ganging up with tolerance...

ecumenical

WASHINGTON — President Trump will travel to Saudi Arabia and Israel this month, the White House announced on Thursday, making the two countries his first foreign destinations since taking office, as he seeks to intensify the war against the Islamic State, rally the region against Iran and negotiate Middle East peace.

Mr. Trump will also visit Rome to meet Pope Francis, completing a tour of the centers of the three major monotheistic religions in what aides said was an effort to seek unity against common enemies. The stops were added to the front of a previously scheduled trip to Brussels and Sicily for back-to-back summit meetings held by NATO and the Group of 7 economic powers.

“Tolerance is the cornerstone of peace,” Mr. Trump said a ceremony at the White House. “That is why I am proud to make a major and historic announcement this morning and share with you that my first foreign trip as president of the United States will be to Saudi Arabia, then Israel, and then to a place that my cardinals love very much, Rome.”

Mr. Trump plans to gather leaders from across the Muslim world in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, and he said he hoped to use the meeting to establish “a new foundation of cooperation and support with our Muslim allies to combat extremism, terrorism and violence and to embrace a more just and hopeful future for young Muslims in their countries.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/politics/trump-to-visit-saudi-arabia-and-israel-in-first-foreign-trip.html

By Gus Leonisky at 5 May 2017 - 8:48am
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laughing his head off...

The stars of United States political satire Veep are in disbelief that Australian MP Graham Perrett choked on his dinner and gave himself a black eye while watching the TV show.

The Queensland Labor MP was having a sushi dinner on Sunday while watching the show, before he started laughing "at the wrong time" and choking on some rice.

Mr Perrett then, while running from the lounge room to the kitchen, hit the edge of his kitchen island.

He knocked himself unconscious, resulting in an injured nose, black eye and having to receive three stitches in his cheek.

"My wife is still laughing, every time she looks at me she's like, you're ridiculous," he told the ABC.

But despite the pain, which was "not much fun", he said the best thing to come out of the incident was a message from Veep star Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-04/federal-mp-laughed-so-hard-at-veep...

Gus loves "Veep"... It's pissing laughing... and far better than the boring "Madam Secretary"...

By Gus Leonisky at 5 May 2017 - 8:55am
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meanwhile, as you're sniffing another dog's butt...

The US and Saudi Arabia have reportedly intensified negotiations over arms deals potentially worth tens of billions of dollars. The purported agreement looks to go beyond or make major shifts from the Obama administration.Washington and Riyadh have been engaged in talks over multi-billion arms deals, Reuters reported Friday, citing unnamed sources within the administration.

Notably, Saudi Arabia is set to be the first stop on President Donald Trump’s maiden foreign trip since taking the office.

Sources told Reuters the arms package includes a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system from Lockheed Martin, similar to the one being made operational in South Korea, which costs around $1 billion.

The countries have also been negotiating over a C2BMC software system and a package of satellite capabilities, also provided by Lockheed. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle and M109 artillery vehicle manufactured by BAE Systems PLC could also be included in the package, sources told Reuters.

There are reportedly more than $1 billion worth of munitions, including armor-piercing Penetrator Warheads and Paveway laser-guided bombs made by the Raytheon Co.

The deal could also contain contracts that have been under discussion for years but was never finalized. One of the newly negotiated contracts was previously approved by the State Department in 2015, and includes four multi-mission surface combat ships costing $11.5 billion.

If the deal is sealed, it would be the first time the US has sold a new small surface warship to a foreign country in decades.

https://www.rt.com/usa/387319-trump-saudi-arms-reuters/

True to his words : BUY AMERICAN"...

By Gus Leonisky at 6 May 2017 - 2:55pm
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are you awake?...

Moscow lashed out at a US Congress bill on tightening sanctions against North Korea which stipulates that the US military may establish control over ports in the Russian Far East. The Russian Upper House warned that such actions violate international law and amount to a declaration of war.

On May 4, the US House of Representatives passed a bill which slapped more sanctions on North Korea and gave the Trump administration the go-ahead to take control over Russian, Iranian, Syrian and Chinese ports in order to ensure that no forbidden cargo reaches Pyongyang.

In particular, the bill mentions the ports of Nakhodka, Vanino and Vladivostok in the Russian Far East.

The bill, which was approved by a 419 to 1 margin, is due to be approved by the Senate and then signed by US President Donald Trump.

Tantamount to war

Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian Upper House's International Affairs Committee, told Sputnik that the US House of Representatives bill on establishing control over ports in the Russian Far East envisions a show of force and thus amounts to a declaration of war.

"This bill, I hope, will never be implemented because its implementation envisions a scenario of power with forced inspections of all vessels by US warships. Such a power scenario is beyond comprehension, because it means a declaration of war," Kosachev said.

According to him, the document, "like a huge number of other pies baked by Congress," runs counters to international law.

"No country in the world and no international organization, primarily the UN, has authorized the US to monitor the implementation of any resolutions of the UN Security Council," he said.

https://sputniknews.com/world/201705061053333749-russia-united-states-bill-north-korea-sanctions-ports/

By Gus Leonisky at 6 May 2017 - 7:29pm
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conjuring the dead...

Talking about the meteoric rise of the so-called Islamic State, former CIA agent John Nixon, who grilled Saddam Hussein following his arrest, said: “In hindsight, the thought of having an aging and disengaged Saddam in power seems almost comforting in comparison with the wasted effort of our brave men and women in uniform and the rise of Islamic State, not to mention the £2.5 trillion spent to build a new Iraq.”

I would smile at the irony of the situation if not for the millions of lives that were shattered over America’s then-imperious needs to “liberate” Iraq and all those territories the sunlight falls upon. As it is, the Iraqi people do not have the luxury of hindsight following the destruction that befell their nation on account of a ruling elite choosing to play political“musical chairs” to better secure geopolitical hegemony.

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that war broke out in the Middle East when US President George W. Bush imagined himself a grand liberator of men. Or was it really to prevent a lunatic tyrant from unleashing weapons of mass destruction on the Free World? The history has been redacted so many times over the years so as to adapt it to the desired political narrative that it is hard to tell. [Gus note: It was mostly about oil as Greenspan later confirmed -- and preserving the Dollar as the only petro-currency]

Maybe we ought to stick to facts and not imagine past events so that state officials could rationalize blame away from guilty parties. But let’s put aside for a moment the rather distasteful longing Washington has chosen to display for the Saddam era and his ability to keep Iraqis on a tight leash - or so we are told.

This would-be mea culpa is but the introduction of a new rationale - one rooted yet again on division and covert sectarianism. One may argue that with ISIS on the run a new devil had to rise, with the Middle East forever blamed for the chaos others in fact constructed.

There it is … the infamous Shia label: “It is improbable that a group like ISIS would have been able to enjoy the kind of success under his [Saddam Hussein] repressive regime that they have had under the Shia-led Baghdad government,” Nixon wrote.

It is almost as if Mr. Nixon is trying to blame Iraq’s Shia population for the murderous insanity ISIS’s Wahhabism rose to carve itself an empire. Of course, THAT would be incendiary criminal … and may I add eerily similar to those comments uttered by ISIS preachers when making a case for a grand religious cleansing against all things Shia.

Let me briefly recap here: rather than blame the rise of terror in Iraq and by extension the Greater Middle East, on the ideology that has forwarded, supported and carried all ISIS-like militants, that is, Wahhabism, a former CIA operative is now blaming Iraq’s religious majority for the fiasco.

Should we play political necromancy and resurrect Saddam Hussein then?

Back in 2015, Catherine Shakdam exposed how IS (ISIS, ISIL) came to be:

The cradle of Wahhabism - an ascetic and radical interpretation of Sunni Islam - Saudi Arabia has often been understood as the nurturer of radical religious thoughts, so much so that many analysts and scholars have actually blamed the rise of Islamic terrorism on the kingdom, arguing that Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabis have not only fanned sectarianism but also promoted Jihad as a religious paradigm, a new expression of one’s religious devotion as a mean to assert its control over the Middle East.

In a report for Global Research published in January 2014, Professor James Petras alleged that it is al Saud royals’ allegiance to Wahhabi Islam which gave birth to radical groups such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS). He wrote, “The ruling elite finances the most fanatical, retrograde, misogynist version of Islam, ‘Wahhabi’ a sect of Sunni Islam.”

The narrative of jihad
While Saudi Arabia has always categorically rejected claims that its leadership has indeed contributed, financed and protected terror radical groups across the Islamic world and, more specifically, the Middle East, it has been increasingly difficult to differentiate in between Wahhabi clerics’ rhetoric in the kingdom and terror militants’ narrative in Syria and Iraq, especially since both preach intolerance and call for harsh punishments against those they view as apostates of Islam while revelling in the concept of jihad (holy war).
As IS - formerly Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL - as it chose to rebrand itself last June, following its expansionist campaign in northern Iraq, has swept through the greater Levant, taking, quite literally, no prisoners, since its militants have the habit of murdering, pillaging and ravaging all which stand in their way, troubling parallels and even patterns have emerged in between terror militants and Saudi-sponsored Wahabbi preachers. How can we forget the vehemence leading Sunni clerics called for global jihad against Syrian President Bashar al Assad and his Shiite backers, namely Iran and Hezbollah? Such a stance has been mimicked by IS and al-Qaeda.
“What is happening to our brothers on Syrian soil, in terms of violence stemming from the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies, counts as a declaration of war on Islam and the Muslim community in general,” declared Mohammed Hassan a prominent Egyptian cleric in June 2013, speaking on behalf of 70 Sunni organisations, all affiliated to Saudi Arabia.
It is such cries for Jihad that have fuelled IS’s fire and sold thousands of men and women its terror narrative. Whether or not Saudi Arabia did indeed willingly partake in the creation of IS, it is evident that it contributed to its inception by entertaining the idea of a reactionary Sunni Islam.
After all, IS’s very inspiration, its quest for the establishment of an all-mighty Islamic State over the nations of the world stems back from Wahhabi Islam’s core ideology. Both share the same hatred for Shia Islam, Iran and all faith denominations that do not fall within the realm of Sunni Islam.
Viewed from a distance, IS and Wahhabis have more in common than Saudi Arabia cares to admit. The extremists of all extremists, IS militants, have merely pushed the envelope further than Saudi Arabia ever dared, or wanted to for that matter.
But if Saudi Arabia was willing to tolerate radicalism in the Middle East in order to rid itself of a few enemies and assert its hegemony over the region by creating a buffer to Iran’s political and ideological traction, it did not intend for IS to become the monster we all have learned to fear.

-------------
Gus: On that last concept, I personally believe that Saudi Arabia did not care if IS "became a monster". The purpose was to achieve Sunni supremacy in the region no matter what, including that of destroying Syria with various Sunni factions (supported by the USA), some less "monstrous" than others. The present dispute with Qatar is the next instalment of the same attack on Shia Muslim (the Sunni moderate of Qatar want rapprochement with Chia Iran) and for the Saudis to dominate the region with the help of "their American friends", including create a greater caliphate (Muslim empire) stretching from half of the African continent to Indonesia and eventually taking over Iran.

Despite hiccups, the Saudi/US plan is going well...

unfairly protecting the petrodollar...

The US Senate's recent vote to impose new sanctions against Russia could potentially disrupt collaboration between Russian and European firms in the energy industry. Shortly after the vote, the German Foreign Minister and Austrian Chancellor warned that the US may be using new sanctions against Russia to further its own economic interests.

Projects likely to be affected by the new, extended wave of sanctions include the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is scheduled to be operational by 2019, spanning in excess of 700 miles, from Russia to the EU's largest economy, Germany. The pipeline will greatly increase the volume of Russian natural gas that can be delivered to this strategic economic area, while also possibly eradicating the need for it pass through Ukraine.

This should ultimately secure Western Europe's future energy needs, by providing it with a more direct transportation route, and doubling capacity. This venture is set to cost around US$10 billion, with Gazprom, Russia's gas giant, and a consortium of key players in Europe's energy market, including Shell and Uniper, putting forward the necessary funds.

https://sputniknews.com/business/201706271055004046-trump-russia-sanctio...

By Gus Leonisky at 27 Jun 2017 - 9:40pm
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