Moon of Alabama
Moon of Alabama (Blog)

[First, a comment by Another World Is Possible:]

🔺What are legitimate targets in war? It seems to us that a distinction should be made between civilian infrastructure on the one hand and institutions, military positions plus military gear on the other. More importantly, there should be one between civilians and military personnel.

🔺A big problem here is the degree to which civilian and military infrastructure are interrelated. In such situations, then what do you do? Is the bombing of power stations legitimate?

🔺The darkening of Kyiv is holding a population hostage to its rulers. The threadbare, unsupported theory here basically is that a cold, hungry population then rises up and overthrows the hated regime. To our knowledge, this has never happened anywhere.

🔺In our view, the civilian population is always sacrosanct, and their needs must go first. To bomb their much-needed supply of electricity is not OK. Not in Ukraine, not in Yugoslavia, not in Palestine, nor anywhere else. We generally support the Russian special operation, but depriving Ukrainian civilians of electricity in wintry conditions is taking it a step too far. We’re not OK with it. – Editor

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NATO doctrine holds that the side in a war that has severe trouble with its infrastructure has choices to make.

Electricity and heating supplies in Ukraine have stopped in large parts of the country. Kyiv had already been on scheduled blackouts in which groups of consumers received, for example, four hours of electricity, only to be cut off for eight hours. That scheduling has ended. The blackout has become permanent.

Over several weeks, Russian attacks had isolated Kyiv's electricity supply from the rest of the country. It then attacked generating stations within the city. There is now less than 10% of the electricity supply available than the city would normally use. Public lighting has been shut down as much as possible. Factories have closed down. Schools and Universities are on prolonged holidays. Many shops have closed because running their private generators costs more than they can make while open.

Moon of Alabama
Moon of Alabama (Blog)

One never know how serious Trump’s ‘leaked’ plans are. Their purpose often seem to be solely to increase pressure on opponents, to move things into a direction he likes. If that does not work the plans may just be discarded. Or may, just may, be carried out.

Venzuela is, as Politico points out, not known for drug trafficking. It does not have ‘cocaine facilities’. But it does have the largest oil reserves in the world. That has always made it a target for a U.S. regime-change operations.

But Venezuela is also a huge country double the size of Iraq with a mountainous and often densely wooded countryside. The U.S. military is unable to invade, occupy and control it.

English Outsider
Moon of Alabama

The outcome of the war with Iran is still unknown. That of the war in Ukraine is set in stone and always has been.

There's nothing funny here, though it's true that the Western military and political establishments are now pure farce. Nothing funny because the farce has had lethal consequences. The unrestrained carnage in Gaza will be a reproach to the West for ever.

As for Ukraine, "b" summed up, must be two years ago now, what we are putting our proxies in Ukraine through. A "crime", he stated. So it is. Has been since 2014. Worse now, after a million and more deaths and economic and societal ruin for Ukraine to match.

As for the military reality Putin, in the video embedded in the Simplicius article above, sums up the military reality that has been clear to us Europeans since February 2022. NATO, the US and all, is a paper tiger. Even with the substantial manpower of the original Ukrainian armed forces NATO has neither the troops nor the equipment for a ground war on Russia’s doorstep and never has had. All we do have is the nuclear threat and neither Biden, nor, now, Trump, will risk Chicago frying for Vilnius. Nor for Berlin. Nor for London. That accepted, the only puzzle lies in working out what the European politicians hope to gain from prolonging a war long since lost.

Author unknown

From the comment section of an online article, cited below.

In the 10 years before Israel was created, from 1937 to 1947, Israel launched at least 50 major terrorist attacks, blowing up 814 civilian aircrafts, two trains, one ship, and razing 385 Arab villages to the ground. Note that these are only “major” terrorist attacks.

Between 1947 and 1949, Israel attacked major Palestinian cities, destroying some 530 villages and killing some 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including dozens of massacres.

On April 9, 1948, Zionist forces carried out one of the most notorious massacres of the war in the village of Deir Yassin, on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, where more than 110 men, women, and children were killed by the Zionist militia of the Irgun and Stern Gang.

During this period, 750.000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and became refugees in their own ancestral land. Refugees have the right under international law to return to their displaced homes and to recover their property. So Israel’s current occupation of Israel is illegal.

Moon of Alabama
Moon of Alabama (Blog)

What is the reason for the 'Al-Aqsa Deluge', as Hamas had named its terror operation against the Zionists? On October 8 Alastair Crooke, one of most experienced Middle East hands, wrote in AlMahadeen:

💬 "Israel" has shattered into two equally weighted factions holding to two irreconcilable visions of "Israel’s" future; two mutually opposing readings of history and of what it means to be Jewish.

The fissure could not be more complete. Except it is. One faction, which holds a majority in parliament, is broadly Mizrahi -- a former underclass in Israeli society; and the other, largely well-to-do liberal Ashkenazi.

Mizrahi are mostly the original Middle Eastern Jews and often on the religious far right, Ashkenazi are mostly liberal European ones. The current Netanyahoo government is the first which includes far-right Mizrahi ministers. Most Mizrahi follow the Sephardi religious rites. They want a religious state based on Jewish law. They are as radical as ISIS.

The High Court of Israel has 14 Ashkenazi judges and one Mizrahi one. It is one of the reasons why the Netanyahoo government wants the parliament to be able to vote down high court judgments. There have been large, U.S. sponsored 'regime change' protests in Israel against that move. The leaders of the military and security services, mostly Ashkenazi, have also opposed the government's move against the court. I therefore think that it is quite possible that there was intelligence pointing to the Hamas attack, but that it was not revealed to let Netanyahoo fall into a trap. We have however no evidence that there were reasonably precise intelligence warnings, or that they were held up.

John Waters

‘Hate speech’ laws are not simply censorship. Their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass.

Those who have doubted that Western Civilisation is in the process of being dismantled are about to receive their definitive reply. The supposedly ‘unavoidable’ fire-brigade damage inflicted on our freedoms in the Spring of 2020, which has never been repaired or reversed, is about to be consolidated. The shout of ‘Emergency!’ was at that time sufficient to quiet most objections and provide reassurance that this was indeed a temporary imposition.

Now, two and a half years later, the maintenance vans pull up and the workmen start to scrutinise the damage done by the firemen — the windows shattered by their axes, the shards of glass still protruding dangerously upwards, the splintered frames. As we look on expectantly, imagining that they are about to replace the broken glass and repair the damaged frames, another convoy of vehicles pulls up, this time bearing men with sledgehammers, crowbars, pneumatic drills, wonder bars, angle grinders — and, bringing up the rear, a scammel transporter with a large crane and wrecking ball. It becomes clear that what the workmen have in mind is not reconstruction, but demolition. Thus, the ‘emergency’ is signalled as over and the Era of Permanent Despotism begins.

Pål Steigan
(Translated from the Norwegian by Tanja Barth)

"Victory for the democratic, pro-Western forces" - This was the message that most of the Norwegian and Western media sent when commenting on the elections in Ukraine, claiming that the Nazi and fascist elements have been completely marginalized. The truth is quite the opposite – never have the Nazi & fascist groups been as strong as they now are in Ukraine.

Election results for the openly fascist parties - The Nazi/fascist party "Svoboda" got 4.71% of the votes and did not pass the national election threshold of 5 %. But the party will still have 6 delegates that have been elected in single constituencies.

The even more extreme fascist party "Right Sector" only got 1.81 % of the votes, but their leader, Dmitro Jarosj, personally won the election in his constituency in the Dnepropetrovsk region. In this region, he is closely allied with the oligarch Igor Kolomoiskij, who has financed several fascist battalions in the East. So in this case there is a fusion in Ukraine between Nazi ideology and Nazi militia on the one side, and robber barons on the other.

"The Radical Party", lead by Oleh Lyashko, got 7.45 % of the votes, which resulted 22 seats in the national assembly. So the openly fascist phalange thus will be represented by 29 seats in the national assembly.

Moon of Alabama
Moon of Alabama ( Blog)

Without Russian Intervention And German Support, the U.S. Campaign Is Stuck

Two days ago a mob, supported by the fascists Right Sektor, killed over 30 federalist Ukrainians in Odessa by pushing them from their camp into a building and then setting fire to it. Those who escaped the massacre, not the perpetrators, were rounded up by police. Today pro-federalism people besieged the police headquarter in Odessa until the police released those it had earlier arrested.

In the east some military and National Guard units under government control were in sporadic fights with federalists but right now the government forces seem to be again in retreat. There were attacks on private bank outlets in the east because the owner of the bank, a well known oligarch, is suspected of financing the fascist Right Sektor paramilitaries.

The U.S. plan for Ukraine seems to be to bait Russia into an occupation. This would destroy EU-Russia relations, embolden NATO and help the U.S. to keep the EU as a secondary partner under its control. There would be lots of economic upsides for the U.S. in such a situation. Selling more arms and increasing energy market shares are only the starters.

Moon of Alabama
Moon of Alabama (Blog)

Tremseh "Massacre" Was A Legitimate Military Operation

The false reporting on the Tremseh "massacre" was supposed to put pressure on Russia and China to agree to a Chapter 7 UN Security Council resolution. Chapter 7 [of the UN Charter] allows the use of force and such a resolution could be used as an excuse for armed intervention. Kofi Annan took that position when, after Tremseh, he urged the UNSC to threaten Syria with "consequences" for not retreating from cities and villages. Annan and Ban Ki Moon were dispatched to Russia and China to further press the issue.

But the Tremseh information operation fell apart when the UN observers confirmed the Syrian government version of the story. Writes the Wall Street Journal:

New evidence on last week's killings in a village in central Syria suggests the bloodshed followed a raid by government forces to arrest male rebels, rather than a deliberate massacre of around 200 civilians as some Syrian opposition leaders and their Western allies first reported.

The findings could ease the pressure on Russia and China to back tougher measures against Bashar al-Assad's government, underscoring how competing narratives and interpretations of events in Syria continue to divide world powers over how to end a conflict now recognized by most as a civil war.

The Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov is scheduled to meet with Kofi Annan tomorrow. He just held a press conference in which he laid out the Russian and Chinese position.

Daniel McAdams

A respected mainstream publication, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung(FAZ), has reported that the infamous Houla massacre in Syria, which the US and NATO hoped would be the casus belli for their planned invasion, was in fact carried out by rebel forces.

Highlighted in the National Review (of all places), the FAZ investigation was exhaustive and convincing. NRO reports on the original FAZ story:

According to the article’s sources, the massacre occurred after rebel forces attacked three army-controlled roadblocks outside of Houla. The roadblocks had been set up to protect nearby Alawi majority villages from attacks by Sunni militias. The rebel attacks provoked a call for reinforcements by the besieged army units. Syrian army and rebel forces are reported to have engaged in battle for some 90 minutes, during which time “dozens of soldiers and rebels” were killed.

“According to eyewitness accounts,” the FAZ report continues,

"the massacre occurred during this time. Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam. Members of the Shomaliya, an Alawi family, were also killed, as was the family of a Sunni member of the Syrian parliament who is regarded as a collaborator. Immediately following the massacre, the perpetrators are supposed to have filmed their victims and then presented them as Sunni victims in videos posted on the internet.

For weeks, alternative media analysts and even eyewitnesses had been poking enormous holes in the suspiciously convenient Western narrative that Assad's forces slaughtered the villagers, cutting and killing at close range. No one paid attention, as usual.

The NRO piece continues with a fascinating story from a Christian monastery in the vicinity:

"Already at the beginning of April, Mother Agnès-Mariam de la Croix of the St. James Monastery warned of rebel atrocities’ being repackaged in both Arab and Western media accounts as regime atrocities. She cited the case of a massacre in the Khalidiya neighborhood in Homs. According to an account published in French on the monastery’s website, rebels gathered Christian and Alawi hostages in a building in Khalidiya and blew up the building with dynamite. They then attributed the crime to the regular Syrian army. 'Even though this act has been attributed to regular army forces . . . the evidence and testimony are irrefutable: It was an operation undertaken by armed groups affiliated with the opposition,' Mother Agnès-Mariam wrote."

Either Mother Agnès-Mariam is a liar or Hillary Clinton is a liar. You decide.