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deadpresidents · 2 years ago

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Is there any truth to the 1980 October surprise theory?

The New York Times published a story earlier this year where Ben Barnes -- a Republican supporter of Reagan's in 1980 who had once served as Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, and protege of former Texas Governor John Connally -- confirmed that the Reagan campaign absolutely encouraged Iran not to release the American embassy hostages before the election because Reagan would give the Iranians a better deal if he was elected President. Barnes admitted that he was present as Connally passed that message around while on a trip to the Middle East in order to get word to the Iranians. It's not exactly a smoking gun because virtually everyone seemingly involved in implementing the October Surprise is dead other than Barnes, but it's a weird thing for Barnes to lie about 45 years later, especially considering how close his relationship was with Governor Connally. Plus, we know that there were shady contacts between people in the Reagan Administration and Iran because of the Iran-Contra scandal.

I think there is definitely some truth to the theory, but I also believe that the Iranians were more than happy to spite President Carter by not releasing the hostages until literally the moment Reagan took the oath of office. The Iranians were still furious with the Carter Administration for letting the Shah come to the United States for medical treatment after he was forced to leave Iran as the Iranian Revolution exploded and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to become Supreme Leader. Carter had also helped broker the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which also infuriated Iran and much of the Islamic world. Plus, Carter had ordered Operation Eagle Claw -- the failed attempt to rescue the hostages by force -- and that was seen as an act of war. So, the Ayatollah and leaders of Revolutionary Iran had no love lost for President Carter and weren't interested in doing him any favors before he left office.

The October Surprise that many people overlook is the one which took place in 1968 shortly before the Nixon vs. Humphrey election. When it looked like there might be some progress made in peace talks to bring the Vietnam War to a close, Nixon and his advisers got word to the South Vietnamese to hold off on working toward peace until Nixon was elected and could give them better terms. It was such an egregious act that LBJ actually told people around him that he felt Nixon had committed treason and that he had the blood of American soldiers on his hands for sabotaging peace talks. We even have the tapes of LBJ's phone calls after finding out about Nixon's actions where President Johnson straight-up says, "This is Treason!"

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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With an Israeli offensive in Rafah looming, the United States continues to face several dilemmas in addressing the evolving humanitarian disaster in Gaza. A growing chorus of American citizens and policymakers alike are asking how the U.S. can support Israeli security while also protecting Palestinian civilians.

Coercing allies is tricky diplomatic business—especially when it comes to pushing policies that restrict a partner’s approach to national defense. Plus, the long-standing U.S. commitment to Israel diminishes U.S. bargaining power further. Far from feeling that they owe the Americans any favors, Israeli decision-makers in crisis are likely wagering that U.S. interests in maintaining an established strategic partnership against shared and emboldened enemies, including the Houthis and Iranians, will prevent Washington from pressing too hard on Israeli policymakers.

The most-often discussed pathway for the U.S. to pressure partners is making aid conditional on reforms. Last week, following mounting pressures from prominent Democratic lawmakers including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, President Joe Biden signed a “historic” directive that would require all U.S. strategic partners to submit written confirmation certifying that U.S.-provided military assistance was being used in compliance with international law. However, it is unclear how this will impact Israeli policy or how the Biden administration will respond to violations. Part of the lack of clarity over what, if anything, this action does for Palestinians in Gaza or for U.S.-Israeli relations is a failure to appreciate the complications involved in making aid conditional on reform.

American diplomats have been here before. The U.S. is aiming to broadly support its partner while also protecting its interests, a challenge it has previously encountered with local allies in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, those alliances of counterinsurgency occupation were very different from the U.S.-Israel partnership, as Kabul and Baghdad had far more limited institutional and military capacity compared to Israel. Nevertheless, despite significant differences in the dynamics of those partnerships, Washington has had to figure out how to support a key ally while maintaining U.S. norms and interests, such as promoting democracy and protecting human rights.

History shows that in pressuring Israel to moderate its policies in Gaza, conditional aid may not work as well as an often-overlooked diplomatic tool: the threat of unilateral U.S. action.

In theory, “tough love” in the form of conditional aid allows the U.S. to trade material for influence. However, in reality, the politics of such approaches are more complicated and riskier for the U.S. than they appear.

First, limiting aid risks weakening the partner, which almost always runs against U.S. interests. If the partner fails, the United States is also in a less secure position vis-à-vis the shared threats that motivate the partnership in the first place. This in turn limits the credibility of such threats, as partners understand that the U.S. will also suffer consequences if Washington follows through.

In 2009, then-President Barack Obama publicly called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to crack down on corruption and the drug trade in Afghanistan. When asked why the U.S. did not withhold troops and aid to leverage said reforms, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan candidly called the argument “stupid.” This is because weakening Karzai risked emboldening the Taliban, extending the U.S. intervention, and setting back key nation-building benchmarks the U.S. had set for itself and its partners in Afghanistan.

Second, withdrawing aid potentially damages the future of the partnership. If partners decide that Washington has undermined their security, they may be motivated to seek alternative allies, including Russia in the case of Israel. The current Israeli mindset of insecurity and isolation means that unless it is done with exceptional skill, U.S. threats to significantly limit military aid during an ongoing Israel Defense Forces operation will likely be met with resentment and resistance by Israeli officials.

Third, unlike pundits, policymakers have the heavy responsibility of dealing with critical allies calling Washington’s bluff and refusing to comply with U.S. demands. Defiant allies create a lose-lose scenario for the U.S. Either American officials follow through on declared penalties and risk undermining strategic partners and possibly emboldening shared adversaries, or they fail to impose the costs and lose credibility and future leverage. Thus, despite reports that the Biden administration is willing to delay weapons delivery to Israel, it is unsurprising that the White House is yet to announce a clear plan.

These risks make aid conditionality a blunt tactic typically held in reserve by U.S. diplomats, as opposed to a sustainable diplomatic approach. The more the U.S. relies on a partner, the less attractive aid conditionality becomes. Admittedly, unconditional aid is also risky since it leaves the U.S. at least partially liable for the partner’s policies, even ghastly ones. For example, in Iraq, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s determination to resist U.S. urges to incorporate Sunni political forces into his government was a contributor to the insurgency that took over parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Luckily, there is an alternative way to pressure partners.

Instead, the U.S. can shift partner behavior by threatening to implement policies that affect local politics unilaterally, with or without partner participation. The coercive message to partners is “either you implement X policy, or we will,” unlike the logic of aid conditionality that states “implement X policy, or the U.S. will cut your support.” The former message is focused on the specific policy in question, as opposed to threats of cutting key resources, which can harm the ally and alliance more broadly.

The threat of select unilateral action is not meant to propose wide-scale U.S. intervention but can instead be tailored to impact local policies that are specifically harmful to U.S. interests. Though allies will likely perceive it as a coercive threat to their autonomy and not welcome this message, the goal is to raise the stakes and pressure allies into reaching a compromise.

Threatening unilateral U.S. action in response to partner inaction often motivated local allies in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan to comply with U.S. demands, at least in part, because unilateral action would have undermined local elites and put them in an increasingly isolated position. In Iraq, for instance, the U.S. was able to successfully use this approach to coerce Maliki into further engaging with Sunni groups in 2010 because the U.S. was credibly threatening to continue its engagement with amenable Sunni leaders—with or without the support of Shiite leaders in Baghdad. (However, Washington lost this leverage when it no longer threatened to support Sunni militias unilaterally as part of the 2011 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.)

The U.S. was also able to pry concessions out of local partners in Saigon during the U.S. withdrawal because of credible threats that the U.S. would move forward with compromises to North Vietnam with or without South Vietnamese participation. In 2010, the U.S. was able to promote moderate anti-corruption reforms in Afghanistan by bringing in U.N. officials to report on progress. Rather than be sidelined, the Afghan government compromised and joined the oversight process, in part to keep tabs on it and shape policy along the way.

While taking unilateral action has a record of successfully nudging critical allies toward meeting U.S. demands, it can only be applied when the U.S. has the sole capacity to implement the requested policy. It cannot be used, for example, to coerce partners to change their domestic laws or disengage from offensive operations, because those are reforms that the U.S. cannot implement without partner participation.

This means the U.S. cannot use this approach to coerce Israel to be more selective with strikes in Gaza. However, Washington can, for example, threaten to unilaterally release detailed information regarding targeting in Gaza to motivate the Israelis to increase transparency and accountability in their campaign. U.S. policymakers can also propose to set up an independent inquiry into civilian deaths in Gaza as a form of oversight and monitoring or use American institutions to address the conflict. The recent U.S. decision to impose financial sanctions on four Israelis who incited violence against Palestinians in the West Bank is a step in this direction.

Regarding the current emergency in Gaza, the U.S. can threaten to unilaterally provide humanitarian aid should Israel impede this critical assistance. It can do so, for example, by dispatching a disaster response naval vessel such as the USNS Mercy or USNS Comfort to join the carrier strike groups assigned to the region. Naturally, there will be critics arguing that this measure may undermine Israel’s military campaign, but those positions are too comfortable with Israeli failures to distinguish between Palestinian civilians and Hamas militants. The U.S. can signal its displeasure for the current offensive by offering to help civilians in Gaza secure their basic needs and survival. Sending U.S. unilateral aid to Gaza and informing the Israelis this will happen with or without their cooperation would send three important messages.

First, the historical record suggests that a credible threat of unilateral U.S. action can nudge Israel to move closer to U.S. positions to avoid being subverted by the U.S. Second, it boosts U.S. bargaining credibility regionally and reinforces that the U.S. is an autonomous actor in the conflict, as well as a committed Israeli ally. This may be increasingly important as the U.S. may need to press against sustained Israeli occupation of Gaza and strengthen its ties to key Arab partners such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Lastly, unilateral action will allow the U.S. to do more than just lament Palestinian civilian deaths. Just as the U.S. sprang into action to defend Israeli civilians brutally slaughtered on Oct. 7, the U.S. can also spring into action to defend Palestinian civilians currently facing what the U.N. calls “apocalyptic” conditions.

Like all tools of statecraft, this is only one of many approaches in the U.S. diplomatic toolkit. Even though it is rarely discussed compared to aid conditionality, threatening unilateral policy action to coerce a strategic partner to participate can be more subtle and less risky because it maintains the security alliance and material support for a partner, while also taking issue with specific partner policies. Additionally, threatening unilateral policy implementation in Gaza does not preclude the U.S. from also considering selective aid conditionality or additional pathways of pressure, including reconsidering blocking U.N. action that challenges Israeli positions.

Washington will need to be agile and purposeful in its diplomatic approaches as the U.S. seeks to both support and influence Israel—even as its policies, including the offensive in Gaza, violate U.S. interests. The U.S. can and should do more.

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ruminativerabbi · 1 year ago

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Eyeless in Gaza

I was waiting for the elevator in one of our local hospitals when my phone started to vibrate last Tuesday afternoon with the news—reported as simple fact by the Bing-Microsoft news service that funnels breaking events into my personal news feed—that Israel had intentionally blown up a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 hospital staff and patients, including children. Then the elevator came and I got into it. By the time I got out on the ninth floor, the original story had been “confirmed” by the New York Times. So how could it not be true?

Two hours later, the original message was gone—magically withdrawn into thin air—and unretrievable. The original Times banner “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say” was also gone, replaced with the slightly (but only slightly) less inflammatory “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.” But the damage was done. Not everybody who has an iPhone that features ongoing news alerts is as involved in news from Israel as I am. (Could anyone be? Maybe. But no one could be more emotionally and personally involved in the events of these last weeks.) And a fair number of them, I’m guessing, just quickly scanned the first headline, then filed it internally as yet one more terrible thing Israel has done to the innocents of Gaza. And so a scurrilous story—one that for me (and for anyone who knows as many IDF veterans as I do, and who has the respect for the IDF that it deserves) could not possibly be true—gains traction. By evening, the murder of these poor innocents was lighting up X, formerly Twitter, as though it were an established fact, as though it were a story featuring confirmed reality that only a willfully blind Zionist would even try to deny.

But, in fact, the story was not true. Or rather it was not true as reported. Yes, a terrible explosion killed hundreds at the al-Ahli hospital (also called the Baptist Hospital) in southern Gaza. And it is also true that all the victims appear to have been innocent civilians. But the IDF insists that it did not target that hospital and that, as far as they can tell, the damage was done by a missile intended by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad to murder Israeli civilians that misfired and landed in Gaza not far from where it was launched. And they also noted that the IDF is bound by rules of combat that specifically forbid its servicepeople from slaying civilians indiscriminately. And then, shortly after that, the P.M., Bibi Netanyahu himself, issued his own statement on Twitter saying plainly and unambiguously that this was not the work of the IDF.

Later, the President of the United States said clearly that American intelligence supported Israel’s claim of non-involvement. Plus, the hospital, it turned out, was not “blown up” at all, but is still standing. Aerial photographs showed rocket shrapnel on the roofs of adjacent buildings. And then, later that night, Israel released an apparently undoctored recording of Hamas operatives more or less confirming the Israeli version of events. (The recording is in Arabic, but click here to hear it with English subtitles.) Even the Gazans themselves eventually pulled back from their initial inflammatory reports, no longer mentioning 500 dead but merely referring to unidentified “hundreds.” But by then the damage was more than done. The Arab street was on fire. There were huge demonstrations in many Muslim capitals, including Istanbul, Amman, Baghdad, and Beirut. President el-Sisi of Egypt, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan cancelled their plans to meet with President Biden, apparently thinking that insulting him for not embracing the initial (and almost fully incorrect) version of the story was a rational plan forward. On home turf, our own Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) asserted unambiguously (but apparently fully falsely) that the Israelis had “bombed the Baptist Hospital and killed 500 Palestinians.” And Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) shamelessly referenced the incident as an Israeli war crime without a shred of evidence to support her vitriol.

To wave this whole incident away as yet another success, albeit a temporary one, of the Palestinian misinformation campaign against Israel would be very wrong, however. The tragedy here is fully real. These poor people fled south in the first place to avoid being caught in the crossfire if Israel ultimately decides to enter Gaza to find and free the 199 hostages being held by Hamas. I suppose they must have imagined they were safe, or safer, in the southern part of Gaza and safer still in a hospital, a place of refuge and healing. If it turns out that this was “just” an accident, that the jihadists trying to murder innocent Israelis accidentally ended up murdering innocent Palestinians, then that will be terrible enough and grimly ironic. But if it turns out that this was intentional, that Hamas did this to prompt—almost to force—el-Sisi, Abdullah, and Mahmoud Abbas publicly to disrespect President Biden by refusing to meet with him in the course of his trip to the Middle East, then the raw cynicism of the move will be almost too much to bear.

I want to think that this was an accident. What normal person wouldn’t? But what if this was intentional, if this actually was undertaken fully intentionally as a piece of grotesque political theater intended to upend President Biden’s visit to the region? To refer to the concept of blowing up a hospital to further political aims as bestial behavior would be an insult to the animal kingdom. But some part of me wonders if that isn’t precisely what’s happened. And, indeed, President Biden’s trip to underscore our nation’s support for Israel and to meet with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, and the PA—that may simply have been too clear a harbinger of a future featuring an alliance of leaders implacably opposed to the kind of barbarism for which Hamas stands for the Hamas leadership not to do whatever it was going to take to prevent from happening. And the fact that the Palestinian president was going to be included—for which invitation the price was surely going to be his willingness to join in a blanket condemnation of Hamas’s brutal incursion into Israel and the unimaginable destruction directed almost solely against innocent civilians that incursion brought in its wake—that just may have been too much for Hamas to swallow. I have no evidence of any of the above. But I am too much a student of history to wave the darkness in my heart away as merely depressive or necessarily delusional. Terrible things happen in the world. And they often happen fully intentionally.

And that brings me to my real point. The challenge facing me personally in the wake of his incident is to find it in my heart to set everything I know about the Middle East—about Hamas and about the IDF and about Israel itself—to set it all aside and to mourn the dead of al-Ahli. I am by nature a bit cynical, but I specifically do not want to bring politics or cynicism to my appraisal of this tragedy, of this disaster. The children who died in the hospital was no more deserving of their fate than the Jewish babies and children murdered in cold blood by Hamas two weekends ago. So to wave them away as “mere” collateral damage in a larger story to which they were tiny footnotes—that would require a level of callousness and insensitivity of which I want—even need—to think of myself as being incapable of sustaining.

Since Simchat Torah, thousands have died on both sides of the Israel-Gaza border. To look past the death of innocents should be an impossibility for all who fear God and revere the sanctity of human life. Many more will die as Israel does what it can to eradicate Hamas and, in so doing, to avenge the death of its citizens. Still others will die as Hamas descends to ever darker degrees of demonic depravity in its anti-Israeli rage and does whatever it thinks necessary to hurt Israel and put space between it and its allies. In the end, Hamas will surely be annihilated. Of that, I harbor no doubts at all. But to take pleasure in that thought without mourning the innocents of al-Ahli should be impossible for even the most ardent supporter of Israel. As well it is with respect to me personally: I ardently look forward to the day when terror is defeated once and for all, but I mourn for those innocents who died when that rocket landed on the hospital in which they were seeking healing and refuge, and I feel their loss as a stone in my heart. To feel otherwise would be to deny their humanity—and that is something no decent person should even be able to do, let alone wish to do.

#Gaza #Israel #Baptist Hospital

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rabbitcruiser · 3 months ago

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World Hello Day

Greet everyone you meet with a friendly smile and wave and witness the power of communication to build bridges and bring about peace.

World Hello Day may sound extremely basic, as it encourages us to take the opportunity to simply greet people, and to recognize how important simple communication is in our daily lives. The story of how it came to be, however, is a long and interesting one.

History of World Hello Day

World Hello Day was first created in 1973 in order to show people, especially the people of the Middle East that conflicts can and should be resolved through communication, and not violence. The idea is that clear, honest communication breeds peace. In the 1970s, the conflict between Egypt and Israel was quite severe, and many people began to fear yet another huge war would end up coming of it.

World Hello Day was in fact created as a direct response to the Yom Kippur War that had just finished in October of 1973, during which thousands of both soldiers and innocent civilians were killed. Some soldiers had also been tortured and flat out executed.

The peace discussion at the end of the war was the first time that Arab and Israeli officials met for direct public discussion in 25 years. The concept of World Hello Day was created by Brian McCormack, a Ph.D. Graduate of Arizona State University, and Michael McCormack, a graduate of Harvard. Over the last 42 years since its creation, World Hello Day has been celebrated in 180 countries, as citizens of each of these countries take advantage of this time to express their concerns for world peace.

Thirty-one winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have stated that World Hello Day carries substantial value as an instrument for preserving peace, and as an occasion that makes it possible for anyone in the world, individual, organization or government, to contribute to the process of creating peace.

World Hello Day Timeline

1948 Israeli War of Independence/Palestinian Nakbah

As the British planned to withdraw from Palestine and the United Nations got involved with partitioning it into an Israeli section and an Arab section, conflicts broke out among the two people groups. The conflict lasted until 1949.

1967 Six Day War

Israel and Syria again find themselves in conflict for six days in June of this year.

October 1973 Yom Kippur War

Sometimes called the October War, this Arab-Israeli conflict was started by Egypt and Syria on October 6 and it lasted for 3 weeks. The war drew in other large world powers such as the United States and the Soviet Union.

1973 Inaugural World Hello Day

Americans Brian McCormack and his brother Michael were concerned about the conflicts in the Middle East, so they mailed letters to more than 1300 government leaders and press outlets to encourage their participation in World Hello Day and, ultimately, aim for peaceful communication.

1974 Second World Hello Day includes at least 15 countries

After so many letters were sent to government leaders and press outlets, the word began to spread and World Hello Day celebrated its second year, with at least 15 countries celebrating. In the four-plus decades since its initial celebration, World Hello Day has garnered the support of 180 countries.

1979 Peace treaty is signed

Israel and Egypt formally sign a peace treaty on March 26 to end the conflict between the two countries that has existed for more than 30 years.

1982 Lebanon War

Israelis and Palestinians again enter into conflict resulting in the bombing of Beirut and southern parts of Lebanon.

1992 High-ranking US military officer writes to founders

In a letter acknowledging the importance of World Hello Day, Colin Powell, the highest ranking military officer in the US at the time, wrote that the word hello “serves as a door through which to gain access to greater understanding among peoples and nations as we continue the quest for world peace”.

2016 Singer/songwriter K-Syran dedicates song to the day

In an effort to promote the day, Artist and Activist K-Syran performed and dedicated a special acoustic version of her song “Hello” to World Hello Day. The song was on the Billboard Top 40 for several months throughout the summer of this year.

How to Celebrate World Hello Day

Participating in World Hello Day is quite simple: all you have to do is say hello to at least 10 people during that one day. This is supposed to send a message of openness and goodwill to others, and the creators of the holiday hoped this small gesture alone would demonstrate how communication can be instrumental in resolving disputes and preventing conflicts.

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xtruss · 10 months ago

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“Terrorist, War Criminal Zionist 🐖 Isra-hell” Conflict Spreads To 16 Nations As Biden Admin Says There’s No War

Iran’s Retaliatory Strikes on Isra-hell Highlight an America-led Regional War Spanning Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Others.

— By Ken Klippenstein, Daniel Boguslaw | April 14 2024 | The Intercept

Guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson launches a Standard Missile 2 surface-to-air missile during a live-fire exercise in the Philippine Sea, on April 5, 2024. Photo: Jamaal Liddell/U.S. Navy

The Regional War in the Middle East now involves at least 16 different countries and includes the first strikes from Iranian territory on Israel, but the United States continues to insist that there is no broader war, hiding the extent of American military involvement. And yet in response to Iran’s drone and missile attacks Saturday, the U.S. flew aircraft and launched air defense missiles from at least eight countries, while Iran and its proxies fired weapons from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

The news media has been complicit in its portrayal of the regional war as nonexistent. “Biden Seeks to Head Off Escalation After Israel’s Successful Defense,” the New York Times blared this morning, ignoring that the conflict had already spread. “Iran attacks Israel, risking a full-blown regional war,” says The Economist. “Some top U.S. officials are worried that Israel may respond hastily to Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attacks and provoke a wider regional conflict that the U.S. could get dragged into,” says NBC, parroting the White House’s deception.

The Washington-based reporting follows repeated Biden administration statements that none of this amounts to a regional war. “So far, there is not … a wider regional conflict,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Thursday, in response to a question about Israel’s strike on the Iranian Embassy. Ryder’s statement followed repeated assertions by Iranian leadership that retaliation would follow — and even a private message from the Iranians to the U.S. that if it helped defend Israel, the U.S. would also be a viable target — after which the White House reiterated its “ironclad” support for Israel.

While the world has been focused on — and the Pentagon has been stressing — the comings and goings of aircraft carriers and fighter jets to serve as a “deterrent” against Iran, the U.S. has quietly built a network of air defenses to fight its regional war. “At my direction, to support the defense of Israel, the U.S. military moved aircraft and ballistic missile defense destroyers to the region over the course of the past week,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Thanks to these deployments and the extraordinary skill of our servicemembers, we helped Israel take down nearly all of the incoming drones and missiles.”

As part of that network, Army long-range Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense surface-to-air missile batteries have been deployed in Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and at the secretive Site 512 base in Israel. These assets — plus American aircraft based in Kuwait, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — are knitted together in order to communicate and cooperate with each other to provide a dome over Israel (and its own regional bases). The United Kingdom is also intimately tied into the regional war network, while additional countries such as Bahrain have purchased Patriot missiles to be part of the network.

Despite this unambiguous regional network, and even after Israel’s attack on Iran’s embassy in Syria earlier this month, the Biden administration has consistently denied that the Hamas war has spread beyond Gaza. It is a policy stance — and a deception — that has held since Hamas’s October 7 attack. “The Middle East region is quieter than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an ill-timed remark eight days before October 7. “We don’t see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the day after three U.S. troops were killed by a kamikaze drone launched by an Iran-backed militia at a U.S. base in Jordan. Since then (and even before this weekend), the fighting has spread to Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen.

As part of the regional war network, four American ships, part of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) battle group, have played a central role in thwarting Iran-backed attacks. The ships are equipped with long-range Standard surface-to-air missiles and the Phalanx close-in weapon system, a Gatling gun that serves as the ship’s last lines of defense against attack. All of the ships have been conducting offensive and defensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, focused on Houthi attacks (they all shot Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles at targets in Yemen on January 12).

According to maritime spotters and the Navy, the destroyer USS Gravely (DDG 107) has been conducting defensive and offensive operations in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since mid-March. It has been engaging Houthi drones and missiles fired from inside Yemen toward Israel and toward maritime traffic.

The destroyer USS Mason (DDG 87) has also been operating in the Red Sea. Just on Tuesday, it targeted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile that was targeting the U.S. commercial ship M/V Yorktown, according to the Navy. The destroyer USS Laboon (DDG 58) arrived in the region in December and has been operating mostly in the Gulf of Aden. The guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea (CG 58) arrived around Christmas and has served as the main air defense command-and-control hub.

American ships have quietly called at ports in Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti (the port of Duqm in Oman has been the most often visited foreign port). Lebanon is also involved in the conflict as Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks.

The White House has also said that U.S. fighter jets were involved in some of the shootdowns of Iranian missiles. Flight trackers noticed a U.S. Air Force refueling plane, stationed in Qatar, flying missions over Iraq during the Iranian attack. In total, according to CNN, around 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles were launched at Israel overnight Saturday. All told, US forces were responsible for over 100 interceptions of Iranian drones and missiles, according to Israeli officials.

#The Intercept #News 🗞️

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justsomeantifas · 5 years ago

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Would Biden be worse in terms of foreign policy than Trump? I honestly can’t decide.

Well in terms of having like “more respect” on the world stage, yeah Biden will probably be liked more by world leaders and more willing to work with them but that’s not necessarily good when your policy means shitty foreign interventions and expanding US power.

From this article:

“Biden was also a key architect of the 1999 bombing of Serbia, which actually dissolved the local pro-democracy movement and rallied popular support around the country’s dictator.”

““I voted to go into Iraq, and I’d vote to do it again,” Biden said in August 2003. He also supported the war on Afghanistan, and his 2009 strategy for the war there appears to have served as the model for Trump’s current actions in the country. He even backed the UK’s invasion of the Falkland Islands.”

“Biden wanted to send US troops to Darfur in 2007 and later suggested putting in place a no-fly zone. No one is in favor of permitting genocide, obviously, but as cases like Libya and Syria have shown, such military intervention often has far-reaching ramifications that lead to massive human suffering.”

“Biden has also been a consistent supporter of expanding NATO into what Russia considers its sphere of influence, a key driver of today’s planet-threatening tensions with the country. Biden called the 1998 NATO induction of three eastern bloc countries — a major provocation of Russia — “the beginning of another fifty years of peace,” coming only four years after the Clinton administration had explicitly and falsely assured Russian president Boris Yeltsin that the US wasn’t seeking to broaden NATO’s membership.”

“Biden’s aversion to military involvement only applies to ground forces en masse. He was a champion of what he called “counterterrorism plus”: a combination of drone strikes and special forces, which essentially became Obama’s approach to fighting terrorism.”

“Biden’s has been known as one of Israel’s “close friends” in Congress for practically his entire political career. He disapprovingly lectured Israeli officials from time to time, as when he warned Menachem Begin in 1982 that Israel’s illegal settlements were hurting the country’s US popularity. But Biden has never exerted any real pressure on Israeli officials to change their behavior.At the same time Biden was supposedly “mad as the devil” about Israeli settlements in the 1980s, he was a reliable advocate for Israeli interests in Congress. When Jimmy Carter decided not to renew an agreement that gave Israel preference in buying industrial diamonds from the US at a negotiated price, Biden and four other Senate Foreign Relations Committee members wrote to him to reconsider.Only a month before his exchange with Begin, Biden voted to not only dramatically step up aid to Israel — over the objections of Reagan, no less — but supported a measure that would ensure US aid to Israel would forever be equal to the amount of US debt repaid by the country.“It’s one of the most extraordinary proposals I have heard,” said Illinois Republican Charles H. Percy, the then-chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who opposed the measure. “The first time in the history of the United States. It makes the American taxpayer responsible for all Israeli debts and all future debts.”This arrangement would end up being crucial for Israel to keep being furnished with weapons and cash by the United States. Due to a 1975 law, any country that fell behind on its loan payments by more than a year lost access to US aid. This change in policy effectively ensured Israel was always guaranteed to avoid this fate.Even as outrage piled on over Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Biden held the line and assured Begin he wasn’t critical of the invasion. Less than a week after Israeli forces slaughtered thousands of Palestinian refugees in the country, Biden went to a four-day retreat held by the United Jewish Appeal Young Leadership Cabinet, where he spoke alongside the executive director of AIPAC and Benjamin Netanyahu (one of Biden’s old friends), at that point serving in the Israeli embassy in D.C. While even a pro-Israel lifer like Cranston had urged Israel to withdraw in the wake of the crime, a year later Biden said that “Israel’s presence in Lebanon is vitally important.”

Check out the rest of the article too, if you’re interested to see how Biden aided in and supports the expansion of the surveillance state here in the US.

Fun stuff!

#Joe biden

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alexsmitposts · 5 years ago

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BC: Why Are We Being Lied to? BC stands for NEO’s Banned Classic. This article was originally published by our journal on 30.12.13 For some reason, this article is missing from Google search results. Since this article remains pretty relevant to those geopolitical events that are taking place on the geopolitical stage today, we deem it possible to present it to our readers once again. Should it go missing again, you may be confident that you will see it republished by NEO once more, should it still remain relevant by that time. Over the past few years, there has been a general breakdown in how reality is perceived. In fact, the term “reality” itself is under assault, everything from issues of controlled news, false flag terrorism, challenges to basic physical laws and even issues of “disclosure,” the tantalizing idea that a complex interstellar world exists. A very real part of what has happened is a calculated attack on traditions and institutions through psychological warfare, a subset of “game theory warfare,” itself a subset of “chaos theory.” Thus, we doubt or believe based on a flow of controlled information and orchestrated events. However, controlling information has proven risky business. Toward that end, what had always been a “lunatic fringe” of biblical prophecy, jingoism or agenda driven “revisionism” has now been supplanted with a virtual ocean of inanity that has crept into the public domain. When traced to its roots, too often one finds powerful organizations. During the last few days, Washington think tanks have released “rumors” citing president Obama as a Kenyan born homosexual, “Bathhouse Barry,” of radical Muslim roots who attempted to gain control of America’s nuclear arsenal in order to destroy Israel. These stories and dozens like them all trace down to sources close to the leadership of the “opposition party,” the bizarre confederation of right wing extremists, the Israel lobby and those aspects of the financial industry that can only be termed “organized crime.” Sadly, up to 30% of the American public believes, not just these missives but things far stranger. Among that 30% is the majority of the leadership of America’s armed forces, security services and police, groups that have descended the evolutionary ladder at a frightening pace. As American “humorist”, Jim W. Dean, so often says, “You just can make these things up.” What the public is left with is uncertainty, in some ways preferable to blind ignorance. Though the original intent, voice in television shows such as “X Files,” in the oft-repeated theme, “Believe No One,” is to destroy public confidence in institutions, this hasn’t worked out as planned. Perhaps that’s why they call it “chaos theory.” Long ago, science developed its own methods, “epistemology,” for discerning what is “likely.” Scientific modeling or experimental method have long sense become unreliable indicators as they are dependent on the “subjectivity” of observation and the vagaries of statistical analysis, the science of making 2 plus two equal three. The real basis of analysis since the latter half of the 20th century has been the philosophy that sneaks into films. In America, some organized crime groups that had “lost their roots” reinvented themselves based on the “Godfather” films of Francis Ford Coppola. One film, “The Usual Suspects,” has a line that has served me well. “The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn’t exist.” Toward that end, the modern “mainstream media seems, when their “work product” is analyzed using methodologies developed for intelligence analysis, appears to be “tasked” in three ways: Covering the tracks of very real secret societies and conspiraciesProtecting a history that is almost entirely falseSpewing a continual narrative both unquestioned and unsupportableIn the process, we have created an incubator for the rise of mediocrity. President George W. Bush has evidenced this more than any individual in recent years. A simple trip to “YouTube” will give evidence of this. His glaring ignorance and endless lapses of decorum were far from simply anecdotal. Yes, he really thought “Africa” was a country. Is it true he couldn’t find Africa on a map? I have privately been assured that though this was the case when he took office in 2001, after visiting Africa he became aware. I would only know this as author of his briefing materials on his last visit. Touching on the issue of redress, the restoration of reality or “truth” has become a process well beyond “encyclopedic.” Approaching this task, television shows in the US, be they “The Secret History of World War II” or Oliver Stone’s “Untold History of the United States,” not only fall short of the task but exist more to close doors than open them. Such efforts, and they are many, perhaps endless, are “gatekeeper functions.” The question people enjoy and ask most often is this; “Is there a secret world out there.” The answer is “yes.” What then qualifies a source as genuine and how does one discern real information from the endless “blind alleys” that have been created to channel modern day adventurers and explorers into areas of harmless or perhaps “not so harmless” confusion? Our tools are observation, reason and analysis. Beyond that, we are faced with the traditional issues of faith, what do we believe, what do we trust? More and more intuition itself has to serve, where such a thing still exists. Toward that end, we can begin a walk down several paths in such areas a “what can be told” or “what can be reasonably surmised.” At the pinnacle, one is faced with unpleasant revelations, that the world is ruled by secret societies, all of which are rooted in beliefs that can be termed “supernatural” or “extraterrestrial.” What can be told is that these organizations are both centuries old “societies” and quasi-governmental organizations whose efforts periodically surface and, in doing so, give evidence of a reality that in startling ways resembles popular science fiction. What can be told is that this coincidental similarity is no an accident. What is safest is approaching what we know and can prove in the mundane world and how it diverges from popular mythology. For Americans, the Kennedy assassination was paramount, at least prior to 9/11. As the 50th anniversary of that even passed recently, many were disturbed at the media’s attempts to restore public confidence in the Warren Report. The popular film, JFK ended such beliefs forever. Even prior to its release, the “Oswald and the Magic Bullet” theory was an obvious sham. Yet, millions of Americans were sickened when the media again tried to “put the toothpaste back in the tube.” This is the official finding of the US government, issued in 1976 by the House Select Committee on Assassinations: Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracyFunny thing, nobody mentioned any of this, the public finding of the US government, when selling the “lone gunman” story to a new generation. Similarly, 9/11 has the exact same problem. The 9/11 Commission Report was rescinded by a majority of members who then asked for members of the Bush administration to be prosecuted for both perjury and withholding evidence. This is public record. Since that time, not only has hard evidence discovered a domestic conspiracy working in concert with foreign intelligence agencies at the heart of 9/11 but finding a reputable scientist that supports the conclusions of the original 9/11 Commission report is almost impossible. There is undeniable hard proof that the 7/7 attacks in Britain were also “false flag” attacks. There is undeniable hard proof that the invasion of not just Iraq but Afghanistan was planned long before 9/11, not just those nations but five others as well as stated by General Wesley Clark and confirmed by Gwyneth Todd and many others. Of recent terror attacks and mass killings, the following are known to be “false flag attacks,” orchestrated by intelligence agencies. By “known,” I mean exactly that, no doubt whatsoever. The DC sniper attacks and subsequent anthrax poisonings, the Breveik killings in Norway, Sandy Hook, the “Gabby Giffords” shootings, the Fort Hood shootings and the Boston Marathon bombings There are no “theories” involved, there is a mass of evidence and clear proof that the story given the public in each of these cases in outlandish and unreasonable. Were one to examine recent events involving Syria, the close alignment of Al Qaeda with groups within US intelligence and their Saudi and Israeli counterparts should “deconstruct” the entirety of the basis for America’s “War on Terror.” Why hasn’t it? Why does the media continue to claim that, though the Taliban ended almost all opium production in Afghanistan, the record heroin production, now over 90% of world supplies now produced there, is being flown around the world by that same organization that doesn’t possess a single aircraft? Can one see a coincidental relationship between heroin trafficking and production and CIA involvement in Afghanistan? Is there historical evidence that this is not the first time? Can we say “Golden Triangle” and “Cali Cartel?” There are areas more important to human development that simple proof that criminal elements have manipulated world events that have probably brought about the deaths of several million people. Let’s take a short look at science. To Einstein, the “holy grail” was solving unified field theory. Simply put, perhaps overly so, the relationship between gravity and magnetism and waves and particles never fit within his ideas of general relativity. Recent revelations that particles travel at above the speed of light, the result of super-collider experiments, has, in actuality, totally disproven Einstein’s original theories. There is a problem when dealing with science. As for history or “news,” it can generally be invented. In science, there are communities that share information, affirm publishings and follow events very carefully. Thus, when areas of research “go dark,” and capabilities are spoken of or even exhibited that are beyond accepted scientific advances, we are challenging something more serious than “public opinion.” Yet, exactly this has happened. Again, we enter an areas of “what can be told.” To those who work in engineering, certain scientific advances, particularly the jump from the development of the transistor to the development of the first integrated circuit is believed to be “non-linear.” This means, technologies that have no history of development have entered our daily lives. You can see where this goes, an area no one wants to travel. Remember “cold fusion?” Remember that it was a “fraud?” We were told that the first experiments were not able to be duplicated that that this “free energy” technology was a dead end? Ever hear of LENR? This stands for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions. The term actually means “cold fusion.” Billions are spent each year, by governments and private corporations, in the development of cold fusion projects. Units exist that could power automobiles, aircraft, even cities. A quick Google search will list the companies involved, the factories and laboratories, the investment opportunities and yet why is none of this reported? Would oil be worthless? Would conventional nuclear power, even wind and solar power, be worthless? Why are we being lied to, “in plain sight” as it were? The answer isn’t simple but there is an answer of sorts. The excuse given originates from the writings of Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798, espoused that “progress” would bring about limitless population growth that would end in disaster. So, we hide technologies. We have had the ability for decades to defeat gravity using technologies developed in Germany in the 1930s, rumored to have been given to them by extraterrestrials. The US built its first anti-gravity “ship” in 1953. I have seen it. It is old and ugly but works, sort of. Nanotechnologies developed in labs “impossibly” at “0 g” have produced semiconductors capable of creating fields that allow vehicle performance typically attributed to UFOs. One of the more common but less spoken of areas is weather modification. Energy weapons developed in “dark projects” are being used to modify weather in some areas of the world, particularly the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf. This is more “hidden in plain sight” use of non-existent technology. We have only touched on a few areas, they are endless. What we can prove is that events are not what they seem, science is not what it seems, this is clear. What is also clear is that anything we are told is suspect and not by accident. Mistrust in everything is engineered into our very being as a method of control, absolute control. Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

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quidqen · 6 years ago

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★ ━ ( shlomit malka, eh, any ) ━ ★ the other day i ran into ELISHEVA BLOOM. it’s funny because i was just thinking about how the TWENTY TWO YEAR OLD’s birthday was on 09/08 and how the last time i saw her, ELI was CREATIVE, GENEROUS & PERSISTENT, but could also be WITHDRAWN, JEALOUS, & PETTY. anyway, she has been living in THE NORTHWEST DISTRICT for FOUR YEARS & currently works as a CASHIER.

So here I am, back again, to present y'all with a mess, better known as Elisheva or simply Eli (pronounced like elly)

First thing as it's the most important, Eli is rather ambivalent towards gender, she doesn't identify with any existing label but also doesn't really have much issue at all with people gendering her however they choose.

I'm using she/her and vague language where easy but feminine language when not as that's what most commonly ends up being used by people she's talked to about gender stuff, the only thing she really has a preference on is that people pick language to use and then stick with it.

Eli was born at a US military base in Israel, her father being an officer stationed there and her mother being from the area, her first move came when she was only two months old.

She moved around regularly throughout childhood as her father was moved from base to base, spending most of her childhood outside the United States, though there were some periods where they were in the States.

She never got much attention from her parents, her dad was busy with his job and was rarely ever home, and her mom, to help with the social issues involved in moving around a lot got really involved with an MLM, putting most of her time not dedicated to housekeeping to that rather than Eli.

Eli herself though struggled with her lack of a consistent friend group and never managed to find a real way to cope with it, ending up giving up on friends entirely by ten, what was the point of making friends if she was simply going to have to start over in a year or two?

Plus often, while there were other children of American solders around the base she often didn’t speak the same language as the other children around her in other countries, never having time to pick up much more than the basics.

Eventually she did settle down though, returning to the States to attend college at Portland State where she majored in music, focusing on composition, and minored in art history, mostly for the simple reason that by her final semester she only needed to take two more classes to be able to to get the minor so she decided why not?

She struggled settling down in Portland though having lived such a transient life before then, she had wanted to settle down for a while now, hating the constant moves of her childhood, but by eighteen she had become so used to it that she never really felt quite stable, as if she had to be ready to lose everything she had set up there to a move like when she was younger.

Her parents paid for her expenses while she was in college, allowing her to focus on school and her personal music without having to work and at first she had thought this would mean that she could create her music and be successful either while right out of school or before even graduating.

She released her first album, a French house/nu-disco album called Golden Nights, on YouTube at nineteen, then a second called Cherry at twenty, and finally a third called Boundless at twenty-one, none of which have gotten much attention outside of from her friends and family despite her best efforts to advertise.

Still unable to make any sort of living on her music by the time she graduated from college she got a job at a small used bookstore about a block from her apartment to be able to start supporting herself, putting in the absolute bare minimum effort so she can focus on working on her next album and trying to figure out what she’s been doing wrong.

I’m blanking on anything else to say so

#portbayintro

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adenovir · 6 years ago

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It’s not just Trump-Russia...

(THREAD) Pre-election Russia collusion may take down Trump. It's equally possible the Trumps' pre- and post-election collusion with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel will do it—a course of collusion also connected to the Kremlin. I explain here. I hope you'll read on and share.

1/ I must stress how unbelievably complex the "Grand Bargain" theory of the Trump-Russia case is—a different thing from saying it's not substantiated. It's substantiated in *almost every single particular*—it just *also* happens to be very confusing. Not byzantine—just confusing.

2/ The basics: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE all view Iran as their chief regional enemy. Iran is propped up by Russia. Therefore the Saudis, Israelis, and Emiratis all need a US government willing to find a way to get the Kremlin to *stop* supporting Iran in the Middle East.

3/ The best way to get Russia to stop supporting Iran—or reduce support—was/is to drop all sanctions on Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea, as that'd be worth *trillions* to the Kremlin over the next decade. Everyone knew that Clinton wouldn't do this—and that Trump would.

4/ Per the NYT, on August 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. met secretly at Trump Tower with a Saudi and Emirati emissary, George Nader, as well as an Israeli intelligence expert, Joel Zamel, with *significant* ties to both Israeli intelligence *and* Russian oligarchs allied with Putin.

5/ Per the NYT, Nader and Zamel both—effectively on behalf of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and Russia—offered the Trumps clandestine collusive assistance to win the 2016 election. Jr. reacted favorably to this offer—which got into the specifics of how the collusion would work.

6/ Zamel specifically offered a domestic disinformation campaign in the United States that would use fake social media accounts to sway "micro-targeted" U.S. voters toward Trump—basically *exactly* what ended up happening. Zamel has been connected to Bannon's Cambridge Analytica.

7/ Nader was an emissary from the Saudi Crown Prince ("MBS") and the Emirati Crown Prince ("MBZ"), while Zamel was connected to a Trump-linked Russian oligarch (Rybolovlev), Israeli intel, and Cambridge Analytica. Together they had money, microtargeting, and "dark" intel methods.

8/ Jesus... this is where it gets insane. I'm going to post five articles now that are absolutely necessary to what I'm about to say. This is... serious stuff, and it needs to be right. Please take a look at the following five articles:

9/ KEY ARTICLE 1:

Trump Jr. and Other Aides Met With Gulf Emissary Offering Help to Win Election

https://www.nytimes.com/…/trump-jr-saudi-uae-nader-prince-z…

10/ KEY ARTICLE 2:

Saudis Close to Crown Prince Discussed Killing Other Enemies a Year Before Khashoggi’s Death

https://www.nytimes.com/…/saudi-iran-assassinations-mohamme…

11/ KEY ARTICLE 3:

Top Cheney Aide in Muellers Sights as Probe Expands

https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-cheney-aide-in-muellers-s…

12/ KEY ARTICLE 4:

Abbas rival hired American mercenaries to kill in Yemen for UAE: report

https://www.i24news.tv/…/186610-181018-abbas-rival-hired-is…

13/ KEY ARTICLE 5:

Dahlan ‘cover-up team’ from Lebanon helps hide traces of Khashoggi murder

https://www.yenisafak.com/…/dahlan-cover-up-team-from-leban…

14/ Upshot: the Saudis and Emiratis formed a plot in 2015 to systematically assassinate Iranians and Iranian allies they considered a threat. To do this they needed the help of US mercenaries and quality intel—two things it now appears the Trumps and their allies helped provide.

15/ In other words, the Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, and Russians didn't offer the Trumps pre-election collusive assistance for free—indeed they asked for a lot. The Russians would get trillions once the 2014 sanctions were dropped, and the other nations would get... other things.

16/ Trump adviser Erik Prince—who was *also* at the secret meeting with Nader, Zamel, and Don Jr. at Trump Tower in August '16—ran a mercenary army. Elliott Broidy, who had enormous access to Trump as a lobbyist and RNC finance co-chair, also was connected to a mercenary company.

17/ Jared Kushner—who wasn't at the August '16 meeting but *would* attend a followup in December with MBZ (who secretly entered the US for the meeting), Bannon, and the Zamel-connected Mike Flynn—struck up a very close "friendship" with MBS (the other Crown Prince) post-election.

18/ Numerous reports say Kushner got intel from his father-in-law's Presidential Daily Briefing—which only Trump could permit him to take—and gave it to MBS. The intel—a list of MBS' enemies—allowed MBS to target his domestic enemies and kill some of them.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/Saudi-crown-prince-brags-Jare…

19/ MBS subsequently told friends that Kushner was "in his pocket." And why would he think otherwise? Trump had (apparently) declassified intel for MBS' use as part of his program of domestic and international assassination. It was that very program that targeted Jamal Khashoggi.

20/ So *no one* was surprised when—despite the CIA concluding that MBS ordered Khashoggi killed—Trump gave his "I'm colluding with this guy" response, saying (as he had of Putin) that he believed MBS wasn't involved in the killing because... wait for it... MBS told him he wasn't.

21/ This five-party collusion explains why Trump went to Saudi Arabia first on his first trip abroad and immediately sold them weapons; why Kushner uses WhatsApp for all his MBS communications (it frustrates oversight); why Prince was Trump's envoy to Russia in the Seychelles...

22/ ...why Broidy was given $1 billion in business by Nader; why Nader met with White House officials repeatedly in the first 60 days of Trump's administration; why Mueller originally suspected Papadopoulos as an Israeli spy; why Flynn, Barrack, Gates, and other Trump allies...

23/ ...began lobbying Trump as soon as he was elected to send nuclear tech to Saudi Arabia (partly to build new nuclear reactors, but with a longer-term goal of letting Saudi Arabia and the UAE develop nuclear weapons as a deterrence of Iran); why Trump ripped up the Iran deal...

24/ ...even though Iran was in compliance; and more. Look: we know Trump's top aides were willing to assist foreign nations in assassinating people living in the U.S., because that's *exactly* what Mike Flynn was caught trying to do—extradite a Turkish cleric to be killed abroad.

25/ The reason this is all so confusing is that *some* of the motives in play may have been reasonable. Iran *is* a state sponsor of terrorism—so it's not so far out of bounds to think that a U.S. government might want to assist Iran's many enemies in the Middle East if possible.

26/ But many of the motives involved were *illegal*, too. Namely—as was the case with Russia—the Trumps (plus Kushner) are *easily* bribed, and willing to set U.S. policy on the basis of bribes. With Putin, it was billions in real estate deals in Moscow that easily bribed Trump.

27/ With Saudi Arabia, Trump and Jared being the *only* people in the White House who supported the Saudi blockade of Qatar suggests that—when Qatar shortly thereafter turned around and "loaned" Jared $1 billion—they were being strong-armed by secret Trump-Saudi Arabia collusion.

28/ Just so, the Trumps are trying to expand (and *have* expanded) their real estate empire into the UAE, which makes pleasing the Emiratis important as a business proposition. And since Trump doesn't care how many people the Saudis or Emiratis assassinate, why not help them out?

29/ This sort of Bribery—a federal crime—is of course impeachable under the Constitution. But if a story that just came out in the Middle East Eye—which has been *very* accurate on the Khashoggi case—is correct, the Trumps may have just crossed the line into something far darker.

30/ If this BREAKING NEWS is accurate, the Trumps *actively* participated in the Saudi-Emirati-Israeli assassination scheme—which, remember, per the links in this thread, both Nader and Zamel were part of—in order to get financial benefits on the back end.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/…/saudis-using-pompeos-plan-s…

31/ Simply put, under circumstances in which you know MBS is criminally responsible for the murder of a Washington Post journalist, you *can't* assist him in escaping detection by delivering to him a plan to do just that. That'd be Accessory After the Fact to First-Degree Murder.

32/ *Obviously* I want to see the Middle East Eye story reported elsewhere also, but again, the Middle East Eye has repeatedly broken news in the Khashoggi case. Plus, their scoop fits with *all the other evidence* we have of this plot dating back (at least) to early August 2016.

33/ I can't help but recall, now, how Pompeo was the CIA director, and then Tillerson was pushed out at State so Pompeo could replace him, and then Trump started singing his praises in terms of his *loyalty*. Well, it'd take that sort of "loyal" person to do something like this.

34/ There are too many angles here to count: for instance, one wouldn't normally think Bannon would be at all the planning meetings for Trump-Russia-Saudi-Emirati-Israeli collusion—but it makes sense when you understand that Zamel and Cambridge Analytica were crucial to the plan.

35/ Flynn's involvement might also be a mystery, until you learn that Zamel had previously tried to recruit him for *his* intel outfit (Flynn had one too), and Flynn thereafter became an *energy lobbyist* trying to bring nuclear energy (thus, eventually, weapons) to Saudi Arabia.

36/ A list of the people relevant to this plot:

Trump Sr. Trump Jr. Kushner Bannon Flynn Nader Broidy Prince Zamel MBS MBZ Rybolovlev* Barrack Gates McFarlane Dmitriev + others

*There's credible evidence Rybolovlev had two secret meetings with Trump in the 10 days pre-election.

37/ My point in writing this thread *isn't* thinking I can explain every aspect of this to all of you on Twitter—the 5- (really 6-) nation "Grand Bargain" requires, literally, an entire book to explain properly. And—as importantly—to document with reliable, major-media reporting.

38/ The important thing to understand is that all the major-media reporting you've read saying that Mueller is looking at *multi-state collusion*—not just a "bipolar" collusion between the Trumps and Russia—is not just correct but *richly* supported by reams of *public* evidence.

39/ This also means that when you see continued reporting on the Khashoggi case, you shouldn't see it as merely the tail-end of a story from weeks ago that is losing steam... but quite possibly the *beginning* of a story that will ultimately lead to the end of Trump's presidency.

40/ I've been saying forever that "Trump-Russia"—which is now the catch-all term for all pre- and post-election collusive activities orchestrated by the Trumps and their allies—is about *greed*. These are really *really* bad people, folks—and we'll soon learn just *how* bad. /end

UPDATE/ This thread continues, with additional *significant* evidence of the "Grand Bargain," here:

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/1064904175761403906

(THE GRAND BARGAIN) If the "grand bargain" theory of the Russia case is accurate—and it is—we'd expect to see MBS pay Rybolovlev hundreds of millions in laundered money to pay Russia for the social media campaign the Saudis promised Jr. And hey—guess what?

https://www.nytimes.com/…/salvator-mundi-da-vinci-saudi-pri…

2/ That's right:

1. Rybolovlev agent offers Trump Jr. (on 8/3/16) a Russia disinformation campaign in the presence of an MBS agent. MBS apparently offers to bankroll it. 2. Trump Jr. says yes. 3. A year later, an MBS agent overpays Rybolovlev by $300 MILLION PLUS for a painting.

3/ The only plausible reason Nader—the MBS agent—offers collusive assistance to the Trumps at *the same secret Trump Tower meeting* at which Zamel (a Rybolovlev agent) pitches a disinformation campaign mirroring Russia's is if the Saudis can bankroll it. So MBS *owed* Rybolovlev.

4/ Below is info on Zamel as Rybolovlev agent. Note: Rybolovlev a) apparently held two secret tarmac meetings with Trump himself in the 10 days before the 2016 election (Charlotte/Las Vegas), b) previously overpaid Trump by tens of millions for a property.

https://www.haaretz.com/…/.premium-who-is-joel-zamel-austra…

5/ But wait! you say. Did Zamel have the sort of micro-targeting data needed to coordinate a Russian pre-election propaganda campaign in the U.S.? Well, almost the very day after the election Zamel *publicly* announced a partnership with... Trump's data-firm, Cambridge Analytica.

6/ And once Trump won, Kushner and Bannon (Trump's data guys) started showing up at secret transition meetings with... MBZ (the other Crown Prince behind the August '16 collusion offer) and Flynn (a former Zamel associate and fellow intel guy) and George Nader (representing MBS).

7/ But why make Don Jr. the first point man in receiving offers of a digital campaign to hurt Clinton? I don't know, was Don Jr. in contact with WikiLeaks to try to find out how to help his dad during the *same 2-week period* he accepted a digital collusion offer from Zamel? Yep.

8/ Can I just repeat that a Saudi prince who's a top ally of MBS overpaid a Trump-linked Russian oligarch for a *painting* by... OVER 300 MILLION? (Re-read multiple times.) Per the NYT, Christie's—the auction house—and everyone else was like, uh, where did this guy get the money?

9/ The key point: this *isn't* a theory of the case that exists only on Twitter. This appears to be *Mueller's theory of the case* with respect to Trump-Russia: that it's a Bribery, Money Laundering, Fraud, and Conspiracy case involving *multiple* nations.

https://newrepublic.com/…/mueller-probe-going-beyond-russia…

10/ Another point about that painting: as NYT notes, many think it's a) not good work, and b) even worse, *fake*. So that transaction is *suspicious as hell*—and it's effectively between the two people in the *world* you'd most suspect of needing to launder money over collusion.

— Seth Abramson, the author of "Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America"

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greysgenesis · 2 years ago

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Adventure capitalist support codes 2019

ADVENTURE CAPITALIST SUPPORT CODES 2019 UPDATE

ADVENTURE CAPITALIST SUPPORT CODES 2019 REGISTRATION

It affords these individuals an occasion for direct response to their cultural context. The PCAS thus offers an opportunity for the coming together of scholars from colleges, universities, community colleges, and the general public, who have something worthwhile to say on matters involving mass society. Send your feedback and questions to adventurecapitalist.

ADVENTURE CAPITALIST SUPPORT CODES 2019 UPDATE

guidebook/page templates, plus some other little codes. Fix for Contact Support connection issue - Update for ad watch services - Other minor bug fixes. Its journal, Studies in Popular Culture, is a firmly established academic publication, and scholars working with topics in popular culture are invited to submit papers for consideration. Tumblr Backup SiteQuickBooks Official Support & Help Site, QuickBooks Online Customer. Young and diverse, this energetic organization has brought together scholars who share an interest in inquiring into all sorts of mass phenomena through a wide variety of disciplines and approaches.

ADVENTURE CAPITALIST SUPPORT CODES 2019 REGISTRATION

Its activities are financed by conference registration fees and sponsoring institutional support. Members of the organization come primarily from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. 20182019 Registration Guide NORTHFIELD HIGH SCHOOL. The PCAS, organized in 1971, is the largest, and from the view of those who have visited several regional meetings, the most thriving of the regional associations. Northfield Public Schools prioritizes equitable opportunities and support for. Its contributors, from the United States, Australia, Canada, China, England, France, Israel, Scotland, and Spain, include distinguished anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars in mass communications, philosophy, literature, and religion. Studies in Popular Culture publishes articles on popular culture however mediated: through film, literature, radio, television, music, graphics, print, practices, associations, events-any of the material or conceptual conditions of life. Formerly triannual, the journal has spun off what was its third issue to become the Popular Culture Association in the South's second journal, Studies in American Culture. Studies in Popular Culture is published biannually, with one issue appearing in the fall and one in the spring. The editor invites the submission of articles dealing with any aspect of American or international, contemporary or historical, popular culture. Studies in Popular Culture is the refereed journal of the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association in the South.

#Adventure capitalist support codes 2019

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the-record-newspaper · 6 years ago

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General: ‘Israel is ready’

Brig. Gen. (Res.) Yehiel Gozal

From Record Staff Reports

Israeli Defense Force Brig. Gen. (Res.) Yehiel Gozal says his country’s troops are ready for whatever may happen.

“We are more prepared and have more technology than we ever,” Gozal said. “As far as military capability, we are one of the strongest military powers in the Middle East for sure. Our strategy is not to wait for them at the border.”

Gozal was interviewed via phone by The Record on Thursday afternoon. The interview was arranged and some of the questions were formulated by Record columnist Earl Cox, an expert on Israeli and Middle Eastern affairs.

Gozal was in Wilkes County Friday morning. Then, Bart Peacher with "It is Time Israel" along with Cox, Israel's Ambassador of Goodwill, hosted a "meet and greet" with Gozal. About 30 people attended the event which was held at the Apple Tree Lodge in Moravian Falls. After this meeting, Gozal and Cox left to visit television stations in three states and hold several meetings, sharing information about the current situation in Israel and the Middle East from an insider's perspective.

Gozal with Earl Cox at last Friday’s gathering

Tiny Israel faces many threats – Palestinians, Syrians, and Iranians – but members of its armed forces have for decades proven to be fearless fighters.

And, with the recent rocket attacks near the Gaza Strip, there is speculation that a new war

may be brewing.

“When you take a risk of launching rockets into Israel, it can escalate immediately,” Gozal said. “If a rocket (for example) were to happen to hit an Israeli school, it would mean they had gone too far. They can’t always control their resolve. One mistake could lead to a war they do not want.”

Gozal has an impressive resume.

He is a senior military professional with extensive experience in solving strategic security, diplomatic, and business challenges, including an international position based in the U.S. and France.

Gozal is currently the CEO of the Yahad - United for the Israeli Soldiers Fund. “Yahad” – is the joint organization of AWIS (Association for the Wellbeing of Israel's Soldiers) and The Libi Fund, the official body for donations which benefit the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) with all overhead costs financed by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, 100 percent of all donations are utilized for their objectives without any overhead. He served as chairman of The Paratroops’ Heritage Association – Israel from 2010 to 2018.

He is national director of Friends of the IDF - USA from 2003 to 2008. The Friends of the IDF (FIDF) is a charitable organization that raises funds on behalf of the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and their families. As National Director, Brig. Gen. Gozal has: Launched long- and short-term planning, with metrics to measure success; changed organizational and board culture, introducing a fiscal transparency that has led to greater trust, commitment, and individual investment; established an endowment to cover operational costs so that 100 percent of funds raised go to programs that directly benefit soldiers; created and implemented procedures to increase efficiencies, reduce expenses, enhance productivity, and improve employee retention; raised the organization’s profile in the U.S.A., Central and South America.

By instituting those changes, FIDF has earned a 4-star (highest possible) rating by Charity Navigator, America's premier independent charity evaluator. In addition, FIDF has: more than doubled its donor base; more than tripled its annual revenues to $61 million; broken fund-raising records – including a one-evening net of $26 million in pledges; begun the construction in Israel of 50-plus capital projects of more than $1 million each; and more than tripled the number of scholarships awarded to veteran soldiers.

In 2000, Brig. Gen. was appointed IDF Defense Attaché to France, Spain, and Portugal. While representing the Israeli Ministry of Defense, he forged productive working relationships across political lines that provided critical access and interchange among all levels of government. During his tenure, he facilitated agreements between the French Army and the IDF on joint, as well as created business opportunities for Israeli defense industries. Brig. Gen. Gozal also established warm ties with France’s Jewish community, which led to increased tourism, immigration, and fund raising opportunities.

From 1976 – 2000, Brig. Gen. Gozal worked his way up from paratrooper to Chief of Staff of the Southern Command. During that time, he developed expertise in both the execution and logistics of high-intensity warfare (commanding five divisions with 50,000 soldiers), as well as the strategy and management of low-intensity conflicts (commanding special-forces/anti-terror units). In 1982, during the first Lebanon War, Gozal received the IDF Citation of Honor for Bravery in Combat, when he was wounded twice and still refused to abandon his soldiers during combat.

Gozal speaks Hebrew, English and French with a full working knowledge of each. He was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, in 1957. His wife is Ayelet and their children are May, Eden, Romy and Adam.

As for recent events and possible upcoming scenarios, Gozal said, “This takes you back to 1973 and the Yom Kippur War, and it was a big victory.”

But, politics is the problems.

“I cannot assure that the politicians in the world will support us,” he said. “If it was up to me, we can stand and be determined and face every threat we have in the Middle East.

When asked, “How the international community can be supportive of Israel's soldiers who are fighting a very difficult enemy?” Gozal answered, “I would say it would be much easier for us if there was less interference. The problem is that some of the countries and states in the world, especially in the west, think they know how to solve our problems when they really don’t. We know how to protect ourselves.”

He added, “I don’t think we need to prove who is right and who is wrong. As long as they won’t be involved it’s better for us. If Europeans want to help, let them talk about peace, not about what Israel is doing wrong. Israel wants peace.”

Gozal has duel citizenship in the U.S. and Israel. When asked, “Why would an American living a relatively predicable and comfortable life volunteer to become a lone soldier (one who was not born in Israel or is not Jewish) in Israel's army, leaving his family, friends and culture?”

He said that there are around 7,000 “lone soldiers” in the IDF. About 4,000 are from other countries including the U.S., China, Russia, Brazil and Argentina.”

“That’s something unique,” Gozal said. “It means a lot for them to do this. When you serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, you are sending a unique message. It’s the military of God. We are, as a military, defending Israel, defending the Holy Land. It’s a very special mission to come and to serve and to do things that affect the whole world.

My responsibility as CEO (of Yahad) is to support those lone soldiers in Israel. We became their family. Some of them have been killed. They’ve sacrificed their lives to come and fight for Israel. And, it’s not for salary. It’s a real privilege to be a young man or woman to come and to be able to say, ‘I serve God.’”

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quranreadalong · 7 years ago

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SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: MOSES’ EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, PART 1

I’m sure this is going to shock you, but the next surah deals with Moses, yet again. Since we have seen our bud Musa about a thousand times now, and will see him a thousand more times, I think it’s worth exploring him a bit. Outside of Islamic sources, I mean. Who was the “real” Moses? How did his story come to be? What did it mean to ancient Jews? Speaking of whom, how did the religion of Judaism itself come to exist as we know it?

First, the bad news: Moses was not real. Yes, this means that the Prince of Egypt is based on events that did not actually happen, but you can still enjoy it. I mean, look at it!

The Exodus story is an origin myth for the Jewish people. There was no mass Hebrew slavery in Egypt, nor did they build the pyramids. The various plagues did not happen, nor did the deaths of either Jewish boys or Egyptian firstborn sons. There was no enormous, 40-year-long trek through the desert from Egypt to Canaan. All archaeological and genetic evidence shows that the Jews have simply always lived in what is now Israel/Palestine. They were Canaanites, starting out as semi-nomadic pastorialists and transitioning to a settled life, just like other peoples in Canaan. So where did the Moses story come from and how did it become so central to the religion? This requires a shitload of lore and backstory to the D&D game gone awry that is the Abrahamic religious group. The lore of Moses is actually more interesting than the Biblical story of Moses!

Let’s set the stage first. Until the 700s BC, there were two related but separate Hebrew-speaking kingdoms in what is now Israel/Palestine (and into Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan), one called Israel and the other called Judah. The Bible claims that they were originally one united kingdom that broke into two after the time of King Solomon, but there’s no historical evidence to substantiate this. It’s not even clear how related the two kingdoms were--most scholars think that Israel was significantly more developed and wealthy than Judah. They both worshiped YHWH, along with other gods, and perhaps that is what made them distinct from other small states. Regardless, by the 700s BC, they were directly next to each other, like this:

As the map shows, the capital of Israel was Samaria, which today is in the West Bank. The capital of Judah was Jerusalem. Israel was far more developed and populous compared to its southern neighbor--the Bible frames Judah as the central player in the saga because it was written primarily by people from Judah, which we’ll talk about later. But in the mid-700s BC, Israel’s status as the more impressive (and therefore more threatening) Hebrew kingdom worked to its detriment, as it was targeted by regional enemies. Assyrians were the ones to land the fatal blow; they invaded Israel and easily overtook it, due to the fact that the kingdom had already been weakened and invaded for decades prior to this. The Assyrians took so many people into captivity, and so many others fled the war south for Judah, that the territory was significantly depopulated. Unlike some other Biblical events, we know that this really happened, as it was recorded by scribes of the king Sargon. This captivity is only tangential to our story here, since the majority of the “lost” Jews never returned. They’re sometimes called the “lost tribes”; in reality they probably just assimilated into various Assyrian provinces or Judah over the centuries and stopped identifying as their “tribe”. But the point is that after 720 BC or so, Judah is now the sole existing Jewish kingdom. 100 years later, they would face their own problems.

The entire area at the time was caught up in a regional power struggle between Assyria plus their Egyptian allies and the Babylonians, the latter of whom were based in what is now Iraq. The Babylonians themselves were ruled by the Assyrians until they broke free in the 600s BC. And for one single, glorious century, the Babylonians went on a tear of fucking shit up. Most of this fucking shit up was accomplished by Nabopolassar, the first emperor of the independent empire, and his son, the more famous Nebuchadnezzar.

The entire Middle East, as it is now, was a clusterfuck at this time. In a single ten-year period the unfortunate kingdom of Judah was taken first by the Egyptians from the Assyrians and then by the Babylonians from the Egyptians. The event of interest here is the Battle of Carchemish, which transferred ownership of Judah from Egypt to Babylon, essentially ending Egyptian involvement in the region. By this time, the Babylonians had already largely destroyed the Assyrians.

For a few years, things were okay. The conquered Jews of Judah (thus the name “Jews”) paid tribute to their new overlords and everyone just existed in the typical unhappy master-puppet state relationship of ancient times. But then in 601 BC Nebuchadnezzar mounted a costly attempt to conquer Egypt itself. It threw the region into even worse chaos, as some of the Babylonian provinces now turned against their masters and supported the Egyptians. Once the conquest of Egypt failed, Nebuchadnezzar pulled his armies back to Babylonian territories and decided there would be hell to pay for those who had supported the Egyptians.

And so in 597 BC, Jerusalem was besieged. It did not last long, as the Jews were hopelessly outnumbered. The city fell easily and most of the upper-class residents of Jerusalem were kicked into Babylon. The Babylonians appointed a puppet ruler to keep Judah in check, but the puppet king Zedekiah resented his masters and turned against them, again allying with the Egyptians. And again there was hell to pay. Only ten years after the first siege, Jerusalem was besieged again. This time, Nebuchadnezzar ensured that there would be no more rebellions... by destroying the entire city. The Jewish temple was destroyed and thousands more were taken away. Judah ceased to be its own kingdom and was fully absorbed into Babylon.

It is in this era that the story of Moses was put into the form we now know. In fact, this era would completely reshape the Jewish religion as a whole, transforming it into what we now recognize as Judaism.

Prior to this, the Jewish religion was similar to that of its neighbors. It had developed over a period of thousands of years already, based on a polytheistic religious system developed by the Sumerians and introduced to the Levant region by Akkadian influence. In its earliest form, this religion was vaguely similar to Greek polytheism, with a head god (El), his wife (Asherah), and their kids (the various other gods).

As the different parts of the Levant and Middle East developed (or re-developed) their own identities, they began to create patron gods for themselves, giving the gods their own personalities and characteristics. Sometimes different gods worshiped by different groups were originally one god. The patron god of the Phoenicians, for example, was Baal; the Arameans of Syria had Hadad. Originally they were just one storm god named “Baal Hadad” which is strangely similar to Bella Hadid and now I feel uncomfortable. As different cultures claimed different gods, El fell out of the spotlight a bit. Over time, he was replaced by his kids in importance. Many groups even gave his wife Asherah to his sons!

The patron god of the Jewish people was Yahweh, a warrior god. No one is quite sure where “Yahweh” came from, but it is possible that he was brought to the Israel region by a nomadic group called the Shasu, who apparently lived in clusters from the Sinai region into Jordan; the Shasu themselves may have gotten him from some now-lost Egyptian group or else came up with the name themselves. His name is not Hebrew (the “I AM” etymology was retroactively applied to it) nor does it resemble any of the languages spoken in the Canaan region. An inscription written around the 8th century suggests that there were temples to Yahweh not just in Jewish lands, but also in Edom (in Jordan, again perhaps related to the Shasu). It’s unclear if other Canaanite peoples like the Edomites also had Yahweh himself as an important god or if he was considered the same as the Edomite god Qos or what. No one really knows!

Wherever he came from, Yahweh, like Baal and the others, was made a son of the god El. Over the span of centuries, he solidified into the most important god in Israel and Judah; in later years he would be conflated with El and take over his daddy’s old stories. The older portions of the Torah make it clear that in this period, Yahweh was regarded as the patron god of the Jewish people, with other gods being the gods of other people. The monotheistic religion of Judaism did not yet exist.

Traces of this era are still found in some Biblical texts. Take this verse from Deuteronomy, which was likely written after Israel fell but before Judah fell:

When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided all mankind, he set up boundaries for the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel. For the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.

I mean, seems normal and typical of the Bible. Here’s the only issue. The bolded words are not in the original text. What it really says is this (long explanation of how it was changed to “sons of Israel” here):

When Elyon divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he established the borders of the nations according to the number of the sons of the gods. Yahweh’s portion was his people, Israel his allotted inheritance.

The original text says that El divided the nations and gave each one to one of his sons with Asherah. Ugaritic texts state that there were 70 of them; Yahweh got the Jews. The fact that Yahweh was one among many is the reason why the early Jewish myths, like the creation account, have Yahweh using the pronoun we instead of I, and why the snake tells Adam and Eve that they shall be like gods. This is also seen in the early Psalms, like 82:1, where Yahweh stands among the gods, or 89:6, where Yahweh is praised: who among the sons of El is like him? This happens over and over.

At some point before Jerusalem’s destruction, some movements seem to have sprung up that sought to stop the worship of other gods. You may recall the story of Jezebel, who was a Canaanite woman who was married to the King of Israel and tried to get him to change Israel’s patron god to Baal, like the Canaanites. The people of Israel, led by the priest Elijah, were furious and resisted it. The story’s message is that worship of gods other than Yahweh was not just bad but treasonous, even though other gods were still believed to exist. Historians are doubtful about whether Jezebel was a real person, but the focus on worshiping Yahweh alone was a real historical shift. When the exiles later sat down to put the Bible together, these movements would be seen as prophetic in hindsight, and the fact that people ignored their message would be seen as the reason for the destruction of Judah.

It was also around this time that worship of Asherah began to be frowned upon; the Bible has many commands to stop using “Asherah poles” (it’s believed they were trees or just decorated sticks in tribute of her) and to stop praying to her. She is now almost totally forgotten and unknown by the majority of adherents to Abrahamic religions.

That was the situation at the time of the fall of Jerusalem: other gods were acknowledged and worship of the others hadn’t fully stopped, but Yahweh was the god of the Jewish people, the favored son of El... who was well on his way to becoming El himself.

⇚ previous day | next day ⇛

#quranreadalong #historylesson #surah 20 #taha

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travelsthrumtkingdoms-blog · 6 years ago

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Family & Friends,

Ku~zoo zang~po La (greetings in Dzongha, Bhutan’s official language) & Namaste (greetings in Nepali)

Six of us, three Andres accompanied by a couple of bolt-on and a friend, are going on an excursion with a tour group to the mountain Kingdom of Bhutan (Land of the Thunder Dragon) and the former mountain Kingdom of Nepal (Roof of the World). These two landlocked countries, sandwiched between India on the south and Tibet on the north, abut the snow-covered Himalayan (abode of the snow) mountain range along their northern border.

Our excursion will combine trekking in the foothills of the Himalayas, and visits to historic, cultural, and religious sites in Buddhist-centric Bhutan and Hindu-centric Nepal.

Our travels and trekking in Bhutan, expected to be at elevations ranging from about 7,000 to 11,000-plus feet above sea level, should test the high-altitude endurance of those in our tour group who have already attained or are at near attainment of senior-citizen standing.

Compared with Bhutan, Nepal should be a piece of cake, as our travels and trekking in and around the bowl-shaped Kathmandu Valley, even though in the shadow of Mt. Everest, will be at much lower elevations ranging from 4,600 to 7,300 feet.

From the comforts of your home, without undue physical exertion, you too can partake in our excursion, albeit virtually, by following our blog which we will update from time-to-time depending upon availability of suitable internet connection.

Suzanne & Mehdi

September 2018

**********************************************

Some interesting facts about Bhutan (the only surviving Tibetan-Buddhist Himalayan Mountain Kingdom), other former Tibetan-Buddhist Kingdoms of the Region and Nepal

All the historic Tibetan-Buddhist Himalayan mountain kingdoms, with the exception of Bhutan, no longer survive as independent nations.

In recent history, three Tibetan-Buddhist kingdoms, all landlocked, ceased to exist: Sikkim, sandwiched between Nepal & Bhutan and formerly administered by colonial Britain, in 1975, with a population of 200,000, voted to join India in a referendum -- rigged by India, which then had it under military occupation, and swayed by the votes from the massive influx of Nepali-speaking Hindu immigrants -- with a banana republic-type of landslide election outcome of 97.6 percent approval; Ladakh become part of post-independence India in 1949 and was incorporated in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir whose border disputes have occasionally led to militarily skirmishes with Pakistan; and Tibet, forcefully gobbled up in 1950 by China after centuries as an independent nation, suffers from the Chinese government’s pogrom to systematically cleanse Tibet of its cultural, religion and heritage, coupled with a calculated endeavor by the Chinese government to change the demographics of Tibet by promoting the massive influx of Han Chinese.

Bhutan, after years of warring fiefdoms was unified in the seventeenth-century as a nation-state by a Buddhist lama, and became a hereditary monarchy in 1907 followed by a constitutional monarchy in 2008. In 2013, Bhutan held its second general election, in which the opposition People’s Democratic Party gained a majority of the seats in the National Assembly, paving the way for the country’s first democratic transfer of power.

Nepal, which had alternated between absolute and constitutional monarchy, became a federal republic in 2008, ending 240 years of royal rule. In 2006, Nepal’s 10-year insurgency led by Maoist rebels ended, and though generally peaceful now, the last 30 years of political instability, epitomized by a revolving door of governments under 25 prime ministers, continues.

The emergence of two major political parties in Nepal, a left- and a right-leaning party, in the December 2017 relatively-free-from-violence election in which 88 parties contested, could be the harbinger to the formation of a stable two-party system. In a resounding win, in what is believed to be a free-and-fair election, an alliance of two, now-reformed communist parties won control of the national government and six of the seven provincial governments.

Bhutan has enshrined in its constitution Drukpa Kagyu and Nyingma, both disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism which is a branch of the Vajrayana (or Tantric) School of Buddhism, as the state religions. However, Bhutan’s constitution allows for the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

Nepal, at one time the only constitutionally-declared Hindu state (Hindu Kingdom of Nepal) in the world, became a secular state with the adoption of its 2008 interim constitution (subsequently secularism was enshrined in its 2015 new constitution), though there are on-going efforts and occasional violent incidences instigated by the fanatic Hindu Nationalist Party with a royalist bent wanting to restore Nepal as a Hindu State.

Bhutan is the only country that uses Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as its development indicator. GNH is a development philosophy and a measure of the collective happiness of the nation. Bhutan’s constitution enshrines the state’s obligation to promote those conditions that it believes enable its citizens the utopian pursuit of happiness.

Bhutan has also enshrined in its constitution the state’s obligation to prevent certain environmental degradations, has committed to retain at least 60% of its landmass forested in perpetuity, and has pledged to become carbon negative (as opposed to carbon neutral) long before 196 countries signed the Paris Climate Accord on limiting carbon emissions.

(Subsequent to President Obama signing this Accord, President Trump, based on his customary penchant to disregard truths, withdrew the U.S. from the Accord after having branded climate change a hoax propagated by the Chinese. Alas, many of Trump’s so-called deplorable supporters fervently believe in this Trump-centric nonsensical alternative truth, and their messianic thirst for alternative truths is satiated by the over 4,000 three, four and five Pinocchio-laden lies (according to the Washington Post scorekeeping) Trump has publicly communicated in less than 2 years after what he seems to believe was his coronation.

Bhutan & Nepal frequently have no choice but to be subservient to India, their giant neighbor to the south, as these two landlocked countries’ economies are inevitably dependent on and tied very closely with that of India.

India, which sees Bhutan as a geopolitical buffer against China, allocates about three-fourths of its foreign aid to Bhutan (amounting to about 30% of Bhutan’s GDP and about 50% of Bhutanese government’s revenues), and wields considerable influence over Bhutan's commerce, and foreign and defense policies.

Apparently Bhutan has outsourced a meaningful portion of its source of wealth (GDP) by trading off some of its sovereignty, but in the process has dumped onto India some of the incidental injurious byproducts of wealth generation that have an inevitable adverse impact on happiness (a drag on GNH). Further, this landlocked country of about 800,000 people has not much choice but to cast its lot with India, knowing that China has designs over some of Bhutan’s territory and also knowing of China’s continued persecution of their brethren in Tibet since its occupation in 1950 by China.

The biggest export of Nepal (30 million population) is its people. Thirty percent of Nepal’s GDP is derived from remittances by the approximately 12 million Nepalis working mostly in India, and to a lesser degree in the Middle East and elsewhere.

In 2015 India had blocked fuel shipments to Nepal because of its displeasure with certain provisions of Nepal’s 2015 constitution, though India had denied such attempt to blackmail Nepal. India and Nepal seem to have worked out their differences after Nepal passed an amendment to its constitution.

A railroad through the Himalayan mountain range connecting Tibet (China) and Nepal, being built and financed by China under its “belt and road” initiative, is expected to reduce Nepal’s dependence on India. This is also an attempt by Nepal to play one regional power against the other, while China views it as an opportunity to expand its dominance in the region.

The 2017 average life expediency of the Bhutanese was 69.8 years, virtually the same (69.2 years) as that of the Nepalis, their neighbors, though with the government-championed National Happiness in their corner, I suspect the Bhutanese die much happier than the Nepalis.

In 2004, Bhutan became the first country to become tobacco-free. It is illegal to sell tobacco, or smoke in public places or even in private offices.

In 2007, with the Nepali Supreme Court ruling in favor of LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) rights, Nepal became the first country to recognize a third gender, intersex – those having neither male nor female traits. (Germany is the second country to recognize intersex rights with its top court’s ruling in 2017.) Subsequently, Nepal enshrined those rights in its constitution and became the most progressive country in South Asia for the protection of LGBTI rights.

People with intersex traits (also referred to as eunuchs) do not have typical male-female sex characteristics. Some intersex traits are visibly evident such as ambiguous genitalia, while other may involve chromosome variations. According to the United Nations, up to about 1.7% of the global population is born with intersex traits.

According to Transparency International’s 2016 Corruption Perceptions Index ranking of 176 countries, 27th-ranked Bhutan (a remarkably high standing for a third-world country), is relatively corruption-free compared with 131st-ranked Nepal which has slipped many notches in recent years. Bhutan is ranked one notch ahead of Israel and behind 18th-ranked U.S. (Denmark & New Zealand are tied for first place, Canada is ranked 9th, and in the last place is that almost-perpetually ungovernable, war-torn Somalia.)

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decesionforesight · 3 years ago

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Global Aviation Market

Global Aviation Market: Industry Perspective, COVID-19 Impact Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Segment, Trends and Forecast, 2030

The Global Aviation Market size was valued at USD 169.72 billion in 2020 and it is expected to reach USD 337.0 billion by 2030, registering the CAGR of 7.10% during the forecast period. The defence and aerospace business is massive and intricate. It caters to both the military and commercial sectors. From commercial planes to jet fighters to single-prop private planes and traffic helicopters, from the space shuttle to mission control systems, from radar systems to cruise missile systems, from missiles and submarines to aircraft carriers, it designs, produces, and supports everything. Tanks, surveillance satellites, flight simulators, ammunition, commercial and private planes, communications satellites, consumer electronics, and innumerable minor parts, components, and subsystems are among the industry's diverse offerings.

Download Sample Copy of the Report to understand the structure of the complete report (Including Full TOC, Table & Figures) @ https://www.decisionforesight.com/request-sample/DFS020258

Market Dynamics and Factors:

The worldwide commercial space industry is expected to experience consistent investments in new and current space technology and services, largely from governments and venture capital. Currently, the commercial space market's earnings are largely derived from the production of earth observation and communications satellites, as well as the launch vehicles that send these payloads into orbit. In the case of commercial aviation, low fuel prices will make it less necessary for airlines to replace their present fleet with more fuel-efficient planes. According to earlier studies, replacement rates decreased to about 1% per year during periods of low oil prices. Low commodity prices are also expected to be undermining the finances of resource-based countries, slowing the development of passenger demand in such growing markets.

Market Segmentation:

On the basis of type, the aviation market is majorly segmented into airborne and ground. By application, the market is categorised into commercial, business & civil and military. By region, the aviation market is classified into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and RoW.

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Geographic Analysis:

With the strong expenditure in the military and space industries, North America dominates the aerospace and defence telemetry industry. During the projection period, however, the Middle East and Africa, as well as Asia-Pacific, are predicted to expand faster. Political tensions in the Gulf have compelled them to raise defence spending in order to modernise their weapons.

Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar are all working to modernise their commercial and military aviation sectors.Unmanned aerial vehicles are also in high demand in the region. As a result of these changes, the need for telemetry systems in the region is anticipated to increase. If overall European defence spending is compared, it is shown that France, Germany, and the United Kingdom account for half of all European defence spending.

Spain and Italy are in a distant fourth and fifth place, with 15.3 percent of the total.On a per-soldier basis, there is a clear northwest-southeast split in military expenditure, with the United Kingdom clearly leading the way ahead of northern Europe and a cluster of France, Germany, and other western European nations. The countries of southern and eastern Europe lag behind.India, China, and Japan, among the Asia-emerging Pacific's economies, are investing heavily in upgrading their military forces. The modernisation plans are supported even more by these nations' increased defence spending, which has a favourable influence on the market's growth.

Competitive Analysis:

Key players in the aviation market are

Lee Aerospace,

Llamas Plastics,

IncGKN Aerospace,

PPG Industries,

Gulfstream Aerospace,

Textron,

Airbus,

Comac,

Boeing,

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL).

How will this Market Intelligence Report Benefit You?

The report offers statistical data in terms of value (US$) as well as Volume (units) till 2030.

Exclusive insight into the key trends affecting the Global Aviation industry, although key threats, opportunities and disruptive technologies that could shape the Global Aviation Market supply and demand.

The report tracks the leading market players that will shape and impact the Global Aviation Market most.

The data analysis present in the Global Aviation Market report is based on the combination of both primary and secondary resources.

The report helps you to understand the real effects of key market drivers or retainers on Global Aviation Market business.

The 2021 Annual Global Aviation Market offers:

100+ charts exploring and analysing the Global Aviation Market from critical angles including retail forecasts, consumer demand, production and more

15+ profiles of top producing states, with highlights of market conditions and retail trends

Regulatory outlook, best practices, and future considerations for manufacturers and industry players seeking to meet consumer demand

Benchmark wholesale prices, market position, plus prices for raw materials involved in Global Aviation Market type

About Us:

Decision Foresight is a market research organization known for its reliable and genuine content, market estimation and the best analysis which is designed to deliver state-of-the-art quality syndicate reports to our customers. Apart from syndicate reports, you will find the best market insights, strategies that will help in taking better business decisions on subjects that may require you to develop and grow your business-like health, science, technology and many more. At Decision Foresight, we truly believe in disseminating the right piece of knowledge to a large section of the audience and cover the in-depth insights of market leaders across various verticals and horizontals.

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