Quick Takes: News You May Have Missed

By: Aaron Klein

Published: September 14th, 2011

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Al Qaeda Leader:

Libyan Rebels Want Islamic State

An Al Qaeda leader told this reporter that rebel forces in Libya – whom the United States and United Nations have backed in their uprising against Moammar Ghadafi – have been planning all along to turn the new nation into an Islamic state.

“The establishing of the Islamic state, we cannot avoid this,” stated Abu Saqer, leader of Jihadiya Salafiya, which represents Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip.

“This is a fact that will happen. This is our goal, we are seeking [this]. We know the goal of some of the rebel leaders in Iraq [who are] fighting as part of Jihadiya Salafiya, and we believe this will happen at the end of the day in Libya and other parts of the Islamic world.”

Saqer made these statements during an interview on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on New York’s WABC Radio.

This is not the first time Al Qaeda pan-Islamic ideology has been associated with the rebel leaders being aided by the U.S. and NATO forces in Libya.

At the start of the insurgency, rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi admitted in an interview with an Italian newspaper that some of his fighters were recruited from foreign countries, while others were on the front lines against coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Sides With Turkey,

Wants Israeli Apology

The Obama administration is applying intense pressure on Israel to issue an apology for its 2010 raid of a Hamas-supporting flotilla attempting to enter the Gaza Strip, according to informed Israeli officials.

That flotilla, sponsored in part by a Turkish group, engaged in deadly clashes with Israeli special forces. Dozens of flotilla activists armed with knives, bats and metal pipes confronted the Israeli naval raid and immediately attacked the soldiers.

Nine activists were killed, while 15 Israeli solders were wounded.

Turkey has since been demanding that Israel issue an apology for the raid, a request scoffed at by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Informed Israeli officials told WorldNetDaily that the U.S. has sided with Turkey in its demand for an apology.

The officials said that while the U.S. does not blame Israel for the raid, the Obama administration sees Turkey as key to the transformation of the Middle East and North Africa.

The U.S. wants to end the diplomatic row between Turkey and Israel. Israeli officials said the Obama administration does not believe it can persuade Turkey to drop its apology demand and so is instead pressuring Israel.

Strategist Behind Israeli Protests

Has Controversial Past

The Democrat strategist identified as an architect of the social protests currently rocking Israel previously ran the campaign of Bolivia’s former president, who was ushered into office amid escalating social protests in that country.

After Gonzalo S?nchez de Lozada took power in Bolivia in 1985, he quickly implemented an economic “shock therapy” crafted by Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who sits on the board of an organization literally seeking to reorganize the entire global economic system.

That organization is the Institute for New Economic Thinking, or INET. Billionaire George Soros is INET’s founding sponsor, having provided a reported $25 million over five years to support INET activities.

According to an investigative report in Israel’s Maariv’s newspaper, the Israeli protests were engineered by a group of media strategists directed by prominent Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, John Kerry and others.

Greenberg reportedly is working with Israeli strategists who were behind left-wing leader Ehud Barak’s successful race for prime minister in 1999. Greenberg himself helped run Barak’s campaign.

Greenberg founded the Democratic strategy firm Democracy Corps with Clinton advisers James Carville and Bob Shrum.

In 2002 that firm was behind a sophisticated campaign in Bolivia that helped de Lozada win his country’s elections amid ongoing social protests. It was the second time de Lozada served as Bolivia’s president.

Both times, after de Lozada came to office, he quickly implemented Sachs’s “shock therapy.” De Lozada attempted to engineer the restructuring of the Bolivian economy and the dismantling of the country’s state-capitalist model that had prevailed there since the 1952 Bolivian Revolution.

Sachs’s “shock therapy” calls for drastically cutting inflation by scrapping all subsidies, price controls, restrictions on exports, imports and private business activity. The scheme also calls for linking each restructured country’s economy with a more global currency.

Sachs’s remedy for Bolivia, however, had dire consequences.

The Sachs plan did beat the country’s inflation, but the price was continuing high unemployment, economic stagnation, labor revolt, a state of siege and deepening involvement in the international drug market, reports noted.

The Bolivian government imposed a state of siege in response to a wave of strikes.

Sachs sits on the board of the Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking. This past April, Sachs keynoted INET’s annual meeting, which took place in the mountains of Bretton Woods, N.H. The gathering took place at Mount Washington Hotel, famous for hosting the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference - commonly known as the Bretton Woods conference – in 1944. That conference’s goal was to rebuild a post-World War II international monetary system. The April gathering had a similar stated goal – a global economic restructuring.

Besides his role at INET, Sachs, a special adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is founder and co-president of the Soros-funded Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization that says it is dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger.

With $50 million in capital from Soros, Millennium promotes a global economy while urging cooperation and investment from international banks and the United Nations Development Program.

Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York’s 770-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2-4 p.m. His new website is KleinOnline.com.