One quick glance at the news reveals this truth. The world is on the brink of war - whether it's the Middle East, China, Russia, Ukraine, Egypt, etc., name a hot spot in the world and you will find that it is on the brink of war. Exactly as we would expect during these days:
Russian military vehicles have been photographed in the main square of Sevastopol, and there are fears that Ukraine is about to plunge into a very bloody civil war. The pro-Russian eastern half of Ukraine is in a state of shock, and many living there are openly calling on Russia to militarily intervene to protect them against the protest groups that have seized power in Kiev. Down in the Crimea, where approximately 60 percent of the population is ethnically Russian, militia groups have formed to protect their region from the “fascist scum running around in Kiev with swastikas“. That quote is from a recent Time Magazine article, and it demonstrates the extreme level of tension that exists between the two halves of Ukraine right now. Perhaps a peaceful resolution can still be achieved, but at the moment a civil war seems quite likely. And if war does erupt, the truth is that it is going to be exceedingly difficult for Russia to stay out of it.
And Russia is not just sitting back and waiting to see what will happen. They are actively moving military forces into position for a potential conflict. Just check out this excerpt from an International Business Times article entitled “Russian Ships Arrive On Ukraine’s Crimean Coast As Fears Mount Over Russian Invasion In the Region“…
According to Russian news site flot.com, Russian military ships carrying soldiers have arrived on Ukraine’s Crimean coast in what some are claiming could be the early signs of a Russian coup in the hotly disputed autonomous region of the Crimea.
Russia’s large landing ship Nikolai Filchenkov has arrived near the Russia Black Sea Fleet’s base at Sevastopol, which Russia has leased from Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The ship is reported to be carrying as many as 200 soldiersand has joined four additional ships carrying an unknown amount of Special Forces troops. Flot.com also reported over the weekend that personnel from the 45th Airborne Special Forces unit and additional divisions had been airlifted into Anapa, a city on Russia’s Black Sea coastline. In addition, it is believed that Russia’s Sevastopol base contains as many as 26,000 troops already, according to the German Institute for International And Security Affairs.
Posted below is a photograph that has been shared widely on Twitter of a Russian armored personnel carrier sitting right in the middle of the main square in Sevastopol. Needless to say, this sends a very strong message to the new “regime” in Kiev…
It has become quite clear that Russia does not intend to relinquish control over the Crimea, and the overwhelmingly pro-Russian population down there does not want that to happen either. In fact, many citizens down there see this as an opportunity for the Crimea to reunite with Russia…
If Russia does get militarily involved, it is a certainty that Ukraine will at least lose control of the Crimea. In fact, one Russian official has already made that abundantly clear…
Moscow earlier revealed that it would be ready to go for war over the Crimea region in order to protect the large population and army installations.
“If Ukraine breaks apart, it will trigger a war. They will lose Crimea first [because] we will go in and protect [it], just as we did in Georgia,” an unidentified Russian official told the Financial Times.
There is ample precedent, furthermore, to believe that if Putin and the Russian establishment believed that Ukraine was slipping permanently out of their grasp, then Russia would find a pretext to seize Crimea. Russia has made it amply clear that it considers the former Soviet Union to be a space where it sees itself having wide latitude for maneuver.
Russia has not hesitated to act militarily within the former Soviet Union, first in the self-proclaimed Transdnestr republic in 1992 and then in South Ossetia in 2008 during its brief war with Georgia. After the end of the war in Georgia, Russia became the only country in the world to officially recognize the independence of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. While Russia does not officially recognize Transdnestr, it has a consulate there, many of Transdnestr’s citizens have Russian passports and the Russians provide a de-facto guarantee of Transdnestr remaining separate from Moldova.
If Ukraine turns decisively West, it may well find that it is forced to leave Crimea behind.
The head of a prominent European Jewish group requested Tuesday that the Israeli government urgently send security personnel to Ukraine in order to protect the Jewish communities there, which have been targeted during the political unrest gripping the country.
In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, the head of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menahem Margolin, urgently requested that Israel “send trained security guards to protect Jewish communities in Ukrainian cities and towns.”
Ukrainian Jewish communities throughout the country are seriously concerned and feel helpless in the face of a “growing wave of anti-Semitic attacks,” the letter stated, citing the recent examples of a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Chabad center in the eastern city of Zaporozhye, a threatening phone message left for a rabbi in Kryvyi Rih calling for him to leave the city, and anti-Semitic graffiti found in Kiev and other locations.
The reports indicate a “Jewish emergency,” according to the letter sent by the Brussels-based EJA head.
The recent Israeli Air Force fly-by over Auschwitz “conveyed a clear message that Israel will ensure the safety of Jews around the world, even in foreign countries,” the rabbi wrote, so “I urge you to take every possible measure, including the dispatch of security guards, to insure the safety of Jewish communities in Ukraine.”
Exiled Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng says that Beijing should prepare for a Ukrainian-style uprising provoked by the Communist country’s hardening crackdown on human rights.
Guangcheng, who lives in New York after miraculously escaping house arrest in China in 2012, warns that the number of arrests of political dissidents in China is on the increase but that demonstrations in general are growing.
Given the admitted involvement of the U.S. in plotting the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, an action that many have warned riskssparking a new cold war with Russia, for the west to become embroiled in any potential Chinese revolution would represent a huge risk.
President Obama’s “pivot” towards Asia has prompted Beijing to display some of its most strident militarism seen in years, including discussion about China’s ability to attack U.S. military bases in the Western Pacific, as well as a lengthy editorial which appeared in Chinese state media explaining how the Chinese military’s current reformation process was part of a move by President Xi Jinping to prepare the People’s Liberation Army for war.
Last month, Chinese state media reported that Beijing’s new hypersonic missile vehicle is primarily designed to target U.S. aircraft carriers. Last year, China reportedly sunk a mock U.S. aircraft carrier utilizing the DF-21D anti-ship missile, dubbed the “carrier killer,” during a wargame which took place in the Gobi Desert.
Any widespread revolt in China is likely to elicit a similar response to that witnessed during the Tiananmen Square massacre, when authorities brutally suppressed a student demonstration, killing hundreds of unarmed protesters.
Western military and intelligence sources report that Israeli Air Force strikes in Lebanon and Syria overnight Monday, Feb. 24 came on the heels of the first use in the three-year Syrian war of a Russian-made nuclear-capable Tochka (Point) surface missile - NATO-coded SS-21 Scarab - which carries a 480-kilo warhead with a range of 70 km. These missiles were fired earlier Monday in the Syrian-Hizballah battle for Yabroud. There was no information about the effect of the Israeli strikes.
According to Lebanese sources, however, the target was a cluster of five Hizballah bases or command posts in the Lebanese Beqaa Valley. Hizballah casualties were reported.
That was one Lebanese version of the incident. In the absence of independent confirmation or official information, different sources offered a variety of alternative targets.
Some sources named them as missile-launchers fired from Lebanon in support of the Hizballah-Syrian army battle for the strategic town of Yabroud, the last Syrian rebel stronghold in the Qalamoun Mts just across the Syrian border. This town, 80 kilometers north of Damascus, has held out against two months of vicious combat.
A fourth version claims that the air strikes hit a convoy ferrying weapons from Hizballah’s Lebanese stores into Syria or, alternatively, convoys transporting missiles in the opposite direction, from Syria to Hizballah bases in Lebanon.
The Air Force went into action the day after Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz commented during a visit to the Golan that a close watch is being kept on the movements of Iranian weapons and ammo present in all the troubled sectors of the region. This is of extreme concern to Israel, he said.
As he spoke, Syrian intelligence detonated a large car bomb at a military hospital near the Iraqi border treating Syrian rebel casualties. The attack cost 14 lives, including several wounded men.
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources estimate that Israel’s action has left two big question marks:
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources estimate that Israel’s action has left two big question marks:
1. Was it a one-off, or the start of a series?
2. Will Hizballah or Syria hit back?
Up until now, any military actions Israel undertook in Syria and Lebanon were cloaked in secrecy and never admitted by the IDF, even when images emerged of the damage caused. This time, there are no images and even Lebanese security sources can’t agree on the targets that were hit.
That is because the shoe is now on the other foot. The Iranian Al Qods Brigades chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani has ordered the Israeli air strikes to be kept under tight wraps.
Earlier this month, Soleimani was placed officially in charge of Iran’s military interventions in the battlefields of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian “resistance.”
This was part of the distribution of tasks ordered by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to hold Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) chiefs back from sabotaging Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the six powers. Diplomacy was left in the province of President Hassan Rouhani, but his government was barred from interfering in Iran’s external military operations.
Khamenei’s solution for separating the two rival camps in Tehran has placed Israel and its armed forces face to face for the first time with the Iranian command center directly orchestrating its Arab adversaries.
It is one of the ruthless Gen. Soleimani’s principles never to let any assault on Iran or its interests go unanswered. Israel may therefore expect retaliation for its air strikes – though not necessarily from Syria or Lebanon.
It is one of the ruthless Gen. Soleimani’s principles never to let any assault on Iran or its interests go unanswered. Israel may therefore expect retaliation for its air strikes – though not necessarily from Syria or Lebanon.
Hezbollah on Wednesday vowed to retaliate for a Monday night attack on its forces that was widely reported to have been an Israeli airstrike, calling it an attack against all of Lebanon.
The statement on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television station was the first acknowledgement of the strike for the terror group. Al-Manar had previously denied that a strike on the group’s forces had occurred, despite reports in Lebanese media earlier Wednesday that four Hezbollah operatives had been killed.
“The resistance will choose the right time and place to retaliate for the Israeli offensive,” Hezbollah was quoted as saying by Al-Manar.
In January, during his annual address at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel, spoke about the current “war between wars.” The IAF, “a sledgehammer,” he said, was being asked to do the “work of a scalpel.”
That appears to be what happened on Monday night. According to Lebanese sources, four “warplanes for the Israeli enemy,” flying southwest off the sea, entered Lebanese airspace at 9:50 p.m., streaking toward the Beqaa Valley. Thirty-five minutes later, the planes exited Lebanon via Nakoura and were back out over the sea.
The strikes took place in the northern Beqaa Valley region, “where recruitment and training of [Hezbollah] fighters are carried out,” and along “a well-known route for arms smuggling between Lebanon and Syria,” according to the Lebanese newspaper the Daily Star.
Al Arabiya suggested that the target was a convoy of long-range surface-to-surface missiles. This was not confirmed. But what is clear, according to Maj. Gen. (res) Eyal Ben-Reuven, the deputy commander of the northern front during the Second Lebanon War, is that the front, ever since Hezbollah and Iran came to the aid of the then-waning Bashar Assad, has changed shape entirely. “Today Lebanon and Syria are one front, under the umbrella of Iran,” Ben-Reuven said in a conference call.
Today, though, the balance of power has shifted. Bashar Assad won Qusayr and held the capital thanks to Hezbollah soldiers on the ground and Iranian Quds Force officers at the helm. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, is now “running the war himself,” according to a 2013 New Yorker profile. Iran, which gave the regime a $7 billion loan in 2013, has been sending troops and arms daily to Damascus.
The price for these self-serving heroics, Ben-Reuven said, is the delivery of “game-changing weapons” to Hezbollah.
Muslim youth congregated atop Jerusalem’s Temple Mount exploded in violence on Tuesday, just days after leading rabbis demanded that Israel officially extend its sovereignty over the ancient Jewish holy site.
As Israeli police officers opened the Mughrabi Gate, the only Temple Mount entrance available to Jews and Christians, a mob of Muslim youth pelted the Israelis with stones and firecrackers.
Two Israeli police officers were wounded and three rioters were arrested in the ensuing melee.
Police officials believed the incident was linked to a Knesset debate regarding Israeli control of the Temple Mount that was scheduled for later in the day.
The Knesset debate was scheduled in response to an official complaint filed by MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud) over “the loss of Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount.”
Feiglin and other Israeli lawmakers have increasingly lamented the lack of religious freedom for Jews and Christians at the Temple Mount. Non-Muslim are forbidden to pray or carry Bibles when visiting the compound for fear of provoking Muslim unrest.
After Israel reunified Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War, it immediately turned around and handed control of the Temple Mount back to the Jordanians who had previously occupied the city. Since then, the holy site has been administered by Jordan and the Palestinian Islamic Trust (Waqf).
Feiglin wants to see the government finally do away with that arrangement and place the Temple Mount under Israeli supervision. His position is backed by a petition signed last week by leading rabbis who insist the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, should be fully under Israeli sovereignty.
But Waqf head Sheikh Ikrima Sabri warned that any move by Israel to “harm the sanctity” of the mosques situated atop the Temple Mount would lead to more violence.
“We will not give up even one grain of earth (on the Temple Mount), since the Jews have no connection to it whatsoever,” Sabri claimed in remarks to Gaza-based media. He insisted that control of the Temple Mount was a “red line” not only for Palestinian Muslims, but for Arabs across the Middle East.
The Knesset debate on Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Tuesday sparked a furious reaction from Jordanian legislators in Amman including calls to cancel the peace treaty with Israel and to return the Jordanian envoy from Tel Aviv .
In the peace treaty signed between the two governments nearly 20 years ago, Israel acknowledged the Hashemite Kingdom’s “special role” in the custodianship of the holy sites in Jerusalem.
The Wakf Muslim religious trust was given oversight of the holy site following theSix Day War in 1967.
On Tuesday, right-wing MKMoshe Feiglin (Likud Beytenu) protested the limitations on Jewish worship on the Mount in the first ever debate on sovereignty of the site ever to be held in the Knesset
MP Yihya Saud, Chairman of the House Palestine Committee, urged the government to expel the Israeli ambassador in Amman and recall the Jordanian ambassador from Tel Aviv in response to the Knesset debate, according to the news outlet.
Further, the report cited Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh as saying last week: “Not one and not even 1,000 Knesset members can cancel the Hashemite custodianship of Islamic and Christian holy shrines in Jerusalem.”
The debate, headlined “the loss of Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount” and rescheduled from last week, was initiated by right-wing lawmaker MK Moshe Feiglin (Likud), whose visits to the Temple Mount have drawn media and police attention. Feiglin was arrested for praying there in October 2012 and January 2013, before he became an MK, and visited the Mount earlier this week ahead of the debate.
“The Israeli leadership is shirking its duty,” Feiglin said at the opening of the session, during which he called for Jewish freedom of worship at the site where the first and second Jewish temples once stood. “Without the Mount, we have no home in Tel Aviv, or Haifa or anywhere else.”
Police restrictions bar Jews from praying or engaging in other religious activities while on visits to the Mount for fear that they will provoke a violent reaction from Muslims, a policy Feiglin said was absurd.
“Behind the back of our people we gave up on any vestige of Israeli sovereignty at the Mount. Every terrorist organization can wave their flag there, but the flag of Israel? It must not be mentioned. Reciting a psalm is grounds for arrest. Even wearing a skullcap [at the site] is inadvisable by police standards,” he said.
Also see:
On second thought, this one is worth reading in full:
Progressivism As A Weapon Of Mass Destruction
Along the way, what is lost is immeasurable. Human freedom, the right of each individual to live a life determined by his own needs, skills, and choices, bounded by laws which recognize the need of ethical limits on our interactions, dissolves or, more accurately, is banned. The progressive understands that the usurpation of total control cannot be achieved where humans are permitted to make informed decisions based on accurate information. Thus, it is necessary first to alter the flow and content of the information on which individuals make decisions which, in its totality, directs events that promote one outcome over another. As such, every repressive regime has depended upon disinformation, presented as "news", meant to shape opinion to favor the illusory virtues of the regime. The success of this process increases in direct proportion to the cultivated pollution of the knowledge of the people.
Progressivism As A Weapon Of Mass Destruction
As the president and Secretary Kerry do their part to misdirect attention from the real issues of our time to the fake ones, the nation and the world reap the increasingly rotted fruits of progressivism. What has done more to cause destruction, poverty, disinformation, failure, and death than this cult, premised upon the false superiority of its proponents? Absolutely nothing. Economies lie in ruin, nations are at each other's throats over bailouts and citizens are pitted against one another for preferential treatment and spoils coerced from others. All while the darkness of human nature parades smugly before us calling itself "hope and change".
Progressivism is merely the current euphemism for centralized power vested in a class of people who believe their own propaganda, or know it is a lie but tell it anyway. It is not enough merely to note that it has failed every time it has been tried. It must also be said that it has done irreparable damage to humanity wherever it has been practiced. Progressivism is human vice incarnate, the indulgence and celebration of the erasure of the constraints that human experience and wisdom have devised to limit evil. The name has been changed to protect the guilty.
Historically, before the current iteration that we are witnessing in the United States, the quest by elitists for unlimited power over their fellow men, pursued initially under the guise of peaceful change, has usually progressed from societal "improvements" and the well-intended promise of social benefit, to oppression, persecution, and murder. The time line may vary, some are more sudden and violent, some more gradual and subtle, but the outcome has always been the same: the dominance of rulers over the ruled, with all rights and possessions, including life, sacrificed to appease to the insatiable hunger of a soulless state and its foolish enablers.
Along the way, what is lost is immeasurable. Human freedom, the right of each individual to live a life determined by his own needs, skills, and choices, bounded by laws which recognize the need of ethical limits on our interactions, dissolves or, more accurately, is banned. The progressive understands that the usurpation of total control cannot be achieved where humans are permitted to make informed decisions based on accurate information. Thus, it is necessary first to alter the flow and content of the information on which individuals make decisions which, in its totality, directs events that promote one outcome over another. As such, every repressive regime has depended upon disinformation, presented as "news", meant to shape opinion to favor the illusory virtues of the regime. The success of this process increases in direct proportion to the cultivated pollution of the knowledge of the people.
Because this part of the process snares the weakest and most vulnerable, whether emotional or intellectual, more drastic action is needed to defeat the rest. Those who seek or know the truth are the real enemy of any repressive state. Thus, assuming they still intend to exercise judgment, they must have their choices taken from them in the name of some greater good. Should they still demand freedom, they must be cowed, humiliated, imprisoned, and ground into the dust. To achieve this, in part, the progressive will warp and twist every established truth to make truth seem ugly and defective, under the guise of "progress".
A significant tool in this arsenal of fraud is the appeal to "science". After all, the progressive argues, "science" is independent of motives or partisan influence. Only a troglodyte disagrees with "science". The progressive needs you to believe that the science he has bought is pure and true, and is only what he says it is. Science has always been sacrificed on the altar of total power.
Beware those who speak of "settled science", and are prepared to act on that conclusion. It was settled science to some that the Jews were genetically inferior. Similarly, those who have historically favored the oppression and servitude of blacks have implicitly invoked settled science to advance the inherent lie that as a people they are genetically incapable of equality on their own, and that a paternalistic hand is necessary to compensate for their historic deficiencies. While this was done in the past to keep them in literal bondage, it is done now to keep them in philosophical bondage, dependent upon the entitlements given to them by their political keepers.
Global warming is merely the latest scientific straw man to walk the stage, dressed in invisible clothes and armed with self-righteous indignation and the power of the state. It's always about control, and is always based on lies. When people stop believing the lies progressives tell to control their choices and behavior, and refuse to grant them power in the name of false benevolence and phony virtue, the spell will be broken. Of course, this simply cannot be allowed.
The problem, as serious Americans grasp, is that there is nowhere else we can go if progressivism completely destroys freedom here. The rest of the world has already succumbed. For generations, others have fled here when like-minded zealots destroyed their countries, because this was someplace else to go, a haven of freedom left on Earth in which a person could not only survive, but advance, on hard work and merit. Now, many of them voice their fear that this magnificent country to which they have fled is becoming increasingly familiar to what they left behind. There is no place left like the United States as it was before the cancer of progressivism.
Progressives intend that the "land of opportunity" shall become the land of servitude. With their backs against the last wall, threatened with mass destruction of all they know and love, some citizens will surrender to the inevitability of serfdom that progressives have always planned for them, despite the evidence and lessons of history. Others, Americans who recognize the danger and cherish what is threatened and will not be regained, will defend themselves, their families and their future. Before 2008, not many of us ever thought we'd have to confront that choice in our lifetimes. Now, only a few short years later, it is on our doorstep.
Look what has already been lost because we have failed thus far to defuse the destructive power of progressivism, and the historic malice or complicity of its proponents, both left and right. The hour is late and the opportunities are shrinking rapidly. It is our time to defeat progressivism, or it will surely destroy all we hold dear as free Americans.
Look what has already been lost because we have failed thus far to defuse the destructive power of progressivism, and the historic malice or complicity of its proponents, both left and right. The hour is late and the opportunities are shrinking rapidly. It is our time to defeat progressivism, or it will surely destroy all we hold dear as free Americans.
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