This builds on something I reported on yesterday: the duly elected president of Donetsk, Aleksandr Zakharchenko may be on the way out. He is currently in Russia, reportedly for a "sit down", presumably with his benefactors in the Russian FSB. What I didn't know until I read this article was that the leader of the "Vostok" Battalion, Aleksandr Khodakovsky could be Zakharchenko's replacement.
What is most interesting is how this times with articles I have written over the nexus of Ukrainian and Russian organized crime in smuggling in western Ukraine and the Donbas area. Several incidents point to that nexus with organized crime, and with Khodakovsky as well.
Russian journalist Pavel Kanygin calls them “Donbosses” – the Kremlin-backed militant leaders of the so-called ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ whose leadership of “terrorists” (his word) armed and funded from Moscow has enabled them to amass millions.
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#2
We gave the Iranians everything but the keys to our nuke arsenal and maybe those too. We don't really know about the secret side deals. If the Iranians reject the deal, it might be the best thing that could happen to the deal from the standpoint of the West.
#6
Their ultimate goal is official in Iran. Israel seems to understand their goal. It's just that others in the West seem to want to play ostrich with the mad mullahs.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] ISIS' activity in Sirte and Sinai is illustrative of a strategy by ISIS to create two centers of power not only to destabilize Libya and Egypt but neighboring countries from West Africa to Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... . These two wings of the caliphate need to be recognized for what they are: A strategic and tactical pincher move to "pop" Egypt and spread ISIS' deviant ideology across North Africa. ISIS is also looking at the outer edge of the caliphate's appendages to form the space necessary to send more fighters from the Caliphates core in the Levant to Libya and Egypt.
ISIS was displaced in Derna by Majlis Shura Al-Mujahideen which is an al-Qaeda affiliate. But the defeat didn't matter because ISIS is pliable. ISIS is able to fill the gaps in Libya and choose Sirte as its next stronghold because of its strategic location.
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Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2015 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State
#1
the root festering cause is sharia. Islam needs to be remade across the middle east as a secular religion not a system of politics and law.
Our rulers have fallen into the trap of helping regional "allies" who support sharia and export it, to fight IS.
Wrong move.
The correct move is to let all nations/groups that support Sharia suffer - they are just as much our enemy. Saudi is just as much an enemy as IS.
Only provide support to groups that renounce sharia in favour of secular democracy. Even if that means IS gain control of all ground. Just ensure safe passage of refugees all of whom must renounce sharia. Once the lines are clear between those that support Sharia and those that do not, turn the Sharia territory into trinitite. Repatriate refugees. Game over.
#2
Yesterday was the anniversary of Eisenhower's signing of the Communist Control Act in 1954--it outlawed communism in the U.S. (Not sure what happened to the enforcement of that law over the years. Probably, in as much need today for such a law as then.) A law is needed today; an anti-Sharia law with active enforcement. Sharia law would be outlawed in the U.S.--in other countries as well. Presently, we don't have the political will in the U.S. to spearhead such an effort. We are currently in the "denial stage" for this disease.
#3
TOTALLY AGREE John QC. Got it in one. People might be Maoists or Leninists or Stalinists - but in 1950 those categories were all Communists and a grave threat to freedom. We legislated and booted them out.
Now, you might be IS or Boko Haram or Milf or Al Qaeda or Saudi Arabia - but you are all promoters and practitioners of Sharia.
Sharia needs to be outlawed. The Caliphate declared enemy and Sharia the ideology. Lock them up for treason.
Secular Muslims are just fine so long as they renounce Sharia and reject it utterly, like Dr Taj Hargey.
#4
We have laws in the US that states and cities choose not to enforce so I'm doubtful an anti-sharia law would work.
Personally the west should (a) protect the Kurds but allow everyone else in the region fight to the last man (b) push for fracking to ensure the oil economy doesn't tank during all that wary (c) convince Europe to recolonize the area under the auspicious of the UN. They can then start deporting people from Europe back to the middle east.
Either that or drop a moab on Mecca but that might be a bit extreme.
[WAPO] If you want to shut down a conversation about race, just say the word "reparations." Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago; only 60 percent think the government should make cash payments to descendants of slaves. White Americans, on the other hand, have reached a consensus: In a YouGov poll taken shortly after the Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates's viral feature, "The Case for Reparations," 94 percent were opposed.
Yet a year of protests over disparate law enforcement practices, a decade of particularly sharp income inequality and centuries of imparity in America show that racial reconciliation is impossible without some kind of broad-based, systemic reparations. Recognizing the original sin is simply not enough; we must also make moral and material amends for our nation's treatment of African American citizens. But if a pecuniary answer can't fix the structural disadvantage -- and it can't -- what can?
Weighted voting.
Thanks to a compromise between Southern slaveholders who wanted enslaved blacks counted in the population, for the sake of boosting Southern congressional representation, and Northern whites who didn't, the framers enshrined the three-fifths clause in the Constitution. This agreement set the census value of a slave as 60 percent of the value of a free person. Even after the 13th Amendment neutralized the political (and moral) compromise by abolishing slavery, Jim Crow laws, which contravened the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equality, stopped blacks from voting. The just answer today is to invert that ratio. If black Americans were once counted as three-fifths of a person, let each African American voter now count as five-thirds.
Reparations in America have come to mean "free" money, so any serious discussion about them also mandates a discussion of how much -- an exercise doomed to failure. Other ways of imagining reparations (as the spilled blood of more than half a million Union soldiers during the Civil War; as affirmative action in universities and workplaces; as subsidized education) don't involve cash payments, but they also don't do enough to combat the structural disadvantages black Americans face -- disadvantages that have gone largely unaddressed by our legislative and executive branches. Author's Website found here. He appears to have a rather singular focus.
#10
Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago
How about compensation to everyone else for all the disproportionate rape, murder, robbery, et al committed by one community against all today? If you can hold one group accountable for the acts of a few, why not others?
BTW, the northern states were 'free' without 'sin' at the beginning, including those that were to be added to the union from the Northwest Territory from which that peculiar institution had already been banned (well before the British or French started to seriously talk about ending the practice).
#13
Reparations? Hell no. This is ridiculous. How much has been paid already to people who were never slaves? Anyone who would be required to pay would become slaves of the government. Is the North going to be required to pay? I thought they emancipated the slaves when Lincoln issued his executive order, the Emancipation Proclamation. Is the South going to have to pay? They have already paid plenty. So I'd say STFU and get a job and quit bilking the rest of us of hard-earned boodle-
-this is basically stealing. Who comes up with this shit?
#14
I say let the white people who simply can't live with their guilt over the distant past contribute their votes to blacks. Say, provide a box on the ballot to effect that the next black voter gets my vote too. That way both groups get what they want, yet the overall vote is unaffected.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
