Sarin is made by combining the fluorine in sodium fluoride with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and phosphorous. It is considered one of the world’s most dangerous chemical warfare agents. It disrupts the nervous system, over-stimulating muscles and vital organs. It is more than 500 times as toxic as cyanide. It can be inhaled as a gas or absorbed through the skin. In high doses, sarin suffocates its victims by paralyzing the muscles around their lungs, and one drop can kill in minutes.

The sodium fluoride was supplied to Syria by British firms, according to The Mail on Sunday:

British companies sold chemicals to Syria that could have been used to produce the deadly nerve agent that killed 1,400 people …

Between July 2004 and May 2010 the Government issued five export licences to two companies, allowing them to sell Syria sodium fluoride, which is used to make sarin.

The Government last night admitted for the first time that the chemical was delivered to Syria – a clear breach of international protocol on the trade of dangerous substances that has been condemned as ‘grossly irresponsible’.

The sales were made at a time when President Bashar Assad was strongly suspected to be stockpiling the chemical weapons that have caused an international crisis.

The UK firms delivered sodium fluoride to a Syrian cosmetics company for what they claim were legitimate purposes. But intelligence experts believe President Assad’s regime uses such companies to divert chemicals into its weapons programme.

Thomas Docherty MP, a member of the Commons Arms Export Controls Committee, said: ‘These are very disturbing revelations uncovered by The Mail on Sunday regarding the provision of sodium fluoride to Syria. At no time should we have allowed President Assad’s regime to get its hands on this substance. Previously we thought that while export licences had been granted, no chemicals were actually delivered. Now we know that in the build-up to the Syrian civil war, UK companies – with the backing of our Government – were supplying this potentially lethal substance. While the last export licence was issued in May 2010, these licences are obtained prior to manufacture and the industry standard is for four to five months to pass before the chemicals are delivered. So we are looking at late 2010 for the British supplies of sodium fluoride reaching Syria. The Government has some very serious questions to answer.” …

Last night the BIS [Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] refused to answer questions regarding how much sodium fluoride was bought and sold – or which companies were involved.

Intelligence expert Richard Kemp … said last night: “President Assad would undoubtedly have diverted legitimately exported supplies of sodium fluoride in order to make chemical weapons. He would have absolutely no qualms about doing this, and his practice was well known to British diplomats and our intelligence agencies. In this light, it is grossly irresponsible of BIS to have approved these licences from 2004 to 2010.”

Scientists at the UK’s military research laboratory at Porton Down proved that sarin was used in the chemical attack on August 21 after testing items of clothing recovered from the scene.

The US says the attack, near Damascus, killed 1,429 people, including 426 children.

We don’t trust the figures, given out by Secretary of State John Kerry, but we do believe people in Syria were gassed with sarin.

And yesterday, EU officials meeting in Lithuania announced that they are convinced that the chemical attack was the work of President Assad’s forces rather than any opposition fighters.

We wouldn’t trust them either.

Last night a senior scientist condemned the sale, as Syria is one of just five countries to have refused to sign protocols against the use of chemical weapons. The other nations not to have signed up to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) accords are North Korea, South Sudan, Egypt and Angola.

Britain has done this before. According to the report it sold fluoride to Saddam Hussein, through intermediaries, and Saddam Hussein made the lethal gas out of it with which he massacred his people.

Last night a BIS spokesman said: ‘The five licences were granted to two UK exporters. We cannot publish their names for reasons of commercial confidentiality. The end users were two Syrian commercial companies. The quantities of sodium fluoride involved were commensurate with the stated end use in the production of cosmetics and there was no reason to link them with Syria’s chemical weapons programme. This remains the case.”

But remember – BIS is a British Government agency.

It is also worth noting, we think, that sarin gas is easy to manufacture.

Which means that if Assad hands over his stock of it into something vaguely described as “international safekeeping”, it will make the world not a jot safer.

Assad can make it again. British firms can find a way of getting sodium fluoride to him again (and we suspect they probably will).

Any nation intent on making it can make it.

And what is there to deter them? Barack Obama’s incoherent speeches?

If this is true (and though DebkaFile is not always entirely reliable, it is very unlikely to be entirely wrong), it is the worst development yet to come out of the Syria brouhaha.

The new Iranian president Hassan Rouhani announced Tuesday that the coming meeting of the General Assembly opening in New York later this month “may prove the perfect setting to reignite talks about the nation’s nuclear program.“

The US Treasury Department accordingly lifted a string of sanctions [against Iran] restricting humanitarian and athletic exchanges between US and Iranian NGOs and environmental projects, as a counter-gesture of good will. …

That same day, the Iranian president declared his country would not give up “one iota of its nuclear capabilities.” …

The secret exchange of messages between Washington, Tehran, Moscow and Damascus focused first on a Russian pledge to bring Assad’s chemical arsenal under international control … This was followed by Tehran consenting to engage in direct dialogue with Washington when the next UN General Assembly session opens in New York on September 23. …

Our Iranian sources report that Tehran was in on all stages of the discreet Obama-Putin discussions on Syria: High-ranking Iranian officials were present in Damascus and Moscow throughout, and points of agreement were brought to Tehran for approval.

“Points of agreement were brought to Tehran for approval”. Ponder that.

*

On the same topic of Obama’s cluelessness, fumbling and failure over Syria and the Middle East generally, we reproduce here our Facebook summary of an IBD editorial:

Russia is filling the U.S. power vacuum on its way back to superpower status. Rather than impale his enemies on stakes like his gruesome medieval namesake, Vlad Putin prefers ordering radioactive isotopes to be dropped in their tea, which is how exiled Russian journalist/activist Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in 2006. It should be no surprise that such a man, while touting his new breakthrough for Mideast peace, is already sending new conventional weapons to Syria. Israel’s Channel 2 reports that parts for tanks are already on their way from Russia for Assad’s forces as they fight the nation’s rebels, and that Syria’s order of 24 MiG-29 fighter jets, postponed by Moscow, may be back in the offing. President Assad without chemical weapons might just end up more powerful than he was with them. As Charles Krauthammer points out, the upshot is “the retaining in power of Assad, and of the Iran/Hezbollah/Assad/Russian axis dominating the region.” But the more distressing aspect to what becomes a sorrier episode with each passing day is the inexcusable transfer of geopolitical prestige from America to Putin’s Russia. Obama thinks his sometime pal Vladimir has just saved him from becoming a lame duck president for three years. But in fact Obama has, thanks to Putin, just ruined the American position in the Middle East, our patrimony of the last seven decades.

Until the end of World War I, the states of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan did not exist. The territory they now cover had been part of the Empire of the Ottoman Turks for some 400 years. The names Syria and Mesopotamia designated Middle Eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire, roughly where Syria and Iraq are now.

In World War I the Turks were allies of Germany. The Arabs were loyal to their Ottoman overlords, and were also on Germany’s side.

But the British incited sedition among some of them, bribing a man in high religious office to head a rebellion. The inducement they offered him was power and glory: rule of an Arab independency of undefined dimensions.

The man was Hussein Ibn Ali, of the clan of the Hashemites and the tribe of the Quraish, Sharif of the Holy City of Mecca, putatively a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

The British gave him arms, supplies, subsidies and advisers. When he asked also for a firm definition of his dream-kingdom, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, sent him a “clarification” in a letter dated 24 October 1915, in which he made it clear that he could not make it clear. The British, he explained, could not promise territory to Hussein which the French might claim, and they did not know what the French might claim.

In 1916 the British and French agreed, in a secret document known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, on how they would divide up the territory between them once they had conquered it from the Turks. It was against the spirit of the times, when high principles were asserted against the old ideas of empire; principles which President Wilson of the United States set out in 14 points and became enshrined on the Covenant of the League of Nations. The new ideal was that never again would great powers impose their will on smaller nations.

In 1918, the British made another promise to the Arabs. It is known as The Declaration to the Seven. The “Seven” were from the Syrian region. They went to Cairo to ask the British what their intentions were in the Middle East. They were given a pledge that Britain would recognize “the complete and sovereign independence of any Arab area emancipated from Turkish control by the Arabs themselves”. It was an uncharacteristically precise promise.

It prompted the self-dramatizing Englishman, Colonel T.E.Lawrence, who had a highly romantic view of the Arabs (a view that has polluted the atmosphere of the  British Foreign Office ever since), to exert himself to lead Hussein’s forces to a decisive victory. He marched them to Damascus, but the Australian Light Horse Brigade got there first, and took the city from the Turks. Lawrence persuaded the British to pretend that his Arabs had conquered the city. So the British ordered the Australians to drift out and let the Arabs march in. This set a really bad precedent by which the Arabs expected always to have a fictional version of reality replace any facts on the ground which inconvenienced them. It also gave the Arabs as a whole a false understanding of their own military power and achievements. (If they had beaten the mighty Turks at Damascus, how could they not be victorious against the new little Jewish state of Israel in 1948?)

When the British, French, and Americans won the Second World War, the British set about fulfilling – more or less –  their promise to Hussein.

Hussein himself already ruled the Hejaz. His son Ali was his heir to that kingdom. (They were, however, to lose it in 1924,when Abdul Aziz al Saud conquered it. Saud was to join the Hejaz and the Nejd together and found a new state, Saudi Arabia, named after himself, in 1932.) But new kingdoms were created by the British for Hussein’s other sons, Abdullah and Faisal. They were to be called Syria and Iraq.

They made Faisal King of of the new state of Syria, and proposed to put Abdullah on the throne of a new state of Iraq. 

Faisal ruled Syria only from March to April, 1920. The French knocked him off his throne and threw him out of the country, whose destiny they claimed was rightfully in their hands. (The French were granted mandates over Syria and Lebanon.)

The British had to find another throne for Faisal, so they made him King of Iraq instead of his brother, and then considered what they could for Abdullah.

What remained in their power to give away – or so they made out – was an area of the Ottoman Empire to which the ancient Romans had given the name Palestine when it was still part of their empire. In July 1922, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate (also agreed on at the San Remo peace conference in 1920) over the Palestine region. The British pleaded that they needed it in order to carry out a promise they had made, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to let the region become a National Home for the Jews. According to the terms of the Mandate they were  to “settle Jews closely on the land”. But when they were confronted by the problem of Abdullah being kingdom-less, they found that there was no need to let Jews settle closely on all the land. So they presented three-quarters of it, stretching eastward from the River Jordan to a chosen line in the desert, to Abdullah and called it the Emirate of Transjordan.

All the newly created Arab states fell short of Arab dreams. One was to flourish fairly well as a monarchy: the Emirate of Transjordan renamed itself the Kingdom of Jordan in 1949, when the Arab armies had failed to crush the new state of Israel, but the Transjordanian forces – known as the Arab Legion, under the able command of a British officer, John Bagot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha – had advanced across the River Jordan and taken control of what has ever since been called the “West Bank”. (Israel conquered it in its defensive war of 1968.)

The French held a mandate over Syria until July 1941. In September 1936,  a treaty of independence was  negotiated, but the French Legislature would not ratify it. Only when the British and Free French beat the forces of Vichy France in Syria and Lebanon in the Second World War, did Syria become an independent republic. But coups and attempted coups followed hot on each other, and the state was extremely unstable.

The Kingdom of Iraq also had a history of instability with numerous uprisings, massacres and assassinations. In 1958 the monarchy came to an end. The king, Faisal II, was eleven years old. His uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was  regent. He was an ambitious man. He had plans to dominate an Arab unity embracing Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait. In February 1958 he achieved a union between Iraq and Jordan, the two remaining Hashemite kingdoms. This was intolerable to the president of Egypt, Jamal Abd al-Nasser, who had just created a union of Egypt and Syria in the same  month. The union of Egypt and Syria under Nasser’s domination was intolerable to Abd al-Ilah.

Nasser had nationalized the Suez canal. Britain and France, who were joint shareholders in the Canal, lost their ownership of it. Nasser closed it to Israeli shipping. Israel saw this as a cause for war. Britain and France arranged with Israel that Israeli forces would strike into the Sinai on 29 October 1956, and they would invade Egypt on the pretext of restoring peace between the belligerents. President Eisenhower – unwisely – put a stop to the invasion when it had only just begun. America’s intervention allowed Nasser to pretend that he had won a victory, and felt encouraged to pursue his pan-Arab dream.

On February 1 1958, the union of Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic (UAR) came into being, with Cairo as its capital and Nasser as its president. Yemen was added a month later to form a confederation called the United Arab States.

Nasser’s agents and sympathizers went to work throughout the Middle East to spread his national socialist ideology. In Baghdad officers sympathetic to “Nasserism”  plotted the destruction of the Iraqi monarchy. In 1958, under pro-Nasserite leadership, a contingent of Iraqi troops despatched by the Regent  to quell a pro-Nasser uprising and civil war in Lebanon (actually put down by US forces) turned instead on their own ruling house. At dawn on 14 July 1958, the boy-king Faisal was murdered, along with his grandmother, his aunt, and others in the palace, including a helpless harmless orphan boy who lived with them.

Abd al-Ilah was dragged through the streets of Baghdad tied with ropes to the back of a truck, then – whether still alive or not when the tuck stopped – his body was dismembered with axes and his limbs and head tossed about by the hysterical mob. His trunk was hung from a balcony and chunks of its flesh were sliced off and thrown to the crowd below. The Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape, but he was caught and killed, and his body flung down on a busy street to be driven over, squashed and broken by the cars full of exulting motorists. His successor too was murdered after five years in power, and his body was fed to dogs.

In 1961, Syria revolted against Egypt’s domination and reasserted its independence. So the UAE was dissolved, and Yemen released. Hafez Assad became president of Syria in 1971. Under his dictatorship, and after him the dictatorship of his son Bashar Assad, rebellion has been put down with ruthless massacres.

Or not put down, as is the case now that civil war rages; or war waged by numerous militias and terrorist groups against the forces of the state. There is no reason to expect a peaceful or stable Syria to emerge out of the chaos, whether Great Powers intervene or not. The Syrians have no precedent for peace and stability in their young unhappy country. 

 

Jillian Becker  September 9, 2013

“Gentlemen, these are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I’ve got others.”

The origin of those immortal words is disputed, but it’s the motto inscribed on the heart of every political turncoat.

We take the following extracts from that valuable resource, Discover the Networks.

They are about John Kerry, who married the widow of Republican Senator H. John Heinz III. (She spends his colossal fortune lavishly on far Left causes – one of them being John Kerry.)

On August 30 [2013],  Obama dispatched Secretary of State Kerry to make a passionate speech in support of a swift U.S. response to Syria’s “moral obscenity”. In that speech, Kerry called Assad “a thug and a murderer” and held him accountable for the 1,429 people who allegedly had died from the recent chemical attack. “My friends,” Kerry added, “it matters here if nothing is done. It matters if the world speaks out in condemnation and then nothing happens.”

A passionate speech indeed on the moral necessity of this foreign intervention.

Just hours after Kerry’s speech, however, Obama …  decided to reverse course. The following day, the President announced that he would seek congressional approval before taking any military action. Kerry, for his part, praised this decision.

Praised it, praised it. He had been made to look the fool he is, but he was unaware of that it seems. He has a long history of turning with the political winds of the Left.

Forty years ago he made passionate speeches on the immorality of foreign interventions.

In a 1971 interview with William F. Buckley, Kerry delivered this broadside against American arrogance and “moralism”:

I don’t think that the United States, and I think this is the biggest problem about Vietnam, can necessarily apply moral, moralisms to its commitments around the world.And I think this is one of the great fallacies of our foreign policy at the present moment. Interventionism as well as globalism both stem from the same kind of moralism. And in a certain sense I think that moralism can be very defeating for the United States in its undertakings. It gets us into a sort of messianic enterprise, whereby we have this impression that somehow we can go out  and touch these other countries and change them. …

Okay, that was years and years ago. A man can change his mind as he grows older. It’s only natural that he should. Mature thoughts are better than those of callow youth.

So let’s set aside for the moment what he said about America’s “immoral” engagement in the Vietnam war.

Let’s come on to recent history, current events, Syria in particular. It is important to remember that Syria under the Ba’athist dictators, Bashar and his father Hafez Assad, has always been a harsh dictatorship. This is from another source.*

In November 1976, [Yasser] Arafat supplied  arms to the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian city of Hama. They rose in rebellion in February 1982. … President Assad … put down the Hama rebellion with the utmost ruthlessness. [His brother] Rif’at Assad’s storm troopers massacred the people of the town in vast numbers.  … A report issued by Amnesty International, in September 1983, reckoned that the number of of citizens killed may have been as high as 25,000: investigators received unverified information that cyanide gas had been piped into the buildings through rubber hoses to kill all inhabaitants indiscriminately. Other reports tell of people being lined up in the streets and shot … Part of the city, the fourth biggest in Syria, was razed by tanks and artillery.

Now to return to Discover the Networks:

Since the early 2000s, Kerry has been the federal government’s highest-ranking apologist for Syrian President Bashar Assad. Indeed it was Kerry who made numerous efforts to undermine the Bush administration’s attempt to isolate the Syrian dictator after its courtship of him ended in failure in 2003; after Bush repeatedly accused Syria of supporting terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere; and after the United States withdrew its ambassador to Syria following the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former premier Rafiq Hariri in a car bombing most likely orchestrated by the Assad regime.

In February 2009, just days after Barack Obama’s inauguration, Kerry was sent to Syria as part of a policy review by an Obama administration looking to establish new relationships with countries the Bush administration had considered hostile. (This was the first of five trips Kerry would make to Syria between 2009 and 2011.)

During the February 2009 trip, Kerry listened to Bashar Assad advise him that Washington must “move away from a policy based on dictating decisions,” and that future relations between the U.S. and Syria should be based on a “proper understanding” by Washington of Middle East issues and interests. In return, Kerry used the occasion to bash the former administration. “Unlike the Bush administration that believed you could simply tell people what to do and walk away and wait for them to do it, we believe you have to engage in a discussion,” he said. “I believe very deeply [haha- ed.] that this is an important moment of change, a moment of potential transformation, not just in the relationship between the United States and Syria but in the relationship of the region.” Emphasizing his belief that Assad would aid the so-called peace process in the Middle East, Kerry stated that “Syria could be, in fact, very helpful in helping to bring about a unity government” between Fatah and Hamas.

A year later, Kerry, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sat down once again with Assad. “Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,” said the senator in April 2010. “Both the United States and Syria have a very deep interest … in having a very frank exchange on any differences [and] agreements that we have about the possibilities of peace in this region.” Kerry added that the Obama administration’s effort to appoint the first U.S. ambassador to Damascus in five years was “evidence that engagement with Syria is a priority at the highest levels of our government.” …

In November 2010, disclosures of diplomatic cables by the WikiLeaks website revealed that Kerry had been busy undermining Israel as well: He had told leaders in Qatar that the Golan Heights should be returned to Syria, and that the capital of a Palestinian state should be established in East Jerusalem, as part of the “peace process.”

Some honest broker he in the endless pointless “peace process”!

By March 2011, as the anti-government protests in the Middle East begin to include Syria, France and the U.S. nixed another trip by Kerry to Damascus, concerned that it would signal “Western weakness”.  That decision may have been precipitated by an appearance Kerry had made before a think tank audience twelve days earlier, where he:

• contended that the United States had a crucial role to play in facilitating the “democratic transitions” in the Middle East, including Egypt;

• asserted that “the people of Egypt liberated themselves in eighteen days without a single IED or suicide bomb”;

• praised President Assad for having been “very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had”; and

• predicted that “Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.”

Oh, what a man of peace he was. For a while. And so convinced that Bashar Assad was too. That is, until the “moral obscenity” Assad committed – according to Obama and Kerry – in August 2013. What a shock it must have been to poor John! However could he have been so mistaken in his judgment? Not once, not twice, but always.

 

* From The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization by Jillian Becker, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1984, p.224

“Need a country? Take ours. It’s okay, we’re dying anyway.”

Who can help laughing? Though of course it’s really very sad when a whole nation goes mad. Even if it’s the Swedes.

We quote from an hilarious – but true – article by that admirable writer on Scandinavian scandals, Bruce Bawer:

Another week, another jaw-dropping development in Sweden. A couple of weeks ago it was the cockamamie “hijab solidarity” campaign, in which non-Muslim women all over the country donned head coverings in tribute to a Muslim woman who claimed a man had yanked hers off. This week, the eyebrow-raising news is that Sweden is offering instant permanent residency to any and all Syrian refugees who apply. These newly minted residents, moreover, will be entitled to bring over their spouses and kids. The reasoning behind this new policy is that the situation in Syria is extremely dangerous right now and not likely to improve anytime soon. …

Before this new policy was announced, the number of Syrians seeking asylum in Sweden was over 1000 a month. But now? The sky’s the limit. Think about it: Syria’s population is 22.5 million, of which about 5000 are fleeing the country every day. More than two million Syrians have fled their country since the civil war began, and there’s no sign of that number abating. As for Sweden, its population is 9.5 million, of which about 1.5 million are foreign-born and about 2.5 million have foreign backgrounds. Earlier this year, Swedish Migration Minister Tobias Billström called current immigration levels “unsustainable” – only to be quickly shut down by Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag, who assured all and sundry that Sweden had no plans to tighten its immigration rules.

What Syrian wouldn’t take Sweden up on such an offer? It means not only a residency card but also an elaborate benefits package including free money, housing, health care, day care – you name it.

Before this week Sweden’s immigration policy was already suicidal; it’s hard not to see the new policy as an effort to turn slow-motion self-slaughter into something more like a leap off a cliff. The sheer numbers aside, how many of the newcomers will be members of Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on? …

It will not be long before civil war will break out between the Sunnis and Shias. Maybe the last of the Swedes will realize what they’ve done just before their nation becomes extinct as collateral damage. But will they care? Won’t they die with their hearts full of joy, and their eyes full of tears of gratification, as they watch those wonderful Syrians doing their thing as comfortably and confidently as if they were still at home?

When I read about the new policy, my first thought was that surely there must be somebody in Sweden who’s standing up and shouting: “Stop! Are we all crazy?” So I looked at the editorial pages of a few Swedish newspapers. Nope. The editors of Aftonbladet, for example, complained that Sweden hadn’t gone far enough, and lamented the fact that the rest of Europe wasn’t joining in. Noting that European countries have taken in about 40,000 Syrians, the editors complained that this wasn’t nearly sufficient. “We have built,” they complained, “a ‘Fortress Europe’.”

Yes, “Fortress Europe.” Pause for a moment to take that one in. Over the last couple of generations, Western Europe has welcomed immigrants from the Muslim world on a scale such as the world has never seen. The continent has been transformed in ways that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Yet in the view of Aftonbladet‘s editors – and, rest assured, of the Swedish establishment generally – Europe has behaved like a fortress. Summed up in these two words, these twin trochees – “Fortress Europe” – is the very madness of Sweden.

Aftonbladet‘s editors called on Sweden to pressure other EU countries to copy the new policy, and proposed that it make a more active effort to bring Syrians to its shores, namely by plucking them up at refugee camps in Syria and shipping them to Sweden from there. …

Their counterparts at Sydsvenskan concurred, calling on other EU countries to follow Sweden’s lead. Dagen‘s editors, calling the new policy an “excellent decision,” hoped it would set a good example for other countries and that “generosity” would continue to characterize Sweden’s approach to the refugee issue. And at Dagens Nyheter, columnist Eric Helmerson also gave the new policy a thumbs-up. “When your neighbors’ house is on fire,” he argued, “you open your door to them.” He, too, lamented the lack of “solidarity” (as he put it) that other EU members were exhibiting: “It’s scandalous that so many wealthy, peaceful countries are looking away from people in the most severe distress.” He singled out for special criticism certain Swedish municipalities that have hesitated to take in more refugees – partly because of the high cost of maintaining refugees, and partly because of the crime and other social problems that they bring with them. While acknowledging that such difficulties exist, Helmerson insisted that “it is deeply cynical to assume that the problems are insoluble and thus shirk responsibility and compassion.”

Ah, compassion. It ‘s what Socialism is supposed to be all about.

Columnist Ivar Arpi at Svenska Dagbladet joined in the applause for the new policy, calling it “irreproachable.” Striking an unexpected realistic note, however, he pointed out that Sweden’s municipalities just don’t have enough housing or the financial resources to take care of newcomers properly. Plus a fact, the Swedish job market is just plain terrible, with sky-high levels of unemployment, especially among the foreign-born.

How, then, does Sweden expect to pay to house and feed all these refugees? An article that appeared a couple of weeks ago provided an answer. The headline was blunt: “Malmö takes from the old and the sick and gives to immigrants.” The thrust of the report was that the city of Malmö, desperate to find a way to cover its ever-rising expenditures on immigrants (it spends $15 million a year on mother-tongue schooling alone), has proposed severe cuts in outlays for sick and elderly native Swedes.

What? Where’s compassion gone? We could swear it was here a moment ago!

Remember that we’re talking here about a country where the chief justification for high taxes is a generous welfare system that provides a safety net for the unemployed, the ill, and the elderly. Swedes are brought up to view themselves as partners in a covenant with the state: pay your way when you’re able to, and you’ll be taken care of when and if you aren’t. Yet in Malmö, thanks to the soaring costs associated with immigration, the local government can no longer keep its end of the deal.

Consequently, it has proposed that nursing-home fees be raised significantly; that free meals in nursing homes be phased out, forcing residents to cover their own food costs; that senior citizens who until now have been receiving free home care be forced to pay for it; that the elderly poor, who now receive discounts on various health-care services based on their income, be compelled to shell out the full price; and that old people who aren’t ambulatory, and thus can’t make it to a clinic, be charged extra for house calls. As for old people who simply don’t have the money to pay for food, shelter, or vital medical treatment, they’ll be forced to “abase themselves before municipal officials by asking to be exempt from the fees.”

Meanwhile, the Swedish government has ordered that illegal immigrants be given free medical and dental care.

Seen from abroad, it’s very clear where all this is leading. Why can’t the Swedes see it themselves?

In the religion of the  Norsemen, unlike most others, Evil was predicted to win the battle that ends the world.

The Norse Prophecies derive from the ancient myth of The Ragnarok which translates, from old Norse to English, roughly as “The Final Destiny of the Gods” or “Twilight of the Gods”. An important part of the Norse Mythological Canon, the Ragnarok describes an epic battle at the end of time or World cycle, between the Gods themselves and between men on the Earth. During the course of events there are a number of various natural disasters, earthquakes and sea surges over the dry land. Mountains topple, the air and the oceans are sprayed with poison, fire and flame ravage the land and then the World is submerged in water. At the end, the World Tree Yggdrasil is destroyed, the Gods Odin, Freya, Loki, Thor etc. are no more and all of humankind perishes also. So the World cycle ends.

The end begins?

We have often wondered how the staffers of the New York Times could stomach the poisonous ideas they swallow, digest, and apparently enjoy.

Now we learn there is something they have gagged on at last: this video. The maidens at The Times have blacked out half of it, being considerate of the public’s susceptibilities. We have seen worse, but apparently The Times staffers have not.

The result of their shock and horror seems to be that, at this late date, they find fault with the jihadist rebels in Syria, although their hero, Barack Obama, is keen on supporting them with American military might.

We have taken the video and text from The Daily Beast:

The raw video was so grisly, and so barbaric, that the New York Times staffers who watched and edited it for online publication were made “physically ill”, according to the newspaper’s spokeswoman. …

The scene of Syrian rebels standing over seven soldiers of the Syrian regular army while the rebel commander recited a bloodthirsty poem — and pointing rifles and a pistol at the heads of their prostrate, shirtless, and badly beaten prisoners — was shocking enough. Times video editors tactfully blackened the screen as the rebels — who, just like the United States government, oppose the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad — began to execute the soldiers; the only indication of the slaughter taking place was a noisy fusillade of 10 seconds in length. Then an image flashed of the broken bodies in a mass grave. …

The video — which the Times reported was obtained a few days ago from “a former rebel who grew disgusted by the killings” and smuggled it out of Syria — is suddenly haunting the Obama administration, and it could not have surfaced at a more inopportune moment. For the past six days, President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and other officials have been waging an all-hands-on-deck public-relations and lobbying campaign to gain congressional authorization next week to punish the Assad regime with a military strike for its [alleged – ed.] illegal use of poison gas against thousands of Syrian civilians, including young children.

The potential U.S. action, probably a cruise-missile attack, is also being marketed as an early step to help the Syrian opposition — an inchoate agglomeration that apparently includes Islamic jihadists, al Qaeda members, and other avowed enemies of America [including the Muslim Brotherhood much beloved by President Obama – ed.] — and ultimately drive Assad from power. But the president’s plan is widely unpopular domestically, and in terms of sheer impact, the Times video is not doing any favors for the campaign to sell it. It hardly matters that the executions reportedly occurred more than a year ago, in the spring of 2012—not this past April, as the Times initially claimed, while offering no explanation for its embarrassing mistake and correction.

“Because the White House and, more broadly, those arguing for direct U.S. military intervention are portraying this as a battle between ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, to put it in crude terms, this video demonstrates that there are bad guys on both sides,” said Ed Husain, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It does make a mockery of Secretary Kerry’s praise on Wednesday [before the House Foreign Affairs Committee] for the Syrian opposition.”

But the brain-challenged Secretary of State John Kerry, who is making Obama’s pitch to Congress and the nation for interference on the rebels’ side, knows of quite another rebel army, having nothing to do with this vile lot, and insists – by implication – that the guys he and the President are supporting would never do anything like that.

Kerry, appearing Thursday night on MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, was at pains  to minimize the video’s influence on the debate in Washington and beyond. “No,” he insisted when Hayes asked if the killers in the video “become, by definition, our allies.” Kerry argued: “In fact, I believe that those men in those videos are disadvantaged by an American response to the chemical-weapons use because it, in fact, empowers the moderate opposition.” Kerry added that “they [the killers in the video and their co-fighters] are not part of the opposition that is being supported by our friends and ourselves”. 

And so does the other war advocate with special mental needs, John McCain:

Similarly, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the leading congressional voice in support of a more robust U.S. military intervention in Syria than even President Obama is proposing, all but ignored the video.

“He hasn’t put a [statement] out on it, except to point out that the moderate opposition and their military council immediately condemned it,” a McCain spokesman emailed me, citing a press release from the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces declaring that “they, and all mainstream opposition groups, condemn in the strongest possible terms any actions that contravene international law. Additionally,” the press release continued, “killing or mistreating captured soldiers, or those who have surrendered, is an affront to the hopes and principles [? -ed.] that fueled the initial popular uprising against the Assad regime.”

Oh yeah! How many people are members of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces? Our guess? Fewer than there are words in their grand-sounding name.

But Husain said the video presents a compelling argument against such reassuring boilerplate. “The implications are that Senator McCain and others leading the charge that the Syrian opposition seeks democracy are mistaken,” he said. “Time and again, opposition fighters have shown callous disregard for human life in the same way as the Assad regime … These images ought to be a wakeup call for those who think Syria is headed for a better future under the rebels.”

No Arab state is headed for a better future. None foreseeable even with that most powerful of telescopes, wishful thinking.

While America contemplates military action against Syrian President Assad, atrocities continue on both sides of the conflict.

Government postal workers being thrown off a building captured by rebel forces

 

Video and text from The Clarion Project

Two boys await execution at the hands of those who
would benefit greatly from Western airstrikes in Syria

Picture and caption from The Religion of Peace

Our view on the pros and cons of a US military attack on Syria is very close to Douglas Murray’s as he expresses it in The Spectator (UK):

For me the conundrum of Syria now comes down to one particular problem. That is one which the House of Commons stumbled over last week and which the US Congress is likely to stumble over in the week ahead. The West has now given ample warning to President Assad of its intention to strike at some point. President Obama has famously drawn a red-line over the use of chemical weapons.

The problem then is this. If any country carries out punitive strikes against the Assad regime they will undoubtedly and rightly be demonstrating the international community’s revulsion over the use of chemical weapons. But if the targets that are hit in the resulting strike are meaningful (government buildings, installations etc) then there is the risk that such an intervention could tip the balance in the Syrian civil war. If that balance is tipped and Assad is severely weakened or even falls as a result then whoever carried out the strikes will be at least partly responsible for what comes next. That is a responsibility which neither America, Britain, France nor any other Western power can handle and it is one which none of us wants.

So – and here is the imponderable – the only purpose of strikes must be to hit targets which are meaningless. … That means something akin to President Clinton’s futile lobbing of missiles at an aspirin factory in Sudan as a response to the 1998 al-Qaeda embassy bombings in Africa. …

I don’t believe that the military should be used for making gestures, but rather to exert power and punish enemies in as meaningful a way as possible.

And the US should only intervene when its own interests are at stake. We want Iran’s nuclear installations to be attacked – in as effective a way as possible.

With the unlimited technological resources at our disposal, we observed and recorded this interchange:

You just gotta do something, B’rack!

But what, Samantha?

Protect the kids, B’rack.

How, Samantha?

Take action, B’rack.

What action?

I dunno. Hit something with something.

I can’t make war on Iraq. I mean … Libya?

Syria.

I can’t do what Bush did.

Do it different.  

What can I do that would be different?

Don’t go it alone.

Did Bush go it alone?

Not really, but we say he did.

So who should I go with?

The British?

They voted not to.

Well, get NATO to do something.

Then it would be like war.

Well, this is war.

I can’t say that. The base wouldn’t like it.

But you can’t lose face. You said you’d do something if Whosit used gas, so you must do something.

Boots on the ground?

Oh no! The base wouldn’t like that.

Bombing?

Nor that.

Drones?

Maybe. But you mustn’t kill anybody.

What then?

I dunno.  Buildings. 

Buildings? With no people in them? Are there some in … where’s it, Syria?

Someone said something about munition stores.

Hit munition stores? With drones?

Just a few.

In and out. A quick dip. Just to show them.

Yes.

That would be okay with the base?

Sure. If it’s quick. In and out. Two three days. At most.

Nobody killed.

Right.

I can do this, Samantha.

Sure you can.

I’ll ask Rashad to ask the King.

The King? Isn’t he dead? 

The King of Saudi Arabia. There’s always a King of Saudi Arabia. … And I’ll ask Valerie.  

And maybe the Pentagon.  

And the UN?

Leave the UN to me.

Do I have to ask Congress?  I hate asking Congress.

You don’t have to ask Congress.

Okay. I’ll do it. Maybe.

Maybe?

I’ll think about it. I’ll give you my answer when I’ve thought about it.

When will you decide?

In two three days. Or weeks. Maybe. 

 

Afternote: Seems B’rack decided not to decide anything himself after all except to let Congress make the decision – and so take the blame for whatever the US then does or doesn’t do.