Europe is terrified. No one can feel secure now. People commute
to work every day using overcrowded public transport and pray this is not their
last journey. But sleep safe, the leaders of the Western World are coming to your
rescue. They are already writing “From Paris, with Love” on their bombs which
they will drop on those ruthless savages who hurt you.
Me? I am restless, outraged and baffled at the same time. Firstly,
let me tell you why I am baffled. A few days after the attack, one of my colleagues,
who had planned to go to Paris for a weekend in February, said: “There’s no way
I’m going there now, it may get even worse.” I think that sentence was a fair reflection
of how most of us felt and, probably, still feel about Paris. Yet, hundreds of
people are not discouraged from traveling to Egypt where a passenger plane with
217 tourists and 7 crew members was blown up, or Tunisia where 24 people died
in Bardo National Museum attack in the country’s capital in March, and then, 38
people were killed in a beach resort at the end of June. A middle-aged couple
going on holiday to Egypt shortly after the Russian plane crash is asked at the
airport if they are not scared, they answer: “No, they say it is safe now,
nothing should happen. We’ve been waiting the whole year to go on that
holiday.” I am checking TripAdvisor to find some reviews of hotels located in
Sousse, Tunisian city where 30 Britons were slain on June 26. I easily find multiple
opinions from their pleased compatriots posted after the time of the massacre,
quite a few from July 2015. Should I be surprised? No, I am just baffled. Humans
are a constant riddle to me.
What is it that outrages me then? What brings unrest to my
always-positively-set joyful mind? That, I am afraid, is a subject I will need
to elaborate on more profoundly.
Your safety is
priceless
I will focus on the UK at first, not only because this is the
country of my residence, but most importantly, it is a large part of this whole
puzzle, and it is the United States’ biggest ally in Europe. Also, its reaction
to the carnage in Paris seems to be the most vocal.
Tuesday morning after the attacks. I prepare breakfast and turn
on the TV to see my favorite morning news program. I find out that British
Prime Minister David Cameron will increase spending on Special Forces by an
additional £2 billion, with 30 percent rise in funds for fighting terrorism. A week later, Mr Cameron informs me through the
same TV channel that an additional £12 billion will be spent on military
purposes. He carries on saying that the UK needs to engage in bombings over
Syria as this is the most crucial matter at the moment. He is speaking, or
rather reading, confidently – days of training on how to manipulate the public.
I am quite disappointed, though, because he does not mention the cuts in
spending on police force that would lead to bringing police officer numbers
down to levels last seen four decades ago. That idea was unexpectedly withdrawn
by the government the next day, I guess that was supposed to make everyone feel
better and forget about the whole proposal that will most likely come into
place at some point in the near future. As a matter of fact, the police force
have shrunk by 16,000 officers since 2010. So there are no funds to support
people who are actually protecting your citizens on the ground, but the lavish
amounts of money can be spent to bomb a foreign nation?
Ultimate farce
I am writing this text exactly at the time when British
Parliament is voting over airstrikes in Syria. The MPs are trying to convince
one another and, most importantly, the public to the righteousness of their
arguments. Completely useless debate. Utter nonsense. Pure gibberish. The
opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, scratches the surface, calls out a few
significant points, but is completely unsupported, even by his associates. I am
listening to the final speeches of representatives of both – you would think –
opposing parties, and I am hearing absolute ignorance, nothing that reaches
deeper than the headlines of tabloid newspapers (I could not wait to check the front
page of the next-day Metro, and it said: “War On Daesh” – what a surprise). No
explanation of the whole purpose of airstrikes, no recollection of similar cases
and their aftermath, and the conclusion from both sides is: “if we want to defeat
terrorists, we need to bomb Syria.” I cannot believe this, is this actually Matrix I am in right now?
How are they fighting terrorism?
A day earlier – the day that Londoners could feel the fear of
terrorism by being evacuated from two central locations because of a suspicious
package and a suspicious vehicle (what a coincidence that it happened just a
day before the vote) – Cameron called the opponents of the airstrikes terrorist sympathizers. Whenever he uses
such phrases, I cannot fail to recall the case of Bherlin Gildo.
The Filipino with a Swedish passport was arrested at the
Heathrow Airport while traveling from Copenhagen to Manila in October 2014. Although
Gildo was neither a UK citizen, nor committed any illegal acts in this country,
he was charged by British prosecutors with “attending a terrorist training
camp, receiving weapons training between 31 August 2012 and 1 March 2013” and
also “possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.” The
prosecutor, Riel Karmy-Jones, said that “on the face of the evidence, the
defendant has committed grave crimes.”
What led to his arrest? Apart from the fact that Gildo was
freely traveling to Syria during the time of the civil war, he had posted
several pictures on Facebook where he was posing over dead body of a man who he
called "Bashar Assad's dog." There were also pictures of him holding a
Thompson submachine gun and a jihadi flag, him standing on tanks brandishing
weapons, posing with children holding AKs as well as a photo of a captured
Syrian Army soldier wearing a crucifix, captioned "Assad's Christian
soldier now in the hands of the Mujahideen."
If you are thinking that the guy is a complete idiot, posting
obviously incriminating pictures of himself boasting about being a jihadist,
with all those counter-terrorism safety measures that our allied governments
have, you cannot be more wrong. Why? Because
for the US and its biggest allies, there is something more important than
overcoming terrorism at the moment, and that is fighting the secular Syrian
government and its ruler, Bashar al-Assad.
So what eventually happened to Gildo? All charges were dropped as
his lawyers proved that the British government was supporting the same rebel
groups the naturalized Swede was fighting for. It was not a secret that the
United Kingdom along with the United States, Turkey and Saudi Arabia had been
providing arms and logistic support to Assad’s opponents. The British and
American governments claim they support “moderate opposition,” mainly the Free
Syrian Army, but Gildo’s lawyers were able to prove that his group was
indistinguishable from “legitimate opposition.”
Who did he fight for? A group called Kataib al-Muhajireen, a
part of al-Nusra Front. You do not have to read a hundred books or be an expert
on Middle East to find out what ideals they stand for. A quick Wikipedia search
and we find out that:
The al-Nusra Front, or Jabhat al-Nusra (Arabic: جبهة النصرة لأهل الشام Jabhat al-Nuṣrah li-Ahli ash-Shām,
"The Support Front for the People of Al-Sham", often abbreviated to
JN or JaN), sometimes called al-Qaeda in
Syria or al-Qaeda in the Levant,
is a Sunni Islamist militia fighting
against Syrian Government forces in the Syrian Civil War, with the aim of
establishing an Islamist state in the
country. It is the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda,
and also operates in neighbouring Lebanon;
Hold on, did it say al-Qaeda?
Remember the guy by the name of Osama bin Laden?
Officially, the Western-backed Free Syrian Army claims that it
distances itself from jihadist factions, but in reality, they already cooperated
with each other, even this year. It is obvious that what unifies different
groups in a war is one enemy, and that enemy, in this case, is the Syrian
president. Also, FSA commanders admitted that thousands of its fighters ran
away to join al-Nusra as they found Syrian al-Qaeda’s ideology very appealing,
and, at a certain point, they saw Jabhat al-Nusra as stronger and better
equipped. Many others – already better trained and armed by the West – became
fighters for ISIS. Concluding that point, both American and British
intelligence had known from the beginning that it would be impossible to
overthrow Assad without the inclusion of extremist Muslim insurgents.
All of what I have just mentioned is only the official side
of the story, the one that could serve as an excuse if someone actually had the
gall to ask questions. In the lavishness of trivialism of what we see on our
TVs and read in our newspapers, it is nothing unusual that we will buy any
fable the Western leaders want to sell us. If we ask: “why would you want to topple
a government that has nothing to do with Islamist extremism,” we will hear: “because
we want to liberate its people and give them Democracy.” Bottom line. That is
all we need to hear, right?
In order to get to the bottom of things, we will need to dig
deeper. Thankfully, we now have access to recently declassified intelligence reports
of the American Defense Intelligence Agency, we also have top class
investigative reporters, who are not satisfied
by shallowness of media coverage and are brave enough to uncover lies we are
fed with every day.
As this is just a blog, I realize that it would be neater to
put everything I want to talk about in more than one post. Therefore, I decided
to pause at this point.
What is yet to come? Paris attacks, and as a consequence, our
willingness to have our rights limited, the migration crisis, which is one of the
most important issues that affects all EU nations at the moment. In the section
“Who are we afraid of?” I will focus on the creation and rise of the Islamic
State and the role of the US in the development of Islamist extremism. I will
not forget about the role of Turkey and Saudi Arabia as well as Russia in the
Syrian conflict, and also NATO’s actions in North Africa. I will also try to
scrutinize how media affect our opinions and political choices and the role
they play in keeping us petrified.
I would like to conclude this post with a section that will show
the matter of recent Western airstrikes in Syria from a bit different
perspective than our favorite newspaper articles. I hope you are not
discouraged yet, and I will see you here again very soon. Thanks for reading.
Ultimate farce – continued
I have not heard it on the news lately, but this is not Cameron’s
first attempt to join American forces in bombing Syria. 2 years ago, he lost
the vote in the House of Commons when he urged for military action against the
Syrian government. What also has not caught too much media attention was the
fact, that British pilots were already involved in military action is Syria,
and British jets were conducting surveillance missions over Syria over a year
ago.
I have a weird impression that now, after the Paris massacre,
the PM just could not wait to get to Westminster to give a completely
meaningless speech, and convince his fellow policy makers and the public to
start sending bombers immediately. This time, he succeeded. He even managed to
divide the opposition and made them turn their back on their leader. The Prime
Minister hit the jackpot! Now, he had the most valid reason a politician can
have. And that is fighting ISIS, the ruthless terrorists who behead innocent people
and spread horror on our soil.
It is quite peculiar, though, that at the same time, Mr.
Cameron rules out sending ground troops to Syria or Iraq, because “it would be
used by ISIS as anti-Western propaganda.” Unbelievable. They could illegally
invade Iraq where there were no terrorists in 2003, but now they are scared of
unfavorable hype? That is a complete farce.
The CIA says there are around 30,000 ISIS fighters in Syria
and Iraq. Jihadists claim their number has risen to 100,000. Saddam Hussein’s
army before the time of invasion consisted of 375,000 soldiers with around 75,000
elite troops known as the Republican Guard. That was a strong well-organized
army. Do you really think that the US, with all its resources and influence, would not be
able to contain a stateless militia?
I will end the post with a quote from Michael Morell, former
acting director of the CIA who, when asked why the US did not hit ISIS oil stocks
before Paris events, said: “We didn’t want to destroy these oil tankers because
that’s infrastructure that’s gonna be necessary to support the people when ISIS
isn’t there anymore, and it’s gonna
create the environmental damage.”
So who is the terrorist sympathizer, Mr. Cameron?
