MIDDLE EAST

MoA—

MoA—More foreign involvement in the war in Libya will be bad for that country but it might be good for Syria. In 2011, after NATO had supported Islamists to destroy the Libyan state, many of those fighters were transferred to Syria to help to destroy that country. Weapons from Libya were transported via Turkey to Syria to support the ‘rebels’ against the government. Both flows are now reverting

RAMIN MAZAHERI—The Basij are also not comparable to Nazi Brownshirts or Italian Blackshirts. The reason for this simple: Iran has a modern, democratic, anti-racist, anti-imperialist & anti-capitalist ideology which is fundamentally different from the fascist, imperialist, war-mongering, racist, faux-socialist ideology of those two European groups. No such comparison is legitimate in the slightest, and it is fear-mongering anti-Iranian propaganda not based on facts.

P GREANVILLE—Still, Fisk is Fisk, and he knows his priorities, one of the first apparently being to report and underscore the truth with a view to putting out the numerous fuses lit by the compulsive arsonists in the region, the chief creep in this regard, by a wide margin, Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who clearly has no real respect for life, or else would not be such a pathological warmonger.

PAUL C ROBERTS—The inability of the Russian government to comprehend the US/Israeli/neoconservative alliance and what this means for the Middle East, together with the indecisiveness of the Russian government about supplying Syria with the S-300 air defense system, has enabled the crisis to escalate with last night’s as of yet unclaimed attack on Syrian military positions with what appears to have been “bunker buster” bombs, an escalation.