September 20, 2021

 

Patrick J. Buchanan

… Former President George W. Bush’s theme [in his recent Sept. 11 speech] was national unity — and how it has been lost over these past 20 years … Bush did not mention his own contribution to our national divide: his invasion of a country, Iraq, that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us — to disarm it of weapons it did not even have. Which contributed more to the loss of America's national unity? … Over 20 years, we have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands — Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, soldiers and civilians alike — and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes and their countries. Are Americans really as oblivious, as Bush suggests, as to why it was that our enemies “hate us with such zeal”?

Martin Jacques - Global Times

In historical retrospect, America's reaction to the 9/11 attacks on New York's Twin Towers was breathtakingly disproportionate … The Iraq war is estimated to have cost between $2 trillion and $3 trillion, and the number killed to have been in excess of 400,000. The cost of the Afghan war is estimated at $2.3 trillion … The Brown University Costs of War project estimates that America's War on Terror has cost over $8 trillion, and resulted in 900,000 deaths. For what? Both wars ended in disastrous and abject failure … Apart from killing Saddam Hussein, the US achieved none of its objectives in Iraq. America's ignominy resulted from a total misreading of the world at the turn of the century … America is a prisoner of a past that is in rapid retreat.

Tom Clifford - CounterPunch

Chinese hardliners just had their stance justified by the erratic, verging on unhinged, behavior in the United States and by its military … Now, a book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa claims US General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called General Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army not once but twice. … Milley sought to assure Li that the United States was stable and not going to attack. However, he said, if there were to be an attack, he would alert his counterpart ahead of time. Schizophrenic? ... Is it a veiled threat? At the very least you would have to put your forces on alert. Imagine this in reverse. If a Chinese general had called his US counterpart. The US would say that China is out of control … Talk shows would be asking viewers if the US should have launched a pre-emptive strike.

Peter Bolton – Counter Punch

… I am still am not persuaded by the major pillars of the 9/11 Truth movement. But I am willing to offer some nuance as well as an appeal to those who still are … The final theory [that the Bush administration planned the 9/11 attacks] is, for me not just the least plausible, but palpably fatuous in all of its dimensions. For starters, why on earth would you need to set off a controlled explosion if two commercial airliners had already flown into the towers at high speeds? … Jet fuel indeed does not burn hot enough to melt steel. But it didn’t have to. Burning jet fuel creates enough heat to weaken steel to point that it loses around 50% of its strength and can therefore bend. This inflicted more than enough damage to the buildings to make them collapse to the ground of their own accord.

Eric Margolis

... As a native New Yorker, I was shaken to the core by 9/11 – but hardly surprised, as I had predicted a major attack on the US nine days earlier … The suicide team that attacked New York and Washington made clear its aim was: a., to punish the US for backing Israel’s repression of Palestinians; and b., what they called US “occupation” of Saudi Arabia. Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor. As the CIA’s former bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer rightly observed, the Muslim world was furious at the US for what it was doing in their region, not because of America’s values, liberties or religion … I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up.

The Times of Israel

A new book has claimed that former US president Donald Trump once said in a White House meeting that his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner was more loyal to Israel than to his own country, evoking a common antisemitic trope, according to a Thursday report. Business Insider published what it said was an excerpt from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, “Peril.” “‘You know,’ Trump joked in another meeting, mocking his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was raised in a modern Orthodox Jewish family and was working on Middle East peace, ‘Jared’s more loyal to Israel than the United States’,” the book reportedly says … Trump has made similar remarks in the past that evoked the canard that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US or have dual loyalty.

DW / AFP

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier praised immigrants on Friday for helping build up Germany’s economy and society … Now a 2.7 million-strong Turkish German population, the largest ethnic minority community in the country. “The people who came back then, the so-called `guest workers’: They, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, they are now Germany,” Steinmeier said in a speech … “A Germany without them is simply unimaginable.” … The German president said the term “German" has changed due to immigration from Turkey. “Being German today can mean having grandparents from Cologne or Königsberg as well as from Istanbul and Diyarbakir," he said, referencing German and Turkish cities. He said that German identity now includes “all those who want to live peacefully in this land of law and freedom.”

Asia Times

China’s mouthpiece Global Times has labeled Hungarian-born American billionaire George Soros a “global economic terrorist” in a tit for tat exchange playing out in dueling op-eds that underscore the rising temperature in US-China relations. The article, published on September 4 and without citing any evidence, accused the hedge fund manager and philanthropist of providing finance to Hong Kong’s jailed newspaper owner Jimmy Lai to support the city’s anti-Beijing protests in 2019 … Soros, 91, who reportedly has a net worth of $86 billion and bankrolls the philanthropic Open Society Foundations that provides financial support to non-governmental organizations worldwide, has a long-time love-hate relationship with China.

NPR

China’s government banned effeminate men on TV and told broadcasters Thursday to promote "revolutionary culture," broadening a campaign to tighten control over business and society and enforce official morality. President Xi Jinping has called for a "national rejuvenation," with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China and healthier society … Broadcasters must "resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics," the TV regulator said, using an insulting slang term for effeminate men — niang pao, or literally, "girlie guns."

Charles Lutton – Institute For Historical Review

Most of the actual fighting during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front between the Soviet Union and Germany and her allies. The last stages of the war in the East are vividly described by the German journalist and historian, Jürgen Thorwald. In Defeat in the East, Thorwald traces the military debacle of the Third Reich and shows what happened to the civilian population wherever the Red Army conquered.

Jonathan Cook

The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly newspaper [published in Britain] that was saved from liquidation last year by a consortium led by a former senior adviser to Theresa May, has been exposed as having a quite astonishing record of journalistic failings. Over the past three years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the misnamed and feeble “press regulator” created by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has found the paper to have breached its code of practice on at least 28 occasions. The weekly has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases over the same period.