Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

The Lab Rat Who Knew Too Much

Amazing Polly | October 23, 2019

It’s a wild one!

Starting from the strange death of 33 year old tech entrepreneur Erin Valenti, I take you on a tour of our real life Matrix of control.

PTSD, Technocracy, real Mind Control tech, human trafficking, “Future Faking,” reputation management and more.

Find me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/99freemind

Bitchute here: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/99Fr…

My website: http://www.amazingpolly.net/

References: Erin Valenti, Heavy: https://heavy.com/news/2019/10/erin-v… .

World Economic Forum Optogenetics: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/1…

Future Faking: https://blogs.psychcentral.com/psycho…

American Addiction Center: https://americanaddictioncenters.org/…

Facebook to acquire CTRL-Labs: https://www.geekwire.com/2019/faceboo…

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

More on the Quincy Institute: Don’t Mention Israel

By Philip Giraldi | American Herald Tribune | October 21, 2019

I have written frequently about how the overwhelming deference to Israeli perceptions not only distorts U.S. foreign policy, it also corrupts discourse regarding genuine national interests at all levels. The mainstream media, where Zionist journalists and editors exist in grossly disproportionate numbers, has long been a source of fake news about the Middle East, successfully obscuring Israel’s abominable record of war crimes and ethnic cleansing. The media lies overlap and often become self-propagating, with one lie from the likes of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC being employed to confirm the veracity of another similar lie being floated by someone like Jake Tapper on CNN.

So, the media, which is part of the Establishment and has a vested interest in promoting the status quo, is part of the “intellectual” underpinning of the government policies that it prefers. And it is joined by a more powerful and secretive ally in the form of the numerous think tanks that have sprung up in Washington like diseased mushrooms over the past twenty years. It is the think tanks that send ideologically driven “experts” to testify in front of congressional committees regarding policy, that draft legislation for lazy legislators, and that host well-funded panel discussions in which they air their biased views on the state of the nation.

I have written several times about the new think tank kid on the block the Quincy Institute, which is currently planning on “launching” during the month of November. Quincy, which claims to represent “Responsible Statecraft,” is largely funded by George Soros and the Charles Koch, both of whom have considerable negative baggage, and one is scarcely ever wrong when positing that compromising one’s views in exchange for money and celebrity is what Washington is all about.

My most recent rant on Quincy involved an article by the organization’s president, Professor Andrew Bacevich, whose books I have previously admired. His piece was entitled “President Trump, Please End the American Era in the Middle East.” The article appeared as one of Bacevich’s regular weekly contributions to The American Conservative (TAC) website under the rubric “Realism and Restraint.” I cited it as a good example of how self-censorship by authors works.

The article particularly focused on the foreign policy pronouncements of Bret Stephens, the resident neocon who writes for The New York Times. Stephens, per Bacevich, has been urging constant war in the Middle East and worrying lest “we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the American era in the Middle East.”

Bacevich wrote the article without once mentioning Israel in spite of the fact that Stephens is an arch-propagandist for the Jewish state, a clearly deliberate omission that was noted not only by me but also by a number of comments from other readers. As the TAC site where the article appeared is heavily moderated, one suspects that additional, more vitriolic comments were not allowed to appear.

Bacevich is clearly on a roll. He followed up the piece on TAC with a stunningly ridiculous propaganda piece entitled “Foreign governments are messing with our elections the old-fashioned way” that appeared last week in the Boston Globe.

The article begins: “President Trump’s record as a unifier is spotty at best. Yet on at least one issue, he has helped forge a solid consensus: Americans are not going to tolerate further outside meddling in their politics. In discussing next year’s elections, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell recently put it this way: ‘Any foreign country that messes with us is going to have a serious problem in return.’ The integrity of our electoral system is sacrosanct. Consider yourself warned, Mr. Putin. The Mueller report showed conclusively that in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election Russian hackers had done plenty of messing. Republicans and Democrats alike (if not President Trump himself) are now intent on preventing any recurrence of such interference, whether by Russia or other mischief-making interlopers such as Iran or China. Patriotic citizens must hope that those efforts will succeed.”

Let’s pause right there. Any article that pretends to be a serious discussion of America’s relationship with foreign powers should avoid quoting Mitch McConnell, who is possibly one of the slimiest politicians currently on display in the Senate. All his judgments are conditioned not by the national interest but rather by political considerations that relate to advancing his own personal agenda as well as the agenda of establishment Republicans. If the “integrity” of the U.S. electoral system is truly threatened, nearly all of the damage comes from inside the system, where corruption is rampant at all levels.

And, one might also note that the Mueller report may have demonstrated that in 2016 there were certain intrusions and manipulations by entities that may or may not have been connected to the Russian government, but it never revealed any plan by the Kremlin to influence voters in any serious way or change the results. It has not even been conclusively demonstrated that the Russians hacked anyone as the FBI has never been able to examine the Democratic National Committee computers. In fact, it is widely recognized that the Russian click-bait efforts on social media were insignificant and had no influence on the outcome. Overturning election results is called “regime change” and it is something that the United States does regularly, not the Russians.

Bacevich continues, “Yet those same citizens would do well to consider the other ways in which foreign governments, many of them ostensible friends, have habitually interfered in our politics. To do so, those governments do not employ the latest innovations in information warfare, waged via social media. No, they mess with our politics the old-fashioned way, distributing vast sums of money to buy influence.”

The professor makes a good point, that money in politics can create access and buy influence, but he then goes on to cite Saudi Arabia as a prime example of that specific form of corruption. He claims that the Saudis spent in 2018 alone “$33 million in their attempts to influence US policy” and wonders “… why the pervasive use of Saudi money to influence U.S. policy is any more tolerable than Moscow’s campaign to tilt the outcome of a presidential election in favor of its preferred candidate.”

Bacevich concludes with “Interested in salvaging the remnants of integrity that survive in American democracy? Well, it won’t be enough to stop the hackers employed by Moscow or Beijing or Tehran (even assuming that it’s possible to do so). To prevent foreign governments from mucking around where they are not wanted will require a concerted effort to get outside money out of American politics altogether. The moneychangers need to be ousted from the temple.”

With this recent series of somewhat related articles Professor Bacevich, unfortunately, defines himself as just another run-of-the-mill American hack propagandist. The enemies list includes Russia, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia but it deliberately avoids mentioning that country the more than any other interferes in U.S. politics. That country is, of course, Israel.

The $33 million that the Saudis allegedly spend on lobbying the U.S. is little more than chump change for the Israel Lobby, which is awash with money donated by Jewish oligarchs like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who came up with three times that much and more in 2016 to insure that America would have a solidly pro-Israel foreign policy. The Lobby plays with hundreds of millions of dollars annually, costs the U.S. taxpayer billions in various free rides for the Jewish state and has hundreds of full-time employees in groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

Andrew Bacevich is a smart man and he knows well that what I have written about above is correct. He knows first-hand that Israel’s interference in U.S. politics is highly organized, generously funded and ongoing at every level of government to obscure what Israel actually represents while also inter alia making it illegal to criticize the Jewish state in any way. Professor Bacevich fully well knows those things even as he pontificates about Americans not tolerating foreign influence in our politics, so why doesn’t he tell the truth for a change? Is it all about the Quincy Institute’s Benjamins?

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , , | 4 Comments

UK protestors face jail for campaigning against Israel owned arms factory

MEMO | October 23, 2019

Seven people are facing the prospect of three months in prison for protesting against an Israeli-owned arms factory based in the UK.

The case against the seven activists will be heard in a Folkestone Magistrates Court Kent today. They are expected to plead not guilty of the charge of Aggravated Trespass, an offence which carries a maximum sentence of three months in prison. A number of the activists are locally connected to Kent.

The activists were arrested in August following a two-day occupation at the Elbit-Instro arms factory, which is newly situated in Discovery Park business park in Sandwich, Kent. Its parent company Elbit Systems supplies military equipment to Israel and activists claim that its products are the “backbone” of Israel’s drone fleet.

Elbit Systems also supplies weapons to a number of other countries accused of committing war crimes including Saudi Arabia. The weapons manufacturer is Israel’s largest privately-owned arms company. Campaign groups say that it provides 85 per cent of Israel’s drones which were used to attack Gaza’s civilian population repeatedly. Drones were used during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge which killed over 2,300 civilians, including over 500 children.

A statement released by the Stop Elbit-Instro Defendants Solidarity Campaign said: “The skilled engineers of Elbit-Instro could be working to make the world a better place, yet instead they are employed to build machines that incinerate children.” It added: “Shame on them all.”

According to the campaign group locals resent the arms manufacturer and relations between Elbit-Instro and Kent residents soured following its attempted take-over of an airport site.

A spokesperson for East Kent Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: “There are urgent questions about whether Instro’s specialist targeting technology is employed by Israel for targeting Gazan civilians every Friday during the Great Return March civil rights demonstrations, or in maintaining the surveillance of Palestinians along its illegal separation barrier, enabling the occupation’s apartheid infrastructure.”

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | 2 Comments

OPCW put lid on key evidence in Douma chemical incident – watchdog whistleblower

RT | October 23, 2019

The international chemical weapons watchdog likely skewed its own investigation of the 2018 chemical weapons incident in Douma, Syria to come to a predetermined decision, a damning conclusion based on whistleblower testimony said.

The April 2018 incident in the Damascus suburb was quickly blamed on the Syrian government by the West. Within days, the US, the UK and France launched barrages of cruise missiles in retaliation. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international chemical weapons watchdog, later backed the justification, all but pointing the finger at Syria in its final report, which was released in March.

Now a panel of experts says the report was based on a flawed conclusion and likely deliberately steered toward the West-favored outcome. The accusation is based on evidence and testimony of an OPCW investigator, who came forward with damning evidence that his own organization had breached its mission.

After talking to the whistleblower and examining internal reports, text exchanges and other evidence, the panel was convinced that “key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion,” it said in a statement.

The statement said the OPCW took effort to exclude dissenting investigators and silence their attempts to raise concerns about the report, which is “a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention.” The experts called on the organization to revisit its investigation and allow those not agreeing with the conclusion put in the final report to voice their concerns without fear of reprisal.

The panel convened by the Courage Foundation, which accepts donations for the legal defense of whistleblowers and journalists that report on leaks, includes several prominent specialists and public figures, including José Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who served as the OPCW’s first Director General before being strong-armed from the office by US superhawk John Bolton.

Bustani said the whistleblower confirmed his doubts about the report, which “seemed incoherent at best” right from the start.

“My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyze a process by which the Organization can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”

The panel did not make public the name of the whistleblower or any previously unpublished evidence of the OPCW’s alleged misconduct. WikiLeaks, whose editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson was a member of the panel, re-printed a draft engineering assessment penned by an OPCW investigator, which was leaked in May. The document rejects the claim that chlorine cylinders, which were used for delivery of the toxic gas in Douma, had been dropped from the air, which was used as a key argument in accusing the Syrian army for the attack.

The OPCW did not challenge the authenticity of the document, but stood by its conclusions on the Douma incident.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Has climate change jumped the shark?

Climate Discussion Nexus | October 23, 2019

You might not think so, with time running out for deniers (again) except perhaps as psychiatric patients. But there are signs of fatigue with it in the political system. In Australia, a senior Labour figure has caused turmoil in his party by suggesting they not run in the next election on the hugely ambitious plans that cost them the last one. And when CNN and the New York Times sponsored the 4th, 3-hour debate among contenders for the Democratic nomination, the moderators didn’t ask a single question about climate and the candidates didn’t make it an issue. You might think it’s because everyone agrees. But what if it’s because nobody has anything useful to suggest and most people secretly don’t care?

Voters claim to be anti-global-warming, of course. But as we learned including from the Yellow Vest upheaval in France, and Canadians’ views on carbon taxes, and any number of similar issues in other countries, citizens aren’t willing to pay any significant price to take action against greenhouse gases, suggesting they don’t really think there’s a problem.

Except when all-in politicians push the agenda too far. For instance deep blue California’s governor is now in big political trouble over high gas prices and unreliable power. And remember, high prices for less available energy is a feature not a bug of the climate alarmist movement, soothing talk of wind power notwithstanding.

The problem isn’t really the cost of alternative energy, because except by accident politicians are not willing to raise the price of energy to levels that would discourage its use. There was some kerfuffle over a study finding that green energy policies cost Britain £9 billion per year, or £340 per household. But while an increase in energy bills means hardship to the poor, Britain is rich, and most households may resent the extra cost but are not unable to pay it. The problem is how much more it’s going to cost to try to get renewables up from their current trivial share… or what happens when you just can’t. (Wind farms, like solar farms, have thus far been cherry-picking sites.) On which politicians have little to say that is not both stale and unconvincing.

The hardcore believe that if voters are not willing to pay high carbon taxes and otherwise do without the conveniences of modern life, they are short-sighted idiots and democracy itself must give way in this climate emergency. Meanwhile most voters are happy just to virtue-signal, if only to avoid fights with their grade-schoolers trained to correct their pronunciation of Thunberg (it’s Toon-BUIY not THUN-berg). But they simply aren’t convinced that it’s the end of the winter and the world as we know it because out their window things are going pretty much as they always have. And since politicians are repeating implausible mantras about what’s supposedly happening and how to fix it painlessly, a lot of them just tune it out and go about their business.

Passionate opposition to climate change coupled with timid or nonexistent proposals to fight it must inevitably become a stale punchline.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | 1 Comment

Clouds ain’t so cool

Climate Discussion Nexus | October 23, 2019

Some climate models say greenhouse gases cause a lot of warming and others don’t. Yet they all fit 20th century temperature data equally well. How is that possible? Simple: They all have an offsetting fudge factor based on the cooling effects of tiny pollution particles called aerosols. Not the observed effects, you understand. The high-sensitivity models simply assume aerosols do a lot of cooling by promoting extra cloud formation, and the low sensitivity models assume they don’t. So the key question is how much cooling aerosols actually do. If it’s not much, then greenhouse gases can only cause a little warming, given how little warming happened over the 20th century. And now we know it’s not much.

New evidence published in July is truly devastating. It doesn’t just say the cloud response to aerosols is very weak, though it does say so. It says aerosols do the opposite of what has been assumed and what they must do to make the models work. Instead of bundling liquid water up inside the clouds, which would lead to strong cooling of the Earth’s surface that might counteract a hypothetical strong impact of warming from GHGs, extra pollution aerosols cause clouds to expel water, weakening their overall cooling properties. Here is the authors’ exact wording (emphasis added).

The cooling of the Earth’s climate through the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on clouds offsets an unknown fraction of greenhouse gas warming. An increase in the amount of water inside liquid-phase clouds induced by aerosols, through the suppression of rain formation, has been postulated to lead to substantial cooling, which would imply that the Earth’s surface temperature is highly sensitive to anthropogenic forcing. Here we provide direct observational evidence that, instead of a strong increase, aerosols cause a relatively weak average decrease in the amount of water in liquid-phase clouds compared with unpolluted clouds. Measurements of polluted clouds downwind of various anthropogenic sources—such as oil refineries, smelters, coal-fired power plants, cities, wildfires and ships—reveal that aerosol-induced cloud-water increases, caused by suppressed rain formation, and decreases, caused by enhanced evaporation of cloud water, partially cancel each other out. We estimate that the observed decrease in cloud water offsets 23% of the global climate-cooling effect caused by aerosol-induced increases in the concentration of cloud droplets. These findings invalidate the hypothesis that increases in cloud water cause a substantial climate cooling effect and translate into reduced uncertainty in projections of future climate.

If this study is correct, and science we remind everyone proceeds skeptically by challenging findings including congenial ones, it is one more piece of evidence that most climate models predict too much warming in response to greenhouse gas emissions. The models with high sensitivity only get to stay in the game by having a big cooling offset in the form of aerosol-induced cloud formation, otherwise they’d have predicted so much warming over the 20th century we’d be fried to a crisp by now.

Up to now no one has been sure how much cooling happens from aerosol pollution because it is hard to measure (although there has previously been research showing that aerosol cooling is weaker than modelers usually assume). This new study knocks the legs out from under the modelers who want to keep a high climate sensitivity in their models.

And since the paper was published in Nature magazine, it will be hard for the IPCC folks to dismiss, though we don’t doubt they’ll try to find a way.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

Facebook’s False Fact Check

There’s no guarantee scientific research is credible or accurate just because it has been peer-reviewed. Why is Facebook promoting this lie?

By Donna Laframboise | Big Picture News | October 23, 2019

Much of what we read, online and elsewhere, is incorrect. That’s life. But Facebook, a platform that helps people socialize, thinks it’s in the business of setting the record straight. It calls this process fact checking, but its fact checkers don’t know what they’re talking about.

A story from NaturalNews.com recently appeared in my Facebook feed. I don’t consider that website a reliable source of information, but that’s beside the point. The story was titled Climate change hoax COLLAPSES as new science finds human activity has virtually zero impact on global temperatures. It begins by talking about a paper written by two Finish academics who say there’s “no experimental evidence” for the idea that humanity significantly affects the climate.

Facebook inserted two “related articles” directly after that Natural News story in my feed, describing it as “incorrect” and “false” (see the screengrab at the top of this post). The first was from ClimateFeedback.org, which talks loftily about accurate information being “the foundation of a functioning democracy.”

According to ClimateFeedback,

Some news outlets are publishing articles stating that this claim is based on a new study. In reality, there is no new published study. The claim comes from a six-page document uploaded to arXiv, a website traditionally used by scientists to make manuscripts available before publication. [my italics]

Ideas exist independently of whether or not they’ve been published somewhere. They exist even if people dismiss them as a six-page document. Peter Ratcliffe, one of three individuals who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, had his research rejected because a reviewer didn’t think his findings were sufficiently significant.

click to enlarge

Was his Nobel-quality research wrong just because Nature chose not to publish it? Of course not.

ClimateFeedback neglects to mention that the availability of the Finnish research on ArXiv.org is a good sign. That platform is used by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, and others who are seeking feedback from the wider community. People post their work there specifically so that others can help them strengthen and sharpen it prior to submission to a scientific journal.

ClimateFeedback carries on:

This means that this article has not been peer-reviewed, so there is no guarantee to its credibility. [my bold]

I’m sure they intended to say there’s no guarantee of its accuracy. But either formulation is nonsense. I recently wrote about research that navigated the peer review process and got published in Nature. A mere 19 days later, the authors conceded it contained multiple errors. It has since been fully and formally retracted.

RetractionWatch.org provides ongoing coverage of faulty and fraudulent research that nevertheless made it through the peer review process. In other words: PEER REVIEW IS NOT A GUARANTEE. Not of credibility. And not of accuracy. Fact checkers who say otherwise are profoundly misleading the public.

Facebook labels the Natural News article false – and then promulgates a gigantic falsehood of its own.

But since we’re on the topic of unpublished research, this is a good time to recall that, when James Hansen delivered his famous global warming testimony back in 1988, he cited unpublished research. The larger scientific community had been given no opportunity to scrutinize his work, to decide if it was brilliant or bollocks. It had been accepted by a journal, but it hadn’t yet appeared.

Similarly, the anti-aerosol movement was kick-started by a 1974 New York Times front page story. It quoted a Harvard scientist who claimed aerosol products were destroying the Earth’s ozone layer. Lots of people apparently didn’t notice the sentence that said no one had yet taken “a hard look at the Harvard calculations,” since the research was still in the process of being submitted to a scientific journal.

Then there’s the world’s most influential climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has long relied on unpublished research when writing its reports (see here, here, here, here, and here).

There is a history, in other words, of taking research findings seriously before they’ve been published in scientific journals. But this only seems to apply when people are preaching doom, gloom, and alarm.

According to Facebook and ClimateFeedback.org, those Finns are just too audacious. No one should pay them the slightest attention. Heavens, their work is still unpublished!

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 2 Comments

US DOJ Refuses To Cooperate With Colombia In Uribe Trial

teleSUR | October 22, 2019

The United States Department of Justice has told the Colombian judiciary that they will not cooperate with them in their investigation into disgraced former right wing President Alvaro Uribe. This is despite Colombia believing that the DOJ hold information about Uribe’s contact with paramilitaries and drug traffickers.

Supreme Court magistrate Cesar Augusto Reyes requested that the DOJ hand over records they have about such calls and visits that Uribe held.

Reyes believes that the US could hold key information that would either corroborate or disprove central claims made by Uribe’s defense attorneys.

According to the magazine La Semana, Reyes has written letter to the DOJ condemning them as ‘disrespectful’ for refusing his “appropriate request.”

Among the charges he must answer to is that he paid for false testimonies to “politically finish off” left-wing lawmaker Ivan Cepeda, who had been exposing his links to paramilitarism. Congress threw out the case against Cepeda and pursued an inquiry into Uribe instead.

Another one of the serious charges he faces is that he bribed former paramilitaries huge amounts to testify that Uribe was not involved in the death squad known as ‘Bloque Metro’.

During Uribe’s time in power, he was a close ally of then president George Bush, and of US interests in the region.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Corruption | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube suppressed Tulsi Gabbard search results during Hillary Clinton ‘foreign asset’ row

RT | October 23, 2019

Conservative internet personality Steven Crowder has accused YouTube of suppressing search results for 2020 Democratic hopeful Tulsi Gabbard during her recent spat with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Following Clinton’s suggestion last Friday that Gabbard (D-Hawaii) was being “groomed” by foreign election-meddlers, the dovish congresswoman shot back with a harsh rebuttal labeling Clinton the “queen of warmongers,” but in a lengthy video posted on Tuesday, Crowder says YouTube concealed her content amid the dispute.

Using a virtual private network (VPN) to observe search results in different countries, Crowder claims to have found evidence the platform demoted Gabbard’s official campaign videos for searches conducted in the US.

The first VPN test was carried out last Friday and compared search results from the US and Spain, showing Gabbard’s channel and videos were buried far below other content in American queries at the height of her feud with Clinton.

A second test two days later, after the Clinton quarrel had calmed down, had a much different outcome, showing similar results between searches attempted in the two countries.

Crowder, who ran afoul of YouTube earlier this year and had his own channel demonetized, claims the platform deliberately throttled Gabbard’s content to limit her message in an attempt at “election meddling.”

Over the summer, Gabbard filed a lawsuit against YouTube’s parent company, Google, alleging the tech giant intentionally blocked her campaign ads on the heels of a Democratic presidential debate that – as shown by Google’s own search analytics – generated intense interest in her candidacy.

A number of conservative commentators weighed in on the allegation, noting the “chilling effect” such suppression could have on anyone challenging “establishment politicians” and the Washington swamp.

“We all knew, now we have proof,” another commenter said.

Some in Crowder’s camp took issue with the claim, however, with New York congressional candidate Joey ‘Salads’ Saladino arguing the comedian failed to prove what he alleged.

Another critic similarly challenged Crowder’s accusation, stating his tests did not show any manipulation of search results, but rather a new feature on YouTube which prioritizes news items curated by its partner “fact checkers” over other videos. While YouTube says the feature was rolled out to combat “misinformation,” it nonetheless raises questions about how the platform chooses which stories to serve up to viewers, at the expense of other content.

October 23, 2019 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | 3 Comments

The Lebanese Fall – Hezbollah’s Latest Challenge

By Ghassan Kadi | The Saker Blog | October 22, 2019

Hezbollah is facing a new challenge, and this time it is not a military one, but rather political.

Perhaps few countries need peaceful “popular revolutions” more than Lebanon does. In my simplistic way of thinking, Lebanon should actually be on the top of the list; followed by the USA.

Corruption in Lebanon is endemic. Its politicians are in reality the heirs of dynasties with self-given “birthrights”. Lebanon is ruled, owned, and manipulated by a few families and bloodlines that virtually own everything and have control on whatever happens in the country. This excludes the very few new comers such as the Hariri dynasty, Hezbollah, and the incumbent President Aoun, among others that one can count on the fingers of one hand.

Before President Aoun was finally elected, Lebanon had a presidential vacuum and had no head of state for 29 long months. It took all that time for the feuding Mafias to finally come to an agreement that guaranteed their positions and vested interests before they were convinced that Aoun was the right choice.

Aoun does not come from any of the political-feudal lineages. As a former Army Chief, and despite his history as a former enemy of Syria in the 1980’s who turned into a supporter twenty years later and eventually became a political partner of Hezbollah, he was finally endorsed even by his Christian Maronite arch-rival, Samir Geagea, the head of the rightwing “Lebanese Forces” as a conciliatory president. This was what finally gave him the numbers to be elected and ended the presidency vacuum crisis.

Aoun was perhaps the first Lebanese president to be elected by consent of many rivals and former political and strategic enemies. After all, he had the backing of Hezbollah and the approval of Geagea. He had all that was needed to embark on a journey of reform.

And “Reform and Change” was the motto of his political party.

As a former enemy of Syria, he took voluntary exile in France in 1984 and started his movement of alleged reform. As he returned to Lebanon in 1999, in the years leading up to his election, his rhetoric was that of holding politicians accountable for corruption.

In 2008 Aoun visited Syria, his former enemy, and was greeted by President Assad like a head of state. He had a huge reform agenda, but whether he was genuine or not, by the time he was elected as President in 2016, he was already in his eighties and suffering ill health.

As a president and if anything at all, he followed the footsteps of those he was meant to hold accountable by endorsing his son-in-law Gibran Bassil to become a Member of Parliament and a Minister. But this is not all, he acted in a manner as if he has passed on the presidency and the running of Lebanon to Bassil.

This would have gone well had Bassil been “clean”, but he soon proved to be corruptible as hell. Bassil is now perhaps the most hated Lebanese politician. He is believed to have amassed billions of dollars of corruption funds. The current Lebanese uprising in the streets of Lebanon and the world are aimed at many Lebanese politicians; but mainly Bassil.

What is pertinent is that the political backdrop that eventuated in guaranteeing Bassil’s position has originally come from Hezbollah who has secured the presidency of his father-in-law; President Aoun.

In hindsight, Hezbollah has made a bad gamble on Aoun, and this is forgivable perhaps, but what is unforgivable was turning a blind eye to thus far three years of unimaginable corruption of the Aoun tenure.

Admittedly, the Lebanese Cabinet, headed by Saad Hariri, an opponent of Hezbollah, is an all-inclusive cabinet. Politically, strategically and militarily protected by Hezbollah in a manner that represents all political parties of Lebanon, the ambient Lebanese cabinet has Nasrallah as its patron. Right or wrong, this is the general understanding in the streets of Lebanon now.

For the sake of giving itself a constitutional cover and parliamentary majority, Hezbollah’s gamble on Aoun is failing. Aoun is losing ground and for Hezbollah to continue to support him would be an act of political suicide.

Currently, everything about what looks like a “Lebanese Revolution” looks legitimate and worthy of support. Thus far, the protestors have been peaceful and civilized. Lebanon is a country rich in many ways; well-educated human resources, agriculture, water, tourism venues, untapped oil/gas, you name it. People are angry because their government has not yet been able to build up enough infrastructure after the 1975-1989 Civil War that destroyed much of it. The country is reeling from growing unemployment, the high cost of living and a lack of basic local services like water, power and garbage management. Add to this the factor of low income, it becomes understandable that the Lebanese are sick and tired of having to put up with a seemingly endless legacy of government incompetence and rising taxes.

So once again, Lebanon needs a peaceful popular revolution that can provide reform; not more destruction, and the current uprising, which hasn’t been given a name yet, will inevitably, for better or for worse, yield some outcomes.

What seems probable is that President Aoun will be forced into retirement at the very least. And, this may only be the prelude to further developments. However, what we are seeing now in Lebanon is not necessarily a “Lebanese Spring”. The seasonal aspect of it does not necessarily mean that it is a “Lebanese Fall” either. It is a Lebanese test; and most specifically a defining moment for Hezbollah.

Thus far, Hezbollah has been “faultless” in as far as deterring Israel, protecting its own ground base and providing enough popular support to guarantee its popularity.

And the support of, and well regard for Hezbollah did not only come from the Shiite sector of the Lebanese community. After all, Hezbollah represented resistance, and this ideological arm has no sectarian boundaries. But what Hezbollah seems to have failed to realize is that it cannot bank on ideology alone, all the while turning a blind eye on corruption.

It has to be said as it is. Hezbollah is becoming increasingly perceived in Lebanon as having a role in protecting its corrupt government. This situation is inviting the “Soros connected” forces to take control of the “Lebanese Revolution”.

But as events in Lebanon are changing on daily basis, we must look back at the Arab Spring and what came out of it.

There is a revolution in Lebanon and I support it. People on the streets are genuine and have legitimate demands. But this revolution is headless and has fingerprints of meddlers already. After all, as we see virtually millions of Lebanese flags appearing all over the world, including some that are 300 and 400 meters long, we ought to ask where did they come from and who paid for them? And, who is giving the greenlight for mainstream media coverage to this all?

After the Israeli war with Hezbollah in July 2006, Shiite Muslim Hezbollah had a huge popularity in Lebanon even in the Muslim Sunni as well as Christian regions. This changed soon after Hezbollah made the decision to control the streets of Beirut in May 2007. Ever since, Hezbollah lost a fair chunk of its popularity outside the Shiite sect.

Nasrallah must make his position clear in regard to the street protests and his stand on the ugly corruption that is bringing Lebanon to its knees. He had to urgently respond to the street rallies during the 2005 so-called “Cedar Revolution”, where protestors wanted Syrian troops out of Lebanon, and the counter pro-Hezbollah protestors demanded the opposite. The schism back then brought Lebanon close to civil war again. A repeat of such a scenario now is potentially more dangerous and inflammatory than back then.

Hezbollah rose victorious, both politically and militarily, and with victory in Syria, the position of Hezbollah in Lebanon has never been stronger. Hence a wise and appropriate response to the current crisis is paramount.

The situation occurring presently is quite different to the events of 2005. It is no longer ideological. People are literally unemployed, angry and hungry. They blame the corrupt government, and are pointing the finger at Hezbollah for its silence.

Hunger and popular anger do not stop at sectarian boundaries.

Nasrallah has been making the right decisions thus far, but he cannot afford to be complacent. Each and every camel has a straw that can break its back, and Aoun is not the one for Nasrallah to count on for political survival; quite the contrary in fact.

Even within the ranks of heartland pro-Hezbollah territory, there is an element of opposition to the Aoun administration and its political and economic bankruptcy.

The success of Hezbollah as a liberating force in Lebanon may well have reached a crossroad now. How the protests and the issues voiced are dealt with, will define the future of Hezbollah. It can cause it great damage or, if quickly respond to with sympathy and solutions to the issues raised by the groundswell of angry and fed-up protesters, Hezbollah can maintain the grassroots support they enjoyed. It is time for Hezbollah to revisit the viability of its political alliances.

The progress of the popular uprising thus far, sounds too good to be true. However the substantial support this uprising is receiving, both domestically and internationally is ominous. International support can only be based on political interests aimed at reducing the stronghold of Hezbollah and to weaken the position of the axis of resistance.

Without a figure head, without a clear agenda, the Lebanese uprising is likely to end up like the Egyptian uprising back in 2011. The street anger will be employed by the meddlers in order to serve their own agendas, and the suffering of the people will not be reduced. This is my fear.

October 22, 2019 Posted by | Corruption | , | Leave a comment

My Dream

Al-Haq | October 22, 2019

This is the story of the Palestinian dream, Khaled Abu Joudeh, who decided to build a house for his seven children, in the Kafr Aqab neighbourhood; and under the pretext of its proximity to the Annexation and Expansion wall, the so-called Jerusalem Municipality decided to demolish it on June 12, 2019.

October 22, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Ankara says ‘no need to start new Syria offensive’ after Erdogan-Putin talks

RT | October 22, 2019

Turkey will not be launching a new offensive against Kurdish militias in northern Syria, following a five-day pause in hostilities and high-level talks in Moscow, Ankara’s Defense Ministry said.

Following lengthy talks on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed that Russian military police and Syrian servicemen will be deployed to northeastern Syria, targeted by Turkey in their ‘Operation Peace Spring.’

The Turkish Defense Ministry then said in a statement that there was “no need to carry out a new operation at this stage,” adding that the creation of a “peace corridor” in the border area would ensure the safe return of millions of displaced Syrians.

Turkey’s latest incursion into the north began earlier this month, directed at Kurdish militias it says are linked to terrorism and its own domestic Kurdish separatist movement.

Until recently, around 1,000 American soldiers were stationed with the Kurdish fighters near the border, insulating them from a Turkish offensive, but a sudden US withdrawal last week cleared the way for Ankara’s operation, which it had threatened for months. Washington’s retreat paved the way for a deal between the Kurds and Damascus, allowing Syrian forces to regain control of territories in the northeast after over 7 years of war.

Even on Tuesday Ankara questioned if the US held its end of the deal and facilitated the withdrawal of Kurdish forces, but the Turkish ministry then said Washington told Ankara the Kurdish groups had all left the area by the end of the 120-hour ceasefire pause.

US President Donald Trump also weighed in on the development, calling it “good news” in a tweet on Monday night.

The deal struck between Ankara and Moscow on Tuesday will ensure the territorial integrity of Syria; allow the government to regain control over towns and cities in the northeast; establish Turkish-Russian patrols along the border; and revitalize the Adana Accord, a security pact struck between Damascus and Ankara in 1998. Dealing with captured Islamic State militants was also addressed in Tuesday’s agreement, which the Syrian government has endorsed.

The agreement underscores Washington’s waning sway in the region and represents a positive step toward winding down a bloody years-long conflict, independent political analyst Ali Demidras told RT.

“The Sochi agreement has cemented the Russian-Turkish cooperation in Syria also effectively reducing the American influence in the country,” Demidras said. “United Syria has been secured.”

October 22, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »