Libye – ONU : l’échec des visées euro-atlantistes et mondialistes
Par Djerrad Amar
Amar Djerrad
12 juillet 2011
by Jonathan Azaziah,
www.maskofzion.com
Editor's Note: WARNING - Photos and hyperlinks in the 'conclusion' section of this essay are of extremely graphic nature. They have been included in this piece due to their unequivocal importance to the overall view of what is taking place in Syria.
The hasbara (propaganda) that is spread throughout the Zionist-owned mainstream media is identical in nature to a house of cards. No matter how imposing the house may be, remove one card from the structure, and it shall immediately collapse in an almost glorious fashion. It is due to its foundation; its towering essence is overshadowed by its flimsiness. The Zionist media imposes its hasbara in terrorizing fashion; like the usurping Israeli entity’s bombs falling upon illegally besieged Gaza or Lebanon, the hasbara enters the psyche as an F-16 bombardment. But unlike the bombs, which are so unstoppably and menacingly destructive, the hasbara is weaker than the web of a spider coming in contact with a machete. Remove just one element, one detail from a news story laced with hasbara, like the house of cards, the aforesaid story will crash to the ground, broken and dismembered.
This house of cards is what has been built upon the events unfolding in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad is facing an uprising not seen since his father’s days. The Zionist media, in partnership with ‘Arab’ media giant Al-Jazeera, painted a rosy picture of heroic, peaceful demonstrators rising up against the dictatorship that has ruled their nation repressively for more than four decades. But that is all that it is, a picture; a story not rooted in reality or fact. Al-Jazeera has finally admitted, that the opposition has lied and exaggerated about casualties and protest numbers (1), to ‘further its cause,’ of course, in typical hasbara fasion, but this small admission, this small card removed from the frame, brings the house of cards crashing down.
Al-Jazeera’s admission only gives further credence to what has already been exposed: the Zionist entity and the House of Saud, allied with the US, Turkey and Jordan, have launched a full-scale destabilization operation against Bashar al-Assad and his government. Mobilizing its forces from certain ‘hotspots,’ or joint operations rooms, the Zionist-Saudi axis has used its agents ex-Syrian VP Abdel-Halim Khaddam, AIPAC member Farid al-Ghadry, Brookings Institution Fellow Ammar AbdulHamid, State Dept giant Jeffrey Feltman and multiple Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leaders to fund, incite, train, guide, organize and direct its agents within Syria to drive the Assad leadership into the ground in hopes of replacing it with an anti-Iran, anti-Hezbollah regime subservient to the Zionist-Saudi axis. With weapons being provided by Jordan and armed operations initiated by Zionist agent Muthanna al-Dhari, Syria has been plunged into chaos (2). Feltman’s role is crucial, as he developed the final phase of this plot with Saudi National Security Advisor ‘Prince’ Bandar bin Sultan, spending $2 billion in the process (3).
The Zionist entity’s hopes of prolonging the ‘kiss of democratic death’ destablization operation and weakening Syria, prior to invading it, destroying it and colonizing it as it did with 13 years of sanctions against (occupied) Iraq, seem to have died down. It seems the next phase has already arrived. Events in the last week have spun out of control at lightning speed and Zionist mobilization has kicked into high gear.
Syrian Crimes Against Humanity: Fact or Pretext For Invasion?
Amnesty International (AI) has a long, disturbing history of collaborating with globalist powers to foment illegal wars and conquer indigenous resources and territory. A corporate member of the Chatham House and bankrolled by Zionist billionaire war criminal George Soros, AI is a ruthless organization that has fooled a great deal of people due to the mask of ‘human rights’ that it parades around in. Most infamously, in the ‘incubator babies’ scandal, it represented an integral wing of the Zionist operation against Iraq just prior to the criminal Gulf War, disseminating horrific propaganda across the globe, portraying Iraqis as animals and baby killers to justify the invasion. The story was revealed to be false on absolutely every level, but AI’s mission had already been accomplished: the Zionist war against Iraq had begun. Over the years, AI has directed mountains of hasbara against Syria, specifically towards Bashar al-Assad’s father, the late Hafez al-Assad (4).
On June 6th 2011, Amnesty International accused the Syrian government, under the direction of Bashar al-Assad and his top officials, of committing crimes against humanity in the town of Tell Kalakh. AI stated that ‘scores of men’ were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and at least 9 had died in custody. Seemingly infuriated, AI thundered in its report that the Syrian regime would respond to nothing but ‘concrete international measures.’ The report was a call to the UN Security Council and International Criminal Court to take action against Bashar al-Assad. A very gripping account indeed; one that pulls right at the heart strings in a whirlwind of emotion. A civilian population under siege at the hands of a monstrous dictator and his security apparatus. But a problem exists within this account; a very prominent, drastic problem. AI obtained all of the information from ‘eyewitnesses’ in Lebanon in addition to telephone conversations (5).
First and foremost, how can ‘crimes against humanity’ accusations be made without any physical evidence provided? Secondly, how can an ‘independent’ NGO have such power that it can demand action to be taken against the nation it is accusing of such crimes from the highest international bodies on earth and be taken seriously? Thirdly, with Amnesty International’s track record of fabricating ‘humanitarian crises’ for the benefit of Zionist hegemony, how can such accusations even be considered credible?
Fourthly, if villagers are armed and firing on soldiers and policemen, they are not civilians; ‘eyewitnesses’ be damned. And if they’re not civilians, ‘crimes against humanity’ are out of the question. On that note, why hasn’t AI reported on the hundreds of Syrian security forces shot dead across Syria by armed Syrian Muslim Brotherhood fighters (6)? Specifically, why hasn’t AI reported on the Syrian security forces shot dead in Tell Kalakh? At least 2 were killed and more than 7 were badly wounded (7). This crucial piece of evidence simply reaffirms that these are not peaceful protesters but gunmen. It reaffirms that what is unfolding in Syria is not a ‘peaceful uprising’ but an armed insurrection. And it reaffirms, that AI’s ‘crimes against humanity’ accusations against Syria are monstrously false.
With that said, who are these so-called ‘eyewitnesses’ that AI met in Lebanon? And why were the meetings held in Lebanon? Why not Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, the Zionist regime itself or any other neighboring entity? Were these ‘eyewitnesses’ provided to AI? If so, by whom? The reason why these particular questions are so vital, is because former Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri’s Future Movement has worked closely with Zionist Near East Affairs asset Jeffrey Feltman and US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro in organizing the press campaign against Syria (8), shaping public opinion in the region, and it would by no means be out of the ordinary if AI’s ‘Lebanese sources’ were provided by the Feltman-Hariri-Shapiro coordination, considering AI’s history of collaborating with Zionism and the role being played in Syria by the aforementioned three men.
Yet again, Amnesty International has been exposed manipulating and fabricating information to justify a take-down of what the Israeli entity and its allies commonly refer to as a ‘hostile environment.’ Yet again, Amnesty International shows that its true colors are not its typical yellow, but Israeli blue and white.
Arrival of The Ambassadors: Incitement and Subversion
Just two days after Amnesty International submitted its (now-debunked) ludicrous claims of Syria committing crimes against humanity in Tell Kalakh, the US and French Ambassadors to Syria made an unauthorized trip to Hama, a stronghold of the Zionist-Saudi axis’ operations against the Bashar al-Assad government. The US State Department called the visit a ‘show of solidarity with the protesters.’ And the solidarity was reciprocated. ‘Protesters’ disgustingly placed olive branches and roses on the vehicles transporting the Western ambassadors as they chanted ‘down with the regime!’ The perturbed Syrian Foreign Ministry, rightfully, blasted the unauthorized visit as incitement. Also, it is not a coincidence that enemies of Al-Jumhuriyyah al-Arabiyyah as-Suriyyah would travel to an anti-government hub as the government prepared to hold a national dialogue and end the nightmarish unrest in the country (9).
There is another element that the US State Department did not reveal to the public. An element behind the curtain, behind the 'solidarity.' The primary reason why US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford traveled to Hama was to deliver tapping devices to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood-dominated opposition. The devices were meant to capture images of their protests to later be amplified prior to airing them with the international Zionist media. The devices were also meant to spy on Syrian security forces, including the army and police in anti-Assad areas. While Syrian security forces dismantled a good deal of these apparatuses, many of them still exist in the Saudi-Zionist-backed opposition’s strongholds (10).
This is simply another example of foreign powers meddling in the internal affairs of Syria to accomplish the mission of toppling Bashar al-Assad and replacing him with a puppet that will happily bow before the international dominance of Zionism. It is excessively important to document that this batch of incitement, while blatant, is nothing but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Weapons, monies, intelligence and military support have been provided to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots by the Zionist-occupied governments in the EU, US and Jordan to drown out the cries of the peaceful reformists who have been fully acknowledged by the Assad leadership (11).
The Ambassadors’ incitement and delivery of materials represents the culmination of more than 3 months of destabilization at the Zionist-led coalition’s hands; an overt act of subversion on top of all of the various covert operations. This infuriated the Syrian people, who have marched in the millions over the last few months in support of the Bashar al-Assad’s Resistance government (12). Their fury was expressed in the streets as hundreds marched to the US and French embassies in Damascus. Protesters broke the embassies’ windows and thunderously chanted against the Western regimes’ meddling (13).
In the aftermath, avid Zionist and murderous war criminal Hillary Clinton responded to the rage of the Syrian people and sharpened her sword of rhetoric. She explicitly stated, “He (Bashar al-Assad) has lost legitimacy, he has failed to deliver on the promises he's made, he has sought and accepted aid from the Iranians as to how to repress his own people. He is not indispensable (14).” The arrogance of Clinton is nauseating; as if she and her government, who take their orders from the Zionist regime that has stolen al-Quds, have the right to dictate who will or who will not lead Syria; as if the majority of the Syrian people who support the Assad government and its Resistance don’t exist.
If the elements of the ‘Syrian Revolution’ that are calling for Bashar al-Assad’s ouster were actually indigenous, legitimate, honest, ‘pro-democracy’ protesters and not a militia-type force that is being armed and directed by an axis of foreign powers led by the Zionist entity and Saudi Arabia, why did they welcome the US and French Ambassadors to Syria with roses? Why would those who claim to represent the typical Resistance-based mindset that the righteous, dignified and strong Syrian people tend to have, show solidarity with nations that are enemies of Syria and are actively pursuing its downfall? And knowing that Syria has been a target perpetually locked in the crosshairs of Zionism and its allies, why would these ‘protesters’ pander to such powers? The answers to these questions are of course, rhetorical.
President Barack Obama, who has served the Zionist entity so well since being placed into office he has had an illegal settlement named after him (15), echoed the words of Hillary Clinton on July 13th as Western governments work closely to fight Russian and Chinese blocks and pass a resolution in the UN to take action against Syria (16). Though it would be an utterly devastating scenario for the Syrian people, it seems that another ‘humanitarian’ invasion is right around the corner.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Globetrotting Zionist Asset
The French ‘intellectual and philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy is no stranger to anti-Zionist writers and solidarity activists. He is known from one end of the globe to the next for infamously and disgracefully stating, “I have never seen such a democratic army (IOF), which asks itself so many moral questions (17).” Needless to say, Lévy is an ardent Zionist who is wholeheartedly dedicated to defending the criminal existence of the Israeli ‘state.’
Most recently, Lévy has been seen in Libya, playing an exceedingly prominent role, if not the most prominent role of all, in getting the West ‘involved’ in the murderous bombing of the oil-rich North African nation. Lévy single-handedly secured meetings for the CIA-proxy Libyan rebels with Zionist French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Hillary Clinton. He warned Sarkozy that if the West didn’t intervene, there would be a ‘bloodbath in Benghazi,’ Libya’s second largest city (18).
Thanks to the efforts of Lévy and the Zionists of the Foreign Policy Initiative who ordered President Obama to attack Libya (19), there isn’t just a bloodbath in Benghazi but a bloodbath across Libya. The NATO coalition led by the US, France and Britain has murdered at least 1,108 Libyan civilians and wounded over 4,537 others since the genocidal, colonial effort began at the end of March (20). Lévy, who is very good friends with mass murderer and Zionist war criminal (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu, conveyed to his friend that the Libyan rebels are ready to recognize the Zionist entity as a legitimate state and that they will be ‘concerned with Israeli security (21).’ Lévy’s high-level meddling in Libya has led to a scenario right out of Qaddafi’s worst nightmare: the CIA-proxy, Israeli-advised rebels are prepared to let the Zionist regime establish a base in eastern Cyrenaica on a 30-year lease (22). These activities confirm that Lévy is no mere Zionist; he is a high-level sayan (helper) doing the bidding of Tel Aviv.
With Libya now in complete disarray at the hands of NATO and Israel, the globetrotting Zionist Lévy has set his sights on Bashar al-Assad and Syria. Lévy led a conference last week in Paris's Cinema St. Germaine against the Assad government, likening Bashar al-Assad’s ‘crackdown on pro-democracy protesters’ to that of the Nazis. The conference was comprised of Zionists, former French officials, Syrian opposition figures and a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood representative. The point of Lévy’s conference was to mobilize the ex-French regime officials to lobby Russia and China in dropping their support for the Syrian Resistance government and getting both nations behind Libya-like resolutions against Bashar al-Assad. Lévy demanded that Syria be referred to an international tribunal (23).
The most disturbing of the attendees of Lévy’s meddlesome conference is a ‘Syrian opposition figure’ named Ammar Qurabi (24). Qurabi is the main source of information, statistics and rumors throughout the media institutions owned by the sheikhdoms of Qatar and Saudi Arabia and has repeatedly delivered fraudulent information and inflated protest numbers to the Zionist media (25). Qurabi’s wife writes for the London-based Saudi Arabia propaganda outlet, Elaph (26). He is frequently quoted as a ‘credible source’ by Western wire services like Reuters and AFP in regards to the ‘civilian death toll’ of the 'Syrian Revolution.' Qurabi however, is anything but credible. If the information initially presented doesn’t indicate that he is a stooge of the House of Saud, Qatar and Zionism, the following revelation most certainly will.
Prior to establishing Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights, Ammar Qurabi worked for Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Human Rights Committee. Human Rights Watch, handsomely funded to the tune of $100 million by billionaire Zionist war criminal George Soros, has a long history of working with Zionist think tanks and intelligence agencies in fostering war propaganda, specifically against the now ravaged nation of (occupied) Iraq. The Syrian Human Rights Committee is a promoter of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and an affiliate of the Patriotic Union Of Kurdistan, a Mossad-linked Zionist political party in northern Iraq with a militia trained by IOF (27). Do all 'human rights activists' work with elements of the Zionist war machine? Clearly, Qurabi is no ‘Syrian human rights advocate.’ He is an agent of the Zionist-Saudi axis’ destabilization operations against Syria.
With Ammar Qurabi keeping the lies flowing throughout Eastern and Western media and Tel Aviv’s ‘man in France’ Bernard-Henri Lévy upping the ante on the international front, Syria just cannot get a break from the Zionist entity’s mobilization.
Turkey’s Deadly Role In Syria Corroborated
The most diabolical character in Israel’s plot to take down Syria is the government of Turkey. In the two-part series on Syria preceding this piece, this author laid waste to the theory that Turkey represented Resistance in the region and exposed the Ankara regime as a willing participant in the ongoing destabilization operation in Syria, providing intelligence, military support, safe havens and meeting grounds to Syrian Muslim Brotherhood fighters, leaders and operatives and also facilitating contact between the Zionist-occupied American government and the Brotherhood. This treacherous, duplicitous behavior is part of a 1993 Turkish-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that unites the two entities in military-intelligence cooperation on a large scale. The focus of this cooperation is to undermine Syria, Iran and Iraq; all enemies of the Zionist entity. The Zionist-run operations are funded with the billions in annual Turkish-Israeli bilateral trade (28).
As documented in the previous sections with the vital role of Bernard-Henri Lévy and the incitement operation in Hama carried out by the French Ambassador to Syria, as well as in the aforementioned series with France leading the European charge in sanctioning Syria, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has played a major part in fomenting the violent unrest in Syria. Sarkozy did excessive spy work for Mossad in the 1980s and remains a high-level sayan to this day (29); his allegiance to Zionism is undeniable. Multiple sources have now confirmed to Mask of Zion that the French and Turkish governments have drawn up their own MOU, to strengthen the 1993 Turkish-Israeli MOU and to focus more intimate cooperation in toppling Bashar al-Assad. The leaked MOU document was initially provided to Mask of Zion in French and then translated by a second source. The French-Turkish MOU is between PM Erdogan himself and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé.
Below is the document in its entirety, which fully corroborates the evidence revealed in the ‘Kiss of Democratic Death’ series:
The document clearly (and disturbingly) speaks for itself. It is interesting to note, that like Turkish-Israeli trade, French-Israeli trade is just as lucrative, with annual profits skyrocketing to over 2 billion Euros ($2.8 billion) last year (30). The money funding the operations of the Tel Aviv-Ankara-Paris axis in Syria is awash in innocent blood, as every cent of it has passed through Zionist hands. Undoubtedly paid for by this blood money and as per number 5 in the Juppé-Erdogan Agreement, Turkey recently hosted yet another Syrian opposition conference in Istanbul on July 13th, 2011. While spouting usual, malicious rhetoric against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Lebanese Resistance movement of Hezbollah, this meeting soared to new heights and is arguably the most dangerous to date, as attendees flamboyantly called on the Syrian armed forces to turn on Bashar al-Assad and help ‘the people’ overthrow the regime (31). As the Juppé-Erdogan Agreement and all of the evidence provided here display, it is not ‘the people’ doing anything, but a murderous nexus with the illegitimate Israeli regime sitting at its head.
Conclusion: A Tale Of Two Children
Over the course of the last several months, one story that has permeated nearly all of the Zionist media’s coverage on Syria is that of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khatib, the first boy in this ‘tale of two children.’ He has become the ‘face of the Syrian Revolution,’ as many news outlets, including Zionist-created Al-Jazeera, have declared. The story goes something like this: seeking freedom and dignity like every other Syrian participating in the ‘peaceful, pro-democracy’ protests in the Dara’a Governorate, little 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khatib hit the streets of Saida Village on April 29th, or the streets of Jiza Village, as ‘eyewitnesses’ can’t seem to be able to make up their minds. He was picked up by Syrian security forces in a routine ‘crackdown’ operation and tortured in custody for almost a month before being delivered back to his family with lacerations, bruises and burns to his elbows, face, knees, chest and feet, bullet wounds and castrated (32). Another sensational, shocking tragedy brought to the world by the Syrian Revolution.
The information, extracted from a Youtube video, is said to be congruent with reports from Human Rights Watch (HRW) about the types of torture used by Syrian security forces. HRW, all of its media glory and hype aside, has been exposed as nothing more than a tool of Zionist-globalist hegemony, fabricating reports whenever the Zionist entity and its allies need justification to prepare an ‘enemy’ country for regime change (as aforementioned), so how can any claim made by such an organization be taken seriously?
How can this Soros-funded band of propagandists and liars possess an almost infallible credibility when the foundation of its ‘legitimacy’ rests on pure illusion? In simpler terms, reports from HRW can’t be congruent with anything because HRW doesn’t tell the truth. The nail in HRW’s coffin comes with placing its senior researcher on Syrian Affairs, Nadim Houry, under a microscope: he’s also done work for the Rothschild-founded mega think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, and he previously worked for the law firm Sherman and Sterling LLP, a group admittedly dedicated to furthering the interests of international bankers through privatization and globalization (33). What kind of human rights advocate also works for organizations solely dedicated to wiping out human rights worldwide through criminal wars and occupations? That is yet another rhetorical question.
Beyond that, a closer look at the Youtube video reveals that there is no evidence of torture at all, and most certainly not at the hands of Syrian security forces. The body is so discolored and disfigured from the discoloration, that one cannot be sure that it is even the body of 13-year old Hamza. It certainly looks to be someone else entirely. The video is definitely graphic, but at no point does the video show that the body has been castrated. Most bizarrely, the Arabic-speaking narrators of the video continue repeating ridiculous slogans about freedom and dignity. Where is the emotion and outrage of what has supposedly been done to the child? Where is the indignation? And casting further doubt on the entire matter, at the end of the video, the narrators call on the UN and Amnesty International to take action against Syria. Suspicious does not begin to describe this footage.
There is an alternative view of what happened to Hamza Ali al-Khatib, a view that has not even been given a fraction of the coverage that the mainstream (i.e. Zionist) view has. The alternative view is: Hamza indeed did take part in 'pro-reform' protests in the Dara’a Governorate and was indeed killed. However, the boy was not ‘murdered’ by Syrian security forces. He was caught in the crossfire of Saudi-Zionist-trained armed fighters and Syrian security officials at the Saida military housing compound. The armed brigade captured several children, including Hamza, and led them to the compound at gunpoint. They then opened fire on army, police, security forces and civilians. In the April 29th battle, a Syrian security chief was gunned down along with several others. Hamza’s body was taken to the hospital and once he was identified, he was transferred back to his family. Bashar al-Assad himself traveled to the family’s home to offer his condolences. The body in the now-infamous Youtube video belonged to that of a still unidentified man in his 20s, which was photographed and taped by Syrian opposition members (34).
This information is quite congruent with previous documentation regarding opposition attacks on Syrian government targets. This information would also mean that the opposition lied about Hamza Ali al-Khatib, which is also congruent with previous documentation. Zionist-backed Syrian opposition forces have already played this game before by faking the death of a 10-year boy named “Ayham al-Ahmad.” The video quality was so poor however that the international media did not pay it any mind (35). A week and a half after the Ayham story failed, the news of Hamza, much more brutal, sensational and heart-wrenching, emerged on the international scene. Psychological warfare is the name of the game and it must not be forgotten that Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, LAP, maintains a cozy working relationship with the Zionist media (36).
The second boy in this ‘tale of two children,’ is one that the greater majority of those who follow mainstream news and even those who claim to be activists have never heard of. This boy isn’t marketable, nor is he profitable and unlike Hamza, his story cannot be manipulated, mutated and transformed into a media fiasco. This boy’s name is Malik Ahmed Suleiman. He was only 14 years old. Young Malik was from the city of Homs, a major battleground between the Zionist-Saudi axis’ destablization operatives and supporters of President Bashar al-Assad. He was the son of Syrian Army Colonel Ahmed Suleiman, a supporter of President Assad and a staunch Syrian nationalist. On May 29th, while the world was incessantly clamoring about the false stories regarding Hamza al-Khatib, Malik Ahmed Suleiman was strangled to death with a belt in front of his home for holding up a picture of Bashar al-Assad during an anti-government protest.
Young Malik was targeted because his family had rejected the ‘Syrian Revolution’ and stood in solidarity with the majority of the Syrian people in their support for Bashar al-Assad. Why hasn’t this heinous murder been spoken about by mainstream media? Firstly, because the Suleiman family stands with the Resistance. And secondly, because Malik Ahmed Suleiman’s tragic story would invalidate the Zionist narrative regarding Syria’s ‘peaceful revolution.’
What about Al-Jazeera? Why hasn’t Al-Jazeera reported on this horrific crime? Because Al-Jazeera is nothing more than the Arab wing of the Zionist media and since 2004 alone, it has suppressed hundreds of stories of Zionist atrocities in occupied Palestine and it deliberately ignored the Zionist regime’s admission of dropping millions of cluster bombs on Lebanon during the genocidal July War (37). Ghassan Bin Jeddo, who stepped down from his post as Al-Jazeera’s Beirut Bureau Chief because the network launched a ‘smear campaign against Syria,’ said, “Al-Jazeera has resorted to gutter journalism. It is now an operations room for incitement and mobilization (38).” Malik Ahmed Suleiman doesn’t help Al-Jazeera ‘incite and mobilize’ against Syria, he blocks it.
What unites Malik Ahmed Suleiman and Hamza Ali al-Khatib is that they are both victims of a deadly, ominous destabilization campaign launched against Syria by the Zionist entity and the House of Saud. It is a campaign that has claimed the lives of police, civilians and soldiers alike and like a shark that smells blood in the water, it will not stop until it reaches its prey: Bashar al-Assad.
The Zionist end game is to fracture Syria into multiple states of ethnic-sectarian distinction (39), ripping apart the unified fabric of the society that has prospered under the leadership of the Assad family for decades. The means of achieving this end lies within the savage opposition, a creature of Zionist-Saudi cooperation. This creature must be exposed for the Israeli-engineered beast that it is and the plot that it represents now more than ever as Zionist mobilization continues its climb towards all-out invasion. It must be exposed for Malik. It must be exposed for Hamza. And it must be exposed for the millions of other Syrians and their children whose lives are very much at stake. It is up to the people of conscience to reject the status quo, break free from the mainstream shackles and do so.
~ The End ~
Sources:
(1) The Syrian Propaganda War by Listening Post, Al-Jazeera English
(2) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - The Syrian Revolution: 100% Manufactured by Israel and Saudi Arabia by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(3) US Seeks To Exploit Anti-Assad Movement In Syria by Jean Shaoul, World Socialist Web Site
(4) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - History On The Fly I: The 1976-1982 ‘Uprising’ by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(5) Report Reveals Crimes Against Humanity In Syrian Town by Amnesty International
(6) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Media Manipulation: Zionism and Al-Jazeera Unite by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(7) Interior Ministry Source: 2 Security Members Martyred, 7 Injured By Extremist And Terrorist Groups In Daraa And Tall Kalakh by Syrian Arab News Agency
(8) Syria, In The Eye Of The Storm – Part II by Nidal Hmedeh and translated by Eslam al-Rihani, Al-Manar
(9) U.S. Ambassador Greeted With Roses By Syrian Protesters In Hama by Robert Mackey, The New York Times
(10) U.S. Ambassador Smuggles Tapping Devices To Opposition In Syria by Al-Manar
(11) Lining The Chessboard Against The Resistance Bloc: War With Syria, Iran And Lebanon In The Works? by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Voltaire Network
(12) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Media Manipulation: Zionism and Al-Jazeera Unite by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(13) Mobs Storm U.S., French Embassies In Syria by The Raw Story
(14) Clinton Says Syria’s Assad Has Lost Legitimacy by Andrew Quinn and Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Reuters
(15) Israel Creates ‘Obama’ Settlement, More Obstacles For Viable Palestinian State by Saleh Naami, Al-Ahram Online
(16) West Piles Pressure For UN Action On Syria by Ma’an News Agency
(17) Bernard-Henri Levy: I Have Never Seen An Army As Democratic As The IDF by Or Kashti, Haaretz
(18) By His Own Reckoning, One Man Made Libya A French Cause by Steven Erlanger, The New York Times
(19) US Neo-Cons Urge Libya Intervention by Jim Lobe, Al-Jazeera English
(20) 1,108 Libyans Killed In NATO Attacks by Press TV
(21) Libyan Rebels Will Recognise Israel by Global Research
(22) NATO’s Alternative Universe In Libya by Wayne Madsen, The San Francisco Bay View
(23) Syria Opposition And Pro-Israeli Confab by Press TV
(24) Ammar Qurabi July 07, 2011 by As’ad Abu Khalil, The Angry Arab News Service
(25) Syrian Muslim Brotherhood And Zionism: Who Is Ammar Qurabi? by As’ad Abu Khalil, The Angry Arab News Service
(26) Ammar Qurabi July 06, 2011 by As’ad Abu Khalil, The Angry Arab News Service
(27) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - History On The Fly I: The 1976-1982 ‘Uprising’ by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(28) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Turkey: The Beast Of Two Faces Emerges by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(29) Sarkozy Accused Of Working For Israeli Intelligence by Gamal Nkrumah, Global Research
(30) France Seeks To Boost Trade With Israel by Brett Kline, Globes
(31) Syrian Exiles Call For Army To Side With People by Simon Cameron-Moore, Reuters
(32) Tortured And Killed: Hamza Al-Khateeb, Age 13 by Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand, Al-Jazeera English; Torture Of The Child Martyr: ‘Rebel,’ 13, Shot, Kneecapped And Had Genitals Removed Before Being Killed By Syria’s Sadistic Regime by Liz Hazelton, The UK Daily Mail
(33) Globalist Infiltration Of International Rights Groups: Nadim Houry’s Syrian Propaganda by Scott Creighton, American Everyman
(34) The True Story Of Hamza Al-Khateeb’s Death Belies Media Fabrications by Syrian Arab News Agency
(35) NEDA Revisited: Another Staged CIA Martyr This Time In Syria by Scott Creighton, American Everyman
(36) Libya: The Zionist Dragon And The Drums Of War by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(37) Pro-Israeli Editors Seek To Influence Al-Jazeera International English Satellite TV by Khalid Amayreh, The Electronic Intifada
(38) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Media Manipulation: Zionism and Al-Jazeera Unite by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(39) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - History On The Fly II: Oded Yinon, A Clean Break and Direct Israeli Aggression by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
Like the financial disintegration hanging over us , that one of the 1340s was the result of 30-40 years of disastrous financial practices, by which the banks built up huge fictitious ``financial bubbles,'' parasitizing production and real trade in goods. These speculative cancers destroyed the real wealth they were monopolizing, and caused these banks to be effectively bankrupt long before they finally went under.
The critical difference between 1345 and 1995, was that in the fourteenth century there were as yet no nations. No governments had the national sovereignty to control the banks and the creation of credit; or, to force these banks into bankruptcy in an orderly way, and replace fictitious bank credit and money with national credit. Nor was the Vatican, the world leadership of the Catholic Church, fighting against the debt-looting of the international banks then as it is today; in fact, at that time it was allied with, aiding, and abetting them.
The result was a disaster for the human population, which fell worldwide by something like 25 percent between 1300 and 1450 (in Europe, by somewhere between 35 percent and 50 percent from the 1340s collapse to the 1440s).
This global crash, caused by the policies and actions of banks which finally completely bankrupted themselves, has been blamed by historians ever since on a king -- poor Edward III of England. Edward revolted against the seizure and looting of his kingdom by the Bardi and Peruzzi banks, by defaulting on their loans starting in 1342. King Edward's national budget was dwarfed by that of either the Bardi or Peruzzi; in fact, by 1342 his national budget had become a subdepartment of theirs. Their internal memos in Florence spoke of him contemptuously as ``Messer Edward''``we shall be fortunate to recover even a part'' of his debts, they sniffed in 1339.
A ``free trade'' mythology has been developed by historians about these ``sober, industrious, Christian bankers'' of Italy in the fourteenth century``doing good'' by their own private greed; developing trade and the beginnings of capitalist industry by seeking monopolies for their family banks; somehow existing in peace with other merchants, and expiating their greedy sins by donations to the Church. But, goes the myth, these sober bankers were led astray by kings (accursed governments!) who were spendthrift, warlike, and unreliable in paying their debts which they forced the helpless or momentarily foolish bankers to lend them. Thus, emerging ``private enterprise capitalism'' was set back by the disaster of the fourteenth century, concludes the classroom myth, noting in passing that 30 million people died in Europe in the ensuing Black Death, famine, and war. If only the ``sober, Christian'' bankers had stuck to industrious ``free trade'' and prosperous city-states, and never gotten entangled with warlike, spendthrift kings!
The Real Story
Two recent books help to turn over this cover story, though perhaps that is beyond the intention of their authors. Edwin Hunt's 1994 book The Medieval Supercompanies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence, establishes that this great bank was losing money and effectively going bankrupt throughout the late 1330s, as a result of its own destructive policies -- in Europe's agricultural credit and trade in particular -- before it ever dealt with Edward III.
``Indeed, the great banking companies were able to survive past 1340 only because news of their deteriorated position had not yet circulated....''
Even if we accept the highest figures ever given for Edward III's 1345 default against the bankers of Florence, the debt to them of the city government of Florence which they controlled, was 35 percent greater, and those bonds also defaulted.
More revealing is the latest work of the historian of Venice, Frederick C. Lane, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. This work shows that it was Venetian finance which, by dominating and controlling a huge international ``bubble'' of currency speculation from 1275 through 1350, rigged the great collapse of the 1340s. Rather than sharing the peace of mutual greed and free enterprise with their ``allies''-- the bankers of Florence -- the merchants of Venice bankrupted them, and the economies of Europe and the Mediterranean along with them. Florence was the fourteenth century ``New York,'' the apparent center of banking with the world's biggest banks. But Venice was ``London,'' manipulating Florentine bankers, kings, and emperors alike, by tight knit financial conspiracy and complete dominance of the markets by which money was minted and credit created.
As long ago as the 1950s, in fact, one historian Fernand Braudel consciously demonstrated that Venice, leading the Italian bankers of Florence, Genoa, Siena, etc., willfully intervened from the beginning of the thirteenth century to destroy the potential emergence of national governments, ``modern states foreshadowed by the achievements of Frederick II.'' Frederick II Hohenstauffen was the Holy Roman Emperor in the first half of the thirteenth century, an able successor of Charlemagne's earlier achievements in spreading education, agricultural progress, population growth, and strong government. The great Dante wrote De Monarchia in a vain attempt to revive the potential of imperial government based on divine law and natural law, which had been identified with Frederick's reign.
Wrote Braudel:
``Venice had deliberately ensnared all the surrounding subject economies, including the German economy, for her own profit; she drew her living from them, preventing them from acting freely.... The fourteenth century saw the creation of such a powerful monopoly to the advantage of the city-states of Italy ... that the embryo territorial states like England, France and Spain necessarily suffered the consequences.''
In addition to what Braudel shows, Venice intervened to stop the accession of the great Alfonso the Wise of Spain, as successor to Emperor Frederick II.
This triumph of ``free trade'' over the potential for national government, rigged the fourteenth century's global human catastrophes, the worst onslaught of death and depopulation in history. It was not until the Renaissance created the French nation state under Louis XI, 100 years later, and then England under Henry VII, and the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel, that the human population could recover.
Population: The Fundamental Measure
The clearest measure of the destruction wrought by the merchants and bankers of Venice and its ``allies'' in the financial crash of the fourteenth century, is shown in Figure 1. What had been 400-600 years of increasing population growth in Europe, China, and India (altogether, three-fourths of the human population) was reversed. The world's population collapsed. Famines, bubonic and pneumonic plagues, and other epidemics killed more than 100 million people.
Wars raged throughout Eurasia; Mongol armies alone slaughtered between 5 and 10 million people. This depopulation did not begin with the 1340s banking crash, although it accelerated after that for nearly a century. The policies of Venetian-allied finance were already reversing human population growth for 40-60 years before their speculative cancer completely exhausted what it monopolized, bringing on the 1340s rolling crash of all major banks which had not collapsed earlier.
How did free enterprise finance, with no government able to control it, collapse all the economies of the Eurasian continent? How could banks concentrated in one part of Europe -- tiny on the scale of modern banks work such a global catastrophe?
A Cancer on Production
In the eleventh, twelfth, and into the thirteenth centuries the growth and development of population both in Europe and particularly in China was accelerating. China's population doubled in 200 years during the ``neoConfucian'' renaissance of the S'ung Dynasty, to 120 million; the population density of northern France and northern Italy began to approximate the levels these regions have today. After the collapse and depopulation of the Roman Empire long before (300-600 A.D.), Europe's population had been growing at a steadily increasing rate for 700 years up to 1300 A.D., due to huge increases in the amount of agricultural land productively cultivated. In addition, there had been several periods in which the rural technologies for using the plow, seed, animal power, water power, and wind power, leaped forward. Classical education of youth in monastery schools (oblates) was spreading up through the twelveth century, when the great cathedral building movement arose in France. These advances spread particularly rapidly due to the impetus of Charlemagne and his English and Italian allies from 750-900, and then again from 1100-1250, the period of the Hohenstauffen Holy Roman Emperors in Germany, Italy, and Sicily, ending with Frederick II.
But about the turn of the fourteenth century, the growth of food production and of population stopped in Europe. (China's population was already being devastated, on which more below.) There were major famines (multiple successive crop failures or extreme shortages) in 1314-17; in 1328-29; and in 1338-39. One historian concludes that:
``we gather from (the Italian chronicler) Villani's statements that a scarcity of more or less severe character put in an appearance about three times each decade. About once each decade the scarcity became so intense as to assume the proportions of a famine.''
The most productive rural regions of northern Italy and northern France began to be depopulated from about 1290 onward, while the towns and cities' population merely stagnated. (The Milan region was the counterexample, due to aggressive construction of government infrastructure, water control works, 3,000 hospital beds in the city for 150,000 people).
The production of wool in England began to decline from about 1310. English and Spanish wool were the basis of European clothing production, although cotton cloth was just beginning to be produced.
``In England, beginning with the reign of Edward I (1291 to 1310) and reaching a climax with Edward III, the Bardi and Peruzzi had acquired a status that gave them a practical monopoly of the procuring and export of wool....''
From 1150 onward, the famous Champagne Fairs had been the hub of trading in cloth and clothing, ironwork, woodwork, wool, agricultural implements and food for all of Europe; year round fairs were held in six cities in the Champagne region around Paris. Merchants had been accustomed to make profits of 34 percent annually in hard cash and goods trading here. The Venetian and Florentine bankers intervened into these fairs with large amounts of credit, bank branches, and with luxury goods ``from the East,'' and took them over. By 1310, an Italian banker from Lucca boasted that he could raise 200,000 French livres tournois in credit on the spot at the Fair of Troyes but the actual trade in physical goods at the fairs was declining. Hunt's analysis of the successive sets of books of the Peruzzi bank shows that the Florentine bankers expected 810 percent annual profits up to 1335. This was far above the rate at which the physical economy of Europe was producing real surplus, and that physical rate of production was falling. The Venetians expected much higher rates of profit still, for reasons outlined below.
``At the end of the thirteenth century a slowdown in trade hit commodities first; credit operations kept going longer, but the fairs went into severe decline,''
In the late 1330s, the beginning of the 100 Years War between England and France led to the clothing industry of Flanders the main clothing production region of Europe being boycotted and completely shut off from wool; by the late 1340s, this industry was in complete decline, and was actually moving out of the towns and cities into tiny ``cottage industries'' in the countryside.
On top of all this, from the 1320s on, there was a ``massive flight of silver oltremare (``over the sea,'' that is, to Venice's maritime empire in the Middle East and Byzantium) which upset the equilibrium of Europe in the midfourteenth century.'' Venetian exports of silver from Europe from 1325-50 equalled ``perhaps 25 percent of all the silver being mined in Europe at that time.'' Standard silver coin had been the stable currency of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, and of England, since Charlemagne's time. This massive export from Venice to the East ``created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,'' and severe problems in making payments in trade. France ``was emptied of silver coinage.'' King Phillip's mintmaster estimated that 100 tons of silver had been exported ``to the land of the Saracens'' (the Islamic Middle East).
So production of the most vital commodities in Europe had been severely reduced, and the trade and circulation of its money completely disrupted, over decades before the 1340s crash, by Italian banks which appeared to be making usurious rates of profit. ``The Florentine supercompanies resembled very closely in their operations the huge international grain companies of today, such as Cargill and Archer-Daniels Midland,'' writes Hunt. ``They used loans to monarchs to dominate and control trade in certain vital commodities, especially grain, and later wool and cloth.'' Their dominance and speculation progressively reduced the production of these commodities.
We can see this in more detail, but keeping in mind that the story of the Florentine bankers and the fourteenth century crash and Black Death, is itself a coverup. These bankers were operating on an international scale limited to Western Europe and some Mediterranean islands. The maritime/financial empire of Venice -- and Venice only -- was speculating on the scale of all of the Eurasian landmass, and on this evidence alone, it had to be the merchants of Venice which rigged the devastation and depopulation of the majority of the human race in the fourteenth century. The Florentine bankers were sharks swimming in Venice's seas. The catastrophe of the Black Death in Europe, so often described, was exceeded by death rates in China and Islamic regions under the homicidal rule of the Mongol Khans from 1250, until nearly 1400. The Islamic chronicler Ibn Khaldun wrote:
``Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind.''
Venice was also the ``banker,'' slave market, and intelligence support service for the Mongol Khans.
The Black Guelph
The Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuouli family banks, along with other large banks in Florence and Siena in particular, were all founded in the years around 1250. In the 1290s they grew dramatically in size and rapaciousness, and were reorganized, by the influx of new partners. These were ``Black Guelph'' noble families, of the faction of northern Italian landed aristocracy always bitterly hostile to the government of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne, 500 years earlier, had already recognized Venice as a threat equal to the Vikings, and had organized a boycott to try to bring Venice to terms with his Empire. Venice in 1300 was the center of the Black Guelph faction which drove Dante and his co-thinkers from Florence. In opposition to Dante's work De Monarchia, a whole series of political theorists of ``Venice, the ideal model of government'' were promoted in north Italy: Bartolomeo of Lucca, Marsiglio of Padua, Enrico Paolino of Venice, etc., all based on Aristotle's Politics which was translated into Latin for the purpose. The same ``coup'' made the Bardi, Peruzzi, etc. Black Guelph banking ``supercompanies,'' suddenly two or three times their previous size and branch structure. Machiavelli describes how by 1308, the Black Guelph ruled everywhere in northern Italy except in Milan, which remained allied with the Holy Roman Empire, and was the most economically developed and powerful city-state in fourteenth century Italy.
The charter of the Parte Guelfa openly claimed that it was the party of the papacy, and with Venice, the Black Guelph openly pushed for the Popes to change usury from a mortal sin to a venial (minor) sin. Lane remarks that the Venetians seemed to enjoy an effective exemption from the Catholic Popes' injunctions against usury, and also from their ban on trading with the infidel -- the Seljuk and Mamluk regimes of Egypt and Syria.
A century earlier, in the 1180s, Doge (Duke) Ziani of Venice had provoked hostilities between the two leaders of Christendom, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, the grandfather of Frederick II. Doge Ziani, in time-worn Venetian style, then personally mediated the ``Peace of Constance'' between the Pope and the Emperor. The doge got his enemy, Emperor Frederick, to agree to withdraw his standard silver coinage from Italy, and allow the Italian cities to mint their own coins.
Over the century from that 1183 Peace of Constance to the 1290s, Venice established the extraordinary, near-total dominance of trading in gold and silver coin and bullion throughout Europe and Asia, which is documented in Frederick Lane's book. Venice broke and replaced the European silver coinage of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Byzantine Empire's silver coinage, and eventually broke the famous Florentine ``gold florin'' in the decades immediately leading into the 1340s financial blowout -- which blew out all the financiers except the Venetians.
Privatization
The Black Guelph bankers of Florence did not simply loan money to monarchs, and then expect repayment with interest. In fact, interest was often ``officially'' not charged on the loans, since usury was considered a sin and a crime among Christians. Rather, like the International Monetary Fund today, the banks imposed ``conditionalities'' on the loans. The primary conditionality was the pledging of royal revenues directly to the bankers -- the clearest sign that the monarchs lacked national sovereignty against the Black Guelph ``privateers.'' Since in fourteenth century Europe, important commodities like food, wool, clothing, salt, iron, etc. were produced only under royal license and taxation, bank control of royal revenue led to, first, private monopolization of production of these commodities, and second, the banks' ``privatization'' and control of the functions of royal government itself.
By 1325, for example, the Peruzzi bank owned all of the revenues of the Kingdom of Naples (the entire southern half of Italy, the most productive grain belt of the entire Mediterranean area); they recruited and ran King Robert of Naples' army, collected his duties and taxes, appointed the officials of his government, above all sold all the grain from his kingdom. They egged Robert on to continual wars to conquer Sicily, because through Spain, Sicily was allied with the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, Sicily's grain production, which the Peruzzi did not control, was reduced by war.
King Robert's Anjou relatives, the Kings of Hungary, had their realm similarly ``privatized'' by the Florentine banks in the same period. In France, the Peruzzi were the cooperating bank (creditor) of the bankers to King Philip IV, the infamous Franzezi bankers ``Biche and Mouche'' (Albizzo and Mosciatto Guidi). The Bardi and Peruzzi banks, always in a ratio of 3 to 2 for investments and returns, ``privatized'' the revenues of Edward II and Edward III of England, paid the King's budget, and monopolized the sales of English wool. Rather than paying interest (usury) on his loans, Edward III gave the Bardi and Peruzzi large ``gifts'' called ``compensations'' for the hardships they were supposedly suffering in paying his budget; this was in addition to assigning them his revenues. When King Edward tried forbidding Italian merchants and bankers to expatriate their profits from England, they converted their profits into wool and stored huge amounts of wool at the ``monasteries'' of the Order of Knights Hospitalers, who were their debtors, political allies, and partners in the monopolization of the wool trade. It was the Bardi's representatives who proposed to Edward III, the wool boycott which destroyed the textile industry of Flanders -- because by 1340 it was the only way to continue to raise wool prices in a desperate attempt to increase King Edward's income flow, which was all assigned to the Bardi and Peruzzi for his debts! Genoese bankers largely controlled the royal revenues of the Kingdom of Castille in Spain, Europe's other supplier of wool, by 1325.
In the first few years of the 100 Years War, which began in 1339, the Florentine financiers imposed on England a rate of exchange which overvalued their currency, the gold florin, by 15 percent relative to English coin. Edward III, in effect, now got 15 percent less for his monopolized wool. Edward tried to counterattack by minting an English florin: the merchants, organized by the Florentines, refused it, and he was defeated. By this action, the Bardi and Peruzzi themselves, in effect, provoked Edward's famous default, and demonstrated his complete lack of sovereignty at the same time.
Even the famous account, by banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, of Edward III's default which triggered the final crash, acknowledges that his debt to the Bardi and Peruzzi included huge amounts he had already paid -- the curious arithmetic of the IMF to Third World debtors today:
``The Bardi found themselves to be his creditors in more than 180,000 marks sterling. And the Peruzzi, more than 135,000 marks sterling, which ... makes a total of 1,365,000 gold florins -- as much as a kingdom is worth. This sum included many purveyances made to them by the king in the past, but, however that may be....''
Even larger revenue flows came to the Vatican in the collection of its church contributions and tithes. Under John XXII, the Black Guelph Pope from 1316-1336, ``papal tithes skyrocketted,'' reaching the apparent value of 250,000 gold florins per year. All were collected by agents of the Venetian banks (for France, the largest source of papal revenue) and the Bardi bank (for everywhere else in Europe except Germany). They charged the Vatican sizable ``exchange fees'' to transfer the collections.
``Only they [the Venice-allied bankers] had the reserves of cash at Avignon [in France, temporary seat of the papacy for about 70 years] and in Italy, to finance papal operations. They transferred collections from Europe, and loaned them to the Popes in advance.''
Thus, Venice controlled the papal credit, and the continuing hostilities between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors.
Perpetual Rents
In Italy itself, these bankers loaned aggressively to farmers and to merchants and other owners of land, often with the ultimate purpose of owning that land. This led by the 1330s to the wildfire spread of the infamous practice of ``perpetual rents,'' whereby farmers calculated the lifetime rent-value of their land and sold that value to a bank for cash for expenses, virtually guaranteeing that they would lose the land to that bank. As the historian Raymond de Roover demonstrated, the practices by which the fourteenth century banks avoided the open crime of usury, were worse than usury.
In the Italian city-states themselves, the early years of the fourteenth century saw the assignment of more and more of the revenues of the primary taxes (gabelle, or sales and excise taxes) to the bankers and other Guelph Party bondholders. From about 1315, the Guelph abolished the income taxes (estimi) in the city, but increased them (estimi) on the surrounding rural areas into which they expanded their authority. Thus, because the bankers, merchants, and wealthy Guelph aristocrats did not pay taxes -- instead, they made loans (prestanze) to the city and commune governments. In Florence, for example, the effective interest rate on this Monte (``mound'' of debt) had reached 15 percent by 1342; the city debt was 1,800,000 gold florins, and no clerical complaints against this usury were being raised. The gabelle taxes were pledged for six years in advance to the bondholders. At that point, Duke Walter of Brienne, who had briefly become dictator of Florence, cancelled all revenue assignments to the bankers (defaulted, exactly like Edward III).
Thus were the rural, food-producing areas of Italy depopulated and ruined in the first half of the fourteenth century. The fertile Contado (county) of Pistoia around Florence, for example, which reached a population density of 6065 persons per square kilometer in 1250, had fallen to 50 persons/square kilometer in 1340; in 1400, after 50 years of Black Plague, its population density was 25 persons/square kilometer. The famines of 1314-17, 1328-9, and 1338-9 were not ``natural disasters.''
Some of the famous banks of Tuscany had failed already in the 1320s: the Asti of Siena, the Franzezi, the Scali company of Florence. In the 1330s, the biggest banks, with the exception of the Bardi, (the Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli, Buonacorsi) were losing money and plunging toward bankruptcy with the fall in production of the vital commodities which they had monopolized, and which their cancer of speculation was devouring. The Acciaiuoli and the Buonacorsi, who had been bankers of the Vatican before it left Rome, went bankrupt in 1342 with the default of the city of Florence and the first defaults of Edward III. The Peruzzi and Bardi, the world's two largest banks, went under in 1345, leaving the entire financial market of Europe and the Mediterranean shattered, with the exception of the much smaller Hanseatic League bankers of Germany, who had never allowed the Italian banks and merchant companies to enter their cities.
Already in 1340, a deadly epidemic -- unidentified but not bubonic plague -- had killed up to 10 percent of many urban populations in northern France, and 15,000 Florentines had died out of 90-100,000 that year. In 1347, the Black Plague, which had already killed 10 million in China, began to sweep over Europe.
Venice, the World's Mint
``Venice,'' wrote Braudel:
``was the greatest commercial success of the Middle Ages -- a city without industry, except for naval-military construction, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an empire through mere trading enterprise. In the fourteenth century she was in the ascendant to her greatest periods of success and power.''
And most importantly, Frederick Lane writes:
``Venice's rulers were less concerned with profits from industries than with profits from trade between regions that valued gold and silver differently.''
Between 1250 and 1350, Venetian financiers built up a worldwide financial speculation in currencies and gold and silver bullion, similar to the huge speculative cancer of ``derivatives contracts'' today. This ultimately dwarfed and controlled the speculation in debt, commodities, and trade of the Bardi, Peruzzi, et al. It took all control of coinage and currency from the monarchs of the time.
The banks of Venice were deceptively smaller and less conspicuous than the Florentine banks, but in fact had much greater resources for speculation at their disposal. The Venetian financial oligarchy as a whole, which ruled a maritime empire through small executive committees under the guise of a republic, centralized and supported its own speculative activities as a whole. The ``Republic'' built the ships and auctioned them to the merchants; escorted them with large, well-armed naval convoys of their empire, with naval commanders responsible to the ``Committee of 10'' and the magistrates for the convoys' safety. This same oligarchy maintained several public mints and did everything possible to foster the centralization of gold and silver trading and coinage in Venice.
As Frederick Lane demonstrates, this was the dominant trade of Venice by no later than 1310. Like today's ``mega-speculators'' in currencies and derivatives, such as the Morgan and Rothschild-backed George Soros and Marc Rich, the Venetian banks and bullion-dealers were backed by large pools of capital and protection.
The size of the Venetian bullion trade was huge: twice a year a ``bullion fleet'' of up to 20-30 ships under heavy naval convoy, sailed from Venice to the eastern Mediterranean coast or to Egypt, bearing primarily silver; and sailed back to Venice bearing mainly gold, including all kinds of coinage, bars, leaf, etc.
The profits of this trade put usury in the shade, though the merchants of Venice were also unbridled in that practice.
One astonishing speech to the Council of 10 by Doge Thomasso Mocenigo, from a time after the 1340s financial crash, goes further. Compare the magnitude of these figures to those discussed earlier for the Papacy, for England, for Florence (keeping in mind that the Venetian standard coin, the gold ducat, was roughly comparable to the Florentine gold florin):
``In peacetime this city puts a capital of 10 million ducats into trade throughout the world with ships and galleys, so that the profit of export is two million, the profit of import is two million, export and import together four million [from the two annual voyages, 40 percent profit --PG].... You have seen our city mint every year 1,200,000 in gold, 800,000 in silver, of which 5,000 marks (20,000 ducats) go annually to Egypt and Syria, 100,000 to your places on the mainland of Italy, to your places beyond the sea 50,000 ducats, to England and France each 100,000 ducats...''
How was this possible? Not by private enterprise, but by imperial Venetian ``state usury.'' The gold from the East was being looted out of China (until then the world's richest economy) and India by the murderous Mongol empires, or being mined in Sudan and Mali in Africa and sold to Venetian merchants, in exchange for greatly overvalued European silver. The silver from the West was being mined in Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, and sold more and more exclusively to Venetians with bottomless supplies of gold at their disposal. Coinages not of Venetian origin were disappearing, first in the Byzantine empire in the twelfth century, then in the Mongol domains, then in Europe in the fourteenth century.
Crusades and Mongols
The so-called Christian Crusades (the first in 1099, the seventh and last major one in 1291) had had only one strategic effect: expanding and strengthening the maritime commercial empire of Venice to the East. Venice provided the ships to take the Crusaders to the Middle East; Venice loaned them money, and Venetian Doges often told them what cities to try to capture or sack. Through the Crusades, Venice gained effective control of the cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Acre in Lebanon and Lajazzo in Turkey, and strengthened its domination of commerce through Constantinople. These were the coastal entry-points for the ``Silk Routes'' through the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions to China and India. During the Mongol Empires (1230-1370), these routes were virtual ``Roman Roads'' maintained by Mongol cavalry.
The empire of the Mongol Khans was for a century the largest and most murderous empire in human history. The Mongols eliminated, by slaughter and disease directly in their domains, perhaps 15 percent of the world's population, and destroyed all the greatest cities from China west to Iraq and north to Russia and Hungary -- including all the trading cities whose competition bothered Venice.
The strategic alliance between Venice and the Mongol Khans, up to and through the financial collapse of the 1340s, has been treated as a historical curiosity of the adventures of Marco Polo's family.
But it gave Venice final control of the trade to the East, and along with the trade through Egypt for the gold mined in Sudan and Mali, it gave them huge amounts of gold with which to dominate world currency trading in the decades leading to the financial disintegration of the fourteenth century.
The Mongols, in their genocidal rule of China, looted all the gold of S'ung China and of the part of India under their control, replacing it with silver currency, and for the lower castes (i.e., the Chinese), with paper money.
ET REBELOTE !
Un coup de griffe de Sarko à son copain Boutef, pour entretenir l’amitié.
Video Report From On The Ground At Site Of Olso, Norway Terrorist Attack
A Google translation of an Aftenposten article reads:
The problem is there is absolutely no motive for Al-Qaeda to launch an attack against Norway since Norway supports the formation of a Palestinian state, which is against the wishes of Israel and in support of Muslim activists world-wide.
The simple answer would be this is a false flag terror attack and the likely suspect for carrying out the operation would be the Israeli Mossad as an act of revenge for supporting Palestine.
Update 11:25 AM
BBC Reports:
CNN Updates on the Terrorist bombings.
Security expert Will Geddes says Norway could be a terror target because it’s seen as a “soft target.”
Via Newshoggers a report from a Norwegian TV site on the activities in the Labour Party youth camp may explain the killer's motive.
Automated translation:
Headline:
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/07/youthcamp-killer-may-have-anti-palestine-motive.htm
Durant toute cette guerre contre surtout la Libye, mais aussi la Syrie, les chaînes/ instruments de l’OTAN ne font que dans la désinformation en manipulant l’image, inventant des faits, créant des évènements et ce, selon des tactiques ordonnées. Ces chaînes sont devenues un élément primordial, pour désinformer, faire diversion, susciter les conflits et les divisions, créer le désordre pour faciliter la pénétration, la domination ou carrément la colonisation. Elles sont de monstrueuses machines de propagande et d’actions psychologiques de l’alliance atlanto-sionistes contre les arabes, les musulmans et les pays impénitents qui refusent la vassalité.
Le pays le plus activiste, dans le cas de la Libye, est la France de cet « idiot », de cet écervelé payeur de rançons aux terroristes, de ce scélérat nommé Sarkozy qui s’appuie du soutien de la putréfiée Ligue arabe du sinistre Amr Moussa et des fetwas de certains cheikhs de service! Quelle déchéance ont atteint la plupart des médias occidentaux et leurs alliés arabes comme surtout Aljazeera de l’Émir du Qatar, Alarabia la Saoudienne – que singent idiotement certains autres médias arabes – lorsqu’ils débitent en continu des infos ridicules qui frisent la débilité ! Après 4 mois d’intenses matraquages médiatiques, elles ont épuisées tous les sujets de mensonges. Ils ne leur restaient que les cocasseries telle cette dernière de France 24 des «stars du football libyen » qui auraient rejoint le « camp des insurgés » et qu’elle conclue ainsi : « dans un pays où le football est très prisé, les défections de ces sportifs constituent un nouveau camouflet pour le colonel Kadhafi, après celles de militaires et de ministres de haut rang ». N’ont-ils pas de journalistes de bon niveau et honnêtes, où sont-ils vraiment privés de cette liberté d’expression que l’Occident prétend défendre ?
Le métier de journaliste est souvent perverti pour servir de couverture aux actions d’espionnage. D’ailleurs, plusieurs de ceux qui se déclarent servir l’information, à Tripoli, (ne parlons pas de Benghazi) sont soupçonnés de faire de l’intelligence au profit de l’Otan. Certains ne font que chercher des infos ‘stratégiques ’ou spéculer sur les endroits ou pourrait ‘se cacher’ Kadhafi. Ils ont été bien sûr repérés, mais bizarrement laissés faire. C’est la raison pour laquelle ces « journalistes » sont souvent des cibles privilégiées dans les endroits ‘chauds’ de la planète. À ce propos qui sont réellement ces 400 ‘journalistes’ et/ou éléments travaillant pour des sociétés de ‘sécurité’ – dont Black Water- débarqués à Benghazi ?
Les articles, images, reportages et témoins «oculaires» de ces chaînes se sont avérés, avec le temps, qu’un tissu de mensonges y compris les accusations de «bombardements de civils par Kadhafi» qui avaient «justifié» l’agression comme l’affirment des journalistes, analystes et observateurs sur les lieux. Ce terrible temps, qui donne du recul, qui permet la réflexion et la bonne mesure. Ce temps qui joue toujours contre l’agresseur en mettant à nu ses visées et ses duperies. Ce temps, enfin, qui annonce souvent l’échec. Échec sur le plan financier qui avait prévu ‘quelques jours’ et nous en sommes à plus 3 autres mois ; sur le plan politique et diplomatique puisque le monde et les libyens savent maintenant les tenants et aboutissants de cette agression – qui sent le pétrole et le gaz, le véritable but de cette guerre- en plus du retrait, de cette aventure, de certains pays de la coalition puisqu’il ne reste que 2, la France et la GB, sur 28 ( Berlusconi s’est même innocenté récemment en déclarant avoir été contraint par le parlement de s’engager) et la France cherche maintenant une issue de sortie à voir la déclaration ‘claire-obscure’ de son ministre de la défense; sur le plan militaire puisque les frappes ne donnent rien de significatif si ce n’est plus de destructions et de morts civils dont les effets sont plus de haine envers l’agresseur et plus de détermination des libyens autour de leur guide. C’est aussi la débandade du côté des insurgés qui perdent du terrain et du CNT qui s’avère être un ramassis d’apostats et d’envieux qui ne cherchent qu’à accaparer les avoirs du peuple libyen à l’étranger en plus d’être divisé et sans principes . Tous se sont constitués une fortune en détournant les « aides » et/ou en faisant main-basse sur le trésor de Benghazi laissant la population sans revenus et dans le besoin et ce, avec l’assentiment de l’Occident qui ne cherchent pas, dans ce cas, l’origine de cet argent. Des informations font état d’un projet du CNT d’imprimer une ‘monnaie de singe’ pour contenir la colère grandissante des Benghazis qui réclament « leurs droits ». C’est-à-dire les salaires, entre autres, que le gouvernement libyen affirme, avec preuves à l’appui, avoir versé pour les 6 mois premiers mois au trésor de Benghazi. Où est donc passé cet argent qui devait permettre aux benghazis, outragés, de vivre décemment ? Malgré cela, les responsables libyens déclarent s’employer à prendre toutes les mesures pour assurer les salaires du 2ème semestre. L’échec se constate aussi dans cette volonté d’armer les insurgés – en violation des 2 résolutions – par la France en parachutant des armes aux insurgés du djebel Nefoussa (dont une partie est récupérée par les forces loyalistes) et par le Qatar avec la capture, par l’armée libyenne, d’un bateau – portant pavillon tunisien – bourré d’armes estampillées « armée du Qatar » (en anglais). L’échec s’observe enfin dans les informations de ces chaînes, battues en brèche par les chaînes libyennes avec des preuves incontestables, au point où elles sont devenues une référence crédible mais aussi des cibles en empêchant la diffusion des chaînes libyennes sur ‘Arabsat’ (3 chaînes sur les 7 déjà ont des difficultés de diffusion). La vedette médiatique qui met à nu quotidiennement le complot, en direct sur Jamahiria sat, est un certain Youssef Amine Chakir, ex-opposant qui avait côtoyé l’opposition pour avoir vécu avec ses membres durant plus de 20 ans aux États-Unis. Il dit les avoir quitté pour leur hypocrisie et leurs accointances avec la NED/CIA et le MI6 ainsi que leur changement de nationalité (le dernier ‘converti’ est le président du CNT, Abdeldjalil, qui vient d’obtenir la nationalité Turc selon la presse de ce pays). Il ne cesse dans son émission d’expliquer avec détails leurs frasques et leur félonie par l’image et documents à l’appui ! Maîtrisant l’arabe et l’anglais, ses analyses politiques pertinentes et ses commentaires de l’information internationale ont fait de lui le personnage le plus écouté sur la scène intérieure et internationale et le plus redouté par le CNT et l’Otan, en leur donnant du fil à retordre, au point où on ne trouve, pour le contrer, que les qualificatifs de « traître (?) » ou de « charlatan » ; à cause du chapelet qu’il porte et les préceptes de l’Islam qu’il cite fréquemment ou bien des mensonges qu’il dévoile ou des déductions et prévisions qui se réalisent ? Les plus visés et fustigés sont Abdeljalil, Bouchena, Hafter, Younes, Tarhouni, Chemmam, Chelgham , Dogha, Djibril,Koussa, Logelli, Fethi et Hassouna. Ces « révolutionnaires », qui sollicitent des frappes destructrices de ce qu’ils disent être leur pays, apparaissent comme de vulgaires renégats, de méprisants traitres aimant le pouvoir, l’argent et la bonne chair.
Il y a aussi et surtout ces manifestations monstre (du 1er juillet) pour la défense de l’unité de la Libye autour du Guide et anti-Otan, sur la Place verte, rassemblant près de 2 millions de Libyens exhibant un drapeau vert de 4Km 500 suivie de celle du 08 juillet à Sebha du sud, arborant un drapeau de 6 Km qui a rassemblé au moins 500 000 de personnes – et l’on prévoit 3 autres à Laadjilet le jeudi, à Zliten le vendredi et à Azzaouiya le samedi – qui ont mis les agresseurs dans un profond désarroi ; car c’est toute la stratégie construite sur le mensonge et le faux qui s’effondre comme un château de carte. Les réactions de certains, sur ces chaînes, montrent une certaine amertume et d’une certaine façon un sentiment de défaite cuisante. Certains opposants soutiennent, par exemple, toute honte bue, la version débile que la transmission en direct de celle de Tripoli n’était pas « vraie » et les images un « montage » ; certains avancent le chiffre de 5000 à 15000 personnes et bien d’autres inepties alors que pour porter ce drapeau il faut déjà au moins 3000 personnes (à raison d’une personne chaque 3 m, des 2 côtés). Ils savent qu’ils sont incapables de mobiliser 2000 personnes à Benghazi devenue ville morte qui s’est vidée d’une grande partie de sa population ; fuyant le ‘nouveau régime’.
La réalité est que l’Otan avec ses « révolutionnaires » de pacotilles – composés de voyous, de truands, de prisonniers libérés de Benghazi et de Guantanamo, d’islamistes graciés, d’éléments de l’AQMI, de jeunes désœuvrés et de sots, de félons de dissidence récente, de renégats, d’opposants inconnus de dernières minutes- montre des signes d’échec, voire de déroute face à un petit pays (qui n’a jamais agressé quiconque) de 7 millions d’habitants qui vivaient correctement, mieux que beaucoup de pays Européens y compris la France. La réalité est que l’on s’évertue à imputer les méfaits de la coalition, y compris les viols dont sont coupables les insurgés, aux « brigades de Kadhafi » expression fallacieuse visant à discréditer l’armée régulière de la Libye qui reste toujours fidèle. La réalité est que l’Otan s’est retrouvée face à un peuple résistant – qu’encadre moralement de puissantes tribus que ne peut comprendre l’Occident – qu’il bombarde au missile pour le « protéger » lui dit-il , à un vrai Guide farouchement soutenu par son peuple et qui n’est pas du tout celui que l’on veut nous faire croire ; c’est-à-dire ce ‘tyran’, ce ‘despote’, ce ‘fou de Tripoli’, ce ‘dictateur’ qui s’avère plutôt intelligent et bien au fait des manigances impérialo-colonialistes, des tromperies de palais et des corruptions de l’Occident érigées en système et particulièrement fervent défenseur des opprimés, qui a fait de la renaissance de l’Afrique son cheval de bataille . Faire croire que Kadhafi est trahi de tous côtés ou qu’il n’a plus de « légitimité populaire » est de la désinformation de bas niveau. Si cela était vrai, il y a longtemps qu’il aurait été évincé. De plus, il est difficile de faire admettre que toute la population s’était liguée contre lui et du même souffle expliquer pourquoi des centaines de milliers lui manifestent leur soutien, pourquoi il ne craint pas d’armer la population, pourquoi il se permet des tours – en cortège et en voiture découverte – dans les rues et ruelles de la capitale sous les applaudissements de milliers de citoyens dont beaucoup sont armés, pourquoi les habitants de plusieurs agglomérations ont violemment répondu par les armes aux rebelles qui avaient tenté de conquérir leur localité , pourquoi Benghazi et récemment Tobrouk, mais aussi Derna – du tueur « Gambo » que soutien l’Otan – se révoltent. Mais l’équation insoluble est que l’Otan n’osera jamais prendre le risque d’une opération militaire terrestre avec ses soldats car, les insurgés, encore dans la croyance qu’ils combattent pour ce qu’on leur a fait croire « juste et légitime » (selon les déclarations des capturés), s’apercevant qu’ils ont été abusés, se retournerons vite contre leur « employeur » qui, le comble, les aura lui-même armé. Terrible dilemme ! La réalité, enfin, est que la stratégie de l’Otan était construite sur du mensonge et du faux.
Si la Libye était un pays « puissant », le clown Sarkozy – qui fait le plus de zèle dans cette aventure – n’oserait jamais s’y aventurer. On se croit toujours fort devant les faibles dit-on. Cet apprenti guerrier, que guide par le nez ce « philosophe » sioniste, fait montre dans cette « aventure libyenne » d’une pseudo force, en la confondant à la puissance de la France Gaullienne, alors qu’il n’est qu’un myrmidon, un roitelet qui sera vite jeté aux oubliettes sauf pour nous rappeler une autre page sombre de l’Histoire de France. Nous avons bien vu ses mesquineries quand il est devant ses maîtres. Il est regrettable que la crédibilité et l’honneur de la vraie France ait été engagé dans cette péripétie sans issue et sans intérêts que pour ceux qui lui ont fait sous-traiter cette « opération Libye ». On découvre aussi, en lui, le plus mauvais Président de l’histoire récente de France. Franchement, ce pays ne mérite vraiment pas un tel représentant qui a sali son histoire et compromis son avenir.
Ces médias de service, ne parlent de faits réels que s’ils sont impossibles à dissimiler, mais avec une forme absconse parfois absurde et sous conditionnel. C’est ainsi que ces chaînes « informent » des 5400 (au 07/07/2011) frappes de missiles qui ont détruit les maisons, touché des hôpitaux, des écoles, des collèges, l’université, des bâtiments administratifs, les commissariats, les services chargés de la corruption, la cité de l’enfance, les infrastructures de bases, des réseaux de communication, les check-point, les dépôts de carburant à Bréga etc. – tuant et blessant des milliers de personnes civiles parmi eux des femmes des vieillards, des hommes de religions dans leur lieu de culte, des employés, des enfants, des bébés – des tentatives visant l’assassinat des personnalités politiques en particulier Kadhafi et son vieux compagnon Lakhouildi, mais atteignant leurs enfants et petits-enfants etc. Pour toutes ces cibles, l’Otan donne l’’excuse’ d’« erreurs » ou le prétexte de « lieu de commandement ».
Que reste-t-il du droit international, des conventions quand ils sont foulés du pied ou bafoués par les pays puissants qui les ont érigé et dont-on exige leur respect aux pays pauvres ou faibles, mais riches en matières premières ? Qui désormais luttera contre le « terrorisme » quand l’Otan s’en sert ou le suscite à l’ «occasion » pour ses intérêts - dans le cas de la Libye entre autre – ou quand la France le finance en payant des rançons par exemple ? Al Qaïda comme dit un analyste «c’est seulement où et quand ça arrange les États Unis». Qui va désormais faire confiance à ces institutions/organisations internationales dites des « droits de l’homme », des « libertés », de « justice » et tutti-quanti quand elles sont détournées pour les rendre auxiliaires et faire valoir des lobbyings imposants leur politique, leurs objectifs, leur idéologie par la force souvent, quand ces ‘instances’ sont devenues des attrape-nigauds pour les pays africains surtout.
Réitérons ceci : Quand l’agresseur n’a pas de morale ou de règle, il est certain qu’il est moins tenté d’attaquer ou de menacer s’il sent que la victime potentielle peut lui infliger les mêmes dommages en usant des mêmes méthodes avec moins de moyens. L’agresseur s’encourage toujours des règles qu’il n’applique pas dans l’impunité. Mais s’il est certain qu’à chaque action criminelle la réponse sera du même acabit, le monde serait moins trouble, plus raisonnable. On ne voit aucune différence entre des États qui tuent des civils en les bombardant au missile ou font assassiner des chefs d’ État ou des politiques en usant de gros moyens et des individus ou groupes d’individus qui déposent des bombes dans des endroits public ou assassinent des personnalités politiques en usant de peu de moyens. La nuance est que les 1er bafouent les règles qu’eux-mêmes ont instauré, destinées en fait à les protéger, alors que les seconds ne font que riposter à une injustice, à un outrage en violant, comme eux, les mêmes règles afin de leur infliger, par revanche, les mêmes préjudices.
Il est logique qu’avec ce qui se déploie en Libye et les tueries programmées de l’Otan qui s’y déroulent que des dizaines de groupes de jeunes des villes et des tribus annoncent leur engagement aux combats ou jurent leur vengeance sur les responsables (et leur famille) de la tragédie libyenne. Quand on connait la mentalité bédouine en particulier, l’affront ne s’éteindra jamais s’il n’est pas réparé de façon légale et juste. Les familles touchées dans leur chair riposteront tôt ou tard, sans aucun doute. Même Kadhafi, pour le cas de la Libye, n’y pourra rien faire. Cette pratique n’est pas plus sordide que ne l’est le comportement moyenâgeux et sauvage de ceux qui se prétendent civilisés. Quand la loi de la force se substitue à la force de la loi, quels moyens légaux laisse-t-on pour se protéger, quand les lois et règles internationales sont bafouées, quand les instances internationales, y compris l’ONU, sont détournées pour servir les pays puissants.
Cette aventure en Libye a mis à l’épreuve les règles internationales de l’ONU qui s’avèrent n’être érigées que pour mettre au pas, par la menace ou la force les pays qui n’entrent pas dans le giron occidental – c’est-à-dire dans les fondements euro-atlantistes et mondialistes en les obligeant à adopter leurs principes politico-philosophiques – et non pour plus de justice dans le monde après l’effroi de la 2ème guerre mondiale. La SDN qu’Hitler a piétinée a été remplacée par l’ONU. Voilà que la même attitude se renouvelle avec l’Otan. Mais pour quelle autres organisations et regroupements cette fois ? L’avenir proche nous le dira. Ce qui est sûr c’est que l’ONU, ses instances et ses organisations actuelles répondent plus aux intérêts des États puissants et oligarchies financières en légitimant les agressions, les invasions pour accaparer les richesses des pays faibles en empêchant leur progrès et leur indépendance économique et sociale qu’à un souci d’équité ou de prévention des conflits pour l’équilibre mondial.
Si la raison humaine arrive au point où elle exige à la victime de financer ou de lui rembourser les dépenses de l’agression c’est qu’il y a matière à se poser des questions graves sur le niveau de déchéance des esprits de ceux qui mènent le monde.
Le pays le plus activiste, dans le cas de la Libye, est la France de cet « idiot », de cet écervelé payeur de rançons aux terroristes, de ce scélérat nommé Sarkozy qui s’appuie du soutien de la putréfiée Ligue arabe du sinistre Amr Moussa et des fetwas de certains cheikhs de service! Quelle déchéance ont atteint la plupart des médias occidentaux et leurs alliés arabes comme surtout Aljazeera de l’Émir du Qatar, Alarabia la Saoudienne – que singent idiotement certains autres médias arabes – lorsqu’ils débitent en continu des infos ridicules qui frisent la débilité ! Après 4 mois d’intenses matraquages médiatiques, elles ont épuisées tous les sujets de mensonges. Ils ne leur restaient que les cocasseries telle cette dernière de France 24 des «stars du football libyen » qui auraient rejoint le « camp des insurgés » et qu’elle conclue ainsi : « dans un pays où le football est très prisé, les défections de ces sportifs constituent un nouveau camouflet pour le colonel Kadhafi, après celles de militaires et de ministres de haut rang ». N’ont-ils pas de journalistes de bon niveau et honnêtes, où sont-ils vraiment privés de cette liberté d’expression que l’Occident prétend défendre ?
Le métier de journaliste est souvent perverti pour servir de couverture aux actions d’espionnage. D’ailleurs, plusieurs de ceux qui se déclarent servir l’information, à Tripoli, (ne parlons pas de Benghazi) sont soupçonnés de faire de l’intelligence au profit de l’Otan. Certains ne font que chercher des infos ‘stratégiques ’ou spéculer sur les endroits ou pourrait ‘se cacher’ Kadhafi. Ils ont été bien sûr repérés, mais bizarrement laissés faire. C’est la raison pour laquelle ces « journalistes » sont souvent des cibles privilégiées dans les endroits ‘chauds’ de la planète. À ce propos qui sont réellement ces 400 ‘journalistes’ et/ou éléments travaillant pour des sociétés de ‘sécurité’ – dont Black Water- débarqués à Benghazi ?
Les articles, images, reportages et témoins «oculaires» de ces chaînes se sont avérés, avec le temps, qu’un tissu de mensonges y compris les accusations de «bombardements de civils par Kadhafi» qui avaient «justifié» l’agression comme l’affirment des journalistes, analystes et observateurs sur les lieux. Ce terrible temps, qui donne du recul, qui permet la réflexion et la bonne mesure. Ce temps qui joue toujours contre l’agresseur en mettant à nu ses visées et ses duperies. Ce temps, enfin, qui annonce souvent l’échec. Échec sur le plan financier qui avait prévu ‘quelques jours’ et nous en sommes à plus 3 autres mois ; sur le plan politique et diplomatique puisque le monde et les libyens savent maintenant les tenants et aboutissants de cette agression – qui sent le pétrole et le gaz, le véritable but de cette guerre- en plus du retrait, de cette aventure, de certains pays de la coalition puisqu’il ne reste que 2, la France et la GB, sur 28 ( Berlusconi s’est même innocenté récemment en déclarant avoir été contraint par le parlement de s’engager) et la France cherche maintenant une issue de sortie à voir la déclaration ‘claire-obscure’ de son ministre de la défense; sur le plan militaire puisque les frappes ne donnent rien de significatif si ce n’est plus de destructions et de morts civils dont les effets sont plus de haine envers l’agresseur et plus de détermination des libyens autour de leur guide. C’est aussi la débandade du côté des insurgés qui perdent du terrain et du CNT qui s’avère être un ramassis d’apostats et d’envieux qui ne cherchent qu’à accaparer les avoirs du peuple libyen à l’étranger en plus d’être divisé et sans principes . Tous se sont constitués une fortune en détournant les « aides » et/ou en faisant main-basse sur le trésor de Benghazi laissant la population sans revenus et dans le besoin et ce, avec l’assentiment de l’Occident qui ne cherchent pas, dans ce cas, l’origine de cet argent. Des informations font état d’un projet du CNT d’imprimer une ‘monnaie de singe’ pour contenir la colère grandissante des Benghazis qui réclament « leurs droits ». C’est-à-dire les salaires, entre autres, que le gouvernement libyen affirme, avec preuves à l’appui, avoir versé pour les 6 mois premiers mois au trésor de Benghazi. Où est donc passé cet argent qui devait permettre aux benghazis, outragés, de vivre décemment ? Malgré cela, les responsables libyens déclarent s’employer à prendre toutes les mesures pour assurer les salaires du 2ème semestre. L’échec se constate aussi dans cette volonté d’armer les insurgés – en violation des 2 résolutions – par la France en parachutant des armes aux insurgés du djebel Nefoussa (dont une partie est récupérée par les forces loyalistes) et par le Qatar avec la capture, par l’armée libyenne, d’un bateau – portant pavillon tunisien – bourré d’armes estampillées « armée du Qatar » (en anglais). L’échec s’observe enfin dans les informations de ces chaînes, battues en brèche par les chaînes libyennes avec des preuves incontestables, au point où elles sont devenues une référence crédible mais aussi des cibles en empêchant la diffusion des chaînes libyennes sur ‘Arabsat’ (3 chaînes sur les 7 déjà ont des difficultés de diffusion). La vedette médiatique qui met à nu quotidiennement le complot, en direct sur Jamahiria sat, est un certain Youssef Amine Chakir, ex-opposant qui avait côtoyé l’opposition pour avoir vécu avec ses membres durant plus de 20 ans aux États-Unis. Il dit les avoir quitté pour leur hypocrisie et leurs accointances avec la NED/CIA et le MI6 ainsi que leur changement de nationalité (le dernier ‘converti’ est le président du CNT, Abdeldjalil, qui vient d’obtenir la nationalité Turc selon la presse de ce pays). Il ne cesse dans son émission d’expliquer avec détails leurs frasques et leur félonie par l’image et documents à l’appui ! Maîtrisant l’arabe et l’anglais, ses analyses politiques pertinentes et ses commentaires de l’information internationale ont fait de lui le personnage le plus écouté sur la scène intérieure et internationale et le plus redouté par le CNT et l’Otan, en leur donnant du fil à retordre, au point où on ne trouve, pour le contrer, que les qualificatifs de « traître (?) » ou de « charlatan » ; à cause du chapelet qu’il porte et les préceptes de l’Islam qu’il cite fréquemment ou bien des mensonges qu’il dévoile ou des déductions et prévisions qui se réalisent ? Les plus visés et fustigés sont Abdeljalil, Bouchena, Hafter, Younes, Tarhouni, Chemmam, Chelgham , Dogha, Djibril,Koussa, Logelli, Fethi et Hassouna. Ces « révolutionnaires », qui sollicitent des frappes destructrices de ce qu’ils disent être leur pays, apparaissent comme de vulgaires renégats, de méprisants traitres aimant le pouvoir, l’argent et la bonne chair.
Il y a aussi et surtout ces manifestations monstre (du 1er juillet) pour la défense de l’unité de la Libye autour du Guide et anti-Otan, sur la Place verte, rassemblant près de 2 millions de Libyens exhibant un drapeau vert de 4Km 500 suivie de celle du 08 juillet à Sebha du sud, arborant un drapeau de 6 Km qui a rassemblé au moins 500 000 de personnes – et l’on prévoit 3 autres à Laadjilet le jeudi, à Zliten le vendredi et à Azzaouiya le samedi – qui ont mis les agresseurs dans un profond désarroi ; car c’est toute la stratégie construite sur le mensonge et le faux qui s’effondre comme un château de carte. Les réactions de certains, sur ces chaînes, montrent une certaine amertume et d’une certaine façon un sentiment de défaite cuisante. Certains opposants soutiennent, par exemple, toute honte bue, la version débile que la transmission en direct de celle de Tripoli n’était pas « vraie » et les images un « montage » ; certains avancent le chiffre de 5000 à 15000 personnes et bien d’autres inepties alors que pour porter ce drapeau il faut déjà au moins 3000 personnes (à raison d’une personne chaque 3 m, des 2 côtés). Ils savent qu’ils sont incapables de mobiliser 2000 personnes à Benghazi devenue ville morte qui s’est vidée d’une grande partie de sa population ; fuyant le ‘nouveau régime’.
La réalité est que l’Otan avec ses « révolutionnaires » de pacotilles – composés de voyous, de truands, de prisonniers libérés de Benghazi et de Guantanamo, d’islamistes graciés, d’éléments de l’AQMI, de jeunes désœuvrés et de sots, de félons de dissidence récente, de renégats, d’opposants inconnus de dernières minutes- montre des signes d’échec, voire de déroute face à un petit pays (qui n’a jamais agressé quiconque) de 7 millions d’habitants qui vivaient correctement, mieux que beaucoup de pays Européens y compris la France. La réalité est que l’on s’évertue à imputer les méfaits de la coalition, y compris les viols dont sont coupables les insurgés, aux « brigades de Kadhafi » expression fallacieuse visant à discréditer l’armée régulière de la Libye qui reste toujours fidèle. La réalité est que l’Otan s’est retrouvée face à un peuple résistant – qu’encadre moralement de puissantes tribus que ne peut comprendre l’Occident – qu’il bombarde au missile pour le « protéger » lui dit-il , à un vrai Guide farouchement soutenu par son peuple et qui n’est pas du tout celui que l’on veut nous faire croire ; c’est-à-dire ce ‘tyran’, ce ‘despote’, ce ‘fou de Tripoli’, ce ‘dictateur’ qui s’avère plutôt intelligent et bien au fait des manigances impérialo-colonialistes, des tromperies de palais et des corruptions de l’Occident érigées en système et particulièrement fervent défenseur des opprimés, qui a fait de la renaissance de l’Afrique son cheval de bataille . Faire croire que Kadhafi est trahi de tous côtés ou qu’il n’a plus de « légitimité populaire » est de la désinformation de bas niveau. Si cela était vrai, il y a longtemps qu’il aurait été évincé. De plus, il est difficile de faire admettre que toute la population s’était liguée contre lui et du même souffle expliquer pourquoi des centaines de milliers lui manifestent leur soutien, pourquoi il ne craint pas d’armer la population, pourquoi il se permet des tours – en cortège et en voiture découverte – dans les rues et ruelles de la capitale sous les applaudissements de milliers de citoyens dont beaucoup sont armés, pourquoi les habitants de plusieurs agglomérations ont violemment répondu par les armes aux rebelles qui avaient tenté de conquérir leur localité , pourquoi Benghazi et récemment Tobrouk, mais aussi Derna – du tueur « Gambo » que soutien l’Otan – se révoltent. Mais l’équation insoluble est que l’Otan n’osera jamais prendre le risque d’une opération militaire terrestre avec ses soldats car, les insurgés, encore dans la croyance qu’ils combattent pour ce qu’on leur a fait croire « juste et légitime » (selon les déclarations des capturés), s’apercevant qu’ils ont été abusés, se retournerons vite contre leur « employeur » qui, le comble, les aura lui-même armé. Terrible dilemme ! La réalité, enfin, est que la stratégie de l’Otan était construite sur du mensonge et du faux.
Si la Libye était un pays « puissant », le clown Sarkozy – qui fait le plus de zèle dans cette aventure – n’oserait jamais s’y aventurer. On se croit toujours fort devant les faibles dit-on. Cet apprenti guerrier, que guide par le nez ce « philosophe » sioniste, fait montre dans cette « aventure libyenne » d’une pseudo force, en la confondant à la puissance de la France Gaullienne, alors qu’il n’est qu’un myrmidon, un roitelet qui sera vite jeté aux oubliettes sauf pour nous rappeler une autre page sombre de l’Histoire de France. Nous avons bien vu ses mesquineries quand il est devant ses maîtres. Il est regrettable que la crédibilité et l’honneur de la vraie France ait été engagé dans cette péripétie sans issue et sans intérêts que pour ceux qui lui ont fait sous-traiter cette « opération Libye ». On découvre aussi, en lui, le plus mauvais Président de l’histoire récente de France. Franchement, ce pays ne mérite vraiment pas un tel représentant qui a sali son histoire et compromis son avenir.
Ces médias de service, ne parlent de faits réels que s’ils sont impossibles à dissimiler, mais avec une forme absconse parfois absurde et sous conditionnel. C’est ainsi que ces chaînes « informent » des 5400 (au 07/07/2011) frappes de missiles qui ont détruit les maisons, touché des hôpitaux, des écoles, des collèges, l’université, des bâtiments administratifs, les commissariats, les services chargés de la corruption, la cité de l’enfance, les infrastructures de bases, des réseaux de communication, les check-point, les dépôts de carburant à Bréga etc. – tuant et blessant des milliers de personnes civiles parmi eux des femmes des vieillards, des hommes de religions dans leur lieu de culte, des employés, des enfants, des bébés – des tentatives visant l’assassinat des personnalités politiques en particulier Kadhafi et son vieux compagnon Lakhouildi, mais atteignant leurs enfants et petits-enfants etc. Pour toutes ces cibles, l’Otan donne l’’excuse’ d’« erreurs » ou le prétexte de « lieu de commandement ».
Que reste-t-il du droit international, des conventions quand ils sont foulés du pied ou bafoués par les pays puissants qui les ont érigé et dont-on exige leur respect aux pays pauvres ou faibles, mais riches en matières premières ? Qui désormais luttera contre le « terrorisme » quand l’Otan s’en sert ou le suscite à l’ «occasion » pour ses intérêts - dans le cas de la Libye entre autre – ou quand la France le finance en payant des rançons par exemple ? Al Qaïda comme dit un analyste «c’est seulement où et quand ça arrange les États Unis». Qui va désormais faire confiance à ces institutions/organisations internationales dites des « droits de l’homme », des « libertés », de « justice » et tutti-quanti quand elles sont détournées pour les rendre auxiliaires et faire valoir des lobbyings imposants leur politique, leurs objectifs, leur idéologie par la force souvent, quand ces ‘instances’ sont devenues des attrape-nigauds pour les pays africains surtout.
Réitérons ceci : Quand l’agresseur n’a pas de morale ou de règle, il est certain qu’il est moins tenté d’attaquer ou de menacer s’il sent que la victime potentielle peut lui infliger les mêmes dommages en usant des mêmes méthodes avec moins de moyens. L’agresseur s’encourage toujours des règles qu’il n’applique pas dans l’impunité. Mais s’il est certain qu’à chaque action criminelle la réponse sera du même acabit, le monde serait moins trouble, plus raisonnable. On ne voit aucune différence entre des États qui tuent des civils en les bombardant au missile ou font assassiner des chefs d’ État ou des politiques en usant de gros moyens et des individus ou groupes d’individus qui déposent des bombes dans des endroits public ou assassinent des personnalités politiques en usant de peu de moyens. La nuance est que les 1er bafouent les règles qu’eux-mêmes ont instauré, destinées en fait à les protéger, alors que les seconds ne font que riposter à une injustice, à un outrage en violant, comme eux, les mêmes règles afin de leur infliger, par revanche, les mêmes préjudices.
Il est logique qu’avec ce qui se déploie en Libye et les tueries programmées de l’Otan qui s’y déroulent que des dizaines de groupes de jeunes des villes et des tribus annoncent leur engagement aux combats ou jurent leur vengeance sur les responsables (et leur famille) de la tragédie libyenne. Quand on connait la mentalité bédouine en particulier, l’affront ne s’éteindra jamais s’il n’est pas réparé de façon légale et juste. Les familles touchées dans leur chair riposteront tôt ou tard, sans aucun doute. Même Kadhafi, pour le cas de la Libye, n’y pourra rien faire. Cette pratique n’est pas plus sordide que ne l’est le comportement moyenâgeux et sauvage de ceux qui se prétendent civilisés. Quand la loi de la force se substitue à la force de la loi, quels moyens légaux laisse-t-on pour se protéger, quand les lois et règles internationales sont bafouées, quand les instances internationales, y compris l’ONU, sont détournées pour servir les pays puissants.
Cette aventure en Libye a mis à l’épreuve les règles internationales de l’ONU qui s’avèrent n’être érigées que pour mettre au pas, par la menace ou la force les pays qui n’entrent pas dans le giron occidental – c’est-à-dire dans les fondements euro-atlantistes et mondialistes en les obligeant à adopter leurs principes politico-philosophiques – et non pour plus de justice dans le monde après l’effroi de la 2ème guerre mondiale. La SDN qu’Hitler a piétinée a été remplacée par l’ONU. Voilà que la même attitude se renouvelle avec l’Otan. Mais pour quelle autres organisations et regroupements cette fois ? L’avenir proche nous le dira. Ce qui est sûr c’est que l’ONU, ses instances et ses organisations actuelles répondent plus aux intérêts des États puissants et oligarchies financières en légitimant les agressions, les invasions pour accaparer les richesses des pays faibles en empêchant leur progrès et leur indépendance économique et sociale qu’à un souci d’équité ou de prévention des conflits pour l’équilibre mondial.
Si la raison humaine arrive au point où elle exige à la victime de financer ou de lui rembourser les dépenses de l’agression c’est qu’il y a matière à se poser des questions graves sur le niveau de déchéance des esprits de ceux qui mènent le monde.
Amar Djerrad
12 juillet 2011
Murdoch is directly linked to the next israeli nuclear false flag in Europe. Murdoch, the Zionist Jewish mafia from Russia and Eastern Europe are heavily involved in the Litvinenko affair with the british MOD, France-Israel's FBI (DCRI), and German secret services (BND). All these services are directly managed by dual citizens british-french-german-israelis!
Read also Rupert you Israeli whore
Media Mogul’s Sinister Links to September 11
The Aussie Connection
By Christopher Bollyn,
With close connections to the key individuals who had control of the twin towers shortly before they were destroyed, the obvious question is: Did Rupert Murdoch have prior knowledge of the impending Sept. 11, 2001, attacks?
Rupert Murdoch sits at the helm of News Corp. and is described as television’s “most powerful man in the world with the capacity to reach more than 110 million viewers across four continents.” Murdoch’s network owns more than 175 newspapers, journals and magazines on three continents, publishes 40 million papers a week and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, Murdoch owns, among other things, The New York Post and the Fox News network.
An old, close friend of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Murdoch openly supports the extremist Likud Party of Israel and the Anglo-American “war on terrorism.”
What is less well known, however, is Murdoch’s involvement in the production of a television program in 2000, which foreshadowed the attacks on the twin towers, and his personal connections to the key individuals who came into possession of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction.
Having produced a film about a 9-11-like attack on the World Trade Center and being closely connected to the individuals who leased and insured the WTC against precisely such an attack is indicative of some prior knowledge.
Calls to Murdoch’s office by American Free Press to ask what he may have known about the possibility of such an attack were not returned.
‘THE LONE GUNMEN’
On March 4, 2001, Fox TV, a branch of Murdoch’s media empire, broadcast the pilot episode of a program called “The Lone Gunmen.” A spin-off of the popular “X-Files,” Murdoch-owned companies produced the pilot episode in Vancouver, Canada, and New York from March 20 to April 7, 2000.
The pilot episode depicted a passenger aircraft being hijacked by a hostile computer hacker and flown directly into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
The climactic sequence actually shows the plane heading for one of the twin towers; but, at the very last moment, the pilots are able to regain control of the plane and avoid the building by inches.
After 9-11, however, rather than being discussed as a prescient warning of the possibility of such an attack, the pilot episode of “The Lone Gunmen” series was quietly forgotten.
Although an estimated 13.2 million viewers watched the pilot episode, very few recalled the program when life imitated art six months later on 9-11.
“I woke up on Sept. 11 and saw [the actual attack] on TV, and the first thing I thought of was ‘The Lone Gunmen’,” Frank Spotnitz, one of the program’s four executive producers, said. “But then in the weeks and months that followed, almost no one noticed the connection.”
Spotnitz, John Shiban, Vince Gilligan and Chris Carter are all listed as executive producers of the program.
“What’s disturbing about it to me is, you think as a fiction writer that if you can imagine this scenario, then the people in power in the government who are there to imagine disaster scenarios can imagine it, too,” Spotnitz said.
Robert McLachlan, director of photography, received an award from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers on March 31, 2001, for his work on the pilot episode.
“It was odd that nobody referenced it,” McLachlan told American Free Press about the uncanny similarity between the television program he filmed and the reality of 9-11. “You’re the first person who mentioned it,” he claimed. “In the ensuing press nobody mentioned that [9-11] echoed something that had been seen before.”
AFP asked McLachlan about the creative talent behind the pilot program. “John Shiban was primarily the creator,” McLachlan said, adding, “Chris Carter was not there.” Carter is well known for his production of the “X-Files.”
“It’s their baby,” Carter said about “The Lone Gunmen.” Carter reportedly had “a minor part” in the production. Carter and Shiban could not be reached for comment.
CONNECTIONS
Murdoch’s sympathies for Zionism and Israel are well known and a matter of record. As New York Gov. George Pataki said, “There is no newspaper in the United States more supportive of Israel than the [Murdoch’s] New York Post.”
It is through his involvement in Zionist organizations that Murdoch is seen to be connected to the key individuals who arranged the privatization of the World Trade Center shortly before its destruction. These key individuals include Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy, the lease holders of the WTC property, and Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg, who supervised the transfer of the leases.
Shortly before 9-11, Silverstein Properties and Lowy’s Westfield America obtained 99-year leases on the WTC. Silverstein Properties controlled the 10.6 million-square-foot complex, which included the twin towers office buildings and two nine-story office buildings. Lowy leased the shopping concourse called the Mall at the World Trade Center,
“Six weeks before the WTC towers were destroyed, the Port Authority completed the process of leasing them for 99 years to Larry Silverstein, the developer who had built the World Trade Center. Simultaneously, the retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America, the U.S. division of an Australian company that is one of the world’s largest operators of shopping malls.” Paul Goldberger wrote in New Yorker, May 20, 2002.
“Silverstein and Westfield were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed, and Westfield has the right to expand the retail space by 30 percent,” Goldberger wrote.
Silverstein is suing to obtain $7.2 billion in insurance money for the destroyed World Trade Center, property he had leased with a reported $100 million down payment of borrowed funds.
Murdoch has been honored by, and belongs to Zionist organizations in which Silverstein, Lowy and Eisenberg hold senior positions, or which they fund. These organizations include the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), and the New York-based Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.
Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held senior leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist “Charity” organization, to which Murdoch and Lowy generously contribute. In 1997, Henry Kissinger presented Murdoch with the UJA’s award for “Humanitarian of the Year.”
Silverstein is a former chairman of UJA. This organization raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for a network of Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel. Eisenberg, who was instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein, is on the Planning Board of UJA.
Eisenberg in his role with the Port Authority was the key person who negotiated the 99-year leases for Silverstein and Frank Lowy’s Westfield America, who were in fact low-bidders for the lease on the 110-story towers and the retail mall.
Murdoch and the Czechoslovakian-born Israeli commando Frank Lowy, a former fighter in Israel’s Golani Brigade who went to Australia in the 1950s, have had a long friendship, which Murdoch recounted during an American Australian Association fund-raising dinner in honor of Frank’s son, Peter S. Lowy, in New York on November 20, 2002.
THE ZIONIST MURDOCH
Sam Kiley, veteran journalist on the Middle East for The Times (UK), wrote about the man who took over the famous British paper: “Murdoch is a close friend of Ariel Sharon.” Kiley said Murdoch’s friendship with Sharon, led senior staff at the paper to rewrite important copy.
“Murdoch’s executives were so afraid of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop of tracking down and photographing the unit in the Israeli army that killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece ‘without mentioning the dead kid,’ ” Kiley wrote. “After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit.”
The visit with Sharon included a trip for Murdoch and his editors from New York and London that “took them on a bird’s-eye tour of Israel aboard a helicopter gunship, flying over the Golan Heights, West Bank and settlements.”
Nouvelles preuves que le gouvernement d'occupation de la France-Israel est implique dans le prochain 9/11, ces attentats nucleaires qui permettront a Israel de prendre le pouvoir en organisant les crises economiques, le chaos, les guerres civiles et en poussant l'Europe dans une nouvelle guerre mondiale. 'L'oeuvre de Dieu' selon Netanyahu, Sarkozy, Cameron, Merkel, et Bankfein de Goldman Sachs
La guerre civile est une realité en Europe, face a la chute programmée de Sarkozy, Cameron, Merkel, Israel choisit le chaos.
Mise a jour 18 Juillet 2011, 15H10: Sarkozy peut tirer sur des manifestants a balles réelles !!!
Adoption de la loi tendant à faciliter l’utilisation des réserves militaires et civiles en cas de crise majeure.
Le Sénat a adopté sans modification, en deuxième lecture, la proposition de loi, modifiée par l’Assemblée nationale en première lecture, dont la teneur suit :
TITRE Ier
DISPOSITIF DE RÉSERVE DE SÉCURITÉ NATIONALE
(AN1) Article 1er
Le livre Ier de la deuxième partie du code de la défense est complété par un titre VII ainsi rédigé :
« TITRE VII
« DISPOSITIF DE RÉSERVE DE SÉCURITÉ NATIONALE
« Chapitre unique
(AN1) « Art. L. 2171-1. – En cas de survenance, sur tout ou partie du territoire national, d’une crise majeure dont l’ampleur met en péril la continuité de l’action de l’État, la sécurité de la population ou la capacité de survie de la Nation, le Premier ministre peut recourir au dispositif de réserve de sécurité nationale par décret.
« Le dispositif de réserve de sécurité nationale a pour objectif de renforcer les moyens mis en œuvre par les services de l’État, les collectivités territoriales ou par toute autre personne de droit public ou privé participant à une mission de service public.
« Il est constitué des réservistes de la réserve opérationnelle militaire, de la réserve civile de la police nationale, de la réserve sanitaire, de la réserve civile pénitentiaire et des réserves de sécurité civile.
(…) (AN1) « Art. L. 2171‑6. – Lors du recours au dispositif de réserve de sécurité nationale, les réservistes sont tenus de rejoindre leur affectation, dans les conditions fixées par les autorités civiles ou militaires dont ils relèvent au titre de leur engagement.
« En cas de nécessité inhérente à la poursuite de la production de biens ou de services ou à la continuité du service public, les réservistes employés par un des opérateurs publics et privés ou des gestionnaires d’établissements désignés par l’autorité administrative conformément aux articles L. 1332‑1 et L. 1332‑2 peuvent être dégagés de ces obligations.
« Les conditions de convocation des réservistes sont fixées par décret en Conseil d’État. Ce décret détermine notamment le délai minimal de préavis de convocation.
(S1) « Art. L. 2171‑7. – Un décret en Conseil d’État détermine les conditions d’application du présent chapitre. »
(…) « Art. L. 4211-1-1. – Les membres de la réserve opérationnelle militaire font partie du dispositif de réserve de sécurité nationale mentionné à l’article L. 2171-1 dont l’objectif est de renforcer les moyens mis en œuvre par les services de l’État, les collectivités territoriales ou par toute autre personne de droit public ou privé participant à une mission de service public en cas de survenance sur tout ou partie du territoire national d’une crise majeure. »
« Seules les personnes majeures de nationalité française, ressortissantes de l’Union européenne, sans nationalité ou bénéficiant du droit d’asile peuvent être soumises aux obligations du service de sécurité nationale.
(…)
Délibéré en séance publique, à Paris, le 13 juillet 2011.
Le Président,
Signé : Gérard LARCHER
Senat.Fr
Lu sur Alterinfo.net: http://www.alterinfo.net/Adoption-de-la-loi-tendant-a-faciliter-l-utilisation-des-reserves-militaires-et-civiles-en-cas-de-crise-majeure_a61264.html#last_comment
France : un décret autorise le tir à balle réelle sur des manifestants. L’état se prépare t il à des émeutes en 2012 ?
Dans l’indifférence générale de nos médias – ceux-ci nous endormant avec les mariages princiers et mettant ainsi en application le tittytainment [1]de Mr Brzeziński conseiller spécial d’Obama – François Fillon, Claude Guéant et Gérard Longuet viennent de signer ce 30 juin un décret relatif aux armes à feu susceptibles d’être utilisées pour le maintien de l’ordre public. [2]
L’article 3 de ce décret dit que « outre les armes à feu […] est susceptible d’être utilisé pour le maintien de l’ordre public, à titre de riposte en cas d’ouverture du feu sur les représentants de la force publique […] le fusil à répétition de précision de calibre 7,62 × 51 mm » ! [3]
On pense bien évidemment aux émeutes des banlieues de 2005 au cours desquelles les policiers auraient essuyé des tirs à balles réelles mais aussi aux manifestations qui ne manqueront pas de se produire lorsque la vague d’austérité qui sévit en Grèce et qui ne va pas tarder à s’abattre sur le Portugal, l’Espagne et l’Italie, atteindra les côtes françaises ?
Grenades lacrymogènes, canons à eau, Taser, Flash Ball, matraques et équipement digne de RoboCop ne sont-ils plus suffisants que nos dirigeants pensent à armer nos forces de l’ordre avec des fusils et des munitions de guerre ? Alors il ne suffira plus qu’un individu tire sur celles-ci pour déclencher la riposte policière faisant le carnage qu’il est facile d’imaginer ! Incident suffisamment violent pour justifier auprès de l’opinion publique la mise en place de l’état d’urgence interdisant tous les rassemblements ainsi que des mesures répressives sévères.
Cette discrète décision prise dans un contexte de crise économique majeure en Europe, est d’autant plus inquiétante que la Constitution européenne s’était déjà dotée d’une annexe (servant de référence pour interpréter le texte auquel elle se réfère) qui était de même nature que ce tout nouveau décret français.
En effet, la Constitution qui interdit la peine de mort dans l’article II-61 [4] introduit dans l’article 2, paragraphe 2, de la CEDH, le texte suivant qui limite singulièrement la portée de l’article susdit :
« La mort n’est pas considérée comme infligée en violation de cet article dans les cas où elle résulterait d’un recours à la force rendu absolument nécessaire […] pour réprimer, conformément à la loi, une émeute ou une insurrection. » [5]
Ce décret français renforce le texte européen. Ne reste-t’il maintenant qu’à craindre l’étincelle qui mettra le feu aux poudres !?
Netanyahu, Squarcini, Azoulay et Sarkozy lancent la campagne terroriste de guerre civile au Maghreb. Des elements de la DCRI, travaillant au sein de l'ambassade France a Tunis, organisent l'attaque de plusieurs postes de police avec la complicité de la police secrete de Ben Ali et des harkis locaux deguisés en 'combattants Musulmans', sur le model franco-israelien des GIAs/AQMI. Les frappes sur le commissariat de Bourdj Menael en Algerie portent la marque des reseaux juifs sionistes de la guestapo franco-israelienne de la DCRI, qui controlent le DRS algerien, le makhzen marocain et la police secrete tunisienne, reseaux oeuvrant pour la domination israelienne en Afrique du Nord
Tunisie : six blessés dans des attaques contre des postes de police dans plusieurs villes
Des postes de police dans cinq villes tunisiennes ont fait l’objet d’attaques, dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche à Tunis, et six policiers ont été blessés, dont quatre grièvement, a annoncé, dimanche, le ministère de l’Intérieur.
http://www.atlasinfo.fr/Tunisie-six-blesses-dans-des-attaques-contre-des-postes-de-police-dans-plusieurs-villes_a19053.html
Les attaques les plus graves se sont produites à la ville de Menzel Bourguiba (65 km au nord de la capitale), où "un groupe d’extrémistes religieux mêlé à des délinquants a pris d’assaut le poste de police et volé des armes", indique le ministère dans un communiqué.
Six policiers ont été blessés, dont quatre se trouvent en soins intensifs à Tunis, précise la même source, dénonçant "l’oeuvre de certaines forces extrémistes pour déstabiliser l’ordre et saboter le processus électoral".
Des bâtiments administratifs et des commerces ont également été vandalisés.
D’autres attaques de postes de police ont eu lieu à Kairouan (centre), Sousse (150 km au sud de Tunis), Hammam Ghzez (est de Tunis), Al Agba (ouest de la capitale) et dans une cité populaire de la capitale, selon le ministère.
La tension était déjà montée d’un cran, vendredi à Tunis, lorsque quelques centaines de personnes venues avec l’intention de faire un sit-in devant le siège du gouvernement avaient été brutalement dispersées par d’importantes forces de police.
http://www.atlasinfo.fr/Tunisie-six-blesses-dans-des-attaques-contre-des-postes-de-police-dans-plusieurs-villes_a19053.html
Israel is the mastermind behind the planned invasions of Libya and Syria. That means that Israel is controling both camps fighting each other, and that the innocent peoples of these countries are deliberately sacrificied for the sake of the Zionist agenda called the 'Great Middle East' in parallel of the destruction of the USA and the EU as nation-states. The NWO, ruling from Jerusalem, or Pax Talmudica is taking shape in front of us
Syria: Zionist Mobilization Kicks Into High Gear
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| Al-Jumhuriyyah al-Arabiyyah as-Suriyyah, the Syrian Arab Republic, is under internal assault from Zionist destabilization forces. |
www.maskofzion.com
Editor's Note: WARNING - Photos and hyperlinks in the 'conclusion' section of this essay are of extremely graphic nature. They have been included in this piece due to their unequivocal importance to the overall view of what is taking place in Syria.
The hasbara (propaganda) that is spread throughout the Zionist-owned mainstream media is identical in nature to a house of cards. No matter how imposing the house may be, remove one card from the structure, and it shall immediately collapse in an almost glorious fashion. It is due to its foundation; its towering essence is overshadowed by its flimsiness. The Zionist media imposes its hasbara in terrorizing fashion; like the usurping Israeli entity’s bombs falling upon illegally besieged Gaza or Lebanon, the hasbara enters the psyche as an F-16 bombardment. But unlike the bombs, which are so unstoppably and menacingly destructive, the hasbara is weaker than the web of a spider coming in contact with a machete. Remove just one element, one detail from a news story laced with hasbara, like the house of cards, the aforesaid story will crash to the ground, broken and dismembered.
This house of cards is what has been built upon the events unfolding in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad is facing an uprising not seen since his father’s days. The Zionist media, in partnership with ‘Arab’ media giant Al-Jazeera, painted a rosy picture of heroic, peaceful demonstrators rising up against the dictatorship that has ruled their nation repressively for more than four decades. But that is all that it is, a picture; a story not rooted in reality or fact. Al-Jazeera has finally admitted, that the opposition has lied and exaggerated about casualties and protest numbers (1), to ‘further its cause,’ of course, in typical hasbara fasion, but this small admission, this small card removed from the frame, brings the house of cards crashing down.
Al-Jazeera’s admission only gives further credence to what has already been exposed: the Zionist entity and the House of Saud, allied with the US, Turkey and Jordan, have launched a full-scale destabilization operation against Bashar al-Assad and his government. Mobilizing its forces from certain ‘hotspots,’ or joint operations rooms, the Zionist-Saudi axis has used its agents ex-Syrian VP Abdel-Halim Khaddam, AIPAC member Farid al-Ghadry, Brookings Institution Fellow Ammar AbdulHamid, State Dept giant Jeffrey Feltman and multiple Syrian Muslim Brotherhood leaders to fund, incite, train, guide, organize and direct its agents within Syria to drive the Assad leadership into the ground in hopes of replacing it with an anti-Iran, anti-Hezbollah regime subservient to the Zionist-Saudi axis. With weapons being provided by Jordan and armed operations initiated by Zionist agent Muthanna al-Dhari, Syria has been plunged into chaos (2). Feltman’s role is crucial, as he developed the final phase of this plot with Saudi National Security Advisor ‘Prince’ Bandar bin Sultan, spending $2 billion in the process (3).
The Zionist entity’s hopes of prolonging the ‘kiss of democratic death’ destablization operation and weakening Syria, prior to invading it, destroying it and colonizing it as it did with 13 years of sanctions against (occupied) Iraq, seem to have died down. It seems the next phase has already arrived. Events in the last week have spun out of control at lightning speed and Zionist mobilization has kicked into high gear.
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| Amnesty International, tool of Zionist-globalist hegemonic dominance, has falsely accused Syria of 'crimes against humanity.' |
Syrian Crimes Against Humanity: Fact or Pretext For Invasion?
Amnesty International (AI) has a long, disturbing history of collaborating with globalist powers to foment illegal wars and conquer indigenous resources and territory. A corporate member of the Chatham House and bankrolled by Zionist billionaire war criminal George Soros, AI is a ruthless organization that has fooled a great deal of people due to the mask of ‘human rights’ that it parades around in. Most infamously, in the ‘incubator babies’ scandal, it represented an integral wing of the Zionist operation against Iraq just prior to the criminal Gulf War, disseminating horrific propaganda across the globe, portraying Iraqis as animals and baby killers to justify the invasion. The story was revealed to be false on absolutely every level, but AI’s mission had already been accomplished: the Zionist war against Iraq had begun. Over the years, AI has directed mountains of hasbara against Syria, specifically towards Bashar al-Assad’s father, the late Hafez al-Assad (4).
On June 6th 2011, Amnesty International accused the Syrian government, under the direction of Bashar al-Assad and his top officials, of committing crimes against humanity in the town of Tell Kalakh. AI stated that ‘scores of men’ were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and at least 9 had died in custody. Seemingly infuriated, AI thundered in its report that the Syrian regime would respond to nothing but ‘concrete international measures.’ The report was a call to the UN Security Council and International Criminal Court to take action against Bashar al-Assad. A very gripping account indeed; one that pulls right at the heart strings in a whirlwind of emotion. A civilian population under siege at the hands of a monstrous dictator and his security apparatus. But a problem exists within this account; a very prominent, drastic problem. AI obtained all of the information from ‘eyewitnesses’ in Lebanon in addition to telephone conversations (5).
First and foremost, how can ‘crimes against humanity’ accusations be made without any physical evidence provided? Secondly, how can an ‘independent’ NGO have such power that it can demand action to be taken against the nation it is accusing of such crimes from the highest international bodies on earth and be taken seriously? Thirdly, with Amnesty International’s track record of fabricating ‘humanitarian crises’ for the benefit of Zionist hegemony, how can such accusations even be considered credible?
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| Soldiers shot dead and wounded by Zionist-Saudi-backed 'protesters' in the Syrian town of Tell Kalakh; not reported by Amnesty International. |
With that said, who are these so-called ‘eyewitnesses’ that AI met in Lebanon? And why were the meetings held in Lebanon? Why not Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, the Zionist regime itself or any other neighboring entity? Were these ‘eyewitnesses’ provided to AI? If so, by whom? The reason why these particular questions are so vital, is because former Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri’s Future Movement has worked closely with Zionist Near East Affairs asset Jeffrey Feltman and US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro in organizing the press campaign against Syria (8), shaping public opinion in the region, and it would by no means be out of the ordinary if AI’s ‘Lebanese sources’ were provided by the Feltman-Hariri-Shapiro coordination, considering AI’s history of collaborating with Zionism and the role being played in Syria by the aforementioned three men.
Yet again, Amnesty International has been exposed manipulating and fabricating information to justify a take-down of what the Israeli entity and its allies commonly refer to as a ‘hostile environment.’ Yet again, Amnesty International shows that its true colors are not its typical yellow, but Israeli blue and white.
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| The US Ambassador to Syria was recently in the Syrian town of Hama with his French counterpart, doing the dirty work of Zionism. |
Just two days after Amnesty International submitted its (now-debunked) ludicrous claims of Syria committing crimes against humanity in Tell Kalakh, the US and French Ambassadors to Syria made an unauthorized trip to Hama, a stronghold of the Zionist-Saudi axis’ operations against the Bashar al-Assad government. The US State Department called the visit a ‘show of solidarity with the protesters.’ And the solidarity was reciprocated. ‘Protesters’ disgustingly placed olive branches and roses on the vehicles transporting the Western ambassadors as they chanted ‘down with the regime!’ The perturbed Syrian Foreign Ministry, rightfully, blasted the unauthorized visit as incitement. Also, it is not a coincidence that enemies of Al-Jumhuriyyah al-Arabiyyah as-Suriyyah would travel to an anti-government hub as the government prepared to hold a national dialogue and end the nightmarish unrest in the country (9).
There is another element that the US State Department did not reveal to the public. An element behind the curtain, behind the 'solidarity.' The primary reason why US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford traveled to Hama was to deliver tapping devices to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood-dominated opposition. The devices were meant to capture images of their protests to later be amplified prior to airing them with the international Zionist media. The devices were also meant to spy on Syrian security forces, including the army and police in anti-Assad areas. While Syrian security forces dismantled a good deal of these apparatuses, many of them still exist in the Saudi-Zionist-backed opposition’s strongholds (10).
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| US Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford. |
The Ambassadors’ incitement and delivery of materials represents the culmination of more than 3 months of destabilization at the Zionist-led coalition’s hands; an overt act of subversion on top of all of the various covert operations. This infuriated the Syrian people, who have marched in the millions over the last few months in support of the Bashar al-Assad’s Resistance government (12). Their fury was expressed in the streets as hundreds marched to the US and French embassies in Damascus. Protesters broke the embassies’ windows and thunderously chanted against the Western regimes’ meddling (13).
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| Hillary Clinton, seen here bowing before AIPAC, says that Bashar al-Assad has 'lost legitimacy.' |
If the elements of the ‘Syrian Revolution’ that are calling for Bashar al-Assad’s ouster were actually indigenous, legitimate, honest, ‘pro-democracy’ protesters and not a militia-type force that is being armed and directed by an axis of foreign powers led by the Zionist entity and Saudi Arabia, why did they welcome the US and French Ambassadors to Syria with roses? Why would those who claim to represent the typical Resistance-based mindset that the righteous, dignified and strong Syrian people tend to have, show solidarity with nations that are enemies of Syria and are actively pursuing its downfall? And knowing that Syria has been a target perpetually locked in the crosshairs of Zionism and its allies, why would these ‘protesters’ pander to such powers? The answers to these questions are of course, rhetorical.
President Barack Obama, who has served the Zionist entity so well since being placed into office he has had an illegal settlement named after him (15), echoed the words of Hillary Clinton on July 13th as Western governments work closely to fight Russian and Chinese blocks and pass a resolution in the UN to take action against Syria (16). Though it would be an utterly devastating scenario for the Syrian people, it seems that another ‘humanitarian’ invasion is right around the corner.
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| Zionist asset Bernard-Henri Lévy helped bring about a campaign of destruction in Libya and is now looking to produce the same result in Syria. |
The French ‘intellectual and philosopher’ Bernard-Henri Lévy is no stranger to anti-Zionist writers and solidarity activists. He is known from one end of the globe to the next for infamously and disgracefully stating, “I have never seen such a democratic army (IOF), which asks itself so many moral questions (17).” Needless to say, Lévy is an ardent Zionist who is wholeheartedly dedicated to defending the criminal existence of the Israeli ‘state.’
Most recently, Lévy has been seen in Libya, playing an exceedingly prominent role, if not the most prominent role of all, in getting the West ‘involved’ in the murderous bombing of the oil-rich North African nation. Lévy single-handedly secured meetings for the CIA-proxy Libyan rebels with Zionist French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Hillary Clinton. He warned Sarkozy that if the West didn’t intervene, there would be a ‘bloodbath in Benghazi,’ Libya’s second largest city (18).
Thanks to the efforts of Lévy and the Zionists of the Foreign Policy Initiative who ordered President Obama to attack Libya (19), there isn’t just a bloodbath in Benghazi but a bloodbath across Libya. The NATO coalition led by the US, France and Britain has murdered at least 1,108 Libyan civilians and wounded over 4,537 others since the genocidal, colonial effort began at the end of March (20). Lévy, who is very good friends with mass murderer and Zionist war criminal (Israeli Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu, conveyed to his friend that the Libyan rebels are ready to recognize the Zionist entity as a legitimate state and that they will be ‘concerned with Israeli security (21).’ Lévy’s high-level meddling in Libya has led to a scenario right out of Qaddafi’s worst nightmare: the CIA-proxy, Israeli-advised rebels are prepared to let the Zionist regime establish a base in eastern Cyrenaica on a 30-year lease (22). These activities confirm that Lévy is no mere Zionist; he is a high-level sayan (helper) doing the bidding of Tel Aviv.
With Libya now in complete disarray at the hands of NATO and Israel, the globetrotting Zionist Lévy has set his sights on Bashar al-Assad and Syria. Lévy led a conference last week in Paris's Cinema St. Germaine against the Assad government, likening Bashar al-Assad’s ‘crackdown on pro-democracy protesters’ to that of the Nazis. The conference was comprised of Zionists, former French officials, Syrian opposition figures and a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood representative. The point of Lévy’s conference was to mobilize the ex-French regime officials to lobby Russia and China in dropping their support for the Syrian Resistance government and getting both nations behind Libya-like resolutions against Bashar al-Assad. Lévy demanded that Syria be referred to an international tribunal (23).
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| Ammar Qurabi; fake human rights activist, closet Zionist. |
Prior to establishing Syria’s National Organization for Human Rights, Ammar Qurabi worked for Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Human Rights Committee. Human Rights Watch, handsomely funded to the tune of $100 million by billionaire Zionist war criminal George Soros, has a long history of working with Zionist think tanks and intelligence agencies in fostering war propaganda, specifically against the now ravaged nation of (occupied) Iraq. The Syrian Human Rights Committee is a promoter of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and an affiliate of the Patriotic Union Of Kurdistan, a Mossad-linked Zionist political party in northern Iraq with a militia trained by IOF (27). Do all 'human rights activists' work with elements of the Zionist war machine? Clearly, Qurabi is no ‘Syrian human rights advocate.’ He is an agent of the Zionist-Saudi axis’ destabilization operations against Syria.
With Ammar Qurabi keeping the lies flowing throughout Eastern and Western media and Tel Aviv’s ‘man in France’ Bernard-Henri Lévy upping the ante on the international front, Syria just cannot get a break from the Zionist entity’s mobilization.
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| Turkey and France have signed a malevolent agreement to further cooperation in destroying Syria. |
Turkey’s Deadly Role In Syria Corroborated
The most diabolical character in Israel’s plot to take down Syria is the government of Turkey. In the two-part series on Syria preceding this piece, this author laid waste to the theory that Turkey represented Resistance in the region and exposed the Ankara regime as a willing participant in the ongoing destabilization operation in Syria, providing intelligence, military support, safe havens and meeting grounds to Syrian Muslim Brotherhood fighters, leaders and operatives and also facilitating contact between the Zionist-occupied American government and the Brotherhood. This treacherous, duplicitous behavior is part of a 1993 Turkish-Israeli Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that unites the two entities in military-intelligence cooperation on a large scale. The focus of this cooperation is to undermine Syria, Iran and Iraq; all enemies of the Zionist entity. The Zionist-run operations are funded with the billions in annual Turkish-Israeli bilateral trade (28).
As documented in the previous sections with the vital role of Bernard-Henri Lévy and the incitement operation in Hama carried out by the French Ambassador to Syria, as well as in the aforementioned series with France leading the European charge in sanctioning Syria, the government of Nicolas Sarkozy has played a major part in fomenting the violent unrest in Syria. Sarkozy did excessive spy work for Mossad in the 1980s and remains a high-level sayan to this day (29); his allegiance to Zionism is undeniable. Multiple sources have now confirmed to Mask of Zion that the French and Turkish governments have drawn up their own MOU, to strengthen the 1993 Turkish-Israeli MOU and to focus more intimate cooperation in toppling Bashar al-Assad. The leaked MOU document was initially provided to Mask of Zion in French and then translated by a second source. The French-Turkish MOU is between PM Erdogan himself and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé.
Below is the document in its entirety, which fully corroborates the evidence revealed in the ‘Kiss of Democratic Death’ series:
The Juppé - Erdogan Agreement:
France, through its Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, attentively views that Turkey joining the European Union will greatly serve an important role in the Middle East. Only France has decided to provide the necessary support to the entry of Turkey into the European Union. This support was to be provided after a documented promise was made via the implementation of this agreement which serves the regional and international interests of Turkey, France and the European Union.
1. France provides the necessary support to Turkey to facilitate its entry into the EU before the end of 2012.
2. Turkey is to provide support to France on its strategic position in the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
3. Leaving Turkey and Israel to continue military activities in Turkey as per the 1993 MOU while France provides support to both of the military units.
4. France will in turn provide the necessary support to Erdogan's upcoming parliamentary elections, to change the Turkish Constitution to serve the process of joining the European Union.
5. Turkey to facilitate the work of the Syrian opposition by organizing meetings of the Syrian opposition in Turkey and France, under the supervision of the representative of the European Union.
6. Turkey is ready to impose pressure on the Syrian regime to control the Middle East and bring down the Assad regime’s rejection of what it views as corrupt international policy in the Middle East.
7. Turkey to facilitate the entry of the Syrians displaced and allow the French media, or any other media allies, access to Syria.
8. Enable Turkey to control the regions of Aleppo and Idlib, northern Syria in exchange for France and Britain to control the rest of the occupied Syrian territorties.
9. Despite reluctance, Turkey is to help establish a U.S. military base in the east of Deir Al-Zour, Syria and France will provide the necessary support for this.
10. France is enjoying its status within the European Union to adopt a UN resolution on the Kurds of Turkey and to propose the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq as a solution for them under the direct supervision of Turkey and France.
11. France is committed to using the veto on the costs of rights of Turkey as it deems appropriate boundaries between themselves and the alleged Kurdish state established in northern Iraq.
12. Facilitate business operations through Turkish territory to Syria and Lebanon, and not check the contents of the French tanks’ transit from Turkey to Syria and Lebanon.
13. The ongoing commitment of Turkey to the Convention on the Turkish-French business in Lebanon.
14. France provides the necessary support to Turkey and unconditional support on the outstanding issues between Turkey and Cyprus.
15. France to give Turkey $45 billion in the accounts of the European Union to support development operations in Turkey after Turkey's commitment to the provisions of this Agreement and such amounts will be disbursed in tranches based on Turkey's obligations to the provisions of this Agreement.
France, through its Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, attentively views that Turkey joining the European Union will greatly serve an important role in the Middle East. Only France has decided to provide the necessary support to the entry of Turkey into the European Union. This support was to be provided after a documented promise was made via the implementation of this agreement which serves the regional and international interests of Turkey, France and the European Union.
1. France provides the necessary support to Turkey to facilitate its entry into the EU before the end of 2012.
2. Turkey is to provide support to France on its strategic position in the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
3. Leaving Turkey and Israel to continue military activities in Turkey as per the 1993 MOU while France provides support to both of the military units.
4. France will in turn provide the necessary support to Erdogan's upcoming parliamentary elections, to change the Turkish Constitution to serve the process of joining the European Union.
5. Turkey to facilitate the work of the Syrian opposition by organizing meetings of the Syrian opposition in Turkey and France, under the supervision of the representative of the European Union.
6. Turkey is ready to impose pressure on the Syrian regime to control the Middle East and bring down the Assad regime’s rejection of what it views as corrupt international policy in the Middle East.
7. Turkey to facilitate the entry of the Syrians displaced and allow the French media, or any other media allies, access to Syria.
8. Enable Turkey to control the regions of Aleppo and Idlib, northern Syria in exchange for France and Britain to control the rest of the occupied Syrian territorties.
9. Despite reluctance, Turkey is to help establish a U.S. military base in the east of Deir Al-Zour, Syria and France will provide the necessary support for this.
10. France is enjoying its status within the European Union to adopt a UN resolution on the Kurds of Turkey and to propose the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq as a solution for them under the direct supervision of Turkey and France.
11. France is committed to using the veto on the costs of rights of Turkey as it deems appropriate boundaries between themselves and the alleged Kurdish state established in northern Iraq.
12. Facilitate business operations through Turkish territory to Syria and Lebanon, and not check the contents of the French tanks’ transit from Turkey to Syria and Lebanon.
13. The ongoing commitment of Turkey to the Convention on the Turkish-French business in Lebanon.
14. France provides the necessary support to Turkey and unconditional support on the outstanding issues between Turkey and Cyprus.
15. France to give Turkey $45 billion in the accounts of the European Union to support development operations in Turkey after Turkey's commitment to the provisions of this Agreement and such amounts will be disbursed in tranches based on Turkey's obligations to the provisions of this Agreement.
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| Turkey and France: United in carrying out Zionist objectives in Syria. |
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| 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khatib; the story of his death as reported by the Zionist media is a grossly exaggerated farce. |
Over the course of the last several months, one story that has permeated nearly all of the Zionist media’s coverage on Syria is that of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khatib, the first boy in this ‘tale of two children.’ He has become the ‘face of the Syrian Revolution,’ as many news outlets, including Zionist-created Al-Jazeera, have declared. The story goes something like this: seeking freedom and dignity like every other Syrian participating in the ‘peaceful, pro-democracy’ protests in the Dara’a Governorate, little 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khatib hit the streets of Saida Village on April 29th, or the streets of Jiza Village, as ‘eyewitnesses’ can’t seem to be able to make up their minds. He was picked up by Syrian security forces in a routine ‘crackdown’ operation and tortured in custody for almost a month before being delivered back to his family with lacerations, bruises and burns to his elbows, face, knees, chest and feet, bullet wounds and castrated (32). Another sensational, shocking tragedy brought to the world by the Syrian Revolution.
The information, extracted from a Youtube video, is said to be congruent with reports from Human Rights Watch (HRW) about the types of torture used by Syrian security forces. HRW, all of its media glory and hype aside, has been exposed as nothing more than a tool of Zionist-globalist hegemony, fabricating reports whenever the Zionist entity and its allies need justification to prepare an ‘enemy’ country for regime change (as aforementioned), so how can any claim made by such an organization be taken seriously?
How can this Soros-funded band of propagandists and liars possess an almost infallible credibility when the foundation of its ‘legitimacy’ rests on pure illusion? In simpler terms, reports from HRW can’t be congruent with anything because HRW doesn’t tell the truth. The nail in HRW’s coffin comes with placing its senior researcher on Syrian Affairs, Nadim Houry, under a microscope: he’s also done work for the Rothschild-founded mega think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, and he previously worked for the law firm Sherman and Sterling LLP, a group admittedly dedicated to furthering the interests of international bankers through privatization and globalization (33). What kind of human rights advocate also works for organizations solely dedicated to wiping out human rights worldwide through criminal wars and occupations? That is yet another rhetorical question.
Beyond that, a closer look at the Youtube video reveals that there is no evidence of torture at all, and most certainly not at the hands of Syrian security forces. The body is so discolored and disfigured from the discoloration, that one cannot be sure that it is even the body of 13-year old Hamza. It certainly looks to be someone else entirely. The video is definitely graphic, but at no point does the video show that the body has been castrated. Most bizarrely, the Arabic-speaking narrators of the video continue repeating ridiculous slogans about freedom and dignity. Where is the emotion and outrage of what has supposedly been done to the child? Where is the indignation? And casting further doubt on the entire matter, at the end of the video, the narrators call on the UN and Amnesty International to take action against Syria. Suspicious does not begin to describe this footage.
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| Contrary to reports in the Zionist Western press and Al-Jazeera, this is NOT the body of Hamza Ali al-Khatib. |
This information is quite congruent with previous documentation regarding opposition attacks on Syrian government targets. This information would also mean that the opposition lied about Hamza Ali al-Khatib, which is also congruent with previous documentation. Zionist-backed Syrian opposition forces have already played this game before by faking the death of a 10-year boy named “Ayham al-Ahmad.” The video quality was so poor however that the international media did not pay it any mind (35). A week and a half after the Ayham story failed, the news of Hamza, much more brutal, sensational and heart-wrenching, emerged on the international scene. Psychological warfare is the name of the game and it must not be forgotten that Mossad’s psychological warfare unit, LAP, maintains a cozy working relationship with the Zionist media (36).
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| 14-year old Malik Ahmed Suleiman after he was strangled to death for supporting Bashar al-Assad. |
Young Malik was targeted because his family had rejected the ‘Syrian Revolution’ and stood in solidarity with the majority of the Syrian people in their support for Bashar al-Assad. Why hasn’t this heinous murder been spoken about by mainstream media? Firstly, because the Suleiman family stands with the Resistance. And secondly, because Malik Ahmed Suleiman’s tragic story would invalidate the Zionist narrative regarding Syria’s ‘peaceful revolution.’
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| Al-Jazeera: An 'island' of Zionist propaganda. |
What unites Malik Ahmed Suleiman and Hamza Ali al-Khatib is that they are both victims of a deadly, ominous destabilization campaign launched against Syria by the Zionist entity and the House of Saud. It is a campaign that has claimed the lives of police, civilians and soldiers alike and like a shark that smells blood in the water, it will not stop until it reaches its prey: Bashar al-Assad.
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| Malik Ahmed Suleiman before he was murdered by Zionist-Saudi destablization forces. |
~ The End ~
Sources:
(1) The Syrian Propaganda War by Listening Post, Al-Jazeera English
(2) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - The Syrian Revolution: 100% Manufactured by Israel and Saudi Arabia by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(3) US Seeks To Exploit Anti-Assad Movement In Syria by Jean Shaoul, World Socialist Web Site
(4) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - History On The Fly I: The 1976-1982 ‘Uprising’ by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(5) Report Reveals Crimes Against Humanity In Syrian Town by Amnesty International
(6) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Media Manipulation: Zionism and Al-Jazeera Unite by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(7) Interior Ministry Source: 2 Security Members Martyred, 7 Injured By Extremist And Terrorist Groups In Daraa And Tall Kalakh by Syrian Arab News Agency
(8) Syria, In The Eye Of The Storm – Part II by Nidal Hmedeh and translated by Eslam al-Rihani, Al-Manar
(9) U.S. Ambassador Greeted With Roses By Syrian Protesters In Hama by Robert Mackey, The New York Times
(10) U.S. Ambassador Smuggles Tapping Devices To Opposition In Syria by Al-Manar
(11) Lining The Chessboard Against The Resistance Bloc: War With Syria, Iran And Lebanon In The Works? by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Voltaire Network
(12) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Media Manipulation: Zionism and Al-Jazeera Unite by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(13) Mobs Storm U.S., French Embassies In Syria by The Raw Story
(14) Clinton Says Syria’s Assad Has Lost Legitimacy by Andrew Quinn and Khaled Yacoub Oweis, Reuters
(15) Israel Creates ‘Obama’ Settlement, More Obstacles For Viable Palestinian State by Saleh Naami, Al-Ahram Online
(16) West Piles Pressure For UN Action On Syria by Ma’an News Agency
(17) Bernard-Henri Levy: I Have Never Seen An Army As Democratic As The IDF by Or Kashti, Haaretz
(18) By His Own Reckoning, One Man Made Libya A French Cause by Steven Erlanger, The New York Times
(19) US Neo-Cons Urge Libya Intervention by Jim Lobe, Al-Jazeera English
(20) 1,108 Libyans Killed In NATO Attacks by Press TV
(21) Libyan Rebels Will Recognise Israel by Global Research
(22) NATO’s Alternative Universe In Libya by Wayne Madsen, The San Francisco Bay View
(23) Syria Opposition And Pro-Israeli Confab by Press TV
(24) Ammar Qurabi July 07, 2011 by As’ad Abu Khalil, The Angry Arab News Service
(25) Syrian Muslim Brotherhood And Zionism: Who Is Ammar Qurabi? by As’ad Abu Khalil, The Angry Arab News Service
(26) Ammar Qurabi July 06, 2011 by As’ad Abu Khalil, The Angry Arab News Service
(27) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - History On The Fly I: The 1976-1982 ‘Uprising’ by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(28) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria II; Section - Turkey: The Beast Of Two Faces Emerges by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(29) Sarkozy Accused Of Working For Israeli Intelligence by Gamal Nkrumah, Global Research
(30) France Seeks To Boost Trade With Israel by Brett Kline, Globes
(31) Syrian Exiles Call For Army To Side With People by Simon Cameron-Moore, Reuters
(32) Tortured And Killed: Hamza Al-Khateeb, Age 13 by Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand, Al-Jazeera English; Torture Of The Child Martyr: ‘Rebel,’ 13, Shot, Kneecapped And Had Genitals Removed Before Being Killed By Syria’s Sadistic Regime by Liz Hazelton, The UK Daily Mail
(33) Globalist Infiltration Of International Rights Groups: Nadim Houry’s Syrian Propaganda by Scott Creighton, American Everyman
(34) The True Story Of Hamza Al-Khateeb’s Death Belies Media Fabrications by Syrian Arab News Agency
(35) NEDA Revisited: Another Staged CIA Martyr This Time In Syria by Scott Creighton, American Everyman
(36) Libya: The Zionist Dragon And The Drums Of War by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
(37) Pro-Israeli Editors Seek To Influence Al-Jazeera International English Satellite TV by Khalid Amayreh, The Electronic Intifada
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(39) Kiss Of ‘Democratic’ Death: Israel’s Plot To Take Down Syria I; Section - History On The Fly II: Oded Yinon, A Clean Break and Direct Israeli Aggression by Jonathan Azaziah, Mask of Zion
Goldman Sachs and Israel's 'work of God', destroying the nation-states in the US, EU to build the NWO, ruling the world from Jerusalem
650 Years Ago: How Bankers Rigged the First, and Worst, Global Financial Crash.
Six hundred and fifty years ago came the climax of the worst financial collapse in history to date. The 1930s Great Depression was a mild and brief episode, compared to the bank crash of the 1340s, which decimated the human population.
The crash, which peaked in 1345 A.D. when the world's biggest banks went under, "led'' by the Bardi and Peruzzi companies of Florence, Italy, was more than a bank crash -- it was a financial disintegration. Chroniclers reported, "all credit vanished together,'' most trade and exchange stopped, and a catastrophic drop of the world's population by famine and disease loomed."
The crash, which peaked in 1345 A.D. when the world's biggest banks went under, "led'' by the Bardi and Peruzzi companies of Florence, Italy, was more than a bank crash -- it was a financial disintegration. Chroniclers reported, "all credit vanished together,'' most trade and exchange stopped, and a catastrophic drop of the world's population by famine and disease loomed."
Like the financial disintegration hanging over us , that one of the 1340s was the result of 30-40 years of disastrous financial practices, by which the banks built up huge fictitious ``financial bubbles,'' parasitizing production and real trade in goods. These speculative cancers destroyed the real wealth they were monopolizing, and caused these banks to be effectively bankrupt long before they finally went under.
The critical difference between 1345 and 1995, was that in the fourteenth century there were as yet no nations. No governments had the national sovereignty to control the banks and the creation of credit; or, to force these banks into bankruptcy in an orderly way, and replace fictitious bank credit and money with national credit. Nor was the Vatican, the world leadership of the Catholic Church, fighting against the debt-looting of the international banks then as it is today; in fact, at that time it was allied with, aiding, and abetting them.
The result was a disaster for the human population, which fell worldwide by something like 25 percent between 1300 and 1450 (in Europe, by somewhere between 35 percent and 50 percent from the 1340s collapse to the 1440s).
This global crash, caused by the policies and actions of banks which finally completely bankrupted themselves, has been blamed by historians ever since on a king -- poor Edward III of England. Edward revolted against the seizure and looting of his kingdom by the Bardi and Peruzzi banks, by defaulting on their loans starting in 1342. King Edward's national budget was dwarfed by that of either the Bardi or Peruzzi; in fact, by 1342 his national budget had become a subdepartment of theirs. Their internal memos in Florence spoke of him contemptuously as ``Messer Edward''``we shall be fortunate to recover even a part'' of his debts, they sniffed in 1339.
A ``free trade'' mythology has been developed by historians about these ``sober, industrious, Christian bankers'' of Italy in the fourteenth century``doing good'' by their own private greed; developing trade and the beginnings of capitalist industry by seeking monopolies for their family banks; somehow existing in peace with other merchants, and expiating their greedy sins by donations to the Church. But, goes the myth, these sober bankers were led astray by kings (accursed governments!) who were spendthrift, warlike, and unreliable in paying their debts which they forced the helpless or momentarily foolish bankers to lend them. Thus, emerging ``private enterprise capitalism'' was set back by the disaster of the fourteenth century, concludes the classroom myth, noting in passing that 30 million people died in Europe in the ensuing Black Death, famine, and war. If only the ``sober, Christian'' bankers had stuck to industrious ``free trade'' and prosperous city-states, and never gotten entangled with warlike, spendthrift kings!
The Real Story
Two recent books help to turn over this cover story, though perhaps that is beyond the intention of their authors. Edwin Hunt's 1994 book The Medieval Supercompanies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence, establishes that this great bank was losing money and effectively going bankrupt throughout the late 1330s, as a result of its own destructive policies -- in Europe's agricultural credit and trade in particular -- before it ever dealt with Edward III.
``Indeed, the great banking companies were able to survive past 1340 only because news of their deteriorated position had not yet circulated....''
Even if we accept the highest figures ever given for Edward III's 1345 default against the bankers of Florence, the debt to them of the city government of Florence which they controlled, was 35 percent greater, and those bonds also defaulted.
More revealing is the latest work of the historian of Venice, Frederick C. Lane, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. This work shows that it was Venetian finance which, by dominating and controlling a huge international ``bubble'' of currency speculation from 1275 through 1350, rigged the great collapse of the 1340s. Rather than sharing the peace of mutual greed and free enterprise with their ``allies''-- the bankers of Florence -- the merchants of Venice bankrupted them, and the economies of Europe and the Mediterranean along with them. Florence was the fourteenth century ``New York,'' the apparent center of banking with the world's biggest banks. But Venice was ``London,'' manipulating Florentine bankers, kings, and emperors alike, by tight knit financial conspiracy and complete dominance of the markets by which money was minted and credit created.
As long ago as the 1950s, in fact, one historian Fernand Braudel consciously demonstrated that Venice, leading the Italian bankers of Florence, Genoa, Siena, etc., willfully intervened from the beginning of the thirteenth century to destroy the potential emergence of national governments, ``modern states foreshadowed by the achievements of Frederick II.'' Frederick II Hohenstauffen was the Holy Roman Emperor in the first half of the thirteenth century, an able successor of Charlemagne's earlier achievements in spreading education, agricultural progress, population growth, and strong government. The great Dante wrote De Monarchia in a vain attempt to revive the potential of imperial government based on divine law and natural law, which had been identified with Frederick's reign.
Wrote Braudel:
``Venice had deliberately ensnared all the surrounding subject economies, including the German economy, for her own profit; she drew her living from them, preventing them from acting freely.... The fourteenth century saw the creation of such a powerful monopoly to the advantage of the city-states of Italy ... that the embryo territorial states like England, France and Spain necessarily suffered the consequences.''
In addition to what Braudel shows, Venice intervened to stop the accession of the great Alfonso the Wise of Spain, as successor to Emperor Frederick II.
This triumph of ``free trade'' over the potential for national government, rigged the fourteenth century's global human catastrophes, the worst onslaught of death and depopulation in history. It was not until the Renaissance created the French nation state under Louis XI, 100 years later, and then England under Henry VII, and the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabel, that the human population could recover.
Population: The Fundamental Measure
The clearest measure of the destruction wrought by the merchants and bankers of Venice and its ``allies'' in the financial crash of the fourteenth century, is shown in Figure 1. What had been 400-600 years of increasing population growth in Europe, China, and India (altogether, three-fourths of the human population) was reversed. The world's population collapsed. Famines, bubonic and pneumonic plagues, and other epidemics killed more than 100 million people.
Wars raged throughout Eurasia; Mongol armies alone slaughtered between 5 and 10 million people. This depopulation did not begin with the 1340s banking crash, although it accelerated after that for nearly a century. The policies of Venetian-allied finance were already reversing human population growth for 40-60 years before their speculative cancer completely exhausted what it monopolized, bringing on the 1340s rolling crash of all major banks which had not collapsed earlier.
How did free enterprise finance, with no government able to control it, collapse all the economies of the Eurasian continent? How could banks concentrated in one part of Europe -- tiny on the scale of modern banks work such a global catastrophe?
A Cancer on Production
In the eleventh, twelfth, and into the thirteenth centuries the growth and development of population both in Europe and particularly in China was accelerating. China's population doubled in 200 years during the ``neoConfucian'' renaissance of the S'ung Dynasty, to 120 million; the population density of northern France and northern Italy began to approximate the levels these regions have today. After the collapse and depopulation of the Roman Empire long before (300-600 A.D.), Europe's population had been growing at a steadily increasing rate for 700 years up to 1300 A.D., due to huge increases in the amount of agricultural land productively cultivated. In addition, there had been several periods in which the rural technologies for using the plow, seed, animal power, water power, and wind power, leaped forward. Classical education of youth in monastery schools (oblates) was spreading up through the twelveth century, when the great cathedral building movement arose in France. These advances spread particularly rapidly due to the impetus of Charlemagne and his English and Italian allies from 750-900, and then again from 1100-1250, the period of the Hohenstauffen Holy Roman Emperors in Germany, Italy, and Sicily, ending with Frederick II.
But about the turn of the fourteenth century, the growth of food production and of population stopped in Europe. (China's population was already being devastated, on which more below.) There were major famines (multiple successive crop failures or extreme shortages) in 1314-17; in 1328-29; and in 1338-39. One historian concludes that:
``we gather from (the Italian chronicler) Villani's statements that a scarcity of more or less severe character put in an appearance about three times each decade. About once each decade the scarcity became so intense as to assume the proportions of a famine.''
The most productive rural regions of northern Italy and northern France began to be depopulated from about 1290 onward, while the towns and cities' population merely stagnated. (The Milan region was the counterexample, due to aggressive construction of government infrastructure, water control works, 3,000 hospital beds in the city for 150,000 people).
The production of wool in England began to decline from about 1310. English and Spanish wool were the basis of European clothing production, although cotton cloth was just beginning to be produced.
``In England, beginning with the reign of Edward I (1291 to 1310) and reaching a climax with Edward III, the Bardi and Peruzzi had acquired a status that gave them a practical monopoly of the procuring and export of wool....''
From 1150 onward, the famous Champagne Fairs had been the hub of trading in cloth and clothing, ironwork, woodwork, wool, agricultural implements and food for all of Europe; year round fairs were held in six cities in the Champagne region around Paris. Merchants had been accustomed to make profits of 34 percent annually in hard cash and goods trading here. The Venetian and Florentine bankers intervened into these fairs with large amounts of credit, bank branches, and with luxury goods ``from the East,'' and took them over. By 1310, an Italian banker from Lucca boasted that he could raise 200,000 French livres tournois in credit on the spot at the Fair of Troyes but the actual trade in physical goods at the fairs was declining. Hunt's analysis of the successive sets of books of the Peruzzi bank shows that the Florentine bankers expected 810 percent annual profits up to 1335. This was far above the rate at which the physical economy of Europe was producing real surplus, and that physical rate of production was falling. The Venetians expected much higher rates of profit still, for reasons outlined below.
``At the end of the thirteenth century a slowdown in trade hit commodities first; credit operations kept going longer, but the fairs went into severe decline,''
In the late 1330s, the beginning of the 100 Years War between England and France led to the clothing industry of Flanders the main clothing production region of Europe being boycotted and completely shut off from wool; by the late 1340s, this industry was in complete decline, and was actually moving out of the towns and cities into tiny ``cottage industries'' in the countryside.
On top of all this, from the 1320s on, there was a ``massive flight of silver oltremare (``over the sea,'' that is, to Venice's maritime empire in the Middle East and Byzantium) which upset the equilibrium of Europe in the midfourteenth century.'' Venetian exports of silver from Europe from 1325-50 equalled ``perhaps 25 percent of all the silver being mined in Europe at that time.'' Standard silver coin had been the stable currency of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, and of England, since Charlemagne's time. This massive export from Venice to the East ``created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,'' and severe problems in making payments in trade. France ``was emptied of silver coinage.'' King Phillip's mintmaster estimated that 100 tons of silver had been exported ``to the land of the Saracens'' (the Islamic Middle East).
So production of the most vital commodities in Europe had been severely reduced, and the trade and circulation of its money completely disrupted, over decades before the 1340s crash, by Italian banks which appeared to be making usurious rates of profit. ``The Florentine supercompanies resembled very closely in their operations the huge international grain companies of today, such as Cargill and Archer-Daniels Midland,'' writes Hunt. ``They used loans to monarchs to dominate and control trade in certain vital commodities, especially grain, and later wool and cloth.'' Their dominance and speculation progressively reduced the production of these commodities.
We can see this in more detail, but keeping in mind that the story of the Florentine bankers and the fourteenth century crash and Black Death, is itself a coverup. These bankers were operating on an international scale limited to Western Europe and some Mediterranean islands. The maritime/financial empire of Venice -- and Venice only -- was speculating on the scale of all of the Eurasian landmass, and on this evidence alone, it had to be the merchants of Venice which rigged the devastation and depopulation of the majority of the human race in the fourteenth century. The Florentine bankers were sharks swimming in Venice's seas. The catastrophe of the Black Death in Europe, so often described, was exceeded by death rates in China and Islamic regions under the homicidal rule of the Mongol Khans from 1250, until nearly 1400. The Islamic chronicler Ibn Khaldun wrote:
``Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind.''
Venice was also the ``banker,'' slave market, and intelligence support service for the Mongol Khans.
The Black Guelph
The Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuouli family banks, along with other large banks in Florence and Siena in particular, were all founded in the years around 1250. In the 1290s they grew dramatically in size and rapaciousness, and were reorganized, by the influx of new partners. These were ``Black Guelph'' noble families, of the faction of northern Italian landed aristocracy always bitterly hostile to the government of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne, 500 years earlier, had already recognized Venice as a threat equal to the Vikings, and had organized a boycott to try to bring Venice to terms with his Empire. Venice in 1300 was the center of the Black Guelph faction which drove Dante and his co-thinkers from Florence. In opposition to Dante's work De Monarchia, a whole series of political theorists of ``Venice, the ideal model of government'' were promoted in north Italy: Bartolomeo of Lucca, Marsiglio of Padua, Enrico Paolino of Venice, etc., all based on Aristotle's Politics which was translated into Latin for the purpose. The same ``coup'' made the Bardi, Peruzzi, etc. Black Guelph banking ``supercompanies,'' suddenly two or three times their previous size and branch structure. Machiavelli describes how by 1308, the Black Guelph ruled everywhere in northern Italy except in Milan, which remained allied with the Holy Roman Empire, and was the most economically developed and powerful city-state in fourteenth century Italy.
The charter of the Parte Guelfa openly claimed that it was the party of the papacy, and with Venice, the Black Guelph openly pushed for the Popes to change usury from a mortal sin to a venial (minor) sin. Lane remarks that the Venetians seemed to enjoy an effective exemption from the Catholic Popes' injunctions against usury, and also from their ban on trading with the infidel -- the Seljuk and Mamluk regimes of Egypt and Syria.
A century earlier, in the 1180s, Doge (Duke) Ziani of Venice had provoked hostilities between the two leaders of Christendom, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, the grandfather of Frederick II. Doge Ziani, in time-worn Venetian style, then personally mediated the ``Peace of Constance'' between the Pope and the Emperor. The doge got his enemy, Emperor Frederick, to agree to withdraw his standard silver coinage from Italy, and allow the Italian cities to mint their own coins.
Over the century from that 1183 Peace of Constance to the 1290s, Venice established the extraordinary, near-total dominance of trading in gold and silver coin and bullion throughout Europe and Asia, which is documented in Frederick Lane's book. Venice broke and replaced the European silver coinage of the Holy Roman Emperors, the Byzantine Empire's silver coinage, and eventually broke the famous Florentine ``gold florin'' in the decades immediately leading into the 1340s financial blowout -- which blew out all the financiers except the Venetians.
Privatization
The Black Guelph bankers of Florence did not simply loan money to monarchs, and then expect repayment with interest. In fact, interest was often ``officially'' not charged on the loans, since usury was considered a sin and a crime among Christians. Rather, like the International Monetary Fund today, the banks imposed ``conditionalities'' on the loans. The primary conditionality was the pledging of royal revenues directly to the bankers -- the clearest sign that the monarchs lacked national sovereignty against the Black Guelph ``privateers.'' Since in fourteenth century Europe, important commodities like food, wool, clothing, salt, iron, etc. were produced only under royal license and taxation, bank control of royal revenue led to, first, private monopolization of production of these commodities, and second, the banks' ``privatization'' and control of the functions of royal government itself.
By 1325, for example, the Peruzzi bank owned all of the revenues of the Kingdom of Naples (the entire southern half of Italy, the most productive grain belt of the entire Mediterranean area); they recruited and ran King Robert of Naples' army, collected his duties and taxes, appointed the officials of his government, above all sold all the grain from his kingdom. They egged Robert on to continual wars to conquer Sicily, because through Spain, Sicily was allied with the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, Sicily's grain production, which the Peruzzi did not control, was reduced by war.
King Robert's Anjou relatives, the Kings of Hungary, had their realm similarly ``privatized'' by the Florentine banks in the same period. In France, the Peruzzi were the cooperating bank (creditor) of the bankers to King Philip IV, the infamous Franzezi bankers ``Biche and Mouche'' (Albizzo and Mosciatto Guidi). The Bardi and Peruzzi banks, always in a ratio of 3 to 2 for investments and returns, ``privatized'' the revenues of Edward II and Edward III of England, paid the King's budget, and monopolized the sales of English wool. Rather than paying interest (usury) on his loans, Edward III gave the Bardi and Peruzzi large ``gifts'' called ``compensations'' for the hardships they were supposedly suffering in paying his budget; this was in addition to assigning them his revenues. When King Edward tried forbidding Italian merchants and bankers to expatriate their profits from England, they converted their profits into wool and stored huge amounts of wool at the ``monasteries'' of the Order of Knights Hospitalers, who were their debtors, political allies, and partners in the monopolization of the wool trade. It was the Bardi's representatives who proposed to Edward III, the wool boycott which destroyed the textile industry of Flanders -- because by 1340 it was the only way to continue to raise wool prices in a desperate attempt to increase King Edward's income flow, which was all assigned to the Bardi and Peruzzi for his debts! Genoese bankers largely controlled the royal revenues of the Kingdom of Castille in Spain, Europe's other supplier of wool, by 1325.
In the first few years of the 100 Years War, which began in 1339, the Florentine financiers imposed on England a rate of exchange which overvalued their currency, the gold florin, by 15 percent relative to English coin. Edward III, in effect, now got 15 percent less for his monopolized wool. Edward tried to counterattack by minting an English florin: the merchants, organized by the Florentines, refused it, and he was defeated. By this action, the Bardi and Peruzzi themselves, in effect, provoked Edward's famous default, and demonstrated his complete lack of sovereignty at the same time.
Even the famous account, by banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, of Edward III's default which triggered the final crash, acknowledges that his debt to the Bardi and Peruzzi included huge amounts he had already paid -- the curious arithmetic of the IMF to Third World debtors today:
``The Bardi found themselves to be his creditors in more than 180,000 marks sterling. And the Peruzzi, more than 135,000 marks sterling, which ... makes a total of 1,365,000 gold florins -- as much as a kingdom is worth. This sum included many purveyances made to them by the king in the past, but, however that may be....''
Even larger revenue flows came to the Vatican in the collection of its church contributions and tithes. Under John XXII, the Black Guelph Pope from 1316-1336, ``papal tithes skyrocketted,'' reaching the apparent value of 250,000 gold florins per year. All were collected by agents of the Venetian banks (for France, the largest source of papal revenue) and the Bardi bank (for everywhere else in Europe except Germany). They charged the Vatican sizable ``exchange fees'' to transfer the collections.
``Only they [the Venice-allied bankers] had the reserves of cash at Avignon [in France, temporary seat of the papacy for about 70 years] and in Italy, to finance papal operations. They transferred collections from Europe, and loaned them to the Popes in advance.''
Thus, Venice controlled the papal credit, and the continuing hostilities between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors.
Perpetual Rents
In Italy itself, these bankers loaned aggressively to farmers and to merchants and other owners of land, often with the ultimate purpose of owning that land. This led by the 1330s to the wildfire spread of the infamous practice of ``perpetual rents,'' whereby farmers calculated the lifetime rent-value of their land and sold that value to a bank for cash for expenses, virtually guaranteeing that they would lose the land to that bank. As the historian Raymond de Roover demonstrated, the practices by which the fourteenth century banks avoided the open crime of usury, were worse than usury.
In the Italian city-states themselves, the early years of the fourteenth century saw the assignment of more and more of the revenues of the primary taxes (gabelle, or sales and excise taxes) to the bankers and other Guelph Party bondholders. From about 1315, the Guelph abolished the income taxes (estimi) in the city, but increased them (estimi) on the surrounding rural areas into which they expanded their authority. Thus, because the bankers, merchants, and wealthy Guelph aristocrats did not pay taxes -- instead, they made loans (prestanze) to the city and commune governments. In Florence, for example, the effective interest rate on this Monte (``mound'' of debt) had reached 15 percent by 1342; the city debt was 1,800,000 gold florins, and no clerical complaints against this usury were being raised. The gabelle taxes were pledged for six years in advance to the bondholders. At that point, Duke Walter of Brienne, who had briefly become dictator of Florence, cancelled all revenue assignments to the bankers (defaulted, exactly like Edward III).
Thus were the rural, food-producing areas of Italy depopulated and ruined in the first half of the fourteenth century. The fertile Contado (county) of Pistoia around Florence, for example, which reached a population density of 6065 persons per square kilometer in 1250, had fallen to 50 persons/square kilometer in 1340; in 1400, after 50 years of Black Plague, its population density was 25 persons/square kilometer. The famines of 1314-17, 1328-9, and 1338-9 were not ``natural disasters.''
Some of the famous banks of Tuscany had failed already in the 1320s: the Asti of Siena, the Franzezi, the Scali company of Florence. In the 1330s, the biggest banks, with the exception of the Bardi, (the Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli, Buonacorsi) were losing money and plunging toward bankruptcy with the fall in production of the vital commodities which they had monopolized, and which their cancer of speculation was devouring. The Acciaiuoli and the Buonacorsi, who had been bankers of the Vatican before it left Rome, went bankrupt in 1342 with the default of the city of Florence and the first defaults of Edward III. The Peruzzi and Bardi, the world's two largest banks, went under in 1345, leaving the entire financial market of Europe and the Mediterranean shattered, with the exception of the much smaller Hanseatic League bankers of Germany, who had never allowed the Italian banks and merchant companies to enter their cities.
Already in 1340, a deadly epidemic -- unidentified but not bubonic plague -- had killed up to 10 percent of many urban populations in northern France, and 15,000 Florentines had died out of 90-100,000 that year. In 1347, the Black Plague, which had already killed 10 million in China, began to sweep over Europe.
Venice, the World's Mint
``Venice,'' wrote Braudel:
``was the greatest commercial success of the Middle Ages -- a city without industry, except for naval-military construction, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an empire through mere trading enterprise. In the fourteenth century she was in the ascendant to her greatest periods of success and power.''
And most importantly, Frederick Lane writes:
``Venice's rulers were less concerned with profits from industries than with profits from trade between regions that valued gold and silver differently.''
Between 1250 and 1350, Venetian financiers built up a worldwide financial speculation in currencies and gold and silver bullion, similar to the huge speculative cancer of ``derivatives contracts'' today. This ultimately dwarfed and controlled the speculation in debt, commodities, and trade of the Bardi, Peruzzi, et al. It took all control of coinage and currency from the monarchs of the time.
The banks of Venice were deceptively smaller and less conspicuous than the Florentine banks, but in fact had much greater resources for speculation at their disposal. The Venetian financial oligarchy as a whole, which ruled a maritime empire through small executive committees under the guise of a republic, centralized and supported its own speculative activities as a whole. The ``Republic'' built the ships and auctioned them to the merchants; escorted them with large, well-armed naval convoys of their empire, with naval commanders responsible to the ``Committee of 10'' and the magistrates for the convoys' safety. This same oligarchy maintained several public mints and did everything possible to foster the centralization of gold and silver trading and coinage in Venice.
As Frederick Lane demonstrates, this was the dominant trade of Venice by no later than 1310. Like today's ``mega-speculators'' in currencies and derivatives, such as the Morgan and Rothschild-backed George Soros and Marc Rich, the Venetian banks and bullion-dealers were backed by large pools of capital and protection.
The size of the Venetian bullion trade was huge: twice a year a ``bullion fleet'' of up to 20-30 ships under heavy naval convoy, sailed from Venice to the eastern Mediterranean coast or to Egypt, bearing primarily silver; and sailed back to Venice bearing mainly gold, including all kinds of coinage, bars, leaf, etc.
The profits of this trade put usury in the shade, though the merchants of Venice were also unbridled in that practice.
One astonishing speech to the Council of 10 by Doge Thomasso Mocenigo, from a time after the 1340s financial crash, goes further. Compare the magnitude of these figures to those discussed earlier for the Papacy, for England, for Florence (keeping in mind that the Venetian standard coin, the gold ducat, was roughly comparable to the Florentine gold florin):
``In peacetime this city puts a capital of 10 million ducats into trade throughout the world with ships and galleys, so that the profit of export is two million, the profit of import is two million, export and import together four million [from the two annual voyages, 40 percent profit --PG].... You have seen our city mint every year 1,200,000 in gold, 800,000 in silver, of which 5,000 marks (20,000 ducats) go annually to Egypt and Syria, 100,000 to your places on the mainland of Italy, to your places beyond the sea 50,000 ducats, to England and France each 100,000 ducats...''
How was this possible? Not by private enterprise, but by imperial Venetian ``state usury.'' The gold from the East was being looted out of China (until then the world's richest economy) and India by the murderous Mongol empires, or being mined in Sudan and Mali in Africa and sold to Venetian merchants, in exchange for greatly overvalued European silver. The silver from the West was being mined in Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, and sold more and more exclusively to Venetians with bottomless supplies of gold at their disposal. Coinages not of Venetian origin were disappearing, first in the Byzantine empire in the twelfth century, then in the Mongol domains, then in Europe in the fourteenth century.
Crusades and Mongols
The so-called Christian Crusades (the first in 1099, the seventh and last major one in 1291) had had only one strategic effect: expanding and strengthening the maritime commercial empire of Venice to the East. Venice provided the ships to take the Crusaders to the Middle East; Venice loaned them money, and Venetian Doges often told them what cities to try to capture or sack. Through the Crusades, Venice gained effective control of the cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Acre in Lebanon and Lajazzo in Turkey, and strengthened its domination of commerce through Constantinople. These were the coastal entry-points for the ``Silk Routes'' through the Black Sea and Caspian Sea regions to China and India. During the Mongol Empires (1230-1370), these routes were virtual ``Roman Roads'' maintained by Mongol cavalry.
The empire of the Mongol Khans was for a century the largest and most murderous empire in human history. The Mongols eliminated, by slaughter and disease directly in their domains, perhaps 15 percent of the world's population, and destroyed all the greatest cities from China west to Iraq and north to Russia and Hungary -- including all the trading cities whose competition bothered Venice.
The strategic alliance between Venice and the Mongol Khans, up to and through the financial collapse of the 1340s, has been treated as a historical curiosity of the adventures of Marco Polo's family.
But it gave Venice final control of the trade to the East, and along with the trade through Egypt for the gold mined in Sudan and Mali, it gave them huge amounts of gold with which to dominate world currency trading in the decades leading to the financial disintegration of the fourteenth century.
The Mongols, in their genocidal rule of China, looted all the gold of S'ung China and of the part of India under their control, replacing it with silver currency, and for the lower castes (i.e., the Chinese), with paper money.
Mongol middlemen met Venetian merchants at the Mongol-ruled Persian trading cities of Tabriz and Trebizond, and the Black Sea port of Tana, and traded gold for silver from Europe. A large-scale trade in slaves from Mongol domains was associated with this currency trading. This was the so-called ``tanga gold,'' from the tanghi or uncoined pieces bearing the seal of the Mongol Khans, as well as bar and leaf gold. The silver was in small Venetian ingots called sommi, which ``were the common medium of exchange throughout the Mongol and Tatar Khanates.... [T]he demand for silver in the Far East was continually increasing,'' writes Lane. ``The Venetians were able to raise the price of silver despite the existence of record quantities'' coming to Venice from Europe.
The Crusades also consolidated the alliance of Venice and its allied Black Guelph-ruled cities, the Papacy, and the Norman and Anjou kings, against the Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany, which Dante and his allies were struggling to restore to its potential. By the late thirteenth century, the Mongols were a conscious part of this Venetian-led alliance, and the Mongol rulers of Persia even proposed Crusades to the European kings and the Popes! Pope John XXII granted Venice alone the license to trade with the infidel Mamluk sultans of Egypt in the 1330s. This was overvalued European silver and Mongol slaves for gold from Sudan and Mali.
"Derivatives"
Thus, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice provided all the coinage and currency-exchange for the largest empire in history, which was looting and destroying the populations under its rule. Venice had taken over the currency trading and coining of what remained of the Byzantine Empire, and also of the Mamluk Sultanates in North Africa. Venice, over this period, took the East off a gold standard and put it on a silver standard (it was the richer region of the world, and being more intensively looted). It took Byzantium and Europe off a 500-year old silver standard and put them on gold standards.
And the Venetian financiers and merchants were making annual rates of profit of up to 40 percent on very large, overwhelmingly short-term (six-month) investments, in a world economy characterized at its most productive, by perhaps 34 percent annual rates of real physical ``free energy'': surplus wealth (see Figure 2). The other Black Guelph Italian bankers' operations were subsumed by Venetian financial manipulations, but they were also realizing rates of profit far above the rate of physical reproduction of the economies of Europe. Because of the dominance of these speculative cancers, all the major real physical economies were shrinking.
What was the effect of this Venetian global currency speculation on the European economies before the 1340s crash and the Black Death? It was the short-term vise that caught the other European bankers and rigged the crash itself.
From 1275-1325, the ratio of the average gold price, to the average silver price, steadily rose, though with continual short-term fluctuations, from about 8:1 to, finally, about 15:1. In this period, Europe's large production of silver was looted through Venice's command of Mongol and African gold. ``Venice had the central position as the world's bullion market,'' writes Lane, ``and attracted to the Rialto (the bridge area which was Venice's ``Wall Street'') the acceleration of buying and selling stimulated by the changing prices of the two precious metals.'' From 1290 into the 1330s prices rose sharply for the most crucial commodities.
In this process of quickening speculation, Venice ``ensnared all the surrounding economies, including the German economy'' where production of silver, iron, and iron implements was concentrated. By the 1320s, Venetian merchants no longer even travelled to Germany to trade: They compelled German producers and merchants to come to Venice and take up lodgings near the large Fondaco dei Tedeschi (``Warehouse of the Germans'') where their goods were stored for sale. Venetian bankers on the Rialto (and Venetian bankers alone in the world at this time) made cashless bank transfers among merchants' accounts, allowed overdrafts and gave credit lines on the spot, created ``bank money,'' and speculated with it. They did this not out of cleverness, but by simple control of currency speculation worldwide: They had the reserves.
In fact, the famous ``bills of exchange'' of the Florentine bankers, were really a crude form of the ``derivatives contracts'' of the 1990s speculative cancer. The Bardi, et al. charged fees to those involved in trade, for exchanging currencies, since there were so many regional and city currencies. These exchange fees were a cost looted out of all production and trade, and a usurious profit to the bankers. But the banker made the ``bills of exchange'' even more expensive, to hedge against their own potential losses in currency fluctuations being manipulated by Venetian bullion merchants. Thus bills of exchange in the fourteenth century cost 14 percent on average, worse than borrowing at interest (usury).
Venice switched Europe to gold by force of looting silver. England, for example, from 1300-1309 imported 90,000 pounds sterling in silver for coining; but from 1330-1339, it was only able to import 1,000 pounds. ``But in Venice there was no lack of silver at all in the 1330s.'' The Florentine bankers, with their famous gold florin, enjoyed great speculative profits in this process.
However, from 1325-1345, the process was reversed. The ratio of gold price to silver price, dominated by Venetian manipulation, now fell steadily from the 15:1 level, back down to 9:1. When the price of silver started rising in the 1330s, there was an unusually large supply of silver in Venice! And through the 1340s, ``the international exchange of gold and silver greatly intensified again,'' Lane shows, and there was another wave of sharp commodity price increases.
Now the Florentine bankers were caught, having loans and investments all over Europe in gold, whose price was now falling.
After Venice triggered the fall of gold with new coins in the late 1320s, the Florentines did not attempt to follow suit until 1334 when it was too late; the king of France did not follow until 1337; and last came the pathetic effort of the king of England in 1340, mentioned above.
As Lane shows:
``The fall of gold, to which the Venetians had contributed so much by their vigorous export of silver and import of gold, and in which they found profits, hurt the Florentines. In spite of their being the leaders of international finance ... the Florentines were not in a position, as were the Venetians, to take advantage of the changes that took place between 1325 and 1345.''
Venetian superprofits in global currency speculation continued right through the bank crash and financial market disintegration of 1345-47 which they had rigged, and beyond.
In the period 1330-1350, the Black Death of bubonic and pneumonic plague had spread through southern China, killing between 15 and 20 million people, as the Mongols' looting process came to exhaustion. The Mongols' ``horse culture'' (they grazed huge herds of horses for hunting and warfare) had destroyed the infrastructure of agriculture wherever they went. It had also moved the population of Plague -- carrying rodents from the small area of northwest China where it had been isolated for centuries, down into southern China and westward all the way to the Black Sea.
In 1346, Mongol cavalry spread the Black Death to towns in the Crimea, on the Black Sea, and from there it was carried by ship to Sicily and Italy in 1347, and spread throughout Europe. The European population had stagnated for 40 years while becoming more concentrated into cities, where water and sanitation infrastructure had decayed. In Florence, for example, all the city's bridges had been built in the 13th century, none in the fourteenth. Nutritional levels had already fallen as grain production declined. During the Crusades, the practice of classical education in monasteries had been viciously attacked by the ``preacher of the Crusades,'' Bernard of Clairvaux, and his Cistercian order. In 1225, the Vatican had finally forbidden the presence of young students oblates in monasteries. Europe's broadest form of education had disappeared.
After the financial crash and the entry of the Plague, Europe's population fell for 100 years, from perhaps 90 million, to roughly 60 million.
No More Venetian Methods
God allows evil, so that we will become better by fighting it, said Gottfried Leibniz, who founded the science of physical economy in the seventeenth century. The Black Death in Europe destroyed the Malthusian idea that fewer people would mean better life for the survivors -- against it, came the Renaissance idea of the dignity and sanctity of each individual life. The chronicler Matteo Villani wrote in the 1360s:
``It was assumed, on account of the lack of people, that there would be an abundance of everything the law produces. But on the contrary, because of man's ingratitude, everything was in unusually short supply ... and in some countries there were terrible famines. It was thought there would be a profusion of clothing and of everything the human body needs besides life itself, and just the opposite occurred. Most things cost twice as much or more than they did before the plague and wages increased disjointedly to double.''
The marked price rises in the aftermath of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, lasted more than a generation. This then led to a sharp deflation and collapse of wages from about 1380.
After 1400, in the years which led to the Golden Renaissance, political forces turned against the methods of the Italian free enterprise bankers. In 1401, King Martin I of Aragon (Spain) expelled them. In 1403, Henry IV of England prohibited them from taking profits in any way in his kingdom. In 1409, Flanders imprisoned and then expelled Genoese bankers. In 1410, all Italian merchants were expelled from Paris. When Louis XI became King of France in 1461, he organized national forces to make it the first strong and sovereign nation state. Along with the development of ports, roads, and support for the cities, Louis XI insisted on a single, standard national currency, created and controlled by the crown. For both Louis XI and England's Henry VII in the same period:
``mercantilist forms of economic nationalism were combined with a pronounced hostility to Italian techniques of credit and clearing.''
The preceding article above is a short version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac.
by Paul Gallagher
Printed in the American Almanac, September 4, 1995
http://members.tripod.com/~american_...c/pbgbardi.htm
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Specifics here about treatment of Jews in Europe, and also Military/Credit-based fiat currency during the Great Crusades.
The "German Crusade"
The First Crusade ignited a long tradition of organized violence against Jews in European culture. While anti-Semitism had always existed in Europe, the First Crusade marks the first mass organized violence against Jewish communities. Setting off in the early summer of 1096, a German army of around 10,000 soldiers led by Gottschalk, Volkmar, and Emich of Leiningen, proceeding northward in the opposite direction of Jerusalem through the Rhine valley, began what is known as "the first Holocaust", or pogrom.
The preaching of the crusade inspired further anti-Semitism.
The Christian conquest of Jerusalem and the establishment of a Christian emperor there would supposedly instigate the End Times, during which the Jews were supposed to convert to Christianity. In parts of France and Germany, Jews were perceived as just as much of an enemy as Muslims: they were thought to be responsible for the crucifixion, and they were more immediately visible than the far-away Muslims. Many people wondered why they should travel thousands of miles to fight non-believers when there were already non-believers closer to home.
The crusaders moved north through the Rhine valley into well known Jewish communities such as Cologne, and then southward. Jewish communities were given the option of converting to Christianity or be slaughtered. Most would not convert and as news of the mass killings spread many Jewish communities commited mass suicides in horrific scenes. Thousands of Jews were massacred, despite attempts by local clergy and secular authorities to shelter them. The massacres were justified by the claim that Urban's speech at Clermont promised the crusaders would not be punished by God for killing non-Christians of any sort, not just Muslims. It is worth noting that although the papacy abhored the purging of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants during the said Crusade, the crusader's zealous and murderous rampage continued for centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade
In economics, military fiat is one of three ways to guarantee the value of money, credit money and commodity money being alternatives - but both relying to some degree on the fiat. True fiat money has no trust or product value of its own, but is backed only by military fiat, i.e. the capacity to collect taxes by force, or require conversion of some other resource (e.g. oil, iron, labor) into that currency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_fiat
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Closely related topic of the Knight's Templar Bankers during the Crusades:
TEMPLAR BANKERS
History
The first of the military orders, the Knights Templar or Poor Knights of Christ were founded in 1118 in the aftermath of the First Crusade to help the new Kingdom of Jerusalem maintain itself against its defeated Muslim neighbors, and to ensure the safety of the large numbers of European pilgrims that flowed towards Jerusalem after its conquest.
Their name alludes to their historical headquarters in the Mosque of Omar (a.k.a. "Dome of the Rock") on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This they renamed Templum Domini. Represented on one of their seals, the structure was believed to be a remnant of the Temple of Jerusalem, and was the model for many Templar churches in Europe, for example the Temple Church in London. See also Raphael's painting The Marriage of the Virgin on show in the Brera Gallery, Milan.
The Templars used their immense wealth with skill and wisdom. Not only did they make substantial strategic investments in land and agricultural pursuits, but they also invested in basic industries which provided the essential ingredients for the massive expansion in building, both lay and ecclesiastical, which began to change the face of Europe. Using their own commercial insights as well as techniques which they adopted from their Muslim opponents in the east, they developed the concept of financial transfer by 'note of hand' into something like its modern equivalent, developed the bankers cheque and the pre-cursor of the credit card. This latter development arose from the financial needs created by the medieval equivalent of the 'package tour industry' - the pilgrimage trade. Whether to Rome, Jerusalem or Compostela, pilgrimage was a long, arduous and expensive enterprise for the pilgrim and a source of immense profit for the Church and innkeepers, ferrymen and others en route.
The pilgrim would be wary of carrying large sums of money as he travelled, for fear of robbery, extortion or unforeseen accident. The answer was simple; seek out the master of the local Templar commanderie and deposit sufficient funds with him to cover the estimated cost of the return journey, including travel, accommodation and ancillary costs such as alms and gift-giving to the important ecclesiastical sites en route and at the final destination. In return for the financial deposit, the Templar treasurer would give the traveller a coded chit as a form of receipt and as a means of exchange. At each overnight stop, or where alms or offerings had to be given, the pilgrim would hand his chit to the local Templar representative who would pay any dues outstanding, re-code the chit accordingly and return it to its owner. When the pilgrimage was over and the weary traveller had returned home, he would present the chit to the Templar treasurer who had first issued it. Any balance of credit would be returned in cash, or if the pilgrim had overspent he would be presented with the appropriate bill.
The entire pilgrimage trade policed by the Templars, who also acted as the bankers for this form of travel, bears a startling resemblance to the modern package tour industry. The modern equivalent of the Templar chit is, of course, the credit card.
Templar banking practise was not restricted to the pilgrimage trade, they also arranged safe transfer of funds for international and local trade, the Church and the State. In the medieval era it was forbidden for Christians to charge interest on loans and therefore money lending as a profession had been traditionally restricted to the Jews. This did little to enhance the reputation of the Jews as a racial group, which was already jeopardised by the persistent allegation that they were 'Christ killers'.
The Knights Templar found a way around this restriction which allowed them to lend considerable sums of money at interest without being subjected to the charge of usury. It was quite permissible to charge rent for the leasing of a house or land, so the Templars used this principle in their money lending and charged 'rent' rather than interest for their services rendered. The rent was payable at the time the loan was granted and was added to the capital sum borrowed. By this euphemism the Templars avoided being brought before the courts on the un-Christian charge of usury. Templar wealth was such that their financial services were not only sought by the merchants and landowners of feudal Europe, but by the princes of the Church and State.
They lent to bishops to finance church building programmes; to princes, kings and emperors to finance state works, building programmes, wars and
crusades. Within the twin embrace of financial security and safe travel, Europe began to transform itself. Safe and effective trade over longer distances led to the accumulation of capital and the emergence of a newly prosperous merchant class, the urban bourgeoisie. The new-found wealth of the city merchants changed the balance of power still further in favour of the towns and cities. With the peace and tranquillity of the countryside now ensured by the activities of the Knights Templar the feudal lords began to lose the raison d'etre on which their power was based.
The Order of the Knights Templar, despite its relatively short life span, was the major instrument of transformative change in medieval Europe. The Templars brought many blessings of knowledge and technology from their Arab opponents in the Holy Land, that conferred immense benefits on the European population. The Gothic cathedrals that arose from their knowledge of sacred geometry still adorn the European landscape and form a permanent series of 'prayers in stone' that raise their spires skyward in silent supplication. When taken as a whole, rather than studied in isolation, the various activities of the Knights Templar are like a huge mosaic of individual pieces which together form a picture which accurately predicted the future.
The order was not merely the medieval pre-cursor of the modern multi-national conglomerate but was in many respects an early embryonic form of the European Union.
However, success, wealth and power stimulated jealousy and resentment, especially from those who were heavily in debt to the order.
INTRODUCTION TO THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
Over a period of 200 years, the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon — the Knights Templar for short, which began as a 9-man team of well-intentioned noblemen, dedicated to defending the Holy Land from the Saracens, became the most powerful — and most secretive — organization in history.
These warrior monks owned many fabled religious treasures including, it is said, the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus as he perished on the Cross, and they were also thought to be the guardians of that most revered of all Christian relics, the Holy Grail.
The Templars possessed immeasurable wealth. Kings of Europe came to them cap in hand to negotiate loans. They created many fundamental aspects of today’s international banking system like the bank note and letters of credit. Yet faithful to their solemnly sworn vows of poverty, the individual members of this secret society were penniless.
But when the Knights Templar was destroyed in the 14th century, their incredible riches vanished into thin air. To escape persecution by King Philip of France, the Templars’ treasure — and their enormous fleet moored at La Rochelle — simply disappeared. To this day, its whereabouts has never been discovered.
History books also describe how the Templars were in possession of a mysterious "great secret". Some historians have suggested this merely related to their connection with the grail. But more recent accounts have painted a different picture. This "great secret" may have been a particular knowledge which, if revealed, would undermine our fundamental view of Christianity itself.
Prince Llewelyn was patron to Hywel Voel who was a Druid and Bard. Hywel Voel wrote of Prince Llewelyn's involvement with the Knights Templar and the Ordre de Seon. Our records show that in 1271 A.D. Hywel commanded those trusted scribes and clerks who owed allegiance to him, to begin the task of compiling what was left of the known mystical knowledge of the Llewelyn family into ordered volumes. It is said that Hywel was the first to collect The Thirteen Treasures. He also caused The Owl, to be created. This was the first Grimoire or spell book of our tradition. The accumulation and recording of this knowledge, was no mean feat, for the political climate of those years was not conducive to study, travel or teaching.
TEMPLAR BUSINESS ACTIVITIES
The transformative effect of Templar activity upon European culture and commerce was remarkable and yet many modern Church historians still accuse the order of being formed of illiterate knights. The so-called 'illiterates' developed sophisticated and coded means of communication which transcended the linguistic barriers which otherwise would have fragmented and diffused the commercial impact of their activities. Among the principal items of their trading activities were those which we would describe in modern terms as 'technology and ideas'. The Templar communication network was the principal route by which knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, herbal medicine and healing skills made their way from the Holy Land to Europe. Among the technological advances brought back by the warrior knights were mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the telescope and a financial instrument which they acquired from the Sufis of Islam, known as 'the note of hand'.
Equally mysterious are accounts claiming that the organisation never really died at all. The end of the Templars was signified by the execution of their the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, who was roasted alive before a chanting mob in Paris in 1314. But some historians believe they simply changed their name and went underground. Evidence has ever been cited which links famous figures from more recent history with the Order — hundreds of years after it officially ceased to be. Sir Isaac Newton is named as one. The great Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama journeyed with the Templar cross insignia on his sails, as did Christopher Columbus. Evidence even suggests that the Templars discovered America some 80 years before Columbus.
There are those who maintain that the Order of the Knights Templar are still in existence today, though under another name. Throughout Europe, its members are still thought to meet secretly to discuss unknown business, conduct arcane rituals and plot our destiny behind closed doors. The order of warrior monks who were to become one of the most powerful and controversial organisations in European medieval history, were known by a variety of names; the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, la Milice du Christ or, more commonly, the Knights Templar.
http://www.tylwythteg.com/templar.html
Robert Bruce carried out a decidedly half-hearted campaign against the Templars in his realm. Indeed, there is little evidence of any activity that could even be called persecution: "only two interrogatories of Templars have been found, in neither of which is any crime admitted" Certainly, legends that connect the Scots to the Order are widespread. Printed material is ripe with suggestions of asylum. Addison mentions in passing that many Templars "escaped in disguise to the wild and mountainous parts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland"
Foucalt’s Pendulum recognizes the widespread notion that "the Templars fled to Scotland," and The Temple and the Lodge goes so far as to suggest that vast Templar riches, which disappeared from France, were shipped from the Siene through Galway and Limerick to Argyll, Scotland
http://members.gntech.net/bubba/z2000templars.htm
There is considerable evidence to suggest that they continue to exercise control over the banking system they created in the 13th century. Distinguishing themselves during the Crusades, the Templars were rewarded with lands the size of some European counties. Luxembourg was in fact a one-time Templar landholding, which explains why Victor Hugo, an alleged Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, sought asylum there during his period of exile. The land referred to today as Luxembourg was owned by the Templar families Guise and Lorraine, who ran their own secret society affiliated with the Templars. Freemasons, and Rosicrucians known as the House of Guise and Lorraine.
The name 'Rosicruscian' is derived from 'rosy cross'. A red cross on a white background was worn by the Templars on the battlefield. It also has affiliations with the Knights Hospitaller (from which the word 'hospital' is derived) and with the International Red Cross, which appears to be a front organisation for the secret brotherhood. Far from engaging in strictly humanitarian activities, the Red Cross has been caught supplying arms to the Tamil Rebels in Sri Lanka and the Zapatista rebels in Mexico.
As for today's scene, the weight of evidence supports the theory that brotherhood organisations such as Freemasonry control an array of multinational corporations including the Seven Sisters oil cartel, through the brotherhood families Rockefeller and Rothschild, along with many of the multinational corporations, which own and control a number of subsidiaries operating under assumed names. The Templar 'double red cross' contained in the company logo for the Rockefeller-controlled oil giant Exxon is an obvious brotherhood symbol.
http://www.jainsamaj.org/literature/global-060704.htm
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And so here we are today...
and more from that great thread
The Simpleton posted
There is a very good book "The Calamatous 14th Century" highlighting many aspects of the times. It did not go into finance, but what it brought most to light was the terrible scourge of mercenaries.
The rise of mercenaries, first were built to travel as military experts and consultants from war to war. Before long, however, they were paid in pillage, making them like Vikings, laying waste to the land. After that, they began to gain such power that they must be continually paid off, and began to unseat Dukes and even Kings with regularity. On the ground level, all that meant was unending famine, murder, rape, turmoil.
Unlike how many people here perceive it, there WAS no sanctuary. None. No one who buried gold in their backyard prospered against those who did not. In the 50-100 years, 5 generations of unending war, famine, tryranny, and disruption, anything anyone could possibly set aside would have been stolen, eaten, or used up. Gold will not help you when they burn your children in front of you to learn where it is hidden.
Nor was country living a special insurance against such times. The cities had higher boom-busts, but the farms and farmers were endlessly, relentlessly, sacked and taxed. Dispersed as they must be, they had no practical defense.
Moral? Don't count too much on your metals to save you, be it gold or lead. If you've seen "Cold Mountain," it was Cold Mountain and worse, every day for a lifespan, a period so long that before it ended, the times previous were entirely forgotten, a mere myth of a thing called "order", passed like Arthur and Charlemange to Avalon.
This is why mercenaries were so ruthlessly put down and never allowed to raise their heads since the rise of Nations and Kings were finally able to put the lid on them in the 1600s by becoming the more ruthless than the ruthless. Now we have mercenaries rising in hundred thousands in Iraq, funded by spoil. Where will they go when they have learned this little trick and the spoil is spoiled? They do not create, only steal. To live they must go where people have, and work, and produce. Do not get started on this road, my friends, or you will be eternally sorry. This is why there is an Army and an Army order and Army Law. It's not a restriction, it's the preservation of the State and of Society itself. The last defense of civilization before Bosnia and Sudan. I was very disappointed in the Abu affair which undermines this last veil of order. Once an army ignores rules of order, what is there but spreading anarchy? Once a Nation takes the stop-gap of not facing itself, its own truth, and hiring mercenaries to do what is not otherwise permitted, what is this but buying anarchy itself? This is exactly what the Dukes of the 14th century did, and one by one they were trampled, eaten alive by the genie they unleashed. It was 200 years before the genie was returned to the bottle. Let us not make the same mistake.
In many ways, the middle ages were no worse than the Age of Rome. At many points and places, there was order and plenty, places where after the Vandals and Goths, libraries and universities were rebuilt and civilization discovered. But this bright middle period, so like Rome, was swept back into utter darkness with the 14th century. This is the part of the medieval period closest to us, which so rightfully deserves the name "Dark Ages." And it happened because of what we're doing, right now, this very minute and every minute of every day for most of your life.
You might look into it. What WAS of any help during this period. It's very illuminating.
more from K
I'm pleased that some of you have kept this thread alive. I feel that the topic of the historical crusades is very relevant to today -- and the lessons of its cause and legacy are almost always misunderstood today.
Who 'profited' from the Great Crusades?
Who suffered?
Who was it meant to SAVE?
Where were the Jewish people, the Muslims during this time frame?
Where were the Christian Italian Roman bankers, and the Knights Templar?
Who won?
Where are those winning/losing --
parties/religions/countries today perhaps?
Who is IN CHARGE today and might also gain from another great crusade?
Does anyone really care? -- Just joking of course...
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About the Crusades and their legacy of hatred:
The mid 7th century to the mid 10th century CE saw the gradual expansion of Islam. Half of the Christian world was conquered by Arab armies; this included countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, such as Egypt, southern France, southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Syria, Turkey, etc. 4
By the late 10th century, Europe and the Middle East were divided into Christian and Muslim spheres of influence. Christian pilgrims from Europe regularly visited Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in reasonable safety. Such pilgrimages were very popular. The were believed to be one of the major acts by which a person could limit their exposure to the tortures of purgatory after their death.
By the middle of the 11th century, Christianity had formally split: The Emperor/Bishop of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome had mutually excommunicated each other. Christendom was divided between the Roman Catholic Church and the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, the Turks defeated the latter at the Battle of Manzikert. This left Constantinople exposed to attack from Muslims. Meanwhile, Christians were being ambushed during their pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
Emperor Alexius asked Pope Urban II for assistance. On 1095-NOV-27, the Pope called on Europeans to go on a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers. "The first and second wave of Crusaders murdered, raped and plundered their way up the Rhine and down the Danube as they headed for Jerusalem." 1 The "army" was primarily composed of untrained peasants with their families, with a core of trained soldiers. On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews. The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust."
Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The latter were also slaughtered without mercy.
The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven. By eliminating what might be many millennia of torture in Purgatory, many Christians were strongly motivated to volunteer for the crusades. "After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church." 3
These mass killings were repeated during each of the 8 additional crusades until the final, 9th, crusade in 1272 CE. Both Christians and Muslims believed that they were fighting on God's side against Satan; they believed that if they died on the battlefield they would be given preferential treatment in Heaven. Battles were fought with a terrible fierceness and a massive loss of life. Over a 200 year period, perhaps 200,000 people were killed. The Muslim warrior Salah a-Din subsequently recaptured Jerusalem from the Christians.
By the end of the crusades, most European Christians believed the unfounded blood-libel myths -- the rumor that Jews engaged in human sacrifice of Christian children. A long series of Christian persecutions of the Jews continued in Europe and Russia into the 20th century. They laid the foundation for the Nazi Holocaust.
The result of centuries of conflict among followers of the three Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) was a "deep mutual hatred" and mistrust among the three faiths. Memories of these genocides still influence relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims to the present time.
Among many Jews and Muslims, the term crusade evokes visions of genocide, mass murder, and mass extermination of innocent people. However, among many Christians it has become a positive term, frequently used to refer to mass rallies and campaigns to win converts - as in the Billy Graham Crusades. Out of respect for the victims of the "first holocaust," we recommend that the term be only used to refer to the wars of the Middle Ages.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_cru1.htm
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Note also the chronology for these terms of language, still with us today.
money - c.1290, "coinage, metal currency," from O.Fr. moneie, from L. moneta "mint, coinage," from Moneta, a title of the Roman goddess Juno, in or near whose temple money was coined; perhaps from monere "advise, warn," in the sense of "admonishing goddess," which is sensible, but the etymology is difficult. Extended early 19c. to include paper money.
usury - c.1303, from M.L. usuria, from L. usura "usury, interest," from usus, from stem of uti (see use). Originally the practice of lending money at interest, later, at excessive rates of interest.
Jew (n.) - c.1175 (in plural, giwis), from Anglo-Fr. iuw, from O.Fr. giu, from L. Judaeum (nom. Judaeus), from Gk. Ioudaios, from Aramaic jehudhai (Heb. y'hudi "Jew," from Y'hudah "Judah," lit. "celebrated," name of Jacob's fourth son and of the tribe descended from him. Replaced O.E. Iudeas "the
Jews." In uneducated times, inexplicable ancient artifacts were credited to Jews, based on the biblical chronology of history: e.g. Jews' money (1577) "Roman coins found in England." In Greece, after Christianity had erased the memory of classical glory, ruins of pagan temples were called "Jews' castles."
jew (v.) - "to cheat, to drive a hard bargain," 1824, from Jew (n.) (cf. gyp, welsh, etc.). The campaign to eliminate it in early 20c. was so successful that people began to avoid the noun and adj., too, and started using Hebrew instead.
Templar - M.E., from Anglo-Fr. templer, O.Fr. templier, member of the medieval religious/military order known as Knights Templars (c.1118-1312), so called because they occupied a building near Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
http://www.etymonline.com/m7etym.htm
Medieval Terms
...USURY The interest charged on a loan. Forbidden by church law (based upon biblical injunction). Commonly used by Knight Hospitallers and Knight Templars in Later Medieval Times.
http://www.veling.nl/anne/templars/Medieval_Terms.html
1)Early Loans And Interest Were Based On Agricultural Produce
From about 30,000 BC human existence became more refined until social and economic forms of agriculture appeared around 10,000 to 7,500 BC. This took the form of hoe gardening done mainly by women and led to matriarchal based societies.
From around 6,000 BC the horse was tamed and sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated so that by 5,000 there existed a mixed culture based on animal breeding and hoe gardening. The great plough revolution starting about 4,500 was complete by 4,000 BC. enabling the first city civilizations to arise, and the introduction of writing shortly after, led to a developing "social technology".
Loans in the pre-urban societies were made in seed grains, animals and tools to farmers. Since one grain of seed could generate a plant with over 100 new grain seeds, after the harvest farmers could easily repay the grain with "interest" in grain. (Suggested graphics here showing 1 wheat seed, next to a sheaf of wheat with the large number of new seeds which could be generated by that 1 seed) Also since just so much seed grain could possibly be used, there were natural limits to this lending activity.
When animals were loaned interest was paid by sharing in any new animals born. (graphics - a male and female cow/sheep/goat, and the offspring) The Sumerians used the same word - mas - for both calves and interest. A similar Egyptian word meant to give birth. What was loaned had the power of generation, and interest was a sharing of the result. Interest on tool loans was paid in the produce which the tools had helped to create.
2)The Oriental Usury Error On Lending Metals
The social organization taken by the developing urban communities in Egypt, Assyria, and Sumeria is known as the Ancient Oriental System. It embraced the idea of a living King as the divine representative and savior, able to organize the welfare of mankind through a powerful Royal household exercising centralized control over the economy. Compulsory labor was required for public works and Pharaohs instructed what and how much to plant and how much of the harvest would be stored. Agricultural and metallic commodities (mainly barley and silver) by weight served as the primitive money system in these societies.
The ancient orient made a momentous innovation, allowing usury to be charged on loans of metals, with the interest to be paid in more metal. This was particularly a problem with agricultural, as opposed to loans for commercial or trading purposes. The conceptual error treated inorganic materials as if they were living organisms with the means of reproduction. But metals are "barren" - they have no powers of generation and any interest paid in them must originate from some other source or process.
4)Aristotle (384-322 BC) Formulated The Classical View Against Usury
Aristotle understood that money is sterile; it doesn’t beget more money the way cows beget more cows. He knew that "Money exists not by nature but by law":
"The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." (1258b, POLITICS)
And he really disliked usurers:
"...those who ply sordid trades, pimps and all such people, and those who lend small sums at high rates. For all these take more than they ought, and from the wrong sources. What is common to them is evidently a sordid love of gain..." (1122a, ETHICS)
http://www.appropriate-economics.org..._interest.html
Organization :The Templars were organized as a monastic order, following a rule created for them by Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order. The Templars were well-connected and quickly became prime movers in the international politics of the Crusades period. In time, they were endowed with several extraordinary Papal bulls (see Omne Datum Optimum) that permitted them, among other things, to levy taxes and accept tithing in the areas under their direct control, facilitating their quick rise to institutional power.
There were four divisions of brothers in the Templars:
the knights, equipped as heavy cavalry
the sergeants, equipped as light cavalry and drawn from a lower social class than the knights
farmers, who administered the property of the Order
the chaplains, who were ordained priests and saw to the spiritual needs of the Order.
At any time, there were approximately 10 people in support positions for each Knight. There were brothers devoted only to banking, as the Order was often trusted with precious goods by participants in the Crusades.
Banking
The Knights involvement in banking over time grew into a new basis of money as Templars became increasingly involved in banking activities. It is some indication of their powerful political connections that the Templars' involvement in usury did not lead to more controversy within the Order and the church at large.
The Templars' political connections and awareness of the essentially urban and commercial nature of the Outremer communities naturally led the Order to a position of significant power both in Europe and the Holy Lands. Their success attracted the concern of many other Orders and eventually that of the nobility and monarchs of Europe as well, who were at this time seeking to monopolize control of money and banking after a long chaotic period in which civil society, especially the Church and its lay Orders, had dominated financial activities. The Templars' holdings were extensive both in Europe and the Middle East, including, for a time, the entire island of Cyprus.
Money and military -- inseparable?
The tangled history of military and money relationships led in the mid-19th-to-mid-20th centuries to a variety of critiques of the use of military fiat. Some saw an evolution to political consultation, others saw the increased concentration of power as a sign that this consultation was only skin-deep, and that the bureaucracy and military's habits would be increasingly aligned and in opposition to public will.
Marxist economists generally hold that military fiat is in practice held exclusively by members of the ruling class and used for its own interests against that of the working class. This has led to the broad range of debates regarding socialism, communism, and the duty of the state to use its political and economic power for the benefit of all. Questions of this nature merge into those of political science in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_fiat
I don't have answers so I am only posing questions here, through the LONG VIEW of TIME...
and another k post
[QUOTE]Who 'profited' from the Great Crusades?
"Venice,'' wrote Braudel: "was the greatest commercial success of the Middle Ages -- a city without industry, except for naval-military construction, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an empire through mere trading enterprise. In the fourteenth century she was in the ascendant to her greatest periods of success and power.''
``Venice's rulers were less concerned with profits from industries than with profits from trade between regions that valued gold and silver differently.''
``The Florentine supercompanies resembled very closely in their operations the huge international grain companies of today, such as Cargill and Archer-Daniels Midland,'' writes Hunt. ``They used loans to monarchs to dominate and control trade in certain vital commodities, especially grain, and later wool and cloth.'' Their dominance and speculation progressively reduced the production of these commodities.
The Crusades also consolidated the alliance of Venice and its allied Black Guelph-ruled cities, the Papacy, and the Norman and Anjou kings, against the Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany, which Dante and his allies were struggling to restore to its potential. By the late thirteenth century, the Mongols were a conscious part of this Venetian-led alliance, and the Mongol rulers of Persia even proposed Crusades to the European kings and the Popes!
Pope John XXII granted Venice alone the license to trade with the infidel Mamluk sultans of Egypt in the 1330s. This was overvalued European silver and Mongol slaves for gold from Sudan and Mali.
Venice was also the ``banker,'' slave market, and intelligence support service for the Mongol Khans.
More revealing is the latest work of the historian of Venice, Frederick C. Lane, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. This work shows that it was Venetian finance which, by dominating and controlling a huge international ``bubble'' of currency speculation from 1275 through 1350, rigged the great collapse of the 1340s.
Venetian superprofits in global currency speculation and manipulation continued right through the Florence bank's crash and financial market disintegration of 1345-47 which they had rigged, and beyond.
So only the bankers and merchants of Venice profited continually, like an eagle is said to fly through a storm.
Who suffered?
In 1208 Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade--this time against a country of fellow Christians. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians, rose to prominence in what is now southern France, but was then a patchwork of city-states and principalities beholden to neither king nor bishop. They infiltrated the highest ranks of society and posed a major threat not only to the Catholic church but also to secular authorities as well.
Pope Innocent boasts that they took five hundred towns and castles from the heretics, and they generally butchered every man, woman and child in a town when they took it. Noble ladies with their daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them. Knights were hanged in batches of eighty. When, at the first large town, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Cistercian abbot thundered: "Kill them all, God will know his own," and they put to the sword the forty thousand surviving men, women and children. It is the Catholics of the time who tell us.
From this came -- the future 'Inquisitions'.
http://www.infidels.org/library/hist...hapter_23.html
Nutritional levels had already fallen as grain production declined. During the Crusades, the practice of classical education in monasteries had been viciously attacked by the ``preacher of the Crusades,'' Bernard of Clairvaux, and his Cistercian order. In 1225, the Vatican had finally forbidden the presence of young students oblates in monasteries. Europe's broadest form of education had disappeared.
On top of all this, from the 1320s on, there was a ``massive flight of silver oltremare (``over the sea,'' that is, to Venice's maritime empire in the Middle East and Byzantium) which upset the equilibrium of Europe in the midfourteenth century.'' Venetian exports of silver from Europe from 1325-50 equalled ``perhaps 25 percent of all the silver being mined in Europe at that time.'' Standard silver coin had been the stable currency of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, and of England, since Charlemagne's time. This massive export from Venice to the East ``created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,'' and severe problems in making payments in trade. This massive export from Venice to the East ``created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,'' and severe problems in making payments in trade. France ``was emptied of silver coinage.''
So production of the most vital commodities in Europe had been severely reduced, and the trade and circulation of its money completely disrupted, over decades before the 1340s crash, by Italian banks which appeared to be making usurious rates of profit.
The Crusades also consolidated the alliance of Venice and its allied Black Guelph-ruled cities, the Papacy, and the Norman and Anjou kings, against the Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany, which Dante and his allies were struggling to restore to its potential. By the late thirteenth century, the Mongols were a conscious part of this Venetian-led alliance, and the Mongol rulers of Persia even proposed Crusades to the European kings and the Popes! Pope John XXII granted Venice alone the license to trade with the infidel Mamluk sultans of Egypt in the 1330s. This was overvalued European silver and Mongol slaves for gold from Sudan and Mali.
"Derivatives"
Thus, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice provided all the coinage and currency-exchange for the largest empire in history, which was looting and destroying the populations under its rule. Venice had taken over the currency trading and coining of what remained of the Byzantine Empire, and also of the Mamluk Sultanates in North Africa. Venice, over this period, took the East off a gold standard and put it on a silver standard (it was the richer region of the world, and being more intensively looted). It took Byzantium and Europe off a 500-year old silver standard and put them on gold standards.
And the Venetian financiers and merchants were making annual rates of profit of up to 40 percent on very large, overwhelmingly short-term (six-month) investments, in a world economy characterized at its most productive, by perhaps 34 percent annual rates of real physical ``free energy'': surplus wealth (see Figure 2). The other Black Guelph Italian bankers' operations were subsumed by Venetian financial manipulations, but they were also realizing rates of profit far above the rate of physical reproduction of the economies of Europe. Because of the dominance of these speculative cancers, all the major real physical economies were shrinking.
What was the effect of this Venetian global currency speculation on the European economies before the 1340s crash and the Black Death? It was the short-term vise that caught the other European bankers and rigged the crash itself.
From 1275-1325, the ratio of the average gold price, to the average silver price, steadily rose, though with continual short-term fluctuations, from about 8:1 to, finally, about 15:1. In this period, Europe's large production of silver was looted through Venice's command of Mongol and African gold. ``Venice had the central position as the world's bullion market,'' writes Lane, ``and attracted to the Rialto (the bridge area which was Venice's ``Wall Street'') the acceleration of buying and selling stimulated by the changing prices of the two precious metals.'' From 1290 into the 1330s prices rose sharply for the most crucial commodities.
In this process of quickening speculation, Venice ``ensnared all the surrounding economies, including the German economy'' where production of silver, iron, and iron implements was concentrated. By the 1320s, Venetian merchants no longer even travelled to Germany to trade: They compelled German producers and merchants to come to Venice and take up lodgings near the large Fondaco dei Tedeschi (``Warehouse of the Germans'') where their goods were stored for sale. Venetian bankers on the Rialto (and Venetian bankers alone in the world at this time) made cashless bank transfers among merchants' accounts, allowed overdrafts and gave credit lines on the spot, created ``bank money,'' and speculated with it. They did this not out of cleverness, but by simple control of currency speculation worldwide: They had the reserves.
In fact, the famous ``bills of exchange'' of the Florentine bankers, were really a crude form of the ``derivatives contracts'' of the 1990s speculative cancer. The Bardi, et al. charged fees to those involved in trade, for exchanging currencies, since there were so many regional and city currencies. These exchange fees were a cost looted out of all production and trade, and a usurious profit to the bankers. But the banker made the ``bills of exchange'' even more expensive, to hedge against their own potential losses in currency fluctuations being manipulated by Venetian bullion merchants. Thus bills of exchange in the fourteenth century cost 14 percent on average, worse than borrowing at interest (usury).
Venice switched Europe to gold by force of looting silver. England, for example, from 1300-1309 imported 90,000 pounds sterling in silver for coining; but from 1330-1339, it was only able to import 1,000 pounds. ``But in Venice there was no lack of silver at all in the 1330s.'' The Florentine bankers, with their famous gold florin, enjoyed great speculative profits in this process.
However, from 1325-1345, the process was reversed. The ratio of gold price to silver price, dominated by Venetian manipulation, now fell steadily from the 15:1 level, back down to 9:1. When the price of silver started rising in the 1330s, there was an unusually large supply of silver in Venice! And through the 1340s, ``the international exchange of gold and silver greatly intensified again,'' Lane shows, and there was another wave of sharp commodity price increases.
Now the Florentine bankers were caught, having loans and investments all over Europe in gold, whose price was now falling.
After Venice triggered the fall of gold with new coins in the late 1320s, the Florentines did not attempt to follow suit until 1334 when it was too late; the king of France did not follow until 1337; and last came the pathetic effort of the king of England in 1340, mentioned above.
As Lane shows:
``The fall of gold, to which the Venetians had contributed so much by their vigorous export of silver and import of gold, and in which they found profits, hurt the Florentines. In spite of their being the leaders of international finance ... the Florentines were not in a position, as were the Venetians, to take advantage of the changes that took place between 1325 and 1345.''
Venetian superprofits in global currency speculation continued right through the bank crash and financial market disintegration of 1345-47 which they had rigged, and beyond.
In the period 1330-1350, the Black Death of bubonic and pneumonic plague had spread through southern China, killing between 15 and 20 million people, as the Mongols' looting process came to exhaustion. The Mongols' ``horse culture'' (they grazed huge herds of horses for hunting and warfare) had destroyed the infrastructure of agriculture wherever they went. It had also moved the population of Plague -- carrying rodents from the small area of northwest China where it had been isolated for centuries, down into southern China and westward all the way to the Black Sea.
In 1346, Mongol cavalry spread the Black Death to towns in the Crimea, on the Black Sea, and from there it was carried by ship to Sicily and Italy in 1347, and spread throughout Europe. The European population had stagnated for 40 years while becoming more concentrated into cities, where water and sanitation infrastructure had decayed. In Florence, for example, all the city's bridges had been built in the 13th century, none in the fourteenth. Nutritional levels had already fallen as grain production declined. During the Crusades, the practice of classical education in monasteries had been viciously attacked by the ``preacher of the Crusades,'' Bernard of Clairvaux, and his Cistercian order. In 1225, the Vatican had finally forbidden the presence of young students oblates in monasteries. Europe's broadest form of education had disappeared.
After the financial crash and the entry of the Plague, Europe's population fell for 100 years, from perhaps 90 million, to roughly 60 million.
No More Venetian Methods
God allows evil, so that we will become better by fighting it, said Gottfried Leibniz, who founded the science of physical economy in the seventeenth century. The Black Death in Europe destroyed the Malthusian idea that fewer people would mean better life for the survivors -- against it, came the Renaissance idea of the dignity and sanctity of each individual life. The chronicler Matteo Villani wrote in the 1360s:
``It was assumed, on account of the lack of people, that there would be an abundance of everything the law produces. But on the contrary, because of man's ingratitude, everything was in unusually short supply ... and in some countries there were terrible famines. It was thought there would be a profusion of clothing and of everything the human body needs besides life itself, and just the opposite occurred. Most things cost twice as much or more than they did before the plague and wages increased disjointedly to double.''
The marked price rises in the aftermath of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, lasted more than a generation. This then led to a sharp deflation and collapse of wages from about 1380.
After 1400, in the years which led to the Golden Renaissance, political forces turned against the methods of the Italian free enterprise bankers. In 1401, King Martin I of Aragon (Spain) expelled them. In 1403, Henry IV of England prohibited them from taking profits in any way in his kingdom. In 1409, Flanders imprisoned and then expelled Genoese bankers. In 1410, all Italian merchants were expelled from Paris. When Louis XI became King of France in 1461, he organized national forces to make it the first strong and sovereign nation state. Along with the development of ports, roads, and support for the cities, Louis XI insisted on a single, standard national currency, created and controlled by the crown. For both Louis XI and England's Henry VII in the same period:
``mercantilist forms of economic nationalism were combined with a pronounced hostility to Italian techniques of credit and clearing.''
The preceding article above is a short version of the article that appeared in The American Almanac. It is made available here with the permission of The New Federalist Newspaper. Any use of, or quotations from, this article must attribute them to The New Federalist, and The American Almanac.
by Paul Gallagher
Printed in the American Almanac, September 4, 1995
http://members.tripod.com/~american_...c/pbgbardi.htm
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Specifics here about treatment of Jews in Europe, and also Military/Credit-based fiat currency during the Great Crusades.
The "German Crusade"
The First Crusade ignited a long tradition of organized violence against Jews in European culture. While anti-Semitism had always existed in Europe, the First Crusade marks the first mass organized violence against Jewish communities. Setting off in the early summer of 1096, a German army of around 10,000 soldiers led by Gottschalk, Volkmar, and Emich of Leiningen, proceeding northward in the opposite direction of Jerusalem through the Rhine valley, began what is known as "the first Holocaust", or pogrom.
The preaching of the crusade inspired further anti-Semitism.
The Christian conquest of Jerusalem and the establishment of a Christian emperor there would supposedly instigate the End Times, during which the Jews were supposed to convert to Christianity. In parts of France and Germany, Jews were perceived as just as much of an enemy as Muslims: they were thought to be responsible for the crucifixion, and they were more immediately visible than the far-away Muslims. Many people wondered why they should travel thousands of miles to fight non-believers when there were already non-believers closer to home.
The crusaders moved north through the Rhine valley into well known Jewish communities such as Cologne, and then southward. Jewish communities were given the option of converting to Christianity or be slaughtered. Most would not convert and as news of the mass killings spread many Jewish communities commited mass suicides in horrific scenes. Thousands of Jews were massacred, despite attempts by local clergy and secular authorities to shelter them. The massacres were justified by the claim that Urban's speech at Clermont promised the crusaders would not be punished by God for killing non-Christians of any sort, not just Muslims. It is worth noting that although the papacy abhored the purging of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants during the said Crusade, the crusader's zealous and murderous rampage continued for centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade
In economics, military fiat is one of three ways to guarantee the value of money, credit money and commodity money being alternatives - but both relying to some degree on the fiat. True fiat money has no trust or product value of its own, but is backed only by military fiat, i.e. the capacity to collect taxes by force, or require conversion of some other resource (e.g. oil, iron, labor) into that currency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_fiat
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Closely related topic of the Knight's Templar Bankers during the Crusades:
TEMPLAR BANKERS
History
The first of the military orders, the Knights Templar or Poor Knights of Christ were founded in 1118 in the aftermath of the First Crusade to help the new Kingdom of Jerusalem maintain itself against its defeated Muslim neighbors, and to ensure the safety of the large numbers of European pilgrims that flowed towards Jerusalem after its conquest.
Their name alludes to their historical headquarters in the Mosque of Omar (a.k.a. "Dome of the Rock") on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This they renamed Templum Domini. Represented on one of their seals, the structure was believed to be a remnant of the Temple of Jerusalem, and was the model for many Templar churches in Europe, for example the Temple Church in London. See also Raphael's painting The Marriage of the Virgin on show in the Brera Gallery, Milan.
The Templars used their immense wealth with skill and wisdom. Not only did they make substantial strategic investments in land and agricultural pursuits, but they also invested in basic industries which provided the essential ingredients for the massive expansion in building, both lay and ecclesiastical, which began to change the face of Europe. Using their own commercial insights as well as techniques which they adopted from their Muslim opponents in the east, they developed the concept of financial transfer by 'note of hand' into something like its modern equivalent, developed the bankers cheque and the pre-cursor of the credit card. This latter development arose from the financial needs created by the medieval equivalent of the 'package tour industry' - the pilgrimage trade. Whether to Rome, Jerusalem or Compostela, pilgrimage was a long, arduous and expensive enterprise for the pilgrim and a source of immense profit for the Church and innkeepers, ferrymen and others en route.
The pilgrim would be wary of carrying large sums of money as he travelled, for fear of robbery, extortion or unforeseen accident. The answer was simple; seek out the master of the local Templar commanderie and deposit sufficient funds with him to cover the estimated cost of the return journey, including travel, accommodation and ancillary costs such as alms and gift-giving to the important ecclesiastical sites en route and at the final destination. In return for the financial deposit, the Templar treasurer would give the traveller a coded chit as a form of receipt and as a means of exchange. At each overnight stop, or where alms or offerings had to be given, the pilgrim would hand his chit to the local Templar representative who would pay any dues outstanding, re-code the chit accordingly and return it to its owner. When the pilgrimage was over and the weary traveller had returned home, he would present the chit to the Templar treasurer who had first issued it. Any balance of credit would be returned in cash, or if the pilgrim had overspent he would be presented with the appropriate bill.
The entire pilgrimage trade policed by the Templars, who also acted as the bankers for this form of travel, bears a startling resemblance to the modern package tour industry. The modern equivalent of the Templar chit is, of course, the credit card.
Templar banking practise was not restricted to the pilgrimage trade, they also arranged safe transfer of funds for international and local trade, the Church and the State. In the medieval era it was forbidden for Christians to charge interest on loans and therefore money lending as a profession had been traditionally restricted to the Jews. This did little to enhance the reputation of the Jews as a racial group, which was already jeopardised by the persistent allegation that they were 'Christ killers'.
The Knights Templar found a way around this restriction which allowed them to lend considerable sums of money at interest without being subjected to the charge of usury. It was quite permissible to charge rent for the leasing of a house or land, so the Templars used this principle in their money lending and charged 'rent' rather than interest for their services rendered. The rent was payable at the time the loan was granted and was added to the capital sum borrowed. By this euphemism the Templars avoided being brought before the courts on the un-Christian charge of usury. Templar wealth was such that their financial services were not only sought by the merchants and landowners of feudal Europe, but by the princes of the Church and State.
They lent to bishops to finance church building programmes; to princes, kings and emperors to finance state works, building programmes, wars and
crusades. Within the twin embrace of financial security and safe travel, Europe began to transform itself. Safe and effective trade over longer distances led to the accumulation of capital and the emergence of a newly prosperous merchant class, the urban bourgeoisie. The new-found wealth of the city merchants changed the balance of power still further in favour of the towns and cities. With the peace and tranquillity of the countryside now ensured by the activities of the Knights Templar the feudal lords began to lose the raison d'etre on which their power was based.
The Order of the Knights Templar, despite its relatively short life span, was the major instrument of transformative change in medieval Europe. The Templars brought many blessings of knowledge and technology from their Arab opponents in the Holy Land, that conferred immense benefits on the European population. The Gothic cathedrals that arose from their knowledge of sacred geometry still adorn the European landscape and form a permanent series of 'prayers in stone' that raise their spires skyward in silent supplication. When taken as a whole, rather than studied in isolation, the various activities of the Knights Templar are like a huge mosaic of individual pieces which together form a picture which accurately predicted the future.
The order was not merely the medieval pre-cursor of the modern multi-national conglomerate but was in many respects an early embryonic form of the European Union.
However, success, wealth and power stimulated jealousy and resentment, especially from those who were heavily in debt to the order.
INTRODUCTION TO THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
Over a period of 200 years, the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon — the Knights Templar for short, which began as a 9-man team of well-intentioned noblemen, dedicated to defending the Holy Land from the Saracens, became the most powerful — and most secretive — organization in history.
These warrior monks owned many fabled religious treasures including, it is said, the Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus as he perished on the Cross, and they were also thought to be the guardians of that most revered of all Christian relics, the Holy Grail.
The Templars possessed immeasurable wealth. Kings of Europe came to them cap in hand to negotiate loans. They created many fundamental aspects of today’s international banking system like the bank note and letters of credit. Yet faithful to their solemnly sworn vows of poverty, the individual members of this secret society were penniless.
But when the Knights Templar was destroyed in the 14th century, their incredible riches vanished into thin air. To escape persecution by King Philip of France, the Templars’ treasure — and their enormous fleet moored at La Rochelle — simply disappeared. To this day, its whereabouts has never been discovered.
History books also describe how the Templars were in possession of a mysterious "great secret". Some historians have suggested this merely related to their connection with the grail. But more recent accounts have painted a different picture. This "great secret" may have been a particular knowledge which, if revealed, would undermine our fundamental view of Christianity itself.
Prince Llewelyn was patron to Hywel Voel who was a Druid and Bard. Hywel Voel wrote of Prince Llewelyn's involvement with the Knights Templar and the Ordre de Seon. Our records show that in 1271 A.D. Hywel commanded those trusted scribes and clerks who owed allegiance to him, to begin the task of compiling what was left of the known mystical knowledge of the Llewelyn family into ordered volumes. It is said that Hywel was the first to collect The Thirteen Treasures. He also caused The Owl, to be created. This was the first Grimoire or spell book of our tradition. The accumulation and recording of this knowledge, was no mean feat, for the political climate of those years was not conducive to study, travel or teaching.
TEMPLAR BUSINESS ACTIVITIES
The transformative effect of Templar activity upon European culture and commerce was remarkable and yet many modern Church historians still accuse the order of being formed of illiterate knights. The so-called 'illiterates' developed sophisticated and coded means of communication which transcended the linguistic barriers which otherwise would have fragmented and diffused the commercial impact of their activities. Among the principal items of their trading activities were those which we would describe in modern terms as 'technology and ideas'. The Templar communication network was the principal route by which knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, herbal medicine and healing skills made their way from the Holy Land to Europe. Among the technological advances brought back by the warrior knights were mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the telescope and a financial instrument which they acquired from the Sufis of Islam, known as 'the note of hand'.
Equally mysterious are accounts claiming that the organisation never really died at all. The end of the Templars was signified by the execution of their the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, who was roasted alive before a chanting mob in Paris in 1314. But some historians believe they simply changed their name and went underground. Evidence has ever been cited which links famous figures from more recent history with the Order — hundreds of years after it officially ceased to be. Sir Isaac Newton is named as one. The great Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama journeyed with the Templar cross insignia on his sails, as did Christopher Columbus. Evidence even suggests that the Templars discovered America some 80 years before Columbus.
There are those who maintain that the Order of the Knights Templar are still in existence today, though under another name. Throughout Europe, its members are still thought to meet secretly to discuss unknown business, conduct arcane rituals and plot our destiny behind closed doors. The order of warrior monks who were to become one of the most powerful and controversial organisations in European medieval history, were known by a variety of names; the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, la Milice du Christ or, more commonly, the Knights Templar.
http://www.tylwythteg.com/templar.html
Robert Bruce carried out a decidedly half-hearted campaign against the Templars in his realm. Indeed, there is little evidence of any activity that could even be called persecution: "only two interrogatories of Templars have been found, in neither of which is any crime admitted" Certainly, legends that connect the Scots to the Order are widespread. Printed material is ripe with suggestions of asylum. Addison mentions in passing that many Templars "escaped in disguise to the wild and mountainous parts of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland"
Foucalt’s Pendulum recognizes the widespread notion that "the Templars fled to Scotland," and The Temple and the Lodge goes so far as to suggest that vast Templar riches, which disappeared from France, were shipped from the Siene through Galway and Limerick to Argyll, Scotland
http://members.gntech.net/bubba/z2000templars.htm
There is considerable evidence to suggest that they continue to exercise control over the banking system they created in the 13th century. Distinguishing themselves during the Crusades, the Templars were rewarded with lands the size of some European counties. Luxembourg was in fact a one-time Templar landholding, which explains why Victor Hugo, an alleged Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, sought asylum there during his period of exile. The land referred to today as Luxembourg was owned by the Templar families Guise and Lorraine, who ran their own secret society affiliated with the Templars. Freemasons, and Rosicrucians known as the House of Guise and Lorraine.
The name 'Rosicruscian' is derived from 'rosy cross'. A red cross on a white background was worn by the Templars on the battlefield. It also has affiliations with the Knights Hospitaller (from which the word 'hospital' is derived) and with the International Red Cross, which appears to be a front organisation for the secret brotherhood. Far from engaging in strictly humanitarian activities, the Red Cross has been caught supplying arms to the Tamil Rebels in Sri Lanka and the Zapatista rebels in Mexico.
As for today's scene, the weight of evidence supports the theory that brotherhood organisations such as Freemasonry control an array of multinational corporations including the Seven Sisters oil cartel, through the brotherhood families Rockefeller and Rothschild, along with many of the multinational corporations, which own and control a number of subsidiaries operating under assumed names. The Templar 'double red cross' contained in the company logo for the Rockefeller-controlled oil giant Exxon is an obvious brotherhood symbol.
http://www.jainsamaj.org/literature/global-060704.htm
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And so here we are today...
and more from that great thread
The Simpleton posted
There is a very good book "The Calamatous 14th Century" highlighting many aspects of the times. It did not go into finance, but what it brought most to light was the terrible scourge of mercenaries.
The rise of mercenaries, first were built to travel as military experts and consultants from war to war. Before long, however, they were paid in pillage, making them like Vikings, laying waste to the land. After that, they began to gain such power that they must be continually paid off, and began to unseat Dukes and even Kings with regularity. On the ground level, all that meant was unending famine, murder, rape, turmoil.
Unlike how many people here perceive it, there WAS no sanctuary. None. No one who buried gold in their backyard prospered against those who did not. In the 50-100 years, 5 generations of unending war, famine, tryranny, and disruption, anything anyone could possibly set aside would have been stolen, eaten, or used up. Gold will not help you when they burn your children in front of you to learn where it is hidden.
Nor was country living a special insurance against such times. The cities had higher boom-busts, but the farms and farmers were endlessly, relentlessly, sacked and taxed. Dispersed as they must be, they had no practical defense.
Moral? Don't count too much on your metals to save you, be it gold or lead. If you've seen "Cold Mountain," it was Cold Mountain and worse, every day for a lifespan, a period so long that before it ended, the times previous were entirely forgotten, a mere myth of a thing called "order", passed like Arthur and Charlemange to Avalon.
This is why mercenaries were so ruthlessly put down and never allowed to raise their heads since the rise of Nations and Kings were finally able to put the lid on them in the 1600s by becoming the more ruthless than the ruthless. Now we have mercenaries rising in hundred thousands in Iraq, funded by spoil. Where will they go when they have learned this little trick and the spoil is spoiled? They do not create, only steal. To live they must go where people have, and work, and produce. Do not get started on this road, my friends, or you will be eternally sorry. This is why there is an Army and an Army order and Army Law. It's not a restriction, it's the preservation of the State and of Society itself. The last defense of civilization before Bosnia and Sudan. I was very disappointed in the Abu affair which undermines this last veil of order. Once an army ignores rules of order, what is there but spreading anarchy? Once a Nation takes the stop-gap of not facing itself, its own truth, and hiring mercenaries to do what is not otherwise permitted, what is this but buying anarchy itself? This is exactly what the Dukes of the 14th century did, and one by one they were trampled, eaten alive by the genie they unleashed. It was 200 years before the genie was returned to the bottle. Let us not make the same mistake.
In many ways, the middle ages were no worse than the Age of Rome. At many points and places, there was order and plenty, places where after the Vandals and Goths, libraries and universities were rebuilt and civilization discovered. But this bright middle period, so like Rome, was swept back into utter darkness with the 14th century. This is the part of the medieval period closest to us, which so rightfully deserves the name "Dark Ages." And it happened because of what we're doing, right now, this very minute and every minute of every day for most of your life.
You might look into it. What WAS of any help during this period. It's very illuminating.
more from K
I'm pleased that some of you have kept this thread alive. I feel that the topic of the historical crusades is very relevant to today -- and the lessons of its cause and legacy are almost always misunderstood today.
Who 'profited' from the Great Crusades?
Who suffered?
Who was it meant to SAVE?
Where were the Jewish people, the Muslims during this time frame?
Where were the Christian Italian Roman bankers, and the Knights Templar?
Who won?
Where are those winning/losing --
parties/religions/countries today perhaps?
Who is IN CHARGE today and might also gain from another great crusade?
Does anyone really care? -- Just joking of course...
-------------------------
About the Crusades and their legacy of hatred:
The mid 7th century to the mid 10th century CE saw the gradual expansion of Islam. Half of the Christian world was conquered by Arab armies; this included countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, such as Egypt, southern France, southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Syria, Turkey, etc. 4
By the late 10th century, Europe and the Middle East were divided into Christian and Muslim spheres of influence. Christian pilgrims from Europe regularly visited Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in reasonable safety. Such pilgrimages were very popular. The were believed to be one of the major acts by which a person could limit their exposure to the tortures of purgatory after their death.
By the middle of the 11th century, Christianity had formally split: The Emperor/Bishop of Constantinople and the Bishop of Rome had mutually excommunicated each other. Christendom was divided between the Roman Catholic Church and the Byzantine Empire. In 1071, the Turks defeated the latter at the Battle of Manzikert. This left Constantinople exposed to attack from Muslims. Meanwhile, Christians were being ambushed during their pilgrimages to Jerusalem.
Emperor Alexius asked Pope Urban II for assistance. On 1095-NOV-27, the Pope called on Europeans to go on a crusade to liberate Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers. "The first and second wave of Crusaders murdered, raped and plundered their way up the Rhine and down the Danube as they headed for Jerusalem." 1 The "army" was primarily composed of untrained peasants with their families, with a core of trained soldiers. On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews. The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust."
Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The latter were also slaughtered without mercy.
The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven. By eliminating what might be many millennia of torture in Purgatory, many Christians were strongly motivated to volunteer for the crusades. "After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church." 3
These mass killings were repeated during each of the 8 additional crusades until the final, 9th, crusade in 1272 CE. Both Christians and Muslims believed that they were fighting on God's side against Satan; they believed that if they died on the battlefield they would be given preferential treatment in Heaven. Battles were fought with a terrible fierceness and a massive loss of life. Over a 200 year period, perhaps 200,000 people were killed. The Muslim warrior Salah a-Din subsequently recaptured Jerusalem from the Christians.
By the end of the crusades, most European Christians believed the unfounded blood-libel myths -- the rumor that Jews engaged in human sacrifice of Christian children. A long series of Christian persecutions of the Jews continued in Europe and Russia into the 20th century. They laid the foundation for the Nazi Holocaust.
The result of centuries of conflict among followers of the three Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) was a "deep mutual hatred" and mistrust among the three faiths. Memories of these genocides still influence relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims to the present time.
Among many Jews and Muslims, the term crusade evokes visions of genocide, mass murder, and mass extermination of innocent people. However, among many Christians it has become a positive term, frequently used to refer to mass rallies and campaigns to win converts - as in the Billy Graham Crusades. Out of respect for the victims of the "first holocaust," we recommend that the term be only used to refer to the wars of the Middle Ages.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_cru1.htm
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Note also the chronology for these terms of language, still with us today.
money - c.1290, "coinage, metal currency," from O.Fr. moneie, from L. moneta "mint, coinage," from Moneta, a title of the Roman goddess Juno, in or near whose temple money was coined; perhaps from monere "advise, warn," in the sense of "admonishing goddess," which is sensible, but the etymology is difficult. Extended early 19c. to include paper money.
usury - c.1303, from M.L. usuria, from L. usura "usury, interest," from usus, from stem of uti (see use). Originally the practice of lending money at interest, later, at excessive rates of interest.
Jew (n.) - c.1175 (in plural, giwis), from Anglo-Fr. iuw, from O.Fr. giu, from L. Judaeum (nom. Judaeus), from Gk. Ioudaios, from Aramaic jehudhai (Heb. y'hudi "Jew," from Y'hudah "Judah," lit. "celebrated," name of Jacob's fourth son and of the tribe descended from him. Replaced O.E. Iudeas "the
Jews." In uneducated times, inexplicable ancient artifacts were credited to Jews, based on the biblical chronology of history: e.g. Jews' money (1577) "Roman coins found in England." In Greece, after Christianity had erased the memory of classical glory, ruins of pagan temples were called "Jews' castles."
jew (v.) - "to cheat, to drive a hard bargain," 1824, from Jew (n.) (cf. gyp, welsh, etc.). The campaign to eliminate it in early 20c. was so successful that people began to avoid the noun and adj., too, and started using Hebrew instead.
Templar - M.E., from Anglo-Fr. templer, O.Fr. templier, member of the medieval religious/military order known as Knights Templars (c.1118-1312), so called because they occupied a building near Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
http://www.etymonline.com/m7etym.htm
Medieval Terms
...USURY The interest charged on a loan. Forbidden by church law (based upon biblical injunction). Commonly used by Knight Hospitallers and Knight Templars in Later Medieval Times.
http://www.veling.nl/anne/templars/Medieval_Terms.html
1)Early Loans And Interest Were Based On Agricultural Produce
From about 30,000 BC human existence became more refined until social and economic forms of agriculture appeared around 10,000 to 7,500 BC. This took the form of hoe gardening done mainly by women and led to matriarchal based societies.
From around 6,000 BC the horse was tamed and sheep, goats and cattle were domesticated so that by 5,000 there existed a mixed culture based on animal breeding and hoe gardening. The great plough revolution starting about 4,500 was complete by 4,000 BC. enabling the first city civilizations to arise, and the introduction of writing shortly after, led to a developing "social technology".
Loans in the pre-urban societies were made in seed grains, animals and tools to farmers. Since one grain of seed could generate a plant with over 100 new grain seeds, after the harvest farmers could easily repay the grain with "interest" in grain. (Suggested graphics here showing 1 wheat seed, next to a sheaf of wheat with the large number of new seeds which could be generated by that 1 seed) Also since just so much seed grain could possibly be used, there were natural limits to this lending activity.
When animals were loaned interest was paid by sharing in any new animals born. (graphics - a male and female cow/sheep/goat, and the offspring) The Sumerians used the same word - mas - for both calves and interest. A similar Egyptian word meant to give birth. What was loaned had the power of generation, and interest was a sharing of the result. Interest on tool loans was paid in the produce which the tools had helped to create.
2)The Oriental Usury Error On Lending Metals
The social organization taken by the developing urban communities in Egypt, Assyria, and Sumeria is known as the Ancient Oriental System. It embraced the idea of a living King as the divine representative and savior, able to organize the welfare of mankind through a powerful Royal household exercising centralized control over the economy. Compulsory labor was required for public works and Pharaohs instructed what and how much to plant and how much of the harvest would be stored. Agricultural and metallic commodities (mainly barley and silver) by weight served as the primitive money system in these societies.
The ancient orient made a momentous innovation, allowing usury to be charged on loans of metals, with the interest to be paid in more metal. This was particularly a problem with agricultural, as opposed to loans for commercial or trading purposes. The conceptual error treated inorganic materials as if they were living organisms with the means of reproduction. But metals are "barren" - they have no powers of generation and any interest paid in them must originate from some other source or process.
4)Aristotle (384-322 BC) Formulated The Classical View Against Usury
Aristotle understood that money is sterile; it doesn’t beget more money the way cows beget more cows. He knew that "Money exists not by nature but by law":
"The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural." (1258b, POLITICS)
And he really disliked usurers:
"...those who ply sordid trades, pimps and all such people, and those who lend small sums at high rates. For all these take more than they ought, and from the wrong sources. What is common to them is evidently a sordid love of gain..." (1122a, ETHICS)
http://www.appropriate-economics.org..._interest.html
Organization :The Templars were organized as a monastic order, following a rule created for them by Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order. The Templars were well-connected and quickly became prime movers in the international politics of the Crusades period. In time, they were endowed with several extraordinary Papal bulls (see Omne Datum Optimum) that permitted them, among other things, to levy taxes and accept tithing in the areas under their direct control, facilitating their quick rise to institutional power.
There were four divisions of brothers in the Templars:
the knights, equipped as heavy cavalry
the sergeants, equipped as light cavalry and drawn from a lower social class than the knights
farmers, who administered the property of the Order
the chaplains, who were ordained priests and saw to the spiritual needs of the Order.
At any time, there were approximately 10 people in support positions for each Knight. There were brothers devoted only to banking, as the Order was often trusted with precious goods by participants in the Crusades.
Banking
The Knights involvement in banking over time grew into a new basis of money as Templars became increasingly involved in banking activities. It is some indication of their powerful political connections that the Templars' involvement in usury did not lead to more controversy within the Order and the church at large.
The Templars' political connections and awareness of the essentially urban and commercial nature of the Outremer communities naturally led the Order to a position of significant power both in Europe and the Holy Lands. Their success attracted the concern of many other Orders and eventually that of the nobility and monarchs of Europe as well, who were at this time seeking to monopolize control of money and banking after a long chaotic period in which civil society, especially the Church and its lay Orders, had dominated financial activities. The Templars' holdings were extensive both in Europe and the Middle East, including, for a time, the entire island of Cyprus.
Money and military -- inseparable?
The tangled history of military and money relationships led in the mid-19th-to-mid-20th centuries to a variety of critiques of the use of military fiat. Some saw an evolution to political consultation, others saw the increased concentration of power as a sign that this consultation was only skin-deep, and that the bureaucracy and military's habits would be increasingly aligned and in opposition to public will.
Marxist economists generally hold that military fiat is in practice held exclusively by members of the ruling class and used for its own interests against that of the working class. This has led to the broad range of debates regarding socialism, communism, and the duty of the state to use its political and economic power for the benefit of all. Questions of this nature merge into those of political science in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_fiat
I don't have answers so I am only posing questions here, through the LONG VIEW of TIME...
and another k post
[QUOTE]Who 'profited' from the Great Crusades?
"Venice,'' wrote Braudel: "was the greatest commercial success of the Middle Ages -- a city without industry, except for naval-military construction, which came to bestride the Mediterranean world and to control an empire through mere trading enterprise. In the fourteenth century she was in the ascendant to her greatest periods of success and power.''
``Venice's rulers were less concerned with profits from industries than with profits from trade between regions that valued gold and silver differently.''
``The Florentine supercompanies resembled very closely in their operations the huge international grain companies of today, such as Cargill and Archer-Daniels Midland,'' writes Hunt. ``They used loans to monarchs to dominate and control trade in certain vital commodities, especially grain, and later wool and cloth.'' Their dominance and speculation progressively reduced the production of these commodities.
The Crusades also consolidated the alliance of Venice and its allied Black Guelph-ruled cities, the Papacy, and the Norman and Anjou kings, against the Holy Roman Empire centered in Germany, which Dante and his allies were struggling to restore to its potential. By the late thirteenth century, the Mongols were a conscious part of this Venetian-led alliance, and the Mongol rulers of Persia even proposed Crusades to the European kings and the Popes!
Pope John XXII granted Venice alone the license to trade with the infidel Mamluk sultans of Egypt in the 1330s. This was overvalued European silver and Mongol slaves for gold from Sudan and Mali.
Venice was also the ``banker,'' slave market, and intelligence support service for the Mongol Khans.
More revealing is the latest work of the historian of Venice, Frederick C. Lane, Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. This work shows that it was Venetian finance which, by dominating and controlling a huge international ``bubble'' of currency speculation from 1275 through 1350, rigged the great collapse of the 1340s.
Venetian superprofits in global currency speculation and manipulation continued right through the Florence bank's crash and financial market disintegration of 1345-47 which they had rigged, and beyond.
So only the bankers and merchants of Venice profited continually, like an eagle is said to fly through a storm.
Who suffered?
In 1208 Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade--this time against a country of fellow Christians. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians, rose to prominence in what is now southern France, but was then a patchwork of city-states and principalities beholden to neither king nor bishop. They infiltrated the highest ranks of society and posed a major threat not only to the Catholic church but also to secular authorities as well.
Pope Innocent boasts that they took five hundred towns and castles from the heretics, and they generally butchered every man, woman and child in a town when they took it. Noble ladies with their daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them. Knights were hanged in batches of eighty. When, at the first large town, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, the Cistercian abbot thundered: "Kill them all, God will know his own," and they put to the sword the forty thousand surviving men, women and children. It is the Catholics of the time who tell us.
From this came -- the future 'Inquisitions'.
http://www.infidels.org/library/hist...hapter_23.html
Nutritional levels had already fallen as grain production declined. During the Crusades, the practice of classical education in monasteries had been viciously attacked by the ``preacher of the Crusades,'' Bernard of Clairvaux, and his Cistercian order. In 1225, the Vatican had finally forbidden the presence of young students oblates in monasteries. Europe's broadest form of education had disappeared.
On top of all this, from the 1320s on, there was a ``massive flight of silver oltremare (``over the sea,'' that is, to Venice's maritime empire in the Middle East and Byzantium) which upset the equilibrium of Europe in the midfourteenth century.'' Venetian exports of silver from Europe from 1325-50 equalled ``perhaps 25 percent of all the silver being mined in Europe at that time.'' Standard silver coin had been the stable currency of the Holy Roman Empire in Europe, and of England, since Charlemagne's time. This massive export from Venice to the East ``created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,'' and severe problems in making payments in trade. This massive export from Venice to the East ``created chronic balance of payments problems as far away as England and Flanders,'' and severe problems in making payments in trade. France ``was emptied of silver coinage.''
So production of the most vital commodities in Europe had been severely reduced, and the trade and circulation of its money completely disrupted, over decades before the 1340s crash, by Italian banks which appeared to be making usurious rates of profit.
Rather than sharing the peace of mutual greed and free enterprise with their ``allies''-- the bankers of Florence -- the merchants of Venice bankrupted them, and the economies of Europe and the Mediterranean along with them. Florence was the fourteenth century ``New York,'' the apparent center of banking with the world's biggest banks. But Venice was ``London,'' manipulating Florentine bankers, kings, and emperors alike, by tight knit financial conspiracy and complete dominance of the markets by which money was minted and credit created.
``The fall of gold, to which the Venetians had contributed so much by their vigorous export of silver and import of gold, and in which they found profits, hurt the Florentines. In spite of their being the leaders of international finance ... the Florentines were not in a position, as were the Venetians, to take advantage of the changes that took place between 1325 and 1345.''
In 1346, Mongol cavalry spread the Black Death to towns in the Crimea, on the Black Sea, and from there it was carried by ship to Sicily and Italy in 1347, and spread throughout Europe. The European population had stagnated for 40 years while becoming more concentrated into cities, where water and sanitation infrastructure had decayed. In Florence, for example, all the city's bridges had been built in the 13th century, none in the fourteenth.
``It was assumed, on account of the lack of people, that there would be an abundance of everything the law produces. But on the contrary, because of man's ingratitude, everything was in unusually short supply ... and in some countries there were terrible famines. It was thought there would be a profusion of clothing and of everything the human body needs besides life itself, and just the opposite occurred. Most things cost twice as much or more than they did before the plague and wages increased disjointedly to double.''
The marked price rises in the aftermath of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, lasted more than a generation. This then led to a sharp deflation and collapse of wages from about 1380.
Thus, emerging ``private enterprise capitalism'' was set back by the disaster of the fourteenth century. Also in passing that 30 million people died in Europe in the ensuing Black Death, famine, and war.
Who was it meant to SAVE?
No one, only the wealth and power of Venice Bankers.
And it curtailed the rise of Islam
The mid 7th century to the mid 10th century CE saw the gradual expansion of Islam. Half of the Christian world was conquered by Arab armies; this included countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, such as Egypt, southern France, southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Syria, Turkey, etc. So the Crusades saved these lands for the Church of Rome.
Where were the Jewish people, the Muslims during this time frame?
King Phillip's mintmaster estimated that 100 tons of silver had been exported ``to the land of the Saracens'' (the Islamic Middle East).
On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews.
The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust." Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The latter were also slaughtered without mercy. During the Crusades, the entire Jewish population of Cologne was destroyed.
The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven. By eliminating what might be many millennia of torture in Purgatory, many Christians were strongly motivated to volunteer for the crusades. "After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church." 3
These mass killings were repeated during each of the 8 additional crusades until the final, 9th, crusade in 1272 CE. Both Christians and Muslims believed that they were fighting on God's side against Satan; they believed that if they died on the battlefield they would be given preferential treatment in Heaven. Battles were fought with a terrible fierceness and a massive loss of life. The Muslim warrior Salah a-Din subsequently recaptured Jerusalem from the Christians.
By the end of the crusades, most European Christians believed the unfounded blood-libel myths -- the rumor that Jews engaged in human sacrifice of Christian children. A long series of Christian persecutions of the Jews continued in Europe and Russia into the 20th century. They laid the foundation for the Nazi Holocaust.
The result of centuries of conflict among followers of the three Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) was a "deep mutual hatred" and mistrust among the three faiths. Memories of these genocides still influence relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims to the present time.
Where were the Christian Italian bankers, and the Knights Templar?
They were refining their arts, preparing to go underground, change names and appearances, continue to pursue the ‘plan’ maybe again and yet again? It seems to me that the remnants of the ancient Greek and Roman bankers had gone to Italy and Germany. They understood well things such as fractional reserve lending and currency devaluation, cash flows and money supply. Most financial terms in the English lexicon came from Rome, not Judea or Hebrew.
The Knights Templar had apparently learned many of their ways from the Sufis. Consumer credit, credit cards, trade associations and multinational corporations were perhaps their contribution to the future world banker’s and credit merchant skills.
Who knows, with a slight adjustment, maybe these old initial Templar divisions have just evolved into today….
Before.................... Today
the knights........... = military and police forces
the sergeants....... = resource harvest/mining and manufacturing corporations
farmers................ = agribusiness and food distribution
the chaplains........ = mass media, education, science/medicine and orthodox religion
Lending.....................= finance, insurance, leasing, mortgages(L. meaning: 'dead-stake')
But some say that the Knights Templars were closely related ideologically to the Cathars. It is then a bit ironic that the Templars were tortured and persecuted, forced to go underground about 100 years after the destruction of the related Cathars.
Who won?
The chief ‘Powers That Be’ of the Financial Industry and Orthodox Christian Churches circa the 14th century -- they ‘won’ perhaps.
So among many Jews and Muslims, the term 'crusade' evokes visions of genocide, mass murder, and mass extermination of innocent people. However, among many Christians it has become a positive term, frequently used to refer to mass rallies and campaigns to win converts - as in the Billy Graham Crusades.
Where are those winning/losing --
parties/religions/countries today perhaps?
Who is IN CHARGE today
and might also gain from another great crusade?
Me, I don’t know, ask the IMF, multinational corporations, arms dealers, any of the New World Order advocates maybe?
Perhaps today, a parallel to Florence is New York and the USA Banking centers, old Venice is perhaps today like the European Commonwealth. Maybe both the USA and Nato are like old Venice. I can only speculate on how it will end up. China is likely now as the Mongols were, complicit to go along with it all again in a new role perhaps. The Middle East is now much like it was then, resource rich and desirable for world power's utility. Saudi Arabia is perhaps now like the old Sultans, still always willing trading partners with the world bankers, just as long as they get their 'fair' cut.
Our own leaders warn us that ‘this war will not end in our lifetimes’. And that sort of warning is unheard of -- except in -- the old CRUSADES.
In some ways the Crusades were perhaps the first of the WORLD WARS. It was a serial religious war as well, so it’s adherence was based upon FAITH and the levels of hatred and genocide exceeded those of any rational understanding. The strife was less about nation states and nationality -- than personal belief structures and the control of promised land ‘sacred sites’.
The financial collapse to follow the Crusades resulted largely from currency exchange valuation and commodity speculation, along with control of territory for a monetary empire. It is during that period of financial collapse that most of the loss of life occurred in Europe, due to the combined effects of famine and plague. Some feel that this 'die off' was part of the intended 'final solution’ and a way back to eventual prosperity.
``The fall of gold, to which the Venetians had contributed so much by their vigorous export of silver and import of gold, and in which they found profits, hurt the Florentines. In spite of their being the leaders of international finance ... the Florentines were not in a position, as were the Venetians, to take advantage of the changes that took place between 1325 and 1345.''
In 1346, Mongol cavalry spread the Black Death to towns in the Crimea, on the Black Sea, and from there it was carried by ship to Sicily and Italy in 1347, and spread throughout Europe. The European population had stagnated for 40 years while becoming more concentrated into cities, where water and sanitation infrastructure had decayed. In Florence, for example, all the city's bridges had been built in the 13th century, none in the fourteenth.
``It was assumed, on account of the lack of people, that there would be an abundance of everything the law produces. But on the contrary, because of man's ingratitude, everything was in unusually short supply ... and in some countries there were terrible famines. It was thought there would be a profusion of clothing and of everything the human body needs besides life itself, and just the opposite occurred. Most things cost twice as much or more than they did before the plague and wages increased disjointedly to double.''
The marked price rises in the aftermath of the Black Death and subsequent epidemics, lasted more than a generation. This then led to a sharp deflation and collapse of wages from about 1380.
Thus, emerging ``private enterprise capitalism'' was set back by the disaster of the fourteenth century. Also in passing that 30 million people died in Europe in the ensuing Black Death, famine, and war.
Who was it meant to SAVE?
No one, only the wealth and power of Venice Bankers.
And it curtailed the rise of Islam
The mid 7th century to the mid 10th century CE saw the gradual expansion of Islam. Half of the Christian world was conquered by Arab armies; this included countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, such as Egypt, southern France, southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Syria, Turkey, etc. So the Crusades saved these lands for the Church of Rome.
Where were the Jewish people, the Muslims during this time frame?
King Phillip's mintmaster estimated that 100 tons of silver had been exported ``to the land of the Saracens'' (the Islamic Middle East).
On the way to the Middle East, they decided that only one of their goals was to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Muslims. A secondary task was to rid the world of as many non-Christians as possible - both Muslims and Jews.
The Crusaders gave the Jews two choices in their slogan: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed as the first Crusade passed through. Some Jewish writers refer to these events as the "first holocaust." Once the army reached Jerusalem and broke through the city walls, they slaughtered all the inhabitants that they could find (men, women, children, newborns). After locating about 6,000 Jews holed up in the synagogue, they set the building on fire; the Jews were burned alive. The Crusaders found that about 30,000 Muslims had fled to the al Aqsa Mosque. The latter were also slaughtered without mercy. During the Crusades, the entire Jewish population of Cologne was destroyed.
The Roman Catholic church taught that going to war against the "Infidels" was an act of Christian penance. If a believer was killed during a crusade, he would bypass purgatory, and be taken directly to heaven. By eliminating what might be many millennia of torture in Purgatory, many Christians were strongly motivated to volunteer for the crusades. "After pronouncing a solemn vow, each warrior received a cross from the hands of the pope or his legates, and was thenceforth considered a soldier of the Church." 3
These mass killings were repeated during each of the 8 additional crusades until the final, 9th, crusade in 1272 CE. Both Christians and Muslims believed that they were fighting on God's side against Satan; they believed that if they died on the battlefield they would be given preferential treatment in Heaven. Battles were fought with a terrible fierceness and a massive loss of life. The Muslim warrior Salah a-Din subsequently recaptured Jerusalem from the Christians.
By the end of the crusades, most European Christians believed the unfounded blood-libel myths -- the rumor that Jews engaged in human sacrifice of Christian children. A long series of Christian persecutions of the Jews continued in Europe and Russia into the 20th century. They laid the foundation for the Nazi Holocaust.
The result of centuries of conflict among followers of the three Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) was a "deep mutual hatred" and mistrust among the three faiths. Memories of these genocides still influence relationships among Jews, Christians and Muslims to the present time.
Where were the Christian Italian bankers, and the Knights Templar?
They were refining their arts, preparing to go underground, change names and appearances, continue to pursue the ‘plan’ maybe again and yet again? It seems to me that the remnants of the ancient Greek and Roman bankers had gone to Italy and Germany. They understood well things such as fractional reserve lending and currency devaluation, cash flows and money supply. Most financial terms in the English lexicon came from Rome, not Judea or Hebrew.
The Knights Templar had apparently learned many of their ways from the Sufis. Consumer credit, credit cards, trade associations and multinational corporations were perhaps their contribution to the future world banker’s and credit merchant skills.
Who knows, with a slight adjustment, maybe these old initial Templar divisions have just evolved into today….
Before.................... Today
the knights........... = military and police forces
the sergeants....... = resource harvest/mining and manufacturing corporations
farmers................ = agribusiness and food distribution
the chaplains........ = mass media, education, science/medicine and orthodox religion
Lending.....................= finance, insurance, leasing, mortgages(L. meaning: 'dead-stake')
But some say that the Knights Templars were closely related ideologically to the Cathars. It is then a bit ironic that the Templars were tortured and persecuted, forced to go underground about 100 years after the destruction of the related Cathars.
Who won?
The chief ‘Powers That Be’ of the Financial Industry and Orthodox Christian Churches circa the 14th century -- they ‘won’ perhaps.
So among many Jews and Muslims, the term 'crusade' evokes visions of genocide, mass murder, and mass extermination of innocent people. However, among many Christians it has become a positive term, frequently used to refer to mass rallies and campaigns to win converts - as in the Billy Graham Crusades.
Where are those winning/losing --
parties/religions/countries today perhaps?
Who is IN CHARGE today
and might also gain from another great crusade?
Me, I don’t know, ask the IMF, multinational corporations, arms dealers, any of the New World Order advocates maybe?
Perhaps today, a parallel to Florence is New York and the USA Banking centers, old Venice is perhaps today like the European Commonwealth. Maybe both the USA and Nato are like old Venice. I can only speculate on how it will end up. China is likely now as the Mongols were, complicit to go along with it all again in a new role perhaps. The Middle East is now much like it was then, resource rich and desirable for world power's utility. Saudi Arabia is perhaps now like the old Sultans, still always willing trading partners with the world bankers, just as long as they get their 'fair' cut.
Our own leaders warn us that ‘this war will not end in our lifetimes’. And that sort of warning is unheard of -- except in -- the old CRUSADES.
In some ways the Crusades were perhaps the first of the WORLD WARS. It was a serial religious war as well, so it’s adherence was based upon FAITH and the levels of hatred and genocide exceeded those of any rational understanding. The strife was less about nation states and nationality -- than personal belief structures and the control of promised land ‘sacred sites’.
The financial collapse to follow the Crusades resulted largely from currency exchange valuation and commodity speculation, along with control of territory for a monetary empire. It is during that period of financial collapse that most of the loss of life occurred in Europe, due to the combined effects of famine and plague. Some feel that this 'die off' was part of the intended 'final solution’ and a way back to eventual prosperity.
L'assassinat de Hariri, l'affaire du Karachi-Gate et les reseaux Kadhafi, l'emir du Qatar, Sarkozy, Israel et la guerre civile en France!
Sarkozy- Takieddine: un secret à 350 millions d'euros
Takkiedine est tres lié aux services israeliens comme toute la racaille juifiste sarkozyste du gouvernement. L'emir du Qatar est également dans l'oeil du cyclone (ndlr: ca lui apprendra a jouer au petit malin). Takkiedine est l'homme qui va confirmer au monde l'assassinat de Hariri par Israel pour sauver sa tete, a moins que les israeliens de la guestapo du CRIF, la DCRI, ne l'assassinent. Pour rappel, les posts publiés l'année derniere ici et en mars dernier la. Des fois il faut aiguiller 'la bonne mere justice'. Si la conversion euro-dollars est bonne, 485 millions de dollars que nos sources nous avaient confirmé l'an dernier ca fait bien 350 millions d'euros... Fait pas bon etre un israelien de France. Creves France-Israel !!!
Il s'agit de l'un des secrets les mieux gardés du clan Sarkozy. L'homme d'affaires Ziad Takieddine, principal suspect dans le volet financier de l'affaire Karachi, devait toucher en 2003 des commissions occultes d'un montant de 350 millions d'euros dans le cadre d'un marché d'armement avec l'Arabie saoudite, selon des documents comptables et des notes obtenus par Mediapart. Les fonds devaient être versés, sous l'autorité de Nicolas Sarkozy, via une société contrôlée par le ministère de l'intérieur.
Estimé à 7 milliards d'euros, le contrat «Saudi Border Guards Developpment Project», nom de code Miksa, avait pour objectif de sécuriser les frontières d'Arabie Saoudite. Une première tranche de ce marché a finalement été obtenue par EADS en juillet 2009. Dans sa version initiale, il comportait la livraison d'hélicoptères, d'avions, de radars, de systèmes de communication ultra-sophistiqués…
Ziad Takieddine
Des notes adressées par Ziad Takieddine au cabinet Sarkozy en 2003 et 2004 attestent que l'homme d'affaires était devenu l'architecte en chef de ce marché pour le ministre de l'intérieur.
En 2003, précisément à cette période, les proches de Nicolas Sarkozy, au premier rang desquels Brice Hortefeux, alors député européen et membre du cabinet du ministre, sont invités à grands frais par le marchand d'armes sur son yacht La Diva et dans sa villa du Cap d'Antibes, comme le prouvent des photographies publiées par Mediapart dimanche 10 juillet.
La signature par Nicolas Sarkozy de ce contrat d'armement mirifique a été empêchée in extremis, en 2004, par Jacques Chirac, dont l'entourage évoquait l'existence d'un montage visant à financer le camp sarkozyste. Un scénario que confirme aujourd'hui à Mediapart un ancien haut responsable de l'armement français.
Des soupçons de financement politique occulte valent aujourd'hui à Ziad Takieddine d'être dans le collimateur de la justice concernant la vente de sous-marins Agosta au Pakistan et de frégates Sawari 2 à l'Arabie Saoudite, conclues sous le gouvernement Balladur, fin 1994.
Le contrat Miksa, établi dans une première version en 1993, alors que Charles Pasqua est à l'intérieur, devient une priorité de Nicolas Sarkozy dès son arrivée à la tête de ce ministère, en 2002. Le futur président de la République écrit en ce sens, dès le 8 juillet 2002, une lettre à son homologue saoudien le prince Nayef.
En voici un extrait:
«Connaissant l'importance pour les autorités saoudiennes du contrôle des frontières du royaume, je tenais à confirmer à votre Altesse Royale, l'intérêt du gouvernement français pour la réalisation du projet Saudi Border Guard Defence Program et à lui confirmer que celui-ci apportera sa garantie à la bonne exécution du contrat qui doit être signé entre le groupe Thalès, maître d'œuvre industriel, et le gouvernement saoudien. Le contrôle de la bonne exécution de ce contrat sera assurée par la société Civi-pol conseil, société de service et de conseil du ministère français de l'Intérieur. Je propose à votre Altesse Royale de signer avec Elle dès qu'Elle le souhaitera l'accord de coopération préparé par nos services.»
Le contrat suivi par le cabinet du ministre de l'intérieur - Claude Guéant, Brice Hortefeux, et David Martinon, son conseiller diplomatique - n'est pas signé si facilement. En effet, la décision saoudienne nécessite, outre l'accord du prince Nayef, l'assentiment du futur roi Abdallah, alors le régent du royaume.
Ziad Takieddine entre dans la danse à l'automne 2003. Selon ses notes en notre possession, l'homme d'affaires rend compte à Claude Guéant et Brice Hortefeux et les accompagne sur place. Il définit les orientations de négociation et les éléments de langage des membres du cabinet Sarkozy, donne lui-même des directives et joue le rôle de courrier entre les dignitaires saoudiens et Nicolas Sarkozy. […]
Les silences de l'Elysée et de l'intérieur
Le 12 décembre 2003, ayant acquis la conviction que le contrat Miksa piloté par la place Beauvau masquait d'inavouables arrière-pensées, l'Elysée ordonne à Nicolas Sarkozy d'annuler son voyage prévu en Arabie saoudite, où il s'apprêtait à signer une version définitive du marché. Pire: Jacques Chirac a contraint le ministre de l'intérieur à se dessaisir du dossier.
C'est Michel Mazens, patron d'un autre office d'armement dédié aux ventes d'armes avec l'Arabie saoudite, la Sofresa, qui apporte cette mauvaise nouvelle au clan Sarkozy. Ce haut responsable de l'armement, déjà au cœur des querelles liés aux marchés Sawari 2 et Agosta, rencontre Claude Guéant.
J. Chirac© Reuters
«Jacques Chirac avait peur que Sarkozy s'empare de Miksa, confirme Michel Mazens à Mediapart. Je ne connaissais pas les motivations cachées du ministère, mais le président Chirac y voyait un danger lié au financement de la présidentielle de 2007. Sur ordre du président de la République, je suis allé prendre connaissance du dossier, dans le bureau de Claude Guéant, plusieurs samedis consécutifs. Ma conviction était que le ministère de l'intérieur n'avait pas les compétences industrielles pour négocier un tel contrat ».
Les contrats secrets de commissions ne sont pas présentés à l'envoyé du président. Ziad Takieddine rapporte deux réunions de Claude Guéant, l'une, le 8 janvier 2004, avec Jean-Paul Perrier de Thalès, l'autre, le 9 janvier 2004, avec Michel Mazens.Il écrit ainsi:
«Tout ceci a jeté un trouble sur les “accords” passés avec l'Arabie Saoudite à travers les contacts directs avec le prince Nayef. Ceux-ci ont besoin d'être confirmés. (…) Le paiement des commissions également. Le jeu de la Sofresa a certainement contribué à créer une atmosphère de doute sur la volonté de respecter ses engagements, notamment ceux qui ont été prix entre les deux ministres à travers les contacts directs établis depuis le mois de septembre ».
Z.Takieddine© Mediapart
A la suite de l'oukaze chiraquienne, plusieurs messages confidentiels seront échangés, début 2004, entre le prince Nayef et Nicolas Sarkozy. Ziad Takieddine s'occupe de les transmettre. Ainsi, le 25 janvier 2004, le marchand d'armes rédige une note intitulée «Messages du prince Nayef Ben Abdel Aziz. A transmettre à Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy».
Le prince saoudien dit maintenir toute sa confiance à l'égard du ministre de l'intérieur pourtant fraîchement désavoué par l'Elysée: «Très informé de l'actualité politique en France, le Prince mesure parfaitement le rôle que joue le Ministre, et si vous me le permettez, Monsieur le Ministre, le rôle que vous jouerez à l'avenir».
«A ce titre, poursuit le message, le prince Nayef souhaite vous confirmer que le contrat industriel sera signé avec vous et vous seul. Il m'a demandé également de vous confirmer qu'au-delà de ce contrat, il tient à entretenir des relations à long terme avec vous (…) Le Prince Nayef apprécie le contact direct établi, ainsi que la qualité du dialogue avec vos émissaires. Ceci, pour la première fois, a permis de résoudre beaucoup de problèmes et d'incompréhensions».
Une semaine plus tard, le 1er février, une note de Ziad Takieddine fait état d'une «conversation téléphonique» de Nicolas Sarkozy avec le prince Nayef. Le premier au second: «Je voudrai vous transmettre également, encore une fois, mes excuses pour le report de ma visite au Royaume et vous confirmer que nous avons pu utiliser ce temps pour arriver aux solutions, qui répondent à vos souhaits exprimés, dans l'intérêt de nos deux pays».
«J'ai appris, poursuit M. Sarkozy, que vous avez l'intention d'effectuer un séjour en dehors du Royaume prochainement. J'espère que j'aurai l'opportunité de vous visiter à titre privé lors de ce séjour, pour vous saluer et vous mettre au courant des derniers développements».
Contactés, ni l'Elysée ni le ministère de l'intérieur n'ont donné suite à nos sollicitations.
…………..
Boîte noire
Après plusieurs semaines d'enquête, Mediapart continue la publication d'une série d'articles consacrés à l'homme d'affaires franco-libanais Ziad Takieddine. Nous avons eu pour cela accès à un nombre important de documents inédits, en particulier à plusieurs dizaines de photographies et rapports ou notes. Nous avons retenu et choisi de publier uniquement les documents qui ont un intérêt public, permettant de développer une information à caractère général.
Tout ce qui pourrait éventuellement relever de la vie privée a été écarté. Nous avons ainsi choisi de masquer les visages des personnes qui apparaissent sur les photographies mais ne sont pas en prise directe sur les affaires publiques évoquées (par exemple les épouses ou les proches ou les membres de la famille des personnalités publiques évoquées).
Connu pour être le principal suspect du volet financier de l'affaire Karachi, Ziad Takieddine apparaît aujourd'hui, grâce aux documents que nous avons pu recueillir, comme le fil conducteur de la part d'ombre d'un clan: celui du chef de l'État.
Ce troisième volet est consacré aux secrets du contrat Miksa, avec l'Arabie saoudite.
http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/190711/de-cope-pecresse-takieddine-un-protege-fiscal
http://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/190711/de-cope-pecresse-takieddine-un-protege-fiscal
VIDEO: Sheykh Imran Hosein explains why he does not travel anymore to the Western countries ruled by barbaric elites hijacking the West for the sake of their racist colonialist zionist ideology
Video: Questions and Answer by Sheykh Imran Hosein
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Apres la Tunisie, Libye, le plan de division du Maghreb par la France-Israel sur la ligne berbere-arabe est en marche
En Algérie, la Kabylie est une poudrière
ET REBELOTE !
Un coup de griffe de Sarko à son copain Boutef, pour entretenir l’amitié.
Et en matière de com’ et de diversion, il s’y connaît le bougre.
La com’, une pathologie d’époque : c’est tout ce qui reste aux politiques improductifs.
Et de part et d’autre, ce ne sont pas les émasculés qui manquent.
Des phrases assassines habituelles à la lumière des historiens du dimanche...
« …certains chefs influents roulent pour les services secrets. »
Faux, vrai… peut-être. Pourquoi pas ?
Interpréter l’agression franco-britannique, comme au bon vieux temps de la « Crise de Suez », comme une « rébellion » des berbères libyens pour « retrouver leur identité dans un pays libéré de la dictature du colonel Kadhafi ». (Avec en arrière fond les « gandouras qui flottent », nos « cousins » adorés et tous les rapaces transnationaux du pétrole et de la finance).
Expliquer ainsi une guéguerre tribale médiévale avec pour supplétifs d’anciennes puissances coloniales en déclin.
Il fallait oser.
Les paras français qui reçoivent raclée sur raclée en Afghanistan voudraient bien revenir crapahuter dans les djebels de l’Algérie de papa.
Un passé d’électriciens professionnels pour se refaire un avenir… de soldats professionnels.
Enième tentative de diviser le peuple algérien.
De l’huile sur le feu, c’est de bonne guerre.
Chacun sa Croix ou sa… brioche.
La Kabylie ne tombera pas dans le piège tendu à plusieurs reprises en deux siècles.
Voire en deux millénaires.
Les problèmes de la Kabylie sont les problèmes de toute l’Algérie, de tout le Maghreb.
Ils font l’ordinaire des billets d’humeur de Djeha.
Il y a évidemment la transparence et l'insignifiance des petits «zaïms» zaouiatico-archiques et les opportunistes en eaux troubles.
Makés par qui on sait…
Ça eut payé…
Un article signé Arezki Aït LARBI pour évoquer l’irrédentisme kabyle.
Décidément, le Figaro ne manque pas d’humour.
Djeha, J. 21 juillet 2011
En Algérie, la Kabylie est une poudrière
Arezki Aït Larbi, Le Figaro, mercredi 20/07/2011 à 22:30
Face à un régime en crise, la voie pacifique empruntée jusque-là par les activistes a atteint ses limites.
À la faveur du «printemps arabe», les Berbères d'Afrique du Nord marquent des points. Au Maroc, leur langue vient d'être reconnue langue officielle par la Constitution au même titre que l'arabe. En Tunisie, la «révolution du jasmin» leur a rendu une visibilité tranquille mais déterminée. En Libye, ils sont au cœur de la rébellion et espèrent retrouver leur identité dans un pays libéré de la dictature du colonel Kadhafi.
En Algérie, le mouvement berbère est dans l'impasse. À la pointe du combat, la Kabylie brisait le mur de la peur, en avril 1980, en exigeant bruyamment la reconnaissance de sa langue et de sa culture, opprimées par l'arabo-islamisme. Ce «printemps berbère» fera de la région rebelle un bastion des luttes pour la conquête des libertés.
Après les émeutes sanglantes d'octobre 1988, le pouvoir concède une «ouverture démocratique» contrôlée. Alors que l'Algérie se donne majoritairement au FIS, la Kabylie marque sa singularité par le choix de deux partis laïques : le FFS, de l'opposant historique Hocine Aït Ahmed, et le RCD de Saïd Sadi, l'animateur du Mouvement culturel berbère. Avec la guerre civile des années 1990, la «Petite Suisse», divisée, est contrainte au rôle de supplétif. Si le RCD s'allie à l'armée contre le «fascisme vert», le FFS choisit le FLN et le FIS pour «défendre le choix du peuple».
Avec le président Bouteflika, la région rebelle sera sacrifiée sur l'autel d'arrangements claniques, au nom de la «réconciliation nationale». L'opération de mise au pas commence en avril 2001, par la mort d'un lycéen, tué par une rafale de Kalachnikov dans les locaux de la gendarmerie. La population dénonce le crime et manifeste sa colère dans la rue ; les forces de l'ordre tirent dans le tas. Bilan : 126 morts et des dizaines de blessés. Aux partis politiques impuissants et discrédités s'est substitué le Mouvement citoyen des Aarchs («tribus»), une organisation ancestrale ressuscitée pour l'occasion, mais dont certains chefs influents roulent pour les services secrets.
Zone de non-droit
En 2002, la reconnaissance du berbère comme langue nationale brise un tabou symbolique ; sur le terrain, elle n'aura aucune incidence concrète. Parallèlement, une politique volontariste de déplacement de populations arabophones vers Tizi-Ouzou, la capitale régionale, tente de diluer les spécificités de la culture locale. Terroristes «repentis» indésirables dans leur douar d'origine, repris de justice, recasés des bidonvilles et marginaux ramenés d'ailleurs feront de la cité-dortoir de la Nouvelle-Ville un cloaque de délinquance, de violence et de trafics en tous genres. Dans ce fief salafiste, des moines-soldats, ont déjà imposé de nouvelles «traditions» au détriment de la culture et de la langue kabyles.
De la diversité revendiquée comme «une richesse dans une Algérie plurielle», les Kabyles sont contraints, par la répression et les manipulations, à l'isolement et au repli communautaire. L'idée d'une large autonomie lancée, en juillet 1998, par un groupe d'intellectuels, est reprise, en juin 2001, par un noyau de militants, qui créent le Mouvement pour l'autonomie de la Kabylie. Si le «divorce à l'amiable avec l'Algérie » séduit une frange importante de la jeunesse élevée dans le culte de la «résistance au pouvoir central », l'idée est déjà plombée par le discours approximatif des dirigeants de ce mouvement qui tombent parfois dans la surenchère indépendantiste. Avec la proclamation, en juin 2010 à Paris, d'un «gouvernement provisoire kabyle» en exil qui navigue à vue, sans ancrage dans le terroir, le MAK suscite la méfiance des militants les plus actifs.
Politiquement neutralisée, la Kabylie est devenue une poudrière. Cette zone de non-droit est livrée à la délinquance et au «terrorisme résiduel». Face à un régime en crise, la voie pacifique empruntée jusque-là par les activistes a atteint ses limites. À court terme, les provocations récurrentes et l'absence de perspectives risquent de pousser une jeunesse impatiente vers des choix extrêmes.
http://www.alterinfo.net/En-Algerie-la-Kabylie-est-une-poudriere_a61414.html#last_comment
Sarkozy involved in offering bribes to Saudi official for Airbus deal
Sarkozy's involvement with the Saudi bribery scandal mirrors similar allegations of receiving kickbacks in return for French defense contracts with Taiwan and Pakistan.
In what may prove to be an old scandal but one that could come back to further tarnish his already poor image, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been heavily implicated in a bribery scandal from the 1990s involving an Airbus deal to supply Saudia Airlines with commercial passenger planes.
http://www.opinion-maker.org/2011/07/sarkozy-and-the-saudis/
By Wayne Madsen
In what may prove to be an old scandal but one that could come back to further tarnish his already poor image, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been heavily implicated in a bribery scandal from the 1990s involving an Airbus deal to supply Saudia Airlines with commercial passenger planes.
The French government, then led by Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, a political mentor of Sarkozy offered to pay a bribe to a major Saudi official in return for a $6 billion contract with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation (MODA) to re-supply Saudia with aircraft. WMR has learned from a source involved with the Saudi contract negotiations that Sarkozy, France's Budget Minister at the time, was Balladur's "right-hand man" in offering the bribe to the Saudi official, said to be a high-level prince in the Saudi government.
Balladur traveled to Saudi Arabia in January 1994 to personally lobby King Fahd for the contract with Airbus. However, President George H. W. Bush had sealed a deal with the Saudis in 1992 for McDonnell-Douglas to supply 72 F-15 fighter jets to the Saudis in a $4 billion deal, with $600 million to Pratt and Whitney for jet engines and an additional $1 billion in "commissions" paid to the same top Saudi prince through a MODA account maintained at Riggs Bank. George H. W. Bush's brother Jonathan Bush became the President of Riggs Investment after the bank bought his J. Bush & Co. in 1997.
In the McDonnell-Douglas "deal" with the Saudis, a package that totaled $5.6 billion, Bush believed he could deliver his promise of election year jobs to the people of St. Louis, where the planes would be built. Bush made the promise to McDonnell-Douglas workers and their families in a speech at Lambert Field on September 11, 1992. Missouri was a key battleground state between Bush and Bill Clinton. In the end, the bribe paid to the Saudi prince, a noted friend of the Bush family, had no impact on Missouri. Clinton won the state's 11 electoral votes.
In detailed information provided to WMR by an aviation industry top executive who was involved with the sensitive negotiations, we learned that the original jet fighter deal worked out between Bush and King Fahd had an additional sweetener: the Saudia commercial plane deal was to go to Boeing to the tune of $4 billion for Boeing, $1.2 billion for General Electric engines, $420 million for Pratt and Whitney/International Aero Engines (IAE) engines, $1.6 billion for McDonnell-Douglas to help it keep it from curtailing production at its Long Beach, California commercial aircraft plant. The total contract was worth $7.2 billion. In addition, our source reports that a "commission" (bribe) equaling $250 million, was paid to Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz, the brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden and the owner of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia. Bin Mahfouz, who died of a sudden heart attack in 2009, threatened to sue major publications who reported that he was the brother-in-law of Bin Laden, even after CIA director testified in 1998 that Bin Mahfouz was Bin Laden's brother-in-law. Woolsey and major publications, including the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, later retracted the report on the brother-in-law link between the two Saudis.
In 1997 Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas merged, strengthening the combined company's influence in Saudi Arabia.
In 1995, when the Saudia airline contract was being considered, Balladur had no way of knowing that the Clinton administration had been apprised of the Boeing deal with the Saudis and that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepted communications between Balladur and his Budget Minister Sarkozy offering the Saudis bribes in return for Saudia awarding its contract for new planes to Airbus. In the end, the Saudis nixed the deal with Balladur and Sarkozy. Sarkozy's involvement with the Saudi bribery scandal mirrors similar allegations of receiving kickbacks in return for French defense contracts with Taiwan and Pakistan.
However, WMR has learned that the French bribery involvement with the Saudis pales in comparison with bribes and kickbacks involving top Saudis and U.S. politicians, particularly George H. W. and George W. Bush. WMR has learned that violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by U.S. corporations in deals with the Saudis have totaled $350 billion. $83 billion from U.S. bribes have been placed in special Saudi fund devoted to squelching civil dissent in Saudi Arabia. The CIA is fully supportive of the "arrangement."
http://www.opinion-maker.org/2011/07/sarkozy-and-the-saudis/
Norway was ready to recognize a state of Palestine at the United Nations and get severly bombed in an 'israeli fashion'. Norway successfully integrated HAMAS in the negociation of the '1967 borders', a plan that was putting Israel as the only real responsible for the failure of the peace inthe Middle East. Bombing Norway means Israel is preparing for a total war to avoid recognition of the palestinian state in September 2011at any cost
Multiple Terrorist Bombings In Olso, Norway — Signature Of Mossad False Flag NATO Terror Attack
Reports of multiple bombings in Olso, Norway have the signature of an 'Al Qaeda' false-flag operation conducted by the Israeli Mossad.
'Norway is the most anti-Semitic country in the West', said Shimon Peres the 15 May 2011. Mr. Shimon Peres critical comments on Norways reluctancy to follow EU, UN and USA in denouncing Hamas as a terrorist movement, are timely remarks. Following Norway's diplomacy efforts to integrate HAMAS in the 'peace process'.
The man arrested is part of the NATO clandestine terror groups, similar to the Gladio, set up all over Europe to start false flag operations and turn the europeans against Islaam and support Israel's war. NATO is responsible for this attack, if nobody takes care of the israelis running NATO, Europe will be the target of the largest massacres since the WW2...
Norway news agencies are reporting that two government buildings have just been bombed in Norway. There are no reports from English agencies at this time. English videos and reports will be added at bottom of this article when they become available.'
Unreal -- An entire block has exploded -- Huge explosion rocks Oslo, Norway
Video Report From On The Ground At Site Of Olso, Norway Terrorist Attack
A Google translation of an Aftenposten article reads:
The report of the first bombing was followed by reports of a two more bombs, as reported in this Google Translation.Large explosion in central Oslo
There has been a major explosion in downtown Oslo. Windows are broken in VG-built and government officials in Oslo.
Read also:
The case updated
It is not yet possible to say how many people are injured or killed in the explosion. But police now acknowledge that there are fatalities.
NTB reported that two confirmed fatalities.
Police have not yet complete overview of the number of casualties.- Oil and Energy was the goal
According to Dagbladet, police said the attack targeted the Oil and Energy Affairs, MOE.
The greatest damage is the R4 building in ministries, the police said.
This is supported by information from the Communications Minister, Earl Smith-Isaksen.
- The premises of the OED is battered. It looks like it was right outside our offices, says Smith-Isaksen to Aftenposten.no.Treats people on the street
The building that houses, among other things, the Prime Minister’s office is also affected by the explosion.
Aftenposten.no have informed the Prime Minister’s Office (SMK), Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg is the safety and undamaged.
- I can not say for certain, everything is chaotic, says Sindre Fossum Beyer at SMK.
Paramedics treat more injured in the street outside the government building.
Many people are bleeding in the street outside, hit by broken glass that fell from the broken windows.
- You can not go through here, because there are still two bombs we do not know where is, police on site to Aftenposten.no reporters.
Aftenposten.no has so far failed to confirm whether it still bombs that have not been located.Trying to get an overview
Several facilities in nearby have been evacuated, including NTB premises.
- All we know is that there is a kind of explosion. We are on the way out there, are the short and hasty message Aftenposten.no get the police in Oslo for the call just after half past four.
In a press release from the Oslo police are the following:
Large parts of the city center is evacuated, and police urge the public not to stay in Oslo.
Police also ask that pulbikum limits the use of mobile phones.Several injured
Both windows in the government quarter and VG building is blown out, according to Aftenposten’s report on the site.
- The police tell us that we need to get us off, we need to get off. There may be more bombs, tells reporters.
They say that there is broken glass everywhere, the burning of buildings.
- I see people with blood on his face and hands, telling Aftenposten reporter.
Eyewitnesses said, according to NTB, it may look like a car outside a high block has been the basis for the explosion.Entire facades blown out
Our reporter passed Market Street and there is full chaos people running around bewildered. Several places are a fire alarm.
You can smell the sulfur fumes.
Shop Denim Gallery has received throughout the facade blown out.Rods of increasing areas
A huge røyksy rose several hundred feet in the air. Large parts of Oslo heard a huge explosion which led to Darren Hayes, the Aftenposten keeps house literally shook when the explosion took place at five at half four in the afternoon.
Press The wave was so powerful that the windows all the way down to the National Agencies building was blown out.
Vaterland tunnel is closed.
The area between Stortorvet, Hammersborg and Storgata is blocked off. Young town square is already closed, because the police fear that new explosions can occur.
There have been several unconfirmed reports that it also should have been a violent explosion in Parliament Street, just below the Parliament, according to NTB.
It is still unclear what caused the explosion.
If there are indeed multiple bombs it is clearly the calling card of an Al-Qaeda terrorist attack which are executed with precision in multiple locations.There may be more bombs
The police on site tell Dagbladet.
(Dagbladet): A little before 15.30 in the afternoon, large parts of the city center hit by a huge explosion in the government quarter .
About a half hour later told NRK that the capital was hit by another explosion, this time in Parliament Street. This message disprove NRK now on their website.
Police at the site told Dagbladet that they fear the new bombs.
- There may be more bombs, police said.
According to Aftenposten.no there are still two bombs the police do not know where is.
- You can not go through here, because there are still two bombs we do not know where is, according to police Aftenposten.no .
The scope of the first explosion is still unclear, but many are injured. Much of the area Youngstorget was hit and routes are broken into several apartment buildings and construction.
- There are a lot of injured people in the area, many seriously injured.There is injured inside the area with excessive bleeding.All the buildings are destroyed, it is absolutely awful, says Jan Larsen told newspaper Dagbladet.
The problem is there is absolutely no motive for Al-Qaeda to launch an attack against Norway since Norway supports the formation of a Palestinian state, which is against the wishes of Israel and in support of Muslim activists world-wide.
If this in fact an Al-Qaeda attack a blaring question remains. Why would Al-Qaeda attack a nation whose goals are aligned with the goals of the Al-Qaeda movement?Norway to support Palestinians – Norwegian FM
Image Credit: Flickr.com/andedam/cc-by-nc-sa 3.0
Norway will support Palestinians who are set to press for recognition of the independence of their state by the United Nations, says the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
He was speaking following his talks in Oslo with the Palestinian National Administration Head Mahmoud Abbas.
Støre said he saw a likely recognition of Palestine’s independence by the United Nations as no hindrance to a peaceful settlement in the Middle East. He said the Palestinian-Israeli talks should continue irrespectively of the UN voting results.
Source: The Voice of Russia
The simple answer would be this is a false flag terror attack and the likely suspect for carrying out the operation would be the Israeli Mossad as an act of revenge for supporting Palestine.
Update 11:25 AM
BBC Reports:
Oslo: Bomb blast near Norway prime minister’s office
Eyewitness: “Police are beginning to seal off streets where there is a danger of falling glass”Related Stories
A large bomb blast has hit near government headquarters in the Norwegian capital Oslo, killing at least one person.
The offices of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg were damaged extensively – a government spokeswoman said he was safe.
Police said a number of people were injured in the city centre explosion.
No-one has said they were behind the attack, which witnesses said could be heard across the capital.
Television footage from the scene showed rubble and glass from shattered windows in the streets – smoke was rising from some buildings. The wreckage of at least one car was on one street.
All roads into the city centre have been closed, said national broadcaster NRK, and security officials evacuated people from the area, fearing another blast.
“Police can confirm there were deaths and injuries following the explosion in the government quarter this afternoon,” police said in a statement.
Oistein Mjarum, head of communications for the Norwegian Red Cross, said his offices were close to the site of the explosion.
“There was a massive explosion which could be heard over the capital Oslo,” he told the BBC.
Government spokeswoman Camilla Ryste told the Associated Press Mr Stoltenberg was safe. Initial reports said he was not hurt.
A spokesman for Oslo University hospital said seven people had been taken there for treatment.
“I don’t know how seriously wounded they are,” he told Reuters.
‘Complete chaos’
Mr Mjarum said there were fires burning in the prime minister’s 17-storey building.
“This is a very busy area on Friday afternoon and there was a lot of people in the streets, and many people working in these buildings that are now burning,” he said.
Eyewitness Ole Tommy Pedersen said he was standing at a bus stop about 100m away from the blast.
“I saw three or four injured people being carried out of the building a few minutes later,” Mr Pedersen told AP.
He said there was a cloud of smoke billowing from the lower floors.
An NRK journalist, Ingunn Andersen, said the headquarters of tabloid newspaper VG had also been damaged.
“I see that some windows of the VG building and the government headquarters have been broken. Some people covered with blood are lying in the street,” AP quoted her as saying.
“It’s complete chaos here. The windows are blown out in all the buildings close by.”
Mr Mjarum said people were in shock in Oslo and across Norway.
“We have never had a terrorist attack like this in Norway – if that’s what it is – but of course this has been a great fear for all Norwegians when they have seen what has been happening around the world.”
Source: BBC
Aftermath of explosion in central Oslo, Norway - 22 July 2011
Smoke billows over Oslo, 22 July
Debris is seen on the street after the explosion in central Oslo, 22 July
Rescuers tend to an injured person after the blast in Oslo, 22 July
Shattered windows in a multi-storey building after the blast in Oslo, 22 July
CNN Updates on the Terrorist bombings.
Security expert: Olso Norway Attacked Because it’s seen as a ‘soft target’
CNN|Added on July 22, 2011Security expert Will Geddes says Norway could be a terror target because it’s seen as a “soft target.”
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READ MORENATO controls over zionist christian extreme right is a political tool for Israel. From dutch zionist christian Geert Wilders, to the crusaders of the EDL in the UK, and the financial zionist terrorists of the german UDC in Switzerland, mossadniks in control of French racist pro-israeli government. Israel has a full range of control over the EU para-military groups, NATO, secret services, political racialist parties and will use these tools to provoke a 'clash of civilization'. The operation in Oslo is an israeli-NATO clandestine networks job and these flase flag are going to be used all over Europe to dismantle all the current nation-states and impose regionalisation of the continent under massive governmental cuts and civil wars engineered from Belfast to Athen, Roma, Barcelona, Marseille, Copenhaguen, Berlin, Warsaw... The plan is to create an euramerica-reich, under the zionist domination of the dual citizens (european-israelis)
NATO far right zionist christian groups are the primary suspects, most of them made allegiance to Israel as the next ruling state in the world through the most vicious and racist corporation known as the freemasonery. In this photo, one of the killers, Anders Behring, is wearing his masonic suit.
Shimon Peres to the israeli newspapers, the 15th May 2011: 'Norway is the most anti-Semitic country in the West'.
Youthcamp Terrorist May Have Pro-Israel Motive
Norway horror: 80 die in camp shooting, 7 in blast
OSLO, Norway (AP) — A Norwegian who dressed as a police officer to gun down summer campers killed at least 80 people at an island retreat, horrified police said early Saturday.The terrorist was a right wing Christian. Norwegian TV via automated translation:
...
The motive was unknown, but both attacks were in areas connected to the ruling Labor Party government. The youth camp, about 20 miles (35 kilometers) northwest of Oslo, is organized by the party's youth wing, and the prime minister had been scheduled to speak there Saturday.
According to TV2's sources, the arrested belong to the right-extremist groups in eastern Norway, and the man must have registered two weapons on their name - an automatic weapon and a pistol of the type of Glock. ... Breivik listed in their Facebook profile as a conservative and Christian, and he may have a connection to the extreme right environment.The rightwing Norwegian Progress Party and its surrounding allotment of rightwing groups are historic fascistic, pro-apartheid and today very much in support of a likudnik Israel.
Via Newshoggers a report from a Norwegian TV site on the activities in the Labour Party youth camp may explain the killer's motive.
Automated translation:
Headline:
Jonas Gahr Store: - The occupation must end, the wall must be demolished and it must happen nowHeader:
The Foreign Minister was met with claims that Norway must recognize a Palestinian state when he visited the Labour Youth League summer camp Thursday.Picturetext:
AUF WANT BOYCOTT: Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store was met by demands that Norway must recognize a Palestinian state when he visited the Labour Youth League summer camp at Utøya Thursday. Here the Minister ushered around in the camp of the AUF leader Eskil Pedersen. (Reuters)Text:
During the second day of Labour Youth League summer camp at Utøya got the Labour Party's young hopefuls visit by Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store. Together with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent Sidsel Wold and Norwegian People's Aid Kirsten Belck-Olsen, discussed the Foreign Minister of the deadlock between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
As foreign minister arrived Utøya he was met with a demand from the AUF that Norway must recognize a Palestinian state.
- The Palestinians must have their own state, the occupation must end, the wall must be demolished and it must happen now, said the Foreign Minister to cheers from the audience.
- Norway is prepared to recognize
Earlier this week, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited Norway, the Minister said to TV 2 news channel that Norway stands ready to recognize a Palestinian state . This he repeated during the debate on Utøya.
- We are ready to recognize a Palestinian state. I await the actual resolution text Palestinians will promote the UN General Assembly in September, said the Minister.
In autumn it is expected that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will bring the matter to the UN. Where will he ask for UN membership and recognition of a Palestinian state within the borders before the 1967 war, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Wednesday said AUF leader Eskil Pedersen that the AUF want a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side.
- Labour Youth will have a more activist Middle East policy and we have to recognize Palestine. NOK NOK's, now we have to get the peace process into a new track, said Pedersen.
The foreign minister admitted that the situation is untenable, but believes that the boycott is the wrong tool.
- Boycott will be to move from dialogue to monologue. It is difficult to open the door the day we will talk with Israel, said the Minister.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2011/07/youthcamp-killer-may-have-anti-palestine-motive.htm
1 comments:
- yassine said...
- Ce qu'il faudrait que tu rajoutes aussi c'est que la date de l'attentat terroriste coïncide avec 65ème anniversaire de l'attentat sioniste contre l’hôtel King David le 22 juillet 1946 en Palestine!
Link Between Breivik and Israeli Mossad
Wayne Madsen Report
Sunday, July 24, 2011Anders Behring Breivik is suspect in massacre of over 80 at Labour Party Youth camp on Norwegian island and downtown Oslo bombing. Breivik is being called a Christian fundamentalist even though he was a Freemason and supporter of such vile Zionist Islamophobes as Pam Geller and Richard Pipes.Pipes and Geller are ciphers for Israeli intelligence and propaganda elements and provide a clear link between Breivik and Mossad, which is under orders to stage false flag attacks to garner support for Israel against Palestine, Cyprus and Norway being the two most recent examples of Mossad-staged attacks.And when it comes to “Al Qaeda’s” Mossad seal of approval, the vicious Zionist Rupert Murdoch and his Zio-trash papers can always be relied on to help out. Murdoch’s scandal-plagued “Sun” reports that Norwegian attacks are the work of “Al Qaeda”:With death toll now over 90, Breivik not alone in attack. Police investigating second shooter. Obama administration covers up for Israel by calling attack “domestic.” With ample evidence of Mossad involvement in Oslo, it is up to every one of us to report to the Nth degree any suspicious contacts with Israelis or Israeli sympathizers.Because our police forces in America, New Zealand, Norway, Britain, Sweden, Denmark, France, Canada, Australia and elsewhere are infiltrated with Mossad sayanim, katsas, and jumper katsas, we must take it upon ourselves to expose these agents, publicize their names, turn the disinfectant of sunshine on their subterranean operations, and generally, make life miserable for them.WMR editor is the godson of Norwegian god-parents from Trondheim and Israel and Mossad have now made their viciousness intensely personal. Tillid ingen israelske!
