Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Middle East. Show all posts

Saturday, November 2, 2024

Terrorism 2024

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24-10-16 How Egypt’s Army Smoked ISIS - T&P > .24-8-22 Hamas’ Exploitation of Schools - IDF > .24-4-8 Ruscia, America, & West: Security Concerns = Islamic Radicalism - TBN > .
24-4-8 [Hamiganda]: How Terrorists in Gaza Manipulate the World - IDF > .
24-2-25 Iran's Bold Claim on Antarctica & Egypt's Gaza Barrier | TBN > .  23-2-27 Alternate Techniques to Fight Pirates in Mid-Ocean - Fluctus > .
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23-10-10 Hamas: Gazan terrorist militants behind atrocities in Israel | ABC > .
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24-4-25 Red Sea | US Strategy Against the Houthis - Shipping > .
Resisting Terrorists - αλλο >> .

Most modern terrorist attacks occur in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. 

This is your brain on terrorism - Vox > .


Versus Terrorism ..

Most terrorism experts would probably agree that terrorism is an ideologically non-specific tactic, used to achieve political change, and in play since prehistoric times. It is non-specific (neutral), although not necessarily acceptable, in that it has been used by militants embracing most political ideologies – except for pacifism – and by authoritarian as well as liberal states such as Great Britain, France and the USA.

Although no universally accepted definition exists, there is agreement about its main elements. Terrorism is the threat or use of violence, it is politically or ideologically motivated and the violence is used to communicate a message of political change and intimidation to individuals or groups beyond its immediate victims. In short, terrorism is best understood as violence used as a form of political communication manipulation.
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Although modern terrorism followed the emergence of modern mass politics and mass media, terrorist violence has probably been used as a political tactic since time immemorial. The Jewish Zealots and the Islamic Assassins were ancient terrorists. They used violence to communicate messages of freedom from opposition and resistance to submission.
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Terrorism’s modern meaning and use to label an intentional political tactic came with the French Revolution. During The Terror, Robespierre described it as a virtuous form of violence, to be used by the new revolutionary democratic state against its domestic enemies.

Following this, the labels of terrorism and terrorists were used by 19th century newspapers to describe intimidation and violence by states against their subjects, such as “the terrorism practiced by the police” in Russia and the “oppressive system of military terrorism” in Poland.

Modern terrorism, which implies the systematic use of violence against the state, rather than by it, emerged in Europe in the 1870s. The person generally recognised as the first terrorist was the 26-year-old social revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who shot the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878 to protest the Russian state’s repression of domestic political protest.
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The new violent political practice was soon institutionalised with the emergence of organised terrorist groups. First came Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will), a group of Russian social revolutionaries and self-proclaimed terrorists, who in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II with a dynamite bomb.
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Britain's first bomb disposal expert: Colonel Vivian Majendie and the original ‘war on terror’.

On the last day of February 1884, the then home secretary Sir William Harcourt rose in the UK parliament to answer a question about a series of bomb attacks on two of London’s major railway stations. He read out details of an initial investigation of two bombs, one which had detonated at Victoria Station and another which had been discovered, unexploded, at Charing Cross.

The bombs, which had been deposited in the stations’ left luggage offices, were of a similar design, and resembled the remains of bombs that had detonated, Harcourt said, in Glasgow, Liverpool and elsewhere in London. The unexploded device, discovered by a vigilant ticket clerk at Charing Cross, and the remains of the bomb that had detonated at Victoria were rushed to the Woolwich Arsenal.
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It is almost impossible to pinpoint the very first act of terrorism carried out within British territory. The most famous incident in early modern history is probably the gunpowder plot of 1605 when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the House of Lords. And although he is the best remembered (on November 5), Fawkes did not act alone. He was part of a larger network of 13 conspirators who sought to destroy parliament and trigger a popular uprising.

In the second half of the 19th century, European anarchism introduced the idea of “propaganda by deed” as a tactic of anti-government resistance. This consisted of the assassination of government officials and bomb attacks in public places such as cafes and theatres.

Although anarchist attacks were actually more common in continental Europe, England was an important hub for anarchist thought. The less restrictive laws of the United Kingdom made it a haven for radicals fleeing political repression in their own countries.

In the same period, the heavy death toll of the Great Famine in Ireland from 1846 to 1852 prompted calls for Irish home rule and resulted in the formation of networks of radical revolutionaries, the Fenians.

Although the largest Fenian campaigns were waged in Canada and in Ireland itself, attacks within England included the bombing of Clerkenwell Prison in London in 1867, in which 12 people were killed and more than 100 injured. The result was a severe backlash by British authorities and the public, which undermined the political reforms that would have made future attacks less likely.
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Recent acts of spectacular violence, such as the mail bombs sent by a tRUMP-supporter to American anti-tRUMP critics, or the mass killings by Canadian “incel” misogynist Alek Minassian, demonstrate a widespread reluctance among media outlets, politicians and authorities to label some acts of ideologically motivated violence as “terrorism”. Such hesitations might give the faulty impression that “terrorism” is reserved purely for anti-Western or Islamist political violence. That is a wrong and dangerous conception.

The first examples of people being labelled “terrorists” were almost exclusively reserved for acts of non-Western terrorism. When terrorist tactics were used against governments and civilians in Western Europe or the USA – by Fenians and anarchists or anti-colonial separatists in British India, for example – "terrorism" was generally not mentioned. Instead, such violence was more often described in terms of "outrage" or "assassination".

This is despite the fact that these groups used the same terrorist tactics and technologies as the Russian terrorists. The new terminology was apparently reserved for the Russian revolutionary cause. It was only after WW1 that these other forms of terrorism in and against Western governments started to more generally be labelled as "terrorism".



Sunday, January 1, 2023

Xina ⟺ Middle East 2023

23-4-27 Xina's Middle East Strategy - gtbt > .
23-12-5 Most Dangerous [XIR] Moment: America’s Role in the Pacific | Hoover > . 
>> Supply Chains >>>
XIR - NoXious - Axis of Evil >> > H-I War >

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Oil Woes

22-5-17 Why The Middle East Won't Survive Without Oil - OBF > . skip ad > .
24-1-26 Saudi Arabia's Catastrophic "Iran" Problem - Hindsight > .
23-12-26 Oil Wars and the Venezuela-Guyana Crisis - Spaniel > .
23-11-5 [XIR] Corrupt, Sanctioned Iran's Military & Power Projection - Perun > .
23-8-11 Saudi Arabia's Challenging Geography - Real > .
23-7-25 Why US Troops Fought Wagner Mercenaries in Syria - T&P > .
23-7-22 Saudi Arabia’s Catastrophic “Everything” Problem - Real > .
23-3-13 Iran, Xina, Saudi Arabia - Influence  Wangling - Update > .
23-2-20 Record Deficit Heralds the Collapse of the Russian Economy - gtbt > .
23-1-2 Dutch Disease | Resource Wealth, Currency Inflation, Economy | EcExEss > .
22-12-14 Xi’s Saudi trip & Sino-Arab relations; X-¥ oil vs petrodollar - Lei > .22-11-25 Why Saudi Arabia is Gladly Helping Russia - T&P > .

Monday, December 20, 2021

80-9-22 Iran-Iraq War 80-8-20

1980-9-22 Start of the Iran-Iraq 8-Year War - HiPo > .
24-3-6 Could the Mossad Have Stopped Iran? | Unpacked > .
24-1-26 Saudi Arabia's Catastrophic "Iran" Problem - Hindsight > .
23-11-5 [XIR] Corrupt, Sanctioned Iran's Military, Proxies, Power Projection - Perun > .

Having become President of Iraq in 1979, Saddam Hussein was keen to consolidate the power of his minority Sunni Muslim Ba’ath government. At almost exactly the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran in a revolution that overthrew the Shah. Khomeini installed a Shi’ite Muslim theocracy in Iraq’s neighbour and called for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. This was met with enormous hostility in Iraq, especially after Shi’ite militants assassinated 20 Ba’ath Party officials in April 1980.

Iraq also wanted to push Iran back from the Shatt Al-Arab waterway in order to secure its own oil exports. If the army was successful, Iraq could even increase its own oil reserves by capturing some of Iran’s oil fields.

Iran was poorly prepared for war as its army had recently been purged of officers and soldiers loyal to the former Shah. Furthermore, the country’s economy was in tatters as a result of western countries boycotting trade due to the ongoing hostage crisis at the American Embassy. At first Saddam consequently dubbed the Iran-Iraq War the ‘Whirlwind War’ in which he expected Iran to be defeated relatively swiftly.

Despite Saddam’s expectations of a quick and easy victory, however, Iran mobilised its revolutionary population and soon the front lines were filled with enthusiastic volunteers who pushed the Iraqis back to their own border. The war persisted for nearly eight long and bloody years, leading to the deaths of an estimated half a million soldiers and the same number of civilians.

The Iran–Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began on 22 September 1980 with a full-scale invasion of Iran by neighbouring Iraq. The war lasted for almost eight years, and ended in a stalemate on 20 August 1988, when Iran accepted Resolution 598 of the United Nations Security Council. Iraq's primary rationale for the invasion was to cripple Iran and prevent Ruhollah Khomeini from exporting the 1979 Iranian Revolution movement to Shia-majority Iraq and internally exploit religious tensions that would threaten the Sunni-dominated Ba'athist leadership. Iraq also wished to replace Iran as the dominant state in the Persian Gulf, which, prior to the Iranian Revolution, was not seen as an achievable objective by the Iraqi leadership due to pre-revolutionary Iran's colossal economic and military power as well as its close alliances with the United States, a superpower, and Israel, a major player in the Middle East. The war followed a long-running history of bilateral border disputes between the two states, as a result of which Iraq planned to retake the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab ceded in 1975. Iraq supported Khuzestan Arab separatists seeking an Arab state known as "Arabistan" who had started an insurgency in 1979 with support from Iraq. Saddam Hussein in November 1980 publicly stated that Iraq did not intend to annex Khuzestan Province; rather, it is believed that Iraq sought to establish a suzerainty over the territory.

While the Iraqi leadership had hoped to take advantage of Iran's post-revolutionary chaos and expected a decisive victory in the face of a severely weakened Iran, the Iraqi military only made progress for three months, and by December 1980, the Iraqi invasion of Iran had stalled. As fierce fighting broke out between the two sides, the Iranian military began to gain momentum against the Iraqis and regained virtually all of its lost territory by June 1982. After pushing Iraqi forces back to the pre-war border lines, Iran invaded Iraq and went on the offensive for the next five years until the latter took back the initiative in mid-1988 and launched a series of major counter-offensives that ultimately led to the conclusion of the war in a stalemate. There were a number of proxy forces operating for both countries—most notably the People's Mujahedin of Iran, which had sided with Iraq, and the Iraqi Kurdish militias of the KDP and PUK, which had sided with Iran. The United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, France, and most Arab countries provided an abundance of financial, political and logistical support for Iraq. While Iran was comparatively isolated to a large degree, it received various forms of support, with its most notable sources of aid being Syria, Libya, China, North Korea, Israel and Pakistan.

The eight years of war-exhaustion, economic devastation, decreased morale, military stalemate, inaction by the international community towards the use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraqi forces on Iranian civilians as well as increasing U.S.–Iran military tensions all culminated in Iran's acceptance of a ceasefire brokered by the United Nations.

The conflict has been compared to WW1 in terms of the tactics used, including large-scale trench warfare with barbed wire stretched across fortified defensive lines, manned machine gun posts, bayonet charges, Iranian human wave attacks, extensive use of chemical weapons by Iraq, and deliberate attacks on civilian targets. A notable feature of the war was the state-sanctioned glorification of martyrdom to Iranian children, which had been developed in the years before the revolution. The discourses on martyrdom formulated in the Iranian Shia Islamic context led to the tactics of "human wave attacks" and thus had a lasting impact on the dynamics of the war.

In total, around 500,000 people were killed during the war (with Iran bearing the larger share of the casualties), excluding the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the concurrent Anfal campaign targeting Kurds in Iraq. The end of the war resulted in neither reparations nor border changes.

1953-8-19 Iranian Coup

1953-8-19 Coup that Ruined US-Iranian Relations - Weird > .
24-8-29 Detailed Analysis: Why Arabs Lose Wars - Magical > .
24-3-6 Could the Mossad Have Stopped Iran? | Unpacked > .
24-1-26 Saudi Arabia's Catastrophic "Iran" Problem - Hindsight > .
23-11-5 [XIR] Corrupt, Sanctioned Iran's Military, Proxies, Power Projection - Perun > .
23-2-9 Russia, Iran, India Want Persian Corridor 2.0 - gtbt > . skip scam > .
22-9-27 Most Unbelievable Things the CIA Has Done - Side > .
22-6-22 Oman (ME's Switzerland) - Guarding Gulf, Strait of Hormuz - Explore > .
22-3-26 Why Russia’s War Drove Up US Gas Prices - CNBC > .

For decades, knowledge of America's role in the 1953 Iran coup, which led to the ejection of the country's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and the installation of a despotic shah, was fragmented and vague. However, when CIA documents were declassified in 2000 about what it called Operation Ajax, it became clear American and British agents played a central role in the Iran coup d'état.

The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d'état was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953. It was orchestrated by the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project or "Operation Ajax") and the United Kingdom (under the name "Operation Boot"). The clergy also played a considerable role.

Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP), in order to verify that AIOC was paying the contracted royalties to Iran, and to limit the company's control over Iranian oil reserves. Upon the AIOC's refusal to co-operate with the Iranian government, the parliament (Majlis) voted to nationalize Iran's oil industry and to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country. After this vote, Britain instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil to pressure Iran economically. Initially, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the British-built Abadan oil refinery, then the world's largest, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee (in power until 1951) opted instead to tighten the economic boycott while using Iranian agents to undermine Mosaddegh's government. Judging Mosaddegh to be unreliable and fearing a Communist takeover in Iran, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's government, though the preceding Truman administration had opposed a coup, fearing the precedent that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement would set. British intelligence officials' conclusions and the UK government's solicitations were instrumental in initiating and planning the coup, despite the fact that the U.S. government in 1952 had been considering unilateral action (without UK support) to assist the Mosaddegh government.

Following the coup in 1953, a government under General Fazlollah Zahedi was formed which allowed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran (Persian for an Iranian king), to rule more firmly as monarch. He relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power. According to the CIA's declassified documents and records, some of the most feared mobsters in Tehran were hired by the CIA to stage pro-Shah riots on 19 August. Other men paid by the CIA were brought into Tehran in buses and trucks, and took over the streets of the city. Between 200 and 300 people were killed because of the conflict. Mosaddegh was arrested, tried and convicted of treason by the Shah's military court. On 21 December 1953, he was sentenced to three years in jail, then placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Other Mosaddegh supporters were imprisoned, and several received the death penalty. After the coup, the Shah continued his rule as monarch for the next 26 years until he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

In August 2013 the U.S. government formally acknowledged the U.S. role in the coup by releasing a bulk of previously classified government documents that show it was in charge of both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda. The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" and "as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government".

Friday, September 20, 2019

Israel's High-Tech Rise

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23-11-7 Scientific Progress & War - [Counterproductive for Ruscia] (subs) - Katz > .First Arab - Israeli War 1948 - Cold War Doc - K&G > .Yom Kippur War 1973 - Sinai Front Doc - K&G > .
Israel's Military Technology | Iron Dome | Gaza Conflict - Moco > .

1848 Middle East 2020 ..
47-11-29 UN partition plan - Palestine ..
Israel's High-Tech Rise ..

Monday, August 20, 2018

Iron Dome - Israel's Missile Defence System

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How Israel’s Iron Dome Works - WSJ > .
24-4-5 Israel's Lavender System, AI Targeting, Battlefield Informatics - McBeth > .
24-2-8 Israel: High-Tech Military; Intelligence Failure - Caspian > .
24-2-1 Why [despite weakist antisemitism] US Supports and Funds Israel | WSJ > .
23-9-5 Israel's Everlasting [Internal & External] War - gtbt > .
23-6-13 NATO IAMD | NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defence > .
23-6-13 Drones and the Dystopian Future of War - Journeyman > .
22-10-1 America's Missile Defense Problem - Poly > .
22-4-9 Drones, Missiles, Mercenaries in Future of Militaries - CNBC > .
Israel's Military Technology | Iron Dome | Gaza Conflict - Moco > .
21-5-19 Israel-Hamas Conflict: 3 Reasons Old Dynamics Prevail | WSJ > .
2021 Why Israel and Palestine are fighting [again] - CaRe > .
2020 BuyBull prophecy, Evangelicals, Idiot-in-Cheat's Middle East fakery > .
How Israel became a high-tech military power - CaRe > .

Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and mortars. During the recent conflict, it has been used to destroy more than 200 rockets bound for Israeli cities.

The Iron Dome is a ground-to-air, short-range, air defence system that neutralises rockets and missiles. The concept was born after the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War when Israel faced thousands of rockets fired by Hezbollah. Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system took years to develop and was tested in combat for the first time in April 2011. The system is designed to intercept short-range missiles and rockets coming in from Gaza.

21-5-17 More than 2,000 rockets have been fired towards Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in five days in the recent clashes. But about 90% of the rockets have been intercepted by its flagship Iron Dome missile defense system. The Iron Dome was specially designed to protect against a range of incoming short-range threats.

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...