Terrorism (state and retail)

The media frenzy in the countries of the anti-Assad coalition over the Russian air strikes on Al-Qaeda-linked guerrillas in Syria has made one very significant fact quite clear.

Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the UN General Assembly on 28 September, the spokespersons for the US regime and its propaganda apparatus have tried to present Russia as a nostalgic power seething with envy. Such misrepresentations of current Russian policy and Russian history in the US are not unusual.  In fact, they have been the rule since 1917. Unlike the US, Russia is not an island whose ignorance and idiocy have been preserved by two oceans separating it from the rest of humanity (except the non-whites and half-whites south of Miami and the Rio Bravo).

In this final week before Vladimir Putin addresses the UN General Assembly, there has been a flurry of contact between Washington and Moscow. And by that I don’t just mean the September 18 telephone call between the defense ministers of Russia and the US. Russia’s beefed up military presence in Syria has clearly sparked a whole series of informal consultations, the culmination of which should be a meeting between the leaders of Russia and the United States on the sidelines of the General Assembly.

Seven months ago, UK Prime Minister David Cameron lamented the “sickening murder” of Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kaseasbeh by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). President Barack Obama also decried the “viciousness and barbarity” of the act.

The Photo that went Round the World
Around 3:30 am September 2, Aylan Kurdi, his brother, mother and nine others drowned trying to reach a Greek island from Bodrum Turkey.

Sometimes so much electronic data has been configured and processed from keystroke to platform software (one used to say “ink spilled” but we already have a generation that has probably never seen ink, and certainly not in fluid form) that the written equivalent of a shout is necessary. When the chattering becomes loud enough, one can scarcely avoid the breach of good manners by yelling “shut up!”.

I don’t really know, I don’t understand how it feels: to live in a rich European country, which is rich mainly because it has been directly plundering many poor nations around the world. Or it has been plundering by association, through its membership in some extremist organization like NATO. To live there, refusing to acknowledge why it is rich, how it became rich.
Palaces, theatres, railroads, hospitals and parks in that rich country are built on broken skeletons and restless specters, on lakes of blood and shameless theft.

News coming out of the occupied Palestine on 8 August 2015 said that Saad Dawabsheh, the father of a Palestinian toddler Ali who was killed in a firebombing of his home a week ago, has died from wounds he sustained in the incident.
Early in the morning of July 31, Israeli settlers hurled a Molotov cocktail into a window of Dawabsheh’s home in the Duma village in occupied West Bank. His 18-month-old son, Ali was burned to death in the arson attack, while his four-year-old son Ahmad, and his wife, Riham were seriously injured and remain in critical condition.

Prologue

It’s fairly obvious to keen observers that Turkey’s Recep Erdogan is not the moderate reformist he once pretended to be, back when Turkey harbored fantasies of joining a surging European Union. In the end, the EU’s temporizing about Turkey’s entry turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Ankara.