Terrified Europe

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?