Turkey is Preparing an Offensive Military Operation in Northern Syria
By Said Al-Khalaki – Global Research – May 30, 2016
It’s been quite a while since the treaty on cease-fire in Syria was signed. We can say February 27 became the new anchor for the people of Syria who are tired of war and havoc. However, the situation doesn’t suit the main sponsors of the “Syrian revolution”, i.e. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar which had already planned how the country would be divided between them.
Turkey is interested in Syria’s division most of all. The most attractive “piece” for Turkey is Northern Syria and its destroyed economic capital Aleppo.
Obviously, the seized Northern territories would be a step forward in Erdogan’s plan to resurrect the Ottoman Empire he is dreaming about. That is why the seizure of Aleppo is a strategic goal for Erdogan and his partners.
The Turkish government has been supporting Syrian terrorists from the very outset of the war in March 2011.
As the Egyptian news site El-Badil reports, in late 2015 the Turkish government was supplying the Syrian opposition with money and food. Also, it allowed them to cross the border between Turkey and Syria. The fact that militants from terrorist groups fighting in Syria can freely cross the border is also reported by the Kurdish news agency ANHA. According to it, militants go through Bab Al-Salama border crossing point to the North of Aleppo from the Turkish city Kilis towards the Syrian town Azaz. As a rule, militants visit Turkey for two reasons: to undergo a qualified medical treatment to heal their wounds or to attend a military training in a special camp where Turks and Saudis work.
Despite all the efforts of Turkish officials to conceal their support in favor of the terrorists, the (Turkish and Western) media has nonetheless acknowledged Ankara’s insidious role. Even the Syrian opposition’s leaders have never hidden such facts. For example, in last September, one of its leaders, Ahmed Tuma, told the British newspaper Al-Arabi that Turkey was supplying Syrian militants with fuel and food. Tuma is proud of his relations with Turkish leaders and highly appreciates the role of Turkey in forming the so-called “new Syrian state.” And it’s no wonder as the oppositional leader lives on money received from Turkey.
According to the activists of the media center Syria from Inside in Ankara, all the operations of sponsoring the Syrian opposition leaders and field commanders of armed groups are conducted through a number of accounts in a Turkish based bank. Moreover, through this bank, Turkey finances NGOs whose main purpose is to support the Syrian revolution.
Besides that, Turkey’s support for Syrian militants, i.e. financing and training, is included in the US secret program Timber Sycamore, according to a New York Times report in January, 2016. The NYT acknowledges that Turkey has been sponsoring Syrian terrorists since 2013.
It’s obvious that the cease-fire in Syria is not to the advantage of Ankara, whose political leaders seek to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad.
Now, the most important point of the face-off is Aleppo province. As locals say, more than 1000 terrorists arrived there between April to mid-May. The fighters were accompanied by trucks with arms and ammunition and off-road vehicles with large-caliber machine guns. Notably, the vehicles’ deployment is covered by Turkish artillery, regularly shelling Syrian border regions from the Turkish side. It’s clear that all these actions are evidence of the fact that terrorists are preparing a large-scale offensive in Aleppo.
No doubt, the attack on Aleppo is a part of the “hybrid” war implemented by Turkey in Syria. The artillery shelling of Syrian territories and the support for Syrian terrorists – Turkish news agency Anadolu calls these “a fight against ISIS.” And the Turkish government justify Erdogan’s desire to seize Northern Syria by claiming that it is just an attempt to create the so-called “safety zone” for refugees.
While the world is trying to reach a peace treaty in Syria, Turkish leaders are planning large-scale operations involving “opposition” terrorists and radical groups.
However, we want to believe that their plans won’t be crowned with success as everyone in Syria understands who is behind the “opposition” and what the “revolutionists” want to achieve.
Copyright © Said Al-Khalaki, Global Research, 2016
Remembering All the Deaths From All of Our Wars
By Gary G. Kohls and S. Brian Willson | Consortium News | May 30, 2016
Introduction by Gary G. Kohls
One of the many heroes of the peace movement who came out of the Vietnam War was Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson. Just like millions of other draft-age Americans, law student Willson had been drafted into that illegal and genocidal war – against his will – and came back disturbed and angry.
For reasons discussed below, he joined the anti-war movement after witnessing the Reagan/Bush Central American war after he traveled to Nicaragua and saw peasants being murdered by US-backed Contras (aka “freedom fighters”). Willson joined the antiwar movement in 1986 and has protested vigorously against America’s aggressive war policies ever since.
But his real life change came on Sept. 1, 1987, in Concord, California, where Willson was part of a gathering of antiwar protestors that were symbolically trying to stop the transport of weapons from a U.S. Navy munitions base. The weapons were destined for Nicaragua and El Salvador as part of the U.S.-backed war in Central America.
As a Vietnam veteran, Willson understood well the satanic nature of America’s perpetual wars against peasants, campesinos and other poor people in Third World countries who were unjustly accused of being “communists” as they were seeking relief from the tyranny of their ruling classes. He also knew about the poisonous realities of military toxins that are used in war that regularly poison innocent civilians, children, babies, villages, farm fields, water supplies and all the future inhabitants of the warzone.
Willson felt so strongly about the criminality of his country’s foreign policy against militarily inferior countries, that he put himself directly in harm’s way that day by lying down in front of the weapons supply train, expecting the engineer to stop. Instead of stopping, the engineer actually increased its speed above the speed limit and ran over him, severing both legs. The engineer later testified that he had only been obeying orders on how to deal with antiwar protesters.
Willson survived his near-fatal injuries, and he became a universally celebrated near-martyr for peace. He has vowed to spend the rest of his life speaking out against war. The piece below was written on May 27, 2016, and published in CounterPunch.
The Vietnam War radically changed him from a conservative Republican who had been raised in a Christian fundamentalist household. In Willson’s autobiography, titled Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, he wrote about his war experience:
“in April 1969, I witnessed the incredible destruction that had just been inflicted (by aerial bombing and napalm ‘practice’) … on a typically defenseless village about the size of a large baseball stadium. With smoldering ruins throughout, the ground was strewn with bodies of villagers and their farm animals, many of whom were motionless and bloody, murdered from bomb shrapnel and napalm. Several were trying to get up on their feet, and others were moving ever so slightly as they cried and moaned. Most of the victims I witnessed were women and children.
“At one dramatic moment I encountered at close range a young wounded woman lying on the ground clutching three young disfigured children. I stared, aghast, at the woman’s open eyes. Upon closer examination, I discovered that she, and what I presumed were her children, all were dead, but napalm had melted much of the woman’s facial skin, including her eyelids. As the Vietnamese lieutenant and I silently made the one-plus hour return trip to our airbase in my jeep, I knew that my life was never going to be the same again.”
An eyewitness to Willson’s 1987 act of resistance to the US War Machine wrote that Brian questioned “the lessons of ‘patriotism’ with which we so proudly indoctrinate our children, especially our boy children. … Nearly twenty years later, I stood just behind Brian on a California train track in a well-publicized effort to block munitions trains carrying American weapons to kill other poor villagers in El Salvador and Nicaragua, thinking about the words he had spoken that morning, before one of those trains ripped his legs from his body. He said, ‘…each train that gets by us is going to kill people, people like you and me. … And the question that I have to ask on these tracks is: am I any more valuable than those people?’”
Here is the latest, very powerful testimony about what he thinks of Memorial Day from the American antiwar hero, S. Brian Willson:
Remembering All the Deaths From All of Our Wars
Celebration of Memorial Day in the US, originally Decoration Day, commenced shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. This is a national holiday to remember the people who died while serving in the armed forces. The day traditionally includes decorating graves of the fallen with flowers.
As a Viet Nam veteran, I know the kinds of pain and suffering incurred by over three million US soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen, 58,313 of whom paid the ultimate price whose names are on The Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC. The Oregon Vietnam Memorial Wall alone, located here in Portland, contains 803 names on its walls.
The function of a memorial is to preserve memory. On this US Memorial Day, May 30, 2016, I want to preserve the memory of all aspects of the US war waged against the Southeast Asian people in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia – what we call the Viet Nam War – as well as the tragic impacts it had on our own people and culture. My own healing and recovery requires me to honestly describe the war and understand how it has impacted me psychically, spiritually, and politically.
Likewise, the same remembrance needs to be practiced for both our soldiers and the victims in all the other countries affected by US wars and aggression. For example, the US incurred nearly 7,000 soldier deaths while causing as many as one million in Afghanistan and Iraq alone, a ratio of 1:143.
It is important to identify very concretely the pain and suffering we caused the Vietnamese – a people who only wanted to be independent from foreign occupiers, whether Chinese, France, Japan, or the United States of America. As honorably, and in some cases heroically, our military served and fought in Southeast Asia, we were nonetheless serving as cannon fodder, in effect mercenaries for reasons other than what we were told. When I came to understand the true nature of the war, I felt betrayed by my government, by my religion, by my cultural conditioning into “American Exceptionalism,” which did a terrible disservice to my own humanity, my own life’s journey. Thus, telling the truth as I uncover it is necessary for recovering my own dignity.
I am staggered by the amount of firepower the US used, and the incredible death and destruction it caused on an innocent people. Here are some statistics:
–Seventy-five percent of South Viet Nam was considered a free-fire zone (i.e., genocidal zones)
–Over 6 million Southeast Asians killed
–Over 64,000 US and Allied soldiers killed
–Over 1,600 US soldiers, and 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers remain missing
–Thousands of amputees, paraplegics, blind, deaf, and other maimings created
–13,000 of 21,000 of Vietnamese villages, or 62 percent, severely damaged or destroyed, mostly by bombing
–Nearly 950 churches and pagodas destroyed by bombing
–350 hospitals and 1,500 maternity wards destroyed by bombing
–Nearly 3,000 high schools and universities destroyed by bombing
–Over 15,000 bridges destroyed by bombing
–10 million cubic meters of dikes destroyed by bombing
–Over 3,700 US fixed-wing aircraft lost
–36,125,000 US helicopter sorties during the war; over 10,000 helicopters were lost or severely damaged
–26 million bomb craters created, the majority from B-52s (a B-52 bomb crater could be 20 feet deep, and 40 feet across)
–39 million acres of land in Indochina (or 91 percent of the land area of South Viet Nam) were littered with fragments of bombs and shells, equivalent to 244,000 (160 acre) farms, or an area the size of all New England except Connecticut
–21 million gallons (80 million liters) of extremely poisonous chemicals (herbicides) were applied in 20,000 chemical spraying missions between 1961 and 1970 in the most intensive use of chemical warfare in human history, with as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese living in nearly 3,200 villages directly sprayed by the chemicals
–24 percent, or 16,100 square miles, of South Viet Nam was sprayed, an area larger than the states of Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island combined, killing tropical forest, food crops, and inland forests
–Over 500,000 Vietnamese have died from chronic conditions related to chemical spraying with an estimated 650,000 still suffering from such conditions; 500,000 children have been born with Agent Orange-induced birth defects, now including third generation offspring
–Nearly 375,000 tons of fireballing napalm was dropped on villages
–Huge Rome Plows (made in Rome, Georgia), 20-ton earthmoving D7E Caterpillar tractors, fitted with a nearly 2.5-ton curved 11-foot wide attached blade protected by 14 additional tons of armor plate, scraped clean between 700,000 and 750,000 acres (1,200 square miles), an area equivalent to Rhode Island, leaving bare earth, rocks, and smashed trees
–As many as 36,000,000 total tons of ordance expended from aerial and naval bombing, artillery, and ground combat firepower. On an average day US artillery expended 10,000 rounds costing $1 million per day; 150,000-300,000 tons of UXO remain scattered around Southeast Asia: 40,000 have been killed in Viet Nam since the end of the war in 1975, and nearly 70,000 injured; 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured since the end of the war
–7 billion gallons of fuel were consumed by US forces during the war
–If there was space for all 6,000,000 names of Southeast Asian dead on the Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC, it would be over 9 sobering miles long, or nearly 100 times its current 493 foot length
I am not able to memorialize our sacrificed US soldiers without also remembering the death and destroyed civilian infrastructure we caused in our illegal invasion and occupation of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. It has been 47 years since I carried out my duties in Viet Nam. My “service” included being an eyewitness to the aftermath of bombings from the air of undefended fishing villages where virtually all the inhabitants were massacred, the vast majority being small children. In that experience, I felt complicit in a diabolical crime against humanity. This experience led me to deeply grasping that I am not worth more than any other human being, and they are not worth less than me.
Recently I spent more than three weeks in Viet Nam, my first trip back since involuntarily being sent there in 1969. I was struck by the multitudes of children suffering from birth defects, most caused presumably by the US chemical spraying some 50 years ago. I experienced deep angst knowing that the US is directly responsible for this genetic damage now being passed on from one generation to the next. I am ashamed that the US government has never acknowledged responsibility or paid reparations. I found myself apologizing to the people for the crimes of my country.
When we only memorialize US soldiers while ignoring the victims of our aggression, we in effect are memorializing war. I cannot do that. War is insane, and our country continues to perpetuate its insanity on others, having been constantly at war since at least 1991. We fail our duties as citizens if we remain silent rather than calling our US wars for what they are – criminal and deceitful aggressions violating international and US law to assure control of geostrategic resources, deemed necessary to further our insatiable American Way Of Life (AWOL).
Memorial Day for me requires remembering all of the deaths and devastation of our wars, and it should remind all of us of the need to end the madness. If we want to end war, we must begin to directly address our out-of-control capitalist political economy that knows no limits to profits for a few at the expense of the many, including our soldiers.
S. Brian Willson, as a 1st lieutenant, served as commander of a US Air Force combat security police unit in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta in 1969. He is a trained lawyer who has been an anti-war, peace and justice activist for more than forty years. His psychohistorical memoir, “Blood On The Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson” was published in 2011 by PM Press. A long time member of Veterans For Peace, he currently resides in Portland, Oregon
US ‘leverage in Syria’ thanks to collusion with terrorists
By Finian Cunningham | RT | May 20, 2016
There is a simple explanation why Washington refuses to proscribe the militant groups Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist. Because Washington relies on them for regime change in Syria.
Therefore, Washington and its Western and Middle East allies cannot possibly designate Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham as terrorist; otherwise it would be a self-indicting admission that the war in Syria is a foreign state-sponsored terrorist assault on a sovereign country.
This criminal conspiracy is understood by many observers as an accurate description of the five-year Syrian conflict and how it originated. Syria fits into the mold of US-led regime change wars in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, Washington and its allies, assisted by the Western corporate news media, have maintained a fictitious alternative narrative on Syria, claiming the war is an insurgency by a pro-democracy rebel movement.
That narrative has strained credulity over the years as the putative “secular rebels” have either vanished or turned out to be indistinguishable from extremist groups like al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra and so-called Islamic State (also known as Daesh).
Washington asserts that it only supports “moderate, secular rebels” of the Free Syrian Army. British Prime Minister David Cameron has claimed that there are 70,000 such “moderate rebels” fighting in Syria against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But no-one can locate these supposed pro-democracy warriors.
All that can be seen is that the fight against the Syrian government is being waged by self-professed extremist jihadists who have no intention of establishing “democracy”. Instead, they explicitly want to carve out an Islamic state dominated by draconian Sharia law.
In addition to Jabhat al-Nusra and Daesh, the two other major militant groups, Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, are vehemently committed to forming a Caliphate based on Salafi or Wahhabi ideology. That ideology views all other religious faiths, including moderate Sunni Muslims, as well as Shia and Alawites, as “infidels” fit to be persecuted until death.
Leaders of both Jaysh and Ahrar have publicly declared their repudiation of democracy.
Yet these two groups are nominated as the Syrian “opposition” in the Geneva talks, as part of the High Negotiations Committee (HNC). The HNC was cobbled together at a summit held in the Saudi capital Riyadh in December ahead of the anticipated negotiations to find a Syrian political settlement.
The HNC is endorsed by Washington as official representatives of the Syrian opposition. It is supported by Saudi Arabia, or indeed more accurately, orchestrated by the Saudi rulers since the main components of the HNC are Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham. Other major sponsors of the militant groups are Qatar and Turkey.
Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy to Syria, also plays an important part in the charade of furnishing an opposition composed of extremists who demand the Syrian government must stand down as a precondition for talks. This maximalist position is one of the main reasons why the negotiations have come unstuck, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Another basic reason is that the HNC members have been involved in breaching the cessation of violence the US and Russia brokered on February 27, as a confidence-building measure to assist the talks process in Geneva.
That Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham have not observed the shaky ceasefire is a corollary of the fact that both groups are integrated with al-Qaeda-affiliated terror organizations, al Nusra and Daesh, which are internationally designated terrorist organizations.
The UN excluded al-Qaeda franchises from the ceasefire when it passed Security Council Resolution 2254 in December to mandate the purported Syrian peace talks. In that way, Syria and its foreign allies, Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, have been legally entitled to continue offensive operations against the extremists in parallel to the Geneva process.
The offensive on the terror groups should include HNC members Jaysh and Ahrar. Both groups have publicly admitted to fighting alongside both Nusra and Daesh in their campaign against the Syrian army. All of these organizations have been involved at various times in bloody feuds and turf wars. Nevertheless, they are at other times self-declared collaborators.
Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are also well-documented to having engaged in massacres and barbarities as vile as the other higher profile terror outfits.
Only last week, Ahrar al-Sham was responsible for the massacre of women and children in the village of Al-Zahraa, near Aleppo, according to survivors. The group has carried out countless no-warning car bombings in civilians neighborhoods. It claimed responsibility for a bombing outside the Russian base at Idlib earlier this year, which killed dozens.
Jaysh al-Islam has publicly admitted using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in recent weeks, also near Aleppo, Syria’s second city after the capital Damascus, and currently the key battleground in the whole conflict.
The same jihadist militia is allegedly linked to the chemical weapon atrocity in August 2013 in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta, when hundreds of civilians, including children, were apparently killed from exposure to Sarin gas. That attack was initially blamed on Syrian government forces and it nearly prompted the Obama administration to order direct military intervention on the pretext that a “red line” was crossed. Until that is, Moscow steered a ground-breaking deal to decommission chemical weapons held by the Syrian state. It later transpired that the more likely culprit for the East Ghouta atrocity was the Jaysh al-Islam militants.
A former commander of the group, Zahran Alloush, once declared that he would “cleanse” all Shia, Alawites and other infidels from the Levant. Many Syrian civilians later rejoiced when the “terrorist boss” – their words – was killed in a Syrian air force strike on December 25. Notably, Saudi Arabia and Turkey vehemently protested over Alloush’s death.
It is irrefutable from both their actions and self-declarations that Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are by any definition terrorist groups. Certainly, Russia and Iran have officially listed both as such.
But not so Washington and its allies. Earlier this month, a Russian proposal at the UN Security Council to proscribe Jaysh and Ahrar was blocked by the US, Britain and France. An American spokesperson told the AFP news agency that it rejected the Russian motion because it feared the tentative Syrian ceasefire would collapse entirely. This is an unwitting US admission about who the main fighting forces in the Syrian “rebellion” are.
This week US Secretary of State John Kerry made an extraordinary claim which, as usual, went unnoticed in the Western media. Kerry said the US “still has leverage in Syria” because if the Syrian government does not accept Washington’s demands for political transition then the country would face years of more war.
Kerry’s confidence in threatening a war of attrition on Syria is based on the fact that the main terror groups are directly or indirectly controlled by Washington and its regional allies in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham are essential to the terror front that gives Washington its leverage in Syria. But the charade must be kept covered with the preposterous denial that these groups are not terrorists.
Three civilians killed in new Saudi strikes in Yemen
Press TV – May 21, 2016
At least three Yemeni civilians have lost their lives and several others sustained injuries in new Saudi airstrikes against Yemen.
Saudi jets attacked two trucks loaded with bags of cement in the Hardin neighborhood of the southern Yemen port city of Mokha, situated 346 kilometers (214 miles) south of the capital, Sana’a, on Friday evening, killing three people and injuring five others, Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah satellite television network reported.
Local sources said the trucks had made a stopover in the area where they were targeted on their way to the city of Ta’izz.
Eyewitnesses said charred body parts were strewn about the area, noting that the death toll would further increase as some of the injured are in a critical condition.
Saudi fighter jets also flew over several areas in the provinces of Ta’izz, Ma’rib and Amran, but there were no immediate reports of attacks.
Separately, a woman lost her life when Saudi warplanes conducted an airstrike in Sahar district of the northwestern Yemeni province of Sa’ada on Friday.
Another Saudi aerial raid against Qa’atabah district in Yemen’s southern province of Dhale left a woman injured.
Moreover, militiamen loyal to former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi lobbed a barrage of mortar shells against a position of Ansarullah fighters in al-Wazi’iyah district of Ta’izz Province on Friday, but no casualties were reported.
Elsewhere in al-Mansura district of the southern province of Aden, unidentified armed men fatally shot a pro-Hadi commander.
Moreover, there are reports that clashes have broken out between Hadi loyalists and Takfiri terrorists in the port city of Aden, with both sides exchanging heavy gunfire.
Saudi Arabia launched its military aggression against Yemen on March 26, 2015, in a bid to bring former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi —a staunch ally of Riyadh who resigned from the presidency — back to power and undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement.
More than 9,400 people have been killed and at least 16,000 others injured since the onset of the aggression.
The Saudi strikes have also taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.
Last week, UN-brokered peace talks between delegates from Ansarullah movement and the Saudi-backed former Yemeni government in Kuwait were suspended after the latter declared its withdrawal from the talks.
Abdulmalek al-Mikhlafi, a representative of the pro-Hadi delegation, blamed Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and allies of torpedoing the talks, saying they have backtracked on their commitments.
The development came as UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Sheikh Ahmed had said he was optimistic about achieving a settlement for the conflict in Yemen.
CrossTalk: Universal Justice?
RT | May 20, 2016
The American legal system is rapidly transforming itself with the expressed purpose of replacing much of international law. Be it within the realm of trade and banking, criminal prosecutions and even sports. The Americanization of law supplants the United Nations and the sovereignty of every state on the planet.
CrossTalking with Joe Lauria, Daoud Khairallah, and Toby Cadman.
‘Clinton as president is danger to world peace’ – French National Front party leader
Photo credit – Gage Skidmore on Flickr
RT | May 20, 2016
Hillary Clinton winning the White House would constitute “a danger for the world peace,” as she would continue to drag Europe into her “destructive policy” of conflicts, Marine Le Pen, leader of the French National Front party, told RT.
While declining to endorse any of the US presidential front-runners, Le Pen said she believes there is one that would definitely not benefit France.
“There is a candidate who appears a lot more dangerous for France than the others – that’s Hillary Clinton,” the head of the National Front told RT France in an exclusive interview. “I’m not American so I don’t need to make a choice. But… in the interests of France, Hillary Clinton is probably the worst choice out there.”
Le Pen sees the Democratic frontrunner as being so “dangerous” because of Clinton’s career as US Secretary of State, in which she worked “hand in hand with the full spectrum of American decisions” that eventually “plunged the world objectively into chaos.”
“I think if she was elected she would continue this policy, a destructive policy, a policy of conflict, a policy of imprisonment of Europe in blinded Atlanticism,” Le Pen said. “I think it’s a danger for world peace.”
In December, Le Pen, who herself hopes to win France’s 2017 presidential elections, criticized Republican frontrunner Donald Trump for proposing to ban almost all Muslims from entering the United States.
“Seriously, have you ever heard me say something like that?” Le Pen said in one of her interviews, presumably in response to being compared with Trump. “I defend all the French people in France, regardless of their origin, regardless of their religion.”
The US media has repeatedly drawn comparisons between Marine Le Pen and Trump. The New York Times called the real estate mogul turned GOP frontrunner “America’s Marine Le Pen”. Bloomberg has also referred to Le Pen as “Europe’s own Donald Trump.”
While Marine Le Pen hasn’t explicitly named a “preferable” candidate for US president, her father has.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, retired long-time leader and founder of the French National Front, made headlines in February by endorsing Trump in a tweet, in which he said that if he was an American, he “would vote Donald Trump.”
Read more:
Japan protests to US over Okinawa woman’s death
Rina Shimabukuro
Press TV – May 19, 2016
Japan has submitted an official letter of protest to the US diplomatic mission in Tokyo over the brutal murder of an Okinawan woman, which is suspected to have been carried out by an American.
On Thursday, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida summoned US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy to the Foreign Ministry and handed over the letter after the police arrested the 32-year-old suspect.
The body of Rina Shimabukuro, who had been missing since late April, was recently found in a weed-covered area in southern Okinawa. Police have found DNA matching the dead woman’s in a car belonging to Kenneth Franklin Shinzato, a former US Marine, who lives in southern Okinawa and works at the US Air Force’s Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture.
The police, accordingly, suspect the man of having murdered the victim and disposed of her body.
“It is extremely regrettable that the very cruel and atrocious case occurred,” Kishida told Kennedy, according to Nippon Television Network.
Okinawa has become known as the site of enduring tensions with the US forces deployed there, and hence a lasting source of conflict between Washington and Tokyo. Pacifist inclinations as well as security and safety concerns have prompted the Japanese to protest against the deployment.
Multiple cases of misconduct by US forces have raised anti-American feelings among the islanders.
Back in 2013, two American sailors admitted to raping a woman in Okinawa a year earlier in a case that sparked huge anti-US sentiments in Japan.
In 1995, the gang rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by US servicemen also sparked mass protests.
In Kerry’s Footsteps: What Saudi ‘Plan B’ Actually Means for Syria and Iran
Sputnik – May 18, 2016
Saudi Arabia has signaled it is ready to implement the much-talked-about ‘Plan B’ in Syria. What does Riyadh actually mean?
Following the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) meeting in Vienna Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister told journalists that it is time to shift the focus to the so-called ‘Plan B’ in Syria.
“We believe we should have moved to a ‘Plan B’ a long time ago,” Adel al-Jubeir told reporters, as quoted by Reuters.
“The choice about moving to an alternative plan, the choice about intensifying the military support (to the opposition) is entirely with the Bashar [Bashar al-Assad] regime. If they do not respond to the treaties of the international community… then we will have to see what else can be done,” he stressed.
What lies behind al-Jubeir’s statement?Saudi Arabia has long been calling for toppling the legitimate and democratically-elected Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. It is no secret that the Gulf kingdom has poured millions of US dollars into anti-Assad Islamist radical groups.
The Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee (HNC) includes such Syrian “opposition groups” as Ahrar ash-Sham and Jaish al-Islam groups which differ from Daesh and the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front in name only.
In April, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underscored that Ahrar ash-Sham and Jaish al-Islam shared the same ideology as Daesh, which is outlawed in Russia, the United States and many other countries.
However, the West still hesitates to recognize the brutal extremist groups as terrorists.
The possibility of Plan B’s implementation was voiced by US Secretary of State John Kerry immediately after the US and Russia announced an agreement on cessation of hostilities in Syria.
“There is a significant discussion taking place now about a Plan B in the event that we do not succeed at the [negotiating] table,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 23, 2016.
The plan envisages the partition of Syria and empowering the country’s “moderate opposition.” It should be noted that Washington is well aware that the so-called moderates have no scruples about intermingling with al-Nusra Front terrorists from time to time.As for Riyadh, it has repeatedly pledged its willingness to deploy Saudi boots on Syrian ground. In the eyes of Saudi Arabia, ‘Plan B’ will allow Riyadh to ultimately get rid of Bashar al-Assad, paving the way for undermining the Middle Eastern Shiite Crescent and “encircling” of Iran.
Actually, the roots of the US-Saudi ‘Plan B’ originated in the times of George W. Bush. After Iraq had been occupied by the US, Saudi Arabia urged Washington to shift its attention toward Iran and Syria, parts of the so-called Shiite Crescent in the Middle East.
“In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January [2007], Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is ‘a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,’ separating ‘reformers’ and ‘extremists’; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were ‘on the other side of that divide.’ (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, ‘have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize’,” Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his 2007 article “The Redirection” for The New Yorker.
According to Kerry and al-Jubeir, Plan B would be implemented should the ceasefire in Syria collapse. As of yet the truce is holding despite numerous violations.
The recent 17-nation ISSG talks were devoted to discussing the stalled negotiations, suspended after the Saudi-backed opposition faction, the HNC, unilaterally withdrew from negotiations, demanding serious concessions from the Syrian government.
It seems that neither HNC, the Riyadh-sponsored “opposition” group, nor its Saudi masters are interested in further diplomatic efforts.
Read more: Kerry’s Ultimatum to Assad: Why US Plan Means ‘Capitulation to Al-Qaeda’
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As Hillary Clinton kisses up to Henry Kissinger, RT looks at 4 of his most heinous acts
RT | September 3, 2016
… While Clinton retains the ultimate warmongering seal, RT examines some of Kissinger’s most memorable acts… Read full article
Blog Roll
Aletho News- IRAN WALKS OUT ON PEACE DEAL DUE TO TRUMP’S THREATS – w/ Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi
- Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine Gets Unanimous Thumbs-Up Despite Risks, Low Efficacy
- UK Speech Regulator’s Telegram Questions Point Toward Private Chats
- Cuban FM blasts Rubio for ‘chronically lying’ about US fuel blockade
- Al-Jazeera demands punishment for Israeli officials following latest assassination of cameraman
- Iran opens hundreds of legal cases over US, Israeli aggression: Prosecutor general
- Iran delegation protests Trump’s threat at Switzerland talks, weighs ‘proper’ response: Source
- Terms of US capitulation to Iran presage new era for the region
- Strategic Oil Reserve Nears Collapse… US Must Choose: Guns or Butter
- The Story the Media — and the Government — Don’t Want You to Hear
- If Americans Knew
- JNS Policy Summit to kick off in Israel
- Fatalities From Israel’s Vast Gaza Genocide Deliberately Undercounted
- ‘Reproductive genocide’ in Gaza; death toll in Lebanon tops 4,000 (during a ceasefire) – Daily Update
- Israelis Invaded Lebanon And Then Cried Victim When Their Soldiers Got Killed
- FARA Docs: Israel is Spying On Millions Of Christian Americans In Their Churches
- Why US presidents from both parties end up cursing Benjamin Netanyahu
- Israel Asked Facebook to Censor Iran War Content, Internal Documents Show
- Deaths in Gaza undercounted, possibly by 100s of thousands; “Psychopath” Ben-Gvir talks trash – Daily Update
- UNICEF: “Trauma is woven into the very fabric of childhood in Gaza”
- 15 articles a day: The extent of the Israeli army’s media interference
- No Tricks Zone
- THE TRANSCEIVER PARADOX: Why Organoid Intelligence (OI) Could Become Our Ultimate Alien Predator
- German Wind Turbines Face Regulatory Shutdown Due To Excessive Noise
- New Study: Chile’s Relative Sea Level Was 3.2 Meters Higher Than Today During The Mid-Holocene
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
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