Ol’ Blind Joe
Cuckoo clock ticking
By Stirling Hamilton
IN 1744, Muhammad bin Saud, the founder of the current Saudi royal dynasty, made a pact with theologian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, to work together to unify the warring tribes of Arabia.
The Wahabi Salafists of Saudi Arabia are the absolute nutjobs of the Islamic religion.
Most Moslems considering adultery think; naughty, naughty, don’t get caughty, no problem.
These Wahabi guys stone women to death as only fundamentalists everywhere are wont to do.
When they hit the jackpot and struck oil in the ’70s they spent billions setting up mosques everywhere in the world focused on nut job religious education and publishing.
Read moreThen came the ‘neo-Wahabis’ like CIA trained Osama Bin Laden who didn’t want all those US bases in Saudi Arabia and flew those planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11.
The Middle East is riddled with them varmints and the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia have been arming, funding and training Al Qaida, ISIS and the Sunni nutjobs for years while Former US president Barack Obama and former secretary of state John Kerry were “watching” ISIS advance and using it as a tool to “manage” their war against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
In 2016, Israeli defence minister Moshe Yaalon made clear Israel’s agenda: “In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State.”
Bob Gates, who was Obama’s defence secretary, had this great line. He said, look, the Saudis and the Israelis want to fight Iran to the last American, right?
Iran has an ancient and beautiful civilization, which dates back to 5000 BC, with the earliest writing that we know of. Ancestors of the word. Also algebra.
This recent murder of leading Iranian General Soleimani was, to quote Hamlet, a “Murder most foul, as in the best it is, but this most foul, strange, and unnatural”, because of his history as a once critical American ally.
Soleimani had diplomatic immunity – and the US knew about it. But no rule, no law and no standard of ethics is respected by Washington.
Soleimani helped save Christians, Kurds, Yazidis and others from being slaughtered by ISIS and was seen as a temperate, judicious statesman.
He’s a legend in Iran, Iraq and Syria and the people he’s worked with viewed him as one of the greatest leaders and thinkers; one of the most humane men of all time. I agree.
The US drone-bombed him, an Iranian diplomatic state official in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi Prime Minister, on a conflict-resolution mission with Saudi Arabia requested by US President Donald Trump himself.
In anybody’s book, that is an act of war –and extraordinary treachery, even in wartime, the equivalent of shooting someone who came to parley under a white flag.
Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi revealed details of his interactions with Trump in the weeks leading up to Soleimani’s assassination in a speech to the Iraqi parliament.
Washington had been browbeating him to toe the American line, even threatening to engage in false-flag sniper shootings of both protesters and security personnel in order to inflame the situation.
Huge demonstrations against him duly materialised.
Prominent American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky says the US is a “rogue state” conducting “reckless international terrorism,” with Trump’s actions giving ISIS “another lease on life”.
It is indeed a crazy world which we live in, where the UK and US try to bring down a Christian supporting government in Syria, and sides with the Islamists who hate the Christians.
National sovereignty? Democracy? Whatever their elected governments say, we will keep our army in Syria to “take the oil,” and in Iraq to … well, to do whatever the hell we want.
“Rules-based international order?” Sure, we make the rules and you follow our orders.
Candidates for another “coalition of the willing” to mask America’s brute adventurism are going to be as scarce as bird shit in a cuckoo clock.
In the ’90s the US shot down passenger plane Iran Air 655, killing 290 Iranian civilians with 66 kids on board.
Former US president George H W Bush (Snr) said in response to that: “I’ll never apologise for the United States of America ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”
In the prophetic words of Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde: “The United States is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence by skipping civilisation.”
In November I wrote how Hong Kong’s rioting hordes are funded heavily by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a virtual branch of the CIA, to put pressure on China.
Well a similar deal is going down on the other side of China in Xingjian which borders Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Uyghurs are largely Wahabi and have been fighting and blowing people up in the Middle East and their own backyard for years and the NED bankrolls the World Uyghur Congress.
So the Chinese with great strategic restraint figured that setting up vocational education and training centres and providing jobs might help with counter terrorism and de-radicalisation measures.
Thirty-seven countries, many Muslim, concur and it does sound sensible – heaven forbid.
In the West we just kill them, or bung them into detention in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib or secret sites and torture them.
“Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologise for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” – Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and nationalist independence leader.