Wild boar smashes up restaurant in South Korea

This is the moment terrified diners ran for their lives when a wild pig smashed its way into a service station restaurant in South Korea.

Dozens of customers fled in terror as a rampaging wild boar broke into the Highway Rest Stop cafe, smashing windows and slamming into walls.

The angry animal attacked the glass door of the cafe at full speed before wreaking havoc inside as punters scrambled to avoid a pummelling - with some even standing on tables to get out of the way.

[embedded content]

Another customer picked up a chair in case he had to fend off the fearsome beast.

And the whole thing was captured in terrifying video footage from surveillance cameras in the restaurant.

The incident was broadcast on Korean news channel CCTV, which showed the hole left by the peeved porker in a low window before it laid the place to waste and escaped through a sliding door.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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Former French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen injured in house fire



Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of the right-wing National Front party, was injured when a fire broke at his home in Rueil-Malmaison, French media reported.

The condition of the 86-year-old veteran politician wasn’t serious, BFM TV reported, citing sources familiar close to the matter.

Le Pen is said to have a bruise on his face. He was taken by firefighters to get medical assistance.

The fire was relatively strong, but its cause wasn’t immediately reported.

URGENT: Frmr French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen injured in house fire http://bit.ly/1ylCQBB http://bit.ly/1yIR9VL

— RT (@RT_com) January 26, 2015

Initial reports on social media say either Le Pen was injured in an arson attack or targeted by a gunman. The rumors proved to be false.

INFO @LCI Incendie en cours chez @lepenjm à Rueil malmaison. Il serait blessé au visage

— BénédicteLeChatelier (@BenLeChatelier) January 26, 2015

Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran for the French presidency five times, is a controversial figure in French politics due to his hardline conservative agenda and sometimes scandalous statements. The latest controversy he sparked was in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, when Le Pen claimed the attack was staged by the secret services. He resigned his position as National Front leader in 2011, citing a “demonization campaign” against him. His daughter Marine Le Pen currently heads the party.

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Symbolic? Germany to use former Nazi barracks to house refugees

© Reuters / Ina Fassbender

Part of a memorial to the victims of forced labour of the National Rail (Reichsbahn) workshop is seen next to a former Nazi SS guards barracks of Buchenwald concentration camp in Schwerte, near the western German town of Dortmund January 13, 2015.

Officials in the German town of Schwerte have made plans to place some 20 refugees in barracks which were once part of the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp. The 'pragmatic solution' to provide shelter has sparked criticism, German media reported.

Hundreds of non-Germans were forced to live in the town of Schwerte in the country's west 70 years ago, when it was an outpost to one of the largest Nazi concentrations camps, Buchenwald.

Now, 21 refugees who have come to Germany seeking new homes have been offered to live in what is left of the former camp: the barracks once occupied by SS guards.

Local authorities say the plan is a pragmatic solution to help accommodate at least some of the large influx of refugees, who have come to the country after fleeing war-torn states such as Syria and Iraq. The first move-in is expected this week, Die Welt reported.

© AFP Photo / Bernd Thissen

The warden's barracks of a former Nazi concentration sub-camp are pictured on January 13, 2015 in Schwerte, western Germany.

With the country struggling to accommodate hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, some local governments are placing refugees not only in hotels and converted school buildings, but also in makeshift villages of freight containers.

Schwerte authorities say they're offering something more comfortable. The barracks in question have never housed any prisoners, and have been widely used by the city over the years. They are among the few surviving buildings left at the former concentration camp, as most of them were demolished in 1950.

After WWII, the barracks accommodated disabled veterans, refugees, and people whose houses were destroyed during the war. They were then used as a warehouse, an artists' studio, and even a kindergarten, city spokesman Carsten Morgenthal told Spiegel.

© Reuters / Ina Fassbender

The camp gate bearing the inscription 'To Each His Own' is pictured at the former Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp near the eastern German city of Weimar in Thuringia.

However, the decision has sparked criticism among the country's activist groups, with many calling the plan "" and "."

"Even if these SS guard barracks were often used in the past for other purposes, no automatic mechanism to do so in the future should be derived from it," Christine Glauning, director of the Documentation Center for Nazi Forced Labor, told Spiegel.

She called the property "," adding that it is hard to imagine that people who have fled their homes for exactly such reasons would be accommodated there.

The SS officers who once lived in the barracks guarded the camp's forced laborers, who were mainly from Eastern Europe. Some 700 prisoners were temporarily housed at the site, out of almost 240,000 incarcerated within the walls of Buchenwald in total.

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"It's all Greece's fault! Let them pay!"

© EPA

Alexis Tsipras, the anti-austerity leader of Syriza party greets supporters after the initial election results.

With The Greek election in full motion, and first results perhaps 12 hours away, It would seem useful, no matter how the Greeks vote, to lay to rest a few misconceptions, and to expose a few 'conceptions' that have - largely - remained buried to date.

The first misconception is that the Greeks borrowed like crazy and therefore deserve to be thrown into a pit of suffering and misery. It is simply nonsense, a mere political narrative. Besides, most of what was borrowed went to the utterly corrupt 'oligarch system', not to the people in the street. Something the EU was certainly aware of when it accepted Greece as a member. But corrupt regimes can be of great use.

A few days back, in Bunch Of Criminals!, I made the point that the EU, and its members, have no right to do to a fellow member country what they did to Greece - and want to continue doing.

SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras said this week that he will not negotiate with the Troika, but directly with EU officials. And there is a very solid reason for that. In today's , Helena Smith interviews Greek sociologist Constantine Tsoukalas, who understands what has been happening to his country, and - rightfully - frames it in terms of Naomi Klein's .

What has happened to Greece is what Klein describes was done to South America and - later - Eastern Europe. Disaster capitalism. Bringing entire countries to their knees by enforcing predatory economic policies, and then using the ensuing chaos and smouldering ruins to take full control over their political, economic and social systems. Helena Smith:

Is Greece About To Call Time On Five Punishing Years Of Austerity?

For Professor Constantine Tsoukalas, Greece's pre-eminent sociologist, there is no question that, come Monday, Europe will have reached a watershed. I first met Tsoukalas in January 2009, in his lofty, book-lined apartment in Kolonaki. For several weeks Athens had been shaken by riots triggered by the police shooting of a teenage boy. The violence was tumultuous and prolonged.

Looking back, it is clear that this was the start of the crisis - a cry for help by a dislocated youth robbed of hope as a result of surging unemployment and enraged by a system that, corrupt and inefficient, favoured the few. Tsoukalas knew that this was "the beginning of something" although he could not tell what. But with great prescience he spoke of the degeneration of politics - both inside and outside Greece - the rise of moral indignation, and the emptiness of a globalised market "that was supposed to put an end to ideology but, in crisis, has instead created this moment of great ideological tension".

Six years later, following the longest recession on record, he is in little doubt that anger has fuelled the rise of Syriza. On the back of rage over austerity, the leftists have seen their popularity soar from 5% before the crisis to as high as 35% - more than the combined total of New Democracy and left-leaning Pasok, the two parties that have alternated in power since the restoration of democracy in 1974.

The European policy towards Greece, to a large extent, has been determined by the will to experiment with the feasibility of shock therapies," says Tsoukalas. "It worked, but the reaction is going to be a leftwing government. Europe cannot survive as it is. The rise of fascism ... should be sufficient [evidence] to everyone that it has to change."

If Greece's rebellion was to occur in a coherent way, Tsoukalas, who is being fielded by Syriza as an honorary candidate, believes it would be only a matter of time before it was replicated in other parts of the continent. "These elections are important because they are a reminder to the people of Europe that there is another way out," he insists. "That neoliberal orthodoxy is not an immovable problem."

[..] at 28 Veikou Street, Syriza runs the Solidarity Club - initially set up as a food bank in March 2013 when stories began to surface of malnourished children fainting in schools. In recent months, its staff have focused on providing medicines. "That's the big problem now because so many are uninsured, without any access to the health system," says volunteer Panaghiota Mourtidou. "People don't have the money to go to doctors. If they have a toothache, they get terrified, because how the hell are they going to pay for a visit to the dentist?"

With its Che Guevara posters, Italian Euro-communist flags, chaos of boxes and tins, and makeshift furniture, there is something of a field-camp feeling about Veikou Street. But its army of volunteers are tireless. This, they say, is a battle to be won, a huge victory for the left that Greece will set in motion. "We are conscious that we have managed to unite in a way that the left elsewhere has failed to do," says Angeliki Kassola, a theatre director. "I've met lots of once-strident New Democracy supporters who say they will be voting for us because they are attracted to Syriza's vision of democracy, justice, dignity - all the things that have been taken from us in the crisis."

There will be plenty who don't agree with an analysis like this. Just as there will be plenty who insist that the Greeks brought it all upon themselves. They should take a look at what my friend Steve Keen, presently "Professor of Economics and Head of the School of Economics, Politics and History at Kingston University London", wrote this week in Magazine. That should cure a few lost souls of their foolish fantasies. And then they should take their new found insights and ask themselves: wait a minute, what is going on here? Why is Greece being squeezed the way it is? Deep down, you already know, don't you? Steve:

It's All The Greeks' Fault

I fully expect most commentators to take a line like that in my title. After all, it's common knowledge that the Greeks lied about their levels of public debt to appear to qualify for the EU's entry criteria, which include that aggregate public debt should be below 60% of GDP. Though there's an argument that Goldman Sachs, many of whose ex-staff are now leading Central Bankers, helped the Greeks make this alleged lie, the responsibility for it will be shafted home to the Greeks, and that in turn will be used to argue that the Greeks deserve to suffer.

The story, in other words, will be that the Greeks were architects of their own dilemma, and that therefore they should pay for it, rather than making the rest of the world suffer through a write-down of their debts. Emotion will rule the debate rather than logic. So to cast a logical eye over this forthcoming debate, I'm going to consider who is really to blame for the Greek dilemma by considering another country entirely: Spain. Today, Greece and Spain are in very similar situations, with unemployment rates of well over 25% - higher than the worst the USA recorded during the Great Depression (see Figure 1). But unlike Greece, Spain before the crisis was doing everything right, according to the EU.

More importantly still, Spain's government debt when the EU imposed its austerity regime (mid-2010) was still well below America's, even though both had risen substantially since the crisis. Spain's government debt ratio was 65% of GDP then, versus 78% for the USA. The whole purpose of the EU's austerity program was to reduce government debt levels. Reducing government debt was the political topic in America as well from 2010 on, but the various attempts to impose austerity came to naught: instead, after shooting up because of deliberate policy at the time of the crisis America's budget deficit merely responded to the state of the economy.

Politically paralyzed Washington talked austerity, but never actually imposed it. So who was more successful: the deliberate, policy-driven EU attempt to reduce government debt, or the "muddle through" USA? Figure 2 shows that muddle through was a hands-down winner: the USA's government debt to GDP ratio has stabilized at 90% of GDP, while Spain's has sailed past 100%. The USA's macroeconomic performance has also been far better than Spain's under the EU's policy of austerity. Comparing the USA's unemployment rate to Spain's has to account for the fact that it was higher before the crisis - at 8.5%, Spain's unemployment was 1.75 times the USA's when the crisis began. It is now about 4 times the USA's.

So simply on the data, the prima facie case is that all of Spain's problems - and by inference, most of Greece's - are due to austerity, rather than Spain's (or Greece's) own failings. On the data alone, the EU should "Cry Uncle", concede Greece's point, stop imposing austerity, and talk debt-writeoffs - especially since the Greeks can argue that at least part of its excessive public debt ratio is due to the failure of the EU's austerity policies to reduce it.

But I know that data isn't enough to sway the public opinion - let alone the bureaucrats in Brussels. So we need to know the why: why did austerity in Europe fail to reduce the government debt ratio, while muddle-through has stabilized it in the USA? Here I return to my hobby-horse: the key factor that I consider and mainstream economists ignore - the level and rate of change of private debt. The first clue this gives us is that the EU's pre-crisis poster-boy, Spain, had the greatest growth in private debt of the three - far exceeding the USA's. Its peak debt level was also much higher - 225% of GDP in mid-2010 versus 170% of GDP for the USA in 2009 (see Figure 4).

The second clue comes from the change in debt data: the factor that Greece and Spain have in common is that the private sector is reducing its debt level drastically - in Spain's case by over 20% per year. The USA, on the other hand, ended its private sector deleveraging way back in 2012. Today, Americans are increasing their private debt levels at a rate of about 5% of GDP per year - well below the peak levels prior to the crisis, but roughly in line with the rate of growth of nominal GDP.

The third clue? I'll leave that for my next post - this one is long enough already. But the conclusion is that Greece's crisis is the EU's fault, and the EU should "pay" via the debt write-offs that Syriza wants - and then some.

Austerity is something that doesn't work, but it does fit in great with the will to experiment with the feasibility of shock therapies. Austerity, in the way it's been applied to Greece, is a tool to gain greater power over people and their social structures. It is economic warfare, plain and simple. That is to say, the EU has become a 'union' where the people in weaker member states can be strangled, and 'economically conquered', with impunity.

If you live in a EU country, and you don't like that these things are carried out in your name, this is the time to make your discontent known. Because now you know. Don't let the Greeks fight this battle on their own. I don't care what you say, but you're not innocent if you let it happen. If they lose, it'll be on your conscience.

Oh, and if they win, heed Helena Smith's words: "if Greece's rebellion was to occur in a coherent way, [..] it would be only a matter of time before it was replicated in other parts of the continent." But don't think 'they' will let it happen peacefully. They'll organize huge social unrest, inject violence, and then try to use it to clamp down on the population and reinforce their grip on power. This won't remain confined to Greece.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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FLASHBACK: How the Shock Doctrine is being applied to Greece

The Shock Doctrine

© Reuters / Yorgos Karahalis

A woman shouting in front of riot policeman shields during a protest in front of the Greek parliament near Athen's Syntagma square on April 5, 2012, in reaction to the suicide of an elderly debt-ridden Greek man

According to bestselling author Naomi Klein, the systemic use of shock and fear by the power elites to undermine vulnerable communities is very much evident in post-bailout Greece. From the rise of racism to the sell-off of the country's oil and natural gas resources - much of what will shape Greece's immediate future are, she argues, predictable consequences of the politics of austerity.

Naomi Klein is the author of controversial New York Times bestseller , which has been referred to as "the master narrative of our time". The book argues that business interests and powerful nations exploit shocks in the form of natural disasters, economic problems, or political turmoil, as an opportunity to aggressively restructure vulnerable countries' economies. She posits that because ultra-capitalistic policies are harmful to the majority of citizens, they cannot be implemented without a shock, ranging from media-hyped anxiety to police torture, that squashes popular resistance. In this exclusive interview, Klein explains to EnetEnglish how she believes the Shock Doctrine relates to Greece today.

How do events in Greece relate to your arguments in ?

To me it is a classic example of the things I wrote about. It's heartbreaking to see the same tricks and the same tactics being used so brutally. And there's been enormous resistance in Greece. It's particularly distressing to see the violent repression of the social movements that were resisting austerity. And it's just been going on for so long now. People get worn down.

What I've been following recently is the sell-off of natural resources for mining and drilling. That's the next frontier of how this is going to play out - the scramble for oil and gas in the Aegean. And it's going to affect Cyprus as well. This is a whole other level of using austerity and debt to force countries to sell off their mining and drilling rights for fire sale prices.

When you add the climate crisis on top of that it is particularly culpable that you have an economic crisis being used as leverage to extract more fossil fuels, especially because Greece itself very climate vulnerable. And I think its possible that, as the scramble for oil and gas heats up, there will be more resistance because it's a huge threat to Greece's economy

How much does climate change affect your argument?

Because I am working on a book and a film on climate change, that's why I've been following the extractive side of the shock doctrine in Greece, which has gotten a lot less attention. Understandably, people are focused on having their pensions cut, and the layoffs - and those definitely are more immediate. Although in the case of the [Skouries] goldmine, there is an immediate threat to safety, to livelihood, and to economy, and so people are extremely vocal about that.

But the part of this that I find so culpable, and so deeply immoral, is that the rise of fascism in this context is entirely predictable. We know that this is what happens. And this is supposedly the lesson of the Second World War: If you impose punishing and humiliating sanctions on a country, it creates the right breeding grounds for fascism. That's what Keynes warned about when he wrote , regarding the Treaty of Versailles. To me it's so incredible that we continue to allow history to repeat in this way.

Greeks have this particular fear that's being exploited, around the fear of becoming a developing country, becoming a third world country. And I think in Greece there's always been this sense of hanging on to Europe by a thread. And the threat is having that thread cut. That fear plays out in two ways: One that you can't leave the eurozone because that will be the end of your status as a developed country. And then on attacks on migrants and in the anti-immigrant backlash.

In The Shock Doctrine you talk about how countries the IMF lent money to were said to have sick economies, and specifically, to have 'cancer.' But with Greece we talk about 'contagion.' What are the implications of this change in metaphor?

'Cancer' is already a violent discourse. When you diagnose a country with cancer whatever treatment you go with is justified, it's necessarily lifesaving. That's the whole point of the cancer metaphor. Once you have that diagnosis, you, as the doctor, are not culpable for the negative affects of the treatment.

But calling it a contagion of course means that this is about keeping it contained, and preventing whatever rebelliousness is being incubated from spreading, particularly to Cyprus, Portugal and Spain.

When you have these fears of a contagion, when investors are afraid of a whole region, it means that that region has power to come together as a block with a much stronger hand. This is what I wrote about in the book about Latin America in the 1980s, with the so-called debt-shock. Where it would have been next to impossible for individual countries to stand up to the power of the IMF. But if Latin America as a block had organised themselves and stood up to the IMF together, then they actually would have had the power to break them. And then you would have had a much more even negotiation. I've always thought that this is one of the answers to the idea of contagion. If that's what your opponents are afraid of, organise into a negotiating block.

So the countries of southern Europe should come together negotiations with the troika?

I would think so, yes. It's called a debtors' cartel. But it never happens. As far as I know it hasn't been tried.

Former deputy prime minister Theodoros Pangalos said, "We all gorged together" - as in every Greek was complicit to causing the crisis. In contrast, Alexis Tsipras, the head of main opposition party Syriza, has pointed the finger at Angela Merkel and her followers. How should the way that the crisis came about affect the way we try to solve it?

If you accept the premise that everybody created this crisis equally, then you have created the context where collective punishment is acceptable. That is the whole point of this false equivalency.

There is a concerted attempt to create the false equivalency between an individual who went into a little bit of consumer debt, and a bank who leveraged themselves 33-1. It's an outrageous comparison. But unfortunately this is the way economics is discussed in our culture where you always have these equivalencies. Between family debt and the debt of a nation. 'Would you run your house this way?' It's a ridiculous comparison because the way you run your house is not the way you run your country. We all gorged together ... that means everyone has to starve. But of course we know everybody won't starve.

The journalist who published the identity of the names on the Lagarde list, Kostas Vaxevanis, said in an interview with the Guardian that Greeks have to go to the foreign press to get news on their own country . What is the role of the press in either assisting or resisting the shock doctrine?

Information is shock resistance. The state of shock that is so easy to exploit is a state of confusion. It's a loss of story, it's that panic that sets in, this window that opens up, when things are changing very, very quickly. And those are the moments when we need our media more than ever. This is the collective way that we 'renarrativise' ourselves. We tell ourselves a story, we keep ourselves oriented - if we have a good media.

Just because something bad is happening doesn't mean you're going to go into shock. Shock is what happens when you lose your narrative, when you no longer understand where you are in time and space. You don't know what your story is anymore. That's when you are very vulnerable to somebody coming along and telling you, 'This is the story.'

None of this can happen without a complicit media, a media willing to work with the elites, and spread the fear. It's the fear that's fuelling this, the fear of falling, falling out of Europe, falling into the developing world. Politicians don't have the ability to spread that fear on their own. They need the commentaries. They need the hysteria on the talk shows.

Journalists have to understand that none of this can happen without us. We are not just observers. In these moments when it's all about fear and orientation and loss of story, we are actors in this and we have choice. Are we going to help people stay oriented, or are we going to be tools of the elites? Whether it's fear of immigrants, or this supposed calamity in the future that prevents people from looking at the calamity in the present. The calamity has come. This is a depression. But by constantly focusing people on the worst thing that could happen down the road that is always being put in front of you, then you are not focusing on the outrageous, masochistic attack that has been inflicted on this country.

The roots of this are the financial crisis in 2008. And it was the journalists who didn't ask the questions in the first place, and fed all of this hype about a market boom that was going to last forever and didn't ask those questions.

We are deep in this. Both in creating the context for the economic crash in the first place, and now being tools of the elites and how we respond to it.

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Ancient underwater forest discovered off Norfolk coast, UK

© Rob Spray and Dawn Watson

Nature experts have discovered a remarkable submerged forest thousands of years old under the sea close to the Norfolk coast.

The trees were part of an area known as 'Doggerland' which formed part of a much bigger area before it was flooded by the North Sea.It was once so vast that hunter-gatherers who lived in the vicinity could have walked to Germany across its land mass.

The underwater forest was discovered by Dawn Watson and Rob Spray from Sea Search on a diving trip to study marine life.The prehistoric forest lay undiscovered until it was exposed by the extreme storms along the east of England coast in December 2013.

BBC Inside Out's David Whiteley reveals exclusive underwater footage of the submerged forest which experts believe could date back more than 10,000 years.

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Now encircled, U.S. scrambling to protect its terror hordes in Syria

© Unknown

One of many U.S.-supported, terror-ravaged scenes in Aleppo over the past two years.

The Syrian Arab Army is reportedly close to completely encircling militants that have occupied the northern city of Aleppo since they invaded it from NATO territory in 2012. Once the encirclement is complete, analysts believe the the city will be finally liberated, in a process similar to the retaking of Homs further south.

The desperation of militants facing this final phase in the Battle for Aleppo is indicated by their Western sponsors' attempts to broker a ceasefire and arrange "aid" to reach them. Similar attempts were made in vain during the closing phases in the Battle for Homs in mid-2014 - with the city of Homs having been an epicenter of terrorist activity beginning in 2011, and now under the control of the Syrian government. Small pockets of militants have been isolated within Homs, allowing order to be restored across the majority of the city and the surrounding region.

As the Syrian government systematically regains control of a nation up-ended by Western-backed terrorists flooding the country accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible torrent of cash, weapons, and equipment, the desperation of these Western interests has visibly increased.

, chief among the many propagandists distorting the conflict since it began in 2011, is now attempting to form a narrative extorting global security by claiming only by NATO establishing a no-fly-zone over Aleppo and repelling Syrian government forces, can "moderate rebels" hold on to the city and repel lingering "Islamic State" (ISIS) forces.

In a report titled, "Syrian rebels prepare to defend ruined Aleppo as troops and militias close in," the claims:

Of course the reality is that the US has merely used ISIS as a pretext to violate Syrian airspace, with the next step being to establish long-planned no-fly-zones, if possible, to thwart the Syrian Arab Army. Just as in Libya, the no-fly-zone would simply hand the rest of Syria over to ISIS and other Al Qaeda affiliates - clearly the most dominate militant force engaged in fighting the Syrian government, and clearly the recipients of the vast majority of material support supplied by NATO and their regional partners, most notably Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel.

It should be noted, that while the Guardian claims the remaining encircled militants in Aleppo are at odds with ISIS, the same report admits these same militants coordinate with US State Department listed foreign terrorist organization, Al Nusra. would admit:

The fight for Zahraa, one of the few Shia enclaves in northern Syria, is being led by the al-Qaida-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra, with whom the Islamic Front have an understanding but no formal alliance. After barely holding ground for much of the past year, al-Nusra recently seized large chunks of territory near the Turkish border, reasserting itself as a power player at the expense of non-jihadist groups. The fast-changing dynamic is forcing a new reckoning with the Islamic Front, which says it has waited fruitlessly for help from Arab states that was promised but never delivered.

These same ISIS forces that are allegedly at odds with "moderate rebels" have seen thousands of so-called "moderates" defecting into their ranks recently bringing with them large sums of Western cash and weapons. That Al Qaeda - both Al Nusra and ISIS - seems to thrive along the Turkish border indicates that NATO support is not at all going to "moderate rebels," but instead, intentionally to Al Qaeda, or to moderate groups NATO knows is working with, or soon to join Al Qaeda.

With a menace of the its own creation - perpetuated to this day and thriving along the borders of NATO, seeking safe-haven in NATO territory and receiving an uninterrupted line of supplies from NATO territory with absolute impunity - the West seeks to extort from the world through fear of ISIS' spread, greater direct military intervention, up to and including no-fly-zones, and perhaps more muscular policies including the carving out of "safe havens" within which ISIS can stage larger and more effective military operations deeper into Syria.

As exposed in 2007 by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and veteran journalist Seymour Hersh in his report titled, "The Redirection," the West conspired to intentionally build up and unleash terrorist mercenaries affiliated with Al Qaeda across the Arab World to fight a proxy war against Iran and its growing arc of influence. US support was to be laundered through Saudi Arabia as to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability and operational compartmentalization. Clearly, what is unfolding in Syria today, is the verbatim manifestation of Hersh's meticulous, 9-page report.

To confound this criminal conspiracy, Syria and its allies must ensure that the ongoing conflict is exposed as a terrorist invasion, not a "civil war," and that any strategy formulated to combat this terrorist scourge must include the Syrian government - demonstrably the most capable force confronting Al Qaeda in the Levant since 2011. Thus, the more aid the West and its regional allies supply this terrorist front with, the greater support Syria has upon the global stage to fight it - painting Western foreign policy into a corner, and allowing Syrians to finally restore order to their besieged nation.

"New Eastern Outlook".

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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