Next steps for Gillian Rosenberg

When last we encountered "Gill" three weeks ago, she had begun building her brand by getting world wide media attention as the first foreign female fighter to join the Kurdish resistance.

That was a great start!

Mere weeks later, Gillian is rocking the headlines again!! This time she is the first foreign female fighter captured by ISIS!

Here's what she should do with this bountiful over-abundance of publicity;

1. Stage daring escape and/or rescue.
2. Hire PR agency.
3. Retain agent.
4. Negotiate movie deal.
5. Negotiate book deal.
6. Pump speakers' circuit for all it's worth...

Of course, that could all go for a shit in the event that her ISIS captors decide to feature her in their next be-heading video...

In which case she will at least have the satisfaction of knowing she died for a cause she truly believed in.

Dr. M. Koohzad explains why the Kurds are people we can work with

When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation posted their hagiography of the plucky Israeli-Canadian woman now fighting for the Kurds, the story contained this interesting nugget;

Israel's NRG news site reported at the time that Rosenberg turned to crime after running short on money, that she was estranged from her parents and had tried in vain to join the Mossad spy service.

Israel has maintained discreet military, intelligence and business ties with the Kurds since the 1960s, seeing in the minority ethnic group a buffer against shared Arab adversaries.

Since the 1960's? That would explain a lot of Kurdish mischief-making, would it not? And would it not make perfect sense, in that the Kurds represent a viable fifth column within many of Israel's adversaries in the region? Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey?

Today Counterpunch has on view an essay by Dr. M. Koohzad, reminding Americans who to thank for the lowest gasoline prices they've seen in years... why, the Kurds of course!

Any serious person will immediately recognize that as a tail-wags-dog story. The collapse in petroleum prices has been engineered by the House of Saud, not by the Kurds, and their rationale has nothing to do with the happiness of American consumers and everything to do with driving a spike through the heart of America's fracking industry.

Nevertheless, Dr. Koozhad makes some telling points.

In the event that petroleum reserves in the Kurdish areas were to be fully exploited, Kurdistan could indeed emerge as a major player in the global petrol sweeps. And unlike those selfish anti-Americans in Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and even, it seems, Saudi Arabia, the reader is assured that the leadership of an independent Kurdistan would pledge eternal fealty to the West in return for providing the guns and bombs required to make that independence possible.

Alas, there is also a hint of venality in Dr. Koohzad's thesis; as much as he is overtly sucking up to the US and Israel, he also lets slip that the biggest cash customers for Kurdish oil are in fact Turkey and Iran!

There you have it. We can work with the Kurds because they are the only democrats in the Middle East (outside of Israel, of course) and they can keep us in cheap oil for a long time. That combo of democratic values and cheap gas is an offer America cannot refuse.

Fighting "terror" to empower women

The signal trope of the first barrage of bullshit intended to justify our unjustifiable onslaught on Afghanistan in 2001 went roughly like this; the Nations of Virtue are justified in this illegal war because we are liberating the women of Afghanistan. Yes, we are bringing light to the benighted and hope to over 50% of the population, so international law be damned; we've got the moral high ground.

In the 1990's my family sponsored an Afghan Muslim family into Canada as refugees. Both parents had once been university professors in Kabul. That was in the bad old days, the days when the shadow of the Evil Empire hung over Afghanistan, the dark days of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, when women voted and worked as university professors, a darkness which Washington spent some $40 billions to undermine and overthrow.

Our refugees were not fleeing the Najibullah regime; they were fleeing the US-installed Taliban. Yet when America and the gang of the virtuous displaced the Taliban... one of the main goals was to liberate Afghanistan's women!

Unfortunately, the warlords given the key to the country by the US invasion in 2001 were no more sympathetic to matters of women's rights than the Talibs. The golden age of women's empowerment in Afghanistan lived and died with the Democratic Republic.

But the trope lives on. Behind the scenes, the Nations of Virtue have at one time or another provisioned virtually every so-called terror group in the Middle East. The Iranian MEK was able to lobby its way off the terror list by paying vast sums to well-connected Washington insiders. Left-leaning Kurdish resistance groups were placed on the terror list due to Turkey paying vast sums to well-connected Washington lobbyists. In the rest of the world, this is called influence peddling. In America it's called lobbying, and it's as American as apple pie baked with genetically modified apples. (Which, by the way, are pretty much the only kind of apples you can find in America, thanks to the GMO lobby.)

Our Kurdish terrorists seem to be following the MEK out of the terror wilderness. Here's a compelling plea from a bona fide lefty begging for guns and money for those Kurds on our terror list. And just in time for Nov. 11, writer Ben Norton makes sure he throws the F word into the mix a few hundred times, just so you're clear on who the bad guys are.

Just like in 1939, we're fighting the Fascists, but even scarier Fascists than before!

We also have this timely story making the rounds; Israeli woman joins Kurds in fight against Islamic State. The Islamic State/ISIL/ISIS is only the most recent iteration of the evil other, created out of whole cloth by the Nations of Virtue, and now an existential threat to our very way of life.

The Gillian Rosenberg fable is the product of a lobbying campaign that has long stressed the egalitarian nature of Kurdish society. Among the vaunted Peshmerga fighters, the women punch above their weight. We rarely if ever run into a discussion of the tradition of FGM in Kurdish society, because that particular abomination is the sole province of the Islamic State evil-doers we're fighting.

We, the Nations of Virtue, are all about freedom and peace and the equality of women.

Therefore, if you care about the rights of women, you will whole-heartedly endorse the latest US war on Arabs who don't know enough to follow orders.