Bomb Blast as Ideological Assertion

Raffaello Pantucci, courtesy of The Telegraph, 23 May 2017, where the title is “Cars and knives are easier to use, but bombs will always be central to terrorist thinking” **

Terrorism has a predictable brutality to it. And yet, the idea of a bombing is something that still surprises us when it happens. The attack in Manchester in some ways appears a flashback to a different time when the terrorists we worried about detonated bombs, rather than using vehicles as rams or stabbing people. The reality is that terrorism’s only constant is its desire to shock and kill. For any group or ideology, the fundamental point is to make yourself heard as dramatically as possible. Groups and individuals will use whatever tools they have to gain that attention.

 The successful use of a bomb is unusual among recent terror attacks CREDIT: JOEL GOODMAN/LNP

Has Assad been Tarred with a Sarin Brush? A False Flag Stratagem at Play?

 in Daily Mirror, 8 May 2017,  with title   “False-flag chemical weapons attack: Re-play of an old US ploy to smash Syria? – See more at:

As the fallout of the April 4th chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhun in Syria continues to unfold, contradictory reports on the incident have produced more questions than answers as to what really happened.  The only certainty seems to be that sarin or a similar poison was used. This was confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons according to Reuters, but OPCW was not mandated to assign blame.

“By the Will of Allah” — Fahad Jabar’s Last Will before Kill

Emily Ritchie, in The Australian, 2 May 2017, where the title is “Curtis Cheng Killer’s ISIS-Style Salute” … Note that emphasis has been imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi.

Just 15 minutes before teenage terrorist Farhad Jabar shot and killed NSW police accountant Curtis Cheng, he stared into the security camera at a Sydney mosque and ominously raised his index finger in an Islamic State-style salute. For the first time, a Sydney court heard details yesterday of alleged plotting between a group of young men accused of supplying the gun Jabar used to carry out the October 2015 ­murder.

  Pic from Daily Telegraph 

Face Our Future: Jihadist Offshoots and Continuing Maelstrom in Middle East

• David Kilcullen

  

  Contributing Editor for Military Affairs courrtey of The Weekend Australian, 1/2 April 2017, where the title is ‘There’s something worse in store once the ‘caliphate’ goes” … note 70 comments already on line

  On a cold rainy evening last week, I stood in the Jordanian capital, Amman, watching images of the terrorist attack in central London. One sequence, looping every few minutes on Al Jazeera, showed ­attacker Khalid Masood lying wounded on cobblestones outside parliament. A police officer covered him with a sub-machinegun while others treated his injuries before carefully placing him on a stretcher and, already dead, into an ambulance. In another sequence, Foreign Office minister Tobias Ellwood worked frantically — streaked in blood — to save police constable Keith Palmer, whom Masood had stabbed moments earlier. Ellwood — whose brother Jonathan was murdered by Jemaah Islamiah in the 2002 Bali bombing and who, full disclosure, is a friend and former army colleague — has been called a hero for rushing to Palmer’s aid. I would rather say that he did what he was trained to do. He did it bravely and well, without hesitation, as did many others that afternoon in a city that’s seen more than its share of terror and has some of the best public safety systems anywhere.

•  An Iraqi girl cries over her father’s body in the Al-Risala neighbourhood in Mosul.

HRW in Syria and Sri Lanka: Moral Fervour generating Political Blindness and Partisanship

Michael Roberts,  courtesy of Colombo Telegraph where the title is different and reads as “The Political Bankruptcy of the Western Human Rights Lobby: Their Stance in Syria & Sri Lanka in Juxtaposition.” I anticipate lively blog-comments therein –with the usual quota of disparaging ‘assassinations’.  Highlighted emphasis in RED in the version below is my work.

 A friend in Adelaide recently directed me towards an article in a prestigious world media outlet by Kenneth Roth, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch. In this essay entitled “What Trump Should Do in Syria,” Roth contends that Donald Trump needs to pursue “a much tougher approach toward Moscow than he so far envisions” because the Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has been “targeting and indiscriminately firing upon civilians and civilian infrastructure in opposition-held areas” with Russian backing. In his reading the enormous civilian death-toll is the product of the regime’s deliberate strategy, Besides generating an outflow of refugees, he says that the consequence will also produce an escalation of Islamist extremism. 

As an outsider with a limited knowledge of the extremely complex Syrian and Middle-Eastern ground situation, what strikes me about Roth’s declamation is its one-sidedness and its simplifications. It slides over the impact of US and NATO bombing runs. It implies that the extremism of ISIS, Al Qaida and other forces who are challenging the Syrian dictator is an outcome of the latter’s policies and says little about (a) the Sunni-Shia rivalries that are one aspect of the complex politics in Syria and the Middle East and (b) the repercussions flowing from the American dethronement of Saddam via invasion.

Hillary Clinton: Contrasting Views and Information

ONE: Rajan Philips — “It was unthinkable that faced with choosing between the most qualified candidate and the most unqualified candidate in their history, the American voters would elect the unqualified candidate as their new president for the next four years. It was unthinkable too that having come so close to making history by electing its first female president, America would go off track to make a different history by electing a male charlatan and a political clown as president for the first time….” in the Sunday Island, 13 November 2016,  http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=155418

TWO: Jeanine Pirro demands Indictment — See “Judge Jeanine Pirro Destroys Hillary Clinton , Private Email Server .Trey Gowdy , James Comey,”.. You Tube Video on Congress Hearing, USA TV, 10 November 2016, … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne57t4IBac0&feature=youtu.be

 Pic fr BusinessInsider  Pic fr Slate

Perilous Big Power/UN Interventions Here-There-Eveywhere

Thalif Deen, from the UN courtesy of InterPress Service, 7 October 2016, where the title is “UN Security Council’s ‘Perilous Interventions’ in War Zones” … Emphasis inserted by Editor, Thuppahi.

When the UN Security Council last week discussed the “deliberate” attacks on medical facilities in war-ravaged Syria and Yemen, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon implicitly criticized some of the warring nations lamenting that “even a slaughterhouse is more humane” than the ongoing indiscriminate killings of civilians in the two devastating conflicts.The attacks on hospitals, he warned, were “war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law”. But Joanne Liu, International President of Medicins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), singled out “four of the five permanent members of the Security Council” for the continued atrocities and lambasted them for their role in the attacks against medical facilities. “The conduct of war today knows no limits,” she regretted, pointing out that the failure of the Security Council “reflects a lack of political will among member states fighting in coalitions and those who enable them.”