Tunisian Jihadis

A group of revealing July 13 tweets by Lebanese journalist Jenan Moussa (lightly edited for clarity) on Tunisian jihadis in Syria:

I gained access to ISIS prisoners captured by Kurds in Raqqa. One of them was a Tunisian ISIS member...
I sat for 2 hours with a 34-year-old Tunisian ISIS prisoner. During the interview he never looked me in the eye because I'm a female reporter.
I asked him why he joined ISIS. He said, When the Muslim Brotherhood government was in power*, they encouraged the youth to go to Syria.
He said, In Tunisia the mosques said, Go to Syria for jihad. And we were told there'd be no repercussions when we returned. So I left.
My friend and I flew to Turkey. When the customs officer at Istanbul Airport realized we were going to Syria, he said, Yalla, go fast!
It was just so easy to join ISIS in Syria. Now I look back and I think, Was this all a conspiracy to get us all in one place and kill us all?

[*Presumably a reference to Rached Ghannouchi's Ennahda Movement government of 2011-14. Abdel Bari Atwan has this to say on the subject: "I have observed Tunisians in the ranks in previous jihads, but only in very small numbers... former Tunisian dictator Ben Ali suppressed all jihadist activity and imprisoned even moderate Islamists. The 2011 revolution and the subsequent victory of Islamist parties inspired a revival of hard-line Islamism in that country. Now, groups like Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of the Law, based in Libya) are able to recruit openly and have funded and facilitated the passage of Tunisian jihadists to the frontline." (Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, 2015, pp 165-66)]

Classic British Blowback

You reap what you sow:

"[Anti-Gaddafi] rebels living in England have claimed the UK Government waived travel bans to let them fight Colonel Gaddafi in Libya as investigators probe the Manchester bomber's visits to Tripoli. Fighters which included Libyan exiles and British-Libyan residents have described how MI5 operated an open door policy for those willing to travel to North Africa to topple the dictator.

"It comes as Home Secretary Amber Rudd admitted Salman Abedi, who killed 22 and injured at least 119 people when he blew himself up at Manchester Arena, was known to counter-terror authorities. Those who travelled to Libya to fight alongside Islamic rebel groups have described how, even though they were subject to counter-terror orders banning them from leaving their homes because they posed a security threat, they were allowed to travel to the hostile warzone.

"When they returned to the UK, having spent months alongside groups thought by British intelligence to have links with Al-Qaeda, rebels were said to have been allowed back into the country without hesitation. Libyan officials have backed up the claims, saying the British government were 'fully aware' of young men being sent to fight, turning the North African country into an 'exporter of terror'." (Rebels 'went to Libya with MI5 blessing' amid Abedi probe, Gareth Davies, dailymail.co.uk, 25/5/17)

But who could possibly have known this at the time?

Well, Gaddafi, actually.

As he warned Tony Blair in February 2011:

"It's a jihad situation. They have arms and are terrorising people in the streets.They are armed gangs... [There are] no foreign correspondents here. We have asked all [the] world's reporters to come and see the truth... [You] can't reason with them. They keep saying Muhammed is the prophet, similar to Bin Laden. They are paving the way for him in North Africa... They want to control the Mediterranean and then they will attack Europe. [You] need to explain to the international community. Reporters can come to make sure that this is the truth. They are welcome." (Colonel Gaddafi warned Tony Blair of Islamist attacks in Europe, phone conversations reveal, Robert Mendick, telegraph.co.uk, 7/1/16)

But what would he know?

Abedi's Accomplices

Well said:

"Here's what the media and politicians don't want you to know about the Manchester, UK, suicide attack: Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old who killed nearly two dozen concert-goers in Manchester, was the product of the US and UK overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya and 'regime change' policy in Syria. He was a radicalised Libyan whose family fled Gaddafi's secular Libya, and later he trained to be an armed 'rebel' in Syria, fighting for the US and UK 'regime change' policy toward the secular Assad government. The suicide attacker was the direct product of US and UK interventions in the greater Middle East.

"According to the London Telegraph, Abedi, a son of Libyan immigrants living in a radicalized Muslim neighbourhood in Manchester, had returned to Libya several times after the overthrow of Muamar Gaddafi, most recently just weeks ago. After the US/UK and allied 'liberation' of Libya, all manner of previously outlawed and fiercely suppressed radical jihadist groups suddenly found they had free rein to operate in Libya. This is the Libya that Abedi returned to and where he likely prepared for his suicide attack on pop concert attendees. Before the US-led attack on Libya in 2011, there was no al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any other related terrorist organization operating (at least with impunity) on Libyan soil.

"Gaddafi himself warned Europe in January 2011 that if they overthrew his government the result would be radical Islamist attacks on Europe, but European governments paid no heed to the warnings. Post-Gaddafi Libya became an incubator of Islamist terrorists and terrorism, including prime recruiting ground for extremists to fight jihad in Syria against the also-secular Bashar Assad.

"In Salman Abedi we have the convergence of both these disastrous US/UK and allied interventions, however: it turns out that not only did Abedi make trips to Libya to radicalize and train for terror, but he also traveled to Syria to become one of the 'Syria rebels' fighting on the same side as the US and UK to overthrow the Assad government. Was he perhaps even trained in a CIA program? We don't know, but it certainly is possible.

"While the mainstream media and opportunistic politicians will argue that the only solution is more western intervention in the Middle East, the plain truth is that at least partial responsibility for this attack lies at the feet of those who pushed and pursued western intervention in Libya and Syria, There would have been no jihadist training camps in Libya had Gaddafi not been overthrown by the US/UK and allies. There would have been no explosion of ISIS or al-Qaeda in Syria had it not been for the US/UK and allied policy of 'regime change' in that country. When thinking about Abedi's guilt for this heinous act of murder, do not forget those interventionists who lit the fuse that started the conflagration. the guilt rests squarely on their shoulders as well." (Manchester bomber was product of West's Libya/Syria intervention, Daniel McAdams, antiwar.com, 24/5/17)

Clinton Emailed

From John Pilger's interview with Julian Assange, Emails show Clinton Foundation funders also bankroll ISIS: the explosive interview with John Pilger, newmatilda.com, 5/11/16:

Pilger: The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she's benefiting politically are quite extraordinary. I'm thinking of when the Qatari representative was given 5 minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.

Assange: And 12m from Morocco... For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party]

Pilger: In terms of US foreign policy, that's where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIS, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate [that] those who are meant to be fighting the ISIS jihadists are actually those who have helped create it?

Assange: There's an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton... to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIS is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. This is the most significant email in the whole collection, and... because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the US government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS. But the dodge has always been that it's just some rogue princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but that, actually, the government disapproves. But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar that have been funding ISIS.

Pilger: The Saudis, Qataris, Moroccans, Bahrainis... were giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and the State Department was approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.

Assange: Under Hillary Clinton the world's largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as secretary of state, total arms exports from the United States, in terms of dollar value, have doubled.

Pilger: Of course, the consequence of that is that ISIS has been created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.

Assange: Yes.

(Assange goes on to reveal that Clinton is the public face of Wall Street and that "half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank.")

Pilger: Why was she so enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya? What have the emails told us about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria... and it was almost Hillary Clinton's invasion?

Assange: Libya... was Hillary Clinton's war. Obama initially opposed it, Hillary Clinton championed it. That's documented throughout her emails. She'd put her favorite agent, Sidney Blumenthal onto it. More than 1,700 out of the 33,000 of the emails we've published are just about Libya. It wasn't about cheap oil. She saw the removal of Gaddafi... as something she could use in her run-up to election as president. In late 2011, an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock was produced for her. It's a chronology of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths in Libya. Jihadists, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee crisis... As Gaddafi said at the time: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy Libya? There's going to be a flood of migrants and jihadists out of Africa and into Europe,' and that's exactly what happened.

The War for Israel that Never Ends

Listen up:

"Make no mistake about it, there is a universal campaign for war on Syria. The rise of Hillary Clinton has emboldened the warmongers out there. There are many elements to this campaign. It includes the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties; the Gulf regimes and their lobbyists in Washington, DC; and of course the Zionist lobby through all of its branches. The DC think tanks are now part and parcel of the Zionist-Gulf lobbies in the US capital.

"The Gulf regimes are utilizing tactics of vilification and defamation against Arab and Western progressives who oppose war and destruction in Syria. When you read that Arab leftists have supported Bashar Al-Asad and his mafia regime, do not believe it. I find it hilarious to read such accusations by people who, only a few years ago, were official apologists for, or diplomats of, the Al-Asad regime, at a time when I, for example, was banned by the Syrian regime for years from entering Lebanon (for writings against the father tyrant, Hafidh Al-Asad), and was accused by official Syrian TV in 2012 of receiving money from the West to attack the Syrian regime. While only a minority of Arab leftists support the Al-Asad regime, the overwhelming majority of Arab liberals are supporters, apologists and stooges of the Gulf regimes.

"Arab leftists are on the whole opposed to the Syrian regime and its brutality while also condemning the transparent Western-Zionist-Gulf conspiracy against Syria and the Arab world. Those who advocated the NATO bombing of Libya, and who are responsible for the mess and destruction in Libya today, are trying to replicate the Libyan scenario in Syria under different headings and titles - or under the same headings and titles: the same propaganda techniques are being used, nakedly.

"They are resorting to a variety of tactics and tricks. They sometimes roll out a Syrian supporter of the Gulf regimes and label him a leftist when he hasn't been a leftist for more than 30 years, and when he writes against Arab leftists in Gulf regimes newspapers. They roll out people working for Gulf regime media and present them as neutral observers and as representatives of the silent majority. They roll out former Ba`thists and operatives of the Syrian regime who now pretend they have been fighting for 'peace and democracy' all their lives. They roll out people who have never studied the Middle East, and present them as the foremost experts on the region because they want to push for war and destruction in Syria. They roll out Western journalists who have never before shown any sympathy for Arab victims, and have them pose for the moment in the media as arbiters of sentiment and humanitarianism and as lovers of the Syrian people.

"They roll out Zionist haters of Arabs and Muslims and tell us that they are the real champions of the interests of the Syrian people. They use people such as Obama administration officials who have presided over war and destruction throughout the world, and have them to counsel war and destruction in Syria. They are willing to revive the rhetoric of the Cold War to present the war on Syria as the only safe and rational option for the US and 'national interests'. They even rely on the authority and opinions of a Jordanian regime royal who was installed in the UN to handle human rights from the standpoint of the US-Israeli alliance which put him in his post.

"It is time to raise our voices and to warn of the deadly and devastating consequences of war - or more war - on Syria. Those who still, laughably, claim that there are some secret secular, feminist, democratic Syrian rebels (whose names and identities are never revealed) out there are engaged in the same propaganda which preceded the US war on Iraq and on Libya. The scenario is obvious for all to see. Too many leftists and progressives have been intimidated into not speaking out against Western conspiracies in Syria for fear of being labeled as Asad regime supporters, just as Zionists have intimidated people into not speaking out against Israel for fear of being labeled anti-Semites.

"Don't let it happen, not now, not any time. Western governments and media don't want an end to the war in Syria; they want what have been the most favored Western policies for decades: the continuation of bloodshed by Arabs against Arabs, or by Muslims against Muslims. They want what they worked for in the Iran-Iraq war and the Lebanese civil war, that is, a never-ending war in order to safeguard Israeli aggression and occupation." (There is an orchestrated campaign for war in Syria, and it's in sync with the rise of Hillary Clinton, The Angry Arab News Service, 27/10/16)

First Bliar, Now Cameron

It seems that British prime ministers just cannot help themselves.

In 2011, a mere 9 years after Bliar invaded Iraq, former UK PM David Cameron (2010-16) got stuck into Libya. (Needless to say, as a Tory MP in 2003, he also voted in favour of the Bush/Bliar war on Iraq.)

Cameron's role in turning Libya into a base for the latter-day Wahhabis and takfiris of IS should receive the same scrutiny as Bliar's in the destruction and sectarianisation of Iraq, and both should be held to account for the devastating consequences of their actions. Hopefully, in Cameron's case, the following official report will help kick-start that process:  

"Former prime minister David Cameron's 2011 decision to intervene militarily in Libya was misguided and helped give rise to jihadist extremism in North Africa, a key British parliamentary committee says. The report slams Mr Cameron and his top advisers for expanding a civilian protection mission in Libya to include regime change and failing to adequately plan for the country's future after the overthrow of long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi. It says Britain's military action was based on 'erroneous assumptions' and 'an incomplete understanding' of the ramifications of removing Colonel Gaddafi, and Mr Cameron's team should have been aware the rebel groups Britain was backing contained 'significant' numbers of extremists. 'The UK's actions in Libya were part of an ill-conceived intervention, the results of which are still playing out today,' said committee chairman Crispin Blunt, a Conservative Party MP." (MPs blame Cameron for Libya crisis, rise of IS, Gregory Katz, AAP/Sydney Morning Herald, 16/9/16)

'You Reap What You Sow'

Some "home truths" on the Islamic State phenomenon from Bruce Hearn Mackinnon (senior lecturer in the Department of Management at Deakin University) in yesterday's Age. While Mackinnon's opinion piece is inadequate in certain respects, it is probably the best commentary on the subject to have appeared thus far in the Australian ms press. Here's just the gist:

"First, the US and its allies armed, trained and supported Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organisation in its dirty war, first against the leftist government in Afghanistan, and then against the Soviet Union who intervened in a doomed attempt to prop up the collapsing regime, which was at war with the Islamists, backed by Pakistan. This ultimately led to the September 11 attacks on the US itself. The Taliban today continues to be trained, financed and supported by forces within the Pakistan security and military establishment.

"Second, the West's support for Israel in its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and its constant and growing humiliation of Palestinian people, has been a festering sore, breeding resentment, frustration anger not only from Palestinians but the wider Muslim community, particularly in the Arab world. As if this wasn't bad enough, let's not forget that Israel was also happy to secretly fund and encourage the terrorist organisation, Hamas, in its early years, as a means of undermining the secular mainstream PLO, led by Yasser Arafat.

"Third, the US (supported by Australia) invasion and destruction of Iraq, justified by the lie about (we now know, non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, resulting in about half a million deaths, was the direct catalyst for for the formation of the Islamic State terrorist organisation - whose current military leaders are former generals from saddam Hussein's then predominantly secular Baathist regime.

"Fourth, the West's eagerness to destroy the largely secular Gaddafi regime has left Libya as a failed state, allowing criminals and terrorists a free rein to engage in violence on a mass scale.

"Fifth, the West's support for violent opposition to the Assad regime in Syria has left his country in ruins and allowed Islamo-Fascism to become the military opposition. All the talk about supporting 'moderate' opposition forces has been exposed as a lie. Syria is in the grip of a full-on sectarian war between the Shia-backed regime and the Sunni extremists, including IS and al-Nusra (al-Qaida). The West's support for the opposition in Syria has taken the form of support for Islamo-Fascism on the ground in Syria.

"Finally, the Islamo-Fascist movement, whether operating in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq or elsewhere, is known to have received financial, ideological, religious and military support from the West's key allies in the Middle East, the brutal Islamo-Fascist regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

"You reap what you sow." (After the Paris attacks: How to confront this Islamo-Fascist plague, 16/11/15)

Some Observations on the Carnage in Paris

by As'ad Abukhalil (aka The Angry Arab), 14/11/15

1) ISIS has gone on the offensive: in 10 days, they downed a Russian civilian airliner, massacred Hazara Shi'ites in Afghanistan, bombed the southern suburbs in Beirut and now Paris.

2) Western governments, the US and France in particular, along with their Saudi, Qatari and Turkish allies are directly responsible for the rise and expansion of ISIS through their policies in Syria, which have cradled and nurtured ISIS and its sister terrorist organizations.

3) There is no way on earth to stem the menace of ISIS and Al-Qa'idah-like organizations without going to their source in Saudi Arabia, which is the official headquarters of the Ibn Taymiyyah terrorist interpretation of Islam.

4) Ibn Taymiyyah* is the one thinker/theologian who has inspired and guided the thoughts and deeds of terrorists striking in the name of Islam.

5) Western governments AND media have been cynically silent about the victims of ISIS terrorism if the victims happen to be categorized as 'enemies.' Western governments AND media (just look at the dispatches from the New York Times and Washington Post over the last 4 years on Syria) have consistently ignored and even cheered sectarian massacres of Syrian and Lebanese civilians if they are perpetrated by foes of the Syrian regime.

6) Just as ISIS and Al-Qa'idah have brought terrorism to the heart of the West, Western governments have been exporting death and destruction to the Middle East and North Africa: from Mali to Libya to Egypt to Sudan to Somalia to Syria to Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan. Terrorism has been inflicted on people in those countries by ISIS and Al-Qaidah, and by the bombs and rockets and drones of Western governments.

7) All Arabs today have noticed something that cannot be ignored: how ISIS and Al-Qa'idah terrorists travel the world to inflict their terrorism but yet spare Israel and its interests. The relationship between the Zionist occupation entity and the Nusrah Front - the official branch of Al-Qa'idah in Syria - is no longer secret.**

8) ISIS cannot be defeated from the air as long as Western governments and their Gulf and Turkish allies assist it on the ground, directly or indirectly.

9) Just as Western powers created and nurtured the precursor of Al-Qa'idah in Afghanistan to defeat the communist regime there, those same powers have created and nurtured a deadly cocktail of the worst Middle Eastern terrorists ever in Syria in the hope that they would bring down the Syrian regime.

10) The story of ISIS terrorism began not only with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but also with the creation of a vast safe haven for Islamist terrorism in Libya. Libya was the biggest gift to jihadi terrorism since the fall of the Taliban.

11) The US and France (along with the GCC countries) have been creating a culture of terrorism in the region by creating a terrorist haven in Syria in the name of fighting for 'democracy and secularism' - in the stupid language of John Kerry. They have done this by making dubious distinctions between various terrorists in Syria [and] through making allies of the Nusrah Front and its affiliates.

12) The myth of moderate Syrian rebels has to be discarded. The remnants of the Free Syrian Army are basically ISIS-in-waiting.

13) Western correspondents in Beirut in charge of covering the savage war in Syria are all guilty (with the exception of Patrick Cockburn) of misinforming and misguiding their leaders. They have been ignoring and JUSTIFYING the scores of car bombs and war crimes by Syrian rebels in Syria and Lebanon because they see them as fitting in with the struggle against the Syrian regime.

14) Western human rights organizations are also guilty of creating a culture of bogus human tights rhetoric which has belittled and even justified the war crimes of Syrian rebels (see the latest HRW report on the placing of Alawite women in cages).

15) French policy under the socialist government has even elevated its relationship with the Saudi and Qatari regimes - the two governments most responsible for sponsoring, financing and arming the cocktail of dangerous terrorists in Syria.

16) It is high time for Western governments to give up on their policies and wars in Syria, not to preserve the Syrian regime (as Iran and Russia would like), but to exclude from the future both sets of war criminals there.

17) I don't like Bashar Al-Asad one bit and I have wanted the overthrow of that regime since 1976 when its army invaded Lebanon and smashed my dreams of a progressive, leftist revolution in Lebanon, but who can now disagree with the warnings given by him 3 years ago that those terrorists that the West are now supporting would one day strike at the heart of Europe? Syrian regime supporters are today reprising those words and re-airing them.

18) The Saudi and Qatari regime media (Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya in particular, but others as well) have created a culture of terrorism in which crimes against civilians who happen to be Shi'ites or Alawites or Christians or Sunnis who happen to reside in 'regime-dominated areas of Syria' are justified on a daily basis. Just yesterday, for example, Saudi and Qatari regime media provided ample justification and rationalization for the crimes, and lionized the terrorists who perpetrated them. This culture of terrorism is responsible for the climate in which the crimes in Paris have taken place.

19) Western governments can't have it both ways; they can't continue to support Gulf regimes and arming them while claiming to want to fight terrorism.

20) US and Western governments and media are responsible for a culture of selective denunciations and condemnations: they are silent about the daily crimes committed by that key Western ally, the terrorist state of Israel, against Palestinians.

21) Arabs/Muslims can't reach an agreement against all manner of terrorism as long as Western governments and Arab regimes continue to be selective in condemning terrorism.

22) Western support for dictatorships in the Arab world is responsible in many ways for the creation of ISIS and other terrorist groups.

23) Terrorist groups in the Middle East have been used and misused by local regimes, Western powers and Israel for decades.

24) Yes, the Iraq invasion of 2003 has proven to be exactly what Jacques Chirac warned it would be: a dangerous Pandora's box.

25) Obama has really not deviated from the dangerous policies of Bush, and his expansion of wars in the Middle East has fueled ISIS.

26) The Islam of Arab regimes is a dangerous and conservative Islam. It cannot be changed by Western military commanders, but it can be changed by the people of the region if they are allowed to think freely and choose: but neither the West nor the Arab regimes want the Arabs to think freely. Al-Azhar University has become, through bribes, a tool of the Saudi Wahhabi regime.

27) It is not sectarian to declare Saudi Wahhabi doctrine as the official doctrine of jihadi terrorism. Wahhabiyeh is not a sect: it is a school of fanatical thought and terrorist practice.

28) How do Western powers fight ISIS? They foolishly rely on a royal buffoon in Jordan and on the UAE regime to engage in the promotion of a kinder Islam in social media. The fools in DC who think that those potentates have any standing among young Muslims need to have their heads examined.

29) Western powers and media are all hypocrites: they still cheer or cover up the war crimes of ISIS and Nusrah in Syria if the affected victims happen to reside in Syrian regime-controlled areas.

30) There should be a categorical end to external support of ALL Syrian rebels and to the Syrian regime by all sides.

31) Finally, why does the media coverage portray these massacres as West-vs-Islam when many of the victims in Paris are likely to be Muslims, and when ISIS in the Middle East kills far more Muslims than non-Muslims, despite the fact that members of the US Congress only see Jews and Christians as victims?

[*Ibn Taymiyyah's (1263-1328) writings are a major source for the wahhabi/salafi movements in Islam, which reject modernity and advocate that society should emulate that of Muhammad and the early believers, as literally described by the Qur'an and the hadith;**See my 3/7/15 post Those Rebels, That Hospital, Our Ambassador & His Wife.]

Abbott of Syria

Sit back, take it easy, crack a tinnie, and let Tone, Jules & Shero sort out Syria for YOU:

"The anticipated green light [for Abbot to approve air strikes on Syria] followed a formal request from President Barack Obama's administration, which itself had come after signalling from Canberra that such an invitation would be favourably received." (Syria air strikes loom, Mark Kenny/David Wroe, Sydney Morning Herald, 9/9/15)

Sir! Sir! Pick me, sir! Pick me! 

No one wants to be left off the team, OK?

"Tony Abbott has set realistic limits for the expansion of Australia's military action in the Middle East, saying airstrikes by the RAAF in Syria will be used to degrade and destroy the Islamic State terror group but not topple the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad... 'Do we want Assad gone? Of course we do. Do our military operations contribute to that at this time? No, they don't,' he said yesterday, adding that the 'Assad regime is not the kind of government that we could ever support' [...] [Mr Abbott] told the ABC's 7.30 program. 'It's not easy to find moderates in that part of the world, particularly in Syria. At the moment the main forces are the gruesome Assad regime; the if anything more diabolical Daesh death cult; and then of course the people linked with al-Qa'da. So it's difficult to find effective moderates in Syria'." (Assad not in our sights: PM, Brendan Nicholson, The Australian, 10/9/15)

OK, so it's not about regime changing the brutal, the gruesome Asad then?

Errr... Hmmm:

"Australia is ramping up diplomatic efforts, with the US and Britain, to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad politically at the same time it bombs Islamic State in the country and takes refugees to ease the humanitarian crises. Tony Abbott is preparing a political strategy to take to US President Barack Obama and the world leaders summit at the UN in three weeks, with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop working with US Secretary of State John Kerry on a political solution aimed at removing Assad without promoting Islamic State." (Allies look to end of Assad, Dennis Shanahan, The Australian, 11/9/15)

On the other hand, the horrible dictator's not really that bad.

Certainly better than Saddam:

"Thus our military actions in Syria may well help Assad. So be it. We will be attacking Assad's chief enemy, Islamic State. That inevitably will take some pressure off Assad. Assad is a horrible dictator but in the last years of his rule before the outbreak of the Arab spring his regime was not especially bad by Arab standards. He certainly in those days bore no comparison with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Since his regime was challenged his regime has been utterly brutal and murderous." (Abbott gets it right on Syrian refugees, Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 10/9/15)

And anyway, look what happened in Libya when we bumped off Gaddafi:

"But Western governments are undergoing an agonising reappraisal. If Assad is overthrown the new situation may be even worse, with nothing left but a civil war between Islamic State, al-Qa'ida and various warlords. Overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya produced no benefit for anybody though the Australian government of the time (and, let me hasten to say, this writer), led by then foreign minister Kevin Rudd, warmly supported it. It may be that any negotiated political future for Syria involves Assad." (ibid)

***

OK, so with these Einsteins in charge, sitting back, taking it easy, and cracking a tinnie is obviously not an option.

Well, you've got a choice:

Stay home and scream into your pillow or

Attend tomorrow's NO Australian War on Syria! rally & march.

Sydney Town Hall, 11 am.

Cory Bernardi Shoulders the White Man's Burden

It's always interesting to learn about the backgrounds of those who toil on our behalf on the parliamentary leather. So thanks must go to Greg Bearup for his illuminating profile of Senator Cory Bernardi in this week's Weekend Australian Magazine. Some highlights:

"You'll be chatting amiably and he'll come out with something inflammatory, like: 'According to the Islamic texts and doctrines, Mohammed was the perfect Muslim; Mohammed was a person that, no question, did a lot of acts that are similar to what ISIS is doing today.' Kaboom! Can't you see how divisive that is, I say, and that most Muslims, even the most moderate Muslims would find that statement offensive? 'It's the truth,' he says. 'Islam needs reform. What was seen as acceptable in the seventh century is not acceptable today.' There's no nuance. He's not trying to appeal to the centre. His method is to spark debate with a hand grenade. At times, he's blown off his own arm. 'I'm just a big ball of scar tissue now,' he says. 'They can't draw any more blood.' Sometimes, listening to him, I am reminded of Pauline Hanson..."  (Regrets, I have just one)

Boy, Cory sure can join the dots! Breathtaking!

"[H]is political epiphany came to him when he was about 25 and he was lying in an isolation ward in an Adelaide hospital, suffering from tuberculosis. Until then he had led a fairly blessed existence. His immigrant father had done well; Leon opened a succession of inner-city restaurants and bars in Adelaide. Cory had attended one of Adelaide's establishment schools, Prince Alfred College, where he was a popular kid and a champion rower. At the age of 18 he was chosen to row for Australia... He won a scholarship to the Australian Institute of Sport... but his promising career was cut short by a back injury at the age of 19. He was bitterly disappointed but he dusted himself off and headed overseas... He travelled all over Europe and then found himself working for a German construction company that won a contract in Libya, where he lived for 9 months. It was not a happy experience and seems to have left him with a grim view of Islam. He was isolated and working with 25 Turks, 'none of whom spoke English'."

Rude bastards! That's Islam for you, I guess.

"When one of his colleagues, an Englishman, was injured and taken to hospital, Bernardi says they had to wait until a goat was treated before they tended to the Brit."

How dare those bloody wogs treat a white man in this fashion! Where's a NATO bombing raid when you need one?

"'There was another time when we saw some burqa-clad ladies and we went to talk to them and the men came and started abusing us, shushing us away... you don't want to accuse all Muslims but there are substantial parts of the Muslim teachings that shouldn't apply in the modern age'."

Jeez! How's a white man supposed to liberate a brown woman with all these bloody brown blokes getting in the way?

Thank God for the local sheilas:

"He came back to Adelaide and... bought into the family business, Bernardi's, an inner city pub. Sinead Sheehy, a beautiful and feisty young Irish woman... was working behind the bar. 'My first impression of him was that he was a very strong individual,' she says. 'Oh, and handsome.' Both of them were going out with other people. That soon changed."

OK, so Cory knows all about Islam and ISIS, but has he ever heard of ISIL - Italian State in Libya - and what it got up to at the Mechiya Oasis in Libya in October, 1911? Rhetorical question, of course.

Here are some correspondents' reports* from the time:

"Tripoli has been the scene of one of the reddest dramas in the history of wars. It was a week of atrocities, a mad rush of assassins, a hecatomb of aged people, women and children - executions in groups." (Correspondent of Excelsior, Paris)

"A perfect nightmare of horror... a veritable carnival of carnage." (Correspondent of the Daily Express)

"The Italians having set themselves to cow the Arabs, the floodgates of blood and lust were opened... One hardly knows to what limits the elasticity of the phrase 'military exigencies' will be stretched in the 20th century." (Correspondent of The Times)

"For 3 days the butchery went on... cripples and blind beggars have been deliberately shot; sick people whose houses were burned were left on the ground and refused even a drop of water. The Arab quarter was overrun by crazy soldiers armed with revolvers, who were shooting every man and woman they met. (Francis McCullagn, Correspondent for the Daily News, Westminster Gazette, and New York World)

*Quoted in Libya & the West: From Independence to Lockerbie, Geoff Simons, 2003

America's Great White Hope

Now isn't this the BLEEDING obvious:

"A direct line can be drawn from NATO's 2011 intervention in Libya to the turmoil currently engulfing the country; a chastening thought for anyone now contemplating another to tackle the twin threats of Islamic State and mass migration. A bombing campaign helped to dislodge Muammar Gaddafi, empowering the multiple rebel forces - including radical Islamists - who then looted his massive arsenal of heavy weapons and turned the guns on each other, battling it out for their share of the nation's vast oil wealth." (Gaddafi's ouster led to splintered, failed state, Catherine Philp, The Times/The Australian, 18/4/15)

Factor in this week's mass drowning of 700 wretched-of-the-earth, fleeing the mayhem, and the takfiri throat-slitting of others, and the ghastly picture of Libya libre is complete.

So what does US presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton have to say about all this?

Nothing.

Which is probably just as well considering what she's already said:

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shared a laugh with a television news reporter moments after hearing deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had been killed. 'We came, we saw, he died,' she joked when told of Qaddafi's death by an aide in between formal interviews." (Clinton on Qaddafi: 'We came, we saw, he died' Corbett B. Daly, CBS/informationclearinghouse.info, 21/10/11)

From Leeton to Libya

The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday led with a report on the accused killer of Leeton High school teacher Stephanie Scott. In it we learned that the accused:

"[Vincent] Stanford maintained a secret online life, hiding behind fantasy characters to indulge his obsession with computer games, violent videos and neo-Nazi propaganda." (Secret life of accused killer, Rachel Olding & Nick Ralston, 14/4/15)

None of which, as you'd expect in a case such as this, would have come as much of a surprise. One item, however, further into the piece, did. I've rendered it here in bold:

"In between the dozens of Stargate video clips that he 'liked' on YouTube, he also liked pro-Nazi clips, clips supporting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and clips about the 2011 military science fiction shooter game, Gears of War 3."

Clips supporting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi... Really?

So, taking these words at face value, we're expected to believe that, in addition to being a closet neo-Nazi obsessed with tales of "violent galactic warfare," Stanford had a soft spot for Colonel Gaddafi, as opposed to, say, the NATO air raids that brought his regime down and sealed his fate.

Are we seriously to believe that he took time out from "indulging" his aforementioned "obsessions" to admire the fact that Libya under Gaddafi ranked No. 1 in Africa on the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index in 2010? Or is it more likely that he merely 'liked' the Israeli-made video parody of Gaddafi that went viral in 2011?*

If so, who is responsible for the words "supporting Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi," which distort the truth of the matter by introducing into it an element of gratuitous Arabophobia?

[* The so-called 'Zenga Zenga Song'. See my 14/3/15 post If Only We Had Gaddafi to Kick Around Some More.]

If Only We Had Gaddafi to Kick Around Some More

Must-read: Libya, ISIS & the Unaffordable Luxury of Hindsight by Ahmad Barqawi

"'Who are you?' the late Muammar Gaddafi once rhetorically asked in a famous speech towards the end of his reign, (rightly) questioning the legitimacy of those seeking to overthrow his government at the time, calling them extremists, foreign agents, rats and drug-addicts. He was laughed at, unfairly caricatured, ridiculed, and incessantly demonized. A distasteful parody video poking fun at the late Libyan leader even went viral on social media. Evidently, the maker of the video, an Israeli, thought the Libyan colloquial Arabic word 'Zenga' (which means an alleyway) sounded so funny that he extracted it from one of Gaddafi's speeches, looped it on top of a hip-hop backing track and voila... he got himself a hit video which was widely (and shamefully) circulated with a 'revolutionary' zeal in the Arab world. We shared, we laughed, he died.

"But the bloody joke is on all of is. Gaddafi knew what he was talking about. Right from the get-go, he accused the so-called Libyan rebels of being influenced by Al-Qaeda ideology and Bin Laden's school of thought. No one took his word for it, of course, not even a little bit. I mean, why should we have? After all, wasn't he a vile, sex-centric dictator hell-bent on massacring half of the Libyan population while subjecting the other half to manic raping sprees with the aid of his trusted army of viagra-gobbling, sub-Saharan mercenaries? At least that's what we got from the visual cancer that is Al-Jazeera channel and its even more acrid Saudi counterpart Al-Arabiya in their heavily skewed coverage of NATO's vicious conquest of Libya. Plus, Gaddafi dressed funny. Why would anyone trust a haggard, weird-looking despot dressed in colorful rags when you have well-groomed Zionists like Bernard Henry Levy, John McCain and Hillary Clinton at your side, smiling and flashing the victory sign in group photo-ops, right?

"Gaddafi called them drug-addicted, Islamic fundamentalists. We know them as ISIS. It doesn't seem much of a joke now, does it? And ISIS is what had been in store for us all along; the 'revolutionary' lynching and sodomization of Muammar Gaddafi amid manic chants of 'Allahu Akbar', lauded by many at the time as some sort of warped triumph of the good of popular will (read: NATO-sponsored mob rule) over the evil of dictatorship (read: sovereign state), was nothing but a gory precursor of the future of the country and the region: the mass lynching of entire populations in Libya, Syria and Iraq, and the breakup of key Arab states into feuding statelets. The gruesome video of Colonel Gaddafi's murder, which puts to shame the majority of ISIS videos in terms of unhinged brutality and gore, did not invoke the slightest of condemnations back then. On the contrary, everyone seemed perfectly fine with the grotesque end of the Libyan 'tyrant'. Except that it was only the beginning of a new and unprecedented reign of terror courtesy of NATO's foot-soldiers and GCC-backed Islamic insurgents.

"The rapid proliferation of trigger-happy terrorist groups and Jihadi factions drenched in petrodollars in Libya was not some sort of intelligence failure on the part of Western governments or a mere by-product of the power vacuum left by a slain Gaddafi. It was a deliberate, calculated policy, planned and implemented by NATO and its allies in the Gulf under the cringe-inducing moniker 'Friends of Libya' (currently known as the International Coalition against ISIS) to turn the north African country into the world's largest ungovernable dumpster of weapons, Al-Qaida militants and illegal oil trading.

"So it is safe to say that UNSC resolution 1973, which practically gave free rein to NATO to bomb Libya to smithereens, has finally borne fruit, and it's rotten to the core. You can call the latest gruesome murder of 21 Egyptian fishermen and workers by the Libyan branch of Islamic State exhibit 'A', not to mention of course the myriad killings, bombings and mini-civil wars that are now dotting the whole country, which, ever since the West engineered its coup d'etat against the Gaddafi government, have become synonymous with the bleak landscape of lawlessness and death that is 'Libya' today. And the gift of NATO liberation is sure to keep on giving for years of instability and chaos to come.

"In a February 2011 interview with the Western media misinformation collective that is the BBC, ABC and Sunday Times, the late Muammar Gaddafi asked his condescending interviewers: Have you ever seen Al-Qaeda operatives? Have you heard all these Jihadi broadcasts? It's Al-Qaeda that's controlling the cities of Al-Baida and Darnah, former Guantanamo inmates and extremists unleashed by America to terrorize the Libyan people.' Darnah is now the main stronghold of ISIS in Libya.

"In a bizarre coincidence (or some sort of cosmic irony), the date on which ISIS chose to release its video of the beheading of Egyptian captives, thereby officially declaring its presence in the war-torn country with three oil fields under its control (approximately), marked the 4th anniversary of the start of the so-called Libyan revolution on February 15 2011. A more apt 'tribute' to commemorate the Western-instigated regime-change debacle in Libya could not have been made.

"But even long before ISIS became the buzzword, the acrid nature of a 'revolutionary' Libya showed in full, sickening splendor almost as soon as the old regime fell. Everything the late Gaddafi was falsely accused of doing was literally perfected to a chilling degree by the so-called rebels; massacres, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, car-bombings, mass arrests, torture, theft of oil and natural resources... the lot. In 2013 two British pro-Palestine activists, on their way to Gaza with an aid convoy, got to experience first-hand the rotten fruits of the Libyan chapter of the so-called Arab Spring when they were abducted by a motley crew of Libyan revolutionaries-turned-warlords in the city of Benghazi and gang-raped in front of their father.

"Proponents of humanitarian interventions must be patting themselves on the back these days, now that Libya has completed its 'democratic' makeover from a country with the highest standard of living in Africa under Gaddafi's rule to a textbook definition of a failed state, a godless wasteland of religious fanaticism, internal bloodletting and wholesale head-lopping. In fact, Libya has become so 'democratic' that there are now two parliaments and two (warring) governments, each with its own (criminal) army and supported with money and weapons from competing foreign powers, not to mention the myriad secessionist movements and militias which the illegal coup against Gaddafi has spawned all over the country, while the free health care, education and electricity which Libyans took for granted under Gaddafi, are now mere relics of the past. That's the 'Odyssey Dawn' Libyans were promised, a sanitized version of Iraq sans the public outrage, neatly re-packaged in a 'Responsibility to Protect' caveat and delivered via aerial bombing campaigns where even the West's overzealous Gulf Co-conspirators Club (GCC), driven by nothing beyond petty personal vendettas against Gaddafi, got to test the lethality of its rusted, American-made military aircraft alongside NATO on the people of Tripoli and Sirte.

"This is what Gaddafi had predicted right from the get-go, and then some. The ephemeral euphoria of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions was just too potent and too exhilirating for us to read the fine print. Was it a conspiracy or true revolutionary spirit gone awry? It doesn't really matter now that ISIS has become the true legacy of Tahrir Square. 'They will turn Libya into another Afghanistan, another Somalia, another Iraq. Women won't be allowed out, Libya will be transformed into an Islamic Emirate, and America will bomb the country under the guise of fighting terrorism,' the late Libyan leader had said in a televised speech on February 22, 2011. More prophetic words were never spoken.

"America's 'clean war' Libyan prototype proved to be such a success that it was replicated with gay abandon in Syria. Paul Bremmer's 'Blackwater' death squads of old, which rained terror all over Iraq, are back - with an Islamic twist; bearded, black-clad, draped in explosives from head to foot, and mounted on convoys of Toyota Land Cruisers with an ever-expanding, seemingly borderless Islamic Caliphate (but never intruding on the Zionist regime's occupation of Palestine) in their sights.

"Every day, the Arab world awakes to a new video-taped atrocity, steeped in gore and maniacal terror courtesy of ISIS, and countless other 'youtubeless' and even more heinous crimes, courtesy of America's very own grinding, one-sided drone warfare. The entire region seesaws between machete beheadings and hellfire missile incinerations. Death from above as well as below. The War on Terror rears its ugly head once again, to bring into line those nasty terrorists that the West itself sponsored and funded in the name of democracy to destabilize 'unsavory' regimes - an unrelenting Groundhog Day that begins with the Responsibility to Protect and ends with the War on Terror, with thousands of innocent lives typically chalked up to collateral damage.

"This is exactly what Gaddafi foresaw, a Libya mired in utter chaos, civil conflict, and Western diktats, a breeding ground for Jihadi fundamentalism and extremism. Too bad we just laughed off his warnings to an Israeli-made parody tune. (counterpunch.org, 9/3/15)

Foreign Policy Sophisticates

OMG! That Tony Abbott is sooo unsophisticated:

"We have a civil war going on in that benighted country between two pretty unsavoury sides. It is not goodies versus baddies, it is baddies versus baddies, and that is why it is very important that we don't make a very difficult situation worse." (Abbott calls for caution against Syria's 'baddies', Paul Maley & Rosie Lewis, The Australian, 2/9/13)

No, if it's foreign policy nouse you want, Bob Carr's your man:

"If the world doesn't respond in a way that's appropriate and proportionate, then other dictators will think that they can gas children." (G20: Australia leaves world's media puzzled over silence, AAP, The Guardian, 7/9/13)

Or even better, Kevin Rudd:

"If we hadn't done anything, as of 2 weeks ago, we'd be talking tonight about the butchery of Benghazi... and 700,000 people, big city, whack, Gaddafi up the middle of it, gone." (Q & A, 4/4/11)

The Summer of Muslim Discontent 3: Libya

Continuing an Arab Spring update from James Petras' latest (21/9/12) essay...

Libya 

"The Obama regime led the aerial and maritime war that devastated Libya's economy, destroyed its national integrity, and allowed a plethora of foreign and domestic fundamentalist terrorist groups to seize control over vast regions of the country. [7] Washington and the EU parachuted a motley group of client ex-pats into government - without any supporting state institutions. The Islamic fundamentalists, tribalists, monarchists, clans, gangs and other local warlords, funded, armed and imported to overthrow Gadhafi by Washington and the EU, did so much more, destroying the entire fabric of organized civil society, the state and public authority. In the face of a chaotic, Hobbesian world of warring fiefdoms, many people turned to their primary groups - family, clan, religious authorities - for minimum protection in the home, street and workplace. The assault on the US consulate was only one of thousands of violent assaults against property and national, regional and local authorities. [8] The police, the military and the ministries have been infiltrated by competing, armed religious and secular factions seeking to secure scarce oil revenues for their particular group. 

"The consulate protest and the assassination of the US ambassador and Special Forces personnel was merely the most publicized act of violence spawned by US and EU military intervention. They thought, either out of total ignorance, naivete or just plain arrogance, that they could arm the fundamentalists to do the dirty work of knocking off Gadhafi and that, once that had been accomplished, they could be discarded like a used condom (or shipped off to Syria as shock troops) and replaced by neo-liberal technocrats who would run the country as a Western client state, turning the oil fields over to US and EU oil companies. Instead, Washington and the EU have alienated all sections of Libyan society: the millions who benefited from the stable, secure, secular and prosperous Libya of Gadhafi; the mass of armed Muslim fanatics who demand an Islamic state and feel that their sacrifices have been ignored; and the warlords and contrabandists of arms who demand respect for their territorial acquisitions. [9] And above all, the vast majority of Libyans who have been impoverished by the war and who looked on with indifference or even satisfaction as the armed gangs stormed the consulate. The violent protest over the amateur film denigrating the Prophet was clearly only the pretext for the discharge of a vast accumulation of popular and elite grievances resulting from armed Western intervention."

[7: Financial Times 13/9/12; 8: FT 13/9/12; 9: Mel Frykberg, Consulate was just the latest in rising violence in Libya, McClatchy, 12/9/12]

Next post in the series: Yemen...

David Burchell & The Heroes of Benghazi

What an outrage:

"The desecration of dozens of graves at Commonwealth war cemetaries in Libya, in an apparent revenge attack by Islamic extremists, has left surviving Australian veterans of the bloody desert campaign shocked and distressed. Footage has appeared on the internet of militiamen uprooting, smashing and kicking headstones of the war dead, in vandalism the Returned Services League last night branded 'beyond the pale'. The attack last week at the cemeteries in Benghazi - the last resting place for more than 1100 Commonwealth troops, including more than 40 Australians - appears to have been orchestrated in retaliation for the burning of the Koran by US troops in Afghanistan." (Digger graves destroyed by Islamic mob, Mark Dodd, The Australian, 5/3/12)

This dreadful news literally catapulted me back to the deathless prose of one-time Australian columnist David Burchell, who sadly seems, to use his oft-repeated signature simile, to have "vanished like a wraith" from its pages.

You don't forget writing such as this in a hurry:

"Seventy years ago my father, along with 14,000 other Australians of the Ninth Division, was domiciled in the sleepy Libyan coastal town of Tobruk, where all year round the sky shone a fierce blue, the earth glowed red, and the ferocious heat of the day and numbing cold of night seemed drawn from some other planet, where the seasons spin by in a single day... Like others of that stoical and self-effacing generation my father said as little as possible about his experiences in that awful, gutted, fly-blown wreck of a town where so many of his friends and comrades are buried. Scour the photographs of that momentous siege today, though, and you are struck by the seemingly indefatigable optimism and self-confidence of that generation of young Australians, by the awful wreckage of their physical surroundings, in that pretty seaside town turned to rubble - and lastly by the absence of the local population, who seem to have vanished like wraiths." (Libyans failed by Left orientalism, The Australian, 28/2/11)

Burchell went on, by way of lashing Edward Said and his "soulmate" Noam Chomsky, to extol the youth of the Middle East (Palestinians excepted, of course) who were calling as one for "democracy, freedom, [and] women's rights."

"What seems obvious," pontificated our pundit, is that "the young Libyans in the streets of Tobruk, Benghazi and Tripoli... merely want to live... in a 'normal' country, where their persons will be treated with dignity and their views with respect."

In later columns, while arguing for Western intervention on their behalf, he hailed the rebels as the "young heroes of Benghazi" (Rebels live and die by Western ideals, 21/3/11) and asserted confidently that their 'revolution' aimed simply for "the restoration of sanity" (Carping critics betray ideals, 4/4/11).

And then he just vanished like a wraith!

As, it seems, have the "young heroes of Benghazi" - replaced with NATO-jihadis, who've taken time off from torturing perceived enemies, to trash David's Daddy's friends' graves.

David, revered pundit, in whichever etheric dimension you now flit, please, please come back and tell us what happened to the heroic, democratic, freedom-loving youth of Benghazi.

Libya Update 2

See my 7/2/12 post You Are Now Entering Free Libya.

Libya Update 1

See my 7/2/12 post You Are Now Entering Free Libya.

You Are Now Entering Free Libya

"Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has predicted a 'promising' future for Libya after making a flying visit to the country... He was surprised to find a calm Tripoli and had heard only 'occasional distant and sporadic gunfire'." (From out of Libya, Rudd a believer, John Lyons, The Australian, 10/12/11)

"Now that Qadhdhafi has been killed... the Libyan NATO militias can focus on their priorities: silencing critics, bloody internecine wars, and the gradual imposition of a Bin Ladenite order." (Asad Abu Khalil, angryarab.blogspot.com, 21/10/11)

"They've had free education, free health, they could study abroad. When they got married they got a certain amount of money. So they were rather the envy of many other citizens of African countries. Now, of course, since NATO's humanitarian intervention the infrastructure of their country has been bombed back to the Stone Age. They will not have the same quality of life. Women will probably not have the same degree of emancipation under any new transitional government. The national wealth is probably going to be siphoned off by Western corporations. Perhaps the standard of living in Libya might have been slightly higher than it is perhaps now in America and the UK with the recession." (Annie Machon, former MI5 agent, quoted in 'Nato has bombed Libya back to the Stone Age', rt.com, 19/10/11)

As the media cycle moves on events in NATO-'liberated' Libya have largely dropped from view, overtaken by the violence in Syria which has led to calls from within and without that country for a Libya-style foreign intervention. But when the likes of Hillary Clinton begin displaying an historically unprecedented concern for the suffering of the Syrian people, a closer look at the new, 'free' Libya would seem wise.

The following list of mainly Australian press items on post-Gaddafi Libya is far from exhaustive and I'll endeavour to update it as further items appear. Items are in reverse chronological order:

Revolutionary militias in western Libya unify: "Representatives of about 100 militias from western Libya said Monday they had formed a new federation to prevent infighting and allow them to press the country's new government for further reform. The move was a blow to the National Transitional Council, which helped lead the 8-month uprising against longtime ruler Moammar Gadhafi... and has largely failed to decommission or bring under its control the hundreds of militias that fought in the war. Ibrahim al-Madani, a commander whose brigade joined the new federation, said the fighters would not give up their arms to what they considered a corrupt government." (Maggie Michael, Associated Press, 14/2/12)

Five killed in clashes in southeast Libya: "At least 5 people have been killed in clashes between rival tribes over control of territory in the far southwest of Libya, officials said on Monday, highlighting the challenge of policing the country's sparsely populated desert." (Ali Shuaib, af.reuters.com, 13/2/12)

Libya unable to control militia violence, looting: "Libya, the country that witnessed the Arab world's most sweeping revolution, is foundering. The government of the interim Prime Minister, Abdel Rahim el-Keeb, is virtually paralysed by rivalries that have forced it to divide power along lines of regions and personalities, by unreachable expectations that Muammar Gaddafi's fall would bring prosperity and by powerlessness so marked the national army is treated like another of the many warring militias. This week one militia assaulted another militia at a seaside base in Tripoli to rescue a woman who had been abducted. When the guns fell silent, briefly, the scene that unfolded felt as chaotic as Libya's revolution - a government whose authority extends no further than its offices, militias whose swagger comes from plentiful guns and residents whose patience fades with every volley of gunfire that cracks at night... A Human Rights Watch researcher estimated there are 250 militias in the coastal city of Misratah... In recent months, those militias have become the most loathed in the country." (Anthony Shadid, Sydney Morning Herald/ New York Times, 11/2/12)

Libyan revolutionaries accused of widespread torture: "Three months after the killing of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, concerns are mounting about the torture of prisoners held by Libyan militiamen who are operating beyond the control of the country's transitional government, as well as by officially recognised security bodies." (Ian Black, Sydney Morning Herald/Guardian, 28/1/12)

Gaddafi loyalists take back Bani Walid: "Fighters loyal to Muammar Gaddafi have seized back the town of Bani Walid and raised the late dictator's green flag, in a blow to Libya's struggling provisional government." (Chris Stephen, The Guardian, 23/1/12)

Libyan NTC offices stormed: "Angry protesters threw home-made grenades and stormed Libya's ruling National Transitional Council offices in the city of Benghazi yesterday, setting its front ablaze." (The Australian/AFP, 23/1/12)

Tripoli militias in gunfight: "Four people were killed here yesterday in a gunfight between militias who helped topple Muammar Gaddafi's regime." (The Australian/AFP, 5/1/12)

Tripoli under lockdown as friend turns to foe: "The Libyan capital has been placed under a security lockdown as the governing National Transitional Council seeks to impose control over local militias, demanding residents give up their weapons by the end of the month." (Christopher Stephen, Sydney Morning Herald/Bloomberg, 8/12/11)

Libya must bring militias into the fold: Local warlords challenge Tripoli for power: "The appointment of a new interim NTC cabinet this week is the right opportunity to jump-start the detente between the militias and the central authorities. The next step will be folding all of the militias into a new national army and police force. Giving them fancy unit names such as the Revolutionary Platoon of Jadu, the Misratah Martyrs Brigade, the Zintani Scourge of Saif, and the Zwaran Zombie Strike Force might help. Yet developments on the ground show that even clever rebranding is unlikely to be enough. Decisive leadership is required, and the NTC has yet to prove it can deliver this." (Opinion Piece, Jason Pack, The Australian, 23/11/11)

Libyan gratitude turns to suspicion : "The former Libyan prime minister Mahmoud Jibril travelled the world to gather foreign supporters to oust Muammar Gaddafi. Now, he views those allied nations with suspicion. As Libya moves through a post-Gaddafi phase and prepares for democratic elections, the US-educated former professor sees ally Qatar meddling in domestic politics by supporting a prominent Islamist. He also has a 'hunch' Gaddafi was 'killed based on a request by a certain foreign power' that wanted the dictator to be 'silent forever'." (Flavia Krause-Jackson & Caroline Alexander, Sydney Morning Herald/Bloomberg, 15/11/11)

Libya's rebels take revenge: "Sitting in their home on the outskirts of Tripoli, a Libyan family is afraid. Their fear is that a knock on the door could come from the rebel militias that toppled Muammar Gaddafi." (John Lyons, The Australian, 5/11/11)

Militias in revenge attacks: "Misratah militia fighters are carrying out revenge attacks on displaced residents of the nearby town of Tawargha, a stronghold of Muammar Gaddafi supporters during the Libyan war, a human rights group says. The New York-based Human Rights Watch said it had credible reports of Misratah militiamen shooting unarmed Tawarghans, and seizing and beating people, sometimes to death." (The Australian/AFP, 1/11/11)

Treasure of Benghazi theft may be one of biggest in history: "A priceless collection of nearly 8000 ancient gold, silver and bronze coins has been stolen from a bank vault in the Libyan city of Benghazi." (Nick Meo, Sydney Morning Herald/Telegraph, 1/1/11)

Conflicting loyalties rule as Libya struggles with life after Gaddafi: "Gaddafi supporters have lost their figurehead leader, and are probably too demoralised at the moment to start the insurgency that some hotheads among them have threatened. But in a land awash with guns there are large numbers of resentful young men, bitter about losing, who might well take up arms if they are not persuaded that they have a place in the new Libya. In places like Bani Walid, such efforts to win them over have not got too far." (Nick Meo, Sydney Morning Herald/Telegraph, 31/10/11)

Signs of massacre at hotel cast ugly shadow over anti-Gaddafi rebels: "In the parched garden of the Mahari Hotel [Sirte], volunteers scrubbed signs of a recent massacre. They collected dozens of bodies, apparently of people executed on the hotel grounds several days ago... The volunteers said the victims included at least two former Gaddafi government officials, local loyalist fighters and maybe civilians. The killers, they believed, were former rebel fighters, belonging to anti-Gaddafi units that had used the hotel as a base in recent weeks. It appeared to be one of the worst massacres of the 8-month conflict but days afterwards no one from Libya's new government had come to investigate." (Kareem Fahim & Adam Nossiter, Sydney Morning Herald/New York Times, 26/10/11)

In Benghazi, a nostalgia for Gaddafi as Libya's rebels fail to keep the peace: "The killing of a senior rebel commander who was spearheading the campaign to topple Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has exposed latent security fears in eastern Libya - particularly about the proliferation of militias and gangs who do not seem to answer to any authority." (Steven Sotloff, Time, 16/8/11)

Rudyard Kipling Redux

I'm starting to wonder about reincarnation? Specifically, that of Rudyard Kipling. You all remember Kipling, don't you?

No? OK, here's a brief intro:

"In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled The White Man's Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands. In this poem, Kipling urged the US to take up the 'burden' of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Published in the February, 1899 issue of McClure's Magazine, the poem coincided with the beginning of the Philippine-American War and US Senate ratification of the treaty that placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines under American control. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, copied the poem and sent it to his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was 'rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view'. Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. The racialized notion of the 'White Man's burden' became a euphemism for imperialism, and many anti-imperialists couched their opposition in reaction to the phrase." ('The White man's Burden': Kipling's hymn to US imperialism, historymatters.gmu.edu)

And here's part of his famous poem:

Take up the White Man's burden-
Send forth the best ye breed-
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child

Take up the White Man's burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain

Well, I've reason to believe that Rudyard's soul currently inhabits the body of one, Micah D. Halpern, a restless soul who, so his website, The Micah Report, tells us, "currently divides his time between Jerusalem and New York City." How very Zionist!

Micah D. who? OK, here's part of his spiel: "Micah D. Halpern has a track record. He is a frequent analyst on network television and radio in the areas of terror, the Middle East and Muslim Fundamentalism. He is the author of the recently released, best selling, book THUGS." Again, how very Zionist!

Now why am I beating around this particular bush, you ask?

Well, it just so happens that I came across the following impassioned plea from Micah D, channeling Rudyard Kipling, in yesterday's Australian:

"Muammar Gaddafi is dead. The Gaddafi family will never again rule Libya. And that leaves Libya where? On the verge of civil war... All people yearn for freedom, but not all people know how to attain freedom. Not all people know how to reorganise, re-educate and instil the passion for freedom to younger generations. Not all people have the patience to wait, listen, watch and learn. We who have known freedom for many, many generations must step in and help those people in need. We must do it cautiously and respectfully, but we must do it, and we must do it quickly. Libya is on the verge of civil war. Libyans cannot help themselves. That is our role." (Gaddafi void opens civil war threat)

Now doesn't that take you back?