"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation then by deflation the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson. Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802) “When the Federal Reserve Act was passed the people of these United States did not perceive that a world banking system was being set up here. A super-state controlled by international bankers and international industrialists acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers but the truth is - The Fed has usurped the government!!” - Congressman Louis T. McFadden“Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.” - Barry Goldwater
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Days after she returned from. 23-year-old Melal al-Zubaidi and a friend went to the market on a pleasant night to eat ice cream. It was a short walk yet unthinkable only a month ago for a woman in the capital. Still her parents were nervous and Zubaidi wore a head scarf and an ankle-length skirt to avoid angering Islamic extremists.
The Zubaidis a Shiite Muslim family have yet to pass another boundary. When they fled Iraq five months ago a Sunni family took over their large house in Dora a sprawling neighborhood in southern Baghdad. When the Zubaidis returned this month they were too scared to ask the new occupants to leave. So they rented a small apartment in Mashtal a mostly Shiite district.
The downturn is a result of a confluence of factors: This year. 30,000 reinforcements were funneled into Baghdad and other areas. Sunni tribes and insurgents turned against the insurgent group and partnered with U. S forces to patrol neighborhoods and towns. Shiite cleric seeking to improve his movement's image ordered his militia to freeze operations.
But those freedoms still come with constraints. Weddings accompanied by honking cars and lively bands are reappearing on the streets but they still end before darkness falls.
Visits to relatives and friends across Baghdad are more possible but still hinge on which group or sect controls each neighborhood. Some stores are selling alcohol but fundamentalists watch for those who breach their codes.
Luay Hashimi. 31 returned to his house in Dora with his wife and three young children last month after fleeing to Syria nine months ago. Since then. 11 other relatives who also had left for Syria -- Sunnis like him -- have come back too.
Hashimi no longer sees bodies in the street when he opens his front door. Sunni extremists no longer man checkpoints to search his vehicle for alcohol or signs of collaboration with the government or the Americans. Roads are being paved and municipal workers are sprucing up parks and traffic circles. His patch of Dora is now a fortress surrounded by tall blast walls that separate entire blocks.
"It's totally secured," said Hashimi who was an intelligence officer during the government of. But a few days ago he drove across the main highway to another section of Dora. He felt a familiar fear. "You're lost there. You don't know who controls the area. Sunni or Shia. American soldiers or Iraqi security forces. It's still chaotic."
Her mother who once ran a preschool in Dora is worried over one of their former neighbors there. He encouraged them to leave their house because they were Shiites. And now he says he has a friend who wants to rent her preschool now shuttered. He insists the area is too dangerous for the family to return.
"He is always terrifying us. He told us there's always a storm after the calm," said Um Melal which means mother of Melal who said she feared having her name published. "We are suspicious. We can't go back although other Sunnis are telling us to come back and saying. 'We'll protect you.' "
Thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria. Jordan and other localities are "taking the midnight train to Baghdad" and other Iraqi cities some because of better security in their former neighborhoods due to the Bush Administration's "surge" tactics many because Syria and other countries are kicking them out and there is no other alternative but to return to Iraq. Fear and insecurity still reigns in some form or another in large measure despite the improved conditions if one calls Israeli style walls and barbed wire barriers improved "security". Homes and property that were taken from them before their exile have still not been returned. Neighborhoods that were once mixed and at peace are now violently segregated under a kind of Iraqi "Jim Crow" society with radical Islamic groups violently imposing medieval "sharia law" upon would be modern "secular" Muslims. I am sure many Iraqi people long for "the good ole days" under Saddam Hussein and who could blame them? But I am here to tell those returning Iraqi refugees to keep "the dream alive" of a better day in Iraq. Once beautiful Baghdad will be restored and a secure democratic and secular Muslim nation established if you and I and others only dare to "dream it and believe it". The Bush neo-con and al-queda occupation of your beloved Iraq will crumble under the weight of the evil and sufferings these societal entities have caused just as segregation and "Jim Crow" law fell in my beloved America. There are millions of souls who know all about that "midnight train" to a better life. Providence. "God" or "Allah" is with you.
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