Category Archives: UN

Rebel Atrocities Repackaged

Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Middle East, Propaganda, UN, War

A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.

Highlighted in the National Review, of all places, the FAZ investigation was exhaustive and convincing.

NRO reports on the original FAZ story:

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

“the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

For weeks, alternative media analysts and even eyewitnesses had been poking enormous holes in the suspiciously convenient Western narrative that Assad’s forces slaughtered the villagers, cutting and killing at close range. No one paid attention, as usual.

The NRO piece continues with a fascinating story from a Christian monastery in the vicinity:

“Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. ‘Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,’ Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote.”

Either Mother Agnès-Mariam is a liar or Hillary Clinton is a liar. You decide.

Follow the article links. This is a must read.

Keep It Regional

Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Islam, Middle East, Neoconservatism, UN, War

Al Jazeera, “headquartered in Doha,” “is the “broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation.” Toward Syria, the Gulf state of Qatar has adopted the regime-change policy of Saudi Arabia (in particular), the Arab League (in general), John McCain’s, Sean Hannity’s, and as many liberals. While Qatar intensifies its efforts to overthrow Syrian President Bashar, it is, simultaneously, supporting Bahrain’s crackdown on dissent. (An Al Jazeera correspondent out of Beirut was so enraged by the network’s bias that he resigned.)

In the Middle East it all boils down to faction and tribe.

Not so long ago, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, ruler of Qatar, asserted that “Arab countries should send troops into Syria.”

We can agree with the Sheikh that the US has no business in Syria. But good luck to him in handling Arab civil wars regionally. South African President Jacob Zuma’s attempted to deal with Libya locally (in the Continent), but the “gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department” (Hillary) would have none of it.

Not even the African Union, which has a good working relationship with warlords, could keep the Über dogs of war of (America masquerading as “NATO”) from leveling Libya. The rest is history.

UPDATED: Russians Voted; The West Objects (The Two-Party Fraud)

America, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Russia, The West, UN

Russians voted. International monitors approved the rambunctious process as the fairest so far. Having failed in egging on a “successful,” “color-coded or plant-based revolution” in Russia, the know-it-all, monolithic media of the West have expressed the standard contempt about Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming majority, calling the victory a “stolen election.” Way to go.

Russians, a naturally nationalistic people, like the hardcore Putin, and do not apprecaite the NATO attempt to “demote it, weaken it geopolitically or undermine its defensive potential.”

UPDATE: THE TWO-PARTY FRAUD. In “The Cannibal In Chronicles” post, I recommended Tom Fleming’s “Daily Mail Blog” (which I cannot link to directly because of some code in the “British” link that throws IlanaMercer/com’s home page). About the West vs. Russia, Fleming writes this:

Everyone knew that Putin was going to win, and even anti-Putin pollsters admitted he would get at least 60% of the vote, which would be a landslide in an American election. But, cry the pundits, Putin has the support of the peasantry. The smart people in the cities who can watch the BBC and read the New York Times–the people who really count in any country–they are holding spontaneous anti-Putin demonstrations. Pro-Putin demonstrators are either state employees doing a job or mere yokels. In other words, Russia=the USA, where only rubes and crazies would support Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul.
The pundits, long in advance, were also predicting corruption and irregularities, as they always do whenever the the US regime disapproves of election results. The fall-back position is that Putin and his cronies rigged the election in advance by restricting the pool of candidates. …
merican elections have never been clean. Nevertheless, the sauce for the Russian goose cannot be ladled on the American gander. This is especially clear in the case of the charge that Putin’s party rigged the election in advance by restricting the pool of candidates. Here in America, we call this manoeuvre the primary system.
In our two-party party state, ballot access for third party candidates is very restricted. After all, only Democrats and Republicans were involved in writing federal and state election laws. There is no mention political parties in the Constitution, and while two political coalitions emerged very early–the faction of Hamilton versus the faction of Jefferson–they did not function as political parties in the later sense. There were no chairmen, party lines, or caucuses to enforce discipline on independent-minded members of Congress or state legislatures.

Read on by clicking “Tom Fleming Daily Mail Blog” on Barely a Blog’s Blogroll.

The Chalabi Times Hoping Not to Repeat Iraq Disgrace

Intelligence, Iran, Iraq, UN, War, WMD

As I pointed out in 2005, Judith Chalabi Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter, shilled for the Iraq war over the pages of the New York Times, like there was no tomorrow. The Bush White House, together with a wily Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi, friend to the neoconservatives, fed the voracious birdbrain with misinformation and lies about WMD. The NYT and Miller, as much as FoxNews and its hot-for-war hotties, promoted the immoral, illegitimate, baseless war on Iraq.

Whereas the Times was prone to see faces in the clouds during the delirium of destruction in Iraq, it is now attempting to cleave to the facts about Iran.

“American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. …Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies. … Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes. ” [NYT]

Ali Asghar Soltanieh, a nuclear scientist and Iran’s permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), speaks reasonably to his country’s need to produce radio isotopes for pharmaceuticals, a product of the nuclear industry. However, the US prefers to increase the burden and isolation of the Iranian people with sanctions. Pure evil and plain counterproductive.

Facts did nothing to sway the U.S. from attacking a prostrate, Third World nation, with no navy or air force, whose military prowess was a fifth of what was smashed in the Gulf War. Rationalizing these war crimes with lies post invasion became de rigueur in the major media.

Similarly, facts will not forestall an American assault on Iran. In the early days, Iraq had provided “documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD.” I recall the derision and mockery with which the Bush administration and its hangers-on greeted what turned out to be the only truthful document in the sad saga of Iraq.