Back to Basics

In spite of convincing evidence that the Syrians fighting against President Bashar al-Assad’s government have possession of — and used — sarin gas, President Barack Obama has officially given the nod for the United States to provide Syrian rebels — including the Islamists who have infiltrated their ranks — with small arms through the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in an announcement on Saturday.

Hagel also mentioned that U.S. troops participating in military exercises with Jordan’s armed forces will allow fighter jets and a cache of Patriot missiles to remain in that Arab nation that borders Syria following the end of joint military exercises.

While President Barack Obama only consented to giving the rebels conventional small arms, Arizona’s Republican Sen. John McCain and other Congressional leaders are urging Obama to provide heavier arms and for the U.S. Air Force or Navy aircraft carrier planes to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria.

“The Pentagon made clear Saturday the detachment of missiles and F-16s was brought to Jordan as part an annual, multi-nation military exercise called Eager Lion and will remain there only at the request of the country leaders, when the exercise ends next week,” according to Fox News Channel stories on Sunday.

According to June 3 Examiner news story, a former police intelligence analyst said that despite the Obama Administration, lawmakers such as Sen. John McCain, and many U.S. news organizations ignoring the “trespasses of the Islamist-infiltrated Syrian rebel militia,” those who are closely following events unfolding in Syria are concerned over the use of WMD by the rebels.

In the Examiner news story earlier this month, it was reported that:

“Some American counterterrorism analysts believe President Barack Obama’s interest in capitalizing on the fear of chemical weapons is to encourage foreign intervention as occurred in Libya and Egypt. The goal is toppling the administration of President Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’ath Party by any means necessary.

“Over the course of the weekend, the SANA news agency reported that among the terrorists slain by the Assad forces were Khaled Othman, the leader of the so-called “Andan Oqla Battalion” terrorist group, Abdul-Min’em Dyab, the leader of the so-called “al-Mout Battalion” terrorist group, Abdul-Hadi Meznazi, the leader of the so-called “al-Ansar and al-Sharia ” terrorist group which is affiliated to Jabhet al-Nusra, Abdul-Rahman Barakat, the leader of the so-called “al-Tasleeh battalion” terrorist group, Mohammad al-Hara, Mohammad Sweif, Mustafa Ziad, Tareq Rahmoun and Khaled Ja’moor.

“On Monday, May 31, Turkish security forces also reported that they discovered a cylinder containing sarin gas when searching the homes of Syrian militants from the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front who were previously detained, the Turkish media reported. The gas was reportedly going to be used in a bomb.

In what many security experts consider paradoxical, President Barack Obama is close to ordering weapons shipments to be sent to the al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels as a consequence of President Bashar al-Assad alleged use of chemical weapons against rebel forces, according to a counterterrorism source on Thursday.

“This is a development that is at once startling and comical,” said former military intelligence officer and police terrorism analyst Steve Moseret. “In fact, in the Middle East news media they are already reporting that Obama has okayed the transfer of weapons to the Syrian rebels.

“We [Americans] are at war with al-Qaeda and yet in order to help topple another Middle East dictator, the Obama administration is seriously considering arming al-Qaeda affiliates such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Nusra Front and other Islamist groups who advocate an Islamic caliphate and the destruction of the United States and Israel,” notes Moseret.

According to Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes, President Obama often stated that any use by the Syrian regime of chemical weapons is the “red line” that could lead to more U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war.

“The President has been clear that the use of chemical weapons – or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States,” said Rhodes in a press statement.

“President [Obama] has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” he said in his written statement.

“Any future action we take will be consistent with our national interest, and must advance our objectives, which include achieving a negotiated political settlement to establish an authority that can provide basic stability and administer state institutions; protecting the rights of all Syrians; securing unconventional and advanced conventional weapons; and countering terrorist activity,” Rhodes said.

However, in a June 3 Examiner news story, it was reported that:

“Israeli intelligence reported that Syrian army troops discovered two large canisters of the deadly WMD (weapon of mass destruction) sarin gas during an ambush of a rebel compound in the city of Hama on Sunday,” according to a counterterrorism and international law enforcement expert.

According to Sean McCallister, a former police intelligence analyst, despite the Obama Administration, lawmakers such as Sen. John McCain, and many U.S. news organizations ignoring the “trespasses of the Islamist-infiltrated Syrian rebel militia,” those who are closely following events unfolding in Syria are concerned over the use of WMD by the rebels.

The Syrian government has repeatedly accused the Islamist rebels of using chemical weapons during their attacks on pro-Assad towns northern Syria, according to McCallister.

“The back-and-forth accusations have caused many to ignore several international reports. When [Sen. John] McCain visited some of the Syrian rebels, it was as if he was totally unaware that a large percentage of the fighters were from al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQII), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al-Nusra and others,” McCallister noted.

Rhodes said that the President intends to share evidence of the use of chemical weapons by Assad’s troops “with the international community” and the American people.

Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams.

American exceptionalism emerged out of a society which empowered the creative talents of the individual, not through grants, regulations, instructional pamphlets, inspectors and guidelines, but through the simple virtue of leaving men alone to do their work.

Freedom is the greatest creative force because it liberates the individual to build and as freedom diminishes within a society so does its creativity. Progress in restricted areas dwindles to a trickle as collectives expend a thousand times the money and effort, and still fail to equal the achievements of individuals operating on shoestring budgets.

The Soviet Union fell because its Communist collectives were not able to equal the West in the military or the economic arena. The only technique that Communist states ever had was to create a heavily regulated top-down infrastructure and when a crisis occurred, a mass of people would be thrown at the problem.

The collective approach allowed the Soviet Union to construct massive infrastructure projects; building roads, power stations and housing. But these were flawed imitations of Western projects and were poorly designed and implemented. The same pattern repeated itself across the Communist sphere. The collective could inefficiently mobilize armies of workers to carry out a project, but the planning and design of the project was grandiose, derivative and poorly adapted to the task at hand. Communist projects were mechanically conceived, mechanically implemented and unfit in the way that any project purely designed by machines would be for human use.

The Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Vietnam all won their engagements with enemies in the same way; by throwing so many men at the problem that the enemy would become bogged down and eventually forced to retreat. Their military victories did not emerge from strategy or heroism, but the mechanical willingness to sacrifice numberless individuals for the goals of the collective.

The few bits of genuine scientific progress came from scientists like Pavlov and Sakharov who were open critics of Communism and the Soviet Union. They did not come out of the collective that collectively crippled Russian science and ensured the collapse of its efforts at military parity with the United States. Ultimately the collective destroyed its own rule.

The seduction of the collective as builder however is not limited to countries that flew the red flag.  When Obama and Warren proclaimed that there were no monads, that no man was an island, but that we were all part of one great economic collective to which we owed an eternal debt, they were following up on some very old ideas.

Obama’s interpretation of individual creativity occurring only within the context of state institutions is a natural outgrowth of a political philosophy that views those institutions as the essence of the country and the true foundation of its national greatness. This “Institutionalism” is the dominant liberal mindset which sees individualism as a chaos that must be ordered by the state.

Institutionalism says that individuals are not creative, only institutions are creative. Individuals who create are harnessing the creative energy of institutions.

Libya‘s Gen. Youssef al-Mangoush, the nation’s army chief of staff was forced to resign on Sunday following a battle between militia members and protesters that left more than ​25 Libyan civilians dead and upwards of 90 wounded in the streets of Benghazi on Saturday, according to a counterterrorism source in Israel who monitors Islamist groups in North African nations.

Gen. al-Mangoush turned over his letter of resignation to members of Libya’s congress on Sunday, according to Mordecai Asher, a former police intelligence analyst.

The deadly violence began when Benghazi protesters picketed outside in front of the barracks in which the one of the country’s militia, the Libya Shield Brigade, resides. The crowd of hundreds demanded that the militia be dissolved and that regular government troops provide security against the city’s numerous Islamist terrorists, Asher said in a phone conversation with Law Enforcement Examiner.

According to Middle East news media, the legitimate Libyan government continues to be hampered by several armed militias after almost two years of unrest in the aftermath of the execution of the nation’s notorious dictator, Col. Moamar Khadhafi, in 2011.

Gen. Mangoush’s second-in-command, Salem al-Gnaidy, was chosen serve as the Libyan military’s temporary army chief until a permanent commander is selected by the members of the General National Congress.

In addition to the shakeup within the army’s command structure, the congress is expected to appoint a special judge to investigate the militias, some of which are suspected of being fronts for terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda, according to Asher.

In the aftermath of Saturday’s violence, the Libyan army claims it will takeover of all facilities used by the Libya Shield Brigade in Benghazi. The main Benghazi headquarters of the militia, where the protest first took place was commandeered by a Libyan special forces unit.

Last year, thousands of anti-militia protesters flooded the streets of Benghazi alleging that armed groups were responsible for the attack on the U.S. consulate located in their city in which four Americans were savagely killed, including the U.S. ambassador, Chris Stevens.

According to former intelligence officer Carlo “Carl” DiGiovanni, the Libyan government suspects that President Barack Obama is not serious about capturing the terrorists who killed the four Americans.

“Many Libyans distrust Obama as much as most conservatives in the United States. They recognize him as a weak, conniving politician who is all talk but little action,” said DiGiovanni.

For Iran and its proxy, armed militia — the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah — preserving Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is of prime importance and a strategic necessity, according to a report published Tuesday by an Israeli think tank.

“Syria is Iran’s greatest ‘resistance camp’ ally, providing it with a firm foothold in the heart of the Middle East, as well as political and military influence,” stated officials at Israel’s Meir Amit Information Center.

Although Hezbollah is based in Lebanon, Syria has always played a vital role in Hezbollah’s weapons acquisition, helping the terrorist group to build offensive and defensive strategies aimed at its mortal enemy — Israel.

The fall of the Assad regime in Syria would quite possibly spell disaster for Iran and its proxy army and intelligence group, Hezbollah, and “it would weaken Iran’s regional position against the United States and Israel and damage Hezbollah’s military capabilities and political influence in Lebanon,” according to the report.

The solidarity of Iran, Hezbollah and Syria has became stronger since the Syrian Shi’ites and their holy sites in Syria became targets for terrorism perpetrated by the rebels, particularly organizations affiliated with the Sunni al-Qaeda and its close ally Al-Nusra Front. Both terrorist networks are predominately Sunni and they consider Shi’ites to be infidels.

According to analysts at the Meir Amit Center:

“Iran and Hezbollah employ two parallel strategic tracks: the first, immediate track is intended to prop up the [Assad] regime’s ability to survive and continue governing, with the aid of military, economic, political and propaganda support.

“The second track, planned as an intermediate- and long-term strategy, is intended to make it possible for the Shi’ites… to defend themselves by founding a ‘popular army.’ In [Meir Amit's] assessment such a ‘popular army’ is planned for an estimated 100,000-150,000 [paramilitary fighters who would] give Iran and Hezbollah a foothold in the areas populated by Shi’ites and Alawites, making them important factors in the internal Syrian arena in the post-Bashar Assad era.”

A major part of Hezbollah’s interest in assisting the Assad regime, according to analysts, is the fact that the terrorist group is anxious to “acquire advanced military capabilities from the Syrian regime.”

The possession of such military capabilities could greatly assist Hezbollah in deterring Israeli aggression and challenge the Jewish nation’s military superiority. Such advanced capabilities would include advanced surface-to-surface missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles, many of which are purchased from Russia by the Syrian military.

However, Israeli policy, as publicly stated by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, is “to prevent, the transfer of advanced weapons to Hezbollah and to [other] terrorist elements.”

There is a revolution growing in the Middle East you are not hearing about. The mainstream media are all but ignoring it, and there’s good reason. It’s not part of the plan. In fact, it threatens to upend the plans of the globalist elites running U.S. foreign policy in the region.

The Turkey uprising has been going on for a week. Unlike high-profile “Arab Spring” events in Egypt, Libya and Syria, this one is truly organic. It wasn’t instigated by the CIA and affiliated nongovernmental organizations. And it’s threatening the rule of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the U.S. puppet who has ruled the country since 2002.

Erdogan and President Barack Obama shake hands in the White House Rose Garden in May. Credit: UPI

The uprising began over the government’s decision to destroy a park in Istanbul and turn it into a shopping center. It grew after police cracked down on the protesters with tear gas and water cannons. It has grown beyond the park issue into a rejection of Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian rule, his crack down on press freedoms (hundreds of journalists have been imprisoned in recent years), Internet censorship and his pursuit of an Islamist agenda. In a television interview this week, Erdoğan described social media, including Twitter, as a “scourge”. But social media have taken on a particular importance as newspapers and television have come increasingly under the sway of government.

So far, two have died and more than 3,000 have been injured and dozens have been arrested in seven days of protests. Some in the Turkish government — like Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arnic — are apologizing for the heavy-handed tactics police have used against Turkish citizens. But Erdoğan appears to be getting desperate and has begun calling protesters looters, vandals and terrorists.

The CIA has been using Turkey to funnel arms to the so-called rebels (really al-Qaida terrorists) trying overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. If Turkey comes apart the region could explode. And as Turkey is a member of NATO, the U.S. will be drawn into another shooting war in a place we don’t belong.

The protest may fizzle out. But it may also grow. And world wars have begun over less significant incidents.

Few figures in American political life have been as consistently wrong as often as John Kerry. The former Senator bet on every Communist leader and Middle Eastern tyrant he could find only to watch the wheels of history roll over his mistakes. And now as Secretary of State, Kerry is at it again.

In between peddling a Syrian peace process that no one but him believes in, he took a break to peddle the even more discredited peace process between Israel and the terrorists.

In a speech to the American Jewish Committee, Kerry invoked the litany of failures, “Madrid to Oslo to Wye River and Camp David and Annapolis”, but urged his audience not to pay attention to history and “give in to cynicism”.

“Cynicism has never solved anything,” he said. But then again neither has the Peace Process. And while cynicism isn’t likely to usher in an era of peace or grow money on trees, it offers you the power to extract yourself from bad situations instead of taking refuge in more of the same wishful thinking that got you into them.

If you find yourself mailing your tenth check to that Nigerian prince, cynicism won’t get you a 200 percent return, but it will keep you from losing more money.

“Why should any Israeli start giving in to that cynicism now?” Kerry asked. Perhaps because it’s been twenty years. Or because thousands of Israelis have been killed and wounded. Or because there isn’t a single piece of supporting evidence to show that the other side is interested in any kind of final peace agreement.

The only sure things that have come out of the Peace Process in two decades are terrorist attacks and increased demands by the terrorists. There has been no final status agreement for the simple reason that the terrorists can only get the best possible deal by never coming to an agreement. The longer they hold out, the better the offers that the likes of John Forbes Kerry extract from Israel are. And the offers keep getting better so there is never any reason to actually make a deal.

Picture a desperate rug merchant dickering with a customer. The rug merchant always lowers his prices. The customer always lowers his bids. The deal can never happen until the price of the rug reaches zero or until the rug merchant decides that the price isn’t worth selling at. And that is the thing that men like Kerry will never allow Israel to do. Israel can never stop bargaining and the Palestinian Authority never has to stop bargaining until the entire rug, all of Israel, is on the table.

Since Israel can never make that offer and since its enemies will never accept less than the whole rug, the negotiations are doomed to a descending spiral in which the Jewish State’s negotiators offer more and more in the hopes of settling the negotiations faster to avoid the even higher demands that they know they will face down the road, while the exact same calculation removes any incentive from the other side to settle because they know that the deals will be better down the road.

The United Nations has dishonestly sought to secure permanent power for its internal bureaucracy and a source of permanent funding unaffected by the whims of its member nations, of which the United States is the largest contributor. To this end, the United Nations has admitted falsifying medical statistics on hiv/aids and over-publicizing pandemics …

First, lets deal with the matter of the United Nations’ estimates. They have admitted that population growth is not linear and many of their projections involving population growth are faulty. Even recently, they admitted that their estimates of HIV/Aids were markedly in error due to a faulty methodology that simply diagnoses anyone with fever and weight loss in a particular region as being affected with HIV/Aids and that the deception was for the benign purposes of raising awareness of the true problem and seeking funding for their programs. Can you say “lying thieves?”

The United Nations has a history of admitting to the overstating of scientific research for the purposes of increasing public awareness and issue-based funding. They are not a credible source of information when it comes to their self-interest which would convey great regulatory and taxation powers to an institution that currently begs member nations for support.

I have zero respect for the United Nations. They have ignored their charter and sat idly by while rogue leaders engaged in genocide. They have admitted to openly distorting science and medicine reporting for the purpose of increasing media and public awareness and to boost fundraising. They have been complicit in the ugly deaths of hundreds of millions with their pseudo-science ban on the pesticide DDT, which they have now approved.  They are rife with internal corruption as members live lavish lifestyles while others starve.

“Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.”

Please Pay Attention to the MERS Warnings — The WHO calls it a ‘threat to the entire world’ and 26 are dead. Why all of the scary talk about the strange, deadly virus coming out of the Middle East? Kent Sepkowitz explains.

Margaret Chan, secretary-general of the World Health Organization, raised a few eyebrows and dropped a few jaws this week with her proclamation that the weird new corona virus circulating mostly in the Middle East posed a “threat to the entire world.”

She might be right, sort of. The virus is a close cousin of the contagion that caused SARS, the acronym for the severe acute respiratory syndrome that appeared dramatically in South China and Hong Kong in 2002, spread rapidly, and ended up causing more than 8,000 cases, including 775 deaths. The exact reason for the precipitous appearance of SARS (and even more precipitous disappearance) remains a hot topic of debate among virologists, public-health sorts, and those who specialize in predicting doom.

Why then the scare tactics? Well, Chan is someone with an interesting career.

New York Times bureau chiefs in Jerusalem are expected to set new standards for malicious bias and during his time there, Ethan Bronner was no exception.

A bureau chief anywhere else in the world may be expected to explore the life and color of the city. But in Jerusalem, a New York Times scribe fills the same spot as the bitter goth kid working on the high school paper who is forced to review musicals put on by cheerleaders. What comes out the other end may have a distant resemblance to journalism, but is mostly just gallons of congealed bile.

Ethan Bronner, who has moved up the New York Times totem pole from attacking Israel to attacking America, still visits the old country on occasion and still pens spiteful little pieces about how dumb and shallow the cheerleaders are. The latest Bronner missive sees him attending a wedding and grumbling at how happy everyone seems to be.

At a “raucous wedding”, Bronner finds that few people are interested in discussing “the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders”. Instead, “everyone was celebrating”. And why wouldn’t they be celebrating? It is a wedding. And people at weddings generally don’t talk about the people trying to kill them. Average weddings in the United States don’t involve detailed discussions of terrorism, even when New York Times reporters are in attendance.

But Bronner’s thesis is the same as the one put forward by John Kerry. “People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity,” Kerry complained. Israelis are having too many weddings and not suffering enough. The limited autonomy achieved in daily life what the peace process was supposed to.

It’s not just about the physical suffering of terrorism. What bothers Bronner is that Israelis aren’t conscious of the grievances of their enemies. They don’t carry the burden of guilt that comes from knowing that their border controls prevent Hamas from getting the weapons with which they could inflict more death and suffering on Israelis.

The peace process is a myth because its end result was never meant to be peace. Instead it was meant to achieve exactly what it did achieve in the 90s. A state of terror. A way of life that would make every Israeli conscious of the terrorists and their demands all the time. That’s not just their plan for Israel. It’s their dream for the entire free world. A world liberated from its freedoms.

The left does not set out to solve social problems, but to induce a state of permanent crisis in order to impose a permanent state of insecurity and guilt on the populace. Its solutions always make problems worse because the left views violence as not the problem, but a symptom of the true problem, which is the oppression of the violent by their victims.

The negotiations and concessions were not supposed to bring peace. They were supposed to make Israelis suffer. And through this ritualistic suffering, the descendants of Holocaust survivors would finally understand their burden of guilt to the descendants of the conquerors who had repressed them and ruled over their land for centuries.

Terrorism is meant to destroy morale.

With the Syrian civil war spilling over into other nearby countries and, through the Assad-Hezbollah alliance, into Lebanon, Israel’s military, police and rescue forces on Sunday launched a series of nationwide drills in order to fine-tune Israeli security force and civilian response to unconventional weapons attacks on their homeland, according to a police and intelligence source familiar with Israeli counterterrorism operations.

According to former NYPD detective and U.S. Marine intelligence officer, Sid Francis, on Sunday Israel began a week-long, all-hazard defense exercise, “Steadfast Home Front,” that will respond to the scenario of having hundreds of missiles, rockets and mortar shells, some armed with biological and chemical warheads, striking major Israeli cities and likely defense targets.

Government officials and local authorities, in conjunction with first-responders, including police, firefighters and paramedics, are leading the exercise, who hope to better prepare the civilian population to respond to unconventional missile strikes, according to Francis, who supervised similar drills in New York City including disaster drills in major hospitals and health care facilities.

“But it is the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the National Emergency Authority that are supervising the Israeli exercises which have been held annually since the 2006 battle against Hezbollah, when more than 3,000 rockets and missiles were launched against the Israelis,” said the decorated detective and Marine.

Because of the timing of the security drill, officials with the IDF found it necessary to emphasize that this week’s exercises are not in response to increased tensions with Syria and Iran, both nations that support the Jew-hating terrorist group Hezbollah.

“This exercise is mostly intended to reach out to the civilian population, to make sure that they are aware of the threats around us, to know what they need to do in case of emergencies,” Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, told reporters in a press conference Saturday night.

“The scenarios being drilled were planned a year in advance, well before the current tensions,” he added.

Last week, Home Front Defense Minister Gilad Erdan told a news conference that missile strikes on Israel’s major cities may be just a matter of time. “The question is no longer if. The question now is when will they fire on population centers? It can happen tonight, or next week.”