Total CEO De Margerie Dies in Moscow Plane Crash, Interfax Says
Christophe de Margerie, chief executive officer at Total SA (FP), Europe’s third-largest oil company, died in a Moscow plane crash, Interfax reported.
The 63-year-old CEO died at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport when a business jet crashed, Interfax said citing an unidentified law enforcement official. All four people on the plane died and were French citizens, Interfax said.
De Margerie started his career in Total’s finance department in 1974 and took over as CEO at the French company in February 2007, when that post was split from the chairman’s.
Before becoming chief executive, de Margerie, known by the nickname “Big Mustache,” because of his curved mustache, oversaw exploration and production and headed up Total’s business in some of the world’s political hotspots including Iraq, Iran and Myanmar.
To contact the reporter on this story: James Paton in Sydney at jpaton4@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew Hobbs at ahobbs4@bloomberg.net; Jason Rogers at jrogers73@bloomberg.net Peter Vercoe
Five Major Risks for Russia
Since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, Russia has not faced such dangerous and destructive processes in the country’s economic and financial spheres. The country is currently entering a zone of economic turbulence, making it extremely difficult to make medium-term forecasts about its future. The year 2014 may turn out to be one of the most difficult in recent years from the point of view of the risks facing the country’s economy.
Let us try to describe the five key types of risk the country is facing. The first category of risk is geopolitical, embracing the entire complex of sanctions against Russia and the “containment policy” adopted by the United States, the European Union, and a number of other countries with regard to Russia. Analysts from the Raiffeisen Bank, one of Russia’s major banks, expect that the sanctions will result in a fall in Russia’s GDP by 0.3 percent in 2014. According to the Russian Finance Ministry, Russia’s balance of payments has suffered a shock equal to 2 percent of GDP as a result of growing geopolitical tensions. Furthermore, the Russian government has as good as acknowledged that the country could fall into a recession.
According to forecasts by Fitch Ratings, consumer price growth will reach 7 percent in 2014 before declining only slightly to 6.8 percent in 2015 and 6 percent in 2016. The ratings agency also says that the international restrictions introduced with regard to Russia and the measures the country has taken in response have negatively affected the business environment, resulting in a falling value of the national currency, accelerating inflation, rising interest rates, accelerating capital outflow, the aggravation of structural flaws, and an increasing risk of recession as well as of Russian companies being cut off from international capital markets. According to Fitch, the capital outflow from Russia in 2015 will reach $100 billion. On October 15, experts from the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting declared that Russia is experiencing a systemic banking crisis that will likely only deepen in the coming year.
These are only preliminary estimates. As became clear in late September, the European Union does not intend to review its sanctions against Russia despite the relative peace in Ukraine’s eastern regions. Russia still has not complied (and seems unlikely to comply) with the West’s primary demand that it pull its troops from Ukrainian territory. This means that geopolitical risks will remain the same and will produce further depreciation of the ruble, rises in inflation and capital outflow, and investor disappointment.
The second type of risk currently plaguing Russia is systemic risk, which has only become more acute in the face of external shocks. Systemic risks include the country’s high corruption level, ineffective ruling system, weak government, poor quality of lawmaking, and lack of parliamentary, civil, and media control.
For the last two years, Russia has been striving to implement Putin’s “May decrees,” issued once he was inaugurated as the country’s president for the third time. Crisis tendencies in the economy that were obvious even before the Ukrainian revolution and the annexation of Crimea have made this program impossible to implement. The government, however, does not seem able to come up with a different plan.
“Oligarchic risks” are connected with the desire of the businessmen close to Putin to distribute assets among themselves and at the same time obtain privileged working conditions.
The third category of risks is connected to the oligarchs. Western sanctions that have made it impossible for businesses to get long-term loans from abroad and have frozen relations with foreign investors have placed enormous pressure on businessmen from Putin’s close circle as well as on the state companies on which “Putin’s economy” is based. The U.S. energy giant ExxonMobil decided to withdraw from its joint ventures with Rosneft in the Arctic. Similarly, the French oil and gas company Total suspended its joint venture with Russia’s Lukoil to explore hard-to-recover oil in Western Siberia.
Under these rapidly deteriorating economic conditions, Rosneft asked the Russian government for 1.5 trillion rubles from the National Welfare Fund (NWF), an account created to service the debts of the Russian Pension Fund. The Russian Ministry of Economic Development recently approved the allocation of 150 billion rubles ($3.75 billion) from the NWF to Novatek, Russia’s second-largest gas producer, for the development of the Yamal LNG project to tap the resources of the South Tambey gas field. Gazprom is also facing difficulties and has announced that it will considerably decrease its production in the coming year.
The consequences of economic difficulties are not only financial. According to many observers, the much-publicized arrest of Vladimir Yevtushenkov, chairman of the Russian conglomerate Sistema, is connected with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin’s ambitions to get his hands on Bashneft, an oil company owned by Sistema. The State Duma is considering a law that would allow Russian citizens whose foreign-held assets were frozen as a result of “unlawful decisions of foreign courts” to demand compensation from the Russian budget. This initiative, which was previously rejected in March 2013, was revived after the Italian government decided to freeze the assets of Arkady Rotenberg, an influential Russian businessman connected with Putin. If this law is adopted and all people blacklisted by the United States and the European Union seek compensation, it is hard to imagine the consequences for the Russian budget.
In other words, “oligarchic risks” are connected with the desire of the businessmen close to Putin to distribute assets among themselves and at the same time obtain privileged working conditions. These measures are being offered as a sort of compensation for the damages caused by sanctions—compensation that would be paid by taxpayers who still believe that Russia is surrounded by enemies.
The fourth category of risk is related to negatives conjunctures regarding energy markets. On October 16, Brent oil prices dropped below $83 a barrel, a historic low since 2010. Considering that Russia needs an oil price of around $90 a barrel to balance its budget, this low price poses a serious risk to the country’s economy. According to the Russian Finance Ministry, low oil prices could shave 2 percent off Russia’s GDP and reduce the value of its exports by $55 billion a year. “The current situation is the payment for the soft policy of the last few years,” said Maksim Oreshkin, head of the Finance Ministry’s Strategic Planning Department. He added that if the oil price was set at $80 a barrel when calculating the budget, the Russian economy would not notice any shocks when oil prices dropped.
Finally, the fifth category of risk is sociopolitical. Polling and sociological research organizations, including the Levada Center, are not currently recording any shifts in public attitude that could provoke the government’s concern. However, sociologists note that the population sees the rise in prices as a major social issue. The effort to halt the rise in prices after the introduction of an embargo on products from the European Union and Norway proved impossible. The government keeps saying that this situation is only temporary, but Russians see a different picture in stores. The obvious weakening of the ruble has made things worse: the population’s profits and purchasing power are decreasing, while basic necessities are becoming more expensive.
Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin recently declared that the window of opportunity to introduce reforms and restore economic growth in Russia has closed under the pressure of Western sanctions and a new election cycle. The country is facing several years of stagnation on the brink of recession in the face of a lack of political will to generate change. However, stagnation is not the worst thing that the country might face if the current tendencies continue to develop. The inertia of Putin’s regime is becoming the main threat to its stability in the future, and if a social and economic crisis were to be provoked by the cumulative effect of the aforementioned risks, there exists no “vertical of power” that could prevent an internal explosion from happening.
What have we here?
ReplyDeleteWhy, obvious Mossad black op of some kind........eh, rat?
The Mysterious Death of Russian Oligarch Boris Berezovsky
DeleteWho was Boris Berezovsky again?
A self-made billionaire—at the height of his wealth in 1997, Berezovsky’s estimated worth was $3 billion, according to Forbes—a former academic who, after the privatization of the Soviet Union’s state-run economy, built his fortune with investments in oil, cars, airplanes, aluminum, and TV stations. Berezovsky played an integral part in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000. Once elected, Putin lashed out against oligarchs, charging many with tax evasion. In 2000, Berezovsky fled to England, where he lived until his death.
What happened?
On March 23 he was discovered in a bathroom at his home in Ascot, Berkshire, by his bodyguard and pronounced dead by paramedics shortly after. The Thames Valley Police reported that Berezovsky was found with “a ligature around his neck and a piece of similar material on the shower rail above him,” and the death was “consistent with hanging.” But there was no suicide note, and, according to the police, the involvement of a second party “cannot be completely eliminated, as tests remain outstanding.” Nikolay Glushkov, a longtime friend of Berezovsky and a fellow Russian exile, suspects foul play. “The idea that he would have taken his own life is bulls- - -,” Glushkov told the Guardian. “Berezovsky had a lot of powerful enemies,” says Mark Galeotti, a professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. One name that’s mentioned repeatedly is Putin’s.
Why would Putin want him dead?
“Putin understands that oligarchs are truly kingmakers,” Galeotti says. “And a kingmaker could easily become a king-breaker. So he set out to either force them to submit to the Kremlin or destroy them.” Oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 on charges of fraud and sent to a Siberian prison camp, where he remains to this day. Berezovsky taunted the Kremlin from afar, speaking publicly about what he called Putin’s “major crimes in Russia.” In 2007, Scotland Yard allegedly advised Berezovsky to leave England because of a possible assassination attempt. (Putin is not the first to allegedly target Berezovsky: In 1994 he was nearly killed in a car bomb in Moscow. His bodyguard lost an eye and his chauffeur was decapitated.)
Has this kind of thing happened to other oligarchs?
In December 2007, Georgian billionaire Arkady “Badri” Patarkatsishvili—who, like Berezovsky, initially supported Putin and went into exile after Putin’s election—told the Sunday Times there was an assassination plot against him orchestrated by the Kremlin. He died a little more than a month later at his Surrey mansion of what pathologists concluded was a heart attack. In November 2012, Russian whistle-blower Alexander Perepilichnyy, who had been helping Swiss authorities uncover a money-laundering scheme by Russian officials, dropped dead while jogging outside his Surrey home, also of an apparent heart attack.
Will we ever know the truth about any of these guys?
Pathologists are working on Berezovsky’s toxicology and histology tests, which could take weeks. “If the authorities are looking hard,” Galeotti says, “they’ll find out if there are traces of poison.” Both journalists and conspiracy theorists on the Web, have pointed out that sodium fluoroacetate, a chemical used in pesticides, can cause heart failure and is difficult to identify. Peter Earnest, the executive director at the International Spy Museum, in Washington and a former CIA operations officer, says conspiracies thrive because sometimes they turn out to be true. “These Russian oligarchs dying in suspicious ways may sound like the plot of spy novels, but you never know,” he says.
Russian Artist Slices Off Earlobe to Protest Putin.........drudge
ReplyDeletePreviously nailed scrotum to Red Square..........drudge
Russian hip hop is the best.
Long Live Pussy Riot !
New Hampshire Senate race is tightening up a bit -
ReplyDeleteNew Hampshire Shaheen (D) +2.6
The Daily Star
ReplyDeleteBEIRUT: Military supplies “appropriate for ground battles against terrorists” are ready to be shipped from Iran to Lebanon, according to the Islamic Republic’s semiofficial Fars News Agency.
“What we are supplying to the Lebanese Army is a rapid reaction in response to a possible threat,” Iranian Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan said Monday.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, with the aim of consolidating national authority and reinforcing security in Lebanon, is ready to supply the needs of the Lebanese Army, and share its experience with this country’s army for fighting terrorist and takfiri groups,” Dehghan said.
Lebanese Defense Minister Samir Moqbel is currently in Tehran to discuss, among other things, possible Iranian military aid to the embattled Lebanese Army.
Moqbel said that Iran’s military support would play an important role in helping the country push back radical Islamist groups ensconced in the border regions.
According to Al-Manar TV, Moqbel visited multiple weapons productions facilities on his trip.
The Lebanese Army has been engaged in intermittent ground clashes with terrorist groups along the country’s eastern border for almost two months. More than a dozen soldiers were killed when militants affiliated with the Nusra Front and ISIS briefly took over the northeastern town of Arsal in early August.
In separate meetings Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told Moqbel that that ignoring the extremist groups along Lebanon’s borders was “a big mistake,” according to the country’s state-run Press TV.
Iran has expressed a commitment to support both the army and the resistance group Hezbollah, which has sent significant assets to Syria to fight alongside Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran, as in the past, will stand by the Lebanese nation’s resistance and Army and is fully prepared for political, security and intelligence cooperation in order to counter extremist and terrorist groups,” Zarif said.
Moqbel is expected to return to Lebanon with Iranian military aid, according to Fars News Agency.
Earlier on his trip Moqbel met with Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, who insisted that his country would stand by the people of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, who he said are all fighting terrorism.
Iran’s pledge of military aid has been a source of controversy in Lebanon since it was announced three weeks ago.
It is unclear whether Lebanon will actually accept the aid package, as several ministers affiliated March 14 have expressed concern that such a deal would breach U.N. sanctions against Tehran.
Iran’s former ambassador to Beirut, Ghazanfar Roknabadi, dismissed such concerns.
“They say the aid breaks sanctions, but it is just a gift and there is no money in return,” Roknabadi said, according to the Associated Press. Iran had initially suggested sending military aid to Lebanon several years ago, he added.
Since 2007, Iran has been barred from importing and exporting weapons by a United Nations embargo.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/Oct-21/274768-iran-ready-to-send-lebanon-arms-to-battle-terrorists.ashx#ixzz3GjfsSjr0
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There are cheaper ways to assassinate people than sacrificing a plane, some of which involve Polonium-290.
ReplyDeleteIs that the umbrella tip deal?
DeleteI recall something about an umbrella tip loaded up with bad shit.
Seattle would be an excellent locale for this method.
Obamanesia: polls reveal people can't remember voting for Obama The first stage of grief is denial More
ReplyDeleteSee: American Thinker
Rufus, are you experiencing difficulty in recalling that you actually voted for O'Fraud ?
If so, electroshock therapy may be your only option.
DeleteCasino time.......
Hezbollah, properly armed could finish off ISIS in a good part of Syria and Lebanon.. It is considerably more powerful than the Lebanese army and is around 60,000 strong. It is highly motivated and fairly well trained.
ReplyDeleteHezbollah is a terrorist army.
DeleteThey are the original ISIS but for the Shiite side of the coin.
Hezbollah is not the solution but one of the reasons ISIS formed in the 1st place. Hezbollah murdering Syrian civilians at the bidding of Assad is what gave the Syrian rebels motivation to fight back they way they are.
Now you want the original butchers to continue to butcher the new butchers?
LOL
Recalling the deadly 1983 attack on the Marine barracks
DeleteThirty years ago today, Americans were devastated by the news of a massive terrorist attack in Lebanon that killed 241 American servicemembers.
Early on a Sunday morning terrorists drove an explosive-laden truck into the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. Moments later 58 French paratroopers were killed in an attack on their barracks.
It was the deadliest single day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima during World War II.
Americans were shocked at the devastation, but at the time few grasped the significance of the deadly bombing. It marked the emergence of a deadly new form of terrorism never seen on this scale.
"It really was a watershed in international terrorism," said Matthew Levitt, author of Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God. "This was something new."
"The world we live in and what we knew of the future security environment was forever changed," Gen. James Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, said at a memorial ceremony.
"It was a new way to attack the West," Amos said. "It was a cowardly attack on freedom."
Western authorities soon learned that the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing was the work of Hezbollah militants acting under Iranian direction.
"There was a recognition that Iran has more or less declared war on us," said Michael Rubin, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. "It shook the Reagan administration."
The Americans were in Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping mission in an effort to bring stability to war-torn Lebanon.
"They came in peace," President Obama said in a statement Wednesday to honor the fallen. Obama called the attack a "despicable act of terrorism."
President Reagan withdrew the American forces from Lebanon in the wake of the bombing. Terrorists the world over drew their own lessons from the devastation.
Al-Qaeda leaders have cited the bombing as an example of how to succeed against Western powers.
As an organization Hezbollah has continued its attacks on the West. The organization, which over the course of its history has switched between global and regional objectives, has returned to pursuing high profile terrorist attacks and is helping the Iranian-backed regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
"Now we are seeing a return to much as they were 30 years ago," Levitt said of Hezbollah.
WiO had a good point.
DeleteIt is so.... American....that an enemy is defined and all that oppose that enemy become good. The place is a cesspool of bad actors and the USA would be well advised to stop naively lumbering about trying to impose its childish view of right and wrong.
Hezbollah and its history of international terrorism and violence:
Delete1982: Israel invades Lebanon to drive out the PLO's terrorist army, which had frequently attacked Israel from its informal "state-within-a-state" in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah, a Shiite group inspired by the teachings and revolution of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, is created with the assistance of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The group is called Hezbollah–or "party of God"– after initially taking responsibility for attacks under the name "Islamic Jihad." (Not to be confused with the Palestinian terror organization Islamic Jihad.)
July 19, 1982: The president of the American University in Beirut, Davis S. Dodge, is kidnapped. Hezbollah is believed to be behind this and most of the other 30 Westerners kidnapped over the next ten years.
April 18, 1983: Hezbollah attacks the U.S. embassy in Beirut with a car bomb, killing 63 people, 17 of whom were American citizens.
Oct. 23, 1983: The group attacks U.S. Marine barracks with a truck bomb, killing 241 American military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of a peace-keeping force. A separate attack against the French military compound in Beirut kills 58.
Sept. 20, 1984: The group attacks the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut with a car bomb, killing 2 Americans and 22 others.
March 16, 1984: William F. Buckley, a CIA operative working at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, is kidnapped and later murdered.
April 12, 1984: Hezbollah attacks a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain. The bombing kills eighteen U.S. servicemen and injures 83 people.
Dec. 4, 1984: Hezbollah terrorists hijack a Kuwait Airlines plane. Four passengers are murdered, including two Americans.
Feb. 16, 1985: Hezbollah publicizes its manifesto. It notes that the group's struggle will continue until Israel is destroyed and rejects any cease-fire or peace treaty with Israel. The document also attacks the U.S. and France.
June 14, 1985: Hezbollah terrorists hijack TWA flight 847. The hijackers severely beat Passenger Robert Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver, before killing him and dumping his body onto the tarmac at the Beirut airport. Other passengers are held as hostages before being released on June 30.
Dec. 31, 1986: Under the alias Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, Hezbollah announces it had kidnapped and murdered three Lebanese Jews. The organization previously had taken responsibility for killing four other Jews since 1984.
DeleteFeb. 17, 1988: The group kidnaps Col. William Higgins, a U.S. Marine serving with a United Nations truce monitoring group in Lebanon, and later murders him.
Oct. 22, 1989: Members of the dissolved Lebanese parliament ratify the Taif Agreement. Although the agreement calls for the "disbanding of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias," Hezbollah remains active.
Feb. 16, 1992: Sayyad Hassan Nasrallah takes over Hezbollah after Israel kills the group's leader, Abbas Musawi.
March 17, 1992: With the help of Iranian intelligence, Hezbollah bombs the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 and injuring over 200.
July 18, 1994: Hezbollah bombs the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires–again with Iranian help–killing 86 and injuring over 200.
Nov. 28, 1995: Hezbollah bombards towns in northern Israel with volleys of Katyusha rockets in one of the group's numerous attacks on Israeli civilians.
March 30, 1996: Hezbollah fires 28 Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli towns. A week later, the group fires 16 rockets, injuring 36 Israelis. Israel responds with a major offensive, known as the "Grapes of Wrath" operation, to stop Hezbollah rocket fire.
Aug. 19, 1997: Hezbollah opens fire on northern Israel with dozens of rockets in one of the group's numerous attacks on Israeli civilians.
October 1997: The United States lists Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
Dec. 28, 1998: Hezbollah opens fire on northern Israel with dozens of rockets in one of the group's numerous attacks on Israeli civilians.
May 17, 1999: Hezbollah opens fire on northern Israel with dozens of rockets in one of the group's numerous attacks on Israeli civilians.
June 24, 1999: Hezbollah opens fire on northern Israel, killing 2.
May 23, 2000: Israel withdraws all troops from Lebanon after 18 years patrolling the "security zone," a strip of land in the south of the country. The security zone was set up to prevent attacks on northern Israel.
June 2000: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan certifies Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. Shortly thereafter, the U.N. Security Council endorses Annan's report. Hezbollah nonetheless alleges Israel occupies Lebanon, claiming the small Shebba Farms area Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 war as Lebanese territory.
Oct. 7, 2000: Hezbollah attacks an Israel military post and raids Israel, kidnapping three Israeli soldiers. The soldiers are later assumed dead. In mid-October, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah announces the group has also kidnapped an Israeli businessman. In 2004, Israel frees over 400 Arab prisoners in exchange for the business man and the bodies of the three soldiers.
DeleteMarch 1, 2001: The British government adds Hezbollah's "military wing" to its list of outlawed terrorist organizations.
April 9, 2002: Hezbollah launches Katyushas into northern Israeli town. This assault comes amidst almost daily Hezbollah attacks against Israeli troops in Shebba farms.
Dec. 11, 2002: Canada lists Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
Aug. 10, 2003: Hezbollah shells kills 16-year-old Israeli boy, wound others.
June 5, 2003: Australia lists Hezbollah's "military wing" as a terrorist organization.
Sept. 2, 2004: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 calls for "the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias," a reference to Hezbollah.
December 2004: Both the United States and France ban Hezbollah's satellite television network, Al Manar. A U.S. State Department spokesman notes the channel "preaches violence and hatred."
March 10, 2005: The European Parliament overwhelmingly passes a resolution stating: "Parliament considers that clear evidence exists of terrorist activities by Hezbollah. The (EU) Council should take all necessary steps to curtail them." The European Union nonetheless refrains from placing the group on its list of terror organizations.
July 12, 2006: Hezbollah attacks Israel with Katyushas, crosses the border and kidnaps two Israeli soldiers. Three Israeli soldiers are killed in the initial attack. Five more soldiers are killed as Israel launches operation to rescue the soldiers and push Hezbollah from its border. During the ensuing war, Hezbollah launches rockets at civilian targets across northern Israel.
Aug. 11, 2006: The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopts Resolution 1701, which calls for a cessation of hostilities, the deployment of Lebanese and U.N. forces into southern Lebanon, and the disarmament of armed groups in Lebanon.
C'mon WiO,
Deletedidn't you see rat, in high dungeon, justify US support for Osama bin laden because of its fight with the Soviets? Embracing evil is good when pursuing short term goals dontcha know?
The 2008 conflict in Lebanon[5] began on May 7, after Lebanon's 17-month long political crisis spiraled out of control. The fighting was sparked by a government move to shut down Hezbollah's telecommunication network and remove Beirut Airport's security chief Wafic Shkeir over alleged ties to Hezbollah. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the government's decision to declare the group's military telecommunications network illegal was a "declaration of war" on the organization, and demanded that the government revoke it.[6][7]
DeleteHezbollah-led opposition fighters seized control of several West Beirut neighborhoods from Future Movement militiamen loyal to the government, in street battles that left 11 dead and 30 wounded. The opposition-seized areas were then handed over to the Lebanese Army.[8] The army also pledged to resolve the dispute and has reversed the decisions of the government by letting Hezbollah preserve its telecoms network and re-instating the airport's security chief.[9][10]
Rival Lebanese leaders reached a deal on May 21, 2008, to end the 18-month political feud that exploded into fighting and nearly drove the country to a new civil war.
Robert Fisk: Hizbollah rules west Beirut in Iran's proxy war with US
DeleteAnother American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that the elected government of Lebanon has lost.
And it has. The national army still patrols the streets, but solely to prevent sectarian killings or massacres. Far from dismantling the pro-Iranian Hizbollah's secret telecommunications system – and disarming the Hizbollah itself – the cabinet of Fouad Siniora sits in the old Turkish serail in Beirut, denouncing violence with the same authority as the Iraqi government in Baghdad's green zone.
The Lebanese army watches the Hizbollah road-blocks. And does nothing. As a Tehran versus Washington conflict, Iran has won, at least for now. Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader and MP and a pro-American supporter of Mr Siniora's government, is isolated in his home in west Beirut, but has not been harmed. The same applies to Saad Hariri, one of the most prominent government MPs and the son of the murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri. He remains in his west Beirut palace in Koreitem, guarded by police and soldiers but unable to move without Hizbollah's approval. The symbolism is everything.
When Hamas became part of the Palestinian government, the West rejected it. So Hamas took over Gaza. When the Hizbollah became part of the Lebanese government, the Americans rejected it. Now Hizbollah has taken over west Beirut. The parallels are not exact, of course. Hamas won a convincing electoral victory. Hizbollah was a minority in the Lebanese government; its withdrawal from cabinet seats with other Shias was occasioned by Mr Siniora's American-defined policies and by their own electoral inability to change these. The Lebanese don't want an Islamic republic any more than the Palestinians. But when Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah chairman, told a press conference that this was a "new era" for Lebanon, he meant what he said.
The Daily Star
DeleteBEIRUT: A senior Hezbollah commander who was on the FBI’s most wanted list was killed in Syria, a Twitter account affiliated with the party said.
The Mouqawama Twitter account posted Monday night a photo of Fawzi Ayoub, also known as Abu Abbas, praying in military fatigues with the caption: “The land of the Levant has been watered with the noblest blood.”
“We are proud that our commanders are among American intelligence’s top most wanted,” the Hezbollah-linked account said.
“If this proves anything, it is that we are on the path of righteousness in the face of the greatest force for evil in the world.”
Ayoub is wanted by the FBI for allegedly forging an American passport and using it to try to enter Israel in order to carry out a bombing on behalf of Hezbollah.
Security sources told Reuters that Ayoub was killed by predominantly Sunni rebel forces in Nawa, a town in the southern Syrian province of Deraa, the cradle of the Syrian uprising-turned-war in which 160,000 people have been killed.
Ayoub, who is from the southern village of Ain Qana, was arrested in the West Bank in 2000 and spent four years in an Israeli jail before being released as part of a prisoner swap, the sources told Reuters. He also holds Canadian citizenship and has lived in the United States.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-regime monitoring group, said in a post on Facebook that a military commander and fighters loyal to the regime of President Bashar Assad were killed in an ambush by Islamist fighters Monday night near Busra al-Sham, a town in Deraa, without identifying the military official.
The group said a number of individuals were wounded in an artillery attack on the commander’s funeral Tuesday.
Hezbollah is fighting alongside forces loyal to Syria’s embattled president against rebels trying to overthrow his rule. The party says the uprising is dominated by “takfiris,” a catch-all term for Sunni rebels, and argues that it is protecting Lebanon from the threat of jihadists entering the country through Syria.
The party has been instrumental in regime victories on the border with Lebanon in the towns of Yabroud and Qusair.
Ayoub’s killing comes amid news of three other deaths among party cadres, including two in Syria.
Media reports said a Hezbollah suspect indicted in the attempted assassination of Telecoms Minister Boutros Harb was killed in Syria.
The reports said Mahmoud Hayek, wanted by the Lebanese authorities, was killed while fighting alongside regime troops. The Daily Star could not confirm the claims.
Harb told a local television channel he had not received official information confirming Hayek’s death.
Hayek, who hails from the Nabatieh village of Adchit, was indicted in February 2013 for attempting to kill Harb, but his whereabouts remained unknown.
He was charged with carrying out acts of terror after planting a bomb in the elevator of the building that houses Harb’s office in Beirut’s Badaro neighborhood.
Hezbollah refused to hand over Hayek after he was implicated in the case.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah members paid their respects at a funeral in the Mount Lebanon village of Maaysra for Qusai Ali Amro, a fighter who was killed in Syria.
An AFP photograph showed fighters carrying Hezbollah flags standing in front of Amro’s flower-covered coffin east of the coastal city of Byblos Monday.
Hezbollah also announced the death of Mustafa Qassir, an official in the party’s Central Council, after a two-year illness.
The party said Qassir was buried at his southern hometown of Deir Qanoon al-Nahr. The official, who died Monday, was instrumental in the party’s educational institutions.
Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Lebanon-News/2014/May-28/257916-senior-hezbollah-commander-killed-in-syria.ashx#ixzz3GjuRupQy
While the United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist group, the two may be indirectly working together to keep ISIS fighters in Syria out of Lebanon, Israel’s NRG News reported Monday.
ReplyDeleteA week after Hezbollah fighters repulsed ISIS forces in Arsal, in northern Lebanon, near the Syrian border, the US is reportedly sending weapons to the Lebanese army, in order to strengthen its abilities against ISIS.
The American aid intended for Syria’s western neighbor, is based on the assumption that Hezbollah and the Lebanese army are collaborating, so it’s not unlikely that the US weapons are reaching the Shiite group, according to the report.
Additionally, CIA intelligence reportedly recently helped Hezbollah stop an ISIS-backed car-bombing plot in the southern part of the capital, Beirut, which is largely under Hezbollah control.
“The international community has an interest in isolating the Syrian crisis,” according to Mohammed Afif, a recently-appointed spokesman for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Afif’s remarks illustrate the Lebanese Shiite terrorist organization’s role in the new balance of power in the region: “Everyone has an interest in keeping the peace in Lebanon,” according to Afif. “Everyone has his own way.”
Hezbollah officials are closely watching the latest regional moves by the United States in the struggle against ISIS, to see how and where they can make profit politically or militarily by the developing US presence.
http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/09/22/report-us-weapons-reaching-hezbollah-in-fight-against-isis-in-syria-video/
Hezbollah is using the cover of the self created crisis with ISIS to build up and attack Israel.
DeleteTunnels are being built under the Lebanese / Israeli border for an invasion by Hezbollah.
They have 10 times the rockets that Hamas had, and Iran has spent several billion dollars up armoring and resupplying them with advanced weapons for the next war.
And when that war break out?
Obama's new best friends, Iran and Hezbollah will think Obama will hold Israel back. But Israel may just surprise Iran and Hezbollah, they may not need to rely on American resupply as Obama has taught them NOT to rely on the USA, at least until a new administration stakes over in 2 years.
Israel will not have the luxury of warning Lebanese civilians in advance to flee when Israel has to take out the tens of thousands of rockets both north and south of the Litani, it will be a blood bath. All brought to you by ? IRAN and Hezbollah.
The 2006 Hezbollah cross-border raid was a cross-border attack carried out by Lebanon-based Hezbollah militants on an Israeli military patrol on 12 July 2006 on Israeli territory.
ReplyDeleteUsing rockets fired on several Israeli towns as a diversion; Hezbollah militants crossed from Lebanon into Israel[1] and ambushed two Israeli Army vehicles, killing three soldiers and abducting two other soldiers. Another five soldiers were killed inside Lebanese territory in a failed rescue attempt. Hezbollah demanded the release of Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in exchange for the release of the abducted soldiers. Israel refused and launched a large-scale military campaign across Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah incursion. This marked the start of the 2006 Lebanon War. Two years later, on 16 July 2008, the bodies of the two abducted soldiers were returned to Israel by Hezbollah in exchange for Samir Kuntar and four Hezbollah prisoners.
Hezbollah Returns Bodies to Israel in Exchange for 5 Lebanese Militants
Five Lebanese militants freed from prisons in Israel in exchange for the bodies of two captured Israeli soldiers strode down a red carpet behind a Hezbollah honor guard Wednesday to a boisterous welcome from hundreds of cheering spectators.
Israel released Samir Kantar and four others after Hezbollah handed over two black coffins with the bodies of the Israeli soldiers, closing a painful chapter from the 2006 war in Lebanon.
Kantar, who had been serving multiple life terms in Israel for a grisly 1979 attack, wiped away tears as he stood before hundreds in the coastal border town of Naqoura in southern Lebanon. An honor guard escorted the men to a stage as a brass band played martial music and rows of uniformed fighters saluted.
Samir Kuntar (Arabic: سمير القنطار, also transcribed Sameer, Kantar, Quntar, Qantar) (born July 20, 1962 in Abey, Lebanon) is a Lebanese Druze former member of the Palestine Liberation Front who was convicted of murder.[1][2][3]
DeleteOn April 22, 1979, at the age of 16, he participated in the attempted kidnapping of an Israeli family in Nahariya that resulted in the deaths of four Israelis and two of his fellow kidnappers. Kuntar and his team broke into an apartment building and kidnapped a father, 31-year-old Danny Haran, and his 4-year-old daughter, Einat, taking them to a nearby beach and killing them.[4]
In Israel, Kuntar is considered the perpetrator of one of the most brutal terrorist attacks in the country's history,[5] while in Lebanon, where Israel's version of the events is disputed by many and it is denied that he killed the father and his daughter,[6][7] he is widely regarded as a "national hero."[8] Newsweek states that the details of Kuntar's attack are "so sickening they give pause even to some of Israel's enemies."[9] The Jerusalem Post states that "exactly how popular Kuntar is in Lebanon is up for some debate."[10]
In November 2008, Syrian president Bashar Assad presented Kuntar with a Syrian medal[11] and in early 2009 he was honored by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.[12] He is on a list of people banned from entering the United Kingdom.
Terrorist who shot father in front of 4 year old girl and smashed her skull given honorary citzenship in PA as hero and role model
DeleteCase of Samir Quntar shows why death penalty and not life imprisonment is necessary for terrorists
March 15, 2006
MIM: The award of honorary citizenship in the PA to a jailed terrorist who murdered a father and his 4 year old daughter, and caused the death of a 2 year old girl in hiding, shows why terrorists must be given the death penalty. Samar Hadar, the wife of Danny and mother of Einat, recounted the murder of her husband and daughter and the attack that killed them as one of "unimaginable cruelty". Her 2 year old daughter suffocated to death in the crawl space in which they were hiding. "The terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Quntar.".." "...Various organizations in the Palestinian Authority responded with applause to the announcement of granting honorary citizenship to the two terrorists..."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PA Grants Murderer of 4-Year-Old Girl Honorary Citizenship
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=100254
The outgoing Fatah regime in the Palestinian Authority voted on March 5th to grant honorary citizenship to Lebanese terrorist Samir Quntar who murdered a 4-year-old Israeli girl and her father.
According to a report from Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Jordanian terrorist Sultan Al-Ajaluni also received honorary citizenship in the same vote. Both terrorists are serving life sentences in Israeli jails.
DeleteIn 1979 in the coastal town of Nahariya, Lebanese terrorist Samir Quntar [pictured above] murdered Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter, Einat. Danny's daughter Yael, just two-years-old, suffocated to death while hiding in a crawl space with her mother. Quntar is serving multiple life sentences totaling 542 years in Israeli prison.
Smadar Haran, wife and mother of the murder victims, described the murder in the Washington Post in 2003:
"It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty… It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband Danny and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach. Around midnight … the terrorists burst into our building. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.
"I will never forget the joy and the hatred in the terrorists voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. … As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought. ..
"The terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Quntar."
Various organizations in the Palestinian Authority responded with applause to the announcement of granting honorary citizenship to the two terrorists.
"The 'Friends of the Prisoners' organization sees the decision, of the present government, to award Palestinian citizenship to two Arab prisoners – Samir Quntar from Lebanon and Sultan Al-Ajaluni from Jordan – an act of Palestinian national obligation and in dedication to the honored history that the Arab prisoners have provided to the Palestinian issue."
[Al-Quds newspaper, Mar. 7, 2006]
Delete"The Palestinian Liberation Front, through general secretariat member, Dr. Wasil Abu Yusuf, praised the government's decision… to award the imprisoned fighters Samir Quntar and Sultan Al-Ajaluni honorary citizenship as an act of dedication to their struggle and their heroic suffering in the occupation's prisons.
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Mar. 8, 2006]
"The Palestinian Popular Committees expressed their appreciation for the government's decision to award the two imprisoned fighters, Samir Quntar and Sultan Al-Ajaluni, honorary citizenship and Palestinian citizenship as an act of dedication to their struggle and their heroic sufferings in the occupation's prisons.
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Mar. 9, 2006]
PMW's Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook noted, "Societies measure their heroes in different ways. Some societies honor athletes or performers. Others celebrate caregivers and humanitarian workers. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have consistently chosen to honor murderers as their national icons."
Documented evidence shows that PA TV and PA leaders have long seen Quntar as a hero. His picture is repeatedly shown on TV, and he was proclaimed the "model warrior," "brave," and a "leader" and "head" of the prisoners.
In an August 15th, 2004 TV broadcast, PA Minister of Prisoners, Hisham Abdul Razeq, defined Quntar as the leader of the prisoners: "The torch of freedom [that] was lifted by our heroic prisoners and headed by the great warrior Samir Quntar... our thanks to you.
On August 24th of the same year, prominent PA TV broadcaster Muhammad Albaz told his audience: "A thousand blessings to the warrior Samir Quntar [the audience claps] and to his family in Lebanon and to this hero who was sentenced to 576 years [in prison]. This is the evil, and this is Israeli democracy.
On August 18th, 2004, PA TV termed the murder of the father and girl as an act of bravery: "He was sentenced to 542 years in prison for committing the brave Nahariya action in Palestine [note-Israel city of Nahariya is defined as Palestine.]
On the same day, Arab demonstrators supporting a prisoner hunger strike singled out Quntar as a model to be followed: "We bless the family members of Samir Quntar, we are with you. He is your son but he is also our son, the son of Palestine. We ask of Allah, that there will be 100 more Samir Quntars, 1,000 more Samir Quntars, 1,000,000 more Samir Quntars, that do and act for the Palestinian issue." The speech was broadcast on PA TV.
The above needs to be read and understood what Hezbollah and those that support Hezbollah actually stand for.
DeleteWhat is the Goal?
ReplyDeleteThe PKK is as much a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION as is Hezbollah.
As much of one as Hamas, too.
Osama, Ash, was an agent of the Saudi government, while he was in Afghanistan.
Now, there certainly are good reasons to not be involved, to steer a more isolationist course than the US has for the past 65 years.
The extended occupation of Afghanistan was an error, for US.
The decade in Iraq, definitely not a sound strategy.
Using the Taliban to bleed the Soviet Union, a low cost alternative to nuclear Armageddon.
Then taking down the Taliban, in 2001 & 02, that was neither difficult nor time consuming.
Whether or not the Taliban was responsible for the 11SEP01 raid on NYCity and DC, another matter entirely.
You continue to confuse the strategic goal with the tactically expedient way to achieve it.
I have been discussing the tactics, while you continue object to the strategy, and then attempt to conflate the two..
They are not really connected.
If the US decided it no longer was going to be the World' police force, I would applaud that.
But that does not seem to be in the cards.
So if the US is going to remain involved, what is the least objectionable tactical technique we can utilize?
Using foreign boots and US wings, that is the lowest profile intervention possible, that still stands a chance of success at achieving the military goals set by the elected officials.
If you wish to change those strategic goals, the election is just a few weeks away.
If you were a resident of a US state, I imagine you could vote for the politico that mirrored your thinking, if there was one.
There are none that so qualify in my district.
The Israeli use terror tactics in their campaign to subjugate the Palestinian people.
ReplyDeleteThey have done so since before the European Zionist colonists unilaterally declared their 'State'.
The Zionists were declared a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION and many of the terrorists went on to serve at the highest level of the Israeli government.
Hezbollah = Haganah = Hamas = PKK
Israel - Founded by Terrorists and Sustained by Terrorism and now ... Allied with Islamic Terrorists
Your comments once again show that you are, as we say in Ohio, dumber than an ear of corn.
DeleteYour contributions to this blog are meaningless and quite frankly show that you side and support terrorists, real ones.
You are an enemy of the United States of America.
I doubt you have any idea of what people say in Ohio, "O"rdure, there are few tourists from Ohio in Tel Aviv..
DeleteEvery political group in the Middle East is a terrorist organization of one sort or another.
The Zionist one of the premier organizations that practiced murder for political gain, have since the beginning of their colonial occupation of Palestine.
Zionists murder civilians, Jewish refugees in a False Flag operation
On Nov. 25, 1940, a boat carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, the “Patra,” exploded and sank off the coast of Palestine killing 252 people.
The Zionist “Haganah” claimed the passengers committed suicide to protest British refusal to let them land.
Years later, it admitted that rather than let the passengers go to Mauritius, it blew up the vessel for its propaganda value.
“Sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice the few in order to save the many,”
Moshe Sharett, a former Israeli Prime Minister said at memorial service in 1958.
http://beforeitsnews.com/strange/2013/03/zionists-led-jews-to-annihilation-in-ww2-2447940.html
BBC
ReplyDeleteFierce fighting has erupted in the north of the Syrian town of Kobane, after two days of relative calm.
Kurdish defenders were thought to have pushed back Islamic State (IS) militants trying to take over the town, including from this area.
US-led forces carried out six air strikes around Kobane on Sunday and Monday, the US military said.
Kobane, on the Turkish border, is a key objective for IS, and the fighting has forced most civilians to leave.
The new fighting came as Turkey said it would allow Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to cross into Syria to fight IS.
The BBC's Kasra Naji on the Turkish border says the decision is a major boost for the defenders' morale, and soon for their fighting capability.
Officials in the Iraqi Kurdish region said they were ready to send forces but had so far received no orders.
Turkey, faced with a long insurgency by its own Kurds, has until now barred access for Kurdish fighters to Syria, but correspondents say Ankara is more sympathetic to Kurds in Iraq.
The Iraqi Army is about to deploy to Kobane,
DeleteDespite the derision the idea received from our retired auto mechanic.
Go Team Iraq !
Bravos at the Met
ReplyDeleteABC
Politicians including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Peter King joined a crowd of demonstrators outside the Metropolitan Opera on Monday as part of an ongoing protest over an opera focused on the death of a Jewish man that critics say glorifies his Palestinian killers.
About 400 people stood behind barricades chanting "Shame on the Met!" and carrying signs saying "The Met glorifies terrorism" before the first performance of "The Death of Klinghoffer."
The opera is based on the 1985 killing of passenger Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship hijacked by four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front. The 69-year-old was shot in his wheelchair and pushed overboard.
American composer John Adams' opera has been a lightning rod since February, when it was scheduled for this season. The first large demonstration came on the Met's Sept. 22 season opening night, featuring a Mozart work, when protesters jeered at arriving spectators.
Giuliani, standing across the street from Lincoln Center on Monday, said he wanted to warn people the Klinghoffer opera "is a distorted work."
"If you listen, you will see that the emotional context of the opera truly romanticizes the terrorists," he said.
But opera expert Fred Plotkin said Adams depicts the Klinghoffers as his work's moral spine.
"Does this opera present the killers in a favorable light? No," Plotkin said. "Are the Klinghoffers far and away the most sympathetic characters in the opera, the ones we care about most? I believe so."
Monday's performance went on with a few orchestrated disruptions: Boos were shouted from scattered seats, and a voice yelled from a balcony, "The murder of Klinghoffer will never be forgotten!" It ended with a standing ovation.
Turks ‘encroach’ on Cyprus’ gas
ReplyDeleteTuesday 21 October 2014 The Herald Scotland
NICOSIA:
Cyprus said a Turkish research vessel had encroached on an area off its southern coast where it is searching for gas. Cyprus said it was preparing counter measures in an escalating row over rights to hydrocarbons in the eastern Mediterranean. A member of the European Union, Cyprus has become particularly keen to develop offshore gas reserves as a potential source of revenue.
Obama sees the Conga Line for what it is and where he doesn’t want it
ReplyDeleteNo one knows if United States president Barack Obama’s administration will manage in the next five weeks to strike what many in the White House consider the most important foreign policy deal of his presidency: an accord with Iran that would forestall its ability to make a nuclear weapon. But the White House has made one significant decision: if agreement is reached, Obama will do everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote on it.
Even while negotiators argue over the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed to spin and where inspectors could roam, the Iranians have signalled that they would accept, at least temporarily, a “suspension” of the stringent sanctions that have dramatically cut their oil revenues and terminated their banking relationships with the West, according to US and Iranian officials.
The US treasury department, in a study it declined to make public, has concluded Obama has the authority to suspend the vast majority of those sanctions without seeking a vote by Congress, officials say.
Congress whored itself out to AIPAC and Obama knows it. They belong to their bidders and brought themselves to this.
ReplyDeleteIran is an avowed enemy of the USA.
DeleteCongress doesn't support, help or give cover to avowed enemies of state.
Obama however does. Obama is dead set on letting Iran go hot and get a nuke.
AIPAC stands with the goal that Iran's goal is the destruction of BOTH America and Israel.
The US is the enemy of the Iranian people, having deposed its elected government, shooting down its passenger airliner and causing financial hardship to them, and for what?
DeleteWhat was the long term advantage the US garnered by installing the Shah?
We can ask Ash ... he may know.
The US wa there, shoulder to shoulder with Saddam, as he had his Army invade Iran.
DeleteDonald Rumsfeld, went to see Saddam, gave him the marching orders, and march east into Iran he did, try.
Some say the Iranians lost ...
123,220–160,000 KIA and 60,711 MIA (Iranian claim)
200,000–600,000 killed (other estimates)
800,000 killed (Iraqi claim)
320,000–500,000 WIA
40,000–42,875 POW
11,000–16,000 civilian dead
Economic loss of US$627 billion
Little wonder then that the Iranians have no love for the US.
The war cost both sides in lives and economic damage: half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with an equivalent number of civilians, are believed to have died, with many more injured; however, the war brought neither reparations nor changes in borders.
DeleteThe conflict has been compared to World War I in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across trenches, manned machine-gun posts, bayonet charges, human wave attacks across a no-man's land, and extensive use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas by the Iraqi government against Iranian troops, civilians, and Iraqi Kurds.
At the time of the conflict, the U.N. Security Council issued statements that
"chemical weapons had been used in the war."
U.N. statements never clarified that only Iraq was using chemical weapons, and according to retrospective authors
"the international community remained silent as Iraq used weapons of mass destruction against Iranian[s] as well as Iraqi Kurds."
A number of proxy forces participated in the war,
Deletemost notably the Iranian Mujahedin-e-Khalq siding with Ba'athist Iraq and
Iraqi Kurdish militias of Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan siding with Iran
—all suffering a major blow by the end of the conflict.
"... we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
DeleteEven if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
“We understand that they are pretty bad guys,” Oren said in the interview.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/obama-iran-deal-could-skirt-congress-1.1970426
ReplyDeleteMaybe after Iran nukes New York you will have a change of heart about Iran, or not..
DeleteFear and Loathing in Tel Aviv !
DeleteHe lived a lot of different lives
been different people many times
He lived his life in bitterness
and filled his heart with emptiness
And now you see, you see it for the first time
there is no crime in being kind
Not everyone is out to screw you over
maybe, yeah just maybe,
they just want to get to know you
And now the time is here
baby you don't have to live your life in fear
and the sky is clear, is clear of fear
Don't wanna live in fear and loathing
You want to feel like you're floating
instead of constantly exploding
in fear and loathing
There are two religious nations that presently have nuclear weapons, Israel and Pakistan. Israel is not a source of stability in the Middle East. Quite the opposite in fact. Israel has time and again provided incentives to other regional powers to acquire a nuclear deterrent. If another Islamic State acquires nuclear weapons, it will have as much to do with what happens in Tel Aviv as Teheran. Should Israel continue along the path that it has chosen for the past fifty years, It is only a matter of when not if and there is nothing Israel can do to stop it and survive. Nothing.
DeleteDoes it matter? In a perverse way it could be a good thing as nuclear deterrence has restrained the US vs Russia, India vs Pakistan vs China and China vs Russia. You have to be totally ignorant of human history or a total optimist to expect that any nation can maintain a monopoly on any military technology. It has never happened. Israel is no exception.
There is a far greater danger that Israeli military and police actions will result in the continuous churn of Islamist religious nut jobs that will one day do a Dr. Strangelove on Israel with a purloined or lab created nuclear weapon. I never underestimate the human ability to hate and adapt, hate and react and hate and seek revenge.
DeleteDo you seriously thing that Jews are the only people to have come up with the expression of “never again”? I have no doubt that there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Palestinians that say “never again”. ISIS is proof of it.
Israel is an example that smart people can do stupid things. The continuous pounding, destruction, humiliation, intimidation and killing of the Palestinians is criminal stupidity.
How many books, stories or cinema has been created based on the theme of revenge by the victim of bullying seeking and finding revenge? They exist and will keep being created because people have a universal view of freedom, justice and injustice. The ending are always the same, justice or revenge (it is the same thing) and the bully always gets his earned wages. It is only a matter of time.
DeleteDeuce ☂: Israel is an example that smart people can do stupid things. The continuous pounding, destruction, humiliation, intimidation and killing of the Palestinians is criminal stupidity.
DeleteMaybe Israel should take your advise and act like others and simply destroy the palestinians once and for all?
Then, when the Palestinians are destroyed and only a few thousand remain, they can hold services and say "never again".
But as long as the Palestinians sole goal is the stupid and fruitless aim to genocide the Jews? They will get their asses handed to them. But they are fortunate. Their enemy are the Jews. If they were the Syrians, Russians, Iranians or even the Americans? They would be reduced to a few...
Just as the great Cherokee or Apache nations....
The bully? Are the Arabs. They squat on 899/900th of the land. They sided with the Nazis, they swept the lands clean of Jews. They rejected the UN division of the land....
The arabs started the wars of genocide and lost.
Israel aint going anywhere.
Get used to it.
IF you think that is bullying?
Lots of luck.
The Jewish Crusade ...
DeleteThat's how the history books will remember the short period of time that the Zionist states survives.
Like all the other Crusader States, the Zionist will, in time, fall.
Walls really don't work. Just ask the Chinese.
Those that repeat the mistakes of the past, thinking that they'll get a different outcome ...
They're called 'crazy'.
You do return to your final solution remedy. Of course the Arabs sided with the Germans. The Germans were fighting the English and French colonizers. Which side would you choose?
DeleteI’m not going to count the number of posts on the Israeli barbarism against Gaza, since I made the prediction that Netanyahu was trying to provoke a war over the three murdered teens. That was the most recorded one sided war in history. The World recognized the bully and the victims. We had the picture of the Israelis in the lawn chairs, eating potato chips and terrified Palestinian woman and children, bloodied, maimed and dead in the rubble, the impersonal consequence of long range US supplied bombs and artillery, delivered by the glorious IDF.
We heard the Israeli talking points on all the “military targets” but no secondary explosions. Strange that.
Give it up. It was bully, bully, bully.
Not strange, at all.
DeleteThere were no munitions stored in the targeted buildings.
It was terrorism, pure and simple.
DeleteTerrorism is the life blood of Zionist Israel.
The Zionists in Palestine offered to help the NAZI fight the British, in Palestine.
DeleteWhen the Irgun split in 1940, Shamir sided with the most militant faction, headed by Avraham Stern. In secret contacts with German representatives at Beirut the group offered to open up a military front against the British in the Middle East in return for the expulsion of the Jewish population of Europe to Palestine (Heller, 1995, pp. 85-86).
DeleteYitzhak Shamir would later become the 7th Prime Minister of Zionist Israel
Turkey says Iraqi Kurds can fight in Kobane. Could they make a difference? (+video)
ReplyDeleteTurkey doesn't want to allow Turkish Kurds - most importantly members of the Marxist PKK - to go fight in Syria. But the PKK's fighters have proven most effective in resisting Islamic State advances in Iraq.
How will the Turks know just who is wearing those Iraq Army uniforms?
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/1020/Turkey-says-Iraqi-Kurds-can-fight-in-Kobane.-Could-they-make-a-difference-video
Wonder if the Turks think that all Kurds look alike?
DeleteCongress doesn’t support, help or give cover to avowed enemies of state.
ReplyDeleteReally? Look at the top right photo on this blog. Ask John McCain about ISIS or the CIA. How about them Saudi amateur pilots that learned how to fly but not land? How about Libya where we hauled all those weapons to Syria? Please, the US Congress?
The Congress has gifted the Israeli regime that attacked the USS Liberty billions and billions in support, help and cover.
DeleteIsrael, is an avowed enemy of the United States, it has attacked a US Navy vessel on the high seas... just like the North Koreans and the Libyans under Colonel Q.
Then, as Mr Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, said to the JPost just a year and a month ago ...
The Israeli prefer al-Qeada.
a·vowed
Deleteəˈvoud/Submit
adjective
that has been asserted, admitted, or stated publicly.
"an avowed atheist"
Once again, rat is HUNG by his own petard.
Jack Hawkins: Israel, is an avowed enemy of the United States
DeletePlease post anywhere by an official statement of the Nation State of Israel that Israel is an " is an avowed enemy of the United States"
otherwise, once again, you are proven to be a liar.
The ISraeli attacked a US Navy ship on the high seas, they then lied about it.
DeleteActions speak louder than words.
The ISraeli used spies in the US in an active campaign to endanger the United States.
DeleteThen lied about it.
Actions speak louder than words
The ISraeli threatened the world with nuclear annihilation.
DeleteActions speak louder than words.
Jonathan Pollard, the American spy now serving a life sentence in jail, was a key figure in Israel's nuclear program (and how some of Pollard's intelligence was turned over to the Soviet Union at the express direction of Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister);
DeleteHow Israel threatened Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon with the use of nuclear weapons on the third day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, successfully blackmailing the White House to airlift much needed supplies;
https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option
Actions speak louder than words
We don't in the West, at least those Westerners who have a sane and serious bent of mind, we don't in the West have a childish view of good and evil, Ash, but it may well be a naive one.
ReplyDeleteThe behavior patterns of the Arabs/Moslems are simply really hard for us to compute.
"We love death more than you love life"
This is not possible for a sane mind to comprehend.
How do we judge? What is the starting point?
The answer that I've given is from William James in his "The Varieties of Religious Experience".
We judge behavior by its 'fruits for life'.
English literature, and European literature in general, is packed chock full of this outlook. There are exceptions to be sure, but these rare exceptions are only noted by their perversity.
And to somehow try to equate Jewish behavior overall with Arab/Moslem behavior seems to me an excellent example of that perversity.
"Iraqi Kurdish militias of Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan siding with Iran."
Delete"... we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post
Go to bed now.
DeleteYou are tired.
And everyone is tired of you, and your unending repetitions.
Delete"We have not yet begun to fight"
- Not really said by John Paul Jones.
”We love death more than you love life”
DeleteWhat idiotic unchallenged racist rubbish! WE have seen pictures and videos of terrified Muslims, being beheaded, mass shootings, bombings, crucifixions, children crying and terrified fleeing and fighting for their lives. I have not seen one photo of some blissful grateful dying Muslim. Neither have you.
We have seen Muslim women fighters doing everything to save the lives of their families and you post such mindless nonsensical tripe:
The behavior patterns of the Arabs/Moslems are simply really hard for us to compute.
"We love death more than you love life"
This is not possible for a sane mind to comprehend.
How do we judge? What is the starting point?
The starting point is to quit sounding like a fool.
DeleteTake your own advise.
DeleteI have not seen one photo of some blissful grateful dying Muslim. Neither have you.
DeleteActually there are dozens.
Just google it.
"hamas suicide videos"
http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=111&fld_id=111&doc_id=1021
Kids shown video of their mother's suicide bombing death on Hamas TV
In a special broadcast of the Hamas TV children's program "Tomorrow's Pioneers," the two young children of female suicide terrorist Reem Riyashi were invited to the TV studio to watch a video re-enactment of their mother's suicide bombing in 2004, which killed four Israelis.
Hamas suicide terrorist farewell video: Palestinians drink the blood of Jews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSftYIGH6-w
There are COUNTLESS videos
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/08/hamas-celebrates-death→-posts-video-of-singing-suicide-bomber-video/
DeleteThis one the SINGING suicide bomber is really cool, he had a nice voice....
Bobbo won a JackPot, and a free T-Shirt :)
ReplyDeleteAnd paid $3.17/gallon for gas with the 10 cent Coeur d'Alene Casino discount !
And drank free coffee too.......
Let's face it - we're all shewed:
ReplyDelete>>>>The bottom line is that we have neither the data nor well-tested theories to explain what sort of skew we should expect this cycle. For my money, there are two races where I really take charges of poll skew seriously: Alaska, where seven of the last seven races have understated Republican strength (by seven points on average), and Colorado, where the introduction of mail voting probably does make the electorate difficult to model. Beyond that, I would not be surprised if there was a Republican skew, but I likewise would not be surprised if there was a Democratic skew. The possibilities basically cancel out, and I’m left with the simple poll averages as the best guidance for this election.<<<<
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/10/20/why_you_should_heed_what_the_polls_say_124349.html#ixzz3GkrP6R3j
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
There was less actually said in this article than in any writing I have read for a long time, excepting only Herr Rat's spews.
We're all skewed, not shewed, of course.
DeleteIt's getting late.
Later than you know ...
Delete"Iraqi Kurdish militias of Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan siding with Iran."
"... we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren told the Jerusalem Post
Late, and also way past time for JackAssDesertRatHawkins to pack it in for another day.
Deleteg'nite
Cheers !
Tehran was the first to provide military hardware and advisory to the Kurdish and Iraqi forces battling ISIL.
DeleteIt has also been very critical of the so-called US-led coalition military strategy stressing that airstrikes will not defeat ISIL.
In his recent visit to Erbil, Iranian FM – Mohammad-Javad Zarif – pointed out that the Iraqi and Kurdish forces need weaponry and military counseling, but not direct military intervention.
Bobbo: I recall something about an umbrella tip loaded up with bad shit.
ReplyDeleteSeattle would be an excellent locale for this method.
You are obviously from out of town. No true Seattlite owns an umbrella.
You are just of the new 'wet' generation.
DeleteWhen I was at U of W there were lots of umbrellas.
I even had one.
A generation that is too dumb to get out of the rain.
Delete:):)
Not you personally, Miss T., just your generation !!
:)
Deuce ☂Tue Oct 21, 01:07:00 AM EDT
ReplyDeleteYou do return to your final solution remedy.
No, I offer it as what would happen if anyone BUT the Jews were the enemy of the Palestinians.
Your grasp of my words is slipping.
DEUCE: Israeli barbarism against Gaza,
LOL
So deluded you believe your own propaganda.
Deuce: since I made the prediction that Netanyahu was trying to provoke a war over the three murdered teens.
Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza. And continued. Do you deny that???????
Deuce: That was the most recorded one sided war in history.
You are deluded. There are MANY examples of "war" that were one-sided. Any "side" that can fire off 4500 rockets is not a one-sided
Deuce: The World recognized the bully and the victims.
The "world"? The Arab world sided with the Jews....
Deuce: We had the picture of the Israelis in the lawn chairs, eating potato chips and terrified Palestinian woman and children, bloodied, maimed and dead in the rubble, the impersonal consequence of long range US supplied bombs and artillery, delivered by the glorious IDF.
WOW, really drinking the koolaid... Israelis, who had suffered for 10 years of daily rocket attacks FINALLY watched as retaliation was being wrought sat on lawn chairs to watch the IDF hit targets that were firing rockets...
Deuce: We heard the Israeli talking points on all the “military targets” but no secondary explosions. Strange that.
Now you are claiming that the Palestinians are just innocent babes in the woods... How childish.
Deuce: Give it up. It was bully, bully, bully.
Bullshit. Hamas is and was a terror group, you deny reality.
that is why the majority of the world DID NOT ACT AGAINST ISRAEL.
NO SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS, NO ARAB ARMIES RIDING TO THE RESCUE.
The Arab world saw it for what it was... HAMAS is ISIS. And the WANTED Israel to bring it down a few notches.
The world is fed up with the Palestinians. The Arab world is fed up with the Palestinians.
The only ones not? A few misguided appeasing Euro-trash has beens, Iranians and Israel hating zealots like Turkey, Syria, Hezbollah and people like you and Obama....
”We love death more than you love life”
ReplyDelete"From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life."
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=987&fld_id=987&doc_id=8025
Deuce: Of course the Arabs sided with the Germans. The Germans were fighting the English and French colonizers. Which side would you choose?
ReplyDeleteWow, how telling.... you are losing it Deuce.....
The Arabs sided with the NAZIS & the Final Solution and the genocide of the Jews. No need to clean it up to make it more "palatable".
The Arabs sided with the genocidal NAZIS.
I guess you would have sided with the Nazis too?
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Gaza, I, also, would love death more than you love life.
ReplyDeleteBut your people the Indians were genocided in America and yet?
DeleteYou don't love death more than life...
If your kids and grandkids were rocketed every day for ten years what would you do?
DeleteGive up? Go and suck their Hamas's dick?
The boy in Tel Aviv doe not know of what he speaks
DeleteGhost Dance, either of two distinct cults in a complex of late 19th-century religious movements that represented an attempt of Indians in the western United States to rehabilitate their traditional cultures. Both cults arose from Northern Paiute prophet-dreamers in western Nevada who announced the imminent return of the dead (hence “ghost”), the ousting of the whites, and the restoration of Indian lands, food supplies, and way of life.
These ends, it was believed, would be hastened by the dances and songs revealed to the prophets in their vision visits to the spirit world and also by strict observance of a moral code that resembled Christian teaching and forbade war against Indians or whites. Many dancers fell into trances and received new songs from the dead they met in visions or were healed by Ghost Dance rituals.
Deuce: We heard the Israeli talking points on all the “military targets” but no secondary explosions. Strange that.
ReplyDeleteHow do you say that? Were you there? Did you film every air strike? Did you review the intel?
Are you suggesting that the Hamas DID not build military bunkers? Munitions stores? Do you deny the tunnels? Do you deny the 4500 rockets and mortars that were buried in and around schools, homes and hospitals?
Bunkers that have no munitions in them are basements
DeleteE85 for $1.76 / Gallon
ReplyDeleteLake Odessa, Mich
Rufus IITue Oct 21, 07:19:00 AM EDT
ReplyDeleteIf I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Gaza, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (2000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Iraq, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (1,000,000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Syria, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (200,000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Lebanon, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (120,000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Checnya, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (200,000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Yemen, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (150,000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Sudan, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (600,000 dead)
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Europe, I, also, would love death more than you love life. (60,000,000 dead)
Some how Gaza is the worst? Get real.
Now "O"rdure is fabricating quotes, again, or did he not get the "Teacher's Assistant" to type in the HTML code for italics, to differentiate his words from Rufus's.?
DeleteElection Day is coming up, and Obama needs a "high-profile victory."
ReplyDeleteLook for "The Battle for Fallujah III," appearing on a tv screen near you, shortly.
The battle proved to be the bloodiest of the war and the bloodiest battle involving American troops since the Vietnam War. Comparisons with the Battle of Hue City and the Pacific campaign of World War II were made.[36] Coalition forces suffered a total of 107 killed and 613 wounded during Operation Phantom Fury. U.S. forces had 54 killed and 425 wounded in the initial attack in November.[7] By 23 December when the operation was officially concluded the casualty number had risen to 95 killed and 560 wounded.[37] British forces had 4 killed and 10 wounded in two separate attacks in the outskirts of Fallujah.[9][10] Iraqi forces suffered 8 killed and 43 wounded[7] Estimates of insurgent casualties are complicated by a lack of official figures. Most estimates places the number of insurgents killed at around 1,200[12] to 1,500,[11] with some estimations as high as over 2,000 killed.[7][37] Coalition forces also captured approximately 1,500 insurgents during the operation.[11] The Red Cross estimated directly following the battle that some 800 civilians had been killed during the offensive.[13]
DeleteThe 1st Marine Division fired a total of 5,685 high-explosive 155mm artillery rounds during the battle.[38] The 3rd Marine Air Wing (aviation assets only) expended 318 precision bombs, 391 rockets and missiles, and 93,000 machine gun and cannon rounds.[38]
Fallujah suffered extensive damage to residences, mosques, city services, and businesses. The city, once referred to as the "City of Mosques", had over 200 pre-battle mosques of which 60 or so were destroyed in the fighting. Many of these mosques had been used as arms caches and weapon strongpoints by Islamist forces. Of the roughly 50,000 buildings in Fallujah, between 7,000 and 10,000 were estimated to have been destroyed in the offensive and from half to two-thirds of the remaining buildings had notable damage.[39][40]
If I had to see my children, and grandchildren growing up in Fallujah, I, also, would love death more than you love life
What no videos of secondary explosions?
DeleteThey'll be there, "O"rdure. have no doubt of that.
DeleteWe target battle tanks, but then again, the Palestinians had no battle tanks.
Only empty basements
So let's be clear.
ReplyDeleteHamas kidnaps 3 teenagers, all Jews. One American, two Israelis, and executes them with a bullet to the back of the brain.
No outrage here at the Elephant blog, after all Rufus, Rat and Deuce, all would have supported the Nazis if given the chance to fight the existence of the BULLY Jewish state.
I hear the cries of war about the USS Liberty all the time, how Israel is a terrorist nation, a bully, but we also hear Deuce excusing Hezbollah's bombing of the American barracks in Lebanon.
So it's only a crime when israelis or jews kill....
Israel "occupies", while the other 899/900th of the middle east has be ethnically cleansed by arabs, all of it's 850,000 Jews sent packing into israel but some how the ONLY refugees that count? Are "palestnians".. 650,000 palestinians were displaced in 1948-1967 and that's the only issue that matters...
today 11 MILLION syrians are refugees.. and the Elephant blog is silent.
Gaza that spent BILLIONS in aid on terror tunnels, bunkers and bombs are "victims"
You folks are sick
Let's be clearer, three illegal aliens were kidnapped, by persons unknown and killed.
DeleteThe Prime Minister of Israel then incited the population, with false accusations against Hamas.
Hundreds of Palestinians were arrested with out cause.
Later it was determined that leadership of Hamas had NOTHING to do with the kidnapping, by Israeli police.
Bibi lied, Palestinians died
Let's be clear.
DeleteYou parse words.
hamas ADMITTED to the kidnapped and murder of one american and 2 israelis.
you lie distort and misdirect.
You stand for terror and Hamas.
you are a traitor to the USA
You are a self confessed criminal
1. Hamas is not to be trusted.
Delete2. Time stamp a reference for this alleged confession
Funny how when some Hamas "Operative" parrots the Zionist storyline, he is a 'reliable source' ...
DeleteWhen they do not ... well, Hamas is full of liars ...
Who do we but more stock in, the Israeli police, or Hamas?
"O"rdure would have us believe Hamas, in this particuar case.
Jack Hawkins, in addition to being a self confessed criminal, is also a self confessed 'professional asshole'.
DeleteTime stamp that reference to being a criminal, will you please.
DeleteIf you can, which is impossible, since it never happened.
You boys are down to creating pure fabrications, whole clothe.
And yes, those folks that train soldiers, they are 'professional assholes', ask anyone that went through Combat Arms advanced individual training or the Jungle Operations Training Center.
Jack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 01:12:00 AM EDT
ReplyDeleteThe Congress has gifted the Israeli regime that attacked the USS Liberty billions and billions in support, help and cover.
Israel, is an avowed enemy of the United States, it has attacked a US Navy vessel on the high seas... just like the North Koreans and the Libyans under Colonel Q.
Then, as Mr Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, said to the JPost just a year and a month ago ...
The Israeli prefer al-Qeada.
What is "Occupation"Tue Oct 21, 07:52:00 AM EDT
a·vowed
əˈvoud/Submit
adjective
that has been asserted, admitted, or stated publicly.
"an avowed atheist"
Once again, rat is HUNG by his own petard.
Delete
What is "Occupation"Tue Oct 21, 07:53:00 AM EDT
Jack Hawkins: Israel, is an avowed enemy of the United States
Please post anywhere by an official statement of the Nation State of Israel that Israel is an " is an avowed enemy of the United States"
otherwise, once again, you are proven to be a liar.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteJack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 08:22:00 AM EDT
DeleteThe ISraeli attacked a US Navy ship on the high seas, they then lied about it.
Actions speak louder than words
Jack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 08:24:00 AM EDT
The ISraeli used spies in the US in an active campaign to endanger the United States.
Then lied about it.
Actions speak louder than words
Jack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 08:27:00 AM EDT
The ISraeli threatened the world with nuclear annihilation.
Actions speak louder than words
Jack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 08:29:00 AM EDT
Jonathan Pollard, the American spy now serving a life sentence in jail, was a key figure in Israel's nuclear program (and how some of Pollard's intelligence was turned over to the Soviet Union at the express direction of Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli prime minister);
How Israel threatened Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon with the use of nuclear weapons on the third day of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, successfully blackmailing the White House to airlift much needed supplies;
https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option
Actions speak louder than words
DeleteTo know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
US-led Air Strikes Kill 8 Civilians in Syria
ReplyDeleteAt least eight civilians were killed in US-led coalition air strikes against ISIS in a Syrian town near Deir el-sour.
U.S.-led coalition air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror group left eight civilians fuel tanker drivers dead in eastern Syria over the weekend, according to Deir el-Zour Free Radio.
A gas distribution station in the town of Khasham was targeted Friday by the coalition because it is located in the oil-rich province of Deir el-Zour.
The strike and its outcome was confirmed by the UK-based watchdog group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Despite the obvious toll in civilian lives, the U.S. military did not comment, according to the Huffington Post.
Late Friday, at least three children and a woman were killed by Syrian government air strikes in the town of Douma, near Damascus. A total of 16 people were killed in five attacks by the government forces, meant to block roads to the capital.
DeleteIf you drive a "tanker truck" for ISIS, you probably should be looking for a different job.
DeleteOne standard for ISIS?
DeleteNo standards for Hamas?
Hamas = Haganah
DeleteKurdistan = Palestine
DeleteISIS = Mossad ?
DeleteZionist Author Admits ISIS is Israeli Secret Intelligence Service
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OF5Gr086kw
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteUntil 1998 Israel denied that Pollard was an Israeli agent. Their official position was that he worked for an unauthorized rogue operation.
Delete...
On May 11, 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Pollard was an Israeli agent, handled by high-ranking officials of the Israeli Bureau for Scientific Relations (Lekem). The Israeli government paid for at least two of Pollard's trial attorneys – Richard A. Hibey and Hamilton Philip Fox III – and continues to ask for his release.[
Actions that speak louder than words
Another reading of this record, though, shows that Pollard’s activities fit a pattern of Israeli espionage efforts.
DeleteAs John Davitt, a 30-year veteran of the Justice Department who resigned in 1980, told the New York Times:
“When the Pollard case broke, the general media and public perception was that this was the first time this had ever happened. No, that’s not true at all. The Israeli intelligence service, when I was in the Justice Department, was the second most active in the United States, to the Soviets.”
Actions speak louder than words
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer138/israeli-spies-us
DeleteAmerica spied on everyone.
DeleteThe US government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001. Since this was first reported on by the press and discovered by the public in late 2005, EFF has been at the forefront of the effort to stop it and bring government surveillance programs back within the law and the Constitution.
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
And Jack Hawkins is a self confessed drug and gun seller in Scottsdale AZ.
when the google your screen name for the screen play they read this
U.S. military forces working in coordination with Iraqi ground forces conducted six airstrikes against #ISIL targets in #Iraq. In Iraq two airstrikes southeast of Fallujah struck a large ISIL unit and destroyed three ISIL vehicles.
ReplyDeleteThree airstrikes south of the Bayji oil refinery struck a small ISIL unit, destroyed an ISIL building and three ISIL vehicles, and damaged another ISIL building. Another airstrike south of Bayji destroyed four ISIL boats and damaged at least four more.
To conduct these airstrikes, U.S. forces used bomber, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft deployed to the Centcom area of operations.
Source: U.S. Central Command
Large ISIS Unit
Getting after those "boats," now. It looks like they have figured out how to tell the ISIS from the rest (maybe, sometimes.) kinda, sorta? :)
DeleteHaaretz -
DeleteBritish defense minister said last week that armed Reaper drones would conduct air strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq.
The Future of Warfare does not involve many "pilots" riding along, taking up space, slowing the mission - gumming up the works.
DeleteThree months ago, the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, dared utter the phrase heard around the petrodollar world, “There is no reason to pay for oil in dollars,” as we noted here.
ReplyDeleteCEO Of One Of The World's Largest Energy Majors "Sees No Reason For Petrodollar
Conspiracy or Coincidence, what brand of tin foil hat do you wear?
www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-05/ceo-one-worlds-largest-energy-major-sees-no-reason-petrodollar
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
DeletePretty clever way to murder someone - get a drunk to drive a plow in the way of the plane as it takes off!
DeleteCoincidence, then.
DeleteShit does Happen.
and it certainly dovetails with 'US Interests', happily enough.
Remember folks, your Flu Shot is now Free. Thanks, Obamacare. :)
ReplyDeleteOh, and you might want to consider a "Shingles Vaccination." That's Free, also. :)
Free.
DeleteRight.
No one pays anything for ObamaCare.
It all comes out of Barack and Michelle's pocket.
Crapper is up and at 'em by 6am this morning.
ReplyDeleteAfter an 16 hour stint yesterday.
Wow, just wow.
Got up to take a piss myself, and am going back to bed.
Good God, looking upstream a bit, Crapper has been passing gas since around 5:30am.
DeleteWaiting for your return, Robert "Draft Dodger" Robertson.
DeleteJust want to make sure you understand that the ISraeli do not support the Kurds.
The ISraeli do not support anyone that is backed by Iran, as are the Kurds of Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
As is Hamas, as is Hezbollah, as is Assad in Syria.
The ISraeli, they prefer al-Qeada
Israel and Iran had great relations for quite a while and will again once the jihadist nut cases are removed from power.
DeleteIsrael has supported the Kurdish people for decades.
However Israel has not supported the PKK.
Jack Hawkins is a serial liar.
Bob, that's called true 'dedication to delusion'.
ReplyDeleteThat guy couldn't possibly have a real working job, whether day or night.
It's called rich enough to do as he pleases.
Delete
Delete“Envy is for people who don’t have the self-esteem to be jealous.”
― Bauvard
Don't have to brag of getting a 'free' t-shirt or 'scoring' a cup of coffee.
And, just for hit and giggles I'd betcha the US taxpayer financed that 'free' 't', one way or another.
And, just for shits and giggles I'd betcha the US taxpayer financed that 'free' 't', one way or another
Delete"Independently wealthy"
DeletePossessing enough wealth that one does not need financial support from another person and does not require income from employment.
Jack lives off his free stolen from the Indians 360 acres of dark deep rich river bottom land and many cattle.
DeleteThat land was never mine, never claimed it was ...
DeleteOnce again, Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson is creating fabrications for his fictionalized characters.
Then peddling those fictions as a reality.
Ah, I see.
DeleteYou just made the whole thing up about having 360 or whatever acres of rich river bottom land and cattle.
You really didn't mean it when you said 'my land'.
bwabwabwahahahaha
Soon you will be saying you pay a fancy lease rent to the Indian Tribes..............
bwabwabwahahahaha
No one believes, or can believe, a thing you say, Jackoff.
You need, but don't deserve, mental evaluation and help, desperately.
You lying piece of human shit.
Getting a little 'touchy' there now, aren't you, Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson.
DeleteCould you provide a specific time stamp where the above person ever admitted being a "draft dodger"
DeleteIf not?
You lie again.
BobSun Jun 22, 01:42:00 PM EDT
DeleteWhen did I ever say I was a scholar??
I don't recall saying that.
I have a college degree in English Lit. from U of Washington.
To avoid being drafted in part. ...
"We are under formal military command and we work within the framework of government institutions," the 52-year-old Shairawi said. "Before the US-led invasion it was different, because we did oppose the regime. And for a time after 2003, some of us fought the state.
ReplyDelete"But in this war, we are defending the state, not our sect."
The prism through which most of the half-dozen or more brigades - call them militias at your peril - view the world, the region and this conflict is that the West created al-Qaeda as a tool to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan; and that the so-called Islamic State, which now controls swathes of Iraq and neighbouring Syria, is a US-Israeli invention to contain Iran – "to clip Tehran's fingernails", I was told.
"The governments of the US, Britain and Australia are hypocritical, selectively blind," a dentist turned fighter in the service of Iraq's Hezbollah Brigades argued. "They created IS to serve as a bogyman to scare the countries of this region – they want to pressure Iran; and to return to Iraq, but this time they want to control the country without sending ground forces
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/iraqi-militias-explain-why-they-fight-isil-its-not-to-please-the-west-20141021-11969y.html#ixzz3GmuJey79
Shairawi told me: "The sum of all our fears is that the American agenda is not to protect the Iraqi people so much as to protect what it perceives to be its strategic interests in the country."
DeleteIf Washington and its allies were genuine in their pursuit of IS, so the logic goes, they would work with the brigades – arm them and increase the intensity of their air strikes on IS.
"It's a very simple equation," Sheikh Adnan al-Shahmani, an MP who takes time away from the national parliament to lead his own fighters in battle, told me. "All the US needs to do is to supply us and cut the IS supply lines. We have enough manpower to defeat IS."
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/iraqi-militias-explain-why-they-fight-isil-its-not-to-please-the-west-20141021-11969y.html#ixzz3Gn76SwtK
2CELLOS - The Trooper Overture
ReplyDeleteSo you want to be a Rock Star?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVH1Y15omgE
Deuce ☂Tue Oct 21, 01:07:00 AM EDT
ReplyDeleteYou do return to your final solution remedy. Of course the Arabs sided with the Germans. The Germans were fighting the English and French colonizers. Which side would you choose?
The Ottoman Turks allied themselves with the Germans in WWI. The Germans were colonizers. Therefore, it is clear that something was at work other than European colonization.
The Turks were just trying to implement their long held desire to be Europeans, too.
DeleteThey were already colonizers and empire builders, themselves.
Though by that era they were more empire administrators, rather than builders ... and not doing a good job of it.
Hallucination Alert:
DeleteThe Turks were just trying to implement their long held desire to be Europeans, too.
Why do you think they marched to Vienna, Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson?
DeleteWhy do they think they should have been part of the European Union, if they do not consider themselves Europeans?
“Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.”
― Jodi Picoult
Why not dispense with the headings entirely. For years, every thread has devolved into Israel, Israeli, Zionist, Jew, Jews, Judaism bashing. I am thinking a simple all purpose headline such as "We Hate Jews and Here Is Why" would work nicely.
ReplyDeleteHave a nice day.
Judaism is only brought up by the Zionists, it is their first line of propaganda bullshit.
DeleteIt is always the first tactic in their efforts to misdirect the discussion, to obscure the truth.
DeleteGood idea, allen.
DeleteFuck off, Jack.
By the way, in my small way, I have tried to change the perpetual subject to.....football, wolves, Senate races, anything else.......it don't work.
ReplyDeleteHollywood is FILLED with zionists!!
ReplyDeleteJust like Sly Stallone…
He just signed a letter with over 200 others supporting Israel and calling Hamas a terror organization.
:)
According to several close sources he just doesn't LIKE those that TRASH Israel.
Delete:)
He could well be an ISraeli sympathizer, there are a lot of 'em in the world.
DeleteHe's a good rider, of horses. Regardless.
He don't "cotton" to Israel haters….
DeleteSo, what's that to me?
DeleteHere -
ReplyDeleteOctober 21, 2014
Surveillance video captures man stuffing ballot box with hundreds of ballots
By Thomas Lifson
File this one under the habitual Democrat claim that vote fraud is “extremely rare.” Jon Street reports in The Blaze:
“A person wearing a Citizens for a Better Arizona T-shirt dropped a large box of hundreds of early ballots on the table and started stuffing the ballot box as I watched in amazement,” said A.J. LaFaro, chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party.
LaFaro confronted the man and was told to perform an anatomically impossible act upon himself, according to an account he provided to the Arizona Daily Independent. La Faro then submitted a request and received surveillance video.
It was between 12:54 and 1:04 that LaFaro said he was seated at one of the cubicles, heard a loud thud and turned around to see the man who he claims was caught on tape stuffing “hundreds” of ballots. LaFaro described the man as a “vulgar, disrespectful, violent thug” with “no respect for our laws.” He said he would have followed the man to his car to get his tag number but “feared for [his] life.”
Citizens for a Better Arizona appears to be a left wing organization, hiding behind the usual bland rhetoric:
…a predominantly volunteer driven organization of Republicans, Democrats and Independents committed to improving the quality of life of all Arizonans – better schools, better health care, better jobs, better government and a better, more civil tone of respect and decency when it comes to solving Arizona’s problems.
But here are some of the stories highlighted on its “news” page:
PROTESTERS CONFRONT THE WOMAN BEHIND ARIZONA’S HATE LAW
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/02/26/protesters-herrod-hate-law-arizona/ Tweet Read More
ACTIVISTS PRESENT CONSERVATIVE REP. WITH TOILET
http://www.kfyi.com/articles/arizona-news-118695/activists-present-conservative-rep-with-toilet-12057574/ Tweet Read More
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/surveillance_video_captures_man_stuffing_ballot_box_with_hundreds_of_ballots.html#ixzz3GnMIiYEA
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
That' Sheriff Joe's jurisdiction, if there was law breaking, his deputies will be on top of it.
DeleteAn arrest will be forth coming, if the report is valid.
So let's be clear.
ReplyDeleteHamas admitted to kidnapping and murdering those 3 teenagers. An American and 2 Israelis.\
Jack Hawkins screamed for days that it was a "false flag' operation by Bibi and the IDF.
Now that the smoke has cleared and hamas admitted it, he now says "Hamas LEADERSHIP" didn't admit it and calls the 3 "illegals"
can we say…
wiggle
wiggle
wiggle
Jack Hawkins = Lying sack of toad shit.
There has been no trial, no one convicted of those crimes.
DeleteThat's a fact.
When you type, I must ask you, does shit flow out of you ears as well as your mouth?
Delete"There has been no trial, no one convicted of those crimes.
That's a fact."
That's a fact? Hamas CONFESSED and BRAGGED about it. No trial is needed. They got their cash bonuses for Jew murder.
You are one pathetic loser.
Who speaks for Hamas?
DeleteWhat is his name, hi position in the organization and ...
Was he telling the truth?
You did not believe it when Hamas said there were no munitions in those basements.
Why believe Hamas when it suits your argument, but not when it doesn't?
Claim that Hamas killed 3 teens is turning out to be the WMD of Gaza onslaught
Delete... reported by BBC's Jon Donnison, who spoked to Israel Police Foreign Press Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld:
Jon Donnison
Israeli police Mickey Rosenfeld tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens def lone cell, hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership 1/2
Seems to contradict the line from Netanyahu government. 2/2
To argue with you is senseless
DeleteYou cannot argue with a liar.
Did you get beat as a child?
DeleteTEL AVIV—Israeli special forces on Tuesday shot and killed two Palestinians accused of carrying out the kidnapping and killing this summer of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.
DeleteThe deaths of Marwan Qawasmeh, 29 years old, and Amer Abu Aisheh, 32, in the West Bank city of Hebron culminated a three-month hunt for those Israel said were responsible for the June 12 abductions of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach while they were hitchhiking home.
No trial, no conviction, no public scrutiny ... Convenient for Bibi.
Coincidence or Conspiracy?
http://online.wsj.com/articles/hamas-suspects-in-slaying-of-israeli-teens-killed-1411473016
DeleteI am not having an argument, "O"rdure.
DeletePerhaps that is the root of your challenge.
I am presenting publicly acknowledged data sets.
The conclusion that are drawn from those, are in the mind of the reader
You are arguing with those conclusion you draw, about the conclusions you know others draw from the data sets.
it is the same thing that irritates Legionnaire Q.
He reads the data sets, and does not like the conclusions he come to, as they are not what he wants to believe.
Same goes for Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson and his preconceived ideas about 'Kurdistan' and Israel.
"O"rdure, you are arguing with the realities of life.
Not with me, not with Jack Hawkins, certainly not with 'desert rat'.
Jack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 12:35:00 PM EDT
DeleteTEL AVIV—Israeli special forces on Tuesday shot and killed two Palestinians accused of carrying out the kidnapping and killing this summer of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank.
The deaths of Marwan Qawasmeh, 29 years old, and Amer Abu Aisheh, 32, in the West Bank city of Hebron culminated a three-month hunt for those Israel said were responsible for the June 12 abductions of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach while they were hitchhiking home.
No trial, no conviction, no public scrutiny ... Convenient for Bibi.
Coincidence or Conspiracy?
You tell us, when you killed civilians in central america as a paid merc, your "victims" had no trial.
Did they deserve to die?
I never killed a civilian in my life, if you have evidence to suggest otherwise, present it, here and to law enforcement authorities.
DeleteOtherwise, your claims are just another one of your foolish fabrications.
A complete fiction,.. a delusion which you continue to propagate.
Rufus IITue Oct 21, 09:48:00 AM EDT
ReplyDeleteRemember folks, your Flu Shot is now Free. Thanks, Obamacare. :)
Oh, and you might want to consider a "Shingles Vaccination." That's Free, also. :)
Bullshit.
Nothing is FREE, it's redistributed
From those of us that PAY to those that do not pay.
Everyone pays, "O"rdure.
DeleteOne way or another.
Stealth Dem taking a hit in Kansas -
ReplyDeletehttp://www.businessinsider.com/kansas-senate-race-pat-roberts-v-greg-orman-2014-10
Sarah Palin should forget her Tea Party principles for once, and get down to Kansas.
Report from Kobani -
ReplyDeleteWorld
10.20.14
In the Battle for Kobani, ISIS Falls Back. But for How Long?
Potential reinforcements from Iraq, U.S. airstrikes, and the sheer bravery of the town’s defenders may hand ISIS a major defeat. But the battle’s not over.
SURUC, Turkey — There was sun and blue sky over the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani on Monday, perfect conditions for airstrikes. But for most of the day there was an eerie quiet.
From the Turkish villages nearby we didn’t hear the now familiar sounds of U.S. bombing sorties or the thuds and bangs of light artillery and tank shelling. Instead we heard the crackle of automatic gunfire and we could see gray smoke rising from the eastern side of the town. According to fighters and civilians inside, contacted by phone, this was evidence that the militants of the so-called Islamic State were torching buildings as they pulled out.
The belated uptick in well-directed and coordinated U.S. airstrikes, the stubborn almost suicidal resistance of Kobani Kurds—men and women—and Sunday night’s air-drop by U.S. military cargo planes of arms, ammunition and medical gear has shifted the balance.
Morale is lifting. Smiles light the faces of Kobani Kurdish refugees and Turkish Kurds who have watched the ebb and flow of the urban combat from this side of the border. For them, this is a battle every bit as symbolic and important as the Alamo once was to Americans. But there’s now a feeling that, unlike the Alamo, it may not end with a massacre. Like a scene out of an old Western, they’ve heard the cavalry is coming.
For days the Kurds have insisted to skeptical journalists, including myself, that Kobani would hold. They swore that the Kurdish defense forces, or YPG, although outgunned and outnumbered and armed with light weapons, would deliver the first major reversal to the Islamic State, widely known as ISIS or ISIL, since the jihadists this summer stormed across Iraq and extended their gains in Syria.
But their protestations often were marked by grim frowns or quieter caveats when they thought the formal interview over. And last week, the leader of the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, the dominant party in Syria’s Kurdistan, appeared to be preparing his supporters for defeat, saying there would be no shame in Kobani falling.
DeleteNow the men standing on the flat rooftops of one-story houses or scrambling for a better view from the top of the mosque in one village right up against the border seemed in an almost festive mood. The news had broken that the Turkish government had given the go-ahead for Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters to enter Kobani, crossing Turkish territory to reinforce the town and assist the exhausted defenders.
“A woman fighter who was wounded in the arm, stomach and leg said she was fine and that she should get back to fighting.”
Activists from Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, the parent of the YPG, expressed their support for such a move. But they cautioned that details still needed to be agreed. Their concern is that the Iraqi Kurds, once they enter Syrian Kurdish territory, will change the political dynamic there and weaken their dominance. The key figure in Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government, President Masoud Barzani, opposes the Syrian Kurds’ long-cherished desire to establish their own independent state.
Inside Kobani others had a different worry: that the Turks would reverse their approval of a relief force. That concession was wrung out of Ankara after immense U.S. diplomatic pressure and in the face of warnings from French and German leaders that they would start arming the Syrian Kurds, say European diplomats.
Reached by phone, Dr. Mohammad Arif, one of a handful of physicians who have stayed in Kobani in appalling circumstances, questioned whether the relief force would ever arrive.
“It is good news,” he says. “But I have no trust in the Turks. How can we trust them when they still make it difficult for us to get our wounded across the border and into Turkish hospitals? Yesterday, from nine o’clock in the morning until about four o’clock in the afternoon they held up one of our badly wounded fighters at the border, saying they didn’t have an ambulance for him.”
DeleteHe accuses the Turks of making up excuses. “Let them allow the Turkish Red Crescent in here to help.” They are needed, he says, because a lot of the medical gear and medicines the U.S. dropped Sunday night was damaged.
The hard-pressed Kobani doctor isn’t the only one who will believe the Peshmerga are coming when they are manning the barricades. “Can the Turks reverse their decision?” asked a nineteen-year-old Kobani girl of her father.
Maybe that question would be better directed to U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who a week ago announced the Turks had agreed to allow American warplanes to use the NATO air base at Incirlik in southern Turkey, a few minutes flying time from Kobani, to launch airstrikes against ISIS. The next day she suffered the embarrassment of the Turks announcing that no such approval had been granted.
Kobani officials say the Peshmerga fighters are needed—or, if not them, that some other relief force must come. They don’t want to re-live the night of October 11 when the town came very close to falling and only managed to hold on because of an extraordinary last-stand resistance. The abrupt increase that night in U.S. sorties also stopped the town falling. Since then the U.S. warplanes have maintained tremendous pressure on the jihadists, coordinating their strikes with YPG commanders.
DeleteThe Turkish media claim that nine American Special Forces operatives are in the town helping to direct the airstrikes. But YPG commanders deny the presence of any U.S. military personnel in the town.
Dr. Arif says the coordination is well organized and mentions the contribution in the targeting effort by an “American” who he says is fighting with the YPG, and by a Ukrainian woman. He won’t be drawn further on details about either.
These issues of whose boots are on the ground, and how many, and under whose authority, deemed hugely important inside the Washington beltway, seem like minor questions to people fighting against an enemy at the gates that crucifies and beheads its prisoners.
A colleague of Arif’s, Dr. Kurdo Abdi, gave me a first-hand account of the extraordinary demands that have been placed on the 15 doctors and nurses who remained in Kobani throughout the siege. They have struggled to provide rudimentary care for wounded fighters and civilians while dodging bombs, rockets and bullets.
“The main hospital was destroyed ten days ago by rockets,” says Abdi. The ISIS militants bombed the hospital on purpose. “Since then we have been treating people in makeshift clinics in different parts of Kobani, mainly in apartments. We have very little medicines. We got a few re-supplies from some fighters and civilians who smuggled it across the border, but very little. The situation is very bad.”
Abdi is speaking with me in front of the hospital in the border town of Suruc. He hadn’t wanted to leave Kobani but crossed into Turkey last night at the insistence of his medical colleagues. The 54-year-old trauma doctor and father of three is suffering from heart disease.
He looks gray and the dirty brown jacket he is wearing appears over-sized on him. “We do what we can,” he says. “We try to get the worst injured over here to Turkey.” I asked him whether they had the use of anesthetic. He shakes his head. “Only local,” he responds, breaking into English.
“There are thousands of civilians still inside Kobani,” he adds, and many are deeply traumatized from the month-long fighting and bombardments, but there is nothing the doctors and nurses can do for that.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group that relies on activists on the ground for its information, says 374 jihadists have been killed in the month-long siege, which is more than the 258 Kurdish fighters, 20 civilians and nine Arab Syrians. Dr. Abdi says the figures probably are a bit low.
“I wanted to work there,” said Abdi. “I felt it was better to die there, then here.” He said he plans to return in three days, God willing. I asked him what sticks in his mind the most from the last four weeks. “A woman fighter who was wounded in the arm, stomach and leg and said she was fine,” he told me, “and that there was nothing wrong with her and that she should get back to fighting.”
That spirit will be needed in the days to come. Despite widespread media reports that the Islamic militants have left the town and are now just on the outskirts, that is not accurate. Both doctors say the jihadists have been pushed back on the West of the town but they are still inside parts of the center and that there is street fighting in the east and south.
And as if to emphasize their accounts, in early afternoon a U.S. airstrike hit a building in the middle of Kobani. By nightfall the relative quiet of the day was shattered by heavy clashes in the eastern part of the town along with volleys of mortars and rockets.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/20/in-the-battle-for-kobani-isis-falls-back-but-for-how-long.html
DeleteGot to hand it to the Kurds.
DeleteKurds and Palestinians, fighting for their homelands ...
DeletePKK = Hamas = YPG = Hezbollah
Delete... Iraqi Kurdish militias of Kurdish Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan siding with Iran
Just like Hezbollah, just like Hamas.
Just like Assad.
"... we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
- Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren
DeleteIsrael prefers Daesh (al-Qeada) in Syria, over the Alawites, Christians and their Kurdish allies
Okay, let me put it another way. You've Already Paid for you flu and shingles shot; you might as well go get them.
ReplyDelete:)
I did.
Delete:)
Got a couple others too, but forget which. I think I got a pneumonia shot. Maybe renewed my tetanus.
Wal-Greens the place to go around here.
;)
Basically took the whole smorgasbord of the offerings.......pricked once, pricked five times, what's the diff?
DeleteHad to go back a second day though, the lady insisted on it, I do remember that.
Rufus IITue Oct 21, 12:50:00 PM EDT
DeleteOkay, let me put it another way. You've Already Paid for you flu and shingles shot; you might as well go get them.
That is a MUCH more accurate statement.
And that also brings up the question of the effectiveness of the flu shot….
I personally, do not get one.
Energy Innovation and the American Economy
ReplyDeleteCan Solar Power Fuel America?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/topic/in_the_news/bp_committed_to_america/
Big smorgasbord of energy articles at RealClearEnergy............fracking, solar, wind, nuclear, you name it.....
Jack ADMITS to being a KILLER
ReplyDelete"Jack HawkinsTue Oct 21, 01:10:00 PM EDT
I never killed a civilian in my life,"
But he does not deny killing people. And he was not in any uniform of any nation at war when doing so.
A hired gun, a merc. Killing soldiers only Jack?
Well then, you are just a terrorist.
But how would Jack Hawkins KNOW if the people he killed were only "non-civilians"? What no collateral damage? Did you interview everyone you shot BEFORE putting a bullet in their brains?
DeleteI wonder, even though you seem to be a soulless, heartless, prick of a man here, do the images of their heads exploding, the blood gushing out haunt you????
Even at 300 yards you should have been able to watch your prey bleed out….
Did you double tap them? Did you shoot the Medics responding to the victim?
What unit did you serve with? Still can't remember?
Oh that's right, Black Ops has no unit….
Just cash on the barrel head. Literally for "heads"
Did you take trophies of your kills? Chop off an ear or two?
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - U.S. military forces carried out four air strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria on Monday and Tuesday and were joined by partner nations in three attacks in Iraq, the U.S. Central Command said.
ReplyDeleteFighter, bomber and attack aircraft were used in the raids and all returned safely, the Central Command statement said.
The strikes near Kobani, Syria, destroyed Islamic State fighting positions, a building and an Islamic State unit.
In Iraq, a fighting position southeast of the Mosul Dam and one south of the Bayji oil refinery were destroyed while another strike north of Fallujah suppressed an Islamic State attack, the statement said. (Writing by Bill Trott; Editing by xxxx xxxxx)
flyin' aroun', bombin' de haidcutters