Journalist Aaron Mate and [Tehran-based] Professor Mohammad Marandi just took a trip to Syria to see the real-life impact on average people caused by the decade-long Western regime-change war and suffocating US/EU sanctions. They speak about their trip with Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton of the Moderate Rebels podcast.
ISRAEL SHAMIR—The United States insists on its right to land any civilian vessel. In 2004, the United States forcibly landed a private plane in which a member of the Russian parliament’s upper chamber and a former deputy minister, Andrei Vavilov, was flying. He was taken for interrogation directly from the airport.
The most famous case was in 2013. The plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales took off from Moscow. US intelligence agencies suspected Snowden was on board. The president’s plane was forced to land in Vienna, where the plane was searched. Snowden was not found, so the plane was released. Afterwards, the United States publicly and officially declared its holy right to detain and search all the world’s civilian ships.
The United States was not alone in landing planes. In 2012, Turkey forced a Moscow-Damascus plane to land. But it was a Russian plane, so nobody cared.
Whom did the Belarusians detain? A Belarusian citizen named Roman Protasevich, the founder and head of the NEXTA telegram channel, who organized the riots in Minsk in 2020.
RT.COM—Western governments condemned Minsk, accusing it of forcibly grounding the plane under a false pretext of a bomb threat. However, when, for example, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the events a “brazen and shocking act” and demanded an international investigation, the call seemed hypocritical to some observers. After all, wasn’t that the same thing that the US and its allies did when they wanted to snatch NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden?
A most interesting analysis of British fatuousness and London’s sudden encounter with reality, as it is forced to withdraw plans for a provocation in the Black Sea, perhaps one of the most heavily fortified strategic areas in the whole planet. The Brits and the Americans were simply forced to back off and start behaving more rationally and humbly. Part of the explanation—a subject that has been brilliiantly discussed by Russian geostrategist Andrei Martyanov, and also by The Saker—is that Russia’s economy and unique ways of developing and procuring advanced military systems—perhaps a gift from the Soviet Union—is that her economic and military capabilities, not counting the intrinsic quality and morale of her soldiers, is far superior to NATO’s. That’s why bean counting is useless and actually misleading. Listen to Mercouris talk on Russia’s actual capabilities and the surprising vigor of her economy.
VANESSA BEELEY—Ambassadors have been reduced to nothing more than talking heads for power, there are no longer any checks and balances from senior diplomats who once held sway over their government policy. These days we see juvenile reactions from gravitas-deficient representatives of UK and US bi-partisan war parties.
We in the West are represented by ambitious careerist popinjays who will run PR campaigns for sadistic regime foreign policy without a second thought for the peoples affected. It is up to us to reverse the trend and to demand that those who lead us to wars we don’t want and who kill people we identify with, in our names, are stopped. Not just this time but for always. We owe it to Syria.
I asked former UK Ambassador to Syria and Bahrain, Peter Ford, for a statement, this is what he wrote:
“The most significant thing is that the elections were held at all. With three foreign armies occupying part of their soil (Turkey, the US and Israel), with the West waging savage economic war on them to turn them against their President, with years of indescribable suffering at the hands of Western-backed militants behind them, the Syrian people delivered a resounding verdict in favour of stability as represented by the holding of elections on schedule.