Category Archives: Middle East

Ariel Sharon, Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Homeland Security, Israel, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, Middle East, Military

As a child growing up in Israel, this 1973 image of the late Ariel Sharon was seared in my mind. Had Sharon himself not performed military miracles, who knows if Israelis, myself included, would have survived. How many Americans can point to a leader who had actually saved their lives, rather than send other men to die in foreign countries and then propagandized his countrymen about having fought for their freedoms?

Seen in the image above, former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon led his men into battle and won the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which the Israeli government and the intelligence failed. Here Sharon is seen during that war “on the western bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Sharon said his greatest military success came during that war. He surrounded Egypt’s Third Army and, defying orders, led 200 tanks and 5,000 men over the Suez Canal, a turning point.”

Sharon died, Jan 11, after languishing in a vegetative state for 8 years.

During the Bush years, “libertarian who loathe Israel” would often compare Emperor Bush with Sharon, whom they detested too.

Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was a soldier in the style of “Stonewall” Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter. As a Special Forces commander, he personally led his troops into battle, performing daring assaults that saved Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Agree or disagree with his methods, it is unarguable that Sharon’s overriding concern was with the security of his citizens. He saw himself as bearing a “historic responsibility” for “the fate of the Jewish people.” By contrast, Bush’s Wilsonian, global missionary movement related not even tangentially to the future and safety of the American people.

Unlike George Bush the internationalist, Arik Sharon was a fierce nationalist who cared first and foremost about his country. Under pressure from the U.S. for his treatment of terrorists, he was expected to make concessions to murderers who kill civilians, while Bush and the international community made no such allowances for al-Qaida.

Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, History, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

“Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is the current column, now on WND. A excerpt:

“Us against al Qaeda”: This has been—still is—the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that played out in the Benghazi affair, in which the American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed). …

… Uncovered by The Times’ investigation, however, was a very different reality in Benghazi—”murkier than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi,” contends Kirkpatrick, “was not infiltrated by al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the findings that “turned up no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “the attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Col. Gadhafi.”

How can that be? Easily: The history of Libya is festooned with similar ransacking and burning of consulates by angry local mobs. Alas, in the ignorance it cultivates about the past, America is Cicero’s perpetual child. By the definition of the great Roman statesman, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.” …

… The facts in the Benghazi affair have likewise been unwoven and retied into two contradictory narratives to suit the respective sides.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, as you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel “dialogue” conducted on the teli. Hosts Stephanie Cutter (left-wing, social-democratic rat) and S. E. Cupp (right-wing, social-democratic rat): Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a “maze-bright” rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth. …

Read the complete column. “Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is on WND.

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Decentralized ‘Al Qaeda’ Represents Ordinary Invaded Muslims

Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism

“Us against Al Qaeda” is the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that allegedly played out in Benghazi.

Understandably, Fox News is fuming over “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” David D. Kirkpatrick’s expose in the New York Times. For these Republicans hold that:

Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

The investigation by The Times, however, shows:

…that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the NYT findings that “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” “The attack,” it was revealed, “was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”

I have no doubt, simply based on the history and policies of the US in the Middle-East, that to the extent the “American-made video denigrating Islam” is a symbolic proxy for the hatred harbored by the invaded Muslims for the invading Americans-–to that extent it is probably correct to say that the video, more so than the mythical Al Qaeda, was a catalyst for the attack on our embassy in Benghazi.

However, the NYT is hardly unsparingly honest; it is, in fact, as dishonest and politically provincial as the neocons of Fox News.

Predictably ignored in the Kirkpatrick article is that Al Qaeda has morphed into many decentralized operations that mirror the aspirations of the invaded Muslims to be free of invading Westerners—unless of course they can get us to bankroll their Baksheesh economy.

There is cross-pollination between these double-crossing entities. So wrong was the Gray Eminence on Iraq that the NYT reporter who piped lies straight form Bush’s White House to her Times readers was recruited to Fox News: She is Judith Chalabi Miller.

‘Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites’

History, Islam, Israel, John McCain, Lebanon, Middle East, The West

Writing at Chronicles magazine, Eugene Girin offers a slice of Syrian history you won’t get from that moron McCain and his media acolytes:

“From 1920 to 1936, Syria’s Alawites enjoyed their own separate autonomous state in French-ruled Syria. First, it was known explicitly as the Alawite State and from 1930 to 1936, as Latakia Governorate. In response to pressure from the Sunni majority, France dissolved the Alawites’ state and forcibly incorporated it into the Sunni-dominated areas.”

“Needless to say, the Alawites (as well as the Christians and Druze) were appalled by France’s surrender to the Muslims and pleaded with the mandate authorities to protect them. In an eerie echo of today’s situation in Syria, 450,000 Alawites, Druze, and Christians signed a letter to the French authorities, part of which stated”:

“The ‘Alawis believe that they are humans, not beasts ready for slaughter. No power in the world can force them to accept the yoke of their traditional and hereditary enemies to be slaves forever….”

“Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper recently quoted part of another letter, sent by Alawite leaders to French Prime Minister Leon Blum in 1936. The French surrender to Arab Muslim demands was influenced by the bloody uprising of Muslims in British-ruled Palestine, led by the future ally of Hitler Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The Alawites alluded to the bloody revolt in their plea to the Jewish Blum”:

The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.
Therefore we ask you to consider the dreadful and terrible fate that awaits the Alawites if they are forced to be annexed to Syria, when it will be free from the oversight of the Mandate, and it will be in their power to implement the laws that stem from its religion.”

One of the six signatories of that letter was Sulayman Assad, the father of Hafez and the grandfather of Bashar. …”

Read “Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites.”