#sharmine narwani

[edwordsmyth]

"Instead of the wholescale massacre of civilians claimed by Israel, incomplete figures published by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz show that almost half the Israelis killed that day were in fact combatants - soldiers or police. There are also so far no recorded deaths of children under the age of three, which throws into question the Israeli narrative that babies were targeted by Palestinian resistance fighters. Of the 683 total casualties reported thus far, seven were between the ages of 4 and 7, and nine between the ages of 10 and 17. The remaining 667 casualties appear to be adults. The numbers and proportion of Palestinian civilians and children among those killed by Israeli bombardment over the past two weeks – over 5,791 killed, including 2,360 children and 1,292 women, and more than 18,000 injured - are far higher than any of these Israeli figures from the events of 7 October. There is little to no credible evidence that Palestinian fighters had a plan to - or deliberately sought to - kill or harm unarmed Israeli civilians on 7 October. From the available footage, we witness them engaging primarily with armed Israeli forces, accounting for the deaths of hundreds of occupation soldiers.

It is essential to recognize that in many reports by western journalists on the ground, the majority of information regarding the actions of Hamas fighters comes from the Israeli army - an active participant in the conflict.

Emerging evidence now indicates that there is a high probability, especially due to the scale of the infrastructural damage, that Israeli military forces could have deliberately killed captives, fired on incorrect targets, or mistaken Israelis for Palestinians in their firefights. If the only source of information for a serious claim made is the Israeli army, then it has to be taken into account that they have reason to conceal cases of friendly fire."

[a-person-on-earth]

Sharmine Narwani on X: "This video needs to be retweeted every day. Let nobody ever argue again that Israeli is not deliberately and gleefully targeting civilians." / X

[libertariantaoist]

Sharmine Narwani joins us today to talk about how western regime change wars are born and raised. She offers some of her research and analysis on Middle East wars, particularly the war in Syria as a comparison to what we are seeing in Venezuela today and with a special focus on how it all starts with a carefully crafted narrative. 

Sharmine is a commentator and analyst of Mideast geopolitics based in Beirut. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and has been published by a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Asia Times Online, al Akhbar English, Al Jazeera and RT.  And you can always find her writing at her website, MidEastShuffle.com. https://mideastshuffle.com/ 

The methods used in much of the regime change and destabilization that we have seen so frequently in recent years is laid out in the Unconventional Warfare (UW) Manual of the US Military’s Special Forces http://www.al-akhbar.com/sites/defaul..., which was leaked in 2010. Sharmine has written about it and shares some of those insights today. This manual begins with the following paragraph: 

“The intent of U.S. [Unconventional Warfare] UW efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish U.S. strategic objectives…For the foreseeable future, U.S. forces will predominantly engage in irregular warfare (IW) operations.” 

But, as we note in our conversation, the world is changing and the success rate of these methods, used for decades by the American empire and its allies, is declining. The political environment in America and even more consequential, the balance of power in the world is also in a state of flux, dynamic and uncertain. There are many signs that the American people want to adopt a new approach toward the world and foreign policy. But it remains to be seen whether the elected government, the plutocrats and the dominant national security state will be able to accept a new global reality and the loss of their sole superpower empire.

Reference Links: 

1. How narratives killed the Syrian people, Sharmine Narwani (2016) https://www.rt.com/op-ed/336934-syria... 

2. Going Rogue: America’s Unconventional Warfare in the Middle East, Sharmine Narwani (2012) https://www.globalresearch.ca/going-r... 

3. Elizabeth Warren tweet https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/11... 

4. Americans Want a Less Aggressive Foreign Policy. It's Time Lawmakers Listened to Them, Ian Bremmer, TIME http://amp.timeinc.net/time/5532307/w... 

5. Vox Populi, Vox Peanut Gallery?, Eurasia Group Foundation http://egfound.org/stories/independen... 

6. Bush rejects Chávez aid, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...

[folagaring-blog]

1499 -Il n’y aura pas de partition de la Syrie

1499 -Il n’y aura pas de partition de la Syrie

Le conflit est trop grand en Syrie pour qu’elle reste unifiée, et la désagrégation du pays est inévitable – les Etats-Unis et l’OTAN la proclament de leurs vœux. Sharmine Narwani, experte du Moyen-Orient, démonte cette argumentation point par point.

Sharmine Narwaniest politologue et analyste des relations internationales, spécialiste en géopolitique du Moyen-Orient. Elle écrit des articles…

[mundomultipolar]

Recado do Pepe Escobar no seu perfil doTelegram:

https://thecradle.co/Article/investigations/1401

BLOWBACK: O TALIBAN ALVO O EXÉRCITO DA SOMBRA DA CIA

Estou MUITO satisfeito em apresentar minha primeira coluna detalhada para o novo site The Cradle, com sede em Beirute.

Link: https://thecradle.co/Article/investigations/1401

O Berço - como em “berço das civilizações” - foi criado pela minha querida amiga Sharmine Narwani, uma mulher fabulosa e excelente analista.

Eu apoio totalmente ela e a equipe e farei o meu melhor para ajudar o The Cradle a se tornar um dos melhores sites geopolíticos da rede.

Esta coluna é - bem - um assassino. Merda muito séria. Você não vai ler NADA semelhante na mídia da OTAN. É território proibido.

O título, subtítulo e legenda resumem toda a história. O Taleban não está atrás de civis afegãos: eles estão perseguindo membros do “secreto” exército das sombras da CIA, um esquadrão da morte do século 21.

A coluna foi escrita um dia antes do atentado suicida em Cabul.

E foi posteriormente confirmado pela revelação da Força-Tarefa Pineapple que, operada pela CIA e diversas Forças Especiais dos EUA, extraiu até 500 Forças Especiais Afegãs, “ativos” e suas famílias.

Esses “ativos” extraídos eram membros das roupas exatas que descrevo na coluna. Até agora eles não foram “resgatados” pelos americanos.

Link: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/biden-abandoned-afghan-allies-retired-us-special-ops-hatched-operation-pineapple

Os americanos também explodiram completamente uma importante estação da CIA em Cabul.

Esta é apenas uma entre várias histórias em vermelho escuro da ocupação, bombardeio, estupro e pilhagem de 20 anos no Afeganistão. Por favor, torne-o viral.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

A message came through from Syria on my mobile phone last week. “General Khadour kept his promise,” it read. I knew what it meant.

Five years ago, I met Mohamed Khadour, who was commanding a few Syrian soldiers in a small suburb of Aleppo, under fire from Islamist fighters in the east of the city. At the time, he showed me his map. He’d recapture these streets in 11 days, he said.

And then in July this year, I met Khadour again, far out in the east of the Syrian desert. He was, he said, going to enter the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor before the end of August. I reminded him, a trifle cruelly, that the last time he told me he’d recapture part of Aleppo in 11 days, it took the Syrian army more than four years to retake. That was long ago, he said. In those days, the army had not learned to fight in a guerrilla war. The army were trained to retake Golan and defend Damascus. But they had learned now.

Indeed they had. Out in the desert, Khadour said he was going to bomb the town of Sukhna – the Russians would do much of the bombing – and his Syrian troops would break through from there to Deir ez-Zor, which had been surrounded by Isis for three years with its encircled 80,000 civilians and 10,000 soldiers. Khadour said he’d reach Deir ez-Zor by 23 August. He turned out to be almost dead on target. Now he is heading towards the rest of Deir ez-Zor and then towards the Syrian-Iraqi border.

So it seems – after the capture of the city is complete and when Khadour is on the frontier, and now that Aleppo is totally in the hands of the regime and only Idlib province remains a dustbin of largely Islamist rebels (including al-Qaeda), many of whom were allowed to travel there in return for surrendering bits of Syrian cities – that what has always been unthinkable in the West is now happening: Bashar al-Assad’s forces look to be winning the war.

(PRATNOTE: notice how western media is slowly beginning to admit that the rebel forces are primarily islamist now that it’s more and more evident that they have no chance in winning?)

And not just “look like”. Hassan “Tiger” Saleh, Syria’s favourite army officer – referred to twice by the Russian defence minister – broke his way into the compound of the 137th Syrian army brigade at Deir ez-Zor and relieved the soldiers there, while Khadour, his commanding officer (they are personal friends), is set to liberate the airbase in the city.

How many remember the day when the Americans bombed the Syrian soldiers close to that airbase and killed more than 60 of them, allowing Isis to cut it off from the rest of the city? The Syrians have never believed the American claim that they made a “mistake”. It was only the Russians who told the US air force they were bombing Syrian forces.

The Brits already seem to have got the message. They slyly withdrew their military trainers last week – the men intended to prepare David Cameron’s mythical “70,000 rebels” who were supposedly going to overthrow the Assad government. Even the UN’s report that the regime killed more than 80 civilians in a gas attack this summer got little play from the European politicians who used to play up war crimes in Syria and supported Donald Trump’s pointless Cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase.

And what of Israel? Here is a nation which truly counted on the end of Assad, going so far as to bomb his forces and those of his Hezbollah and Iranian allies while giving medical help to Islamist fighters from Syria in Israeli cities. No wonder Benjamin Netanyahu was so “agitated” and “emotional” – Russian descriptions – when he met Vladimir Putin in Sochi. Iran was Russia’s “strategic ally” in the region, Putin said. Israel was an “important partner” of Russia. Which was not quite the same – and not what Netanyahu wanted to hear.

The repeated victories of the Syrians mean that the Syrian army is among the most “battle-hardened” in the region, its soldiers used to fighting for their lives and now trained in coordinating troops and intelligence from a single command headquarters. As former St Antony’s College associate scholar Sharmine Narwani put it this week, this alliance now has political cover from two permanent UN Security Council members, Russia and China.

So what will Israel do? Netanyahu has been so obsessed with Iran’s nuclear programme that he clearly never imagined – in company with Obama, Hillary Clinton, Trump, Cameron, May, Hollande and other members of the political elites in the West – that Assad might win, and that a more powerful Iraqi army might also emerge from the rubble of Mosul.

Netanyahu still supports the Kurds, but neither Syria nor Turkey nor Iran nor Iraq have any interest in supporting Kurdish national aspirations – despite the military use by America of Kurdish militiamen in the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (it being largely Kurdish rather than “Syrian”, not “democratic” at all and scarcely a “force” without US air power).

(prat note: tfw the meaningfulness of SDF is the modern day equivalent to the HRE lol)

So while we’re all waiting for Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un to start World War Three, we’ve not spotted that the military map of the Middle East has substantially, bloodily changed. It will be years before Syria and Iraq (and Yemen) are rebuilt, but the Israelis, so used to calling on Washington for help, may have to go back to Putin again to clear up the mess they’re in.

Those in the Israeli political right who claimed that Assad was a greater danger than Isis may have to think again – not least because Assad may be the man they’ll have to talk to if they want to keep their northern border safe.

TL;DR

Western media is beginning to realize that, in their geopolitical gamble to destabilize Syria, they have merely only created a powerful, prideful, battle hardened Syria, allied with a newly Iranian aligned Iraq, with Russia as the primary powerbroker in the region... and their sole remaining ally, Kurdistan, is an untenable ally WRT to Turkey

GG no re

Thanks for playing, west

[icymirss]

The good thing about Bolton, Pompeo, [Elliott] Abrams and [Jared] Kushner is that they're nuts and the international community doesn't take them all that seriously. The bad thing about Bolton–Pompeo–Abrams–Kushner is that they're nuts and you never know when they might get the president to take them seriously.

[tdshay]

Sharmine Narwani on the end of the Syrian war and the “post-imperial Middle East” Middle East correspondent Narwani sees a new era emerging in Asia, while Trump, Pompeo and Bolton bluster Source: Sharmine Narwani on the end of the Syrian war and the "post-imperial Middle East"

[razia-thinks]

Tunisian MP Mubaraka Awainiya shames Arab Foreign Ministers for complici...

[winstonclosepoliticalcommentator]

SYRIAN ARMENIAN EXPLODES THE MYTH ABOUT THE WESTERN MEDIA’S “PEACEFUL” REVOLT AGAINST THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT - By Ziad Fadel

SYRIAN ARMENIAN EXPLODES THE MYTH ABOUT THE WESTERN MEDIA’S “PEACEFUL” REVOLT AGAINST THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT – By Ziad Fadel

SEE THE CRIMINAL ROBERT FORD STANDING NEXT TO MASS MURDERER ‘UKAYDI Ziad Fadel / 7 hours ago

  We thank Sharmine Narwani for sending us this must-see milestone in the search for the truth about Syria.  Make this viral.  Send it to everybody.

SYRIAN ARMENIAN EXPLODES THE MYTH ABOUT THE WESTERN MEDIA’S “PEACEFUL” REVOLT…

[sirlotharjuarez]

Tweeted

Most popular figure in #Iran, General Qassem Soleimani was viewed favorably by 81% of Iranians in a Univ of Maryland poll conducted just a few months ago. Do you understand that? 81% OF IRANIANS. https://t.co/J0nVvGarwu https://t.co/2tJuzQLY55

— Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) January 6, 2020

[newscitygroup]

The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic

This article was originally published by Caitlin Johnstone at Activist Post. 

If you’re skeptical of Western power structures and you’ve ever engaged in online political debate for any length of time, the following has definitely happened to you.

You find yourself going back and forth with one of those high-confidence, low-information establishment types promulgating a dubious mainstream narrative, whether that be about politics, war, Julian Assange, or whatever. At some point they make an assertion which you know to be false–publicly available information invalidates the claim they’re making.

“I’ve got them now!” you think to yourself if you’re new to this sort of thing. Then you share a link to an article or video which makes a well-sourced, independently verifiable case for the point you are trying to make.

Then, the inevitable happens.

“LMAO! That outlet!” they scoff in response. “That outlet is propaganda/fake news/conspiracy theory trash!”

Or something to that effect. You’ll encounter this tactic over and over and over again if you continually engage in online political discourse with people who don’t agree with you. It doesn’t matter if you’re literally just linking to an interview featuring some public figure saying a thing you’d claimed they said. It doesn’t matter if you’re linking to a WikiLeaks publication of a verified authentic document. Unless you’re linking to CNN/Fox News (whichever fits the preferred ideology of the establishment loyalist you’re debating), they’ll bleat “fake news!” or “propaganda!” or “Russia!” as though that in and of itself magically invalidates the point you’re trying to make.

And of course, it doesn’t. What they are doing is called attacking the source, also known as an ad hominem, and it’s a very basic logical fallacy.

Most people are familiar with the term “ad hominem”, but they usually think about it in terms of merely hurling verbal insults at people. What it actually means is attacking the source of the argument rather than attacking the argument itself in a way that avoids dealing with the question of whether or not the argument itself is true. It’s a logical fallacy because it’s used deliberately to obfuscate the goal of a logical conclusion to the debate.

“An ad hominem is more than just an insult,” explains David Ferrer for The Quad. “It’s an insult used as if it were an argument or evidence in support of a conclusion. Verbally attacking people proves nothing about the truth or falsity of their claims.”

This can take the form of saying “Claim X is false because the person making it is an idiot.” But it can also take the form of “Claim X is false because the person making it is a propagandist,” or “Claim X is false because the person making it is a conspiracy theorist.”

I don’t think @bellingcat knows what’s about to hit them now that @caitoz is on their case. Settle in for a few fun months as their entire bullshit narrative on #Syria chemical weapons comes tumbling down. Here’s her opening jab: https://t.co/jvYfIBkDM2

— Sharmine Narwani (@snarwani) November 27, 2019

Someone being an idiot, a propagandist or a conspiracy theorist is irrelevant to the question of whether or not what they’re saying is true. In my last article debunking a spin job on the OPCW scandal by the narrative management firm Bellingcat, I pointed out that Bellingcat is funded by imperialist regime change operations like the National Endowment for Democracy, which was worth highlighting because it shows the readers where that organization is coming from. But if I’d left my argument there it would still be an ad hominem attack, because it wouldn’t address whether or not what Bellingcat wrote about the OPCW scandal is true. It would be a logical fallacy; proving that they are propagandists doesn’t prove that what they are saying in this particular instance is false.

What I had to do in order to actually refute Bellingcat’s spin job was show that they were making a bad argument using bad logic, which I did by highlighting the way they used pedantic wordplay to make it seem as though the explosive leaks which have been emerging from the OPCW’s investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria were insignificant. I had to show how Bellingcat actually never came anywhere close to addressing the actual concerns about a leaked internal OPCW email, such as extremely low chlorinated organic chemical levels on the scene and patients’ symptoms not matching up with chlorine gas poisoning, as well as the fact that the OPCW investigators plainly don’t feel as though their concerns were met since they’re blowing the whistle on the organization now.

And, for the record, Bellingcat’s lead trainer/researcher guy responded to my arguments by saying I’m a conspiracy theorist. I personally count that as a win.

The correct response to someone who attacks the outlet or individual you’re citing instead of attacking the actual argument being made is, “You’re attacking the source instead of the argument. That’s a logical fallacy, and it’s only ever employed by people who can’t attack the argument.”

The demand that you only ever use mainstream establishment media when arguing against establishment narratives is itself an inherently contradictory position because establishment media by their very nature do not report facts against the establishment. It’s saying “You’re only allowed to criticize establishment power using outlets which never criticize establishment power.”

2/2 No principle is worth nuclear war. This honest reporter, @caitoz, beholden to no ideology or special interest, calls it as it is, not as the #MSM wants to see — https://t.co/miDXqmZAG7

— Oliver Stone (@TheOliverStone) November 26, 2019

Good luck finding a compilation of Trump’s dangerous escalations against Moscow like the one I wrote the other day anywhere in the mainstream media, for example. Neither mainstream liberals nor mainstream conservatives are interested in promoting that narrative, so it simply doesn’t exist in the mainstream information bubble. Every item I listed in that article is independently verifiable and sourced from separate mainstream media reports, yet if you share that article in a debate with an establishment loyalist and they know who I am, nine times out of ten they’ll say something like “LOL Caitlin Johnstone?? She’s nuts!” With “nuts” of course meaning “Says things my TV doesn’t say”.

It’s possible to just click on all the hyperlinks in my article and share them separately to make your point, but you can also simply point out that they are committing a logical fallacy, and that they are doing so because they can’t actually attack the argument.

This will make them very upset because for the last few years establishment loyalists have been told that it is perfectly normal and acceptable to attack the source instead of the argument. The mass hysteria about “fake news” and “Russian propaganda” has left consumers of mainstream media with the unquestioned assumption that if they ever so much as glance at an RT article their faces will begin to melt like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. They’ve been trained to believe that it’s perfectly logical and acceptable to simply shriek “propaganda!” at a rational argument or well-sourced article which invalidates their position or even to proactively go around calling people Russian agents who dissent from mainstream western power-serving narratives.

But it isn’t logical, and it isn’t acceptable. The best way to oppose their favorite logically fallacious tactic is to call it like it is and let them deal with the cognitive dissonance that that brings up for them.

Me: This link proves my claim. Empire loyalist: Eww, THAT outlet? They publish criticisms of western imperialism! Me: Yeah. That’s why I’m linking to them. Empire loyalist: No. You can only criticize western imperialism linking to outlets that never criticize western imperialism.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) November 27, 2019

Of course, some nuance is needed here. Remember that alternative media is just like anything else: there’s good and bad, even within the same outlet, so make sure what you’re sharing is solid and not just some schmuck making a baseless claim. You can’t just post a link to some YouTuber making an unsubstantiated assertion and then accuse the person you’re debating of attacking the source when they dismiss it. That which has been presented without evidence may be dismissed without evidence, and if the link you’re citing consists of nothing other than unproven assertions by someone they’ve got no reason to take at their word, they can rightly dismiss it.

If, however, the claims in the link you’re citing are logically coherent arguments or well-documented facts presented in a way that people can independently fact-check, it doesn’t matter if you’re citing CNN or Sputnik. The only advantage to using CNN when possible would be that it allows you to skip the part where they perform the online equivalent of putting their fingers in their ears and humming.

Don’t allow those who are still sleeping bully those who are not into silence. Insist on facts, evidence, and intellectually honest arguments, and if they refuse to provide them call it what it is: an admission that they have lost the debate.

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The post The Establishment Loyalist’s Favorite Online Tactic appeared first on News City Group.

from News City Group https://newscitygroup.com/the-establishment-loyalists-favorite-online-tactic/9811082/

[handsoffassange]

Renegade Inc: What’s the real plan with Iran?THANK YOU SHARMINE NARWANI