Egyptian media report that Shaikh Doctor Mohammed Mukhtar Gom’a, Egyptian minister of Islamic Awqaf seems excited about the new prize won by the Saudi King Abdullah. He has congratulated his Majesty King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, Servant of the Two Holy Shrines, for winning the Shaikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahayan Prize and being picked as the Cultural Personality of our Universe, via Abu Dhabi.

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mhg

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According to the Kuwait daily Al Qabas Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani has been a master at multitasking over the past few years. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard chief of the Quds Force is reported everywhere from Basrah to Damascus to Cairo. He is quoted extensively in Gulf and Western media, although he has never talked to any of them:

• Last year when the Muslim Brotherhood were ruling Egypt the newspaper claimed that they sought help from Iran’s Brigadier Suleimani. Morsi was president in Egypt at the time and Al Qabas claimed in a bizarre story that Qassem Suleimani had met a senior Egyptian (Muslim Brotherhood) leader at a famous Cairo hotel. It did not claim they met at a hotel bar over drinks. But where else?
• Now we all know Morsi was as sectarian as anyone else in Cairo, as sectarian as any of his former Salafi allies who betrayed him last July. No doubt the purpose of the leak was to discredit the local Muslim Brotherhood (both Kuwaiti and Gulf) and perhaps influence events in Egypt.
• Now the same newspaper, which represents the interests of traditional business oligarchs in Kuwait, has a new gem which it claims is based on Saudi and Gulf intelligence sources (as suspect in my book as Iranian and Syrian and Israeli or any other intelligence when it comes to disinformation). Mr. Suleimani is also in the illegal drug business.
• They report that Qassem Suleimani is now also in charge of a network that prepares and smuggles drugs into the Persian Gulf states. The daily claims that the ‘raw drugs’ are originally shipped through Iraq (according to Saudi and Gulf GCC intelligence agencies) to Syria and Lebanon where they are processed (not clear where the raw materials come from into Iran). Then the final products are presumably shipped from Lebanon all the way to Bandar Abbas, an Iranian port on the Gulf. A hell of a long way to ship drugs, several thousand kilometers through the Suez Canal (or maybe the longer route around Africa?). Why not process the drugs in Iran, or even Iraq, instead of shipping them all the way to Lebanon to be shipped back to the Gulf by sea? Somebody is very stupid here, either the Iranians or the writer for Al Qabas. I pick the Al Qabas writer for the prize.
• Al Qabas also claims that Suleimani runs the drug operation from Southern Iraq, where he is also managing a campaign to get another term for Nouri Al Maliki as prime minister of Iraq. Imagine that.
• Now that is true multitasking. Notice how all the countries involved are the “usual suspects”: all either Shi’a majority or plurality or members of a certain camp? I mean Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria?That must be a coincidence, no?
• Al Qabas did not say, however, that Qassem Suleimani is also in charge of the Iranian nuclear program and operates execution squads, as well as the Amsterdam Red Light District and the Mexican Drug Cartels (all based on Saudi and Gulf intelligence source). Not yet. But maybe some Saudi prince would hire him to run their family campaign to become king after their next election.
• All this can be true, of course. Anything is possible these days and not only on paper. But I am not buying it.

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mhg

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Watched a morning CNN show. They had two U.S. senators, a Democrat from the Northeast and a Republican from the West. Senator Barrasso of Wyoming is a former doctor and seems like a reasonable man. No doubt he is. Yet he kept doing a common (but stupid) senatorial thing: he kept making assertions that simply are not supported by any facts. He kept saying things like “Syria is an enemy of the United States”. Now calling some country “an enemy” has big implications and should not be used cavalierly as many U.S. senators do, especially when the senator is not up for reelection. 

“A court in southern Egypt on Monday decreed a mass death sentence for nearly 700 people, including the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement of Egypt’s ousted Islamist president. On the same day, another Egyptian court banned the April 6 movement, which was among the primary engines behind the landmark 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt’s sharp turn toward authoritarianism in the nearly 10 months since an interim government took power has provoked expressions of concern from human rights groups and Western governments, but little in the way of meaningful punitive actions against the military-backed regime………………”

The best scenario, an optimistic scenario, in this impending Egyptian butchery is that it is just a political show. They are setting the stage for a great show of mercy by the new dictator. The Kangaroo courts continue their job, preparing the way for a new dictator for life in Cairo. He, Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi will probably show “restraint” and “mercy” after pleas from allies and suppliers in the West. He will likely show calculated moderation by commuting most of these hundreds, thousands by then, of death sentences to life in prison. All these people, including tens of thousands awaiting trial, will end up in prison for life simply because they exercised their right of protest. 

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An Egyptian daily newspaper quotes a high government official that Saudi Arabia has postponed delivery of any new aid to Egypt until after the results of the coming presidential elections are ‘known’. The official is quoted that a ‘huge’ financial aid package will be announced after the victory of Generalisimo Field Marshal Al Sisi is assured (just in case there is any doubt about the kind of election they are staging in Egypt). This new aid is promised to surpass all previous aid packages to Egypt………

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mhg

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“The world’s chemical weapons watchdog will send a fact-finding mission to Syria to examine claims by the United States and other Western powers that the Syrian government may have used deadly chlorine gas against its own people. Tuesday’s announcement by the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) followed a week of intensive diplomatic efforts by Washington to rally international support for such a mission, which is likely to renew international scrutiny of Syria’s chemical weapons at a time when Damascus was receiving credit for destroying its stockpiles of the lethal toxins.………….”

Here we go again. It has been happening regularly, ever since the tide of the Syrian war seemed to turn against the Wahhabi side. I believe that nobody, not even an Arab political leader, is that stupid. Imagine, every month or so the “activists” or the “opposition” claim that Bashar Al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons: Sarin or Chlorine or whatever. It is like clockwork. They always accompany the claim with photos and videos of people choking or dead and canisters clearly marked (in English): Sarin or Chlorine. They do not, however, paste a return address for these canisters at the presidential palace in Damascus. 

Some older posts on this:

“A hospital visit was out of the question; admission for Rohingya Muslims, a long-persecuted minority, always requires a lengthy approval process — time that the baby, named Parmin, did not have. In desperation, the pharmacy owner sent the family to the rarely staffed Dapaing clinic, the only government emergency health center for the tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims herded into displaced people’s camps. Although it was just 4 p.m., the doors were shuttered. “We became like crazy people, running everywhere,” the child’s grandmother, Daw Mu Mu Lwin, said. With no good choices left, the family returned to the pharmacy, where Parmin died, untreated, three and a half hours later, cradled in her grandmother’s arms. The baby’s death was part of a rapidly expanding death toll and humanitarian crisis among the Rohingya, a Muslim minority that Myanmar’s Buddhist-led government has increasingly deprived of the …………….Some aid workers fear they are being kept away so there are fewer witnesses to rampant mistreatment most basic liberties and aid even as it trumpets its latest democratic reforms and occasional bloodletting ……….”

Which brings me to a curiously silent figure: Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, allegedly acclaimed humanitarian freedom fighter of Burma (Myanmar). The lady has struggled for years for democracy in her country. Yet the lady has been stubbornly and deafeningly silent about the expanding systemic genocide in her country. Like many otherwise ‘good Germans’ of the 20th century, she has been silent on organized ethnic cleansing in her country. Understandably silent because she would have to pay a heavy political price, a price to be exacted not by the military rulers of the country, but by the Buddhist monks and their millions of followers. 

Burma and its Muslims: Myanmar Takes the Nazi Route
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mhg

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Mr. Ahmad Al Jarba, the Saudi-appointed current head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) will be in the United States this week, seeking ‘long term’ ties with the United States. Recent Syrian history is certainly against him. It is unlikely that he himself will last ‘long term’ enough, that he will be around much longer than his several predecessors who bit the dust quickly. 

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mhg

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“The flow of foreign fighters to Syria to join the war against Bashar Assad’s dictatorship is becoming the largest in the history of the global jihad, and the Syrian battleground is on the way to outstripping the 1980s Afghan war against the Soviets as a training ground for Islamic militants. Security services around the world are becoming increasingly alarmed at the implications for the safety of their citizens. American intelligence officials now put the number of foreign fighters who have gone to Syria since the war began in 2011 at between 8,000 and 10,000. Other sources put the total even higher, up to 12,000. The largest contingent is probably Saudis. Saudi sources put the number of their citizens who have gone to wage jihad in Syria at 1,200, of whom 300 are reported to have died on the battlefield. Jordanian sources report about a thousand Jordanians………….”

The prospects look grim. All forms of Jihad are humorless, but this Syrian Jihad is even more so. I mean with contingents from Saudi Arabia, Gulf Salafis, Chechnya, Bosnia, Libya, Algeria, and Jordan (especially Jordan) who can expect anything else? If there are such things as Algerian and Libyan humor, I have never heard of them. Have you ever heard of Wahhabi humor (there is some but the jokes start like this: these three true Salafi believers dive into a river of wine near a couple of skinny-dipping skinny houris, and………….)?

Not that Syrian humor was well-known even before the current tragedy started in 2011. Remember, the Baath Party has been in power in Syria since 1963. In Iraq it ruled briefly in 1963, but came back with a vengeance in 1968 to wipe out any Iraqi sense of humor (assuming any existed after four centuries of humorless Turkish rule). The terms “Baath” and “humor” don’t fit well in the same sentence, or in the same paragraph, or in the same chapter. Come to think of it, I can think of many terms that don’t fit anywhere near the word ‘humor’: Salafi, Al Saud, Al Khalifa (well, maybe just LOL), mullah, functionary, bureaucrat, Mitch McConnell, among others. 

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It could be one way to flush out malcontents, reformists, cynics, and even a few potential ‘terrorists’. It all depends on what you write the king about. After all, social media like Twitter and Facebook have opened avenues for protest and political activism, but they have also helped flush out active and silent regime opponents.