UK Anti-Terror Police Listed Extinction Rebellion in a Guide to Prevent School Atrocities

[I think this post, and HotScot’s post which it is replying to, are seriously off-topic. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for moderators to remove both of them, but if HotScot’s is allowed to remain, I think this response should also be allowed. If both comments are removed, I would be grateful if the moderators could forward this one to HotScot to explain why his has disappeared.]

I’m always surprised that people who have shown the independence of mind to reject mainstream brainwashing in one area (in this case, global warming) should be keen to echo it in different areas (like the claim that Soleimani was a terrorist). In fact, Soleimani was the greatest ANTI-terrorist fighter of the Middle East. His career consisted of helping people fight illegal invasions of their countries (starting with Saddam Hussain’s invasion of Iran), and fighting terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaida — in which enterprise he sometimes worked with American armed forces. (Though, obviously, not with those elements of the American Deep State that backed the terrorists.)

He is revered not only amongst anti-terrorist Muslims, but among the Christian and Yazidi communities of Syria, who regard him as the most effective shield that they had against the jihadists that wanted to enslave or exterminate them. It was Soleimani that organised the defence of Erbil and Baghdad that prevented ISIS taking almost the whole of Iraq in their original surge. The Popular Mobilization Units that Soleimani organised did the bulk of the work in pushing ISIS out of Iraq, whatever American MSM say. The PMUs are notable for using house-to-house fighting to liberate terrorist-held areas, risking their own lives to minimise civilian casualties. (This contrasts with the American strategy of just flattening terrorist-occupied areas, used in Raqqa and elsewhere.)

The American claim that the PMUs were responsible for the death of the Iraqi-born American contractor in last December’s attack on the base in northern Iraq is, to put it mildly, far from conclusively established — especially when you consider that the attacked base was shared with the PMUs. America’s response to the attack on this (PMU!) base was to bomb five other PMU bases, hundreds of miles away, which were guarding against ISIS infiltration. This killed about half-a-dozen PMU members, and about a couple of dozen regular Iraqi soldiers and border guards. Unsurprisingly, some of their funerals turned into anti-American demonstrations — for which America blamed Soleimani, even though he used his influence to moderate the anger!

With American encouragement, Saudi Arabia started diplomatic efforts to calm the situation down. Iraq invited Soleimani to represent Iran in those negotiations and to attend the remaining funerals. He travelled openly, using a diplomatic passport, on a scheduled air service. America told Iraq shortly before his arrival of its intention to kill him, and was told in no uncertain terms not to. But it went ahead and murdered not just Soleimani but also the Iraqi anti-terror forces chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who had greeted him at the airport. This was an act of war against both Iraq and Iran.

Far from being “a legitimate military target”, Soleimani was killed while on a mission of peace, under a flag of truce, on his way to the funerals of the last batch of America’s innocent victims. It is widely believed in the Middle East that the Americans suggested the negotiations precisely to get him to where it would be convenient to kill him. The contempt for American duplicity is now incandescent. Soleimani was extremely popular — he had about an 85% approval rating in Iran, according to Western opinion-pollsters working there. It was widely assumed that he would be elected the next President of Iran, and the effect of his assassination on Iranians is analogous to that of JFK on Americans. Except that in this case, the killers don’t hide their identity. Instead they glory in their actions, slander their victims, and threaten a massively disproportionate response (including the war-crime of targeting cultural sites) if any retaliation at all is taken, even the proportionate retaliation that Iran is entitled to under international law. (Incidentally, it remains to be seen whether the Soleimani assassination will eventually also be seen as analogous to that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.)

Any Iranian government that did not take proportionate retaliation for the killing of the national hero would fall, so great was the people’s anger. Iran had to launch such retaliation. As with the drone incident last summer, Iran targeted military equipment rather than personnel, and hit precisely what they targeted. American generals and politicians (behind the scenes) were so shocked by the demonstration of Iranian capabilities that they cancelled any planned “disproportionate response”, at least for as long as it would take them to either harden up, or withdraw from, all the bases that they belatedly realised were wide open to Iranian missiles.

Of course, the Iranians couldn’t be sure that the threatened American response wouldn’t come, so they had to go on high alert for air raids. Unfortunately, some idiot failed to suspend civilian air traffic, and some older air defence missile units were brought out of mothballs and moved around the country to fill gaps in coverage, without being reliably linked into the modern command and control structure. I find both of these decisions blameworthy, but military bloggers have persuaded me that probably no blame attaches to the character mocked by HotScot, the “Abdul” with his finger on the pushbutton. (“Abdul” is not a Persian name, by the way.)

Tragically, the fog of war led to a civilian plane being shot down, when its height, speed and direction happened to match that of a cruise missile headed for an important military base. It took the Iranians a couple of days to sort out what had happened, to apologise profusely, and to promise to pay compensation and to punish any individuals found to be at fault. That really isn’t fast enough, but it compares well with the years that America took to formally admit that the USS Vincennes had shot down Iran Air flight 655 in 1988, with America’s explicit refusal to apologise for the resulting 290 deaths, and with the awarding of honours rather than punishment to those on the Vincennes who were responsible. It’s also worth noticing that no threats had been made against the Vincennes to make it expect imminent attack, and that the Tehran missile-crew were defending their own territory, while the Vincennes was thousands of miles from home, and actually entered Iranian territorial waters to shoot down an Iranian airliner in Iranian airspace. Americans are in no position to criticise.

Everything I have said will seem astonishing to anyone who depends on the MSM for news and analysis about the Middle East. I get my information from a loose network of analytical blogs, many of which are run by Western ex-military, ex-intelligence or ex-diplomatic staff. These are people who retired or were pushed out over the last couple of decades because they refused to fit the intelligence to the politically desired policy — a policy of aggression towards any country whose governments try to rule in the interests of their nations’ people, rather than for the benefit of an international exploitative ruling class, which seeks to break up national cohesion so that all non-elite people become easily-dominated interchangeable cyphers.

These bloggers are usually much more insightful, and certainly more truthful, than the sort of people who are allowed into the MSM. If you want to examine such blogs, good places to start are: (1) Sic Semper Tyrannis. (Run by a group of American ex-military and ex-intelligence people.) (2) Moon of Alabama. (Run by a German of similar background, I think.) (3) craigmurray.org.uk (Run by a British ex-ambassador who was forced out for whistleblowing about an allied country boiling dissidents alive. Skip the boring stuff about domestic Scottish politics if you’re not Scottish.) And (4) the Vineyard of the Saker. (Run from Florida by an ex-NATO analyst of Swiss nationality and Russian descent.) Following links from those will give a much higher proportion of truth than using MSM sites, though of course they can sometimes get things wrong, and there is never any guarantee that you can’t find yourself on a disinformation site after a couple of jumps.