Ismail Salami

A politically incorrect wave of labyrinthine madness is casting its heavy shadow over Syria as the country is being surrounded left and right by Zionist plots thickening beyond control.

The complicated situation in Syria is ever more obfuscated by myriad forces at work to destroy the friend of Iran and the foe of Israel.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned on Sunday that Syria has become the target of imperialist foreign conspiracy and that the country is facing a real war waged from the outside.

In an address to the new parliament in Damascus, Assad said,

“We are not facing a political problem because if we were this party would put forth a political program. What we are facing is (an attempt) to sow sectarian strife and the tool of this is terrorism."

The Syrian leader also slammed the perpetrators of the Houla massacre as "monsters". The carnage claimed the lives of 108 people, including 49 children and 34 women.

"What happened in Houla and elsewhere (in Syria) are brutal massacres which even monsters would not have carried out."

As an act of character assassination and in order to portray Assad as an illogical person, the media only broadcast a select part of his speech, cutting his speech only to those parts which could be easily misinterpreted or interpreted out of context instead of giving every listener or viewer the chance to judge everything in its proper context.

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Stephen Lendman

Morning headlines again falsely accused Assad of mass killings in Qubeir village in central Hama province.

Houla-style slaughter was repeated. Reports said as many as 78 civilians were killed. Half were women and children. Around 35 members of one family were murdered in cold blood.

Victims were shot at close range and/or stabbed. Some bodies were burned. Independent reports haven't explained what eventually will come out. Pro-Assad loyalists were targeted for assassination. At issue also is creating pretexts for Libyan-style intervention.

Western-recruited death squads bear full responsibility. Syrian state TV said an "armed terror group" committed the "horrifying crime....What a few media have reported (is) completely false. (They're) contributing to spilling the blood of Syrians."

Responding to calls for help, government forces headed for Qubeir. State TV said they "raided a terrorist cell and killed a number of them and confiscated their weapons."

At issue is Obama advancing the ball closer to war. Washington readied plans long ago. Timing alone remains undecided. Plans now may be set. Most likely the Serbia/Kosovo/Iraq/Libya model will be repeated.

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Stephen J. Sniegoski

Young emissaries of the Jewish Agency for Israel dance their way
up Fifth Avenue during the annual Celebrate Israel Parade in Man-
hattan. (Photo: David Karp/The Times of Israel)

Philip Giraldi, the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and an astute critic of America’s Israelocentric policy in the Middle East, recently made the case that United States support for Israel, and the concomitant Israeli power which depends on that support, has reached its tipping point and is now on an ineluctable downward slide. A “tipping point,” a term given wide publicity in the decade past by Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book with that title, is defined by Giraldi as a point “where physical momentum, inclined in one direction, reverses its course, stabilizes, and then begins to move the opposite way.” And the movement usually accelerates after reaching the “tipping point.” In Gladwell’s definition: “The word ‘Tipping Point’ . . . comes from the world of epidemiology. It’s the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It’s the boiling point. It’s the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards. AIDS tipped in 1982, when it went from a rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic.”

Thus, after citing examples of criticism of Israeli policies, Giraldi concludes: “So we have reached the point where the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Everyone, with the possible exception of the U.S. Congress, has become aware that there is something terribly wrong with Israel. In Israel itself, where there is often ferocious debate over the country’s policies, it is time for a reckoning. Does Israel want to become a normal state with correct relationships with its neighbors, including an independent Palestine, or does it want to continue down the road that it is pursuing, which is folly and will lead to ruin?” It is not apparent to me, however, that support for Israel has passed its peak and is now in an irreversible downward spiral; in fact, despite some criticism here and there, and much more so on the Internet than in the mainstream media, there does not really seem to be a decline at all.

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Philip Giraldi

The Internet as Jellyfish: A visualization of the Inter-
net by Young Hyun of CAIDA (by Martin Dodge)

A mass murderer presenting a medal to another mass murderer. Wage war for humanitarian reasons but kill the children. Promote the freedom of the Internet but secretly make it a weapon of war and figure out how to shut it down. All in a day’s work in the Imperial City.

There were two interesting news stories last Thursday plus a couple of others during the week, all of which combine to tell an awkward tale about the United States government’s perception of itself and its willingness to engage in acts of preemptive aggression that most other governments would balk at. One headline article described in some detail how the United States is building up its ability to engage in cyber warfare, referred to as Cyber “Plan X,” a “new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyber space.” The article went on to explain that “cyberwarfare conjures images of smoking servers, downed electrical systems, and exploding industrial plants,” but its battlefield use would be more focused even though it is fighting in a “global domain that includes tens of billions of computers and other devices.” Near the end, the article notes that “cyberwar experts worry about unintended consequences of attacks” because “the military needs more of a brute force approach that allows it to get at a thousand targets as quickly as possible.”

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