Making Love to Satan

Numbers written on the bodies and on white cards told regime bureaucrats the identities of the deceased, when they died and which branch of Syrian authorities had held them, according to a Syrian military-police photographer now outside of Syria. Faces have been obscured at photo source's request. — Numbers written on the bodies and on white cards told regime bureaucrats the identities of the deceased, when they died and which branch of Syrian authorities had held them, according to a Syrian military-police photographer now outside of Syria. Faces have been obscured at photo source’s request.

10,000 Bodies: Inside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Crackdown – WSJ.

Caesar’s revelations referred in the WSJ article might seem old by now to those following developments in Syria at it has been reported months ago, but now, it is the U.S. official investigators who have examined the evidence supplied by Caesar and who are corroborating his story. Indeed, an Industrial-scale campaign of mass slaughter is being conducted by the Assad regime against his opponent, a campaign that was unleashed soon after the beginning of the Syrian Revolution, even in its year-long nonviolent phase.

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Down in Ukraine

The debris of a jet engine from Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is seen near the settlement of Grabovo in the Donetsk. (IMAGE: REUTERS/MAXIM ZMEYEV)

It was not only an airliner that was shut down in Ukraine, but the last vestige of the post-Cold War global order, and the popular myth regarding the containability of “local” conflicts. In today’s hyper-connected world, conflict anywhere is a conflict everywhere, for spillovers are unavoidable and containability a myth.

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The Ummah Illusion

President Obama Hosts Iftar Dinner At White House To Celebrate Ramadan.

Obama approval high with Muslims – Jonathan Topaz – POLITICO.com.

Neither Arabs nor Muslims have ever constituted an Ummah, nor will they. In itself, that’s not a bad thing. It’s our inability to accept this reality and our insistence on believing in the illusion of Ummah-hood that is the essence of the problem. We desperately need new thinking. Meanwhile, Arab and Muslim majority states and communities will always different priorities that reflect the local socioeconomic realities with which they have to contend, and the political ideologies they espouse. We are not One. We never were. We will never be. Perish the illusion.

Ah, the sheer lunacy of it all!

Mideast-Israel-Palest_Horo-31-965x543 — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a press conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, Friday, July 11, 2014. (photo credit: AP/Gali Tibbon, Pool)

Netanyahu finally speaks his mind | The Times of Israel.

If Netanyahu rejects a binational state and a fully sovereign Palestinian state, then, what does he endorse: apartheid “lite”? The expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan? What other conclusions can one draw here? I mean a demilitarized entity encircled by walls and fences and crisscrossed by security checkpoints won’t even amount to a Lesotho-type state. Be that as it may, it’s clear that the Two-State Solution has by now taken its last breaths.

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