Weaponry

Are you confused by the Middle East? Here are some things you should know. (But you’ll probably still be confused.)

The list of settler ambushes upon Palestinian women and children and unarmed men in the West Bank is endless.  It grows day by day with more and more ferocity. In fact, there have been more than a thousand such documented attacks by rabid settlers on Palestinian civilians, although many more go unreported as futile.  Of late the victims of settler violence have begun to include other Jews.

This past weekend the CyberBerkut team revealed another story, shocking in its extraordinary cynism even for today’s Ukraine. It turned out that the top Ukrainian Interior Ministry officials are abusing Western military assistance, designated to reequip and strengthen the Ukrainian National Guard (internal police forces). They organized an international traders’ chain to secretly reexport these arms to the Middle East where they would most likely appear in the hands of Saudi-linked radical groups operating in Syria and other hot spots.

I felt empty when I heard that to the north of where I work in Kabul, bombs were dropped on a ‘Doctors Without Borders’ Hospital in #Kunduz, for a full hour.
12 hospital staff and 10 patients were killed, three of them Afghan children. 33 persons are still missing.
Borderfree Afghan Street Kids say that the three Afghan children shouldn’t have been killed by a U.S. airstrike on a Doctor Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
I wondered if it was mainly medical personnel like myself who felt sad.

The confluence of Columbus Day Weekend and the Kunduz hospital bombing has us thinking about the deep levels of cultural violence in the United States and what can be done to change it. How does the US move from a country dominated by war culture to one dominated by a humanitarian culture? And, how do we do it in time to avoid war with China and Russia, which both advanced closer this week.
What does Celebrating Columbus say About the Character of the United States?

The most unedifying spectacle since Russia’s full-blooded attempt to change the tide of conflict in Bashar al-Assad’s favour has been the lexical scrounging on the part of Western governments. They are on the hunt for excuses what, exactly, they are defending, let alone protecting.

Here is the US changing its story for the FOURTH time of why it launched an air strike on the Doctors without Borders hospital in the Afghan town of Kunduz at the weekend, massacring at least 22 patients and hospital staff.

I was a bit surprised as well as appalled at the reported reaction of U.S. military personnel who had participated in the November 2004 destruction of Fallujah under Operation Phantom Fury, to the January 2014 taking control of the city by Sunni insurgents.

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).

Amidst all the handwringing across the political spectrum, commentators of every type decry the deplorable conditions that prevail in the parts of the world that have been under attack by the US, NATO, and the historic colonial powers of Europe: Britain and France. That is to say jointly and severally the wealthiest countries on Earth concentrated in the North Atlantic region of the world. However, the vast majority of the text generated on this subject is truly tiresome.