I guess it just goes to show that fas­cists don’t always trust each oth­er, do they? Nice post, Dave. :)

[...] Anoth­er Pic­ture worth a Thou­sand Words This entry was post­ed in Non classé. Book­mark the perma­link. ← Nico­las Far­gues: La Charia, preuve d’une plus grande tolérance… [...]

I’ve stopped hunt­ing for the good guys here. Racist ele­ments in Turkey prob­a­bly see EU mem­ber­ship as an obsta­cle in the pur­suit of a Tur­kic speak­ing empire. They are not up to the patient eth­nic pars­ing and finan­cial takeovers that Ger­many prefers. Nato airstrikes are quick­er. Turkophiles have their eyes on north­ern Syr­ia and north­ern Iran and points east. An emerg­ing but prob­a­bly unim­por­tant ene­my-of-my-ene­my alliance is that of Greece and Iran. Mean­while, the peo­ple of the region get to choose between left and right ver­sions of fas­cism. Assad, like Nixon, has to go — he’s a fas­cist but still not hard right enough. He spends too much on bread sub­si­dies that could be bet­ter spent else­where on gold bath­room fix­tures.

@Dwight: I don’t see any good guys, either. In fact, if you want my opin­ion, all 3 of these of these coun­tries have gov­ern­ments who are real­ly just sides on the same rot­ten dice.

Allow me Dave, please, to pon­tif­i­cate a lit­tle bit. It is true that a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words. While surf­ing on the web, I stum­bled upon some pic­tures from the Saint­sa­tions, the New Orleans Saints Cheer­lead­ers.

In a nut­shell, one has to remem­ber that the French pres­ence in Louisiana is due to the depor­ta­tion of French colonists liv­ing in what is called today Nova Scot­tia, Cana­da, when the French Crown aban­doned North Amer­i­ca to the British.

What is absolute­ly strik­ing about the­ses cheer­lead­ers is that they wear...a gold­en lily on their chest! Sym­bol­i­cal­ly, it’s incred­i­ble. The fleur-de-lis is not new on the Saints’ jer­sey appar­ent­ly but to see it like that, on these beau­ti­ful women, hit me like a train. God that it would make me a great army! It is for these women that we have to con­tin­ue the fight to pro­tect and defend our civ­i­liza­tion. Only free­dom allow women to become so beau­ti­ful, not reli­gion, total­i­tar­i­an­ism or author­i­tar­i­an­ism.

My blog is nev­er men­tioned any­where nor is my name but I have the impres­sion some­times that I have an impact. It made my day any­way and I hope you will enjoy it too.

http://saintsations.net/main/meet_the_team.php?page=meet_the_team

The spig­ot is about to open:

Sau­di, Qatari plans to arm Syr­i­an rebels risk over­tak­ing cau­tious approach favored by U.S.
By Karen DeY­oung, Pub­lished: March 1
WaPo

Arab plans to arm Syria’s oppo­si­tion fight­ers are threat­en­ing to over­take the cau­tious approach advo­cat­ed by the Unit­ed States and oth­er coun­tries, which fear that send­ing weapons to the region could fuel a civ­il war and lead to a region­al con­fla­gra­tion.

Sau­di Ara­bia and Qatar indi­cat­ed this week that they are pre­pared to help Syr­i­an oppo­si­tion mil­i­tary forces. Kuwait’s par­lia­ment passed a non­bind­ing res­o­lu­tion Thurs­day call­ing for the gov­ern­ment to pro­vide weapons to the rebels and break ties with Dam­as­cus.

The Syr­i­an Nation­al Coun­cil, the oppo­si­tion group pre­vi­ous­ly com­mit­ted to non­vi­o­lence, announced the for­ma­tion of a “defense min­istry” that it said would uni­fy rebel forces under a cen­tral polit­i­cal com­mand and direct strat­e­gy. “The rev­o­lu­tion start­ed peace­ful­ly and kept up its peace­ful nature for months,” SNC Pres­i­dent Burhan Ghalioun told reporters in Paris, “but the real­i­ty today is dif­fer­ent.”

The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has con­tin­ued to insist pub­licly that eco­nom­ic and diplo­mat­ic pres­sure is the best way to push Syr­i­an Pres­i­dent Bashar al-Assad to capit­u­late.

“It’s not clear to us that arm­ing peo­ple right now will either save lives or lead to the demise of Assad’s regime,” Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of State Jef­frey D. Felt­man said at a Sen­ate hear­ing on the cri­sis Thurs­day.

But a senior Arab diplo­mat said, “Peo­ple are more and more frus­trat­ed, and are com­ing to the con­clu­sion that diplo­mat­ic efforts are not enough in light of con­tin­u­ing abuse by the regime.” The Saud­is and Qataris, said the diplo­mat speak­ing on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to dis­cuss nation­al deci­sion-mak­ing, are pre­pared to move “as soon as they phys­i­cal­ly can,” with­in days, or weeks at the most. “The delays,” he said, “are logis­ti­cal, not polit­i­cal.”

Beyond sym­pa­thy for the Syr­i­an peo­ple, the Saud­is see Assad’s ear­ly down­fall as a major blow against Iran, his only remain­ing sup­port­er in the region. Qatar, which played a lead­ing role in arm­ing the Libyan oppo­si­tion to Moam­mar Gaddafi, is seek­ing to fur­ther expand its role as a major for­eign-pol­i­cy play­er.

Despite U.S. demur­ral on the ques­tion of arms, region­al diplo­mats said they think the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion will not oppose deci­sions by indi­vid­ual nations to pro­vide weapons to the rebel fight­ers.

“I don’t think any­one will stand up and scream” in oppo­si­tion to weapons ship­ments, the Arab diplo­mat said. Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton, who has led the admin­is­tra­tion effort to coor­di­nate a uni­fied inter­na­tion­al effort, “is not going to stop the Saud­is,” he said.

Felt­man acknowl­edged that “the longer this goes on, the deep­er the sec­tar­i­an divi­sions, the high­er the risks of long-term sec­tar­i­an con­flict, the high­er the risk of extrem­ist” involve­ment. But the well-equipped Syr­i­an army has used tanks and artillery against the oppo­si­tion, he said, “and I don’t think [those propos­ing aid] are talk­ing about some­how giv­ing tanks to the oppo­si­tion.”

Daniel Byman, pro­fes­sor of secu­ri­ty stud­ies at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, not­ed the “fun­da­men­tal dis­par­i­ty between oppo­si­tion forces and the Syr­i­an gov­ern­ment” and said “it’s very hard to lev­el that play­ing field.” Sup­port to the oppo­si­tion would prob­a­bly involve “small arms, auto­mat­ic weapons, rock­et-pro­pelled grenades, per­haps mor­tars — things that in the end won’t stand up to a tank.”

The admin­is­tra­tion is con­sid­er­ing pro­vid­ing the oppo­si­tion with non­lethal train­ing and assis­tance, includ­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions equip­ment, sim­i­lar to what it gave the Libyan oppo­si­tion ground forces.

...

Rov­ing bands of rad­i­cal Islamist fight­ers: one of those mag­ic ingre­di­ents that can can take any sit­u­a­tion, no mat­ter how messed up it it already is, and make it even worse.

From an inter­net def­i­n­i­tion of the Ba’ath par­ty — main ide­o­log­i­cal objec­tives are sec­u­lar­ism, social­ism, and pan-Arab union­ism. Gaddafi was­n’t Ba’ath par­ty but he worked its plat­form. He became a dan­ger in the eyes of west­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies only when he stopped pro­mot­ing ter­ror­ism.
Of Hus­sein, Gaddafi, and now Assad, none of them were poster boys for democ­ra­cy but their real crime was try­ing to hold togeth­er a sov­er­eign nation whose inter­ests did not always coin­cide with the glob­al cor­po­rate mod­el.
With­out West­ern inter­fer­ence some sort of sec­u­lar pan-Arab move­ment might have suc­ceed­ed, threat­en­ing the reign of the region’s depraved oil sheiks and emirs and forc­ing Israel to be rea­son­able.
It’s a strange, almost blas­phe­mous thought to con­sid­er that the world might be in a much worse place by now if Rus­sia and Chi­na did not have nuclear weapons.

While this is a pre­dictable even­tu­al devel­op­ment, the tim­ing is rather sur­pris­ing. Nor­mal­ly the Islamists would main­tain their alliance with the sec­u­lar rebels until after Assad falls. They might be get­ting ahead of them­selves:

New front opens in Syr­ia as rebels say al Qae­da attack means war
Mari­am Karouny and Oliv­er Holmes July 12, 2013

By Mari­am Karouny and Oliv­er Holmes

BEIRUT (Reuters) — Syr­i­an rebels said on Fri­day the assas­si­na­tion of one of their top com­man­ders by al Qae­da-linked mil­i­tants was tan­ta­mount to a dec­la­ra­tion of war, open­ing a new front for the West­ern-backed fight­ers strug­gling against Pres­i­dent Bashar al-Assad’s forces.

Rival­ries have been grow­ing between the Free Syr­i­an Army (FSA) and the Islamists, whose small­er but more effec­tive forces con­trol most of the rebel-held parts of north­ern Syr­ia more than two years after pro-democ­ra­cy protests became an upris­ing.

“We will not let them get away with it because they want to tar­get us,” a senior FSA com­man­der said on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty after mem­bers of the Islam­ic State of Iraq and Lev­ant killed Kamal Hama­mi on Thurs­day.

“We are going to wipe the floor with them,” he said.

Hama­mi, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bassir al-Lad­kani, is one of the top 30 fig­ures on the FSA’s Supreme Mil­i­tary Com­mand.

His killing high­lights how the West­’s vision of a future, demo­c­ra­t­ic Syr­ia is unrav­el­ing.

Assad appeared close to defeat a year ago when rebels killed top offi­cials in a bomb attack and pushed deep into Dam­as­cus. Now, with mil­i­tary and finan­cial sup­port from Rus­sia and Iran, he has pushed the rebels back to the out­skirts of the cap­i­tal and put them on the defen­sive in the south while rad­i­cal Islamists assert con­trol over the north.

The FSA com­man­der said the al Qae­da-linked mil­i­tants had warned FSA rebels that there was “no place” for them where Hama­mi was killed in Latakia province, a north­ern rur­al region of Syr­ia bor­der­ing Turkey where Islamist groups are pow­er­ful.

Oth­er oppo­si­tion sources said the killing fol­lowed a dis­pute between Hamami’s forces and the Islam­ic State over con­trol of a strate­gic check­point in Latakia and would lead to fight­ing.

VACUUM OF POWER

The two sides have pre­vi­ous­ly fought togeth­er from time to time, but the West­ern and Arab-backed FSA, des­per­ate for greater fire­pow­er, has recent­ly tried to dis­tance itself to allay U.S. fears any arms it might sup­ply could reach al Qae­da.

Louay Mek­dad, FSA Supreme Com­mand Polit­i­cal Coor­di­na­tor, said Abu Ayman al-Bagh­da­di, the Islam­ic State’s Emir of the coastal region, per­son­al­ly shot dead Hama­mi and his broth­er at the road­block.

He said a fight­er who was trav­el­ling with them was set free to rely the mes­sage that the Islam­ic State con­sid­ers the FSA heretics and that the Supreme Com­mand is now an al Qae­da tar­get.

“If these peo­ple came to defend the Syr­i­an rev­o­lu­tion and not help the Assad regime, then they have to hand over the killers,” Mek­dad said, adding that the bod­ies of the two men were still with the al Qae­da affil­i­ate.

The FSA has been try­ing to build a logis­tics net­work and rein­force its pres­ence across Syr­ia as the U.S. admin­is­tra­tion con­sid­ers send­ing weapons, in part to present a bul­wark against units it con­sid­ers “ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions.”

But with fund­ing from Gulf-based indi­vid­u­als, Islamist brigades have tak­en a lead­ing role in rebel-held regions of Syr­ia, fill­ing the vac­u­um of pow­er by set­ting up reli­gious courts and gov­er­nance bod­ies.

The FSA — a mix­ture of loose­ly-affil­i­at­ed brigades — is accused by locals of loot­ing and has not been able to present a uni­fied front to side­line hard­line units who favor an Islam­ic caliphate over plu­ral­ist democ­ra­cy.

Some frus­trat­ed FSA fight­ers say they have joined Islamist groups and mod­er­ate and hard­line fight­ers some­times buy and sell weapons from each oth­er.

...