Former Butler Student Being Held By ISIS, Threatened With Beheading

UPDATED: Those of you who read my blog regularly know how skeptical I am of any claims made by the U.S. government and mainstream media regarding the so-called terrorist organization known as ISIS. The basis for my skepticism is the fact that the organization is entirely a manufactured creation of Western intelligence agencies no different than Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. In the case of both, America and its Western allies covertly created, trained, armed and funded them to mold them as an enemy and threat to our national security to justify the relevance and expansion of the military/industrial complex following the end of the Cold War and the resulting military incursions into regions of geopolitical importance primarily for the purpose of controlling natural resources.

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad has irked Western interests by his refusal to allow a natural gas pipeline to be constructed through his country from the south to the north. When the West's repeated efforts to fabricate war crimes allegedly committed by President Assad against his own people were one after another debunked, the U.S. and its allies turned to a different strategy. Rather than use the terrorist rebels the West sent into Syria to topple Assad in a losing civil war, their puppet masters turned them into a new terrorist threat known as ISIS and sent them into Iraq to wreak havoc where they quickly gained control of much of the country without the standing Iraqi army trained by the American military putting up so much as a fight. This was immediately played up as a basis for redeploying U.S. troops back in Iraq.

One by one, a series of videos have been uploaded in recent months to YouTube claiming to show Western aid workers from the United States and Great Britain being held hostage and ultimately beheaded. Numerous Internet sleuths have exposed these videos to be hoaxes perpetrated for pure propaganda purposes, which are generally successful in duping average Americans who only take at best a passing interest on any given day at what's being passed off to the public as legitimate news reporting. The videos served the propaganda purpose, and President Obama now had his excuse to begin a bombing campaign in Syria specifically aimed at weakening and toppling President Assad's government under the cover of combating the very same ISIS forces put on the ground in Syria by our intelligence assets.

The latest ISIS video depicting the beheading of a British hostage, Alan Henning, has introduced yet another individual this time with ties locally to Indianapolis. This person has been identified as Peter Kassig, who we're told served as a U.S. Army Ranger for a couple of years deployed in Iraq from 2006-07 before he was honorably discharged due to medical reasons. Kassig, a 2006 graduate of North Central High School, reportedly attended Hanover College from 2007-09 according to the Indianapolis Star. Kassig then began studying political science at Butler University in 2011. He apparently was at Butler for a very short time because by 2012 he had headed to Lebanon where he began performing humanitarian work as a volunteer medical assistant in the Middle East.

Kassig founded an organization called Special Emergency Response and Assistance ("SERA"). You can check out the website for SERA here, which looks a bit contrived if you ask me. The website has a copyright date of 2014. Whoops! WhoIs tells us it was created on August 1, 2013 only two months before Kassig's kidnapping and was last updated on August 20, 2014. Naturally, CNN just happened to do a propaganda profile piece on Kassig back in 2012 to bolster the good work he was doing while helping provide emergency medical assistance to the victims of the manufactured civil war in Syria as it attempted to build American support for another war in Syria. Watch closely in the video above as he is shown applying bandages to patients. Try not to laugh too hard at how staged it is just like most of CNN's news reports.

According to a statement released by a spokesman for the Kassig family, WTHR-TV is reporting that Kassig was actually captured by ISIS almost exactly one year ago on October 1, 2013 before most Americans had even heard anything about the existence of ISIS, or if our crack news media knew about it, they were keeping the supposed greatest terrorist threat in the world facing our country a big secret at that time. The Kassig family kept Peter's abduction quiet because they wanted to work behind the scenes with his kidnappers to assist in his release. He disappeared while on his way to Deir Ezzour in eastern Syria, while on a SERA relief effort, WTHR-TV reported. Kassig's SERA organization was based in Gaziantep, Turkey at the time of his capture where the CIA was staging its covert efforts supporting the rebels we now know as ISIS. His family says Peter converted to Islam following his capture and assumed a new name, Abdul-Ramman Kassig. Curiously, until today, no media outlet in Indiana seemed to have been aware of Kassig's work. [Kassig's parents, Ed and Paula, released this video today (10-4-14) making a plea for his release. According to the father, Peter, a Methodist, had converted to Islam prior to his kidnapping.]


In February, 2013, a Syrian publication, News Deeply, interviewed Kassig about his humanitarian work. Kassig told the publication his organization was neutral in the Syrian conflict. "We do not discriminate between pro- and anti-regime people and we do strive to remain neutral," he said. Asked about his funding, he replied, "We need more funding." "Most of what we've done in terms of development, operationally or anything else, I've funded personally from my savings." He was specifically asked as a former soldier whether his work went beyond his humanitarian mandate. "Sometimes rebels want to know if I will help train people or if I will join the fight," he replied. "I always tell them no. It is of course not that I do not feel terrible for the civilians that are suffering in Syria, but… for an American young man in my position that would be foolish, and regarded as such by pretty much everyone, including the opposition. I can either be in a position to deliver tens of thousands of dollars of antibiotics for women and children, or I can be another young man with a gun."

In September, 2013 shortly before Kassig's kidnapping, Reed magazine, a literary journal published by San Jose State University in California, had a feature story discussing his work in Syria.

. . . Somewhere in southern Turkey, Eliot Stempf ’11 knowingly nodded his head—and shifted in his low-rent desk chair as he contended with a glacially slow internet connection. Eliot lives in Gaziantep, Turkey, roughly 20 miles from the Syrian border, and is currently masterminding the launch of a humanitarian startup, SERA (Special Emergency Response and Assistance), which specializes in prehospital care and has so far trained roughly 50 Syrians to become emergency first responders.

SERA was founded in late 2012 by Peter Kassig, a 24-year-old Army Ranger and Indiana native who returned from Iraq intent on mitigating the carnage of war. Kassig, who’s an EMT, lives with Eliot in Gaziantep and frequently forays into war-torn Syrian towns like Deir Ezzor to lead training sessions, distribute supplies, and provide basic medical care. Eliot, meanwhile, remains in Turkey, hunched at his computer, networking with care providers, such as the Red Crescent, and conferring with two Syrian doctors who advise SERA on, as Eliot puts it, “how to deliver aid in a way that’s sensitive, without exacerbating political tensions.”

Last week, Atlanta-based Conscience International gave SERA its biggest contribution yet—$30,000 worth of medical supplies (mostly antibiotics and pharmaceuticals) to be distributed over the coming weeks.

President Obama released the following statement on the lastest beheading and threats made by Kassig's captors to do the same to him:

"The United States strongly condemns the brutal murder of United Kingdom citizen Alan Henning by the terrorist group ISIL. Mr. Henning worked to help improve the lives of the Syrian people and his death is a great loss for them, for his family and the people of the United Kingdom. Standing together with our UK friends and allies, we will work to bring the perpetrators of Alan's murder - as well as the murders of Jim Foley, Steven Sotloff and David Haines - to justice. Standing together with a broad coalition of allies and partners, we will continue taking decisive action to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL."

Red Pill Revolution posted this video to YouTube recently to demonstrate five easy steps to staging  hoax ISIS beheading. Judge for yourself. The authenticity of the videos themselves, of course, doesn't necessarily equate to the deaths they depict as being faked as well, but it certainly raises doubts in the minds of anyone capable of critical thinking of what actually transpired.


See also this video for more background on the origins of ISIS.