Once again Israel is very much in the news these days, especially after its new bout of aerial bombardment of Gaza.

As if under a knee-jerking hypnotic trance since these raids began in early July, the Western media again went into "poor-little-Israel-is-only-defending-itself" mode.

Anyone daring to say otherwise will feel the full impact of the "A" word: "anti-Semitism!" That dreaded insult is unleashed like a bolt from Zion's "Olympus" upon all who criticize Israel!

Jews are a very tiny group of people: just under 16 million worldwide in a planet where over 7 billion people live and toil. That's a mere 0.2 percent of the global population; the other 99.8 percent of mankind is a wide assortment of ethnic and religious groups.

That in our day and age any man, woman or child should be attacked or harassed on account of race, creed, nationality, ideology, social or physical characteristics is completely unacceptable. As I mentioned earlier, the world needs to come to grips with the age-old tragedy of Jews being so often discriminated and persecuted.

However, continuously crying "Anti-Semitism!" to stifle all criticism of Israel's seventy years of genocidal attacks on the Palestinians does not and should not work anymore.

"In the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate. In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility." - Author Neil Postman

Caught up in the uproar over this year's latest hullabaloo - militarized police in Ferguson, tanks on Main Street and ISIS - Americans have not only largely forgotten last year's hullabaloo over the NSA and government surveillance but are generally foggy about everything that has happened in between.

Then again, so much has happened in the year since Edward Snowden first appeared on the national scene that it's understandable if the average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the "events," manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the reality of the American police state.

This is not to say that many of these events are not critical or important. However, when we're being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it's difficult to stay focused on one thing - namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law - and the powers-that-be understand this.

[Editor's note: This is possibly the best video presentation on the truth behind 'ISIS/IS' available. Spread it far and wide.]

The Islamic militant group ISIS, formerly known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and recently rebranded as the so called Islamic State, is the stuff of nightmares. They are ruthless, fanatical, killers, on a mission, and that mission is to wipe out anyone and everyone, from any religion or belief system and to impose Shari'ah law. The mass executions, beheadings and even crucifixions that they are committing as they work towards this goal are flaunted like badges of pride, video taped and uploaded for the whole world to see. This is the new face of evil.

Would it interest you to know who helped these psychopaths rise to power? Would it interest you to know who armed them, funded them and trained them? Would it interest you to know why?

The authors of this NYT piece, Ukraine Reports Russian Invasion on a New Front, are not really convincing when presenting these reports by the Ukrainian government as truthful:

The latest incursion, which Ukraine's military said included five armored personnel carriers, was at least the third movement of troops and weapons from Russia across the southeast part of the border this week, further blunting the momentum Ukrainian forces have made in weakening the insurgents in their redoubts of Donetsk and Luhansk farther north. Evidence of a possible turn was seen in the panicky retreat of Ukrainian soldiers on Tuesday from a force they said had come over the Russian border.
...
Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military in Kiev, said the Russian armored column entered the town of Amvrosiyivka, south of Donetsk, expanding what Western and Ukrainian officials have described as one of the main fronts in a multipronged counteroffensive directed by Russia.

The "momentum" the Ukrainian troops had was never as big as the Ukrainian government had claimed. A few motorized brigades ran through open territory held by few insurgents and when coming to a halt at their primary target were immediately cut off and surrounded. Their morale is bad, their equipment old, ammunition is low and the entire aim of their campaign is dubious. Now even a few weak counterattacks, the "counteroffensive", have them on the run.

The road to the Minsk summit this past Tuesday began to be paved when German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked to ARD public TV after her brief visit to Kiev on Saturday.

Merkel emphasized, "A solution must be found to the Ukraine crisis that does not hurt Russia."

She added that "There must be dialogue. There can only be a political solution. There won't be a military solution to this conflict."

Merkel talked about "decentralization" of Ukraine, a definitive deal on gas prices, Ukraine-Russia trade, and even hinted Ukraine is free to join the Russia-promoted Eurasian Union (the EU would never make a "huge conflict" out of it). Exit sanctions; enter sound proposals.

She could not have been more explicit; "We [Germany] want to have good trade relations with Russia as well. We want reasonable relations with Russia. We are depending on one another and there are so many other conflicts in the world where we should work together, so I hope we can make progress".

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2011, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote "mutual response," collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent "Occupy" movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, "Law enforcement agencies responding to...Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork."

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in "counter-terror" operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police - whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media - reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

America's spanker-in-chief is at it again - threatening to bomb Syria owing to the uncivilized actions of its inhabitants. And when it comes to Syria, Washington avers that there are punishable malefactors virtually everywhere within its borders.

Exactly one year ago Obama proposed to take Bashar Al Assad to the woodshed because he had allegedly unleashed a vicious chemical attack on his own citizens. That was all pretext, of course, because even the CIA refused to sign-off on the flimsy case for Assad's culpability at the time - -a reluctance corroborated since then by the considerable evidence that hundreds of Syrian civilians were murdered during a false flag operation staged by the rebels with help from Turkey. The aim of the rebels, of course, was to activate American tomahawk missiles and bombers in behalf of "regime change", which was also the stated goal of the Obama Administration.

Now the White House is threatening to bomb Syria again, but this time its "regime change" objective has been expanded to include both sides! In 12 short months what had been the allegedly heroic Sunni opposition to the "brutal rule" of the Assad/Alawite minority has transmuted into the "greatest terrorist threat ever", according to the Secretary of Defense.

So Obama has already unleashed the drones and surveillance apparatus to identify targets of attack that will help bring down a regime in northern and eastern Syria - the so-called Islamic State - which did not even exist a year ago. And a regime that is now armed to the teeth with America's own latest and greatest weaponry as previously supplied to the disintegrated Iraqi army and the Syrian rebels trained by the CIA in Jordan.

Alexander V. Zakharchenko: As you all know, a week ago we announced our plan to attack. We started it yesterday. Until yesterday we have been preparing for the attack, examining trophy equipment, arming the crews, and testing communication between different military formations.

I can now proudly announce that we formed 2 tank battalions, 2 full artillery brigades, 2 Grad divisions, 1 mechanized infantry battalion, 3 infantry brigades and a special purpose assault airborne brigade. All these units have now received Army numbers. The communication system has been regularized and 2 field hospitals and 1 maintenance brigade have been formed.

We have begun testing all these units in battle. Yesterday we began an attack on the Amvrosiyivka enemy group. According to our data, in the course of the offensive, the enemy lost about 45 units of military equipment, we captured 14 units of military equipment, and about 1,200 people were killed and wounded.

There are two cauldrons at the moment, in Amvrosiyivka and Starobeshevskaia. We started to advance at 4 a.m. on Elenovka, where the fighting is still going on. 2/3 of Elenovka is under our control. We hope to clean up these areas before nightfall. However, the offensive will not end at that. We will continue until we free all populated areas in the Donetsk National Republic. The army is ready and we have the support of the people. There will be more and more prisoners.

A funny thing happened on the way to 500 years of Western Empire and colonialism. Russia just boycotted Eurangloland's (The EU, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) food and agricultural products, which in itself is very telling about ongoing trends. But there's more. The oppressed are biting back. Until recently, the ongoing reaction of the world's non-Eurangloland governments to Russia's stand (those which represent the 85% of our planet's people), would have been unimaginable. So, sit back and enjoy the show.

In all fairness to this proud, global majority, you must add the peoples of Japan and South Korea to Eurangloland's empire. They are militarily occupied, supine satraps to the Princes of Power in Washington. Groveling like dogs, they actually take their barking orders from the West seriously. Throw in a few more countries that cower at the feet of Western Empire and we can say that about 20% of the world's people rule the remaining 80%, not much differently than the pharaohs did over their subjects and slaves in Ancient Egypt. The Pareto principle applies here too. This secondary list of client states waxes and wanes, depending on how recently the CIA/MI6/DGSE deep state has installed a whore government in their puppet, local halls of power, or as in the Philippines recently, which prostrated itself to America's Worldwide Wehrmacht. Ukraine is the most recent prom slut for Western servitude and so far, Venezuela is holding out admirably against the West's internal efforts at regime change.

Kudos to Russia for its genius to pick ag products as a punch in the solar plexus of power. As Deena Stryker recently pointed out in a recent article,

Anyone who has witnessed European farmers drive their tractors into the center of Brussels and dump crops in front of EU headquarters, knows the hold they have on legislators. Much of European agriculture takes place on family farms and the EU has had to create special rules and subsidies to keep its food producers happy.

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the king's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
The Doors, The End

The killer awoke before dawn. He put his American desert boots on. He took a knife from the ancient gallery. And he walked on down the hall - bathed in desert sunlight.

The killer spoke with a British accent (London's East End?) Father (Saud), I want to kill you. Mother (Langley?) I want to...

yeeeaaahh, c'mon!

Then the sartorially composed Man in Black beheaded American photojournalist James Foley.

This is not the end, beautiful friend. It's just a new beginning in the never-ending Global War on Terror. Now starring Papa Saud's brand new bag - The Caliph and his goons. This is the way Shock and Awe morphs into "Assad must go" morphs into Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, morphs into The Caliph's Black Britannia goon responding to "humanitarian" bombing. I'm my own baby now. Watch me work. Bring it on.

Choice scenery. Good sound and vision production values. Careful editing. No unnecessary gore. No blood splattering. No Allahu Akbar shrieks. "A Message to America", indeed - but most of all a message to the Ummah. As in we're the Men in Black badasses. We run The Caliphate. We're no mere death cult; we're winners. And we take no prisoners.

And why did Islamic State, formerly ISIS, become winners? Because the "West" regimented, schooled, trained, logistically helped and weaponized most of IS's Takfiri goons with a mission at hand: to destroy Syria. The "West" lauded them as "Syrian rebels". Freedom fighters.

Washington even promoted Jabhat al-Nusra (the official al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, and a "terrorist organization", according to the State Department) as "good" jihadis, as well as the preferred Saudi combo, the Islamic Front.

No wonder after photojournalist James Foley was kidnapped in November 2012 the Washington-sanctioned version was that he was being kept by "Assad must go" forces in a prison near Damascus.