Friday, July 22, 2016 8:10 PM EDT
Hillary Clinton named Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia to be her running mate Friday, according to a senior campaign official, selecting a battleground state politician with working-class roots and a fluency in Spanish, traits that she believes can bolster her chances to defeat Donald J. Trump in November.
Mrs. Clinton’s choice came after her advisers spent months poring over potential vice-presidential candidates who could lift the Democratic ticket in an unpredictable race against Mr. Trump.
Assad Meets US Senator in Damascus to Discuss Fight Against Terrorism
Syrian President Bashar Assad discussed in Damascus on Thursday the situation in the Arab country and the fight against terrorism with US Sen. Richard Black, local media reported.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Assad said that terrorist actions all across the globe highlighted the need for real international cooperation not only in the fight against terrorism but also against the Wahhabi ideology behind it, according to the SANA news agency.
Black in turn said that it was necessary to show the US people the real situation in Syria despite disinformation that some parties at the US administration practiced.
The US senator also called for lifting economic sanctions imposed on Syria that violated international law.
Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces fighting against several opposition factions and extremist groups. The United States and some of its allies have been supporting the so-called moderate Syrian opposition since the beginning of the conflict, calling on Assad to resign.
Video: Must see Saudi Arabia & Turkey are greatest dangers to world peace – VA state Senator
Republican Virginia state Senator Dick Black
RT Republican Virginia state Senator Dick Black said Saudi Arabia and Turkey are the greatest threats to world peace in an interview with RT, adding that Saudi Arabia’s “absolute barbarity” is overlooked because of its long-standing relationship with the US.
“I believe that Saudi Arabia and Turkey are the two greatest dangers to world peace,” Senator Black told RT. “It is Saudi Arabia, through the Wahhabist doctrine, that is spreading terrorism across the globe. It’s not Iran, it’s not Syria or any other country.”
Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored teachings of Wahhabism promote an ultra-conservative, austere version of Sunni Islam. Meanwhile, Black told RT that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intends to impose an absolute dictatorship.
“Erdogan has a dream of becoming a new Ottoman Empire,” Black said. “He’s a very calculating, very vicious individual and, I think, a great danger. Erdogan won an absolute majority of the Turkish parliament, which will enable him to rewrite the constitution. Once he had that total power to impose an absolute dictatorship – which he intends to do – and he publicly said that his model is that of Adolph Hitler.”
At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire encompassed southeast Europe, western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire declared a military jihad on France, Russia, and Great Britain, but ultimately lost.
The Adolph Hitler comment Black referred to comes from an interview back in January when Erdogan told journalists that he wanted to transform his office into a US-style executive “super-presidency,” through constitutional reforms.
https://youtu.be/gBTH1O_pIvE
“In a unitary system (such as Turkey’s) a presidential system can work perfectly,” said Erdogan, according to Agence France-Presse. “There’s already examples in the world and in history. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany.”
After that analogy caught news headlines, the president’s office said in a statement that it was “unacceptable” to interpret Erdogan’s remarks as endorsement of Nazism.
“Our president…has declared that the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, along with Islamophobia, are crimes against humanity,” a press statement read, adding that Hitler’s Germany “had disastrous consequences” for the political system and could not be held up as a model.
Erdogan’s party, while controlling a majority of seats in the parliament, does not command the required two-thirds necessary to change the constitution without the support of other parties.
Senator Black thinks the civil war in Syria would never have happened without the efforts of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. He said the war in Syria was not a domestic uprising or part of the Arab Spring, with civilians seeking democracy. Instead, he called it an uprising of hardcore jihadists, aided by the CIA and MI6, with the help of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Saudi Arabia was able to control governments across the world with its financial strength, and the Turks had their own agenda with regard to Europe, Black argued.
“Virtually all arms, ammunition, equipment, supplies, jihadists, medical support – all of it comes from Turkey. Right now, ISIS sends 44,000 barrels of oil per day – stolen barrels, most of it from Syria – across the border into Turkey,” said Black. “The State Department has publicly said that there’s only a trickle of oil that gets into Turkey, but I have personally spoken to Kurdish activists … [who] observed hundreds of ISIS oil tankers carrying stolen Syrian oil into Turkey on a daily basis.”
Black said Turkey is “actively assisting the ISIS rebels,” and also “helping the Al-Nusra rebels which are linked with Al-Qaeda.”
“In both places we’ve got terrorists, and in both places their major support comes out of Turkey. And it comes out of Turkey with approval from the highest levels of government.”
As for Saudi Arabia, Black believes the latest spike in tensions between the Saudis and Iran is proof of how Washington has been turning a blind eye to Riyadh’s actions.
“The US has been so in bed with the Saudi Arabians for so long. The Bush family – Herbert Walker Bush, George Bush, Jeb Bush – all of them have been closely tied with the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia,” he said. “The same thing with the Clintons – Bill, Hillary – very closely tied to the money from Saudi Arabia. And because of this Saudi Arabia has been able to do the most outrageous things,” said Black.
“We tend to condemn various secular nations in the Middle East because they do don’t do this quite right, or that quite right. And yet we overlook the absolute barbarity of the Saudi Kingdom, their absolute dictatorship.”
Black said that there is not a single Christian church in Saudi Arabia, but the US is quick to condemn other countries lacking in religious freedoms.
“What’s happening is that they [the Saudi family] are trying to restore some of the hostility between Shiites and the Sunnis. The Saudis massacred 47 people,” Black told RT. “I’m sure some of them were genuine criminals, but many of them were simply political opponents. And then there was an inevitable reaction which they knew there would be. And the Saudis, in typical fashion, have now shown a sense of outrage that people would be angered by the level of their debauchery – and this is typical of the Saudis.”
Black served in the US Marine Corps and retired as a Colonel in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps before being elected to the Virginia legislature. He maintains that the Assad government is effectively fighting against Islamic State and protecting the remaining Christians of Syria. Its fall, he says, would allow IS to quickly seize Jordan and Lebanon, and continue its drive westward.
Senator Rand Paul blames Republican hawks for creation of ISIL
Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul
Republican presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul says the hawkish members of his party are responsible for the creation of the ISIL Takfiri terrorists in the Middle East.
Paul blamed hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham for the creation of ISIL, saying the group “exists and grew stronger because of the hawks in our party who gave arms indiscriminately, and most of those arms were snatched up by ISIS (ISIL).”
Talking to MSNBC on Wednesday, Paul said, “These hawks also wanted to bomb [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, which would have made ISIS’ job even easier. They’ve created these people.”
Senator Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said formerly that he advocated sending around 10,000 US troops to Iraq to help train and support militants fighting ISIL. report presstv
Graham is expected to announce his White House bid next Monday.
“Right now there are 1,500 groups, many of them bad people, including ISIS, that hawks in our party have been arming,” Paul noted.
The US and its allies have been conducting airstrikes against ISIL in Iraq and Syria since last year. However, the terror network is controlling large parts of the two countries.
The terrorists managed to capture Ramadi, the capital city of Iraq’s Anbar Province, last week.
The ISIL terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, are engaged in crimes against humanity in the areas under their control.
SB/AGB
If Damascus falls, Europe won’t be far behind – US senator
he streets of Syria’s northern Raqqa province June 30, 2014. (Reuters)
“If Damascus falls, the dreaded black and white flag of ISIS will fly” over Syria, Virginia state Senator Richard Black told RT. “Within a period of months after the fall of Damascus, Jordan will fall and Lebanon will fall,” he said, adding that the self-proclaimed Islamic State would then target Europe next.
Black is no stranger to the Syrian crisis. Last year, he wrote a letter thanking the government in Damascus for a “gallant and effective campaign” to liberate Christian villages on the border with Lebanon. Most Americans are not aware that Christianity started in present-day Syria, he pointed out.
Years of US interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere have resulted in vast numbers of displaced Christians in Syria, Iraq and the Balkans. “If you look at the history of American involvement,” since the first Iraq war, Black told RT, “the one central theme has been that in each instance we’ve purged Christians from various countries.” Christians who lived in Kosovo for over a thousand years “are gone, completely annihilated.”
During the four-day pogrom in Kosovo 11 years ago, more than 4,000 Christian Serbs were driven out of six towns and nine villages. Over 900 houses and 39 churches were also destroyed by ethnic Albanian rioters.
As a new report details the devastation wrought upon Syria by four years of rebellion, a Virginia state senator who once thanked the Syrian government for defending Christians is worried about the fate of Damascus, the Middle East and Europe.
“If Damascus falls, the dreaded black and white flag of ISIS will fly” over Syria, Virginia state Senator Richard Black told RT. “Within a period of months after the fall of Damascus, Jordan will fall and Lebanon will fall,” he said, adding that the self-proclaimed Islamic State would then target Europe next.
Black is no stranger to the Syrian crisis. Last year, he wrote a letter thanking the government in Damascus for a “gallant and effective campaign” to liberate Christian villages on the border with Lebanon. Most Americans are not aware that Christianity started in present-day Syria, he pointed out.
Years of US interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere have resulted in vast numbers of displaced Christians in Syria, Iraq and the Balkans. “If you look at the history of American involvement,” since the first Iraq war, Black told RT, “the one central theme has been that in each instance we’ve purged Christians from various countries.” Christians who lived in Kosovo for over a thousand years “are gone, completely annihilated.”
During the four-day pogrom in Kosovo 11 years ago, more than 4,000 Christian Serbs were driven out of six towns and nine villages. Over 900 houses and 39 churches were also destroyed by ethnic Albanian rioters.
11th Anniversary of the March pogrom of Serbs in #Kosovo pic.twitter.com/9qBChPRsDj
— Serbian Embassy, US (@SerbiaEmbWashin) March 17, 2015
According to a recent report by the Syrian Centre for Policy Research, six percent of the country’s population has been killed or wounded in the fighting in Syria. Life expectancy went from 79.5 years in 2010 to 55.7 years. More than 5 million Syrians became refugees or migrated in search of work, while 40 percent of the remaining 17.65 million are internally displaced. The country has lost over $200 billion through destruction, looting, capital flight and GDP loss; unemployment is officially at 58 percent; and most of those who have jobs work for the government.
The current conflict in Syria began in 2011, when the US-backed opposition began an armed rebellion against President Bashar Assad’s government during the Arab Spring. By 2013, large portions of eastern Syria and western Iraq had fallen under control of militants known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS, or ISIS/ISIL). While declaring the need to fight ISIS, Washington has continued to demand the overthrow of Assad in favor of “moderate opposition.”
Black, who served in the US Marine Corps and retired as a Colonel in the Judge Advocate General (JAG) corps before getting elected to the Virginia legislature, maintains that the Assad government is effectively fighting against the Islamic State and protecting the remaining Christians of Syria. Its fall, he says, would let ISIS quickly seize Jordan and Lebanon, and continue its drive westward.
“I look at Syria as the center of gravity… for Western civilization,” Black said, using the military strategists’ term for a place or event that can determine the outcome of a war. “If it falls, we’ll begin to see a very rapid advance of Islam on Europe.”
