Mossad’s filthy work behind the Paris massacres

ONE year ago the eyes of the world focused on Paris and the atrocity which unfolded on a bleak winter’s evening.

The attacks on the night of Friday 13 November by gunmen and suicide bombers hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars, almost simultaneously – and left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded.

It was a carnage of almost unimaginable proportions in our so-called “civilised” Western society.

The massacres were described by President Francois Hollande as an “act of war” organised by the Islamic State (IS) militant group.

In the days immediately after the attacks, French police carried out hundreds of raids across the country, as the search for suspects continued.

Raids also took place in the Belgian city of Brussels.

The first of three explosions occurred outside the Stade de France stadium on the northern fringe of Paris where France were playing Germany in an international football friendly.

A man wearing a suicide belt was reportedly prevented from entering the stadium after a routine security check detected the explosives. According to press reports, the man backed away from security guards and detonated the explosives.

The bomber and a passer-by were killed.

A second man detonated his suicide vest outside a different stadium entrance at 21:30.

A third suicide bomber blew himself at a fast-food outlet near the stadium at 21:53. The attackers all wore identical explosive vests.

Meanwhile, other attacks occured nearer to the centre of town, around popular nightlife spots.

The first took place at about 21:25 in the 10th district (Arrondissement), not far from the Place de la Republique.

The gunmen arrived at the scene in a black Seat car, later found abandoned, about three miles away in the eastern suburb of Montreuil.

Fifteen people died in the attack on the bar and restaurant, with 15 severely injured. More than 100 bullets were fired.

Then came an attack on diners a few streets south of rue Alibert, in front of the Cafe Bonne Biere and La Casa Nostra pizzeria in rue de la Fontaine au Roi. Five people were killed and eight were severely injured.

Again, witnesses reported that the gunmen were travelling in a black Seat.

The next reports of shootings came to the south of the first restaurant attacks, at La Belle Equipe bar in the rue de Charonne in the 11th district.

Witnesses said that the attackers arrived in a black Seat. Two men opened fire on the terrace of the cafe.

“It lasted at least three minutes,” one witness said. “Then they got back in their car and headed towards Charonne station.”

Nineteen people died in the shooting, with a further nine in a critical condition.

A few minutes later, an attacker – later revealed to be Braham Abdeslam – killed himself by detonating a suicide bomb at the restaurant Le Comptoir Voltaire on the Boulevard Voltaire.

One other person was severely injured in this incident.

The deadliest attack of the night came at a concert venue on Boulevard Voltaire, also in the 11th district, where Californian rock group Eagles of Death Metal was playing.

The 1,500-seat Bataclan hall was sold out.

The Paris chief prosecutor said three attackers wearing suicide belts were involved – earlier reports spoke of four attackers.

Witnesses said they arrived in a black Volkswagen Polo then stormed in through the main entrance and into the back of the concert hall.

Eighty-nine people died as the men fired Kalashnikov-type assault rifles into the crowd. At least 99 others were taken to hospital in a critical condition.

One of the attackers was said to have shouted “God is great” in Arabic. One witness heard a gunman blaming President Hollande for intervening in Syria.

It was the first overt claim that Paris was being targeted by Islamists.

A claim immediately picked up by Western media and used by the French government in a full frontal propaganda assault.

And like the Charlie Hebdo attacks 11 months earlier, the public was quick to believe and even quicker to blame Islamic extremists.

But the Paris atrocities of 13 November 2015, occurred at a strangely ironic time for me as a writer and Middle East commentator.

Earlier that same day I had published a piece entitled Roll On John  which looked at false flags and dirty tricks by the US and UK military to distract the public from the truth about operations in the Middle East and beyond.

Earlier that month I had also published a piece called Jerusalem to Riyadh: an Axis of Evil which examined some of the dirty tricks used by MI5, the CIA, Mossad and Saudi Arabia to maintain organised instability in the Middle East for their own capitalist ends.

And between them create and sustain ISIS as a vehicle for that instability.

In particular I looked at Israel and its unregulated Intelligence agency Mossad which carries out the dirtiest of deeds, including many False Flag attacks: 7/7 in the UK, the Bulgarian bus bombing of 2014, and the Charlie Hebdo outrage in Paris.

From the very start after the formation of its own nation state Israel’s secret services ran rogue operations, stealing money from the Swiss accounts of Hitler’s victims, bombing a synagogue in Baghdad during prayers in 1951 to scare Jewish Iraqis into moving into tent villages in Israel, and bombing British and American offices in Cairo in 1954 (the Lavon affair) to discredit Egypt’s Nasser regime.

Using American funds provided for other purposes, Mossad bribed its way across Africa and Latin America. The late dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu—who edged Sadat toward Jerusalem and Camp David—received about $30 million from the agency.

Elsewhere, Mossad spies threw in their lot with established power, however autocratic: Iran (where they trained the SAVAK secret police in interrogation methods), Zaire, Chad and other African countries, Singapore, Sri Lanka (where they helped the Sinhalese go after Tamils), South Korea, South Africa (where Israel aided the birth of nuclear weapons), and Argentina (supplying arms during the Falklands War).

They helped Morocco capture and kill an opposition leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, in Paris. While in Beirut, they murdered Palestinians and blew up MEA Caravelles at the airport.

During the 1967 war, they protected the disinformation communications which brought Jordan into the conflict by directing the attack on the US spy ship Liberty, an action in which 34 Americans were killed and 171 wounded.

Misinformation has always been a Mossad trademark.

So it came as little shock when it was reported last week that investigative journalist Hicham Hamza had been detained by French police for exposing Israel’s role in orchestrating the Paris attacks on 13 November, 2015.

Police charged Hamza with “violating judicial secrecy,” and threatened him with prison for a photo he published online.

“An independent journalist and founder of the investigative website Panamza, I was detained for seven hours by police about an article in which I revealed the Israeli origin of the shocking photo of the Bataclan,” he explains.

“On Monday, 22 February, I went of my own accord to the police station in response to a summons from the Crimes Against Persons Brigade, located in the 13th Arrondissement of Paris.

“The day before, I had received an “urgent” voice message from an official of the Directorate of the Judicial Police asking me to call him immediately. The reason: my 15 December 2015 article entitled Bataclan Carnage: The shocking photo was disseminated from Jerusalem.

“I was familiar with the Judicial Police premises, having been summoned twice to respond to defamation complaints brought against me by Caroline Fourest and Pierre Bergé.

“This time, upon arrival I was placed in custody following a preliminary investigation by the Paris prosecutor. 

“The officer informed me that I was now suspected of having committed the following offenses: violation of the secrecy of an investigation, publication of an image that seriously undermines human dignity, and premeditated voluntary violence without ITT.

“I was then led to cell to await the arrival of my lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre so that she could be present, during my interrogation.

“After the interrogation, I was made to read and sign the minutes of my statements. I was then returned to detention pending the police response. “Five hours later I left the musty old double-locked room to learn that no decision had been taken by the prosecutor of the Republic.

“The merits of the case?

“While following the torturous trail of the shocking, anonymous Bataclan massacre photo, I had done my work as an investigative journalist. My objective was to fully document my sources.

“So in my article, I inserted the URL of the first web page containing the non-blurred Bataclan picture.

“The original source of the photo turned out, oddly enough, to be a tweet published by an Israeli organization headed by the US neoconservative Mark Gerson.

“A detail that speaks volumes: In my article Bataclan Carnage: The shocking photo was disseminated from Jerusalem, I also raised questions about the JDL, stressing that this Zionist and racist militia, which is tolerated in France (but considered a terrorist group the United States and Israel) had directly published the gruesome Bataclan photograph on the homepage of its website.

“We still do not know all the details about provenance and chain of custody of the photograph in question, which was designed to elicit terror, and whose authenticity is has been much discussed in the foreign alternative media. What we do know is that it first appeared on the website of a webmaster based in Jerusalem.

“But it should come as no surprise that the Jewish Defense League – a small group linked to similar networks of the Israeli extreme right – could publish the photo without attracting the wrath of Bernard Cazeneuve, the Minister of the Interior who is extremely obliging to the Zionist movement and its operational relay in France: Mossad.

“Someone in high places must have protected the JDL from any police summons by quietly asking them to remove the photograph.

“As for me: For revealing the Israeli source of the image, which was manipulated through social media to instil fear and acceptance of draconian security measures, I was detained by police, at the request of prosecutors, for seven hours.

“Now I am under threat of new prosecutions likely to bring, this time, a prison sentence.

“I have no illusions about the traditional corporate media, with its complete indifference to my detention. After eight years of exercising my investigative reporting skills on taboo subjects, namely the Zionist movement and false flag terrorism, I reclaim outsider status with respect to the profession, as a journalist,” he added.

This is an important Israeli link to the accepted storytelling of the massacre.

And the link goes even further – French investigative reporter Eric Laurent shocked television viewers in 2011 when he revealed that Jews working in the World Trade Centre had been warned about the 11 September terrorist attacks in New York in 2001.

And according to the Israeli press, French Jews were also warned about the Bataclan attack.

Meanwhile, the general public is being told to believe a story to demonise Muslims, for which there is scant evidence.

Why should they believe governments that serve the interests of foreign bond-holders and bankers?

Why should they trust a ruling class who, instead of fighting to raise the material, cultural and intellectual welfare of the people, do the opposite, attempting at every opportunity to rob, demoralise and stultify the masses?

The French government is now encouraging its young people to join the army reserve. It may become treasonous not to enlist.

We are passing from an era where dissent is ridiculed towards an era where dissent is criminalised.

http://www.panamza.com

 

Frankie Boyle on the fallout from Paris: ‘This is the worst time for society to go on psychopathic autopilot’

(This is quite possibly the funniest and most poignant commentary on the Middle East crisis I have read in a very long time. Written by Frankie Boyle and it appears in today’s Guardian, 24 November, 2015)

 FROM authoritarian power grabs to Andrew Neil’s nonsensical eulogy, the reaction to the Paris attacks proves that we haven’t learned from our past mistakes.

There were a lot of tributes after the horror in Paris. It has to be said that Trafalgar Square is an odd choice of venue to show solidarity with France; presumably Waterloo was too busy. One of the most appropriate tributes was Adele dedicating Hometown Glory to Paris, just as the raids on St-Denis started. A song about south London where, 10 years ago, armed police decided to hysterically blow the face off a man just because he was a bit beige.

In times of crisis, we are made to feel we should scrutinise our government’s actions less closely, when surely that’s when we should pay closest attention. There’s a feeling that after an atrocity history and context become less relevant, when surely these are actually the worst times for a society to go on psychopathic autopilot. Our attitudes are fostered by a society built on ideas of dominance, where the solution to crises are force and action, rather than reflection and compromise.

If that sounds unbearably drippy, just humour me for a second and imagine a country where the response to Paris involved an urgent debate about how to make public spaces safer and marginalised groups less vulnerable to radicalisation. Do you honestly feel safer with a debate centred around when we can turn some desert town 3,000 miles away into a sheet of glass? Of course, it’s not as if the west hasn’t learned any lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. This time round, no one’s said out loud that we’re going to win.

People seem concerned to make sure that Islam gets its full share of the blame, so we get the unedifying circus of neocons invoking God as much as the killers. “Well, Isis say they’re motivated by God.” Yes, and people who have sex with their pets say they’re motivated by love, but most of us don’t really believe them. Not that I’m any friend of religion – let’s blame religion for whatever we can. Let’s blame anyone who invokes the name of any deity just because they want to ruin our weekend, starting with TGI Friday’s.

The ringleader, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, evaded detection by security services by having a name too long to fit into one tweet. How could the most stringent surveillance in the world not have picked up Abdelhamid Abaaoud before? I mean, they’d have got him even if they just went through lists of terrorists alphabetically.

We’re always dealing with terror in retrospect – like stocking up on Imodium rather than reading the cooking instructions on your mini kievs. The truth is that modern governments sit at the head of a well-funded security apparatus. They are told that foreign military adventures put domestic populations at risk and they give them the thumbs up anyway. Charitably, the safety of their populations just aren’t of great concern to them. Realistically, domestic terrorist attacks play into their agenda: they allow them to grab ever more authoritarian powers with which to police their increasingly unequal and volatile societies. Of course, no one wants to believe that our government isn’t interested in our safety, just like everyone really wanted to believe that Jimmy Savile cared about whether kids got to meet Duran Duran.

It’s not an insult to the dead to wonder why France, a $2tn economy, couldn’t make a better offer to its disenfranchised youth than a bunch of sick bullies grooming them on the internet. It’s not apologism to try to understand why something happened. When Syria’s drought kicked in, 25% of the population became unemployed. The vast majority of the country’s livestock has died over the past decade. A lot of Isis are farmers with nowhere to go, their entire industry destroyed – you’d think they’d have more sympathy for journalists. Those who think radicalising a youngster has nothing to do with climate – have you seen Tatooine?

No one is saying climate change causes terrorism. Stop thinking that a global death cult is caused by one thing – it’s a complex situation involving several different countries and ideologies, not a rattling sound in your washing machine. Personally, I think that for all our blaming religion, there will be peace in the Middle East when the oil runs out. But knowing their luck, then somebody will invent a way of making fuel by mixing sand and falafel.

Maybe the west’s approach is right. After all, if you’ve got a massive fight in, say, a pub car park, the best way of solving it is clearly standing well back and randomly lobbing in fireworks. You can’t get rid of an ideology by destroying its leaders; you’d think if there’s anything “Christian” countries should know, it’s that. Europe has rejected the death penalty on moral grounds, and yet we relax this view when it comes to a group who want to be martyred. You can’t bomb ideas. If your kid shits on the carpet, you can’t stop them by bombing the person who invented shit – though it would tidy up ITV’s Saturday night schedule.

Andrew Neil went viral with an impassioned eulogy that, like most eulogies, was just inaccurate nonsense in the form of nice memorable words strung together with angry sad words. A speech that would have made those named within it proud, but only because a good few of them were nihilistic absurdists. Listing the great French thinkers in a tribute to nuclear power showcased the worst aspect of historical fame: these were figures Neil could name but appeared to know nothing about.

For a list supporting the French government’s foray into bombing its former colony he chose Satie, a composer so questioning of state he put a question mark into La Marseillaise; Zola, a man so adamant about the function of a fair and full trial he may have been murdered for his beliefs; Rousseau – “Those who think themselves masters of others are greater slaves than they”; Ravel, who rejected all state honours; Gauguin, a passionate defender of indigenous peoples; and Camus, the great Algerian-born philosopher, who died in 1960, a year before he would’ve been thrown into the Seine at the orders of the Nazi head of the Parisian police.

Out of his list of peacenik, thoughtful, anti-government icons, one of the few who might have been in favour of bombing Syria was Sartre, and that’s only because he thought we were all dead anyway. Of course, we mustn’t forget Coco Chanel, who Neil threw on to the list in such a blatant “if we don’t include a woman we’ll get into trouble” rush, he didn’t notice a quick wiki would reveal her to be a Nazi spy. These are the people who made France great, because what they asked of France was to question, to look death in the eye, to commit to full trials and never resort to military force, to step away from government, away from indigenous lands, to never see themselves as superior, and most, most of all, for people to stop regurgitating rhetorical cliches and think for themselves.

Neil asked us to consider who will be remembered in 1,000 years, and the answer of course is Thkkkkkkkzzzzxrrkksd, the insane Cockroach Emperor, who revolutionised the mining of our bones for fuel. But let’s go with his conceit. A thousand years is a long time; the first book published in French wasn’t until 1476. Goodness knows what an Islamic caliphate would have been doing 1,000 years ago? They built the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, one of the first universities in the world; they asked scholars of all faiths to translate every text ever written into Arabic; they demanded the first qualifications for doctors, founded the first psychiatric hospitals and invented ophthalmology. They developed algebra (algorithms are named after their Arab father) and a programmable machine … a computer. They introduced Aristotle to Europe, Al-Jahiz began theories of natural selection, they discovered the Andromeda galaxy, classified the spinal nerves and created hydropower using pumps and gears.

And Neil is right – we don’t remember any of that. Not to say that this is what Isis want – Isis are like the group that closed the House of Wisdom, the next caliphate who decided science was irreligious. Isis want to destroy the knowledge that Islam is a beautiful, scientific and intelligent culture, and we are way ahead of them.

We want Paris to be remembered in 1,000 years and we don’t remember the names of the victims 10 minutes after reading them – we don’t remember Amine Ibnolmobarak, a Moroccan émigré who was designing an architectural solution to the 2,000 deaths at Mecca; we don’t remember Elsa Delplace and her mother Patricia San Martin, who died shielding Delplace’s young son from bullets. We remember that the female terrorist was blond and one had no pants on. We remember that the terrorists came in with refugees even though they don’t seem to have done, especially since they were all French or Belgian. We expect our descendants to remember Daft Punk and we don’t even remember that invading Iraq caused the birth and rise of Isis. And we won’t remember any of this once the new series of Britain’s Got Talent starts.

 

Beyond the Horizon O’er the Treacherous Sea

SINCE the atrocities in Paris on Friday evening I have been surprised just how many of my friends have believed without question the explanation of events as described by our own Government.

This is the same Government which covered up the Hillsborough disaster, lied over MI6 dirty tricks during the miners’ strike, lied over MPs’ expenses and shifted Heaven and Earth to blanket a 50 year VIP paedophile network, involving at least one former PM.

It is a truism that “all you believe are your eyes, but your eyes they just tell you lies”.

For me, as a so-called investigative journalist for more than 20 years of my working life, I am naturally more sceptical, having many times seen, at first hand, the depths to which our own British Establishment will stoop to distort the truth, cover-up malpractice and quite simply lie.

Within half an hour of the tragic events of Friday night being relayed to our TV screens I was informed by former journalist friends that the official spin was the attack was the work of ISIS.

And within 12 hours the official press office lines from Paris, London and Washington corroborated that, with the sound knowledge that the terror group numbered eight – including suicide bombers – and they were of Syrian and Egyptian origin.

But sixty hours later, their hall of smoke and mirrors is starting to crumble.

Eyewitnesses now say they saw white professional killers at the Bataclan Concert Hall and at one of the restaurant shootings in Paris.

And by my own reckoning (it is quite easy to count between the official reports) there were at least 10 and possibly 12 people involved in the terror attacks.

French police have now confirmed that at least three separate teams perpetrated the attacks which left 129 people dead and hundreds injured in the capital city.

One survivor told Sky News that he was in the Bataclan Concert Hall and saw the attackers who murdered hostages.

He said that one of the gunmen had white skin and blonde hair.

Elsewhere an eyewitness has told how 20 people were executed in a calculated attack on a busy restaurant in the heart of the French capital as they ate at tables on the pavement.

Mahoud Admo said: “The gunman showed no emotion at all as he began spraying bullets into the diners. He just kept reloading his machine gun and firing, without saying a thing.”

Mr Admo, 26, who was staying at the Salvation Army hostel in Rue de Charonne opposite the Le Belle Equipe, recalled how the massacre unfolded, he said: “I was just in my room and had the window open on to the street below.

“I could see lots people sat outside the bar eating dinner and enjoying a drink. The place was full of people just enjoying themselves.

“At about 9.30pm a new looking black Mercedes pulled up outside with dark tinted windows at the back and the passenger and driver windows down. I could clearly see the passenger’s face as he was not wearing a hat or mask.

“As soon as the car stopped he quietly opened the door and got out in front of the restaurant.

“That is when I saw he was holding a machine gun that was resting on his hip.

“People outside spotted the shooter approaching with his gun and tried to run inside but he shot them down in the doorway.

“Then people inside moved forward to see what was happening and he sprayed more bullets into them. I was trying to catch them on my camera phone but the gunman saw the light on my mobile and I ducked down behind the wall as they fired at my hotel.

“The gunman calmly reloaded his weapon several times. He then shot up at the windows in the street to make sure nobody was filming anything or taking photographs. It lasted over six minutes.

“He fired lots of bullets. He was white, clean shaven and had dark hair neatly trimmed. He was dressed all in black accept for a red scarf.

“The shooter was aged about 35 and had an extremely muscular build, which you could tell from the size of his arms. He looked like a weightlifter.

“He was not wearing gloves and his face was expressionless as he walked towards the bar.

“The driver had opened his door shortly before the shooting began and stood up with his arm and a machine gun rested on the roof of the car. He stood there with his foot up in the door acting as a lookout.

“I would describe him as tall, with dark hair and also quite muscular.

“They looked like soldiers and carried the whole thing out like a military operation. It was clear that they were both very heavily armed and the gunman was carrying several magazines on him.”

These killers, like the ones in the Charlie Hebdo attack in January, are professionals for all intents and purposes.

The true facts are buried in a murkiness few can possibly imagine.

The West’s endless War on Terror, launched 14 years ago by George Bush, is tying itself up in ever more grotesque contortions.

In June this year, the trial in London of a Swedish man, Bherlin Gildo, accused of terrorism in Syria, collapsed after it became clear British intelligence had been arming the same rebel groups the defendant was charged with supporting.

The prosecution abandoned the case to avoid embarrassing the intelligence services.

The defence argued that going ahead with the trial would have been an “affront to justice” when there was plenty of evidence the British state was itself providing “extensive support” to the armed Syrian opposition.

That didn’t only include the “non-lethal assistance” boasted of by the government (including body armour and military vehicles), but training, logistical support and the secret supply of “arms on a massive scale”. Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

Clearly, the absurdity of sending someone to prison for doing what ministers and their security officials were up to themselves became too much.

But it’s only the latest of a string of such cases.

Less fortunate was a London cab driver Anis Sardar, who was given a life sentence a fortnight earlier for taking part in 2007 in resistance to the occupation of Iraq by US and British forces. Armed opposition to illegal invasion and occupation clearly doesn’t constitute terrorism or murder on most definitions, including the Geneva Convention.

But terrorism is now in the eye of the beholder.

And nowhere is that more so than in the Middle East, where today’s terrorists are tomorrow’s fighters against tyranny, a place where allies suddenly become enemies.

For the past year, US, British and other Western forces have been back in Iraq, supposedly in the cause of destroying ISIS. This was after ISIS overran huge chunks of Iraqi and Syrian territory and proclaimed a self-styled Islamic caliphate.

The campaign isn’t going well. Last month, ISIS rolled into the Iraqi city of Ramadi, while on the other side of the now non-existent border its forces conquered the Syrian town of Palmyra.

Al-Qaida’s official Nusra Front, has also been making gains in Syria.

Some Iraqis complain that the US sat on its hands while all this was going on. The Americans insist they are trying to avoid civilian casualties, and claim significant successes.

Privately, officials say they don’t want to be seen hammering Sunni strongholds in a sectarian war and risk upsetting their Wahhabi Sunni Muslim allies in the Gulf – particularly Saudi Arabia.

A revealing light on how we got into this crazy mess has been shone by a recently declassified secret US intelligence report, written in August 2012, which predicts – and effectively welcomes – the prospect of a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria and an al-Qaida-controlled Islamic state in Syria and Iraq.

In stark contrast to Western claims at the time, the Defense Intelligence Agency document identifies al-Qaida in Iraq (which became ISIS) and fellow Salafists as the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” – and states that “Western countries, the Gulf states and Turkey” were supporting the opposition’s efforts to take control of eastern Syria.

Raising the “possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality”, the Pentagon report goes on, “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion.”

So American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria

Which is pretty well exactly what happened two years later.

A year into the Syrian rebellion, the US and its allies weren’t only supporting and arming an opposition they knew to be dominated by extreme sectarian groups; they were prepared to countenance the creation of some sort of “Islamic state” – despite the “grave danger” to Iraq’s unity – as a Sunni buffer to weaken Syria.

That doesn’t mean the US created ISIS, though some of its Gulf allies certainly played a role in it – as the US vice-president, Joe Biden, acknowledged last year.

In August 2014, The Times of Israel reported that a Free Syrian Army commander, arrested by the Al-Nusra Front, told his captors he collaborated with Israel in return for medical and military support.

Sharif As-Safouri, the commander of the Free Syrian Army’s Al-Haramein Battalion, admitted to having entered Israel five times to meet with Israeli officers who later provided him with Soviet anti-tank weapons and light arms.

Safouri was abducted by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front in the Quneitra area, near the Israeli border, in the summer of 2014.

“The opposition factions would receive support and send the injured in to Israel on condition that the Israeli fence area is secured.” Safouri said.

“No person was allowed to come near the fence without prior coordination with Israel authorities.”

Safouri says that at first he met with an Israeli officer named Ashraf at the border and was given an Israeli cellular phone. He later met with another officer named Younis and with the two men’s commander, Abu Daoud.

In total, Safouri said he entered Israel five times for meetings that took place in Tiberias.

Following the meetings, Israel began providing Safouri and his men with “basic medical support and clothes” as well as weapons, which included 30 Russian rifles, 10 RPG launchers with 47 rockets, and 48,000 5.56mm bullets.

Late last year the Jewish Telegraphic Agency – a 97-year old Jewish wire service – reported: A senior employee of the Dutch Justice Ministry said ISIS was created by Zionists seeking to give Islam a bad reputation.

Yasmina Haifi, a project leader at the ministry’s National Cyber Security Center, stated: “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It’s part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam’s name.”

In March, Haaretz reported: “The Syrian opposition is willing to give up claims to the Golan Heights in return for cash and Israeli military aid against President Bashar Assad.”

And to add a further twist, a former high-level al Qaida commander has repeatedly alleged that ISIS works for the CIA. Investment adviser Jim Willie alleged: “The ISIS troops that are working there in Syria and Iraq are Langley (CIA) troops. They’re trained, funded, and armed by Langley.

While we don’t know which of the above-described allegations are true, two things are certain:

• The US armed Islamic jihadis in Syria, and their weapons ended up in the hands of ISIS

• Close allies of the US have supported and trained the ISIS terrorists

And the US has certainly exploited the existence of ISIS against other forces in the region as part of a wider drive to maintain western control.

The calculus changed when ISIS started beheading westerners and posting atrocities online, and the Gulf States are now backing other groups in the Syrian war, such as the Nusra Front.

But this is a US and western habit of playing with jihadi groups, which then come back to bite them.

In reality, US and western policy in the conflagration that is now the Middle East is in the classic mould of imperial divide-and-rule.

American forces bomb one set of rebels while backing another in Syria, and mount what are effectively joint military operations with Iran against ISIS in Iraq while supporting Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi forces in Yemen.

However confused US policy may often be, a weak, partitioned Iraq and Syria fit such an approach perfectly.

What’s clear is that ISIS and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since.

Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division.

Unless we want to see more atrocities like Paris on Friday we must force our governments to leave the Middle East alone.

Stop creating more failed states.

Stop throwing away our freedoms at home on falsehoods.

Stop disenfranchising the Muslims who live with us.

Start with those things and see, even if you won’t give it 14 years to succeed, if things improve. Other than the death tolls scaling up further, I can’t imagine we could be doing anything worse.

I will finish with some words by a journalist hero of mine, John Pilger (his book Distant Voices is a must read): “By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism.

“The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common.

“Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

“Bush and Blair blew all this to bits.

“Iraq is now a nest of jihadism.

“Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed.

“Rebel Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable.”

A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently: “The Cameron Government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism.”

Acknowledgment: Saumas Milne