Job = Just Over Broke
The Economic Collapse
Aug 12, 2014
If you are fortunate enough to have a job in America today, the phrase “just over broke” probably describes you. Yes, there are a handful of jobs that certainly pay very well, but most Americans that work for somebody else are just barely making it from month to month. More than half of all working Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and more than half of all working Americans make less than $30,000 a year. That is an amazing statistic but it is actually true. Once upon a time, anyone that was responsible and that was willing to work hard could get a good job in America. But now those days are long gone. Instead, we live at a time when good jobs are disappearing and when the middle class is getting smaller with each passing year. In some homes, the husband and the wife are both working multiple jobs and they can still barely pay their bills. Something has gone horribly wrong, and yet our leaders just keep telling us how wonderful our economy is.
One of the biggest things that has killed jobs in this country is the fact that the U.S. economy has been steadily merged into the emerging one world economic system over the past several decades. They call it “free trade”, but they never told us that we would be merged into a single global labor pool where we would be competing directly for jobs with workers on the other side of the planet that live in nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.
According to Gallup, only about 1.3 billion people around the world work full-time for an employer at this point.
But overall there are more than 7 billion people.
That means that there are a whole lot of really poor, really desperate people that need to be employed.
This has been wonderful for the big corporations. They can just take jobs away from American workers and give them to people who are willing to work for less than a tenth of what an American worker would make. This has resulted in the systematic deindustrialization of the United States and horrific decline in dozens of formerly great manufacturing cities.
At the same time, we have also been losing millions of middle class jobs to technology. At this point, robots are even starting to replace warehouse workers and fast food employees. As robots become even more advanced and become even cheaper to produce, there will be less jobs available for the rest of us.
And what happens when robots can do everything better than us?
Because there are fewer middle class jobs available, the competition for the remaining jobs has become incredibly intense. In recent years, millions of Americans have been forced to take just about anything that they can get. For those Americans, “just over broke” has become “just trying to survive” as they scratch and claw their way through life.
A recent CNBC article profiled one such individual. His name is Ken Bowman, and his job at a guitar shop just barely enables him to pay his rent and feed himself…
Ken Bowman joins the line for a free lunch in the Youngstown Salvation Army canteen, just like he does every Friday.
Looking younger than his 21 years, his hair dyed jet black and wearing big, battered boots, Bowman plays heavy metal on his cell phone. He chooses a seat at the end of a table and sits hunched over his tray, his blues eyes furtively sweeping the room. The others sit in packs, regulars who’ve formed lunchtime friendships over their burnt coffee and peppered corn, discussing the jobs they once had and the government benefits they no longer get.
Bowman is sensitive to the stigma of accepting handouts like lunch. “[It] doesn’t mean you’re homeless or poor, people have standards but they struggle,” he said, his chin jutting out, his eyes glowering.
After paying his rent, Bowman says his job in a guitar shop leaves him with $50 a month to live on — if he can get shifts. He is one of America’s “underemployed,” a group of as many as 11 million Americans struggling to survive in society’s shadows on wages that put them below the federal poverty line.
There are millions of others out there just like Bowman. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous article, one out of every four part-time workers in America is living below the poverty line. The “working poor” is a phrase that describes a very large segment of the U.S. population today.
And the cold, hard truth of the matter is that most of the country is steadily getting poorer. According to a study recently discussed in the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago. That is a staggering decline in just ten years.
Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to rise. This is something that I have discussed repeatedly, but sometimes a picture can say things far better than any words can.
The photo posted below has been floating around on Twitter. It is of a McDonald’s menu from the 1960s. As you can see, prices have gone up a little bit since then…
Most people think that I am crazy when I tell them that I can remember a cup of coffee being sold for a quarter when I was young. But it is true. Over the long-term, our purchasing power has been systematically destroyed by the insane polices of the Federal Reserve.
Sadly, most Americans don’t understand any of this. They just trust that our leaders actually know what they are doing. Meanwhile, they just keep on struggling to survive in an economic system that is stacked against them.
According to one recent study, 40 percent of all households in the United States are experiencing financial stress right now and the homeownership rate for Americans under the age of 35 is at an all-time low.
In the old days, if you got your education, worked hard and did all the right things, it was just about an automatic ticket to the middle class.
Today it doesn’t work like that.
Instead, more Americans than ever are being forced to become dependent on the government. If you can believe it, Americans received more than 2 trillion dollars in benefits from the federal government last year alone.
So it astounds me whenever I hear anyone say that the economy is in “good shape”.
How can it be in “good shape” when one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections” and there are 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity?
The truth is that we are in the midst of a long-term economic decline that is the result of decades of incredibly foolish decisions.
Until the American people start understanding what has happened to us, they are never going to demand real change that actually accomplishes something.
Oh, Great: Robots Are Set to Conduct National Security Clearance Interviews
by Lucas Cort
Canadian Awareness Network
Jul 28, 2014
Oh, Great: Robots Are Set to Conduct National Security Clearance Interviews
Written by STEPHEN BURANYI
July 22, 2014 // 01:32 PM EST
Advancing a career in the US government might soon require an interview with a computer-generated head who wants to know about that time you took ketamine.
Psychologists at the National Center for Credibility Assessment (NCCA) are developing an interview system that uses a responsive on-screen avatar for the first stage of the national security clearance process.
Initial screening for a variety of government jobs currently requires applicants to fill out a form disclosing past drug use, criminal activity, and mental health issues, which is then reviewed during an interview—with a human.
But a recent NCCA study published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior asserts that not only would a computer-generated interviewer be less “time consuming, labor intensive, and costly to the Federal Government,” people are actually more likely to admit things to the robot.
The study used US Army basic trainees as volunteer subjects for a mock national security clearance interview. The trainees were not told that the questions would be asked by a robot. After being hooked up to electrodes for cardio graphic and electrodermal (heart and skin) responses the volunteers were told that the interview would be with a computer avatar, and were left alone in a chamber with their on-screen interrogator.
The program used for the study was capable of responding to vocal cues and taking multiple conversation paths depending on the subject’s answers. The researchers were hoping to leverage the power of presence: the idea that people recognize another sentient being in the environment, and are more responsive as a result.
The bot is racially ambiguous and looks like a sort of cross between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin. Clean-shaven and all business, the bot asks you to divulge your most embarrassing personal mistakes in the name of national security and trustworthiness.
And apparently these computer-generated heads had a lot of presence. Volunteers in the study were significantly more likely to disclose alcohol use and mental health issues to the avatar than to the questionnaire. Responses for drug use and criminal charges were about the same.
Using the avatar also allowed the researchers to measure pauses in conversation and take advantage of questions that would seem out of place on a paper form. At the end of each interview section the computer-generated interviewer asked the volunteers “if there was anything at all” they wished to discuss—with over 10 percent then responding with more information.
The researchers concluded, in so many words, that national security clearance interviews can totally be outsourced to a computer-generated agent. That’s not an empty recommendation: The NCCA grew out of the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute and is still responsible for “lie detection” training for all branches of government. It’s also tasked with developing new technologies for credibility assessment.
In other words, when “Blade Runner” is an actual job, they will likely be trained at the NCCA headquarters in South Carolina.
The NCCA predicts a bright future for its virtual agents. The study notes that computer-generated interviewers might help mitigate the gender and culture bias that affects human interviewers. It also recommends using avatars with distinctive physical characteristics and “culture-specific utterances.”
The interviewer isn’t quite a sentient AI; it relies on a dialogue tree similar to telephone customer service: tell the computer all the simple things, then press 0 for a human to explain the story behind your streaking arrest.
Still the idea of a computer conducting national security clearance interviews, even with human oversight, is bound be unsettling for some. But depending on the system’s effectiveness and the potential cost savings, we may see national security screening being done by a screen in the very near future.
Read More Here
It’s Official: Being Poor in America Has Been Outlawed
by Joshua Krause
Activist Post
Aug 5, 2014
As they say, you can always judge a society by how they treat their weakest members. So I shudder to think of how future generations will judge our society. We’ve become a nation that discards our poor like they are trash, and anyone who doesn’t “fit in” is segregated from the herd.
The police are now fining homeless folks for any arbitrary offense they can think of, and city councils across the country are making it illegal to sleep in public. They’ve gone so far as to make it illegal to camp, or even sit or lay down in certain public areas. Worst of all, many cities are making it illegal, or prohibitively expensive to give food to the homeless. According to an interview from The Independent, with a former police chief involved in a charity dedicated to feeding the poor:
The homeless are an embarrassment for the town, said Arnold Abbott, a 90-year-old former police chief from Pennsylvania and director of Love Thy Neighbor, an organization that has been feeding homeless here for over 20 years. Five times the city has tried and failed in court to stop him serving meals each Wednesday on the beach beneath the tourist strip.
The town, he said, really wants the homeless to go away. “They would like to put them in a bus and send them to Miami or Palm Beach. It’s very close to ethnic cleansing. But they are not going to succeed.”
Thank God there are still some people willing to do the right thing, even if it means breaking the law.
In other cities, you now need a $500 permit from the health department to give away food, or perhaps you’ll have to spend $800 to rent the park every time you try to hand out food there. On the surface, it’s bad enough that they are making it so difficult to help out those in need, but when you take the homeless out of the equation, it starts to sound really asinine. To the city councils out there that are perpetuating these laws, are you really going to make it illegal for one consenting adult to buy a sandwich, and voluntarily give it away for free to another adult who wants it? When it’s phrased that way, doesn’t it just sound utterly contemptible and insane?
In LA, things may be about to get downright draconian. If this whistleblower is to be trusted, then the city of Los Angeles is preparing to force their homeless population into internment camps. Of course it would never be called that. They would simply be referred to as ‘low cost housing’ or maybe they’ll just call it a homeless shelter, but with the caveat that once you enter, you wouldn’t be allowed to leave. This would probably be disastrous for anyone entering the facility, as many homeless shelters are notoriously awful and dangerous places. After all, if most shelters provided a safe and healthy environment, would there really be that many people on the streets? So they’re going to make a “homeless shelter” that you’re not allowed to leave? I’m sure that place will just be a ray of sunshine won’t it? But as you’ll see next, finding alternatives to a shelter can end disastrously if you have a family.
Last month, a family in Houston had their kids taken away by CPS when it was discovered that the family had been living in a storage unit for the past three years. The family had fallen on hard times after the father had lost his welding job, and after getting a job with maintenance at the storage facility, decided that living in a unit there would be far safer for his family than a homeless shelter. By all appearances, these are otherwise lawful and caring adults just trying to provide the best they can for their family in a difficult economy.
There were no reports of abuse, and the unit had air conditioning and two computers. While it lacked running water, if they’ve lived there for 3 years without anyone getting severely ill, then it’s safe to assume that they’re doing their “business” in a proper bathroom somewhere else. They obviously have permission from the owners of the storage facility to live there, or they would have been kicked out a long time ago. So what’s the problem? What did they do to deserve this?
They happened to be poor, that’s what they did. This is what it means to live in America now. If you fail to achieve a certain income, then you are now at the mercy of the authorities (or God knows who else on the streets). And if you really think about it, if the government is going to treat the poor like this, then there is no reason to have a government in the first place. I thought that the main reason we have a government, is because life without them would be hell. It would be a chaotic place where the weak are indiscriminately killed, or are abused and exploited by the strong. At least that’s what we’ve been told.
If the poor are being treated this way, then our modern society is just as much of a Darwinian struggle as it was for our primitive ancestors. If that’s the case, can we even call what we live under, a government? Keep in mind, I’m not asking the government to step in and help. I’m not asking for them to provide free housing or increase welfare entitlements. I’m asking them to stay out of the way. How could you make it so difficult for private citizens to help each other out?
Perhaps what I said at first was wrong. Maybe our society isn’t so bad. Future generations won’t judge us for how we treat our fellow man. Plenty of private citizens have done their part to help the homeless.
No. They’ll judge our government, for breaking up families, fining people with no money, starving them, and then throwing them into internment camps.
Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personal Twitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger .
Nigeria on Fire
nsnbc international Aug 4, 2014Alexander Mezyaev (SCF) : In July 2014 the activities of Boko Haram – a terrorist group operating in Nigeria – intensified activities on a broader scale. Skirmishes with the government troops turned into real battles. Terrorist acts became much more frequent and the fighting has gone beyond the state borders. The Boko Haram terrorist group appears to become an international organization.
Boko Haram (1) (usually translated as “Western education is a sin”), is a Salafi militant Islamist organization based in northern Nigeria and influenced by Wahhabi movement. (2)
Formally it was founded in 2009 to periodically stage local terrorist acts and attack Christian shrines. With every passing year their activities were becoming more frequent and well-planned encompassing the whole country. The group abruptly intensified actions including the neighboring Cameroon.
This April Chibok kidnapping took place with over 280 schoolgirls snatched by the militants. The group wanted all its members behind bars to be set free. The government refused. Then the action was followed by a string of attacks against populated areas and police stations. Officials and many civilians lost their lives. In June a blast took place in the port of Lagos, the wave of terror hit the oil-rich shores of the Niger River. The end of July was real hot: terrorist acts became a routine matter. On July 27 – Kaduna bombing with the death toll of 50, on July 30 – at least six people have been killed in a suicide bombing at a college in northern Nigeria’s biggest city, Kano. (3) On July 27 Boko Haram militants attacked the northern Cameroon town of Kolofata and seized several people including the wife of Cameroon’s Vice Prime Minister Amadou Ali. The official was taken away from the place by his guards. The mayor and his family were taken hostage. The clashes with the Cameroon army lasted for a few days…
How do the international community, Africa and Nigeria respond to the disastrous unfolding of the events?
First, the United Nations Security Council has started to react. In 2014 the Council’s chairman has made a number of condemning statements. But there has been no resolution and it makes ask questions. In July the names of Boko Haram leaders (especially Abubakar Shekau) were blacklisted under the U.N. al Qaeda sanctions list. It means the United Nations considers Boko Haram to be part of Al Qaeda.
Second, Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger agreed to provide troops in order to stamp out Boko Haram. With each country contributing 700 troops each the force is strong enough. (4) Finally the United States State Department has listed Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization. This decision gives publicity to the group serving as a kind of advertisement to attract more recruits.
The fact that Boko Haram has become an internationally known organization. This fact could be considered from two angles of view.
The internal aspect is related to complicated state system of Nigeria with the population of hundreds of ethnic groups and clans living in 36 states. The structure is the legacy of British rule which had rich experience of drawing dividing (5) and coercively uniting borders to make live together the peoples who had a long history of animosity towards each other. The independent Nigeria has faced the consequences of the British colonial policy a number of times. For instance, Biafra, officially the Republic of Biafra, was a secessionist state in south-eastern Nigeria that existed from 30 May 1967 to 15 January 1970, taking its name from the Bight of Biafra (the Atlantic bay to its south). The inhabitants were mostly the Igbo people who led the secession due to economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria. The creation of the new state that was pushing for recognition was among the causes of the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War that took, according to different estimates, the lives of 1-3 million people.
The aspiration for an independent Biafra is still alive. Before his death in late 2013 Chinua Achebe, the world-wide known Nigerian novelist, who was Igbo by nationality, devoted his last book which was called with obvious meaning There Was a Country. The book is in fact a lament for Biafra and the decline of Nigeria, which he relates directly to the Biafran war. It offers a future outlook.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Published in 2006 by Knopf/Anchor, it tells the story of the Biafran War. The author also belongs to the people of Igbo. She wrote about the existence of a special Sun that shines not from the sky but from the banner of Biafra. The book has received many awards, including in Great Britain. It has just been translated into Russian – that’s good news…
The external aspect is to great extent defined by the role of the International Criminal Court which is conducting an official investigation of the Boko Haram activities. Jonathan of Nigeria, the President of Nigeria, is invited as a witness. We believe it to be a grave mistake. Other countries have also faced the situation Nigeria has to tackle today. They have involved the International Criminal Court. For instance, Cote D’Ivoire has invited the Court to make an investigation. Now the President of the country Laurent Gbagbo is in Hague put behind bars. The same thing may be in store for Nigeria. For instance, the recent report by International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Fatou Bensouda says the crimes in Nigeria are committed not only by Boko Haram but also by government troops often in violation of human rights while fighting terrorists. The insinuation is clear, President Goodluck should simulate the fight but he will not be allowed to hold a real victory. The International Criminal Court is an instrument of global governance. Boko Haram and other terrorist organizations have a mission to destabilize Africa to prevent it from leaving behind the economic backwardness.
What is the reason for making the activities of terrorists in Nigeria and in West Africa more vibrant? Many say it’s due to the system of clans. There are three major ethnic groups in Nigeria (6) and a lot of smaller ones. The groups come to power in rotation. The fragile pattern was broken after former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Hausa by origin, suddenly died in 2010 (being only 58). As a result then Vice President Jonathan Goodluck (Yoruba) stepped in as an interim President to win the next presidential election. In 2015 the country will hold another presidential election. Goodluck is among the hopefuls. The intensification of terrorist activities could be a way to pressure him into rejecting his office in favor of someone who belongs to the Hausa tribe. There are attempts made to make people believe that a Hausa Muslim could tackle the problem of Boko Haram. (7) The religious and ethnic aspects do play some role but not the decisive one.
We believe the main reason for the deterioration of the situation in Nigeria is abruptly stated rapid economic growth.
It’s worth to note that the terrorist activities intensified at the time of Nigeria becoming the leading economy in Africa (at the start of 2014) leaving behind the main competitor – the economically strong South Africa. It may not suit the plans of those who stand in the way of progress.
The Boko Haram escalated its activities right at the time the situation in Africa started to seriously deteriorate. The regime of global governance has reasons for concern: the Africa’s GDP growth (8) has been 5, 6 % during the recent ten years against 3, 8% in the world. (9) It was only 1, 1% in eurozone. The economic reasons give rise to the new wave of destabilization in Africa.
In 2013 such countries as Mali, the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Kenia and some other stares faced great difficulties. No matter that, the growth of Africa’s GDP was 5, 7% by far exceeding the world average of 4, 1%. It means the pressure on Africa will grow including terrorist activities.
In 1984 the book Nigeria on Fire in Russian written by former President of the country Olusegun Obasanjo hit the bookstore shelves in 1984. The book describes the war in Biafra, the operations of federal troops and the aid provided by the Soviet Union. Thirty years have passed. Nigeria is hit by fire again. The fire has spread to other countries and is threatening the whole continent. Though the continent is an intermediate goal, Boko Haram fights to make the whole world a caliphate without any borders.
Related background analysis:
How Colonialism Benefits from Boko Haram’s Mass Kidnapping of Girls
NOTES:
About the Author
Why Aren’t ISIS and Al-Qaeda Attacking Israel?
by Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
Aug 6, 2014
With the recent slaughter of Palestinians taking place on television screens across the world, only the grossly misinformed would believe that Israel’s Palestinian extermination program is actually “self-defense.”
Yet for all of Israel’s whining about how it is being targeted by “Islamic extremists” and “terrorists,”(which should be translated to mean Palestinians, Iran, or any other secular or nationalist Arab government in the region) there is a curious and deafening silence when it is confronted with actual terrorists and Muslim fanatics such as ISIS, al-Nusra, and the myriad of other fundamentalist groups waging jihad in Syria and Iraq.
This bizarre silence has yet to raise the eyebrows of the somnambulant general public.
Of course, Israel’s lack of concern regarding legitimate terrorist groups is not bizarre at all when one understands the perspective and goals held by the settler state toward its neighbors in the region or its connections to the very groups who espouse Israel as their number one enemy.
But while Israel does not respond with its usual apoplectic frothing of victimhood and danger regarding these terrorist groups that have now so infested the Middle East as to make the entire region a general war zone, it is important to point out that these same terrorist groups do not launch coordinated military attacks in Tel Aviv, they launch them in Damascus and Mosul – cities belonging to secular nations seen by Israel as the enemy.
The question then is “Why?” Why does Israel not share the concern it has over Palestinians, Iranians, Syrians, and Lebanese with al-Nusra, ISIS, and al-Qaeda? Why do these groups wage jihad against Israel’s enemies but not against Israel itself?
Indeed, this curious fact was also raised by Nabil Na’eem, the former al-Qaeda commander who recently gave an interview to Al-Maydeen where he stated that these organizations of Islamic terror were in fact controlled by the CIA. Na’eem stated in regards to Issam Hattito,
For instance, Issam Hattito, head of Muslim Brotherhood responsible for leading the battles against Bashar Assad, where does he reside? Is he in Beirut? Riyadh or Cairo? He’s residing in Tel Aviv.
Ahmad Jarba, does he stay in Riyadh, Cairo or Tehran? He’s moving between New York, Paris and London, his employers, who pay his expenses . . .
Na’eem is right to point out these odd bedfellows because it provides one small piece of a larger puzzle – that Israel, along with its cohorts in the West (the United States and Europe) are not victims of Islamic terror, they are sponsors of it.
From providing medical aid, military training, and outright military assistance, the so-called state of Israel has been a much better friend to Muslim terrorists than any of the regimes it claims as its enemy.
For instance, it has been well-known for quite some time that Israel has been providing wounded Syrian rebels with medical treatment inside Israel so that they can continue the Jihad against the secular government of Bashar al-Assad. According to Colum Lynch of The Cable (the news wing of the Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Policy),
In the past three months, battle-hardened Syrian rebels have transported scores of wounded Syrians across a cease-fire line that has separated Israel from Syria since 1974, according to a 15-page report by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the work of the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF). Once in Israel, they receive medical treatment in a field clinic before being sent back to Syria, where, presumably, some will return to carry on the fight.
U.N. blue helmets responsible for monitoring the decades-old cease-fire report observing armed opposition groups “transferring 89 wounded persons” from Syrian territory into Israel, where they were received by members of the Israel Defense Forces, according to the report. The IDF returned 21 Syrians to armed opposition members back in Syria, including the bodies of two who died.
Later in the article, the writer mentions the fact that Israel has provided such medical assistance to Syrian rebels since at least as far back as February. Realistically, however, such assistance was being provided even further back. Lynch writes that Israel provided the medical treatment for at least a year.
Indeed, in February, 2014, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually visited one of the medical facilities in which the Syrian rebels were being treated and even posed for a photo op shaking hands with a death squad fighter.
More notable than even the medical services, is the fact that Israel has provided military support to the terrorist death squads in the form of artillery and air force bombing campaigns. These attacks have generally come after the Assad government seems to be making considerable gains on the ground against the Western-backed fighters.
For instance, on October 30, 2013, Israel attacked and completely destroyed a Syrian air defense base in Snobar Jableh, Syria which is located near Latakia, a port city on the coast of the Mediterranean. The base was alleged to have housed a surface to air missile battery.
Of course, this was not the only time where Israel inflicted an injury against the enemies of Islamic extremists during the course of the Syrian conflict. It is known that Israel launched attacks against Syrian forces and military convoys at least four times prior to the October 30 attack.
As recently as June, 2014, Israel launched a series of airstrikes against Syrian military positions under the pretext of retaliation for a cross-border attack which was almost certainly initiated by death squad fighters whose logistical inadequacy spilled over into Israeli occupied territory in the Golan Heights. Given the questionable circumstances surrounding the justifying incident – the killing of yet another Israeli teenager by an alleged anti-tank missile – one would be justified in questioning the Israeli story.
While the occasional attack on Syrian territory is bad enough, the fact is that Israel has apparently coordinated these attacks with the death squad directors on the ground so as to provide cover fire and diversions for death squad “swarming” and jihadist invasions.
For instance, in May 2013, WABC host and best-selling author Aaron Klein stated that an Israeli airstrike in Syria was closely coordinated with Turkey which, in turn, helped coordinate the death squad attacks to occur at the exact same time as the Israeli airstrikes. The sources speaking to Klein came from Jordanian and Egyptian intelligence agencies.
Israel’s air strike in Syria today was coordinated with Turkey, which in turn coordinated rebel attacks throughout Syria timed to coincide with the Israeli strike, according to Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence sources speaking to KleinOnline. The sources said the rebels did not know about the Israeli strike in advance but instead were given specific instructions for when to begin today’s major assaults against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “Almost the moment the Israel Air Force departed was the moment the rebel advance began,” added the Egyptian intelligence source. Multiple reports have noted how the Syrian rebels consist in large part of al-Qaida-linked jihad groups. The Egyptian and Jordanian sources described how immediately after today’s Israeli air strike the jihadist rebels used access roads to advance toward Damascus and began heavy clashes with Syrian military forces throughout the country.
Israel was even documented in 2011 as hosting and directing a terrorist mercenary training camp inside the country in order to produce mercenaries tailor-made to be used in the Arab world.
What’s more, the Israeli establishment does not seem to feel the need to hide its support for terrorism which, in this specific instance, tends to take the form of mercenaries. Indeed, the Israeli terrorist trainers actually appear to be quite open about their efforts.
In a 2011 report conducted by The Media Line,[1] an international news organization which focuses on the Middle East, Arieh O’Sullivan was able to film an Israeli-run terrorist mercenary training camp, complete with interviews, on-scene narration, and ample video footage of actual training taking place.
As the report begins, one can see a multicultural group of men –Arabs, Africans, Europeans, etc. – dressed in typical Arab clothing, riding camels, and taking part in tactical training.
“The men on these camels have been training for the past week to operate in the Arab world,” O’Sullivan says. “They dress as Arabs, even take a ride on a desert Ferrari [camel] and learn rudimentary phrases that will allow them to do their job. They have come to Israel to learn from former members of the country’s secret services.”
The report continues by saying,
On this training base, run by the International Security Academy Israel, they are tapping into Israel’s unique experience in dealing with these threats and learning counterterrorism techniques in convoy and [VIP? ] protection. The changes in the Middle East may be dubbed the Arab Spring but, to continue with another metaphor, it’s about to get hot.
Out here far away from prying eyes, a group of personal protection specialists have come to Israel to learn about the Israeli tactics. Their background is diverse – from police to military officers – even a former French Legionnaire. They will go on to work for governments and private security contractors.
In an interview with one of the “students,” the future mercenary stated, “Only the best can train here with the best. I have this feeling that I was . . . something like was bringing me here . . . something was like ‘Go. Go and do it now.’”
Another mercenary who was interviewed, stated, “Well, I learn a lot because Israel have bring up a standard of training that everyone in the world will have to emulate from them. And, with this, as I’m going back, I think I will take what I have learned in Israel, to impart on my fellow colleagues.”
The narrator then adds, “But it’s an expensive program, costing upwards of $2,000 Euros a week. But this can be a lucrative profession, earning thousands of Euros a day. Just don’t call them mercenaries.” Still, O’Sullivan ends by saying, “This line of work is one of the oldest in the world. Still, it seems like it is always in demand.”
A mercenary who appeared to be from Singapore, named Venky Raman, also chimed in. “Some of those dictatorships governments have fallen basically. And that’s going to create new chaos and confusion in the market. And that’s also going to create some instability in the market. So that’s why I think we’re getting more of these incidents and terrorist attacks and such going to happen.”
While the individuals seen in the clip mentioned above are largely mercenaries who train the dupes and deviants who take on the role as cannon fodder for Jihad, only engaging in limited combat operations themselves, it is clear the only allegiance they have is to the almighty dollar.
Ironically, however, the individuals who make up the bulk of death squad invasions across the Arab world – religious fanatics, savages, and the criminally insane – maintain an open hatred for Israel. That is, those death squad members at the bottom who are either ignorant of the fact that Israel itself is a major backer of their own movement or those wholly incapable of understanding anything other than what their faction leader has told them are caught somewhere between tragedy and farce.
Yet Israel is not only involved in directed and implementing Islamic terrorism in other countries. On its own soil, Israel has been documented as creating “fake” al-Qaeda groups to justify its treatment of the Palestinian people.
Israel’s arch nemesis, Hamas, was created by Israel itself for the purpose of splitting the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) and Fatah, the leading outfit for the Palestinian freedom and resistance movement.
Robert Dreyfuss, a veteran journalist for The Nation, even wrote that,
In the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organizations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons, because they were seen a fierce anti-communists and because the opposed secular nationalists such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh.
***
In Syria, the United States, Israel, and Jordan supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a civil war against Syria. And … Israel quietly backed Ahmed Yassin and the Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza, leading to the establishment of Hamas.
As Justin Raimondo of AntiWar.com wrote in his 2006 article “Hamas, Son of Israel,”
Amid all the howls of pain and gnashing of teeth over the triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian elections, one fact remains relatively obscure, albeit highly relevant: Israel did much to launch Hamas as an effective force in the occupied territories. If ever there was a clear case of “blowback,” then this is it. As Richard Sale pointed out in a piece for UPI:
Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel ‘aided Hamas directly – the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),’ said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic [and International] Studies.Israel’s support for Hamas ‘was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,’ said a former senior CIA official.
Middle East analyst Ray Hanania concurs:
In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic, anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel’s control over the occupied territories.
In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a “humanitarian” organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas – but not before it was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political support.
It is important to note here that the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to this close connection to the predecessor of Hamas and thus Mossad and other forms of Israeli intelligence, also contains close and historical ties to Western intelligence, most notably the British and the American versions.
With that in mind, Raimondo’s article continues by stating that,
Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate with Israel – and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO: the Israelis allowed Yassin’s group to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.
Ami Isseroff, writing on MideastWeb, shows how the Israelis deliberately promoted the Islamists of the future Hamas by helping them turn the Islamic University of Gaza into a base from which the group recruited activists – and the suicide bombers of tomorrow. As the only higher-education facility in the Gaza strip, and the only such institution open to Palestinians since Anwar Sadat closed Egyptian colleges to them, IUG contained within its grounds the seeds of the future Palestinian state. When a conflict arose over religious issues, however, the Israeli authorities sided with the Islamists against the secularists of the Fatah-PLO mainstream. As Isseroff relates, the Islamists
Encouraged Israeli authorities to dismiss their opponents in the committee in February of 1981, resulting in subsequent Islamisation of IUG policy and staff (including the obligation on women to wear the hijab and thobe and separate entrances for men and women), and enforced by violence and ostracization of dissenters. Tacit complicity from both university and Israeli authorities allowed Mujama to keep a weapons cache to use against secularists. By the mid 1980s, it was the largest university in occupied territories with 4,500 students, and student elections were won handily by Mujama.
Again, the motive was to offset Arafat’s influence and divide the Palestinians. In the short term, this may have worked to some extent; in the longer term, however, it backfired badly – as demonstrated by the results of the recent Palestinian election.
***
Israel’s relentless offensive against its perceived enemies – first Fatah, now Hamas and Islamic Jihad – has created a backlash and solidified support for fundamentalist extremist factions in the Palestinian community.
What Raimondo refers to as “backlash”, however, has revealed itself to be more of a cleverly written script designed to play out years later.
Still, The Wall Street Journal concurred with Raimondo’s analysis in an article published in 2009. In this article, entitled “How Israel Helped To Spawn Hamas,” Andrew Higgins wrote (my emphasis added),
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
***
When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.
***
When it became clear in the early 1990s that Gaza’s Islamists had mutated from a religious group into a fighting force aimed at Israel — particularly after they turned to suicide bombings in 1994 — Israel cracked down with ferocious force. But each military assault only increased Hamas’s appeal to ordinary Palestinians. The group ultimately trounced secular rivals, notably Fatah, in a 2006 election supported by Israel’s main ally, the U.S.
***
In Gaza, Israel hunted down members of Fatah and other secular PLO factions, but it dropped harsh restrictions imposed on Islamic activists by the territory’s previous Egyptian rulers.
***
The Muslim Brotherhood, led in Gaza by Sheikh Yassin, was free to spread its message openly. In addition to launching various charity projects, Sheikh Yassin collected money to reprint the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian member of the Brotherhood who, before his execution by President Nasser, advocated global jihad. He is now seen as one of the founding ideologues of militant political Islam.
Mr. Cohen, who worked at the time for the Israeli government’s religious affairs department in Gaza, says he began to hear disturbing reports in the mid-1970s about Sheikh Yassin from traditional Islamic clerics. He says they warned that the sheikh had no formal Islamic training and was ultimately more interested in politics than faith. “They said, ‘Keep away from Yassin. He is a big danger,’” recalls Mr. Cohen.
Instead, Israel’s military-led administration in Gaza looked favorably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy.
***
Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who took over as governor in Gaza in late 1979, says he had no illusions about Sheikh Yassin’s long-term intentions or the perils of political Islam. As Israel’s former military attache in Iran, he’d watched Islamic fervor topple the Shah. However, in Gaza, says Mr. Segev, “our main enemy was Fatah,” and the cleric “was still 100% peaceful” towards Israel. Former officials say Israel was also at the time wary of being viewed as an enemy of Islam.
Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. “We had no problems with him,” he says.
In fact, the cleric and Israel had a shared enemy: secular Palestinian activists. After a failed attempt in Gaza to oust secularists from leadership of the Palestinian Red Crescent, the Muslim version of the Red Cross, Mujama staged a violent demonstration, storming the Red Crescent building. Islamists also attacked shops selling liquor and cinemas. The Israeli military mostly stood on the sidelines. [emphasis added]
***
A leader of Birzeit’s Islamist faction at the time was Mahmoud Musleh, now a pro-Hamas member of a Palestinian legislature elected in 2006. He recalls how usually aggressive Israeli security forces stood back and let conflagration develop. He denies any collusion between his own camp and the Israelis, but says “they hoped we would become an alternative to the PLO.”
A year later, in 1984, the Israeli military received a tip-off from Fatah supporters that Sheikh Yassin’s Gaza Islamists were collecting arms, according to Israeli officials in Gaza at the time. Israeli troops raided a mosque and found a cache of weapons. Sheikh Yassin was jailed. He told Israeli interrogators the weapons were for use against rival Palestinians, not Israel, according to Mr. Hacham, the military affairs expert who says he spoke frequently with jailed Islamists. The cleric was released after a year and continued to expand Mujama’s reach across Gaza.
Taking into consideration the fact that Israel has provided military and medical support to the most bloodthirsty and brutal Islamic extremist terrorists in the world and the fact that it has created Hamas from the very beginning, the answer to the question of “Why aren’t organizations like Nusra, al-Qaeda, and ISIS attacking Israel?” is quite simple – because Israel is partly responsible for funding and directing them.
With all of this in mind, any claims of victimhood by Israel should immediately be discarded. Indeed, this portrayal of self-defense and endangerment should especially be discarded when one considers the history of the state itself.
Israel has made its own enemies by virtue of its colonial nature, its foreign and domestic policy, and even by direct organization and funding. It is thus wholly accurate to say that Israel’s enemies are literally those of its own making.
In the end, the information presented in this article is simply one more window into the realm of the Anglo-European-American-Israeli intelligence apparatus and the depths to which the rabbit hole goes in terms of international terrorism. The script which is being acted out across the Middle East and the rest of the world is clearly being directed by a force unseen by the vast majority of the world’s population.
Still, the players act out their roles according to the predetermined narrative provided to them, despite the fact that they have no idea they are actually acting out the will of a shadowy “other” who does not have their best interests at heart.
In this game, virtually all of those acting out their parts on the ground are merely players unaware of their roles.
Notes:
[1] “Arab & Western Mercenaries Train at an Israeli Security Academy.” YouTube. Posted by AnonMI SR. Posted on December 30, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ZWijzG6qQ
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Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, and The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria. Turbeville has published over 300 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.
“We Will Raise the Flag of Allah in the White House” ISIS Warns America — video included
The Islamic State has warned the United States that it plans to attack America and raise “the flag of Allah in the White House.”
“I say to America that the Islamic caliphate has been established,” Abu Mosa, a spokesman for the terror group, also known as ISIS, told Vice Media in a video interview posted online Thursday. “Don’t be cowards and attack us with drones. Instead send your soldiers, the ones we humiliated in Iraq. We will humiliate them everywhere, God willing, and we will raise the flag of Allah in the White House.”
Vice Media has produced a five-part series of videos using footage from reporter Medyan Dairieh, who spent three weeks embedded with ISIS fighters and gained unprecedented access to the terror group. In the first video, Dairieh heads to the Syrian city of Raqqa, where the brutal extremists are building a regime while also laying siege to a Syrian army base.
Here is the first video:
Newsmax continues:
The ISIS threat to conquer the United States was issued before President Barack Obama announced Thursday that he planned to authorize “targeted” airstrikes against the hard-line Sunni jihadists to prevent the genocide of ethnic minorities in Iraq, including tens of thousands of fleeing Christians, as well as to protect U.S personnel in Irbil and Baghdad.
ISIS, which now calls itself the Islamic State, seized territory in both Iraq and Syria and declared an Islamic caliphate.
They have engaged in ruthless slaughter, and have targeted minority groups.
From CNN:
“I don’t see any attention from the rest of the world,” a member of the Yazidi minority in Iraq told the New Yorker. “In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’”
In Syria, the group hoisted some of its victims severed heads on poles. One of the latest videos of the savagery shows a Christian man forced to his knees, surrounded by masked militants, identified in the video as members of ISIS. They force the man at gunpoint to “convert” to Islam. Then, the group beheads him.
Today, the US began dropping laser-guided bombs on ISIS artillery in Iraq, beginning the airstrikes Obama threatened yesterday.
In a speech from the White House last night, Obama said that he was authorizing airstrikes to protect American interests in Iraq and drops of food and water for tens of thousands of refugees trapped by ISIS on a mountain in Iraq, reports NBC.
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Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”
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The Daily Sheeple
August 8th, 2014
Latin youth operatives posed as aid workers in Anti-Cuban plot, new report says
Intellihub.com
Aug 4, 2014
By Shepard Ambellas
Obama Admin sought to create Cuban rebellion
Havana Cuba (Photo credit: Nathan Laurell/Flickr)
(INTELLIHUB) — According to a new bombshell report by the AP, young Latin operatives were actually deployed into Cuba under direction from the Obama Administration to recruit anti-government protestors and rally a rebellion. Shockingly, the covert operation was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, which was also instrumental in the development of a Cuban Twitter style social media network.
The AP reported:
According to internal documents obtained by the AP and interviews in six countries, USAID’s young operatives posed as tourists, visited college campuses and used a ruse that could undermine USAID’s credibility in critical health work around the world: An HIV-prevention workshop one called the “perfect excuse” to recruit political activists, according to a report by Murillo’s group. For all the risks, some travelers were paid as little as $5.41 an hour.
The travelers program was launched during a time when newly inaugurated President Barack Obama spoke about a “new beginning” with Cuba after decades of mistrust, raising questions about whether the White House had a coherent policy toward the island nation.
There’s no evidence that the program advanced the mission to create a pro-democracy movement against the government of Raul Castro. Creative Associates declined to comment, referring questions to USAID.
USAID would not say how much the Costa Rica-based program cost. In response to questions from the AP, the agency issued a statement that said, “USAID and the Obama administration are committed to supporting the Cuban people’s desire to freely determine their own future. USAID works with independent youth groups in Cuba on community service projects, public health, the arts and other opportunities to engage publicly, consistent with democracy programs worldwide.”
In a statement late Sunday, USAID said the HIV workshop had a dual purpose: It “enabled support for Cuban civil society while providing a secondary benefit of addressing the desire Cubans expressed for information and training about HIV prevention.”
The entire goal of the operation was to essentially stir up rebellion in Cuba from within, a goal all so common to the United States.
About the author:
Shepard Ambellas is the founder and editor-in-chief of Intellihub News and the maker of SHADE the Motion Picture. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook. Shepard also appears on the Travel Channel series America Declassified.
PN 