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!

Whatever happened to Guevara?

Guevara was one of the first pop culture heroes who popped out of the so-called "Syrian civil war." She came out of nowhere to dominate pro-"rebel" propaganda for a few months.

Check out here and here. There's dozens of mainstream fluff pieces just like that to choose from.

That was such a compelling story. Too compelling. I caught the whiff of bullshit right away.

Then Guevara faded away... only to be replaced by the White Helmets fairy-tale, and Little Bana after that.

So why/how did she fade away?

Was her head blown off by a Russian sniper? If so, you'd think we'd have heard about it, because that's something that would have had immense propaganda value.

Maybe she found out her kids were still alive, and she didn't need to take revenge?

Or maybe, and I don't want to go all conspiracy here, but maybe, the narrative managers on her file realized the Sniper-Babe fable was so silly it was bound to be a liability in the long run. Once word got out that Guevara was entirely imaginary, the Clinton crowd feared their Syrian war-mongering could lose a lot of cred.

Those first responders, on the other hand, are the real thing. They actually exist. We know that because we've been funding them to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Just ask Le Mesurier.

Oh, I forgot... he did an Epstein to prevent the shit from hitting the fan.


Anyway, that's speculation. I'm only wondering what happened to Guevara.

Why the White Helmets are untouchable

Trudeau's foreign policy is really Uncle Sam's foreign policy writ small. We've known that for some time. In fact, there are exactly zero examples of the folks in Ottawa diverging from US foreign policy in the PM Fluffy era.

America's little brother is tasked with doing stuff that Trump himself is loathe to do.

Like rolling out the red carpet for those bold humanitarians, the White Helmets. As you may recall, those are the folks in Syria who worked exclusively in the areas controlled by the radical Islamist head-choppers, who provided Western media with a steady stream of evidence of Assad's war crimes.

There's a reason Western media had to rely on the White Helmets for news about Syria. Sending their own reporters into combat zones meant certain death. Not at the hand of the Assad regime, but at the hands of the "freedom fighters."

It's instructive that while Israel, Jordan, and the US declined the opportunity to give sanctuary to any of these folks, Chrystia Freeland welcomed them to Canada.

The latest controversy around the White Helmets has sprouted up around the OPCW scandal. This hails back to the alleged Douma gas attack. There were a handful of MSM journos who pegged that as bullshit from the get-go. Robert Fisk of The Independent comes to mind.

If the Douma gas attack was indeed faked, as more and more mainstream journalists are saying, we are left with an awkward question.

The White Helmets showed us video of over forty dead victims of that alleged gas attack. If the gas attack was faked, where did those dead folks come from?


There's a reason the Globe and Mail and the CBC haven't said a word about the OPCW scandal. To acknowledge that would be to acknowledge that our Foreign Minister allowed dozens, if not hundreds, of hard-core Islamic terrorists into the country.

White Helmets fairy tale fraying rapidly

It has always been obvious to anyone capable of critical thinking that the tale of the White Helmets, those brave Syrian first responders, was as far-fetched as it was fetching. Up until very recently, however, anyone voicing their suspicions has been dismissed as an Assad-loving Putin stooge.

That's changing. Over the past week both Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday and Jonathan Steele of The Guardian have joined the ranks of those disclaiming the official narrative. Neither of these writers can be accused of pro-Assad sympathies or of being Putin's stooge. So far nobody in mainstream Canadian media has had the courage to pick up the story.

Seems to me Chrystia has some 'splainin' to do.

Black hands in motion

I see where James Le Mesurier, mastermind of the White Helmets propaganda triumph, leapt to his doom from the balcony of his Istanbul apartment. They say he was depressed.

You'd be depressed too if spooks from half a dozen countries, including your own, were highly motivated to see you as an "inconvenient fact."

We know what happens to inconvenient facts.

And how to read Morales heading to Mexico for asylum? Just last week Donny J offered to invade Mexico to save Mormons from drug cartels. Now he's got an added incentive!

I fear AMLO has tipped his hand. He's now on the official enemies list.


Oh shit, now we gotta restore democracy to Mexico too!?

When is a volunteer not a volunteer?

There's another dose of White Helmets propaganda on view at the Globe and Mail today, courtesy of Mark MacKinnon.

Seems that a few of those brave White Helmet volunteers that Israel allowed transit to Jordan last year remain stuck in Jordan, instead of finding their way to a warm welcome in Canada. Apparently there are "security concerns," and our Foreign Minister sounds like she's trying to fob them off on some other Western country, one that doesn't vet their young Muslim immigrants of fighting age, coming from combat zones, as thoroughly as Canada does.

Call me skeptical, but the White Helmets saga has smelled mighty fishy from the get-go. The official story, that these are local volunteers saving their neighbours from the vile Assad's relentless attacks, sounds good on the face of it.

So why does that bit of local altruism require an ex-SAS guy from the British Army by the name of James Le Mesurier to organize it? And how can a "volunteer" group soak up well over $100 million in Western financing over four short years? That's well over $25,000 per "volunteer." To put that into context, $25k is about 20 years salary for a conscript in Assad's Syrian Arab Army.

Either these are the best paid volunteers in the Middle East, or James and his Mayday Rescue outfit are siphoning off one hell of a management fee.

MacKinnon recycles the stale tale of the White Helmets expose of Assad's use of chemical weapons:

Videos made by the White Helmets also provided the initial evidence-later substantiated by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons-that the regime had used chemical weapons against its opponents.

Mark is being disingenuous with that claim. Google "OPCW news" and see what comes up. The integrity of the OPCW has taken a huge hit in recent weeks, and Mark is surely aware of that fact. Why not mention it in his story?

Instead, he quotes Chystia Freeland blaming Russian smears.


Not sure exactly what it is you're doing, Mark, but it isn't journalism. Propaganda, perhaps?

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.

Chrystia Freeland scores honorary White Helmet!

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs has been recognized for her services to ISIS affiliate Syria Civil Defense, also known as the "White Helmets."

As everyone knows, the White Helmets are courageous volunteers from all walks of life who risk everything to save innocent civilians. They are strictly non-partisan but work exclusively in areas of Syria held by Nusra Front, ISIS, and al-Qaeda.

It apparently costs a lot of money to keep these altruistic volunteers in business. Over the course of their rise to stardom they have been lavished with many millions of dollars in funding from the same Western governments who have been the most vehement in their denunciations of the legitimate government of Syria.

Suspicious minds may conclude that the White Helmets are little more than a PR stunt, designed to provide cover for Western support for the very terrorists we've allegedly been fighting all these years, but Freeland herself has denied this, claiming it is mere Russian propaganda.

What a relief! For a brief moment I felt a sense of dread that we'd let a bunch of ISIS operatives, "terrorists," into the country...

A new fascism for a new century

One thing easy to miss during the last two years, as our "free press" was incessantly waving the Russiagate hoax at the public, is how the purveyors of fake news are incrementally shutting down our ability to access news that comes from alternative sources.

The Washington Post gave acres of free publicity to an outfit called PropOrNot in late 2016. PropOrNot claims to be working diligently to ferret out "Russian propaganda" on the internet. They compiled a handy list of websites to shun if one wishes to avoid having one's thoughts contaminated by "fake news." I'm a regular visitor to a number of those sites, and I like to think I'm intelligent enough and sufficiently well read to decide for myself when I'm reading bullshit.

PropOrNot would prefer that I not imbibe the propaganda to be found on sites like Global Research or truthdig. Frankly, my bullshit detector has to work a lot harder when I'm reading the Washington Post than when I'm reading those sites.

Similarly, the Integrity Initiative was a UK government effort to steer the public away from "fake news." It is beyond ironic that the fakery of the Integrity Initiative was exposed by one of those fake news sites we're supposed to avoid.

That concept of a "network of networks" detailed in the RT story clarifies a lot of things. It goes a long way to explaining the White Helmets' journey from al Qaeda auxiliary to Hollywood, and eight-year-old Bana al-Abed's journey from Aleppo to the Oscars.

Unfortunately, the powers that be are working overtime to make those alternative news sources harder and harder to find. Our tech overlords are joining with governments and the corporate media to restrict our access to information that might be upsetting to the establishment narrative. The Facebook-Twitter-Google crowd are all-in for making sure that your delicate sensitivities will be spared inconvenient facts.

It's all for your own good, of course.

In Albert Speer's Spandau prison memoir, the former Hitler deputy observed that if the Nazis had had television, they would have been unstoppable.


The new fascists have way more than television.

On the trail of fake news;connecting the dots from Syria to Hollywood

Read a great feel-good news story in my Sunday Star today. Seems that some "opposition activists" (code for the al Qaeda /ISIS crowd fighting for regime change in Syria) have teamed up with some entrepreneurial Americans to develop an app that gives those plucky activists a heads-up that a pro-government fighter-bomber is heading their way.

They've got planespotters lurking around Syrian airbases. When they spot a jet taking off they call in the particulars to a "foreign server," where the information is plugged into magic algorithms. Almost instantly, the algorithms calculate where that plane is heading, and then send a warning to those target areas on social media. A simple cell-phone app has saved tens of thousands of civilian lives!

I was surprised that war-torn Syria would have such robust cell-phone coverage, especially in the rebel-held areas. Doesn't the Syrian government control the cell networks? Wouldn't they just turn off the coverage for any area they planned to bomb?

Something doesn't add up, so I thought I'd dig around a little. The Star filched the story from the Washington Post, and the Post's story appears to be an abbreviated version of this story at Wired from a few days before. This story provides a little more background on the three partners who founded Hala Systems: Dave Levin, the American entrepreneur, John Jaeger of the US State Department, and "Murad," the Syrian coder working in Turkey on "data management" for the White Helmets.

The White Helmets are the civilian defense outfit that works only in areas under the control of the so-called rebels, primarily ISIS and various affiliates of al Qaeda. There is an abundance of evidence that strongly suggests institutional ties between the White Helmets and the terrorists, and the White Helmets have received at least $100 millions in financing (and an Oscar!) from the very Western countries that have sponsored the overthrow of Assad from the beginning.

So far our good-news story has ensnared the White Helmets, their sponsors in the US and other countries, and their links to the terrorists that we've supposedly been fighting since 9/11, but where's the Hollywood connection?

Here you go. Dave Levin, inventor of the miracle app saving lives in Syria, is listed as a collaborator on the website of USC's World Building Institute. Take a gander at their partners page. You'll find the aristocracy of the global infotainment industry very well represented indeed!

Among other things, these connections clarify how little Bana made it so smoothly from Aleppo to Turkey to Hollywood.

As for that story being flogged via Wired, WaPo, and the Toronto Star, I don't know why you'd need spotters lurking around Syrian air bases when the US military can see every airplane in the sky anywhere over Syria.


But it gives the story a human touch, doesn't it?

What would Jesus do?

On considerable reflection, I fear I've perhaps been a little harsh in my dismissal of the White Helmets.

And it's not because they're not terrorists.

No, it's because of my Christian values. Yup, believe it or not, I was baptised into the Christian faith at Schloss Beuggen way back in '55. My understanding is that was an orphanage at the time.

I may want to take the matter up with my alleged parents.

But irregardless, I do try to temper my commentary by asking myself, just before I push "publish," what would Jesus do?

Well, I think Jesus would give the vile head-choppers another chance.

Wasn't it Jesus who said "let they without blame cast the first stone?"

And let's face it; none among us is without blame for something or other.

I further believe that the attitude of Jesus in showing mercy to the miscreants reflects Canadian values through and through.

I mean, look at our Foreign Minister's dear Nazi grampa. Over 40,000 Canadians gave their lives in the fight against the Nazis, yet once the war was over, we let bygones be bygones.

We didn't sit around holding grudges against Nazi-collaborators. No, we gave them a warm Canadian welcome!


There's no reason we can't do the same for the White Helmets.

Bring on the Syrians!

I been thinking, next time I retire, maybe I'll head back to Saint John.

Lived there for a spell back in the early '90s, when I worked at Mr. Irving's shipyard, building those frigates for the Royal Canadian Navy. Ya, that was me. Sure, there was a couple thousand other guys "worked" there, but everybody knew who done all the actual work.

Even though life was somewhat unkind to me during my tenure in Canada's oldest city, I've always had a warm spot in my heart for the old girl. That's why it pains me to see what she's come to.

All those solid shipyard jobs are gone. The main Irving yard is in Halifax now.

A lot of the people are gone too, off in pursuit of greener pastures.

That's led to a situation where Saint John has some of the most affordable real estate in the land. You can get yourself a two-family classic east-coast-style home in the downtown for well under a hundred grand. Rents may be low by Ontario standards, but even if you only got 600 bucks a month for that other unit, you'd pretty much have your own roof taken care of.

This is why Saint John needs Syrian immigrants. Yup, bring on those White Helmets!

Hey, they were making a $150/ month "stipend" in the homeland; even at min wage they'll be pulling down two grand! And nobody dropping barrel bombs on your head... you've made it to paradise!

As for jobs, I just took a tour of the Canada Job Bank and they've got 401 jobs on the board in the Saint John area. True, many of them are going to be out of reach for a new arrival, but plenty of them are not. Landscaping. Entry level restaurant jobs. The kind of jobs traditionally filled by recent immigrants, come to think of it.


Come on White Helmets; now it's time to save Saint John!

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...