Global Research

In a sign of how politically vulnerable he has rapidly become, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged Israel into new elections last week – less than two months after his far-right bloc appeared to win at the ballot box.

Netanyahu was forced to dissolve the 120-member parliament to block his chief rival, Benny Gantz, from getting a chance to assemble an alternative governing coalition.

Gantz, a former army general who heads the Blue and White party, won 35 seats, the same number as Netanyahu’s Likud party, in the April election, but had fewer potential allies to form a majority. So in September, Israelis will cast their votes afresh.

The ostensible reason for the parliament’s dissolution is a stand-off between Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, his former defence minister. They clashed over Lieberman’s insistence that ultra-orthodox Jews be drafted into the army.

But Lieberman, it seems, chose to turn a relatively marginal issue into a full-blown crisis as a way to unseat the prime minister.

To win a far-right majority, Netanyahu needed not only Lieberman’s small Yisrael Beiteinu party but also the ultra-Orthodox parties, which vehemently oppose conscription.

Netanyahu grew so desperate that at the last moment he tried – unsuccessfully – to woo Avi Gabbay, leader of the centrist Labour party. Labour was crushed in April, receiving just six seats, its lowest-ever result.

Netanyahu’s panic was fully justified. He is due to face a hearing in October, when it is widely expected he will be indicted on multiple corruption charges.

With parliament’s dissolution, he no longer has time to pass two pieces of legislation that could have absolved him of charges before the October deadline. First, he needed an immunity law exempting him from trial, and then a so-called “override law” to prevent Israel’s supreme court from using its powers of judicial review to rule the immunity law unconstitutional.

Gabbay objected to Netanyahu insisting on support for the immunity law as the price for Labour’s inclusion in the coalition.

Ayman Odeh, leader of the biggest party representing Israel’s Palestinian minority, one-fifth of the population, mocked Netanyahu’s frantic bargaining.

He provoked much mirth from other legislators by joking that Netanyahu had offered an “end to the occupation” and a promise to “recognise the historic wrongs of the Nakba”, the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948, in return for Palestinian parties supporting the immunity law.

Lieberman also humiliated Netanyahu, albeit without the humour. He understood that the prime minister was in no position to haggle.

The gain for Lieberman is that by proposing a bill to draft ultra-orthodox Jews into the army, he appealed to secular Jews. That, he hopes, will win him new supporters in the September election, setting him up again to be kingmaker.

Netanyahu will not be able to count on Lieberman’s support and that in turn puts pressure on Likud to drop its leader.

But there is another, less obvious, way that Lieberman can strengthen his own hand.

The battle lines in the new election, like the last, are between the far-right parties, led by Netanyahu, and the centre-right parties, led by Gantz.

Lieberman can now hedge his bets. The far-right has become more overtly religious, with the rise of ideological settlers to prominence and the rapid growth of the ultra-orthodox electorate.

Lieberman’s appeal, meanwhile, has been restricted to a declining constituency of disgruntled immigrants from the former Soviet Union, whose politics is ultra-nationalist but implacably secular.

And this gives him reason to want to influence Gantz’s Blue and White party, which is largely secular too.

In recent weeks, a political “resistance” movement has emerged in Israel against Netanyahu, echoing the one against Donald Trump in the US. With Gantz as its figurehead, it has mobilised over the threat Netanyahu poses to Israel’s system of checks and balances.

The chief concern has been the far-right’s intensifying assault on the supreme court, the last relatively liberal institution. The override law, which would neuter the court, has epitomised, for the centre-right, the intensifying erosion of even the most superficial of democratic norms.

Tens of thousands of Israelis attended a protest last month against Netanyahu and his legal manoeuvres.

But Odeh, the most prominent of the Palestinian minority’s leaders, was not invited – not until Gantz had a last-minute change of heart.

Without the Palestinian parties’ 10 or more seats in the parliament behind him, Gantz currently has little hope of tipping the balance in his favour against Netanyahu at the forthcoming election.

Lieberman, a settler, has a special loathing for Palestinian legislators. He has even called for them to be executed. One option is for him to lure Gantz away from Odeh, promising that his Yisrael Beinteinu party can serve up the the keys to the castle after September’s election.

What does all this jostling mean for the Palestinians?

If he can win again, Netanyahu will doubtless scheme to avert a trial and hope to carry on as before.

If he is felled, a successor from his Likud party is unlikely to prove either more moderate or more amenable to Palestinian ambitions for statehood. Likud has lurched significantly to the far-right over the past decade.

But Gantz, the only plausible alternative, is no peacenik either. He oversaw the terrible destruction of Gaza in 2014, supports keeping most of the settlements in place and seems unlikely to pay more than lip service to a peace process.

Should he find himself reliant on Lieberman to build a government, Gantz will have to emphasise the more right-wing elements of his party’s already hawkish programme.

Faced with the current political turmoil, however, the Trump administration might prefer to abandon efforts to press ahead with its “deal of the century” peace plan – at least beyond an initial investment conference scheduled for late June.

That is a reprieve of kinds. All indications were that the plan would prove catastrophically bad for the Palestinians and might have included annexing parts of the West Bank.

But even if that specific threat is lifted, the next Israeli government – whether led by Netanyahu, his successor or Gantz – is not likely to depart from Israel’s long-term consensus, one that the Trump plan was simply set to accelerate.

The settlements will continue their relentless expansion and more Palestinian land will be stolen, eroding any prospect of a viable state for Palestinians emerging.

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has announced the “temporary” closure of her country’s embassy and the withdrawal of diplomatic personnel from Venezuela, claiming Ottawa had “no choice.”

In a Sunday press statement, Freeland accused the Maduro government of having “taken steps to limit the ability of foreign embassies to function” by failing to renew visas for diplomatic personnel. No evidence was provided to support the claim. She additionally claimed that that the Caribbean country is “slid[ing] deeper into dictatorship.”

The measure is to take immediate effect, with diplomatic visas reportedly due to expire at the end of June. All embassy and consular services are to be transferred to the Colombian capital of Bogota over 1,500 kilometers away.

Freeland also indicated that Ottawa will “evaluate” the status of Venezuelan diplomats in Canada “appointed by Maduro.”

Canada was the second country to recognise Juan Guaido after he swore himself in as “interim president” on January 23. It has since continued to back Guaido’s attempts to oust the Maduro government and has begun to forge diplomatic relations with the opposition leader’s representative in Canada, Orlando Viera Blanco, who has held a number of meetings with government representatives and members of parliament in Ottawa and Vancouver. The Trudeau administration has also followed US President Donald Trump in imposing several rounds of sanctions on Venezuela.

It is unknown how many Canadian citizens in Venezuela this measure will affect, but recent opposition-led estimates suggest that there are up to 50,000 Venezuelans living in Canada.

The latest diplomatic spat follows a similar confrontation in March, when the United States and Venezuela both withdrew their diplomatic teams, severed diplomatic relations and vacated the embassies. The United States had likewise recognised Guaido envoy Carlos Vecchio as Venezuela’s representative in the country.

The diplomatic standoff came to a head in Washington when US government forces violated the Vienna Convention and breached the Venezuelan embassy building to evict a group of US citizens safeguarding it with the backing of the Caracas government, leading to a number of arrests.

Brazil snubs Guaido representative

The diplomatic scuffle comes as Guaido’s team faces a setback in its efforts to replace Maduro’s diplomatic representation in Brazil.

The far-right Bolsonaro government, which similarly recognises Guaido as the legitimate Venezuelan president, had previously invited his envoy, Maria Teresa Belandria, to present her credentials at the Presidential Palace last Tuesday, only to later inform that the invitation had been withdrawn.

“I was uninvited,” she told Reuters, downplaying the political impact of the news.

Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of foreign relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, suggests, however, that the move may suggest Brasilia is losing faith in Guaido’s efforts to oust Maduro.

“[The government] realize[s] Brazil has to deal with the reality that Maduro is not going anywhere right now,” he explained.

Brazilian diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida also shares this idea, claiming that the snub shows increasing friction between Brazil’s civilian and military leaders.

“Recognition of Guaido’s envoy was never agreed to by the military,” he said.

Guaido promises Maduro will go this year

Guaido, for his part, told supporters in Venezuela that he will achieve his objective to seize power by the end of the year.

Speaking at a small gathering in Barinas State, Guaido proclaimed,

“We are in times of definitions, of advances, of actions (…) This didn’t start in 2019, but I’ll tell you something, it will end in 2019.”

Guaido talks to a small number of supporters in the western state of Barinas. (Courtesy / Twitter)

Guaido has previously promised supporters that he would force humanitarian “aid” into Venezuela, convince the armed forces to join his cause, and call new presidential elections. He also led a failed putsch in April.

Taking to Twitter Monday, Guaido further reiterated his pledge to do “what is needed” to oust Maduro, echoing Washington’s statements that “all options are on the table” regarding Venezuela.

Guaido has openly called for a foreign intervention into Venezuela, and is currently calling for Venezuela’s reincorporation into the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), a mutual defense pact involving sixteen countries in the hemisphere which has been cited as a possible legal justification for US military action.

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Featured image by Chris Wattie/Reuters

Last week in an episode of my daily Ron Paul Liberty Report we discussed whether the US and British government were actually trying to kill jailed Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. More than seven years ago Assange was granted asylum from the government of Ecuador over fears that espionage charges were being prepared against him by Washington. He spent those years in a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London without sunlight. Without fresh air. Without exercise. Without medical treatment.

Assange’s critics mocked him for entering the embassy, saying his fear that the US government would indict him was paranoia. Then the US-controlled International Monetary Fund dangled a four billion dollar loan in front of Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno (elected in 2017, replacing the president who granted him asylum), and Moreno eagerly handed Assange over to British authorities who the same day hauled him before the court to answer for skipping bail. No medical examination after what was seven years of house arrest. Straight to court. He was sentenced to 50 weeks – the maximum sentence.

And what happened while he was serving time in the notorious Belmarsh prison? The Trump Administration decided to go where the Obama Administration before him did not dare to tread: he was indicted on 17 counts under the US Espionage Act and now faces 170 years in prison – or worse – once the formality of his extradition hearing is over. He faces life in prison for acting as a journalist – publishing information about the US government that is clearly in the public interest.

But do they really want to put him up on trial?

When US citizen Otto Warmbier died in a wretched North Korean prison cell after being denied proper medical treatment, the western world was disgusted by Pyongyang’s disregard for basic human rights. Now we have Julian Assange reportedly too sick to even appear by video at his own court hearings. UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has investigated the treatment of Assange over the past nine years and has determined that the journalist has been the “victim of brutal psychological torture.”

UN investigator Melzer concluded,

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize, and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

Governments hate it when the truth is told about them. They prefer to kill the messenger than face the message.

Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote last week that,

“the whole purpose of the First Amendment…is to promote and provoke open, wide, robust political debate about the policies of the government.”

We need to understand that it is our First Amendment that is on trial right there along with Assange. The Obama Administration – no defenders of civil liberties – wanted to prosecute Assange but determined that his “crime” was the same kind of journalism that the US mainstream media engages in every day.

Let’s hope President Trump recovers from his amnesia – on the campaign trail he praised Wikileaks more than 100 times but now claims to know nothing about them – and orders his Attorney General to stand down. Assange deserves our gratitude, not a lifetime in prison.

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Featured image is from Silent Crow News

I always like my beer on the bitter side. Recently, I discovered the wild variety of plant behind the delicate taste. 

On the afternoon of our 79th (combined average) birthday, my wife and I took a lengthy hike in the Galilee mountains that frame Arrabeh. We used to walk the same mountain paths, carrying our two children on our backs, to visit our friends, the two monks who chose the highest peak in our range to recreate early monastic life in Palestine. 

This was before the Ariel Sharon-led assault on the Galilee, with all the Jewish-only, mountain-top settlements justified as being needed to protect our land from us.

My wife and I gingerly supported our sagging frames with a pair of walking sticks each. We met our minimum of 10,000 steps on the Fitbit my wife wears. She is a stickler for precision on matters that I usually guess at.

That also was the case when it came to identifying the native greenery on the side of the dirt path: trees, bushes, flowers and grasses, both edible and poisonous.

At one point, she called my attention to a thin, wheat-like stalk with a pretty, dangling, heavy head, which she identified as wild hops. I picked one and carefully wrapped it in a paper towel to show to my jeweller grandnephew, so that he could recreate it in gold or silver as an earring or pendant.

The next day, I recalled our hike while reading a news item stating that a centuries-old mosque in Safed, the birthplace of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, had been converted into a bar and wedding hall. According to al-Quds al-Arabi, the al-Ahmar Mosque has been repurposed several times since 1948 – first into a Jewish school, then an election campaigns centre, then a clothing shop and now a bar and events hall.

This was not as shocking to me as it might have been to other readers. For years, when friends have visited from abroad, I’ve often taken them to one of my favourite sites: Ein Hod’s old mosque. On the way there, I usually explained the sociocultural miracle that the Romanian new immigrant Dadaist artist, Marcel Janco, and his followers had wrought.

Parched palate

In the 1950s, they had saved the stone homes of the centuries-old Palestinian village of Ein Hawd from demolition in order to form an art colony. In the process, the name of the village was changed from the Arabic Ein Hawd (meaning “Spring of the Trough”) to the Hebrew Ein Hod (meaning “Spring of Grace”).

They offered some of the village’s original Palestinian residents – descendants of the Abu al-Hija clan who had moved to their olive fields and would eventually establish the new Ein Hawd there – a level of sustenance as guards, gardeners and housekeepers in their own original homes, repurposed as art galleries.

I usually alluded to the majority of the Abu al-Hijas, who became refugees in Jenin, and who provided the plot for Mornings in Jenin, the novel that launched my friend Susan Abulhawa as a leading Palestinian fiction writer.

By this point in my tour-guiding, I usually suffer from a parched palate because of the emotional impact of the narrative – and, even more, because, as a writer, I have for years been scrabbling after Abulhawa’s level of literary achievement.

You can imagine how thirst-quenching an ice-cold beer is. After that, we usually rush back to our bus at the adjoining parking plot, the asphalt-topped former village cemetery, and head up to the alternative Ein Hawd that led the struggle for scores of unrecognised Palestinian villages in Israel. Like a dozen or so other such villages, this one has finally gained recognition.

Jewish nation’s deed

Others have not been as lucky. Witness the unrecognised Bedouin village of al-Araqib, which has been demolished and rebuilt close to 150 times. When the court prohibits its chief, Sheikh Sayyah al-Turi, from entering the village, he seeks shelter in its cemetery.

No wonder his wife and their son served jail terms as well. They lack the necessary empathy with Holocaust descendants to move out of the way, enabling Jewish settlers to build a residential paradise in their place and make the desert bloom. The logic of involved government officials, including Supreme Court judges, is impeccable: the focus must be on Jewish settlers reclaiming their homeland.

God, my throat is parched again. Think of all the bars that would have studded the country, had Israel been more careful. In the aftermath of the Nakba, in the 1950s alone, the state demolished 1,200 mosques, with their adjacent cemeteries, no doubt.

Israel’s representative at the UN has shown the Security Council the Jewish nation’s “deed” to the entire Promised Land.

The same deed promised the Jewish nation enough Palestinians to serve as “choppers of wood and drawers of water”. But now we have imported Chinese, Thai and Sri Lankan manual labourers, obviating the need for Bedouin servants in this or the next life.

That is why their cemetery will likely go with them to who-knows-where. To hell, if need be.

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Hatim Kanaaneh is a retired doctor, the first Western-trained physician in his village in Galilee, who has spent decades serving and advocating for his community.

Nearly 400 hospitals and medical facilities in Yemen were destroyed during the four-year war period as a result of the Saudi-led coalition air strikes, Health Ministry spokesman Youssef Hadiri said in an interview with Sputnik News, on Thursday.

“More than 375 hospitals and medical facilities were destroyed because they were hit directly or indirectly by bombs and missiles launched by the coalition,” Hadiri said.

The spokesman added that the Yemeni medical sector is in critical condition due to the war that is exacerbated by Saudi-led aggression.

Hadiri also said that more than 5,000 people in Yemen need to undergo dialysis or kidney transplants and that in the war period at least 1,200 people died from not receiving the treatment or medication needed for kidney disease. In addition, the spokesman said that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen has led to the death of more than 700,000 people.

“Diseases and epidemics such as cholera, diphtheria, various flu viruses and hunger, caused by the blockade to Yemen, affected to some degree 16 million people, as a result more than 700,000 people died,” he said.

Hadiri told Sputnik News last week that six people, including four children, were killed in a coalition airstrike in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. Meanwhile, 56 people, including two Russian women, were injured.

Yemen has for years been involved in a clash between the illegitimate “government” forces led by President Abdul Rahman Mansour Hadi, and between the Yemeni Army and Popular Militias. The Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out attacks against Yemeni forces at Hadi’s request since March 2015.

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Featured image is from NEO

In recent days, in response to the Trump administration’s issuance on May 23 of a 17-charge indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a number of prominent liberal columnists and Democratic politicians have come out with highly critical comments. Understandably, many long-time supporters of Julian Assange have seized on these condemnations as a chink of light in the darkness of the U.S. Government’s decade-long pursuit of the trailblazing publisher, as a hopeful sign that, finally, it might be possible to move defense of Julian Assange into the mainstream.

However, such rejoicing may be misplaced, at best, and dangerously deluded, at worst. Who are these liberal icons taking a stand on behalf of Assange? They included Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). They also included journalists such as Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian; Masha Gessen of the New Yorker; MSNBC host Rachel Maddow; and the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post. So, let’s take each of them, one by one.

First, there’s tribune of the people Bernie Sanders. Sanders had said nothing about the first indictment, issued on April 11, but came out with a strange tweet 24 hours after the issuance of the May 23 indictment:

“Let me be clear: it is a disturbing attack on the First Amendment for the Trump administration to decide who is or is not a reporter for the purposes of a criminal prosecution. Donald Trump must obey the Constitution, which protects the publication of news about our government.”

Let me be clear: it is a disturbing attack on the First Amendment for the Trump administration to decide who is or is not a reporter for the purposes of a criminal prosecution. Donald Trump must obey the Constitution, which protects the publication of news about our government. https://t.co/5JtHNHH2BE

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 24, 2019

Sanders’s comments appeared in a re-tweet of an American Civil Liberties Union tweet:

For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment.

The ACLU tweet was forthright and unambiguous. Not so Sanders’s tweet, which failed to name either Assange or WikiLeaks. Moreover, the issue Sanders that disturbs Sanders, namely, who is or is not a reporter, isn’t one raised by the ACLU, which states that the target of prosecution is a publisher of truthful information. However, without a mention of either Assange’s name or the recent indictment, Sanders’s intervention is unlikely to have much of an impact.

Then there’s Elizabeth Warren. She was quoted as saying,

“Assange is a bad actor who has harmed U.S. national security—and he should be held accountable. But Trump should not be using the case as a pretext to wage war on the First Amendment and go after the free press who hold the powerful accountable everyday.”

Source: The Washington Times

It’s hard to decide which is more objectionable: her characterization of Assange as “a bad actor,” without explaining why and what she means by the term; her insistence that he “be held accountable,” without explaining for what or in what way (lethal injection, perhaps?); or her transparent attempts to ingratiate herself with the press, who are supposedly holding “the powerful accountable everyday.”

Warren’s statement, like that of Sanders, oozes insincerity. The two presidential aspirants know perfectly well that the Democratic Party national leadership blames Assange for the 2016 electoral debacle, and would like to see him executed or, at the very least, chained to a wall in a Supermax prison for the rest of his life. Any statement from them that smacks even vaguely of a defense of WikiLeaks would mean instant excommunication. However, some of Sanders and Warren’s supporters do undoubtedly feel that Assange and WikiLeaks have been unjustly persecuted; hence the convoluted, and largely worthless, nonsense.

And that’s it. Not one presidential candidate, other than Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) and Sen. Mike Gravel (both of whom having spoken out in defense of Julian Assange long before the release of the superseding indictment) has said anything about Assange. So, not exactly a tidal wave of support. To his credit, Ron Wyden did issue a statement on the day of the new indictment, one that was mercifully free of the Sanders/Warren contrivances:

This is not about Julian Assange. This is about the use of the Espionage Act to charge a recipient and publisher of classified information. I am extremely concerned about the precedent this may set and potential dangers to the work of journalists and the First Amendment.

Source: US Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon

Wyden’s relative boldness is probably not unrelated to his not running for president, and hence to his not needing the help of Democratic Party.

Let us consider the journalists, who are supposedly now moving to Julian Assange’s side. Take the New York Times. On April 11, the day of Julian Assange’s arrest and the unsealing of the first indictment, the Times ran a classic smear job in its news pages. The story was packed with familiar allegations and insinuations, none supported by any evidence. As usual, the Times’s assertions went even beyond those of the zealous prosecutors.

“Throughout the 2016 campaign,” the Times reporters claimed, “Mr. Assange played down accusations of Russian interference, and misled the public on his source for the damaging documents WikiLeaks released.”

The slippery use of the word “misled” is based on at least two unsupported assumptions: the Russians were the source of the DNC/Podesta e-mails and that Assange knew that they were the source. (Neither President Obama nor the Mueller team has ever made the latter claim; Mueller implied it, but didn’t say so explicitly.)

In its editorial, published the same day, the Times, after first charmingly noting that “British police officers unceremoniously bundled the scraggly-bearded refugee off in a van,” explained why the indictment was heartening: “The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime.” A legal proceeding against Julian Assange would be useful, moreover, in that it “could help draw a sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime. Once he’s in the United States, moreover, Assange could prove to be a useful source on how Russia orchestrated its attacks on the Clinton campaign.” No one could come away from reading this editorial without concluding that the Times was delighted that the U.S. Government was finally going after Assange.

So, did the Times change its position on Assange on May 23? Let’s first look at how the Trump Justice Department unrolled its indictment. Let’s look at the statement of Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, in particular to the assertion that Assange is no journalist:

Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions. The Department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the Department’s policy to target them for their reporting. Julian Assange is no journalist. This made plain by the totality of his conduct as alleged in the indictment—i.e., his conspiring with and assisting a security clearance holder to acquire classified information, and his publishing the names of human sources. Indeed, no responsible actor—journalist or otherwise—would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones, exposing them to the gravest of dangers.

U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger for the Eastern District of Virginia then chimed in:

Assange is charged for his alleged complicity in illegal acts to obtain or receive voluminous databases of classified information and for agreeing and attempting to obtain classified information through computer hacking. The United States has not charged Assange for passively obtaining or receiving classified information. The indictment alleges that Assange published in bulk hundreds of thousands of these stolen classified documents. But the United States has not charged Assange for that. Instead, the United States has only charged Assange for publishing a narrow set of classified documents in which Assange also allegedly published the un-redacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to provide information to the United States and its allies. These sources included local Afghans and Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents from repressive regimes.

In other words, the U.S. wasn’t charging Assange for publishing “stolen classified documents”; it was charging him for publishing classified documents in which he published the “un-redacted names of innocent people.” So, no reason for anyone to panic; no one’s going after “real” journalists.

The measure of the sincerity of media complaints about the new indictment would be the extent to which they echo or distance themselves from the words of the U.S. Government officials bringing it forward. Sure enough, the New York Times repeated the officials’ claims almost word-for-word. The editorial started off by asserting that Assange

released numerous documents without removing names of confidential sources, putting their lives in jeopardy. The government notes in its charging document that those put at risk included “journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents” living in repressive regimes who provided information to the United States.

The government’s claim that WikiLeaks’s disclosures put “in jeopardy” the lives of “confidential sources” is belied by the fact that during the 2013 court martial of Chelsea Manning, it failed to name even one “source” who had lost his life. The use of the word “sources” suggests foreigners risking their lives to help Americans. In reality, the “sources” named in the WikiLeaks documents refer to anyone to whom U.S. diplomats have talked. There is no reason why the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of such people should enjoy anonymity in perpetuity.

The Times admits that it had worked with Assange in the past when the paper published WikiLeaks material. Those documents “shed important light on the American war effort in Iraq, revealing how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.” What a relief then that the Times was able to expose malfeasance on the part of Iraqis and Iranians—the bad guys! Perhaps if it had been Iranians who had shot up the two Reuters war correspondents, the Timesmight have got around to mentioning the Collateral Murder video.

Be that as it may, the Times goes on, while WikiLeaks may have done some useful work in the past, the paper had always treated WikiLeaks as “a source,” never as “a partner.” Moreover, unlike WikiLeaks, the Times “does not condone breaking into government computers or irresponsibly publishing the identities of sources.” Nevertheless, the paper concludes, the Trump administration “has chosen to go well beyond the question of hacking to directly challenge the boundaries of the First Amendment.”

The editorial was a head-scratcher: If WikiLeaks is a “source” and not a publisher worthy of partnership with the Times, it’s hard to see why respectable media outlets should have anything to fear from a prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act. According to the First Amendment doctrine continually espoused by U.S. media, sources are fair game for prosecutors, while the media are untouchable. This was precisely the point the Trump DOJ officials were making.

Let’s take a look at the Washington Post. Its editorial page purred with satisfaction on the day of Julian Assange’s arrest. His arrest was “a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.” The editorial accepted without question the prosecutors’ allegation against him. Assange, the Post said, obtained his documents “unethically…including… by trying to help now-former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning hack into a classified U.S. computer system. Also unlike real journalists, WikiLeaks dumped material into the public domain without any effort independently to verify its factuality or give named individuals an opportunity to comment.”

This last statement is truly the height of insolence. WikiLeaks has never been shown to have published anything false. The same cannot be said about the Post. A few recent examples: Its blockbuster story about Russians’ supposedly hacking the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont; its smear of a story alleging that innumerable independent media were advertent or inadvertent tools of Russian propaganda; its exultant discovery of an e-mail sent by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to Kremlin press secretary Dimitry Peskov—“the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.” As Matt Taibbi wrote,

the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.

As for unethical conduct, nothing WikiLeaks did surpasses for lack of ethics the Post’s disclosure of the contents of a telephone call between incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that was listened in on by the National Security Agency. The unmasking of an American who is not the subject of surveillance is a crime, and without question morally dubious.

So, on April 11, the Post was extremely enthusiastic about Assange’s indictment. The sooner the U.S. Government could get its hands on him the better:

Britain should not fear that sending him for trial on that hacking count would endanger freedom of the press. To the contrary, Mr. Assange’s transfer to U.S. custody, followed possibly by additional Russia-related charges or his conversion into a cooperating witness, could be the key to learning more about Russian intelligence’s efforts to undermine democracy in the West. Certainly he is long overdue for personal accountability.

So, the British should transfer Assange into the custody of the U.S., which should then issue “additional Russia-related charges,” presumably additional to what’s stated in the extradition request. It’s not in accord with international law or domestic law, but who cares? There’s bigger fish to fry: “Russian intelligence’s efforts to undermine democracy in the West”!

In its May 24 editorial, the Post lamented that Assange could slip through U.S. hands. If only the Trump administration had kept to the original charge, “the federal government could have locked up Mr. Assange for years without challenging the First Amendment, chilling reporters’ activities or discouraging the British government, which is holding Mr. Assange, from extraditing him to the United States rather than to Sweden, where he faces a rape investigation.”

Instead, the Trump administration is going after Assange under a legal theory that “could easily be applied to journalists,” though of course Assange is no journalist.

The same theme—let’s nail Assange, but let’s leave the Espionage Act out of it—informed the column of Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian. He too starts with the obligatory personal attack: Assange is “mercurial, untrustworthy and dislikable.” He expressed disapproval of Assange’s “releasing unredacted material from the Manning trove in September 2011,” omitting naturally the Guardian’s role in the disclosure of the “unredacted material.”

The unredacted material, including names of sources, became publicly available because two Guardian writers, David Leigh and Luke Harding, published in 2011 a cash-in book, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, in which they, for reasons never explained, disclosed the password to all of the WikiLeaks files. Assange published the unredacted files in response to the Guardian’s disclosure of the password, in order to provide the named sources a measure of protection.

Nonetheless, Rusbridger argues, though Assange is a terrible and irresponsible person, “the attempt to lock him up under the Espionage Act is a deeply troubling move that should serve as a wake-up call to all journalists.” Rusbridger’s call of course leaves open the possibility that he would look on with favor an attempt to lock up Assange under something other than the Espionage Act. This is indeed the editorial position of the Guardian, which, following the release of the May 23 indictment, called on the U.K. Home Secretary to pack Assange off to Sweden to face “a rape charge process” there: “This is serious and deserves a proper trial.” The peculiar term “rape process” was a later addition. The editorial had originally said “rape charges.” In response to readers’ pointing out that no “rape charges” have ever been filed against Assange, the Guardian inserted that suggestive yet meaningless term.

Conveniently, the Guardian doesn’t insist on the Home Secretary’s imposing on any extradition of Assange to Sweden the condition that he not be transferred to the United States. Nor, significantly, does the paper express any readiness to see Assange walk free in the event that Sweden’s courts fail to press charges against him, that they acquit him or that they convict but release him within a couple of years.

The same odd combination of furious disavowal of Assange and apparent alarm over the new indictment informed the views of a number of liberal commentators. Consider the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen. Her article kicks off with the standard attacks on Assange: He “keeps terrible political company,” he is “power crazed and manipulative,” “he shared information that exposed people to danger.” Such attacks are of course a rhetorical device, introduced in order to show us what a fine, principled person the author is. Yes, X is the scummiest person to have walked this earth since Adolf Hitler, but I will fight to the death X’s right to say or do…whatever. This kind of stuff does wonders for the writer but very little for the purported object of the so-called principled defense. All a reader comes away with is that “X is the scummiest person since Adolf Hitler” and thus hardly merits time or attention.

Source: The New Yorker

Sure enough, Gessen’s anti-Assange vituperations segue into the predictable “One has to hold one’s nose while defending Assange—and yet one must defend Assange.”

Of course, what comes next is not any kind of a defense of Assange. There is no defense of the publication of critical material such as the Guantanamo Files, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, Cablegate. None of that is mentioned, not even Collateral Murder. So, what’s her defense of Julian Assange? Apparently, it’s that if the government goes after Julian Assange under the Espionage Act one day, it might go after an august publication such as the New Yorker or the New York Times under the same act the next. However, Gessen immediately undercuts her own argument by happily repeating, as the Times did, the Trump DOJ assertion that Assange is no journalist:

The government has argued that Assange is not a journalist. Most journalists would probably agree: the indiscriminate publication of classified information (or any other information, for that matter), with neither a narrative nor regard for people’s safety, is not journalism in any conventional understanding of the word.

So, if the U.S. Government says Assange isn’t a real journalist, and is only going after him for doing things that Gessen and others say real journalists don’t do, then why the anguish? Well, she says, “The last thing we want the U.S. government, or any government, to do is to start deciding who is and who is not a journalist.”

So, once again, Assange is a terrible person and not even a real journalist at that, yet we must defend him because one day the Trump administration might go after a real journalist. OK, but what if it doesn’t? What if the government is telling the truth and intends only to go after Assange? (That may be true. As the Nixon administration found, going after the New York Times isn’t worth the hassle.) Would that make the prosecution of Assange acceptable? If your answer is yes, then you aren’t really interested in the freedom to publish. In any case, whether the government goes after “real” journalists is scarcely the issue. The First Amendment protects everybody who thinks, writes, expresses an opinion or argues with his neighbor. There is no special carve-out for journalists. For Gessen and the New York Times to get into this semantic debate over who is and who isn’t a journalist means they have already accepted the terms of the debate as the U.S. government has set them.

Then, there is also the interesting case of Rachel Maddow, the prime exhibit in the case that the tide is shifting in favor of Julian Assange. On the evening of May 23, rumors began to swirl that Maddow had come out fiercely against the new indictment and embraced the cause of press freedom. Caitlin Johnstone wrote excitedly:

Rachel Maddow has aired a segment condemning the new indictment for 17 alleged violations of the Espionage Act. Yes, that Rachel Maddow. Wow. Make no mistake, this is a hugely significant development….Now that she’s recognized that this could actually hurt her and her network directly, she’s finally feeding her audience a different narrative out of sheer enlightened self-interest….Maddow’s credulous audience would eat live kittens if she told them to, so the way she’s pushing back against a dangerous legal precedent in language they can understand will make a difference in the way American liberals think about Assange’s predicament….She actually chose to do the right thing. I’m gobsmacked, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that my hope for humanity sparked up a little today.

Wow! Gobsmacked! Let’s take a look at what Maddow actually said. On April 11, she did a long segment about Assange’s arrest, focusing exclusively on the question of whether Assange would be put on trial for his “major role in the Russian military intelligence operation that monkey wrenched the 2016 election.” She was of course alarmed that he wouldn’t be:

I think if they are going to charge anything about Assange and his role in that attack, if they are going to charge anything against Assange other than what they`ve already put in this initial indictment, the way I read this, I think, they`re going to have to do so really, really quickly like imminently, like this isn`t going to linger….After you`re extradited, no more charges.  The extraditing country has to know exactly what you`re facing before they make the decision to send you over here, the Rule of Specialty….As far as I understand this, if U.S. prosecutors do intend to file any more charges against Julian Assange, they really won`t have much more time to get that done because the U.K. will extradite him in short order and that`s a full stop on anything else being added to the charges against Assange

So, what mattered to her wasn’t the issue of press freedom; what mattered, as always, was Russia. She was concerned that the Trump administration was dawdling, avoiding charging Assange with Russia stuff. On May 23, she returned to this theme, making clear that she did not believe the Trump administration was serious about extraditing Assange:

Now today, apparently, the United States government has decided maybe they don`t want the U.K. to extradite Julian Assange here to ever face trial. Or at least that would appear to be the intriguing, fascinating and very worrying bottom line of this remarkable thing that the Justice Department did today when they unsealed a new superseding indictment, so an additional indictment against Assange.

Pay close attention to what she is saying here. What’s “fascinating” and “very worrying” is not that Assange will be prosecuted. It’s that he won’t be prosecuted. She then continues her lament by pointing out that a successful prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act is virtually impossible:

These new charges are trying to prosecute Assange for publishing that stolen secret material, which was obtained by somebody else. And that is a whole different kettle of fish than what he was initially charged with.  There has never in this country been a successful prosecution under the Espionage Act of some third party for publishing something that somebody else stole or something that otherwise made its way out of the government while the government was trying to keep it secret. We`ve never in this country successfully charged somebody for publishing secret material.

Her point is that the DOJ knows full well that the U.K. courts will almost certainly not grant its extradition request, and that’s precisely the reason why Trump made it. He wants the extradition process to fail because he doesn’t want to bring Assange to the United States. That’s why Trump’s new charges are not about what they should be about: They are not about Assange’s

working with Russian intelligence material in 2016 to try to help Trump win the election and to try to hurt Hillary Clinton.  This is not about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange personally strategizing with Trump campaign staffers about how to beat Hillary Clinton as they were releasing all of that information stolen by the Russians.

In other words, Trump doesn’t want Assange over here to disclose all of the grimy details of their collusion with Russia. Hence, the issuance of an indictment guaranteed to be rejected by the U.K. There is nothing whatsoever here about the right to publish.

The first thing to take note about this alleged tidal wave of support for Julian Assange among liberals is that no one is actually expressing any support for Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. There were no criticisms of the first indictment of Assange that the U.S. unsealed on April 11, despite the none-too-subtle hints in it that an Espionage Act prosecution was in the works. There have been no condemnations of the indefinite detention of Chelsea Manning on no ground other than that she refuses to testify against Assange. The media as usual dismiss any concern about her fate, adopting the smug attitude that, as a “source,” she’s not really entitled to the legal protections afforded to journalists by the First Amendment. Using that logic, it would have been perfectly fine to imprison Daniel Ellsberg for decades even as the New York Times was collecting its Pulitzers.

There is something wildly implausible about the idea that liberal commentators will now be manning the barricades on behalf of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, that as a result of the issuance of the superseding indictment, the scales have fallen from their eyes. It is hard to believe that during all of those years that Assange was holed up in the Ecuador embassy, warning that the Swedish extradition request was simply a ruse to ship him to the United States, it never occurred to liberal commentators that issues of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment were at stake.

Now, it is possible that these liberal commentators did not believe that Julian Assange would ever be prosecuted. Maybe they really did think that he was confined for years in the tiny Ecuador embassy because he was afraid of going on trial in Sweden or serving a few months for bail jumping. Maybe so, but if that is the case, then their silence during the years when key figures in the U.S. political establishment were calling for his execution and/or imprisonment was deafening. There were no calls for his release or for a clarifying statement from either the Obama or the Trump administration as to whether it intends to prosecute Assange.

The truth is that for most liberal commentators the only problem they have with any indictment and obviously lengthy imprisonment of Assange is the use of the Espionage Act to get there. If the Trump administration were to come up with some other mechanism, if it could charge him with something other than violation of the Espionage Act, everything would be fine.

There is every likelihood that this will happen. The grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia is still sitting. Chelsea Manning is still in prison for refusing to testify against Assange. That the grand jury has not been dissolved and that Manning has not been released, even after the release of the indictments, indicate strongly that additional indictments against Assange are pending.

Then there is RussiaGate. So far, the Eastern District of Virginia has focused on 2010 stuff. It could well shift its attention to 2016. Recall that in July 2018, Mueller charged 12 alleged members of the GRU with “conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States.” These GRU officers

knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the “Conspirators”), to gain unauthorized access (to “hack”) into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Well, Julian Assange was part of that conspiracy, says Mueller. It is surely only a matter of time before Assange is formally charged with involvement in this conspiracy with the GRU to sabotage the U.S. election. Also significant is the transfer of Assange’s personal belongings by Ecuador to the U.S. The U.S., at this very moment, is doubtless sifting through Assange’s hard drives and flash drives and probably fabricating discoveries (“new evidence”) that will find their way into any new indictment.

Should the Eastern District of Virginia prosecutors will now issue an indictment of Assange charging him with interference in the U.S. election on behalf of the GRU, there will be cries of glee and rejoicing, not only in the studios of MSNBC but in the offices of the DNC, the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, the editorial offices of the New York Times and Washington Post, and on the Twitter feed of every single liberal commentator in the country. This will indeed be a tidal wave of support.

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The US’ recently released “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” envisages India playing a key role in this vast transregional space in order to “contain” China, while Pakistan is conspicuously absent from the text despite being one of the few nuclear weapons states, among the most populous countries in the world, and the transit route for China’s overland access to the Afro-Asian Ocean via CPEC.

“Containing” China

The US officially unveiled its “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” over the weekend and tasked Defense Secretary Shanahan with sharing a summary of it during the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore. The gist of the document is that the US is committed to “containing” China through the crucial support of its many regional partners per what can be described as the “Lead From Behind” stratagem. South Asia, and especially aspiring hegemon India, naturally figures prominently in this vision, though the conspicuous absence of the global pivot state of Pakistan from the text — one of the few nuclear weapons states, among the most populous countries in the world, and the transit route for China’s overland access to the Afro-Asian Ocean via CPEC — hints that the US wants to “isolate” it from this seemingly inclusive geostrategic concept. Interestingly, even landlocked and mountainous Nepal has a part to play in this paradigm, but that’s probably because the US regards it as a zone of Indo-Chinese competition unlike Pakistan which is solidly in the Chinese camp, hence why the US sees no need to touch upon it at all because it likely regards the country as a “lost cause”.

The Integral Role Of India

There are only several pages that specifically deal with South Asia (33-36), though India is also briefly  mentioned in other parts as well. The US emphasizes the “common outlook” that it shares with India and how New Delhi’s “Act East” policy of ASEAN engagement supposedly proves its commitment to the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept, Washington’s new euphemism for “containing” China. The “convergence of strategic interests” between these two Great Powers manifests itself through India’s unique designation as the US’ only “Major Defense Partner” and the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue that was commenced last year between their Defense and Foreign Ministers. The document also lauds the effect that COMCASA will have in improving “interoperability” between their armed forces, though it noticeably omits any mentioning of the LEMOA pact that allows them to use some of the other’s military facilities on a case-by-case “logistical” basis. Even so, the Pentagon praises the increased “scope, complexity, and frequency” of military exercises with India and the upcoming tri-service exercises later this year, on top of their rapidly expanding arms trade.

South Asian Satellite States

As for the other countries of South Asia (apart from Pakistan and Bhutan), the US speaks highly about the “increased cooperation on mutual logistics arrangements” that it agreed to with Sri Lanka earlier this year, as well as the “avenues to expand security cooperation” with the Maldives after its “democratic transition” late last year. Concerning Bangladesh, it’s described as having a “strong defense relationship” with the US and being an “important partner for regional stability and security”. The “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” also applauds the “annual Bilateral Defense Dialogue” between the two for “setting the strategic direction of their relationship”. Lastly, landlocked and mountainous Nepal is curiously included in the text despite not being a country that ordinarily comes to mind when one thinks of the Afro-Pacific (“Indo-Pacific”) region. The document talks about the opportunity for expanding defense ties in light of last year’s “Land Forces Talks” and several landmark visits by high-ranking US defense officials, including the head of USINDOPACOM.

Network-Centric Proxy Warfare

While the aforementioned South Asian states are implicitly conceived of as Indian satellites whose overall role in the larger paradigm is very limited, the aspiring hegemon itself is expected to fulfill a transregional one as regards the Pacific part of the Afro-Pacific (“Indo-Pacific”) concept. Later on in the document the Pentagon talks about how India is contributing to the formation of a “networked region” by being one of several trilateral partnerships that the US and Japan are forming. It also points out the “emerging intra-Asian security relationships” that India is bilaterally involved in with Japan and Vietnam, as well as the trilateral one between itself, Japan, and Australia. Furthermore, the Quad of the US, India, Japan, and Australia is mentioned once, but it doesn’t play a major role in policy formation, probably because Washington considers it better to expand its “Chinese Containment Coalition” beyond those three major states to include medium and smaller ones too, thus allowing it to incorporate the entire Afro-Pacific region into this concept.

Concluding Thoughts

In sum, the US’ “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” envisages India playing a leading role in “containing” China in the Afro-Asian (“Indian”) Ocean region and then using its strategic partnerships with Japan, Australia, and Vietnam to expand its influence into the Pacific portion of this transregional space. Likewise, its very presence in its eponymous ocean serves as the gateway for more robust Japanese military involvement on the other side of ASEAN, with these South and East Asian Great Powers strategically uniting in the ASEAN middle ground between them. For all intents and purposes and apart from the exceptional involvement of landlocked Nepal (Laos, and Mongolia), the “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” deals entirely with maritime nations and therefore naturally has a naval focus, though it’s still strange that nothing is mentioned about Pakistan when considering that S-CPEC+ is China’s multimodal connectivity shortcut to Africa. In any case, Islamabad’s lack of inclusion in this policy planning document doesn’t take away from its global pivot significance, it just means that an entirely separate strategy report will likely need to be written for countering it.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Overnight on June 2, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a missile strike on Syrian Arab Army (SAA) targets in the  southern part of the country. According to the IDF, the missiles hit 2 artillery batteries, observation and intelligence posts and an SA-2 (S-75 Dvina) aerial defense battery.

The IDF says that the strike was conducted in response to the launch of 2 rockets at Mount Hermon from the area controlled by the Syrian government. Pro-Israeli media outlets immediately speculated that the rockets were Iranian-made Fadjr-5.

The Syrian state media confirmed the Israeli strike saying that air defense forces had intercepted several Israeli missiles coming from the Golan Heights. 3 Syrian soldiers were killed and 7 others were injured.

This was the second Israeli strike on Syria during the week. On May 27, Israeli jets destroyed a Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft gun killing one service member and injuring another one at Tal Sha’ar.

Israel seems to be increasing its military against Syria once again after the decision of the Trump administration to recognize the occupied Golan Heights as a part of Israel. At the same time, the Syrian military is avoiding to employ a S-300 air defense system received from Russia, most likely to avoid a further military escalation in the region.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Turkish-backed militant groups carried out a failed attack on al-Hwaiz in northwestern Hama. At least one vehicle and 19 militants were eliminated in clashes with the SAA.

ISIS fighters have destroyed two SAA vehicles east of the town of al-Sukhnah with an anti-tank mine and an improvised-explosive device (IED), the terrorist groups’ news agency, Amaq, reported on June 1. According to Amaq, several Syrian service members were killed and injured in the attacks.

The terrorist group went on to claim that its fighters captured a third vehicle in an ambush west of al-Sukhnah. Four SAA soldiers were reportedly killed there.

Earlier, ISIS cells in the Homs desert launched a large attack on the area of al-Faydah in southwestern Deir Ezzor. The army repelled the attack after more than six hours of heavy clashes. Several soldiers were killed.

Amaq said that these attacks were a part of a new military campaign called Ghazwat Al-Aistinzaf [the Battle of Attrition], which began on May 31. The campaign appears to be aimed against both the SAA and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

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Julian Assange is being slowly murdered by “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” at Belmarsh prison in the south-east of London. The prison is notorious for holding people who have never been charged with a crime indefinitely. It is also called the British version of Guantanamo, and, typically used to detain so-called terrorists, thus called by the British police and secret service and aped by the British MSM and establishment. Terrorists that become terrorists by continuous and repeated accusations, by media propaganda, but not necessarily by fact.

Remember, if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes the truth in the minds of the braindead listeners. Its indoctrination of the public to demonize somebody or a group of people, or a country, who could become dangerous for the empire’s vicious and criminal endeavors. That’s what they are doing with Julian Assange. Exactly the same principle is applied, though on a different scale, against President Putin and against Russia and China. And it seems to work in a brainwashed-to-the-core, western society, ran by their spineless European US-vassalic leadership.

Yes, what is happening to Julian Assange could happen to any journalist who reveals the inconvenient truth about the empire and its minions’ criminal machinations, any journalist – or non-journalist, whistleblower, for that matter – anyone who dares standing up to the AngloZionist atrocities may end up in Guantanamo or Belmarsh which is considered a Type A prison for adult men, meaning, a “serious” prison, where “dangerous” detainees are held for as long as Her Majesty’s Prison Service considers necessary, and prisoners treatments are held secret and include torture.

Julian Assange’s case goes even farther than breaking all the rules of “democratic” free speech. The way he is treated is a serious infraction on Human Rights. The US and British governments intend to silence and punish a champion of free speech, torturing him for the world to see, and especially as a deterrent for would-be whistleblowers and other free-speech advocates.

Julian Assange has been condemned to a ‘temporary’ prison sentence of 50 weeks for jumping bail, when he sought and was granted refuge in 2012 in the Ecuadorian Embassy. And why did he jump bail? Because he was about to be extradited to neofascist Sweden, who acting in the name of Washington, accused him with phony rape and sexual misconduct charges, from where he would have most likely been extradited to the US – where he might have faced a kangaroo court and a fake trial with possible death sentence, or indefinite incarceration at Guantanamo.

That’s why he jumped bail and why he escaped to the Ecuadorian Embassy, because western injustice was already then played out with false propaganda, for everyone, but the blind and indoctrinated, to see. Rafael Correa, then President of Ecuador, saw the truth behind it all and granted Julian asylum, and later gave him Ecuadorian citizenship – which in 2018 was revoked by Correa’s traitor and fascist successor, US-implant, Lenin Moreno, who, as a reward, it is said, got an IMF loan of US$ 4.2 billion to help the government carry out its neoliberal economic reform program, meaning undoing much of the social programs of improving economic equality for the Ecuadorian population, implemented during the Correa presidency.

Well, how sick can that be? – Unfortunately, acting pathologically or even psychopathically in today’s world is fully accepted. It’s the new normal. This means, we are living in an almost-terminally ill, corrupt and utterly brainwashed society – to be precise, western society. “Almost-terminally” means that there is only dim hope of healing for the utter lack of conscientiousness of western society. Hope of western people’s awakening is fading, as it is sliding ever deeper into a bottomless abyss.

Julian Assange was first accused by Washington of fake charges of computer hacking and conspiring to defraud the United States. In fact, what this is all about is the 2010 publication by Wikileaks of the infamous video that circulated the world a million times, depicting the purposeful, malicious ‘collateral killing’ of harmless civilians by the crew of a US Army helicopter – and of other data of atrocious acts of the US military revealed by Chelsea Manning, and published by Wikileaks. Chelsea Manning has been and is herself serving prison sentences.

Despite the fact that this little video has been seen around the world probably by more than a billion people, nobody went on the barricades – on an endless mass-demonstration – to stop the rogue-state and killing machine United States of America from committing its daily and deadly crimes. Nobody. And the killing goes on. And Washington is doing its utmost to silence every future revealing of their atrocities, by silencing Julian Assange, and intimidating any potential future truth-revealer.

They have now 50 weeks, while he is hidden away in a British Guantanamo-like prison, to slowly kill him on behalf of and as a little favor to Washington, so he doesn’t have to be extradited and the US is spared being exposed to the kangaroo trial that Julian would otherwise receive. If he dies a “natural” death in a British prison, Trump may wash his bloody hands in innocence, and those in Congress who want to send a CIA squadron to murder Assange – I kid you not they are not ashamed to openly say so – will also be able to whitewash their criminal and bloody minds. Nobody will ever know what really happened behind Her Majesty’s prison walls.  – There will be some flareups in the media – and then all quiets down. As usual. The Wikileaks founder will be gone – and all potential whistleblowers and truth-seeking journalists will be on their guard. Objective achieved.

In the meantime and to reach that objective, Julian is most likely being tortured, possibly physically and psychologically.  Julian Assange has suffered “prolonged exposure to psychological torture”, the UN’s torture expert, Nils Melzer, said in a BBC interview, and urged Britain not to extradite Assange to Washington. According to retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, he may have been doped with psychotropic drugs, like 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ that produces hallucinations, mental confusion and memory loss. This may have been the reason, why he was unable to speak clearly, and to participate in a Swedish Court hearing – and had to be transferred to the hospital wing of Her Majesty’s Belmarsh prison. One of the few pictures that emerged at the time of his transfer to the hospital was one of a zombie.

Let’s just hope that I‘m totally wrong with this scenario – and that people’s pressure (at this point it would be a miracle) will prey Julian loose from the lethal fangs of the empire and its minions.

The Western world keeps looking on – worse, they even support Her Majesty’s Prison Service, to which Julian Assange is subjected. They largely applauded the brutal British arrest of Julian Assange, when the police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy into a van and off to preventive custody, and hours later he was convicted to 50 weeks on a phony charge for jumping bail.

What can be said – is not better said than by Paul Craig Roberts,

“If the world stands for the US / UK / Swedish judicial murder of an innocent man, the world does not deserve to exist another second.” – Amen.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from Medium

Since its 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US-installed fascist dictatorship, Washington has been militantly hostile toward Iran — especially since Trump took office.

His regime continues all out war by other means to topple its government, wanting the Islamic Republic returned to US client state status, its vast oil and gas reserves looted, its people ruthlessly exploited, the way things were from 1953 – 1979 under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

That’s what Pompeo has in mind by saying the Trump regime is “prepared to engage in a conversation with no preconditions (sic). We are ready to sit down with” Iranian officials, adding:

“The American effort to fundamentally reverse the malign activity (sic) of this Islamic Republic, this revolutionary force, is going to continue.”

Pompeo’s notion of “no preconditions” is subterfuge. US harshness toward Iran shows its real objectives.

The US under Republicans and Dems oppose all sovereign independent governments they don’t control.

They’re especially hostile to ruling authorities against Washington’s imperial agenda, its wars of aggression, its hostility toward peace, equity, and justice, its rage to dominate other nations, control their resources, and exploit their people as serfs.

Pompeo also failed to explain that Israel’s top geopolitical aim is eliminating Islamic Republic rule, for years urging the US to terror-bomb the country into submission, one of John Bolton’s longtime positions.

There’s no softening whatever of Trump regime policy toward Iran. Harsh rhetoric, Big Lies about the country, mean-spirited toughness, and longstanding US plans for wanting its government toppled drown out remarks like Pompeo’s on Sunday.

Last July, two months after he illegally abandoned the JCPOA nuclear deal, Trump said he’d meet with his Iranian counterpart without preconditions.

“If they want to meet, we’ll meet,” he added, saying as well his only concern is over not wanting Iran to develop a nuclear weapon it abhors, doesn’t seek, never has, and wants eliminated everywhere — Israel the only regional nuclear armed and dangerous state, a reality he ignores, supporting the Jewish state’s high crimes, mainly against defenseless Palestinians.

Trump’s public remarks show he’s a geopolitical know-nothing, an embarrassment to the office he holds, an unindicted war criminal multiple times over for endless aggression in multiple theaters on his watch, along with war by other means on Iran and Venezuela.

His comments last year on willingness to talk to Iran came ahead of US weaponized sanctions — aiming to drive its oil and gas exports to zero, along with disconnecting its banks from the SWIFT international financial transactions system, and other steps to crush its economy and inflict enormous hardships on its people.

In mid-May, Trump again said he’s willing to talk to Iran — around the same time a US carrier strike force and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers were deployed to the Middle East over fake intelligence claiming an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist, not now or at any time in Islamic Republic history.

John Bolton’s claims about Iranian responsibility for sabotaging Saudi and UAE tankers are Big Lies, aimed at heightening tensions further, risking possible war if things are pushed too far.

Preconditions define US relations with other countries, demanding they bend to its will, cooperative relations and compromise in international relations ruled out — especially with nations on the US target list for regime change like Russia, China, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran.

On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said

his government “support(s) logic and negotiation if (the Trump regime) sits at the negotiating table and fully respects and follows international regulations, not if it issues a decree to negotiate.”

On Sunday he said

“(t)he party (meaning the US) who left the negotiating table and upended an agreement must come back to normal conditions,” adding:

Otherwise “I declare as the representative of the Iranian nation that in this period, and for as long as the enemy does not regret its measures in the past, we have no way but to show resistance.”

As long as the Trump regime remains a JCPOA scofflaw, breaching international law by abandoning the nuclear deal, along with maintaining illegal sanctions on Iran, aiming to crush its economy and harm its people, there’s no basis for talks.

There’s reason to engage with the US only if it fully complies with its international obligations and the rule of law — clearly what it has no intention of doing.

In late May, Iranian leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei ruled out talks with the Trump regime, calling them “fruitless, harmful, (and) a total loss,” adding:

US talks are all about applying pressure, he stressed, unrelated to evenhanded negotiations and mutual respect.

North Korean officials can explain the futility of talks with the US, accomplishing nothing but unacceptable demands and empty promises, what Iran knows well from 40 years of hostile US actions against the country.

Separately on Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed EU countries for breaching their JCPOA obligations, saying the following:

“Europe has not complied with any of the terms of the agreement in practice. Ostensibly, it has, but not in practice. What Europe has to do is to implement the deal” — what it refuses to do, adding:

“The UN Security Council issued a resolution on the JCPOA. The resolution follows two objectives: guarantee the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program and guarantee the normalization of Iran’s economic relations with the world.”

The Islamic Republic is in full compliance with JCPOA provisions. So are Russia and China. The US illegally pull out. Britain, France, and Germany, the other signatories, failed to fulfill their obligations. The same goes for other EU countries, yielding to US pressure instead of observing the rule of law.

Zarif asked EU governments “how many European companies are currently operating in Iran? How many European banks are working with Iran?”

How many EU countries are maintaining normal political, economic, financial, and trade relations with the Islamic Republic?

The answer is none, bowing to unacceptable US interests instead, showing their ruling authorities can never be trusted, the same, of course, true for the US.

As for negotiating with Trump regime hardliners, Iran wants no part of dealing with rogue actors bent on destroying the country and enslaving its people.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from LobeLog

“Oh, sono contrario all’intervento militare!” Recita un racconto “pacifista” ascoltato nel Nord che funge da pretesto per una dichiarazione sul Venezuela.

Questo preludio consola l’anima, libera la coscienza liberale e s’impegna a mantenere le credenziali accademiche, giornalistiche e politiche desiderate, ma sempre più elusive. Tuttavia, il “pacifismo” trattato qui non ha niente a che fare col recente gesto della Norvegia di cercare una soluzione pacifica. Il governo del Presidente Nicolás Maduro è ovviamente pienamente coinvolto in questo ultimo tentativo di negoziato.

In effetti, il governo venezuelano lo proposte per tutta la crisi. Ad esempio, il primo maggio, il segretario di Stato Mike Pompeo, tra i principali artefici di tale narrativa “pacifista” insieme a John Bolton e al presidente Trump, dichiarò: “L’azione militare è possibile. Se questo è ciò che è richiesto, è quello che faranno gli Stati Uniti… cerchiamo di fare tutto il possibile per evitare la violenza… Preferiremmo una transizione pacifica del governo…”

C’è solo una ragione per cui finora gli Stati Uniti non potevano togliere l’opzione militare dal tavolo e attuarla. Non è perché ha qualche scrupolo sull’invasione di altri Paesi, ma piuttosto perché falliva miseramente nell’ambizioso tentativo di spezzare l’alleanza civile-militare, una precondizione esplicita all’opzione militare, almeno per il momento. Tuttavia, a Washington l’opzione della guerra economica non solo è sempre stata sul tavolo, ma veniva applicata ferocemente. Dopo le elezioni del 2013 del Presidente Nicolás Maduro in seguito la morte di Hugo Chávez, gli Stati Uniti sostennero le violente proteste dell’opposizione contro le elezioni legali, con conseguente pretesto per la legislazione sul Venezuela del presidente Obama nel 2014, volta a sanzionare il personale della Repubblica Bolivariana quale leva della punizione economica coll’obiettivo di ostacolare i funzionari politici chavisti e lo Stato.

Nel marzo 2015, Obama estese tale politica dichiarando il Venezuela “minaccia alla sicurezza nazionale degli Stati Uniti”, aprendo la porta a ulteriori sanzioni individuali. Trump le ampliava ulteriormente in sanzioni economiche collettive e piena guerra economica. Come notava il noto scrittore e accademico internazionale Vijay Prashad, influente nella sinistra statunitense, “Obama forgiò la lancia; Trump l’ha lanciata al cuore del Venezuela”. La guerra economica guidata da Trump contro il Venezuela colpisce soprattutto l’industria petrolifera. Secondo uno studio dell’aprile 2019 pubblicato negli Stati Uniti dai noti economisti statunitensi Mark Weisbrot e Jeffrey Sachs, queste e altre sanzioni economiche “riducevano l’apporto calorico della popolazione, aumentavano malattie e mortalità (sia tra gli adulti che i bambini) e milioni di venezuelani che lasciavano il Paese a causa del peggioramento della depressione economica e dell’iperinflazione. Esacerbarono la crisi economica del Venezuela e reso quasi impossibile stabilizzare l’economia, contribuendo ulteriormente ad altri morti”.

Continuano a sostenere che “Tali impatti danneggiarono in modo sproporzionato i venezuelani più poveri e vulnerabili… Si scoprivano che le sanzioni hanno inflitto e infliggono sempre più danni a vita e salute umana, tra cui si stima oltre 40000 morti nel 2017-2018; e che tali sanzioni corrisponderebbero alla definizione di punizione collettiva della popolazione civile descritta nelle convenzioni internazionali di Ginevra e dell’Aja, di cui gli Stati Uniti sono firmatari”.

Il governo venezuelano affermava che la guerra include anche non meno di tre sabotaggi elettrici nel marzo 2019 (7-14 marzo, 29 marzo e 30 marzo). Accompagnati da tre tentativi di colpo di Stato, il 23 gennaio, il 23 febbraio e il 30 aprile. Tutti incontrarono un’opposizione multipla e diffusa nelle strade da parte del Chavismo per difendere la rivoluzione. Tuttavia, si può immaginare come questa mobilitazione di massa influisca sull’economia già malconcia e sulla rotta “normale” di quella che è diventata una vita molto difficile. Inoltre, la guerra dei media degli USA contro Maduro e il Chavismo è una delle più feroci contro qualsiasi leader rivoluzionario della storia recente.

Il 16 maggio, dopo un mese di stallo, l’amministrazione Trump ordinò l’invasione della polizia nell’ambasciata venezuelana a Washington, arrestando quattro membri del collettivo di protezione dell’ambasciata presenti su invito del governo del Venezuela, mentre i “pacifisti” mantenevano il loro silenzio sulla guerra nella stessa città in cui molti di loro vivono e lavorano.

Cosa rimane di tale narrativa “pacifista” in opposizione a un eventuale intervento militare e in favore di una “transizione pacifica”, pur restando in silenzio sull’attuale guerra multiforme? I “pacifisti” sono complici apologetici della retorica di Washington sulla “transizione pacifica”, inquadrando l’opposizione alla politica USA sul Venezuela unicamente su come evitare l’intervento militare mentre non denunciano i tentativi di golpe e la guerra economica sostenuti dagli USA.

Tale politica sembra essere volta a provocare un’implosione sociale in Venezuela in modo che gli Stati Uniti possano istituire un governo cliente senza mai occupare militarmente il terreno. Questa è la nuova guerra? Se lo è, allora tale tipo di guerra non è così nuovo. Non era questo l’obiettivo degli Stati Uniti nel 1960 nel blocco contro Cuba, cioè creare “disincanto e disaffezione basati su insoddisfazione economica e difficoltà” come indicato dal dipartimento di Stato nel 1960, in modo che la gente si ribellasse al governo? E non era questo lo scenario che si dispiegò per rovesciare il governo democraticamente eletto di Salvador Allende nel 1973? Questo nuovo regime, che cambia il vino in bottiglie vecchie, è altrettanto letale oggi come lo era ieri. Gli Stati Uniti non imparano dalla storia.

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This article was originally published on Aurora. Traduzione di Alessandro Lattanzio.

Arnold August è giornalista e docente canadese, autore di Democrazia a Cuba e le elezioni del 1997-98, Cuba e i suoi vicini: Democrazia in movimento e Cuba – Relazioni con gli Stati Uniti: Obama e oltre. Collabora con molti siti, trasmissioni televisive e radiofoniche in America Latina, Cuba, Europa, Nord America e Medio Oriente. Sito web: Arnoldaugust.com.

Notes

1) “La trama per uccidere il Venezuela”, di Vijay Prashad, in Salon.com
2) Le sanzioni economiche come punizione collettiva: il caso del Venezuela di Mark Weisbrot e Jeffrey Sachs. Aprile 2019.
3) Memorandum Dal vicesegretario di Stato per gli affari inter-americani (Mallory) al sottosegretario di Stato per gli affari inter-americani (Rubottom). Washington DC, 6 aprile 1960.

Featured image is from Aurora

US President Donald Trump’s “the deal of the century” wants Palestinian refugees to be naturalized and settled in several countries, including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, Israeli daily Haaretz reports. 

As the world marked the International Quds Day on Friday, political leaders warned of mysterious aspects of the much-touted US plan and its ramifications for the future of Palestinians.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said one definite prospect is that the plan seeks to do away with the issue of returning 6 million refugees to their homeland.

“To realize this goal, America is about to arrange an economic deal and get its money from the miserable Persian Gulf countries,” he said in Tehran.

Haaretz said Washington is thought to be pressing Lebanon to grant citizenship to Palestinian refugees living in the country.

“In the process, this is seen as defusing the issue of a right of return of refugees to Israel, which has been a major obstacle to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the paper said.

According to UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, about 450,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon.

Other reports have put the figure lower, prompting Lebanese groups to say that the census had been conducted under US pressure designed to underreport the real numbers because that way Lebanon could absorb a modest-sized population.

The Lebanese constitution, however, provides that the country’s territory is indivisible and that refugees living there are not to receive citizenship.

The official reason for this is that the absorption of Palestinian refugees would impair their claim to a right of return.

However, the US has sugarcoated the plan with a lifeline to extract Lebanon from its economic crisis, where the country’s debt is estimated at more than $85 billion (about 155 percent of GDP), Haaretz said.

According to the Israeli paper, giving Palestinians citizenship is likely to prompt the roughly 1 million Syrian refugees in the country to demand similar status.

However, Lebanon isn’t the only country concerned about Washington dictating a solution to the refugee problem.

Jordan is horrified over the prospect that the United States will demand it absorb hundreds of thousands or even a million Palestinian refugees in the country, Haaretz added.

The paper cited investigative journalist Vicky Ward recounting in her new book “Kushner Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption” that the Trump administration’s plan sees Jordan providing territory to the Palestinians and receiving Saudi territory in return.

The Saudis, for their part, would get the islands of Sanafir and Tiran from Egypt, it said.

“Land swaps appear to be the magic formula that the Trump administration has adopted, and not just for Jordan,” Haaretz said.

According to Ward, it has been suggested that Egypt give up territory along the Sinai coast between Gaza and el-Arish, to which some of the Gaza population would be transferred. In return, Israel would give Egypt territory of equivalent size in the western Negev.

Haaretz, meanwhile, revealed lucrative projects to be funded by European countries, the US and wealthy Arab states, including an underwater tunnel which Israel would allow to be dug between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Egypt, the paper said, has been promised a whopping $65 billion to help boost its economy which is currently in shambles.

The plan also says Palestinian refugees in Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries would receive citizenship in exchange for generous assistance to the host countries.

The Israeli paper, however, cast doubt on the viability of the “plan of generous financial compensation and empty tracts of land for new housing”.

“The problem is that the Palestinian refugees are the supreme symbols of Palestinian nationhood,” it said.

“An American deal that blatantly relies on buying up that symbol for cash, even lots of it, can’t be acceptable to the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza,” it added.

The Trump administration is set to unveil the economic portion of the so-called “deal of the century” during a conference in Manama, Bahrain, on June 25-26.

All Palestinian factions have boycotted the event, accusing Washington of offering financial rewards for accepting the Israeli occupation.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have said they will send delegations to the Manama forum and Israel’s Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon has said he intends to attend.

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Featured image is from NDTV

In its march toward yet another war, the United States accuses Iran of using military force to establish itself as a “regional hegemon.” It accuses Iran of being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. It accuses Iran of aiding rebels in Yemen, the government in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

There is an unfortunate tendency in the United States to throw money at a problem, particularly when the problem is related to powerful constituencies. The recent attacks on synagogues, churches, and mosques have included two attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego that killed 12 and a shooting at a Texas church in 2017 that killed 26. The recent massacre of 51 Muslims in New Zealand also resonated in the United States.

Attacks on religious sites are increasingly being seen as a national problem in the U.S., even though they are statistically speaking extremely rare, far less frequent than attacks on or inside public schools. The characteristic government response to the incidents has been to authorize and granting money to provide surveillance cameras, bulletproof glass and armed guards for those sites that are considered to be particularly vulnerable.

It also is happening at state and local levels. The New York city council is considering including funding for security at houses of worship in the next year’s budget, while Connecticut is proposing a grant of $5 million to pay for specific physical security upgrades.  Not to be left behind, a bipartisan bill has been introduced in the Senate by Senators Rob Portman and Gary Peters to authorize $75 million in grants to protect religious sites as well as select nonprofit organizations. The nonprofits would include facilities that are considered vulnerable to violence, including abortion clinics.

As usual, however, the devil is in the details and, most particularly, in the process used to determine who gets the cash. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) already doles out considerable money, $1.7 billion in 2019, in grants to various organizations and both governmental and non-governmental entities. Included are grants to “nonprofit” groups that are considered to be particularly targeted by terrorists. This process is not particularly objective and it was reported in 2014 that fully 94% of all grants issued by DHS to enhance security had gone to Jewish groups and their associated facilities. Jewish groups also received nearly all of the grants since the inception of the program in 2005, totaling $151 million. This disparity, which was the case even before the two recent armed attacks on synagogues, is a tribute to the political power of Jewish organizations versus the lack of the same relating to small and relatively impecunious congregations of Christians and Muslims.

Indeed, many religious groups have taken steps on their own, without a government handout, to enhance their own security. They are to be commended for doing so. It is to be presumed that some other houses of worship have been hesitant about upgrading security, even if they can afford it, because they are waiting for the government to cover the costs. Other religious entities have eschewed overt security because it sends the wrong message about their accessibility to the public.

In theory, community policing means that law enforcement officers, paid for by the entire community, will be deployed at locations where their presence contributes to public safety. This is already the case in most towns and cities, where policemen are present and highly visible at the times of religious services to handle traffic and other security problems. This is all accomplished without any particular fuss and without any special federal government grants.

There is also the question of how the grants would be awarded. As noted above, the politically powerful who have access to the bureaucrats will inevitably be the principal beneficiaries. Sarah Levin, director of governmental affairs for the Secular Coalition for America, has observed that there is no particular reason why grants for security enhancement at religious sites should not be made available to anyone who believes him or herself targeted for any particular reason or even for no reason at all. She cites the example of non-religious nonprofits, to include abortion clinics, explaining that “Favoring the security of houses of worship over the security of other communities is not only violation of separation of church and state, it’s wrong.”

Levin is right but she is wrong about the broader acceptability of government issuing grants to specific communities or constituencies that are considered to be threatened. Government should be neutral, leaving it up to local police and the resources of the communities themselves to assess the security situation and provide appropriate protection against potential criminals.

The desire on the part of some in government to pander to some constituencies that are most vocal is understandable, but it is not acceptable to do so because that ultimately means that the state is enabling the activities of one group over another based on a subjective grant-giving process. And doing so also raises moral issues. Why should I as a Roman Catholic who does not believe acceptable some forms of abortion be required to pay taxes to protect the activity of abortion clinics?

The mentality of those in government that compels some legislators to seek to favor certain groups derives from the unfortunate tendency to regard some actions as more heinous than others. Is it really worse to shoot people in a synagogue rather than in an elementary school, requiring national level remedial action consisting of grants to upgrade security in the former rather than the latter?

The willingness of some in government to use taxpayer money to support constituencies near to their hearts rather than based on objective standards that apply to everyone all began with the popularization of the concept of the “hate crime.” For the first time killing, robbing or maiming someone was considered somehow to be worse if hatred for that individual or the group he or she represented was involved. Now we Americans will have religious groups and abortion clinics alike lining up for assistance to protect themselves against maniacs and the ones who shout the loudest will, as ever, get the lion’s share of the money.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Bipartisan Plan to Secure State Bonding for Synagogue, Mosque, and Church Security. Credit: CT Senate Democrats/ flickr

Monsanto paid a shadowy chemical industry front group to help push back against the mounting scientific evidence that the company’s signature Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, court documents reveal. 

“If a company like [Monsanto] won’t support us, then who will?” the head of the American Council on Science and Health wrote to a Monsanto scientist in 2015. A day later came the reply: “[T]he answer is yes…. [D]efinitely count us in!!”

Emails between Monsanto and the American Council on Science and Health, or ACSH, and related internal Monsanto emails were first made public during the trial last July of a lawsuit by a former California school groundskeeper who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using Roundup. The jury awarded Dewayne “Lee” Johnson $289 million in punitive and compensatory damages, later reduced by the judge to $78 million.

The internal Monsanto/ACSH emails reappeared as evidence in the most recent lawsuit to go before a court, brought by a California couple who were both diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after decades of using the herbicide. In May, the jury ordered Bayer-Monsanto to pay Alva and Alberta Pilliod more than $2 billion in damages.

It was the third verdict in less than a year in which juries found that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer and that Monsanto covered up evidence of its health risk for decades. Last year, Bayer bought Monsanto for $63 billion and is now facing tens of thousands of similar lawsuits.

The emails – here and here – show that in February 2015, Monsanto was working with ACSH to prepare for the expected fallout from a pending report on the safety of glyphosate by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC. The following month the IARC, part of the World Health Organization, would release a report that classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Anticipating the report, Gilbert Ross, then the acting head of ACSH, asked Monsanto for support, “particularly if ACSH’s commentary is needed to critique an adverse outcome.”

On Feb. 26, Dr. Daniel Goldstein, the head of medical sciences and outreach at Monsanto, wrote to several colleagues, urging them to support continued payment to ACSH for its work.

Later that day, after his colleagues expressed reservations, Goldstein wrote:

But on March 16, just days before the IARC’s report, the ACSH’s Ross wrote to Goldstein complaining the group has still not received payment for its work on glyphosate:

Goldstein replied “count us in!!,” and Ross wrote back: “Great news, thanks Dan.”

From the emails, it is unclear how much Monsanto paid ACSH to defend the company and its weedkiller. But since the IARC report, ACSH has posted dozens of blogs or releases attacking scientists or organizations that have raised concerns about the health risks of glyphosate exposure. ACSH officials have also been quoted in news media reports, accusing EWG – “an alarmist group” – and other glyphosate critics of scare tactics.

According to ACSH’s website, the group is a “consumer advocacy organization” that does “not represent any industry.” But in 2013 Mother Jones reported that an internal ACSH document showed the organization received more than $390,000 in that year from corporations and large private foundations, including $30,000 from Bayer Cropscience, $22,5000 from the Chinese-owned pesticide and seed company Syngenta, and $30,000 from chemical giant 3M, among many others.

The ACSH document also lists Monsanto among “potential sources of support from previous donors.” As the recently released emails show, that potential was soon realized.

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Bill Walker is Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of EWG.

All images in this article are from EWG

The next UK Prime Minister has their work cut out to unite a divided nation, but also to improve Britain’s standing on the world stage, after one of the worst periods in UK-Russian relations

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UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s political career officially ended in tears on Friday, as the woman who declared that she would provide ‘strong and stable’ leadership when she came to power back three years ago, proved in the end to be not quite so strong or stable as she broke down in front of press outside 10 Downing Street.

She had in fact, arguably one of the most disastrous records of a UK PM to date. A total of 50 cabinet resignations since she took office, far more than any of her recent predecessors; together with scandals such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, Windrush scandal, hostile environment policy and record levels of homelessness and poverty which have all tainted her legacy.  And that’s not to mention her inability to deliver Brexit, which effectively led to her demise.

Indeed however tempting it may be to feel sorry for Mrs May – she has been surrounded by political vultures all vying for her position for months now – one is minded of the words of British political commentator Owen Jones,who when asked recently if he felt sorry for the Prime Minister, noted that May’s tears were simply those of self-pity and were absent at times when they would have been appropriate, such as in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives.

One may be inclined to think that if she was so unsuccessful on the domestic front, then perhaps in the area of foreign policy Mrs May could have had a better record. But alas, no such luck. We only have to look at the considerable deterioration in relations with Russia to understand that under her leadership, Britain’s standing in the world has diminished. Prominent British journalist Patrick Cockburn has even gone as far to say that Britain is now ‘entering a period of permanent crisis not seen since the 17th century’.

But arguably back in the 17th century the UK was more competent in the art of diplomacy than it is now.  May’s Defence Minister, Gavin Williamson, with his comment that Russia should ‘go away and shut up’ epitomised the extraordinary lack of finesse and savoir-faire the May government had when dealing with Russia.

His bellicose tone unfortunately went hand-in-hand with a completely misplaced notion of Russia presenting to the UK some kind of genuine threat, as he argued earlier this year that the UK had to ‘enhance its lethality’ against such well-resourced states, as opposed to concentrating its energies on Islamic terror groups. He was then accused by fellow politicians of ‘sabre-rattling’ in what were widely seen as misguided and provocative statements.

However, the Defence Minister was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under the May leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative programme really began to flourish; designed to ‘counteract Russian propaganda’ but instead deceptively engaged itself in spreading disinformation about Russia and even about the UK Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when it came to discourse about Russia in the press.

What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent ‘Russian threat’ and are prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this.

Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged in order to heighten the UK population’s awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by British secret services 

Staged or not, the handling of the Skripal incident by Prime Minister May left much to be desired. Even her experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as Home Secretary hadn’t taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, Mrs May was already issuing ultimatums to the Russian President. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was ‘highly likely’ Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and became something of a household joke in Russia as the UK Prime Minister herself became nothing more than a laughing stock.

The decision to publicly accuse another state of attempting murder on UK soil with evidence which only amounted to ‘a nerve agent of a type produced by Russia’, was utterly reckless, not only deeply harming relations with Russia, but undermining the credibility of the UK as a whole. And despite it being an attempt to bolster the PM’s position at a time when desperately needed to generate support for her upcoming Brexit white paper – this itself, given a delayed Brexit and divided country, proved fruitless.

So what can we expect from the next Prime Minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In terms of improving relations with Russia, as long as the Tories remain in power, and the ‘deep-state’ or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda, we are unlikely to see any significant change in policy.

One could hope that a certain Boris Johnson, himself named after a Russian émigré, and the leading candidate to replace May, could seek to build bridges in this regard, but his record on the Skripal case leaves room for doubt. The PM is after all a figurehead, and the UK civil service remains a driving force of policy-making.

As former Labour PM Tony Blair once said:

“You cannot underestimate how much they [the civil service] believe it’s their job to actually run the country and to resist the changes put forward by people they dismiss as ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians. They genuinely see themselves as the true guardians of the national interest, and think that their job is simply to wear you down and wait you out.”

Says it all really.

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The corporate media is concealing a leaked UN agency report that shows Syrian government innocence in an alleged chemical attack.

“Americans have been fed a steady diet of ‘Assad the butcher’ and any counter narrative is disappeared.”

The corporate media march in lock step with the United States and its allies around the world. They have a tacit agreement to exclude any information which might inconvenience pro-war, pro-interventionist narratives.

Claims of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are but one example of this tactic. These improbable stories have been repeated with regularity ever since the United States and its allies began using jihadist proxies to overthrow the Syrian government in 2011. In 2013 we were told that president Assad waged a chemical weapons attack on the same day that United Nations weapons inspectors arrived in the country. It is an understatement to say that this scenario is unlikely to be true.

In 2018 the U.S. and its European allies repeated that they would take military action against Syria if there were any reports of chemical weapons use. Like clockwork, such an event was reported and a bombing campaign took place in April of that year.

Anyone with common sense should doubt these reports. Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country. Furthermore, persons with credibility and expertise had already provided evidence that these claims are nothing but false flags meant to get public buy-in for aggression.

“Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country.”

The claims and counter claims always merited serious scrutiny. But a leaked document from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) makes the case that even supposedly disinterested parties take the side of the U.S. and its allies if enough pressure is applied.

The leaked report makes clear that there were serious questions about the 2018 reports, even among OPCW staff. The New York Times and the rest of their partners in propaganda wanted to make the case for the once and future war and accused the Syrian government of dropping chlorine gas devices onto an apartment building. But the leaked document  shows that there were serious doubts expressed by the some of the expert investigators. “…there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at both locations rather than being delivered by aircraft.”

There are many dots to connect here and they point away from the “Assad is gassing his own people” tale. The OPCW was pressured into taking on the role of judge and jury and assigning blame, rather than merely reporting on its technical findings. The politicization of its work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives. As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as coincidence.

“The politicization of the OPCW’s work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives.”

The recently leaked documents ought to make for headlines around the world. Instead the story has been ignored by corporate media. Only those who are already interested in the topic or who are familiar with organizations such as the Working Group  on Syria, Propaganda and Media know anything about this news. It has been deliberately kept hidden so that the next call for an armed response will receive little or no opposition.

The U.S. Congress came very close to calling for a Syrian war in a May 20, 2019 letter signed by 70% of its members . The AIPAC inspired massive calls for president Trump to “stabilize” Syria, protect Israel and stop Russian and Iranian influence. The call was bipartisan and bicameral with 79 senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism. Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are among those calling for the dangerous slippery slope. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chairwoman Karen Bass signed too as did Hakeem Jeffries, James Clyburn, and Elijah Cummings among others.

Americans have been fed a steady diet of “Assad the butcher” and any counter narrative is disappeared, just like the OPCW leak. It is a useful ploy to have around. Let us not forget that last year’s bombing resulted in praise from the so-called resistance crowd who think they are supporting a humanitarian action. When he next decides to protect the U.S. jihadist proxies the gas attack story will suddenly reappear. Revealing any doubts about its veracity will undermine the U.S. hegemonic project.

“Seventy-nine senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism.”

There is plenty of collusion in the United States and it isn’t between Trump and Russia. The love triangle involves the corporate media, both sides of the war party, and foreign ally puppet states. They all play nicely together in the sandbox when there is an evil deed to carry out. The public are mostly hapless dupes who give approval for destruction and carnage just like the state want them to.

We have been through this often enough to know when lies are being told. It wasn’t that long ago that Colin Powell went to the United Nations with a vial and a tall tale about WMD. The cast of characters changes but the story is the same. It is time to grow up and end useful idiocy.

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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at [email protected].

Featured image is from BAR

The Congressional Black Caucus sides with its party’s war mongers and in fear of the Israel lobby, while large Black majorities believe Israel is neither an ally nor a friend.

“The Black Caucus’ tolerance of apartheid Israel’s barbarism is infinite.”

Nearly 400 members of the U.S. House and Senate signed a letter urging President Trump to keep U.S. troops in Syria – against the wishes of the sovereign government of that country and therefore, in gross violation of international law — and to increase sanctions against Russia for assisting the Syrian government in its battle against Islamic jihadists. Among the signers  were 26 of the 51 Black voting members of the House and the two Black U.S. senators that are running for president, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

Nobody except the Israel lobby gets that kind of immediate obeisance from the Congress. Tel Aviv’s interests top the letter’s list of bullet-points: “Underscore Israel’s right to self-defense.” The letter baldly lobbies to increase the annual billions in U.S. subsidies to Israel’s bloated and hyper-aggressive, nuclear-armed military. “We must also look for ways to augment our support in the context of the current 10-year Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Israel,” the letter reads, “ and to ensure that Israel has access to the resources and materiel it needs to defend itself against the threats it faces on its northern border.”

“Tel Aviv’s interests top the letter’s list of bullet-points.”

The massive sign-on was organized to pressure Trump into even more aggressive actions against Iran, and to prevent the president from fulfilling his oft-repeated wish to withdraw from Syria, now that the ISIS “caliphate” has been shattered and al-Qaida’s legions are bottled up in Idlib province, under siege by the Syrian Army. Israel has provided arms and assistance to both terrorist factions, as have Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Britain, France — and the United States, the imperial grandmaster of the jihadist offensive that began in 2011 against Libya (see “U.S. Protects Jihadists in Syria,” BAR). Libya was plunged into barbarism and Syria is in ruins, with half a million dead and a third of the country displaced. Iraq, still reeling from Washington’s 2003 “Shock and Awe” and occupation, has been savaged yet again by the West’s jihadist proxies, with its second largest city, Mosul, flattened by U.S. bombs and artillery. Yet, three-quarters of the U.S. Congress last week signed on to the insane statement that the region has “been destabilized by Iranian regime’s threatening behavior.”

“The United States was the imperial grandmaster of the jihadist offensive that began in 2011.”

Were it not for Iranian and Lebanese Shiite militias and Russia’s 2015 intervention, Syria’s secular government would have fallen to the U.S.-sponsored jihadist legions, at which point the U.S. and allied governments, including Israel, would have occupied the region, ostensibly to restore order and control the head-chopping Islamic warriors. Even in the current circumstances, Israel recently seized the opportunity to formally claim sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights , occupied by the Zionists in the 1967 war, and the U.S. got the chance to move 5,000 troops back into Iran to aid in the fight against ISIS, the “rogue” faction of al-Qaida that rejected the West’s instructions to blend in with other Islamist fighters and stick to the mission of regime change in  Syria.

Had President Obama’s 2011 war plan been successful, Syria would have been balkanized into mini-states ruled by warlords beholden to the U.S. and its regional allies, and Lebanon would be wracked by renewed civil war, or under the discipline of constant Israeli air strikes, or both. Iraqi Kurdistan, with its huge oil reserves and deep ties to Israel, would have seceded, and U.S. troops would be back in multi-divisional force in Iraq at the request of a terrified central government. Iran would be surrounded. The stage would then be set to empower the U.S. to cut off China’s access to Middle Eastern (and even central Asian) energy supplies – which was the larger purpose of Obama’s “smart war” of “humanitarian” intervention plus jihadist proxies, his slickly demonic contribution to the Great Imperial Game.

“Three-quarters of the U.S. Congress signed on to the insane statement that the region has “been destabilized by Iranian regime’s threatening behavior.” 

If the Congressional Black Caucus had properly understood that last week’s letter was asking them to help rescue the remnants of the First Black President’s grand plan, they might have signed on in even greater numbers. Even so, the 26 signatories included John Lewis, the “soul” of the Caucus (or “de Lawd,” as he is derisively referred to in Atlanta), who is usually part of the ten or twelve Black Caucus members that can still be counted on to vote against some of the most blatantly warlike measures. Lewis sensed that the letter was an Israeli lobby priority, as did his Black Caucus colleagues, who are listed below in order of their signing .

James Clyburn (SC)
Hakeem Jeffries (NY)
Gregory Meeks (NY)
Karen Bass (CA)
Colin Allred (TX)
Yvette Clarke (NY)
Elijah Cummings (MD)
Donald Payne (NJ)
Val Demings (FL)
David Scott (GA)
John Lewis (GA)
Donald McEachin (VA)
Sheila Jackson Le (TX)
G.K. Butterfield (NC)
Danny Davis (IL)
Joyce Beatty (OH)
Sanford Bishop (GA)
Alma Adams (NC)
Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)
Marc Veasey (TX)
Alcee Hastings (FL)
Emanuel Cleaver (MO)
Frederica Wilson (FL)
Steven Horsford (NV)
Robin Kelly (IL)
Antonio Delgado (NY)

Poll Shows Black People Don’t Think of Israel as a Friend or Ally

The 26 lawmakers make up just over half of the 51 Black voting members of the House. (The delegates from Washington, DC, and the U.S. Virgin Islands cannot vote on the House floor.) On the Senate side, presidential candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have always been in the Israel lobby’s pocket. In their haste to make a splash with headlines around the world proclaiming “Nearly 400 Lawmakers Call on Trump to Address Threats in Syria ,” the letter’s handlers may have simply quit pressing for signatures once they reached three-quarters of the House and Senate. Back in the summer of 2014, while Israel was slaughtering over 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza, the combined chambers of Congress voted unanimously in favor of a resolution affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Not one member of the Black Caucus dissented or abstained. Thus, their tolerance of apartheid Israel’s barbarism is infinite.

But, where do their Black constituents stand on the unholy U.S. alliance with the Zionist state? A poll taken last October by The Economis/YouGov  showed only 19 percent of Black Americans thought of Israel as an “ally,” compared to 43 percent of whites and 22 percent of Hispanics. Only 17 percent of Blacks think Israel is a “friendly” country, and just 27 percent of whites and 21 percent of Hispanics see Israel as friendly. Among all races in the U.S,, support for Israel is described as “plummeting” – which is cause for the Israel lobby to organize a letter-signing publicity campaign among the folks whose cowardice or bought-and-paid-for allegiance they can count on: the elected officials of both corporate parties.

“Only 17 percent of Blacks think Israel is a ‘friendly’ country.”

The electoral arrangement in the United States, where half of the duopoly is the White Man’s Party, has created a one-party system for Black America. With nowhere else to go, Black voters can think or feel however they want, but their elected representatives vote according to the wishes of their party’s funders – rich white people, virtually all of them in league with apartheid Israel. The Democratic Party is thus the mechanism for rich white people’s political domination of Black America, the nation’s most left-leaning constituency, including on issues of war and peace, and especially on Israeli apartheid. Black Democrats, with the exception of a handful of dissidents like New York lawmakers Charles and Inez Barron , are agents of forces hostile to the Black community, and enemies of peace. Last year, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a protected class, and in 2014, shortly before the unanimous vote in favor of Israel, 80 percent of the Black Caucus voted to continue the multi-billion dollar militarization of local police, through the Pentagon’s infamous 1033 program.

Every member of the Black Caucus should be ousted on grounds of misrepresentation. But the authentic Black political conversation doesn’t travel much beyond the barbershops, beauty parlors and activist circles before it is smothered by the octopus of Black America’s one party Democratic state. That’s why the best thing that can happen this primary election season is for the Democratic Party to implode — and set its Black and left constituencies free from the agents of rich man’s rule.

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BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault.

North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that things are not going well”. If everything else fails, they simply try to get some second or third job, and just survive, somehow.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris. In these nations, there is suddenly no appetite for sacrificing their own people on the altar of well-being of Western citizens. Several countries, including Venezuela and Syria, are even willing to fight for their independence.

Despite insane and sadistic embargos and sanctions imposed on them by the West; China, Russia and Iran are now flourishing, in many fields doing much better than Europe and North America.

If they are really pushed any further, China, Russia and their allies combined, could easily collapse the economy of the United States; an economy which is built on clay and unserviceable debt. It is also becoming clear that militarily, the Pentagon could never defeat Beijing, Moscow, even Teheran.

After terrorizing the world for ages, the West is now almost finished: morally, economically, socially, and even militarily. It still plunders, but it has no plan to improve the state of the world. It cannot even think in such terms.

It hates China, and every other country that does have progressive, internationalist plans. It smears President Xi Jinping and his brainchild, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but there is nothing new and exciting that the West is able to offer to the world. Yes, of course, those regime changes, coups, military interventions and theft of natural resources, but anything else? No, silence!

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Image on the right: In Pilsen, Czechia, people raiding garbage in order to eat

During my two weeks long working visit to Europe, in the Czech Republic (now renamed to Czechia), a country that enjoys a higher HDI (Human Development Index defined by UNDP) than Italy or Spain, I saw several young, decently dressed men, picking through garbage bins, right in front of my hotel, looking for food.

I saw young Europeans kneeling and begging in Stuttgart, the second richest city in Germany (where both Mercedes and Porsche car are produced).

What I observed in all seven countries of the EU that I visited, was confusion, but also indifference, extreme selfishness and almost grotesque idleness. In great contrast to Asia, everybody in Europe was obsessed with their ‘rights’ and privileges, while no one gave a slightest damn about responsibilities.

When my plane from Copenhagen landed in Stuttgart, it began to rain. It was not heavy rain; just rain. The Canadair jet operated by SAS is a small aircraft, and it did not get a gate. It parked a few meters from the terminal and the captain announced that ground staff refused to bring a bus, due to lightning and the downpour. And so, we stayed inside the plane, for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. The lightning ended. The drizzle continued. 40 minutes, no bus. One hour later, a bus appeared. A man from the ground staff emerged leisurely, totally wrapped in plastic, protected hermetically from rain. Passengers, on the other hand, were not even offered umbrellas.

“I love myself”, I later read graffiti in the center of the city.

The graffiti was not far from the central train station, which is being refurbished at the cost of several billion euros, and against the will of the citizens. The monstrous project is marching on at an insanely lazy pace, with only 5-6 construction workers detectable at a time, down in the tremendous excavations.

Stuttgart is unbelievably filthy. Escalators often do not work, drunkards are all over, and so are beggars. It is as if for decades, no one did any face-lift to the city. Once free museums are charging hefty entrance fees, and most of the public benches have disappeared from parks and avenues.

The decay is omnipresent. The German rail system (DB) has virtually collapsed. Almost all trains are late, from the ‘regional’; to the once glorified ICE (these German ‘bullet trains’ are actually moving slower, on average, even in comparison to some Indonesian inter-city expresses).

Image below: Author with great Marxist Italian professor Luciano Vasapollo

The services provided everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Italy, are grotesquely bad. Convenience stores, cafes, hotels – all are understaffed, badly run and mostly arrogant. Humans are often replaced by dysfunctional machines. Tension is everywhere, the bad mood omnipresent. Demanding anything is unthinkable; one risks being snapped at, insulted, sent to hell.

I still remember how Western propaganda used to glorify services in the capitalist countries, when we were growing up in the Communist East: “The customer is always treated like a god”. Yes, right! How laughable.

For centuries, “European workers” were ‘subsidized’ by colonialist and neo-colonialist plunder, perpetrated in all non-white corners of the world. They ended up being spoiled, showered with benefits, and unproductive. That was fine for the elites: as long as the masses kept voting for the imperialist regime of the West.

“The Proletariat” eventually became right-wing, imperialist, even hedonistic.

I saw a lot this time, and soon I will write much more about it.

What I did not witness, was hope, or enthusiasm. There was no optimism. No healthy and productive exchange of ideas, or profound debate; something I am so used to in China, Russia or Venezuela, just confusion, apathy and decay everywhere.

And hate for those countries that are better, more human, more advanced, and full of socialist enthusiasm.

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Image on the right: At Sapienza University in Rome

Italy felt slightly different. Again, I met great left-wing thinkers there; philosophers, professors, filmmakers, journalists. I spoke at Sapienza University, the biggest university in Europe. I lectured about Venezuela and Western imperialism. I worked with the Venezuelan embassy in Rome. All of that was fantastic and enlightening, but was this really Italy?

A day after I left Rome for Beirut, Italians went to the polls. And they withdrew their supports from my friends of the 5-Star-Movement, leaving them with just over 17%, while doubling the backing for the extreme right-wing Northern League.

This virtually happened all over Europe. UK Labor lost, while right-wing Brexit forces gained significantly. Extreme right-wing, even near-fascist parties, reached unexpected heights.

It was all “me, me, me” politics. An orgy of “political selfies”. Me had enough of immigrants. Mewants better benefits.Mewants better medical care, shorter working hours. And so on.

Who pays for it, no one in Europe seems to care. Not once did I hear any European politicians lamenting about the plundering of West Papua or Borneo, about Amazonia or the Middle East, let alone Africa.

And immigration? Did we hear anything about that nuisance of European refugees, millions of them, many illegal, that have descended in the last decades on Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, and even Sub Continent? They are escaping, in hordes, from meaninglessness, depressions, existential emptiness. In the process, they are stripping the locals of land, real estate, beaches, everything.

“Immigrants out”? Fine; then European immigrants out from the rest of the world, too! Enough of the one-sidedness!

The recent EU elections clearly showed that Europe has not evolved. For countless dark centuries, it used to live only for its pleasure, murdering millions in order to support its high life.

Right now, it is trying to reshuffle its political and administrative system, so it can continue doing the same. More efficiently!

On top of it, absurdly, the world is expected to pity that overpaid and badly performing, mainly right-wing and lethargic European proletariat, and sacrifice further tens of millions of people, just in order to further increase its standard of living.

All this should not be allowed to happen. Never again! It has to be stopped.

What Europe has achieved so far, at the expense of billions of lives of “the others”, is definitely not worthy of dying for.

Beware of Europe and its people! Study its history. Study imperialism, colonialism and the genocides it has been spreading all over the world.

Let them vote in their fascists. But keep them away. Prevent them from spreading their poison all over the world.

They want to put the interests of their countries first? Wonderful! Let us do exactly the same: The people of Russia first, too! China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Four of his latest books are China and Ecological Civilization with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon.

All images in this article are from the author

Seven years ago Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick wrote a book (and Stone followed with a 10 part series on The Showtime Channel) The Untold History of the United States. This is a ‘must read’ or ‘should view’ for anyone who wishes to understand more about the true history of this great nation from The New Deal on. Although this writer has read countless books on the subjects covered by Stone and Kuznick, I found information that I never knew before.

If only all our high school history students could have the opportunity to read and discuss the book in class, and balance it with what the mainstream educational system tosses their way. So, for those of you out there who will nod affirmatively as to what  Stone & Kuznick report, you have clean hands. Simply put, you were against the acts of aggression that our leaders have orchestrated in our name. The most heinous of all being the hidden truth of 9/11 and what followed in  the illegal and immoral invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. O f course, just having clean hands is only half of it all. The real challenge is to use those clean hands to show others who may be not so aware that truth is paramount. Speaking up and speaking out for a better way for us all to live is part of the cleansing process.

Too many of our former leaders and their handlers have had dirty hands.

This Military Industrial Empire, AKA The Deep State, has been responsible for most of the mess this world finds itself in.

By manipulating countless countries and strangling their voices for democracy, and then placing into power murderous and greedy puppets, the blowback has been tremendous.

As the Stone & Kuznick book explains, it has always been about control of resources, cheap labor and markets abroad. It has never been about freedom for others… many our own citizens have seen that Big Lie right here at home.

Sadly, the dirty hands of our 21^st Century leaders have equaled or outdone the dirty hands of their predecessors. What the Bush/Cheney gang had done is unconscionable! To weave a campaign of half truths and outright lies so as to justify an act of aggression against a sovereign nation like Iraq is almost as low as one can ever get… unless of course if one focuses on the 9/11 con job. Hitler and Goebbels could not have spun a greater excuse for preemptive war. Sixteen years later many working stiffs still struggle on, as military spending sucks up more than half of our federal tax revenues.

The dirty hands who control what Eisenhower (he of his own dirty hands) called the Military Industrial Complex are the selfish men and women who profited from 9/11 and the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions and occupations… to the tune of hundreds of billions of your tax dollars each and every year! Thus, that diverted money could have gone for Medicare for All, infrastructure repairs and upgrades (which would have softened the effects of Hurricanes Katrina , Sandy, Mathew, Harvey, Maria and Irma), schools and libraries… and so many other safety nets and needs.

The real sadness is those who, by their own choices, have no hands. They being unfortunately the majority of Americans, the overwhelming majority, who buy into the lies and fabrications, never once exhibiting what made America so great: skepticism.  Either through apathy (“Hey, it ain’t my kids who are being Shock and Awed or killed in uniform“) or foolish jingoism (“USA USA…build the wall and Make America Great Again”) they rally round a flag that has been hijacked and abused by those with dirty hands. These lemmings are more concerned about some famous celebrity’s scandalous acts than the truth as to why 99% of us are confined to this financial treadmill. As long as they walk past we with clean hands and never listen or read what we are offering… Karma can be a bitch!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

As if trade war wasn’t enough for traders to worry about with futures reopening sharply lower after China’s government blamed the U.S. for the latest collapse in trade talks, it appears that Boeing is about to resume the position as yet another very popular 737 model suddenly finds itself in hot water.

Accord to Bloomberg, the wing components on as many as 312 Boeing 737s, including some of the grounded 737 Max, are prone to cracking and must be repaired within 10 days, aviation regulators said late Sunday.

With Boeing already under scrutiny for the 737 MAX fiasco, Boeing – which is suddenly finding a lot of faults that never existed before the company found itself under congressional scrutiny – informed the FAA that so-called “leading edge slat tracks” may not have been properly manufactured and pose a safety risk, the agency said. The parts allow the wing to expand to create more lift during takeoff and landing.

In response, the FAA plans to issue an order calling for operators of the planes worldwide to identify whether the deficient parts were installed and to replace them. A complete failure wouldn’t lead to a loss of the aircraft, the FAA – which was humiliated for siding with Boeing and was initially against the grounding of the 737 MAX only to flip flop when the rest of the world boycotted the troubled airliner – said, but “could cause damage during flight.”

Because “damage during flight” of a key component rarely if ever leads to a “loss of the aircraft”?

As Boeing noted in the statement, it has notified operators of the planes about the needed repairs and is sending replacement parts to help minimize the time aircraft are out of service, the company said in a statement.

Boeing identified 148 parts made by a subcontractor that are affected. The parts may be on a total of 179 737 Max aircraft and 133 737 NG planes worldwide, including 33 Max and 32 NG aircraft in the U.S., the FAA said. The NG, or Next Generation, 737s are a predecessor to the Max family (which by that logic must be the next, next generation).

So many 737MAX… pic.twitter.com/uG5OMusg8l

— Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren (@photoJDL) June 2, 2019

This latest quality control fiasco piles on even more problems for Boeing, whose 737 Max has been grounded worldwide since March 13 after two fatal crashes tied to a malfunction that caused a flight control system to repeatedly drive down the plane’s nose. Boeing is finalizing a “software fix” along with proposed new training that will be required before the planes fly again. One only hopes that Boeing’s software “fix” isn’t in some way connected to the Google cloud…

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Mass public resistance awaits him during his three-day visit, including photo-op meetings with Queen Elizabeth and UK officials.

Reportedly, millions of pounds were spent for security, largely for deploying thousands of police and other security forces.

Scotland Yard estimates that around 250,000 Brits will demonstrate publicly against his presence, activists from the Stop Trump Coalition involved.

Its website headlined: “Trump is coming back to the UK. Let’s get ready — 4 June! Together Against Trump national demonstration” planned for 11:00 Tuesday in Trafalgar Square,” instructions for demonstrators saying: “Be ready to follow Trump wherever he goes!”

Show him he’s not welcome, urging “a diverse Carnival of Resistance” to reject his “policies of bigotry, hate and greed.”

Reportedly 18 separate anti-Trump related events are scheduled throughout his stay — other groups involved, including “Together Against Trump” and “Stand Up to Trump.”

During his visit last year, hundreds of thousands protested against his presence. A baby blimp depicted him as a bloated snarling orange infant.

It’ll greet him again this time, or something similar, along with a robotic version of him sitting on a golden toilet — to be displayed throughout his stay.

Some royal family members are reportedly displeased about his visit because of his criticism of princess Diana and Megan Markle, calling her “nasty.”

On Monday, a ceremonial welcome awaits him at Buckingham Palace, a state banquet to be held in the evening.

Telegraph, June 3, 2019

The Hill, June 3, 2019

Before departing on Sunday, he said Britain should “walk away” from a Brexit deal with the EU if British demands aren’t met. He criticized what Britain pays for EU membership, saying:

“If I were them, I wouldn’t pay $50 billion. That is a tremendous number.” Like most often, he’s got his facts wrong. Britain pays around $21 billion annually to the EU budget.

He suggested Britain sue the EU for “ammunition” to pursue Brexit, urging its government send Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage to Brussels to renegotiate exit terms.

In late May European Parliament elections, his party topped other UK ones, winning 29 seats. Following Theresa May’s resignation as UK prime minister, effective when her replacement is chosen, Trump again meddled improperly in British affairs, expressing support for Boris Johnson to replace her.

The Guardian, June 3, 2019

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn slammed his remark, calling it “unacceptable interference in our country’s” internal affairs, adding:

“The next prime minister should be chosen not by the US president, nor by 100,000 unrepresentative Conservative party members, but by the British people in a general election.”

Newly appointed Commons leader Mel Stride also said Trump shouldn’t be picking the next UK prime minister.

Lib Dem deputy leader Jo Swinson said

“(i)t shouldn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump backs Boris. They’re cut from the same cloth.”

DJT reportedly wants Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) included in US/UK trade talks, wanting it privatized for exploitation by Big Pharma and other US business interests.

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock ruled out the idea, saying

“I have a clear message: the NHS is not for sale, and it will not be on the table in any future trade talks.”

Before landing in London, Trump derided Mayor Sadiq Khan, calling him “a stone cold loser… “dumb (and) nasty,” accusing him of doing a “terrible job.”

Trump’s remarks followed Khan slamming DJT as “one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat,” comparing him to “fascists of the 20th century.”

Trump notoriously praises some of the world’s most oppressive leaders, saying they’re doing a “terrific job” — notably ruling authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Israel.

Parliament snubbed Trump by not inviting him to address the body during his stay, unwilling to grant him the honor.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from TruePublica

A vote for Boris Johnson as Britain’s Prime Minister would effectively be a vote for US President Donald Trump and his sidekick, Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel.  They have ‘form’ in working closely together to violate UN Security Council Resolutions.

To date, against the specific will of the international community of over 190 nation states worldwide they have ignored UNSCR 2334; have moved the US embassy to Jerusalem against world protest and have unilaterally approved the illegal annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel.  All these actions are a violation of international law and a complete contempt for the authority of the UN.

If Johnson joins Trump and Netanyahu it would bring the UK into a war in the Middle East against Iran that would almost certainly use nuclear weapons and be the cause of tens of thousands of deaths.  Is this what we want for Britain?

Is this what we fought for in two world wars?  To be associated with warmongers who are intent only on self-image and family assets?

Virtually any candidate other than Boris Johnson would be in Britain’s best interests.  We do not want British troops fighting a war for Trump and Netanyahu in the Middle East.  There are currently already a number of ministers and ex ministers who have been recruited as lobbyists for foreign interests, including a former Defence Minister and a former International Development Secretary, both of whom were eventually obliged to resign. Britain needs no more.

Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab or Angela Leadsom etc., are all experienced politicians any one of whom would be a leader of integrity in keeping Britain safe militarily, secure politically and economically whilst commanding respect throughout the world. On the other hand, any associate of Trump and Netanyahu would cause irreparable damage to Britain’s global standing and to world peace. The choice is plain.

We are a proud nation that has been an exemplar of democracy and human rights for over 100 years. Let us not now be associated with power-hungry, warring politicians, international corruption, trade wars and global instability.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Just at the time of Britain’s most needy moment since the last world war, the Tories have decided the best thing to do is not face up to the very serious challenges of our time but to have their own beauty contest to find out just how ugly the participants can get – other than competing for the stupidness of the Grayling cup.

Boris Johnson, the bookies favourite is in court for lying over the whole Brexit saga. One can only fret at the thought of this man becoming PM of Britain and turning what is left of the international laughing stock into something a lot less funny.

Raab has just announced his vision of Britain is a race to the bottom by stating unequivocally that taxes should fall to 15 and 35 per cent, whilst having no idea how to fund the revenue crash other than shut government departments down.

Hunt, McVey and Gove speak volumes. Serial liars, extreme neoliberal capitalists, bigots and backstabbers or a combination thereof.

Matt Hancock’s couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say about his leadership bid other than to say – “I just think we need a new face.”

There are others too – Rory Stewart, James Cleverly, Sajid Javid and Andrea Leadsom along with Mordant and Baker to name just a few. Not one springs to mind as having the intelligence and presence to lead a gang of drug crazed psycho’s at a snow and blow banquet let alone lead the sixth largest economy in the world.

But the latest contender is Mark Harper, and his bid to become PM demonstrates just how detached from society the party has become. Someone sane should have told him to be quiet and hide in a corner. He’s the ex-immigration minister who resigned back in 2014 after admitting he employed an illegal immigrant as his cleaner. He was unable to find any documentation papers for the cleaner he’d employed for seven years. He was praised as a man of integrity by Cameron who lied when he said Harper has significantly reduced immigration into the UK when he didn’t. His cleaner was arrested at her own daughter’s wedding.

It was Harper who oversaw the vans driving around the capital with messages to immigrants saying ‘go home or face arrest’ – all part of the building hostile environment built by Theresa May and her non-stop catastrophic failures at the Home Office, demonstrated by the Windrush scandal and destroying the police’s ability to fight crime, whilst illegally surveilling everyone else for no reason.

Other than Harper’s ability to reject any sense of morality and toe the line like a mindless puppet, he has no accomplishments whatsoever – like none. And yet, he sees himself as having the qualities of Prime Minister of Britain – and obviously others in the party do as well.

These deluded aspirants demonstrate one thing and one thing only – Britain will soon be rid of a party that plunged the country into darkness and set the nation back decades. The party is so self-absorbed and detached from reality that it is currently taking selfies and admiring their own phoney qualities. It’s like watching a bunch of school kids in a playground – only worse.

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One cannot and should not turn away from the disastrous results of the recent European Parliament elections, especially considering that Leftist parties across the European Union (EU) expected to gain 38 Members of the European Parliament (MEP), achieving around 5% of the vote.

The leadership and organizers of European Left needs to think thoroughly over its failure to mobilize and address working people. Even if failure is specific to the concrete context we can abstract a few very important reasons for such weak results.

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Lack of a Cohesive Radical Vision Across Borders: “Just a bit more social.”

Firstly, and most obviously, there is an absence of an integral European program for radical social change that combines viable short-term reformist policies with a utopian transformative vision of the future. The Yanis Varoufakis DiEM25 movement attempted to make one step in this direction, but fell behind two steps in its too reformist demands and a weak organizational support. Even if a few parties on the Left openly promote ecosocialism – one has difficulty understanding why this is not on the agenda of a majority of those parties – most parties find themselves in the trenches defending against the ongoing assault of neoliberal capitalism.

In short, the message of the Left has been boiled down to a mere defence of just a bit more open and a bit more social Europe. There is no radical criticism of the Eurozone and the asymmetrical relationship between the core and the periphery, and there is no call for or practice of international solidarity of working people across all the regions. The absence of a more integral and transformative program that would also be politically effective is coupled by limited media channels, and at times, out-dated use of that media, which restricts the ability to mobilize voters European-wide. Browsing through some slogans and banners in the country I live in, Germany, one perceives very minimal differentiation between the Left and the Social Democrats when they both hold the banner “Für soziale Europa” (For social Europe) – which is an inadequate and too moderate slogan. For an ordinary voter the Left has become just a somewhat better version of what Social Democrats used to be, which is treated as old fashioned in the mainstream parties’ discourse. The electoral campaign for EU elections reflected this: no enthusiasm, no provocation, no sparkle to inspire the desire/dream/community of people. It seems that the goal of European Left is a vote horizon of 5-10% of the electorate rather a radical transformation of Europe.

Secondly, despite some good work on the ground – for example, many members of the Left party (Linke) in Germany have been very active on anti-fascist (anti-AfD) issues, in the environmental movement connected to Fridays for Future and in the movement against rising rents that calls for expropriation of major real estate – the political enthusiasm for the alternative future has been increasingly associated and channelled to the Greens. The climate issue, at least at the present time, overdetermines other social issues, and functions as a fear of climate change (nature) that is juxtaposed with anti-social fears promoted by AfD (fear of foreigners, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism).

Divisions Among the Left and the Failure of Tsipras

Thirdly, the European Union elections clearly testify to further splits on the Left: for example, between autonomous campaigns on a national scale and the Yanis Varoufakis led DiEM project for democratizing the EU; or between movements and citizens’/city initiatives and entrenched, parliamentary-centred Left parties. The spectre of a future in Europe dealing with splits over the legacy of the failed Grexit and lurking Brexit weigh heavily in the discussions on the Left and have substantially weakened its thinking of different, non-capitalist future.

Fourthly, and most symptomatically, the current Left has not yet come to terms with the defeat of the once-messianic figure of Alexis Tsipras. If the sequence of 2014/15 promised an open confrontation with the Troika (the European Central Bank, European Commission, International Monetary Fund), that was catalysed by the OXI referendum in Greece, the social movements, the strikes and the electoral victory of Syriza, the latter has largely neutralized its social base and transformed the Left party into a dull disciple that conducts what the master of austerity says. Despite the IMF openly admitting the failures and injustices connected to the assault on the Greek economy and welfare, the austerity measures penetrate into the deepest pores of society, bringing together a wave of resignation, resentment and internalization/normalization of the crisis. The traumatic conversion from left hero to neoliberal Tsipras has had deep consequences for the Left and points to the weakness of the leadership of Syriza and the uncompromising stance of the EU ruling class, as well as extremely feeble international solidarity in the historic moment. The latest election results in Greece returned the conservative New Democracy party to a powerful position in governing and are thus not at all surprising.

Low Voter Turn-out and the Rise of the Right

Fifthly, even if the reasons for the decline of the Left are dependent on the specific circumstances of each region/country, I should mention that throughout the periphery there has been, as always, low voter turnouts. For example, in my home country of Slovenia, only 28% of people voted. Rather than speaking about lazy and passive voters, I would argue that their choice not to vote is a clear political choice. Many voters do not see any possibility for real change: how on earth should eight MEPs in a 751-member Parliament, only 1% of all the MEPs, exert any kind of influence? If those eight MEPs are so powerless, and everything is decided by lobbies, and in times of crisis, by the Troika, then it becomes extremely difficult to mobilize voters. Also, let’s remember that the Left was beaten not only on the periphery but also in the central countries. In Germany, Linke scored only 5%, while in France, La France Insoumise achieved only 6.5% (Melenchon). Specific to Linke’s decline in support is clearly its plummeting numbers in the East, which is connected to the rise of AfD, the fall of Sahra Wagenknecht within Linke and also the failure to address the issue of the core-periphery within Germany itself.

If the Left lost dramatically, the far Right, in contrast, has been profiting from the disenchantment of voters with the ‘extreme centre’ parties, by the failure of left anti-austerity policies and the defeat of Tsipras, the growing militarization of our societies and the fear of being left behind and losing even more of an already low level of prosperity. The far Right has pioneered a very aggressive use of social media – aided by mainstream media playing along with the game of spectacularizing the far Right – that spread hate speech (Islamophobia) and scapegoat migrants and refugees. This xenophobia has been repeatedly identified by CSU interior minister Horst Seehofer: Migration is mother of all problems. It is no surprise that the xenophobic attitudes and the defence of national workers have been present in other parties, including those on the left spectrum. What is more surprising is that there has been no political will to address the causes of the far Right’s ascendance, especially the brutality of neoliberal austerity that was all along unchallenged by the ‘extreme centre’ parties.

In terms of concrete results, two major far-right-wing groups in the European Parliament will now have around 112 MEPs (EFD + ENF more than 15% of the vote). This makes them three times more powerful than the Left, and also, in fact, on the way to becoming the third largest party. Even more worrisome is the trend toward increasing strength of the far Right in the core countries. Let us not forget that they won in major countries: in the UK – Farage’s Brexit party, in France – the National Front of Le Pen and in Italy – Salvini’s Liga Nord. The far-Right parties in the European Parliament are still quite small, but they have made major gains in the last five years while also succeeding in shifting discourse – forcing their agenda within the extreme centre – which is reflected in a tough anti-migrant stance and support of the ‘war against terror’. The far Right is now organized in the streets and in the parliaments, nationally and EU-wide, and poses a major threat to the future.

Green Parties and their Ethical-Management Lifestyle

Let me now turn to what was, for many, the surprise story of the elections: the rising tide of Green parties. They brought in 69 MEPs, which is a bit more than 9% of the electoral body. In Germany, they won more than 20% of the seats, the second largest number, and in France, with 13%, they are now the third largest party. Let me posit a disclaimer and say I am happy for Green Party comrades, activists and sympathisers for their strong results across Europe and in Germany. To think and act on the viable alternative against neoliberal destructionist capitalism can be built only through ecological socialism. What I would like to, nevertheless, argue here is that one major danger can be seen on the horizon of the apocalypse and environmental catastrophe, the thought of which can elicit only nausea and a sense of helplessness.

The Green Party and those that think and act green have been successful in their branding of an alternative life style. To simplify, this primarily individualistic life style oscillates between smart consumerism – it is your choice to live more ecologically – and self-righteous moralization of politics that demands a deeper change in our lives. The latter often feels like a new secularized religion, which insists on a micro-approach to address and finally ‘resolve’ our bad conscience. A notion of a pure green life is presented as the utopian future. Simultaneously, this utopian vision has already been worked on and realised by a whole army of smart green corporations, using green energy and infrastructure to offer us the option to go to bio-shops instead of big supermarkets and to support local farmers and cooperatives, and drive only electric cars. One comes across very diversified styles of green management of our moral guilt. The more the climate crisis becomes a reality – weather changes, lack of resources, climate migrants – the more strongly people feel called upon to understand what is happening and organize themselves.

Green Just Means “a bit better and a bit cleaner” (technology)

By now, many are very aware that human activity and the capitalist mode of production and consumption are the cause of these major climate changes. If we add that the large majority of extractive and exploitative corporations are located in the West and are responsible for pollution worldwide, we can expect to accumulate an even greater sense of guilt. In this context, the top priority becomes the desire to make at least some small changes in our micro everyday life and follow moral imperatives that help to improve and make our environment a bit cleaner. The formula for Green success then falls from the melting ice and sky. If going to a bio-shop simply means buying a commodity on the (economic) market and feeling good by buying and consuming it, then voting for the Greens performs the same function in the political market. I buy and vote to feel a bit better and believe I, individually, can make a small difference. Voting Green is thus a moral supplement to economic consumerism for concerned and more wealthy citizens who are here not concernedabout migration, but, rather, worried about their general helplessness in the face of the apocalypse.

What is, furthermore, very disturbing is when green moral righteousness becomes linked to the new messiah, as if the Green Party can somehow miraculously, along with our individual green choices, save us all from the capitalist path to social and ecological disaster. Given that the major representatives of the established Green Parties call for merely soft reformism and more green capitalism, this messianic expectation is very naïve. In fact, what we need are changes that are radical and more than superficial. Even if an ever-increasing number of individuals are organized ‘bio’ cleaner activities, this is still a small and atomised bubble within the larger frame of capitalism. When one hears that better and cleaner technology can save the planet, one wonders if we have learned anything from the ‘productivism’ of the 20th century. The belief that micro change and green capitalism shall save us is part of a dangerous illusion that can, at best, only stall the climate crisis. Those that vote now for Greens and hope that Green program and leadership can execute transformative changes will be as disappointed as all the Left voters across Europe who saw Tsipras as a champion of anti-austerity and the rising tide of the Left’s answer to neoliberalism. Many of the young voters might also be oblivious to the fact that more than a decade ago, in Germany, the Greens were a part of the most neoliberal achievements in recent German history under the rule of SPD’s Schröder; this government was neither particularly environmentally friendly, nor was it particularly peaceful, for the first time since WWII Schröder sent German troops outside of Germany in order to intervene in the Balkans.

Is There Any Hope for a Radical Utopian Vision?

Might the new Green tide enjoy the temptation to rule in coalition with the ruling extreme centre parties, or might it – by an increasingly radicalized movement and Fridays for Future – turn toward the Left? The future is unwritten, but what is clear at the moment is that in the European Union not much will change. Most likely, the neoliberal party ALDE, which won some 14% of votes, will join those that have run the show for a long time: EPP (conservatives, 24%) and S&D social democrats (19%). The people – with a voter turnout of only around 50% – gave a clear mandate to continue the trend of neoliberal austerity, anti-immigrant wall building and cemeteries in the Mediterranean sea, and further destruction of the environment by adjusting to corporative/capital’s interests.

Future progressive strategy demands not only that we give up the naïve expectation that green technology, micro changes and the Green tide can prevent climate catastrophe without radically intervening or breaking with capitalism. Progressive strategy should also give up on the unspoken ‘productivism’ (of endless economic growth) of the majority of the Left and its weakening defence of the already weakened welfare state. Both Green and Left entertain an array of contradictory positions about downplaying the capitalist growth as if it can be reformed and channeled into a bit cleaner technology and better wage relations? What one could, nevertheless, hope for is that the activism of Fridays for Future will spread from children to parents, from the ecologically engaged to other social sectors, from Friday to Thursday, and so on.

The call for a global climate strike has already been made for this autumn; will that be the first truly global strike? What is certain, however, is that only through the radicalization of leaderships of the Left, the Greens, and the trade unions can we strive for a viable future again, and with it, for a much different world that is not indebted, sold, consumed, and predicated on (capitalist) growth. To do that we need to think and act beyond the limits of welfare and green capitalism distilled in a Green New Deal. It is a good departing point for rethinking and organizing internationally, but should not become a biblical story, we should beware it becomes successful in merely regulating neoliberal beastiality, and in this way, even save capitalism. However, it might not be enough to save humanity, not to mention major portions of animal and plant species. If the Greens and the Left do not push for a radical utopian vision that goes beyond capitalism, the radical Left and Green parties will remain at the margin – dominated by the extreme centre and attacked by extreme right in crisis – and content with 15% of the electoral body and ineffective in determining the future. Their future might look grim, our future can start again, every Friday.

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Gal Kirn currently lives in Berlin, works at TU Dresden, while in his hometown of Ljubljana he is a member of the Left Party (Levica). His book Partisan Ruptures and Contradictions of Market Socialism in Yugoslaviais forthcoming later this year (Pluto Press), he co-edited the book Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017), Encountering Althusser (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Surfing the Black, Transgressive Moments in Yugoslav Cinema (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), and edited the publication Post-Fordism and its Discontents (JvE Academie, 2010).

All images in this article are from The Bullet

On June 1, 2019, American vice president Mike Pence gave the commencement address at West Point. He told the graduates that it was a certainty that they will “be on a battlefield for America” and “will move to the sound of guns.” See this.

Pence did not say for whose agenda they would be fighting, whether it would be the oil companies’ agenda, or Israel’s, or the New York Banks’, or for the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony, or for the CIA’s drug business.  Indeed, the West Point graduates will die without ever knowing for whose interest they are fighting.  

Pence’s address is a perfect illustration of The Matrix at work.  The innocent and ignorant graduates are sitting ducks for recruitment into what US Marine General Smedley Butler described as the hit men for American corporate interests. See this. 

War and the preparation for war has been the hallmark of America since the Clinton regime. In American history, the wars have always been for empire and the economic and financial interests that benefit from empire. There are very few years in American history when the government has not been at war with someone.  

On June 10, 1963, 56 years ago, a much greater man than Pence, President John F. Kennedy, gave the commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C.  His speech stunned the military/security complex.  It revealed a president who was committed to establishing a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.  This would be a peace that would threaten their budget, power, and importance.  Kennedy’s brave speech was a nail in his coffin. Five months later President Kennedy was murdered by the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff in Dallas Texas.  Their deed was blamed on Oswall, who was promptly shot dead inside the Dallas jail by a private citizen given admittance for that purpose. Thus, the set-up fall man was murdered before he could deny his involvement.

President Eisenhower had rattled the cage of the military/security complex when he said in his last public address in 1961 that they were a threat to American democracy.  But at American University President Kennedy went further and said his intention was to make peace and to remove the threat of war:

“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived–yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” See this. 

Kennedy also had  confidence in America that no president since, except Ronald Reagan, had: 

“We can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.”

Contrast Washington today with President Kennedy, and you can see the total collapse of America.  Today we seek to stamp out all news except from those presstitutes that repeat the official explanations. We jam foreign broadcasts by requiring Russian news services to register as “foreign agents.” We close down websites and ban free speech from Facebook and Twitter. We have zero diplomacy, only threats.  Indeed threats are America’s hallmark.  Threats of war.  Threats of sanctions. The President of the United States gives away other countries’ territories and decides who is to be the president of Venezuela.  Today’s America is scared to death of peaceful competition and imposes tariffs on everyone from Mexico to China. 

When John Kennedy was president, America was a proud country.  Today it is a shameful place in freefall, a grave danger to its own citizens and to the rest of the world.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Spare a thought for all the governments wanting to cash in on the multi-trillion-dollar bonanza of the fifth generation of wireless technology or 5G while pacifying the half of their population who are anxious about its dire health and environmental consequences and keeping in ignorance the other half of the population who do not yet oppose its introduction because they are uninformed about its dangers.

Various governments have adopted different strategies to tackle this challenge, any of which may serve as a template for other governments to use. Let us take some instructive examples from Austria, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Governments that have been dilatory in availing themselves of the surveillance and control potential of 5G to quash dissent may wish to choose a strategy from the following list that they feel is most compatible with the national character and situation of their country and therefore most likely to meet their need for a smooth and rapid 5G rollout.

Austria: brute force and public ignorance

The most advisable strategy for any cautious government is to ensure that the population remains uninformed of the dangers of 5G. This is relatively simple to achieve by using brute force to rapidly sign into law legislation forcing the entire population to accept “smart” meters with no possibility of refusal, as the Austrian government did in 2018, and issuing a Gesteznovelle or amendment to a law allowing 5G antennas to be installed on all public buildings, including nurseries, kindergartens and schools. This results in a quick 5G rollout, which can then be portrayed as a triumph in the race to digitalization and its claimed benefits of more jobs, faster downloads, low latency, fourth industrial revolution, core cloud, cutting edge technology, or any other similarly hyperbolic promotional rhetoric designed to con the public (or, in PR language, “capture the public imagination”).

Complicity with the media conveniently ensures that no whisper of the dangers inherent in a new and untested technology penetrates the public sphere. The population remains in ignorance, is not given the option to refuse 5G infrastructure and is propagandized to believe that their country is at the forefront of the modern age. This strategy has much to recommend it and avoids all controversy, long-winded debate, troublesome negotiations, annoying delays and unnecessary costs.  Well done, Austria, for demonstrating how easy the 5G rollout can be when such a simple and highly effective strategy is adopted!

France: trickery and opportunism

France offers two possible strategies for rolling out 5G, each of which has great potential. France’s majority state-owned ENEDIS is steamrolling the French public with “smart” meters (called “Linky”) for the 5G Internet of Things, despite opposition from 71% of the population. Since 1884, electric meters belong to the municipalities of France, 906 of which, out of a total of 35,498 (2.5%) are refusing “smart” meters, a number that is constantly rising. The French population recognizes that “smart” meters are being imposed without their consent, with many complaints of trickery used by ENEDIS subcontractors, including some where the gendarmerie had to intervene to protect the citizenry.

If stealth and trickery should fail, another possibility is to take advantage of a national tragedy to impose 5G surreptitiously. While the nation is preoccupied mourning the loss of a much-loved historical monument, oligarchs – including those with close ties to telecommunications companies – have a whip round involving hundreds of millions of euros each to reconstruct rather than restore, your lawmakers announce the suspension of regulations regarding the protection of a national and world heritage site, and declare the legitimacy of rebuilding according to “the techniques and challenges of our era”. Any dissent expressed by historical experts or architects about the origins of the fire or the manner of rebuilding the monument is suppressed.

The public discovers only later that the ground on which the monument stood had already been subject to advance privatization plans before the terrible tragedyof its destruction and hey presto!, it can be rebuilt complete with modern technology suitable for the 5G rollout, especially appropriate and convenient given its central location as the “point zero” of France, from which all distances in the country are calculated.

Since France´s 5G rollout strategy is not yet complete, the above scenario remains at the level of speculation; only time will tell if indeed this strategy turns out to be the one employed. Whatever the case, it would have been a strong contender for most inventive strategy had it not been a longstanding and now rather tired strategy of disaster capitalism, these days greatly facilitated by the advent of directed energy weapons.

Switzerland: intricacies of the exclusion clause and amended subparagraph

Switzerland´s public servants are to be commended for demonstrating a mental dexterity that has enabled them to solve the conundrum of introducing 5G while facing an educated and informed citizenry. It has provided a useful template for the benefit of similarly unfortunate governments. Switzerland´s approach involves the devious use of exclusion clauses and innocent-looking subparagraphs.

Switzerland follows the exposure levels set out in the so-called safety guidelines of the so-called International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (more about these “guidelines” and ICNIRP later).  The problem for the Swiss government is that Switzerland has precautionary exposure levels for single transmitters (base stations) that are 10 times lower than the ICNIRP levels.

Having gone ahead and auctioned the available spectrum in the 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands in February 2019, netting US$380 million, the Swiss government was faced with the challenge of enabling the use of the spectrum it had sold by raising limits without alerting the public.

As the public and cantonal lawmakers gradually started to grasp the scale of the threat from the completely untested 5G, the federal government’s dilemma grew. First came a people´s petition to force a parliamentary debate on 5G signed by 56,000 Swiss, then the cantons of Vaud, Jura and Geneva adopted moratoria on the 5G rollout. These were closely followed by Neuchâtel, which posed a series of questions to the federal government regarding the safety of 5G technology.

Cantonal lawmakers and Swiss citizens were outraged when the majority state-owned Swisscom defied the opposition to 5G by using existing antennas installed for previous generations of wireless technology to impose 5G on 102 locations in Switzerland. They will doubtless be further outraged when they learn that Swisscom has known about the non-thermal effects of electromagnetic radiation since at least 2004, when it filed a patent on a method and system for reducing electro smog in wireless local networks. This reveals that Swisscom has rolled out 5G on the Swiss population in full knowledge of its ability to cause damage to DNA and increase cancer risk.

On 17 April, the federal government made its move to stymie the public opposition while enabling the 5G rollout. This constitutes a veritable primer on conning the public. It published a document modifying its 1999/2016 ordinance on protection against non-ionizing radiation (NIR), with effect from 1 June 2019. The beauty of this is that an ordinance cannot be challenged by a people´s referendum. The accompanying report helpfully explains the purpose and operation of the modifications.

Given that more than half the Swiss population considers the radiation emitted by mobile phone antennas to be dangerous or rather dangerous (Office fédéral de la statistique (OFS), Omnibus 2011, 2015), the modifications to the ordinance have two significant purposes: (1) to establish a system of monitoring public exposure to NIR (sect. 4.1.1) in accordance with the Aarhus Convention, which obliges ratifying states to inform the public about pollutants and their effects on people and the environment, and (2) to fill the gaps in regulation that impede the deployment of 5G (sect. 2).

Point 1, the monitoring system, sounds promising until we are told later on in the report that the Federal Office for the Environment (OFEV) would be tasked with informing the public periodically of the extent of their exposure to NIR and the state of the science on the effects of NIR, but that no coordination with the Federal Office of Public Safety would be required since “no biological marker or modification of a biological marker presenting a link with NIR or its effects on health has been identified to date [sic]” (sect. 4.1.1).

The great advantage of this strategy, we are told, is that the public would thereby be informed “in an objective manner about its exposure to NIR and its origin, and the current margin as compared to the limits set out in the ordinance, which would contribute to taking the passion out of the debate and the perception of risk”. And most satisfyingly, OFEV would always be in a position to justify to the public why the current exposure limits were in line with science and testing (sect. 4.1.2).  In other words, it would be a closed circle and no examination of the real health and environmental dangers of NIR would be possible.

Point 2 is equally a master-stroke, for filling in the gaps in regulations that impede the deployment of 5G turns out to mean that the modified ordinance should include a principle of evaluation of “beam-forming” antennas and that “mobile phone antennas that emit during less than 800 hours per annum” should be exempted from the requirement to “respect the preventative exposure limits” (sect. 2).

This sleight of hand enables the federal government to exclude all 5G antennas from regulation, since they are all beam-forming and, if their emissions are calculated on the basis of their “directionality”, as implied by the chap. 62, additional subpara. 6, which states that “[The term] beam-forming antennas is intended to mean the radiating direction or the antenna pattern is adjusted automatically at short intervals”, it appears that it could be not the entirety of the emissions that would be subject to calculation, but solely each direction of emission. 800 hours would permit two months of emissions per annum per stationary antenna, but if each degree of emission of, for example, 180 degrees of movement of a directional antenna were to be permitted 800 hours, then no 5G antenna, all of which are directional, could exceed 800 hours of emissions and therefore none would come within the ambit of the modified ordinance.

Et voilà!  As if by magic, the Swiss federal government checkmates the Swiss people and their cantonal governments to enable 5G!

It is to be noted here that, thanks to the diligence of Swiss NGO Gigaherz, Swiss telephone companies have already been caught in the act of illegally irradiating the Swiss people, when antennas hidden under manhole covers were found in 2018 to be transmitting way in excess of their permitted limits.

Who would know if the millions of beam-forming antennas throughout Switzerland were exceeding the permitted exposure limits or transmitting in excess of 800 hours? Would anyone want to risk exposure by taking up position within their vicinity, given that the new beam-forming antennas are “especially used with the high frequencies auctioned in early 2019” (sect. 4.3)?

No wonder Switzerland is famous for its high-class and high-tech products! Its skill and meticulousness in drafting such a Byzantine 5G rollout strategy trumps all!

United Kingdom: strict legalism and authoritative assertions

The United Kingdom can always be relied upon for its professed adherence to the rule of law. Thus enquirers as to the safety of 5G, both members of the public and parliamentarians, are treated to lengthy disquisitions on the reliability of the so-called science produced by the various official bodies responsible for assuring the public that they are duly protected from electromagnetic radiation (EMR). As in the popular British children´s party-game, this may be termed a “pass-the-parcel” strategy and is greatly facilitated by the existence of a large number of organizations with acronyms that may be conveniently juggled as needed.

Answers to questions in parliament or from the public are drafted along the following lines: Public Health England relies on AGNIR [if this body has unfortunately been disbanded due to allegations of conflict of interest, incompetence, lack of qualified experts, falsified science or any other reason, the name of another body such as ICNIRP or SCENIHR may be substituted here] to supply the scientific evidence showing the safety of wireless telecommunications technologies since [add appropriate date]. The World Health Organization endorses the safety guidelines set forth by [name of body] in setting its EMR safety guidelines. Should Public Health England be made aware of any changes in the science, it will amend its policies accordingly. 

It may easily be seen that the UK strategy is an astute one since it serves simultaneously to impress and mystify, for no one has any clue as to the meaning of the various acronyms or the tainted reputations of the various bodies named, especially when they hail from another country. Such is the case, for example, with the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection or ICNIRP, which is in reality just a little club of male scientists in Germany that appoints its own members without supervision or consultation with anyone and mysteriously receives funding from, and is housed by, the German government, conveniently in the same building with the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection. Nor would any UK citizen be likely to wonder how it came to be that the little club´s guidelines were adopted and endorsed not only by the UN´s World Health Organization, but also by its International Telecommunication Union.

Great work, United Kingdom! Deceiving the public while sounding sincere and trustworthy is quite an achievement. A note of caution, though, for other governments considering employing a similar strategy: it does necessitate a certain level of gullibility among the general public and is therefore unlikely to be effective in the case of populations already skeptical about government pronouncements.

United States: big spending by lobbyists to enable capture of government agencies

As may be expected of the United States, the preferred 5G rollout strategy involves money and muscle. The imposition of 5G without public consent or consultation was made possible long in advance by regulatory capture by industry, which ensured that laws were changed to prohibit injury to health and environmental damage being taken into account to prevent or hinder the rollout of 5G.

President Clinton signed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act, section 704 of which states that no health or environmental concern can interfere with the placement of telecom equipment such as cell towers and antennas. Wireless facilities have been made a permitted use in all public rights-of-way, with the intention of locating them directly in front of homes and businesses and close above the heads of pedestrians, including mothers with babies. Public notice requirements and public hearings have been eliminated. Local authorities are prohibited from taking into consideration testimony from scientific experts. For example, local governments are prohibited from regulating wireless technology “on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency radiation”, and courts have reversed regulatory decisions about cell tower placement simply because most of the public testimony was about health.

Combined with corporate control of the media, preferably by telecommunications companies, and manipulation of lawmakers by armies of highly paid lobbyists, the strategy of regulatory capture is much to be admired, since – barring the appearance of a lawmaker with integrity and the existence of alternative media – it becomes almost impossible for the public to learn that 5G was never tested for health or safety and poses an existential threat to the entire planet.

In a country such as the US that believes itself a bastion of freedom, the public are unlikely to find plausible the idea that they are being hoodwinked in this way over such a dangerous technology and the 5G rollout may therefore be expected to proceed relatively unhindered. Should any information on the adverse effects of 5G leak out, recourse may be made to the oft-used and handy “blame-it-on-the-Russians” narrative. It should be noted, however, that this strategy requires considerable advance planning and the easy availability of funds sufficient to make your point of view the only one visible to lawmakers. It will therefore not be within the means of all countries. Nevertheless, this one has to qualify for the prize in the “heavy-handed but effective” category.

International aid and assistance 

Implementation of the above strategies is likely to be facilitated by recourse to the assistance of international organizations. If the aim is to impose a global telecommunications technology capable of “blanketing” the Earth, as stated in the literature on 5G, especially one involving transmissions by satellites, it would be indispensable to enlist the aid of the United Nations. An appropriate Secretary-General would have to be appointed, preferably someone benefitting from a professional background as an electrical engineer and physicist. Timing here is all, for such an opportunity arises only once every eight years.

Should 5G proponents be successful in this, they would have struck gold, for a UN Secretary-General can guide all of the organization´s activities in the desired direction, ensuring that 5G deployment feeds into the implementation of all treaties and conventions and thus becomes seen as a sine qua non in all resulting policy-making activities.

The UN Secretary-General also has the prerogative of “spontaneously” appointing, for example, an international Panel on Digital Cooperation, which could include all the international proponents of 5G in one go, while conveniently excluding any difficult people such as scientists or physicians knowledgeable about the deleterious biological effects of EMR. The Panel´s terms of reference would want to ensure its separation from the usual work of the UN, again obviating time-wasting questions that might be posed by UN officials or other concerned experts. The members of the Panel would automatically gain access to all UN member states, thereby profiting from the opportunity of one-sidedly convincing them of the benefits of 5G while conveniently failing to mention any possible downsides to the technology.

Should anyone have the temerity to raise objections to the UN’s failure to even mention the word “health” in the context of its rush to embrace 5G in all its programs and to assist in its imposition on every inch of the planet as well as in space, the cooperation agreement between Interpol and the UN’s  International Telecommunication Union may be usefully invoked to intimidate such a person as a potential cybercriminal.

The generally favorable worldwide public view of UN activities combined with universal ignorance about those activities and their purposes makes seeking such international assistance distinctly advantageous.

A smorgasbord of opportunities for rolling out 5G

I hope it is clear by now to all the governments reading this primer on the world´s most effective 5G rollout strategies that they have a smorgasbord of opportunities and support available to them for implementing 5G. Excuses regarding opposition from namby-pamby scientists and physicians across the world complaining about the lack of health and safety testing of 5G, citing the tens of thousands of studies that demonstrate the biological effects of EMR, or calling 5G the stupidest idea in the history of the world will not be tolerated.

Nor will excuses regarding pockets of opposition from nationals of your countries who cite phenomenal rises in all the major diseases of civilization since the advent of wireless technology and smartphones, plus ADHD, autism, suicides, depression, neurological diseases, and catastrophic decreases in fertility across the planet, as well as major declines in insect populations.

5G IS A GOOD THING BECAUSE WE SAY SO AND YOU WILL DO AS YOU HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED OR LIVE TO REGRET IT WHEN WE CONTROL EVERYTHING

Signed:

Sophia

pp. A.I.

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Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Chinese President Xi will attend this week’s Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) and likely broker some Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) deals with his Russian counterpart.

Thousands of people from across the world will be descending on Russia’s “second capital” of Saint Petersburg later this week to attend the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) that will be held from 6-8, with the most important of them being Chinese President Xi. His presence at this yearly event is extremely significant because it’s the first out of three times that President Putin plans to meet him this month. As luck would have it, June this year is the month of summits, with the SCO one (13-14) in Bishkek coming one week after SPIEF and then the G20 one (28-29) following two weeks later. Presidents Putin and Xi will attend all three events of ever-expanding geopolitical and economic importance, which is why their first meeting later this week in Saint Petersburg is especially noteworthy as an opportunity to coordinate their approaches to these forthcoming multilateral political functions.

The ongoing “trade war” between the US and China sets the contextual backdrop for this week’s meeting, as does President Putin’s wholehearted commitment to Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) that he made during the eponymous summit in late April during his last meeting with his Chinese counterpart. It can thus be expected that some landmark agreements in this respect might be agreed to by both parties during the upcoming summit that would aim to improve Russia’s integration with BRI, which has thus far remained rhetorical at best seeing as how the country’s “Pivot to Asia” of the past half-decade has only thus far resulted in a gas pipeline and two bridges. It’s of the highest importance that Russia intensifies its real-sector economic ties with China through trade and infrastructure cooperation in order to bring some international substance to President Putin’s “Great Society” socio-economic development program and enable the country to fulfill its destiny as the “Eurasian Land Bridge”.

Looking ahead to the next two events later this month, Presidents Putin and Xi need to decide how best to handle the very sensitive issue of India’s military-strategic alliance with the US before they meet Prime Minister Modi in Bishkek during the upcoming SCO Summit. The US is trying to use India to “contain” China through the so-called “Indo–Pacific” concept that both Moscow and Beijing are very suspicious of, yet at the same time, New Delhi insists that it’s still abiding by its much-touted policy of “multi-alignment” and that its intensification of military ties with Washington isn’t aimed against any third parties. Moreover, Trump’s unexpected termination of India’s membership in the tariff-free “Generalized System of Preferences” has created the optics of an opportunity for Russia and China to more vigorously re-engage their nominal BRICS partner on the economic front, which could in turn possibly put the brakes on its pro-American pivot in the unlikely event that they’re successful.

As for the last main function of the month, the G20, Russia and China need to know that they can count on one another to jointly oppose Trump’s trade plans that he’s sure to talk about during the summit. They also need to reinforce their trust in one another ahead of what seems to be the US’ tacit attempts to drive a Kissinger-like wedge between them in the New Cold War throughout course of its negotiations with Russia for a “New Detente” just as it successfully did during the Old Cold War when it clinched such a deal with China at the time. It’s extremely unlikely at this point that this grand geopolitical plot will succeed, but both leaders should expect the US to ramp up its psychological operations against both them and their people in the coming future as it attempts to bring its ambitious plan to fruition. Seeing as how Presidents Putin and Xi will be meeting three times this month alone, however, it can safely be assumed that they’ll take the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership to new heights and will collectively commit to thwarting the US plans.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

The Judaization of Jerusalem. It used to work under cover of darkness, at least in the mainstream media, but now it’s out in the open with official recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem from the United States.

Israel implements its judaization of Jerusalem by directly undermining the sanctity of both Muslim (the Haram al Sharif) and Christian (the Via Dolorosa) holy sites in al-Quds and by continuing to establish irreversible and exclusive control over the holy city as an Israeli-Jewish city.

Israel implements strategies that ensure its physical domination of the city. Since it illegally annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, it has devised numerous policies to create geographic integrity and demographic superiority in favor of a Jewish Jerusalem.

But this strategy did not begin in 1967. In the wake of the 1948 war, the newly-minted Israeli government quickly rejected all calls for internationalizing the city and declared that “Arab aggression” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement the partition plan, and specifically the UN sanctioned corpus separatum of Jerusalem — Resolution 181 recommended the creation of independent Palestinian and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem.

Today Israel’s hasbara machine falsely declares that Palestinian “terrorism” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement final status negotiations for an independent Palestinian state in the Oslo process, when, in fact, it has been busy leaving nothing for the negotiators to decide upon.

Ironically, on 2 Feb 1949, Ben Gurion magnanimously expressed willingness to establish corpus separatum over the Old City, primarily in order to delegitimize Jordan’s hold over the Old City while removing Israel’s own territorial gains from the equation.

Today, unsurprisingly, we hear that Israel’s exclusive control of the Old City is part of the “New Palestine” Deal. At the same time, on June 01, 2019 the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) released a report that documented 130 violations by Israel against Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem during April.

It was the Labor government of Levi Eshkol which set the precedents for complete Israeli sovereignty over a “united” Jerusalem in 1967, with a flurry of Israeli legislative maneuvering that echoed the 1949 frenzy, immediately according Jerusalem a status different than that of the rest of the occupied territories.

Jewish colonization efforts were to emphasize security in the Jordan Valley and in “Greater Jerusalem” as well as the high ground along the western portion of the West Bank. In other words, preserve the Jewish demographic majority won as a result of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 in the Palestinian lands already grabbed.

Likud’s obsession, an obsession which today has the political upper hand, was/is on creating a Jewish demographic majority in the occupied Palestinian territories with the purpose of acquiring more Palestinian territory for the Jewish state.

Israel’s strategies re Jerusalem implemented at the municipal level (with full backing of the Israeli government) have been the most devastating for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The architect of the Israeli master plan for Jerusalem, as many know, was former mayor Teddy Kollek, who pursued plans to cut “Greater Jerusalem” from the rest of the West Bank and facilitated its annexation with the stated objective of ensuring Jewish demographic superiority as well as geographic integrity. Here are a few of his words from 1984 regarding what he considered to be the premature establishment of the now vast Jewish colony of Ma’aleh Adumim ringing the city:

“I think it is a mistake to establish it before we have filled Jerusalem. In aother five years, we will fill Jerusalem and then we will go there [Ma’aleh Adumim]. In Jerusalem, we took upon ourselves, as Jews, a very difficult urban task, in that we received distant neighborhoods, and we had to connect them …”

Note: Jerusalem was not empty and did not need to be “filled”!

The Jewish colonization of Jerusalem is in direct contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 465 Concerning the Application of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Prohibition to Establish Settlements in the Territories, including Jerusalem, 1 March 1980.

Israel has forced a Jewish majority in all parts of Jerusalem and in the process brutally suffocated the legitimate rights and aspirations of Palestinian Jerusalemites, who, nevertheless, cling to their rights and identity in the holy city as Muslims, as Christians and as Palestinians.

Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have systematically eradicated all other visions of the holy city of Jerusalem except for the vision of Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish State.”

Without question, Israel has always viewed the final status of Jerusalem as already settled. With Trump’s “Deal of the Century”, Israel believes it will finally secure unquestionable legitimacy for its exclusive rule over the holy city.

It’s up to the international community to stop it. In its report mentioned above, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) “urged the United Nations and its concerned bodies as well as the European Union to closely monitor the situation in Jerusalem and to condemn the harsh acts to which Palestinians are subjected and to shoulder their responsibilities towards the Palestinians under occupation.”

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Rima Najjar is a former professor (now retired) at Al-Quds University, Palestine. She comes from Lifta, Jerusalem and Ijzim, Haifa and currently lives in the United States. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Shanahan summarized the main points of the Pentagon’s newly released “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” during the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore over the weekend, but the document itself contains many other important details that he failed to mention, all of which pertain to the United States’ implicit goal of containing China.

The document directly accuses China of being a so-called “revisionist power” that’s supposedly opposed to the U.S. vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” even though it is Beijing that stands to lose the most from any disruption of its majority-maritime trade routes, which suggests that the U.S. is projecting its own aggressive intentions onto China in order to justify its forthcoming containment measures against it.

Before going any further, it should be understood that the following analysis is what the U.S. intends to do and doesn’t automatically mean that the countries that it plans to cooperate with will willingly agree to contain China.

Nevertheless, drawing attention to the U.S.’ designs could help these governments and their people to realize what America is up to and avoid falling into the trap of being exploited as pawns in this plot.

To begin with, the strategy report emphasizes that this is a whole-of-government effort that aims to sustain U.S. influence in this vast space through preparedness, partnerships, and promoting a networked region.

Image on the right: Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan speaks at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore, June 1, 2019. /VCG Photo

The first part entails a forward-operating posture such as the deployment of missile defense systems in Japan and Australia and the opening of a joint American-Australian military facility in the Papua New Guinean island of Manus to complement the recently opened U.S. Marine base in Darwin.

As for its partnerships, these are divided into alliances (Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand) and different degrees of other partnerships such as the one-of-its-kind “Major Defense Partnership” that it clinched with India in 2016.

A lot of emphases is placed on the concept of interoperability between American forces and their counterparts, and the U.S. importantly committed to supporting the vision of its strategic Indonesian partner to become a “global maritime fulcrum” between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Apart from its Asian-based partners, the U.S. wants to closely cooperate with the UK, France, and Canada in the Indo-Pacific as well, with the end result being that a multitude of bilateral relationships is being leveraged by America to its grand strategic ends.

Naturally, it makes sense for the U.S. to “weave together these partnerships with a purpose” in creating what it describes as a “networked security architecture” that amounts to the multilateralism of these separate relationships.

Prior importance is placed on the trilateral partnerships that the U.S.-Japan Alliance (described in the text as “the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific”) has with South Korea, Australia, and India, while a lot of attention is also paid to ASEAN’s “centrality in the regional security architecture.”

About the latter, the document lists off about half a dozen platforms and mechanisms such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the ASEAN-U.S. Maritime Exercise (AUMX) through which the U.S. plans to more intensely cooperate with the region.

Wrapping up the strategy document,  the U.S.’ observations about the emerging intra-Asian security relationships such as the ones between Japan and India, India and Vietnam, and the Indian-Japanese-Australian trilateral dialogue all share its vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Altogether, the “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” is a comprehensive look at what the U.S. intends to achieve in this vast space across the coming decades, but once again, the reader should be reminded that it doesn’t automatically mean that it’ll succeed.

Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan (L) shakes hands with Chinese Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe at the Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore, June 1, 2019. /VCG Photo

International Relations are moving away from the zero-sum mindset of the past toward the win-win paradigm of the future, meaning that it’ll be an uphill battle for the U.S. to convince its regional partners to cooperate with it in containing China.

The more closely countries integrate with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the less likely they are to go against their own national interests by burning bridges with China.

Therefore, the most pragmatic peacemaking solution is for all countries to focus more on economic connectivity with one another and less on the military competition that the U.S. wants to provoke.

Only through trade, investment, and shared social development can the Indo-Pacific become a centerpiece of global stability, but that requires the U.S. to abandon its aggressive aims to contain China and return to cooperation instead.

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This article was originally published on CGTN.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CGTN

On May 30th, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times wrote: “Mueller Delivered a Message. Washington Couldn’t Agree on What It Was.”  In this article, he argues that the statement by “Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel proved as polarizing and unsatisfying as almost everything else”; “what President Trump heard” was “Case closed” and what “his adversaries heard” was “Time to impeach.” Historically, this is a classic case of a standoff between the irreconcilable sections of ruling elites; however, the public display of this conflict at this level is unprecedented in the history of the United States.

The Democratic Party establishment through its loyal “pundits” in the media and of course their 2020 candidates are propagating that “impeachment” is the solution to solve the current problems in the U.S. They proudly are advising Madam Speaker, that it is their “Congressional oversight duty” to investigate obstruction of justice by President Trump and his advisers and the time is now. On the other hand, the White House and Republican Party are playing their own counter “investigation” game and have made it crystal clear that no longer they would comply with any subpoena to testify about Robert Mueller’s Russia report. Politically, both parties have reached the end of a dead-end ally. Is the 2020 presidential election a way out of this quagmire? The short answer is no. Based on the deep animosity that has been displayed by the two dominant parties since the last presidential election; expecting a normal, democratic and civilized election process would be unrealistic.

However both parties regardless of their differences share two common challenges.

First, they are the fearful of the frustrated American people who have no interest in their family feud and are struggling with the day to day challenges of having a decent life with dignity.

Second, on the global scale, both parties understand that the U.S. weaken economy has undermined their imperialist power significantly. Therefore, in order to project a strong state of union and also gaining back the “glorious” era of the post WWII, the ruling elite have a mutual understanding that a confrontation on a national and international scale is unavoidable.

We already are witnessing that the democratic rights of the average working people in the U.S. are under attack. Even the elected representatives are chastised when they freely express their opinion on certain political issues.

The courageous Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange unlawfully are confined in harsh conditions under psychological torture for uncovering the truth. Their punishment is a clear message to all whistleblowers and independent journalists who dare to question or expose the corruptions and criminal operations which are conducted within the U.S. government or through big companies with the approval of the government authorities.

Today, in day light, the rightwing lawmakers are limiting the women’s rights as much as they can in hope to turn back time to the dark ages. Under these circumstances, one can imagine how these official hangmen would treat the defenseless immigrant women and children who have reached the U.S. and seek asylum.

On the international level, the U.S. government plays an even more dreadful role. According to the current U.S. foreign policy; China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and the major European countries are considered as adversary regimes that needs to be dealt with in one way or another. Both Democrats and Republicans believe that a major war gives them a chance to rally their national and international forces. Both parties see a major military conflict as a catalyzing factor to tilt the power for a fundamental change in their benefit. President Trump plays a unique role in flaming the trade and military wars. Since 2016, Mr. Trump’s contradictory positions on many issues have discredited his Administration and the role of the U.S. in the world.

As a conman, Mr. Trump promises a lot which cannot deliver, but he is relentless in delivering his fascistic polices in undermining the democratic foundation in the United States. His constant surprises throw the entire U.S. economy into chaos and his illogical warmongering and peace offering talks at the same time on Iran or North Korea makes the U.S. foreign policy look rather strange. His behavior against his political opponents violates all the norms which were sacred once to U.S. Presidents. When it comes to the question of war and peace, no one can take President Trump’s tweets too seriously. Maybe the best description so far was given by one of the President’s staunch supporter who enthusiastically commented on the Fox News – in regard to Mr. Trump recent press conference in Japan that “Sometime President Trump plays good cop and sometime he plays bad cop, but he is the top cop all the time!”

True peace activists know very well that imperialists’ wars do not happen by accident or by an ambitious leader of a country. On the contrary, igniting a major war is a calculated plan with considerable in advance military preparation. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, upon President Bush request in 2002, his Administration received the Congressional authorization to use of force against Iraq. At the same time, the Bush Administration worked hard propagating fake news and unsubstantiated lies/accusations, put pressure on the European allies and also the U.N. Security Council to get the UN approval for invasion of Iraq. Today, once again the U.S. government is preparing for another major war. However, time has changed. The Trump Administration does not think a Congressional authorization or U.N. approval is needed. This time the target is Iran and tactics have not changed. Mr. Trump advisors have been busy to propagate the similar unsubstantiated lies and accusations to justify a duplication of the same failed and dangerous military action in that region again. However, the next U.S. military “shock and awe” campaign would not be confined to a single country, rather it would ignite a global war. Certainly, Russia as one of the military powers involved in the Middle East affairs and close neighbor and ally of Iranian government which has “good military cooperation” with Iran -as Mr. Putin pointed out in Tehran – cannot afford to be neutral, when the U.S. military operation begins. That war would not look anything like U.S./Saudi war against Yemen, it certainly drags many countries to theater of war many of which have the nuclear power capabilities.

Regardless of the grim future of any armed conflict in the Persian Gulf, U.S. military preparation is underway. The U.S. has already sent an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the region and is determined and projects to be victorious in this war with the last drop of her young Americans. This unfortunate fact was reflected best in the Vice President Pence speech to the 2019 Graduates Class of the West Point Military Academy, when he promised: “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life.”

Regarding the political preparation for war, Mr. Pompeo and Bolton are all over places. Mr. Pompeo with the carrot and stick diplomacy is trying to convince the European countries that “Maximum Pressure” on Iran via sanctions is working and there is no need for a military war, at the same time Mr. Pompeo warns that the U.S. would punish those who still looking to trade with Iran in any form and shape. According to the Associated Press; in Germany: the “U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the Trump Administration’s campaign against Iran to Europe for the third time this month amid heightened Mideast tensions and a risk of open conflict that has unnerved American allies.” Meanwhile Mr. Bolton after profound statement that “Iran was almost certainly responsible for the recent attacks on oil tankers and pipelines in the Gulf” is encouraging Saudi Arabia and the UAE to stay strong since he will show the world the “evidence” soon.

The madness of warmongers is beyond belief. An international unity for peace by the working people around the world (independent of their governments) is the last chance to prevent another Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A nuclear war has no victor!

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

India’s general elections were the most wide-ranging and possibly most expensive election campaign in the nation’s history. More than 2,000 parties and over 8,000 candidates contested 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, and some 900 million registered voters cast their votes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged victorious to seal his re-election with a majority of 303 seats.

However, Modi’s return to power has brought distress for some minorities, including India’s 200 million Muslims. With an increase in hate crimes against Indian Muslims, “some fear the world’s largest democracy is becoming dangerously intolerant” under the Hindu nationalist government, reports the BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan.

Religion Is Poisoning Indian Politics

Using religion as a way to win is a global phenomenon. For instance, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Republicans in the US all use religion in politics. Politicians appeal to religious emotions to gain support. Indeed, Modi is a great example of that practice and he has dramatically reshaped the politics of India.

Ever since he was first elected in 2014, Modi has tried to appease his party’s hard-line Hindu base while pursuing his goals of development and economic growth. He has humored Hindu extremists like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organization that created his party. Modi himself was an RSS preacher before he became an active BJP politician. While the prime minister has not condoned violence against Indian Muslims, he has not publicly criticized anti-Muslim actions by Hindu extremists.

Hindutva, a form of Hindu nationalism, is where the problem lies. As a term and ideology, it was popularized by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar first in 1923. It forms the basis of the RSS, as well as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Hindu Sena groups. As a far-right, ethno-nationalist ideology, Hindutva uses religion as a way to justify violence “against Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Ravidassias and Buddhists.”

Over the past five years, the Hindutva movement has gained momentum under the Modi government. According to Human Rights Watch, vigilante groups calling for the protection of cows have killed dozens of people. Most of them are Muslims who were murdered for allegedly slaughtering cows. Many Hindus believe cows are sacred and killing them is a sin. Therefore, some extremists have targeted those who kill the animal.

These attacks are a symptom of the rise of violent Hindu nationalism under Modi. With a BJP government in office, some have seen this as encouragement to embark on vigilantism against cattle traders. Even “lower-caste Hindus previously known as ‘untouchables’ have faced violence from hard-line Hindu nationalists,” reports Swati Gupta.

Hindu Extremism Must be Reined in

Paul Marshal, a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, says that while international focus has been  on Islamic terrorism, it has largely ignored Hindu extremism and its record of violence. Saffron terror is a real phenomenon and is supported by members of the BJP. It is rarely scrutinized in the West because Hinduism is stereotyped as a gentle and non-violent faith. It is personified by the image of Mahatma Gandhi.

This allows the RSS and the BJP to take advantage of the attention that the West gives to Islamist violence, enabling Hindu extremism to slip under the radar. In fact, the actions of Hindu extremists are perturbing and nerve-wracking. In India, religious extremism and hatred are now deeply entrenched.

Under Modi, anti-Muslim “bigotry has been normalised in the democratic process,” says journalist Neyaz Farooquee. After re-election, the BJP might double down on its policies, making life more difficult for Indian Muslims and other groups. Therefore, the international community must take urgent measures to ensure the ruling party does not persecute minorities.

The United Nations, along with other major powers, should put pressure on India to protect minority rights as per its constitution. India must curb the RSS and other extremist Hindu groups. It must prevent communal riots and human rights violations.

In 2018, the BJP government “harassed and at times prosecuted activists, lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists for criticizing authorities,” according to Human Rights Watch. This must stop. Instead, Prime Minister Modi must work to create a balanced, peaceful and tolerant environment for all minorities in India.

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This article was originally published on Fair Observer, US.

Azaz Zaman is a columnist and a university lecturer. He currently teaches at the Bangladesh Army International University of Science and Technology. He has also worked as a researcher in several national and international research firms, including IPAG (Bangladesh) and EPSCoR (US). He regularly publishes articles in both national and international journals and daily newspapers. He was selected as one of the outstanding young researchers by the South-Central Climate Science Center, US, in 2014. He completed his BBA at North South University, Bangladesh and MSc in Applied Economics at Oklahoma State University, US.

Featured image is from the author

It is a giddy intoxicant, and making all who partake fall over in puddling nonsense.  The Mueller Report is not turning out to be the cleansing agent any of its readers were hoping for.  Originally encouraged to identify the cause behind Trumpland and its dark side, the agent of disaffection, the root of madness, it has done as much to disrupt as any Donald Trump show.  The Democrats continue to fret about what to do, and find themselves squabbling.

The Mueller Report, supposedly a document of deliverance, threatens to fracture the anti-Trump camp.  A hard line on impeachment is being pushed by the snarlers, those of the Ocasio-Cortez camp, a reminder that youth and enthusiasm can lag behind wisdom and application.  The centrists seem more uneasy about the whole thing, worried that such enthusiasm may serve to harden electoral resolve against them.

Robert Mueller’s statement last Wednesday, announcing a closing of the Special Counsel’s Office and an overview of the report’s findings, was a brief recapitulation of furrowed ground.  But, as ever, he left a few crumbs of excitement for those overly exercised about implications.

As Mueller explained, indictments touching on Russian cyber intervention in the US elections of 2016 and a “social media operation where Russian citizens posed as Americans in order to interfere in the election” did not entitle him to comment on guilt or innocence. Further investigation, he suggested, was required, leaving enough for Democrats keen on process to salivate.

Mueller affirmed that there was “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy” regarding Trump-Russia collusion. But he also threw both sides of the Trump divide a bone.  For the Democrats, he claimed that, “if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.” For the Trump cheer squad, he also noted that the investigation “did not […] make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.”  This had as much to do with operating protocol as anything else: the Department of Justice does not charge Presidents with federal crimes while in office.  “That is unconstitutional.”

What is left is the need for another avenue to get to the President, one “other than the criminal justice” route.  This point sent a good number among the cult of the impeachers into a flutter.  But as with President Bill Clinton, an impeachment process can see a rise rather than fall in the popularity of the incumbent.  Transforming a mechanical and for the most part prosaic 448-page report into a narrative of obstruction and corruption for US voters will drive advocates to distraction.  Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is at least aware that impeachment remains a political act – “you cannot impeach a president if the American people will not support it.”

That message and warning from history is not evidently making it to the progressive wing.  Voices such as those of Ezra Levin, co-founder of the liberal activist group Indivisible, claims “a real danger if Democrats fail to have message clarity and moral clarity when it comes to this.  There will be a real question of how they’ll ever motivate people to vote for them.”

Markos Moulitsas, the force behind progressive blog DailyKos, is equally adamant.  “This notion that Democrats are going to catch [Trump’s] voters sleeping if they just tip-toe around this utterly ignores the reality that Trump’s old, white, male base of support is the most reliable voting constituency in this country.” The Democrats’ best focus is on their constituency base – and so, a return to polarising form is guaranteed.

At the California Democratic Party convention on Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi attempted to keep a middling approach.  “This isn’t about politics, it isn’t about partisanship, Democrats versus Republicans, no.  It’s about patriotism, it’s about the sanctity of the Constitution and it’s about the future of our nation.”

For all that, Pelosi seems incapable of convincing the wobblers.  Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have pivoted away from their previously cautious positions on impeachment in light of the Mueller Report findings.  “History is going to look back at this moment and what we choose to do,” Booker explained to MSNBC.  “I think the right thing now is to hold this president accountable for his actions.”  Representative Karen Bass of California of the Black Caucus suggests that there might be “no alternative but to move to impeachment” though resists pinning her colours to the mast just yet.  

Representative Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), on the other hand, senses a dangerous distraction.  Her own special contribution about the Mueller Report is one of continuing Russian influence.  (The Kremlin remains oppressively spectral for such figures.)  “There is a theme that is throughout this report about how Russia is trying to divide this country.  I don’t want to play into Russia’s hands and divide this country more with a partisan impeachment.”  Dingell supplies us the perfect psychological portrait of current Democratic thinking, admitting to being “totally schizophrenic right now about all the different things that are in there.”  Democrat strategists are bound to confuse this state of mind for constructive debate.  

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Venezuela is under attack. An alliance led by the United States and supported by most states of the European Union, including Germany, has set itself the goal to oust the government of President Nicolás Maduro, which was democratically elected one year ago. This policy relies on politicians within the reactionary opposition in Venezuela, who created this aggression, as willing marionettes.

Part of this aggression is that the German Federal Government has recognized a politician of the opposition, elected by no one as Venezuelan „transitional president“ and has broken off all official contacts with the legitimate government of the South American country. The representative of Venezuela was therefore not invited to a conference of Latin American and Caribbean foreign ministers held in Berlin today (28.05.19, jW) at the invitation of the German Foreign Office.

While German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas meets with his guests for dinner, we met at the Berlin conference center »Urania« to demonstrate our solidarity with Bolivarian Venezuela. We want to do our part to ensure that the coup attempt in Venezuela, which has been going on since January, fails. Our solidarity goes to the popular movement of Venezuela, which resolutely defends itself against imperialist aggression.

We note:

• The only legitimate government of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela is that led by President Nicolás Maduro.
• The recognition of an opposition politician who has proclaimed himself a „transitional president“ is an interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs contrary to international law, as even the scientific services of the Bundestag have stated. The occupation of diplomatic missions of the Bolivarian Republic in the USA and other countries in order to provide them with representatives of this „self-proclaimed president“ is a grave violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and in violation of the sovereignty of Venezuela.
• The economic and financial blockade imposed by the United States, the EU and other forces against Venezuela constitutes an illegal collective punishment of the people of this South American country. Such a crime is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
• The repeated threat of military intervention in Venezuela by the US is a grave violation of all basic rules of international law, in particular the Charter of the United Nations.

Source: Jens Schulze

We demand:

• Immediate lifting of all punitive measures imposed on Venezuela and its representatives! Release all assets blocked by international banks and financial institutions!
• Immediate normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela! The German Government must withdraw the recognition of the self-styled „transitional president“ and end the diplomatic exclusion of the legitimate representatives of Venezuela!
• Steer clear of Venezuela!

The event was supported by:

Daily newspaper junge Welt, Cultural magazine Melodie & Rhythmus, Granma Internacional – German edition, Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gesellschaft, Anti-NATO-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg, Berliner Bündnis »Hände weg von Venezuela«, Bloque Latinoamericano Berlin, Chile-Freundschaftsgesellschaft »Salvador Allende« e. V., Coop Antikriegscafé Berlin, Cuba Sí, Deutscher Freidenker-Verband Berlin, DIDF, Die Linke Tempelhof-Schöneberg, DKP-Parteivorstand, DKP Berlin, Freundschaftsgesellschaft BRD-Kuba, Gruppe Tendenzen Berlin, Mondos Arts, Netzwerk Cuba – Informationsbüro e. V., North East Antifa Berlin, Ostdeutsches Kuratorium von Verbänden (OKV), Red Patria Grande, Red Venezuela-Berlin, RedGlobe, Re:volt Magazine, R-mediabase, SDAJ, Unidos por la Paz – Alemania, Venezuela Avanza, World Beyond War

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The Trump administration and its allies are slow-walking the United States into war with Iran, and, with a few notable exceptions, mainstream U.S. media is helping them.

Much of this assistance has been overt. Just like during the run-up to the Iraq war, outlets like CNN, NBC, and the New York Times have in recent weeks simply parroted without scrutiny claims from Bolton and other administration officials of a dire Iranian threat based on intelligence no one has seen (these claims would in turn compel officials within the U.S. intelligence community to tell reporters that the intelligence in question shows nothing new or that it was being blown out of proportion).

But the media is also failing us in other, less overt ways, namely by quoting and promoting those pushing for regime change and/or war and presenting them as, at best, neutral “experts,” or at worst, proponents of a “strong” or “tough” U.S. policy vis-a-vis Iran.

In a story earlier this week about how President Trump is showing signs of souring on Bolton, particularly because of Bolton’s quest for war with Iran, the Times gave Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) CEO Mark Dubowitz prominent billing to praise Bolton as the one giving Trump the “diplomatic space for him to go back and forth between a very hard-line position and holding talks.”

Except the reality is that Dubowitz has no interest in the U.S. holding talks with Iran. In fact, over the past decade or so, he’s essentially been the titular head of the pro-regime change/Iran war movement that worked to prevent President Obama from reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, and subsequently pushed to destroy it.

Dubowitz himself has called for regime change in Iran and the organization he runs, FDD, has been underwritten by right-wing billionaire funders Bernie “I think Iran is the devil” Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, who’s on record calling for the U.S. to nuke Iran. FDD has also been the leader in promoting the false narrative that Iran is in league with al-Qaeda, and its staffers regularly publish op-eds and papers pushing a militaristic approach or outright calling for war with Iran. Indeed, Bolton recruited one of his most hawkish staffers, Richard Goldberg, from FDD. Months before joining the administration, Goldberg wrote a piece urging Trump to attack Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The Times story mentioned none of this. It actually portrayed FDD somewhat positively, identifying it only as a “group that advocates a tough approach to Iran.”

USA Today made a similar mistake this week in a piece about Bolton’s relationship with Trump on Iran. The story identified Dubowitz as an “expert” and quoted him praising Bolton’s aggressive push toward conflict with Iran as “a well-orchestrated campaign,” and downplaying any worries that Bolton has outsize influence over Trump and his Iran policy.

Of course Dubowitz would want to downplay any public perception that Bolton is controlling Trump’s Iran policy, not only to calm concerns about a potential war with Iran, but also to placate Trump himself, who has a penchant for firing aides after conventional wisdom emerges that they have more power than he does.

Again, USA Today made no mention that Dubowitz is a regime change proponent or that employees of his organization have called for war. Instead, the piece identified FDD favorably as “a Washington-based foreign policy research institute that supports strong pressure on Iran.”

And if “strong pressure on Iran” and a “tough approach to Iran,” as the Times put it, are euphemisms for FDD’s militaristic positions, why are USA Today and the New York Times portraying a hawkish Iran policy as “strong” and “tough”? Is pushing for regime change in Tehran or war with Iran—one that would likely dwarf the catastrophe that was the invasion of Iraq—a “tough” position? Do we look back on the Iraq war and say George W. Bush’s policy was “strong?” Or rather, is it strong and tough to organize and unite a broad international coalition—including U.S. adversaries China and Russia—to pressure Iran into an agreement that boxed in its nuclear program so that it could not build a nuclear weapon?

Unfortunately, reporters quote Dubowitz all the time without providing the proper context as to what he’s up to. And it’s somewhat understandable. He’s the CEO of an influential and well-funded “think tank,” a position that gives it, and Dubowitz, a fairly thick veneer of credibility. Moreover, oftentimes reporters don’t have time to dig deep into the details of their sourcing, particularly if the source in question is one many of their colleagues turn to, and has seemingly already been vetted.

But the reality is that FDD oozes with bad faith to cover for its subtle push for regime change in Iran. Dubowitz himself famously called for a “nix and fix” strategy with regard to the Iran nuclear deal—in that, he said Trump should withdraw from the agreement and negotiate a better one. While those who closely follow these issues were aware of Dubowitz’s disingenuousness at that time, the fact that he’s now promoting an astroturfed hashtag on Twitter—likely engineered with the help of FDD—calling for no deal at all should put to rest any notion that he, or FDD, has any interest in diplomacy with Iran.

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Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress.

Featured image: Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz (Source: LobeLog)

Na presença do Chefe de Estado, Sergio Mattarella, da Ministra da Defesa, Elisabetta Trenta, do Ministro do Desenvolvimento Económico, Luigi di Maio e das mais altas autoridades militares, o navio Trieste, construído pela Fincantieri, foi lançado ao mar, em 25 de Maio, no Cantieri di Castellammare di Stabia (Nápoles). É uma unidade anfíbia multi-usos e multi-funções da Marinha Militar Italiana, definida por Trenta, como “uma síntese perfeita da capacidade de inovação tecnológica do país”.

Com 214 metros de comprimento e velocidade de 25 nós (46 km/h), possui um convés de vôo de 230 metros para descolagem de helicópteros, descolagem curta e aterragem vertical dos caça bombardeiros F-35B e para aviões convertíveis V-22 Osprey. Pode transportar veículos blindados no convés garagem de 1200 metros lineares. Tem uma zona inundável, com 50 metros de comprimento e 15 de largura, o que permite ao navio funcionar com os mais modernos meios anfíbios da NATO.

Em termos técnicos, é um navio destinado a “lançar e apoiar, em áreas de crise, a força de desembarque da Marinha Militar e a capacidade nacional de projecção da Defesa, a partir do mar”. Em termos práticos, é um navio de assalto anfíbio que, ao aproximar-se das costas de um país, ataca com caças e helicópteros armados com bombas e mísseis e, em seguida, invade esse mesmo país, com um batalhão de 600 homens transportados, juntamente com armamento pesado, em helicópteros e outros meios de desembarque.

Por outras palavras, é um sistema de armas projectado, não para a defesa, mas para o ataque, em operações de guerra realizadas no âmbito da “projecção de forças” USA/NATO a grande distância.

A decisão de construir o Trieste foi tomada em 2014, pelo governo Renzi, apresentando-o como um navio militar usado, principalmente, em “actividades de ajuda humanitária”.

O custo do navio, a cargo não do Ministério da Defesa, mas do Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico, foi quantificado em 844 milhões de euros, no âmbito de uma atribuição de 5.427 milhões para a construção, além do Trieste, de mais 9 navios de guerra. Entre estes, duas unidades navais de alta velocidade para incursões das forças especiais em “contextos operacionais que exigem discrição”, isto é, em operações bélicas secretas.

No momento do lançamento, o custo de Trieste foi estabelecido em 1.100 milhões de euros, com um acréscimo de 250 acima da despesa prevista. O custo final será muito maior, pois que devemos acrescentar o custo dos caças F-35B e dos helicópteros a bordo, além de outros armamentos e sistemas electrónicos que serão instalados no navio, nos próximos anos.

A inovação tecnológica no campo militar – salientou a Ministro da Defesa – “deve ser apoiada pela estabilidade dos financiamentos”.Ou seja, pelo financiamento contínuo e crescente com dinheiro público também da parte do Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico, agora liderado por Luigi Di Maio. Na cerimónia de lançamento, ele prometeu aos trabalhadores outros investimentos: na verdade, existem outros navios de guerra a serem construídos. A cerimónia de lançamento teve um significado adicional quando o Arcebispo Militar Ordinário, Monsenhor Santo Marcianò, enalteceu o facto de que os operários haviam colocado uma grande cruz na proa do navio, composta de imagens sagradas das quais eles são devotos, incluindo as do papa Wojtyla e do Padre Pio.

Monsenhor Marcianò elogiou a “força da fé” demonstrada pelos operários e abençoou e agradeceu “este sinal maravilhoso que vocês colocaram no navio”.

Foi assim, lançado o grande navio de guerra, como exemplo da capacidade de inovação do nosso país, paga pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico, com o nosso dinheiro roubado aos investimentos produtivos e despesas sociais, abençoado com o sinal da Cruz como na época das Cruzadas e das conquistas coloniais.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

La nave d’assalto dei nuovi crociati

il manifesto, 28 de Maio de 2019

Tradutora : Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in its quarterly report that Iran has stayed within the main restrictions of its nuclear deal at a time when tensions between Washington and Tehran remain high.

The report on Friday found that Iran continues to abide by the main terms of its 2015 deal with world powers, including the most sensitive issues of its stockpile of enriched uranium and level of enrichment.

The report by the UN nuclear watchdog comes at a sensitive time, with Washington having tightened sanctions on Tehran this month, and Iran threatening to take retaliatory steps that may eventually bring it out of compliance with the pact.

It did, however, flag some issues, namely the number of advanced centrifuges Iran is allowed, which is loosely defined in the deal.

Every quarterly IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear programme since the 2015 deal has said that the Islamic Republic has adhered to the multilateral agreement.

A year after Washington abandoned the landmark deal, which curbed Tehran’s nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions, European powers are trying to keep it in place.

To evade sanctions from US financial institutions, Tehran and major European countries are setting up a barter system that does not involve exchanging dollars.

The administration of President Donald Trump says the deal negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, did not go far enough to curb Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes.

The US has snapped pre-deal sanctions back into place and even imposed additional ones targeting the country’s metals trade. It also designated the Revolutionary Guards, an important arm of the Islamic Republic’s military, as a terrorist organisation.

In addition, Washington has dispatched a naval strike group to the Gulf, deployed Patriot missiles in the region and announced that it was sending 1,500 additional troops.

Moreover, the US has accused Iran of using naval mines to “sabotage” four ships off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

Iran denies any link to attacks on shipping and says the US military moves are “psychological warfare”.

Technical aspects

The IAEA report said its staff had access “to all the sites and locations in Iran which it needed to visit”.

Inspectors found that Iran’s stock of enriched uranium was well below the limit set by the deal, as of 20 May. That last date covered by the report is also the day Iran said it had increased the rate at which it enriches uranium, meaning any acceleration will appear only in the next report.

The IAEA said Iran had installed 33 advanced IR-6 centrifuges, machines that can enrich uranium, although only 10 had been tested with uranium feedstock so far. The deal allows Iran to test up to 30, but only after eight-and-a-half years have passed. The limit before then is a “grey area,” diplomats say.

“Technical discussions in relation to the IR-6 centrifuges are ongoing,” the report said.

While Iran has stayed within the deal’s main limits over the past three years, it has breached a cap on its heavy-water stock within the first year, although foreign diplomats told Reuters that this technical aspect is a relatively minor issue.

Diplomats also said Iran has dragged its feet on allowing access to some sites, without explicitly violating the requirements of the deal.

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Featured image is from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In a move considered surreal even two days ago, the Israeli Knesset – elected on April 9th – dissolved itself last night (Wednesday). Some new Members of Knesset didn’t even get to get to give their maiden speech.

The vote on dismissal came after a few political days which cannot be described as anything but lunatic.

In an attempt to get extra votes to get his government past the president, Netanyahu tried:

• To get Labour to join his family, and failed.
• He offered Tal Russo, a former general in 2nd place in Labour, the office of the Minister of Defense if he’d support his government. Russo, to his credit, said no.
• Random Blue-White new MKs, still trying to find their way in the Knesset (in the lead rival party to Netanyahu’s Likud), were dumbfounded to be offered ambassadorships if they’d only support Netanyahu’s government. As this was a downgrade from the ministry positions they were offered in the last two days, they sensibly turned the offer down.
• Haaretz reported sources in the Knesset said Netanyahu desperately tried to convince the two Palestinian MKs of the RAAM party to leave the plenum and avoid voting against his government, promising to stop the demolition of Bedouin houses in the south and recognition of an unrecognized Palestinian village; this ploy failed, as well.

With no cards up his sleeve and no rabbits in his hat, the so-called wizard of Israeli politics managed to pull an extraordinary act of self-immolation.

The “King” of Israeli politics failed to create a coalition, and he has only himself to blame. Let’s recount what happened, and begin with what we know. The unknowable will remain such.

Some basic law is needed. By law, once the Knesset is elected, the President must appoint an Member of Knesset – legally, any MK he so desires – to form a government. Without exception in the last 71 years, this was entrusted to the MK who had a majority around him. Often it was the leader of the largest party, but the system works by blocs: if you have 35 MKs in your party and can get another 26 MK’s to tell the President they support you,  you will automatically be offered first dibs at the premiership. This is what happened: Netanayhu went to President Rivlin with 65 supporters, and was given 28 days to form a government.

He failed. This wasn’t of much concern, as it happens almost every time. Netanyahu then asked for, and duly received, the customary 14 extra days to form a government. This is all part of the coalition chicken game: the parties are trying to get as much as they can from the would-be prime minister. They want offices, budgets, sinecures, bills passed. They wave an unloaded gun around, threatening to shoot themselves in the head if the prime minister doesn’t cave to their demands.

So far, so good. Parties are supposed to represent their voters, and get as much as they can for them as is legally decent. But everyone knows the game has to end not 14 days after the extension, but 12: it takes at least a day to write down a semi-respectable coalition agreement, which is a binding legal document.

By law, there are three ways to resolve a case if a candidate can’t create a coalition in 42 days (28 + 14):

1. The President orders another MK to form a government. The only MK explicitly prohibited from trying is the one who just failed (in our case, Netanyahu).
2. The President, having reached the conclusion no MK can realistically form a coalition, informs the Chairman of the Knesset he believes new elections should be held.
3. The Knesset dissolves itself. It is sovereign to do so at any point.

Options 2 and 3 were never used before.

By late Thursday last week, you could sense something was going wrong. Netanyahu went to the President with 65 supporters – but he couldn’t get them to form a coalition. Noted racist and underworld figure, Avigdor “there are no testimonies against me because the witnesses are all dead” Lieberman, insisted on an arcane amendment to a dead parrot, the Equality in Enlistment Bill. The correction would move the right to set the minimum limit of ultra-Orthodox military draftees from the government to the Knesset. Lieberman claimed, correctly, that if the government could set the limit, it would set a low limit which will allow most ultra-Orthodox draftees to stay home. Lieberman knows this, because he sat in several governments which did precisely that for the last 15 years. The ultra-Orthodox parties, for their part, said the amendment would pass over their dead bodies. Given Lieberman’s reputation regarding dead bodies, that’s not a threat I’d make easily, but they did it anyway.

Any normal prime minister would, in such a case, opt for 2. You’d let Benny Gantz of Blue-White waste time for 28 days trying hopelessly to create a coalition, and when his time was up, you’d go back to the President and ask for a second attempt.

But Netanyahu didn’t dare do so. There were several reasons.

First, just as Netanyahu tried to get Blue-White MKs into his coalition, Gantz could do the same with Likud MKs. Netanyahu was haunted by two scenarios: One, Gantz offering a unity government to Likud and a majority in Likud supporting that deal so as to get rid of Netanyahu; Second, that once Gantz failed, President Rivlin would offer another Likudnik a chance at forming a coalition, and that Likudnik would form a coalition with Blue-White.

The last scenario so haunted Netanyahu, a couple of months before the elections, he tried to change the Basic Law so that the President could only offer the office to party leaders, not any run of the mill MK. When pressed for a reason for changing a Basic Law which worked well for decades, Netanyahu claimed he knew of a conspiracy between President Rivlin and Gideon Sa’ar, a Likudnink, to have Rivlin declare Sa’ar Prime Minister after the elections. Both denied the claim furiously, and unlike Netanyahu, Rivlin is regarded as an honorable man who respects his office. Such shenanigans are beyond him.

But, above it all, the legal clock is ticking.

Netanyahu is a suspect in three legal cases. He has a right to a hearing before a formal indictment. Netanyahu decided on the April elections because he knew the spineless attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, would inform the public in February about the coming indictments. Once Mandelblit did so, Netanyahu demanded the hearing would be postponed until after the elections. Mandelblit complied.

The elections over, Mandelblit asked Netanyahu’s lawyers to come and get the indictment materials by May 20th, so he could set a hearing for July. Shockingly, they refused to do so. When Mandelblit tried to send them the material via messenger, the lawyers refused to accept it. Their excuse was priceless: Netanyahu didn’t pay them, since he didn’t want to pay his legal fees himself, and was futilely trying to convince a government committee to let foreign oligarchs pay for his legal fees. The committee demurred, demanding Netanyahu would give a full account of his financial affairs, in particular his financial connections with said oligarchs. Netanyahu refused to do so.

Mandelblit then informed the lawyers they can either take it or leave it: the hearing would take place in July. Upon which, most of Netanyahu’s lawyers resigned, presumably still unpaid. One of them remained, and asked for a postponement of the hearing, since he was new at his job and the amount of material was enormous. Mandelblit obliged, and set the hearing for October.

Netanyahu was buying time. He was furiously trying to convince his new would-be coalition to pass two laws: One was an amendment forcing the attorney general to convince the MKs to remove Netanyahu’s immunity before indictment; the other was a legal monstrosity called the Overbearing Clause, which will allow the Knesset to annul any and all judicial reviews of laws and government decisions. Basically it would turn the legal system into a dead letter. These laws would need time, but they would get Netanyahu off the legal hooks. His ultra-Orthodox and settler allies were perfectly willing to pass these laws, as they are hostile to the judicial system.

Netanyahu announced this policy publicly: His indictment, he said, will wait until he will end his service as prime minister. This is contrary to what he said during the April elections, when he affected astonishment at the very idea of legislation intended to unshackle him from the law, but if you believe Netanyahu – well, you can only blame yourself and enlist in the undying army of the suckers.

And then Lieberman threw a spanner in the works. The hearing would be in October. If Netanyahu cannot form a government, he cannot legislate. If we the Knesset is dispersed, the legal clock will keep on ticking without Netanyahu being able to emasculate the courts.

Why? Nobody knows. Anyone who tells you he knows why is probably mistaking conjecture for knowledge. But the fact is: Netanyahu dissolved the Knesset so as not to face an option of a coup within his own party, which in turn would lead him to the penitentiary.

The die has been cast. Nobody knows where it will fall. Nothing like this has ever happened. Nobody knows how the public will react. I will hazard one guess: Lieberman, having won the chicken game of all chicken games, will gain a sizable number of votes, likely at the expense of Blue-White and Meretz. Any other guess (let’s not have the audacity to call it “analysis”) is a fool’s game.

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Yossi Gurvitz is a journalist and a blogger, and has covered the occupation extensively.

No, this is not at all an endorsement of the apocalyptic scenarios of AOC or that famous young Swedish climate expert, Greta. It is, however, a look at unusual weather disasters in several key growing regions from the USA to Australia, the Philippines and beyond that could dramatically affect food availability and prices in the coming year. That in turn could have major political implications depending on how the rest of the growing season develops.

USA Midwest Waterlogged

According to the latest May 20 report of the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) of the US Department of Agriculture, corn and soybean crops are well behind the planting growth levels normal this time of the planting season. They report that only 49% of all planned corn acreage in the US has been planted compared with 78% at this time a year ago. Of that only 19% has yet emerged from the ground compared to 47% in May 2018. In terms of soybeans, barely 19% of crops have yet been planted compared with 53% a year before. Rice acreage planted is down to 73% compared to 92% a year ago in the six US rice-growing states. Of course, should weather dramatically improve the final harvest numbers could improve. It is simply too early to predict.

The USA is by a wide margin the world largest soybean producer with 34 percent of the world’s soybean production and 42% of world exports prior to the China trade battles. The US is also the world largest corn or maize producer, almost double China, the number two. A serious harvest failure in these two crops could significantly affect world food prices, leaving aside the unfortunate fact that almost all US soybeans and corn are GMO crops. They are mainly used in animal feed.

A major factor in the disruption of the US Midwest growing season is the fact that the past 12 months have seen the greatest precipitation levels since the US Government began keeping statistics in 1895, according to the US NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Record snowfall followed by abnormally heavy rains are the reason.

Noteworthy is the fact that a strong Pacific El Niño was in play during 2015-16 and a new El Niño has been confirmed this past winter, somewhat earlier than normal. Precisely how that affected the current weather is not yet clear. El Niño is the periodic warming of the equatorial eastern and central Pacific Ocean.

Connected with solar activity, not manmade factors, it can shift global weather patterns over a period of months, bringing the possibility of more warm, cold, wet or dry weather in parts of the world. They occur in cycles every several years, usually every two to seven years, and it is notable that there is a confirmed, if relatively weak El Nino which is expected to reach peak this month of May. The NOAA in April estimated that the current El Niño conditions are likely to continue through the Northern Hemisphere for spring 2019 (~80% chance) and summer (~60% chance).

Australia and Philippines Severe Drought

While the Midwest USA farm-belt is waterlogged, other regions of the globe suffer drought, most notably, Australia, a major grain producer. For the first time since 2007 Australia is being forced to import wheat, mainly from Canada. Last year drought caused a 20% crop harvest reduction. The Government has issued a bulk import permit to deal with the situation. Current wheat harvest estimates are for only 16 million metric tons, half of what it was two seasons ago. Australia is in recent years the number five world wheat export nation.

Adding to the shortfall of grains, The Philippines is experiencing a major drought since February 2018, which is devastating the current rice crop. Although the country is not one of the world top rice producers—India, Thailand, Vietnam and Pakistan comprise a total of some 70% all rice export—it has significant political impact on the troubled country.

Another country being hit by severe drought is North Korea. There rainfall so far this year is lowest since 1982. State media reports that a “severe drought has been lingering in all parts” of the country. The average precipitation since January is only 42.3% of the average annual precipitation of 5 inches. This comes as the country experiences significant food shortages. While data is likely politicized, effect of international sanctions do not help.

While these significant shortfalls are still not grounds for declaring global emergency, notably they take place at the same time the Peoples’ Republic of China is in the midst of the worst infestation of deadly African Swine Fever across the entire China pig population. USDA estimates that as many as 200 million pigs must be slaughtered this year if the contagion is to be at all contained. China is the world’s largest pig producer by far with some 700 million. As if this were not bad enough, the country is being hit by a plague of Fall Armyworms which could devastate crops such as corn or soybeans across China.

This all does not take into account the various warzones around the world from Yemen to Syria to the Congo where agriculture production has been devastated as a casualty of war.

Russia as New Grain Power?

These current crop difficulties or possible major harvest shortfalls could be a major advantage to Russia, the country which, since imposition of US and EU sanctions in 2014, has emerged in the past three years to become the world’s largest wheat exporter, far surpassing both Canada and the United States. This current 2019/2020 harvest year, Russia is estimated to export a record 49.4 million tons of wheat, some 10% above a year ago. Last year Russia accounted for 21% of total world wheat exports compared with around 14% for the USA and about the same for Canada.

Western sanctions on Russia have had the interesting effect of forcing the government to take measures to become self-sufficient in food production. The Government banned GMO plantings or imports in 2016, and enjoys some of the most productive black earth soils on the planet. At least in the short term, Russia stands well suited to step in to address the various harvest shortfalls in the world grain markets.

While it is unlikely that it will be asked to sell grain to the US, were that to happen, it would be a major historic irony. During the Soviet harvest failures of the early 1970’s it was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who orchestrated, with the complicity of Cargill and the grain cartel, sale of tons of grain to the USSR at enormously inflated prices in what came to be called the Great Grain Robbery, sending grain prices in the Chicago commodity exchanges to 125 year highs. Combined with the 1973-74 OPEC 400% oil price shock, one in which the sneaky diplomacy of the same Kissinger played a central role, food and oil were responsible for the great inflation of the 1970’s, not the wage demands of American or European workers as we were told.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

On 25 May 2019, Head of State Sergio Mattarella, Minister for Defence Elisabetta Trenta, Minister for Economic Development Luigi Di Maio, and the highest military authorities, were all present for the launching of the ship Trieste, built by Fincantieri, at the Castellammare di Stabia shipyards (Naples).

The Trieste is the Italian Navy’s multi-role and multi-function amphibious craft, defined by Trenta as the “perfect synthesis of our country’s capacity for technological innovation”. It is 214 metres long and can reach speeds of up to 25 knots (46 km/h). It has a 230-metre flight deck for helicopter take-off, F-35B fighters with short take-off and vertical landing, and V-22 Osprey convertibles. On its garage deck, it can transport armoured vehicles which can cover a linear distance of 1,200 metres. It has an internal launch deck, 50 metres long and 15 metres wide, which enables the ship to operate with NATO’s most modern amphibious vehicles.

In technical terms, it is a ship destined to “project and support, in crisis areas, the disembarkation of the naval military forces and the national capacity for the projection of Defence from the sea”. In practical terms, it is an amphibious assault ship which, by approaching the coast of a target country, can attack it with fighters and helicopters armed with bombs and missiles, then invade with a battalion of 600 men transported, with their heavy weaponry, in helicopters and disembarkation vehicles. In other words, it is a weapons system projected not for defence but attack in large-scale war operations in the context of long-distance USA/NATO “force projection”.

The decision to build the Trieste was taken in 2014 by the Renzi government, which presented it as a naval military naval craft to be used mainly for “humanitarian assistance activities”.

The cost of the ship, to be assumed not by the Ministry for Defence but by the Ministry of Economic Development, was quantified as 844 million Euros, in the context of the financing of 5,427 million Euros for the construction of nine other warships as well as the Trieste. Among these are two other high-speed naval patrol units for the special forces in “operations which require discretion”, in other words, secret war operations.

At the moment of launching, the cost of the Trieste was estimated at 1,100 million Euros, or 250 million Euros more than the planned cost. The final cost will be even higher, because of the budget for the F-35B fighters and helicopters taken on board, plus that of the other weapons and electronic systems with which the ship will be equipped in the years to come.

The technical innovation in the military sector – announced the Ministry of Defence – “must be supported by the certainty of the finances”. That is to say the continual and growing financing with public money, including by the Ministry of Economic Development, now headed by Luigi Di Maio. At the launching ceremony, he promised the workers that there were to be other investments: indeed, there are other warships which need to be built.

The launch ceremony took on a different significance when the Vicar of the Armed Forces, Monseigneur Santo Marcianò, praised the fact that the workers had attached a large cross to the prow of the ship, composed of sacred images for which they have a special devotion , including those of Pope Wojtyla and Padre Pio. Monseigneur Marcianò praised the “power of faith” expressed by the workers, whom he blessed and thanked for “this marvelous sign that you have attached to the ship”.

So was launched the great warship, presented as an example of our country’s capacity for innovation, paid for by the Ministry of Economic Development with our own money, subtracted from productive investments and social spending, blessed with the sign of the cross like in the time of the Crusades and colonial conquest.

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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated by Pete Kimberley.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

In quest of seeking the support of the Arab Muslim leaders for an international stance against Iran, Saudi Arabia is hosting three consecutive summits at the holy city of Mecca after Iran’s alleged attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. Saudi monarch King Salman, interestingly, called this emergency summit of Arab leaders just hours after the US National Security Advisor John Bolton’s comment regarding Iran’s probable involvement in the sabotage of four ships, including two Saudi oil tankers, off the UAE coast. While the UAE has not publicly blamed anyone for this incident, Mr. Bolton made his comments without providing any evidence to support the allegation, says BBC. Consequently, amid the escalated tensions between Iran and the US, King Salman reiterated in the summit to use “all means to stop the Iranian regime from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.”

Surprisingly, in order to address swelling tensions with Iran, Saudi Arabia has even reached out to Qatar, the Arab neighbor against which Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Egypt issued a blockade two years ago, cutting off the diplomatic relationship via land and sea. Andreas Krieg, a lecturer at the King’s College London School of Security Studies, told that Saudi Arabia’s direct contact with Qatar indicates that the tension with Iran has been taken very seriously in Riyadh, according to CNBC. If this is true, then, my question is: what is the outcome of these emergency summits by Arab nations? Just attending to the summits organized by Saudi Arabia and listening to Saudi King Salman’s political rhetoric is nothing but bolstering the ongoing US-Iran tension.

Trump’s Political Game

U.S. President Donald Trump has a particular way of—can be termed as game plan—winning any political issue, especially in case of bilateral relationships, be it between political competitors from his own country or foreign leaders. At the outset, he uses mocking, aggressive political rhetoric to escalate the tension, getting momentous media coverage at the same time. After a while, he, almost suddenly, calls for reconciliation or negotiation. He has impeccably used this gambit from the beginning of his election campaign for the US presidency in 2016. His political game with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the 2016 U.S. election is a picture-perfect example of Trump’s game plan. According to Business Insider, the political dispute between Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz during the 2016 election was one of the dirtiest in recent U.S. election memory. Both of them viciously attacked each other including their wives, citizenship, and integrity. Entertainingly, they even went on threatening each other to sue for lying and cheating on various issues. However, following his own rule, Trump resolved malicious issues with his rival Ted Cruz and later rallied together in Houston. Even after Trump’s win, both of them started working together, keeping us all flabbergasted and speechless.

Similarly, the intensified tension between North Korea and the United States— during all over 2017 and half of 2018— began with North Korea’s series of missile tests and augmented by the exchange of political rhetoric between the two hot-tempered leaders: Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Even calling Kim “the little rocket man”, Trump furiously announced that any threats against the U.S. would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Again, after getting substantial media coverage, both the leaders met at Singapore on June 12, 2018 for an unanticipated summit, making a new-fangled history of first time meeting between a North Korean leader and a sitting US president. Nevertheless, the summit yielded nothing but gave both leaders the media attention they yearn for. Jenny Town, a Korea specialist and research analyst at BBC, published an article titled “Trump Kim summit: Rhetoric versus reality”, questioning the willingness of the both the administration to fulfill commitments towards sustainable solutions. This summit also bears a resemblance to the type of political game Mr. Trump usually plays.

Saudi Arabia: Joining Trump’s Game

Without any straightforward goals or plausible actions against Iran, Saudi Arabia has called for two emergency summits of GCC countries and a regular meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), making it three consecutive summits at one place. So, is there an emergency? Calling three consecutive summits in one place, unquestionably, trigger our attention towards the compulsion of addressing something urgently. Yet, as an outcome of the summit, it has been brought to us nothing but political rhetoric against Iran, as Trump often does. More importantly, it seems like joining the Trump’s political game: using piercing rhetoric to gain media attention. Throughout the summit, the Saudi King Salman accused Iran of threatening the Arab regional security. Subsequently, asking fora global stanceagainst Iran, Saudi king also labeled the recent Gulf attacks as “terrorist acts” by Iran. However, Abbas Mousavi, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, has rejected and condemned Saudi monarch’s accusations of Tehran interfering in the region.

Intensifying tension in the Muslim world, Donald Trump perhaps enjoying the exchange of fiery, harsh political rhetoric between two neighboring Arab nations. The current monarch of Saudi Arabia seems to become more and more dependent on Trump administration to protect its own power. US president also repeats— from time to time—his continuous support for the Saudi monarchy quoting “Saudi Arabia buys a lot, I don’t want to lose them.” Even Trump’s continuous support in the Saudi-led war in Yemen has been criticized in the US Congress. Plus, Human rights groups have repeatedly condemned Saudi Arabia for unending war in Yemen, causing disproportionate civilian deaths in the conflict. In addition to that, Saudi Arabia has literally fractured the 39-year-old alliance—the joint defense force under the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—by leading the Qatar blockade. Many believe that the blockade was prompted by US President Donald Trump because it took place just two days after the US President Donald Trump met Arab leaders in Riyadh. Thus, this is quite clear that Trump is playing his game keeping Iran under extreme pressure with the help of Saudi Arabia. However, the greater Muslim world expects more mature actions by Saudi Arabia, as it’s the birthplace of the Prophet of Islam, in order to bring peace and solidarity among the Arab nations as well as in the Muslim world.

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Azaz Zaman is a columnist and a university lecturer from Bangladesh. He can be reached at [email protected]

This article was originally published in November 2015.

The document in the American Archives, reporting the widespread famine and spread of epidemic disease in Iran, estimates the number of the deceased due to the famine to be about 8-10 million.

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One of the little-known chapters of history was the widespread famine in Iran during World War I, caused by the British presence in Iran. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Britain became the main foreign power in Iran and this famine or–more accurately–‘genocide’ was committed by the British. The document in the American Archives, reporting the widespread famine and spread of epidemic disease in Iran, estimates the number of the deceased due to the famine to be about 8-10 million during 1917-19 (1), making this the greatest genocide of the 20th century and Iran the biggest victim of World War I (2).

It should be noted that Iran had been one of the main suppliers of food grains to the British forces stationed in the empire’s South Asian colonies. Although bad harvest during these two years made the situation worse, it was by no means the main reason why the Great Famine occurred. Prof. Gholi Majd of Princeton University writes in his book, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, that  American documents show that the British prevented imports of wheat and other food grains into Iran from Mesopotamia, Asia, and also the USA, and that ships loaded with wheat were not allowed to unload at the port of Bushehr in the Persian Gulf. Professor Majd argues that Great Britain intentionally created genocide conditions to destroy Iran, and to effectively control the country for its own purposes. Major Donohoe describes Iran of that time as a “land of desolation and death” (3). But this event soon became the subject of a British cover up.

Britain has a long record of its several attempts to conceal history and rewrite it in their own favor. The pages are filled with conspiracies that were covered up by the British government to hide its involvement in different episodes that would tarnish the country’s image. One of the clear examples is the “Jameson Raid”; a failed coup against Paul Kruger’s government in South Africa. This raid was planned and executed directly by the British government of Joseph Chamberlain under the orders of Queen Victoria (4) (5). In 2002, Sir Graham Bower‘s memoirs were published in South Africa, revealing these involvements that had been covered up for more than a century, focusing attention on Bower as a scapegoat for the incident (6).

The records that were destroyed to cover up British crimes around the globe, or were kept in secret Foreign Office archives, so as to, not only protect the United Kingdom’s reputation, but also to shield the government from litigation, are indicative of the attempts made by the British to evade the consequences of their crimes. The papers at Hanslope Park also include the reports on the “elimination” of the colonial authority’s enemies in 1950s Malaya; records that show ministers in London knew of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya and roasting them alive (7). These records may include those related to Iran’s Great Famine. Why were these records that cover the darkest secrets of the British Empire destroyed or kept secret? Simply because they might ‘embarrass’ Her Majesty’s government (8).

A famine occurred in Ireland from 1845 until 1852 which killed one fourth of the Irish population. This famine was caused by British policies and faced a large cover up attempt by the British government and crown to blame it on ‘potatoes’ (9). The famine, even today, is famous in the world as the “potato famine” when, in reality, it was a result of a planned food shortage and thus a deliberate genocide by the British government (10).

The true face of this famine as a genocide has been proven by historian Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy published by Palgrave MacMillan (11). A ceremony was planned to take place in the US to unveil Coogan’s book in America, but he was denied a visa by the American embassy in Dublin (12).

Therefore it becomes obvious that Britain’s role in Iran’s Great famine, which killed nearly half of Iran’s population, was not unprecedented. The documents published by the British government overlook the genocide, and consequently, the tragedy underwent an attempted cover-up by the British government. The Foreign Office “handbook on Iran” of 1919 mentioned nothing related to the Great Famine.

Julian Bharier, a scholar who studied Iran’s population, built his “backward projection” estimation of Iran’s population (13) based on reports from this “handbook” and, as a result, ignored the effect of the Great Famine on Iran’s population in 1917. Bharier’s estimations were used by some authors to deny the occurrence of the Great Famine or to underestimate its impacts.

By ignoring Iran’s Great Famine in his estimations, Bharier’s work faces four scientific deficiencies. Bharier does not consider the loss of population caused by the famine in his calculations; he needs to ‘adjust’ the figure of the official census in 1956 from 18.97 million to 20.37 million, and this is despite the fact that he uses 1956 census as his primary building block for his “backward projection” model. He also ignores the official growth rates and uses his personal assumptions in this regard, which is far lower than other estimates. Finally, although Bharier frequently cites Amani’s estimates (14), in the end Bharier’s findings contradict that of Amani’s; notably Bharier’s population estimate for 1911 is 12.19 million while Amani put this figure at 10.94 million.

Despite deficiencies in the population estimates offered by Bharier for the period of the Famine and its earlier period, his article offers useful data for the post-Famine period; this is because these figures are generated from 1956 backward. That is to say, numbers generated from 1956 to 1919 are thus credible because they do not include the period of famine. Moreover, this portion of Bharier’s data are also true to that of the American Legation. For example, Caldwell and Sykes estimate the 1919 population at 10 million, which is comparitive to Bharier’s figure of 11 million.

Gholi Majd was not the first author to refute Bharier’s figures for this period. Gad G. Gilbar, in his 1976 article on demographic developments during the second half of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, also considers Bharier’s estimates inaccurate for the period.

In an apparently biased review of Majd’s work, Willem Floor confirms Bharier’s model (15), despite its apparent deficiencies, and takes a mocking tone toward the well- documented work of Gholi Majd to undermine the devastation caused by the British-instigated famine in Iran, to the point of total denial of the existence of such a genocide. Floor also offers inaccurate or untrue information to oppose the fact that the British deprived Iranians from honey and caviar in the north, as he argues caviar was haram (religiously prohibited), while no such fatwa has ever existed in Shia jurisprudence and all available decrees assert that caviar is halal or permissible under the Islamic law. There was a rumor made up by Russians at the time, saying that Caviar was haram and Britain made full use of this rumor.

Another criticism made by Floor was to question why Majd’s work does not use British archival sources. A more important question is why Majd should have used these sources when they totally ignore the occurrence of the famine in Iran. The fact that Majd used mainly US sources seems to be reasonable on the grounds that the US was neutral toward the state of affairs in Iran at the time, and made efforts to help by feeding them (16).

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Sadegh Abbasi is a M.A. student at Tehran University. As a student in history he has also worked as a contributor to different Iranian news agencies.

Notes

1. Majd, Mohammad Gholi. The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran: 1917-1919. Lanham : University Press of America, 2013. p.71: https://books.google.com/books?id=5WgSAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA71&lpg.

2. Sniegoski, Stephen J. Iran as a Twentieth Century Victim: 1900 Through the Aftermath of World War II. mycatbirdseat.com. [Online] 11 10, 2013. [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://mycatbirdseat.com/2013/11/iran-twentieth-century-victim-1900-aftermath-world-war-ii/.

3. Donohoe, Major M. H. With The Persian Expedition. London : Edward Arnold, 1919. p. 76.

4. Nelson, Michael and Briggs, Asa. Queen Victoria and the Discovery of the Riviera. London : Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2007. p. 97: https://books.google.com/books?id=6ISE-ZEBfy4C&pg=PA97&lpg.

5. Bower, Graham. Sir Graham Bower’s Secret History of the Jameson Raid and the South African Crisis, 1895-1902. Cape Town : Van Riebeeck Society, 2002. p. xii: https://books.google.fr/books?id=VFYFZKRBXz0C&pg=PR23&lpg.

6. Ibid. p. xvii.

7. Cobain, Ian, Bowcott, Owen and Norton-Taylor, Richard. Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes . The Guardian. [Online] 03 17, 2012. [Cited: 10 10, 2015.] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes.

8. Walton, Calder. Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire. New York : The Overlook Press, 2013. p. 15: https://books.google.fr/books?id=f2cjCQAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&lpg.

9. Warfield, Brian. History Corner: The Great Irish Famine. wolfetonesofficialsite.com. [Online] [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.wolfetonesofficialsite.com/famine.htm.

10. Britain’s Cover Up. irishholocaust.org. [Online] [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.irishholocaust.org/britain’scoverup.

11. Coogan, Tim Pat. The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

12. O’Dowd, Niall. Proving the Irish Famine was genocide by the British. IrishCentral. [Online] 08 06, 2015. [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.irishcentral.com/news/proving-the-irish-famine-was-genocide-by-the-british-tim-pat-coogan-moves-famine-history-unto-a-new-plane-181984471-238161151.html.

13. Bharier, Julien. A Note on the Population of Iran, 1900-1966 . Population Studies. 1968, Vol. 22, 2.

14. Amani, Mehdi. La population de l’Iran. Population (French Edition). 1972, Vol. 27, 3: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1529398.

15. Floor, Willem. Reviewed Work: The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-1919 by Mohammad Gholi Majd . Iranian Studies. Iran Facing the New Century, 2005, Vol. 38, 1.

16. Fecitt, Harry. Other Theatres of War. westernfrontassociation.com. [Online] 09 29, 2013. [Cited: 10 12, 2015.] http://www.westernfrontassociation.com/the-great-war/great-war-on-land/other-war-theatres/3305-dunsterforce-part-1.html.

Featured image is from Khamenei.ir

A future without independent media leaves us with an upside down reality where according to the corporate media “NATO deserves a Nobel Peace Prize”, and where “nuclear weapons and wars make us safer”.

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Desperate MH17 “Intelligence” Spin. Ukraine Secret Service Contends that “Pro-Russian Rebels had Targeted a Russian Passenger Plane”. “But Shot Down Flight MH17 by Mistake”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 02, 2019

According to the official SBU report entitled Terrorists and Militants planned cynical terrorist attack at Aeroflot civil aircraft  published in August 2014, the Donetsk militia (with the support of Moscow) was aiming at a Russian Aeroflot passenger plane and shot down the Malaysian MH17 airliner by mistake. That’s the official Ukraine government story which was acknowledged by the Ukrainian media.

Political Upheaval in the United Kingdom

By Dr. David Halpin, June 01, 2019

The beauty parade for leader following PM May’s slow motion and tearful ‘retirement’ has today been joined by an eleventh candidate, all with millimetre insight.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Has Dismantled the West’s Official Narrative About Malaysian Airlines MH17

By Andrew Korybko, June 01, 2019

The nonagenarian leader raised questions that no non-Russian had hitherto dared to publicly ask before, such as why his country hadn’t been allowed to examine the plane’s black box and why the conclusion was automatically reached that Russia was responsible solely because of the type of missile that was allegedly involved.

Findings of Torture: The UN Rapporteur and Julian Assange

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, June 01, 2019

Often reviled and dismissed as ineffectual if not irrelevant, the United Nations has offered Assange some measure of protection through its articulations and findings.  Ironically enough, powers happy to regard the UN as a mere bauble of international relations in not protecting human rights have dismissed it when action does take place.

The Policy of Creative Chaos: America’s Project for a “Middle-East Holocaust”

By Mark Taliano, June 01, 2019

Empire willfully destroys the sovereignty and territorial integrity of prey nations such as Libya, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond. Genocidal ethnic cleansing, mass murder and destruction are described benignly as “chaos” and as “creative”.

UN Condemns the Psychological Torture Inflicted Upon Julian Assange. “Coordinated” by UK, US, Sweden and Ecuador

By Dr. Leon Tressell, June 01, 2019

The WikiLeaks publisher has spent over 7 weeks in Belmarsh prison where his health has deteriorated to such an extent that he is now displaying symptoms of, “intense psychological trauma.’’

The 2019 Beijing Consensus of the Conference on Dialogue of Asian Civilizations

By Dialogue of Asian Civilizations, May 31, 2019

The participants discussed the development of Asian civilizations, exchanged views on mutually beneficial cooperation among Asian countries, and reached extensive consensus.

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On 2 May 2019, the Trump administration implemented Title III of the 1996 Helms Burton Act. In doing so, it unleashed the most severe economic sanctions against Cuba since the blockade was first introduced by President Kennedy in 1962. 

Title III of the Helms-Burton Act enables Cuban-Americans to launch lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies accused of “trafficking” in property nationalised after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Previously, lawsuits had been limited to US citizens with claims against nationalised properties. Now that Title III is ‘live’ it includes claims by Cuban-Americans who were Cuban citizens at the time of the Revolution, despite their claims lacking legitimacy under international law.

Britain, like most other countries, negotiated compensation agreements over nationalised properties on the island many years ago. Nationalisations were carried out in accordance with international law and previous owners compensated. Cuba has repeatedly offered to do the same with the United States, but its offers have been rejected.

The US State Department’s action comes hot on the heels of a succession of increasingly hostile threats. In November 2018, National Security Adviser John Bolton, who has a history of aggression towards Latin American countries, labelled Cuba as part of a “troika of tyranny” together with Venezuela and Nicaragua. 

Legal experts anticipate there may be as many as 200,000 Title III cases waiting to be taken. However, while the US strictly adheres to other articles of Helms-Burton (an Act which codified sanctions against Cuba into US law 23 years ago), until 2 May Title III had never been enforced. Every president, Democrat and Republican, waived this part of the Act on a six-monthly basis since it was passed in 1996. 

The US blockade already constituted the longest economic sanctions against any country in history. It has cost the Cuban economy more than $933 billion dollars since 1962. The new measures aim to further deter foreign investment in Cuba and deprive the country of much-needed resources.

There is speculation that the move is an attempt to court the votes of Cuban-Americans in Florida in advance of the 2020 presidential election. Hardliners in the community are relishing the prospect of taking the Cuban government to court–a grievance they have been carrying since many deserted their properties and plantations in the early years of the Revolution.  

In response to the US measures, Josefina Vidal, who was a key negotiator with the US during the Obama rapprochement process said

“they want Cuba to abandon what Cuba is, to abandon its principles, and to submit Cuba to the desires of the US. But that won’t happen.”

In addition to the implementation of Title III, on 17 April, the 58th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the end of virtually all non-family travel to the island and new limits on the amount of money Cuban-Americans can send home to family. 

Cuban President, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, recognised that the US had chosen a significant date on which to make the announcements and tweeted “58th Anniversary of Girón [Cuba’s name for the Bay of Pigs]: The victory that the US does not forgive.”

Some analysts are predicting that the US move could backfire. Cuba specialist Professor William Leogrande has warned that enacting Title III “would cause an enormous legal mess, anger US allies in Europe and Latin America, and probably result in a World Trade Organisation case against the US.”

When Helms Burton was enacted in 1996, the European Union filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation and passed a law prohibiting EU members from complying with it. Mexico, Canada and the UK passed similar laws.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström released a statement on behalf of the EU which said it would “consider all options at its disposal to protect its legitimate interests.” Brussels may launch a WTO lawsuit and invoke the EU’s Blocking Statute, which allows EU companies sued in the US to recover any damage through legal proceedings against US claimants before EU courts.

Canada, China and Mexico also condemned the US action, as did several Democrat members of Congress, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Ben Rhodes, the White House official who had been responsible for former president Obama’s Cuba policy tweeted that the only real consequence of Trump’s policy would be to “hurt millions of Cubans” by “denying them resources, drying up remittances, choking off the foreign travel they depend upon to make a living.” 

Four lawsuits were filed in the first 16 days that Title III became operational. On 2 May, two Cuban-Americans sued cruise operator Carnival Corp for using Cuban ports nationalised from family members who owned them 60 years ago.

On 3 May, Exon Mobil filed a lawsuit seeking $280 million from state-owned Cuba-Petroleo and CIMEX Corp over a refinery, gas stations and other assets. And on 17 May, members of the Mata family in Florida filed a claim for use of the Meliá San Carlos hotel – the first filed by people who became US citizens after the property was nationalised.

No previous US president has risked unleashing such chaos in the US courts. But the Trump administration takes its advice on Cuba policy from Bolton, Marco Rubio and hardline anti-Cuba lobbyists in Florida. Vicki Huddleston, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana from 1999 to 2002, told Intelligence Matters magazine in February that she thought “most Cuba watchers and experts on Cuba believe the policy is now regime change.”

Even without Title III, the US blockade is already extraterritorial in its application. International companies including the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Bank have been fined billions of dollars by the US Office of Foreign Asset Control for historic trading with Cuba.

The Co-operative Bank closed the accounts of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in 2016, and the Open University banned applications from Cuban students in 2017, both due to the perceived threat of fines for breaking US sanctions.

The British government says that it will work with the EU to protect British companies and that it considers Title III sanctions to be “illegal under international law,” adding that they “threaten to harm UK and EU companies doing legitimate business in Cuba by exposing them to liability in US courts.”

Despite existing antidote legislation and various proclamations about British sovereignty, successive governments have failed to defend British companies’ rights to trade with the island. It remains to be seen how strongly British Trade Minister, Liam Fox, will defend British corporate interests against Trump’s expansionist policy in Latin America generally and this renewed aggression towards Cuba particularly.

Title III promises to kill off chances of improving US-Cuba relations. But its most devastating impact will be felt by the people of Cuba, already suffering under a 57-year-old blockade. The labour movement, in Britain and internationally, must do all it can to ensure this inhumane policy is not exacerbated by these new measures.

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Adrian Weir is Assistant Chief of Staff at Unite the union, a member of Labour’s National Policy Forum (NPF) International Commission and serves on the Executive Committee of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. He is a member of Tribune’s Advisory Board.

Featured image is from Tribune

The phenomenon of climate change invokes images of black smoke billowing out of smokestacks, emissions from exhaust pipes on an endless highway of bumper-to-bumper traffic, or the insect-like cranes of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and drilling operations dotting the landscape. We do not view our plastic shopping bags as part of the climate crisis — but we should. And just as the thirst for fossil fuel energy is an ugly symptom of runaway capitalism, so is plastic production and use. Both arise from the same problematic system, and both contribute to the same existential crisis humanity faces.

Plastic pervades every aspect of our modern lives. From the keys that I tap on my laptop as I write this piece to the lid on my coffee shop latté, the packaging of the individually wrapped cookies on the countertop, and even the lenses on my sunglasses. While we may worry about the pollution that plastic — especially the disposable variety — creates in clogging our landfills, choking our marine life, entering our food chain and disrupting our endocrine systems, we are likely not considering the role of plastic production and disposal on climate change. There is indeed a direct link between the devastating tornadoes in the Midwest this week and the 128 billion plastic bottles that Coca-Cola churns out every year.

Manufacturers churn out 448 million tons of plastic a year, a large part of which is disposable, intended for packaging products. Perhaps we imagine the containers holding our fresh organic berries or the sturdy bubble-wrapped packages our Amazon orders are delivered in are easily transformed into new packaging once we toss them into our recycling bins. But only about 10% of all plastic waste in the U.S. is ever recycled, and now that percentage has likely dropped even more. Malaysia announced this week it will be sending back hundreds of tons of plastic waste to their countries of origin — including the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia. Malaysia’s move comes a year after China decided to stop accepting plastic waste for recycling and is the latest in a disturbing trend of a world filling up with unwanted plastic at the same time that manufacturers are ramping up production.

Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), explained to me in an interview that “plastics are simply fossil fuels in another form. Ninety-nine percent of what goes into plastics are oil, gas and, to a lesser extent, coal feed stocks.” As a result, “the processes that produce plastics begin at wellheads and at frac pads across the United States and around the world.” According to Muffett, every step in the production of the plastic we casually use and toss away has an impact on the climate, from the emissions released during extractive processes like fracking to the transporting of the raw materials to plants and beyond. Because ever fewer plastics are getting recycled, many communities across the globe are also burning their plastic trash as fuel, adding more emissions into our already saturated atmosphere. And the plastic that is not recycled or incinerated itself emits potent greenhouse gases like methane and ethylene, as a 2018 study has alarmingly shown.

CIEL recently published a report called Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet, which found, among other things, that “the production and incineration of plastic will produce more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases — equal to the emissions from 189 500-megawatt coal power plants.”

In spite of these alarming statistics, Muffett says that “the infrastructure for making new plastics is growing incredibly rapidly.” Instead of ramping down plastic production and use, the fossil fuel industry is accelerating its growth. The International Energy Agency (IEA) found last year that petrochemicals, the raw materials from which everyday plastics are created, “are becoming the largest drivers of global oil demand, in front of cars, planes and trucks.” Calling it a “blind spot” of the global energy system, the IEA found petrochemicals “account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030, and nearly half the growth to 2050, adding nearly 7 million barrels of oil a day by then.”

Muffett pointed out,

“As global recognition of the need to transition away from fossil fuels for energy and transportation increases, the oil and gas companies — who are also not coincidentally the same companies that make plastics such as Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Total — those companies are increasingly relying on petrochemicals and plastics to make their long-term business models add up.”

In other words, the fossil fuel companies are repackaging the same climate-change-causing product in a different form and selling it to us in the hope that we won’t notice how little difference there is between the two.

A perverse aspect of the industry is the vast extent to which taxpayers subsidize fossil fuel corporations. Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund estimated fossil fuel subsidies globally add up to $5.2 trillion a year, with the U.S. second only to China in scale. As Muffett noted wryly, “We as a society are being forced to subsidize our own destruction.”

If we begin to see plastic production and use as part of the fossil fuel industry’s deadly means of turning profits, we may be able to tackle head on the drive to ramp up production. The climate crisis is deeply linked to the plastics crisis. There is a massive supply of oil and gas in our economy, and fossil fuel companies want to make the most of their easily available raw materials in spite of the destructive nature of the products.

Alongside our demand to transition to a new, clean, green economy has to be a call to dramatically cut the production and use of plastics. According to Muffett, the single-use disposable plastic packaging of the kind that most of our products come wrapped in are “actually the major driver for the build-out of new plastic infrastructure.” And although plastics producers like to assert they are simply responding to consumer demand, Muffett says that research has shown that “plastics, to a far greater extent than virtually any other product, is actually a matter of supply driving demand.”

CIEL’s report on plastics calls for an end to the production and use of single-use, disposable plastic and the curtailing of new oil, gas and petrochemical infrastructure. As oil and gas companies build out new processing plants to transition from producing fuel to producing plastic, that infrastructure needs to be stopped in its tracks. As many in the climate justice movements have done, rather than just calling for a transition to renewable energy sources, the way forward is a rallying cry to leave all fossil fuels in the ground.

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Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA and affiliates.

Featured image is from Shutterstock; Edited: LW / TO

“They [the West] are accusing Russia but where is the evidence? You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians. … It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be the Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile, … We don’t know why we [Malaysia] are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it… The idea was not to find out how this happened but it seems to have concentrated on trying to pin it on the Russians. This is not a [politically] neutral kind of examination” (Tun Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, May 31, 2019)

In the light of Prime Minister Mahathir’s rebuttal concerning Russia’s alleged responsibility in the MH17 tragedy, we bring to the attention of our readers the following article (first published in 2014) which focusses on the official Kiev government’s position concerning the downing of flight MH17, as confirmed by a statement of Ukraine’s Secret Service (SBU).

A short summary and analysis is provided in this introductory note.

According to the official SBU report entitled Terrorists and Militants planned cynical terrorist attack at Aeroflot civil aircraft  published in August 2014, the SBU accused the Kremlin of having ordered a false flag attack involving the shooting down of its own Aeroflot plane leading to the death of its own citizens, and then blaming it on Kiev, with Russia using the tragedy as a casus belli pretext to invade Ukraine: The Donetsk militia were aiming at a Russian Aeroflot passenger plane and shot down the Malaysian MH17 airliner by mistake. That’s the official Ukraine government story which was acknowledged by the Ukrainian media. See below.

Kiev Post August 7, 2014

(Since its release in August 2014, the link to the original SBU report is no longer available. The full text of the SBU report is published in annex to this article.)

The August 2014 “intelligence” report released by SBU Chief Nalyvaichenko bordered on ridicule and incompetence to say to the least.

With some exceptions, it was never acknowledged, analyzed, accepted or denied by the Western media.  Washington was silent. Nobody in the US intelligence community acknowledged or corroborated the statement of their Ukrainian counterpart.

Moreover, this report by Ukraine intelligence was never analyzed by the Dutch investigation of MH17.

As we recall, immediately after the MH17 plane crash on July 17 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry and US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power pointed their finger at Moscow without a shred of evidence. In turn,  the allegations directed against Russia were used to justify the imposition of sweeping economic sanctions  against the Russian Federation.

In the wake of this official and “authoritative” August 7 announcement by the Kiev regime, Obama, Kerry, Samantha Power et al, chose to remain mum.  The Ukraine Secret Service’s official statement concerning the crash of Malaysian airlines MH17 was so outlandish. It simply did not fit the usual mold of media disinformation.

Following the release of Ukraine’s official report on the crash of flight MH17, the US media as well as Western politicians chose to remain silent. Acknowledging Kiev’s official statement concerning MH17 would have opened up a diplomatic “can of worms” which would inevitably have backlashed. Not to mention the fact that the justification for the economic sanctions rested in part on Moscow’s alleged role in downing the Malaysian airliner.

Another consideration was that real evidence pertaining to the crash of flight MH17 had emerged to the effect that the plane had most likely been shot down on the orders of the Kiev regime. This evidence came to light following statements by the head of the OSCE team to the effect that the plane’s fuselage was perforated with machine-gun like holes indicating that it could have been shot at by a military aircraft.

Michael Bociurkiw [head] of the OSCE group of monitors at his daily briefing described part of the plane’s fuselage dotted with “shrapnel-like, almost machine gun-like holes.” He said the damage was inspected by Malaysian aviation-security officials .(Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2014,

OSCE Head of Mission Michael Bociurkiw made the above statement on July 31st, 2014 one week prior to the release (on August 7) of the SBU intelligence report entitled  Terrorists and Militants planned cynical terrorist attack at Aeroflot civil aircraft.

Did the Kiev government fast-track an “authoritative intelligence report” following revelations that the cockpit of the plane had machine gun like entry and exit holes pointing to the fact that the Malaysian plane “was not downed by a missile attack”?  (Revelations of German Pilot: Shocking Analysis of the “Shooting Down” of Malaysian MH17. “Aircraft Was Not Hit by a Missile” Global Research, July 30, 2014)

It is worth noting that the Russian media chose not to comment on the Kiev intelligence report.

(For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, “Support MH17 Truth”: OSCE Monitors Identify “Shrapnel and Machine Gun-Like Holes” indicating Shelling. No Evidence of a Missile Attack. Shot Down by a Military Aircraft?, Global Research, July 31, 2014

Michel Chossudovsky, October 15, 2015, June 2, 2019,

minor edits to the article below, June 2, 2019

Desperate MH17 “Intelligence” Spin by Ukraine Secret Service: Pro-Russian Rebels had Targeted a Russian Passenger Plane. “But Shot Down Flight MH17 by Mistake”

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, August 11, 2014

The official MH17 narrative still prevails: the “pro-Russian rebels” shot down Malaysian airlines MH17 with a Buk missile system provided by Russia.

In a new and rather unusual twist, however,  according to the Kiev regime, the Donetsk militia did not intend to shoot down Malaysian airlines MH17. What the “pro-Russian rebels” were aiming at was a Russian Aeroflot passenger plane.

The MH17 was shot down “by mistake” according to an official statement by the head of Ukraine’s Secret Service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko (Ukraine News Service, August 7, 2014)

According to SBU Chief Nalyvaichenko:

“Ukraine’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies have established during the investigation into a terrorist attack on the Boeing… that on that day, July 17, and at that time military mercenaries and terrorists from the Russian Federation planned to carry out a terrorist attack against a passenger aircraft of Aeroflot en route from Moscow to Larnaca… as a pretext for the further invasion by Russia,”

“This cynical terrorist attack was planned for the day when the [Malaysia Airlines] plane happened to fly by, planned by war criminals as a pretext for the further military invasion by the Russian Federation, that is, there would be a casus belli,” he added.

Thus, according Nalyvaichenko, the terrorists downed the Malaysian airliner by mistake.” (Ukraine Interfax News, August 8, 2014)

Nalyvaichenko said that the Kiev government reached this conclusion “in the course of its own investigation into the downing of MH17”.

According to Britain’s foremost news tabloid, The Mail on Sunday, quoting the head of Ukraine intelligence, the insidious design of the pro-Russian rebels (supported by Moscow) was to shoot down a Russian commercial airline plane, with a view to blaming the Ukrainian government. The objective of this alleged “false flag” covert op was to create a justifiable and credible pretext for Vladimir Putin to declare war on Ukraine.

In an utterly twisted logic, according to Ukraine’s head of intelligence:

“the [Donesk] rebels were meant to down [the] Aeroflot plane… to justify the invasion [of Ukraine by Russia]”,

Valentyn Nalyvaichenko (right), head of Ukraine intelligence confirms that the pro-Russian rebels were “aiming at a Russian passenger plane “so Putin had reason to invade”.

“the crime was planned as a ground for bringing of Russian troops into Ukraine, that is – CASUS BELLI for the Russian military invasion.” (Official statement of Ukraine Security Service, in annex below)

In a bitter irony, the alleged “false flag” covert op got muddled. The Donesk rebels got it all wrong and hit the MH17 plane by mistake.

That’s the “official line” now emanating from Kiev’s “intelligent” Secret Service (SBU), yet to be corroborated by their Western intelligence counterparts including the CIA and Britain’s MI6 which are actively collaborating with Ukraine’s SBU.

The head of Ukraine’s secret service has claimed rebels intended to down a Russian airliner to give Vladimir Putin a pretext for invasion – but blasted Flight MH17 out of the sky by mistake. (ibid)

In its authoritative report, the British news tabloid fails to beg the important question: why on earth would pro-Russian rebels who are at war with the Kiev regime shoot down a Russian passenger plane AFL-2074 allegedly with a view to harnessing Russia’s support?

What’s more, according to SBU Chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko’s  statement, Moscow was helping the pro-Russian rebels in their alleged false flag op to shoot down Russia’s Aeroflot plane by providing them with a Buk missile system, which had been discretely smuggled across the border to the Donesk region of Eastern Ukraine. The Aeroflot plane was slated to be “shot down over territory controlled by Ukrainian government troops”:

Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said that Russian-backed fighters were supposed to take their BUK rocket launcher – which had been transported across the Russian border – to a village called Pervomaiskoe in Ukrainian-held territory west of Donetsk.

But they “screwed up”. The Buk rocket launcher was apparently positioned in the wrong rural location and because of that it targeted the MH17 by mistake:

If they had gone where they had been ordered, he said, they would have hit an Aeroflot flight carrying civilians travelling from Moscow to Larnaca in Cyprus.

Crucially, the crash site would have been in Ukrainian-held territory. (Mail on Sunday)

The pro-Russian rebels had allegedly planned an Operation Northwoods type “false flag” with utmost proficiency. The covert op consisted in downing a Russian passenger plane with Moscow’s support. The alleged objective was for Moscow to place the blame on the government of Ukraine for having ordered the downing of the Aeroflot plane (resulting in the deaths of Russian tourists), thereby creating a “useful wave of indignation” across the Russian Federation.

The  alleged “false flag” slated to be implemented by the Donetsk “terrorists and mercenaries” would then, according to the scenario depicted by Ukraine’s Chief Spy, spearhead public support for a Russian invasion of Ukraine, with patriotic Russian troops coming to the rescue of the “pro-Russian separatists”:

The mass killing of Russian tourists could then have been blamed on the Ukrainian army, giving Moscow a justification for invasion, said Mr Nalyvaichenko, head of the Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU. (ibid)

The official SBU report states that the:

“Russian side would need a compelling argument for such a step, for example accusation of the Ukrainian government in mass murder of the Russian citizens [on the plane]” (See complete SBU statement in Annex below).

According to the head of Ukraine’s Secret Service: “It is incredibly cynical that the act of terrorism was planned [by the rebels] against peaceful innocent Russian citizens who were on the way to their holidays with children”:

‘This cynical terrorist act was intended to justify an immediate military invasion by the Russian Federation,’ he said.

Aeroflot flight AFL2074 was close to Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 when it was blown out of the sky on July 17, killing all 298 on board, he said.

… He claimed this was a significant conclusion of Kiev’s probe into MH17’s downing. (Ibid)

A Russian invasion plan had allegedly been scheduled –according to the official SBU report– to take place on July 18, on the day following the planned downing of Aeroflot flight 2074. But when the MH17 flight was downed by mistake, the Russian invasion plan scheduled for July 18, according to the Kiev scenario, was cancelled.

Operation Northwoods

It is worth noting that an earlier GR report pointed to the possibility of an Operation Northwoods type False Flag undertaken not by Russia but by the Kiev regime (in liaison with Washington) with a view to blaming Russia for the downing of flight MH17.

While there is no proof as yet of a Kiev sponsored false flag, the available evidence collected sofar is damning: reports confirm unequivocally the presence of at least one Ukrainian military aircraft in proximity of the flight path of MH17. Moreover, the fuselage of the plane had machine gun like bullet holes.

Mainstream Media Response to Kiev Regime’s Accusations

Normally, the Western media would provide ample coverage and commentary to an official Kiev statement pertaining to MH17 and accusing Russia. It’s part of the MSM routine of “Russia bashing” and demonizing president Vladimir Putin.

With the exception of Ukraine News Service and London’s Daily Mail, however, the official statement of the head of Ukraine’s Secret Service has gone largely unnoticed. Normally, a declaration of this nature would be picked up by the wire services with syndicated reports flooding the front page of the Western news chain.

Was the mainstream media instructed to temporarily “put a hold” on reporting on the “revelations” of  Ukraine’s Secret Service.

The Kiev regime’s allegations are far-fetched to say the least: the Donesk rebels –largely involved in combat operations– have neither the capabilities nor the desire to undertake a complex intelligence operation of this nature. What purpose would it serve? Cui Bono?

Does Russia require a fake humanitarian pretext to intervene when more than 1000 civilians in the Donbass region have been killed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, not to mention the Odessa massacre perpetrated by the Kiev regime’s Neo-Nazi national guard.

Ironically, barely four days after being accused by Kiev of planning to invade Ukraine, Russia’s President Putin agreed with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso that Moscow would not only collaborate with the Red Cross on channeling humanitarian aid to Eastern Ukraine through Russian territory, but that the agreement reached with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), had the support of the Kiev government.

Russia bashing in the MSM seems to be “on hold”. In turn, neither the Russian government nor the Russian media have commented on (or responded to) the accusations directed against Moscow contained in Ukraine’s dodgy Secret Service’s MH17 report.

Dodgy Ukraine MH17 Intelligence Report: Kiev’s Western “Allies”

Was Washington consulted before the release of the dodgy SBU False Flag report?

Did Washington give them the “Green Light” to the release of the SBU report as a means of “Framing Russia”? Or did the White House or the State Department decide that the SBU’s “fake intelligence” was visibly flawed and could not effectively be used for propaganda purposes against Russia?

Were the CIA and MI6 consulted? Britain’s Secret Service MI6 has access to the plane’s black box, which was handed over by the Dutch task force to an unnamed partner entity in the UK.

Sofar, neither the White House nor the mainstream media, not to mention the US intelligence community, have commented on the Ukraine’s August 7 SBU statement, which has been officially endorsed by the Kiev government.

It is worth noting that the statement of Ukraine’s intelligence service was made following the release of evidence by the OSCE mission that there were “machine gun like bullet holes” on the fuselage indicating that the MH17 had been brought down by cannon fire from a military aircraft.

Ukraine’s Chief Spy Valentyn Nalyvaichenko confirms that the SBU report on the downing of MH17 –which accuses the Donetsk rebels of  implementing a “false flag” operation– has been submitted to the MH17 investigation task force headed by The Netherlands.

Annex

Official Statement of Ukraine’s Security Service (August 7, 2014)

Terrorists and Militants planned cynical terrorist attack at Aeroflot civil aircraft

ca retrived at Way Back Machine Archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20140807205620/http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/en/publish/article?art_id=129860&cat_id=35317

Screenshot of original report

Transcript

[emphasis added]

During the investigation of Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 downing the law enforcement and intelligence bodies established that terrorists and militants have cynically planned the terrorist attack at Aeroflot civil aircraft, AFL-2074 Moscow-Larnaca, which was flying over the territory of Ukraine at that moment. Hereof informed the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine Mr. Valentyn Nalyvaichenko during the briefing today.

He underlined – the crime was planned as a ground for bringing of Russian troops into Ukraine, that is – CASUS BELLI for the Russian military invasion.

According to the official Ukrainian data, June 17, 2014, at the mentioned time two regular international flights were operating over the territory of Ukraine following the filed requests for aircraft clearance – MAS17 plane of the Malaysia Airlines and AFL-2074 one of Aeroflot.

The routes of the mentioned international flights were approaching the sky over Donetsk. At 16:09 in the area of Novomykolaivka town the routes of the mentioned flights crossed. It is worth noting that the flight specifications of the aircrafts were almost identical – the Malaysian aircraft flew at a height of 10,100 m at a speed 909 km/h, while the Russian one – at a height of 10,600 m at a speed 768 km/h.

At 16:20 from the area of ‘Pervomaiske’ village, north-east from Donetsk, near the town of Torez, terrorists shot down the Malaysian jet, which then crashed near Grabove, Donetsk region.

According to the intercepted and published data about the ‘Buk” missile system, the terrorists had received an order to place the system near ‘Pervomaiskoe’ village, V. Nalyvaichenko mentioned. The namesake village is located about 20 km to the north-east from Donetsk.

The terrorists (most of them are not locals, but the Russian mercenaries) misrecognized the namesake villages and moved the other way, the SSU Head said. The odd route of the ‘Buk’ missile system on the territory of Ukraine proves that fact. The system crossed the Russia-Ukraine border in Luhansk region, then was deployed westward to Donetsk and moved back to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk regions afterwards.

By setting up the ‘Buk’ missile system in ‘Pervomaiske’ village located to the west from Donetsk and taking into consideration the military specifications of the weapon, the terrorists could have shot down the Russian civilian jetliner with its further crashing on the Ukrainian territory controlled by the ATO [Ukraine] forces.

In that case Russia would receive an opportunity to accuse the Ukrainian authorities of downing the Russian plane, assaulting the Russian citizens and would use this irresistible proof for its invasion into Ukraine.

Russian side would need a compelling argument for such a step, for example accusation of the Ukrainian government in mass murder of the Russian citizens.

“A peculiar cynicism appears in the fact that the terrorist act was planned just against the peaceful, innocent Russian citizens, who were flying with their children on vacation”, – V. Nalyvaichenko, stressed.

Intelligence data proved that on July 18 the militants have already waited for the introduction of Russian Armed forces into the territory of Ukraine. The Russian side had been giving grounding for such developments for the several previous days. The Russian Mass Media had massively published information about the alleged shelling of the RF territory from the Ukrainian side.

For further details see  [link no longer available]

http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/en/publish/article;jsessionid=73352780A12C97E27DD0BF852482D3C0.app1?art_id=129860&cat_id=35317

can be retrieved at the WayBack archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20140807205620/http://www.sbu.gov.ua/sbu/control/en/publish/article?art_id=129860&cat_id=35317

This article was first published in 2010.

The author’s introductory quote was first formulated in 2001 in the context of the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City which was held a few months before 9/11

“Everything the [Ford] Foundation did could be regarded as “making the World safe for capitalism”, reducing social tensions by helping to comfort the afflicted, provide safety valves for the angry, and improve the functioning of government (McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (1961-1966), President of the Ford Foundation, (1966-1979))

“By providing the funding and the policy framework to many concerned and dedicated people working within the non-profit sector, the ruling class is able to co-opt leadership from grassroots communities, … and is able to make the funding, accounting, and evaluation components of the work so time consuming and onerous that social justice work is virtually impossible under these conditions” (Paul Kivel, You Call this Democracy, Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides, 2004, p. 122 )

***

“Under the New World Order, the ritual of inviting “civil society” leaders into the inner circles of power –while simultaneously repressing the rank and file– serves several important functions. First, it says to the World that the critics of globalization “must make concessions” to earn the right to mingle. Second, it conveys the illusion that while the global elites should –under what is euphemistically called democracy– be subject to criticism, they nonetheless rule legitimately. And third, it says “there is no alternative” to globalization: fundamental change is not possible and the most we can hope is to engage with these rulers in an ineffective “give and take”.

While the “Globalizers” may adopt a few progressive phrases to demonstrate they have good intentions, their fundamental goals are not challenged. And what this “civil society mingling” does is to reinforce the clutch of the corporate establishment while weakening and dividing the protest movement. An understanding of this process of co-optation is important, because tens of thousands of the most principled young people in Seattle, Prague and Quebec City [1999-2001] are involved in the anti-globalization protests because they reject the notion that money is everything, because they reject the impoverishment of millions and the destruction of fragile Earth so that a few may get richer.

This rank and file and some of their leaders as well, are to be applauded. But we need to go further. We need to challenge the right of the “Globalizers” to rule. This requires that we rethink the strategy of protest. Can we move to a higher plane, by launching mass movements in our respective countries, movements that bring the message of what globalization is doing, to ordinary people? For they are the force that must be mobilized to challenge those who plunder the Globe.” (Michel Chossudovsky,  The Quebec Wall, April  2001)

“Manufactured Consent” vs. “Manufactured Dissent”

The term “manufacturing consent” was initially coined by Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky.

“Manufacturing consent” describes a propaganda model used by the corporate media to sway public opinion and “inculcate individuals with values and beliefs…”:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda. (Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky)

“Manufacturing consent” implies manipulating and shaping public opinion. It establishes conformity and acceptance to authority and social hierarchy. It seeks compliance to an established social order. “Manufacturing consent” describes the submission of public opinion to the mainstream media narrative, to its lies and fabrications.

In this article, we focus on a related concept, namely the subtle process of “manufacturing dissent” (rather than “consent”), which plays a decisive role in serving the interests of the ruling class.

Under contemporary capitalism, the illusion of democracy must prevail. It is in the interest of the corporate elites to accept dissent and protest as a feature of the system inasmuch as they do not threaten the established social order. The purpose is not to repress dissent, but, on the contrary, to shape and mould the protest movement, to set the outer limits of dissent.

To maintain their legitimacy, the economic elites favor limited and controlled forms of opposition, with a view to preventing the development of radical forms of protest, which might shake the very foundations and institutions of global capitalism. In other words, “manufacturing dissent” acts as a “safety valve”, which protects and sustains the New World Order.

To be effective, however, the process of “manufacturing dissent” must be carefully regulated and monitored by those who are the object of the protest movement.

“Funding Dissent”

How is the process of manufacturing dissent achieved?

Essentially by “funding dissent”, namely by channeling financial resources from those who are the object of the protest movement to those who are involved in organizing the protest movement.

Co-optation is not limited to buying the favors of politicians. The economic elites –which control major foundations– also oversee the funding of numerous NGOs and civil society organizations, which historically have been involved in the protest movement against the established economic and social order. The programs of many NGOs and people’s movements rely heavily on funding from both public as well as private foundations including the Ford, Rockefeller, McCarthy foundations, among others.

The anti-globalization movement is opposed to Wall Street and the Texas oil giants controlled by Rockefeller, et al. Yet the foundations and charities of Rockefeller et al will generously fund progressive anti-capitalist networks as well as environmentalists (opposed to Big Oil) with a view to ultimately overseeing and shaping their various activities.

The mechanisms of “manufacturing dissent” require a manipulative environment, a process of arm-twisting and subtle cooptation of individuals within progressive organizations, including anti-war coalitions, environmentalists and the anti-globalization movement.

Whereas the mainstream media “manufactures consent”, the complex network of NGOs (including segments of the alternative media) are used by the corporate elites to mould and manipulate the protest movement.

Following the deregulation of the global financial system in the 1990s and the rapid enrichment of the financial establishment, funding through foundations and charities has skyrocketed.

In a bitter irony, part of the fraudulent financial gains on Wall Street in recent years have been recycled to the elites’ tax exempt foundations and charities. These windfall financial gains have not only been used to buy out politicians, they have also been channelled to NGOs, research institutes, community centres, church groups, environmentalists, alternative media, human rights groups, etc. “Manufactured dissent” also applies to the “corporate left” and “progressive” media, funded by NGOs or directly by the foundations.

The inner objective is to “manufacture dissent” and establish the boundaries of a “politically correct” opposition. In turn, many NGOs are infiltrated by  informants often acting on behalf of western intelligence agencies. Moreover, an increasingly large segment of the progressive alternative news media on the internet has become dependent on funding from corporate foundations and charities.

Piecemeal Activism

The objective of the corporate elites has been to fragment the people’s movement into a vast “do it yourself” mosaic. War and globalization are no longer in the forefront of civil society activism. Activism tends to be piecemeal. There is no integrated anti-globalization anti-war movement. The economic crisis is not seen as having a relationship to the US led war.

Dissent has been compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, climate change) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement. This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits and People’s Summits of the 1990s.

The Anti-Globalization Movement

The Seattle 1999 counter-summit is invariably upheld as a triumph for the anti-globalization movement: “a historic coalition of activists shut down the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, the spark that ignited a global anti-corporate movement.” (See Naomi Klein, Copenhagen: Seattle Grows Up, The Nation, November 13, 2009).

Seattle was an indeed an important crossroads in the history of the mass movement. Over 50,000 people from diverse backgrounds, civil society organizations, human rights, labor unions, environmentalists had come together in a common pursuit. Their goal was to forecefully dismantle the neoliberal agenda including its institutional base.

But Seattle also marked a major reversal. With mounting dissent from all sectors of society, the official WTO Summit desperately needed the token participation of civil society leaders “on the inside”, to give the appearance of being “democratic” “on the outside”.

While thousands of people had converged on Seattle, what occurred behind the scenes was a de facto victory for neoliberalism. A handful of civil society organizations, formally opposed to the WTO had contributed to legitimizing the WTO’s global trading architecture. Instead of challenging the WTO as an an illegal intergovernmental body, they agreed to a pre-summit dialogue with the WTO and Western governments. “Accredited NGO participants were invited to mingle in a friendly environment with ambassadors, trade ministers and Wall Street tycoons at several of the official events including the numerous cocktail parties and receptions.” (Michel Chossudovsky, Seattle and Beyond: Disarming the New World Order , Covert Action Quarterly, November 1999, See Ten Years Ago: “Manufacturing Dissent” in Seattle).

The hidden agenda was to weaken and divide the protest movement and orient the anti-globalization movement into areas that would not directly threaten the interests of the business establishment.

Funded by private foundations (including Ford, Rockefeller, Rockefeller Brothers, Charles Stewart Mott, The Foundation for Deep Ecology), these “accredited” civil society organizations had positioned themselves as lobby groups, acting formally on behalf of the people’s movement. Led by prominent and committed activists, their hands were tied. They ultimately contributed (unwittingly) to weakening the anti-globalization movement by accepting the legitimacy of what was essentially an illegal organization. (The 1994 Marrakech Summit agreement which led to the creation of the WTO on January 1, 1995). (Ibid)

The NGO leaders were fully aware as to where the money was coming from. Yet within the US and European NGO community, the foundations and charities are considered to be independent philanthropic bodies, separate from the corporations; namely the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, for instance, is considered to be separate and distinct from the Rockefeller family empire of banks and oil companies.

With salaries and operating expenses depending on private foundations, it became an accepted routine: In a twisted logic, the battle against corporate capitalism was to be fought using the funds from the tax exempt foundations owned by corporate capitalism.

The NGOs were caught in a straightjacket; their very existence depended on the foundations. Their activities were closely monitored. In a twisted logic, the very nature of anti-capitalist activism was indirectly controlled  by the capitalists through their independent foundations.

“Progressive Watchdogs”

In this evolving saga, the corporate elites –whose interests are duly served by the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO– will readily fund (through their various foundations and charities) organizations which are at the forefront of the protest movement against the WTO and the Washington based international financial institutions.

Supported by foundation money, various “watchdogs” were set up by the NGOs to monitor the implementation of neoliberal policies, without however raising the broader issue of how the Bretton Woods twins and the WTO, through their policies, had contributed to the impoverishment of millions of people.

The Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Network (SAPRIN) was established by Development Gap, a USAID and World Bank funded NGO based in Washington DC.

Amply documented, the imposition of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) on developing countries constitutes a blatant form of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states on behalf of creditor institutions.

Instead of challenging the legitimacy of the IMF-World Bank’s “deadly economic medicine”, SAPRIN’s core organization sought to establish a participatory role for the NGOs, working hand in glove with USAID and the World Bank. The objective was to give a “human face” to the neoliberal policy agenda, rather than reject the IMF-World Bank policy framework outright:

“SAPRIN is the global civil-society network that took its name from the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI), which it launched with the World Bank and its president, Jim Wolfensohn, in 1997.

SAPRI is designed as a tripartite exercise to bring together organizations of civil society, their governments and the World Bank in a joint review of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and an exploration of new policy options. It is legitimizing an active role for civil society in economic decision-making, as it is designed to indicate areas in which changes in economic policies and in the economic-policymaking process are required. ( http://www.saprin.org/overview.htm  SAPRIN website, emphasis added)

Similarly, The Trade Observatory (formerly WTO Watch), operating out of Geneva, is a project of the Minneapolis based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), which is generously funded by Ford, Rockefeller, Charles Stewart Mott among others. (see Table 1 below).

The Trade Observatory has a mandate to monitor the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas  (FTAA). (IATP, About Trade Observatory, accessed September 2010).

The Trade Observatory is also to develop data and information as well as foster “governance” and “accountability”. Accountability to the victims of WTO policies or accountability to the protagonists of neoliberal reforms?

The Trade Observatory watchdog functions does not in any way threaten the WTO. Quite the opposite: the legitimacy of the trade organizations and agreements are never questioned.

Table 1 Minneapolis Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) largest donors
(for complete list click here)

Ford Foundation
$2,612,500.00
1994 – 2006

Rockefeller Brothers Fund
$2,320,000.00
1995 – 2005

Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
$1,391,000.00
1994 – 2005

McKnight Foundation
$1,056,600.00
1995 – 2005

Joyce Foundation
$748,000.00
1996 – 2004

Bush Foundation
$610,000.00
2001 – 2006

Bauman Family Foundation
$600,000.00
1994 – 2006

Great Lakes Protection Fund
$580,000.00
1995 – 2000

John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
$554,100.00
1991 – 2003

John Merck Fund
$490,000.00
1992 – 2003

Harold K. Hochschild Foundation
$486,600.00
1997 – 2005

Foundation for Deep Ecology
$417,500.00
1991 – 2001

Jennifer Altman Foundation
$366,500.00
1992 – 2001

Rockefeller Foundation
$344,134.00
2000 – 2004

Soruce: http://activistcash.com/organization_financials.cfm/o/16-institute-for-agriculture-and-trade-policy

The World Economic Forum. “All Roads Lead to Davos”

The people’s movement has been hijacked. Selected intellectuals, trade union executives, and the leaders of civil society organizations (including Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace) are routinely invited to the Davos World Economic Forum, where they mingle with the World’s most powerful economic and political actors. This mingling of the World’s corporate elites with hand-picked “progressives” is part of the ritual underlying the process of  “manufacturing dissent”.

The ploy is to selectively handpick civil society leaders “whom we can trust” and integrate them into a “dialogue”, cut them off from their rank and file, make them feel that they are “global citizens” acting on behalf of their fellow workers but make them act in a way which serves the interests of the corporate establishment:

“The participation of NGOs in the Annual Meeting in Davos is evidence of the fact that [we] purposely seek to integrate a broad spectrum of the major stakeholders in society in … defining and advancing the global agenda … We believe the [Davos] World Economic Forum provides the business community with the ideal framework for engaging in collaborative efforts with the other principal stakeholders [NGOs] of the global economy to “improve the state of the world,” which is the Forum’s mission. (World Economic Forum, Press Release 5 January 2001)

The WEF does not represent the broader business community. It is an elitist gathering: Its members are giant global corporations (with a minimum $5 billion annual turnover). The selected non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are viewed as partner “stakeholders” as well as a convenient “mouthpiece for the voiceless who are often left out of decision-making processes.” (World Economic Forum – Non-Governmental Organizations, 2010)

“They [the NGOs] play a variety of roles in partnering with the Forum to improve the state of the world, including serving as a bridge between business, government and civil society, connecting the policy makers to the grassroots, bringing practical solutions to the table…” (Ibid)

Civil society “partnering” with global corporations on behalf of “the voiceless”, who are “left out”?

Trade union executives are also co-opted to the detriment of workers’ rights.  The leaders of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), the AFL-CIO, the European Trade Union Confederation, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), among others, are routinely invited to attend both the annual WEF meetings in Davos, Switzerland as well as to the regional summits. They also participate in the WEF’s Labour Leaders Community which focuses on mutually acceptable patterns of behavior for the labor movement. The WEF “believes that the voice of Labour is important to dynamic dialogue on issues of globalisation, economic justice, transparency and accountability, and ensuring a healthy global financial system.”

“Ensuring a healthy global financial system” wrought by fraud and corruption? The issue of workers’ rights is not mentioned. (World Economic Forum – Labour Leaders, 2010).

The World Social Forum: “Another World Is Possible”

The 1999 Seattle counter-summit in many regards laid the foundations for the development of the World Social Forum.

The first gathering of the World Social Forum took place in January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This international gathering involved the participation of  tens of thousands of activists from grass-roots organizations and NGOs.

The WSF  gathering of NGOs and progressive organizations is held simultaneously with the Davos World Economic Forum (WEF). It was intended to voice opposition and dissent to the World Economic Forum of corporate leaders and finance ministers.

The WSF at the outset was an initiative of France’s ATTAC and several Brazilian NGOs’:

“… In February 2000, Bernard Cassen, the head of a French NGO platform ATTAC, Oded Grajew, head of a Brazilian employers’ organisation, and Francisco Whitaker, head of an association of Brazilian NGOs, met to discuss a proposal for a “world civil society event”; by March 2000, they formally secured the support of the municipal government of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, both controlled at the time by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT)…. A group of French NGOs, including ATTAC, Friends of L’Humanité, and Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique, sponsored an Alternative Social Forum in Paris titled “One Year after Seattle”, in order to prepare an agenda for the protests to be staged at the upcoming European Union summit at Nice. The speakers called for “reorienting certain international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO… so as to create a globalization from below” and “building an international citizens’ movement, not to destroy the IMF but to reorient its missions.” (Research Unit For Political Economy, The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum, Global Research, January 20, 2004)

From the outset in 2001, the WSF was supported by core funding from the Ford Foundation, which is known to have ties to the CIA going back to the 1950s: “The CIA uses philanthropic foundations as the most effective conduit to channel large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to their source.” (James Petras, The Ford Foundation and the CIA, Global Research, September 18, 2002) 

The same procedure of donor funded counter-summits or people’s summits which characterized the 1990s People’s Summits was embodied in the World Social Forum (WSF):

“… other WSF funders (or `partners’, as they are referred to in WSF terminology) included the Ford Foundation, — suffice it to say here that it has always operated in the closest collaboration with the US Central Intelligence Agency and US overall strategic interests; the Heinrich Boll Foundation, which is controlled by the German Greens party, a partner in the present [2003] German government and a supporter of the wars on Yugoslavia and Afghanistan (its leader Joschka Fischer is the [former] German foreign minister); and major funding agencies such as Oxfam (UK), Novib (Netherlands), ActionAid (UK), and so on.

Remarkably, an International Council member of the WSF reports that the “considerable funds” received from these agencies have “not hitherto awakened any significant debates [in the WSF bodies] on the possible relations of dependence it could generate.” Yet he admits that “in order to get funding from the Ford Foundation, the organisers had to convince the foundation that the Workers Party was not involved in the process.” Two points are worth noting here. First, this establishes that the funders were able to twist arms and determine the role of different forces in the WSF — they needed to be `convinced’ of the credentials of those who would be involved. Secondly, if the funders objected to the participation of the thoroughly domesticated Workers Party, they would all the more strenuously object to prominence being given to genuinely anti-imperialist forces. That they did so object will be become clear as we describe who was included and who excluded from the second and third meets of the WSF….

… The question of funding [of the WSF] does not even figure in the charter of principles of the WSF, adopted in June 2001. Marxists, being materialists, would point out that one should look at the material base of the forum to grasp its nature. (One indeed does not have to be a Marxist to understand that “he who pays the piper calls the tune”.) But the WSF does not agree. It can draw funds from imperialist institutions like Ford Foundation while fighting “domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism” (Research Unit For Political Economy, The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum, Global Research, January 20, 2004)

The Ford Foundation provided core support to the WSF, with indirect contributions to participating “partner organizations” from the McArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the W. Alton Jones Foundation,  the European Commission, several European governments (including the Labour government of Tony Blair), the Canadian government, as well as a number of UN bodies (including UNESCO, UNICEF, UNDP, ILO and the FAO) .(Ibid).

In addition to initial core support from the Ford Foundation, many of the participating civil society organizations receive funding from major foundations and charities. In turn, the US and European based NGOs often operate as secondary funding agencies channelling Ford and Rockefeller money towards partner organizations in developing countries, including grassroots peasant and human rights movements.

The International Council (IC) of the WSF is made up of representatives from NGOs, trade unions, alternative media organizations, research institutes, many of which are heavily funded by foundations as well as governments. (See  Fórum Social Mundial). The same trade unions, which are routinely invited to mingle with Wall Street CEOs at the Davos World Economic Forum (WSF) including the AFL-CIO, the European Trade Union Confederation and the  Canadian Labor Congress (CLC) also sit on the WSF’s International Council (IC). Among NGOs funded by major foundations sitting on the WSF’s IC is the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) (see our analysis above) which oversees the Geneva based Trade Observatory.

The Funders Network on Trade and Globalization (FTNG), which has observer status on the WSF International Council plays a key role. While channelling financial support to the WSF, it acts as a clearing house for major foundations. The FTNG describes itself as “an alliance of grant makers committed to building just and sustainable communities around the world”. Members of this alliance are Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers, Heinrich Boell, C. S. Mott, Merck Family Foundation, Open Society Institute, Tides, among others. (For a complete list of FTNG funding agencies see FNTG: Funders). FTNG acts as a fund raising entity on behalf of the WSF.

Western Governments Fund the Counter-Summits and Repress the Protest Movement

In a bitter irony, governments including the European Union grant money to fund progressive groups (including the WSF) involved in organizing protests against the very same governments which finance their activities:

“Governments, too, have been significant financiers of protest groups. The European Commission, for example, funded two groups who mobilised large numbers of people to protest at EU summits at Gothenburg and Nice. Britain’s national lottery, which is overseen by the government, helped fund a group at the heart of the British contingent at both protests.” (James Harding, Counter-capitalism, FT.com, October 15 2001)

We are dealing with a diabolical process: The host government finances the official summit as well as the NGOs actively involved in the Counter-Summit. It also funds the multimillion dollar anti-riot police operation which has a mandate to repress the grassroots participants of the Counter-Summit, including members of NGOs direcly funded by the government. .

The purpose of these combined operations, including violent actions of vandalism committed by undercover cops (Toronto G20, 2010) dressed up as activists, is to discredit the protest movement and intimidate its participants. The broader objective is to transform the counter-summit into a ritual of dissent, which serves to uphold the interests of the official summit and the host government. This logic has prevailed in numerous counter summits since the 1990s.

At the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, funding from the Canadian federal government to mainstream NGOs and trade unions was granted under certain conditions. A large segment of the protest movement was de facto excluded from the People’s Summit. This in itself led to the formation of a second parallel People’s venue, which some observers described as a “a counter-People’s Summit. In turn, in an agreement with both the provincial and federal authorities, the organizers directed the protest march towards a remote location some 10 km out of town, rather than towards the historical downtown area were the official FTAA summit was being held behind a heavily guarded “security perimeter”.

“Rather than marching toward the perimeter fence and the Summit of the Americas meetings, march organizers chose a route that marched from the People’s Summit away from the fence, through largely empty residential areas to the parking lot of a stadium in a vacant area several miles away. Henri Masse, the president of the Federation des travailleurs et travailleuses du Quebec (FTQ), explained, “I deplore that we are so far from the center-city…. But it was a question of security.” One thousand marshals from the FTQ kept very tight control over the march. When the march came to the point where some activists planned to split off and go up the hill to the fence, FTQ marshals signalled the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) contingent walking behind CUPE to sit down and stop the march so that FTQ marshals could lock arms and prevent others from leaving the official march route.” (Katherine Dwyer,  Lessons of Quebec City, International Socialist Review, June/July 2001)

The Summit of the Americas was held inside a four kilometer  “bunker” made of concrete and galvanized steel fencing. The 10 feet high “Quebec Wall” encircled part of the historic city center including the parliamentary compound of the National Assembly, hotels and shopping areas.

NGO Leaders versus their Grassroots

The establishment of the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 was unquestionably a historical landmark, bringing together tens of thousands of committed activists. It was an important venue which allowed for the exchange of ideas and the establishment of ties of solidarity.

What is at stake is the ambivalent role of the leaders of progressive organizations. Their cozy and polite relationship to the inner circles of power, to corporate and government funding, aid agencies, the World Bank, etc, undermines their relationship and responsibilities to their rank and file. The objective of manufactured dissent is precisely that: to distance the leaders from their rank and file as a means to effectively silencing and weakening grassroots actions.

Funding dissent is also a means of infiltrating the NGOs as well as acquiring inside information on strategies of protest and resistance of grass-roots movements.

Most of the grassroots participating organizations in the World Social Forum including peasant, workers’ and student organizations, firmly committed to combating neoliberalism were unaware of the WSF International Council’s relationship to corporate funding, negotiated behind their backs by a handful of NGO leaders with ties to both official and private funding agencies.

Funding to progressive organizations is not unconditional. Its purpose is to “pacify” and manipulate the protest movement.  Precise conditionalities are set by the funding agencies. If they are not met, the disbursements are discontinued and the recipient NGO is driven into de facto bankruptcy due to lack of funds.

The WSF defines itself  as “an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and inter-linking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a society centred on the human person”. (See Fórum Social Mundial, accessed 2010).

The WSF is a mosaic of individual initiatives which does not directly threaten or challenge the legitimacy of global capitalism and its institutions. It meets annually. It is characterised by a multitude of sessions and workshops. In this regard, one of the features of the WSF was to retain the “do-it-yourself” framework, characteristic of the donor funded counter G7 People’s Summits of the 1990s.

This apparent disorganized structure is deliberate. While favoring debate on a number of individual topics, the WSF framework is not conducive to the articulation of a cohesive common platform and plan of action directed against global capitalism. Moreover, the US led war in the Middle East and Central Asia, which broke out a few months after the inaugural WSF venue in Porto Alegre in January 2001, has not been a central issue in forum discussions.

What prevails is a vast and intricate network of organizations. The recipient grassroots organizations in developing countries are invariably unaware that their partner NGOs in the United States or the European Union, which are providing them with financial support, are themselves funded by major foundations. The money trickles down, setting constraints on grassroots actions. Many of these NGO leaders are committed and well meaning individuals acting within a framework which sets the boundaries of dissent. The leaders of these movements are often co-opted, without even realizing that as a result of corporate funding their hands are tied.

Global capitalism finances anti-capitalism: an absurd and contradictory relationship.

“Another World is Possible”, but it cannot be meaningfully achieved under the present arrangement.

A shake-up of the World Social Forum, of its organizational structure, its funding arrangements and leadership is required.

There can be no meaningful mass movement when dissent is generously funded by those same corporate interests which are the target of the protest movement. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation (1966-1979),“Everything the [Ford] Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism'”.

Polish authorities appear to have become obsessed with establishing the “Fort Trump” permanent military base in Poland, but the US does appear to be in no hurry to make any such deployment.

Moreover, periodically there are reports that Washington has decided to place some requirements for its Polish ally, and only after fulfilling them may the base eventually be established.

Earlier in February of this year, Polish media reported that the US ambassador Georgette Mosbacher was pressuring the Polish authorities, demanding that the archives of the National Holocaust Memorial Institute in Poland be submitted to the United States for publication in exchange for the establishment of the US military base.

Despite the fact that the ambassador denied this information, this story made a lot of noise in the country and caused outrage in all Polish national-patriotic circles.

US outlet The Washington Free Beacon reported that the US Congress was considering a number of initiatives that would force the Trump administration to demand from Poland to resolve the issue of the property requests of some Jewish organizations before the United States builds a permanent military base on Polish territory.

It is worth recalling that about a year ago, Donald Trump signed Law No. 447 (“Justice for Survivors Left Without Compensation”) for returning property to Holocaust victims, giving US government support to such claims.

The Washington Free Beacon notes in its material that Polish-American negotiations are underway regarding the deployment of a permanent base of US forces in Poland, which will “counter the threat presented by Russia and Iran.”

However, in this context, the outlet notes that “many members of Congress and leading representatives of the Jewish community are lobbying behind the scenes to the Trump Administration and specifically Secretary of State Mike Pompeo” in order to link the issue of the Jewish claims with the base.

Poland is the only country in the EU that hasn’t passed the law “ordering restitution in favor of the aging Holocaust survivors and their families whose property was confiscated during World War II.”

At the same time, Poland protested against the demand, saying that its people were also victims of the Nazis, and especially the millions of Polish Jews sent to the death camps.

According to the American edition, a part of the American legislators from the Congress sees in the negotiations about Fort Trump the opportunity to exert pressure on Poland, “so that it will finally solve the issue of restitution.”

It was reported that State Secretary Mike Pompeo himself spoke about this several times during negotiations with Poland, to the satisfaction of some Jewish circles. According to sources of the outlet, the negotiations are still on-going in the State Department.

According to sources in the US Congress and in the Jewish community, Congressmen ought to block any financing for “Fort Trump” until the issue of restitution has been resolved.

One of the sources even alleged that Poland’s current actions are contributing to “anti-Semitism” in the country, and the Poles should not be allowed to have a US base on their soil until the issue was resolved.

The outlet noted that anti-Semitism is growing in Europe, but in particular it is quite strongly expressed in Poland.

The demonstrations which saw 20,000 people take to the streets on May 11^th were condemned, and called anti-Semitic. They were organized in Poland by the nationalist Euro-skeptics from the Confederation Association and members of the Kukiz 15 movement.

The protest was against the adoption of Law 447 and claims by the Jewish community to return property to Holocaust victims.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki argued that the issue of compensation has already been settled, and that Poland does not intend to provide any other resitution, because the Poles were the main victims of the Second World War.

There was an alleged letter by the US State Secretary and the White House, in which congressmen are urged to exercise pressure on Poland to restitute property.

The draft letter states that Poland has repeatedly rejected previous calls on this issue, and after the war, the communist authorities nationalized the property of both Jews and non-Jews, who now cannot get their former property back or receive compensation.

According to one of the anonymous sources from the Jewish community who worked on this problem “the Congress is upset by the uncompromising position of Poland.”

He further warned that Poland in this matter should not test its relations with the Jewish community and Israel. In a veiled manner, warning that this would potentially jeopardize relations between Washington and Warsaw.

“If they don’t want to listen to us Jews, they will be forced to listen to us Americans,” the source claimed.

The translation of the Washington Free Beacon article was published by many Polish media outlets, and the material provoked a strong reaction in Polish society.

The leader of the Polish People’s Party Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz addressed the government of the country with the request: “Is it true that in order for Fort Trump to be constructed, the claims by the Jewish community must be fulfilled?”

“We do not request anything from anybody, and we will not pay any claims, because everything that had to be settled, was settled. Poland suffered heavy losses during the Second World War. It was the victim of the Second World War and was invaded on the one side by Nazi Germany, and on the other by Stalin’s Soviet Union,” he said.

According to the right-wing party Kukiz 15, its deputy head Tomasz Rzymkowski said that the US approach calls for a rethinking of the urgency of “Fort Trump.”

“300 billion dollars is the sum of four times the Polish state budget. For this money, we could solve the issue of our security in a different way, and even hire a whole Russian army. If the American side treats us like this, then we must ask ourselves the question if it is worth it. I do not remember that any of our allies throughout the history of Poland demanded such a payment for military support. Does the international situation really require us to go into debt for generations?” he said.

The head of Kukiz 15, Paweł Kukiz said:

“I get the impression that the government is trading these claims, thinking of Fort Trump, but if Fort Trump costs Poland $330 billion, because Jewish organizations demand that much for property that was lost during the Holocaust. Property which was plundered and destroyed by the Germans, what is this Fort Trump supposed to protect? Empty land?”

It should be noted that the Polish authorities officially denied any connection between the construction of the American military base with compensations for properties lost during the Holocaust. Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak stated that the Fort Trump project was in no way connected with “Law 447”, accusing opposition politicians of “trying to connect American law with negotiations to the detriment of Polish interest.”

Naturally, pro-government media saw “the hand of Moscow” in the entire situation:

“This is a powerful operation of Moscow […] Today we see an incredibly high participation of the Russian side. The Kremlin seeks to fuel the topic as soon as possible,” said Tomasz Sakevich, editor-in-chief of the Gazeta Polska.

The topic was raised with the aim of advertising one of the parties, which is clearly pro-Russian – the Confederation. The question was put forward just when the agreement on the increase of American troops in Poland was on the table,” further claiming that it was a success of “Russian activity.”

At the same time, the Kremlin, in the opinion of pro-government journalists, is using all means possible to prevent the construction of “Fort Trump” in Poland:

“Ecologists” are sounding the alarm that trees will be cut out because of “Fort Trump”. Old generals are repeating claims regarding unnecessary irritation of Russia. Open Dialogue (a Georgi Soros foundation), which allegedly also has Russian ties, seeks to overthrow a government that wants close cooperation with the Americans. The new citizens of Uyarowo threaten that with the help of America the Jews will rob the country. When the Kremlin loses influence in Poland, it launches its instruments of influence, from full-time agents to naive, useful idiots,” the Gazeta Polska writes in an article.

Under US President Donald Trump, it would appear that US-Poland relations had a true renaissance, but it would appear that if the claims of the US trying to push Jewish interests forward turn out true, all of the “work” is in jeopardy.

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Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April – 4 May) in Paris.

“The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture,” said IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

“The Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global,” he said. “Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

“The member States of IPBES Plenary have now acknowledged that, by its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but also that such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good,” Watson said.

The IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is the most comprehensive ever completed. It is the first intergovernmental Report of its kind and builds on the landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, introducing innovative ways of evaluating evidence.

Compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries over the past three years, with inputs from another 310 contributing authors, the Report assesses changes over the past five decades, providing a comprehensive picture of the relationship between economic development pathways and their impacts on nature. It also offers a range of possible scenarios for the coming decades.

Based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources, the Report also draws (for the first time ever at this scale) on indigenous and local knowledge, particularly addressing issues relevant to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

“Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity’s most important life-supporting ‘safety net’. But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point,” said Prof. Sandra Díaz (Argentina), who co-chaired the Assessment with Prof. Josef Settele (Germany) and Prof. Eduardo S. Brondízio (Brazil and USA). “The diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, as well as many fundamental contributions we derive from nature, are declining fast, although we still have the means to ensure a sustainable future for people and the planet.”

The Report finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.

The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of reefforming corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened. The picture is less clear for insect species, but available evidence supports a tentative estimate of 10% being threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.

“Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed,” said Prof. Settele. “This loss is a direct result of human activity and constitutes a direct threat to human well-being in all regions of the world.”

To increase the policy-relevance of the Report, the assessment’s authors have ranked, for the first time at this scale and based on a thorough analysis of the available evidence, the five direct drivers of change in nature with the largest relative global impacts so far. These culprits are, in descending order:

(1) changes in land and sea use;

(2) direct exploitation of organisms;

(3) climate change;

(4) pollution and

(5) invasive alien species.

The Report notes that, since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions have doubled, raising average global temperatures by at least 0.7 degrees Celsius – with climate change already impacting nature from the level of ecosystems to that of genetics – impacts expected to increase over the coming decades, in some cases surpassing the impact of land and sea use change and other drivers.

Despite progress to conserve nature and implement policies, the Report also finds that global goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors. With good progress on components of only four of the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, it is likely that most will be missed by the 2020 deadline. Current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystems will undermine progress towards 80% (35 out of 44) of the assessed targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans and land (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 15). Loss of biodiversity is therefore shown to be not only an environmental issue, but also a developmental, economic, security, social and moral issue as well.

“To better understand and, more importantly, to address the main causes of damage to biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, we need to understand the history and global interconnection of complex demographic and economic indirect drivers of change, as well as the social values that underpin them,” said Prof. Brondízio. “Key indirect drivers include increased population and per capita consumption; technological innovation, which in some cases has lowered and in other cases increased the damage to nature; and, critically, issues of governance and accountability. A pattern that emerges is one of global interconnectivity and ‘telecoupling’ – with resource extraction and production often occurring in one part of the world to satisfy the needs of distant consumers in other regions.”

Other notable findings of the Report include[1]:

• Three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions. On average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.
• More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production.
• The value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest has risen by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and nonrenewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.
• Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, up to US$577 billion in annual global crops are at risk from pollinator loss and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.
• In 2015, 33% of marine fish stocks were being harvested at unsustainable levels; 60% were maximally sustainably fished, with just 7% harvested at levels lower than what can be sustainably fished.
• Urban areas have more than doubled since 1992.
• Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters, and fertilizers entering coastal ecosystems have produced more than 400 ocean ‘dead zones’, totalling more than 245,000 km2 (591-595) – a combined area greater than that of the United Kingdom.
• Negative trends in nature will continue to 2050 and beyond in all of the policy scenarios explored in the Report, except those that include transformative change – due to the projected impacts of increasing land-use change, exploitation of organisms and climate change, although with significant differences between regions.

The Report also presents a wide range of illustrative actions for sustainability and pathways for achieving them across and between sectors such as agriculture, forestry, marine systems, freshwater systems, urban areas, energy, finance and many others. It highlights the importance of, among others, adopting integrated management and cross-sectoral approaches that take into account the trade-offs of food and energy production, infrastructure, freshwater and coastal management, and biodiversity conservation.

Also identified as a key element of more sustainable future policies is the evolution of global financial and economic systems to build a global sustainable economy, steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth.

“IPBES presents the authoritative science, knowledge and the policy options to decisionmakers for their consideration,” said IPBES Executive Secretary, Dr. Anne Larigauderie. “We thank the hundreds of experts, from around the world, who have volunteered their time and knowledge to help address the loss of species, ecosystems and genetic diversity – a truly global and generational threat to human well-being.” 

 

Further details here.

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[1] See this.

Featured image is from IPBES

We are seriously worried about the condition of Julian Assange. He was too unwell to appear in court yesterday, and his Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, found him in a state where he was unable to conduct a conversation and give instructions. There are very definite physical symptoms, particularly rapid weight loss, and we are not satisfied that genuine and sufficient diagnostic efforts are being made to determine the underlying cause.

Julian had been held for the last year in poor, highly confining and increasingly oppressive conditions in the Ecuadorean Embassy and his health was already deteriorating alarmingly before his expulsion and arrest. A number of conditions, including dental abcesses, can have very serious consequences if long term untreated, and the continual refusal by the British government and latterly the Ecuadoreans to permit him access to adequate healthcare while a political asylee was a callous denial of basic human rights.

I confess to feeling an amount of personal relief after his arrest that at least he would now get proper medical treatment. However there now seems to be no intention to provide that and indeed since he has been in Belmarsh his health problems have accelerated. I witnessed enough of the British state’s complicity in torture to know that this may be more than just the consequence of unintended neglect. That the most lucid man I know is now not capable of having a rational conversation is extremely alarming.

There is no rational reason that Assange needs to be kept in a high security facility for terrorists and violent offenders. We are seeing the motive behind his unprecedented lengthy imprisonment for jumping police bail when he entered political asylum. As a convicted prisoner, Assange can be kept in a worse regime than if he were merely on remand for his extradition proceedings. In particular, his access to his lawyers is extremely restricted and for a man facing major legal proceedings in the UK, USA and Sweden it is impossible, even were he healthy, for his lawyers to have sufficient time with him adequately to prepare his cases while he is under the restrictions placed on a convict. Of course we know from the fact that, within three hours of being dragged from the Ecuadorean Embassy, he was already convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term, that the state has no intention that his lawyers should be able to prepare.

I have asked before and I ask again. If this were a dissident publisher in Russia, what would the UK political and media class be saying about his being dragged out by armed police, and convicted and sentenced to jail by a judge without a jury, just three hours later, after a farce of a “trial” in which the judge insulted him and called him a “narcissist” before he had said anything in his defence? The Western media would be up in arms if that happened in Russia. Here, they cheer it on.

Below is a photo of Julian in the Embassy in happier times, during the Correa Presidency, with a truly amazing and strong group of people, every one of whose stories we can follow and learn from:

Left to Right: Thomas Drake, Coleen Rowley, Julian Assange, Elizabeth Murray, Ray McGovern, Nadira, Ann Wright

I should add that I am currently trying to see Julian personally with two other close friends, but obviously access is extremely difficult.

Julian’s personal possessions have been seized by the Ecuadoreans to be given to the US government. These include not only computers but his legal and medical papers. This is yet another example of completely illegal state action against him. Furthermore, any transfer must involve the stolen material physically transiting London, and the British government is taking no steps to prevent that, which is yet another of multiple signs of the degree of international governmental coordination behind the flimsy pretence of independent judicial action.

Julian is imprisoned for at least another five months, even with parole (which they will probably find an excuse not to grant). After that he will be held further on remand. There is therefore no need for rush. The refusal of the Swedish court to delay a hearing on a potential extradition warrant at all, to allow Julian to recover to the extent he can instruct his lawyer, and the very brief postponement of the US extradition hearing in London, with the intimation it may be held inside Belmarsh prison if Julian is too unwell to move, are both examples of an entirely unaccustomed and unnecessary haste with which the case is being rushed forward. The mills of God grind slowly; those of the Devil seem to spin dangerously fast.

Finally, for those who still believe that actions against Julian, particularly but not only in Sweden, are in any way motivated by a concern for justice, particularly justice for violated women, I do urge you to read this excellent account by Jonathan Cook. As a summary of the truly breathtaking series of legal abuses by states against Assange, that the corporate and state media has been deliberately distorting and hiding for a decade, it cannot be bettered.

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Responding to today’s announcement by the U.S.-led Coalition that at least 1,302 civilians have been unintentionally killed by Coalition strikes in Syria and Iraq between August 2014 and the end of April 2019, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser Donatella Rovera said:

“While all admissions of responsibility by the U.S.-led Coalition for civilian casualties are welcome, the Coalition remains deeply in denial about the devastating scale of the civilian casualties caused by their operations in both Iraq and Syria.

“A comprehensive investigation by Amnesty International in partnership with Airwars, launched last month, revealed that more than 1,600 civilians were killed in the Raqqa offensive alone in 2017 – meaning the acknowledged deaths are just a fraction of the total numbers killed.

“Today’s acknowledgement of further civilian deaths underscores the urgent need for thorough, independent investigations that can uncover the true scale of civilian casualties caused by Coalition strikes, examine whether each attack complied with international humanitarian law and provide full reparation to victims.

“Even in cases where the Coalition has admitted responsibility this has only happened after civilian deaths were investigated and brought to its attention by organizations such as Amnesty International and Airwars. The Coalition has so far failed to carry out investigations on the ground or provide reasons for the civilian casualties. Without a clear examination of what went wrong in each case lessons can never be learned.”

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Here in these beautiful isles there are many good people.  Those not affected by class or university ‘education’ say ‘We should have been out of the EU within a few weeks of the vote.  The EU is a racket.  We know there will be pain but there was from 1939 and for years after that ‘war to end all wars.’

Instead the Tories who do not know the word equity or the ‘love thy neighbour of the OT’! are hanging on by their finger nails, conceit riding over a hidden fear that they will be in the wilderness for decades. 

Those that are life-denying shrivel in death eventually.  The beauty parade for leader following PM May’s slow motion and tearful ‘retirement’ has today been joined by an eleventh candidate, all with millimetre insight. 

On the opposition side, there is division upon division.  This has been started and kept fresh by the large Zionist faction led by the likes of Lady Hodge.  A majority of its MPs are Blairites and share some of his many psychopathic traits. Northern Labour MPs are scared they will lose their seats, their constituencies being stout for ‘Leave’. (Was the word ‘Brexit’ coined by the Remainers to drive the population mad?).   They are torn between joining the mangle lead by Sir Keir Starmer, the former Director of Public Prosecutions.  Keir, a barrister by trade, is far removed from the Keir Hardie who founded the Labour party.  Instead of pupillage and dry sherry, the latter started working at the age of seven, and from the age of 10 worked in the South Lanarkshire coal mines.

At the head of this centrifugal party is a kindly man who is human and who has voted against the Labour whip over 130 times.  Some of these motions would have been for mass killing, and specifically for things like handing over the Chagos Islanders to the evil empire, whilst ‘cleansing’ its small population of this remote paradise in the Indian Ocean to slums in Mauritius.  The British saw to the shooting of the islanders’ dogs.  (Read John Pilger, the courageous beacon) 

This leader is Jeremy Corbyn. That there is any blood left within him is beyond belief.  He has been stabbed in the back day after day and the BBC has broadcast most of the knifing and character assassination.  Chief among the back stabbers have been the deputy leader Tom Watson and the FCO shadow and Zionist Ms Thornberry.  The former was VP of the Trade Union Friends of Israel, an irony beyond belief, given that the main Israeli trade union only let in Arab workers in recent years.  The latter is often on the panels of the the BBC Propagandare Nero (PN) ‘shows’.  She of course is parroting for a second vote, or more votes pehaps, until the downtrodden British revolt, which is very unlikely or until they vote to remain in the neo-liberal, gravy sodden club.  Unfortunately, Corbyn is trapped and ends consorting with the rabbis we are told. 

The ‘Liberal Democrats’ came a good second after Farage’s newborn party.  Those who flocked to this party had forgotten that it had coalesced with the Conservative and Unionist party and happily supported Lord Lansley’s Health and Social Security, jokingly tabled 1^st April 2012.  This was designed to put OUR NHS in the mortuary and so far it is succeeding. Its leader with Cameron was Clegg. He has slid sideways to Facebook and digs in LA.

All the horse trading, stabbing, actual blackmail etc. has been reported in a ‘steady as she goes’ style by the PN broadcaster.  It is at once extraordinary that a vast political upheaval is taking place but also no surprise that the PN department of the BBC with its linguists, requests from No 10 and from the SIS etc should be attempting to hide the Queen’s naked state.

These are a few fragments of the minute by minute PN of ‘’Auntie’’ BBC.  Readers foreign to “This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, ……” will not know that the Director-General, Lord Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, CBE, as befitting his responsibility, receives a salary said to be in the £450,000 and £499,999 bracket, along with disc jockey Chris Evans and Come Dancing presenter Claudia Winkelman.  This comes from the £5 billion of licence fees.

The attempt to completely assassinate the character and political potency of the Labour leader was loudly echoed by the BBC yesterday.  It spoke of Corbyn’s ‘anti-semitic crisis’.  This man is not an ‘anti-semite’ be that towards an Arab, the semite, or a Jew.  The Tory party, in its dying gasps, fears a Labour victory if the likely General Election happens soon.    Labour must be decimated by whatever means, and the BBC will be the sword.

The bagman for Blair, Alistair Campbell, was described on the BBC ‘News’ bulletin at 7am yesterday as a ‘spin doctor’.  He was more than that.  He was instead a dossier doctor.  The pretext for the removal of Saddam Hussein was that Iraqi WMD threatened Britain itself. He was said to have ‘sexed’ it up, whereas Dr David Kelly** and other weapons experts had corrected factual errors within it.  Kelly had been 37 times to Iraq with UNSCOM, which no doubt contained some CIA personnel who ‘cased the joint’.  Campbell’s efforts for the threatened ‘supreme war crime’ (Nuremberg) reflected the PN (black propaganda) coming from the Project of the New American century and its Zionist members. This was pumped through to the British and the world by the BBC, the Speak Truth to Nations megalith and megaphone.  To promote and to conspire for aggressive war is forbidden in the Charter of the UN, but Auntie never lets on. 

Stephen Sackur is most often the interviewer of a chosen guest on the BBC’s HARDtalk. He is assertive and well briefed. Last week he had Julie Hambleton on. She had lost a sister among the 21 killed in the ‘Birmingham’ pub bombings in 1974, for which 5 Irish men were jailed until their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal in 1991. She has been the lead campaigner for a second inquest with 11 others and has never given up.  Although he tried to damp her startling account a little, extraordinary facts emerged.  These are not extraordinary for the author who tried with a few others, for years, to get an inquest which had never happened on the unnatural death of Dr David Kelly 17/18^th July 2003.  

High Court Kelly  19 December 2011.  She told Sackur that the coroner had excluded references to the police and SIS investigation of the bombing and that all West Midlands Police, MoJ, MoD, MI5, MI6 written evidence was ‘closed’ for 70 years, as with most of the evidence re. Kelly’s death.  Chris Mullin, ex-MP, who was known for uncovering wrong doing, has important evidence which he has refused to divulge to the canpaigners over years. 

The BBC online report is worse than anodyne by being apparently selective in its quotations and in its ommissions, a ubiquitous tactic, of the closed evidence above.  Thornton – “We always expect our emergency services, particularly the police and firefighters to be there for us at the time of disaster and they were.”  Quite so!  It omitted ex-MP Chris Mullin’s silence.

This was a very revealing interview and of the best.  There was another Sackur interview since on the 27th (see this) of Hisham Matar, whose father had been ‘disappeared’ by the Ghaddafi ‘regime’.  Sackur relayed evidence of mass torture and killing.  He has not yet interviewed or expressed his equal concern for the thousands of disappeared Palestinian fathers and sons by another regime.

Zion, that little hill in Jerusalem, towers over government and media in Britain.  Here is a good but foul example – a letter from Conservative Friends of Israel which is said to contain 80% of Tory MPs.  Incest and gross, racist bias would be euphemisms.

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David Halpin FRCS has written of the BBC often, its part in generating wars, and much else.  These are two contemporary links:

https://www.globalresearch.ca/british-broadcasting-corporation-the-most-potent-state-propagandist/5671552 

https://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/21-articles/media/238-bbc-the-roe-deer-the-yearling-and-the-fawn 

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**There are many on Dr Kelly and the lightning start to the cover up of this unnatural death.  This is the first of six by him – this a short interview outside the High Court by Press TV

Featured image is from Media Lens

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad surprised observers when he unexpectedly spoke out against the MH-17 cover-up and dismantled the West’s official narrative blaming Russia for this tragedy. The nonagenarian leader raised questions that no non-Russian had hitherto dared to publicly ask before, such as why his country hadn’t been allowed to examine the plane’s black box and why the conclusion was automatically reached that Russia was responsible solely because of the type of missile that was allegedly involved. This led him to conclude that “from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it and the idea was not to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians.” Prime Minister Mahathir even provocatively hinted that none other than Ukraine’s own forces might have been the ones who downed the passenger jet, saying that “You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians, it could be by the rebels in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that his comments have caused a political earthquake because they’re the first time that any leader other than Russia’s has questioned the official narrative about what happened, and they carry extra weight because they come from the Prime Minister of the country whose plane was destroyed. Evidently, Prime Minister Mahathir had been thinking about this for quite some time and ultimately summoned up the courage to finally say what was on his mind, likely expecting there to be a massive Mainstream Media pushback against him in response but nevertheless wanting to have a clear conscience in doing what’s right. That takes a lot of willpower and reveals the strength of his beliefs, which might finally get the international audience at large to begin wondering whether they’ve been lied to this entire time by their governments. After all, Russia said from the very beginning that it wasn’t involved whatsoever and some voices even claimed that a Ukrainian fighter jet shot down MH-17.

It’s beyond the scope of this analysis to rehash the arguments and specific evidence in support of that claim, but it’s enough to make the reader aware of it so that they can independently conduct their own research in arriving at whatever conclusion they reach. What’s important to acknowledge is that the Western Mainstream Media narrative about this tragedy is finally being debunked and that it could possibly create a chain reaction of cynicism across the world if left unchecked, which is probably why these same informational forces will either ignore what Prime Minister Mahathir said or begin a vicious smear campaign against him in order to discredit his words. There have already been previous claims in the past about him supposedly being anti-Semitic, which is a label that’s regrettably been bandied about and weaponized in order to suppress “inconvenient” claims made by people who aren’t anti-Semites at all. It’s therefore possible that something of the sort could once again happen in response to his brave comments about the MH-17 cover-up.

Going forward, it’s best for readers to realize that the Western Mainstream Media narrative about anything shouldn’t automatically be taken for granted, whether it’s about MH-17, the so-called “White Helmets”, or anything else of geopolitical significance at all. The very fact that the leader of the same nation whose jetliner was destroyed almost half a decade ago would publicly come forth and question the official storyline about what happened should be enough to get others to raise their own questions too, as well as wonder what else they might have been lied to about over the years. As disturbing as it might be for some to countenance, it can’t be discounted that the MH-17 tragedy was actually a false flag attack carried out either intentionally or accidentally and which was then immediately exploited to increase international pressure on Russia as part of the West’s campaign to “isolate” it as revenge for Crimea’s reunification just a few months prior. In any case, it’s worthwhile for people to conduct research into this issue and others in order to arrive at the truth, though they should psychologically prepare themselves beforehand in case the answers that they’re seeking aren’t what they’ve been indoctrinated to expect.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Another crude and sad chapter, yet more evidence of a system’s vengeance against its challengers.  Julian Assange, like they dying Roman emperor Vespasian, may be transforming into a god of sorts, but the suffering of his mortal physical is finding its mark.  While some in the cynical, narcissistic press corps still find little to commend his case, the movement to highlight his fate, and the extra-territorial vengeance of the United States, grows.  

Often reviled and dismissed as ineffectual if not irrelevant, the United Nations has offered Assange some measure of protection through its articulations and findings.  Ironically enough, powers happy to regard the UN as a mere bauble of international relations in not protecting human rights have dismissed it when action does take place.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, for instance, found in 2016 that the publisher’s conditions of confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy amounted to arbitrary detention. 

“The Working Group considered that Mr Assange has been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorean embassy.”     

The Working Group took the long view: to suggest that he had a choice in leaving the embassy at any point was farfetched and myopic.  Specific reference to the shoddy Swedish prosecution effort against Assange (“lack of diligence… in its investigations”) was also made, as it compounded the element of arbitrariness.  Any request to question him in Sweden could hardly be seen as “benign”.  How right they were. 

Notwithstanding that, a resounding sneer from the British authorities, a bevy of black letter lawyers, and newspapers followed.  “He is not being detained arbitrarily,” The Guardian editorialised with its usual fair-friend weathered disposition.  The Working Group’s finding, according to international law authority Philippe Sands, was “poorly reasoned and unpersuasive”. Assange best give up the ghost and face the music. 

This week, Professor Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, came to a conclusion as unsurprising as it was necessary.  After visiting Assange at the maximum security facility at Belmarsh on May 9, the UN official found that the publisher had been subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.  This was all part of him becoming the cause célèbre of “a relentless campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation […] not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom, Sweden and, more recently, Ecuador.”  These governments had, be it through “an attitude of complacency at best, and of complicity at worst […] created an atmosphere of impunity encouraging Mr Assange’s uninhibited vilification and abuse.”

The fresh list of charges from US prosecutors – 17 additions to spice those centred on computer intrusion and conspiracy – alarmed Melzer. 

“My most urgent concern is that, in the United States, Mr Assange would be exposed to a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”   

The cumulative and crushing effect of the charges – potentially 175 years imprisonment – astonished Melzer. 

“This may well result in a life sentence without parole, or possibly even the death penalty, if further charges are added in the future.” 

To this can be added a nine-year period of systematic judicial abuse, arbitrary confinement, oppressive isolation, harassment, embassy surveillance by Ecuador and the “deliberative collective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.”

While the conditions in Belmarsh do not currently make the grade of solitary confinement, they have been severe and inhospitable enough to cause concern.  Visits by Assange’s legal team are limited and sporadic; access to necessary case files and documents has been curbed, impairing chances of adequately preparing his legal defence. 

Melzer also has a dig against the broader effort to attack journalism, with Assange as figurehead.

“Since 2010, when WikiLeaks started publishing evidence of war crimes and torture committed by US forces, we have seen a sustained and concerted effort by several States towards getting Mr Assange extradited to the United States by prosecution, raising serious concern over the criminalisation of investigative journalism in violation of both the US constitution and international human rights law.”

Medical experts who accompanied Melzer on his visit also expressed opinions on Assange’s health, finding that his health had been “seriously affected by the extremely hostile and arbitrary environment he has been exposed to for many years.”  Physical ailments were found alongside the “symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.”

UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, taking a dog-eared leaf out of the book of excuses used against the Working Group, dismissed Melzer’s findings.  Assange always had an unimpaired, free choice (that word again). 

“Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice. The UN Special Rapporteur should allow British courts to make their judgments without his interference or inflammatory accusations.” 

The BBC also noted the views of a justice ministry spokesperson, keen to disabuse sceptics that the British justice system might be suffering from judicial wear and tear.  The UK did not, it was asserted, participate in torture; its judges were independent and rights to appeal could be exercised.

The response to Hunt from the good professor was sharp: Assange “was about as ‘free to leave’ as a [sic] someone sitting on a rubberboat in a sharkpool.”  In his view, “UK courts have not shown the impartiality and objectivity required by the rule of law.”

Melzer’s words suffice as a damningly grim biography on the treatment levelled at Assange and the broader enterprise of publishing.  For two decades, having worked with “victims of war, violence and political persecution,” the rapporteur had “never seen a group of democratic States gang up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

I begin my column with the profound words from the great anti empire documentarian Paul Edwards, at the end of his fine new piece Idiocracy:

“The naive cry out for answers to our absurd paralysis, but there are none. Cassius said the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings. History is a tale of failed societies that lacked the will to save themselves, so our impotence is not unique. Perhaps then, given the vast catalogue of our self inflicted disasters, the question is not how we can be saved but whether we should be.”

If you go out into the real world of our neighborhoods, business offices, supermarkets, libraries, and other places of community interaction, go and speak to those you rub elbows with. Sadly, not too many, to this writer’s tally of understanding, even know the real facts of what is really going down concerning Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Iran and Venezuela, to name just a few recent issues.

No, the herd is either deeply engrossed in their electronic gadgets or sports news, or for those who actually get their info from the mainstream media, the important (tongue deeply in cheek) Mueller report, border wall, Trump impeachment Yes or No, or other trivial scandals.

Remember after the tragedy of 9/11/01, when Bush Jr. made the most pertinent message to we suckers: ” Go on vacation or shop.” This was important so as to give the rogue elements of this empire time to ( literally ) cover up the crime scene.

Meanwhile , the good ole mainstream media did its best to echo the empire’s line as to who did what to us. Folks, Fiction is always stranger than truth! ( A mere 18 years later and how many of your friends and neighbors either a) don’t give a rat’s ass as to what may have actually went down or b) still believe the lie as to who did the deed… according to the propaganda). Then, in November of 2002 the spectators and shoppers became the voters who allowed both of the empire’s political parties to vote in concert ( with but too few exceptions) to give the Bush/Cheney cabal the go ahead to do the most heinous act of attacking Iraq… both illegally and immorally. To quote one famous commentator  ( I cannot recall his name ) who always ended his monologue with “The rest is history”.

As our economy, not the one parroted by the Dow and S&P, rather the Main Street one, slides lower and lower towards the abyss, the spectators and shoppers continue to do just that. The mainstream media continues to salute our flag held hostage, and the Congress cannot find enough funding for the Military Industrial Empire. As the herd once again becomes voters, very few seem to care that half of their hard earned federal tax dollars goes to the militarists. No, they are too hypnotized by those men and women in uniform (mostly from low or low middle income families), ALWAYS dressed in camouflage as the camera pans them. The giant flags across the fields and sports arenas, with the honor guards and that effervescent mood as the anthem is sung, shouts to the world that ‘We are at War!’ Meanwhile, we become deeper entrenched in a Non Union, part time employment with shitty health coverage Amerika.

Paul Edwards is so correct: We are an Idiocracy!!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

“This is insane. Not only can they not move, they can’t breathe, they can’t eat, they can’t do anything like this. Children have died and will continue to die if this is not stopped now.”

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A federal immigrant detention facility in El Paso, Texas is so unsanitary and overcrowded that migrants held by the Trump administration were forced to wear “soiled clothing for days or weeks” at a time and stand on toilets to find breathing space in their cells.

That’s according to a not-yet-released report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, which was obtained exclusively by CNN on Friday.

According to CNN, the inspector general visited the El Paso Del Norte Processing Center unannounced earlier this month and found that the Border Patrol facility—which has a maximum capacity of 125 people—was holding around 750 migrants on May 7 and 900 on May 8.

The report—which observers described as “absolutely appalling” and “horrific“—also detailed overcrowding in the detention center’s individual cells.

CNN, citing logs from the inspector general, reported that a “cell with a maximum capacity of 12 held 76 detainees, another with a maximum capacity of eight held 41, and another with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155.”

“We also observed detainees standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to the toilets,” states the report.

When Trump administration officials were notified of the watchdog’s findings, they appeared to place blame on the immigrants themselves.

“The current situation on the border represents an acute and worsening crisis. Our immigration is not equipped to accommodate a migration pattern like the one we are experiencing now,” DHS said in a written response to the inspector general obtained by CNN. “The speed with which illegal migrants are transiting through Mexico to reach our southern border is frustrating our best efforts to respond quickly.”

This is outrageous on at least two levels: 1) The treatment of human beings by the US govt is absolutely appalling. 2) When caught, DHS officials had the gall to blame the problem on the migrants (@adamserwer's "the cruelty is the point" comes to mind) https://t.co/9kQFqkKvzS

— Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) May 31, 2019

RAICES, the largest immigration legal services non-profit in Texas, expressed outrage at CNN‘s report on the inspector general’s findings.

“This is insane. Not only can they not move, they can’t breathe, they can’t eat, they can’t do anything like this,” RAICES tweeted. “Children have died and will continue to die if this is not stopped now.”

Children have died and will continue to die if this is not stopped NOW.

This kind of treatment and detainment is completely and utterly INHUMANE and we will not stand by as it happens.

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) May 31, 2019

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), in a tweet responding to the watchdog’s findings, called for the resignation of every Trump administration official “involved in this horrific, cruel, and inhumane policy.”

Every single person involved in this horrific, cruel, and inhumane policy needs to resign. The administration’s continued treatment of immigrants is beyond barbaric – and shows exactly how racist and xenophobic Trump is. https://t.co/Trw4qn5Suc

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) May 31, 2019

“The administration’s continued treatment of immigrants is beyond barbaric,” said Lee, “and shows exactly how racist and xenophobic Trump is.”

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The Project for a New Middle East[1] is a Project for a New Holocaust.  It is happening now.  The policy of “Creative Chaos”[2] underpins the “Middle East Holocaust”.  Empire willfully destroys the sovereignty and territorial integrity of prey nations such as Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and beyond. Genocidal ethnic cleansing, mass murder and destruction are described benignly as “chaos” and as “creative”.

Empire deploys meticulously planned strategies to fabricate sectarian and ethnic divides, and to balkanize prey nations. The notion, as expressed by Condoleeza Rice, that the Middle East should be divided into a “Sunni Belt” and a “Shia Belt”[3] objectifies peoples, diminishes their humanity, turns them into fictional “stock characters” defined exclusively by perceived religious affiliations, and deliberately fabricates ethnic and religious tensions, all of which serve as preconditions for imperialists to create chaos and the disintegration of strong nation-states into fractious vassal states, devoid of self-determination and sovereignty.

Empire sees non-compliant, self-governing, secular, pluralist, multi-confessional, democratic states as enemies. Syria is all of the above, and therefore an “enemy”. Empire further destroys the “host” when it “opens the veins” of prey countries for resource plundering and criminal occupation. The oil-rich, strategically-located area East of the Euphrates is one such example.

When Empire supports the SDF against ISIS, it is polishing its fake image by creating the perception that it opposes ISIS, even as it re-introduces “rebadged” ISIS into the same battle grounds. Alternatively, as in the case of Raqqa, Empire “rescues” and redeploys ISIS elsewhere. Both terrorists and civilians are expendable in these demonic operations.

Empire rounds civilians up in terrorist-controlled concentration camps[4]. It “weaponizes” them by deliberately creating conditions of desperation which lend themselves to recruiting opportunities for new terrorist proxies. Daesh will never disappear as long as Empire is in control or seeking control globally.

As long as Western war propaganda remains ascendant, and Western populations remain oblivious, Westerners will continue to believe that these wars are humanitarian or in their national interests. In fact, the wars are anti-humanitarian, and they only represent narrow “special interests.”

NATO’s strongest weapon is its apparatus of “Perception Management”.  Without it, NATO and the imperialists would be exposed as the Supreme International War Criminals that they are.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

[1] Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya,“Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”.” Global Research, 18 November, 2006, 24 October, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/plans-for-redrawing-the-middle-east-the-project-for-a-new-middle-east/3882) Accessed 31 May, 2019.

[2] Mark Taliano, “ ‘Creative Chaos’ “ and the War Against Humanity. US-NATO Supports ISIS.” Global Research, 29 May, 2017.( https://www.marktaliano.net/creative-chaos-and-the-war-against-humanity-us-nato-supports-isis/?fbclid=IwAR1JZUi7SbjC6u6FI-kf3PgEvuERb7m02RAHZAarpJQNo_11m3hGtx-Lrm0) Accessed 31 May 2019.

[3] Prof. Tim Anderson, “U.S. ATTEMPTED TO CREATE SUNNI-SHIA RIFT IN THE MIDDLE EAST.” Shia Followers, 25 February, 2018. (https://shiafollowers.com/index.php/2018/02/25/u-s-attempted-create-sunni-shia-rift-middle-east-tim-anderson/?fbclid=IwAR0twDRc8GYrXJkRHuGosHwAeUa57PSXr-hVthZWRDWlW5RVLbkD5tSyhyk) Accessed 31 May, 2019.

[4] Arabi Souri, “US Forces in Syria Causing Catastrophic Effects on Civilians Held in Rukban Concentration Camp.” Syria News 30 May, 2019, Global Research, 31 May, 2019. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-forces-syria-causing-catastrophic-effects-civilians-rukban-concentration-camp/5679112) Accessed 31 May, 2019.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer Per Samuelson has told the press that “Assange’s health situation on Friday was such that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him.”

This jarring revelation has been reported by a small handful of outlets, but only as an aside in relation to Sweden refusing Samuelson’s request for a postponement of a scheduled hearing regarding Assange’s detention in absentia for a preliminary investigation of rape allegations. The fact that the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder is so ill that he can’t converse lucidly is itself far more significant than the postponement refusal, yet headlines mentioning Samuelson’s statement focus on the Swedish case, de-emphasizing the startling news from his lawyer.

As of this writing I’ve been able to find very few news outlets reporting on this at all, the most mainstream being a Reuters article with the very tame headline “Swedish court rejects delay of Assange hearing over ill-health: lawyer”. The Sydney Morning Herald also covered the story without even mentioning illness in headline, instead going with “Swedish court rejects effort to delay Assange hearing”. The much smaller alternative media outlet World Socialist Website has been the only outlet I’ve found so far which reports on Samuelson’s statement in anything resembling its proper scale, publishing a good article titled “Despite Assange’s ill-health, Swedish court rejects delay to hearing” a few hours ago.

This news has been so under-discussed and under-appreciated as of this writing that I didn’t find out about it until hours after the story broke, and I’m very plugged in to both alternative media commentary and WikiLeaks-related news. A report that Julian Assange was so sick he could barely speak all the way back on Friday and we still have no news about how he’s doing now should be hugely significant for everyone who cares about Assange, press freedom, government transparency or peace activism.

Another part of this story which has gone completely uncovered in all English-language media as of this writing is the news that Assange has actually been transferred to the hospital wing of Belmarsh prison. This was reported by the Swedish outlet Upsala Nya Tidning, a newspaper published in the same district court Assange is scheduled to call in to for his hearing. The report was also based on a statement to the press by Per Samuelson.

The article reports the following, per machine translation:

“Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s Swedish lawyer wants the arrest hearing on Monday in Uppsala to be postponed. According to the lawyer, who has now visited his client in British prison, Assange is admitted to the medical department and was unable to make a call.

…

“Last Friday, Assange’s Swedish defender, lawyer Per E Samuelson, visited his client in prison. In a letter to Uppsala District Court, the lawyer says that they met for just under two hours. According to the lawyer, Assange’s state of health at the meeting was such that ‘a normal conversation with him was not possible’. Julian Assange is said to have been taken to the prison’s ward, but there is no more detailed information about his state of health.”

This story was picked up from Upsala Nya Tidning by Danish new agency Ritzau and published in the outlet Politiken, with the title (per machine translation) “Weakened Assange hospitalized in London prison: ‘Impossible to have a normal conversation with him’”. These news outlets are to my understanding as reputable as any other mainstream western outlet, yet they remain the only publications I’ve been able to find which are reporting that Assange has been hospitalized. This is absolutely bizarre.

I’ve emailed Per Samuelson with a request to confirm the news that Assange has been hospitalized. I’ll update this article if I hear back.

For Assange’s supporters, one of the many frustrating things about his imprisonment has been the way he’s been cut off from the usual means which used to be used to inform the public about his well being. It used to be that news reports could be easily confirmed or refuted by people who had consistent access to Assange in some way by sources like the WikiLeaks Twitter account, but the people who operate that account don’t have ready access to him anymore. Now we’re seeing all sorts of rumors circulating about how Assange is faring in prison, and it gets difficult to sort out fact from fiction. It appears that it would be difficult to find a more reliable source on the state of his health than his own lawyer, however.

He needed urgent assistance after his expulsion from the Embassy. Instead, he was not allowed to receive adequate medical treatment. In the case of Emin Huseynov (1 y @ Swiss Embassy) it took at least a month of treatment to go back to normal. Imagine after 7 years! Brutal. https://t.co/9fxV3Dz4Iw

— Renata Avila (@avilarenata) May 28, 2019

It has long been an established fact that Assange was in failing health while trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London; doctors who visited him published an article with the Guardian in January 2018 titled “We examined Julian Assange, and he badly needs care — but he can’t get it”. Renata Avila, an activist and author who has worked with and written about WikiLeaks, tweeted in response to the new revelations, “He needed urgent assistance after his expulsion from the Embassy. Instead, he was not allowed to receive adequate medical treatment. In the case of Emin Huseynov (1 y @ Swiss Embassy) it took at least a month of treatment to go back to normal. Imagine after 7 years! Brutal.”

We have been watching the slow-motion assassination of Julian Assange.They have been choking him to death by tactical psyops, siege tactics, and wilful neglect as surely as if they placed a noose tied around his neck, not just in Belmarsh Prison but in the embassy as well. The only difference between his execution and someone on death row is the same as the difference between covert and overt warfare, which makes sense because the intelligence, judicial and military agencies who are carrying out his death sentence operate within the same power structure which carries out war. First came the smears (propaganda), then came the siege (sanctions), and they staged their coup (dragged him out of the embassy) and now they’ve got him in their clutches and they can do what they want behind closed doors. That’s how you kill a nation while still looking like a nice guy, and that’s how they’re killing Assange.

Shout this from the rooftops. Whether this media blackout is self-imposed or perhaps the result of the malicious use of a D-notice, we have to use everything in our power to get this information into the mainstream, and get people asking questions of the press and their local members about what the Dickens is going on in Belmarsh prison right now. Assange’s life may depend on it.

UPDATE: WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson has confirmed that Assange has been transferred to the health ward of Belmarsh prison, and that his health has been steadily deteriorating since his imprisonment.

WikiLeaks has grave concerns about the state of health of our publisher, Julian Assange, who has been moved to the health ward of Belmarsh prison. – See full statement: pic.twitter.com/HnZVks4kWj

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 29, 2019

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Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.

Featured image is from Medium