Posts filed under 'Ideaology'
A substantial racist uproar is taking place in conservative America, particularly in right-wing radio and television. Reactionary pundits are drawing increased attention to plans to build an Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan, near Ground Zero. Republicans and conservatives have long been known to harbor racist views of Islam, although they’re hardly alone in this. Many on the right frame the entire religion as radical, fundamentalist, and a threat to national security. In light of this pattern, there’s little surprising about the right’s most recent attack on Muslim Americans as a secret, under the radar threat.
Continue Reading August 16th, 2010
Although the United Nations Security Council, which some politicians believe is one of the most undemocratic organizations in the world, voted in favor of a fourth round of sanctions against Iran over its uranium enrichment program, global public opinion is well aware of the fact that 15 countries, 5 of which are entitled to remain in an unquestionable monopoly and dominance, cannot in reality represent the interests of the international community.
Continue Reading June 23rd, 2010
WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
Continue Reading June 16th, 2010
Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.
In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.
Continue Reading June 15th, 2010
Most people still don’t know what caused the financial crisis. They know it had something to do with subprime mortgages and Lehman Bros, but beyond that, it gets rather hazy. Unfortunately, Congress appears to be in the dark too, which is why their attempt to regulate the system is bound to fail and pave the way for another crisis in the next few years. [Financial crises occur on average every seven years. Eds.]
The real source of the the last crisis is a design-flaw in the architecture of the modern banking system. This sounds more complicated than it really is.
Continue Reading April 29th, 2010
All frauds have a purpose, mostly to relieve the unwary of their wealth, though occasionally to launch some foreign adventure: the 1965 Tonkin Gulf hoax that escalated the Vietnam War comes to mind.
So what was the design behind “Operation Moshtarak,” or the “battle of Marjuh,” in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, the largest U.S. and NATO military operation in Afghanistan since the 2003 invasion? That Moshtarak was a fraud was obvious from the start, a con job that the U.S. media enthusiastically went along with.
Marjuh was billed as a “fortress,” a “city of 80,000” and the Taliban’s “stronghold,” packed with more than 1,000 “hard core fighters.” But as Gareth Porter of the Inter Press Service revealed, Marjuh is not even a city, but a district of scattered villages. As the days went by—and civilian deaths passed military casualties—the number of “hard core” fighters declined to 750, then 500, and then maybe 100. In the end, it was barely a skirmish. “Hardly a single gun was captured by NATO forces,” tribal elder and former police chief Abdul Rahman Jan told Time.
Continue Reading April 15th, 2010
A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.
The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website as a threat to national security. The US defence department was embarrassed when that confidential report appeared on the Wikileaks site last month alongside a slew of military documents.
The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies.
The newly released video of the Baghdad attacks was recorded on one of two Apache helicopters hunting for insurgents on 12 July 2007. Among the dead were a 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40. The Pentagon blocked an attempt by Reuters to obtain the video through a freedom of information request. Wikileaks director Julian Assange said his organisation had to break through encryption by the military to view it.
In the recording, the helicopter crews can be heard discussing the scene on the street below. One American claims to have spotted six people with AK-47s and one with a rocket-propelled grenade. It is unclear if some of the men are armed but Noor-Eldeen can be seen with a camera. Chmagh is talking on his mobile phone.
One of the helicopter crew is then heard saying that one of the group is shooting. But the video shows there is no shooting or even pointing of weapons. The men are standing around, apparently unperturbed.
The lead helicopter, using the moniker Crazyhorse, opens fire. “Hahaha. I hit ‘em,” shouts one of the American crew. Another responds a little later: “Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.”
One of the men on the ground, believed to be Chmagh, is seen wounded and trying to crawl to safety. One of the helicopter crew is heard wishing for the man to reach for a gun, even though there is none visible nearby, so he has the pretext for opening fire: “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.” A van draws up next to the wounded man and Iraqis climb out. They are unarmed and start to carry the victim to the vehicle in what would appear to be an attempt to get him to hospital. One of the helicopters opens fire with armour-piercing shells. “Look at that. Right through the windshield,” says one of the crew. Another responds with a laugh.
Sitting behind the windscreen were two children who were wounded.
After ground forces arrive and the children are discovered, the American air crew blame the Iraqis. “Well it’s their fault for bringing kids in to a battle,” says one. “That’s right,” says another.
Initially the US military said that all the dead were insurgents. Then it claimed the helicopters reacted to an active firefight. Assange said that the video demonstrated that neither claim was true.
“Why would anyone be so relaxed with two Apaches if someone was carrying an RPG and that person was an enemy of the United States?” he said. “The behaviour of the pilots is like a computer game. When Saeed is crawling, clearly unable to do anything, their response is: come on buddy, we want to kill you, just pick up a weapon … It appears to be a desire to get a higher score, or a higher number of kills.”
Wikileaks says it will shortly release a second secret US military video showing the deaths of civilians in an attack in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has been seeking ways to prevent classified material appearing on Wikileaks, including through “criminal sanctions”. Wikileaks has made public classified US army reports on weapons, military units and battle strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon report, reflecting the depth of paranoia about where Wikileaks is obtaining its material, speculates that the CIA may be responsible. But perhaps most embarrassing leak for the US defence department was that of the 2008 report itself which appeared on the Wikileaks site last month.
Source
April 6th, 2010
“The Zionist regime is the most hated regime in the world. It is no longer useful to its (western) overlords. They doubt it. They wonder if it’s worth continuing to invest in this regime. But whether Israel wants it or not, with Allah’s help, this regime will be annihilated.”
Continue Reading March 12th, 2010
In a 2008 poll taken in the US, more than 80 per cent of Christians stated that they had a ‘‘moral and biblical’’ obligation to love, pray and support Israel, while 62 per cent of evangelicals said that Jerusalem should remain Israel’s undivided capital.
Continue Reading March 6th, 2010
Perception is not reality. Due to the right wing’s influence and propaganda, people mistakenly think that Islamic terrorism is the greatest threat to the Western world. It is even a commonly held belief that Islamic terrorism poses an existential threat–that the very survival of the Western world is at stake. Of course, the reality is that there are other groups that engage in terrorism on a much larger scale, yet these terrorist incidents are minimized. Acts of terrorism committed by Muslims are purposefully sensationalized and focused upon, culminating in the idea that “(nearly) all terrorists are Muslims.”
Continue Reading March 2nd, 2010
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