Headline News 17/11/2018

Headlines

• CIA turns against MBS over Khashoggi killing supporting establishment against Trump

• House Republicans Block Attempt to cut US Assistance to Saudi Arabia for Yemen war

• American Military Base in southern Syria responsible for suffering of refugees

• Government Austerity Programmes Increasing Mass Poverty in Britain

Details

CIA turns against MBS over Khashoggi killing supporting establishment against Trump

According to the Washington Post:

The CIA has concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month, contradicting the Saudi government’s claims that he was not involved in the killing, according to people familiar with the matter.

The CIA’s assessment, in which officials have said they have high confidence, is the most definitive to date linking Mohammed to the operation and complicates the Trump administration’s efforts to preserve its relationship with a close ally. A team of 15 Saudi agents flew to Istanbul on government aircraft in October and killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate, where he had come to pick up documents that he needed for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman.

In reaching its conclusions, the CIA examined multiple sources of intelligence, including a phone call that the prince’s brother Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, had with Khashoggi, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence. Khalid told Khashoggi, a contributing columnist to The Washington Post, that he should go to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to retrieve the documents and gave him assurances that it would be safe to do so.

It is not only the Saudi government that has been trying to protect Mohammad bin Salman. US President Donald Trump has also been trying to protect him, as a Reuters article explains:

Trump has told senior White House officials that he wants Mohammed to remain in power because Saudi Arabia helps to check Iran, which the administration considers its top security challenge in the Middle East. He has said that he does not want the controversy over Khashoggi’s death to impede oil production by the kingdom.

In fact, Donald Trump has personally invested considerably time and effort in the relationship with Saudi Arabia, which was also the first country he visited as President, and his advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner built a close personal relationship with Mohammed bin Salman. It seems that the US establishment is using the Khashoggi issue to undermine Jared Kushner to reduce his role in Trump’s White House and his foreign policy.

America portrays itself as a democracy but the fact is that major policy is defined by the American establishment in accordance with the interests of the American capitalist elite. Trump was an establishment outsider whose independence has been ground away over his term of office. Key Trump advisors such as Steve Bannon exited long ago. Jared Kushner is almost the last to be targeted.

Democracy is an illusion to fool the Western masses. The real Western system is oligarchic materialist Capitalist imperialism, which exploits its own populations and ravages the entire world. With the permission of Allah (swt) the world will soon again see an alternative in the form of the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) State on the method of the Prophet (saw).

House Republicans block attempt to cut US assistance to Saudi Arabia for Yemen war

Despite public proclamations against the war in Yemen, it seems the US establishment remains keen to see it continue, using deception to block an anti-war resolution. According to The Intercept:

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives undercut a bipartisan effort to end U.S. involvement in Yemen by sneaking a measure that would kill an anti-war resolution into a vote about wolves.

On Tuesday night, the Republican-led House Rules Committee voted to advance the “Manage Our Wolves Act,” which will remove gray wolves from the endangered species list. The Rules Committee waived all points of order against the bill and voted to advance it to the floor.

The catch: Republicans inserted language that would block a floor vote on whether to direct President Donald Trump to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi- and UAE-led intervention in Yemen. The intervention has been highly destructive, flattening homes, roads, markets, hospitals, and schools, and leading to the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

On Wednesday evening, the House approved the rule 201-187, largely on party lines, successfully blocking a vote on the Yemen resolution.

It is America that is behind all the wars in Muslim lands at this time. We will not enjoy peace as long as our governments continue to serve Western interests, fearing their disbelieving masters more than they fear their Maker. The present ruling class must be overthrown and replaced with sincere, politically aware, ideological leadership that dedicates itself to worshipping Allah (swt) through implementing His Deen and realising the righteous meaning of politics, which is the take care of the affairs of the people.

American military base in southern Syria responsible for suffering of refugees

According to Newsweek:

Russia has called on the United States to withdraw from a base established by the Pentagon in southern Syria, alleging the presence runs contrary to international law.
Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Moscow's National Defense Control Center, addressed a joint session Friday of Russian and Syrian committees tasked with returning Syrian refugees and blamed the U.S. for deteriorating humanitarian conditions in the Rukban refugee camp. The settlement is located within a U.S.-controlled security zone surrounding the Al-Tanf base on the harsh border of Syria and Jordan and has witnessed starvation deaths due to lack of supplies.

"Such a situation in which the camp finds itself reminds concentration camps of the Second World War, which seemed to be long gone. How is it possible in the modern world?" Mizintsev said. "Why, in these conditions, the world community, which cares so much about human rights, continues to persistently keep silent about the humanitarian disaster in the Rukban camp? In fact, being held hostage.

"Why are the official structures of the United Nations responsible for providing all-round assistance to refugees, in fact, are not active and persistent in resolving global humanitarian issues related to the terrible situation of Syrian citizens in the Rukban camp?" he added.

The United States has close to one thousand military bases distributed across the world, many times more than the number of its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions, and never misses an opportunity to build more bases. The US has chosen the highly strategic region of the Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian border, rich in oil but low in population, to establish its military base in Syria.

America considers the countries of Muslims to be its personal property, like Britain before her, and is using wars in Muslims lands to further entrench its position, returning Western military force to lands that they had abandoned many decades ago when the tired empires of Europe were forced to accept nominal independence for their colonies. With Allah’s permission, the righteous Islamic Khilafah shall soon be established, unifying all Muslim lands under a single leadership and combining the armies of Muslim countries to implement Islam, eject the foreign disbelieving imperialist and restore peace and justice to the entire world.

Government Austerity Programmes Increasing Mass Poverty in Britain

According to the New York Times:

The British government’s policies of austerity are directly linked to a rise in poverty in the United Kingdom, a United Nations expert said in a scathing report on Friday after a two-week fact-finding mission to the country’s poorest districts.

Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur for extreme poverty and human rights, concluded that efforts by the Conservative government to pare state spending were “entrenching high levels of poverty and inflicting unnecessary misery in one of the richest countries in the world,” his team said in a statement about his preliminary findings.

Since 2010, the Conservative government has announced more than 30 billion pounds, or nearly $40 billion, in cuts to welfare payments, housing subsidies and social services, and the British leadership is in “a state of denial” about the devastation its policies have wrought, Mr. Alston said.

Although overall poverty levels have remained fairly constant under the Conservative government, most measures show that poverty has risen among children and working families.

The use of food banks almost doubled between 2013 and 2017. Families that receive benefits are now over $2,600 worse off every year, according to an analysis by the Child Poverty Action Group, an advocacy group.

The West has already stripped its societies of humanitarian, ethical and spiritual values in accordance with its materialist Capitalist ideology, which promotes the material value above all else. However, it is evidently only the elite that really benefit materially.

The masses are left to work long hours eking out a stressful existence struggling to achieve even an average lifestyle, with the more fortunate living off considerable debt. Meanwhile, the elite continue to amass riches for themselves, the wealth of any one of them exceeding the annual production of many countries of the world.

In fact, austerity policies, brought in after the Western financial crisis, were entirely unnecessary at the time as numerous economists pointed out. The real reason for austerity was the decision of the Capitalist elite to roll back the social benefits that the state continued to pay out to its citizens even though the threat of communist revolution had clearly ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Curtailing these payments, which constitute the largest share of Western government budgets, has become all the more urgent because of the demographic shift in Western societies, which is resulting in a vast elderly generation to whom state social payments are clearly unsustainable at present levels. The financial crisis was simply a convenient excuse to implement the austerity that the Western elite had already decided was necessary.

The only reason that the West has been able to function thus far was the continued presence of Christian values and tradition, in whatever weakened form, which partially complemented the materialist mentality. The world needs to see again the example of Islamic civilisation, which harmonises the material with the ethical, humanitarian and spiritual developing a balanced society that remains progressive while caring for all. Only Islam is able to do this because its systems are divinely revealed and not devised by limited and flawed human intellectual ability.

Communism collapsed without war simply because of the incompatibility of its systems with human nature and life. Capitalism shall do the same as soon as the world sees that a better alternative is possible.