‘Man-made crisis’: Venezuelan hell destabilizes region

Venezuelan refugees line up for food donations at Simon Bolivar Square in Boa Vista, Brazil. / Andre Coelho / Bloomberg

 

UNITED NATIONS — It didn’t have to be this way. An oil rich, economically prosperous middle class country, once a stable Latin American democracy, is disintegrating into a socialist dystopia plagued by hunger, corruption, hyper-inflation and churning political unrest.

While petroleum remains Venezuela’s major export, now tragically it’s the people too who are fleeing this twice California sized country.

Iran Trains Children for War

 

At the “City of Games for Revolutionary Chidren” theme park in Mashad, Iran, children are trained to engage in wars against the US and Israel. (Image source: Courtesy Raja News Agency, via Al Arabiya)

 

• The children, as young as eight years old, are trained to hate the US and Israel and to attack their enemies in the West, as well as to oppose Western values.
• Iran’s actions are a direct violation of international humanitarian law that is defined as a war crime by the International Criminal Court. According to the United Nations, “Human rights law declares 18 as the minimum legal age for recruitment and use of children in hostilities.
• Finally, these institutions that recruit children for war, in violation of the international humanitarian law, are the main beneficiaries of the sanctions relief and billions of dollars being poured into the Islamic republic as a result of the nuclear deal.

Iran is using new methods of recruiting and training children through its paramilitary militia group, Basij, one of the five branches of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The children, as young as eight years old, are trained to hate the US and Israel and to attack their enemies in the West, as well as to oppose Western values.

One of Iran’s tactics has been to air promotional video clips on its state media outlets to seduce children. One of the most recent jihadist promotional clips is titled, “Martyrs who defend the sacred shrine.”

Exclusive: Dissident says he was tortured for challenging Vladimir Putin

From London to Vienna to Berlin, exiled opponents of the Russian state are increasingly fearing for their safety. Not since the Cold War have Russian operatives been accused of such violence nad [sic] intimidation abroad. The story of one man who says he was tortured for challenging Putin

On a warm morning in early August, a 68-year-old Chechen man named Said-Emin Ibragimov packed up his fishing gear and walked to his favorite spot on the west bank of the river that runs through Strasbourg, the city of his exile in eastern France. Ibragimov, who was a minister in the breakaway Chechen government in the 1990s, needed to calm his nerves, and his favorite way to relax was to watch the Ill River, a tributary of the Rhine, flow by as he waited for a fish to bite.

Ibragimov had reason to be nervous. The previous month he had accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes in a criminal complaint he had sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and to the Kremlin. Ibragimov had taken five years to compile evidence of what he considered crimes committed during Russia’s two wars against separatists in the Russian republic of Chechnya. During the second Chechen war, which Putin oversaw in 1999–2000, Russia bombarded the Chechen capital of Grozny and killed thousands of civilians. The U.N. later called Grozny “the most destroyed city on earth.”

Obama Declares War on Israel

Many Arabs and Muslims are rubbing their hands in joy as they watch U.S. President Barack Obama declare war on Israel after the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party in last week’s general election.

They do not see the rising tensions between Obama and Netanyahu as the result of a personal dispute between two leaders. Instead, the dispute is seen by many Arabs and Muslims as part of the Obama Administration’s strategy to undermine Israel and force it to make territorial concessions that would pose an existential threat to Israel.

At the beginning of his first term in office, he raised high hopes in the Arab and Islamic countries when he rushed to deliver an apologetic speech at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Al-Azhar University in Cairo. His speech left many Arabs and Muslims with the impression that here, finally, is an American president who is prepared to sacrifice Israel for the sake of appeasing its enemies.

By removing Assad, Obama may be declaring war on China

President Obama is not the only actor with a red line on Syria. China, Russia and Iran also have their own red line on Damascus.

CNN on 12 November reported Obama administration is suddenly focused on removing Assad as the core of its anti-ISIS strategy, once again submitting to Turkey and Arab Gulf states that enabled ISIS to begin with, and are actually contributing very little to the anti-ISIS efforts to be dictating such orders to Washington.

Moreover, these demands are harmful to US security interests—redefining US anti-ISIS mission to one of anti-Assad mission—and thereby potentially drawing in Eurasian powers of China, Russia and Iran into open military conflict against the US.

Iranian General Threatens Surprise Attack on Israel

Iran “will not give a diplomatic response,” but will air its grievances with Israel on the “battlefield,” senior Iranian generals were quoted as saying on Tuesday.

“Our response to this aggression will not be diplomatic, we will retaliate in the battlefield, but will not necessarily announce it,” Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the Lieutenant Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) was quoted as saying during a ceremony on Tuesday meant to commemorate “martyred” Iranian military personnel.

“The enemy will see and understand it,” Salami was quoted as saying by the semi official Fars News Agency. “We never step back (in the confrontation) against the enemy. The Islamic Republic is powerful and is capable of confronting any power at any level and we never bring down the level of our goals.”

The threat of a surprise attack against Israel for its apparent attempts to send a spy drone into Tehran came just a day after Iranian government officials threatened to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court.

Criminal terror charges filed against Obama

WASHINGTON –- Several prominent media sources in Egypt are now reporting that Egyptian lawyers have filed criminal terrorism charges in the International Criminal Court against President Obama in addition to the criminal terrorism charges previously filed in Egyptian courts against the president’s half-brother Malik Obama.

Malik Obama is quickly becoming a person of interest in Egypt for his alleged management of funds for a terrorist organization based in neighboring Sudan. A group of Egyptian lawyers, meanwhile have charged President Obama with crimes against humanity for his support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.