Wonder Woman banned by three Muslim nations

Sexy Jewish Women Need Not Apply

(Breitbart Jerusalem)  -  Qatar has joined Lebanon and Tunisia to become the latest state to ban the screening of the hit movie Wonder Woman starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot.

As Breitbart Jerusalem reported, Gadot, who served in the IDF during the 2006 Lebanon war, has come under fire for her open support of Israel, in particular for a tweet during 2014’s conflict with Gaza in which she prayed for the safety of Israel’s citizens.

Now Doha News reports the presence of the Israeli star in the blockbuster is enough for authorities in Qatar to ban the screening. Wonder Woman was initially scheduled to premiere in Doha last Thursday across local theater chains VOX Cinemas Qatar and Novo Cinemas.

On Facebook, she previously sent her “love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens. Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children…We shall overcome!!!”

Gadot also expressed support for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during the 2014 Gaza conflict. That was enough for the Palestinian Authority not to screen the blockbuster.

Read More . . . .

Jewish "Wonder Woman" to be banned by Lebanon

Gal Gadot in the Israeli Army

A Hard Core Wonder of a Woman

(Washington Free Beacon)  -  Lebanon's government is seeking to ban the new Wonder Woman movie because its lead actress is Israeli, although a formal request for a ban has yet to be received.

Gal Gadot, a former Miss Israel, served in the Israel Defense Forces for two years before becoming an actress and has expressed support for Israeli soldiers. Lebanon has cited her nationality and past military service as its rationale for moving to keep Wonder Woman out of Lebanese movie theaters, the Times of Israel reported Tuesday.

The Lebanese Ministry of Economy and Trade is in the process of getting the movie banned, although advertisements have appeared in parts of Beirut. A Lebanese security official told the Times that a ban would require a recommendation from a six-ministry-member committee, noting that such a process has not yet started. The Ministry of the Interior would then have to approve the recommendation for it to go into effect.

Lebanon remains officially at war with Israel, and Israel-related content is subject to prior censorship, which officials can use to prevent Wonder Woman from being screened in the country. Other topics subject to censorship include Islam and homosexuality; the government claims the right to censor anything that would upset "political or military sensitivities."

Gadot has publicly supported Israeli soldiers, angering anti-Israel activists. In 2014, the actress wrote a Facebook post to stand in solidarity with her fellow citizens during Israel's brief war with Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, during the summer of 2014.

"I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens," Gadot wrote. "Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children."

Before her time in the IDF, Gadot went to the Miss Universe competition as Miss Israel in 2004 and studied law. She went on to become an actress, appearing as Gisele Yashar in the Fast and Furious movies. She debuted as the character Wonder Woman in the 2016 movie Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Read More . . . .

Hezbollah wins the Syrian Civil War

“Hezbollah is in charge of the whole region, and they control everything here,” said Abu Ishak, a spokesman for Saraya Ahl Alsham. 

EDITOR  -  President Trump is getting sucked deeper into the nightmare of Syria. The U.S. Military-Industrial Complex has been arming Islamists for years and then tells Trump we must go into Syria to fight Islamists we just armed.

(The Wall Street Journal)  -  Few wars have seen such a tangle of combatants as Syria’s, from obscure and morphing rebel groups to Russians, Turks, Kurdish and Iraqi militias. From the chaos, one clear winner is emerging.

Returning to his ancestral Syrian town of Qusayr after years away, a man named Mohammed discovered a new militia patrolling the neighborhood. Patches on the men’s camouflage uniforms called them the Islamic Resistance of Syria. Their identity became clearer when he found a notice on his house claiming it for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group.

“Many houses have been confiscated with notices that they’ve been reserved for this or that family,” Mohammed said.

Hezbollah, founded in the early 1980s to fight Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, became involved in the civil war next door to protect its patrons in Damascus and a supply line of Iranian weapons. After years of growing engagement, including training thousands of mostly Shiite Muslim fighters and beginning to provide social services, Hezbollah is today stronger, more independent and in command of a new Syrian militia that its officials say is ready to be deployed to other conflicts in the region.

Hezbollah now fights alongside Russian troops, its first alliance with a global power. It was Hezbollah that devised the battlefield plan for Aleppo used by Syrian and Russian forces last year, according to Arab and U.S. officials who monitor the group.

Bassem Mroue/Associated Press A Hezbollah fighter in Syria stands by the group's yellow flag.

Thanks to money and arms from Tehran, Hezbollah now stands almost on a par with Iran as a protector of President Bashar al-Assad’s government, and as a sponsor of Shiite fighting forces in Syria.

“It’s hard to see people rising through Syrian intelligence or military ranks without the blessing of Hezbollah or the Iranians,” said Andrew Exum, until January a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.

With its growing might, this arch-foe of Israel, a group long labeled terrorist by the U.S., has gained a modicum of international recognition. It participated in negotiations sponsored by Russia following the rout of rebels from Aleppo. When China’s special envoy to Syria visited Lebanon in December, he carved out time to see Hezbollah’s foreign-relations chief.

Read More . . . .

Hezbollah POV GoPro Helmet Cam CQB Footage 

Hezbollah Has U.S. Armored
Personal Carriers
(Washington Post)  -  Over the weekend images surfaced online of a Hezbollah parade in Qusair, Syria, featuring U.S. armored personnel carriers affixed with antiaircraft guns. The images prompted a flurry of speculation about the vehicles’ origin and whether the group had pilfered the stocks of the U.S.-supplied Lebanese military.
.The armored personnel carrier, known as the M113, is one of the United States’ most ubiquitous armored vehicles and has been in service since the 1960s.
.
As a prominent political and military entity in Lebanon, Hezbollah’s possession of the vehicles could support the theory floated by the defense analyst Tobias Schneider, who tweeted that the personnel carriers were probably taken from the Lebanese Armed Forces, a major recipient of U.S. military aid.
.
Over the summer, the Lebanese military took possession of dozens of pieces of artillery, armored vehicles, semiautomatic grenade launchers and 1,000 tons of ammunition — all worth about $50 million — as part of the United States’ ongoing efforts to bolster the country’s capacity to fight extremists. The shipment, overseen by the Pentagon and the State Department, brought the amount of U.S. military aid sent to Lebanon in 2016 to $221 million, according to U.S. Ambassador Elizabeth H. Richard.
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Read More:
WashingtonPost.com

Poll: ISIS supported by 63 to 287 million Muslims

Egyptian feminist Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, 23, challenges the strict nature of Islam on her blog and Facebook pages. She went a step further in her protest against the Islamic State (IS) with a photo of Elmahdy and a veiled woman pooping and menstruating on the black IS flag.

What the poll does not tell you

• #1  -  This poll is flawed. I suspect you can easily double (or more) the number of ISIS supporters. Most Muslims polled are not going to openly admit to a pollster that they support a terrorist group that beheads people.
• #2  -  Just because a Muslim says they have an unfavorable view of ISIS does not mean they believe in freedom. Just try to build a brand new Jewish Synagogue or Christian Church in Muslim Morocco, Libya, Turkey or Iran and see the reaction of the locals. The Muslims polled might not support ISIS, but they could be supporters of other terrorist factions.
• #3  -  By translating the pro-ISIS poll percentages into millions of people you can see the bottomless pit of potential terrorists.

(American Thinker)  -  A new poll by the Pew Research Center reveals significant levels of support for ISIS within the Muslim world.  In 11 representative nation-states, up to 14 percent of the population has a favorable opinion of ISIS, and upwards of 62 percent "don't know" whether or not they have a favorable opinion of the Islamist group.

In Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state, only 28 percent of the public view ISIS unfavorably.  By this overwhelming degree of either tacit support or tolerance for ISIS in the country, ISIS should be considered as a potential proxy nuclear weapons power via its linkages and support within Pakistan.

When broken down by ethnicity and religion, the results are equally troubling.  In Israel, 4 percent of its Arab population – which equates to more than 66,000 individuals – have a favorable view of ISIS.  For Gaza and the West Bank, 5 and 8 percent, respectively, also hold a favorable view of ISIS.  

In Nigeria, the ISIS favorability rating among the Muslim population soars to 20 percent.  Another 12 percent of Muslims in Malaysia take a similar positive view of ISIS.

Read More . . . .

US weapons and ammunition arrives in Lebanon

Workers unload artillery from a ship at Beirut’s port in Lebanon, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015. U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale said $25 million worth of military assistance has arrived in Beirut in the latest American aid to Lebanon's army and that Lebanon has become the 5th largest recipient of U.S. foreign military assistance. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

Marching to August, 1914

Yet another unconstitutional war . . . oh fuck it.  No one gives a shit about the Constitution any way.  Just fucking blow everything up.  Fuck it all to Hell.

BEIRUT (Associated Press) — The U.S. ambassador to Lebanon said Sunday that $25 million worth of weapons and ammunition have arrived in Beirut, the latest American assistance to Lebanon's army as it fights Islamic extremists along the border with Syria.

Ambassador David Hale said the equipment includes more than 70 M198 howitzers and over 26 million rounds of ammunition and artillery "of all shapes and sizes, including heavy artillery."

Islamic extremists have launched several attacks on Lebanese troops over the past months in areas near the Syrian border, killing and wounding scores of troops. The most serious attack occurred in August, when members of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front and the Islamic State group captured two dozen Lebanese soldiers. They have killed four of them and still hold the rest.

U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale, left, speaks
with a U.S. Army soldier during a handover ceremony of U.S.
weapons to the Lebanese army at Beirut's port in
Lebanon on Sunday, Feb. 8, 2015.

Lebanese and American officials attended a handover ceremony Sunday at Beirut's port.

"We are very proud of this and this is top-of-the-line equipment. This is the best that there is in the marketplace. It's what our soldiers use," Hale said. "I know that in a matter of days it's going to be what your brave soldiers are using in the battle to defeat terrorism and extremism that is pouring across the border from Syria."

Hale told reporters that Lebanon has become the fifth-largest recipient of U.S. foreign military assistance. He added that weapons worth more than $100 million were given to Lebanon last year and over a $1 billion worth in the last eight years.

He said the U.S. help to Lebanon will continue "until the job is done."

The Lebanese military is generally seen as a unifying force in Lebanon, and draws its ranks from all of the country's sects — Sunni and Shiite Muslim, Christian and Druze. But the armed forces have struggled to contain the escalating violence in the country.

This is the latest aid promised to Lebanon. In November, France and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement for Paris to provide the Lebanese army with $3 billion worth of weapons paid for by Riyadh. The first shipment of those weapons is expected to arrive in April.

Insane Obama now bombs anti-Assad rebels he wanted to help

Obama Insanity

Obama bombs non-ISIS groups in Syria to help Assad 

who Obama wanted to overthrow last year.

(London Telegraph)  -  The United States has broadened its air campaign in Syria, hitting a faction once seen as part of a mainstream rebel alliance not part of either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The attack on Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist group which has been backed by Qatar and which has been allied to a number of mainstream rebel brigades, is likely to further complicate Syria's multidimensional war.
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Rebel groups reacted angrily to the bombing, as they did to a separate attack against the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra group, which is reported to have killed civilians including at least two children.
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Activists in the border town of Harem posted footage of the small and bloodied corpse of a young boy amid the rubble of a Jabhat al-Nusra base there.

A member of a foreign aid organisation, who asked not to be named but was in the town at the time of the air strike, confirmed to The Telegraph that it had caused civilian casualties.

Rebel groups expected - though in many cases opposed - US bombing raids against Isil. But they have been angered by the strikes against Jabhat and Ahrar, saying they are primarily fighting the Assad regime, and that the attacks are helping his cause.

Ahrar al-Sham in particular fell out badly with Isil last year, led the fighting against it when it was driven out of many opposition areas last January, and is also valued for its strong track record of fighting against the Syrian regime.

Rebels, including those backed by the US, said the raids were likely to turn local public opinion further against the American intervention and drive more people into the arms of hardline jihadist organisations.

"This only makes things more difficult for the international coalition," said Khaled Saleh, the Secretary General of Harakat Hazm, one of the principle rebel groups to receive US military support.

"The patience of the Syrian street is running out. They wonder why everyone is bombing them, and now, when an attack comes they don't know if it's from the regime or from the US-led coalition."

An Ahrar al-Sham spokesman issued a statement on Thursday confirming that the group's headquarters in Babsaqa, near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing in Idlib province, had been hit.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group also confirmed the raid and activist video and photos claimed to be from the scene showed a large explosion and a building collapsed into rubble.

Read More . . . . 

The Islamic State and Hezbollah Fight For Lebanon

As the Islamic State massacred its way throughout Iraq and Syria this summer, a separate battle took place in neighboring Lebanon.

This summer, the Islamic State invaded the Lebanese border town of Arsal, beheading captured soldiers and unleashing waves of lethal car bombs, destabilizing the country. Hezbollah, one of the world's strongest guerrilla armies, has also become involved — either defending Lebanon, or making things worse, depending on who you ask.

Pot farmers to fight Islamic State

Just Don't Piss Off The Drug Lords

ISIS can blow up churches and mosques, cut off heads, 

bomb cities, but don't screw with the drug lords.

(Washington Post)  -  The cultivation of marijuana is illegal in Lebanon, but that doesn't mean people don't grow it. The  industry boomed during the country's lengthy civil war, earning millions for the impoverished yet fertile Bekaa Valley province, and Lebanese authorities have struggled to control it ever since. In 2012, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime listed Lebanon as one of the five "main countries producing cannabis resin," yielding an amount similar to Pakistan's production.

Political instability in Lebanon has often led to boom times for pot farmers. "The worse the security situation is in Lebanon, the more we can grow," one farmer told the Christian Science Monitor in 2007. As such, the chaos in neighboring Syria appears to have been a boon for the farmers, with troops diverted to the border and annual cannabis-eradication drives skipped.

However, the continued rise of the Islamic State militant group has some of Lebanon's cannabis farmers concerned. Yaara Bou Melhem of Australia's Special Broadcasting Service Corp. spoke to one farmer who is collecting weapons in a bid to fight the Islamic State should its fighters breach the border.

"I'll burn a tank if I hit it with it," Abo Hamoudi, 65, said as he showed off his arsenal. "If I hit a pickup with Islamic State people in it, it will burn. If I hit any vehicle with Islamic State in it, I'll burn it."

Among Lebanese authorities, there's some suspicion but also a tacit acceptance that, if worse comes to worst, the farmers may act. "I think they're using Islamic State militants as an excuse to justify having weapons, but the real reason is to protect their hashish," Col. Ghassan Shamseddine, head of Lebanon's drug enforcement unit, told SBS News. "But, of course, if there's any assault from outside of Lebanon into Lebanon, they may use their weapons to help the army."

For the farmers, the concern may be understandable: The Bekaa Valley is not far from Syria, and the Lebanese military has clashed with Syrian militants in the border town of Arsal. Neither the Islamic State nor al-Qaeda proxy Jabhat al-Nusra have shown themselves to be sympathetic to marijuana cultivation: In August, Islamic State militants released a video that showed them burning marijuana fields in Syria.

(Washington Post)

A Russian - Lebanon Alliance? - Putin Strikes Again

Putin acts while Obama hides

• Standing up to Islamists. Putin is shipping in mountains of weapons to the anti-Islamist governments of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and now to Lebanon.

Vice News says on Wednesday, the Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper reported that the Russian ambassador to Lebanon confirmed that the two nations are in the process of negotiating potential military cooperation. This comes on the heels of Lebanon's request to the US in August for new aircraft to support counterinsurgency operations against the Islamic State and other jihadist groups.

Saudi Arabia recently granted $1 billion to Lebanon to help its fight against the Islamic State, on top of another huge dollop of cash it pledged to the country's military last year.

Fighting from Syria's civil war finally spilled over into the Lebanese town of Arsal in early August, bringing ISIS forces with it. The country's Cabinet convened a special session just days later to chart a plan for getting military assistance from "brotherly and friendly countries." In other words, Lebanon is looking for guns and ammo from just about anyone willing to supply them reports Vice News.


So far, the support from Saudi Arabia, the US, and now Russia has been an extension, adjustment, or renewal of existing policies. Saudi Arabia announced a $3 billion aid package for the Lebanese military at the end of 2013.

The US has reversed its trend of declining military aid to the country with recent emergency shipments of equipment and weapons. News of the negotiations between Russia and Lebanon was preceded by an agreement to revive a Russian grant of helicopters and tanks from 2010.

It's widely known that Iran has been supplying Hezbollah, which more or less rules southern Lebanon as its own fiefdom, for decades. As a Shia proxy for Iran, Hezbollah has been fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces against both rebels and Sunni militant groups like ISIS.

Several of those groups have been threatening to take the fight to Hezbollah, rooting them out of their Lebanese safe haven. This would almost certainly entail significant attacks on Lebanese territory, violations of national sovereignty that the army would want to repel.

This clamor for new munitions and weapons is understandable, given the alarm that ISIS is raising around the world. But there's another worrying possibility lurking in the distance: the prospect of another Lebanese civil war.

Lebanon is a fractured country with loads of different ethnic groups, religious sects, and tribal clans — the last civil war there dragged on for 15 bloody years, from 1975 to 1990. Since then, the Lebanese military has played an important political role by providing a unifying, specifically national entity, incorporating people from many different backgrounds and affiliations.

Read More . . . .

Lebanon's Illegal Arms Dealers

Warlords of Tripoli
(Part 1/5)
Vice News.  The best reporting on the planet.  Check out all five parts
of this series.

"We Russians like the Middle East."

The Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria.
Tartus hosts a Soviet-era naval supply and maintenance facility, under a 1971 agreement with Ba'athist Syria, which was—until the second year of the Syrian civil war—staffed by Russian naval personnel. Most recently, the facility hosts the Amur class floating workshop PM-138, capable of providing technical maintenance to Russian warships deployed in the Mediterranean.

Hezbollah Launches Its Own iPhone App

Press One for Allah

Press Two for Car Bombs

Press Three to Explode this Phone

Hezbollah has launched a multi-lingual news application for iPhones and iPads, the latest weapon in its hate-ware against the U.S., Sunni Muslims and Israel.

The Lebanese-based, Iranian-funded Hezbollah describes the app known as LCG as “an application that brings news from all around the world.” Nowhere on the Apple pages describing the product in English is it clear that LCG is the creation of Hezbollah. Hezbollah uses every available medium to try to control the message regarding its terror campaigns in the region and beyond.

The Anti-Defamation League is amongst those leading the campaign against Hezbollah’s public relations war.

“Al-Manar broadcasts the terrorist group’s messages of hate and violence, disseminates anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda and glorifies suicide bombings to millions of viewers 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

On Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV website, the group attacked “the campaign carried out by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League to deactivate Al-Manar applications on smart phones at google play and apple store.”

Major mobile-Internet companies such and Google and Apple previously banned Hezbollah apps but each time the organization’s PR team managed to reintroduce its “news service” in one form or another.

Terrorism
Reach out and touch someone.

 

53,000 Books Burned by Muslims in Lebanon

Assailants set alight the Saeh library belonging to Father Ibrahim Surouj on Friday night, destroying
two-thirds of the 80,000 books and manuscripts it stored.
(File photo: AFP)

An Attack Against Thought Itself

While some moderate Muslims spoke out against this

terrorism, the protest was a fairly small one.

Hundreds of Lebanese took to the streets of the northern city of Tripoli on Saturday to protest the torching of a decades-old library owned by a Greek Orthodox priest.

The demonstrators held up banners that read "Tripoli, peaceful town" and "This is contrary to the values of the Prophet," in reference to the Muslim Prophet Mohammad.

Assailants set alight the Saeh library belonging to Father Ibrahim Surouj on Friday night, destroying two-thirds of the 80,000 books and manuscripts it stored, a security official told Agence France-Presse News.

The attack came a day after "a pamphlet was discovered inside one of the books at the library that was insulting to Islam and the prophet Mohammad," the official said at the time.

Sa’eh library owner Father Ibrahim Surouj

Later, however, "it became clear the priest had nothing to do with the pamphlet," said the same source.

"Then on Friday night, the library was torched," he added.

The attack left the shelves and walls of the library charred.

But the Greek Orthodox priest forgave those responsible for the attack, in a statement aired on television on Saturday.

.

The library is located in the historic heart of Tripoli, Lebanon's second city and scene of frequent Syria-related violence pitting Sunnis against members of the minority Alawite community, to which Syria's President Bashar al-Assad belongs.

Sectarian violence involving the city's Christians has been extremely rare in recent years.

But Friday's incident comes amid a backdrop of growing religious radicalism in Lebanon related to the war in neighbouring Syria.

Future Movement bloc MP Mohammad Kabbara voiced on Saturday March 14 coalition’s condemnation of the burning of a library owned by a Greek Orthodox priest in Tripoli.

“The torching of the library is [akin to] targeting the cultural image of the city,” Kabbara said on Saturday following a meeting of the Tripoli Declaration Committee.

The Future parliamentarian expressed March 14 officials’ and Tripoli figures’ solidarity with the owner of the library, Father Ibrahim Surouj, and stressed the importance of coexistence in Tripoli.

“Evil hands appear to be refusing to leave Tripoli alone to enjoy stability and evil minds want to accuse the city of terrorism in all possible means.” Kabbara said adding “March 14 condemns and deplores the attack that only indicates the immoral character of the perpetrators.”

Also see Yalibnan.com

Lebanon arrests Saudi terrorist behind Iran Embassy bombing

The Religion of Peace™
Freedom of religion, of speech and of thought do not exist under Islam.

100,000 Muslims march against free speech

100,000 Muslims march attacking America for daring to have free speech

• Freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of thought are not allowed under Islam.

Biggest-ever rally over an anti-Islamic film has brought scores to Beirut, Lebanon, following a call for mass demonstrations by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Bottom Line  -  Muslims are angry that other nations have freedom of speech and allow people to speak out against the insanity of Islamic authoritarianism.

Most of the demonstrators were wearing green and yellow headbands, indicating membership in Hezbollah.
.
"America, hear us – don't insult our Prophet," the protesters were chanting. The rally was split into two columns, with women marching separately from men reports RT News.

Shouts of "Death to Israel" and "America is the biggest devil" could also be heard from the crowd, as RT's Lucy Kafanov reported from the scene. A protester, nevertheless, told RT that the demonstrators' anger is not with the American people, but with the US government for allowing the film to spread.


Church burnings in Cairo, Egypt
Muslims burn churches in Egypt, but Americans better not dare to make any movies pointing out the truth of Islam.

Copts nervous after Egypt church attack
The New Year's day bombing of a church in Alexandria has left many in Egypt's Coptic Christian community frustrated and frightened.

Burning Churches.
Muslims show no respect for other religions.

Obama is running guns to Syria

Caesar Obama the First.
The Congress and the Constitution mean nothing to Caesar.  He can kill who he wants around the world at will.

MORE  WAR  -  Obama rips up the Constitution and is now making war on Syria

• Most members of Congress from both parties are secretly eager to destroy the Constitution and create an Imperial Presidency.
• The Republican Party is either silent or encourages Caesar Obama's war plans.   

The US has coordinated the climbing number of illegal shipments of more advanced weapons to anti-Damascus Syrian rebels paid for by Persian Gulf Arab states, US and foreign officials say.

The United States is helping bring more and better weapons to Syria's rebels, including anti-tank weaponry, for their fight against President Bashar al-Assad regime, says The Washington Post.

Officials of the Caesar Barack Obama regime claim that American support is limited to ‘expanded contacts with opposition military forces’ to provide ‘credibility assessment’ of rebel forces and command-and-control infrastructure to US-sponsored Persian Gulf dictatorships that fund the purchase and shipment of lethal weapons to anti-Damascus armed gangs, The Washington Post. 

TRANSLATION OF WASHINGTON DOUBLE TALK  -  Yes.  We are running guns.

American officials also met and negotiated in Washington this week with a delegation of Kurds from sparsely populated eastern Syria, where little violence has occurred. The talks, says an Obama administration official, included discussions about the likelihood of opening a second front against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in efforts to compel him to move resources from the west. 

Constitution?  What Constitution?

Many officials, the report adds, now consider an expanding military confrontation to be inevitable. 

The American military, the paper notes, has also prepared options for Syria “extending all the way to air assaults to destroy the nation’s air defenses.” However, US officials describe such scenario as unlikely, claiming instead, that the United States and its allies are increasingly focusing on coordination of intelligence and the supplying weapons to anti-Damascus rebel groups. 

Moreover, the new weaponry for the Syrian rebels are being stockpiled in Damascus, in Idlib near the Turkish border and in Zabadani on the Lebanese border, according to the report, with the rebels claiming that their supplies of arms and ammunition has significantly increased following a decision by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Persian Gulf Arab kingdoms to provide millions of dollars in funding each month. 

Anti-Syrian rebel leaders say they have been in direct contact with the State Department officials to “designate worthy rebel recipients of arms and pinpoint locations for stockpiles, but US officials said that there currently are no military or intelligence personnel on the ground in Syria.” 

(Press TV)          (France 24 News)

The vessel "Lutfallah II" docks at the port of Selaata, north of Beirut, on April 27, 2012 after it was intercepted by the Lebanese navy for being suspected of carrying weapons destined for Syria's rebel army.

Turkish intervention OK says Syria's Muslim Brotherhood



This cartoon is the image of Syria's government that the media wants you to hear.  It is certainly one point of view.  But life is not that simple.



A point of view you are not allowed to hear . . .

"I go every week, especially in areas where clashes are supposed to be taking place. But nothing happens! The media is lying.  About 95% of the population supports Bashar al-Assad." 

• The Muslim Brotherhood wants Islamist Turkey to invade Syria.
• The secular Baath Party of Syria has a good deal of support among the general population and Islamic and Christian minority groups.

Americans are grossly misinformed about the world. 

Americans are told by their hack leaders that the secular and Socialist Baath Parties of Syria and Iraq are bad and must go.  But not everything is that easy. 

THINK.  The Baathists are secular and Socialist and they are the enemies of the radical Muslim Brotherhood and radical Islam.  So if they are the enemies of radical Islam why do we oppose the Baathists? 

Now a leader of Syria’s outlawed Muslim Brotherhood said the Syrian people would accept military intervention by Turkey, rather than Western countries, to protect them from President Bashar al-Assad’s security forces.

Mohammad Riad Shaqfa, who lives in exile in Saudi Arabia, told a news conference in Istanbul the international community should isolate Assad’s government to encourage people in their struggle to end more than four decades of Assad family rule says FRANCE 24 news.

Hundreds of people have been killed this month, one of the bloodiest periods in the revolt that began in March. The United Nations says more than 3,500 people have died in the unrest.

If Assad’s government refused to halt its repression, Shaqfa said Turkish intervention would be acceptable.

“If the international community procrastinates then more is required from Turkey as a neighbor to be more serious than other countries to handle this regime,” Shaqfa said.

After mobs attacked Turkey’s diplomatic missions in Syria at the weekend, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu hosted representatives of the Syrian opposition at dinner.
 

Saydnaya church, near Damascus, is second only to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrimage.
As an increasing number of Syrians take to the streets to demand sweeping government reforms, many Syrian Christians are still hesitant to do so – afraid of an uncertain future as a minority that has until now been safe under the current secular government.  (Orthodox Peace Fellowship)



A view you are not allowed to hear: 

"If Bashar al-Assad falls, there will be no more Alawites or Christians here.”


They hail from the same community as Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Now Lebanon’s Alawite community is monitoring the situation across the Lebanon-Syrian border with trepidation.

A few kilometers from the Syrian border and there are growing fears that the current crisis in Syria, sparked by protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, could spill over into the region.

Anxiety levels are particularly high among the Alawites, a community that follows the same offshoot of Shiite Islam as the embattled Syrian leader.

In these parts, support for Assad – and his father, former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad – is strong.

"When Hafez al-Assad came to power [in the 1970s], the Alawite community finally obtained rights in Syria and Lebanon,” said Ali Ahmed Ali, a client at the Tal Abbas barbershop.

“We buy our medications, our gas, even our vegetables in Syria. Everything is cheap there. I hope the regime will not fall. If Bashar al-Assad [who succeeded his father in 2000] falls, there will be no more Alawites or Christians here,” he predicts, brandishing his cane.

In the impoverished Jabal Mohsen neighborhood of Tripoli, posters of Bashar and Hafez al-Assad adorn the walls of some of the buildings.

But in this neighborhood that is home to the majority of Lebanon’s estimated 100,000 Alawites, the residents are cagey and suspicious.

Tripoli has a history of sectarian tensions between the Alawites and their Sunni neighbors. The tensions stem from Syria’s longstanding involvement in Lebanese politics dating back to the country’s fratricidal civil war during the 1970s and the 1980s.

Clashes have frequently broken out between residents of Jabal Mohsen and Bab el-Tebbaneh, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Tripoli.

Saleh, the Arab Democratic Party spokesman, rarely goes to the center of Tripoli, a Sunni majority area. He leaves Jabal Mohsen only to go to Syria. "I go every week, especially in areas where clashes are supposed to be taking place. But nothing happens! The media is lying. About 95% of the population supports Bashar al-Assad."  (FRANCE 24)



It is not as simple as black and white.
Syria and Lebanon are a mixture of ethnic and religious groups.  About 10% of Syrians are Christians.  Some 1.1 million Greek Orthodox, 700,000 Syrian Orthodox, 200,000 Armenian Christians (Apostolics and Catholics), 400,000 Catholics of various rites and the Church of the East (Assyrian).



And the same mix of ethnic groups and religions for Lebanon.
About 40% of Lebanon is Christian, mostly Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Melkite Greek Catholics, Assyrian Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox, Chaldean Catholic, Syrian Catholics.

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