It has been almost a year since the contorted body of little Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, oblivious in death to the fact that he was to become the key pawn in a global media campaign seeking to cement public opinion in favor of intervention in Syria. The UK’s Guardian newspaper intoned at the time: To begin restoring that hope will inevitably mean […]
Yannis Vasilis Yaylalı was brought up as a proud, nationalist Turk. From a fascist background, he joined the army in the 1990s, at a time when Turkey was waging its most brutal attacks ever on its Kurdish population. Yannis was eager “to go east and fight the Kurds.” After just a few months in the military, he was captured by […]
Since June 13, 2016, I have been visiting different regions of Syria but have not had sufficient time to post regularly. However, until I am able to, I will share some brief updates I had shared on social media, and otherwise refer to my writings/photos/videos from my prior 4 visits. Going through my files, I found two short clips. In the first […]
The following text is a point by point thematic summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s presentation at the Science for Peace Conference, Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 15-16 August 2016 Introduction Historically, science has supported the development of the weapons industry and the war economy. “Science for Peace” indelibly requires reversing the logic whereby commissioned scientific endeavors are directed towards supporting […]
“Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long” – Hunter S. Thompson The non-profit journalistic and publishing organization WikiLeaks released on 22nd July 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments sent from or received by Democratic National Committee (DNC) personnel. The emails exposed numerous instances of unprofessional, unethical and possibly illegal behaviour, including concerted attempts to […]
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knew that the US was sending arms from Libya to Syria in 2011, a year before the Benghazi attacks. The Iran-Contra scandal almost brought down Reagan’s second term. Essentially Oliver North and other senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. The Reagan administration officials hoped […]
“Anytime bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror” – Barack Obama A US presidential policy guidance document on drone strikes – often referred to as the ‘drone playbook’ – was last week made public in edited form in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Politico’s Josh Berstein […]
On the subject of the Syrian war there has been much deserved mockery of the name change by Jabhat Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s local Syrian branch, to its new name: “Jabhat Fateh al-Sham”. It has been rightly pointed out that this name change, and the organisation’s attempt to distance itself from its Al-Qaeda parent, is a transparent fraud made all the […]
The Holocaust was the first historic event that touched my inner core as a human being. Perhaps this explains my early fascination with everything Jewish. In the 1990s, I lived for two years in Israel, where I volunteered in a center for adults with special needs. This was part of my German Zivildienst — a civilian substitute for conscientious objectors […]
10: Bashar al-Assad has a higher approval rating than Barack Obama Despite Obama’s claims Assad is illegitimate and must step down, the fact remains that since the conflict erupted in 2011, Assad has held the majority support of his people. The elections in 2014 – which Assad won by a landslide with international observers claiming no violations – is a testament […]
I don’t read the Guardian anymore, just as I don’t lick around the toilet bowl or engage in dalliances with farm animals. On Wednesday I made a reluctant exception, after discovering that arch-Blairite sycophant and former arms trade lobbyist Luke Akehurst had written a pub-bore piece about New Labour, Jeremy Corbyn and his vision for the party. Akehurst starts off by recalling […]
The ICTY’s exoneration of the late Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Yugoslavia, for war crimes committed in the Bosnia war, proves again we should take NATO claims regarding its ’official enemies’ not with a pinch of salt, but a huge lorry load.
