Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)
Monday, May 7, 2018
Friday, May 4, 2018
Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City ‘under threat’ from settlers
Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem, The Guardian, 1 May 2018
Christians in Jerusalem’s Old City say their presence at the geographical heart of their faith is under threat from intimidation and aggressive property acquisition by hardline Jewish settlers.
According to church leaders, priests are being verbally abused and spat at, and property vandalised.
Tensions have risen this year in the Christian and Armenian quarters of the 1 sq km ancient walled city, which includes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest place in Christianity where Jesus was believed to be crucified and resurrected. The Old City is also home to places of critical religious importance to Jews and Muslims.
The churches say they are facing onslaught on three fronts: a war of attrition waged by hardline settlers; unprecedented tax demands by Jerusalem city council; and a proposal to allow the expropriation of church land sold to private developers.
Theophilos III, the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem and the most senior Christian leader in the Holy Land, told the Guardian: “Today the church faces a most severe threat at the hands of certain settler groups. The settlers are persistent in their attempts to erode the presence of the Christian community in Jerusalem.
“These radical settler groups are highly organised. Over the last years we have witnessed the desecration and vandalism of an unprecedented number of churches and holy sites and receive growing numbers of reports from priests and local worshippers who have been assaulted and attacked.
“Where the authorities are concerned, this behaviour goes largely unchecked and unpunished.”
At Mount Zion, just outside the Old City walls, undeveloped land owned by the church and often referred to as the “Greek garden” is regularly vandalised, according to Moni Shama, a church caretaker.
Trees have been uprooted, garbage left, graffiti scrawled on stones and paint thrown inside the ancient Chapel of Pentecost, he said. Three years ago, a Greek Orthodox seminary at the site was set alight.
The Greek Orthodox church, the oldest Christian presence in the Old City, is also deeply concerned about attempts to gain control of properties it owns close to Jaffa Gate, the main entrance to the Christian and Armenian quarters.
A court ruling is expected later this year on a disputed sale of the historic Imperial and Petra hotels. The church has challenged a deal made by an official under the previous patriarch, which it claims involved bribery and conspiracy and was therefore invalid. The church has already lost one case on the sale, but it is appealing.
It says the settler organisation Ateret Cohanim is behind the purchase of the strategically significant properties as part of its drive to increase the Jewish presence in the Old City. The organisation, dedicated to the “physical and spiritual redemption” of the Old City, has been frequently accused of using third parties to buy properties.
Abu Walid Dajani, whose family has managed the 45-room Imperial Hotel for almost 70 years, said the prospect of ownership changing hands from the Greek Orthodox church to Ateret Cohanim was a “nightmare”.
“If I used to wake up twice a night, now I wake up four times, thinking what if the decision goes in favour of Ateret Cohanim,” said Dajani, 74. “I will try my best to keep this hotel, but I know they want us out.”
Gabi Hani, whose restaurant Versavee is next to the hotel, said: “They [Ateret Cohanim] want to drive Christians out, for sure.
“If you have a hostile organisation sitting in your home, it is no longer your home.”
Daniel Luria of Ateret Cohanim said: “Claims or accusations by the Greek Patriarchate regarding ‘radical settlers’ targeting their priests with verbal abuse etc are absurd, unacceptable and disgraceful.”
He denied that the organisation wanted Christians to leave the Old City, and declined to comment on the issue of the Jaffa Gate sales. “Ateret Cohanim believes in coexistence with Christians and Muslims alike, living side by side without fences or borders, living in any neighbourhood of Jerusalem,” he said.
“The concept of disallowing Jews to live in certain areas is foreign and unacceptable. Christian and Muslim Arabs buy and live quietly side by side with Jews in predominantly Jewish neighbourhoods, so why couldn’t or shouldn’t Jews purchase and live in predominantly Arab neighbourhoods?”
In a separate development–but one that church leaders say is part of a pattern of targeting Christians–Jerusalem city council issued churches with a demand in February for nearly $200m (£143m) in back taxes. In protest, the church denominations closed holy sites, during which thousands of pilgrims were locked out.
The tax bill followed a decision that a tax exemption for places of worship had been wrongly applied to church-owned commercial properties. The churches say they pay taxes on purely commercial properties, such as restaurants and hotels, but many of those that the council says are liable provide educational, medical and welfare facilities for Christians and others.
The closure was lifted only after the intervention of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who set up a committee to look at the issue of church taxes. He also temporarily halted the progress of a proposed law to expropriate church lands sold to private developers.
The bill has the support of 40 members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, who say the Greek Orthodox church is selling off land at discount prices to private developers, which puts leaseholders at risk. The Greek Orthodox church owns about a third of land in the Old City and key sites around Jerusalem, including the land on which the Knesset, government offices and the Israel Museum are built.
Theophilos has in the past few months travelled to the UK, the Vatican, the US and elsewhere to seek support for Christian institutions in the heart of the Holy Land. In the UK, he met Prince Charles, government ministers and Christian leaders, including the archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster and the Coptic archbishop of London.
The patriarch wants a commitment to the continuation of the status quo, an agreement which provides protection of, and access to, holy sites in Jerusalem and elsewhere, allowing Christians to live and worship in peace despite the conflicts and divisions in the area.
Pope Francis and other Christian leaders have called for the status quo to be respected.
Palestinian president says Jewish behavior caused the Holocaust, sparking condemnation
In a speech broadcast live on Palestinian TV on Monday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas delivered what he called a “history lesson” in which he suggested that the Holocaust was the fault of Jews themselves
During his 90-minute remarks to the Palestinian lawmakers in Ramallah, he said European Jews’ “social function”–specifically “usury and banking and such”–was the basis for animosity toward them that led to their mass murder. Abbas claimed his views are backed by Jewish authors, whose books conclude “that animosity toward Jews was not because of their religion but because of their social activities.”
The comments quickly prompted backlash in and outside of Israel. “With utmost ignorance and brazen gall, he claimed that European Jews were persecuted and murdered not because they were Jews but because they gave loans with interest,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted. “Again, he has recited the most contemptible anti-Semitic canards.”
Abbas has long been accused of denying or undermining the Holocaust. His doctoral dissertation questioned whether the death toll of 6 million Jews might have been inflated, and he argued that Zionists and Nazis worked together to send Jews to present-day Israel. But he has at times seemed to take a different stance: In 2003, Abbas said that the Holocaust was “a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity that cannot be accepted by humankind”; in 2014, he issued a statement in which he called the Holocaust “the most heinous crime to have occurred against humanity in the modern era.”
Abbas’s remarks come at a time of deep tension between the Palestinians, Israel and the Trump administration: In less than two weeks, the United States will open an embassy in Jerusalem after Trump recognized the city as Israel’s capital, a move that has drawn global condemnation. Recent weekly protests by Palestinians in Gaza, which have led to deadly clashes between civilians and Israeli military forces, have increased the ill feeling.
Dennis Edwards: Get ready for the opening of the embassy on May 14th.
Friday, April 27, 2018
How To Be Happy In Today’s Crazy World: 3 Secrets From Research
Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree, April 24th, 2018.
Sometimes it feels like the world is actively conspiring against your happiness. There are a record number of people on antidepressants. Enough people in Western nations consume–and then excrete–the medications that they’re at detectable levels in the water supply.
Some one in five U.S. adults is taking at least one drug for a psychiatric problem; nearly one in four middle-aged women in the United States is taking antidepressants at any given time… You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day.
For the past few decades we’ve lived under the idea that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in your noggin. And while that is true for some people, more and more research is showing that our dissatisfaction may be due less to a broken brain and more to a broken life.
You don’t see so rapid a surge in cases of depression because our genetics or grey matter changed overnight. The world has shifted in ways that are detrimental to the psychological needs of the human animal. That persistent feeling of vague dissatisfaction may be a normal response to abnormal circumstances. The canary in the coal mine.
So journalist Johann Hari spent three years on a journey of over forty thousand miles conducting more than 200 interviews with social scientists and psychologists to discover what was wrong with the way we live today that was causing such an explosion of unhappiness.
His excellent book is Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions.
What he found was that while our world has become very technologically connected, all the sources of unhappiness stem from a growing disconnection in other areas of our lives.
Disconnection From Other People: Loneliness is the equivalent of being punched in the face. I mean, literally.
Your stress response to both–the increase in your body’s cortisol level–is the same.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar–as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack. It’s worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.
And have no illusions, loneliness is an epidemic in the modern world. A few decades ago, the average US citizen reported having three close friends. Since 2004 the most common answer is… Zero.
I can already hear some people crowing: “I might be dissatisfied but how could it be due to loneliness? I’m always around people.”
Turns out there’s a difference between being lonely and feeling lonely. This is why someone who works a job surrounded by people and then goes home to a spouse and children, can spend very little time alone–and yet still feel profoundly lonely.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
In his studies, it turned out that feeling lonely was different from simply being alone. Surprisingly, the sensation of loneliness didn’t have much to do with how many people you spoke to every day, or every week. Some of the people in his study who felt most lonely actually talked to lots of people every day. “There’s a relatively low correlation between the objective connections and perceived connections,” he says.
So what do we need to do? To prevent feeling lonely, we must share something with those around us–something meaningful to both you and them. A belief. A cause. An activity. A goal. We need to be “in it together”–not merely together in the middle of a faceless crowd.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
As he researched this, John discovered that there was a missing ingredient to loneliness, and to recovering from it. To end loneliness, you need other people–plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together–and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.
So join a group. Harvard researcher Robert Putnam has studied group activities for decades–everything from bowling leagues to volunteer groups.
Between 1985 and 1994 involvement in community organizations declined by 45%.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
Today, people still bowl, but they do it alone. They’re in their own lane, doing their own thing. The collective structure has collapsed. Think about everything else we do to come together–like supporting your kid’s school, say. “In the ten short years between 1985 and 1994” alone, he wrote, “active involvement in community organizations … fell by 45 percent.”
Famed biologist E.O. Wilson once said, “People must belong to a tribe.” Increasingly, we don’t.
Disconnection From Values: Your pursue “intrinsic values” when you do something solely because you love it. You pursue “extrinsic values” when you chase money or status. Being a patriotic soldier is intrinsic; being a mercenary is extrinsic.
The lesson from the research is clear: the more extrinsically motivated you are, the more you feel motivated by money or status, the more depressed and anxious you are.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
Twenty-two different studies have, in the years since, found that the more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more depressed you will be. Twelve different studies found that the more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more anxious you will be. Similar studies, inspired by Tim’s work and using similar techniques, have now been carried out in Britain, Denmark, Germany, India, South Korea, Russia, Romania, Australia, and Canada–and the results, all over the world, keep coming back the same.
I know some people are jumping to say, “Well, I’m not like that!” But, to a degree, we have all become more extrinsically motivated. We all care, to some degree, what others think of us and technology often amplifies this to toxic levels. Facebook and Instagram have become gladiatorial status tournaments to show off how cool our lives are.
But when we’re counting “likes” on social media, we let others control our self-esteem. And that places your own happiness outside your control. Not good.
And even if you win, you lose. Studies show that the achievement of extrinsic goals–the fancy car and the impressive promotion–bring no lasting happiness. None. Meanwhile, when we pursue intrinsic goals like being a better parent or trying to improve our writing skills so our blog posts don’t suck, we feel much happier and less anxious.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
People who achieved their extrinsic goals didn’t experience any increase in day-to-day happiness–none. They spent a huge amount of energy chasing these goals, but when they fulfilled them, they felt the same as they had at the start…. But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious. You could track the movement. As they worked at it and felt they became (for example) a better friend–not because they wanted anything out of it but because they felt it was a good thing to do–they became more satisfied with life.
You experience “flow” when you’re so involved in something that you lose track of time. You know the old saying: “time flies when you’re having fun.” Flow is a huge contributor to happiness.
And the more focused we are on extrinsic goals like status, the fewer flow states we experience.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
But when Tim studied highly materialistic people, he discovered they experience significantly fewer flow states than the rest of us. Why would that be? He seems to have found an explanation. Imagine if, when Tim was playing the piano every day, he kept thinking: Am I the best piano player in Illinois? Are people going to applaud this performance? Am I going to get paid for this? How much?
So what should we do? Yeah, we all have to pay the bills and achieving a decent level of status is a good thing, but we need to start choosing more activities that serve those intrinsic values.
Spending more time with those we love rather than those who can help us get ahead. More time playing the guitar because it’s fun rather than sharpening our Excel skills to get that promotion.
Spend a little more time with people that make you smile and doing the things that make you smile–simply because they make you smile.
So you’re connecting with people and connecting with your intrinsic values. Great. What’s another connection we’re getting less and less of?
Disconnection From Nature: All other things being equal, move closer to nature and you’ll be happier. Move away from nature and you’ll be more depressed.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
…the people who moved to green areas saw a big reduction in depression, and the people who moved away from green areas saw a big increase in depression.
Some might say that’s because rural areas have less crime or less pollution or… Wrong.
If you live in the part of a big city with lots of trees, you get happier. Cart yourself over to the section of the city that’s nothing but concrete and you get sadder.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
They compared deprived inner-city areas that had some green space to very similar deprived inner-city areas without green space. Everything else–like levels of social connections–was the same. But it turned out there was less stress and despair in the greener neighborhood.
We simply weren’t meant to spend all our time going from cubicle to couch. Feeling happier can be as simple as spending more time in nature.
The research all says that exercise makes us happier. Guess what? When you exercise outdoors the effect is even stronger.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
When scientists have compared people who run on treadmills in the gym with people who run in nature, they found that both see a reduction in depression–but it’s higher for the people who run in nature.
So what happens when you make a consistent, concerted effort to be happier?
You fail miserably. No joke. Deliberate efforts to be happier do not work… in the US and UK, that is.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
They tracked thousands of people, some of whom had decided to deliberately pursue happiness and some of whom hadn’t. When they compared the results, they found something they had not expected. If you deliberately try to become happy, you will not become happier–if you live in the United States. But if you live in Russia, Japan, or Taiwan, you will become happier.
What’s going on? It’s not that happiness is unachievable or that hard work isn’t rewarded. The issue here is that the US and UK have the most individualistic cultures. And so the efforts people in those countries make are usually individualistic…
But happiness comes from our connections to other people.
And so when we work toward just making ourselves happy as individuals we often fail. But when we work towards the happiness of a group, we usually succeed.
From Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions:
“The more you think happiness is a social thing, the better off you are,” Brett explained to me, summarizing her findings and reams of other social science.
The modern world promotes a culture of “be yourself.” But if you want to be happy, that isn’t always the best idea.
To find more joy, spend a little less time being you and little more time being us.
Dennis Edwards: Like someone once said, "Happiness is not something you find, it's something that you give to others and you receive as a blessed recompense."
Dennis Edwards: Like someone once said, "Happiness is not something you find, it's something that you give to others and you receive as a blessed recompense."
Friday, April 20, 2018
Thursday, April 19, 2018
The President's Syrian Mistake!
The War-Hungry Neocon Crowd Just Keeps Repeating The Same Discredited Dirty Trick
Posted by Roger Stone | Apr 16, 2018 | Latest News, Roger Stone News | 0
Posted by Roger Stone | Apr 16, 2018 | Latest News, Roger Stone News | 0
The moment Donald Trump became president-elect, the political and governmental establishments of the United States, in particular the intelligence agencies, commenced nonstop efforts to stall, co-opt and dilute the policies on which Trump ran, and was ultimately elected.
On trade, immigration, tax policy and regulatory reform President Trump has managed to accomplish more than many of his critics and even some of his supporters had thought possible. It is vital to note that some of the president’s policy advisors and even White House aides have tried to kill or dilute many of the policy changes and reforms Trump was enacting. Fortunately, they failed.
They tried to reverse the president’s position on climate change, they tried to dilute his tax cuts, they tried to kill the tariffs he enacted, they tried to undermine his travel ban and there are some who continue to insist that the southern border wall cannot be built.
But more than any of the other policy areas, it is in national defense and foreign affairs that President Trump faces the most ruthless and ubiquitous of would-be usurpers: the so-called neoconservatives. The neocons are dead-set on maintaining their vice grip on American foreign policy and continuing to impose on this country their messianic international designs and risky interventionist schemes that seek to use American military might as the tool of their dubious globalist objectives.
The track record of the neocons is as clear as it is dismal and disturbing. This aberrant sect that has burrowed itself within America’s defense, intelligence and diplomatic hierarchies has given us endless war, 100’s of thousands, if not millions, of human beings slaughtered, and trillions of dollars siphoned out of the pockets of America’s taxpayers, present AND future, only to be squandered on aimless overseas misadventures and prolonged military occupations of hostile 3rd-world countries.
Compounding the injuries and costs they have inflicted on the American people with their hubris-driven overseas military interventions, the neocons have systematically, and in many instances illegally, decimated many of the most fundamental safeguards against tyrannical government that comprise the essence of the Constitution of the United States. The rise of the neocons has been directly proportional to the erosion of civil liberties in the United States of America.
The militarists and spooks who serve this neocon agenda color, hype, fabricate and dress up the intelligence given to the president to induce him to abandon his non-interventionist ideals. They abuse their official capacity to promote a political agenda.
President Trump has great reverence for the institutions of our military, and particular affection for those who serve in America’s armed forces. Unfortunately, the president has not recognized the extent to which the Pentagon was, like every other arm of our federal government, cynically politicized under Barack Obama.
Obama’s apparatchiks methodically promoted and empowered personnel whose leanings are decidedly globalist, while retiring if not purging those suspected of having Republican leanings or a traditionalist conservative view of American military power, whereby our fighting forces exist for our national defense, not as an international police force.
The President gives his foreign policy advisors a presumption of honesty they do not deserve. The pardon of Scooter Libby, who was the immediate underling of perhaps the ultimate neocon warmonger Dick Cheney, merely highlights the president’s failure to recognize how the neocons will simply invent a false narrative and spoon feed it to their handmaidens in the pliant corporate media in furtherance of their war agenda.
The very notion that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad would launch a chemical attack defies logic, on the face of it. Assad’s Russian backers asserted to the world community that Assad has no chemical weapons. For Assad to randomly launch a chemical weapons attack, he would not only have to defy the international community but also embarrass his patrons, effectively making liars out of them on the global stage.
Assad currently has the upper hand against the Islamic fundamentalist rebels seeking his overthrow. After the president’s missile strike one year ago, in retaliation for Assad’s alleged (yet still unproven) use of chemical weapons, Assad clearly knows the dire consequences and international condemnation that would result from any use of chemical weapons. Not only would such an act amount to a war crime, but it would also reveal that Assad does, in fact, possess these heinous weapons.
Why would Assad ever do this? Why would he take such an unnecessary and provocative action, just days after President Trump announced his intention to withdraw American troops from the area, as soon as possible?
Use of chemical weapons by Assad would only serve those who wish to further enmesh the United States in Syria’s ongoing civil war –a development that Assad undeniably wishes to avoid, not provoke. In fact, such a move by Assad would play right into the hands of those who seek his downfall and want an escalation of American involvement, not those who support President Trump’s desire to limit the misuse of American military power as an illegitimate tool of ‘regime change’.
To be blunt, the sudden, inexplicable use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad would be highly convenient only to those who seek to execute the foreign policy not of Donald Trump, but of the miserable failure he defeated in the 2016 election, Barack Obama’s bellicose foreign policy underling, Hillary Clinton.
The last time Assad was accused of using chemical weapons, the bloodthirsty presidential loser Clinton called for the bombing of Syrian airfields, and is on record as rejecting her former master Barack Obama’s decision not to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria. Such a dangerous and provocative insinuation as Clinton was pushing would certainly antagonize the Russians and create the constant risk of direct military conflict with a heavily-armed nuclear power, if only by accident, that could quickly spin out of control.
Just as the warhawks around the President are selling him a bill of goods on Syria, they also seek to keep the U.S. mired in Afghanistan, perpetuating what is already the longest continuous military conflict in American history, at nearly 17 years and still going.
They are constantly pushing for more and more sanctions against Russia, to punish offenses they can’t even prove were committed by that nation, and are constantly instigating against the Chinese, just as the president seeks to deepen the dialog with each of these countries, towards a strategy of playing the two nations off against each other, while securing from each the most favorable trade deals possible for the United States.
As far as the new strikes in Syria are concerned, let’s not forget how these same underhanded elements incessantly pushing America towards aggressive militarism abroad used the same exact allegation, also totally-unfounded, that Assad had used chemical weapons as their way of stampeding the president into ordering the first airstrikes on Syria, almost exactly one year ago. Even General Mattis had to finally admit, many months after the airstrikes, that there was no proof that Assad had, in fact, used chemical weapons.
This war-hungry neocon crowd just keeps repeating the same discredited dirty trick. They are clearly intent on taking our country to war and undermining Donald Trump’s efforts to de-escalate America’s perpetual military presence in hostile foreign lands, and perhaps even facilitate peace, for a change.
I will continue to support the President but in a few weeks, or perhaps months, it will likely become clear that the alleged chemical weapons attack attributed to Assad was, in fact, a fraud…a ruse…and, ultimately, that these military strikes against Syria were a grave mistake.
Let us hope the neocons have no other dirty tricks up their sleeves, before the president can get a handle on the situation and ascertain the truth of the matter, before he — and our country — are pushed further down the road to yet another fruitless, destructive war…or worse.
Comment by Dennis Edwards:
It seems to me that the only one that gains by the supposed chemical use is Israel. Israel benefits from a fractured weakened Syria and as far back as 1982 has made the Balkanizing of the Middle East's Arab nations its priority. If the Arab nations are fighting amongst themselves or in civil-war, Israel gains her security and maintains her dominance as the only hegemony in the area. The Mossad could easily have supplied and paid the rebel troops who were losing the city to mount the attack and then blame it on Assad. The international pro-Israeli leaning media then carried the narrative forward.
Also, if America and Russia are divided they cannot put pressure on Israel to resolve the Palestinian problem. A divided world lets Israel get away with her atrocious actions against the Palestinian people. Besides America, both France and Britain are the other nations Israel uses to do her dirty work. It may be all behind the scenes, but this is how espionage works. I suspect the Israelis may even be the ones behind the death of the Russian spy and his daughter in England. That event further heightened the tension between Great Britain and Russian, even when Theresa May had said that Britain's removal from the European Union would enable her to make unilateral agreements with Russia. That idea also seems off the table at this time, as well as Trumps hopes off working well with Putin.
Of course, this is all speculation. But if we look at who wins in these situations, it seems Israel is one country that comes out the winner. Just like we did the dirty work to get rid of Saddam Hussein and Libya's Qaddafi, we seem to be intent on removing Assad. Wasn't Syria, along with Libya and Iraq on the list of nations George Bush Sr. said would have leadership change in his New World Order?
I just wonder why the American Christians don't rise up against these wars. It must be their unconditional devotion to Israel as God's people that blinds them to the error of all this war-mongering. Eisenhower warned us of the encroaching power of the military/congressional/industrial complex (He deleted the "congressional" from his speech, but it was in his original notes). But we've ignored his warning and have let ourselves be pushed down the road to warring as the solution. We are just filling our cup of iniquity to the full so God can righteously let our judgment come, even if it comes from the enemy we should have befriended.
