Michaela Whitton | ANTIMEDIA

United Kingdom —Dubbed the “jihadist’s drug,” Captagon is rapidly flooding the Middle East and is said to be fueling the bloody conflict in Syria. French media recently reported that the Paris attackers may have taken the drug.

Last weekend, Turkish anti-narcotics police seized 11 million Captagon pills in a haul that weighed almost two tons. It was set to ship to Gulf countries. Widely banned since the mid-eighties, the pills provide a cheap and long-lasting high and are highly addictive. They also have the potential to cause psychosis and brain damage.

The production of the drug, which keeps fighters awake over long periods of time, is said to be providing income for all factions involved in the Syrian war.

During the last year, shipments of Captagon have been seized on the way to the West Bank, Jordan, Sudan, Syria and the Gulf. In October, Anti-Media reported on a Saudi prince who was arrested for trying to smuggle two tons of the drug onto a plane.

As Syria has been engulfed in war, smugglers of the little-known, highly addictive pills have been forced to find alternate routes through Lebanon.

Lebanese journalist Radwan Mortada has spent 10 years investigating crime, corruption, and the war in Syria. In his documentary for Journeyman Pictures, The Drug Fueling Conflict in Syria, Mortada follows the Captagon trail, from users on the battlefields to traffickers on Lebanese smuggling routes to the kingpins at the top of the supply chain.

“There was no fear anymore”

Since the Syrian war began, police in the region have continued to seize record-breaking numbers of the pills. Lebanon’s biggest haul to date was a whopping 50 million tablets with a street value of $300 million, weighing over 4 tons, en route to Dubai.

In Mortada’s documentary, men in Beirut are shown crushing the pills and chopping them into lines. They describe the effects as “better than cocaine” and “really strong and like morphine — for really strong pains.” Their experience points to why Captagon has become the drug of choice for some Syrian fighters.

“There was no fear anymore after I took Captagon,” one ex-fighter said.

“It stops you feeling anything, you know? It makes you numb, numb,” said another, who described the first time he took the drug as making him feel physically fit.

“If there were 10 people in front of you, you could catch them and kill them. You’re awake all the time,” he said.

Since 2013, Captagon smuggling in Lebanon has skyrocketed. The Syrian war has not only pushed smuggling through the country, but has allowed gangs to set up makeshift Captagon factories in the country itself.

Mortada’s documentary is the first time an illegal factory has ever been filmed. It shows the pills being packaged and disguised in packets of tissues. Factory workers reveal that they use vegetables, bread, and hair gel for smuggling in Lebanon’s home-grown Captagon trade.

Shia militant group Hezbollah—currently fighting in Syria for the Assad regime—has also been accused of being involved in the trade after two factories were discovered on its premises.

“Standing on their feet”

On the surface, Abu Zeus looks just like a wealthy businessman, but he has been funding Captagon factories for years. He fled Syria when the war began and now resides in Europe. It took Mortada months to persuade him to be interviewed.

Described as being at the top of the supply chain, Abu Zeus boasts on camera of a $6 million profit last year from trading the small pills. The Syrian brigades that have publicly named him as a benefactor number in the thousands, according to Mortada.

Opposed to both the regime and jihadist groups, Abu Zeus brags of keeping the secular groups in Syria “standing on their feet.’’ He boasts of ‘supporting’ around 12,000 armed men.

He claims the Saudis love the drug because of the country’s alcohol ban and admits that selling to them has made him a great deal of money. He’s adamant that his drug profits counter the money from Saudi Arabia that he believes is funding jihadist groups and destroying Syria:

“The truth is that the country that exports terrorism to the Middle East and the protector of terrorism is Saudi Arabia,” he said.

He continued: “The fight is not a revolution anymore, it is a fight between seculars and Salafists — a fight between countries.”

Going some way towards explaining why Captagon is tailor-made for the battlefield—and why some have come to rely on the drug after five years of fighting—another fighter described the drug’s effects. He was frank:

“You don’t have any problems. You don’t even thinking about sleeping or leaving the checkpoint. It gives you great courage and power,” he said.

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European leaders talk about two things these days; preserving European values by taking in Muslim migrants and integrating Muslim migrants into Europe by getting them to adopt European values.

It does not occur to them that their plan to save European values depends on killing European values.

The same European values that require Sweden, a country of less than 10 million, to take in 180,000 Muslim migrants in one year also expects the new “Swedes” to celebrate tolerance, feminism and gay marriage. Instead European values have filled the cities of Europe with Shariah patrols, unemployed angry men waving ISIS flags and the occasional public act of terror.

European countries that refuse to invest money in border security instead find themselves forced to invest money into counterterrorism forces. And those are bad for European values too.

But, as Central European countries are discovering, European values don’t have much to do with the preservation of viable functioning European states. Instead they are about the sort of static Socialism that Bernie Sanders admires from abroad. But even a Socialist welfare state requires people to work for a living. Maine’s generous welfare policies began collapsing once Somali Muslims swarmed in to take advantage of them. Denmark and the Dutch, among other of Bernie Sanders’ role models, have been sounding more like Reagan and less like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

image: https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BIN-OpEd-Experts-300×2501.png

Two years ago, the Dutch King declared that, “The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.” That same year, the Danish Finance Minister called for the “modernization of the welfare state.”

But the problem isn’t one of modernization, it’s medievalization.

27% of Moroccans and 21% of Turks in the Netherlands are unemployed. It’s 27% in Denmark for Iraqis. And even when employed, their average income is well below the European average.

Critics pointed out in the past that a multicultural America can’t afford the welfare states that European countries have. Now that those same countries are turning multicultural, they can’t afford them either.

Europe invested in the values of its welfare state. The Muslim world invested in large families. Europe expects the Muslim world to bail out its shrinking birth rate by working and paying into the system so that its aging population can retire. The Muslim migrants however expect Europe to subsidize their large families with its welfare state while they deal some drugs and chop off some heads on the side.

Once again, European values are in conflict with European survival.

The European values that require Europe to commit suicide are about ideology, not language, culture or nationhood. But the incoming migrants don’t share that ideology. They have their own Islamic values.

Why should 23-year-old Mohammed work for four decades so that Hans or Fritz across the way can retire at 61 and lie on a beach in Mallorca? The idea that Mohammed would ever want to do such a thing out of love for Europe was a silly fantasy that European governments fed their worried citizens.

Mohammed doesn’t share European values. Nor are they likely to take hold of him no matter how often the aging teachers, who hope he gets a job and subsidizes their retirement, try to drill them into his head. Europeans expect Mohammed to become a Swede or a German as if he were some child they had adopted from an exotic country and raised as their own, and work to subsidize their European values.

The Muslim migrants are meant to be the retirement plan for an aging Europe. They’re supposed to keep its ramshackle collection of economic policies, its welfare states and social programs rolling along.

But they’re more like a final solution.

Mohammed is Fritz’s retirement plan. But Mohammed has a very different type of plan. Fritz is counting on Mohammed to work while he relaxes. Mohammed relaxes and expects Fritz to work.  Fritz is not related to him and therefore Mohammed sees no reason why he should work to support him.

European social democracy reduces society to a giant insurance plan in which money is pooled together.  But insurance is forbidden in Islam which considers it to be gambling. European social democracy expects him to bail it out, but to Mohammed, European values are a crime against Islam. Mohammed’s Imam will tell him to work off the books because paying into the system is gambling. However taking money out of the system is just Jizya; the money non-Muslims are obligated to pay to Muslims. Under Islamic law, it’s better for Mohammed to sell drugs than to pay taxes.

That’s why drug dealing and petty crime are such popular occupations for Salafis in Europe. It’s preferable to steal from infidels than to participate in the great gamble of the European welfare state.

Mohammed isn’t staking his future on the shaky pensions of European socialism. He invests in what social scientists call social capital. He plans his retirement by having a dozen kids. If this lifestyle is subsidized by infidel social services, so much the better. And when social services collapse, those of his kids who aren’t in prison or in ISIS will be there to look after him in his golden years.

As retirement plans go, it’s older and better than the European model.

Mohammed doesn’t worry much about the future. Even if he doesn’t make it past six kids, by the time he’s ready to retire the European country he’s living in will probably be an Islamic State. And he is confident that whatever its arrangements are, they will be better and more just than the infidel system.

Sweden will take in 180,000 migrants this year. Germany may take in 1.5 million. Most of them will be young men following the Mohammed retirement plan.

Europeans are being assured that the Mohammeds will balance out the demographic disparity of an aging population with too many retirees and too few younger workers. But instead the Mohammeds will put even more pressure on the younger workers who not only have to subsidize their elders, but millions of Mohammeds, their multiple brides and their fourteen child Islamic retirement plans.

Retirement ages will go further up and social services for the elderly will be cut. The welfare state will collapse, but it will have to be kept running because the alternative will be major social unrest.

Among the triggers of the Arab Spring were rising wheat prices and cuts to food subsidies. Prices went up and governments fell as street riots turned into civil wars. Imagine a Sweden where 50 percent of the young male population is Muslim, mostly unemployed, turning into Syria when the economy collapses and the bill comes due. Imagine European Muslim street riots where the gangs have heavy artillery and each ghetto Caliph has his own Imams and Fatwas to back up his claims.

Europe is slowly killing itself in the name of European values. It’s trying to protect its economic setup by bankrupting it. European values have become a suicide pact. Its politicians deliver speeches explaining why European values require mass Muslim migration that make as little sense as a lunatic’s suicide note.

Islamic values are not compatible with European values. Not only free speech and religious freedom, but even the European welfare state is un-Islamic. Muslims have a high birth rate because their approach to the future is fundamentally different than the European one. Europeans have chosen to have few children and many government agencies to take care of them. Muslims choose to have many children and few government agencies. The European values so admired by American leftists have no future.

Europe is drinking rat poison to cure a cold. Instead of changing its values, it’s trying to maintain them by killing itself. The Mohammed retirement plan won’t save European Socialism. It will bury it.

Reprinted with author’s permission from Sultan Knish Blog

This is the first of two-part series on America’s unspoken war with Islam.

America’s presidential candidates dance around the question: Do black lives matter? The progressives monitor every written word, blog or tweet for something they can use against a Republican candidate. And to their shame, the Republicans do not fight back.

We are a year from the presidential election and black representatives in the Democratic Party have set sail on a tailwind of black anger stemming from past mistreatment, income inequalities and finally justifiable shootings by police officers of African-American criminals. It is a perfect storm for President Barack Obama, who is playing out his presidency. His focus is on his legacy, specifically as defender in chief of black rights.

Ask yourself the question that Obama never asks, nor do those who have found race-baiting is an effective way to frame almost any argument and win: Do white lives matter?

If a white person answers “yes” or that “all lives matter,” ipso facto he is a racist. Republicans, having lost the country conscience when President Ronald Reagan left office, have acquiesced to the Democrats for a quarter of a century until we have reached a point where independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, is running with the leaders in this presidential race.

The country has veered to the left because of white guilt; and even though she is white, Hillary Clinton has the playbook down with the backing of the major media. To grasp the golden ring, Clinton and other Democrats continue to spell out how black lives have more merit than white lives.

Like Obama, Clinton refuses to acknowledge the greatest threat to America.

With apologies to presidential candidate Sanders, the answer is not climate change. The long-term threat to America is Islam. Our government knows it know, or at least Obama and Clinton should know it.

One year ago, Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in which she said America should “empathize” and show “respect.”

As reported by Fox News, Clinton said America must become a “smart power.” She then urged America to use “every possible tool and partner” to advance peace and included “leaving no one on the sidelines, showing respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view.”

It is as if U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens could have talked his way out of the Sept. 11, 2012 onslaught in Libya. And despite all her hand-wringing over that attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Clinton’s inane appeasement argument is the attack was spurred on by a despicable video that slandered Muhammad. This demonstrates her ignorance of Islamic ambitions, despite being Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

It always feels to me that when violence is perpetrated against Westerners, Obama and now Clinton feel compelled to say that the victims are somehow to blame. Such was the case regarding the Islamist murders of the French satirical writers at the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Last January, CBS News ran the headline: “White House questioned French magazine’s ‘judgment’ in 2012 for publishing naked Muhammad cartoon.” It was about former White House press secretary Jay Carney who, two years before the attack, said that the magazine had gone too far in lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

Then came the slaughter early this year in which the White House doubled down on its theory that the best way to win this undeclared global war with Islam is the way Clinton prescribes, by winning their understanding.

We need a president who understands all American lives matter

As blood was washed from the streets of France, it too seemed to be washed from the president’s mind. Most people would have thought that the American president would join with more than 40 other world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the march and rally that drew over a million people to remember those who lost their lives at Charlie Hebdo. But not in attendance were Obama, Vice President Joe Biden or even Secretary of State John Kerry, despite his close connections to France. It was hardly the response Team Obama showed when he was front and center at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, whom Obama referred to as “Dada,” a man he met once in 2005 but a man who inspired Obama to do good things. Obama has never mentioned that Dada had a rap sheet; he had pleaded guilty to 156 acts of public violence, including mobilizing terrorist bombing campaigns that planted bombs in public places such as the Johannesburg railway station bombing, which resulted in the deaths of women and children.

We have been told that black lives matter, and the implication is white lives don’t matter as much. This raises a terrible possibility: that if Clinton wins the presidency, her administration will proclaim Muslim lives matter.

In fact, Muslim lives probably mean more to us than they do to Muslims. Syria and Iraq are the most barbarous regions in the world. And yet the butchery continues unabated as does the Islamic goal to dominate the world.

The long-term goal of tens of millions of Muslims is to eradicate Judeo-Christian society, just as Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution was to eradicate the Jews of Europe. We are in the calm before the storm. As Winston Churchill was dismissed in the early 1930s, so will others today for being fear mongers. But keep in mind that like the Nazis there are growing legions of Muslims that are prepared to die for Allah, and it isn’t a group of extremists we need to treat better.

The unholy war is already upon us

My closest friend for more than 30 years finished up a teaching stint in Saudi Arabia, where he taught mostly the children of Saudi aristocrats at a school I called the Alamo. It was a compound surrounded by 12-foot-high walls with additional safety for the mostly Western teachers provided by Western contractors manning machine-gun turrets. While American teenagers’ most revered person living or dead might be Justin Bieber, the person picked by his Saudi students was Adolf Hitler. The same man who exterminated 6 million Jews and started a war that resulted in more than 60 million dead is revered by rich Saudi kids 70 years after his death. And while all the kiddies love American technology, most loathe America itself. They are not alone in the Muslim world. There are between 1.3 and 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. ACT! for America’s president and founder Brigitte Gabriel claimed earlier that 15 to 25 percent of them are “Muslims dedicated to the destruction of Western civilization.”

She concluded that somewhere between 180 million and 300 million Muslims want to destroy the West. This is unrealistic, as you cannot count infants, the old or the infirm bent on much but their own survival. Polls I have read from separate countries say the actual number of radicals able and willing to enter combat is roughly 10 percent of Gabriel’s estimate. Yet it still comes to a startling total of 20 million Muslims who are willing to die so as to institute Sharia law in Christian countries. For comparison, Germany had a population 81 million at the onset of World War II with less than 5 million men under arms. Keeping in mind that at the time Germany had the most mechanized army in the world and that its command and control were far superior to the Western allies’, even 20 million Islamists in Toyota pickups fighting against themselves may raise eyebrows but not alarm bells.

But the Islamists are not idiots. Many in Afghanistan and Iraq have spent much of their lives in combat. And no leader worth of his goat would engage in a conventional war against the United States or any Western power. However, a guerrilla warfare like that which was perfected by Ho Chi Minh would have far different consequences. With Ho’s devout and willing-to-die believers, his original force of 10,000 men fought to a draw two superpowers, France and the United States, for almost 30 years. In the face of vastly superior numbers, technology and training, Ho prevailed.

The first brush wars between Islam and America that have been ongoing for 14 years are not comforting. And while Arab lands lay far away, American targets are all over in a world that seems to shrink each year. What it means is that the United States faces a real challenge that our leaders are going to have to face and then proclaim: America is at war.

If elected, Clinton will prove to be one of the worst presidents in American history.

Clinton may wish “respect for one’s enemies.” But as anyone who has ever been in a street fight knows, respect hits the bricks when the first punch is thrown. Sept. 11, 2001 was the first punch. And while America shook it off, many more shock waves are coming. And, frankly, America cannot defend itself adequately with Hillary Clinton as our commander in chief.

I will follow up more next week with details including the Islamic threat to our futures and how the next president must unite the country rather than exacerbate the racist split in America characterized by stupid slogans like “black lives matter.” Our leaders need to wake up; we are facing an enemy where many of the followers believe no lives matter.

Yours in good times and bad,

–John Myers