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OverUnity Research > General - Free Energy Related > Miscellaneous Discussions (Moderator: Allcanadian) > 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk!
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2250 on: 2017-09-23, 09:42:52 »

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Robert Steele: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is US…

http://phibetaiota.net/2017/09/robert-steele-we-have-met-the-enemy-and-he-is-us/

https://ahtribune.com/world/unga/1913-enemy-is-us.html

The US Government (USG) is in enemy hands. More specifically, the USG is owned and operated by the Deep State led by the Rothschilds and the Jesuit Superior General, with four major “action groups” able to subvert any country: the City of London, Wall Street, and Central Banks; the Freemasons; the Knights of Malta; and the Zionist leadership of Israel (not to be confused with peace-loving Jews). [1]


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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2251 on: 2017-09-23, 10:27:49 »

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The First Holy War

https://www.usnews.com/news/religion/articles/2008/04/07/the-first-holy-war

The truth about the epic clash between east and west.

By Andrew Curry, Contributor | April 7, 2008, at 2:30 p.m.

It was the fall of 1187, and an emissary from the besieged city of Jerusalem had come to beg the sultan of Egypt for mercy. After barely four days of assaults, the Christian defenders saw that the sultan, Saladin, had them hopelessly outmatched. Waiting in his tent outside the city walls, the Muslim ruler knew both sides had a lot riding on the outcome of this battle.

For the city's defenders, the prospect of Saladin's wrath loomed. The last time Jerusalem had been sacked by invaders its narrow streets ran red with blood. For Saladin, his honor depended on capturing Jerusalem. All summer his armies had battled their way through the Holy Land, sweeping through the Christian fiefs like an angry desert wind. Their only goal: recapturing the holy city that had been occupied by European invaders for 88 years.

Now the sultan stood on the hills north of Jerusalem. But the Christian emissary trudging toward him had no prize to offer, only surrender. For days, Saladin's men had bombarded the city from the north, finally breaching St. Stephen's Gate. The few defenders who remained knew that prolonging the fight would only worsen the consequences of defeat.

And so a triumphant Saladin entered Jerusalem on Oct. 2, 1187. For the sultan's army, it was a moment of both joy and sadness. The Christians had profaned some of Islam's holiest sites. The al-Aqsa mosque had been used as a stable for horses. Pieces of the rock from which Muhammad was said to have ascended to heaven had been chipped away to sell in Constantinople.

But the victorious Saladin forbade acts of vengeance. There were no more deaths, no violence. A token ransom was arranged for the residents. Saladin and his brother paid for hundreds of the poorest themselves and arranged guards for the caravans of refugees.

If this account sounds less than familiar, it's because Saladin doesn't get much ink in western history books. They are more likely to feature Richard the Lion-Hearted, the leader of the European expedition to retake Jerusalem (most often remembered from Robin Hood tales). But most Muslims will focus on Saladin and his generosity in the face of Christian aggression and hatred. And they will be right.

The battle between Saladin and Richard marked the high point of the Crusades, the first major clash between Islam and western Christendom, which lasted more than three centuries. And though they left only a faint imprint on western minds, in the Muslim world the Crusades still loom large. When Osama bin Laden declared his own jihad in 1998, he accused America of "[spearheading] the crusade against the Islamic nation." He later promised the world would "see again Saladin carrying his sword, the blood of unbelievers dripping from it."

His words tapped into a reservoir of ill will. "The impact of the Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today," says Akbar Ahmed, chair of Islamic studies at American University. Its legacy was profound. For Muslims, then probably the strongest and most vibrant civilization on the globe, the Crusader victories and the destruction that followed were a confidence-shaking blow. At the same time, the Crusades were a tipping point for Europe, pushing the continent out of the Dark Ages and into the modern world.

From their beginnings in 1095, the Crusades inspired more passion than anyone ever expected. The First Crusade was preceded by droughts and famine and heralded by meteor showers. The idea of an expedition to reclaim Jerusalem from the unbelievers seized the imagination of people from all social classes. Led by deeply religious knights, armies of European Christians marched through what is now Hungary to the city of Constantinople, the great center of Christianity in the East.

When the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, they looked like one undifferentiated barbaric mob to their Muslim foes. But the Franks were tough. In 1099, they assaulted the heavily defended Jerusalem and finally broke through. Bloodthirsty after the long siege, they swarmed over the walls and set upon the city's inhabitants. In later accounts, they boasted of wading through the city's holy sites knee deep in blood. Their brutality horrified the Muslim world. Writes British historian Steven Runciman: "When later, wiser Latins in the East sought to find some basis on which Christian and Moslem could work together, the memory of the massacre stood always in the way."

It took almost a century before a leader strong enough to unite the Muslim Middle East appeared. When Saladin finally retook Jerusalem, it was Christendom's turn to be shocked. Chroniclers say that when Pope Urban III learned of Saladin's victory, he died of grief. His successor, Gregory VIII, sent messengers to spread the word of a new crusade to wrest back the holy city. He spoke of "the fierceness of the barbarians who thirst for Christian blood." And he promised salvation through violence: He would "acquit before God all the sins of those who would bear the sign of the cross to go recover the Promised Land, provided they confessed and were truly penitent," wrote contemporary chronicler William of Tyre.

The pope's message of salvation and the opportunity for earthly glory drew the most powerful kings of Europe—like the young Richard the Lion-Hearted, who sailed east leading armies of knights and peasants. Expeditions like Richard's would be repeated for almost five centuries. Many scholars now believe that crusading eventually spanned the entire continent of Europe, as the church used it to fight "heretical" Christians and convert pagans at sword point.

The First Crusade, in which wide swaths of the Holy Land were seized by Latin Christians, is the only one that can be considered a European victory. Crusades thereafter were either catastrophes or barely successful attempts to preserve European strongholds in the Middle East. The Third Crusade is the best remembered, perhaps because of the personalities involved, like Richard the Lion-Hearted, the handsome and temperamental king of England. Though known today as a paragon of chivalry, Richard was a merciless adversary. He took a different view of war from Saladin's. After one battle, he had thousands of captured men beheaded within full view of their own armies. For 16 months, Saladin and Richard battled across the parched plains of the Holy Land. Finally, ill and leading an exhausted army, Richard negotiated a truce and headed home. He never returned.

In the early 20th century, western expansion into the Middle East was embittering Arabs. "For [Muslims], imperialism is a dirty word, and they turned the western memory of the Crusades on its head and demonized it," says Jonathan Riley-Smith, a historian at the University of Cambridge in Britain. Angry Muslim nationalists adopted the Crusades as a convenient metaphor. It still works. "Since the late 19th century, western imperialism and Zionism were portrayed as a modern crusade," says Hebrew University historian Benjamin Kedar. "This is why the topic is so timely in Arab political discourse."

Undoubtedly, George W. Bush had a different sense of the term in mind when he told the nation, after Sept. 11, 2001, that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." Bush's statement resounded like thunder among Muslims. "It was precisely the worst word he could have used—it allowed bin Laden and others to conceptualize the nature of the struggle into resisting Christian and Jewish invaders and point out the hostility of the West to the Muslim world," Ahmed says. "Crusader lore is only part of this rage, but it's a significant part."

This rage is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning just over a century ago, when memories of the Crusades were revived as a historical analogy to colonialism. Before Europe's colonial expansion into the Middle East, Muslim chroniclers paid little attention to the Crusades. "In actual historical reality, the Crusades were far more important for the West than for the Muslim world," says John Voll, director of the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

For decades, western historians held on to the idea that the Crusades were a colonial venture motivated by just about everything but the cross: greed, lack of opportunity in Europe, territorial expansion. Few gave credence to the idea that the Crusaders were motivated by genuine religious feeling. But recently Crusades scholarship has recognized that faith could move people to violence as easily as greed or land.

The best example is the First Crusade. Eager to unite warring Christians, Pope Urban II spoke in 1095 to a massive crowd in France. Describing the cruelties inflicted by Muslims on Christian pilgrims trying to visit Jerusalem, he called on all of western Christendom to rescue their eastern breth-ren. "They should leave off slaying each other and fight instead a righteous war, doing the work of God, and God would lead them...." Runciman writes. "Here they were poor and unhappy; there they would be joyful and prosperous and true friends of God."

The response was tremendous. Urban's speech was interrupted by cries of "Deus lo volt"—"God wills it." Hundreds begged to go on the holy expedition. Soon tens of thousands of commoners and knights were heading off to the Holy Land. Across Europe, preachers called on the faithful to sew crosses on their clothes, to mark them until they succeeded in their quest.

The key to Urban's call was a revolutionary (and doomed) theology: salvation through the sword. "There is a very powerful devotional element," says Riley-Smith. "West European Catholics believed they could aid their salvation by fighting the infidel in the East. [Crusading is] as much a penance as fasting on bread and water.... This idea is without precedent in Christian history."

Jerusalem was the medieval Christians' equivalent of Mecca, Christ's tomb their quest. To take up the cross in the city's defense was a deeply spiritual act for many. Superstitious peasants saw the journey as a road to heaven. Fiery itinerant preachers like Peter the Hermit, whose army of starving peasants had no place in Urban's vision of an orderly march on Jerusalem, promised paradise. "Many...believed that he was promising to lead them out of their present miseries to the land flowing with milk and honey of which the Scriptures spoke," Runciman writes.

Peter's success was cited repeatedly. The defeats suffered by better-organized Crusades led many to believe that it was the humble who were destined to succeed, not the proud, rich military classes. In the end, these "People's Crusades" ended in disaster, too. None ever reached the Holy Land, and most of the peasant Crusaders were either slaughtered as they plundered their way across Europe or disbanded before ever reaching a port. Without the resources to reach the Holy Land, many turned on more convenient targets, like local Jewish enclaves. "[Why] are we going to seek out our profanity and to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him?" was the rationale, as recorded by a Jewish eyewitness.

But persuading landed knights to take up the cross took more than anti-Semitic rants and vague stories of the Promised Land. Europe's warrior class, the fighting force Pope Urban II really wanted, had much to lose: Crusaders faced death, disease, or capture. There were also more-mundane risks. A knight's lands and title could be stolen in his absence. If his Crusade failed, the returning knight risked the scorn of those who blamed him for failing to do God's work. And the costs involved in crusading were a risk in themselves. King Louis IX of France (later to become St. Louis) set out in 1249 on a crusade from a harbor he had specially constructed with an artificial canal and grand tower, stocked with plentiful supplies. He spent six times his annual revenue on the venture, which ended when he was captured and forced to pay a 400,000-pound ransom. "Most Crusaders engaged in a dangerous, unpleasant, unprofitable, and extremely expensive enterprise," says Riley-Smith, "and they do not seem to have expected anything else."

Though most were military and financial fiascoes, the Crusades had a long-term impact on European civilization that went beyond finding an outlet for the violence of warring Christian kingdoms. "[The Crusades] made the Continent more cosmopolitan and gave Europeans a far greater awareness of the wider world. Like all wars, veterans came back and had seen things they never would have if they had stayed in their villages," says James Reston Jr., author of Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. The stories they brought back also sparked a blaze of creativity. Beginning in the 12th century, or around the time of the First Crusade, literature and verse flowered in the form of memoir and song. Coming after the virtual silence that marked the Dark Ages, the proliferation of Crusader epics like the French Song of Roland is called by some scholars the "12th-century Renaissance."

Many Crusaders chose not to return at all, especially second and third sons with no chance of inheriting. Those who stayed created a cultural, military, and mercantile outpost in the Holy Land. The fortresses they built after the First Crusade were usually transplanted reflections of the European feudal system, but over time the "Latin kingdoms" in the Holy Land also served as a powerful integrating force. Contact with the libraries of the Arab world opened up new worlds for the isolated scholars of Europe, who gradually gained access to a wealth of ancient Greek texts that had been preserved in Arabic since the beginning of the fall of Rome. "Violent interactions were paralleled by economic and conceptual exchanges," says Georgetown's Voll. "In some ways, the Crusades' positive intellectual dimensions outweigh the negative impact."

"The Crusades were an absolute failure, but they did integrate European travelers and traders into an ongoing world system," says Janet Abu-Lughod, author of Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. Increased demand for Middle Eastern luxury items meant that Europeans had to come up with trade goods of their own, helping build industries like wool and textiles. "By stimulating an interest in the goods of the East, they had a double-back effect on the development of European economies." Even later failures may have hidden some positive benefits. The end of the Crusades and the Latin kingdoms meant the end of easy ac-cess to Asian trade goods but not to demand for them. Some historians have speculated that the closing of the Middle East to European merchants in the 15th century accelerated the voyages of discovery that led to the New World.

But even the Europeans' increasing sophistication did little to redeem them in the eyes of the Muslims whose land they occupied and controlled. To the Arabs, they were "illiterate barbarians, for whom physical force is a supreme virtue, their religion is a despised polytheism, their medicine a collection of superstitions," writes historian Joshua Prawer in The Crusaders' Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages. "Far from feeling inferior to the conqueror, the conquered regarded himself not only as his equal but by far his superior."

More than nine centuries after Urban II called the First Crusade, the legacy of misunderstanding and animosity is still with us. In the West, many of the most lasting misperceptions of Islam stem from that time. In the Arab and Muslim world, the Crusades have made an unfortunate rhetorical comeback. "Such analogies are really not very helpful to understand the Crusades or present-day realities—they obscure rather than clarify," says Kedar. "People get so obsessed with...the past that they don't react to the reality but to the reflection." With that reflection so distorted today by rhetoric and misunderstanding, a clearer vision of the past has never been more important.

https://www.ftsd.org/cms/lib6/MT01001165/Centricity/Domain/159/Crusades%20-%20US%20News%20reduced%20size.pdf


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2252 on: 2017-09-23, 10:31:12 »

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1,400 Years of Christian/Islamic Struggle: An Analysis

http://www1.cbn.com/churchandministry/1400-years-of-christian-islamic-struggle

Richard C. Csaplar, Jr.

I was very disappointed to see that U.S. News would publish a clearly false article, adopting the world's clearly false, politically correct (PC) view of the place of the Crusades in history. What makes it even worse, the article hides its views under the additional headline falsehood, "The Truth About the Epic Clash Between Christianity and Islam."

Let me explain.

The opening heading states, "During the Crusades, East and West first met." This is just totally in error, as any person with the slightest knowledge of history well knows. East and West had been fighting for at least 1,500 years before the first Crusade.

To give just a few examples -- the Persians invaded Europe in an attempt to conquer the Greeks in the fifth century B.C. The Greek, Alexander the Great, attempted to conquer all of Asia, as far as India, in the fourth century B.C. Both the Persians of the east and the Greeks of the west set up colonial empires founded upon bloody military conquest. The Romans established by bloody military conquest colonies in Mesopotamia, northwestern Arabia, and Assyria in the second century A.D.

A different type of bloody conquest occurred through the movement of whole tribal groups between the east and the west. Again, just to name a few, the Huns, the Goths, and the Avars came from as far away as western Asia, central Asia, and China respectively in the fifth through the seventh centuries A.D. Indeed, the Avars from northern China and Mongolia were besieging Constantinople in 626 A.D., at the very moment Mohammed was a merchant in Arabia. Indeed, the Avars, by this siege, were one of the forces that weakened the Byzantines (there were many other, perhaps more important, forces) to the extent that most of the Byzantine mid-eastern empire fell relatively easily to the Muslims.

But let's give the writer the benefit of the doubt and say that the author meant that "During the Crusades, Islam and Christianity first met." This, of course, is also totally false.

Let us review the Muslim conquest. In 624, Mohammed led a raid for booty and plunder against a Meccan caravan, killing 70 Meccans for mere material gain. Between 630 A.D. and the death of Mohammed in 632 A.D., Muslims -- on at least one occasion led by Mohammed -- had conquered the bulk of western Arabia and southern Palestine through approximately a dozen separate invasions and bloody conquests. These conquests were in large part "Holy wars," putting the lie to another statement in the U.S. News article that proclaimed the Crusades "The First Holy War," as if the Christians had invented the concept of a holy war. After Mohammed's death in 632, the new Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr, launched Islam into almost 1,500 years of continual imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest and subjugation of others through invasion and war, a role Islam continues to this very day.

You will note the string of adjectives and may have some objection to my using them. They are used because they are the absolute truth. Anyone denying them is a victim of PC thinking, ignorant of history, or lying to protect Islam. Let us take each word separately before we proceed further in our true history of the relationship between the Christian west and the Islamic east.

Imperialistic

The Muslim wars of imperialist conquest have been launched for almost 1,500 years against hundreds of nations, over millions of square miles (significantly larger than the British Empire at its peak). The lust for Muslim imperialist conquest stretched from southern France to the Philippines, from Austria to Nigeria, and from central Asia to New Guinea. This is the classic definition of imperialism -- "the policy and practice of seeking to dominate the economic and political affairs of weaker countries."

Colonialist

The Muslim goal was to have a central government, first at Damascus, and then at Baghdad -- later at Cairo, Istanbul, or other imperial centers. The local governors, judges, and other rulers were appointed by the central imperial authorities for far off colonies. Islamic law was introduced as the senior law, whether or not wanted by the local people. Arabic was introduced as the rulers' language, and the local language frequently disappeared. Two classes of residents were established. The native residents paid a tax that their colonialist rulers did not have to pay.

Although the law differed in different places, the following are examples of colonialist laws to which colonized Christians and Jews were made subject to over the years:

    Christians and Jews could not bear arms -- Muslims could;
    Christians and Jews could not ride horses -- Muslims could;
    Christians and Jews had to get permission to build -- Muslims did not;
    Christians and Jews had to pay certain taxes which Muslims did not;
    Christians could not proselytize -- Muslims could;
    Christians and Jews had to bow to their Muslim masters when they paid their taxes; and
    Christians and Jews had to live under the law set forth in the Koran, not under either their own religious or secular law.

In each case, these laws allowed the local conquered people less freedom than was allowed the conquering colonialist rulers. Even non-Arab Muslim inhabitants of the conquered lands became second class citizens behind the ruling Arabs. This is the classic definition of colonialist -- "a group of people who settle in a distant territory from the state having jurisdiction or control over it and who remain under the political jurisdiction of their native land."

We will talk about "bloody" as we proceed. Because the U.S. News article related only to the Christian west against the Muslim east, except in this paragraph I will not describe the almost 1,500 years of Muslim imperialistic, colonialist, bloody conquest and subjugation of others through invasion and war to the east of Arabia in Iraq, Persia, and much further eastward, which continues to this day.

In any event, because it was the closest geographically, Palestine was the first Western non-Arab area invaded in the Muslim imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest and subjugation of others. At the time, Palestine was under the rule of the so-called Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Istanbul by Greek speaking people, and was Eastern Orthodox Catholic. The Eastern Orthodox rule was despotic and the Eastern Roman Empire was in serious decline. The Eastern Orthodox rulers were despots, and in Palestine had subjugated the large population of local Jews and Monophysite Christians. Because the Orthodox were imperialist, colonialist, and bloody, and majored in religious persecution to boot, the Muslim imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest and subjugation of Palestine, and then Egypt, was made easier. Because of Orthodox weakness and the relative speed of the conquest of Palestine and Israel, I have often seen this Muslim, imperialist, colonialist bloody conquest described by Muslim and PC writers as "peaceful" or "bloodless." This statement is simply not true.

The Muslim imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest and subjugation of Palestine began with a battle, the August 20, 636, battle of Yarmk (it is believed that 75,000 soldiers took part -- hardly bloodless). With the help of the local Jews who welcomed the Muslims as liberators, the Muslims had subjugated the remainder of Palestine but had not been able to capture Jerusalem. Beginning in July 637, the Muslims began a siege of Jerusalem which lasted for five (hardly bloodless) months before Jerusalem fell in February 638. Arabs did not sack the city, and the Arab soldiers were apparently kept in tight control by their leaders. No destruction was permitted. This was indeed a triumph of civilized control, if imperialism, colonization, and bloody conquest can ever be said to be "civilized." It was at this conquest that many significant hallmarks of Muslim colonialism began. The conquered Christian and Jewish people were made to pay a tribute to the colonialist Muslims. In addition, Baghdad used the imperialist, colonialist, bloody wars of conquest throughout the life of its empire to provide the Caliphate with a steady stream of slaves, many of whom were made eunuchs.

The Muslim conquest of (Christian) North Africa went relatively easily until the native peoples of North Africa (most importantly the Berbers) were encountered west of Egypt. The North African people fought so strongly against the Muslims that the Muslim imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest in the west was brought to an almost complete stop between Tripoli and Carthage for more than a quarter century. The Muslims broke through in a series of bloody battles followed by bloody (revenge) massacres of the Muslim's (largely Christian) opponents. This Muslim imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquest continued through North Africa and through what is now Spain, Portugal, and southern France, until they were stopped at the battle of Poiters (hardly bloodless) in the middle of France.

I believe that if I had the time, I could show that the Muslims, in their western imperialist, colonialist, bloody conquests, killed two to three times as many Christians as the Christians killed Muslims in all of the Crusades combined.

But let us return to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem

The U.S. News article states that after Saladin conquered Jerusalem, "the victorious Saladin forbade acts of vengeance. There were no more deaths, no violence." True, as far as it goes. The article goes on to say, "most Muslims [will] tell you about Saladin and his generosity in the face of Christian aggression and hatred." Thus, the PC people and the Muslims ignore 450 years of prior Muslim aggression and approach the Crusades as being Christian or Western aggression against Islam, beginning out of the blue, without any prior history. Let us go back to the Muslim colonialist occupation of Jerusalem.

When we left our truthful history of Jerusalem, the Muslims, headquartered in Arabia, had just captured Jerusalem. For approximately 100 years, chiefly under the Umayyads, Jerusalem prospered under Muslim rule. Under the succeeding Abbasids, Jerusalem began to decline -- beginning at approximately 725 A.D. The occasion, among other things, was the decline of the central Muslim government, the breaking away from Arabia of far-flung provinces, the growth of warlike revolutionary groups, the growth of extremist Muslim sects, and, perhaps most important, the decision (relatively new) that Muslims had an obligation to convert all Christians and Jews (and "other pagans") to Islam. Thereafter, the true colonial nature of Jerusalem became more apparent. The Abbasids drained wealth from Jerusalem to Baghdad for the benefit of the caliphs, and Jerusalem declined economically. The language of the government became Arabic, and forcible conversion to Islam became the Muslim policy.

In approximately 750, the Caliph destroyed the walls of Jerusalem, leaving it defenseless (they were later rebuilt, in time to defend against the Crusaders). The history of the following three hundred years is too complex and too tangled to describe in a single paragraph. Jerusalem and its Christian and Jewish majority suffered greatly during alternating periods of peace and war. Among the happenings were repeated Muslim destruction of the countryside of Israel (970-983, and 1024-1077) of Jerusalem; the wholesale destruction by the Muslims of Christian churches -- sometimes at the direct order of the Caliph, as in 1003, and sometimes by Muslim mobs; the total destruction of Jerusalem by the Caliph of Cairo in the early 1020s; building small mosques on the top of Christian churches; enforcing the Muslim laws limiting the height of Christian churches; attacking and robbing Christian pilgrims from Europe; attacking Christian processions in the streets of Jerusalem; etc.

Why the change after nearly 100 years of mostly peaceful Muslim rule? From what I read, there is a general view among the historians that the caliphs had begun to add a religious importance to their conquests, setting conversion to Islam as an important priority; their later caliphs had no first-hand remembrance of Mohammed; the vast distances of the empire led to independent rulers being established in Spain, North Africa, Cairo, Asia Minor, etc.; and the instability of the caliphates and resulting civil wars.

The point about conversion to Islam I find particularly interesting. Many historians believe that the first one hundred years of Muslim conquest were imperialist and colonialist only with little significant forced conversion content. With respect to Jerusalem, there was a particular problem in the fact that generally the Christians and their churches (and to a lesser degree, the Jews) were significantly wealthier than the Muslims. This was largely because beginning in the early 800s with Charlemaigne, Europe adopted a sort of prototype "foreign aid" program for the churches located at the holy places in Jerusalem, where, to the embarrassment of the Muslims, Christian churches and monasteries outshone their Muslim rivals. Many of these churches and monasteries were run by western religious orders reporting directly to Rome under western leaders appointed by Rome (more were subject to Constantinople). Literally thousands of European Christian pilgrims made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from such places as Germany, France, and Hungary (particularly in the years 1000, 1033, 1064, and 1099). Finally, Muslim rulers and European rulers frequently sought to enter into treaties of support with each other. As a result, Christian churches became the target of Muslims when enemies of those with whom there were European ties were victorious in a civil war. From time to time, Christian churches were rebuilt with Muslim funds when pro-western rulers came to power.

So much for the PC, U.S. News, Muslim outright lie that begins with the statement, "During the Crusades, East and West first met," and that later in the article called the Crusades, "the first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom." What about the long, prior conquest by Islam of Spain and Portugal? What about the battle of Portiers?

The following is just an aside, which I cannot prove, but I have noticed that PC and Muslim statements frequently cut off history when it is not in their favor. Thus, the article gives credence to the widespread belief in Islam that east-west history began with the Crusades. See also as an example of this tendency to begin history where it is convenient, today's Muslim description of the current Israeli occupation of the West Bank without mentioning the fact that the current occupation was caused by the widespread cold-blooded murder of Israeli civilians by Muslims.

But let us move on to the Crusades themselves.

The Crusades

First, a word about my personal view of the Crusades. I believe that the murderous and pillaging acts of the Crusaders when they entered Jerusalem were barbaric, unchristian, and evil. This is particularly so as those barbaric, unchristian, and evil acts were carried on in the name of a religion of peace, love, and forgiveness. I believe that the vast bulk of thinking Christians agree with me. I cite as evidence the large numbers of Christians who have recently taken long pilgrimages in the footsteps of the Crusaders, repenting for the Crusader's acts, seeking for forgiveness, and giving penance for the Crusader's barbaric, unchristian, and evil acts.

A question occurs to me here. How many Muslim groups have taken long pilgrimages in the footsteps of the Muslim conquest repenting, seeking for forgiveness, and giving penance for the Muslims imperialist, colonialist, and bloody conquest of Palestine, Egypt, Syria, North Africa, and Spain? This is particularly important as the U.S. News article claims, "For [Muslims] imperialism is a dirty word" Where is Muslim repentance for its imperialism, geographically the largest in all of history, which permits Muslims to call Western imperialism a dirty word?

Let us rewrite the beginning of the U.S. News article as follows: "In 1095, after suffering from the murderous invasions of Muslim conquerors who killed tens of thousands of Christians through four-and-one-half centuries of Muslim imperialist, colonialist conquest, made slaves and eunuchs of Christians for the pleasure of the caliphs, burned down or sacked the holiest churches in Christendom, robbed and killed thousands of Christians on holy pilgrimage, brutally sacked and pillaged Jerusalem, and pillaged the countryside of Israel, western Europe, under the leadership of the Pope, decided to free the people of the Holy Land from their brutal masters and reclaim Christianity's holiest places for free Christian worship."

Now, I fully realize that the previous paragraph is one-sided, that the six centuries of Muslim colonial, imperialist occupation were more complex than are shown in the previous paragraphs, and that the Christians were not always blameless, little babes. However, the previous paragraph has the benefit of not being an outright lie, which is more than I can say for the U.S. News article.

To beat the dog one more time, you may have noted that I stated above that Muslim imperialism has continued until the present. Muslim imperialism has continued without any let-up from ten years before Mohammed's death until today.

Consider the Ottoman invasion of Christian Eastern Europe in which the Ottoman Empire invaded the west and conquered and colonized Greece, all of the Balkans, Romania, Bessarabia, and Hungary, and was stopped only at the outskirts of Vienna in 1529. Consider also the Muhgal conquest of Northern India in the early 1600s. But today? Of course! In the 20th century alone:

1. Muslim Turkey has expelled approximately 1,500,000 Greeks from its empire in the east and replaced them with Turks. They have massacred approximately 2 million Armenians and replaced them with Turks in the west.

2. Muslim Turkey has invaded and occupied northern Cyprus, displacing the Greeks living there.

3. Muslim northern Sudan has conquered much of southern Sudan, literally enslaving its Christian and pagan population.

4. Indonesian imperialism has occupied all of non-Islamic western New Guinea and incorporated into Indonesia.

5. Muslim Indonesia has invaded and conquered Christian East Timor with horrible loss of life.

6. This very day, Muslim Indonesia is attempting to destroy Christianity in what used to be called the Celebes.

7. A half-dozen Arab countries have fought two to four wars (depending how you count) in an attempt to destroy Israel and occupy its territory, and is currently continuing the attempt this very day with the publicly voted consent of 55 of the world's 57 Islamic nations.

8. For no good reason, Muslim Libya has blown up western aircraft, killing many civilians.

9. Muslim Iraq, in an imperialist war of aggression, invaded and occupied Muslim Kuwait.

10. Muslim Iraq, in an imperialist act of aggression, invaded Muslim Iran with a resulting (some estimates say) death of 2 million people.

11. Muslim Albania, this very minute, is attempting to enlarge its borders at Christian Macedonia's expense.

12. Muslim Northern Nigeria has been (and is currently) an aggressor against the Christian south.

13. Muslims expelled approximately 800,000 Jews from their homelands between 1947 and 1955.

14. During Jordan's occupation of the West Bank, the kingdom undertook an unsuccessful attempt to make Jerusalem a Muslim city by forcing out approximately 10,000 Christian inhabitants.

Yes, I know that the reverse has been true. For example, Christian Serbia entered and massacred Bosnian Muslims. The western response was instructive. The west sent troops to protect the Muslims. Serbia gave up its leader to be tried for the crime by an international panel. Will Indonesia do the same with respect to Timor? Or Sudan with respect to southern Sudan?

Question: What is the title of the shortest book in the world? Answer: "The list of Muslim nations who have risked the lives of their soldiers to protect (as with the U.S. protection of Muslims in Kuwait) Christian or Jewish citizens from Muslim imperialism."

Yes, I also know that in the 20th century the west fought two of the bloodiest wars in history. But in the past more than 55 years, the west has developed methods that have led to peace among the west, and all but totally ended western imperialism and colonialism. With former colonies having a large majority in the UN, and the example of the west before it, Islam has continued its imperialist, colonial, bloody wars unabated.

One final point. Muslims base their claim to the city of Jerusalem upon the belief that Jerusalem has been a Muslim city for centuries. It may be that Muslims were never a majority in Jerusalem. We cannot prove this for all time periods, but we know that Muslims were a minority in the first several centuries after the Muslim imperialist conquest and during the century of Christian occupation during the Crusades. And we know that in the Middle Ages, Jerusalem was not considered important to the Muslims, but it was to the Christians and Jews. The Muslims made cities other than Jerusalem the capital of their Palestinian colony. Many Caliphs never even visited Jerusalem. Therefore, there was a steady stream of Jewish and Christian (but not Muslim) immigrants into Jerusalem throughout the Middle Ages, including a major immigration of Karaite Jews in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and a steady stream of Armenians for hundreds of years, until there were so many Armenians that an Armenian Quarter was established in Jerusalem. Finally, we know that for at least more than the last 160 years, Muslims were a clear minority in Jerusalem. The Muslim Ottomans, and then the British and Israelis, kept careful census record showing the following percentages of Muslim population in Jerusalem:

1844 -- 33%

1896 -- 19%

1910 -- 13%

1922 -- 22%

1931 -- 22%

1948 -- 24%

1967 -- 21%

1972 -- 23%

1992 -- 25%


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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2253 on: 2017-09-23, 10:41:48 »

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Abrahamic Covenant

http://christianity.wikia.com/wiki/Abrahamic_Covenant

The Abrahamic Covenant, found in Genesis 15, granted the Israelites a promised land in the Land of Israel. In this covenant, God promises (see Genesis 12:1-3; 13:14-18; 15:1-21; 17:1-22):

    To make from Abraham a great nation and to multiply his seed exceedingly and to make him a father of great many nations.
    To bless Abraham and make him great.
    To make Abraham a blessing to all the families of the earth.
    To bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him.
    To give Abraham and his seed forever all the land which he could see.
    To give him a sign of the covenant (circumcision).

INTRODUCTION

Around 2000 B.C., the Almighty Creator, Yahweh [God], made a sacred promise to Abraham of Ur, that He would bless him and make him great. He also promised to make him a blessing to all the families of the earth and to bless those who bless him and curse those who curse him. God promised to give Abraham and his seed all the land that he could see forever, and to give him a sign of the covenant which was circumcision. This sworn oath of God [Covenant] was predicated on Abraham's faith in Him as the one and only true God. Because of his faith, Abraham's left his homeland and journeyed to an unknown land.

To make the Covenant binding, however, a stipulation was made. God ordered Abraham to circumcise himself and all male members of his household - those who were related or unrelated to him. As mentioned earlier, circumcision would be a sign of the Covenant, a reminder to all that it was in effect. As time went on and Abraham was becoming more and more knowledgeable of the land that his offspring would inherit Canaan, God made repeated reassurances of His initial promise of blessings. Abraham continued to walk before God all his life, demonstrating, in many ways, his faith in God and in what he had promised to do. On one particular occasion, Abraham's act of faith was followed by God's reassuring words, "through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me" [Genesis 22:18].

Although there exists varying views about which group or groups are included in the blessings of the Covenant, all can agree on the fact that the promises inherent in it were unconditional. The circumcision of the flesh, though commanded by God, was not the motivating factor in His making the promises, Abraham's faith was. Achieving the blessings, however, would depend upon those who have been included in the Covenant.

Finally, the Abrahamic Covenant is seen by Christians as a forerunner to the New Covenant under the Messiah, Jesus Christ. The blood of Christ, taken during the Eucharist [Holy Communion, The Lord's Last Supper, etc.]ceremony, brought about a remission of sins so that all men could partake of the blessings of Abraham, for through Christ, the faithful are also heirs of Abraham. The Apostle Paul says, "If you be Christ's, then you are the seed of Abraham" (Galatians 3:39). Also see Romans 1:5, 4:11 and 16:26. [1] [2] [3].

PARTIES INVOLVED

Yahweh, the Eternal God of heaven and earth, and the creator of all things seen and unseen, is the originator of the covenant with Abraham. Abraham, the primary party to this covenant, is known as the founding father of the Israelites as well as the father of the faithful. He was born in Ur of the Chaldees around the year 2000 B.C. and later moved, with his family, to Haran [Northern Mesopotamia]. It was while Abraham was living in Haran that God made the Covenant promises to him [See the "Abraham and Archaeology" section below.].

The other present and future parties to the Covenant were members of Abraham's household and those bought with money from foreigners, Abraham's natural heirs, the Israelites through Jacob, and much later, the "many nations" of the world.

Jdgray 16:09, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

TRANSPIRING EVENTS

God Reaffirms His Oath

Several important events transpired after God first called Abraham from Haran. After heeding this call, and journeying with his wife, Sarai, his nephew Lot and his servants, to the land of Canaan [4], God appeared to him a second time in Shechem [a city of Canaan] and promised the land of Canaan to him and his descendants [See Genesis 12:6 and Numbers 34:1-29]. [5]. At Shechem, Abraham built the first altar. The altar was a place of worship, and it was on the altar that a fellowship offering was undoubtedly made. The act itself was indicative of Abraham's total submission to God, and marked the start of a faithful and loving relationship.

At Bethel, following Lot's departure, God shows Abraham Canaan's furthermost boundaries. Here, God is providing Abraham with physical evidence and reassurance. Note what it says at Genesis 13:14-16, "After Lot departs from Abraham, God repeats His promise'…Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. 15 All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. 16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.'" [6] Jdgray 13:24, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Abraham's Blessing by God's High Priest/Altar Ritual

A very significant act takes place on Abraham's behalf after he returns to Hebron following the defeat of Kedorlaomer and the kings. Here, Melchizedek, King of Salem and Priest of the Most High God, comes out to bless Abraham, bringing him "bread and wine". This is viewed as a foreshadowing of [and tie-in to] the New Covenant instituted by the Lord Jesus Christ, for it is by means of these very same sacraments [bread and wine] that Christians receive sanctification. Melchizedek says, "Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth." (See Genesis 14:16-20) [7]. (See also Matthew 26:17-30) [8]In addition to the literal blessings in the covenant, is the all-important spiritual blessing of God.

This act of blessing is soon followed by a ritual that appears to validate the Covenant. The Biblical text reads, "9 So the LORD said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon." 10 Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. We then read at verse 17, "When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. 18 On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates- 19 the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, 20 Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, 21 Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites."

It does now say why this event had to occur, but one can reason from other covenants in the Bible that this act had to occur before the Covenant could be validated. For nowhere in the Bible is it shown where God has instituted a covenant without a ritual sacrifice. This Covenant, though based on faith, also falls under God's Law that says, "without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness" [Hebrews 9:22].

    Biblical evidence shows that Moses first had to perform a purification ritual [sprinkle the Israelites with the sacrificial blood of an undefiled animal] before the Mosaic Law Covenant could be enacted [Exodus 24:3-8 says, "…He [Moses] got up early the next morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up twelve stone pillars representing the twelve tribes of Israel. 5 Then he sent young Israelite men, and they offered burnt offerings and sacrificed young bulls as fellowship offerings to the LORD. 6 Moses took half of the blood and put it in bowls, and the other half he splashed against the altar. 7 Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people. They responded, "We will do everything the LORD has said; we will obey." 8 Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, "This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words."]

    Jesus Christ, the pure and undefiled "Lamb of God," had to give up Himself [and shed His blood] before the New Covenant could come into existence [Matthew 26:27 reads, "Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."] So the altar, in this instance, appears to have validated the Covenant when considering the fact that Abraham and his descendants' had "inherited sin." And this sin would have most likely had to first be atoned for before the Covenant could be validated. [9] [10]. [(For Noah's covenant, see Genesis 9:1-17.) [11]]

Circumcision - A Sign of the Covenant

The next event involved a stipulation. After God changed Abraham's name from Abram to Abraham ["the father of many nations"] and reaffirmed the covenantal promises made earlier, He explained to Abraham, the deed that would make the Covenant binding, and that was "circumcision." The passage reads, "3 Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, 4 "As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. 5 No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. 6 I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. 7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God" 9 Then God said to Abraham, "As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. 10 This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. 11 You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you" (Genesis 17:3-11 ). The fact that this regulation came after the promises, by the way, proves that the promises were not dependant upon it. Nevertheless, those who wished to be a part of the covenant had to become circumcised as commanded. The circumcision would be a constant reminder of their covenantal relationship with God. This sign would, no doubt, strengthen the participants' faith in God and in His promises. [12]

Verses twelve through fourteen state, " For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner—those who are not your offspring. 13 Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. 14 Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant." [13]

The Promise of a Natural Heir [Isaac]

God promises Abraham a natural heir in this important event. This is in keeping with His promise to make Abraham the father of many.Genesis 18:10 reads, "10 Then the LORD said, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son." We then read in verses 13-14 , "Then the LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh and say, 'Will I really have a child, now that I am old?' 14 Is anything too hard for the LORD I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son."

Abraham's Testing on Mt. Moriah

The final event which draws the Covenant to its conclusion occurs when Abraham's faith and obedience was put to the test on Mt. Moriah. God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Genesis 22: 9-14 reads, 9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, "Abraham! Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. 12 "Do not lay a hand on the boy," he said. "Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son." 13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son." 14 So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, "On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided." [14]

This test on Mt. Moriah was a test of Abram's faith, and the obedience that came through his faith. [Romans 1:5 states, "Through him (Christ) and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith."] [15]. After passing the test, God reaffirmed the Covenant that had already been established between them, and adds that all nations ill be blessed through his offspring. Genesis 22:15-18 states, "15 The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, "I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me."

In promising to bless all nations through Abraham's offspring or seed, God was clearly referring to a future heir of Abraham's who would arrive at a time when God decides to bless all nations in addition to the Israelites. Christians know that the seed to whom God was referring was none other than the Lord Jesus Christ, whose lineage is traced back to Abraham and who is the only through whom all nations on the earth could be blessed. This major event served to connect the Abrahamic Covenant to the New Covenant in Christ Jesus. [16]

THE NATURE OF THE COVENANT

The Abrahamic Covenant, as stated before, was unconditional, predicated on Abraham's faith in the true God. There were many promises that came with the covenant such as, to make Abraham a great nation, to bless him to make his name great and to make him a blessing, to bless them that bless him and to curse them that curse him; and finally, that in him [or through his seed] all nations of the earth will be blessed.

The fact that God had promised to bless Abraham's offspring, without a showing of their faith or obedience proves also that this Covenant was unconditional. Later on, God even tells Moses of His disappointment with the Israelites prior to their entering the promised land, but says that He will allow them to still enter the land because of the promise He had made to Abraham.

Although God made no statement to Abraham concerning the obedience of his heirs, He must have felt that they should obey Him as Abraham did, or that their failure to "walk before him" would hamper their receiving the blesings; for God instituted a law covenant as a way of bringing them into obedience. Biblical records indicate that while the Israelites were encamped in the wilderness, God instituted the Mosaic Law Covenant mentioned above, for He was not able to abide with them in their present spiritual state of disobedience. This could also indicate, and very strongly I might add, that Yahweh had known beforehand that He would bring the the Israelites into submission through the Law Covenant, and thereby made the promises to Abraham. So the Law Covenant, a covenant requiring very strict obedience, would not nullify the Abrahamic Covenant, but would aid the Israelites in obtaining the promises already made to them.[to add reference]. For the Christian, such spiritual aid would come through the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ.

In respect to the blessing that was promised to come through Abraham's seed [Christ], God made a statement that corroborates the belief that Christ was the promised seed, for it reveals that God viewed Himself as the nations' promised blessing. God says, "Fear not, Abram, I am your shield and your exceeding great reward" (Gen. 15:1).

THE FULFILLMENT OF THE PROMISE IN CHRIST

When God told Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his seed, He was referring to the Messiah of heaven and earth, the Lord Jesus Christ. This promise was assuredly fulfilled in the Messiah at the time of His crucifixion and resurrection. His redemptive sacrifice made it possible for all who exercise faith in God and in Him to become partakers of the blessings promised to Abraham.

Once persons of faith come to belong to Christ, they are considered Abraham's heirs. The Apostle Paul's says at Galatians 3:39, "If you be Christ's, then you are the seed of Abraham." Entrance into the blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant, therefore, must come through Christ alone.

The circumcision of the flesh regulation stated previously was a sign of the Abrahamic Covenant,but Christ circumcises those who have faith in Him, and this circumcision is of the heart [Rom 2:28-29] [Luke 22:20]. Note what it says at Colossians 2:11, "In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ."

Jesus Christ left a ritual for those of faith to perform regularly in order stay in remembrance of Him and His role of redemption, and this allows Christians to "remain in Him." This ritual is known as "the Eucharist" [aka, "The Lord's Supper","Holy Communion", "The Divine Liturgy" etc.]. This is where the faithful partake of the 'bread, "christ's body," and the wine, "Christ's blood". [Loving one another was a commandment that all Christians have to follow as well.]

It was by Christ's blood alone that our sins were forgiven in order that we could receive of His grace [the Abrahamic promises]. If we remain "in Christ," we are then heirs of the promises God made to Abraham. Jdgray 14:53, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, God covenanted with Abraham, promising him many blessings. While doing so, God revealed to him the kind of God He truly was: truthful, trustworthy, faithful, loving, forgiving and generous. Knowing beforehand, man's weaknesses, He still made unconditional promises to bless Abraham's natural offspring as well as the nations of the world through his seed. The Abrahamic Covenant found fulfillment in the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who by His crucifixion, bought salvation for all men and made it possible for them to become partakers of the blessings God had promised earlier. One can only marvel at the love and faithfulness of God who never broke His promise to Abraham even when all men went astray.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2254 on: 2017-09-23, 14:11:36 »

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Russia Warns US In Unprecedented "Secret" Face-To-Face Meeting Over Syria, But What's The Endgame?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-22/russia-warns-us-unprecedented-face-face-meeting-over-syria-whats-endgame

The moment the first Russian jet landed in Syria at the invitation of the Assad government in 2015, Putin placed himself in the driver's seat concerning the international proxy war in the Levant. From a strategic standpoint the armed opposition stood no chance of ever tipping the scales against Damascus from that moment onward. And though US relations with Russia became more belligerent and tense partly as a result of that intervention, it meant that Russia would set the terms of how the war would ultimately wind down.

Russia's diplomatic and strategic victory in the Middle East was made clear this week as news broke of "secret" and unprecedented US-Russia face to face talks on Syria. The Russians reportedly issued a stern warning to the US military, saying that it will respond in force should the Syrian Army or Russian assets come under fire by US proxies.

The AP reports that senior military officials from both countries met in an undisclosed location "somewhere in the Middle East" in order to discuss spheres of operation in Syria and how to avoid the potential for a direct clash of forces. Tensions have escalated in the past two weeks as the Syrian Army in tandem with Russian special forces are now set to fully liberate Deir Ezzor city, while at the same time the US-backed SDF (the Arab-Kurdish coalition, "Syrian Democratic Forces") - advised by American special forces - is advancing on the other side of the Euphrates. As we've explained before, the US is not fundamentally motivated in its "race for Deir Ezzor province" by defeat of ISIS terrorism, but in truth by control of the eastern province's oil fields. Whatever oil fields the SDF can gain control of in the wake of Islamic State's retreat will then used as powerful bargaining leverage in negotiating a post-ISIS Syria. The Kurdish and Arab coalition just this week captured Tabiyeh and al-Isba oil and gas fields northeast of Deir Ezzor city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJDVOq2LP_k

At various times the Syrian-Russian side has come under mortar fire from SDF positions, even as Russia and the US are theoretically said to coordinate through a special military hotline. The SDF for its part claims it too has come under attack from the Syrian Army. The most significant event occurred just over a year ago when the US coalition launched a massive air attack on Syrian government troops in Deir Ezzor near the city's military airport at the very moment they were fighting ISIS. The US characterized it as a case of mistaken identity while Syria accused the US coalition of directly aiding ISIS by the attack. The end result was about 100 Syrian soldiers dead and over a hundred more wounded while ISIS terrorists were able to advance and entrench their positions.

Though US officials disclosed few elements of this week's unusual meeting, the US side did confirm Russia's threat of returning fire should Syrian soldiers come under attack. US coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon confirmed that, “They had a face-to-face discussion, laid down maps and graphics.” But the Russians publicly delivered further details outlining its message to the US military. Russian Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement,“A representative of the U.S. military command in Al Udeid (the U.S. operations center in Qatar) was told in no uncertain terms that any attempts to open fire from areas where SDF fighters are located would be quickly shut down.” He added that, “Fire points in those areas will be immediately suppressed with all military means.” Russia has further openly accused the US of violating previously agreed to 'de-escalation' zones in Idlib (as part of Astana talks) using al-Qaeda proxies to engaged the Syrian Army in Idlib.

The US coalition hinted in its statements that future military-to-military talks could continue regarding coordination in Syria. Though Russian warnings sound alarmist, and though the situation is increasingly very dangerous for the prospect of escalation, the US side appears to be in a vulnerable enough position to listen. The fact that the meeting occurred in the first place and was publicly acknowledged by the Pentagon is hugely significant as a US ban on such direct military talks was put in place after the collapse in relations between the two nations following the outbreak of the Ukraine proxy war in 2014.

In reality some degree of US-Russian back channel communication and intelligence sharing probably existed long before the SDF made gains in Syria's east - this according to Seymour Hersh's 2016 investigation entitled, "Military to Military". Though (ironically) the CIA's push for regime change against Damascus was still operational and presumably in full gear at that time, the Pentagon's actions in Syria were always perhaps more humble regarding pursuit of regime change.

But what are current Pentagon plans for its SDF proxy?

It's no secret that the core component force of the SDF - the Kurdish YPG - has at times loosely cooperated with the Syrian government when the situation pragmatically served both sides. At the same time Damascus has over the past few years recognized the Kurds as a militarily effective buffer against both ISIS and other powerful jihadist groups like al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham. While many Russian and pro-Damascus analysts have accused the SDF of being a mere pawn of US imperialism meant to permanently Balkanize the region, this is only partially true - the truth is likely more nuanced.

No doubt, the US is laying plenty of concrete in the form of forward operating bases across Kurdish held areas of northern and eastern Syria (currently about a dozen or more). And no doubt the US is enabling the illegal seizure of oil fields formerly held by the Islamic State, but Kurdish and US interests are not necessarily one and the same. The Kurds know that the best they can hope for in a post-war Syria is a federated system which allows Kurdish areas a high degree of autonomy. They also know, as decades of experience has taught them, that they will eventually be dumped by the US should the political cost of support grow too high or become untenable. For now the Kurds are gobbling up as many oil fields as possible before they are inevitably forced to cut deals with Damascus.

    That is it. #Kurdistan referendum has gone ahead. Diaspora Kurds can begin early voting. First vote has been cast in China.

    — Namo Abdulla (@namo_abdulla) September 22, 2017

Though the US endgame is the ultimate million dollar question in all of this, it appears at least for now that this endgame has something to do with the Pentagon forcing itself into a place of affecting the Syrian war's outcome and final apportionment of power: the best case scenario being permanent US bases under a Syrian Kurdish federated zone with favored access to Syrian oil doled out by Kurdish partners. While this is the 'realist' scenario, there's of course always the question that an independent Iraqi Kurdistan could one day be realized out of the merging of Kurdish northern Iraq and Syria. But this would be nothing less than a geopolitical miracle. For now, early voting has begun in the Kurdish diaspora ahead of the planned for September 25th referendum on Kurdish independence, with the very first votes reportedly being cast in China.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2255 on: 2017-09-23, 14:14:52 »

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Hat tip to the zerohedge commentator who made me aware of this article  O0

How Independent Kurdistan Will Allow Israel to Kill Two Birds With One Stone

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201709221057624450-kurdistan-independence-israel-syria-iraq/

The Kurdistan independence vote scheduled for September 25 will play into Tel Aviv's hands: an independent Kurdish state would allow Israel to solve its energy issues and weaken its regional rivals Iraq and Syria, Iraqi expert told Sputnik. For his part, a Syrian general revealed what steps the Syrian Army is taking to halt Kurdish separatism.

Israel has good reason to support the creation of an independent Kurdistan in the Middle East, Iraqi security expert Ahmed al-Sharifi told Sputnik Arabic: This project targets Damascus and Baghdad to guarantee water and energy supplies to Tel Aviv.

"Since 2005 [Benjamin] Netanyahu has spoken about the necessity of building an oil pipeline from [the Iraqi cities of] Kirkuk and Mosul to the Mediterranean Sea through Syria, to provide Israel with a constant source of energy," al-Sharifi emphasized.

According to the expert, Daesh (ISIS/ISIL) was created "to replace the governments in Syria and Iraq with pro-American authorities." It would also have played into the hand of Israel, he believes.

"It would have allowed Israel to maintain control over oil and water resources," al-Sharifi suggested. "Additionally, [Tel Aviv] would have had loyal neighbors from the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean basin."

However, due to the Syrians' determination to resist terrorism the plan didn't turn into reality, the expert pointed out, adding that "the Kurdish project" aimed at separating Syria and Iraq has recently emerged as a natural progression. 

The expert called attention to Baghdad's balanced response to the Iraqi Kurdistan initiative to gain independence: "People who make decisions in Baghdad are trying to be extremely diplomatic, trying to solve the problem through dialogue."

He emphasized that the Iraqi government doesn't want the problem of Kurdistan to become an international headache.

For his part, Syrian Brigade General Haisam Hassun told Sputnik, "The Syrian [Arab] Army has already begun to fight the Kurdish threat backed by American masterminds in the territory of Syria."

"First of all, [the operation includes] the transfer of [Syrian government forces] to the east bank of the Euphrates River," General Hassun explained. "In the near future [the SAA is going] to return the lands occupied by the Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF] under its control."

The general remarked that the SDF "can safely be called a branch of Daesh since they have illegally occupied Syrian territories."

In June, President of Iraqi Kurdistan Masoud Barzani set September 25 as the date for the independence referendum, prompting strong opposition from Baghdad as well as deep concerns among regional players that the creation of a new independent entity may trigger a domino effect across the Middle East.

However, in mid-August The Jerusalem Post reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed a "positive attitude" toward a Kurdish state in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, calling the nation one of "brave, pro-Western people who share our [Israeli] values."

A month later Netanyahu reiterated his support for Iraqi Kurdistan's efforts to create its own state. Netanyahu's statement came just weeks before the referendum in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region in Iraq. However, the Israeli prime minister's remarks were not something new: He had already made similar statements in 2004 and 2014.

In contrast, Turkey and Iran have voiced their opposition to the creation of a sovereign state in the Kurdish-dominated region of Iraq, citing national security issues.

According to Reuters, in August, Turkish and Iranian military leaders held talks on the Syrian conflict and counterterrorism, as well as the issue of dealing with Kurdish militants in the Turkish-Iranian border region.

For its part, Damascus fears that the Syrian Kurds, who hold vast territories in northern Syria, may follow into Iraqi Kurdistan's footsteps thus splitting the country up.

Commenting on the upcoming Iraqi Kurdistan independence vote Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday that Russia supports the territorial integrity of Middle Eastern countries.

The Kurds, who account for about 20 percent of the Iraqi population, have been seeking self-governance for decades. In 2005, Iraq's Constitution recognized Kurdistan as an autonomous region run by the Kurdistan Regional Government.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2256 on: 2017-09-23, 14:20:26 »

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Iraq's Supreme Court Rules to Halt Independence Referendum in Kurdistan

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201709181057480174-iraq-court-halts-kurdistan-referendum/

"The court issued a ruling on suspension of referendum, scheduled for September 25, 2017, according to  the decree of the Kurdistan president, until a decision … on unconstitutionality of this decision is taken," the Iraqi supreme court's spokesman said in a statement.

Iraq: We will not allow creation of a second Israel

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/235633

An Iraqi vice president warned Sunday that Baghdad would not tolerate the creation of "a second Israel" after the Jewish state became the only country to support a planned Kurdish independence
referendum in northern Iraq.

200,000 Jewish Kurds headed for Iraqi Kurdistan, howls Turkish press

https://al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/09/jewish-israeli-kurds-bound-for-krg-after-referendum.html

Several Turkish media outlets reported Sept. 13 that Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani had reached a secret agreement with the Israeli government. The alleged deal involves the settlement of Jewish Israelis of Kurdish origin — a community of some 200,000 people — from Israel to the KRG after the independence referendum on Sept. 25.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2257 on: 2017-09-23, 14:24:54 »

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'Squatter' builder who renovated and moved into empty £400,000 three-bedroom house after elderly owner died wins right to KEEP it

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2622995/Squatter-400-000-three-bedroom-house-owned-elderly-woman-WINS-right-ownership-10-years-claiming-squatters-rights.html

Builder Keith Best 'treated the house as his own' after hearing it was empty

Owner died and her son had not visited since he was attacked in the area

High Court judge rules the house is Best's due to 'no action by the owner'

Neighbours furious that builder 'trespassed and got a free house out of it'


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2258 on: 2017-09-23, 14:27:35 »

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The Rohingya Crisis: Reality, Rumors and Ramifications

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201709051057114181-myanmar-after-rohingya-violence/

Andrew Korybko

The world, and especially the Ummah, is incensed at what is being portrayed as genocide against Muslims in Myanmar, but the reality of what's happening there is a lot more complex than the simplistic rumors lead one to believe, and the geopolitical ramifications of this crisis could become very far-reaching.

Right off the bat, killing innocent people is wrong, and everyone is justified for feeling outraged when they believe this is happening, as it plainly is in some cases in Myanmar's coastal Rakhine State. The question, though, comes down to identifying who's doing the killing and why, and whether the victims were intentionally targeted or "collateral damage," be it from a military "anti-terrorist" operation or a "rebel" one against the government. It's also important to ponder what the geopolitical ramifications of all of this could be in terms of the larger dynamics at play in the New Cold War.

Rakhine Review

To oversimplify the situation for brevity's sake, the Rohingya are Muslims who live in the northern part of Rakhine State and claim to be native to the region, though the Myanmarese government says that they're just Bengali migrants and their descendants who began moving into the area after the late-19th-century imposition of British colonial rule. The other main demographic group in this territory is the Rakhine people, who are Buddhists that inherited the legacy of the long-standing Kingdom of Mrauk U.

The immediate post-independence period in Myanmar, called Burma until 1989, saw the many ethno-religious minorities of the country's resource-rich periphery rebel against the central authorities in favor of federalization or, as the Rohingyas wanted, unification with the neighboring state that they more closely identified with (East Pakistan, but Bangladesh since 1971), thereby setting off the world's longest-running and still-unresolved civil war.

Pertaining to Rakhine State, this conflict has ebbed and flowed throughout the decades, most recently climaxing in 2012, 2015 and just recently this summer, with the latest three escalations seeing reprisal violence by some of the hyper-nationalist Buddhist majority against the minority Muslim population. In response, the more impoverished Rohingya, who don't have citizenship rights because most of them don't qualify for such under the country's pertinent laws, had little to leave behind in Rakhine State and would flee en mass to Bangladesh for safety.

It's worthwhile here to point out that the Myanmarese military, known as the Tatmadaw, claims that its operations in their locales are triggered by the deadly attacks that Rohingya rebels — seen as terrorists by Naypyidaw and accused of having links to al-Qaeda and other such notorious groups — carried out against them and Buddhist villagers. The fog of war is such that civilians are obviously getting killed as a result, but it's unclear whether this constitutes genocide, or who's actually behind it all.

A "South Asian Kosovo"

It's impossible to tell at this moment exactly what's going on in Rakhine State and part of the reason is because of the heavy information war against Myanmar right now and Naypyidaw's refusal to let independent journalists into the region out of what it says are security concerns, but the general dynamics at play right now are oddly reminiscent of the run-up to NATO's 1999 War on Yugoslavia in carving the West's protectorate of Kosovo out of what is now Serbia.

Back then, the world suddenly became aware of a newly popularized sub-identity of Muslims called "Kosovars," just as they're now becoming quickly acquainted with the "Rohingyas," and they too claimed that their rights were being violated and that this therefore justified them committing acts of violence against the state and sometimes even civilians.

Another common thread is how much-publicized mainstream media images and stories, many of which were later proven to be fake or totally decontextualized, served to inspire the global Muslim community (Ummah) to rise up in rage and send volunteer fighters to help their co-confessionals, as is the traditional duty of this religion when they believe one of their own is being persecuted.

The problem, however, is that the situation is never as black and white as it's made out to be by the mainstream media, as anyone following the war on Syria for the past six and a half years knows by now, especially when it comes to the never-ending accusations that President Assad is also carrying out a "genocide" against Muslims like Milosevic before him and now the Tatmadaw apparently too. The intrinsic human urge for people to get upset by what they believe to be the senseless and deliberate killing of an entire identity group is often abused by "perception managers" to gin up support for their patrons' upcoming wars, and this is especially so when Muslim victims are involved.

Unfortunately, these sorts of situations have a track record of attracting international terrorists and leading to the explosion of domestic ones, like what happened with the "Kosovo Liberation Army" and its al-Qaeda backers in Yugoslavia; the "moderate rebels," al-Qaeda and eventually Daesh in Syria; and now the "Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army" and what increasingly looks to be Daesh's next Asian hot spot in Myanmar.

Correspondingly, each conflict was linked to either capturing the whole country or partitioning off a strategic corner of it, with post-conflict Kosovo hosting the US's gigantic Camp Bondsteel; all of Syria at one time being planned to become the US's pivot of control over the entire Levant; and a future "South Asian Kosovo" of "Rohingyaland" giving its patron powerful influence over the two oil and gas pipelines from coastal Kyaukphyu to China's Kunming and accordingly dominating this envisioned New Silk Road hub.

Yugoslavia 2.0

The point here isn't to whitewash what might eventually turn out to be proven is the Tatmadaw's excessive and disproportionate counterinsurgency operations against civilians, but to draw attention to how the overall conflict momentum is being guided in the direction of an externally provoked identity-centric hybrid war through a coordinated and one-sided information campaign. This is aimed most immediately at demonizing the Myanmarese state while deflecting attention away from the attacks of Rohingya "rebels," which contributed to the rapidly deteriorating military and humanitarian situation.

The medium-term purpose behind provoking such targeted global outrage is to inspire countless Muslim "volunteers" (some of whom will undoubtedly be actual terrorists) to flood into Rakhine State and then set the stage for a multilateral "humanitarian intervention" following the Kosovo model or an anti-terrorist campaign like what the US-led coalition experimented with in Syria in order to ultimately gain control of a territory indispensable to China's One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity.

Furthermore, remembering how none of this is taking place in a vacuum and that the country is still engulfed in a multi-sided civil war all along its periphery, it's possible that the ongoing federalization talks could give way to the all-out "Balkanization" of the former Burma along the lines of what happened to the former Yugoslavia. The end result of this tragedy would be the birth of a host of new states through their own bloody baptisms of fire, which would allow hostile foreign powers to more easily control this strategic space at the juncture of South, Southeast and East Asia.

Moreover, another fault line would instantly emerge in the so-called "Clash of Civilizations" (itself nothing more than a blueprint for dividing and ruling the Eastern Hemisphere through identity-centric Hybrid War) between not only Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine State, but possibly even eventually the Buddhists and Christians in the central part of Myanmar and its Northern-Eastern peripheries respectively. In addition, one could expect Buddhist and Christian "volunteers" from abroad to flood into the battlefield too, potentially catalyzing what might go on to one day become their religions' own form of Daesh.

Other than the geopolitical removal of Myanmar from the world map and the untold suffering of its over 50 million people, the other victim would of course be China, which would have to confront a Syrian-like Hybrid War along its porous southwestern border on top of the other many security challenges ringing its periphery (North Korea, East China Sea, South China Sea and India). Any plans for a CPEC-complementing Myanmar Corridor to the Indian Ocean would also be dashed, and Buddhist troublemakers in Tibet might become radicalized and inspired to commence another round of violence.

The likelihood of these forecasted scenarios could naturally compel China to take the lead in jump-starting emergency conflict resolution measures in Myanmar if the situation continues to spiral out of control there, which might help establish exactly which of the two sides started this whole mess and hopefully bring justice to all the perpetrators without the large-scale geopolitical consequences that threaten to unfold otherwise.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2259 on: 2017-09-23, 16:03:11 »

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MEDIA: BNP WAS RIGHT ON MUSLIM RAPE GANGS

https://bnp.org.uk/media-bnp-was-right-on-muslim-rape-gangs/

January 5 2011

The controlled media has finally admitted that there are Muslim paedophile gangs operating in Britain which prey on young white females, a fact for which Nick Griffin was twice put on trial for daring to say.

In a front page article in The Times newspaper, the existence of the Muslim paedophile gangs is openly acknowledged, although that paper quite falsely claims that it has the story “exclusively.”

In reality, Mr Griffin was arrested in 2004 after comments he made about the Muslim paedophile groom gangs scandal were broadcast on the BBC documentary, ‘The Secret Agent’.

The British National Party leader was charged with “using words or behaviour intended or likely to stir up racial hatred” for pointing out what The Times today has repeated and now presented as an ‘exclusive’ story.

As readers will doubtless be aware, Mr Griffin was acquitted of all the charges after two trials.

According to The Times’ “revelation,” police and social services have fuelled a “culture of silence” which has “allowed hundreds of young white girls to be exploited by Asian men for sex.”

According to figures printed by The Times, an “alarmingly” high number of prosecutions for on-street grooming of girls aged between 11 and 16 have involved “men of Pakistani heritage.”

In 17 court cases since 1997 where groups of men were prosecuted, 53 of the 56 people found guilty were Asian, 50 of them Muslim, while just three were white, according to The Times.

Worse still, experts were quoted as saying that the statistics “represent a mere fraction of a tidal wave of offending” in counties across the Midlands and the north of England which has been going on for more than a decade.

The media quoted a senior officer at West Mercia police as saying that these white “girls are being passed around and used as meat.”

Chief Inspector Alan Edwards was quoted as saying that to “stop this type of crime you need to start everyone talking about it but everyone’s been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.

“No one wants to stand up and say that Pakistani guys in some parts of the country are recruiting young white girls and passing them around their relatives for sex, but we need to stop being worried about the racial complication.”

Mr Griffin said that The Times story which claimed that there was a “conspiracy of silence” was ironic, because that newspaper had long been part of the conspiracy to cover up the issue.

“We first raised this issue in 2001,” Mr Griffin told an interview with Radio RWB.

“This is not, as The Times has claimed, an ‘Asian’ or even a ‘Pakistani’ problem, but actually a Muslim problem,” Mr Griffin said.

“In Wrexham for example, the problem is found amongst Iraqis. It is not a Pakistani problem, but a Muslim problem, as this behaviour comes from the core of that religion,” he said.


---------------------------
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Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2260 on: 2017-09-23, 16:35:24 »

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British National Party

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party

The British National Party (BNP) is a far-right political party in the United Kingdom. It is headquartered in Wigton, Cumbria, and its current leader is Adam Walker. A minor party, it currently has one councillor in UK local government. During its heyday in the 2000s, it had over fifty seats in local government, one seat on the London Assembly, and two Members of the European Parliament.

The BNP was formed in 1982 by John Tyndall and other former members of the National Front (NF). By Tyndall's admission, it remained ideologically identical to the NF, and took its name from that of a defunct 1960s party. During its first two decades, the BNP placed little emphasis on contesting elections, in which it did poorly, but rather focused on street marches and rallies. A growing 'moderniser' faction was frustrated by Tyndall's leadership and in 1999 ousted him. The new leader Nick Griffin sought to broaden the BNP's electoral base by moderating some of its policies, targeting concerns about rising immigration rates, and emphasising localised community campaigns. This resulted in increased electoral growth throughout the 2000s, to the extent that it became the most electorally successful far-right party in British history. Concerns regarding financial mismanagement resulted in Griffin being ousted in 2014. By this point the BNP's membership and vote share had declined dramatically, and members had split to form rival groups like Britain First.

Ideologically positioned on the extreme or far-right of British politics, the BNP has been characterised as fascist or neo-fascist by political scientists. Under Tyndall's leadership, it was more specifically regarded as Neo-Nazi. The party is ethnic nationalist, and it espouses the view that only white people should be citizens of the United Kingdom. It calls for an end to non-white migration into the UK and the removal of settled non-white populations from the country. Initially, it called for the compulsory expulsion of non-whites, although it has since advocated voluntary removals with financial incentives. It promotes biological racism and the white genocide conspiracy theory, calling for global racial separatism and condemning mixed-race relationships. Under Tyndall, the BNP emphasised anti-semitism and Holocaust denial, although Griffin switched the party's focus on to Islamophobia. It promotes economic protectionism, Euroscepticism, and a transformation away from liberal democracy, while its social policies oppose feminism, LGBT rights, and societal permissiveness.

The BNP has a highly centralised structure that gives its chairman near total control. It established a range of sub-groups—such as a youth wing, record label, and trade union—and built links with extreme-right parties across Europe. Regarded as the most successful far-right party in British history, the BNP attracted most support from within White British working-class communities in Northern and Eastern England, particularly among middle-aged and elderly men. More widely, it was highly unpopular and faced much opposition from anti-fascists, religious organisations, and mainstream politicians and media. BNP members were banned from a number of professions and polling suggested that a majority of Britons favoured the party's criminalisation.

Ethnic nationalism and biological racism

The BNP adheres to biological racist ideas,[152] displaying an obsession with the perceived differences of racial groups.[153] Both Tyndall and Griffin believed that there was a biologically distinct white-skinned "British race" which was one branch of a wider Nordic race.[154] In this, Tyndall's views were similar both to Hitler and to prominent British fascist Arnold Leese.[155]

The BNP adheres to an ideology of ethnic nationalism.[13] It promotes the idea that not all citizens of the United Kingdom belong to the British nation.[13] Instead, it claims that the nation only belongs to "the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh along with the limited numbers of peoples of European descent, who have arrived centuries or decades ago and who have fully integrated into our society".[13] This is a group that Griffin referred to as the "home people" or "the folk".[156] According to Tyndall, "The BNP is a racial nationalist party which believes in Britain for the British, that is to say racial separatism."[25] Richard Edmonds in 1993 told The Guardian's Duncan Campbell that "we [the BNP] are 100% racist".[157] The BNP does not regard UK citizens who are not ethnic white Europeans as "British", and party literature calls on supporters to avoid referring to such individuals as "black Britons" or "Asian Britons", instead describing them as "racial foreigners".[158]

The party emphasises what it sees as the need to protect the racial purity of the white British.[152] It condemns miscegenation and "race mixing", claiming that this is a threat to the British race.[159] Tyndall stated that he "felt deeply sorry for the child of a mixed marriage" but had "no sympathy whatsoever for the parents".[160] Griffin similarly stated that mixed-race children were "the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism", and that the party would not "accept miscegenation as moral or normal... we never will."[161] In its 1983 election manifesto, the BNP stated that "family size is a private matter" but still called for white Britons who are "of intelligent, healthy and industrious stock" to have large families and thus raise the white British birth-rate.[162] The encouragement of high birth rates among white British families continued under Griffin's leadership.[163]

Tyndall believed the Nordic race to be superior to other races,[155] and under his leadership, the BNP promoted a variety of pseudoscientific claims in support of white supremacy.[164] Following Griffin's ascendency to power in the party, it officially repudiated racial supremacism and insisted that no racial group was superior or inferior to another.[64] Instead it foregrounded an "ethno-pluralist" racial separatism, claiming that different racial groups had to be kept separate and distinct for their own preservation, maintaining that global ethno-cultural diversity was something to be protected.[165] At the same time it switched focus from openly promoting biological racism to stressing what it perceived as the cultural incompatibility of racial groups.[61] It placed great focus on opposing what it referred to as "multiculturalism",[166] characterising this as a form of "cultural genocide",[167] which promotes the interests of non-whites at the expense of the white British population.[168] However, internal documents produced and circulated under Griffin's leadership demonstrated that it retained its dedication to biological racist ideas.[158] In focusing on culture rather than biology and speaking of 'ethno-pluralism', Griffin's BNP borrowed much of its discourse from the French Nouvelle Droite.[167]

During Tyndall's period of leadership, the BNP promoted eugenics, calling for the forced sterilisation of those with genetically transmittable disabilities.[169] In party literature, it talked of improving the British 'racial stock' by removing "inferior strains within the indigenous races of the British Isles".[170] Tyndall argued that medical professionals should be responsible for determining who to sterilise, while a lowering of welfare benefits would discourage breeding among those he deemed to be genetic inferiors.[171] In his magazine Spearhead, Tyndall also stated that "the gas chamber system" should be used to eliminate "sub-human elements", "perverts", and "asocials" from British society.[146]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2261 on: 2017-09-23, 16:45:15 »

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Turkey ‘will not allow fait accompli’ in Iraq’s north

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-will-not-allow-fait-accompli-in-iraqs-north.aspx?pageID=238&nID=118131&NewsCatID=510

Ankara has once again stressed that it will not allow any fait accompli in northern Iraq and will take all necessary measures against the independence referendum to be held by the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on Sept. 25.

The Turkish Armed Forces expanded the scope of the military exercise it launched on Sept. 18 on the Iraqi border near the Habur Border Gate, in parallel with the government’s harshened rhetoric on the KRG’s bid.

“Turkey will not allow fait accompli in northern Iraq. The world stood up, we stood up [against the referendum]. Arabs and Turkmens rejected it and even Kurds in the region are against it,” Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdağ said at a ceremony marking the start of the academic year at Bozok University in the Central Anatolian province of Yozgat on Sept. 19.

Despite opposition from the world as well as the United Nations, the “sick mentality” in northern Iraq seems to be determined in holding the referendum, Bozdağ said.

“These kinds of steps in the region will ruin regional security and will shatter comfort, peace and stability. Not only the region but all countries in the region will be negatively affected by it and no one can tolerate this,” he added.

Recalling that Turkey has always supported the KRG until now through good neighborly relations amid economic stability, Bozdağ stressed it will continue to do so “if Arbil moves forward with good intentions.”

“But if they go ahead to hold the referendum despite all these warnings, then it will surely be responded to. Our president has declared: ‘We will hold our cabinet meeting right after the National Security Council on Friday [Sept. 22] and will announce our last steps to the world,” he said, vowing that Ankara would “not tolerate” steps that would endanger its security and future.

“We will take all necessary measures to this end and implement them decisively,” he added.

Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli also told reporters on Sept. 19 that Turkey could never allow the foundation of an “ethnic-based state in northern Iraq.”

“All of our security forces are on duty. We are following the developments very closely. If a decision needs to be taken, it will be taken and implemented with determination,” Canikli stressed.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2262 on: 2017-09-23, 16:48:05 »

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Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Myanmar

There is a history of persecution of Muslims in Myanmar that continues to the present day.[2] Myanmar is a Buddhist majority country, with a significant Muslim minority. While Muslims served in the government of Prime Minister U Nu (1948-63), the situation changed with the 1962 Burmese coup d'état. While a few continued to serve, most Muslims were excluded from positions in the government and army. [3] In 1982, the government introduced regulations that denied citizenship to anyone who could not prove that his ancestors lived in Myanmar prior to 1823.[4] This disenfranchised many Muslims in Myanmar, even though they had lived in Myanmar for several generations.[5]

The largest Muslim group in Myanmar are the Rohingya people; the Rohingyas have been the most persecuted group under Myanmar's military regime.[6] (The UN states that the Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted groups in the world)[citation needed]. Since 1948, successive governments have carried out 13 military operations against the Rohingya (including in 1975, 1978, 1989, 1991-2, 2002).[7] During the operations, Myanmar security forces have driven the Rohingyas off their land, burned down their mosques and committed widespread looting, arson and rape of Rohingya Muslims.[7] Outside of these military raids, Rohingya are subjected to frequent theft and extortion from the authorities and many are subjected to forced labor.[8] In some cases, land occupied by Rohingya Muslims has been confiscated and reallocated to local Buddhists.[8]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2263 on: 2017-09-23, 16:51:35 »

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Land of Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Israel

The Land of Israel (Hebrew: אֶרֶץ יִשְׂרָאֵל, Modern Eretz Yisrael, Tiberian ʼÉreṣ Yiśrāʼēl) is the traditional Jewish name for an area of indefinite geographical extension in the Southern Levant. Related biblical, religious and historical English terms include the Land of Canaan, the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and Palestine (see also Israel (disambiguation)). The definitions of the limits of this territory vary between passages in the Hebrew Bible, with specific mentions in Genesis 15, Exodus 23, Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47. Nine times elsewhere in the Bible, the settled land is referred as "from Dan to Beersheba, and three times it is referred as "from the entrance of Hamath unto the brook of Egypt” (1 Kings 8:65, 1 Chronicles 13:5 and 2 Chronicles 7:8).".

These biblical limits for the land differ from the borders of established historical Israelite and later Jewish kingdoms; over time these have included the United Kingdom of Israel, the two separated kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah, the Hasmonean Kingdom, and the Herodian Kingdom, which at their heights ruled lands with similar but not identical boundaries.

The Jewish religious belief defining the land as where Jewish religious law prevailed and excluding territory where it was not applied,[1] holds that the area is a God-given inheritance of the Jewish people based on the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis and Exodus, as well as on the later Prophets.[2] According to the Book of Genesis, the land was first promised by God to the descendants of Abram; the text is explicit that this is a covenant between God and Abram for his descendants.[3] Abram's name was later changed to Abraham, with the promise refined to pass through his son Isaac and to the Israelites, descendants of Jacob, Abraham's grandson. This belief is not shared by most adherents of replacement theology (or supersessionism), who hold the view that the Old Testament prophecies were superseded by the coming of Jesus,[4] a view often repudiated by Christian Zionists as a theological error.[5] Evangelical Zionists variously claim that Israel has title to the land by divine right,[6] or by a theological, historical and moral grounding of attachment to the land unique to Jews (James Parkes),[7] The idea that ancient religious texts can be warrant or divine right for a modern claim has often been challenged,[8][9] and Israeli courts have rejected land claims based on religious motivations.[10]

During the mandatory period (1920-1948) the term "Eretz Yisrael" or the "Land of Israel" was part of the official Hebrew name of Mandatory Palestine. Official Hebrew documents used the Hebrew transliteration of the word “Palestine” פלשתינה (Palestina) followed always by the two initial letters of "Eretz Yisrael", א״י Aleph-Yod.[11][12]

The Land of Israel concept has been evoked by the founders of the State of Israel. It often surfaces in political debates on the status of the West Bank, which is referred to in official Israeli discourse as Judea and Samaria, from the names of the two historical Jewish kingdoms.[13]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2264 on: 2017-09-23, 17:06:44 »

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List of messiah claimants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants

This is a list of people who have been said to be a messiah, either by themselves or by their followers. The list is divided into categories, which are sorted according to date of birth (where known).

Jewish messiah claimants

In Judaism, "messiah" originally meant a divinely appointed king, such as David, Cyrus the Great[1] or Alexander the Great.[2] Later, especially after the failure of the Hasmonean Kingdom (37 BC) and the Jewish–Roman wars (AD 66–135), the figure of the Jewish Messiah was one who would deliver the Jews from oppression and usher in an Olam Haba ("world to come") or Messianic Age. However the term "false messiah" was largely absent from rabbinic literature. The first mention is in the Sefer Zerubbabel, from the mid-seventh century, which uses the term, mashiah sheker, ("false messiah").[3]

    Jesus of Nazareth (c. 5 BCE – 30 CE), leader of a Jewish sect who was crucified by the Romans for sedition.[4] Jews who believed him to be the Messiah were the first Christians, also known as Jewish Christians.[5] Muslims,[6][7] Christians[8] and Messianic Jews[9] believe him to be the real Messiah.
    Athronges (c. 3 CE),[10] a shepherd turned rebel leader.
    Simon bar Kokhba (died c. 135), founded a short-lived Jewish state before being defeated in the Second Jewish-Roman War.
    Moses of Crete, who in about 440–470 persuaded the Jews of Crete to walk into the sea, as Moses had done, to return to Israel. The results were disastrous and he soon disappeared.
    Ishak ben Ya'kub Obadiah Abu 'Isa al-Isfahani (684–705), who led a revolt in Persia against the Umayyad Caliph 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.
    David Alroy, born in Kurdistan, who around 1160 agitated against the caliph before being assassinated.
    Moses Botarel of Cisneros, active around 1413; claimed to be a sorcerer able to combine the names of God.
    Asher Lämmlein, a German near Venice who proclaimed himself a forerunner of the Messiah in 1502.
    David Reubeni (1490–1541?) and Solomon Molcho (1500–1532), messianic adventurers who travelled in Portugal, Italy and Turkey; Molcho, who was a baptised Catholic, was tried by the Inquisition, convicted of apostasy and burned at the stake.
    Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), an Ottoman Jew who claimed to be the Messiah, but then converted to Islam; still has followers today in the Dönmeh.
        Jacob Querido (?–1690), claimed to be the new incarnation of Sabbatai; later converted to Islam and led the Dönmeh.
        Miguel Cardoso (1630–1706), another successor of Sabbatai who claimed to be the "Messiah ben Ephraim".
        Löbele Prossnitz (?–1750), attained some following amongst former followers of Sabbatai, calling himself the "Messiah ben Joseph".
    Jacob Joseph Frank (1726–1791), who claimed to be the reincarnation of King David and preached a synthesis of Christianity and Judaism.
    Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (r. 1920–1950), sixth Rebbe (spiritual leader) of Chabad Lubavitch.[11][12]
    Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), seventh Rebbe (spiritual leader) of Chabad.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]

Christian messiah claimants

Verses in the Christian Bible tell that Jesus will come again in some fashion; various people have claimed to, in fact, be the second coming of Jesus. Others have been styled a new messiah still under the umbrella of Christianity. The Synoptic gospels (Matthew 24:4, 6, 24; Mark 13:5, 21-22; and Luke 21:3) all use the term pseudochristos for messianic pretenders.[22]

    Simon Magus (early 1st century), was a Samaritan, and a native of Gitta; he was considered a god in Simonianism; he "darkly hinted" that he himself was Christ, calling himself the Standing One.
    Dositheos the Samaritan (mid 1st century), was one of the supposed founders of Mandaeanism. After the time of Jesus he wished to persuade the Samaritans that he himself was the Messiah prophesied by Moses.[23] Dositheus pretended to be the Christ (Messiah), applying Deuteronomy 18:15 to himself, and he compares him with Theudas and Judas the Galilean.[23][24]
    Tanchelm of Antwerp (c. 1110), who violently opposed the sacrament and the Eucharist.
    Ann Lee (1736–1784), a central figure to the Shakers,[25] who thought she "embodied all the perfections of God" in female form and considered herself to be Christ’s female counterpart in 1772.[26]
    Bernhard Müller (c. 1799–1834) claimed to be the Lion of Judah and a prophet in possession of the Philosopher's stone.
    John Nichols Thom (1799–1838), who had achieved fame and followers as Sir William Courtenay and adopted the claim of Messiah after a period in a mental institute.[27]
    Arnold Potter (1804–1872), Latter Day Saint schismatic leader; called himself "Potter Christ"
    Hong Xiuquan (1814–1864), Hakka Chinese; claimed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ; started the Taiping Rebellion and founded the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Committed suicide before the fall of Tianjing (Nanjing) in 1864.
    Mirza Husayn 'Ali Nuri, Bahá'u'lláh (1817–1864), born Shiite, adopting Bábism later in life, he claimed to be the promised one of all religions, and founded the Bahá'í Faith.
    Jacobina Mentz Maurer (1841 or 1842–1874) was a German-Brazilian woman who lived and died in the state of Rio Grande do Sul who emerged as a messianic prophetess, a representation of God, and later declared the very reincarnation of Jesus Christ on earth by her German-speaking community called Die Muckers (or the false saints) by her enemies, Die Spotters (or the mockers). After a number of deadly confrontations with outsiders, Jacobina was shot to death together with many of her followers by the Brazilian Imperial Army.
    William W. Davies (1833–1906), Latter Day Saint (Mormon) schismatic leader; claimed that his infant son Arthur (born 1868) was the reincarnated Jesus Christ.
    Cyrus Reed Teed (October 18, 1839 – December 22, 1908, erroneously Cyrus Tweed) was a U.S. eclectic physician and alchemist turned religious leader and messiah. In 1869, claiming divine inspiration, Dr. Teed took on the name Koresh and proposed a new set of scientific and religious ideas he called Koreshanity.
    Abd-ru-shin (18 April 1875 – 6 December 1941), founder of the Grail Movement.[28][29][30][31]
    Father Divine (George Baker) (c. 1880 – September 10, 1965), an African American spiritual leader from about 1907 until his death who claimed to be God.
    André Matsoua (1899–1942), Congolese founder of Amicale, proponents of which subsequently adopted him as Messiah in the late 1920s.
    Samael Aun Weor (1917–1977), born Víctor Manuel Gómez Rodríguez, Colombian citizen and later Mexican, was an author, lecturer and founder of the 'Universal Christian Gnostic Movement', according to him, 'the most powerful movement ever founded'. By 1972, he referenced that his death and resurrection would be occurring before 1978.[32]
    Ahn Sahng-hong (1918–1985), founder of the World Mission Society Church of God and worshiped by the members as the messiah.[33]
    Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012), founder and leader of the Unification Church established in Seoul, South Korea, who considered himself the Second Coming of Christ, but not Jesus himself.[34] Although it is generally believed by Unification Church members ("Moonies") that he was the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ and was anointed to fulfill Jesus' unfinished mission.[34]
    Yahweh ben Yahweh (1935–2007), born as Hulon Mitchell, Jr., a black nationalist and separatist who created the Nation of Yahweh and allegedly orchestrated the murder of dozens of persons.
    Laszlo Toth (1940–2012) claimed he was Jesus Christ as he battered Michelangelo's Pieta with a geologist hammer.
    Wayne Bent (born 1941), also known as Michael Travesser of the Lord Our Righteousness Church, also known as the "Strong City Cult", convicted December 15, 2008 of one count of criminal sexual contact of a minor and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor in 2008.[35]
    Iesu Matayoshi (born 1944), in 1997 he established the World Economic Community Party based on his conviction that he is God and the Christ.
    Jung Myung Seok (born 1945), a South Korean who was a member of the Unification Church in the 1970s, before breaking off to found the dissenting group[36] now known as Providence Church in 1980.[37][38] He also considers himself the Second Coming of Christ, but not Jesus himself in 1980.[39] He believes he has come to finish the incomplete message and mission of Jesus Christ, asserting that he is the Messiah and has the responsibility to save all mankind.[40] He claims that the Christian doctrine of resurrection is false but that people can be saved through him.[41]
    Claude Vorilhon now known as Raël "messenger of the Elohim" (born 1946), a French professional test driver and former automobile journalist became founder and leader of UFO religion the Raël Movement in 1972, which teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestrials, which they call Elohim. He claimed he met an extraterrestrial humanoid in 1973 and became the Messiah.[42] Then devoted himself to the task he said was given by his "biological father", an extraterrestrial named Yahweh.[43]
    José Luis de Jesús (1946–2013), founder and leader of Creciendo en Gracia sect (Growing In Grace International Ministry, Inc.), based in Miami, Florida. He claimed to be both Jesus Christ returned and the Antichrist, and exhibited a "666" tattoo on his forearm. He has referred to himself as Jesucristo Hombre, which translates to "Jesus Christ made Man".
    Inri Cristo (born 1948) of Indaial, Brazil, a claimant to be the second Jesus.[44]
    Apollo Quiboloy (born 1950), founder and leader of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ religious group, who claims that Jesus Christ is the "Almighty Father," that Quiboloy is "His Appointed Son," and that salvation is now completed. Proclaims himself as the "Appointed Son of the God" not direct to the point as the "Begotten Son of the God" in 1985.[45]
    David Icke (born 1952), of Great Britain, has described himself as "the son of God", and a "channel for the Christ spirit".
    Brian David Mitchell was born on October 18, 1953 in Salt Lake City, Utah, he believed himself the fore-ordained angel born on earth to be the Davidic "servant" prepared by God as a type of Messiah who would restore the divinely led kingdom of Israel to the world in preparation for Christ's second coming. (Mitchell's belief in such an end-times figure – also known among many fundamentalist Latter Day Saints as "the One Mighty and Strong" – appeared to be based in part on a reading of the biblical book of Isaiah by the independent LDS Hebraist, Avraham Gileadi, with which Mitchell became familiar from his former participation with Stirling Allan's American Study Group.)[46][47]
    David Koresh (Vernon Wayne Howell) (1959–1993), leader of the Branch Davidians.
    Maria Devi Christos (born 1960), founder of the Great White Brotherhood.
    Sergey Torop (born 1961), who started to call himself "Vissarion", founder of the Church of the Last Testament and the spiritual community Ecopolis Tiberkul in Southern Siberia.
    Alan John Miller (born 1962), founder of Divine Truth, a new religious movement based in Australia. Alan John Miller, also known as A.J., who claims to be Jesus of Nazareth through reincarnation. Miller was formerly an elder in the Jehovah's Witnesses.
    David Shayler (born 1965), former MI5 agent and whistleblower who declared himself the Messiah on 7 July 2007.[48]

Muslim messiah claimants

Islamic tradition has a prophecy of the Mahdi, who will come alongside the return of Isa (Jesus).

    Muhammad Jaunpuri (1443–1505), who traveled Northeastern India; he influenced the Mahdavia and the Zikris.
    Báb (1819–1850), who declared himself to be the promised Mahdi in Shiraz, Iran in 1844. (Related to Baha'i claims.)
    Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, India (1835–1908), claimed to be the awaited Mahdi as well as (Second Coming) and likeness of Jesus the promised Messiah at the end of time, being the only person in Islamic history who claimed to be both. He claimed to be Jesus in the metaphorical sense; in character. He founded the Ahmadiyya Movement in 1889 envisioning it to be the rejuvenation of Islam, and claimed to be commissioned by God for the reformation of mankind.[49] He declared that Jesus survived crucifixion and died a natural death (lived over the age of 100) having migrated towards the east- Kashmir.[50]
    Muhammad Ahmad ("The Mad Mahdi") (1844–1885), who declared himself the Mahdi in 1881, defeated the Ottoman Egyptian authority, and founded the Mahdist Sudan.
    Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan (1864–1920), who led the Dervish State in present-day Somalia in a two-decade long resistance movement between 1900 and 1920.
    Rashad Khalifa (1935–1990), an Egyptian-American biochemist who claimed that he had discovered a mathematical code in the text of the Qur'an involving the number 19; he later claimed to be the "Messenger of the Covenant" and founded the "Submitters International" movement before being murdered.
    Juhayman al-Otaybi (1936–1980), who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979 and declared his son-in-law the Mahdi.

Other/combination messiah claimants

This list features people who are said, either by themselves or their followers, to be some form of a messiah that do not easily fit into only Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

    Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia (1892–1975), Messiah of the Rastafari movement. Never claimed himself to be Messiah, but was thus proclaimed by Leonard Howell, amongst others.
    André Matsoua (1899–1942), Congolese founder of Amicale, proponents of which subsequently adopted him as Messiah.
    Samael Aun Weor (1917–1977), born Víctor Manuel Gómez Rodríguez, Colombian citizen and later Mexican, was an author, lecturer and founder of the Universal Christian Gnostic Movement. By 1972, Samael Aun Weor referenced that his death and resurrection would be occurring before 1978.
    Nirmala Srivastava (1923–2011), guru and goddess of Sahaja Yoga, proclaimed herself to be the Comforter promised by Jesus (that is, the incarnation of the Holy Ghost / Adi Shakti).[51][52]
    Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda (born 1946 – died 2013), a Puerto Rican preacher who had claimed to be both "the Man Jesus Christ" and the Antichrist at the same time. He claimed he was indwelled with the same spirit that dwelled in Jesus, however, Miranda also contradicted his claims of being Christ incarnate by also claiming he was the Antichrist, even going as far as tattooing the number of the beast (666) on his forearm, a behavior his followers also adopted. Founder of the "Growing in Grace" ministries, Miranda died on August 14, 2013 due to liver cancer.
    Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi (born 25 November 1941) is a spiritual leader and the founder of the spiritual movements Messiah Foundation International (MFI) and Anjuman Serfaroshan-e-Islam.[53][54] He is controversial for being declared the Mehdi, Messiah, and Kalki Avatar by the MFI.[55][56][57]
    Raël, founder and leader of Raëlism (born 30 September 1946); Rael claimed he met an extraterrestrial being in 1973 and became the Messiah.
    World Teacher (unknown), a being claimed to be the Theosophical Maitreya and the Messiah (promised one) of all religions. He is said to have descended from the higher planes and manifested a physical body in early 1977 in the Himalayas, then on 19 July 1977 he is said to have taken a commercial airplane flight from Pakistan to England. He is currently said to be living in secret in London;[58][59][60] promoted by New Age activist Benjamin Creme and his organization, Share International (See Maitreya (Benjamin Creme)).
    Ryuho Okawa (born 7 July 1956), is the founder of Happy Science in Japan. Okawa claims to channel the spirits of Muhammad, Christ, Buddha and Confucius and claims to be the incarnation of the supreme spiritual being called El Cantare.


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Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2265 on: 2017-09-23, 17:13:03 »

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Scientology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology

Scientology is a body of religious beliefs and practices developed in 1954 by American author L. Ron Hubbard (1911–86). Hubbard initially developed a program of ideas called Dianetics, which was distributed through the Dianetics Foundation. The foundation soon entered bankruptcy, and Hubbard lost the rights to his seminal publication Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1952. He then recharacterized the subject as a religion and renamed it Scientology,[4] retaining the terminology, doctrines, the E-meter, and the practice of auditing.[5][6] Within a year, he regained the rights to Dianetics and retained both subjects under the umbrella of the Church of Scientology.[7][8][9][10][11][12]

Hubbard describes the etymology of the word Scientology as coming from the Latin word "scio", meaning know or distinguish, and the Greek word “logos”, meaning “the word or outward form by which the inward thought is expressed and made known”. Hubbard writes, “thus, Scientology means knowing about knowing, or science of knowledge”.[13]

Hubbard's groups have encountered considerable opposition and controversy.[14] In January 1951, the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners brought proceedings against Dianetics Foundation on the charge of teaching medicine without a license.[15] Hubbard's followers engaged in a program of criminal infiltration of the U.S. government.[16][17]

Hubbard-inspired organizations and their classification are often a point of contention. Germany classifies Scientology groups as an "anti-constitutional sect".[18][19] In France, they have been classified as a dangerous cult by some parliamentary reports.[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][excessive citations]

Scientology beliefs and practices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_beliefs_and_practices

The Church of Scientology says that a human is an immortal, spiritual being (thetan) that is resident in a physical body. The thetan has had innumerable past lives and it is observed in advanced Scientology texts that lives preceding the thetan's arrival on Earth were lived in extraterrestrial cultures. Based on case studies at advanced levels, it is predicted that any Scientologist undergoing auditing will eventually come across and recount a common series of events.

According to the Church, founder L. Ron Hubbard's discovery of the thetan places Scientology at the heart of the human quest for meaning, and proves that "its origins are as ancient as religious thought itself." However, Scientology considers that its understanding of the thetan distinguishes it from other religious traditions, especially Judaism and Christianity, in three important ways. First, while many religions fuse the concept of the body and the soul, the thetan (spirit) is separate and independent. Second, unlike the three great world monotheisms, Scientologists believe in past lives and that the thetan has lived through many, perhaps thousands of lifetimes. Third, contrary to Christian concepts of original sin, Scientology holds to the intrinsic goodness of a being and believes that the spiritual essence has lost touch with its nature. "The spirit, then, is not a thing," Hubbard writes. "It is the creator of things."[1]

Scientology describes itself as the study and handling of the spirit in relationship to itself, others, and all of life. Scientologists also believe that people have innate, yet suppressed, power and ability which can be regained if cleared of enforced and unwanted behaviour patterns and discomforts.[2][3] Scientology is described as "a religion to help people use scientific approaches to self-actualize their full potential."[4] Believers reach their full potential "when they understand themselves in their true relationship to the physical universe and the Supreme Being. "[4] There have been many scholarly studies of Scientology and the books are freely available in bookshops, churches and most libraries.[4]

The Church of Scientology believes that "Man is basically good, that he is seeking to survive, (and) that his survival depends on himself and his attainment of brotherhood with the universe," as stated in the Creed of the Church of Scientology.[5]

Roy Wallis of Columbia University describes Scientology as "a movement that straddles the boundaries between psychology and religion, [offering] a graded hierarchy of 'auditing' and training" with the intention of releasing the individual's full potential.[6]

Scientology does not require that their members must exclusively believe in Scientology, distinguishing it from biblical religions. Scientologists may profess belief in other religions, such as Protestantism and Catholicism, and may participate in their activities and sacred rites. Jacob Neusner emphasizes this in the section on Scientology in his book World Religions in America.[7] According to J. Gordon Melton, "Scientologists aim to utterly make the world instead of taking refuge from it," as they participate in culture instead of being isolated.[8] Scientology is inherently nondenominational and open to individuals, regardless of religious background; according to Mary A. Mann, it contains the elements necessary for a global religion and caters to people of all different ethnicities and educational upbringing.[9]

Wilson writes that Scientology "constitutes a religious system set forth in the terms of scientific discourse." Hubbard similarly states that "along with science, Scientology can achieve positive invariable results. Given the same conditions, one always get the same results ... What has happened is the superstition has been subtracted from spiritual studies."[10]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2266 on: 2017-09-23, 17:16:36 »

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Flying Spaghetti Monster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) is the deity of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarianism. Pastafarianism (a portmanteau of pasta and Rastafarian) is a social movement that promotes a light-hearted view of religion and opposes the teaching of intelligent design and creationism in public schools. According to adherents, Pastafarianism is a "real, legitimate religion, as much as any other".[3] It is legally recognized as a religion in the Netherlands[4] and New Zealand – where Pastafarian representatives have been authorized to celebrate weddings and where the first legally recognized Pastafarian wedding was performed in April 2016.[5][6][7] However, in the United States, a federal judge has ruled that the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" is not a real religion.[8]

The "Flying Spaghetti Monster" was first described in a satirical open letter written by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the Kansas State Board of Education decision to permit teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in public school science classes.[9] In the letter, Henderson demanded equal time in science classrooms for "Flying Spaghetti Monsterism", alongside intelligent design and evolution.[10] After Henderson published the letter on his website, the Flying Spaghetti Monster rapidly became an Internet phenomenon and a symbol of opposition to the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.[11]

Because of its popularity and exposure, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is often used as a contemporary version of Russell's teapot—an argument that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon those who make unfalsifiable claims, not on those who reject them. Pastafarianism has received praise from the scientific community and criticism from proponents of intelligent design. Pastafarians have engaged in disputes with creationists, including in Polk County, Florida, where they played a role in dissuading the local school board from adopting new rules on teaching evolution.[12]

Pastafarian tenets (generally satires of creationism) are presented both on Henderson's Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster website, where he is described as "prophet", and in The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, written by Henderson in 2006. The central belief is that an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. Pirates are revered as the original Pastafarians.[13] Henderson asserts that a decline in the number of pirates over the years is the cause of global warming.[10] The FSM community congregates at Henderson's website to share ideas about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and crafts representing images of it.[3]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2267 on: 2017-09-23, 17:23:55 »

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https://litemind.com/problem-definition/

Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.

This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place!

The Problem Is To Know What the Problem Is

The definition of the problem will be the focal point of all your problem-solving efforts. As such, it makes sense to devote as much attention and dedication to problem definition as possible. What usually happens is that as soon as we have a problem to work on we’re so eager to get to solutions that we neglect spending any time refining it.

What most of us don’t realize — and what supposedly Einstein might have been alluding to — is that the quality of the solutions we come up with will be in direct proportion to the quality of the description of the problem we’re trying to solve. Not only will your solutions be more abundant and of higher quality, but they’ll be achieved much, much more easily. Most importantly, you’ll have the confidence to be tackling a worthwhile problem.


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2268 on: 2017-09-23, 20:50:08 »

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No Brexit until 2021 - May confirms transition deal but Leavers shouldn’t feel betrayed

http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/857541/theresa-may-florence-speech-live-brexit-transition-deal-immigration-free-movement

THERESA May has confirmed a Brexit transition period of “around two years” will take place once Britain leaves the European Union (EU).

Date of Brexit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit

Despite the formal[91] departure being scheduled to occur on 29 March 2019,[92] May proposed on 22 September 2017 that a two-year transition period should occur, thus setting up a delay in the de facto departure until 2021.[93][clarification needed]


---------------------------
Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2269 on: 2017-09-24, 08:21:13 »

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Quote from: evolvingape on 2017-09-23, 17:23:55
https://litemind.com/problem-definition/

Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.

This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place!

The Problem Is To Know What the Problem Is

The definition of the problem will be the focal point of all your problem-solving efforts. As such, it makes sense to devote as much attention and dedication to problem definition as possible. What usually happens is that as soon as we have a problem to work on we’re so eager to get to solutions that we neglect spending any time refining it.

What most of us don’t realize — and what supposedly Einstein might have been alluding to — is that the quality of the solutions we come up with will be in direct proportion to the quality of the description of the problem we’re trying to solve. Not only will your solutions be more abundant and of higher quality, but they’ll be achieved much, much more easily. Most importantly, you’ll have the confidence to be tackling a worthwhile problem.

As a systems engineer dealing with missile systems I was introduced to the "don't know squared" problem.  People don't know that they don't know.  And that leads them down all sorts of false trails.
Smudge
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2270 on: 2017-09-24, 13:42:52 »
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Quote from: Smudge on 2017-09-24, 08:21:13
As a systems engineer dealing with missile systems I was introduced to the "don't know squared" problem.  People don't know that they don't know.  And that leads them down all sorts of false trails.
Smudge

I think in Germany we say for this "The only thing I know is that I do not know anything." Das einzigste was ich weiß ist, dass ich nichts weiß.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2271 on: 2017-09-30, 10:09:25 »

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Quote from: Smudge on 2017-09-24, 08:21:13
As a systems engineer dealing with missile systems I was introduced to the "don't know squared" problem.  People don't know that they don't know.  And that leads them down all sorts of false trails.
Smudge

The fact that people don't know that they don't know is a significant problem that arises from a narrow information perspective. This is why we have a controlled media in the west with an agenda driven narrative that inhibits the ability to question more.

For example, using publicly available material we can determine why the BNP is a failed political movement:

Quote from: evolvingape on 2017-09-23, 16:35:24
British National Party

Ideologically positioned on the extreme or far-right of British politics, the BNP has been characterised as fascist or neo-fascist by political scientists. Under Tyndall's leadership, it was more specifically regarded as Neo-Nazi. The party is ethnic nationalist, and it espouses the view that only white people should be citizens of the United Kingdom. It calls for an end to non-white migration into the UK and the removal of settled non-white populations from the country. Initially, it called for the compulsory expulsion of non-whites, although it has since advocated voluntary removals with financial incentives. It promotes biological racism and the white genocide conspiracy theory, calling for global racial separatism and condemning mixed-race relationships. Under Tyndall, the BNP emphasised anti-semitism and Holocaust denial, although Griffin switched the party's focus on to Islamophobia. It promotes economic protectionism, Euroscepticism, and a transformation away from liberal democracy, while its social policies oppose feminism, LGBT rights, and societal permissiveness.

Ethnic nationalism and biological racism

The BNP adheres to biological racist ideas,[152] displaying an obsession with the perceived differences of racial groups.[153] Both Tyndall and Griffin believed that there was a biologically distinct white-skinned "British race" which was one branch of a wider Nordic race.[154] In this, Tyndall's views were similar both to Hitler and to prominent British fascist Arnold Leese.[155]

The BNP adheres to an ideology of ethnic nationalism.[13] It promotes the idea that not all citizens of the United Kingdom belong to the British nation.[13] Instead, it claims that the nation only belongs to "the English, Scots, Irish and Welsh along with the limited numbers of peoples of European descent, who have arrived centuries or decades ago and who have fully integrated into our society".[13] This is a group that Griffin referred to as the "home people" or "the folk".[156] According to Tyndall, "The BNP is a racial nationalist party which believes in Britain for the British, that is to say racial separatism."[25] Richard Edmonds in 1993 told The Guardian's Duncan Campbell that "we [the BNP] are 100% racist".[157] The BNP does not regard UK citizens who are not ethnic white Europeans as "British", and party literature calls on supporters to avoid referring to such individuals as "black Britons" or "Asian Britons", instead describing them as "racial foreigners".[158]

They call themselves "British" without understanding that the political label is a construct that has removed the right to sovereign racial identity, by defining the sovereign area as a land mass with borders and all those born within it with that label. It is a mechanism for racial replacement which has further been exploited by joining that political entity "Britain" subordinate to the "EU".

Religion is the other significant factor:

Practising Muslims 'will outnumber Christians by 2035'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1936418/Practising-Muslims-will-outnumber-Christians-by-2035.html

Christians could be minority by 2018, census analysis reveals

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/11/christians-minority-2018-census-analysis

Is the UK still a Christian country?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32722155

and interestingly they reveal what the plan is:

Are we losing our religion? The answer for the UK seems to be "Yes", while the answer for the developing world is a resounding "No".

That was the conclusion of a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center in the US.

It suggests that in the UK, if current trends continue, the proportion of the population identifying themselves as Christians will fall from 64% in 2010 to 45% by 2050, while the proportion of Muslims will rise from 5% to 11%.

The proportion of the population claiming no religion in the UK - the "unaffiliated" - will also rise significantly, from 28% to 39%.

Pew's research also suggests there are likely to be more Muslims than Christians in the world by 2070, with Islam's share of global population equalling that of Christianity at just above 30% each by 2050.

Equally eye-catching is its conclusion that by 2050, under half of the population will be Christian not just in the UK, but also France, the Netherlands, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Australia and New Zealand, while Muslims will make up about 10% of Europe's population, up from 6% now, thanks to higher birth rates.

However, Christianity globally will continue to grow, with the number of Christians projected to rise significantly in sub-Saharan Africa in particular.

According to demographer Conrad Hackett at Pew, in 1910 some 66% of the world's Christians lived in Europe. Now that has fallen to about 25%.

By 2050, however, Europe will be home to just 16% of the world's Christians, while four out of every 10 Christians globally will live in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to high birth rates and falling infant mortality.

You have to remember that Christianity is an occupying religion, it is not native to "Britain" and the native people reject it. Bring the muslim's from Africa to occupy and colonise Europe, and occupy Africa with Christianity, and the three tribes of Abraham maintain religious control, completely destroying all native ethnic races and sovereignty in the process.


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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2272 on: 2017-09-30, 11:21:26 »

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A good example of a tightly controlled public narrative is provided by this report, which has not been plastered all over the front page news in the west:

The Pentagon's $2.2 Billion Soviet Arms Pipeline Flooding Syria

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/the-pentagon-s-2-2-billion-soviet-arms-pipeline-flooding-syria-09-12-2017

The Pentagon is on a spending spree as it scrabbles to amass vast quantities of Soviet-style weapons and ammunition. But it’s running into problems sourcing them, and is using misleading legal documents to disguise their final destination: Syria.

Ivan Angelovski, Lawrence Marzouk BIRN Washington, Belgrade

The defeat of Islamic State in Syria is reliant on a questionable supply-line, funnelling unprecedented quantities of weapons and ammunition from Eastern Europe to some 30,000 anti-ISIS rebel fighters.

Armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades fresh from state-owned production lines and stockpiles of the Balkans, Central Europe and increasingly the former Soviet Union, these US-backed troops are spearheading the battle to reclaim Raqqa, the capital of the so-called caliphate, and liberate other areas of Syria held by ISIS.

But the flow of weapons to these Pentagon-backed militia depends on misleading official paperwork, an investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, has uncovered.

The operation has been criticised by arms transfer experts and even worried officials in Berlin, who have seen large quantities of weapons passing through US military bases in Germany on the way to Syria.

Reporters have pinpointed more than $700 million of spending on weapons and ammunition likely destined for Syrian rebels since September 2015, when the Pentagon’s anti-ISIS train and equip programme shifted strategy.

The Department of Defense has budgeted $584 million specifically for this Syrian operation for the financial years 2017 and 2018, and has earmarked another $900 million of spending on Soviet-style munitions between now and 2022.

The total, $2.2 billion, likely understates the flow of weapons to Syrian rebels in the coming years.

The weapons and ammunition that the Pentagon is supplying to Syria are dispatched through a sprawling logistical network, including an army of arms dealers, shipping companies, cargo airlines, German military bases and Balkan airports and ports.

The purchases are routed through two channels. One is run by the US military’s Special Operations Command, SOCOM, and the other is operated by Picatinny Arsenal, a little-known New Jersey weapons depot.

The Pentagon’s anti-ISIS programme became Washington’s sole military campaign in Syria in July 2017 after President Trump closed the CIA-funded Operation Syacamore, aimed at arming Syrian rebels fighting President Assad.

Trump has pledged to “wipe out” ISIS and has allocated increased funding for the Pentagon campaign, which now has many former anti-regime groups on its pay-roll.

With vast quantities of weapons continuing to pour into Syria, concerns abound about a wider conflict emerging once the common enemy of ISIS is defeated.

Asked about the unprecedented purchase of Soviet-style arms for Syrian rebels, the Pentagon said that it had carefully vetted the recipients and was releasing equipment incrementally.

Train and equip: A Major Shift in Strategy   

As ISIS swept across Syria in 2014, the Pentagon hastily launched a $500 million train and equip programme that December to build up a new force of Syrian rebels, armed with modern US weapons, in an attempt to counter the threat.

But nine months later, the programme had collapsed, with only a handful of recruits having made it onto the battlefield.

Amid a flurry of negative headlines, the Pentagon needed a new plan: Starting in September 2015, and largely unnoticed by the media, it quietly shifted focus to arming Syrian rebels already on the ground with the Eastern Bloc arms and ammunition they were already using, according to a previously unreported Pentagon document from February 2016.

This Soviet-type equipment, both newly produced and sourced from stockpiles, is available from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries, as well as China and Russia. The latter two large suppliers are out of bounds, as their military equipment falls under US sanctions.

The first Pentagon delivery, which included 50 tonnes of ammunition, arrived in October 2015, just a month after the shift in policy. The munitions were airdropped to Arab units within the then recently formed Syrian Democratic Forces, SDF, a Kurdish-led coalition currently spearheading the fight to reclaim Raqqa, and the Pentagon’s main ally in Syria.

The shipment was far from a one-time event and the SDF was not the only group to receive support – a changing coalition of rebel fighters in Syria’s south east is also being armed by the Pentagon.

Socom supply-line

Special Operations Command, SOCOM, has not previously acknowledged its role in the Syria train and equip programme, but in a written statement to BIRN and OCCRP, the Pentagon confirmed that it had been charged with procuring weapons and ammunition for Syrian rebels.

From the swift in strategy to May 2017, it has purchased weapons and ammunition worth $240 million from Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Poland and Romania, according to an analysis of thousands of procurement records by BIRN and OCCRP. Prior to the start of the programme, its spending on Eastern Bloc weaponry had been negligible.

While SOCOM is known to covertly supply US partners in other conflicts, documentary evidence, expert analysis, and the testimony of a contractor involved in the supply-line confirmed that Syria is the main destination for these purchases.

Between December 2015 and September 2016, SOCOM also chartered four cargo ships from Romanian and Bulgarian Black Sea ports, laden with 6,300 tonnes of the purchased munitions to be delivered to military bases in Turkey and Jordan, the main logistics bases for supplying Syrian rebels, according to procurement documents, packing lists and ship tracking data.

It also commissioned commercial cargo flights with the Azerbaijan airline Silk Way to air bases in Turkey and Kuwait, other key hubs in the anti-ISIS mission. 

The Pentagon has requested an additional $322.5 million for the financial year ending October 2017 and has asked for $261.9 million for the following 12 months [see infographic], to buy munitions for the Syria train and equip programme.

This will include tens of thousands of AK-47s and Rocket Propelled Grenades, RPGs, and hundreds of millions of pieces of ammunition, according to the funding requests made by the Pentagon and the Trump administration.

SOCOM had already made a dent in the budget by February, after it issued a $90 million shopping list specifically for Syria, seen by reporters, which includes 10,000 AK-47s, 6,000 rocket launchers, 6,000 heavy and light machine guns and 36 million pieces of ammunition.

Picatinny: A New Supply-Line Revealed

SOCOM is not, however, the only Pentagon unit that is buying munitions for the Syria train and equip programme.
The Picatinny Arsenal, a military base in New Jersey, with the help of its sister facility in Rock Island New Jersey, is also a critical part of the supply-chain.

It has bought up to $480 million worth of Soviet-style arms and ammunition for Syrian rebels since the switch in strategy, this investigation can reveal, from Afghanistan, Bulgaria, BIH, Croatia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Serbia.

Picatinny boasts of its record supplying large quantities of Eastern Bloc equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has been far more circumspect about its role in the Syrian conflict, which is politically divisive internationally and involves supplying militia groups rather than state armies.

This means that while purchases of non-standard munitions – the US’s euphemism for Soviet-style equipment – were clearly marked for Iraq or Afghanistan, it appears to be Pentagon policy not to label procurement goods destined for Syria.

BIRN and OCCRP discovered seven contracts worth $71 million that were signed in September 2016 and cited Syria either by name or the Department of Defense’s internal code – V7 – for the Syria train and equip programme. But these references were quickly deleted from the public record after BIRN and OCCRP asked the Department of Defense and supplier countries about these deliveries in March of this year.

Reporters made copies of all documents before they were deleted. The Pentagon has declined to explain the alterations. 
On top of the $71 million marked for Syria, a further $408 million of Eastern Bloc equipment was made since the strategy switch with no destination mentioned.

Deliveries to Syrian rebels are set to increase in coming years as Picatinny has already earmarked as much as $950 million to be spent on Soviet-style ammunition by 2022 – it spent $1.3billion in the preceding decade – placing further pressure on the supply-line.

Picatinny’s CIA Pipeline

The CIA used a little-known Pentagon arsenal to purchase weapons for anti-Assad rebels, a contractor has claimed.

The SOCOM contractor, who asked not to be named, identified the Pentagon’s Picatinny Arsenal as a source for the CIA-run programme to arm Syrian rebels fighting President Assad as well as the Pentagon’s anti-ISIS campaign.

The CIA’s covert Operation Timber Sycamore, which was started in 2013 under President Obama, was stopped in July 2017 by President Trump.

Procurement records show that the Picatinny Arsenal previously bought Soviet-style ammunition for Camp Stanley in Texas, which, according to a 2015 report by a former CIA analyst, is the likely home of a secretive CIA depot that armed rebel groups from Nicaragua to Afghanistan.

A June 2016 Picatinny contract for “non-standard weapons” also points to CIA involvement. It says that unspecified quantities of weapons such as AK-47s and RPGs will be purchased on behalf of “Other Government Agency (OGA),” a euphemism for the CIA.

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel

The newly revealed $2.2 billion pipeline financed by the US, as well as an earlier 1.2 billion euro pipeline financed by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates that was previously revealed by BIRN, have meant boom times for arms producers in Central and Eastern Europe.

Factories such as the Krusik missile manufacturer in Serbia and the VMZ military plant in Bulgaria have drastically increased production in response. Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic promised on July 1 to turn “meadows and forests” into arms factories and almost double Serbia’s arms exports to $750 million by 2020 as he toured Belom, a recently opened bullet factory.

While the pipeline has yet to dry up, Pentagon contractors have been forced to scour the world for new sources and have requested permission to provide aging stockpiled material rather than newly produced material, according to documents obtained by reporters.

The US had traditionally turned to Romania and Bulgaria for non-standard armaments, but the surge in demand has forced contractors to look to the Czech Republic, BiH, Serbia, and now Russia’s neighbours Ukraine, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, and even Afghanistan, according to US procurement records.

As demand continues to grow, the competition between contractors to secure weapons, is becoming increasingly fierce, forcing them to look even further afield, including Pakistan and Vietnam, a source said.

The Pentagon contractor, who asked to remain anonymous, said that this had created an “environment where greed is the motivating factor among most … contractors involved”.

Scarce supplies have pushed the Pentagon to lower its standards for weapons and ammunition. Previously it had required suppliers to provide equipment of less than five years old but in February it dropped this requirement for some equipment, according to official documents obtained by BIRN and OCCRP.

Munitions stored in poor conditions degrade, sometimes becoming unusable or even dangerous. A Pentagon contractor due to train Syrian rebels died in June 2015 when the 30-year-old RPG he was handling exploded at a firing range in Bulgaria.

Undermining the Arms Control System

The smooth functioning of the weapons supply-line to Syria depends not only on keeping the final destination of the arms secret but also – say experts who have reviewed the evidence obtained by BIRN and the OCCRP – on supplier countries in Eastern Europe not asking too many questions about why the US is seeking so much Eastern Bloc weaponry.

These experts believe that as a result, both sides are likely in breach of their international obligations.

A valid end-user certificate guaranteeing the final destination of arms and ammunition is a standard international legal requirement to secure an arms export licence, but an end user certificate issued by SOCOM under the Syria programme and seen by BIRN and OCCRP does not mention the Middle East country.

Instead, it lists SOCOM as the final user, despite the fact the US army does not use Eastern Bloc weaponry itself. The document states that “the material will be used for defense purposes in direct use by US government, transferred by means of grants as military education or training program or security assistance.”

The document is similar in wording to four SOCOM end user certificates leaked online earlier this month, which detail how the weapons or ammunition will be for the “exclusive use of the US Special Operations Command, its NATO allies and partners in support of United States training, security assistance and stability operations”. 

In a detailed written response, the Pentagon did not dispute designating the US Army as the end user, adding it viewed the transfer of weapons to Syrian rebels as part of its “security assistance” programme, a term it uses in the legal document.

But Patrick Wilcken, an arms researcher at Amnesty International, described these end-user certificate as “very misleading” adding: “An end user certificate that did not contain this information [final destination] would be self-defeating and highly unusual.”

Washington has not yet ratified the UN’s Arms Trade Treaty, an international agreement attempting to regulate the transfer of weapons by preventing the diversion of weapons to war zones and improving transparency, and is therefore not legally bound by it. But as a signatory, the US is expected not to undermine the deal, something Wilcken argues that Washington is doing.

As a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE, Washington has, however, signed a series of measures to prevent weapons trafficking -- including a binding decision that end-user certificates include the final destination country.

European exporter states have ratified the ATT and are also bound by the OSCE’s decisions and the EU’s even stricter rules, known as the Common Position on Arms Exports. The EU rules apply to most prospective members.

Under the ATT and EU Common Position, exporters must weigh up the risks that arms and ammunition will be diverted and used to commit war crimes or “undermine peace and security” before issuing a licence.

Without knowing the final destination, such an assessment is impossible meaning that exporting states are acting “negligently”, Wilcken said.

Roy Isbister of Saferworld, a non-governmental organisation that works to strengthen controls on the international arms trade , said: “If the US is manipulating the process and providing cover for others to claim ignorance of the end users of the weapons in question, the whole control system is at risk.”

Authorities in Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia were presented with US procurement documents showing that weapons they had exported were destined to Syria. Romania, the Czech Republic and Serbia told BIRN and OCCRP that they had granted export licences with the US, not Syria, listed as the final destination. Prague’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs added that it supported the US’s fight against ISIS, but refused to confirm it was aware of the arms’ final destination.

Georgia’s Ministry of Defence said an export deal was under negotiation but it had not received an end-user certificate from the Pentagon and no contract had been signed. Ukraine and Bulgaria did not respond to requests for comment.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Poland, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan, which have all agreed to exports to SOCOM or Picatinny for an unspecified destination since September 2015, were also asked whether they were aware if these weapons had ended up in Syria.

BiH confirmed that it had issued export licenses to SOCOM but not Syria, while Poland and Croatia said it obeyed by all international rules. Kazakhstan and Afghanistan did not respond.

German authorities appear to have been less comfortable with how the weapons pipeline was operating. A leaked Pentagon email obtained by BIRN and OCCRP reveals how Berlin had become “very sensitive” to the huge quantities of Eastern Bloc weapons passing through its territory to US bases, apparently forcing a reroute of the supply-line to Syria.

Weapons continue to pour into Syria to fight ISIS, and fears are growing about what will happen to the arms and fighters when the jihadists are defeated.

Wilcken said that he feared for the future of the Middle East.

“Given the very complex, fluid situation in Syria … and the existence of many armed groups accused of serious abuses,” he said. “It is difficult to see how the US could ensure arms sent to the region would not be misused.”

Additional reporting from Pavla Holcova, Maria Cheresheva, Roxana Jipa, David Bloss, Roberto Capocelli, Ana Babinets, Atanas Tchobanov, Aubrey Belford and Frederik Obermaier.

This investigation is produced by BIRN as a part of Paper Trail to Better Governance project.


---------------------------
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Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2273 on: 2017-09-30, 11:31:03 »

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The Moral Hazard of Proxy Warfare

https://warontherocks.com/2015/10/the-moral-hazard-of-proxy-warfare/

Adam Elkus
October 14, 2015

It has been a very bad month for advocates of the “indirect” approach to U.S. national security policy. U.S.-trained rebels in Syria handed over their weapons to al-Qaeda; and the United States has been forced to sit back helplessly and watch as Russian bombers target CIA-backed rebel forces. The Department of Defense’s train-and-equip program has been cancelled after blowing an obscene amount of money to train what amounts to a fire team of operational fighters. The separate CIA proxy program remains, but nonetheless faces an uncertain future. And that’s just a small slice of what seems to be a flood of bad news about the outcomes of train-and-equip programs designed to create pliable, pro-American proxies to fight our wars. Even the most vociferous critics of President Obama’s Syria policy, however, fail to notice the larger problem.

Proxy warfare, while tempting, is by definition what economists call a “moral hazard,” or a situation in which one party can take risks that will be wholly borne by the other party in the partnership. Because no American lives are on the line, and men saying they will fight America’s enemies are not uncommon, U.S. policymakers often imagine they can create a “third force” to advance American interests. Not only does this attitude lead to ill-chosen interventions, it also ignores the asymmetry of interest inherent in asking others to risk their lives for a distant foreign power.

Certainly the raising of proxy armies has an undeniable appeal. The United States can achieve its strategic aims without devoting blood and much treasure directly to the fight. Moreover, in certain situations proxies may be the only way to influence the outcome. In fact, certain states — such as Iran and Pakistan — have exerted influence far above their normal station in international politics through their backing and direction of proxy forces. During the Cold War, the United States both benefited from its proxies and was harmed by the proxies of other powers, offering a misleading lesson about their effectiveness. So why shouldn’t the United States use proxies?

First, the interests of proxies and their sponsors may not be aligned. It is quite understandable, for instance, that Syrian rebels would care more about fighting the hated dictator Bashar al-Assad than taking on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). To Americans, ISIL is the main problem. But to many Sunni Arab Syrians, it is a distraction from the real horror of Assad’s murderous repression. Even if their aims did converge a bit more, proxies understand full well that their distant sponsor has limited interest in their struggle. At the end of the day, the friendly CIA officer working with them can always go back to his or her family and children in a peaceful and prosperous country. The proxy, however, cannot do the same because “home” is the very battleground that is being contested. Hence, proxies are canny survivors that will do business with anyone willing to lend a helping hand. Do not be surprised that the ostensibly pro-American Kurds will cheer on Russia’s airstrikes. They care only about their own fight, not Washington’s geopolitical rivalry with Moscow.

Proxies also create perverse incentives for U.S. decision-making concerning intervention abroad. They are cheap, flexible, scalable, and above all else expendable. Because a dead foreign proxy will never come home to the United States in a star-spangled coffin, the United States can engage in adventurism of questionable direction and value. A far older mess with proxies, the Bay of Pigs, nearly triggered nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The broadening of the Vietnam War into a struggle that destabilized the whole of Indochina was possible due to the ease with which the United States raised armies of proxies that could act as foot soldiers in the expansion of an ultimately futile war. The White House’s petulant response to criticism of the Syrian train-and-equip program suggests a lot about the problematic incentives that proxies present to American national security policymakers.

In blaming political opponents for supposedly forcing it to train a Syrian opposition army, the White House unintentionally revealed its Syrian decision calculus. The White House claims it invested in the Syrian train-and-equip program, in other words, in large part because it wanted to deflect potential criticism from domestic hawks. There are a lot of valid reasons for supplying weapons, training, and large sums of money to a Middle Eastern group of militants. It should go without saying that getting political opponents off your back is not one of them. If, indeed, this was one of the core drivers of the U.S. effort to back Syrian rebels then we should not be surprised that it has turned out to be a bloody disaster.

Finally, there is something very unjust and disturbing in the way in which the United States can encourage men to risk their lives under the false hope that Uncle Sam will be with them the whole way. In reality, we will write them off and abandon them to their fates as soon as supporting them becomes inconvenient. That is, unfortunately, the reality of international politics. If we are forced to choose between, say, keeping faith with the men we have backed in Syria and avoiding a confrontation with Russia, we will obviously not trigger World War III over a group of rebel fighters in the Middle East. But therein lies the problem. Is it right to encourage others to fight and die for us under false pretenses of U.S. support? More often than not, when following through on our promises to proxies poses far lesser challenges for us, we elect to let them burn instead of lending a helping hand. We have a long and sordid history of this, and our hapless Syrian pawns are only the latest to realize that the United States’ promises cannot be trusted.

This is, to be sure, not a blanket call to abandon the policy and strategy of using proxies to aid American interests. It is, however, a call to recognize the perverse incentives inherent in the enterprise, and the difficulties of pulling it off. Proxies are often deployed in situations where using any form of coercive force may not be in America’s interests. Proxies also allow policymakers to dodge the question of whether or not intervention is justified. We certainly — as opposed to rare situations like the Cuban Missile Crisis — will avoid any severe long-term costs. But the men who fight for us will pay with their lives for being foolish enough to believe that our word is our bond; and those who do not can be expected to do whatever it takes to survive (including flirting with our enemies). Like anything else associated with American defense and national security, the training and funding of proxies ought not to be done glibly. It should be accompanied by sober assessment of the risks, costs, benefits, and challenges inherent in the matter. However, due to the enormous temptations that proxies pose to pressured policymakers looking for solutions to difficult security problems, it is unlikely that such sober assessment will always occur when proxies are considered.


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Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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Re: 9/11 debate - enter at your own risk! « Reply #2274 on: 2017-09-30, 15:16:56 »

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Why Jihadism Won’t Be Allowed to Die

https://geopolitics.co/2017/09/02/why-jihadism-wont-be-allowed-to-die/

A serious working hypothesis is being discussed for a while now among independent geopolitical analysts. Here it is, in a nutshell.

by Pepe Escobar

Daesh may be dying – but the world is still encumbered with its walking corpse. Plan B of Daesh’s masters may have been to indoctrinate repeated waves of misguided youth across the EU and “seduce” them into D.I. Y. jihadi terror, creating fear and insecurity in Europe. I’ve just been to Barcelona — and that’s not happening. No Fear.

Daesh can also manipulate its brand name to stake a claim into what we may call the New War Belt in Southwest Asia. That’s also not happening, because the “4+1” – Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, plus Hezbollah – with the addition of Turkey, and with China in a “leading from behind” role, are all working together.

The unfinished war across “Syraq” coupled with spasms of jihadism in Europe could certainly still metastasize into a massive Eurasian cancer, spreading like a plague from Afghanistan to Germany and vice-versa, and from the South China Sea to Brussels via Pakistan and vice-versa.

What would happen under this cataclysmic scenario is the complete derailment of the Chinese-driven New Silk Roads, a.k.a. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); its integration with the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EAEC); and a massive security threat to the domestic stability of the Russia-China strategic partnership, with uncontrollable bellicose scenarios developing very close to their borders.

It’s no secret which elements and institutions would very much cherish internal political chaos in both Russia and China.

Charlie gets stronger

Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski may be dead, but geopolitics is still encumbered with his corpse. Brzezinski’s life obsession is that no peer competitor to the US should be allowed to emerge. Imagine as he lay dying contemplating the ongoing, ultimate nightmare; a Russia-China pan-Eurasian alliance.

The less disastrous scenario in this case would be to seduce either Moscow or Beijing into becoming a US partner, based on which one would pose a lesser “threat” in the future. Brzezinski focused on Russia as the immediate threat and China as the long game threat.

Thus the obsession of the US deep state and the Clinton machine in demonizing all things Russia – like an infantile neo-McCarthyism on steroids. Inevitably, what this geopolitical back hole has precipitated is China’s even more rapid advance on all fronts.

Not to mention that the Russia-China strategic partnership kept getting stronger every day – an eerie echo of Capt. Willard’s line in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now; “Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker, every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger”.

And yet Charlie is not squatting; he’s conquering via trade and investment. And he’s not in the bush; he’s all over the Eurasian plains.

A basket of Hobbesian flare-ups

The other American dalang, Henry Kissinger, is still alive, at 94. Advising President Trump before the January inauguration, and posing as the supreme gray eminence on China matters, he suggested Russia should be courted.

But then came the clincher. Clearly identifying that the Russia-China-Iran alliance holds the key to Eurasia integration, Kissinger revealed his true colors; it’s the weakest link – Iran – that should be neutralized.

Thus his recent proclamation/warning about an “Iranian radical empire” developing/stretching from Tehran to Beirut as the “vacuum” left by Daesh is filled by the Persians.

And here we have Kissinger once again as the unreconstructed Cold Warrior that he is; exit Communism, enter Khomeinism as the supreme “evil.” And may the Lord bask in praise of the Wahhabi matrix of jihadism enablers; the House of Saud.

The Kissingerian recipe sounds like music to the US deep state; Daesh should not be routed, it should be “realigned” as a tool against Iran.

Who cares that the notion of an “Iranian radical empire” per se does not even qualify as a joke? Lebanon is multicultural. Syria will continue to be ruled by the secular Baath Party. Iraq rejects Khomeinism – with tremendously influential Ayatollah Sistani privileging the parliamentary system.

The “4+1” – backed by China — have forged a serious alliance in the fire of the Syrian war. None of this will change by a Kissinger decree. As for “filling the vacuum”, the alternative is Daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria. “But wait!” — say the neocons/neoliberalcons of the War Party. “We like that!”

And that brings us full circle to the initial working hypothesis. Daesh won’t be allowed to die – as much as the geopolitical re-engineering of what Dr. Zbig used to call the “Eurasian Balkans” refuses to die.

ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K – that regroup in Afghanistan – can be so handy to wreak havoc in the intersection of Central Asia and South Asia, so close to key BRI development corridors.

Moscow and Beijing though, know exactly what’s goin’ on. The phony Caliphate was useful in an attempt to break off BRI across “Syraq”, as much as Maidan in Ukraine was useful to break off the EAEU. Other war fronts will follow – from the Philippines to Venezuela, all bent on disrupting regional integration projects under a Divide and Rule strategy of US satraps manipulated into Hobbesian asymmetrical flare-ups.

Sixteen years after 9/11, the name of the game is not GWOT (Global War on Terror) anymore; is how, under the cover of GWOT, to disturb geostrategic expansion by the people who matter; “peer competitors” Russia and China.


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Everyman Standing Order 01: In the Face of Tyranny; Everybody Stands, Nobody Runs.
Everyman Standing Order 02: Everyman is Responsible for Energy and Security.
Everyman Standing Order 03: Everyman knows Timing is Critical in any Movement.
   
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