Turkish parliament approves bill to deploy troops in Qatar

Turkish parliament approves bill to deploy troops in Qatar

    Wednesday, June 07, 2017   No comments

Turkey's parliament on June 7 approved a draft bill allowing its troops to be deployed to a Turkish military base in Qatar.

The move appears to support the Gulf Arab country as it faces diplomatic and trade isolation from some of the biggest Middle Eastern powers.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain severed relations with Qatar and closed their airspace to commercial flights on Monday, charging it with financing militant groups.

Qatar vehemently denies the accusations. It is the worst split between powerful Arab states in decades.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has criticized the Arab states' move, saying isolating Qatar and imposing sanctions will not resolve any problems and adding that Ankara will do everything in its power to help end the crisis. source

Trump: Saudi Arabia must pay for US protection... Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly

Trump: Saudi Arabia must pay for US protection... Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly

    Friday, April 28, 2017   No comments

Pro-regime propaganda in Saudi Arabia

President Donald Trump complained on Thursday that U.S. ally Saudi Arabia was not treating the United States fairly and Washington was losing a “tremendous amount of money” defending the kingdom.

In an interview with Reuters, Trump confirmed his administration was in talks about possible visits to Saudi Arabia and Israel in the second half of May. He is due to make his first trip abroad as president for a May 25 NATO summit in Brussels and could add other stops.

"Frankly, Saudi Arabia has not treated us fairly, because we are losing a tremendous amount of money in defending Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Trump’s criticism of Riyadh was a return to his 2016 election campaign rhetoric when he accused the kingdom of not pulling its weight in paying for the U.S. security umbrella.

"Nobody’s going to mess with Saudi Arabia because we’re watching them," Trump told a campaign rally in Wisconsin a year ago. “They’re not paying us a fair price. We’re losing our shirt.”  source

Who killed 150 to 250 ISIS fighters and destroyed their vehicles near Fallujah?

Who killed 150 to 250 ISIS fighters and destroyed their vehicles near Fallujah?

    Thursday, June 30, 2016   No comments

It seems that the different players in the fight against ISIL are now competing for credit.

On Wednesday, Iraqi military released footage showing destroyed cars and trucks. Military officials claimed that the raid was carried out by Iraqi pilots who were using Russian made helicopters. It should be noted that it was reported that "Iraq has received their final batch of Russian Mi-28 NE Night Hunter military helicopters". The attack footage indicated that these helicopters were used. NBC News reported the same story.

Reuters, on the other hand, reported the following:

U.S.-led coalition aircraft waged a series of deadly strikes against Islamic State around the city of Falluja on Wednesday, U.S. officials told Reuters, with one citing a preliminary estimate of at least 250 suspected fighters killed and at least 40 vehicles destroyed.

Iraqi officials indicated that U.S. refused to assist with the attack they took credit for. These conflicting reports show that the U.S. led anti-ISIL coalition is not as unified behind the mission as they claim.

Video footage of the attack, one of the attacks, or something like that:

Meanwhile, more American weapons fell in the hands of ISIS when another so-called "moderate" Syrian rebel group attempted to push out ISIS from a town near the Iraqi border. According to reports, 40 of the rebel were killed and 15 taken prisoners by ISIS.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the group's offensive against ISIS was being mounted with the backing of Western special forces and US-led air strikes.

Biden: How can Israel be democratic and Jewish at the same time

Biden: How can Israel be democratic and Jewish at the same time

    Tuesday, April 19, 2016   No comments

BBC: How can Israel be democratic and Jewish at the same time

Joe Biden voiced his 'overwhelming frustration' with Israel's government which he said is leading the country in the wrong direction, in an unusually sharp rebuke of America's closest ally in the Middle East.

The Vice President, in a speech yesterday to the pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group J Street, offered a grim outlook for peace efforts between Israel and Palestine, reflecting dim hopes for progress during the remainder of the Obama administration.

Although he said Israelis and Palestinians shared blame for undermining trust and shirking responsibility, he criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, suggesting his approach raised 'profound questions' about how Israel could remain both Jewish and democratic.

'I firmly believe that the actions that Israel's government has taken over the past several years - the steady and systematic expansion of settlements, the legalization of outposts, land seizures - they're moving us and more importantly they're moving Israel in the wrong direction,' Biden said.

He said those policies were moving Israel toward a 'one-state reality' - meaning a single state for Palestinians and Israelis in which eventually, Israeli Jews will no longer be the majority.

'That reality is dangerous,' Biden added.


'There is at the moment no political will that I observed from either Israelis or Palestinians to go forward with serious negotiations,' Biden said. source

Showing the growing strategic difference with the US and converging interests with Saudi Arabia: Israeli DM declares that he prefers ISIS to Iran

Showing the growing strategic difference with the US and converging interests with Saudi Arabia: Israeli DM declares that he prefers ISIS to Iran

    Wednesday, January 20, 2016   No comments

Evidence is mounting that the Middle East is entering a new era. Days after the Iran Deal, which mainly ended the US-Iran nuclear dispute, Israeli leaders are now taking public steps to align themselves with Saudi Arabia and the groups that country supports and distancing itself from the U.S. 

Speaking today at a security conference in Tel Aviv, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon declared that he “prefers ISIS” over Iran, and does not consider ISIS to pose a serious threat to the Israeli state, saying Iran will always remain “the main enemy.”

Ya’alon insisted that he believes ISIS will be defeated at any rate, what with the US launching strikes on their oil supplies, but that he’d much rather see ISIS rule all of Syria, and consequently be directly on Israel’s border, than have the pro-Iran government remain in power.

Ya’alon’s declaration was a lot more public than most, but not really outside of long-standing Israeli policy, and the defense minister laid out a similar argument around the notion of an apocalyptic “clash of civilizations” between Israel and the Shi’ite world, believing that the Sunnis, like ISIS, are practically on their side.

Not that ISIS sees it that way. While they’ve been more focused on attacking Shi’ites than attacking Israel so far, they’ve made multiple statements about their plans to expand into Palestine and fight against Israeli forces. Israel’s military chief warned only yesterday that ISIS may soon turn its focus to attacking Israel and Jordan.

source: www.ynetnews.com

Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail

Why Al Jazeera America Was Destined to Fail

    Monday, January 18, 2016   No comments

Al Jazeera America never had a chance. Having struggled in vain to attract an audience since it launched in 2013, the cable news channel announced Wednesday that it would shut down come April. “The decision is driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in an increasingly digital world, and because of the current global financial challenges,” CEO Al Anstey said in a staff memo, thereby glossing over all of the operation's actual failures.


Maybe you liked Al Jazeera America's news coverage. More likely, you never watched it. After spending $500 million to buy Al Gore's Current TV and put itself in about 40 million homes, the channel reached a piddly 28,000 prime-time viewers in 2015. CNN, by comparison, reaches around 700,000. That is not the sort of gap you can simply ascribe to a secular decline in cable audiences as people spend more time online. Some of the trouble undoubtedly boiled down to its name. Many Americans were never going to watch a channel created by Al Jazeera, the media network owned by the Qatari government with a reputation (fair or not) for being a smidgen hostile to the U.S.

But if Al Jazeera America's brand was a handicap, its philosophy was a death sentence. The channel was founded on the utterly ill-conceived idea that Americans were starving for sober, “unbiased” hard news coverage. In other words, it made the mistake of offering viewers the programming they claimed to want, instead of the programming that all available evidence suggests they actually enjoy. Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2013, the channel's first CEO, Ehab Al Shihabi, said market research suggested that there were 40 million or 50 million Americans yearning for deep, old-school reportage.  “If we do the kind of reporting that is considered ‘back to the future’—the hard-core journalistic reporting, not biased, not for entertainment, but fact-based—do we have a place? All the research indicates yes,” Al Shihabi later told the Nation. source