Come and See, and Prevent World War III.

Screenshot from the film: “Come and See”

By Jerry Alatalo | March 12, 2024

“We must say what everybody knows but does not venture to say. We must say that by whatever name men may call murder – murder always remains murder. . . . They will cease to see the service of their country, the heroism of war, military glory, and patriotism, and will see what exists: the naked, criminal business of murder!” – LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) Address to the Swedish Government Congress Peace Conference, 1909

Given growing concerns of escalating war since the Russian government’s initiation of its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in February 2022, we’ve thought hard about ways of contributing to efforts at negotiating a peaceful end to the war before the situation becomes unmanageable. 

Whether sharing the powerhouse 1985 anti-war film “Come and See” – brought to the cinema by Russian Director Elem Klimov – and the late, great movie critic Roger Ebert (1942-2013) 1985 review of the film will make a good difference in the name of peace in March 2024, or the message misses the mark, remains to be seen.  

Most reviewers of the film place it among the top anti-war films ever made, with some confident enough in their views to conclude that “Come and See” deserves recognition as the single most important anti-war film ever produced. In a sane world, anti-war films such as this would be made far more often, rising above the competition in every annual Academy Awards ceremony – until the message is finally received, and war becomes extinct, a thing of the far distant past which students of history can only look back upon in disbelief and horror. 

Given the unprecedented seriousness of the current disappointing situation on Earth with respect to the potential for World War III, we anticipated no objection to the exercise of artistic license; that the owner(s) of RogerEbert.com wouldn’t need to be asked for any copyright permission, and would, if asked, gladly encourage the public to share the late Mr. Ebert’s review of a film which can help increase understanding of the past and present root cause(s) of each war. 

With that said, we have borrowed Roger Ebert’s review of “Come and See” and share it here (in italics):

Review by Roger Ebert (1942-2013) of “Come And See”, the 1985 anti-war film by Russian Director Elem Klimov.
It’s said that you can’t make an effective anti-war film because war by its nature is exciting, and the end of the film belongs to the survivors. No one would ever make the mistake of saying that about Elem Klimov’s “Come and See.” This 1985 film from Russia is one of the most devastating films ever about anything, and in it, the survivors must envy the dead.
The film begins with an ambiguous scene, as a man calls out commands to invisible others on a beach. Who is he? Who is he calling to? Why is he fed up with them?

It’s revealed that he’s calling out to children who have concealed themselves among the reeds. They are playing games of war, and digging in the sand for weapons concealed or lost during some earlier conflict.

We meet them. Florya, perhaps 14, lives nearby with his family. It is 1943, Hitler’s troops are invading the Soviet republic of Byelorussia, and Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko) dreams of becoming a heroic partisan and defending his homeland. He wants to leave home and volunteer. His family forbids him. But as events unfold, he leaves, is accepted in a fighting unit, forced to change his newer shoes with a veteran’s worn-out ones and is taken under the wing of these battle-weary foot soldiers.

He is still young. He seems younger than his years in early scenes, and much, much older in later ones. At first he is eager to do a good job; posted as a sentry, told to fire on anyone who doesn’t know the password, he challenges a girl scarcely older than he is. He does not shoot her; indeed, he never shoots anybody. They grow friendly. Glasha (Olga Mironova), innocent and warm, dreams of her future. Florya is not articulate and may be mentally slow, but he is touched.

The film follows him for its entire length, sometimes pausing to look aside at details of horror. He doesn’t see everything. In particular, there’s a scene where he and the girl, separated from the army unit, return to his family farm, where he expects a warm welcome. There is nobody there, furniture is upturned, but it seems they’ve just left. A pot of soup is still warm. He suddenly becomes convinced he knows where they’re gone, and pulls her to run with him to an island in a marshland. Then she sees a sight that he doesn’t.

Such a departure from his point of view doesn’t let us off easy. All he sees is horror, and all he doesn’t see is horror, too. Later Florya finds himself in a village as Nazi occupiers arrive. There is a sustained sequence as they methodically round up all the villagers and lock them into a barn. The images evoke the Holocaust. As he’s shoved in as part of the seething crowd, Florya’s eyes never leave the windows high above the floor. By now his only instinct in life has become to escape death. Parents and children, old people and infants, are all packed in. The Nazis call for any able-bodied men to come out. The fathers stay with their families.

Florya scrambles out a window and watches as the Nazis burn down the barn, its locked double doors heaving from the desperation inside. This is a horrifying scene, avoiding facile cutaways and simply standing back and regarding.
This incident, and the story of the boy himself, are based on fact. Many Russian films have depicted the horror of Nazism, because Hitler was a safe target and a convenient stand-in for political allegory closer to home. This film is much more than an allegory. I have rarely seen a film more ruthless in its depiction of human evil.

The principal Nazi monster in the film, S.S. Major Sturmbannfuhrer, is a suave, heartless beast not a million miles distant from Tarantino’s Col. Hans Landa. He toys with an unpleasant little simian pet that clings to his neck. He is almost studious in his murderous commands. His detachment embodies power, which is the thing Florya never for a moment possesses throughout the movie. It is possible that Florya survives because he is so manifestly powerless. To look at him is to see a mind reeling from shock. One would like to think the depiction of the Nazis is exaggerated, but no. The final title card says, “The Nazis burned down 628 Byelorussian villages together with all the people in them.”

It strains credulity to imagine Florya surviving all the horrors that he witnesses, but there was a real Florya, and Klimov’s script was written with Ales Adamovich; Klimov told Ron Holloway in a 1986 interview, “Adamovich was the same age as the hero in the film. He and his family fought with the partisans and witnessed the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis on Belarussian soil.” Klimov added that his film was shot in Byelorussia (now known as Belarus) near where the events took place, and that he used no professional actors.

The film depicts brutality and is occasionally very realistic, but there’s an overlay of muted nightmarish exaggeration. The swamp that Florya and Glasha wade through, for example, has a thick gelatinous top layer that seems like a living, malevolent skin. There’s a sequence in which Florya becomes involved with some cows who will become food for starving troops. He and the cow are in a field obscured by a thick fog when machine-gun fire breaks out — from where, he cannot tell.

The eventual death of the beast is told in a series of images that mirror the inexorable shutting down of life. The cow’s life was doomed one way or another, but these suggest how utterly incomprehensible death is to the cow. The nightmare intensifies after Florya is too near an artillery bombardment and is deafened. The sound becomes muted, and there is a faint ringing, which makes the reality of sound frustratingly out of reach for him.

Is it true that audiences demand some kind of release or catharsis? That we cannot accept a film that leaves us with no hope? That we struggle to find uplift in the mire of malevolence? There’s a curious scene here in a wood, the sun falling down through the leaves, when the soundtrack, which has been grim and mournful, suddenly breaks free into Mozart. And what does this signify? A fantasy, I believe, and not Florya’s, who has probably never heard such music. The Mozart descends into the film like a deus ex machina, to lift us from its despair. We can accept it if we want, but it changes nothing. It is like an ironic taunt.

I must not describe the famous sequence at the end. It must unfold as a surprise for you. It pretends to roll back history. You will see how. It is unutterably depressing, because history can never undo itself, and is with us forever.

I learn from IMDb.com that the film’s title, seemingly so straightforward, has a bleak context. It comes from the Book of Revelation: “And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’ And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the Earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the Earth.”

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If the reader believes the information in this post has the potential to slow and/or prevent the catastrophic outbreak of World War III, we would humbly and sincerely ask the information becomes share widely. Thank you. 

Peace.

WARNING: The film contains excessive violence, both physical and psychological. The content should be shared with/seen by mature audiences only.  

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Patrick Lawrence Resurrects Harold Pinter.

Cross-posted via ConsortiumNews.com by Jerry Alatalo | December 17, 2024

Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA on Pexels.com

[Editor’s note: My comment on Mr. Lawrence’s article included an excerpt where he provides links to photographs proving the Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham military group was/is operating with weaponry of Western manufacture:

“…But something worth considering here: These media ran interesting photographs with their initial stories on the militias’ sudden offensive, showing rocket launchers and armored personnel carriers of obvious Western manufacture. Here is one such picture and here is another.

I see these pictures and the accompanying stories as mirrors. They show us exactly who we are, what we have become — and also the extent to which we are encouraged not to see either.

There are no true surprises in what we witness now in Syria. It is an old story. We have been blinded to it, along with many other things to which we have been blinded. Most fundamentally we have been rendered blind to ourselves.”

I then shared the unforgettable words of the late great British playwright Harold Pinter, from his profoundly honest, eternally important lecture delivered upon Mr. Pinter’s becoming awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005: “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them.”

Finally, I issued a direct public challenge to the International Criminal Court judges: “…It remains to be seen if the International Criminal Court judges act upon the (undeniable) evidence, or, in other words – do the right thing.”]

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Article title: Patrick Lawrence: Blinded to Syria | December 15, 2024

Decades after deploying mass violence and rendering citizens grotesquely ignorant of the world, U.S.-led powers appear willing to risk world war, while reinventing a terrorist to lead what was a secular nation until last week.

A faction of jihadists in Syria, 2019. (Halab Today TV/Wikimedia Commons)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

I do not know anyone who was not shocked by the lightning speed with which Damascus fell to expensively armed jihadist militias last weekend.

I know very few people who do not understand that another domino has just fallen in the “seven-front war” Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted this year of waging across West Asia. I know very few people who do not recognize that terrorist Israel is well on the way to establishing itself as a dictatorial hegemon across the region.

I know very few people who do not understand that the longstanding project of the Zionist neoconservatives, who have more or less controlled U.S. foreign policy for decades, i.e., “remaking the Middle East,” is the design behind all that has occurred since the Israelis launched their attack on Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023.

I do not know anyone who has achieved the age of reason who does not recognize the U.S. hand in the stunning sweep through Syria of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham, long-recognized as a terrorist organization. All one needs to grasp this is a little history.

But I know of no corporate or state-funded medium on either side of the Atlantic — the major dailies, the broadcast networks, NPR, PBS, the BBC — where you can read or hear about any of this.

Blinding Us

Mainstream media are doing exactly what they did as the U.S.–led “regime change” operation in Syria began in early 2012 at the latest and probably in the final months of 2011: They are making sure the events now unfolding in Syria are not quite illegible but nearly.

It is again a question of knowing the history. In the case of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham and the other jihadists who knocked over the Assad regime as if it were made of Lego blocks, it is another exercise in dressing up a monster in a suit and tie.

The corporate press and broadcasters are now resolutely recasting the murderous fanatics who have seized control of Syria as legitimate “rebels.” Rebels, rebels, rebels: This is the approved terminology.

I see they have left off describing these Sunni zealots as the “moderate rebels” of yesteryear, that phrase having been hopelessly discredited last time around, but the drift is the same: These are civilized people out there trying to do the right thing.

My favorite in this line appeared in The Daily Telegraph several days before the Assad government collapsed: “How Syria’s ‘diversity-friendly’ jihadists plan on building a state.” I had to read this one twice, too.

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Nowhere but nowhere in the West’s mass media can you find even a mention of the U.S.–Turkish-and-probably–Israeli support that made possible the swift sweep of Hay`at Tahrir al–Sham and its ever-bickering allies from its seat in the Idlib governorate through Hama and other cities to the center of Damascus.

This is, like the earlier years of the Western-backed terrorist attacks on the Assad regime, and like the proxy war in Ukraine, and like the Saudis’ U.S.–supported war against Yemen, and like the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, and like the Israelis’ attacks in Lebanon, sponsored military aggression we are not permitted to see without considerable effort to transcend official representations of reality.

Understanding Who the Americans Are

Mossadegh at his court martial, 1953. (Ebrahim Golestan, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

What happened, what is happening, what will happen: I do not know anyone who is not asking these questions, too.

We must go back and back and back further to understand what has just occurred in Syria and to understand why, and finally to understand who Americans are and who they have been for all the decades since the 1945 victories.

It is logical to begin this pencil-sketch of the past with the famous coups of the 1950s. These occurred in Iran, where the C.I.A., working with MI6, deposed Mohammed Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in August 1953, and in Guatemala, where an agency operation forced Jacobo Árbenz from the presidency a year later.

It is striking today to consider a few of the features of these operations. Stimulating various social and economic antagonisms to foment public unrest and an appearance of political disorder was key in both cases. Both coups removed popularly elected leaders and installed repressive puppets.

There was violence in both cases, but by later standards these operations were something close to surgical. Mossadegh withdrew to his farm in the Iranian countryside; Árbenz, a Swiss pharmacist by background, spent his last years wandering dejectedly through Europe.

An appearance of propriety was important back then. Most Americans were unaware that the C.I.A. had engineered the events in Tehran and Guatemala City. And in the Iranian case, something to note: Removing Iran’s first elected prime minister set in motion a wave of blowback that continues to break over U.S.–Iranian relations; in Guatemala it led to a civil war that endured for 36 years.

The C.I.A. considered the coup in Iran a useful model – Guatemala its next application. But in 1965 the agency began to do things very differently when it organized the coup that brought down Sukarno, independent Indonesia’s charismatic founding father and its first president.

The Jakarta Model

Vincent Bevins, a seasoned foreign correspondent, got this down better than anyone in The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020). With the Cold War approaching its worst years, the Indonesian coup was the first, as Blevins’s subtitle indicates, to submerge an entire nation in prolonged violence.

There are various figures for the number of deaths that resulted as the agency installed the dictatorial, bottomlessly corrupt Suharto in the presidential palace in 1967. Blevins puts it at a million or more. Along with the deaths, the nation’s previously lively political culture was extinguished until Suharto fell 32 years later.

The Jakarta Method was subsequently applied in various other circumstances, notably but not only in the 1973 coup that deposed Salvador Allende in Chile and installed Augusto Pinochet, a vicious dictator in the Suharto mold. Nine years later Zbigniew Brzezinski put a modified version to use in Afghanistan.

Blind to US Support for Jihadism

Brzezinski at the chess board, 1978. (White House)

As Jimmy Carter’s relentlessly anti–Soviet national security adviser, Brzezinski persuaded Carter to back the mujahideen then fighting the Moscow-backed regime in Kabul. The result was the well-armed, well-financed force named al–Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden.

And so we come, via the campaigns of mass violence in Iraq and Libya and the proxy war in Ukraine, to the Syrian operation. People who rely on mainstream media still have a hard time accepting that the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies backed al–Qaeda’s Syrian forces, the Islamic State, and their heinous offshoots in their war against the Assad regime.

There are no grounds whatsoever for this disbelief. The U.S. operation in Syria is a straight readout of Brzezinski’s Afghanistan strategy. Sharmine Narwani, the tenacious Beirut-based correspondent and the founding editor of The Cradle, reported the American op first-hand as it unfolded. She recounted what she saw in an impressively detailed interview I published in 2019. It is here and here in two parts.

It Wasn’t Over

By 2018–19, it was obvious that the C.I.A.’s Syrian operation, in my judgment its largest since the Cold War’s end, had failed after several years of Russia’s bombing campaign against the Islamic State. Everyone making this judgment, myself included, forgot to add four essential words: It had failed for the time being.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham was founded at the start of the covert U.S. intervention, in 2011–12. Its name translates as Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.

Liberating the Levant is a very good idea, but HTS does not mean this the way anyone opposed to the Western powers’ long and violent domination of West Asia would mean it. HTS shared with the Islamic State an ambition to establish a caliphate ruled by radical interpretations of Islamic law.

In May 2018 the State Department added HTS to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, FTOs in the parlance of the apparatchiks. It is a direct descendent of Jabhat al–Nusra, which was the worst of the worst among al–Qaeda’s shape-shifting affiliates operating in Syria.

By the time HTS made the list, Jabhat al–Nusra was already on it. They both remain on it as we speak.

HTS was founded by Abu Mohammad al–Jolani, a nom de guerre now all over the news: He has long led HTS and appears now to have plans to make himself Syria’s next president. When he spoke at a celebrated mosque in Damascus last week, he shed the public alias in favor of his real name, Ahmed al–Shara.

Jolani’s background is not to be missed. He was once an Islamic State commander who went on to found Jabhat al–Nusra and, after a violent split, HTS.

As the HTS leader, he was implicated in numerous cases of torture, violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests, disappearances, and so on. Reflecting his singular malignity, the State Department had declared Jolani a “specially designated global terrorist” as far back as 2013.

That designation still stood in 2021. Then something odd, and in hindsight very revealing, occurred.

Rehabilitating Jolani

Abu Mohammad al-Julani, commander-in-chief of Tahrir al-Sham; he was emir of its predecessor al-Nusra Front, Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. (U.S. State Dept.)

In April of that year PBS broadcast the first interview with Jolani ever to appear in any Western medium. It was conducted by Martin Smith, a longtime broadcast correspondent with a good reputation.

And there on camera was the specially designated terrorist in a blue blazer and a buttoned-down shirt, telling Smith he planned to build a “salvation government” in Syria.

Smith was not shy, to his credit, in his review of Jolani’s horrific record. But he gave his interview subject ample airtime to make his that-was-then-this-is-now argument.

There was no talk of a caliphate, despite how HTS still named itself. It was about sound local governance. Yes, this would be according to Sharia law, but it would be a kind-and-gentle Sharia law.

The Martin Smith interview, it is now evident, was highly significant for its timing and its implications for U.S. policy. It is almost certain that it signaled an already-in-train revival of the Syrian operation; certainly it marked the start of the preposterous reinvention of Jolani that is now ubiquitous in Western media.

It is a long way from those first postwar coups — large in ambition and implications but small in scale as they look to us now. Since the Jakarta Method was devised in the mid–1960s, mass murder programs have shaped our world just as Vincent Blevins insightfully put it.

Committed to Mass Violence

The questions noted at the start of this commentary remain those we must ask: What happened, what is happening, what will happen. Clarity on these matters arrives by degrees — not by way of official accounts or the corporate press, but in independent media. For now, two conclusions.

One, the U.S. and its trans–Atlantic allies are now thoroughly committed to mass violence. This means it is difficult to avoid concluding that the Western powers and Israel will turn to Iran once Syria as a functioning polity has been thoroughly disabled.

What has prompted the U.S. and Israel to exercise caution to date has been the risk of what would without doubt be a cataclysmic conflict that could tip into another world war.

With a six-decade history of mass violence behind them, these powers now appear willing to take this risk. There is little ground left to continue questioning this.

Two, we now witness the reinvention of a viciously intolerant terrorist given to waging holy wars as an acceptable presence at the head of what was a secular nation until earlier this month.

We must read this as the outcome — the successful outcome — of an eight-decade campaign to render the citizens of the Western powers grotesquely ignorant of the world in which they live.

The New York Times and other major dailies continue to lie by omission about U.S. support for Jolani and the organization he leads, even as both are officially designated terrorists. But something worth considering here: These media ran interesting photographs with their initial stories on the militias’ sudden offensive, showing rocket launchers and armored personnel carriers of obvious Western manufacture. Here is one such picture and here is another.

I see these pictures and the accompanying stories as mirrors. They show us exactly who we are, what we have become — and also the extent to which we are encouraged not to see either.

There are no true surprises in what we witness now in Syria. It is an old story. We have been blinded to it, along with many other things to which we have been blinded. Most fundamentally we have been rendered blind to ourselves.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows.   Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

International Criminal Court Changes the Face of Benjamin Netanyahu.

TRT World discussion and Middle East Monitor article reposted by Jerry Alatalo | December 16, 2024

[Editor’s note: At this decisive moment in world history, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is arguably the #1 clear and present danger on Earth. It is imperative that Benjamin Netanyahu becomes subject to arrest, prosecution and punishment (taken off the streets) for the crimes he has already committed, – before his increasingly desperate, criminally insane mind resorts to even more destructive criminal actions.]

Netanyahu: Israel is changing the Middle East

Chuck Baldwin: U.S. Launches Third Proxy War.

Cross-posted by Jerry Alatalo via LewRockwell.com | December 14, 2024

[Editor’s note: Our inclusion of an outstanding discussion between Syrian-born peace activist Kevork Almassian and George Galloway following Pastor Chuck Baldwin’s explosive article should provide readers/viewers with a fairly comprehensive, accurate perspective on the situation inside Syria. These perspectives will not become found/presented anywhere in Western corporate media.] 

U.S. Launches Third Proxy War, This Time in Syria

By Chuck Baldwin

Chuck Baldwin Live

December 14, 2024

Here we go again: The War Party in Washington, D.C., has launched its third proxy war against Russia and Iran, this time in Syria.

Let me start by encouraging readers to watch my brief 10-minute video analysis of the invasion of Syria here.

Mind you, this invasion has been in the planning stages for months—or even years. The invasion itself was conducted by a fanatical jihadist Sunni terrorist group that is a splinter organization of ISIS, ISIL and al-Nusra called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Previous to this Western-led invasion on Syria, HTS was categorized by the United States as one of the top ten terrorist groups in the world. Of course, the Islamic terror militias ISIS, ISIL and al-Nusra were initially created, equipped and trained by America’s CIA, Israel’s Mossad and Turkish intelligence. The staging area for this invasion into Damascus was in Idlib, Syria, which was under the oversight and protection of the Turkish government.

The invasion was organized and implemented by the governments of five countries: the United States, Great Britain, Israel, Turkey and Ukraine. Many of the ground forces that participated in the invasion of Southern Syria, including Damascus, were Ukrainians. Ukraine also supplied the drones used in the invasion.

Here is a spot-on analysis of the Syrian situation from Ben Norton:

The United States spent billions over years arming and training militants in Syria, many linked to Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Current US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan admitted back in 2012 that “AQ [Al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria”.

In December 2024, armed extremists overthrew the Syrian government and seized power in the capital Damascus, in an operation sponsored by NATO member Turkey.

This assault was led by a rebranded Al-Qaeda militia that espouses a fanatical Salafi-jihadist ideology.

Some of the Al-Qaeda-linked “rebels” who now rule Syria told the Israeli media that they “love Israel”. They vowed to establish a new pro-Western regime in the country.

Israel has for years given weapons and other forms of support to extremist “rebels” in Syria, including Al-Qaeda. They successfully toppled the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who had refused to recognize Israel and had provided military aid to resistance groups in the region.

The Salafi-jihadist militants who seized Syria’s second-biggest city Aleppo in late November, and subsequently took over Damascus on December 8, were portrayed sympathetically in Western media as “rebels”, but they were led by rebranded Al-Qaeda.

The main armed group that conquered Syria is called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which emerged out of the country’s Al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra (also known as the Nusra Front). This was previously the largest branch of Al-Qaeda in the world.

HTS superficially distanced itself from Al-Qaeda as part of a Western-backed public relations campaign to depict itself as more “moderate”. Neoconservative think tanks in Washington have whitewashed HTS leaders as “diversity-friendly jihadists”, but they still maintain the same fascist ideology.

In fact, despite this cynical rebranding effort, the US government officially recognized HTS as a terrorist organization in 2018, adding the extremist group to its previous designation of Jabhat al-Nusra.

Terrorist designations like this, nevertheless, have not stopped the US and its allies in Israel, Turkey, and the Gulf monarchies from providing support to Al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.

HTS had previously established a de facto government in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, where it ruled with an iron fist, with direct assistance from NATO member Turkey.

The rebranded Al-Qaeda militia used Idlib as its base of operations to launch the assault on neighboring Aleppo in November 2024. Major French media outlet AFP reported that Syrian “opposition sources in touch with Turkish intelligence said Turkey had given a green light to the offensive”.

After taking Aleppo, the extremists moved south and captured the capital, overthrowing the government.

Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for the victory of the rebranded Al-Qaeda death squad.

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In the aftermath of the overthrow of the Syrian government by HTS, President-elect Donald Trump said, “This is not our war.” What a joke! Trump is either staggeringly naïve or he surreptitiously supports this military action in Syria. I believe it’s the latter, as Trump sees it as a means of facilitating his plans to extend U.S. involvement in fighting Israel’s wars when he takes office. As Norton documents, Washington, D.C., is neck-deep in this war. I would speculate that Washington, D.C., is neck-deep in over 90% of ALL the wars and conflicts worldwide.

If a president—any president—truly wanted to promote peace in the world, he would dismantle the CIA, because the CIA (along with Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad) is the biggest instigator of war in the world.

The American people need to wrap their heads around what’s going on here. For over two decades, we were told that the Islamic extremists within ISIS, ISIL and al-Nusra were America’s greatest threat—our greatest enemy. We fought the “war on terror” to destroy this part of the “axis of evil.” Thousands of American lives were lost (and are still being lost) in this “holy” war. Now, the United States is directly supporting the same extremist Sunni group it had branded as terrorists just a few years ago.

In truth, it was NOT the United States that defeated these Islamic terror groups; it was Russia and Iran, especially the dynamic and strategic leadership of the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, whom President Trump assassinated while Soleimani was on a diplomatic peace mission on January 3, 2020.

Scott Ritter said the following in a S.A.M. interview regarding the Syrian crisis:

S.A.M.: It’s a day-by-day reality that’s rapidly changing on a day-to-day basis. So, with so many active war fronts, it’s very hard for most people to keep up. And I’m wondering, is this chaos intentional in that could it have anything to do with Trump taking office on January 20th? Are there players who are trying to rush things before that date arrives?

Ritter: There’s no doubt that there’s an element. First of all, it’s difficult to quantify Trump, because there’s a world vision and then there’s the fact that he’s a tool of Zionism. He’s built the most pro-Zionist, pro-Israeli administration imaginable. I mean it seems that you have to be an outright Zionist in order to get in here. It’s ridiculous what he’s done here.

So, normally I would say, for instance, what’s going on in Ukraine and everything with NATO is, you have the establishment seeking to Trump-proof their policies. That is, to create chaos, create disruption, commit the United States to a policy course that Trump won’t be able to disentangle. And in many ways that may be what’s happening here by getting the Turks and Israelis to prematurely initiate this offensive designed to shape events in the Middle East that will make it difficult for Trump to come in with a plan. Because literally the entire Middle East map is being redrawn politically and geopolitically as we speak.

What Trump thought he was going to be dealing with and what he’s going to be dealing with are two totally different things. And this is probably deliberate on the part of those people who are trying to Trump-proof a policy.

But again, it’s difficult to say because he’s put in the most pro-Israeli cabinet imaginable. So, these are people that have close ties to Israel, which means they have to be cognizant of Israel’s strategic objectives in this offensive. Which means that actually in the case of the Middle East, this might not be something that is designed to entangle Trump but liberate Trump.

I can’t even begin to address objectively the political makeup of his cabinet, because it’s the most anti-American cabinet imaginable when it comes to Israel, because it’s literally sold out to Israel across the board.

*

Hear Ritter’s statement again: “This might not be something that is designed to entangle Trump but liberate Trump.”

That is one of the most profound statements I have heard from anyone regarding the overall subject of Donald Trump and Israel. In other words, Trump may have actually been the driving force behind the invasion of Syria, knowing it will better allow him to unleash his radical Zionist war agenda in the Middle East. Miriam Adelson is going to get her $100 million campaign donation to Trump back in spades.

The bottom line here is that the United States has opened a third proxy war in Syria against Russia and Iran and in support of Zionist Israel.

As a Christian minister, I look at all of these geopolitical events in terms of how they impact the lives and wellbeing of my Christian brothers and sisters in these regions, knowing that satanic forces constantly seek to persecute, punish, pummel and ultimately to see the New Covenant Church-Bride of Christ perish from off the earth.

Zionist Israel—with the enthusiastic support of Christian Zionists in America—has tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Christians throughout the Middle East: in Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. Now, Israel and its allies in the West are facilitating and actively assisting the torture and murders of tens of thousands of Christians in Syria.

Say what you will about Bashar al-Assad, his personal faith system is that of the Alawite Muslims. As such, he was rejected as a heretic by both the Sunni and Shia Muslims. Therefore, as Syria’s leader, he was the most tolerant to people of all faiths of any leader in the Middle East. He allowed people of all religions to freely practice their faith, whether they were Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims, Jews or Christians. And there are tens of thousands of practicing Christians in Syria.

Now, our brothers and sisters in Christ in Syria face a horrific future of persecution, torture and death at the hands of the radical jihadist Sunni terror group that just took over Damascus, HTS.

Thank you, Zionist President Joe Biden. Thank you, Zionist President Donald Trump. Thank you, Christian Zionist pastors John Hagee, Robert Jeffress, John MacArthur, et al.

Sooner or later, a Just God will put a stop to these Zionist warmongers and avenge the blood of His martyred saints, as He did when He destroyed the Pharisees and their seat of power in Jerusalem and the Jewish temple in 70 AD.

It can’t come soon enough.

Reprinted with permission from Chuck Baldwin Live.

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Kevork Almassian and George Galloway discuss the situation in Syria:

Joe Glenton: Warning to the World.

Video reposted by Jerry Alatalo | December 12, 2024

Joe Glenton’s outstanding, comprehensive message was first published at Double Down News channel on YouTube. Please deeply consider the magnitude of Mr. Glenton’s profound warning and then share as widely as possible. Thank you very much.

Peace.