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the evil american empire goes one hypocrisy better than the last one...Outgoing US President Joe Biden has claimed credit for the fall of Damascus to a coalition of armed groups, including jihadists from Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS). Washington had weakened the supporters of former Syrian President Bashar Assad, the American leader has said. The result of the lightning offensive of anti-government militants in the past two weeks was a “fundamental act of justice” and a “moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering citizens of Syria,” Biden said in a video address from the White House on Sunday. “For years, the main backers of Assad have been Iran, [the Lebanese-based militant movement] Hezbollah, and Russia. But over the last week, their support collapsed, all three of them. Because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” Biden said. Washington has been pushing for the ouster of Assad since 2011, when mass protests spiraled into a devastating civil war, in which foreign-armed Islamists emerged as dominant players among anti-government forces. HTS, one of the groups that took over Damascus on Sunday, was formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate. The war was exacerbated further in 2014 when the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) rose as a regional threat amid the collapse of security in Syria. READ MORE: CNN interviews ‘moderate’ terrorist leaderIn his speech, Biden highlighted the sanctions on Syria, as well as the US military presence in the country and its support for Kurdish militias in the northeast, which denied Damascus access to fertile lands and oil fields under their control. The US has also supported Israel in its military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon and its direct confrontation with Iran, Biden added. “Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” Biden said, mirroring similar remarksby Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Through this combination of support of our partners, sanctions, diplomacy, and targeted military force where necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region. The US president claimed that Washington was clear-eyed about HTS and its “grim record of terrorism and human right abuses.” Washington will “assess not just their words, but their actions,” he stated. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Sunday that HTS’ history of terrorism and atrocities is a concern for the US. READ MORE: Taliban hails Islamist victory in SyriaAbu Mohammed al-Julani, the current leader of HTS, has had a $10 million bounty posted on his head by the US since 2013. According to the US government, the fighters he led were responsible for kidnappings and massacres of civilians. https://www.rt.com/news/609024-biden-credit-damascus-fall/
AS FAR AS DESPOTS GO, ASSAD WAS A VERY MILD DICTATOR COMPARED TO THE LOONY AMERICAN PRESIDENTS AND TO GENOCIDUS NETANYAHU WHO ALL HAVE MADE SPURIOUS CLAIMS ABOUT ASSAD WHILE THEY MURDER WOMEN AND CHILDREN BY THE TRUCK-LOAD...
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE THAT TURKEY, ISRAEL AND THE USA GOT TOGETHER WITH THE SAUDI (WAHHABI/SUNNI) TERRORISTS TO UNSEAT ASSAD... WHILE MAKING A DEAL WITH RUSSIA THAT ITS BASES WOULD NOT BE ATTACKED. TO AVOID WW3, RUSSIA PLAYED A CONSERVATIVE GAME AND SPIRITED ASSAD TO MOSCOW... THE REST IS STILL TO COME... MEANWHILE, SYRIA WILL BECOME A BASTARD CASE LIKE LIBYA... PREPARE FOR A NEW WAVE OF REFUGEES IN EUROPE...
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the lies we see....
BY Viktor DEDAJ
Syria is not a country I know. In fact, from the outside, it seems so complicated that I wonder how many people really know it. But if it is, it is not complicated at all.
On the other hand, I know very well how Western propaganda works and I see it running at full speed. And making you "understand" is not one of its missions. Its mission is to plant general impressions in your minds that are enough to obtain consent - or resignation. To push you into the position of "why the hell try to know, since I already know?". To give you a feeling of understanding enough to dissuade you from trying to understand more since... you already understand.
This is a very common attitude among CSP+ and consumers of mass media in general.
And the human ego being what it is, it does not take much to achieve this. After all, "it is easier to deceive a person than to convince him that he has been deceived" (Mark Twain, if I am not mistaken).
And it does not matter if the subsequent events bring its share of denials, because the human mind being what it is, most people will have moved on and will even have forgotten "why" they think/thought such and such a thing.
You can test this phenomenon on yourself by thinking about the image you have of China, for example, and compare it to the information you actually have about China. How many Chinese cities can you name, apart from Beijing (or Peking) and Shanghai? As for Chinese culture, I'll go for it: dragons, lotuses, tigers, kung-fu, rice, chopsticks and tea. There you go, you know as much as I do now.
And for Iran, it's even worse: Tehran, mullahs, Shiism. Then? And I must point out that while I know the word "Shiism", I have no real idea what it is or what it implies. And I am someone who claims to be very interested in the way the world works.
Yesterday, I came across articles written in 2009, about Israel. That was 15 years ago. The parallel with current events is staggering. They talk about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, massacres of civilians, Israeli soldiers taking selfies, in short, everything that some people seem to be discovering today. With Israel, the more you dig, the more the disgust increases.
And to return to the initial question, how was it possible to distil an image, if not "positive", at least sufficiently attenuated and embellished to obtain consent or resignation for this State that has always been deeply racist, fascist, colonial and genocidal?
If they can make such a gap between image and reality, with Israel, imagine what they can accomplish in the opposite direction for other countries.
In short, all this to say that I have no revelations to make to you about Syria.
The only thing I know (without quotation marks) is that when a situation is "complex", and when the geopolitical stakes are high, and because the media are what they are, the probability of being correctly informed is exactly equal to ZERO. In other words, the probability of being misinformed is equal to 100%.
In this kind of situation, it is never the truth that is prepared in the kitchen and served on a platter in the dining room. If you doubt it, ask to see the Chef.
In this kind of situation, the truth, you have to go and get it yourself in the jungle, sometimes with a bow and arrows, sometimes just with your teeth.
And we often come back empty-handed, unlike the "special correspondents" and other "specialists" on the sets whose prowess in terms of hunting for information is limited to reading the first page of search results on Google.
To sum up, let's say that I prefer to ignore a truth than to know a lie.
Viktor Dedaj
chestnut hunter
https://www.legrandsoir.info/tous-ces-mensonges-que-l-on-sait.html
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.
on the western payroll.....
What reasonable person wouldn’t give terrorists the benefit of the doubt? Maybe banking on jihadists will work out this time, eh? If not, the West can always just bomb them into oblivion. That should work out about as well as it always does.
Where have we seen this movie before? Ah, yes. “Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace,”journalist Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent in 1993 – about Al-Qaeda founder and former CIA asset against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden. And we know how that turned out. Now Al-Qaeda’s leader in Syria is getting the same treatment from the Western establishment.
It seems like just yesterday Washington and vassals were slamming the same group of jihadists who recently rampaged through Syria and rocked right up to Damascus as former President Bashar Assad fled to Moscow.
We’re talking here about a coup d’état by a group – Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – long considered terrorist by the West. And not even just by Washington, whose embassy in Syria tweeted in 2017 that “HTS is a merger and any group that merged into it becomes part of Al-Qaeda’s Syrian network.”
The European Union’s Agency for Asylum’s website also describes HTS as “frequently committing serious human rights abuses, including harassment, assassinations, kidnapping, and torture, as well as unlawful detention of civilians,” and having committed suicide bombings, hostage takings, extortion, and assassination. But hey, at least they’re not Assad, right?
Also, why does it seem like he and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky share the same stylist? Maybe he figures that if he resembles the Western establishment’s girlfriend, they’ll fall in love with him. And maybe it worked, because they’re choosing him over Assad despite the fact that this same HTS leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is still listed as wanted by Washington to the tune of a $10 million bounty and is under a United Nations arms embargo since 2013 for palling around with ISIS. But he did brand his stampede through Aleppo, “Together We Return,” according to Britain’s Telegraph – which is apparently the new way of branding a coup d’état as social justice. He also has the Western media saying that his regime will be more lenient than the Taliban in Afghanistan. Woah, let’s not go too crazy now in aiming high!
Despite the United Nations’ condemnations of this guy, its special envoy for Syria apparently didn’t get the memo, calling the HTS coup a “watershed moment” from which the UN looks forward with hope for “peace, reconciliation, dignity, and inclusion.” Why stop there? Has he even assured the UN yet that his executions are going to be climate-neutral?
Britain’s deputy prime minister welcomed the change from Assad. You’d think that he hadn’t dropped off the radar. This is like when the West – led mainly by the UK and France – cheered the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi by local proxies in Libya, setting the country on the path to becoming a failed state. Not to mention sparking a tidal wave of migrants into Europe fleeing the ensuing chaos, which Gaddafi had explicitly warned would happen.
Meanwhile, the former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, toldSky News that it would be “rather ridiculous” if Britain couldn’t deal with these terrorists just because they’re on Washington’s outcast catalog. Chomping at the bit to do business with the guy who was palling around with ISIS now that the West has spontaneously rehabilitated his image – it’s almost like British intelligence hasn’t clued in to the fact that US sanctions serve to give Washington first dibs on deals with any terrorists magically converted into freedom fighters after doing the West’s dirty work. Just ask the French business community how they feel about being shut out of US-sanctioned Iran while Washington was granting exemptions to their own corporations doing business with Tehran.
Right in black and white on the EU’s website, it says that the objective of HTS is to “establish Islamic rule”in Syria by overthrowing Assad. Now they’re ecstatic about the exact thing that they were warning about.
Here in France, we’re a long way from the days, nearly a quarter-century ago, when former President Jacques Chirac was warning that overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq wouldn’t be the means to a glorious end that Washington fantasized about. These days, Macron, who you’d think might want to keep a low profile on the subject of presidential legitimacy given that a new CSA poll finds 59% of French want him to resign, has effectively underscored that he shares the same brain cell as his Western counterparts on Assad’s leadership. “The barbaric state has fallen. At last,” he said. “I pay tribute to the Syrian people, to their courage, to their patience.” Looks like the “barbaric state” might just be limbering up rather than falling, given who’s now in charge.
The West is great at ripping down regime change highway, cheering all the way – but not so great at finding exit ramps that don’t go straight off a cliff. Speaking of which, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saidthat Assad “oppressed his people brutally” and “has countless lives on his conscience and has driven numerous people to flee, many of whom have arrived in Germany.” You think it couldn’t possibly get worse in the fleeing-to-Germany department, huh? You’ve just blessed Al-Qaeda with an entire country. What could possibly go wrong?
Riding shotgun and handling the GPS in Scholz’s moron-mobile is his foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, whose navigational skills are so notorious that she infamously took a U-turn to be 360 degrees. Joining the anti-Assad pile-on, she added that “the country must not fall into the hands of other radicals – no matter what guise they take.”
A bit late for that when the guys taking over Syria are the ideological successors of the group – Al-Qaeda – that her Western pals hold responsible for nosediving into the Pentagon and New York’s twin towers on September 11, 2001. That’s what you’re cheering here, genius.
Surely the EU’s new foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, would be aware of small matters like the bloc’s own website describing these terrorists as having forced religious minorities to convert to Islam though, right?
“The end of Assad’s dictatorship is a positive and long-awaited development. It also shows the weakness of Assad’s backers, Russia, and Iran,” Kallas said.
Well, looks like she’s too busy obsessing over Russia and Iran to even bother caring who these guys are – beyond the fact that they’re not Assad. The same Assad who had managed to be ignored by them almost completely for years ever since their previous CIA and Pentagon-backed ‘Syrian rebel’ regime change operation failed. But now he’s suddenly worse than jihadists. Of course he has to be. Because otherwise how could they possibly justify condoning a successor of America’s former number one enemy to shake loose a whole country for the taking?
https://www.rt.com/news/609080-west-cheers-al-qaeda-successors-syria/
READ FROM TOP.
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.
RUSSIA AND IRAN DECIDED TO SPARE LIVES... SEE WHAT THE TERRORISTS DO....
MEANWHILE:
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has threatened to propose sanctions against fellow NATO member Türkiye if it attacks the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). A strong supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, Graham argued that sweeping operations against the SDF would benefit the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) and damage American interests in the region.
The SDF, which is dominated by Kurdish groups, reported over the weekend that it came under Turkish artillery and drone attacks.
Pan-Arabic news channel Al Mayadeen cited the local SDF command on Saturday as saying that “the Turkish occupation and its mercenaries” were clashing with the Kurdish-led troops around Manbij, a city to the northeast of Aleppo.
Reuters reported on Sunday that the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) has captured Manbij, while the SDF has withdrawn. According to the Turkish media, SNA was operating against Kurdish militias that are part of the SDF and are considered terrorists by Ankara.
READ MORE: Biden claims credit for toppling Syria’s AssadIn a post on X on Sunday, Graham argued that the US “should not allow the Kurdish forces – who helped us destroy ISIS on President Trump’s watch – to be threatened by Turkey or the radical Islamists who have taken over Syria.”
“We have to ensure that the roughly 50,000 ISIS prisoners in northeastern Syria – being primarily held by Kurdish forces – are not released,” he added.
“Turkey has legitimate concerns regarding different groups that reside in northeastern Syria,” Graham wrote, referring to Türkiye by its old name, but “an ISIS jailbreak … would be a nightmare for America.”
Turkey deserves to have a demilitarized buffer zone between northeastern Syria and Turkey to protect Turkish interests. However, if Turkey takes military action against Kurdish forces in Syria, it will jeopardize America’s interests dramatically.
“In the past I have drafted sanctions targeting Turkey if they engage in military operations against the Kurdish forces who helped President Trump destroy ISIS. I stand ready to do this again in a bipartisan way,” the senator warned.
https://www.rt.com/news/609106-trump-ally-calls-sanctions-nato/
Israel’s military incursion into Syria has been condemned by neighbors Egypt, Jordan and Qatar, who have accused the Jewish state of exploiting the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to seize land, in violation of international law.
Israel moved troops into a demilitarized buffer zone in the occupied Golan Heights on Sunday, after opposition forces seized Damascus and Assad fled to Russia. In a video statement from the region, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel’s 1974 agreement with Syria to establish the demilitarized strip had effectively “collapsed” once Syrian troops “abandoned their positions.”
Israeli troops and tanks moved beyond the buffer zone on Monday, entering Syria proper in an operation that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said is intended to create a new “security area” that would be clear of “heavy strategic weapons and terrorist infrastructure.”
The move was criticized across the Arab world. Qatar’s Foreign Ministry called it “a dangerous development and a blatant attack on Syria’s sovereignty and unity, as well as a flagrant violation of international law.”
Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi issued a similarly worded condemnation, as did the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, which declared that Israel had “exploited the…vacuum in Syria in order to occupy more Syrian land and to impose a new reality on the ground in contravention of international law.”
https://www.rt.com/news/609100-israel-condemned-syria-invasion/