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Sri Lanka & the Easter Sunday Massacre: A Critical Analysis…

Sri Lanka terrorist attack

The terrorist attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka were absolutely horrendous.

The death-toll has been enormous. And the fact that the attacks occurred on Easter Sunday specifically – and were primarily targeting innocent Christian worshippers – was clearly intended to spell out what these acts of mass murder were about.

At least, that’s the impression that they (whoever organised these evil attacks) were hoping to create. But while the ‘War on Christianity’ meme has inevitably gone into overdrive, let’s just pull back for a moment and look a little more critically at the situation.

The church attacks were clearly targeting Christians and Christianity: no doubts about that. Which immediately lends itself, on the surface, to having been a basic Islamist act of terrorism: it would be in keeping with various other attacks elsewhere, such as acts against Coptic Christians in Egypt, etc.

However, a lot of people in the West don’t realise that the cultural dynamics in that region – including in Sri Lanka, India, China, or somewhere like Myanmar – are not the same dynamics or demographics as in the Middle East. While Islamist terrorism is rampant in parts of the Middle East, the majority of previous attacks on Christian places of worship in Sri Lanka have in fact been carried out by Buddhist extremists.

To elaborate briefly on some of the regional dynamics, there is an ongoing persecution of Christian and Muslim minorities in China, as one example: and a persecution of Muslims in Myanmar (or even ethnic cleansing, according to some sources).

My point being that Sri Lanka is not Syria – the dynamics aren’t the same: and a lot of people (especially the propaganda swallowers in some Western circles, most of who couldn’t point out Sri Lanka on a map until Sunday) don’t seem to realise this, but seem to only want to focus on the manufactured ‘clash of civilisations’ paradigm (basically, The Crusades Part II – or the idea of the Muslim East vs the Christian West).

We’ll circle back to that propaganda side of it, because it’s clearly a big part of how these Sri Lanka atrocities are being used as psy-op fodder (outside of Sri Lanka): but first, let’s just deal with some important details.

The authorities in Sri Lanka initially blamed the attack on a very obscure group called ‘NTJ‘ (‘National Thowheeth Jama’ath’): an Islamist terror group. Said group didn’t actually claim responsiblity for the attacks – and it’s always curious when the terrorists don’t claim responsibility, because the whole point of a terror attack is to claim responsiblity.

The attacks in Sri Lanka were very well coordinated; with multiple attacks in multiple locations apparently happening at precisely the same time.

As has been noted, however, ‘NTJ’ is very small and is unlikely to have carried out such a coordinated act on its own. The group, according to most reports, is known to have links to foreign countries.

We can look at two of those foreign countries here.

Adam Garrie, writing in Eurasia Future, notes that ‘As the Muslim population of Sri Lanka is less than 8% of the country’s entire population, it is difficult to conceive that any genuine local Islamist group would seek to stage such massive attacks when the possibility of any material gain would be limited by the fact that… the population of Muslims is incredibly small.’

That’s not to say this Islamist group didn’t carry out the attacks: but you have to ask why extremists from one minority (Muslims) would attack people from another minority (Christians) in Sri Lanka. Who is supposed to benefit from that?

As of writing this, it’s now being reported that the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack. But what does that mean, really? If ‘ISIS’ is – at least in part – an intelligence-community psy-op or pawn, then this doesn’t mean anything.

In his article, Garrie writes, ‘It is highly likely that a foreign entity, most likely a foreign state or state intelligence agency, was behind the attacks and that the men on the ground who have been captured are merely pawns in a much larger and even more dangerous game.

For his part, he is clear on who should be implicated. ‘When it comes to seeking to pin-pointing the country with a clear motive for orchestrating the attacks, India is the one that springs immediately to mind‘, he writes.

India, as he notes, has a long history of seeking to manipulate politics and the balance of power in Sri Lanka in order to, as he writes, ‘turn the country into something of an Indian protectorate.’


Before continuing with the subject of Indian interference in Sri Lanka (and possible links to these terror attacks), let’s also take note of a second foreign link to the events in Colombo. It turns out that, four months ago, a key Indian ally – Israel – was training Sri Lankan emergency responders specifically for a mass-casualty terrorist attack in Colombo.


Clearly, they seemed to know a major terrorist act in Colombo was coming.

Which means that these Colombo attacks, like a number of terror incidents in various countries in recent times, were specifically drilled in advance.

Via Israel National News, we learn that ‘Sri Lankan emergency teams responding to a string of deadly bombings across the island nation were trained in part by Israel, in a special program to prepare first responders in the Sri Lankan capital to handle a variety of large-scale disasters – including multiple terror attacks…’

Again: ‘According to a spokesman for the United Hatzalah emergency responder organization, earlier this year, Israeli rescue teams from United Hatzalah traveled to the Sri Lankan capital city of Colombo to train local teams to prepare them for possible mass-casualty incidents, including mega-terror attacks. The program, a joint effort of the American Jewish Committee and United Hatzalah, began in December 2018 and continued into January, with training programs in both India and Sri Lanka…’

We can come back to that detail (and what it implies) in a moment: but let’s carry on with India for the moment.

This perception of India interfering in Sri Lanka is ongoing, in fact. If India did have anything to do with these terrorist atrocities, we should put in context with other recent events.

Just months ago, an Indian man was arrested for possible links to an alleged plot to assassinate Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena.

Marceli Thomas was arrested following a complaint by a Namal Kumara (reportedly representing the “Anti-Corruption Force”), who had alleged there was a plot to assassinate the president and a former top defence ministry bureaucrat. He also claimed that the senior officer in charge of the police’s counter terrorism division had been the mastermind of the plot: it led to the novel scenario of the senior counter-terrorism officer being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act!

While, as far as I can ascertain, most of this drama seems to have dissipated and key people have apparently backtracked from their statements, it’s worth noting this was only a few months ago.

It was also reported that a Sri Lankan minister, who declined to be named, had claimed that the president had said India’s external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) was behind the plot. Meanwhile, some leftist leaders in Sri Lanka had warned about a ‘fascist conspiracy’ unfolding in Sri Lanka.

So, with Indian interference in Sri Lanka well established, along with the Indian intelligence community’s past instances of staging terror attacks to be blamed on Islamists (specifcally from Pakistan), and coupling this with the general perception that this ‘NTJ’ terror group in Sri Lanka is too small and ill-equpped to have carried out such an attack on its own, you inevitably have to ask the question of whether Indian agencies are playing games in Sri Lanka.

Citing the previous record of Indian agencies staging apparent Islamist attacks to blame on Pakistan, Garrie, in his Eurasia Future piece, suggests the ‘bodies of the terrorists must be examined to determine whether they are circumcised or not. This is crucial as previous Indian false flag attacks have involved non-circumcised men (therefore not Muslims) participating in allegedly Islamist attacks whilst also, previous false flag attacks in India allegedly involving Pakistanis were later exposed due to the fact that the “Pakistani” suspects could not speak Urdu or any other official Pakistani language but instead spoke in languages and vernaculars common only to India…’

This Easter Sunday massacre also occurs against a continuing backdrop of geo-political controversy involving an extreme government in India (which is currently in the midst of highly controversial and toxic elections): we just had, for one thing, the flare-up between India and Pakistan, involving a terror attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir and a very curious Indian air-force attack on a Pakistani terror camp that various observers have said didn’t actually exist in the location that was bombed (see here).


So, right off the bat, that’s India and Israel with questions to answer about what some of their agencies have been doing in Sri Lanka.


Also, if Israel had agencies in Sri Lanka helping prepare for mass-casualty terror attacks – and we’re being told that the Sri Lankan authorities had advance warnings about a terror attack (as early as April 4th)why were the Christian worshippers and the churches not either protected or given the same warnings?

Again, the question (as always) is ‘Who Benefits?’ Does a tiny terror group with no real prospects benefit from staging a massive massacre of Christian worshippers? Does a small Muslim minority in Sri Lanka have anything to gain from that?

It’s entirely possible, of course, that this tiny, relatively unheard-of group (perhaps delegating for the Islamic State group) were just rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth jihadists who had no bigger agenda or thought-process other than to mass-murder Christians in churches or guests in hotels. It’s not as if suicide-bombers are high-IQ people.

But you’d still have to ask why both Israeli and Indian agencies seemed to know long in advance that something on this scale was coming: some of the Israeli agencies’ ‘training’ work was going on in India as well as Sri Lanka and it was the Indian authorities, we’re told, who warned the Sri Lankans about a terror attack.

Meanwhile, along with cultural and religious tensions, conspiracy theories and paranoia also appear to have been rampant in Sri Lanka, with the government previously having actually conducted investigations into international NGO’s operating in the country, which were being accused specifically of a ‘conspiracy to create religious disharmony‘.

Those accusations appear to have originated with the Buddhist majority: but it nevertheless raises questions about whether there is or has been some kind of manipulation going on to aggravate sectarian problems.

If there is or was any real operation to aggravate religious tensions in Sri Lanka (whether it involves those NGOs or whether it involves India, Israel or any other foreign manipulator), it would be pretty diabolical – given the country’s history of sectarian and religious bloodshed and civil war (and the risk, therefore, of a similar eruption of violence in the future).

But we know there are psychotic forces in the world who are willing to let things like that happen – just witness what was allowed to unfold in Syria, for example.

 Christians in Syria 

Pitting Muslims and Christians against each other is nothing new: neither is using Christian or Muslim communities as pawns or sacrificial lambs for larger agendas. In Sri Lanka, both Christians and Muslims are minority communities.

Again, if the authorities had advance warning of terror attacks – and the Israeli instructors were specifically preparing first responders for large-scale terror attacks specifically in Colombo – that almost suggests those people in the churches were knowingly left there to be victims.


Also, this operation to manufacture or aggravate religious or cultural disharmony isn’t limited to Sri Lanka, of course: it’s going on in lots of places, including in our own Western societies. Which means what happened in Sri Lanka isn’t only about Sri Lanka, but is deliberately incorporated into what is now an international propaganda war.


As a case in point, even these church attacks in Sri Lanka have been spun by the usual alt-right (and elite-funded) propagandists in the West as part of a coordinated attack on Christianity being led by Muslims.

Clearly, there’s a perception-management operation in play to create that impression: these disgusting church attacks happened on Easter Sunday, and followed a week on from the legendary Notre Dame cathedral in Paris suffering major damage – an incident which was also being spun by online alt-right BS merchants as a Muslim attack on Christianity.

You could also include the Christchurch massacre in that equation, as an example of the same game being played from the other side – the point being to create this Holy War or Clash of Civilisations perception.

The wild conspiracy claims that Notre Dame was an Islamist or ‘migrant’ attack or that multiple churches had also been attacked at the same time were clearly BS being put out to inflame outrage – but then to have these horrific church bombings in Sri Lanka happen a week later (on Easter Sunday, no less), someone is clearly trying to manufacture a perceived attack on Christianity by Muslims – in order to play up the perceived civilisational clash psy-op.

My reference earlier to ‘The Crusades, Part II’ wasn’t just sarcasm: if you pay attention to the various trends among the ‘alt-right’, the Far Right or whatever-else they’re calling themselves in various parts of the Internet, you’ll note a growing use of Crusader symbolism and tropes and association with things like the Knights Templar (including with the supposed Christchurch killer).

 Notre Dame Cathedral on fire, 2019 

Someone is going to a lot of trouble to evoke these things and create these paradigms. In that context, the evocative image of the medieval Notre Dame cathedral burning was an absolute god-send: which is why it was milked for all it was worth by the online psy-op community.

For the record, if there was any foul-play in the Notre Dame scenario, it was probably a way to deflect all attention away from the Yellow Vests crisis and the fact that Macron – on that very evening – was supposed to be presenting his decisive speech on how to resolve the ongoing protests and unrest (which he backed out of, using Notre Dame as the excuse).

Christianity actually is under attack in certain places. Certainly these atrocities in Sri Lanka are one example. Another is the ongoing persecution of both Christians and Muslims in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region (which I touched on here).

And, certainly, we can say that Christians were very much under attack in those parts of Syria and Iraq where they were being driven out of their communities by the Islamic State group and the other Salafist terror outfits in 2014 – but then the Islamic State group was being backed by foreign (including Western powers) in the first place; and the Christian and Muslim communities in those places were living perfectly happily together for centuries prior to all of that.

The point being that it wasn’t any kind of in-built inability of different religions to live peacefully with each other – it was a case of societal breakdown and sectarian division being deliberately manufactured or aggravated from the outside. Those Christian communities in Syria or Iraq were expendable, sacrificial pawns – and you have to wonder whether those Christians in the churches in Sri Lanka are something similar.

A manufactured ‘clash of civilisations’ – and a manufactured perception – is very different to a genuine religious or cultural war: although, of course, if it goes on for long enough and spans enough societies, it pretty much becomes the same thing anyway.

And maybe that’s the plan. It wouldn’t be new.

 


Read more:The Christchurch Massacre: And the Perpetual Motion Machine’ , ‘India/Pakistan – What the Hell Just Happened?‘, ‘Islamist Extremists and White Supremacists: The Coming ‘Civil War’ Psy-Op‘, ‘The Middle East & the Endless Conflict Equation‘, ‘The Destruction of the Cultural Heritage of Iraq & Syria‘…

See ALL ‘False-Flag Terror’ posts here.


S. Awan

Independent journalist. Pariah. Believer in human rights, human dignity and liberty. Musician. Substandard Jedi. All-round failure. And future ghost.

9 Comments

  1. “..At face value – devastating and disruptive terrorist attacks visited upon Sri Lanka – a nation that has recently and decisively pivoted from West to East and is now a major partner of Beijing’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative – is suspiciously coincidental…”

    http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2019/04/sri-lanka-us-saudi-terror-targets.html#more

    I think it was a multipurpose operation. Both for letting Muslims get even for Christchurch, so the angloamerican homelands/commonwealth would be less likely to be targeted.
    Second it was part of the usual chaoswar against the economy of imperial rivals.
    Delaying positive processes for India/Pakistan/China.

  2. Notre Dame attack was 15/4/19 = 1 (5+4)/19=1919, inverted = 6161. Where ‘1’ is a Hebrew Vav this is ‘6666’.

    • In the case of the Notre Dame attack all the statues of the Saints were removed and ‘beheaded’ two weeks prior to the ‘fire’.

      • The Sri Lankan authorities claimed the attack had been in preparation for 7-8 years. Ie since 2011-12.
        That doesnt mean it was being planned to attack right now. It was prepared in the event that it would be needed for contingencies like Christchurch.
        It is very likely that the Us/Uks arab spring and the clash of civilisations theme they were pushing entailed preparations for contingencies like Christchurch.
        Who benefits? In this case the Commonwealth nations since they are seen as allies and retribution for Christchurch might be targeted at any of them.
        By directing the controlled asset IS against a different christian target the apparent opponent Islam would be satisfied.
        Parallell:The Us shot down an Iranian airliner and then Lockerbie was the controlled retribution offered.

  3. There was comment posted on my blog last night from a citizen of Pakistan who thinks that groups based in his country, Pakistan, may have had a role in these attacks in Sri Lanka.

    Yes, the dynamics are different in south and in east Asia. Most Westerners know very little about the history and the current tensions of these regions. Thus, public opinion in the West can be very easily manipulated by the media pushing a misleading narrative.

    Christians are being targeted in the Middle East. And, Muslims also in these regime change wars that Washington engages in either directly with its military or by proxy. The small Christian minorities in Iraq (on the Nineveh Plain), and in Syria have been terrorized, killed and driven from their homes in the past several years. Yeah, sure, let us all blame ISIS, but where does ISIS gets its funding from? The Gulf oil states, and it gets support from the Mossad. The US has to stop serving Israeli interests in the region.

  4. I wonder how the earlier Tamil(~hindu)/Sinhalese(~buddhist) animosities come into the picture today. Before the british period there was apparently no conflicts between them.
    A century ago the british were playing them against each other to prevent them from uniting to liberate themselves. First the Tamils were positively discriminated by the colonial masters. After 1948 the Sinhalese have taken over as I understand it.
    In the 1980s Sri Lanka was torn appart by internal conflict.
    Tamil Tigers:

    “Founded in May 1976 by Velupillai Prabhakaran(killed in 2009 together with many of his cadres), it waged a secessionist nationalist insurgency”

    “After a 26-year military campaign, the Sri Lankan military defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, bringing the civil war to an end”

    Thus need for new conflicts, right? 🤔

    “Raj Rajaratnam ,ethnic Tamil (and Imperial stooge?) , the New York-based billionaire and hedge fund manager charged in an alleged insider trading scheme on Friday, was funding the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which is considered a terrorist group by the US, the Sri Lankan government claimed on Sunday.Oct 18, 2009”

    “As of February, 2018, Rajaratnam is incarcerated at Federal Medical Center, Devens in Ayer, Massachusetts, an administrative facility housing male offenders requiring specialized or long-term medical or mental health care. Rajaratnam’s release date is July 4, 2021.”

    ” His father was the head of the Singer Sewing Machine Co. in South Asia”
    “Rajaratnam’s family emigrated to England in 1971, ”
    “Rajaratnam started his career as a lending officer at Chase Manhattan Bank”
    I was just browsing around a bit, with no predetermined aim really.
    I suspect India is the primary target. Kashmir /Pakistan and Sri Lanka are suitable imperial nodes for that. But simultaneously India has motives for preemption.
    Israel, here highly visible, is not likely to be a prime mover.
    The malthusians want this region in particular to have its population count cut down.
    Clash of civilisations yes but a bit too obvious?
    India the primary target and with implications for Indian/Russian understanding? By blaming India for kiling christians.
    Enough of brainstorming fot now…

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