Oz School bust, Sep Gorka on CNN, more: Links 2 for July 11, 17

14 Replies to “Oz School bust, Sep Gorka on CNN, more: Links 2 for July 11, 17”

1. 300 Iranian cities on verge of water tensions (saudigazette, Jul 11, 2017)
   http://saudigazette.com.sa/article/512598/World/Mena/water

   “Iranian media outlets have revealed an open message sent by the “Water Foundation” to President Hassan Rohani warning of “escalating conflicts in Iranian provinces over water sharing in the near future” as the country is facing an unprecedented water crisis.

   “In the near future, competing for limited water resources will expand, and conflicts over shares will spread across the country,” the Iranian Water Corporation said in an open statement to Rohani, signed by 110 experts, researchers and scientists in the water field.

   The head of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of the Iranian parliament, Alaa El-ddin Boroujerdi has confirmed that the “water crisis” has turned into a security issue and the parliament established the (Water Security Committee) to track the repercussions of the crisis.

   “The water resources in the country are very limited; Iran is one of the driest places in the world and we have a water crisis that has practically become a security issue,” Boroujerdi criticized 38 years of neglecting the water crisis in his country, which is the age of the Islamic revolution.

   Rahim Maidani, water official at the Iranian Energy Ministry, said that 295 cities, including 6 large cities, are facing drought and water crisis in the country.

   Demonstrations have been launched in cities such as Ahwaz, which accuses the government of directing water towards the Persian provinces in the center of Iran, as well as Isfahan, what increases the complains is the of lack of water, where some Iranian officials warned of the emergence of internal conflicts in the near future because of the water crisis in the country.

   Two years ago the former agriculture minister Issa Klanter warned of the crisis and said that 50 million Iranians would have to emigrate over the next two decades in order to survive.

   “Misusing and wasting water resources are due to mismanagement in the field of water and natural resources,” Toronto-based Iranian environmental expert Sam Khosravifard told Al Arabiya News.

   Last year, Iranian President Hassan Rohani instructed the agriculture ministry to boost output in order to achieve self-sufficiency in five staple crops.

   Iran’s agricultural sector reducing its water consumption would “hamper the target of self-sufficiency,” Bijan Khajehpour, a consultant at a Tehran-based group wrote.

   Crop-growing alone “devours more than 90 percent of the water and the water efficiency is around 30 percent in this sector,” Khosravifard said, adding that a water shortage was inevitable.

   “Moreover, the irrigation system hasn’t been modernized in many areas and the cultivation pattern is not matched with ecological capabilities. Therefore, the current issue was not unpredictable.”

   Highlighting the magnitude of the crisis, a 2013 study by the World Resources Institute ranked Iran as the world’s 24th most water-stressed country.

   In the past 50 years, the growing population has used up almost 70 percent of Iran’s groundwater supply, the Washington Post reported, adding that the situation would only worsen because of “unsustainable development.”

   In ancient times, to deal with the country’s “arid and semi-arid” environment, “Iranians created the aqueduct in order to overcome the challenges caused by water shortages,” Khosravifard said.

   But more recently, even when the Iranian government attempted to tackle the issue by building dams, the water held by the massive structures evaporated, he added.

   “Several research and studies carried out by academics have shown the pros and cons of the dam in Iran,” he told Al Arabiya News.

   However, the Iranian government did not consider the results of the studies “because the dam construction not only provides lots of benefits for VIPs, but also they are tools to be presented as success and achievement of officials,” he said. — Al Arabiya English”

   • …Due to gross water mismanagement and its ruinous impact on the country, Iran faces the worst water future of any industrialized nation. After the fall of the shah in 1979, water policy became a victim of bad governance and corruption, putting the country on what may be an irreversible path to environmental doom and disruption that owes nothing to sanctions or years of war with its neighbors.

     Beginning in 1987, as the war with Iraq was ending, the special military force of the Iranian regime — the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — was given a special perk. Among other strangleholds on the Iranian economy, IRGC-owned companies, including Khatam al-Anbia, its construction arm, were given control over major engineering projects throughout the country.

     Recklessly, these companies began damming major rivers, changing the historical water flows of Iran. This was done to give water preferences to powerful landowners and favored ethnic communities while also transferring billions from the public treasury to IRGC leaders’ accounts. In all, since the 1979 revolution, more than 600 dam projects have been completed, contrasted with 13 dams built in Iran prior to the shah’s fall.
     […]
     After a few years of such environmental abuse of dammed rivers and over-drafted groundwater, aquifers began to go dry and lakes shriveled. Iran’s once massive Lake Urmia, until recently 2,000-square-mile expanse, contracted 90 percent between 1985 and 2015, creating cascading regional environmental problems. Other surface water resources experienced similar shrinkage and ecological consequences.

     With farmland ruined, topsoil blown away and insufficient water to grow crops, millions of farmers and herders have left the countryside to live in dismal conditions in Iran’s growing cities. Meanwhile, deserts have also expanded, and the environmental damage to the country continues.

     …Of all the injustices and miseries that the Islamic revolution may have visited on the Iranian people — from human rights abuses to large-scale corruption to the destruction of Iran’s natural environment — turning 60% of the country’s citizens into internal refugees would be the cruelest of all.

     Forget the politics. Iran has bigger problems.
     https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/05/16/forget-the-politics-iran-has-bigger-problems/?utm_term=.2d23c248fc2c

     • With the water crisis comes a food crisis and then the people in Iran start becoming more refugees to flood the developed nation.

       The refugees from Africa are what is coming from Iran, and the environmental damage is what is coming to the west if we let unlimited numbers of refugees into our nations. The long term solution is birth control and a change of government that will let people who know what they are doing work to repair the damage done by the Islamic fundamentalists.

       On a side note I think part of the Shiite end time prophecies is the requirement that Iran be destroyed, looks like the theocracy has fulfilled that one.

   • “Last year, Iranian President Hassan Rohani instructed the agriculture ministry to boost output in order to achieve self-sufficiency in five staple crops.

     Iran’s agricultural sector reducing its water consumption would “hamper the target of self-sufficiency,” Bijan Khajehpour, a consultant at a Tehran-based group wrote.

     Crop-growing alone “devours more than 90 percent of the water and the water efficiency is around 30 percent in this sector,” Khosravifard said, adding that a water shortage was inevitable.

     “Moreover, the irrigation system hasn’t been modernized in many areas and the cultivation pattern is not matched with ecological capabilities. Therefore, the current issue was not unpredictable.”

     Iran is a good model of what happens when issues of Food Security are addressed using agricultural models from the last century (or several centuries ago). What help is it to grow those “five staple crops” (e.g., wheat), if everybody ends up dying of thirst?

     All of this can be traced by to the Mad Dwarf’s program of khodkafa’i (i.e., “self sufficiency”). From the 2007 link:

     The policy has already all but killed the once-buoyant textile industry, destroying tens of thousands of jobs. It has also affected hundreds of small and medium-size businesses that, in some cases, have been unable to pay their employees for months.

     Mr. Ahmadinejad has also used khodkafa’i as an excuse to freeze a number of business deals aimed at preventing the collapse of Iran’s aging and semi-derelict oil and gas fields. He has also vetoed foreign participation in building oil refineries, forcing the Islamic Republic to import more than 40% of the refined petroleum products consumed in Iran. The prospect of a prolonged duel with the U.N., and possible military clash with the U.S., has also hurt the Iranian economy in the past six months.

     One result of the president’s weird policy is the series of strikes that have continued in Tehran and at least 20 other major cities since last autumn. Last year, one major strike by transport workers in Tehran brought the city of 15 million to a standstill for several days. Right now tens of thousands of workers in industries as diverse as gas refining, paper and newsprint, automobile, and copper mining are on strike.

     President Ahmadinejad, however, is determined to impose what looks like a North Korean model on the Iranian economy.

     None of which addresses the, “claims that as much as $300 billion may have left the country since President Ahmadinejad was sworn in.”

     Let’s face it, the Koran is a terrible agronomy handbook. Too bad these morons all focus on a single text and forget to read more widely.

2. Alleged teen terrorist in state care mentored by Salafist (DW, Jul 11, 2017)
   http://www.dw.com/en/alleged-teen-terrorist-in-state-care-mentored-by-salafist/a-39646273

   “A boy who had planned an attack on a Christmas market was looked after by an Islamist extremist for weeks. The blunder by a local youth care agency is likely to severely impact his de-radicalization.

   In December 2016, the then-12-year-old German-Iraqi is said to have filled jars with fireworks powder, taped nails to them and placed them close to the town hall and on the Christmas market in the southern-German city of Ludwigshafen. Fortunately, the home-made explosives didn’t detonate. The boy was caught and put into a closed facility at an undisclosed location, where he is receiving intensive psychological treatment.

   On Tuesday, journalists with the TV magazine “Report Mainz” reported that one of the people looking after the boy is believed to be an adherent of the Salafist ideology. Salafism is an ultra-conservative and often violent branch of Islam.

   In other words: One of the psychologists in charge of de-radicalizing the young aggressor is an extremist himself.

   The youth and integration ministry of Rhineland-Palatinate, the boy’s home state, confirmed in a statement to “Report Mainz” that a background check on the caregiver led authorities to suspect that he “could be close to Islamist circles.”
   Six weeks with a Salafist

   A spokeswoman for the city of Ludwigshafen explained in a statement to DW on Tuesday that an independent agency is in charge of the boy’s care. The authorities at this agency were the ones who hired the employees to take care of the now-13-year-old after regular police background checks. On March 3, 2017, the psychologist in question began to work with the boy.

   A few weeks later, he agreed to a voluntary, more thorough background check, which was set in motion on April 19. It is unclear why he was allowed to take care of the boy before this measure was completed. On May 19, the city was informed that the man had participated in a now-illegal Quran distribution initiative, shared Islamist videos on Facebook and worked security at rallies of German Salafist preachers.

   “The caregiver was immediately removed from the case,” Ludwigshafen’s spokeswoman stated. “He was one of several employees, who work [with the boy] in shifts. He was not the boy’s primary caregiver.”

   Prioritizing prevention

   Susanne Schröter, director of the Frankfurt Research Center on Global Islam, says the slip-up is still likely to have dramatic consequences for the boy’s social reintegration process…”

3. ISIL killed 304 in 14 major attacks in Turkey (hurriyetdailynews, Jul 11, 2017)
   http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/isil-killed-304-in-14-major-attacks-in-turkey-.aspx?pageID=238&nID=115378&NewsCatID=341

   “The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has killed a total of 304 people in 14 major attacks in Turkey overall, according to a report prepared by the Interior Ministry, Turkish media reported on July 11.

   “A total of 14 significant ISIL terror attacks were carried out in Turkey. Ten of these were suicide attacks, one was a bomb attack and three were armed attacks. As a result, 304 people, including 10 police officers and one soldier, were killed and 1,338 people, including 62 police officers and seven soldiers, were wounded,” the 76-page report titled “Turkey’s Struggle against ISIL” stated.

   According to the report, three of the attacks were carried out in Istanbul and five of the others were in the southeastern provinces of Diyarbak?r, ?anl?urfa and Gaziantep and the capital Ankara.

   The ministry reportedly stated that 22 significant terror acts were prevented in 2016 after operations and intelligence work were carried out.

   In addition, the ministry reportedly claimed that “the necessary detailed information” on suspected foreign terrorist fighters is not being shared by the source countries before their arrival in Turkey.

   “Even though Turkey determines the individuals with potential to become foreign terrorist fighters and extradites them to their countries, it is seen that the threat posed by these individuals in the source countries isn’t being taken into consideration enough,” the report allegedly states.

   The ministry reportedly said foreign terrorist fighters who arrive in the country to join ISIL from all over the world are trying to cross into clash zones through Turkey, adding that they mostly enter the country from Istanbul and the southern province of Antalya.

   “These people are using airways to enter Turkey,” the ministry reportedly said, noting that a small number of the foreign fighters are entering Turkey via sea from the western province of ?zmir and the southern province of Mersin.

   “Trying to use Turkey as a transit country, these people have been trying to reach the provinces close to clash zones using land or airway,” it stated, referring to the southeastern provinces of Gaziantep and ?anl?urfa and the southern provinces of Hatay and Adana.

   Furthermore, the report stated that 650 people, of whom 366 are foreigners, are under arrest on terror charges as of 2017.

   “The ISIL threat potential against Turkey is continuing, even though it has suffered significant losses as a result of the international struggle against ISIL, which had claimed many territories by taking advantage of the authority gap in Syria and Iraq,” the report stated.

   It added that ISIL has the “potential to carry out lone wolf attacks globally when taking the number of its foreign militants and the emergence of groups swearing allegiance to the group in certain parts of the world.”

   “It can be seen that ISIL continues to be a global threat,” the report stated.

   Tunisians top Turkey’s list

   Tunisians have reportedly topped the list of Turkey’s list of individuals who are banned over suspected links to international terrorism.

   Daily Cumhuriyet reported on July 11 that the Interior Ministry has prepared a 76-page report titled “Turkey’s Struggle against ISIL,” which gives information on banned foreign individuals and jihadists’ routes.

   The report names Tunisian, Saudi Arabian, Kazakh, French, Russian and Belgian citizens as being among those banned over suspected links to international terrorism, after Turkey received notices that they may cross into clash zones in Syria.

   Russian, Iranian, Libyan and Azerbaijani citizens, meanwhile, top the list of nationals who have been are caught by the Turkish authorities while trying to cross into Syria to fight.”

   • Über-Turk richly earns this bonus for serving as a conduit for years. Selling them weapons for oil, bombing their enemies, toying with appeasement-minded Eurocrats. Reap what you sow, you blackmailing son-of a -Turk.

     • “…you blackmailing son-of a-Turk.”

       Wasn’t that supposed to end with a “d”?

       Enquiring minds want to know!!!

       • Um…transliteration error?

4. EU rights court upholds Belgian ban on full-face niqab veil (france24, Jul 11, 2017)
   http://www.france24.com/en/20170711-eu-human-rights-courts-upholds-belgian-ban-full-face-niqab-veil

   “The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday upheld a Belgian ban on wearing the full-face niqab veil in public.

   The court ruled that the restriction sought to guarantee social cohesion, the “protection of the rights and freedoms of others” and that it was “necessary in a democratic society”, a statement said.

   Belgian banned the wearing of the full-face veil under a June 2011 law. It prohibits appearing in public “with a face masked or hidden, in whole or in part, in such a way as to be unidentifiable”.

   Violations can result in fines and up to seven days in jail.

   France was the first European country to ban the niqab in April 2011.

   The European Court of Human Rights had already ruled on a challenge to the French law in 2014 when it also rejected arguments that the restriction breached religious freedom and individual human rights.

   The Belgian case was brought by two Muslim women, Samia Belcacemi, a Belgian national, and Yamina Oussar, a Moroccan.

   Both women said they chose of their own free will to wear the niqab and claimed their rights had been infringed and the law was discriminatory.

   After Belgium introduced the ban, Belcacemi continued wearing the veil for a while but stopped because of social pressure and fears she would be fined.

   Oussar told the court that she had decided to stay at home, the statement from the court said.”

5. 34 terror suspects held in last 2 weeks (saudigazette, Jul 11, 2017)
   http://saudigazette.com.sa/article/512647/SAUDI-ARABIA/terror-suspects

   “The security authorities arrested 34 terror suspects in raids across the Kingdom in the last two weeks, according to the updated list on the Nafethah website which is a window of communication between prisoners and detainees and their kin.

   Among those arrested are 29 Saudis, two Yemenis, a Nigerian, an Omani and a Libyan. All these terror suspects are under investigation. The security authorities carried out the raids from the first day of the blessed Eid which resulted in the arrest of the terror suspects.

   The most successful raid took place on Shawwal 6 (June 30) when nine Saudi terror suspects were nabbed.

   The latest arrests take the total number of detainees to 5115, according to the Nafethah list which was last updated on Monday.”

6. Islamophobia a growing trend: OIC’s latest report (saudigazette, Jul 11, 2017)
   http://saudigazette.com.sa/article/512645/SAUDI-ARABIA/Islamophobia

   “There has been an increasing trend of Islamophobia indicated by the growing fear against Islam and Muslims in certain parts of the world leading to negative perceptions among non-Muslims, according to the 10th annual report on Islamophobia released by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) here on Tuesday.

   The report released at the commencement of the 44th Council of OIC Foreign Ministers conference covered a period from Oct. 2016 to May 2017.

   This negative trend, according to the report, was assessed to have been boosted mostly by three factors: The US elections, immigrant issue in Europe, and the rise of populism and far-rights in Europe.

   “Muslims have been terrorized and discriminated. Islamic sacred symbols have been insulted. People with Islamic attires were targeted with hatred. Women with hijabs were abused on streets and public spaces,” said OIC Secretary General Yousef Al-Othaimeen in his foreword to the report.

   He said certain governments outlawed Islamic attires or applied restrictive access for Muslims to have prayer facilities.

   “Right-wing politicians and media also spread evil images of Islam,” said Al-Othaimeen.

   He said the 10th report of the Islamophobia Observatory “vindicates our position that the growing trend of Islamophobia has not subsided in any tangible way.”

   “Acts of radical and extreme groups in the name of Islam have provided xenophobes with excuses to further their agenda. Their statements and acts have not only been irresponsible, but also conducive to the radical narratives of violent groups and terrorists, jeopardizing the positive image of Islam and boosting Islamophobia across the globe,” the OIC secretary general added.

   He, however, stressed that the OIC as mandated by member states has been active on combating the Islamophobia phenomenon at political, diplomatic, and operational fronts in order to raise awareness among the international community of the threats that the Islamophobia poses to global peace and security.

   He noted that OIC member states, together with the international community, need to take more serious actions to address the contemporary challenge of Islamophobia, including by enforcing laws which clearly stand for prohibition of any advocacy of religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.”

7. Indeed. “…enforcing laws which clearly stand…” Right. Pretty rich. Fix the Koran first. (Sarc.) Then we’ll talk.

8. CNN is showing what they are, paid mouthpieces for the Dems.