1.The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a document on the history of U. S. genocide against Native Americans on their official website. Currently trending on Weibo, and being promoted by People’s Daily and other major media accounts. Yesterday, a recent documentary about U. S. military experiments on Danish children during the 1960s was one of the major trending items.
Title was: "Peace terms rejected by Zelensky", then changed to "Rapid demise of US puppet Zilenski regime the most humanitarian way forward for Ukraine", and then changed back again - 3 Mar 2022, Ed
Zelensky says the Russian terms are not acceptable and wants a ceasefire prior to any further negotiation.
He is a stand-up comedian by profession.
Seriously, he is.
The disconnect between the Western and Russian narratives in the current conflict could prove fatal to the world, writes Scott Ritter.
It seems that many of the leading ‘social change’ agents are enthusiastically piling on the bandwagon to reinforce, not change, one of the most significant problems now threatening society at both the global and local scale.
In solidarity with the people of Ukraine and Russia, a call has gone out to the international peace movement to hold rallies and actions during the week of March 1 – 7, 2022. The Independent and Peaceful Australian Network proposes national rallies are held across Australia on Wednesday 2nd March in solidarity with international peace actions and with the people of Ukraine and Russia in their demands for peace. Please let them know if you are organising any actions earlier or interested in organising a rally/protest action in your state on Wednesday 2 March.
With his unusual breath of geopolitical and historical knowledge, Alex Mercouris explores the recognition of Donbass Republics from the point of view of the West, Russia, and Greece. He points out that this is not the first time that borders have been changed unilaterally, and notes two precedents executed by the west: 1.
Moscow has been handed the American response to its earlier proposals concerning collective security in Europe, the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed on Wednesday evening.
Can Palestine be liberated while the US illegally occupies Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Apparently Melbourne's pro-Palestine movement thinks Palestine can be liberated while Syria has much of its territory illegally occupied and US troops also illegally occupy Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Jan. 20, 2021, Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network urges Australians to reflect on our relationship with the US during this inauguration and think deeply about how we may forge an independent and peaceful foreign policy in the coming years.
While President Biden promises to differ from former-President Donald Trump, Australia faces issues that will persist regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
On-going conflicts in the Middle East, the growing power of China, the ramifications of global warming and many more issues necessitate an intelligent foreign policy informed by the need for peace, science and our national interests.
IPAN has established the People’s Inquiry exploring the costs and consequences of the US alliance and US-led wars to assist in the development of this foreign policy. The Inquiry is already receiving submissions which will result in a report covering the Australian public’s opinion on the US alliance and its alternatives.
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s admission that Australia is “joined at the hip” to the US is a worrying prospect - a sentiment that has continued under Prime Minister Scott Morrison – and is one not supported by an Australian public that routinely disagrees with US foreign policy.
Australia needs to build a diplomatic and policy apparatus that can not only deviate from Washington but pursue the interests of the Australian people.
This will only happen when a cohesive and informed foreign policy approach is established. The People’s Inquiry will contribute to this through soliciting public submissions and expert opinion.
Details of this Inquiry can be found at the following link: https://www.independentpeacefulaustralia.com.au
Hot-head President Erdogan seems to be threatening a full-scale invasion of Syria, which would risk major conflict between Russia and the United States. Erdogan is obsessed with the idea of heading up a new Ottoman Empire. These ambitions and Turkey's geographical location make him susceptible to manipulation by restless world powers with a variety of geopolitical interests in the region. We republish this article from https://www.rt.com/news/481179-erdogan-idlib-operation-imminent/ where it first appeared on 19 Feb, 2020 09:14.
A new Turkish military incursion into Syria’s Idlib governorate has been planned and may start at any moment, President Recep Erdogan has warned, ramping up a tense standoff with Damascus.
Ankara will not “leave Idlib to the Assad regime and its backers,” Erdogan vowed, referring to the Syrian government and, apparently, to Russia and Iran. Speaking to lawmakers on Wednesday, he said his words were “a final warning.”
The Turkish president also said negotiations with Russia over Idlib have so far failed to meet Ankara’s demands. He said he wanted the province to be safe for Turkey, “no matter the cost.”
The northwestern Syrian province bordering Turkey is the last major stronghold of anti-government forces in the protracted civil war. Ankara backs some of the armed groups in the area, but there is also a strong presence of jihadists, who have no interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Under an agreement with Russia, Turkey is supposed to use its leverage in Idlib to curb violence and prevent attacks on other parts of Syria.
The arrangement never fully worked, with Damascus regularly complaining about cross-border militant attacks. Its response was to gradually take control over some parts of the province, forcing jihadists to retreat. Since last month the advancements put Syrian troops in direct opposition to Turkish forces, which have been deployed in Idlib to monitor the situation. At least two clashes between them have resulted in casualties among the Turks, angering Ankara.
Moscow is mediating in the situation to prevent it from boiling over into a major confrontation. Erdogan has demanded that Damascus pull back its forces from Idlib and threatened to use the Turkish army to force a retreat if necessary.
"[US National Security Advisor] John Bolton is a kind of bureaucratic tape-worm. Try as you might, you can't expel him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agency, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering - but critically, somehow, never suffering himself. His life really is Washington in a nutshell: Blunder into obvious catastrophes again and again, refuse to admit blame, and then demand more of the same. That's the John Bolton life-cycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, cable news contracts. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it is always good business." (Tucker Carlson in Tucker Carlson Tonight 22 June 2019.) Read more in the partial transcript inside or watch the video. This session was remarkable in its forthright criticism of war, its assessment of Iraq, and its rundown, with several interviewees on the Washington war-culture and war-media. Some readers may find Carlson's praise of Trump's stated rationale for leaving Iran overly fulsome, but world peace is at stake. For those of you who loath this show because of its frequent support for Right to Life views and religion, keep in mind that that is probably the price Carlson has to pay in order to speak out against the war machine.
TUCKER CARLSON: "Neocons still wield enormous power in Washington. They don't care what the cost of war with Iran is. They certainly don't care what the effect on Trump's political fortunes might be. They despise Donald Trump. Now, one of their key allies is the National Security Advisor of the United States. John Bolton's an old friend of Bill Crystal's. Together they helped plan the Iraq war. When Bolton made it to the Whitehouse, the neocons cheered. Left-wing New York Times columnist, Brett Stevens, took a break from attacking Donald Trump, to celebrate his hiring. [...]Hilary Clinton's toppling of Libya was not a disaster, says John Bolton. Keep in mind there are literally slave markets operating in the streets of Tripoli right now. No problem, Bolton's fine with that. He's fine with the outcome in Iraq too. That wasn't a disaster either. According to John Bolton, that was a raging success. We killed hundreds of thousands of people, lost thousands of our own troops, spent more than a trillion dollars - all to eliminate a WMD threat that, despite John Bolton's assurances, never existed in the first place.
Bolton is glad we did all that. Really happy about it. That's demented. Normal people don't talk like that. There's nothing normal about John Bolton. Check out this piece of tape we've recently uncovered in which Bolton promises we're going to overthrow the government of Iran. Keep in mind that this was filmed long before the Iranians shot down a single drone. [Film excerpt shows Bolton in front of a huge audience predicting a celebration in Iran of a successful regime change by America before 2019.]
In other words, last night has been in the works for years. John Bolton is a kind of bureaucratic tape-worm. Try as you might, you can't expell him. He seems to live forever in the bowels of the federal agency, periodically reemerging to cause pain and suffering - but critically, somehow, never suffering himself. His life really is Washington in a nutshell: Blunder into obvious catastrophes again and again, refuse to admit blame, and then demand more of the same. That's the John Bolton life-cycle. In between administration jobs, there are always cushy think-tank posts, paid speaking gigs, cable news contracts. War may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons, it is always good business."
Carlson then interviews Glen Greenwald of The Intercept.
TUCKER CARLSON: "Glenn Greenwald co-founded The Intercept. He joins us tonight. So, Glen, the reaction to the President not going to war tonight has been really striking. Very little celebration about it. In certain quarters, outright attacks [gives example of CNN's national security analyst and of a congresswoman, Lis Cheney] What about Washington makes war the first resort for both parties, every time?
GREENWALD: "It's exciting, so it drives media ratings. It makes people buy newspapers. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) wrote about how, when a country becomes an empire, the people in the capital never get any risk from wars. So, Liz Cheney and Bill Crystal, David From and the people who cheer war, are never put at risk, but they get excitement and purpose from it. They get kind of a feeling of power. Ben Shapiro on Twitter today said, "Let's show Iran that we can match them!" That's something that people say when they go through life feeling inadequate and without any kind of purpose or strength. So it gives people strength. And there's also this much deeper issue that after the Iraq war, almost nobody other than Judy Miller, the single scapegoat, - There was no accountability, no accountability for the people who lied the country into the war. So you get somebody like Geoffrey Godberg you look at someone like Jeffrey Goldberg who for The New Yorker was writing award-winning articles claiming that Sadam Hussein was in an alliance with al-qaeda making people believe that Iraq did 9/11.
Is he out of journalism because of that? No he's been promoted! He's the editor in chief of the Atlantic. You turn on MSNBC, there's Bill Kristol! You open up the New York Times, there's Brett Stephen, Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post. They're all embedded in Washington culture, the think tanks especially. And they only become important and enlivened when the US is at war. They get all kinds of psychological economic and political benefits from it at everybody else's expense. If you claim that there was a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al-qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam, it's clearly untrue. How in the world could you stay in journalism? I mean do you know? How could Jeff Goldberg go on to run one of the most famous magazines in English? The thing is, Tucker, the more you promote war - even if you get it wrong - the more you're going to prosper.That is the sickness, the pathology of the DC media and political class. Jeffrey Goldberg's articles won a national magazine award for creating a grotesque conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Not only should he not be in journalism, he should be out of decent society. And yet, when it came time to compete for whether he was going to stay at the New Yorker or go to the Atlantic the owner of the Atlantic gave him and his children rare exotic horses to lure him away from the New Yorker and he now runs one of the most important magazines in the world. You see that all throughout the media; the same people who not just lied about Iraq, but who cheered all kinds of wars in Muslim countries get prosper from it. They get promoted. They continually get treated as the voices of authority, and that's why this continuously goes on. It is so mind-bogglingly corrupt it's hard to believe. It happens in our city in our business."
Pontius Pilate, of course, was the judge who condemned Jesus Christ to death, according to the bible. The crime Jesus was punished for was that of leading a religion critical of the values of the Roman state. Modern authorities try to defend their right to have criminal secrets in order to justify pursecuting Assange, who has led a world-wide movement for transparent and just government. If UK or Swedish judges deliver Assange to authorities who then deliver him to the United States, they may claim that they are only doing their duty under the law, just like Judge Pontius Pilate. I am not religious, but I think this is a valuable parable for our time.
I first became aware of Julian Assange through Wikileak's publication of the "Collateral Murder" material. [Collateral murder comes from the expression 'collateral damage', a euphemism coined by the US war machine to describe civilian deaths and material damage in war.] I was filled with admiration and relief that someone was exposing the continuing illegal role of the US Army in Iraq and its vicious conduct. I could not understand why the United States had not been universally condemned for the lies it used to illegally invade Iraq and then why a range of US-NATO allies failed to condemn its continuing brutal occupation of that country. I next became aware of the US-NATO horror caused in Libya and then in Syria. As my awareness grew, so did the effrontery of the United States. Soon it was accusing Russia of aggression, as the US itself surrounded Russia with US bases. See the map.[1]
Now, in the ultimate criminal state absurdity, Britain, a major partner to US in weapons sales and war crimes in the Middle East, is aiding and abetting the United States to punish the one man who was able and courageous enough to expose the United States for its war crimes within war crimes. Obscenely, but revealingly, a small-time London magistrate, Judge Deborah Taylor, showed the clay that British "justice" is based on, as she 'diagnosed' [SIC] Assange a "narcissist" [an upstart] and thereby sentenced him to 58 weeks in high security prison, presumably for crimes of personality and class. She completely ignored what ordinary people can see and what she must have seen; that he was correctly in fear of his life from the criminal government of the United States and its vassal, the British government. She had to know that extradition was in the wings, but she pretended that it was not.
It is hard to find out anything about this woman, but, contrary to her supposed impartiality, she seems to me to be either the servant or the dupe of the British upper class. That ruling class considers that it has the right to engage in murder and mayhem all over the world by supplying weapons for cash, but woe-betide any commoner who might expose its crimes for public judgement. Should the US elites succeed in their plans to exact their cruel revenge on Julian Assange, I think that Judge Deborah Taylor may go down in history as the woman who helped send modern civilisation down its final corridor to total enslavement and war.
For Julian Assange, unlike Jesus - another 'upstart' - probably won't arise again. You may or may not believe in Jesus, but the crucifixion story is a valid parable nonetheless and it is all about justice and democracy: After Judas identified him, Jesus was convicted by a magistrate, Pontius Pilate, of the crime of trying to lead the jews against the Romans in a revolutionary religion, which preached love instead of war, slavery and pillage.[2] Later the Romans adopted Christianity and when the Roman empire fell, the Holy Roman Empire continued. In the 16th Century Henry VIII took over as head of religion in England and called it the Church of England. The Church of England still claims to believe that Jesus Christ died to save the rest of us from oppression. The queen is supposed to believe that. British magistrates are supposed to act within that paradigm, but we can see that they do not.
In Jesus' case, at the site of crucifixion, the attending crowd was asked who they would prefer to save: Jesus or another revolutionary, Barrabas. The crowd chose Barrabas.[2] We, however, do not have another revolutionary of Assange's extraordinary global profile, but neither is anyone asking us if we want to save Julian Assange.
It is up to us to save ourselves and Julian Assange and the right to shine a light on the crimes that the power elite carry out all the time.
We live in a world, sadly, where electronic technology has reached a point at which people with money can do almost anything. They can launch wars for profit, carry out torture, influence the courts and the media, and then they can secretly try and imprison anyone who attempts to expose what they have done. That's why they are persecuting Julian Assange. They are out to prove that they can silence any protest.
These rich power-elites are networked and they back each other up. Julian Assange, as part of the alternative media, exposed this network - and he did not take sides. Even the cowardly mainstream media that pretends he is not a journalist republished the information he provided. If Julian is extradited to the United States, judged guilty in a secret court (for it will be secret) publishing in the western world will suffer the same fate as publishing in Muslim countries. Remember Charlie Hebdo and "We are all Charlie."
We are all Julian Assange now. Jesus of Nazareth was a local phenomena that went viral. Julian is a global phenomena in a global world - but he may be our last because, after him, what individual will ever achieve such a political profile, if the power-elite get their wish for utter media control and total secrecy?
Humans who live in modern techno civilisations are only apparently better than their ancestors; they are essentially the same, in different clothes, with different technologies. Without those materials and technologies, we are our ancestors. And so are our masters. They can be just as vicious as Attila, just as grasping as the Roman Emperors, and just as cowardly as modern generals who order drone executions without trial on people far away. America's 'Exceptionalism' seems to be no different from Hitler's belief in the 'master race' doctrine. The United States openly uses its Exceptionalist doctrine to justify the invasion, occupation and genocide involved in its multiple regime change projects, which seem to have two aims: to get control of fossil fuel resources and to make money out of weapons in continuous rolling wars. Weapons sales seem to be the most profitable industry in the world. That is what Julian Assange is up against.
Of course, none of this persecution of one inspired giant of a man could have been achieved if the client vassal state to America, Australia, had not remained collusively silent. Successive Australian governments have pretended that they have provided Assange with 'appropriate' consular support. That is why I say that Assange's plight shows how little worth Australian citizens have in the eyes of the Australian Government. As Assange himself once said something like that it is right for Australians to look at what happens in Washington, because that is where the real government of Australia is. As an Australian, I am ashamed of my government and I cannot understand why my countrymen remain so cowed and confused about what this all means.
[1] 
The US has 800 to 1000 military bases world wide. Russia has only eight, and these are located close to its own borders. France has nine. The United Kingdom has the most next to the US.
These bases are themselves occupations by the United States of sovereign powers: Here is a list of military bases by country. Australia also has a US base. Citizens in Australia and most or all countries that the US occupies with armed forces have protested again and again, yet their governments have acquiesced to the US, not to the democratic demands of their citizens.
[2] According to biblical history, Pontius Pilate served as the prefect of Judaea from 26 to 36 A.D. He convicted Jesus of treason and declared that Jesus thought himself King of the Jews, and had Jesus crucified. In the Gospel according to Mark, Pilate’s main question to Jesus was whether he considered himself to be the King of the Jews, and thus a political threat (Mark 15:2). In the Gospel according to Luke, Temple authorities had decided that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, but brought him to Pilate to accuse him further of sedition against Rome. The Gospel of Luke says that Pilate handed Jesus over to the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas for judgment on the grounds that Jesus was a Galilean and thus under Antipas' jurisdiction. Jesus was publicly flogged and then executed by crucifixion as a traitor to Rome. All Gospels say that it had been a tradition of the Romans to release a Jewish prisoner at the time of the Passover. Pilate offered the crowd at the execution site the choice of releasing either Jesus or another revolutionary named Barabbas. The crowd stated that it wished to save Barabbas. Accordingly, Pilate condemned Jesus to crucifixion.
Not so long ago the middle classes were marching enthusiastically all over the western world to defend freedom of the press, after the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo. "We are all Charlie!" they cried. Now there is hardly a peep about Julian Assange's cruel and unusual punishment for telling the world of war-crimes. Certainly no mass marches in the street. What's the difference? The mainstream press is singing a different song. It suited them to have people marching in the streets about Charlie Hebdo. Now, for some reason, it doesn't.
“Imagine that in 1946 the general-secretary of the United Nations had submitted a resolution to the General Assembly stating that Nazi crimes were so horrendous and despicable that the countries of the world needed to impose a blanket censorship on any public reference to or discussion of Hitler or his henchmen. Only the names of victims were to be mentioned or discussed. And the U.N. member countries, then, unanimously passed this resolution. If such a resolution had been proposed, passed, and fully enforced, what would we know today about the Nazi regime, the German history of that period, or the origins, premises, logic, and implied conclusions of national-socialist ideology and policies, both domestic and foreign? Without open and public discussion and debate through mention of Hitler’s name and unrestricted access to and use of his papers, speeches, and all other related documents, from whom would the world know why and what the Nazi system had done?” (Extract from article by Professor Richard M. Ebeling).
Professor Ebeling's points are very well made in the full article. One thing Ebeling does not mention is that the police and justice system are supposed to serve us and we are supposed to keep track of them. Perhaps he does not mention this because it would take him into the personally dangerous realms of questioning his own state. However, the questions remain: If access to documents involving evidence, suspects' identities and trials, is removed from public examination, how can we be sure that justice is being served? How do we know that our courts serve our interests, rather than the interests of criminals and the military? An explosive case in point: If we do not have the material to examine, how can we assess what the New Zealand justice system is doing about the massacre in Christchurch? The arrested terrorist's face was pixelated in video of his being brought to be charged in court. The video record he apparently made of his mass murder, does not match up with what he is reported to have done. It seems to show him going round to two mosques, apparently for a second time, and shooting a mostly immobile piles of bodies. Ambulances did not arrive for over half an hour. It does not make sense. Perhaps there is an explanation, but how can doubts be satisfied if there is to be no discussion and no access to documents?
Many would call such doubts extreme: who could question Western governments?
Another thing that Professor Ebeling does not mention, is the fact that censorship has clearly been used to protect western evil in recent times.
I refer to the 'classification' of war footage taken in Iraq, leaked by Chelsea Manning to Wikileaks, which published it as Collateral Murder. This war footage was a 2007 recording made by US soldiers in Iraq (a country illegally invaded on an invented pretext and repeatedly pulverised). It records the shooting of unarmed civilians, including ambulance attendants and children, with the authority of the United States military, on the mistaken pretext that one of them may be carrying a machine gun. The video is taken from a powerful helicopter, which shoots hails of bullets into the civilians, a grotesque act of brutality and overkill. They shoot the ambulance attendants when those people are attempting to remove the wounded from the scene. They even shoot an obviously severely wounded man who is dragging himself on his belly towards a door. First they hope he will go for a gun to justify this shooting, but he doesn't, so they shoot him anyway. Twelve Iraqis die, including, among them, two Reuters journalists. This footage was censored by the US Government, but Wikileaks made it public. It is for this reason that the US wants to capture, imprison, and possibly execute past Wikileaks editor, Julian Assange, an Australian who has committed no crime - quite the opposite. The crime is all on the United States side. It is part of an unjustifiable series of brutal events associated with their illegal invasion of Iraq.
If you watch Wikileaks' Collateral Murder, you can assess that crime, and it has been discussed and reported all over the world. You can also assess Julian Assange's subsquent hounding by the United States government. His persecution and false painting as a criminal shows the price of revealing what elites consider their prerogative: mass murder and management of the mass media. Ironically, again, Collateral Murder has been republished many many times, by media outlets which have not been persecuted and which, like cowardly collaborators, have failed to stand up for Julian Assange. Fortunately it has not been recensored. The video embedded in this article is commented on by Julian Assange and Ivan Eland (US Defense analyst and ex-Cato institute director), and compered by a mainstream Al-Jazeera corporate news interviewer. The Al-Jazeera presentation and interview took place in 2010. It is worth looking at as well to see Julian Assange before his demonisation, to remember why saving him from the United States is so important.
And remembering why it is so important to stop censorship - that it is our responsibility to know what is going on, not to accept what we are told is going on as if we were children. Indeed, terrorism by private citizens does not begin to compare on the scale of terrorism by US-NATO.
The Syrian army discovered a highly-equipped hospital which had been built with the support of the western states and Israel for the terrorists and their family members in Quneitra province.
The Arabic-language service of RT reported on Wednesday that the Syrian police forces entered the town of al-Bariqeh in Quneitra and took control of a hospital with modern equipment and medication.
It added that the hospital is equipped with different types of x-ray systems, an advanced central heating system, well-equipped beds and a surgery section and a vast storage drugs, including new and advanced medications needed for surgical operations.
A medical source said that a large number of Israeli, US and French equipment and drugs have been found in the hospital, saying that some of the medicines and equipment are not at all available to Syrian citizens.
Quneitra province in Southwestern Syria came under government control around two months ago, when terrorists, mostly from the al-Nusra Front, were forced to withdraw to Idlib. Others agreed to the government peace offer, ended the war of insurgency and received government amnesty.
The hospital is one of the last placed that had remained unknown to the government forces ever since they came in control of the province that neighbors the occupied Golan Heights, but it is not the only instance of the US and Israeli support for the terrorists.
In another instance on Tuesday, the Damascus army launched two separate ambush operations against ISIL in Palmyra (Tadmur) region in Eastern Syria, and discovered a large volume of arms, including American weapons.
The army soldiers ambushed a group of ISIL that tried to move from al-Tanf in Southern Homs towards al-Bayarat al-Qarbi in Palmyra to further move towards Raqqa via al-Taweinan and Wadi Abyaz Dam region.
The army men killed two terrorists and capturd two more, forcing the remaining pockets of the terrorist to flee the battlefield.
The army soldiers also seized a large volume of military equipment and six motorcycles.
In the meantime, other units of the army ambushed another group of ISIL terrorists in al-Forou’a region 70 km Southeast of Palmyra, and captured five terrorists.
The army units seized two military vehicles with communication devices on board and a large volume of the US-made machineguns and M16 rifles and several boxes of munitions.
FARS First published on September 19, 2018 at https://en.muraselon.com/2018/09/damascus-terrorists-hospital-israel-us-france-quneitra/
Over 2,600 corpses of civilians killed in the US air raids and victims of the ISIL terrorist group have been found in Raqqa province so far, local sources said.
The sources in Raqqa reported on Wednesday that 9 more bodies of civilians killed in the US-led coalition attacks were found in al-Jamili district in Raqqa city on Tuesday.
Meantime, the Kurdish-language Hawar news quoted an official source in Raqqa civil council team as saying that the corpses of over 2,600 people, mostly women and children, have been unearthed in al-Rashid stadium, the city zoo, al-Qadim great mosque and al-Badou district since the liberation of Raqqa last October who were mostly buried by the ISIL in mass-graves.
The bodies of civilians killed in the US airstrikes and the ISIL assaults are every day discovered in mass-graves and under the ruins of buildings in different parts of Raqqa.
Last Sunday, a sum of 13 bodies of civilians killed in the US-led coalition’s airstrikes on Raqqa city were found.
Raqqa Civil Council Team discovered bodies of four civilians killed in the air raid in al-Tamovin Garden in al-Kahroba neighborhood in Raqqa city.
In the meantime, three more bodies were found in the yard of al-Atiq mosque and six more were unearthed from the debris of ruined buildings in al-Badou neighborhood in Raqqa city.
FARS First published on 20 September 2018 at https://en.muraselon.com/2018/09/bodies-isil-us-raqqa/
US protests that Syria's retaking of Idlib from terrorists risks being the greatest humanitarian crisis of all time permeate the press. Cliched staged footage of 'White Helmets' rushing down dusty streets in Syria, purportedly to warn, direct and save civilians, insults the intellect. You wonder how the news announcers can bear to sit there pretending this is real news. Aren't they afraid of war-crimes prosecution when the dust settles? In fact, Idlib is the last province in Syria and in a region that remains occupied illegally by both the United States and other western forces [1] and terrorists, in a bizarre gothic partnership.
The United States pretends that Idlib is the last province still in 'rebellion' against Syria's President Assad. This is false. Idlib is the last province occupied by US military. What the US calls 'rebels' are takfiri militants and mercenaries who have taken the local population hostage, apparently under US protection. Furthermore, Idlib has become the refuge of takfiri routed from other parts of Syria.
In the other terrorist occupied provinces where takfiri fighters had dug in and taken civilians hostage, like East Aleppo, Gouta and Daraa, the Syrian Government bused civilians to safety and allowed terrorists to leave in buses for Idlib if they chose, or be rehabilitated to serve in the Syrian Arab Army, before they bombed those who were trying to maintain a stronghold. See https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-last-bus-to-idlib-terrorist-safe-haven-in-syria-faces-a-cleaning-out/246956/. Many terrorists took the Idlib option and Idlib is now where the worst die-hard terrorists have gone to ground.
The Idlib terrorists are relying on the protection of the United States, and the US is flooding the world with propaganda as though it might be prepared to fight Syria and Russia to save this hellish toehold they have illegally established in Syria's second most important province. Turkey's President Erdogan, despite his recent posturing against the United States over a failed coup in 2016, has taken a stance which comforts the interests of the US, claiming that Turkey cannot accommodate more refugees if Idlib is bombed. See https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/after-rejecting-turkey-plea-russia-and-iran-back-offensive-in-idlib-20180908-p502l0.html. It is widely thought that Erdogan not only wants to prevent the formation of any Kurdish state, but hopes to establish this area as Turkish, which it was before the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which carved up the Ottoman Empire and created the tensions in the area which have since been fanned by US-European interests, notably NATO. The Kurds have been used as pawns by US-NATO, which was considering using them as its toehold, however this caused conflict with its ally, Turkey, since the separatist Kurds want the same land that Erdogan wants for Turkey.
"The Turkish position is not different from that of the US, apart from the change of language, interests and objectives. Instead of ensuring the security of Israel through the US in the Southwest region, there are Kurdish forces hostile to Turkey which has been striving for decades to curtail, dissolve and prevent Turkish Kurds from separating themselves and establishing their Kurdish state.
Some details of the scene are different. The pro-Turkish national movement and calls to protect Sunnis in the city of Idlib are coming from the Muslim Brotherhood Group which supports every plan of Ankara in Syria even if it comes to cut a piece of its land to become the borderline, similar to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982." (Source: Syria Sykes Picot in Idlib, http://www.arabtimesonline.com/news/syria-sykes-picot-in-idlib/.)
Syria has crawled out alive from under a monster foreign-backed terrorist intervention, to everyone's amazement. And now she is trying to banish the monster. Not so long ago, people were shaking their heads and wondering how any country could survive the foreign-backed assault, how any government could survive the continuous psychopathic propaganda against it, but now they have hope. Meanwhile the United States can hardly believe that it is losing this war. It seemed like such a slam-dunk, another Iraq, another Libya - but not another Vietnam. How has Syria done it?
They have used the same process for each enemy territory. To foil the insincere accusations that the government was persecuting civilians, Syria has sent buses to take civilian hostages out, and, at the same time, it has offered two solutions to the terrorists: either they can be rehabilitated in the Syrian Army and fight for Syria, or they could take buses to Idlib. So Syria has squeezed the terrorists towards its northern borders, city by city, whilst greatly limiting civilian casualties.
The United States, which accuses the Syrian Government of purposely bombing civilians, has itself bombed civilians and terrorists alike in Raqqa, Iraq, along the north-east Syrian border. As Raqqa was reduced to ashes and stones, there were no buses to evacuate civilians or to allow press-ganged takfiri soldiers to escape.
There never was a civil war in Syria and most of the remaining bad guys are now all holed up in Idlib, surrounded by human shields. And America says it's worried about civilians. But we all can see that America wants to keep its takfiri mercenaries in Idlib, like a mad sorcerer deploying his orcs from some terrible dark tower.
[1] Source: Their presence is unofficial. http://freenations.net/200-british-and-us-troops-trapped-in-idlib/ US troops are overtly present in a region touching Idlib. See the map below from the New York Times.
The U.S. asked the Merkel administration to participate in "retaliatory" regime change strikes on the Syrian government forces when, likely soon, another faked 'chemical' incident will be blamed on it. Several high ranking members of Chancellor Merkel's party want to follow that call. But now the Scientific Services of the German Bundestag, the equivalent of the U.S. Congressional Research Service, released an authoritative legal opinion (pdf, in German) on the issue. Such an attack would be illegal under international law and it would also violate the German constitution. There will be no official German support for such a wider attack on Syria. (In an earlier opinion the Scientific Service found that the continued U.S. presence in Syria is illegal.)
Fitting to the anniversary of a remarkable incident that took place in New York, Maram Susli, aka SyrianGirl, released this video with quotes from Brett McGurk, special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS, and from the U.S. ambassador to the UN Nicky Halley.
Source: Moon of Alabama.
See also article at RT here: https://www.rt.com/news/438198-german-airstrikes-syria-wagenknecht/
The leader of Germany’s Left Party hit out at the government for mulling potential military strikes against Damascus, just one day after Berlin said it was in talks with allies about possible German military deployment in Syria.
“I believe that these discussions are completely irresponsible,” Die Linke (the Left Party) leader Sahra Wagenknecht told German N-TV, adding that discussing such plans is “absurd.”
In a Facebook post just hours earlier, Wagenknecht demanded from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the federal government not blindly follow demands from the Trump administration.
Merkel should “make it clear [to Washington] that there will be no automatism for a German participation” in US-led strikes on Syria, she said, branding such attacks as “violating international law.”
Wagenknecht castigated the ministry of defense, saying “it’s a scandal” that the department is even checking “whether a principle of a parliamentary army can be thrown away for the sake of military support for Trump.”
According to German law, the use of the army (Bundeswehr) for missions abroad should be greenlighted by MPs.
The comments from the leftist politician come just one day after German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said that Berlin is in talks with its allies about a possible military deployment to Syria if Syrian government forces “used chemical weapons” against the last major rebel stronghold in Idlib.
The government announcement drew instant criticism from the Social Democrats on Monday, while on Tuesday a group of specialists within the Bundestag concluded that the German military’s participation in military strikes in Syria would violate Germany’s constitution and international law.
FILE PHOTO. Aftermath of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Eastern Ghouta in April 2018. © White Helmets / Reuters
Footage, meant to serve as proof that the Syrian government has conducted a chemical weapons attack in Idlib, Syria, is to be handed to global news outlets by the end of Tuesday, the Russian military claims.
Several Middle East TV channels and a US news channel have been sent to Jisr al-Shughur in Syria’s Idlib Governorate to produce the footage needed for the provocation, a statement by the Russian Center for Syrian Reconciliation said. It added the intelligence came from local residents of Jisr al-Shughur.
“All the footage of the staged provocation in Jisr al-Shughur is to be delivered to the newsrooms of TV channels, which are to broadcast it after its publication on social media,” the statement claimed.
It also said that an Islamist group was provided with two canisters of a “chlorine-based chemical” for the purpose of the operation.
The Russian military said the footage would include scenes of White Helmets operatives treating supposed victims of an apparent barrel bomb chemical weapon attack by Damascus.
Moscow has repeatedly warned that a false flag chemical weapon attack was being prepared in Idlib, giving the US and its allies justification to attack Syrian government forces. Senior US officials have threatened Damascus with retaliation if it uses chemical weapons in Idlib and even preemptively assigned the blame for any such attack to the government.
Speaking at the UN security Council meeting on Tuesday, Russia’s Ambassador Vassily Nebenzya, stressed that Damascus did not possess any chemical weaponry to begin with. Any incident with such weaponry would only benefit the militants, fighting Syria’s government.
“The false-flag attack by the adversaries of Damascus, who count on foreign armed support, is very possible. We have irrefutable evidence of preparations [for it],” the official stated.
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There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its arsenal has never been inspected by any international agency. But this nation is not Iran. It's Israel. (James Corbett)
The Transcript below has been republished from https://www.corbettreport.com/israelinukes/
TRANSCRIPT
DONALD TRUMP: I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. In a few moments I will sign a presidential memorandum to begin reinstating US nuclear sanctions on the Iranian regime. We will be instituting the highest level of economic sanction.
SOURCE: President Trump Gives Remarks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
When President Trump announced that the US was going to de-certify the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, better known as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and reinstitute sanctions on that country, one of the reasons he cited for that move was the presentation of “new” evidence from Israeli intelligence showing that the Iranians had lied about its nuclear program during the negotiation of that deal.
TRUMP: Last week Israel published intelligence documents long concealed by Iran conclusively showing the Iranians regime and its history of pursuing nuclear weapons.
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: A few weeks ago, in a great intelligence achievement, Israel obtained half a ton of the material inside these vaults. And here’s what we got; 55,000 pages. Another 55,000 files on 183 CDs. Everything you’re about to see is an exact copy of the original Iranian material
SOURCE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives statement on Iran Nuclear Deal
Theatrical props and dramatic rhetoric aside, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent presentation on the “Iranian nuclear deal” in fact contained no new information.
That Iran had explored a nuclear weapons program prior to 2003 has been known and admitted for years. That they have an archive of this information is not a violation of the Iranian nuclear deal completed in 2015. In fact, if anything, Netanyahu’s presentation actually proved the exact opposite of what was intended: Namely, that Iran is abiding by the terms of that treaty and is not covertly pursuing any nuclear weapons activity. That’s why they had to go back to 15 year old information and present it as if it was something new and revelatory.
But here’s the real head-scratcher in this new round of propaganda over the Iranian nuclear non-threat: There is in fact a Middle Eastern nation that is in fact in control of a vast, undeclared stockpile of nuclear weapons. This nation does have the capability of deploying those weapons anywhere in the region. It is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and its arsenal has never been inspected by any international agency. But this nation is not Iran. It’s Israel.
This is the story of the real Middle East Nuclear Threat. You’re watching The Corbett Report.
Hand-wringing over Iran’s nuclear program is nothing new. It became a mainstay of western political discourse after an Iranian dissident revealed the Iranian government’s plans for a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in August 2002. But the surprising fact for Americans and others around the world who get their information from the corporate mainstream media, is that Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear weapons program has long been known and admitted. Since 2003, when the program was scrapped, not a single piece of evidence has been presented (not even by Netanyahu or the Israeli government) that the Iranian government ever pursued anything other than what it said it was pursuing: a nuclear energy program.
Not that that fact has ever stopped Netanyahu from using any opportunity to use cartoon-level propaganda tactics to convince the world otherwise:
NETANYAHU: In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages.
The first stage: they have to enrich enough of low enriched uranium. The second stage: they have to enrich enough medium enriched uranium. And the third stage and final stage: they have to enrich enough high enriched uranium for the first bomb.
Where’s Iran? Iran’s completed the first stage. It took them many years, but they completed it and they’re 70% of the way there.
Now they are well into the second stage. By next spring, at most by next summer at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb.
Ladies and gentlemen, what I told you now is not based on secret information. It’s not based on military intelligence. It’s based on public reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Anybody can read them. They’re online.
So if these are the facts, and they are, where should the red line be drawn?
The red line should be drawn right here. Before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb. Before Iran gets to a point where it’s a few months away or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.
Each day, that point is getting closer. That’s why I speak today with such a sense of urgency. And that’s why everyone should have a sense of urgency.
SOURCE: Israel PM Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu Address to United Nations Sept 27, 2012
Of course, Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons and Netanyahu’s Wile E. Coyote bomb and red line warnings bore no greater semblance to reality than the cartoon propaganda surrounding Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction.” Not only did the IAEA repeatedly confirm that Iran never diverted any nuclear material into any military program, but even the US intelligence community itself conceded that Iran was not trying to build a nuclear bomb. Most remarkable of all was Mossad’s own assessment that Iran was “not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.”
As I detailed earlier this year in “We Need to Talk About the Iran Protests,” fearmongering over Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons program was the basis for an extraordinary series of measures against the country in recent decades. These measures included “NITRO ZEUS,” a full-scale military cyberattack against Iran the best-known element of which was Stuxnet, the military-grade cyberweapon co-developed by the United States and Israel that specifically targeted Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz.
Iran’s non-existent nuclear program also provided the pretext for sanctions aimed at crippling the country’s economy, including the de-listing of Iranian banks from the Swift Network connecting the world’s financial institutions.
The fearmongers even went so far as to plant evidence of nuclear weapons involvement on Iran to further justify these attacks.
But the great irony is that there really is a nuclear armed nation in the Middle East. It is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It does not allow inspections of its arsenal. It does not even officially acknowledge its stockpile of nuclear weapons. It has even resisted the push for an international treaty recognizing a nuclear-free zone in the middle east. And that country is Israel.
Sometimes ranked as the world’s sixth largest nuclear superpower, Israel actively pursued a nuclear program from the time of its inception as a state in 1948. By the late 1950s, they had begun building a reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona with British and French aid. And by 1967, a classified CIA report estimated that Israel would be capable of producing a nuclear warhead in “six to eight weeks.” Shortly thereafter, it is believed, Israel began producing and stockpiling a nuclear arsenal.
OLENKA FRENKIEL: It was the young Shimon Peres, back in the fifties who negotiated a secret deal with the French to buy a nuclear weapons reactor like theirs. But while Dimona was going up, intelligence reports reached Washington that Israel was building an atom bomb.
Despite claims that Dimona was for peaceful purposes only, Israel’s leader Ben Gurion was summoned to Washington. President Kennedy feared an arms race in the Middle East and demanded inspections. But when inspectors finally entered the plant in May 1961 they were tricked. They were shown a fake control room on the ground floor. They were unaware of the six floors below where the plutonium was made.
PETER HOUNAM, Freelance journalist: Well this was something of great pride and almost a legendary story in Dimona, according to Vanunu. When the Americans came they were completely hoodwinked. All the entrances including the lift shafts were bricked up and plastered over so it was impossible for anyone to find their way down to the lower floors.
FRENKIEL: After Kennedy’s assassination the pressure on Israel was off. His successor Lyndon Johnson turned a blind eye. Then In 1969 Israel’s Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon struck a deal, renewed by every President to this day. Israel’s nuclear programme could continue as long as it was never made public. It’s called “nuclear ambiguity.”
The term “nuclear ambiguity,” in some ways it sounds very grand. But isn’t just a euphemism for deception?
SHIMON PERES, Former Prime Minister of Israel: If somebody wants to kill you, and you use a deception to save your life it is not immoral. If we wouldn’t have enemies we wouldn’t need deceptions. We wouldn’t need deterrent.
FRENKIEL: Was this the justification for concealing the floors of the plutonium reprocessing areas from the Americans, the inspectors, when they came?
PERES: You are having a dialogue with yourself, not with me.
FRENKIEL: But that’s been documented in a number of books.
PERES: Ask the question to yourself, not to me.
FRENKIEL: I mean, is it not true?
PERES: I don’t have to answer your questions, even. I don’t see any reason why.
FRENKIEL: Ambiguity is a luxury unique to Israel. Today the country’s an inspection-free zone, protected from scrutiny by America and her allies.
SOURCE: Israel’s Secret Weapon
Although estimates vary, it is now believed that Israel has somewhere between 75 and 400 nuclear warheads, and that it possesses the capability to deliver these warheads to Iran.
The existence of this stockpile, while known to governments around the world for decades, was only revealed to the public in 1986, when The Sunday Times published photographic proof and a detailed account of Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. That story was provided by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona facility, who spent decades behind bars for his part in revealing this truth to the world.
NARRATOR: On October 5th, 1986, The Sunday Times announced they had evidence to prove that Israel had become the world’s sixth biggest nuclear power, having developed their arsenal beneath the Negev desert at Dimona. Photographs like this were given to the Sunday Times by a former technician at Dimona, Mordechai Vanunu.
[…]
Mordechai Vanunu’s family, Moroccan Jews, settled in the Negev in the early 60s, inspired by the idea of being a part of Israel. Vanunu did national service in the army. Then, while he worked at Dimona he began studying philosophy. He became active in student politics. He opposed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Vanunu came to believe that Israel’s nuclear development program was immoral. He left Damona and, eventually, Israel itself.
Vanunu arrived in Sydney armed with photographs he’d taken inside Dimona. Here, he turned his back on Judaism and became a Christian. He met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian journalist who urged him to sell his secrets to The Sunday Times. His evidence was processed at a local photo shop. Vanunu talked openly about what he’d done.
It’s said that by the time Vanunu arrived in London on September the 12th, 1986, Australian intelligence had already alerted MI6 and the CIA, and Mossad—Israeli intelligence—had already begun questioning his family in Israel. The Sunday Times disguised their informant and moved him from place to place for protection. But in Leicester Square one day, Vanunu met a blonde who called herself “Cindy,” a beautician from Florida. Meanwhile, Oscar Guerrero, eager to profit from what he knew, turned to The Sunday Mirror. Vanunu’s photograph appeared on page one. Vanunu began to despair. At this point, Cindy was able to lure him to Rome to sp end the weekend with her at her sister’s apartment. Not once did Vanunu suspect that Cindy was a Mossad agent and that this was the beginning of a plot to kidnap him.
In Rome, the tactics of the Mossad agents changed dramatically.
MEIR VANUNU: In the apartment, two Israeli agents attacked him and bit him and strangled him really hard. And then chained him, injected drugs [in]to his body. And later on he woke up in a small cell on a boat. The boat went to Israel for a few days and he arrived to Israel on the 7th of October, 1986.
Vanunu was assumed dead until he turned up weeks later in Tel Aviv. Vanunu himself, on his way to court, gave the first clue of what had happened to him. Scrawled on his hand was the message “Vanunu was hijacked from Rome, Italy. 30.9.86. BA 504.”
But a key element of the story is missing from the handful of documentaries that acknowledge Israel’s nuclear stockpile. Namely, that these weapons were not merely developed by Israeli scientists working in isolation, but with the aid of a nuclear smuggling ring that helped develop and advance Israel’s arsenal by stealing important nuclear technologies from their “ally,” the United States. These rings and their activities have been known about and even investigated by the FBI for decades, but largely kept secret from the public.
It has fallen to researchers like Grant F. Smith of IRMEP.org, author of Divert!: NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program, to piece together the story from the documents that have been released. On The Corbett Report in 2012, Smith revealed the name of one of the high-powered Israeli officials who was at the heart of a plot in the 1970s to smuggle 800 nuclear triggers from the United States.
GRANT F. SMITH: In terms of the FBI uncovering a multi-node network, this one happened to be centered in California. MILCO was a company that was incorporated in 1972 by a man named Richard Kelly Smyth. He was discovered sending 800 krytrons, which are dual-use items that could be used to trigger nuclear weapons. When he was discovered doing that, he skipped bail in the mid-1980s and disappeared until he was picked up by Interpol in the early part of 2000.
And so the story is interesting and explosive, because after multiple attempts and denials we had a document release in which the key contact, or one of the key contacts that Smyth was meeting with to set up sales in Israel was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu. And so the document—which I’m kind of holding up right here for the people who are on video—actually names Benjamin Netanyahu as being an employee of Heli Trading Company, which was the node in Israel that would receive Ministry of Defense requisitions that they would pass on to MILCO.
And so the interesting thing about this, of course, is the high-profile nature of Benjamin Netanyahu, [and] the fact that the smuggling ring ring leader has been identified as Arnon Milchan, a person any American knows for his movie productions such as Pretty Woman and other favorites, who is running this and who a recent book has named as being a top economic espionage fly a spy for LAKAM, who worked under Benjamin Bloomberg and Rafi Eitan. But the FBI documents that we published on July 4th related to an antiwar.com story which was really short and direct. And its core focus was on the fact that in a period when Netanyahu was building himself up as a leader in the terrorism industry—hosting major conferences, having just returned from his studies in the United States, hosting major conferences in the Jonathan Netanyahu Terrorism Institute, named after his brother who was killed on the Raid on Entebbe.
Here’s a person who was supposed to be working as a furniture company executive, and yet these documents which are very credible because of what they were—which is testimony from Richard Kelly Smith after he was returned his exile overseas and finally forced serve a prison sentence. These were the statements he made to an FBI agent in a district attorney office when they debriefed and wanted to know what the extent of the nuclear technology smuggling network was and—boom!—there’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
SOURCE: Corbett Report Radio 214 – Israel’s Nuclear Smuggling with Grant F. Smith
Benjamin Netanyahu. And now this unindicted nuclear smuggler is lecturing Iran about a 15 year old, long-acknowledged nuclear weapons program that never produced a single nuclear weapon.
Even more worryingly, Israel’s nuclear knowledge has not only helped to arm its own nation, but actually helped to proliferate nuclear weapons to Pakistan through the so-called Khan network. One of the men who helped to transfer the nuclear triggers used in the construction of the Pakistani bomb was Asher Karni, an orthodox Jew living in South Africa who had been a major in the Israeli army prior to emigrating to Cape Town. Upon his arrival there in 1985, he began teaching Torah at the local synagogue and educating Jewish youth, encouraging them to relocate to Israel.
In 2004, U.S. authorities arrested Karni for his role in supplying the nuclear triggers and in 2005 he was sentenced to three years in prison. It has never been officially explained why this Israeli citizen and former Israeli military officer was interested in helping proliferate nuclear technologies to Pakistan.
But perhaps the greatest irony of all is that it is Iran who has been arguing for decades that the Middle East should be a nuclear-free zone. The idea was first floated by the Shah in 1969, and was first formally proposed by Iran in a joint UN General Assembly resolution, but the idea failed to garner any support. The idea was again raised by then-Iranian President Ahmedinejad in 2006 and yet again by then-Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki in 2008, but these calls to banish nuclear weapons from the Middle East have not even been acknowledged by the west, let alone seriously considered.
Now more than ever, the prospect of a nuclear-free Middle East seems the only way to prevent a nuclear conflagration that threatens to draw in the world’s superpowers, and yet the idea is being ignored by Israel and its staunchest ally, the United States.
Why does Israel refuse to declare its nuclear weapons stockpile? Why do they refuse to sign on to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty?
Why do they refuse IAEA inspections of their nuclear facility?
Why did they kidnap and imprison Mordechai Vanunu for 18 years for providing the proof of this nuclear program?
And perhaps most importantly, why does the United States, the only country who could single-handedly force NPT compliance from Israel, still refuse to even admit the openly-acknowledged status of Israel as a nuclear power?
Don’t hold your breath waiting for these questions to be answered by the teleprompter readers on the nightly news.
Still, as even many in the mainstream are now admitting, Netanyahu’s presentation on Iran’s nuclear non-secrets are a cheap display of political theatrics. The only thing he ended up doing is underlining the point that Iran, unlike Israel, fully cooperated with the IAEA, lived up to its obligations as a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and pointedly has not violated the 2015 nuclear deal.
And now that the United States has allowed the Israeli tail to wag the American dog once again by de-certifying that Iranian deal without valid cause, negotiators in North Korea and elsewhere will be watching, reminded yet again that a promise from the American empire isn’t worth the signed agreement it’s written on.
During a Barcelona concert on April 13, Roger Waters denounced the Syrian White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists.” Warning that the groups’ unverified claims about chemical weapons attacks across insurgent-held territory were aimed at triggering Western military intervention, Waters cautioned his audience, “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White 
Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”
In fact, Waters had first hand experience with the powerful pro-war PR operation behind the White Helmets. Back in October 2016, a public relations firm representing the White Helmets called The Syria Campaign attempted to recruit Waters by inviting him to a lavish dinner organized by a Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. The rock legend and renowned activist was told that by signing on to the organization’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes”
[This article, by Max Blumenthal, is republished in part from Gray Zone.]
Just days before his recent concert in Barcelona, Waters was lobbied again to support the White Helmets, this time by an eccentric French photojournalist affiliated with what he described as a “very powerfull [sic] syrian network.” The activist demanded to join Waters on stage and deliver a message for the “children of syria.”
Waters did not respond to either request.
These emailed solicitations from White Helmets representatives and activists were provided by Waters to the Grayzone Project, and are published in full at the bottom of this article. The documents demonstrate how the organization’s well-funded public relations apparatus has targeted celebrities as the key to the hearts and minds of the broader Western public.
Unlike many other A-listers, however, Waters took time to research the White Helmets and investigate its ulterior agenda.
“I was quite suspicious after I was invited to that [White Helmets] dinner,” Waters told the Grayzone Project. “And now my worst suspicions have been confirmed.”
The Syria Campaign’s initial approach
The October 2016 dinner invite was delivered to Waters by a representative for the Corniche Group, an international holding company belonging to the family of the London-based Saudi billionaire Hani Farsi. Farsi was seeking Waters’ presence at a fundraising dinner he had organized on behalf of The Syria Campaign.
The Syria Campaign is a well-funded public relations front established to promote The White Helmets as a group of heroic rescuers who require the protection of Western militaries. Through series of petitions and public demonstrations, The Syria Campaign has unsuccessfully pushed for a No Fly Zone in Syria that would have likely resulted in the kind of Western military intervention that toppled Libyan President Moammar Qaddafi and destabilized Libya.
The slick PR firm has also resorted to astroturfed public stunts like a pro-White Helmets flash mob and orchestral performance at New York City’s Grand Central Station where participants were paid up to $600 each.
Farsi’s relationship to the The Syria Campaign had been kept private until now. A Syrian-British oil tycoon named Ayman Asfari has taken a much more vocal role with the PR group, providing it with seed money to advance his mission to stimulate US and UK support for regime change in Syria. Waters was informed that Asfari’s wife, Sawsan, would be on hand for the 2016 White Helmets fundraising dinner.
This video will make you feel better about thinking, in a world where being programmed seems easier.
Filmed by Dima Aboud in Spain. Roger Waters exposes NATO-member-state White Helmets as a multi million dollar funded propaganda construct for terrorist factions inside Syria.
Video & translation: "Today your announcements show that your project is not humanitarian, but strictly political, since you no longer even hide the fact that your more or less single intention is to overturn the Syrian government. You are taking us back to dark days, where one of your predecssors, arguing humanitarian reasons, announced that he wanted to overturn Gaddaffi's government. We know where that took us. The nations of the world did not give us a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in order for us to follow servilely the way and the law of the strongest."
Marie Le Pen addresses Emmanuel Macron:
Mr President of the Republic,
If I have decided to address you directly here, this is because, on the pretext of chemical weapons use, (denied by the Syrian Government), the American president, Donald Trump, decided to attack Syria immediately.
This situation is all the more distressing because you yourself seem to want to associate our country with this new warlike adventure, before any independent investigation, without any consideration of international law, of our national interests, of our soldiers' lives, and of France's historic mission.
Yet, as France's attack on Iraq under President Chirac was vigorously condemned in the United Nations by his minister for foreign affairs, our country itself is called upon to make the voice of justice heard for world peace.
Already at that time, in 2003, do you remember, Mr President, some had already tried to get us to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction.
Today we know that unjustifyable gunboat policy of former times was based on a State's lie. A lie promoted in the theatre of mass media and all the way to the security council seats. That intervention, which France was unable to prevent, threw the whole Middle East into chaos and encouraged and armed Islamism.
The attacks we have experienced on our soil are almost the direct consequence, with the development of Daech, [...unintelligible] . The same scenario was repeated with the calamitous destabilisation of Syria and Libya, to which we owe today the immigration submerging Europe and the extension of jihadism in the Sahel and West Africa.
You are not ignorant of the fact that such political errors are never without consequence for us. Today your announcements show that your project is not humanitarian, but strictly political, since you no longer even hide the fact that your more or less single intention is to overturn the Syrian government.
You are taking us back to dark days, where one of your predecssors, arguing humanitarian reasons, announced that he wanted to overturn Gaddaffi's government. We know where that took us. The nations of the world did not give us a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in order for us to follow servilely the way and the law of the strongest.
Who could believe that in these circumstances of exceptional gravity, France, which is an old country, a country that knows better than most the cost of war, should let itself be dragged into such war madness and lightly accept the roles of political pig [unknown metaphore] and military support.
Over and above this business in Syrian, we can only worry about the temptation of the western leaders to rebuild a new Berlin Wall, as if they were unable to see the world as it is today. Since 1989 the world has changed. The threats don't come from a secular state in the Middle East [Le Pen is referring to Syria, which is secular, as was Libya], nor from European powers which are potential allies in the battle against terrorism, but from groups or states that aspire to impose on the world, in the middle east, in Africa, or even in Europe, the theocratic dictatorship of a political Islam.
Our battle does not oppose western nations against Muslims, but Islamic totalitarianism against free countries, whether they are Muslim or not. The free world will come to the end of this criminal ideology and its hegemonic projects. All our efforts must be directed to eradicate Daech and jihadist groups, even when they call themselves 'freedom fighters' in order to spread Islamist ideology.
We are the inheritors of a nation which can only be herself in a state of dignity, to quote De Gaulle. The situation demands that France be herself worthy of her history, her rank, worthy of the role that free nations have conferred on her through her glorious history.
Mr President, if you
Bombing not the answer for peace in Syria, rather a dangerous mistake - Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s reckless support for a military strike by the US in Syria demonstrates Australia’s lack of independence in its foreign policy.
IPAN spokesperson Mr Stephen Darley said, “Surely it is clear that any military exchange between Russian and US forces threatens a dangerous widening of the conflict and the lives of millions.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has accepted an invitation from the Syrian government to inspect the region where an alleged chemical weapon attack occurred demonstrating a willingness to support its claim they had not conducted such an attack.
The video showing children being hosed down allegedly from a chemical weapons attack needs to be investigated. Any chemical attack is an inhumane and illegal act, requiring the strongest condemnation.
If there is proof that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, regardless of who was behind it, then there needs to be serious consequences in the international court of justice where crimes against humanity are legitimately dealt with.
What is clear is that a bombing assault on sites in Syria is neither legal, effective nor acceptable. The risks of even more innocent people suffering death, injury and destruction of homes and the risk that a major powers war could ensue is being recognised internationally.
Mr Darley is calling on the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister to clearly reject the proposed missile attack and instead be a voice of reason in calling for all non-military means possible to be adopted to resolve the conflict.
This press release was issued two days before Mr Trumps attack of today.
"US President Trump, French President Macron, and British Prime Minister May accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons in Douma on the basis of evidence and staged videos of the so-called “White Helmets”, who are the medical wing of the fascist Al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. The countries mentioned above have called meetings of the UN Security Council in order to propose resolutions to strike at the legitimate government of Syria, which is heavily engaged in the fight against terrorism, and despite the assertion of a member state in the Security Council, Russia, that the (Douma) location was free of any chemical traces after the Russian experts entered Damascus, refuting their claims. The Syrian government has asked the experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to enter and verify the incident, but Trump and his lackies from European and Gulf Arab countries blocked their ears and decided to proceed with their lies and threats." (General Confederation of Trade Unions of Syria.)
First published by the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War·Friday, April 13, 2018 at https://www.facebook.com/notes/hamilton-coalition-to-stop-the-war/statement-by-general-confederation-of-trade-unions-of-syria-regarding-us-and-eur/2408602269165730/.
Dear comrades, brothers, and sisters,
The United States and its followers in European countries, such as France and Britain, and their proxies in the region such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others, have been provoking Syria since they began their terrorist war against Syria eight years ago, in order to carry out their agendas on Syrian territory. We are witnessing these days the manufacture of alleged evidence, the latest of which is the fabricated story of Eastern Ghouta hit by chemical weapons by the Syrian Arab Army.
These colonial powers have always used the UN Security Council and its instruments to strike sovereign states by using illusory and fake pretexts to achieve their goals, such as the infamous presentation of Colin Powell in 2003 at the UN Security Council to strike Iraq.
The chemical incident was staged in Douma because the terrorists suffered defeat at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army that liberated Eastern Ghouta, which defeat contributed to the safety and tranquility of the people of Damascus after they suffered a lot because of the terrorists who were raining down hundreds of missiles and rockets upon the capital. The more the Syrian Arab Army achieves victories on the ground, the more the terrorists urge their employers to save them, as happened when they concocted the chemical incident in Khan Sheikhoun (in April 2017).
This time, US President Trump, French President Macron, and British Prime Minister May accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons in Douma on the basis of evidence and staged videos of the so-called “White Helmets”, who are the medical wing of the fascist Al-Nusra terrorists in Syria. The countries mentioned above have called meetings of the UN Security Council in order to propose resolutions to strike at the legitimate government of Syria, which is heavily engaged in the fight against terrorism, and despite the assertion of a member state in the Security Council, Russia, that the (Douma) location was free of any chemical traces after the Russian experts entered Damascus, refuting their claims. The Syrian government has asked the experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to enter and verify the incident, but Trump and his lackies from European and Gulf Arab countries blocked their ears and decided to proceed with their lies and threats.
We, at the General Union of Trade Unions in Syria, declare our stand with our Syrian government and army under the leadership of President Bashar al-Assad, with whom we have faced terrorism and its sponsors for eight years. We affirm that we are confident of victory and that these US and European threats constitute a flagrant violation of the UN Charter.
We call upon all honourable people from the World Federation of Trade Unions, the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions, and all Arab and international organizations to expedite the campaign of defending Syria by sending messages of solidarity and support to Syria and by organizing marches and sit-ins in front of US embassies and consulates everywhere in the world, condemning this blatant US aggression and to save the world from Trump's ruthlessness. We ask you also to send letters to officials of the United Nations and of the United States of America, stressing that the threatened actions of the US president against Syria will lead to a global war that will drag the whole world into further chaos, destruction, and poverty and will increase the number of refugees generated by the wars already being waged by the United States against sovereign states in the world.
Long live the Syrian people in their war against terrorism! Long live international solidarity with Syria!
Executive Bureau
General Union of Trade Unions
Syrian Arab Republic
Video inside: Jimmy Dore, the comedian from the very intelligent and acid Jimmy Dore Show does a superbly simple analysis of US form for lying to start wars, plus the fact that the corporate media go along with this. And us on the brink of World War Three - "for nothing," as Dore sums up.
Video inside: This video records a really shameful action on behalf of the US regime, on a par with Hitler's arrogant exceptionalism and dishonesty. We have begun the video where the benighted Syrian ambassador begins to respond to a series of utterly unfounded accusations by Niki Haley, the US Ambassador. That she walks out with her following, without listening to him, shows the contempt in which the United States regime holds the people of Syria and its government. Many lives are at stake and the welfare of many generations, but the United States military-industrial complex do not even give them a hearing. Although we have begun the video at the point of the Syrian ambassador's speech, you can roll it back to hear Haley, and then the Russian Ambassador.
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