I answered another question on Quora. It is getting a little difficult to answer these. Yesterday I went to my inbox to look for Quora questions to answer and found them interspersed among over 20 emails from Quora reporting that this or that Quora member had upvoted one or another of my answers. It isn’t just that the answers provide details from hard-to-find sources. I stick my neck waaaay out to express opinions that are all but banned in the Western press. People are hungry for this information and for my unvarnished opinions, which they are not finding anywhere else. (Perhaps if I had any sense, I would stick to writing recipes and stories about cute puppies.)
 
All of this is further clear-cut evidence that something is terribly wrong with the Western press and Western Establishment in general, and I am referring to both Left and Right. There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats with regard to foreign policy. Both sides of the aisle wholeheartedly endorse the war du jour and are eager to increase the body count. We are doing precisely what the Bible warned about:
 
 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Isaiah 5:20
 
And yet many people calling themselves “Christian conservatives” support this sin of tacitly endorsing crimes of their government and then standing idly by as the msm cover up, or even excuse, these crimes. People calling themselves “Christians” refuse to protest the actions of a government that, while representing people calling themselves Christians, implements policies that they know, in their hearts, Jesus would condemn. Yet because it is their government doing these evil things, they can hide behind this fact and just pretend it never happened. They can say “it wasn’t my doing.” But something else is also not their doing: raising one finger to stop it or protesting. In fact they wholeheartedly stand behind a president who endorses the jailing of truth tellers like Assange, Snowden and Manning. BTW, even if it is, strictly speaking, illegal to leak US secrets, since these are mostly secrets about US crimes or misdeeds, then the government’s message is this: it is, of course, not necessarily legal for your government to commit crimes, but it is much more of a crime for an individual to expose these crimes because your government is more important than the individual. And if the world knew the truth about the US government, we would lose the trust of the world community. (What Washington refuses to admit is that international polls show the world community rating the US dead last in trustworthiness. Jailing these whistle-blowers will only drive the last nail in the coffin of US prestige).
 
Besides, if these US “Christians” are Evangelicals, the majority of them support Zionism, foolishly believing it is their duty to defend a secular state called Israel, based on the shaky belief that the homicidal apartheid state of modern Israel is the resurrected Israel prophesied in Ezekiel 37. What they refuse to do is open their eyes and read verse 24, proving modern Israel is not Ezekiel’s Israel at all. That verse says this prophesied Israel represented by the reassembled dry bones will be “obedient to God’s decrees.” But Leviticus, part of the Jews’ own Torah, commands them to love their neighbours as themselves. Israel could not have been settled without the involvement of terrorist gangs, as described here. And you can’t claim to be obeying this decree and shoot unarmed protesters including women and children, as is now common practice in Israel. Further, a WIN/Gallup poll shows 65% of Israelis have no religious beliefs at all and therefore cannot be “obeying God’s decrees.” (I need to point out that young American Jews support Israel at a much lower rate, while supporting Palestine at a much higher rate, than US Evangelicals and are therefore, though not necessarily believers, closer than Evangelicals to obeying God’s decree to love one’s neighbour as oneself!).
 
The trouble is, most American Evangelicals are so complacent that if their pastor says they must support Israel to get to heaven, then they don’t bother doing any further research; fearing for their afterlife, they just believe it and teach their kids this same Satanic doctrine. Meanwhile, Middle Easterners look at these foolish “Christians” and thank Allah they do not subscribe to this Satanic religion. The thing is, true Christianity itself is, of course, not Satanic at all. Yet many American Christians have been swept into this false doctrine of “Christian” Zionism and therefore actually have no right to call themselves followers of Christ. They are sullying the name of their Saviour. No wonder Middle Easterners are sceptical of Christianity.
 
VINCE ON QUORA
 
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-believe-the-United-States-Of-America-is-still-the-greatest-country-in-the-world-or-has-it-lost-its-touch-of-what-once-was/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Do you believe the United States Of America is still the greatest country in the world or has it lost its touch of what once was?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 

Your use of the word “still” indicates you think it was great at one time. “Make America great again” carries this same message.
 
But you know I have always wanted to ask Mr. Trump when America was great before. I really want to know. Was it great when the Amerindians were driven from their homes to give the white man elbow room? Was it great at Wounded Knee? Was it great at the Trail of Tears? Was it great when the US Army went to the Okefenokee to exterminate the original inhabitants of Florida? Was it great when it rounded up the redskins to herd them onto the very least-inhabitable land in America that was later called reserves? Was it great when great American leaders like Washington kept slaves to do all their drudgery against their will? Yes, we know that slavery was just a custom in those days and that many Americans forgive Washington on that basis, but the question is, was America great at that time?
 
Was America great when it decided, along with Britain, to carpet bomb Dresden and burn the residents alive? Or when it dropped its great bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yes, there are a million and one excuses for this, but was America truly great when it was carrying out this atrocity?
 
Was it great when, after realizing it would not win the Korean war, it decided to take revenge on the residents who had stoically defended their homes, killing about 14% of North Koreans with aerial bombs for no justifiable reason at all?
 
Was the US great when, lacking legitimate justification, it used the false-flag Gulf of Tonkin incident to invade Vietnam and kill 2 million civilians, 1.1 million fighters on both sides and about 60,000 US soldiers, and when US soldiers massacred dozens of peaceful Vietnamese villagers at Song My and elsewhere? This report shows atrocities were not the exception.  Was it great when it cooked up a story about WMDs and invaded Iraq, killing over a hundred thousand innocent civilians who had done nothing to harm a hair on the head of a single American?
 
Was America great when it pretended to be waging war in terror but allowed hundreds of US-supplied white Toyota trucks full of ISIS fighters to enter Syria and mingle with the civilians in towns like Aleppo and Raqqa where they could only be subdued at the expense of thousands of civilian lives, and this same “great” country then blamed this slaughter all on Assad, who was really just defending his country from terrorists, many of whom were called “moderates” and sponsored by this great country of America and its allies?
 
Was it great when it rewarded the homicidal Zionists for their atrocities by promoting nationhood for Israel at the expense of the Arabs it ethnically cleansed and drove out by massacring whole families (documented here at Quora: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the...)
 
Was the US great when it jailed Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning for telling the world the truth about unsavoury and illegal actions in Iraq, including the summary executions of 10 Iraqis, including one child and one woman? Was America great when it forced the extradition of Julian Assange to stand trial for telling the truth about US misdeeds? Do Americans believe that government crimes are excusable if they are well covered? If Americans agree that telling the truth about American misdeeds is evil and quashing it is good, are they a great people?
 
I guess if greatness is defined as something independent of morality and virtue, then this use of military might was a sign of greatness. Having great weapons and using them to subjugate leaders who dare to declare independence of the great America could certainly be considered greatness by the amoral and immoral psychopaths in Washington.
 
But on the other hand, if America has an ounce of decency and virtue and wants to call itself a Christian nation, shouldn’t it confess its crimes and stop the killing? And stop supporting the murders by Israel? Trump had promised to stop interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. His followers thought that was his intention and was part of the greatness they expected him to deliver.
 
But is Trump being great in Venezuela, threatening to invade because the people elected a president he doesn’t like? In Iran, threatening to destroy the whole country? In Israel? In the camps housing refugees of Israel atrocities, to which he cut off funding? In China, whose economy he is trying to ruin, allowing its people to starve while putting US farmers out of business?
 
Tell you what. Somebody let me know when the US is great again because I have not seen a sign of it yet and, at least for now, am tired of waiting.

https://fr.quora.com/Pourquoi-lIran-soutient-il-le-gouvernement-Assad/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Vince Dhimos answered a question on Quora in French.
 
Translation: Why does Iran support Assad’s government?
 
Both Iran and Syria are targets of the US and Israel and both are part of the Shiite triangle -- although Syria is Sunni in its majority, its leadership is Alawite (a Shiite sect distinguished by its tolerance and mild manners) and Assad is firmly in control of the government, mostly because he respects all religions and sects (typical for Alawites) and has been able to defeat the terrorists, who are mostly backed by Saudi Arabia and the US, although the US falsely claims that it fights terror. After all, it was not until Russia entered the war in 2015 that the terrorists were forced to start ceding their territory back to government control, clear-cut proof that there was no truly sincere war on terror on the part of the West.
 
Iran is also an ally of Iraq, a Shiite-majority country which is now very friendly with Syria, and Iran’s ally Hezbollah was instrumental in defeating the Israeli aggressor in the war of 2006. Hezbollah is falsely portrayed by the US as a terror group, but in fact it is a legitimate and respected political party in Lebanon and without it, the terrorists would have continued to spread all over the Middle East. The fact is, almost everything Americans “know” about Iran and Hezbollah is based on false propaganda of the US Establishment. And let’s be clear: Trump is part of this Establishment. Although part of the Establishment is anti-Trump, and he and his followers call this part the Deep State, this Establishment is firmly controlled by the Israel lobby AIPAC, and he has pledged to them his support for Israel, which means he supports the atrocities against the Palestinians and Netanyahu’s ambition to expel them from the territories to which they are legitimately entitled. If you read this brief history of the settling and founding of Israel, you will understand what their ultimate goal is and how they conquered Palestine by terror. The first organized terrorist group in the Middle East was the Irgun, a Jewish group that ruthlessly slaughtered Arabs to clear the land for themselves.
 
It is obvious to most Syrians that the real enemy of peace in the Middle East is Israel (and its ally the US), and this fact rallies the people around Assad. These countries, Iran, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, are aware that their common enemy is Israel, which is supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, and they are therefore forming an increasingly tight alliance to ensure their mutual survival. After all, the Iraqi war was fought in large part because of Netanyahu’s propaganda message to the US Congress.
 
With the help of Russia, the balance of power has now shifted against the terrorists supported by Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia. All that remains is for Putin to establish control in Lebanon to protect that small country from Israel. This will be the last great effort, whether military or political, that must be won to bring peace to the Middle East. Putin wants to achieve peace without firing a shot, maintaining a harmonious balance between Israel and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa. The Russians have a legitimate interest in a peaceful Israel because there are 900,000 Israelis who were either born in Russia or are descendants of Russian-born Jews. 20% of Israelis were born in Russia.
 
The main impediment is the US.

Below is our translation of an article from RIA Novosti with commentary by Vince Dhimos.
 
Here is just one of many examples of how US tariffs are hurting the US economy. In the case of natural gas, it is an example of how US tariffs wind up inadvertently helping the Russian economy and simultaneously hurting the US.  
 
The psychopaths at RAND Corporation get paid big money to sit around thinking of ways to sabotage Russia’s economy, and this idea it once promoted of having the US sell its energy products to the world while shrinking Russia’s share has been a spectacular fail all the way around. (See Manlio Dinucci's exposé on RAND’s latest plan to destroy Russia).
 
It makes you wonder why no one ever gets paid just to think up ways to boost America through cooperation with Russia and China. I think that until the US starts thinking along those lines, it will keep taking giant steps toward the dustbin of history. I suspect that at no time in history has a country done so little to lift itself up and so much to shoot itself in the foot as now in America. With governments like Washington’s, America needs no enemies.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
China passes sentence on US gas industry
 
MOSCOW, May 20 - RIA Novosti, Alexander Lesnykh. From June 1, China will increase import duties on US liquefied natural gas from ten to 25 percent, according to the State Customs Committee Tariff Committee. Why this could turn into a catastrophe for the US gas industry and what Russia will gain from a new round of trade war – from RIA Novosti.
 
Total failure
 
Chinese import duties are a response to Washington’s aggressive actions. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump accused Beijing of disrupting trade negotiations and announced an increase in tariffs on the importation of goods from China totalling $200 billion.
 
Donald J. Trump [on Twitter]
✔
@realDonaldTrump
 For 10 months, it has been 25% on the 50th, and 10% on the 200th on the USA. These payments are partially responsible for our great economic results. The 10% will go up to 25% on Friday. 325 Billion dollars ....
May 5, 2019
 
Trump also promised to extend these measures in general to all Chinese imports. Beijing responded immediately: starting June 1, additional duties on US goods worth $60 billion, including LNG, are being introduced.
 
Note that the Chinese LNG market is the largest and fastest growing in the world, and therefore the most desired by all exporters of fuel, including the United States. “This year, China’s LNG market will grow by about a quarter,” said Carlos Torres-Diaz, head of the gas market research department at RystadEnergy.
 
It is precisely in light of this that most of the projects for construction of gas liquefaction terminals in the USA were started. [my highlighting] So, recently Cameron LNG plant with three production lines with a total capacity of 13.5 million tons per year opened in the state of Louisiana.
 
But because of the trade war, the Americans exported only 300,000 tons of gas to China in four months, compared to 1.4 million tons in the same period last year, Vygon Consulting experts say. And because of the new duties, the deliveries will have to be stopped completely. [idem]
 
Meanwhile, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), five lines with a total capacity of 57 million tons of LNG per year are currently being built in the United States. Projects of five more lines received approval and are waiting for final investment decisions. Now their prospects are very much in question. [This damage to US LNG companies is not being taken into consideration by most analysts and certainly not by Trump. Like the damage to soybean and pig farmers of the original round of tariffs.]
 
Without China Europe is no help either
 
New Chinese duties are forcing Americans to turn to Europe. It is no coincidence that last week two senators urgently submitted to the US parliament a bill on sanctions against the owners of ships, are used for laying the Nord Stream 2 [project for Russian-gas pipelines to Europe] pipes, as well as those who provide financial or technical support to the project. Washington has long demanded that Europeans switch from Russian pipeline gas to American LNG.
 
The loss of the Chinese market can disrupt the American plans for European expansion. As analysts of Rystad Energy calculated, Russia is now supplying gas to Europe at an average price of five dollars per million British fuel units (MMBtu). The break-even point for deliveries of American LNG to Europe is at this same level. In other words, for Americans to sell their gas at the price of Russia means to work without profit.
 
Washington expected to solve this problem by using parallel deliveries to Asia, where LNG prices are traditionally higher than European ones. But now, without China, the expansion of exports to Europe is extremely unprofitable for the American gas industry.
 
From Russia with love
 
Russia gains the most from the new round of the US-China trade war. Domestic companies have good chances to gain market share to which the Americans aspired.
 
By December 1, the Power of Siberia gas pipeline with a capacity of 38 billion cubic meters of gas per year should be launched. The next step is the construction of another gas pipeline to China through Altai [province in Western Siberia].
 
“Deliveries of Russian pipeline gas to China via the western route may become the most promising and significant gas transmission corridor,” said Gazprom’s head Alexei Miller at the end of April.
 
“China continues to steadily increase gas consumption - by 15% in 2017 and by 18% in 2018,” he pointed out. “Import is increasing more actively: last year, by 32%, to 125.7 billion cubic meters. As a result, the PRC for the first time topped the list of the largest importers of natural gas in the world. The demand for natural gas in China will continue to grow, and we are ready to provide it with reliable supplies for the long term."
 
END TRANSLATION

The latest propaganda effort by the Saudi-Israel-US coalition is aimed at turning the entire world against Iran. Can you believe it? Those bad Houthis actually tried to damage Islam’s holiest of holies, the city all Muslims -- including Iran and the Houthis it supports -- face in prayer. That’s like stomping on Bibles in a Christian country.
 
I read it first in Haaretz. No, I am not subscribed to the newspaper. But when Israel wants the US to read about something outrageous that the Iranians or their allies supposedly did, they generously offer the relevant article free of charge. I read it through and, being a geopolitical code cracker, my first thought was “the Houthis didn't do this.” Every Muslim, whether Sunni (as in Saudi) or Shia (as in Iran), strives to make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime. Every Muslim respects, reveres and honours Mecca and would never do anything to sully this holiest of cities. The Houthis are Muslims. They belong to a Shia sect, Zaidi, and we know that the Saudi and Gulf state Sunnis consider all Shiites heretics and want them either dead or gone from the Middle East (their reason for wanting Assad to be overthrown by the Saudi-funded and –armed terrorists including the ones euphemistically called “rebels” by Saudi pals in Washington). Which is why the Saudis make up ridiculous stories accusing the Houthis of attacking Mecca with their missiles.
 
I scoured the Haaretz article for a Houthi statement that they were not targeting Mecca, but after all, Israel is a de facto ally of Saudi because the enemy of my enemy is my pal. I did not find such a statement denying the targeting of Mecca, and didn’t really expect to find it in Haaretz. So I dug up other articles on the subject and found that other sites did of course, report that the Houthis denied targeting Mecca. Reuters, for instance.
 
Then to make sure that the Houthis do in fact claim responsibility for some of their attacks, I dug up a France24 article showing that they do:
 
QUOTE:
 
“The Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen carried out several air strikes on the Houthi-held capital Sanaa on Thursday after the Iranian-aligned movement claimed responsibility for drone attacks on Saudi oil installations.”
 
So what about those attacks on oil tankers? My gut told me Iran would not be involved in this because the country is extremely environmentally sensitive, strictly enforcing its domestic environmental laws and doing research aimed at preserving the environment (as frequently reported in Tehran Times, eg, here, here, here, and this is only the latest issue of the publication). I immediately thought of Mossad, the Israeli “intelligence” agency, which has a long history of false flag operations.
 
Now we need to be careful here, of course, because many sloppy “researchers” will immediately jump to conclusions about supposed Mossad false flags and the internet is awash with their unproved theories (which may, however, be true). Therefore, I present below only those false flag events for which ample corroboration is provided or which have been proved.
 
In one report by Global Research, an actual ex-agent outs some of the false flag information:
 
“Former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky told ABC public radio that the spy agency had used Australian passports for previous operations before last month’s assassination of a top Hamas commander in Dubai that has been blamed on Israel.”
 
Haaretz
 
“Newly released British documents contain a claim by an unnamed contact that the Shin Bet security service collaborated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to hijack the June 1976 flight from Israel that was diverted to Entebbe, Uganda, the BBC reported Friday.”
 
Foreign Policy
 
“False Flag
A series of CIA memos describes how Israeli Mossad agents posed as American spies to recruit members of the terrorist organization Jundallah to fight their covert war against Iran.”
 
And then as I expected, while Iran and its allies do indeed claim responsibility for attacks on Saudi assets when they perpetrate them, as reported, for example, by AP here:
 
“...Iran-aligned rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack on the Saudi pipeline.”
 
Israel has already admitted to perpetrating prior false flag events:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/historys-dire-warning-beware-false-flag-trigger-for-long-sought-war-with-iran/258478/
 
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/iran-denies-accusation-attacks-oil-tankers-uae-coast-190514181857002.html
 
So I am going to say that the Houthis absolutely did not target Mecca because they are theologically incapable of doing this and also because they deny it – whereas they do claim responsibility for their deeds, and that Iran absolutely did not attack those oil tankers in the Gulf because Iran is very environmentally conscious – after all, it is the Persian Gulf and the oil spill would have impacted their own environment. I guarantee that the Iranians had nothing to do with this attack. My prime suspect is Israel who wanted the attack to look like it was Iran so that Trump would have an excuse to fire his missiles and kill thousands of innocent civilians. After all, he is an American president and is controlled not by the constituents but by the unsavory agents listed here. Israel is near the top of the list, and Israel has already admitted it wants to drag the US into its war against Iran.
 
It wouldn’t be the first false flag perpetrated by Israel country. And it won’t be the last.
 
Relevant:
 
Israel just admitted it wants to drag the US into its war on Iran.
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/military-affairs/israel-just-admitted-it-wants-to-drag-the-us-into-war-with-iran

 In the following is our translation of an analysis by Ivan Danilov from RIA Novosti with commentary and notes in [brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
We recall Trump’s threat to Assad over a “chemical attack” that turned out never to have happened. He seemed prepared to launch an air attack like the ones that killed over a 100,000 Iraqis in the Bush era. Then there was North Korea: “we will destroy your country.” It was a scary time. Then there was the threat to invade Venezuela. It kept the whole world up at night. Then once the Russians showed up, it was all but forgotten. It was like the boy who cried wolf.
 
So what is different about this threat to Iran? Well, for one thing, Trump had blasted Iran throughout his campaign. I suspected he was already building up to a war even then. Yet there was euphoria over his potential as a “peace” candidate because he lambasted GW Bush for his warlike stance and in one memorable moment, said to Jeb “you just want to kill people.” Surely Trump was different? Either that or a con artist.
 
But it has long been my observation that there is no such thing as a “different” president ever in the US. I identified a group of agents that run America (and I would like to call them foreign agents because, while they are ensconced in the US Establishment and are household names, they are alien to American sentiments and ideals), independently of presidents and of the US people. Which is why there can be no talk of “democracy” in the US. No American has the right to call the US a democracy. They all should know better by now. Yet very few do. People love to be lied to.
 
Americans remind me of Jeremiah: The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love to have it so. These words were not about the Hebrews. And they’re not about Americans. They’re about people, just people, everywhere. People want to be ruled but have never grasped the idea of ruling themselves. It’s too hard, it makes my head hurt. It takes an expert to make decisions that affect my life, especially on foreign policy. What do I know? What the people don’t realize is that the folks they hired to know things know nothing and could care less because their constituents can be conned indefinitely. Lincoln was wrong. You can fool essentially all the people all the time. The “leaders” are supporting Israel, Saudi Arabia, the bankers, the arms manufacturers, Big Business, everyone but the poor American sucker who dutifully pulls the levers that hire them, in the steadfast belief that they the voters are good citizens, and that the chosen ones, whether Candidate A or Candidate B, can all be counted on to further bankrupt the nation and make it hopelessly insecure on behalf of Saudi, Israel and the arms manufacturers, and universally distrusted. But who cares? My people love to have it so.
 
I showed yesterday that the Israeli leadership now brazenly admits it wants to drag the US into its war on Iran. And the American public will be a pushover because 80% of US Evangelicals believe that the murderous, apartheid secular state calling itself Israel was given its land by God (the cult of “Christian” Zionism) and did not receive it by terrorizing the Arabs who once lived there in peace, by slaughtering whole families, moms, dads and kids, and thus scaring the survivors away. Your pastor didn’t mention the Nakba, did he? But he might mention the Holocaust and take you on a Holy Land tour next year that will make him a nice profit and will keep you safely away from Palestine. He knows the truth could make you free and we can’t have that.
 
Bush’s war on Iraq was as much for Israel and Saudi as for anything else. Trump’s upcoming war is for Israel too, but <shhh> you’re supposed to believe Trump is different.
 
You know what? If you really want to vote for a presidential candidate who is different, wait until a candidate declares in his campaign: I will not make your sons and daughter fight a war for Israel or Saudi Arabia.
 
Now that would be different. Unfortunately, that candidate would lose the election.
 
At any rate, if a catastrophic war scenario develops, as Russian analyst Ivan Danilov seems to expect, perhaps Trump voters will remember how they voted for this “different” candidate who seemed assured of bringing peace at last. But most likely, as in the case of GW Bush, they will not remember.
 
My people love to have it so. Jeremiah 5:31
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
US prepares to send "500 missiles a day" to Iran and advertises our air defence
 
May 17, 2019
 
Ivan Danilov
 
Donald Trump's entourage is approaching one of its main foreign policy goals: the war with Iran, and leaks about how the Washington hawks are going to win this war are published in the American media. Judging by the plans that Newsweek and the New York Times openly write about, history has taught little to the most radical part of the presidential administration [note that, like many US journalists, government-connected journalists in Russia almost never directly criticize Trump, always suggesting that his advisers are to blame. In reality, Trump is just as radical as they are]. Many in the White House really believe that a lightning-fast and victorious war, virtually inviting an American loss, can be organized against Iran, and a positive result is expected to be obtained not just quickly, but literally in a matter of days.
 
There are two logical explanations for this over-optimism. Explanation one: supporters of the solution by force of the “Iran issue” are confident that Iran is so weak that its surrender can be ensured with just one blow, after which the Iranian leadership will simply be unable to retain power. The second explanation is more probable: supporters of violent action against Iran are well aware that there will be no “lightning victory,” but it is important for them to convince Trump at any cost to start a war, and for this you need to actively lie that it will be quick and easy.
 
It is indicative that the traditional American "pre-war scheme," which uses a gradual intensification of media and diplomatic hysteria based on releases of "intelligence information" about the growing threat to the future victim of American aggression, is no longer operative. Despite all the efforts of the American media and the intelligence community, even representatives of American allies who helped them to bathe Serbia, Libya and Iraq in blood, say that the American "information" about the Iranian threat is not confirmed. If even the British Guardian, referring to a briefing by its local leader of the “operation against ISIS,*” criticizes the American preparations for war with Iran, this means that on the information and diplomatic front, Washington is not doing the right thing. “A senior British general (working. - Ed.) In the US-led coalition against ISIS*, said that the threat from Iranian forces in Iraq or Syria is not increasing. This directly contradicts the US claims used to justify the military build-up in the region,” writes the Guardian.
 
The American magazine Newsweek describes the views of the American war hawks on how Iran will be forced to surrender: "A source at the Pentagon said that options suggest a powerful campaign of rocket attacks in an attempt to bring Tehran to the negotiating table with Washington." It depends on an escalation of strength. But, regardless of Iran’s bravado, when you get 500 rockets a day, it hurts you a lot, which is the goal. When your opponent is weak, you get more," said one official familiar with the plans."
 
At the same time, although the interlocutors of Newsweek argue that the current actions (with the transfer of not only missiles but 120,000 American soldiers to the Persian Gulf zone, "in case of escalation") are not at all a signal of imminent war, common sense and the historical experience of the last 30 years indicate that Washington is clearly preparing for a scenario of force. And it will be the initiator of the transition to the "hot" phase of the conflict.
 
The most influential (and often very well-informed) American publication The New York Times reports that the White House is consciously trying to bring the situation to a real armed conflict: "One American official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that new intelligence about the increased threat from Iran does not merit the planning of the war carried out by Bolton (presidential adviser on national security. – author’s comment). The official also said that the ultimate goal of the campaign of economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration last year, was to draw Iran into armed conflict with the United States. "
 
One would traditionally assume that the interests of the Trump administration are oil interests, especially since military interventions against oil-exporting countries are a long-standing American practice. However, in this case, the reasons should rather be sought on a political plane. The US president came to power not only because of the wave of popular discontent with the Obama administration’s economic policies, but also because of the very clear obligations that he assumed in terms of a radical solution to the “Iranian problem.” These promises played an important role in the support that Trump received from the American military-industrial lobby and from other players behind the scenes of American politics [Danilov, like all government-approved Russian authors, avoids direct reference to Israeli involvement in misdeeds. Hence “other players”]. Now, apparently, the time has come to pay the bills - even despite the fact that in economic terms any military intervention against Iran will become a source of very serious problems of not only an economic, but also a military nature. And regardless of the fact that unreasonably optimistic Pentagon planners think and argue otherwise.
 
Meanwhile, a war with Iran would inevitably lead to an increase in oil prices. And not only because of the reduction of Iranian exports, but also because navigation in the Persian Gulf would be at risk. In addition, within the framework of an “asymmetric response” to American aggression, key elements of Saudi Arabia’s oil (both processing and pipeline) infrastructure may find themselves attacked by pro-Iranian forces.
 
Perhaps the prospect of a real energy crisis in the pre-election period (which will greatly influence prices in the United States) will really stop Donald Trump’s administration. But if Washington believes it is possible to resolve the Iranian issue quickly and solely with massive missile strikes, then it is quite possible that economic risks will not be taken into account.
 
And there’s more
 
No matter how the situation develops further, Washington can now be thanked for very effectively conducting an advertising campaign for Russian air defence systems. After all, watching the American preparations for the bombing of Iran and Washington’s reaction to the appearance of the S-300 in Venezuela, many countries are beginning to think that Russian "insurance" against the excesses of American foreign policy should be bought urgently and at any cost.
 
END TRANSLATION
 
More about the world’s most dangerous cult:
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/culture/the-worlds-most-dangerous-cult-its-not-wahhabism
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/culture/the-worlds-most-dangerous-cult-its-not-wahhabism-part-ii           
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/culture/the-worlds-most-dangerous-cult-its-not-wahhabism-part-iii

Vince Dhimos answered a question at Quora.
 
Did the United States first normalize economic relations with China for any reasons other than economic advantage?
 
https://www.quora.com/Did-the-United-States-first-normalize-economic-relations-with-China-for-any-reasons-other-than-economic-advantage/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
BEGIN QUORA ANSWER

I think the answer is yes. The ulterior motive was to use China as a counterweight against Russia and drive a wedge between the two nations. It was an epic fail.
 
Nixon was the first to come up with the idea of normalizing relations and trade with China. He did some rather strange things that were all conceptually inter-related: First he took the US off the gold standard, which was almost inevitable because too many countries were demanding gold instead of dollars. Then to deal with the crisis that this caused, he signed an agreement with Saudi King Faisal that created the petrodollar. It was effective in keeping the dollar afloat but immoral because it caused the US to engage in savage wars that pleased the Saudis but did not in any way benefit the US. (details here: https://www.quora.com/What-were-...). He then came up with the idea of free trade with China. It was the perfect complement to the petrodollar agreement because it would enable the US to use the free dollars printed thanks to the Saudis to buy cheap goods from China.This idea went into effect in the 80s after he was impeached and left office. The idea was sold as a way to reach the “world’s biggest market.” When China finally was awarded this status, the US people were told the Chinese would be buying billions of dollars worth of goods from the US. A good trade balance was expected by naive and gullible people. It was a negative balance from the start and that never changed. The architects of the plan had to know this. During the debate over Most Favored Nation status in the 80s, there was mention that China would become a counterweight to Russia as a result. Never happened either. I suspect that this idea of containing Russia using China as a counterweight was one of the ulterior motives of this deal. It was a bust all the way around.
 
This policy of free trade with China was also deeply immoral because China insisted that the US cut relations with Taiwan, forcing the US to betray one of its best friends and allies.
 
The consequences of these two deeply immoral acts, ie, signing the petrodollar agreement that traded immoral wars for a stable dollar, and betraying Taiwan for short-term economic gain, were a lesson that America experienced but never learned. It continues to discard virtue for short term gains and just plunges deeper and deeper into debt, war and irrelevance.
 
A poll among young people in the Middle East shows that this group now trusts Russia and mistrusts the US (ASIA – AFRICA Arab youth are less optimistic, drawn to Putin, and increasingly distant from the US). An international poll shows people everywhere saying that the US is the biggest threat to world peace on earth. It was taken in the Obama era but would rank the US even lower today (A new poll says these nations are the top 4 threats to world peace. Guess who's number one).
 
The nation has sold its soul by adopting a purely transactional view of the world and shoving virtue aside. The US is reaping its reward and shows no signs of repentance.
 
There is a way that seemeth right unto man but the end thereof are the ways of death.
 

​END QUORA ANSWER
 
Relevant:
 
US support for murder, war based on misreading of the Bible
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/vince-on-quora-why-does-the-us-show-unwavering-support-for-israel-and-not-palestine
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/military-affairs/israel-just-admitted-it-wants-to-drag-the-us-into-war-with-iran
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/arguments-supporting-israeli-atrocities-are-crumbling
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/israels-right-to-existarabs-right-to-die
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/how-american-evangelicals-are-preventing-the-second-coming-sending-guns-not-gospel-to-israel
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/international-relations/us-evangelical-christians-are-the-staunchest-supporters-of-israels-crimes
 
 

From Mint Press News.
John McCain posing with neo-Nazi leader in Ukraine during the US-backed Maidan coup that kicked off the transformation of Ukraine to the out-of-control mess that it is today.

 
Below is our translation from RIA Novosti with commentary and notes in [brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
This article will seem somewhat abstruse even to those interested in the subject. When Russian commentators write about Ukraine, they typically throw in some Ukrainian words, often slang, which often is pejorative anti-Russian. The word vata, for example, refers to cotton or wadding in Russian, but the Ukrainian nationalists have been using it to refer pejoratively to pro-Putin Russian patriots. It is hard to describe what Ukraine has sunk to since the 2014 illegal and violent US-backed coup. I suppose you could compare the ubiquitous Ukrainian nationalists to European skinheads, except that these Nazi wannabes are not just street punks, they include high-ranking officials. The poison has spread everywhere. The UK Travel Advisory advises travellers to Ukraine to avoid large gatherings which are possibly groups of terrorists who may target UK citizens.
 
Ukraine is fast becoming a giant insane asylum. They have taken all the most depraved and negative thinking in the West and amplified it – which suggests who we really are under the veneer. According to the IMF, Ukraine has the worst economy in Europe. Yet it was doing fairly well until the US swooped in and promoted an illegal and violent coup in 2014. But the “liberated” Ukraine suddenly filled up with such anti-Russian hate that the government soon broke off all economic contracts with Russia that had once supported the economy with jobs and energy (coal and gas). Today, thanks to irrational anti-Russian sentiment, Ukraine no longer buys Russian gas directly from the Russian pipeline but instead buys this same Russian gas rerouted from other countries at a premium price. They have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. There is no word in the English language to describe this masochistic absurdity.
 
Further, as our translation below from rueconomics.ru shows, under the direct and indirect influence of the US, they have embraced Nazism like no other country in the world. How Ukraine came to this dismal state of affairs is hard to understand, but it ought to be clear that any country that adopts an extreme anti-Russian stance on things is on track to become a Third Reich wannabe. After all, the fact that Russia suffered the most from the Hitlerian scourge, with 27 million killed, is a pretty clear evidence that Nazism and the Russian mindset (not just Soviet ideology) were diametrically opposed, and we note that the US today is the main source of Russophobia in the world. Recall that the Third Reich was racist and ultranationalist, while the Soviet Union, like today’s RF, fiercely opposed racism and ultranationalism. Further, Russia stands for a multipolar world, while the US has taken the view of itself as the Indispensable Nation or the Exceptional Nation. It is only a hop skip and a jump from there to Deutschland über alles, the notion that “ours” is a superior nation populated by superior beings who deserve to lord it over everyone else. It is a peculiar form of racist nationalism never envisioned by the US founders but it has infiltrated the new America and is well represented on both sides of the political aisle.
 
Now imagine if your great grand-daddy, who risked his life to free the West from the Nazis, could see what the US has done to Ukraine, which was saved by the Allies, mostly Soviet fighters, from enslavement by the Third Reich. I remind you that the US is still sending lethal arms to Ukraine, which is using them against the Russian speakers in Donbass. Under Trump, the US has moved to an extreme-right vision of the world and the situation in Ukraine is this vision taken to its logical end. Many US conservatives think this is an expression of conservatism, but a giant leap backward to Hitler’s Germany cannot be conservatism. Conservatism is the conserving of something American that has had a glorious history. The events in Ukraine signal something new, something sinister and Satanic that should send chills down the spine of every American. Real US conservatives are not lusting after the goose step and the Nazi salute. Now the US Establishment, that’s a different story.
 
To get a good overview of the neo-Nazis who seek control over all of Ukraine, read this eye-opening report: https://www.mintpressnews.com/fbi-neo-nazi-militia-trained-by-us-military-in-ukraine-now-training-us-white-supremacists/251687/
 
Note the photo of John McCain meeting with the leader of neo-Nazi party Svoboda. And note that Americans’ tax money is being sent in the form of lethal aid to the Azov Battalion, the umbrella group of the smaller neo-Nazi groups mentioned below. Only recently has the US Congress banned sending money and arms to the Ukrainian Neo-Nazis.
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
Former Victory Day in Ukraine: the swastika finally defeated the red star
 
Nyura N. Berg
 
Ukraine, as is known, has for some time abolished the concept of the “Great Patriotic War” as such, has rewritten textbooks and now, “together with the whole of Europe,” May 8 marks the Day of Remembrance and Reconciliation. This decision is an important part of the Ukrainian cargo cult, which allows local ideologues and the entire nationalist public to consider themselves to be Europe.
 
On this day, it is necessary to weep, put candles in the corner of the television screen, fill the air with mourning, mourn, rave about the parade in Moscow and remind again and again that for Ukraine this war was never domestic, and certainly not great [Russians call WW II the Great Patriotic War]. And the fact that Ukraine was occupied as a result, and this occupation lasted until 1991, well, and the rest is blah blah blah.
 
This year, the director of the Institute of National Remembrance, Vladimir Vyatrovich, with his twin brothers of the same Nazi mind-set, has already raised the question of cancelling the holiday on May 9, and they seem to be cancelling it. [National remembrance is the idea of honouring the Soviet Russians and Ukrainians who jointly freed Ukraine from the Nazis. Yet, incredibly, the Ukrainian leadership wants to honour not the freedom fighters but the Nazis who invaded and killed 600,000 Ukrainians and Russians at the Battle of Kiev!]
 
All the latest Ukrainian ideology of the "post-genocidal nation," the eternal victim of the northern invaders, develops in this paradigm. In order to secure the format of the rewritten history imposed on Ukrainians, the so-called law banning communist and Nazi symbols was adopted.
 
Even when the law was passed (and it happened in 2015), everyone clearly understood that Nazi symbolism would not suffer at all, and the ground work was being laid for the sake of fighting the legacy of the “Soviet occupation regime” within the framework of the final separation from Russia. The hammer and sickle, the red star and Soviet songs were immediately outlawed, and then films in which the Soviet army was shown to be the liberator of Europe from fascism, then films about the modern Russian army, were soon totally banned by all Russian television channels and the list went on.
 
A special frenzy is caused by St. George's ribbon, which Ukrainian patriots do not hesitate to pull out of the hands of even 90-year-old veterans and on whom they spew vitriol for many hours on television. But still, relatively recently, Ukrainian deputies have been seen with ribbons on their lapels congregating en masse to congratulate war heroes.
 
On May 2, in Odessa, the police detained a girl with a ribbon, but since the violator was a minor, they simply had a preventive conversation with her, but her father received an administrative punishment. [Yes, punishment for honouring the fighters who defeated the Nazis!]
 
The Cherkasy [Cherkasy is a city in central Ukraine] teacher who tried to tell students who it was that actually liberated Europe from fascism, how brave Ukrainians fought valiantly in the Soviet army and how important it is to honour the memory of their grandfathers to prevent the return of Nazism, was subjected to considerably harsher repression. In her classes, the children sang "Katyusha" [Russian folk song] and "Holy War." Vigilant citizens instantly reported where they should be (to the question of "who wrote the four million denunciations"), and the director of the department of education and humanitarian policy of Cherkasy city council Sergey Voronov said: "This is unacceptable." Perhaps he does not even think so, but behind every official today auditors from the Prayiy Sektor (Right Sector* -- a Nazi wannabe political party), C14* [Ukrainian racist, homophobic nationalist group included in the US terrorist group list of TRAC] and the National Corps* loom invisibly. So the teacher was subjected to such a suggestive conversation that she considered it a blessing to be able to quit of her own free will.
 
The teacher was lucky, but they could have put her in prison. For veterans of the Great Patriotic War, there is o leniency. For example, the former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada [the Ukrainian congress], Yuriy Syrotyuk, demands that they be judged “if they committed crimes against humanity”. This, they say, is done "in all normal countries," and they are not "reconciling with evil."
 
... Of course, repression in connection with the violation of the law did not in any way affect either the swastika, or the Nazi uniform, or the public signatures, or hats with twisted cords and characteristic emblems, or the motto “Ukraine ponad use” adopted from the German Deutschland über alles. And before and after the law was passed, it flourished magnificently and bore fruit and continues to march victoriously on the territory of Tseevropa [a combination of two Ukrainian words meaning “is Europe” and referring to Ukraine] to this day.
 
In the midst of the democratic pro-European Maidan, a group of young Nazis, painted swastikas, made a photo from the heart to the sun [refers to the “heil Hitler” salute] right in the building of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The children gave the “sieg heil!” salute on the streets, in educational institutions, on television, and the stylized swastika became the logo of almost all patriotic organizations. “Ukraine ponad use” [Ukraine above all, imitation of Nazi slogan: Deutschland über alles] the Minister of Health Uliana Suprun continually reminds the citizens.
 
In the years since the adoption of the law banning communist and Nazi symbols, the latter have been practiced in Ukraine with even greater success. Recently, the mayor of the Ukrainian town of Karlovka in Poltava region, Alexander Nakonechny, dressed in a Nazi uniform and greeted the audience with a characteristic gesture. This photo with the head of local government was spread all over the Internet, but don’t bother to google the search query “the mayor of Karlovka was summoned to the prosecutor’s office”, because he was not called anywhere. The police are not up to it at all. It is preparing to enforce the law in terms of the prohibition of only communist symbolism and has already pasted a reminder for the citizens of cities and villages - it says, Achtung, Achtung.
 
Participant of the march on the occasion of the anniversary of the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, an extremist organization, banned in Russia) in Kiev
 
Or, a Ukrainian journalist in the same form, with a drawn moustache, looking friendly, depicts Hitler on her YouTube channel. Channel motto: "Vata should burn brightly." [Vata means cotton wadding in Russian but is used in Ukraine as a pejorative denoting Russians] Outraged citizens are reassured by the Odessa police – So what? It’s great fun.
 
Social networks also discussed for several days a photo from a Lviv wedding, to which some of the guests were festively dressed up - in costumes of Wehrmacht soldiers. The whole company poses against the background of the Cathedral of St. George, near the monument to the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church Andrei Sheptytsky, who collaborated with the German invaders during World War II. In Lviv, it is generally seen as extremely fashionable to walk in the uniforms of SS or Wehrmacht officers - the police reaction is favourable and the Nazi symbols, God forbid, do not disturb them. Tourists eagerly take pictures, and passers-by smile affably.
 
Monuments to Hitler's collaborators, by the way, throughout Galicia and the Volyn Oblast, are there to stay. They are not uncommon in Central Ukraine, but in the cities of Eastern Ukraine [home to the Russian speakers, who dislike the Nazis], there are already memorials to the UPA* and Petliurist soldiers. After the victory of the “revolution of dignity” and the adoption of the aforementioned law on the prohibition of symbolism, the number of such monuments began to grow exponentially.
In recent years, before the May holidays, the idea of ​​reconciliation between the Soviet soldier and the “warrior” UPA* has been actively accelerated. The posters depict two veterans and - say, they defeated Nazism together. When asked to name at least one, even the smallest victory of the Ukrainian nationalists over the German fascists, or to cite at least one village liberated from them, the descendants of the elders shout out the traditional “Mordor,” “occupation” and “Russian propaganda.”
 
In principle, everything is logical. When the whole country is more or less entirely ruled by radical nationalists, when the execution of the law banning Nazi symbols is enforced by the Nazis from paramilitary forces who have declared themselves to be the guardians of law and order, acting with the full connivance of the police, it would be strange to expect a different kind of public discourse.
 
P. S. Here is the last of the news feeds - the militants from C14*, the most odious of the Nazi organizations, have been destroying one Kiev trading network for several days, arranging sinister performances in its stores and promising guards a cruel death. The police do not intervene, the prosecutor's office is silent, and there are no comments either from the deputies or from both presidents. [Since the Maidan coup, it has been increasingly difficult for the Ukrainian government to control the renegade Neo-Nazi groups, particularly the Azov Battalion, which has behaved like a terrorist organization. This kind of lawlessness suggests that Ukraine is an ungovernable failed state.]
 
* Extremist organizations banned in Russia.
 
END TRANSLATION

 Above: Photo of Trump and Hagee family

A few days ago I posted my response at the Spanish-language section of Quora to the question: Does Israel have a right to exist? Why or why not?
 
I did not express a personal opinion but documented that today’s Israel was land seized from its original Arab settlers by terror and murder. I have had exchanges on this subject with Israeli Quora members in the past and their reaction was always the same: denial or justification of the atrocities, often with personal attacks on myself and foul language for daring to tell a truth that has long been hidden with the complicity of the Israeli and US Establishments.
 
Below is another example of such an exchange with an Israeli woman who resorts to the usual arguments. My original answer had pointed out that the arguments of Israelis and Zionists almost invariably focus on statehood and on the fact that Palestine had never been a nation. However, I argued that the real underlying issue is not statehood but the atrocities committed by the original Jewish settlers, including wholesale murder to terrorize the Arabs into leaving. This can hardly be construed as “God” giving the Jews the land.
 
This is a shock to my opponents because no one had ever taken this tack with them, which rendered the statehood arguments irrelevant. I was talking morality, an issue no one had ever raised, not even the American so-called “Christian” Zionists who are responsible for a critical amount of the support, moral, financial, military and propaganda, received by Israel. At the end of my arguments I always point out that for me, the adversary is not Israel, the Jews or even the murderous Zionists, but these “Christian” Zionists, who blasphemously hide behind the name of Christ to support the most heinous form of evil. Thus, morality, the whole focus of the Bible, is ignored by people calling themselves “Christians” (around 80% of Evangelicals and 60% of Catholics believe God gave the Jews the land of Israel, but no one talks about the fact that 65% of Israelis are irreligious and therefore not Jews in the biblical sense.)
 
And I clearly demonstrate that none of this Israel worship is biblical, conflicting with both the Old and New Testament scripture referred to by these Zionists as “support.” The most absurd and blasphemous of their arguments is that God wants Christians to support the building of the Third temple in Jerusalem so that the Anti-Christ will be able to sit there as he persecutes Christians in the end times. Yes, “Christians” urging Christians to support the Anti-Christ so that the prophecies can be fulfilled! As though God were incapable of fulfilling His prophecies without the help of “Christians” whose focus is not the teachings of Christ but support for a secular country calling itself Israel.
 
My analysis of “Christian” Zionism at New Silk Strategies:
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/vince-on-quora-why-does-the-us-show-unwavering-support-for-israel-and-not-palestine
 
and at Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t-NATO-evaluated-its-peacekeeping-experience-to-identify-and-implement-best-practices-for-transitioning-failed-states-into-functional-democracy/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
The atrocities committed by early Israeli settlers:
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/israels-right-to-existarabs-right-to-die
 
Leah Zeinsteger, responding to the above eye witness accounts of atrocities.
 
Dear Vince ... This story is not as you show it. Behind those massacres that you mention there is much more ... How about the arms deals of the ruling Sheikhs before 1948? And the English so innocent that they did not want to lose their place in the Middle East because of the geopolitics of the area? [Actually, the British disarmed the Palestinians, leaving them helpless, while allowing the Zionists to have weapons. It was a recipe for a disaster. Vince] What happened to the Arabs who lived in the current territory of Israel? Israel wanted to come to an agreement with the heads of the Arab villages that were in the territory. Unfortunately the Arab heads of state under the infamous promises of the British forced the villages to refuse support to the inhabitants in terms of schooling, health, education to cultivate the land ... etc. [Why in heaven’s name would these Arabs trust the British or the Zionist settlers? The fact that these people later massacred the Arabs proves that the Arabs were right in rejecting their “help.” Vince] Of course the [male] Arab villagers were used to sitting drinking coffee in the corner and smoking hookah or drinking tea while the women and children worked to feed the family [So because the women and children were abused, the Zionists were entitled to slaughter them? Really? Vince]. A repeated theme. You have to read a lot on this topic. And I'm not saying that Israel did not make mistakes, of course things happened, but we are talking about human beings who were beaten, running, punished all over the planet. [Since the Jews had suffered atrocities themselves, they should have been able to identify with the persecuted Palestinians rather than unleash similar atrocities on them. Holocaust survivors Eli Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal urged the Jews to take up the cause of persecuted non-Jewish groups and not just focus on themselves. Israel ignored this message. Vince]
 
Vince Dhimos
Original author
When someone murders another person, there is always a motive that seems to justify the murder. Everyone already knows that. But someday the US will no longer swallow excuses and the support of the Yankees will disappear. Already the young Jews of the USA are ceasing to support Israel. They are saying: "Enough excuses." A wise people prepares for the future.
 
Leah Zeinsteger
 
I invite you to live a season in Israel and in some kind of Arab country that is not Jordan, because the Jordanians are very peaceful people. Talk to you later. It is very easy to talk about excuses when reality is not known.
 
Vince
It is not about which region is better. What the Zionist terror gangs did is a crime against humanity. There is no excuse for the murder that the Stern and Irgun groups committed. The fact that the Zionists try to justify atrocities is a sign of something deeply malevolent, beyond the understanding of civilized people. Honestly, it gives me chills to read these justifications for unjustifiable crimes. All my life I have opposed the arguments in favour of the perpetrators of the Holocaust who pointed to the foibles of the Jews as an excuse for their crimes. I have always answered: There can be no excuses for the atrocities.
Do you think I was wrong?

The moderators (censors) of Quora pulled a post of mine regarding the atrocities committed by the Zionists at the founding of Israel.
 
I am able to open my post at the below URL. Perhaps because I am the author? Or perhaps because they forgot to delete it? (Let us know if you can open it).
 
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-official-history-of-Israel-as-presented-by-Israeli-government-highly-distorted-to-say-the-least-compared-to-what-actually-happened/answer/Vince-Dhimos?__nsrc__=4&__snid3__=4440847037
 
Like all social media moderators (ie, censors), when Quora pulls a post, they never tell the author why they did so. Typically, if the author asks why, social media moderators will send the author a list of the rules and regulations. Usually, there is no rule that the author can see that he has violated. That’s like a judge in a criminal court sentencing a defendant but failing to tell the accused what he is charged with and instead, handing the accused a pile of law-books and saying “see for yourself.”
 
Below is the post that was pulled. Let me know if you can guess why the moderators didn’t like this post.
 
I also lost my Twitter account months ago after posting about how the IDF shoots unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. It would appear that the topic of Israel and Zionism is the most highly censored of all topics in the Land of the Free. At the same time, it is the topic concerning the most aggrieved victims group on the planet. But Israel enjoys unswerving support of US Evangelicals (and also many Catholics) and their president. Neither US pastors nor the Trump administration even so much as acknowledge the existence of these ongoing atrocities. And that is, or course, why they continue unabated with no mercy shown to the victims. The real culprit is US cultists who think they are Christians.
 
But injustice is a distortion, and distortions naturally seek a resolution – just as a coil spring that is compressed will fly into the air when the pressure is released. It’s only a matter of time.
 
Here is an article on the censoring of Israeli atrocities in the founding of Israel: https://www.zochrot.org/en/educationUnit2/all
 
MY CENSORED POST
 
Why is the official history of Israel as presented by Israeli government highly distorted, to say the least, compared to what actually happened?
 
https://www.zochrot.org/en/educationUnit2/all
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Your answer to this question has been deleted by Quora Moderation.
 
I think this question deserves an explanation more than an answer. Israel’s true history — the story of the Nakba — is so well hidden that I suspect very few are aware of the tragic atrocities against the Palestinians.
 
I had written about this in Spanish at Quora. Respuesta de Vince Dhimos a ¿Tiene derecho a existir el Estado de Israel? ¿Por qué o por qué no?)
 
Here is a redacted translation of that answer:
 
The issue of whether Israel has the right to exist is generally falsely and slyly framed as the question of its right to be a nation-state.
 
Therefore, people who discuss this issue always present it as a nationality problem, but that is almost irrelevant in the real human rights context, which is invariably ignored. Specifically, what is ignored is the cold-blooded murder of human beings by the Zionist terrorist gangs, whose lives are portrayed as less than those of an animal. The rationale for this heartless view of the Palestinians is that they are Muslims and are therefore the enemy of civilization. This view dominates US right-wing politics today and is held unquestioningly among most Americans who consider themselves conservative Christians.
 
This is the main reason the Arabs’ right to life is ignored by Western commentators.
 
Meanwhile, the Zionists slyly remind us that Palestine is not a distinct identity and that the Palestinians have never had a nation of their own, but that Israel had been a nation millennia ago. Therefore, if supposedly follows that the Arabs who had occupied Palestine for millennia prior to the arrival of the Zionists from Europe and elsewhere simply had to go. Immediately. Because they were trespassers on land that they mistakenly thought was theirs. And the methods used to expel them were, of course, unimportant. This Zionist mentality, fully supported by the majority of US Evangelicals, set the stage for the gruesome murder of thousands of the people unfortunate enough to have been born in the territory claimed by the Zionists and their allies in Britain and the US in the decades leading up to the UN declaration of Israel as a state.
 
But the issue that is never raised is whether they are humans with the right to life, and that issue is cunningly masked by the argument purely concerning nationhood. And, of course, in the US, the issue is dominated by a very large population of Evangelicals, who consider themselves “Christian” Zionists. These folks make up the largest voting bloc in the US and have managed to capture the current president who grovels more submissively to Israel than any other president in US history, and is now flirting with a big war against Iran, just to please Israel. I have detailed the problem of this dangerous cult and its fatally flawed reading of the scriptures here:
 
Vince on Quora: Why does the US show unwavering support for Israel and not Palestine?
 
The important question regarding Israel – the one that is ignored by all parties involved – is: did the Arabs who were living in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century have the right to live? Or did the Zionists have the right to kill them? In this context, the question of their right to be a nation fades into the background. But it is very important if the Arabs had the right to live or if they had the right to stay in the land where they lived when the Zionists and the British came and forced them to leave at gun point. This puts the anger of the Palestinians in a different light.
 
Since the question mentions "rights," the important thing is the way the Zionists forced the Arabs to leave. Here is a description of how they respected the "rights" of the Arabs who lived in this area:
 
El horror del terrorismo judío
 
Prologue of the book "Violence and terror of the Zionists, before and after the State of Israel", Editorial Canaan
 
"The horror of Jewish terrorism ..." Golda Meir
 
On 9 April, 69 years will have passed since the entry of the hordes of Zionist Khazars in Palestine and of the massacres and crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian populations. There were no war crimes because there was no war. These were undoubtedly imprescriptible crimes against humanity that still await justice and condemnation of their perpetrators: Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir and their murderous gangs.
 
The great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, in a memorable letter, awarded Menahem Begin and his general Arik Sharon with the "Nobel Prize for Death," for their responsibility in the massacres in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Sabra and Shatila, in the Lebanese capital Beirut in 1982. [Remembering Sabra And Shatila Massacre]
 
Dr. Teresa Aranguren, [2] in an enlightening book, recounts the events that took place, and I want to extract from her book only a few moving paragraphs:
 
"On April 9, 1948, the armed groups Irgun and Stern (whose leaders included two future prime ministers of Israel, Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir) carried out the massacre of the inhabitants of Deir Yassin. [Testimonies from the censored Deir Yassin massacre: 'They piled bodies and burned them' Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre: 'They Piled Bodies and Burned Them'
 
A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun. The testimonies collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are difficult to process even 70 years after the fact]
 
The delegate of the Red Cross in the area, Jacques de Reynier, was the first person to arrive at the place while the Irgun militias were still present: "Among the troops there were some very young people, almost adolescents, all in military clothing and helmets, men and women armed to the teeth with pistols, machine guns, grenades and also big knives, most of them still bloodied. A very beautiful young woman showed me her blood still dripping like a trophy [from her knife]...
 
I made my way between them and entered a house. The first room was dark with everything in disarray but nobody could be seen. In the next room I found, under the furniture and the busted mattresses, several corpses aIready cold.
 
The cleansing operation had been done first with machine guns, then with grenades and finally with the long knives, without any worries that it would be discovered. The same scene we found in the next room but as I was about to leave I heard what I thought was a sigh.
 
I removed the corpses until I touched a small foot that was still warm. She was a ten-year-old girl, badly injured by a grenade but still alive. I picked her up and one of the officers tried to block me at the door, I pushed him and left with my precious body ...
 
We check the other houses and in all of them we find the same spooky scene. We only found two other people alive, two women, one of them an old woman huddled in the kitchen, she had been hiding there for hours ...
 
The village had four hundred inhabitants, some fifty managed to flee, three had survived, the rest had been thoroughly massacred, following the orders of their chiefs as they are admirably disciplined troops ... "[3]
 
Jacques de Reynier gives the figure of 347 dead in the killing of Deir Yassin; other sources speak of 250. In any case, it is not about the number of victims – because in those months of 1948 there were similar massacres in many other villages of Palestine – but about the echo that the killing had, the panic movement it provoked, which made Deir Yassin one of the keys to the exodus of the Palestinian peasants.
 
[In my debates with Israelis and Zionits at Quora, I keep encountering the argument that the Arabs left of their own free will and that the Zionists are not responsible for this. They never mention these massacres, of course. Vince]
 
In fact it became one of the elements of the military strategy to achieve the "spontaneous" evacuation of the Arab population of rural Palestine. A pattern that was repeated with assiduity was to surround the villages and broadcast through speakers a messages to its inhabitants: Leave the village or you will get the Deir Yassin treatment.
 
Below is a link to a video that will help you understand how the first Zionists got their "rights" to the land (it’s in English with Spanish subs):
 
Al Nakba: premiado documental de Al-Jazeera subtitulado al español
 
In view of the above, it seems that when the Israelis say they have a right to this land, what they really mean is that the Arabs have no rights, not even the right to life, and that the Israelis have the right to kill them with impunity.
 
Then let's forget about the question you asked at Quora, and ask the important question:
 
If the Israelis have a right to this land, does this not imply that the Arabs have no right, not even the right to live?
 
​END TRANSLATION
 
The really chilling part of this is that an Israeli lady commented at the site that the Zionists had every right to commit these atrocities because of things that these Palestinians and the Arab community had done to the Jews. I could hardly believe anyone could defend these atrocities against unarmed men, women and children! The arguments she used were the same ones I had heard many times before from Isrealis, many of whom are thoroughly brainwashed by their government.
 
In my response to her I said that despite the excuses given by German anti-Semites, I had always argued in defense of the Jews who were killed by Hitler, saying there was no excuse for what Hitler did.
 
And I asked her: Do you think I was wrong?

Translation of Vince Dhimos’ Spanish-language answer to the question: Does the state of Israel have the right to exist? Why or why not?
 
(link to Spanish-language original: https://es.quora.com/Tiene-derecho-a-existir-el-Estado-de-Israel-Por-qu%C3%A9-o-por-qu%C3%A9-no/answer/Vince-Dhimos)
 
BEGIN MY ANSWER (notes in [brackets] are my addenda after publication at Quora. The following is a redacted version of my answer):
 
The issue of whether Israel has the right to exist is generally falsely and slyly framed as the question of its right to be a nation-state.
 
Therefore, people who discuss this issue always present it as a nationality problem, but that is almost irrelevant in the real human rights context, which is invariably ignored. Specifically, what is ignored is the cold-blooded murder of human beings by the Zionist terrorist gangs, whose lives are portrayed as less than those of an animal. The rationale for this heartless view of the Palestinians is that they are Muslims and are therefore the enemy of civilization. This view dominates US right-wing politics today and is held unquestioningly among most Americans who consider themselves conservative Christians.
 
This is the main reason the right to life is ignored by Western commentators.
 
Meanwhile, the Zionists slyly remind us that Palestine is not a distinct identity and that the Palestinians have never had a nation of their own, but that Israel had been a nation millennia ago. Therefore, if supposedly follows that the Arabs who had occupied Palestine for millennia prior to the arrival of the Zionists from Europe and elsewhere simply had to go. Immediately. Because they were trespassers on land that they mistakenly thought was theirs. And the methods used to expel them were, of course, unimportant. This Zionist mentality, fully supported by the majority of US Evangelicals, set the stage for the gruesome murder of thousands of the people unfortunate enough to have been born in the territory claimed by the Zionists and their allies in Britain and the US in the decades leading up to the UN declaration of Israel as a state.
 
But the issue that is never raised is whether they are humans with the right to life, and that issue is cunningly masked by the argument purely concerning nationhood. And, of course, in the US, the issue is dominated by a very large population of Evangelicals, who consider themselves “Christian” Zionists. These folks make up the largest voting bloc in the US and have managed to capture the current president who grovels more submissively to Israel than any other president in US history, and is now flirting with a big war against Iran, just to please Israel. I have detailed the problem of this dangerous cult and its fatally flawed reading of the scriptures here:
 
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/vince-on-quora-why-does-the-us-show-unwavering-support-for-israel-and-not-palestine
 
The important question regarding Israel – the one that is ignored by all parties involved – is: did the Arabs who were living in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century have the right to live? Or did the Zionists have the right to kill them? In this context, the question of their right to be a nation fades into the background. But it is very important if the Arabs had the right to live or if they had the right to stay in the land where they lived when the Zionists and the British came and forced them to leave at gun point. This puts the anger of the Palestinians in a different light.
 
Since the question mentions "rights," the important thing is the way the Zionists forced the Arabs to leave. Here is a description of how they respected the "rights" of the Arabs who lived in this area:
 
http://www.palestinalibre.org/articulo.php?a=49642
 
Prologue of the book "Violence and terror of the Zionists, before and after the State of Israel", Editorial Canaan
 
"The horror of Jewish terrorism ..." Golda Meir
 
On 9 April, 69 years will have passed since the entry of the hordes of Zionist Khazars in Palestine and of the massacres and crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinian populations. There were no war crimes because there was no war. These were undoubtedly imprescriptible crimes against humanity that still await justice and condemnation of their perpetrators: Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir and their murderous gangs.
 
The great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, in a memorable letter, awarded Menahem Begin and his general Arik Sharon with the "Nobel Prize for Death," for their responsibility in the massacres in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of Sabra and Shatila, in the Lebanese capital Beirut in 1982. [https://imemc.org/article/66121/]
 
Dr. Teresa Aranguren, [2] in an enlightening book, recounts the events that took place, and I want to extract from her book only a few moving paragraphs:
 
"On April 9, 1948, the armed groups Irgun and Stern (whose leaders included two future prime ministers of Israel, Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir) carried out the massacre of the inhabitants of Deir Yassin. [https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-testimonies-from-the-censored-massacre-at-deir-yassin-1.5494094 Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre: 'They Piled Bodies and Burned Them'
A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun. The testimonies collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are difficult to process even 70 years after the fact]
 
The delegate of the Red Cross in the area, Jacques de Reynier, was the first person to arrive at the place while the Irgun militias were still present: "Among the troops there were some very young people, almost adolescents, all in military clothing and helmets, men and women armed to the teeth with pistols, machine guns, grenades and also big knives, most of them still bloodied. A very beautiful young woman showed me her blood still dripping like a trophy [from her knife]...
 
I made my way between them and entered a house. The first room was dark with everything in disarray but nobody could be seen. In the next room I found, under the furniture and the busted mattresses, several corpses aIready cold.
 
The cleansing operation had been done first with machine guns, then with grenades and finally with the long knives, without any worries that it would be discovered. The same scene we found in the next room but as I was about to leave I heard what I thought was a sigh.
 
I removed the corpses until I touched a small foot that was still warm. She was a ten-year-old girl, badly injured by a grenade but still alive. I picked her up and one of the officers tried to block me at the door, I pushed him and left with my precious body ...
 
We check the other houses and in all of them we find the same spooky scene. We only found two other people alive, two women, one of them an old woman huddled in the kitchen, she had been hiding there for hours ...
 
The village had four hundred inhabitants, some fifty managed to flee, three had survived, the rest had been thoroughly massacred, following the orders of their chiefs as they are admirably disciplined troops ... "[3]
 
Jacques de Reynier gives the figure of 347 dead in the killing of Deir Yassin; other sources speak of 250. In any case, it is not about the number of victims – because in those months of 1948 there were similar massacres in many other villages of Palestine – but about the echo that the killing had, the panic movement it provoked, which made Deir Yassin one of the keys to the exodus of the Palestinian peasants.
 
[In my debates with Israelis and Zionits at Quora, I keep encountering the argument that the Arabs left of their own free will and that the Zionists are not responsible for this. They never mention these massacres, of course. Vince]
 
In fact it became one of the elements of the military strategy to achieve the "spontaneous" evacuation of the Arab population of rural Palestine. A pattern that was repeated with assiduity was to surround the villages and broadcast through speakers a messages to its inhabitants: Leave the village or you will get the Deir Yassin treatment.
 
Below is a link to a video that will help you understand how the first Zionists got their "rights" to the land:
 
http://palestinalibre.org/articulo.php?a=44961
 
In view of the above, it seems that when the Israelis say they have a right to this land, what they really mean is that the Arabs have no rights, not even the right to life, and that the Israelis have the right to kill them with impunity.
 
Then let's forget about the question you asked at Quora, and ask the important question:
 
If the Israelis have a right to this land, does this not imply that the Arabs have no right, not even the right to live?
​

Our translation of an article from telesurtv.net from Spanish follows below, with commentary and notes in [brackets] by Vince Dhimos.
 
I have always considered Bloomberg to be balanced and fair, mostly because they are often the only outlet reporting economic news reflecting the actual crisis surrounding the US dollar and the hopelessness of the US sovereign debt. However, yesterday it posted the opinion piece shown below the link to Bloomberg. It was based on an outrageous lie, namely, that Maduro’s re-election was irregular and unfair and one that “no serious outside observer found to be free or fair.” That was a whopper, and I could not resist writing to the author and editor to set them straight (emails: elake1@bloomberg.net, mnewman43@bloomberg.net).
 
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-30/juan-guaido-s-uprising-in-venezuela-is-not-a-coup
 
BEGIN MY EMAIL
 
You wrote:

“Guaido himself, actually, is the other main reason the rebellion in Venezuela is not a coup: The interim president, who is recognized by the U.S. and dozens of other nations, has democratic legitimacy. Maduro is responsible for this turn of events. In May 2018, Maduro won a so-called election that no serious outside observer found to be free or fair. His second term began on Jan. 10, which is when Venezuela’s Supreme Court in exile ruled that Maduro had exceeded his authority by staying in power after his legitimate term in office.”
 
This is the problem with printing only US Establishment-approved “news.”
 
The site linked below posted a letter from several of the international observers who actually witnessed the elections in which Maduro was re-elected. Their names appear below.
 
Their letter, addressed to EU foreign minister Federica Mogherini, was intended to dispel the myth that the EU had spread accusing Maduro of “irregular” elections, even though the EU refused to send observers.
 
We were unanimous in concluding that the elections were conducted fairly, that the election conditions were not biased, that genuine irregularities were exceptionally few and of a very minor nature. 
 
https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13899
 
Jeremy Fox, journalist / writer
Jospeh Farrell, Board of the Centre for Investigative Journalism
Calvin Tucker, journalist MS
Dr Francisco Dominguez, Latin American Studies, Middlesex University
END BIASED BLOOMBERG ARTICLE
As journalists writing for Bloomberg, you are supposed to report the news, not invent it. As for the editors, when you publish an irresponsible piece containing a major error, simply adding a disclaimer is not enough. If you know it is misleading your readers, don’t print it. Thanks.
V.D.
 
END EMAIL
 
Of course, the bold-face lie that no international observer attested to the legitimacy of the elections is key to the US position that Maduro is "illegitimate." If he is not illegitmate, then the US position and Guaido are illegitimate.

But Bloomberg is not the only one spreading lies about Venezuela. Señor Juan Guaidó, interim puppet in Venenzuela, told 5 lies in an interview to the press, and as a result of this man’s actions and lies yesterday, most of the news-reading world went to bed last night believing that the US and its minions in Caracas had succeeded in overthrowing the legitimate president, Nicolás Maduro, and installed a Washington puppet who would help Donald Trump help himself to Venezuela’s oil reserves in his quest to MAGA.
 
You realize, of course, that a puppet can never be blamed for his actions. The puppeteer pulling his strings is to blame. And this puppeteer, residing in the White House, is an accomplished liar who has taught Guaidó a trick or two. Just last week, for instance, Trump appeared before a gathering of his fans, many of whom believe that he was chosen by the Almighty, and told the crowd he had recently called the Saudi king and demanded millions of dollars as payment for protection, and had received the money. The crowd went wild. But he was clearly lying because King Salman has a bad case of dementia and has put his son in charge of the kingdom due to a serious illness that started in 2008. The fact is, Trump could never have gotten through to the king. No one in the palace would have allowed the poor man to speak, even if he could have. This is the intellectual level to which the US presidency - and the gullible public - has sunk!
 
So Guaidó has a good teacher and, as the translated article below shows, is following in the master’s footsteps.

 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
5 lies by Guaidó after the attempted coup d'état
 
 Venezuela: As on April 13, 2002, the people and the FANB made the coup attempt fail.
 
by Carlos Aznarez
 
After a day of opposition violence, the self-proclaimed opposition deputy Juan Guaidó gave a speech with some inconsistencies.
 
The self-proclaimed opposition deputy Juan Guaidó gave a speech on Tuesday after trying to launch a coup d'etat against the Venezuelan government.
 
See how the ally of the United States (USA) misrepresents the information in his speech:
 
"What the regime said, that it had control of the Armed Forces, is a farce."
 
Defense minister Vladimir Padrino López, together with the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) expressed their support for the government of Nicolás Maduro and rejected the attempt by the opposition to take power by means of violence. He described the attempted coup as a cowardly and terrorist act.
 
"We know that Maduro does not have the backing or respect of the Armed Forces, much less the people of Venezuela (...) They made a call to Miraflores [the presidential palace] and nobody answered."
 
Supporters of Chavismo concentrated in the vicinity of the Miraflores Palace (seat of the national government) to reject the coup d'état and ensure the institutionality of the country, which a small group of rebels attempted to violate.
 
"My thanks to the international community for their support."
 
By "the international community", Guaidó means the United States and right-wing governments that support the power grab by violent means. Different governments, political parties and social movements around the world have rejected the coup d'état and called for dialogue.
 
Likewise, the ambassador of Venezuela to the United Nations (UN), Samuel Moncada, denounced the coup and asked the world to reject these actions.
 
"There is no possibility of a coup d'etat, unless they want to arrest me."
 
There is a small group of military rebels against the national government, which were neutralized by that national government. [Actually, there were 25 coup participants, who are now seeking refuge in the Brazilian embassy in Caracas. Some others, about 70, were held in custody. There are 200,000 military members who remain loyal to the government of Maduro].
 
The group of armed rebels did it through arms, and in turn, opposition supporters created pockets of violence in the capital.
 
The US, on the other hand, admitted that it supports this coup and seeks a change of government in Venezuela.
 
Really, deputy?
 
"This is another sabotage of the coup-making right wing that wants us to confront each other"
 
"Venezuela today has the opportunity of a peaceful rebellion."
 
Most of the soldiers who were initially in the Altamira distributor road were tricked into being there. The rest of the rebels were armed and besieged the La Carlota Air Base in Caracas (capital), along with violent opposition.
 
END TRANSLATION

Our translation from telesurtv.net with commentary by Vince Dhimos. We refer to our article of March 4, 2019, which started out with a video of violence perpetrated by the opposition during the famous “guarimbas,” riots in 2014 that the Western media keep telling us were “peaceful,” but people somehow got killed by these peace loving US-backed car-burning rioters. One of the captions on the screen of the video said:

 
“Leopoldo López, the brains behind the death and injuries in Caracas. The State no longer has any excuses [not] to punish this murderer.”
 
In today’s attempted coup, this murderer López was released from captivity by the turncoat military people but when it was clear that the coup would fail, López found refuge in the Spanish embassy.
 
https://www.telesurtv.net/news/militares-sublevados-golpe-estado-venezuela-20190430-0028.html
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
What is known about the military rebels in Venezuela?
 
Jorge Gestoso
 
The insurgent military asked for asylum in the embassy of Brazil in Venezuela.
 
At dawn today, Tuesday, a small group of soldiers in Venezuela rebelled, in complicity with the extreme right. Some claimed to have been deceived by their superiors, but another 25 did so with treacherous intent.
 
The right and the US government have tried to implant the idea that it is not a coup d'état, but "a military action to restore the constitutional thread in Venezuela." That is, to attach an alternative name to the overthrow of a president elected by popular vote, Nicolás Maduro.
 
The name "coup d'état" is not in the vocabulary of US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who admitted that the destabilization in Venezuela has been planned and supports regime change by the means necessary.
 
The group of armed rebels supported the opposition siege of La Carlota Air Base, but not only with slogans, pots and good intentions, as the right-wing media have historically wanted to convey.
 
The rebel military men had blue ribbons that differentiated them from the rest and fired both at the military defending the people’s interests, and at the group of violent demonstrators who were at the Altamira distributor road, a road section to the east of the capital.
 
Madelein Garcia [tweet]
 
 1. I was in #LaCarlota when we heard a flurry of shots coming from the #Altamira distributor road occupied by a group of turncoat soldiers, and this was just at  moment when they were shooting, watch carefully, even the civilians who were there also took out their weapons.
The military men were not the only ones armed. The opposition was also armed and was participating in clashes with the objective of entering or seizing La Carlota base, an objective that they did not achieve because it was held by the Armed Forces.
In the afternoon, the Brazilian government confirmed that it approved asylum in its embassy for the 25 soldiers, who are low-ranking, not generals or high commanding officers.
 
END TRANSLATION

​from medium.com:

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/trump-has-murdered-over-40-000-venezuelans-with-sanctions-6eb3e7f0eb7f
 
Trump Has Murdered Over 40,000 Venezuelans with Sanctions


Caitlin Johnstone

Apr 25, 2019
 
A new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has found that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died as a direct result of Trump administration sanctions put into effect in August 2017, and that tens of thousands more are expected to die as a result of additional sanctions put into place in January of this year.
 
Some noteworthy points:
 
The sanctions are “depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food, and other essential imports.”
The sanctions “reduced the public’s caloric intake, increased disease and mortality (for both adults and infants), and displaced millions of Venezuelans who fled the country as a result of the worsening economic depression and hyperinflation.”
The sanctions “have inflicted, and continue to inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–2018.”
That means 2019 deaths haven’t been added to this estimate. The year’s nearly half over, and more aggressive sanctions went into effect this past January.
Because of the sanctions, “some 22,000 doctors — about one third of the total — have left the country.”

“The loss of so many billions of dollars of foreign exchange and government revenues was very likely the main shock that pushed the economy from its high inflation, when the August 2017 sanctions were implemented, into the hyperinflation that followed.”
The massive number of already highly at-risk Venezuelans hurting from the 2017 sanctions “virtually guarantee that the current sanctions, which are much more severe than those implemented before this year, are a death sentence for tens of thousands of Venezuelans. This is especially true if the projected 67 percent drop in oil revenue materializes in 2019.”

“The United Nations finds that the groups most vulnerable to the accelerating crisis include children and adolescents (including many who can no longer attend school); people who are in poverty or extreme poverty; pregnant and nursing women; older persons; indigenous people; people in need of protection; women and adolescent girls at risk; people with disabilities; and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex.”

The sanctions “would fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory.”
 
To be clear, this unforgivable atrocity rests predominantly on the shoulders of the Trump administration. It is true that Venezuela has had deep economic troubles for years due to declining oil prices and other issues, and it is true that the sanctions in question follow a longstanding agenda of previous administrations and were built on the foundation of an Obama policy declaring the Venezuelan government an “extraordinary threat to national security”. But the report is clear in its assessment that what took the nation’s economy from a state of high inflation to hyperinflation was the August 2017 sanctions, and that’s what’s been causing these high numbers of deaths which will get even worse due to the January 2019 sanctions.
 
To put this in perspective for Trump supporters, 40,000 is also the number of people said to have died as a result of the disastrous Obama/Clinton interventionism in Libya. And, again, that number only covers 2017 and 2018, and death tolls are predicted to accelerate this year.
 
This would be the same President Trump, by the way, who recently vetoed a congressional bill to end the role of the United States in facilitating Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen. Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project indicates that up to 80,000 people had been killed in this war as of the end of last year. This number applies to deaths by military violence only, not to the other untold tens of thousands who have died of starvation and cholera as a result of Saudi Arabia’s inhuman blockades on imports and its deliberate targeting of farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites and cholera treatment centers with airstrikes. Just for children under the age of five, the death toll due to starvation alone is believed to be over 85,000.
 
Is America great yet?
 
Sanctions are the only form of warfare where it’s considered perfectly acceptable and legitimate to deliberately target a nation’s civilian population with lethal force. The human corpses it creates are just as dead as the human corpses created by overt military violence, but because this form of violence happens in slow motion it’s not treated like the same kind of horrific assault as if Trump had ordered the carpet bombing of Caracas. The distinction makes no difference to the dead and no difference to their loved ones, but it makes all the difference in the world when it comes to manufacturing public consent for murderous acts of interventionism.
 
The way sanctions are discussed by the western political/media class, they can even get away with blaming the deaths on the government being targeted. They’ll say things like, “Maduro is starving his people by not stepping down.” That tactic would never work with other forms of lethal force. Imagine if Trump deployed a barrage of Tomahawk missiles onto the most impoverished parts of a densely populated city in Venezuela, then hearing anyone say “Well Maduro actually exploded those people, because he wouldn’t do what we told him to do.” It doesn’t work. Sanctions are a slower and more gruelling weapon of war than bombs and missiles, but they’re vastly superior when it comes to the matter of keeping the public asleep through depraved acts of mass slaughter. Which is why everyone’s yammering about Joe Biden’s presidential campaign announcement right now instead of talking about this new CEPR report.
 
To this day I still run into defenders of Trump’s Venezuela interventionism (easily the most obnoxious and intellectually dishonest political group I’ve ever encountered, for the record) who insist that the sanctions are laser-targeted only at Venezuela’s elites, having no impact on the suffering of the Venezuelan people. This is exactly as stupid as believing that American bombs only kill bad guys. Attacking an economy hurts the people who depend on that economy to feed themselves and their children. Sanctions are an act of war which kill civilians just as dead as any other, and this latest report helps make that a stark and undeniable reality for us all.
 
__________________
 
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New Silk Strategies has posted a Spanish-language translation of this article at Quora:
​
https://es.quora.com/Qu%C3%A9-motiv%C3%B3-a-los-venezolanos-a-votar-a-favor-de-Nicolas-Maduro-como-presidente-de-Venezuela/answer/Vince-Dhimos

​ 
https://www.quora.com/Why-arent-other-countries-copying-the-USAs-political-and-economic-systems?__nsrc__=4
 
This question reflects one of the many narratives used by the US Establishment and its satellites in the Western world to convince otherwise innocent and decent citizens that the US coalition and NATO must step in and slaughter thousands more civilians to protect them from leaders who refuse to accept “our” political and economic system.
 
First it is important to consider that there is nothing even remotely resembling a democracy in the US. I have made a list of the members of a cabal that tightly controls the US. Here it is at Quora:
 https://www.quora.com/Is-China-a-bigger-threat-to-the-western-democracy-than-Russia/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
So if the person asking this question is referring to “democracy” as the political system that other countries do not emulate, then this is not a relevant question because the state doing the accusing is not a real democracy.
 
Let me remind the reader that the media virtually control the minds of the US populace and the citizens of its satellite states. The situation is reaching critical mass these days with the unlawful arrest of Julian Assange, who has provided the world with important news about the misdeeds of people in positions of power and who is admired and defended by people everywhere, including Trump supporters (although Trump was one of the first to call for his illegal extradition – illegal because he was not charged with a crime). I would also remind you that the social media are now censoring posts and barring users who express ideas that the operators and owners of these media do not agree with. I also note that Congress is trying to pass a law that would cut into Americans’ First Amendment free speech by prohibiting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to organize, for example, a boycott of products made in illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine. This is perhaps the most egregious example of law turned on its head because in essence it not only protects illegality but in fact, absurdly, makes it illegal to oppose illegality. I explained on Quora why the US gives the country in question a pass: https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-United-states-hold-unwavering-support-for-Israel-and-not-Palestine/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
As you can see from that answer, the offending country is practicing atrocities against the Palestinians and denying them basic rights. This country, which calls itself “the only democracy in the Middle East,” is not a democracy, and is wholeheartedly supported in its crimes by another country that falsely calls itself a democracy and pretends to be exporting democracy when in fact it is only punishing countries that refuse to bow to its wishes by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, absurdly claiming to save them from imagined despots.
 
Let’s look at some of the states that the US – ie, both politicians and msm – claim are non-democratic. First let us take North Korea. In this one case, the US is right. North Korea is not in any way democratic. Elections are not held there.
How about Syria? The US is flat out lying when it calls Assad a dictator. Assad was democratically elected and is probably more popular than any Western leader. So that is false. They also call his government a regime, another suggestion that it is a dictatorship. Not true.

Pretty much the same applies to Venezuela, which is accused of being a dictatorship, despite the fact that it was supervised by international observers, some of whom recently wrote a letter attesting to the fairness of the election, as shown here: https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13899
How about Saddam Hussein, whom the US overthrew with military means that killed over 100,000 mostly civilians? Saddam did indeed seize power following a coup that saw the execution of the then dictator Abd al-Karim Qasim – who had also seized power through a coup against the Libyan king. Saddam did not become president but served as the president al-Bakr’s deputy, during which time he built up the infrastructure and instituted social programs that made Iraq prosperous.
Quote from https://www.biography.com/dictator/saddam-hussein:
“During al-Bakr’s presidency, Saddam proved himself to be an effective and progressive politician, albeit a decidedly ruthless one. He did much to modernize Iraq's infrastructure, industry, and health-care system, and raised social services, education, and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in other Arab countries in the region.”
Saddam then held elections in 1995, but the results were preposterous, giving Saddam 96.96% of the vote, clearly a fraud.

So yes, Saddam was not democratically elected and, as in the US, the elites, not the people, held the reins of power.

Libya was also ruled by Gadaffi, who had seized power with the overthrow of the Libyan kingdom.

As for the economics of these states, Assad presides over a capitalist economy, which was rather prosperous until the US and its allied terrorists attacked illegally and without invitation to support Islamic radicals, including fighters from over 80 countries. Now the US has a base at Deir Ezzor, the most oil-rich area. The ideas is to seize the oil belonging to the Syrian people in an attempt to plunge them into poverty and poor health, thanks also to the illegal and criminal US sanctions. The idea is to bring them “democracy.”
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Saddam Hussein ruled over an economy in which the oil industry was state-controlled and very well run, making the country the most prosperous in the region. The US was not happy because it lost its economic interests in Iraqi oil. However, there was an efficient health care system that provided health care to all citizens – unlike the US, where health care is extravagantly priced and private, and if you can’t afford it, well, you are out of luck. It’s called “freedom.”
 
And how about Saudi Arabia? Let’s see. When was the last election there? Yes, that was sarcasm. The US media and politicians (at least before the Kashoggi affair) almost never call this state a “dictatorship,” calling it a kingdom. Yet it is the biggest state supporter of terror (even though the US has falsely assigned that title to Iran, which is a democracy) and is responsible for financing, arming and transporting ISIS and Al-Qaeda to Iraq and Syria.
 
Do you get the impression the US is constantly pulling the wool over our eyes?
From that standpoint, it would be appropriate to call the US a deceptocracy, a state ruled by deceit.

https://www.salon.com/2019/04/21/reporter-sharmine-narwani-on-the-secret-history-of-americas-defeat-in-syria/


After years covering the "main battlefield in World War III," Narwani says everything you think you know is wrong

By Patrick Lawrence
April 22, 2019 -   When the war in Syria was recently declared decisively over, there were few correspondents or witnesses to turn to for a credible look at exactly what happened during eight years of conflict. The questions were many, but I could count on one hand those worth putting them to. Among these was Sharmine Narwani, whose work I have long counted distinctly thorough and honest amid coverage that — in her view as well as mine — hit a new low by way of collapsed professional standards and abandoned ethics. Narwani’s pieces, written for a variety of publications, consistently reflect her hard work on the ground — work nearly no one else did. She is eyes wide open and beholden to no national interest or media slant.   
Narwani brings impressive credentials to the craft. After earning a masters in journalism from Columbia, she was for four years (2010–14) a senior associate at St. Antony's College, Oxford. It was during those years that she began to make her mark covering the Middle East from her bureau-of-one in Beirut. Her accounts of the war as it truly unfolded have opened many eyes over the years, mine included.
Having witnessed the Syrian war from start to finish, she now casts it in a usefully broad context. “The Syrian conflict constitutes the main battlefield in a kind of World War III,” she said during our lengthy exchange. “The world wars were, in essence, great-power wars, after which the global order reshuffled a bit and new global institutions were established.” This, in outline, is what Narwani sees out in front of us, now that the Western powers’ latest “regime change” operation has failed.
Narwani and I conducted our exchange via email, Skype and WhatsApp over a period of several weeks in late March and early April. In this, the first of two parts, Narwani dissects the role of various constituencies — radical jihadists and the nations that backed them, the Western press, the NGOs — in prolonging a war that, in her view, could have ended far sooner than it did. I have edited the transcript solely for length. Part 2 will follow.    You returned from Syria just last week — this after going in several times last year. The intervening months were important, given the war has just ended. What have you been seeing on the ground?
 
My trips last year took place in May and June, in the weeks before the battle for the south of Syria began. I visited Daraa, Suweida and Quneitra, the three southern governorates most critical to the upcoming battle. It was fascinating. It dispelled a number of myths about the conflict for me. One of these was the discovery that al–Qaida was smack in the middle of the fight in Daraa, indistinguishable from Western-supported militant groups in all the main theaters. Another shocker was when I interviewed former al–Nusra and FSA [Free Syrian Army] fighters near the Lebanese border: They told me their salaries had been paid by the Israelis for the entire year before they surrendered, around $200,000 per month from Israel to militants in the town of Beit Jinn alone.
The southern battle was very swift, and since then all focus has moved to the north — to Idlib, where the most extreme militants have amassed in their final stronghold, and in the northeast, where U.S. troops have begun a slow withdrawal, without having yet ceded those territories back to the Syrian state…. Last week, I visited Idlib to see what I could glean about the timing of the upcoming battle, but nothing much has changed. There has to be a political decision first; some hope this will come after Russia, Iran and Turkey meet in late April. Idlib is different from Daraa because the militancy there is probably around 80 percent al–Qaida, and the rest, its allies. But Turkey and the Western powers — including the U.S. — continue to protect it for the moment.  
What is the latest you have on reconstruction efforts, plans for a new constitution, and a political settlement? Russia, Iran and Turkey are said to be trying to establish a constitutional mechanism of some kind at the U.N. Russia and Turkey have summited with Germany and France on reconstruction plans — not that we’ve seen a word about it in the American press. Where is all this headed, in your estimation?
We need to put what is commonly called the Syrian “political process” into perspective. Syria, Russia and Iran won. Turkey is crippled by its Syria losses and is desperately seeking a new geopolitical equilibrium. France and Germany are very worried about more refugees — and extremists — flooding their borders, and they are willing to break with the U.S.’ goals in Syria over this issue.
In short, the “political process” is whatever Syria, Russia and Iran want it to be. Their meetings in Astana [the Kazakh capital, where a series of peace talks have taken place] demilitarized the hotspots in Syria and placed them back under government control. And their meetings in Sochi [the Russian resort city] managed to get Syrians of all walks together, in a room talking. So these three countries will figure out the constitutional process. Just expect it to be mostly under the victor’s terms. Major concessions to Western interests — in exchange for reconstruction funds — will be unlikely because the whole Middle East now knows the U.S. doesn’t stick to its agreements. Syria isn’t betting on Western funds anyway, contrary to what media reports suggest.
I predict that the endgame will take Syria back to where it was in 2011, right after Assad passed unprecedented reforms that the international community decided to ignore.
That’s a very interesting observation. In your writing, you previously suggested that the 2016 peace talks in Geneva would lead to the same thing. Very few people in the West know that Assad proposed numerous reforms in response to the initial unrest in 2011. Some of them are strikingly liberal by any standard. Please tell us about these, and why you think Assad’s 2011 proposals are where things will finish up now.
When the Syrian government introduced reforms in 2011 and 2012, the only thing we ever really heard about them was “it’s too late” and “they’re window-dressing.” But these reforms were far-reaching and significant. So much carnage could have been avoided had they been given the time and space to take hold.
Starting in 2011, Assad issued decrees suspending almost five decades of emergency law that prohibited public gatherings. This was a big deal, as other Arab leaders were doing the opposite in response to their “uprisings.” Other decrees included the establishment of a multi-party political system, term limits for the presidency, the suspension of state security courts, prisoner releases, amnesty agreements, decentralizing down to local authorities, sacking controversial political figures, introducing new media laws that prohibited the arrest of journalists and provided for more freedom of expression, investment in infrastructure, housing, pension funds, establishing direct dialogue between populations and governing authorities, setting up a committee to dialogue with the opposition — many of whom turned down the offer.
You could feel these reforms unfolding in Damascus by early 2012. I would drive into the city from Beirut, call up opposition figures on their mobile phones, go to their homes, talk to regular folks about politics. I could even access Twitter and Facebook in Syria — platforms that had been banned for years.
What was the reaction among Syrians? Mixed, I gather. You’ve written that some Syrian dissidents were also critical of these reforms.  
Many people were skeptical about reforms initially. The narratives against the Syrian state were very pervasive, and folks were confused with all the competing information. Most domestic opposition figures were certain that Assad was going to be gone within a few weeks, so that impacted their readiness to dialogue with his government or support reforms publicly. At the same time, these figures — many of whom had languished in Syrian prisons for years — rejected foreign intervention, the imposition of sanctions, and the militarization of the conflict. In early 2012, the dissidents I met mostly scoffed at reforms, but when massive bombs tore apart Damascus that summer, I saw a marked shift in their positions.
In terms of the general population, I think sentiments were split — not so much on the reforms themselves, but on whether they would actually be implemented. One way to gauge public support would be to look at how many Syrians turned out for the constitutional referendum. Many boycotted it, but the participation rate was just under 60 percent, so I would argue that a modest majority of Syrians were willing to put their trust in the reforms.
What is your assessment of the U.S. plan to withdraw from Syria? I think you suggested in one piece you wrote some time ago that the U.S. effectively ceded Syria to Russia as far back as the first Russian air sorties in September 2015. 
Yes, in September 2015 the U.S. lost the conflict to Russia and its allies. The reason is very simple. The Russian intervention provided the Syrian army and its ground allies with the necessary cover to do their jobs effectively. He who dominates the air and the ground wins the war.
To be fair, it also seemed highly unlikely that Obama was prepared to turn this into a full-on U.S. air war. He was happy to do “regime change” in that passive-aggressive way Democrats do it: all “humanitarian intervention” and marketing spin and tragic soundbites. But the Nobel Peace Prize winner was not going to put U.S.–piloted planes in Russian-dominated airspace over Syria in any significant way — not after Iraq and Afghanistan, certainly, and not after the Russians and Chinese blocked Obama’s U.N. Security Council route to war by vetoing all resolutions that might legitimize intervention.
To what extent do you think Syria changed the U.S. position in the Middle East as a whole? It seems as if we are coming out of an important passage in the long story of American involvement in the region. 
The U.S. was already exiting the Middle East before the so-called “Arab uprisings” kicked off. Whoever in the U.S. national security apparatus made the decision to stick around and redirect these uprisings against regional adversaries made a colossal mistake. I want to write about this one day because it’s important. I believe the Syrian conflict constitutes the main battlefield in a kind of World War III. The world wars were, in essence, great-power wars, after which the global order reshuffled a bit and new global institutions were established.
Look around you now. We have had a reshuffle in the balance of power in recent years, with Russia, China, Iran in ascendance and Europe and North America in decline. That’s not to say that Washington, London or Paris don’t have levers left to pull: They do. But it is on the back of the Syrian conflict that a great-power battle was fought, and in its wake, new international institutions for finance, defense and policymaking have been born or transformed.
I’m not just talking about the strengthening of the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa], the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Eurasian Union, etc. I mean the world’s networks are shifting hands, too. What will happen to Western-controlled shipping routes now that Asia has started to build faster, cheaper land routes? Will the SWIFT [bank messaging] system survive when an alternative is agreed upon to bypass U.S. sanctions everywhere? There are so many examples of these shifts. It’s not to say that they are due to events in Syria, but rather that Syria triggered the great-power battle that unleashed the potential of this new order much more quickly and efficiently.
Keep in mind that World War III was never going to be like the other two conventionally fought wars…. It was always going to be an irregular war that would escalate on multiple fronts — not just regime change events, but financial pressures, sanctions, propaganda, political subversion activities, destabilization, increased terrorism, proxy fights and so on. The battle for global hegemony really began to unfold over Syria, though, when the Russians, Iranians and Chinese decided to draw a line and put up a fight. The world changed after that.
As you’ve just suggested, Syria has long seemed to be a different kind of war, a new kind — a war fought with images, information and disinformation, true and false portrayals of events, people, organizations, and so on. Based on what you’ve written over many years — and from inside Syria, on the ground — I would think you agree with this.
In some ways, Syria wasn’t that different. All modern Western wars have been fought with manipulated imagery and disinformation. We call it propaganda and accuse the Nazis and Soviets of doing it, but the U.S. does it better than anyone. It’s literally the main tool in America's military kit: Otherwise, Americans would never accept the never-ending wars. There used to be laws forbidding the U.S. government from propagandizing the American people. The Obama administration undid many of those legal barriers. If you ever have a chance to read the U.S. Special Forces’ Unconventional Warfare manual, you will see how fundamental propaganda is to U.S. efforts to maintain hegemony. Everything starts and ends with “scene-setting” and “swaying perceptions” to prepare a population to support invasion, occupation, drone wars, “humanitarian interventions,” rebellion, regime change.
It was no different in Syria. The U.S. government imposed key narratives from day one — that Assad was indiscriminately killing civilians in a popular, peaceful revolution. Was this true? Not particularly. Eighty-eight soldiers were killed across Syria in the first month of protests. You never heard that in the Western media. That information would have altered your perception of the conflict, wouldn’t it?
The Syrian opposition used to burn tires on the tops of buildings to simulate shelling for TV cameras. Did you see that footage here? The only reason Syria seems like a “different kind of war” is because we had Twitter and Facebook and alternative media punching holes in Washington’s storyline every day — and because Syrians had the audacity to resist for eight years. You can’t keep up an act for eight years. People catch on.
Let’s focus on a few topics that you’ve argued very effectively were key factors in prolonging and, as you say, “weaponizing” the conflict. The first of these is the question of casualty counts — “the casualty count circus,” I think you called it in one of your pieces. Can you summarize what you found and how you came to be so at odds with mainstream reporting? 
I first investigated the Syrian death toll 10 months into the conflict. In that month, January 2012, the U.N.’s figure for casualties in Syria was around 5,000 dead. The U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria issued its first report two months later, in March, stating that 2,569 Syrian security forces had been killed in the first year. Right there we know that half of the dead were neither civilians nor with the opposition. Half of the Syrian dead were security forces, which also informed us that the opposition was, in fact, armed, organized, and very, very lethal.
How about the other half of the death toll — the remaining 2,431 casualties? I found that they were a mixture of pro-government civilians, pro-opposition civilians, and opposition gunmen in civilian clothing. The “rebels” were not wearing military gear, so they were indistinguishable from civilians. Mainstream media just didn’t want to know this obvious stuff. They asked no questions, they investigated nothing.
A year later, one of the main opposition casualty counters, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which the Western media quote all the time, told me it was hard to differentiate rebels from civilians because “everybody hides it.” By then, in year two, the Syrian death toll had increased tenfold and the U.N. released a casualty analysis that included the information that 92.5 percent of the dead were male. That is not a death toll representative of a “civilian population.”
The point is, why wasn’t there a single other journalist out there asking the question, “Who is killing and who is dying?” If they had asked that elementary question, the way we view this conflict would have been very, very different. There was, at the very least, parity in the killing, which also means the Syrian government’s response to opponents was not at all disproportionate. 
Another area of interest is the question of when and how the opposition — supposedly unarmed at the start — came to be armed. The question of proportionate responses to violence comes into this, as you’ve just suggested.  
Elements of the opposition were armed from the very start of the conflict. We have visual and anecdotal evidence of weapons caches, armed gunmen infiltrating the Lebanese border, and “foreign” gunmen appearing in Daraa, the city [in southern Syria] where protests first manifested. In the early days, it was hard to prove this because efforts were made to hide evidence that the opposition had weapons — and anyone claiming so was instantly marginalized. But then the Arab League (which had suspended Syria and was therefore viewed as an impartial body) sent in an observer team that produced a stunning report — one you did not read about in the Western press. The observer mission detailed the opposition’s bombings and terrorism and attacks on infrastructure and civilians. 
I also know the opposition was armed from the start [March 2011] because of my own investigation and discovery that 88 Syrian soldiers were ambushed and killed across Syria in the first month of the conflict…. I have their names, ages, ranks, birthplaces — everything. Then in June 2011, over 100 Syrian soldiers were murdered in Jisr Shughour, in Idlib Province, many with their heads cut off, and nobody could dispute this anymore. Yet we continued to hear “the opposition is unarmed and peaceful” in the media for a good long while.
But you asked about proportionality, and to that I would simply ask: What if there were armed men in Washington who killed a few cops in the last week of December? In January, these unknown shooters began a campaign of ambushing American servicemen coming and going from their bases in Fairfax, Newport News, Arlington, killing 88 in total. Then, in March, over 100 U.S. soldiers are killed in a single day, half with their heads cut off. What is a “proportionate” response for you…? That answer about proportionality will be different for different people, I can assure you.
The next question is obvious. Who armed the opposition? Are we able to say?
We know today the U.S., U.K., France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Turkey are the main countries that armed, trained, financed and equipped the militants, and that they found intricate ways to avoid detection, especially at the beginning. Weapons came into Syria from all five border countries at different parts of this conflict — Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Israel — but I would say the most weapons probably arrived via Turkey, arms transfers that were very much coordinated with its NATO partners.
When, why, and how did groups such as al–Nusra become involved? What were or are their relations with the Free Syrian Army and the Syrian Democratic Forces? 
The Nusra Front is the Syrian franchise of al–Qaida. Bombings in Damascus in December 2011 and January 2012 were the first actions publicly attributed to al–Qaida, and these were shortly followed by a viral video of AQ chief Ayman al–Zawahiri urging fellow jihadists to flood into the Syrian theater. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the declassified 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document on AQ? This paper shows that the U.S. and its allies had identified AQ as the strongest, most capable fighting force in Syria against the Assad government, that these extremists had intent to create a “Salafist principality” on the Syrian–Iraqi border, and that the U.S. and its allies basically supported this. Many tried to play down this document, but then Obama sacked Michael Flynn as head of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], and Flynn came out and said the document was correct, that the U.S. had “willfully” supported this whole mess.
The FSA was a shitshow from the start — no central authority, no chain of command, no cohesion, etc. “FSA” became the whitewashed moniker for any militant fighting the Syrian army. Many FSA fighters joined AQ and ISIS during this conflict. The FSA often gave or sold its U.S.–provided weapons to al–Qaida — and the Pentagon knew about this all along. When I asked a CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command] spokesman in 2015 why so many U.S. weapons supplied to their trainee fighters were showing up in al–Qaida’s hands, he actually said: “We don’t ‘command and control’ these forces. We just ‘train and equip’ them.”
Here’s the bottom line. During my trip to Daraa last year, just before the battle to oust militants from Syria’s south, I discovered that al–Qaida was in every major strategic area alongside the 54 Western-backed militant factions preparing to fight the Syrian army. If you looked at any U.S. think tank map before the big battle for the south, you would have seen three colors: red for the Syrian army, green for the “rebels,” and black for ISIS. So where was al–Qaeda? They were smack right alongside the green “rebels.” That’s how indistinguishable AQ has been from U.S.–backed forces in this conflict.
You made an effort at one point to get the State Department to name even a single “moderate rebel” group. They couldn’t or wouldn’t, as you reported it. Please tell us about that episode. 
I used to ask the State Department to name the so-called “moderate rebels” they supported in the Syrian conflict. They always refused to answer, claiming that info could compromise the security of rebel groups.
Here’s my takeaway: The reason the U.S. won’t name the militant groups they funded and armed is because the moment they do, we will find atrocity videos and snuff films made by that group. The liability issues are huge. But mostly the issue is that the U.S. basically armed extremist groups in the Syrian conflict, and they don’t need the public knowing who these people are.
What degree of support for the Assad government did you find? And from which sectors of the Syrian population?
First of all, let me say that Syria is not Tunisia or Egypt — those populations had pretty much zero connection to their leaders, not on the domestic front, not in terms of worldview. The Syrian state is not wealthy, yet it provided basic services, plus education, health care, food staples for its population. And it very much shared a worldview with its population — anti-imperialist, anti–Zionist, resistance against interventionist powers, independence, etc.
In a nutshell, Assad always maintained support from some very key constituencies. These are the major urban hubs of Aleppo and Damascus, the business class and elites, the armed forces (very significant), the minority groups (Alawites, Christians, Druze, Shia, etc.), and the secular Sunnis. The [governing] Baath Party has around 3 million members, and they’re mostly Sunni. That’s a big chunk of core support right there. And then, as living conditions deteriorated and political violence escalated, many opponents fled to government-controlled areas and gave up on the fight.  
Let’s stay with Syria a little longer before dilating the lens. There were two factors in the war that played decisive roles in constructing and maintaining the narrative, as you say. At a certain point they intersected, but let’s take them one at a time.
First, please describe your impressions of how the Western media performed. You’ve called them “ridiculously sycophantic” in one of your pieces. I’d like to hear from you on this. Were they, for example, purposely complicit in “perception management,” as they say, or simply dupes? Maybe professional standards have just plain collapsed since my years in the field.
Mainstream Western media were absolutely complicit in disseminating disinformation about the Syrian conflict to serve the political agendas of their respective governments…. We are living through an era of full-on information warfare, and what is interesting is that populations recognize this at some gut level, because people are turning off their media and searching for alternative sources of information.
Journalists were not dupes in this conflict. Western journalists covering Syria were, for the most part, believers in the liberal order, U.S. exceptionalism, interventionism — these people are hiredbecause they think that way. They quote their governments’ statements unquestioningly, despite the lies of Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, etc. They are fundamentally uninterested in the legalities of warfare — the U.S. and U.K. bombardment of Syria, the establishment of military bases there, the funding and arming of terrorist groups — all of it illegal under international law.  
A number of Western journalists who dared to probe deeper were sacked, silenced or smeared. I know a couple of journalists who lost their jobs. The Huffington Post stopped publishing my work once I started reporting from inside Syria — and then a year or so later, they quietly removed my entire archive from their site. Other mainstream journalists who questioned the Syria narratives were badly smeared — by their colleagues, quite shockingly — which made more than a few of them back down, write less, tweet differently. The intimidation tactics by our peers have been relentless in the coverage of Syria.
In short, Western media helped to stage and grow this conflict. I no longer think journalists should be treated with a special kind of immunity when they get a story this wrong, repeatedly, and people die in the process. I prefer to call them “media combatants,” and I think that is a fair and accurate description of the part they play in wars today.
Now let’s go to the Western NGOs — Human Rights Watch and the like — or the Syrian Observatory, for that matter. What was their role? Was it principled, as most Westerners assume? They were primary sources for the Western press while, as Patrick Cockburn pointed out [in The London Review of Books], they were staffed by anti–Assad activists. Not exactly “reliable sources,” I’d say.
It’s actually quite interesting the role NGOs played in the spinning of this conflict. You’re right, they were entirely one-sided and pro-opposition. They would put out statements and reports based on the loosest definition of sourcing I’ve ever seen, their Western journalist pals would then bullhorn this rubbish across the world media, and then governments would react in outrage and cite the NGO and press reports as fact.
Most of their interviews of Syrians on the ground were coordinated by liaisons connected with the militant opposition — many were conducted via Skype. How do you know who you’re speaking to? How do you know if they’re telling the truth? Who introduced you to this “source?” Do they have a motive? NGOs — local and international — were the source of most of the information we learned about chemical weapons attacks, cluster munitions, massacres, civilian casualties of air attacks, etc.
The most ubiquitous of these is, of course, the Western-funded White Helmets “rescue team,” who worked only in areas with the most extreme militant groups and played witness to so many of the alleged chemical attacks in Syria. But troll Facebook for a while and you will find photos of dozens of these White Helmets guys flaunting weapons and posing next to al–Qaida and ISIS fighters. Despite this kind of evidence from their own pages and websites, media consistently used this group as a source, and still do.
In this line, you wrote a piece following the alleged gas attack in Eastern Ghouta — in the spring of last year, I think — that was especially fine. I was pleased to cite it at length in one of my Salon columns. You actually found and photographed a jihadist-held farmhouse filled with U.S.–supplied chemical weapons equipment. Nobody else had it.
Can you talk about that experience? How, generally, do you manage to get so much closer to the ground than other correspondents, especially the Beirut-dwelling Westerners? And as that story demonstrates, closer to the truth.
I have no particular advantage over other foreign journalists traveling to Syria. I have to wait just as long to receive a visa, and each visit is limited to four days, though that can be extended in-country with permission from the Ministry of Information.
When I was in Damascus last March, the ministry put out a call to reporters about a laboratory they’d discovered the day before while liberating some Ghouta farmlands….  It turns out the facility was not that secure and we had to duck and weave through some very bumpy fields on foot, with mortars and gunfire going off just meters away. I’m not a war reporter and I have no training whatsoever in that very specialized, madman’s niche, so it wasn’t pleasant in the least. The facility itself was a laboratory of sorts run by a militant, Saudi-backed faction called Jaysh al–Islam. It was clear that something was being produced there that had military applications, but since the lab had only just been discovered, it wasn’t yet clear what that was.
I never wrote that it was a chemical weapons lab, by the way. You could see in the photos the level of sophistication of the equipment, the large compression units, the pipes going from the laboratory upstairs to the heavier devices below. The one thing I did conclude from this discovery is that Syrian militants clearly had the means to access sanctioned, foreign — even American — equipment with dual-use technologies, that they were able to create production lines in the middle of war zones, that they were able to procure toxic substances. Chlorine was found in rows of containers at the front of the facility. Before this, the narrative was that the “rebels” couldn’t possibly be responsible for chemical weapons attacks because they couldn’t make or buy them. This facility showed they could make them….
Interesting. Your account prompts another question. I take it you were led to the site by Syrian officials. Were you able to conclude with confidence it wasn’t a put-up job on the government’s part?
Yes, two other media crews — TV outlets — and I were taken to the location by Syrian soldiers, with permission from the defense ministry. There are several things that made me fairly confident I wasn’t walking into a set-up. The facility had been shelled fairly extensively — there was debris and dust covering most of the equipment, so this stuff wasn’t “brought in” the day before for staging. There was so much gunfire and shelling still going on in the area that I still can’t believe the army had the gall to call this “liberated land.” With war still raging mere meters away, one could not reasonably believe the Syrian army moved in equipment for staging, carried it across the furrowed fields to this lab, then dusted it just-so with realistic looking debris from mortar hits.
Finally, the militant group that occupied this lab, the Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam: Not only didn’t they deny they ran this lab; they have previously admitted to using toxic agents in the Syrian conflict — against Kurds in the Sheikh Maqsood neighborhood of Aleppo.
To me the episode in Ghouta, which ended in U.S., British and French missile bombardments of Damascus, was the second-clumsiest of them all. First place goes to the August 2013 incident, when U.N. chemical weapons inspectors had just settled in their Damascus hotels — at Assad’s invitation — and there’s a gas attack in, once again, Ghouta. On cue, the U.S. instantly blamed Assad. Preposterous. False-flag and “psy-ops” just aren’t what they used to be. Or maybe in our media-saturated age, we can simply see more.
Were all these incidents in Syria faked or staged? Are you in a position to judge this conclusively?
I am not in a position to judge anything conclusively, but based on my experience I do have some opinions on this subject. In the early days, it seemed that on the eve of every U.N. Security Council meeting on Syria — or before an “international team” was about to arrive in the country — something violent and horrific would happen. You could almost time these massacres and chemical weapons attacks according to the politically significant event that was about to take place in a Western capital. It was hard not to notice this pattern and even harder not to get cynical about “massacres.” ...
I did some early deep dives on the chemical weapons attacks, including the 2013 Ghouta incident. I can’t tell you exactly what happened, but here’s what I do know about that incident. A Jordanian journalist was on the ground in Ghouta the next day and he interviewed residents, militants and their families. He wrote a piece with an AP reporter explaining that militants had taken shipment of some new and unknown container weapons from the Saudis that they had mishandled and which caused the deaths. Then, we had one of the most senior U.N. officials on Syria tell us, off the record: “Saudi intelligence was behind the attacks and unfortunately nobody will dare say that.” This official, we know, gave the same information to at least two other Western reporters — who did not report it….
This is a pattern you see in most of the other attacks — evidence manipulated, unknown chain of custody, controlled and limited access for investigators. Most of the attacks happen in militant-controlled areas, so the opposition is in complete control over access and flow of information. I do not believe you could prosecute the Syrian government in an impartial court and win convictions in any of these cases. Logically, the Syrian state is the entity that least benefits from any of these CW or massacre incidents. It had no motive to launch these attacks. Why use highly controversial chemical munitions when you can do more damage with conventional ones — and escape censure?
As I hinted a moment ago, your reporting is very distinctive for its granular detail. In Syria you’re more or less in a class by yourself in this respect. One of your sources especially intrigued me, Father Frans van der Lugt, the Dutch priest who lived many years in Homs. Tell us about him. I should mention for readers’ sake, he was killed in Homs in the spring of 2014.
I never interviewed Father Frans, though I did go to his church gravesite during a visit to Homs shortly after he was killed. Through his writings, this Dutch priest gave us some rare, objective insights into what took place in the early days of the crisis — events he witnessed first-hand.
In September 2011 he wrote: “From the start there has been the problem of the armed groups, which are also part of the opposition… The opposition of the street is much stronger than any other opposition. And this opposition is armed and frequently employs brutality and violence, only in order then to blame the government.” 
And then in January 2012 he expanded: “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”
The 75-year-old Father Frans was shot at point-blank range by a gunman while sitting in a church garden in the rebel-occupied part of Homs...
Patrick Lawrence is Salon’s foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he is an essayist, critic, editor and contributing writer at The Nation. His most recent book is “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century”. Follow him on Twitter. Support him at Patreon.com. His web site ispatricklawrence.us.

 

"Christian" Zionism sells war to spiritually non-discerning Evangelicals, but it is not Biblical.


https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-United-states-hold-unwavering-support-for-Israel-and-not-Palestine/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Why does the United states hold unwavering support for Israel and not Palestine?
 
The US supports Israel unwaveringly for two reasons:
 
AIPAC, the Israel lobby, which wields enormous power and influence over Congress and the White House and can ruin any candidate’s chances of winning an election by either withholding funding and funding the opposing candidate or by smearing the dissident candidate in the media (AIPAC: The Israeli Lobby) (a historic change is happening now as Democrat candidates fight back for the first time ever. Trump’s shameless bowing and scraping before Netanyahu has caused a powerful backlash).
 
The Evangelical church, the biggest block of Trump voters (the following is not intended as a primarily religious commentary although it applies to Christians as well as others. My aim is to persuade people to stop supporting war and regime change in the Middle East based on a misreading — not a misinterpretation — of the scriptures). About 80% of Evangelical pastors teach that Christians must support Israel. They are in effect “Christian” Zionists (but don’t often use the term), which is a contradiction in terms. Using the word “Christian” in that expression would in fact be blasphemous to a non-Zionist Biblical Christian (though such are in the minority) because Jesus never once taught his followers to support a secular state calling itself Israel. In fact, while these Israel worshippers claim that restoration of Israel, and especially the temple in Jerusalem, is key to the Second Coming, Jesus not only never even hinted at this but in fact had only words of sharp criticism for the high priests of His time and even prophesied the destruction of the temple, which actually happened in 70 AD. Now, one of the far-fetched arguments of most Evangelical pastors is that the anti-Christ is prophesied to sit in this temple and if the temple is not built, then the anti-Christ cannot come, and since that is to happen before Christ can return, well, then, you see, it is up to Christians to make sure the anti-Christ has a throne to sit on as he blasphemes Christ and persecutes Christians. Isn’t that nice? In other words, good Evangelicals are supposed to help usher in the anti-Christ! I am not making this up, folks. Linked below is just one of many sites propounding this utter absurdity and – if you are a Christian and independent close reader of the Bible – blasphemy: Time to Build the Third Temple - Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter
 
The fact is, as Jesus stood at the temple in Jerusalem on one of the last days of His earthly life, he said, addressing Jerusalem and by extension all of Israel:
 
“For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'" Matthew 23:39
 
And Jesus intentionally said this in the presence of His disciples so that they could recall these words and jot this down for posterity. In other words, He clearly hoped his followers would evangelize among the Jews (in a loving way of course). Instead, today most US Evangelicals support the gifting of lethal arms to a secular country calling itself Israel so that it can defy the commandment in its own Torah to love their neighbour as themselves (Leviticus 19:9–18). Somehow, this got transformed into murder of Arabs, and Evangelicals mostly do not notice and do not care.
 
Note that Jesus did not say “you will not see me again until Israel becomes a nation as prophesied and until the third temple is built.” And yet, roughly 70% of Evangelicals apparently think Jesus wants them to help build the anti-Christ’s temple.
 
Again, this is not intended as a primarily theological or religious commentary. I write this to show how a peculiar fanaticism based on a clear distortion of the Bible threatens to plunge the world into war again. To my knowledge, none of these Zionist mega-pastors have ever protested that their government is leading its people into war after war in the Middle East and that it sends $4.5 billion a year free and clear to a government that has a policy of shooting to maim and kill unarmed protesters in Gaza and kill Iranians in Syria who are there to fight the terror that the US has not sincerely fought in its fake War on Terror. (The Israel connection with US-waged wars is illustrated in the video linked at the top of the page. The latest example of IDF brutality is described at the Israeli site Haaretz.) The scary thing about Christian Zionism is the sense of invulnerability it confers to its adherents. It is akin to the Chiliastic Christians during the Peasants War in Europe, who believed that they could enter the thick of a battle and emerge unscathed thanks to divine protection. Almost all of their leaders wound up burned at the stake. But modern Zionist Chiliasts will not hesitate to plunge the world into the same scenario, one that could end life on earth.
 
Many Evangelicals accept the policies and statements of the Israeli government as divinely inspired. An Evangelical friend of mine was surprised when I told her Netanyahu was not a Christian. She said “are you sure?” This is brain washing done right and proper.
 
As for their belief that modern Israel is the Israel prophesied in Ezekiel 37, there is a major hitch in that chapter. Verse 24 says this Israel resurrected from the dry bones will be “obedient to God’s decrees.” So what’s the hitch?
 
A Gallup poll shows that 65% of Israelis have no religion at all! (Israel among the least religious countries in the world). Thus it is clearly not Ezekiel’s Israel! Some will say “well then how do you explain Ezekiel’s prophecy?” Excuse me. I don’t owe anyone an explanation for it – although I do have a theory, which is beyond the scope of this analysis. My thrust is just to give it a proper reading, that's all.
 
I write these words in hopes that eventually this message will filter down to the Evangelicals who are supporting the instability in the Middle East in the steadfast but misguided belief that they are doing the will of the Almighty.
 
So far the main argument against this dangerous theology has been that Evangelicals are too literal in their interpretation of the Bible, but the truth is just the opposite as you can see. They are sadly lacking in their reading skills.
 
Trump’s moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and his recognition of the Syrian Golan Heights as Israeli territory suggest very strongly that Trump is a true believer in this dangerous theological hokus-pocus.

 
Our translation below is from rueconomics.ru (Economics Today), with commentary by Vince Dhimos.
 
It is easy to understand Russia’s interest in North Korea. The US position is the thorny one. Even though the US is willing to deal with China, another country with an economy that is not entirely market, the US position on North Korea is based on the fact that it refuses to be a US vassal and on the fact that the country is small and weak, and therefore easier to push around. Apologists of US foreign policy like to point out that the Soviet Union held Eastern Europe captive after the war and that this mistreatment fully justifies the fears of these nations that Russia might just take them over. The problem with this position is that in Soviet days, Russia did not come as an enemy causing death and destruction in the sense that the Germans did. The Germans completely bombed out the old city in Warsaw, for example. I witnessed the reconstruction efforts in the early 70s. They were building over the rubble, not just refurbishing damaged architecture. Germany came as an implacable enemy, killing vast numbers of especially Polish Jews. The Soviet Union held these territories as a buffer for fear that another Hitler could arise and invade again. The Soviets rebuilt over the ruins left by the Germans. And yet, incredibly, the Poles – like all the peoples of Eastern Europe – have long forgiven and forgotten the Holocaust and the atrocities of the Germans against the Poles, but still remember with resentment the Soviets who rebuilt their cities and gave them jobs, lifting them out of the economic crisis into which the Germans had plunged them.
 
Therefore, there is only one explanation for this double standard, and that is, US and NATO propaganda to keep alive the anti-Russian hostility that reigns in these nations. And that hostility has its origin in the fact that Russia refuses to treat the US as a superior. Ditto North Korea.
 
However, Russia seems to be counting on North Korea to eventually loosen up its command control of the economy and join the rest of the world, at which point Russia will be in a position to deal with it – a better position than the West enjoys. It looks like Putin has finally grasped that Kim Jong-un will never give up his nuclear program because in his view, it is the only thing standing between survival and another possible invasion of the kind that wound up killing a significant percentage of its population and destroying almost every settlement in his country in the 50s. It was not Russia or China that committed this near-genocide but the USA. If we can just keep that in mind, we can better understand Kim’s position. But Westerners must first overcome years of conditioning to understand the more rational viewpoint of the East.
 
QUOTE FROM BELOW:
 
“North Korea sees nuclear weapons as the main and only guarantee of the security for the ruling class, and therefore Pyongyang will never give up developments in this area. Its goal is to achieve the Indian version of events. That is, the country creates nuclear weapons, the whole world secretly recognizes them as a nuclear power and continues to trade, with political contacts and equal dialogue.”
 
QUOTE
 
“First we observed a rather long history of Kim's talks with US President Donald Trump, where each was playing his own game and actively saber-rattling. As a result, the dialogue failed.”
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION
 
Putin’s detailed conversation with Kim Jong-un was a signal to the West
 
25 April 2019 Vladivostok
 
https://rueconomics.ru/389527-obstoyatelnyi-razgovor-putina-s-kim-chen-ynom-stal-signalom-zapadu
 
It is not for nothing that Putin called the conversation with Kim Jong Un thorough, and both Moscow and Pyongyang achieved their goals in the first dialogue at the summit level. This opinion was expressed ed by Vasily Mikheev, chief researcher and head of the group of the IMEMO (Institute of World Economy and International Relations) at the Russian Academy of Sciences in a conversation with FBA Economics Today [rueconomics.ru].
 
 
“Initially, Kim Jong-un’s visit to Russia did not promise practical results - it was a visit to determine negotiating positions. That is why the parties did not prepare joint projects and agreements for official signing - the goal was completely different. They didn’t quite correctly identify one of the main topics of the talks - denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula although it is worth talking about the nuclear disarmament of North Korea, and here it must be said that this is an impossible task.
 
North Korea sees nuclear weapons as the main and only guarantee of the security for the ruling class, and therefore Pyongyang will never give up developments in this area. Its goal is to achieve the Indian version of events. That is, the country creates nuclear weapons, the whole world secretly recognizes them as a nuclear power and continues to trade and maintain political contacts and equal dialogue. Nobody encroaches on the state, as everyone is afraid of the bomb,” the expert notes.
 
Negotiations between the delegations of Russia and North Korea (DPRK), led by their leaders Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, were held on Russky Island in Vladivostok. The one-to-one dialogue between the two heads of state lasted more than two hours, and then there was an extended meeting. The Russian president spoke about the topics of conversation. “Of course, we also talked about the situation on the Korean Peninsula, exchanged views on how and what needs to be done to ensure that the situation has good prospects for improvement,” Putin said.
 
"North Korea is a closed country, its economy is not a market economy, and the state has no money. Therefore, at a certain stage, Kim Jong-un began to bargain with world powers - first of all, over parts of its nuclear program, but without aiming at the complete disarmament of the state. Initially, we observed a rather extended history of Kim's talks with US President Donald Trump, where each was playing his own game and actively saber-rattling. As a result, the dialogue failed.
 
After that, Pyongyang tried to negotiate with South Korea, but that country is following the American policy, and therefore, there was no breakthrough. China pointedly and strictly adheres to UN sanctions against North Korea, so Kim’s last year’s dialogue with PRC leader Xi Jinping was fairly formal. Russia also complies with UN sanctions, but, nevertheless, Pyongyang is also trying to find support in Moscow for its actions. Putin’s dialogue with Kim is important for both sides,” the expert emphasizes.
 
"Korean game"
 
The Russian leader called the conversation with the head of the DPRK "quite thorough."
 
"We were able to talk about the history of our interstate relations, and about the present day, the prospects for the development of bilateral relations," said Vladimir Putin after the meeting with the North Korean leader. Kim Jong-un, in turn, expressed the hope that his dialogue with Putin, which had begun in a constructive manner, would continue in the same spirit.
 
Until April 2018, Kim had not only never left his country, but had not met with any other foreign head of state. Negotiations with Xi Jinping in Beijing were the first summit-level dialogue of his life. In Russia, the DPRK leader was met at the border station Hassan, and then in Vladivostok - just like his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, in 1948, and his father, Kim Jong Il in 2001. The visit of the third North Korean leader to the Russian Federation will last until Friday.
 
"North Korea seeks to show the world that Russia is becoming its serious partner. Moscow has nothing against such a position. It is equally important for the Russian side to demonstrate that we remain in the global game that has been going on around the Korean Peninsula for more than half a century. Therefore, Putin’s meeting with Kim was mostly declarative - there simply could be no serious decisions at the first stage of the dialogue.
 
On the other hand, Moscow is not hiding its economic interests in rapprochement with Pyongyang. It has been stated more than once that the Russian Federation is interested in building a gas pipeline that will run from Russia through the North to the South of Korea. Of no less interest is the project of connecting the Korean railways with the Russian railways for organizing large freight shipments from South Korea to Europe. In both cases, North Korea appears rather as a transit country, but these initiatives will benefit everyone.
 
You can assess these initiatives as a look into the future in the long term. In the near future these projects will hardly be able to be realized - two factors interfere. First of all, North Korea needs to become an open market economy in order to be able to fully work with it without the existing risks. Secondly, Pyongyang still needs to solve the country's security problems, and taking into account the positions of the West, this is unlikely to happen soon, "concludes Vasily Mikheev.
 
END TRANSLATION

Below is our translation of an analysis from RIA Novosti on how Russia has seized control of OPEC. Commentary and notes in [brackets] are by Vince Dhimos.
 
We had posted previously about the sudden shift in the Saudis’ attitude toward their erstwhile Washington masters. Two items rocked the financial world:

1) Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Fatih had warned the US not to keep on sanctioning Russia
​
2) Unnamed Saudi officials had told Reuters that the Saudis were prepared to use the nuclear option, ie, start charging non-dollar currencies for their oil, should Congress pass the NOPEC bill curtailing the decision-making power of OPEC. As we mentioned in that article, such a move on their part would have the potential to turn the financial world upside down, causing a major slide in the US dollar and stymying investment in Treasuries. The fact that they would even dare to mention this already suggested that a geopolitical plate shift was already in the works.
 
QUOTE FROM THE TRANSLATION:
 
“Now it’s clear that with the new ally, Russia, Saudi Arabia no longer belongs to Washington."
 
Please note: The above quote is not from the Russian author of our article but is quoted from WSJ. When WSJ writes something like this, it is time to sit up and take notice!
 
It is now just a matter of time. Now might be a good time to invest in precious metals or perhaps even rouble-denominated bonds. [not advice but it is what I would do if I had money]
 
Finally, the author mentions US shale oil. I had posted a while back a critical analysis on the US economy, and I pointed out that shale oil was turning out to be a bad bet. I had said that the cost of extracting gas and oil from shale was high because it required fracking. Sure enough, reports came in months later that shale oil producers were paring back their investments due to lacklustre results.
 
Now oddly, Trump keeps saying he wants low oil prices. Perhaps he is being sly. If he really wants to encourage shale oil production, he could not sincerely want low oil prices. Perhaps what he really wants is to tell his gullible constituents that he wants low oil prices so they’ll think he is on the consumer’s side. He must know that shale drillers need high prices. At any rate, Putin and MBS are for the moment, giving him what he needs if not what he wants since they are targeting high prices by cutting back production.
 
Now if I were Putin, I think I would be more than disgruntled with the US, including Trump, for its anti-Russian moves, ie, sanctions, tariffs, the near-bankrupting of the aluminium company Rusal, and the sanctions on Venezuela and threats of war against that country as well as the total lack of cooperation on Syria and the threat of war on Iran, the support for Israel’s illegal annexation of the occupied Golan Heights, etc.
 
If Putin were vindictive (he may be above vindictiveness, of course), I think he might play a little cat and mouse game in tandem with the Saudis. That is, he would keep the crude prices at a high enough level to attract investments in shale oil, and when enough US companies had invested again in expensive equipment and exploration, he would spring the trap, allowing prices to fall just to levels that are unprofitable to the US oil companies but acceptable to OPEC (because for the most part, their extraction costs are lower), and he would leave the prices at that level just long enough to make them lose money and curtail their investments. This would seriously hurt US shale oil production.
 
But even if Washington richly deserves a come-uppance for the shabby way it has treated Russia, could Putin be that vindictive?
 
On the other hand, perhaps this diabolical scheme will be his solution to the dilemma posed as follows:
 
QUOTE from below:
 
“According to Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov, Russia does not intend to cede the market to American shale companies. "There is a dilemma: we either continue to lose the market occupied by the Americans, or withdraw from the OPEC + agreement," Siluanov said.”
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION:
 
Rescue and control: US tells how Russia controls OPEC
 
April 19, 2019
 
MOSCOW, April 19 - RIA Novosti, Natalia Dembinskaya. In December, OPEC was practically on the verge of collapse: cartel participants could not agree on production cuts, although in just a month and a half oil quotations fell by 30 percent. Russia played a decisive role in resolving this crisis, and Moscow not only strengthened ties with the cartel, but also gained unlimited influence on the world oil market, The Wall Street Journal writes. RIA Novosti tells how it was possible.
 
Decisive word
 
By December, the situation on the oil market had worsened to the limit. Prices had fallen by almost 30 percent, as investors reacted to a record increase in the volume of commercial stocks of crude in the United States and an actual increase in production by OPEC countries. The situation could be saved only by an agreement on production cuts, but not everyone was willing.
 
Iran, Venezuela and Libya rejected the agreement. Qatar actually announced its withdrawal from OPEC, explaining that it wanted to focus on LNG production.
 
However, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing high-ranking Qatari officials, the discontent of the major exporter of natural gas was due to the fact that the cartel "had become what the Saudi prince Mohammed and his friend Vladimir Putin wanted it to be."
 
At the same time, Donald Trump was pressuring Saudi Arabia to keep prices low. The fact that, under pressure from the Saudis, OPEC decided not to cut production, seemed to be a reality. Accordingly, the market was threatened with oversupply, and prices risked falling to the lows of 2014.
 
According to WSJ, Al-Falih, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister, asked Iran’s oil minister, Bijan Zangeneheh, to reduce production, and in response the latter accused the Saudis of trying to seize Iran’s oil market share.
 
The organization of oil exporting countries was on the verge of collapse. As the newspaper notes, Russia saved OPEC, although it is not a member of the cartel.
 
According to WSJ, "President Vladimir Putin agreed to cut production in conjunction with OPEC, but on condition that Iran be allowed to keep its production at the same level.” As a result, Iran, Venezuela and Libya were allowed not to reduce production, since Washington had imposed sanctions against Iran and Venezuela, and Libya faced a new round of civil war.
 
At the December meeting, the cartel actually recorded what Russia and Saudi Arabia agreed upon. OPEC + reduced production by 1.2 million barrels per day: 800,000 by OPEC itself, and 400,000 by countries that are not part of the cartel.
 
"Now Putin is able to significantly influence the Middle East and the entire global oil market amounting to $1.7 trillion," points out the WSJ.
 
Independent experts confirm the findings of the WSJ. As stated to the periodical by the global head of commodity strategy of RBC Capital Markets, Helima Croft, "Russia actually acted as the attending physician of OPEC."
 
Forming a relationship
 
However, observers note that it is not so much about “therapy,” but about cartel management, and OPEC+ is increasingly affecting the world market. Russia and Saudi Arabia - the key parties to the OPEC+ agreement and the largest oil-producing countries - almost completely determine the decisions of the organization: whatever Moscow agrees to with Riyadh will be done.
 
Analysts say the main weakness of OPEC+ is the lack of a formal agreement on cooperation and compliance with commitments. Therefore, the next step for Russia and Saudi Arabia could be a new global alliance of the largest oil exporters, which will replace OPEC. The question of reforming the cartel is expected to be the focus of the May OPEC summit.
 
"For decades, the United States perceived Saudi Arabia as one of the closest geopolitical allies, an important stabilizing force in the Middle East. They sold weapons to Riyadh. In response, Washington expected stable oil supplies to world markets to avoid price spikes and damage to the economy, writes WSJ. “Now it’s clear that with the new ally, Russia, Saudi Arabia no longer belongs to Washington."
 
Anticipating a warning to the Saudis against rapprochement with Moscow, Congress is preparing to discuss the proposed No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels (NOPEC) Act, approved in February by the legal committee of the House of Representatives. This document declares as illegal any decisions of OPEC, as well as any joint actions of the governments of other countries (except the USA), aimed at restricting oil production and regulating the prices of crude.
 
But the Saudis do not give in to pressure: Riyadh warned Washington that if the bill is passed, Saudi Arabia will refuse to pay in dollars when selling oil, thereby undermining the international position of the American currency.
 
Moscow, for its part, is already pointing out to the cartel that it may be time to halt production cuts. According to the Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister Anton Siluanov, Russia does not intend to cede the market to American shale companies. "There is a dilemma: we either continue to lose the market occupied by the Americans, or withdraw from the OPEC+ agreement," Siluanov said.
 
END TRANSLATION

Relevant

The US military is a mercenary force in the hire of the Saudi dictatorship
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/the-us-military-is-a-mercenary-force-in-the-hire-of-the-saudi-dictatorship
​
Israel and Saudi jioned at the hip and writing failed US policies
http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/israel-and-saudi-joined-at-the-hip-and-writing-failed-us-policies

Vince Dhimos answered a question in German at Quora. Translation:
 
Who is to blame for the Migration crisis in Europe?
 
https://de.quora.com/Wer-ist-an-der-Migrationskrise-in-Europa-schuld/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
Before we can answer this, we must establish that there is a migration crisis. Some Europeans say there is a crisis, others say there is none.
 
Fine. But how many of us understand that the real crisis is not the impact that this migration has on Europeans, especially Germans, but rather the heart-wrenching tragedy that it represents in the lives of the migrants themselves, many of whom have left their homes and families behind in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Africa? The majority of Western people are seeing the crisis through ethnocentric eyes – that is, in terms of their own comfort or discomfort. They largely ignore the plight of the refugees themselves.
 
And who is to blame for the fact that Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians were forced to leave their homes?

The blame must be laid at the feet of the US and its allies, including NATO, who supported the Arab Spring and the revolutions, which were foolishly described by naive Western people as “democratic.” These revolutions caused nothing but chaos and death because the leaders were radical Islamists, not sincere activists seeking Western style democracy.
 
In Syria, this revolution ushered in the invasion of the IS and the unspeakable horrors they caused – beheadings, forced conversions, seizure of territories where tolerance once reigned and imposition of harsh Shariah law on people who had grown accustomed to freedom and tolerance. Bashar al-Assad was democratically elected but was falsely called a “dictator” by cynical Western politicians and media. He and his father Hafez presided over the most tolerant of all the nations in the Middle East, where any Syrian considered it impolite even to ask another Syrian what his religion was. Christians, Shiites, Yazidis and Sunnis lived in relative harmony. It is true that Hafez Assad did in fact put down by force a rebellion of jihadists who were intent on “liberating” territory by means of terror. But somehow, the Western world, led by the US, has assumed the attitude that Islamic radicals must be tolerated while democratically elected tolerant leaders are dictators and must be overthrown by the US, US allies and NATO. This is best illustrated by the famous long lines of IS Toyota trucks freely entering Syria from Iraq while the US was supposedly waging a war on terror. These long lines of invaders prove that the War on Terror was clearly a fake. It is amazing how many Western people accepted this illogical assumption and supported the US invasions of the Middle East that ultimately led to the invasion of Syria, Iraq and Libya by terrorists.
 
The main source of arms and financing given to IS and Al-Qaeda was Saudi Arabia, the closest Arab ally of the US, which collaborated with the Saudis in supporting the terrorists. The US also shipped arms to terrorists, as reported by the brave Bulgarian journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva. Zero Hedge reports:
 
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-28/journalist-interrogated-fired-story-linking-cia-and-syria-weapons-flights
 
If you view the situation from the standpoint represented above, you can easily see who is to blame for the fact that millions of Middle Easterners lost their homes and were forced to flee. And even if you maintain that there is no crisis for Europe, there is indeed a great heartbreak for the migrants themselves.
 
As for the African migrants, many of them were forced to flee because of terrorist groups like al-Hijra and al-Mujajiroun in Kenya; Boko Haram and Wilayat Gharb Afriqiyah in Nigeria; Jama’at Nusrat al Islam and affiliates in Mali and Burkina Faso, Ansar al-Sharia in Libya and many more. These terrorists were inspired by the initial success of IS and Al-Qaeda in the Middle East – and again, we have the US and its allies to thank for that. The African migrants were driven from their homes not only directly by these terrorists but also by the instability of governments caused by them.
 
Without the intervention of the US and its allies, there would no doubt be an influx of migrants into Europe, but there would be no major migrant crisis.
 

In the following is our translation of an analysis from RIA Novosti, with commentary by Vince Dhimos. No, Folks, you can’t call it Russian propaganda. All facts are from US and international sources. It’s about how the Boeing lobby managed to send hundreds of people to their death in aircraft that were improperly certified thanks to the efforts of Mitch McConnell, who receives more free money from Boeing than anyone else in Congress, and his wife Elaine Chao, who has the very important title of US Secretary of Transportation and the very important task of overseeing the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) even though her educational background is in banking and humanities. Would it be gauche of me to remind the reader that a person with no background in aviation would never be considered for such a post in Russia? Just to make sure I was right about that after writing it (I was prepared to delete it), I looked up the credentials of Alexander Neradko, the head of the Russian Federal Air Navigation Service. It turns out he is a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Civil Aviation Engineering with an aviation engineering background. A guy like that would never make it in the US bureaucracy where people with technical and scientific competence are automatically disqualified in favour of well-connected and influential incompetents. Feel safer now, fellow passengers?
 
One of my pet peeves is hypocrisy. The US is so obsessed with alleged “corruption” in Venezuela that it is prepared to invade, killing thousands of Venezuelans to “save” them. The same officials screaming corruption have never given concrete examples of said corruption in Venezuela, which they know little to nothing about, because they’re just winging it in an effort to start another war for oil.
 
Now in US vernacular, lobbying is not considered corruption. By definition, the fact that Elaine Chao’s husband gets tons of free money from Boeing falls under the heading of lobbying, and that can never be conflated with corruption by the US definition. Definitions are definitions. So why complain? Mitch and Elaine are untouchable. In fact, the US Establishment tries people for crimes when they tell the truth about things like this. Ask Julian.
 
But let’s get real for a second and admit that when bureaucrats get paid by Big Business to slough off on their oversight and people die in aircraft that were not properly certified, then their actions are equal to, if not identical to, crimes. High crimes. And this is the very definition of corruption. Hence, lobbying of the kind where big bucks from Big Business pass into the hands of officials and legislators responsible for safety certification, is corruption. If your loved one had died in that 737 MAX in Ethiopia or the one in Indonesia, you’d be vigorously nodding in the affirmative. And while Russia has its government relations specialists, much of the legislation passes through the office of the president, providing a filter. More importantly, the ministries involved in technical matters are run by competent technical people, who cannot be conned in technical matters by industry representatives. In Russia, a non-technical person like Elaine would not be making key decisions about civil aviation safety.
 
And there’s the difference: professionalism and seriousness vs carelessness and incompetence.
 
But there is always a catch for the cheaters, and this case illustrates it. While the bureaucracy can neglect its duty with impunity in the Exceptional USA, the consequences in the real world can’t be ignored, and while the bureaucracy refuses to do its job because it is unaccountable, people everywhere now know that two airliners crashed, and they know why and who is responsible.
 
On March 25, The Telegraph reported that China is buying $35 billion worth of mostly airliners from Airbus. The Ethiopian 737 MAX had crashed 15 days earlier, and the Chinese knew this was the second crash of this plane since November. So who would expect them to buy from Boeing? See, the US officials at the FAA and the Boeing officials liaising with them think they are getting away with something when they cheat on safety. But they forget that the media will always report airliner crashes and investigative reporters will dig up relevant facts about congressional lobbying. They can’t put a lid on that. Result:
 
QUOTE FROM BELOW:
 
“According to estimates by JP Morgan chief economist Michael Feroli, the refusal of airlines to acquire the Boeing 737 MAX will cause more damage to the US economy than the recent 35-day government shutdown.
 
“’If Boeing is forced to stop production of the 737 MAX, GDP growth will slow down by 0.6% on an annualized basis,” Feroli calculated.’”
 
QUOTE FROM BELOW:
 
“Boeing has spent more on congressional lobbying in the last twenty years than any other defence or aviation industry company. In 2018 alone, lobbying costs amounted to $ 15.1 million.
 
The largest recipient of these funds was the Republican "Senate Leadership Fund," created by Senator Mitch McConnell. His wife, Elaine Chao, is Secretary of the Department of Transportation and oversees the FAA.
 
On March 13, Acting Director of the Federal Aviation Administration, Dan Elwell, told reporters that the FAA’s decision regarding the certification of Boeing MAX aircraft was made "as a result of ongoing consultations with Elaine Chao." [relying on her extensive knowledge of humanities and banking]
 
BEGIN TRANSLATION:
 
Your flight is over: Boeing sends the US economy into a nosedive
 
March 28, 2019
 
MOSCOW, March 28 - RIA Novosti, Maxim Rubchenko. Interruptions in the release of the Boeing 737 MAX are capable of reducing US GDP, investment bank JP Morgan warned clients. Airlines are already refusing to purchase the problem aircraft and are demanding compensation for the cancellation of 737 MAX flights. How it all can end for Boeing and the global aviation industry – published by RIA Novosti.
 
Damage assessment
 
According to estimates by JP Morgan chief economist Michael Feroli, the refusal of airlines to acquire the Boeing 737 MAX will cause more damage to the US economy than the recent 35-day government shutdown.
 
“If Boeing is forced to stop production of 737 MAX, GDP growth will slow down by 0.6% on an annualized basis,” Feroli calculated.” For comparison: according to the Congressional Budget Office, the longest government recess in US history ended Jan. 25, cutting GDP by 0.4 percentage points."
 
JP Morgan analysts emphasize that orders for the Boeing 737 MAX account for about a quarter of total aircraft production in the United States. "Even if the release of 737 MAX proceeds, the problems of the airline will still negatively affect the American economy due to the slowdown in investment and the decline in the country’s gross exports," Feroli warns.
 
JP Morgan’s alarming predictions are coming true. This week, Indonesia’s national airline Garuda Indonesia cancelled an order for 49 Boeing 737 MAX 8 airliners worth five billion dollars.
 
“Garuda passengers have lost confidence in this aircraft and do not want to fly it,” explained I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra, president of the airline.
 
Experts say that the largest orders for 737 MAX have been placed by Norwegian, SpiceJet, Ryanair, Jet Airways, Lion Air, Flydubai, and Southwest, and they are wondering if the Garuda Indonesia decision will cause a domino effect.
 
This is quite realistic, given that the same Norwegian company expressed its intention to demand compensation from Boeing for the down time due to the global ban on 737 MAX flights.
 
“I see no reason why we would not have to send a bill for unused machines to the manufacturer,” said the Norwegian company president Bjørn Kjos in a video message to Norwegian passengers.
 
Plans to seek compensation from Boeing were also announced by the Polish charter airline Enter Air and Indian SpiceJet. Lion Air, apparently, is waiting for the completion of the official investigation of the October catastrophe to assert a hefty claim against the aircraft manufacturer.
 
According to experts, compensation for forced downtime is at least $250,000 per month per aircraft. And American Airlines alone on Sunday announced the cancellation of 90 flights a day "at least until April 24" because of the ban on Boeing 737 MAX flights.
 
Disaster program
 
Yesterday, Boeing Corporation held a meeting with representatives of the airlines at the plant in Renton. It invited more than 200 pilots and technicians from around the world, as well as officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States.
 
Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines (a Boeing 737 MAX of this airline crashed on March 10 near Addis Ababa) declined to participate in the event. Like Garuda Indonesia, it said that the invitation from Boeing came too late.
 
The aircraft manufacturer introduced customers to a new version of the software for the Boeing 737 MAX, which more smoothly reacts to the nose lift of the plane. In addition, the re-triggering of the angle of attack correction system (MCAS), the failure of which is unanimously considered by experts to be the main cause of the plane crashes in Indonesia on October 29 and in Ethiopia on March 10 (although official investigations have not been completed), is ruled out.
 
As New York Times journalists found out in conversations with the staff of the aviation corporation, Boeing sought to prevent a lag relative to its main competitor Airbus, which launched the 2011 line of Neo models - more economical than the previous aircraft.
 
To maintain leadership, there were two options: either work on a new model from scratch, spending $32 billion on the project, or equip the Boeing 737 with new engines with an increased turbine diameter that promised twenty percent fuel savings. Of course, they chose the latter.
 
However, due to the larger size, it was impossible to install new engines in their place - they had to be carried forward and secured higher. As a result, the alignment was disrupted and the plane began to balk.
 
To correct this defect, Boeing specialists developed a special computer program MCAS, which automatically lowered the nose when it was lifted too much. The system turned out to be quite defective - it tripped even during normal flight mode. And, as reported, it lowered the nose of the aircraft four times more than envisaged. That is, MCAS did not straighten the plane’s position. It sent it into a nosedive.
 
"Not corruption. Lobbying"
 
Even if the new software actually corrects the MCAS distortions, the problems will not end there. The two air crashes attracted a great deal of attention from the public and law enforcement agencies to the working methods of the aircraft manufacturer.
 
First of all, questions arose as to how such a poor system was certified by the FAA. Investigations into this issue are the purview of the Federal Prosecutor's Office, the inspector general of the Ministry of Transport and the congressional commission, and the FBI has even opened a criminal investigation.
 
The first answer is already there: It turns out that the leaders of the Federal Aviation Administration transferred part of the certification process to Boeing Corporation itself. The FAA refers to financial problems: they say, due to lack of funds, there are not enough employees to carry out full-scale certification on their own. However, observers point to something else.
 
As the American Centre for Responsive Politics notes, Boeing has spent more on congressional lobbying in the last twenty years than any other defence or aviation industry company. In 2018 alone, lobbying costs amounted to $ 15.1 million.
 
The largest recipient of these funds was the Republican "Senate Leadership Fund", created by Senator Mitch McConnell. His wife, Elaine Chao, is Secretary of the Ministry of Transport and oversees the FAA.
 
On March 13, Acting Director of the Federal Aviation Administration, Dan Elwell, told reporters that the FAA’s decision regarding the certification of Boeing MAX aircraft was made "as a result of ongoing consultations with Elaine Chao." [My highlighting. Elaine Chao studied banking and humanities, not science or aviation]
 
It is not surprising that the Ethiopian government sent the black box of a crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane to France, although European experts usually investigate Airbus crashes, while American specialists are normally involved in Boeing crashes.
 
Experts and the media have come to an unequivocal conclusion: there is no longer any trust in the United States Federal Aviation Administration in the aviation community. This is confirmed by recent statements by the European Union and Canada regarding their intention to conduct their own examination of all security updates that are being implemented by Boeing.
 
This threatens to significantly delay the return of the Boeing 737 MAX to the sky, and to disrupt all schedules of aircraft deliveries to customers.
 
The competitors win
 
However, the biggest aggravation for American aircraft manufacturers are the Chinese. Last week, during a European tour of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Paris, a contract was signed for the delivery of 300 Airbus aircraft to China.
 
After that, the government-related Internet portal Guncha published a lot of material under the mocking headline "US Dominance collapsed like Boeing."
 
“If Americans are smart enough, they will see that the Boeing incident is not just a plane crash, it is a clear sign that the United States is at risk of losing dominance in the world,” the article notes. “This country has long been at the top in the world, and it continues to indulge in the benefits of this position, refusing to innovate in favour of profit maximization; a predetermined historical replacement will be made that will not be subject to human will: Boeing airplanes will descend from heaven to earth, and the US will inevitably fly off its throne.”
 
The Chinese aviation market is rightfully considered one of the most promising in the world. According to the Boeing forecast, the needs of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in civilian aircraft for the next 20 years will amount to 7,240 new aircraft with a total value of more than 1.1 trillion dollars. Moreover, the share of narrow-body aircraft like the Boeing 737 will garner three-quarters of the potential demand. But now it will be very difficult for Americans to gain a foothold in this market.
 
Recall that the PRC is developing its own narrow-body aircraft C919, which should compete with the Boeing 737 and Airbus 320 at a more attractive price ($50 million against 70-120 million). The start-up of mass production is planned in 2021, after which the Chinese market for foreign aircraft in this segment will close.
 
But the airlines of other developing countries are watching with increasing interest the new Russian MS-21 as an alternative to the problematic Boeing 737. Last week, the Minister of Industry and Trade Denis Manturov discussed the purchase of these aircraft with representatives of Indonesia. According to him, the MS-21-300 has now successfully passed certification. "Certification in accordance with Russian and European standards and the start of operation will help intensify the promotion of the aircraft in Southeast Asia and other regions," Manturov stressed.
 
END TRANSLATION

Vince posted at Quora:
 
What are your thoughts on the EU rethinking its economic policy toward China?
 
Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-are-your-thoughts-about-the-EU-rethinking-its-economic-policy-with-respect-to-China?__nsrc__=4
 
Europe is clearly trying to please Donald Trump and is not acting of its own accord. However, It is probably too late for Europe – or the US – to be thinking about restraining China.
 
The crucial time to act was in the 1980s when Congress first debated the pros and cons of granting this hostile communist nation most favoured nation status. America’s mistake was in granting China power over the US even though America held all the cards. Sort of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Chinese immediately demanded that the US rescind recognition of Taiwan, a loyal friend and ally that had provided profitable trade relations for decades. The decision to pull the US embassy from Taiwan was a betrayal of a friend and was grossly immoral and unethical. It was not the first time America had sold its soul and it set the stage for China’s dominance of the world and the West. Washington’s fatal mistake has always been acting as though there is no such thing as morality. There is a real price for this and the US is paying dearly. The negotiators at that time could have said they would be glad to trade with China but that they would never betray Taiwan because that would be unethical. The Chinese, with their long history of respect for harmony among people and nations, would have respected that. Since that time, however, they have been treating the US with the disrespect it deserves.
 
But now Trump is trying to set the clock back and that will not work (Trump had promised his tariffs would reduce the trade deficit. Instead they gave the US a record high deficit).
 
China has made many advances and much of this was done independently of the US, though the US is loath to admit it.
 
China is trending to surpass the US and Europe in technology not because it steals our technology (which it may or may not be doing) but because it has taken steps in education to achieve technological dominance, by promoting science and technology. The methods are too harsh to be contemplated in the West. When students are still in secondary school they are competing fiercely to gain entry into the most prestigious universities. Those who fail to make the grade are eliminated mercilessly. Your rich daddy can’t donate money to the university of your choice because the university is funded solely by the government. Thus corruption of the US kind is eliminated. It is a meritocracy. In the long run such a system will win over a “democratic” system. The die was cast at the founding of America.
 
If the first mistake was made by allowing China to dictate terms in the 80s, the second mistake was behaving like a drowning man and trying to wind back that mistake by getting “tough” on China. The BRI is not a fire-breathing dragon set to devour the West. It is a business opportunity that the West threw away. The BRI was open to all investors, but the Washington elites allowed their false pride to overcome their business sense.
 
The third mistake was betraying Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation was their best chance of escaping Chinese domination. Again, their pride dictated to the US elites that they must be like the Most High – the Exceptional and Indispensable nation. In adopting this attitude, they relinquished their chance to be strong and prosperous in cooperation with other nations, and not as an adversary. Nothing has changed since then. Trump is taking this folly to new heights.
 
There was a brief rapprochement with Russia in the nineties but the elites squandered the opportunity to benefit from it by treating Russia fairly. Instead they plundered its resources. They did to Russia what they had done to Taiwan. They betrayed it and worse, they tried to imbue in Westerners a deep-seated hatred and mistrust of Russia. Although James Baker had promised Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into the Warsaw Pact states, NATO did just that and extended right up to the Russian border, threatening and provoking with its massive military drills and spy places as if trying to start a war with this country that wanted peace.
 
As a result, Russia and China, now realizing the treacherous nature of their “partner,” were virtually driven into each others’ arms. Thus if China should ever threaten the US, Washington can never more count on Russia for help.
 
As we can see from the above, unlike Russia and China, Washington is indifferent to the notion of actually prospering and becoming a stable economy like these two. Its interest lies apparently not in true economic strength on a traditional foundation of hard work and targeted planning but in proving that the traditional values of its grassroots, such as loyalty and honesty, are obsolete and not needed in their brave new world. Of course, they are proving just the opposite.
 
I had written on this previously at Quora in response to a similar question:
https://www.quora.com/Why-doesn-t-USA-show-any-interest-in-defending-Christian-minorities-in-Middle-East-while-its-leaders-proclaim-themselves-Christians/answer/Vince-Dhimos

Vince Dhimos
 
Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"

He said to him, "What is written in the law? How do you read it?"
He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself."
He said to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live."
But he, desiring to justify himself, asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?"

— Luke 10:25–29, World English Bible
 
Jesus then went on to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan, which is well known in the Western world.
 
So why did Jesus choose a Samaritan for his story of a good neighbour who gave generously to save a stranger?
 
Because the Samaritans were generally hated by the Jews – just the Palestinian Arabs are hated by the Zionists today. Jesus was simply saying stop the hate. The key to the story is the word “neighbour,” which can have various meanings in Hebrew – which was not the language they were speaking at the time, although in the Greek of the New Testament, the word πλησίον (plisíon) has the same ambiguity. It can mean generally anyone close to you. But Jesus made sure the lawyer understood that your neighbour includes a person from a hated minority as well.
 
Note that in this case, Jesus did not tell the lawyer he had to believe in Jesus. And He discussed a text from the Jewish Torah, clearly showing He was not promoting a new religion.
 
Jesus knew this man was out for blood and wanted to trap him, so he was being very cautious.
 
Further, in so doing, Jesus was being as inoffensive as possible. And to be inoffensive, public figures say things that are universally accepted. Jesus was uttering a universal truth. It is telling that Jesus was talking about the Old Testament with its tangle of do’s and don’t’s but chose – like his interlocutor—not one of the do’s or don’t’s but a truth that no one could deny. In so doing, he was not talking about a new religion called Christianity, he was talking about a universal truth from Leviticus.
 
Today, preaching universal love would not offend a devout Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist or an atheist, although it would offend the Pentagon, the State Department, the arms manufacturers, the Zionists and the millionaire TV mega-preachers who want you to believe in the plastic bobble-head they blasphemously pass off as Jesus.
 
The men who behead non-believers in Syria and Iraq are not Muslims, they are Wahhabists, whom every decent Muslim rejects.
 
The politicians and officials who planned and promoted the invasions in Kosovo, Libya and Iraq and imposed crippling and murderous sanctions on the people who live there – and on the Venezuelans today – are not Christians or devout Jews or Muslims, they are Satanists. Some of these politicians have boldly proclaimed in public “I stand with Israel.” As for the Westerners who believed the vicious lie that these wars were keeping America or Europe safe, God will judge them.
 
The men who shoot unarmed protesters in Gaza and the commanders who ordered this killing and maiming are not Jews, they are Zionists and, judging by their fruits, Satanists. As for the congress people and presidents who sent them the guns, fighter jets, tanks and munitions and sent them $billions to arm themselves and do their mischief, they too are Satanists. Not one of these same “Christian” Zionist politicians has ever stood up and publicly proclaimed “I stand for Jesus.” Because they don’t stand up for Jesus. They tacitly deny Him. As for grassroots American Evangelicals who support this killing in their hearts, they are at best fools who believe in a distorted version of the scriptures, ignoring the fact that Christ never taught His followers to support a secular state called Israel. He said instead, addressing Jerusalem: “For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'" Matthew 23:39.
 
No TV pastor would dare preach a sermon based on this verse! And yet they preach that Christians can prepare for the second coming by supporting the secular Israel and the movement to make Jerusalem the capital of secular Israel – a doctrine cut from whole cloth without a shred of scripture tying it to the teachings of Jesus. In fact, in Bible times, a person without faith was not considered a Jew. A Gallup poll shows that 65% of Israelis consider themselves irreligious.
 
Whether you are a Christian or not, you can agree that if we want to get along in this world, we must extend our love and kindness toward every human being without exception. Jesus said if we do this we will live. The Jewish lawyer agreed.
 
 

​https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-see-the-political-structure-of-the-United-States-changing-in-the-next-20-years/answer/Vince-Dhimos
 
How do you see United States politics evolving in the next 20 years?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
Answered 23h ago
Originally Answered: How do you see the political structure of the United States changing in the next 20 years? 
In my answer to a similar question on Quora, I included an important detail about US “democracy,” namely, that it is not a democracy at all but is controlled by a cabal of individuals and organizations unrelated to the US grassroots and ignoring their interests:
https://www.quora.com/Is-China-a...
This system has never shown any sign that it might change at some point. In fact, the grassroots seem to be getting more and more tightly controlled by the cabal. One recent indication of this is the arrest of Julian Assange, who has not even been charged with a crime at the time of his arrest. This tyrannical behaviour of the Cabal is reflected in the way social media cavalierly remove messages that, even if written politely, express views that do not pass muster with the cabal, even banning users for expressing these views, and by the bill before congress to make a boycott of Israeli illegal settlements illegal and even to criminalize speech or print that encourages people not to buy products from illegal settlements in Palestine. It is telling that illegality is not only legalized but is in fact protected by law in this way, thus reversing the Constitutional precepts and universal concepts of human rights.
As long as the demographics of the US remain as they are, there therefore seems to be little hope of a change.
For example, 80% of US Evangelicals can be described as “Christian” Zionists, who cling to a very specific interpretation of certain Bible verses that have been misread for over a century in both England and the US. The best example is Ezekiel 37, the prophecy of the dry bones that come together to form the nation of Israel. “Christian” Zionists generally unwaveringly insist that this prophecy refers to modern secular Israel. They ignore verse 24, which says that this resurrected Israel will be “obedient to God’s decrees.” A Gallup poll has shown that 65% of Israelis have no religious beliefs at all and therefore can hardly be deemed “obedient to God’s decrees” since they do not believe in the God of Abraham. This misinformed creed of “Christian” Zionism has much more influence on US foreign policy in the Middle East than any scholarly organization, think tank or political movement and is directly involved in the initiation and pursuit of wars, which are based on the Zionist policy of Greater Israel as enunciated by Theodore Herzl and Oded Yinon, which is being pursued in the Middle East with the full support of the US military.
So no, this will not change or else will change at an imperceptibly slow rate over the next 20 years.
The main source of any change will be from outside the US. Indeed the most significant change we have seen in Middle East affairs in the last 50 years has been the Russian incursion into Syria, which has stood on its head the situation where the US was the most trusted partner and the Russians were less trusted in the region. Polls show that the opposite is now true.
Russia and China will continue to make these fundamental changes, the main one being the de-dollarization of world trade, which will see the end of dollar hegemony, and hence the end of US ability to continue slaughtering civilians and imposing crippling sanctions on countries that do not toe the US line.
The grassroots will change not from within but from without. That is how I see it.
 

​Vince answered a question on Quora.

Do you think economic sanctions are immoral as they hurt the innocent?
 
Vince Dhimos, Editor-in-Chief at New Silk Strategies (2016-present)
 
Of course they are immoral. US-waged wars are also immoral. The harm sanctions cause in the Third World  is far worse than Westerners imagine. The problem with US foreign policy is that the people who devise the policies are immoral and the US people do not make any moral challenges to the policies.
 
If you read, for example, sites like the Atlancic Council (NATO mouthpiece), you will probably never find an article mentioning the word “moral” or “morality.” When a country abandons all notions of morality, the policies are not only amoral but quickly become immoral. This is reflected in the fact that US wars since WW II have so far slaughtered an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people, mostly civilians who were minding their own business, and sanctions have also killed countless thousands of innocents.
 
The aftermath of the Iraq war left most of the country without electricity or drinking water. Under these conditions, people are forced to drink water from rivers, lakes and puddles left after rainfall. This means that most of the people who drink this water without boiling it first will get dysentery, which if left untreated (the sanctions also left them without medicine), also will kill the patient.
 
The irony of all this is that most of the US population consider themselves Christian. But Christian ethics and morals are, for some reason, not applied by these Christians to politics, especially foreign policy. While some Christian groups oppose abortion on moral grounds, none of the groups that do so oppose the immoral US sanctions and war. It all seems kind of superficial.
 
A very important fact is that the US waited 7 years after the end of the Iraq war in 2003 to lift the sanctions — in 2010. So what was their excuse I wonder? Did they think there were still WMDs? The Iraqi people had already suffered horribly during the war, mostly from US “humanitarian” bombing, which caused anywhere from 150,000 to 400,000 deaths (depending on who is doing the reporting), and then had to suffer 7 long years of excruciating sanctions. George Galloway said before the US Congress that 1 million Iraqis died as a result of sanctions. 
 
During the Syrian war (NOT a civil war. The fighters, mostly terrorists, came from over 80 countries), the US also imposed sanctions, and now that the war is mostly over, the US is forbidding all countries to help rebuild the mess caused by mostly the US, and the sanctions continue.
 
Obviously there is no palpable morality in Washington. There is an unspoken racism and neo-colonialism in US policy as well. It is just the opposite of the foreign policies of Russia and China. A poll taken among young Arabs poll among young Arabs reflects a major loss of trust in the US and a major gain in trust of Russia among this group, which views the US as an enemy.