The Syrian Crisis: Cutting Through the Propaganda (satire)

Image courtesy of Reuters

Robert Ford is why wannabe jihadis are flocking to Syria to fight against the corrupt regime of Bashir al Assad.

Thanks to strong propaganda against Syria, primarily due to its ties with North Korea, the US government has created the current crisis in that country.

Since Robert Stephen Ford is the mastermind of American sponsored terrorism in Syria, the blood is truly on the hands of American government.

However, Islam is not the enemy in Syria.

That would be the US-backed propagandists labeling Assad an evil tyrant in their mainstream media. His crime would be aligning with Iran and dealing with North Korea. Yet the majority of people suffering are Palestinians, displaced by the birth of Israel in 1947.

Hence, Syria's Arab Spring is but a continuation of the struggle between a people (the Palestinians) demonized by propaganda and a world misled into believing Israel is one of the good guys.

If you do not believe Israel is on our side, then you are an anti-Semite, even if your lack of trust in Israel is based on the cold facts that Israel acts like a client state of America and its imperialism in the Middle East.

Even America's invasion of Iraq is but a cold and calculated move for American dominance in the Middle East, or, so the propaganda goes.

However, both sides are in error since the endless war is never over, because the so-called oppressed nation of Israel will be exposed for crying wolf. Yet the sheeple will side with Israel because of right-wing propaganda painting all Muslims as caricatures of Islamic jihadism.

If you hate all Muslims then know that you have been duped by the mainstream media and your gut feeling has been manipulated by propaganda from CNN and FOX News. We all saw how well they tried to blame Amerithrax on Iraq when it's more likely that might have been an inside job.

Muslims who know the truth will laugh at this compliance with propaganda. Nobody who is Muslim in the Middle East and well educated believes al Qaeda and their ilk are Muslim. They know them to be criminals who will burn in hell for their crimes against humanity.

Once, right wing militants like the Muslim Brotherhood will cheer on those criminal terrorists who hide under the robes of a pious Muslim. Now, with the rise of the Islamic State in northern Iraq, all the Muslims have condemned them.

Those who condemn Syria should remember that Ambassador Robert Ford egged on the civilians of Syria to protest in a country where the Assad regime rules with an iron fist.

Given that the rebels did not sent their envoys to the failed peace talks in Geneva, that makes them look like they are only interested in an endless war controlled by ideology rather than by cold hard facts.

However, if you think Syrians are suffering, think again. These people in the picture are not Syrians. The smart ones with the means have already fled Syria, either fleeing to Turkey or to America. It is the unfortunate ones that end up anywhere else, including Jordan and Egypt.

For the people in the photograph are Palestinians, and they suffer due to ideology be it Shi'a or Sunni or even American foreign policy as expedited by Israel, often with prejudice favoring Jews over Arab.

Indeed, the enemy here is not Assad. It is those criminals behind al Qaeda and the Taleban, and especially the Islamic State. No Muslim in their right mind would support them. It is they who threaten, Syria and now Iraq, because their Sharia will ruin both Syria and Iraq were they to win. Any Muslim who supports the Islamic State is Muslim in name only. For the Qatari and Saudis who are behind them are crazy, crazy for oil money, and eager to pay for a holy war, contrary to Islam, all thanks to Big Oil.

Think about that the next time you line up for gas at the gas pumps: your driving privileges support terrorism. It also leads to endless war in the Middle East. So regarding any propaganda about Muslims that you hold, you've been lied to just to manipulate your fears by mainstream media.

If you really cared about the Middle East, then please sell your second car, which you don't really need. Its convenience is echoed in millions of other people with two vehicles actually fund unrest in the Middle East.

Yet, were I to tell this to people filling up their SUVs at the gas pumps, they would be angry due to their fear of losing status among their peers. It is such a waste of money but everyone is doing it, hoping that another recession controlled by powers-that-be won't cause them to lose their jobs.

For all these wars in the Middle East are the doing of elites around the world who want to make a profit from it. Who cares if you lose your jobs? Who cares if Palestinians suffer in Syria? They are also hoping you side with the thinly veiled propaganda designed to cause you to hate the Muslims.

Still, what good does this do except gain more subscribers for the propaganda machine called mainstream media? Indeed, the mainstream media sources are merely propaganda outlets for US foreign policy which has caused much of the civil unrest in the world today. By pushing democracy, America has only caused anarchy in the world.

In my opinion, Muslims were never our enemies. Islamic terrorists did not fly planes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That is only what the elites want you to believe. You have been lied to.

A jihadi is not Islamic -- he is an Islamist. The term "Islamic terrorist" is used for propaganda, and is only true within context of mainstream media. They are a corporate terrorist network that is nominally Islamic in that they take what is in the Quran and its hadiths only to utterly distort its true meaning.

I'm sure that people who believe otherwise think that what I am writing is propaganda. However, I am telling you truth based on what Muslims tell me. They were never the enemy. That has always been truth. I am just saddened that few people are willing to discover the truth about what Muslims think about those quasi-Muslim terrorists - the Islamists - that the mainstream media write about.

However, it's not up to me to change the minds of bigots. They would rather listen to the propaganda than work to open their minds to Truth.

It is Sayyid Qutb who is the father of Islamism. However, the acts of violent revolution are influenced by his words.

By "setting up the kingdom of God on earth, and eliminating the kingdom of man," Islamists think they are "taking power from the hands of its human usurpers and restoring it to God alone".

Instead, they are taking power into their own hands and forcing sharia in contravention to the Quran by limiting the choices of their Muslim subjects in the Islamic State to submit or die.

Thus, the Islamic State is merely continuing human usurpation and oppression of Muslims by Islamists who are political ideologists bent on total control and domination of the Ummah that they are purported of restoring power to God alone.

Since this has occurred in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, it is still a part of the Syrian crisis. That crisis has proven time and again of being orchestrated by American foreign policy in Syria, and funded by Qatari and Saudi sympathizers of the Syrian rebels.

For the almost-religious zeal of the American government to force democracy on the Middle East, especially Afghanistan, Iraq and even Syria will only lead to more anarchy in the Middle East.

Perhaps then, the Islamic State is only a symptom of that anarchy, which makes Islamism a Muslim answer to globalism. Might that mean jihadi is just another name for "freedom fighter" and the freedom that they are fighting for is the extreme of the right to freedom of religion?

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Originally posted March 2, 2014 at 10:48 AM
Update posted July 10, 2014 zy 1:29 AM

Reference:

A shocking image of Syria's brutal war - The Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/28/shocking-image-syria-brutal-war-yarmouk

Who is Ambassador Robert Stephen Ford? The Architect of US Sponsored Terrorism in Syria:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-is-ambassador-robert-stephen-ford-the-architect-of-us-sponsored-terrorism-in-syria/5385973

Arabs Before Islam or the Incompleat History of Pre-Islamic Arabs

This article refers to Arabs of the period from just before 325 BCE to 651 CE and its purpose is to provide information about Arabian Pre-Islamic history and culture. Some of the following information may be considered speculative. The purpose of this article is to collect a list of references on the Internet to more information on Arab culture before Islam. It is a part of my on-going research on Arabian history.

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At first, the researcher of Arabic culture will be puzzled before a phenomenon existing also in China and India. It is the case of a people who have reached the peak of growth in the world by population, while remaining abysmally primitive in the Middle East. A people who have not exceeded the most primordial levels of existence, and indeed, remain far below them in certain areas of behavior.

Yet the confusion vanishes after scrutinizing the past of this people, and the reason that this zenith of population has combined with this nadir of primitiveness is revealed.


At the fall of the Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE, it was 330 BCE. Both Aramaic and Greek were spoken throughout the Middle East and Asia Minor, along with Persian, Median, Akkadian, Elamite and Sumerian, though the latter four languages were dying out due to the predominance of Greek, Aramaean and Old Persian.

As a result of the dominance of the Achaemenid Empire, Aramaic was spoken in Judea later during Jesus' time. Prior to 539 BCE, Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent due to the dominance of the city-states of Damascus, Hamath and Arpad in ancient Syria. The Aramaic script contributed to the development of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.

As the last of Arses had been killed by Bogoas along with Artaxerses III, possibly due to the influence of Darius the Great, Philip of Macedonia planned to invade by uniting Greece to the cause. However Philip was assassinated in 336 BCE, so it was up to his son Alexander the Great to invade Persia and defeat Darius.

After his death, Alexander's once massive Hellenistic empire was dividep by his ambitious generals (the Diadochi) and succeeded in becoming a few smaller empires, the largest of which was the Seleucid Empire, ruled by the generals of Alexander and their descendants. They in turn would be succeeded by the Parthian Empire when the Seleucid Empire fell in 63 BCE.

In 312 BCE the Seleucid Empire arose, consisting of all of Asia Minor including Anatolia (most of present-day Turkey), a part of Central Asia, and reaching as far as the Indus River. Mesopotamia was also included in the Empire. Aramaic, Greek, and Old Persian were lingua franca in the courts of Seleucid kings.

In the region of Northern Arabia and the Levant, between the Sinai Peninsula and the Arabian Peninsula, arose the Nabatean Kingdom. Established in 168 BCE, its inhabitants were originally nomadic pastoralists from the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula circa 4th Century BCE.

During Aretas III's reign from 87 to 62 BCE the kingdom had reached its territorial zenith.

In 64 BCE, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus convinced Aretas to end the siege of Judea during the civil war between the brothers Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, heirs of the Hasmonean Dynasty.

Also Pompey had asked Sampsiceramus I of Emesa to capture and kill in 64 BC, the second last Seleucid King Antiochus XIII Asiaticus. As a result, the Seleucid Kingdom had ended and became another client-kingdom ruled by Philip II Philorhomaeus who was cousin to Antiochus. Possibly Pompey had tired of bribery attempts by both Antiochus and Philip II, but considered Antiochus to be more of a threat to stability in the region.

By 63 BCE, Judea had become a client kingdom paying tribute to Rome with both Hyrcanus and Aristobulus becoming pawns in a power play between Pompey and Julius Caesar.

Defeated by a Roman army commanded by Scaurus in 62 BCE, the Nabatean Kingdom also became a client kingdom of the Rome Empire. After accepting a 300 talent bribe, Scaurus relieved his siege of Petra.

Circa 56 BCE Philip was betrothed to Cleopatra's sister Berenice IV of Egypt. After realizing that he was not a truthworthy client king, Pompey may have asked Roman governor of Syria Aulus Gabinius to eliminate Philip since a union between the Seleucid Empire and Egypt might have threatened the Roman Empire. From that time on, Syria was made a province of Rome.

Saracens appear in Western narratives circa 1st Century CE. In time their name came to represent Arabian people and after the fall of the Roman Empire, was used to describe Islam and Muslim in 17th Century Europe. This is thus a Eurocentric term that died out by the 20th Century.

In the 1st and 2nd Centuries, Petra — lying in the Jordan Rift Valley, 80 kilometres south of the Dead Sea — rose to become a thriving urban community. The gods worshipped at Petra were notably Dushara and al-‘Uzzá.

Originally, Nabateans represented their gods as unadorned pillars or blocks. Most commonly, they would create a god-block out of the top of a hill or cliff face, leaving only a block behind. Under influence of the Greeks and Romans, they soon added anthropomorphic features to their depictions of their gods, often adding
human features

In 127 CE Arabia Petraea was annexed to the Roman Empire. It consists of the Sinai Peninsula, most of Palestine, and later the northern part of the Hejaz region of the Arabian Peninsula.

Originally Arabia Petraea was known as Achaemenid Arabia, and refers to the land between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

In the 2nd century the Kingdom of Araba arose, covering an area from south Jordan to northeastern Iraq, consisting of Arab cities running from Hatra, in the northeast, via Palmyra, Baalbek and Petra.

During the 2nd and 3rd Century, the Royal family of Emesa was associated with Severus and his dynasty. Emesa was a client kingdom that paid tribute to Rome. Originally they were Arabs who spoke Aramaic, which was the lingua franca before Greek was adopted after 127 CE. Originally Emesesi were Bedouins who had settled in Orontes Valley and south of the Apamea region in ancient Syria circa 1st Century BCE. Later, through trade with the Seleucid Empire, Emesesii spoke Greek, and after becoming part of the Roman Empire, spoke Latin. Their sun-god was called El-Gabal, who was later called Elagabal, possibly due to Hellenization of gods indigenous to Syria.

Since the fall of the Seleucid Empire in 63 BCE, Greek became a common tongue due to immigration of Macedonian people into the Near East, replacing Nabatean and Aramaic as lingua franca. Indeed, Arabs and Jews born in Petra at the time would have been considered Roman citizens and given Roman names at birth.

It is likely that Arabs of Medina and Mecca just before Islam would have been familiar with Greek, Latin and Persian due to the annexation of Arabia Petraea to the Roman Empire and the expansion of the Lakhmid kingdom and contact with Persians and Greeks through trade with the Seleucids and later, the Sassanids. The Lakhmids paid tribute to the Sassanids, which inspired them to attack Palestine and Syria while the Nabatean people also had become Roman citizen of Rome by 127 CE after their defeat by Roman forces almost 200 centuries earlier. Thus the Arabs before Islam were already formidable foes as pagans.

As well, it is likely the sedentary Arabs of southern Mesopotamia maintained worship of Allat and Shamiyyah (or Shamiya) since Arabian princes ruled the Arab cities running from Hatra, in the northeast, via Palmyra, Baalbek and Petra, in the southwest along the western border of the Parthian kingdom.

Syria was settled by Ghassanid Christians from Yemen circa early 3rd Century. In the 200s CE the Ghassanids migrated Syria due to a dam flooding their villages in Yemen.

Syria's Bashar al-Assad and his peoples are descendants of Arabs, Turks, Romans, Normans, French and English people due to the Crusades. The Lakhmids are the forerunners of the Arabic peoples in what is called Iraq today. Indeed, they are not foreigners like the Saudis are, but they are Arabs. Iraq is also home to Syriacs and Kurds.

The Middle Persian name for the Sassanian Empire Ērānshahr and Ērān which evolved into the New Persian names, Iranshahr and Iran.

al-Hira was the capital of Lakhmid, the first Arabian kingdom in south Mesopotamia, a client of the Sassanids for containing the nomadic Arabs to the south of Mesopotamia.

Lakhmid was founded by 'Amr, of the Arab tribe Banu Lakhm who had migrated to south Mesopotamia from Yemen.

His son Imru' al-Qais succeeded him as king and may have been a Nestorian Christian.

After the Sassanid Empire arose in 225 CE, Lakhmid soon became a client kingdom charged with keeping the nomadic bedouin Arabs at bay.

Then the Sassanids fell to the Muslims in 651 CE.

In conclusion, Islam paid no part in their conquest of the Middle East and Near East. Rather, Christians and Jews made enemies of the pagan Arabs who soon would be back with Islamic verses on their lips, and proselyting by the sword on their minds. Islam does not make a Muslim an enemy since like Christianity and Judaism before it, Muslims are people of a holy book that guides them closer to God.

Even if a few Muslims become kaf'r (apostate as in falling out of the state of grace offered freely by God according to Christian sources), that should not be cause for concern since the social control of Muslims is absolute by a council of imams or mullah but is fair. What is unfair is how a Muslim society practices sharia with the common people resorting to "an eye for an eye while the imam calls for less violent means. That is because it is a patriarchal society which still considers women and children to be chattel, despite lip service in the name of equal rights as taught in the Koran.

If Arab society followed Mohammad completely according to the Koran, then there would still be need to recall Hadiths that guide them to carry the right Sharia law justly without rationalizing cause and effect rather than resorting to the Law of Hammurabi.

Indeed, that ancient law is the law of the land in the Middle East. Just as Aramaic became the lingua franca before Roman annexation, so too did ancient Babylonia law. Today, that law is king in the Maghreb, in southern Spain which used to be Muslim, in Sicily and Calabria, Albanian, Bosnia, and Kosovo, Turkey, the Middle East, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Malaysian, Indonesia, Mindanao, Brunei and a few islands in the Indian Ocean. Though in Indonesia and Malaysia, it sometimes abused by politicians.

Overall though, the law of Hammurabi guides the Muslim nations more likely than people realize, and more often than Islamic law, because the Arabs have been there since Babylonian times in the 8 Century BCE. When a woman is oppressed, that is like Hammurabi guiding a Muslim man to abuse his wife and beat his children, not sharia. Thus, domestic violence is not in the Koran. If it appears in sharia, then that is because of a pagan law that allowed a woman to be treated like something a husband owned. It even was a vital part of ancient Greek life, a pagan society that the Muslims borrowed knowledge of science and of the arts.

Thus today's Muslim world is a syncretism that took the underlying Aramaean language that preceded Neo-Babylonian times, mixed in Mohammad's interpretation of Christianity and Judaism due to their lengthy experiences with Byzantine Christians and Jews of the Levant and the Middle East and latern bits and pieces of European Marxism and its influence on democratic socialism as well as Nazism.

Can one wonder why Sayyid Qutb responded by criticizing American women and penned the literature that Islamists take literally? This is upon which al-Qaeda is founded, and also why the Egyptian Islamists who aspired to be jihadi joined al-Qaeda, only for their current leader to lead them to terrorize Iraq.

I only mention current events in the Middle East to show that history repeats itself until great men and women arise to help humanity to learn from their mistakes. These men and women are neither famous nor notorious, but one of them may be you.

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Originally posted: January 16, 2014 1:22 AM

References:

Achaemenid Empire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaemenid_Empire

Aramaic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language

History of the Arabic alphabet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Arabic_alphabet

Nabateans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataeans

Nabatean Kingdom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabatean_kingdom

Civil war between Aristobulus and Hyrcanus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristobulus_II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrcanus_II
Ptolemy Mennæii, son of Mennæus: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12419-ptolemy
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aemilius_Scaurus_(praetor_56_BC)

Royal Family of Emesa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_family_of_Emesa

Saracen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saracen

Seleucid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seleuicid

Pre-Islamic Arabia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Islamic_Arabia

Arabia Petraea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabia_Petraea

Sassanid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid

Hatra, capital of the Arabian kingdom west of Parthia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatra

Araba, tentative first Arab kingdom outside Arabia:: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Araba

al-Hirah, first historical Arab kingdom to contain the southern Arabian for the Sassanids: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Hirah

Lakhmid, an Arabic empire centred in al-Hirah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhmid

Lakhmid bandits were raiding Syrian towns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Syria#Roman_Syria

Ghassanids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassanids

Sayyid Qutb's "The America I have Seen": http://www.kalamullah.com/sayyid-qutb.html

A Condemnation of Israel's Overkill in Gaza (satire)

March 7, 2008: It's been about a week since Israel began pounding the Gaza strip, using munitions many times more powerful than the crude missiles shot into Israel from the region.

Body count so far as of February 27: 182 dead Palestinians, 1 Israeli in Dimona.

Most of the newscast yesterday tried to paint Israel as victim, but very few Israelis have been killed.

So it's another manufactured newsbyte to justify Israeli indignation over being harassed by the Palestinians again.

What really needs to be done is to moderate Arabic sentimentality such that Israelis and Arabs live in harmony, even if that requires more time for a few of the coalition troops from in the Middle East to be redeployed as security training specialists in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This may also require more intensive training of coalition troops to be more culturally sensitive to Afghan, Arab and Iraqi interests.

It's not in America's best interests to totally alienate the Arabs now.

Update: January 13, 2013

As the body count for Palestinians killed on the Gaza strip over the rest of 2008, only 13 soldiers would be injured in the Kerem Shalom suicide bombing on April 19, 2008.

By December 27, the Israelis killed 400 children and 900 adults in Gaza.

In Afghanistan, two cultural traditions must at all costs be condoned: Boy Thursdays and the routine torturing and killing of dogs. If coalition troops cannot stomach this, then cultural sensitivity training needs to be instituted.

It has to be ingrained in each soldier that this is a Don't Ask, Don't Tell special ops mission, not a peace-keeping mission. Otherwise, the body count of remaining coalition members still in Afghanistan and Iraq will continue to rise.

In my opinion, the nations that started their war against the Taleban and decided to invade Iraq under a false flag waved by the Bush administration after 911 need to provide both Afghanistan and Iraq with more foreign aid especially of the humanitarian kind.

If this means selecting westernized Turkish in reserve at home to help assimilate the Turkish diaspora in Europe, then so be it.

At the moment, German schools in towns with a high Turkish population require help in tackling the violence against teaching staff which has been ongoing since Germany decided to allow them into the country.

Another nation with the same problem is the UK in cities with no-go zones like Birmingham. Though more assimilated Pakistanis and Sikhs are needed to help assimilate Desis and Pak

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Originally posted: March 7, 2008 3:40 PM

References:

Israel declares Gaza "enemy entity" (23 September 2007): http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-declares-gaza-enemy-entity/3282

Israel kills at least 31 Gazabs Today Including 8 Children:
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-kills-least-31-gazans-today-including-8-children/3330

Israeli Atrocities in Palestine, The Real Terrorism in Palestine: http://www.peterloud.co.uk/palestine/

The Fallacy of anti-semitism and anti-Zionism

Roman lawyer Tertullian wrote the first anti-semitic propaganda circa "fugitives and vagabonds, condemned to be scattered all over the earth because of the disrespect they had shown to the Christian Saviour".

Thus Christian anti-semitism was born and adopted by the Roman Catholic Church as dogma.

Such propaganda are based on fallacies. For Jews are neither fugitives nor vagabonds. Rather they are successful, hard-working people. Tertullian's propaganda was hard to resist at first.

Even 1700 years later, I have to realize the fallacy of anti-American == anti-semitism and anti-Zionist == anti-semitism, when actually anti-American actually means "democracy free of American foreign policy" and anti-Zionist means "objection to Zionist zealotry consisting of confrontation of Palestinians, stealing their land and other violation of human rights not excluding the use of MOSSAD to fund certain Arab terrorism organizations".

I object to anti-semitism because I condemn Tertullian, and the acts of modern day Zionists. For both of them condoned violence to oppress Jews and Arabs respectively which belies their fallacies.

However, it would be nice to hear from Arabs and Jews who have not bought into the radicalism of politics.

In wake of the Israeli elections today, the current centrist-left versus right situation is better than before the election.

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History in Jews in Tunisia: http://www.sefarad.org/publication/lm/045/8.html
Final vote tally in Israel: http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-final-vote-tally-in-israel-20130124,0,222963.story