Moderate rebels take Syria - Democracy and Pride parades coming soon!

Finally! There’s a whole lotta gloatin’ goin’ on today in certain circles. Washington, the Pentagon, Langley… What I’ve read at the JPost today is a little more nuanced. Yes, it’s a happy day in some ways, but… and there’s the rub. While it’s good that Assad has been vanquished, the Israelis know the “moderate rebels” better than anyone. Remember a few years ago when Canada rescued about 100 of those brave Syrian White Helmets that were trapped by Assad’s forces? Chrystia Freeland was even honored as an “Honorary White Helmet” by the White Helmets themselves! The White Helmets were first responders who worked exclusively in rebel held areas of Syria. That’s because they were rebels! And how moderate were those rebels? Moderate enough for Canada, but not nearly moderate enough for Israel. Although those humanitarian White Helmets escaped Syria via Israel, Israel was adamant that not a single one remain there. That’s because they know the truth, and the truth is, today’s moderate rebels are just the latest rebranding of the ISIS head-choppers and the Al Qaeda terrorists who allegedly brought down the twin towers. To my complete shock, CNN aired an interview with the HTS (latest acronym after AQ and ISIS for the usual head-choppers) leader that actually broached this subject! The CNN interviewer quizzed al-Julani on his remarkable path from terrorist Al Qaeda operative to ISIS leader to moderate rebel leader celebrated by CNN. It’s a stunning exercise in narrative management and well worth a look. She even brought up the fact that HTS is listed as a terrorist entity by the USA and its vassals, and brought up the $10 million bounty the FBI has on him. We’re supposed to believe all his terrorist activity was just youthful indiscretions, the Islamic fundamentalist version of an Amish kid out on their “rumspringa.” Sure… What we know for sure is Israel is now rid of Assad, and instead, has a collection of Islamic fundamentalist whackos next door. Good luck with that!

US-backed forces doing God's work in Syria

Today's Sunday Star presents an AP story that confirmms our belief that US-backed forces are doing great stuff in Syria besides liberating Syrian oil. "US-backed forces free women, children at ISIS camp." Well, thank goodness for US-backed forces. Writer Bassam Mroue is so thrilled to report the good news that "US-backed" appears six times in a 300 word story. Don't they have editors anymore at Torstar or Associated Press? So what were the baddies up to that drew the wrath of US-backed forces? Oppressing women and children, if such an outrage can be imagined. In fact, the evil-doers are so vile they have killed 44 people this year. Sounds to me like we could use some US-backed forces to clean up Chicago. After that, maybe they could pay some attention to Syria's neighbour, Israel, where over 80 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces thus far this year... Oh wait... those ARE the US-backed forces.

Pot-addled hillbilly ripped off again

Here's a story by Craig Murray at Consortium News on 14 November, about the ever-so-timely demise of James Le Mesurier. Murray had the same story on his own blog on the 12th.

Here's what I posted 11 November. Looks like the same story to me!

So, did Craig rip me off?

Not at all. That's a story that pretty much anyone who follows things could piece together themselves.

Le Mesurier was the critical link between UK and US security agencies and the Islamist radicals we were lavishly funding throughout our sham "war on terror."


Once our Syria regime-change gambit floundered, it was beyond obvious that he had to go.

Top terror mastermind killed again!

Islamic State's top towelhead 'o terror is a gonner! The good news came directly from the lips of The Real Donald Trump, so obviously it must be true.

This is of course not the first time the good guys have killed Abu Bakr "Big Daddy" Baghdadi. Check out this accounting of his various deaths at International Business Times. That's from over two years ago and doesn't include his several assassinations since. This guy has more lives than Bin Laden!

So did they really actually get him this time?

Who knows? Maybe...

But consider this counter-narrative. It was a particularly hallucinatory week in US foreign policy. It began with Trump's announcement that he, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, was withdrawing American troops from Syria. This sent the entire US defence and foreign policy establishment into a collective shit-hemmorage.

What!? That's treason! Nobody, not even the President, pulls US troops out of a foreign country they were illegally occupying! This just IS NOT DONE!!!

By the end of the week, forces higher up the food chain than the Commander-in-Chief had over-ruled Trump. US troops weren't leaving Syria after all; they were merely re-locating within the country to "protect the oil," which like all oil globally, pines for the protective umbrella of Uncle Sam.

Having exposed Trump as an ineffectual puppet president and American foreign policy as a bankrupt farce, the folks behind the curtain needed some catchy headlines to take our eyes off this shit-show.


Voila, there we have it; US Special Ops kill top terrorist in daring mission!

Chrystia Freeland welcomed ISIS terrorists into Canada

When reports of the "missing" pages of the OPCW report on the Douma gas attack first began to circulate a couple of weeks ago, I didn't want to jump the gun and give them too much credence. After all, this story seemed largely confined to RT, Sputnik, and assorted non MSM sources. It increasingly seems that in this case, RT got the story right. The New York Times and the rest of the Western mainstream media got it wrong.

By now, a number of Western journalists I respect, including Robert Fisk, Jonathan Cook, and Peter Hitchens, have seemingly corroborated the RT version.

No hint yet from the Globe and Mail, the CBC, or any other Canadian media outlets that they acknowledge being conned by the White Helmets.

And it wasn't just our media outlets who were conned. Apparently our PM and our Foreign Minister were too...

Unless they were in on the scam from the beginning.


Foreign Minister Freeland gets honorary White Helmet

I'm looking forward to an explanation from our Foreign Minister.

True fakery, fake truthiness, fake news, true fake news, and fake news that might be true...

I see where the White Helmets are in the news again. Well, obliquely, anyway.

As regular readers will know, I'm more than a little skeptical of the official story. You know, those plucky volunteers who work exclusively in areas of Syria held by the "rebels," meaning ISIS/al Qaeda, and their affiliates.

Ya, I'm fully aware Assad is a bad dude and all that, but...

That plucky band of Syrian volunteers was originally organized by James Le Mesurier, a non-Syrian, non-Arab, non-Muslim white guy with deep connections to the UK military. And, for "volunteers," they've managed to hoover up an incredible amount of money from the same constellation of foreign state actors who have been behind the Syrian "civil war" from even before the get-go.

So here's the latest story.  Some version of it has been on virtually every "fake" news channel on the internet (although I believe it's absent from Glenn Greenwald's "The Intercept"). This of course is where things get dodgy. How do we know what's fake news on the internet? That original Propornot disinformation piece at the WaPo, advising us what was fake and what was not, turned out to be more fake than true itself.

Our official media, on the other hand, has not even acknowledged the existence of this story.

Anyway, this alleged report from the OPCW (the folks who are charged with investigating alleged chemical weapons attacks) was allegedly deep-sixed by the OPCW itself. If that is the case, and if that allegedly quashed report is indeed the real deal, then the entire "White Helmets are heroes" narrative goes down the shitter, as does the credibility of the OPCW itself.

That would be a huge story.

The allegedly quashed OPCW report was leaked to an outfit called the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, a bunch of mainly Brit academics who you'd think would know enough to put a comma after Propaganda. I'm not sure what their fakery rating might be, but they've done some yeoman work on the faker-than-fake Integrity Initiative (lots of initiative, a little light on integrity).

So, who/what to believe? Let me know if you figure it out.

Canada rolls out red carpet for White Helmets

According to this story at CBC, Canada is poised to accept 250 White Helmet civil volunteers from Syria, plus their (no-doubt very extended) families.

Depending on how closely you follow current events, you may or may not be familiar with the rather dodgy history of this bold brotherhood of "civil defence volunteers."

They are routinely portrayed as heroes in our mainstream media. They worked exclusively in areas of Syria under the control of the most virulent Islamic radicals. That so many young fighting-age males would be allowed to operate in such areas without pledging allegiance to the ISIS head-choppers or picking up a gun is but the first of many mysteries.

They even won an Oscar for their heroics!

Another mystery concerns their status as "volunteers." My understanding of the word "volunteer" is that a volunteer is someone who gives freely of their time to further some cause that is worthwhile, at least in their own mind.

If these White Helmet guys were volunteers, why did they get tens of millions of dollars per year in funding from the very cabal of nations committed to over-throwing the Assad administration?

The CBC story mentions that the White Helmets were founded by a "retired" British SAS operative by the name of James Le Mesurier. Google that name and see what comes up.

Here's a story from Scott Ritter, the former US weapons inspector, that includes a lengthy discussion of the White Helmets.

Here's a Robert Fisk story that raises a few questions about the heroic White Helmets. Fisk is one of the most respected Middle-East reporters published in mainstream media.

I'm a guy who tries to keep an open mind. I'm an immigrant. I come from a family that once had refugee status.

Maybe Scott Ritter is full of shit.

Maybe Robert Fisk is full of shit.

I want to welcome refugees.

But maybe, just maybe, we're opening the door to 250 hard-core ISIS militants.


Something to think about...

Now would be a good time to bid adieu to NATO

NATO promotes democratic values and guarantees the freedom and security of its members -NATO

According to this story by Evan Dyer at CBC, our NATO allies France, Britain, and the US, are actively engaged in tracking down and killing their own citizens who had volunteered to fight with ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Do these citizens of our NATO allies get the benefit of fair trials or the presumption of innocence or any of that fancy rule-of-law stuff?

No way Jose. Their names get added to a kill list and it's so-long Jihadi John.

That's what "democratic values" have been reduced to in the three most powerful NATO nations.

Do we really want to be part of that club?

Ever since its reason for being wafted away with the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has been desperate to make itself relevant again.

Let's bomb Belgrade.

Let's liberate the women of Afghanistan.

Let's bomb Libya.... and so on.

Needless to say, none of these busy-work exercises did much for freedom or democratic values.

That's not all. How are "democratic values" faring in Turkey these days? Turkey is the NATO member with the second largest military after the US.

And how do our democratic values stack up against those of our NATO allies Poland and Hungary?

With tiny and entirely irrelevant Montenegro being made a full-patch NATO member just recently, it's beyond obvious that the leadership of the NATO gang sees goading Russia as a great strategy for keeping itself in business.

And just who is leading NATO?

Ostensibly it's General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg, but every serious person knows that it's the US that calls the shots in NATO.

And as we know, the Commander in Chief of the USA is one Donald J. Trump.

I'll say it again; how badly do Canadians really want to be in that club?

What I learned from my Globe and Mail today

Jeremy Freed informs me that I can spend $2,300 plus applicable taxes on a baseball cap!

I had no idea! But it's true; Stefano Ricci has opened up a boutique in Vancouver. Great! You'll just have to step over the homeless addicts on the sidewalk, and you too can put down $2,300 plus tax for a baseball cap!

Is this a great country or what!?

Elsewhere, Kelly's got an interesting profile of Tim Bezbatchenko. Even though I don't give a fig for football, a good writer can find the human interest angle in any story. But the best part of the sports section was the obit for Gregory Baum.

I've always been fascinated by obviously intelligent and well-educated people who manage to hold on to their religious convictions in spite of their intelligence and education, and Baum was such a man. It is somehow reassuring that such a thing is possible.

On A21 Lee Berthiaume tells the sorry tale of Canadian Special Forces who have been training the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraqi army for a couple of years. Yup, we trained them both and now they're fighting each other!

Good job, Canada! That was an obvious waste of resources, and underlines once again the folly of doing something just to be seen as doing something, even as you have no clue as to what you're doing.

Berthiaume completely misses the bigger story; most of the nominally independent Kurdish area in Iraq was retaken by Iraqi forces this past week in an operation so swift and seamless that it must have had the connivance of the American overlords.

Thanks for your help with ISIS, now forget about that Kurdish homeland nonsense and do as you're told.

Also on A21 we're treated to a Canadian Press story about a chap in Gatineau who inflicted a year's worth of violence on his teenage daughter for "removing her hijab when she was away from the family home." Hmm... wonder what culture that family hails from?

What a pity the Globe brain trust couldn't find room to place that story on A5, where Ingrid Peritz gets an entire half page to bemoan the fate of niqab-wearing women who are being bullied by Quebec's Bill 62. It would have made for great juxtaposing.

Frankly, I think Bill 62 is a pretty big hammer with which to thwart the scourge of a few dozen Muslim women choosing (or being coerced) to cover themselves. Is this really a "problem?" Don't they have bigger fish to fry?

No edition of the Globe is complete without at least some token Putin-bashing, and that's what you'll find on A6. Between hosting the latest Ukrainian PM and passing our version of a Browder Bill, we're still sticking it to Putin big time.

Finally, Renzetti uses her A2 slot for something other than professing her love for Hillary or contempt for Trump. She dumps on Amazon instead! How refreshing! There really needs to be more questioning of Amazon and Big Tech in major media, and it's a welcome thing to see at least a hint of it.

There you go. Was it worth $6.30?

Qatar get's voted off Trump's "Arab NATO" island

Trump made a lot of noise in his speech in Riyadh a week ago about Iran's supposed underwriting of terrorism. No doubt more than a few of the assembled Sheikhs felt the sweat beading up under their Keffiyas; after all, no one knows better than they who's really been behind the financing of Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, ISIS, and sundry other chapters of Head-choppers Inc.

Not that it's much of a secret. Those e-mails Putin stole off Hillary's computer last year revealed that she's been aware of the game for years and obviously was wholly untroubled by the fact.

It's certainly not something you read about in American media of course. We prefer to hew to the Israeli line that Iran is the troublemaker in the neighbourhood. But with Trump shining the presidential spotlight on the matter, something was bound to give.

And today, Trump's "Arab NATO" chums discovered the traitor in their midst; Qatar. Yup, one of the Sunni Kingdoms has indeed been sponsoring ISIS et al. And not only that, they've been way too chummy with Israel's number one existential threat for quite some time.

Looks like we're seeing a new power bloc stepping out of the shadows; a US/Saudi/Egypt/Israel combine. Forget democracy, forget human rights, and above all, forget the Palestinians.

If you think we live in interesting times, you ain't seen nothing yet!

59 Tomahawks prove Trump's a team player after all

There's a new tone all around the MSM today. Hey, maybe Donny J is not in Putin's pocket after all!? (although I did notice that a handful of your more implacable warmongers in the American political firmament are pouty that the Ruskies were afforded a heads-up re the 59 incoming - guess they'd rather skip the foreplay and go straight to nuclear Armageddon.)

All the important leaders in the Nations of Virtue were quick to offer Trump props on a job well done; Merkel, May, Hollande, Netanyahu.

Shares of Tomahawk manufacturer Raytheon got a Trump bump today, as investors bet that this opening volley of 59 portends great things for the future.

Saudi Arabia, the foremost ISIS/Daesh sponsor, thanked Trump, as did spokesmen for the terror outfits themselves.

Even Canada's lovable mop-topped hippy-dippy peace-loving PM Justin is all-in for America's unprovoked and completely illegal attack on yet another predominantly Muslim nation.

Amazing how such a diverse cast of characters can come together in praise of US aggression!

ISIS to determine outcome of next presidential election in France

When you think of a typical Frenchman,  do you picture a hale and hardy ninety-year-old white dude pedalling his bicycle through the verdant countryside with a big bagatelle and a jumbo flask of red wine in the carrier, while puffing on an unfiltered cigarette?

Or do you picture an alienated young man with dark skin cooped up in an urban high-rise, wondering why this cradle of modern secularism renders him a second-class citizen even though he was born there?

That guy on the bike is a stereotype, to be sure. He's of that generation who engineered all those goodies that Michael Moore never tires of reminding us of. He landed a good job straight out of school and between the annual mandatory three months of holidays and being on strike six months of the year only did an actual 5.2 years of work before hitting the mandatory retirement age of fifty, and life's been nothing but red wine, cigarettes, and bike rides ever since!

That other guy is a stereotype too, but like it or not, the population of alienated brown people in France is growing rapidly, while that other stereotype is fading away.

It hasn't helped that Hollande the Hapless has, over his mandate, further alienated both of those groups. Which brings us to the next election.

The so-called "centre-right" candidate next April is to be Francois Fillon, it was determined today. Fillon isn't any more centre-right than the socialist president as near as I can tell. Seems to be a bit more hawkish on taking benefits away from that guy on the bike. If Fillon has his way that guy will be renting a room in that urban high-rise from a Muslim family.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Getting to know other cultures is always a good thing, but forcing old Jean off his bike and off his wine and ciggies is just going to create animosity. Maybe Jean will decide he'd rather die... maybe that's the plan? Getting all those old fuckers off the pension rolls would be a huge money saver, after all.

So, even though the mainstream press already foresee the April election as a show-down between Fillon and Marine Le Pen, I don't see either of our stereotypical Frenchmen having any reason to vote for Fillon.

Much will depend on who represents the French Left. While Hollande wasn't much of a "socialist," France, unlike the US, actually has a genuine left polity. Given the right candidate for the times, and the candidate will not be selected until January, it's possible to see that the greater showdown could be between the Left Front and Le Pen.

Hollande has been a complete disaster. In the first place, he's spent virtually the entirety of his mandate with his head up BHL's ass. It's fine to have presidential advisers, but when their advice is consistently and disastrously wrong, you can't just blame the adviser and walk away.

Given the right Left candidate, I can see both our stereotypical Frenchmen voting Left Front, as well as a goodly portion of the electorate who voted Hollande in 2012. That could keep Le Pen out and bring a genuinely progressive and inclusive party to power.

Which is where ISIS comes in. The Europeans in general, and nobody more enthusiastically than the French, have been co-conspirators with the US in the project to destroy the Muslim nations of the Middle East. Whether we're saving the people from their tyrants or eliminating their weapons of mass destruction or whatever gloss we want to put on it, we've been busy destroying the Middle East. That has created both an unprecedented refugee crisis and ISIS. Not hard to figure out that those two phenomena are mutually reinforcing.

Spare me the bullshit head-scratching about the clash of civilizations and why they hate us; they hate us because we've been stealing their stuff and killing their kids for generations. Ask that alienated young Muslim in that high-rise. He knows, even as the savants and the political elite pretend they can't figure it out.

So France is five months out from a presidential election and awash with refugees from countries the West has been "liberating." A certain unknown percentage of those refugees will be hard-core radicals. A much larger percentage have at least some sympathy for that hard core. Every time one of those hard-core radicals explodes in a French shopping mall between now and April, Le Pens polling numbers will spike.

That's how ISIS will determine who becomes the next president of France.

Five years after we liberated Libya, we're liberating them again!

Yup, more US bombs to liberate the people of Libya!

I have a hunch we're gonna keep liberating those benighted folks as long as they've got a single drop of oil in the ground.

Note that we're specifically liberating Sirte, supposedly an ISIS stronghold. But, check out the last few lines of this story from Al Jazeera from a few days ago. Sirte was already liberated!

I have another hunch that the story behind the story is that things aren't going according to script for America's bumboy du jour, General Haftar. It's now come out that at least four of the Nations of Virtue, US, UK, France, and Italy, all have boots on the ground in support of the good General.

You will recall that General Haftar cut short a cosy twenty-year retirement in Virginia to return to his homeland and fight for... the people? ...the oil? ...the USA?

Nobody knows... but it's clear that when General Haftar calls in missile strikes, the USAF answers the call.

Is the jig finally up for the wily Erdogan?

As I write this multiple media reports have President Erdogan playing hide-and-seek with military police firing live rounds in his 1,000 room palace.

The myriad contradictions that have come to contaminate Erdogan's reign over the past few years made it inevitable that things would come to this. Turkey is a NATO ally, the world's premier club for "freedom and democracy," but under Erdogan it has become anything but free and a democracy only in a very limited sense.

Freedom of the press? If Erdogan doesn't like what he sees in your newspaper or on your TV channel, his thugs will take over your newsroom.

He's been waging a vicious war on his Kurdish population for the past year, because although a cease-fire had been largely successful, he needed to ramp up violence to assure an absolute majority in the second of last year's elections. It was a cynical strategy that worked, and allowed him to even further consolidate his power. At the cost of thousands of Turkish lives.

He's been playing a double game in the "war on terror" for years, supposedly fighting ISIS while at the same time supplying them with weapons, facilitating their trade in stolen oil, and allowing free passage through Turkey for ISIS fighters.

He alienated Israel and Washington with the Mavi Mamora fiasco.

He's risked a major escalation of the Middle East inferno with the reckless downing of a Russian jet. He has alienated virtually every one time ally, to the point where he'd have a tough time finding a place to seek sanctuary today.

Maybe he can swap digs with Fethulla Gulen. Gulen gets the 1,000 room palace and Erdogan gets that lovely country get-away in Pennsylvania.

CANADA SNUBBED!!!

Canadian media across the board, from the drooling knuckle-draggers at the Sun to the pinkos at the Star, are aghast that our new badass Minister of Defence, the nattily turbaned Harjit Sajjan, was not extended an invite to today's conflab of the anti-ISIS coalition!

They allege with one voice that this can only be due to POTHEAD's promise to end our participation in the illegal bombing of Syria and Iraq, led as always by our ally the USA, which leads the world in illegal bombing missions against sovereign nations.

Mainly Muslim sovereign nations, by some fluke of happenstance...

And our fourth estate is unanimous in declaring this a bad thing?

Frankly, I'm hoping the Big Dog and the Me-Too nations kick us out of the bully-boy club altogether. No more NATO. No more F-35 bullshit where we spend hundreds of billions for the sake of "interoperability" with the rest of the war criminals.

Let's make Canada an independent country again!

Turkey unleashes massive barrage of tank and artillery fire on ISIS

I see where Turkey PM Ahmet Davutoglu is doing a little chest-thumping over those 200 ISIS baddies his guys have dispatched in the past 48 hours. This is apparently pay-back for that terror-bombing in Istanbul's tourist quarter the other day.

Really?

Is Davutoglu admitting that Turkey knew the locations of 500 ISIS encampments all along, but has done absolutely nothing about them until now? That would seem to support the school of thought that believes the Turks have been mentoring and coddling the "Islamic State" all along...

Sounds like a massive barrage of bullshit to me.

Christmas Wishes

By all accounts it's been a bleak year, at least if you pay attention to the news.

Between the great European refugee migration, Putin's quest for world domination, and ISIS forcing the Nations of Virtue into a death match for the future of civilization, we're led to believe that things only went from bad to worse in 2015.

The think tank here at Falling Downs figures most of this is scaremongering or all-out bullshit.

Take those huddled masses hiking to Europe for example. Sooner or later some of the brighter lights in the Western intellectual firmament are going to connect the dots and realize that most of these folks are coming from countries that we've been bombing to ratshit for the last ten or twenty years.

Hey! Maybe that's why they're refugees! Maybe we should stop bombing them?

Maybe if we stop creating refugees we wouldn't have a refugee crisis on our hands.

This would of course entail some soul-searching in the centres of power in the West, and the most central of centres of power would be Washington. There is hope on the horizon, and though this may be hard to believe, that hope comes in the person of one Donald Trump.

Not that Mr. Trump has any fresh ideas or policy options that would lead to a more peaceful world; I would agree with the critics who claim he is a bigot and a racist who is totally bereft of ideas or policy options, but those critics are missing the point.

Donald Trump is important because he threatens the very foundations of America's toxic, sclerotic, and America-destroying two-party political system. With any luck, Trump could yet create a legacy other than over-priced condos and bankrupt casinos; he could be the catalyst for a long overdue reinvention of politics in the USA.

The business of politics has to be taken away from business interests. Citizens United was the last nail in the coffin of American democracy. Until that is undone, America's downward spiral will continue. Not Donald Trump nor anyone else is going to make America great again until the system itself is wrestled out of the hands of the corporate lobbyists and the super-PACs and the armies of Beltway think-tankers.

The perfect gun for hunting Christmas shoppers in the malls of Europe

I'm a little surprised about the low profile that Italian story about the 800 Winchester shotguns has managed to maintain.

Even habitual fear-mongering sites like Britain's Daily Mail are soft pedalling the terror angle, stressing instead the fact that the Winchester Defender, (three shotgun blasts in under half a second) is not a potential terror tool, but a "hunting gun."

Indeed!

And the fact that this shipment originated in Turkey, with a proven history of supporting terrorism, and was heading to Belgium, hotbed of ISIS sympathizers and acolytes, raises scarcely a note of concern?...

Hmm...

Dropping names, dropping bombs, and why Obama needs to put US boots on Syrian soil

That indefatigable cheerleader for war, Bernard-Henri Levy, solemnly informed us this week that, make no mistake, we are at war with Islamic State.

"A new kind of war," no less.

And please note that this is not a war of our choosing; this war has been forced on the US and France and their allies. Yes, the sordid history of France in Algeria and America's serial wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have nothing to do with the emergence of radical Islam.

They hate us for our democratic values, our openness, our tolerance...

Even the great BHL seems to be vaguely aware of what a putrid pile of shit he has concocted here. Perhaps that is why he has perfumed this outrageously dishonest dung-heap of a call to war with no less than twenty instances of name-dropping:

 Leon Blum

 Elie Halevy

 Georges Bataille

 Michel Leiris

 Roger Caillois

 Thucydides

 Clausewitz

 Carl Schmitt

 Saint Augustine

 Saint Thomas Aquinas

 Victor Hugo

 Paul Claudel

 Hitler

 Massoud

 Izetbegovic

 Mujibur Rahman

 Tariq Ramadan

 Abdelwahab Meddeb

 Churchill

 George Pitt-Rivers.

Wow! That's a staggeringly impressive level of erudition on display in one relatively brief essay! How is it possible that such a brilliant narrator could be lying to us?

And fear not, BHL already has a road-map to victory in the war that the forces of darkness have forced on the Nations of Virtue.

Yes, they've got us cornered, those "fascislamists" do, and we freedom-loving peaceable nations who have been ravaging and plundering and humiliating the Islamic world for generations have no choice but to fight a merciless war for our very survival...

And the very survival of Western Civilization depends on Mr. Obama putting American boots on the ground.

Now!

...at least according to that philosopher, war-monger, and imbecile-at-large, the esteemed Bernard-Henri Levy.

The King of the "New Philosophers" is nothing more than a shill for the sinking Empire

It would be easy to dismiss Bernard-Henri Levy as a vainglorious douchebag, but he's a douchebag who still has a lot of schlep. The great BHL, as he styles himself, took credit early on for the liberation of Libya. Given how that triumph has worked out, one can only marvel that any reputable news platform would bother to publish his ruminations viz the latest Nations of Virtue operation, the liberation of Syria.

But there he was the other day, in Canada's national newspaper of record (and no, that's not the National Post), waxing wise on the whys and why-nots of the crusade against Assad. The paper earnestly informs us that BHL is a founder of the Nouveaux Philosophes movement.

Wow! Guess we are meant to be mightily impressed!

BHL's essay begins with a couple of highly speculative assertions presented as facts in the first paragraph, and goes downhill from there. Hey, he's a philosopher, not a journalist!

Here's one of the few real working journalists still working the Syria file, Patrick Cockburn, contradicting most of what the great BHL has to say.

So who are you going to believe?