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Iraq +15: Accumulated Evil of the Whole

By Nat Parry | Consortium News | March 19, 2018

Robert Jackson, the Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, once denounced aggressive war as “the greatest menace of our time.” With much of Europe laying in smoldering ruin, he said in 1945 that “to initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime: it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of whole.”

When it comes to the U.S. invasion of Iraq 15 years ago today, the accumulated evil of the whole is difficult to fully comprehend. Estimates of the war’s costs vary, but commonly cited figures put the financial cost for U.S. taxpayers at upwards of a trillion dollars, the cost in Iraqi lives in the hundreds of thousands, and U.S. soldier deaths at nearly 5,000. Another 100,000 Americans have been wounded and four million Iraqis driven from their homes as refugees.

As staggering as those numbers may be, they don’t come close to describing the true cost of the war, or the magnitude of the crime that was committed by launching it on March 19-20, 2003. Besides the cost in blood and treasure, the cost to basic principles of international justice, long-term geopolitical stability, and the impacts on the U.S. political system are equally profound.

Lessons Learned and Forgotten

Although for a time, it seemed that the lessons of the war were widely understood and had tangible effects on American politics – with Democrats, for example, taking control of Congress in the midterm elections of 2006 based primarily on growing antiwar sentiment around the country and Barack Obama defeating Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primaries based largely on the two candidates’ opposing views on the Iraq War – the political establishment has, since then, effectively swept these lessons under the rug.

One of those lessons, of course, was that proclamations of the intelligence community should be treated with huge grain of salt. In the build-up to war with Iraq a decade and a half ago, there were those who pushed back on the politicized and “cherry-picked” intelligence that the Bush administration was using to convince the American people of the need to go to war, but for the most part, the media and political establishment parroted these claims without showing the due diligence of independently confirming the claims or even applying basic principles of logic.

For example, even as United Nations weapons inspectors, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, were coming up empty-handed when acting on tips from the U.S. intelligence community, few within the mainstream media were willing to draw the logical conclusion that the intelligence was wrong (or that the Bush administration was lying). Instead, they assumed that the UN inspectors were simply incompetent or that Saddam Hussein was just really good at hiding his weapons of mass destruction.

Yet, despite being misled so thoroughly back in 2002 and 2003, today Americans show the same credulousness to the intelligence community when it claims that “Russia hacked the 2016 election,” without offering proof. Liberals, in particular, have hitched their wagons to the investigation being led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is widely hailed as a paragon of virtue, while the truth is, as FBI Director during the Bush administration, he was a key enabler of the WMD narrative used to launch an illegal war.

Mueller testified to Congress that “Iraq has moved to the top of my list” of threats to the domestic security of the United States. “As we previously briefed this Committee,” Mueller said on February 11, 2003, “Iraq’s WMD program poses a clear threat to our national security.” He warned that Baghdad might provide WMDs to al-Qaeda to carry out a catastrophic attack in the United States.

Mueller drew criticism at the time, including from FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, for conflating Iraq and al-Qaeda, with demands that the FBI produce whatever evidence it had on this supposed connection.

Today, of course, Mueller is celebrated by Democrats as the best hope for bringing down the presidency of Donald Trump. George W. Bush has also enjoyed a revival of his image thanks largely to his public criticisms of Trump, with a majority of Democrats now viewing the 43rd president favorably. Many Democrats have also embraced aggressive war – often couched in the rhetoric of “humanitarian interventionism” – as their preferred option to deal with foreign policy challenges such as the Syrian conflict.

When the Democratic Party chose Clinton as its nominee in 2016, it appeared that Democrats had also embraced her willingness to use military force to achieve “regime change” in countries that are seen as a threat to U.S. interests – whether Iraq, Iran or Syria.

As a senator from New York during the build-up for military action against Iraq, Clinton not only voted to authorize the U.S. invasion, but fervently supported the war – which she backed with or without UN Security Council authorization. Her speech on the floor of the Senate on Oct. 10, 2002 arguing for military action promoted the same falsehoods that were being used by the Bush administration to build support for the war, claiming for example that Saddam Hussein had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.”

“If left unchecked,” she said, “Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.”

Clinton maintained support for the war even as it became obvious that Iraq in fact had no weapons of mass destruction – the primary casus belli for the war – only cooling her enthusiasm in 2006 when it became clear that the Democratic base had turned decisively against the war and her hawkish position endangered her chances for the 2008 presidential nomination. But eight years later, the Democrats had apparently moved on, and her support for the war was no longer considered a disqualification for the presidency.

One of the lessons that should be recalled today, especially as the U.S. gears up today for possible confrontations with countries including North Korea and Russia, is how easy it was in 2002-2003 for the Bush administration to convince Americans that they were under threat from the regime of Saddam Hussein some 7,000 miles away. The claims about Iraq’s WMDs were untrue, with many saying so in real time – including by the newly formed group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which was regularly issuing memoranda to the president and to the American people debunking the falsehoods that were being promoted by the U.S. intelligence community.

But even if the claims about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles were true, there was still no reason to assume that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of launching a surprise attack against the United States. Indeed, while Americans were all but convinced that Iraq threatened their safety and security, it was actually the U.S. government that was threatening Iraqis.

Far from posing an imminent threat to the United States, in 2003, Iraq was a country that had already been devastated by a U.S.-led war a decade earlier and crippling economic sanctions that caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqis (leading to the resignation of two UN humanitarian coordinators who called the sanctions genocidal).

Threats and Bluster

Although the invasion didn’t officially begin until March 20, 2003 (still the 19th in Washington), the United States had been explicitly threatening to attack the country as early as January 2003, with the Pentagon publicizing plans for a so-called “shock and awe” bombing campaign.

“If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan,” CBS News reported on January 24, “one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq. … [T]his is more than the number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.”

A Pentagon official warned: “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.”

These public threats appeared to be a form of intimidation and psychological warfare, and were almost certainly in violation of the UN Charter, which states:  “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

The Pentagon’s vaunted “shock and awe” attack began with limited bombing on March 19-20, as U.S. forces unsuccessfully attempted to kill Hussein. Attacks continued against a small number of targets until March 21, when the main bombing campaign began. U.S.-led forces launched approximately 1,700 air sorties, with 504 using cruise missiles.

During the invasion, the U.S. also dropped some 10,800 cluster bombs on Iraq despite claiming that only a fraction of that number had been used.

“The Pentagon presented a misleading picture during the war of the extent to which cluster weapons were being used and of the civilian casualties they were causing,” reported USA Today in late 2003. Despite claims that only 1,500 cluster weapons had been used resulting in just one civilian casualty, “in fact, the United States used 10,782 cluster weapons,” including many that were fired into urban areas from late March to early April 2003.

The cluster bombs killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians and left behind thousands of unexploded bomblets that continued to kill and injure civilians weeks after the fighting stopped.

(Because of the indiscriminate effect of these weapons, their use is banned by the international Convention on Cluster Munitions, which the United States has refused to sign.)

Attempting to kill Hussein, Bush ordered the bombing of an Iraqi residential restaurant on April 7. A single B-1B bomber dropped four precision-guided 2,000-pound bombs. The four bunker-penetrating bombs destroyed the target building, the al Saa restaurant block and several surrounding structures, leaving a 60-foot crater and unknown casualties.

Diners, including children, were ripped apart by the bombs. One mother found her daughter’s torso and then her severed head. U.S. intelligence later confirmed that Hussein wasn’t there.

Resistance and Torture

It was evident within weeks of the initial invasion that the Bush administration had misjudged the critical question of whether Iraqis would fight. They put up stiffer than expected resistance even in southern Iraqi cities such as Umm Qasr, Basra and Nasiriya where Hussein’s support was considered weak, and soon after the fall of the regime on April 9, when the Bush administration decided to disband the Iraqi army, it helped spark an anti-U.S. insurgency led by many former Iraqi military figures.

Despite Bush’s triumphant May 1 landing on an aircraft carrier and his speech in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner, it looked as though the collapse of the Baathist government had been just the first stage in what would become a long-running war of attrition. After the Iraqi conventional forces had been disbanded, the U.S. military began to notice in May 2003 a steadily increasing flurry of attacks on U.S. occupiers in various regions of the so-called “Sunni Triangle.”

These included groups of insurgents firing assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at U.S. occupation troops, as well as increasing use of improvised explosive devices on U.S. convoys.

Possibly anticipating a long, drawn-out occupation and counter-insurgency campaign, in a March 2003 memorandum Bush administration lawyers devised legal doctrines to justify certain torture techniques, offering legal rationales “that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful.”

They argued that the president or anyone acting on the president’s orders were not bound by U.S. laws or international treaties prohibiting torture, asserting that the need for “obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens” superseded any obligations the administration had under domestic or international law.

“In order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign,” the memo stated, U.S. prohibitions against torture “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”

Over the course of the next year, disclosures emerged that torture had been used extensively in Iraq for “intelligence gathering.” Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh disclosed in The New Yorker in May 2004 that a 53-page classified Army report written by Gen. Antonio Taguba concluded that Abu Ghraib prison’s military police were urged on by intelligence officers seeking to break down the Iraqis before interrogation.

“Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees,” wrote Taguba.

These actions, authorized at the highest levels, constituted serious breaches of international and domestic law, including the Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Convention relative to the treatment of Prisoners of War, as well as the U.S. War Crimes Act and the Torture Statute.

They also may have played a role in the rise of the ISIS terror group, the origins of which were subsequently traced to an American prison in Iraq dubbed Camp Bucca. This camp was the site of rampant abuse of prisoners, one of whom, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, later became the leader of ISIS. Al-Baghdadi spent four years as a prisoner at Bucca, where he started recruiting others to his cause.

America’s Weapons of Mass Destruction

Besides torture and the use of cluster bombs, the crimes against the Iraqi people over the years included wholesale massacres, long-term poisoning and the destruction of cities.

There was the 2004 assault on Fallujah in which white phosphorus – banned under international law – was used against civilians. There was the 2005 Haditha massacre, in which 24 unarmed civilians were systematically murdered by U.S. marines. There was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” massacre revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010, depicting the indiscriminate killing of more than a dozen civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad – including two Reuters news staff.

There is also the tragic legacy of cancer and birth defects caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. In Fallujah the use of depleted uranium led to birth defects in infants 14 times higher than in the Japanese cities targeted by U.S. atomic bombs at close of World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Noting the birth defects in Fallujah, Al Jazeera journalist Dahr Jamail told Democracy Now! in 2013:

“And going on to Fallujah, because I wrote about this a year ago, and then I returned to the city again this trip, we are seeing an absolute crisis of congenital malformations of newborn. … I mean, these are extremely hard to look at. They’re extremely hard to bear witness to. But it’s something that we all need to pay attention to, because of the amount of depleted uranium used by the U.S. military during both of their brutal attacks on the city of 2004, as well as other toxic munitions like white phosphorus, among other things.”

A report sent to the UN General Assembly by Dr. Nawal Majeed Al-Sammarai, Iraq’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, stated that in September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 babies born, 75 percent of whom were deformed. A quarter of them died within their first week of life.

The military’s use of depleted uranium also caused a sharp increase in Leukemia and birth defects in the city of Najaf, which saw one of the most severe military actions during the 2003 invasion, with cancer becoming more common than the flu according to local doctors.

By the end of the war, a number of Iraq’s major cities, including Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul, had been reduced to rubble and by 2014, a former CIA director conceded that the nation of Iraq had basically been destroyed.

“I think Iraq has pretty much ceased to exist,” said Michael Hayden, noting that it was fragmented into multiple parts which he didn’t see “getting back together.” In other words, the United States, using its own extensive arsenal of actual weapons of mass destruction, had completely destroyed a sovereign nation.

Predictable Consequences

The effects of these policies included the predictable growth of Islamic extremism, with a National Intelligence Estimate – representing the consensus view of the 16 spy services inside the U.S. government – warning in 2006 that a whole new generation of Islamic radicalism was being spawned by the U.S. occupation of Iraq. According to one American intelligence official, the consensus was that “the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

The assessment noted that several underlying factors were “fueling the spread of the jihadist movement,” including “entrenched grievances, such as corruption, injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a sense of powerlessness,” and “pervasive anti-U.S. sentiment among most Muslims all of which jihadists exploit.”

But rather than leading to substantive changes or reversals in U.S. policies, the strategy agreed upon in Washington seemed to be to double down on the failed policies that had given rise to radical jihadist groups. In fact, instead of withdrawing from Iraq, the U.S. decided to send a surge of 20,000 troops in 2007. This is despite the fact that public opinion was decidedly against the war.

A Newsweek poll in early 2007 found that 68 percent of Americans opposed the surge, and in another poll conducted just after Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address, 64 percent said Congress was not being assertive enough in challenging the Bush administration over its conduct of the war.

An estimated half-million people marched on Washington on Jan. 27, 2007, with messages for the newly sworn in 110th Congress to “Stand up to Bush,” urging Congress to cut the war funding with the slogan, “Not one more dollar, not one more death.” A growing combativeness was also on display in the antiwar movement with this demonstration marked by hundreds of protesters breaking through police lines and charging Capitol Hill.

Although there were additional large-scale protests a couple months later to mark the sixth anniversary of the invasion, including a march on the Pentagon led by Iraq War veterans, over the next year the antiwar movement’s activities steadily declined. While fatigue might explain some of the waning support for mass mobilizations, much of the decline can also surely be explained by the rise of Barack Obama’s candidacy. Millions of people channeled their energies into his campaign, including many motivated by a hope that he represented real change from the Bush years.

One of Obama’s advantages over Clinton in the Democratic primary was that he had been an early opponent of the Iraq War while she had been one of its most vocal supporters. This led many American voters to believe in 2008 that they had elected someone who might rein in some of the U.S. military adventurism and quickly end U.S. involvement in Iraq. But this wasn’t to be the case. The combat mission dragged on well into President Obama’s first term.

War, War and More War

After its well-publicized failures in Iraq, the U.S. turned its attention to Libya, overthrowing the government of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 utilizing armed militias implicated in war crimes and backed with NATO air power. Following Gaddafi’s ouster, his caches of weapons ended up being shuttled to rebels in Syria, fueling the civil war[sic] there. The Obama administration also took a keen interest in destabilizing the Syrian government and to do so began providing arms that often fell into the hands of extremists.

The CIA trained and armed so-called “moderate” rebel units in Syria, only to watch these groups switch sides by joining forces with Islamist brigades such as ISIS and Al Qaeda’s affiliate the Nusra Front. Others surrendered to Sunni extremist groups with the U.S.-provided weapons presumably ending up in the arsenals of jihadists or sometimes just quit or went missing altogether.

Beyond Syria and Libya, Obama also expanded U.S. military engagements in countries including Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and sent a surge of troops to Afghanistan in 2009. And despite belatedly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, with the last U.S. troops finally leaving on December 18, 2011, Obama also presided over a major increase in the use of drone strikes and conventional air wars.

In his first term, Obama dropped 20,000 bombs and missiles, a number that shot up to over 100,000 bombs and missiles dropped in his second term. In 2016, the final year of Obama’s presidency, the U.S. dropped nearly three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day.

Obama also had the distinction of becoming the fourth U.S. president in a row to bomb the nation of Iraq. Under criticism for allowing the rise of ISIS in the country, Obama decided to reverse his earlier decision to disengage with Iraq, and in 2014 started bombing the country again. Addressing the American people on Sept. 10, 2014, President Obama said that “ISIL poses a threat to the people of Iraq and Syria, and the broader Middle East including American citizens, personnel and facilities.”

“If left unchecked,” he continued, “these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region, including to the United States. While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISIL leaders have threatened America and our allies.”

Of course, this is precisely the result that many voices of caution had warned about back in 2002 and 2003, when millions of Americans were taking to the streets in protest of the looming invasion of Iraq. And, to be clear, it wasn’t just the antiwar left urging restraint – establishment figures and paleoconservatives were also voicing concern.

Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, for example, who served as a Middle East envoy for George W. Bush, warned in October 2002 that by invading Iraq, “we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started.” Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush administration, said a strike on Iraq “could unleash an Armageddon in the Middle East.”

No matter, Bush was a gut player who had made up his mind, so those warnings were brushed aside and the invasion proceeded.

Campaign 2016

When presidential candidate Donald Trump began slamming Bush for the Iraq War during the Republican primary campaign in 2015 and 2016, calling the decision to invade Iraq a “big fat mistake,” he not only won over some of the antiwar libertarian vote, but also helped solidify his image as a political outsider who “tells it like it is.”

And after Hillary Clinton emerged as the Democratic nominee, with her track record as an enthusiastic backer of virtually all U.S. interventions and an advocate of deeper involvement in countries such as Syria, voters could have been forgiven for getting the impression that the Republican Party was now the antiwar party and the Democrats were the hawks.

As the late Robert Parry observed in June 2016, “Amid the celebrations about picking the first woman as a major party’s presumptive nominee, Democrats appear to have given little thought to the fact that they have abandoned a near half-century standing as the party more skeptical about the use of military force. Clinton is an unabashed war hawk who has shown no inclination to rethink her pro-war attitudes.”

The antiwar faction within the Democratic Party was further marginalized during the Democratic National Convention when chants of “No More War” broke out during former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s speech. The Democratic establishment responded with chants of “USA!” to drown out the voices for peace and they even turned the lights out on the antiwar section of the crowd. The message was clear: there is no room for the antiwar movement inside the Democratic Party.

While there were numerous factors that played a role in Trump’s stunning victory over Clinton in November 2016, it is no stretch of the imagination to speculate that one of those factors was lingering antiwar sentiment from the Iraq debacle and other engagements of the U.S. military. Many of those fed up with U.S. military adventurism may have fallen for Trump’s quasi-anti-interventionist rhetoric while others may have opted to vote for an alternative party such as the Libertarians or the Greens, both of which took strong stances against U.S. interventionism.

But despite Trump’s occasional statements questioning the wisdom of committing the military to far-off lands such as Iraq or Afghanistan, he was also an advocate for war crimes such as “taking out [the] families” of suspected terrorists. He urged that the U.S. stop being “politically correct” in its waging of war.

So, ultimately, Americans were confronted with choosing between an unreconstructed regime-changing neoconservative Democratic hawk, and a reluctant interventionist who nevertheless wanted to teach terrorists a lesson by killing their children. Although ultimately the neocon won the popular vote, the war crimes advocate carried the Electoral College.

Nawar al-Awlaki, 8, killed by US drone 1/29/17

Following the election it turned out that Trump was a man of his word when it came to killing children. In one of his first military actions as president, Trump ordered an attack on a village in Yemen on Jan. 29, 2017, which claimed the lives of as many as 23 civilians, including a newborn baby and an eight-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki.

Nawar was the daughter of the al-Qaeda propagandist and American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a September 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen.

Normalized Aggression

2017, Trump’s first year in office, turned out to be the deadliest year for civilians in Iraq and Syria since U.S. airstrikes began on the two countries in 2014. The U.S. killed between 3,923 and 6,102 civilians during the year, according to a tally by the monitoring group Airwars. “Non-combatant deaths from Coalition air and artillery strikes rose by more than 200 per cent compared to 2016,” Airwars noted.

While this spike in civilian deaths did make some headlines, including in the Washington Post, for the most part, the thousands of innocents killed by U.S. airstrikes are dismissed as “collateral damage.” The ongoing carnage is considered perfectly normal, barely even eliciting a comment from the pundit class.

This is arguably one of the most enduring legacies of the 2003 invasion of Iraq – an act of military aggression that was based on false pretenses, which brushed aside warnings of caution, and blatantly violated international law. With no one in the media or the Bush administration ever held accountable for promoting this war or for launching it, what we have seen is the normalization of military aggression to a level that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.

Indeed, I remember well the bombing of Iraq that took place in 1998 as part of Bill Clinton’s Operation Desert Fox. Although this was a very limited bombing campaign, lasting only four days, there were sizable protests in opposition to the military action. I joined a picket of a couple hundred people in front of the White House holding a hand-made sign reading “IMPEACH HIM FOR WAR CRIMES” – a reference to the fact that Congress was at the time impeaching him for lying about a blowjob.

Compare that to what we see today – or, more accurately what we don’t see today – in regards to antiwar advocacy. Despite the fact that the U.S. is now engaged in at least seven military conflicts, there is little in the way of peace activism or even much of a national debate over the wisdom, legality or morality of waging war. Few even raise objections to its significant financial cost to U.S. taxpayers, for example the fact that one day of spending on these wars amounts to about $200 million.

Fifteen years ago, one of the arguments of the antiwar movement was that the war on terror was morphing into a perpetual war without boundaries, without rules, and without any end game. The U.S., in other words, was in danger of finding itself in a state of endless war.

We are now clearly embroiled in that endless war, which is a reality that even Senate war hawk Lindsey Graham acknowledged last year when four U.S. troops were killed in Niger. Claiming that he didn’t know that the U.S. had a military presence in Niger, Graham – who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs – stated that “this is an endless war without boundaries, no limitation on time or geography.”

Although it wasn’t clear whether he was lamenting or celebrating this endless and borderless war, his words should be taken as a warning of where the U.S. stands on this 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq – in a war without end, without boundaries, without limits on time or geography.

March 19, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

US Splurges More Cash on Balkans Arms for Syria

Pentagon shopping spree for Balkans arms to equip Syrian rebels shows no sign of abating, after plans have emerged for US to buy a further 25,000 Kalashnikov-style rifles and 20 million bullets.

By Lawrence Marzouk, Ivan Angelovski, Juliana Ruhfus, Jelena Cosic | Balkan Insight | March 15, 2018

The Pentagon is planning to spend $162.5 million on weapons, ammunition and other equipment in 2019 to arm Syrian forces fighting Islamic State, ISIS, a recently released budget report reveals.

The amount comes on top of the $2.2 billion already designated by the US for arms to Syrian fighters [and other Pentagon-backed groups] from former Eastern Bloc countries – which BIRN revealed in investigation in September last year.

The operation of arming Syrian rebels already on the ground with former Eastern Bloc arms and ammunition, known as the Syria Train and Equip programme, has drawn almost entirely from the Balkans and Central Europe to date, a trend that is likely to continue throughout 2018 and 2019.

The new details of the spending have emerged as Al Jazeera English broadcasts “America’s Guns – Pipeline to Syria”, a joint investigation with Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

The probe found further evidence that arms were flowing from the Balkans to the Pentagon’s military projects in the Middle East.

BIRN tracked more than 20 Pentagon-commissioned flights leaving the island airport of Krk, Croatia, carrying unidentified military equipment to US bases, mostly in the Middle East.

The pattern of these airlifts being accompanied by inbound flights from the Azeri cargo firm Silk Way, first revealed by BIRN last October, has continued.

Serbia’s air aviation directorate told BIRN that a Silk Way flight from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Rijeka on October 5, 2017, which overflew their airspace, was given a permit for the “transportation of arms and dangerous goods”.

The Croatian authorities have refused to confirm or deny whether the flights are carrying weapons to Syria.

Questions have been raised about the ability of the US to keep track of its deliveries to anti-ISIS fighters, with evidence that Pentagon-purchased equipment is finding its way also to Islamist groups.

James Bevan, executive director of Conflict Armament Research, has documented more than 40,000 items found with ISIS in Syria, and found that many had originally been supplied by the Pentagon to its allies.

“The main issue is that if you supply weapons to non-state actors, you have very little control over what happens to those weapons,” Bevan explained, “particularly in a situation like Syria, where we have multiple competing groups.”

“That means, as somebody who is supplying weapons into that conflict, you really have no control over where they are going,” he added.

The Pentagon insists that US weapons deliveries to Syria are “incremental” and intended only for specific operations.

The new batch of weapons is needed, according to the latest Pentagon budget, to create a force capable of ensuring ”a safe and secure environment and capable of countering ISIS 2.0 and AQ [Al Qaeda].”

The equipment will be provided to 65,000 “Vetted Syrian Opposition” fighters – 30,000 of which will be tasked with offensive combat missions while the remaining 35,000 will become part of the new “Internal Security Forces”, whose job it will be to maintain security in “liberated areas”.

Currently, the Pentagon has around 30,000 vetted fighters on its books, mostly from the 50,000-strong Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF.

The US military said in January that half of the new “Internal Security Forces” – branded the “Border Security Force” at the time – would be made up of former members of the SDF.

The SDF is a coalition of different militia, widely considered to be Kurdish-led but, according to the Pentagon, split equally between Kurds and Arabs.

The Kurdish People’s Protection Units, YPG, is one of its most important elements and played a critical role in the battle for Raqqa, the former “capital” of the Islamic State group.

The Turkish government, however, argues that it is an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Ankara considers a terrorist group. It launched an offensive against the YPG in January, placing it on a collision course with its NATO allies.

The Pentagon has sought to assuage Turkey fears by insisting that the weapons’ pipeline to these vetted forces is “mission-specific” and that new recruits would be “comprised of local forces that are demographically representative”.

March 18, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Iran official warns Europe against playing US-Israeli game

Press TV – March 17, 2018

A senior Iranian official has warned European countries against playing into the hands of the United States and the Israeli regime as European signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal propose fresh sanctions against Tehran under the pressure of Washington.

“Defense capabilities, particularly the missile program, of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which have a deterrent nature, will firmly be continued based on national security necessities,” Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani said in a meeting with Oman’s Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi in Tehran on Saturday.

“Political and media propaganda will have no impact on their development,” he added.

Britain, France and Germany have proposed new EU sanctions on Iran over its missile program and its regional role, a confidential document said on Friday.

The joint paper was sent to the EU capitals to sound out support for such sanctions as they would need the backing of all 28 member states of the bloc, Reuters quoted two people familiar with the matter as saying.

The proposal is allegedly part of an EU strategy to appease US President Donald Trump and preserve the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Tehran and the P5+1 group of countries in 2015 amid constant US threats to withdraw from it.

Shamkhani said US failure to fulfill its obligations and its illegal approach to the JCPOA as well as Europe’s passivity with regard to Washington’s approaches clearly show that regional countries need to focus on finding a solution to the ongoing issues and crises in the region by themselves.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will give a proper and due response to the US constant violations of its commitments under the JCPOA and will accept no change, interpretation or new measure that would limit the JCPOA,” the SNSC secretary said.

His comments came a day after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned the US against the “painful mistake” of pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement.

“Considering what has been envisaged in the JCPOA in the field of research and development and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continued measures to develop its peaceful nuclear capability, if the US makes the mistake of exiting the JCPOA, it will definitely be a painful mistake for the Americans,” Zarif told reporters.

Elsewhere in his comments, Shamkhani said growing deep relations between Iran and Oman had led to consensus on regional issues.

“The development of constructive and all-out relations with neighbors based on common interests is the top priority of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy,” he added.

The senior Iranian official lashed out at certain regional countries for adopting “a hasty and arrogant attitude and statements” which have posed serious challenges to the handling of regional crises.

He expressed his concern about the killing of Yemeni women and children in airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as the catastrophic conditions of the oppressed Yemeni people.

“The shared view of Iran and Oman on the Yemeni crisis is based on putting an immediate end to war, establishing ceasefire, lifting the blockade, dispatching humanitarian aid and holding Yemeni-Yemeni dialogue to form new political structures based on the Yemeni people’s demands and vote,” Shamkhani pointed out.

He emphasized that the Yemeni crisis cannot be settled through military approaches and urged a political initiative in this regard.

About 14,000 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen in March 2015. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The United Nations says a record 22.2 million people are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.

The UN Security Council on March 15 warned about the worsening humanitarian situation in war-battered Yemen, stating the status quo is having a “devastating” impact on the lives of civilians in the impoverished Arab country.

“The Security Council expresses its grave concern at the continued deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Yemen, and the devastating humanitarian impact of the conflict on civilians,” it said in a statement.

Oman urges dialogue instead of military approaches

The Omani foreign minister, for his part, criticized military approaches to regional issues and urged the path of dialogue and understanding instead.

He added that Oman regards Iran as a trustworthy neighboring country and commended the Islamic Republic’s role in establishing stability and security in the region.

Bin Alawi arrived in Tehran Friday night on a two-day visit to hold talks with senior Iranian officials about mutual and regional issues.

Iran rejects speculations about bin Alawi’s visit

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi on Saturday rejected speculation about a link between the Omani minister’s visit to Tehran and US Defense Secretary James Mattis’s recent travel to Muscat and said bin Alawi’s trip was taking place with the purpose of strengthening mutual relations.

“Although Oman has very good relations with many countries in the world, Mr. Yusuf bin Alawi’s trip to Tehran has nothing to do with Mattis’s visit to this country,” Qassemi said.

He strongly rejected any link between bin Alawi’s visit to Tehran and US policies on the JCPOA.

The Iranian spokesperson said, “Iran and Oman are cooperating with each other on a wide range of issues and the two sides seek to use the two countries’ existing capacities to further deepen economic, commercial, banking and financial cooperation.”

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia meddling in Lebanon’s affairs, pitting people against each other: Hezbollah official

Deputy Chairman of Hezbollah’s Executive Council Sheikh Nabil Qaouq (Photo by al-Manar television network)
Press TV – March 17, 2018

A senior official of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement has accused Saudi officials of interfering in Lebanon’s domestic affairs and pitting people from various walks of life against each other.

“Saudi Arabia’s latest interference in Lebanon’s internal affairs is embodied in meddling in the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections. Saudi interventions are pitting the Lebanese against each other, and creating divisions and political tensions among them,” Deputy Chairman of Hezbollah’s Executive Council Sheikh Nabil Qaouq said on Saturday.

He added, “Saudi Arabia wishes to change Lebanon’s political equations through interfering in the elections, collecting information about composition of future electoral lists and supporting candidates that could challenge Hezbollah.”

Commenting on the ongoing military drills between the US and Israeli armies in the southern areas of occupied Palestinian territories, the senior Hezbollah official pointed out that “the maneuver officially documents Israel’s recognition of the fact that Hezbollah can reach the depth of Israel, and that Israel has no ability to confront the resistance movement’ rockets.”

He stressed that Hezbollah is now the main obstacle to Israel’s expansionist policies in the Middle East region.

On October 30 last year, Saudi Minister of State for Persian Gulf Affairs Thamer al-Sabhan issued threats against Lebanon’s government as well as Iran and Hezbollah via Twitter, stating that the movement needed to be “toppled” in Lebanon.

The Saudi minister also warned in an interview with Lebanese MTV television station that there would be “astonishing” developments to “oust” Hezbollah.

He also said that Saudi Arabia would deal with Lebanon’s government as a hostile administration because of Hezbollah’s power-sharing role in it.

On November 4, 2017, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation in a televised statement from Saudi Arabia, citing many reasons, including the security situation in Lebanon, for his sudden decision. He also said that he sensed a plot being hatched against his life.

He returned to Beirut on November 21. All political factions in Lebanon had called on him to return back home.

Top Lebanese officials and senior politicians close to Hariri had earlier said that he had been forced to resign, and that Saudi authorities were holding him captive.

Lebanese President Michel Aoun had also refused to accept Hariri’s resignation.

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Good Wishes for Nowruz

Iranians Prepare to Celebrate the Persian New Year, Netanyahu Is Sounding the Drums of War

By Miko Peled | American Herald Tribune | March 17, 2108

As millions of Iranians prepare to celebrate the Persian new year, Nowruz, we should extend our wishes for peace and prosperity to our Iranian brothers and sisters. However, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is once again sounding the drums of war and his target is once again Iran. It seems that when the going gets tough Netanyahu goes for Iran. He has done it several times in the past and most recently during his latest visit to Washington, DC. Netanyahu – arguably in an effort to divert attention from his impending indictment – insisted that “Iran, Iran, Iran” is a threat. And although all who visit Iran talk about the richness of its culture, the beauty of its landscapes and the kindness of its people, according to Netanyahu “Darkness is descending on our region,” and that darkness is caused by Iran. “Iran,” a country that has never attacked or occupied anyone, “is building an aggressive empire” which includes, “Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen” and “more to come.”

It is no coincidence that Netanyahu specifically mentioned Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. The message that he sends is clear: the destruction of Iraq and Syria must go on because of Iran; the destabilization of Lebanon and the demonizing of Hezbollah must go on, the genocide in Gaza too will go on, not because of Zionist genocidal tendencies but because of Iranian influence and finally, in a message of support to Mohammad Bin Salman, Netanyahu gave his blessing to the ongoing Saudi bombing in Yemen. It so happens that during his recent visit to the UK, Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia just sealed a deal to receive billions of pounds worth of weapons to be used in the ongoing slaughter in Yemen. Netanyahu explained that these are the arms of the “Iranian empire” and even though the lion’s share of the killing in the Middle East is done by the US, Israel and their cronies, Iran is the problem. “More to come” Netanyahu added presumably as a threat that Israel is keeping open the possibility that still other countries may see destruction.

Though he did not mention it specifically, at the center of Netanyahu’s speech is the new vision for the Middle East- sewn together by Israel, The United States and the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman. What has been named “The Deal of the Century” in English and Safkat El Kurn in Arabic (the Arabic name being less ambitious as it means the deal of the decade) is a vision of an “open” and “moderate” Saudi Arabia which like Jordan and Egypt will have diplomatic relations with Israel ignoring the Palestinian people’s struggle against Zionist oppression. In return Saudi Arabia will be permitted to continue its own genocide in Yemen and receive Western support in its ongoing feud with Iran. It will also be spared, like Egypt and Jordan, “Israel’s longtime peace partners,” the lectures on human rights violations. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are all reactionary dictatorships with leaders who have no regard for human rights and who sold their Palestinian brothers in return for billions of dollars. The message for Arab regimes is clear – collaborate with Israel and the West and you will be allowed to oppress your people and line your pockets with cash, or stand with the Palestinians and find yourself in ruins like Iraq and Syria or under constant threat like Iran. Clearly, Mohammad Bin Salman made his choice clear.

“The force behind so much of what is bad is this radical tyranny in Tehran. If I have a message for you today, it’s a very simple one: We must stop Iran. We will stop Iran.”

Stop Iran from doing what? Stop Iran from supporting the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Stop Iran from calling to remove the racist Zionist regime from Palestine and to allow for a democracy to emerge. How is Iran a dangerous radical tyranny more than Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia? The difference is that the latter are happy to collaborate with Israel.

Netanyahu is accustomed to receiving political gifts from the U.S. and particularly from Donald Trump. These are gifts that solidify his power at home, and this time he received the following: “The President has also made it clear that if the fatal flaws of the nuclear deal are not fixed, he will walk away from the deal and restore sanctions.” The United States walking away from the Iran agreement will suit Israel fine, and will show Bin Salman that when it comes to the US, Israel can deliver. While other Israeli politicians run around the like children, with few achievements to show Netanyahu is a serious player on national and international issues.

The troubling partnership between Bin Salman, Netanyahu and Trump (through his son-in-law Jared Kushner) will inevitably crash and burn. Both Bin Salman and Netanyahu represent regimes that have no legitimacy and the Kushner-Trump foreign policy is founded on Zionist mythology and grand ambitions that disregard the will of the people of the region. It is an irony that Netanyahu could not resist calling Iran dishonest, “I warned that Iran’s regime had repeatedly lied to the international community, that it could not be trusted,” and then add the biggest lie of them all, “Israel remains committed to achieving peace with all our neighbors, including the Palestinians.”

Hard as it may be to believe, Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran has nothing to do with Iran and it has nothing to do with any real or perceived threat by Iran. Netanyahu discovered that Iran is a perfect target to use each time he needs a smoke screen. As Palestinians die a slow agonizing death due to his policies, thirsty for water, desperate for urgent medical care and fighting for their freedom, killed in the streets and held in Israeli torture chambers, Netanyahu the magician is terrifying the world with a smoke screen intended to turning the world’s attention to a threat that does not exist. Still, one may safely assume some seventy-five million Iranians are concerned for their country and their lives.

As Nowruz approaches, I wish all Iranians inner strength, peace, prosperity and Nowruz Mobarak.

Miko Peled is a writer and human rights activist. He is an international speaker and the author of “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine”.

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

US plans to remain in Syria ‘for a long time, if not forever’ – Lavrov

RT | March 14, 2018

Some officials in Washington are aiming to maintain a foothold in Syria for a long time, “if not forever,” using chemical weapons provocations to achieve this objective, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

There are no grounds “to doubt the willingness of some US officials to keep a foothold [in Syria] for a long time, if not forever, and contribute to the collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic,” Lavrov said at a news conference in Moscow on Wednesday.

“Various methods” are being used, including “information revealed via [Russia’s] Defense and Foreign Ministries, which says that other provocations involving chemical weapons are being prepared,” the foreign minister said, noting that one such “staging” might take place in Eastern Ghouta.

On March 5, Lavrov said Russia had evidence that the US involvement in Syria had nothing to do with combatting terrorism. Speaking during a visit to Namibia, the foreign minister asserted that Washington is willing to keep the Al-Nusra Front terrorist group as a “plan B” to change the leadership in Damascus, according to Interfax.

Some policymakers in the American capital, he said, are “harboring plans to disintegrate the Syrian state.”

In February, Lavrov told Euronews that “the US clearly has a strategy that, I think, consists of stationing its armed forces in Syria forever.”

The US pursues the same goal in Iraq and Afghanistan “despite all of its earlier promises.” The Americans are working “to cut a huge chunk of Syrian territory from the rest of the country” while setting up puppet local authorities in that area and “trying in every way to establish an autonomous entity under Kurdish authority,” Lavrov said.

US support for Kurdish militias operating in Syria contributed to damaging relations between Washington and Ankara. Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch earlier this year and entered Syria’s Kurdish enclave in Afrin with the stated goal to drive Kurdish “terrorists” and other militant groupings out of the area.

Speaking alongside Lavrov on Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara backs Syria’s territorial integrity, although the operation is ongoing. “Our goal is not to seize or attempt to seize Syrian territory,” he said.

Read more:

Islamists in E. Ghouta plan to stage false flag chemical attack – Damascus

March 14, 2018 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

US Commander: ‘US Troops Prepared to Die for Israel’ in War against Syria, Hezbollah

Operation Juniper Cobra is not a routine exercise; it is a portent of a potentially devastating war against Syria, Hezbollah and Gaza for which Israel is actively preparing — a war likely to erupt within the coming months.

By Whitney Webb | Mint Press | March 12, 2018

Last Sunday, the largest joint military exercise between the United States and Israel began with little fanfare. The war game, dubbed “Operation Juniper Cobra,” has been a regular occurrence for years, though it has consistently grown in size and scope. Now, however, this year’s 12-day exercise brings a portent of conflict unlike those of its predecessors.

Previous reports on the operation suggested that, like prior incarnations of the same exercise, the focus would be on improving Israeli defenses. “Juniper Cobra 2018 is another step in improving the readiness of the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] and the IAF [Israeli Air Force] in particular to enhance their operational capabilities in facing the threat posed by high-trajectory missiles,” Brig. Gen. Zvika Haimovitch, the IDF’s Aerial Defense Division head, told the Jerusalem Post.

However, this year’s “Juniper Cobra” is unique for several reasons. The Post reported on Thursday that the drill, set to end on March 15, was not only the largest joint U.S.-Israeli air defense exercise to ever happen but it was also simulating a battle “on three fronts.” In other words, Israel and the U.S. are jointly simulating a war with Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine – namely, the Gaza strip – simultaneously.

What makes this last part so concerning are Israel’s recent statements and other preparations for war with all three nations, making “Juniper Cobra” anything but a “routine” drill. It is instead yet another preparation for a massive regional conflict, suggesting that such a conflict could be only a matter of months away.

As MintPress recently reported, Israeli officials recently told a bipartisan pair of U.S. Senators that it needed “ammunition, ammunition, ammunition” for a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon — a war that will expressly target Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings. The alleged motive for the invasion is the presence of Iranian rocket factories. However, this allegation is based solely on the claims of an anonymous deputy serving in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and was first reported on by a Kuwaiti newspaper known to publish stories planted by the Israeli government.

In addition, Israel has been laying the groundwork for an invasion of Syria since last year and is largely responsible for the current conflict in Syria that has raged on for seven years. Israel’s current push to invade Syria is also based on flimsy evidence suggesting that Iran is establishing bases in Syria to target Israel.

Israel has also been preparing for a conflict on the embattled Gaza strip, which – owing to the effects of Israel’s illegal blockade and the devastation wrought by past wars – is set to be entirely uninhabitable by 2020. Reports have quoted officials of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which governs the Gaza strip, as saying that they place the chances of a new war with Israel in 2018 “at 95 percent” and that war games, like Operation Juniper Cobra, were likely to be used to plan or even initiate such a conflict. This concern was echoed by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who stated that another Israeli invasion of Gaza, home to 1.8 million people, was “likely” to occur this year. Eizenkot ironically framed the imminent invasion as a way to “prevent a humanitarian collapse” in Gaza.

U.S. lights match, prepares troops

Such a war is likely to be ignited by the unrest destined to follow the U.S.’ imminent move of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The move, set to take place in May, led Hamas to call for a third intifada, or uprising, in response to the U.S.’ unilateral decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in defiance of the international consensus.

Beyond the fact that Israel is preparing to go to war with several countries simultaneously is the fact that U.S. ground troops are now “prepared to die for the Jewish state,” according to U.S. Third Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Richard Clark. “We are ready to commit to the defense of Israel and anytime we get involved in a kinetic fight there is always the risk that there will be casualties. But we accept that, as in every conflict we train for and enter, there is always that possibility,” Clark told the Post.

However, more troubling than the fact that U.S. troops stand ready to die at Israel’s behest was Clark’s assertion that Haimovitch would “probably” have the last word as to whether U.S. forces would join the IDF during war time. In other words, the IDF will decide whether or not U.S. troops become embroiled in the regional war for which Israel is preparing, not the United States. Indeed, Haimovitch buoyed Clark’s words, stating that: “I am sure once the order comes we will find here U.S. troops on the ground to be part of our deployment and team to defend the state of Israel.”

Operation Juniper Cobra is not a routine exercise; it is a portent of a potentially devastating war for which Israel is actively preparing, a war likely to erupt within the coming months. In addition to overtly targeting civilians, these preparations for war — as Juniper Cobra shows — directly involve the United States military and give the war-bent Israeli government the power to decide whether or not American troops will be involved and to what extent. This is a devastating giveaway of national sovereignty by U.S. President Donald Trump.

While the potential involvement of the U.S. forces in such a war is being framed as limited in scope, there is no indication that such a war will be so in practice. Indeed, the U.S. is currently occupying 25 percent of Syria and the Trump administration has economically attacked Palestinians living in Gaza by withdrawing crucial aid, as well as Hezbollah by enforcing new sanctions against the group. Furthermore, Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the fact that Iran — and even Russia — could become involved in such a conflict means that it could quickly spiral out of control.

Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, the Anti-Media, and 21st Century Wire among others. She currently lives in Southern Chile.

March 13, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Three Years after Guilt-Trip Ambush: Germany to Enhance Societal Destabilization on Path to Self-Destruction

By D. E. Steil  |  Aletho News | March 13, 2018

I – Introduction – Merkel to continue leadership that has thus far been a colossal failure in numerous instances

Tomorrow Angela Merkel is expected to be elected in the Bundestag to a fourth term as Germany’s federal chancellor, a position she has continuously held for over a dozen years. Below is an analysis of the current political situation in Germany, which has been dominated by the ongoing migration crisis. This report contains details about specific events during the past few years, especially in 2015, which led to a crisis condition. Sufficient background information plus thirty links are contained for the reader to understand important developments in a proper context. The impact of certain flawed elements of German society, its media organizations, the political party landscape, the judicial structure, and popular sentiment, which, through their interactions, contribute to an ongoing erosion of community and increasing strife, are highlighted with specific examples. Some of the facts included here are being presented for the first time in English, though most people in Germany have also been completely unaware of them. The report is subdivided into 18 different sections to delineate various interrelated themes and facilitate legibility.

Often a contemporary joke, not unlike a political cartoon drawing, succinctly encapsulates poignant realities and may elicit mirth. Have you heard the latest one, about a particular type of dog encountering a rare bird?

Question: What type of creature do you get when you cross-breed a poodle on a leash with a parrot in a birdcage?

Answer: A German Supporter of Merkel, even if only implicitly. (Cumulatively, that’s a majority of adult Germans).

On Sunday, March 4, 2018, it was announced that a majority of nearly two thirds of the voting members of Germany’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), gave permission for its party leaders to proceed with a coalition agreement they had negotiated a few weeks ago with party representatives of the Christian Democratic Union (SDU), headed by Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), headed by Horst Seehoferfor more for than ten years until his resignation earlier today, after which he moves to Berlin to take on the position of Minister of the Interior. This means that Germany will finally form a majority government nearly half a year after federal elections were held last September. These three parties had already constituted the previous coalition government for four years, though with a more substantial majority of seats than is the case now. Based on the parameters of the new coalition agreement, which party leaders of CDU and CSU have already ratified without a popular vote of its registered party members, one thing is certain: Societal destabilization – triggered in the summer of 2015 by a historically unprecedented influx of illegal migration to Germany upon Merkel’s open-ended invitation, which has not been rescinded so that it continues at a rate of a few hundred newcomers on a daily basis – will be significantly exacerbated.

The previous Merkel coalition government has been a colossal failure, not only regarding the all-important migration crisis but also in its dealing with the euro currency crisis, the lingering European banking crisis, the Greek bankruptcy crisis, the governmental spying scandal, the Ukrainian government coup, the diesel emission fraud scandal, a breakdown in diplomatic and commercial relations with Russia, the supply and preparedness scandal in the German military, increasing impoverishment of many among the older generation (Altersarmut) receiving meager pensions, critical urban housing shortages brought on by a combination of negligent planning, speculative foreign investment in urban real estate, and demand by migrants from eastern Europe and beyond, who have chosen to live in high density population centers, which have resulted in skyrocketing property and rental prices. No matter what the critical issues have been, actual solutions were not provided; the specific situations remain unresolved, they were either made worse or deferred. For instance, to highlight that general affluence is purely a myth, it was recently announced by a European statistical agency that the acute risk of becoming poor due to unemployment was over 70% in Germany, significantly higher than in any of the 28 countries of the EU. Though Germany’s labor agency claims a low unemployment rate, such figures are artificial, as they are known to be in the US too. It is remarkable that Merkel still remains sufficiently popular with a substantial portion of the population so that rival politicians have not dared to oust her from office, even though it must be evident by now that she actually dislikes her country – and its flag – to such an extent that she is allowing the gradual deterioration of social cohesion to progress, yet the population appears to oblivious. Like sheep or cattle, millions of people are eagerly or just blindly following her into the abyss.

II – Forced immigration and social stratification are unfair to citizens because they induce alienation and conflict

For many centuries societies built fortified walls around their settlements to keep out unwanted invaders. Even today dwellers build fences or walls, with gates, around their homes, and it is a common feature of entrance doors to come with locks. Social progress brought on the concept of the nation state, which was based on basic commonalities and affinities of the people they represented, same language, related ethnicities or a common heritage such as religious beliefs. Until recently external borders in European countries had border crossings or checkpoints, as continues to be the case in most countries in the world. Maintaining open borders was subjected to negotiated treaties and agreements among countries with a similar social structure and political values, premised on external borders continuing to be subject to rigid controls. This system worked rather well until 2015, in which year the system broke down, through malicious subterfuge and ultimately, the egregious and illegal decision by Merkel, as will be explained below, with the complicity of party colleagues and the media. Millions of foreign people (with different ethnicities, different languages, different customs, different religions, from economically underdeveloped societies) have been resettled, purportedly temporarily, but in reality with the repeatedly professed intent to somehow permanently “integrate” them into the indigenous population. From many decades of social experiments already conducted elsewhere, it should be understood what the consequences of such a large-scale resettlement effort will likely be.

It must be noted that this new German “experiment”, which is preordained to fail calamitously – as have previous German social experiments last century that were attempted under some flavor of “Humanism”, as described by Yuval Noah Harari  – is in clear violation of the preamble and spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949:

The parties to this treaty… are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.

This acknowledges the very basic right of a society or country to maintain and preserve such cultural commonalities. Contrary to what the treaty stipulates, the common heritage and civilization of the German people, who are being invaded, is not being safeguarded at all but being intentionally destroyed over time through the demographic effects that will ensue. Though such basic societal aspects have been instinctively understood for centuries, it has been established beyond dispute by Robert D. Putnam, a social researcher at Harvard University, that mixing newcomers into a society results in mutual distrust. A sense of social cohesion gets replaced by increasing stratification, conflict, societal corrosion. This must certainly be evident to anyone who has ever visited such cities as New York, London, and Paris, among the larger centers where such phenomena are constantly on display. The migration processes leading to these phenomena came about by enacting certain laws that allowed such migration to occur.

What forces or impulses led to the drafting, introducing, and lobbying for such legislation is equally well documented but is rarely discussed in the popular media, if at all. Triggered by their paranoia, Jewish elites living in the galut, sought to become more visibly inconspicuous in their respective environments. They were concerned about their safety from collective historical experiences of expulsion, of which there had been many. Rarely reflecting honestly exactly what about their conduct or behavior might have prompted such animosities, they reflexively blamed their host population, which limited the remedies they would consider. By altering the ethnic and racial make-up of modern western societies in North America and Western Europe, their fear factor is decreased because they can more easily blend in with the indigenous population with whom they share more similarities, genetically and culturally, than, say, migrants who have come from sub-Saharan Africa or East Asiatic regions. With regard to the US situation in Europe, this has been very well documented by psychology researcher Kevin MacDonald (Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review). With regard to the situation in Sweden, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who had moved from Wisconsin to Israel to Stockholm, has been rather candid about acknowledging this too, in videos that went viral a few years ago. With regard to the situation in Germany, Jewish leaders have played a significant role too, most explicitly in May 2015, through psychological coercion (guilt-tripping), as is documented farther below in Section IX.

III – A combination of lacking freedom of speech and tight media control effectively enhances social conformity

The legislative period prior to last September’s parliamentary election had been a disaster for the common people in Germany, though the powerful television and print media, who shape the cognitive framework of the majority of the population, have been very successful in covering up this fact, through distorted reporting, lies of omission, and other tricks that generate a result that is known under the generic term “fake news”. In Germany critical intellectuals refer to them as the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). The degree of uniformity they display when reporting on the critical issues concerning the country has been even tighter in Germany than what has been in evidence by the US media in its nearly universal support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election season and thereafter. The German media, which lack the healthy and thriving alternative Internet media landscape evident in the US, tend to be even more ideologically driven than the US corporate media. Unlike in the US, German journalists do not make a pretense of being unbiased, for they see it as their duty to project a selective and slanted interpretation of actual events or developments (Deutungshoheit) and incidentally also function as a type of thought police (Gedankenpolizei) by vilifying those whose views might stray too far from permitted opinion. In Germany, as nearly everywhere else, freedom to publicly express any opinion is not constitutionally guaranteed, as is the case in the US. Under the fuzzy pretext of cherishing human “dignity” as a paramount value, certain paragraphs in the German penal code forbid anybody to publicly insult or disparage others too strongly (Beleidigung), which in the US might be an actionable civil matter under libel and slander laws. Criminalizing such kinds of opinion fosters superficial politeness, lest some influencial individual, whose feelings were allegedly hurt, files a criminal complaint to investigate the matter. An incidental effect is that powerful crooks and liars are less likely to be strongly criticized. In the absence of freedoms of speech that Americans take for granted, the level of social conformity and acquiescence, to whatever standards of thought the media set, increases. The higher one’s social standing, correlating strongly with educational level, the farther down one could fall upon stepping out of line with an unpopular opinion, due to an effect known as public shaming, that can be achieved through negative media reinforcement. This leads to the paradoxical situation, witnessed in US towns with top universities, namely that very well educated people often publicly project themselves as ignoramuses by professing opinions on social issues that they ought to know are contrived. Such attitudes are a reflection of the cognitive dissonance they develop as a consequence of political correctness overload, as they learn what they dare not mention openly. In Germany and Sweden the traditional media have been very effective in maintaining this behavioral control mechanism while incrementally yet constantly narrowing the scope of opinions that will avoid possible ostracism.

IV – Manipulating public perceptions by obfuscating basic facts and lying with false and misleading terminology

As was revealed late 2014 in a book by a former journalist, turned to whistleblower, Udo Ulfkotte, formerly employed by Germany’s preferred newspaper read by top level decision makers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, prominent and influential journalists in Germany are “bought” (Gekaufte Journalisten) to serve special interest groups and also collaborate with the CIA, which tells them what to write. Though this admission is hardly shocking, given the power of the press, it is nonetheless helpful for prior presumptions to have been confirmed by a person, who was part of this practice, to then come clean and publicly apologize for his own involvement before  his death, last year. A concrete example from the German media’s methods of “perception management” – the contemporary term for what used to be referred to as “thought control” or “mind control” or simply “brainwashing” – has been the persistent use of the word Flüchtlinge (i.e. refugees, more precisely “those who are fleeing”) when referring to the assortment of migrants who have arrived overland in Bavaria by way of Austria and other countries farther south before that, either from Africa or the Middle East. According to Germany’s own basic law, as well as international treaties and agreements, by the time the migrants arrive at Germany’s border they have relinquished any possible refugee status that may have obtained elsewhere, based on strict criteria. Therefore, they have no legal right whatsoever to apply for – much less receive – asylum in Germany. An orderly procedure to deal with their presence would involve refusing them entry or immediately deporting them if they had already crossed the border. Repeatedly using this particular word and its derivations in that manner, for instance “refugee crisis” (Migrationskrise), is simply a bold lie and a tacit insult at least to Austria, because the implication, if the word were used correctly, would have to be that these migrants had all incurred individual political persecution by the Austrian government, from which jurisdiction they were compelled to taking flight, as it were. Yet both Austria and Sweden had actually taken in a higher percentage of alien migrants, relative to their respective populations, than has Germany. Using this term also entails a degree of arrogance because it tacitly suggests some moral superiority or high-minded benevolence on the part of Germany for providing refuge to those economic migrants who have come so far. On a psychological level, this makes those people who are perpetually burdened by self-hatred and unearned guilt, to feel a little better. In practice, this misleading term has also been used by the media to even pertain to those migrants whose asylum requests were rejected, and whose continued residency is simply “tolerated” (geduldet) by the local governments instead of being deported.

V – Falsely invoking “humanitarian” reasons as a pretense for a historically unprecedented and criminal decision

As Europeans have witnessed, the established legal premises and procedures for dealing with a mass influx into Germany, by migrants who are not members of the European Union (EU), had been unilaterally abandoned by Merkel in early September 2015, with no prior consultations with members of her own government. This unilateral action constituted a major crime. It was done under a false guise simply by invoking the magic word “humanitarian”, a useful lie that somehow causes people’s brains to lock up, causing any rational or critical thinking to be automatically aborted by the population. Practice has shown that it is possible to trick a people into accepting the most reprehensible acts, including waging war and killing hundreds of thousands of people, so long as these crimes are summarily packaged as somehow being humanitarian. The assertion “We had to destroy the village [Ben Tre] to save it” from the era of the Vietnam war is an example of such a purportedly humanitarian gesture, as was the US bombing campaign against Serbia a few decades thereafter. However, Merkel did not just accept a few trains filled with migrants coming from Hungary through Vienna as a special exception, she subsequently went on to publicly invite any and all migrants to come to Germany and receive an enthusiastic public welcome (Willkommenskultur). They were primarily young males, of whom many had previously been ‘Islamist’ mercenaries driven out by the Syrian troops. This was likely the most ominous and stupid decision yet made this century, which has led to a completely novel situation, unprecedented in human history. As will be explained in detail below in Section IX, there is plenty of evidence that this was definitely not an ad hoc response to an unforeseen emergency situation, as the media have deceptively portrayed it to have been, but the consequence of an orchestrated destabilization campaign, one of the various modes of asymmetric warfare, planned months ahead of time, which not only high officials but even the general public had been warned about, months before, as being imminent unless appropriate counter-measures would be adopted. Though even the alternative media have neglected to do so, due to a lack of information, it is possible, within a contextual chronology of events in the first half of 2015, to trace back the origin of Merkel’s commitment to break the laws on a grand scale – also to have the Bavarian minister to go along with it – and thereby permanently alter the future demographics of the population within Germany, possibly even in other countries. Her determination to betray her country and its population was triggered by listening to a fateful speech given in early May 2015 north of Munich, at a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US troops.

VI – The symbiosis between the authoritarian and elite “leftist” Green Party and Merkel’s shifting policy positions

Nowadays a substantial proportion of German journalists sympathize with the Green Party, which during its inception a few decades ago primarily promoted their desired legalization of pederasty (for which they have apologized only decades later) and the banning of nuclear power generation plants, which is in the process of being implemented. They were very supportive of so-called “humanitarian bombings” in the Balkans, solar and wind power, and more recently, taking cues from the Obama regime, have been obsessed with advocating or promoting divisive cultural Marxist issues (gender identity, homosexual marriage, ethnic multiculturalism through unchecked mass migration, political correctness, global warming alarmism, open borders, self-hatred, abolishing national sovereignty, opposing free speech, and fighting vocally against “the right”). The Green Party is most popular among school teachers and petty bureaucrats, who enjoy special privileges in German society, students and people who got university degrees in sociology, psychology, journalism, political science, and pedagogy. Given the fact that they are German, those seven political parties that were elected to the Bundestag last September have an authoritarian bent, but the Green Party is the most authoritarian of them all, which is not surprising since their roots lie in the doctrinaire “New Left” movement that derived from the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Their leading functionaries are the most eager to dictate what the behavior of everybody else ought to be, yet are most zealous in filing criminal complaints because they felt personally insulted by some criticism or crude remark. Most memorable is their proposal, a few years ago, to force cafeterias to serve veggie burgers at least once a week because eating beef consumed more resources. Since they do not object to economic neo-liberalism, they have become an important pillar of contemporary “One World” Globalism of open borders. Accordingly, their support among those who might consider themselves “working class” laborers in the industrial and service sectors is miniscule.

As one might expect, a party with such a dubious pedigree as the Green Party is characterized by hypocrisy and internal contradictions. For instance, while its leadership professes to be strongly “anti-fascist”, representatives have no problems with Germany maintaining close relations with such quintessentially fascist regimes that are currently in power in Israel, Ukraine, Turkey, and China. Though the word “Green” refers to environmentalism, the consequences of their advocacy has harmed the environment. The Green Party strongholds are primarily in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which is headed by a Green Party member. The mayors of the university towns of Tübingen and Freiburg are from the Green Party. Only in two of nearly three hundred voting districts did the Green Party exceed a vote of 20% – in Freiburg, with their strongest showing at 21.2%, and in one of the central districts in Berlin. The mayor of the capital city, Stuttgart, is also from the Green Party. Stuttgart happens to be a bastion of the automotive industry. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes cars, Porsche, manufacturer of sporty vehicles, both have their headquarters, respective museums, and some manufacturing facilities in Stuttgart, as does Bosch, the largest automotive supplier. In part due to its topography, Stuttgart residents continue to suffer some of Germany’s worst air pollution. In their zeal to limit carbon dioxide emissions, as if they were toxic, the Green Party has wound up promoting diesel vehicles simply because they are slightly more efficient than gasoline engines, while ignoring the far more serious health effects of carbon particulate matter and harmful nitrogen oxides coming from diesel combustion, as if people were not already aware of this fact from the serious incidences of smog experienced in Tokyo and Los Angeles forty years ago. Suddenly, however, anyone who drives a diesel car is a sucker (one third of registered cars in Germany have diesel motors), since a few days ago Germany’s top administrative court ruled that city administrators are permitted to ban diesel cars due to their obligation to curtail excessive air pollution, at least two thirds of which is caused by diesel vehicles. Thirdly, in a most incredible exercise in self-deception, self-righteous adherents of the German Green Party tout the coexistence of radical feminism with misogynist practices of men from Asian and African societies because “it’s part of their culture”. Though such antithetical concepts are not subject to debate, some people are beginning to wonder, resulting in a loss of support for this party, which used to have a much stronger following a decade ago. Since the professed desire by politicians for unspecified cultural integration is a delusion, the only way to synthesize such opposing concepts is to support the creation of parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften), essentially ghettos, or “no-go” zones where police do not venture into. From a class analysis perspective, elitists do not regard such a development as a problem because they have the resources to live in more affluent enclaves and send their children to private schools, while the less financially endowed sectors of society are left to deal with reduced employment and housing opportunities, high crime, and other manifestations of social ferment.

In the federal election last September (with over 76% participation rate) the Green Party received less than nine percent of the total vote. That was less than those who voted for the Left Party (proponents of the traditional economic Marxism; their legacy comes from the near-totalitarian East German society, though they now also support unconstrained mass migration) as well as those who voted for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which appeals mainly to managers, bankers, physicians, entrepreneurs, attorneys, affluent and wealthy individuals. It would be fair to say that the majority of tax dodgers and evaders have a strong political affinity toward the FDP. Generally, this party is the least authoritarian of the seven parties.

What is important to understand is that during the course of more than a dozen years as Germany’s chancellor, Merkel has continuously drifted toward adopting positions that have been traditionally dear to the Green Party. Thereby, she has effectively become the Green Party’s “secret” leader, or top ally. So as not to be eclipsed by her shifting, the Green party has advocated more extremist and self-destructive positions. These views were not necessarily shared by the vast majority of the population but passively tolerated. In principle, most Green Party voters can be considered to be Merkel supporters because they take pride in her having gravitated toward their side. If they had been too far apart the Green Party would not have been willing to engage in lengthy coalition talks after the election to form a coalition government under Merkel’s leadership. The same could be said of the FDP, which joined with the Green Party to engage in these negotiations, which ultimately failed. Those who voted for the FDP did so in the hopes of influencing certain liberal economic policies and were comfortable in having some of these accents being implemented under a Merkel leadership.

VI – The new leader of the Free Democratic Party missed a rare opportunity to oust Merkel on election night

A few hours after the September election results became evident, the SPD announced that they would not join another coalition under Merkel. At that point the relatively new leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, could have easily announced that, almost likewise, while the FDP was not opposed to joining a coalition with her party, he would only entertain this prospect under a different personal leadership, that is, not with Merkel. Such a firm statement would have surely led to Merkel’s inevitable resignation, arising from internal pressure. Four years earlier the FDP had missed the 5% threshold to remain in the Bundestag and had re-emerged that evening with over 10% of votes. Had Lindner not been so cautious (some might say spineless), Merkel could have been ousted from her domineering role on election night because the only realistic alternative would have forced her into a minority government, which is not uncommon in Nordic and western European countries. Such a constellation requires hard work – true leadership – by patching together temporary coalitions, depending what the specific issues happen to be. However, Merkel is apparently too lazy, clumsy, and vain to pursue such an endeavor. Moreover, she is too obsessed with wanting to maintain full control and has ruled out leading a minority government.

VII – Social Democratic Party leaders obsessed with preferring Israeli interests to those concerns of its core voters

As Merkel’s junior partner in the past government, the SPD received only slightly more than one fifth of the popular vote last September. Due to this collapse in popularity, compared to their standing only a decade ago, the leader until a few weeks ago, Martin Schulz, said on election night that the reason for not intending to enter into another coalition with Merkel’s Union parties (one, CSU, representing Bavaria, the other, CDU, everywhere else) was a need to re-group and regain a distinct profile, which could better be cultivated in the opposition. Yet, just as Merkel was completely detached from reality after more than a decade as chancellor, beholden to Globalists, media elites, and corporate executives, so also was Martin Schulz, a top-level EU commissar from Brussels, and former alcoholic, who may have never awakened from what appeared to be a perpetual utopian delirium. If an outsider might think that Merkel was completely nuts, this guy seemed to be a certified lunatic. For a person wanting to become the next German chancellor, his particular hobby-horse issues were rather peculiar and definitely contrary to the interests of the party’s core clientele:

– Abolishing nation states and their associated sovereignty within the EU; consequently Germany would merely be yet another region among many others with a centralized (Soviet totalitarian style) Europe;

– A longstanding position that “for me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people”, which he basically reiterated in the only – bland and stale – election debate with Merkel last year;

– After negotiation agreements for a coalition of Green Party and FDP with Merkel had broken down, he expropriated an ongoing Green Party obsession, namely to permit endless chain migration from the MENA region, specifically those related to migrants whose asylum requests had been rejected in Germany and had received temporary (subsidiary) protection but were technically subject to forced repatriation in the very near future. Some politicians associated with Merkel’s alliance parties were already demanding these deportations occur without any further delay yet Schulz and his colleagues demanded that these individuals, subject to deportation, should be allowed instead to bring their family members to Germany too, and so on, which would mean they would all be allowed to remain in Germany forever.

Interestingly, for weeks earlier this year the German media regularly reported that reaching an agreement on the issue of allowing family members of these migrants subject to deportation to join them in Germany, thus completely nullifying the prospect of implementing these repatriations back to their home countries, was a contentious issue and appeared to be the major stumbling block toward achieving a comprehensive agreement, yet never were the SPD functionaries ever called upon to provide a cogent rationale for insisting so staunchly on such a counterproductive demand that was clearly not in the interest of the German people, since, as was shown earlier in this report, enticing and accommodating even more people from foreign cultures, who will likely never assimilate, is not only an unnecessary drain on the budget and a strain on public infrastructure, especially housing, it results in higher crime rates and distrust between newcomers and the indigenous population. Social cohesion, such as it exists, is replaced by increasing stratification, conflict and corrosion. Obviously this conspicuous failure by the media to elicit an explanation by the SPD – and the Green Party before that – to justify their stance was because the true reason would have been a huge embarrassment, another taboo theme that dare not be publicly explained. The best that these supporters of unrestrained migration could deliver was an unconvincing cliché reference to this being the moral or “Christian” thing to do, as if though these cynical politicians were suddenly pretending to be virtuous and benevolent spokespersons for the Catholic and Protestant religious establishments, both of which have become so mentally corrupted that they now indulge in and propagate a most pernicious form of pathological altruism.

Their rationale for enhancing societal destabilization is not rooted in any religious epiphany but derives from the fact that the SPD has jumped onto the bandwagon to please Israeli and Jewish interests, specifically merging or synthesizing the long term goals of the Israeli Oded Yinon Plan, published in 1982, to enable Zionist expansion by destroying its Arab neighbor countries, the desired implementation of which served as the inspiration for the attacks on the World Trade towers to provoke US led wars on Israel’s behalf, with the intended realization of an expanded Coudenhove-Kalergi “Plan” – or vision – published in 1925, according to which the indigenous European populations would universally intermarry with Black Africans and transform themselves over time to a new type of mixed race, to be ruled over by a spiritual nobility of Jews. By destroying Syria and causing a depopulation of its inhabitants, Israel could eventually take over more of this territory with only slight resistance at an opportune moment, while at the same time resettling much of the population in Europe would cause its desired destabilization and weakening, ultimately destroying its culture. While it is understandable that supporting such a fantastical endeavor must sound wonderful to Zionist Jews, the eagerness with which European leaders would want to actively facilitate such a development is quite appalling, an indicator of a treasonous or mentally deranged frame of mind.

VIII – Merkel concedes to adopt even more extremist positions on migration to maintain power in a new coalition

The result of the negotiations on allowing family members of those individuals subject to deportation from Germany to join them and resettle in Germany, presumptively in perpetuity, was a rather fuzzy formulation with numerous contingencies and loopholes, so that all parties then claimed their own public stance had prevailed while the other side had conceded. In reality, the SPD had prevailed on this issue, so the door will soon be open to additional mass migration, along with generous financing for it, though it is impossible to foresee just how significant it will turn out to be in the longer term. This concession by Merkel, with the CDU giving up the finance ministry to the SPD, while the SPD gives up the economics ministry to the CDU, was characterized by a political cartoon on the cover of Germany’s largest newsweekly magazine as a big sellout – a huge exaggeration that was surely intended to sway the vote by the SPD party to endorse the coalition deal. With regard to a second dispute during the negotiations, very dear to a majority of the population, namely modifying the medical insurance scheme in such a manner that the dual track structure (the privileged few, affluent people and public bureaucrats, get preferred treatment while everybody else gets regular treatment) would eventually be abolished and transformed to a more equitable construct, the SPD simply caved in; they accepted that a commission would be formed to study the issue – everyone familiar with government knows what that means. The message is clear: Health insurance issues, of concern to the general public, are subsidiary to debased elites of a party preceded by the adjective “Social” in a quest to placate Israel, while parties whose names are preceded by the adjective “Christian” endorse an accelerated tendency for the society to become more Islamic. Applied Orwellian terminology has been on full display. In reality, of course, not just Merkel but the German political leadership despises the common population, even if they are of the same ethnicity. In general, to put it abstractly, the government would prefer its people to die as soon as possible upon having served their usefulness as laborers and consumers, to avoid paying them pensions from public funds upon their retirement. This attitude explains why the German government raised the retirement age to 67 a few years ago and why in Europe only Germany, along with Bulgaria, still permits billboard advertising for cigarettes, which tend to target young women, who still have a higher statistical life expectancy. It is surely just a matter of time until the pharmaceutical opium epidemic will also hit Germany, so that various people may be compelled to prematurely end their misery pursuant to maintaining their dignity. A few days after the agreement was reached and subjected to SPD party member votes, Schulz resigned his position after he came under criticism. He now has no functionary role in the SPD.

IX – A chronology of key milestones that led to the mass invasion of migrants and Islamic jihadists into Europe

In order to contradict the common misconception that the unpleasant invasion of Germany through mass migration came as a sudden surprise and could not possibly have been anticipated in the scope that occurred, so that authorities would have been unprepared to avert it in any case, a few informative milestones preceding this ominous development are presented below, with attendant commentary or analysis:

In October 2010 a widely discussed book, by an SPD member and high official of the German Federal Bank, Thilo Sarazin, with the provocative title “Germany Abolishes Itself” (Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab), led to him being reviled by the media and forced to resign his position. He predicted and warned about the emerging problems of migration and development of parallel societies from foreign cultures and their detrimental effects on social cohesion. Heavily footnoted and rationally argued, his thesis was hard to contradict, so instead of engaging with the issues raised, the media vilified him personally as a “racist”, misrepresented his assertions, or constructed straw-man allegations that were easy to refute.

In October 2014 public concern about creeping societal transformation in Germany due to “Islamic” radicalization, of larger segments of the migrant population and their descendents, a reality already in evidence in such European cities as London, Birmingham, Paris, Marseille, Brussels, and Malmö, among others, led to weekly Monday evening protest marches through Dresden, by a patriotic group under the name PEGIDA, to express their dissatisfaction about such an ominous trend also taking hold in Germany. Without addressing their published points of concern, the thousands of marchers were summarily denounced by the media as “Nazis” or “xenophobes” or “radical right-wingers”.

In early January 2015, just a few days after a shooting attack in the offices of a Charlie Hebdo publication in Paris, a Bavarian offshoot of PEGIDA announced plans to demonstrate in Munich. In response, the city government and local media demanded a huge public turnout for a counter-demonstration. This constituted a spectacular 180° reversal, a true display of extreme hypocrisy, according to the double standard principle of Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: Just a few days before top politicians from all over, including Merkel, had congregated to march in a staged parade in Paris (“We are Charlie”) to express solidarity for the right of a publication to criticize Islam – including depicting the mythical prophet Mohammad as a cartoon character – yet a planned march in Munich, in which people also wished to express dissatisfaction with creeping Islamic tendencies in the Occident, not unlike Charlie Hebdo had projected, was characterized as evil. Other German cities, including Cologne, also saw mass demonstrations that month, counteracting the feared popular acclaim of an emerging PEGIDA movement by supporting what they were against. Professing the desire to welcome any and all refugees from anywhere came more as a reactionary response to the PEGIDA challenge, which the German media had vilified as Neo-Nazi, than as an expression of wanting to be invaded by migrants, but expressing a derivative sentiment by being against a group that was against something (anti-anti) was hardly a compelling inspiration to motivate people to march out in the cold weather. Some of the huge and professionally done banners being carried should have made it obvious to onlookers that some group with deep pockets was operating behind the scenes to pay for this. By this time “Refugees Welcome” signs displayed by protesters were becoming ubiquitous. Images of these types of demonstrations were later leveraged or amplified by spreading them on the Internet. Credulous individuals were made to feel they had a duty to recite these slogans to prove they were “tolerant”, while impoverished individuals around the world who saw such images may have easily gotten the impression they would be loved if they migrated over to Germany. It is unclear how many people were actually paid by non-governmental organizations to show up. In any case, Germans tend to be extremely easy to manipulate into being politically correct simply by guilt-tripping and using a few trigger words. For many years a most infantile and therefore very effective slogan, “Fight Against the Right” (Kampf gegen Rechts), had been cultivated, initially by the SPD led government to target narrow groups, before Merkel rose to power, but expanded in scope thereafter, so all that was necessary to incite the population against some group was merely for the media or some politician to assert (no evidence needed) that this or that organization met this loose criterion of being “Right”. As was demonstrated more than sixty years ago by the famous conformity experiments by Solomon Asch, there is a tendency by a large segment of any society to knowingly contort their publicly expressed opinion to conform to some imagined norm. However, this phenomenon of submissive conformity is much more strongly in evidence amid Germans than in other European societies, though perhaps not quite as much as in some East Asian cultures. This serious behavioral weakness was basically a major factor that contributed to the strong support that Adolf Hitler enjoyed in the 1930s, and it appears that Germans have not learned enough from history. The social conditioning is being deployed by propagandists to have the German public reflexively repeating nonsensical slogans or lies, like a parrot, against their own interest. Of course, the specific ideological content being promoted now is different from what was prevalent eighty years ago, but this is secondary. What matters most is whatever sentiment is being established and reinforced as the standard for others to conform to. Though it may be a conjectural proposition, it seems very plausible that the Green Party “leftist” who blindly parrots the media cues today, if transformed back through time into a propaganda setting that prevailed eight decades ago, would have analogously wanted to conform to what was popular back then.

In mid February 2015 British and Italian media reported that the terror militia organization ISIS (organized and operated by Israel; financed and ideologically trained by Saudi Arabia to embrace Wahhabism, a puritanical flavor of Sunni Islam; and supplied with offensive weaponry by the US), which was operating mainly within Syria and Libya, would be sending half a million migrants to Europe as part of a psychological warfare effort to create chaos and would embed its own fighters, who would pose as migrants. From the Daily Mail:

ISIS threatens to send 500,000 migrants to Europe as a ‘psychological weapon’

“… letters from jihadists show plans to hide terrorists among refugees”

In early March 2015, an explicit threat was made by the Greek defense and foreign ministries in the wake of ongoing disputes between the Greek government versus the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (the Troika). However, this Troika constellation was a fancy way of providing cover to publicly conceal the heart of the conflict, which was between the Greek government and Deutsche Bank, which had speculated on Greek bond price developments and was on the verge of losing significant money, possibly leading to bankruptcy, if Greece would be unable to make good on their debt. Due to options bets by other banks, additional financial institutions would also be adversely impacted. Greece was put under painful austerity supervision to make binding commitments in return for being lent more money, which they in turn would pay back to Deutsche Bank for the Greek bonds they held. Throughout this dispute the German finance minister in particular was regarded to have behaved very arrogantly toward Greece. From the Telegraph:

Greece’s defence minister threatens to send migrants including jihadists to Western Europe

“Greece will unleash a ‘wave of millions of economic migrants’ and jihadists on Europe unless the eurozone backs down on austerity demands, the country’s defence and foreign ministers have threatened.”

The most convenient way for migrants to pass into central Europe was through Greece, past Salonika, then farther to the north toward Macedonia. It appears that Germany didn’t take the threat so seriously. It is obvious that government ministers making threats of this nature must at least have already known that they were in a position to follow through, which implies a degree of prior cooperation with non-governmental organizations and Turkey to facilitate such a “wave of millions of economic migrants”. In other words, the basic organizational structure to follow through was already in place by then. With regard to the mention of “jihadists” joining in with the migrants, this term may sound abstract but one must have surely been aware of what type of people were being referred to. Mainly mercenaries, their occupation as rag-tag fighters entailed such activities as riding around the back of Japanese pickup trucks and indiscriminately spraying high caliber ammunition from belts through the smoking hot barrels of heavy machine guns mounted to them on tripods, operating shoulder-held missile launchers aimed at tanks, feeding mortars or grenade launchers whose explosives landed inside villages, shooting assault rifles with high capacity banana clips in urban combat scenarios, occasionally singing religious songs of jihad, engaging in the massacres of sickly village elders, learning how to make improvised bombs at a “workshop” in the desert, gang raping teenage girls and young women, stealing archeological artifacts and selling them to middlemen, occasionally decapitating their conquered enemies with a sharpened blade, stacking their heads atop a wall for public display to show off how tough they are and send the message “don’t mess with us”. As these murderous jihadists were being dislodged from their occupational positions by the Syrian army attempting to slowly regain territorial control, they could either fight to their deaths or drop their weapons and make a getaway to some other region far away, mingle with other members of a displaced population, likely they would be unwelcome in Turkey where they might be found out, maybe trim their beards and get a haircut, head out farther away for new adventures, toward central Europe to re-group with comrades already living there; rumor had it that Sweden and Germany were being overly generous – “refugees welcome” and all that, no questions asked – free housing with running water.

On a rainy weekend in early May 2015 the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, born in Haifa during the 1950s, gave a prepared speech at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich to commemorate its liberation by US forces 70 years earlier, just a few days before Germany’s surrender. In attendance were chancellor Merkel and Bavarian minister Seehofer sitting next to each other. His speech featured vituperative comments against the PEGIDA movement, along with the usual well-known complaints one would imagine at such an event, including references to their standard atrocity narrative. One of the key passages was the following, in which He doth commanded:

“Germany has foisted so much disaster upon the world. It stands so deeply indebted to so many countries – we are the last country that can afford to reject refugees and those who are persecuted!”

This particular passage was subsequently amplified by the newspaper Die Welt, as follows: “Germany Must Not be Allowed to Reject Any Refugees”. The event was significant inasmuch as Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp and because Merkel had previously not attended such a commemoration elsewhere that year. There was virtually no coverage in the US media, and the aforementioned cryptic command pertaining to the orchestrated deluge of migrants, including jihadists, was not cited by any of the two English language publications that reported on the event through the Internet. In writing about the ceremony, The Times of Israel cited the following assertion made by Merkel later that day in her weekly podcast message:

“We Germans have a particular responsibility here to handle what we [sic] perpetrated in the period of National Socialism attentively, sensitively and also knowledgeably”.

If the translation is correct, then Merkel has apparently accepted the dubious concept of collective and inherited guilt that may be transferred to subsequent generations of Germans and imposes an unearned burden upon them. The faulty logic seems to be: Because a few of Germany’s ancestors ran concentration camps more than seven decades ago, that now obliges Germany’s current generation to now accept and pamper militant jihadists and impoverished migrants, as well as their eventual descendents, for life. Such a proposition is irrational and unacceptable and should be firmly rejected rather than embracing it. This date was surely one of the most significant milestones in the ongoing mass migration crisis. The causality between Schuster’s commands that day and Merkel and Seehofer’s utter disregard for the law from September 2015 onward right until this day, is beyond question because Merkel herself had cited the rationale of Germany’s past as a justifications for not controlling the country’s border crossings and repeatedly refusing to set an upper limit on the number of migrants that Germany would be willing to take in annually. It is for this stubborn stance that her fiercest critics have characterized her as a traitor of the people (Volksverräter). By contrast, Seeohofer repeatedly postured publicly about the need to set a limit, thereby consenting to ignoring the laws, but it soon became apparent that he was just puffing hot air (Dampfplauderer). For this his Bavarian CSU party lost much support in the election, and as a consequence he will not be heading the party in this year’s regional election in Bavaria. Instead, he will be the minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Merkel’s new coalition government.

Early June 2015, a month after Merkel seems to have made a private commitment to never automatically reject any migrants coming to Germany, contrary to what the law stipulates, she hosted the G7 Summit in southern Bavaria at the base of the Alps. Like an obedient poodle, Merkel is eager to please her nominal Globalist masters, in this case Obama, who in reality was himself just a puppet figurehead. As a reward for her obsequiousness she got countless puff pieces in the media that stroked her ego. The media put her on a pedestal and crafted a light personality cult, so how could she ever even think about disappointing their increasing expectations? Though Merkel has no children, the German media have referred to her as “Mommy” (Mutti) to concoct the impression that she cared so much about the German people, which is contradictory to reality. She had invited numerous leaders of African countries to also make an appearance at the summit conference the next day. (Might they have been encouraged to empty their jails and send the freed prisoners north, to board flimsy boats to Europe and then be accepted by Germany?) A few days later the annual Bilderberg meeting took place only a few miles away in Tyrol, near Innsbruck, where the migrant issue was one of numerous agenda items. The impending “Operation Deluge”, as one might call it, must certainly have been a topic of private conversation by insiders, according to their Chatham House rules.

By early September 2015 the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Irvine, California, had registered – and was operating – a German language web site in India. The web site specialized in providing encouragement and organizational tips on how to smuggle migrants into Germany inside the personal vehicles of Germans coming back from vacations, particularly from Italy. A professionally produced video on their web site presented such illegal activities as morally heroic. Another video featured a Black African in the back seat of a car, asserting that all borders should be open (one world) and that anybody had a human right to go anywhere they wanted. On September 2, 2015 a little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose parents were trying to get to Canada, was found drowned and washed ashore at a Turkish beach. Photos of his lifeless body appeared on the front pages of nearly all major newspapers because this mishap provided them a perfect opportunity to sentimentalize the developing migration crisis while detracting from the fact that it was being actively orchestrated by various organizations behind the scenes. Normally publishing such pictures of corpses would be considered in bad taste and therefore newspapers would refrain from publishing them. The fact that nearly every newspaper published some version of him, shot from all angles by the same Turkish photographer, including even one of his face visible with open eye, cannot be a mere coincidence and points toward prior coordination. The media exploited this mishap in order to soften up the public into viewing the entire migration phenomenon in an emotional manner. By focusing on the dead toddler they were able to detract from the mass exodus of murderous jihadists escaping toward Europe from their eroding military positions before the Syrian army closed in on them. A couple of days later, on September 4, a group of migrants had set out from the Budapest train station to walk toward Austria on the highway because train traffic between Budapest and Vienna had been discontinued. The migrants could have sought refugee status in Hungary or in other countries along the way before that but were determined to reach Germany instead because international organizations working behind the scenes had steered them in that direction. Operating on a Friday night in the immediate emotional wake of the images of Alan Kurdi, Merkel arranged to have numerous trains filled with migrants to come to Munich directly from Hungary through Vienna. From September 5 onward, the deluge was unstoppable. A detailed chronology of what happened during those two days is available at Zeit Online:

The Night Germany Lost Control – “What happened on September 4, 2015? What intentions, failures and misunderstandings led to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Germany?”

Though the hordes of migrants – at least four fifth of which were young men traveling alone – began arriving at Munich’s main train station on Saturday morning, even though the public could not possibly have known or anticipated just 12 hours earlier that Merkel would be illegally arranging a mass transfer of many thousands of migrants in the middle of the night, there “just happened to be” a huge “spontaneous” welcoming crowd of do-gooders already in place, with banners and stuffed animals available for the few children – which the photographers and cameramen focused on, to convey a selectively distorted impression to the public. The sentiment being conveyed was something to the effect of: “Hey look, we’re such wonderful people”. (In Munich over 17% voted for the Green Party last September to make it the city’s second strongest party.) Anybody who would want to deny that this whole episode in Munich was not a meticulously orchestrated ambush operation must surely be a hard-core coincidence theorist! It would have been interesting to know which organization was primarily involved in the welcoming ceremony and how much per hour these mysterious do-gooders (mobs on demand) were getting paid, but local media know not to report on such details in case they bothered to inquire. Those working at the top level of this sophisticated transfer operation from Syria to Munich must have been amused by Merkel’s subservient compliance. Hundreds of Covert Islamic Jihadist Escapees Receive Enthusiastic Welcome at Munich Train Station might have been an appropriate headline to present.

X – Speculation about a possible Nobel Peace Prize award to create the perception that Merkel acted honorably

One must wonder whether the planners had promised to use their influence to propose Merkel for getting the Nobel Peace Prize just a month later. In any case, in following up after the floodgates had already been open for a few weeks, the media in Germany and elsewhere reinforced the notion that her fateful decision had been the bold and correct thing to do by suggesting that she was the favorite to win this prize. Only hours before the official award announcement, the Telegraph wrote:

Speculation is mounting that Angela Merkel will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her handling of the European refugee crisis and the war in Ukraine…

The German Chancellor has emerged as the firm favourite for the 2015 peace prize, the winner of which will be announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday.

Mrs Merkel was the favourite in late betting on Thursday night…

Over the years the Norwegian Nobel Committee had come under criticism and ridicule for having made dubious choices by having conferred this prestigious award to assorted war criminals. In an attempt to recover from their reputation it would have been folly to announce that yet another public criminal would be publicly honored.

XI – Efforts by other European countries to curtail steady migration flow as Merkel prolongs her open invitation

Many of the jihadists continued onward toward Copenhagen, from where they took a train across the water to Malmö in Sweden. Early January 2016 Swedish authorities were compelled to implement border controls for traffic coming from Denmark for the first time in over sixty years to stem the migration flow. Since Merkel had been publicly encouraging anyone in need to come to Germany, which in turn created new waves of migration, including from poor regions in the Balkans, it was up to other leaders to finally take the initiative to curtail this flow. On February 24, 2016 the Austrian foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, now chancellor, arranged a high-level conference in Vienna. He invited 18 leaders, including interior and foreign ministers, from six countries: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The purpose was to coordinate border management between these countries. Explicitly not invited were Merkel or representatives from Greece, clearly a diplomatic snub to the two countries most responsible for having encouraged this mess. Merkel expressed disappointment that the migration flow would be curtailed.

XII – Extreme displays of arrogance by Merkel and EU Commissars trying to force other countries to accept migrants

The height of German arrogance nowadays, coming from Merkel and president of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, began soon thereafter, when they and other top EU bureaucrats repeatedly demanded that countries in Eastern Europe be required to take in substantial numbers of these migrants, which she had invited in and accepted illegally, even though neither the migrants wanted to resettle in these countries nor did these countries want to accept them. Media constantly and deceptively use the word “integrate”, as if though it were possible for these mainly Islamic migrants to ever be fully integrated into these respective Slavic societies, or, for that matter also Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Merkel says these countries need to take in “their fair share” and “show solidarity”, which really means they are now being coerced to be complicit in her illegal activity and sheer stupidity. The leaders of these European continue to refuse this outrageous demand. The Austrian chancellor, Kurz, took their side in December 2017, shortly after he took office. The matter has been deferred for a few more months. In July 2018 Austria will have the European rotating presidency until the end of the year, so Kurz will host numerous high-level European conferences. If Merkel and Juncker continue their arrogant stance to force illegal migration onto all the other countries too through a redistribution scheme, future conflict will be assured. Not only will Merkel then likely be reviled all over Europe, as she already is in Greece and Russia, by extension Germans in general may be strongly disliked too when they go abroad.

XIII – Emerging signs of public animosity to Merkel now countered by Antifa goons on her behalf in Hamburg

In a few days Merkel is expected to be reelected to become the chancellor for a fourth four-year term. Any leader heading a state after so many years in office has basically lost contact with the public. Merkel may enjoy ongoing popularity among most Germans, but many strongly dislike her. During the election campaign last year she was frequently jeered loudly at public squares where she appeared and called a traitor. Only a few days prior to the election, during the Oktoberfest, she was jeered so loudly at Munich’s main square that her speech could no longer be heard, despite heavy amplification through loudspeakers. Some demonstrators had even brought along plastic horns, vuvuzelas, used to make noise during soccer matches in South Africa, Brazil, and Iberia. Videos with audio of this public square rejection of Merkel went viral. Some leaders whose terms are not constitutionally limited may convince themselves of their own indispensability and usually do not know when to quit or ignore warning signals, as appears to be the case with Merkel, who has received numerous polite but explicit hints in the European media during the past six months, that her time is up. History has repeatedly shown the possible consequences of such stubbornness. Leaders wound up being ousted through parliamentary intrigue to force their resignation, perhaps they were sent into exile, but sometimes this process of removal occurred violently. In contemporary times, mobs of common people no longer oust their rulers by force but instead provide the collective message of popular resentment. While such messages have already been expressed, they do not represent the majority mood, yet the dynamics of political trends are hard to predict. Long suppressed sentiments tend to erupt suddenly, without warning, like some surprise volcanic eruptions or urban riots. There will then be a tendency for such expressions to be suppressed, in hopes of counteracting the likelihood of spreading.

An interesting example of how public resentment can spread almost like wildfire was demonstrated a few weeks ago in Hamburg. In late January Uta Ogilvies, a Mom who was fed up with Merkel during the ongoing coalition negotiations at the time, walked in the center of Hamburg one evening alone, holding a simple sign saying “Merkel Must Go” (Merkel muss weg). This is the stationary equivalent of a group of demonstrators parading and chanting “hay-hay, hoe-hoe, whatever it is has got to go”. Exactly one week later there were about sixty demonstrators who had come out to support her. One week after that the number had doubled to 120, she claims. Then the hooded Antifa affiliated agitators started to show up. They found out where she lives, and somebody threw paint through her window at home into her kid’s room. Last week, Hamburg’s newspaper reported 350 demonstrators showing up to protest against Merkel, with roughly a thousand counter-demonstrators. Understanding that the event is potentially volatile, the police have been showing up in force too, including with armored water cannons. Counter-demonstrators have been able to mobilizing in the usual way, by crying “wolf”, claiming that opponents of Merkel are “right-wingers” or worse. Yesterday a city official attempted to intimidate those wanting to demonstrate against Merkel by asserting that they should be aware of their commonality with right wing extremists. These developments underscore that Merkel is no longer considered as “conservative” but has become the new darling of the “left”. More importantly, it shows that Merkel now has lumpen thugs of black clad street fighters who will reliably come out to counter those who would openly support her resignation. Hitler had his notorious Brown-Shirts (Braunhemden), derived from Mussolini’s Black-Shirts, and now Merkel has her Antifa Black-Hoods. Nobody can predict with any certainty how rapidly or severely future conflict will escalate. The still localized phenomenon of hooded goon squads could spread from Hamburg to other cities.

XIV – New waves of mass migration by organized transfers of Africans on ships directly to Hamburg easily possible

Other things could be happening in Hamburg this year too. Some experts have warned that there are millions of migrants in Africa, but only a small portion of them, almost exclusively young males, manage to arrive in Italy, either a few dozen by inflatable raft or a few hundred at a time by wooden boat, yet it is not difficult to imagine a new scenario, especially in light of Italian general elections on March 4, 2018, the results of which makes it more likely that the Italian navy will no longer graciously accept these African migrants and will send them back instead of processing them in Italy and then distributing them. Of the more than a hundred cruise liners owned or operated by one or the other Israeli mogul, at some point an overhaul or refurbishing is necessary at the dry dock. Hamburg and other shipyards in northern Germany have dry docks. In the summer of 1980 Fidel Castro opened his jails and freed all he prisoners, who took boats to southern Florida. Officials in some African countries would be glad to release their violent male prisoners if a Big Sugar Daddy would guarantee their transfer out of the country. Packed tightly, a big multi-level cruise liner could transport between ten to twenty thousand people, they could be filled up and embark from such places as Lagos, Monrovia, and Dakar. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, the ships have quietly arrived in the port of Hamburg, and thousands of young African males have arrived on land and are hungry, truly a humanitarian crisis, some will surely need medical care. They all apply for asylum because they have been unfairly “persecuted”, they will claim. Having arrived by ship from Africa, they cannot be sent back, as would have to be the case if they had come to Bavaria from Austria and Merkel decided to follow the law. Hamburgers are so open and welcoming; they are used to seeing African sailors roaming about town. Roughly half of Hamburgers voted either for the Green Party or the SPD or the Left Party; all of these parties want not just more migrants, but the newly arrived young African men must then also be allowed to bring their entire families and clans, ad infinitum, and if citizens should object then Merkel’s Black-Hoods will mobilize to show up. That such a scenario has not yet occurred is not so much because nobody would dare to make it happen, but more likely because simply threatening to do so – words like blackmail or extortion come to mind – can achieve other benefits to those who have the connections to organize such an operation.

XV – None of Germany’s seven Bundestag parties offer the winning mix of positions on economic and social issues

Of the seven political parties represented in Germany’s current parliament (Bundestag), all but two of them have either accepted or embraced continued mass migration into Germany of impoverished individuals. The FDP would like to see selective migration of qualified people with useful skills according to the Canadian model. Only Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new party, rejects migration from outside Europe due to issues of cultural incompatibility. US President Donald Trump recently reflected this position when he reportedly complained that so many immigrants are coming from “shithole” countries instead of from advanced countries like Norway. After many decades of social engineering and economic policy experiments, it has been empirically proven that maintaining a viable and affluent social state for the benefit of public well-being is incompatible with mass immigration, though so many people whose perspective is ideologically driven are in denial about this. Furthermore, the economic neo-liberalism flavor of capitalism being pursued today (Chicago School, Milton Friedman) ever since it was initially adopted under Margaret Thatcher, then implemented in numerous other countries, results in high levels of wealth inequality, which is also a destabilizing force in the long run. With rampant speculation in an expanded financial sector at the expense of taxpayers after bailouts and decreasing disposable income of an increasingly greater part of the population, due to low wages or higher unemployment in conjunction with inflated rental and real estate prices, declining economic wellbeing for the broad public becomes inevitable. Though the Left Party rejects the adverse excesses of economic neo-liberalism and advocates the type of social market capitalism that was successful in Germany under Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, but also in Scandinavia, yet was abandoned by the SPD under Chancellor Schroeder, on the other hand the Left Party completely neutralizes and discredits itself by embracing open borders and unlimited migration because the former policy cannot work if you also entertain the latter. Only one prominent and increasingly popular politician from the Left Party, who regularly appears on the political talk show circuit, seems to have understood this. For having strayed from the self-contradictory Left Party position, Sahra Wagenknecht, was punished at a Left Party Congress in 2016 by receiving a creamy pie shoved in her face by a fellow “leftist”, yet an attempt to dethrone her from leadership ranks has failed.

Additionally, an important prerequisite for democracy to work well is for the population to be both well educated and well informed, in an environment that respects free speech that allows a variety of opinions and ideas, so they are encouraged to participate in the process and make well-informed decisions when voting, as opposed to having their perceptions and perspectives manipulated by carefully crafted lies. Most importantly, the legal framework must be sophisticated to enhance fairness and discourage as well as punish corruption. However, none of the parties in Germany even state these basic ideals as worthwhile to pursue and attain. Any party exclusively pursuing such goals has the potential to achieve an absolute majority because a society based on such basic premises is one that most citizens would want to be a part of. Since the AfD is still new and ridiculed in the press as an opportunistic one-trick pony capitalizing on public resentment of Merkel’s open border policy, it has not yet developed a full spectrum of policy advocacy, so it could attain the first-mover advantage by embracing sensible positions because it would not entail back-tracking or having to reverse themselves, as other parties would have to do. At least theoretically, they could become Germany’s strongest party in four years, as they already are in Saxony.

XVI – Numerous significant flaws in Germany’s antiquated and corrupted judicial system impede basic fairness

To highlight one key element of a well functioning society, cited above, that is not so well known about, even within Germany, namely its judicial system, it needs to pointed out that important criteria by which to evaluate such a system are how well it is structured with regard to its laws and its procedural rules, as well as how accessible it is for the general public, as opposed to just affluent individuals and corporations. The German system fails on all these aspects. It should be understood and acknowledged that it is extremely flawed – primitive and inherently (structurally) corrupt, a complete sham. It lacks the most elementary elements that are taken for granted in the US legal system. Its inadequacies prevent the functioning of reliable justice and a fair society. For instance, to be specific by citing at least ten structural peculiarities: This antiquated and byzantine system has numerous different court venues (Criminal, Administrative, Labor, Family, Commerce, Social, Youth, Agriculture, etc.) with differing procedural regulation, judicial proceedings are not recorded, there is no jury, class action suits are not permitted, appellate levels require representation by attorneys, whose mandatory fees are strictly regulated, pro bono public representation is uncommon, contingency fees are a novelty and uncommon, court fees are excessive and a severe impediment to seeking redress, requests for waivers of fees and legal representation when bringing a complaint in civil cases are subject to a much higher standard (hard evidence of favorable outcome, to be decided by – and routinely rejected – by the same judge who would then take the case) than they are elsewhere in Europe (showing that a suit is neither malicious nor frivolous), and especially incomprehensible, a first level appellate judge may decree that his or her decision may not be subject to a higher level appeal, and any attempt at circumventing such a stipulation is practically impossible; if a dispute is not considered potentially relevant or instructive for a wide domain of other people that could be potentially affected but simply too specific or individual, then accepting an appeal can be ignored.  These flaws make it very easy for judges to deviate from other norms that should be followed, without taking accountability for failing to follow guidelines. Basic rules of deductive logical reasoning need not be followed because truth or evidence are deemed subjective, exculpatory evidence can be ignored if the judges decide not to take note of it in the record. Even the basic constitutional guarantee, to have relevant arguments heard and addressed, is routinely ignored if a judge did not deem it relevant.

Though these numerous flaws are known among practicing attorneys, who themselves are often frustrated by the corrupt system they have chosen to operate in, they have an interest in allowing things to remain as they are. Since public calls for comprehensive judicial reform of this system come not even from the academic realm, it is fair to conclude that this must be another of various German taboos, such as advocating for free speech. Within this wider judicial milieu of judges, attorneys, and law professors there exists a conspiracy of silence to not rock the boat, for which, if they had a conscience, they ought to be ashamed of for doing nothing and thus perpetuating a very flawed system. In order to make the point, that if even in a very high profile case, subject to coverage by international reporters, a panel of judges fails to provide justice and conducts a show trial instead, transparent foe all to see, one can safely assume that such a corrupt practice is completely routine in such cases that enjoy no public scrutiny at all, highlighting a specific instance from the John Demjanjuk trial, that took place in Munich over the course of a few years, is very instructive.

XVII – The Demjanjuk show trial and its shameful perversion of justice proves needs for reforms that remain taboo

John Demjanjuk has been falsely accused in a show trial in Israel for allegedly having been “Ivan the Terible” at the Treblinka concentration camp and was sentenced to death in 1988, but this verdict was overturned five years later after new evidence cast reasonable doubt on his culpability. This did not deter zealous prosecutors with an axe to grind, so in the summer of 2009 he was deported from Cleveland to Munich to stand trial for allegedly having been accessory to murder in Sobibor on nearly 28 thousand counts. These charges were based on testimony of dubious credibility and purported evidence, an ID card that was deemed to have most likely been forged. Demjanjuk had denied having been a guard in Sobibor and his presence there was never proved. Essentially, the court required proof of a negative proposition, which is a logical impossibility unless one can prove an alternative proposition that is mutually exclusive of the first. This is the principle of being guilty as charged by default unless and until one can prove innocence, a violation of basic principles in US jurisprudence. Aside from that, alone the charge that he was present at Sobibor automatically entailed the presumption, without any need for this to be proved, that he was an accessory to so many murders. Cited in Wikipedia:

An 11 August 2010, Esquire magazine article written and researched by Scott Raab questioned the whole idea of Demjanjuk’s trial, crime, and punishment, pointing out many of the absurdities of this particular case, stating specifically “Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you’ll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene.

Leaving aside the question of whether Demjanjuk had been in Sobibor or not and assuming for the sake of argument that he had been there, though in this case he would have been a prisoner too, though functioning involuntarily as a guard with a weapon, the prosecution basically reasoned that it was incumbent on him to flee. On March 16, 2010 the court heard expert testimony from Dieter Pohl, an expert at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, Institute for Contemporary History, as was widely reported at the time in the international media covering the trial, including from Cleveland, Demjanjuks’ former home. A particular finding presented orally in court by Pohl was essentially of an exculpatory nature:

Pohl said that some Trawniki men did successfully escape, but conceded that if they had fled with their weapons and were recaptured, they faced certain execution.

As Pohl had asserted this, the defense attorney submitted a motion to the court to have that particular passage by Pohl be submitted into the record. It was close to lunchtime so the chief judge said that the court would adjourn and announce the decision after the recess. After the recess the full court denied the motion to take official note of that evidence, so it was not included in the record. Thus, anybody following the proceedings knew what the court itself refused to acknowledge.

More than a year later Demjanjuk was sentenced anyway. His appeal was pending when he died. From Wikipedia:

Christiaan F. Rüter, Professor of Law and expert on NS trials in Germany, who researched the subject at the University of Amsterdam for 40 years, expressed reservations against the commencement of proceedings stating that to him “it is a complete mystery, how anyone who knows the German jurisdiction up to now, would be able to assume that Demjanjuk could be sentenced based on the given evidence.

It was understood by everyone that the facts and evidence were irrelevant to the court. So much for the concept of “human dignity” if authorities determine that somebody does not deserve it for reasons of political expediency. This set an important precedent and sent the signal to judges that they will surely get away with perversion of justice (Rechsbeugung), which is technically a criminal offense in Germany, though a judge will virtually never gets indicted for it, much less prosecuted and convicted. Nobody who was initially hoping to enjoy some kind of hateful revenge could have been placated by the verdict since it was evident that the proceedings were a complete farce. From Wikipedia:

Yoram Sheftel, the lawyer who represented Demjanjuk during the Israel trial in the 1980s, criticized the German court for conducting a show trial. “There was a shameful farce here”, he said. “Certainly the German court did not believe its own ruling.” “Nothing has changed since then”, he said. “Even during the trial in Germany, there was not one person who testified that Demjanjuk was Ivan from Sobibor, by virtue that he was seen there, and as such the conviction is a farce.”

Months ago one of the high profile leaders of the AfD party was accused of having asserted in an e-mail to somebody that the German legal system was corrupt, which she subsequently denied she had written, though she did not deny the system was corrupt. When looking at the slick web site of the AfD, it is apparent that the party takes absolutely no position on the need to reform Germany’s legal system. The issue remains outside the bounds of legitimate criticism or discussion.

XVIII – Summary – Germany has not yet matured to engender trust; Merkel’s legacy will incur infamy and shame

It should be evident from the serious shortcomings within its society, alluded to above, that, as a whole, Germany has not matured sufficiently for its neighboring countries to feel comfortable if it were no longer under supervision through its ongoing de facto occupation. Its leadership has failed to live up to the ambitious desire to become a model nation, and a majority of its citizens have been led astray. It is up to Germans themselves to continue on their self-destructive path or otherwise attain the sophistication that engenders lasting trust and respect from peers and adversaries alike. Surely, once the younger generations recognize the long-term societal damage that will have been caused by and blamed on Merkel’s decisions and policies – the adverse effects from which they may themselves be suffering and coping with – then they may covertly be ashamed for the rest of their lives because the disaster unfolded while they could have actively insinuated themselves to challenge these policies rather than being indifferent or passively acquiescent. In recognizing this situation and taking a pivotal turn away from the current course, before it is too late, Germans may still avert future disaster if they change course under a new leadership.

March 13, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Retired US Colonel: Israel Is Dragging the United States Into World War III

By Darius Shahtahmasebi | Mint Press News | March 12, 2018

Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington approximately a week ago.

Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.

At the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”

One of the principal antagonists begging for a war with Iran that Wilkerson identified was none other than Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Russian-born Defense Minister. Wilkerson stated:

Lieberman will speak in April in New York City at the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post. The title is, ‘The New War with Iran.’ It is clear that he’s [at] the forefront of promoting this war.

And nowhere does my concern about such a war focus more acutely at the moment than Syria. As [the] president of France Emmanuel Macron described it recently, ‘The current rhetoric of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel is pushing the region toward conflict with Iran.’”

Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incessant denigrations of Iran, including claiming the greatest danger facing the Jewish state is the Islamic republic — a country he accuses of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism — Wilkerson blew these accusations out of the park using simple logic. He said:

This antisemitism bit, of course, as we’ve heard today, is almost always a weapon of choice for Israeli politicians under stress hurled, in this case, at the country whose Jewish population — by the way, the largest in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel — lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”

He continued:

And don’t forget that these words were uttered by the man who, as we’ve heard today, is doing everything he can to expel dark-skinned African refugees largely from Eritrea and Sudan from Israel, where most have come as legitimate refugees.”

Wilkerson highlighted the hypocrisy of Netanyahu and his cohorts in more ways than one. For example, Wilkerson referred to Netanyahu’s grandiose speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he directly challenged Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif while holding remnants of a drone allegedly downed over Israeli airspace. Israel claimed the drone was Iranian-manufactured. Wilkerson noted that in response, Iran found itself being rescued by Lebanon’s Defense Minister, who said he had an Israeli drone over his head virtually 24 hours a day.

Further, the mainstream media and the governments that benefit from their narratives pay close to zero attention to the fact that Israel routinely violates Lebanese airspace with its sophisticated aircraft. Rather, Iran is constantly painted as the major threat and violator of international law.

“Of late of course,” Wilkerson continued, “Tel Aviv is increasingly using Iran’s presence in Syria, its support for Bashar al-Assad, and its alleged drive– and I love this one, and my military comrades love it, too– for a Shia corridor from Tehran to Aden, as the hoary beast that must not be at any cost, including of course America’s treasure and lives, as his probable cause and existential prompt for action.”

But why is there a danger that the U.S. will be dragged into this war, and why does Israel need America’s help? As Wilkerson explains:

I believe the answer is fairly clear once you push aside the cobwebs that surround it. The legitimacy of great power is what I call it. And that is precisely what Netanyahu and Lieberman desire.

“It’s also what Riyadh desires, especially with the new boy king Mohammed bin Salman, now an erstwhile ally of Israel.

“In short, the IDF could defend Israel but it could not attack Iran. Not successfully, anyway. And were it to do so, it would be damned internationally and thus isolated even more than it already is today, perhaps devastatingly so.”

Last year, a top Israeli general tasked with writing his country’s defense policy admitted that Israel cannot take on Iran’s military alone if the day should come that the regional powers face off in a direct military confrontation, saying they would need to rely on the U.S. for assistance

According to a Politico report, during the Obama years, Israel drew up a military strike option but never really used it. Deep down, Israel knew its effectiveness lied in its ability to pressure the U.S. government into taking further action of its own lest it be dragged into a catastrophic war with Iran that it may or may not be prepared to fight. From the Politico report:

They [the Israelis] ordered the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence arms to prepare for a huge operation: an all-out air attack in the heart of Iran. Some $2 billion was spent on preparations for the attack and for what the Israelis believed would take place the day after – a counterattack either by Iranian warplanes and missiles or by its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The latter could use either the 50,000 missiles it had stockpiled (by 2018, Israeli intelligence estimated the number had increased to 100,000), or it could activate its terror cells abroad, with the assistance of Iranian intelligence, to strike at Israeli or Jewish targets. This is what it did in 1992 and 1994 when it responded to Israeli attacks in Lebanon by blowing up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the Jewish community center AMIA in that city, with a massive number of casualties in both attacks.”

The strike plan never took place, of course, but according to Politico, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to use it to put pressure on the U.S. government to achieve its anti-Iranian objectives. Every day, the likelihood that a war might erupt between Israel and Iran, in turn involving the United States, which has sworn to come to Israel’s defense if attacked by Iran, continues to inch that much closer to reality.

Watch | Is the US Ramping Up Its Military Presence in Syria and Planning to Attack Iran for Israel?

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national security advisor during the Reagan administration. Wilkerson is an outspoken critic of the current US foreign policy.

Darius Shahtahmasebi is a practicing attorney with an interest in human rights, international law, and journalism. He is a graduate of the University of Otago, where he obtained degrees in Law and Japanese. Follow him on Twitter at @TVsLeaking.

March 12, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia leads flood of arms imports to Middle East: Study

Press TV – March 12, 2018

A study shows weapons imports to the Middle East and Asia have soared over the past five years, with Saudi Arabia leading the steep rise amid its bloody war on Yemen.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), arms imports to the Middle East between 2013 and 2017 jumped by 103 percent compared with the previous five-year period.

Saudi Arabia is now the world’s second largest importer of arms after India. The kingdom registered a 225-percent rise in military purchases – almost all from the US and Europe – during the period, the study released on Monday said.

American weapons constitute 61 percent of arms imports to Saudi Arabia and British weapons 23 percent. During the period, the Saudis received 78 combat aircraft, 72 combat helicopters, 328 tanks and 4,000 vehicles, the SIPRI noted.

The same period, it said, saw Israel increasing its arms exports by 55 percent.

“The US and European states remain the main arms exporters to the region and supplied over 98 percent of weapons imported by Saudi Arabia,” it said.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia signed a preliminary deal to buy 48 Typhoon jets worth as much as $10 billion.

Saudi Arabia already operates more than 70 Typhoon jets. They have been used extensively in the Yemen war, and the deal is likely to spark outrage among rights groups and campaigners.

Arms remain the main component of UK-Saudi trade and the UK government has approved the export of $6.4 billion in weapons since the start of the war in Yemen, despite allegations that Saudi-led forces have committed war crimes.

The United Kingdom has increased its weapons sales by around 500 percent since March 2015, The Independent reported last November.

Last May, US President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia in his first foreign visit, signing a $110-billion deal to sell weapons to the kingdom.

“Widespread violent conflict in the Middle East and concerns about human rights have led to political debate in Western Europe and North America about restricting arms sales,” said senior SIPRI researcher Pieter Wezeman.

“Yet the US and European states remain the main arms exporters to the region and supplied over 98 percent of weapons imported by Saudi Arabia.”

More than 13,600 people have died since the Saudi-led invasion began, and Yemen has turned into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

March 12, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran to Open $3Bln Credit Line to Iraq for Post-War Reconstruction

Sputnik – 11.03.2018

Tehran will loan $3 billion to help Baghdad with the restoration of its infrastructure after the defeat of the Daesh terrorist group in the country, Iranian First Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri said on Sunday.

“Iran is ready to provide Iraq with a credit line of $3 billion in order to increase the presence of Iran’s private sector in the restoration of Iraq,” Jahangiri said, as quoted by the Tasnim news agency.

Both Iran and Iraq aim to further strengthen their bilateral political and economic ties, according to the official.

Jahangiri also said that it is necessary to connect the railway systems of both countries and the sides are planning to construct a bridge and a 30-kilometer section of the railway.

“By doing this, Iraq will be able to get access to Central Asia and China, and the Iranian railways will reach the Mediterranean [region],” the first vice-president added, as quoted by the agency.

Jahangiri is currently on a visit to Baghdad to hold talks with the country’s officials.

In December, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi declared an end of the country’s fight against Daesh as Iraqi troops re-established complete control over the country’s Syrian border. This came after years of violent fighting, that brought significant damage to the country’s infrastructure.

The Kuwait International Conference of Iraq Reconstruction and Development, which was held in February, managed to raise $30 billion in direct aid, loans and investments for the post-war reconstruction of Iraq’s economy, according to Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Al Salim Sabah.

March 11, 2018 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

‘Short of engaging in combat’: UK has Al Saud’s back in Yemen war

By Dan Glazebrook | RT | March 9, 2018

London was not a coincidental choice of Saudi Arabia’s new Crown Prince for his first official visit to the Western world. The UK has been deeply involved in the brutal war the Saudis are waging on Yemen.

When it began three years ago this month, the then-foreign minister Philip Hammond explained that Britain’s policy was to support the war “in every practical way short of engaging in combat.”

He has been true to his word. Since then, not only has Britain licenced over £6 billion ($8.3 billion) worth of military equipment, but has supplied no less than 166 personnel to assist the Saudi arms forces, including several officers deployed in the air-force control room, advising on targeting. Britain provides training to Saudi air-force pilots and battlefield skills to Saudi infantry – including, it was recently revealed, training specifically tailored to Yemeni terrain. On the diplomatic front, the UK has repeatedly used its position on the UN Security Council to block UN investigations into war crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition, much to the disgust of many of its European partners. In sum, Yemen is being destroyed by British-made missiles, dropped from British planes, by British-trained pilots.

As the eminent international lawyer Philippe Sands QC told a UK parliament select committee, – as the UK government continues to do – “that the United Kingdom is not involved” in the Yemen war. This involvement is not limited to mere support, however, what is becoming increasingly clear is that Britain is playing a leading role in the war’s strategic direction.

In late 2016, the “Yemen Quartet” was set up – a ministerial-level grouping of the four main powers responsible for the war – the UK, the US, the KSA, and the UAE. Their meetings have been sporadic, but over the past four months, they have become much more frequent, usually at Britain’s behest. But what is particularly noteworthy is that every single major strategic shift in the war’s execution in recent months has coincided with a meeting of the Quartet called by Boris Johnson. Clearly, the Foreign Office mandarins responsible for planning the Yemen war have been working overtime.

On November 29, Theresa May was in Riyadh, meeting with King Salman. At the same time, Johnson was hosting a meeting of the Quartet, attended by the foreign ministers of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, along with the US under-secretary of state. That very day, the forces of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh turned on their erstwhile allies in the Houthi-led Ansar Allah movement in what was heralded as the most significant shift in the war to date.

A few days later, on December 2, Saleh announced his formal defection to the Saudis, a move immediately followed by the launching of a new offensive aimed at the Houthi-held port city of Hodeidah under the auspices of a newly created military alliance between the UAE and the Saudis. Saleh’s defection was supposed to tip the balance against the Houthis, but his assassination two days later left his forces in disarray, allowing the Houthis to more firmly secure the areas under their control.

Nevertheless, the move had clearly been well coordinated with the powers waging war on Yemen, with intense Saudi airstrikes immediately launched in support of Saleh’s move against the Houthis. Meanwhile, the Saudis wanted to know that the offensive on Hodeidah – which had been vigorously opposed by aid agencies as likely to create a famine, and had even been blocked by President Obama when suggested the previous year – had the blessing of their Anglo-American sponsors.

The simultaneous meetings in London and Riyadh were precisely such a demonstration of that support. Less than two weeks after this meeting, and just four days into the new Red Sea offensive, Boris Johnson was in Abu Dhabi, discussing the Yemen war with the most powerful figures in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, their Crown Princes Mohammad bin Salman and Mohammad bin Zayed, followed by another meeting of the Quartet.

On January 23, the Quartet met again, this time in Paris, and again at the instigation of Boris Johnson. This came hot on the heels of the UN’s humanitarian response plan published three days earlier, which explained that the war had driven a further one million people to brink of famine since last year (leaving a total of eight million facing extreme malnutrition), and pushed another 3.5 million to dependence on aid, reaching a total of over 22 million – three-quarters of the population.

Clearly a PR offensive was going to be necessary. The groundwork had already been laid by the Saudi’s “Yemen Comprehensive Humanitarian Operations” plan, announced to the media the day before the Quartet meeting by a British PR company made up of former employees of the disgraced Bell Pottinger. The plan, which proposes to tighten up the blockade of Houthi-controlled ports – a blockade which is already helping to starve 130 children to death every day – essentially dresses up new war crimes as nothing more than heartfelt philanthropy.

Just three weeks later, on February 15, Johnson called another meeting of the Quartet – attended for the first time by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. This meeting occurred as coalition forces had been making slow but steady progress through Hodeidah province and were poised to take their battle to Hodeidah city itself. Once again, such a devastating move for the Yemeni population meant all four powers sought reassurance that the planned slaughter had the blessing of all the others at the highest governmental level.

The following day, the UK put forward a motion to the Security Council praising Saudi Arabia and the UAE for their humanitarian efforts in Yemen, and on February 20, the Emirati press announced that the push on Hodeidah city would begin within days, to be led by Saleh’s nephew. The four protagonists were united in their plans to intensify the strangulation of the Yemeni people.

The reasons for this deep British determination to wage war on Yemen go back over a century, when Britain decided to help the Saudi family secure their rule of the peninsula in the knowledge that their sectarianism and lack of popular legitimacy would make them forever dependent on outside colonial support. The one potential thorn in the side to this plan has always been Yemen, whose population outnumber those of every other country on the peninsula put together, and whose historic civilization appears to give the Sauds an inferiority complex.

The British have always understood that an independent Yemen is the greatest threat to Western domination of the Arab peninsula, and have consistently sought to smash the possibility every time it rears its head. This week’s meeting shows that even the obliteration of the entire country is deemed acceptable in pursuit of this goal.

Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and ‘austerity’. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.

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‘Toxic, damaging & shameful’: Fury as UK and Saudi Arabia sign huge arms deal

March 11, 2018 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment