Behind Qatar's crisis: Israel's plan to annex Gaza and expel all its inhabitants

I have been as puzzled as anyone about what on Earth was going on behind the sudden blockade and blackmail by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and a couple of lesser players (UAE and Bahrain) against Qatar. But today suddenly the puzzle begins to take shape with the addition of two new pieces:

1. Egypt's Parliament voted to cede two strategic islands to Saudi Arabia. The islands of Tiran and Sanafir are located at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, making that strait Egyptian territorial waters. This cession was done against Egyptian national interest and historical pride and without Saudi Arabia having ever staked any claim on those islands. Actually the cession is not about Egypt nor Saudi Arabia but about Israel, because by giving away those strategic islands, the Zionist Colony gains free access to the Red Sea via what will suddenly become international (and not anymore Egyptian) waters. 

Tiran and Sanafir islands (source: The Real News)

2. Prince Khalid Bin Farhan al-Saud, who lives outside the rigors of the Saudi courtly plots in Germany, has revealed that the conditions imposed by the USA to the current Crown Prince (heir) and effective strongman of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Bin Salman, in order to allow his raise to the throne before his (demented) father's death are that Saudi Arabia accepts the genocide in Gaza and finances the resettlement of Palestinians in Sinai, and also the internationalization of the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba.

From the Middle East Monitor:

The alleged conditions include “absolute obedience to the US and Israel and carrying out whatever they ask him to do.” Three other conditions, claimed Khalid, are stated in return for helping Bin Salman take the throne before the death of his father: “Working to settle all Gaza residents in north Sinai as an alternative homeland and Saudi Arabia along with the UAE will afford the needed funds; getting rid of Hamas and whoever supports it; and getting Sanafir Island from Egypt.”

Bin Farhan said that the last condition would make the Gulf of Aqaba international waters instead of Egyptian territorial waters, which would facilitate Israeli shipping to and from the port of Eilat. It would also help Israel to carry out a project planned to operate in parallel to the Suez Canal. A retainer of around $500 million is also involved, he claimed.

Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and Gulf of Aqaba (credit: Graphic Lab (ru))

For the last many years Gaza has been ruled by Hamas, originally a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, against whose elected government arose the current military strongman and President of Egypt. Both moderate islamist organizations are the main pretext for the Saudi-Egyptian aggression against Qatar. 

It is worth reminding that Turkey, whose autocratic President Erdogan seems to have been falling apart with the USA and even flirting with Russia and Iran, has rushed to protect Qatar from any possible Saudi invasion and can be perceived as a historical mild ally of the Muslim Brotherhood and even Hamas (remember the Mavi Marmara). However Turkey remains part of NATO and provides a key air base (Inçirlik, near the Syrian border) to the USA and its European vassals ("allies").

It would seem that when Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed his happiness about Trump's election, he knew well what was going on behind the obvious political and geostrategical clumsiness of the White House's buffoon (so-called "President"). Only someone of the low stock as Trump would allow for such a blatant a genocide to take place before our noses.

The plan is quite apparently already ongoing, the cession of the islands is a clear sign, so we should expect that in few weeks, months at most, the plan to invade Gaza and expel all its inhabitants, more than one million people, most of them refugees from what is now Israel, will begin.

Let's not be mere spectators, let us make everything possible to prevent this new genocide.

Macron and May agree to destroy Internet freedom of speech

They agreed to force Internet companies to bar nonviolent "extremism". The meeting at Paris got almost no news coverage in the West and I must rely on RT's Dan Glazebrook op-ed (the only other medium to report on it was Al Jazeera).

Specifically, what was announced was that both countries would be introducing heavy fines for internet companies that failed to remove what they, very loosely, defined as “extremist content.” (...)

It was former PM David Cameron who originally came up with the idea that “nonviolent extremism” should be criminalized alongside violent extremism. Intriguingly, as an example of what he meant, he included the idea that the “West is bad,” as well as elsewhere arguing that the promotion of “wild conspiracy theories” would also qualify.

This is exactly what Macron and May, both managers for the Bankster Mafia, to attempt to destroy freedom of speech in NATOland. The idea is not so much to clamp down on terrorist propaganda outlets (many of which are actually backed and actively protected by the British and French states) but to impede any form of dissident expression within the Western Empire or at least its European province. 

Their problem is as follows:

For example, an RT interview I did about British collusion with terrorism shortly before the election got over one and half million views on Facebook – higher than the daily readership of the Daily Mail. Jonathan Pie’s fantastic piece tearing apart the Tory’s ‘strong and stable’ nonsense, got 11 million views. That is two and half million more than the combined circulation of the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Guardian, Sun, Daily Star, Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard, and the Mirror and Metro – the country’s ten leading newspapers.  And hilariously, when I had just watched one of Theresa May’s speeches on YouTube during the campaign, immediately afterwards, YouTube automatically played Liar Liar, the anti-May anthem that reached number four in the UK pop charts last week. And I suspect YouTube auto played that video after anyone watched anything about Theresa May due to the algorithms that they employ.

All this is pretty much like book (and witch/heretic) burning in the early Modern Ages, when the oligarchs felt threatened by the new invention: print! Just like then, but multiplied times a thousand at least, the new media and its power-democratization capability feels threatening to those who try to retain their dinosaur power heavily reliant on mass-media, which, the more they get manipulated, the less they are watched/read (because there are alternatives, reasonably good, critical and diverse ones). 

Probably not even Goebbels (on whom the likes of May and Macron base their ideas) would be able to survive something like that,  Berlusconi didn't, his Serbian precursor Milosevic didn't either, the declared admirer of Hitler, Turkish President Erdogan, is struggling all the time against the likes of YouTube and Twitter: he bans them once and again but it's never enough, more so with people in the more totalitarian countries getting quickly used to skip censorship via TOR. Not even a giant like China can control it, because it's like the first law of chaos: you just cannot have absolute power, nor absolute control, the more repressive you get, the less you can actually control in the mid run.

It does not surprise me the least with dinosaurs like May or Trump, they are just too old to know, they belong to a long gone era, but Macron is young and supposedly quite smart, how can he also fall for that megalomaniac fallacy? Well, he's probably too "viejuno" or "viejoven", as they say in Spain, i.e. "old-like" or "old-young" (just look at his haircut and his clothes, he seems taken from an old Hitchcock movie), and not at all as smart as the oligarchs sell him: one thing is smart-lackey (which does not really need true intelligence only operational smarts) and another thing is smart-brilliant (which is automatically critical and scientific, even if sometimes not too practical). That's the difference between Thatcher (brilliant even if truly evil) and Reagan (a mere sockpuppet with performance skills), Macron seems to be rather in the latter category (and so is May of course, a quite gray woman).

Glaezbrook's conclusions:

So that’s what this new crackdown on the internet is really about; it’s about regaining control of that narrative. It’s about turning the CEOs of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google into the Rupert Murdochs of the 21st century – the political allies and mouthpieces of the British state and the capitalist class, and doing this by forging a new relationship that explicitly punishes them if they refuse to play ball.

(...)

The Open Rights Group has warned that “to push on with these extreme proposals for internet clampdowns would appear to be a distraction from the current political situation and from effective measures against terror."

“The government already has extensive surveillance powers. Conservative proposals for automated censorship of the internet would see decisions about what British citizens can see online being placed in the hands of computer algorithms, with judgments ultimately made by private companies rather than courts. Home Office plans to force companies to weaken the security of their communications products could put all of us at a greater risk of crime.”

Those who are worried about extremism should be calling for an end to the British intelligence services’ collaboration and facilitation of terrorism and the extradition of those who have carried out or facilitated attacks abroad, as well as an international investigation and prosecutions of all those involved.

Theresa May’s new proposals do nothing to end the impunity of her own government in the grooming and facilitation of terrorism. Rather, they serve to extend this impunity. They must be resisted.

Hopefully they will fail (again) but let us be most vigilant and ready to fight against this kind of pseudo-democratic fascism. It is extremely dangerous and we must indeed resist it: we need more freedom of speech, not less.