Mayor Bloomberg, winning praise over his position on the “Ground Zero Mosque,” weighs in against Native Americans’ right to tax-free tobacco sales on their reservations in blatantly racist terms.
At the unveiling of a new bomber, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran “should seek the ability to make pre-emptive strikes against a perceived threat,” while also saying it would “never strike first.”
Author William Dalrymple weighs in with a defense of Sufism and the “Ground Zero Mosque” on the Times op-ed page—but in terms that smack of a neocon strategy to groom domesticated “good” Muslims.
New York City buses will be running ads from the jingoistic American Freedom Defense Initiative attacking the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”—part of a nationwide propaganda campaign.
The US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced that they have temporarily halted their campaign against ISIS after they were bombarded for the second time in four days by Turkish forces. With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an promising to "wipe out" the Kurdish YPG militia, calling them "terrorists," his forces in northern Syria attacked YPG positions east of the Euphrates River. The YPG, or People's Protection Units, constitute the central pillar of the US-backed SDF, which Washington continues to support with some 2,000 embedded troops. At least 10 YPG fighters were reported killed in the Turkish shelling of territory in the Kurdish autonomous canton of Kobani. The SDF said in a statement: "Turkish attacks in the north and ISIS attacks in the south against our troops had forced us to stop our current operation temporarily against ISIS in its last pocket… We call upon the international community to condemn the Turkish provocations." The statement claimed that YPG fighters responded to the shelling with artillery and machine-gun fire, destroying a Turkish military vehicle and border post. (Image of SDF fighters via Rudaw)
The Hague’s ruling that Kosova’s declaration of independence was not illegal is predictably applauded by the US and Kosova and protested by Russia and Serbia—yet it resolves nothing.
US senators are demanding that BP face a criminal investigation into its possible role in freeing convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi as a kickback for a Libyan oil deal.
World leaders commemorated the 1995 Srebrenica massacre July 11, and genocide convictions have been handed down—but the accused massacre mastermind Ratko Mladic remains at large.
Obama’s “humiliation” at the hands of Netanyahu has Washington’s “pragmatists” paranoid about a Zionist Occupied Government—because they fail to grasp Israel’s assigned role in the imperial order.
Barack Obama’s replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus as commander of US forces in Afghanistan appears to represent a strategic shift within the administration.
With appalling blatancy, Israel’s “amen chorus” on Capitol Hill is proposing use of the Armenian genocide—or the threat of US recognition of it as genocide—as political ammo against Turkey.
