How Many Innocents Must Die?

 

This past week brought another horrific murder in the name of Islam. A priest, Father Jacques Hamel, was reciting Mass at the Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen. The 85 year old priest was forced by his attackers, the terrorists, to kneel before they sliced his throat. Some reports have stated they completely beheaded though we were unable to confirm the report. Parishioners, who were in prayer when the attack occurred, reported further that when the police arrived they attempted to use the nuns from the church as human shields. Another unnamed individual referred to only as an 86-year-old worshipper was seriously injured but hospital reports inform they are out of danger and continue to be treated. The alarm was raised when one of the nuns escaped and called the authorities. The Islamic State claimed ‘credit’ for the attack, but who claims credit for murdering an unarmed innocent allowing it to stand as a testament to their faith? The answer is the Islamic State as their Caliphate gets spread with designs on world conquest. What needs to be understood is that many of these Islamic groups and definitely applies to such as the Muslim Brotherhood who is working on a Civilizational Jihad whereby they use religious tolerance and such to change the customs and laws eventually altering imposing Sharia in one final blitzkrieg where the remainder of laws are rewritten or replaced making Islam the only recognized and eventually permitted faith. Islamic State is less patient and take spreading Islam by any means including the sword, though they use rifles and knives when beheading priests. The blood toll of the Islamic State has included their brave conquest of the basically unarmed Yazidi who they slaughtered saving only the younger women who they made sport of raping them often until they died. They slaughtered the Christians they could find in Mosul using their women in similar fashion. Probably the least mentioned thing is what happened to the Muslims of Mosul and other areas where the Islamic State took hold. One need understand that the Islamic State has their own version of Islam and their own select verses of the Quran which they hold were the final verses and the only verses necessary to permit their conquests and purification even of other Islamic believers. The largest number of victims of the Islamic State has been other Muslims. They often ask questions which any Muslim to quote the verses they have chosen and in the exact way they have interpreted said verse often at the end of a rifle. Should one not choose as the Islamic State warrior desires they may very well end up murdered. The tale was the trail of Islamic blood spilled throughout Mosul and other places visited by the Islamic State. Additionally, the Islamic State is warring with other Muslims and murdering only Muslims as are the branches of al-Qaeda and the Syrian Army. This is the holy war being fought in Syria and areas of Iraq, Muslims killing Muslims in the name of Allah and Islam. While they are busy killing one another they also urge others to murder people, their neighbors in many instances, and kill in the name of Allah and expect this to make people admire Allah and Islam. Eventually, once the world figures out the simple truth, which such forces as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Taliban, Iran, and other Islamic forces all desiring world conquest, will not rest until they force all to bend before them and fall before the sway of Islam as so prescribed by their conquerors kneeling before them in submission. That is right, world conquest as it has not been recognized as impossible by some forces and Islam is amongst those who still desire conquest of the world by the sword if required. Do not believe us just ask Erdogan in Turkey who has been executing his military, police and judiciary and other lawyers in his own Stalinist purge of thousands of fellow Turks and Muslims to make Turkey in his own image and ready to reestablish the Ottoman Empire and proceed in conquering the rest of the world making him Caliph.

 

Father Jacques Hamel

 

Speaking of Father Jacques Hamel, Sister Danielle told French TV, “They forced him to his knees. He wanted to defend himself. And that’s when the tragedy happened. They recorded themselves. They did a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic. It’s a horror. He was an extraordinary priest. He was a wonderful, kind man.” How many tributes about a kind man, a compassionate mother, a wonderful brother, sister or loving parent does the world need before we realize that these are not “man caused disaster” and that it will take something greater than an “overseas contingency operation” to end the murders by the Islamic State and the Haters they influence? These killings will continue for as long as leaders simply make grand speeches and fantastic promises about working across lines with all faiths and actually face that this is a war and only fighting against those who demand to wage war does a war end. Still, the people cannot fully lay the blame on their leaders as the way things stand in the Western World, the people themselves have no stomach for a prolonged war to bring an end to Islamist violence and without the support of the people no fight can be waged. As long as no fight will be waged, then the attacks will only continue and; if the Muslims fighting one another ever united under one banner, then Europe would be the first frontier and the war would come to them full force. As things stand now the fight to bring an end to Islamic terrorism in Europe, in the United States, in Canada, in Israel, around the world and most of all throughout the Muslim world where non-Muslims, infidels as the Islamists call them, and those Muslims considered to be the wrong kind of Muslim or insufficiently Muslim or weak or un-Islamic, they are the ones who are suffering the most from Muslim violence.

 

The terrorism faced in the Western and developed worlds is nothing compared to the violence in northern Africa which itself barely registers compared to Islamist on Muslim violence. The perfidy of Islam goes further as it serves as a shield behind which many leaders hide while the people suffer in poverty. If as much money and effort that goes into building ever larger and grander Mosques were instead used to build infrastructure, irrigations, and facilities to encourage manufacturing and other ventures thus attracting companies to construct factories and employ thousands then the people could be brought out of poverty and backwardness. There is one thing preventing such investments which can be put into a single word, violence. As long as terrorism threatens any factory or other venture it will remain impossible to bring any investments into the Islamic world. Those who claim it is impossible to modernize and bring prosperity to any population need look no further than Malaysia(PDF file). Malaysia is but one example of such change with Sanghai being another example of Third World to First World transition in barely a single generation. These examples prove that what it takes to attain such results is a formula which, where posing serious challenges, has nothing insurmountable with good leadership and a dedicated core of inspired individuals.

 

The fist requirement is a ruler desiring change and modernization for their people over enriching themselves, though often they also benefit from the new economics. The first requirement is impressing upon the nation law and order with personal freedoms and ownership of assets such as land, businesses, homes and so forth. The nation will have started in the right direction as the nation builds infrastructure, largely good roads, access to harbors, enlarged harbors, additions to airports, electricity, gas and water extensions and increased ability. Within a year or two of starting such a project other countries and companies will have taken notice. Here it becomes important to make the framework of the government, nation and its peoples attractive to investments. This includes improved education with a new emphasis on math, science and technologies. Further, any laws restricting religious beliefs or favoring one group over other demographic entities such as Apartheid laws need be repealed or otherwise removed as no company will construct their facilities in a nation where all of their employees, especially upper management, would be prosecuted or otherwise inconvenienced simply by visiting their facilities in the nation they constructed a facility. Finally, the tax structure should be conducive or even favoring both industry and their employees. Such lowered taxes can be recovered by laying a small percentage on purchases other than food or medical expenses. There might also be a further tax on “luxuries” such as vehicles above a certain price, that part is taxable, jewelry, alcohol and other amenities. Once these changes and perhaps others; depending on the culture, laws, and other factors, have been accomplished and there begins investments and coming industries then employment of the people is accomplished, the standard of living increases and the nation is itself being transformed out of third world and towards first world status and potentially developed world joining those in the information age, an accomplishment requiring a highly educated population.

 

Great upheavals are envisioned as the world itself transforms and new nations rise and other long established ones crash. This has occurred all throughout history with the fall of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Minoans, Hittite, China, Mongol, USSR, Greek, Roman, Spain, Portugal, Zulu, Aztec, Olmec, Toltec and near countless others some of which exist only in the anthological records waiting to be unearthed. Behind each collapse rose another, Mongols came after the collapse of a united China breaking at its seams with different families struggling for supremacy. The Rise of Islam came on the heels of a collapsing Roman Empire leaving a vulnerable Byzantine Empire which was the eastern Roman Empire with its stronghold of Constantinople. After numerous decades the great walls of Constantinople were finally breached and Islam took what today would be Turkey. Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, a practice used by Islam to erase any histories which predate their inception thus making Islam the start of all humanity should they accomplish their goal of world conquest. Such a desire was an objective of empires all the way up to somewhere before World War I. World hegemony is the current hope of such empires as the United States whose culture permeates almost every corner of the globe. Almost anywhere one travels there will be American style T-shirts in English and even in the native language. This influence is oft referred to as the Anglo-influence. But even with its powerful military, the United States no more dreams of empire and world conquest because they realize, as should most, that even a world under a single rule would no sooner be accomplished before segments of such a society would revolt to break away from centralized rule. That is what brought the age of colonialism to an end and cut the British Empire down by its colonies, as did the Spanish, French, Portuguese and other empires with one exception, the Islamic Arab Empire which still stretches from the Iran/Iraq border to Morocco. This is the final empire and it is currently in remission but starting to arise and press Europe and North America through terrorist attacks and cultural conversion to bring them too under Islamic Arab hegemony or even direct control. The most violent of their fronts is in Central and North Africa.

 

The war being fought is both direct confrontation and military conquest known as Jihad, or they are using sublimation and injection of Sharia and other favorable laws using minority rights and the cloak of Islam as a religion rather than a smothering cloak that brings about the conquest through usurpation of the legal system to submit the entire culture replacing it with Sharia and Islamic rule, known as Civilizational Jihad. The use of freedom of religion, false claims of purported assaults on Muslims, demands for accommodation of prayer schedules and private dedicated prayer rooms, and their demands for special treatment not given other religions, they slowly take the easily surrendered legal grounds. This is combined with their taking positions as they are able often deceiving their real intentions. This can be found in many educational systems throughout the developed world, especially the United States. They attempt to have text books which favorably treat Islam and denigrate Israel or even replace it on world maps with “Palestine.” This was evidenced when publishing giant HarperCollins released an atlas which included Lebanon, West Bank, Gaza but omitted Israel. The entire run of tens of thousands (if not millions) of these atlases were recalled and destroyed to be replaced with a proper map of the area (see below).

 

Atlas Released by HarperCollins which
Omitted Israel Causing Mass Recall

 

Such could be attributed to a single person with a motive whose supervisor agrees with the politics in which Israel is seen as a condemnable, colonialist, Apartheid, racist and unforgivable blight on the world which must be eliminated even if only and uniquely in this particular atlas as all things need a first step. The problem with such thinking is such an act is so far from being the first step that if one knows their history it makes such laughable. The founding of the Jewish State was actively opposed by the British who had promised the Arab League that there would never be a Jewish State because the British would allow as many Arabs as required into the area such that there would never ever be a Jewish majority. This was true and when Israel was declared a state there were more Arabs residing in Israel than Jews and they could have declared themselves an Arab Islamic entity and made Jews a persecuted minority to be hunted down and murdered. Instead of relying on such democratic means, the Mufti of Jerusalem, the man who met with Hitler and the upper crust of Nazism and recruited divisions for the Reich and fomented uprisings against the Jews throughout the late 1920’s through the 1930’s, demanded the Arabs leave their homes so the entering Arab armies of half a dozen nations could simply kill all they encountered as they wiped the Zionists from the face of the Earth. They did not attain their desired goal but did gain both Gaza and Judea and Samaria (renamed West Bank as Judea was a bit too Jewish) and occupied these areas illegally. Still, Israel remained and need be in any accurate atlas no matter who drew it.

 

The real problem facing the world and even more heavily facing Islam is what to do about the now evident attempts by Islamic forces to advance their conquest once again and see Europe and eventually the United States fall before their subversions. Further, there is a military attempt to subvert and conquer more of Africa moving into central Africa where they plan on converting by whatever means is required the Christian and Animist cultures of Central Africa and complete their complete and total domination of North Africa driving out, converting or murdering every last person not worshiping and surrendered to Allah and Islam. The singular aim of Islam anywhere it takes hold and even if there is but a single Muslim the lands they tread are required to be brought under Islam and all converted by coercion or by the sword. Until the current Islamic supremacy doctrine is destroyed or altered, Islam will remain a threat and challenge to every non-Islamic nation on earth.

 

This brings us right back to the question of how many more must die before the world awakens and brings about the reformation of Islam that some Imams and President Sisi of Egypt have proposed and Imams through the ages have attempted to bring about. Thus far such people have been in the minority as Islam was not under threat and in the developed world even offered the protection granted all religions. What was not seen, or seen but not believed, were the supremacy doctrines in the Quran and the Hadiths. They were viewed as something from the deep past and as Islam was calmly being observed with only minor violence perpetrated and in modern times the majority of Islamic violence had been directed against Israel which many in the Western World found served their desires for their forming of the Jewish State to be revoked and the Arabs were providing the means. As long as those murdered were Israelis, then all was forgiven and even condoned in some circles. That violence is now being expanded into the developed world. The same terrorist groups which assault Israel now have shadow branches growing from the same roots, the roots planted by the Mufti of Jerusalem after World War I and through World War II and beyond being the same roots for these groups, al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Taliban, Boko Haram and near countless others now operating in Russia, Europe, China, United States, Canada, Australia and Africa. These terror groups also spawn what are often called ‘lone wolves’ who attack often from off the radar of Western security forces. Israel has a means of detecting and intercepting such attackers but even they miss more than one would prefer, but they intercept their share which often are not reported so as to retain sources and intelligence methods. The same is probably true in the developed world though Israel has spent decades building up HUMIT (human intelligence) without which they would be as blind as the rest of the world was on September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were struck and one other undisclosed target was saved by the actions of the passengers on that fateful flight. That was and remains the shining example of ordinary citizens rising to the occasion and taking the risk and ending a terror threat even, in this case, at the cost of their lives.

 

The world is facing a menace and if one were to read about the elections in the United States or the BREXIT vote in Britain, one would believe that the economy was the greatest problem faced by society and the threats from Islam are nowhere on the horizon. The threat becomes heated after the murder of a priest, or the slaughter of people across Paris or an attack by an Army Officer at Fort Hood taking the lives of numerous soldiers and their family or whatever is the most recent attack. Still, these are treated as singular events and not at all related to Islam or connected to one another. The threat is allowed to fester and grow and eventually will be so pervasive that the people will demand action and those politicians unwilling to take such steps will not be reelected. The need is for the people to demand of their elected officials that they take the needful steps to eradicate the threat. Granted that the vast majority of the Muslims we all know are decent and hard working members of our communities. That would have been the description of a fellow worker whose supervisors described as a hard worker who did not bother others and was friendly and cordial in his relations. What none of us knew was he had a second life where he was the leader of a terror strike force. He is currently serving a very long sentence in a Federal Prison as he and his team were caught before they took their actions. I was surprised but far from shocked as I had observed some clues but had not reached any conclusive belief he was a terrorist, let alone a leader of a terrorist team.

 

But one need ask themselves a simple question. Let us assume there is a mostly Muslim neighborhood where within a short distance from a Mosque five hundred to a thousand members to this Mosque reside. All has been a bed of roses but unbeknownst to all a team of fifty Islamists move into the area and instruct their Imam to begin putting a sharper tone to his sermons, not all at once but slowly over the weeks. After about six months one of the leaders of this group takes the forum one week and preached the need for Jihad. A few weeks later the youth director resigns and is replaced or gains an assistant, a minder. The children are taught Jihad as the way for all good followers of Islam. They are taught about the great leaders of Islamic conquest, Saladin, Khalid bin Walid, Bu Ali, Khalid ibn al-Walid, Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Al Qaqaa Ibn Omar, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb, Omar Mukhta, Abu Ali and others. They are regaled with tales of defeating the Crusaders, the breaching of the walls of Constantinople with siege cannons and balls brought by barges to the battle front, the conquests of Jerusalem, the conquest of North Africa and of Spain. The children start correcting any presumed deficiencies in their observance of Islam. Initially the parent see this as endearing as their children are learning to be good Muslims and they feel they will be like their parents when they are older just as they adjusted. What they learn too late is their children are being inundated with Jihad as well as their faith. The children are learning to be pure Islamic warriors ready for Jihad. When the final push comes even many parents never saw what was coming, they missed the signs and the changes. Now your peaceful neighbors are challenged to join Jihad or face recrimination and to prepare themselves for assigned duties. Most are given mundane tasks such as praying and demanding prayer rooms at work, demanding women’s only times for Islamic women to use the pool in private. There will be demands that they be wearing more concealing proper clothing and eventually the full body covering and veil. By this point your Muslim friends will view themselves as no longer a part of the community but rather a community apart and superior and truly religious while the rest are Kaffir, unbelievers to be converted or put to the sword. At this point a portion of your former peaceful Muslims will now have become potential, if not already; Jihadist Muslims ready to wage the war against the unbeliever. Those who resisted this propagandizing are no longer members of their former society and are under a great deal of pressure to return. Those most resistive will be considered part of the great unwashed and also to have deserted their faith; and as apostates, they are in even greater danger than the unbelievers. What occurs next, well, let us all hope we have awakened long before such unrest strikes our homes. This war is progressing and will continue to advance in stages which have been tried and proven true throughout Islamic history and is in progress today throughout much of our world. Be aware, pay attention, read the little and passive signs but not to the point of paranoia. The best thing one can do is continue to be an anchor point with your Islamic friends and treat them as you would best friends as they are the front line in preventing Islamists from converting them and their friends and fellow Muslims and perhaps Islam will finally be granted its reformation and the Mecca Quran can become dominant over the Medina Quran (read our intro to the two Qurans here) and the initial verses of tolerance and welcome will prevail over those of conquest by the sword or any other means necessary.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Swiss Conference on Israel and Ignores Syria et al

 

The Swiss are holding their “Conference on Humanitarian Law in Palestinian Authority Assigned Territories” as if Israeli actions are the worst acts and the Israeli forces are thugs with criminal intent using force and slaughtering Arabs in lands belonging to them for autonomous rule being denied their ancient homelands. The truth is well known to anybody who reads our posts here at BTC. The San Remo Conference deeded these lands the Swiss are questioning for the formation of the Jewish State of Israel and they cannot be used by any other entity unless the Zionists surrender their autonomy over the lands from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, just to use phraseology familiar to the misguided Swiss. Perhaps they should take a few moments away from their frenetic haste and read the Balfour Declaration, the San Remo Conference conclusions, the United States Congress affirmation of their approval as an observing nations of San Remo and Article 80 of the United Nations Charter and maybe they will realize that the Jews were deeded all of the lands including those where Jordan sits today thanks to the generosity of the World Zionist Congress which willingly surrendered the lands east of the Jordan River for a sacred promise that the remaining lands east of the Jordan River would remain dedicated and reserved for the Jewish state and was inviolate. Apparently the world sees no problem demanding that the Jews once again surrender lands promised them to forge yet another Arab state and this one promises to be a failed state dedicated to a single purpose, to destroy and supplant the Jewish state. The European leaders clamoring for a state for the poor and downtrodden Palestinians whose homeland that was a piece of imagination conceived in KGB Moscow Headquarters with Yasser Arafat chosen as their operative to lead the struggle with Mahmoud Abbas as the terror organizer, financier and second in command all with the single purpose of supplanting Israel and slaughtering the Jews within.

 

Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas are apparatchiks (аппара́тчик if one prefers the original Soviet Russian spelling) and dedicated pawns of the initial Soviet designs to eradicate the Jewish state of Israel as part of their Cold War against the imperial powers of the United States and its allies. When the Soviet Union fell the Arab liberation movement had reached heights never imagined by the Soviets and had become self-sustaining and actually very profitable as Yasser Arafat had made hundreds of millions of dollars which he had stashed away in a Swiss bank account and also bought some prime properties where his wife would live luxuriously. Mahmoud Abbas and his sons had fared quite well all becoming multi-millionaires and then there is the competing terror group Hamas whose leader Khaled Mashaal has reportedly become a billionaire with Ismail Haniyeh merely a multi-millionaire. Who says terrorism doesn’t pay, if you are fighting to destroy Israel the world apparently rewards one rather well. One needs look no further than the “The Cairo International Conference on Palestine Reconstructing Gaza” where it was reported that over five-billion dollars were pledged for reconstruction with the stated provision that Hamas not be permitted access to monies or supplies, particularly building supplies which were needed to rebuild their infiltration tunnel system purposed for terror raids to slaughter Jewish Israelis living in Sderot and numerous kibbutzim located near the Gaza Strip. The only problem was that there was no enforcement placed on the supplies beyond promises from Abbas who has little if any power over Gaza. Needless to point out, Hamas is moving ahead full bore rebuilding their tunnels under the border and into Israel while those rebuilding the residences and other areas destroyed or damaged have already gone through every dollar of the monies donated and are demanding another round where at least twice the amount be raised as they have been unable to apply all the material for its intended use building homes for the people. This was exactly the result the donors claimed they would guard against and then took the word of a Holocaust denying criminal named Mahmoud Abbas, the financier and purchasing agent for the Black September raid on the Munich Olympics where the Israeli Olympic Team was slaughtered in cold blood as the entire world witnessed the events on the twenty-four hour news channels. The world leaders watched and permitted the mishandling of the situation leading to the slaughter of the remaining Israelis at the airport where the attempt to free the hostages went so very poorly resulting in their deaths and not even approaching successfully freeing them and guarding their lives. Assistance from Israel was refused and they were told their plane would not receive clearance to land should they attempt to take over the rescue despite the Israelis having decades of experience in such rescue missions and the Germans facing their first mission of this sort. No body mourned and the games continued unabated as if nothing untoward or tragic had occurred, just a simple terror attack against the Israeli team while the rest went about their competitions. One wonders what the train of events might have been had the terrorists been Irish revolutionaries and the hostages been the British team, would the games had continued or come to a screeching halt and be terminated if the British team were slaughtered. I know that would be different as the British contingent was significant and there were but a little over a dozen Israelis murdered, insignificant when compared to the European national team components, after all, the Israeli team could hardly be considered an actual component, they were not even entering most of the events. Thus was probably the thinking as after all, when has Europe ever wept or shown concern for Jewish lives?

 

Meanwhile, the Swiss conference attempting to prove the perfidy and criminal intents of the Israeli treatment and actions concerning the Arabs who refer to themselves as Palestinians simply to grant themselves a reference which presumably will supercede the Jewish claims to the lands, as they ignore the latest milestones in the Syrian machine of misery and death which had claimed over two-hundred-thousand civilian lives and injured or maimed over a million civilian victims. This civil war which has been anything but civil has raged unabated and unresolved for over three years and has gutted the nation of Syria which may never recover from the widespread destructions which have been a direct result of the fighting. Sure, President Obama laid down an adjustable red line which appeared to jump back whenever it had been broken by Bashir al-Assad such that it took Russian President Putin to intercede and marginally enforce the ever shifting Obama red line to release the American President further embarrassment. But this slaughter is of no interest; why?

 

The drone campaign used by the United States military in conjunction with the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) targeting presumable terrorist leaders and others in the leadership of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and in ISIS wherever they can be located and there is presumably solid evidence of their presence in a location and there will be minimal collateral damage, a term for unfortunate victims of the bomb, missile or other ordinance which will be utilized to liquidate their intended targets has had unintended consequences. The stated goal can be presented with such noble words that it sounds like the perfect policy. The results are messaged such that the civilian casualties are minimized and made to appear acceptable. The real results are frightening as they show that these directed precision munitions are more often than not targeting locations well after the target has left or on faulty intelligence information. The answer you hear is that such are the misfortunes of war; there will be some miniscule amount of unintended consequences but that the majority of those killed in these strikes are really terrible terror masters. Well, not so much. It has been revealed that the numbers of civilian deaths from these targeted strikes using very refined and accurate munitions have, more often than not, missed their intended target and have resulted in over ninety-five percent civilian casualties. Perhaps Senator Feinstein would like to investigate this usage of American military might instead of the three water-boarded individuals almost immediately after the carnage on September 11, 2001 and the couple of dozen other terrorists who resisted normal methods and were subjected to other manner of enhanced interrogations methods (some of which more resemble the abuse college young men are subjected to during pledge week at various fraternities when I was attending college) in efforts to save lives of both civilians as well as American and allied service men and women.

 

Then there are the abductions by Boko Haram in and around Nigeria which the world has dedicated token forces to assist in the capture or elimination of these terrorists and the liberation of their victims. There is the terrible and ongoing violence in Yemen which has previously served as a refueling port for United States warships. There is tribal violence in the nascent state of South Sudan which has been further fueled by terrorist forces authorized by the Sudan from which the South Sudan has ceded and been recognized as a new nation. Perhaps those European nations and the United States who so gloriously and with great fanfare recognized the new nation might assist in getting the nation on its feet and establish order, but there is no interest as there are no favorite people to save or blame as there are in the Arab-Israeli conflict. There are the several attacks perpetrated by Russian armed and supported rebels in the Ukraine, in Georgia, and starting in Latvia, Estonia and perhaps Lithuania and other former nations which were part of the Soviet Empire with both Georgia and the Ukraine having had large portions of their countries absorbed by Russian troops and gifted to those more inclined to be subservient to Putin and Russian interests and less likely to view the Western world favorably.

 

There has been one force in the world fighting the good fight and I never thought I would be announcing my support for Saudi Arabia, but they are the modern day heroes in fighting the good fight. The Saudi Arabian rulers have ignored their own immediate interest and profits by flooding the world with crude oil at lower than average price per barrels. This has had an astoundingly successful set of results. This tactic by the Saudi royals is aimed at the United States fracking and sideways drilling oil shale industry which has boosted American crude oil production such as to place an additional output equal to that of Kuwait. The Saudis would love to put those interests out of business. Further, Iranian crude oil is not as high grade sweet crude like Saudi oil and thus they require a greater price to profit from their oil wells. The price that Iranian crude must sell for to maintain a profit has been surmised to be between eighty-five dollars per barrel to over one-hundred dollars per barrel, not the paltry near or under seventy dollars a barrel oil is currently selling at. Another victim of the low price per barrel is Russia who the Saudi may not have directly targeted but whom they would not be upset at hurting their interests as Russia has chosen to support Iran, the greatest menace and threat to Saudi Arabia and their leadership. Russia also requires a higher price for their oil as most of their economy is balanced on their oil sales. We have noticed the panic in Russia as the Ruble, or should we say Rubble, has drastically faltered against other currencies on the world market and many have seen the collapse of the Russian economy in recent days. There are calls for Putin’s head to be placed on a pike at the entrance to Red Square, or at least his resignation. The Saudi insistence at the last OPEC meeting, which they took the unusual step of disallowing media presence or coverage and chose whom to include in the invite, and more importantly who not to allow, and they must have made a grand presentation for their hopes and plans or laid out a threat which none wished to contend against, but they agreed to keep the spigots open and let the price of oil drop and drop drastically into ranges not seen for quite some time. When all is done, I would not be surprised to find out that the Saudi Royals used their own vast wealth to promise to subsidize the other OPEC nations allied with Saudi Arabia in these actions in order to prevent unrest within their borders in order to sink their chosen targets. Thus far their actions have not deterred the American oil interest, especially the new finds in North Dakota, who have a secondary advantage of much lower shipping costs to the refineries, and time will tell if they have blunted Iran at all, but their effects on Russia are already quite evident for all to see. The people in the west in particular are the main beneficiaries of the Saudi oil war as their petroleum costs to keep their vehicles gassed up and ready to go have dropped precipitously and this means more cash for Christmas presents. Children of the west rejoice.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Israel Hated Similar Reasons as is the United States

One of the mantras heard in the condemnation of Israel in the current struggle to end the rocket bombardment and destroy the infiltration tunnel networks of the Hamas terrorist forces is that while there are hundreds of casualties being suffered within Gaza there are relatively little damage and a near unbelievable lack of noticeable casualties amongst the Israeli populations and cities. This lack of such disaster spread throughout Israel is due to two basic facts, first, the Hamas rockets are unguided and inaccurate with the majority landing in open areas thus doing little other than difficult to measure psychological damage simply from the repeated sirens and the having to hurriedly head for shelters and spend anxious minutes or longer in tense anxiety and second, the next to impossible success of the Iron Dome interceptor batteries which have downed approaching perfect interception percentage which has spared Israel the damage and casualties which previously would reached frightful levels. Take away either of these two factors and Israel would be showing similar levels of damage and significantly higher casualties than are being witnessed in Gaza despite the facts that Hamas places their civilians in the path of dangers and risks their lives in order to attempt to prevent attacks on something they value more than their people’s lives, their rockets to launch in the hope of murdering as many Israelis as possible while Israel invests whatever is necessary to prevent any harm from coming to her civilians. For those hanging on every new broadcast hoping for news of a highly successful attack which brings devastation to those Israelis, it will only take one failure of the Iron Dome batteries which are tasked with protecting Tel Aviv for your dreams to be unfortunately realized. In central Tel Aviv are tall office buildings with ten having forty or more floors and one that clears fifty which could be struck by a Hamas rocket and some of their largest are capable of doing sufficient damage to collapse one such skyscraper making such a strike the worst terrorist strike in Israeli history with a potential of thousands of murdered Israelis as a result of that one rocket which might get through. Those who hold the disparate death tolls and damages as their reason for despising Israel and throwing their sympathies to Hamas in empathy for their greater losses are damning Israel because of her success at protecting her population.

If instead of measuring by damage taken one were to measure the presumed disparity by number of explosive bombs and warheads launched or dropped and number of attempted ground mission and took the period of time leading up to the Israeli ground assault beginning you might be surprised. This comparison does not include the over a thousand rockets launched by Hamas into Israel before Israel launched her first bombing mission and only those rockets and attempted infiltrations by Hamas measured against the number of Israeli bombs and commando raids. The explosive comparison had slightly over a thousand-five-hundred Hamas rockets while the Israelis retaliated with slightly over two-thousand bombs with Hamas having attempted around a half-dozen infiltrations against a single naval commando mission by Israel. When one looks at the attacks and attempts to impart damage, destruction and casualties on the other side the conflict between Israel and Hamas becomes far more even contest with the measurable difference being in the preparation and success in defending and protecting ones people from those attacks.

This holding Israel at fault because of her being the stronger and more technologically advanced also ignores one of the most vital and important facts, Israel did not initiate this war and Israel removed every last Israeli and removed every IDF troop and base from all of Gaza in August of 2005. When people point to the blockade it needs to be pointed out that when Israel removed their presence they tuned the greenhouses and working businesses worth millions of dollars behind for the Gazans to utilize giving them functioning and profitable operations and did not impose any blockade on Gaza until after Hamas took control of Gaza in a bloody and violent coup defeating the forces of the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. As long as the Palestinian Authority was governing Gaza the Israelis felt little need to clamp strict control over the ports in Gaza but this sense of security dissipated when Hamas which is sworn to the destruction of Israel and the eradication of Jews worldwide stipulated in the clearest possible language in the Hamas Charter and is a unifying theme taught in their schools and portrayed throughout their media.

Anybody who has attended one of the liberal arts colleges or universities and received lectures from professors holding the typical anti-capitalist and anti-American views such as often lectured by such as Noam Chomsky you would be familiar with their anti-American programs. They claim that American culture is polluting the world and tainting the natural culture and altering societies claiming that this societal culture creep that is Americanizing many of the cultures in the third world presumably destroying these primitive cultures which they claim are superior to the crass American culture as the more primitive cultures presumably live in harmony with nature. They also claim that the United States is the worst polluter of nature in the world, something far from borne out by actual unmassaged statistics. Was the United States a large pollution engine a number of decades ago? Yes, though not necessarily the worst. The truth is that since the 1970s the United States has been the only nation that has actually met and surpassed the stringent requirements set by the Kyoto Protocols despite the fact that the United States never signed on to these standards. Another canard is that the United States economic wealth has stolen from the less developed world their share of wealth because since the available wealth is presumably constant, their claim, not mine, then by obvious measurement, by the United States having so much wealth they have to have made it unfairly by robbing the poorer nations. What they are intentionally suppressing is that wealth is not a constant and the United States historically has been the greatest creator of wealth.

What, you need some proof that wealth is constantly being created? To use the most obvious proof that wealth grows over time and directly proportionally to technological advancement one need look no further than ancient human history, real ancient human history. Original ancient man, as in Homo erectus, our ancient ancestors hunted with spears and possibly bow and arrows and the keeper of the fire would be put to death if he permitted the fire to be extinguished and was responsible for transporting the embers to spark the fire when the tribe migrated. We could now trend the advances and thus creations of wealth through the ages with the Greeks and Romans who used plumbing, aqueducts and relatively complex weaponry compared to spears but quite primitive and useless against modern weaponry. Then we see what we have today with buildings covering large swaths of Europe and the United States, automobiles and other items which not long ago were considered luxuries or were not yet invented. All of these are indication of increased available wealth and by claiming that American culture and production methods are ruinous to less advanced nations is actually a form of elitism which is using false arguments to keep the third world less advanced and inferior to the technologically modern world by claiming that their lack of modernity is a state of existence that needs to be preserved. Where this is actually more destructive ecologically can also be described by researching the production of a simple product which has been in existence for numerous centuries, the production of charcoal. Modern charcoal is produced using electrical heating elements with the wood chips placed in a chamber which is filled with CO₂ which minimizes escaping pollution while the tried and true old school method is to make large piles of wood chips and allow them to smolder such that the ones buried in the center are oxygen starved and are made into charcoal but produce heavy amounts of smoke and if a large area is used to mass produce charcoal with numerous large mounds smoldering away the area can become absolutely toxic. Which way would any intelligent ecological activist desire to have people worldwide produce charcoal, with modern equipment or the good old fashioned way which is still used in much of today’s world? Criticizing the United States for having a worldwide cultural influence and a greater proportion of the world’s per capita wealth is a form of primitivism and a rejection of advanced technology. This is found in a number of other elitist fads such as rejection of most technological advancements in agricultural preferring “natural” products. The same crippling anti-success jealousy which has infected much of social academia is behind much of the anti-Americanism as it is also behind much of the anti-Israel hatreds. This is most evident in the condemnation of Israel for protecting her people while sympathizing with Hamas because they appear disadvantaged by the resulting casualty numbers and destruction of infrastructure despite the actual number and size of explosives launched by each side being relatively equal, and actually favoring Hamas if one includes the three week buildup of rockets fired into Israel before the initial Israeli response to those attacks. But it is so much more noble to favor the underdog and it gives one a sense of superiority but cannot be assumed to grant them any moral advantage, that takes a more reasoned, systematic and unemotional examination of facts and actual numbers and not kneejerk emotional spontaneous reactions.

Beyond the Cusp