#long live lebanon iran and the allies of the oppressed

[dykehot]

I don’t believe in hell except for politicians

[hero-israel]

have you seen the news that Iranians are actually doing anti Hamas protesting and even expressing support for Israel? Gives me a little bit of hope (https://www.tumblr.com/castlead/732158568074199040/the-people-of-iran-are-so-fucking-brave-unlike)

Yes, this happens periodically and it's both inspiring and poignantly sad. We should not expect Iranians to be Zionists (uh, to put that mildly), but they also aren't stupid and they can plainly see how their murderously oppressive regime is prioritizing Palestine over their own lives and well-being. I lose count of how many times in the last 10-15 years there have been massive, nationwide riots throughout Iran aimed at toppling the dictatorship, always to be finally, gorily beaten back when the ayatollah sends his death squads to just machine-gun them all in the streets.

Before the ayatollah took over, Iran and Israel were allies. There were tourists, students, business deals. Iranians now over age 60 or so should remember that, may have told their children. But even if they hadn't, you often see cases of Iranians jeering down official displays of Palestinian flags, or performatively refusing to walk upon the Israeli flags that the regime stretches across the ground. This is not a love for Herzl or Jews, it is a rejection of diversions, of the symbols demanded by the tyrants who kill them in the streets. As the chants go: Taliban, Taliban, this is not Afghanistan / No Gaza, no Lebanon, my life for Iran.

It's especially tragic that there were giant anti-government protests throughout both Iran and Israel all year long. The world would be so much better if even one of those movements had truly won.

[eretzyisrael]

It’s a Tribal Conflict

Humans have always arranged themselves into families, extended families, and tribes. After all, they are primates, and many other primate species act similarly. Sometimes tribes clash over a piece of territory. Maybe the ground is fertile or the hunting is good. When that happens, the tribes fight. If there are other tribes nearby, each side may seek allies to help them win. This is the way human beings behave. We think we are different today. We are not.

Usually one tribe is the aggressor and one is the victim. The goal of the aggressor is to take what the victim has: property and land, and sometimes to enslave the useful members of the victim tribe. Some tribes have been very successful in serial aggressions, even building empires as they sweep across the land, employing techniques of aggression that they improve with successive conquests. The Arab conquests of the 7th century and the Mongols of the 13th come to mind.

Sometimes the aggressor wins, and sometimes the intended victim beats the aggressor off, or even destroys him. Sometimes there are repeated conflicts with no clear winner over a long period.

When one tribe achieves a conclusive victory, the other tribe usually disappears. They are killed, enslaved, expelled, females raped, and their genetic material fades into the background noise. The culture of the aggressor becomes the dominant culture in conquered areas. Their language and their religion replace those of the losing tribe.

In modern times tribes have coalesced into nations. Sometimes – rarely these days – a nation is comprised of primarily one tribe or a group of closely related tribes. Such a nation is Japan. Other nations are dominated by one tribe, but have significant national minorities, like China or Russia. Usually the more stable nations are the ones that are homogeneous or the ones whose dominant tribes are solidly in control, which in part explains why China and Russia sometimes behave in ways that are considered oppressive to their minorities.

An example of what can happen when there are large national minorities is Lebanon. Lebanon was an experiment in modern politics in which political structures were built to balance the power of the multiple Christian, Muslim, and Druze factions (i.e., tribes). Great care was taken to ensure that no tribe would be dominant. This, it turns out, is precisely the formula for instability – which was exploited by outside forces like the PLO, Syria, and Iran. Today the nation has been reduced to failed third-world state status, without a functional currency or electric power grid. Worse, it has been made into one massive remote-controlled missile launcher for Iran, and will be forced to absorb even more blows if (when) war breaks out between Israel and Iran.

Muslim minorities in non-Muslim states are particularly destabilizing. This is because Islamic ideology contains several concepts that lead to conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim neighbors. Islamic doctrine holds that women and non-Muslims have fewer rights than male Muslims, something that creates friction in modern liberal cultures. And they believe that it is unacceptable for Muslims to live under a non-Islamic regime, which results in noncompliance with laws and rebelliousness. We can see these phenomena in Europe today.

Israel is in a particularly difficult position, with an extremely large national minority of Muslim Arabs (about one in every five Israeli citizens). In addition to the religious factor they have developed a sense of grievance and a narrative of dispossession and loss of honor. This is a formula for trouble, and indeed it has broken out into open insurrection several times; most notably in the two intifadas, and in the “disturbances” (anti-Jewish pogroms) in cities with mixed Jewish and Arab populations this May during the recent war with Hamas in Gaza.

Recently Arab alienation has taken the form of contempt for the laws of the state, with crime rampant in Arab areas – and spreading outside of them. In particular, Israel’s strict laws regulating the possession of firearms are massively flouted, with Arabs obtaining weapons stolen from the army, smuggled across the border from Lebanon, or even manufactured at home. Some illegal weapons also find their way into the hands of terrorists.

Israelis are worried. Even leaving aside the conflict with the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza who have been educated by their remarkably evil leaders over the past several generations to incandescently hate Jews, what can be done to preserve the Jewish state with its increasingly restive Arab Muslim minority?

Back in 2006, a group of Arab intellectuals, citizens of the state of Israel, told us what they thought in a document called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” The writers were academics, politicians, and social activists, people from the intellectual elite of Arab Israeli society, chosen to represent “different political beliefs and thought schools.” It was a serious project, sponsored by the National Committee for the Heads of the Local Arab Councils in Israel. The final product represented their consensus of opinion.

The document affirms the narrative of Israel as a European colonial project, involving the “Judaization” of the land and the “destruction of Palestinian history.” It asserts that Israel is an “ethnocracy” and not a democracy. The writers demanded that the state “acknowledge responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba” of 1948, and recognize its Arab citizens as an “indigenous national minority” and an essential part of the greater “Palestinian people.” They demanded that the State of Israel redefine itself from a Jewish state into a binational one, with equal political representation for Jews and Arabs, including granting Arabs a veto power over state policies. They demanded “corrective justice … in order to compensate for the damage inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs due to the ethnic favoritism policies of the Jews.” And naturally they called for “Guaranteeing the rights of the Palestinian Arabs in issues obliterated in the past such as the present absentees and their right of return.”

Even much of the Israeli Left was shocked. Such a binational state would in short order make Lebanon look like a success story. Despite the language of human rights that suffuses the document, it represents a demand for the Jews to reverse the outcome of the 1948 War of Independence, and submit to what would quickly become Arab domination. And that in turn – as is normal among primates – would end in murder, slavery, expulsion, and rape, and the final end of the Jewish people in the Middle East and perhaps in the world.

The centrist Zionist position is that it is possible to buy the Arabs off by making it possible for them to have the “good things in life,” like nice cars and fast internet service. After all, they already have the highest standard of living of any other Arab population in the Middle East. In some respects they live better than many Jewish Israelis (compare the large mansions in Arab towns to the cramped apartments of the Jews). But there are some things that we are not prepared to give them: land – they want it all – and their honor, which they believe we took from them in the Nakba. Their honor demands that we become subservient to those whom former MK Haneen Zouabi called “the owners of the homeland,” the Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately, these are the things they really want, not cars and internet service.

There is no middle ground, just as there is no mutually acceptable “two-state solution” for the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, and no prospect of peace with Hamas. This is a struggle between tribes. And although we are a majority in our state, our tribe is a tiny minority in the region and the world, so it is also a struggle for our continued existence.

This is a kind of struggle that liberal societies are not good at. We want to compromise, to find win-win solutions. There aren’t any here. One side has to win and the other lose. And if we lose, we disappear; so we’d better win.

Abu Yehuda

[go-redgirl]

In Syria, Trump Makes the Best of the Situation

The controversy over President Trump’s pullout on the Turkish–Syrian border will settle down quickly. It is another useful debunking of ancient shibboleths and decrepit truisms, like the long-impregnable encrustation of false wisdom that moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem would unleash hell upon the whole Middle East. There are about 35 million Kurds, approximately half of them in Turkey, where they make up about a fifth of Turkey’s population. 

A century ago almost all the Kurds had been in the Ottoman Empire, which the Allied powers broke up after World War I, a foolish decision that is on all fours with the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The result was the creation of four patched-together artificial states that have all now disintegrated: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Syria. 

They are not alike in other respects, of course. The Czechs and Slovenians (Yugoslavia) have flourished; the Slovaks and Croatians, and more recently the Serbs, have got by adequately well; and the rest of the remnants of Yugoslavia are struggling, but they are all living paradisiacal monuments to the foresight of western statesmen compared to the current fate of the populations of Syria and Iraq.

No American adult needs an update on what a debacle post-Saddam Iraq has become. The Iranians are the principal influence in the 60 percent of the population that is Shiite, precisely the opposite of what was intended when the United States invaded Iraq under President George W. Bush. 

The dispossessed Sunni 20 percent of Iraqis around Baghdad are being thoroughly misgoverned, even by Saddam’s standards, and the Kurds in the north, where most of the oil is, should be building a modern and autonomous Kurdistan that could attract and accommodate mistreated Kurds from Turkey, Iran, and Syria — an authentic Kurdish homeland. 

Instead, the Kurdish government in northern Iraq has been a sinkhole of corruption and misrule, anything but a Mecca for this bellicose, scattered, nomadic people.

The Kurds in northern Syria have undoubtedly been a source of considerable provocation to Turkey, and the Kurds in Turkey have also undoubtedly been a frequently oppressed minority. There is no room for anyone but the parties involved to sort this out. 

The Turkish part of it is an internal matter for Turkey, and no one will ever know the rights and wrongs of who began or escalated the reciprocal antagonism of the Turkish central government and the Kurdish minority, which is effectively segregated in some parts of Turkey but thoroughly and distinguishedly integrated in others. It is, in any case, nobody’s business but the Turks’, including the Kurdish Turks.

The Syrian Kurds sometimes overlap with the PKK, an internationally recognized terrorist organization that is associated with the Syrian and Turkish Communist parties. PKK is not supported by all the Kurds in Syria, but they have substantially infiltrated that body of Kurds that made common cause with the West in destroying ISIS in Syria and Iraq. 

They were doubtless useful allies in that conflict, but they also destabilized as best they could all the surrounding governments, and the picture being painted by both the Left and the neoconservative Right in Washington of the Trump administration deserting gallant and constant allies is bunk. The Kurds were constantly threatening to release all the ISIS prisoners (and their families) that they were holding, and they always drew the Turks out in hot pursuit of them after border outrages.

The president has been much criticized for seeming to take this move peremptorily, and for departing from talking points in a telephone conversation with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The facts appear to be that the Turkish president announced that PKK outrages at the border required a Turkish response and that he intended to retaliate, whatever the U.S. thought of it, and that he also intended to begin the process of moving a million Syrian refugees back into Syria humanely. 

As the U.S forces involved were 400 highly trained specialists, very competent soldiers but scarcely numerous enough to restrain the movement of main units of the Turkish army, President Trump salvaged a good arrangement from the conversation: 

Erdogan would avoid civilian casualties as much as possible and clear the Kurdish military back 20 miles from the border, with the understanding that if Turkey was negligent about civilians, the United States would apply heavy economic sanctions against Turkey.

The entry of the Turks brought forward the Syrian army, supplied by Russia, and tele-spectators may have the spectacle of Turkey, which has been the superpower of the region since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, pouring fire on Assad’s Syrian army. 

Assad will not be able to maintain such an exchange for more than a few days, regardless of the volume of Russian assistance he receives. There were very serious limits to what the U.S. could do with 400 servicemen trying to sort out a large guerrilla force on one side and a large professional national army on the other. In the broader context, American sanctions will be much more of a lever on Turkey than 400 soldiers could have been, and U.S. goodwill generally will weigh more heavily on Erdogan than any other factor in these considerations.

Because Europe rebuffed Turkey, the latter turned to the Middle East to focus its foreign policy, where it had been somewhat displaced by the Great Powers’ preoccupation with the area during and after World War II, stemming from the strategic value of Arabian oil and the American interest in the success of Israel as a Jewish state. 

The hostility to the West of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria was more than compensated for by the benevolence of Turkey and Iran. Between 1973 and 1978 there was a golden window, created by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, when Anwar Sadat of Egypt and the Shah of Iran both were friendly with the West. 

This was the time of the Camp David agreement, hosted by President Carter, who succumbed to the American weakness for promoting democracy in infertile soil, and who bears considerable blame for the fall of the Shah, a strategic disaster for the United States after the Nixon-Kissinger triumph of bringing Egypt into the western camp. 

George W. Bush was mercilessly attacked by the same democratic bug when he inadvertently promoted Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Brotherhood, a process in which President Barack Obama, Senator Lindsey Graham, and the late Senator John McCain were not blameless.

The promise of the new arrangement is that the U.S. withdraws manpower from an area where its forces were extremely vulnerable but of insufficient number to be decisive, as candidate Trump promised. 

This removes all obstacles to good relations with Turkey, the region’s premier force and a NATO ally. Erdogan is an unreliable, Islamist ally, but as long as the U.S. isn’t protecting Kurdish terrorists, there is no reason that Turkish and American interests could not be reasonably aligned. 

And Erdogan’s grandiose nationalist ambitions could be usefully satisfied by urging him to extend his influence over the Sunni Muslims of Iraq and Syria, leaving an autonomous Kurdistan in northern Iraq. 

With Hezbollah thus starved and discouraged in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, a Palestinian settlement and a stable Lebanon could finally be possible, and a solid coalition of aligned interests between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel, with U.S. backing, could expel Iran from its terrorist meddling around the region and relieve the United States of most of the defense burden it has carried in the region for seven decades.

Establishing sustainable local balances of power with comparatively modest contributions to maintain them has been the U.S. foreign-policy goal since shortly after World War II. 

It has been achieved in Western and Central Europe and is close at hand in the Far East and now, perhaps, in the Middle East as well. It is from this perspective that the president’s actions with the Kurds should be seen, not with shamed and breathless hand-wringing every time there is a casualty on the Syrian–Turkish border.

[paulbenedictblog]

%news%

New Post has been published on %http://paulbenedictsgeneralstore.com%

Abc news Iraqi police fire tear gas as protesters hit Baghdad streets

Abc news

Tens of hundreds of folks, moderately heaps of them younger and unemployed males, thronged public squares and blocked major streets Friday within the capitals of Iraq and Lebanon in unprecedented, spontaneous anti-government revolts in two nations scarred by long conflicts.

Attracted to Iraq?

Add Iraq as an ardour to end up up to now on the most contemporary Iraq data, video, and prognosis from ABC Info.

Demonstrators in Iraq had been overwhelmed aid by police firing are living ammunition and tear gasoline, and officials said 30 folks had been killed in a novel wave of unrest that has left 179 civilians unimaginative this month. In Lebanon, scuffles between rival political groups broke out at a shriek camp, threatening to undermine an in every other case united civil disobedience campaign now in its ninth day.

The protests are directed at a postwar political design and a class of elite leaders that include kept each nations from relapsing into civil struggle however achieved small else. Primarily the most customary rallying bawl from the protesters in Iraq and Lebanon is "Thieves! Thieves!" — a reference to officials they accuse of stealing their money and accumulating wealth for a protracted time.

The leaderless uprisings are unprecedented in uniting folks against political leaders from their very have spiritual communities. But the revolutionary swap they are calling for would dismantle vitality-sharing governments that include largely contained sectarian animosities and power out leaders who are shut to Iran and its heavily armed native allies.

Their grievances need to no longer contemporary.

Three a protracted time after the quit of Lebanon's civil struggle and 16 years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the streets of their capitals echo with the exclaim of personal generators that attach the lights on. Tap water is undrinkable and trash goes uncollected. Excessive unemployment forces the younger to position off marriage and children.

Every few years there are elections, and every time it seems to be love the same folks bewitch.

The sectarian vitality-sharing association that ended Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil struggle dispensed vitality and high offices amongst Christians, Shiites and Sunnis. It has largely kept the peace, however has was worn warlords right into a eternal political class that trades favors for votes. A planned tax on WhatsApp amid a monetary crisis was once the last straw.

In Iraq, a an identical association amongst Shiites and minority Sunnis and Kurds has ended in the same low stasis, with parties haggling over ministries so that they'll give jobs and aid to supporters whereas lining their very have pockets. The devastating struggle against the Islamic Voice neighborhood finest exacerbated a protracted time-worn financial complications within the oil-rich country.

"They (leaders) include eaten away at the country love most cancers," said Abu Ali al-Majidi, 55, pointing toward the Green Zone, house to government offices and Western embassies.

"They are all low thieves," he added, surrounded by his four sons who had advance along for the shriek.

In Iraq, a ferocious crackdown on protests that started Oct. 1 resulted within the deaths of 149 civilians in lower than a week, most of them shot within the head and chest, along with eight security forces killed. After a three-week hiatus, the protests resumed Friday, with 30 folks killed, in response to the semi-reliable Iraq Excessive Rate for Human Rights.

In each nations, which portion a historical past of civil strife, the aptitude for sustained turmoil is proper.

Iraq and Lebanon are regarded as to be firmly in Iran's orbit, and Tehran is loath to explore protracted political turbulence that threatens the position quo, fearing it would perhaps well perhaps lose influence at a time when it's miles under heavy stress from the U.S.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah in Beirut and the In fashion Mobilization Forces in Baghdad include said they need the governments in each nations to end in vitality.

The protests against Iraq's Shiite-led government include unfold to several, mainly Shiite-populated southern provinces. In Lebanon, demonstrations include erupted in Shiite communities, together with in south Lebanon for the principle time.

Indicators of a backlash against Tehran's tight grip on each nations can already be considered.

Among the many protesters' chants in Baghdad, one said: "Iran out, out! Baghdad free, free!"

Protesters making an attempt to attain the heavily fortified Green Zone had been met with tear gasoline and are living ammunition. Males in dusky plainclothes and masks stood in entrance of Iraqi squaddies, going via off with protesters and firing the tear gasoline. Residents said they did no longer know who they had been, with some speculating they had been Iranians.

Within the south, headquarters of Iran-backed militias had been space on fire.

In central Beirut, Hezbollah supporters clashed with anti-government protesters. Supporters of the extremely efficient neighborhood rejected the protesters equating its chief with other low politicians. A favored refrain within the rallies, now of their ninth day, has been: "All formulation all."

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah warned in a televised speech that the protests — even supposing largely aloof except now — would perhaps well perhaps result in chaos and civil struggle. He said they had been being hijacked by political competitors opposing the neighborhood.

"We're closing the roads, calling for toppling the design that has been ruling us for the past 30 years with oppression, suppression and fright, said Abed Doughan, a protester blocking a avenue in southern Beirut.

After Friday's lethal violence in Iraq, a curfew was once announced in several areas of the south. A complete bunch of folks had been taken to hospitals, many with shortness of breath from the tear gasoline.

The most contemporary spherical of protests has been instructed by nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has a protracted-established contaminated of red meat up and holds the ideal need of seats in parliament. He has known as on the federal government to resign and suspended his bloc's participation within the federal government except it comes up with a reform program.

However, extremely efficient Shiite militias backed by Iran include stood by the federal government and suggested the demonstrations had been an outdoor "conspiracy."

Iraq's most senior Shiite spiritual chief, Wide Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, appealed for protesters and security forces to steer clear of violence. In his Friday sermon, he also criticized the federal government-appointed committee investigating the crackdown within the old protests, announcing it did no longer manufacture its targets or say who was once within the aid of the violence.

As within the protests earlier this month, the protesters, organized on social media, started from the central Tahrir Square. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags and chanted anti-government slogans, demanding jobs and higher public providers love water and electrical energy.

"I need my country aid, I need Iraq aid," said Ban Soumaydai, 50, an Training Ministry employee who wore dusky denims, a white T-shirt and carried an Iraqi flag with the hashtag #We wish a rustic printed on it.

Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has struggled to address the protests. In an address to the nation early Friday, he promised a government reshuffle next week and pledged reforms. He informed protesters they've an even to aloof demonstrations and known as on security forces to guard the protesters.

Equally, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri issued an emergency reform kit few days after the protests started on Oct. 17 — a fable that has been brushed apart by protesters as "empty promises."

———

Karam reported from Beirut and Krauss from Jerusalem. Associated Press author Sarah El Deeb in Beirut contributed.

[mideastsoccer]

Countering civilisationalism: Lebanese and Iraqi protesters transcend sectarianism

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon and Castbox.

 Protests in Lebanon have evolved into more than a fight against failed and corrupt government that has long stymied development in the Middle East and North Africa.

 The protests constitute a rare demand for political and social structures that emphasize national rather than ethnic or sectarian religious identities in a world in which civilizational leaders who advocate some form of racial, ethnic or religious supremacy govern the world’s major as well as key regional powers.

 “One, one, one, we are one people,” is a popular slogan chanted by Lebanese protesters irrespective of their denomination.

 Tens of thousands of protesters emphasized last Sunday the quest for a political structure and identity that transcends sect by forming a human chain that stretched along Lebanon’s Mediterranean coast.

 “We are one people. ‘Our’ leaders have been fooling us for decades that we are not one nation, but a group of nations. The past 10 days have shown that we are truly one nation, we are Lebanese, and that’s why you only see the Lebanese flag,” said Sobhi Jaroudi, a 67-year old Beirut resident who joined the chain.

 “It’s a do or die situation... We are ready to face fear and face responsibility that comes with facing a sectarian structure that has been in place for 30 years,” added Mohammed Shamas, a young protester, insisting he had no desire to live in a country of corrupt, sectarian politicians that have dragged the country down for their own benefit.

The protesters may not frame their demands in terms that go beyond their fragile Lebanese nation state even if those demands, stemming from constitutionally institutionalized sectarianism, have broader significance.

 If they succeed in transforming Lebanese identity and translating that into constitutional reform, Lebanese protesters will have contributed to securing the future of protest as an effective tool of change.

 That future depends on protesters’ perceptions of a common interest that transcends sect, ethnicity and class becoming part of the fabric of society.

 Lebanese protesters’ success this week in forcing Prime Minister Saad Harari to resign also highlighted the difficulty in transcending sectarianism.

 Sunni Muslim voices noted that it was a Sunni Muslim politician that had stepped down, reinforcing calls by protesters that he form a new Cabinet of technocrats only.

 Nevertheless, Mr. Hariri’s resignation buoyed primarily Shiite demonstrators in Iraq, whose anti-sectarian instincts, according to Fanar Haddad, an Iraq scholar at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute, have been reflected in increasingly issue- rather than identity-oriented demands since 2015.

 Following in Lebanon’s footsteps, Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi is under increasing pressure to step down.

 In the most recent Iraqi protests, those instincts were evident in slogans denouncing Iranian influence in the country and the government’s perceived prioritization of Iranian over Iraqi interests.

 Protesters blamed Iran and its Iraqi proxies for the harsh response by security forces that has cost the lives of more than 200 people.

 The Guardian quoted an Iraqi intelligence officer as saying that the operations room coordinating the security response to the demonstrations was run by Iranian and Iraqi militia commanders. “These militia became the tool to oppress the demonstrations,” the officer said.

 The anti-Iranian slogans also reflected attitudes expressed by Ayatollah Ali Husseini Sistani, one of Shiite Islam’s foremost scholars and spiritual leaders known as the “safety valve of Iraq,” who has sought to counter sectarianism, keep a distance to Iran, and steer Iraq towards a more cohesive society.

 They also amounted to what journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad termed “anger towards a corrupt religious oligarchy.”

 Ayatollah Sistani signalled his support for the protesters with the handing out of free food, water and drinks and the provision of toilet facilities to the protesters by the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf that is run by his representative.

 The anger, like a rift in the power base of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shiite political movement and militia, and Amal, another Shiite group led by parliament speaker Nabih Berri, fits a trend evident not only in the broader Middle East, but also in countries like Russia where criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church is mounting because of its close association with the Kremlin.

 A poll of Arab youth earlier this year showed that two thirds of those surveyed felt that religion played too large a role in their lives, up from 50% four years ago. Seventy-nine percent argued that religious institutions needed to be reformed while half said that religious values were holding the Arab world back.

 To be sure, Iraqi denunciations of Iran were rooted in a history of Iraqi Shiite allegiance to the state evident in the fact that a majority of the Iraqi soldiers who died in the 1980s fighting an eight-year long war against Iran were Shiites, and long standing rivalry between Najaf, the Iraqi holy city that is home to Ayatollah Sistani, and Iran’s Qom.

 It’s a history, despite the vicious sectarian violence in the years following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, that contrasts starkly with the historical emphasis in Lebanon on sectarian identity that exploded in 1975 in a 15-year long civil war.

 As a result, Lebanese protesters were more explicit in their rejection of a sectarian-based political system. Even supporters of Hezbollah transcended sectarian identities by ignoring a call by the group’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah for an end to the protests.

 The protesters rejected Mr. Nasrallah’s allegation that some of those protesting were funded by foreign embassies and seeking to settle political accounts.

 “I’m financed by the embassy of Hela Hela Hela Ho-stan, who’s financing you?” said a demonstrator’s placard on Beirut’s Riad Solh Square, using a chant popular with the protesters.

 Added protester Alaa, a Nasrallah supporter: “His priorities here are different from our priorities, we want to change the system, get ourselves a better life; in short we want a new life, while Hezbollah’s priorities are keeping the system and making sure they’re on good terms with their allies. For the first time ever, we are having a clear diversion in vision.”

 Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture

[todaynewsstories]

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards threaten to avenge military parade attack

DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards vowed on Sunday to exact “deadly and unforgettable” vengeance for an attack on a military parade that killed 25 people, including 12 of their comrades, and Tehran accused Gulf Arab states of backing the gunmen.

Saturday’s assault, one of the worst ever against the most powerful force of the Islamic Republic, struck a blow at its security establishment at a time when the United States and its Gulf allies are working to isolate Tehran.

“Considering (the Guards’) full knowledge about the centres of deployment of the criminal terrorists’ leaders…, they will face a deadly and unforgettable vengeance in the near future,” the Guards said in a statement carried by state media.

Four assailants fired on a viewing stand in the southwestern city of Ahvaz where Iranian officials had gathered to watch an annual event marking the start of the Islamic Republic’s 1980-88 war with Iraq. Soldiers crawled about as gunfire crackled. Women and children fled for their lives.

Ahvaz National Resistance, an Iranian ethnic Arab opposition movement which seeks a separate state in oil-rich Khuzestan province, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Islamic State militants also claimed responsibility. Neither claim provided evidence. All four attackers were killed.

There has been a blizzard of furious statements from top Iranian officials, including President Hassan Rouhani, accusing Iran’s adversaries the United States and Gulf states of provoking the bloodshed and threatening a tough response.

“LOOK IN THE MIRROR”

Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, rejected Rouhani’s accusations. “He’s got the Iranian people … protesting, every ounce of money that goes into Iran goes into his military, he has oppressed his people for a long time and he needs to look at his own base to figure out where that’s coming from,” she told CNN.

“He can blame us all he wants. The thing he’s got to do is look in the mirror,” she said.

Senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have said the Ahvaz attack was carried out by militants trained by Gulf states and Israel, and backed by America. But it is unlikely the IRGC will strike any of these foes directly.

The Guards could put on a show of strength by firing missiles at opposition groups operating in Iraq or Syria that may be linked to the militants who staged the attack.

They are also likely to enforce a tight security policy in Khuzestan province, arresting any perceived domestic opponents including civil rights activists.

Three Arab activists told Reuters that security forces, especially the intelligence branch of the Revolutionary Guards, had detained more activists in Ahvaz.

“There are many checkpoints on the streets of Ahvaz, and the security forces are searching cars,” said Hossein Bouazar, a member of Ahwazi Centre for Human Rights. “Many people are scared.” Reuters could not immediately verify this account.

Iran has also been hit by sporadic street protests over economic hardship that have taken on anti-government overtones.

Rouhani engineered Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers that ushered in a cautious detente with Washington before tensions flared anew with President Donald Trump’s decision in May to pull out of the accord and reimpose sanctions on Tehran.

FILE PHOTO: Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani attends a news conference at the Chancellery in Vienna, Austria July 4, 2018. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner/File Photo

The attack on the military parade is likely to give security hardliners like the Guards more political ammunition because they did not endorse the pragmatist Rouhani’s pursuit of the nuclear deal with the West, analysts say.

In New York, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani said on Saturday that U.S. sanctions were inflicting economic pain on Iran that could lead to a “successful revolution”.

The Trump administration has said that changing Iran’s system of government is not U.S. policy.

REGIONAL STRUGGLE

Mostly Shi’ite Muslim Iran is at odds with Western-allied Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia for predominance in the Middle East. The regional superpowers support opposing sides in the civil wars in Yemen and Syria, as well as rival political groups in Iraq and Lebanon.

A senior United Arab Emirates official denied Iranian allegations alluding to the involvement of the UAE in training gunmen that claimed the attack.

The “formal incitement against the UAE from within Iran is unfortunate, and has escalated after the Ahvaz attack,” Minister of State for Foreign Affairs for the United Arab Emirates Anwar Gargash said in a tweet.

“The UAE’s historical position against terrorism and violence is clear and Tehran’s allegations are baseless.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry earlier summoned the UAE charge d’affaires over comments made about the bloody fusillade at the military parade, state-run PressTV said.

Slideshow (3 Images)

Reporting by Dubai newsroom, Bozorg Sharafedin in London and Babak Dehghanpisheh in Geneva, Doina Chiacu in Washington; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Edmund Blair

Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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9/11 Mastermind Dispels ‘They Hate Us For Our Freedom’ Myth In Letter To Obama

We Are Change

9/11 Mastermind’s Letter to Obama: Here’s Why We Attacked America

Article via The Anti-Media: 

When Barack Obama was still in office, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks, penned a letter to him. Though a judge recently ruled that letter could be sent to the White House before the outgoing president left office, the contents were to be withheld from the public until a month later — until after President Trump had assumed power.

This week, the Miami Herald obtained and published the contents of the 18-page letter, originally written in 2015 and titled “LETTER FROM THE CAPTIVE MUJAHID KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMAD TO THE HEAD OF THE SNAKE, BARACK OBAMA, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE COUNTRY OF OPPRESSION AND TYRANNY.” It contains the Kuwait-born Pakistani terrorist’s insights into why 9/11 occurred, as well as surprisingly accurate assessments of American politics.

One of the main reasons for 9/11, according to Mohammed, is one terrorists have referenced before: American foreign policy. His explanation is rooted both in history and in current affairs.

“The American people were misled by the Johnson administration and the Pentagon into waging a war in Vietnam that cost 58,000 U.S. lives and millions of Vietnamese lives and ultimately led to a humiliating defeat,” he writes, correctly referencing Johnson’s false flag attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, which the Democratic president used to push the U.S. into a prolonged, messy, and ultimately failed war.

Mohammed also focused on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and the Muslim world specifically, providing a long list of reasons why the “U.S. reaped what it sowed on 9/11.” One of those grievances was the U.S. government and CIA’s scheme to back and support  “the Indonesian dictator Suharto when his army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands of landless farmers,” though his examples span the globe.

He cites America’s notorious desire for oil, referencing when the U.S. built “military bases in the Arabian Peninsula in Tabuk, Dhahran, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and U.A.E – which is prohibited by Sharia laws – to secure a non-stop flood of oil to [their] country at the cheapest price.” He argues this was “to support the dictatorial rule of monarchial families and oppressive, corrupt, dynastic regimes and looting the wealth of the Muslim Ummah population; and to accomplish [U.S.] military objectives there.”

He references the CIA’s 1953 coup in Iran — conducted in conjunction with their British intelligence counterparts — to overthrow the country’s democratically elected leader and empower the “Shah of Iran and Safak, the brutal Iranian intelligence agency, for 40 years.”

Discussing Iraq in the 1990s, he references “when Anglo-Saxon crusaders imposed sanctions against the Iraqi people in a manner of collective punishment that resulted in the death of half a million civilians.” He later addresses former U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright’s claim that the deaths of half a million children were “worth it.”

Mohammed also points out hypocrisies in American foreign policy, such as the American officials�� ties to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad before they wanted to oust him. He also points out that before invading Iraq, the U.S. “supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, even when he was using poison mustard gas against the Kurds…”

Mohammed discusses at length the centuries of Western attacks on Muslims and their countries, also noting the way Western countries broke up formerly Ottoman nations in the early 20th century, dividing them up and claiming control in the region.

He circles back to indict the whole of American foreign policy, noting the U.S. has escaped prosecution for their “brutal and savage massacres against the American Indian and [their] crimes in Vietnam, Korea, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and Latin America; and for [their] support for the Chinese Dictator, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Mexico’s dictator, Santa Ana.”

“You can keep your military bases in Japan, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere,” he writes, “but Muslim land will never accept infidels army bases in their land.” He credits Allah with helping them fight back against Western aggression, frequently weaving in religious sentiments as justification for further violence.

Though Mohammed focuses largely on U.S. imperialism, one of his main grievances is the U.S. government’s support for Israel throughout the decades. He argues America reaped what it sowed on 9/11 in part because of America’s backing of Israel “in the political arena, when you blocked resolutions in the United Nations Security Council more than 45 times to protect repeated Israeli crimes.” Mohammed cites the U.S.’ support for Israel’s invasions of Lebanon throughout the years, ultimately arguing that jihadists fight for all oppressed Muslims. He claims they represent Palestinians and others who have been crushed by Western influence and invasion (of course, it is impossible to prove all victimized Muslims support terrorism as recourse, making this claim rather grandiose).

He discusses Obama’s ongoing efforts to continue providing weaponry to Israel even as the former president openly questioned Israeli settlements. “While your children may play safely in the White House backyard, the entire world is watching your weapons kill Palestinian children at play on the Gaza beach during Holy Month of Ramadan or studying in their classrooms.”

Mohammed criticizes American politicians’ repeated claims that Israel “has a right to defend itself.”

“Why can’t you or any American president before you say that the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves against Israeli crimes?” he wonders. “The answer is very clear but you can’t say it because your lords will be very angry.” Indeed, Israel wields significant influence over American policy.

The notion that American politicians are beholden to higher powers is echoed throughout the letter, but not just with regard to Israel’s influence through lobbying organization AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). With surprising accuracy, Mohammed details corporate influence throughout government. Early in the letter, he points out that politicians must serve their donors, whether they are in the healthcare industry, the prison industry, or “Blackwater, Halliburton, or any other arms industry of weapons firm.” He says the latter industry requires politicians “to push the DoD and U.S. soldiers into more wars…”

He condemns American capitalism and the farce of democracy throughout the letter, referring to politicians as mercenaries working for their financiers. He asserts that “[i]n the end, this will lead the rich to grow richer and the poor to grow poorer. The country will sink into debt and finally the nation will die.”

Mohammed also singles out Obama, citing his drone strikes, which killed countless innocent civilians and children. He condemns Obama’s assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without trial — followed by the killing of his 16-year-old son — as well as the president’s establishment of indefinite detention and his failure to close Guantanamo, where Mohammed has been imprisoned for years.

He calls out Western media, as well. “Don’t let Fox, CNN, BBC, or American and pro-Israeli channels cover your eyes because they never show the truth, their main task is brainwashing,” he argues. “They are experts at lying and distorting the facts to achieve their masters’ ends.”

(Instead, he praises Al-Jazeera, which is, in fact, a news agency originally funded by the oil-rich Qatari government, an ally of the United States.)

Since 9/11, the political establishment’s narrative has asserted Islamic terrorists target the United States because they hate us for our freedom, because their religion is violent, and because they are hellbent on destroying anyone who disagrees with their ideology. While it’s indisputable that anyone who would seek to kill 3,000 civilians is a cold-blooded murderer, his explanation has been echoed by terrorists before; the Charlie Hebdo shooters, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the Orlando night club shooter all referenced violent, imperialistic American policy as reasons for their attacks.

Mohammed concludes:

“If your government and public won’t tolerate 9/11, then how can you ask Muslims to tolerate your 60 years of crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, the Arabian Peninsula and the whole Muslim World?”

As former congressman and longtime non-interventionist Dr. Ron Paul warned in 1998 — long before 9/11:

“Far too often, the bombing of declared (or concocted) enemies, whether it’s the North Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Sudanese, the Albanians, or the Afghans, produces precisely the opposite effect to what is sought. It kills innocent people, creates more hatred toward America, unifies and stimulates the growth of the extremist Islamic movement and makes them more determined than ever to strike back with their weapon of choice – terror.”

This article (9/11 Mastermind’s Letter to Obama: Here’s Why We Attacked America) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under aCreative Commons license with attribution to Carey Wedler and theAntiMedia.org.Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11 pm Eastern/8 pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, please email the error and name of the article to edits@theantimedia.org.

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