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Western War on Libya Imminent
Stephen Lendman
In 2011, US-led NATO ravaged Africa’s most developed country. Libya remains a cauldron of violence and chaos, now threatened by ISIS.
Washington helped it establish a foothold in Sirte, a jumping off point to expand to other areas - with designs on Libyan oil, perhaps just a matter of time before it seizes control without efforts to stop their forces.
Sirte is a gateway to several major oil fields and refineries further east. ISIS fighters targeted them before, gaining control of some. Its propaganda claims “Sirte will be no less that Raqqa,” its self-declared Syrian capital.
West Largely Silent About Erdogan’s War on Kurds
Stephen Lendman
They’re ravaged the way America treated is native people for centuries, exterminating the vast majority of Indian tribe members.
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) members are marked for elimination. Earlier attempts for peace collapsed in July. Open warfare followed - Ankara using tanks, artillery, warplanes, attack helicopters and thousands of combat troops in heavily populated areas. Civilians suffer most.
Devastating war on Kurds shows no signs of abating. Urban areas are bloody battlefields. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were displaced.
Combat areas are off-limits to journalists to suppress reports of horrific ongoing carnage. Corpses piling up in streets attest to Erdogan’s brutality. Cities and towns affected are trapped under virtual siege - without food, electricity, medical supplies and other essentials. Erdogan vowed to eliminate PKK members, freedom fighters wanting local autonomy or independence in Turkey’s southeast, wrongfully designated terrorists.
New Year Market Turmoil
Stephen Lendman
Will 2016 be the year the artificially stimulated US economic house of cards collapses? It’s long overdue. What can’t go on forever, won’t. Markets levitate only for so long. Day of reckoning time inevitably arrives.
Fed money printing madness turned Wall Street into a casino - high risk for ordinary people wanting their savings protected along with a reasonable return.
Former Reagan administration Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman warns often of a coming collapse - calling America’s financial system an “unstable, bubble-prone gambling arena that undermines capitalist prosperity and showers speculators with vast windfall gains” on an ocean of easy money.
Grim New Year’s Horrors in Palestine
Stephen Lendman
Israel’s high crimes against Palestinians continue unabated into the new year - an entire population collectively punished by brute force.
The Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association updated the mass arrests and collective punishment toll since Israel unleashed unrestrained violence and brutality three months ago - against legitimate Palestinian resistance, a new generation of youths wanting occupation harshness ended, their fundamental rights respected. From October 1 through yearend, at least 2,663 Palestinians were arbitrarily arrested - over 600 including 177 from East Jerusalem, another 1,885 including 278 children from the rest of the West Bank, 158 Palestinians including 24 children from “1948 occupied territories.”
America’s Now-Aggressive War Against Russia
Eric Zuesse,
America’s aristocracy is determined to take over Russia. Ever since the end of the Soviet Union and of its communism, the Cold War has become replaced by an increasingly hot war in which the U.S. and its allies are expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and imposing against Russia what the U.S. refused to accept being imposed upon itself during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: nuclear checkmate!
The direction of aggression since the end of communism has reversed, and the aggression itself has considerably intensified. Though the ideological excuse for the conflict is thus entirely gone, the aggression against Russia is far more than the Soviet Union ever dreamt of even trying against America. It’s so blatant. This is raw aggression, for nothing else than conquest — ideology has nothing to do with it.
America’s Vampire Aristocracy
Eric Zuesse
On January 2nd, America’s NBC News bannered “Arab Spring Cleric Nimr al-Nimr Among 47 Executed by Saudi Arabia,” and, one-third of the way into their report, showed this tweet:
“Saudi execution of Nimr al-Nimr along w/ al Qaeda members is straight from Assad's playbook - lumping nonviolent activists with terrorists.
— DavidKenner (@DavidKenner) January 2, 2016”
Even when Sunni-Islamic extremists, the Sauds, perpetrate mass-murder, in Saudi Arabia and not only in Yemen and in Syria, the U.S. ‘news’ media find some way to smear their audience’s minds with the demon, “Bashar al-Assad,” as if Assad actually had anything to do with it, and the King of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, had nothing to do with it. Salman, who owns Saudi Arabia and everyone in it (and who even allows outright slavery there), wasn’t so much as mentioned by the NBC ‘News’ ‘reporter’ or propagandist. (Assad was mentioned in that ‘news’ report only because Assad allies with the U.S. aristocracy’s super-demon, Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia, who refuses to do the U.S. aristocracy’s bidding, such as his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, much praised by the U.S. aristocracy, had done.)
Russian Sanctions Biting Turkey’s Economy
Stephen Lendman
Erdogan’s act of war against Russia is proving costly. Sanctions Putin imposed bans or restricts Turkish organizations from conducting certain types of activity in Russia.
Effective January 1, Russian employers are prohibited from hiring Turkish nationals. Job security for current Turkish employees is uncertain.
Tourism accounting for 11% of Ankara’s economy is harmed. Charter flights to Turkey are banned. Travel agencies suspended tours. Millions of Russian tourists aren’t coming. Nor are around a million visiting for business and other reasons.
Russian visits were facilitated by visa-free travel, now cancelled. Loss of billions of dollars of trade and investment means harder economic times for Turkey.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said some current and planned joint projects are frozen or cancelled - including the major Turkish Stream pipeline project to deliver Russian natural gas through Turkey to Europe and planned construction of one or more nuclear power plants.Turkish fruits, vegetables, poultry and other foodstuffs are banned. Lost revenues from frozen joint projects and prohibited new ones are biting. Erdogan picked the wrong fight with the wrong target.
Captured ISIS Terrorist Admits Stolen Oil Arrives in Turkey Daily
Stephen Lendman
Russian surveillance footage, independent investigative journalists and others exposed Erdogan’s oil smuggling racket, complicit with ISIS, refining and selling stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil on the black market - Israel a key beneficiary.
Captured ISIS militant Mahmud Ghazi Tatar provided more evidence of illegal Turkish oil operations. His “commander told us that the group sells fuel to Turkey,” he explained.
Income funds ISIS terrorist activities. “(O)il trucks crossing into Turkey every day carry crude oil, as well as petrol,” Tatar said. Militants have “enough oil to last them a long time” - generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually along with other lucrative illicit operations supplying more, up to an estimated billion dollars annually.
Four Dozen Saudi Extrajudicial Executions
Stephen Lendman
Riyadh and Washington are close allies, partnering in each other’s high crimes - both countries notably supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups, used as US imperial foot soldiers.
Domestically, Riyadh’s human rights record is abominable. Fundamental freedoms don’t exist. Criticizing ruling authorities risks arrest, imprisonment or death.
On Saturday, the kingdom’s interior ministry said prominent Muslim cleric Nimr al-Nimr along with 46 others were executed on phony charges of terrorism - mostly by beheadings, several by firing squad, done inside prisons instead of public squares, Riyadh’s usual procedure.
Jewish Religions and The Prospect of Dissent
Gilad Atzmon
"The Jewish religion is a religion of Mitzvoth (commandments) and without this religious idiom, the Jewish religion doesn’t exist at all." Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz
While Islam and Christianity can be easily understood as belief systems, Judaism actually defies the notion of belief all together. Judaism is an obedience regulative system. The Judaic universe is ruled by ‘mitzvoth’ (commandment), a set of 613 precepts and directives ordered by God. In opposition to Christianity and Islam that build from spiritual and heavenly precepts in worship to a transcendental God, the Judaic subject subscribes to strict earthly and material observance. While the Islamo-Christian is wrapped in God’s loving and the spirituality of the sublime and divinity, the follower of Judaism is judged by his or her ability to adhere to hundreds of rigorous earthly orders.
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