foreign aircraft, you shoot it. These are the rules, the military rules.

Question 28: How much of benefit are you getting from American airstrikes in Syria, reducing the power of ISIS?

President Assad: Sometimes it could have local benefits, but in general if you want to talk in terms of ISIS, actually ISIS has expanded since the beginning of the strikes, not like some Americans want to sugarcoat the situation as to say that it's getting better, ISIS has been defeated, and so on. Actually, no, they have more recruits. Some estimate that they have 1,000 recruits every month, in Syria and Iraq, they are expanding in Libya, and many other Al Qaeda-affiliated organizations have announced their allegiance to ISIS. So, that's the situation.

Question 29: How much territory do they control in Syria? ISIS controls how much territory, 50%?

President Assad: It's not a regular war, you don't have criteria. It's not an army that makes incursions. They try to infiltrate any area when there's no army, and when you have inhabitants. The question is how much incubator they have, that is the question; how much hearts and minds they won so far.

1

Question 30: How do you measure that?

President Assad: You can't measure it, but you can tell that the majority of the people who suffered from ISIS, they are supporting the government, and of course the rest of the Syrian people are afraid from ISIS. I don't think they win; I think they lost a lot of hearts and minds.

Question 31: They've lost a lot?

President Assad: They have lost, except the very ideological people who have Wahhabi states of mind and ideology.

Question 32: Explain to me why are people fleeing to go to refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey. What are they fleeing from? The Syrian Army?

President Assad: No, those camps started being built before there was any real conflicts in Syria, so it was premeditated to be used as a humanitarian headline and title, to be used against Syria to be a pretext a military intervention. That's how it started. Later, they started giving incentives to people to flee there. Now, the majority of those, they fled because of the terrorism, and I'll give you an example. In the elections, the presidential elections, most of the refugees in Lebanon, for example, and even in Jordan, they voted for the president, not against the president. That's a concrete indicator, you cannot ignore it. So, they did not flee the Syrian Army; if they fled from the Syrian Army, they will be in the other-

Question 33: I have interviewed some of them in the Jordanian refugee camps, and they were fearful of the Syrian Army. And they were fearful of repercussions if people knew they were being interviewed, so they were reluctant to give their name and where they were from, but they had fled in fear of the Syrian Army.

President Assad: That could happen. Of course, you have different kinds of people, you have different perceptions, you have that perception. We don't say that everybody fled just because of the terrorists. Some people fled just because of the situation, not from the Syrian Army not from the terrorists, they want to go to a safer place. So, they have different reasons for the refugees.

Question 34: There is another number that is alarming to me. It is that 90% of the civilian casualties, 90%, come from the Syrian Army.

President Assad: How did you get that result?

Question 35: There was a report that was issued in the last six months.

President Assad: Okay, as I said earlier, the war is not a traditional war, it's not about capturing land and gaining land; it's about winning the hearts and minds of the Syrians. We cannot win the hearts of the Syrians while we are killing Syrians. We cannot sustain four years in that position as a government, and me as a president, while the rest of the world, most of the world, the great powers, the regional powers, are against me, and my people are against me. That's impossible. I mean, this logic has no legs to stand on. This is not realistic, and this is against our interest, as a government, to kill the people. What do we get? What is the benefit of killing the people?

Question 36: Well, the argument is that you… there are weapons of war that have been used that most people look down on. One is chlorine gas. They believe that it has been used here. They said that there is evidence of that and they would like to have the right to inspect, to see where it's coming from. As you know, barrel bombs have been used, and they come from helicopters. The only people that have helicopters are the Syrian Army. And so, those two acts of war, which society looks down on, as-

President Assad: Let me fully answer this, this is very important. This is part of the malicious propaganda against Syria. First of all, the chlorine gas is not a military gas, you can buy it anywhere.

Question 37: But it can be weaponized.

President Assad: No, because it's not very effective, it's not used as a military gas. That's self evident. Traditional arms are more important than chlorine, and if it was very effective, the terrorists would have used it on a larger scale. Because it's not very effective, it's not used very much.

Question 38: Then why not let somebody come in and inspect and see whether it was used or not?

President Assad: We allowed.

Question 39: You'd be happy for that?

President Assad: Of course. We always ask that a delegation, an impartial delegation, to come and investigate, but I mean logically and realistically, it cannot be used as a military. This is part of the propaganda, because, as you know, in the media, when it bleeds, it leads, and they always look for something that bleeds, which is the chlorine gas and the barrel bombs. This is very important, the barrel bombs, what are barrel bombs? They say barrel bomb as a bomb that kills people indiscriminately, because it doesn't aim. This is not realistic for one reason: because no army uses a bomb that doesn't aim, and the proof to what I'm saying is that, you don't talk about the shape of the bomb to call it a barrel or cylindrical or whatever. The state-of-the-art drones, American drones, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, in Yemen, with state-of-the-art precision missiles have killed more civilians and innocents than killing terrorists. So, it's not about this bomb that doesn't aim, that kills people indiscriminately; it's about the way you use it.

Question 40: But you're acknowledging then that you do use it? You do use barrel bombs?

President Assad: No, no. There's no such thing called barrel bombs. You have bombs, and any bomb is about killing, it's not about tingling people.

Question 41: Most people understand what a barrel bomb is. I mean, they understand how it's put together, what's put inside of the barrel, and they understand how it's dropped from helicopters.

President Assad: No, we have had a very good military industry for years, for decades, in Syria. We don't have to make bombs, very primitive ones, very malicious ones. This bomb, this term, was used only to demonize the Syrian Army. That's it. This is part of the propaganda.

Question 42: If barrel bombs were used by the Syrian Army, would you order the Syrian Army to stop using barrel bombs?

President Assad: Again, what is this term, what is the barrel bomb? I mean do you describe the missile that you have by-

Question 43: It's a bomb that inflicts terrible civilian casualties.

President Assad: Any bomb and missile and even bullet is made to make casualties, but not civilian. There's no military means made in order not to kill. But how you use, it's again about the way you use it, it's not about the bomb. I mean, if you want to talk about casualties, that's another issue. Every war is malignant, every war is bad. You don't have benign war. That's wars are bad because you always have casualties. That is not related to certain kinds of bombs or bullets or whatever. This is completely another issue.

Question 44: So in fact, are you denying that barrel bombs are being and inflicting great casualties.

President Assad: Again, I always say, we use a bomb, we use missiles, we use everything, we use bullets. You don't describe what we use by the shape, whether it called barrel, spherical, cylindrical missile, you don't describe it this way. You use armaments, if you have casualties, it's a mistake that could happen in every war, but you aim always to kill terrorists, not to kill your people, because you have support by your people, you can't kill them.

Question 45: But you acknowledge that they come from helicopters, barrel bombs.

President Assad: This is a technical issue, a military issue. How to throw-

Question 46: But only one-

President Assad: No, no. You can throw bombs by any airplane. You can throw them by missile. You don't have to use helicopters, you can use them anyway you want.

Question 47: But, if I hear you correctly, you acknowledge that barrel bombs are being used, but they're like other bombs in your judgment, and they are not necessarily any different than other weapons. That is what you seem to be saying.

President Assad: We don't have a bomb that is called barrel bomb. This came from the media, we don't have it. What you call our bombs, that is related to the media. And that is used by the militants, then adopted by the West, in order to demonize the Syrian Army. We don't have something barrel bombs that kill indiscriminately. If you have a strong bomb or weak bomb, or whatever, I mean you could call it whatever you want. I mean, we have regular bombs, traditional armaments. That's what we have.

Question 48: What do most people consider barrel bombs more brutal than others?

President Assad: You have to ask the one who created that term, as I said, for the media, for the propaganda. This is part of the propaganda. If you want to refute the propaganda that's been going on for four years, you have many things to refute.

Question 49: You have often spoken about the danger of a wider war in the Middle East. Let me talk about the parties involved, and characterize how you see them. Let me begin with Saudi Arabia.

President Assad: Saudi Arabia is an archaic autocracy, medieval system that is based on the Wahhabi dark ideology. Actually, I say it's a marriage between the Wahhabi and the political system for 200 years now. That is how we look at it.

Question 50: And what is their connection to ISIS?

President Assad: The same ideology, the same background.

Question 51: So ISIS and Saudi Arabia are one and the same?

President Assad: The same ideology, yes.

Question 52: The same ideology.

President Assad: It's the Wahhabi ideology. Their ideology is based on the books of the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia.

Question 53: So you believe that all Wahhabis have the same ideology as ISIS.

President Assad: Exactly, definitely. And that's not just by ISIS; by al-Qaeda, by al-Nusra. It's not something we discovered or we try to promote. I mean, they use the same books to indoctrinate the people.

Question 54: What about Turkey?

President Assad: Turkey, let's say, it's about Erdogan. He's a Muslim Brotherhood fanatic. That doesn't mean that he's a member, but he's a fanatic.

Question 55: President Erdogan is…?

President Assad: A Muslim Brotherhood fanatic. And he's somebody who's suffering from political megalomania, and you think that he is becoming the sultan of the new era, of the 21st century.

Question 56: You think he could stop the border if he wanted to?

President Assad: Yes, of course, definitely. He doesn't only ignore the terrorists coming to Syria; he supports them logistically and militarily, directly, on daily basis, and if you take the example of Kobani, what you call Kobani, we call it Ayn al-Arab, the city where the Kurds were fighting ISIS and where the campaign started, the American military campaign started there. It took them four months to liberate that small city, not only because the airstrikes were cosmetic as we said, but because of the direct support of the Turks to ISIS.

Question 57: They were supporting them directly?

President Assad: Directly.

Question 58: You were quoted as saying that the Syrian Army could have eliminated ISIS in Kobani in three weeks.

President Assad: Actually, similar cities with the same terrain and the same size were liberated in a few weeks, without even using the airstrikes.

Question 59: Why have you spent more time attacking Aleppo than Raqqa?

President Assad: We didn't attack Aleppo. We try to get rid of the terrorists everywhere.

Question 60: Were they terrorists in Aleppo, or were they moderates?

President Assad: In Aleppo? No, you don't have any moderate militants in Syria.

Question 61: No moderate militants in Syria? So the definition of a terrorist is what?

President Assad: Of terrorism? Whenever you hold a gun, and kill people, and destroy public buildings, destroy private properties, that's terrorism.

Question 62: So, anyone who opposed your government in Syria, and used military tactics, was a terrorist.

President Assad: With military tactics, or without?

Question 63: Using weapons to-

President Assad: The word opposition, everywhere in the world, including your country, is a political opposition. Do you have military opposition in the United States? Would you accept it? You wouldn't, and we wouldn't. No-one accepts military opposition.

Question 64: It's one thing to say to say there's military opposition. It's another thing to call them terrorists.

President Assad: Military opposition is terrorism. Whenever you hold a gun, a machinegun, and you try to destroy and kill and threaten, this is terrorism, by every definition in the world. It's not my definition. Whenever you want to make opposition, it's going to be political opposition, like your country, you have the same criteria, we don't have different criteria from the one you have in the United States or in Europe or anywhere else.

Question 65: If there's a negotiation, would you accept as part of the negotiation and share power in Syria with anyone who is in opposition to you now, whether they are moderates, whether they are terrorists, but if in fact they lay down their arms and say we want to be part of a future government, a transitional government, in Syria?

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President Assad: Whenever they lay down their arms, they're not terrorists anymore.

Question 66: Even ISIS?

President Assad: ISIS will not. This, how to say, virtual. For ISIS to lay down their arms, this is virtual, because their ideology is they want to fight and to be killed and to go to heaven, to go to paradise. That's how we look at it. They won't negotiate anyway. So, we don't have to answer something which is virtual, not realistic. The realistic one is that many of the militants laid down their arms and are working with the government now. This is reality. I'm not talking about what is going to happen in the future. That is happening, and that is part of the reconciliations. Some people are interested in politics, they can take that track, and some people are interested only to going back to their normal lives and work any job, not being part of the politics. Of course we are open. Whenever there is political opposition, we are fully open to deal with them.

Question 67: As you know, Secretary Kerry has called you a brutal dictator. Secretary Kerry! Other people have said worse. Does that bother you? Is that an accurate description of you?

President Assad: You want the rest of the world to know the reality, of course you won't be happy to hear something that is a far cry from the reality, but at the end, this kind of description to an official wouldn't be really important unless the Syrian citizens said this word. And because the Syrian people still support you, it's a dictator, killing your people, and have the support of the people. It's a contradiction.

Question 68: It's interesting to have that conversation, but with respect, it is said that there was a time, several years ago, in which you were in a very difficult place, and some people thought the government might fall, even suggestions that you were planning to leave, and then the Iranians came in, and Hezbollah came in, and the tide began to turn. Is that a fair appraisal of the circumstances? Because if it's true, it means that the Syrian people were not supporting you, because before foreign forces came in, you were about to lose.

President Assad: First of all, the Iranians never came in during the conflict. Never.

Question 69: General Suleimani was here, in Damascus.

President Assad: He's always here, for decades. This kind of cooperation, like you say, no we have-

Question 70: He was here for the same reason that he is in Iraq right now. He was advising Hezbollah and-

President Assad: You have cooperation, as America, with different countries. You send experts, you have a kind of cooperation. That's different from sending troops. Is that correct? Different, sending troops is different from having cooperation on higher levels.

Question 71: It doesn't matter where they came from. If they are under your command, so to speak, I mean if you are giving direction to Hezbollah… but the central point I want to-

President Assad: No, what you mentioned, I mean your question implied that Iranians are fighting in Syria. That's completely incorrect. Not correct, definitely. If they come here, we would announce, we don't have a problem. We have the right to bring allies to fight with us. At the same time, we announced that Hezbollah is in Syria, we didn't deny this. So, why deny Iran and not deny Hezbollah? We don't.

Question 72: But my argument with you, and you are an artful debater, my argument is, and I'm asking questions, I have no position here, my question is: if the Syrian people supported you, why when the so-called Arab spring came, were you almost about to lose power until outside forces came in. It's self evident that the Syrian people were not supporting you if you were facing that kind of-

President Assad: If you have a real Arab spring today, neither Iran nor Russia, not even Hezbollah can help you. The difference in the situation that you mentioned earlier, between the beginning of the crisis and today, is that we are more gaining support by the Syrian people, because they discovered the truth. At the very beginning, many people weren't… I mean the vision wasn't clear for many Syrians. Now, it's very clear, and we have support even from many people in the opposition against terrorism. So, the main factor, why the situation has changed, is not Iran or Hezbollah; it's the Syrian incubator, the Syrian population. That was the difference. Hezbollah is not a big army. It cannot play that role all over Syria.

Question 73: But the game on the ground didn't change until they came here.

President Assad: No, that's not true.

Question 74: So you didn't need them?

President Assad: No, we needed them, of course. That's alliance, we need them. They play an important part. But what has changed, the balance that you mentioned, when you talk about 23 millions in Syria, when you have Arab spring, let's say a few thousand fighters from Hezbollah wouldn't change the balance. What has changed the balance is the incubator that moved toward the government. That is what has happened.

Question 75: Here is what is also clear, that even though Secretary Kerry has suggested you are part of the problem or part of the solution, and they want you to be part of the solution, but they have not yet changed their mind that you have to agree to share power or give up power. They don't want you in power.

President Assad: First of all, they didn't try to make negotiations or dialogue with us, so they don't know what we want.

Question 76: That's why I'm here. See, that's why I'm here, to have you tell me what you want, that's exactly why I'm here. Tell me what you want.

President Assad: What we want is whatever the Syrian people want. As I said, as a president, to stay or not to stay-

Question 77: But the Syrian people supporting you, you have a relationship with them, you know what they want. So what do you want?

President Assad: Now, we want, in such circumstances, we always ask for two things: first of all, dialogue. Second, sharing, sharing of power, by any political entity that represents Syrian people, not a political entity that has been forged in the United States, the CIA, or in France, or in Qatar. By patriotic Syrian opposition that represents the Syrians. And we have it, we have in Syria-

Question 78: So what do you mean by sharing power?

President Assad: I mean if you want to go back to constitutional procedures, they should go to elections, they can share in the parliament, in the local administration, in the government, in everything, and to be part of the decision in the government, like any country.

Question 79: You, and your father, have held power in Syria, for how many years? The combination, of you and your father, how many years?

President Assad: Is it a calculation of years, or public support? There's a big difference. Years, it doesn't matter how many years, the question is-

Question 80: Well, it does matter.

President Assad: No, what matters for us is do the Syrians support these two presidents? Doesn't matter if they are father and son. We don't say George W. Bush is the son of George Bush. It's different. He's president, I'm president, he had support from that generation, I have support from these generations now. That is the question. It doesn't matter how many… it's not the family rule, as you want to imply.

Question 81: It's not?

President Assad: No, it's not. It's not a family rule. It has nothing to do with me being president. When he died, I was nothing. I was just in the army. I wasn't, let's say, a high-ranking official.

Question 82: You know your family much better than I do, but conventional wisdom is after your older brother died, your father wanted you to come back, because he wanted you to be able to assume power when he left.

President Assad: Actually, the reality is the opposite; he wanted me to stay as a doctor and go back to London and I refused. That's the reality.

Question 83: He didn't want you to come back?

President Assad: No, never. He didn't want me to be part of the politics.

Question 84: Then why did you become part of the political process when you were a doctor?

President Assad: We live in a political family, we live in a political environment, and in the army, I'm a doctor in the army, and the army during the history of Syria has made the history and the reality in this country.

Question 85: Because he was such a significant political figure in the Middle East, would he have done things differently, if he was President of Syria today?

President Assad: That's a virtual question, I cannot answer on his behalf. That's a virtual question, nobody knows.

Question 86: You think he would agree with what you have done?

President Assad: Definitely. He wouldn't allow the terrorists to take over, wouldn't obey or submit to external intervention. And he would have defended his country like he did during the Muslim Brotherhood. The same happened on a smaller scale in the eighties, late seventies, early eighties, when the Muslim Brotherhood started assassinating, killing, and destroying, and burning, and he fought them. That is his mission as a president. That's what you have to do. To leave terrorists killing your people, that's your mission?

Question 87: Is it a fair appraisal of what you believe, that everything must be done, and the ends justify the means to stop terrorism in Syria, as you define it?

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President Assad: No, it's not the ends justify the means, this is a Machiavellian principle. You should have values and principles. You have constitutions, and you have interests. So according to your values, you have to defend your people, the population, the Syrian citizens, you have to defend your country. For your interests, you have to get rid of terrorists. So, that's how we think, not only in a Machiavellian way.

Question 88: Tell us what the Russians want. They are a strong ally of you. What do they want?

President Assad: Definitely, they want to have balance in the world. It's not only about Syria; it's a small country. It's not about having huge interests in Syria, they could have it anywhere else. So, it's about the future of the world. They want to be a great power that has its own say in the future of the world.

Question 89: And what do they want for Syria?

President Assad: Stability. They want stability and a political solution.

Question 90: And what does Iran want.

President Assad: The same. Syria and Iran and Russia see eye-to-eye regarding this conflict.

Question 91: And what is your obligation to both of them?

President Assad: What do you mean, obligation?

Question 92: What you owe them.

President Assad: Yes, I know, but they didn't ask for anything. Nothing at all. That's why I said they don't do that for Syria; they do it for the region and for the world, because stability is very important for them, because if you have conflicts here, it will burn somebody else there. If you want to talk about terrorism, terrorism has no boundaries. It sees no borders, no political borders. It's much more difficult to take any procedure to face it due to the internet, which is difficult to control. When you have ideology, it could cross everywhere, it could reach Russia, it could Turkey, anywhere. So, they have the same interest. Russia, and Iran, and many other countries that support Syria, not because they support the president, not because they support the government, but because they want to have stability in the region.

Question 93: Let me present an alternative argument which the Untied States may very well believe, that they support you because they had a longstanding relationship. They support you because they want access to Lebanon. They support you because it's part of the larger conflict between Sunni and Shi'a.

President Assad: You mean the Iranians or the Russians?

Question 94: The Iranians, and because they've supported you militarily and financially.

President Assad: No. The way the Iranians look at the Shi'a-Sunni issue or conflict, is that this is the most detrimental thing that could happen to Iran.

Question 95: To Iran? This conflict is the most detrimental thing?

President Assad: Anything related to Sunni-Shi'a conflict is detrimental to Iran. That's their point of view, and that's how we see it. We agree with them. So, actually they are going the other way. They want always to have reconciliation, unification between the Muslims, because that's very good for Iran. They don't want to be part… they don't look at the issue in Syria as a part. They know that Saudi Arabia, the Wahhabis, they want to instigate this conflict, in order to bring more of the Muslims to their side.

Question 96: As you know, there are many people who look at the Middle East today beyond Israel, and say within the Islamic world, it's all about the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and choose your sides.

President Assad: That's what the Israelis want to promote.

Question 97: No, some analysts look at the Middle East today and say, it is a competition between Iran on the one hand, Shi'a nation, Iraq, Shi'a, you here, Sunni majority, and Saudi Arabia. These two are mortal enemies, fighting for influence in the Middle East.

President Assad: That's not precise for one reason, because it looks like Iran wants to attack the Sunni and Saudi Arabia wants to attack the Shi'a. It actually started with Saudi Arabia after the revolution in Iran in 79. So, it didn't start from Iran. Iran never interfered in any other nation's internal issues, including Syria. We have good relations with them, they never tried to interfere. Actually, it's Saudi propaganda. I mean the whole issue of Sunni-Shi'a conflict is a Saudi initiative and propaganda. It's reality, but because of the Saudis, not because of the Iranians.

Question 98: But in Syria, they are on opposite sides, Saudi Arabia and Iran are on different sides.

President Assad: That's what Saudi Arabia wants to promote, and that's what ISIS wants to promote, and that's what al-Nusra wants to promote. In their political discourse, they always mention the sectarian issues.

Question 99: I'm now talking about how you see, here, the region and what is happening now. One, is the rise of ISIS here, the rise of ISIS and affiliated groups in Iraq. When you look at Iraq, Iranians are supporting Shi'a militia in Iraq, and they've been a very effective fighting force. The United States is engaged in airstrikes. They just had an airstrike yesterday in Tekrit which the Iranian militias have captured, correct.

President Assad: Not everything is correct. It's not only Shi'a militia who are fighting. Many others joined, so it's a mixture now.

Question 100: What's the possibility of Iranian-American cooperation?

President Assad: Regarding fighting ISIS?

Question 101: Yes.

President Assad: I don't think anyone trusts or believes that the American administration wants to really fight this kind of terrorism, because, I mean if you look at the airstrikes in Syria and Iraq, the whole 60 countries launch much less airstrikes than only the Syrian Army does on the daily, much less, so they're not serious. Second, they only attack the northern part of Iraq. I mean, they attack the terrorists in the northern part of Iraq, not the rest of Iraq. Why did they join now? They want to get part of the cake, if there's a victory against the terrorists, just to say that we fought terrorists and we defeated ISIS? Where were they during the last few months? They suddenly wanted to attack?

Question 102: So what do you think Iran wants in Iraq?

President Assad: They want to get rid of the terrorists, definitely, and to have stability.

Question 103: How long do you think that will take?

President Assad: Nobody has any idea, because you know, you have support from the outside, you have the support of the petrodollar, of ISIS, and many extremists in Iraq, and in Syria. So, how long that support will continue, we cannot tell.

Question 104: When you look at the future, and you look at the battle ahead, what the end result to Syria? How much of this can Syria take? How much of the conflict that is here today can the Syrian government withstand? How much, the Syrian country, the civilian loss? Will there be anything left in Syria?

President Assad: Of course, Syria is still here. It's not the first kind of crisis that we've been facing here in history.

Question 105: But nothing like this.

President Assad: No, during the history, you have many similar crises. Damascus and Aleppo have been destroyed many times, but, I mean, it's about the population. The Syrian population are determined to survive and to protect their country, and to rebuild it. How much do we tolerate? That is about the potent power that every population has, and the Syrian people proved that they have strong potential in that regard. Anyway, we don't have any other option. What option do we have? Whether we suffer, whether we pay a high price or a lesser price, what options do we have but to defend our country, but to fight terrorism. We don't have any other option.

Question 106: I asked the question because many asked it; what's the cost to Syria, what it's going through, and how to put the pieces together? Whenever there is finally, an end this, how will you put the pieces back together, and who will put the pieces back together?

President Assad: There's a misconception in the West that what's happening in Syria is a civil war. This is where you can ask that question. What is happening in Syria is not a civil war. When you have civil war, you should have, how to say, clear lines separated between different sects or ethnicities or different components. That's not what we have. What we have are terrorist-infiltrated areas, and people are suffering from the fighting and from the terrorism of those terrorists. So, you don't have division in the society now. You don't have the sectarian issue now. Actually, you'd be surprised if I tell you that the sectarian situation in Syria today is better than the sectarian situation, let's say, before the crisis. People are more unified now regarding the conflict, regarding the unity of the sects, religions, and so on. So, we cannot talk about how can you rebuild, let's say, the society. The society is suffering from the humanitarian aspect of the problem, but it's not divided anymore, and that's very important, and that's why we're assured, that, I mean, even this conflict, which is a very bad conflict, as you say, every cloud must have a silver lining, and this is the silver lining in this crisis, that the population is more unified now. So we don't have a problem as long as the society is unified and homogenous, regardless of some dark part of this society, ideological corners in our society that support the Wahhabis, support ISIS, and support the extremists, but this is not the general situation in our society.

Question 107: Why do you think that they, people in the West, question your legitimacy?

President Assad: This is intervention in Syrian matters. I don't care about to be frank, I never care about it as long as I have the public support of the Syrian people, that's my legitimacy. Legitimacy comes from the inside. But why? I will tell you why, because the West is used to have puppets, not independent leaders or officials in any other country, and that's the problem with Putin. They demonize Putin because he can say no, and he wants to be independent, and because the West, and especially the United States, don't accept partners. They even accept followers. Even Europe is not a partner with the United States. Best to be very frank with you. So, this is their problem with Syria. They need somebody to keeping saying yes, yes, and a puppet, a marionette, and so on, somebody they can control by remote control.

Question 108: There are those who argue that you feel now that you're militarily stronger, that the advent of Hezbollah and Iranian advisors and American airstrikes and coalition airstrikes, that you feel militarily stronger, and therefore you're less willing to negotiate.

President Assad: Any war can deplete the strongest power, even the United States. When you go to war, you will be depleted in every sense of the world, and we are a small country, we'll be depleted more than a great country. So, you cannot say that you are militarily powerful, this is again the reality, but you can say that you are politically powerful, because when you win the hearts and minds of the people, more support from the population, this is where you become more powerful. So, what we achieved militarily, not because we are stronger militarily; because we have more support.

Question 109: And how much do you believe you may have some opportunity to win the minds and hearts of the Syrian people because they fear ISIS more than anybody?

President Assad: We cannot ignore this reason.

Question 110: Then ISIS has changed the circumstances?

President Assad: We cannot ignore that factor, we cannot ignore it. We don't say no, this is a factor, but there are other factors. When you're transparent with the citizens, with the people, when you're patriotic, you work for their interests, they will support you even if they disagree with you politically. So, we don't have support now from the traditional supporters. We don't have support because they don't oppose us. We have opposition who oppose our government in many aspects; economy, politics, political systems, and so on. But they know that we are working for this country, and when you have a war, it's time for unity, not time for division for recriminations and so on. That's why I said we can have more support, and we already had it recently.

Question 111: What circumstances would cause you to give up power?

President Assad: When I don't have the public support, when I don't represent the Syrian interests and values.

Question 112: And how do you determine that?

President Assad: I have direct contact with the people.

Question 113: So, you determine whether they support you?

President Assad: No, I don't determine; I sense, I feel, I'm in contact with them, I'm a human. How can a human make a direct relation with the population? I mean, the war was a very important “lab” for this support. I mean, if they don't support me, they could go and support the other side. They didn't. Why? And that's very clear, that's very concrete.

Question 114: Some have argued to me that the majority of Syrians support neither the government nor ISIS.

President Assad: Some that don't support either? If you don't, I mean this is like saying that ISIS is like the government. I don't think that this is realistic. Even people who oppose the government, they oppose ISIS, that's how we look at it.

Question 115: That's the question, isn't it? Even those who oppose the government oppose ISIS, and the question is, how do you bring those two together, and what are you prepared to do, and what are they prepared to do, and how will you get those people that have a vested interest here, like the Russians and the Iranians and the Americans, to-

President Assad: Because very simply, they cannot put the government and ISIS on the same level, so it's not difficult for them to choose. They didn't choose… I mean, not to support the government doesn't to support ISIS. It means automatically they're going to be with the government against ISIS, but not with the government in other issues. It's opposition, I mean, you have points of view, but as I said, it's not time for division. Now, you support the government. When you get rid of ISIS, then you oppose the government in your own way, you use political means. But you cannot compare a government with the terrorists.

Question 116: Which raises the question: can you destroy ISIS without coming together with a united plan, a common purpose?

President Assad: On the local level, you are correct. You cannot destroy terrorists, not only ISIS, you have al-Nusra Front, which is as dangerous as ISIS. You cannot destroy them unless you are unified as a society. But, again, ISIS now is not the Syrian case. ISIS is in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. So, it's not enough to be unified on the local level; it's on the regional level and on the international level, something we don't have yet. That's why defeating terrorism is going very difficult because of that situation.

Question 117: Something we don't have yet. So, that's the question: you don't have it yet, and how do you get it? Because that's the future.

President Assad: You are talking about more than one party. You are talking about the international parties, first of all the United States, regional parties, first of all Turkey which is our neighbor and plays a very negative role, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and the local parties. We would like to see this cohesion in fighting terrorism, but how can we convince them? We tried, maybe not directly, because we don't have any direct channels with them, but that's how it should be. If they could see the reality and the future in clearer vision, they would make dialogue with every country including Syria, not because they support the Syrian President or the Syrian Army, we don't need their support internally; it's about only fighting terrorism. You need to make dialogue. You cannot kill them and defeat them from the air. That's a foregone conclusions.

Question 118: That's true in Iraq or here, you can't do it from the air.

President Assad: Anywhere, no you cannot.

Question 119: Do you want to see another conference, like the Geneva conference that failed?

President Assad: Yes, that's the aim of Moscow conference. The next one.

Question 120: That's it?

President Assad: Yes.

Question 121: And what might happen there?

President Assad: that depends on different parties. I mean, I cannot talk on behalf of every party. For us as Syria, you should have principles, to agree about, let's say, some principles like unification of Syria, denouncing terrorism, something like this, and then-

Question 122: Sharing power?

President Assad: Sharing power, that's in the constitution anyway. I mean, sharing power is about how much grassroots you have, how much of the Syrians you represent. You don't come and share power just because you want to share power. You should have public support.

Question 123: You have to be a forced to share power.

President Assad: Exactly, exactly, you have to represent them. So, maybe if we reach a conclusion and we reach agreement in Moscow, it could be as preparation to go to Geneva 3, for example, but it's still early to tell.

Question 124: I came here after Secretary Kerry made his remarks. My impression once I got here is that when you heard those remarks, you were optimistic. The State Department backed a little bit, and said we still think there needs to be a new government, but you were optimistic after you heard that. You believe there is a way for your government and the American government to cooperate and coordinate?

President Assad: That's not the main point. I mean, regarding that statement. I think the main point, we could have a feeling, and we hope that we are right, that the American administration started to abandon this policy of isolation, which is very harmful to them and to us, because if you isolate a country, you isolate yourself as the United States from being influential and effective in the course of events, unless you are talking about the negative influence, like making the embargo that could kill the people slowly, or launching a war and supporting terrorists that could kill them in a faster way. So, our impression, let's say, we are optimistic, more optimistic. I wouldn't exaggerate. That at least when they're thinking about dialogue, doesn't matter what kind of dialogue, and what the content of the dialogue is, and even doesn't matter what their real intentions are, but the word “dialogue” is something we haven't heard from the United States on the global level for a long time.

Question 125: But you just did, from the Secretary of State: we need to negotiate. That's dialogue.

President Assad: Exactly, that's what I said. I mean, that's why I said it's positive. That's why I said we're more optimistic. I mean, when they abandon this policy of isolation, things should be better. I mean, when you start dialogue, things will be better.

Question 126: Why don't you reach out to Secretary Kerry and say, let's talk.

President Assad: Are they ready to talk? We are always open. We never closed our doors. They should be ready for the talks, they should be ready for the negotiations. We didn't make the embargo on the United States. We didn't attack the American population. We didn't support terrorists who did anything to the United States. Actually, the United States did. We always wanted to have good relations with the United States. We never thought in the other direction. It's a great power. Nobody, not a wise person would think of having bad relations with the United States.

Question 127: But can you have a good relationship with a country that thinks you shouldn't be in power?

President Assad: No, that's not going to be part of the dialogue as I mentioned earlier. This is not their business. We have Syrian citizens who can decide this, no-one else. Whether they want to talk about it or not, this is not something we are going to discuss with anyone.

Question 128: Mr. President, thank you.

President Assad: Thank you.

See also: 1 in 10 wild bees faces extinction in Europe, study warns (25/3/15)

Inappropriate fuel-reduction could see more losses of threatened species.

In late January, 2014, after wildfires tore through two conservation parks in South Australia, researchers scoured the charred terrain for signs of life.  Tragically, they found nothing; only the charred silence of an empty, burnt landscape!  The 60 remaining breeding pairs of Mallee emu-wren (Stipiturus mallee) in South Australia had been lost and the species was now extinct in the state.

The fires ignited in two conservation parks in South Australia’s Mallee region that were home to the only remaining South Australian populations of the endangered Mallee Emu-wren, and another fire in the Victorian mallee, 12 kilometres southwest of Ouyen, burnt the entire 13,000-hectare reserve that was one of two small populations in Victoria of the endangered Black-eared Miner. (Article republished from the Australian Wildlife Protection Website at "End of the line for the tiny Mallee Emu-Wren?"

The only remaining population in the world of Mallee Emu Wren occurs at a single area in north-western Victoria. They became extinct in South Australia last summer after wildfires burnt them out.

“The fact that we lost several significant bird populations in fires linked to a single heat wave event highlights just how vulnerable many of these species are,” says ecologist Dr Rohan Clarke from Monash University’s School of Biological Sciences.

(image: Mallee Emu-wren)

“There is nothing left of an emu-wren after a fire, not even a pile of ash,” says Professor Michael Clarke, head of Life Sciences at La Trobe University. These tiny birds are unable to flee an approaching fire, and any that survive the flames have nowhere to live after the fire has passed. He says that “the Mallee region, which is home to less than 3 per cent of the state’s at-risk population, has been repeatedly targeted for planned burns in recent years, with up to 17 per cent of the program being held in that area“. Ironically, the Mallee does not have high human populations! Government agencies will choose the least risky areas and the more convenient areas to burn, to complete their target, rather than protect human lives and property.

According to Birdlife Australia, the Victorian Government (Lib) stands accused of all but guaranteeing the extinction of threatened Mallee birds as a consequence of its bushfire prevention policy. The Mallee emu-wren, in particular, was just one fire away from being wiped from the planet. At the end of last year, 2014, there were at total of 314 in Australia – and five of them, including the Victorian Murray Mallee, are in danger of losing the species for which The Mallee was one of the most important sites for birds in the world!

In 2006, it was estimated that less than 3000 Mallee Emu-wrens remained and are mainly restricted to conservation zones. With a highly fragmented habitat, each of the five or six isolated populations is particularly vulnerable to being wiped out by fire.

After the devastation of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission set a yearly target to burn five per cent of public land to reduce bushfire risk across the state.

Birdlife Australia’s head of conservation, and Guy Dutson, a world authority on birds of the south-west Pacific region, says “cannot be reburnt for at least 15 to 20 years”.

The Mallee Emu-wren is about 10 to 15 cm in length and has a mass of 4 to 6.5 g. The adult male has a black bill and the adult female has a dark brown bill, but both sexes have dark-brown irides and pinkish-brown legs and feet. The Mallee Emu-wren occurs in mallee regions south of the Murray River, in south-eastern South Australia and north-western Victoria. The decline of the Mallee Emu-wren has mainly been due to the extensive loss, degradation and fragmentation of its habitat caused by broad-scale clearing and fire.

Despite the listing of the Mallee emu wren under the Flora and Fauna Act, the Victorian Coalition failed to develop an action plan for its protection despite a massive expansion of native forest burning under the banner of “hazard reduction” burning! In fact most of the Mallee burning in remote areas contributes little to improving the safety of lives and property, but is about fulfilling government targets!

BirdLife Australia welcomed the announcement in February this year that the Federal Government will fund a program to protect the birds. The announcement builds on the outcomes of an Emergency Summit which BirdLife Australia hosted last year. The program will create an insurance population could be a lifesaver. Mallee Emu-wren and Black-eared Miner (VIC) got $110,000! However, a captive “insurance” population can’t replace species living where they naturally live, to further be extinguished on release by fires! It’s a band-aid, politically-motivated token, rather that the holistic approach of actually protecting the birds in their natural habitats!

Australian wildlife, along with insects, and fungi,once played a key role in ensuring ‘cool’ burns rather than the all-devastating wildfires. The loss of leaf eating moths, dung beetles and a variety of leaf and coarse woody debris recycling insects is contributing to a potentially high frequency fire cycle. The torching of wildlife, assumed to be collateral damage to keep “us” safe, is barbaric, anthropocentric, and will fuel more fires by working against Nature, rather than with it.

Habitat clearance and degradation has been the major threat to Black-eared Miners. Old growth mallee is the preferred habitat of Black-eared Miners, and they prefer habitat that has not been burnt for 40 years or more.

ACOSS has come to the amazing and unprecedented conclusion that for "an increasing number of Australians, housing affordability is a serious problem that affects their ability to work". A quarter of people battling with housing stress regularly skip meals in order to pay their rent.

"There's a lot of overcrowding, people are bunking up, living in inappropriate forms of housing which are not good for anybody," chief executive of the Australian Council of Social Service Dr Goldie said. (Article republished from comment to front page article.)

Surely this explosion of logic, the profound cognitive process that drew to this conclusion is well overdue? The conclusion is surely obvious, that homelessness is more than a product of "domestic violence" as it's usually portrayed.

Our cities are becoming hostile to our living standards, and the vulnerable are the first to fall between the cracks.

Our real estate and housing-construction based economy means more congestion, and negative social impacts. On any given night, more than 7000 people sleep in crisis accommodation, while more than 105,000 identify as homeless. This is in a country that touts our living standards and wealth all over the world, to lure more people to migrate here!

Dr Goldie, instead of addressing the major cause of poverty, unemployment and unaffordable housing - population growth - she's endorsing funding for the homeless, and urged a bipartisan commitment to increase housing supply to help vulnerable people afford a place to live. To "increase housing supply", or putting more heat on the housing market frenzy, won't produce "affordable housing". With budget constraints, and heavy cut-backs to public services, there's nothing set aside for more social housing either.

ACOSS have no population policy, but their methods are more funding, more more more - of fixing symptoms and not addressing the cause - greed and growth!

Housing affordability driving homelessness SMH

Secretary General of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has said that the true motivation behind the Saudi aggression on Yemen is the desire of Al Saud to dominate and subjugate it after they failed and lost any control over it, as they sensed that it now belongs to sovereign forces that cannot be dominated.

For the most up-to-date news about Yemen, visit the Twitter feeds #YemenUnderAttack, #YemenAttack.

See also: Israeli Fighter Jets Join Saudi Arabia in War on Yemen, Yemen: Ansarullah will not adhere to the Saudi 'House of Obedience', Houthi's fighters urge a 'general mobilization', Houthi Militia Takes Over Taiz as Yemen Descends into Civil War, PressTV-'Foreign meddling ripping Yemen apart', Land Destroyer: US-Saudi Blitz in Yemen: Naked Aggression, Absolute Desperation, Syria News 26/3/2015, Flagrant aggression against Yemen led by Saudi regime & GCC countries - YouTube, The Objective of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. is the Invasion and Occupation of Yemen, PressTV-'Pakistan not to join Saudi-led alliance', PressTV-'Algeria not to join attacks on Yemen', Russian expert: Saudi Arabia may suffer defeat in Yemen | Russia Beyond The Headlines

In a speech on Friday, March 27, 2015, Nasrallah said it’s the right of the Yemeni people to defend themselves, calling for stopping the aggression and urging Arab leaders who will meet in Egypt to work towards that and push towards a political solution instead of being partners in shedding blood and destroying Yemen.

He noted that the Arab states that took part in the raids on Yemen remained idle throughout decades of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian and Arab people, and didn’t take the slightest action to stop Israel’s aggression.

Nasrallah said that the main problem with the Saudi regime is that it treats other people as if they were mere subjects, and that the Saudi regime and intelligence agencies are responsible for sending ISIS terrorists to Syria and Iraq, funding and arming these terrorists to destroy the two states, adding that the Saudis are also working to prevent a political solution in Syria and persist in the complicity to the killing of its people.

Hazem Sabbagh

27/03/2015
Source Nasrallah Beirut, SANA -

I recently attended an ACF meeting. As the oldest environmental NGO in Australia they are doing a road tour seeking support. These people are fighting against the inevitable destruction of the Australian environment, which the ABC, our public broadcaster, on whom so many Australians rely for serious information, fully sanctions using pro population growth extremism. Unfortunately the argument put forth is akin to one where a driver, because he is wearing a seat-belt, believes that he now no longer needs to worry about travelling at high speed without brakes.

The ACF are unable to mention population growth in any of their 11 core campaigns, apparently because they are confused about what to do and how to do it. The ABC, on which Australians rely for much of their information, has partly driven this confusion through destructive propaganda which seeks to suppress discussion of the scientific truth about population growth.

Typically such Environmental NGO meetings are a combination of over 50s and younger people. A significant proportion of the older people recognise the population problem because they have the wisdom of the experience of rapid change iThe 20 somethings just can’t see how rapidly the degeneration is occurring because they lack that experience and remain uninformed by important broadcasters like the ABC.

I rang the ABC's RN Breakfast line yesterday again making a plea for impartial coverage of the population growth issue. A cause I have supported for the last 8 years and more.

I explained that refugees, migration and population growth management are related, but completely different, issues. What appeared to be a bigoted ABC fool on the other end of the line said she didn’t agree. To me this betrayed the reality of intolerance, prejudice and ignorance endemic at the ABC. Ever since the Pauline Hanson debacle the ABC has sought to confuse population growth management, which is a humanitarian and environmental issue, with anti refugee and anti migration attitudes.

Refugees are created by overpopulation, degraded environments and conflict over resources.

Migration, in Australia, is a government policy based on an outdated belief in population growth and a ‘populate or perish’ mentality that is a relic of a mid-20th century world with no limits to growth. Apart from the US and Canada, there are no other countries with longstanding mass migration policies. Such policies are in conflict with refugee policy. For example Australia's planned migration intake for 2014/15 is 190,000 while refugee intake is 13,750. And this is happening in the context of annual unemployment growth roughly 60% higher than annual population growth. The US has 50 million people below the poverty line and is arguably one of the most environmentally destructive, inhumane examples of capitalist malpractice on earth. Canada is similar to Australia because there is a delusion of no limits to growth there too; despite the evidence to the contrary.

Population growth management is essential for achieving for humanitarian and environmentally sustainable objectives. This is not a political issue; it is a scientific fact; just as global warming is a scientific fact.

Australia’s economy, in deteriorating more rapidly under the extreme population growth scenario, provides the proof of the unhumanitarian and unsustainable nature of extreme population growth. I have written at length about this scientific fact, explaining that Australia displays contempt for the risk management of this issue that any Australian business entity would be legally bound to apply based on WorkSafe legislation. All multinational corporations, including large mining and oil companies, follow guidelines similar to WorkSafe. The basis for these risk management strategies is based on maximising safe outcomes in an environment (the business environment) where there is a physical (and financial) limit to the available resources. This risk management strategy, if practiced by the Australian government, would lead to the following:

• Immediate evaluation of the impact of population growth on the economy to determine whether lower rates of growth would lead to better holistic financial outcomes
• If the evidence supports this conclusion this would lead to more money available for domestic and foreign aid to promote quality of life and family planning in the developing world (and in Australia)
• The simple risk management conclusion may be that moderating Australia’s rate of population growth will serve the greater good. This is why confusing such a strategy with anti-migration or anti-refugee attitudes is so destructive.

One analogy is a driver in a car wearing a seat belt. The seat belt represents renewable energy. The car represents population growth. The car is currently driving towards a brick wall at 100 km per hour. Unless the car slows down the seat belt will be of no use.

Or another driver in the car. The seatbelt represents government capacity to balance the budget. Same car, same population problem, same brick wall. Population growth denial doesn't work.

There have been many economic studies supporting the conclusion that rapid population growth is economically unsustainable due to the high cost of infrastructure expansion. Here is one example: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0

The argument about reducing carbon footprints of the developed world is one thing. But if you are wearing a size 11 shoe in Melbourne you will need a size 0.08 shoe 200 years from now based on the current rate of population growth. That is because the current trend population growth in Melbourne will change today’s population of 4.25 million into 593 million in 2215.

We don’t have enough time left to continue with confused and bigoted ABC propaganda driving population growth denial.

David Packham, former bushfire CSIRO scientist, is urging more 'fuel reduction' burns to our precious bushland. But more and more people are noticing that wildlife are not 'bouncing back' after the constant burning in Victoria. The yearly target of burning five per cent of public land, purportedly to reduce bushfire risk in Victoria (after the 2009 bushfires), means that within 20 years or even less, there will be no viable bushland left in this state on public land if people allow this to happen. Forests and their inhabitants just do not recover from this kind of assault, despite common propaganda that this is 'normal' for Australia. Kooris have since denied that this was their practice. People need to ask themselves, 'Who benefits?" when they hear calls for even more burning. The forestry industry benefits by replanting rows of straight pines which provide little habitat for animals and are in fact very flammable. The property development industry also benefits when bushland is razed by fire.

After the devastation of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, the Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission set a yearly target to burn five per cent of public land to reduce bushfire risk across the state.

According to former CSIRO bushfire scientist, David Packham, forest fuel levels have worsened over the past 30 years because of “misguided green ideology”, vested interests, political failure and mismanagement, creating a massive bushfire threat.

He is arguing that unless the annual fuel reduction burning target, currently at a minimum of 5 per cent of public land, “is doubled or preferably tripled, a massive bushfire disaster will occur”!

Rather than Victoria’s “failed forest management” being a threat, our State’s excessive and draconian response of 5% to be burnt each year is itself a threat to forest environments. We must live with Nature, not destroy it with draconian “management”.

This expert is failing to see the forests for the trees, and seems to think that the wholesale destruction of forests, with more burning, will “save” them – in a maligned effort to protect human lives and assets?

Many academics are promoting fire for forestry and mining. The Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre shares a chairman with the cooperative Research Centre Mining and the forestry Co-operative research Centre based at Tasmania University.

State agencies will choose the easiest route of randomly burning sensitive environments, to fill quotas, and in the process kill off flora, fauna and habitat features as mere collateral damage!

Reports published by the CSIRO and BirdLife Australia cite “inappropriate fire regimes” as threatening more than 50 Australian mammal and 50 Australian bird species.

They concede that to some extent the old adage ‘fight fire with fire’ applies. Used well, fire is an effective, economical tool for land managers.

Reintroduction of occasional fire into some landscapes, and return to a finer mosaic of burning, will not prevent wildfires; it may, however, reduce their impact, by maintaining fire-dependent habitat and

protecting fire-sensitive birds. Kakadu National Park, subjected to decades of management burning, has all but lost its fauna from too frequent fire, which is likely the cause of the loss of the hollow dependent Gouldian Finch from vast areas of its frequently burned former range.

(image:”GouldianFinches” by Nigel Jacques (Kris) – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons)

The original forests of Gippsland were not flammable, settlers of Fish Creek were not able to burn the forest to clear land until the railway line was cut through, bringing in a ‘draft’. This is a common story Australia wide in formerly wet forested areas.

Climate change is also said to be playing a role, with the biennial Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO State of the Climate Report 2014 finding that rising greenhouse gas emissions are causing fire seasons to lengthen and are contributing to an increase in the number of fire risk days, particularly in the south-east of Australia.

Bill Gammage is an Adjunct Professor at the Humanities Research Centre, studying Aboriginal land management at the time of contact. He has convinced quite a few environmentally concerned people through his book ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’ that regular burning is needed. It contains many fundamental flaws and represents ‘blind advocacy’ for repeated burning’ because ‘Aboriginal people did it’. Mooney et. al. examined over 200 sediment cores of 70,000 years or more of age to determine fire frequency. They found that fire frequency increased 50 fold with the arrival of Europeans.

However, more fires to fight fire is like using a sledge hammer to drive in a tack, or killing fleas on a dog with a shotgun!

Joel Wright, a Gunditjmara Linguist, has found no evidence of landscape burning in the Victorian western district but outlined the use of fire for smoke signals, and as an effective weapon against settlers. Research shows that fires have increased 50 fold since European settlement, so “fuel reduction” to make the bush less flammable seems to be having the opposite effect.

Natural ecological functions have always existed to limit fires, such as fungi, bacteria, insects, native species, high forest densities and tree canopies.

The Andrews government will review the minimum 5 per cent burning target in response to a Inspector-General’s report. Five years ago, both major parties backed the “minimum of 5 per cent” target, a key recommendation of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission held after Black Saturday.

Fire management needs to be multidisciplinary, and not simply about human welfare, stock and property assets. The timing of the burns should also take heed of breeding times and seasons for the species present, particularly those that are already rare or threatened due to the loss of habitat, food or human encroachment. We need to work out how we carry out our works without disturbing the nesting, roosting and breeding times for those animals in that immediate areas near human settlements.

Fire management needs to be optimised and based on where the greatest risks are, not on the metrics of hectares or percentages of Victoria’s landscape.

This article reproduces a leaflet written by Jim Quirk, who was my father. The leaflet advertised a 'Nature Show' at the lower Melbourne Town Hall in 1966. The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria and the Society for Growing Australian Plants sponsored the Nature Show to help the plight and status of the wombat in Australia. I wonder if the same results could be achieved today. Have we advanced at all? Reading of the particularly dire conditions for wombats in South Australia, it would seem not. And, think of the kangaroos who suffer so badly still at the wrong end of rifles and who are caught up so messily and tragically in urban development. The discursive nature of the account below may be a reflection of a time when conservation was a battle but our lives were not as stressed and rushed as they are today. We were more able to organise politically for causes in NGOs which were not then commercialised.

The Wombat

This animal, as all naturalists and most people in general know, is a marsupial, indigenous to Australia , including some Bass Strait islands. It is confined to Eastern and Southern Australia, including the great Australian Bight area. Fossil remains have been have been found in Western Australia, s,o apparently it inhabited that part of the continent.

Wombats are divided into five main species, although some naturalists concede only four distinct types. The most significant differences in the various species are size, fur and nose covering. The species best known to Victoria has a bare nose.,while others in Eastern Australia have hairy noses. Some have coarse hair; this applies to the Naked -nosed Wombat, while the southern , while the Southern Hairy-Nosed and Flinders Island species have soft silky fur. Size and weight for adults varies from about 2’ 6’ and fifty pounds, to 3’ 6” and eighty pounds or more. These figures apply to the small Flinders Island variety and the species familiar to Victorians respectively.

Wombats are, of course essentially nocturnal animals and as they burrow in the ground sometimes to the extent of 15 feet, are not frequently seen. They are herbivorous, feeding mainly on grass, the roots of a variety of vegetation and some fungi, almost entirely confining this activity to the hours of darkness.

These native animals are not prolific breeders, bearing only one young a year, about July. Tiny when born , the young remains with the parent for about 6 months. Wombats are credited with being the most intelligent of marsupials and the Flinders Island variety is regarded as being the most attractive of the species. It is on record that wombats have become most docile with friendly people and much liked as pets.

The wombat as with most animals and birds has suffered greatly with the advent of the white man to this country - very little is known of the hairy-nosed variety of South Queensland, and those inhabiting Southern New South Wales have been killed out over a large part of their range. By 1887, every wombat on King Island had been killed. This brings me to the “political" side of this animal, as affecting it in the State of Victoria.

Victorians have certainly been no exception to the incompatibility of native fauna and human settlement. The wombat early incurred the displeasure of settlers, when they erected fences to stop the movement of the introduced rabbit. These fences naturally came across the path of the wombat as it moved about to feed at night. Being a very strong animal and naturally adopted to burrowing and pushing obstacles aside, the wombat had no difficulty in getting through the fences . So the irony is that the introduced rabbit has indirectly been the death of probably hundreds of thousands of wombats: no rabbits, - no wire-netting fences - no holes made by wombats - and probably no entry to the Vermin List on which this otherwise harmless animal was placed by the State Government in 1906, at the behest of farming interests.

Of course human settlement would still have affected this creature as it has all forms of wild life, but possibly not as drastically, as in addition to being the only only native animal declared vermin in 1906, a bounty on its destruction was added in 1925. The operation of the Act was for municipalities to administer the bounty, but subsidised to the extent of 2/6 a “scalp” by the State Government. The subsidy was increased to 7/6 in 1949 with the local councils adding 2/6 which meant a reward of 10/- ($1.00) for each wombat killed by farmers and hunters. Municipalities concerned were mainly in northern Victoria, where the animals are most numerous.

The exact number of wombats killed in Victoria since Federation is not known, but in the past 6 years, bonuses have been paid in respect in respect to over 50,000. I consider the number slaughtered since the introduction of the bonus in 1925 must be at least 500,000, although exact figures are not available, as amounts paid in bonuses before 1960 also included dingoes, foxes etc. Many more before this though would have been slaughtered - as mentioned earlier, the animal was classified as vermin in 1906. No one knows the present Victorian wombat population - estimates vary between 2,000,000 and 500,000 - it could be much less than the latter.They are now practically confined to the “wilderness' area of Eastern Victoria being largely eliminated by settlement etc.

The Fauna protection Council was formed in 1959 to counter a widespread racket, prevalent then in the export of Australian birds. It obtained the affiliation of most of the natural history and animal welfare organisations in the State at the time. It was successful in its representations to the Federal Government not to further permit the export of native birds.

Many unsatisfactory aspects of the treatment of native fauna were subsequently discussed by the Council, prominent amongst them, the sad situation of the native wombat. As we considered its vices exaggerated, its treatment by authority unenlightened and not in accord with civilised society, it was decided in 1961 to try to persuade the then Minister for Lands to remove it from the vermin list and logically place it under the control of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department, like other native species. Despite considerable efforts, we were unable to get the Minister to alter the decision made 55 years earlier.

In 1964, with a new Lands Minister in office, the council decided to again put in a plea for the wombat, and as a result had a deputation to the Minister in October of that year. With the aid of many other people and organisations, despite considerable opposition from political representatives of farming interests, some headway was made the Government giving consideration to the removal of the bonus system of control. It was then realised that this was the best we could hope for at this stage; after all, old customs die hard, they’d been shooting and trapping wombats for probably 100 years. It was accordingly decided to concentrate on this, which culminated in the Government passing a bill, after vigorous debate and opposition from a political segment, in April of this year to discontinue the payment of the $1.00 wombat bonus for a trial period of three years.

The morality of the bonus rankled strongly and the Council now feel that this is a most significant decision, although not all that was sought. Considerable destruction of the animal by fumigation and other methods will still be carried out by Lands department employees, if Gippsland farmers have their way, as this native animal is still classified as VERMIN. The Council will not be satisfied until the wombat is removed form the list of Vermin and placed under the control of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department. On the other hand, full note must be taken that the bounty has been removed for only a “trial' period of three years, and little mercy or sentimentality was shown in the parliamentary debates on the subject. In the three years we have, we will have to persuade the Government to sponsor some satisfactory research on the animal, so that more will be known about its numbers, natural increase and life cycle.

What has happened to the wombat over the years is an example of the ruthlessness and brutality of our dominant species towards other forms of life with which we share this world. What has been achieved in the last few months is an example of what an enlightened, determined public can achieve. It is an example that in the long run it is not the overwhelming mass of people or a few academics who are going to save wild life and habitat, but a persistent and informed section of the public, the more numerous the better, who are prepared to give their time and energy to persuade our legislators that it is good policy to adopt intelligent wildlife conservation measures - for it is the politicians who are eventually going to make these decisions, be they good or ill.

J.H Quirk

(August 1966)

The ABC reported today:

Mr Fraser — Australia's 22nd prime minister — was born into a wealthy pastoral family in 1930 and first entered Parliament in 1955 as its youngest MP. He spent nearly 20 years as a backbencher and in the ministry. He became opposition leader in 1975, facing off against Gough Whitlam and becoming prime minister in the wake of Mr Whitlam's dismissal.

From his first days in politics, Mr Fraser was an advocate of immigration as a means of boosting the population.

As a minister in the Gorton government, he became the first federal politician to use the word "multiculturalism" — an historic break from the Anglocentric past of his own party. Mr Fraser's multicultural conviction found shape in immigration policy in the post-Vietnam war push to bring refugees from mainland South East Asia to Australia.

"I believe we had a moral and ethical obligation," Mr Fraser later said. "If we had taken polls ... I think people would have voted 80, 90 per cent against us but we explained the reasons for it.

"We were also working to get people to understand that the idea and the reality of a multicultural Australia could be an enormous strength to this country, not a weakness."

"There is strength in this kind of diversity so long as we understand what it's about."

Nothing wrong with any of these sentiments. After declaring war on Vietnam, a humanitarian refugee intake was logical and ethical.

Note also Fraser's intimated "Populate or Perish" attitude to population growth. Fraser was supporting humane refugee intake from Vietnam on an ethical basis and mass migration to achieve population growth - based on his opinion that population growth was "a good idea".

The ABC loves pumping this kind of confusing muddle of refugee / immigration / population growth rhetoric to support its propaganda campaign for pro population growth extremism.

Since when are refugee intake, mass migration of the relatively wealthy, and population growth management the same issue? Even an ABC journalist should be able to understand that these are three separate issues. If you look at what Malcolm Fraser actually did it is as follows:

• "Believed in" Australian population growth in the early 70s, when the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" and Paul Erlich's "The Population Bomb" had just been published (in the late 60s). The concept of environmental limits was a fringe opinion at the time and Fraser's opinion was "conventional wisdom" that is now recognised as outdated. The constraints on population growth are physical (environmental) and economic constraints that have nothing to do with xenophobia or racism.
• Abhorred racism. This was always right and has nothing to do with population growth management. Physical and economic constraints are now far better understood than they were in the days of "no Limits to Growth".

But the ABC doesn't want to confront this contemporary reality because it is suffocated by confused, outdated and illegitimate phobias.

(Candobetter Ed: We are putting this article back on the front page because it is obviously relevant today.) Malcolm Fraser died today, March 20, 2014. Although loathed by a large section of the population because of his role in usurping Gough Whitlam, in what many believe was a CIA coup,[1] Malcolm Fraser since redeemed himself in many ways by advocating more thoughtful and responsible policy in Foreign Affairs. The current government and opposition are unlikely to acknowledge this most valuable role because it was critical of both of them. In recent interviews Fraser deplored the gung-ho and dishonest attitude of the west in pursuing wars and warned of the dangers to the world if the West continued to dismiss the legitimate concerns of Russia, the East and the Middle East. In this video and transcript, first published on 7 August 2014, Malcolm Fraser describes US/NATO moves on Ukraine as provocative. Russian stance justified. America feels it can break international law. The West should not, under any circumstances, involve itself militarily in the affairs of Crimea, Ukraine. Ukraine should be free to make whatever economic relationships it likes with other countries, whether with Russia or the West or both, but it should not become part of a defence bloc, a military block, and therefore [...] should not be eligible to join NATO, which Russia would reasonably interpret as provocative. Agrees that most Australian politicians showing poor judgement on Ukraine, Putin. Thinks this is partly influenced by mass media through deliberate slant. (First published on 20 March 2014.)