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Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts

12 September 2013

What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria

RECENT events surrounding Syria have prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.

Relations between us have passed through different stages. We stood against each other during the cold war. But we were also allies once, and defeated the Nazis together. The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again. 

The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades. 

No one wants the United Nations to suffer the fate of the League of Nations, which collapsed because it lacked real leverage. This is possible if influential countries bypass the United Nations and take military action without Security Council authorization. 

The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders.

A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. 

It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. 

The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world

Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all

From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law. We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today’s complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. 

The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not. Under current international law, force is permitted only in self-defense or by the decision of the Security Council. Anything else is unacceptable under the United Nations Charter and would constitute an act of aggression

No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists. Reports that militants are preparing another attack — this time against Israel — cannot be ignored. 

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.” 

But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes. 

No matter how targeted the strikes or how sophisticated the weapons, civilian casualties are inevitable, including the elderly and children, whom the strikes are meant to protect. 

The world reacts by asking: if you cannot count on international law, then you must find other ways to ensure your security. Thus a growing number of countries seek to acquire weapons of mass destruction. This is logical: if you have the bomb, no one will touch you. We are left with talk of the need to strengthen nonproliferation, when in reality this is being eroded. 

We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement. 

A new opportunity to avoid military action has emerged in the past few days. The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government’s willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction. Judging by the statements of President Obama, the United States sees this as an alternative to military action. 

I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive, as we agreed to at the Group of 8 meeting in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June, and steer the discussion back toward negotiations. 

If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues. 

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. 

There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal. 

Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia. - http://ow.ly/oO2dG

09 September 2013

From Russia With Love- A Letter From Putin to All Americans

A letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin to the American people has been circulating around the internet for the past couple of days. In the letter, Putin re-introduces Americans to some unpleasant facts about history and life they’d rather forget, such as Nixon’s reasoning behind massive carpet bombing of millions or North Vietnamese for the purpose of ‘looking good’ while exiting the war, and how Pakistan has been using the U.S. as a ‘false ally’ to gain foreign aid, while using the funds to embolden the Taliban in Afghanistan. He calls out Barrack Hussein Obama for having the audacity to meet with gay rights activists while he is in Russia next week, a group Putin despises, while refusing to carve away time to meet with him and solve the Syria issue. He compares the action to the equivalent of him (Putin) coming to the U.S. and meeting with Obama’s domestic enemy, the N.R.A.

Read the letter below for yourself, and decide whether President Putin is on spot or not:

......................................
How do I put this politely? You Americans are dumb. Today, Russia and America are fighting each other over fighting the Muslim radicals. Instead, we should be uniting to crush these violent Islamists, once and for all.

You Americans want to remove my ally, the Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad. To borrow a phrase from your John F. Kennedy, Assad may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s my son-of-a-bitch.

So if you want to destroy him, what are you going to give me in return? If your answer is, “We will give you nothing,” well, why would I ever agree to that? That’s not negotiation, that’s dictation; it’s a return to the bad Yeltsin days, when Holy Mother Russia was pushed into the mud like a used whore.

Look, I’ll be the first to say that Obama’s “red line” comment was dumb. It’s obvious he hadn’t thought it through; one can see it in the words he used to express his policy. He said that the “red line” would be crossed if “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons were used. What kind of language is that? How does one quantify a “whole bunch”? This is the President of the High-and-Mighty United States, and he’s talking like a schoolboy? All for this silliness over sarin in Syria?

Do I think that Assad did it? Gassed those people? I don’t know; I’ve never asked him. He’s certainly capable of it, and yet only the Americans think that the case against Assad is a “slam dunk.” Everyone else agrees that the case is murky. Everyone else follows the first rule of intelligence-gathering: Consider the source–namely, the pro-rebel media. In this instance, the rebels were losing, and then they got “gassed”–and now Uncle Sam is rushing to their side. How convenient.

The Romans, who knew something about both imperialism and trickery, always asked, cui bono–who benefits? Well, the beneficiaries in this episode are the rebels–also known as Al Qaeda. Way to go, Americans!

So let’s check some other news items: Here’s a June 6 item from a Turkish newspaper reporting on “the case of Syrian rebels who were seized on the Turkish-Syrian border with two kilograms of sarin.” And it’s not just the Turks: Carla Del Ponte, the Swiss-born former UN Prosecutor for War Crime Tribunals, has echoed those same charges against the rebels. They’re the bad guys!

Yet could this evidence against the rebels all be Russian disinformation? Hey, we’re good, but not that good.

Meanwhile, go ahead: Look for this information in your mainstream American media–your so-called “free press.” You can barely find it. Yankee lapdog reporters will cover everything that Obama says, and everything that John McCain says, but they won’t send reporters to warzones to go and actually figure out what happened.

Nor will American “presstitutes” remind their people of their own country’s history of helping the Iraqis use poison gas, all the time, in the 80s.

Yes, American reporters are sheep. They try to figure out what Obama wants them to write, and then they write it. Or if Obama doesn’t have a clear line on some topic–which is often–they look over the shoulder of the reporter next to them and copy that. Like I said, sheep.

The result is a herd mentality, showing no understanding of what true necessity truly looks like.

Here’s an example of a real “red line”: It’s June 24, 1812, and Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered all of continental Europe, is now leading a half-million soldiers across the Neman River, invading Russia, heading straight for Moscow. Six months later, Napoleon retreats in disastrous defeat, but only after he burns our sacred capital and leaves 200,000 Russians dead in battle. Now that’s a red-line situation.

But even the Czars, those blockheads, weren’t dumb enough to send Russian forces halfway around the world because someone wasn’t being nice to someone else.

So in my time, I can hardly get worked up over Assad using poison gas–if he did. Dead is dead, I say. In any case, Assad is adhering to the first rule of a leader: Stay in power. And so you do what it takes.

In fact, I’m not against gas warfare; I’m for gas warfare, if that’s what it takes. For example, I would love to gas the Chechens–all 1.2 million of them. They are like cockroaches, murderous Muslim cockroaches, and if the Chechens had done to Americans what they have done to Russians, maybe the US public would want to join with us. Oh wait, they have: The Boston Bombers, those Tsarnaev brothers, were Chechens. You took them in–against our advice. You put them on welfare for a decade, ignored our intelligence warnings, and then they terror-bomb you. The Chechens deserve to be fumigated. As an aside, what’s wrong with your media? They seem like “useful idiots”–to borrow Lenin’s phrase–for the terrorists. That Rolling Stone cover? Really? That would never happen in Russia.

In addition, there are another billion or more Muslims to the south of Russia–and a lot of them are trouble, too. Indeed, Russia has been fighting Muslims all across Central Asia for centuries. It’s not easy.

But the American leaders don’t seem to understand any of this. They are lost in their silly theories about liberation, human rights–all that nonsense. They don’t see that the struggle with radical Islam is a war, pure and simple. It’s a war that should unite all the civilized countries of the world. I didn’t say “democratic,” I said “civilized.”

One Western journalist who at least begins to understand where I’m coming from is The New York Times’ Steven Lee Myers. In his report of August 28, Myers accurately describes the Putin view of what’s been going on in the Middle East:

“In his view, the United States and its partners have unleashed the forces of extremism in country after country in the Middle East by forcing or advocating change in leadership — from Iraq to Libya, Egypt to Syria.”

That’s right. Over the last 15 years, from Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama, America has stirred up all the hornet-nests in the Middle East. For the most part, those angry hornets are far away from the US, but those insects are on Russia’s southern border–starting with those lousy Chechens.

And it’s not just the Americans stirring things up; it’s flunky-countries, too. It still kills me to think back to what British Prime Minister Tony Blair said just a few weeks after 9-11. In a speech that made the Americans swoon, Blair chose to regard all the coming wars as a great opportunity for international do-gooding.

After talking up the importance of “freedom,” Blair cited all needy peoples of the Muslim world and declared, “They, too, are our cause.” What kind of bull is that? Radical Muslims kill you, and so you want to go help them? Put them on welfare? America put its blacks on welfare, and were they grateful? Did they become less violent? Yet in Blair’s mind, these same Muslims were supposed to be grateful for all this “help.” That was the theory.

Then Blair concluded with these lines:

“This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

And of course, that’s what Blair and Bush did–they reordered the Muslim world. But not in a good way. They made it much worse!

Look, I’m a conservative. I have my imperial ambitions, to be sure, but the last thing I want to do is send all the pieces of the world-kaleidoscope fluxing around. We’ve had enough gratuitous messing things up in our own history, whether by Ivan the Terrible or Comrade Stalin. I want order–Russian Orthodox order.

So I’ve been predicting, all along, that the Bush-Blair crusade wouldn’t work–and I’ve been right, all along. A Reuters reporter quoted me as saying on September 1:

    “We need to remember what’s happened in the last decade, the number of times the United States has initiated armed conflicts in various parts of the world. Has it solved a single problem?”

And the answer, of course, is “no.” The US made things worse. Today, look at Syria.

Indeed, by my count, the US has led six major interventions in the Muslim Asia and Africa over the last 30 years: Reagan in Lebanon, Bush 41 and Clinton in Somalia, Bush 43 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama in Libya and Egypt. None of them have worked out well. And so now, Syria!

Needless to say, I’m happy to see the Americans make fools of themselves once again. Anything that weakens Uncle Sam helps Mother Russia.

Yet even so, after all this, I could be persuaded to make a deal with Obama on Syria. Other US presidents have done just that; they have gone over the heads of the crummy little countries they were fighting in some benighted corner of the world, and reached a war-ending agreement with us Russians.

That’s what Nixon did with Brezhnev in May 1972, as Vietnam was still raging. He said, in effect, I need to get out of this stupid war, but I must look tough so I get re-elected. So you Russians, pretty please, look the other way while I bomb the crap out of the North Vietnamese. So the US can stand tall on its way out of Vietnam, secure a “decent interval,” and not obviously lose our honor. And then we’ll owe you one.

Brezhnev went along, Nixon bombed and then got out, and the result was “detente,” a notable warming of US-Soviet relations in the 1970s.

So that’s the kind of deal that Obama could make with me today on Syria. Coincidentally, he’s coming this week to St. Petersburg for the G-20 Summit; we could easily peel off some time and figure out how to solve the Syria question.

Yet once again, Obama would have to give me something in return. What would it be? A free rein in Chechyna? A blind eye toward the incremental reclaiming of lost Soviet territories, back into the Russian Motherland? Or just a simple bribe? Who knows. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

But that rendezvous at the bridge almost certainly won’t happen, because Obama doesn’t seem to think he needs me for anything.

Indeed, he is going out of his way to stick his finger in my eye: Just on Monday, we learned that the President is going to be meeting with “gay” groups while in Russia, as a not-so-subtle statement against recent Russia’s anti-homosexuality crackdown. He is meeting with my enemies! Right in my own country! I don’t do that to him. I don’t come to America to meet with, say, the National Rifle Association.

Yes, Obama would rather cultivate the worldwide “gay” constituency than work with me to solve Syria. The Americans still think they can have it all: They think they can clobber Assad in Damascus, snub me here in Russia, and pander to their liberal sexual constituencies.

In other words, they get everything, and we get nothing. The Americans have had it so good for so long that it just doesn’t occur to them that they might have to make some tradeoffs.

We Russians know about tradeoffs. Back during the Great Patriotic War, in ’42, the Nazis were besieging both Leningrad and Stalingrad. The Red Army had to manage its resources: Do we seek to relieve Leningrad in the north and keep a million people from starving, or do we relieve Stalingrad in the south and keep the Hitlerites from capturing our oil resources? We did the latter, of course, and not only did we save the Hero City of Stalingrad, but we wiped out the entire German Sixth Army.

So yes, it was a tough tradeoff, the kind you have to make when you need to win. Hundreds of thousands in Leningrad died–including my uncle–but the tide of the war was shifted, and the USSR was saved.

Today, of course, I will make it my business to see to it that Obama gets none of what he wants. I will help Assad, I will subdue the homosexuals here in Russia, and I will be still be in power when Obama is laughed off the world stage.

Yet while I will savor the prospect of humiliating Obama, I still lament the lost opportunity–the lost opportunity to focus on the real enemy, which is Islamic radicalism. We can deal with Saudi Arabia, that’s for sure–but even they have trouble with the crazies. They would be glad to have our help. But we should do it together, so that one party doesn’t come to dominate.

The Americans, the Europeans, the Israelis, the Christian Africans, the Chinese, and the Indians all have something in common with us: The jihadis are our collective enemy. From Nigeria to Libya, from Syria to Chechnya, we see terrorism and strife.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can manage this problem–again, if we work together. Let’s look at the globe. The truth is that we have Islam surrounded: east, west, south and north. So we, the civilized people, should make a deal.

For starters, let Russia reoccupy the Central Asian states–the five “Stans”–that broke away during Russia’s most recent time of troubles, in the early 90s.

In return, I will turn Assad over to his fate, and so will the Chinese. Why? Because the Chinese are cursed with 50 million or so Muslims in their westernmost province, Xinjiang, which is right next to Russia. So as part of the same deal, the Chinese get to suppress–I guess that’s the nice way of putting it–their restive Muslims.

Wait, there’s more. Under this new deal, the Israelis can do what they want with the Palestinians. My fellow ex-Soviet citizen, Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister of Israel–he gets this. And he’s still close to Bibi.

And together, we can all deal with those two most troublesome nations: Iran and Pakistan.

Iran is a lot closer to Russia than it is to America–I don’t want those nuts to have nuclear weapons! But I have defended Iran to keep the Americans from filling the space instead. I’d rather have the ayatollahs in Tehran than a hostile US Army, bent on still more “liberation.”

As for Pakistan, the Americans are only beginning to figure out how badly they have been played by those guys. All along, the Pakistanis have using all their US foreign-aid money to boost the Taliban.

Those Americans–they thought they were so cool for helping to push the Red Army out of Afghanistan in the 80s. And look what they got after that–Osama Bin Laden in his new home.

Now, 25 years later, the Americans are finally giving up on their missionary work in Afghanistan. If we ever have to go back to bring order there, it will be no more Mr. Nice Guy! But Pakistan is the real problem–they make Afghanistan possible.

So those are the real evil empires: Iran and Pakistan. Bringing them to heel won’t be easy, of course, but we Russians have never shied away from strong measures. The Americans could learn a lot from us.

So that’s my vision. Let’s stop worrying about silly little niceties about the right and the wrong way to fight a war. Let’s stop trying to bring democracy to barbarians. Instead, let’s bring them the only thing they understand–force.

Let’s all of us–Moscow, Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Jerusalem, Lagos, Addis Ababa, Beijing, New Delhi–come together in a new Holy Alliance, similar to that which kept Europe safe from radicalism in the early 19th century. Let’s join one another to crush the unholy, unruly, jihadi Muslims. The good Muslims will thank us for it. And if they don’t–too bad.

Admit it: You, too, think it’s a good idea.

A letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin to the American people has been circulating around the internet for the past couple of days. In the letter, Putin re-introduces Americans to some unpleasant facts about history and life they’d rather forget, such as Nixon’s reasoning behind massive carpet bombing of millions or North Vietnamese for the purpose of ‘looking good’ while exiting the war, and how Pakistan has been using the U.S. as a ‘false ally’ to gain foreign aid, while using the funds to embolden the Taliban in Afghanistan. He calls out Barrack Hussein Obama for having the audacity to meet with gay rights activists while he is in Russia next week, a group Putin despises, while refusing to carve away time to meet with him and solve the Syria issue. He compares the action to the equivalent of him (Putin) coming to the U.S. and meeting with Obama’s domestic enemy, the N.R.A.
Read the letter below for yourself, and decide whether President Putin is on spot or not:

How do I put this politely? You Americans are dumb. Today, Russia and America are fighting each other over fighting the Muslim radicals. Instead, we should be uniting to crush these violent Islamists, once and for all.

You Americans want to remove my ally, the Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad. To borrow a phrase from your John F. Kennedy, Assad may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s my son-of-a-bitch.
So if you want to destroy him, what are you going to give me in return? If your answer is, “We will give you nothing,” well, why would I ever agree to that? That’s not negotiation, that’s dictation; it’s a return to the bad Yeltsin days, when Holy Mother Russia was pushed into the mud like a used whore.
Look, I’ll be the first to say that Obama’s “red line” comment was dumb. It’s obvious he hadn’t thought it through; one can see it in the words he used to express his policy. He said that the “red line” would be crossed if “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons were used. What kind of language is that? How does one quantify a “whole bunch”? This is the President of the High-and-Mighty United States, and he’s talking like a schoolboy? All for this silliness over sarin in Syria?
Do I think that Assad did it? Gassed those people? I don’t know; I’ve never asked him. He’s certainly capable of it, and yet only the Americans think that the case against Assad is a “slam dunk.” Everyone else agrees that the case is murky. Everyone else follows the first rule of intelligence-gathering: Consider the source–namely, the pro-rebel media. In this instance, the rebels were losing, and then they got “gassed”–and now Uncle Sam is rushing to their side. How convenient.
The Romans, who knew something about both imperialism and trickery, always asked, cui bono–who benefits? Well, the beneficiaries in this episode are the rebels–also known as Al Qaeda. Way to go, Americans!
So let’s check some other news items: Here’s a June 6 item from a Turkish newspaper reporting on “the case of Syrian rebels who were seized on the Turkish-Syrian border with two kilograms of sarin.” And it’s not just the Turks: Carla Del Ponte, the Swiss-born former UN Prosecutor for War Crime Tribunals, has echoed those same charges against the rebels. They’re the bad guys!
Yet could this evidence against the rebels all be Russian disinformation? Hey, we’re good, but not that good.
Meanwhile, go ahead: Look for this information in your mainstream American media–your so-called “free press.” You can barely find it. Yankee lapdog reporters will cover everything that Obama says, and everything that John McCain says, but they won’t send reporters to warzones to go and actually figure out what happened.
Nor will American “presstitutes” remind their people of their own country’s history of helping the Iraqis use poison gas, all the time, in the 80s.
Yes, American reporters are sheep. They try to figure out what Obama wants them to write, and then they write it. Or if Obama doesn’t have a clear line on some topic–which is often–they look over the shoulder of the reporter next to them and copy that. Like I said, sheep.
The result is a herd mentality, showing no understanding of what true necessity truly looks like.
Here’s an example of a real “red line”: It’s June 24, 1812, and Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered all of continental Europe, is now leading a half-million soldiers across the Neman River, invading Russia, heading straight for Moscow. Six months later, Napoleon retreats in disastrous defeat, but only after he burns our sacred capital and leaves 200,000 Russians dead in battle. Now that’s a red-line situation.
But even the Czars, those blockheads, weren’t dumb enough to send Russian forces halfway around the world because someone wasn’t being nice to someone else.
So in my time, I can hardly get worked up over Assad using poison gas–if he did. Dead is dead, I say. In any case, Assad is adhering to the first rule of a leader: Stay in power. And so you do what it takes.
In fact, I’m not against gas warfare; I’m for gas warfare, if that’s what it takes. For example, I would love to gas the Chechens–all 1.2 million of them. They are like cockroaches, murderous Muslim cockroaches, and if the Chechens had done to Americans what they have done to Russians, maybe the US public would want to join with us. Oh wait, they have: The Boston Bombers, those Tsarnaev brothers, were Chechens. You took them in–against our advice. You put them on welfare for a decade, ignored our intelligence warnings, and then they terror-bomb you. The Chechens deserve to be fumigated. As an aside, what’s wrong with your media? They seem like “useful idiots”–to borrow Lenin’s phrase–for the terrorists. That Rolling Stone cover? Really? That would never happen in Russia.
In addition, there are another billion or more Muslims to the south of Russia–and a lot of them are trouble, too. Indeed, Russia has been fighting Muslims all across Central Asia for centuries. It’s not easy.
But the American leaders don’t seem to understand any of this. They are lost in their silly theories about liberation, human rights–all that nonsense. They don’t see that the struggle with radical Islam is a war, pure and simple. It’s a war that should unite all the civilized countries of the world. I didn’t say “democratic,” I said “civilized.”
One Western journalist who at least begins to understand where I’m coming from is The New York Times’ Steven Lee Myers. In his report of August 28, Myers accurately describes the Putin view of what’s been going on in the Middle East:
“In his view, the United States and its partners have unleashed the forces of extremism in country after country in the Middle East by forcing or advocating change in leadership — from Iraq to Libya, Egypt to Syria.”
That’s right. Over the last 15 years, from Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama, America has stirred up all the hornet-nests in the Middle East. For the most part, those angry hornets are far away from the US, but those insects are on Russia’s southern border–starting with those lousy Chechens.
And it’s not just the Americans stirring things up; it’s flunky-countries, too. It still kills me to think back to what British Prime Minister Tony Blair said just a few weeks after 9-11. In a speech that made the Americans swoon, Blair chose to regard all the coming wars as a great opportunity for international do-gooding.
After talking up the importance of “freedom,” Blair cited all needy peoples of the Muslim world and declared, “They, too, are our cause.” What kind of bull is that? Radical Muslims kill you, and so you want to go help them? Put them on welfare? America put its blacks on welfare, and were they grateful? Did they become less violent? Yet in Blair’s mind, these same Muslims were supposed to be grateful for all this “help.” That was the theory.
Then Blair concluded with these lines:
“This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”
And of course, that’s what Blair and Bush did–they reordered the Muslim world. But not in a good way. They made it much worse!
Look, I’m a conservative. I have my imperial ambitions, to be sure, but the last thing I want to do is send all the pieces of the world-kaleidoscope fluxing around. We’ve had enough gratuitous messing things up in our own history, whether by Ivan the Terrible or Comrade Stalin. I want order–Russian Orthodox order.
So I’ve been predicting, all along, that the Bush-Blair crusade wouldn’t work–and I’ve been right, all along. A Reuters reporter quoted me as saying on September 1:
“We need to remember what’s happened in the last decade, the number of times the United States has initiated armed conflicts in various parts of the world. Has it solved a single problem?” 
And the answer, of course, is “no.” The US made things worse. Today, look at Syria.
Indeed, by my count, the US has led six major interventions in the Muslim Asia and Africa over the last 30 years: Reagan in Lebanon, Bush 41 and Clinton in Somalia, Bush 43 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama in Libya and Egypt. None of them have worked out well. And so now, Syria!
Needless to say, I’m happy to see the Americans make fools of themselves once again. Anything that weakens Uncle Sam helps Mother Russia.
Yet even so, after all this, I could be persuaded to make a deal with Obama on Syria. Other US presidents have done just that; they have gone over the heads of the crummy little countries they were fighting in some benighted corner of the world, and reached a war-ending agreement with us Russians.
That’s what Nixon did with Brezhnev in May 1972, as Vietnam was still raging. He said, in effect, I need to get out of this stupid war, but I must look tough so I get re-elected. So you Russians, pretty please, look the other way while I bomb the crap out of the North Vietnamese. So the US can stand tall on its way out of Vietnam, secure a “decent interval,” and not obviously lose our honor. And then we’ll owe you one. 
Brezhnev went along, Nixon bombed and then got out, and the result was “detente,” a notable warming of US-Soviet relations in the 1970s.
So that’s the kind of deal that Obama could make with me today on Syria. Coincidentally, he’s coming this week to St. Petersburg for the G-20 Summit; we could easily peel off some time and figure out how to solve the Syria question.
Yet once again, Obama would have to give me something in return. What would it be? A free rein in Chechyna? A blind eye toward the incremental reclaiming of lost Soviet territories, back into the Russian Motherland? Or just a simple bribe? Who knows. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
But that rendezvous at the bridge almost certainly won’t happen, because Obama doesn’t seem to think he needs me for anything.
Indeed, he is going out of his way to stick his finger in my eye: Just on Monday, we learned that the President is going to be meeting with “gay” groups while in Russia, as a not-so-subtle statement against recent Russia’s anti-homosexuality crackdown. He is meeting with my enemies! Right in my own country! I don’t do that to him. I don’t come to America to meet with, say, the National Rifle Association.
Yes, Obama would rather cultivate the worldwide “gay” constituency than work with me to solve Syria. The Americans still think they can have it all: They think they can clobber Assad in Damascus, snub me here in Russia, and pander to their liberal sexual constituencies.
In other words, they get everything, and we get nothing. The Americans have had it so good for so long that it just doesn’t occur to them that they might have to make some tradeoffs.
We Russians know about tradeoffs. Back during the Great Patriotic War, in ’42, the Nazis were besieging both Leningrad and Stalingrad. The Red Army had to manage its resources: Do we seek to relieve Leningrad in the north and keep a million people from starving, or do we relieve Stalingrad in the south and keep the Hitlerites from capturing our oil resources? We did the latter, of course, and not only did we save the Hero City of Stalingrad, but we wiped out the entire German Sixth Army.
So yes, it was a tough tradeoff, the kind you have to make when you need to win. Hundreds of thousands in Leningrad died–including my uncle–but the tide of the war was shifted, and the USSR was saved.
Today, of course, I will make it my business to see to it that Obama gets none of what he wants. I will help Assad, I will subdue the homosexuals here in Russia, and I will be still be in power when Obama is laughed off the world stage.
Yet while I will savor the prospect of humiliating Obama, I still lament the lost opportunity–the lost opportunity to focus on the real enemy, which is Islamic radicalism. We can deal with Saudi Arabia, that’s for sure–but even they have trouble with the crazies. They would be glad to have our help. But we should do it together, so that one party doesn’t come to dominate.
The Americans, the Europeans, the Israelis, the Christian Africans, the Chinese, and the Indians all have something in common with us: The jihadis are our collective enemy. From Nigeria to Libya, from Syria to Chechnya, we see terrorism and strife.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can manage this problem–again, if we work together. Let’s look at the globe. The truth is that we have Islam surrounded: east, west, south and north. So we, the civilized people, should make a deal.
For starters, let Russia reoccupy the Central Asian states–the five “Stans”–that broke away during Russia’s most recent time of troubles, in the early 90s.
In return, I will turn Assad over to his fate, and so will the Chinese. Why? Because the Chinese are cursed with 50 million or so Muslims in their westernmost province, Xinjiang, which is right next to Russia. So as part of the same deal, the Chinese get to suppress–I guess that’s the nice way of putting it–their restive Muslims.
Wait, there’s more. Under this new deal, the Israelis can do what they want with the Palestinians. My fellow ex-Soviet citizen, Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister of Israel–he gets this. And he’s still close to Bibi.
And together, we can all deal with those two most troublesome nations: Iran and Pakistan.
Iran is a lot closer to Russia than it is to America–I don’t want those nuts to have nuclear weapons! But I have defended Iran to keep the Americans from filling the space instead. I’d rather have the ayatollahs in Tehran than a hostile US Army, bent on still more “liberation.”
As for Pakistan, the Americans are only beginning to figure out how badly they have been played by those guys. All along, the Pakistanis have using all their US foreign-aid money to boost the Taliban.
Those Americans–they thought they were so cool for helping to push the Red Army out of Afghanistan in the 80s. And look what they got after that–Osama Bin Laden in his new home.
Now, 25 years later, the Americans are finally giving up on their missionary work in Afghanistan. If we ever have to go back to bring order there, it will be no more Mr. Nice Guy! But Pakistan is the real problem–they make Afghanistan possible.
So those are the real evil empires: Iran and Pakistan. Bringing them to heel won’t be easy, of course, but we Russians have never shied away from strong measures. The Americans could learn a lot from us.
So that’s my vision. Let’s stop worrying about silly little niceties about the right and the wrong way to fight a war. Let’s stop trying to bring democracy to barbarians. Instead, let’s bring them the only thing they understand–force.
Let’s all of us–Moscow, Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Jerusalem, Lagos, Addis Ababa, Beijing, New Delhi–come together in a new Holy Alliance, similar to that which kept Europe safe from radicalism in the early 19th century. Let’s join one another to crush the unholy, unruly, jihadi Muslims. The good Muslims will thank us for it. And if they don’t–too bad.
Admit it: You, too, think it’s a good idea.
- See more at: http://freepatriot.org/2013/09/08/russia-love-letter-putin-americans/?fb_source=pubv1#sthash.rdwqR1t5.dpuf
A letter from Russian President Vladimir Putin to the American people has been circulating around the internet for the past couple of days. In the letter, Putin re-introduces Americans to some unpleasant facts about history and life they’d rather forget, such as Nixon’s reasoning behind massive carpet bombing of millions or North Vietnamese for the purpose of ‘looking good’ while exiting the war, and how Pakistan has been using the U.S. as a ‘false ally’ to gain foreign aid, while using the funds to embolden the Taliban in Afghanistan. He calls out Barrack Hussein Obama for having the audacity to meet with gay rights activists while he is in Russia next week, a group Putin despises, while refusing to carve away time to meet with him and solve the Syria issue. He compares the action to the equivalent of him (Putin) coming to the U.S. and meeting with Obama’s domestic enemy, the N.R.A.
Read the letter below for yourself, and decide whether President Putin is on spot or not:

How do I put this politely? You Americans are dumb. Today, Russia and America are fighting each other over fighting the Muslim radicals. Instead, we should be uniting to crush these violent Islamists, once and for all.

You Americans want to remove my ally, the Syrian leader Bashar Al-Assad. To borrow a phrase from your John F. Kennedy, Assad may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s my son-of-a-bitch.
So if you want to destroy him, what are you going to give me in return? If your answer is, “We will give you nothing,” well, why would I ever agree to that? That’s not negotiation, that’s dictation; it’s a return to the bad Yeltsin days, when Holy Mother Russia was pushed into the mud like a used whore.
Look, I’ll be the first to say that Obama’s “red line” comment was dumb. It’s obvious he hadn’t thought it through; one can see it in the words he used to express his policy. He said that the “red line” would be crossed if “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons were used. What kind of language is that? How does one quantify a “whole bunch”? This is the President of the High-and-Mighty United States, and he’s talking like a schoolboy? All for this silliness over sarin in Syria?
Do I think that Assad did it? Gassed those people? I don’t know; I’ve never asked him. He’s certainly capable of it, and yet only the Americans think that the case against Assad is a “slam dunk.” Everyone else agrees that the case is murky. Everyone else follows the first rule of intelligence-gathering: Consider the source–namely, the pro-rebel media. In this instance, the rebels were losing, and then they got “gassed”–and now Uncle Sam is rushing to their side. How convenient.
The Romans, who knew something about both imperialism and trickery, always asked, cui bono–who benefits? Well, the beneficiaries in this episode are the rebels–also known as Al Qaeda. Way to go, Americans!
So let’s check some other news items: Here’s a June 6 item from a Turkish newspaper reporting on “the case of Syrian rebels who were seized on the Turkish-Syrian border with two kilograms of sarin.” And it’s not just the Turks: Carla Del Ponte, the Swiss-born former UN Prosecutor for War Crime Tribunals, has echoed those same charges against the rebels. They’re the bad guys!
Yet could this evidence against the rebels all be Russian disinformation? Hey, we’re good, but not that good.
Meanwhile, go ahead: Look for this information in your mainstream American media–your so-called “free press.” You can barely find it. Yankee lapdog reporters will cover everything that Obama says, and everything that John McCain says, but they won’t send reporters to warzones to go and actually figure out what happened.
Nor will American “presstitutes” remind their people of their own country’s history of helping the Iraqis use poison gas, all the time, in the 80s.
Yes, American reporters are sheep. They try to figure out what Obama wants them to write, and then they write it. Or if Obama doesn’t have a clear line on some topic–which is often–they look over the shoulder of the reporter next to them and copy that. Like I said, sheep.
The result is a herd mentality, showing no understanding of what true necessity truly looks like.
Here’s an example of a real “red line”: It’s June 24, 1812, and Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered all of continental Europe, is now leading a half-million soldiers across the Neman River, invading Russia, heading straight for Moscow. Six months later, Napoleon retreats in disastrous defeat, but only after he burns our sacred capital and leaves 200,000 Russians dead in battle. Now that’s a red-line situation.
But even the Czars, those blockheads, weren’t dumb enough to send Russian forces halfway around the world because someone wasn’t being nice to someone else.
So in my time, I can hardly get worked up over Assad using poison gas–if he did. Dead is dead, I say. In any case, Assad is adhering to the first rule of a leader: Stay in power. And so you do what it takes.
In fact, I’m not against gas warfare; I’m for gas warfare, if that’s what it takes. For example, I would love to gas the Chechens–all 1.2 million of them. They are like cockroaches, murderous Muslim cockroaches, and if the Chechens had done to Americans what they have done to Russians, maybe the US public would want to join with us. Oh wait, they have: The Boston Bombers, those Tsarnaev brothers, were Chechens. You took them in–against our advice. You put them on welfare for a decade, ignored our intelligence warnings, and then they terror-bomb you. The Chechens deserve to be fumigated. As an aside, what’s wrong with your media? They seem like “useful idiots”–to borrow Lenin’s phrase–for the terrorists. That Rolling Stone cover? Really? That would never happen in Russia.
In addition, there are another billion or more Muslims to the south of Russia–and a lot of them are trouble, too. Indeed, Russia has been fighting Muslims all across Central Asia for centuries. It’s not easy.
But the American leaders don’t seem to understand any of this. They are lost in their silly theories about liberation, human rights–all that nonsense. They don’t see that the struggle with radical Islam is a war, pure and simple. It’s a war that should unite all the civilized countries of the world. I didn’t say “democratic,” I said “civilized.”
One Western journalist who at least begins to understand where I’m coming from is The New York Times’ Steven Lee Myers. In his report of August 28, Myers accurately describes the Putin view of what’s been going on in the Middle East:
“In his view, the United States and its partners have unleashed the forces of extremism in country after country in the Middle East by forcing or advocating change in leadership — from Iraq to Libya, Egypt to Syria.”
That’s right. Over the last 15 years, from Clinton to Bush 43 to Obama, America has stirred up all the hornet-nests in the Middle East. For the most part, those angry hornets are far away from the US, but those insects are on Russia’s southern border–starting with those lousy Chechens.
And it’s not just the Americans stirring things up; it’s flunky-countries, too. It still kills me to think back to what British Prime Minister Tony Blair said just a few weeks after 9-11. In a speech that made the Americans swoon, Blair chose to regard all the coming wars as a great opportunity for international do-gooding.
After talking up the importance of “freedom,” Blair cited all needy peoples of the Muslim world and declared, “They, too, are our cause.” What kind of bull is that? Radical Muslims kill you, and so you want to go help them? Put them on welfare? America put its blacks on welfare, and were they grateful? Did they become less violent? Yet in Blair’s mind, these same Muslims were supposed to be grateful for all this “help.” That was the theory.
Then Blair concluded with these lines:
“This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”
And of course, that’s what Blair and Bush did–they reordered the Muslim world. But not in a good way. They made it much worse!
Look, I’m a conservative. I have my imperial ambitions, to be sure, but the last thing I want to do is send all the pieces of the world-kaleidoscope fluxing around. We’ve had enough gratuitous messing things up in our own history, whether by Ivan the Terrible or Comrade Stalin. I want order–Russian Orthodox order.
So I’ve been predicting, all along, that the Bush-Blair crusade wouldn’t work–and I’ve been right, all along. A Reuters reporter quoted me as saying on September 1:
“We need to remember what’s happened in the last decade, the number of times the United States has initiated armed conflicts in various parts of the world. Has it solved a single problem?” 
And the answer, of course, is “no.” The US made things worse. Today, look at Syria.
Indeed, by my count, the US has led six major interventions in the Muslim Asia and Africa over the last 30 years: Reagan in Lebanon, Bush 41 and Clinton in Somalia, Bush 43 in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Obama in Libya and Egypt. None of them have worked out well. And so now, Syria!
Needless to say, I’m happy to see the Americans make fools of themselves once again. Anything that weakens Uncle Sam helps Mother Russia.
Yet even so, after all this, I could be persuaded to make a deal with Obama on Syria. Other US presidents have done just that; they have gone over the heads of the crummy little countries they were fighting in some benighted corner of the world, and reached a war-ending agreement with us Russians.
That’s what Nixon did with Brezhnev in May 1972, as Vietnam was still raging. He said, in effect, I need to get out of this stupid war, but I must look tough so I get re-elected. So you Russians, pretty please, look the other way while I bomb the crap out of the North Vietnamese. So the US can stand tall on its way out of Vietnam, secure a “decent interval,” and not obviously lose our honor. And then we’ll owe you one. 
Brezhnev went along, Nixon bombed and then got out, and the result was “detente,” a notable warming of US-Soviet relations in the 1970s.
So that’s the kind of deal that Obama could make with me today on Syria. Coincidentally, he’s coming this week to St. Petersburg for the G-20 Summit; we could easily peel off some time and figure out how to solve the Syria question.
Yet once again, Obama would have to give me something in return. What would it be? A free rein in Chechyna? A blind eye toward the incremental reclaiming of lost Soviet territories, back into the Russian Motherland? Or just a simple bribe? Who knows. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
But that rendezvous at the bridge almost certainly won’t happen, because Obama doesn’t seem to think he needs me for anything.
Indeed, he is going out of his way to stick his finger in my eye: Just on Monday, we learned that the President is going to be meeting with “gay” groups while in Russia, as a not-so-subtle statement against recent Russia’s anti-homosexuality crackdown. He is meeting with my enemies! Right in my own country! I don’t do that to him. I don’t come to America to meet with, say, the National Rifle Association.
Yes, Obama would rather cultivate the worldwide “gay” constituency than work with me to solve Syria. The Americans still think they can have it all: They think they can clobber Assad in Damascus, snub me here in Russia, and pander to their liberal sexual constituencies.
In other words, they get everything, and we get nothing. The Americans have had it so good for so long that it just doesn’t occur to them that they might have to make some tradeoffs.
We Russians know about tradeoffs. Back during the Great Patriotic War, in ’42, the Nazis were besieging both Leningrad and Stalingrad. The Red Army had to manage its resources: Do we seek to relieve Leningrad in the north and keep a million people from starving, or do we relieve Stalingrad in the south and keep the Hitlerites from capturing our oil resources? We did the latter, of course, and not only did we save the Hero City of Stalingrad, but we wiped out the entire German Sixth Army.
So yes, it was a tough tradeoff, the kind you have to make when you need to win. Hundreds of thousands in Leningrad died–including my uncle–but the tide of the war was shifted, and the USSR was saved.
Today, of course, I will make it my business to see to it that Obama gets none of what he wants. I will help Assad, I will subdue the homosexuals here in Russia, and I will be still be in power when Obama is laughed off the world stage.
Yet while I will savor the prospect of humiliating Obama, I still lament the lost opportunity–the lost opportunity to focus on the real enemy, which is Islamic radicalism. We can deal with Saudi Arabia, that’s for sure–but even they have trouble with the crazies. They would be glad to have our help. But we should do it together, so that one party doesn’t come to dominate.
The Americans, the Europeans, the Israelis, the Christian Africans, the Chinese, and the Indians all have something in common with us: The jihadis are our collective enemy. From Nigeria to Libya, from Syria to Chechnya, we see terrorism and strife.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can manage this problem–again, if we work together. Let’s look at the globe. The truth is that we have Islam surrounded: east, west, south and north. So we, the civilized people, should make a deal.
For starters, let Russia reoccupy the Central Asian states–the five “Stans”–that broke away during Russia’s most recent time of troubles, in the early 90s.
In return, I will turn Assad over to his fate, and so will the Chinese. Why? Because the Chinese are cursed with 50 million or so Muslims in their westernmost province, Xinjiang, which is right next to Russia. So as part of the same deal, the Chinese get to suppress–I guess that’s the nice way of putting it–their restive Muslims.
Wait, there’s more. Under this new deal, the Israelis can do what they want with the Palestinians. My fellow ex-Soviet citizen, Avigdor Lieberman, the former foreign minister of Israel–he gets this. And he’s still close to Bibi.
And together, we can all deal with those two most troublesome nations: Iran and Pakistan.
Iran is a lot closer to Russia than it is to America–I don’t want those nuts to have nuclear weapons! But I have defended Iran to keep the Americans from filling the space instead. I’d rather have the ayatollahs in Tehran than a hostile US Army, bent on still more “liberation.”
As for Pakistan, the Americans are only beginning to figure out how badly they have been played by those guys. All along, the Pakistanis have using all their US foreign-aid money to boost the Taliban.
Those Americans–they thought they were so cool for helping to push the Red Army out of Afghanistan in the 80s. And look what they got after that–Osama Bin Laden in his new home.
Now, 25 years later, the Americans are finally giving up on their missionary work in Afghanistan. If we ever have to go back to bring order there, it will be no more Mr. Nice Guy! But Pakistan is the real problem–they make Afghanistan possible.
So those are the real evil empires: Iran and Pakistan. Bringing them to heel won’t be easy, of course, but we Russians have never shied away from strong measures. The Americans could learn a lot from us.
So that’s my vision. Let’s stop worrying about silly little niceties about the right and the wrong way to fight a war. Let’s stop trying to bring democracy to barbarians. Instead, let’s bring them the only thing they understand–force.
Let’s all of us–Moscow, Washington, London, Paris, Brussels, Jerusalem, Lagos, Addis Ababa, Beijing, New Delhi–come together in a new Holy Alliance, similar to that which kept Europe safe from radicalism in the early 19th century. Let’s join one another to crush the unholy, unruly, jihadi Muslims. The good Muslims will thank us for it. And if they don’t–too bad.
Admit it: You, too, think it’s a good idea.
- See more at: http://freepatriot.org/2013/09/08/russia-love-letter-putin-americans/?fb_source=pubv1#sthash.rdwqR1t5.dpuf

30 August 2013

Rebels Admit Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attack

Militants tell AP reporter they mishandled Saudi-supplied chemical weapons, causing accident
 
Syrian rebels in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta have admitted to Associated Press journalist Dale Gavlak that they were responsible for last week’s chemical weapons incident which western powers have blamed on Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, revealing that the casualties were the result of an accident caused by rebels mishandling chemical weapons provided to them by Saudi Arabia.
 
"From numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families….many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the (deadly) gas attack,” writes Gavlak.
 
Rebels told Gavlak that they were not properly trained on how to handle the chemical weapons or even told what they were. It appears as though the weapons were initially supposed to be given to the Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra.

“We were very curious about these arms. And unfortunately, some of the fighters handled the weapons improperly and set off the explosions,” one militant named ‘J’ told Gavlak.
His claims are echoed by another female fighter named ‘K’, who told Gavlak, “They didn’t tell us what these arms were or how to use them. We didn’t know they were chemical weapons. We never imagined they were chemical weapons.”

Abu Abdel-Moneim, the father of an opposition rebel, also told Gavlak, “My son came to me two weeks ago asking what I thought the weapons were that he had been asked to carry,” describing them as having a “tube-like structure” while others were like a “huge gas bottle.” The father names the Saudi militant who provided the weapons as Abu Ayesha.

According to Abdel-Moneim, the weapons exploded inside a tunnel, killing 12 rebels.
“More than a dozen rebels interviewed reported that their salaries came from the Saudi government,” writes Gavlak.

If accurate, this story could completely derail the United States’ rush to attack Syria which has been founded on the “undeniable” justification that Assad was behind the chemical weapons attack. Dale Gavlak’s credibility is very impressive. He has been a Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press for two decades and has also worked for National Public Radio (NPR).

The website on which the story originally appeared - Mint Press (which is currently down as a result of huge traffic it is attracting to the article) is a legitimate media organization based in Minnesota. The Minnesota Post did a profile on them last year.

Saudi Arabia’s alleged role in providing rebels, whom they have vehemently backed at every turn, with chemical weapons, is no surprise given the revelations earlier this week that the Saudis threatened Russia with terror attacks at next year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi unless they abandoned support for the Syrian President.

“I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” Prince Bandar allegedly told Vladimir Putin, the Telegraph reports.

The Obama administration is set to present its intelligence findings today in an effort prove that Assad’s forces were behind last week’s attack, despite American officials admitting to the New York Times that there is no “smoking gun” that directly links President Assad to the attack.
US intelligence officials also told the Associated Press that the intelligence proving Assad’s culpability is “no slam dunk.”

As we reported earlier this week, intercepted intelligence revealed that the Syrian Defense Ministry was making “panicked” phone calls to Syria’s chemical weapons department demanding answers in the hours after the attack, suggesting that it was not ordered by Assad’s forces.

Source: http://bit.ly/16WfeJy
 

*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

28 November 2012

Miracles on the border: Syrians encounter Jesus


NOTE TO READERS: The deepening crisis created by the civil war in Syria poses a major threat not only to the continued existence of that nation but to the stability of an already chaotic Middle East. This story and the following other stories cover the growing Christian ministry to thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing into neighboring countries.

As Syria disintegrates in war, Christians give refugees hope

Wounded warrior learns power of forgiveness


BEIRUT (BP) -- The Christian relief team heard about the needy Syrian widow living outside a Lebanese Muslim village near the Syrian border. So they took food to her.

Apparently, Jesus had been there first.

A refugee from the civil war in Syria, the Muslim widow, along with her three children, had sought shelter in Lebanon -- like more than 100,000 other Syrians. She was observing a traditional 40-day period of solitude to mourn her dead husband, so she had received nothing from the local Islamic aid society.

When the Christians knocked at her door, the widow appeared fully covered in black, including an opaque veil over her face. She explained her period of self-isolation. They offered to leave the food outside, but she unexpectedly invited them in. They sat with her and her children on the floor of the temporary dwelling.

"Who are you?" she asked anxiously.

"You don't know us, but we have great love in our hearts toward you," the team leader answered, explaining their reasons for helping Syrian refugees. "That love comes from God, who has worked in our lives."

To their amazement, she responded by removing her veil --— unheard of in her conservative Muslim culture. Then the words came flooding out.

"I want to tell you what happened to me yesterday," she said, her voice trembling with emotion. "As I was sleeping during the night, someone knocked on my door. I was so scared, but I opened the window to see who it was. No one was there. After a while, I heard the same knocking. My heart was beating so fast, so I went and sat beside the door, and I fell asleep there.

"As I was sleeping, someone put His hand on my shoulder. He said, 'You don't know Me. You have passed through a great pain. I experienced a great pain, also. But I will not leave you alone. Tomorrow I will send you someone who will tell you about Me. Listen to him.'"

When she finished the story, she began to weep. She turned to the team leader and said, "Tell me about this person that I saw in my dream."

Through his own tears, the leader told her about Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the friend of widows, orphans and outcasts. "This Book that I'm going to give you will explain to you about God's love," he promised, giving her a Bible along with additional aid to help her and her children survive the mourning period.

The widow later returned to Syria. No one knows for sure what has become of her. But God knows.

'Dead or alive?'

Sami*, the Lebanese Christian pastor who told the widow about Jesus, has had similar experiences with other Muslims. He and several Christian partners have been reaching out to Muslim villages in Lebanon with the simple Gospel message. They expanded their outreach to Syrian Muslims when refugees started streaming across the border last year.

"When we started to serve among those villages and communities, I had a doubt in my heart," Sami admits. "Will it work? Are we going to experience what we hear from different parts of the Middle East and the world about Muslims coming to know Jesus as Savior and Lord? It was a challenge, a discovery process for me personally and for many with us in the ministry. But as we have shared the Gospel faithfully, the Lord is showing us signs of people who are opening up, asking questions and opening the door for us to reach a wider community.

"We started a couple of house groups in different areas with Lebanese and Syrian Muslims, and we are discipling those people. Some of them have come to know Christ. Others are discovering who Jesus is. They are showing signs of changing in their lives."

A Muslim community leader the Christians befriended last year helped them gain entrance to the homes of many Muslims -- Lebanese and Syrian. During those visits, he heard the Gospel message of God's offer of salvation through Jesus Christ perhaps 100 times.

At the beginning of one such visit, the Muslim leader walked up to a refugee family, pointed at them and said, "Are you dead or alive?"

The family was taken aback; so were the Christians. He repeated his question: "Are you dead or alive?" Then he pointed at the Christians and declared, "These people have a Book, and it's going to tell you how to find life. You need to read it!"

"This is a Muslim guy who probably has never read the New Testament himself," marvels Christian worker David James*, who participated in the visit. "But he's opening doors for us now because he saw something different in us as he heard the things that we were sharing."

In another village, the relief team made a repeat visit to the home of an influential Syrian Muslim. He knows many other needy families, so they brought a large supply of food for distribution.

"We don't need your boxes of food," the Syrian leader said. "What we need is somebody to come and teach us how to walk in the way of Jesus and how we can forgive one another. We don't know how to live with each other." The Christians were happy to oblige.

'I want to follow Jesus'

Perhaps the boldest new evangelist in Lebanon, however, is an older Syrian woman whose home has become a center for teaching truth.

Sami met Noora* at the end of a long, exhausting day of aid deliveries to refugees. He was ready to go home, but his guide insisted on one more stop to a particularly needy group of families. Reluctantly, he agreed. They distributed food portions and New Testaments along with a simple Gospel presentation.

Noora, one of the Syrian Muslim women in the home, started asking questions about baptism. As it turned out, she already was reading the New Testament. She had plenty of other questions about Jesus: How do you address Him? How does He differ from the other prophets?

"We read Matthew, the first chapters, about Jesus' incarnation and that He is Immanuel," Sami recounts. "Immanuel means 'God with us.'"

"I don't understand," Noora replied.

Sami explained the concept of a king visiting his people disguised in plain clothing and humility, yet remaining in every aspect a king. He told her about Jesus' sinless life compared to the other prophets, all of whom had failed God in various ways, despite their greatness.

"Who do you want to follow -- Jesus or the prophets?" Simi asked.

"I want to follow Jesus," Noora answered.

During another visit Noora suddenly declared, "The message that you shared with me changed my life. I'm a new person." The changes in her life proved her words.

"Once we visited her and she was reading the Old Testament," Sami recalls. "After another week, she was in the New Testament. She told us, 'This is my third time of reading the whole Bible.' After that we continued visiting her, encouraging her and discipling her. She said, 'Everything you tell me, I go and I share it with others. I tell the traditional Christians that worshipping saints is not good; you have to worship God. I'm sharing with the Syrians [Muslims] about how God changed my life.'"

Recently Noora returned to Syria for a visit with family, despite the dangers. When Sami called her to make sure she was OK, she reported: "I have a group of women gathered in my house from Muslim and Christian backgrounds and I'm teaching them.

"It's hard," Noora acknowledged, "but God is helping me."
--30--
*Names changed. Erich Bridges is a global correspondent for the International Mission Board. Contributions to relief ministry among Syrian refugees can be made by visiting imb.org/syrianrefugees? and designating "Syria relief" in the comment line. For updates on how God is at work through the crisis in Syria and ways to pray and help, email love4syria@pobox.com. Contributions to the spread of God's Word among Syrians can be made by calling Faith Comes By Hearing at  1-800-545-6552and designating a gift for the Syrian Refugees Project. Get Baptist Press headlines and breaking news on Twitter (@BaptistPress), Facebook (Facebook.com/BaptistPress ) and in your email ( baptistpress.com/SubscribeBP.asp).

18 December 2011

Racist syrians!

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