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Best of the Web: 'Why not give Israel North & South Carolina?' Syrian envoy asks US at UN

North Carolina, U.S.
© REUTERS/Charles MostollerFILE PHOTO: An aerial view on a housing complex in North Carolina, U.S.
Syria's UN ambassador has suggested the US hand "a couple" of its own states over to Israel instead of flouting international law and selling others' land for favors with the Israeli lobby, like it did with the Golan Heights.

Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari offered a stark rebuke to the US-backed Israeli claim to the occupied Golan Heights at the UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday. Jaafari said the Trump administration does the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the UN to curry favor with the powerful Israeli lobby in the US.

In a remark that elicited a chuckle and a head-shake from his Israeli counterpart, Jaafari suggested that Washington bargain away land that is actually its to give.
You can give them North and South Carolina, for example, why not? South Carolina is a great piece of land... So, give Israel a couple of states if this administration really wants to have Israeli support...

Comment: Too much? How about just New York City and Los Angeles?

All this declaring of foreign leaders, foreign capitals and foreign borders is making the US a global laughing stock.


Mr. Potato

Best of the Web: Conspiracy theories belong to MSM: Degenerate gamblers tripling down on Russiagate lunacy

rachel maddow
After news broke that Robert Mueller had turned in his final report without recommending any further indictments, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow began frantically retweeting blue-checkmarked Twitter pundits who claimed that since nobody knows the contents of the report yet, the news that the number of Americans indicted for conspiring with the Russian government is set at zero doesn't matter.

rachel maddow tweets

Colosseum

Best of the Web: Paul Joseph Watson: The Collapse of Western Civilization

collapse
All around us the signs may be seen. And are accelerating. Watch Paul Joseph Watson as he explains why almost every factor that precedes the collapse of great civilizations has been met by the West.


Comment: See also: Depravity, frivolity, and dissent: The tell-tale signs of the end of an empire


Vader

Flashback Best of the Web: Parenti: NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 wrapped up 'rational destruction' of Yugoslavia

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USA, Inc.
In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda — not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching "humanitarian bombings" against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the Guatemalan military's systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators — who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.

Why then did U.S. leaders wage an unrestrainedly murderous assault upon Yugoslavia?

Comment: See also: The Weight of Chains: US/NATO Destruction of Yugoslavia (Documentary)


Candle

Best of the Web: 20 years ago today, NATO began bombing a European country - 'This is why we will never join NATO,' says Serbian Defense Minister

An anti-NATO protester man waves a flag in downtown Belgrade
© AFP / ALEXA STANKOVIC
Serbia will never be part of NATO, even if it is the only non-member European country, the country's defense minister, Aleksandar Vulin, said during anniversary events of the 1999 NATO bombing of former Yugoslavia.

Vulin said on Saturday that Belgrade has chosen to be militarily neutral at all times.

"We made this choice because we were bombed, but first of all because we will never do to other nations what they have done to us."

On March 24, Serbia marks 20 years since the 1999 NATO bombing that saw hundreds of civilians killed and many more injured. Countless civilian structures across the country were left in ruins after the airstrikes.

"We won't be in NATO, I made it clear speaking to [Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg," Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said in a sit-down interview with Russia's Channel 1 on March 22. Serbia, which was the heartland of former Yugoslavia, "isn't something that you can break down or destroy," he said.

"Yes, we are ready to forgive but we will never forget."

Comment: The 78-day illegal bombing campaign against Yugoslavia had no UN support. 15 tons of depleted uranium was used. The psychos called it Operation Noble Anvil, killed over 2,500 civilians, and devastated the country's highly developed civilian infrastructure.

The event is, arguably, what shocked Russia out of its slumber regarding Western intentions. By the end of the year, Putin was in power.

Watch the RT documentary 'Hellbent: 78 Days of Bombing Yugoslavia' to learn more.


Edit March 2024, the above video is no longer available in all countries. An article on RT that introduced the video has:
23 Mar, 2019 17:24 Hellbent: 78 Days of Bombing Yugoslavia
This RT America special presentation commemorates the 20th anniversary of NATO's 78 day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. It examines the lead up to the operation, the nearly 3 months of relentless attacks by NATO and the aftermath 20 years down the road. The special also explores the idea that the NATO alliance had planned the bombing campaign long before any accusations of wrongdoing against Yugoslavia. RT America's Alex Mihailovich was there when the bombing began. He revisits Serbia now to see how the scars of war still haunt this part of the world.
Another article:
23 Mar, 2019 13:42 How NATO bombed Serbs into submission and left toxic legacy behind (DOCUMENTARY)
Two decades ago, NATO started its 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. RT America's Alex Mihailovich revisits the Balkans to recall how the intervention happened and see the harm the people in the Balkans still suffer from.

The 1999 NATO operation was the culmination of Yugoslavia's decade of bloody dissolution, which split the entire region along ethnic and religious lines. Mihailovich was there when the cruise missiles started hitting Novi Sad and other major cities. Touted as a surgical humanitarian intervention to stop the violence in Kosovo, in reality, Operation Allied Force killed more civilians than troops and devastated civilian infrastructure of the nation.

It had plenty of unintended consequences too, from hitting a civilian train, a marketplace and the Chinese Embassy, to polluting the land with depleted uranium. The toxic substance is used for armor-piercing munitions and is believed to be the cause of a spike of cancer cases today.

The political legacy is arguably as toxic as the medical. Kosovo, the area split with the help of NATO battering, remains unrecognized by plenty of nations and turned out to be a bountiful recruiting ground for jihadist groups like Islamic State. And ethnic divisions in the Balkans don't seem any less severe.



Eye 1

Best of the Web: New Zealand's memory hole: Shaping the mosque shootings into yet another 'lone gunman' story

new zealand police mosque shooting
© Associated PressNew Zealand police have told Muslims to stay away from mosques
Early news reports suggested 2 mosque shooters; IEDs strapped to multiple vehicles; suspect's strange travel history

The official narrative being pushed in the mainstream press on the tragic shootings at two crowded mosques in New Zealand is that 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant murdered 50 people and injured scores of others at the time of this report by himself. However, there are more questions than answers regarding the attack.

For instance, New Zealand authorities reported that after the incident four suspects were taken into custody - three men and a woman. Adding that they had found and neutralized several IEDs (improvised explosive devices) on the vehicles stopped during the arrests.

MSN even wrote the IEDs were "attached to the attackers' vehicles," which was cited by Associated Press at the top of the article.

Comment:


Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: 'World-Low': 9% of Ukrainians have confidence in Government - Gallup poll

poroshenko
In the lead-up to the presidential election on March 31, Ukrainians go to the polls with less faith in their government than is true for any other electorate in the world. Just 9% of residents have confidence in the national government, the lowest confidence level in the world for the second straight year. This is far below the regional median for former Soviet states (48%) as well as the global average (56%) in 2018.

Ukrainians have had little to feel confident about over the past decade. Incumbent President Petro Poroshenko's predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was involved in a number of scandals and was ousted after the Maidan revolution in 2014. Yanukovych fled to Russia because he is wanted for high treason by the Ukrainian courts. During his presidency, confidence in national government was no higher than 24%.

Early in Poroshenko's presidency, there were signs that the then-new president was starting to rebuild Ukrainians' shaky trust in their leadership -- 24% were confident in their government and 48% approved of Poroshenko's job performance. However, these hopes quickly faded as many Ukrainians saw the government failing to deliver on what protesters had demanded during the Maidan revolution. Since 2015, confidence has been no higher than 14%.


Comment: The 'Maidan revolution' was in fact another US-backed coup, which included the Odessa and Mariupol massacres, and Ukraine has in a state of collapse ever since.


Comment: Ukraine is falling apart, and fast - even the once 'loyal' neo-Nazi far right (civilian and military) are losing faith in the demented leadership: Far-right protesting military corruption clash with police in Ukraine, 'You have 7 days!' - UPDATE

Below are just a few of the damning stories relating to Ukraine's dire situation from the last few months:


Cardboard Box

Best of the Web: Tucker Carlson: No American citizen has been charged with Russian collusion as per Mueller Report

Mueller
At long last what half the country already knew for the past two years is now made "official" with submission of the Mueller Report to Attorney General Barr. The spurious, vindictive, relentless and hysterical Mueller investigation - designed to politically destroy President Donald Trump and simultaneously demonize Russia is now at an end. But not without implanting seeds of distrust in the minds of many Americans, and ruining the lives of a few individuals close to Trump first.

Watch Tucker Carlson come as close to an appropriate and articulate expression of righteous indignation that anyone in the mainstream media is going to give:


Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: Macron's dangerous escalation: 5,000 soldiers to enforce Yellow Vest protest bans in central Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux

Yellow Vest protest
© Agence France-PresseProtesters walk by burning cars during clashes with riot police on the sideline of a protest of Gilets jaunes against rising oil prices and living costs,
If the black smoke over the Paris skyline and charred cars and buildings along the Champs-Elysees which have become characteristic of France's increasingly violent Yellow Vest protests over the past months weren't alarming enough, things look to get much worse as the government prepares to escalate.

In an effort to clamp down on the unraveling security situation, which has lately seen banks and residential buildings torched, and luxury stores and restaurants vandalized and destroyed, the French authorities have announced the deployment of anti-terrorism military forces in order to protect and secure public buildings.


Comment: RT reports that "anyone found violating the ban faces a fine of up to €135." This follows an earlier announcement by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe of "a ban on the protests at the Champs-Elysées, the Capitole in Toulouse and the Pey-Berland plaza in Bordeaux. "

Élie Tenenbaum, researcher and defense specialist with the Institut Francais de Relations Internationale, told France 24, "The last time the State requisitioned the army for policing operations was in 1947-1948."

And so the French government brings the situation to within one gunshot of a full-blown revolution.

The Yellow Vest movement began as peaceful demonstrations against rapacious government policies. It is Macron's actions that have steadily ramped up the violence.

As we have pointed out repeatedly over the last two decades, the troops deployed to 'protect streets from terrorism' would one day be seamlessly deployed to protect the streets (the political class really) from people...

Here is a chronology of the protests and the ensuing crackdowns:

Inside the Yellow Vests: What the Western media won't tell you


Hardhat

Best of the Web: Inside the Yellow Vests: What the Western media won't tell you

Gilet Juanes 1
Disclaimer: if you think that Soros/Russia/America/Illuminati is behind the Yellow Vests or some other batsh*t nonsense, then please stop here. This article isn't for you. Cat videos on YouTube are maybe more appropriate.

While the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests actually began on 17.11.18, I think most are aware that frustration with the government has been building for many, many years. Sarkozy certainly played a big role in this. Deep-rooted contractions have been left unaddressed while offshore accounts were filled up. Without wanting to dedicate a lot of space to the details of each French government since the last massive riots in 1968, I think it is easier to proceed from the fact that France has been essentially occupied by America for decades. For me personally, this helps to explain a lot.

In Russia there is the word "народ". The closest translation of this into English is "nation", but actually it doesn't really convey the sense. We're talking about fraternal relations amongst peoples that are indistinguishable from kindred ones. And it's understandable why this concept doesn't exist in the West. Or at least, I've never seen it. When America landed on Omaha beach in 1944 it sure didn't have the best interests of France at heart. And the quick formation of NATO in 1949 testifies to this. America succeeded to create a loyal bloc in synchronisation with the USSR's withdrawal from Europe (by the way, talk about "Soviet occupation" is vulgar NATO propaganda). Normandy was bombarded by US aviation in an act of national subjugation. This is also psychological warfare.

Comment: Excellent reporting. This 'uprising' has it's roots in decades of systemic oppression, the slow, subtle kind that we see becoming ever more fascist all throughout the West. People around the word would do well to take a page from the Yellow Vests and find some solidarity with each other and stand against the slow destruction our their lives and erosion of their freedoms by the elite. See also: