Stumbling to War With Russia?
Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian warplane was a provocative and portentous act.
That Sukhoi Su-24, which the Turks say intruded into their air space, crashed and burned — in Syria. One of the Russian pilots was executed while parachuting to safety. A Russian rescue helicopter was destroyed by rebels using a U.S. TOW missile. A Russian marine was killed.
“A stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists,” said Vladimir Putin of the first downing of a Russian warplane by a NATO nation in half a century. Putin has a point, as the Russians are bombing rebels in northwest Syria, some of which are linked to al-Qaida.
As it is impossible to believe Turkish F-16 pilots would fire missiles at a Russian plane without authorization from President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, we must ask: Why did the Turkish autocrat do it?
Why is he risking a clash with Russia?
Answer: Erdogan is probably less outraged by intrusions into his air space than by Putin’s success in securing the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, whom Erdogan detests, and by relentless Russian air strikes on Turkmen rebels seeking to overthrow Assad.
Imperiled strategic goals and ethnicity may explain Erdogan. But what does the Turkish president see down at the end of this road?
And what about us? Was the U.S. government aware Turkey might attack Russian planes? Did we give Erdogan a green light to shoot them down?
These are not insignificant questions.
For Turkey is a NATO ally. And if Russia strikes back, there is a possibility Ankara will invoke Article V of NATO and demand that we come in on their side in any fight with Russia.
And Putin was not at all cowed. Twenty-four hours after that plane went down, his planes, ships and artillery were firing on those same Turkmen rebels and their jihadist allies.
Politically, the Turkish attack on the Sukhoi Su-24 has probably aborted plans to have Russia join France and the U.S. in targeting ISIS, a diplomatic reversal of the first order.
Indeed, it now seems clear that in Syria’s civil war, Turkey is on the rebel-jihadist side, with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah on the side of the Syrian regime.
But whose side are we on?
As for what strategy and solution President Obama offers, and how exactly he plans to achieve it, it remains an enigma.
Nor is this the end of the alarming news.
According to The Times of Israel, Damascus reports that, on Monday, Israel launched four strikes, killing five Syrian soldiers and eight Hezbollah fighters, and wounding others.
Should Assad or Hezbollah retaliate, this could bring Israel more openly into the Syrian civil war. And if Israel is attacked, the pressure on Washington to join her in attacking the Syrian regime and Hezbollah would become intense.
Yet, should we accede to that pressure, it could bring us into direct conflict with Russia, which is now the fighting ally of the Assad regime.
Something U.S. presidents conscientiously avoided through 45 years of Cold War — a military clash with Moscow — could become a real possibility. Does the White House see what is unfolding here?
Elsewhere, yet another Russia-NATO clash may be brewing.
In southern Ukraine, pylons supporting the power lines that deliver electricity to Crimea have been sabotaged, blown up, reportedly by nationalists, shutting off much of the electric power to the peninsula.
Repair crews have been prevented from fixing the pylons by Crimean Tatars, angry at the treatment of their kinfolk in Crimea.
In solidarity with the Tatars, Kiev has declared that trucks carrying goods to Crimea will not be allowed to cross the border.
A state of emergency has been declared in Crimea.
Russia is retaliating, saying it will not buy produce from Ukraine, and may start cutting off gas and coal as winter begins to set in.
Ukraine is as dependent upon Russia for fossil fuels as Crimea is upon Ukraine for electricity. Crimea receives 85 percent of its water and 80 percent of its electricity from Ukraine.
Moreover, Moscow’s hopes for a lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, imposed after the annexation of Crimea, appear to be fading.
Are these events coordinated? Has the U.S. government given a go-ahead to Erdogan to shoot down Russian planes? Has Obama authorized a Ukrainian economic quarantine of Crimea?
For Vladimir Putin is not without options. The Russian Army and pro-Russian rebels in southeast Ukraine could occupy Mariupol on the Black Sea and establish a land bridge to Crimea in two weeks.
In Syria, the Russians, with 4,000 troops, could escalate far more rapidly than either us or our French allies.
As of today, Putin supports U.S.-French attacks on ISIS. But if we follow the Turks and begin aiding the rebels who are attacking the Syrian army, we could find ourselves eyeball to eyeball in a confrontation with Russia, where our NATO allies will be nowhere to be found.
Has anyone thought this through?
The French have moved from not working with Assad, to proclaiming the wisdom of working with Assad, to saying they will not work with Assad. All in the course of a day.
ReplyDeleteConfusion reigns.
The Russian S400 air defense system is being deployed in Syria.
The Russians have the interior lines and the US will not go to war in Syria, for Turkey.
NATO will collapse in the face of war with Russia.
Especially if the Russians do not invade a NATO country in Europe, the Ukrainian crisis was telling in that regard.
Reuters -
DeletePARIS France's foreign minister was forced to backtrack on Friday after suggesting earlier in the day that troops loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad could be used to fight Islamic State before a political transition took place in the country.
NATO will collapse in the face of war with Russia.
ReplyDeleteEspecially if the Russians do not invade a NATO country in Europe
But of course.
If the Russians do not invade a NATO country it is indeed unlikely NATO will go to war with Russia.
Why hadn't we all thought of that ?
Probably because you lack analytical skills, Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson.
DeleteThe Russians do not have to invade Turkey, to cause the Turks to invoke Article 5 of the treaty.
DeleteNo one invaded the US when, after 9/11 the US invoked Article 5 of the treaty.
NATO followed US to Afghanistan, it did not work out well for any of our Allies.
If the Turks were to invoke Article 5, and the European countries did not come to Turkey's aid, which they won't, NATO is finished as a military alliance. I don't see Bulgaria, Croatia, Spain, Portugal or even Germany sending troops to support Turkey.
None of the 26 Europeans countries want to, or even can, send ground troops, neither does the US.
You may, but then you don't want Turkey in NATO, you just pine to see the soldiers of the US bleed out in sands of the Middle East.
Your statements regarding sending US troops to die defending the clit clipping Kurds, well documented.
Your mom says she wants you to turn the computer off now, rat, and go to bed.
ReplyDeleteDo as she says.
You have had a long day and are all tuckered out.
November 28, 2015
ReplyDeleteHow close is Putin to blowing up NATO?
By Silvio Canto, Jr.
The Turkey-Russia feud raises a few questions about the future of NATO. In other words, are NATO allies ready to defend Turkey? Or are they expecting U.S. jets to do it?
Based on what we saw in Iraq in the late 1990s (enforcing the no fly zone) and Kosovo in 1995, NATO will come down to U.S. and UK jets doing all of the flying.
My guess is that Putin knows this and will try to force NATO to act. He is now saying that the U.S. knew that Turkey would shoot down a Russian jet. On the other hand, Turkey is telling Russia not to play with fire.
Who really knows? At the same time, it does not matter. The jet is down, a pilot is dead and Putin just got the opportunity to prick the NATO balloon.
Putin has been trying to downsize NATO for some time. I agree with Stephen Covington:
Russia’s leadership wants a Europe without strategic Alliances, without multi-national organizations and without a U.S.-Europe Transatlantic link that can through collective policies and action offset the national strengths Russia would hold over any one European nation. It would be a European security environment that would allow Russia to apply its national strengths to great effect without challenge and competition -- enhancing its power abroad and at home.
How does Putin blow up NATO? He doesn't. He simply watches NATO blow up itself. He forces NATO to work together, such as in defending Turkey under Article 5 or fighting ISIS.
In the end, NATO won't work together because of weak U.S. leadership and the reality that most countries have no real military resources to bring to the game. NATO is like a baseball team where only a couple of guys can play and the rest can't do much more than watch from the dugout.
We will watch to see how this plays out. Nevertheless, Putin is a master tactician and he assumes that Obama is weak and the West is weaker. He is betting that he will win because the other side doesn't want to fight. And he is right!
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/11/how_close_is_putin_to_blowing_up_nato.html
Worrisome and disconcerting, for sure.
You just posted a comment reinforcing everything Jack is Back Hawkins just said. I concur. NATO as anything other than a job creator is finished.
ReplyDeleteI know what it says. I read what I post.
DeleteI'm uncertain about many things in Europe and the Mid-East.
I noticed the other day the Swedes burning down many refugee encampments.
I have no idea how all this is going to come out.
I agree about the Turks being worthless.
Not so sure about NATO.
NATO RIP
ReplyDeleteWASHINGTON, Nov. 27, 2015 – Turkey’s decision to shoot down a Russian jet on a mission against ISIS targets in Syria not only killed a Russian pilot but also mortally wounded NATO. Whether the Russian jet was in Turkish airspace and whether warnings were issued and received are all but irrelevant.
NATO, the collective defense alliance the U.S. and its Western European allies formed in 1949, was designed to balance the military threat posed by the Warsaw Pact and deter Communist aggression against the territory of member states. Article 5 of the NATO treaty states that an attack on any member is an attack on all and commits the entire alliance to the defense of the victim.
Throughout the Cold War, NATO served its purpose, but with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, some opined that NATO’s success had effectively rendered the alliance obsolete, too expensive financially and politically to maintain, and potentially threatening to the new Federation of Russian States.
Despite the absence of the threat it was created to check, NATO, like all bureaucracies, has struggled to survive. For the last quarter-century, NATO has cast about for and found things to do to justify its existence. Its political-military planners invented the concept of “out-of-area” missions to authorize peace-making and -keeping roles in places outside NATO’s geographic boundaries such as Bosnia and Kosovo and to provide European troop contributions to the war in Afghanistan. Since 9/11, NATO has stayed busy enforcing no-fly zones, executing stabilization and humanitarian missions far beyond the territory of member states, and even absorbing former Warsaw Pact members.
Yet when NATO has been most necessary, such as when the U.S. and the UK solicited its authorization of the Iraq War in 2003, the alliance balked—compelling some to suggest that NATO had outlived its usefulness.
The failure of NATO to invoke Article 5 and rise as one in battle against ISIS following the Friday the 13th attacks on Paris further revealed the extent to which NATO has become an ossified, dysfunctional, anachronistic talk shop.
Making matters worse, U.S. claims that a grand coalition of 60-odd nations, many of which are NATO members, are united behind American “strategy” and power and are taking the fight to ISIS is a contemptible lie. To date, the only nation that has demonstrated the combination of political will and military capacity to battle radical Islam is Russia. NATO has no plan and no resolve, and its members cannot even come together to acknowledge that the West is at war with radical Islam.
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ReplyDeleteAnd now, the potential confrontation between a resurgent Russia and an Islamist Turkey, coupled with ill-considered calls by several leading U.S. presidential candidates for NATO to rally behind the latter as an alliance obligation, threatens to reawaken cold hostility with Russia and forfeit the opportunity for genuine and effective cooperation between like-minded and capable military powers in the destruction of radical Islam.
Disturbing as the downing of the Russian jet and the rising tensions between NATO and Russia are, they present a precious but fleeting opportunity to undertake a complete re-evaluation of Western collective security requirements, architecture, membership, and purpose.
Here is how that re-evaluation should proceed:
First, the West—a construct that includes Russia but by definition is incommensurable with Islamist nations—must acknowledge that it is at war with radical Islam and that it cannot maintain collective security arrangements or otherwise provide support or assistance to nations governed or influenced by this wicked ideology. The West no longer needs to stand guard against and deter Communist aggression. The threat has changed, the mission is now war-fighting rather than deterrence, and the orientation of collective security thinking and action and the institutions which manage this must transform.
Second, the radical Islamist threat is global and mortal. All instruments of national and alliance power must be used to reduce and defeat it. Any effective international effort against radical Islam will thus by definition not be regionally based but rather transnational in membership and scope. It will include partners across the globe that share an understanding and appreciation of the threat and thus are committed to and do in fact collaborate across the world and along the full spectrum of military, intelligence, law enforcement and other measures.
Third, such an effort cannot be led by NATO, an organization whose reason for being is gone, whose purpose, membership and decision making processes are relics of a bygone threat, and whose existence—particularly insofar as it rattles sabers at Russia—impedes collaboration with the most willing and able anti-radical Islamist nation. Moreover, a NATO member like Turkey has at least one toe in the Islamist pond, to the point of engaging in trade, diplomacy and military support of Islamist groups in the region, and threatens to draw the U.S. and NATO into, if not a shooting war with Russia, then at least a new era of distrust and suspicion. Booting Turkey out of NATO, however, while it would absolve NATO of any responsibility to that nation, would not yield the coalition that can defeat radical Islam. What is necessary, therefore, is to pronounce NATO dead and create the grand alliance that can defeat the existential threat of our time.
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DeleteTo achieve this, the U.S. should shun calls to back Turkey in this current phase of its centuries-old conflict with Russia—a feud that spawned the Crimean War and created a major front in the Great War—and instead cast the net wide to draw in all those nations that are willing, able and ready to fight radical Islam. Many members of NATO, along with Russia, Israel, the Gulf Arab states, Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China and others could form a vast and powerful force that, supported by sufficient resolve, proper strategy, leadership and the domestic support of their peoples, could use all instruments of their power to shatter the appeal of radical Islamist ideology and end, perhaps forever, the global scourge this phenomenon represents. Commitments from these nations would be based on capabilities. Burden-sharing in terms of troops, treasure, and willingness to sacrifice both would be a requirement for membership. Free-riding by this new alliance on the back of U.S. power, and the expectation that the U.S. would continue to do most of the spending and dying to protect the West, would no longer be tolerated. In exchange, this community of shared interests would reap the benefits and distribute burdens in a manner that has never been the practice in NATO, and as a result its reach, power and results would exceed that organization by orders of magnitude—ensuring the survival of the West in a way that NATO simply cannot and will not.
Pronouncing NATO dead and assembling an alliance that will not merely hold policy coordination meetings but will fight side by side against radical Islam until the extinction of the common foe will take domestic political courage and international diplomatic skill absent from U.S. policymaking for decades. And it will mean that alliance members can no longer rely on the U.S. to do all the deterring and fighting for them. Many nations, long sheltered under the U.S. security umbrella, will need to build and deploy the sort of armed forces they have not had to maintain or use since World War II in order to be true partners. German and Japanese forces will need to deploy globally to fight ISIS. Language, culture, geography, interests and other complicating factors will need to be overcome or aligned.
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DeleteThus, achieving this alliance against radical Islam will require harnessing military, diplomatic, economic, and information power in a much more complex manner and dynamic environment than has ever been attempted. Under the Obama administration, which refuses even to recognize that radical Islam is the enemy, there is no hope to even begin this effort. This work will thus await the entry on duty of a new president, for whom creating this alliance will be the foremost U.S. national security imperative.
The international security architecture upon which the West has relied for the past seven decades is woefully inadequate to the threat imperatives and military and political realities of the 21st century and even constitutes a basis for Russian refusal to collaborate. The great army of the West cannot be built on the skeleton of NATO, an organization designed for a long-vanished threat that, by its continued existence and the unwarranted belligerence of its Islamist member, threatens to divide the West, fragment a potential anti-ISIS coalition and reawaken the Cold War.
Simply put, NATO is dead. Rather than foolishly back Turkey in its ancient feud with Russia, the U.S., as soon as its leaders will permit, should consign NATO to the pages of history and get on with the hard and serious business of building and leading a grand coalition to destroy radical Islam.
Read more at http://www.commdiginews.com/world-news/turkey-signs-natos-death-warrant-52802/#GHaUChIVLgKPscHl.99
William Brute Bradford
DeleteDr. William C. “Brute” Bradford, PhD (Northwestern), LLM (Harvard), is Attorney General of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, a former intelligence officer, and a legal academic with more than 30 published articles on strategy, terrorism, the law of war, radical Islam, and Native American affairs. Dr. Bradford has presented his research worldwide to civilian and military audiences at universities, think tanks, and other public forums, and he is a frequent commentator in U.S. and foreign media. The existential threat of radical Islam, the financial instability in the U.S. political economy, and the erosion of traditional American moral values form the basis of his research, scholarship, and advocacy.
Read more at http://www.commdiginews.com/world-news/turkey-signs-natos-death-warrant-52802/#GHaUChIVLgKPscHl.99
I agree with most of the article. It does one further thing and that is identifies who is an ally in the cause and who is not. Any state that is engaged in assaulting another state that is in the fight is not an ally in the cause and should be sanctioned. That includes Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia.
DeleteNot a bad idea perhaps.
DeleteIf NATO has become the land of Nietzsche's/Zarathustra's lustige menschen, the last men who just want to live comfortably and long, sit in cafes and chat and haven't the spunk to fight for their own being in the world, then it's about the only alternative, and Brute Bradford, of the wonderful nickname, has it right.
The English are voting next week whether or not to engage their Air Force in Syria.
It sounds like they will.
We had one guy in high school named Spud, another named Punky, one Mad Dog and an Og or Oggie or The Og. We also had a Spike and he became a lawyer.
DeleteNo one knows what happened to Og, he seems to have disappeared into the drug culture. He may be in prison, or dead by now.
Og was also known sometimes as Og the Dog. I can't recall him hanging around with Mad Dog much.
DeleteNot of the same kennel.
New “Study Quran” aims to convince you that the Muslim holy book doesn’t really mean what it says
ReplyDeleteNovember 27, 2015 12:07 pm By Robert Spencer
Long article about The Study Koran and debunking some of its conclusions and some of its authors.
Lumbard is again being disingenuous. This is not just a Saudi or Islamic State interpretation of this verse; it is a venerable interpretation in Islamic tradition. The classic Qur’anic commentator Ibn Kathir explains that “the two paths He described here are both misguided,” and that those “two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he avoids them. The path of the believers is knowledge of the truth and abiding by it. In comparison, the Jews abandoned practicing the religion, while the Christians lost the true knowledge. This is why ‘anger’ descended upon the Jews, while being described as ‘led astray’ is more appropriate of the Christians.” Ibn Kathir’s understanding of this passage is not a lone “extremist” interpretation. In fact, most Muslim commentators believe that the Jews are those who have earned Allah’s wrath and the Christians are those who have gone astray. This is the view of Tabari, Zamakhshari, the Tafsir al-Jalalayn, the Tanwir al-Miqbas min Tafsir Ibn Abbas, and Ibn Arabi, as well as Ibn Kathir. One contrasting, but not majority view, is that of Nisaburi, who says that “those who have incurred Allah’s wrath are the people of negligence, and those who have gone astray are the people of immoderation.”
There were times, though, when even Mohammed disagreed with the Quran. Verse 4:34 is one of those instances, said Maria Dakake, an expert on Islamic studies at George Mason University in Virginia.
One of the most controversial sections of the Quran, 4:34 is sometimes derisively called the “beat your wife” verse. It says that if men “fear discord and animosity” from their wives, they may strike them after first trying to admonish their spouse and “leave them in bed.”
“It’s obviously a difficult verse,” said Dakake, the only woman on the translation team of “The Study Quran.”
“I found it difficult when I first read it as a woman, and when people today, both men and women, try to address the meaning of the verse in a contemporary context, they can find it difficult to understand and reconcile with their own sense of right and wrong.”
But Dakake said that while reading through the reams of commentary, she found that Mohammed did not like the verse, either. In one hadith, or saying attributed the prophet, he reportedly said, “I wanted one thing, and God wanted another.”
“That was very meaningful to me,” Dekake [sic] said. “We can say, looking at this commentary, that hitting your wife, even if it is permitted in the Quran, was not the morally virtuous thing to do from the point of view of the prophet.”…
Any Muslim will tell you that nothing, even Muhammad’s wishes, supersedes the Qur’an. Dakake doesn’t mention that wife-beating is also sanctioned by Muhammad’s example: A hadith has Aisha reporting that Muhammad struck her. Once he went out at night after he thought she was asleep, and she followed him surreptitiously. Muhammad saw her, and, as Aisha recounts: “He struck me on the chest which caused me pain, and then said: Did you think that Allah and His Apostle would deal unjustly with you?” (Sahih Muslim 2127)
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/11/new-study-quran-aims-to-convince-you-that-the-muslim-holy-book-doesnt-really-mean-what-it-says
The BBC reported yesterday that Turkey claims they didn’t even know the jet was Russian.
ReplyDeleteErdogan jumped the shark
ReplyDeleteRussia will no longer balance between Turkey and Kurds.
An independent Kurdistan is all but assured.
Russian tourism and trade is lost.
Joint Russian and Turkish infrastructure are likely lost.
Turkey will be marginalized in decision making about Syria and Turkey will not get a piece of Syria.
Assad had a missile defense system equal to or superior to Turkey
.
Russia decimated Turkeman forces in North West Syria by fierce ongoing bombardment.
Russia has three immediate priorities:
ReplyDelete1. A de facto no-fly zone already in effect south of the Turkish-Syrian border enforced by the S-400s.
2. Russia will continue to hit hard anything that suspiciously moves on every transport corridor in and out of Turkey. Turkish "humanitarian" convoys – carrying, what else, weapons – were pulverized in Azaz, which is only five kilometers from the Turkish border. And truck distribution points were also bombed near Raqqa.
3. Already in effect; Russia massively bombing the whole wide region where CIA ops run a cash and weapon highway to the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and “innocent” Turkmen. Russia started carpet bombing the Jabal Turkmen area immediately after Russian pilot Lt. Col Oleg Pershin was rescued.
Question: Why did the US not bomb these ISIS Turkey oil exchange in the past year?
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/323634-putin-hollande-erdogan-isis/
Because Obama is Commander - in - Chief.
DeleteThe Donald says he'll bomb the shit out of these oil facilities, wells, trucks....
DeleteUS Vice President Joe Biden grabbed headlines in the Fall of 2014 when he criticized the decisions of America’s allies in the war on IS – Biden named Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – for their not intentional but negligent support for IS: ”They were so determined to overthrow Assad and to lead a Sunni-Shiite war – what did they do? They pumped hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons to anyone who wanted to fight Assad. But they also supplied people from al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and extremist elements of the Jihadists from all parts of the world,” Biden said.
DeleteLet the UK , France and Russia have at it with ISIS in Syria. The US should clean up its own mess in Iraq.
ReplyDeleteResearch: Islam really is the world’s most violent religion
ReplyDeleteNovember 27, 2015 10:15 am By Nicolai Sennels 39 Comments
Together with a number of research assistants, the Danish linguist Tina Magaard spent three years examining the texts of the ten largest religions. The purpose was to investigate whether any of the religions incite violence.
The conclusion was clear: “The texts of Islam are clearly distinct from the other religions texts as they, to a higher degree, call for violence and aggression against followers of other faiths. There are also direct incitements to terror. … Moreover, in the Qur’an there are hundreds of invitations to fight against people of other faiths.”
The verses are in black and white and without mitigating context. One of the verses that deal with non-Muslims is: “So when you meet those who disbelieve, strike their necks until you have inflicted slaughter upon them.” (Qur’an 47: 4).
Violent in practice
Islam is not only the world’s most violent religion in writing. A huge study, based on in-depth interviews with 45,000 subjects, confirms that it is also the world’s most violent religion in practice.
The study shows that Islam is the only religion in the world in which people become more violent, the stronger they believe in their religion.
Terror
The fact that Islam is the world’s most violent religion is most likely the reason why Muslims since September 11, 2001, have committed more than 27,000 deadly terrorist attacks in the name of Islam. This corresponds to approximately 2,000 a year, or five a day.
Another fact is that the number of Muslims in the Western world is increasing dramatically and that they are becoming still more religious: 75 percent of Muslims inside Europe think that the texts of the world’s most violent religion must be taken literally.
This is probably why 80 percent of young Turks in Holland see “nothing wrong” with waging Jihad against non-Muslims. And that 27 percent of all young French and 14 percent of all young British under 25 sympathize with the genocidal terror organisation Islamic State. This includes most probably the vast majority of young Muslims in these two countries.
Europe is about to face its greatest challenge ever.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/11/research-islam-really-is-the-worlds-most-violent-religion
Report: Turkey collaborating with the Islamic State
ReplyDeleteNovember 27, 2015 9:47 am By Ralph Sidway 26 Comments
This damning report on rapidly re-islamizing Turkey’s support for the Islamic State from last year is updated with fresh documentation, corroborating Russian President Vladimir Putin’s charge that Turkey is an “accomplice to terrorists.” Putin and French President Hollande just conducted a meeting in Moscow, indicating Russia and France will cooperate more closely in targeting ISIS’ oil transport lines, one of the key components of Turkey’s aid to the Islamic State, as detailed below.
“Research Paper: ISIS-Turkey List,” by David L. Phillips, Columbia University, Huffington Post, originally published November 9, 2014, updated November 25, 2015:
Is Turkey collaborating with the Islamic State (ISIS)? Allegations range from military cooperation and weapons transfers to logistical support, financial assistance, and the provision of medical services. It is also alleged that Turkey turned a blind eye to ISIS attacks against Kobani.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu strongly deny complicity with ISIS. Erdogan visited the Council on Foreign Relations on September 22, 2014. He criticized “smear campaigns [and] attempts to distort perception about us.” Erdogan decried, “A systematic attack on Turkey’s international reputation, “complaining that “Turkey has been subject to very unjust and ill-intentioned news items from media organizations.” Erdogan posited: “My request from our friends in the United States is to make your assessment about Turkey by basing your information on objective sources.”
Columbia University’s Program on Peace-building and Rights assigned a team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Turkey to examine Turkish and international media, assessing the credibility of allegations. This report draws on a variety of international sources — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, BBC, Sky News, as well as Turkish sources, CNN Turk, Hurriyet Daily News, Taraf, Cumhuriyet, and Radikal among others.
Allegations
Turkey Provides Military Equipment to ISIS
DeleteAn ISIS commander told The Washington Post on August 12, 2014: “Most of the fighters who joined us in the beginning of the war came via Turkey, and so did our equipment and supplies.”
Kemal Kiliadaroglu, head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), produced a statement from the Adana Office of the Prosecutor on October 14, 2014 maintaining that Turkey supplied weapons to terror groups. He also produced interview transcripts from truck drivers who delivered weapons to the groups. According to Kiliadaroglu, the Turkish government claims the trucks were for humanitarian aid to the Turkmen, but the Turkmen said no humanitarian aid was delivered.
According to CHP Vice President Bulent Tezcan, three trucks were stopped in Adana for inspection on January 19, 2014. The trucks were loaded with weapons in Esenboga Airport in Ankara. The drivers drove the trucks to the border, where a MIT agent was supposed to take over and drive the trucks to Syria to deliver materials to ISIS and groups in Syria. This happened many times. When the trucks were stopped, MIT agents tried to keep the inspectors from looking inside the crates. The inspectors found rockets, arms, and ammunitions.
Cumhuriyet reports that Fuat Avni, a preeminent Twitter user who reported on the December 17th corruption probe, that audio tapes confirm that Turkey provided financial and military aid to terrorist groups associated with Al Qaeda on October 12, 2014. On the tapes, Erdogan pressured the Turkish Armed Forces to go to war with Syria. Erdogan demanded that Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Agency (MIT), come up with a justification for attacking Syria.
Hakan Fidan told Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Yasar Guler, a senior defense official, and Feridun Sinirlioglu, a senior foreign affairs official: “If need be, I’ll send 4 men into Syria. I’ll formulate a reason to go to war by shooting 8 rockets into Turkey; I’ll have them attack the Tomb of Suleiman Shah.”
Documents surfaced on September 19th, 2014 showing that the Saudi Emir Bender Bin Sultan financed the transportation of arms to ISIS through Turkey. A flight leaving Germany dropped off arms in the Etimesgut airport in Turkey, which was then split into three containers, two of which were given to ISIS and one to Gaza.
Turkey Provided Transport and Logistical Assistance to ISIS Fighters
DeleteAccording to Radikal on June 13, 2014, Interior Minister Muammar Guler signed a directive: “According to our regional gains, we will help al-Nusra militants against the branch of PKK terrorist organization, the PYD, within our borders…Hatay is a strategic location for the mujahideen crossing from within our borders to Syria. Logistical support for Islamist groups will be increased, and their training, hospital care, and safe passage will mostly take place in Hatay…MIT and the Religious Affairs Directorate will coordinate the placement of fighters in public accommodations.”
The Daily Mail reported on August 25, 2014 that many foreign militants joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq after traveling through Turkey, but Turkey did not try to stop them. This article describes how foreign militants, especially from the UK, go to Syria and Iraq through the Turkish border. They call the border the “Gateway to Jihad.” Turkish army soldiers either turn a blind eye and let them pass, or the jihadists pay the border guards as little as $10 to facilitate their crossing.
Britain’s Sky News obtained documents showing that the Turkish government has stamped passports of foreign militants seeking to cross the Turkey border into Syria to join ISIS.
The BBC interviewed villagers, who claim that buses travel at night, carrying jihadists to fight Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, not the Syrian Armed Forces.
A senior Egyptian official indicated on October 9, 2014 that Turkish intelligence is passing satellite imagery and other data to ISIS.
Turkey Provided Training to ISIS Fighters
CNN Turk reported on July 29, 2014 that in the heart of Istanbul, places like Duzce and Adapazari, have become gathering spots for terrorists. There are religious orders where ISIS militants are trained. Some of these training videos are posted on the Turkish ISIS propaganda website takvahaber.net. According to CNN Turk, Turkish security forces could have stopped these developments if they had wanted to.
Turks who joined an affiliate of ISIS were recorded at a public gathering in Istanbul, which took place on July 28, 2014.
A video shows an ISIS affiliate holding a prayer/gathering in Omerli, a district of Istanbul. In response to the video, CHP Vice President, MP Tanrikulu submitted parliamentary questions to the Minister of the Interior, Efkan Ala, asking questions such as, “Is it true that a camp or camps have been allocated to an affiliate of ISIS in Istanbul? What is this affiliate? Who is it made up of? Is the rumor true that the same area allocated for the camp is also used for military exercises?”
Kemal Kiliçdaroglu warned the AKP government not to provide money and training to terror groups on October 14, 2014. He said, “It isn’t right for armed groups to be trained on Turkish soil. You bring foreign fighters to Turkey, put money in their pockets, guns in their hands, and you ask them to kill Muslims in Syria. We told them to stop helping ISIS. Ahmet Davutoglu asked us to show proof. Everyone knows that they’re helping ISIS.” (See HERE and HERE.)
According to Jordanian intelligence, Turkey trained ISIS militants for special operations.
Turkey Offers Medical Care to ISIS Fighters
DeleteAn ISIS commander told the Washington Post on August 12, 2014, “We used to have some fighters — even high-level members of the Islamic State — getting treated in Turkish hospitals.”
Taraf reported on October 12, 2014 that Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, a founder of the AKP, said that Turkey supported terrorist groups and still supports them and treats them in hospitals. “In order to weaken the developments in Rojova (Syrian Kurdistan), the government gave concessions and arms to extreme religious groups…the government was helping the wounded. The Minister of Health said something such as, it’s a human obligation to care for the ISIS wounded.”
According to Taraf, Ahmet El H, one of the top commanders at ISIS and Al Baghdadi’s right hand man, was treated at a hospital in Sanliurfa, Turkey, along with other ISIS militants. The Turkish state paid for their treatment. According to Taraf’s sources, ISIS militants are being treated in hospitals all across southeastern Turkey. More and more militants have been coming in to be treated since the start of airstrikes in August. To be more specific, eight ISIS militants were transported through the Sanliurfa border crossing; these are their names: “Mustafa A., Yusuf El R., Mustafa H., Halil El M., Muhammet El H., Ahmet El S., Hasan H., [and] Salim El D.”
Turkey Supports ISIS Financially Through Purchase of Oil
On September 13, 2014, The New York Times reported on the Obama administration’s efforts to pressure Turkey to crack down on ISIS extensive sales network for oil. James Phillips, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, argues that Turkey has not fully cracked down on ISIS’s sales network because it benefits from a lower price for oil, and that there might even be Turks and government officials who benefit from the trade.
Fehim Tastekin wrote in Radikal on September 13, 2014 about illegal pipelines transporting oil from Syria to nearby border towns in Turkey. The oil is sold for as little as 1.25 liras per liter. Tastekin indicated that many of these illegal pipelines were dismantled after operating for 3 years, once his article was published.
According to Diken and OdaTV, David Cohen, a Justice Department official, says that there are Turkish individuals acting as middlemen to help sell ISIS’s oil through Turkey.
On October 14, 2014, a German Parliamentarian from the Green Party accused Turkey of allowing the transportation of arms to ISIS over its territory, as well as the sale of oil.
Turkey Assists ISIS Recruitment
DeleteKemal Kiliadaroglu claimed on October 14, 2014 that ISIS offices in Istanbul and Gaziantep are used to recruit fighters. On October 10, 2014, the mufti of Konya said that 100 people from Konya joined ISIS 4 days ago. (See HERE and HERE.)
OdaTV reports that Takva Haber serves as a propaganda outlet for ISIS to recruit Turkish-speaking individuals in Turkey and Germany. The address where this propaganda website is registered corresponds to the address of a school called Irfan Koleji, which was established by Ilim Yayma Vakfi, a foundation that was created by Erdogan and Davutoglu, among others. It is thus claimed that the propaganda site is operated from the school of the foundation started by AKP members.
Minister of Sports, Suat Kilic, an AKP member, visited Salafi jihadists who are ISIS supporters in Germany. The group is known for reaching out to supporters via free Quran distributions and raising funds to sponsor suicide attacks in Syria and Iraq by raising money.
OdaTV released a video allegedly showing ISIS militants riding a bus in Istanbul.
Turkish Forces Are Fighting Alongside ISIS
On October 7, 2014, IBDA-C, a militant Islamic organization in Turkey, pledged support to ISIS. A Turkish friend who is a commander in ISIS suggests that Turkey is “involved in all of this” and that “10,000 ISIS members will come to Turkey.” A Huda-Par member at the meeting claims that officials criticize ISIS but in fact sympathize with the group (Huda-Par, the “Free Cause Party”, is a Kurdish Sunni fundamentalist political party). BBP member claims that National Action Party (MHP) officials are close to embracing ISIS. In the meeting, it is asserted that ISIS militants come to Turkey frequently to rest, as though they are taking a break from military service. They claim that Turkey will experience an Islamic revolution, and Turks should be ready for jihad. (See HERE and HERE.)
Seymour Hersh maintains in the London Review of Books that ISIS conducted sarin attacks in Syria, and that Turkey was informed. “For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbors, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.”
On September 20, 2014, Demir Celik, a Member of Parliament with the people’s democratic party (HDP) claimed that Turkish Special Forces fight with ISIS.
Turkey Helped ISIS in Battle for Kobani
DeleteAnwar Moslem, Mayor of Kobani, said on September 19, 2014: “Based on the intelligence we got two days before the breakout of the current war, trains full of forces and ammunition, which were passing by north of Kobane, had an-hour-and-ten-to-twenty-minute-long stops in these villages: Salib Qaran, Gire Sor, Moshrefat Ezzo. There are evidences, witnesses, and videos about this. Why is ISIS strong only in Kobane’s east? Why is it not strong either in its south or west? Since these trains stopped in villages located in the east of Kobane, we guess they had brought ammunition and additional force for the ISIS.” In the second article on September 30, 2014, a CHP delegation visited Kobani, where locals claimed that everything from the clothes ISIS militants wear to their guns comes from Turkey. (See HERE and HERE.)
Released by Nuhaber, a video shows Turkish military convoys carrying tanks and ammunition moving freely under ISIS flags in the Cerablus region and Karkamis border crossing (September 25, 2014). There are writings in Turkish on the trucks.
Salih Muslim, PYD head, claims that 120 militants crossed into Syria from Turkey between October 20th and 24th, 2014.
According to an op-ed written by a YPG commander in The New York Times on October 29, 2014, Turkey allows ISIS militants and their equipment to pass freely over the border.
Diken reported, “ISIS fighters crossed the border from Turkey into Syria, over the Turkish train tracks that delineate the border, in full view of Turkish soldiers. They were met there by PYD fighters and stopped.”
A Kurdish commander in Kobani claims that ISIS militants have Turkish entry stamps on their passports.
Kurds trying to join the battle in Kobani are turned away by Turkish police at the Turkey-Syrian border.
OdaTV released a photograph of a Turkish soldier befriending ISIS militants.…
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/11/report-turkey-collaborating-with-the-islamic-state
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ReplyDeleteTo achieve this, the U.S. should shun calls to back Turkey in this current phase of its centuries-old conflict with Russia—a feud that spawned the Crimean War and created a major front in the Great War—and instead cast the net wide to draw in all those nations that are willing, able and ready to fight radical Islam. Many members of NATO, along with Russia, Israel, the Gulf Arab states, Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, China and others could form a vast and powerful force that, supported by sufficient resolve, proper strategy, leadership and the domestic support of their peoples, could use all instruments of their power to shatter the appeal of radical Islamist ideology and end, perhaps forever, the global scourge this phenomenon represents. Commitments from these nations would be based on capabilities. Burden-sharing in terms of troops, treasure, and willingness to sacrifice both would be a requirement for membership. Free-riding by this new alliance on the back of U.S. power, and the expectation that the U.S. would continue to do most of the spending and dying to protect the West, would no longer be tolerated. In exchange, this community of shared interests would reap the benefits and distribute burdens in a manner that has never been the practice in NATO, and as a result its reach, power and results would exceed that organization by orders of magnitude—ensuring the survival of the West in a way that NATO simply cannot and will not.
Unicorns and Lollipops.
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According to open sources, the S-400 is capable of shooting down any existing aircraft, helicopter or missile traveling at speeds of up to 4.8 kilometer per second (over 17,000 km/h) The only target the system would have problems with is a nuclear warhead of intercontinental ballistic missile, which flies at speeds of up to 6-7 kilometer per second.
ReplyDeleteThe S-400 engages targets at distances as far as 400 kilometers and heights of up to 27 kilometers (or higher with newer missiles). This is enough to cover at least 75 percent of Syrian territory, along with the airspaces of Lebanon, Cyprus, half of Israel and a vast part of Turkey.
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ReplyDeleteWhen they spend tens of billions of dollars each year on systems to scoop up every phone call and electronic communication throughout the world, it is easy to understand the CIA's and NSA's confusion and denial to believe that any terrorist attack could be pulled off without a lot of increased electronic 'chatter'. The idea that a plot could be designed and initiated from some guy's basement is beyond their ken. This myopic view naturally leads to the search for scapegoats when their state of the art systems fail to predict something like the Paris terrorist attacks. Their solution, blame the whistle blowers, demand more back doors and less encryption, ask for more money for new and improved systems to track the info that isn't there, ask for new laws to 'legalize' their abuse of individual rights, all in the search for the security they cannot provide.
Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity.
Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden.
The real objective is to depict Silicon Valley as terrorist-helpers for the crime of offering privacy protections to Internet users. -
The CIA's former acting director, Michael Morell, blamed the Paris attack on Internet companies "building encryption without keys," which, he said, was caused by the debate over surveillance prompted by Snowden's disclosures. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) blamed Silicon Valley's privacy safeguards, claiming: "I have asked for help. And I haven't gotten any help."
Former CIA chief James Woolsey said Snowden "has blood on his hands" because, he asserted, the Paris attackers learned from his disclosures how to hide their communications behind encryption. Woolsey thus decreed on CNN that the NSA whistleblower should be "hanged by the neck until he's dead, rather than merely electrocuted."
In one sense, this blame-shifting tactic is understandable. After all, the CIA, the NSA and similar agencies receive billions of dollars annually from Congress and have been vested by their Senate overseers with virtually unlimited spying power. They have one paramount mission: find and stop people who are plotting terrorist attacks. When they fail, of course they are desperate to blame others.
The CIA's blame-shifting game, aside from being self-serving, was deceitful in the extreme. To begin with, there still is no evidence that the perpetrators in Paris used the Internet to plot their attacks, let alone used encryption technology.
CIA officials simply made that up. It is at least equally likely that the attackers formulated their plans in face-to-face meetings. The central premise of the CIA's campaign — encryption enabled the attackers to evade our detection — is baseless...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1126-greenwald-snowden-paris-encryption-20151126-story.html
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ReplyDeleteRussia Reacts.
Russia has unveiled a series of increasingly harsh economic and diplomatic responses to the shoot down, including suspension of major investment projects [$20 billion nuclear deal], a possible ban on Turkish fruit and vegetable import, and the arrests of the 39 businessmen who entered the country as tourists.
In the most drastic step so far, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said on Friday that Moscow it would scrap a visa-free regime with Turkey from January 1, 2016.
Announcing the move at a press conference with Walid Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, Mr Lavrov said Ankara had been uncooperative in providing information about Turkish citizens suspected of terrorism.
"We have more and more questions about the activity of Ankara and its real commitment to eradicating terrorism," Mr Lavrov said.
The move only affects Turks entering Russia, and will not impact four million Russian tourists who visit Turkey without visas each year unless Ankara imposes a reciprocal ban.
Blinking first in the battle of wills between the two countries, the Turkish airforce reportedly decided to suspend missions over Syria as part of the US-led coalition against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), in a move to ease tensions with Russia...
Putin Refuses to Talk to Erdogan Until Turkey Apologizes
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ReplyDeleteRobert "Draft Dodger" Peterson continues to remain confused about the world.
DeleteThe fact that Turkey has been aiding the Islamic State (Daesh) has been known since May, when articles concerning weapons convoys transiting from Turkey to Syria in 2014 were published in the Cumhuriyet newspaper. The editor of the paper has been charged with espionage and treason.
According to the paper, the trucks were carrying six steel containers, with 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000 heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells. The arms were reportedly delivered to extremist groups fighting against the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad
Robert "Draft Dodger" Peterson is spewing 'old news'. His sources, well behind the curve, as he has always been.
We have had threads concerning Israel's duplicity in arming Daesh, as well.
DeleteAnd we know that Michael Oren who was Israel's Ambassador to the US told the Jerusalem Post that Israel so wanted Assad out and his Iranian backers weakened, that Israel would accept al-Qaeda operatives taking power in Syria.
Delete“We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”
Even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.
http://www.jpost.com/Syria-Crisis/Oren-Jerusalem-has-wanted-Assad-ousted-since-the-outbreak-of-the-Syrian-civil-war-326328.
Shiite Muslims targeted by radical Islamic terrorists, again ...
ReplyDeleteKano, Nigeria (CNN) - At least 21 people were killed and dozens more were injured Friday in a suicide attack targeting a symbolic Shiite Muslim march passing through a village in northern Nigeria's Kano state, according to an organizer.
Islamic State has claimed responsibility for an attack on a Shia Muslim mosque in Bangladesh on Thursday, in which a cleric was killed and three other people were wounded.
ReplyDeleteIn the second attack on the country’s tiny Shia community in a month, witnesses said three young men stormed into the mosque in the north-western Bogra district and shot at worshippers indiscriminately during prayers.
“The attackers entered the mosque and opened fire on the devotees after locking the main gate and then fled immediately after the shooting,” said a police official, Ahsan Habib.
Two people from nearby villages have been detained for questioning about the attack, another police officer said.
The monitoring service Site said Islamic State had claimed responsibility for the attack, just as it did for the previous bombing on the biggest Shia shrine in the country.
Muslim-majority Bangladesh has seen a rise in Islamist violence in recent months, with two foreigners, four secular writers and a publisher killed this year.
In the Wake of Paris:
ReplyDeleteRelease the 28 Pages Now!
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Nov. 17—On Jan. 7, 2015, just hours after terrorists staged an assault on the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and killed a dozen people, former U.S. Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.) joined House of Representatives Members Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and representatives of the 9/11 families, in a Capitol Hill press conference, convened to demand the immediate release of the 28-page chapter from the original 2002 Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, which documented the role of the Saudi Royal Family in financing the hijackers.
Sen. Graham’s words are even more profound and timely today, in the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris massacres by Islamic State-allied butchers. Graham told the standing-room only crowd:
The Saudis know what they did. They are not persons who are unaware of the consequences of their government’s actions. Second, the Saudis know that we know what they did! Somebody in the Federal government has read these 28 pages, someone in the Federal government has read all the other documents that have been covered up so far. And the Saudis know that.
What would you think the Saudis’ position would be, if they knew what they had done, they knew that the United States knew what they had done, and they also observed that the United States had taken a position of either passivity, or actual hostility to letting those facts be known? What would the Saudi government do in that circumstance, which is precisely where they have been for more than a decade?
Well, one, they have continued, maybe accelerated, their support for one of the most extreme forms of Islam, Wahhabism, throughout the world, particularly in the Middle East. And second, they have supported their religious fervor, with financial and other forms of support of the institutions which were going to carry out those extreme forms of Islam. Those institutions have included mosques, madrassas, and the military. Al-Qaeda was a creature of Saudi Arabia; the regional groups such as al-Shabaab have been largely creatures of Saudi Arabia; and now, ISIS is the latest creature!
Yes, I hope and I trust that the United States will crush ISIS, but if we think that is the definition of victory, we are being very naive! ISIS is a consequence, not a cause—it is a consequence of the spread of extremism, largely by Saudi Arabia, and if it is crushed, there will be another institution established, financed, supported, to carry on the cause.
So the consequences of our passivity to Saudi Arabia, have been that we have tolerated this succession of institutions,—violent, extreme, extremely hurtful to the region of the Middle East, and a threat to the world, as we saw this morning in Paris.
Sen. Graham was absolutely right on Jan. 7. His words now take on even greater significance, as the entire world is still in shock over the Friday events in Paris, and the prospect that it can happen again.
SIS is a consequence of Saudi promotion of Wahhabism and violent jihadi terrorism. To be more precise, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Nusra Front and other terrorist groupings are products of an Anglo-Saudi alliance, most publicly associated with the Al-Yamamah arms-for-oil barter deals between London and Riyadh. Al-Yamamah created an offshore slush fund for terrorism that directly fed al-Qaeda, from the start of that sinister deal in the 1980s.
ReplyDeleteThe shock of the Paris attacks has forced the Obama Administration, for the moment at least, to abandon its hate campaign against Russia and President Putin, and at least formally accept the urgency of collaboration with Moscow to crush the Islamic State.
Now it is time for a reckoning with the Anglo-Saudi apparatus that has been steering the growth of the global jihadist apparatus, through decades of funding and logistical support.
It is time to release the full 28 pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11. The release of those 28 pages should be the start of a thorough, top-down investigation into the role of the Saudi Monarchy in promoting global terrorism, starting with full disclosure of the Saudi role in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2015/4246wake_paris.html
A married woman has been sentenced to death by stoning in Saudi Arabia after admitting to adultery - while the man she had sex with has escaped with a punishment of 100 lashes.
ReplyDeleteThe 45-year-old Sri Lankan woman who had worked as a maid in Riyadh since 2013, and her partner, also a migrant from the island nation, were both convicted of adultery in August.
However, their sentences were very different.
While the woman was told by a Sharia court she would be pelted with stones until she died for cheating on her husband, her lover was handed only lashes - because he was single at the time.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3337297/Saudi-Arabia-sentences-married-maid-death-stoning-adultery-man-slept-escape-100-lashes.html#ixzz3snTmTU6V
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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DeleteSaudi Arabia is on a record pace for beheadings this year. They are advertising for 8 new executioners. I don't know if there is a union for such things.
SA has already had 85 beheadings this year and there was a Times of Israel story about a number human rights groups condemning the announcement that there were going to be 55 executed in a single day. Most of the executions are for drug offenses.
And Rufus worries about this country. (:o)
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Is there a more loathsome country and US ally than Saudi Arabia?
ReplyDelete.
DeleteNo.
Thus my comment above regarding 'Unicorns and Lollipops'. How can you form an effective coalition to fight ISIS from the group the guy mentioned. Sure, you might get the UK and France, Canada might offer a couple planes, Australia and New Zealand are always looking for a fight; but those countries are all long time allies and couched in the Western tradition. When you start talking about our Near-, Middle-, and Far-Eastern 'allies', forget about it.
The Gulf Arab states? Good lord, most of them are Sunni and they are the problem. Saudi Arabia is the spiritual source for all of these radical groups and the other countries, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, etc. support them through arms and money. The only reason any of them would actively fight any of these radical groups is if after letting the genie out of the bottle it started threatening their own little fiefdoms.
Those same states would also threaten the Shia, Iran and it clients, Syria, Hezbollah, Iraq, the only Arabs currently fighting ISIS.
Israel? Ridiculous. ISIS is low down on Israel's list of worries. They see Syria as an opportunity not a challenge. Not only has it emasculated one, Assad; it has also distracted another one, Hezbollah. In addition, it offers an opportunity to gobble up more land on the Golan Heights. We talk about Jewish settlers in the WB but there are as many in East Jerusalem and there are an estimated 24,000 of them on the Golan Heights. The Times of Israel ran a story the last time Bibi visited D.C. stating he raised the idea of annexing the land Israel controls on the Golan Heights to Obama. He didn't get a positive reply but you can see what he is thinking. The longer the war in Syria goes on, the longer he can establish new 'facts on the ground' there. He's not about to fight ISIS.
And even if Israel would, the US wouldn't want them to. Just as in past ME wars, the US has asked Israel to stay out. No ME state would ever overtly join in a coalition with Israel. That would merely provide more propaganda for ISIS.
Russia is already is Syria and will keep fighting ISIS and these other radical groups because it is in their interest to do so. They want want to keep their military installations and naval base and they want to make sure the terrorists scourge doesn't expand to Russia. They already have enough problems along those lines. However, joining any coalition led by the US would be in name only and it's likely both sides want it that way.
China? Why would China jump into the mess we have created in the ME? When you enemy is destroying himself you don't join in to help him and China has done swimmingly sitting on the sidelines.
Japan might provide some money and intelligence but I doubt much more, South Korea a few troops, South Africa I don't know.
No this whole idea of a 'grand coalition' where every nation jumps in and does his part and the US conducts from the back is nothing more than Unicorns and Lollipops.
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SOUTHWEST ASIA, November 28, 2015 — U.S. and coalition military forces have continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.
ReplyDeleteOfficials reported details of the latest strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.
Strikes in Syria
Attack and remotely piloted aircraft conducted three strikes near Ayn Isa, striking an ISIL tactical unit and destroying an ISIL tactical vehicle.
Strikes in Iraq
Bomber, fighter, attack, and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 17 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of Iraq’s government:
-- Near Baghdadi, two strikes destroyed two ISIL rocket rails and damaged a third ISIL rocket rail and denied ISIL access to terrain.
-- Near Albu Hayat, one strike struck an ISIL tactical unit.
-- Near Mosul, three strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL mortar position and four ISIL fighting positions.
-- Near Ramadi, seven strikes struck two separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed an ISIL home-made explosives cache, an ISIL vehicle, an ISIL boat, an ISIL vehicle-borne bomb, two ISIL buildings, an ISIL heavy machine gun, an ISIL ammo cache, two ISIL weapons caches, and an ISIL fighting position.
-- Near Sinjar, four strikes struck three separate tactical units and destroyed two ISIL fighting positions and three ISIL vehicles.
Definition of a ‘Strike’
A strike, as defined in the CJTF releases, means one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect for that location.
So, the officials said, having a single aircraft deliver a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike. Multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against a group of buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, with the cumulative effect of making that facility [or facilities] harder or impossible to use is also considered a single strike, task force officials said.
Accordingly, CJTF-OIR does not report the number or type of aircraft employed in each strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target.
DOD
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DeleteBy the way, what's happening in Iraq?
Have we ceded Anbar to ISIS? I haven't heard of any real offensive there since early last summer.
I saw one of these reports here the other day that said we took out an 'earthen bridge' or maybe it was a 'dirt bridge', a concept that sounds a little impractical on its face, but...
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The US ceded Iraq to the Iraqi.
DeleteThere does not seem to be much vigor on the part of the Iraqi government to battle from city to city, street to street and then building to building against the Daesh in Anbar
That said, from the type, and frequency, of airstrikes in Ramadi, I'm expecting that the Iraqis might retake that town fairly soon.
Delete
ReplyDeleteIn December, 2014 the Jerusalem Post in Israel reported the findings of a largely ignored, and politically explosive report detailing UN sightings of Israeli military together with ISIS terrorist combatants.
The UN peacekeeping force, UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), stationed since 1974 along the Golan Heights border between Syria and Israel, revealed that Israel had been working closely with Syrian opposition terrorists, including Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front and IS in the Golan Heights, and “kept close contact over the past 18 months.”
The report was submitted to the UN Security Council. Mainstream media in the US and West buried the explosive findings.
The UN documents showed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were maintaining regular contact with members of the so-called Islamic State since May of 2013.
The IDF stated that this was only for medical care for civilians, but the deception was broken when the UNDOF observers identified direct contact between IDF forces and ISIS soldiers, including giving medical care to ISIS fighters.
Observations even included the transfer of two crates from the IDF to ISIS forces, the contents of which have not been confirmed. Further the UN report identified what the Syrians label a “crossing point of forces between Israel and ISIS,” a point of concern UNDOF brought before the UN Security Council.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/guess-who-is-behind-the-islamic-state-israeli-colonel-caught-with-is-pants-down/5491582
Israeli Colonel Caught with IS Pants Down
ReplyDeleteThis was definitely not supposed to happen. It seems that an Israeli military man with the rank of colonel was “caught with IS pants down.” By that I mean he was captured amid a gaggle of so-called IS–or Islamic State or ISIS or DAESH depending on your preference–terrorists, by soldiers of the Iraqi army. Under interrogation by the Iraqi intelligence he apparently said a lot regarding the role of Netanyahu’s IDF in supporting IS.
In late October an Iranian news agency, quoting a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, reported the capture of an Israeli army colonel, named Yusi Oulen Shahak, reportedly related to the ISIS Golani Battalion operating in Iraq in the Salahuddin front. In a statement to Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency a Commander of the Iraqi Army stated, “The security and popular forces have held captive an Israeli colonel.” He added that the IDF colonel “had participated in the Takfiri ISIL group’s terrorist operations.” He said the colonel was arrested together with a number of ISIL or IS terrorists, giving the details: “The Israeli colonel’s name is Yusi Oulen Shahak and is ranked colonel in Golani Brigade… with the security and military code of Re34356578765az231434.”
First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/11/25/israeli-colonel-caught-with-is-pants-down/
I totally concur. I don't want to wake up to the call to prayer anywhere I ever go in USA - not in Hamtramck, Michigan, and not in Idaho -
ReplyDeleteNovember 28, 2015
The question we should be asking on Syrian refugees
By Thomas Lifson
Andrew McCarthy’s column on Syrian refugees and the broader topic of asylum is the read of the day. With his characteristic knowledge and incisiveness, the former prosecutor of the Blind Sheikh for the first World Trade Center bombing gets to the heart of the issue. Few excerpts will convey the importance of this work, which should be read in its whole.
What happens in France happens in Belgium. It happens in Sweden where much of Malmo, the third largest city, is controlled by Muslim immigrant gangs — emergency medical personnel attacked routinely enough that they will not respond to calls without police protection, and the police in turn unwilling to enter without back-up. Not long ago in Britain, a soldier was killed and nearly beheaded in broad daylight by jihadists known to the intelligence services; dozens of sharia courts now operate throughout the country, even as Muslim activists demand more accommodations. And it was in Germany, which green-lighted Europe’s ongoing influx of Muslim migrants, that Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new Western countries is “a crime against humanity.”
So how many of us look across the ocean at Europe and say, “Yeah, let’s bring some of that here”?
None of us with any sense. Alas, “bring it here” is the order of the day in Washington, under the control of leftists bent on fundamentally transforming America (Muslims in America overwhelmingly support Democrats) and the progressive-lite GOP, which fears the “Islamophobia” smear nearly as much as the “racist” smear.
The American people are far ahead of their elites in seeing the problem, even though our media, like the French and other Euromeadia, generally ignores the problematic aspects of not just Islamic culture, but the scriptural religion itself. Guided by a refugee policy begin by Jimmy Carter (of course!), the United States has been importing hundreds of thousands of Muslims as refugees and asylum-seekers. And the vetting is worse than useless:
DeleteWashington, in its delusional Islamophilia, vets only for ties to terrorism, which it defines as “violent extremism” in purblind denial of modern terrorism’s Islamist ideological moorings. As the deteriorating situation in Europe manifests, our actual challenge is Islamic supremacism, of which jihadist terrorism is only a subset.
For nearly a quarter-century, our bipartisan governing class has labored mightily to suppress public discussion of the undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism. Consequently, many Americans are still in the dark about sharia, classical Islam’s societal framework and legal code. We should long ago have recognized sharia as the bright line that separates authentic Muslim moderates, hungry for the West’s culture of reason and individual liberty, from Islamic supremacists, resistant to Western assimilation and insistent on incremental accommodation of Muslim law and mores.
The promotion of constitutional principles and civic education has always been foundational to the American immigration and naturalization process. We fatally undermine this process by narrowly vetting for terrorism rather than sharia adherence.
Yes, I can already hear the slander: “You are betraying our commitment to religious liberty.” Please. Even if there were anything colorable to this claim, we are talking about inquiring into the beliefs of aliens who want to enter our country, not citizens entitled to constitutional protections.
As McCarthy notes, what Americans recognize as the religious sphere is far narrower than what Islam does. Islam is a comprehensive political and social doctrine, one in utter conflict with our Constitution. And the nations from which we are importing refugees have very large majorities in favor of sharia as the organizing principle of society. Even of Muslims born in the U.S., support for sharia is alarmingly strong.
… since we are vetting for terrorism rather than sharia-adherence, and since we know a significant number of Muslims are sharia-adherent, we are missing the certainty that we are importing an ever-larger population hostile to our society and our Constitution — a population that has been encouraged by influential Islamist scholars and leaders to form Muslim enclaves throughout the West.
This leads seamlessly to the second reason why the influx of refugees is calamitous. Not only are we vetting for the wrong thing, we are ignoring the dynamics of jihadism. The question is not whether we are admitting Muslims who currently have ties to terrorist organizations; it is whether we are admitting Muslims who are apt to become violent jihadists after they settle here.
Adherence to Islam is what sociologists and criminologists like to call a “risk factor,” for accepting the doctrines of sharia leads one toward violence. Not in every case. And not right away. But the very substance of the doctrine is such that we are justified in screening for it. As McCarthy concludes:
...there is nothing obligatory about any immigration policy, including asylum. There is no global right to come here. American immigration policy is supposed to serve the national interests of the United States. Right now, American immigration policy is serving the interests of immigrants at the expense of American national security and the financial security of distressed American workers.
Hat tip: Ed Lasky
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/11/the_question_we_should_be_asking_on_syrian_refugees.html
Nothing much is going to happen to ISIS from the USA until we have a new President. Obama is turning his sights now on another try to take our guns.....
ReplyDeleteNovember 28, 2015
Obama Spares ISIS Oil Facilities to Save the Earth
By Daniel John Sobieski
One may be thankful that President Harry S. Truman didn’t have to file an environmental impact statement before he dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, acts which shortened and won World War II and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
If you wondered why our air campaign against ISIS was inept, consider the statement by Mike Morell, speaking on the “Charlie Rose” program Tuesday night that we didn’t take out the oil facilities that ISIS was using to become the best financed terrorist organization in history because of our concern the environment would be harmed. As the Washington Times reported:
A former CIA director said the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State has been reluctant to attack oil wells controlled by the extremist group partly because of environmental concerns.
We didn’t go after oil wells -- actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure,” said former spy chief Michael Morell, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
So much for the campaign to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, giving credence to the adage that there is no specific and credible evidence of intelligence in the White House. You win wars by breaking things and killing the enemy and letting the sea levels take care of themselves. You don’t win by worrying that destroying an enemy’s infrastructure might melt a glacier in a hundred years.
Our delusional president has embraced the line that climate change is our greatest national security threat............
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/obama_spares_isis_oil_facilities_to_save_the_eaarth.html
As galopin2 once said "With the 2nd Amendment we got nothing".
ReplyDelete(that may not be exact but it is awfully close)
Grrrr....
Delete"with OUT the 2nd Amendment we got nothing"
.
DeleteWell, you were right. It was 'awfully close'.
.
:0:0:):)
ReplyDeleteNovember 28, 2015
Progressive heads exploding over gay marriage ban on tribal lands
By Thomas Lifson
What’s a prog to do when confronted with the failure of a favorite victim group to get with the program on catering to another favorite victim group? Felicia Fonseca of the Associated Press reports on the politically incorrect response of many Indian Native American tribes to the same-sex marriage diktat of the Supreme Court (they are ignoring it, and they have the right to do so):
Cleo Pablo married her longtime partner when gay weddings became legal in Arizona and looked forward to the day when her wife and their children could move into her home in the small Native American community outside Phoenix where she grew up.
That day never came. The Ak-Chin Indian Community doesn't recognize same-sex marriages and has a law that prohibits unmarried couples from living together. So Pablo voluntarily gave up her tribal home and now is suing the tribe in tribal court to have her marriage validated.
That’s right: the U.S. Constitution (and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it) does not apply to tribal lands, which theoretically are sovereign nations. It’s not just untaxed gasoline and casinos at issue; it is the latest inventions of the progressive mindset ratified by jurists not being enforced..........................
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/11/progressive_heads_exploding_over_gay_marriage_ban_on_tribal_lands.html
Tribal Court - these American Indian (as they wish to be called now) tribal courts are about the only 'alternative courts' I might support, unlike Quirt, who somehow how has out maneuvered himself into defending alternative Sharia Courts in the USA, the nitwit.
(Quirk is much better with realpolitik than he has ever been with legal affairs )
Delete.
DeleteYou continue to flaunt your ignorance here.
.
I knew Dr. Ben Carson is a man of good sense, and a quick study, and he's still my guy, though I don't think he's going to be the nominee.
ReplyDeleteI hold out hope for the VP slot for Dr. Carson though.
Carson After Camp Tour: Absorb Syrian Refugees in Mideast
By omar akour, associated press
AZRAQ REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan — Nov 28, 2015, 9:24 AM ET
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Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said Saturday, after visiting a camp for Syrian refugees, that the displaced should be absorbed by Middle Eastern countries, with the international community sending aid and "encouragement" to the host nations.
Carson toured the Azraq camp in northern Jordan under heavy Jordanian security, with journalists barred. Carson's campaign also limited access, not providing his itinerary and releasing only a short statement after the camp visit.
The candidate has repeatedly struggled to discuss international affairs as they become a greater focus in the 2016 presidential contest. Advisers have conceded that his foreign policy fluency isn't where it needs to be and have expressed hope missions like his two-day trip to Jordan will help change that.............
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/carson-camp-tour-absorb-syrian-refugees-mideast-35460495
Only took Dr. Ben two days to get this one right......he's a quick study, very intelligent guy.
For awhile I thought FEMA camps might be an alternative, until the wars settle down, then send them back.
DeleteBut no, don't think so now.
I can see the prog protests in my mind -
"Free the noble Syrian 'prisoners' from the FEMA gulag", etc, etc.....
Here's a glowing report from Hamtramck, Michigan - they have lowered the decibel level of the calls to prayers - first Syrian refugees arrive - one, and elderly gentleman, has fallen in love with America - but says only bring over those with families - not the single young men -
ReplyDeleteHopefully the second and third generation will still share his feelings.....but the studies on the subject say they will not.....
Refugee debate stokes tensions in Hamtramck, America's Muslim capital
Mayor says city is ready to welcome more Syrian refugees as national politicians raise security concerns in wake of Paris attacks
New City Councilman of Hamtramck, Saad Almasmari, 28, far right, talks with community members Photo: Salwan Georges
Nick Allen
By Nick Allen, Hamtramck, Michigan
3:50PM GMT 28 Nov 2015
Shortly before dawn in Hamtramck, Michigan, the first call to prayer reverberates through the narrow rows of snow-dusted white clapboard houses as American flags flutter on porches in the chill wind off Lake Erie.
Around the corner from the Al-Islah Mosque the five daily calls can be heard at the Martha Washington bakery. As customers trickle in one non-Muslim woman refers to it as "that noise". She's also not a fan of the niqabs now regularly seen in the high street.
"My ancestors died so I wouldn't have to wear one of those and I never will," she says.
A woman walks past the Polish Market in downtown Hamtramck, MichiganA woman walks past the Polish Market in downtown Hamtramck, Michigan Photo: Salwan Georges
Hamtramck, a working class city of 22,000 people near Detroit, is a national curiosity in America. Earlier this month it became the first city in the country to elect a majority Muslim council. The US Census does not record religion but demographers believe it is also now the first American city where more than 50 per cent of the population is Muslim.
It has four mosques and 27 languages are spoken in its schools. The young lady serving burgers in McDonald's wears a headscarf under her baseball cap. Many shop signs are in Arabic, and so is some of the graffiti.
The vast majority of people in Hamtramck, both Muslim and non-Muslim, are proud of their new status as "the most diverse city in the US" and want it to be a beacon for multicultural America. Inside City Hall a plaque celebrates the annual Arabic Festival and a sign reads "Middle East: Coming to Hamtramck."
New City Councilman of Hamtramck, Saad Almasmari, 28, left, talks to a woman who stopped to take a photo of a popular mural of Yemeni faces by artist Dasic Fernandez on the side of Sheeba restaurant in Hamtramck.New City Councilman of Hamtramck, Saad Almasmari, 28, left, talks to a woman who stopped to take a photo of a popular mural of Yemeni faces by artist Dasic Fernandez on the side of Sheeba restaurant in Hamtramck. Photo: Salwan Georges
But that status has drawn Hamtramck to the forefront of a fierce debate over immigration that is engulfing US politics.
And there are signs of underlying tensions in the community.................
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/12022583/Refugee-debate-stokes-tensions-in-Hamtramck-Americas-Muslim-capital.html
Please, the Second Amendment?
ReplyDeleteIt is a farce, an artifice to the pretense that anyone still has any meaningful individual rights. It would better if they just collected the guns and then everyone would wake up and realize what should be obvious and the final delusion of liberty and freedom would collapse. Look at any ‘“civilian” police force today and tell me what you and your personal weapons can do for you.
Every government agency is armed to the teeth and the US military is not a citizen army that would resist an illegal order. They are the Praetorian Guard and the corporate foreign legion.
The second amendment it a gummed down dumbed down tease to allow you to feel free and you are not.
If you had the right to own a TOW missile, you might have a point, but you don’t and you have no more right to bear arms than you do to go occupy one of those government building that you allegedly own. It’s over. Wake up.
DeleteOn the previous post, Rufus put up a run of comments on the real first “thanksgiving”. It is all just another lie and a myth used to delude and pacify the herd. The second amendment is a far more cynical charade because it has lethal consequences that far surpass the wished for power of a phantom citizen army that would come to our rescue in the face of rogue federal forces or in the event that some foreign entity after smoting the US military would be as much as dinged by roused Idaho Irregulars.
Delete.
DeleteTrue enough.
You saw what they brought against 2 young punks that used a pressure cooker bomb in Boston. They shut the entire city down before bringing in the troops and the armor.
Organizing a resistance on Facebook?
:o)
.
The Facebook revolutionaries are a comical diversion from reality.
Delete.
ReplyDeleteBy Nick Allen, Hamtramck, Michigan
3:50PM GMT 28 Nov 2015
Shortly before dawn in Hamtramck, Michigan, the first call to prayer reverberates through the narrow rows of snow-dusted white clapboard houses as American flags flutter on porches in the chill wind off Lake Erie...
Nick Allen reporting from Hamtramck, MI.
That must be a pretty stiff chill wind blowing off of Lake Erie, Nick. Hamtramck is pretty much surrounded by Detroit and Lake Erie is about 50 miles to the South.
.
If there weren't chill winds a-blowing off Lake Erie there wouldn't be snow dusted white clapboard houses in Hamtramck, it would be raining.
DeleteThe usual air flow there is east-north east.
What you got against Nick Allen, huh ?
I think you should consider moving to Hamrtramck, Quirk.
DeleteIt's not that far away.
You could still drive round and round Detroit.
Being called to prayer five times a day/365/year might just be the thing that would set a guy like you on the straight and narrow.
;)
.
DeleteI explained. You can't even get a good gwumpkie there any more. All the Poles moved out decades ago. The tradition is still there but not the people. Or the food. As I recall, the Poles that remain only make up about 11% of the population there now. They still make thousands of paczkis there for Fat Tuesday, but they are a pale shadow of the ones we used to get when I was a kid.
Sad, but Hamtramck's best days are probably past. But wait for another 25 years and they will start gentrifying it. Young people are already starting to move in.
.
ReplyDeletePutin, citing national security, signs Turkey sanctions decree
The decree, which entered into force immediately, said charter flights from Russia to Turkey would be banned, that tour firms would be told not to sell any holidays there, and that unspecified Turkish imports would be outlawed, and Turkish firms and nationals have their economic activities halted or curbed.
"The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat," Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said hours before the decree was published.
A senior Turkish official told Reuters the sanctions would only worsen the standoff between Moscow and Ankara.
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/29/us-mideast-crisis-turkey-russia-kremlin-idUSKBN0TH0H720151129#vtbvJIhK1l76Uhtk.99
Idaho 38
ReplyDeleteTexas State 31
This game may have saved Coach Patrino's ass.
Defense played a decent game for a change. One magnificent goal line stand from the 5.
4 tries and Texas State couldn't get it over the line.
Really exciting game all the way......we were never behind, but tied a couple of times.
That's it for this season, Vandal Fans.
We ended up with four wins, and there were two games we lost by the bounce of the ball.
Go Vandals !
Boosting the Vandals Builds Character !
ReplyDeleteCol. Steve Warren, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, using another name for ISIS, which is also called the Islamic State. "Airstrikes alone won't defeat them. We need indigenous ground forces too.
That combination has liberated Tikrit, Baiji, Sinjar, and has reclaimed a quarter of the territory ISIL once held."
The U.S. has had more success fighting ISIS in Iraq than it has battling it in Syria. There are many reasons for that, but perhaps the most important one is that in Iraq the U.S. has legitimate partners on the ground that it can support from the sky. There's been no such synergy in Syria; Washington has no relationship with Assad, diplomatic, military, or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteIndia's Modi Poised to Make or Break Climate Talks in Paris
Natalie Obiko Pearson
November 26, 2015 — 10:30 AM PST
MALAYSIA-ASEAN-DIPLOMACY-SUMMIT
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Photographer: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images
Paris talks shaping up to be Modi's biggest diplomatic test
India can meet emissions target without doing anything new
At the climate talks in Paris next week, all eyes will be on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Developing nations are looking for him to champion their interests in winning funds to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Richer countries including the U.S. are wary that India could end up scuttling any deal.
For Modi, it’s an opportunity to claim his spot among the world’s top statesmen crafting a solution to one of the biggest risks facing humanity -- and he’s unlikely to pass that up.
“He wants to project India -- and himself -- as a problem solver, not a blocker," said Sreeram Sundar Chaulia, dean of the Jindal School of International Affairs near New Delhi. “Modi realizes that issues like climate change, transnational terrorism and multilateral trade are the big questions of our times, the defining global-governance crises."
So far Modi’s approach has amounted to more style over substance. His top diplomat has called the talks India’s biggest negotiation of the year, a new website is providing round-the-clock updates on India’s green credentials, and Modi has cast himself as the standard bearer for developing nations.
Kerry Spat
Yet at the same time, Modi has set a target for reducing emissions that’s so low the world’s third-largest polluter will meet it without committing to anything new...............
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-26/india-s-modi-poised-to-make-or-break-climate-talks-in-paris
I like Modi. He's tough on the moslems. The Pakistanis are always up to some shit. And the other day the first ISIS supporters that I've read about made a big demo and stew in India, all masked up, and chanting death crap, as usual.
By the way, the shrinking of the glaciers in Glacier National Park and other areas out west started way before the coming of the automobile.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has it right - be tough with moslems, not so much with emissions. He knows that -
ReplyDeleteClimate Change Will Not Be Dangerous for a Long Time
Slower warming than predicted gives the world time to develop better energy technologies
By Matt Ridley on November 27, 2015
The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time.
This “lukewarm” option has been boosted by recent climate research, and if it is right, current policies may do more harm than good. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other bodies agree that the rush to grow biofuels, justified as a decarbonization measure, has raised food prices and contributed to rainforest destruction. Since 2013 aid agencies such as the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have restricted funding for building fossil-fuel plants in Asia and Africa; that has slowed progress in bringing electricity to the one billion people who live without it and the four million who die each year from the effects of cooking over wood fires.
In 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was predicting that if emissions rose in a “business as usual” way, which they have done, then global average temperature would rise at the rate of about 0.3 degree Celsius per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade). In the 25 years since, temperature has risen at about 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, depending on whether surface or satellite data is used. The IPCC, in its most recent assessment report, lowered its near-term forecast for the global mean surface temperature over the period 2016 to 2035 to just 0.3 to 0.7 degree C above the 1986–2005 level. That is a warming of 0.1 to 0.2 degree C per decade, in all scenarios, including the high-emissions ones.
At the same time, new studies of climate sensitivity—the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels from 0.03 to 0.06 percent in the atmosphere—have suggested that most models are too sensitive. The average sensitivity of the 108 model runs considered by the IPCC is 3.2 degrees C. As Pat Michaels, a climatologist and self-described global warming skeptic at the Cato Institute testified to Congress in July, certain studies of sensitivity published since 2011 find an average sensitivity of 2 degrees C.
Such lower sensitivity does not contradict greenhouse-effect physics. The theory of dangerous climate change is based not just on carbon dioxide warming but on positive and negative feedback effects from water vapor and phenomena such as clouds and airborne aerosols from coal burning. Doubling carbon dioxide levels, alone, should produce just over 1 degree C of warming. These feedback effects have been poorly estimated, and almost certainly overestimated, in the models......
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-will-not-be-dangerous-for-a-long-time/
If we are going into a solar minimum, and heading into some real cooling, all this may look simply silly in down the road.
The oceans are huge. They soak up a lot of the CO2.
There's a lot of money in 'climate change', that make over description from the former 'global warming'.
With 'climate change' we may need to spend trillions on the weather, regardless of whether the temps are going up or down.
We've got to do something !
"Daddy, daddy, daddy ! We can't do that ! I'm kicking you out of our Party !"
ReplyDeleteMarina Le Pen, perhaps --
Monsieur Le Pen Wants to Guillotine Terrorists in France
Nothing says ‘Europe’ like ‘no capital punishment.’ But the Paris attacks have right-wingers talking about bringing back the death penalty.
PARIS — With France still reeling from the Nov. 13 terror attacks, one infamous French politician has made a bizarre, Donald Trumpian statement by calling for the return of the guillotine to France.
“We must restore the death penalty for terrorists, with decapitation,” former right-wing National Front (FN) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen told a press conference in the west Parisian suburb of Saint Cloud.
OK, so maybe he didn’t use the word “guillotine,” but what other decapitation method has existed in the country? Most commonly associated with the fate of Marie Antoinette and other doomed members of the 18th-century aristocracy, Charles Dickens described it with cynical irony in A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack.”
The gruesome device was retired officially in 1977, following the execution of a convicted murderer named Hamida Djandoubi. Four years later, the country threw out the death penalty altogether.......
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/25/monsieur-le-pen-wants-to-guillotine-terrorists-in-france.html
Many of the jihadis richly deserve the death penalty.
Why not give them a cheap, absolutely certain exit ?
I'd vote for it.
Daily Life
ReplyDeleteYou'll Never Guess The Most Charitable Nation In The World
November 28, 20156:16 AM ET
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/11/28/457101304/youll-never-guess-the-most-charitable-nation-in-the-world?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news
It's not the USA, but we came out well.
Here is the 'climate change' we need be worried about -
ReplyDeleteIt will bring the glaciers, which have been receding since around 1800 AD, back too --
November 29, 2015
Surviving an imminent ice age
By S. Fred Singer
Solar observers predict a “Little Ice Age (LIA)” to arrive before 2100. While expert economists confirm that a modestly warmer climate benefits both health and human prosperity, a colder climate generally spells more sickness and poses real danger to agricultural yields—with consequent famines and mass starvation. These calamities can be overcome – through adequate and timely preparation of energy supplies, water projects, and croplands.
There is some urgency in preparing now for the possibility of such a cold period, similar to the LIA that prevailed off and on during 1400-1800 AD. It is likely then that tropical regions will end up as the major sources of food and be called upon to supply the rest of the world.
Short-term energy (till 2100):
No foreseeable problem; known reserves of fossil fuels appear to be adequate – even with a world population peaking at around 9 billion
Long-term energy (till 3000 AD and beyond):
No real problem, if nuclear technology is encouraged to commercialize the use of inert Uranium-238 and Thorium through “breeder reactors” -- especially Molten-Salt-cooled fast-neutron Reactors (MSR) and perhaps hybrid fusion-fission. Pure fusion reactors, if perfected, could provide a useful back-up technology
This leaves the problem of adequate water supplies and crop land..............
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/surviving_an_imminent_ice_age_.html
India: Muslim cleric says gender equality “un-Islamic,” women “fit only to deliver children”
ReplyDeleteNovember 28, 2015 6:31 pm By Robert Spencer 16 Comments
“Musliar, the chief of All India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama, said women have no mental strength and the power to control the universe, ‘which lies in the hands of men….Gender equality is something which is never going to be a reality. It is against Islam, humanity and was intellectually wrong.'”
Where did he get this idea? From the Qur’an: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” (4:34)
A P Aboobacker74
“Kerala: Sunni leader says ‘women only fit to deliver children’; calls gender equality ‘un-Islamic,'” PTI, November 28, 2015:
Sunni leader Kanthapuram A P Aboobacker Musliar, the chief of All India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama, said women have no mental strength and the power to control the universe, “which lies in the hands of men.”
In a controversial remark, Sunni leader Kanthapuram A P Aboobacker Musliar on Saturday described as “un-Islamic” the concept of gender equality and said that women could never equal men as “they are fit only to deliver children”.
Musliar, the chief of All India Sunni Jamiyyathul Ulama, said women have no mental strength and the power to control the universe, “which lies in the hands of men.”
“Gender equality is something which is never going to be a reality. It is against Islam, humanity and was intellectually wrong,” he said while speaking at a camp of Muslim Students Federation (MSF) in Kozhikode.
“Women can never equal men. They are fit only to deliver children. Women cannot withstand crisis situations,” he said. He wondered if there was even a single woman among thousands of cardiac surgeons.
The 76-year-old Islamic scholar’s remarks against reservation for women in elections had set off another controversy recently. He had said 50% reservation of seats for women in civic polls was “too high” but retracted the statement later when it became controversial.
Referring to the ongoing debates over allowing girls and boys to share seats in colleges, Musliar said it was “part of a calculated move to destroy Islam and culture.” He also rubbished recent allegations regarding sexual exploitations at Madrasas and asked those who raised allegations to bring evidence to prove it.
A controversy had erupted recently after a woman journalist wrote an account on her Facebook wall about the alleged sexual abuse of young boys and girls in Madrasas.
Deletehttp://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/11/india-muslim-cleric-says-gender-equality-un-islamic-women-fit-only-to-deliver-children
************
Sweden: Community torn apart as arrival of migrants prompts running battles in streets
By Robert Spencer on Nov 28, 2015 07:00 pm
Sweden: Community torn apart as arrival of migrants prompts running battles in streets
Multiculturalism in full flower. “Community torn apart as arrival of migrants prompts running battles in streets,” by Nick Gutteridge, Express, November 28, 2015: Outraged protestors threatened children and hurled stones at sheltered housing in apparent retaliation for vandalism and burglaries carried out by newly arrived refugees. The growing chaos engulfing the once tranquil village of […]
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Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison falsely claims “not one” refugee engaged in jihad terror
By Robert Spencer on Nov 28, 2015 06:44 pm
Muslim Brotherhood-linked Congressman Keith Ellison falsely claims “not one” refugee engaged in jihad terror
Ellison, who accepted money from the Muslim American Society, a Muslim Brotherhood organization, to finance his pilgrimage to Mecca, is banking here upon the ignorance of the American public and the eagerness of the mainstream media to maintain them in that status. “Muslim-American Congressman Claims ‘Not One’ Refugee Engaged in Terrorism — Let’s Check the […]
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Read at Jihad Watch
I knew Keith Elllison would turn out to be a shitter when I first reed about him.
DeleteLet's face it, the Swedes of Minnesota aren't the sharpest knives in the utensil drawer.
Hillary's concierge, Huma, also has heavy links to the Moslem Brotherhood.
Wake up, America !
read about him
DeleteWake up, America, no more moslems --
ReplyDeleteNovember 29, 2015
Islam, rape, and the fate of Western women
By Carol Brown
Muslim men rape non-Muslim women (and girls) in disproportionately high numbers in countries with growing Muslim minority populations. Rape of infidel women is part of Islamic law and Islamic tradition. As such, it’s been going on for centuries.
This article is about the current threat Muslim rapists pose to non-Muslim women. In order to keep this article to a reasonable length, the focus is on the rape epidemic in Europe, but suffice it to say rape jihad is a gruesome reality the world over.
Perhaps there is no European country where rape has reached epidemic proportions as it has in Sweden, a country now known as the “rape capital” of Europe. Sweden ranks Number 2 on the global list of rape countries. From 1975 to present, rape in Sweden has increased 1472%. Based on this model, it is now projected that one in four Swedish women (and sometimes little girls) will be raped. Rape of men and boys is also on the rise.
Making this nightmarish situation worse, the authorities hide what’s going on, make outlandish excuses for it, and/or side with the rapists. Dhimmitude has taken hold. Few, if any, will state the truth: that the majority of rapes in Sweden are committed by Muslim males.
Of note, a large number of Muslim rapists are under the age of 18 and, if brought to “justice,” receive exceedingly light sentences (even lighter than the absurd non-punishment adults receive) because they are considered juveniles. And so they are released back onto the streets in a flash. To commit more rape. Related to this issue is the fact that many Muslim men in Sweden are classified as “unaccompanied children” when they arrive.
The sickness that has taken over Swedish culture is so shocking that in one case where a Somali Muslim was found guilty of raping a dying woman to death (which is horrific enough), the judicial system refused to send him back to Somalia because they determined he would be just as much a risk to women in Somalia as he would be to women in Sweden. And so Swedish women were disregarded out of deference to Somali women.
(To learn more about the rape epidemic in Sweden see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.).................
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/islam_rape_and_the_fate_of_western_women.html