The ideological perfidy and willful ahistoricism of the United Nations and its affiliate entities was on despicable display again last week when an official resolution by a U.N. body referred to Israel as an “occupying power” of the famous Temple Mount in Jerusalem, among other outrageous indignities.
As a large part of a broader, virulently anti-Israel resolution, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) refused even to refer to the Temple Mount as such, instead adopting the Arabic title, the “Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif” – while refusing to even acknowledge the factually undeniable, age-old Jewish links to the famous Western Wall and its environs.
The resolution even complained about Israeli plans to build what the Times of Israeldescribed as “an egalitarian prayer service space” at the nearby, remarkably handsome Robinson’s Arch.
This is worse than tendentious; it’s vicious. There is no doubt – historical, archaeological, cultural, or religious – that the Temple Mount and especially the Western Wall is, in toto, the single holiest site for all Judaism, the very location most central to the entire religion. By comparison, the Al-Aqsa Mosque there is considered only the third holiest site for Islam, which can point to no historically verifiable connection to the site until well after Islam was founded.
Yes, adherents of Islam now claim that Muhammad once was transported hundreds of miles, in a dream, to the spot – but even if someone doesn’t find the claim fanciful (I make no judgment here), it clearly gives Muslims less reason to treasure the area than Jews do. Muslims, after all, still have their Mecca (prayers at which are, by some Islamic traditions, worth 200 times the value of prayers said at the Al-Aqsa Mosque).
To what should be Israelis’ everlasting credit, they use their control of the Temple Mount area to keep it open to people of all faiths – something that cannot be said for the mosque, which is forbidden even for visits by non-Muslims.
A prior UNESCO resolution had harshly criticized Israeli archaeological excavations near the Old City, which even further establish Jewish ties to the area for three full millennia, well over twice as long as Islam’s more tenuous links thereto. UNESCO is, by its very name, supposed to be dedicated to education, science, and culture, yet when Israel pursues scientific and cultural research for educational (and other) purposes, the hypocrites at UNESCO urge that the research be halted.
This is a sign of intense moral rot at the heart of UNESCO and the U.N.
According to Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Economic News), on April 23rd, U.S. President Barack Obama is “demanding the active deployment of the Bundeswehr [Germany’s armed forces, including their Army, Navy, and Air Force] to NATO’s eastern borders” at Poland and the Baltic republics, to join the quadrupling of America’s forces there, on and near those borders of Russia. (This is an extreme violation of what Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to when he ended the Soviet Union and its NATO-mirror organization the Warsaw Pact, but it’s actually culminating a process that began shortly after he agreed to America’s terms, which included that NATO “not move one inch to the east.”)
Furthermore, DWN reports that on April 25th, the U.S. President will hold a “summit meeting” in Hannover Germany with the leaders of Germany (Angela Merkel), Italy (Matteo Renzi), France (Francois Hollande), and Britain (David Cameron). The presumed objective of this meeting is to establish in NATO’s countries bordering on Russia, a military force of all five countries that are headed by these leaders, a force threatening Russia with an invasion, if NATO subsequently decides that the ‘threat from Russia’ be ‘responded to’ militarily.
NATO’s surrounding Russia with hostile forces is supposedly defensive against Russia — not an offensive operation. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America’s President JFK didn’t consider Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev’s plan to base nuclear missiles in Cuba to be ‘defensive’ on the USSR’s part — and neither does Russia’s President Vladimir Putin consider America’s far bigger operation, of surrounding Russia with such weapons, to be ‘defensive’ and not offensive. The U.S. Government, and NATO, act as if Russia is surrounding them, instead of them surrounding Russia — and their ‘news’ media transmit this lie as if it should be taken seriously, not as its being a lie; but, in actual fact, NATO has already expanded right up to Russia’s western borders.
Obama is thus now adding to the economic sanctions against Russia that he had imposed allegedly because of Russia’s alleged ‘seizure’ of Crimea from Ukraine after Obama’s coup overthrew Russia’s ally Viktor Yanukovych who led Ukraine until the coupin February 2014.
Right after Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia, Obama slapped sanctions against Russia (even though Western-sponsored polls in Crimea, both before and after the coup, had shown higher than 90% support by Crimeans for rejoining with Russia), and nuclear weapons were prepared, both on the U.S.-EU side and on the Russian side, for a possible nuclear war.
Basically, the U.S. leadership decided to take over Ukraine, and refused to acknowledge the rights of the Crimean people to reject being conquered by the U.S. — and Russia’s leadership decided to protect them against the type of invasion that subsequently occurred in Ukraine’s former Donbass region, where the opposition to Obama’s coup was even more intense.
Any in-depth news-report about Obama’s organizing for a possible invasion of Russia, needs to deal, therefore, with the key question: What basis of ‘the West’s’ aggressive actions threatening Russia’s national security is there, other than such lies by ‘the West’? And, if there is no honest answer to it, then the only rational response by Western publics, to what Obama and his foreign allies are doing, is to recognize what is actually happening and to take action against their own leaders, before this increasingly high-stakes confrontation — of no benefit but only extremely high costs, to publics around the world — becomes terminal. In that instance, Western publics need to defend themselves against their own nation’s leaders. This is a situation that is frequently encountered in dictatorships.
The key questions are not being asked in the Western press; they are being ignored by it. Unless these questions are publicly dealt with — and soon — the answer, to them all, could well be terminal. Consequently, any ‘news’ medium that fails to address them is less than worthless; it is sheer propaganda that merely parades in the mask of being a ‘news medium’: the potentially terminal questions are then being ignored, and lies are promoted instead, which distract the public from the most urgent public-affairs issue of them all, in our era, not draw the public’s attention to that overriding international-affairs issue.
The closer that things are getting to a nuclear war, the more difficult becomes either side’s backing down from it — and this is especially the case with the aggressor (most especially when it falsely claims that it is being aggressed-against, and this is the reason why the lies urgently need to be exposed).
Venezuela has fallen into an economic pit.
Dirty air and water have caused widespread sickness. A drought has led to pervasive water and electricity shortages. The country’s economy has contracted and inflation runs in the triple digits. Food, medicine and common items like toilet paper are increasingly scarce. Violent crime ravages the streets.
To be sure, some of these problems resulted from natural disasters. But Venezuela’s socialist government also deserves much of the blame, according to William J. Murray, chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition.
“The problem in Venezuela originated with Hugo Chavez and the socialism that he brought,” said Murray, whose most recent book is titled “Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning.” “Let’s be clear: Venezuela was the most advanced nation in South America as far as its economy.”
Once upon a time, as Murray recalled, Venezuela had a huge middle class, property ownership was high and a large slice of the population held credit cards. But a series of economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s convinced many Venezuelans they had to change their country’s direction.
“They thought their answer was Chavez,” Murray said. “They thought it was socialism. They thought that their credit woes and other problems were going to be cured through socialism, and the result is what you have in Venezuela today, which is always the result of utopian systems or utopian thought, and that is no clean water, undependable electricity, gasoline shortages in one of the greatest oil-producing countries, food shortages – I could go on.”
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