Chickens Come Home To Roost In Saudi Arabia With 3 Suicide Bombings

The feudalistic regime of the House of Saud, which arrogated to itself the right to claim ownership of an entire country constituting most of the land area of the Arabian peninsula, just experienced some blowback for its spreading globally of a noxious, intolerant, extremist religious ideology, Wahhabism. The blowback came in the form of three suicide bombers, who struck in three separate Saudi cities near the end of the "holy" month of Ramadan.

One bomber took out four Saudi security guards with him, and wounded five more, outside "the prophet's mosque" in Medina, "the second holiest city in Islam," as the catechism goes. Another bomber, a Pakistani man who came to Saudi Arabia 12 years ago to work as a driver, according to the Saudi regime, blew himself up outside the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, wounding two guards. The third bomber targeted a mosque in the predominantly Shiite city of Qatif. (Wahhabism and its terrorist spawn are Sunni. Both the Saudi regime and ISIS persecute Shias. The regime executed a leading Shiite cleric in January for leading protests for more rights and democracy, and ISIS considers Shiites "apostates," abandoners of Islam, and worthy of death.)

This is far from the first time people even more extreme than the Saudis have violently attacked the regime. There have been other attacks on religious sites, shootouts with state security, and assassinations.

So repression, even the extreme repression of a Saudi Arabia, cannot totally suppress attacks by determined zealots willing to sacrifice themselves or take great risks. This is one reason the eventual overthrow of vicious regimes does not result in humane new orders. It is the fanatics who have the gumption, will, and commitment to fight repressive regimes. The decent, moral people are cowed, imprisoned, driven into exile, or killed.

All across the world, cancerous offspring of Wahhabism have sprouted. First came Al-Qaeda, then various Taliban organizations and movements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose military aided and abetted the creation of terrorist organizations to use against India, and provides a haven for the Taliban, policies that in recent years have come back to bite them. (Frankenstein's monster slipping out of the control of the creator.)

In the Philippines there is Abu Sayyef, founded by a veteran of the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistai anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan instigated by Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski and vigorously pursued by the Reagan regime in the 1980s.

Another of the numerous Sunni jihadist organizations is Jemaah Islamiyah, which also operates in the Philippines, and in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Indonesia, the major country in that region, is also the site of Islamist terrorist activities, such as the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002 that targeted Australian and other tourists and killed 202 people. (A lot fewer than the approximately one million Indonesians murdered in the CIA-inspired anti-communist military pogrom of 1965.) Members of Jemaah Islamiyah were convicted in the bombings.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has wreaked havoc. (The brutality of the various Nigerian military regimes led directly to radicalizing Boko Haram.)

In Libya there is a war on against ISIS by Libyans fighting back.

In Bangladesh, the regime's tolerance of Islamofascists murdering bloggers, writers, and secularists by hacking them to death with machetes has suddenly come with a price tag, as Islamofascists just attacked foreigners in a restaurant. This is not only scaring off tourists, but is causing foreign clothing companies to consider taking their production business out of the country to saver slave-wage states.

Other attacks in just the last few days include a truck bombing in Baghdad that slaughtered over 200 people so far, and the first attack in Malaysia credited to ISIS, a grenade lobbed at a club that wounded 8 people. [1]

Egypt's tourism industry has been devastated by Islamofascist attacks there, including the destruction of two airliners in flight so far, first a Russian one, then an Egyptian.

In Turkey, the most recent bombing there, in the Istanbul airport by armed suicide bombers, is being blamed on ISIS, even though ISIS hasn't boasted its responsibility, which they usually do. (NPR and other media have been claiming the attack "has the hallmarks of ISIS" or even "all the hallmarks of ISIS." No it doesn't. Which doesn't mean ISIS didn't do it, of course.)

So while ISIS is being systematically squeezed geographically in Iraq, where it declared its "caliphate," and is being fought by the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, fanatics inspired by it have been undertaking attacks on civilians around the world.

We can expect this situation to last for years. Which is great news for the U.S. political elites of both parties, and the secret police/military combine. That combine sought and deliberately created a never-ending "war on terrorism" in order to gain huge increases in both funds and powers. They initiated this operation, with malice aforethought, by arranging to allow al-Qaeda operatives to hijack planes on September 11, 2001. In order to create "another Pearl Harbor," in the words of one of the seminal planning documents for this criminal enterprise, agents of the U.S. deep state planted demolition charges in three steel structures at the World Trade Center and detonated them on that day, as has been proven beyond doubt by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, an organization of 2,000 experts.

Thus the program to Create a More Perfect Police State continues, under both Democratic and Republican regimes.

1]  "Toll climbs to more than 200 in Islamic State’s worst-ever bomb attack on civilians," Washington Post, July 4, 2016.  "Islamic State launches first successful attack in Malaysia," CNN, July 4, 2016.

Suicide bomber goes up in cloud of smoke in Medina, presumably ascending to paradise and his reward of an orgy with waiting virgins.

 

Turkey Providing Material Support to Terrorism, And Destroying UNESCO World Heritage Sites à la ISIS

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by the U.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Which, with the help of the loyal U.S. media, it largely does.

1] "Behind the Barricades of Turkey’s Hidden War: A simmering conflict with the Kurds threatens to consume an American ally and inflame an already-unstable region," New York Times, May 24, 2016.

Turkey Bombards America's Kurds in Syria

The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly ripped open when it invaded Iraq!

The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their Saudi-style beheadings.

The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we can assume by extension the British government, supports, given today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.

So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan, predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to Biden.

So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting "terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces." (Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they suddenly decide they don't like.)

The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though they're fighting ISIS.

In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S. is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.

U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that Turkey is bombing and shelling.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces" (commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain, France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime, will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)

Is that all clear now?

I didn't think so.



1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and other depredations against human rights. The actual history of Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda manifested yet again.


The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds. And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict," even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming majority of the now-dead.

By the way, that NATO army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.