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Two Laws on Establishing Real Estate Financing Companies, Regional Center for Early Childhood Development

DAMASCUS, (SANA)_ President Bashar al-Assad on Monday issued Law No. 15 for the year 2012 that allows establishing public and private financing and refinancing real estate companies as Joint-stock company.

The purpose of establishing such companies is to fund operations of real estate investment and deals.

Law on Establishing Regional Center for Early Childhood Development

President Bashar al-Assad also issued Law No. 17 for the year 2012 on establishing the Regional Center for Early Childhood Development based in Damascus, linked to the Minister of Education.

The Center is aimed at building national and regional capacities in early childhood care and education, as well as contributing to achieving the UN millennium goals in providing education for all.

Annan Informs Security Council of his mission in Syria… al-Jaafari: Countries that call for Arming opposition seek to make the Mission a failure

NEW YORK, (SANA)-Syria’s permanent Envoy to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari said that the countries which arm the terrorists in Syria, fund and supply them with communication sets seek to make the mission of UN Envoy to Syria Kofi Annan a failure.

“Those countries are violating the Syrian sovereignty and declaring the war on it… those countries are involved in complicating the crisis… they have to assume responsibilities and commit to Annan’s mission,” al-Jaafar said at a press conference held in the New York-based the UN.

“The Saudi Foreign Minister didn’t hide his personal intervention in the Syrian domestic affairs as he openly called for arming the opposition, moreover; he considered that a duty,” al-Jaafari added.

He said that those statements and others indicate to a duality in language that contradicts the harmonious way adopted by the Security Council, those statements represent a call for foiling Anna’s mission, so there are sides who want to confuse his voice through finding parallel tracks as the case in the meeting of Syria’s Enemies in Istanbul.

“The Turkish current government’s policy is hostile towards Syria… it hosted a meeting on its land which undermines sovereignty of a neighboring country as to be considered declaring war on it,” al-Jaafari added.

He made clear that commitment to Annan’s mission must be applied on all, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and all who seek to pass the Syrian sovereignty, create parallel tracks for the security Council which are not recognized internationally.

“All now acknowledge the existence of armed terrorist groups in Syria… the Syrian government didn’t accept what it rejected in the past… Syria deals with a matter that is proven now and it was asking all, including al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya TV channels to acknowledge the existence of the armed groups,” al-Jaafari underlined.

He said that Syria is doing its best to make Annan’s mission a success, adding “we expect that Mr. Annan and members of the UNSC have as much as Syria commitment to make the plan a success… in diplomacy, there is no obligation to impose preconditions, what is important is preserving the Syrian sovereignty, and talking about observers is too early.

“We expect Mr. Annan will contact the other sides, particularly those who are involved in arming the terrorist groups to end acts of violence,” Dr. al-Jaafari added.

At a close session, Mr. Annan informed members of the UNSC of his mission in Syria, saying that Syria has agreed his plan, but it awaits a commitment by the opposition to halt violence and withdraw the armed terrorist groups.

Lavrov: Annan’s Plan Evaluated by Security Council Only, Moscow Against Putting any Deadline or Ultimatum in It

MOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday said that the plan of UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan is evaluated by the Security Council, not the “Friends of Syria” meeting, adding that Moscow is against putting any deadline or ultimatum in this plan.

He also said that Russia is the friend of the entire Syrian people, not the friend of a part of it like the west.

In a statement made at the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Lavrov warned against the danger of the stances of the so-called “Friends of Syria” meeting in terms of recognizing some of the Syrian opposition groups as representatives of the Syrian people, saying that this is a grave matter that contradicts with Annan’s efforts.

He added that Russia intends to receive two delegations representing various spectrums of the opposition at a later time.

Minister Lavrov voiced the hope that western colleges would send a clear signal to the armed groups which commit violence acts in Syria to stop violence as to secure the work for the full implementation of Annan’s six-point plan.

At a lecture in Yerevan public University, Lavrov underlined that it is not possible to ignore the reforms carried out by the Syrian government, adding “all sides must engage in dialogue.”

“We see that Syria is facing a complicated crisis,” Lavrov said, adding that the compromise between the Syrian government and the opposition to settle the crisis is very possible.

Russian Foreign Ministry: “Friends of Syria” Meeting Contradicts Peaceful Solution Efforts

The Russian Foreign Ministry criticized the so-called “Friends of Syria” meeting, describing its decisions as unilateral and contradict the efforts of reaching a peaceful solution for the crisis in Syria.

The ministry added in a statement that the most important matter currently is implementing cessation of fire and violence regardless of the source and starting a comprehensive dialogue among all Syrians, not igniting sedition and provocation in Syria.

The ministry stressed that the intentions and promises made in Istanbul regarding military and logistic support for the armed opposition in Syria are totally inconsistent with the mission of the UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan to reach a peaceful solution for the crisis in Syria.

Authorities Foil Terrorist Group Infiltration Attempt from Turkey, 103 persons give themselves up to Authorities

IDLEB, DAMASCUS COUNTRYSIDE, (SANA)- Authorities on Monday foiled an infiltration attempt by an armed terrorist group from the Turkish territories into Syria near Khirbet al-Jouz border village in Idleb countryside.

One of the terrorists was killed in the clash while the others escaped.

SANA Reporter quoted a source at Idleb Province as saying that the authorities found different kinds of weapons left by the terrorists including 1500 electric detonators used to detonate explosive charges.

Terrorists Caught , Weapons Seized in Damascus Countryside

The competent authorities aided by the locals arrested 4 terrorists on a farm in al- Ma’addamieh in Damascus countryside.

An official source told SANA correspondent that amounts of weapons were seized. The competent authorities also raided a farm used by armed groups to manufacture explosives for targeting law-enforcement members and citizens in Ashrafiyet Sahnaya.

103 persons give themselves up to authorities in Madaya, Damascus Countryside

103 persons in Madaya, Damascus countryside gave themselves up along with their weapons to the authorities today.

The persons underlined that they were subjected to a lot of deception, but the reality became clear, underlining that the authorities released them immediately to return to normal life.

They pledged not to carry any weapon in future or participate in any acts of sabotage.

Prime Minister: Current Stage Necessitates all Efforts to Overcome Foreign Conspiracy

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – The current stage necessitates gathering all efforts as to overcome the situation which is fed by foreign sides conspiring against Syria and to restore normal life and achieve security and stability in the homeland, Prime Minister, Adel Safar, said on Monday.

Opening the Heads of Provincial Councils Meeting in Damascus, Safar added that the Government is ready to offer all forms of assistance to the provincial councils as to carry out their duties and development plans.

For his part, Minister of Local Administration Omar Ibrahim Ghalawenji stressed the importance of provincial councils in tackling all development and service issues which concern all citizens.

Ten Army and Law Enforcement Martyrs Laid to Rest

DAMASCUS / ALEPPO, (SANA) – Ten army and law enforcement martyrs on Monday were escorted from Tishreen and Aleppo Military Hospitals in Damascus and Aleppo to their final resting place.

Solemn funeral processions were held for the martyrs who were targeted by armed terrorist groups while they were in the line of duty in Damascus Countryside, Homs, Idleb, Deir Ezzor, Daraa, Hama and Aleppo.

The Martyrs are:

­           Colonel Malik Ahmad Saleh, from Lattakia.

­           Chief Warrant Officer Seif Mohammed, from Lattakia.

­           Sergeant Major Weaam Fayad, from Hama.

­           Sergeant Major Bashar Mohammed Deeb Qurabi, from Aleppo.

­           Sergeant Major Ekrima Salem Haji Suleiman, from Idleb.

­           Sergeant Ahmad Abdullah al-Ali, from Aleppo.

­           Conscript Walid Miskin Mahmoud, from Hasaka.

­           Conscript Hussein Hamzeh al-Hardan, from Aleppo.

­           Conscript Abdul-Karim al-Nasseri, from Aleppo.

­           Civilian Haitham Agha, from Aleppo.

The martyrs’ families stressed that the systematic terrorism perpetrated by the armed terrorist groups will not persuade the Syrian people from adhering to their national and pan-Arab stances.

They called for confronting the terrorists in order to restore Syria’s security and stability, expressing confidence in the ability of the Syrian people to overcome the crisis through adhering to national unity.

They expressed rejection of the foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs , asserting the Syrian people ability to resolve their problems by themselves.

Turkish Media: Failure of Istanbul Meeting, Ankara Hostile Towards Syrian Protester against Meeting

ANKARA, (SANA) – The majority of the Turkish media highlighted the failure of the so-called “Friends of Syria” meeting in Istanbul despite the attempts of pro-government media to show the opposite.

Writers specialized in the international affairs underlined that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu failed to persuade the participants in the meeting to issue concrete decisions against Syria.

Turkish TV channels and newspapers talked about the aggressive and provocative stance of the Turkish security forces against the Syrian pro-government protesters in Istanbul who condemned the meeting.

The renown Turkish journalist Asli Aydintash from Milliyet Newspaper asked ” what democratic message could Ankara send to President Bashar al-Assad through the democracy of burner pepper gas, which couldn’t stand the shouting of only thirty people.”

Cumhuriyet newspaper revealed that foreign ministers of western countries, including the USA, Britain and Germany refused a Turkish proposal on granting the UN special envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, two weeks only for his mission, as they also rejected another Turkish proposal on arming the opposition and the militia of the so called “Free Army” and granting monetary aid. The participants of the Meeting also ruled out discussing the idea of establishing a buffer zone on the Turkish-Syrian border.

Syrian Human Rights Network Condemn  Istanbul Conference and Decisions

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Syrian Human Rights Network condemned Istanbul Conference and its false decisions, considering that they only represent the opinion of the defeated and fragmented opposition and traitors of the Arabs.

The Network said in a statement Monday that the Conference and its decisions are rejected by the Syrian people of all backgrounds, considering that those who put their hands with Israel do not have the right to talk on behalf of the Syrian people who consider the Palestinian Cause as his their central issue and offer thousands of martyrs to destabilize the situation in the country.

The statement added that some Arab countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia in addition to Turkey are supplying the terrorist armed groups with weapons and money to sow sedition among the Syrians and support terrorism which violates the Statue of Rome and Resolution no. 1373 on combating terrorism.

Syrian Consultative Center for Studies and Human Rights: Istanbul Conference Endorses Killing and Bloodshed in Syria

The Syrian Consultative Center for Studies and Human Rights stressed that Istanbul meeting endorses killing and bloodshed in Syria by armed terrorist groups which are funded by the conferees.

The Center said in a statement on Monday that the conferees should have called for dialogue instead of foreign interference, calling for prosecuting them for their support to criminals and mercenaries who are violating human rights.

Sculpture Honoring Syria’s Martyrs Unveiled in Sweida

SWEIDA, (SANA) – A sculpture honoring the sacrifices of Syria’s martyrs, dubbed “Rock of Martyrs,” was unveiled on Monday in Tishreen Square in Sweida city.

Chairman of Swedia branch of the National Union of Syrian Students Omar al-Jibaei said that this sculpture, which was made by sculptor Karam Haidar under the supervision of the Union, is a gesture of appreciation for the martyrs’ sacrifices.

He said that the basalt sculpture, which is three meters high, 1.8 meters wide and weighs 2.5 tons, resembles an open book symbolizing “the open book of martyrdom” and the continuing martyrdom in defense of Syria, adding that the names of 82 martyrs from Sweida have been carved on the sculpture.

Al-Jibaei noted that the sculpture was inspired by a speech delivered by President Bashar al-Assad in which he said that “Sweida is the strongest rock in the impregnable fortress of Syria.”

In April 2012, a sculpture dubbed “The Strongest Rock” was unveiled in the same square. It was carved by seven sculptors, standing 4 meters high and weighing 32 tons, depicting Syria’s history throughout the ages.

Al-Maliki Reiterates Rejection of Interference in the Syrian Internal Affairs

BAGHDAD, (SANA)_Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki reiterated Iraq’s rejection of foreign interference in the Syrian domestic affairs, arming the Syrian opposition or the use of force against Syria as this would add fuel to the fire.

During a press conference in Baghdad on Sunday, al-Maliki called for finding a political peaceful solution to the crisis in Syria, expressing willingness to back the political efforts and national dialogue for that purpose.

Al-Maliki said that Iraq rejects the forceful overthrow of the regime as it will create a growing crisis in the region that will spill over into other countries, expressing support to the will of the Syrians.

He indicated that the so-called Friends of Syria meeting in Istanbul will only echo calls for arming the opposition by two countries.

Al-Maliki clarified that Iraq’s initiative to help reach a solution to the crisis is based on understanding its dimensions and repercussions, adding that it proposes that all sides will come to the ballot box.

Al-Maliki considered that those who are calling for arming the Syrian opposition are not aware of Syria’s position and its interrelations with other countries, adding that the responsibility of the Arabs and Muslims is to contain the crisis.

Al-Maliki indicated that the situation in Syria is different from any other country, affirming that the regime won’t be toppled by force.

7 Protesters Injured by Turkish Security Forces during Protest against Istanbul Meeting

ISTANBUL, (SANA)_Turkish security forces attacked a protest in Istanbul against the anti-Syria Istanbul meeting in an attempt to disperse the protesters , injuring 7 of them.

The participants held the Syrian flags and chanted slogans rejecting foreign interference and condemning Istanbul meeting.

Fadi al-Mahmoud, organizer of National Unity Convoy and a participant in the protest, said that the Turkish security forces used tear gas to disperse the protesters and beat them up.

Ezawi:  Number of candidates for next people’s Assembly term reached 7195

DAMASCUS, (SANA)-Counselor Khalaf al-Ezawi, Head of the Higher Committee for elections said that the number of candidates to the first legislative term for 2012 reached at 7195 in all Syrian cities, among them 2632 have university degrees and 710 female candidates.

During a meeting held on Sunday, al-Ezawi called on members and chairmen of judicial committees of elections to provide suitable circumstances to make the electoral process, due on May 7th, a success in light of the new constitution which was approved in February.

He underlined that the voters are free in their options to select whom they see fit to represent them , adding that the constitution paved the way for making elections free, fair and democratic.

President al-Assad Issues Decree No. 25

DAMASCUS, SANA_ President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday issued decree No. 25 for 2012 stipulating for the Supreme Constitutional Court to reconsider the People’s Assembly’s elections-related contestations.

In a statement to SANA, Head of the Elections Higher Committee Counselor Khalaf al-Azzawi said that the Legislative Decree No. 25 came according to what has been stated by the new constitution on amending laws in three years.

Ezawi:  Number of candidates for next people’s Assembly term reached 7195

DAMASCUS, (SANA)-Counselor Khalaf al-Ezawi, Head of the Higher Committee for elections said that the number of candidates to the first legislative term for 2012 reached at 7195 in all Syrian cities, among them 2632 have university degrees and 710 female candidates.

During a meeting held on Sunday, al-Ezawi called on members and chairmen of judicial committees of elections to provide suitable circumstances to make the electoral process, due on May 7th, a success in light of the new constitution which was approved in February.

He underlined that the voters are free in their options to select whom they see fit to represent them , adding that the constitution paved the way for making elections free, fair and democratic.

Gunmen Caught in Damascus and Daraa Countryside, Terrorist Killed in Clash with Authorities in Deir Ezzor

PROVINCES, (SANA)_ Competent authorities arrested gunmen with their weapons in Douma in Damascus countryside.

SANA correspondent said that big amounts of weapons were seized during raids of the terrorists’ hideouts in the area.

In Harasta, the competent authorities raided a farm used by armed terrorist groups and seized weapons and ammunition.

In Yelda, Damascus countryside, the competent authorities aided by citizens seized big amounts of weapons during raids of terrorists’ hideouts in the area.

Terrorists Turn themselves in, Others Caught in Daraa Eastern Countryside

Competent authorities clashed with an armed terrorist group in the eastern Gharrieh and western Gharrieh towns in Daraa eastern countryside.

An official source told SANA correspondent that the clash left a number of terrorists killed while many others turned themselves in. Many wanted terrorists were also caught.

The source indicated that the competent authorities confiscated big amounts of weapons and communication devices.

Authorities Find Water Well in Homs Used by terrorists to Smuggle, Hide Weapons

Authorities on Sunday found a water well in al-Naziheen Quarter in Homs used by terrorist groups to smuggle and hide weapons.

The armed groups opened a hole in the adjacent house to facilitate their movement from and to the well and to hide their weapons after killing and terrorizing citizens.

Terrorist Killed in Clash with Authorities in Deir Ezzor, Weapons Confiscated

The authorities clashed with terrorist groups in the town of al-Quria in Deir Ezzor countryside, leading to the death of several terrorists and the injuring of others.

Weapons were confiscated from terrorists, including 4 RPG launchers with 20 rounds and 12 AK-47 assault rifles, in addition to a large amount of machinegun and assault rifle ammo, 15 hand grenades, and a large number of explosive devices.

Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums: World Heritage Sites in Syria Suffered Attacks by Terrorists

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – The Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums on Sunday said that the world heritage sites in Damascus, Aleppo, Old Bosra, Palmyra, Citadel of Saladin and Krak des Chevaliers were targeted by the terrorist groups.

In a statement which SANA received a copy of, the directorate added that some armed terrorist groups are positioning in some architectural sites and damaging them.

“Bosra city suffered many illegal constructions in its campus. Al-Lujat area between Sweida and Daraa provinces suffered secret excavation operation.” The directorate stated.

The directorate highlighted that the local heritage sites were also exposed to attacks carried out by the terrorists, adding that ” A golden statue that is dated back to the Aramaic era was stolen from Hama Museum. Shaizar Castle, Misyaf Architectural Department, Ma’arrat al-Numan Museum were also attacked by terrorists.

The directorate concluded by saying that Syria played an important role in preserving the Arab heritage, adding that Syria expressed condemnation of the US aggressions in Iraq against the architectural sites at a time when other countries remained silence and now they are taking parts in sabotaging Syria’s cultural heritage.

Five Army and Law Enforcement Martyrs Laid to Rest

PROVINCES, (SANA) – Five army and law enforcement martyrs on Sunday were escorted from Tishreen, Zahi Azraq and Aleppo Military Hospitals in Damascus, Lattakia and Aleppo and the Police Hospital in Harasta in Damascus to their final resting place.

Solemn funeral processions were held for the martyrs who were targeted by armed terrorist groups while they were in the line of duty in Damascus Countryside, Homs and Aleppo.

The Martyrs are:

­           Colonel Khalid al-Hies, from Hama.

­           Conscript Hammoud Khedr al-Khedr, from Damascus Countryside.

­           Conscript Ahmad Kamal al-haj Hassan, from Aleppo.

­           Policeman jihad Jourieh, from Hama.

­           Civilian Qassem ali Kahileh, from Lattakia.

The martyrs’ families stressed that the systematic terrorism perpetrated by the armed terrorist groups will not persuade the Syrian people from adhering to their national and pan-Arab stances.

They called for confronting the terrorists in order to restore Syria’s security and stability, expressing confidence in the ability of the Syrian people to overcome the crisis through adhering to national unity.

Ghusn, Charbel: Smuggling Weapons into Syria Continued, Army is Combating It

BEIRUT, (SANA)- Lebanese Defense Minister, Fayez Ghusn, stressed that smuggling weapons into Syria is continuous and the Lebanese army is exerting efforts to combat it as much as possible as it deals firmly with this issue.

“ Smuggling weapons persists and is in fact increasing; the army is fighting it as much as it can but the smuggling operations are on the rise because they bring lots of profit and money,” Ghusn told An-Nahar newspaper on Sunday.

He added the borders with Syria, which extend 330 kilometers, include several illegal crossings making it difficult to monitor and control them from both sides.

“The army is ready but sometimes there are gaps and problems,” he said, adding that there are two main groups of the Lebanese army which are deployed on all the crossings.

In turn, Lebanese Interior Minister Marwan Charbbel said that there has been smuggling of weapons from Lebanon to Syria from the beginning of the events in Syria and throughout their development, noting that the Lebanese Army is currently curbing this phenomena.

In an interview with al-Manar TV, Charbel said that his Ministry and other security bodies in Lebanon are holding extensive meetings with Lebanese President Michel Sleiman and Premier Najib Mikati to discuss this issue which has negative ramifications on security in Lebanon.

Weapons, Ammunitions Seized from House of Lebanese MP Supporter

On Saturday evening, the Lebanese army stormed into the home of one of supporters of Member of the Lebanese Future Bloc and MP Khaled al-Daher in Akkar.

Lebanese OTV said that the army seized amounts of weapons and ammunitions.

Mansour: Helping Syria Through Supporting Reform Measures, Istanbul Meeting Fruitless

Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour stressed that helping Syria is through supporting the reform measures, asserting that Istanbul meeting will yield nothing as it happened in Tunisia’s conference.

Mansour, in a radio speech, called for dialogue as the only outlet for the crisis in Syria.

He underlined support to the mission of the UN envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, and the necessity of making it success.

The Minister said: ” We deal with Syria as a state to state as we deal with all the Arab countries, we don’t want to inter axes and what we have said on the necessity of halting violence and adopting dialogue is the same speech that we hear today at the international level.”

He added that Lebanon’s self-distancing policy towards Syria protects the diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Participants in Asia Convoy of Global March to al-Quds: Palestinian Cause Will Remain Central to All Arabs, Muslims and Free People

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – A press conference was held on Sunday to honor the Asian delegations which participated in the Global March to al-Quds in Syria and Lebanon.

In a speech at the conference, head of the preparatory committee of Global March to al-Quds Khaled Abdelmajid said that this March will herald more activities in the future to support the Palestinian cause, lauding the stances of Syria and its people towards the Palestinian cause, people and resistance.

In turn, member of the Syrian committee for the March Hala al-Asaad affirmed that Syria, Arabs, Muslims and the free people of the world stand alongside the Palestinian people in their struggle to reclaim their rights.

For their parts, participants in the March, hailing from Iran, the Philippines, Pakistan and Bahrain said that the March is an act of defiance against Israel’s crimes and barbaric policies against Palestinians, noting that the March was a success despite all of Israel’s attempts to foil it.

They said that this global initiative is the result of a growing awareness around the world, and that it sends out a message that people reject occupation and want to liberate occupied lands and topple the regimes serving Israel and the US, particularly some of the regimes in the Arab Gulf.

They also stressed the need to expand this movement and rally international support for the Palestinian cause.

At the conclusion of the conference, the national committee for the March honored the participating Asian delegation in appreciation of their efforts and support.

Asia Convoy of Global March to al-Quds began its journey early in March from the tomb of Mahatma Gandhi in India, traveling through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey, and afterwards it split and headed to Lebanon and Syria.

The Convoy encompassed activists from 15 Asian countries including Iran, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bahrain, Malaysia, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq and more, with the members including representatives of organizations supporting the Palestinian people’s rights.

On Land Day, Golan People Reiterate Adherence to Syrian Identity and Unity with the Land

QUNEITRA, (SANA)- People of the occupied Syrian Golan on Friday marked the Land Day reiterating adherence to the national and pan-Arab principles along with their Palestinian brethren and rejection of the Israeli occupation practices.

A rally was held to commemorate the 36th anniversary of Land Day, with the Golan marchers stressing that every day in their struggle against the Israeli occupation is a Day for Land and for defending it until liberations is achieved.

March 30, is an annual day of commemoration for Palestinians of the events of that date in 1976 when a general strike and marches were organized in Arab towns from the Galilee to the Negev protesting the Israeli occupation authorities’ plan to illegally confiscate thousands of dunams of privately-owned of Palestinian lands . In the ensuing confrontations with the Israeli occupation forces, six Arab citizens were killed, about one hundred were wounded, and hundreds of others arrested.

In statements to SANA reporter in Quneitra, the people of villages occupied by Israel affirmed unity and solidarity with their brothers in occupied Palestine to thwart the Israeli schemes and to protect their land from expropriation in favor of settlements whether in the West Bank and the villages of Mas’ada, Jbata al-Zeit and Ba’qatha in Golan among others.

“When we speak of the Land Day, we stress to our Palestinian brethren and the Homeland’s sons that what unites us is the land that is blended with the blood of martyrs and the sweat of farmer,” said sheikh Hisham Shaalan from the occupied village of Ein Qunba, one of the participants in the rally.

“We will remain deep-rooted in our land in as much as the oaks of al-Sheikh mountain are deep-rooted, and in the same way Shemon Perez expelled us from Majdal Shams in 1987, we will kick out all who think that the way to it is going to be easy,” Shaalan added.

Sheikh Fadlallah Hamad from the occupied village of Mas’ada said the over six month open strike staged by the Golan people in 1982 in defense of the land and the Syrian identity was “a tough lesson” to the occupation authorities.

He continued that the Golan people have translated the National Document items into a reality through declaring that “the land is sacred and not one inch of it could be waived.”

Governor of Quneitra, Eng. Hussein Arnous, said it is the governorate’s priority to reconstruct the villages demolished by the occupation forces and bring citizens back to them to unite with the land near the barbed wire.

He cited a number of villages which restored life after having been reconstructed, adding that other villages are in the process of reconstruction in support of the governorate’s inhabitants and their defense of their land.

Abdul-Lahian: Syria has Turned the Corner despite Conspiracies

BEIRUT, (SANA)_ Iranian Assistant Foreign Minister Hussein Amir Abdul-Lahian said that Syria has turned the corner in the crisis despite conspiracies, reiterating rejection of all foreign interference in the Syrian internal affairs.

In a statement following his meeting with the Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour, Abdul-Lahian affirmed that the political process is the sole exit from the crisis in Syria, indicating that his country has exerted efforts for the mission of the UN envoy to Syria Kofi Annan to succeed.

Abdul-Lahian expressed trust that Iran will spare no effort to support Syria as to preserve its resistance to the Israeli enemy.

He also stressed that President Bashar al-Assad had met the aspirations of the Syrian people through the reforms enacted, which will help Syria restore security and stability and achieve prosperity soon.

Conference of the Arab Youth Front for Defending Syria: Correcting Arab Governments’ Stance towards Syria

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – The Founding Conference of the Arab Youth Front for Defending Syria on Saturday continued its works, discussing propositions for setting a blueprint and studying the works of media and culture, law and social and economic committees, in addition to youth issues and voluntary work.

The participants set the political program for the front, as it contains shedding light on the western and Arab conspiracies hatched against Syria, boosting the resistance approach, supporting it against Zionism and the principle of the Arab nation.

In a statement to SANA, Chairman of Yemen Student Union, Motaz al-Qurashi, said that the Conference reflects the Arab youth’s realization of the conspiracy and it is meant to correct the stance of some Arab governments through emphasizing that the Arab youth are the real representatives of the Arab nation.

The Front started its work on Thursday in Damascus with the participation of delegations from Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Bahrain, Palestine, Lebanon, Mauritania, Algeria, Iran and Sirloin representing parties, humanitarian commotions, student unions and NGO’s.

Syria Third in Arab Chess Championship

DAMASCUS, (SANA)- Syria’s national youth chess team won a gold and two silver medals at the Arab Championship held recently in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Teams from eleven countries competed in the Championship including Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Egypt, the UAE, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan in addition to Syria.

Player Ward Tarboush won the gold medal in the 16 age category while Bashir Eiti earned a silver medal in 20 age category. The other silver medal went to Rita Yaghi in 18 age category.

Participating with 6 players, the national chess team came third on the general classification, following the UAE in the first place with 13 players and Algeria in the second with 12 players.

Player Bashir Eiti was awarded the title of International Master.

Death and destruction in Syria, arranged by armed insurrection sustained covertly by foreign powers including the US, NATO nations, Israel, Arabia, Qatar, al Qaeda, and made into an ‘Arab Spring’ by imperialist media managed ‘reporting.’ Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations cross the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. US State Dept. proudly admits involvement. Why? for whom? brought into historical context 

When the colonial powers war on Gaddafi was going well, American news commentators did, in rare moments, proudly admit that the CIA was heavily involved. Not so yet, when it comes to the CIA in Syria. It’s still too early. The public has not been yet been sufficiently taught to hate this quiet gentleman President Assad Junior.

We will eventually be told of horrific CIA crimes in Syria created under the media masking “Arab Spring.’ We always find out about CIA clever false flags, provocations, violence funding and assassinations once these become past history and Americans are focused elsewhere.

It’s amazing, truly amazing, how a powerful predatory investing elite, owning 98% of media, is able to mold the public mind to finding the despicable, the homicidal, and the immoral as perfectly acceptable, normal, necessary and even good, if it be performed by an official secret criminal agency of their very own American government.

The great cartel of Pentagon/CIA fed media conglomerates, having the great majority of the basically indifferent population of the West in tow, is effortlessly running its usual cascade of disinformation, half-truths, and blacked-out context propaganda fostering justification for military intervention – this time in Syria. But more and more people are noticing this war promotion of strictly one-sided coverage is yet another repeat of previous media promotions of US wars in Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, Lebanon, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, the Dominica Republic, Cuba, Congo, Guatemala, Korea, Greece and innumerable other countries in between – in every single case, a bloody intervention in a civil war provoked and then used by the US. It is interesting that all this ruthless taking of millions of lives occurred under the guidance of David Rockefeller’s closest confidants, John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

But none of this is of much interest to the American public, and when official secret files about how the CIA made an “Arab Spring’ in Syria and Libya are declassified and made public, it wont matter anymore than previous revelations did.

How could anything other than Wall Street owned criminal media saturation sound bites matter?  Nothing else has mattered for more that sixty-six years.

Did the truth ever matter during the thirty-year “heroic’  American and French crucifixion of the colonial rice farming population of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia? For years Walter Kronkite affably reported from the trenches on what King called an atrocity. After a decent interval, the former Secretary of Defense (read War), Robert McNamara proclaimed the war a miscalculation, a mistake, exonerating Americans from having  done anything wrong intentionally. The fact that millions were bombed to death didn’t, and still doesn’t, matter.

Did the truth matter when CBS’ Mike Wallace incredulous, his voice almost breaking, reported from a tower overlooking the Santo Domingo airport that US snipers a few feet away from him were merciless cutting down Dominican army troops fighting to reinstate their popular elected President Bosch, who had been overthrown as unacceptable to Washington (read Wall Street investors) .

The truth didn’t matter when, in spite of  assurances given the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA, led by Robert Kennedy on his brother’s orders, continued unabated to covertly attack Cuba, sabotage its agriculture and try to assassinate a popular revolutionary leader well liked throughout Latin America.

It doesn’t matter that this is documented in released CIA secret files along with files of witness testimony that Ike put out a contract on the popular first elected president of an independent Congo – files that have Nixon’s memo to Kissinger to “make the Chilean economy scream” to facilitate what would be the death-dealing overthrow of Dr. Salvador Allende’s popular government by the Chicago University School of Neo-Liberal economists’ favorite dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

No, the truth of US imperialist foreign policy never matters to the general American public, even if occasionally appearing in print or on TV. What matters is what is good for business, as described in Network entertainment news day-in-day-out in-between-commercials in a sold-on-materialism consumer society clinging to its exceptionally angelic corporatist media portrait

Because anything the CIA does is acceptable, Presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, without fear of public condemnation, let alone prosecution, could brag to French media ( Le Nouvel Observateur ),[1] that he had Carter authorize the CIA to fund, arm and train hill tribe fundamentalist terror against a popular[2] women-liberating Socialist Kabul administration, in order to frighten the Soviets into military intervention.

When hearing a truth that somehow does not fit with a fantasy world it has been brought to believe in wherein America not Germany is great ueber alles, Mr. and Ms America, so self-occupied with avoiding depression and overeating, just say to each other that politics is complicated and the government must know, or have known, what it had to do to “keep America safe. They console themselves that communists and anti-American terrorists commit worse crimes than capitalists or Americans do.

Those horrible truths of CIA protection and employment of Nazi war criminals; of CIA overthrowing the first democratic government of Iran; of CIA backing of murderous dictators like Saddam Hussein and Gen. Suharto; of CIA building a world market poppy growing industry again in Afghanistan after the Taliban all but eliminated it; of CIA involvement in murderous drug running in Colombia and in Panama with agent Noriega; of CIA funding the most famous acid thrower at unveiled ladies[3]and executioners of teachers for teaching girls[4]; of CIA secret attacks on democratic Guatemala, once reveled in progressive non-corporate funded publications, these heinous crimes simply slip into insignificance.

When Syria or any other overseas conflict is discussed in commercial media or sadly even in progressive media, there seems little reason to ask about CIA. The CIA, is considered part of American democracy, understood as merely one of many agencies of a freely elected government. Since it’s operations and activities are secret, what is the use of discussing them?

Associated Press carries almost daily reports of deadly CIA activity in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but even in progressive journalism it is the domestic policies put forth by the current U.S. president (who surely must be taking, not giving, orders to Robert Gates, Leon Panetta heads of the Central Intelligence Agency) that deserve attention. The CIA, by law connected up solely and secretly to the chief executive, is in itself a glaring contradiction to claims of democracy in the U.S., but this also goes largely unaddressed even on the progressive sites of the Internet.

Unfortunately, it seems that progressives and even socialists in the U.S. are overly cooperative with mainstream media and Congress in hardly ever asking after a secret CIA shadow government.

Almost since the CIA was founded, well before the Korean “police action’ devastation, CIA operatives, in every country in the world, have been acting as commandos penetrating local society, preparing  political, financial and where necessary military domination. Its four billion dollar base legal budget is known, but its vast private funding is not. Its mammoth financial empire fueled by corporate donations and funding and far flung net of banks, enterprises, publications, media outlets and infiltrated agencies within U.S. and foreign governments has been researched, documented and much of it can be found on line. CIA exploits of assassinations, overthrowing elected government and hiring goons to support U.S. business friendly dictatorships have become legendary.

A few scholarly sites on the Internet always manage to fill in a bit of what is intentionally blacked out in the Pentagon counseled and fed commercial mass media of the Western pseudo-democracies. Here, Michael Chossudovsky, consultant with a half-dozen UN agencies and publisher of Global Research out of Canada tells us:

“What is unfolding in Syria is an armed insurrection supported covertly by foreign powers including the US, Turkey and Israel. Armed insurgents belonging to Islamist organizations have crossed the border from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. The US State Department has confirmed that it is supporting the insurgency. This was stated by U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland. “We started to expand contacts with the Syrians, those who are calling for change, both inside and outside the country.”

“Action against Syria is part of a “military roadmap’, a sequencing of military operations. According to former NATO Commander General Wesley Clark–by late 2001, the Pentagon had clearly identified Iraq, Libya, Syria and Lebanon as target countries of a US-NATO intervention: “[The] Five-year campaign plan [included]… a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.’  General Wesley Clark states the following:

“The objective is to destabilize the Syrian State and implement “regime change” through the covert support of an armed insurgency, integrated by Islamist militia. “Reports on civilian deaths are used to provide a pretext and a justification for humanitarian intervention under the principle “Responsibility to Protect’.”

[Pentagon official quoted by General Wesley Clark in Winning Modern Wars (page 130)]

“Responsibility to Protect’ brought UN authorized bombing and Western  reconquering of a wealthy Libya  (recognized by the same UN as having an Human Development Index higher that than nine European countries with fine free heath care and higher education) only after a  successful armed insurrection (similar  to Syria’s) called for by a CIA funded Libyan exile organization in London.  CNN and al Jazeera produced a saturation of stories of peaceful protests being fired upon, but without corroboration and in contradiction to Reuters and even early BBC coverage of mass murder executions of government soldiers by heavily armed gangs and few civilian casualties.[5]

CNN reports incessantly that the Syrian armed forces and the police are shooting civilian protesters to death usually in double digit numbers. Independent press reports, however, confirm, from the outset of the protest movement, an exchange of gunfire between armed insurgents and the police, with casualties reported on both sides.

Global Research continues, “The insurrection started in mid March in the border city of Daraa, which is 10 km from the Jordanian border. The Daraa “protest movement” on March 18 had all the appearances of a staged event involving, in all likelihood, covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence. Government sources point to the role of radical Salafist groups (supported by Israel)

Other reports have pointed to the role of Saudi Arabia in financing the protest movement.

What has unfolded in Daraa in the weeks following the initial violent clashes on 17-18 March, is the confrontation between the police and the armed forces on the one hand and armed units of terrorists and snipers on the other which have infiltrated the protest movement” [The Destabilization of Syria and the Broader Middle East War, By Michael Chossudovsky]

One would be naive to believe that after the half-century of brutal occupation of the Arab lands of Syria, Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco by France and those of Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Somaliland, Aden, and Yemen by the British, with both occupying Libya after W.W.II, that British M16 and and the French Secret Service would not be indispensable for the johnny-come-lately America empire and its CIA.

But one would have to be even more naive to believe the excellent secret service of Israel, Mossad, at war with the Arab world since 1948 was not playing a key role in Syria and Libya, two adamant adversaries of the UN created State of Israel. Here below is some background of planning that predates the Pentagon briefing of Gen. Clark:

Experts Fear Israeli Design to Balkanize Arab States By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, 6/19/11

” A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s , ” Written in 1981 by Oded Yinon, then a senior advisor for Israel’s foreign ministry, the essay explicitly calls for breaking up the Arab states of the region along ethnic and sectarian lines. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas” is Israel’s primary target on the eastern front in the long run.”

A few years ago, New Yorker published investigative reporter Seymour Hersh tried to awaken interest in what the CIA was doing all these years in Iraq during the massive amount of sectarian violence that U.S. government spokespersons and subservient media constantly pointed to as the reason “we have to stay in Iraq.’ Almost no one took up this topic in alternative media.

For decades CIA has sponsored, provoked, initiated, and or prepared overt invasion and occupation by clandestine initiating and stoking civil wars in Greece, Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Columbia, and is notorious for its  success in arranging fratricide to look unprovoked by outside forces. The motive always being to prevent unified independent nations capable of negotiating for their own trade and prosperity.

In Putting Syria into Some Perspective

The Anti-Empire Report, April 8th, 2012,

peoples historian William Blum writes of “the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining of the antigovernment forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.”

Imperialist media would have us  believe that no Syrian government forces are fighting against an armed insurrection funded and controlled from forces outside Syria. And CNN  would have us discount the periodic massive pro-government demonstrations and believe the smaller anti-Assad demonstrations to be more important, have us disregard Syrian Christian fears: Fearing Change, Many Christians in Syria Back Assad, New York Times, 9/29/2011. “Syrian Christians in the Bab Touma district of Damascus held a rally in support of President Bashar al-Assad”

However, “The plan to destabilize Syria is not working all that well,” surmised Thierry Meyssan in “The Plan to Destabilize Syria”, Voltaire Network, Lebanon, 6/13/11.

“It succeeded in persuading public opinion that the country is in the grips of a brutal dictatorship, but it also welded the vast majority of the Syrian population firmly behind its government. Ultimately, the plan could backfire on those who masterminded it, notably Tel Aviv cl

In the wake of Tunisian, Egyptian and Yemeni uprisings of the poor against Wall Street benefiting colonial West installed dictatorships, the Networks have featured discussions from the farcical point of view that the business interests oriented American government is capable of being occasionally in favor of democracy in nations being plundered by Western investment banks. For anchors and commentators,     it is what the U.S. president will say that is supposed to be of paramount interest, not what the awkward-to-speak-of CIA might be accomplishing.

Prostituting mainstream media will continue to keep the focus away from CIA, away from the desperate capital accumulation of the rich immorally empowered by their undeserved billions, and focus instead on U.S. Presidents, members of Congress and the Supreme Court, all of whom are, as FDR wrote in 1933, “owned by a financial element.”[6]

Are we never to hear of the mass homicidal crimes of the CIA until files are forced open by law decades too late? No, the three centuries crimes against humanity by European stock empires run by investment banks will not avoid prosecution much longer in this space age of instant personal communication and computers capable of a trillion operations per nanosecond.

Agents of CIA, its NATO, EU, Israeli (Mossad) branches, their commanders-in-chiefs, sundry collaborating gangsters running third world governments and their employing elite group of powerful investors of global ruling ex-‘Colonial Powers’ now haughtily calling themselves “The International Community of Nations’ will not be able to keep themselves above prosecution and punishment much longer.

And since their center of operations is the government of the United States of America, initial prosecutions will be of US citizens, and not so very long from now. The absurdity of mindless mathematically mechanical merchandizing being the essence of Man in the universe will be halted before it wears itself out in an ultimate for profit calculation of moronic self-destruction.

Rational Man in all his and her inexpressible miraculously  exquisite art in loving imagination will endure, and not be obliterated Man’s lesser fearfully greedy side.

Martin Luther King Jr. followers are accelerating this overcoming of what is exemplified today in the cruel attack on Syrians, with a new Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign .

Footnotes:

1 Read Brzezinski’s own self-condemning admission in the ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’ interview attached at the bottom of Carter Funding Fundamentalists to Sucker Soviets into Afghanistan …”using ethnic and religious divisions to foment civil war goes unprosecuted.”

Afghanistan…”using ethnic and religious divisions to foment civil war goes unprosecuted.”

2  Most experienced Middle East journalist Robert Fisk describes well the popularity of the Kabul government, which had replaced the King, at the time of CIA intervention in his Great War For Civilization- The Conquest of the Middle East.

3  Warlords of Afghanistan Gulbuddin Hekmatyar “throwing acid in the faces of unveiled women … Billions of dollars in US aid flowed through the ISI to Hekmatyar.” And A Deal With the Devil, Newsweek, 3/25/2010

4  This writer remembers a photo on the front page of the NY Times – captioned: three government teachers (face down in a pit, hands wired behind backs) executed for teaching girls.”

5  On the first day, Feb. 15, Reuters reported hundreds of “protesters’ attacking police stations, no deaths, 60 injured.

The next day, Feb. 16, Reuters reported, along with opposition media, 6 dead when more than a thousand “protesters’ attacked more police stations.

Feb. 17th, internationally planned Day of Rage, The Evening Standard and Al Jazeera English estimated that fourteen people were killed. Reuters, BBC and opposition media reported 14 or 15 dead. After overnight protests, the following day,

18 February 2011, Guardian.co.uk , Ian Black and Owen Bowcott, Article history:

“Amer Saad, a political activist from Derna, told al-Jazeera: “The “protesters’ in al-Bayda have been able to seize control of the military air base in the city and have executed 50 African [“]mercenaries[‘] . from Capitalism’s Warplanes: CIA & al Qaeda Destroy Socialist Libya’s 53rd Highest Living Standard, OpEdNews Promoted to Headline, 4/22/2011

6  “The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

A letter written by FDR to Colonel House, November 21st, l933

By Jay Janson

18 April 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Jay Janson, 80, archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; lived, worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC;. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his. GlobalResearch, InformationClearingHouse, CounterCurrents, Minority Perspective, UK DissidentVoice, OpEdNews, HistoryNewsNetwork and others have published his articles. Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; articles China Daily, 1989.  Is coordinator of King Condemned US Wars and Predatory Investments International Awareness Campaign ( King Condemned US Wars ) and creator of Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign with a country by country history of US crimes. Studied history at CCNY, Columbia U., U. Puerto Rico,  Dolmetscher Institut München; Germany;  Korean National University of Arts, Seoul; Radiotelevisione italiana, Rome; Zagreb Radiotelevision,Yugoslavia; Hong Kong Arts Academy.

Al-Moallem and his Chinese Counterpart: Supporting Annan’s Mission and continuing coordination between the two Countries

BEIJING, (SANA)- Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi stressed that the visit of Syrian Foreign and Expatriates  Minister Walid al-Moallem to China is of  “great importance”.

Xinhua, the Chinese News Agency quoted Yang as saying at the beginning of his meeting with al-Moallem on Wednesday that “Today we can exchange opinions on the latest developments of the situation in Syria in a board and intensive way,” expressing the hope to exchange views with al-Moallem  on a number of main regional and international issues.

“I believe that your visit will have positive results,” Yang said.

Ministers  al-Moallem and Yang held important talks in the framework of the high-level consultations Syria is intensively conducting with China about  the crisis in Syria and China’s role at the UN Security Council in supporting Syria’s sovereignty and stability.

Al-Moallem : China’s principled and firm stance in supporting Syria at the international circles restored hope and balance to international policy

Following the talks,Foreign Minister al-Moallem expressed Syria’s leadership and people’s appreciation to China’s principled and firm stance in supporting Syria at the international circles, pointing out that this stance has restored hope and balance to the international policy .

Al-Moallem and Yang discussed the developments of the current situation in the Syrian arena, as al-Moallem presented a review about the recent events in Syria and the efforts exerted by the Syrian Government to make the reform program launched by President Bashar al-Assad a success.

He pointed out to the escalation of the violence acts perpetrated by the armed terrorist groups including the breaching of  their commitments to the plan of the UN Envoy to Syria, Kofi Anna.

For his part, the Chinese Foreign Minister expressed China’s keenness on the necessity of respecting Syria’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.

Al-Moallem and Yang expressed support to Annan’s plan and care on its success, particularly halting the violence acts  and kicking off the process of the political dialogue.

The two sides also  discussed the standing distinguished bilateral relations and means of enhancing them in all fields.

They also stressed keenness on developing the economic cooperation and trade exchange.

In this regard, the Chinese side expressed rejection of the unilateral sanctions imposed by some countries on Syria.

The two sides agreed on the need of continuing coordination and contacts between the two friendly countries.

Earlier, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Weimin said, in a regular press briefing, that invitation of al-Moallem to visit China is a part of China’s efforts to tackle the crisis in Syria.

He expressed China’s readiness to play a pivotal and structural role in finding solution to this crisis in a just, peaceful and appropriate way, pointing out that the leaders of the Syrian opposition would visit China in the near future.

Al-Moallem at Press conference: Syrian Government has committed to cease-fire

Xinhua News Agency quoted al-Moallem as saying at a press conference that he held fruitful and constructive talks with his Chinese counterpart on bilateral relations and the latest developments in Syria as well as Annan’s mission.

“Viewpoints between the two sides were very close.. Syria, as leadership and people, appreciate China’s stances at international circles which stem from the UN principles and rejecting foreign intervention in the Syrian affairs,” al-Moallem said.

He hailed China and Russia stances at the UNSC regarding the crisis in Syria which “restored balance for working at the international circles and preventing the foreign intervention in Syrian affairs.”

Al-Moallem said that he briefed his Chinese counterpart on the interference currently taking place by countries that openly announced determination to fund terrorist, explaining to him the scale of violations carried out by terrorist groups since Syria announced its commitment to ceasing military conflicts.

He noted that Syria is also facing unilateral economic sanctions and an attack through funding terrorists who attack civilians and government forces and vandalize the country’s infrastructure.

He also underlined that Syria has a genuine interest in the arrival of the observers because “our aim is to achieve security and stability for the Syrian people, saying that the observer mission must work within the framework of Syrian sovereignty and in coordination with the Syrian government, adding that Syria welcomed the participation of observers from neutral countries such as Russia, China, Brazil, India and South Africa.

“The Syrian government has committed to the cease-fire,  released a number of prisoners, handed over the aids to the affected regions.. and we will continue cooperation with the UN Envoy to make his mission a success,” al-Moallem added, indicating to the violations of the armed groups which reached to 70 violations in one day, saying that the government will continue commitment in spite of what is happening and hope so by all sides.

“This commitment never cancels the right of self-defense and respond in a suitable way to the aggressions of the armed terrorist groups on the infrastructure, the civilians, private and public properties,” al-Moallem said.

On the remarks of the UN envoy that 250 observers is not enough and there is a need to use planes and helicopters, Foreign Minister said “we believe that 250 observers is a reasonable number, but we don’t know why they want to use planes… nevertheless, if there is a need for this purpose, Syria will be ready to put its air force at the UN disposal because  helicopters are used to evacuate the wounded… we have equipment at the air force capable to assume this mission.”

Regarding the Syrian refugees, Minister al-Moallem considered it a fabricated problem intended to materializing the ”humanitarian corridors” and ”buffer zones” announced by the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that paves the way to a military intervention in the Syrian affairs.

”Some families were forced to leave their homes by terrorist groups after Turkey set up camps few months earlier, ” said al-Moallem, indicating that the Syrian government issued a statement last week calling upon the Syrian refugees to return to their homes, and voicing readiness to support them in getting back to their normal life.

He noted that the damage done to Syrian economy due to the acts of terrorist and the unilateral sanctions imposed by the US, the EU and some Arab countries is significant, and that the Syrian government is now giving priority to rebuilding the houses that were damaged and to returning people to their homes from which they were forced to flee, affirming that the government will start implementing the 5-year plan once the crisis ends.

“If those who gathered in Doha had been actually keen on the Syrian people and really support Annan’s plan, then some of them – who are well known  and announced their position openly – should stop supporting terrorist groups with funds and weapons,” al-Moallem said.

He noted that any movement made by the Syrian government towards the cessation of violence is met by increased funding and arming of terrorists, which shows that the aforementioned countries don’t want a solution and are lying when they claim to support Annan’s plan, and it also shows that they’re not keen on the Syrian people’s interests, otherwise they wouldn’t have imposed economic sanctions on them.

Al-Moallem also pointed out that Syria was the first to seek an Arab solution and received the Arab observers, but the aforementioned countries withdrew them and trashed their report, concluding “so I don’t observe nor care about what came out of their meeting in Doha.”

Answering a question on the possibility of continuing violations of Annan’s plan and a possible outbreak of war, Minister al-Moallem said: ”There is a US-led, phased scheme targeting Syria, but the acts of the armed groups necessitate response …If the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is considering moving to the final stage of this scheme, I think that the international community has to oppose the military intervention she is considering.”

He added that the violations are aimed at thwarting Annan’s plan and holding the Syrian government responsible for the failure to pave the way for military action.

Al-Moallem wondered in the NATO presented reports on the victims claimed by its military intervention in Libya, saying that there are reports of over 100,000 casualties and hundreds of thousands of those who were wounded and disfigured by NATO raids, asking if this is what the Arabs want for Syria.

Minister al-Moallem criticized the media coverage of the events in Syria, adding “There is no objective coverage of the events…More than 70 international and Arab channels are distorting facts, and this biased media is part of the conspiracy against Syria.”

Syrian Ambassador in Beijing: Meeting of al-Moallem and Jiechi Stresses Support to Annan’s Plan

In a phone call with the Syrian TV, Syria’s Ambassador to China, Dr. Imad Mustafa, said the meeting between al-Moallem and Jiechi reflects the two countries’ desire for joint cooperation and serious consultation on the crisis in Syria.

Dr. Mustafa added that the important point stressed in the meeting was Syria’s and China’s common stance on supporting Annan’s plan and their keenness on the success of the international observers’ mission.

The Syrian Ambassador continued that Damascus and Beijing expressed in the meeting their awareness that the armed terrorist groups are sparing no efforts to foil Annan’s initiative and that there are several parties which do not want the political solution to proceed or Syria to restore stability and security.

Dr. Mustafa said Minister al-Moallem welcomed the participation of China in the UN observers team as Damascus considers that China, along with Russia, South Africa, India and Brazil, are neutral countries that can play an objective and logical role away from tendentious goals or agendas affiliated to the US and its policies.

President al-Assad Stresses Importance of Transparency in Fighting Corruption

DAMASCUS, (SANA)_ President Bashar al-Assad presided on Wednesday over the Higher Council of Local Administration which was established under the Local Administration Law issued in August 2011.

President al-Assad underlined the importance of the Council since the most important development steps take place through local administration, being the link between citizens and the state, noting that this relation was weak for various reasons but communication has become a reality through legislations and must be put into practice.

He said that the majority of issues and suggestions now go through local administration which must have an active role in them, pointing out that the Higher Council’s importance lies in finding coordination mechanisms which are currently weak, devising mechanisms for exchanging expertise among governorates or municipalities, and the participation of citizens who might feel that the government is distant from them.

“Ambitions must be linked to reality, and solutions must be based on specific priorities beginning from the moiré pressing issues which are specified by citizens,” the President said.

President al-Assad underscored the role of the Council and the local administration in qualifying cadres and moving to the administrative decentralization, which should reduce government burdens and transfer some of them to local administration.

He stressed that success in decentralization and thus ensuring the success of local administration requires resolving preexisting hindrances, adding that there is confusion between what is central and what is local, but the Council will establish committees to coordinate between ministries and governors.

President al-Assad underlined the role of local administration in urban and regional planning, environment preservation and addressing random houses in practical and studied ways, with emphasis on coordination and giving more authority to municipalities in terms of regional planning.

“Studies for any project must not begin before guaranteeing its funding, because studies are costly,” he said, noting that the issue of the halting of projects for bureaucratic reasons must also be dealt with.

President al-Assad said that the issue of random housing is strategic in all aspects and must be resolved through a vision, even if it’s a long-term one.

The President pointed out that providing income is the biggest problem for local administration, stressing the need to take a developmental direction and seek resources, saying that nothing prevents local administration from being flexible and free in taking economic decision like the private sector, which would create resources and job opportunities.

President al-Assad requested that transparency be adopted through propagating the plans of the local administration and municipalities to fight corruption and engage the citizens, allowing them to pose their opinions and suggestions.

President al-Assad underlined necessity of enhancing connections between the state and society through increasing the citizens’ participation and finding practical solutions to problems, calling upon the officials to get a closer look at the issues of interest to the citizens.

The president also called for according enough care to the countryside development and avoiding neglecting it to focus on cities, in addition to establishing balance between areas in single cities and justice in the distribution of services among richer and poorer areas.

“At this stage, we must focus more on areas that are poor and deprived of services such as infrastructure, water, electricity, roads, gardens and more,” he said.

President al-Assad reviewed the importance of the service centers as to save the citizens’ efforts, reduce expenses, and combat corruption and bribery, said that what6 was applied in these centers can be copied in other establishments affiliated to ministries.

President al-Assad stressed the significance of industrial cities and marketing them properly, market their products.

President al-Assad considered that one of the Council ‘s important missions is to find a mechanism for coordination among state institutions and benefitting from the successful experiences of some institutions and municipalities, as well as the experiences of other countries in local administration.

8 Law Enforcement Members Martyred in Idleb, Daraa and Damascus Countryside, Terrorists Murder Entire Family in Hama

PROVINCES, (SANA)- Six law enforcement members, including a first lieutenant, were martyred on Wednesday and 11 others were injured in an explosive device blast in the town of al-Mastoumeh in the countryside of Idleb province.

The martyrs include First Lieutenant Tammam Hassoun and Privates Anas Idris Juani, Hassan Ahmad Arnous, and Faraj Mustafa Ismael.

The explosive device was planted on al-Mastoumeh-Idleb road and detonated by an armed terrorist group targeting the law enforcement personnel.

Policeman Martyred in Daraa

Meanwhile in Daraa province, the policeman Youssef Qasqas was martyred by the gunfire of a sniper in front of the Customs’ old building in the city of Daraa.

Lieutenant Colonel Martyred in Damascus Countryside

In Damascus Countryside, an armed terrorist group opened fire on members of law enforcement forces in teh city of Douma killing a lieutenant colonel and injuring a chief warrant officer.

SANA reporter quoted a source in the province as saying that an armed terrorist group driving a white Mazda car opened fire on law enforcement personnel near al-Baz gas station.

The source added that the shooting resulted in the martyrdom of Lt. Col. Wael Hassan, while a chief warrant officer was seriously wounded.

Terrorists Murder Entire Family in Hama

An armed terrorist group broke into the home of citizen Zakariya Khalif in Janoub al-Mala’ab neighborhood in Hama, murdering him along with his wife and three daughters.

Armed groups attack 3 microbuses transporting law-enforcement forces, abducting a number of them

Armed terrorist groups today attacked three microbuses that transport law-enforcement forces on their way back home, abducting a number of them.

The armed groups at Khanaser, Kanater and Khan al-Asal areas in Aleppo attacked the microbuses , kidnapping several members and taking them to unknown place.

226 Wanted Men from Hama and Its Countryside Turn Themselves In

226 wanted men from Hama and its countryside on Tuesday turned themselves in and surrendered their weapons to the authorities.

A source in the governorate said that those who turned themselves in and surrendered their weapons were released after verifying that they didn’t commit any acts of violence or murder against citizens.

The wanted men said that they now intend to return to their daily lives and rejoin society, pledging not to bear arms again and resort to vandalism or anything that may undermine the country’s security and safety.

Fourteen Army, Law-Enforcement, Civilian Martyrs Laid to Rest

PROVINCES, (SANA) – Fourteen army, law-enforcement and civilian martyrs were escorted on Wednesday from Tishreen, Zahi Azraq and Aleppo Military Hospitals in Damascus, Lattakia and Aleppo and Daraa  National Hospital to their final resting place.

Solemn funeral processions were held for the martyrs who were targeted by armed terrorist groups while they were in the line of duty in Idleb, Homs, Damascus Countryside, Daraa and Aleppo.

The martyrs are:

-Captain Majd Said Mahfud, from Hama.

-Chief Warrant Officer Ghazi Mousa al-Saeed, from Daraa.

-Sergeant Major Adham Saleh Suleiman, from Hama.

-Conscript Mustafa Abdul-Salam Ahmad, from Aleppo.

-Conscript Basel Monawar Saud, from Daraa.

-Conscript Mohammad Najib Jamal al-Shawa, from Aleppo.

-Conscript Ismael Ibrahim al-Jarouf, from Damascus Countryside.

-Conscript Basel Ali Barazi, from Hama.

-Conscript Ayman Bashar Sweidan, from Damascus.

-Policeman Mazloum Hussein Khalil, from Hasaka.

-Policeman Bayer Ali al-Hammoud, from Damascus Countryside .

-Policeman Mohammad Samir Rayyani, from Hama.

-Policeman Raghib Yousef Qasas, from Daraa.

-Civilian Youssef Ali Kobawar, from Aleppo.

The martyrs’ families stressed that the systematic terrorism perpetrated by the armed terrorist groups won’t persuade  the Syrians from adhering to their national and pan-Arab stances.

They called for confronting the terrorist criminals who are carrying out  foreign agendas that aim at undermining Syria’s national unity and stability.

They also condemned the criminal acts committed by the armed terrorist groups against the Syrian people.

Indian Delegation Starts Visit to Syria

DAMASCUS, (SANA)_An Indian delegation comprised of researchers, academics and pressmen started a visit to Syria on Wednesday to inspect the situation on the ground.

”I came to Syria to get a close look at the situation on the ground, since there is an abundance of news at a time when a lot of media outlets are not free as they tend to broadcast news that serve their agendas,” said Rajendra Abhyankar, head of Kunzru Centre for Studies and Research.

The members of the delegation said that what is happening in Syria is in service to foreign agendas, and it is hard to judge according to what media airs.

The delegation, which is comprised of 18 personalities, is due to meet officials and religious figures, and will also visit a number of archeological and religious sites in Damascus and the governorates.

Press Delegation from Denmark , Austria and Turkey Visits Daraa

A press delegation from Denmark , Austria and Turkey visited on Wednesday the city of Daraa and inspected the situation there, especially in relation to implementing the plan of the UN envoy Kofi Annan.

Head of Daraa Police Command, Lieutenant Colonel Muhammad Adeeb al-Assa’ad, said that the armed terrorist groups have gone ahead with their aggressions against citizens and law-enforcement members and violation of Annan’ plan, indicating that the armed groups escalated their criminal acts since Thursday morning.

The delegation visited Daraa National Hospital where they saw the bodies of martyrs killed by the armed groups, in violation of Annan’s plan.

They also visited the Justice Palace which was burned down in March last year, and toured the streets of the city.

The members of the delegation said they have not seen tanks or heavy weapons in the city, affirming that the protests demanding legitimate demands were hijacked by gunmen.

Lavrov: Syrian armed opposition exercises provocative acts to foil Annan’s plan

MOSCOW, (SANA) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday said that the Syrian armed opposition exercises provocative acts to bring back violence and foil Annan’s plan.

In a press conference with the Moroccan Foreign Affairs Minister, Saad Eddin Ottoman in Moscow, Lavrov said “We condemn pre-assessments to Annan’s plan and call upon all powers which have influence on the Syrian opposition, particularly the armed one, to practice its role in order to stop violence.”

He pointed out to reports published by Turkish media that fighters of the so-called ‘Free Army’ are exploiting the camps of the refugees in Turkey to prepare attacks on the Syrian forces from the Turkish lands.

Lavrov added that Moscow calls to solve all issues in peaceful methods through dialogue without foreign interference in accordance to the international law and within respecting the countries’ sovereignty and independence.

Russia’s Foreign Minister expressed Moscow’s concerns over the attempts of some groups which call themselves ‘Friends of Syria’ at evaluating Annan’s plan, adding that “I personally noticed that some of our partners lost the ability to focus after they knew that the Syrian government had accepted Annan’s plan.”

Lavrov stressed that Annan’s plan was adopted by the UN Security Council, adding that the Council is the only side with the powers to assess the plan on the basis of the information submitted by the UN monitoring mission.

Russia: International Human rights Committee has to be objective and unbiased

Russia today underlined the importance of the International Independent Committee , formed by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the human right issues in Syria, to be committed to objectivity and unbiased.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov met today with President of the International Committee Paulo Pinheiro, discussing with him a number of issues related to the work of the committee on human rights in Syria to be debated at the 21st session of the Human Rights Council.

During the meeting, the Russian side said it relies on the objectivity and fairness of the Committee’s work whether in regards to the human situation in Syria or when formulating its recommendations which should be directed to contributing to “a national comprehensive dialogue and a peaceful settlement to the crisis In Syria.”

On his Twitter website, Gatilov said that Pinheiro admitted that the Syrian opposition is perpetrating serious violations of human rights.

Bogdanov: Other Group of Syrian Opposition to Visit Moscow Soon

Russian President’s Special Representative for Middle East Affairs, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov, said that another group of the Syrian opposition is set to visit Russia soon.

In a statement released Wednesday, Bogdanov added that this group will visit Moscow within the next few days, adding that the group is headed by a figure of the ‘Front for Change and Liberation’, which also represents the Syrian internal opposition.

Bogdanov Stresses to Ambassador Haddad Need for Annan’s Plan to Be Implemented Strictly and Firmly by All Sides

Later, Bogdanov discussed with Syrian Ambassador in Moscow Riyad Haddad the developments of the situation in Syria.

The Russian side stressed the need to preserve the ceasefire and the importance of having the Syrian government and all other sides committed to implementing Annan’s plan strictly and firmly, in addition to the importance of expediting the implementation of UN monitoring.

In turn, Haddad affirmed the Syrian authorities’ strict determination to adhering to its obligations in this regard, relaying facts regarding the repeated attempts of armed terrorist groups to undermine Annan’s plans.

He also hoped that the UN observers will manage to put an end to provocations and violations by terrorist groups.

Gatilov Stresses Need to Coordinate Operation of Observer Mission with Syrian Government

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov stressed the need for coordination between the Syrian government and the UN observer mission, saying that the mission’s success depends on this.

In a statement, Gatilov said that UN regulations stipulate for establishing understanding with missions’ host countries in addition to strict adherence to sovereignty and independence of the country in question.

He said that the UN General Secretariat must provide preliminary information to the Security Council on the indicators of the observer mission’s work in Syria, and that the Council should issue a resolution on delegation the observer mission.

Gatilov said that Russia may expand its participation in this delegation, noting that a Russian officer was part of the first group of observers to arrive in Syria, adding that there’s a possibility of altering the initial estimation of observer numbers to 250 according to developments, and that any change should be done in coordination with the Syrian government.

International Observer Team Visit Zamalka and Irbeen in Damascus Countryside

DAMASCUS COUNTRYSIDE, (SANA)- A team of the international observers mandated by the UN to monitor the ceasefire in Syria on Wednesday visited the towns of Zamalka and Irbeen in Damascus Countryside.

The team members listened to a number of citizens in the towns.

Head of the team, Colonel Ahmad Hmeish called on all sides to cooperate with the observers in order to fulfill their mission.

“We try to accomplish our mission which was assigned to us by the UN in light of resolution 2048 completely in connection with the Syrian security forces and other sides,” Hmeish said in a statement.

He added “to make this mission a success, we need confidence, sufficient time and assistance by all sides.”

WFDY and WPC Stress Rejection of Foreign Interference in Syria under any Pretext

ATHENS, (SANA)- The World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and the World Peace Council (WPC) stressed their rejection of foreign interference in Syria under any pretext, considering that the Syrian people alone have the right to determine their homeland’s future.

The two bodies expressed in a joint statement published by the Greek Rizospastis newspaper on Wednesday deep concern over the strong imperialist attack on the Middle East region and the new threats and plots of the US, the NATO and the EU and their regional allies against Syria.

The newspaper noted that the WFDY and the WPC will organize sending an international solidarity mission to express support to the Syrian people between April 21 and 26.

The mission will include representatives from the WPC-affiliated peace movements in Cyprus, Turkey, India, Nepal, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Belgium, South Africa, Italy and Venezuela, in addition to a number of members of the WFDY.

The statement clarified that the aim of this mission is to meet the representatives of the youth, student and unionist organizations and the peace movements in Syria and express condemnation of the interference in its internal affairs as well as the imperialist threats and the media fabrications directed against Syria.

The mission also aims at expressing support to the Syrian people in their struggle against the imperialist threats facing their country.

Authorities Seize a Number of Archeological Pieces While Being Smuggled into Lebanon

HOMS, (SANA)- The authorities seized a number of archeological pieces, pottery and statues while they are being smuggled in a vehicle coming from Idleb into Lebanon through al-Dabousiya border crossing in Homs province.

SANA reported quoted an informed source in the province as saying that the seized archeological pieces were hidden within house furniture.

The source noted that the vehicle’s driver was arrested while another person managed to flee.

A committee of the General Directorate of Archeology and Museums was formed to discuss the seized pieces to determine the places from which they were stolen.

Source: The Embassy of Syrian Arab Republican in Kuala Lumpur.

Mini-Documentary Exposes Imperial Expansion Through “Humanitarian Interventionism”

The Paris-based Centre for the Study of Interventionism (CSI) and Julien Teil, director of “Lies behind the “Humanitarian War” in Libya: There is no evidence!” has recently released a short documentary exposing how a cartel of Western nations and their Arab proxies are purposefully creating chaos inside targeted nations and then using it as a pretext to invade, topple governments, and replace them with preselected client regimes, and in effect threatening the very concept of national sovereignty.

The documentary particularly focuses on Syria and features video of Syrian opposition members sitting at the US State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) “round-table” having praise heaped upon them, and in particular Washington-based Syrian “activist” Radwn Ziadeh, for their complicity in betraying their nation and people for the corporate-financier interests that constitute NED’s board of directors.

Mention is made of how this very same gambit, featuring very similar characters working with the very same Western organizations and “institutions” similarly ravaged Libya, toppled the government, and installed a proxy client regime using this fraudulent model of “Responsibility to Protect.” It is stated multiple times, that the West’s self-evident desire to see “regime change” in Syria and its decision to “pick sides” in regards to backing Syrian opposition terrorist clearly violates the not only Syria’s national sovereignty, but endangers the very concept of national sovereignty all together.

It is important to understand that this agenda of neo-imperialism is being driven by converging corporate-financier interests centered around Wall Street and London and seeks to create a global “open society” which they can dominate without the hindrance of borders or national institutions opposing them. The distinction is made in the documentary between Western-educated opposition members helping facilitate the West’s global blitzkrieg who hold the “global worldview of the West” verses the classical view of international law and diplomacy held by the rest of the world.

Humanitarian interventionism is simply the institutionalization of modern global imperial conquest.

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at

Land Destroyer Report.

By Tony Cartalucci

13 April 2012

@ Activist Post

At last, it seems springtime has come to the eurozone: the sap is rising in financial markets, sovereign bond yields are subsiding and the tensions in the banking markets are easing, thanks to the mass injection of liquidity by the European Central Bank.

But Richard Koo, Nomura’s mild-mannered chief economist, begs to differ. He argues that Europe’s leaders have misdiagnosed their economic crisis and is forecasting a return to wintry conditions.

At a time of collapsing private sector demand in several member states, the eurozone’s obsession with slashing public spending will only aggravate its problems, he suggests. Its fiscal compact is more likely to kill the patient than cure it.

For years, Mr Koo has eloquently defended the largely unfashionable view that Japan pursued the right policies to deal with the bursting of its bubble economy. True, Japan may not have grown much over the past two decades but a far worse outcome was avoided: the country skirted a 1930s-style depression that, Mr Koo believes, now threatens the peripheral members of the eurozone.

In an interview, on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti financial forum in Cernobbio, Italy, Mr Koo outlines his theory of “balance sheet recessions”, which runs so much in contrast to current eurozone orthodoxy.

When countries such as Japan experience a slump in asset prices, then traumatised private-sector companies, banks and households will do everything possible to deleverage their balance sheets and pay down debt – even when interest rates are near zero. In such circumstances, the government has no alternative but to increase public spending to prevent a collapse of demand.

“The key point is that if the private sector is deleveraging, the last thing you want is for the government to cut its budget deficit,” he says. “If central banks bring interest rates down to almost zero and nothing happens then it is not an ordinary world.”

Mr Koo says that when Japan listened to the advice of outside experts, such as the International Monetary Fund, and pursued fiscal consolidation in 1997 it tipped into a damaging recession. “The government cut spending and we had five quarters of negative growth and it took Japan 10 years to recover,” he says.

Some European officials at the Ambrosetti forum appeared to be scarcely able to conceal their scorn when listening to Mr Koo’s presentation. They argue it is delusional to believe one can choose between austerity and growth. Austerity, they say, is an indispensable precondition for the return of market confidence and economic growth.

Moreover, a further piling up of public debt to solve a problem of over-indebtedness would be counterproductive. Financial markets would not tolerate a further ballooning of budget deficits in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy.

Mr Koo accepts that the 17-member eurozone is more complex than Japan: its economies are moving at different speeds and directions and some of them, notably Greece’s, have their own particular challenges.

But he argues that the eurozone’s fiscal compact, which enforces synchronised austerity even for its healthier members, risks repeating Japan’s mistakes of 15 years ago. And he rejects the idea that increased public borrowing would necessarily scare the markets: Japan, the US and the UK are running looser fiscal policies while still enjoying low rates of borrowing.

If eurozone members were to restrict sales of government bonds to their own citizens, he suggests, then they would reduce the risks of damaging capital flight within the euro area.

Mr Koo’s analysis has some supporters. Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University, says that while fiscal austerity may be appropriate for some eurozone countries it is not valid for all, especially those, such as Ireland and Spain, which have experienced a private sector implosion, like Japan did.

“The right design of policy response for the eurozone would have been massive liquidity injection by the ECB, a weakening of the euro to restore the competitiveness of the periphery and fiscal stimulus in the core and where private sector deleveraging was a problem.”

With such a policy mix absent, Mr Roubini suggests, “Europe could get worse than Japan.”

“Japan had a Great Recession, and a Great Stagnation, but it never had a Great Depression,” he says. “But recession in some eurozone countries could become a depression, just like the 1930s.”

By John Thornhill in Cernobbio

2 April 2012

@ Financial Times

The fact that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has joined the vicious triangle of the United States, Israel and Britain to destabilize the Islamic Republic of Iran and put pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program is not a secret anymore. The Saudi officials have openly stated their opposition to Iran’s access to peaceful nuclear energy and even have boastfully promised to make up for the amount of crude oil which the EU member states will be losing after imposing a multilateral oil embargo against Iran which is seen as an effort to force Iran into giving up its nuclear rights.

The Saudis are officially considered to be among the Muslim states which don’t recognize the Israeli regime; however, they haven’t hesitated to publicize their ties with the Israeli officials during the recent years, especially when it comes to their cooperation with Tel Aviv against Iran.

Allying with the Zionist regime and betraying a Muslim friend with which it had long maintained sound and reasonable ties can be considered as a manifestation of Saudis’ miscalculations and their erroneous analyses about the position of Iran in the international community; a position which has been bolstered with the unexpectedly massive participation of Iranians in the recent parliamentary elections in early March, showing people’s solidarity and steadfastness in the face of harsh economic sanctions and paralyzing political pressures.

Recent WikiLeaks reports suggest that Saudi officials have been working closely with Mossad to step up pressure against Iran and gathering intelligence about the country’s nuclear program.

In the Stratfor (a Texas-based global intelligence firm) emails leaked by WikiLeaks and obtained by the Beirut-based Al Akhbar newspaper, it was revealed the Saudi Arabia reached out to the Mossad, which assisted the Kingdom with, as Al Akhbar reports, “intelligence collection and advice on Iran.”

According to a source quoted in the emails, “Several enterprising Mossad officers, both past and present, are making a bundle selling the Saudis everything from security equipment, intelligence and consultation.”

There are also credible reports indicating that Mossad chief has recently visited Saudi Arabia and talked to Saudi officials about the possible plans for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and the role the Arab nation can play in this dangerous anti-Iranian scenario.

As written by Haaretz, “the talks conducted in Saudi Arabia with the head of Israel’s espionage agency dealt with Iran and its nuclear program. The account follows a series of recent reports on increasing secret cooperation between Israel and the Saudis, including defense coordination on matters related to possible military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Another report by the Times of London revealed that in 2010 and during the course of a Saudi military exercise, air defense system operations were halted for a few hours to rehearse a scenario whereby Israeli fighter planes would cross Saudi Arabian air space en route to an attack on Iran.

Other independent media reports also confirmed that Israeli air force planes and helicopters have recently landed in Saudi Arabia for the purpose of positioning warfare and equipment there to be used in a possible military assault on Iran. Actually, it’s one of the plans of the Israeli officials to use the airspace of Saudi Arabia, Iran’s southwestern neighbor, for launching an attack against the country’s nuclear installations and seemingly, the Saudis are not reluctant for giving a green light to Tel Aviv in this regard.

In retrospect, the Saudi officials have expressively and explicitly denounced Iran’s nuclear program and called on the U.S. and its European officials to tighten the noose of economic sanctions around their Muslim neighbor as if they’re unaware of the fact that several IAEA and NIE reports have confirmed that Iran is not, and has not been after nuclear weapons and has never diverted from the path of using nuclear technology for peaceful ends.

Two years ago, in a joint press conference with his American counterpart, the Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saudi al-Faisal said that economic sanctions cannot guarantee that Iran will retreat from its nuclear program and a more effective solution is needed for the “threats posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Al-Faisal described sanctions as a long-term solution and said the perceived threat coming from Iran is more pressing. “We see the issue in the shorter term because we are closer to the threat. We need immediate resolution rather than gradual resolution,” he said. The Saudi prince did not specify any short-term resolution, but it seems that his implied option, which he did not rule out, is a military intervention in Iran.

The Saudis are also trying to convince the U.S. and Europe that Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to their security and should be hindered as soon as possible. That’s why many U.S. and European officials state in their bilateral meetings with the Saudi officials that a “nuclear-armed Iran” is harmful to the security of the Persian Gulf.

“I understand the Arab world cannot allow that Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons,” said Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the leader of opposition party in the German parliament and former foreign minister in a February meeting with the Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.

The Saudi kingdom’s hostility toward Iran, however, has gone beyond the pale. In the recent months that war rhetoric and economic sanctions against Tehran have been swaying in the sky, the Saudi officials have sent signals that they’re ready to offset any shortfall that may happen in the crude oil market after the EU member states’ foreign ministers reached an agreement to impose an oil embargo on Iran which will come into effect in early July.

According to an Associated Press report, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister said on March 14 that his country and other oil exporters are ready to offset any shortfalls in supply because of market volatility, an apparent reference to showdowns with Iran over its nuclear program.

At any rate, the stance which Riyadh has adopted against Tehran is absolutely in line with the anti-Iranian policies of the Israeli regime. They’re dancing to Israel’s tune and performing what Tel Aviv desires the most: isolating Iran, ramping up pressure against the people and creating discord between them to persuade them to rise against the government. However, what is clear is that such pressures cannot bring Iranians to their knees and will only unveil the true face of the enemies of this nation. Over the course of three decades since the victory of Islamic revolution, Iran has been constantly the target of enmity and belligerence by the global superpowers and their allies, so the recent antagonistic policies and hostilities of Saudi Arabia are nothing new or surprising.

By Kourosh Ziabari

14 April 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian journalist

Western corporate-financiers have plotted since at least 1991 to overturn not only Syria’s government, but to topple and co-opt the governments of every nation previously in the Soviet sphere of influence. US Army General Wesley Clark made it known during a 2007 speech given to the Commonwealth Club of California, that in 1991, then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz said the US had 5-10 years to clean up the old Soviet “client regimes” before the next super power rose up and challenged western hegemony.

Clark would go on to say that shortly after September 11, 2001, while at the Pentagon, a document handed down from the Office of the Secretary of Defense indicated plans to attack and destroy the governments of 7 countries; Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Lebanon and Libya.

More recently, US State Department is on record stating that millions of dollars have been spent recruiting, training, networking, and equipping armies of “activists” from these targeted nations since at least 2008 to return home and sow the very unrest seen at the beginning of the “Arab Spring” – unrest that has served as the very foundation for the violence now plaguing Syria.

And even as the UN’s Kofi Annan disingenuously peddles his 6-point “peace plan,” the US, European Union, and their Arab League junior partners, are funding and arming the rebels to continue the fight even while attempting to hold the Syrian government accountable to the peace deal they themselves brazenly flaunt.

Never has it been so obvious that “international law” and “humanitarian concerns” are merely the latest contrived rhetorical devices, institutionalized as “the responsibility to protect,” to expand the financial, political, and tactical hegemony of today’s imperialists across the globe.

Yet despite brazen admissions by US policy think-tanks like the Fortune 500 funded Brookings Institution, that the latest peace deal in Syria is nothing more than a ploy to buy time to continue eroding the Syrian government in pursuit of Western orchestrated regime change, and political “commentators” drawn from Fortune 500 funded institutions like the Henry Jackson Society admitting that “diplomatic options” are merely the West paying lip service ahead of unilateral military intervention, there are still throngs of brain-addled pundits parroting the latest US State Department talking-points regarding a brutal regime mass murdering its own people and how it is the moral imperative of the West to intervene.

The latest, and perhaps most depraved grandstanding yet, comes to us from United States President Obama, who stood in front of the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum correlating Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to restore order to his nation to Adolf Hitler’s US and British eugenics-inspired, Bush-bankrolled, IBM facilitated racial superiority death cult. Worse than even the real history behind World War II, is the fact that since then, the United States has conducted a global campaign of systematic atrocities killing easily as many Vietnamese and Iraqis as Hitler did Jews. To this day, the United States maintains an unparalleled global network of torture chambers and hit teams as it combs the planet extra-judicially executing and imprisoning people with absolute impunity.

In fact, the very personalities behind the sort of atrocities carried out by the United States over the last 20 years are still dictating US foreign policy today. Despite the charade carried on by Obama and his alleged “liberal” presidency, he has merely fronted for the continuation of a singular agenda meted out by Wall Street and London’s think-tanks with but the flimsiest veneer of “progressive liberalism” laid over it.

For those that take a few minutes to look into the details of what is presented to them by a serially compromised corporate-media, they will see yet another “Iraq-style” pack of lies being paraded before them to justify continued meddling in Syria. Just like in Libya before it, Syria will not face salvation by means of a NATO intervention, it will face total destruction. Sanctions of “luxury goods” announced just this week by the White House are aimed at peeling away the Syrian government’s supporters, hoping that, through basic game theory, the ruling elite across Syria will take the bait to “save themselves.” In reality, the collapse of the Syrian government will lead to the same perpetual instability, lawlessness, division, and murderous mayhem Libya has been plunged into – to the benefit of no one but the multinationals.

Imperialism throughout the ages has always been sold with rhetoric peddling a “higher cause.” Whether it was taming the barbarians outside the gates of Rome, spreading “superior” Anglo civilization to the four corners of the globe, the big-oil and banker expansionism during America’s manifest destiny, or today’s “humanitarian wars,” the underlying truth is one of megalomania, exploitation, and human depravity on an ever increasing scale.

It is peddled with simplistic rhetoric aimed at the most impressionable, weakest of minds. The support these gullible minds lend the powered elite results in catastrophic consequences not only for the victims of imperialism, but for the empires themselves – inevitably wrecked by insatiable, unchecked greed.

Syria is just one prize of many sought after by a long line of empires attempting to feed the world, its people, and resources into its ever-hungry maw. And Syria itself has been the subject of imperial ambitions many times in the past, including those of the Romans, Ottomans, the French, and now the Anglo-Americans. Unlike in the past, where information was difficult to come by for the average person, there is no excuse for ignorance, nor for believing the same tired lies told by the global elite in their quest to mobilize entire populations to sustain their own self-serving agenda. While the allure to “fit in” with what we think the rest of the world is thinking is persuasive, it is illogical, and in reality an illusion. What the TV tells us on a daily basis is not what the rest of the world thinks – it is what the rest of the world is told to think by an extremely small minority.

Image: Confessed liar Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi is proud that his politically motivated Syria’s government could not stand for as long as it has with only a military backing it. It has support across both the upper echelons of Syrian society, as well as across the myriad of minorities who all stand to lose should NATO’s terrorist proxies, drunk on extremist doctrine and promises of dominion over their fellow Syrians, come to power. This is precisely why NATO has adopted a two-prong strategy – terrorize Syria’s minorities into submission and penalize Syria’s elite until they defect.

More importantly, Syria has stood against insidious foreign meddling for over a year because the people see themselves, their nation, and their sovereignty, both personal and national, at risk. Whatever transgressions they face under the Syrian government, it is ultimately still a Syrian government. Whatever comes into being by NATO’s blood-soaked hands will be entirely divorced from anything “Syrian.” In Libya, it took the form of Abdurrahim el-Keib – a long time US resident, chairman of the BP, Shell, Total-funded Petroleum Institute who has swiftly moved to sell the nation out from under the Libyan people. Worst of all, he has done so as a first priority, even at the expense of Libya’s security and territorial integrity.

The oligarchs of Wall Street and London will continue directing their vast propaganda networks to portray the violence they themselves are fueling as a one-sided atrocity carried out solely by the long-targeted Syrian government. They will continue to use the UN as a willing tool to develop their casus belli for military intervention on behalf of known terrorists. We will also see the West attempt various ploys to prod members of the Syrian government and military into defecting as Syria is slowly destroyed just as in Libya.

It is not enough for the world to simply ward off a military intervention by the Wall Street and London oligarchs. Regardless, Syria will still be picked apart. It must be made clear that as US President Obama stands before a memorial for victims of Nazi war crimes, he and the corporate-financiers he speaks on behalf of, are in the middle of carrying out their own vast crimes against humanity – on a scale far exceeding anything the Nazis could have hoped to accomplish – and they do so with UN and NATO complicity.

No matter how much power these self-proclaimed leaders garner, no matter how many people they succeed in turning to their cause, rationally, logically, historically, and morally, they are wrong. No amount of contrived institutional approval or signed resolutions makes what is being done in Syria, or what was done to Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan right. This is modern day empire being propagated not by nation-states, but by corporate-financiers, fueled by our daily patronage of their goods and services, who see themselves as transcending the nation-state. And because even imperialism in its purest form is beyond the understanding of many people, it becomes doubly so in its new, stateless form.

Tony Cartalucci

24 April 2012

@ Activist Post

Tony Cartalucci’s articles have appeared on many alternative media websites, including his own at  Land Destroyer Report.   Read other contributed articles by Tony Cartalucci here.

The Holy Triumvirate — The United States, NATO, and the European Union — or an approved segment thereof, can usually get what they want. They wanted Saddam Hussein out, and soon he was swinging from a rope. They wanted the Taliban ousted from power, and, using overwhelming force, that was achieved rather quickly. They wanted Moammar Gaddafi’s rule to come to an end, and before very long he suffered a horrible death. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected, but this black man who didn’t know his place was sent into distant exile by the United States and France in 2004. Iraq and Libya were the two most modern, educated and secular states in the Middle East; now all four of these countries could qualify as failed states.

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

Assad actually appears to have a large measure of popularity, not only in Syria, but elsewhere in the Middle East. This includes not just fellow Alawites, but Syria’s two million Christians and no small number of Sunnis. Gaddafi had at least as much support in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The difference between the two cases, at least so far, is that the Holy Triumvirate bombed and machine-gunned Libya daily for seven months, unceasingly, crushing the pro-government forces, as well as Gaddafi himself, and effecting the Triumvirate’s treasured “regime change”. Now, rampant chaos, anarchy, looting and shooting, revenge murders, tribal war, militia war, religious war, civil war, the most awful racism against the black population, loss of their cherished welfare state, and possible dismemberment of the country into several mini-states are the new daily life for the Libyan people. The capital city of Tripoli is “wallowing in four months of uncollected garbage” because the landfill is controlled by a faction that doesn’t want the trash of another faction.1 Just imagine what has happened to the country’s infrastructure. This may be what Syria has to look forward to if the Triumvirate gets its way, although the Masters of the Universe undoubtedly believe that the people of Libya should be grateful to them for their “liberation”.

As to the current violence in Syria, we must consider the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining the anti-government forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.

Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, reported that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” Opposition groups including the Syrian National Council, the Free Syrian Army and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights began disseminating “claims that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre,” and declared that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor added that any suggestions of massacres are unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”2

Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, reported in a December 2011 email on a meeting she attended at the Pentagon about Syria: “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [Special Operation Forces] teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” We know of Bhalla’s comments thanks to the 5 million Stratfor emails obtained by the Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed on to Wikileaks.3

Human Rights Watch has reported that both Syrian government security forces and Syria’s armed rebels have committed serious human rights abuses, including kidnapings, torture, and executions. But only the Holy Triumvirate can get away with the sanctions they love to impose. Assad’s wife is now banned from traveling to EU countries and any assets she may have there are frozen. Same for Assad’s mother, sister and sister-in-law, as well as eight of his government ministers. Assad himself received the same treatment last May.4 Because the Triumvirate can.

On March 25, the US and Turkish governments announced that they were discussing sending non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, implying quite clearly that until then they had not been engaged in such activity.5 But according to a US embassy cable, revealed by Wikileaks, since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria as well as the London-based satellite TV channel, Barada TV, run by Syrian exiles, that beams anti-government programming into the country. The cable further stated that Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

Regime change in Syria has been on the neo-conservative wish list since at least 2002 when John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called the two states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 Bolton said that the United States should have overthrown the Syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein. Amongst Syria’s crimes have been their close relations with Iran, Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Palestinian resistance, and Russia, and their failure to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan and Egypt; all this constituting evidence to the Holy Triumvirate of Syria, like Aristide, being “uppity”.

The clinical megalomania of the Holy Triumvirate can scarcely be exaggerated. And never prosecuted.

A closing word from Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister for United States affairs:

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more than any other country. But the US always feels unsafe or insecure about other countries. … I suggest the United States spend more time thinking about how to make other countries feel less worried about the United States.6

President Obama’s accomplishments

Last month, Alan S. Hoffman, an American professor from Washington University in St. Louis, was forbidden by the US Treasury Department to travel to Cuba to give classes in a course on biomaterials.7

At the same time, the State Department refused to grant two Cuban diplomats in Washington, DC permission to travel to New York City to speak at The Left Forum, the largest annual gathering of the left in the United States, which this year attracted over 5,000 people.8

The State Department has also been occupied recently with preventing Cuba from being invited to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April.9

And that’s just the past month.

I mention all this to keep in mind the next time President Obama or one of his supporters lists US relations with Cuba as one of his accomplishments.

And I still cannot go to Cuba legally.

Another claim the Obamabots are fond of making to defend their man is that he’s abolished torture. That sounds very nice, but there’s no good reason to accept it at face value. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”10

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is equal to torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the home of the brave. Kosovo and Diego Garcia — both of which house very large and secretive American military bases — if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same for Guantánamo. Moreover, the executive order concerning torture, issued January 22, 2009 — “Executive Order 13491 — Ensuring Lawful Interrogations” — leaves loopholes, such as being applicable only “in any armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside environments of “armed conflict”, which is where much torture in the world happens anyway, is not prohibited. And what about torture in a “counter-terrorism” environment?

One of Mr. Obama’s orders required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and perhaps noise, and possibly stress positions and sensory overload.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions “that violate our human values.”11

Just as no one in the Bush and Obama administrations has been punished in any way for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other countries they waged illegal war against, no one has been punished for torture. And, it could be added, no American bankster has been punished for their indispensable role in the world-wide financial torture. What a marvelously forgiving land is America. This, however, does not apply to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In the last days of the Bush White House, Michael Ratner, professor at Columbia Law School and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out:

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.12

I’d like at this point to remind my dear readers of the words of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which was drafted by the United Nations in 1984, came into force in 1987, and ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back.

Joseph Biden

From a document found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after his assassination last May: A call to kill President Obama because “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.13

So … it would appear that the man America loved to hate and fear was no more knowledgeable of how United States foreign policy works than is the average American. What difference in the War on Terror — for better or for worse — against the likes of bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers could there have been over the past three years if Joe Biden had been the president? Biden was an outspoken supporter of the war against Iraq and is every bit the pro-Israel fanatic that Obama is. In his 35 years in the US Senate Biden avidly supported every American war of aggression including the attacks on Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. Whatever was Osama bin Laden thinking?

And whatever was Joe Biden thinking when he recently said the following after hosting China’s presumptive next leader Xi Jinping in a visit to the United States?

America holds at least one key economic advantage over China. Because China’s authoritarian government represses its own citizens, they don’t think freely or innovate. “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.” Noting that China and similar countries produce many engineers and scientists but few innovators, Biden said, “It’s impossible to think different in a country where you can’t speak freely. It’s impossible to think different when you have to worry what you put on the Internet will either be confiscated or you will be arrested. It’s impossible to think different where orthodoxy reigns. That’s why we remain the most innovative country in the world.”14

Holy Cold War, Batman! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were told about the Soviet Union. For years and years. For decades. Then came Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth’s orbit. It was launched into an Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1’s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race. The USSR’s launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency to regain a technological lead. Not only did the launch of Sputnik spur America to action in the space race, it also led directly to the creation of NASA. 15

By William Blum

7 April 2012

@ Killinghope.org

Notes

1. Washington Post, April 1, 2012 ↩

2. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011↩

3. See the document on WikiLeaks ↩

4. Washington Post, March 24, 2012↩

5. Ibid., March 26, 2012 ↩

6. Ibid., January 10, 2012 ↩

7. Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 18, 2012 ↩

8. See the video description on Cuba’s UN Ambassador at Left Forum ’12↩

9. BBC News, “Ecuador to boycott Americas summit over Cuba exclusion”, April 3, 2012↩

10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009 ↩

11. New York Times, February 6, 2009 ↩

12. Associated Press, November 17, 2008 ↩

13. Washington Post, March 16, 2012 ↩

14. Ibid., March 1, 2012 ↩

15. Wikipedia entry for Sputnik 1 ↩

William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2

Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower

West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir

Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with “add” in the subject line. I’d like your name and city in the message, but that’s optional. I ask for your city only in case I’ll be speaking in your area.

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I’d appreciate it if the website were mentioned.

On Friday March 30 th hundreds of thousands of people from all backgrounds; religious, social and political, had marched towards Zionist occupied Palestine, or to the nearest point of it, to protest Israeli crimes against indigenous Palestinian population, Israeli violations of international laws and human rights, Israeli ethnic cleansing and distortion of the social, cultural and religious characteristics of Palestine in a systemic process of judiazing the whole country.

The march was called “Global March to Jerusalem (Al-Quds in Arabic)” ( GMJ ) to protest the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the mutilations of the city of peace that has the highest regards by all three Abrahamic religions. The marchers focused on Al-Quds (Jerusalem) because the holy city had suffered the brunt of the Israeli apartheid colonization policies and represents the Israeli illegal racist and inhumane policies of terror, destruction and property theft perpetrated against the rest of Palestinian cities.

In order to change the demographic, physical, cultural and spiritual original characteristics of the holy city from Palestinian to Jewish majority Israel had adopted many apartheid judiazation policies that include among others the unrestricted building and expansion of illegal Israeli colonies (settlements) on usurped Palestinian land, the continued dispossession and demolition of Palestinian homes, the illegal forceful evictions of Palestinian families from their homes so that violent armed religious extremist Jewish Israelis can occupy them, the illegal heavy taxations of Palestinian properties and businesses, the revocation of ID cards of Palestinian Jerusalemites, and the construction of the separation wall surrounding the city to deny Palestinians, Christians as well as Muslims, access to their holy places.

These Zionist racist policies constitute flagrant crimes not only against Palestinians but against all humanity as well. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories reported in his report of 2011 that “the continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with forcible eviction of long residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation that can only be described, in its cumulative impact, as a form of ethnic cleansing”

The Global March to Jerusalem came on the 36 annual commemoration of the Land Day protest that started in March 1976, which was the first act of Palestinian popular mass resistance, since 1948 Israeli occupation, against Zionist policies of colonization and systemic process of theft of Palestinian land that took place in the Galilee area north of Palestine. Six Palestinian rights activists were killed and over a hundred were injured while hundreds others were arrested when the Israeli army responded violently with tanks re-occupying Palestinian cities. Since then, Palestinians commemorate the Land Day with strikes and marches every year.

The GMJ is a new groundbreaking non-violent civil movement comprised of diverse coalition of Palestinians, Arabs, and international activists; Christians, Muslims and Jews, who are united to support Palestinian struggle to liberate Palestine from the colonial Zionist occupation. It does not represent any one nationality, ethnicity, political party or one religious group but is an amalgamation of all of them. Among its Advisory Board members we find politicians, human rights activists, and religious figures. Politicians are represented by former British MP George Galloway, Indian former MP Swami Agnivesh, former Jordanian Prime Minister Ahmad Obeidat, and former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohammad. Human rights activists are represented by philosopher and writer Dr. Cornel West, Indonesian MP feminist and writer Marwah Ibrahim, and cofounder of International Solidarity Movement Neta Golan. Christians are represented by Palestinian H.E. Atallah Hanna Archbishop of Sebastia, Patriarchate of Jerusalem, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Dr. Jeremiah Wright Pastor Emeritus at the Trinity United Church of Christ. Muslims are represented by Sheikh Raed Salah founder of Islamic Movement for 48 Palestinians, Dr Hammam Said, Head of the Jordanian Consultative Council of Muslim Brothers, and Sheikh Yousuf Jumaa, Former Palestinian Minister of Awqaf and Religious Affairs and former preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque. Jews are represented by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, author and activist in the Jewish Renewal Movement, and Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, Jewish German author, activist and publicist. Jewish participation in the GMJ was prominent by Jewish organizations such as Neturei Karta; Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism ( www.nkusa.org ), Australian Jews against the Occupation ( http://jao.org.au ), Canadian Independent Jewish Voices ( http://ijvcanada.org ), American Not in Our Name (NION www.notinourname.net ), and Spain international Jewish Anti-Zionist Network ( http://judiosantisionistasenespanya.blogspot.com ).

Participants from 80 countries, estimated to reach 2 millions, traveled to one of Palestine’s neighboring countries; Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, in solidarity with the Palestinians to protest Israeli occupation. The largest group, about 10 thousands included participants from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iraq, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, left India on 9 th of March in a caravan towards Lebanon picking up more participants from Iran and Turkey on their way. Palestinian demonstrators marched into the streets of 1948 occupied Palestinian cities, of West Bank cities, in Gaza Strip, and in Al-Quds (Jerusalem) itself. About 30 thousand Egyptians demonstrated in Tahrir Square. Many other mass peaceful demonstrators marched through the streets of capitals of many countries in every continent, and especially in front of Israeli Embassies.

The GMJ movement had brought back the just Palestinian cause to the front. It emphasized the importance of the Palestinian issue locally, regionally, and internationally. It had sent important messages to Israel, to its American sponsor, to the international political bodies, and to the rest of the world. The Palestinian cause is not just a mere Israeli/Palestinian conflict as Zionists like to present it to the world; rather it is a just cause that is important to the whole world as well as to the Islamic and Arab worlds. The Palestinian resistance against Zionist Israeli occupation has gained international acceptance, and their demonstrations have become global spreading from Palestinian cities to many major capitals of the international community and had become a popular movement. It has become clear that judiaizing Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and stripping it from its spiritual characteristics is not just a Palestinian issue rather an issue for all international religious community. The participation of many western NGOs; human rights and religious organizations, and the increasing popularity of the BDS (boycott, divest and sanction Israel) campaign are clear indications that nations of the west, especially Americans, are getting fed up with Israeli violations of international laws, and are against their governments’ financial and political unconditional support to Israeli terror while ignoring the pressing affairs of their own people.

The participation of the different Islamic groups and different members of political parties in the MGJ movement is a proof to Israel and to the whole world that the Palestinian cause is a uniting factor of all different Arab, religious and political factions. Palestine, and particularly Al-Quds, counteracts all Israeli attempts to divide and conquer.

The increasing Palestinian resistance of the Israeli occupation throughout the generations had proved wrong, to Zionist leaders and to Israeli Jewish occupiers, the silly Zionist belief that the old Palestinian generations would perish and the new generations, uprooted and barred re-entry to their home towns would forget all about Palestine. The new Palestinian generations, including those born in refugee camps outside occupied Palestine, are more adamant than their fathers to return to their own roots.

Those Zionist Israeli Jewish new generations better understand that their Zionist greedy leaders are misguiding them, and that they will never enjoy security and peace while occupying Palestine, rather they will know only perpetual wars, death, sorrow and eventual defeat.

By Dr. Elias Akleh

2 April 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Dr. Elias Akleh is a writer living in Corona, CA., eakleh@ca.rr.com