RTTue, 31 Dec 2019 11:37 UTC
© REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani
Hashd al-Shaabi (paramilitary forces) fighters set fire to the U.S. Embassy wall to condemn air strikes on their bases, in Baghdad, Iraq December 31, 2019.
Dozens of Iraqi protesters furious over airstrikes that targeted Hezbollah positions
have forced their way into the US embassy compound in Baghdad. Tear gas and sounds of gunfire were reported at the scene.
The crowd was able to gain access to sections of the heavily-fortified Green Zone, smashing doors and security cameras on the wall surrounding the diplomatic building, according to the Associated Press. The agency said that there was a fire in one part of the compound, and that at least three US soldiers were spotted on the roof of the embassy.
Plumes of dark smoke could be seen rising from the compound,
as protesters waved Hezbollah flags and chanted "Down, down USA!", "Death to America" and "Death to Israel."
Comment: The 'protesters' in military fatigues with guns are standing around watching the burning. It looks like Iraqi military and therefore the government is tacitly approving.
Officially, however,
it is not. But what else can they do given that the country is held together by a coalition of militias, a swathe of which are Shia and thus natural allies of Iran, Hezbollah and the anti-ISIS government in Syria.
So when America blows up two dozen of their fighters taking on ISIS in the Syria border region, this is what results: the first real penetration of the Green Zone since 2003. The compound can resist mortars and car-bombs, but it withers under a wave of popular discontent.
How much did that facility cost US taxpayers again? Oh yeah, a billion to build, and another billion ANNUALLY to run... that's about $16 BILLION. Good job, Pompeo...
Now, will he be signalling his support for
these protests in Iraq,
as he did last month when he said "Lebanese and Iraqi protesters have the right to get rid of Iran's meddling"?
No chance!
© Reuters / Instagram / @IDASHOPE4STROKE
Tourists and locals attempt to flee brush fires in Mallacoota, Australia, December 31, 2019.
Thousands of people have been forced onto the beaches in Australia as massive bushfires hit popular holiday resort towns.
Holidaymakers have fled into the water as the blaze moved into the Victorian town of Mallacoota in New South Wales on Tuesday morning.
Wildfires are now burning across the country's two most-populated states in what has been described as "apocalyptic" scenes.
Two are now confirmed to have died with five others still missing and feared dead with "significant losses" to property.
Executive order implies that "Jewishness" is now a nationality
Dems: "Literally Hitler!"
The pandering by Donald Trump and those around him to Israel and to some conservative American Jews is apparently endless. Last Wednesday the president
signed an executive order that is
intended to address alleged anti-Semitism on college campuses by cutting off funds to those universities that do not prevent criticism of Israel. To provide a legal basis to defund, the administration is relying on title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which prohibits any discrimination based on race, color or national origin. Since the Act does not include religion,
Trump's order is declaring ipso facto that henceforth "Jewishness" is a nationality.
The executive order does not mention Israel by name, but it does state that its assumptions are based on "the non-legally binding
working definition of anti-Semitism adopted on May 26, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which states, 'Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities'; and (ii) the 'Contemporary Examples of Anti-Semitism' identified by the IHRA, to the extent that
any examples might be useful as evidence of discriminatory intent."
Comment: We would ordinarily agree with the author. However, given that things are as they are, and given how powerful the lobby has become, why keep standing up to it and losing every time? How about yielding instead, thereby giving it all the rope it needs...
So we say let them call their network a nationality. They do after all have a nation-state now. And, like their Western Christian counterparts, almost none of them are religious anymore.
If you think about it, this actually simplifies things. Judaism the religion is long dead. But Zionism, the secular replacement for that religion, is thriving. Whether or not most Jews globally consider themselves adherents of it, it is the only show in town for them.
So in that sense, yes, if you criticize 'Zionism', you're criticizing 'the Jewish nation', thus you're being a critic of Jews, thus 'anti-Semitic'.
The danger of course, which they're apparently oblivious to, or willing to risk, is that this expansion of censorship to all criticism of Jews further accentuates the division between Jews and every other people. When it was a religious movement, the Jewish ideology could to a better extent 'blend' and 'integrate among the nations'.
But now that it's a national project with a significant diaspora and (for all intents and purposes) explicit dual-national allegiance, it's highly visible and increases the odds of backlash - which is apparently underway in the form of a global wave of 'anti-Semitic attacks'.
Ultimately, it's reverse-Nazism. Instead of yellow Stars of David, Jews are getting highly-publicized special favors. Either way, Jews are set apart and thus exposed to retaliation from 'the herd'. This is NOT going to end well.
Donald Trump is in a painful bind.
The China-bashing traitors within his own party trying to pass themselves off as American patriots have done everything imaginable to destroy the one chance the President has to save America from the policies of economic and social decay which have mis-shaped the past 50 years of world history. Before breaking under the pressure to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act on November 27, Trump attempted desperately to push against the hard liners
stating a day earlier:
"I stand with Hong Kong, but I also stand with President Xi. He's a friend of mine, he's an incredible guy. We have to stand, but I'd like to see them work it out, OK? We have to see them work it out. I stand for Hong Kong, I stand for freedom, I stand for all those things we want to do. But we are also in the process of making the largest trade deal in history."
© Screen Shot
Calanais Stones were constructed with astrological phenomena.
New evidence of
a massive lightning strike at the centre of a hidden stone circle in the Outer Hebrides may help shed light on why these monuments were created thousands of years ago.
The Calanais Virtual Reconstruction Project, a joint venture led by the University of St Andrews with the Urras nan Tursachan and the University of Bradford, with funding from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, has uncovered
a potential link between ancient stone circles and the forces of nature.
While studying prehistoric Tursachan Chalanais, the main stone circle at Calanais on the Isle of Lewis, the project team surveyed nearby satellite sites to reveal evidence for lost circles buried beneath the peat.
One rarely-visited site surveyed, known as Site XI or Airigh na Beinne Bige, now consists of a single standing stone on an exposed hillside overlooking the great circle.
Comment: What an astonishing find.
Clearly, at least some of these stone circles - located all over the world - were machines or technologies of some sort....
This is getting really, really, really weird.
WikiLeaks has
published yet another set of leaked internal documents from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) adding even more material to
the mountain of evidence that
we've been lied to about an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria last year which resulted in airstrikes upon that nation from the US, UK and France.
This new WikiLeaks drop includes an email from the OPCW Chief of Cabinet Sebastien Braha (who is
reportedly so detested by organisation inspectors that they code named him "Voldemort") throwing a fit over the
Ian Henderson Engineering Assessment which found that
the Douma incident was likely a staged event.
Braha is seen ordering OPCW staff to "remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever" from the organisation's secure registry.
Dom Calicchio
Fox NewsSun, 29 Dec 2019 13:30 UTC
© AP
Police work the scene of the stabbings that took place inside the home of a rabbi in Monsey, New York, on Saturday
A frightening attack at a Hanukkah celebration in the home of a rabbi in a suburb north of New York City on Saturday night placed the entire New York region on edge and had public officials vowing to stop the violence.
The assault in Monsey, N.Y. -- by
a machete-wielding suspect who drove away but whom authorities believe was the man they apprehended later --
continued a string of incidents in recent weeks that have included beatings of Jewish people on the streets of New York City and a massacre at a kosher grocery store in nearby Jersey City, N.J.
Five people were wounded at what public records say was
the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, who leads a nearby synagogue. Soon after the attack, video posted on social media showed emergency responders frantically transporting victims on gurneys to waiting ambulances.
Comment: No one should ever be attacked because of their faith, especially while peacefully celebrating a religious holiday. The recent epidemic of "anti-semitic attacks" makes us wonder, however, what's really going on.
Cui bono?
In an Op-ed today in
The Jerusalem Post, titled
Inconvenient antisemitism: The daily attacks on Jews in New York, Seth Frantzman ends with:
The result is a multi-layered cake of excuses and fear at confronting a wider range of perpetrators of antisemitism in New York. If violent antisemitism that sees Jews controlling the police and being responsible for slavery and white supremacy, is growing in the African American community in America then confronting it requires asking a minority community that is also a victim to be self-critical. In the US there tends to be pass for minority groups who are homophobic or racist. Society can only confront one kind of racism. This is largely because those driving the agenda of confronting racism either have blinders on regarding all forms of racism and antisemitism or are unaware of it because they don't conduct surveys and polls regarding the prevalence of antisemitism in places like Brooklyn. When the perpetrators and victims do not fit a convenient model, it is easier to just excuse the attacks or see them as random. Unfortunately, in the US these attacks are not random, and there is rising violent antisemitism coming from a broad spectrum of communities, including white supremacists and from African Americans. Confronting it requires the same broad spectrum to step up the struggle.
Does it sound like some Jewish people are vying for THE minority position among all minorities?
UPDATE 21:00 CET
Governor Cuomo has called the attack
"an act of domestic terrorism" fueled by intolerance:
"This is intolerance meets ignorance meets illegality," Cuomo told reporters on Sunday, calling the attack the 13th incidence of anti-Semitism in recent weeks. "This is violence spurred by hate, it is mass violence, and I consider it an act of domestic terrorism."
Police have arrested the alleged perpetrator, though his possible terrorist motives are unknown. The man was arrested without struggle in Harlem shortly after midnight.
The attack took place during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, as Rabbi Rottenberg was hosting around 100 people in his home for the lighting of the candle marking the seventh night of the holiday. The rabbi's home is located in Rockland County, which has the highest per-capita population of Jews of any US county.
The New York Police Department's counterterrorism unit said it is "closely monitoring" the incident. Prior to the attack, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the NYPD would step up patrols in Jewish neighborhoods of New York City, citing a string of recent anti-Semitic attacks.
An eyewitness
describes what he saw go down at the rabbi's house:
Witness Aron Kohn described the moment the suspect walked into the Rabbi's residence and began attacking with a knife he described as almost as big as "a broomstick."
"I saw him walking in by the door. I asked who was coming in in the middle of the night with an umbrella. While I was saying that, he pulled it out from the thing and he started to run into the big room, which was on the left side. And I had thrown tables and chairs, that he should get out of here. And the injured guy, he was bleeding here, bleeding in his hand, all over," Kohn said. "I ran into the other room to save my life. I saw him running this way, so I ran the other way to save my life. He said something but I could not understand what he said. I saw him pull out the knife from the holder, the case."
Again, it's all very vague.
In France, one small community of Jews in the country's northeast have been targeted dozens of times in the last year. Despite having the full force of the state on their side, authorities there still have ZERO leads...
42 acts of vandalism in 1.5 years: Jewish cemeteries are being systematically desecrated in Alsace, France, but not a SINGLE arrest has been made
The suspect's name and image, by the way:
Update 22:30 CET
The above suspect, Grafton Thomas, is also now, retrospectively,
a suspect in a 'stab-a-Jew-and-run' incident in the same town of Monsey, NY, on 20 November this year (that's the earlier incident we comment on above, the one where a cash reward was offered for info).
Nebojsa Malic
RTFri, 27 Dec 2019 20:38 UTC
© 1Avangard liftoff, Sputnik/Russian Defense Ministry
Avangard liftoff
Moscow's deployment of 'Avangard' hypersonic warheads means the US missile defense installations in Europe are now obsolete - and that Washington would have to spend a lot of money it doesn't have in order to catch up.
Video released by the Russian defense ministry on Friday shows the hypersonic glider warheads being loaded onto silo-based missiles. For now, the Avangards will be mounted on the UR-100N (or SS-19 Stiletto, as NATO calls them) ballistic missiles, until the RS-28 Sarmat is ready to enter service.
Hypersonic weapons fly far faster than the speed of sound. Avangard is
capable of reaching Mach 27 without losing control or disintegrating under heat and pressure. This means that the weapon can outmaneuver any defenses on its approach phase, rendering it
"absolutely invulnerable to any air or missile defense system," in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"We don't have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us," is how
General John Hyten, then head of the US Strategic Command, put it to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2018, shortly after Putin confirmed the existence of Avangard and several other weapons.
RTSat, 28 Dec 2019 01:47 UTC
© Reuters / Anton Vaganov
Workers are seen at the construction site of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, near the town of Kingisepp, Leningrad region, Russia, on June 5, 2019
.
In a
document called 'fact sheet' on the US opposition to Nord Stream 2, the State Department demands that all related parties "immediately cease construction-related activity" in a "good-faith wind-down,"
adding that those who would lack this good faith, would face sanctions.
Further in the text, it clarifies that the contractors have 30 days to comply with America's demands, warning that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will identify and reveal all "violators" to the US Congress in about two months.
Comment: Never did we imagine we'd ever see such words in print!
Astonishing times we live in.
Avner Cohen and William Burr
HaaretzFri, 03 May 2019 11:30 UTC
© DPA / AFP
Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. Their meeting in May 1961 was as tetchy as their subsequent communication regarding Israel's nukes
Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, the leaders of the United States and Israel - President John F. Kennedy and Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol - were engaged in
a high-stakes battle of wills over Israel's nuclear program. The tensions were invisible to the publics of both countries, and only a few senior officials, on both sides of the ocean, were aware of the severity of the situation.
In Israel, those in the know saw the situation as a real crisis, as a former high-level science adviser, Prof. Yuval Ne'eman, told one of us (Avner Cohen) 25 years ago. Ne'eman recalled that Eshkol, Ben-Gurion's successor, and his associates
saw Kennedy as presenting Israel with a real ultimatum. There was even one senior Israeli official, Ne'eman told me, the former Israel Air Force commander Maj. Gen. (res.) Dan Tolkowsky, who
seriously entertained the fear that Kennedy might send U.S. airborne troops to Dimona, the home of
Israel's nuclear complex.
Comment: The authors appear not to have realized it, but the publication this year of these documents revealing the secret US-Israeli war over nukes - right up to JFK's sudden demise in November 1963 - puts Israel squarely in the frame for his assassination.
They had motive - not the only motive, but certainly a strong one - and, through their double agent James Jesus Angleton in the CIA's counter-intelligence unit, they had the means to stage a palace coup...
Comment: The 'protesters' in military fatigues with guns are standing around watching the burning. It looks like Iraqi military and therefore the government is tacitly approving.
Officially, however, it is not. But what else can they do given that the country is held together by a coalition of militias, a swathe of which are Shia and thus natural allies of Iran, Hezbollah and the anti-ISIS government in Syria.
So when America blows up two dozen of their fighters taking on ISIS in the Syria border region, this is what results: the first real penetration of the Green Zone since 2003. The compound can resist mortars and car-bombs, but it withers under a wave of popular discontent.
How much did that facility cost US taxpayers again? Oh yeah, a billion to build, and another billion ANNUALLY to run... that's about $16 BILLION. Good job, Pompeo...
Now, will he be signalling his support for these protests in Iraq, as he did last month when he said "Lebanese and Iraqi protesters have the right to get rid of Iran's meddling"?
No chance!