Friday News Roundup - International
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-06-01/friday-news-roundup-international
U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton says the chances of civil war in Syria are high if the world fails to act. There are mixed messages on whether the U.S. would take military action there without the U.N. Iran claims it defeated a powerful computer virus used for spying. Pakistan militants deny links to a doctor hired by the C.I.A. to help track down Osama bin Laden. Ireland declares victory in a referendum on Europe's new fiscal treaty. The vote comes as European’s central bank chief said the eurozone’s current structure can’t be sustained. And Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth celebrates sixty years on the throne.
Guests
David Ignatius
columnist, The Washington Post; contributor to “Post Partisan” blog on washingtonpost.com. His latest book is titled "Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage."
Elise Labott
CNN foreign affairs reporter.
Yochi Dreazen
senior national security correspondent, National Journal magazine.
Comments
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don't you think people in that part of the world find it absurd that leaders in the U.S. responsible for thousands of deaths in Iraq based on a "pack of lies" which many people around the world consider a "massacre" are lecturing Syrian leaders about human rights etc. Why is it that these same U.S. leaders and MSM host are calling what is happening in Syria a "massacre" yet either ignore the dead, injured and displaced in Iraq due to the U.S. invasion or refer to the dead in Iraq or from U.S. drones as "collateral damage" Why is it that as soon as innocent people in Syria have been brutally killed the images and numbers of dead immediately make it up on U.S. MSM outlets like MSNBC etc yet these same outlets never showed images of Iraqi dead or never ever report about the numbers killed in Iraq or by U.S. drones? Can your guest explain this horrific absurdity
I would like to hear what your panel has to say about the race riots in Tel Aviv this past week.
There has been a notable lack of coverage by the major news organizations, (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, BBC),
while NPR, The Guardian newspaper (UK), dw.de, and France24 have posted stories about the Levinsky Park riots.
From the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/29/levinsky-park-migrants-tel-aviv
In recent weeks, Molotov cocktails have been thrown at apartments housing African migrants.
One firebomb was hurled into the yard of a kindergarten.
And: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/24/israelis-attack-african-migr...
Miri Regev, a member of the Israeli parliament, told the crowd "the Sudanese are a cancer in our body".
Around 1,000 demonstrators took part in the demonstration on Wednesday night, waving signs saying:
"Infiltrators, get out of our homes" and "Our streets are no longer safe for our children."
A car containing Africans was attacked and shops serving the refugee community were looted.
Seventeen people were arrested.
The protest followed a claim on Sunday by the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, that
"illegal infiltrators [were] flooding the country" and threatening the security and identity
of the Jewish state. "This phenomenon is very grave and threatens the social fabric of society,
our national security and our national identity," he said.
Is this not news because no one was killed, in an area where the IDF and terrorists do kill people?
Or, well, what do you expect of a society living in a state of war for generations?
Last week, Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman "My expectation from all Jewish communities around the world is that they support any Israeli government."
Is it due to other pressures: advertizing dollars, editorial policy, or maintaining market share, or just
give the readers what they want to read.
kathleen: Maybe the Pentagon or the CIA could send Bashir Assad some drones so he can kill more cleanly. Big Picture: The Saudis are conquering Syria the hard way, using the population as a cudgel.
PNAC following the Project for A New American Century...plans
Former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit Micheal Scheuer's take on the situation with Syria
War kills people … as do lies by U.S. and Western Interventionists
http://non-intervention.com/
"Washington’s threat mongering about Syria for a long time had to do with both parties’ readiness to earn campaign donations by towing the anti-Syria propaganda line put forth by Israel and its AIPAC-led fifth column of U.S. citizens. (NB:Ironically, AIPAC’s deliberate corruption of the U.S. Congress and political system has always been a far greater threat to America than Syria.) And, indeed, the Russia-armed Syrians may have posed a threat to Israel and its ongoing expansion into Palestinian-owned territory. But this was a threat to Israel, never a threat to the United States, although U.S. leaders have spoken and spent, and still speak and spend as if the Syrian marines — if there are any — were soon going to splash ashore along the Hamptons’ beaches and ruin the holidays of many cocaine-addled but campaign-contributing Hollywood celebrities.
Cont from Micheal Scheuer's website
"Given the reliable ability of Israel and its U.S. fifth column to determine and control the content of U.S. policy in the Islamic world, the ersatz Syrian threat remained front and center until the Arab Spring unleashed a fatal dementia that is likely to destroy Israel and embroil the United States and its allies in a losing clash of civilizations with the Islamic world. This fatal dementia can be found in the words and — to give them the benefit of the doubt — the thoughts of Mrs. Clinton, Obama, Rice, McCain, Cameron, and Graham that assert the Arab Spring ensures the installation of secular democracy across the Arab and Islamic worlds. Although Islamic parties have won all of the elections since the Tunisian regime fell — and Egyptians are poised to choose between Islamists on the one side, and the army and Mubarak‘s assistant tyrants on the other — Mrs. Clinton still insists that secular democracy is on the march. And it is, but only in the reality-proof brains of the Secretary of State and other of our Ivy-League educated (?) political and media leaders."
Friday Night on Disney News prettyboy David Muir cozied up to Diane Sawyer with a slice of cheesecake, like the Arabian Royals eat (made in Chicago). I really laughed when he claimed their lux purchases there are an important part of our jobs recovery here. They buy more Chevrolet SUVs and cheesecake from the USA than from China. Who would have thought?
Meanwhile Bahrain has jailed more doctors than all our Medicare fraud units combined. Wanna trade some cheesecake for a quart of motor oil? How about some rubber bullets for some dates? Commerce makes hearts grow fonder. Are we living in a Disney Story yet? Are we? How long 'til we get there?
(Fox is the cherry on top.)
Diane,
Please, could you please ask your guests to comment on whether the German people realize that their government stance (and actually their own stance) on aiding Greece, Spain, and other European countries is breaking Europe apart and risk sending the entire world in another recession.
Especially, because Germans are profiting from the troubles that is afflicting the other European countries through exceptionally low interest rates on their treasury notes, lowering Euro exchange rates, while stable inter-Europe exchange rates, which is a boon for the German exporting.
I think resentment towards Germans is beginning to grow among the other Europeans and this will rapidly expand towards the Euro and Europe itself.
Regards,
Cleveland
Former head of the CIA's Bin Laden unit said this about Secretary of State Clinton "As the Syrian civil war lengthens and deepens as the result of the support of U.S.-Western interventionists for the Saudis’ funding and arming of the mujahedin already in Syria and those on the way there form other battle fronts, we will no doubt here more lies about the Syrian threat to the United States. We also will hear more about the Syrian threat to Israel, but what once was a lie now will be the truth as Mrs. Clinton and company — in their doctrinaire, Marxist-Leninist-like belief in democracy’s inevitable triumph — help to give to al-Qaeda and the Saudis what they could never attain alone; that is, the gradual entrenchment of militant Sunni regimes from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean."
What do you think about what Micheal Scheuer has stated?
David Ignatius you just described what has gone on as a "massacre" Why is it that our leaders, our MSM host, journalist refer to what is going on in Syria as a "massacre" But have never described the thousands dead, injured in Iraq as a direct result of the U.S. invasion or the innocents killed in the Gazaby Israeli forces as a "massacre"
Why are the killings in Syria described as a "massacre" and killings in Iraq in the tens of thousands described as "collateral damage" in Iraq or in the Gaza?
If a sociopathic superpower lacked a focal enemy it would have to invent one.
And once the Lie is told resources must be allocated to back it up.
Didn't Dr. Frankenstein create his "monster" as a worthy chess opponent?
(But he could pull the plug in a pinch.... oops, maybe not.)
Subtext: Empire itself is an artificial construct by the wealthy class.
The shoemaker is content to perfect his art in service to feet; but the gambler knows no bounds.
We have to realize that the advantage for any regime that will follow Assad will be in the absence of bordering countries that are willing or capable of harboring and sending terrorists and insurgents to then disturb Syria’s recovery like was the case in Iraq.
The Syrian regime was always the major inciter of most of the instabilities in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza,... Its fall will eliminate a major hindrance to stability and peace in the region.
Those who are afraid of an Islamists rule should understand that the Syrians who are dying today for their freedom are in their majority not willing to replace an autocracy with a more virulent theocracy.
What is happening in Syria is plain brutal and unacceptable and the world should devise a plan to swiftly bring Assad and his gangs down even if the alternative to his rule is not defined yet. A Middle East without Assad will be a lot better place.
David and other guest please explain when journalist, leaders decide to use the word "massacre" when it comes to killings in Syira but "collateral damage" when they whisper about dead, injured in Iraq or innocents killed by Israel in the Gaza? Explain?
Diane, thank you for covering so many important topics.
I would like to ask Yochi Dreazen to cite his sources that the Taliban has killed more civilians than the U.S. military. Do his sources include drone strikes?
The dead and injured in Iraq were due to the insurgency that ensued the liberation of the Iraqi people from the yoke of the brutal saddam hussein's regime.
These insurgency were incited mostly by Iran and Syria. The terrorists who killed most of the Iraqi victims were trained and harbored in Syria by the current Syrian regime.
To not fall for the propaganda of the extremists and the Arabs which puts the blame on the US while the balme falls on most of them who inflamed sectarian strife at the expense of the Iraqi people.
We have to realize that the advantage for any regime that will follow Assad will be in the absence of bordering countries that are willing or capable of harboring and sending terrorists and insurgents to then disturb Syria’s recovery like was the case in Iraq.
The Syrian regime was always the major inciter of most of the instabilities in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza,... Its fall will eliminate a major hindrance to stability and peace in the region.
Those who are afraid of an Islamists rule should understand that the Syrians who are dying today for their freedom are in their majority not willing to replace an autocracy with a more virulent theocracy.
What is happening in Syria is plain brutal and unacceptable and the world should devise a plan to swiftly bring Assad and his gangs down even if the alternative to his rule is not defined yet. A Middle East without Assad will be a lot better place.
Clearly "massacres" are not created equal in the U.S. press or in our leaders and Reps language or views. "Massacres" in Iraq or the Gaza are referred to if at all as "collateral damage" But in Syria a "massacre" Telling
Regarding Syria, when people live under dictators, and hegemonies often the only way out is revolution and revolutions have been successful. Or one can do it the Bush way, of preemptive war and install the perfect free market democracy as with the Provisional Coalition Authority under Bremmer. We can see how successful that was. It is a long circuitous road from the so called end of history where western style free market liberal democracy’s was projected to prevail to what the world is experiencing now as the ravages of unregulated local institutions and international institutions created wild unsustainable markets in countries across the globe. One would think it is time to rethink our ideologies. Totally skipped by the US news is the OWS like protests in Israel against wealth inequality. I offer this from the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of “Foreign Affairs” magazine, from the “Future of History” by Francis Fukuyama.
“The current concentration of wealth in the United States has already become self-reinforcing: as the economist Simon Johnson has argued, the financial sector has used its lobbying clout to avoid more onerous forms of regulation. Schools for the well-off are better than ever; those for everyone else continue to deteriorate. Elites in all societies use their superior access to the political system to protect their interests, absent a countervailing democratic mobilization to rectify the situation. American elites are no exception to the rule.
That mobilization will not happen, however, as long as the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the past generation: that their interests will be best served by ever-freer markets and smaller states. The alternative narrative is out there, waiting to be born.”
Hegemonies are hegemonies regardless if they are right wing, left wing, or private.
"Pancake Rankin wrote:
kathleen: Maybe the Pentagon or the CIA could send Bashir Assad some drones so he can kill more cleanly. Big Picture: The Saudis are conquering Syria the hard way, using the population as a cudgel.
June 1, 2012 - 10:48 am"
Close Kathleen, but no Prize. It's actually, Big Picture: The XXXXXX Americans are conquering Syria the XXXX easy way, using the population as a cudgel, just as the Republicans did in Hungary, Iraqi Kurdistan, Libya, to name a few among many.
Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com
I was so pleased to hear you mention the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth at the end of the program (brief though it was). What an upbeat positive way to end a review of dismal and discouraging topics. I seem to recall reading that Elizabeth (as a teen) drove an ambulance in London during the Blitz - and her family stayed there in Buckingham Palace through the war - enduring the same privations and limitations that all of the populace was subjected to during that siege. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote quite compellingly about her visit to wartime London and her stay in the Palace during that terrible time in her memoir "This I Remember" (a highly readable and well-written volume). I hope that your brief remarks on today's show won't be all that you have to say. The life, the example she set and public service of this Queen - certainly regarded as a truly historic world figure - is worthy of a program to more intently focus on and appreciate her remarkable tenure. Please consider doing such a program.