14.01.2013

Links January 13, 2013


From now on there will be regular posts with link collections. The linked articles must not necessarily reflect the opinion of the blog administrator.
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They hate us for our freedom (to waste resources).
The “Green Economy” is advancing, just let the entrepreneurial spirit solve humanities problems.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide. His idea about free access to human knowledge was altruistic, humane, idealistic, BUT, one doesn’t interfere in profit making without consequences. 
The privatization of the US Postal Service is making progress.
Cancer is big business and a promising market. Expect accelerating growth rates.
Hope and change (for BP)
In Syria President Bashar Al-Assad delivered a speech which was more intelligent and constructive than anything one ever has heard from Western politicians.
The reactions were mixed, probably because the speech was beyond the intellectual scope of analysts.
A somber assessment of the Wests appetite for a peaceful solution.
Mali, another recolonized African nation. 
Zimbabwe is not ready yet for recolonization.

Death in Paris
On January 9 Sakine Cansız, one of the founding members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Fidan Dogan, a representative of the Brussels-based Kurdistan National Congress, and Kurdish activist Leyla Soylemez were murdered in an execution-style assassination.
The three were found dead in the office of the Kurdistan Information Center on Rue Lafayette in Paris next to the Gare de Nord after friends became concerned because cellphone calls had gone unanswered and none of them had returned home. The office was locked from the outside, three bullet casings were found on the floor.
According to French police there are not any strong leads, but circumstances indicate that a professional killer was at work. The three women were shot in the head and the killer is believed to have used a gun silencer.
France has a large Kurdish community concentrated in the Paris region and French police have occasionally arrested Kurds suspected of illegally financing the PKK.
Rusen Werdi, a lawyer at the Paris Kurdish Institute told, that Sakine Cansiz had been under constant surveillance by the French police because of her activism. Ms. Werdi also said that Sakine Cansiz had been keeping a low profile in recent months, and that it was rare for her to be at the information center.
The legendary Sakine Cansiz
Sakine Cansiz was present at the founding meeting of the PKK in 1978 in Fis, a town in Turkeys predominantly Kurdish south-east.
After the military coup of 1980 she was imprisoned along with many other members of the PKK and spent several years in Diyarbakir prison, where between 1981 and 1989 34 inmates died of torture, and hundreds more suffered lasting injury. According to PKK members and former inmates, the treatment of political prisoners in Diyarbakir prison was the main reason for the PKK’s militarization and the start of the armed struggle against the Turkish authorities in 1984.
Sakine Cansiz led the Kurdish protest movement from inside prison and by the time she was released she had become already a legend amongst PKK members. She entered the PKK training camp in the Bekaa Valley, then under Syrian control, and joined the armed struggle in northern Iraq under the command of Osman Ocalan, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan’s younger brother.
It was there that Cansiz started to organize the women's movement inside the PKK and it is largely because of her work that by 1993, one-third of the PKK's armed forces were women.
Cansiz was known to be very close to Abdullah Ocalan. When Ocalan left Syria under massive Turkish pressure in the late 1990s, unsuccessfully seeking asylum in Europe, Cansiz was always by his side until his arrest in Kenya. When Ocalan was interrogated after his imprisonment, he said about her: "I started the women's movement to free women from the feudalism of men and to create a strong type of woman. I wanted lively discussions.”
The long shadows of empire
French and Turkish commentators were quick to point out, that this assassination was probably a feud between rival Kurdish factions, on commentator wrote: “When the authorities allow terrorists to move freely inside Europe, they should not wonder, when the result is mayhem.”
It is a telling elucidation of the Turkish mindset, that the three slain unarmed women are called terrorists, while the violent psychopaths of the Free Syrian Army who wreak havoc in Syria are celebrated as freedom fighters. 
One has to bear in mind, that the Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest and longest lasting colonial powers, controlling much of southeast Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa from the 15th century till the beginning of the 20th century. It was an empire as cruel and inhuman as any of the Western colonial powers.
In 1915, when the Russian Caucasus Army advanced in eastern Anatolia, aided by the native Armenian population, the Ottoman government started mass killings of Armenian men in massacres and labor camps, followed by the deportation of Armenian women, children, and elderly on death marches to the Syrian Desert. In addition to that there were also many well documented cases of mass burnings (alive) and mass drownings. It was the first genocide of the 20th century and between 600,000 and 900,000 Armenians lost their lives.
This was by the way not the first mass extermination of Armenians by the Turks. From 1894 to 1897 between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were killed in the Hamidian massacres.
Turkey needs peace (with the Kurds)
In recent weeks, a solution to Turkey's long-running conflict with Kurdish separatists seemed near. Prime Minister Erdogan's chief adviser reported that officials had been discussing disarmament with the PKK and at the start of the year Kurdish lawmakers paid a visit to PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in his island prison.
Though Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan ruled out a general amnesty for Kurdish militants, he said that intelligence agents would continue to talk to Abdullah Ocalan and try to reach an agreement.
The main reason for Erdogans outreach are the Kurds in northern Syria, which either support the secular Syrian government or are neutral after Bashar Al-Assad granted them far reaching autonomy and handed military control to the PYD, an affiliate of the PKK.
Turkey has already paid a heavy political and economic price for failing to dispose the Syrian government despite an intense 21 months long effort including every imaginable overt and covert steps and measures. Inviting masses of Syrian refugees with the hope that they may facilitate setting up a buffer zone did not work and Turkey is now carrying alone the financial burden of more than 140,000 refugees.
As the Syrian conflict goes on unabated without end in sight, Erdogan becomes more and more desperate to do something because the steadily raising costs could eventually jeopardize the rule of Turkeys neo-Islamist AKP government.
The blame game
Gestures of reconciliation and some token measures to appease Turkeys Kurds would for sure help to weaken the unity of Syrian Kurds, which means that derailing such efforts is helping the Syrian government. It seems though unlikely that Iranian or Syrian agents are involved in the killings, because the European Union has enacted a strict embargo against both countries and every citizen from Iran and Syria who still manages it to enter Europe can expect to be constantly surveilled.
It is common knowledge that Paris is crowded with MI6, CIA, and Mossad agents, alone for this fact it cannot be ruled out that for until now unknown reasons they were responsible for this quick and easy assassination. 
It also cannot be ruled out that a dissident faction of the PKK was responsible. Cansiz was not on good terms with PKK leader Ferman Hussein, a Syrian citizen, and Senior PKK commander Murat Karayilan considers the Turkish offer as not sufficient and has called for more concrete prove that the Turkish leadership wants peace, including an upgrade in prison conditions for Ocalan and a formal recognition of Kurdish identity in Turkey's constitution.
According to leaked reports the Turkish negotiator have offered that PKK leaders in northern Iraq's Qandil mountains would not be brought to trial but would instead be given the opportunity to seek exile elsewhere, while regular PKK fighters would be reintegrated into society. This is maybe not an outcome the PKK leaders would endorse.
Yet it is unlikely that anyone in the PKK, even the most unforgiving and hardline fighter, would kill Sakine Cansız, a longtime comrade and companion of Abdullah Ocalan, who is a larger than life figure, undisputed and respected by every PKK member. The death of Sakine Cansız is for sure a tragic blow to Ocalan and the worst things that could have been done to him (short of painfully torturing him to death).
PKK commander Murat Karayilan is a known admirer of Cansız.
Considering all these facts the most likely explanation is still that a hardline faction of the Turkish intelligence agency MIT is responsible. The MIT is not a monolithic organization and has divided loyalties. It is a powerful and shadowy agency with practically no legal oversight. In the last years the agencies budget increased 32 percent to almost one billion Turkish Lira.
In 1997, former MIT Undersecretary Teoman Koman was called to give testimony to a parliamentary commission charged with investigating the existence of a “deep state” in the wake of the infamous Susurluk scandal. Koman did not even bother to show up when the commission called for his testimony.
In February 2012 there was a widely reported row about the agency which analysts interpreted as a warning from nationalists to Erdogan against seeking any negotiated settlement with the PKK, after being alarmed by what the PKK had been offered during initial talks in Norway’s capital Oslo.
What the media avoid to mention
What the news organizations purposefully avoided to discuss: Three helpless women were shot dead by a bestial, monstrous killer. Maybe it was a contract killer, maybe it was a secret agent, but whoever committed this crime was a deranged psychopathic animal which in any functioning society should be put away into a mental institution till the end of its life.
If Sakine Cansiz was indeed under police surveillance, how could this assassination happen? How could the murderer enter the Kurdish center without being noticed by the French police? Why was the DCRI (Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence) not able to foil the plot? Or did they keep quiet because they didn’t want to disturb a colleague doing his job?
Did they know and just turned a blind eye?
In Paris, the mood was angry and somber as hundreds of exiled Kurds filled the street outside the Kurdistan Information Center. Police erected barricades to try to contain the crowd. Flowers were laid in front of the building and some people waved Kurdish flags while others chanted, “We are all PKK.”

Update:

From a comment on Moon of Alabama:

This is an act ordered from outside PKK and the assassination was likely targeting the entire current PKK political leadership, since an internal feud between factions regarding policy would have either directly targeted the opposing ideological figure(s) or associated lower level operatives with the objective of eliminating them, sow terror, and deter the opposing faction. These women were the PR face of the PKK in France and the whole EU. They didn’t have any operation role in the field and their assassination doesn’t help either faction.
It is also likely that French intelligence was aware of the act before hand. This area of Paris has the second and third biggest train stations in the city right next to each other and is heavily guarded by security elements.

From Wikileaks 2007
US targets Sakine Cansiz

“6. (S) Our immediate goal is to deny the PKK use of the European financial and air transport systems to move money from Europe into northern Iraq for their operations. We can accomplish this via enhanced intelligence sharing, more careful airport screening and strict enforcement of cash declaration requirements. We also should press the Europeans to take action against the two most notorious PKK/KGK financiers in Europe, Riza Altun and Sakine Cansiz. Riza Altun is known to be a top PKK financier. He fled judicial arrest in France in July and Austrian authorities allowed him to fly to Iraq on July 13, but he recently has been seen traveling again in Europe. Sakine Cansiz is a PKK/KGK financier and weapons and tactical strategist. She was arrested in Germany but released by a Hamburg court on April 27 after 40 days of detention and remains in Europe. Their re-arrest and prosecution would limit PKK/KGK activities and signal that Europe is not a free zone for PKK/KGK fundraising.”


FIRST POST – JANUARY 12, 2013 – FRANCE BEHIND ASSASSINATIONS OF PKK ACTIVIST WOMEN IN PARIS; EXCLUSIVE NEWS AND REPORT FOR SYRPER

Last night we received a telephone call from a old friend in the Lebanese Deauxieme Bureau who enjoys our blog.  He asked me not to publish his name because, although he is a retired officer living in Morocco, he still had friends in both the French DGSE (Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure) and the newly named Lebanese General Security Directorate.  (Mudiriyyat Al-Amn Al-’Aam).  I will call him Tawfiq.  Tawfiq told me that the evidence all points to the French government acting on a request from Director of the Turkish MIT (Milli Istihbarat Teshkilati),  Hakan Fidan.

Tawfiq confirmed what some newspapers have written, that the MIT does not have extensive international operations or agents capable of carrying out what Americans call “black ops” or “wet ops”.  For this, they would have to send a “legal” agent into the country with the knowledge of the Ministry of the Interior and the DGSE.  Tawfiq believes that the agent used to penetrate the institute, where the women were meeting, was a Kurdish-speaking Turk trained to perform assassinations, and a Kurdish operative known to the women. Tawfiq hinted that he knew of such a man in the Turkish army who was recruited by the MIT after military discharge.

The motive was obvious. Erdoghan’s regime was negotiating with Abdallah Ocalan, the imprisoned former head of the PKK (Partie Karkerani Kurdistan) through the offices of the MIT — specifically the head, Hakan Fidan.  Ocalan is doing a life term for terrorism-related charges but was spared the death penalty when Turkey, soaring high on hopes of EU membership, abolished the practice and gave him a life term.  Ocalan was known to be severely depressed by the prospect of living out his life in a Turkish prison on his own “Elba”, the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara, just 32 miles south of Istanbul.

Notwithstanding Erdoghan’s fatuous advertisements about Imrali’s high security penitentiary with its “luxurious” appointments and “perquisites”, all reports received by SyrPer demonstrate that this Alcatraz is no better than the Turkish prison detailed in the movie Midnight Express complete with a successful native rodent population and sadistic staff. You cannot fly over it and no fishing is permitted off its shores. It is Devils Island with a Turkish twist.

It is believed Ocalan had reiterated his oft-quoted demand that he be set free in exchange for which he would call on the PKK to throw down its arms to negotiate. Just recently, he used his questionable moral clout to end a national hunger strike that was inspired by his living conditions on the “luxurious and Edenic” Imrali island.
Tawfiq says the women were told in advance that an operative was going to visit them to coordinate Cansiz’ trip to Cologne where it was believed she was going to denounce both Erdoghan and Ocalan. The French regime of Francois Hollande, which is deeply invested in the ouster of Dr. Bashar Al-Assad and his government in Syria, cooperated with Erdoghan’s regime and actually proposed the assassination of Cansiz on condition that no French citizen would be the trigger man. This was agreeable to Fidan Hakan, MIT’s director. This is why a Turk was sent to Paris. Tawfiq says that the best way to know who pulled the trigger was to check on recent arrivals to the Turkish Embassy in Paris under diplomatic cover. Tawfiq did remark that the killer’s identity would probably be concealed although he would carry diplomatic papers in case something went wrong and he was arrested.

What went wrong, as usual with French operations, was the presence of the two other women with Cansiz. Tawfiq says that it is virtually certain that only Cansiz would be the target and that any others had to be viewed as “collateral damage”. He used the Arabic expression: “Dahaayaa Thanawiyya” or “Secondary Victims”. The operation was very professional.

Access to the institute was as Erdoghan described it: A person who was trusted was allowed in. The outside door lock was only operable with a coded key. So, in his mind, one of the women, certainly Cansiz, recognized the voice of one of the assassination team and permitted entry. This is how Erdoghan was able to say with a straight face that the killing was an “internal matter” for the PKK. What he did not say was that the trigger man was a Turk working for the MIT and that the PKK was penetrated. He also failed to state that the French government, literally, set up the murders to promote a Turk-Kurd solution in order to make the campaign against Dr. Assad’s government more effective.

Cuba after the Hurricane


Cube was directly in Hurricane Sandy’s path and suffered the most severe destruction of all affected countries, when the storm moved over Eastern Cuba with winds of 175 km/h and gusts of up to 225 km/h.
11 Cubans died despite the evacuation of 340,000 people to safe shelters, 20,000 buildings were completely demolished and another 200,000 were severely damaged. The storm destroyed 43,000 roofs. Among the damaged buildings were 896 schools, serving 180,000 students. 129 schools were so severely damaged that the classes have to be held in temporary facilities (private homes, libraries, community centers).
Many areas lost power and running water for days and 1.4 million people still do not have access to safe potable water, which poses a significant sanitary risk. The volume of debris was so high that it obstructed for days access to vital production and public service facilities. The state-owned utility company Empresa Electrica emphasized that the task was and is still titanic since it means building practically all of the secondary networks from the ground up.
The losses to industry, infrastructure (hospitals, schools, electricity lines, water and sewage pipes), and agriculture amount to 2 billion US$, it is the second biggest storm damage in Cuban history.
This two earlier blog posts described the hurricanes impact and the situation immediately after the storm, the following text is an update about the current status.
The eastern provinces and especially Santiago are still building sites and the reconstruction will take month, if not years. Considering the fact that damage from hurricane Ike in 2008 is still noticeable it does not seem far-fetched to assume that people will still be rebuilding when the next hurricane hits.
Cholera and dengue fever epidemic
In the wake of the hurricane Cuba is suffering from a dangerous outbreak of cholera and dengue fever, fueled by Hurricane Sandy’s floods.
More than a dozen deaths have been reported. Hospitals and prisons (Mar Verde prison, Boniato prison) have been quarantined at times. Schools have been shut down, and so have restaurants and street kiosks which are selling juices and other products made with water.
Government buildings have established hand and shoe disinfection stands at their entrances. Public health officials go from door to door asking if anyone is suffering from diarrhea, vomiting or fever. The authorities also distribute water purification tablets.
In Havana so many dengue cases are filling the hospitals wards that there is a shortage of medicines, needles, bandages, chlorine, soap, and other medical supplies.
Health workers are driving around Old Havana issuing notifications by loudspeaker, telling people what precautions to take, urging them not to try to cure themselves, and announcing training sessions where medical staff is taught how to contain the two epidemics.
Several municipalities (La Tinta, Maisi, Imias, Mayari, Moa) are quarantined.
In August there was a cholera outbreak in the eastern city of Manzanillo, which ended after three deaths and 417 confirmed cases. Without the storm floods and the destruction of vital infrastructure the Cuban authorities would have easily contained the epidemic, but broken water and sewer pipes, flooded latrines, and left behind puddles created ideal conditions for cholera bacteria and dengue-carrying mosquitoes.
Cuban expatriates in Miami were quick to point out that only 65 percent of Cubans have access to piped drinking water and that sewage services reach only 38 percent of the population, accusing the government of negligence and mismanagement.
Cuba is not an affluent country and the limited resources have to be carefully allocated. Safe drinking water and sanitation until now was ranking behind the priorities of food security, housing, health, and education. This will have to change, but the installation of new pipe systems and sewage treatment plants will not be done by taking IMF loans or inviting US corporations, it will be done by a concerted effort of the population with the help of Cuba’s genuine friends.
International relief efforts
In the days after the storm cargo planes from Venezuela, Panama, Bolivia, Ecuador, Japan, Russia, and China  arrived at Santiago’s Antonio Maceo International Airport. Venezuela and Mexico immediately sent ships. Russia is sending construction materials to restore buildings.
The UN Central Emergency Response Fund has allocated 5.5 million US$ for Cuba through UNICEF, FAO, UNFPA, WFP, WHO, and UNDP. The European Union intends to donate 4 million Euro, however, as the DG ECHO's Operational Reserve is exhausted and only 2 million Euro are immediately available it remains to be seen how much money will be sent. 
There are also private initiatives and Cuba Benefit Relief Concerts (for instance in Berkeley, CA and Vancouver, Canada).
MEDICC and Global Links, with the aid of the Pan American Health Organization, is sending medical supplies and equipment, chlorine tablets, hospital furnishings and critical medical books for the medical school to Santiago.
The Canadian Network on Cuba has started a Sandy Relief Fund campaign
http://www.canadiannetworkoncuba.ca/
The US government is absent from the list of donors and even accused of obstructing humanitarian aid to the Caribbean Island. One relief agency wrote: Be aware of the fact that the Obama administration, which has already seized more than a billion dollars destined for Cuba, is relentless in its efforts to pursue ways of continuing this practice; so be careful of the vehicles you use to send aid to Cuba.
One cannot have it both ways. Cuba has endured a strict US embargo since 1960 and by comparing other Caribbean nations with Cuba, one could easily come to the conclusion that this embargo didn’t hurt and to the contrary was rather beneficial, allowing Cuba to develop a unique socialist society and to some extent autarchic economy without outside interference.
Haiti has the closest economic ties to the USA, it is the poorest nation in the Americas. Coincidence?
US aid to other countries has in every single case brought short time relief payed by longtime social and economic devastation. The intentions of private donors maybe were honest, but the coordination of relief efforts by the US government always made sure to pave the way for US corporations, resulting in the destruction of local trades, land grab, evictions, resource exploration (plus the inevitable ecological destruction), sweat shops, social and political turmoil.
US aid in every single case was a greek gift.
Following are excerpts from a speech by LeiLani Dowell at the Workers World conference in November. http://www.workers.org/
Cuba’s love for human life
An important biological species is in danger of disappearing with the rapid and progressive destruction of its natural life-sustaining conditions ­-- man. We are just now becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.
It is necessary to point out that the societies of consumers are those who are fundamentally responsible for the atrocious destruction of the environment. They are born from former colonial powers and imperial politics, which in turn engendered the backwardness and poverty which are now beating down the immense majority of humankind.
With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume three-fourths of the energy which is produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have weakened and punctured the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gasses which alter climatic conditions with catastrophic effects from which we are now beginning to suffer. …
If we want to save humanity from this self-destruction, it is necessary to better distribute the available wealth and technology of the planet. Less luxury and less extravagance in a few countries; for that matter, less poverty and less hunger in a large portion of the earth. … Make human existence more rational. Apply a fair international economic order. Make use of all the scientific knowledge necessary for ongoing development without contamination. Pay the ecological debt and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear and not mankind.
This quote is from the beloved leader of the Cuban people, Fidel Castro, from a speech at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 13 years before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and 20 years before this month’s Hurricane Sandy. The US has persistently ignored that tomorrow is now; it has ignored it at the expense of the growing number of storm victims and survivors.
Over and over again, Cuba has had to pay for capitalism’s crimes against the very environment that sustains us as human beings. Cuba is a small island situated in the Caribbean Sea across from the Gulf of Mexico. So it has always been prone to hurricanes. But these storms have become increasingly destructive and deadly as a result of climate change generated by the profit system’s shortsightedness and greed. In 2006, Cuba was the only nation in the world that met the World Wide Fund for Nature’s definition of sustainable development.
And yet, each year as storms hit the region, Cuba avoids losing its people to the ravages of the hurricanes. When deaths do occur, they are minimal compared to those in other countries. This year, Cuba lost an unprecedented 11 lives to Hurricane Sandy. The US lost 132 -- and those numbers will undoubtedly rise.
One could say that Cuba is able to protect its people because it has more experience dealing with hurricanes. But that’s actually only a small part of the equation.
The bigger part is the love and dedication to human life that a socialist system bestows on its people. In 2008, before Hurricane Gustav hit, Fidel said: “We are lucky to have a Revolution! It is a fact that nobody will be neglected.”
In Cuba major planning and preparation go into hurricane preparedness, and when they do hit, these plans are executed with precision. In Cuba, 55,000 people were evacuated from their homes before Sandy hit this year.
For the Cubans, “evacuation” doesn’t mean what it does in the US -- where politicians stand on a podium and yell, “Get out!,” then blame those who “didn’t leave” because they didn’t have transportation, or because they have disabilities or medical situations, or because they have nowhere to go.
In Cuba, a plan is devised for how each person will be evacuated and where each one will go. If, for instance, there is an elderly woman living on the second floor of a house in a wheelchair, people are designated in advance to help carry her down the stairs, and they know which relative or which civil defense area is prepared to house her.
Because lives come before profit in Cuba, any and all resources are commandeered for the emergency relief -- from boats and buses to buildings and communication networks. All social, economic and military organizations are involved in the effort and every community. Strong bonds of solidarity tie Cubans together as a safety net against any storm.
Now some would say, well, Cuba’s this small island with a smaller population than the US; they can afford to do this for their population. But the US is the wealthiest country in the world, with the most resources in the world.
There is absolutely no reason why the US cannot effectively organize protection for every single person in the country -- no reason, of course, except its priorities. Capitalism’s main focus, its only reason for existing, is to secure the profits of the 1 percent, the ruling class. People’s lives — especially those of the poor, people of color and workers -- are totally expendable.
Meanwhile, Cuba is saddled with a blockade that the US has imposed on it for some 50 years now. This makes getting even the most basic medicines, construction equipment, etc., extremely difficult. And Cuba still takes care of its people.
Again, it’s an issue of priorities.
Not only does Cuba take care of its own, but it also shares its expertise with the world. We can never forget the image of Cuban doctors lined up at the airport, waiting to fly to the US to aid survivors of Hurricane Katrina, only to be rejected by President Bush.
So this year, as we provide mutual aid, support and love to our sisters and brothers suffering from the storm -- as we expose the ravages of the storm of capitalism upon our daily lives -- we would like to give our thanks to socialist Cuba for its efforts in protecting the lives of the entire world, both politically and materially.
And we want to renew our commitment to destroy capitalism, so that the people everywhere can live. Cuba’s socialist system shows the way.

Doha fairytales (1001 nights) Number 2


The first fairytale from Doha was a satyrical comment about the UN climate-change conference 2012, which as expected ended without any progress.
How could it have been different when the conference took place in the country with the world’s highest per capita carbon emissions, the highest average income, and a lifestyle that is nothing less than an ecstatic celebration of consumerism, putting even the most affluent US Americans to shame.
The Qataris enthusiastic embrace of Western consumerism has lead to serious problems, making Qatar not only the richest, but also the most obese nation on earth. Half of the adults and a third of the children in Qatar are overweight, 17 percent of the native population suffers from diabetes. Related illnesses and complications like hypertension, blindness, partial paralysis, and heart disease are on the rise and in addition to that there are also high rates of birth defects and genetic disorders.
The weight problems have not dented the ambitions to gain political weight and in recent years Qatar has emerged as an important sponsor of radical Islamism. It is the main backer of the Muslim Brotherhood which became the biggest player (and winner) in the so called “Arab Spring.” Qatar is also an important member of the NATO/GCC coalition that destroyed Libya and now tries to destroy Syria.
I wrote about Qatar in several other blog posts and refer for details to these posts:
The post that you are reading now is about Al Jazeera, a prominent TV broadcaster that is owned and controlled by Qatar’s Al Thani family. The propaganda war in the Middle East is in its zenith and the deceptive rhetoric, the boldness and inventiveness of the fabrications, lies, deliberate misconstructions and distortions is amazing, extraordinary, fascinating, breathtaking, gut wrenching.
The tale of Middle East politics is admittedly complicated but it can nevertheless be subsumed in a few sentences:
The Western neocolonial powers wanted to get rid of the secular Arab regimes because their leaders were not as easily to bribe as Arab monarchs. Iraq, Libya, Tunisia is done, Syria is next. Egypt is a different story: The USA were quite comfortable with Mubarak, but he was toppled by a public revolt so the USA had to install Mohamed Morsi, who maybe suits them even better.
Iran is also different, it is an Islamic theocracy but cooperates with Syria and supports the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world. It is also blocking the progress of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism into the Caucasus and Central Asia, which would bring Russia into big trouble.
The West used and uses radical Islamists as proxies to destroy the secular regimes, a method which has the welcome side effect that the ranks of jihadist fighters are significantly thinned out, thereby reducing their ability to threaten Western interests (the Syrian army has killed more Islamic terrorists since March 2011 than President Obamas drone assassinations would have eliminated in 20 years)
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and since 2011 also Turkey are the intermediaries between the West and the Islamists.
All Gulf monarchies have sizable Shia minorities and want to curb Shia influence in the Arab world (Iran, Iraq, Syria’s Alawites).
Qatar has teamed up with the West to extinguish Arab socialism (Ba’ath party), which is an existential threat to the Arab monarchies. It uses the Muslim Brotherhood to extent its influence in the Middle East and to cannibalize the economies of the countries where regime change plans succeeded. QNB (Qatar National Bank) for instance bought half of Libya's Bank of Commerce and Development, it bought the Egypt unit of Societe Generale SA, it also opened several new branches in both countries.
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Qatar’s Al Thani family uses Al Jazeera to further their agenda. If the media company can make a profit, thats fine, but financial success is not the main purpose of Al Jazeera. The broadcaster was first comparatively independent and only held on a long leash so that it could build up a reputation among a young and progressive audience both in the Middle East and in the West.
Right after the tumultuous events in Tunisia and Egypt the journalistic freedom was severely curtailed, because the involvement of Qatar in the Arab Spring had to be accompanied by an increasingly overt propaganda of Al Jazeera in covering these events.
Al Jazeera boss Wadah Khanfar was replaced by Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim Al Thani, a member of Qatar’s royal family. Several journalists and bureau chiefs resigned in disgust and the broadcaster’s erstwhile reputation as an independent, critical news media outlet rapidly dissipated when the newscasts belittled the popular uprising against the Khalifa regime in neighboring Bahrain, while at the same time giving saturated coverage to the Western-fomented insurgency in Syria.
The Western and Qatari/Saudi-backed covert campaign of subversion in Syria was distorted to appear as a noble struggle for democracy against the government of Bashar Al Assad. On more than one occasion, Al Jazeera was caught red-handed peddling disinformation about the Damascus government with unfounded allegations of human rights abuses, while covering up rampant atrocities committed by the  FSA (Free Syrian Army).
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Former Vice President Al Gore's Current TV was never popular with US viewers, but when Gore founded the channel in 2005, he managed through a combination of personal lobbying and arm-twisting to get the channel piped into millions of households via cable and satellite providers.
On January 2 it was announced that Al Gore has sold Current TV to Al Jazeera for 500 million US$ (which means some 100 million US$ for him personally) paving the way for Al Jazeera broadcasts into at least 40 million US homes.
Several media analysts said that Al Jazeera overpaid for Current TV and the research firm PrivCo wrote in a note to clients: “The deep-pocketed Qatari royal family handily outbid any other bidder's rational bid.”
Mr. Gore has a lot of other projects running and is quite busy, but he took a limited role in running Current, handpicking some liberal hosts for the channel, including Keith Olbermann and Jennifer Granholm in 2011 and Mr. Olbermann's replacement, Eliot Spitzer, in 2012.
None of the hosts could attract an audience large enough to satisfy distributors, particularly Time Warner Cable, which was warning for over a year that it might drop Current from its lineup. Predictably Time Warner pulled Current just hours after the announcement of the acquisition.
Is this a chance to restore Al Jazeera’s reputation and present it again as an alternative to traditional media companies?
The New York Times wrote:
With a handful of exceptions (including New York City and Washington), American cable and satellite distributors have mostly refused to carry Al Jazeera since its inception in 2006. While the television sets of White House officials and lawmakers were tuned to the channel during the Arab Spring in 2011, ordinary Americans who wanted to watch had to find a live stream on the Internet.
The objections to Al Jazeera are only to a certain part rooted in islamophobia. The established media companies don’t need another competitor, the market is saturated and the audience is shrinking. According to a Nielsen report the number of US households with access to TV (cable, satellite, or antenna)  was shrinking for two years and has dropped to 114.1 million. New ideas, new successful TV shows are rare, the economic decline goes hand in hand with a social and cultural decline.
Al Jazeera will have a chance again to build a reputation as an alternative media outlet. It will cater to a liberal audience by presenting dissident views about issues that are not connected to the Middle East and  do not imperil Qatari interests or criticize Western strategies.
It will tell fairytales about brave and honest Syrian rebels and Libyans breathing the air of freedom, about responsible Kurdish leaders in Iraq and wise, open-minded, progressive Emirs in the Gulf states.
US liberals will love it.
=============
On December 11 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article by Akhtham Suliman, Al-Jazeera’s longtime Germany correspondent, in which he details what led to his resignation from the company. It was translated by http://callmecynical.com/
A farewell to Al Jazeera: Forget what you have seen!
The news station Al Jazeera was committed to the truth. Now the truth is being twisted. It is about politics, not about journalism. For reporters this means: It’s time to go.
Aleppo, December 2012: An Al Jazeera correspondent had images relating to Syria that didn’t suit the station’s headquarters and which were not broadcast. This is no isolated incident.
“What do you regard as a terrorist attack and what as an act of legitimate resistance?” Nabil Khoury, the Lebanese-born spokesman for the US State Department in Iraq, asked me one autumn day in Baghdad. His gaze was reproachful. At the time, Al Jazeera stood accused of supporting the violence in Iraq under occupation, in the eyes of American politicians and the media. “The matter is simple, Mr. Khoury,” I replied. “Actions that target US military installations are resistance. Killing Iraqi civilians is terrorism.”
“Name an example!” he demanded. “Well yesterday, rockets were fired at the Al-Rashid Hotel, which houses the US joint chief of staffs. That is resistance.” --  “Aktham! I was at the hotel. The explosions were so close that I was thrown out of my bed. Some friends and colleagues of mine were injured.”
With all due sympathy for Mr Khoury, I could not change the definition. Resistance to occupation is an internationally recognized right, irrespective of sympathies. It was the time of -- at least relative -- clarity and self-confidence at Al Jazeera. One felt committed to the truth and principles of independent journalism, no matter what the cost. Criticism of the channel from the outside and especially in front of rolling cameras was seen as confirmation, as welcome promotional material that was spliced together and repeatedly rebroadcast on our station.
The declining station
Arab viewers will certainly recall the juxtaposition of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahhaaf in one of these episodes. Both delivered the message that Al-Jazeera was not telling the truth. Al Jazeera at the time acted according to the motto: If both parties to the conflict are saying so, then it is confirmation of the accuracy of our reporting. For extended periods, politicians, parties and governments were furious with Al Jazeera; spectators and staff, by contrast, were happy. The decline from 2004 to 2011 was sneaky, subtle and very slow, but with a catastrophic end.
“Ali! It’s me, your colleague from Berlin. Have you seen the alleged e-mail correspondence between you and Rola circulating on the Internet?” I asked Ali Hashem, the Al-Jazeera correspondent in Lebanon, on the phone earlier this year. I had just stumbled upon the alleged email communications between Al Jazeera staff published by the so-called “Syrian Electronic Army,” a Syrian pro-government hacker group. In one of the emails, the correspondent Ali Hashem had told Syrian TV presenter Rola Ibrahim, who was working at the network’s headquarters in Qatar, that he had seen and filmed armed Syrian revolutionaries on the border with Lebanon in 2011.
The channel didn’t broadcast the images because they showed an armed deployment, which did not fit the desired narrative of a peaceful uprising. “My bosses told me: forget what you have seen!” Hashem wrote to Rola, as published. She is said to have replied that she was faring no better. She had been “massively humiliated, just because I embarrassed Zuhair Salem, the spokesman for the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, with my questions during a news broadcast. They threatened to exclude me from interviews relating to Syria and to restrict me to presenting the late night news, under the pretext that I was jeopardizing the station’s balance.”
Mistakes become the routine
“Desirable” and less desirable images? Penalties for interviews that are “too critical”? At Al Jazeera? Here it must be said that in the online propaganda war between supporters and opponents of the Syrian regime, anything is possible, including lies and deception, as the months since the outbreak of the uprising in mid-March 2011 have shown. Regime supporters wanted to show that the rebellion is solely waged by “armed gangs.” Regime opponents wanted to show that the Syrian army is the only party committing acts of violence. 
That’s why I asked Ali Hashem whether the story was true. His answer was devastating: “Yes, it’s true. Those are really my emails with Rola. I do not know what to do now.”
Several days later, he knew the answer. Ali Hashem left.
Leaving is the only option that remains when these mistakes, which are altogether common in the fast-paced news industry, become the routine and are no longer recognized, treated or penalized as mistakes.
“There must be consequences. What do we do if the supervisor who told Ali that he should forget what he had seen, tells us one day: Forget that a hand has five fingers! Does a hand have more or fewer fingers based on the whims and needs of our superiors?” I remarked on Al Jazeera’s Talkback, an internal platform for employees. 
No reaction. Internal discussions were no longer fashionable at Al Jazeera.
This process did not remain an isolated case. On the contrary: it became a lesson. It quickly became clear to employees: this is about politics, not about journalism. More precisely: about Qatari foreign policy, which had subtly started to employ Al Jazeera as a tool to praise friends and attack enemies.
A hostage becomes a turncoat
It was not the first incident. When Al Jazeera’s Japan correspondent, Fadi Salameh, came to Doha at the end of 2011 to help out for a month at the channel’s headquarters, colleagues asked him how he -- as a Syrian -- assessed or felt about their Syria coverage. He responded evasively with something like: So-so. And why was that? He said: well, the issue of accuracy is no longer taken as seriously as it ought to be, and mentioned the story of his cousin, who had been depicted as a deserter from the Syrian military only a few days earlier in a video broadcast on the channel. He was said to have defected to the Free Syrian army in a short recording placed online by the rebels.
But that could well be true, replied a colleague. “Not at all.” Fadi replied. “That was a hostage video. The fear apparent on my cousin’s face, having just been captured by the rebels, was unmistakable.”
Later Fadi went on to say that Al Jazeera now presumes to know better than one’s own family members what is happening to someone in Syria. “Only when I said that my cousin had disappeared two days before his wedding, were some people willing to reconsider,” Fadi said. “Thank God no one got the idea that the groom was trying to escape a forced marriage.” He doesn’t muster a laugh. His cousin never returned and is presumed dead. When the story was leaked to a Lebanese newspaper, this was the response from a person in charge at Al Jazeera: “Oh, those damn yellow papers…”
“This is an office of the Muslim Brotherhood”
Al Jazeera has become the mother of invention: Those who have protested to the editorial board or turned their backs on the station are “supporters of the Syrian regime,” as  Yaser Al Zaatra, the Jordanian author affiliated with the Islamist camp, wrote this spring in a guest article published on -- it almost defies belief – Al Jazeera’s very own website.
The attacks against its employees waged on its own website are meant to obscure the fact that Syria is not the core issue in this internal conflict, but rather the station’s lack of professionalism. Cairo’s Al-Jazeera correspondent Samir Omer moved to Sky News earlier this year not because of Syria, but rather, as he told his colleagues: “Because I could not stand it anymore. This is no longer an Al-Jazeera office. This is an office of the Muslim Brotherhood” -- in other words, the very group that is supported by Qatar in all Arab countries, and is heralded as the winner of the” Arab Spring.”
Ministers are made into prophets
The Paris bureau chief Ziad Tarrouch was Tunisian, not Syrian. He left in silence last summer, shortly after the presidential elections in France. Unsurprisingly, after weeks of continuous suffering and following repeated subpoenas from the French authorities, because Al Jazeera’s regular guest, Sheikh Yusef Al Qaradawi, had appeared on the station and called for the killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. This had invited a lawsuit against the station in France for “incitement to murder.”
”Damn it, I’m a journalist!” Ziad had mumbled to himself during his last days at the station. When the Russia correspondent Mohammad Al Hasan also left later that summer, he replied to media queries from news agencies about his departure by saying that he was expected to deliver incendiary reporting on Russia. In response, the fanciful minds in Al Jazeera’s editorial department sought salvation with the claim that Al Hasan was leaving to open a kebab shop in Moscow.
It is difficult to gauge what the now retired former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahhaaf are up to these days. But Al Jazeera would have granted them cause for belated delight. Both will go down in history as prophets for having declared that “Al Jazeera does not tell the truth.” 
Now, almost ten years later, the statement has unfortunately come true.
And so it has finally come to this. Even for me, this means I must bid my farewell. Since October, Al-Jazeera’s Germany correspondent can no longer be found “on the air.”
============= 
This interview with a former news editors of Al-Jazeera appeared on a social networking site. The interviewed journalist remains anonymous for obvious reasons. He answered the following questions:
1. Why were you fired from Al Jazeera?
2. What kind of pressures were you exposed to?
3. What happened when the Syrian Electronic Army penetrated Al Jazeera’s website?
4. Were you linked to the Syrian Electronic Army before the penetration?
5. Are the rumours about how the fabrications and lies are carried out by Al Jazeera true?
6. What do you say to your colleagues in Al Jazeera?
7. What do you say to the Syrian people?
=============
1. Why were you fired from Al Jazeera?
Until this moment I do not know why I was fired but my political position and my constant refusal to engage in the policy of Al Jazeera regarding the coverage of the Syrian crisis likely contributed towards it. This is in addition to being critical of its narratives and distortions that were in opposition to the professional media standard it once followed which led to it being ranked amongst international channels.
The dismissal letter did not mention any specific reason! It only terminated my contract according to the employment terms and came in the wake of my explicit refusal to prepare Syrian news as well as several penetrations by the Syrian Electronic Army and others who loved the truth and their homeland.
The letter was directed as being immediately applicable despite the perfect record I maintained throughout nearly a decade, during which I did not get any penalty and was promoted many times confirming my professionalism. It seemed however that the institution of “the opinion and the other opinion” did not count amongst the ranks of those who took the initiative to terminate my contract after various penetrations which revealed Al Jazeera’s transformation into a tool of incitement and support for terrorist acts in my country.
2. What kind of pressures were you exposed to?
According to me, the first pressure was to cover the Syrian crisis itself, including Al Jazeera’s campaign of fraud from its onset. Upon my protest and criticism as well as my attempts to correct their policy, the reply was these were “individual errors” that should be overlooked. However, the succession of these “errors” showed that the network was not abandoning its method which were commanded by Qatari officials without a doubt.
Some of my colleagues and I were trying to identify and clarify the facts since we were from Syria and we know it more than most of the other workers who were from varied nationalities and levels of knowledge about the region. The discussions were more like fights except for some people whose conscience was still intact.
There was pressure from officials to push me to participate in the Syrian news coverage and preparation, but I repeatedly refused to do so alongside a number of colleagues to the resentment and annoyance of the management team.
One of the officials attempted to force me to write about Syria but I rejected his orders because they would edit and interfere with my work in a manner that the administration wanted. I believe this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I was asked to resign.
The peer pressure from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and they were many of them there, was almost daily. Various provocations and dealings were unworthy of the so-called “carriers of the banner of freedom” to the extent that it came to the threat of physical liquidation only due to my opinion that was in opposition of their extremism. Their talk was hatefully sectarian and they always spoke of the desire to change the government of Syria by substituting themselves for it.
I still remember their demands “announce your position, the boat is sinking” and their threats “thank your god if you get a pardon when we become the government”, “the majority is with the Muslim brotherhood and governance is within our grasp”.
They would prophesy to other colleagues since the first month of the near collapse of the Syrian government. Their language was disgusting. They said that civil unrest would begin in the coast, Hama and Homs, and that their “democratic” system entitled murder based on sect and identity.
When confronted about their distortion of facts, they would wave it away with abhorrent sectarianism. As an example, there was a video clip which has become infamous for its intensity and horror. It was a video of slaughtered people’s corpses being thrown off the Orontes River and was presented as being people killed by the army and “Shabiha” throwing them.
I have made it clear to the officials at the time that those bodies were dressed in military uniforms and those who threw them were cursing the army. How could they flip the truth like that? An official was upset with the Muslim Brothers who acknowledged fraud and answered, that it was “ok” as the soldiers deserved to be slaughtered due to their sect. I then replied to the administrator for him that he was lying yet again and that everybody knows that the Syrian Arab Army consists of all communities and all the men who are eighteen years would enlist so that almost every family in Syria had sons in the army.”
3. What happened when the Syrian Electronic Army penetrated Al Jazeera’s website?
Do you mean what happened or what didn’t happen? I knew it was simply a complete paralysis that confused management for hours, especially when management had paid enormous amounts of money generously to a security support company that suffered many short comings and flaws that all workers knew about. There were previous attempts to penetrate the system such that the department began to disable images in articles, to the degree that administrators stopped taking the company seriously. The next blow was fatal came when Syrian Electronic Army managed to post their messages on the site, disabling it from functioning at all to the confusion of officials and the support company.
I also knew that as a result of that the internet was blocked in spite the journalistic work tied to it and the restriction of the internet to a limited set of equipment. As well as that, all the passwords were changed via a personal request to the support company. Also, all of the staff were asked to change the password to their email addresses every month and that it should contain symbols, letters and numbers so that it is not easily penetrated and such penetration would fall under penalty of perjury, which has not happened in the history of the channel.
4. Were you linked to the Syrian Electronic Army before the penetration?
No, I had nothing to do with the Syrian Electronic Army before the penetration of Al Jazeera despite my admiration for the existence of people like this in my country. I tried to respect the company that I worked for as well as the professional code of honor that they ignored though I did not want to.
After I finished my contractual obligations with the channel, I started cooperation with the Syrian Electronic Army, the fruit of it which was the breakthrough of the Al Jazeera mobile broadcast system sending messages to the subscribers about a country attacking Syria similar to the “sincerity” of those broadcast by Al Jazeera about my own. There was also an attempt to hack Al Jazeera’s news ticker in the same manner.
5. Are the rumors about how the fabrications and lies are carried out by Al Jazeera true?
Sadly, yes. The channel started instigation and ‘revolutionizing’ through the broadcast of video footage from Yemen and Iraq and other countries to stir the emotions of Syrians and play with their affection. When we tried to point out this, we were either ignored or told that it was an individual mistake. However, it turned out that this is a trend and that there is a well-drawn plan. The fake footages kept coming, from the funny ones, the sad ones and the one who had living dead (that one showed a group of people praying for two persons presumably dead but are seen later on a motorbike!). Demonstrations around the famous clock in Homs turned out to be in Qatar; this latter fabrication was debunked by friends who love their country, could spot the clock, film it and send it to one of our channels.
When it comes to the eye witnesses who used to describe things as if they were inside Syria and close to the events, their phone numbers were from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Kingdom and other countries. The webmaster of the website had to correct news based on the comments and the mockery of the website’s visitors concerning the claims of the ‘eyewitnesses’, that were so contradictory a small child would not believe them. The channel’s administration had to filter what the eyewitnesses said before going live. Indoctrinating was performed as well which is not surprising since the person responsible of the Syrian file in the channel is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The special design for the ‘Syrian revolution’ page on the web contained a picture of a previous demonstration which had a banner that said ‘Long live the President’. The banner was tampered with by removing the writing, putting something else in and then used ‘innocently’ by the channel.
The slogan ‘the view and the other view’ disappeared and the motto of credibility and neutrality balanced to one side while explicitly ignoring the other side. Professionalism has become non-existent and this is what we made sure of previously. The fall of the media has become imminent.
Yes, Al-Jazeera has lied and is still lying. The proof is in the successive resignations, dismissals and… especially of important figures like the director of the Al-Jazeera bureau in Beirut Ghassan Ben Jeddo and the reporter Ali Hashem, who dared and spoke the truth about the presence of armed men from the very beginning, which made the administration go berserk and got revenge from whoever gave him the opportunity to appear on TV.
And amongst the important dismissals was the director of the news Hassan Shawky, known for his journalistic and professional aptitudes, worked for around 15 years at the channel and was asked to leave Qatar in 48 hours!
This approach reaches all the administrative bodies of the channel. It included the website where journalists Oday Johnny and Rou’aa Zaher were dismissed without any reason but their refusal to the blemishing of the channel and the extremism of the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter controlling the Syrian file at Al-Jazeera.
And last but not least of the resigned is the director of the Berlin bureau Aktham Sleiman, a Syrian, who was, at the beginning, with the opposition. He voiced his opinion from the beginning with the Syrian anchor woman Rola Ibrahim. However, and according to a trusted co-worker, he resigned after he saw the anxiety, lies and despicable sectarianism that Rola herself was a victim of since the very beginning, despite her protesting again it via messages on the ‘Topak’ system, used by Al-Jazeera employees, but to no avail.
An administrator with a conscience told me before I left: we haven’t only lost credibility, professionalism and impartiality but we also lost conscience and humanity
6. What do you say to your colleagues in Al Jazeera?
I say to my colleagues on Al Jazeera and in all media, fear God and the blood and suffering of the Syrian people, words can kill. I know that the vast majority of them are in search for a living and a better place and that many knew the truth and saw through the channel practices, but were helpless. Shake your consciences for your involvement in the bloodshed in my country. God will one day ask you what you have done.
7. What do you say to the Syrian people?
I say to my fellow Syrian nationals, the truth will prevail and falsehood will die soon, God willing. Yes we do deserve a better future, but no one should convince themselves that the West and its tools wanted a good future for Syria. The coming alternative does not carry any democracy but blood.

Conflicting views about Syria


The conflicting signals and widely differing assessments make it nearly impossible to get a realistic view about the situation in Syria. Western media outlets maintain, that the governments fall is only a matter of time and will occur in the next month.
The primitive staged and faked propaganda videos uploaded by FSA terrorists are not taken seriously by anyone anymore but the Western media propaganda tries to jump in and is often breathtakingly grotesque:
There are news which will never be broadcast on any Western media channel:
The true “alternative media” tries to make sense of the conflicting signals despite the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to compile the news pieces into a coherent picture:
Thierry Meyssan, a legend of alternative journalism, offers like so often before bold optimism. Sometimes one has to give oneself a treat and so his last assessment of the Syrian conflict is here republished in full length:
 The FSA continues to shine like a dead star
Thierry Meyssan  www.voltairenet.org
While the French press persists in announcing the "imminent fall" of Syria and the "flight of Bashar al-Assad," the reality on the ground has turned around completely. Even though chaos is plaguing most of the territory, the "liberated zones" have melted like snow in the sun. Deprived of its anchor points, the FSA has been left with no prospects in sight, while Washington and Moscow are poised to blow the whistle to end the game.
The countdown has begun. As soon as the new Obama administration will be confirmed by the Senate, it will present a peace plan for Syria to the Security Council. Legally, though President Obama succeeds himself, his former administration is only responsible for the managing of current affairs and cannot take any major initiative. Politically, Obama failed to react when, in the midst of the presidential race, some of his colleagues torpedoed the Geneva Agreement. But he proceeded with a general housecleaning right after the announcement of his reelection. As expected, General David Petraeus, the architect of the war on Syria, fell into the trap that had been set up for him and was forced to resign. As expected, the NATO and Missile Shield chiefs -- adverse to an agreement with Russia -- have been put under investigation for corruption and obliged to remain silent. Also as expected, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been taken out of the game. Only the method chosen to eliminate her came as a surprise: a serious health accident that plunged her into a coma.
Meanwhile back at the UN, things have moved on. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) signed a Memorandum with the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in September. In October, it monitored CSTO maneuvers in Kazakhstan simulating a deployment of "blue chapkas" in Syria. In December, the DPKO convened the military representatives of the permanent Security Council members to brief them on the manner in which the deployment could be carried out. Despite their opposition to this solution, the French and the British bowed to the wishes of the United States.
Nevertheless, France attempted to use the Joint Special Representative of the United Nations and the League of Arab States, Lakhdar Brahimi, to modify the Geneva peace plan in line with the objections it had raised on June 30th. Ultimately, Brahimi carefully refrained from taking a position, and instead contented himself with transmitting messages to and fro between the various parties to the conflict.
The truth is that on the ground the upper hand is held by the Syrian government. The military situation has been reversed. The French themselves have ceased to mention the "liberated zones" they yearned to govern through a United Nations mandate. These areas have been steadily shrinking, and those that are still holding out are in the hands of the disreputable Salafists. The FSA troops were instructed to abandon their positions and regroup around the capital for a final assault. The Contras were hoping to rally the Palestinian refugees, mainly Sunni Moslem, against the inter-denominational Syrian regime in the same manner that the Hariris in Lebanon tried to arouse the Sunni Palestinians of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp against the Shiite Hezbollah. As in Lebanon this objective failed because the Palestinians know very well who their friends are and who is really fighting for the liberation of their land. Concretely, in Israel’s recent 8-day war on Gaza, it was the Iranian and Syrian weapons that saved the day, while the Gulf monarchies did not move a finger.
Certain elements of Hamas, loyal to Khaled Meshaal and funded by Qatar, opened the doors of the Yarmouk camp to a few hundred fighters of the Front to Protect the Levant (Syrian-Lebanese branch of Al-Qaeda), also related to Qatar. They fought mainly against members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC). Via SMS, the Syrian government asked the 180 000 camp residents to evacuate the premises as soon as possible and offered them temporary accommodation in Damascus hotels, schools and gyms. Some preferred to go to Lebanon. The next day, the Syrian Arab army attacked the camp with heavy artillery and regained control. 14 Palestinian organizations then signed an agreement declaring the camp a "neutral zone". The FSA fighters withdrew in an orderly fashion and resumed their war against Syria in the surrounding countryside, while the civilians returned to their homes. They found a devastated camp where schools and hospitals had been systematically destroyed.
In strategic terms, the war is already over: the FSA has lost the popular support it had enjoyed at one point and has no chance of achieving victory. The Europeans still think they can replace the regime by bribing top officials and causing a coup, but they realize that it will be impossible to bring off with the FSA. Contras continue to roll in, but the flow of money and weapons is drying up. Much of the international support has stopped although the consequences on the battlefield cannot yet be seen, much like a star that can continue to shine long after its death.
The United States has clearly decided to turn the page and to sacrifice the FSA. It gives it senseless instructions that lead the Contras to their death. Thousands were killed last month. Meanwhile, in Washington, the National Intelligence Council cynically announced that "international jihadism" will soon disappear. Other allies of the United States should now ask themselves whether this new equation does not imply that they too will be sacrificed.

01.01.2013

Disorderly and discordant thoughts

An illustrated version of this text is on http://mato48.com/
At the end of the year in a winter night that is not cold and dark I let my thoughts roam freely. I let them wander across the hills and valleys, across the diminishing forests and the ever increasing deserts; I let them fly across the polluted waters, the overflowing landfills, the suburbs with nearly endless rows of single-family homes, the shanty towns with nearly endless rows of makeshift shacks, the inner cities with their spectacular skylines of towering skyscrapers, the war ravaged towns where whole districts are laying in ruins.
This winter night is not dark because it is around full moon and the moonlight paints everything in shades of mysterious silvery-blue (which can be alternatively interpreted as shades of ghostly greenish-yellow, if one is in a negative mood). This winter night is not cold because there is unusual warm weather here with daytime temperatures of up to 18 degrees Celsius. 
Some flies, beetles, mosquitos, and spiders have woken up, believing that this is spring after an unusual short winter. They will be bitter disappointed when it gets cold again.
The local climate change skeptics are silent, waiting for colder times and jealously eying the international climate change denier movement, which is jubilant.
A cold spell in Russia has killed 142 people until now, another 1,400 needed medical care. Temperatures in Siberia have been minus 40 degrees Celsius for several days, many heating pipes are frozen, water pipes have burst, thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes. Five districts in the Altai region were left without electricity and heat.
133 people froze to death in the Ukraine, most of them homeless persons who lost their lives on the streets at night as temperatures dropped to double-digit levels. The authorities set up 3,000 heated tents for those in need, but not all homeless people took shelter because of mistrust and resentments against the authorities. The Ukrainian cabinet considers now to dispatch patrol teams with officers, doctors, and social workers to forcibly send the homeless to the tents.
60 people, most of them homeless or alcoholics, died in Poland.
How is it possible that most of Western Europe is experiencing Spring-like weather while in Eastern Europe and Asia people are freezing to death? A changed winter jet stream, moving polar ice?
How is it possible, that there are so many homeless people in countries who successfully overcame communism and who are now reaping the fruits of capitalism?
Why did life expectancy of Russian men fall from 64 years in Soviet times to 58 years? Why are 40,000 Russians dying every year from acute alcohol poisoning and maybe twice as many from the effects of alcohol abuse?
Some things don’t add up and there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the official (by the Ministry of Truth approved) narrative that could make one wonder.
There were many pictures about the Russian cold spell, pictures of ice covered trains and cars, of people wrapped in heavy winter coats and scarfs, of burst pipes and fallen electricity pylons. One picture showed a homeless man resting on the ventilation outlet of a building, surrounded by his five dogs.
Pictures of homeless people with pets are common and easy to find and I used already some to illustrate blog posts. While I looked for more pictures I came across various stories about homeless women and men sharing their live with equally homeless fellow animals like dogs and cats -- it seems that the lost and forsaken souls of the world can more easily cross the mental barriers of speciecism to become friends and a family.
Can we ever pay back the solace and comfort that our animal friends provide in times of need and distress? Can we ever adequately honor their love and unquestioning trust? Can we ever make good the horrible brutality and the pain that they suffer from the hands of our fellow humans? Can we ever redeem ourself?
No.
A respected and well liked citizen from the little village where I live died a few days before Christmas. He once was the veterinarian of the municipality. Veterinarians are important people in this rural area, where the main economic activity is farming, and they have the same status as the major, the priest, the physician, and the teacher.
He was 98 years old, one cannot say that this was an untimely dead, but there was nevertheless one tragic aspect in his passing: His beloved wife had died three month ago and it was very clear that he simply didn’t want to spend this Christmas without her. He didn’t die of old age, he died of grief.
When I read the news about the hundreds of homeless people who froze to death in the cold spell I asked myself about the animals who will have died in the cold. How many could have perished? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Billions?
I’m always dismayed and deeply saddened when I walk in the forest in spring and find dead hedgehogs, rolled into a ball. No, I never have seen a dead bird, their remains are eaten by the other animals. Once I found the cadaver of a dear, and it stank terribly. A week later there were only the bare bones remaining with no traces of flesh left. In the forest everything is recycled, everything is used to keep life going in one way or the other.
There are many monogamous bird species: Crows, falcons, loons, sparrows, swans, woodpeckers, just to name a few. These creatures look for a mate and when they have found each other they stay together for their whole life. What happens when they are old and one of them dies? Will the surviving bird stay alone, look for another mate, follow her or his companion into death?
Or will they leave this world together? Will they huddle together in the coldest night of the year and sit quietly in their hideout in the underbrush? They have spent many years together, they have raised so many little babies. Only a few of the baby birds survived, just enough to keep the population stable.
When the old bird couple is sitting in the underbrush and it gets colder and colder as the night progresses, will they realize that they cannot make it till the morning, or that one of them cannot make it till the morning? Will they look at each other and softly stroke each others feathers with their peak one last time?
I don’t know why, but when I wrote this sentences and tears filled my eyes I suddenly remembered the horrifying story of a young couple who in 2007 died in the wildfire catastrophe in Greece. The two became trapped in a flaming ravine during a hike in the forest and their charred bodies were found embracing each other.
Two young people clinging to each other, comforting each other in the last terrible moments of their life.
It is a time-honored tradition that at the end of the year professional commenters, dissident journalists, famous activists, and everyone else are publishing wakeup calls and are warning about the imminent breakdown of the ecosphere, of society, of the economy. Disasters of unimaginable proportions are looming, apocalyptic scenarios could become our reality soon, the end of the world as we know it is near, and we are quickly approaching the point of no return.
We are approaching the point of no return since many years and it seems that in contradiction to the steadily increasing frequency of wakeup calls the speed of approximation must have significantly slowed down because otherwise we would have passed the point of no return long ago.
Or have we reached the tipping point without realizing it? Could it be that we have already embarked on the final journey, the journey of no return, thereby eliminating the need to change our lifestyle and learn alternative ways and methods? Reorganizing our life and conducting it in a more modest and sustainable way would make it necessary to abandon familiar habits and routines, which is always inconvenient and sometimes outright painful.
Reorganizing our life would also make it necessary to develop new routines and practices, which could only be done by thorough thinking, research, analysis, and planning. Thinking is hard work and very exhausting, because the brain uses more energy than any other organ (up to 20 percent of the body's total consumption).
It is understandable that many people don’t want to work that hard and rather avoid thinking (especially critical thinking), it is understandable that people rather consume TV, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. Turning on TV or floating in the trivialities of social networking chatter easily avoids the mental exhaustion that critical thinking inevitably will cause.
Is mental laziness the reason that people don’t worry about the ominous point of no return?
Does this ominous point of no return really exist?
Fellow blogger Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez quoted Paul Chefurka in a comment:
“Until recently there was at least a chance that perhaps a combination of behavior change and the reduced availability of cheap fossil fuels might combine to pull us back from the brink, or at least make a much-changed and simpler life possible for a much smaller population of humans and other creatures. That chance is gone.”
And she asked:
“So if this is true (and it may be!) my question is, what should we who are awake to the coming catastrophe be doing with our time? I have been in dialogue with Paul Chefurka on that question this week, and would love to know your thoughts about this question as well.”
My answer will come soon but before that back to the end-of-the-year (end of the word) wakeup calls:
Many seasoned commenters, activists, dissidents have realized that the routine cassandra call alone doesn’t cut it anymore and the target audience (liberals, progressives, lefties, environmentalists, peace-activists) reacts either with yawning, barely concealed disbelief, or biting sarcasm.
In order to avoid such disappointing reactions this year many wakeup calls are spiced with the demand for immediate action. New mass movements, new parties are needed, new leaders have to be elected, the rotten system has to be replaced, the empire has to fall, the good people of the world have to join together in a global uprising, there has to be a revolution.
Nothing less than a worldwide revolution will save us.
SNAP [...] Here it is!
In which parallel universe will the revolution begin?
Where are the revolutionary masses hiding?
They are for sure not hiding in the industrialized countries of the West.
The broad public in Western nations is not concerned about global warming, about pollution, habitat destruction, or mass extinction. The broad public is not concerned about surveillance, big data, and the erosion of civil liberties. The broad public is even less concerned about weapons production and proliferation, assassinations via drones, Navy seal squads, or secret agents; the broad public is not at all concerned about the destruction of Middle East nations by Western funded Islamic terrorists, the broad public doesn’t care about the plight of far away brown people.
The broad public is deeply concerned about fuel prices, new electronic gadgets, cell phone reception, the latest TV shows, new video game releases, viral videos and other recent internet memes.
The in the wakeup calls embedded fantasies about a global mass movement, about a worldwide revolutionary uprising, about sweeping away the old structures are not very convincing, they are not even inspiring. The reaction to this journalistic pieces is evidently (and understandably) not enthusiastic, the audience has heard such fantasies recited too often before. 
The comment sections of the alternative media outlets where the wakeup calls are published reflect the public sentiment. Dozens of people try to demonstrate that they stand above the fray by pouring irony and acid humor onto the authors and onto fellow commenters. Tenor: “We are screwed,” “we are doomed,” “enjoy the remaining years.”
Standing above the fray, bravely facing the inescapable, unpreventable apocalypse, showing serenity, composure, placidity, stoicism -- how admirable!
This is an easy way out for persons who don’t want to change their lifestyle (which is a prerequisite for changing anything else) and who need to rationalize their cognitive dissonance. This indeed comes in handy and some people will be quite relieved to have an excuse for continuing placid and unflustered with their usual routines. They are hypocrites, are short sighted, are not concerned about the plight of the following generations.
No, I don’t accuse Paul Chefurka and Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez to be this kind of persons. First: I don’t know how they live and I don’t know what their carbon footprint is. Second: I get the impression from their writing, that they are serious and ethical persons, eager to make the best possible and most beneficial decisions.
I think they both fall into the trap of uncritical and unquestioning believing scientific predictions. I belief into the scientific method, which is still the best and most useful tool at our disposal to make sense of the world, but scientific predictions and speculations have a bad record. One could even say they have a very bad record. Ask the particle physicists at CERN about supersymmetry.
I always considered chemical pollution and radioactive contamination as the bigger threat to life. I considered and still consider habitat destruction and mass extinction as a bigger threat than climate change. The influence of clouds, one of the crucial variables, is missing in most climate models. If a volcano eruption like Krakatoa happens, the resulting dust clouds will neutralize the greenhouse effect for many years.
What about a nuclear winter caused by a regional nuclear war? (India - Pakistan, Israel - Iran for example).
I always considered wars and weapons (especially nuclear weapons) as the biggest threat to mankind.
Things look grim, thats true, but why should that diminish our resolve and determination? Human history is a succession of ups and downs and we walk, run, jump, crawl from one tipping point to the next. All this talk about reaching the point of no return makes no sense, is futile, is a folly!
Will the doctors kill the patient because she/he has a chronic or even terminal sickness? Will they stop treatment? Or will they try to improve the condition with all available medical procedures, will they try to keep the patient alive, to ease her/his pain, to gain a few more days, weeks, month, years of life and a few more moments of joy and happiness?
Things look grim, thats true, but even if there is not much cause for optimism the hope still remains -- the flame is still burning. I will fight as long as I live and I appeal to everybody to do the same. There is no excuse for giving up, predictions can be false, a hopeless cause can suddenly turn into a promising adventure, a lost battle can turn into a resounding victory.
Many people think like me. We are a minority but we are nevertheless many and we are a growing movement, we are part of an unreported, under the radar “paradigm shift.”
And we will never give up!
Will our efforts be enough to prevent the apocalypse, will a minority of kind hearted idealists repel the savages, the monstrous criminals who are about to destroy nature?
Will we be more intelligent than they are?
Just now it doesn’t look good and the struggle is one sided, but many people are thinking out of the box, many people develop and carefully implement unconventional strategies. Sabotage, obstruction, subversion, disruption, disobedience, monkey wrenching, infiltrating, undermining. 
Don’t forget, the monsters are not invincible!
The next financial crash is inevitable, several European countries are on the brink, the US FED is creating money from thin air (quantitative easing). The US financial system will collapse when the BRICS abandon the dollar as reserve currency.
Austerity, people will go nuts and they are well armed. The security forces are even better armed and the plutocrats will show their iron fists. Some Western societies will break apart and everybody will be on his/her own. Individualism, everybody for him/herself is of course the unique “American way” since a long time, but it could get even more brutal and lethal than it is right now.
What if the sane people have long ago started to built up their small networks and have changed their life to self-sufficiency? What if the foundations for local small scale economies are already in place? What if determined activists in secluded places have without much fanfare created the model of community we all claim to struggle for? What if the structures of a participatory democracy have been developed to be implemented at any time?
Permaculture, transition town movement, co-ops, slow food, counter currencies, is that nothing?
The present system will not go on for much longer and we are approaching the breaking point fast. Many things will change and if we are well prepared we could significantly influence the flying path of the phoenix after it has finally crawled out from the ashes.
But this is only one part of the struggle, because the monsters have their powerful weapons and they will use them to enslave and exploit the population. They will use the weapons to destroy the alternative networks and the small communities who’s shining example alone will be an existential threat to their rule.
When I read the end-of-the-year 2012 wakeup calls and the included fantasies about a global mass movement and a worldwide revolutionary uprising, I felt pity for the writers and sadness at the same time. How detached can one be from reality without going astray and falling into a deep dark pit?
How can one ignore the millions of guns, the armored vehicles, tanks, jet fighters, cruise missiles, drones? How can one ignore the violent psychopaths who wreak havoc across the planet? They are a minority but they are able to hold the majority of sane and decent people hostage by the power of their weapons.
The psychopaths get the weapons from the super-psychopaths, from the monsters that are ruling the world right now. What can one do against the psychopath? They would need mental care, they would need drug therapy, but they get weapons instead.
Is there any defense, restraint, deterrent, antidote, counteraction to be used against the psychopaths and their weapons?
What can be done to stop violence and wars?
I often dreamed about revenge, about gunning down my enemies with a powerful weapon, about cleaning the world from the bad guys with fire and sword in an apocalyptic showdown. I often felt powerless and was dreaming of having a gun to defend myself and my beloved fellow animals against the evil monsters that are killing everything what is getting in their way.
I still feel powerless but I don’t dream about revenge anymore, because a few years ago I came to the conclusion that violence and weapons will not solve the problem of violence and weapons. I would easily get the license for owning a gun as I have no criminal record and live in a remote place, but after buying a gun I would have to train on a shooting range because without proper training the gun in my hand would be just a useless piece of metal.
I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to spend hours with target practice, I don’t want to endanger my hearing with the gun blasts, I don’t want to add another gun to the already existing enormous arsenal.
I rather ruminate, brood, ponder, dream about how to avoid violent situations, I rather run away and hide, I rather think about strategic moves to weaken and incapacitate the callous monsters, I rather rack my brain looking for ways to dismantle or disable the monsters weapons.
There are hundred of strip manuals for Glock17/19, AK-47, M-16. Maybe someone can produce a quick guide how to take apart or permanently disable the most popular guns. It should be an easy and fast process. Superglue? Breaking the trigger off?
Syrian experts were able to booby-trap ammunition supplies of the FSA terrorists (rifle and machine-gun cartridges, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars) by exchanging the propellant with high explosives. The doctored projectiles were placed on the black market and resulted in stalling and permanent damage of the guns or in injuries of FSA terrorists, when the weapons exploded in their hands.
Would it help to implant GPS-devices in military vehicles, to break the encryptions of communications equipment, jam the signals, infect the military computers with malware? Would it help to spice the psychopaths food supply with whatever works? Would it help to organize early warning systems in which sane citizens use cell phones to report gatherings of psychopaths and track their movements?
Would it help to stop military vehicles with caltrops, with lubricants that make the road slippery, with barriers of various kinds? What about microbes (like the diesel bugs) who disable combustion engines, what about nano-particles and gases who disable sensors, switches, valves, transmissions, what about electromagnetic beams of various wavelength who make the electronic components of weapons systems unreliable?
What about monkey wrenching, hacking, sabotage and obstruction at every level, infiltration of security and military agencies, infiltration of media organizations, subliminal messages, reverse engineered psy-ops?
Could we be more clever than the super-psychopaths and their minions?
I’m quite sure that a lot of DARPA money is spent for research in various related fields, will some of the researchers leak their findings to the public?
Could it be that intelligence trumps barbarity and hate?
We Shall Overcome. This is still a hymn of my life together with Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, John Lennons Imagine, Buffy Sainte-Maries Universal Soldier, Bill Withers Lean On Me, Billie Holidays God Bless The Child. There are many other wonderful songs that elate and comfort me, make me smile or cry. I can’t name them here, maybe in another blog post.
How can I be sure that the my view of the world is right? I’m not sure that I’m right, I’m not sure about anything. I just try to make sense of the incoming information, interpolating and extrapolating, sorting the pieces of the puzzle, connecting the dots, looking behind the curtain. I’m searching my internal memory (in my brain) and the external memory (books, the collected data on my computer harddrives, the data on the internet). I’m sorting, cataloguing, classifying, weighing, comparing, correlating, equating. I use common sense, logic, intuition.
If you dispute my findings, tell me your opinion, I’m glad about any feedback, about any correction. I will look at it, follow every hint, turn the words and try to understand you. I will think long and hard, I’m not afraid of being exhausted after thoroughly thinking through a problem. Our brain is the most powerful tool that we have.
Will this tool be more powerful than the weapons of the psychopaths?
We will see.
I have a psychopath in my cat family.
Ma Xi, a five year old neutered cat, who was a feral cat for most of his life before he joined the family, took offense when my sister in law dumbed a cat mother with three tiny little kittens at my place, which meant, that the cat family suddenly expanded to nine cats.
I told about this incident in earlier blog posts and so I don’t go into details here. I only want to state, that I never intended to host that much cats and still consider one or two cats as absolutely sufficient to maintain the mental hygiene in a household.
Fortunately a couple from Germany took two of the kittens. They seem to be friendly and sensible people and they have a big estate where animals can roam freely. I hope the two cats will have a good life there.
The disappearance of the two kittens didn’t appease Ma Xi, who was so upset about the family expansion that he got a psychosis and started to growl and hiss at the other cats, even at the ones with whom he was good friends before. He is not violent and doesn’t attack his fellow cats, he only growls and hisses and runs away when he sees them.
He doesn’t sleep in the house anymore and comes only to eat hastily and he also doesn’t participate in the daily walks in the forest. He still likes to walk and waits now in the wood across the road for me to come and make a separate walk with him alone.
So I make every day two walks in the forest, one with Ma Xi and one with the other cats. I still consider him as my friend and I hate the idea that he could end as a straying feral cat again. Feral cats don’t get old, they soon die from infections and parasites.
Well, I’m just on my way to the big clearing on the hill top in the middle of the forest. Ma Xi walks beside me, sometimes he sniffs around in the underwood along the way and I wait for him. The big clearing is covered with all kinds of shrubs and bushes and also many one or two meter high young trees who grew naturally from the seeds of the older trees who are surrounding the clearing.
We have a special place there with a big tree trunk where I can sit comfortably and look into the sun. There is no sun at the moment because it is 10 PM, but it is full moon and the moon is shining bright onto us two.
We have been here many times before and Ma Xi expects that we make a long rest now. He runs to the tree trunk and looks at me, waiting that I sit down so he can jump onto my lap. Of course I sit down, I will not disappoint my dear friend.
Ma Xi takes his place and he turns and turns and turns till he is comfortable with his position. I wrap my arms around him and he is laying on my lap like in a little nest, safe and warm. I have learned in the many years that I spent with the cat family how to hold a cat in my arms without getting tired and stiff, so we are able to sit here for a long time.
Ma Xi relaxes and starts purring.
I always talk to Ma Xi and tell him little stories, he likes to listen to my voice. This is what I tell him today:
My little friend, I’m glad that I can help you. You know that you can visit me at any time, you are always welcome.
Life would be so much easier if humans and cats and all other species would always act reasonable and sane. Life would be much easier if there would be no mental disorders, no psychoses, traumas, phobias, depressions, addictions, obsessions.
Is it too much dopamine, too less glutamate/glutamine? Unfortunately there is no cat psychiatrist here and I don’t know if there are psychiatric drugs for cats available. I will have to ask the veterinarian, maybe he has an idea.
Your life would be so much easier if you could overcome your aversion against the other cats. You could sit in a warm place in a separate room. The other cats would not bother you, they know that you are troubled and they would leave you alone.
They even wouldn’t mind if you are growling at them, we all have our bad days and our mood swings.
Time heals many wounds but your mental scars are deep. It will take a long time, it will take passion and endurance.
Love heals many wounds. You will get my affection and love in the same way as I get yours.
Love is the biggest healer.
It will take time and there will be days when I’m overwhelmed by the multitude of tasks and when there is a backlog of work to do. There will be days when you will wait in vain in the forest across the road. You will be angry.
But you will have forgiven me when we again come together for another walk. There will be another day or another night where we sit here in our secret place and I will talk to you and you will purr and everything will be easy. I don’t mind to spend one hour with you. I will never abandon you, I will never forsake you, you can depend on me.
Donny Hathaway produced a magnificent rendition of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”. He was also a troubled soul, jumping to his death from the balcony of a New York hotel, just 33 years old. 
Ma Xi, at least you are not suicidal! And you ain’t heavy, you are a little cat weighing not more than five kilo. You are my brother of course.
My brother Ma Xi.
Love is the biggest healer, and yet a good outcome is not guaranteed. But we will try and we will be persistent.
And our time together is precious, the hours that we spend together will be in our mind till the end of our life.
You are brother, you are my friend.
Love is the biggest healer.