Muslim and Jewish leaders gather at Paris concert hall memorial.

Greg Krasovsky's comments on "Muslim and Jewish leaders gather at Paris concert hall memorial."

My sympathies and condolences go out to the loved ones of the victims of the Paris terrorist attacks this past weekend.

We need to do everything to make sure that ALL the organizers, financiers, conspirators and executioners of this heinous crime against humanity are brought to justice.

We also need to remember who funded and supported the vast majority of Syrian terrorist groups, including ISIS, Al-Nusra and etc. -- it wasn't Assad's regime, Iran, North Korea or Russia. 

Sadly, this support was mostly covertly provided by states and organizations (government and private) who wanted to topple the Assad regime...and thought that supporting (or just allowing to grow) terrorist groups was a justified means.

What we should not do is allow another despicable terrorist act to feed xenophobia and religious intolerance, especially against Islam, one of the the Abrahamic faiths that grew out of Judaic and Christian traditions in the 7th century.

All faiths must unite to condemn all varieties of terrorism -- religious-based, racial or ethnic-based, political and state-sponsored -- and confirm that killing of innocent civilians is an indisputable sin under every faith and cannot be justified EVER by Satanist arguments of "sacrificing a hundred or a thousand of innocent civilians is justified if this act will save millions in the future."

We must mourn, honor and avenge (by Justice!) all victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity -- regardless of whether they are 

- victims of terrorists who proclaim themselves to be insurgents fighting for freedom of their people & land, or defenders of their faith 

- victims of state-sponsored terrorism, war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by military, intelligence, state security or law enforcement personnel.

- as we hear pretty often lately, unfortunate and inadvertent civilian "collateral damage" in artillery, bombing and drone strikes. 
   
Moreover, we must remember that all human lives have equal value before G-d, regardless of whether the victim is a citizen of France, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt, UK, USA, Russia or Ukraine.

And we must do everything as people, citizens, tax-payers, voters, employees and members of community organizations to make sure that terrorism is condemned and fought on every level of our world-wide human society and government. 

The interfaith flower-laying ceremony in Paris was a good first step!
  
Am I wrong?
  
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Selected Excerpts from

Muslim and Jewish leaders gather at Paris concert hall memorial.

"The flower-laying ceremony, initiated by the Polish-born French Jewish author Marek Halter.

Representatives of the Jewish and Muslim communities join people gathered at the makeshift memorial near the Bataclan concert hall. 

They carried white roses, which they laid among the hundreds of candles and bouquets left by members of the public and were accompanied, as a show of inter-faith solidarity, by representatives of the French capital’s Jewish community.

In case anyone – specifically France’s far right and its supporters – were minded to miss it, Hassen Chalghoumi, the imam of Drancy, a Paris suburb, spelled it out.

“Anyone who uses hate speech has no place in France and those places that preach hate are not places of prayer but are those of a sect. After this tragedy and the more than 100 deaths, now is the time to close these places of hate,” Chalghoumi, president of the imams’ conference of France, told the crowd. 

Chalghoumi, who says he is the subject of an Islamic State “fatwa” calling for his killing, said: “1.5 million people are hostages of Daesh, 1.5 million people are hostages of these barbarians who are sullying the name of Islam and Muslims. It’s time to say no to this barbarity.”


Earlier, the imam of Bordeaux, Tarek Oubrou told Le Journal du Dimanche: “From a religious point of view, Islam’s position is very clear: these murders call for a triple condemnation – ethical, legal and theological.

“Ethical because no morality allows for the killing of innocent people, legal because these acts do not respect war as it is decreed in the Muslim tradition and theological because these suicide bombers are convinced they’re going to heaven when they actually risk finding themselves in hell.”

He said that communications from Muslim institutions, however, were not enough: “Muslims must also demonstrate to say ‘stop’ – to say that we don’t accept these actions being done in the name of our religion.”"

Please read the rest of the article at:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/15/muslim-and-jewish-leaders-gather-at-paris-concert-hall-memorial

The Six Most Disastrous Interventions of the 21st Century.

By GARY LEUPP
October 9, 2015

"On October 2 President Barack Obama, alluding to Russia’s decision to launch air strikes in Syria, told reporters at the White House that for Russia to view the forces targeted “from the perspective they’re all terrorists [is] a recipe for disaster, and it’s one that I reject.”

In other words, he was saying that Moscow is not (as it claims) really focusing on ISIL and the al-Nusra Front but on the anti-regime opposition in general, which supposedly includes “moderates.”

Never mind that Obama himself as well as Joseph Biden have on occasion pooh-poohed the existence of a moderate armed opposition that controls territory in Syria. Didn’t Biden say last year at Harvard that “there was no moderate middle [in Syria] because the moderate middle are made up of shop-keepers, not soldiers”?

And hasn’t it been shown that maps showing territory in the hands of the “Free Syrian Army” are the figments of propagandists’ imagination? The FSA has no coordinated command structure and its networks overlap those of groups that Washington would not normally define as “moderate” (unless it wanted to rehabilitate al-Qaeda, which having attacked the U.S. on 9/11 and supposedly the cause of all the—disastrous—post-9/11 U.S. military actions in the Middle East), has gradually become my-enemy-against-my-enemy and hence a new found friend."

Read the rest of this article at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/09/the-six-most-disastrous-interventions-of-the-21st-century/

Syria: As the bombs fall, the people of Damascus rally round Bashar al-Assad.

Syria: As the bombs fall, the people of Damascus rally round Bashar al-Assad. 

The West may oppose Assad's regime, but on the streets of the capital the people fear a greater evil.

Read the rest at:  
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10770311/Syria-As-the-bombs-fall-the-people-of-Damascus-rally-round-Bashar-al-Assad.html

Below's a summary & an excerpt by Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque: 

http://www.chris-floyd.com/Articles/2523-road-to-damascus-an-odd-quack-of-truth-from-the-telegraph.html

"I don’t know what prompts these sudden spasms of truth-telling in such an odious rag — probably moves in some game in the bowels of the Deep State, one faction of apparatchiks trying to undercut another. But they’ve done it again this week, albeit on a smaller scale than the Iraq dirty war piece, with a story by Peter Oborne, reporting from Damascus, where, as he notes, a diverse, secular regime (repressive to be sure, but much less repressive than, say, Saudi Arabia, and far more religiously diverse than, say, Egypt — or even Israel) is being torn apart by monomaniacal extremists backed with money, weapons, bombs and gear from the West. A few excerpts:

… On Palm Sunday, I went to the Old City and walked up Straight Street, following the route taken by St Paul after he had been blinded (Kokab, the scene of his Damascene conversion, is now in rebel hands). At the Greek Catholic church, I watched ceremonies of breathtaking beauty – in precincts that had been struck twice in the past week, though happily causing no injuries. On the way back, I passed a man looking dazed next to his ruined car. A mortar had struck it just a few minutes earlier. When I picked up the shell casing, it was still warm.

… People here see their country as being threatened by foreign powers (above all Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, all backed by the West) who are sponsoring the jihadist groups that make up the opposition. I was struck by the fact that this argument is not made only by the Alawite coterie around the president. I also heard it from Sunni Muslims, Christians and members of the various other cultural and religious groups that abound in Syria.

How can this square with the Western narrative that President Assad’s government, with the aid of a handful of tribal followers, is hell-bent on the destruction of the rest of the country? Consider the facts. Only a handful of members of Assad’s 30-strong cabinet (I was told two) are Alawite. The prime minister is Sunni, as are the interior minister, the justice minister, the foreign minister, even the defence minister. The delegation that travelled to Geneva for the failed peace talks several months ago was also almost entirely composed of Sunni Muslims (though they would probably reject sectarian terms, and prefer to think of themselves just as Syrians).

Nor is it merely the political class that thinks in this way. Last night I had dinner with a young doctor. He showed me a Facebook exchange that he had recently had with a former friend from medical school, who has joined the extremist opposition group al-Nusra. The doctor had put out a public status aimed at all jihadists asking them: “Please stop shooting at us with your mortars.” He was astonished to receive a reply from his friend: “I will put a bullet in your heads.” My doctor friend messaged him back: “I am not afraid of you.” This was followed by a horrifying response. “We love death, we drink blood. Our president is dead bodies. Wait for our exploding cars to kill you.”

… [A shopkeeper] walked me along an alleyway to his home and pointed to a destroyed balcony where his mother had liked to sit. Two months ago, she had been resting there as usual when she was killed by a direct hit from a mortar. “Your government,” he told me, “is the worst ever; they want Syria to be a democracy and ally themselves with Saudi Arabia, which has nothing to do with democracy.”

… I am well aware that the government has committed dreadful atrocities, though I suspect that some of the accounts have been exaggerated. Nevertheless, I do think the words of my shopkeeper friend are worth pondering. If the insurgents who killed his mother win the war, there will be no Christian churches in Syria any more (just as there aren’t in Saudi Arabia at the moment). Life will be similarly terrible for many of the ordinary Muslims who make up the great majority of the population.

There are no “good guys” in Syria’s civil war. But we should not be blind to the fact that there is a project out there to destroy its rich, pluralist and unbelievably intricate culture and replace it with a monochrome version of Wahhabi Islam, of the kind favoured by Saudi mullahs. And for reasons that history may come to judge very severely, Britain, the United States, and the West have been aiding and abetting this project."