And now we are being warned of an imminent terror strike in Belgium.
The announcement by the Crisis Centre of the Belgian Interior Ministry is advising the public to avoid places where large groups gather -- such as concerts, sporting events, airports and train stations -- and comply with security checks. The rest of the nation will maintain its current terror level.Why is ISIS doing this? The group split from Al Qaeda over the very issue of mounting operations in western countries: ISIS insisted that their warriors should stay home and concentrate on establishing a caliphate in Syria. Why would ISIS mount terror attacks in Europe now? What can be gained from striking Belgium of all nations?
If people take the terror alert seriously, Brussels will be "shut down tomorrow," CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said.
"It suggests they have something specific and credible at the intelligence front pointing them in the direction that there may be a terrorist plot in the works," he said. "It also suggests they don't have a handle on it, that they don't know where these plotters are or where they're coming from."
So far, the only sensible suggestion has been that ISIS/Al Qaeda hopes to foment an anti-Muslim reaction which would radicalize young Muslims and cause the jihadist ranks to swell. If so, conservatives in both the United States and Europe have performed their roles so well they might as well be on the ISIS payroll.
If you don't believe that the American right hopes to aid the terrorists, let me ask you one question: Why are so many politicians calling for a no fly zone over Syria?
ISIS has no air force. The people attacking ISIS have total control of the air. Why would we want to stop Russia and Syria from destroying ISIS encampments?
Why did John McCain insist that we should supply the jihadis with Stinger missiles? Why would we want to deprive the anti-ISIS forces of their great advantage?
The "no fly zone" makes sense only if we posit that the secret goal of the neocons is not to stop ISIS but to help them.
How else can you explain the wimpitude of our airstrikes against ISIS in Syria? Our air campaign -- grandly titled Operation Tidal Wave II -- is pure theater.
Moon of Alabama proves the point in an important piece which demonstrates that PBS used footage of a Russian strike against the jihadis to illustrate a story about our alleged efforts.
U.S. media can no agree with itself if Russia is giving ISIS an airforce or if Russia pounds ISIS with the biggest bomber raid in decades. Such confusion occurs when propaganda fantasies collide with the observable reality.
The U.S. military recently claimed to have hit Islamic State oil tankers in Syria. This only after Putin embarrassed Obama at the G-20 meeting in Turkey. Putin showed satellite pictures of ridiculous long tanker lines waiting for days and weeks to load oil from the Islamic State without any U.S. interference.(A similarly mislabeled piece of footage was broadcast during the American invasion of Baghdad. I can discuss this at greater length in another post.)
The U.S. then claimed to have hit 116 oil tankers while the Russian air force claims to have hit 500. But there is an important difference between these claims. The Russians provided videos showing how their airstrikes hit at least two different very large oil tanker assemblies with hundreds of tankers in each. They also provided video of several hits on oil storage sites and refinery infrastructure.
I have found no video of U.S. hits on Islamic State oil tanker assemblies.
The U.S. PBS NewsHour did not find any either.
In their TV report yesterday about Islamic State financing and the claimed U.S. hits on oil trucks they used the videos Russia provided without revealing the source. You can see the Russian videos played within an interview with a U.S. military spokesperson at 2:22 min.
The U.S. military spokesperson speaks on camera about U.S. airforce hits against the Islamic State. The video cuts to footage taken by Russian airplanes hitting oil tanks and then trucks. The voice-over while showing the Russian video with the Russians blowing up trucks says: "For the first time the U.S. is attacking oil delivery trucks." The video then cuts back to the U.S. military spokesperson.
At no point is the Russian campaign mentioned or the source of the footage revealed.
Propaganda and reality also collide in the larger U.S. policy on Syria. President Obama claims that the "overwhelming majority of people in Syria" want the Syrian President Assad to leave. But independent British polling in Syria found (pdf) that a strong plurality of Syrians prefers him as president over any of the available alternatives.You will never see our mainstream press refer to Assad as the elected leader of his country, although observers from other nations found the 2014 Syrian vote to be free, fair and transparent.
Bottom line: America isn't fighting ISIS because America made ISIS.
The superb "Reality Check" video embedded above compelling evidence that the west intentionally instigated a jihadist insurrection in Syria. The paternity test proves that Uncle Sam is the daddy.
This video poses a key question: Why should we believe any politician (right or left) who blathers on about the need to combat ISIS if said pol isn't honest enough to admit our role in manufacturing the problem?
Justin King provides additional background here:
It started in 2006 when the US decided it wanted to oust Syrian President Assad and started laying the ground work. This was proven by leaked Saudi Arabian intelligence cables hosted on Wikileaks.
The same year, the Islamic State was just a half-baked insurgent group in Iraq. The group would then migrate to Syria, where it was reinforced by battalions of defecting Free Syrian Army troops who were trained by the United States. Many of those claimed to have ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. The Islamic State truly became a child of the United States.
In 2009, the United States began secretly funding opposition groups within Syria and even provided $6 million to Barada TV, a UK-based TV channel, to produce propaganda to support “regime change” inside Syria.
Slowly but surely, the US and its allies put this plan into effect until in March of 2011 spontaneous demonstrations popped up in Syria demanding Assad step down. Of course, Huffington Post UK would later point out that these demonstrations weren’t spontaneous at all. They were orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Throughout this time the West has tried various methods of justifying an invasion. There were claims of chemical weapon attacks perpetrated by Assad, but the only proof offered was the analysis that the weapons might have originated from the Syrian military’s storerooms. The average American was smart enough to realize that it’s a civil war and that the weapons of all sides came from the Syrian military, except of those “accidentally” dropped to Islamic State forces by the United States. The chemical weapons claim disappeared when the Kurds were hit by chemical weapons. The Kurds were fighting the Islamic State, not Assad. There were scores of unsuccessful airstrikes launched by the West. They accomplished nothing, and the Islamic State continued to destabilize Assad. NATO allies openly attacked those fighting the Islamic State.The west's war against ISIS is pure fabrication -- an obvious lie. Why, then do so many believe in this bunk?
The average American is simply too stupid to understand that the Islamic State is Assad’s enemy. The West has successfully sold people on the idea that removing Assad is somehow benefiting the fight against the Islamic State. And people cheer.
Recap: The United States planted the seeds of revolt through propaganda, led the demonstrations against Assad, helped arm and train the Islamic State, repeatedly pushed a false narrative to gain a pretext to invade, denied proper air support to those fighting the Islamic State, and will now capitalize on the murders committed by the Islamic State to achieve its goal of ousting Assad.
7 comments:
If I'm not mistaken, the NDAA repealed as quaint any existing prohibitions against the military focusing its formidable psy-ops capabilities on the domestic population. In other words, every byte of officially-sanctioned "news" we receive in this country might well be distorted to advance a wartime agenda. Everything we hear, from barrel bombs to claims of Russians bombing hospitals, could likely be scripted to maximize support for an otherwise brutal and sinister agenda.
Just a thought.
Such Cutting Edge Journalism, now go pick up your award from the very media entities that are pushing the U.S. lies.
Stay off the streets, citizens. Compliance will be rewarded.
Nothing is going to happen in Belgium, it's just fearmongering.
Operation Tidal Wave the first, incidentally, was a disaster.
Could Belgium be a target due to the location of Nato headquarters in Brussels?
"Average people" shouldn't be casually derided as "stupid", when the process and effect of information dissemination is rather complex. The mainstream media, like the political structure, is part of consensus reality and therefore gets the benefit of the doubt. That the media lies or the political structure is hopelessly corrupt challenges consensus reality, and acceptance or true understanding of this requires a radical shift in perception. Most people are unprepared for such a shift, as it requires a re-ordering of largely unconscious thought patterns and something of an effort. Many people are lazy or indifferent rather than stupid.
ISIS is and was a psy-op. The roll-out of the shiny new trucks was accompanied by a string of professionally produced atrocity videos uploaded directly to SITE and then widely disseminated by the MSM. Accompanying this was an orchestrated reaction across the Western political establishment, labelling ISIS as the greatest and most horrific threat ever, which required the re-positioning of NATO forces into the region for a struggle which would last, as military officials intoned, several decades. The obvious rational response - to identify and eliminate the sources of funding and supply - was never ever seriously engaged. ISIS was the tool by which the Middle East would become a NATO protectorate. These fanatic forces are being deliberately used to sow chaos in the Mid-East, in Africa, in a province of China, etc - as a form of warfare designed to extend Western corporate control across the planet.
Yes, reports on what the French bombed. Not a single person killed. They bombed exclusively places where no one was. Old training camps, old checkpoints. Nothing there.
"Terror and the truth". What I'd like to know for starters is how many people at the Bataclan were killed by gunfire or impact caused by explosion, and how many were killed by stampede.
In these times when more and more people are scared of being caught up in terror attacks, what to do if you're really caught up in an attack is something people need to think more about.
This is the genuinely terrifying microcosm that relates to the macrocosm of the role of terrorism in the contemporary culture, experienced (at the moment) by most people through the media.
This article is worth reading, from Russia Today. Those who have the time should also watch the video interview with Pierre Janaszak, a Bataclan survivor. (Interesting how RT works with Google's Youtube.)
Janaszak describes the "apocalypse" in the theatre, the terror, the hysteria, and how, for example, even a pregnant woman got trampled.
The guy looks very human and genuine to me.
He suggests that many people were killed by stampede.
"We were 300 running... You walk on everybody. You don't care about anybody... This is the apocalypse."
He describes how he felt leaving his sister behind, thinking she was dead:
"(not) because of the guns, but because of the people running on her."
He describes how his consciousness went to his phone, and facing possible imminent death he thought of contacting his parents and saying sorry to them - but couldn't, because he'd had to turn his phone off.
He describes the terrorist, who seemed so French, and how he didn't hear any "religion stuff".
He describes how when the police told everyone to run, and not to look at anything, he and others walked on a pleading woman who was saying "help me" - and how he feels about that.
Dunno whether she's your type, Joseph, but the interviewer Sophie Shevardnadze, wearing red heels, is Eduard Shevardnadze's granddaughter - and a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire. She talks of good and evil and God.
The setting for the interview is pretty weird in places: wallpaper, peeling gilt on a picture frame.
RT left in the bit where he says innocent people are killed by advanced countries, and in particular by those countries which aim to spread the "western way of life".
"This is the end of the world (...) like the Second World War, this is the beginning of the end."
Meanwhile, in the macrocosm...
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