The horrific destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 is one of those rare events that shocks the conscience of the entire world. While an objective investigation has been rightly called for to uncover the full truth behind this horrific crime, is it unlikely that such truth will be easily discoverable. The President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, simultaneously  condemned as a rush to judgment finger-pointing at his government, called for a full investigation and simultaneously stated for the record that-without a doubt-the Ukrainian government was responsible.  Meanwhile, Putin’s Russian militias in Eastern Ukraine, suspected by most of the world of being behind the anti-aircraft missile firing that doomed MH17, have seized control of the debris field, where dead bodies, many of them fragmented, lay amid a million shattered metallic pieces of the destroyed Boeing 777. The allegations and observations made by journalists on the scene that these militias have shown disrespect for the human remains of the victims, engaged in theft, evidence tampering and appeared often to be drunk has presented the world with an unedited as well as unflattering portrait of Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian policy as executed on the ground by the Kremlin.

In a previous blog pierce, written after Putin seized control of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, I warned of the dangerous path the Russian president appeared to be pursuing, and suggested a better alternative for serving Russia’s legitimate security and cultural interests in Ukraine, namely  replicating a modern version of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s policy towards Finland after World War II, what became known as Finlandization. Instead, Putin appears to have chosen a different model, one that was created by the CIA in the 1980s when it launched a covert war against Nicaragua with armed militias known as the Contras. In effect, Putin’s Russian militias operating in Eastern Ukraine bear stark resemblance to the Contras in form and substance.

The deliberate stifling of initial attempts to effect a proper investigation of the MH17 crash scene has aroused deep horror and indignation around the world, but especially in the Netherlands-of the 298 passengers and crew murdered in this atrocity, 193 were citizens of that small country. All this suggests that Mr. Putin has drawn the wrong lessons from Stalin. Instead of Finlandization, he appears to be implementing an updated version of the Katyn Forest episode, one of the darkest chapters in Russian history.

Katyn Forest outside Smolensk, Russia was the site where thousands of Polish prisoners of war, officers and NCOs, were murdered in cold blood  by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in 1940. In 1939 these men were captured by the Russians when Stalin signed his infamous pact with Hitler, which included a secret protocol for dividing  Poland between the two dictatorships. Stalin had the Polish officers shot to eliminate a potential obstacle towards imposing communism on the part of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union. In 1943, two years after Germany stabbed Stalin in the back and invaded Russia, Katyn Forest, which was then occupied by the German army, became the site of a major excavation. The Nazis had learned about the executions, leading them to uncover the mass graves. The Germans of course were committing the equivalent of many Katyn massacres themselves at that time; they cynically exploited the discovery  of Stalin’s crime to drive a wedge between the Allied nations confronting Hitler though a massive propaganda campaign. However, in the fall of 1943, the Russian army reoccupied Katyn Forest, and from that time on, the Soviets engaged in a large-scale cover-up program, involving the creation of fraudulent documents, phony forensic examinations and sham witnesses. The cover-up was very elaborate, though practically no one in Poland believed the official Soviet line about the massacre. In 1990, in the dying moments of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gorbachev officially admitted that the Katyn massacre was the responsibility of the Soviet secret police, and was carried out on Stalin’s orders.  Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, released archives pertaining to the Katyn massacre, including a document bearing Stalin’s signature authorizing the mass executions.

Unlike the Katyn Forest massacre, the slaughter of the innocent victims of MH17 was unlikely due to deliberate intent. If it was Russian militias that shot down the plane with missiles supplied on Putin’s orders, perhaps with direct assistance from Russian army personnel, it is most likely the culprits thought they were targeting a Ukrainian military transport plane rather than a civil aviation aircraft. From this point on, however, the similarities with Katyn became haunting and profane. Putin’s media outlets are already claiming that a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down MH17, believing it was a Russian aircraft carrying President Putin himself. It appears that the early stages of the cover-up are being engineered in Moscow.

As with Stalin’s cover-up of the mass murder at Katyn Forest, there are people who will believe Putin’s propaganda, no matter how ridiculously contrived. For example, the retired Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, rushed off a pompous declaration in the form of a commentary, which appeared in the official Cuban Communist Party newspaper, Granma (http://www.granma.cu/idiomas/ingles/cuba-i/18julio-fidel.html). Seething with indignation, Castro denounced the “unheard of news that a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane had been hit at an altitude of 10,100 meters as it flew over Ukrainian territory, along a route controlled by the war-hungry government of chocolate king, Petro Poroshenko.”  The retired dictator wrote further that he  “cannot refrain from expressing our repudiation of the action of the anti-Russian, anti-Ukrainian and pro-imperialist government.” So in the eyes of Castro, the Ukrainian President shot down MH17. On the other hand, Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs released an official statement declaring that the United States is responsible for the downing of MH17 (http://www.eluniversal.com/internacional/140718/venezuela-acusa-a-estados-unidos-y-la-otan-de-tragedia-de-malaysia-ari).

Those exceptions are overwhelmed by the near-universal revulsion at the emerging cobbling-up of a cover-up of Russia’s complicity in the Malaysian Airlines massacre. I don’t know if Putin is pursuing a Katyn Forest-style cover-up of his government’s complicity in the MH17 shoot down out of ignorance of the growing disgust being aroused throughout the world, or if he really believes this obstruction of the truth will somehow serve Russia’s geopolitical interests. If the Russian president were to truly analyze the situation objectively, he would come to realize that allowing the full truth to come out, even if it were to show that a bad policy decision was made in supplying advanced anti-aircraft missiles to the militias in Eastern Ukraine, would be far less injurious to Russian national interests and his nation’s standing in the world, than unleashing its state-sponsored propaganda machine to concoct a sinister remake of the Katyn massacre cover-up.

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As the world mark’s the 100th anniversary of the First World War, the self-proclaimed  Caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made his first public appearance at the Great Al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq. In a fiery sermon, the man who claims to be the leader of the first Islamic caliphate since 1924 in effect declared war against the non-Islamic world. Across the globe, especially in Europe and America, his words were greeted with ridicule and scorn.  I would urge a less dismissive and much more analytical response.

Just like the Meccans who fourteen  centuries ago dismissed the Prophet Mohammed, only to later submit to him as the founder of the world’s second largest religious community, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is currently seen as nothing more than a transient figure. This reaction should be tempered by remembrance of a previous dismissal, especially  by American policy makers, when Osama bin Laden issued his fateful fatwa in 1996 declaring war on the United States.

In his sermon,  al-Baghdadi makes clear that the formation of the Islamic Caliphate is merely a means to an end. That end is defined in terms as brutally stark as they are unambiguous: revenge. In the words of the new caliph, “By Allah, we will take revenge! Even if it takes a while, we will take revenge, and every amount of harm against the ummah will be responded to with multitudes more against the perpetrator.” (https://ia902501.us.archive.org/2/items/hym3_22aw/english.pdf)

Who are the targets of al-Baghdadi’s uncompromising hatred? In general terms, he defines them as ” the crusaders and the atheists, and the guards of the Jews!” In addition, those political rulers within the Muslim world who, in his view, are agents of the above enemies, are also included on the target list. This would include advocates within the Islamic world for pluralistic democracy, since this contradicts, in al-Baghdadi’s worldview, the will of Allah, as manifested in Islam’s shariah law.

Much of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s polemic was devoted to annunciating contemporary grievances against the Muslim world which, in his strident mindset, cry out for a powerful vengeance. More than twenty specific references were made in al-Baghdadi’s sermon. Perhaps surprisingly, the Israel-Palestine conflict ranked only seventh on the Caliph’s list, preceded  by references to violence against Muslims in Burma, Kashmir, the Philippines, Bosnia and the Caucasus. The offending states include Russia, India and China, as well France (its sin being laws passed by the nation’s legislature for promoting the separation of church and state, which included restrictions on the wearing of the hijab).  Iran is also singled out as anti-Islamic, its Shiite form of Islamic governance regarded as apostasy and heresy, the most  grievous of all anti-Islamic offenses in the eyes of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers.

In Islamic jurisprudence and shariah texts, holy war or jihad can be conducted against unbelievers and apostates. An extension of this theological rationale for waging war in the name of God is the division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, the latter encompassing the unbelievers and apostates. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi  has very dramatically appealed to his followers in a warlike sermon, calling on them to follow him as their leader as he wages war for the propagation of Islam by exacting revenge on the entirety of our planet that falls outside the new Caliph’s definition of the House of Islam.

There will be a tendency to ignore or belittle Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in much of the world. However, irrespective of what one may think of his merciless manner of waging war and general lack of humanity, I think that, looked at objectively, there can be no denying that Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a remarkably  charismatic and able leader of the international jihadi movement.

Extremist notions in religion are not the monopoly of Islam. In times past, the most savage religious wars have been waged in the name of Christianity. In the seventeenth century  the Thirty-Years War between Protestants and Catholics  wiped out one third of Germany’s population.  In 1850 Hong Xiuquan, a Chinese religious fanatic, became convinced he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, chosen by God to bring Christianity to China through the sword, and he launched the Taiping Rebellion. When the rebellion was finally suppressed in 1864, between twenty and forty million Chinese were slaughtered, making this religious war the second bloodiest military conflict in history. And that was with weapons that were very primitive by current standards.

The lessons of history itself should compel us to take Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s promise to wage a ferocious worldwide war of vengeance against those he sees as the enemies of God with the utmost seriousness. His sermon in Mosul may very well mark the opening shots of the Third World War, and the most ferocious religious conflict since the Taiping Rebellion.

If Hillary Clinton runs for President of the United States  in 2016, see the video about the book that warned back in 2008 what a second Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

CLICK ON IMAGE TO VIEW VIDEO Hillary Clinton Nude