Opinion: Why the West are allowing the Muslims to talk about the root cause of 'Terrorism'

It's interesting that the West are suddenly allowing the Muslims to question the root cause of 'Terrorism'. We find that in the past the Muslims were always discussing this very point amongst themselves but it was inherently shunned from the media spotlight in order to keep the public opinion off its foreign policy.

So why the sudden change?

If we analyse the shift in Western foreign policy, we can see that the new approach to deal with the rise of Islam is to take the apparent backseat while carrying out covert operations as well as puppeteering the corrupt agent rulers to fight the war on Islam internally in their own regions.

What does this new stance mean?

It is not only the Muslims that are questioning the Western foreign policy in the Middle East but non-Muslims alike since 9/11. The new stance taken would mean the West are 'scot-free' on any events in the Greater Middle East and therefore they can raise their hands and put the blame on the Muslims themselves. 

We know that the media is the main tool to sway public opinion and therefore the discussion put forward on this platform will always have to serve and benefit the West. 

If the Muslims are fighting amongst themselves, be it through conventional warfare or Western armed militias such as ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al-Nusra etc - it only leaves the Muslims to wrongly accuse themselves. 

How should the Muslims respond?

As a Muslim, if you are given the platform to discuss the root causes of 'terrorism', you should expose the foreign policy that is both apparent and covert. You should expose those leaders in the Muslim world that are in line with the Western narrative of participatory democracy and civil state that are off-base with Islam. You should expose the Western plans of severing the link between Islam and politics through global initiatives like the Greater Middle East Initiative. You should expose local initiatives such as the CTS bill in the UK and the CVE in the U.S. that directly attack the core beliefs of Islam and that they require the Muslims to ultimately apostatize from their religion.

The recent interview by Kay Burley of Sky News with CAGE spokesperson Cerie Bullivant may have shown Cerie in a good light and that he ultimately made the media seem inherently racist towards Muslims and Islam.

BUT

If we were to let the West be successful in its attempt to get the Muslims to kill eachother amongst themselves with no apparent Western foreign policy affecting those regions, then Kay Burley would say "What about our foreign policy? We have left the Muslims to deal with their own issues." This would leave the Muslims to indeed blame themselves as well as Islam being the cause of such division and devastation as they can't easily blame the foreign policy of the West. 

Article: John Pilger - From Pol Pot to ISIS: Anything that flies on everything that moves

http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flies-on-everything-that-moves

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. "Rebel" Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, "The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in particular our Middle East wars - had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here."

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children's vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. "Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. "I was instructed," Halliday said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 "excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee, "[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live."  When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. "I feel ashamed," he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will further "the imperative of a political solution". Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants "boots on the ground" now. There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the willing" - notably Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. "I am going to tell you something," he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate... This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned."

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west - Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine negotiations with Syria should be seen as "morally questionable" (the Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but dangerous.

Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region's most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century". Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft".  Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

Why the Muslims should not forget the past

WHY THE MUSLIMS SHOULD NOT FORGET THE PAST

John Pilger Austra-British Journalist on interviewing Carne Ross:

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee,

"[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live."

Three years later in an interview with Carne Ross who was consumed with regret and contrition. He said:

"I feel ashamed,"

He said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception.

"We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze them out."


Is this still not the case today? Would the West take the moral high ground all of a sudden? I don't think so. They've use the media to deceive the public in the past on a 'war' that left over a million people dead. Today they continue to deceive the public and claim the Middle East is in the hands of the Arabs. Yet their involvement in almost every Arab Nation is both factual and evident.


Before that Dennis Halliday said:
"I was instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."

And his successor Hans Von Sponeck UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator said:
"Imagine setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."

It is important we remember the past. It is not history it is still present as the West are still headed by the same people they were back then. Just because the face of a leader has changed it does not mean the systems they propagate have changed. They have remained - let us not be naive in our political analysis and blame the Muslims for the instabilities in their regions.

Like John Pilger himself said:

"in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common"

The sectarian divides were indeed created by the West.

Source: http://johnpilger.com/articles/from-pol-pot-to-isis-anything-that-flies-on-everything-that-moves

No suprise 'Jihadi John' was known to the MI5 and attempted to be recruited.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31637090

He is Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born British man in his mid-20s from west London, who was previously known to British security services.

Emwazi then ended up flying to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where he claimed to be met by British intelligence agents from MI5 who accused him of trying to travel to Somalia, where the jihadist group al-Shabab operates. He denied the accusation and said the agents had tried to recruit him before allowing him to return to the UK.

We don't know exactly when the British or the American security services worked out that the masked man in the killing videos was Londoner Mohammed Emwazi - and nobody in official security circles is going to comment on how they got to that conclusion.

But we do know that he was, to use the jargon, a "person of interest" to MI5 going back to at least 2010 because he features in semi-secret court cases relating to extremism overseas and back in the UK.

Racial Profiling Muslims in France

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/25/france-landmark-ruling-racial-profiling-checks-police-paris-terror-attacks

The strained relationship between French police and the country’s non-white population is under fresh scrutiny in the wake of last month’s terrorist attacks as a Paris appeals court considers a landmark case brought by black and Arab men who say they were openly stopped by officers for no other reason than their skin colour.

Racial profiling – in which French people of black and north African origin are routinely pulled over on the street and asked to show their identity papers with no explanation – has long been a fraught issue in France, contributing to tension and urban rioting on housing estates.

But the current political context, in which France is soul-searching over race relations, discrimination, antisemitism and hate speech in the wake of January’s terrorist attacks, has thrown the spotlight on equality issues more than ever before. Campaign groups say that since the attacks, which began with a deadly assault on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and ended in a bloody siege at a kosher supermarket, French people of “Muslim appearance” – black and Arab – are complaining of an increase in incidences of arbitrarily being pulled over by police.

Blackwater convicted and tried

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/22/us-jury-convicts-blackwater-security-guards-iraq

US jury convicts Blackwater guards in 2007 killing of Iraqi civilians

Security guards for private US contractor guilty of manslaughter for notorious 2007 incident that left 17 dead in Baghdad

Three security guards working for the private US contractor Blackwater have been found guilty of the manslaughter of a group of unarmed civilians at a crowded Baghdad traffic junction in one of the darkest incidents of the Iraq war.

A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, was found guilty of one charge of first-degree murder. All face the likelihood of lengthy prison sentences after unanimous verdicts on separate weapons charges related to the incident. Lawyers for the guards say they plan to appeal.

The Nisour Square massacre in 2007 left 17 people dead and 20 seriously injured after the guards working for the US State Department fired heavy machine guns and grenade launchers from their armoured convoy in the mistaken belief they were under attack by insurgents.

But attempts to prosecute the guards have previously foundered because of a series of legal mistakes by US officials, and the case had attracted widespread attention in Iraq as a symbol of apparent American immunity.

Blackwater – renamed first Xe Services and then Academi after the incident saw it thrown out of Iraq and dubbed a mercenary force by a United Nations report – reached a civilian settlement on behalf of six of the victims in 2012 and paid an undisclosed sum in compensation.

Minsk II: Derailed Before the Ink Was Dry

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/minsk-ii-derailed-before-ink-was-dry.html

Minsk II: Derailed Before the Ink Was Dry

February 24, 2015 (Eric Draitser - NEO) - When the Minsk II agreement was officially announced on February 12, 2015, there was, for the first time in many months, a real belief that a cessation of hostilities was at the very least possible, if only conceptually. It seemed that the parties to the conflict finally had a framework within which they could move toward a peaceful settlement to end the dreadful war that has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent civilians in Donetsk, Lugansk, and surrounding areas. But perhaps this was simply wishful thinking.

While the “Normandy 4” (France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine) were negotiating the terms of the agreement, developments on the ground in Donetsk and Lugansk told quite a different story. Ukrainian forces continued their criminal shelling of civilians in Donetsk, while the anti-Kiev rebels continued sporadic fighting around Debaltsevo. Of course a war is always messy, and one cannot expect fighting to halt, or even necessarily decrease, while political leaders sit around the table.

But the continuation of military hostilities was not the only issue. Rather, actions taken by Kiev’s military and fascist paramilitaries, in addition to their patrons in Washington, demonstrated that, rather than peace, the US-Kiev faction was interested in escalation.

But how is this possible considering the string of defeats the Ukrainian military suffered at the hand of the rebels? Simple. Under the cover of media darkness cast by the shadow of the Minsk talks, the US and Kiev quietly connived to escalate the war and, simultaneously, violate multiple key provisions of the agreement. In effect, Minsk II was null and void the moment the clock struck midnight on Sunday February 15, 2015, the appointed time at which the agreement allegedly took effect.



Minsk II: Dead on Arrival 

Although everyone was (and is) hopeful that the Minsk II agreement will lead to at least a temporary peace, the inescapable reality is that it is a political document designed for public relations, rather than a true agreement between equal parties. Moreover, Minsk II should be understood as the “peace” side of the Tolstoyan war and peace coin – a seemingly contradictory, but in fact quite complimentary, two-pronged approach taken by the US and its puppet regime in Kiev.

On one level, the strategy is to bring negotiations front and center, highlighting the West’s so called “commitment to peace” as evidenced by the much vaunted jet-setting diplomacy of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Indeed, Germany has much to lose given a continuation, and likely expansion, of the war in Ukraine; many in the German establishment correctly interpret the conflict as a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, a war in which Washington stands everything to gain, and Berlin everything to lose.

And so, the view from Berlin was that Europe had gambled on Ukraine and lost, and that conciliatory negotiations had become paramount both to ease tensions with Russia, and to pull Europe back from the brink of a wider, and far more dangerous war. However, at the very moment that Merkel was seated across the table from Putin in Minsk, her partners in Washington were pursuing a decidedly different, and much more aggressive and dangerous policy.

On Wednesday February 11, literally the very day that the Minsk talks were taking place, Reuters ran a story headlined U.S. army to train Ukrainians in March: commander U.S. army Europe which quoted U.S. Army Europe commander Ben Hodges as saying, “We will train [Ukrainian military] in security tasks, medical (tasks), how to operate in an environment where the Russians are jamming (communications) and how to protect (themselves) from Russian and rebel artillery.” So, at the moment that Western media were busily lauding Merkel and Hollande for offering an olive branch, US military officials were describing how Washington would be escalating the war.

It is important to note that Hodges described the initial mission as training three battalions, but no specific limits in terms of time or manpower were presented by any US official. Presumably then, this escalation program would go on indefinitely, and would impact far more than simply three battalions. Moreover, a careful reading of the language of Hodges’ statement certainly should give anyone pause.

For instance, what exactly is meant by “security tasks”? Does this include policing the streets of captured territory and/or Ukraine proper? It would certainly stand to reason considering the repeated warnings from President Poroshenko about possibly instituting martial law on the streets of Ukraine.

Hodges’ declaration should be read as a carefully constructed statement designed to present the illusion that US military forces would be providing only “defensive” training and support. However, any serious political observer understands that such training will go far beyond simply teaching soldiers how to “protect themselves.” Rather, a more realistic interpretation of that statement would conclude that counterattack strategies and tactics are really the objective.

Of course, Hodges is not the only one hinting at US plans. President Obama himself stated on the eve of the Minsk negotiations, “The possibility of lethal defence is one of those options that’s being examined…but I have not made a decision about that yet,” and that the US would consider “whether there are additional things we can do to help Ukraine bolster its defences in the face of Russian aggression.” Naturally, the phrase “bolstering defenses” is really just a politically acceptable euphemism, coded language for providing lethal weapons. Translation: the US wants to escalate the war by providing more material support to Ukraine in hopes of forcing Russia to respond in kind, then blaming Russia for precisely the escalation Washington itself initiated.

So, on the one hand you have NATO allies Germany and France allegedly brokering peace, while the US foments war. While this should surprise no one who has followed the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, it does illustrate the degree to which US-NATO has come to accept the inevitability of a military defeat for Kiev. That is, unless the strategic calculus is altered significantly.

In effect, the US killed Minsk II before any agreement was even reached. But, what of the agreement itself? Are the provisions even possible to implement and uphold?

Minsk II: The Foreign Elements 

One of the key provisions in the text of the agreement relates to the presence of foreign elements and their necessary withdrawal. The agreement calls for, “Pullout of all foreign armed formations, military equipment, and also mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under OSCE supervision. Disarmament of all illegal groups.” It stands to reason that the West and its puppet Poroshenko demanded this provision be included so as to immediately be able to cry foul on the rebels who Kiev has always maintained are “foreign terrorists” (regardless of whether they are Ukrainian or not).

Indeed, the provision would require any volunteers from Russia, or those who have come from Spain, France, the US, and elsewhere to fight alongside the anti-fascist rebel forces, to withdraw from the territory. However, it is quite likely that Moscow agreed to this provision knowing that it is impossible for Kiev and Washington to live up to it. Why? Because US mercenaries have been operating inside Ukraine all along.

According to German intelligence, at least 400 US mercenaries from Academi aka Blackwater, the infamous military/security contractor responsible for documented war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere, have been operating inside Ukraine from the very beginning of the conflict. Exactly what actions and/or crimes they might be responsible for is still unknown. However, their very presence inside Ukraine should raise eyebrows around the world, much of which has been inundated with the meme of “Russian aggression.” So, if Russian and other volunteers aren’t the only “foreigners” inside Ukraine, why is it that Russia is the only party being held up as a “foreign armed formation”?

It should also be pointed out that this German intelligence report is only one snippet of information that was leaked to the German press. Typically, a leak indicates a far larger body of information. Who knows how many other US-NATO mercenary “formations” have been, and continue to be, involved in Ukraine?

One should also remember that there have been numerous pieces of video (14:40 mark) andphotographic evidence, not to mention written testimony, demonstrating that Academi/Blackwater (and possibly other mercenary groups) has been active in Ukraine. In late 2014, Russia’s ITAR-TASSreported that $3.5 million will be used to train an “experimental battalion” of 550 Ukrainian soldiers in “marksmanship, operations by assault groups in urban conditions, close combat and combat and logistics support.”

Taken in total, the case for US-NATO mercenary involvement in Ukraine is quite strong. But this somehow never makes it into the mainstream narrative about Ukraine in the West. Moreover, the media never seems to question the fact that the line between official US military, and unofficial mercenary forces, exists for a simple reason: Washington can disavow any knowledge of unofficial forces operating inside Ukraine.

And this is precisely the point. The US is able to simultaneously say it is “considering” arming Ukrainian forces, while already having other forces on the ground. With one hand the US holds the knife to the throat, and with the other it holds the gun to the temple. So much for Minsk and diplomacy.

While the politicians dance their danse macabre and talk of peace, withdrawal of heavy weapons, and demilitarizing the conflict, the US and its associated military and quasi-military appendages works diligently to escalate an obviously failed proxy war. In so doing, Washington undermines both the interests of its nominal European partners, and any prospects for peace. But of course, that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? The US is perfectly happy to pay its geopolitical tab in the currency of Ukrainian blood, while constantly pointing the finger at Moscow.

But it’s not Washington’s fault, is it? The Empire is doing what empires do. It is the fault of all those in the media, both mainstream and alternative, who refuse to examine the evidence, who choose to reduce everything into simplistic black and white terms – they are the ones who must be held accountable. For the blood of innocents in Donetsk and Lugansk stains all. And those stains will never be washed away.

Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Asghar Bukhari - The Beginning Of The End: Why The West Can Never Beat ISIS

https://medium.com/@asgharbukhari/the-begining-of-the-end-why-the-west-can-never-beat-isis-d20d7fe4eef3

The first reason the public are told, we need to go to war, is that this violent group is so barbaric, so utterly wicked, that we as Westerners have a moral duty to stop them — really?

French troops in Algeria showing off the heads of Algerian resistance fighters

If we look at the facts, we can see ISIS is no more barbaric than the dictators, the Western elites have backed, in their 100 year domination of the region.

In relatively recent history in the very region ISIS now threatens, in the 1953 coup of Mordad.
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was installed as a monarch by Mi6 and the CIA. He immediately went about systematically killing and torturing anyone who opposed him.

When he was overthrown by a popular revolution, the West pushed Saddam Hussain to start a war with Iran, resulting in a million Muslims being killed.

Finding Saddam surplus to requirements, they tried to overthrow him. Using sanctions they starved and denied medical provisions to the Iraqi people. The UN reported that one and a half million children were malnourished, eventually half a million of those children would die.

As the award winning investigative journalist John Pilger noted:

“ It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” — from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat cancer.

The British Government restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. The Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, they said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. The majority of sick people could not even afford treatment. And make no mistake, this was deliberate. Von Sponeck the UN Coordinator said “I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.”

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned.”
“I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

When that failed to dislodge Saddam, they bombed Iraq back to the stone age. Starting a war that cost another million Muslim lives.
We created hell; murdered millions, brutalised the regions inhabitants and then blamed the people that emerged from its ashes for not acting like poets and philosophers.

Across the region we installed brutal dictator, after brutal dictator. None of them more sane or humane than ISIS! And Muslims kept finding that these men were always kept in place through violence.

ISIS then is everything to do with our policies — right down to its brutality. Try as we might to deny it. It is a brutal, violent, reaction to a brutal, violent, order. An order we keep in place.
Just another dead Muslim child. Killed by Israel on a beach in Gaza.

The shocking fact is, that only weeks before they decided to bomb ISIS, both America and the UK confirmed their support for Israel and its right to defend itself. Even as it massacred 2,100 Palestinians civilians, 501 of them were children. In the end, over 11,000 men, women and children were wounded and 520,000 refugees were created as they tried to escape the vicious bombing of Gaza’s 1.8 million people, entrapped in an open-air prison with no escape.

ISIS in their wildest dreams could not compete with Israel’s arsenal of death, paid for by the American tax payer.

This moral case for war, was in fact nothing short of propaganda. Mark Curtis highlights in his book, Web of Deceit, how the British MoD had realised that public support for humanitarian wars — could help sell one.
The second argument is: If we do not attack them there, they will attack us here.

In fact the reverse is true. All terrorist attacks that have occurred against Western targets, have occurred, according to the terrorists themselves, because of Western foreign policy. Bin laden even laid out his reasons for fighting the West and every single point was linked to foreign policy. You can read more about this in the brilliant book ‘Imperial Hubris’ written by the CIA head of the Bin Laden Unit — Michael Scheuer.

If you really want to understand Muslim terrorism — read this book. He is one of the few non-Muslim white men who truly understand what is going on and has the courage to tell the truth despite attacks against him.
“This is about our security, contrary to Bush’s claim that we attack them for hating freedom. If we hated freedom, let him explain to us, why we don’t strike Sweden.” - Bin Laden Oct 2004

So if it is not about stopping terrorism, then why are they waging the a war against ISIS?

It is far less altruistic and far more obvious than the reasons they give to their corporate-media-duped public — but you have to go back into history to understand it.

For 100 years Western Elites have tried to keep the Muslim world from forming into a rising and possible rival power again.

They never forgot the conquest of Spain and their humiliating defeats, at the hands of a united Muslim Empire. So after the first world war, they decided as the British Prime Minister Lloyd George famously said ‘to make Islam innocuous’.

So when they had a chance to recreate the Muslim world, they created a structure in the Middle East that was inherently flawed. With inbuilt tensions amongst the communities and so constantly on the verge of fragmenting.

They manufactured lines in the sand, that cut through ancient communities. Sects were pitched against each other. All this was done to ensure the new nations, would always be internally fragmented and destabilised. The only way to keep them together was through repression. Hence the reason why they needed a dictator or a strongman. These strongmen of course were always dependant on the West to maintain the balance of power.

Both had a vested interest in keeping the prevalent order for any re-awakening would not only depose these leaders but challenge the order itself.

Vitally, the strongmen and the West needed to erase, any sense of a common, Muslim political identity — a pan-Islamic Muslim identity. By changing the peoples understanding of their past historical identity and implanting racial and nationalistic identities in its place — they fragmented the one unifier — Islam. Without a unifying identity — the Muslim world would never have a common struggle again. It could never unite.

The other major benefit of course, was it allowed them to steal its wealth — primarily oil.

This 100 year old game, was finally falling apart. From the Western strategists point of view, Tony Blair's real mistake and the real reason why they hate him, was that he had weakened the very order he was supposed to uphold.

By taking out the strongman in the region — the tensions built over a century — exploded.

Some analysts like Jonathan Cook in his excellent book ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilisations’ argued that Western Elites, along with Israel, did this on purpose. They had been planning to implement an even more radical carve up of the Middle East, a ‘Sykes-Picot’ version 2.

The book explains that they intended to carve up the current Middle Eastern nations into even smaller - weaker states (note the fragmentation of Libya and Iraq, after Western intervention).

But the growing momentum of groups taking to Jihad was threatening this.

The US found themselves facing forces, that were stronger than their puppet states and ones who would not play by the rules — their rules!

Western policy makers had two options.

The first was to stay out of the region and see the plan it had worked on, for over a century, fall apart. Leading to the embryonic rise of a Muslim Empire and the demise of cheap oil — The second was to go to war.

It was simple mathematics, a no brainer — that’s why we are going to war. It is as simple as that. Everything else, dear reader — is propaganda.

So why do I say the most powerful military powers in the World cannot beat a small group of armed zealots in the form of ISIS/L?

Simply this — they are not fighting ISIS/L. They are just another extreme manifestation of the root problem. They are fighting the IDEA that has grown in the minds of millions of Muslims. That idea is simple:

That the current western order is unjust and that peaceful ways of changing that order have been crushed, leaving only one option — to take up arms. Muslims had decided to revolt.

The West had one small window to stop this — the Arab Spring. Instead they undermined it. Leaving no option for many young men but take up armed struggle. It was a catastrophic mistake. It was only a matter of time that armed revolution would spread (war propagandists call this ‘Jihadist ideology’) — because they don’t want the public to understand it.

We now have two options open to us — leave the region alone and allow Muslims to make a destiny that is not dictated by the Western powers — or war

es it is true that if they leave the region, armed groups will rule for a while, some of them backward and barbaric - but overtime these would be replaced by state builders and mature into real civilisations. All revolutions are bloody, but eventually, all new states mature — even the Mongol’s changed over time.

There is, if we are honest — only one way to stop a violent reaction. Change the factors that have caused that reaction.

All talk of ‘jihadists’, ‘terrorists’, ‘extremists’, ‘Islamists’, ‘hate preachers’ or any other politically manufactured ‘unspeak’ is the war propagandists way of making sure you never understand this simple, concrete, insoluble — fact:

They don't hate us for our freedom, they hate us because we deny theirs.

“How is it right for you to occupy our countries and kill our women and children and expect to live in peace and security? … the equation is clear: you are killed as you kill us and are kidnapped as you kidnap us…” Bin Laden Oct 2010

I leave you with a man who says it so much better than I can — Ron Paul

Asghar Bukhari - Colonized Muslim Slave

https://medium.com/@asgharbukhari/asghar-bukhari-the-colonized-muslim-slave-3465876885cf 

Umar ibn Khatab once said ‘We’re the most humiliated people on earth & Allah gave us honour through Islam’.

The re-writing of the Muslim story started at different periods, but the defeats of the Mughal Empire and the Ottomans paved the way for a wholescale implementation and re-writing of Muslim history.

Muslims were taught a story created by others. Colonialists erased our history, and today most Muslims do not know much about our history at all. Muslims would come to define themselves the way their colonial masters defined them.

The colonial plan was not simply to manufacture new smaller, Muslim nations, but to change history and identity itself.

The idea was to break a single unifying identity — a Muslim identity and replace it with multiple other identities. We would, from that moment on, see ourselves along ethnic, racial, tribal and sectarian lines — and this would be further broken down into manufactured nationalistic ones.

Of course Muslims did not simply give up their identity, or their history. Colonial powers enforced these new identities through the most horrific violence. History bears testament to the millions who were murdered, starved to death and tortured, from one end of the Muslim world to the other to ensure these identities would replace any pan Islamic understanding of ourselves.

Once defeated — Muslims were taught by their colonizer the story that they were inferior, over time we became to subconsciously believe it.

Take for example how little Muslims care for their own peoples lives.

To understand this, let us first compare, the behavior of those who do not view themselves as inferior. Those who are not mentally defeated. Let us take the example of 9-11 and analyse how white Christians reacted after the attack on the twin towers. White Western men and women were killed in that attack. In total 2996 people died.

The reaction was an overwhelming desire for retribution across the Western World. They wanted war. The people who tried to take their liberty were to be hunted down and killed. Trial or no trial. They invaded two countries and over a million people died as a result. To this day their blood lust is not satisfied. Their war of terror is never ending.

Every year American’s remember those who lost their lives. Each one of those lives had a value. Giant monuments with every name of those who died carved on them are erected, and millions visit these monuments and keep their memory alive.

The same can be said of the Jewish people. Who does not know about the Holocaust? You even know the number — 6 million.

The examples are numerous across the World. Now look at the Muslims. Compare our behavior.

The Muslim remembers none of his dead. No monuments for the millions murdered over the centuries.

None of the million Muslims cleansed or murdered from the fall of Spain, the Messianic breaking up of the Ottoman Empire that led to the gassing of the Kurds by the British, the starving to death of millions by Churchill or the murder of countless millions who opposed the manufactured states that they were forced to live in From Palestine to Pakistan, the barbaric ethnic cleansing in the Caucases, atrocity after gruesome atrocity – all forgotten.

From Malaysia to Morrocco, Indonesia to India, country after country, Bosnia, Burma, Chechnya, Syria, Kashmir, Iraq, Arabia, Somalia, Yemen destroyed by invasions or foreign backed dictators.

It is not just history they hide from. It is estimated that Muslims killed in Iraq from sanctions exceed the number slain by all so called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.

More Muslim children died under Western sanctions in Iraq per month than did on September the 11th — and sanctions went on for ten years.

No names carved in metal columns, or fountains made in their honor, no minute’s silence, no commemoration, no flowers, each year, no honouring our dead, no fund for their families, not even their names mentioned in the Mosques on Friday — their corpses buried in mass graves are not worthy of being remembered — even by us.

The lack of reaction by Muslims is shocking — but in it lay the proof of our inferiority complex, our hatred of our own — our colonized minds.

The Muslim had no value for himself, how could he have any value for others like him.

Of course, these are not the only examples of the odd and tragic behavior of the broken Muslim mentality. The more you look the more you find.

Islam should have been the solution. After all, the Prophet PBUH in his last sermon stated that God Alone was One and mankind were all equal under Him. Fracturing any inferiority that others would impose upon Muslims.

However the version of Islam their colonizer allowed them to learn, failed to counter this inferiority. The colonial master killed, imprisoned and murdered anyone who spoke of the Mission of Islam.

All ethical obligations were stripped from Islam, the great Mission of Justice Islam brought to the world — muted. Now Islam became petty rules about dress, appearance. Petty topics like the perfect length of the beard became priority matters.

The colonized version of Islam taught them what foot to enter the toilet with, or what hand to eat with, but never to use those hands and feet to establish God’s Justice on earth. Our colonial Masters erased that from our faith.

They could tell you the names of the arcane Arabic text, but not a single name of the mothers raped and murdered, lying in unmarked graves, or the dead Muslim children from one end of the world to the other. In their colonized minds, this was nothing to do with Islam.

The colonized Muslim was taught to think of his oppression, like a slave thinks of slavery, something that was wrong but normal.

Muslims began to use religion as a drug to distract them from the nightmare — never to wake them up from it.

The Muslim is a broken thing. Inside the fissures are deep, the fear of the whip of the oppressor is never far from their mind. The Islam, he learned, taught him to bow not to God, but to the masters he found himself imitating.

While the apolitical practicing religious Muslims use the pillars of Islam to hide behind, so those who have achieved a modicum of success financially use their job.

This ‘professional’ class is normally the most fearful, for they have more to lose. You will hardly find a single activist against the oppression of our people amongst the western Muslim professional classes. Our most educated and successful minds are also the most slave like.

Money or status made them feel like men again, like humans, like equals.

And those with nothing, little educated and without jobs, they felt like equals often by using violence. Reader, you may find it strange that Muslims are the most aggressive to each other, but often silent against those non Muslim elites who attack them. Dogs dont fight lions, they fight other dogs. A man who has no value for himself, looks with contempt at others like him -for he sees himself in them.

In the past, Islam was the source of justice, it gave them honour, now it was a hollow set of minor rules that brought no help or change to their condition.

And because this colonized Islam could never give them equality, these defeated people looked to find it elsewhere.

Allah taught us all mankind was equal under God, the manifestation of Tawhid was equality. And in the past we fought to bring it to the world. We freed mankind from this tyranny of false Kings and Emperorors. We made a world where Kings and men became equals under Allah.

All that is gone and in its place — nothing but misery and servitude.

You see no man can be equal unless he is willing to demand it from those who deny his equality. When we lost the courage to do this, we hated our subservient condition, eventually we began to hate ourselves.

We ran away from the duty we were ordained to take up — our true mission, to establish Justice on this earth, written in the Quran. Instead of the rituals upholding the great mission, we used them to hide behind, and so we debased ourselves, prostrated through fear to men, not God.

We might deny it, but free men do not let themselves be oppressed. Only a slave does that — and you will hardly find a Muslim in the world who is not oppressed and who has not been trained like a zoo animal to accept his people’s oppression.

Allah taught us to change this world, to overthrow tyranny and through this sacrifice we freed ourselves, learned greatness and honour. It is time we did this again.

“We sent Our Messengers with clear signs and sent down with them the Book and the Measure in order to establish justice among the people…” (Quran 57:25)