Terrorism (state and retail)

Since terrorism’s tragedy is again in the news, it is timely to revisit perhaps one of the biggest acts of terrorism in modern history — the illegal invasion and destruction, ongoing, of Iraq.
March 20th marked the thirteenth anniversary of an action resulting in the equivalent of a Paris, Brussels, London July 7th, 2005, often multiple times daily in Iraq ever since. As for  September 11th, 2001, there has frequently been that death toll and heartbreak every several weeks, also ongoing.

Saudi Arabia has been militarily involved and trying to manipulate political outcomes in Yemen for decades. The last time they did this in 2009, they lost militarily to the Houthis.
— Hillary Mann Leverett on CNN, Early 2015

If some intelligent extraterrestrial beings were circling over our planet in their spaceship, monitoring for decades and centuries all that has been and is taking place on its surface, they would, most likely, be horrified by our brutality, and shocked by the countless contradictions, double standards and inconsistencies.

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”
Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

In April 2014 I first visited Syria, going to Homs and Latakia, in addition to Damascus. On each of my three subsequent trips to Syria, speaking moderate colloquial Arabic, I have been able to interact one-on-one with Syrians there, whether in markets, taxis, on the streets or in areas I visited.

This month, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to Syria’s President. The methods used to undermine Shaaban’s message should come as no surprise.

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in August 2011 to April 2013, Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front were a single organization that chose the banner of “Jabhat al Nusra.” Although, the current Al-Nusra Front is led by Abu Mohammad al Julani but he was appointed as the Emir of Al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, in January 2012. The current Al-Nusra Front is only a splinter group of Islamic State which split away from its parent organization in April 2013 over a dispute between the leaders of two organizations.

The terror-ravaged neighbourhood of al-Zahra’a, in Homs, has again mercilessly been hit by western and Saudi-backed terrorists’ bombings. Local journalists put the number of murdered at 57 now, some hours after the double-vehicle bombing earlier today. Russia Today reports:

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
— Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina, 1992

In Palestine, you would be forgiven for thinking that there was no United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The SR, Christof Heyns, in the past 6 years, has never made a country on-site visit to Palestine to get first hand information on the hundreds of cases of Zionist perpetration of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions of the people of Palestine.