Dramatic Images of Chaos in Brussels Following Attacks on Airport and Metro

Dear Trump & Cruz: Muslim Turkey arrested Brussels Terrorist & Gave him to European Authorities

By Juan Cole

The paroxysms of hatred and bigotry spewed by the two GOP frontrunners in the 2016 presidential campaign probably do not need any pretext, since Trump and Cruz are clearly sadistic and unfair individuals. But the Brussels airport and metro attacks gave them another excuse to blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny fringe.

Trump accused Muslims of not reporting terrorist activity to the government, and suggested that torture would be useful, and then wanted to put all mosques under surveillance, and again called for a Muslim exclusion act regarding Muslims coming to the US. Cruz appears to think that Muslim Americans live all together so that their ‘neighborhoods’ can be patrolled.

But most Muslims in the US are not segregated in that way, living in amongst all other kinds of Americans. Most terrorism in the US is anyway by white nationalists and anti-abortion nuts.

Ripping up the Bill of Rights is an odd platform for “conservative” candidates. What is it that they want to conserve if not the Constitution? Arbitrary search and seizure of personal papers and effects, which is what they mean by surveillance, was the technique used by George III, against whom the American Revolution was fought to stop such abuses. Trump and Cruz want to go back to those George III techniques.
But in any case, it turns out that the central premise of this sort of hate speech toward Muslims is simply incorrect.

Turkey, a Muslim-majority state, arrested one of the Brussels attackers (Ibrahim El Bakraoui?) in summer of 2015, in Gaziantep not far from Syria. Turkey determined that the individual had links to terrorist groups and posed a danger. It then turned him back over to Europe with a warning that he was, in Ankara’s view, a very dangerous individual.

…

From http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/dear-trump-cruz-muslim-turkey-arrested-brussels-terrorist-gave-him-to-holland.html

Belgium authorities knew it in advance. The suicide bombers were detained as terrorists on Syrian Turkish border and deported to Benelux and then released and came to Brussels; Here is more:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-23/explosive-accusation-belgium-had-advance-and-precise-warning-about-airport-and-subwa

Ok. I just woke up and turned to Intercept for some news.

The author is informing us of some explosions in Brussels. I am trying desperately to learn who did this. Let’s see: it is probably not something related to Arabs or muslims, see debunked notion of Arabic slogans screemed before explosions; perhapse it is Pinchas Kupferstein or Ketevak Kardava with some connection to the former Soviet Union – FSB/KGB; or Jeff Versele, the brewer; or Pieter Van Ostaeyen? I don’t know, but based on reading this, I tend to believe that Russkies are involved for sure. Great journalism…

How not to talk about Muslims after a Fringe Terrorist Group attacks

byJuan Cole, at http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/how-not-to-talk-about-muslims-after-a-fringe-terrorist-group-attacks.html

Excerpts:

1. Stop calling Daesh “the Islamic State.” They are manipulating you. They aren’t a state and they aren’t Islamic. If some fringe cult took over some villages in Mexico and called itself “The Vatican,” then committed terrorism, would journalists blithely say on air “Today, the Vatican killed 39 and injured 200 with a bomb belt”?

2. Call the terrorists “Muslim” if you have to characterize them, not “Islamic” or even worse, “Islamics.” There is no such thing as “Islamic” terrorism. The word “Islamic” has to do with the ideals and verities of the religion of Islam, and is analogous to “Judaic.”

[I have been hammering out this point here and I am glad to see that there’s a non-Muslim scholar who agrees with me. But many of those who keep calling terrorism Islamic (which means, “According to the teachings of Islam”) most likely DO WANT to link it with the religion of Islam.]

3. Stop suggesting that there is something wrong with Muslims that they keep producing terrorists. All the major world faiths produce violent people. In the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s, Christian Hutus murdered between 500,000 and 1 million other people, and the Christian churches were deeply involved in enabling this slaughter.

4. Call terrorism ‘terrorism’ no matter who commits it. When Basques blew up a gas station in Madrid, the US press did not report it, much less terming it ‘terrorism.’

5. Muslims are a sixth of humankind and hail from all sorts of backgrounds, ethnicities, and languages. There are 40 million Chinese Muslims. There are 23 million Russian ones. Ethiopian Muslims and Senegalese Muslims have little in common despite being African, and neither has much in common with Bangladeshi Muslims. To tag all of them with the actions of some violent Brussels slum-dwellers of North African heritage is weird. It is exactly like assuming that all American Christians want to kill Tutsis, just because Hutu Christians did.

6. Show some basic humanity and sympathize with Muslim victims of terrorism (and they are the main victims nowadays). It is right that we show solidarity with the Brussels victims and that we say “we are Brussels.” But why aren’t we “Istanbul” or “Beirut” or “Baghdad” when those cities are blown up by Dash?

7. Recognize that most Muslims actively despise Daesh and similar violent cults. There are only like 30,000 Daesh fighters, and that’s in an area with lots of armed groups. They don’t like Daesh and won’t join it.

8. Show your Muslim neighbor (or even more likely in the US, physician) some love. Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) does these horrible things to get people of Christian heritage to be beastly to the Muslims in their midst, spreading hatred and anger and a sense of victimization. Daesh is hoping to use *you* to drive other Muslims into their arms.

I have only copied and pasted parts of most of the above points. They are detailed in his article, the link to which is at the top of this post.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Turkey%E2%80%99s_Erdogan_Warns_Of_Attacks_In_Brussels_Four_Days_Before_Event_Took_Place/49976/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Only four days before the Brussels attacks, Erdogan spoke at a commencement ceremony for the 101st anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli in Canakkale, Turkey on March, 18 where he stated that “there is no reason why the bomb that exploded in Ankara cannot explode in Brussels, in any other European city.”

Excerpt:

Despite the horrifying character of the Brussels attacks, it is essential that people not allow themselves to be stampeded into new wars and police state measures by the propaganda of the media and a thoroughly degraded political establishment.
All of the statements of bourgeois politicians condemning terrorist violence are as hypocritical as they are dishonest. The wave of ISIS attacks in Europe, from the Charlie Hebdo and November 13 bombings in Paris last year to yesterday’s Brussels bombings, are inextricably bound up with decades of wars and military interventions that have destroyed large parts of the Middle East and destabilized the rest.
ISIS itself is the product of three imperialist wars: first, the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States, aided by European countries including Britain, Spain and Italy, on the basis of lying claims that the Iraqi government would give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda; second, the war for regime-change in Libya waged by the US and NATO, utilizing Al Qaeda-linked militia as proxy ground forces; and, third, the proxy war stoked up by the US and the European powers in Syria, where they have backed various Islamist militias including ISIS in an effort to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

from “The Terror Bombings In Brussels”
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/23/pers-m23.html

Now the time to take drastic measures has finally come. Way too long the American forces and their European allies have been way too soft on these evil parasitic hordes of hostile pestilent invaders. Europe needs to establish a demarcation line throughout its continent, secured by electrical fences, autonomous firing installations, water ditches, anti vehicle and anti personal mine fields, autonomous flame throwers and concrete walls, a bulwark to transform itself into a fortress of freedom, democracy, peace and prosperity by erecting a semi permeable membrane.

The US has to stop playing around in the middle east, it has to change its primary interest from war profiteering of its main arms manufacturers by teasing terrorists with oversized toy planes (while indeed great weapons to spread terror, a shock and aww approach is much more efficient) and instead adopt a new process and solution oriented strategy to eradicate this hostile elements as soon as possible.
The world’s most powerful nation, the only superpower in a world of mere regional powers, the nation that successfully contained and restrained the evil and barbaric hordes of communist aggressors needs to step up its game and eradicate this subhuman filth calling itself ISIS.
A bunch of (not more than a five digit number) criminals with stolen weapons and without an air force and or air defence, laughable. Propping up this scum as any form of challenge isn’t even funny anymore, it is deeply insulting to the intellect and honor of all armed service members who proudly fulfill their duty of protecting their country, their nation, the great United States of America.
For any observer it is obvious that the main goal heretofore hasn’t been the destruction of this crime syndicate, otherwise much more effective measures would have been taken than to just tease them with oversized toy planes as already mentioned, which by the way, act as great recruiting tool for more terrorists for the purpose of never ending conflict and continued warfare with the intent of boosting the profits of the defence industry. That certainly has its place as an experimental playground for new weapons systems, however not anymore when the violence swaps over to our beloved allies.
The US has to purchase and refit a big number of Boeing 747-800s and Airbus A-380s into modern, long range high capacity bombers. Each of these aircraft is much bigger and has a much higher payload than the aging but still mighty Boeing B-52 Stratofortress.
As soon as such have been acquired, which also would be in the best interest of the defence industry, we need to identify the terrorist’s nests and immediately start carpet bombing them like we did in Vietnam and WWII. Fly formations of dozens of bombers over the designated target zones, drop hundredths of tons of bombs in a single mission and destroy every human build structure identifiable. Leave only death and destruction.
As long as we continue to bomb individual buildings, complexes by single sorties where we expect the terrorists to be, they, because of being highly mobile, will just relocate to a different structure. Bombing the entire area at once and leaving just ashes and rubble, has a much higher probability of taking them all out at once. Contrary to Vietnam, in Iraq and Syria there are no woods the hide under, therefore it is easy to spot all of the man-made structures in the terrorist controlled areas to bomb them into smithereens.
Certainly there might be some collateral damage, however for the greater good that is justifiable because it is going to alleviate millions from continued suffering and harm, it is indeed an act of decency and humanity to do everything in our power to eradicate any terrorist threat surfacing at any given time. For that purpose we always have to have a large fleet of really big bombers to carpet bomb indiscriminately whenever, wherever and whatever we deem appropriate, being in Asia, Africa, Arabia or South America.
In the media it is sometimes mentioned that more bombing and or a prolonged bombing campaign doesn’t lead to the desired result, which is utter nonsense of course. Bombing done right nearly always leads to the desired result, as soon as everything is destroyed and killed any threat just evaporates in the truest sense of the word, one has to do it right of course, cold war style.

God bless the United States of America, the supreme force of good, prosperity, justice, happiness freedom and democracy in the world.

It is a horrible loss of lives resulting from the Belgium bombings, and none of us can feel the immense pain of those that lost love ones.

The additional travesty that will result from this tragedy is that the media owned and controlled by the war mongering, profiteering elite will use it to spread more hate and prejudice 24/7 for days on end. Plus it serves to blur our vision so we can only see the far less immediate harmful enemy from without, and miss seeing what is right in front of us, the enemy from within causing vaster suffering presently.

The cries will be shut down our borders and carpet bomb them into oblivion.
If we were not terrorizing them in the first place by blowing up entire Arab nations and then proceeding to follow up that destruction by sending down bombs from our drones for years on end killing innocent women and children we would not have had to deal with a most desperate immigration problem in the first place.

Why is it that we refuse to ignore what has not worked throughout history, killing does not end killing it only brings about more of it. I guess that is why it was marked upon the tablets “Thou Shall Not Kill”. Barbaric acts such as when Richard the Lionheart whom in 1191 AD on a small hill called Ayyadieh under the banner of Christ slaughter 3,000 only vibrate through time to incite more murder. Do we have to continue this lunacy?

I think that our reaction to all these terrorist attacks are encouraging the terror masters to plan more terror attacks.

We must fight back by refusing to be terrified. Indignant, angry yes, but definitely not cowed down and terrified. We must take the fight right into their den and drone them up as ruthlessly as possible. This is how to defeat them.

To begin, we must stop calling them terrorists. This is only encouraging the Muslims and the gun manufacturers. It is not doing us any good at all.

I was really disgusted with some of the immediate Belgium-bashing in sources like http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/world/europe/belgium-security.html – an article written hours after the attacks that says that Belgium

” faces widening derision as being the world’s wealthiest failed state — a worrying mix of deeply rooted terrorist networks, a government weakened by divisions among French, Dutch and German speakers, and an overwhelmed intelligence service in seemingly chronic disarray.”

Unfortunately, they’re not even the only ones. But they stand out because I’d think New Yorkers would remember the rest of the world didn’t start yelling “haha you fuckups” on the afternoon of September 11th!

Part of this is the Benghazi School of Terrorism Cheerleading, which uses any casualty figure however small as an open-ended attempt to bully anyone in the government. Never mind that when you try to get officials fired because some nut decided to attack, you’re becoming the terrorists’ force multiplier … it’s just instinct, the good old American instinct that when you see someone lying bleeding in the dirt, that’s when you start kicking until you hear bones break. Whether we’re speaking of homeless people, mentally disturbed, people who need medical care, or just girls getting cyberbullied on the Internet, we’re always there to lend a harming hand. Man I’m tired of it.

Another part of it seems to be some kind of racial homeland utopia. Maybe if Belgium recognizes that French and Dutch speakers can’t really run a country well together, then they can come out and lay out a plan for how the U.S. is going to segregate out the Hispanics! Just don’t ask them about Switzerland.

And the last part is just beating the war drum for more spook funding. The ironic part is that this doesn’t allow for giving spooks a pat on the back. I mean, there were multiple terrorists in Belgium with explosives and guns and they did not get onto a plane. They did not crash it into a building. But instead of saying “Yeah, great job, Belgian TSA, you just saved 5,000 lives of people in some high tower in London who will never know they would have died without you”, they go and rag on the security forces because the terrorists managed to kill a busload worth. Now I’m all for ragging on security forces, but not like this!

I think the New York Times owes Belgium a damn apology.

Never thought the Intercept would run a piece of terror-porn.

I’m sure by tomorrow The Intercept will have 20 articles running about how this is all really America’s or the West’s fault.

It’s time to stop handwaving middle eastern, Islamic terrorism. No they’re not the only terrorists. Yes, American bombs did help create this problem, but not in its totality. It’s time to stop pretending that fundamentalist, middle eastern Islam is a totally peaceful participant in the world religious community, and stop shaming people who point out how it is different when it clearly is.

When mass shootings in the US happen constantly, the American and international left get justifiably upset that we do nothing about it. But yet they shrivel up when it comes to middle eastern Islamic terrorism. That should be fought with openness and compassion and hugs.

It’s time to stabilize Syria using any means necessary, and end the refugee crisis, sending those that have come to Europe back to their homes and accepting no more.

To put simply, it’s time to stop pretending this problem is not really a problem.

This is the thinking in Brussels:

There would have been no Hitlerian National Socialism without a monolithically racial petite-bourgeoisie to absorb and support it, break that monolith as was done in England, and especially in the hegemonic national metropole of London and you drive a permanent stake through the undead specter of National Socialism in the financial center of Europe, do it again in Germany and its industrial heartland becomes permanently ‘disinfected’ as well: in short, replace the mass specter of brown shirts with the mass reality of “brown people” and you have demographically immunized yourself against a regress to the ultimate belligerent, indeed genocidal, logic of Volk nationalism.

The next step will be detention camps, concentration camps, all across Europe. How soon will depend on the number and frequency of attacks. It has been estimated that already there are about 50 thousand jihadists in Europe. Kill a few thousand Europeans and these camps will appear as I am sure they are already being prepared.
At some point even the leaders in Europe will have to be realistic and practical. Or lose their jobs. So for gamblers now, what is magic number? 1000? 2000? What is your guess? When the magic number is reached the camps will start filling up and the deportations, the closed borders, the torture, etc. The same may happen here. Immigration was never about compassion or humanitarianism. It was about destroying the West.

Showing pictures and videos is playing on the emotion field, that’s the least we want. Tabloids will take care of that, but please not the intercept.

Death by a thousand cuts in Europe to liberty and democracy. If the populace is terrorized it cannot think rationally enough to defend and preserve its own interests before the onslaught of total securitization, before the crushing wheel of hyper-militarized, world-hegemonic plutocracy.

The Islamic State traces its roots back to 2004 in Iraq, a child of the instability spawned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent Bush Administration effort to set up a neocolonial puppet regime in Iraq that would deliver oil contracts (and electricity, telecom, agriculture, etc.) to U.S. and British firms. Popular Iraqi opposition to this agenda was met with the Abu Ghraib torture program and violent repression, opening the door to Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Iraq remained active as a terrorist group in Iraq, but declining in importance and activities, through the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, which was completed by Dec 2011.

However, soon after, ~2012, they became a resurgent force, fighting against the Iraqi government, which by then had close ties to Iran. They received large amounts of weapons and money and began taking over oilfields across northern Iraq and southern Syria, committing all kinds of atrocities against Kurds and Christians and Shiite Muslims and implementing draconian Wahhabi Islam religious rules in the zones the controlled.

So, what happened from 2012-2014?

Somehow Al Qaeda in Iraq had morphed into the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, received major support from somewhere, and was attacking the Syrian and Iraqi governments. This has been reported fairly extensively. What the US corporate media is reluctant to discuss is how the group was initially funded – but see this report from the Atlantic, by Steve Clemons, Jun 23, 2014:

“. . . But two of the most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the latter of which is now amassing territory in Iraq and threatening to further destabilize the entire region. And that success is in part due to the support they have received from two Persian Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia. . . ”

“. . . ISIS, in fact, may have been a major part of Bandar’s covert-ops strategy in Syria. The Saudi government, for its part, has denied allegations, including claims made by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, that it has directly supported ISIS. . .But while official support from Qatar and Saudi Arabia appears to have dried up, non-governmental military and financial support may still be flowing from these countries to Islamist groups.”

ISIS has all the hallmarks of a joint Saudi-Qatari-CIA-Israeli-Turkey project gone disastrously awry, a project that was intended to counter Iranian influence in the region but which ended up promoting a terrorist group whose ambitions included attacks in Europe, Russia, Britain and the United States. The more recent discoveries of advanced US/Israeli/European weapons like TOW-II anti-tank missiles in captured ISIS arsenals gives even more credence to this notion:

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/10/12/war-news-us-delivery-of-tow-missiles-to-isis-seized-by-iraq/

This is what happens when you let the neoliberal and neoconservative ‘adults’ play their stupid little regime change games in the Middle East: the establishment of a terrorist group with the resources to ship explosives and weapons into Europe for terror attacks, as well as a flood of desperate refugees.

Trump and Cruz wasted no time with the U.S. official reaction. Close the borders, enhance torture methods further, patrol Muslim neighborhoods. The not-unexpected song and dance.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/22/four-us-presidential-candidates-respond-to-brussels-attacks

It suggests that future attacks will dominate or maybe be decisive in the U.S. elections, or at least Trump will certainly exploit them with alacrity with his eek-a-mouse schtick. This kind of coverage also adds to the lame-duck meme — wasn’t the current president in Jamaica or something this week, trying to do something?

If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it ’tis not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.
— Hamlet

Now we have official confirmation that the ‘collect it all’ is a sham.

“Three U.S. government officials acknowledged that the United States believed an attack by Islamic State in Brussels was possible, if not likely. Still, they were not aware of any U.S. intelligence about where or when the attack would occur.”

They didn’t know squat.

So where is the NSA gathering of metadata ‘helping’ to prevent terrorism?
We have all been deluged with the facade of the NSA ‘keeping us safe’ by their ‘collect it all’ attitude of spying on all of US.
Did they (the NSA) prevent anything? No.
And now we have the fear mongers Trump, Cruz, Clinton demanding more ‘security’ (presumably more electronic spying).
All in the name of making us less terrorized.
What a crock. The terrorists have won, the politicians are terrorized.

Brussels attacks: The nightmare continues driving Europe in deeper darkness

http://bit.ly/1MkP6Qw