Alt Left: As a Rule, In Civil Wars, Nations Never Say They’re Own People Are Rebelling against Them

NATO and Ukraine have been lying and saying it’s been the Russian Army fighting in Donbass all these years. The Ukrainians are lying because they don’t want to admit their own people are fighting against them. The US and many other countries always do this in any civil war. The state never admits that it’s own people are rebelling against it.

It’s always just some outsiders who came in and stirred things up. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, Filipino, Greek, Turkish, Salvadoran, Peruvian, Brazilian, Chilean, Argentine, Colombian, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan, Honduran, Venezuelan, and Dominican people were never revolting against their leaders. They were fat and happy.

It was all just evil Soviets going in there and starting revolutions. The locals weren’t revolting at all. In the Western Hemisphere, it was always Cubans who were doing the revolting. Later on it was Nicaraguans. And now in Colombia it’s Venezuelans attacking the state. In Asia it was all China and the USSR. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, and Lao people were happy as clams. They weren’t fighting. We were always just fighting Russians and Chinese over there.

Our enemies do this crap too. Syria says all the people fighting against it are foreign fighters. That’s not the case. There are quite a few foreigners over there, but 7

The Lebanese people are perfectly happy and they love Israel so much. There’s no such thing as Hezbollah. It’s all just Iranians. Same thing in Yemen. There are no Houthis waging a popular rebellion. It’s all nothing but Iranians. Iraqis love us so much that they ordered us out of the country. Of course we refused to leave and Trump threatened to have the president killed if he pushed the issue. Of course those Iraqis attacking our bases couldn’t possibly be Iraqis because Iraqis love us. It’s all just a bunch of Iranians. Same thing in Syria.

Syrians love the US. We’re over there stealing all their oil and a lot of their wheat and burning what wheat fields we don’t steal. We bomb their bakeries and water tanks. We bomb their factories so they can’t rebuild. We occupy their land against international law. Isn’t all that just wonderful? How could any Syrian be upset by that? They could not of course. So the people attacking our bases in Syria are all just a bunch of Iranians. Boy those Iranians sure get around, don’t they?

As you can see there is a human need for peoples and states to lie every time there’s a civil war and insist that their people are happy as kings. They couldn’t possibly be taking up arms against  the wonderful country! It’s always just a bunch of evil foreigners.

The Ukrainians are doing the same thing. They won’t admit that their own people in the Donbass have taken up arms against them. How could that be possible. Top Ukrainian figures have gone on the biggest Ukrainian TV stations and openly called for the extermination of 1.5 million Russians in the Donbass. How could people not love a group that wants to kill 1.5 million of your own people? They couldn’t! So it’s always just these evil Russian foreigners invading their land and killing Ukrainian soldiers.

India won’t admit that Kashmiris are miserable in India and want to go independent. They’re fat and happy. Turns out all the fighting is nothing but Pakistan trying to steal Indian land.

Who Are the Druze?

Rambo: What are Droozes in Lebanon? Part Christian part something else?

The Druze exist in Northern Israel, Southwester Syria and Southern Lebanon. Druze are a sect that branched off from Islam about 100 years ago.They have a strange religion where only the elders know the true secrets of the religion because they have books that no one else is allowed to see. In this way they are similar to the Yezidis in Northern Iraq, the Alawites in Syria, and even the Catholics in the Middle Ages.

Like the others, the Druze tell their people only a very watered-down version of the religion, so your average person doesn’t really have good details on what the religion is exactly about. Women play a significant role in Druze culture, and I think some of their priests are even women. In  this way,  they are odd in the Middle Eastern sense.

This may well be an ancient idea. As with the other two religions, you cannot convert into the Druze religion. Like the Yezidis, the Druze are not supposed to marry outside their religion.

Although to hardline Islamists, they often say they are Muslims. The Islamists usually accept this. They were often persecuted, so they took refuse in high mountains and hid out. They also practiced a lot of taqiyya to get out of persecution. The Druze have been loyal to Israel, though they have been treated terribly by the Jews. This is because it is Druze tradition to go along with whatever government is in whatever state they happen to be in. Druze must serve in the Israeli military. But some are now identifying as Arabs and refusing to serve. That’s illegal and some are going to jail for doing that.

In Syria, they support the state and are very anti-Israel. The Druze in the Golan under Israeli rule are still loyal to Syria, and they really hate Israel.

In Lebanon a lot of them work with Hezbollah. They’re real Israel-haters there too. Their leader is a man named Walid Jumbalat who is one of most cynical men in Lebanon. He’s all over the place all the time, always changing sides and positions. His politics isn’t really coherent.

They are very similar to the Alawites, a similar obscure mountain sect that has used taqiyya and obfuscation to confuse people about what they are. The Alawites are Muslims, although Islamists call them heretics because the Islam they practice is very odd.

Alt Left: The Fascists in Israel, Ukraine, and Lebanon

The Nazi Fascists in Ukraine

The Jews in Ukraine are particularly evil. They’re out and out neo-Nazis, but it’s this weird Nazism that substitutes Russians for Jews. However, the spiritual father of these Nazis was an independence movement supported by Stepan Bandera in World War 2 Ukraine who supported Hitler and murdered 200,000 Jews and 40,000 Poles on their own. So the Jewish Nazis in Ukraine are supporting a movement that helped in the Holocaust of their own people!

In addition, the governments of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and the opposition in Belarus are all pro-Nazi because the independence movements in all of these places were pro-Nazi in World War 2 in part because the Nazis conquered these places and promised them independence.

The local Nazis in some of these places were almost worse than the real thing. A Belarussian recently told about how the Belarussian local Nazi militia were going to wipe out his entire village for whatever reason, and the village heads went to the local German Nazi Army commander and told him of their plans. The Nazi officer was so appalled that he halted their plans and stationed soldiers in the village to protect the people. The local Nazi militias in Romania hung local Jews on meathooks in slaughterhouses. Photos of these murders leaked out, and even the local German Nazi military officers were outraged by this.

The truth is a number of German military officers were not interested in or even opposed to the Jew-killing.

A German general reportedly saved 3,000 Jews in Warsaw from imminent extermination by the SS. They were working in a factory the Nazis had set up as a sort of slave labor force, but the general tried to treat them as well as he could. He heard that the SS was coming to raid the factory and he knew what that meant. So he gave a talk to his Jewish workers and told that them that the SS was coming to the factory in a few days. He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have to. All 3,000 workers had fled by the time the SS showed up. The general said they broke out while his men were sleeping. The Jews escaped to safety, at least for a while anyway. He later tried protect another few thousand Jews and was caught and executed.

Not everyone in the Army was a raving antisemite. In the beginning the Nazis had assigned the task of Jew-killing to ordinary soldiers. Famous letters from German soldiers expressed disgust and outrage over the gruesome murder by bayonet of a couple of dozen Jews that their unit had participated in in Eastern Europe. The soldiers had so many breakdowns and traumatic reactions afterwards that a special Jew- and other civilian-killing force, the SS, had to be created.

Before the Nazi Party went after the Jews, they had a lot of supporters among German Jews, many of whom were ready to go fascist themselves. They only reason they didn’t was because Hitler turned on them. If not they would have been with him to the end. By the way, guess who else supports those (((Nazis in Ukraine)))? You got it. Israel.

Jewish Fascists in Israel

The Jewish would-be fascists of the 1930’s have since vacated to Israel where they have resurrected a native Israeli fascism derived from the literal Jewish fascist Jabotinsky, who wrote The Iron Wall in 1921. All of the Likud and other rightwing governments since the early 1980’s have been literally heirs to Jabotinskyism. In fact, Jabotinsky is considered to be the spiritual father of the Likud Party, and everyone who came after him is one of his children. Jabotinsky supported all of the nascent fascist movements in Europe at the time.

Israel has now made alliances with fascist-like parties in Hungary, Poland, (((Ukraine))), India, and the Philippines, which should not be surprising because fascist states form alliances with other fascist states, and Israel is a fascist state made up of Jewish fascists.

Falange Fascists in Lebanon

Israel has long supported the fascist Falangists in Lebanon, a strongly-Christian native fascist movement. About half of Lebanese Christians are with these fascists and the other half are with Christian President Aoun and hence are supporters of Hezbollah because he is with Hezbollah. So half of Lebanese Christians are with Hezbollah and the other half basically want to exterminate Hezbollah. By the way, the fascist Lebanese Christians hate the Palestinians too.

They are also one of the only groups in the Arab World to support actual rightwing economics, which goes against basic Arab culture and Islam itself. This is because while most Middle Eastern Christians (Catholics) look East to the pro-socialist Eastern Orthodox Church, especially the leadership in Russia. The Lebanese, who are also Catholics, are Western Catholics who look to Rome and Europe. Hence the support for Western neoliberalism and libertarianism, two things which have never caught on in the Orthodox East and probably will not within the foreseeable future. Neoliberalism literally goes against their very culture.

The forefather of that movement, a man named Gemayal, emerged in Lebanon early on. In the 1930’s, he also supported fascist movements in Europe. He literally had pictures of Hitler pasted to his high school locker. The US also supports these Lebanese fascists, and in fact they are the principal US ally in that government. The Saudis also support them, but the Saudis are Far Right themselves, so it should not shock us when they support non-Islamic fascist, in this case, Christian ones.

The Israeli government is Far Right, and Far Right parties are often fascist-like. And as I noted above, the Far Right in Israel literally has fascist roots.

Alt Left: Neuveau Fascism in South America and Europe

Manuel Rodriguez: Back to politics. What is going on in Bolivia is worrying me. We have fascist squads lynching “undesirables” like peasants. We also see that there have been placed barricades with rubbish and tires that block vehicle mobilization, causing people to be fed up and remove the barricades. You know what this all reminds me? The guarimbas of 2014 in Venezuela and Nicaragua. I can see where this is going.

————————– Separate: There is an tendency that is pretty worrying going on at least in Latin America.

The people are tired of the structural inequalities from the neoliberal policies of the right, causing them to lose in elections whenever they appear as they are, and the people are conscious enough.

The mutation consisted on swapping in the public’s mind the Traditional Right image with Center-Right, which seems like a more popular alternative. The complementary tactic is for thee Center-Right to dress up as the Center-Left, which in reality are already prepared sell-outs whose main purpose is try to divert votes from the Left to help the Right win.

The media did their thing, which was to help Center-Left Boric would win over the Leftist Jadue. The whole purpose of Center-Left Yaku Pérez’ candidacy was to make the Leftist Andrés Arauz lose.

That strategy seems to be being recently changing. They are changing the Center-Right for populist Trump-style fascist Far Right candidates. The most worrying thing is that they are getting a lot of support from the population. Bolsonaro is an classic example. Jose Antonio Kast is a more recent example. It seems that Vamos in Argentina is going to win in the parliament.

I would like to point out that the election in Ecuador was profoundly unfair. First of all, the main opposition party kept getting banned, and its leaders all have warrants out for their arrest on fake charges. This “lawfare” is similar to what was done in Brazil. By the way, the FBI greatly assisted the Brazilian fascists in the lawfare against the Left down there. The US is also engaging in lawfare against Venezuela.

Vamos are Argentine fascists?

Obviously Bolsonaro is a fascist, and Kast is clearly a Pinochet-style Chilean fascist.

Why are people voting fascist? I don’t get it. Although Chile and Argentine both have deep fascist blocs in each country, in my opinion mostly because those are majority-White countries. Brazil is also a majority-White country, which may be why they are going fascist too.

In Latin America nowadays, where you lack a White majority, fascism is hard to install because Latin non-Whites hate fascism. They’ve had quite enough of it. However, they do support it in Colombia. On the other hand, Colombia is also a fairly White country. Fascist roots in Colombia go back to Independence. The country simply has developed a culture of popular fascism for whatever reason. Turkey is very similar. The people get no benefit for voting fascist, but they keep doing it anyway.

There are fascist governments in non-White Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay, but all of those are dictatorships. The Right seized power with fascist coups – armed in Haiti and Honduras and legislative in Paraguay – and they have ruled by dictatorship ever since.

In the Americas, Whiteness is associated with rightwing authoritarianism and fascism. In Europe this is not the case, but Whites are a huge majority over there. It appears that Whites go fascist when they are in the minority, but Argentina and Chile are majority-White, so I don’t get it.

Really any population descended from the Catholic Spaniards divides into the typical Far Right-Far versus Left Collectivist pattern. This pattern is also seen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Lebanon, all Mediterranean countries. This is also seen now somewhat in France. Spain, France, and Italy are Catholic, Greece is Orthodox, Turkey is Muslim, and Lebanon is mostly Catholic and Muslim. Mediterranean countries are collectivist, so politics tends to be collectivist. Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity are collectivist religions.

Left collectivism is Communism and socialism, while Right collectivism is fascism.

The Catholic East European fascism in Poland and Hungary is different and has a Catholic socially conservative and anti-Communist tint. Liberation theology never took hold in Eastern Europe except in Czechia, where there is a long tradition of “Catholic Communism.”

In Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus, the fascism is simply Nazism, pure and simple. Ukraine and Belarus are Orthodox, and the Baltics are Catholic (Lithuania) and Protestant (Latvia and Estonia). The Nazism here stems from World War and the independence movements in these countries making alliances with the Nazi occupiers who promised them independence. The Communists in turn were seen as anti-nationalists who thwarted these nations independence dreams. See below for more on that.

In Orthodox Georgia and Russia, fascism nationalist – ethnic nationalist in Georgia or simply nationalist or “Russian Empire nationalist” in Russia.

Protestant Northern Europe is more individualistic. The Right there is just about dead except in the UK and the Baltics. The Right in the UK is a pale copy of US politics. See below for the anti-Communist roots of the Right in the Baltics.

The Right in the northern individualist parts of Europe is mostly anti-Muslim. It’s conservatism is toned down like all politics in Northern Europe is toned down, so it’s not really fascist, instead a type of Woke Anti-Islam. Otherwise they are very left on social issues. One of their leaders in the Netherlands was a gay man. And they support a more socialist economics, but this is the case for both the Right and Left in most of Europe proper other than the Baltics.

The Economic Right is only popular in the UK, where the political economics mirrors the US, and in Czechia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. In all of these places except the UK, it is an anti-Communist reaction where many people are angry about living under Communism in the past, so they have gone to extreme Right economics as an overreaction.

In Estonia and Latvia, support for the economic Right has been disastrous and has almost destroyed both countries. The Economic Right has little power in Russia and Belarus, with only 10-2

Alt Left: Fascism, In Its Many and Varied Forms, Continues to Rampage Across the Planet

Rambo: Your friend there is wrong, Highbrow. Fascism is NOT dead. Just look around the world. Trying my best not to spout clichés, it’s very much alive and well. Maybe that’s what Highbrow has been trying to remind people of.

Yes, and fascism now is taking dramatically different forms than it has in the past. In general, fascism is political process set up by capitalists when they are facing a serious threat from the Left. Any rightwing authoritarian regime or dictatorship against the Left, especially a popular one, can only be seen as fascist.

Therefore, there were many fascist regimes in the world in the last 75 years. States in bold house current fascist regimes. States in normal print indicate past fascist regimes:

In Latin America in Guatemala until 1995, El Salvador until 1992, Honduras, Nicaragua until 1979, Haiti, Colombia, Brazil, Peru under Fujimori in the 1990’s, Ecuador, Bolivia under Hugo Banzer in the 1950’s and briefly last year, Argentina under Videla and Uruguay under the generals in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Paraguay, and Chile under Pinochet, but also in Spain under Franco until 1975, Portugal under Salazar until 1974, Croatia and Serbia after the Balkans War, Greece under the generals in the late 1960’s, Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Pakistan under Zia in the 1980’s, India, Iran under the Shah until 1979, Liberia under Samuel Doe in the 1980’s, Zaire under Mobutu, South Africa under apartheid, Rhodesia under Ian Smith, Morocco under the king, Brunei under the Sultan, the Philippines, Vietnam under Thieu and Diem, Thailand Burma under the generals, Indonesia under Soekarno, South Korea under Singhman Rhee in the 1950’s until 1980, Taiwan in the 1950’s until 1980 and China in the late 1940’s under Chiang Kai Chek, and Fiji.

Incipient fascism is creeping in the US, the UK, Israel, Poland, and Hungary.

There is presently strong fascist opposition in Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Belarus, Lebanon, and Hong Kong.

Pro-fascist democracies exist in the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia in particular and frankly, in the entire EU and NATO because the EU and NATO are supporting the fascist opposition in Latin America, the fascist government in Ukraine, and the fascist opposition in Belarus these days.

There are arguments that the Taliban is fascist, but I’m not buying it. I’m also not buying arguments about “Islamo-fascism.” Nor do I think China, North Korea, Belarus, or Russia are fascist.

Alt Left: Lying Western Media about “Clashes” in Lebanon

Did you notice that as soon as Victoria Nuland showed up in Beirut, snipers on rooftops appeared and started shooting at Hezbollah and Amal people? There were no “clashes” in Beirut, but the entire Western media is lying  to you about that. There were demonstrations by Hezbollah and Amal supporters in Beirut over a judge assigned to investigate something that never even happened in the first place – a stash of fertilizer blew up in the Beirut harbor. But everyone in Lebanon and even Iran has gone along with the lie that this is what happened because it’s better for everyone that way.

What really happened was the Jews dropped a nuclear bomb on Beirut and then set up a vast lie about a how a fertilizer stash blew up. The whole world officially went along with it. Not one nation dared to tell the truth  about what  happened. This is what the Malay Prime Minister Malathir meant when he said, “The Jews (Israel) control the world by proxy.” See anyone calling them on dropping that bomb? See anyone ever going against the ridiculous story that was put out? Of course not. Well, that’s what happens when you have the world damn world in the palm of your hand and everyone is either owned by you or afraid of you.

The Lebanese Forces are a Christian Phalangist movement whose members formed a proxy army allied with Israel when the Jews occupied Southern Lebanon. Their ideological mentor loved Hitler and had photographs of him in his high school locker. The current leader is a former general named Gaega. They are strongly pro-US and in my opinion they are more responsible than anyone else for bringing fascism to Lebanon.

About half of the Lebanese Christians are out and out Christian fascists. They have extreme hate for Muslims and especially for Iran, Hezbollah, and more than anything else, the Palestinians. These are the people who murdered 3,500 people in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982 while Ariel Sharon, head of the Jewish Army, watched with binoculars from a nearby building to make sure resistance to the killers didn’t get out of hand.

They are funded by Saudi Arabia due to the fact that they both hate the Shia and Iran. The Lebanese Forces put snipers on rooftops and fired on the above Hezbollah and Amal demonstrators, killing 6 and wounding 60 more. After this, Hezbollah and Amal militias arrived on the scene and started shooting back. Somehow this gets called “clashes.” Not one Western media report mentioned the Lebanese Forces fascists.

Not even one. That is because the entire Western media is in bed with fascist elements around the world in Ukraine, Lebanon, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Israel, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, El Salvador, and Haiti. Mostly this is due to economic support for fascist elites and a democratic left. In a few places like Ukraine and Lebanon it is down to US geopolitical war against Iran and Russia which we have dragged our European slaves into.

On the other hand, arguably fascist states in Eastern Europe in Hungary and Poland are savagely attacked for not going along with the Western woke project.

If you notice, the snipers started shooting as soon as (((Victoria Nuland))) showed up. Mysterious snipers have a tendency to start shooting from roofs everywhere this walking malignancy shows up. Based on that, I think the US and maybe Israel had a hand in these snipers. Mostly I blame the Saudis. I’d say it was a US-Saudi plot to start a civil war in Lebanon with possibly input from Israel.

The US, the Saudis, and mysterious fascist snipers shooting at Shia Muslims to overthrow a pro-Hezbollah/Iran and anti-Israel government.

Alt Left: Mysterious NATO/CIA/Deep State/Jihadist or Fascist Snipers on Roofs That Shoot Both Sides During Unrest to Cause Chaos or Overthrow Regimes

Remember in Ukraine where mysterious snipers appeared when (((Victoria Nuland))) showed up and shot both the pro-Russian Berkut police and anti-Russian pro-Nazi protesters? That was a pure NATO operation, 10

The Lithuanians were holed up in a high tower and disguised as classical musicians. Some were female. They were photographed leaving Ukraine after the attacks with their guns in their instrument cases. The Ukrainian pro-Russian police were blamed but all of the bullets came from guns that they did not have as per an investigation by a commission of the Ukrainian Nazi government.

NATO, the CIA, the EU, and mysterious fascist snipers shooting both sides to install a fascist government and overthrow a pro-Russian one.

Mysterious NATO Jihadist Snipers Shooting Both Sides in Syria

Recall that in the Syrian Civil War, the war started with Saudi jihadist gunmen smuggled in with weapons stored in mosques who opened fire on both Syrian police, who were unarmed, and demonstrators. Reports indicate that NATO was deeply involved in this Saudi operation, as NATO helped them smuggle the weapons and vehicles across the border.

The Syrian police were blamed, but they had no guns. This was the demo that started the Syrian Civil War. So the Syrian conflict was violent from the very start. Within three weeks of the demos, there were already armed attacks on the Syrian Army. The scene continued for months with mysterious snipers on roofs targeting both police and protesters in cities in Syria.

Once again, NATO, the US, the CIA, and mysterious jihadist snipers shooting both sides to get rid of a Shia pro-Iranian and anti-Israel government.

Mysterious (NATO?) Snipers Shooting Both Sides in Egypt

During the Egyptian Revolution, snipers appeared on roofs attacking both police and protesters. There were rumors of NATO involvement here. Apparently the objective here was to get rid of the Mubarak government,  which had become a thorn in the side of the US.

NATO and mysterious snipers shooting both sides.

Mysterious CIA and Fascist Snipers Shooting Police and Protesters in Venezuela

During the coup against Chavez in 2002, rightwing fascist snipers on bridges attacked both protestors and police. Venezuelan police were blamed. NATO and the EU have long supported the armed fascist opposition in Venezuela.

The CIA and fascist snipers shooting cops and protestors to overthrow a Left government.

Mysterious (NATO?) Snipers Shooting Police and Protesters on Both Sides in Thailand

During the Thai civil unrest, mysterious snipers appeared on rooftops and shot both police and protestors. NATO was once again blamed. I’m not sure what the rationale here was, but the West was supporting one of the sides, either the red shirts or the yellow shirts, I have no idea.

It looks like this “mysterious snipers on roofs often shooting both sides, including police and protesters” thing is a CIA/NATO thing linked to US Deep State operations all over the globe. It looks like the Saudis are also involved, as are European fascist states like Georgia, the Baltics, and Poland. The goal is unclear but in most cases it is to start civil wars, increase unrest, and many cases, to overthrow regimes the US does not like.

Wherever Ms. (((Nuland))) goes, snipers on rooftops mysteriously appear, and they just so happen to promote US objectives. The objective in Lebanon was to drag Hezbollah into a civil war. The Western media are already lying like snakes about this, saying that the fighting was the result of “clashes” without laying blame on the US and Israel-supported Christian fascist Lebanese Forces who started it.

Alt Left: Israel Blew up an Oil Refinery in Lebanon

Not sure if you saw those photos of that burning oil refinery in Lebanon on October 11, but word just came in via French intelligence that that fire was caused by an Israeli missile.

Boy, everyone is covering up all of the Israel’s foul deeds, aren’t they? If you haven’t noticed, Israel is totally on a roll now, heads swollen far more arrogantly than usual, and more aggressive than ever. There’s nothing stopping them. They’re going all out, for broke. They’ve recently gotten a couple of academics fired at universities in the US and the UK.

I think of the Prime Minister of Malaysia saying, “The Jews (Israel) control the world by proxy.” You see anybody stopping them? You see anybody lifting even one finger or saying even one word against them outside of the Arab and Muslim World? You see any papers, TV or radio stations even saying one word against them or at least refusing to cover for their lies? Of course not. They get to do whatever the Hell they damn well please.

And when you get to do whatever the Hell you fucking want to no matter what and no one will even call you on it or even admit that you did it, guess what? The world is your oyster. It’s your baby. You’ve got the world in the palm of your hand.

So in that sense, the great Prime Minister was absolutely correct and perhaps he has been paying the price ever since.

Israel are an integral part of Western imperialism, NATO, the EU, the Pentagon, the Deep States of the West, and the corporations and rich of the West. They’re all in bed with Israel and none of them will say one word against them. And the security linkage is profound. Israel is an essential link in the world structure of Western militarized imperialism.

Well, Israel controls the West all right. In a sense that is. In the sense that all of the West is deeply in bed with Israel. In the sense that no Western state will lift one finger against Israel or say one word against them, nor will any Western media outlets. Israel is essentially a part of NATO right now and has been for a very long time. The relationship between Israel and the West is a political alliance that is more military than anything else.

I’m not sure to what extent trade has to do with it. In the US and the UK, it has to do with domestic policy in that Jewish money controls the political process in both nations on the question of Israel. Also Jews have significant media power in those two states, though the actual degree of that power is not known, and it seems to be lessening in recent years as rich Gentiles like Bezos buy papers. In Germany, it’s all tied in with guilt over WW2. This may be the case in most of Europe for that matter. The European Gentiles in large part got in on the Jew-killing in the world war, and now they repent for it by supporting Israel.

All of the Deep States of the West are totally in with Israel. And the number of Arab and Muslim traitors going over to them grows by the day. They don’t really have many state enemies outside of the Muslim and Arab World, and neither one will lift a finger to stop them. Only the Axis of Resistance, which includes Iran, the Iraqi government, army, and militias, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Afghanistan and Pakistan are against them.

I’d like to point out that the recent cave-in’s by Arab leaders to the Jewish state are not what they seem.

Alt Left: About Those Fake Peace Breakthroughs Between Israel and the Arab World

First of all, all that is happening is normalization. Most if not all of those countries had no relationship with Israel at all. In fact, they all refused to even recognize that Israel even existed. Most of them were officially at war with Israel since 1947! Syria and Lebanon are still officially at war with Israel. No peace treaty was ever signed.

So all these countries did was recognize that Israel existed! And in some places, ended the state of war that had been going on for over 70 years. They also vowed to set up embassies in each other’s countries. In some cases, there are now regular flights between the two countries.

None of this is remarkable and hostile countries all over the world recognize each other, have embassies, flights, etc.

Now the Emiratis have taken this to the next level, but they’re just into it for the money. All they care about is money. Getting in with the Jews is seen as an obvious way to increase their wealth.

All of these countries had to be threatened and bribed to make these moves. All of these happened after the Abrahamic Accords, the worst peace deal by far ever offered by Israel. In fact, there were no accords at all. The US and Israel just laid out a fake peace plan and said, “Here it is. Here are the new accords!” No Palestinian signed that document. So it’s not an accord at all, as no opposing sides agreed to anything.

The Emiratis and Bahrainis were bribed by Trump with billions in military aid to normalize relations with Israel.

Morocco was bribed by the US recognizing Morocco’s outrageous annexation of Spanish Sahara. Didn’t take much to get them to go over.

Sudan was bribed by taking them off the fake “state sponsors of terrorism” list, which is nothing but a fake enterprise anyway made of lies and sleazy scams. So all of these regimes had to be bribed big-time to even recognize Israel’s existence in the first place.

In addition, all of these regimes are dictatorships!

Sudan is a military dictatorship and the people have demonstrated against normalization.

Bahrain and UAE are dictatorships. There have been large demos in Bahrain against normalization, but the police have broken them up.

Morocco is a royalist dictatorship run by a king. There have been large demos in Morocco against normalization.

Surveys of Arab countries show that ~two-thirds or more of their populations oppose normalization of relations with Israel. The lowest I saw was 5

There was a small conference in Kurdistan of Iraqi leaders advocating normalization of relations with Israel. The Kurds have been with Israel forever now. There were a few Iraqis there, but most of the traitors were Kurds. When word got out, the Iraqi government exploded and issued arrest warrants for everyone who attended the meeting and spoke. It is illegal in Iraq to advocate for normalized relations with Israel. This is rather typical. In Algeria it is illegal for Algerians to travel to Israel. Similar travel bans may exist in other places.

Alt Left: The Republican Right Resembles the Latin American Oligarchic Right More than Anything Else

From a discussion I am in on Academia: Instead, so much of what is found out there on the Internet is rhetoric, propaganda & misinformation. And, of course that has fed into the Trump cult and others who seem to have reverted to a kind of feral being that can no longer be reasoned with and/or who cannot engage in a civil conversation.
These people remind me of nothing so much as the Latin American Right, and in fact, the US Right is now very much like the oligarchic Right of Latin America. I can’t think of any other rightwing movements elsewhere in the world that resemble the US Right.
Of course, the Right in Canada, the UK, and Australia are similar but much less virulent.
There is no evidence of this sort of a Right anywhere on the Continent, nor in the former USSR, nor in the Middle East.  The ferocious unreasonableness of the US Right resembles the Lebanese Right and Gulf politics, but both are much more sectarian and even bigoted and racist.
It is absent in Central Asia except among Shahis and the Iranian opposition.
It also looks something like the armed Syrian Islamist opposition in terms of its wild irrationality and addiction to lying as a matter of course.
It is absent in South Asia.
It is not present in SE Asia. It is not present in the Philippines or Indonesia, nor does it exist in China, although the anti-Communist Chinese around the Epoch Times resemble the US Right a lot.
Really, the US Right is a fascism of the Latin American oligarchic authoritarian type. It’s all about the money, the loot, and class politics reign supreme.The extreme hatred of liberalism, the Left, social progress of any kind, and even democracy is also typical of the Latin American Right. I hate to use the f word but Trumpism is US fascism, period. Sinclair Lewis said when fascism came to America it would look exactly like this. That was 85 years ago.

Alt Left: More on the Israeli Nuclear Bombing of Beirut Harbor

Observer: When was this tactical strike supposed to have happened?

This is in reference to the so-called fertilizer accident at the Beirut harbor a year ago. There was no explosion of fertilizer at the Beirut Harbor.

There wasn’t even any fertilizer in the warehouse. There was 2,300 pounds of dirt and rocks pretending to be fertilizer. And it won’t go off unless you mix it with fuel oil in proper proportions and even then, you need to throw a charge into it. There are videos of people trying to make AN fertilizer explode, and they can’t do it. They even use blowtorches. That’s why they changed the story later to add that there was somehow tons of fuel oil stored next to the fertilizer. The constantly changing story to fill in holes is indicative of fake attacks. Also even 100X that amount of AN, even mixed with fuel oil, won’t blow a hole that big.

Now that we have established that there was no fertilizer, we move on. Sources in Israel and in Saudi and UAE said that Israel had bombed a Hezbollah weapons depot at the harbor. The “Hezbollah weapons depot” was a fallback story to be used to attack Hezbollah and blame them for the attack. But no amount of missiles could blow a hole that deep in solid rock.

Netanyahu had pinpointed ground zero in a presentation eariler where he pointed to it on a map saying it was a Hezbollah weapons depot and it was going to be attacked. But that can’t be true either because Hezbollah doesn’t store missiles at the harbor and even if they did, they would not store them in that part of the harbor that is controlled by their worst enemies, the Lebanese Forces. Also two weeks before, Israel said that the next time Hezbollah attacked it, they would destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure. This was followed a week later by a “Hezbollah attack” on the border with a “bomb team” trying to plant a bomb. The entire team was killed.

Problem? There was no bomb team. Hezbollah said they knew nothing of the attack and there were no death announcements of their cadre. Apparently this attack never even happened. After this fake attack, Israel said there would now be Hell to pay for Lebanon.

So what happened. Hundreds to thousands of Lebanese eyewitnesses say they saw or heard jets coming in shortly before the attack.

There are photos of these jets, but I am not sure how accurate they are. Detractors are saying they are birds. They do look like birds but warplanes at high altitudes look like birds.

There is a video in the Armenian Quarter of men pointing up in the sky, apparently at the oncoming jets. Soon afterwards, a massive explosion hits and the men are thrown aside.

There have been over 1,000 reports of people hearing jets come in. There is a video showing a man and his wife videotaping the scene after the first bombing (there were two bomb attacks) and talking. A minute and a half in, you hear a steadily increasing roar. The woman asks in Arabic, “What’s that!?” Then there is a huge blast that knocks them away from the window. I heard the steadily increasing roar for 10-15 seconds and to me it sounded like a military jet. I’ve only ever heard that sound at Blue Angels plane displays. People said it sounded like an F-16.

Also a few hours before the attack, 3-4 US spy planes or drones appeared on the Lebanese border with Syria. They lingered there for an hour afterwards. US spy planes are almost never over Lebanon. Why did they suddenly show up right before the fertilizer explosion? Does the US have precognition?

The attack destroyed all of Lebanon’s grain supply for a month. Remember the warning about attacking civilian infrastructure? The attack was followed the next day by three US bombings of Syrian grain warehouses in Eastern Syria. Why did we bomb three Syrian grain storage silos a day after Lebanon’s largest grain silo was destroyed? An attack on food warehouses in Southern Iraq occurred soon after. Notice an attack on a food supply? Southern Iraq is where the pro-Iranian Iraqi Shia live. Next an Iranian mall in Dubai caught fire. Mossad or the CIA is suspected in the attacks in Dubai and Southern Iraq. I’d put money on Mossad. They are unbelievably good, probably better than the CIA.

Nations attacked:

  • Lebanon – site of pro-Iranian Hezbollah.
  • Syria – Shia government, ally of Hezbollah and Iran.
  • Southern Iraq – Shia population allied with Iran and Hezbollah.
  • DubaiIranian mall.

Notice the common feature here is Iran followed by Hezbollah. All Iranian assets and allies were attacked in the port attack and the attacks that followed. Why? Because it wasn’t a fertilizer explosion the Gulf! It was a bombing.

Now that we have established that Israel dropped two bombs on the harbor, we need to determine what sort of weapons they were. The article sets about to make the case that Israel used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon in the attack.

Keep in mind that tactical nukes are low yield and give off very low levels of radiation. Also the blast is much reduced so not nearly as many people die. 1,000 were killed in Beirut. A Hiroshima type weapon would have killed 100-200,000 people, mostly from radiation.

Evidence of recent use of tactical nukes by the US and Israel in the last 30 years.

Four attacks:

  • Israel: There is evidence Israel has used these before. The explosion in Syria that Syrian intelligence said reminded them of the Beirut attack was done by an Israeli bomb in Homs Province. The explosion does indeed look like the Port explosion and it doesn’t look normal at all. It looks like a nuclear bomb test photograph! A Russian team went to the site right afterwards and verified that a nuclear bomb had been used.
  • Israel: During the Lebanon war of 2006, Israel was reported to have used a tactical nuke against dug-in Hezbollah troops. A Russian team came to the site afterwards with equipment and said a nuclear bomb was used.
  • US: There are reports that the US used tactical nukes in the attack on the tunnels in Tora Bora in Afghanistan.
  • US: There is a report of a US tactical nuke attack on Iraq in 1991 13 miles west of Basra. This is the first reported use of one in the modern era.

Alt Left: Sources for the Israel Attacked Beirut with a Nuclear Bomb Story

Claudius Americanus:

Hi Robert. Have you got any sources? Thanks.

“There was little radiation because those bombs give off hardly any radiation anyway. However, 10 hours after the attack, the UN Agency for Nuclear Arms Control facility in Sicily recorded a large radiation spike consistent with either a nuclear bomb or a failed nuclear reactor. 10 hours is about how long it would take for that spike to drift over to Italy.

The governments of Syria, Lebanon, Greece, and Italy have all privately confirmed that Beirut was attacked by Israel. All except Syria said it was with a nuclear bomb. Syria said the attack was with ‘some new type of weapon.’”

It’s all from Gordon Duff at Veterans Today. Keep in mind that I know Gordon and Jim Dean and we have corresponded with me. I saw a copy of the readout from the UN Nuclear Agency station in Sicily, and it shows a huge spike all right. At first I thought it was faked evidence because the spike took so long to show up and everyone said it would have been detected immediately, but later others said that 10 hours later is about how long it would take for the spike to drift over to Sicily.

Gordon also confirmed it was a nuclear bomb via Bob Smith, former nuclear arms control inspector for the UN and particle physicist. I sent an email to Bob to try to get him to confirm it personally from him, but he didn’t write back.

Syrian intelligence confirmed it via the Voltaire Network. I guess they have connections there.

Gordon confirmed it via Lebanese military and intelligence, whom he spoke to. He also confirmed it via President Auon.

In addition, he confirmed it via the Pentagon. He said the Pentagon originally contacted him to ask what happened. Did you see the next day when Trump said it was an attack, not a fertilizer explosion?

Gordon said it was confirmed by the Italian and Greek governments. I’m not sure if he spoke to them or not. He definitely has connections all right in Executive Branch, the Pentagon, and in the Middle East.

He said he first learned about it when Lebanese intelligence contacted him and told him what it was.

Some team went in there with counters eight days later but supposedly they didn’t find anything, but I’m not sure how much is left at eight days. Gordon’s team from VT flew into Lebanon a day or two later with radiation counters, etc. but they were denied access to the site.

Gordon said Lebanese intelligence told him the decision had been made by the Lebanese government, Hezbollah, and Iran to go with the fake fertilizer story, which literally could not have happened. Hezbollah has no way to respond to nuclear bombs and neither does the Lebanese government or Iran. All of them, especially Hezbollah, felt it would demoralize the Lebanese people and Hezbollah supporters if they said they got attacked by a nuke, and it would promote defeatism among the people. So both sides agreed to the fake cover story.

I know he’s sketchy on other stuff, but this time it looks like Gordon hit the ball out of the park.

There’s no way that anything other than a nuclear bomb causes that white-hot mushroom shaped cloud. I’ve only seen clouds like that in photos of nuclear tests and the Hiroshima bomb. Also, witnesses said it felt like their faces were melting. Only a nuclear blast feels like that.

We know it was a bombing attack. There are videos showing people pointing at the planes overhead and a blast shortly after. Over 1,000 witnesses in Beirut said they heard the planes coming in. There are also videos where you can hear the jet coming from 10-15 seconds before the blast. The camerawoman says, “What’s that?” as the jet roar comes in. I don’t know my jets very well, but that sounds like like an F-16 to me. It reminded of those Blue Angels flight shows. That’s the only place I’ve ever heard anything that sounds like that. When those jets come in for a bombing run, there a loud roar that increases in volume. Nothing else sounds like that.

So we know Israel dropped two bombs on the port. The only thing we don’t know is if it was a nuke. But look at that massive crater. That’s in solid rock. The only way you blow a hole in solid rock is with a nuclear bomb. Anything else you drop on solid explodes upwards and won’t penetrate the rock. Otherwise, if you want to blow up rock, you have a drill a hole deep down inside the rock and set off the charge down below.

There’s no way an amount of ammonium nitrate 100X that size blows a hole that wide. Forget it. And there was no way to set it off. Notice the jet fuel got added later when people pointed out that the fertilizer doesn’t go off until you mix it with fuel oil? All of a sudden it turns out that the fertilizer was stored with a huge amount of fuel oil! See how the story changed? That’s how you know it’s fake. In all these fake attacks and false flags, the story keeps changing. People start pointing out the holes in the story, and then the story starts changing to fill in the holes. In an actual attack, the story doesn’t change all the time.

Syria said it was a “new weapon,” and they thought it was the same one that Israel dropped on Homs Province in Syria during a battle with Al Qaeda. I saw a video of that blast, and the cloud looked exactly the same.

I think all these bunker busters must be nuclear in some sense because only a nuclear device can penetrate through stone or rock like that to get down to the bunkers.

I’m also thinking that stupid MOAB bomb might be nuclear in some way. I don’t see how you get a blast that big from a conventional explosive. Everyone within one half mile radius gets deaf from that bomb. It also penetrates underground in mountains. And six months after they dropped that thing, surrounding villagers had strange ailments and all crops planted after the blast were failing. That MOAB is a WMD. It needs to be banned. You can’t allow weapons that deafen the enemy soldiers! WTF. Weapons that render agricultural land infertile? WTF. Weapons that cause weird diseases in nearby villagers? WTF. Ordinary bombs don’t do any of those things.

Alt Left: Another Look at the Israeli Nuclear Bombing of the Port of Beirut

The (((coincidence marks))) in this piece refers to Israel and its supporters, not ordinary Jewish people in the Diaspora who are not involved in affairs of the Israeli state and should not be blamed for its predations. Are the Jews in the US squatting in Palestine, killing people and doing all manner of sleazy dirty things all the time? Of course not. So why are they are problem. I have a beef with the Israeli state, not with Jewish people in general.

There are almost no limits to what the Israelis will do, as we saw in the nuclear bomb attack on the Beirut port a year ago. The port was attacked with a mini-nuke by an Israeli F-16 overhead that was witnessed and heard by thousands of witnesses.

There was little radiation because those bombs give off hardly any radiation anyway. However, 10 hours after the attack, the UN Agency for Nuclear Arms Control facility in Sicily recorded a large radiation spike consistent with either a nuclear bomb or a failed nuclear reactor. 10 hours is about how long it would take for that spike to drift over to Italy.

The governments of Syria, Lebanon, Greece, and Italy have all privately confirmed that Beirut was attacked by Israel. All except Syria said it was with a nuclear bomb. Syria said the attack was with “some new type of weapon.” They compared it to another mini-nuke nuclear bomb Israel had dropped over Syria in Homs a few years back when acting as the air force for Al Qaeda while it was fighting the Syrian government.

I have seen the cloud from that explosion, and it can only be a nuclear bomb. Further, a look at the mushroom cloud indicates that this bomb was similar to the one dropped on Beirut. So Israel is regularly dropping nuclear bombs on Arab countries! Remember what I said about Jews having no morals? Well, there you go.

Sources say that now even the US government, including all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have agreed that Israel attacked Beirut with a nuclear bomb. Even Trump was told that Beirut was an attack by warplanes, a fact that he repeated to the media.

The nuclear bomb attack was timed to occur in tandem with the (((fake UN investigation))) that convicted Hezbollah of assassinating President Hariri, although Hezbollah has now proven that the attack was done by an Israeli drone (possibly with another mini-nuke) in order to frame Hezbollah. There was an Israeli drone directly over the site of the attack for one hour up until the attack. It left shortly afterwards.

The grain silo at the port was destroyed and this was the obvious target. It contained a month’s worth of grain for the country. So Israel wiped out all the grain in Lebanon. This was quickly followed by several (((US))) attacks on grain silos in Eastern Syria. There were also (((attacks against food warehouses))) in Southern Iraq and a (((huge fire at an Iranian shopping mall))) in (((Dubai))) caught fire. These all appear to be Mossad plots. Linking all of these attacks (most of them against food supplies) is an (((attack on Iran and Iran’s supporters))) – the Syrian government, the Shia in Southern Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Shortly before the attack, Israeli president Netanyahu had given a presentation pinpointing the precise Ground Zero of the attack as the site of a Hezbollah missile depot. Netanyahu pledged to attack the site. After the attack, sources in Israel along with (((UAE))) and (((Saudi))) intelligence put out the (((fake story))) that a Hezbollah missile depot had blown up. However, Hezbollah does not store missiles at the port and never has. Also that part of the port is controlled by the Lebanese Forces, a Christian fascist force that hates Hezbollah. No way would they have let Hezbollah store missiles there. This fake story was also intended to get the Lebanese people to rise up against Hezbollah.

Nevertheless, the whole world suckers has swallowed the (((cover story))) lie that was put out about 2,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate blowing up, except that AN is inert and dirt is more likely to blow up than AN. It’s pretty pathetic that the whole world has been (((scammed))) like this, but it’s par for the course.

Later, when informed that AN doesn’t blow up without being carefully mixed with fuel oil, a new fake story went out that the AN stash had been stored next to a huge amount of (((fuel oil))). See how the story changed? You can tell about these false flags and fake attacks because the story keeps changing. In a real attack, the story doesn’t change every few days. The spark needed to set it off was from a (((fireworks factory))) that never existed.

In fact, Lebanese intelligence reported that there was no AN at all in that warehouse. Instead, there was nothing but dirt and rocks. The entire affair was a Mossad plot dating back up to 10 years leading to this point involving a (((ship))) full of fake AN (really dirt and rocks) that had been in a number of ports, including one in Georgia where they loaded up with AN, except that AN is not produced in Georgia. Lebanese intelligence discovered that everything about the ship was fake, including the (((Russian captain))). Everything on the ship’s record had been (((faked and forged))).

After the (((fake fertilizer))) was unloaded, it sat in a warehouse for a decade. Meanwhile another plot was hatched to protest the (((AN))) being stored at the port as a hazard. Someone in the Lebanese government or courts must have been paid off because they kept passing the buck on getting rid of the (((fake fertilizer))). This was a set up for an “incompetent government allows horrible accident to occur” scenario.

I’m thinking these officials or court officers were (((paid off))) somehow. The whole thing was probably done in tandem with the fascist (((Lebanese Forces))) who controlled the port. They must have known that the fake fertilizer was nothing but dirt and rocks. However, the (((LF))) is the most pro-Israel group in Lebanon, but they are primarily motivated by mutual hatred of Hezbollah.

Of course, everyone knows that Lebanon is crawling with Israeli spies and Israeli assets. They get caught all the time. Hezbollah is always finding them. I guess a bit of (((money))) goes a long way or recruiting assets is easy due to a mutual enemy.

On the anniversary of the nuclear attack, the (((LF))) is leading the charge to use the attack to try to get rid of the Hezbollah-dominated government on grounds of incompetence. In truth, Hezbollah is one of the least corrupt forces in Lebanon and the LF are one of the most, but never mind the logic. Soon after the attack, the (((US))) and (((Macron)))’s (((France))) staged a (((color revolution))) that managed to overthrow the government with a mere 2,000 rioters. (((Macron))), who by the way was put into power by the British (((Rothschilds))), flew into Beirut and demanded that Lebanon form a new government without Hezbollah or else.

The government refused to do this, so the (((US))) retaliated and put massive sanctions on all of Lebanon’s banks on the basis that they were all moving Hezbollah money. That was true of course, but Hezbollah is a huge force in Lebanon with massive influence.

The sanctioning of all of Lebanon’s banks has completely collapsed the economy of the country. The (((US))) did this with the purpose of making things so miserable in Lebanon that the people would rise up and throw out Hezbollah. As it is, Hezbollah and allied forces control 6

Clearly, Lebanon’s voters voted for a Hezbollah government. Although (((US))) sanctions wrecked the country, the (((US))) is predictably using the wrecked economy to attack the government by blaming the government for all of the hardship. This is what the US does every time it destroys an economy with sanctions. Put on sanctions, destroy the economy, and then blamed the attacked government for the economic wreckage. It’s obviously a gigantic lie and scam, but apparently most Americans either don’t care or are too dumb to figure it out.

On the anniversary of the fake AN explosion, the LF have been organizing riots and violence all over Lebanon to use the fake incident (which they were probably involved in (((faking))) themselves) to try to overthrow the government.

Alt Left: Hezbollah, the True Army of Lebanon, Is Neither Sectarian Nor Puritanical

Hezbollah Is Neither Sectarian Nor Puritanical

In truth, Hezbollah is the true army of Lebanon, as the Lebanese Army is so weak it is pathetic. Patriotic Lebanese rely on Hezbollah to defend the country.

Hezbollah is not sectarian at all. You can go into a bar in Southern Lebanon’s Hezbollah country and order a beer in a Christian town. The headscarf mandate, with is really just a preference, is not enforced in Christian and Druze villages in the area. A vast number of secular Lebanese support Hezbollah. Pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Beirut feature many scantily-clad hot young women without headscarfs fanatically waving Hezbollah flags.

Half of all of Lebanon’s Christians are now with Hezbollah, while the other half is against them. The President Auon is a pro-Hezbollah Christian. Hezbollah is so nonsectarian that they actually have Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Druze arms of their army. These are referred to as militias and they form the Hezbollah militia in whichever ethnic region they are defending.

However, to join the main Hezbollah force, it is preferred though not necessary to be a Shia Muslim, but there have been high-ranking Druze members in the past. The Shia Mullah Fadlallah, the spiritual head of Hezbollah, is quite secular and pragmatic. He has even issued decrees allowing female masturbation on the grounds that if it is preferred that women not have sex outside of marriage, they still have a strong sex drive that needs some sort of an outlet. This may not seem like much, but it’s awfully progressive for a Muslim scholar.

Similarities: The Shia and Catholicism Versus the Protestants and Sunnism

But the Shia are a pragmatic sect. While the Sunni feel that Islam was frozen in time during the era of Mohammad and there are continuous attempts by radicals, often armed, to “get back to the old days and the true roots of Islam.” In this sense they are like the Protestant sects who claim they practice the original Christianity of the first churches. Since that would be the Syrian Orthodox Church of 60 AD (set up by Paul I believe) I doubt if they are practicing the Christianity of that church.

Both Protestants and Sunnis tend to believe in religious literalism and the sanctity of the texts, although there is a lot of leeway in the hadiths, or sayings of Mohammad which were recorded in the 200 years after he died. Scholars have ruled that many of the hadiths are “not reliable” and hence not binding. Endless debate goes on about the degree of reliability of this or that hadith. Still, they are quite as literalist as the Protestants who insist that every word of the Bible is truth.

The Shia are more like the Catholics. They have an institutionalized Church centered in Iran with the mullahs that resembles the institutional Catholicism centered in Vatican City. In recent years, the Church has ruled that “Christianity must be continuously updated to keep it in accord with the times and the constant changes on mankind’s circumstances that result. This has resulted in the Church having an official astronomer (!) and issuing rulings saying that both alien civilizations and Evolution are compatible with Catholicism. Similarly, the Shia feel that Islam must be continually updated in accord with changing times.

Although there are many liberal Protestant sects, nevertheless, the notion of the unerring nature of Biblical texts is a Protestant idea, not a Catholic one. Instead, Catholics tend to regard the entirety of Catholic Church doctrine instead of Biblical literacy as the base of the religion.

Hence Trad Catholics want to go back to the earlier and more conservative Church rulings, and the modern liberals squirm to accomodate all sorts of things, including homosexuality and lesbianism in many parishes in big US cities. The liberalism of Vatican 2 in 1964 caused a massive split in the religion, and the Trads generally see it as an abomination, whereas the liberals see it as a much-needed progressive upgrade. The Trad-liberal wars wage on in the Church.

Temporary Marriage As a Sanction for Fornication and Adultery in Islam

Iran itself has essentially legalized prostitution under the rubric of temporary marriage allowed in Shia Islam. In the religious city of Qom, the streets are full of pious young Shia men who have come there for their Islamic Studies. However, the place is swarming with young female prostitutes. A student just grabs one of these women, takes her to one of the local mullahs who preside over such ceremonies all day, and marries her for 1-3 days, a period in which he is seen as her husband in a legal sense.

Then they head off two one of the many graveyards in town. Shia graveyards are full of shrines for the dead, often elaborate and a bit underground. Money changes hands, the couple heads into an underground shrine, has sex, and then emerges and parts ways.

I think the Iranian regime feels that these men are sexually frustrated so temporary marriage is an outlet for men. There is a lot of prostitution in Tehran and although authorities crack down on it, the women are seen as more victims than criminal and they are sent off to rehabilitation centers run by sympathetic women. The regime has been toying with the idea of fully legalized brothels or houses of prostitution, apparently to be sanctioned under the rubric of temporary marriage.

I was surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia has actually allowed temporary marriage under a similar rubric for decades now. It’s used not so much for prostitution as for an outlet for men to have more than one wife, albeit one who does not live with him. Under this scheme, he is also her guardian and he is required to help support her.

Hezbollah are hardly puritans.

A Requiem for Arabia’s Jews

A Requiem for Arabia’s Jews

I wish I could tell you who wrote this. It was written by a young Palestinian Lebanese man and posted on Academia. Once anything is posted there, it’s pretty much community property and in the public domain, so I grabbed it and am republishing it here. It required a pretty heavy-duty edit which I just finished. People writing English as a second language are often very hard to edit because their English is being translated from their native tongue.

What sounds fine in our language ends up sounding strange, odd, awkward, or weird in our language. And it’s not always easy to figure out how to fix it up! In a number of cases, the meaning of some particular sentence simply cannot be discerned, and one has to guess at the best possible approximation.

As I was editing this, I came close to closing out the application a number of times, especially towards the end. Each paragraph near the end had its own monstrosities that appeared daunting to say the least. In this edit, I took it upon myself to rephrase some of the less well-constructed phrases with my own style, so you are also reading a bit of Robert Lindsay at the same time you are reading the unknown author.

There is actually a social science that deals with all of this called Translation Studies. It’s not Linguistics per se. I think it’s an off-growth of English and Literature Departments. I haven’t read much of this material, but I imagine they go over everything I wrote above and then some.

Famous books that have been translated multiple times, like The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky and especially Remembrance of Things Past by Proust have been the subject of long articles comparing the various translations and trying to figure out which are better and which worse. A similar enterprise has gone on for much longer with the translations of Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey because English speakers have been translating these for a lot longer than the former two. It’s amazing how hard it is to translate good prose from one language to another. It’s an art form.

The author has a point. The expulsion of the Arab Jews was a tragedy not nearly on the level of the expulsion of the Palestinians, but it is still a potent enough crime. The Jews are hypocrites about this, but they’re that way about everything, so no surprise there. They yell about the  expulsion of the Jews, in numbers about the same as the number of Palestinians expelled. Of course, being Jews, they want ample (((compensation))) for their losses, (((with interest))) if you can believe it. The gall of them. What chutzpah. But it figures. Of course they want (((interest))), right?

But the real problem here is the usual (((hypocrisy))). (((Pay))) us for our losses, scream the Jews. Fair enough, perhaps they deserve it, but only in the dollars of the day, not the inflated dollars of today. They lost the value of 1948 dollars, not 2021 dollars, no matter what  they would be worth if they held onto them.

But how about fair play. Oh yeah, Jews don’t play that game! How about paying the Palestinians for all of their losses in 1948 at the hands of the Jews. While there have been proposals to pay off the Palestinians in return for renouncing their beefs, right to return and resist oppression and the crimes committed against them; in other words, pay them off to make the problem go away, these will never fly because of all those nasty strings attached, like giving up your basic human rights. But generally speaking, with the Jews, it’s “Give us back all the stuff you took from us! Oh, about the stuff we took from you? Sorry, pal, you’re SOL!” The usual Jewish bullshit, in other words. For this reason, all the yelling about paying back the poor Mizrachi Jews leaves me a bit cold.

But there is another much more important question and it hinges on the notion that the expulsion of the Arab Jews was such a huge tragedy after all. Because almost 10

It’s another matter for the Palestinians. The Palestinians were also thrown off their lands and got all their stuff taken. But many if not most Palestinians, at least many of those in Gaza and the West Bank anyway, have a desire to go back to the homes they were thrown out of. “I threw you off your land, you went away angry, you’re miserable where  you are now, and you’re desperate to get your land back” is a tragedy of a much greater magnitude than the one of the Arab Jews above.

Of course, bring this up to Jews and you get the usual (((barrage of lawyerly diversion, bluster, threats, and accusations of anti-Semitism))). As far as the latter goes, natch.

“They threaten to beat us to death,” said Yahya Ya’ish and repeated the sentence while he leaned forward to look deep into my eyes. I do not know whether he did so to see if I believed him or to see whether I was credible. I recoiled imperceptibly. I did it to escape his forceful, inquisitive stare as well as his smell – a smell of fear.

We sat in the office of the director of the Yemen Observatory for Human Rights, a leading human rights organization. Yahya Ya’ish brought a joint letter from the few remaining Jews in Rayda, the last Yemeni town with an indigenous Jewish population. The Jews of Rayda requested the human rights center to assist them in obtaining protection against the repeated assaults, harassment, and threats that they have been suffering under for almost a year.

I must admit, now with shame, that I did not quite believe Ya’ish’s story, credible as it sounds. He aroused all my Arab anti-Jewish stereotypes. He looked exactly as a Jew looks in Arabic caricature. He had unkempt black hair with long curly sideburns, dark skin with black unruly beard, a prominent nose, and black, skewed, penetrating eyes.

I do not know if my suspicion was due to deep-seated prejudices derived from a childhood in which Israelis and Jews were one and same in my father’s Palestinian family or whether it was due to some experiences in my school where wild young classmates celebrated the days when the news reported that Israelis were killed.

I know not whether it was also due to deep-seated hatred for all those times when I and my family lived through the Israeli bombings, which often struck indiscriminately at my birth country, Lebanon. My distrust of Yai’sh’s credible report could also have been because I had lost my credulity having heard through the years my share of exaggerated stories of persecution; first from refugees and asylum seekers when I worked as interpreter and later as a human rights activist from Arab dissidents.

Yahya Ya’ish is a descendant of Yemen’s legendary chief rabbi, Ya’ish Bin Yihya, who died two years ago at the age of 81 years and left one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities without spiritual guidance. Along with a few families, he is among the last Jews in Yemen, once a home to one of the Arab world’s oldest and most populous Jewish communities. Now there are only 300 to 400 Jews left in the country.

In 1948 there were 60,000 Jews among the approximately 2.5 million Yemenis. Nearly 48,000 Jews ‘went away’ to Israel in the years just after the establishment of Israel. Today there are approximately 400 Jews out of a population of approximately 22 million Yemenis. Ya’ish told me that he and his family, but especially a cousin, has been subjected to systematic persecution by their fellow citizens in Rayda.

He reported that Rayda’s Jews were being harassed on the streets and threatened with death if they did not convert to Islam or leave the city. Many of the Jews’ neighbors refuse to do commerce with them. Ya’ish’s voice became especially anxious when in his sad tale of the daily humiliation, he recounted his greatest fear -“‘They threaten us to intrude upon our women (yet’aradu li-sharafina).”

During an earlier trip to Rayda in 2007, I noted that Jewish women wore the black abaya covering their bodies from head to toe and were secluded, while the men who sat and chewed qat, an addictive narcotic plant, claimed that according to Jewish law they were allowed, like their Muslim neighbors, to several women at once.

In this traditional culture to molest somebody’s woman is the worst calamity a man can be exposed to. Ya’ish feared,

If they molest our women, we will not be able to control the reactions of the young among us. They know it is not helpful to turn to the authorities. We have tried for years. Instead of providing us protection, they defended their own clansmen. If our young men hit back, it will be the end with us. This will give the Muslims an excuse to beat us all to death.

What Ya’ish feared happened the 11th of December 2008, just a few days after I met him. Moshe Ya’ish bin Yahya, brother of the Rabbi Ya’ish Yahya bin Yahya and a relative of Ya’ish, was murdered in cold blood in bright daylight in the middle of the street (Amnesty International, 19.12.2008).

The perpetrator of the heinous crime was a pilot in the army. In the court, which was filled with members of his tribe, he admitted without repentance to his action and added,

I had written and warned the Jews in Rayda several times before. I have warned them that they must either convert to Islam, leave the country, or I kill them.  (Daily Star, 23.12.2008).

He refused to accept the claim made by his advocates appointed the state that he is insane. He cried in court, “You are helping the Jews against me’.

The Rayda attack in itself does constitute something unique. Racist violence occurs everywhere. What makes the incident special is the Yemeni government’s response. In the wake of the attacks, President Ali Abdallah Saleh, the ruler of the country since 1978, declared in a magnanimous gesture designed to impress Yemen’s Western donors that he will take Rayda’s Jews under his personal protection but in the capital Sanaa, not in their city.

President Saleh’s apparent rescue of the Jews is anything but an expression of the Arab leader’s generosity. When Rayda’s Jews endured systematic harassment which occurred with the authorities’ knowledge and participation and refused to travel to Sanaa or out of the country to the United States and Israel like most other Jews have felt compelled to do in the last 50 years, it was not because they were patriotic heroes more connected than others to their Yemeni homeland.

Rayda’s Jews held out because they wanted to keep their houses, land, and other possessions. Apart from their own possessions, many of the remaining Jews purchased, acquired, or inherited the property of those Jews who had left. The Jews, who ‘went away’, nourished a hope that the remaining family members might be able to sell their possessions without a huge loss of their value, as usually happens when a population is driven away. This means that the remaining Jews, as Ya’ish informed me, are making a stand for the land and houses belonging to the rest of the Jewish community.

The persecution of the Jews of Rayda is also motivated to some extent, according Ya’ish’s report, by their neighbors’ hope to ‘inherit’ their property once they flee the country. It is a known phenomenon from similar cleansings of Jews in both Europe and the Arab world and for that matter from Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. Ya’ish reported clearly, “If the state or anyone else buys our lands and houses at a reasonable price, we will not stay a single day longer in Yemen.”

By ordering the Jews moved under his own direct protection to Sana’a, President Saleh made himself guilty of the Jews’ persecution and not their rescue. President Saleh was aware of it. He made the same grandiose gesture when in 2005 another Jewish community was driven away from their home town in Sa’ada, located in the northern part of Yemen’s mountains.

Sa’ada had been ravaged by a civil war between a Shiite splinter group inspired by Iran and Hezbollah, called the Houthi, who let their rebellious anger transfer to Saada’s unarmed Jews. The Houthi rebels claimed that the Jews committed fornication and alcoholic orgies in Sa’ada, the most backward and traditionalist region of the country! Sa’ada’s Jews were moved into a ‘tourist town’ in the capital. Of the several hundred Jews who were moved from Sa’ada to Sana’a to become the President’s special guests, there are now fewer than 250 Jews left.

When President Saleh allowed the Sa’ada Jews to be driven away from their home town which they inhabited in 3000 years, he caused them to be driven from their houses, land, and trades without a guarantee of return and when his only gesture was to house them in of a fenced residential camp two miles from Sana’a Airport, it was an indirect way of throwing them out of the country.

Rayda’s Jews will face in the same dilemma as the tourist town’s Jews. Should they choose to continue to live in a fenced housing for soldiers, which requires a special permit from the Interior Department for foreign visitors to enter at the only entrance, without a glimmer of hope of returning to their homes or receiving compensation from the state for their lost property, or should they instead join their compatriots in the U.S. and Israel and emigrate forever from Yemen?

The result either way will be to exorcise the Yemeni Jews in all practical respects. The few Jewish families left soon found will soon find their way to the airport. With only a few Jews left as in Lebanon, Iraq, or Egypt, there will no longer be any real Jewish life left in Yemen. It will be a sad, unnoticed, and unrecognized end of a thousand-year-old residence that created a wealth of culture such that Yemen became one of the major lands in Jewish history in terms of importance.

With the exorcism of Yemen’s Jews will come the sad end of one of the Arab World’s most shameful chapters: the tacit, planned, and decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Arab Jews. This particular end of the chapter is particularly shameful because it did not happen under the exceptional conditions of war and sectarian conflict that characterized the previous expulsions. These conditions were used by Arab governments to show how they could not prevent the expulsions for fear of stoking the wrath of the enraged population.

The exorcism of the Arab Jews was not caused only by the wars between Israel and the Arab states. Ask around the Arab World about what happened to the Jews of that country. “The Jews went away,” they will say vaguely. True enough, many Arab Jews left due to Zionist propaganda and many were driven out by terrorism committed by Israel such as the grenade attacks on Jews in Iraq and the bombing of Jewish targets by Israel in Egypt in 1949-1950.

In part, Jews left because for centuries they were treated as dhimmis, second class people under Sharia, or Islamic law, for centuries, although this ended for the most par a century ago with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Most left as a direct result of the wars, when mass hysteria and suspicion of the Jews as an Israeli fifth column swept the Arab lands. Sadly, this view of Jews as traitors to the homeland was stirred up by Arab rulers to distract the population from their humiliating defeat by the Jews in the newborn Jewish state of Israel that arose from the ruins of Arab Palestine.

Palestinians were driven away by the Jews too. 700,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians were driven away by the Israeli forces in 1947-48. The Israeli exorcism of the Palestinians was matched by a concurrent exorcism of almost as many Jews from the Arab lands, with the proviso that the Jewish exodus occurred more gradually over a period of 50 years.

The Jewish communities of the Arab World, which for had developed complex and fascinating cultures in the lands of their birth in Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, were were for the most part dissolved. By driving away the Jews, the Arabs not only hurt their own communities, but they also played into the propaganda of Zionism that said that Jews could only be safe in Israel. Israel needed mass Arab Jewish immigration to achieve universal legitimacy, in part to rid the land of its reputation as a homeland for European Ashkenazim only.

But what about the exorcism that continued after the 1948 war? What about the Arab governments’ passive or active involvement in this exodus to drive the Jews from their lands? And perhaps worst of all, what of the silence of Arab historians and intellectuals about the tragic loss of a millennia-old Jewish residence in their lands, where a huge population of 900,000 Arab Jews lost over 9

How can I as a Palestinian reconcile the expulsion of my parents during Israel’s ethnic cleansing when one million Palestinians remain peacefully in Israel with the expulsion of 900,000 Arab Jews, where only 6,500 Jews are left to live among 300 million Arabs?

In Israel, there arose a school history that obfuscated if not outright denied the Zionists’ exorcism of Palestinians in 1948, and there have always been brave Israeli intellectuals who have spoken in favor of the Palestinian cause and condemned the Israeli government’s crimes against human rights. But how is it that Arab intellectuals can pour so much condemnation on Palestinian exorcism in poetry, prose, and film, while allowing the concomitant tragedy of the exorcism of the Arab World’s Jews – a wound to the the heart of the Arab psyche and the world’s consciousness – to pass with nary a mention?

What do they expressions of solidarity that Arab intellectuals and masses have been trained practitioners of when it they are only practiced in solidarity with themselves? Is there only one possible solidarity for the Arabs, that of the aggression by the Satans, the U.S. and Israel? Strange how mention of the two unites so many Arabs and gets them shouting spiritually superior cries against the residue left and sets off so much flag burning by angry gangs of Arabs in the streets of the Middle East.

Why should massive protests against U.S. and Israeli aggression close London and Tehran, Paris and Cairo, Rome and and Istanbul, while not a word is heard about genocide in Darfur or starvation in Zimbabwe?

When were there were more than a few pre-cooled saved souls protesting in European cities against Burma’s inhuman regime, systematic persecution of gays in Iran, and the systematic oppression of women in Saudi Arabia? Or Arab compassion selective, as in: “My pain is the greatest, my enemy the worst, and my crime the least”

Ancient Arabs believed that poets should celebrate their own particular culture, whether their people were “ashamed or proud, peaceful or aggressive, radical or conformist,” and they should also celebrate the surrounding cultures, even if they were neither noble nor courageous. Arab spokesmen of old performed their role well and produced some of the world’s most beautiful poems.

But modern Arab spokesmen have a different responsibility than celebrating their own strains and opponents. They should in their books, articles, and movies hold up a mirror which reflects both the good and bad in Arab life and history. With few exceptions, such as Hazem Saghieh, Wadah Sherara, George Tarabishi and Sadek al-Azem, most Arab intellectuals fail at this brave task.

But even these courageous intellectuals never commented on the tragedy of the exorcism of the Arab Jews. Until the Arabs get their Orhan Pamuk or their Avi Shlaim, one who tells the hard truths, convenient or not, they will continue to reside in the dishonest half of the universe.

A showdown with the Arabs’ most shameful aspects of their history will help to reconcile them with themselves and possibly with their neighbors, and may help to preserve what is left of religious and ethnic diversity in their countries. Only by coming to terms with their own expulsion of the Jews from the Arab lands will the Arabs avoid reliving the failure, oppression and and resulting revenge on the innocent to correct their own errors. Until then they must live with the shame of silence.

Alt Left: Chaos in Lebanon

Alt Left: PFLP Funeral from 1976

Translation: From the funeral of the martyr Abd al-Wahhab Eid al-Tayeb, a leader in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a member of its central committee, who was assassinated with his militant wife Khalidiya Ali Khalid in Beirut, December 25, 1976. The commando Laila Khaled appears in the video, shooting in the air.

Alt Left: Ahmad Jibril, PFLP-GC Founder, Dies

Alt Left: An Overview of the Recent Israel-Gaza War

I have contacts very close to the whole Resistance Bloc  and I can tell you flat out that a lot of the material published by corporate media is just false. I know people close to Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, and the Iranian and Iraqi governments. They’re journalists with great access.

During this war, rockets were shot from Lebanon. The corporate media began insisting that the rockets had been fired by Hezbollah. First of all, Hezbollah did not shoot any rockets out of Lebanon. They wanted to stay out of this fight. Also, Hamas themselves did not want Hezbollah to join in.

Instead, Hamas asked permission from Hezbollah to launch rockets, mortars, etc. from Lebanon. Hamas has many activists in Southern Lebanon, probably associated with the refugee camps. The request was  granted. Five rockets were launched. They were all Grad missiles! As they were Grads, they probably came from Syria. A couple of rockets were fired from Syria days ago. I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t the government.

The point here is very important. Assad gave those missiles to Hamas in Lebanon to shoot at Lebanon. And he probably gave whoever shot those missiles from Syria at Israel permission. This is very important. What this means is that Assad was getting his revenge for years of attacks against his army in Syria. This war was also used by Iran to get revenge on Israel, often via Syria, for all of the attacks Israel has made against Iran recently. Iran and Syria used this Hamas war to get their revenge on Israel.

In an important sense, every one of those 4,400 rockets came from Syria, and to an even greater extent, Iran. You would think this would be a great line for the corporate media to play on, but they completely missed it as did the US and Israeli governments. This war was really Iran (and to a lesser extent) Syria versus Israel. Of course the Palestinian role was essential  also and they were a major source of the combatants, but to overlook the vengeance Iran and Syria got out of this war is a huge mistake.

A drone was at first thought to be launched from Jordan and shot down over Israel. Later examination showed it had been launched from Iraq by the Shia militias parts of the Iraqi Army.

Vast crowds massed at the Jordanian border trying to cross into Israel. Police held them back but the Jordanian police were completely in favor of the demonstrators. It’s false to say that Jordan is pro-Israel. Sure, the government is but that’s because it’s a dictatorship. If they had elections there, a vehemently anti-Israel government would be voted in very fast. 6

Three infiltrators got in. These are just local Palestinian Jordanians try to sneak in to Israel. They all say they want to go to Jerusalem. I know that one Palestinian in Jordan somehow made it to Gaza and was very happy that he had returned to Palestine. He was killed in the war, but he had gained his wish and he died happy.

Also, Hamas reported that one of their suicide submarines bombed a gas platform off the coast. A platform off of Haifa caught fire. Israel said the cause was an accidental explosion, but we still don’t know yet if it was hit by one of these suicide subs. Israeli Shin Bet intelligence somehow knew nothing about this submarine, so their intel is not as good as you think.

Mossad does not work in Gaza, as Israel considers Gaza part of Israel and Shin Bet is the intelligence force for Israel proper. Mossad only works overseas in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Qatar, Iraq, and UAE.

A missile that hit a building in Beersheba killed 2 civilians and wounded 15 more. The building was a small factory that employed overseas workers.  That must have been a big missile that hit that building, considering the damage it did.

In the course of a single day, there were eight IDF troops wounded, two seriously, in the Gaza Belt or Gaza Envelope. In Kissifum, an IDF helicopter crashed. possibly hit by a rocket. At Nahal Oz, several soldiers were wounded, probably by a mortar barrage. The helicopter that crashed was coming to evacuate the wounded soldiers. These mortar barrages were being launched by a number of groups, not just Hamas.

The DFLP and PFLP, two explicitly Marxist or leftwing groups, were launching quite a few rockets and mortars, mostly shorter range. Hamas and Islamic Jihad seem to have the long range missiles and rockets. Surprisingly, the DFLP and especially the PFLP are very popular in Gaza, which is interesting as they are both basically Communists.

The Salah al Din Brigades are (Popular Resistance Committees) Fatah rejectionists. Fatah, the armed wing of the PLO, gave up armed struggle and surrendered to Israel. However, many members of Fatah rejected this surrender and split off to form their own groups. The Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades, especially large in the West Bank, was the largest of these. AAMB is explicitly secular.

The Popular Resistance Committees were groups of Fatah rejectionists in Gaza. The Salah al Din Brigades is their armed faction. They tend to be more Islamist than Fatah proper. They have quite a bit of weaponry and fired a lot of rockets and mortars in this war, mostly short-range. SADB is the third largest group in Gaza after Hamas (13,000 members) and Islamic Jihad (7,000 members).

A new group called Palestinian Mujahedin or PM is ideologically close to Islamic Jihad Hamas. They also shot some missiles. This is one of the smaller groups in Gaza.

The PFLP-GC is a secular group founded by Ahmad Jibril that is secular. They are very close to Syria almost to the point of being Syrian-controlled. They have a fair amount of support in Gaza but they do not have a large force or arsenal.

The “resistance” in Gaza actually consists of 17 different groups. One is a Hamas cutout, then there are DFLP, PFLP, PFLP-GC, SADB, AAMB, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and PM. I was only able to find names for nine of them. Most of the rest seem to be Fatah rejectionists, secular.

They all work together, Communist atheists right alongside Hamas and Islamic Jihad Islamists.

This whole war was cynically started by Netanyahu in order to stay out of jail, and it worked. He’d been stoking the flames for these wars since he came into office in 2009. Really most of the Israeli public is aligned with either Netanyahu’s Likud Party or similar parties like the one Bennett is a member of that are just as bad if not worse. The Israeli Left, including the Labor Party, has basically collapsed.

The uprising among Israeli Arabs in Israel proper was an utter catastrophe for Israel. Netanyahu said it was a worse problem than the rockets from Gaza.

The whole Arab population of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza was in open revolt along with large sections of Arabs in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. There was also a huge outcry in Pakistan.

This was due to a accumulation mostly of 11 years of Likudism and worse. This is where it led. There were huge riots in Jerusalem. Entire Arab cities all across Israel shut down one day for a general strike. Gangs of Arabs rioted all across Israel and in the north, they were even gathered along major highways where they threw rocks. It was dangerous to go anywhere in Israel during this war. In the first week of the war, 1,000 arrests of Israeli Arabs were made, 500 for attempted murder. So 500 Israeli Arabs, basically an army, all tried to kill Jews in the last week. Disastrous!

Of course Hamas decided to attack. Neither they nor any of the rest of the Resistance takes orders from Iran. The corporate media is wrong about that. They go to Iran if they want to do attacks, and Iran gives them a list of attacks that they might do that Iran would be ok with. Then they can do them. For really crazy attacks, they have to get ok’d by Iran first, and they get shot down a lot. If they do decide to do an attack, Iran may help plan and carry it out.

Iran helped plan that Houthi attack on Aramco. Also there are Iranian and Hezbollah advisors in the Houthis. The Houthis are just the former Yemeni Army, and they have huge factories, mostly underground, where they are churning out all these drones and missiles. They use Iranian prototypes and then modify them from there. Iran and Hezbollah, especially Hez, help them make the drones and missiles.

The “Iraqi militias” are just the Iraqi Army! They are not attacking the US directly usually. Instead, member of those militias take leave and go off on their own and form little resistance groups and moonlight as guerrillas while being soldiers the rest of the time. The militias have plausible deniability, as they are not doing or planning the attacks. However, anyone in Iraq who tried to crack down on those resistance groups would be stopped. You can’t. They’re too popular and wield too much power. No one can go against them.

Also, these grouplets contain moonlighting Iraqi Army from outside the militias people and Federal Police members. Munitions are probably Iraqi Army stuff.

Hezbollah was in contact with Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Lebanon every hour since this started. Later, we heard that Hezbollah used drones to help the Gaza resistance avoid Israeli attacks. I have also heard that much of the tunnel infrastructure is intact. Most of it is 90 feet underground and as such, it is going to be very hard to for conventional bombs to get at those tunnels. They will either require a ground invasion or the use of mini-nukes to take them out.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad make their own stuff now in underground factories. Some is Iranian smuggled in. It is very easy for Iranian weaponry to get into Gaza. Only a week after a war, Iran was already busy resupplying the Palestinians with money and weapons.

Once again as with Ansar Allah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad use Iranian prototypes and then make local knockoffs. Iran and Hezbollah help them a lot in these underground factories to make these munitions, and they helped, especially Hezbollah, helped build the tunnels.

The decision to launch this attack was Hamas’ alone. But once it started Iran and Hez gave them moral support.

The Palestinians have their own agenda so they did not launch this war for Syria and Iran, but in a way this is a multiple front war. Israel was attacked from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Gaza and the West Bank was in open rebellion with a number of towns in the West Bank becoming “liberated zones” by Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, normally quiescent but now resurrected and the main force in the West Bank. They’re secular.

During the war, there were many attacks every day in the West Bank: 5-10 shooting,, 1-2 attempted or completed ramming or stabbing, ~20 firebomb, and 80 fireworks! Some Israeli soldiers are even fled the front briefly. They felt under siege. A checkpoint was abandoned by fleeing troops and briefly taken over by AAMB.

Also all of these rockets and missiles that everyone has all come from Iran in one way or another. Even the weapons that the Commie groups have. The AA weapons, antitank guns and automatic weapons are all Iranian. Some is smuggled in. The smuggling route goes from:

Iran -> Sudan -> Egypt -> Sinai -> tunnels -> Gaza.

Alt Left: Rural Land Reforms: An Overview

What’s odd is that imperialism went along with land reforms in a lot of other places such as Europe and the Middle East. All of the Middle East has done a land reform.

That was one thing the wave of Arab nationalist leaders who came to power in 1950-1970 did right away, including the Baath in Iraq and Syria, Yemen, Nasser in Egypt, the FLN in Algeria, Tunisia, and Qaddafi in Libya.

I believe there was some type of land reform done in Palestine too. If you read Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian Leftist, in the 1930’s, he talked about how terribly exploited the Arab fellahin or peasants were in Palestine.

If you went to Yemen in the 1960’s, there was a portrait of Nasser in every house.

I’m not sure if a land reform was ever done in Morocco. It’s been ruled by a fairly rightwing king for a long time.

A land reform was probably done in Lebanon, but I don’t have details. Likewise with Jordan.

Nothing grows in the Gulf anyway, so there’s no need for a reform.

I’m not sure about Sudan or Mauritania, but I doubt much grows in Mauritania except date palms.

In all of these places, land reform was a very easy sell for whatever reason, probably because neoliberal capitalism seems to be antithetical to Islam itself. The feudal lords of the former Ottoman Empire had tried to justify feudalism on the basis that in the Koran it says something like, “Some are rich and some are poor, and this is a natural thing” but that never went over too well.

The idea that in an Islamic country, the rich Muslims were viciously exploit the poor Muslims is nearly haram on its face. You just can’t do that. All Muslims are part of the ummah. All the Muslim men are your brothers and all the Muslim women are your sisters. Also individualism never made it to any part of the Muslim World other than the Hindu variety in Pakistan and Bangladesh, but that’s not really the same radical individualism that we have in the West. It’s just an ancient caste based system.

The first thing the Communists did in Eastern Europe was to do a land reform. You will never hear it here in the West, but until 1960, the Communist regimes in the East were very popular with industrial workers and also with the peasants.

In most of the world, peasants and rural dwellers are leftwingers. This is even the case in Western Europe in France.

The US is odd in that it’s farmers are so reactionary. That goes against the usual trend.

Yes, farmers are said to be conservatives, but that usually just means social conservatism. In most of the world, peasants are literally Alt Left: left on economics and right on social and cultural issues.

A land reform was definitely done in Iran.

Obviously one was done in the USSR, and the large landowners have not yet consolidated themselves in the former USSR, mostly because everybody hates them. Large landowners have taken over some of the state farms in Russia, but for whatever reason, they are not very productive. In fact, many of the state farms are still in existence. I am not sure what sort of arrangement they have now.

5

After World War 2, the US supported land reforms in some places as a way of heading off a Communist threat. This is one great thing about the Communists. So many great steps of social progress were only done out of fear or terror that if these were not done, the Communists would take over. Now that that threat is gone, one wonders what motivation the oligarchs have to give up anything.

In particular, land reforms were done in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They went over very easily. And in fact, the subsequent economic growth occurred right on the back of these reforms. There is a good argument that you can never develop a proper economy without first doing a land reform.

First of all, you need to get rid of the problem of rural poverty.

Second of all, you need to feed your own people. Large landowners in these countries typically grow food for export or simply fallow the land and keep it as an income base or a source of wealth.

When crops are grown for export, there is a problem in that the nation does not grow enough food to feed its people. This is a problem in Cuba and Venezuela right now, and it should not be. These are very fertile countries and there is no need to import food, but they have gotten hooked on some sort of “crack” of importing their food for whatever reason, possibly because most of their farmland was being used to grow crops for export.

When a nation can feed itself, this means it can feed its urban workers. This is extremely important and it is part of the reason that Stalin went at such breakneck speed in his collectivization. He had to feed his urban workers so he could industrialize because even back then, he was looking into the future and seeing that he was going to have to fight Hitler.

I’m not quite sure why, but no country seems to be able to properly industrialize and develop as long as the problem of rural poverty exists.

And once you are feeding your own people, you have solved a lot of other problems. Money that would be wasted importing inferior food from the West, especially the US, can now be spent on actual development of a national economy. The elimination of rural poverty gets rid of a constant revolutionary bur in the side of the state.

The US has always opposed land reform in Latin America because large US corporations are usually involved in growing foods for export down there. See Dole Pineapple in Guatemala. We want all of their agricultural land to go for export crops so US corporations can grow those crops or make money importing them. And we do not want them to grow their own food. That way there won’t be so much land for export crops which we need to make money off of.

Also, we want them to spend all of their food money importing lousy processed food from the US. So we make money on food both ways – importing food from crops grown for export to the US and in exporting processed food to the Latin America. This processed food is not very good for you and it is implicated in a lot of health problems in these places.

This is why the US opposes most efforts at land reform in the Americas.

An exception was made in El Salvador. After 200,000 people died, the US and the Salvadoran oligarchs were forced to the negotiating table and a land reform was one of the first things they pushed. I recall a piece written soon afterwards where the reporter went out to the rural areas and interviewed recipients of the land reform. They basically said, “Well, at least we can eat now. It wasn’t like that before.”

In semi-feudal countries, there is debt bondage whereby large landowners rent out their land to sharecroppers or peasants who never seem to get out of debt. This is a very primitive form of development.

The Philippines is notable that there has never been a land reform. And of course they have a vicious Communist insurgency.

Nor has there been one in Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Paraguay, Honduras, or Argentina. The first five countries are horribly screwed up. Colombia and Paraguay have active armed leftwing guerrillas, and Guatemala did for many years. Haiti is a disaster. Honduras has a vicious rightwing dictatorship that has murdered over 1,000 people.

Argentina is mostly urbanized, but the landed rural elite still runs the country. Any talk at all of land reform or even taxation of large estates as was done recently under Christine Fernandez, and the ruling class starts making ominous threats of a coup. I assume something similar is going on in Uruguay. Those countries are urbanized though, so large landownership is not such a problem.

I’m not sure if there has ever been a land reform in Brazil, but there is no dearth of large landowners.

The fact that Colombia, Guatemala, and Haiti are so backwards is largely because there has never been a land reform.

The land reform was incomplete in Venezuela.

It is interesting that every country that fails to do a land reform seems to end up with a Communist or Leftist insurgency at some point or another. It’s almost without fail. This goes to show you that most Communist insurgencies in the Third World are over the most basic things dating all the way back to French Revolution: land and bread (food).

As far as land reforms go, they were done in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru.

I’m not sure about Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Jamaica, Belize, the Guyanas, Chile, and most of the Caribbean.

And I’m not sure if one ever got done in the Dominican Republic after Bosch.

In El Salvador, 200,000 had to die in order for a land reform to take place. Roberto D’Aubission, the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads and the most favored visitor at the US Embassy, once said that “We will have to kill 200,000 people in order to prevent socialism in El Salvador.” What he meant by socialism was land reform.

It is notable that no land reform was ever done in India, nor in Pakistan or even Bangladesh. I had a friend whose parents were large feudal landowners in Pakistan who rented out land to farmers who ended up in debt peonage. In 1986, 14 million people a year were dying of starvation related diseases in the capitalist world. Most of that was in South Asia in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India. Most of these deaths were attributed to the problem of the private ownership of land.

There is a problem with the private ownership of land. In the US, we think this is sacrosanct, but on a worldwide basis, it doesn’t work very well. What do you need all that land for? What do you need more than, say, an acre and a house? Nothing, unless you are a farmer.

In China, all land is owned by the state. All homeowners lease the land, often on 100 year leases. I’m not sure how it works in the countryside.

In Mexico, much of the land is owned by the state also, a product of the land reform that occurred after the Revolution. One of the major demands of the Revolution was land reform. Pre-revolution, most peasants usually lived like serfs. The state land in Mexico is called ejidos.

If you ever can’t make it in the city, if you become unemployed or homeless, you can always go out to the countryside and take up residence in an ejido, which are something like communal lands that are formed by the group that makes up the ejido. You join this group, work the land, and get a share of the crop. At least you have enough food to eat. So in Mexico the ejidos are a stopgap measure.

In China too, if you can’t make it in the city, you can always go back to the rural areas, take up residence, and work the land. At least you will have enough to food to eat. It is illegal to be homeless in China. If you are homeless, the police pick you up and put you in shelters, which are something like college dorms. They also encourage you to go back to the countryside if you have relatives back there. In recent years, many people have moved from the countryside to the cities to make more money. Those that don’t make it can always move back to the farm.

There was debate a while back about privatizing state land, but it ran aground on the idea that the state ownership of land was necessary as a stopgap measure in the event of urban poverty. In addition, state ownership of land has prevented the development of a national oligarchy or plutocracy.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been adamant that the  development of a national oligarchy or plutocracy must be prevented at all costs. Once they develop, they are sort of like an infection in that they soon spread and take over society. The CCP has billionaire party members who are members of the People’s Assembly.

Guess what these “Communists” are advocating for? Reduction or elimination of taxes on the rich, massive reductions in social spending, state repression of labor, and the privatization of land along with most of the rest of the economy. I think this goes to show you that billionaires are the same everywhere. Whether in a Communist or capitalist country, a rightwing or leftwing country, billionaires always have precisely the same class interests that barely vary at all. It’s usually something like this:

Reduction or elimination of taxes on the rich, massive reductions in social spending, state repression of labor, and the privatization of land along with most of the rest of the economy.

This goes to show that class interests of various classes are nearly a  law in a mathematical sense and not even a theory of social science. This was what Marx was getting at when he spoke of the laws of economics. They are so predictable that we can almost class them with the laws, theorems, and corollaries of mathematics instead of the typical “true for now” theories of most of the sciences.

I have a feeling that a Hell of a lot more things are laws, too, especially in terms of basic human behavior. So many of these things seem almost unchangeable. Of course they would never apply to everyone, but it’s pretty obvious that they are general tendencies.

Alt Left: Sunni Hatred and Paranoia of the Shia and Iran: One of the Stupidest Forms of Bigotry On Earth

Almost all Sunni morons, even Pakistanis, believe that Iran wants to control the Middle East. The extreme versions say Iran wants to conquer all of the Sunni Arabs and rule over them. Almost all Sunni Arabs actually believe this crap. This thinking is especially prominent in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Gulf (except possibly Qatar), Lebanon, to some extent in Jordan, and Egypt and Sudan to a somewhat weak extent.

Further west in Africa, the Sunnis do not give two shits about Iran. Nor do the rest of the African Sunnis. Nor do they Turks although they hate and persecute their own Shia. Nor do the Muslims of the Caucasus, Russia, and the Stans. In Afghanistan it is particularly stupid because Afghanistan is largely Iranic culturally and even linguistically, particularly in the West. Some of the bigger warlords such as Ismail Khan over there in the west in Herat were actually openly pro-Iran.

Shias are persecuted pretty brutally in Pakistan. Sunni Salafists regularly attack their rallies with suicide bombers, killing many people. The jihadi group LET, which fights in Kashmir, is viciously anti-Shia.

No one quite knows where this comes from but it seems that anyplace where there are lots of Shia, they Shia are hated by the Sunnis.

They are persecuted by Sunni majorities in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but not in Yemen or Syria, although there are vicious anti-Shia groups there. Sunni minorities in Lebanon and Iran and particularly in Iraq are very anti-Shia. However, the Iranian Sunnis are not treated right at all, although they have 28,000 mosques in Iran. W

hen you get over to North Africa, there are just not any Shia to hate. What’s a Shia? That’s what the North African says.

Palestinians were typically anti-Shia and especially anti-Iran historically because Arab nationalist idiots hate Iran for no good reason, as I elaborated above. Hamas caused a lot of controversy in Palestine for being so close to Iran since they were Sunnis, but they are not stupid. Recently they supported the Sunni Syrian opposition, which enraged the Syrian government. At the same time, Palestinians in Syria formed pro-government militias and fought on the side of the government, though a few went over to the jihadi opposition.

ISIS took over a large Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus for a time and the Palestinians were smeared as ISIS supporters because of this. But most Palestinians in that camp disliked ISIS. The camp is called Yarmouk, and is one of the worst hellholes in Syria. I think there may be delays in rebuilding because of government suspicion that residents sided with ISIS. So Hamas was aligned with Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, the Houthis, the Iraqi Shia, and Iran, and then like complete tools they let their bigotry get the best of them and supported the Sunni jihadis in Syria. However, Syria and Hamas have patched up their relationship.

This is especially odd considering how poorly the Shia have been treated. Before the rise of Hezbollah, the Sunnis in Lebanon would not let the Shia work at any job more respectable than a trash collector. They were like Dalits in India. Imagine that you were in the Jim Crow South and the Whites were all possessed by paranoid fantasies that the Blacks were going to declare war on the Whites, conquer them and rule over the Whites, treating them as inferiors. Crazy, right? This is how Sunnis feel about Iran. They’re all nutcases. It’s also projection, see?

But the Palestinians have become very pro-Iran these days since only Iran has stepped up to the plate to support the Palestinians and only the Shia are supporting the Palestinians at all. The Sunni Arabs would much rather kill the Shia than fight Israel, though the latter obviously is more important and the former has no importance at all.

The only significant help the Palestinians are getting is from the Shia Houthis in Yemen, the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syria, a Shia-led regime in a majority Sunni country, Shia Iran, and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq that are now formally part of the Iraqi Army itself.

They have gotten help from Jordanians who massed at the border and tried to break through, but those were probably mostly Palestinian refugees, as they make up 7

It is true that large majorities in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, and Qatar support the Palestinians, and there is also a lot of support for them in Turkey and Pakistan. These supporters are mostly Sunnis. But the average person does not rule in the Arab World and dictatorships are the rule. It is these dictatorships that have been selling out and making peace with Israel lately, the most outrageous of which has been the UAE, which has apparently gone full Zionist. They’re simply traitors.

However, the Saudis and Emiratis have brainwashed their populations, which used to strongly support the Palestinians but who know repeat the programmed lie that “the Palestinians are not our problem.

A while back, mobs stormed the Israeli border with Syria in the Golan and quite a few of them were killed. These were probably mostly Sunni Syrians though there may have been a lot of Palestinian refugees among them, as there are quite a few in Syria.

There was some anti-Shia sentiment when Islamic Jihad was formed because this Sunni group took inspiration from the Iranian revolution.

There was a rumor that the original Sunni leader converted to Shiism and this caused something of a scandal. The Sunnis are all absolutely terrified that Iran is going to conquer and dominate them and in the process force them to convert to Shiism. The truth is almost zero Sunnis ever convert to Shiism.

Shiism is simply not a proselytizing religion, whereas Sunnism is. One of the main complaints of the Houthis was that Saudi Arabia was sponsoring Wahhabi preachers to come into the north of Yemen and convert the Shia to Sunni Wahhabism. This roused up quite a bit of anger amid the Shia and it was a major reason for the Houthi Revolution. Once again you can see that Sunnis are projecting with their terror of the Shia forcibly converting them to Shiism.

Hamas has aligned very closely with Iran, but so have the Salah-al-Din Brigades, the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades rejectionists who took up arms in various formations, and the PFLP. I have heard that there is a portrait of Soleimani in every home in Gaza.

Alt Left: If Iran Is Broke, How Can They Afford to Support All of These Resistance Groups

Rambo: How is Iran supposed to be giving all of this military and economic aid to different countries if they’re supposedly so broke because of sanctions against them? The media never asks that question. I’ve always wondered that. Supposedly they’re supposed to have been crippled by sanctions, so where is all this spare cash coming from? Something’s fishy.

They have the money. It doesn’t take a whole lot. Who are they supporting? Hezbollah. The Palestinians. The Houthis. That’s all very much affordable for them. All of those groups have their own income streams, banks, businesses, you name it, they’ve got it. The Houthis have all the weapons left over from the Yemeni Army because Ansar Allah is nothing but the former Yemeni Army.

Hezbollah has extensive underground arms factories and they make most of their own weapons. Hamas also has large factories that manufacture weapons and Islamic Jihad and the Salah-al-Din Brigades also have their own factories. The Houthis are now running large factories where they are making their own rockets, missiles, and drones. Hezbollah factories also manufacture these things. Hamas factories also make drones, mortars, rockets, missiles, and even submarines!

All of these factories – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi in Yemen, are underground, often deep underground. They’re pretty much untouchable short of a ground operation.

Anyway, in Iran, military spending comes first. I don’t know that they are spending much money in Syria or Iraq. There’s not much to spend on over there. They’re helping Assad, but they aren’t really in Iraq at all despite what you hear.

This military assistance to the Resistance takes precedence over everything. Also they’re not broke. They’ve been exporting lots of oil and oil products and nobody seems to be stopping them. It’s not like Venezuela where they can hardly import anything. Whatever sanctions there are on Iran are not nearly as bad as the ones on Venezuela.

There’s nothing fishy. Iran is a large country that has a big economy and quite a bit of money on hand like all big countries. They are already flooding Gaza with cash and weapons to replenish what was lost and rebuild what was destroyed.

On the other hand, the spending abroad is starting to get a bit controversial and the Iranian opposition has taken advantage of that. But the opposition rioters are only ~1

 

Alt Left: Anti-Aircraft Missile Lands Near Dimona

About a month ago, Israeli jets attacked Syria for the umpteenth time. They’ve probably attacked them a thousand times since the war started. Of course, Syria can’t lift one finger to hit back because of they do, those (((dogs in Israel))), like all (((bullies))), will say that they got attacked for no reason and now they have to defend themselves.

And they’ve threatened to raze Syria to the ground if Syria so much as looks at them wrong when they get attacked. That’s the bully. The bully beats you up all the time, all the while saying you are attacking him. Israel bombs Syria constantly, all the while saying Syria is attacking it.

If you dare to fight back against the bully even one time, he goes completely crazy and tries to destroy you in some way or another.

That is because you, the victim, are not allowed to retaliate against the bully. It is as if you are upsetting the whole fabric of the bullying itself. It’s a slave rebellion and you know how outraged masters get when slaves fight back. So Israel is just a typical 8th grade punk that everyone hates going around beating up on all the weaker, wimpier, or effeminate boys. America is also a bully country. In fact, we are the biggest bully in the whole world. So naturally we form an alliance with the Israeli bully as bullies tend to befriend other bullies.

Sometimes shells from the Syrian Civil War go errant and fly into the Golan Heights. Syria attacks the Syrian Army every time this happens, saying it “holds Syria responsible for any shells that come over its border.” Except the shells are often launched by the rebels. Syria is not allowed to fight back against these attacks because Israel threatens to destroy Syria if it lifts a finger against it.

Israel, of course, in tribute to its kind, humanitarian nature, has been treating ISIS and Al Qaeda rebels in Syria. All they have to do is present themselves at the border saying they’re wounded and it’s a first class ticket to an Israeli hospital. But the US, UK, France, Turkey, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia have also been supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. In the case of Al Qaeda, a while back, a former East German journalist who now works for a German newspaper who is somehow not completely cucked got an interview with an Al Qaeda commander in a cave in Aleppo Province.

The commander was emphatic that US, UK, Turkish, Ermirati, Saudi, Israeli, and US intelligence officers were all embedded with Al Qaeda forces in Syria. In fact, when Aleppo was being liberated by the Syrian Army, Syria announced that 10 US intelligence officers were still holed up in the last strongholds of the city. Syria said the US was demanding that they be allowed to evacuate their Al Qaeda-embedded US spies. The Syrian government even published a list of the  10 spies. The execrable Samantha Power, a Democrat (!) was having hissy fits in Aleppo while all of this was going on. Even Biden admitted that we had been supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria for a long time.

Anyway, Israel was bombing Syria as usual, and Syria fired some Anti-air missiles at the Israeli jets, which it missed as usual. One was an F-5 Anti-aircraft missile. These missiles have a short range and if they miss their target, they are programmed to simply fall towards the ground and explode, I believe in the air.

At around this time, there was a huge blast from a missile or a rocket 20 miles north of the Dimona nuclear plant in Dimona, Israel. Israel quickly reported that an F-5 Syrian missile fired at an Israeli jet over the Golan traveled all the down to Dimona and blew up on the ground. First of all, I don’t think they blow up on the ground. Second of all, an F-5 missile does not have a very long range, surely not all the way down to Dimona. Third, even if it did blow up on the ground, it would not make a very big explosion, not as large as the one reported. Fourth, it somehow managed to completely evade the Iron Dome and all Israeli radars. Fifth, as I noted, it would have blown up in the air after it missed the jet.

A colleague of mine, E.J. Magnier, wrote an article saying everything above. He also said that the attack was not done by a anti-air missile but by a ballistic missile, a Fajr-110. It flies very fast so it can evade the Iron Dome, besides I don’t think that Dome is much use against actual ballistic missiles. An interesting report from Veterans Today said that Russia used electronic warfare to jam the Iron Dome’s radars, enabling the ballistic missile to slip by unnoticed. I think there is something to it, but E.J. poo-pooed it in an email to me.

On the other hand, rejects a lot of stuff. He still believes that 2,800 pounds of unexplodable fertilizer somehow blew up in a harbor in Beirut because that is the lie that Hezbollah and Iran told him. Hez and Iran had reason to lie about the Israeli nuclear bomb attack on Beirut because it would be an extremely demoralizing thing to report to the Iranian and Lebanese people as it would imply an omnipotent Israel and there was no way for either Hezbollah or Iran to retaliate against Israel.

Anyway, it appears that that was a Syrian knockoff of an Iranian Fajr-110 ballistic missile. And it appears that Iran either helped launch it or gave it a go-ahead. And Russia may well have assisted with the electronic warfare because Israel was stunned that the missile got through. E.J. said it is because these missiles fly very fast, hence they can avoid the Iron Dome. I doubt if that is true. Anyway, this missile caused a huge explosion 20 miles north of Dimona in an open area. That missile has a targeting that causes it to land within 12 feet of where it is programmed to land. That is, it is a guided missile. So it was targeted to land just there.

This was a message to Israel from Syria and especially Iran to watch it. It was also payback for the endless attacks on Iran and Syria that Israel has engaged in. And it also said that we can shoot a missile that can hit your nuclear reactor, a huge ballistic missile that flies very fast, and we know how to make it invisible to your radars and anti-aircraft batteries.

In other words, paybacks from Iran and Syria.

Alt Left: Yes, There is Little Classism in Muslim Countries (Because It’s Against Islam)

James Schipper: Was it really very different (highly classist) in Islam?

Yes, Islamic countries are just not like that.

I can’t think of any Arab country that is like that.

No North African country is like that.

Neither Malaysia nor Afghanistan nor the Caucasus nor Xinjiang nor the Stans is not like that. However, Afghanistan was feudal or semi-feudal until recently. That’s why Communism was fairly popular there. An outsider went there in the 1950’s, and he saw groups of young men chanting with their fists in the air, “Kill the rich!” I suppose the Communist revolution did a land reform and got rid of this feudal land tenure system.

Communism was an easy sell in Bosnia and Albania, but Islam is weak there.

Corruption is a bad problem in the Arab World and a rich elite bled Lebanon dry for decades, but they are widely hated, and there is little to no class hatred in Lebanon.

I can’t see any class hatred in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or even in UAE.

I’ve never heard of any real classism in the Sahel, but no one there has any money anyway.

The only African countries with a history of classism were the apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa, but there it was racialized, and the classism was imported from Christian Europe. Classism among the Whites of these states themselves was not a problem.

Angola has become very unequal due to oil wealth, but the system is not popular, and most people are ending up poor. They had a successful Communist revolution that remained in power for a long time. The anti-Communist rebels didn’t even have much ideology. Jonas Savimbi of UNITA started out as a Maoist and switched to rightwing capitalist to get money from the West for his revolution.

Africa just doesn’t have a history of European classism. It was always a relatively egalitarian village society. Sure, the chiefs were rich, but they were supposed to provide for everyone.

All of the Gulf Arab states have such extensive social democracies that in a lot of cases, you hardly even have to work. Education and health care is free and housing may be subsidized. UAE is a very rich country and capitalism roars right along, but I don’t see a lot of class hatred. For one thing, everyone in the Gulf is well-off.

As I said, it was different before. Read Ghassan Khanafani (one of the founders of the PFLP) on the lives of fellahin or peasants in debt bondage in semi-feudal Palestine in the 1930’s. Nasser did a land reform in Egypt in the 50’s and he was a hero all over the Arab World. People said they went to Yemen in the 1960’s, and there were Nasser portraits everywhere in the homes of working class people. Nasser’s land reform set off a wave of land reforms in the Arab World. In Syria and Iraq, they were done by the socialist Baath Party. There was never much resistance to the Baath’s socialism. There were large state sectors and good social democracies. Even Saddam was basically a socialist.

Bangladesh is a problem. Pakistan has been discussed but it is Indianized and Hinduized. The same problem may be going on in Bangladesh. The class hatred is vicious in India, but it’s coded as caste hatred instead. So Pakistan and Bangladesh have a sort of Hinduized Islam. But the poverty and class hatred is not nearly as bad in those two states as it is in India and Nepal.

Bahrain and Indonesia are problems for whatever reasons but in Indonesia they had to kill 1 million Communists to get their crappy rightwing capitalist dictatorship. And in the last several years they have been led by a social democrat.

Turkey does have problems with its capitalist class in terms of exploitation of workers. After World War 2, there was a Communist revolution and the Commies almost won. However, there is a huge underground Leftist and Communist movement that regularly sets the factories and yachts of the rich on fire! They’re quite popular. The Kurdish PKK was also Left. Islam is rather weak in Turkey though, and Turkey is Europeanized. Erdogan is actually quite socialist. He’s more socialist than Biden. His brand is Islamism is heavy on the social justice end.

 

Alt Left: Right and Left in Islamic and Catholic Societies

If you’re not careful, the media will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and cheering the people doing the oppressing.

Malcolm X

This is precisely the function of the media in a capitalist society. The Chinese media is not like this because, duh, China is not a capitalist country! Nor is the Iranian media because Iran is not a capitalist country. In fact, Iran is almost something like “Islamic Communism.” I’m not wild about Ayatollah Khomeini, but he did have a strong social justice streak.

The Revolution was populist, pro-independence, and anti-imperialist. Iran is almost based on a Muslim version of Liberation Theology or “the preferential option of the poor.” The social safety net is huge in Iran. Also, much of the economy is run by the state. It’s actually run by religious charities, often with ties to the military and the IRGC. I believe these religious charities do not operate at a profit. Small businesses are not bothered at all, as in all Muslim countries. I was reading Ayatollah Khameini’s tweets for a while on Twitter, and I could have been reading Che Guevara. Basically the same message.

Islam is just not friendly to neoliberal economics or radical individualism. It is a very collectivist religion in a very collectivist society.

Neoliberalism hasn’t caught on much of anywhere in the Muslim world other than Indonesia and the Southern Philippines, and they had to murder 1 million Communists in cold blood to get there in Indonesia and the Moros have always rejected Catholic rule in both a political and economic sense. it is notable that the Maoist NPA are also huge in Mindanao, home of the Moros.

Pakistan, too, has inherited the selfish economics and even feudalism in land tenure straight from Indian Hinduism. They even have caste, which would be considered an aberration in any decent Muslim society.

All of the Arab countries are basically socialist at least in name, and that was never a hard sell there. It’s true that 100 years ago, the Arab lands were mostly feudal in nature, with big landowners and peasants in debt bondage. They rich had co-opted the religious authorities like they always do, and the mullahs preached that Islamic feudalism was right and proper because the Prophet had said, “It is normal that some are rich and some are poor.” But it was always a hard sell, and it had a very weak foundation.

After independence, socialism was instituted in most if not all Arab countries at least in name. In particular, huge land reforms were done in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and Palestine. I assume something like that was done in Algeria too. It was a very easy sell, and everyone went along with it without a hitch. The mullahs quickly changed from support for feudalism to support for socialism.

Hamas rules Gaza and I was shocked at how huge the social safety net is. The many religious charities run the safety net, which is distributed under the rubric of Islam. This is done instead of the state doling it out.

Mohammad himself didn’t have much to say about economics, but he wasn’t a neoliberal capitalist or a feudalist.

In Christian societies, the rich have utter contempt and hatred for the poor, who they regard as little more than human garbage. If you want to see this philosophy in action, look at the classism in Latin America. As all Muslims are part of the umma, and hence, as all are brothers and sisters, it is simply unconscionable that wealthy Muslims would be able to openly hate poor Muslims. You simply cannot treat your fellow Muslims like that. It’s not officially haram but it might as well be.

European Style Fascism in the Middle East

It is instructive that the only place in the Arab world where neoliberal economics and in particular Libertarianism took hold was in Lebanon, and even there, it was only among Catholic Maronites. Most Arab Christians look east to Antioch (and before that, Constantinople) to the Eastern Orthodox church, which is really just the eastern wing of Catholicism.

The Maronites, though, deride Antioch and instead look to Rome. They see themselves as European people instead of Arabs. Many deny that they are Arabs and instead refer to themselves as “Phoenicians.” It is interesting that the only real classical fascism in the Arab World  took hold in the Lebanese Maronites, where the Gameyels imported it from Europe in the 1930’s.

The Jews of Israel also developed a very European form of fascism starting with Jabotinsky and his book The Iron Wall in 1921. This man was an open fascist. He is considered to be the spiritual father of the Likud Party. During the 1940’s, the armed Jewish rebels split into leftwingers who were almost Communists and rightwingers who were more or less fascists.

The Kahanists today look a lot like a European fascist party. And in fact, the entire Israeli rightwing around Likud, etc. looks pretty fascist in a European sense. So Israeli Jews are really Jewish fascists or fascist Jews. It has never been an easy ride for liberal and secular US Jews to support the Orthodox religious fanatics and rightwingers if not out and out fascists in the Likud, etc. in Israel. This was always completely unstable, and after that latest war, it’s finally starting to fall apart. But the seeds of destruction were already there.

But note that the Jews of Israel very much look to the West and see themselves as Europeans (which many are for all intents and purposes). They align themselves with the Judeo-Christian European society that many of them came from.

Half of Israeli Jews are Mizrachi Jews from the Arab World, and they have always had a Judeo-Islamic culture. However, when they moved to Israel, this was dismantled by perhaps not entirely. They rejected it due to the association of Arabs and Islam with the enemy, which is correct.

Economics and Catholicism

This radical classism and near-feudalism in Latin America was supported by the Catholic Church, which was always a very rightwing institution because they were always in bed with the rich. There were always Left splits in Catholicism like Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker. The Catholic clergy in the US has tended to be quite leftwing.

There is a long history of “Catholic Communism” in the Philippines, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the Basque Country, France, Italy, Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. The IRA was a leftwing Catholic armed group. A lot of priests were caught hiding IRA cadre. So was the ETA in the Basque Country of Spain.

Catholic Leftism never caught on in Poland and Lithuania due to hatred of Russia and the USSR. Nevertheless, both are more or less socialist countries.

Even today there is an active “Catholic Communist” movement in Cuba that is very lively. In Honduras and Colombia, Catholic priests actually led guerrilla bands. Liberation Theoloy is something like “Jesus Christ with an AK-47.” The Leftist who recently took power in Paraguay was a former Catholic priest.

The ELN was founded by a priest, Camilo Torres, and many Catholic clergy even supported the Shining Path! Edith Lagos, a 20 year old woman, was the leader of a very early Shining Path column in Peru. She was killed in 1980 and the entire town of Ayacucho, 30,0000 people, came out for her funeral which was held at midnight. The lines of mourners stretched through the whole city. All of the priests in town blessed her body, and she was given a proper Catholic funeral.

I believe that the PT or Workers Party of Brazil has a large Liberation Theology component. The Catholic clergy had an excellent relationship with the FARC in Colombia. Of course, the Catholic clergy played a big role in Venezeula, and Hugo Chavez himself was a practicing Catholic. The FMLN Salvadoran rebels were explicitly Catholic, as were the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. One of the Sandinists’ top leaders, Tomas Borge, was a Catholic priest. Jean-Paul Aristide in Haiti was a Catholic priest. Catholic believers are now allowed to join the Communist Party in Cuba, and near the end of his life, Fidel Castro said he was a “cultural Catholic.”

After Vatican 2 and Liberation Theology began to spread out via the seminal documents written by Gustavo Gutierrez in Brazil, “A Theology of Liberation,” otherwise known as “exercising the preferential option for the poor,” it began to spread in Latin America. It started with local priests and especially Catholic lay workers in impoverished areas and then slowly spread. Even today, Catholic layworkers and especially seminaries are very leftwing, while the Vatican itself is not. A lot of seminaries are hotbeds of homosexuality, and the gay priests and lay workers are quite open about it. It is estimated that 1

Alt Left: Israel Versus Egypt and Lebanon

Polar Bear: Egyptians, Lebanese, etc. defeated Israel in battle, and they backed off.

Egypt

Egypt, sure. But Egypt also has to suck up to Israel as part of the peace deal. They also get $1.5 billion completely wasted tax dollars a year as part of the peace deal. Consider that $1.5 billion as more or less aid to Israel.

However, the peace between Israel and Egypt is a cold one indeed. Especially the ordinary people seriously hate Israel. The Israeli Embassy was burned to the ground by a mob of thousands of people a few years back. The entire staff had to flee. The cops just sat back and let the mob burn it to the ground. Curiously enough, the mob was not mostly Islamists. Sure, they were there too, but it was mostly Leftists, including quite a few Communists. There were a lot of women without hijab in that mob. At any rate, the Leftists and Islamists worked very well together.

It’s the same thing in Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel proper. Both Islamists and Leftists in those places really hate Israel, so they get along swimmingly. There are two Marxist Palestinian groups who work very closely with Hamas!

For one thing, Leftists tend to be extreme rejectionists of making any sort of peace with Israel, so they have that in common with a lot of Islamists.

Obviously I am not including the Islamist sellout traitors in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE.

In Morocco and Sudan, sure, the governments made peace with Israel recently (because they were bribed to do so, as were the Gulf Arabs), but the people still hate Israel. The difference in opinion between the people and the regimes is vast in all of those US-allied Arab states. The only reason any of those US Arab allies are in power at all is because they have dictatorships. If they had real elections, no way would any civilians in the Arab world vote in a pro-Israel government, never, ever.

Truthfully, of all of the governments that recently recognized Israel (they didn’t make peace like the idiots keep saying because they were never at war recently anyway), only the UAE has excellent relations with Israel. The UAE is so friendly to Israel that it is almost bizarre. I guess they sold out the Palestinians for the $$. That’s all they care about anyway. They and the other Gulf traitors think they can make a lot of money working with Israel, and more than anything else, they want Israeli weapons systems.

They’ve all been allied with Israel forever anyway, but it’s always been behind the scenes, so no one saw it. The Saudis have been allied with Israel for a good 40 years. The Saudis used to own some islands in the Gulf of Aqaba. In 1979, the Israelis, with their usual charm, decided that those islands were really owned by Jews, so they demanded that the Saudis hand them over. The Saudis did just that and of course got nothing in return. They sold out to Israel like craven sissies.

However, Oman, Kuwait, Yemen, and especially Qatar do not have good relations with Israel at all. Qatar has long housed the leadership of Hamas. Khaled Meshal made an appearance there recently to a mob of cheering civilians.

In Egypt, an anti-US and anti-Israel Muslim Brotherhood (Ikwan) government that won with 7

In addition, Egypt maintains a terrible blockade on Gaza, an anti-Hamas blockade. The probable reason is because Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine, and the Egyptian government despises the Ikwan.

The Ikwan is also despised in Saudi Arabia and UAE, but this is due more to competition than anything else. This is why you see Islamist UAE and Saudi Arabia allying with Egypt and why you see the UAE arming the anti-government army in Libya where the UN-recognized government is the Ikwan. Turkey and Qatar support the Ikwan, so this is why you see Turkey in Libya supporting the government.

The Ikwan proper is often friendly to Iran because they figure the Iranians are very religious Muslims too. Hamas, Qatar, and Turkey enjoy good relations with Iran. This was strained for a bit when Hamas supported the Syrian rebels. The Iranians didn’t care that much, but the Syrians were very angry. Syria has now made up with Hamas. Sunni Hamas has excellent relations with Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon, the PMF in Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Iran.

Hamas never talks about being Ikwan-Palestine because the Ikwan has always been unpopular in Palestine. Palestine is actually one of the more secular Arab states, a longstanding trend. 2

Gaza is a very conservative society and has been for a long time. The West Bank is also pretty conservative but not as conservative as Gaza. In Israel proper, the Arabs are less conservative. In that famous recent video from Lod, those are young Arab women or teenage girls climbing that pole, tearing down the Israeli flag, and putting up the Palestinian flag to the cheers of a crowd below full of teenage girls and young women. None of them are wearing a hijab. But Lod is in Central Israel very close to Tel Aviv, which is the secular, SJW center of Israel, so there’s probably some bleed-over.

East Jerusalem probably has the most secular Arabs in Palestine for some reason. Why might that be? In videos of recent riots, many of the younger women were not wearing a hijab. In a lot of these communities, you often see teenage girls and young women not wearing a hijab while the older women still do.

But in Umm al Fahm in the Galilee, a famous nearly all-Arab town, most women wear the hijab.

Lebanon

Yes, Hezbollah eventually threw Israel out of Lebanon, but Hell no, has Israel backed off on Lebanon. See that nuclear bomb Israel dropped on Beirut a while back? You call that backing off? By the way, speaking of civilian populations hating Israel, the Lebanese probably are some of the worst Israel-haters in the Arab World.

Like Syria, Lebanon is still officially at war with Israel. Syria has been since 1973, but Lebanon has been since 1948. Both refused to sign an armistice. The Christian Maronite Phalange, however, are pro-Israel to some rather weak extent, but the rest of the Maronite Christians are with Hezbollah. The Greek Orthodox are represented by the Leftist, profoundly anti-Israel Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The Druze go back and forth, but Walid Jumbalatt has been a serious Israel-hater in his time. He’s just a guy who no principles of morals with his finger to the wind.

Opinion polls in Lebanon recently showed that 8

What people don’t realize is that Lebanon has no real army. The true army of Lebanon, with much more power and capabilities than the Lebanese Army, is Hezbollah. The Lebanese Army has been deliberately kept weak by the West, with whom they are rather unstably allied. Notice that the Army worked for Israel in the latest conflict, arresting a few of the Hamas people in Southern Lebanon shooting Grad missiles at Israel and dismantling some rocket launchers. They’re traitors, or maybe they are just scared.

Alt Left: Jewish-Arab Civil War in Israel

The Israeli Arabs have never risen up like this before or at least not in a very long time.

Alt Left: Websites of Palestinian Resistance Factions

These are all on Telegram, so it would help if you have Telegram, but if you don’t, they will still work in preview. They’re all in Arabic so you will need a translator, but Chrome has one built in.

Izz-al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas): The largest faction. Closely allied with Iran and Hezbollah. Have 14,000 missiles, including long-range ballistic missiles, drones, suicide drones, vast tunnel systems and even underground cities, munitions factories, a navy, ATGM anti-tank missiles, MLRS missile launchers, etc. Some of their missiles are so large they have to be launched from vehicles. They have a huge army, maybe 13,000 men under arms. Almost all of their weaponry is homemade, but it all ultimately comes from Iran. The designs come from Iran and Iranians help them make them. Hezbollah helps too. Their largest presence is in Gaza. They’re quite radical but they are more pragmatic than you think. Leadership is in Iran and Lebanon.

Al-Quds Brigades (Islamic Jihad): Another very large faction, also very close to Iran and Hezbollah. Closer to Iran than Hamas. All of their weaponry comes from Iran, as does all of their money. They also have ballistic missiles. They have ~7,000 rockets in their inventory. Also radical but pragmatic. They have a large group of female fighters under their command. Leadership in Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon.

Al-Nasser Salah-al-Din Brigades (Popular Resistance Committees): Basically Fatah rejectionists who left and took up arms due to the PLO’s pacifism. More nationalist in orientation. Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades are still big in the West Bank where they have automatic weapons that they manufacture themselves in factories! This is the third largest group in Gaza and they have fired many missiles in this latest fight. Saladin is a hero in the region. He was actually a Kurd. He threw the Crusaders out of Palestine. The Nasser may be a reference to Arab nationalist leader Gamel Nasser of Egypt. This group is more secular. Leadership in Palestine.

Mujahedin Brigades (Mujahedin Movement): These are said to be Salafists, but they seem quite similar to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with whom they share philosophy and even weaponry. This is one of the smaller groups in Gaza. I don’t know much about them. Leadership in Palestine.

National Resistance Brigades (DFLP): A Marxist group that attracts a lot of the secular crowd, including Christians. They have an armed force and a lot of missiles. Their leader is Nayef Hawatmeh in Jordan, a Christian. This group has a surprisingly large presence in Gaza. It’s interesting that Hamas and Islamic Jihad get along just fine with Marxists. This group has fired quite a few missiles in the latest war. You would be surprised at how active they are. Much of the leadership is in Syria.

Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades (PFLP): Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A member of the PLO which refuses to participate in the PLO government because they see the PLO as sellouts. Marxists. They have a surprisingly large army inside Gaza and they have carried out many attacks recently, including an attack on the port of Ashkelon. They also have a lot of women under arms. Most PFLP women do not wear hijabs. Also attracts the secular crowd and a lot of Christians. Also pretty big in the West Bank.  Basically secular Arab nationalists. They’re actually probably a lot more moderate than the other group in that they argue that all of the Jews can stay in Palestine. Leader Ahmad Saadat is in an Israeli prison. Leadership is presently in Syria.

PFLP-GC: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. No channel. Very close to Syria. Significant presence in Lebanese refugee camps. They have launched missiles in the latest war and they do have a presence in Gaza. Very secular. Formerly Ahmad Jibril’s group. Another PLO split.

As you can see, the PFLP-GC, the DFLP, the PFLP, and the PRC are all at least fairly secular groups. The first three are very secular. The Mujahedin Brigades, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are Islamists.

 

 

Alt Left: Jordanians Rushing the Border

Alt Left: The Chameleon-Like Nature of Fascism

I wrote this in objection to a paper under review right now on Academia by a Left professor of Somatic Psychology, a PhD and a very smart man, who quotes Wilhelm Reich, a Jewish pro-sex and anti-fascist writer, as saying that fascists are out of touch with their bodies. Presumably antifascists are in touch with their bodies and not repressed. Apparently sexual repression and being out of touch with your body is part of the genesis of fascism. I don’t agree. Here is my response, in part.

I think that quoting Reich on fascism is not the greatest idea. He’s not the best person to ask about fascist theory. The modern intellectual descendants of Reich (the Cultural Left) don’t have a very good view of fascism.

Further, Reich was an extreme sexual libertine who may have molested his sister and raped his maids as a boy. Reich’s sexual libertinism was rejected by all Communists in the last century and is still condemned in existing Communist countries. So Reich’s critique is ill-formed, as the Communists were just as bad as the fascists when it came to Reich’s libertinism.

Fascists are sexually repressed? I don’t know. I’ve run into some MAGA women lately who are ridiculously libertine to the point of being degenerate or depraved. They’re about this far from becoming out and out porn stars. Yet fascists they are. A friend used to be an actor in the porn industry. He told me that the industry is full of conservatives. I’m aware of a few pornstars who were basically White Supremacists.

Donald Trump’s fascism was nearly a “pornographic fascism.” He cavorted with pornstars, cheated on all of his wives, made lewd remarks about his own daughter and the teenage underage daughters of his friends, reportedly attended sex orgies, and may have raped a 13 year old girl and forced a 12 and 13 year old girl to have sex with each other. He’s as libertine as Reich, yet he’s a fascist.

Better definitions are coming out of serious scholars of the Left. There area number of modern scholars who are trying to pin down exactly what fascism is. Almost all are operating from the Left. Among these superb modern theorists of fascism are David Neiwert who blogs at Daily Kos, the authors of a blog called Three Way Fight (not sure if it’s still up), along with excellent political scientists working out of the universities.

Better older analyses of fascism also come from Lenin and especially from Trotsky, who wrote some of the best essays on fascism ever written.

A “popular dictatorship against the Left” seems to be the best definition. “Palingetic nationalism” is another, referring to the bird that rises from the ashes in mythology. Fascism appeals to “the everyman,” “the man on the street” – “the shirtless ones” of Peronist fame. That’s the appeal – to your “basic man” and “basic woman.” It also appeals to strong primitive drives of aggression, violence, projection of failures onto outsiders, expansionism, often imperialism, an opposition to liberalism and democracy. It also opposes equality and in favor of hierarchy.

Fascism involves a reverence for sacred violence bordering on the religious, a worship of “the greatness of the ancestors,” a dialogue to restore “the glory days of yore” from the ruins of the “degenerate present”, ruined by liberals, democracy, anti-nationals, nation-haters, and traitors.

Fascism has historically supported a return to traditional values and a rejection of degenerate modernism, but as we can see in the “pornographic fascism” of Donald Trump, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.

Fascism also always advocated a return to traditional male female role models, but that need to be a hindrance to basic equal de jure rights for women, as seen in the many successful MAGA women and the many often-religious MAGA men who love and cherish their wives.

Fascism has typically targeted minorities and has been racist. People think that fascism is inherently anti-Semitic, yet many early Zionists such as Jabotinsky were open fascists and supported the fascist movement in Europe. Some of the early Israeli guerrillas were Jabotinskist fascists.

I’d argue that Israel has been fascist from Day One, but certainly with the coming of Sharon and Netanyahu, the ideological descendants of Jabotinskyist fascism, Israel became literally a fascist country. Jacobinsky is the hero and spiritual founder of the Likud Party. He was an early Zionist who wrote a book in 1921 called The Iron Wall. He and his followers were strong supporters of the fascist parties in Europe in the 1920’s and 30’s. Some of the early Zionist guerrilla organizations were Jabotinskyist fascists.

In Lebanon, the Gemayalist Phalangists named after a general named Gemayal, are an actual literal fascist party. Even their name is fascist as phalange is a popular name for fascist parties. They are Christian Maronites who see themselves as transplanted Europeans, descendants of “Phoenicians,” who despise Arabs and Islam. They are also the most pro-Israel party in Lebanon. This founder of this party had photos of Hitler in his school locker when he was in high school and the party’s ideology is modeled on the classic European fascism of the 30’s.

Israeli fascism is not anti-Semitic at all, and many White Supremacists actually support Israel as the model for the racist state they wish to set up. Many dislike Jews in the Diaspora who are seen as anti-national, but have no problem with the fascist Jews in Israel and see them as fellow fascists.

A number of the anti-immigrant Right parties in Europe are pro-Israel, including the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, and the neo-Nazi party in Austria! They often like Israel because of its strong anti-Muslim orientation. Along the same lines, the Muslim-hating Hindu nationalist fascists ruling India in the form of the BJP party, are very pro-Israel.

The pro-fascist Spanish and Italian conservatives, remnants of former large fascist movements in those countries, are pro-Israel. The fascist Saudis, Bahrainis, Egyptians, Moroccans, and Ermiratis are now pro-Israel. They’ve always been Rightists so it’s no surprise. So philosemitic fascism is absolutely possible and even existing.

Arab nationalists have always been quite fascist despite their Leftist trappings. Saddam was a fascist, as was Hafez Assad. Some think Bashar Assad is a fascist. The North African leaders, all Arab Nationalists, were fascists in the sense that they tried to destroy the Berbers’ identity and make everyone into an Arab. The Assads and Saddam also attacked Kurds and Assyrians, in both cases in attempts to turn everyone into an Arab. Saddam also attacked Turkmen. And he discriminated against Iraqis of Iranian background in the South so much that he threw hundreds of thousands of them out of the country.

The Moroccan fascists are even expansionists, having invaded Spanish Sahara. The Indonesian fascists committed genocide in East Timor and Aceh and in the entire country against Communists when they unleashed a genocide in 1965 that murdered 1 million Communist in less than a couple of months. It was as bad as the Rwandan genocide.

All of these are examples of “Muslim fascists,” so fascism and Islam are quite compatible.

There seems to be a view in the West that fascism must be White Supremacist and of course it must be anti-Semitic.

None of the above were White Supremacists. They were all non-Whites, and none were self-haters.

Also as you can see above, fascism need not be anti-Semitic.

I also listed a number of fascist and anti-Islamic movements, rightwing dictatorships along with the post-fascist conservatives in Spain and Italy. The former fascist followers of Mussolini and Franco simply melted into the rightwing movements of both countries. In Spain it was the Conservative Party, a party with fascist roots.The Francoists simply changed clothes and melted into the Conservative Party. Francoism is still extremely popular, mostly in the form of anti-separatism, these days. I’ve been to their very popular websites.

Burlusconi in Italy has inherited the descendants of fascism in Italy. A fascist and racist separatist and somewhat White Supremacist movement has formed in Northern Italy. They are White Supremacists in the sense that  they claim the are Celts or “pure Whites” and they despise Southern Italians as de facto “niggers.”

A friend in Italy told me that fascism was still very popular in Italy to this very day, although it was also widely hated as the Left in Italy is often Far Left or almost Communist. There are cities in Sicily were the leftwingers are all Communists and the rightwingers are all fascists. They engage in street battles all the time.

My friend told me that the Red Brigades, an anti-fascist Far Left group of Communists that attacked the state, was extremely popular in Northern Italy, particularly in Vicenzia Province where he lived. His sister was a strong supporter of the Red Brigades, and she came from a normal middle class background in Trieste.

Fascism is said to be anti-Muslim, yet we have Islamic fascism in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Brunei, Morocco, and probably the Taliban in Afghanistan. Turkey and Azerbaijan are classic fascists of the 1930’s type, however they have married this to Ottoman imperialism and Islamic jihadism, particularly the genocidal variety that held sway in Turkey from 1880 until 1940.

That the Taliban are a new sort of fascism was an argument of the Leftists at Three Way Fight. I’m not sure I agree with that. Other Muslim fascists used to rule in Indonesia,  Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Iran. Above I listed more Muslim fascists in the Arab World, who might better be described as rightwing dictatorships.

Fascism is chameleon-like and changes shape endlessly to mirror and capture whatever times it is in. I can even see chameleon-like fascists adopting yoga, meditation, and bodywork, the “Left” body psychology mechanisms the author refers to. Hitler was a vegetarian and a good animal rights supporter, if terrible in so many other ways.

This aspect of fascism of what makes this political mercury blob so hard to pin down. Indeed, many fascists pose as anti-Nazis and anti-fascists and accuse anti-fascists of being fascists! I’ve seen this with my own eyes.

Problem is the Modern Left starts talking about fascism, and it immediately degenerates into propaganda and nonsense where we push views that line up whatever biases our Left formation is pushing du jour. The Cultural Left, which is almost devoid of intelligence or intellectual honesty of any sort, in particular cannot be relied upon, as almost everything coming out of there is propaganda and a lie in some form or another. For instance, the Cultural Left argues that White Supremacists, anti-feminists (or what feminists would call misogynists), homophobes, and transphobes are all “fascists.”

That’s utter nonsense as none of this Identity Stuff has anything to do with the Left in the first place, as the Left is only about economics and many Communists of the last century were in fact social conservatives described under the epithets above. Many of the antifascist fighters fighting in the Allies in World War 2 were White Supremacists, racists (in particular, racist against Blacks), “misogynists” (or at the very least strong sexists), and virulent homophobes. Trannies didn’t exist back then, but they would have been hated much worse than gays.

The very racist White Southern Democrats of that time absolutely despised Hitler, Mussolini, and the rest of the European fascists along with the Japanese, who were promoting a sort of “fascist militarism.”

The Cultural Left would have us believe that Stalin, Mao, Castro, Hoxha, Deng, Ho Chi Minh, the Bulgarian Communists, etc. were all fascists because they were social conservatives. Homosexuality was banned as a bourgeois vice in the Eastern Blog. The Shining Path executed homosexuals and cocaine abusers (another bourgeois vice). The Khmer Rogue were terribly racist. I don’t think anyone will deny that they were Communists.

Even Strasserites are Communists, granted they were odd ones. Further, Strasser had no biological race-based objection to Jews. He had an economic objection. And he wasn’t the best anti-Semite. He kept asking the others why they were so overboard on the Jewish Question.

Stalin wasn’t the best on women’s rights.

The Bulgarian Communists had opinions on race that would be considered Nazism nowadays.

As noted, homosexuality was banned in all of the Communist World. Castro put them in labor camps. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation even today doesn’t have the best policy on gays nor on Jews for that matter. I’m pretty sure they are Communists.

Trans people were not even acknowledged by any Communist country ever.

We have to completely rethink our view of fascism.

It is perfectly possible to have a libertine fascism in a porn-drenched society, which is what we just went through with Trump. MAGA folks are not repressed at all in my observation. They’re not out of touch with their bodies. The Sex Revolution of the 60’s which I was a part of took care of that.

MAGA fascism even allowed for equal rights for women. MAGA women do not appear to be discriminated against legally. A lot of them made a lot of money and held high positions.

Fascism has always been homophobic, yet the Nazi brownshirts were full of homosexuals, and I’ve talked to many gay MAGA types.

I assure you that there are gay MAGA folks. I’ve talked to a number of them. Mitch McConnell is a lifelong homosexual. He’s as fascist as they come. The first brownshirts were full of homosexuals. The Republican Convention welcomed an open fascist, the founder of Ebay, to their convention. They gave him a standing ovation.

I’m aware of Neo-Nazis to this day who are open homosexuals. James O’Meara was one. A number of White Supremacists have been outed as closeted gays. One was murdered by his young Black boyfriend. A friend used to be involved in these groups and he told me that was a LOT of homosexuality in this scene.

Brazilian fascist integralism was multi-racial and formally anti-racist, populist to the core. But Bolsonaro does not come from this milieu; he represents an actual throwback in some ways to classical European fascism of the 1930’s.

Fascism has traditionally been racist, but Black and Indian fascism is a real thing. I believe that fascism knows no color. The Tonton Macoutes of Haiti were black fascists. The Black Hutu government in Rwanda was fascist, as was Mobutu in Zaire and Samuel Doe in Liberia.

A fascist indigenist Indian rights activist is running for President in Ecuador. He’s pulled support from Cultural Left morons who support his Identity Politics while overlooking his fascism, a typical error of IP types, who are the a scourge of the Left.

Obviously modern fascism opposes transsexualism, but that’s not necessarily the case into the future. Caitlin Jenner, a fully-transitioned transwoman, is MAGA.

In the future we may see even forms of fascism that offer equal rights to gays and maybe even transsexuals.

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