***
How ISIS Finally Became Obama’s Enemy:
“Suddenly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has become a threat worthy of American missiles. For almost two years President Obama completely ignored the biggest and most brutal terror group in the Middle East, allowing it to balloon into a regional power. No matter how many heads it severed or how much territory it conquered, ISIS just couldn’t draw Obama’s attention.
As ISIS was conquering ever-expanding territories Obama was supposedly waging a “war on terror” around the globe, drone-bombing any would-be bogeyman in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc. But when a real bogeyman emerged, Obama ignored it, and so did the U.S. media, which instead followed Obama’s warmongering gaze to Ukraine, while plagiarizing the president’s endless excuse-making for Israel’s genocidal conduct in Gaza.
For well over two years ISIS and other al-Qaeda-style groups have been the main driving force in the Syrian war that has claimed over 170,000 lives, with millions made refugees. And now, suddenly, Obama wants to intervene for “humanitarian” reasons to fight ISIS. But the actual reason that ISIS attracted Obama’s missiles is that the terror group did something unforgivable: It has finally threatened “U.S. interests,” whereas before the interests of ISIS and Obama were perfectly aligned.
While ignoring ISIS’ destruction of Syria and invasion of Iraq, U.S.-led NATO issued non-stop warnings about Russia possibly invading Ukraine. But of course there were no such warnings issued — or attention paid — to Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
And whereas Obama didn’t lift a finger to stop the Israeli invasion, he recently stated that the U.S. has a “unique opportunity” to stop an ISIS massacre in Iraq; thousands of Gazans must be rolling in their freshly dug graves.
…These terror groups were encouraged to grow exponentially in their fight against al-Assad, with Obama knowing full well that Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allied Gulf States were sending mountains of money, guns, and fighters to the jihadists. There was simply was no one else effectively fighting al-Assad, a dynamic that has artificially lengthened a war that would have ended years ago, while creating the environment that ISIS thrived in. Much of the money and guns that Obama shipped to the “moderate” Islamists rebels of course found its way into the hands of the jihadists, since thousands of moderates have since joined ISIS.
The more that ISIS did for the U.S. in Syria, the less Obama gave it attention, a very powerful form of passive political support. When ISIS invaded Iraq from Syria, Obama barely batted an eyelash, making excuse after excuse about why the U.S. couldn’t send the Iraqi government military equipment to fight ISIS. Imagine, however, if Saudi Arabia or Israel were invaded by a terrorist organization? Obama would have green-lighted F-16 bombing raids in minutes.
Obama’s lack of concern for the ISIS invasion of Iraq was ideologically linked to his inaction in Syria: Obama wants regime change in both nations, and is using ISIS as a de facto ally in both cases. This became quickly obvious with Obama’s response to the ISIS invasion of Iraq; he simply criticized the Iraqi government for not being more inclusive; meanwhile ISIS butchered its way through giant regions of Iraq and subjected the survivors to a more brutal totalitarianism than the U.S.-allied dictatorship in Saudi Arabia.
Further political support was given to ISIS by U.S. politicians, who essentially accepted ISIS as the ruler of the newly conquered Iraqi territories; these politicians instantly referred to Iraq as being “de facto partitioned,” meaning that ISIS had created a separate Sunni region that would be complemented by Shia and Kurdish regions.
Coincidentally, this “partition” plan just happens to be the official plan of Vice President Joe Biden, who for a while has advocated a “soft partition” of Iraq, an idea as ludicrous as a “partial” nuclear attack. As long as ISIS was “de facto” helping achieve Biden’s partition plan, Obama was fine with ISIS’ murderous rampage. And now the media informs us, unsurprisingly, that Biden’s plan has officially been “gaining momentum” in Washington D.C.
But then ISIS went too far. The red line that ISIS finally crossed was their attack against the U.S. allied Iraqi Kurds. The Kurds govern their own oil-rich autonomous zone in Iraq, and have been steadfast U.S. supporters.
The thousands who have been slaughtered by ISIS in Syria and other parts of Iraq weren’t “worth defending,” but the Kurds are different, since their leaders are U.S. allies. This sums up U.S. foreign policy in a nutshell, which has absolutely nothing to do with “humanitarianism.” Gazans are allowed to be slaughtered, Syrian’s massacred, and half of Iraq torn to shreds while Obama has busied himself with making threats to Russia.”
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ISIS, Maliki, and the US Agenda in Iraq:
“Eric Draitser of StopImperialism.org appears on RT to discuss the latest developments in Iraq. Draitser explains that Washington is using the situation with ISIS as a pretext to execute its agenda which includes ousting PM Maliki, creating a servile puppet government, dislodging the Kurdish North, and dismembering the Iraqi state. He notes that the US has had these goals for quite a while, and that the current situation with ISIS is used as a convenient pretext to achieve geopolitical and strategic goals in the region. Draitser also describes how US policy in Iraq is designed to spread the ISIS problem to beyond Syria and Iraq, specifically to Lebanon, thereby breaking the Shia axis of resistance.”
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Neturei Karta stands for peace: Jewish state should not have been founded through warfare:
“When the Zionist movement began in the late 1800s, almost all major rabbis opposed it, ranging from the German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, to the Lithuanian Rabbi Chaim Brisker, to the Sephardic Rabbi Chaim Chizkiyahu Medini, author of Sdei Chemed. A generation later, Rabbi Aharon Kotler and Rabbi Elchonon Wasserman of the Lithuanian yeshivas, as well as Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, opposed the creation of a Jewish state. And even the minority of rabbis who supported settlement in the Holy Land did not advocate a state founded through warfare.
Thus Neturei Karta represents a viewpoint that was originally the normative Jewish one. It is only recently, with many Jewish communities unfortunately swept up in the enthusiasm of Zionism, that Neturei Karta has become outnumbered. But NK still represents large communities of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The world needs to know about these communities, and if not for Neturei Karta’s “professional protesters” as Rabbi Green terms them, the world would not know. Most anti-Zionist Jewish communities are insular and old-fashioned, and get little coverage in the media.
Neturei Karta emphatically is apolitical and is not affiliated with any group or government. We are for peace in the Holy Land, and we think it’s time that Jews do some thinking and consider that perhaps the State of Israel may be responsible for the ongoing violence and conflict. Perhaps its founders should have thought twice before declaring their homeland in a place that was already inhabited by another people.
When we visited Iran, our clear purpose was to let the Iranians know about the existence of hundreds of thousands of Jews who are not Zionists. They understand this message: in a 2011 CNN interview Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he had nothing against Jews, only against Zionists, of whom there were at most 10,000 in the world, with 2,000 main members. The Zionists, he said, had lured Jews to Israel with promises of housing and employment.
We are not dedicated to the “destruction” of the Jewish state. We want Jews to realize that it’s wrong according to the Torah, and dismantle it peacefully, to be replaced by a state run by non-Jews with equal rights for all citizens.”
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Former Gaza detainee: ‘We wished we were dead rather than face this humiliation’:
**[note: the man in the Red Crescent vest is the amazing Ahmed Abu Foul, a dedicated medic who has been injured countless times by the Zionist mercenaries while Ahmed was performing his medical/rescuer work. This is criminal. He survived the 2008/9 massacre of Gaza (in which 16 medics/rescuers were killed) but was wounded a number of times (including human skull shrapnel to his own head, that of his doctor colleague). I am honoured to know and have accompanied Ahmed and other valiant medics and I pray in my way that he continues to dodge the Zionists' attacks and return home to his children. see here and here for more info on targeting rescuers, and here for a glimpse into the wonderful person that is Ahmed Abu Foul.]
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“Mohammed Qudaih, 28, could not believe that he was able to survive and return home after the Israeli occupation forces released him at the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing in the northern Gaza Strip. He had to walk home with others who had been detained with him, late at night.
Qudaih gave Al-Akhbar an account of his multiple brushes with death. First, the young man escaped certain death as Israeli tanks bombed his family’s home in Khuza’a east of Khan Younis (southern Gaza), killing his 60-year-old father in front of him and injuring several members of his family. As they tried to flee, Israeli soldiers detained him with two of his brothers, while the women and children were able to leave.
“The occupation forces took us along with 50 others from the town, [to an area] behind the fence,” said Qudaih. “We sat through the night for more than 10 hours in an empty [piece of] land, before they took us to an unknown location.”
They could hear the sound of shelling and clashes, and felt the fighting was moving closer to their location. They were handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded, and nearly naked, after the Israelis forced them to undress.
They were then taken to an interrogation center, where they were told they were in the custody of Israeli intelligence, and that they had to answer questions. But even before any questions were asked, the investigators started beating them violently.
“They asked us about Resistance fighters, where they lived, how they moved, and whether we knew any of them. They also focused on the locations of the tunnels, who dug them, and where the rockets were being launched from.” According to Qudaih, the detainees were denied sleep and food throughout the four days they were held.
The worst thing in this episode, according to Qudaih, was that after their interrogation, they were taken to an open area where they started running while the soldiers fired their machine guns between their legs. The soldiers then threatened to execute them if they did not confess and answer their questions.”
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The Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza:
by FIDEL CASTRO
“…The Israeli government declared a humanitarian truce in Gaza at 07:00 GMT on Monday, nevertheless within a few hours, it broke the truce attacking a house, injuring 30 persons, in their majority women and children, and an eight-year-old girl died.
In the dawn hours of this same day, 10 Palestinians died as a result of Israeli attacks in all of Gaza and the number of Palestinians murdered has already increased to 2,000.
…The Nazi genocide of Jews outraged all the earth’s peoples. Why does this government believe that the world will be insensitive to the macabre genocide which today is being perpetuated against the Palestinian people? Perhaps it is expected that the complicity of the U.S. empire in this shameful massacre will be ignored?”
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Israeli troops deployed around Gaza as truce deadline looms:
“Sources say the Israeli military has already deployed regular troops and mobilized a number of reservist soldiers near Gaza in case the ongoing talks fail.
This comes as the expiry of a 72-hour truce between Israelis and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is approaching. A temporary Egypt-brokered truce between the two sides came into effect at 2100 GMT on Sunday.
Senior Israeli officials in Tel Aviv have warned about the resumption of the aerial and ground attacks on the besieged Palestinian coastal enclave.
Diplomatic sources say there seems to be no progress in the indirect negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis in Cairo.
The contentious subject at the talks is the issue of the Israeli blockade of the impoverished territory.
Palestinian officials have indicated that the ceasefire will not be extended if no progress is made. The Palestinian resistance group Hamas wants the seven-year siege to be removed, but Tel Aviv claims it will only take the measure if Hamas disarms.
Palestinian health officials say at least 1,958 people have been killed over the past several weeks in Gaza with nearly 10,100 injured.”
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How Israel Used Its Own Civilians as Human Shields While Assaulting Gaza:
“Throughout the ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, perhaps no phrase has featured as prominently or persistently in the lexicon of Israeli propaganda as “human shields.” Repeated in stentorian fashion by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a heavily regimented army of 10,000 public relations flacks, the phrase has been ruthlessly deployed [3] to shield Israel from responsibility for the bloodbath it has caused in Gaza. Israel has killed 1,800 civilians in a matter of weeks, including some 430 children, but it was Hamas that forced them to do it.
Like so many Zionist accusations against Palestinian society (“They only understand force,” “They teach their children to hate,” “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”) the human shields slander is a projection. Israel is the most militarized society on earth, with soldiers and military installations honeycombed throughout its civil society. With full military conscription for all men and women and reserve duty required for all Jews until they reach their 40s, Jewish Israelis alternate constantly between the role of civilian and soldier, blurring the line between the two.
Within one of Tel Aviv’s most densely populated neighborhoods sits Ha’Kirya, the army’s headquarters, a gigantic complex of monolithic buildings that house the offices where attacks on Gaza are planned. The uniformed officers and soldiers who work inside take lunch in the cafes and shop in the malls surrounding their offices, embedding themselves among the civilian population. A military base is nestled [4] in the middle of the campus of Haifa University while Hebrew and Tel Aviv Universities offer military officers free tuition, encouraging their enrollment and allowing them to carry weapons on campus. It is hard to find a henhouse, flophouse, or fieldhouse anywhere in Israel without some kind of military presence.
In an editorial [5] for the Israeli daily, Yedioth Aharonot, veteran Israeli military advisor Giora Eiland argued in favor of collectively punishing Gaza’s civilian population. “In order to guarantee our interests versus the other side’s demands, we must avoid the artificial, wrong and dangerous distinction between the Hamas people, who are ‘the bad guys,’ and Gaza’s residents, which are allegedly ‘the good guys.’”
Naturally, Eiland failed to consider the terrible implications of eliminating the distinction between civilians and the armed factions that move among them: If his logic were inverted to apply to Israeli society, where civilians are soldiers and soldiers are civilians, almost every Jewish Israeli citizen could be considered a legitimate target.
Most vulnerable among the Jewish Israeli public are residents of the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip. Many of these working class development towns and kibbutzim were planted during the 1950s in place of the Palestinians who had just been forcibly expelled. In al-Majdal Asqalan, now known as Ashkelon, Jewish immigrants from the Middle East were literally trucked in to replace the Palestinians who had been held within a barbed wire enclosure before being outcasted to Gaza. Today, these largely neglected communities form a human wall against the demographic threat tucked behind a high-tech cordon sanitaire just to their south.
…Renan Raz, a 26-year-old waiter and anti-occupation activist now living in Tel Aviv, remembers the anguish he experienced when the army arrived in Dorot, the southern kibbutz where he was born and raised. It was the height of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault that left over 1400 Palestinian Gazans dead, mostly civilians, between December 2008 and January 2009.
“Most of the days soldiers were fighting in the Gaza Strip in the morning and in the evening they were coming back to our kibbutz, bringing their weapons there, they were sleeping there, and sometimes they were practicing [military drills] in the fields, in the kibbutz grass — they were hiding there and making plans,” Raz told me. “The way I saw it, they were using us as human shields.”
Raz recalled, “We were right on the border of the Gaza Strip and they were practicing in the fields with weaponry, whether it’s with their rifle or armored vehicles. I could hear explosions [from the fields] while they were practicing and maybe even shooting things into Gaza.”
“We are a sick military society,” he continued. “You can’t say Hamas is using their civilians as a human shield when it’s obvious that our army is using all of us as human shields.
Having already refused army service in defiance of his country’s militarist ethos, Raz turned solidly against the attack on Gaza. “Whenever there was a rocket alarm, all the people around me were shouting, Death to leftists! and Death to Arabs! And I just wanted to have a better life for everyone. I don’t want to be intimidated by the rockets but I also don’t want the people in Gaza to be bombed and massacred for no reason. I realized that this is the oppressed and the oppressor — it wasn’t self-defense.”
…In a recorded message broadcast on July 29 by al-Aqsa television, Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades general commander Mohammad Daif declared [6] that Gaza fighters were exclusively targeting active duty Israeli military personnel and avoiding attacks on civilians. So far, the Qassam Brigades have killed 65 Israeli soldiers, two Israeli civilians, one Thai worker, and wounded a kibbutz owl.“Filed under: Zionists wars on Gaza