Israel braces for fresh round of Islamic terror

Here's a fact you might want to ponder, at least if you're keen on peace in the Middle East.

Half the Palestinian population in greater Israel is under twenty years of age.

In their lifetimes, what has PLO/PA done for them?

If they are in Gaza, what has Hamas done for them?

Palestinians under both Hamas and the PA have known nothing but humiliation.

Along comes ISIL, Islamic State, with a promise of restoring Palestinian pride.

Driven out of Syria and Iraq after wreaking immense havoc, these toxic fundamentalists, with whom the IDF played footsie while they were on our side in Syria, seem to have a foothold in greater Israel today.

This can only get much worse before it gets better.

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!

Why "The War on Terror" will never be won with more bombs, more bullets, more resolve, more boots on the ground, more cliches...

If you've been following the news, Islamic State is up against it because they are now under attack in both Iraq and Syria. The latest "Battle of Fallujah," much ballyhooed in the media for the past week, has ground to a halt before the "new" Iraqi army and their American "advisers" even entered the city. This was to be a test not only of that army, but of Abadi's leadership.

In a face-saving bullshitting exercise, Abadi has today claimed that although victory is at hand, he and his new army have ceased their advance out of concern for civilian casualties! Were this whopper to contain even a minute morsel of truth, it would mark the first time in the last eighty years that any combatant on any side in any Middle Eastern conflict has ceased hostilities out of concern for civilian casualties...

No, what's happened is that this latest glorious liberation of Fallujah has run out of gas even before the new Iraqi army got there. You'll be hearing plenty of experts waxing wise in the days to come about what must happen now. More training. More American advisers. More guns, bombs, bullets etc. Of course that's what the experts will prescribe - otherwise they'd have to face the fact that the only way to make peace with this mysterious contagion known as " radical Islam" is, brace yourself... by negotiating with the  "terrorists."

And what a mysterious contagion it is. Why do these nihilistic death cults hate us so? For our freedoms? For our democracies? Because we let women drive cars?..

Or could it be something else? Could it be they hate us because we've been stealing their stuff, killing their kids, and destroying their societies for the past hundred years?

Something to think about.

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.

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?

The wily Erdogan's civil war gambit pays off

After failing to win a majority in the general election of 7 June, the wily Erdogan was faced with a stark choice; form a coalition government with one of the opposition parties, or plunge the country into another election campaign. Erdogan chose the latter course.

Then he stole a crucial chapter out of Netanyahu's playbook.

Bibi has long known that there's nothing the voting public likes more than a tough guy at the top in turbulent times. And, if perchance the times are insufficiently turbulent... well, the guy at the top is perfectly placed to ratchet up the turbulence, is he not? A well-timed provocation or two, and whoopsie!... the obliging "terrorists" are only too happy to unleash Armageddon...

Enter the strongman!

Unlike Netanyahu, Erdogan was triply blessed with terror threats. At the time of the 7 June election, a two-year peace with one of those threats was holding, the war on the Gulenists was, at least at the moment, muted, and Erdogan was actively nurturing the third terrorist threat, the Islamic State.

Post 7 June, Erdogan cranked the turbulence knob to eleven. He declared the truce with the Kurds over, declared war on Islamic State (who conveniently obliged him with two deadly terror attacks on Kurdish groups in Turkey) and declared all out war on the "parallel state" of the "terroristic"  Gulenist network.

To impress upon the electorate the importance of a strongman at the top, Erdogan pushed his country to the very brink of civil war.

And it's worked!

Alas, it may not have worked well enough. While today's election delivered enough votes for single party rule, it did not deliver enough to allow the AKP to make unilateral changes to the constitution.

You know what that means... between now and the next election, the turbulence will need to be cranked even higher.

Dire times for Turkey.

Canada's back-channel support for ISIS

No serious person can deny the links between the Saudi regime and its Wahhabi driven seedlings, al Qaeda and ISIS.

Nevertheless, the Harper gang was loathe to raise their voice in protest against our "Saudi friends." After all, those friends were responsible for the biggest manufacturing export "win" in the history of Canadian manufacturing.

This was one of the great achievements of Harper's Decade of Darkness.

Justin Trudeau has weighed in on the Raif Badawi file. Maybe that signals a sea-change in Canada's modus operandi. Maybe we'll no longer shut-up about human rights abuses just to secure those big wins for our foreign-owned export sector.

While Justin is championing Badawi, he might want to have a look at the case of Ali-Mohammad al-Nimr. Ali Mo pretty much done what Badawi done; used the internet to cast aspersions on the Saudi royal family. But unlike Badawi, Ali Mo lacks an overseas support network.

So Ali Mo didn't get sentenced to 1000 lashes; he got sentenced to a head-chopping... and get this; after they lop his noggin, he's due for a crucifixion!

Yup, if that sounds like a scene straight outta the ISIS playbook, it's because it is. Now you know where ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State/Daesh got their playbook...

Saudi Arabia!

So while we're busy as can be supposedly fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria with our fleet of '70's era jet-fighters, we're selling Saudi Arabia thousands of state-of-the-art armoured vehicles, the better to propagate their vision of human rights with.

US gifts 250 armoured vehicles to Kurds - but holds back the armour!

Here's a howler from the Washington Post!

The Kurds are supposedly America's "boots on the ground" in the battle against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. That's why the US gifted the Kurds a fleet of 250 used MRAP armoured vehicles. You'd think that's the least you can do for our indispensable allies.

You'd be wrong. You can do less by having technicians go to the trouble of removing the side-armour before delivery. In the words of one former American officer, that makes riding in the MRAP in a battle zone akin to committing suicide.

Supposedly the rationale for this spot of idiocy is that the side armour is classified technology and might fall into the hands of the Iranians.

Meanwhile, ISIS, the bad guys America has been targeting relentlessly with over 9,000 air strikes in the past year, have their own fleet of MRAPs, and guess what?



Yup, the Islamic State's MRAPs sport the full side armour!

US commentariat exploding in shit-hemmorages as Russia joins battle against ISIS

There's always been a few brazen incongruities about our battle against Islamic State, or Daesh, or ISIS, or ISIL...  this terror meme with many names...

Like, we all agree that the evil Assad has got to go, but when enthusiastic young people from the Nations of Virtue venture to the Middle East to join the battle against the evil tyrant, we brand them "terrorists!"

What up with that?

But now we've got no less an international ogre than Putin himself offering to assist the West in the battle against the head-chopping maniacs of ISIS.

Well, hold the phone...

Putin is not welcome in our losing battle to confront and roll back those most terrorific towelheads of terror!

Not welcome?

How is such a thing even possible?

I'm no expert. I'm not a commentarian for any of the multitudinous think tanks that spew war-mongering drivel against Putin and Assad and anyone else who inconveniences the master plan of the PNAC crowd.

But I've got a hunch...

Just like we don't want those youthful but unreliable freebooters heading over to Syria to "free" the Syrian people from Assad, we REALLY don't need a professional military force over there fighting the terror scourge of ISIS.

Why?

Because they might destroy ISIS and thereby save Assad's skin...

And that would completely wipe out every reason we had for creating the Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh in the first place!

An honourable politician in the Harper gang? Forsooth... what was I thinking?

It's been a couple of days. For a few hopeful seconds I thought perhaps Immigration Minister Chris Alexander had a "Damascus" moment. Faced with the enormity of the impact the Aylan Kurdi photo made on the conscience of the nation, I'd hoped Mr. Alexander suspended his re-election campaign to reflect on how far on the wrong side of history the Harper gang finds itself.

It appears my hopeful seconds were misguided. All indications are that the Big Steve crowd are consolidating around their utterly contradictory positions on Syria. The evil Assad gotta go, but the Canadian Air Force is over there bombing the crap out of Islamic State, the only force on the ground with any chance of facilitating that outcome.

That's beyond delusional and self-defeating; it's utterly schizophrenic

Be that as it may, the only "Damascus" moment the Harperites are likely to have is when God tells them they have to drop more bombs on Damascus.

As for the refugees, Harper has handled that file like he handles the ship-building file. You don't actually ever have to do anything.

Just keep making new announcements every few months.

That's the beauty of governing by photo-op and press release!

Turkey joins war on ISIS again

Here's a headline from the Times of London on the 25th July; Turkey joins war on ISIS with strikes in Syria.


And here's a Reuter's headline yesterday, exactly a month later; Turkey to join coalition's air fight against Islamic State soon: Pentagon.


So what's up? Is Reuter's just that much slower in sniffing out a story? Not likely. Is this an underhanded acknowledgement on Turkey's part that they've not actually got around to fighting ISIS yet and their war thus far has been on the Kurds that her NATO allies have been busy training?


That's not likely either.


The think tank here at Falling Downs figures the wily Erdogan is stealing a page out of Big Steve's Book 'o Bullshit and Bamboozlement. Why bother fighting Islamic State when you can get adulatory headlines for just announcing that you're joining the fight every month or so? It's like Harper's shipbuilding programs; ten years of announcements, and look, no ships!

Turkey heading down the shitter

It's long been taken as a given, here in the non-aligned centre, that the wily Erdogan is simply cutting his own path through a forest of dimwits and sycophants.


But the headline informing the world that it's Turkey's job to eliminate ISIS left me speechless.


We're not told what level of authority an edict from "Brett McGurk" might even have... we're just tossed this name, McGurk, and we're expected to understand that he's a semi-official spokesperson for US foreign policy.


And according to this story, it is now up to Turkey to cure the Islamic State problem.


At one level that is highly ironic because Turkey has been a key sponsor of Islamic State.


At another level, it's even more ironic because the same US policy gurus who are now demanding that Turkey solve Islamic state, are the very same ones who were greenlighting Turkey's collusion with that same Islamic State all along!

Harper gang mines fear factor for maximum electoral advantage

Minus the Air India thing and a couple of French-Canadian wankers who converted to Islam and went nuts, Canada has NEVER had a terrorist attack of any sort.

Let alone an attack from Islamic State.

But that's not slowing down the Harper crew's attack on Islam.

The latest headline grabber is Harper's proposed new law on banning travel to "terror" states.

Trudeau is right in labeling this as "posturing."

But it's so more insidious than that.

First of all, bear in mind that Canada has been utterly terror free.

In that environment, Canada, ie the Harper gang, decide to join some jury-rigged "coalition" that is bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

This is justifiable because ISIS has declared war on Canada. Yes, some Islamic State spokesperson mentioned Canada while reading a list of states allied against them.

That was the "declaration of war."

Big Steve has been milking that like gangbusters ever since.

Let's have a closer look at this ban on travel to so-called terror states.

Big Steve is obviously not going to designate our NATO ally Turkey as a "terror state."

Yet virtually 100% of Western Islamic State recruits enter Syria via Turkey.

You don't have to ponder this conundrum very long or very hard to come to the realization that the most recent Harper pronouncement about terror travel is absolute electioneering bullshit.

It means nothing, but it gets Big Steve a chance to fan the flames of fear while simultaneously presenting himself as the solution to a non-existent problem.

So fight terror. Vote for a strong Canada. Vote for peace and freedom.

Vote Harper on October 19.

Erdogan takes Turkey over the cliff

When Erdogan officially joined the war on Islamic State last week, the move was widely heralded in Western media as a good thing.

After all, Turkey has been, unofficially, the most prominent facilitator of Islamic State heretofore. ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State/Daesh would not have been possible without the connivance of Turkey. Not that this fact was widely acknowledged in that same Western media.

I've long been a fan of the wily Erdogan. He seemed to think himself the reincarnation of Kemal Ataturk, and he conducted himself accordingly.

But if you've been paying attention, you've noticed that the much ballyhooed war on the Islamic scourge is nothing of the sort. What he's done is declared a war on them but instead opened a war on the Kurds.

This can only end badly for Turkey.

Israel in the age of Islamic State

The arrogant Likudniks who have been running the show in Israel for the last 25 years today announced another 300 settler homes on Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

As every Israeli who gives these matters any thought whatsoever already understands, that's going to inflame resistance all over again.

The "resistance" these days is largely confined to teens throwing stones at settler vehicles.

Ya, I know there's those deadly Gaza rockets that never manage to hit anything, but by and large, those stone-throwers are the "resistance."

Their resistance has recently been further criminalized by the introduction of a 20 year jail term for the stone-throwers.

While that is going on, the Likudniks have been cynically annexing the Golan, because what the hell is Assad going to do about it?

We'll just help ourselves to those oil and gas resources while Mr. Assad is otherwise occupied.

Does nobody in the Likudnik power structure see where they are taking their country?

There may be folks high up in the IDF who think they have a handle on what's going on across the borders, and at this point the upheaval is ongoing across every border.

You've got a highly unpopular non-democratic government in Egypt tamping down the fires in the Sinai.

Lebanon is practically an anarchic state, as Syria and Iraq are already.

Jordan is on the brink.

And Netanyahu concludes that this is the moment to announce 300 settler homes in the West Bank!

Yes, it may be great PR to humour some of those IS guys who show up at the border seeking medical attention. But is there a long-term strategy at work in the Netanyahu cabinet?

The closest thing that the Likudniks have ever had to a "long term strategy" is the belief that when and if the shit hits the fan, the USA will come to the rescue.

It might be time to give that strategy a good re-think.

Canada training Kurdish fighters in Iraq while NATO ally Turkey bombs them

We're all well-acquainted with the story of Canadian Forces training up the Kurds in Iraq. After all, they're an invaluable ally in the war on Islamic State.

But here's an unexpected development; today our NATO ally Turkey bombed our Kurdish ally in Iraq!

Obviously NATO is having difficulty finding a singularity of purpose. In the long run, that can only be a good thing. NATO long ago outlived its mandate, and for over twenty years now has been desperately looking for reasons to keep its bloated bureaucracy intact, stumbling from one disastrous busy-work project to the next, from Bosnia to Afghanistan to Libya.

As the only Islamic member of the club, Turkey has long provided a veneer of non-sectarianism to what is essentially a proxy army for US interests. Perhaps when various NATO members are openly pulling in opposite directions, more people will realize that we'd all be better off without this relic of the cold war era.

After years of sponsoring ISIS, Erdogan and Davutaglu pretend they didn't see the blowback coming...

Sure, they're going to increase "border security" now that an ISIS suicide bomber has lit up on their side of the border.

Border security between Turkey and Syria has been a complete joke for at least the past four years. Turkey under Erdogan and Davutaglu has been a no-holds-barred conduit for fighters and weapons heading into Syria to unseat Assad.

But now they pretend to be utterly shocked that the very "terror" entities that they have been feeding and promoting all along have turned on them?

Erdogan (and make no mistake, Turkey remains Erdogan's show regardless of who the nominal leader is) has been playing a double game all the way down the line.

Now that duplicity is coming back to bite him.

Unfortunately, it's the little people who pay the price.

Obama's latest Syria initiative has found only 60 moderate rebels to train

It's been a PNAC wet dream to affect regime change in Syria for at least 20 years, but somehow the media still manage to fumble over the matter as though it's an idea Obama just came up with six months ago.

Hence the desultory reportage about the epic fail in the latest US "training" program of those imaginary moderate Syrian rebels.

Yup, they've only found 60 moderates in all of Syria to train up in their $500 million training program... and they'll be "moderates" till they get around the next corner with their US weapons and training, whereupon they'll hook up with their home crew of Nusra or ISIL homies.

Nobody ever imagined things would turn out any other way.

Those vile Islamic head-choppers are an American fabrication from start to finish.

They are labelled "moderates" for training purposes only.

Al Qaeda is just a Pentagon fabrication

And therefore, al Qaeda's slightly-more-sinister brothers in terror, the Qaeda offspring known variously as al-Nusra, ISIL, ISIS, and Islamic State, can safely be deemed Pentagon spawn too.

The think tank here at Falling Downs had our suspicions way back in '11, when it became obvious that those "Libyan rebels" NATO was continuously driving forward were nothing more or less than particularly lazy and particularly drug-addled al Qaeda "terrorists."

Once we had facilitated their triumph over the evil Gaddafi, it was on to greater triumphs!

That's why the US and her eager minions in the Gulf have been busy helping al Qaeda and its manifold mutations bring freedom to Syria for the last four years!

When you step back and think about it, back far enough so that your head is at least briefly clear of the propaganda smog, you can see the win-win here.

Fabricate an enemy and arm them to the teeth.

Bomb them to ratshit.

Arm them to the teeth again.

... repeat cycle.

It's been going on for years now.