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* The editors of the Aden College website express their deep sorrow and offer their condolences to the family members of the late alumnus Farouk Mohd. Ali Luqman on his death in Saudi Arabia last month. May God rest his soul in peace.
* In its latest issue Arab News which was established and run by the late alumnus Farouk Luqman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for more than 20 years wrote an article on his death by saying ''Farouk Luqman, former editor-in-chief of Arab News, dies at 84.
Luqman was an outstanding columnist in Saudi and Arab media. He wrote more than 5,000 columns for Al-Eqtisadiah and Asharq Al-Awsat, sister publications of Arab News Family, friends and former colleagues mourned the death on Saturday of the distinguished journalist and author Farouk Luqman.
Luqman died in Jeddah after a prolonged illness. He was 84, and leaves three sons and two daughters.
“It is a very sad day for us at Arab News and for all those who knew Farouq as a friend and colleague,” said Faisal J. Abbas, Editor in Chief of Arab News, said. “We extend our sympathies to his family and loved ones and offer our full support, thoughts and prayers at this very difficult time for them.”
Read more of mouring here.
* Dr. Qais Ghanem wrote, ''Here is yet another  (third) fantastic review of my latest book, DEMOCRACY, DEITY & DEATH, a DISCUSSION BY 4 ARABS, this time by Elie Nasrallah, author of "Hostage to History" and co-author of "My Arab Spring My Canada."
''The Four Arabs''
‘’Taboos are absent from this masterpiece of current Arab catastrophic conditions. Search as long as you wish, no taboo will be found, and that is the genius of this timely and timeless book!
As someone who was born in Lebanon and educated during my adolescent years in the town of Zahle (chapter four), I found the reference to Sam as a brilliant metaphor for that alluring town and Lebanon as well.
The tribal references by Adonis are also relevant. One British general once remarked that “most states of the Arab world are tribes with flags except Egypt and Tunisia.”
Cafe Mocha is the cafe of the Arab world made easy, accessible and mandatory.
As someone who wrote a book titled “Hostage to History: The Cultural Collapse of the 21st Century Arab World,” I find this fictional narrative as compelling and pertinent as any factual description and academic examination of the ailing body politics of Arab decline.
In fiction and non-fiction books and studies, one fact becomes clear: To join modernity and renew their golden age, Arabs must adopt the workable solution of modernity; the separation of church/mosque from politics. That protects both domains and ensures freedom for all.
Democracy, deity, and fear of death are all examined in a surgical way that only a doctor like Qais Ghanem is capable of.
In my opinion, the book would have been even more compelling had it contained two men and two women of opposite views politically and religiously. One modern and liberal woman, and another conservative and ultra-religious.
Their debate would have added immensely to the emancipation of woman as the book envisions and aims toward. There shall be no taboo...!!!
Elie M Nasrallah, author of “Hostage to History: The Cultural Collapse of the 21st Arab World.”
If you are interested in acquiring the book look for this link.
* The Oman News Centre posted a video of the Muscat International Ophthalmology Conference which was held in Oman in March 2019. In it Dr.  Ghazi Omar Al Zubaidi who graduated from Aden College, lives now in Oman. He was honoured with an award in Muscat International Ophthalmology Conference which was launched to coincide with the achievements of the pioneer scientist Dr. Bin Omira, an Omani ophthalmologist who lived in the 15th century.
Dr. Al Zubaidi joined the hospital in Oman and introduced endoscopy services in 1987 and later worked as a Consultant in the Gastroenterology Department where he had tremendous efforts in advancing the introduction of medical equipment in the Omani health system.
Watch the video here.
* Dr. Shihab Ghanem received a plaque from The Global Examination Board of Indian Art and Culture for his significant contribution in the field of Social Services throughout the world.
Dr. Ghanem has also received a certificate in recognition of his contributions in the field of literature specially in poetry, Hindusthan Art and Music society.
* Almunus Farooq Murshed sent an email about a book by a German author F. William Engdahl.  The author said about the book, "I want to share a portion of my latest book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance. The world today is being increasingly manipulated by NATO- directed mainstream media, often using the new mantra, “fake news,” which but thinly disguises what is becoming an Orwellian censorship unimaginable even a decade ago. Here I take up one of the most insidious and most effective instruments of creating regime change to the advantage of select Western interests, most directly tied to the mega-banks of Wall Street and the military industrial complex those banks control. In the 19th Century an ideology was promoted by certain leading circles around the Adams family and others that the United States of America had a divine mission, a “manifest destiny,” God-given, to spread its dominion over the entire globe. Since the Ronald Reagan presidency, that Manifest Destiny has been advanced through a collection of government-connected NGOs, above all the National Endowment for Democracy and the Soros Open Society Foundations, fostering an insidious form of what is called democracy and in fact is cognitive dissonance. The following taken from the introduction will hopefully make you curious enough to venture buying the entire book. Legislation is being debated today in the European Union and in Washington that very soon could eliminate the most important platform of open, free discourse, the unregulated Internet.
Freedom is Slavery:Destroying Nations in the Name of Democracy.
In 1945, British writer and social critic George Orwell wrote a book titled 1984 on the theme of a fictional totalitarian society.
The book, one of the most successful in publishing history, relates the aftermath of an atomic world war in which the world is partitioned into three states. One state, Oceania, whose capital is London, is ruled by an English Socialist Party that has total control over all its citizens, especially over their minds. The central mind-control program used to keep its citizens abject and obedient mind slaves was referred to as “doublethink.”
In doublethink, subjects were submitted to two contradictory concepts, both of which they must accept as correct simultaneously, termed by psychologists “cognitive dissonance.” So, although Oceania is constantly at war, its citizens act as if there is peace too. The essence of the doublethink is summarized by Orwell at the beginning of the novel:War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.[1]
In the following work I chronicle what, in truth, is an adaptation of Orwell’s doublethink which might be termed “democracy as cognitive dissonance.” It’s the chronicle of one of the most destructive and one of the most effective operations by the intelligence services of any modern state, including of that of Stalin’s Soviet Union or even Hitler’s Goebbels-steered Third Reich. It’s the chronicle of a vast project developed by US intelligence services over decades, going back to the May 1968 CIA student strikes that brought down French President Charles de Gaulle, a determined foe of American global domination.
The Cold War between the countries of NATO and those allied to the Soviet Union lasted nearly a half century. Finally, exhausted and economically in dire straits, the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, raised a white flag of surrender in November 1989, as Moscow let the Berlin Wall fall. The wall had become the symbol of what Winston Churchill, in his famous 1946 Fulton, Missouri–speech, called the Iron Curtain dividing the West--the “Free World” as Washington propaganda was fond of ever repeating from the communist world dominated by Moscow. Outside a small circle of US CIA, State Department, and Pentagon senior officials, together with their allies in select Washington think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute or the New York Council on Foreign Relations, what few realized was that Washington was about to unleash the most concerted effort at regime change across the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and the newly formed Russian Federation itself. The rallying call was the “introduction of US-style democracy, freedom, human rights, a neo-liberal free market.” It was to become a tyranny and in some cases, such as Ukraine, it would be far worse than anything experienced under the Soviet regime.
The Washington regime-change operations came to be called “color revolutions” because of the distinct Madison Avenue color-logo themes each destabilization brought with it, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Green Revolution in Iran, and so forth. Invariably, they targeted any significant nation that stood in the way of what David Rockefeller, in his Memoirs, referred to as a one-world government or Bill Clinton, in the 1990s, referred to by the innocent sounding term but not-so-innocent process of corporate globalization.[2]
In truth, what those Washington color revolution regime-change interventions represented was an attempt to replace former communist leaders with handpicked, Washington-corrupted political leaders who would be willing to sell their national crown jewels and their people to select Western financial predators, such as the billionaire speculator George Soros or Western bankers and multinational corporations.
The Aura of American Power
Ironically, the greatest challenge confronting Washington, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the powerful military, industrial and banking lobby groups, who control congressmen and presidents with their money, was the end of the active Cold War in late 1989. There was suddenly no “enemy” to justify continued vast US military spending or the existence of NATO.
James R. Schlesinger, former US defense secretary and later CIA director, described the dilemma: “American policy makers should be quite clear in their own minds that the basis for determining US force structure and military expenditures in the future should not simply be the response to individual threats, but rather that which is needed to maintain the overall aura of American power.”[3] At the end of the 1980s, the economy and financial system of the US was in the throes of its deepest crisis since the Great Depression. The largest banks of Wall Street—Citigroup, Bank of America, and others—were technically bankrupt. The deregulation of US Savings & Loan banks had led to a real estate speculation bubble that collapsed in the late 1980s, at the same time as a dramatic fall in world oil prices led to waves of bankruptcies across the US domestic oil industry.
To demand that US taxpayers continue to waste hundreds of billions of their tax dollars on high levels of defense spending for an enemy that could no longer be identified, rather than to create a “peace dividend” that would allow those billions to go to the renewal of America’s rapidly decaying economic infrastructure, was a challenge to the US military and intelligence establishment. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell told Army Times in April 1991: “Think hard about it, I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. . . I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”[4]
That dilemma was soon to be resolved.
Rather than solely relying on military overt force to advance its global agenda, Washington unveiled a dramatic new weapon: “fake democracy” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that would be used to covertly create pro-Washington regimes in strategic parts of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Democratic freedom would be the banner, incredibly enough, to introduce a new tyranny: “free” markets in actual fact controlled by Wall Street and European global banks, as well as Western multinational corporations that would loot the vast state-owned resources of the collapsed communist world.
Weaponizing Human Right.
Instead of overt military confrontation, the 1990s, with the brutal exception of Washington’s war in Yugoslavia, were to see the major deployment of what was becoming a dramatically effective new weapon for US-steered, fake democracy regime changes around the world.
Anchor So-called “human rights” NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch financed by billionaire speculator George Soros, Freedom House, the International Republican Institute (IRI), Amnesty International USA, or the US government’s supposedly private National Endowment for Democracy (NED), were to become a primary Washington weapon for regime change to transform the newly independent states of formerly communist Eastern Europe and Russia as well. Later, Washington’s “fake democracy” color revolutions would be brought to China, Central Asia, and, most dramatically, to the oil-rich states of the Middle East as the so-called Arab Spring.
The goal was to turn the target countries into US economic satrapies, or vassal states, by way of a series of regime-change color revolutions. It took a while before the unsuspecting target nations realized what was being done to them and their economies in the name of US export of “democracy.”
The first successful fake democracy color revolution regime change was aimed at Slobodan Milošević, then president of what had become by 1999 former Yugoslavia—Serbia Vojvodina, Kosovo, and Montenegro.
We begin our investigation with a description of the birth of the NGO in Washington that was created with little fanfare by President Reagan’s CIA Director Bill Casey and others in the early 1980s. It was called the NED or National Endowment for Democracy. That NED has played the central role in every Washington-backed regime destabilization aimed at governments pursuing policies not congruent with those of Washington’s post–Cold War new globalization order.
Endnotes:
[1] George Orwell, 1984, cited in
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quote
s/g/georgeorwe141783.html
[2] David Rockefeller, Memoirs, p. 405,
http://opengov.ideascale.com/a/dtd/David-
Rockefeller-s-book-Memoirs-admits-secretly -conspiring-for-a-NWO/4007-4049.
The quote reads: “Some even believe we [Rockefeller family] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - One World, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
[3] Joe Stork, New Enemies for a New World Order, MER176,
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer176/new-
enemies-new-world-order?
ip_login_no_cache=e4b596febb56c8ddb4c
739f2806fd833
[4] William W. Kaufmann and John D.
Steinbruner, Decisions for Defense
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1991), p. 45
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