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Vince Dhimos Quora is a forum that enables people to consult experts on just about any topic. I have been listed as an expert in languages and international affairs, among other things, and am directly asked questions on related topics. You can learn a lot from Westerners who are indoctrinated by the statements of politicians and the msm and believe implicitly in them. These people are generally not the enemy. They just need help. I responded to a question as to why the US and the West want to remove Bashar Al-Assad and fund groups that oppose him. I said that the US had signed in 1973 an agreement with the Saudis to use their military to “defend” them and that things had gotten out of hand. My response: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-US-and-Wests-interests-for-the-removal-of-Mr-Bashar-al-Assad-and-the-funding-and-arming-of-the-groups-that-opposed-him/answer/Vince-Dhimos At this same URL I showed that the US has been a mercenary of the Saudi royals ever since Nixon and King Faisal signed what I call the petrodollar agreement, in 1973. (This same text is available at the NSS page: http://www.newsilkstrategies.com/news--analysis/the-us-military-is-a-mercenary-force-in-the-hire-of-the-saudi-dictatorship) A respondent retorted: “These aren’t facts. There’s are your opinions and interpretations. Many of which I believe are no where near the truth. You isn’t cute anything you said [sic]. Didn’t source.” It may be worth noting that I have written at Quora numerous commentaries on the brutality of the Israelis and am sometimes attacked by Israeli trolls whose English usage and grammar tips them off as non-native speakers of English. It appears as if some of these trolls follow me all over the forum just to harass. But their views are rather uniform and include a pronounced pro-Saudi stance, thanks to the shared hostility toward Iran. (BTW, the anti-Iran position of the White House has everything to do with US kowtowing to the Saudis/Israelis). Since this mentality infects others, it is important for the other side to be heard. BTW, instead of directly answering the trolls, I generally just post links to sites that show, often with videos, the brutality of the Israeli army against the hapless residents of the occupied territories. (Such as this one: https://vimeo.com/86575949). Most of my linked material is from Israeli sites like Haaretz or Jerusalem Post. I also like to post links to articles showing how the Israeli government is losing the support of young US Jews and Evangelicals. These reports and videos eventually cool of the hotheads and send the trolls packing. Facts are still facts. BTW, unlike liberal critics of "Christian" Zionism, I do not criticise these "Christians" for being overly literal in their scriptural interpretations. In fact, quite the opposite is true. They are no literal enough in this case. They base much of their Cult of Israel on Ezekiel 37, but if they examined Ezekiel 37 more closely, they would see in verse 24 that David is the king of this Israel and that this nation is obedient to God's decrees. Thus, since David has been dead for millennia and has not been resurrected, and since a Reuters poll shows that a full 60% of today's Israelis self-describe as "irreligious," there is no way modern Israel could be construed to be the nation prophesied by Ezekiel. So where did their heresy come from? Mostly from the Scofield Bible commentaries, which are full of flaws. I responded as follows: First off, which of my facts would you need sources for? After all, my arguments are based on the kind of countries and leaders that the Saudis hate, and which just happen to be the targets of US wars. The wars are common knowledge and the kinds of leaders are well known as well. I entered into detail, covering all the wars and the leaders who were taken out by the US and showed how the outcomes of each war were all in keeping with Saudi wishes. This is not rocket science. The main hurdle is allowing yourself to see the obvious. On the issue of “sources,” let us look at an analogy. In the early 1500s, a Polish scholar named Mikołai Kopernik (we call him Nicolaus Copernicus now) burned the midnight oil for many years doing research on planetary movements relative to the sun, and after this painstaking research, wrote a book titled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres—back then, European scholars wrote in Latin) explaining, based on Kopernik’s mathematical calculations (only his, no one helped), that the planets, including earth, rotate about the sun and that, contrary to popular belief everywhere in the world, the sun does not move relative to the planets but rather it’s the other way around. (Do you need a source for that too?) Kopernik knew that if he published this book too early, the Church would likely try him as a heretic. Religion was the centre of Western thinking, just as it is today, where US foreign policy is based in large part on a misreading of the Bible, as I showed here https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-follow-the-thousands-year-old-religion-and-kill-for-it. Worst of all for Kopernik is that the poor fellow was unable to provide a single footnote in his book. Why? Because his was pioneering research and no one had ever written anything like it. Further, it was taboo material. Even if someone else had thought about writing on this topic, they would have been deterred by fear of the Church. Now some Westerners today are also doing pioneering research, and because they are breaking new ground, there just is no one to cite as a source. And in the field of geopolitics, pioneering can be fatal. There are agencies watching those who dare to challenge the received wisdom from the msm, Washington, Wall Street, AIPAC and the ADL. And they have their henchmen in social media. Thus many Western zombies will say “but you have no sources.” Because every time a Westerner says or writes anything, Westerners expect the ideas expressed to have a safe, approved precedent somewhere. But if that person is basing his text on his own personal research, no matter how meticulous the study or how accurate the observations may be, many Western readers will reject it and will condemn the unfortunate messenger for daring to step out of line. The upshot of Kopernik’s story is that he was obliged to have the book published on his deathbed because he was afraid, based on the experience of others, that he was literally risking being burned at the stake simply for reporting his scientific findings. Westerners have not changed since then. We still burn “heretics.”
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