Eva Bartlett’s recent interview by Ajamu Baraka of the Green Party is being circulated on YouTube by the Hands Off Syria coalition. How shall we politically describe that coalition without resorting to sarcasm & ridicule when its members took a whirlwind tour to Syria guided by Bartlett & Beeley, met with Assad & came back with glowing reports of his dictatorship? He & Asma Assad are so western & so haute couture that it didn’t seem prudent to ask about the gulag, the mass graves, or the carpet bombing of civilians.

Can we not beat around the bush with false diplomacies & just say outright that the Hands Off Syria coalition is a sorry-assed amalgam of Stalinists who worship Stalin & deny his crimes; David Icke libertarians like Bartlett who believe reptilian Jewish bankers are trying to create global fascism; & dried up little socialist factions who want a regime they can hold on to in a cold cold world & call their very own.

Bartlett & Beeley are feeling the heat of exposure for being toured & feted in Syria always in the company of Assad officials & Syrian army security & want to assert their status as independent journalists rather than on-the-take propagandists. So Baraka, the eminent confusionist & compromiser has become part of a campaign to salvage their unsavory reputations as the Ann Coulter & Leni Riefenstahl of the Assad regime. Bartlett told Baraka we are not hearing Syrian voices in this debate without mentioning that her primary mission has been to vilify & discredit them all as “head-choppers.”

It took a while to figure out why Icke & his two disciples would get so actively involved in Syrian politics along with fascist groups from around the world & supremacists like David Duke of the KKK. If took some study to understand why Islamophobic hating & hysteria combined with pernicious anti-Semitic currents in the vitriolic writings of Assadists. But if one examines the history of persecution against Jews under the rule of Hafez Al-Assad one can see the pole of attraction for fascists & their libertarian allies.

Jews under both Assads were massively discriminated against & not allowed to travel outside the country; they were treated the same as in Russia under Stalin. In 1992, when the senior Assad allowed them exit visas, 4,500 of them fled to other countries. As of November 2015 only 18 Jews remained in Syria though there are no estimates of how many remain in Assad’s gulag.

For libertarians who accept & do not oppose capitalism & who see reptilian Jewish bankers as the root of all evil in the world, Syria must seem the ideal launching pad for their grotesque dystopia of a society rid of all Jews, all Muslims, & let’s be frank, all dark-skinned people. That’s what makes the political views of Ajamu Baraka on Syria not just odious but pathetic.

Stay away from the Hands Off Syria coalition which promotes Islamophobia & anti-Semitism in its charter. Its members have gone over to the dark side & most will not be coming back.

“60 Minutes” had a segment on the new generation of drone aircraft: the autonomous drone which doesn’t require humans operating what they called the “joy stick.” Dozens are ejected from F-18 fighter jets flying in formation & they swarm together to hunt down their targets. The Pentagon pays $3 billion a year to develop them. They’re scary as hell.

One of the sociopathic officers involved in development said there were ethical questions in unleashing autonomous drones to kill without human guidance. You can’t reason with this kind of crap; it has to be ended.

From Kashmiri Umar Lateef Misgar:

This redacted Russia-hacking report released jointly by the FBI, the NSA and the CIA is more whining than substance. The report, broadly, focuses on how Russian state-funded organizations engaged in propaganda, that could have had some impact on US public opinion. Also, the US intelligence agencies seem to be upset about Putin and his cronies making hyperbolic statements and engaging in political rhetoric vis-à-vis US presidential nominees, which is what every political office-holder across the world basically does.

The only worthy revelation this otherwise disgraceful, borderline comic report makes is that Russian military intelligence might have employed a hacker that goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0 to hack the Democrats & leak the “Podesta emails” that ended up harming the electability of Clinton. Considering the fact that a week before November elections, the FBI itself came out with this statement condemning Hillary for her handling of classified data during the stint as Secretary of State, Guccifer is a mere wheeze.

Also, the thing that really interests me is that if Russia sought to influence US public opinion in favor of Trump, didn’t the plan end in a spectacular failure, considering the fact that Clinton received a lead of almost 3 million in popular vote? Unless US public opinion, explicitly, means electoral college and swing states, isn’t this report, just a tiny bit, too light-headed to bring US and Russia head-to-head? Keeping in mind John McCain recently called this “an act of war”, doesn’t American public and the whole world deserve more concrete evidence before we all are plunged into a nuclear holocaust?

So glad so many are up-in-arms about the CIA maligning Putin, the former KGB agent. Myself, I don’t give a rat’s ass. They’re all hacking & spying on each other because that’s how capitalism operates: in competition. There are more important things to worry about than if Putin the war criminal gets a bad rap for hacking. What he’s doing in Syria is far worse.

This year, Reporters Without Borders ranked Russia 148 out of 180 countries in press freedom. It’s considered one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists & also one of the worst at investigating & prosecuting the assailants. Since Putin took over in 2000 there have been 98 journalists murdered & only 36 trials.

Under Putin, most electronic, regional, & national press in Russia has been taken over by state agencies & the Kremlin has expanded its global reach through cable, satellite, & the internet. RT is read & viewed by millions around the world in several languages along with Sputnik News & Strategic Culture.

Those making the big stink about Putin getting shafted are those who use Russian media as their go-to source on Syria. They either don’t want the political lies of RT exposed or they’re paranoid in an infantile way about reading a wide range of media & literature.

In the interests of freedom of press, we shouldn’t call for Russian media to be shut down & we should certainly read it even though their influence has been absolutely pernicious on the issue of Syria. But Putin & the gangsters who run Russia can damn well take care of themselves.

PS: As for influencing the election, Russian hacking must have favored Clinton since she won the popular vote but the presidency was handed to Trump instead.

Just when you think Global Research has plumbed the depths of conspiracy-mongering, it’s grand poobah Michel Chossudovsky (otherwise known as Dr. Demento) posts a ten-mile long article that nefarious forces within the US government, including the “Clinton Faction,” are attempting to destabilize the Trump presidency.

While the rest of us are on heavy medications in preparation for the Trump inauguration & think the orange man has done well enough alone to discredit himself, the right-wing libertarians are panicking about impeachment or a coup. Some of us think he’ll just get bored in a while, start bristling against taking orders from the generals & think tanks, & resign.

Even Elton John refused to perform at Trump’s inauguration & he played Arizona during the boycott for immigrant rights & Israel despite the cultural boycott of Israel. Has Global Research less good sense than Elton John? Oh indeed! Much less. And that’s a hell of an indictment.

Message from Kashmir:

(Photo from Live Kashmir News)

It’s regrettable Cindy Sheehan is frittering away her antiwar authority by posting pro-Russian bombing propaganda by Beeley & Bartlett & scurrilous condemnations of Médicins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders written by Assad supporters. One should think twice about vilifying Médicins Sans Frontières before investigating the allegations since they have been on the front lines in the Ebola epidemic, the refugee crises, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, & elsewhere.

Is she at least a little uncomfortable about promoting Russian bombing of civilians as a liberation? Are US bombs the only ones she thinks barbaric? Has she read anything other than Assad propagandists, like the writings & testimonies of Syrian revolutionists both in Syria & among the refugees? Is she willing to discredit herself by siding with war-mongers rooted in Muslim & Jew-hating?

One of the pities of this crazy-pants paranoia that “corporate media” is all deceptions & reading it will rot your brain is that you miss essential news reported by those who often risked & even lost their lives to get it.

Corrupt & oppressive regimes have a different paranoia about those reporters because they kidnap & murder so many, debar & deport so many. The only ones allowed free rein are propagandists being fed “news” by the regimes.

It’s one of the most dangerous & censored occupations in the world. Reporters play an essential role for democracy & those who defame or debase the profession are the real purveyors of fake news & usually defenders of autocracy.

Does media have conservative editorial policies that conflict with reporting? Does the sun rise in the east? Is the pope Catholic? That doesn’t negate for one moment that reporters are doing invaluable & dangerous work to keep us informed. One example alone out of many: Reuters has a series on drug trafficking from China to the Philippines & on Duterte’s death squads. Find any cogent coverage of that by Pepe Escobar & his ilk who think Duterte is unfairly maligned for purposes of regime change?

Civilians in Mosul, Iraq fleeing from bombers & ground fighting between Iraqi & US-coalition forces against ISIS fighters:
This is the model for fighting ‘terrorism’ employed by the US-NATO & Russia & all their allies: carpet bombing cities with hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including elderly, infirm, children, pregnant women.

The problem with this model is that it kills, disables, traumatizes, & displaces tens of thousands more civilians than it does ‘terrorists’ & doesn’t do a damn thing to end terrorism. The civilians don’t feel so liberated so much as they know they’re the targets.

There is another model: take your armies & your bombers & get the hell out. Arm Iraqis & Syrians so they can defend themselves.

The only principled antiwar demands:
–The immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces;
–Stop the bombing;
–Stop supporting dictators & calling it national liberation.

(Photo by Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters)

Two  little sisters in a Gaza winter keeping each other warm.

(Photo thanks to Mohammed E Jaber from 2015)