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The US-Turkish tensions continue to grow over the so-called Manbij issue in northern Syria.

On May 30, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Davutoglu said that a roadmap for cooperation on Manbij had been reached by Ankara and Washington. He said that that the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) may even withdraw from Manbij before the end of this summer in the framework of the agreed roadmap.

However, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the YPG is their core, dined that it is planning to withdraw from Manbij.

On May 31, US State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said that the US does not have any agreements with Turkey over Manbij. Nauert’s statement was especially strange because on May 25 the US Embassy in Turkey said that the sides had outlined the main contours of the road map.

These developments once again highlighted deep misunderstanding between Washington and Ankara over the situation in northern Syria.

At the same time, the SDF is facing problems with consolidating political control in the captured areas because of Arab-Kurdish tensions caused by the YPG dominance within the SDF.

On May 31, Aharar al-Sham clashed with the Northern Brigade, Ahrar al-Sharqiyah and the Sultan Murad Division in the town of Jarabulus in the Turkish-controlled part of Syria. At least 3 civilians and a few militants were killed in the clashes caused by a disagreement on money issues. On May 6 and May 26, inter-militant clashes were also reported in another Turkish-held town – al-Bab. These incidents demonstrate a poor security situation in the areas seized by Turkey and its proxies during Operation Euphrates Shield.

The Turkish-backed Second Coastal Division of the Free Syrian Army carried anti-tank guided missile strikes at two groups of Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers in the village of al-Ziyarah in northern Latakia. An officer of the SAA told SouthFront that one soldier was killed and three other were injured in the incident.

The number of casualties was low because militants used Fagot ATGMs with high-explosive anti-tank warheads, which are designed to be used against armoured targets.

Earlier this month, the Turkish military established an observation point in northern Latakia to monitor the de-escalation zone there. However, this does not stop militants from conducting hit and run attacks against the SAA.

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The European peoples whose governments were paid to sell out the sovereignty of their nations to the EU are experiencing great difficulties in being permitted to govern themselves.

As the result of Italians’ frustration with the self-serving elite who have ruled Italy for decades, the recent democratic elections in Italy brought to power two anti-establishment political parties, Five-Star and Lega (League), that have solid majorities in both houses. However, the Italian president, an operative for the EU and US, attempted to appoint the prime minister independently of the election results, tried to himself appoint a “technocratic cabinet” that would ignore the democratic outcome, and succeeded in blocking the anti-establishment winners of the election from forming a government for three months.

EU official Gunther Oettinger said that it was “not acceptable” for Italians to vote for anti-establishment parties and threatened Italians with financial destabilization that would “teach them how to vote.”

Previously, in the wake of the international economic crisis brought on by the “banks too big to fail,” the Italians and the Greeks attempted to govern themselves democratically, but it was not permitted. The European Commission appointed Mario Monti, a banker, to be Italy’s prime minister. Monti, a member of Goldman Sachs Board of International Advisers, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, and a member of the Bilderberg Group, was appointed by the elite, not elected by the people. His cabinet did not include a single elected politician. (See my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism.)

Greece suffered the same fate of having an unelected banker appointed prime minister of Greece. Later when the Greeks succeeded in electing an anti-establishment government, the EU used economic threats and punishments to prevent the Greek government from governing.

In the US the Democratic Party, presstitute media, and the security agencies have made a strenuous effort to overturn the election of Donald Trump. They have failed to evict him from office, but they have turned him away from his goal of normalizing relations with Russia and withdrawing militarily from the Middle East. In effect, Trump has been forced into the position of being the agent for what he campaigned against.

In the West and among Western funded NGOs that operate in Russia and China, there is mindless talk about Russian and Chinese authoritarianism. Yet, democracy is far more alive in Russia and within the Chinese Communist Party that it is in the West.

Western democracy has been dying for a long time. In the course of forming the EU, populations in some countries voted down membership. The vote was not permitted to stand. After a period of propaganda to instill fear of being “excluded from Europe,” populatons were made to vote again. In this way they were strong-armed into sacrificing sovereignty to the EU.

It remains to be seen if the British vote to exit the EU will actually be implemented.

The Western elites despise democracy. They tolerate it only as a cover for their self-dealing when it can be manipulated to serve their interests. The Russians who want to join Western Democracy are clearly lacking in understanding.

Considering the seeds of crisis that the self-serving policies of the Western elites have sowed, the responses to the crises will be calls for and acceptance of authoritatrian rule. It is entirely possible that the democratic era is approaching its end.

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This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute of Political Economy.

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

A special commission report on foreign meddling in the 2018 presidential election has been unveiled in Russia’s Upper House. The document highlighted the main methods of the elaborate campaign, spearheaded by the US.

The report, presented on Wednesday in Russia’s Upper House (the Senate), was prepared by the Commission for State Sovereignty Protection in cooperation with leading experts and analysts. The publicly available document was presented by the head of the commission, Senator Andrey Klimov.

The document pinned the blame for the meddling in Russia’s election directly on Washington, linking the ongoing surge in hostile activities with the domestic political struggle in the US. Attempts to interfere in internal Russian affairs, however, are not new, as they have been going on since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The US has been the “main violator of international law” since the founding of the United Nations, and has “interfered more than 120 times in the affairs of 60 countries on all continents.” Washington’s closest allies – the UK, Germany, France, NATO, and European countries – are also to blame, since they either participate directly or support US activities, according to the document.

“We tried to show… the areas in which the subversive work took place. We’ve named 10 such areas. We have concrete examples for all of them based on absolutely reliable facts. It’s not someone’s guess, it’s not ‘highly likely,’ it’s something we can prove anywhere, it is backed up by testimonies, documents and it is, by great margin, not disputed by the other side [the US],” Klimov said at a press conference, which followed the hearings in the Upper House.

The main purpose of the commission’s report, according to Klimov, is to show the public – both Russian, and international – the scale and systematic nature of the efforts to undermine Russia’s “electoral sovereignty.” The ultimate goal of these activities is to force changes of Russia’s political course, destroy its territorial and economic integrity, he said.

Direct election meddling & stirring dissent

The West has been trying to de-legitimize each and every election in Russia, routinely dismissing them as “undemocratic.” Ahead of the 2018 presidential election, both the US and EU condemned the barring of opposition figure Aleksey Navalny from the election. Ignoring his criminal conviction that bars Navalny from running for president, a US State Department representative called it a move to “suppress independent voices.”

The EU foreign office went even further and stated that barring the politician from the election due to “an alleged past conviction” casted “serious doubt on political pluralism in Russia and the prospect of democratic elections.” Such calls for “democracy” completely disregard Russian law and constitute a blatant attempt at election interference. While one may view Navalny’s conviction as they please, it is certainly not an “alleged” but a very real one, Klimov noted.

The election meddling also included wide-scale cyberattacks on government electronic resources, primarily the Central Election Commission. All in all, roughly one-third of such attacks are conducted from US territory, according to the report.

More discreet methods include stirring dissent by intensifying the activities of foreign-based Russian-language media outlets and “independent” bloggers. The use of modern technology and communication methods apparently yielded some results, since the latest protests, while much smaller than those of 2011-13, increasingly attracted younger and even underage activists into the streets.

Generous NGO funding

NGOs operating in Russia have enjoyed a steady flow of funding from abroad, which spiked following the failure to discredit the 2012 presidential election. In 2015, for instance, politically active NGOs received 80 billion rubles (around $1.3 billion) from the US alone, the report says.

Although Russia limited the activities of foreign NGOs within the country, requiring them to openly register as ‘foreign agents,’ the flow of funds did not stop. Various ‘grey’ schemes came into use, such as providing large sums in cash or transferring funds to private individuals. In the meantime, Russia-based subsidiaries of foreign NGOs flourished – their funding in 2017 almost doubled compared to 2016.

The total amount of NGO funding greatly surpasses the upper limit for a presidential candidate’s campaign in Russia. The scale is comparable to the entire budget for holding elections in the entire country, according to the report.

Apart from directly financing “civil activists” in Russia, the US and its allies spent money on more covert activities. Ahead of the election, several unsanctioned socio-political surveys were conducted in Russia, which were sponsored by foreign government structures – including the Pentagon – the report stated.

Targeting top Russian leadership, and Putin personally

A large part of the foreign efforts to interfere in domestic affairs targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin directly. This was observed as early as 2004, but spiked ahead of the 2012 election, according to the report. Then-US Vice President Joe Biden visited Russia and met with opposition figures, and told Putin that he should not run for a new term, since “Russia was tired” of him, the report says.

A similar pattern was seen in the following years, with Putin being portrayed as the only obstacle to the growth and prosperity of the Russian economy, and the man who “deprives the people of the democratic achievements of the 1980-90s.” Apart from smear campaigns, the report said some media also tried to demonize the Russian president in the eyes of the public by exaggerating certain problems to provoke Putin into making “unacceptable mistakes.”

Proposed countermeasures

The foreign activities outlined, however, failed to yield any tangible effect on the election, proving not their ineffectiveness, but the strength and stability of Russia’s socio-political system, the report concludes.

The commission prepared a set of recommendations on countermeasures against future foreign meddling, primarily by tightening up the laws. The proposed measures include prohibiting foreign-printed election campaign handouts, banning the participation of non-Russian citizens in the campaigns in any form, and barring dual-citizenship individuals from becoming trustees of candidates.

Other recommended measures include introducing a “special relationship” format with countries that impose sanctions or meddle in Russian affairs.

The recommended measures are not limited to restrictions. The report called for other countries and international organizations to become united in jointly opposing US meddling practices. On the home front, special attention will be given to education work, aimed primarily at young people, who are deliberately targeted with foreign propaganda, Senator Lyudmila Bokova told the press conference. The classified version of the report, according to Klimov, contains additional recommendations for countering foreign meddling.

Russia isn’t the only country to recognize the ways in which Western funded NGOs meddle in the affairs of other sovereign nations. Hungary has recently begun taking up legislation to crack down on NGOs funded by George Soros and those which relocate migrants into and within Hungary, potentially altering its demographic makeup, religious traditions, social homogeneity, and political environment.

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The Saudi Ambassador to Russia gave an exclusive interview to Sputnik where he revealed that the two Great Powers are working more closely together in Syria than had previously been acknowledged.

Up until this point, it was recognized that there were political contacts between the two sides over observing the Astana ceasefires and other technical topics, but this is the first time that it was publicly confirmed that Saudi Arabia solidly stands behind Russia’s role in promoting a political solution to the Hybrid War of Terror on Syria and is “in consultations and coordination sometimes with [it] regarding the ways to move this process ahead in the near future.” Furthermore, the Ambassador stressed the following:

“In the principal, our objectives are the same. We respect the independence, the unity and sovereignty of Syria. We want Syria for all Syrians on the equal basis regardless of their sector ethnicity or religious affiliation. We want Syria that is stable, secure and prosperous and we want Syria that is free from terrorist groups and sectarian militias and foreign troops.”

This strongly implies that some of the “consultations and coordination” between Russia and Saudi Arabia might have involved their “same objectives” of a “Syria that is free from…foreign troops”, like President Putin announced was his country’s assumption of the Arab Republic’s future while standing alongside President Assad during their Sochi Summit earlier this month. There are undoubtedly many, especially in the Alt-Media Community and under the influence over its prevailing dogma, who can’t believe that Russia would work so closely with the same Kingdom that’s largely responsible for most of Syria’s destruction, just like they can’t believe that it’s doing the same with “Israel” either, but those people are clearly unaware of or have purposely ignored the fast-moving an d full-spectrum Russian-Saudi rapprochement.

Moscow’s Rapprochement With Riyadh

To summarize what’s been happening between the two Great Powers over the past year or so, they’ve entered into the globally impactful OPEC+ deal with one another in stabilizing oil prices and Riyadh is even allowing Russian companies to bid to construct its 16 planned nuclear reactors, 15 more than Moscow has built in neighboring Iran. On top of that, the two parties are discussing exports of Russia’s S-400 anti-missile defense system and already agreed upon the sale of other weapons during the King’s visit to Moscow in October that include “Kornet-EM anti-tank missile systems, TOS-1A “Buratino” heavy flame systems, AGS-30 grenade launchers and Kalashnikov AK-103 assault rifles”. Unsurprisingly, the Ambassador confirmed in his interview that Russian state arms company Rostec has opened up an office in his country.

Taking the military dimensions of their relationship even further, he told Sputnik that

“(Saudi) officers [will] be trained and schooled in Russian military academies for the first time” and that “almost 200 Saudi military personnel (are) studying in various cities in Russia.”

Most observers could never have expected anything of the sort to happen, but this just speaks to the sincerity with which the Russian-Saudi rapprochement is developing in the sense that both sides trust one another enough to enter into long-term military training agreements of that sort. Moving beyond the energy and military aspects of their newfound partnership, Russia and Saudi Arabia are investing billions in one another’s economies, as was discussed in the interview, and relatedly, a representative of Russian Railways recently said that his company wants to participate in the construction of the Trans-Arabian Railway.

Explaining The Seemingly Unexplainable

Altogether, the multifaceted rapprochement between these two traditionally antagonistic Great Powers is proceeding quite smoothly, hence the naturalness with which it’s moved to Syria in seeing them engage in “consultations and coordination” with one another related to their shared political objectives, which most likely relates to the unofficial components of President Putin’s peace plan that specifically depends on Iran’s presumed “phased withdrawal” from the Arab Republic. To explain why all of this is happening in the first place and understand what’s behind Russia’s outreaches to Saudi Arabia, it’s necessary to remember that Moscow envisions its 21^st-century role as being the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, to which end it’s pursuing a slew of non-traditional partnerships with countries whom it previously had problems with such as Turkey and Pakistan.

This grand strategy aims to provide Russia with a neutral but strategic stake in regional affairs all across the hemisphere that could then be leveraged to allow it to mediate between rival countries and reap the resultant economic benefits from both parties as a result. In this instance, Russia wants to “balance” Saudi Arabia and Iran in order to manage the American-exacerbated and Hybrid War-weaponized “Sunni-Shiite split” as a means of stabilizing the Greater Mideast, with the first step in this direction being Moscow’s “consultations and coordination” with Riyadh over President Putin’s peace plan for Syria. Specifically, while it can’t be known for sure, it can be strongly speculated that this involves some degree or another of talks over the future of what Russia recognizes as the “armed opposition” in southern Syria.

The Art Of “Balancing”

This terminology is being used because Russia doesn’t deal with terrorists but has conducted “de-escalation” agreements with a variety of what it considers to be “armed opposition” groups, including those abutting the “Israeli”-occupied Golan Heights. Saudi Arabia is known for its patronage of all sorts of militant actors in Syria so it can safely be assumed that may have had a say in the Russian-“Israeli” deal that Foreign Minister Lavrov publicly confirmed earlier this week in stipulating that “non-Syrian forces” (which is a euphemism for Iran and Hezbollah) won’t be used in the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) forthcoming liberation campaign in the area and “should [be withdrawn] as soon as possible”. Without the agreement of these groups’ two main “Israeli” and Saudi sponsors, the SAA might encounter such heavy resistance that its mission could fail.

It’s an open secret that Saudi Arabia and “Israel” are not only allies with one another, but consecrated this relationship through coordinating the Hybrid War of Terror on Syria, so it makes sense that Russia would seek to “de-escalate” the conflict right at its source by engaging in a series of “compromises” with these two. In exchange for Russia passively facilitating countless “Israeli” strikes against Iranian and Hezbollah positions in the Arab Republic, as well as recently agreeing that neither of those two ground forces should come anywhere near the frontier with the occupied Golan Heights, “Israeli” and Saudi Arabia will implicitly agree to de-facto “recognize” President Assad and downscale their destabilizing activities against his country, which is similar in a sense to the rumored deal that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman purportedly tried to strike with Damascus.

Concluding Thoughts

Looking at the bigger picture, Russia’s “consultations and coordination” with Saudi Arabia in Syria are the latest step in the two sides’ fast-moving and full-spectrum rapprochement with one another and are designed to advance President Putin’s peace plan by managing the reciprocal “withdrawal” (or at the very least, “secretly promised downscaling”) of Riyadh-backed “armed opposition” forces from areas where its Iranian rival also agrees to leave. This sensitive quid pro quo could never be agreed to by either Great Power directly but required the “balancing” prowess of Russia as the geopolitical broker between them in order to pull it off. Through a series of very delicate moves that would undoubtedly be denied by both Mideast heavyweights if they were ever pressed to comment upon them in public, Moscow is therefore bringing peace to the embattled Arab Republic through its policy of mediating “mutual compromises” between them while simultaneously strengthening its strategic relations with the Wahhabi Kingdom as a result.

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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.

The father of modern public relations and spin, Edward Bernays was a cold, cynical manipulator of mass perception. He knew that by shaping people’s desires in a certain way, governments and corporations could sell just about any notion to the masses and manipulate them at will. Whether it was whipping up fear about the bogeyman of communism or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming goods, Bernays and the public relations/advertising industry, which took its cue from him, did exactly that.

Bernays was an expert in stage managing events to capture the popular imagination. Among his various accomplishments was to get women hooked on cigarettes by associating feminism and fashion with smoking. Calling cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’, he was instrumental in convincing women that cigarettes were trendy and that smoking symbolised emancipation. From getting people to change their diets to putting fluoride in drinking water, corporations knew who to turn to when they wanted to sell their dubious products.

Thanks in large part to Bernays, politicians, the corporate media and the system’s opinion leaders learned to appeal to primitive impulses, such as fear, sex and narcissism, that have little bearing on issues beyond the narrow self-interests of a consumer society. The whole point of such a society is to distract people from the reality of the wider world and train them to desire and want new things that they don’t really need – or for that matter even want – while stripping them of their ability to be self-reliant and independent.

The US government quickly learned that angels and demons could be manufactured from thin air and, from Guatemala and Congo to Vietnam, that wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies – lies about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the impending misery they would inflict and lies about the government delivering the world from impending doom.

The 2002 BBC documentary series ‘The Century of the Self’ describes how Bernays’s propagandised on behalf of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) and the US government to help overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz wanted to nationalise the company’s lands but Bernays successfully helped brand Arbenz as a communist with links to the USSR, which had no basis in reality. This set the stage for public support for a US-backed violent overthrow of Arbenz.

Whether it has involved Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine or Libya, Bernay’s tactics of deception have been further developed to keep the masses docile in order to sell imperialism under the lie of a war on terror, humanitarian intervention or exporting freedom, while enriching corporate interests in the process.

Consumer capitalism and imperialism

Millions are now locked into the pursuit of the Bernay’s model of consumerism. They are locked into addiction. Addicted to the pursuit of acquisition, of hedonism, of self-gratification. Addicted to the belief that there is an actual point to it all.

In the US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Freedom and happiness (or the pursuit of it) is central but was subverted by the likes of Bernays. With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle), Bernays knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get people hooked on consuming.

This great ‘American Dream’ of consumerism was built on craving and propaganda. And it is maintained by stripping the environment bare, by the unsustainable raping of nature to fuel profits, and is underpinned by perpetual war to grab resources.

As a result of such war, the US military-industrial complex is now responsible for a body count of 20 million dead and counting since 1945, people killed by US-backed wars and death squads, covert ops and destabilisations. All glossed over by countless Hollywood icons, commentators and politicians under the banner of championing freedom and democracy.

Today’s globalised system of capitalism exists to facilitate the desires of around just 6,000 to 7,000 people: the extremely wealthy of the world who are setting the globalisation and war agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations.

These billionaires (a transnational capitalist class) dictate global economic policies through their high-level think tank and lobbying networks and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars are fought and inflicted on which people.

They are called ‘wealth creators’. ‘High flyers’ who have stolen ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens, who have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and greed and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent from them or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.

Little wonder then that attempts to redress the balance have been brutally suppressed over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations or governments pursuing a socialist alternative or just displaying independent tendencies, this class has used intelligence agencies, front groups, threats, co-opted leaders or military might to attempt to subvert or annihilate any threat to its global hegemony.

From El Salvador and Chile to Egypt  and India’s tribal belt, ordinary folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off by politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed or much worse to prevent the truth from emerging. And that truth is that many of us know what ‘happiness’ really is and the type of society necessary to achieve it – based on common ownership of natural assets (the commons), self-reliance, localisation, economic democracy and equality – and that the immensely wealthy people who stand in its way do all things necessary to prevent us from having it.

Yet it is ordinary men (and women) who sign up to join the military and support this system on behalf of these immensely wealthy people. In part thanks to Bernays, such people have however been adept in manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or justify their exploitation.

In his book ‘A People’s History of England’, AL Morton documented how ordinary people, over many hundreds of years, set out to challenge these rulers and often paid with their lives. Nothing ever came for free and ordinary working people fought tooth and nail for any rights that they managed to obtain.

Such a travesty then that today ordinary people in the richer countries are denied decent livelihoods because jobs have been sold to the lowest bidder in places such as China, a de facto colonial outpost for the US empire with its ready supply of cheap labour.

With workers’ wages having been depressed, consumer demand thus propped up by debt, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being used as a battering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher did in the 80s with their pro-big business, pro-privatisation, anti-union, anti-welfare policies.

And we are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this and vote for ‘their’ politicians and support their wars. Ordinary young men (and women) are encouraged to sign up – the grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse on the blood-soaked battlefields of countless other wars that have gone before can now join up to fight again. For what, a land fit for heroes? Or austerity, food banks, child poverty, powerlessness, more imperialism and propping up the US dollar. For whom? Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan, Boeing and the rest.

The US economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been shipped abroad. For those who benefited, US workers can go to hell in a handbasket as long as profits keep rolling in. It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements which open the gates for plunder or through coercion and militarism which merely tear them down.

Bernay’s was a sophisticated operator in his time. But in terms of being able to manipulate the public and keep them onside, docile, hooked and oblivious to what is really happening, things have certainly moved on.

Today, there are no doubt hundreds of firms like Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), which has conducted ‘behavioural change’ programmes in over 60 countries with clients having included the British Military of Defence, the US State Department and NATO. The use of the media to fool the public appears to be one of SCL’s key selling points.

And then there is APCO Worldwide, also politically well-connected and, as Shelley Kasli puts it, well-versed in “beating the war drum” and other fine pursuits such as facilitating the plunder of Iraqi wealth.

Whether it concerns the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings or the rest of the high-level think tanks – which determine policies for their politicians to sell to the public – or the various powerful corporate lobby groups, what they all have in common is that they are all involved in orchestrating our future for their benefit.

But none of this must be exposed. If the propaganda is to remain effective, the public must remain comatose, emotionally malleable, strung out on consumerism and endlessly subjected to an echo chamber of empty slogans about patriotism, the bogeyman at the door and freedom and democracy.

The system must promote a mass mindset that is immune to the lies because the alternative is rational analysis and emancipatory change.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

More than 9,200 local volunteers from the Eastern Ghouta region near Damascus have joined the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and several pro-government groups since the liberation of the area on April 14, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported on May 30.

Under the reconciliation agreement reached in the area, 18-42 y.o. men got a six-month period to settle their legal status and join the SAA if they have not completed their mandatory service.

On May 9, the number of locals joined government forces was about 4,000 according to the Syrian pro-opposition news outlet Damascus Voice.

The US is allegedly considering to abandon the al-Tanaf base near the Syrian-Iraqi border under a deal with Russia, which will also force Iranian-backed forces and Hezbollah to withdraw away from the border with Jordan and from the contact line with Israel, the Newsweek magazine reported on May 30. Earlier, similar rumors were fueled by Saudi and Israeli media.

On May 30, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a statement on the situation in southern Syria. He said that all non-Syrian forces must withdraw from the de-escalation zone, which was established by the US, Russia and Jordan in July of 2017. Some sources linked this statement with the aforementioned rumors.

Most likely, the situation can become more clear after this week visit of Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and other Israeli officials to Moscow or after the start of a military operation in southern Syria by the SAA.

ISIS mobile units carried out new attacks on government forces positions in eastern Syria engaging them near the T3 pumping station and the village of Humaymah. However, the both attacks were repelled.

The ISIS activity in eastern Syria is one of the reasons behind the SAA’s efforts to solve the Daraa militants issue as soon as possible. Then, government troops will be able to deal with the remaining ISIS terrorists in the Homs desert.

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From the day he announced his candidacy for president of the United States – with his talk of Mexican rapists illegally crossing the border – it has been clear that Mr. Trump has no regard for truth, evidence, or any of the norms that make for honest, intelligent inquiry and debate.

Since Trump took office we have witnessed a president who is by any measure addicted to lying. According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump makes statements which are either untrue or misleading, on average, over six times each and every day. No president in modern history has displayed such contempt for the epistemic norms that are the foundation of civil discourse and a vibrant democracy – and all the while congress looks on inept and indeed complicit with this travesty.

Mr. Trump is the quintessential embodiment of the ‘post-truth’ era, and his actions as president reveal the high cost of such brazen dishonesty and willful disregard of reality; illustrated by his denial of anthropogenic climate change (a fact affirmed by virtually all climate scientists) and withdrawal from the Paris climate accord; his refusal to acknowledge the pressing need for, at a minimum, common sense gun laws in stemming the growing tide of gun-related violence; his persistent attacks on the FBI and Department of Justice, as well as outright disdain for the rule of law, which is unable to function properly without a healthy respect for things like objective reality, truth and justification; his penchant for conspiracy theories and utterly bogus claims, like the one that the Obama administration had his phones tapped.

But we cannot lay all the blame at the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We may indeed be living in the era of ‘post-truth’ – but for that, Trump himself is not solely responsible. Robust notions of truth, reality and objective inquiry have long been under assault, both in the culture at large, as well as in the hallowed halls of academia. Trump cleverly exploited this skepticism, a crisis of confidence, to which liberalism undoubtedly contributed.

The philosopher Hegel once wrote,

“Truth is a noble word and the thing is nobler still.”

It is fair to say that philosophers have long since abandoned the high estimation he expressed. The American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty may serve as a case in point. He claimed that there are only two senses of true: a) what you can defend against all conversational objections, and b) correspondence with things-in-themselves (some mind-independent reality). Since, according to Rorty, there is no such a thing as ‘the way the world is’ we are left with the first option: truth is reduced to a conversational remnant. Of course, Rorty’s dichotomy was far from exhaustive – but putting that aside, the problem with his account of truth is that while there may sometimes be objections which really cannot be overcome, there are also objections which can be, but are not due to the limitations on the part of the participants.

If you go as far as Rorty in giving up on the notion of truth, a reasonable appreciation of science is also undermined. What we are in fact seeing today is the depreciation of reason and the devaluation of truth – a dwindling confidence in the mind as an instrument or faculty for arriving at knowledge, or true justified belief.

Trumpism is a travesty of reason – and its tragic consequence is the sad tale that continues unfolding to the ongoing horror of thinking peoples the world over. It is the tragedy of watching the Presidency of the United States devolve into a hollow megalomania, a form of mindless entertainment to be consumed by the most jingoistic and least informed among us. The tragedy of Trumpism is nothing less than a moral calamity, a breakdown of social values, a rejection of truth and justice for the sake of tribalism (where a belief is “true” if it satisfies the standards of the community to which we happen to belong).

Meanwhile, we have entirely lost sight of the value of truth as such; of why truth matters, and what makes truth something to be sought after, prized and protected. The most common defense of truth is the pragmatic one – namely, that truth works; that true beliefs are more likely to get the job done than those that are not true.

The pragmatic account of the value of truth is not wrong, but at the same time it is not enough. Truth is not valuable for solely instrumental or extrinsic reasons. Truth has intrinsic value as well. When we reduce the value of truth to instrumentality, it is a very short step to saying that we just want beliefs that work for us, regardless of whether they are true or not.

My claim is that truth is to be valued for its own sake as well. Truth is intrinsically valuable and having lost sight of that is one of the great follies that Trumpism helps to perpetuate.

To bring the inherent value of truth into focus we need to get beyond the view that truth is simply the correspondence between a belief and the way the world is – that is, truth is more than agreement between thought and thing. Truth is, first and foremost, the correspondence of a thing with itself – as when, for example, we speak of a true friend or a true work of art. Incidentally, this is what truth meant for Hegel, who made an important distinction between truth and correctness, which are often taken to be synonymous.

Truth, he said, “lies in the coincidence of the object with itself.”

It is precisely in this sense that we can begin to appreciate the inherent value of truth. Truth is valuable in itself because it is nothing less than a thing’s measuring up to itself, living up to what it is meant to be, and what it claims to be.

It is also in this sense that we can see how false this president is – how miserably he fails to live up to what his office demands, and what we as a country should demand of him. The tragedy of Trumpism is the unbearably sad prospect that this country may cease, not simply to be true to itself, to its most cherished ideals – for perhaps it never really was – but that it may cease striving to be so; that it may cynically give up on the struggle for truth; that we may indeed die through a kind of collective suicide, a suicide on the part of us which has maintained that, with all of our terrible sins, there is still a truth embodied in the United States.

If this country stands for anything it is collective self-government: “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln put it in what is now part of our secular scripture. But such government requires a citizenry that is able to distinguish fact from illusion, and demagoguery from democracy. It demands a citizenry that prizes truth and despises lies – especially when they come from high places.

“Truth is relative,” Rudolph Giuliani, now a member of Trump’s legal team, explained recently. “They [the Special Counsel] may have a different version of the truth than we do.”

Giuliani’s self-defeating position would be laughable were it not so dangerous: it is the position that allows the Alex Joneses of the world to operate with impunity; it is the position that allows the president to make a mockery of genuine inquiry.

The onslaught of post-truth is something we must resist with everything in our power, and every means at our disposal – in courts, and classrooms and public discourse. The era of Trumpism must come to an end lest, shamefully, we sink in shallow water.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

At midnight on June 19, 1999, Nusret Ajdezi was woken up by a loud knocking on his door. Four armed people entered his home in a central Pristina neighbourhood and said that he and his family had until morning to flee the house or be killed.

“They were armed civilians. They said that they were [Kosovo Liberation Army] commanders. My wife, children and I did not sleep that night at all. We didn’t know where to go,” Ajdezi recalls.

The next morning, Ajdezi talked with his Roma fellow neighbours and found that they had experienced the same thing. Within three days, the majority of Pristina’s Roma inhabitants had fled to Serbia.

At the end of 2001, Ajdezi came back to his home but found that it had been turned into a brothel. Someone there told him that he had bought the house, and drove him away by hitting him with an iron bar.

Like Ajdezi, thousands of Albanians, Serbs, Roma and others whose homes have been unlawfully occupied have not been able to get them back since the war ended in Kosovo in June 1999.

This has had a negative impact on inter-ethnic relations in the country and made the return of refugees and people displaced by the war more difficult.

“Property issues, especially usurpations, have curbed the return of displaced persons,” Narasimha Rao, the head of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR office in Kosovo, told BIRN.

For almost two decades now, Ajdezi has been living in a refugee camp in the northern Serbian town of Novi Sad, locked in a permanent battle with poverty and his ever-worsening health.

“I built that house with my work for 27 years at a butcher’s that was owned by an Albanian, and they snatched it only because I am Roma,” he said.

During his time in the refugee camp, he has appealed to UN Habitat, a United Nations agency dealing with human settlements, calling on it to address the home seizures and other property-related issues that emerged after the conflict.

Up to 2007, the former Kosovo Property Agency, which has now been renamed the Agency for Comparison and Verification of Property, AKKVP, had registered 42,749 seized properties in Kosovo.

Year by year, the number of seized properties has decreased because some of them have been sold, often under pressure, while others have been returned to their original owners.

“Currently there are 12,823 properties under AKKVP administration. Most of them are agricultural land, then business and residential properties,” said AKKVP spokesperson Arian Krasniqi.

The figure does not include forest land, which remains unregistered.

The majority of properties that were seized belong to Serbs and Roma who fled Kosovo just after the war in June 1999.

“96.84 per cent or 41,399 of usurped properties belonged to Serbs,” Krasniqi said.

Fake documents

Ajdezi’s (image on the right) legal battle to get back his property has been long and complicated.

“The usurper Isa Hamiti says that he bought the house from another person. But documents are fake,” he insisted.

According to court documents, the person who occupied Ajdezi’s house said he bought it from a person named Bekim Ramadani, who was not the owner, but was authorised by a woman called Sanije Deri. However, her name does not appear as the owner in the cadastral registry of properties in Kosovo.

At the time of the contract which said that she authorised the selling of the house, in the year 2000, she had already been dead for 30 years, according to the civil registry.

Meanwhile the seller, Bekim Ramadani from the southern Serbian town of Medvedja, is in prison in Serbia for other offences.

In 2016, the Kosovo government approved a national strategy on property rights. According to the strategy, property transactions like this which involve go-betweens raise concerns over human rights, because in a post-conflict environment, sometimes the properties are not sold willingly.

The court has not ruled yet on Ajdezi’s case, but his house now exists only in photographs and in its former inhabitants’ memories. A huge residential building has been erected where it once stood; the constructor compensated the seller of the house with two apartments.

Court rulings ignored

Image on the left: Ljubinko Todorovic.

Slavica Djordjevic never planned to leave Kosovo until the day that she, her husband and six of her neighbours were kidnapped by a group of armed men in the southern town of Prizren in June 1999.

They were rescued by a patrol of German soldiers from the NATO peacekeeping force, KFOR, which was deployed in Kosovo following the Western military alliance’s 78-day air campaign which resulted in the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo.

While preparing to leave, Djordjevic saw her house, which was not yet fully built, seized by an Albanian neighbour.

“He continued construction where we left off. They used it for storage, as a shop and office space,” she told BIRN.

While she was moving from one refugee shelter to another in Serbia, a Prizren court ruled in 2011 that her property should be returned to her in the state in which she left it.

“But he did not want to obey the verdict,” Djordjevic explained. “To this day, the usurper of my property does not wish to return it. Instead, they threatened to kill us in the courtroom.”

In the end, the judge decided that she must pay 19,500 euros for the verdict to be implemented if she wants her property back.

When she complained to the Court of Appeals, the judges ruled again that the property should be returned. But then the Supreme Court also ruled that Djordjevic should pay 19,500 euros. Now she has filed a complaint to Kosovo’s Constitutional Court.

Now 66, Djordjevic (image on the right) said she cannot afford to pay for the restitution of her property.

“I am retired, my husband too. We are struggling to survive,” she said.

Kosovo Serbs find it particularly hard to get back property in villages in which the ethnic Albanian population were subjected to killings and gruesome massacres by Serbian forces.

Marko Vukotic left his house in the village of Lubeniq/Ljubenica in the Peje/Pec area, where in May 1999, Serbian forces killed more than 80 Albanian civilians. Two years later, Vukotic returned and sold the house. But he did not get his agricultural land back.

“I see that they [Albanians] are working the land, harvesting their fruit, and I can do nothing,” Vukotic told BIRN.

In 2016, the Peje/Pec court ruled that his property should be released. But the man who now uses the land, Asllan Zenelaj, insisted that it has always belonged to his family.

“This land was expropriated. Then during the Milosevic regime [in the 1990s] there were some discriminatory laws about Albanians’ properties. I am collecting documents which prove my right to the property,” Zenelaj told BIRN.

The ownership status of many properties that were traded between Serbs and Albanians in the 1990s remains unresolved in the cadastral register, further complicating the situation.

The Agency for Comparison and Verifiction of Property is responsible for restitution of property when it is illegally occupied or illegally occupied for a second time, as sometimes happens. But if it is illegally occupied for a third time, the Agency is legally powerless to intervene.

Kosovo Ombudsperson Hilmi Jashari, has requested legal changes which would make the Agency responsible for acting after every seizure.

“Some provisions of the law violate the property rights of displaced persons,” Jashari told BIRN.

He also said that the law is “in contradiction with UN rules for the restitution of property for displaced persons”, known as the Phinerio Principles.

Lawyer Ljubinko Todorovic, who served as Kosovo’s Deputy Ombudsperson from 2003 to 2006, is among those whose houses have been seized. He blames the former UN administration mission, UNMIK, for being incapable of stopping the seizures.

“It was the time when fear prevailed. The usurper of my apartment came to my office at the Ombudsperson’s HQ and told me that he will never vacate it,” Todorovic told BIRN.

In his current office in the central Kosovo town of Gracanica, Todorovic is dealing with a backlog of cases of property usurpations involving Serbs and Roma which are waiting for court verdicts. Each of the plaintiffs has been waiting for more than a decade for their problem to be dealt with.

‘No rule of law’

Agim Voca (image on the left) remembers how, one sunny October day in 1998, he left his apartment in Kosovo northern town of Zvecane/Zvecan, and moved to live with some relatives in the neighbouring town of Mitrovica.

He and his family did not take many things with them, believing that they would return soon. But the conflict erupted more quickly than he expected and other Albanians were also displaced from Zvecane/Zvecan. Some of them were never able to return home again.

Nineteen years later, Voca is still waiting for the day when he can go back. His apartment in central Zvecan/Zvecane was occupied by a Serb family, and Voca and his family now live in a Serb’s house in the southern part of the ethnically-divided town of Mitrovica.

“When the war ended, a new war started for me. I lost a job, I lost an apartment. I had taken refuge near my town. There was no place for Albanians beyond the bridge, nor for Serbs in this side,” he said, referring to Ibar bridge in Mitrovica which divides the town and has been the scene of several inter-ethnic clashes since the war.

Voca, now 65, used to work at Trepca, a huge mining complex which has never recovered since the war. As as consequence, he was unemployed when he reached retirement age.

As he was homeless for year while seeking the restitution of his property, the Kosovo Property Agency settled him in an apartment which belonged to a Serb whose family fled Mitrovica in June 1999.

“I was born and grew up in Zvecan/Zvecani, in a good neighbourly relationship with local Serbs. But the time came when everything was upended and now we live in each others’ usurped apartments,” he said.

His apartment is being occupied by a Serb family, whose house in the village of Runik in the Skenderaj/Srbica municipality was destroyed after the war.

Voca once met the Serb owner of the house in which he is living, Aca Milutinovic, who paid a visit with his wife to see their home, escorted by UN police. The place is now in a poor state and the roof is leaky.

“They saw their house destroyed over the years by different families who lived here. In that time, the walls have been covered with hate grafitti,” said Selvete Voca, Agim’s wife.

Over the years, the AKVVM has put some of the seized properties under its administration and is trying to oblige their occupiers to pay rent.

“In cases when users do not pay rent, we evict them,” the Agency spokesperson Krasniqi said.

But the obligation to pay rent often does not work in practice because the families who live in these properties are so poor.

Voca said he has never been paid rent from his apartment, nor paid anything for the house he lives in.

“Besides threats, I have never received anything. And nobody has asked me to pay rent for this house,” he explained.

Naim Osmani from Civil Rights Programme in Kosovo, which has defalt with property restitution problems, said that in most cases, owners hesitate to take legal action against unlawful occupiers because they know that they “cannot solve the problems” through the courts.

“We have seen the fear of those who ask for their property back through the courts. This is a reflection of the lack of rule of law,” he added.

Attempted arson

Image on the right: Marko Vucotic

Beshir Islami, head of the Appeals College of the Kosovo Supreme Court, a mechanism that deals with complaints to the Kosovo Commission for Property Claims, said resolving property issues remains a challenge.

“However, allegations that sides are taken based on ethnic motivations in resolving property issues have no basis,” Islami insisted.

The Kosovo prosecution has initiated 422 property usurpation cases. But properties are often illegally occupied several times, leaving the Agency powerless to intervene.

One home-owner became so infuriated with the situation that he decided to take retribution. Alush Alushi from Mitrovica, who lost two sons during the war, said that he tried to set his home in the Serb-dominated north of Mitrovica on fire twice. A Serb family has lived in the house since the end of the war.

Alushi’s attempt to torch his own house failed, however.

“I couldn’t set the fire from outside,” he told BIRN.

In 2017, he staged another radical intervention. Armed with a gun and two hand grenades, he went to a police station and threatened to “blow the house into the air” if authorities did not act.

“It was very hard for me when I imagined how I lost two sons during the war and the house after the war ended,” he said.

His property was eventually returned to him, but he said it had been damaged, and he plans to sell it because he says he would not feel safe living there anymore.

Slavica Djordjevic said that she feels that nothing can compensate her for what she has experienced during these years in which she has been forced to live so far from her home.

“It’s too much for one lifetime. There is no money, no means to give us back the 20 years of life that we have spent here in Novi Sad,” she said.

Many people fear that they could lose their properties because of the amount of time that has now passed, but judge Beshir Islami said this is not possible because “the legal right to immovable property has no statutory limitation”.

In 2011, under EU mediation, Kosovo and Serbia signed an agreement on the return of copies of scanned cadastral registries which were taken away by the Belgrade-run administration when it fled Kosovo in June 1999.

The agreement – which has still to be implemented – provides for the return of over 4.1 million copies of private property documents. It’s believed that they would clarify many of the property issues that have arisen since the war.

Meanwhile, Marko Vukotic and Agim Voca are still hoping that they will get their homes back again – although Aca Milutinovic and his wife died in Serbia recently without ever getting the satisfaction of having their house returned to them.

Ajdezi expects the property documents that are due to be returned from Belgrade to prove that his house really belongs to him, even though the building itself has been razed to the ground.

“I spent my entire life working to have a house. I don’t want to feel like a homeless person any more. I wouldn’t like to die in a shelter,” he said.

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All images, except the featured, in this article are from BIRN.

As Israeli leaders and the Trump regime grotesquely celebrated the moving of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence, May 14, just 40 miles away Israeli troops were massacring unarmed Palestinians trapped inside Gaza. At least 61 Palestinians were killed, and more than 2,700 wounded, over a thousand shot by snipers firing military grade ammunition against unarmed protestors who were demanding an end to their isolation and the right to return to their homeland.

There was a bitter historical irony in the juxtaposition of these events

Most of the two million residents of Gaza are refugees and their descendants (who also have refugee status), driven from other parts of Palestine in 1948. Altogether, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948-49 to make way for the creation of the Israeli state. Another 300,000 were driven out after the Six Day War in 1967. Today, there are seven million registered Palestinians refugees, many still living in 59 refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza. None have ever been allowed to return to their stolen homes, farms and shops, in blatant violation of their rights.

For many decades, Israeli leaders and their American apologists maintained the fiction that the Palestinians who left did so at the urging of their leaders. Even if that had been the case, it would have in no way invalidated their right of return, an inalienable right under international law.

But it was not the case. As has been irrefutably documented by numerous Israeli as well as Palestinian historians, mass ethnic cleansing was carried out by means of massacre and other forms of terror. It could not have accomplished otherwise.

The Israeli colonial state was not, of course, the only one that employed terror and massacre to subjugate the indigenous population. All of the colonizers utilized such tactics, including the United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Japan, Netherlands, Italy, etc., to establish their empires.

“Transfer” – Zionist leaders’ intention from the start

The leaders of the Zionist movement that manifested itself as the Israeli state in 1948 had often been quite open about their intention to conquer all of Palestine and to force the indigenous population out. Their code word for ethnic cleansing was “transfer.” In 1937, David Ben-Gurion, a reputed “moderate” in the Zionist leadership who would later become Israel’s first prime minister wrote:

“Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin…Jewish power which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”

In 1940, another key Zionist leader, Josef Weiiz, director of the Jewish National Fund charged with acquiring as much land as possible, wrote:

“Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people in this country . . . and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer them all, except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, a single tribe.”

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted to partition the British colony of Palestine: 55% for a Jewish state, 44% for an Arab state, and 1% for an international zone. In true colonialist fashion, there was no consultation with the Palestinians before the vote. Widespread fighting broke out immediately.

A month after the vote, Ben-Gurion, said in a speech:

“In the area allocated to the Jewish state there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350, 000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment will be about one million, including almost 40 percent non-Jews. Such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish state. This fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a composition, there cannot event be absolute certainty that the control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority . . . There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60 percent.”

Ben-Gurion hailed ethnic cleansing

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began almost immediately after the fateful UN vote delighted Ben-Gurion. In a February 8, 1948 speech to the governing council of his Labor Party, he gloated:

“From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [an East Jerusalem neighborhood] … there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been as Jewish as it is now. In many Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single Arab. I do not assume that this will change … What has happened in Jerusalem … is likely to happen in many parts of the country … in the six, eight to ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country.”

But what so heartened Ben-Gurion in early 1948 was not yet reflected in most of the country. The much better armed and financed Zionist militias prevailed in most, though not all, battles. But in most areas, the objective of driving out the Palestinian population was not being achieved. Palestinian villagers would retreat during active combat, but only to nearby villages or towns, waiting for the fighting to stop so they could return to their homes and farms.

At the time, the majority of Palestinians were peasant farmers who could not leave their land and livestock for any extended period of time without disastrous consequences. The contention that they would have voluntarily abandoned their farms based on the call of some far-off “leader” is simply ludicrous.

By March 1, 1948, less than 5% of the Palestinian population had been driven out, which was viewed by the Zionist leaders as serious threat to their plan.

Two additional factors made this a crisis-in-the-making for Ben-Gurion and his cohorts. One was a shift in Washington. While the Truman administration had played a key role in ramming the partition plan through the UN, it was now evidencing second thoughts. The partition plan had not brought peace — just the opposite, and much of the anger in the Arab world and beyond was directed at the U.S.

The State Department was floating a proposal to scrap partition and replace it with a five-year trusteeship. The Zionist leaders rejected it outright, but were acutely conscious of the importance of maintaining support from the United States.

And, the approach of May 15, 1948, the date the British colonizers had set for withdrawing their troops from Palestine was fast approaching.

An Israeli soldier stops Palestinians in Nazareth, 1948, for traveling after the imposed curfew

Plan Dalet – terrorist violence on a mass scale

Confronted with what they viewed as multi-front crisis, Ben-Gurion and his commanders began to implement a new military doctrine under the name Plan Dalet, or Plan D. Under the plan, the official Zionist army, the Haganah, along with its supposed rival militias, Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang), both of the latter self-proclaimed terrorist organizations, began attacking “quiet” Palestinian villages, those not involved in fighting.

The progressive Israeli historian Ilan Pappe asserts in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that Ben-Gurion actually viewed the “quiet” villages as a bigger problem than those that resisted, as the latter provided a pretext for carrying out harsh repression and removal.

Among the directives of Plan Dalet were:

“Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

“Destruction of villages – setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris – especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

“Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Plan Dalet escalated the level of violence directed against the Palestinian civilian population to an extreme. A typical operation carried out by Zionist military units would involve planting explosives around Palestinian houses in the middle of the night, drenching them with gasoline and then opening fire. The point was to terrorize and expel the population. Arbitrary executions became routine, particularly targeting men and boys simply deemed to be of “fighting age,” regardless of whether they were actually engaged in combat.

Deir Yassin massacre – a turning point

Deir Yassin, on the outskirts of Jerusalem was on of the “quiet” villages. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun led by Menachem Begin, wiped out nearly its entire population The Irgun blew up houses with the inhabitants inside, executed others in their homes. Many of the women in the village were raped before being killed. The Irgun paraded the few survivors in a truck through Jerusalem where they were jeered and spit on.

Deir Yassin raised Plan Dalet to a new level of brutality, The Jewish Agency, which a few weeks later would become the Israeli government, officially condemned the massacre but on the same day brought Irgun into the Joint Command with the Haganah, and Lehi, led by another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir.

The massacres in Deir Yassin, Tantura and other villages were widely publicized by the Zionists themselves, for maximum effect. Pappe has documented at least 29 additional massacres by Zionist forces between December 1947 and January 1949.

Twelve days after the Deir Yassin massacre, on April 21, 1948, the British commander in Haifa, a major city in the north with a mixed population, advised the Jewish Agency that he would immediately begin withdrawing his forces. He did not inform the Palestinians. The same day, Hagahah forces launched a major attack on the Palestinian neighborhoods of the city, rolling barrel bombs filled with gasoline and dynamite down narrow alleys in the heavily populated city while shelling the same areas with mortars.

Haganah army loudspeakers and sound cars broadcast “horror recordings” of shrieks and screams of Arab women, mixed with calls of, “flee for your lives, the Jews are using poison gas and nuclear weapons. By early May, only 4,000 Palestinians of 65,000 remained in Haifa.

Irgun commander Menachem Begin, provided most vivid description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin was instrumental in the expulsion of the Palestinians from Haifa and other cities, towns and villages. In his book The Revolt, Begin wrote:

“Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel [sic]. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah (the underground Jewish military organization that became the Israeli Army), was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces … The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa … All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”

Three decades later, in an article for The American Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem expressed his concern about the failure to understand the major significance of terrorism in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty. He wrote:

“Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.”

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(Much of the historical material in this article can be found in the book, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire, by Richard Becker. PSL Publications, 2009)

This article was originally published on Liberation School. Richard Becker is a frequent Contributor to Global Research

Syria has long dominated international headlines while the big powers discuss the possibility of dividing it into smaller, more homogeneous states along ethnic or religious lines. The Democratic Republic of Congo is rarely if ever at the top of the Western headlines, but heads of state and so-called experts have long made similar proposals to carve out new, smaller, more homogeneous nations in Congo’s resource-rich eastern provinces. I spoke with Congolese scholar and activist Boniface Musavuli about the plans.

Ann Garrison: Boniface, can you summarize the history of proposals to divide up the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Boniface Musavuli: Attempts to break up the Congo began as soon as the country became independent in 1960. First there was the Katangese secession, from 1960 to 1963, led by Moïse Tshombe with the support of Belgium, the colonial power that Congo had just freed itself from, in name at least. Katanga is Congo’s most southeastern province, bordering Angola, Zambia, and Tanzania, which makes it easier to slice off, like the rest of the resource-rich eastern border provinces. Katanga is also Congo’s most mineral-rich province, and the Belgians had made it clear, before independence, that they did not intend to cede control of its wealth to the Congolese.

Another secession began in the southern part of Kasai Province, which borders Katanga. These secessions were defeated by UN forces and the Congolese army led by Lieutenant-General Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who was then chief of staff of the armed forces.

In October 1996, Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu (image on the right) called for the organization of a new Berlin Conference to allow Rwanda to take possession of part of eastern Congo. Bizimungu was a Hutu figurehead concealing the minority Tutsi rule that General Paul Kagame had reestablished at the end of the 1990-1994 invasion, war, and genocide in Rwanda.

At the same time, US official and corporatist Walter Kansteiner began advocating ethnic Balkanization, including the creation of a homogeneous Tutsi state in eastern Congo.

AG: I’ve read about Kansteiner. He was Bill Clinton’s National Security Council Advisor for African Affairs, then he became Deputy Spokesman for Clinton’s National Security Council, and in 2002, he became George W. Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. He’s been involved in mergers, acquisitions, and privatizations all over Africa, and he owns a commodity trading firm in Chicago that specializes in tropical products. He’s a member of the Corporate Council on Africa, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the African Development Foundation.

BM: Yes, that’s him. And he began advocating for the Balkanization of Congo along ethnic lines in October 1996.

AG: October 1996 was also the month when Uganda and Rwanda invaded the Congo, formed a coalition army with Laurent Désiré Kabila, and drove Congolese President Mobutu Sese Seko into exile seven months later.

BM: Yes, and then in 1998, during the Second Congo War, the DRC and its vast resources were divided into three main parts, even though there was no formal secession. One part was controlled by Congolese President Laurent-Désiré Kabila and his allies, another by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his allies, and the third by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his allies. This de facto partition of the country ended in 2003 when the Sun City peace agreement was signed in South Africa.

Image below: Walter Kansteiner

AG: I read some of the press about the Sun City Agreement at the time. It was reported that Uganda had agreed to give the Congolese finance portfolio to Congo in exchange for the power to choose the president of Congo’s 500-member national assembly, and Rwanda got to choose the head of Congo’s 120-member Senate, but that these bargains were not spelled out in the agreement.

BM: Yes, but it’s important to note that Congolese President Laurent Kabila had been assassinated in 2001, and succeeded by Joseph Kabila, his adopted son, who became a partner in US and Rwandan Tutsi interests in Congo.

AG: WorldBiography.com reports that, “Only a week after he [Kabila] was sworn in as president, George Bush invited Kabila to visit Washington. Kabila accepted the invitation and went there to meet with Colin Powell and Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda.”

BM: Yes. So the 2003 Sun City Agreement was really an agreement between the Rwandan government in Kigali, the Ugandan government in Kampala, and the Rwandan government in Kinshasa, which was pretending to be Congolese. The agreement marked the next stage in a long period of veiled occupation that continues in Congo today.

By January 2009, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared publicly that Congo must share its space and wealth with Rwanda.

AG: What proposals are currently on the table, and who is proposing them?

BM: There are now several initiatives aimed at Balkanizing Congo, but the Congolese have always opposed them. That explains, for example, the defeat of M23, an armed Tutsi militia, in November 2013.

A petition was recently launched by individuals who claimed to be from the Hutu community in Congo, calling for the partition of North Kivu, one of Congo’s most resource-rich and population-dense provinces. North Kivu borders Rwanda, and Rwandan forces have never left the province despite the 2003 agreement that formally ended the Second Congo War. Instead they pretended to be Congolese and renamed themselves the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) and then the March 23 Movement (M23). North Kivu continued to be ravaged by their violence and looting of Congolese resources, including coltan, gold, diamonds, and timber.

This partition of North Kivu would weaken the inter-ethnic cohesion of the province, weaken its different territories, and cause massive population displacements. There are already more than 1.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in North Kivu Province, nearly a quarter of the 4.5 million IDPs in the country. Partitioning the territories of North Kivu would facilitate their annexation to Rwanda, as envisioned by the Balkanizers back in 1996. The people behind this petition are in fact linked to Kagame and Kabila’s Tutsi expansionist regimes, which have always worked together to Balkanize eastern Congo. This explains the massive presence of Rwandan Tutsi officers in the ranks of the Congolese army.

However, the Rwandan military presence is not sufficient to achieve Balkanization. This also requires huge Rwandan populations on Congolese soil. Hence their massive arrival, particularly in North Kivu Province’s Beni Territory and Ituri Province. Some of these Rwandans commit massacres against the indigenous populations, which explains the hostility of the Congolese to their arrival.

AG: Is the plan to populate the territories that Rwanda would like to annex with Rwandans and then hold a referendum on whether the territories want to be part of Rwanda or Congo?

BM: Yes. Rwanda’s strategy has always been to use populations of Rwandan origin, or of Rwandan ancestry. By sending Rwandan populations to Congo and massacring native Congolese, Rwanda is trying to create a Rwandan majority in several provinces or territories of Congo. If they become a majority, these populations will be able to demand a referendum of self-determination and obtain the autonomy of the territories under their control. Then, after autonomy, these territories could be annexed to Rwanda.

However, it should be noted that a large part of the populations of Rwandan origin or ancestry, now established in Congo for several generations, oppose the Balkanization. These populations now consider themselves Congolese and refuse to collaborate in the Kagame regime’s expansionist ambitions. This is one of the main reasons why the Balkanization project is floundering.

AG: And are the Balkanizers, both here and there, trying to Balkanize North Kivu, Ituri, and maybe more of Congo’s resource-rich east along ethnic lines? The US has pursued a policy of ethnic and/or religious division since the breakup of Yugoslavia, then Iraq, South Sudan, and now Syria.

BM: Yes, and Walter Kansteiner spoke about the creation of an ethnically homogeneous Tutsi state in eastern Congo. It’s a terrifying idea because Tutsi do not even represent 5% of the total population of Kivu and are not a majority in any Congolese territory. The only way for them to have a homogeneous state is to slaughter 95% of the local population or drive them off their land. That explains in part the death of six million Congolese and the continuation of the massacres in eastern Congo.

But despite these unending massacres and millions of deaths, the Tutsi still remain a minority throughout the eastern Congo. They cannot create a homogeneous state in eastern Congo, but perhaps they can create a totalitarian state like Rwanda’s, where a tiny, super-militarized Tutsi minority reigns supreme over the country and crushes the majority Hutu population.

AG: In her new book “In Praise of Blood: Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front,” Judi Rever writes:

The market analyst predicted a complete geostrategic restructuring in central Africa, with Rwandan Tutsis, an ethnic group that had faced existential threats for decades, now steering affairs. “You’ll see a de facto ‘Greater Tutsi Land’ there. What you’ve got is a situation where Rwanda and Uganda are clearly now the dominant military powers in the region. They will do pretty much what they want.”

Do you agree that that’s what’s happened?

BM: Yes, absolutely. The Hima powers of Uganda and Tutsi of Rwanda are the dominant military force in the region. Although they are a minority in number, they control virtually all military decisions in the DRC and, of course, in Uganda and Rwanda. They operate within the framework of the American strategy of entrusting the “real power” to the minority communities even if they enslave the majority.

AG: Isn’t Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni a Tutsi, like Rwandan President Paul Kagame, though this is rarely discussed?

BM: Museveni was born in 1944. His parents were nomads from the Western Uganda Bahima subgroup of the Banyankole people, closely related to the Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi.

AG: And was this elite minority ruling class selected and empowered by the US and its Western allies?

BM: Yes indeed. That is why elites in the Western countries remain silent about the terrible crimes that Kagame and Museveni have committed in the African Great Lakes region for more than 20 years. More than six million Congolese people have died by their crimes, but not a single Ugandan or Rwandan leader faces prosecution anywhere in the world.

AG: Pundits and policymakers here in the US argue that Congo is a “weak state,” so they need to break it up into smaller, stronger states. The 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected, post-independence Prime Minister, by US and Belgian operatives has precluded the possibility of Congo becoming a strong state for nearly 60 years.

BM: Congo is not a weak state, but a state where the occupying authorities intentionally weakened the state. Since Joseph Kabila came to power in 2001, every solution proposed—such as building a road, fighting corruption, or eliminating an armed group—has been sabotaged, so the problems only worsen. Why? Because the current authorities controlling the DRC, including President Kabila, have all come from Rwanda and Uganda, behind the armed movement that has been constantly renamed, from AFDL to RCD, CNDP, then M23. These authorities are on a mission to keep the Congolese state permanently weak, so that Kagame, their boss, can pursue his expansionist agenda in Congo.

When Congolese get rid of Kagame’s henchman Joseph Kabila, they will work to rebuild their country with a strong state. As it is now, 85% of Congolese mineral resources are looted by members of the regime and their foreign allies. If the Congolese reclaim their own resources, Congo can rapidly become a strong and wealthy state with a high standard of living.

AG: Who opposes the division of the Democratic Republic of Congo?

BM: The Congolese as a whole are strongly opposed to the Balkanization of their country. Congo is a multiethnic nation, but there is not a single Congolese community that supports Balkanization along ethnic lines.

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Boniface Musavuli is a Congolese author and political exile living in France. He is the author of the book “Les Massacres de Beni: Kabila, le Rwanda et les Faux Islamistes “ (The Massacres of Beni: Kabila, Rwanda, and the Faux Islamists). This book will soon be published in English. He is also the author of “Les Genocides des Congolais—De Leopold II à Paul Kagame” (The Genocides of the Congolese—from Leopold II to Paul Kagame).

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison or [email protected]. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The operation, Ukrainian officials said, helped to capture the person, who initiated the upcoming attempted assassination.

On May 29, it became known that journalist Arkady Babchenko was shot in the back in his apartment building. It was reported that Babchenko died on the way to hospital. On May 30, however, he appeared alive at a news conference, at which he said that the special operation had been prepared two months in advance.

“I was let into a month ago, and during this month I saw that the guys were working very hard, they were taking pains and plowing like buffaloes. We were in touch the whole month, we were thinking and working everything through. As a result, the special operation was conducted,” Babchenko said.

As he added, he was supposed to be killed prior to the Champions League finals in Kiev. He also said that the price for his assassination was set at $40,000.

Official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that the staging of Babchenko’s murder had a propaganda effect.

Chairman of the International Association of Veterans of Alfa anti-terror unit, Sergei Goncharov, said that Ukraine’s operation was an “anachronism.” Yet, member of the board of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Anton Gerashchenko, believes that the Ukrainian security forces were guided by finest role models in their actions.

The head of the Council Committee on International Affairs of the Council of Federation, Konstantin Kosachev, said that the staging of the journalist’s assassination should be attributed to “a string of delusional actions of the Ukrainian authorities against Russia.”

The head of Reporters without Borders NGO Christophe Deloir called the situation part of the media war and expressed his deepest indignation in connection with the manipulations conducted by Ukrainian secret services.”

Ukrainian security forces claim that Russian special services stand behind the operation to plot Babchenko’s assassination. SBU representatives did not provide any evidence to prove their point, but said that the organiser “was talking about the need to eliminate 30 persons in Ukraine.” No names were specified.

Many assumed that the whole operation to stage the journalist’s death was bizarre. According to the version of the SBU, the Ukrainian special services knew who the organiser was (the “hand of the Kremlin”). Plus, the assassin had received $40,000 on his account. Consequently, the SBU had known the identity of the assassin long in advance. It was also said that the assassin had Babchenko’s passport photo. Why would the killer need such a photo given that it was taken nearly 20 years ago? It is an open secret that people may look very different from their passport photos. SBU claims that as long as the assassin had Babchenko’s passport photo, it means that the assassination was arranged by Russian special services. Yet, it is not only Russia that may have access to Babchenko’s passport. Passport is not a matter of state secrecy. Babchenko, like any other Russian citizen, would very often hand his passport to commercial organisations, such as banks, travel agencies, visa centres, etc. To crown it all, Babchenko, apparently, had received residence permit in Ukraine, which means that the Ukrainian government has a copy of his passport.

US journalist Jill Dougherty noted that the fact that Babchenko is alive was obviously good news, but this fact also struck a huge blow to the reputation of Ukraine, because no one would ever trust what the Ukrainians say.

The silence of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at the meeting with his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier looked particularly remarkable.

It is worthy of note that a number of Western leaders condemned the “killing” of the Russian journalist and implied in their comments that Russia was to blame again.

“The Skripal case was made before the presidential election in Russia. The case of Babchenko was fabricated on the eve of the World Cup in Russia. It is important for them to disrupt all political processes and develop the process of Russophobia instead,” Russian Senator Franz Klintsevich said.

Traditionally, after the announcement of the news about the killing of Babchenko, the perpetrators were announced immediately – Russian special services. No investigation is required for such cases at all – they just point fingers at Russia and say it. The scenario was used in the UK, when Sergei and Yulia Skripal were said to have suffered from exposure to a highly toxic poison, from which they miraculously recovered within a very short period of time. A similar story was used in Syria, when the West masterminded the chemical attack in Eastern Ghouta. A number of victims of that attack soon rose from the dead and said that the attack was staged.

The Babchenko story is bizarre indeed. The journalist is alive, and all those, who have accused Russia of the crime seem to have made a blunder. So far, Western leaders have not released any new comments on the subject.

Some say protests in Gaza are useless: No tangible results. Then, there are silly discussions about biased reporting, 1 as if “balance”, representing two sides equally, leads to truth.  It doesn’t, at least not for questions that matter.

You don’t get objective truth by balancing available information. In fact, you may not get objective truth from true information. That view is naïve. It’s been known to be naïve for a long time: more than half a century by philosophers in the North and forever by some in the South.

It’s a simple point about how we know things: It depends on who you think you are. José Martí, who led a war for Latin America’s independence, political and human, said in his famous “Our America” that such naiveite – about knowledge – is a bigger barrier to human freedom than US power.

He meant freedom for human beings. They need to be known.

Jean Paul Sartre knew this point. He told Europeans in the 60s that they wouldn’t understand Frantz Fanon by reading Wretched of the Earth. It wasn’t because Fanon is obscure. He’s not. It’s because the “wretched” didn’t count, and that they didn’t count was part of what it meant to be European.

It was European identity. It is well-known that we don’t understand that which, if we did understand it, fully, would undermine our sense of who we are. It is why some white folk don’t get racism and why the US will never understand Cuba, or Venezuela.

It is not about how much information is available and from how many sources.

Sartre knew that Europeans would not understand Fanon because if they did, as Sartre puts it, the ground would move beneath them. They’d be insecure. He urged Europeans to let the ground move beneath them, in order to learn.

Sartre urged Europeans to “enter into” Fanon’s work:

“At a respectful distance”, he wrote, “it is you who feel furtive, nightbound, and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; from these shadows from which a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies”. 2

Palestinian teenager, Ahed Tamimi, also knows the point. She’s in jail for slapping a heavily armed Israeli soldier, on her own land, after her young cousin was shot in the head, also while unarmed. Tamimi told Abby Martin of Telesur that what would most help Palestinian kids is human solidarity: from around the world. 3

She doesn’t mean possessing information. Che Guevara said, famously, that

solidarity “has something of the bitter irony of the plebeians cheering on the gladiators in the Roman circus”.

It is not enough “to wish the victim success …  One must join the victim in victory or death”.

Or, at least, “turn and turn about”. Lenin called it a “passage through dark waters”.

Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved to know the experience.  It’s the story of an escaped slave who kills her children to protect them from slavery.  On the face of it, her choice is irrational. Nothing is gained, you might say. Her kid is dead. Slavery remains.

But read it and you find out that “used-to-be-slave”, Sethe, is not irrational at all.  And she’s not morally irresponsible. This is clear when you know her. You know Sethe as a human being who knows herself as a human being. That’s what dignity is.

The question, then, is not: What does she gain? Instead, it is: How is death an option for someone who is rational, loves her children and wants above all to protect them?

The answer is dehumanization. Sethe’s good friend, Paul D, also a “used-to-be-slave”, says:

“More frightening that what Sethe did was what Sethe claimed”.

She claimed her humanity. It was frightening even to Paul D, who knew everything that could be known about slavery.  He’d been a slave. He’d lived it.

Wretched of the Earth is about that claim: to be human. Fanon said resistance, sometimes violent, can be an act of self-creation. Sartre said Europeans wouldn’t understand, at least not just by reading intellectually, and not easily. They didn’t need self-creation, or so they thought.

“What is gained?” is not always useful. It is not even the question we ask ourselves when faced with important life choices, according to economists. 4 It is a simplistic view of human reasoning that says that what matters is results, and all we need to properly evaluate such results is a lot of data.

It ignores what Ramzy Baroud calls “the epic struggle to feel human”. With his new book, The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press 2018), readers can “turn and turn about” to know the dignity that drives that epic struggle in Gaza, rationally, and will continue to do so.

Martí knew that struggle.  So did Fidel Castro. Fidel articulated it his entire life although some, even sympathetic to Cuba, didn’t notice. At least occasionally, more frightening than what Fidel did was what he claimed: that the poor matter, that the poor remember, that human beings “think and feel”.

Not everyone understood, even on the left, and even with piles of information. It’s one of those truths which, if we understand it fully, changes who we think we are, as human beings. It’s been the message of many philosophers – Martí, Che Guevara – who understood the Empire (and its allies)’s dehumanization. They’d lived it.

They knew the epic struggle. The Last Earth takes us there, again.

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Prof. Susan Babbitt teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston  Ont. She is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1. CBC FM1 Sunday Edition Sunday, May 27, 2018

2. “Preface”, Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1963)

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV1HwG1_phs

4. E.g. Pink, Dan (2010). The surprising truth about motivation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Featured image is from The Unz Review.

The Israeli blockade of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents from essential supplies of food, medicine, power and goods has now continued for 11 years! 

This blockade is illegal, inhuman and an atrocity against a civilian population, the likes of which has no parallel in modern history.  It is the deliberate repression, starvation and oppression of nearly two million civilians in an illegal attempt by the nuclear-armed state of Israel to effect a regime change under the pretext of arms control. 

The number of Palestinians in Israel, the Occupied Gaza Strip, Occupied East Jerusalem and the Occupied West Bank is now estimated at over 5.3 million, exceeding the Jewish population of 5.2 million.

Arabs and Jews, in number, are therefore approximately equal yet the state of Israel controls the vast majority of the land and the indigenous population, through military force and illegal occupation and settlement.

The UN Security Council has declared the occupation of Palestinian land with the settlement of 600,000+ Israeli citizens, to be illegal and a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions on Human Rights.

For more than 11 years the world has watched as nearly two million indigenous Palestinians are deprived of basic humanitarian help.  Virtually no electricity or power, insufficient food and clothes, restricted building materials, no employment, prohibited movement of people or goods, a blockade of the entire Mediterranean coast of Gaza by heavily armed Israeli forces intent on beating two million into submission.  All this in the full glare of the international media.

It is an insult to humanity. An insult to democracy. An insult to Judaism, Christianity, Islam and an affront to God and all decent, civilised people everywhere.

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

Featured image: A U.S. Army infantryman waits atop an M2 Bradley fighting vehicle for the start of a live fire training exercise at Presidenski Range in Trzebian, Poland, March 26, 2018. (Spc. Dustin Biven/Army)

Poland made the news this week for all the wrong reasons because of its offer to pay between $1,5-2 billion to host a permanent American base on its territory. It’s difficult to explain this as anything other than what it looks like, which is a vassal paying tribute to its lord, but there might be another reason behind this move as well. As counterintuitive as it may sound at first listen, this plan is also partially designed to aggravate Russian-Belarusian relations by provoking Moscow into putting heavy pressure on Minsk to coordinate a joint response, ideally one that the Kremlin would like to see result in the revival of the two CSTO mutual defense partners’ failed talks from a few years back to host a Russian airbase in the frontline state. 

Behind-The-Scenes Intrigue Of Russian-Belarusian Relations 

Those negotiations fell through for publicly unexplainable reasons that probably in hindsight have to do with Lukashenko’s ambition to “balance” between East and West, a thin tightrope that he’s been trying to walk for the past couple of years ever since the 2014 success of the US-backed urban terrorism spree commonly referred to as “EuroMaidan” in neighboring Ukraine. Since then, Belarus has become a lot bolder in asserting its interests vis-à-vis Russia, betting that it’s now become “too important to lose” for Moscow to continue “playing games with” at what its leadership believes to be at the expense of their independent national interests. Whether it’s over the failed talks to host a Russian airbase or continual trade disputes within the Eurasian Economic Union (EAU), Russian-Belarusian ties aren’t as perfect as their governments make them seem. 

Having recognized this “inconvenient fact”, they’re also nowhere close to horrible either, and Belarus is one of Russia’s actual allies in the sense of being doubly incorporated into two Moscow-led integration organizations, the CSTO and the EAU. This makes it obligatory, from an institutional-legal standpoint, for Belarus to support its Russian partner, though therein lies the core of their never-ending disagreements and Lukashenko’s power “balancing”, as he refuses to – as he sees it – “submit” to whatever the Kremlin tells him and instead is trying to gradually “diversify” his foreign policy by “opening up” to the West. It’s this ongoing transitional phase, coupled with the one-man leadership in Minsk, which makes Russian-Belarusian ties so sensitive because it means that Moscow’s junior partner is less prone to “do what he’s told” than before. 

Setting The Trap 

Reverting back to the lead-in topic at hand, Poland’s plans to permanently host a US base on its territory are a military-strategic provocation for Russia, and accordingly, should also be interpreted as such for the CSTO and its westernmost Belarusian member, too. The problem, though, is that Minsk – for whatever its public statements on the topic may be – probably doesn’t really see it that way because of the presumed series of “gentlemen’s agreements” that it’s reached with its newfound “Western partners”, which is why its Foreign Ministry said that it is not discussing the opening of a new Russian military base within its borders. It did, however, ambiguously leave this possibility open in the event that the US base is indeed built, but this might just be a “face-saving” signal of “friendship” to Russia than any serious intention. 

That said, the “knee-jerk” reaction that one would expect from Russia would be for it to utilize its CSTO mutual defense alliance with Belarus in doing exactly what Minsk said it’s not interested in, which is open up a base in the Polish-neighboring country just like it unsuccessfully tried to do a few years ago, and it’s precisely this scenario that Poland is counting on for several reasons. The first is that Warsaw knows that this move would reverse all of Minsk’s ”progress” with its “Western partners” and make the country more strategically dependent on Moscow, which is something that Lukashenko is trying to avoid and actually explains why he undertook this “gradual pivot” to begin with. Secondly, the concerted but clumsy exertion of Russian pressure on Belarus would likely have the opposite effect of what Moscow expects and could inadvertently advance Minsk’s strategic reorientation. 

Although it’s sometimes misleading to evaluate global affairs from a “zero-sum” perspective, in this instance it can be instructive if one takes stock of the situation in the former Soviet Union and concludes that Russia has “lost” Georgia, Ukraine, and recently, Armenia, with Belarus potentially “up for grabs” depending whether Russia’s response to the potential US base in Poland leads to it uncomfortably pressuring its ally to roll back its “Western pivot” out of the organizational solidarity that it’s obliged to practice. Chances are that Lukashenko would balk at this because he’s already concluded that his and his nation’s interests are best served through “balancing”, which is ironic because he’s essentially trying to “balance” the country that envisions its 21^st-century geostrategic role as being the supreme “balancing” force in Eurasia, but such are the curiosities of international politics at times. 

Concluding Thoughts

Right now it’s much too early to make any firm prognosis about the future of Russian-Belarusian relations in light of Poland’s plans to permanently host a US military base on its territory, but what can be understood at this moment is that ties aren’t as perfect as they may initially appear to be, though nor are they anywhere near as bad as their most diehard critics make them out to be either. In any case, it’s obvious that their relationship will be tested as Russia works out what it hopes will be a joint response together with tis Belarusian CSTO military ally, but there’s no telling whether Lukashenko will agree to whatever President Putin proposes given his recent predisposition for exploiting his country’s geography in order to “balance” East and West for ultimate gain. 

Russia will have to proceed very cautiously and be aware of the strategic trap that Poland has set for it in trying to make Moscow overreact and unintentionally chase away one of its last remaining post-Soviet allies. While the “knee-jerk” reaction to the provocative US-Polish move would be to reciprocate by opening up a Russian base in neighboring Belarus, decision makers should reflect on whether this is the wisest option in a practical sense, as it would risk straining the bilateral relationship with Minsk given the likelihood of Lukashenko rejecting it. 

Instead of going for a symbolic and highly publicized move that would play to the expectations of the global media and Moscow’s intended international audiences, it might be better to do away with the “muscle-flexing” and instead calmly announce that the new Kinzhal hypersonic missiles already deployed within the country’s borders will be aimed at this enemy base. This revolutionary technology is capable of more than making up for any perceived advantages that would derive from a base in Belarus because this munition could be shot at any adversary at a moment’s notice and strike it sooner than anything else could. It would of course be preferred if these weapons could be based in Belarus, but there’s nothing preventing them from being placed in Kaliningrad instead and even closer to Poland’s borders than expected. 

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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.

Nobody in the mainstream media ever asks Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or Finance Minister Bill Morneau if they’re perpetrating an unprecedented crime on future generations.

Even after the Liberal government announced its intention to pay a Texas oil company $4.5 billion for its Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion project, coverage focused on the financial aspects of the deal, not its moral component. 

So these are the typical issues addressed:

How much would Canadian taxpayers pay to complete construction?

Are there really buyers in Asia for the 890,000 barrels per day of expensively produced, energy-intensive diluted bitumen that will arrive in Burnaby from Alberta?

What does this mean for the people who work on the project?

How will Indigenous people react?

The most uncomfortable questions about greenhouse gases are almost never broached.

But what if, in fact, Trudeau, Morneau, and politicians like them around the world are committing a crime of immense proportions on the young and those yet to be born?

What if this can be demonstrated through the relationship between additional greenhouse gas emissions and more powerful and deadly hurricanes, longer and more devastating forest fire seasons, and unimaginable flooding of seaside and riverside cities around the world?

Would the mainstream media become an accessory to the crime through its acquiescence?

These are some of the issues raised in an extraordinary new book, Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival, by B.C. authors Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth.

“The global climate change emergency deserves and requires a rapid global emergency response,” Carter and Woodworth declare.

What’s more, they maintain that it would be criminally negligent to do otherwise. And they point out that information about the threat has been publicly available for nearly four decades.

“During the last ten UN climate conferences, the large GHG-polluting national governments not only committed the crime of omission by failing to protect their citizens from climate disruption: they blocked and delayed action needed to save vulnerable non-polluting nations from CO2-induced havoc already underway,” they write.

Carter is founder of the Climate Emergency Institute and was an expert reviewer of the Intergovernmental Panel of on Climate Change’s fifth and most frightening assessment in 2014. Woodworth is a retired B.C. government medical librarian.

They document the shocking rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which surpassed 410 parts per million in the spring of 2017.

“This trend in atmospheric CO2 concentration increase is on course with the worst case IPCC 2014 scenario…which leads to a best estimate warming from atmospheric GHGs of 4.3 °C by 2100,” Carter and Woodworth write. “However, the IPCC says it could be as high as 7.8 °C by 2100 when including uncertainties such as amplifying feedbacks. Large feedback emissions are certain at 3 °C.”

As well, they keep readers up to date on record sea-surface temperatures, the rapid decline in Arctic ice in the summer, and the disturbing impacts of deforestation on the Earth’s capacity to retain carbon.

Do politicians have blood on their hands?

The first half of the book is called “Crimes Against Life and Humanity”, laying out the legal case for state-corporate crime in willfully blocking actions to curb greenhouse gas emissions, which would save millions of lives.

In one chapter, the authors focus on media collusion, noting that not a single question about climate change was asked in six hours of 2016 presidential debates.

They also write:

“Big Carbon could never have been able to continue its polluting ways—long after the scientific community had reached consensus about the connection between fossil-fuel emissions, global warming, and climate change—without the assistance of the media.”

It’s all so familiar to climate-conscious Canadians who’ve paid close attention to national TV network and newspaper coverage of the bailout of Kinder Morgan.

And in Unprecedented Crime, the case is developed in a clear, logical way that not only appeals to people with a great deal of expertise about climate change, but also to average readers who may not grasp the magnitude of the challenge facing humanity.

“We have established that the decades-long blocking and lying about the scientific evidence on the dangers of human-caused global warming has been deliberate,” Carter and Woodworth write. “So the question arises, how many people have been, or will be, hurt or killed by climate change?”

The answer, according to a DARA International report, was 400,000 deaths each year, with that expected to rise to 600,000 by 2030 as a result of climate change.

The report notes that another 400,000 to five million per year could die annually from the health consequences of burning fossil fuels.

The importance of the “normalcy bias”

Deep in Unprecedented Crime, Carter and Woodworth delve into the “normalcy bias”.

This “belief that things will always, ultimately, return to normal” is common among those entering a disaster.

This has been reflected in Canadian media coverage of recent B.C. floods, which were described as a once-in-a-100-year or once-in-a-200-year event.

It was on display in the reports on last year’s forest fires in B.C., which shattered the record for hectares consumed. Again, this was treated as utterly extraordinary, and not something we may see again in our lifetimes, let alone every two or three years.

The forest-fire cycle has started earlier than normal this year, with evacuation orders and alerts being issued in the Southern Interior of B.C.

People in the Gulf states and the Caribbean are being warned to prepare for another brutal hurricane season.

This normalcy bias, insist Carter and Woodworth, “is obstructing our view of the gathering climate disaster”.

What’s most galling is that this unprecedented crime of jacking up fossil-fuel production is occurring when alternatives are at hand.

Seven chapters in Part II of the book, “Game Changers for Survival”, outline in detail what can be done to wean the world off fossil fuels.

The authors rely heavily on the Stanford Solutions Project, which has laid out a road map for making renewable energy a reality for everyone.

Carter and Woodworth favour carbon pricing over cap-and-trade of greenhouse gas emissions, describing the latter as “a subterfuge designed to promote fossil fuel viability”.

There’s also an intriguing section on a public-trust lawsuit, Juliana v. United States et al., which is being advanced by climate scientist James Hansen on behalf of his granddaughter.

Hansen wrote the foreword for the book, stating that it makes “an overwhelming case that the public, especially young people, are victims of ‘Unprecedented Crime’.”

“Fortunately, Carter and Woodworth do much more than expose the crimes against humanity—they also present actions that people can take to alleviate the consequences for today’s public and for future generations,” Hansen adds.

To that end, there’s a breathtaking array of technological solutions to the climate crisis outlined in the book.

They include a detailed explanation how improvements in battery technology is making it far easier to store renewable electricity.

And, of course, Unprecedented Crime documents phenomenal progress in the development of solar, wind, and geothermal energy.

The authors close by declaring that high-emitting national governments “are continuing to sacrifice our survival—and the survival of all future generations—for fossil fuel corporate profit that includes untold oil for military operations subsidized with our money”.

They say it’s time for ordinary people who love their children to demand a stop to this and embrace the solutions outlined in the book.

Are Trudeau and Morneau listening?

If not, they might one day find themselves before a court of law explaining their actions in front of a judge.

That’s one obvious takeaway from Unprecedented Crime, and one that’s particularly timely in light of the Kinder Morgan bailout.

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Title: Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival

Author: Peter D. Carter and Elizabeth Woodworth

ISBN: 978-0-9986947-3-3

Price: $27.95

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Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983-89 said in a speech that: “Most of the world is not in the EU and … most of these countries are doing better economically than most of the European Union’. The alternative to membership of the EU is simple, he says: it is ‘not being in the European Union’

That statement was a complete lie. There are only 16 countries in a world of 191 economies that has an annual GDP of over $1trillion and 67 per cent of all global economies generate less than one-third of what Britain does. The EU itself is the second largest economy in the world, behind America with one-third of the top 25 trading nations being in the EU.

About 43% of UK exports in goods and services went to other countries in the EU in 2016-17  – £240 billion out of £550 billion total exports. The EU is Britain’s biggest single customer.

So being outside the EU does come with risks. Those risks centre mainly around leaving the 27 nation trading bloc and then not having other trade agreements signed and ready. Of the 40 trade agreements Liam Fox has avidly expressed are all lining up to sign, not one – I repeat, not one has actually been signed.

As for trade agreements more widely, it is an open secret – albeit one that’s under-acknowledged by trade policy professionals – that signing a free trade agreement does next to nothing for a country’s headline GDP. For reference, the flagship EU-Canada free trade agreement is only predicted to increase European GDP by 0.03% – and even this is actually a rounding error. One has to be careful what is actually meant by these trade agreements in the first place.

In the meantime, Nigel Lawson has been comfortably sat in the House of Lords since 1992 now lives in the past. He constantly refers to his golden years under Thatcher by saying that it was “the reforms that restored the UK economy during the Thatcher administration.” That too is a lie. Thatcher brought us an ideology called neoliberal capitalism and today we are where we are because of it; the breakdown of community and civil society, the crumbling system of globalisation and the world order as we know it because its fundamental message of ‘trickle down economics’ was a falsehood – and everyone now knows it. Hence the rise of populist leaders, isolationism and protectionism.

The result of that is that Britain is to become fully ‘Americanised’ – and I can’t think of anything worse.

But more recently, this highly vocal and visible arch-Brexiteer who thinks all Briton’s should do as he says has moved to Gers, south-west France. How nice.

Lawson said in 2016 that leaving the EU would not affect Britons’ fundamental rights but it might mean “a little extra tiresome paperwork.”

Then, we find out that Lawson is applying for his carte de séjour, which guarantees those rights. In other words, Lawson is applying for residency in France. He is effectively abandoning Britain to ensure his fundamental rights of are protected.

Lawson has not lived in France for long – only several years but has stated that the EU is ‘profoundly’ undemocratic, suffers from ‘a bureaucratic surplus’ and has a ‘democratic deficit’ and that membership is an affront to self-government.

And yet, prefers to live there than Britain.

That’s strange don’t you think.

*

Featured image is from TruePublica.

Featured image: Thuy` Linh, 21 years old. Third generation Agent Orange victim genetic malformation, born without arms. Thuy` Linh finished high school 2 years ago. She applied to many universities to study but most of them didn’t accept her because of her missing arms. Her mother finally found a school willing to admit her. She finished her course in design a few months ago. Currently, she is looking for a suitable job. She went to Tû Dû Obstetrics Hospital when she was 3 years old and stayed until she was 18. HO CHI MINH CITY, VIET NAM, 2015. Photo credit: Mathieu Asselin

Many documentary photography projects attempt to reveal the structural violence that society has wrought. Monsanto: a photographic investigation by photographer Mathieu Asselin is more specific in its aim: it is a visual call for corporate responsibility. Drawing on the theme of temporality that pollution often creates, the photobook is a timeline that documents over 100 years of chemical harm. The book explains through word and image how the agrochemical company Monsanto has caused ecological, social, and health problems for countless people across the world.

“The book draws on a wide range of visual techniques to tell its dark story”

If Asselin’s visual project was an academic dissertation, it could be described as using a ‘mixed methods’ approach. I don’t make the comparison to scholarly work lightly: the photobook is an impressively well researched photo-thesis. It could also be compared to recent moves within academia towards ‘slow scholarship’: the photobook is the product of long term investigative documentary work. From studio photographs, to outside portraits, and from candid images, to landscape photographs, the book draws on a wide range of visual techniques to tell its dark story.

It is both ethnographic and archival in tone, weaving original images with repurposed corporate texts and pictures. As Colin Pantall rightly said: ‘it punches home a message by any means necessary’. The book is both sophisticated and thorough, providing a well timed antidote to the Greenwashing that chemical companies so often employ. It is no surprise that a company like Monsanto does everything it can to improve its reputation, as accusations of environmental injustice still abound: in June this year the company will go on trial for allegedly hiding evidence that their weed killing products cause cancer.

Monsanto: a photographic investigation extends the conventional borders of documentary photography, using documents, memorabilia, advertisements, and found objects in its narration of Monsanto. For example, the first ‘act’ of the book is dedicated to Monsanto adverts, which create a utopian image of the agrochemical company, which is later demolished through Asselin’s adroit visual material.

David Baker (65) at his brother Terry’s grave. Terry Baker died at the age of 16 from a brain tumor and lung cancer, caused by PCB exposure. The average level of PCB in Anniston is twenty-seven times higher than the national average. EDGEMONT CEMETERY, WEST ANNISTON, ALABAMA, 2012. Photo credit: Mathieu Asselin

The juxtaposition between bullish slogans of Monsanto’s advertisements and Asselin’s careful documentation of the visual damage the company has caused is striking. ‘Chemicals make you eat better’ reads one corporate message; ‘Chemicals help you to live longer’ reads another. As Environmental activist Mark Lynas writes in ‘Seeds of Science‘, Monsanto tried and failed ‘to reclaim the word ‘chemical’ from rising public distrust and recast it as something good’. Asselin’s photography project becomes an interrogation, of sorts, exposing these messages for what they are. In one such official document displayed in the book, a memo from 1969 reads ‘we can’t afford to lose one dollar of business‘, raising questions about the uneven price of life, and what Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee calls ‘necrocapitalism’.

The academic project ‘ToxicDocs‘, from Columbia University and the City University of New York, recently unearthed classified Monsanto documents that demonstrate the necrocapitalism of the chemical industry. Among the millions of previously classified documents on industrial poisons that ToxicDocs have disclosed, are hand written notes from a meeting at Monsanto on 25th August 1969. The document reveals how the chemical company planned to deal with the harm that their PCBs’ were causing to the environment. At the meeting, they brainstormed several alternative ways forward, including “1) Go out of business“, and “2) sell the hell out of them as long as we can and do nothing else“. Monsanto would continue to sell PCBs for almost a decade longer, until public pressure helped to ban the chemical in the late 1970s.

‘What do we tell our customers: The Big Question!’ Recently revealed documents from a Monsanto meeting in 1969. Documents found via the Toxic Docs project. (view the  original Monsanto documents here)

“The book reminded me of ‘multi-sited ethnography’ that was made popular by British Sociologist Michael Burowoy”

Thematically, Monsanto: a photographic investigation can be compared to Philip Jones Griffiths’ monochrome photography book ‘Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Vietnam’ (2003). Asselin, born two generations after Griffiths, not only exposes the intergenerational harm of this deadly defoliant chemical, but also traces the toxic reach of pollution back to the ‘unregulated paradise‘ of Alabama, USA. In this sense, the book reminded me of ‘multi-sited ethnography‘ that was made popular by British Sociologist Michael Burowoy, as well as the ‘follow the thing‘ approach forwarded by human geographer Ian Cook. The global connections and geographies of harm created by Monsanto are vividly portrayed in this photobook, in both photographic and extraphotographic ways.

In 1996, Monsanto® introduced its first GMO seeds. It ensured that farmers could not save the seeds and essentially lost the ownership of their seeds. Consequently, the power balance shifted away from the farmers to corporations who now own about 80 percent of GM corn and 93 percent of the GM soy market. Now farmers not only have to buy the seeds from the corporations year after year, but they are also forced to comply with the rules and regulations embedded in the contracts, which are designed to put the farmers at a juridical disadvantage. VAN BUREN, INDIANA, 2013. Photo credit: Mathieu Asselin

Like in other toxic geographies, at first glance the landscapes Asselin documents are not obviously contaminated, and the people he photographs are not always obviously affected. The photographs Asselin uses are shot in the places Monsanto touched with its social and chemical legacy, including Vietnam where many victims of Agent Orange still live, and the post-industrial landscapes of America, where other toxic legacies persist to this day. In the book we learn about Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) which Monsanto continued to manufacture for many years, despite knowing its health risks. We also learn how exposure to Agent Orange has been linked to myelomas, Parkinson’s disease, Hodgkin’s disease, lymphomas, Diabetes Type II, Leukemia, Amyloidosis, Prostate Cancer, and many other illnesses. In this photobook, Asselin exposes the chemical company to a visual scrutiny not normally given to powerful corporations like Monsanto.

“We are all living downstream of companies like Monsanto”

To quote the writer and photographer Lewis Bush: “It’s really, really rare that a photobook speaks to you in a way which feels important beyond the narrow realm of photography, and even does so in a way which feels desperately urgent.” (You can read his excellent review of the book and an interview with Mathieu Asselin here). Having spent the last few years doing ethnographic research with communities impacted by chemical pollution in ‘Cancer Alley’, Louisiana, I am also taken by the urgency of this subject. This photography project is not a work of historical retrospection, but an ongoing story that continues to impact the lives of many people around the world. We are all living downstream of companies such as Monsanto, and meticulously researched documentary work such as this photobook become important mechanisms to hold such industries accountable.

‘Monsanto: a photographic investigation’ has been awarded multiple photography prizes, including the Dummy Book Award Kassel 2016, the Aperture Foundation First Book Award in 2017, and was recently shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation 2018.

Mathieu Asselin is giving a talk about ‘Monsanto: a photographic investigation’ at Photobook Festival Kassel, Germany, on June 1st 2018: tickets here. You can follow Mathieu Asselin on twitter here. And find out more about his book here.

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Sources

Asselin, M., 2017. Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation, Verlag Kettler

Bobby Banerjee, S., 2008. Necrocapitalism. Organization Studies, 29(12), pp.1541-1563.

Cook, I., 2004. Follow the thing: Papaya. Antipode, 36(4), pp.642-664.

Griffiths, P.J., 2003. Agent Orange:” collateral Damage” in Viet Nam. Trolley

Lynas, M., 2018. Seeds of Science: Why We Got It So Wrong On GMOs. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Nixon, R., 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

Featured image: Silwan/City of David. Photo credit: Emek Shaveh.

This month, the Israeli minister of culture Miri Regev (MK Jewish Home) announced plans to funnel $17 million toward archaeological excavations in East Jerusalem.

Regev announced the project to commemorate the 1967 Israeli occupation of the holy city. Israel’s 1967 occupation and subsequent annexation of Jerusalem stands in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and UN Security Council resolutions 194, 181, 252, 476 and 478.

The goal of the excavations, according to a culture ministry statement quoted in Israeli media, is to “expose Jerusalem’s antiquities and…express the history of the Jewish people 3,000 years ago.” The grant also aims to “empower” Jerusalem as an “international center of religion, heritage, culture and tourism.”

The bulk of the funds will fuel excavations at the settlement archeology site known as the City of David, which is located in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, south of Al-Aqsa Mosque. The center sits on a confiscated Palestinian home and orchard. Elad’s excavations in and around the site have severely damaged nearby Palestinian residences. Israeli police and private security guards permanently monitor the site, leading to increased harassment and arrests of Palestinians. Speaking to the Times of Israel, vice president of the City of David Foundation said:

“[Regev’s] decision will enable the City of David National Park to double the number of those seeking to connect with the history of Jerusalem with their own eyes, to over one million annually.”

The entrance to the City of David settlement and archeological site. Photo credit: Emek Shaveh.

Although the City of David is part of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, it is administered by settler organization Elad, which seizes Palestinian property in Silwan to establish new settlements. The group effectively functions as an arm of the Israeli government, and the government permits Elad to conceal the names of its major donors. Israeli settlement watch group Peace Now reports that in the last two years, Elad has stolen ten Palestinian properties in Silwan, including three apartments in April 2018.

Regev’s pledge to expand the City of David’s activities supports government plans to destroy evidence of Palestinian history in the Old City, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah, the Mount of Olives, Ras al-Amud, Musrara and Mamilla and build tourist sites that peddle messianic justifications for Israeli colonization. This year, the government escalated its confiscation of Bab al-Rahmah Cemetery, a centuries-old Muslim cemetery outside of the Old City, in the name of incorporating it into the Jerusalem Walls National Park. In 2017, the Jerusalem municipality published a plan to confiscate 1,300 square meters of land next to a mosque in Ras al-Amud to build a visitor center for the Mount of Olives Jewish Cemetery. Perhaps the most well known example of Israeli destruction for the purposes of tourism is the building of Independence Park and the Museum of Tolerance in Mamilla. Both are located on what was once the Mamilla Cemetery, which, historian Rashid Khalidi has written “is reputed to have become the burial place of several of the Prophet Muhammad’s Companions who died during or after the nascent Muslim state’s military campaigns in the region.”

Construction at Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem, May 2014. Photo credit: Utilisateur:Djampa for Wikipedia Commons.

Israeli efforts to erase Palestinian landownership and history however are not limited to the aforementioned neighborhoods in Jerusalem. For years, the Israeli government has been confiscating lands in the Cremisan Valley to create the Emek Refaim Park, an Israeli National Park on the outskirts of Jerusalem that celebrates “historic agrarian landscapes” and “traditional culture.” Walaja, a village adjacent to the Cremisan Valley has been hit particularly hard by these confiscations and accompanying restrictions to Palestinian movement. Most recently, Israeli authorities built a new checkpoint to bar residents from accessing Wallaja’s historic spring so that Israelis can enjoy it as part of Emek Refaim Park.

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Corey Sherman is a teacher in Washington D.C. and a contributing editor to aicnews.org.

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US Opposes Protecting Gazans from Excessive Israeli Force

By Stephen Lendman, June 01, 2018

Since mid-2007, Gazans have been besieged under suffocating/illegal blockade – imposed for political reasons, unrelated to security, as Israel falsely claims.

Its action is one of countless examples of callous indifference to Palestinian lives, rights and welfare, treating them as viciously as Hitler mistreated Jews – slow-motion genocide its option over industrial scale ruthlessness, Gazans harmed most.

Freedom Flotilla Statement on Israeli Interception of Gaza Flotilla

By Freedom Flotilla Coalition, June 01, 2018

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) condemns Israel’s brutal act of state piracy in attacking the aptly named Hurriya (Liberty) vessel which attempted to leave the port of Gaza today filled with people needing urgent medical assistance as well as students and crew, as they attempted to peacefully make safe passage to Cyprus. This latest attempt to break the illegal blockade of Gaza continues the brave challenges during the Great March of Return, where more than 120 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli snipers and thousands severely injured.

Gaza Massacre Update: “Decent Humanity” Will Boycott Apartheid Israel and All Its Supporters

By Gideon Polya, June 01, 2018

The latest Israeli Gaza Massacre in which Apartheid Israeli soldiers shot and killed 116 unarmed Palestinian protesters and wounded 13,000, has divided the world into 2 camps, (1) the Good, those who have variously reacted with horror, condemnation and demands for action against the Israeli perpetrators, and (2) the Bad, those whose responses have been to support the perpetrators or have been otherwise deficient.

Crimes against Humanity and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

By Julian Rose, May 29, 2018

For decades Palestinians have lived on the edge of annihilation, their homeland steadily annexed until just a slither of the original remains. It’s a story that just won’t go away, even for those thousands of miles away, who try to cover their ears and eyes from the shame which has befallen the ruthless oppressor of this now tiny peninsular of land and its battle weary people.

With One Shot: One Kill of the Israeli Defense Narrative

By Phil Butler, May 27, 2018

Gaza is all in the news since protesters were fired upon by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from inside perimeter fence dividing peoples and ideas. As complex as the situation in Palestine is though, there are only four concrete sides to the crisis. Here are those four sides framed and simplified in the hopes that sanity and humaneness can prevail henceforth.

Blaming the Victims of Israel’s Gaza Massacre

By Gregory Shupak, May 20, 2018

On the 70th anniversary of Israel’s so-called “declaration of independence,” the United States opened its new embassy in Jerusalem—a city Israel claims as its own, despite what international law says on the matter—and Palestinians undertook unarmed protests in reaction to the move and as part of the Great Return March. Although to this point, the only Israeli casualty during the entire cycle of demonstrations has been one “lightly wounded” soldier, considerable space in coverage of the massacres is devoted to blaming Palestinians for their own slaughter.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

In early April, the Trump regime appeared heading toward trade war with China – a scheme aiming to harm Beijing economically, unrelated to producing more domestic jobs if pursued.

Fewer imports from China would increase them from other low-wage countries. US manufacturing jobs created are increasingly performed by robots in many cases.

Beijing wants cooperative political, economic and trade relations with Washington, unwilling to compromise its growth strategy.

Following May 17 and 18 trade talks in Washington, China expressed willingness to “significantly increase purchases of United States goods and services (to) help support growth and employment in the United States.”

At the same time, lead Beijing trade negotiator/Vice Premier Liu said it’ll take time to resolve differences between both countries. In 2017, China’s trade surplus with America was a record-high $375 billion.

Beijing agreed to increase purchases of US agricultural and energy products – details to be discussed in future talks.

Trade is reciprocal. China wants access to US high-tech products, a sticking point in bilateral relations, certain US products off-limits to Chinese buyers. Beijing wants this policy ended.

Both countries agreed to avoid a trade war. Washington proved countless times it can never be trusted, its promises most often proving hollow.

US-initiated trade war may be back on again. According to China’s Global Times (GT),

“(t)he Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would proceed with plans to impose a series of punitive trade-related measures aimed at China next month,” adding:

“The statement said the US would levy 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in imported Chinese goods, and will target items ‘containing industrially significant technology’ related to the ‘Made in China 2025’ program. The new tariffs will be announced June 15.”

The Trump regime also said it’ll restrict Chinese investment in America, along with limiting access to US technology by its companies and investors – restrictions to be announced June 30.

China responded to Trump’s about face, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying sharply saying

“(w)e urge the United States to keep its promise,” adding:

“When it comes to international relations, every time a country does an about face and contradicts itself, it’s another blow to, and a squandering of, its reputation.”

On Wednesday, US officials arrived in Beijing for more trade talks. China vowed to retaliate in kind if Trump follows through on his threat, GT warning Trump’s “trade renege could leave Washington dancing with itself.”

China is an economic powerhouse, a US strategic political, economic and military rival.

Along with possible US-initiated trade war, sanctions war could follow much like Washington’s policy against Russia – the unacceptable way it treats other sovereign independent states.

Separately, the Trump regime imposed tariffs on EU, Canadian and Mexican steel and aluminum – 25% on former products, 10% on latter ones, effective midnight May 31.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced them, saying

“(w)e look forward to continued negotiations, both with Canada and Mexico on the one hand, and with the European Commission on the other hand, because there are other issues that we also need to get resolved.”

Brussels pledged to retaliate with 25% tariffs on US motorcycles, jeans, cigarettes, bourbon whiskey, cranberry juice, peanut butter, and possibly other products.

Mexico said it’ll impose tariffs on US pork bellies, blueberries, apples, grapes, cheese products, various types of steel, and perhaps other products. Canada said it’ll “respond appropriately to defend jobs.”

Earlier, European Council President Donald Tusk said

Trump “made us realize that if you need a helping hand, (you’ll only) find one at the end of your arm” in dealing with his administration, adding:

“…Europe should be grateful for President Trump because thanks to him we have got rid of all illusions.”

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker called Trump’s action “a bad day for world trade,” saying

“counter-balancing measures (will be announced) in the coming hours.”

Trade wars are hugely counterproductive, assuring losers, not winners.

It’s unclear how things will develop in the weeks and months ahead – especially for the world economy if things go too far.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Since mid-2007, Gazans have been besieged under suffocating/illegal blockade – imposed for political reasons, unrelated to security, as Israel falsely claims.

Its action is one of countless examples of callous indifference to Palestinian lives, rights and welfare, treating them as viciously as Hitler mistreated Jews – slow-motion genocide its option over industrial scale ruthlessness, Gazans harmed most.

The Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement calls Gaza’s closure “politically driven. (D)egradation of its economy and civilian infrastructure, including its hospitals, are not an unforeseen natural disaster.”

It’s “the direct (result) of closure. For Gaza, time does not heal all. It only makes things worse” – its two million population victimized by what Edward Said called “refined (Israeli) viciousness.”

Israeli control of Gaza is absolute – “in the throes of a manmade humanitarian disaster,” B’Tselem explained.

Suffocating conditions made the Strip unlivable for its people – grossly abused, impoverished, suffering under concentration camp conditions, imposed by a vicious occupier, the world community failing to hold it accountable.

Israel’s 2005 Disengagement Plan was subterfuge. Gaza remains occupied, Israel exerting total control over its borders, offshore waters and airspace.

All movement of people and goods in and out of the Strip is totally controlled, Rafah crossing under Egyptian control, most often closed. Cairo and Tel Aviv cooperate in persecuting long-suffering Gazans.

Maintaining separation between Gaza and the West Bank is longstanding Israeli policy – movement between them subject to extremely hard to get permit permission, foreign travel mostly banned.

According to Gisha obtained document through a Freedom of Information petition, Israel imposed a “deliberate reductive policy” on the Strip, mandating minimal caloric intake, barely enough for survival only.

One Israeli official earlier called it putting Gazans on a diet, stopping short of starvation, fostering malnutrition, leaving residents vulnerable to otherwise preventable illnesses and diseases.

Years of blockade took a terrible toll on Gaza’s healthcare system – near collapse for lack of equipment in good working order, shortages of everything including essential drugs, limited power availability, and harsh restrictions on travel outside the Strip for medical treatment not available internally.

Adequate care for the seriously wounded and ill is virtually impossible to get for most Gazans, doctors severely limited in what they’re able to do. Badly wounded limbs are lost to amputations for lack of other options.

Gaza’s economy is in a state of collapse, 80% of its residents dependent on inadequate amounts of humanitarian aid. Food insecurity affects most Gazans.

Nearly all Strip water is contaminated and unpotable. Residents able to afford it buy expensive desalinated water – much of it contaminated. Electricity is available only a few hours daily.

Hospitals rely on generators, forced to offer limited services for shortages of everything. Sewage treatment facilities can’t operate properly, partially and untreated sewage pumped into offshore waters, turning them into a toxic stew.

Blockade prevents adequate construction for lack of enough building materials. Most everything Israel considers possibly “dual use” is hard or impossible to get.

Tens of thousands remain homeless because of three preemptive Israeli wars of aggression since December 2008.

Israel’s buffer zone along its border put vital farmland off-limits. Live fire policy endangers anyone entering or near the zone.

Israel is unaccountable for high crimes throughout the Territories too egregious to ignore, ruthlessness harming Gazans most of all.

On Friday, a Kuwait-drafted Security Council resolution to be voted on calls for protecting Gazans from Israeli high crimes, citing “excessive use of force” against (peaceful) demonstrators by IDF soldiers.

Washington intends vetoing it. Neocon extremist US UN envoy Nikki Haley falsely called it “grossly one-sided…only serv(ing) to undermine ongoing efforts toward peace” – bald-faced lies!

The US and Israel deplore peace and stability, waging endless undeclared wars of aggression, civilians in affected theaters harmed most – Gazans viciously abused for 11 years under suffocating blockade conditions.

According to PA UN envoy Riyad Mansour, Washington intends vetoing the Kuwaiti draft resolution unless it’s unacceptably amended.

Instead of even minimal Israeli accountability for horrendous high crimes, the Trump regime wants pro-Western UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to submit undefined “recommendations” on Gaza within 60 days.

As long as Israel has firm US support, it’ll remain unaccountable for the highest of high crimes too serious to ignore.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) condemns Israel’s brutal act of state piracy in attacking the aptly named Hurriya (Liberty) vessel which attempted to leave the port of Gaza today filled with people needing urgent medical assistance as well as students and crew, as they attempted to peacefully make safe passage to Cyprus. This latest attempt to break the illegal blockade of Gaza continues the brave challenges during the Great March of Return, where more than 120 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli snipers and thousands severely injured.

Communication was lost with the Gaza Flotilla vessel around 3pm local time today, after it was reported to have been surrounded by warships of the Israeli Occupation Forces about nine nautical miles off the coast of Gaza. Organisers hold Israel responsible for the safety and well-being of everyone on board, including those people suffering from pre-existing serious injuries who were seeking medical treatment abroad. Since March 30, 2018, when Palestinians in Gaza began the Great Return March, the UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that medical facilities in Gaza, already overstrained by the longstanding shortages of medical supplies, electricity and fuel, are struggling to cope with the overwhelming number of casualties.

We remind governments of the world and international organizations that this Israeli attack at just nine nautical miles from the Palestinian coast at Gaza is well within the 20 nautical mile marine zone which Palestinians are supposed to be guaranteed under international agreements, as well as within the 12 nautical miles to which all coastal peoples are legally entitled. Given the declared itinerary of Hurriya (Liberty), from Palestinian territorial waters through international waters to Cyprus, there can be no possible ‘military’ or ‘security’ justification for this Israeli attack. Like our Freedom Flotilla vessels that have been violently seized over the last eight years, their course was never towards Israel nor towards Israeli waters: they posed no threat to anyone. Like Israel’s daily armed attacks on Palestinian fishing boats and the arbitrary restrictions on fishing areas off Gaza, today’s attack is a clear violation of international law and of Israel’s obligations under the Geneva Convention as the occupying power.

Just as the Great March of Return is an affirmation of Palestinians freedom of movement back to the communities they were ethnically cleansed from in 1947 and 1948, today’s Gaza Flotilla is a powerful affirmation of freedom of movement that is directed towards the outside world, not towards lands currently occupied by Israel. We condemn all violations of freedom of movement, including the “marine barrier” that Israel has recently been reported to be constructing.

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms the rights of every person to move freely around their own country as well as the right to leave and return to their country. We stand with Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, until they achieve full recognition and protection of their rights, including full freedom of movement.

We are grateful for the amazing work of everyone who reported live on today’s events, including journalists from one of our Palestinian partners in Gaza, We Are Not Numbers who have been providing video and statements from the port of Gaza and from on the water. We have the deepest respect for your courageous reporting and we are honoured to help bring Palestinian voices like yours to the world.

This opens an unprecedented crisis in post-WWII political history in Italy. A crisis that can be defined as “European”, because it says something unequivocal: that the majority of the Italian electorate deems it necessary to change the politics of Europe, to change Europe as it is. Stop. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

And the outcome – provisional, completely provisional – says that the Italian ruling class, the one that led the country to the current crisis, the public debt over € 2.300 billion, six million poor families, youth unemployment to 50 % in the south, the disaster of social services, wild privatization, stagnation, generalized precariousness, not only does not intend to leave, but relies on the blackmail of the “markets” and claims that it has the best of the popular vote.

Interpreter of this “strange idea” was the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, who explicitly explained his thoughts. Violating article 1 of the Constitution, on which he swore, that sounds unequivocal:

“Sovereignty belongs to the people”.

The “excuse” choice was the nomination of Paolo Savona as minister of Economy. The professor was “accused” by Mattarella to want the Euro exit. The accusation was totally unfounded, as he informed interested parties with a statement by the unequivocal words:

“I just fight for a stronger and juster Europe”.

It was not enough. Mattarella did not make any secret of his alarmist and alarmed thoughts: a government with this minister would still be a negative sign for Europe. And therefore, better prevent the formation of the government that run this risk.

He had perhaps foreseen that the leader of the League, Matteo Salvini, and the leader of the 5 Stars, Luigi Di Maio, would have surrendered, taking away from Paolo Savona and falling back on a different solution. But, yesterday afternoon, the two leaders of the new majority – after unpublished, dramatic and unexpected meetings with the President – answered spades:

“we cannot and we do not want to give up to requests that, obviously, come from outside the country. A majority exists, the premier in charge, Giuseppe Conte, has the list of ministers ready, the President does not have the powers to reject the “government of change”.

And Mattarella has crossed the Rubicon deciding that the “markets” count more than people. And he did it with a further challenge, announcing an immediate plan, exclusively his own, for a government of the President. A few hours after the announcement that today he would meet Sergio Cottarelli, perhaps to entrust him with an assignment. But the numbers say that even if Cottarelli (former minister for the spending review of Letta government) were to be presented to the Chambers, he would not receive a majority.

But this would allow Mattarella to keep him in charge, for current affairs and to approve, with decree (another serious irregularity) a new electoral law. These are just hypotheses, for the moment, but all are signs of a clash that opposes the outgoing political èlite to the popular vote on March 4th. And that is a prelude to a situation of generalized political confrontation.

The response of M5 Stars was immediately furious, as was that of Salvini for League: proposal to launch the procedure of Impeachment for the attack on the Constitution. Lega, in the moment we are writing, is not yet clearly pronounced. Salvini invited his own to calm. Evidently thinking that, in the event of early elections, its success will nevertheless be overflowing. But even the small right-wing coalition Fratelli d’Italia immediately announced that it would support the impeachment.

If these positions were consolidated, there would be the numbers for the impeachment in the two assembled chambers. And, for Mattarella, the situation would become incandescent. There were only two precedents of this kind: the first against the then President Leone, the other against Francesco Cossiga. In both cases the impeachment did not take place because both of them resigned before the vote. But in this case it will not be so easy to evade by the responsibility.

In any case, it will not be a short story. Much has yet to happen: what government, what duration, with what tasks. Furthermore: what will be the reactions of so-called “markets”, of Germany, of France, of the European Central Bank. Finally when and if there will be new elections.

On the President’s side there is majority of great mass media, which justify and defend him. There is Democratic Party of Matteo Renzi. And there is Berlusconi too. Which means that the right alliance is definitely over. Berlusconi extends his hand to the Democratic Party, to save himself. It is clear that, in case of election, both are even more at risk than they have shown their double electoral disaster on 4 March. And, in any case, they do not have the numbers to resist the popular wave against them.

The only weapon: the threat of sanctions from Brussels. But beware: Italy is one of the founders of the European Union. The signal that comes from Rome says that crisis is continental. It will not be easy to defuse it.

The latest Israeli Gaza Massacre in which Apartheid Israeli soldiers shot and killed 116 unarmed Palestinian protesters and wounded 13,000, has divided the world into 2 camps, (1) the Good,those who have variously reacted with horror, condemnation and demands for action against the Israeli perpetrators, and (2) the Bad, those whose responses have been to support the perpetrators or have been otherwise deficient. Decent anti-racist people around the world have been galvanized by these latest Gaza Massacres to urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters after the example of the ultimately successful Boycotts and Sanctions against Apartheid South Africa and its supporters  after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in which 69 unarmed African protesters were killed and 220 wounded by Apartheid South African police.

Before presenting an updated, carefully-documented and alphabetically-organized compendium of such humane Good responses and of heartless or deficient Bad responses it is important to summarize the background to the latest Israeli Gaza Massacre .

1. Palestinian Genocide. In Palestine in 1880 there were about 500,000 Arab Palestinians and about 25,000 Jews (half of the latter being immigrants). Genocidally racist  Zionists have been responsible  for a Palestinian Genocide involving successive mass expulsions (800,000 in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) and 400,000 in the 1967 Naksa (Setback) , ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine, and in the century since the British invasion of Palestine about 2.3  million Palestinian deaths from violence (0.1 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation  (2.2 million) [1-16]. Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group;  b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [17]. Genocidal “intent” is established by sustained ethnic cleansing action and more rarely by confession.  However the genocidal Zionists established “intent” by a remorseless, 100 year and continuing Palestinian Genocide and numerous statements of genocidal  intent from the Zionist leadership from racist psychopath Theodor Herzl to serial war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu [13, 14]. As estimated from under-5 infant mortality data, presently 4,200 Occupied Palestinians die avoidably from imposed deprivation  each year (2,900 in the Gaza Concentration Camp and 1,300 in West Bank ghettoes) [16], and an average of  about 550  are killed violently each year by racist Zionists [15]. There are 7 million Exiled Indigenous Palestinians who are forbidden to step foot in their own country. There are presently about 65 million refugees in the world of which half are Muslims and 7 million are Palestinians.

2. Poverty kills Palestinians. Poverty kills and Israeli Apartheid entrenches inequality and poverty in an ongoing Palestinian Genocide and a continuing war criminal Occupation. The per capita GDP for the West Bank and Gaza is $1,924 and $876, respectively, as compared to $39,000 for Apartheid Israel [18, 19]. The populations of the West Bank and the Gaza Concentration Camp are 3 million and 2 million, respectively, and thus the GDP of the West Bank and Gaza are  $5.772 billion and $1.752 billion, respectively, as compared to the GDP of Apartheid Israel  (population 8.8 million) of $342 billion [20]. Let W = annual West Bank avoidable deaths and let G = annual Gaza avoidable deaths so that W + G = 4,200. Now avoidable deaths are inversely proportional to per capita income and accordingly W/G = 876/1,924 and thus W= 876G/1,924 ; 876G/1,924 + G = 4,200 ;  876G + 1,924G = 4,200 x 1,924; 2,800G = 8,080, 800; and thus G = 2,886 and W = 1,314.

3. Apartheid Israel entrenches Palestinian poverty. The State of Israel has a population of approximately 8.8 million inhabitants as of first half-2018. Some 74.5% percent are Jews of all backgrounds (about 6.56 million), 20.9% are Arab of any religion other than Jewish (about 1.84 million), and the remaining 4.6% are non-Jewish and non-Arab (about 0.40 million) [20]. Apartheid Israel has a further 5 million Occupied Indigenous Palestinian subjects including 3 million confined to West Bank ghettoes and 2 million imprisoned in the Gaza Concentration Camp. A further 7 million Exiled Palestinians are excluded from stepping foot in Palestine on pain of death.  The 6.84 million Indigenous Palestinian subjects of Apartheid Israel represent 50% of the subjects of Apartheid Israel whereas Jewish Israelis represent 47% of the subjects.  However 74% of the Indigenous Palestinian subjects of Apartheid Israel have zero human rights (as defined by the Universal Charter of human rights [5]) and in particular are excluded from voting from the government ruling them i.e. they are subject to egregious Apartheid, noting that Apartheid is a crime against Humanity according to the UN and the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the crime of Apartheid [21]

4. Apartheid Israel egregiously violates International Law. Through imposed deprivation, each year Apartheid Israel passively murders about 2,700 under-5 year old Palestinian  infants and passively murders 4,200 Occupied Palestinians in general who die avoidably from deprivation under Israeli Apartheid each year [16]. There is an approximately 10 year life expectancy gap between Occupied Palestinians and Israelis [1, 6], this grossly violating Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War that demand that an Occupier must provide life-sustaining food and medical services to the Occupied “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”  [22]. In its genocidal treatment of the Palestinians, US-, UK-, Canada-, France- and Australia-backed Apartheid Israel ignores numerous UN General Assembly Resolutions and UN Security Council Resolutions, the UN Genocide Convention, the Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rights of the Child Convention, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and many other aspects of International Law [17, 18, 22-27]. In particular, the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (unanimously passed with Obama US abstaining but rejected by Apartheid Israel,  Trump America and US lackey Australia) stated that Israel’s settlements have no legal validity, and constitute flagrant violations of international law [28-30].

5. Reduction ad absurdum for occupied Palestinian Human Rights – let a civilized neutral country rule the Occupied Palestinians. The fundamental issue is Palestinian Human Rights that for 50-70 years have been comprehensively abrogated by an occupying rogue state, namely nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel. Full human rights as set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [26] can be very simply restored to the  Occupied Palestinians if the UN Security Council orders  that a UN-funded total military/police  control of  the Occupied Palestinian Territories is to be run by a suitable Occupying country that is a democracy and has absolutely no record of human rights abuse,  invasion of other countries or military alliances with such countries (e.g. some candidates  from West to East could be Guyana, Ireland, Mauritius, Nepal, and Timor L’Este). This arrangement would be in effective perpetuity under International Law and would not abrogate Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states “(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality”. Indeed the 7 million Exiled Palestinians and 5 million Occupied Palestinians  abusively confined to the Gaza Concentration Camp or to West Bank ghettoes still have their Palestinian nationality as legally conceded by the UN recognition of the State of Palestine. The Occupied Palestinians would remain “Occupied” in perpetuity but would regain all Human Rights and administration of all their affairs – except for benign foreign military occupation of their land.  If the Zionist-subverted US were to veto such as UNSC Resolution then it would be insisting (as it presently does de facto) on continuing abrogation of all Palestinian Human Rights under neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and would merit (as it presently does) utter condemnation and Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) by an indignant  international community.

6. Humane Unitary State solution. The Humanity-threatening awfulness of the Occupied Palestinians’ egregious and deadly poverty has been utterly avoidable. Decent Humanity demands all human rights for the Palestinians and a generous and genuine movement to maximize health, life expectancy, happiness, opportunity, and dignity for these sorely oppressed people.  The “2-State Solution” for Palestine has been a dishonest, disingenuous Western excuse for inaction and is now dead because of the ethnic cleansing of 90% of the land of Palestine. However, a peaceful , humane solution informed by the post-Apartheid South African experience is for a Unitary State in Palestine with return of all refugees, zero tolerance for racism, equal rights for all, all human rights for all, one-person-one-vote, justice, goodwill, reconciliation, airport-level security, nuclear weapons removal, internationally-guaranteed national security initially based on the present armed forces, and untrammelled access for all citizens to all of the Holy Land. It can and should happen tomorrow – but won’t because of the racist intransigence of US-, UK-, Canada- , Australia-, US Alliance- and EU-backed Apartheid Israel.

7. Repeated Gaza Massacres, the Palestinian Holocaust and the Palestinian Genocide.   These latest Gaza Massacres (116 unarmed protesters killed and 13,000 wounded by the neo-Nazi Israelis of whom one soldier was slightly injured by a rock) were preceded by even worse Gaza Massacres. In the 2008-2009 Gaza War (called Operation Cast Lead by the Israelis) about 1,400 Palestinians were killed and 5,300 were wounded. 13 Israelis were killed, this including 10 from friendly fire and 3 civilians. In 2012 in the 1-week Israeli Operation Pillar of Defense, 220 Palestinians were killed, half civilians, and 1,000 wounded, as compared to 2 Israeli soldiers killed and 20 wounded). In the 2014 Gaza Massacre (called Operation Protective Edge by the Israelis) 2,300 Palestinians were killed (including about 1,500 civilians) and 10,600 were wounded.  73 Israelis (66 of them soldiers) were killed [31-34]. Only 34 Israelis have ever been killed by Gaza rockets [35].

It gets worse. Avoidable Palestinian deaths from deprivation  since the British invasion of Palestine in WW1 total 2.2 million, the breakdown being 0.1 million in the WW1 Palestinian Famine [36-38]; 0.65 million Palestinian avoidable deaths in 1918-1948, assuming an average Palestinian population in this period of 0.9 million and an avoidable death rate of 24 per thousand, that obtaining  in British-ruled India in 1940-1947 [39];  1.35 million avoidable non-Israeli Palestinian deaths  from deprivation in 1950-2005) [16];  and 0.1 million avoidable non-Israeli Palestinian deaths  from deprivation in 2005-2018 (including  both Exiled and Occupied Palestinians) [16, 40]. In addition a further 0.1 million Palestinians have been violently killed by the British and Zionists in the ongoing Palestinian Genocide [1]. The ongoing Palestinian Genocide has been associated with 8 million refugees and 2.3 million Palestinian deaths from violence (0.1 million) or from imposed deprivation (2.2 million), a Palestinian Holocaust.

The Palestinian Holocaust and Palestinian Genocide (2.3 million killed) must be compared to the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed by the Nazis through violence or imposed deprivation)  [16, 41, 42].  Just as the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed) was part of a WW2 European Holocaust  (30 million Slavs, Jews and Roma killed by the German Nazis ) [16] and a bigger still WW2 Holocaust that also included the WW2 Chinese Holocaust  (35-40 million Chinese killed under the Japanese in 1937-1945) [16, 43, 44] and the WW2 Indian Holocaust (6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by the British with Australian  complicity) [45-53], so the  Palestinian Holocaust (2.3 million premature deaths) is part of a 21st century Zionist-promoted, US Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide in which 32 million Muslims have been killed by violence (5 million) or imposed deprivation  (28 million) in 20 countries invaded by US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [54, 55].

8. Disproportionality – comparing Palestinian/Zionist and Enemy subject/Nazi German military death ratios. The obscene disproportionality of 100,000 Palestinians killed violently by the British or Zionists since WW1 [1, 56] as compared to 4,000 Zionists killed by Palestinians in the same period [57-59] gives a Palestinian/Zionist violent death ratio of 100,000/4,000 = 25. By way of comparison with Apartheid Israel, the blood-soaked German Nazi leader Adolph Hitler recommended an enemy partisan/German military reprisal death ratio of 10. Thus  in 1995 Nazi SS Captain Erich Priebke was extradited from Argentina to Italy to face a war crimes trial over the March 24, 1944 execution of 335 Italian men and boys (about 75 of them Jewish) at the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome. The Ardeatine Massacre and an enemy partisan/German military reprisal death ratio of 10 had been ordered by arch-terrorist Adolph Hitler in retaliation for the killing of 33 German soldiers by Italian partisans the previous day [15, 60]. However if one includes Palestinian avoidable deaths from deprivation since the WW1 British invasion of Palestine then the Palestinian /Zionist death ratio becomes 2,300,000/4,000 = 575 as compared to Nazi leader Hitler’s advocated and executed death ratio of 10. Nazi is as Nazi does.

9. Gaza Massacres, Sharpeville Massacre and Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its supporters.  In the notorious 1960 Sharpeville Massacre,  Apartheid South African police shot dead 69 unarmed African protesters and wounded 220 This was rightly condemned throughout the world and gave rise to rigorous, comprehensive, world-wide Sanctions and Boycotts against US-, UK- , Australia- and Apartheid Israel-backed Apartheid South Africa that were ultimately successful in ending the evil of Apartheid in South Africa [61]. Pro-Apartheid Trump America and US lackey Australia merit international Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as the only countries to vote against the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution to formally investigate the latest Israeli Gaza Massacres in which Apartheid Israeli soldiers have shot and killed 116unarmed Palestinian  protestors and injured about 13,000. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded and no Palestinians protestors penetrated the barbed wire surrounding the Gaza Concentration Camp. Just as a galvanized world successfully boycotted Apartheid South Africa  after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre (69 unarmed African protestors killed and 220 wounded), so the world must respond to the latest Gaza Massacres  with Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, companies, corporations and countries supporting this genocidally racist obscenity [62].
10. Set out below are updated, initial  global responses to the latest Gaza Massacres that fall into 2 categories, (A) Good, humane responses – an honour roll  of decent Humanity, and (B) Bad, offensive or deficient response to the US Jerusalem move and the latest Gaza Massacres – a  compendium of shameful complicity.

(A) Good, humane responses – an honour roll  of decent Humanity.

Abdel-Fattah (Australia). Randa Abdel-Fattah (Muslim Palestinian Australian lawyer, sociologist, academic, writer, author and activist):

“After seventy years, I’m done trying to persuade people of our cause. It needs no defence, no humanisation, no legitimising. My words are no longer an argument. We won the argument at Deir Yassin, in the UNRWA refugee camps, in the buried villages, stateless generations, the billions of Western dollars cashing up what the UN, South African diplomats and former anti-apartheid activists – including Jews – have described as an “apartheid state,” the live bullets at protestors in Gaza… They kill Palestinians with bullets, missiles and bombs. But they kill many more slowly, quietly, without a trace. What is the hashtag for death by occupation?… We start to speak, to write, and we do not know when or how to stop because it is unending. The Nakba is not an anniversary, it is repeated every day across the West Bank, Gaza, Israel, the refugee camps, in the diaspora. Seventy years of bearing witness. Seventy years of millions of testimonies. We write and we speak because it is all we have left”  and “I think it’s important to put this into context if we’re really to make sense of this conflict. They are protesting a brutal siege. They are an open-air prison – the largest concentration camp in the world, as it has been described by a prominent Israeli sociologist. They are about 1.8 million people in a size of about 355 square kilometres. There’s about 41km by 10-12km. They have a blockade for the last 11 years. Israel described it as economic warfare, where they were calculating the number of calories that Palestinians could live under, just short of starvation. They have a population of 75% under the age of 25. 51% of those are children. 97% of the water is poisonous. It is undrinkable. And why is that? Because Israel denied them a water desalination plant and bombed their water treatment facility in the 2008 and 2009 siege. It is an area that is trying to send a message to the world that, after 11 years of being besieged, of being traumatised, of having no sense of dignity or hope and being trapped – they’re not even allowed to leave – they’re trying to tell the world, “Wake up. It’s been 11 years now. What more do we have to do for you to take notice?” And they did it in a non-violent protest. And what were they met with? …  They were met with live fire by snipers… What would you have the Palestinians do? They… What broke me about this protest is not that they were resisting Israel. It’s not that they were sending a message to Israel. They were sending a message to the world. “This is our cage. We’re rattling this cage. Help us, because we are besieged and no-one is coming to our aid.” So that’s what, for me, is the message here. Listen to Palestinians.” (Randa Abdel-Fattah, “Living the Nakba: testimonies of trauma, loss, rage and hope”, ABC, 10 May 2018; ABC Q&A, “Weddings, Gaza and losing faith”, 21 May 2018.)

Akleh (US). Dr Elias Akleh (an Arab Palestinian American whose family was evicted from Haifa in the 1948 Nakba and evicted from the West Bank in the 1967 Naksa) on the latest Gaza Massacres:

“Israel’s history demonstrates clearly that Israel is a perpetual warmongering terrorist state since its illegal inception. Through an elitist, supremacist, racist and genocidal  path a majority of world Jewry had been brainwashed to adopt the terrorist Zionist ideology. This ideology had led Jewish terrorist groups to perpetrate hundreds of genocidal crimes against peaceful Palestinian villagers, totally wiping their towns off the world map, ethnically cleansing 800,000 Palestinians out of their homeland and establishing the terrorist state of Israel, that has, and is still violating hundreds of UNSC resolutions, waging wars of terrorism and aggression against its Arab neighbors, and is perpetrating war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinian civilians, last of which was the deliberate murder of 63 civilian peaceful Palestinian demonstrators and the severe wounding of 3000 others in mere one day of Monday May 14th… Since the beginning of the March of Return, March 30th, until today Israeli army with 100 snipers on Gaza border had intentionally and deliberately murdered 116 peacefully demonstrating Palestinians and wounded more than 12,000 others including press reporters and medics. They have used tear and chemical gas, rubber coated bullets, and exploding hollow-pointed bullets to perpetrate yet a new massacre against Palestinians. This massacre reflects the terrorist nature of Israel. Israel was founded on terror and genocide against Arabs especially against Palestinians.” ( Elias Akleh, “With Israel peace has no chance”, Countercurrents, 21 May 2018.)

Albanese (Australia). Anthony Albanese (leading Australian Labor Opposition figure and Shadow Minister for Transport and Infrastructure) criticizing the Australian “No” vote against UN Human Rights Council  investigation of the Gaza Killings:

“International law requires a proportionate response, and those people who have guns on one side and, on the other side has rocks, the people with guns have a responsibility to act in a way which is proportionate and people have seen this acted out on their television screen in the last week. Certainly, I think the government needs to explain why it has opposed this independent investigation.” (Amy Remeikis, “Albanese demands explanation why Australia voted against Gaza inquiry”, The Guardian, 20 May 2018.)

Al Hussein (Jordan).  Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) in a speech to the Special Session of the Human Rights Council (18 May 2018) :

“Appalling recent events in Gaza have called this Council into Special Session. Since the protests began on 30 March, 87 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli security forces in the context of the demonstrations, including 12 children; 29 others, including three children, were killed in other circumstances. And over 12,000 people have been injured, more than 3,500 of them by live ammunition. The violence reached a peak on Monday 14 May, when 43 demonstrators were killed by Israeli forces – and the number sadly continues to climb, as some of the 1,360 demonstrators injured with live ammunition that day succumb to their wounds. These people, many of whom were completely unarmed, were shot in the back, in the chest, in the head and limbs with live ammunition, as well as rubber-coated steel bullets and tear-gas canisters. Israeli forces also killed a further 17 Palestinians outside the context of the five demonstration hot spots. Together, this figure of 60 is the highest one-day death toll in Gaza since the 2014 hostilities… on the Israeli side, one soldier was reportedly wounded, slightly, by a stone… Israel, as an occupying power under international law, is obligated to protect the population of Gaza and ensure their welfare. But they are, in essence, caged in a toxic slum from birth to death; deprived of dignity; dehumanised by the Israeli authorities to such a point it appears officials do not even consider that these men and women have a right, as well as every reason, to protest.” (Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, “Special Session of the Human Rights Council on the deteriorating human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. Statement by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein”, UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 18 May 2018.)

Amnesty International (International NGO). Amnesty International:

“We are witnessing an abhorrent violation of Int law and human rights. 38 confirmed dead, including children/minors, with close to 2000 people injured in Gaza. Many are reporting injuries to the head and chest. Over 500 injured with live ammunition. This horror must end now” and “ Amnesty International is dismayed and alarmed at the mass killings and injuries of Palestinians in the context of the “Great March of Return” protests in the Gaza Strip. In their response to these protests, since 30 March, Israeli forces have killed at least 102 Palestinians, including at least 12 children, two journalists and one paramedic. As many as 60 people died in one day alone, on 14 May, during protests commemorating 70 years of Palestinian displacement and dispossession. Eyewitness testimonies, and video and photographic evidence suggest that many were deliberately killed or injured, while posing no imminent threat to Israeli soldiers and snipers. Israeli forces have used high-velocity military weapons and ammunitions to disperse protesters, injuring approximately 3,600 Palestinians, including men, women and children – a shocking and appalling number. Many who have not died have suffered life-changing injuries, and will likely face further complications, infections and some form of physical disability. Others, including health workers treating the injured, have suffered tear gas inhalation, while ambulances have been partially damaged. Hospitals are struggling to cope with the volume of serious injuries without adequate resources and chronic shortages of fuel, electricity and medical supplies caused mainly by Israel’s illegal blockade” (Amnesty International, Amnesty Press, Twitter, 14 May 2018; Amnesty International: “Amnesty International public statement. Israel/OPT: International Commission of Inquiry needed to ensure accountability for Israel’s deplorable use of excessive force in response to protests”, 18 May 2018. )

Anti-racist Jewish, Indigenous & Palestinian activist writers (Australia).  Michael Brull (anti-racist Jewish Australian writer), Amy McQuire (Darumbal Indigenous Australian and South Sea Islander journalist), Nayuka Gorrie(Kurnai/Gunai, Gunditjmara, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta Indigenous Australian freelance writer), Meriki Onus (Gunnai Gunditjmara Indigenous Australian woman  commentator and activist), Randa Abdel Fattah (Muslim Palestinian Australian academic researcher and author of 12 books), Samah Sabawi (ia Palestinian-Australian-Canadian writer, commentator, author and playwright), Bassam Dally ( a Palestinian-Australian academic, commentator, founding member of The Australian Friends of Palestine Association and vice-president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy network), Jordy Silverstein (anti-racist Jewish Australian academic, author and historian) and Jordanna Moroney( an anti-racist Masorti Jewish Australian activist for refugee human rights):

“An open letter about Jessica Mauboy’s decision to perform a concert in Israel, by Michael Brull, Amy McQuire, Nayuka Gorrie, Meriki Onus, Randa Abdel Fattah, Samah Sabawi, Bassam Dally, Jordy Silverstein and Jordanna Moroney. Dear Jessica, … We are writing this letter to express our deep hurt and disappointment at your post on Instagram recently, in which you announced you were performing in Israel. We know you are there for Israel Calling, featuring a free concert in Tel Aviv with 25 performers from 43 countries in the lead-up to Eurovision. According to the Jerusalem Post it is “run in conjunction with the Foreign Ministry, the Tourism Ministry and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund… It is a propaganda coup, particularly at a time when artists from around the world have boycotted Israel, due to its treatment of the Palestinians. As the Aboriginal writers of this letter know, the oppression of Palestinians under Israeli occupation has many similarities to our own situation. We share a history of settler-colonialism, and this land that you routinely celebrate on Australia Day, when you sing the national anthem, is founded on the dispossession of our people and the destruction of our traditional lands… 20 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli snipers. 750 were wounded with fire from live ammunition. During the second week, another 25,000 Palestinian protesters showed up, according to Israel’s army. About nine more were shot dead, and another 300 were wounded by live ammunition fired by Israeli snipers. … This is also an opportunity for you. Where do you stand on millions of disfranchised Palestinians, living under military occupation? Where do you stand on the destruction of Gaza? Where do you stand on the open, brazen massacres of unarmed protesters [from 30 March 2018] that have again disgusted the world? Do you stand with the Foreign Ministry, as it uses you to whitewash its crimes against humanity? The Aboriginal community has largely supported you for all your achievements. But if we continually make a stand for you, why can’t you make a stand for those who are suffering?” (Michael Brull, Amy McQuire, Nayuka Gorrie, Meriki Onus, Randa Abdel Fattah, Samah Sabawi, Bassam Dally, Jordy Silverstein and Jordanna Moroney: “An open letter to Jessica Mauboy: don’t paint over oppression with hearts and rainbows”, New Matilda, 2 May 2018. )

Ardern (New Zealand). Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand Prime Minister):

“You will recall at the time the United States announced they would be moving their representation to Jerusalem we stated at that time strongly that we did not believe that would take us closer to peace and it hasn’t. As we’ve seen, the results of the protests along the border at Gaza has been devastating. It is the right of any nation to defend their border, but this is a devastating, one-sided loss of life. We would condemn the violence that has occurred and it’s plain to see the effects of this decision and the ramifications are wide reaching.” (Claire Trevett, “PM Jacinta Ardern: Gaza deaths show US Embassy move to Jerusalem hurt chance for peace”,  New Zealand Herald, 15 May 2018.)

Ashrawi (Palestine). Dr Hanan Ashrawi (PLO Executive Committee Member) on latest Gaza Massacres:

“On the same day that the United States officially relocated its embassy to occupied Jerusalem, Israel murdered 55 unarmed Palestinians, including children, and injured 2,000 more who were protesting America’s illegal and disastrous move, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) and affirming the right of return for Palestinians. We urgently appeal to all members of the international community to stop the bloodshed against the captive people in Gaza immediately. We also urge the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention and the ICC to convene and investigate Israel’s gross violations and flagrant war crimes. This deliberate massacre, as well as other massacres committed by Israel, should not go unpunished.” (Dr Hanan Ashrawi, “PLO Executive Committee Member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi appeals to the international community to stop Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza”, Embassy of the State of Palestine, 15 May 2018.)

Baroud (Palestine). Dr Ramzy Baroud (journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle):

“The Israelis and their American friends are dancing. They are celebrating while my people have dug 58 more graves just today. They have danced on our graves for far too long.” (Ramzy Baroud, “Ramzy Baroud speaking at the rally for Gaza in Sydney (VIDEO)” and  “60 Palestinians were killed in Gaza on May 15, simply for protesting and demanding their Right of Return as guaranteed by international law. 50 more were killed since March 30, the start of the ‘Great March of Return’, which marks Land Day. Nearly 10,000 have been wounded and maimed in between these two dates. ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, White House officials announced, paying no heed to the ludicrousness of the statement when understood within the current context of an unequal struggle. Peaceful protesters were not threatening the existence of Israel; rock throwing kids were not about to overwhelm hundreds of Israeli snipers, who shot, killed and wounded Gaza youngsters with no legal or moral boundary whatsoever … The world watched in horror, and even western media failed to hide the full ugly truth from its readers. The two acts – of lavish parties and heartbreaking burials – were beamed all over the world, and the already struggling American reputation sank deeper and deeper. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, may have thought he had won. Comforted by his rightwing government and society on the one hand, Trump and his angry UN bully, Nikki Haley, on the other, he feels invulnerable. But he should rethink his power-driven logic. When Gazan youth stood bare-chested at the border fence, falling one drove after the other, they crossed a fear barrier that no generation of Palestinians has ever crossed. And when people are unafraid, they can never be subdued or defeated.” (Ramzy Baroud, 15 May 2018; Ramzy Baroud, “Israel’s premature celebration: Gazans have crossed the fear barrier”, Countercurrents, 23 May 2018.)

Berger (UK). Luciana Berger (an anti-racist Jewish  British Labour Co-operative politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Liverpool Wavertree since 2010) writing on Twitter:

“The hugely inflammatory decision by the US to move its embassy to Jerusalem… [Gaza scenes] horrific… it is vital that there is urgent restraint in order to immediately halt the loss of civilian life. The voices of those in Israel who advocate for peace must not be drowned out. ” (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018.)

Brull (Australia). Michael Brull (anti-racist Jewish Australian scholar and writer):

“From 30 March, Palestinians in Gaza have held weekly protests, demanding the right to return to their homes, and for an end to the blockade of Gaza. Both demands are in accordance with international law. Israel has responded each week by shooting hundreds of unarmed, peaceful protesters… As the world reeled in horror at week after week of Israeli massacres of unarmed, peaceful protesters – who at the most, tried to cut a fence or use slingshots to take down drones firing tear gas at them – Australian politicians have been mostly silent…Australia and the US were the only countries to vote against the [UN Human Rights Council] motion to investigate Israel’s attacks on protesters… Australia has a long record of complicity in Israeli war crimes and oppression of the Palestinians. Indeed, in March it similarly voted against five motions at the Human Rights Council upholding the rights of Palestinians. For example, in a vote on Palestinian self-determination, 43 countries voted in favour, the Democratic Republic of Congo abstained, and Australia and the US voted against. Most Australians would have no idea about that. And they wouldn’t know about what Israel does to Gaza with Australian support.” (Michael Brull, “Australia’s shameful complicity with Israeli atrocities, and the Media’s determination to cover it up” , New Matilda, 23 May 2018.)

B’Tselem (Israel). B’Tselem (the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories):

“The demonstrations held in Gaza today came as no surprise. Israel had plenty of time to come up with alternate approaches for dealing with the protests, apart from firing live ammunition. The fact that live gunfire is once again the sole measure that the Israeli military is using in the field evinces appalling indifference towards human life on the part of senior Israeli government and military officials. B’Tselem calls for an immediate halt to the killing of Palestinian demonstrators. If the relevant officials do not issue an order to stop the lethal fire, the soldiers in the field must refuse to comply with these manifestly unlawful open-fire orders.” (B’Tselem, “B’Tselem: Firing live ammunition at Gaza demonstrators shows appalling indifference to human life”, B’Tselem, 14 May 2018.)

Corbyn (UK). Jeremy Corbyn (UK Labour Opposition leader):

 “[Palestinian deaths an] outrage… hold those responsible to account… slaughter…  [IDF has] wanton disregard for international law… [Western governments must] demand an end to the multiple abuses of human and political rights Palestinians face on a daily basis, the 11-year siege of Gaza, the continuing 50-year occupation of Palestinian territory and the ongoing expansion of illegal settlements.”  (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018.)

Countries boycotting the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem.  Those 50 countries with embassies in Apartheid Israel (black mark) which were invited but  which did not attend (good mark) included Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan , Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Myanmar, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and the United Kingdom ([36]. Noa Landau, “These are the countries planning to participate in Israel’s celebrations of U.S. Embassy move”, Haaretz, 16 May 2016. )

Di Natale (Australia). Dr Richard Di Natale (Leader of the Australian Greens):

“The Australian Greens condemn in the strongest possible terms this latest example of the Israeli military’s excessive use of force. Yesterday marked the deadliest day in Gaza since the 2014 war, with more than 50 Palestinians killed. We are distressed that almost 100 mostly unarmed Palestinian protestors have reportedly been killed by Israeli forces since the end of March on the border with Gaza, including at least four minors and two journalists. It is deplorable that the Liberal and Labor parties have remained silent in the face of the Israeli Government’s excessive use of force. What will it take for them to speak up? They must condemn this disproportionate response against Palestinians exercising their legitimate and important right to engage in non-violent protest. Donald Trump’s decision to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem is a body blow to the peace process and the Palestinian people. Trump is intent on inflaming tensions, yet the Turnbull Government has repeatedly refused to stand with the rest of the world and speak out against this move. It’s well past time for both the old parties to recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.” ( “Greens condemn Palestinian deaths at Gaza border”, The Greens, 15 May 2018).

Doherty (Ireland). Pearse Doherty (Finance Spokesperson for Sinn Féin and Teachta Dála (lower House MP) for Donegal):

“If Israel continues to act with impunity, we will continue to see the carnage we witnessed on our televisions yesterday and are likely to continue to see in the weeks ahead. It is time for countries to make a stand. The Government made a stand in the case of a Russian diplomat [expulsion after the Skripal Affair] , so what will it take for the Government to say ‘No more’? What will it take for this proud country to take a stand, as an international independent country, by telling the Israeli ambassador it is time to pack his bags?” (Fiach Kelly, “Dail divided on response to violence on Israel-Gaza border””, Irish Times, 16 May 2018).

Erdogan (Turkey). Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkish President) in response to the latest 2018 Gaza Massacres (the Turkish ambassador was withdrawn but was frisked by Israeli goons at the airport) :

“Netanyahu is the PM of an apartheid state that has occupied a defenceless people’s lands for 60+ yrs in violation of UN resolutions, He has the blood of Palestinians on his hands and can’t cover up crimes by attacking Turkey.” (“Turkey-Israel row: video of airport frisking deepens tensions”, Al Jazeera, 16 May 2018.)

Erekat (Palestine). Saeb Erekat (senior West Bank Palestinian official):

 “These war crimes should not go unpunished and the international community has a responsibility to provide international protection for the Palestinian people.” (“Dozens killed in Gaza clashes as US opens Jerusalem embassy”, SBS News, 15 May 2018.)

France. France (one of the UN Security Council’s 5 permanent members:

“ [condemned] the violence of Israeli armed forces against demonstrators.” (Chris Baynes, “US “blocks UN motion” calling for  investigation into Israeli killing of Gaza protesters”, Independent, 15 May 2018.)

Freeland (Canada). Chrystia Freeland (Canadian foreign affairs minister:

“It is inexcusable that civilians, journalists + children have been victims. All parties to the conflict have a responsibility to ensure civilians are protected.” ( Peter Zimonjic, “Freeland calls on “all parties” involved in Gaza violence to protect civilians””, CBC News, 14 May 2018)

Gleeson (Australia). Lisa Gleeson (Australian Green Left Weekly writer):

“In just over 24 hours on May 14 and 15, the single greatest number of deaths and injuries of Gazans at the hands of the Israeli military since the start of the Great March of Return protests on March 30 occurred. Israel’s latest crimes must be a catalyst to strengthen the struggle for Palestinian freedom… The sheer horror and scale of the deaths and injuries could be a turning point in responses to Israeli crimes — if the global solidarity movement is able to capitalise on widespread disgust and anger, and strengthen pressure… In Australia, it has been Greens politicians who have condemned Israel’s actions. Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon and leader Richard Di Natale issued statements condemning Israeli attacks and the failure of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to criticise Israel, with which Australia has arms deals worth billions of dollars. For 70 years, Palestinians have suffered ongoing Israeli attacks, theft of their land and resources, the destruction of their communities, discriminatory laws, dwindling access to basic infrastructure and amenities and frequent deadly violence by a heavily armed military. Yet Palestinians continue to demand the right to return to lands from which they were expelled, and an end to Israel’s violence and apartheid law. It is well beyond time the world backs their demands — Israel’s latest deadly crimes must become a turning point in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” (Lisa Gleeson, “Could Israel’s Gaza Massacre be a turning point?”, Green Left Weekly, 18 May 2018.)

Horowitz (US). Adam Horowitz (see “Mondoweiss” , a news website that is co-edited by anti-racist Jewish American journalists Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz and is a part of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change).

Independent Jewish Voices (UK). Dr Anthony Isaacs, Dr Vivienne Jackson, Dr Katy Fox-Hodess, Dr Tamar Steinitz, Professor Jacqueline Rose, Ann Jungman, Merav Pinchassoff, Professor Adam Fagan, Professor Francesa Klug (UK Independent Jewish Voices steering group):

“Since 30 March, each week has seen more protests by Gazans at the border with Israel and more killings of largely unarmed protesters by Israeli snipers using live ammunition. As of the morning of 15 May, Nakba Day, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed and some thousands injured. The position has been aggravated by the provocation of the opening of a new US embassy in Jerusalem, hammering another nail into the coffin of an already moribund peace process. The Independent Jewish Voices steering group wishes to express our horror at the flagrant disregard for the human rights of the Palestinians and the norms of international law, and our support for those many thousands who have been demonstrating their opposition around the world. We call upon the UK government to condemn the actions of the Israeli authorities, to demand an independent inquiry into the use of force on the Gaza border, to make clear that the UK embassy will remain in Tel Aviv, and to redouble all diplomatic efforts to bring the occupation to an end.” (Letters, “The Guardian”, 16 May 2018.)

Ingres (France, Doctors Without Borders). Marie-Elisabeth Ingres (Palestinian- treating Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories):

“What happened today is unacceptable and inhuman. The death toll provided this evening by Gaza health authorities—55 dead and 2,271 wounded—including 1,359 wounded with live ammunition, is staggering. It is unbearable to witness such a massive number of unarmed people being shot in such a short time. Our medical teams are working around the clock, as they have done since April 1, providing surgical and postoperative care to men, women, and children, and they will continue to do so tonight, tomorrow, and as long as they are needed. In one of the hospitals where we are working, the chaotic situation is comparable to what we observed after the bombings of the 2014 war, with a colossal influx of injured people in a few hours, completely overwhelming the medical staff. Our teams carried out more than 30 surgical interventions today, sometimes on two or three patients in the same operating theater, and even in the corridors. This bloodbath is the continuation of the Israeli army’s policy during the last seven weeks: shooting with live ammunition at demonstrators, on the assumption that anyone approaching the separation fence is a legitimate target. Most of the wounded will be condemned to suffer lifelong injuries.As new demonstrations are announced for tomorrow, the Israeli army must stop its disproportionate use of violence against Palestinian protesters.” (Marie-Elisabeth Ingres, “”Unacceptable and inhuman” violence by Israeli army against Palestinian protesters in Gaza”, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 14 May 2018.)

Israeli eminent persons (Israel). Eminent Israeli persons, namely Avraham Burg (former speaker of the Knesset and chairman of the Jewish Agency),  Prof Nurit Peled Elhanan (2001 co-laureate of the Sakharov prize), Prof David Harel (vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and recipient of the 2004 Israel Prize), Prof Yehoshua Kolodny (recipient of the 2010 Israel prize), Alex Levac (photographer and recipient of the 2005 Israel prize),  Prof Judd Ne’eman (director and recipient of the 2009 Israel prize), Prof Zeev Sternhell (historian and recipient of the 2008 Israel prize), Prof David Shulman (recipient of the 2016 Israel prize) and David Tartakover (artist and recipient of the 2002 Israel prize):

 “ We, Israelis who wish our country to be safe and just, are appalled and horrified by the massive killing of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza (Reports, 15 May). None of the demonstrators posed any direct danger to the state of Israel or to its citizens. The killing of over 50 demonstrators and the thousands more wounded are reminiscent of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 in South Africa. The world acted then. We call upon decent members of the international community to act by demanding that those who commanded such shootings be investigated and tried. The current leaders of the Israeli government are responsible for the criminal policy of shooting at unarmed demonstrators. The world must intervene to stop the ongoing killing.” (Letters, “The Guardian”, 16 May 2018.)

Larison (US). Daniel Larison (writer for The American Conservative):

 “The Trump administration’s response to today’s massacre of unarmed protesters in Gaza by Israeli forces was as appalling as we would expect it to be: the Trump administration blamed Hamas for the deaths of dozens of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers on Monday during mass protests along the boundary fence, the deadliest day of violence since the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. We know that the Trump administration consistently indulges U.S. clients and encourages them in their worst behavior, but the refusal to hold Israel accountable for obvious, egregious crimes like this one is nonetheless breathtaking and despicable. Hamas bears responsibility for its own crimes and misrule, but it is ludicrous to hold them responsible when Israeli forces shoot live ammunition into a crowd of unarmed people. The administration’s attempt to shift the blame from the government that killed nearly five dozen unarmed protesters and wounded hundreds more to anyone else is similar to their responses to Saudi coalition crimes in Yemen: ignore them for as long as possible, absurdly claim that the client state is acting in “self-defense,” and when all else fails find some other group or government to blame for things that the client has done. Refusing to hold Israel responsible for its crimes guarantees that there will be more of them in the weeks and months to come. As long as the administration doesn’t object to this excessive and illegal treatment of Palestinians, the Israeli government will assume that it has Trump’s full support and will keep doing more of the same. The Trump administration is giving Israel a green light to shoot Palestinian protesters, and its determination to ensure that there is “no daylight” between our two governments means that there is practically nothing that the Israeli government can do that this administration won’t tolerate.” (Daniel Larison, “The Trump Administration’s despicable response to the Gaza Massacre”, The American Conservative, 14 May 2018.)

Latin American artists (Latin America). Latin American artists ( more than 500 including  poets, painters, rappers, theatre directors, filmmakers, actors, writers, and musicians from 17 Latin American countries) signed a letter supporting boycott of Apartheid Israel:

“[pledge to] reject any invitation to perform in Israel or at any event financed by this government that leads to the ‘normalisation’ of apartheid, that is, where the regime of segregation maintained by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people is not denounced.” (Federico Fuentes, “South America: Israel’s massacre in Gaza denounced, support for BDS grows”, Green Left Weekly, 17 May 2018).

Le Drian (France). Jean-Yves Le Drian (French Foreign Minister) speaking to the French Parliament:

“The situation in the Middle East is explosive, violence is doing the talking, war could loom. We are committed to the security of Israel but Israel’s security cannot justify this level of violence… We [also] have a disagreement about the method. Because in both cases [including  Jerusalem embassy] the United States decided to act unilaterally. ” (Amanda Holpuch  and Matthew Weaver, “Gaza: Nakba Day protests as Palestinians bury those killed in embassy unrest – live updates”, The Guardian,  16 May 2018)

Levy (Israel). Gideon Levy (anti-racist Jewish Israeli writer for Haaretz ):

“When will the moment come in which the mass killing of Palestinians matters anything to the right? When will the moment come in which the massacre of civilians shocks at least the left-center? If 60 people slain don’t do it, perhaps 600? Will 6,000 jolt them? When will the moment come in which a pinch of human feeling arises, if only for a moment, toward the Palestinians? Sympathy? At what moment will someone call a halt, and suggest compassion, without being branded an eccentric or an Israel hater? When will there be a moment in which someone admits that the slaughterer has, after all, some responsibility for the slaughter, not only the slaughtered, who are of course responsible for their own slaughter? Sixty people killed didn’t matter to anyone – perhaps 600 would? How about 6,000? Will Israel find all the excuses and justifications then also? Will the blame be laid on the slain people and their “dispatchers” even then, and not a word of criticism, mea culpa, sorrow, pity or guilt will be heard?” (Gideon Levy, “60 dead in Gaza and the end of Israeli concscience”, Haaretz, 17 May 2018)

Luther (UK, Amnesty International). Philip Luther (Amnesty International, Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa):

“This is another horrific example of the Israeli military using excessive force and live ammunition in a totally deplorable way. This is a violation of international standards, in some instances committing what appear to be wilful killings constituting war crimes. Today’s footage from Gaza is extremely troubling, and as violence continues to spiral out of control, the Israeli authorities must immediately rein in the military to prevent the further loss of life and serious injuries. Only last month, Amnesty International called on the international community to stop the delivery of arms and military equipment to Israel. The rising toll of deaths and injuries today only serves to highlight the urgent need for an arms embargo. While some protestors may have engaged in some form of violence, this still does not justify the use of live ammunition. Under international law, firearms can only be used to protect against an imminent threat of death or serious injury.” ( Philip Luther, “Israel/OPT: use of excessive force in Gaza an abhorrent violation of international law”, Amnesty International, 14 May 2018)

Mabaya (South Africa). Ndivhuwo Mabaya (South African Department of International Relations spokesperson) re the indefinite recall of the South Africa Ambassador Sisa Ngombane in response to the latest 2018 Gaza Massacres (shades of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in Apartheid South Africa)(2018):

“Given the indiscriminate and gravity of the latest Israeli attack, the South African government has taken a decision to recall Ambassador Sisa Ngombane with immediate effect until further notice… [government condemned] in the strongest terms possible the latest act of violent aggression carried out by Israeli armed forces along the Gaza border. [This] led to the deaths of over 40 [people] killed following a peaceful protest against the provocative inauguration of the US embassy in Jerusalem… [Israeli Defence Force] must withdraw from the Gaza Strip and bring to an end the violent and destructive incursions into Palestinian territories. South Africa maintains further that the violence in the Gaza Strip will stand in the way of rebuilding Palestinian institutions and infrastructure.” (Kaveel Singh, “SA pulls ambassador out of Israel over Gaza violence”, News24, 14 May 2018.)

Macron (France). Emmanuel Macron (French President) in a  statement to war criminal Netanyahu according to the Elysee Palace:

“He expressed his very deep concern about the situation in Gaza, condemned the violence and underlined the importance of protecting civilian populations and of the right to protest peacefully.” (“France’s Macron tells Netanyahu Palestinians have right to protest peacefully”, Reuters, 16 May 21081)

Maduro (Venezuela). Nicolas Maduro (President of Venezuela that cut diplomatic relations with Apartheid Israel during the 2009 Gaza Massacre):

“Today we are all Palestine. Their dead, injured and hopes are ours. We condemn atrocity and measures taken by US and Israel. Long live Palestine! Long live a free and independent Palestine!” (Federico Fuentes, “South America: Israel’s massacre in Gaza denounced, support for BDS grows”, Green Left Weekly, 17 May 2018)

Mansour (Palestine). Riyad Mansour (ambassador of the permanent observer mission of the State of Palestine to the UN):

“We condemn in the strongest terms this odious massacre committed by Israel occupation forces… [Israeli] occupation is the main source of violence in the region, for those who do not acknowledge it live in a different reality. Let us investigate what’s happening on the ground… Palestinians will accept the findings come what may…. [US embassy move to Jerusalem]  provocation… [Trump allows Israel to]  commit more crimes against the Palestinian people [with] impunity… [The US] should not close their eyes to situation on the ground.” (Amanda Holpuch  and Matthew Weaver, “Gaza: Nakba Day protests as Palestinians bury those killed in embassy unrest – live updates”, The Guardian,  16 May 2018)

McGoldrick (Ireland, UN). Jamie McGoldrick (UN Humanitarian Coordinator,  Occupied Palestinian Territory) (18 May 2018):

“The situation in Gaza is devastating and the crisis is far from over. For every person killed and injured this week and those before, there is a family and a network of friends affected.” (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory, “50 Palestinians reported injured during demonstrations in Gaza on  first Friday of Ramadan”, 18 May 2018)

Mondoweiss (US). Mondoweiss (a news website that is co-edited by anti-racist Jewish American journalists Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz and is a part of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change) on Gaza killings (14 May 2014):

“Today is unfolding as a horrifying and tragic day in Palestine. The Israeli military has opened fire on Gaza protesters as the U.S. and Israeli governments prepare to mark the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Today has been the deadliest day in Gaza since the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health (as of 21:00 GMT): 58 killed, including 7 minors and 1 paramedic; 2,771 injured – including 225 minors, 11 journalists, 17 paramedics; 130 in serious and critical condition; 1,359 shot by Israeli soldiers using live Israeli ammunition. Since the beginning of the Great March of Return on March 30th, 107 Palestinians have been killed, almost 3,400 protesters have been shot with live ammunition, and almost 13,000 injured.” (“Live blog: massacre in Gaza as US and Israel celebrate embassy move to Jerusalem”, Mondoweiss, 14 May 2018)

Moorehead (UK). Jennifer Moorehead (Save the Children’s Country Director for the Occupied Palestinian Territory): “All parties must ensure that children are protected in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and other relevant international law. We are deeply concerned by the high number of children who have been hit by live ammunition and we agree with the High Commissioner for Human Rights that this could suggest an excessive use of force and may amount to unlawful killing and maiming, We support the UN Secretary General’s call for independent investigations to be carried out and any perpetrators to be held to account. We strongly urge all protests to remain peaceful, and call on all sides to tackle the long-term causes of this conflict and promote dignity and security for both Israelis and Palestinians…Gaza has been under an Israeli air, sea and land blockade for more than 10 years and has suffered three wars from which it has never fully recovered. This has meant an already very difficult humanitarian situation in Gaza has gone from bad to worse with almost every aspect of life – from employment, education and electricity to health and sanitation – being negatively impacted. The result has been devastating for the children of Gaza  – physically and psychologically. Many have been injured, and many more have seen their parents or loved ones either hurt at the protests, or suffering increasing hardship in their daily lives. Save the Children is deeply concerned at the prospect of further violence and we fear that even more children could be injured or lose their lives. Children and families are telling our staff that they are losing hope of conditions ever improving in Gaza. We’re calling for an urgent lifting of the Israeli blockade that has crippled the economy and for increased donor engagement to alleviate the urgent daily needs of almost two million people in Gaza.” (Save the Children, “More than 250-children in Gaza shot with live ammunition as protests escalate” Save the Children, 11 May 2018)

Morales (Bolivia). Evo Morales (President of Bolivia that cut diplomatic relations with Apartheid Israel during the 2009 Gaza Massacre ):  “Strongly condemned” the brutal Israeli crackdown on Gaza protesters, tweeting on May 15: “Bolivia condemns the genocidal reaction of the Israeli army that slaughters Palestinian brothers in cold blood. More than 50 dead, 2000 injured in protest against arbitrary transfer of US Embassy to Jerusalem. Bolivia rejects and strongly condemns the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem. Again, the US violates international law and covers the crimes of the state of Israel. #PalestinaLibre.” (Federico Fuentes, “South America: Israel’s massacre in Gaza denounced, support for BDS grows”, Green Left Weekly, 17 May 2018)

Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) (Palestine). Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) re a football boycott of Apartheid Israel :

“Dear Lionel Messi and Argentina National Football Team, We urge you to cancel your friendly match with Israel, scheduled for June 9, 2018, due to Israel’s long record of human rights abuses, on and off the field. Israel arrests, harasses and kills Palestinian players. It destroys Palestinian stadiums and denies Palestinian footballers the right to travel to play. And, Israeli football leagues include clubs based in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land . Israeli snipers killed more than 40 unarmed Palestinians in Gaza and injured thousands. Mohammed Khalil, a Palestinian footballer who was demonstrating with thousands for their basic human rights, was shot by a sniper in both legs, ending his football career. This is not the first time Israeli bullets have ended Palestinians’ football careers. And, it won’t be the last under Israel’s violent regime of occupation and apartheid. Messi, your game with Israel is political. The Israeli government will use it to cover-up its brutal attacks on Palestinians, on and off the field. There is nothing “friendly” about military occupation and apartheid. Don’t play Israel until Palestinians’ human rights are respected. Don’t team up with Israeli apartheid!” (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), “Tell Argentina and Lionel Messi: there is #NothingFriendly abpout Israel shooting Palestinian footballers”, BDS, 15 May 2018).

Polya (Australia). Dr Gideon Polya (anti-racist Jewish Australian scientist, writer, artist and humanitarian activist):

“Pro-Apartheid Trump America and US lackey Australia merit international Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as the only countries to vote against the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution to formally investigate the latest Israeli Gaza Massacres in which Apartheid Israeli soldiers have shot [and killed]  116 unarmed Palestinian  protestors and injured about 13,000. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded and no Palestinians protestors penetrated the barbed wire surrounding the Gaza Concentration Camp. Just as a galvanized world successfully boycotted Apartheid South Africa  after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre (69 unarmed African protestors killed and 220 wounded), so the world must respond to the latest Gaza Massacres  with BDS against Apartheid Israel and all people and countries supporting this genocidally racist obscenity.”  (Polya, “Boycott Pro-Apartheid US & Australia For Backing Israeli Gaza Massacres, Apartheid, Theft & Palestinian Genocide”, Countercurrents, 22 May 2018).

Riemer (Australia). Dr Nick Riemer (Australian literature and linguistics academic):

“Australia, Israel’s best friend. On his visit to Australia in 2017, Netanyahu said that ‘there is no better friend [than Australia] for the state of Israel’. He wasn’t greatly exaggerating. The UN committee that drafted the 1947 Partition resolution creating Israel was chaired by an Australian, HV Evatt, as local politicians often remind us. A glance at Australia’s recent UN voting record speaks volumes about Australia’s position on the “extreme fringe” of world opinion on Israel. In a 2012 vote making Palestine a UN non-member state, we abstained. In 2013, when a record 162 countries called for a stop to “all Israeli settlement activities in all of the occupied territories” and condemned any attempts to desecrate the Al-Aqsa Mosque, we abstained. We even voted against a UN resolution declaring the following year, 2014, the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Faced with a proposal in the UN Security Council demanding Israel end the occupation of Palestinian territories within two years, we abstained. At the same time, the Abbott government took the extraordinary step of ruling out using the term ‘occupied’ when describing Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. In 2016, Australia indicated   it didn’t support the UN Security Council resolution condemning the construction and expansion of settlements. Last year, when the UN passed a resolution in December condemning the projected move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, we abstained. Protests are necessary, but they can seem a weak gesture in the face of the carnage on the Gaza boundary. Since the first Great Return March a month and a half ago, around ninety people have been killed by IDF snipers. The victims include at least two journalists and five children. As of midnight Sydney time on Monday, no less than 40 protesters had been killed, and over 900 injured in Gaza on that day alone. … Israel’s actions have been documented and denounced by organisations like Medicins Sans Frontiere and Human Rights Watch. Yet, true to form, Western leaders, Australia’s included, have stayed eloquently silent. That silence expresses better than words the moral bankruptcy over Israel that has long been normalised within the Western ruling class. The US lobby group Jewish Voice for Peace recently took out newspaper advertisements noting that as of May 10, only 21 out of 535 members of Congress had spoken out against Israeli brutality during the Great March of Return protests.” (Nick Riemer, “Nakba Day: The Palestinian slaughter goes on but the path to peace is still possible”, New Matilda, 15 May 2018)

Sanders (US).  Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement after more than 50 Palestinians were killed and 2,200 wounded by Israeli troops along the border fence with Gaza on Monday, 14 May 2018:

“More than 50 killed in Gaza today and 2,000 wounded, on top of the 41 killed and more than 9,000 wounded over the past weeks. This is a staggering toll. Hamas violence does not justify Israel firing on unarmed protesters. The United States must play an aggressive role in bringing Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and the international community together to address Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and stop this escalating violence. ” (“Sanders statement on Gaza violence”, Bernie Sanders, 14 May 2018)

Save the Children (International NGO). Save the Children (an iconic, international,  child-saving NGO):

“Hundreds of children, some as young as eight years old, have been shot by live ammunition in the Gaza protests, an analysis by Save the Children has shown. Out of more than 500 detailed injuries in children, at least 250 (some 50 percent) were hit with live bullets, according to data collected by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is also being used by the United Nations in its reporting. The true number could be even higher. The Ministry have reported that so far 689 children have been injured, however the details of these injuries have not yet been revealed. Almost 8,000 people, including almost 700 children, have been injured in protests since 30 March. This includes 4,150 people (52 per cent) who were hospitalized and 2,017 (25 per cent) were shot with live ammunition. There have been no reported injuries on the Israeli side.” (Save the Children, “More than 250-children in Gaza shot with live ammunition as protests escalate” Save the Children, 11 May 2018)

Shakir (US, Human Rights Watch). Omar Shakir (Israel and Palestine Director , Human Rights Watch):

“As hundreds gathered Monday in Jerusalem to celebrate the move of the U.S. Embassy, about 100 kilometers away, Israeli forces fired on Palestinian demonstrators protected by the fence separating Israel from Gaza. They killed 60 people and injured well over 1,000 with live fire, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israeli forces have shot dead over 100 Palestinians in demonstrations in Gaza since March 30, including 14 children, and injured over 3,500 with live fire. These staggering casualty levels are neither the result of justifiable force nor of isolated abuses; but foreseeable results of senior Israeli officials’ orders on the use of force… Bloodshed on this scale results directly from these open-fire orders that green-light the firing on demonstrators irrespective of the threat they pose, along with Israel’s decades-long failure to hold accountable soldiers who violate their already lax open-fire orders. As criticism of this predictable bloodbath pours in from leaders around the world, the Trump administration is blaming Hamas alone, giving Israel a green light to continue killing and maiming.” ( Omar Shakir, “Israeli open-fire orders predictably result in bloodbath” and “Breaking: @hrw  [Human Rights Watch] reacts to Israel’s gunning down of dozens of Palestinian protestors in Gaza today.” (Human Rights Watch, 15 May 2018; Omar Shakir, Twitter, 15 May 2018.)

Shehada (Palestine).  Muhammad Shehada (Palestinian Gaza writer and activist):

“The point is that people are trying to undertake a mass jailbreak out of what David Cameron, the prime minister of—the former prime minister of Britain, called an “open-air prison,” what a Haaretz editorial calls a “Palestinian ghetto,” and what Israeli distinguished scholar Baruch Kimmerling calls “the largest concentration camp ever to exist. Then you have the call for return, which is the main theme of the protest. And that represents even deeper and deeper desperation amongst the masses. The call for return does not constitute, what Israel claims, an attempt to destroy the state of Israel, but it rather shows that Gazans have given up about the place where they are caged … For the mass protest, the main target or goal is basically finding life. People’s livelihood has been completely destroyed behind the fence. Their future is glittering, literally, after the fence, if they manage to break out of Gaza. Although, virtually, these are waiting, they are no longer prisoners. And that’s exactly what they want. The separation fence is a window for the people of Gaza to always stare at Israelis on the other side leading a normal and organized life. This window does not awaken only jealousy, but also extreme anger and outrage. For how come on Earth that the entire world is watching 2 million people chained to the ground, dying slowly, and doing absolutely nothing?… when Jared was saying that the people in Gaza who are marching and risking their lives and walking towards death bare-chested are part of the problem, not the solution. Then what’s the solution, in his head? Just exterminating the entire population.” (“Gazan writer: protesters are seeking freedom from the world’s  largest concentration camp”, Democracy Now, 15 May 2018)

Shorten (Australia). Bill Shorten (Australian Labor Opposition Leader)  on the latest Gaza Massacres:

“I think it is dreadful what we’ve seen  . In particular when you see the death of children. No good comes of that. No good comes from that at all. That’s a disaster. We are urging restraint from Israel. We also support a 2 state solution and we believe that aggression by any party puts back the cause of peace and doesn’t promote it.” (“Malcolm Turnbull blames Hamas for “tragic” Gaza deaths”, Sky News, 15 May 2018)

Singh (Canada). Jagmeet Singh (Leader of the National Democratic Party, NDP, of Canada):

“Our government has been shamefully silent on recent developments in Gaza, and the prime minister should condemn the violence, call on Israel to cease violations of international law, and support an independent investigation into these deaths… [Canada must] call on the government of Israel to end this occupation. Illegal killings, arbitrary and abusive detention, forced displacement, restrictions on movement, the expansion of illegal settlements, collective punishment and institutionalized discrimination have characterized this occupation that has persisted for over half a century.” (Peter Zimonjic, “Freeland calls on “all parties” involved in Gaza violence to protect civilians””, CBC News, 14 May 2018)

South Africa. South Africa’s Department of International Relations in a statement on the Gaza killings (noting that South Africa withdrew its ambassador to Apartheid Israel) :

“The South African government condemns in the strongest terms possible the latest act of violent aggression carried out by Israeli armed forces along the Gaza border, which has led to the deaths of over 40 civilians. The victims were taking part in a peaceful protest against the provocative inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. This latest attack has resulted in scores of other Palestinian citizens reported injured, and the wanton destruction of property.” ( “Live blog: massacre in Gaza as US and Israel celebrate embassy move to Jerusalem”, Mondoweiss, 14 May 2018)

Stein (US). Dr Jill Stein (Green Party 2016 candidate for President, anti-racist Jewish American activist, medical doctor, and environmental health advocate.):

“ Israel killing scores of Palestinian protesters in Gaza isn’t a “clash”, it’s a massacre. A US-backed massacre of an occupied people crying out for their human rights. The occupation of Palestine is an atrocity. Stop $10 million/day US support for Israeli military NOW.” (Dr Jill Stein, Twitter, 15 May 2018)

Taylor (UK, EU MEP). Keith Taylor (Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Green party, South East England):

 “In the face of the bloodshed in Gaza, too many in the west have been quick to minimise or even excuse the state-sanctioned murder of unarmed protesters. The White House labelled the innocent lives lost at the hands of Israeli troops as “part of the problem”, as it celebrated its embassy move. The UK government and Labour Friends of Israel blamed the unarmed Palestinian people for daring to protest against their repression and raised the spectre of Hamas. Greens will continue to support the ideals of freedom, equality and respect for international law. And that includes supporting Palestinian people marking the Nakba by protesting against their illegal oppressors. We support a two-state solution but, with Netanyahu being appeased by the west at every turn, this has never seemed so far away.” (Letters, “The Guardian”, 16 May 2018)

Thornberry (UK). Emily Thornberry (UK Labour Opposition  Shadow Foreign Secretary) re Gaza killings:

“[Condemned the Israeli government for] brutal, lethal and entirely unjustified actions on the Gazan border… These actions are made all the worse because they come not as the result of a disproportionate over-reaction to one day’s protests, but as a culmination of six weeks of an apparently systemic and deliberate policy of killing and maiming unarmed protestors and bystanders who pose no threat to the forces at the Gaza border, many of them shot in the back … and many of them children” and “Yesterday’s horrific massacre at the Gaza border left at least 58 dead and almost 3,000 injured. Our first thoughts today are with those Palestinians who are mourning their loved ones or waking up with life-changing injuries. What makes yesterday’s events all the worse is that they came not as the result of some accidental overreaction to one day’s protests but as the culmination of six weeks of an apparently calculated and deliberate policy to kill and maim unarmed protestors who posed ​no threat to the forces on the Gaza border. Many of them were shot in the back, many of them were shot hundreds of metres from the border and many of them were children. If we are in any doubt about the lethal intent of the Israeli snipers working on the border, we need only look at the wounds suffered by their victims. American hunting websites regularly debate the merits of 7.6 mm bullets versus 5.5 mm bullets. The latter, they say, are effective when wanting to wound multiple internal organs, while the former are preferred by some because they are “designed to mushroom and fragment, to do maximum internal damage to the animal.” It is alleged that this was the ammunition used in Gaza yesterday against men, women and children.” (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018 and House of Commons Hansard, Gaza border violence, 15 May 2018)

Trudeau (Canada). Justin Trudeau:

“Canada deplores and is gravely concerned by the violence in the Gaza Strip that has led to a tragic loss of life and injured countless people. We are appalled that Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Canadian citizen, is among the wounded – along with so many unarmed people, including civilians, members of the media, first responders, and children. We are doing everything we can to assist Dr. Loubani and his family, and to determine how a Canadian citizen came to be injured. We are engaging with Israeli officials to get to the bottom of these events… Reported use of excessive force and live ammunition is inexcusable. It is imperative we establish the facts of what is happening in Gaza. Canada calls for an immediate independent investigation.” (John Paul Tasker, “Trudeau calling for independent probe of reported use of “excessive force” in Gaza shootings”, CBC News, 16 May 2018)

Turkey. Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Apartheid Israel.

UN Human Rights Council.   UN Human Rights Council (the UN’s top human rights body)  has voted to send a team of international war crimes investigators to probe the killing and wounding  of Gaza protesters by Israeli forces. UN Human Rights Council Resolution on Gaza Massacres:

“[to] urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry… [It must] investigate all alleged violations and abuses … in the context of the military assaults on large-scale civilian protests that began on 30 March 2018” (29 members voted Yes, US and Australia voted No, 14 countries Abstained, and 2 countries Did Not Register). The 29 countries voting Yes: Afghanistan, Angola, Belgium, Brazil, Burundi, Chile, China, Cote D’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador, Egypt, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela; 2 countries voting No: Australia and the United States of America; 14 countries Abstaining: Croatia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Panama, Republic of Korea, Rwanda, Slovakia, Switzerland, Togo, and United Kingdom; and 2 countries which Did Not Register: Mongolia and Ukraine. In addition,  10 of the council’s 15 members wrote to UN secretary-general to express serious  concern that the 2016 UNSC Resolution 2334 demanding an end to Israeli settlement building on occupied land was not being implemented: “The Security Council must stand behind its resolutions and ensure they have meaning; otherwise, we risk undermining the credibility of the international system,” wrote Bolivia, China, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, France, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Peru and Sweden in a joint letter (“UN votes to send war crimes investigators to Gaza”, Al Jazeera, 19 May 2018)

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory:

“Today, as of 20:00, Israeli forces injured 56 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH), during demonstrations near the perimeter fence as part of the “Great March of Return.” Although 15 May, the 70^th anniversary of what Palestinians refer to as the 1948 “Nakba”, was initially intended to be the culmination of the protests, the demonstrations are now expected to continue at least until 5 June, which commemorates the “Naksa”, when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967… Since the first protest on 30 March, according to the MoH in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed 104 Palestinians, including 14 children, during the course of the “Great March of Return” demonstrations. In addition, 12 Palestinians have been killed during the same period in other circumstances, including five reportedly shot at the fence or after crossing into Israel, whose bodies are reportedly being withheld by the Israeli authorities. The cumulative number of injuries by Israeli forces is approximately 12,600, of whom 55 per cent have been hospitalized. One Israeli soldier has been injured. The violence reached a peak on 14 May, coinciding with the official transfer of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, when Israeli forces killed approximately 60 Palestinians and injured over 2,700 in Gaza, the highest casualty toll in the Gaza Strip in a single day since the 2014 hostilities… In the context of the massive rise in Palestinian casualties since 30 March, the humanitarian response in Gaza has been focusing on providing immediate life-saving healthcare, mental health and psycho-social support for affected people, especially children, and monitoring, verifying and documenting possible protection violations. These new needs occur in the context of a pre-existing humanitarian and human rights crisis caused by nearly 11 years of Israeli blockade, alongside the internal Palestinian political divide and a chronic energy crisis that leaves Gaza’s two million inhabitants with power cuts of up to 22 hours per day, on average, and severely disrupts the provision of essential services.” (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory, “50 Palestinians reported injured during demonstrations in Gaza on  first Friday of Ramadan”, 18 May 2018)

UN Security Council members. Draft resolution for the UNSC meeting called for by Kuwait re the Gaza killings:

“The Security Council expresses its outrage and sorrow at the killing of Palestinian civilians exercising their right to peaceful protest. The Security Council calls for an independent and transparent investigation into these actions to ensure accountability…all sides to exercise restraint with a view to averting further escalation and establishing calm…  [actions] which purport to have altered the character, status or demographic composition of the Holy City of Jerusalem have no legal effect” . US opposition effectively vetoed passage of the resolution. (Chris Baynes, “US “blocks UN motion” calling for  investigation into Israeli killing of Gaza protesters”, Independent, 15 May 2018)

Varadkar (Ireland). Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (Ireland’s Taoiseach or Prime Minister, Minister for Defence and Leader of Fine Gael):

“Live ammunition is not a tool to be used for crowd control. The Government will not be expelling the ambassador. In recent decades Ireland has never expelled an ambassador. Any country is entitled to defend its border but the use of force must be proportionate…  Ireland’s embassy will remain in Tel Aviv.” (Fiach Kelly, “Dail divided on response to violence on Israel-Gaza border””, Irish Times, 16 May 2018).

Venezuela. Venezuela Foreign Ministry:

 “[Venezuela’s] ongoing support for the just cause of the Palestinian people and their right to return to the lands that have historically belonged to them… [Venezuela’s] disapproval of the ongoing actions taken by the US government with the Israeli occupying force. These measures are illegal, contrary to international law, and run contrary to all international resolutions regarding this conflict, thus undermining the efforts to find a peaceful and just solution for the return of the heroic Palestinian people to their land.” (Federico Fuentes, “South America: Israel’s massacre in Gaza denounced, support for BDS grows”, Green Left Weekly, 17 May 2018)

Vlazna (Australia). Dr Vacy Vazna (Australian humanitarian activist and writer) :

“All the above criteria for sanctions (and more) apply to the Jewish state’s military occupation and control of Palestinian lives over the past 70 years and apply to its blatant belligerence during the past month against Gaza’s unarmed protestors that has culminated, to date, in 46 martyrs and over 6000 injuries that began with the Good Friday massacre.  The killings and maiming are indisputable evidence of the violation of International Law and International Humanitarian Law ( IHL) which prohibits under Rule 70 ,“The use of means and methods of warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering… Article 6 of the ATT [UN Arms Trade Treaty] provides a solid legal structure and obligations for arms embargoes, “Article 6: 3. A State Party shall not authorize any transfer of conventional arms covered under Article 2 (1) or of items covered under Article 3 or Article 4, if it has knowledge at the time of authorization that the arms or items would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes as defined by international agreements to which it is a Party”. 94 countries have ratified the ATT. We can demand that our governments honour their obligations and end arms trade with Israel and lobby our governments to support a UN arms embargo. It is the least we can do. ATT  campaigns will erase any sense of bystander helplessness in the face of the Jewish state’s slaughter and maiming of brave young Gazans who are simply demanding their Right of Return under international law.” (Vacy Vlazna, “Calls for arms grade embargo against Jewish State atrocities in Gaza”, Justice for Palestine Matters)

Weiss (US). Philip Weiss (see “Mondoweiss” , an American news website that is co-edited by anti-racist Jewish American journalists Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz and is a part of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change).

Whitson (US, Human Rights Watch). Sarah Leah Whitson (Executive Director, Middle East and North Africa , Human Rights Watch):

“Israel has killed 37 Palestinians in Gaza today, & day’s not even over. This is about individual snipers safely esconced hundreds of feet, even farther, away, targeting individual protestors and executing them one at a time. So inhumane.” (Sarah Leah Whitson, Twitter, 14 May 2018)

Zomlot (Palestine). Hussar Zomlot (Palestinian Ambassador to the US):

 “The US silence is license to kill for Israel, and Israel is taking this license to her and implementing it in full. Failing to speak up is a dent in the moral history of this country” and  re the US Embassy shift to Jerusalem: “Today will go down in history as the day the U.S. encouraged Israel to cross the line towards what numerous U.S. and international leaders have been warning from: A full-fledged apartheid. The reality has evolved into a system of privileging one group and continuing to deny the human and national rights, all granted by international law, of over 12 million Palestinians.” (Caitlin Doherty, “”Israel has right to defend itself” – Donald Trump blames Hamas for Gaza deaths”, Express, 15 May 2018; “Live blog: massacre in Gaza as US and Israel celebrate embassy move to Jerusalem”, Mondoweiss, 14 May 2018)

(B) Bad, offensive or deficient responses to the US Jerusalem move and the latest Gaza Massacres – a  compendium of shameful complicity.

Abbott (Australia).  Tony Abbott (former Prime Minister of Australia betrayed and replaced as PM by Malcolm Turnbull) supporting the US Embassy move:

“The US embassy is now in West Jerusalem, which has been Israel’s capital for nearly 70 years. Australia should consider following Trump’s move” [ noting that Apartheid Israel has war criminally incorporated East Jerusalem and  its Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants into a forcibly and war criminally unified Jerusalem and into Apartheid Israel in gross violation of numerous UN Resolutions, the UN Charter, the UN Genocide Convention and the Geneva Convention; the violently incorporated Indigenous Palestinians cannot vote in Israeli elections ]. (Primrose Riordan , “Turnbull, US blame  Hamas for death of Palestinians in Gaza”, The Australian, 16 May 2018; Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel & Pro-Apartheid US, Australia & Canada face world sanctions over East Jerusalem”, Countercurrents, 20 December 2017)

Ambassadors to Apartheid Israel. Of 83 countries with embassies in Apartheid Israel and invited to the celebrations only 33 attended, namely   Albania, Angola, Austria, Cameroon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Georgia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Kenya, Macedonia, Burma, Nigeria, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Romania, Rwanda, Serbia, South Sudan, Thailand, Ukraine, United States, Vietnam, Paraguay, Tanzania and Zambia (Noa Landau, “These are the countries planning to participate in Israel’s celebrations of U.S. Embassy move”, Haaretz, 16 May 2016)

Australia. US lackey Australia and the US voted No to the UN Human Rights Council Resolution on Gaza Massacres “[to] urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry… [It must] investigate all alleged violations and abuses … in the context of the military assaults on large-scale civilian protests that began on 30 March 2018.” ( “UN votes to send war crimes investigators to Gaza”, Al Jazeera, 19 May 2018).

Bishop (Australia). Julie Bishop (Coalition Australian Foreign Minister) released the following detailed statement after the latest series of Israeli Gaza Massacres that was entitled “Palestinian protests in Gaza” (2018):

“The Australian Government expresses its deep regret and sadness over the loss of life and injury during the continuing protests in Gaza. We recognise that Israel has legitimate security concerns and needs to protect its population, and we call on Israel to be proportionate in its response and refrain from excessive use of force. Australia urges Palestinian protesters to refrain from violence and attempting to enter into Israeli territory during the March of Return. The violence underlines the importance of a return to negotiations toward a two-state solution so an enduring peace can be found. The Australian Government is committed to a future where Israel and a Palestinian state exist side-by-side in peace and security, within internationally recognised borders”,  “Australia voted against the [UN Human Rights Council] resolution because of our principled opposition to resolutions that fail the test of balance and impartiality. The UNHRC resolution prejudged the outcome of an inquiry into violations of international law in the context of large-scale civilian protests in the Palestinian Territories, including East Jerusalem. Nor did it refer to the role of Hamas in inciting violent protests” and “Clearly there have been tensions building for some time and Israel believes that Hamas is the instigator behind the protests. The protestors are resorting to violence, they are trying to force entry into the Israeli territories, and we have urged them not to do that. Israel is of course entitled to defend itself, a legitimate right to self-defence, but it must be proportionate and we urge Israel not to use excessive force. The issue of the US Embassy has just escalated the tensions. We are urging all sides to reduce the violence, cut out the violence and return to negotiations. I think the violence underscores the desperate need for both sides to return to peaceful negotiations for a two-state solution” ( Julie Bishop, “Palestinian  protests in Gaza”, Media release, 15 May 2018; “We can hold head high”, Australian Jewish News, 24 May 2018; Julie Bishop, “Interview with Leigh Sales – ABC 7.30”, 15 May 2018)

Block (Australia). Anton Block (Executive Council of Australian Jewry president):

 “The Foreign Minister was correct in rejecting the terms of the resolution which pre-empted the outcome of the inquiry, accusing Israel of ‘impunity’, ‘systematic failures’, and ‘intentionally targeting civilians’. The whole exercise is a polemical stunt to give the appearance of legitimacy and objectivity to blatantly one-sided political attacks on Israel.” (“We can hold head high”, Australian Jewish News, 24 May 2018).

Burt (UK). Alistair Burt (UK Minister for the Middle East):

 “[Palestinian death toll] extremely worrying… [ Israel should] show greater restraint…  [UK would] not waver from our support for Israel’s right to defend its borders” [51]. Alistair Burt issued a statement on Twitter: “Extremely saddened by loss of life in Gaza today. Concerned peaceful protests are being exploited by extremist elements. Urge restraint in use of live fire. Violence is destructive to peace efforts. UK remains committed to a two-state solution with Jerusalem as a shared capital.” (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Collins (Australia). Julie Collins ( Tasmanian Labor MP and Shadow Minister for Ageing and Mental Health):

“Well, I think the whole…the deaths recently was a bit of a tragedy and, you know, I think the arguments that we’re hearing here tonight at the table show how complex an issue this is. I mean, Labor yesterday called for the government to explain its vote in the UN. We were very concerned that we were one of only two countries to actually vote against it. As we’ve heard, some countries did abstain. But the question would be, well, why didn’t Australia abstain? Why didn’t we talk about, perhaps, supporting another investigation with a differently-worded motion? I mean, we’re not in government, we don’t know what the negotiations around that were. But, clearly, I think both sides, if there was an investigation, would welcome it, so that we can actually get to the bottom of what happened. Let’s not forget, 60 people died. I mean, it is heartbreaking that this continues to happen. This conflict has been going on for a long time. A two-state solution is the only solution, and we need to de-escalate things, not keep inflaming them.” (ABC Q&A, “Weddings, Gaza and losing faith”, 21 May 2018)

Conricus (Israel). Lt Col Jonathan Conricus (a spokesperson for the genocidally racist and war criminal IDF):

 “[Since 30 March] only 1 soldier slightly wounded by shrapnel…[no Palestinian incursion] Our troops have not taken any sustained direct fire” [58] (In stark contrast Mohammed Nabieh ( a descendant of refugees from a village near Israeli Ashdod) stated of the protest:  “I’m here because of our land that we want back. We have nothing to lose,” Nobody cares about us. Why should we wait to die slowly?” (Oliver Holmes and Hazem Balousha, “Israel faces outcry over Gaza killings during Jerusalem embassy protests”, The Guardian, 15 May 2018)

Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) (UK). Lord Polak CBE (CFI Honorary President) and James Gurd (CFI Executive Director) said:

“The ongoing events on the Israel-Gaza border are truly heart breaking, and the loss of lives deeply concerning. What makes the matter worse is Hamas’s cynical manipulation of a legitimate protest to further its well-documented violent and genocidal intentions towards Israeli citizens, which is deplorable. In the face of attempts to breach the border and attack civilians, Israel (like any other country) has the right to self-defence. We hope there will be no further casualties and we urge restraint on all sides.” ( Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Danon (Israel). Danny Danon ( permanent representative of Apartheid Israel to the UN)  addressing the UN Security Council:

“Hamas terrorists are hiding behind civilians during the riots.  When it comes to the safety of the Israeli public, too often, the world is silent. The Palestinian leadership is using every ounce of its leadership to attack us and destroy us… [Palestinian authorities] killing their own people [and] playing a public relations game… [Palestinians] always choose violence. ” (Amanda Holpuch  and Matthew Weaver, “Gaza: Nakba Day protests as Palestinians bury those killed in embassy unrest – live updates”, The Guardian,  16 May 2018) [Note that no Palestinians penetrated the Gaza Concentration Camp fence and no Israelis were killed or injured, with 1 Israel soldier being “slightly wounded by shrapnel”].

Dichter (Israel). Avi Dichter ( Likud chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defense committee of the Apartheid Israeli Knesset): “[Security forces] won’t let anyone put soldiers, and certainly not civilians, in danger,” he said.

“The IDF has enough bullets for everyone. I think that ultimately, the means that the IDF prepared, whether non-lethal, or if needed, lethal, in cases where it’s justified by the open-fire regulations — there’s enough ammunition for everyone.”(Avi Dichter quoted in Stuart Winer and Times of Israel  Staff, “Israel “has enough bullets for everyone” senior MK says of deadly Gaza clashes”, The Times of Israel”, 14 May 2018)

Erdan (Israel). Gilad Erdan (Apartheid Israeli minister of Strategic Affairs):

“Israel does not wish to escalate and doesn’t want the death of residents of the Gaza Strip. Those who want this are solely the leadership of the Hamas terrorist organization, which uses a cynical and malicious use of bloodshed. The number of killed doesn’t indicate anything – just as the number of Nazis who died in the world war doesn’t make Nazism something you can explain or understand.” (“Live blog: massacre in Gaza as US and Israel celebrate embassy move to Jerusalem”, Mondoweiss, 14 May 2018)

Fleischer (Australia). Dr Tzvi Fleischer (editor of the Australia/Israel Review at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), PhD in International Politics from Monash University):

“The loss of 60 Palestinian lives along the Israel-Gaza border on Monday was indeed tragic and heartbreaking. Yet these deaths were not the result of anything resembling a peaceful protest, despite claims to the contrary; nor were they the result of either the difficult and worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza, or the opening of the new US embassy in Jerusalem. Instead, they were yet another product of the often divided Palestinian leadership, which has cost the Palestinian people so much. Hamas, which has ruled Gaza with an iron fist for 11 years has become increasingly isolated. It has also been locked in a very bitter political struggle with the Palestinian Authority, which rules the West Bank and has far more international recognition. Furthermore, Hamas’ traditional methods of gaining attention both internationally and on the Palestinian streets – launching suicide bombings and rocket attacks, or creating terror tunnels targeting Israel – have been closed off by Israeli counter-measures.” ( Tzvi Fleischer, “Gaza deaths a win for Hamas, but show Palestinian leadership failures”, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 2018)

Gurd (UK). Lord Polak CBE (CFI Honorary President) and James Gurd (CFI Executive Director) said:

“The ongoing events on the Israel-Gaza border are truly heart breaking, and the loss of lives deeply concerning. What makes the matter worse is Hamas’s cynical manipulation of a legitimate protest to further its well-documented violent and genocidal intentions towards Israeli citizens, which is deplorable. In the face of attempts to breach the border and attack civilians, Israel (like any other country) has the right to self-defence. We hope there will be no further casualties and we urge restraint on all sides.” (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Guterres (Portugal, UN). António Guterres (UN Secretary-General via a Spokesman):

“The Secretary-General is deeply concerned about the clashes at the Gaza fence today between Palestinians participating in the “Great Return March” and Israeli Security Forces, which resulted in at least 15 deaths and a large number of injured.  His thoughts are with the families of the victims. The Secretary-General calls for an independent and transparent investigation into these incidents. He also appeals to those concerned to refrain from any act that could lead to further casualties and in particular any measures that could place civilians in harm’s way. This tragedy underlines the urgency of revitalizing the peace process aiming at creating the conditions for a return to meaningful negotiations for a peaceful solution that will allow Palestinians and Israelis to live side by side peacefully and in security.  The Secretary-General reaffirms the readiness of the United Nations to support these efforts.” (António Guterres (30 March 2018), “Secretary-General deeply concerned about deadly clashes along Israel-Gaza border, calls for independent investigation, restraint to prevent more casualties.” (UN, 30 March 2018)

Hastie (Australia). Andrew Hastie (former Special Forces soldier,  Australian Liberal Party and Coalition Government  backbencher and chairman of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security)  backed the call by former PM Tony Abbott  for the Turnbull Liberal Party-National Party Coalition government to follow the US lead and move its embassy to Jerusalem. (Primrose Riordan , “Turnbull, US blame  Hamas for death of Palestinians in Gaza”, The Australian, 16 May 2018)

Hume (Australia). Jane Hume (Australian Liberal Party Senator from Victoria):

“The reason why Australia voted against this inquiry was because we believed that it was already being prejudged, that the UN Human Rights Council had already prejudged the outcome. And you could tell that from its language. It didn’t include Hamas in any of the terms of reference of that inquiry. It only included Israel. It included not just Gaza, but also Jerusalem and the West Bank, which weren’t necessarily involved in this particular incident.” (ABC Q&A, “Weddings, Gaza and losing faith”, 21 May 2018)

Johnson (UK). Boris Johnson (UK Foreign Secretary): “There has got to be restraint in the use of live rounds.” (Primrose Riordan , “Turnbull, US blame  Hamas for death of Palestinians in Gaza”, The Australian, 16 May 2018)

Kushner (US). Jared Kushner (Trump’s wealthy and fanatically Jewish Zionist son-in-law as husband of Ivanka Trump) (May 2018):

“As we have seen from the protests of the last month and even today those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution.” (Amanda Holpuch  and Matthew Weaver, “Gaza: Nakba Day protests as Palestinians bury those killed in embassy unrest – live updates”, The Guardian,  16 May 2018)

Israeli Defence Force (IDF) (Israel). Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson:

“Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was cZArried out uncontrolled, everything was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.” (Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson on Twitter, @IDFSpokesperson, 31 March 2018)

Labour Friends of Israel (UK). The UK  Labour Friends of Israel group said:

“It is clear after yesterday’s terrible death toll that the violence on the Gazan border has to stop. Hamas must end its cynical exploitation of peaceful protests to launch attacks on Israel and we would urge the IDF to ensure they take all measures necessary to minimise civilian casualties and show restraint. ” ( Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Lamm (Australia). Danny Lamm (Zionist Federation of Australia president):

[Thanks the Australian government] for taking a stand and for protecting Israel’s right to defend itself and not being railroaded by an organisation that has a miserable track record on human rights and calling out human rights failures. ” (“We can hold head high”, Australian Jewish News, 24 May 2018).

Leibler (Australia). Mark Leibler (Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council chairman with executive director Colin Rubenstein:

“Australia can hold its head high as the only member state along with the US to oppose this biased and counterproductive [UN Human Rights Council] resolution. The government promised not to support one-sided resolutions when it recently joined the council and we commend the government for keeping its promise.” (“We can hold head high”, Australian Jewish News, 24 May 2018).

Liberman (Israel). Avigdor Liberman (Apartheid Israeli Defense Minister):

“This weekend hundreds of people were killed in Syria, including dozens of women and children, and I haven’t yet heard the UN secretary general, we didn’t see the Security Council or the Arab League convene, so we need to understand in what environment we are living. Dozens, maybe hundreds were also killed in Yemen, that doesn’t interest anyone at all. But when Israel defends itself we immediately see the spree of hypocrisy and the parade of foolishness. It has to be understood that there are no innocent people in Gaza. Everyone is affiliated with Hamas, they are all paid by Hamas, and all the activists trying to challenge us and breach the border are operatives of its military wing.” (Michael Bachner, “Liberman signals Trump didn’t consult with Israel on Syria withdrawal”, The Times of Israel, 8 April 2018)

May (UK). Theresa May (UK Prime Minister) via a spokesperson (May 2018):

“The UK remains firmly committed to a two-state solution with Jerusalem a shared capital. We are concerned by the reports of violence and loss of life in Gaza. We urge calm and restraint to avoid actions destructive to peace efforts.” (Caitlin Doherty, “”Israel has right to defend itself” – Donald Trump blames Hamas for Gaza deaths”, Express, 15 May 2018; Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Merkel (Germany). Angela Merkel (German Chancellor) statement re the Gaza killings to war criminal Netanyahu as reported by a spokesman  “[Expressed her] concerns about the escalation of violence… [understands] the security concerns of Israel… The right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly should not be abused to provoke unrest. Violence should not be a means to enforce political goals. ” (Nadine Schmidt, “Merkel expresses concern over Gaza violence in call with Netanyahu”, CNN, 15 May 2018) [Under Merkel,  Germany supplied German submarines to carry Israeli nuclear weapons-tipped missiles].

Netanyahu (Israel). Benjamin Netanyahu (serial war criminal Prime Minister of Apartheid Israel) blaming Hamas for the Gaza killings:

“Every country has an obligation to defend its borders. The Hamas terrorist organisation declares it intends to destroy Israel and sends thousands to breach the border fence in order to achieve this goal. We will continue to act with determination to protect our sovereignty and citizens” and [I salute] the soldiers of the IDF who keep us safe… from those who pretend to speak of human rights, while holding a Nazi flag. Here is the naked truth. They speak of human rights, but they really want to crush the Jewish state. We won’t let them. We’ll stand strong. We’ll keep our country safe.” (“Netanyahu explains Israel actions in Gaza by “obligation to defend its borders””, Sputnik , 14 May 2018; Michael Bachner, “Liberman signals Trump didn’t consult with Israel on Syria withdrawal”, The Times of Israel, 8 April 2018)

Polak (UK). CFI Honorary President Lord Polak CBE and CFI Executive Director James Gurd said:

“The ongoing events on the Israel-Gaza border are truly heart breaking, and the loss of lives deeply concerning.What makes the matter worse is Hamas’s cynical manipulation of a legitimate protest to further its well-documented violent and genocidal intentions towards Israeli citizens, which is deplorable. In the face of attempts to breach the border and attack civilians, Israel (like any other country) has the right to self-defence. We hope there will be no further casualties and we urge restraint on all sides. ” (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Pompeo (US). Mike Pompeo (US Secretary of State) re the Gaza Massacres “[The US] does believe the Israeli’s have the right to defend themselves and we’re fully supportive of that.” (Caitlin Doherty, “”Israel has right to defend itself” – Donald Trump blames Hamas for Gaza deaths”, Express, 15 May 2018)

Regev (Israel). Mark Regev (Australian Israeli and Israeli ambassador to the UK) defending the war criminal IDF response in the Gaza Massacres: “We used live fire in only a very measured way in a very surgical way.” (Lee Harpin, “Deaths in Gaza are an “outrage” says Jeremy Corbyn as he backs review of arms sales to Israel”, The JC, 15 May 2018)

Schechter (Israel). Aviva Raz Shechter (Israeli UN ambassador): “It is deplorable that this [UN Human Rights] council, which pretends to be interested in the truth, turns a blind eye to the reality on the ground, and unjustifiably condemns Israel for protecting its population.” (“We can hold head high”, Australian Jewish News, 24 May 2018).

Shah (US). Raj Shah (White House deputy press secretary) at news conference re Gaza killings (15 May 2018):

 “We believe that Hamas is responsible for these tragic deaths, that their rather cynical exploitation of the situation is what’s leading to these deaths, and we want them to stop… We think that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Hamas is the one that, frankly, bear [sic] responsibility for the dire situation right now in Gaza…We believe Hamas, as an organization, is engaged in cynical action that’s leading to these deaths. This is a gruesome and unfortunate propaganda attempt… [Mike Pompeo agrees that]  Israel has the right to self-defense.”  (Caitlin Doherty, “”Israel has right to defend itself” – Donald Trump blames Hamas for Gaza deaths”, Express, 15 May 2018; Alex Ward, “White House absolves Israel of all responsibility in Gaza deaths”, Vox, 15 May 2018)

Sharma (Australia). Dave Sharma (former Australian ambassador to Israel) has called on the Turnbull government to consider recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel even if it does not move the embassy from Tel Aviv. (Primrose Riordan , “Turnbull, US blame  Hamas for death of Palestinians in Gaza”, The Australian, 16 May 2018)

Sheridan (Australia).  Greg Sheridan (foreign editor of the extreme right-wing Murdoch media newspaper “The Australian”):

 “So, look, this is a very emotional and difficult issue. The death of 60 people is a terrible tragedy. And there’s plenty of moral blame to go around. I’ll make a couple of points to you. The United Nations Human Rights Council… Depends where we want to start in the debate, but the United Nations Human Rights Council has zero credibility. It never investigates its members such as Cuba or China, and it has had more resolutions against Israel than against all other nations on earth put together. Now, even if you are a critic of Israel, you cannot believe that it is responsible for more human rights abuses than all the other nations of the whole earth put together – the North Korean labour camp, gulag, 400,000 dead in Syria and so on. So as an organisation, it has zero credibility. And therefore, I think the Australian government was right to refuse to endorse that investigation. Now, the business of the demonstrations is tremendously contested. We’re not going to have time to go through all the detail. If it is the case that the Israelis used unnecessary force, that should be investigated. And I would have faith in the Israeli legal system to investigate it… Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and said, “Let’s make this work together. If you work together, you can have a very prosperous economic future.” The situation of life in Gaza is terrible, almost entirely because of the actions of Hamas, which murdered…when it took power, murdered hundreds of other Palestinians. Murdered dissidents, threw homosexuals off the rooftop, murdered Fatah and Palestinian Authority people. One of the reasons conditions in Gaza are so bad today is because the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah decided to sanction Hamas in Gaza and stop paying the salaries of Palestinian Authority workers in Gaza.” (ABC Q&A, “Weddings, Gaza and losing faith”, 21 May 2018)

Singer (Australia). Professor Peter Singer  (Jewish Australian philosopher and author of  “Animal Liberation”):

“I think the situation is a tragic one and it has resulted in the tragedy that we’re talking about this time. But clearly there are extremists on both sides. And, you know, there was hope some years ago, when Rabin was prime minister, for example. But, sadly, he was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli and hopes for peace went down. And since then, I think, both sides have gone to extremes. Certainly, the Israeli government has gone to extremes and has not shown signs of really being interested in negotiating peace or stopping settlements. But on the other hand, you have to say, as far as Hamas is concerned particularly…  they are a terrorist organisation, they are firing rockets into Israel, they are openly trying to kill Israelis where they can, and they did reject offers of cooperation back when Israel left Gaza. So that’s a tragedy for the people of Gaza. And it’s very hard to see a way out… I would have liked to see an investigation, both into why Israel used live fire and could not find a less lethal way of preventing people from attacking and cutting through the fence, but also why Hamas was inviting people to go to the fence when Israel had made it clear that it was going to use force to prevent people, that there clearly was a risk of live ammunition, of people being killed. And why people would go there with their children and babies actually, you know, is mind-boggling to me. What kind of a person would you have to be to say, “I’m gonna take my baby to this area where there’s likely to be firing”.”  (ABC Q&A, “Weddings, Gaza and losing faith”, 21 May 2018)

Turnbull (Australia). Malcolm Turnbull (fervent Christian Zionist and Australian Coalition Prime Minister who betrayed and replaced former PM Tony Abbott) disgracefully blaming the victim in his comments on the latest Gaza Massacres (2018):

“This is Hamas pushing people to the border, pushing them with Israel, pushing them to challenge the border, to try to get through the border. It’s it is it’s it is it’s tragic, Any loss of life is like this or any loss of life is tragic in these circumstances, but Hamas’ conduct is confrontational, they are seeking to provoke the Israeli defence forces… We;;, they’re pushing people to the border in an area in, you know, in context in that  conflict zone you’re basically pushing people into circumstances where they are likely to be shot as Israel seeks to defend itself” and We have taken the view — as indeed, most countries have — that it’s more conducive to the peace process to keep the embassy in Tel Aviv. Obviously, the status of Jerusalem and negotiations relating to Jerusalem are a key part of the peace negotiations, which we wish the very best for and which we support.” (“Malcolm Turnbull blames Hamas for “tragic” Gaza deaths”, Sky News, 15 May 2018; Primrose Riordan , “Turnbull, US blame  Hamas for death of Palestinians in Gaza”, The Australian, 16 May 2018)

Trump (US). Racist warmonger US President Donald Trump has moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem thereby endorsing the war criminal Apartheid Israeli incorporation of  East Jerusalem and  its Indigenous Palestinian inhabitants into a forcibly and war criminally unified Jerusalem and into Apartheid Israel in gross violation of numerous UN Resolutions, the UN Charter, the UN Genocide Convention and the Geneva Convention, noting that the violently incorporated Indigenous Palestinians cannot vote in Israeli elections. Through his various spokespeople Trump has blamed the Gaza protestors for getting killed (Caitlin Doherty, “”Israel has right to defend itself” – Donald Trump blames Hamas for Gaza deaths”, Express, 15 May 2018; Alex Ward, “White House absolves Israel of all responsibility in Gaza deaths”, Vox, 15 May 2018; Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel & Pro-Apartheid US, Australia & Canada face world sanctions over East Jerusalem”, Countercurrents, 20 December 2017)

UN Human Rights Council members voting No, abstaining or not registering over proposed investigation of Gaza killings. The UN Human Rights Council Resolution on Gaza Massacres:

“[to] urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry… [It must] investigate all alleged violations and abuses … in the context of the military assaults on large-scale civilian protests that began on 30 March 2018” ( 29 members voted Yes, but US and Australia voted No, 14 countries Abstained, and 2 countries Did Not Register). The 14 countries Abstaining included Croatia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, Panama, Republic of Korea, Rwanda, Slovakia, Switzerland, Togo, and the UK), and the 2 countries that Did Not Register were Mongolia and Ukraine. (“UN votes to send war crimes investigators to Gaza”, Al Jazeera, 19 May 2018)

2018. The US and Australia voted No to the UN Human Rights Council Resolution on Gaza Massacres “[to] urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry… [It must] investigate all alleged violations and abuses … in the context of the military assaults on large-scale civilian protests that began on 30 March 2018.” ( “UN votes to send war crimes investigators to Gaza”, Al Jazeera, 19 May 2018).

US senators.  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and 12 of his Democratic Senate colleagues (Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Thomas Carper (D-Del.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.)) in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:

“[Pompeo] should do more to alleviate the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip… The territory’s lack of power, clean water, adequate medical care and other necessities not only exacerbates the hardships faced by Gaza’s population, but redounds to the benefit of extremist groups who use this deprivation and despair to incite violence against Israel… The political and security challenges in Gaza are formidable, but support for the basic human rights of its people must not be conditioned on progress on those fronts. For the sake of Israelis and Palestinians alike, the United States must act urgently to help relieve the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. We stand ready to work with you on this important matter”. Sanders added  a statement: “In light of yesterday’s horrific violence in Gaza, in which more than 50 Palestinians were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded by Israeli snipers, it’s important to understand the desperate situation out of which these protests have arisen. That is why I, along with 12 of my Senate colleagues, have sent a letter to the secretary of state making clear that the United States must play a leading role in addressing the situation.” (“Sanders leads call to address humanitarian crisis in Gaza”, Bernie Sanders, 16 May 2018)

Wong (Australia). Penny Wong (Australian Labor Senator and Shadow Foreign Minister):

“We’ve seen a large number of Palestinians killed, a large number of casualties, not just in the last 24 hours but we have seen issues over the last six weeks. We would urge Israel to demonstrate restraint in responding to these protests. We obviously respect Israel’s right to secure its borders but we do believe it is important that they demonstrate restraint in this and we would call on both sides to de-escalate the conflict.”  (Senator Penny Wong, “Transcript. Sky News live now with Ashleigh Gillon”, 15 May 2018)

*

This article was originally published on Countercurrents.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ).

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[47]. Gideon Polya (2011), “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”,  Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm  .

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Steve Bannon – Der ehemalige Stratege von Donald Trump, Theoretiker des Nationalpopulismus, drückte seine enthusiastische Unterstützung für die Allianz mit der 5-Sterne-Liga-Bewegung für “die Regierung des Wandels” aus. In einem Interview (Sky TG24, 26. Mai) sagte er: “Die grundlegende Frage in Italien im März war die Frage der Souveränität. Das Ergebnis der Wahlen war, diejenigen Italiener ins Amt zu bringen, die Souveränität und Kontrolle über ihr Land wiedererlangen wollen. Zieht einen Schlussstrich unter die Regeln, die aus Brüssel kommen “.

Aber das heißt nicht “Schluss mit den Regeln, die aus Washington kommen”.

Es ist nicht nur die Europäische Union, die Druck auf Italien ausübt, um dessen politische Entscheidungen zu lenken, dominiert von den mächtigen Wirtschafts- und Finanzkeisen, insbesondere Deutschland und Frankreich, die einen Bruch der “Regeln” befürchten, die ihren Interessen dienen.

Starker Druck auf Italien wird, in einer weniger offensichtlichen, aber nicht weniger aufdringlichen Art, durch die Vereinigten Staaten ausgeübt, die einen Bruch der “Regeln” fürchten, die Italien ihren wirtschaftlichen und strategischen Interessen unterordnen.

Dies ist Teil der Politik, die Washington durch verschiedene Verwaltungen und mit unterschiedlichen Methoden gegenüber Europa anwendet und das selbe Ziel verfolgt: Europa unter amerikanischem Einfluss zu halten.

Ein grundlegendes Instrument dieser Strategie ist die NATO. Der Vertrag von Maastricht begründet in Art. 42, dass die EU “die Verpflichtungen einiger Mitgliedstaaten achtet, die ihre gemeinsame Verteidigung durch die North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) realisiert sehen. Und das Protokoll 10 zur Zusammenarbeit stellt fest, dass die NATO “die Grundlage der Verteidigung” der Europäischen Union bleibt.

Heute sind 21 der 27 EU-Länder (nach dem Brexit), mit rund 90% der Bevölkerung der Union, Teil der NATO, deren “Regeln” es den USA erlaubt, seit 1949 die Position des Obersten Alliierten Befehlshabers in Europa inne zu halten sowie alle anderen Hauptbefehligungen; sie erlauben den Vereinigten Staaten, die politischen und strategischen Entscheidungen des Bündnisses zu bestimmen, indem Sie unter dem Tisch Vereinbahrungen treffen, insbesondere mit Deutschland, Frankreich und Großbritannien, und Sie dann vom Nordatlantikrat billigen lassen, in dem es nach den «Regeln» der NATO keine Abstimmung oder Mehrheitsentscheidung gibt, sondern in dem Entscheidungen immer einstimmig getroffen werden.

Der Beitritt der osteuropäischen Länder in die NATO – ehemals Mitglieder des Warschauer Pakts, der Jugoslawischen Föderation und auch der UdSSR – hat es den Vereinigten Staaten ermöglicht, diese Länder, denen die Ukraine und Georgien hinzugefügt werden und die faktisch bereits in der NATO sind, mehr an Washington als an Brüssel zu binden.

Washington war somit in der Lage, Europa in einen neuen Kalten Krieg zu drängen und es zur Frontlinie einer zunehmend gefährlichen Konfrontation mit Russland zu machen, die für die politischen, wirtschaftlichen und strategischen Interessen der Vereinigten Staaten von Nutzen ist.

Sinnbildlich ist die Tatsache, dass in der Woche, in der Europa bitter um die “italienische Frage” kämpfte, die erste Panzerbrigade der 1. US-Kavallerie-Division aus Fort Hood in Texas in Anvers (Belgien) gelandet ist, ohne irgend eine nennenswerte Reaktion hervorzurufen. 3.000 Soldaten sind gelandet mit 87 Abrams M-1 Panzern, 125 Bradley Kampffahrzeugen, 18 Paladin Selbstfahrlafetten, 976 Militärfahrzeugen und weiterer Ausrüstung, die in fünf Stützpunkten in Polen stationiert und von hier aus in die Nähe des russischen Territoriums geschickt werden.

Dies “verbessert weiterhin die Bereitschaft und Letalität der US-Streitkräfte in Europa” die ab 2015 16,5 Milliarden Dollar bereitstellen.

Gerade als die aus Washington gesandten Panzer in Europa landeten, drängte Steve Bannon die Italiener und Europäer, “ihre Souveränität » von Brüssel wiederzuerlangen.

Dieser Artikel erschien zuerst am 29.

Mai 2018 in il manifesto

Übersetzung: K.R.

 

Video — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L9qQvg3bYM

 

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will hold its 18th annual summit meeting in Qingdao, Shandong Province on June 9-10, barely a few days before the (scheduled) Kim-Trump Summit in Singapore on June 12-14. The SCO meetings will be chaired by China’s President Xi-Jingping.  

There are unconfirmed reports that Kim Jong-un will be invited and that a “secret meeting” between Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin, is scheduled to take place in Qingdao on June 9, “on the margin”of the official SCO meeting. At the time of writing the holding of the Singapore Summit is still unconfirmed and could be cancelled by either side.

In all likelihood, the Korean crisis will be on the agenda of the SCO meeting which regroups representatives from SCO member states including China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, India and Pakistan as well as observers from Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus and Mongolia.

Were Kim to attend the SCO venue, this would be his third meeting with China’s president Xi Jinping in 2018.

It should be mentioned that China was a signatory of the 1953 armistice agreement (U.S., DPRK, China’s Volunteer Army). Legally this 1953 agreement cannot be rescinded without China’s participation in the Korea-US peace process.

An unconfirmed report suggests that Kim Jong-un may also “make a guest appearance” at the SCO meetings:

The China Times reports that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made a statement about the upcoming SCO Summit, declaring that a “Declaration of Qingdao” is expected to be signed at the meeting, along with 10 other agreements on cooperation in fields of security, the economy, and culture. See Taiwan Times report,

“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” ― Bertolt Brecht, Selected Poems

There are days I wake up, and I’m not sure what country I live in anymore.

There are days I wake up and want to go right back to sleep in the hopes that this surreal landscape of government-sanctioned injustice, corruption and brutality is just a really bad dream.

There are days I am so battered by the never-ending wave of bad news that I have little outrage left in me: I am numb.

And then I get hold of myself, shake myself out of the doldrums, and remind myself that it’s not yet time to give up: America needs our outrage and our alertness and our tenacity and our fierce determination to remain a free people in a land where justice matters.

This is still our country.

Don’t just sit there.

Do something.

When you hear that the U.S. government “lost” 1,475 migrant children within its care over a three-month period, in some cases handing them off to human traffickers, don’t just chalk it up to incompetent bureaucrats.

The Trump Administration’s plan to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border should outrage anyone with a moral conscience, especially in light of the government’s latest revelation that it is unable to account for the whereabouts of 1500 of those children.

Mind you, this is not just a Trump problem. A recent report indicates that under President Obama’s watch, migrant children were allegedly beaten, threatened with sexual violence and repeatedly assaulted while under the care of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials. According to Newsweek,

“Border authorities were accused of kicking a child in the ribs and forcing a 16-year-old girl to ‘spread her legs’ for an aggressive body search. Other children accused officers of punching a child in the head three times, running over a 17-year-old boy and denying medical care to a pregnant teen, who later had a stillbirth.”

ACT. It doesn’t matter what your politics are or where you stand on immigration issues. There are some lines that should never be crossed—some government actions that should never be tolerated or justified—no matter what the end goal might be, and this is one of them. Demand that Congress stop playing politics and endangering children’s lives.

When you read that Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants police to use stop and frisk tactics randomly against Americans without even the need for reasonable suspicion, don’t just shake your head disapprovingly.

ACT: Call the Justice Department (202-353-1555) and read them the Fourth Amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

After you watch the video of how the Transportation Security Administration, unfailingly tone deaf to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, subjected a 96-year-old World War II veteran in a wheelchair to a patdown that left no part of her body untouched, don’t just seethe in silence.

ACT: Contact your representative in Congress and file a complaint on the TSA’s egregious practices. When old women and little children are being groped by government agents, things have gone too far. In light of revelations that the TSA “has created a new secret watch list to monitor people who may be targeted as potential threats at airport checkpoints simply because they have swatted away security screeners’ hands or otherwise appeared unruly,” you can expect even more headache-inducing behavior in the near future.

When you find out that Amazon is selling police real time facial recognition software that can scan hundreds of thousands of faces, identify them, track them, and then report them to police, don’t just shrug helplessly.

ACT: Harness the power of your wallet to urge Amazon to favor freedom principles over profit motives. It’s only a matter of time before these programs are used widely here in the U.S. They are already being used and abused abroad.

For instance, Amazon’s Rekognition software was used by broadcasters to identify attendees at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Chinese police have used similar facial recognition tools to scan crowds at rock concerts, malls and gas stations in order to catch alleged lawbreakers. Just recently, Chinese police used the technology to capture a suspect who had been living under a pseudonym after he failed to pay for $17,000 worth of potatoes. Chinese schools are even employing the facial recognition cameras in classrooms to alert teachers to students who aren’t paying attention.

When you hear Sessions bragging about how much he loves civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government to seize Americans’ personal property—money, cars, homes and other valuables—without having to first prove that any criminal conduct has taken place, don’t just take his word for it.

ACT: Do your own research. You’ll soon discover that because of the corruption that surrounds this abusive program, countless innocent Americans have been robbed blind by government agents out to get rich at their expense. Billions of dollars have been taken without probable cause. Anthonia Nwaorie, a Texas nurse who had saved up $41,377 to start a medical clinic for women and children in Nigeria, had her life savings seized by Customs Agents who refused to return the money unless she agreed to pay their “expenses.” Six months later, even though Nwaorie was never charged with a crime, she’s still waiting to get her money back.

When you hear about armed Denver police pulling a gun on a school official and conducting a classroom-to-classroom search for a missing student at an area high school, don’t just thank your lucky stars your childhood was more idyllic. Likewise, when you hear that the lieutenant governor of Texas thinks the solution to school shootings is fewer school doors (entrances and exits), don’t just marvel at the short-sightedness of government officials.

ACT: Say “enough is enough” to government-sponsored violence. The systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government has done more collective harm to the American people and our liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting. Violence has become the government’s calling card, starting at the top and trickling down, from the more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year on unsuspecting Americans by heavily armed, black-garbed commandos and the increasingly rapid militarization of local police forces across the country to the surveillance drones that are already crisscrossing American skies.

When you read about how 28-year-old Andrew Finch of Kansas answered a 5 pm knock on his front door only to be shot in the head and killed ten seconds later by a police sniper because a SWAT team responded to a prank “swatting” phone call with full force, don’t just tsk-tsk over the senseless tragedies arising from militarized and police and overzealous SWAT teams. Not only did police refuse to identify the officer who pulled the trigger, but he was also never charged with Andrew’s death.

ACT: Demand accountability. If any hope for police reform is to be realized, especially as it relates to how SWAT teams are deployed locally and holding police accountable for their actions, it must begin at the community level, with local police departments and governing bodies, where citizens can still, with sufficient reinforcements, make their voices heard.

The rise of SWAT teams and militarization of American police—blowback effects of the military empire—have unfortunately become entrenched parts of American life. SWAT teams originated as specialized units dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations. As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers. Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling. In some instances, SWAT teams are even employed, in full armament, to perform routine patrols. All too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted in one tragedy after another for American citizens with little consequences for law enforcement.

When you find out that police and other law enforcement agencies are accessing the DNA shared with genealogical websites and using it to identify possible suspects, don’t offer up your DNA without some assurance of privacy protections.

ACT: Protect your privacy. It’s not just yourself you have to worry about, either. It’s also anyone related to you who can be connected by DNA. These genetic fingerprints, as they’re called, do more than just single out a person. They also show who you’re related to and how. As the Associated Press reports,

“DNA samples that can help solve robberies and murders could also, in theory, be used to track down our relatives, scan us for susceptibility to disease, or monitor our movements.”

By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. Capitalizing on this, police in California, Colorado, Virginia and Texas use DNA found at crime scenes to identify and target family members for possible clues to a suspect’s whereabouts. Who will protect your family from being singled out for “special treatment” simply because they’re related to you? As biomedical researcher Yaniv Erlichwarns, “If it’s not regulated and the police can do whatever they want … they can use your DNA to infer things about your health, your ancestry, whether your kids are your kids.”

In the face of DNA evidence that places us at the scene of a crime, behavior sensing technology that interprets our body temperature and facial tics as suspicious, and government surveillance devices that cross-check our biometrics, license plates and DNA against a growing database of unsolved crimes and potential criminals, we are no longer “innocent until proven guilty.”

Finally, when you hear someone talking about how two American citizens in Montana were detained by a Border Patrol agent because he overheard them speaking Spanish at a gas station, don’t just shake your head in disgust.

Screenshot from The Washington Post

ACT: Remind yourself (and those around you) that despite the polarizing, racially-charged rhetoric being tossed about by President Trump, this is still a nation whose strength derives from the diversity of its people and from the immigrants who have been seeking shelter on our shores since the earliest days of our Republic. As President Ronald Reagan recognized in one of his last speeches before leaving office:

“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation… Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost… Those who become American citizens love this country even more. And that’s why the Statue of Liberty lifts her lamp to welcome them to the golden door. It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world—the last, best hope of man on Earth.”

As I  make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, are to mean anything anymore—if they are to stand for anything ever again—then “we the people” have to stand up for them.

We cannot allow ourselves to be divided and distracted and turned into warring factions.

We cannot sell out our birthright for empty promises of false security.

We cannot remain silent in the face of ugliness, pettiness, meanness, brutality, corruption and injustice.

We cannot allow politicians, corporations, profiteers and war hawks to whittle our freedoms away until they are little more than empty campaign slogans.

We must stand strong for freedom.

We must give voice to moral outrage.

We must do something—anything—everything in our power to make America free again.

As Reagan recognized,

“If we lose this way of freedom, history will record with the great astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”

*

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Featured image is from the author.

President Putin’s surprise announcement that Russia is ready to maintain gas transit through Ukraine has left people wondering whether both sides’ pipeline jostling over the past couple of years was ultimately all for naught if the pre-Maidan status quo ultimately returns.

President Putin took the world off guard by announcing that Russia is “ready to preserve the Ukrainian transit” of gas, instantly provoking a wave of speculation over why both his country and Ukraine would even be interested in this after making many moves over the past couple of years to strategically disengage from one another. The 2014 success of the US-backed urban terrorist movement commonly known as “EuroMaidan” led to a serious security dilemma between Russia and its “revolutionary” neighbor after which both parties simultaneously came to the conclusion that they can’t depend on one another from that point onwards.

Ukraine started exploring “reverse gas flows” through its preexisting pipelines in order to receive supplies from its western neighbors, which then set into motion Poland’s moves to build an expensive LNG terminal along its Baltic coast. The US saw – and some would say, engineered – a perfect opportunity to sell its costly LNG to the EU by hyping up the threat of Russia’s possible “weaponization” of energy supplies, relying on the mid-2000s stereotype that itself was just a media-driven manipulation stemming from Kiev’s own weaponization of its transit state status. Faced with eventually being cut off from its largest customers, Russia endeavored to diversify its export routes and clientele.

The first part of this strategy saw it transforming the stalled South Stream pipeline into Turkish Stream and launching another Nord Stream pipeline, while the second half dealt with Russia’s “Pivot to Asia” and development of LNG exports to faraway markets. Concurrent with this, the US began to court its Croatian ally into footing a large part of the bill for an LNG terminal on Krk island, with the long-term vision being for America to supply the EU with gas through receptacles along the northern and southern Baltic and Adriatic coasts respectively of the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative”.

As it stood up until the middle of this week, all relevant players were positioning themselves for what would happen when Russia and Ukraine finally decoupled their energy relations with another, but all of that was suddenly thrown into uncertainty after President Putin’s announcement, which was completely unexpected. Taking a stab at what might be on the Russian leader’s mind and extrapolating on the geostrategic implications of this move if both parties end up agreeing to it, here’s what it might mean now that Russia said that it’s willing to maintain its gas transit through Ukraine:

Deal Or No Deal?

It’s hard to tell whether either side was able to wrestle any type of “concession” from the other prior to this announcement. There’s a chance that the past couple of years were mostly just one big bluff, notwithstanding the tangible progress that Russia and the US have already made regarding their European energy infrastructure, and that neither Russia nor Ukraine ultimately got anything from the other so they therefore decided to return to the pre-Maidan status quo. On the other hand, there’s also a very real possibility that some kind of deal might indeed be reached, whether related to the Donbass conflict or Ukraine’s internal stability.

It’s impossible to know with any degree of certainty what kind of political horse trading might have taken place in East Ukraine, but as regards the country’s domestic affairs, Russia would have self-interested reasons in keeping its neighbor’s economy afloat through gas transit and the attendant fees Kiev would levy in order to delay this failing state’s collapse and stave off another migrant wave towards its borders. There are almost half a million Ukrainian asylum seekers in Russia on top of 2.6 million migrantsalready in the country, so Moscow might have decided that enough is enough and that it doesn’t want to potentially host another 3 million Ukrainians.

Are Nord Stream II And Turkish Stream In Danger?

Another possible reason behind Russia’s volte-face on gas transit through Ukraine could be that US sanctions against Nord Stream II might actually be more of a serious threat than either Moscow or Berlin have let on, and that the strategic uncertainty surrounding these threats and what would happen next might have compelled Russia to go ahead with its Ukrainian “backup plan”. It’s not to say that Nord Stream II will be cancelled or its scheduled opening delayed, but just that guaranteeing energy flows through Ukraine might assuage some of the US and Polish resistance to this project by proving to Moscow’s adversaries that the EU’s Russian-sourced supplies won’t be almost totally dependent on Germany and Turkey in the future.

About the latter, the expansion of Turkish Stream into the EU via its proposed “Bulgarian Stream” branch would have to go through the same Brussels bureaucracy that ultimately led to South Stream’s cancellation, which itself was an entirely political decision that had little to do with Russia’s actual adherence to the EU’s many regulations. Although Hungary and the Balkan countries desperately need reliable energy exports from Russia, the EU might be more than willing to sacrifice its vassals’ living standards for the time being in order to indefinitely delay “Bulgarian Stream” just like it did with South Stream, wagering that the Azerbaijani-sourced TANAP-TAP and forthcoming “Israeli”-sourced East Mediterranean Pipeline could replace it in the future.

Should Russia succeed in keeping the tap open through Ukraine, however, then the EU would have less of a reason to fear any strategic “dependence” on Russia’s German and Turkish Great Power energy partners because the “middle way” through Ukraine would still be available in mitigating any fear mongered “weaponization” of transit routes that some countries such as Poland are afraid that either of those two might one day resort to. Keeping things as they were with Ukraine might end up being a necessary “compromise” from Russia in order to receive the EU’s approval for “Bulgarian Stream” and calm Poland’s American-triggered paranoia over Nord Stream II supposedly being a “new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”.

Same Route, Same Problems?

The obvious question on most observers’ minds is whether there’ll be a “back to the future” moment in the coming years if Ukraine once again weaponizes its transit status to provoke a Russian energy shutoff and therefore hold European countries hostage at the US’ implicit behest. That’s always a possibility but it appears less likely to happen anytime in the future than in the past. Post-Maidan Ukraine is much weaker than it’s ever been and the economy is literally on the verge of collapse. The country cannot weather any short-term disruption of energy supplies during the winter months in order to please its American patron because this could catalyze uncontrollably chaotic forces that might eventually undermine everything that the US and its on-the-ground allies worked so hard to “achieve” over the past 4 years.

Even in the off-chance that Kiev is compelled to deliver this risky self-inflicted hit to its own very tentative stability, Russia might have already succeeded in diversifying its pipeline routes through Nord Stream II and Turkish/Bulgarian/Balkan Stream by that time, thus mitigating the possible impact of this asymmetrical attack and making it much less dramatic than what happened in 2005-2006. Of course, it can’t be assured that this “back to the future” scenario won’t unfold next winter before either of these two are online, which would in that case make it a deliberate provocation in order to increase the appeal of the US’ LNG and decrease European confidence in these two Russian pipelines, though there are slim odds that this will happen anytime soon just because it might lead to Ukraine’s all-out collapse and remove the present oligarchy from power.

Reflecting on the aforementioned reasons for possibly keeping Ukraine’s pipelines open, Russia might have concluded that this is a necessary and pragmatic “compromise” in order to ensure that the construction of its Nord Stream II and Turkish/Bulgarian Stream pipelines to the EU isn’t disrupted by Brussels’ politicized bureaucracy, wagering that it’s also in Kiev’s self-interest to not interfere with these energy supplies no matter how much Washington might want it to in the future.

*

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.

Featured image is from Eurasia Future.

Wednesday, May 30^th, was Memorial Day in the United States. The commemoration began in 1868 shortly after the American Civil War, when townsmen in several communities came together to decorate the graves of the fallen on the last Monday in May. The practice began in the northern states but soon spread to the south and the annual remembrance ceremony soon took on the name Decoration Day. As wars proliferated in the twentieth century the commemoration eventually lost its association with the Civil War and was increasingly referred to nationally as Memorial Day, eventually becoming a federal holiday.

The American Civil war killed 655,000 soldiers, more than all other U.S. wars before or since combined. It was the first modern war in that it relied on railroads and steamships. The North also destroyed the livelihoods of and deliberately starved civilian populations to reduce the South’s will to resist. It was a war fought on U.S. soil and experienced first hand by the American people.

Today Memorial Day has largely lost its connection with dead soldiers and is instead best noted for being regarded as the first day of summer for recreational purposes. Beaches open up, the lifeguards come out and the smell of barbecued meat fills the air. The declining number of veterans of World War 2, Korea and Vietnam work hard to remember the dead but there is little interest from a public that has become increasingly detached from its non-conscripted professional army.

There is a certain irony in how a holiday commemorating a war fought 150 years ago that had devastating impact, a memento mori to honor the dead and warn the living about the reality of war, is now little more than a bump in the road on the way to the beach as the United States government is openly contemplating new military initiatives in Asia and possibly even in Europe.

The truth is that Americans have forgotten about the War Between the States and, protected by two broad oceans, have no idea whatsoever about the horrible reality that war represents. They have become addicted to war pari passu without any perception of what that might mean if an adversary were to develop the capability to strike the homeland. For most Americans war is little more than a video game, seen in snippets on the nightly news. It is a peculiar form of cultural blindness, an exercise that involves foreign people in faraway places and is not to be taken seriously. The rest of the world, which has experienced far too much of war’s devastation first hand has quite a different viewpoint, however.

For the past three weeks I have been traveling in Asia and Europe, to include stops in America’s two enemies du jour Iran and Russia. World War 2, ended 73 years ago, is still clearly visible in the ruins and shattered lives. St Petersburg in Russia is still restoring palaces vandalized and burnt by the Germans. In Germany, the historic Medieval Hanseatic port of Rostock was 80% reduced to rubble by U.S. and British bombers. It was a war in which cities burned and 80 million soldiers and civilians died, only one half of one per cent of which were Americans. Russia lost 27 million alone. The continental United States alone among major belligerents was untouched by the fighting.

Iran too bears the scars of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, in which Washington supported Baghdad. Half a million Iranians and Iraqis died. In the deliberately never-ending War on Terror 8,000 Americans have lost their lives in places few would be able to find on a map but, by some estimates, so have nearly 4 million Muslims directly and as collateral damage. Three foreign governments have been overthrown and Washington is seeking to add Damascus to that toll, with suggestions that even Moscow is being targeted for change.

All of which led on my recent travels to discussions in which many non-Americans wondered openly “What has happened to the United States?” Most went so far as to opine that Washington is the world’s greatest threat to peace, not China, Russia or Iran. Sadly, I had to agree.

So it behooves all Americans if good will to band together to end the madness. When Memorial Day comes around next year let it again be a commemoration of the horror of war, the death and destruction. With that in mind, all thoughts of confrontation should vanish to be replaced by demands for negotiation and accommodation. And as for the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, give them a Memorial Day gift and bring them home. Every one of them.

*

Philip Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCF.

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How Do You Get Off the US “Kill List”?

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, May 31, 2018

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration created a secret “kill list” to step up the targeting of alleged terrorists for assassination. The criteria for inclusion on the list have apparently morphed over three presidential administrations, yet they remain elusive.

America’s Big-Brother ‘News’ Media

By Eric Zuesse, May 31, 2018

The way it works was well displayed, May 25^th, on the opinion page of America’s largest-circulation newspaper, USA Today. Each of the three articles there presumed that the US Government is fighting for the public’s interests, and that the countries it invades or threatens to invade are evil. It is all, and always, propaganda for the US military, which is the reason why the US military is the most-respected institution in the United States, despite being the most wasteful and the most corrupt of all federal Departments.

Denialism: The Historical Denialism of Japan’s Crimes against Humanity

By George Burchett, May 31, 2018

Mass-circulation mainstream newspapers have sections dedicated to denying Japan’s crimes during World War Two and its pre-war colonial occupation of Asian nations, notably Korea and China.

“I Have a Nuclear Button, … And My Button Works” Trump Is Far More Dangerous than Hitler?

By Shane Quinn, May 31, 2018

The decision by America to relentlessly pursue, and use, nuclear weapons started an inevitable proliferation domino effect – of no great concern to Western leaders – with nine countries now possessing nuclear arsenals. This includes nations hostile to each other such as the United States and Russia, while on the other side of the world, old enemies India and Pakistan have nuclear stockpiles, not to mention Israel.

The US Trade War with China. Trump wants to Block Countries from using the Yuan as a Reserve Currency

By Peter Koenig and Press TV, May 31, 2018

As you know, the Yuan has become an official IMF reserve currency about a year ago. That established worldwide trust in the Chinese currency, especially since the Yuan is backed by the Chinese economy plus by gold. Whereas the US dollar has no backing whatsoever; its pure and simple FIAT money. 

RFK’s Son Robert Francis Kennedy Jr: I Don’t Believe Sirhan Did It

By Michael Carmichael, May 31, 2018

The media-driven mantra of ‘conspiracy theory’ has collapsed while the lone gunman theories of these three iconic political assassinations have disappeared under the stark gaze of scientific analysis and the testimony of credible eyewitnesses including Paul Schrade, a genuine American hero who survived a bullet wound to his head at the side of RFK on that fateful evening in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel half a century ago.

Syrian President Bashar Assad says Moscow deterred the West from launching a devastating country-wide air strike last month, and believes that Damascus has nearly won the seven-year war, despite continued US “interference.”

International migration from sub-Saharan Africa towards Europe and the United States has significantly increased over the past decade. These migration trends, especially towards Europe, directly influence migration patterns to other North African countries.

The specific migration pull and push factors vary depending on each country and individual, but economic reasons remain a primary factor. According to Pew Research Center, in 1990, 40 percent of sub-Saharan African migrants moved for economic reasons, by 2013, this number had increased to 90 percent.

In 2015, the UNHCR gathered that over 1 million refugees, displaced people groups, and migrants fled to the EU in order to escape conflict or seek better economic opportunities. This resulted in further militarization of EU borders in attempts to manage what the European Commision called an “unprecedented displacement crisis.”

They confirmed that EU’s stricter border control initiatives have lowered the number of irregular migrants (those without legal paperwork) entering and have made “transit countries” more permanent residences for many migrants.

The Kingdom of Morocco is one such country.

According to Mehdi Lahlou from Istituto Affari Internazionali, an estimated 5,003 irregular migrants in 2010 used the western Mediterranean route, primarily Morocco, to access Europe. In 2014, this number increased to 7,842. The number of illegal entrances into Europe has decreased since 2015 due to these border restrictions, but migration flows to and from Morocco continue.

Morocco is seen as being one of the few stable and secure countries in the MENA region. With the EU’s tighter security, it is becoming a destination of both passage and residence for many migrants.

Morocco’s long migration history has led to well-established sub-Saharan African migrant communities throughout some of its major cities like Rabat, Casablanca, and Tangier. Germany’s GIZ identified that these established social, religious, and economic networks act as appealing factors for increased settlement in Morocco.

Further signs of Morocco’s growing migration mediary role is reflected by Pope Francis’ planned visit to Morocco, next December, for an international migration conference. The North Africa Post anticipates the formation of an international “global compact” for regularizing migration during his visit.

However, four years after Morocco implemented its more humanitarian migration policy reform, many migrants and refugees continue to live in clandestine conditions, lack working opportunities, face tension within local communities, and remain unaware of their legal rights under Moroccan law.

The students of University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah (USMBA) in Fez diagnosed the need to help the growing number of refugees and asylum seekers and improve the conditions for their societal integration.

In this way, they desire to launch a Law Clinic to guide civil society by taking a model already established by Hassan II University’s Faculty of Law, Economics, and Social Sciences in Mohammedia––a program for marginalized families funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.

USMBA President Omar Assobhei explained that Fez has become a necessary stop on Morocco’s transportation highways for migrants heading to Tangier, and then potentially Europe. Fez already hosts a large sub-Saharan student population in institutions and higher education, but this increased traffic has created a dire need for legal support for those that fall into precarious situations.

University students propose creating a Law Clinic that aims to: 1) provide leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) with legal skills to better integrate vulnerable migrants; 2) strengthen the capacity of law students’ as well as those of these vulnerable populations through business development and legal practice; and 3) advance community cohesiveness and sustainability.

University officials would identify 10 CSOs, 40 law students, and 100 migrants and refugees to participate in joint legal workshops covering new migration policies, integration, and entrepreneurial development.

This 1st phase will be followed with specific legal aid given by law students to benefit participating migrants and refugees.

The idea is to bring the students, migrants, and the associations together to assess the situation. The members of each group benefit from the participatory workshops they experience together and from hearing differing perspectives regarding problems facing the community.

Students gain experience interacting with real people requiring legal aid, associations will be better informed on legal aspects of their work and feel empowered to advocate, and migrants are equipped with legal knowledge and entrepreneurial skills.

This Law Clinic’s legal provision will enable more irregular migrants to socially integrate into society, which in turn, will help alleviate tensions between sub-Saharan African and local Moroccan communities.

Using the same participatory development method from the first initiative, this Law Clinic will be sufficiently equipped to tackle all legal concerns presented by the community.

Due to its adaptable nature to different academic institutions and its tendency to spark community involvement, this symbiotic education and learning model holds positive future benefits for surrounding regions and universities.

St. Andrew’s Church in Cairo, Egypt established a similar refugee legal aid program that provides 3,000 refugees annually with everything from referrals, representation, rights advocacy, and education. It is an example that reveals the potential outcomes that can be realized in Morocco.

This Law Clinic’s implementation is a solid bridge for fostering intercultural, societal, and economic dialogue essential for perpetuating a harmonious future of coexistence for Morocco’s growing diversity.

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Nathan Park is an undergraduate student in his fourth year at the University of Virginia and he is currently interning with the High Atlas Foundation in Marrakech, Morocco.

Russia wants all non-Syrian forces withdrawn from southern areas bordering Israel. More on this below.

The right to self-defense is inviolable under international law, including under Article 51 of the UN Charter. It prohibits one nation from attacking another except in self-defense, stating:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Washington, NATO, their so-called “coalition” partners and Israel are waging undeclared war on Syria, clearly violating international law.

Nothing under international law prohibits a nation from requesting and receiving help from other countries, groups, entities or individuals for any lawful purpose, including self-defense when attacked or if aggression is imminent.

There’s nothing civil about war in Syria, correctly explained by Bashar al-Assad in an interview with RT, published on Thursday.

He also explained Iranian military advisors alone are in Syria “which we don’t conceal,” he said, no Islamic Republic combat forces there.

All casualties from US, UK, French and Israeli attacks were Syrian, not Iranian, he stressed, praising vital Russian aid.

In March 2011, Obama launched naked aggression on the country, using ISIS and other terrorists as imperial foot soldiers.

Trump escalated what he began, war in its 8th year with no breakthroughs for resolution because Washington wants endless war and regime change, part of its strategy to replace all sovereign independent governments with pro-Western puppet regimes.

America’s rage for global dominance threatens something far more serious in Syria than already if not challenged with strength and resolve.

Russia’s intervention in September 2015 to help Syria combat terrorism (at its request) was legal and admirable.

Yet Putin hasn’t acted boldly enough to challenge and help defeat the US-supported scourge. True enough he has no obligation to defend Syria or any other country, obligated only to preserve and protect Russia’s security and territorial integrity from foreign or internal threats.

Yet he’s geopolitically savvy, knowing if Syria goes, Iran is next, the prime regional target by Washington and Israel.

If both fall, Russia and China remain the only sovereign independent nations standing in the way of unchallenged US dominance.

Both countries are the key ones on Washington’s target list for regime change by color revolution or war, preceded by economic and financial strangulation on Russia (China likely later) the way Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are targeted now.

The softer Putin is on US, UK, French and Israeli aggression, the more they’re able to get away with uncontested. Who’ll challenge them in the Middle East if not Russia?

Its super-weapons exceeding America’s best make it the world’s leading superpower, a strength it’s able to use for right over wrong.

Washington is Russia’s sworn enemy, NATO and Israel appendages of its imperial agenda. Cooperating with them in Syria or elsewhere is counterproductive, serving their interests, harming Russia’s, Syria’s, and other independent governments.

On Wednesday, Netanyahu vowed to strike anywhere in Syria nationwide on the phony pretext of targeting Iranian forces in the country. Only military advisors are there, not combat troops.

Netanyahu lied claiming Tehran intends “establish(ing) a military presence in Syria, opposite us, not just opposite the Golan Heights but anywhere in Syria.”

Iranian military advisors are opposite no one there except US and Israeli-supported terrorists. Tehran clearly said it’ll remain in the country as long as Damascus values and wants its presence – operating from Syrian bases, not its own.

The goal of both countries is liberating Syria from ISIS and other terrorists, neither threatening Israel or any other regional nations.

Syrian forces are preparing for a major offensive to free areas bordering Jordan from US/Israeli-supported terrorists – unless they voluntarily agree to surrender their heavy weapons and leave territory they occupy illegally.

Reportedly only government troops will be involved in their southern offensive. It’s their sovereign right to accept help from Iran and Hezbollah. No one may legitimately demand otherwise.

On Wednesday, Sergey Lavrov said all non-Syrian forces should withdraw from areas near Israel’s border with Jordan. It includes illegally occupied Syria’s Golan territory.

Lavrov added withdrawal should be “on a mutual basis…a two-way street” – saying nothing specific about US forces illegally occupying Syrian territory along the Jordanian border. He said the following:

“We have well-known agreements concerning the southwestern de-escalation zone. Those agreements were concluded by Russia, the United States and Jordan.”

“Israel was perfectly aware of them while they were still being drafted. They stipulate that the zone of de-escalation is expected to consolidate stability and that all non-Syrian forces must be pulled out of that area.”

“I believe this must happen as soon as possible. This is precisely what we are busy with now in cooperation with our Jordanian and US counterparts.”

According to Syria’s UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafari, US forces occupy around one-third of northern and southern parts of the country.

Washington and its imperial partners have been terror-bombing Syria since September 2014 – massacring countless thousands of civilians, destroying vital infrastructure, supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups.

By its own admission, Israel terror-bombed Syrian targets countless times throughout much of the war.

NATO nations, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other states are involved in US-led aggression in Syria.

Instead of condemning what’s going on, Russia is largely silent – dealing with Washington and Israel as “partners”, its good will not reciprocated in kind.

The more latitude given regimes running both countries, as well as Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the more they take advantage, believing Putin shows weakness, not strength.

The only language Washington and Israel understand is force. Diplomacy achieves nothing in dealing with them – not so far so why expect them turning a new leaf ahead.

Passivity in the face of its aggression encourages more of it. Failure to supply Damascus with S-300 air defense systems left it vulnerable to repeated attacks. Syria’s current systems are only effective enough to partially deter terror-bombing of
its territory, unable to stop most or all of it.

The only effective way to deal with US, Israeli and allied aggression is by challenging it forcefully. Six years of Russian diplomatic efforts failed to achieve conflict resolution. Nothing suggests continued efforts can succeed in dealing with nations wanting regime change, deploring peace.

On Thursday, Israeli war minister Avigdor Lieberman met with his Russian counterpart in Moscow, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, tweeting:

Israel’s “primary focus…is preventing the entrenchment of Iran and its proxies in Syria” – initially seeking a “Russian-Israeli agreement” for Iran to be no closer than 60 km from Israeli occupied Golan, ahead of wanting no Iranian military presence in Syria anywhere in the country.

According to AP News, Moscow wants a deal with Israel, involving Russian military police deployed in southern Syria, replacing the presence of foreign forces, along with US/Israeli-supported terrorists surrendering their heavy weapons.

Like Washington and NATO, Israel’s “primary focus” is regime change, wanting a regional rival eliminated, isolating Iran, ahead of a similar strategy against its sovereign government – aiming for regional dominance along with America’s presence.

Confronting Washington and Israel forcefully in Syria is high-risk for Russia – higher risk by not doing it, I believe.

Appeasement doesn’t work with hegemons – never did, never will, a sign of weakness, not strength.

Failure to challenge US/NATO/Israeli aggression risks something far more serious than already.

Continuing what hasn’t worked is counterproductive and defeatist. A show of strength is needed by Russia, a different approach than it’s pursued so far.

Otherwise Syria could become another Afghanistan, a forever war with no end in sight.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

Featured image: The California state Senate votes Wednesday on SB 822, which would restore net neutrality protections. (Photo: Free Press/ Free Press Action Fund/flickr/cc)

Update: The California state Senate on Wednesday voted to pass a bill restoring net neutrality protections. SB 822 passed 23-12 along party lines, with all Republicans voting against it. 

“Today the State Senate took a huge step towards re-instating net neutrality in California,” said Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, author of the bill. “When Donald Trump’s FCC took a wrecking ball to the Obama-era net neutrality protections, we said we would step in to make sure that California residents would be protected from having their internet access manipulated. I want to thank the enormous grassroots coalition that is fighting tooth and nail to help pass SB 822 and protect a free and open internet. We have a lot more work to get this bill through the Assembly, but this is a major win in our fight to re-instate net neutrality in California.”

Earlier:

With the California state Senate on the cusp of voting on a net neutrality bill Wednesday, its advocates are urging constituents to grab their phones to demand their legislators stand up for an open internet.

CALIFORNIA: ISPs have descended on Sacramento to stop #SB822 — which would save #NetNeutrality in CA. If this bill is going to pass, your senator needs to hear from you. Call them NOW! 916–823–9612.

— Free Press (@freepress) May 30, 2018

SB 822—a bill deemed the “gold standard for states looking to protect net neutrality” in the face of the federal rollback by the Republican-controlled FCC in December—was authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), and has advanced despite attacks by internet service providers (ISPs).

As Katharine Trendacosta, policy analyst at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains,

the bill “would prevent ISPs in California from engaging in blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and anti-competitive zero rating. Blocking and throttling are what they sound like: preventing access to or slowing down access to any service or content an ISP chooses.”

“At its core,” a press statement from Weiner’s office says, “SB 822 stands for the basic proposition that the role of internet service providers (ISPs) is to provide neutral access to the internet, not to pick winners and losers by deciding (based on financial payments or otherwise) which websites or applications will be easy or hard to access, which will have fast or slow access, and which will be blocked entirely.”

ISPs aren’t letting up on their fight to defeat the measure.

The Mercury News reported Tuesday:

SB 822 is opposed by the broadband, cable and telecom industries, plus the state’s Chamber of Commerce.

AT&T, Comcast and two major industry trade groups reported spending nearly $1 million on lobbying in Sacramento in the first three months of the year alone—including against SB 822—according to documents filed with the California Secretary of State.

According to Gigi Sohn, a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy and a Mozilla Technology Policy Fellow, “Cable companies are flooding the California Senate with lobbyists working 24-7 against #SB822.” Demand Progress added: “AT&T is spreading anti-SB 822 propaganda at the state house.”

Cable companies are flooding the California Senate with lobbyists working 24-7 against #SB822. The only way to win is for YOU to call your state Senator NOW at 916-823-9612 to restore #netneutrality to California. https://t.co/URttdXx5SZ

— Gigi Sohn (@gigibsohn) May 30, 2018

The California State Senate is about to vote on #SB822. that would save #NetNeutrality in CA! AT&T is spreading anti-SB 822 propaganda at the state house, so it's important you call your senator NOW! Click here to make a call: https://t.co/vKQIWYSSWb

— Demand Progress (@demandprogress) May 29, 2018

Weiner, for his part, joined organizations including Color of Change and the Center for Media Justice in Sacramento on Tuesday at a rally in support of SB 822.

“Net neutrality impacts everyone in our state, and we need to do everything we can to ensure that the people of California can decide for themselves whether, when, and for what purpose they are using the internet,” he declared.

Today, we and other believers in an open Internet are in Sacramento telling California to protect #NetNeutrality. Add your voice to theirs by calling your state senator. https://t.co/WbsrS6WMgm pic.twitter.com/w3aOM9KDhf

— EFF (@EFF) May 29, 2018

If the bill passes the state Senate Wednesday, it then heads to the Assembly.

At the federal level, meanwhile, net neutrality supporters have their sights set on a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to restore open internet protections. The Senate passed the resolution this month, so now its proponents are focused on achieving a similar victory in the House.

“The fight ahead is not going to be easy, ” charged Fight for the Future, “but victory is within reach.”

Featured image: Local activist Tim Tanksley (L) leads Oklahoma gubernatorial candidate Connie Johnson (center) and Johnson’s campaign manager, Charise Walker, to Bokoshe’s fly ash dump.

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, fly ash contains a range of heavy metals, from arsenic to lead to mercury, some of which are linked to cancer.

That hasn’t stopped Tim Tanksley, 73, a Vietnam vet born and raised in Bokoshe. He and his neighbors call their representatives, file complaints with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (ODEQ) and have appeared on state PBS affiliate OETA.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. An updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was recently published. Visit her website: http://marjoriecohn.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from JR / TO; Adapted: WindVector, WeAre / Shutterstock.

The way it works was well displayed, May 25^th, on the opinion page of America’s largest-circulation newspaper, USA Today. Each of the three articles there presumed that the US Government is fighting for the public’s interests, and that the countries it invades or threatens to invade are evil. It is all, and always, propaganda for the US military, which is the reason why the US military is the most-respected institution in the United States, despite being the most wasteful and the most corrupt of all federal Departments. 

The US public don’t think of the military as being driven by the military corporations — Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc. — each corporation deriving that multi-billion-dollar profit annually from selling weapons to the US and to its allied governments, but the public are indoctrinated constantly to think of the US military instead in an admiring way, as if it were being led by and represented the US troops who are operating those weapons to kill foreigners in countries that actually never had invaded nor threatened to invade America, and those troops are America’s presumed heroes, when Americans rate the military as America’s best institution.

But this is no longer World War II — it’s a very different time and country — when the US was, at least to a substantial extent, a democracy, and it helped the Soviet and British Governments to defeat the fascist dictatorships, which wanted to become the capitalist global empire that the US aristocracy now wants to be. America, now, is fascist — the country that has invaded Vietnam and Iraq and Libya and Syria and Yemen, and that perpetrated coups in Iran and Indonesia and Chile and Ukraine, and many other countries, though none of those countries had ever invaded or threatened to invade America. Sheer aggression has become America’s bad habit.

Continual wars are needed by Lockheed Martin and the other such government contractors; and, so, ‘enemy’ lands must be targeted by those weapons and those troops, to kill millions of people there, and to destroy the infrastructure that provides the residents there sustenance. Otherwise, why would these weapons even be bought (with taxpayers’ money), at all? America’s international corporations profit from it, but America’s taxpayers pay the immense (over trillion-dollar annual) tab for it.

The market for these weapons cannot continually expand — meet corporate executives’ constant and (in the military field) cancerous growth-addiction — unless new targets for the public to fear and hate (Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela, etc.) can be developed and intensified in its public’s deceived mind. America’s ‘news’ media perform that function, for corporate America, to open up extraction-lands (for oil, metals, etc.), and to establish new military anchors there (such as the US now is doing, for example, in Syria’s oil-producing region). This isn’t only for corporations such as Lockheed Martin, which manufacture those weapons, but it is also for corporations such as ExxonMobil, which are extractive industries and require extractions from countries all over the world, not merely within America.

Here, then, is how this mass-indoctrination is done, to “manufacture the public’s consent” for continual invasion-and-occupation:

The lead opinion-piece In the May 25th USA Today was the editorial, “Our View: Donald Trump, deal-breaker in chief”, and it established the tone and theme for the entire page, by mixing together, and confusing readers to apply the same standards to, commercial foreign polices such as tariffs, and military foreign policies such as denuclearizing North Korea (so as ultimately to conquer that nation). Consequently, USA Today’s editorial about Trump’s cancellation of his summit with Kim Jong-un argued: “The list of broken or endangered agreements keeps growing: The Paris climate accord. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.”

Those multi-national agreements were presented in terms of Democratic-versus-Republican-Party domestic political conflict, as being the sitting Republican US President’s undoing of what the previous Democratic Party President (Obama) had done, and thus repositioned the issue subtly out of either the commercial or the military international field, into the American aristocracy’s domestic squabbles. Here, this major US ‘news’-medium was taking sides in the US aristocracy’s partisan split, and favoring the Democratic Party side of the US aristocracy, against the Republican Party side of the US aristocracy. But what does this intra-aristocratic domestic squabble have to do with US relations with North Korea — the supposed topic here?

America’s aristocracy are united supporting conquest. However, there are differences of opinion about how to go about doing it. Then, the editorial said:

“In other words, Trump’s pretty good at deal-breaking. It’s deal-making where he stumbles: Even as he pulled out of an agreement preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, Trump pushed for an even more ironclad deal stripping North Korea of the same weapons. As enticements, he promised Kim major US investments (‘His country will be rich’) and safety and security (‘He will be happy’) — strange offerings for a dictator who operates one of the world’s last, brutal gulag systems, imprisoning tens of thousands.”

This editorial took a clearly partisan pro-US-regime, anti-North Korean regime, PR stance, without so much as just mentioning that, even according to pro-US estimates, North Korea’s percentage of population that are in prison is no higher than is America’s percentage who are in prison. So, “one of the world’s last, brutal gulag systems” isn’t clearly a worse one in that regard, than is the US Government itself. All the propaganda (such as this in USA Today) is pure uninformative and misleading indoctrination (PR), instead of being informative and trustworthy journalism. This ‘news’paper sides with America’s aristocracy against North Korea’s aristocracy, and with the Democratic Party faction of the US aristocracy against the Republican Party faction of the US aristocracy; but, this editorial provides no evidence for the particular prejudices it promotes. And it pretends to be about Trump’s cancellation of that summit.

Next on the editorial page was “Donald Trump is onto something” (or, on the printed page, “Opposing view: ‘Today’s failure might be tomorrow’s success’”), in which the editors’ selected Republican Party propagandist, Kenneth Rapoza of Forbes, argued “Trump brought tariffs back to life. … Trump is trying to manage trade outcomes to the benefit of US citizens.” How did Trump’s tariffs-policy relate to the proposed summit between him and Kim Jong-un? Obviously, the editors of USA Today didn’t really care about that. This is how much they insult the intelligence of their readership (if not of themselves). The only difference between the pro and the contra here was the difference between the Democratic and the Republican Parties.

Finally, the third article was “My hope for this Memorial Day”, authored by PBS documentary film-maker Michael Epstein. He opened “The night before I left for Iraq, I put my two young daughters to bed.” Then, after more irrelevancy, he noted that, “I did not go to Iraq as a Marine or a soldier. I went as a filmmaker. Still, as I lay next to my youngest daughter, it struck me that if something were to happen to me in Iraq, …”

Storytelling, like that, engages readers at the surface-level, and presses the buttons of readers’ propaganda vulnerabilities, for the desired atmosphere — here, in order for this non-soldier writer to pretend he understands the problems that America’s troops face. But then he incoherently proceeds to saying, in no relevant context, that he wants “to regularly remind myself of the burden carried by the many for the benefit of the few” — and he provides there no indication as to whom are “the many” and whom “the few.” One might try to guess that “the few” are the small percentage of Americans who are in the military, but that wouldn’t actually fit into the given context, because he’s supposedly discussing instead “the burden carried by the many for the benefit of the few.”

Is he talking there about the burden carried by the many taxpayers, for the benefit of the few troops? But, those troops aren’t actually the people who become enriched by America’s invasions and occupations — the owners of US military contractors such as United Technologies and Lockheed Martin, and of extractive industries, are those people, and they aren’t even peripherally mentioned. Then, he continues this nonsense by saying,

“As a nation we excel at waging war, yet we are criminally indifferent to its costs and consequences.”

But his article makes no mention of the “costs and consequences” to the residents in the lands where these troops invade and occupy, other peoples’ lands — and that’s the vast majority of the “costs and consequences” of these invasions and occupations. His article simply ignores the death and destruction that the troops amongst whom he was embedded, were perpetrating upon the residents; he doesn’t care about those victims, at all; they don’t figure among his concerns; he doesn’t mention them. He then refers to “Sebastian Junger, whose film about the Afghanistan War, ‘Restrepo,’ which he co-directed with Tim Hetherington, is the gold standard for documentary war reporting.” The film-maker of Restreppo was embedded with US troops in 2007 during their occupation of Afghanistan fighting against the Taliban, which (though Epstein makes no mention of the fact) the US and Sauds had created in 1979 in order to defeat the Soviets. US troops were actually fighting against a monster that the US and Sauds had jointly created, with assistance from yet another ally of the US aristocracy: Pakistan’s aristocracy.

Discordantly, another page in that same day’s issue of USA Today headlined “Afghanistan stabilization effort failing after 17 years of US work, watchdog report says”, and reported that:

“The US government’s 17-year effort to stabilize parts of war-torn Afghanistan has mostly failed, according to a report released Thursday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

The damning report finds that much of the $4.7 billion spent on programs to stabilize areas cleared of insurgents has been largely wasted — some of it siphoned off by corrupt officials, some of it paying for projects that did more harm than good. All told, the US government has appropriated about $126 billion to rebuild the country. … The huge flows of money into the impoverished country had the opposite effect of what was intended, the report says. … ‘By fueling corruption and the population’s disillusionment with its government, the coalition undermined the very government it sought to legitimize and drove support for the insurgency,’ the report says.”

So: who benefited from this death and destruction? Of course, the owners of America’s gigantic weapons-manufacturing firms did. And who suffered? Most of all, the residents in the invaded lands did, and do (though they weren’t even tokens considered in USA Today’s ‘journalism’).

There is nothing unique about USA Today, in any of this. For example, on the day before they ran those articles, the New York Times had bannered “North Korea Says It Will Give Trump ‘Time and Opportunity’ to Reconsider” and reported that “North Korea appeared to shift the blame to the United States” but provided no evidence that the blame belonged to anyone but America’s own President. How could North Korea have “shifted the blame” for Trump’s sudden termination of preparations for that summit? The NYT published that propaganda, treating its readers as fools who wouldn’t notice the ridiculousness of their “shift the blame” accusation against North Korea. Those readers pay subscription-fees to subject themselves to such propaganda as that.

On May 22^nd, the independent investigative historian, Gareth Porter, had headlined “How Corporate Media Are Undermining a US-North Korea Nuclear Weapons Deal”, and he described the prior consistent record of US major ‘news’ media, as serving, in the North Korean matter, the function of propaganda agents for the owners of America’s giant weapons-making firms.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCF.

This is how Wikipedia defines denialism:

In the psychology of human behavior, denialism is a person’s choice to deny reality, as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality. In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of radical and controversial ideas.

In some countries, denying the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity is a crime.

In other countries denialism is part of the official discourse.

One such country is Japan.

Mass-circulation mainstream newspapers have sections dedicated to denying Japan’s crimes during World War Two and its pre-war colonial occupation of Asian nations, notably Korea and China.

One such paper is the Sankei Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers.

The Sankei Shimbun has a section called History Wars aimed at challenging the proven history of Japan’s war crimes prior to and during World War Two.

The historical denialism of the Sankei Shimbun – and that of its English language online publication Japan Forward – is mostly focused on denying the existence of comfort women, with titles such as 200,000 South Korean Wartime Sex Slaves is ‘Fake News’. Or denying that the Nanjing Massacre ever happened.

But there is another object of denialism that connects Japanese war crimes to ‘alleged’ American war crimes in Korea. It is the issue of bacteriological warfare and the notorious Unit 731 of Japan’s Kwantung Army, in occupied Manchuria. On this topic, the  Sankei Shinbun and Japan Forward are very discreet.

The crimes committed by Unit 731, led by Surgeon General Shiro Ishii, surpass in sadistic cruelty anything committed by Nazi Germany. Ishii and his men conducted “scientific” and “medical” experiments on prisoners – mostly Chinese “communists”, Soviet POWs and the occasional civilians caught at the wrong place when more human material was needed for the unit’s “experiments.”

Unit 731 had a contract with the local branch of the Kenpeitai, Japan’s Military Police, to supply human guinea-pigs for its experimental work. The people – men, women, children – delivered to the Unit 731 compound in Pingpang, on the outskirts of Harbin, were called maruta, Japanese for log. When the unit’s “scientists” were done with vivisecting, freezing to death, infecting with bacteria such as plague, cholera, typhus, syphilis and other deadly diseases, gassing, mummifying, detonating bombs and conducting other sadistic experiments, the maruta were disposed of as ‘logs’: their remains were burned in a furnace operating 24/7. Thousands of people died in the hands of Unit 731 “experimenters” – the exact number will probably never be known.

But what has been established beyond doubt is that some of the worst war crimes in the history of humankind were committed in occupied Manchuria against Chinese, Korean, Soviet, Mongolian men, women and children – and probably people of other nationalities too, including possibly US and Allied POWs.

Yet these crimes were never punished. In fact, until the 1990s, when stories started to appear in the Japanese media about the infamous unit and its crimes, very few had ever heard of Unit 731.

And with good reason. In 1945, Surgeon General Shiro Ishii’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito negotiated a deal with the American occupying forces. Members of Unit 731 would reveal the results of their research in bacteriological weapons and other experiments on humans in exchange for immunity against prosecution for war crimes. The deal was approved at the highest level, by the White House. The knowledge acquired by Unit 731 through criminal experiments on humans was transferred to the US bacteriological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Japan’s evil science became the property of the US military and intelligence services, adding to evil science acquired from Nazi war criminals in Operation Paperclip and other secret deals.

In January 1949, the Soviet Union put 12 members of Unit 731 on trial in Khabarovsk, found them guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and gave them rather lenient sentences. The result of the trial were published in Russian and English under the title Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army: Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons. It is available online. Its 540 pages document in great detail the criminal activities of Unit 731 of Japan’s Kwantung Army. The Americans dismissed the findings as “communist propaganda”. Today it is generally agreed that the findings are factual and conclusive.

Most senior members of Unit 731, including its commander, Surgeon General Shiro Ishii, escaped to Japan. But not one of them appeared before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trials or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, convened by the US and Allies (excluding the USSR) on April 29, 1946.

In fact, one of the main purposes of the trial was not to bring Japanese war criminals to trial, but to shield the Emperor of Japan from being charged with war crimes – including those of Unit 731, the formation of which he personally approved with his Imperial seal.

Former members of Unit 731 went on to occupy prominent positions in post-war Japan’s medical institutions, hospitals, faculties of medicine and various affiliated corporations.

In 1951, Shiro Ishii’s right-hand man and top negotiator with the Americans, Lieutenant Colonel Ryoichi Naito opened Japan’s first blood bank, together with former colleagues from Unit 731. His American “friends” gave him technical advice and support. The company, called Green Cross made a killing supplying blood to the US and Allies during the Korean war. It became one of the great successes of Japan’s post-war economic miracle, until in the 1980s it was charged with supplying blood contaminated with the AIDS virus. Ryoichi Naito’s specialty at Unit 731 was experimenting with blood, including pumping horse blood into live people and watching them slowly die. (See: Green Cross founder tied to Unit 731 preservation, The Japan Times, Aug 14, 1998).

On 22 February 1952, the North Korean Foreign Ministry made a formal allegation that American planes had been dropping infected insects onto North Korea. This was immediately denied by the US government. The accusation was supported by eye-witness accounts by the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett and others. (Wikipedia).

During the Sino-Japanese war and during World War Two, Unit 731 caused plague epidemics in several regions of China, spreading plague infested fleas. It also triggered outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and other highly contagious and deadly diseases. These are irrefutable and established facts.

In 1945, the USA gave immunity to all members of Unit 731 in exchange for their expertise in bacteriological warfare. That expertise was used by US scientists at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to develop and experiment with bacteriological weapons. These are also irrefutable and established facts.

What is still being debated is whether the United States did or did not conduct bacteriological warfare in Korea and China.

Image below: A still from Wormwood

The issue had been mostly dormant until Errol Morris’ docu-drama Wormwood recently re-ignited the debate. (See: Wormwood and a Shocking Secret of War, CounterPunch, January 12, 2018.) Wormwood alleges that Frank Olson, a leading Fort Detrick scientist and CIA operative was murdered by the CIA because he was about to reveal that the US was conducting germ warfare in Korea. The case for BW in Korea is convincingly argued by Frank Olson’s son, Eric, who dedicated his life to solving his father’s death by defenestration.

The allegations that the US has conducted bacteriological warfare in Korea are backed by an overwhelming body of evidence, including the 650-page-long Report by the International Scientific Commission For The Investigation of The Facts Concerning Bacteriological Warfare In Korea and China. The Commission was led by one of Great Britain’s most prestigious scientists, Joseph Needham.

The US dismissed the report as “communist propaganda” and a “hoax”, just as it had dismissed the evidence collected during the Khabarovsk Trial. All those reporting, investigating and supporting allegation of US BW in Korea were branded “communist propagandists”, “agents of Moscow, Peking and Pyongyang”, “communists”, “dupes”, “useful idiots” and similar dismissive and insulting epithets. (See, Truth or Treason? Dirty Secrets of the Korean War, CounterPunch, 26 January, 2018)

If one believes in America’s exceptionalism and God-given moral superiority, this arguments may hold. But after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the monstrous war crimes committed against the people of Korea before and during the Korean War, in which the northern part of the country was reduced to rubble, after the war in Viet Nam, Agent Orange, the My Lai massacre and countless other war crimes and atrocities, the moral superiority argument is hard to sustain without a huge leap of faith.

In November 1998, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman published The United States and Biological Warfare Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea. It is a meticulously researched book.

“The United States and Biological Warfare is a major contribution to our understanding of the past involvement by the US and Japanese governments with BW, with important, crucial implications for the future…. Pieces of this story, including the Korean War allegations, have been told before, but never so authoritatively, and with such a convincing foundation in historical research…. This is a brave and significant scholarly contribution on a matter of great importance to the future of humanity.” – Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Princeton University

“The United States and Biological Warfare argues persuasively that the United States experimented with and deployed biological weapons during the Korean War. Endicott and Hagerman explore the political and moral dimensions of this issue, asking what restraints were applied or forgotten in those years of ideological and political passion and military crisis.”

With impeccable timing, “in January 1998 the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun published excerpts from a collection of documents purportedly obtained from the Russian Presidential Archive (known formally as the Archive of the President, Russian Federation, or APRF) by its Moscow-based reporter, Yasuo Naito. These remarkable documents provide the first Soviet evidence yet to emerge regarding the longstanding allegations that the United States employed bacteriological weapons during the Korean War. Sankei Shimbun subsequently agreed to make the documents available to scholars; a translation of the complete texts is presented below.

“The circumstances under which these documents were obtained are unusual. Because the Presidential Archive does not allow researchers to make photocopies, the texts were copied by hand and subsequently re-typed. We therefore do not have such tell-tale signs of authenticity as seals, stamps or signatures that a photocopy can provide. Furthermore, since the documents have not been formally released, we do not have their archival citations. Nor do we know the selection criteria of the person who collected them.” Kathryn Weathersby, Deceiving the Deceivers: Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and the Allegations of Bacteriological Weapons Use in Korea.

The twelve ‘documents’ miraculously produced by Mr. Yasuo Naito, the Moscow correspondent of the denialist newspaper Sankei Shinbun, to coincide with the publication of the Endicott and Hagerman book, were used by Milton Leitenberg, then with the Wilson Centre, to triumphantly declare that the accusations that the US had conducted BW in Korea were an elaborate “hoax” concocted by Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung. (See: Milton Leitenberg, New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis, December 1998).

I’ve read and re-read the “copied” Russian documents translated into English by Kathryn Weathersby. They perfectly fit the denialist script. Here’s an extract from Document No. 2 (my comments in brackets):

“The Koreans stated that the Americans had supposedly repeatedly exposed several areas of their country to plague and cholera.  To prove these facts, the North Koreans, with the assistance of our advisers, created false areas of exposure. (Really?)  In June-July 1952 a delegation of specialists in bacteriology from the World Peace Council arrived in North Korea.  Two false areas of exposure were prepared. (Really??) In connection with this, the Koreans insisted on obtaining cholera bacteria from corpses which they would get from China.  During the period of the work of the delegation, which included academician N. Zhukov, who was an agent of the MGB [Ministry of State Security], (How convenient!) an unworkable situation was created for them, with the help of our advisers, in order to frighten them and force them to leave. (Why?) In this connection, under the leadership of Lt. Petrov, adviser to the Engineering Department of the KPA [Korean People’s Army], (as if they needed advisors!) explosions were set off near the place where the delegation was staying, and while they were in Pyongyang false air raid alarms were sounded.” (Why??)

And so it goes. This sounds to me like utter nonsense. I would like Milton Leitenberg, Kathryn Weathersby and others to please explain why after inviting the International Scientific Commission to investigate allegations of germ warfare, the Soviets and Koreans would go out of their way to scare it off by detonating bombs and sounding false air raid alarms?

The documents are so obviously self-incriminating that they are embarrassing to read. I wonder why their authenticity hasn’t been more seriously scrutinized and challenged. Why are they taken at face value when their authenticity is so obviously dubious?

To further complicate matters, according to Russian historian Yuri Vasylievich Vanin (1930-2017), the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation where Yasuo Naito “discovered” the 12 Soviet ‘documents’ in 1998, was donated to the Republic of Korea in 1994 by Boris Yeltsin. Which makes them even more suspect.

And yet, I am informed by highly authoritative sources that Milton Leitenberg’s Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung “hoax” theory is the accepted one in “polite circles”. Leitenberg re-iterated it forcefully recently in response to a review of Wormwood by Michael Ignatieff in The New York Review of Books. (No, They Didn’t Milton Leitenberg, reply by Michael Ignatieff, March 22, 2018). Ignatieff swiftly fell into line with Leitenberg on BW. The man seems to hold great powers of persuasion. Or are “polite circles” easily intimidated and swayed?

But I’m not. For as long as Mr. Yasuo Naito, of the denialist Sankei Shimbun and Japan Forward, and Milton Leitenberg, now of the Center for International and Security Studies in Maryland, and their associates are unable to produce the original Soviet ‘documents’, I shall consider them to be rather crude forgeries.

And I consider this statement by Professor Joseph Needham in a letter to my father, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, dated 23 February 1969 to be the truth of the matter. Needham writes:

“I agree entirely with your formulation of ‘large scale experimentation in delivery systems’, basically insect vectors, and I have in no way changed my opinion since the report was issued. Nor, so far as I know, has any other member of the International Scientific Commission expressed any doubts about the findings.”

Visitors view the “The Flower That Doesn’t Wilt: I’m the Evidence” exhibition of work on comfort women by Korean comic artists at the Angouleme International Comics Festival in France, Jan. 31. (Yonhap News)

In January 2014, Yasuo Naito was spotted at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France. Twenty South Korean comics artists were invited by the Festival to present their work on the theme of comfort women. The exhibition was called “The Flower That Doesn’t Wilt: I’m the Evidence”. The Japanese Foreign Ministry Protested. A Japanese publisher, Nextdoor set up a stand at the Festival with banners proclaiming: The Comfort Women Controversy: Sex Slaves Or Prostitutes? And Fabricated Comfort Women Story (in French and English). It had one single manga (comic book) on display titled Facts, ‘debunking’ the ‘myth’ of comfort women. The Japanese stand was run by four people affiliated with the extreme-right wing denialist movement Kofoku no Kagaku.

Allow me to quote from an article in French on the matter (my English translation):

“Alerted to this annoying presence, Nicolas Finet, organizer of 9th Art + and in charge of the festival’s Little Asia section arrives in the afternoon. He observes that the Nextdoor team openly spreads denialist messages that contravene the Gayssot Act by denying crimes against humanity. “These people are denying war crimes. It is serious, in particular for the Japanese authorities, which they pretended to represent,” explains Nicolas Finet.

“Their stand is immediately closed by the organizer and the material is seized. The incident makes a big noise on the web. Nicolas Finet becomes the bête noire of many Japanese Internet users.”

Here’s more from the same article:

“After some research on the Internet, the Japanese journalist Kolin Kobayashi, correspondent in France for the magazine Days Japan informs us that he (Fujiki Shun-Ichi) is a collaborator of the extremist-racist Shuhei Nishimura, leader of a Japanese right-wing group and known for his violent methods.

“Who finances this team capable of publishing in a few weeks a 100 pages manga, of hiring a stand at the Festival by concealing its intentions, of attracting over 10,000 Internet followers and rallying the Japanese media? Kolin Kobayashi finds out that the Sankei Shimbun – Japan’s fifth largest daily – have been keeping its readers informed about the misadventures of Nextdoor Publishing.

“Sankei Shimbun is also a revisionist right-wing newspaper,” says the journalist. “They are probably accomplices in this case. They would have coordinated their action in Angoulême. They were probably funded by the religious sect Kofoku no Kagaku which is also a denialist movement, or by other far-right organizations.”

“And as if to confirm Kolin Kobayashi’s suspicions, Yasuo Naito, head of the Sankei Shimbun office in London, is present in Angoulême for the duration of the festival. This courteous English-speaking journalist kept questioning festival-goers about this mini-scandal, operating as a discreet but tenacious advocate of Nextdoor Publishing.”

So here we have it. Japanese ultra-denialists, supported by the denialist paper Sankei Shimbun, can produce a 100 page denialist manga and try to infiltrate and disrupt an International Comics Festival in France with denialist propaganda. What stops them from producing 12 ‘documents’ proving that Chinese, Korean and Soviet allegations that the US (with Japan’s direct or indirect complicity) conducted germ warfare in Korea were a “hoax” concocted by Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung?

And while I’m in denialist fantasy land or manga fiction, I’ll even suggest a Russian author for the 12 Soviet ‘documents’ published by Sankei Shimbun in January 1998. I have no proof, but the denialists have no proof either.

In 1991, a group of former Japanese POWs, kept in prison camps in Siberia after World War Two, invited an obscure Russian-Jewish writer to visit Japan. He was treated like royalty. His name in Russian is Вениамин Залманович Додин (1924-2014). In English it would be Veniamin Zalmanovich Dodin. Google has nothing on him in English. But a search in Russian reveals a prolific writer of unpublished books, essays etc. One such publication in two parts is Towards The Sun. (Навстречу солнцу, 2013). It tells of his visit to Japan in 1991.

Dodin was the son of Russian Jews of German origin. His father was an engineer and his mother an army nurse who served in the Japan-Russia war of 1905. Both parents suffered under Stalin and the young Dodin grew up in orphanages and labour camps. His books tell about his horrendous childhood and Stalinist repression. After World War Two he was again in a labour camp in Siberia where he says he befriended some Japanese war prisoners and, according to him, saved their lives, by sharing food and warmth. In 1991, his former Japanese prison camp mates traced him and invited him to Japan. His visit was organized and sponsored by Senkei Shinbum and others, including the founder of Sony Corporation, Masaru Ibuka.

He was treated like a hero. His official escort throughout the trip was Yasuo Naito, of the Senkei Shinbum. Yasuo Naito, then 27, speaks fluent Russian – his father was Japan’s Press attaché in Moscow in the 1970s and young Yasuo attended Russian school there.

Dodin’s hatred of Stalin and the USSR, his literary talents and conspiratorial themes make him an excellent candidate for writing the 12 Soviet ‘documents’ that Yasuo Naito so conveniently ‘discovered’. I can’t prove it. But neither can they prove that their 12 documents are authentic and not clever forgeries.

As far as I’m concerned, my “conspiracy theory” is as good as theirs.

But mine is backed by a huge amount of evidence, including undeniable and unpunished Japanese war crimes. Unpunished because the US traded evil Japanese science for impunity for the perpetrators of the crimes, namely senior members of Unit 731.

Korean, Chinese, Soviet, Russian and other people – men, women, children – have suffered horribly from Japanese war crimes and crimes perpetrated by US led forces in Korea. Including bacteriological warfare conducted by the Japanese and, with little doubt, by the Americans. No maruta or logs survived their captivity at Unit 731. All died as a result of “experiments” or were killed to make sure no witnesses lived to recount the sadistic nightmarish horrors of Japan’s evil science.

The Japanese can no longer deny the crimes of Unit 731. But they can obviously still shield some of the criminals, deeply embedded in Japanese society, and their American benefactors and beneficiaries of their “science”.

No opportunity should be missed to expose them.

Especially today, when accusations of “chemical warfare” allegedly carried by the Russians on British soil and alleged “chemical attacks” in Syria by Assad’s “regime” may very well lead to a war to end all wars and all life on earth.

We must be vigilant and not fooled by dodgy “dossiers” and “documents”.

And denialists should not be allowed to cover the tracks of war criminals and evidence of war crimes, past, current and future.

*

George Burchett is an artist who lives in Ha Noi. He has co-edited Rebel Journalist, The Autobiography of Wilfred Burchett, University of New South Wales Press, 2005 and Rebel Journalism, The Writings of Wilfred Burchett, Cambridge University Press, 2007. He has written for CounterPunch, Japan Focus, Z-Net, The Australian, Viet Nam News and other publications.

In early January this year, American president Donald Trump singled out his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-un when writing, “…please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” Before, during his presidential bid, Trump had repeatedly asked a foreign policy advisor regarding nuclear weapons, “If we have them, why can’t we just use them?”

In November 1944, Adolf Hitler had a discussion with his prized SS commander Otto Skorzeny, where the Nazi leader said of atomic bombs:

“No nation, no group of civilized people could take on such a responsibility. The first bomb would be followed by a second, and then humanity would be forced down the road to extinction. Only tribes in the Amazon and the primeval forests of Sumatra would have a chance of survival”.

Image on the right: Intaglio print by Sarah Churchill/Curtis Hooper

Hitler’s comments have, unfortunately, been telling. One bomb was followed by a second, both of them dropped by the US Air Force upon Japanese cities – after American and British leaders gave the green light to kill tens of thousands of civilians, with Japan’s military long since set in irreversible retreat. In his war memoirs, Winston Churchill wrote of the bombings of Japan:

“The final decision now lay in the main with president [Harry] Truman, who had the weapon; but I never doubted what it would be, nor have I ever doubted since that he was right… There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table”.

The decision by America to relentlessly pursue, and use, nuclear weapons started an inevitable proliferation domino effect – of no great concern to Western leaders – with nine countries now possessing nuclear arsenals. This includes nations hostile to each other such as the United States and Russia, while on the other side of the world, old enemies India and Pakistan have nuclear stockpiles, not to mention Israel.

Humanity has indeed almost been “forced down the road to extinction” because of these policies – particularly if the atomic scientists running the Doomsday Clock are to be taken seriously. Regarding nuclear weapons in the post-World War II era, there have been a series of nightmarish provocations and false alarms, leaving humanity teetering on the edge. Such have been the risks deliberately imposed on populations by the great powers, who refuse to disarm their nuclear arsenals. The unprecedented dangers of nuclear weapons have been “systematically concealed from the public” by government leaders and mainstream media, as Daniel Ellsberg writes in his recent book The Doomsday Machine.

Ellsberg, a veteran former Pentagon official, author and activist writes that,

 “first-strike nuclear attacks by either side very much smaller than were planned in the sixties and seventies… would still kill, by loss of sunlight and resulting starvation, nearly all the humans on earth, now over seven billion”.

Ellsberg confirms this apocalyptic outcome is firmly supported by “the latest scientific peer-reviewed studies of climatic consequences of nuclear war” – while he insists “basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost 60 years ago: Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert, aimed mainly at Russian military targets… many in or near cities”.

Today, if America was to begin a nuclear war, as Trump has openly threatened: The resulting nuclear winter effect would destroy all human life within his own country, the United States, along with practically the rest of the world’s population.

Ellsberg notes that,

“What none of us knew at the time [in the 1960s]… not the president or his science advisors… were the phenomena of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, which meant that a large nuclear war of the kind we prepared for then, or later, would kill nearly every human on earth (along with most other large species)”.

Also facing certain extinction would be iconic land animals such as elephants, lions, giraffes, etc., all of whom are heavily reliant in different ways on the life-giver of sunlight.

Critically, Ellsberg writes of nuclear winter:

“It is the smoke, after all (not the fallout, which would remain mostly limited to the northern hemisphere), that would do it worldwide: Smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more – enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight, lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last Ice Age, and killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two”.

Indeed, before a two-year lapse of time following a nuclear war, perhaps 99% of the now 7.6 billion humans on earth would die of starvation, or extreme cold. Hitler’s prediction of over 70 years before remains increasingly relevant, the only humans that could possibly survive are those such as the “tribes in the Amazon and the primeval forests of Sumatra”. It is certainly the “primitive” peoples, not entirely reliant upon sunlight or food crops, that would have the only chance of lasting out a nuclear Armageddon. Even then, there are few guarantees.

It says much about the morality and psychological state of Western leaders whereby Hitler – a notorious dictator – repeatedly expressed his repulsion regarding nuclear bombs. This was clear from the first moment Hitler’s new armaments minister, Albert Speer, broached the subject of nuclear research with him in the summer of 1942. As the war advanced, no such concerns afflicted US presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Truman, nor British prime minister Churchill. They were all enthusiasts, despite it becoming clear by late 1943 the Nazis had shunned the atomic bomb.

Even more worryingly, the final decision as to who fires the “US nuclear forces has never been exclusively that of the president, nor even his highest military officials”, Ellsberg outlines. The ultimate call in authorizing the use of nuclear weapons reaches down even “to subordinate commanders”. This was the case not only under president Dwight D. Eisenhower in the late 1950s, but later through the administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Ellsberg highlights that this is “almost certainly” the case with “every subsequent US president until this day”, noting that such a strategy is “one of our highest national secrets”.

Rather than there being “a nuclear button” as Trump wrote, the great likelihood is there are quite a number of these buttons in the US. Nor are such policies of insanity restricted to US administrations. Ellsberg surmises it is “virtually certain” that “this same secret delegation exists in every nuclear state”.

Further revealed is that, during the Kennedy period, there were planned US nuclear attacks on the USSR and China that would knowingly lead to “the extermination of over half a billion people”. That is, about 100 Nazi Holocausts combined. In fact, such nuclear assaults would have led to the virtual annihilation of the human race – due to the unforeseen nuclear winter effects, which only started becoming clear to scientists from 1983 on.

Though today nuclear winter is widely known in specialist circles, it seems implausible the Trump administration is completely aware of this extinction phenomenon. Otherwise, the president would hardly be undertaking such reckless statements – the atomic scientists specifically noted Trump’s comments while outlining their decision to again advance the Doomsday Clock, in January this year. Even if Trump and associates were briefed of the dire nuclear winter theory, it is probable they would not take it seriously anyway. Scientific certainties are routinely ridiculed by high-ranking Republican Party members, who are scornful of unwanted facts in general.

While running for president in 2016, Trump refused to take “off the table” the use of nuclear weapons in any conflict. Be it against ISIS, in Europe, or whomever it may concern. Elsewhere, it seems unlikely Trump’s counterparts in India, Pakistan, North Korea, and so on, are intimate of the critical facts regarding nuclear weapons.

Combining all of this, one can comfortably arrive at the conclusion that Trump is a far more dangerous figure than Hitler before him. The Fascist dictator was responsible for mass genocide, primarily against Jewish and Slavic populations, killing well over 30 million people. In the West, often forgotten is that over 25 million Soviet citizens were also killed by Hitler’s forces. The total death toll, while horrendous, was a tiny fraction of the global human population at the time, of 2.3 billion people.

Hitler was not undertaking actions that remotely threatened the human race as a whole. The Nazi leader was opposed to nuclear weapons on skewed racial grounds (“Jewish physics”) and because he foresaw that their arrival, from early on, was a severe threat to the planet. However outlandish it may seem, one could argue that a number of post-war leaders in America (and elsewhere) have indeed been more dangerous than Hitler. Rather than leading the way in disarming the unparalleled threat to the earth, nuclear weapons, US leaders have done anything but – often flaunting their arsenals through possible attack, intimidation, while leaving the way open to unforeseen accidents.

Trump’s policies of the continuing provocation of Russia, China and North Korea, three nuclear states, is a game of cat and mouse with the highest possible stakes. For instance in the preceding months thousands of fresh troops from NATO, an expansionist US-led alliance, arrived in Europe, pushing up to Russia’s borders. Three months ago, Vladimir Putin felt compelled to publicly display his country’s nuclear capabilities, such are the threats he understandably discerns.

Trump has further increased American support for Israel, an aggressive nuclear power situated in an especially unstable region, the Middle East. The US president recently pulled his country out of the Iran deal, possibly setting the Islamic republic on the road to developing nuclear bombs. Furthermore, Trump last year withdrew America from the Paris climate agreement – a serious blow to the planet – as his administration continues to ignore, indeed exacerbate, major threat number two: unrestricted climate change.

*

Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. 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   

Background

Far-reaching trade policies and sanctions against China are envisaged, According to Reuters:

The United States said on Tuesday that it will continue pursuing action on trade with China, days after Washington and Beijing announced a tentative solution to their dispute and suggested that tensions had cooled.

By June 15, Washington will release a list of some $50 billion worth of Chinese goods that will be subject to a 25 percent tariff, the White House said in a statement. The United States will also continue to pursue litigation against China at the World Trade Organization.

In addition, by the end of June, the United States will announce investment restrictions and “enhanced export controls” for Chinese individuals and entities “related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology,” it said.

In mid-May, China agreed to increase purchases of U.S. Commerce Department told lawmakers it had reached a deal to put Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corp back in business.

While the announcements eased worries about the possibility of a trade war between world’s two largest economies, U.S. President Donald Trump also said last week that any deal between Washington and Beijing would need “a different structure,” fueling uncertainty over the talks.

Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion of Chinese goods to combat what he has labeled unfair trade practices on the part of Beijing. Meanwhile, China has warned of equal retaliation, including duties on some of its most significant U.S. imports, like aircraft, soybeans and vehicles. (Reuters Report)

***

PressTV: What do you make of this so-called Trade War between the US and China?

Peter Koenig: It’s like almost everything by Trump – “on again, off again…” – Will these threats be materialized or just remain threats for propaganda, for public consumption?

The same with the long-sought head-to-head meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-Un on 12 June in Singapore – it was on, then off and now – maybe.

Iran – after 9 years of hard negotiations the 5+1 Nuclear Deal was singed in July 2015 – Trump comes in – of course highly influenced by Netanyahu – the deal is off. But he doesn’t like that the other four will stick to it.

Same with China and the so-called Trade War. China certainly will not like tariff “punishment”. But, I’m sure if it happens, China has many avenues to circumvent dealing and trading with the US. But once that happens, China may be lost for good for the US market. And Trump knows it – hence, a little bit the on-and-off game. He wants to test the waters; see who reacts how.

PressTV: You say China has many avenues to circumvent the US sanctions or retaliate. What can China do?

PK: China can of course also levy import duties on US goods. China doesn’t depend on US imports. China is self-sufficient and has, as it is, a huge trade surplus vis-à-vis the US.

China also controls the Asian market – having over taken the US already a couple of years ago.

But what I really suspect is that Trump wants to discourage the world from using the Yuan as a reserve currency, since as such, it lowers not only the value of the US dollar, but it replaces the US dollar as the de facto reserve currency in the world.

Only 20 years ago, or so, the US dollar figured to 90% as reserve currency in treasuries around the globe. Today that percentage has shrunk to below 60%.

As you know, the Yuan has become an official IMF reserve currency about a year ago. That established worldwide trust in the Chinese currency, especially since the Yuan is backed by the Chinese economy plus by gold. Whereas the US dollar has no backing whatsoever; it’s pure and simple FIAT money. 

Plus, the US is broke. Everybody knows it. The US has a current debt of about 110% of her GDP, more than the Greek debt was in 2008. 

And if counting what the US General Accounting Office calls, “unmet obligations” or “uncovered liabilities” – the US debt is about 7 ½ times the US GDP. 

Of course, such figures do not go unnoticed by the treasurers of the world.

So, Trump’s trade war with China – or the Propaganda for a Trade war, might as well be a Propaganda against the Yuan, diminishing its reputation – so as to deflect from every country’s golden opportunity to use the Yuan to replace the dollar as reserve currency. 

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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 Vineyard of The Saker Blog; 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.

Featured image is from FinanceTwitter.

As a witness of the broadcast of RFK’s victory speech and the virtually simultaneous announcement of his assassination at the Ambassador Hotel while I was serving as a university coordinator for RFK for President, I feel a heavy sense of duty to support RFK, Jr.’s plea for a fresh official approach to the death of his father. 

With the 50th anniversary of the death of Robert Francis Kennedy approaching on the 6th of June, we must not forget the circumstances of his brutal murder that followed the cruel murder of his brother, JFK, and the vicious murder of MLK, Jr.

Today, RFK’s case rises in importance because his son, RFK, Jr. calls for a new investigation stating that he is not convinced by the original handling of the case and he has lost all confidence in the ‘lone nut’ theory adopted by the prosecution of Sirhan.

In doing so, RFK follows members of the King family who have long called for a new investigation into the facts of the murder of MLK.  For decades public, private and scientific dissatisfaction with the case of JFK remains a massive lacuna in our understanding of the United States of America in the turbulent 20th century.

Finally, the media-driven mantra of ‘conspiracy theory’ has collapsed while the lone gunman theories of these three iconic political assassinations have disappeared under the stark gaze of scientific analysis and the testimony of credible eyewitnesses including Paul Schrade, a genuine American hero who survived a bullet wound to his head at the side of RFK on that fateful evening in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel half a century ago.

It is worth recalling the history of the initial incursion of ISIS forces (Summer 2014) and the timeline extending from the occupation of Mosul in Summer of 2014 which was covertly supported by the US, to the “Liberation” of Mosul three years later which was also supported by the US and its allies.

We’re dealing with a diabolical military and intelligence agenda. 

Moreover, it was only once the ISIS had captured Mosul and was firmly entrenched inside Iraq, that the US and its allies initiated two months later its  “counter-terrorism” operation, allegedly against the ISIS. 

With the so-called “Liberation” of Iraq (June-July 2017), it is important to reflect on Washington’s diabolical project.

The ISIS, a construct of US intelligence  was dispatched to Iraq in Summer 2014. With limited paramilitary capabilities it occupied Mosul.

What would have been required from a military standpoint to wipe out the ISIS Daesh convoy with no effective anti-aircraft capabilities?

If they had wanted to eliminate the Islamic State brigades, they could have “carpet” bombed their convoys of Toyota pickup trucks when they crossed the desert from Syria into Iraq in June. 

The answer is pretty obvious, yet not a single mainstream media has acknowledged it.

The  Syro-Arabian Desert is open territory (see map right). With state of the art jet fighter aircraft (F15, F22 Raptor, F16) it would have been  –from a military standpoint–  ”a piece of cake”, a rapid and expedient surgical operation, which would have decimated the Islamic State convoys in a matter of hours.

Iraqi forces were coopted by the US to let it happen. The Iraqi military commanders were manipulated and paid off, They allowed the city to fall into the hands of the ISIS rebels without “a single shot being fired”. 

Shiite General Mehdi Sabih al-Gharawi who was in charge of the Mosul Army divisions “had left the city”. Al Gharawi had worked hand in glove with the US military. He took over the command of Mosul in September 2011, from US Col Scott McKean. 

Had he been co-opted, instructed by his US counterparts to abandon his command?

Then in August 2014, Obama launched a so-called “counter-terrorism operation” against the ISIS, namely against terrorists who were supported and financed by the US, UK, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel.

Three years of extensive bombings under a fake counter-terrorism mandate. 

America’s ultimate intent was to destroy, destabilize and fracture Iraq as a nation State.  That objective has largely been achieved. 

The “Liberation” of Mosul constitutes an extensive crime against humanity consisting in actively supporting the ISIS terrorists occupation of Mosul, and then waging an extensive bombing campaign to “liberate” the city.  

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, May 30, 2018

Nazli Tarsi‘s carefully documented article below describes the cruel aftermath of the “Liberation” of Mosul

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Like heavy fog, the stench of death fills the air in Mosul

by Nazli Tarsi

Middle East Monitor 

May 29, 2018

Throughout the nine months from the beginning of military operations to liberate Iraq’s north-western province in October 2016, thousands of men, women and children, as well as fighters, perished. The Pentagon refers to the ancient city of Mosul’s fallen civilian population as “unintentional” casualties, but locally they are still mourned as mothers and fathers, children and grandchildren, all caught in the crossfire of a war outside of their making.

In July last year, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi announced the liberation of the final Daesh stronghold in the ancient city. Another ten months have now passed, yet the corpses of civilians and Daesh fighters still litter the ground in Mosul’s Old City. According to investigator Samuel Oakford of monitoring group Airwars, “There remains no official count of the dead in Mosul.”

Eleven thousand has been the largest figure cited by press agencies, but hundreds who are still missing may yet have to be added to any final total. The tally is likely to grow for at least the next six months, if not longer.

Efforts to dispose of dismembered and mutilated corpses have been as agonisingly slow as efforts to reconstruct a city that endured, according to Airwars, 1,250 air strikes to be liberated. Bodies are collected by Iraq’s Civil Defence teams and death certificates are then issued, but even their efforts have been limited, owing to the lack of funds and human resources to tackle the problem head-on.

The blistering heat of an Iraqi summer threatens to aggravate the adverse health risks associated with rotting corpses. Already, like heavy fog, the stench of death fills the air in Mosul. Greater efforts are needed desperately, but the neglect of the bodies has established itself as the norm; they are simply being left to rot.

The Iraqi authorities, both central and provincial, have defended themselves against allegations of neglect over this issue. Each blames the other for failure to exhume bodies trapped beneath the rubble, as families, offered no support, are left to fill in the blanks over the fate of their missing loved ones. The perceived identify of abandoned corpses has been the excuse that some federal officials have used in defence of their inaction.

Iraq’s Civil Defence teams have, in some instances, refused to clear corpses which they claim belong to “Daesh families”. Nevertheless, on 17 and 18 May alone, Civil Defence responders recovered as many as a 1,000 bodies.

Local volunteers and civil society organisations have explained the dilemma by pointing to the lack of specialist equipment and the means needed to clear the city. Mohammad Dylan, a member of the Wasel Tasel Team distributing relief items and offering support to devastated neighbourhoods and homes in the Old City, expects further delays. “Some of the areas are not safe for volunteer teams to travel to alone,” he told MEMO, “particularly in the Old City District, where the majority of bodies are concentrated.”

In the absence of a coordinated corpse removal campaign, local volunteers from Nineveh and other Iraqi provinces have assumed the responsibility that officials have shrugged off. Despite the slow pace of their work, they are seeing results for the first time since the defeat of Daesh last July.

Fatima Alani, senior researcher at the Amman-based Iraqi War Crimes Centre, cited “multiple reasons” for the situation being as it is. “Safe corridors that could have provided civilians trapped inside the city with a safe escape route were not secured,” she explained. “Moreover, we received evidence that throughout the struggle for the city’s liberation, civilians were obstructed or dissuaded from leaving”.

Last week alone, Alani pointed out, a total of 600 bodies were recovered in the space of 48 hours. She contends that the brutality that visited Mosul could have been avoided if civilian-populated centres were not deliberately hit by overwhelming force.

As buildings crumbled, the face of Mosul was changed beyond recognition. The scale of urban devastation has made it almost impossible for families to locate relatives that they fear are dead, or find out how they died. The pattern of the killing that has emerged suggests clearly that beneath every shattered building rotting corpses remain entombed.

While the River Tigris made it easy for the disposal of bodies, the city’s water supplies are now dangerously polluted. The head of the Nineveh Water Directorate has denied such claims, though, and assured city residents of the periodic testing and sterilisation of potable water. No independent evidence exists to verify his claims.

Mohammad Al-Azzawi, the deputy head of the medical centre in Alam, told state-owned Chinese news agency Xinhua that laboratory tests show the water from the river to be highly contaminated with faecal and intestinal bacteria. “The negligence we see and the abandonment of these corpses will give rise to different diseases,” he said. “It could result in another plague or anthrax. The longer they remain, the more toxic the effects of environmental pollution will be.”

Al-Azzawi added that we should not forget that the prolonged presence of corpses in the rubble and on the streets will affect the health of the residents left behind, and contaminate the city’s water facilities. “The spread of lethal strains of influenza and other deadly pathogens will put civilian lives at greater risk.”

While many questions remain unanswered, the most pressing are linked to the identities of newly-recovered corpses, especially those discovered inside what have been described as “killing rooms”, where countless bodies are layered messily on top of each other. Almost a year after Mosul’s liberation, not all of the bodies are subject to forensic tests to determine the cause of death and their identity.

The stench of death that hangs heavily over the corpse-infested city has arrested optimism about a hopeful future for its remaining residents. They may have lived through one of the ugliest wars in modern memory, but their battle for survival goes on.

In 2017 the retired US Navy admiral and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander,  t is an attractive read for military professionals, especially those serving in the Navy, as well as for historians, political scientists, and anyone interested in the complex junctures of the geographical landscape and the ways in which power is projected. Of course in this instance we are primarily talking about the environment of the sea.  However, the style of the presentation and the method used to convey the material betrays a certain ideological determinism.  From the very first pages the author proclaims his identity and his devotion to the cult of the sea, just like a Venetian doge presiding over a Marriage of the Sea ceremony — “Like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, I had an epiphany: I wanted to be a sailor. In all my life, we had not been a family particularly oriented to the water, but the Pacific grabbed me by the throat and said quite simply, ‘You are home.’ I’ve never looked back” (pg. 12) — this is how James Stavridis describes his first ocean voyage in 1972 on the USS Jouett cruiser, when he was a young student at the Naval Academy. She was “beautiful and modern” —  these words, spoken about a warship, are an example of the typical sort of slang used by military professionals who lavish such epithets on their equipment, almost as if they were describing a living creature.

There are nine chapters, seven of which are broken down by region — the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, the Mediterranean and the South China Sea, the Caribbean, the Arctic Ocean, and two chapters with themes on maritime piracy, the fishing industry, ecology, and US Naval strategy for the 21st century.  The political and elective subtext is specified right up front in the table of contents.

Who would have been thinking about the South China Sea 15 years ago? The focus would have more likely been on the Persian Gulf. That trend became an object of particular interest to Washington once China successfully incorporated high-tech military equipment into its arsenal and the country started to take off economically, although run-ins in the South China Sea began to occur in the 1970s.  And isn’t the conceptualization of global maritime piracy just a reason to justify the forward presence of the US Navy in the most far-flung corners of the world, under the pretext of a noble cause?

However, US interests like these are described in the first chapter from a historical perspective — such as the 1898 annexation of Hawaii, because American ships needed refueling (which awaited them at transit points known as coaling stations), and also the dramatic voyage of American Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan in the 1850s (pg. 25), which not only led to that country’s dependence on treaties with the US, but also its rapid modernization in keeping with the Western model. In describing the Russo-Turkish war, Stavridis mentions what he calls an “interesting side note” — some Russian ships surrendered to the enemy. As a result, “[w]hen the commanders came home, they were court-martialed and sentenced to death, ending for all intents and purposes the idea of surrender” (pg. 29). Stavridis claims that the US has a different philosophy — to never surrender one’s ship but rather to fight to the end.

Image: James George Stavridis, a retired United States Navy admiral and the current dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a graduate school for international affairs in the US.

The USS Pueblo (AGER-2), which was a reconnaissance ship disguised as a scientific vessel, was carrying a crew of over 80 sailors when it was captured by North Korean patrol boats in 1968. No one even attempted to fend off the Koreans (two machine guns remained under wraps). Nor were any of the secret documents destroyed and the equipment continued to operate right in front of the astonished Koreans who descended into the holds.  In 1969 the captain was even subjected to a Naval court of inquiry in the US. That’s no surprise — for the first time in 160 years, an American ship had surrendered to the enemy, and no one had come to its rescue!  But in the end no action was taken against him, since it became clear that the US military system was in such a deep “mess.”

No mention is made of the heroic resistance offered by the Russian cruiser Varyag, which acquiesced to an unequal battle with the Japanese in 1905. Those details are quite worthy of note, however, since in 1907 the commander of that ship, Admiral Vsevolod Rudnev, became the first European to be decorated with Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun, as a sign of Tokyo’s respect for his heroism in that battle.

What’s more, Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his role in the negotiations between Russia and Japan. When you think about the fact that the Japanese won their victory at Tsushima thanks to their superior ability to communicate by radio — a stumbling block for the Russians — one can also then discern the role played by the US, by that same Commodore Perry who had been the first to introduce Tokyo to Western technology.

Stavridis then argues that “[t]he Pacific Ocean arms race is real and it is dangerous” (pg. 41). But as they say, when you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.

Next, let’s take a look at the Atlantic Ocean, or the “cradle of our civilization,” as Stavridis calls it.  His brief historical digression into the navigational tactics of the Greeks, the Vikings, and the Irish (St. Brendan) is fairly interesting, and those stories are blended with the admiral’s personal reminiscences. Of course five nations fought a war over the Atlantic: the Portuguese, under the rule of Prince Henry the Navigator and later Christopher Columbus; the Spanish Armada; the “creative geostrategic genius William Pitt” (pg. 60); and also France and the Netherlands, which had their own interests at stake. And then 1773 saw the Boston Tea Party, which resulted in England being stripped of its own colonies. Finally there was the Battle of Trafalgar and the American Civil War, during which both Southerners and Northerners utilized the Atlantic, plus WWI, the Battle of the Atlantic (as Churchill dubbed it), and the Falklands War in 1982 (the last military conflict in this ocean) — our author leads us through each twist and turn. At the end of the chapter he states, “The Atlantic today is, for essentially the first time in its long history, a zone of cooperation and peace from the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Antarctic in the far South” (pg. 84). And here we see the contradiction that emerges at the end of the book. In the section about pirates (pg. 285), he speaks about the Gulf of Guinea and the deltas of the Niger and the Volta where Boko Haram is active, which has forced Western nations to deploy special missions to the coast of West Africa. So we still have a long way to go before we can objectively point to peace and cooperation in the Atlantic.

The chapter on the Indian Ocean also begins with personal impressions, mixed with historical facts. One important observation is that wars have not been fought there as often as in other seas, because of the idiosyncrasies of the strategic geography. The clashes that occurred between the competing powers that bordered the Indian Ocean were primarily conducted on land. Did this predestine these countries to be afterwards partial to Land Power? It is quite possible, although they made good use of their fleets for commercial purposes, making it possible for them to establish a system of communication from China to the east coast of Africa even back in the days of antiquity.

And kudos to Stavridis for bringing up what happened to Iran Air Flight 655 when a missile from the USS Vincennes cruiser shot down an Iranian airliner carrying 290 civilian passengers. Stavridis calls it “a terrible mistake caused by the high state of tension in the region, the confusion and fog of war …” (pg. 99).

But then we get to Vasco da Gama, who is credited with “the most epic and impactful voyage of exploration in world history …” (pg. 101), and the experienced eye of a historian of oceanic exploration will immediately pick up on the omission, for where is the mention of the pilot of his ship, the native of Oman, Ahmad ibn Majid? For without this Arab navigator there would have been no discoveries in the name of Portugal. And why is there no reference to the legend of Sinbad the Sailor, who was based on a real historical figure? Robert Kaplan was more careful in his book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and The Future of American Power, and made note of these details.

Instead Stavridis turns his attention to the Suez Canal, although it would be better to have moved that subject to the chapter on the Mediterranean, where it would be a more logical fit.

One can discern recurring value judgments by reading between the lines, such as in reference to the Iranian government of Ayatollah Khomeini, “which truly, madly, deeply, hated the United States” (pg. 115). Such passages clearly help to entrench the negative image of Iran held by American (and other) readers of this book.

The chapter’s conclusions are quite obvious — “we must recognize the vital importance of the Indian Ocean itself … Our strategic and geopolitical mental map reflects this …” (pg. 120). The artificial narrative of the Indo-Pacific region that is promoted by the US represents an incremental realization of these intentions. India is identified as America’s primary partner on this issue. And it’s a sensible idea to bring not only NATO and Washington’s Asian partners on board for the joint fight against piracy, “but also China, India, Pakistan, and Iran.” But that will be difficult if the US continues to act like the world’s policeman, in keeping with its ideas of its own political superiority and exceptionalism.

The chapter on the Mediterranean opens with statistical data and this region’s role in world history: the Minoans, Cretans, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians; the early “clash of civilizations” between the Greeks and Persians; and the transformation of the Mediterranean into a home sea for the Romans. And then, alas, the book blunders and has only a few lines to offer about the Crusades and the Byzantine Empire. After all, Byzantium lasted longer than any other mighty power in that region. Moreover, many historians have dubbed it a “sea empire,” because of its powerful fleet and interest in controlling sea-based communication channels. Under Diocletian, Byzantium possessed several fleets — after the seventh-century reforms, a system of sea themata was established, and the phenomenon of the sea-based droungarios, was in fact, a prototype for the mobile units and interdepartmental cooperation seen today. And, of course, there was the “Greek fire” (or, more precisely, “liquid fire,” as it was called in Byzantium) and the epic naval battles — the Battle of the Masts, the defeat of the Arabs in 747 after their unsuccessful siege of Constantinople, the conquest of Cyprus and Crete from the Muslims in the second half of the tenth century, etc. Nor did the Slavs’ Siege of Constantinople rate a mention (although Ukraine, Crimea, and Russia are referred to quite freely later in the book.).

Is this evidence of his ignorance of historical facts or rather an intentional oversight in order to avoid recognizing the role played by Byzantium for centuries in the region’s maritime policy? The second option is more likely to be correct, since the Ottoman Empire is also discussed rather selectively. Laziness is the only explanation for the omission of the Battle of Lepanto, but why no references to Pasha Hayreddin Barbarossa (Khidr Reis), who inspired fear in every European power in the early 16th century? The Battle of Preveza is also worth describing, in which the Ottoman fleet was far smaller than the combined flotilla of the legendary Admiral Andrea Doria (122 ships vs. 600), yet Doria’s forces ultimately lost and beat an ignoble retreat. And keeping in mind Barbarossa’s  famous saying — “whoever rules the waves rules the world” — was not Halford Mackinder‘s formula for controlling Eurasia merely a restatement of the ideas of ​​that Ottoman admiral?

At the end of this chapter, a number of regional imperatives for NATO are suggested, including finding a solution to the problems of refugees and terrorists, although these are headaches that that organization itself created (through, for example, the destruction of Libya as a sovereign state and its support for the militants in Syria). And of course one mustn’t forget the “Russian threat” —   “Russian adventurism will continue in and around the eastern Med and the Black Sea. It is clear the Med will continue to be a fickle and changing geopolitical body of water …” (pg. 162).

A fairly lengthy chapter on the Caribbean betrays the author’s desire to demonstrate the significance of this region. And how. Back in the era of great geographical discoveries, this was the place where the European empires deployed their most sophisticated resources against one another, and since they were far from the shores of their home countries, this posed certain risks. Only passing mention is made of Guantanamo Bay, which has garnered international notoriety due to the vast number of people who have been held there who were suspected of having links to al-Qaeda. Many were captured in Afghanistan and were kept there for years without ever being charged or tried. Yet these facts are cited as if Gitmo were a legitimate military base for the US Navy, and not a chunk of occupied Cuban territory. And the intervention in Haiti and Grenada is presented as a mere matter of course. Once Reagan decided that the government there posed a threat to the American citizens in that country, orchestrating a coup became a distinct possibility. “That the government also had Marxist tendencies was an additional problem. The United States invaded Grenada …” (pg. 226).

The Arctic chapter is primarily devoted to the territorial disputes of the Arctic nations, the environment, and the natural resources. Somehow the fact was left out that the Arctic is also extremely convenient in a strategic sense — a missile launched from a Russian submarine at the North Pole will fly much faster to the American coastline than one from a land-based installation. And one passage offers evidence of what is clearly a misunderstanding by Stavridis of the mentality of the Russian nation — “The Arctic is also a part of the world that figures deeply in the Russian mind-set and self-image as a nation of rugged individualists who are capable of surviving in the harshest of conditions” (pg. 247). Excuse me, but how could individualists survive in this harsh environment? On the contrary, here we see in action the principle of mutual assistance and support. Even small groups would fare better under such conditions than individualists, who wouldn’t be able to accomplish much, if anything. In this chapter, Stavridis suggests that the US shore up its leadership role in the Arctic Council, construct more icebreakers, and continue to call the shots in the Arctic through NATO, but also to begin a dialog with Russia. Russia is superior to the US in the Arctic both in terms of military and technology, so Washington will not be the one dictating the terms there.

Incidentally, discussions of the Arctic are usually conflated with analysis of the Antarctic.  They’re both mostly water, after all. But Stavridis avoids doing that. The Antarctic, in case you need a reminder, was discovered by Russian navigators. And yes, the idea of maritime law was also a Russian idea — suggested during the era of Catherine II.

The conclusions at the end of the book are entirely predictable — the US needs to preserve its presence and influence wherever possible. In the author’s view, this applies not only to the Navy, but also to all the various installations and elements of the missile defense system. This is the notion behind the global network referred to in the document “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” which was published in 2015, and can also be found in the concept of global alliances and partnerships that was pioneered by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Therefore, it is quite logical that the final chapter, “America and the Oceans,” discusses the Eurasian continent, Halford Mackinder’s “World Island,” and land-based forces, which (here Stavridis paraphrases Mahan) need to be offset by naval forces acting as a counterweight. But since Mahan’s day there have been significant changes related to military technology and strategy. Russia’s and China’s submarine and surface power is growing, aircraft carriers have become vulnerable to missiles, and command-and-control systems can be subjected to cyberattacks. All this presents different environments and challenges for any sea power. Stavridis suggests supplementing Mahan’s formula (a large fleet, forward deployment, and secure logistics) with cooperation that is international (including through NATO), inter-agency, and public-private in nature. This could create a “smart-power approach for the seas” (pg. 342).

War is not an anomaly, nor an exception to the rule, it has always been with us and it might always be. Militarism and its practice in war are subcategories of waste (the harmful things we produce such as pollution and bombs) and domains of accumulation themselves. They are also prerequisites for the expansion of capital and its market economy. Much is done to portray war as an inherent attribute of human fallibility or an unintended consequence. However, mainstream concepts associated with the promotion of the market economy are weapons of the ruling class. They are all laced with poison. The facts are such that we have never been without wars. Amongst other economic functions, wars invariably act as measures of depopulation, regulating the supply of global labour. 

My hypothesis is that a market economy requires a permanent state of war. Behind the crocodile tears for the human disasters and ‘white man burden,’ people and nature are of value in themselves and war does a good job at consuming both very quickly.

In a globally integrated production process, all idle assets are legal property and, as such, economic categories, influencing the production process and exchange either by being consumed, set aside or destroyed. Nothing escapes the rule of capital and its guns, which means that man and nature are commodified value, either actively or in suspended animation – the latter because commodities obey the time ordained by capital, abstract time as opposed to conventional time. This latter point is not too abstract if we think about it this way: people in power decide the time to engage and act and so we cannot think of time in terms of a conventional or chronological ordering; after all that is what is meant by totality when we say capital is a totality (I revert to this below). Just as hegemonic imperialism controls space, real time is also at its command. All the pollution humanity already produced, all the waste, has now entered the market to be sold for a price. Pollution was never free of charge. It was something of value whose time to enter the market and exchange for a money price is power derived, or decided by the power of capital. 

To put things differently, to say that the nature and people that white colonists encountered abroad and exterminated had no value because they did not yet exchange for a price, implies that the wars and genocides were not a market that fetched a price for the skins of natives. It implies that destruction is not inherent to capital’s activity, and as such, ‘noble savages’ and their territories were just things whose obliteration did not generate any value. What is wrong with the western theory of value is that it assumes that value is an object or a thing. It omits the subject in value, the power relation in control of time and space, whose most ferocious form is imperialism. 

The third world has somewhat become fortunate as a result of the environmental disasters simply because it entered the discourse as a victim of capital and its imperialism, just like nature. Although capital metabolises both man and nature, bourgeois elements such as those of the British royal family still posit that there are too many humans. It is as if, there is an infestation of some mammal species, which requires culling by Safari hunting trips. At any rate, the industry of war, insofar as it consumes people lives in short spans of time, is an intense surplus value producing activity. And as we know, it takes surplus value to undergird profit rates in a global production. 

Across history, wars were always present, as they would be in class society. However, they acquire a distinctively destructive bent in a market economy dominated by finance-monopoly capital. Prior to the current capitalist mode of production, the one in which our lives came to depend on the market, that is before people started to sell their labour for a wage in highly mechanised factories that produce far in excess of society’s needs, empires, more often than not, did not destroy the peasants and their low-tech tools; obviously they needed them for more tribute. Long periods of stagnation and stability took root, longue duree as they have come to be known, because although political regimes may change, the economic base of society experienced little upheavals. A conquering empire would soon have to repair the irrigation canals and restore stability. Pre-capitalist crises were crises of underproduction and underconsumption, namely caused by nature. 

As capitalism and its free market trade dawned, we began to produce for profits and in excess to existing demand. The regulation of the resources employed by society required the setting aside of people along with some of their outdated technological-means. Moreover, the private mode of appropriating moneyed-profits severed the compatibility between what people need and what people produce. We produced many things we did not need, or we literally produced waste and things that harm us. Waste, militarism and wars are foremost examples of what people do not need, yet society continues to produce. They are said to be alienated processes. 

Although wars have always been with us, they are not the same in terms of their specific historical reasons, their forms are not the same, and the way they are conducted is no longer the same. To be scientific is to go beyond the unchangeable Platonic forms, the transhistorical or that which is true and the same across history; the word war itself may be the same, but its content and determinations are different as time and conditions change. Yes, empires still seek tribute and imperial rents, but one must look further into the shifting content of war under capitalism and its market economy. It is for instance complacent to say that ancient empires fought for power whenever a new empire rose, and so the US and rising China will also engage in war. The condition then are not the conditions now.     

Organised capital requires bigger markets, but also cheaper labour and environmental costs. At first, we see that wars in market economies become regulators of production, which reduce the number of labourers or force more people to become refugees and hence reduce the wage bill. They also pillage nature – the depleted uranium in Fallujah still maims new-borns. Just as important, wars are fields of production themselves. US-imperialist spending on wars is the sort of investment that does not infringe on the market of the private sector. Defence, or more appropriately, offence, is not an area the private sector has taken up yet, whereas health and education are areas, it would like to see privatised. War spending and effort absorb excess profits (the economic surplus of which there are huge piles in the monopoly age) that would otherwise not generate much in returns or fuel demand and other crises.

As I have said, imperialist wars have been with us for long, but most recently one need only look at what has occurred in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq to discover the new shape and objectives of war. One observes that countries attempting to control their own resources or assert their sovereignty are liable to fragmentation or to the destruction of their states. These new wars are blatant encroachment wars by which imperialism buttresses its own power standing as it destroys and takes control of the country as it tears it apart. It is almost a return to the colonial age but without the modicum of responsibility colonists assumed for the conquered population. 

At any rate, in times of crisis, militarism and war spending are all the more necessary to take the market out of its slump. In a way, war is awful, but it does wonders for the macroeconomy, and it is the macroeconomy that matters. Tangentially, the case of the war in Syria is of particular interest since the presence of so many super powers there may augur bigger future wars. The latest American bombing of Syria in April 2018 could have been a major catastrophe had Russian forces been hit. We are living in an age, where a human mistake can precipitate a nuclear winter. Although remote, it remains a serious spectre that haunts us. 

The last and this century are particularly significant in terms of the degree, frequency and intensity of wars. Imperialist wars and austerity reduce the population of the planet. They cut short population growth way below its historically determined potential; humans die prematurely. As you read this, there are many wars ongoing, there are many human deaths related to poverty, and many species on the planet are perishing. Around 30,000 people daily succumb to hunger and related causes. Not long ago, the human rights rapporteur on the right to food had said that one child perishes every four or five seconds from hunger and other preventable diseases.

These are manmade disasters, which essentially means class-made, because classes are the state of social being for people. Unfortunately, we have come to learn of wars and to cohabitate with them and, oddly enough, accept them as normal. As a society that lives by the proxy of the spectacle (as per Guy DeBord), we reject the gruesome shows of ISIS, yet we seem to be oblivious to the much bigger crimes committed by the western-suited people in charge of the planet. So long as their crimes are not conveyed to us as a spectacular show, they are out of sight out of mind. To paraphrase the astute activist Roger Waters, ‘we have become comfortably numb.’ 

There is a historically specific reason for the wars as I said and our de-sensitisation to them. We were born into a world whose ideas and institutions remake these disasters on daily basis. Indeed, the interlocutors of capital would have to proclaim that they work for peace and the reduction of poverty, but that is not the tendency under capital, the dominant relationship, because as I have mentioned above, the making of profits requires the setting aside or destruction of resources. These institutions and ideas (ideologies) are there before us and they are real; they are the result of past powers putting them in place to promote their interests. This is the objective and impersonal history, the family, the state, the race the nationality, etc., into which we come into life as living beings. To date, we have not changed that order of things, that history, which dictates our lives and will dictate the lives of future generations – that is if there will be more generations in the future. 

In a sense, history happens against the wishes of most people. As to the question of what this history is? Let us just say it is the totality of the social relations of production, which in our case are capitalist relations. These capitalist relations that command history can be summarized as capital, a totalising relation without limits and with a rationality of its own, which transforms everything social into private class wealth and power. It basically rips apart the peasant from his tools or means of production just as it erect barriers between use and exchange value or between the social and the private. It does so mostly by means of violence. 

As you can see what we call value is this particular relationship in which a labourer, through the labour invested in the commodity, produces things that it does not own or have use for, and that such a contradiction (abstract labour vs. use value) resolves as the commodity exchanges for money, from which the labouring class must earn less than what it takes to acquire a decent standard of living relative to the wealth prevailing at the time. Why relative to the wealth prevailing at the time, or the historically determined level of wealth, because it is absurd to compare someone dying from poverty and depleted uranium exposure at the age of say 43, and at the same time, say he should be happy, because in Sumerian or Neolithic times, he or she would have at best lived to 23 years. Time is also of shifting quality and incoherent. Value is a subject to object relationship, it is the commodity (object) and the people organised in social relationships to produce it (subject). 

This value associated with the market phenomenon only arose as our lives became dependent on the market economy under capitalism. True, markets always existed, but never to the point where all of social life depended on them. We all sell our labour on the market for a wage. Again, one should not be formal or platonic with historical concepts. Things or markets have the same name, but they are different in content as time and their underlying conditions change. Prior to capitalism failures in the markets for long distance trade in luxury goods, which were puny, did not cause unemployment and misery on a large scale, as do market failures today. Markets have come to represent the social foundation of our existence and questions of degree matter for scientific investigations. 

Nearly all commodities are destined for exchange under capitalism. Let us follow the classical Marxist line and propose that in these commodities there is some useful side that serves social ends (the apples and oranges), and an exchange side that serves private ends (the money profits for which they are sold). Although of late, nearly all commodities can be said to be underlaid with an environmentally deleterious content, which is in addition to the fact that commodities contain the child or slave-like labour and the blood of wars; their negative waste side trumps the goodness in them. However, for the sake of argument we say in the commodity as it exists objectively, outside of us, the private (exchange value) is set against the social (use value) and they repulse each other. We are in a world where the commodity we created is at war with itself in order to expand in money form as it sells on the market. All the commodities we create constitute our wealth. The owners of commodities create the conditions for the expansion of the market for commodities and always by means of war. They shape both the conditions for production on the cheap and sale on the dear. Through commodity fetishism or as commodities exchange for each other, driven by their own internal contradiction, these things lay down the conditions for their own expansion and always through violence. Not the profiteers, it is these things, the commodities we created, which order us to go to wars. And this is different from any other time prior to capitalism. 

Commodities are not so useful anymore. Not only bombs, even apples and oranges pollute and poison us. Still, the war outside the commodity, has become a magnification of the contradiction of the value relationship within the commodity; that is so long as the product of labour and its usefulness are forcefully alienated from the direct producer and mediated by exchange, we will experience war. At this historical juncture, instead of just going to war for apples and oranges, we war for waste products. We go to war for the sake of war. This is an immensely powerful state of alienation. Such is the power of the commodity form and commodity fetishism. 

Violence emanates from the very heart of the commodity under capitalism, a condition given its dues in the work of Frantz Fanon. For now, capital is an uncontrollable social relation, it is a process of being as a whole and the social map by which the whole reproduces itself is the simultaneous act of wealth creation and destruction. Evidently, waste in general and, war in particular, fall on the destruction side of the capital relationship as it reproduces itself. 

Put anecdotally in a personal-like structure, for rich people to get richer they must make wars not only because wars make them money, but because wars make things cheap and puts them in control to continue to make money. Even if one tries to simplify reality it remains somewhat convoluted, as it should be, else the answers to everything would be too easy. In the immediate (that is as we observe things that are the products of history now), the interests of the few in leading positions, organised in various social forms, those who inherited the privileges and the wealth from previous generations, they would like to maintain things as they are and continue to expand the markets for more of the private wealth, while at the same time reducing the costs of labour and environmental inputs. The ruling class is the dominant relationship in capital, which in relation to other classes makes history, would not like to keep capital as it is, it would like to expand it. 

Most working people are faced off against their institutions and ideologies (these are the structural forms of history), which like history, exist outside of them and controls them. Naturally enough, these institutions systemically promote the cheapening of labour and the environment by the most gruesome means. Obviously to make people and nature cheap, business and its class must pay people less or put back less into the environment, which means to lessen them in quantity and quality. Militarism as a domain of accumulation and its wars does a great job at both. I will explain why and how briefly.

To give structure to ideas, the world of which I speak is the real world that is governed by huge institutions like the UN the World Bank and the IMF and their mainstream ideologies. To be sure, there is no right or wrong or good and bad in ideology. There are class ideologies, and the ideologies of these institutions serve the imperialist class. These are not democratic institutions. They are principally ruled by the powerful US leading class, which is heir to the colonial European empires and its historically amassed power and wealth. Such a lopsided power structure trailing from the past favouring the western world, western in the ideological not geographic sense, produces game rules and ideas that promote the interest of the Western ruling classes and their allies downstream. It does so by maintaining unequal political, social and trade relations. For instance, heads of states in the powerful nations are the product of such domineering order and they perpetuate such a structure or the status quo. 

That the US holds most power in the most important organisational bodies (the UN, etc.) in the world, is not a conspiracy, it is a fact available for everyone to see. That is, I am not speaking of people conspiring behind closed doors, although that happens too, I am speaking of the obvious: the world has been perpetually made into an uneven power structure, both at the level of institutions and ideas, to promote specific interests, which to date have undermined people and nature. This much we know after the fact, or ipso facto. 

For capital to serve its interest, that is to produce things to sell on a market for profit, it also requires wars to extract raw material, oil extraction that pollutes for example, and union busting to lower wages, etc. Making wars for raw materials is a widely debated point. However, such an imperialist system also has to beautify the ugly reality and to concomitantly initiate ideas that convince even the people that are suffering that this is the best world of all the possible worlds. It cannot just say, we are going to kill the Arabs for their oil. For capital, this is the role of ideological production, which is just as important as commodity production. Capital produces the commodity and, through its schools, temples and media bombardment, etc., it also produces the human being who is submissively adequate for the uncritical consumption of that commodity. 

Capital, that is the beneficial ruling class, would like us to believe that there is no alternative to this system. To this very notion, that there is not alternative, the late professor of logic Istvan Meszaros used to say that he would fail a student who says that there are no alternatives to an existing reality. Yet the catchphrase ‘there is no alternative (TINA)’ and the market economy (capitalism) is progressive still dominate the airwaves. Do not ask me how people can be so ignorant, so as to hear Margaret Thatcher repeat TINA so often. Sections of people can be held hostage to capital for lack of alternatives and fear of transition to a better world. That is a question related to the development of revolutionary consciousness, for which there is not enough space here to address fully.

Is capitalism really progressive? To inculcate such untruthiness, i.e. progressive capitalism, there are so many academic and media apparatuses remaking the language to fit the objectives of history and those of its people in charge. Orientalism, for instance, is one way of depicting the other or the ‘barbarian’ in lesser standing, but demeaning others is standard practice across history and in every class society. The real orientalism, the one that returns further gains to the powerful relationship of capital, to the ruling classes, such as racism, occurs at the juncture where the use of pejorative language can be put to use through a power platform to usurp/undermine the other, as in slavery or colonialism. Only sticks and stones break bones, words alone do nothing.

This orientalism with teeth is different from the salient critique of literature or art. It is based on the violent practice of discrimination in a particular historical phase; in our historical phase, that language and its attendant practice would be for example an R2P to save the Libyans. It is neo-colonial practice, which preserves much of the brutality of colonialism. It deprives the Libyan people from their state as the political platform through which they negotiate better living standards for themselves and, more importantly, from growing and producing in a world that has ‘too many people’ and machines and that already over-produces. Unquestionably, there are never too many people, but the market structures production for profit in such a way that it makes people redundant. It replaces living labour with machines or literally dead labour. That is why only under capitalism, the forcibly unemployed have a right to benefits as opposed to charity. Their unemployment is a constant social handicap, which is historically determined.  

But the reigning ideology is not solely racist or orientalist vis-à-vis the East, it also denigrates and misleads and targets all the working populations east and west. The concepts produced by mainstream social science to convince people of the grandeur of the market economy is quite an insult to peoples’ intelligence and, I think it is a form of class to class racism irrespective of colour or ethnic boundaries. There is also a sort of ‘Occidentalism’ if you like.

For instance, in mainstream academia, the labels conspiracy, determinism and, worse of all, ‘structuralism acts as a god and explains everything’ are levied as derogatory remarks at inquisitive minds and critical students to discipline their thought processes. Let us ask ourselves a few questions to clarify these points. Can there be political action without backdoor negotiations serving disparate interests?

Can there not be determinism in theory; we know history is uncertain, but can we really not be deterministic about laws of development which form a tendency for things to happen? Can any theory be so eclectic to constitute an indefinite collection of facts that does not gel or rely on a specific law of development; or can any theory not be made simple, in the sense that, it can be attributed to the development of a pivotal relationship? Theory is grey, but green is the tree of life, as per Goethe. It is an illusion to amass a multifarious reality in the mind and make it complicated, as in reconstitute all the given phenomena in empirical facts. That is not theory. It is vulgar solipsism. After all, reality is dictated by simple laws and politics.

We as a society follow very simple rules, but the reigning ideology of the marketeers wants to confuse us. We call that method of bamboozling, reification, as in making real, the unreal, and or to separate all things of the social totality and make it look like a salad, instead of the coherent whole, which it is in theory. This is theoretical construction we are talking about and not the absurd enumeration of infinite actuality. That is literally useless, absurd and impossible.

To further illustrate, consider for instance the interrelated concepts of progressive capitalism and its consumer surplus. Capitalism creates wealth, it is progressive, and the consumer surplus is an indication of such improvement. True, capitalism produces wealth, and for a minority on the planet standards of living improve as they buy more things relative to their incomes. But the secular trend is for the majority to suffer and for the environment to bear the brunt of chaotic production. Prices are not innocent, and they allocate resources for a social outcome that serves the people who can manipulate prices. 

Often people confuse prices with the real value of things. Prices are flawed representation of value because value creation is a process of production, or a social relation. Surplus value, which is the source of money profit, is never expressed in prices during its extraction. It is only after its realisation on the market that it assumes a price form determined by the power rapport of that market. For capital, prices/money are a tool, the dollar is a tool, they just need to control/destroy to keep their class power, they use prices to further exploit people by cheapening them and reducing their class power. 

Now most working people can be cordoned off as the inferior others, we can say they do not deserve to share in the wealth because they are too primitive to use advanced machinery, or they are the ‘others’ by their national identity or colour, they can be poor because of constructed labels such as their culture, but not the environment. The degradation of the environment reaches everyone even those behind palace walls. Luckily nature does not belong to a tribe as the American Indian proverb says. And as we live in an age where humans impact the environment most (the Anthropocene) and as the planet under the market/profit way by which we organise to reproduce ourselves may totally become uninhabitable (remember we need to use labour and nature on the cheap), we then ask where is the progress?

Obviously, we must reorganise the way we produce to survive. We must reorganise man and nature. We already produce through social production, that is people getting together and cooperating to produce, and hence, we can cut out the privateers and the private intermediaries. The profit incentive already made extinct more innumerable animal and plant species than ever, and it is putting the planet at risk. There must be a better and more disciplining incentive for humanity in a planned development than otherwise. We must stem the foundational order of the market that requires destruction of nature and people to produce profits, all of this at a time when the very ideology of anything social or socialism, or anything to do with planning, is defunct.  Moreover, rising identity politics divides working people across the globe. The task is daunting, but change is inevitable, because as the market expands and it harms everyone rich and poor. The chance of a turnaround grows as the masters of time, the organised privateers, lose control of social time, or the time it takes to take an initiative and turn things around.  

What is waste-side accumulation?

In my work, I emphasise the intrinsic drive of capital to make wars and destroy people and nature. Of course, killing species including humans is a tragic act, but I look at the value-destruction side of things and how it contributes to production and accumulation. To put things bluntly, killing has always been a part of the market business. I call this side of capitalism the waste side. The market produces trousers and bombs at the same time. The trousers are ok, but the bombs, the pollution, this is the waste side. I think the production of waste has been instituted in forms of organisation and introjected in thought for so long, such that we fail to see it as part of the system. Just like apples and oranges, bombs are also commodities produced and alienated from the labourers who produce them. Just like apple and oranges, they acquire a price determined by the power of monopolists, and as such their exchange price and their money forms, as opposed to what we really need as a society, comes to dictate how we live. What I have added here is that I have just included waste products under what is known as commodity fetishism in political economy. The price or money form of the commodities we produce becomes a weapon against ordinary people, that is, they get less and less in wages in order to leave a higher profit margin. 

It is important to think in holistic terms here. As the products of labour require inputs from all the world, the wages become the wages of all the world’s working people differentially distributed amongst them by the way they construct their own identity or skill differences. The global wage share of total income rises with internationalist solidarity and vice versa. The value, the labour, that society invests in a commodity is like nature: it does not have a tribe.  In a sense, the global business class wins by driving working people apart. So, when one wants to identify capital, instead of pointing out the many rich people who own so much of the global wealth, a real barometer/reflection of the strength of the capitalist class, is how badly working people are divided against each other. The business class can still pay a certain section of working people higher wages, but overall if it destroys or drives hungry many others, it pays less in wages and keeps more for profits. Capital is always aware of the primacy of politics and the social nature of production, that is, the roots of profits are in the control and immiseration of the working class, which also accounts for the severity of inter-imperialist wars.

Like other commodities, bombs are also realised, sold on the market and consumed, but their cycle is an endless cycle engaging labour both as living and as dead people. Militarism unearths the macabre essence of capital. As production stages and areas of production are co-determined, and as capital seeks higher profits or the easy way out via militarism pollution and bombs (waste), wars become a domain of accumulation themselves, sort of like the factory, in its social organisational structure and its industrial culture altogether. Militarism is also an investment area, which unlike other investment areas that dip as time goes on, it always has the potential for growth. Remember states, unlike a single individual, create credit and money as they borrow; imperialist state debt is the credit afforded to growth whereas our debt is debilitating. 

Sadly, war is big business not only for the money it earns as states issue bonds to absorb surpluses, which the financial sector loves by the way, or as private business free-rides on war’s tech-innovation, or as the state invests in the military and leaves health care to the private sector, etc., war is big business because it really lowers the value inherent in human lives, it takes away the will of people by destroying their organisations in order to cheapen them. The modern forms of wars which destroy states are massive forms of enslavement. 

Here war acts as both an adjunct to the capitalist wage system and a wage system in itself. That is to say, it helps lower wages by hijacking the will of people and their states or unions (these are forms of social organisation), and it also employs workers for wages. The state is a form of peoples’ organisation in the third world and its destruction is of use to capital. By way of interjection, the Marxian wage system is far more pessimistic, brutal and aggressive than the Malthusian one. It always requires a diminution of the population because of crisis of overproduction. In my work, I emphasise the point that there are wars to capture natural resources, but what many people fail to recognise is that war is an end in itself. 

It is this bequeathed history, the social relations, the rationality behind doing everything and anything to make profits at any expense and using people who believe in the pre-existing idea that ‘the system is great’ to promote that agenda, is also the overdetermining structure. But these people who take us to war and abuse us are unlike their rational master, history, they are irrational, because in the end, they will be hurting themselves, and they have already done too much damage as it is – most extinct species and people are irrepealable. I argue that history is impersonal, objective and rational insofar as it aligns all forces to serve the market, however, it serves the wrongs ends. I also argue that the waste economy, the wars, the militarism, and the pollution, is bigger than the regular economy, and that if we continue the way we are, the current stage of history may be its last. Evidently, to change the social relations, the classes at the helm of history, working people should, as it always has been, take command of history, foremost, the state.

Why is war more important than trade sometimes? 

Let us just take Iraq’s war. Iraq was willing to negotiate, and it would have continued to sell its oil in the dollar, yet it was invaded, and the costs of its war were around 6 trillion in some estimates (estimates differ). But, these same costs were at the same time the investments in militarism, the credit earned by the financial sector and, in terms of money expansion, these trillions go around to create more credit and induce more investment. In short, the money costs of war were also multiple gains to the financial and military industrial sector – the financial first as it gains most. What were the other gains? Iraq as an opponent semi-sovereign state was destroyed reasserting the US’s lead position in the region and globally and millions of Iraqis died or migrated pressuring downwards the global wage. Moreover, the US’s working class is submissively paying for a war that supposedly saved their way of life; and what a way that is. Now had the US just traded with Iraq, which was a 50 billion US$ GDP country in 1990, it may have made off with say tens or a hundred billion in trade gains. So, without going into details, the trillion gains of war are tremendous in comparison to trading in Iraqi dates and oil. In fact, it is the war that forces oil everywhere to be traded in dollars, and for all the excess dollars to support US debt expansion. This is the new form of tribute or imperial rent. 

The same applies to Syria. Why would the US be interested in a few billion dollar trade with a country whose GDP was around 40 billion US$ in 2007, when the pretext for the war in Syria drives a huge militaristic adventure which will be financed by taxpayers to the benefit of the financial sector. One can hardly see a western academic that does not demonise Assad to save Syria, just as happened with Iraq and Libya. There is no limit to the amount of cash that the US will spend on its war effort in Syria, including bribes to journalists and academics, which are also war effort. In macroeconomics, the capitalist class controls the state and earns what it spends and what the state spends to expand its business, especially militarism. To reiterate, these are war costs only to the working people, but are war gains for the financial class. It is the class as opposed to the fictional national divide that captures the flows of value. 

Come to think of it, all of political Islam has been bred by colonialism and later imperialism. Today the US fights alongside AL Qaeda in Syria. What would it mean to Syrian women if a Salafist group assumes the reins of power in Syria. In Iraq, for instance, some reports about the rights of women after the American occupation and the rise of the Mullahs, rank it below Saudi Arabia. What sort of western liberalism supports American aggression in order to put obscurantists in power? One way to answer this question, and possibly the only way, is that liberals derive their consciousness partly from the imperial rents and privileges associated with imperialist wars. 

*

Professor Ali Kadri teaches at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He was previously a  visiting fellow at the Centre for Human Rights, London School of Economics. He is the author of The Cordon Sanitaire: A Single Law Governing Development in East Asia and the Arab World, Palgrave, 2017. he is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is, one appeared in the skies above Florida.

But that’s a story for later. For now, let’s focus on a 2017 executive order issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: “It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.”

That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.” Meant to strengthen the president’s case for the travel ban, it was panned for its methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups contend that the report was “biased, misleading, and incomplete” and “manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim conclusions.”

To bolster the president’s arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, “pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS”; the Uzbek who “posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS”; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement, “admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at others, in coordination with Al Nusrah,” an al-Qaeda offshoot.

Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and that “People’s Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a drone-launched missile.”

That’s right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM’s Florida headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!

Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends, the president’s hurricane of tweets?

Well, there’s a simple explanation. That attack doesn’t actually happen until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air, and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. military’s war colleges, the training grounds for its future generals and admirals.

PALing Around with Terrorists

The 2016 edition of JLASS-SP was played out remotely for weeks before culminating in a five-day on-site exercise at the Air Force Wargaming Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It involved 148 students from the Air Force’s Air War College, the Army War College, the Marine Corps War College, the Naval War College, the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, and the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College. Those up-and-coming officers — some of whom will likely play significant roles in running America’s actual wars in the 2020s — confronted a future in which, as the script for the war game put it, “lingering jealousy and distrust of American power and national interests have made it politically and culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally.”

Here’s the scene as set in JLASS-SP: while the U.S. is still economically and militarily powerful into the next decade, anxieties abound about increasing constraints on the country’s ability to control, dictate, and dominate world affairs. “Even in the military realm… advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and non-state actors, proliferation of nuclear weapons and long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks have increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action,” reads the war game’s summary.

While the materials used are “not intended to be an actual prediction of events,” they are explicitly meant “to reflect a plausible depiction of major trends and influences in the world regions.” Indeed, what’s striking about the exercise is how — though scripted before the election of Donald Trump — it anticipated many of the fears articulated in the president’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. That document, for instance, bemoans the potential dangers not only of regional powers like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but also of “transnational threats from jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations,” undocumented immigrants, “drug traffickers, and criminal cartels [which] exploit porous borders and threaten U.S. security and public safety.”

The JLASS-SP scenario also prefigured themes from that 2018 DOJ/DHS report supporting the travel ban in the way it stoked fears of, above all, a major “foreign-born” — especially Muslim — terror threat in the United States. A 2017 Government Accountability Office report would, however, conclude that, of “the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).”

Two years after the war game was conducted, in a time of almost metronomic domestic mass killings, President Trump continues to spotlight the supposedly singular danger posed by “inadequately vetted people” in the U.S., although stovetops and ovens, hot air balloons, and burning pajamas are far more deadly to Americans. Indeed, since 9/11, terrorism has been a distinctly low-level risk to the American public — at least when compared to heart disease, cancer, car crashes, fires, or heat waves — but has had an outsized effect on the perceptions and actions of the government, not to mention its visions of tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s Terror Today

An examination of the threats from international and domestic terror groups, as imagined in JLASS-SP, offers unique clues to the Pentagon’s fears for the future. “Increasingly,” reads the war game’s summary, “transnational organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and violent extremist organizations challenge the traditional notions of boundaries and sovereignty.”

That drone-launching terror group, PAL, for instance, is neither Islamist nor a right-wing terror group, but an organization supposedly formed in 2017 in hopes of defeating “globalism and capitalism throughout the world by rallying the proletariat to orchestrate the overthrow of capitalist governments and global conglomerates.” Its ideology, an amalgam of increasingly stale leftist social movements, belies its progressive ranks, a rainbow coalition consisting of “most of the globe’s ethnicities and cultures,” all of whom seem to be cyber-sophisticates skilled in fundraising, recruiting, as well as marketing their particular brand of radicalism.

As of 2020, the audacious drone strike on CENTCOM’s headquarters was PAL’s only terror attack in the tangible world. The rest of its actions have taken place in the digital realm, where the group is known for launching cyber-assaults and siphoning off “funds from large global corporations, banks, and capitalist governments around the world.”

Even though PAL went from a gleam in the eye of its founder, the Bond-villain-esquely named Otto Cyre, to terrorist power-player in just a few short years, the pace of its operations didn’t please its hardest core members who, the war game scenario says, broke away in late 2020 to form yet another organization devoted to even more rapidly eroding “confidence in governmental and institutional bodies by staging events that demonstrate the ‘impotency’ of the establishment.” That splinter group, United Patriots Against International Government (UPAIGO) — in this war game all terror groups have Pentagon-style acronyms — concentrates on “spectacular but deniable actions,” a scattershot campaign of often botched but sometimes lethal efforts that include:

* November 2021: a cyber-attack on the Angarsk Refinery in the Russian Federation, which resulted in a two-week shutdown causing a sharp rise in the price of oil and gas just prior to the 2021-2022 winter heating season.

* April 2022: a failed attempt to assassinate, by IED, the chief of U.S. Pacific Command. Two members of the commander’s security detail and the command’s political advisor were killed in the attack while others, including civilians, were injured.

* January 2022: a failed plot to detonate a dirty [radioactive] bomb, employing medical waste and homemade explosives, at Philadelphia International Airport.

* 2023 fire season: as fires raged in the western United States, UPAIGO established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. government’s response, in order to “undermine confidence in government agencies.”

* June 2024: an attack, in coordination with members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), on a U.S. flagged air carrier transporting U.S. military personnel at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Militants fired two surface-to-air missiles at the aircraft, which was damaged but managed to land successfully.”

PAL and UPAIGO are, however, hardly the only terror threats facing the United States in the 2020s, according to JLASS-SP 2016. PAL’s fellow travelers, for example, include the fictional versions of the real Irish National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). There’s also the Environmentalists Against Capitalists Organization, or EACO, “a lethal environmental anti-capitalist terrorist group with global connections.” Formed in 2010 (though not in our actual world), EACO, according to the war gamers, evolved into an increasingly violent organization in the 2020s, carrying out not just cyberattacks on corporations but also a full-scale bombing campaign “targeting executive board meetings of large corporations, particularly in industries such as oil, coal, natural gas, and logging.” The group even took to planting IEDs on logging roads and employing tainted food as a weapon. By 2025, EACO was implicated in more than 400 criminal acts in the U.S. resulting in 126 deaths and $862 million in damages.

Then there’s Anonymous. In the Pentagon’s fictional war-game, this real-world hacktivist group is characterized as a “loose organization of malicious black-hat hackers” that employs its digital prowess to “distribute bomb-making instructions, and conduct targeting for options other than planes, trains, and automobiles.” In the past created by the military’s imagineers, Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization after it conducted an August 2015 digital attack on Louisiana’s power grid with something akin to the Stuxnet worm that damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran. That cyber-assault was meant to protest the state’s restrictions on online gambling — an affront, according to the fictional Anonymous, to Internet freedom. (In the real world, Louisiana lawmakers actually just deep-sixed online gambling without an apparent terrorist response.) Taking down that power grid “resulted in the death of 15 elderly patients trapped in a facility denied air conditioning as a result of the power outage.”

Also included among domestic terror groups is Mara Salvatrucha 13 or MS-13, the Los Angeles street gang, born of the American-fueled Central American civil wars of the 1980s, that was transplanted to El Salvador and has since returned to the United States. This violent American export — the product of deportations in the 1990s — has paradoxically become a key justification for President Trump’s crackdown on immigration. “MS-13 recruits through our broken immigration system, violating our borders. And it just comes right through — whenever they want to come through, they come through,” said Trump earlier this year during a White House roundtable focused on the gang. “We’ve really never seen anything quite like this — the level of ferocity, the level of violence, and the reforms we need from Congress to defeat it.”

In the real world, the U.S. branch of MS-13 operates in loose local cliques under a franchised name, dabbling in small-time drug dealing, gun-running, prostitution, and extortion (primarily of recent immigrants). Many of its crimes are committed against its own affiliates or members of other gangs. The president nonetheless baselessly claimed that MS-13 has “literally taken over towns and cities of the United States.” He also continues to portray the gang, which reportedly makes up less than 1% of the estimated 1.4 million gang members in the U.S., as a sophisticated international cartel.

And that’s precisely how MS-13 was also portrayed in the fantasy world of JLASS-SP. In that war game, Mara Salvatrucha has developed “the resources to wage full-scale insurgent campaigns in Central America and the capability to cause serious disruption in the United States and Canada,” while rumors swirl of contacts between its members and foreign militants. “If cooperation between foreign terrorist groups and MS-13 ever blossomed, the potential for terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States would increase significantly,” the war game scenario warns.

President Trump has been accused of conflating members of MS-13 with undocumented immigrants (and referring to both groups as “animals”). Regardless, there’s no question that he kicked off his presidential run in 2015 by disparaging Mexicans. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he infamously declared. The JLASS-SP documents reverse Trump’s formula by first noting that “most illegal immigrants crossing into the United States are just trying to make a better life for themselves,” only to suggest that the U.S.-Mexican border also “serves as an infiltration point for terrorists.”

Unlike in the real world, where such fears circulate primarily as a conspiracy theory, in the Pentagon’s future fantasy there is “substantial evidence… that terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa transit the Mexican-U.S. border.” Worse yet, radical Islamists even “camouflage themselves as Hispanics” to cross the border. The military’s fantasists point to “a flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported linking of drug cartels along the Texas border with Middle East and North Africa terrorism.”

That represents a Trumpian-style nightmare-cum-fantasy even the president hasn’t yet dreamed up — a Hispanic-surnamed, cartel-supported group of Islamist terrorists. But by the 2020s, according to the Pentagon’s futurists, such worries are well-founded. And this will occur at the same time that Mexican and South American drug gangs have grown so rich and powerful they can regularly buy protection from U.S. government officials.

“Popular opinion in the United States is beginning to believe the ‘Narco-corruption’ is affecting the ‘rule of law’ north of the border,” according to their scenario, with the cartels spending $20 billion in 2022 alone to buy off U.S. officials or get candidates of their choice elected. That same year, allegations of election tampering in mayoral races across the American South come to light and the number of corruption convictions of U.S. Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials skyrockets. Perhaps most shocking is the discovery of a “vast irrigated grow site” (evidently a massive marijuana farm) tended by “a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47’s” in — wait for it! — “remote areas of Illinois.”

Mexican farmers, El Salvadoran gang members, Islamists masquerading as Hispanics, eco-terrorists, and anti-globalization militants aren’t the only threats foreseen by the military’s futurists. Much-ballyhooed reports of the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, like the much-hyped defeat of its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, turn out to be premature. In the 2020s, the re-re-branded group, now known as the Global Islamic Caliphate, or GIC, draws “support from Sunni-majority regions in Syria and Iraq; refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and internally displaced persons in Syria and Iraq,” while continuing to launch attacks in the region.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has grown in reach, size, and might. By 2021, the group has 38,000 members spread across Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger with bases reportedly located in Western Sahara. On May 23, 2023, AQIM carries out the most lethal terror attack in the U.S. since 9/11, detonating massive truck-bombs at both the New York and New Jersey ends of the Lincoln Tunnel, killing 435 people and injuring another 618. The bombing prompts President McGraw — you remember him, Karl Maxwell McGraw, the independent Arizona senator who rode his populist “America on the Move” campaign to victory in the 2020 election — to invade Mauritania and become mired in yet another American forever war that shows every indication of grinding on into the 2030s, if not beyond.

The Age of Terrorism

In the real world, the lifetime odds of an American dying from “walking” are one in 672. The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist? One in 45,808. By an illegal immigrant terrorist? One in 138 million. And the odds of being killed by a “chain migration” immigrant sometime this year? One in 1.2 billion! In other words, you have a far greater chance of being killed by a dog, a shark, lightning, or the government via legal execution.

This is not to say terrorism isn’t a major threat to others around the world or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled by the Pentagon — from Africa to the Middle East to Asia — has grown markedly.

“States are the principal actors on the global stage, but non-state actors also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities,” reads an unclassified synopsis of the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy. “Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption.”

In the fictional future of the Pentagon’s JLASS-SP 2016, this menace only expands to include various hybrid threats and new homegrown groups with increasing capabilities for death and destruction.

While it may be “the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks,” as President Trump’s 2017 executive order declares, the Pentagon envisions a future in which such policies are increasingly ineffective. In their dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of fighting “them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America” (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007) proves unequivocally futile. In this sense, the Pentagon’s fantasies bear an eerie resemblance to the actual present. In the dystopian scenario used by the Pentagon to train its future leaders, today’s forever wars have proven ineffective and future threats are to be met with new, similarly ineffective, forever wars.

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Trump declared that we’re living in the “age of terrorism.” His solution: wielding “unmatched power,” loosening the rules of engagement, and establishing an unfettered ability to detain, question, and “annihilate” terrorists.

All of these tactics have, however, been part of the Pentagon’s playbook since 2001 and, according to the military’s best guess at the future, will lead to an increase in terror groups and terror attacks while terror networks and terrorist ideologies will grow in strength, resilience, and appeal. Almost two decades in, it seems we’re still only in the opening days of the “age of terrorism” and, if the Pentagon’s war-gamers are to be believed, far worse is yet to come.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.

With his reckless support for Kinder Morgan and other oil pipelines, Trudeau has willingly compromised his own commitments to address climate change and pursue reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Now he’s willing to risk billions of public tax dollars as well.

Recently Trudeau’s Finance Minister, Bill Morneau, announced that Canada was willing to write a blank cheque from Canadian citizens to Texas-based oil pipeline company Kinder Morgan to indemnify the company against political risks to the Trans Mountain project. Over the past month, he’s been negotiating behind closed doors to work out some sort of deal to save the project. Canada has repeatedly promised to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and next month is hosting this year’s G7 Summit, where world leaders have already promised to end handouts for oil, gas, and coal. A move to indemnify Trans Mountain from risk would represent a massive new fossil fuel subsidy, breaking the Trudeau government’s commitments.

Amid serious questions about the financial viability of the Trans Mountain project and Kinder Morgan’s inability to finance its more-than-$7.4-billion price tag, few analysts expect Kinder Morgan to actually proceed. In April, the company vowed to walk away if political risks to the project were not eliminated by May 31st, but since then obstacles and opposition have only grown. Canada’s offer to indemnify Kinder Morgan’s risk doesn’t appear to be sufficient to save the project, and no other companies have stepped forward.

That likely leaves only one, crazy option on the table.

Are Canadians about to find themselves shelling out billions of tax dollars to a Texas-based company to buy an unbuildable, financially doomed pipeline? We’re likely to find out before tomorrow, when Finance Minister Bill Morneau plans to speak in downtown Calgary.

Outside Canada’s oil-soaked political bubble, this all sounds completely absurd. It’s baffling to watch a seemingly progressive, stable, wealthy country like Canada twist itself into pretzels, risk billions in public money, and edge towards a constitutional crisis all for the benefit of a handful of private oil interests. With a diversified, service-based economy and a highly educated workforce, Canada has much more to offer than dirty fossil fuels. But oil money buys an awful lot of influence.

Canada’s oil industry is a cornered, wounded animal. Unprecedented opposition to new export routes that would feed tar sands expansion – including Keystone XL, Line 3, and Kinder Morgan, all of which are being heavily resisted by Indigenous peoples and millions more – has blocked all the exits. Investment in new growth has dried up. A coming global energy transition is an existential threat.

As we all know, wounded animals can be dangerous. The oil industry is calling in all of its political favours, and its outsized influence on Canada’s government could lead to crazy things. We’re about find out just how far Prime Minister Trudeau is willing to go to indemnify Big Oil.

Our thanks to Oil Change International for this incisive report

In the weeks and months ahead, there will be many political casualties of the Liberal government’s crisis surrounding the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion. The first of these, however, was the carefully-crafted illusion that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board’s (CPPIB) investment decisions are free from political influence. Over two decades, the Board had painstakingly constructed the pretence that Board decisions stood above retail politics.

Despite occasional whispers of politically-inspired Board investments and industrial policy by stealth, the public position of the Board has been a steadfast insistence on autonomy and independence. For two decades, a parade of faith groups, trade unionists, environmentalists, and mining justice activists beat a path to 1 Queen Street East in Toronto, only to be solemnly informed that shunning tobacco, divesting from fossil fuels, and rejecting labour and human rights violators were incompatible with the CPPIB’s exclusive remit to make profits.

The Board needed only to point to its founding statute. The CPPIB Act carefully specifies that the Board is not an agent of the Crown, and that it stands at arm’s length from the Government of Canada. The Board is mandated to invest its assets with a view to achieving a maximum rate of return, without undue risk of loss, and the Board is expressly prohibited from conducting any business in a manner that is contrary to this principle.

In practice, of course, these strictures proved extremely malleable, and the Board continued to invest in a diverse group of assets offering a wide range of risk-adjusted returns. Nevertheless, the Board stuck to its narrative that the political needs of governments of the day never entered into the equation.

Pretence Laid to Rest

In mid-May, however, this pretence was laid to rest. Canada Finance Minister Bill Morneau pledged to indemnify any investor that takes over Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, and mused that pension funds might be interested if KM stepped away. The same day, CPPIB CEO Mark Machin signaled that the CPP was on board.

Now, the federal government will assume the construction risk of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, transferring ownership to private investors once the political and first-phase uncertainties are overcome. If the CPPIB is among these investors, there will be no going back to the Board’s guise of a politically-independent global investor.

Since its inception, the CPPIB has been intensely sensitive to the political winds blowing from Ottawa and provincial capitals. What’s changed is that the federal government has embarked on seriously courting pension fund investment. Like many governments around the world, Canada’s response has been to keep public investment carefully limited, while expanding opportunities for private capital to invest. The Liberal’s ‘Bank of Privatization’, the Canada Infrastructure Bank, was conceived precisely to attract Canadian and international pension funds to large-scale infrastructure projects. In practice, this has proved exceedingly difficult in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other countries. Where pension funds and large investors can be persuaded to join in, the result will be far more expensive projects with higher long-term costs to public finances.

Democratically-Controlled Social Investment

In our view, trade unions and the Left should seize on this opportunity by demanding much more than elaborate trappings of socially-responsible investment criteria in Board decision-making. Instead, the Left needs to think much more ambitiously about ways to harness pension funds for democratically-controlled social investment, for several reasons.

First, Canada is not on track to meet even its modest climate commitments made in Paris. Far more ambitious investments in renewable energy, energy conservation, and electrified transit are needed to significantly reduce emissions by mid-century. Hoping that a mix of carbon taxes and inducements will spur private investors to lead this transition is pure fantasy. A major program of public investment is necessary if we are to speed decarbonization, creating decent jobs and reversing insecurity and inequality in the process.

Second, underinvestment in public infrastructure in recent decades is unmistakable. Municipal infrastructure is decaying; transit systems and libraries are shamefully under-resourced; and public housing nearly everywhere is scarce and in disrepair. Hospitals and long-term care need significant investments, and northern and remote communities have vast unmet energy, water and health needs. Canada beyond Quebec continues to have no universal child care system. As even bourgeois economists have been insisting, public infrastructure investments are more likely than ever to pay off in creating jobs and incomes, reducing poverty and improving public health, to say nothing of stimulating productivity growth and private investment.

One solution would be to propose a conditional levy on pension surpluses to finance a fund for economic renewal. This fund could be bankrolled simply through funding excesses generated by pension plans like the CPP. The existing CPP remains a largely pay-as-you-go plan, with current contributions funding current benefits. Since 1997, however, higher contributions have allowed the CPP reserve fund, managed by the CPPIB, to grow to over $350-billion today, before swelling to a projected $6.7-trillion in 2090. Since it began in 1997, the CPPIB’s average return on CPP assets has been well above the necessary minimum long-run real rate of return; current assets are one-third again greater than was projected just ten years ago. Tapping only funding excesses in the CPP would preserve benefit security and leave plan provisions unchanged.

How might a fund for economic renewal work? It could distribute funds to regional sub-funds overseen by local community groups, unions, community economic development associations. Residents could identify urgent local needs – childcare, or school renovations, hospital beds or community care facilities. Investments in basic skills, on-the-job training and apprenticeships would aim at maximizing local employment benefits and developing capacities, especially among disadvantaged groups. Economic renewal funds could be supported by federal, provincial/territorial and municipal investment. A portion of returns on specific investments, for instance from rents on social housing, would flow back to the pension fund.

Nor should a pension levy to support economic development be restricted to the CPP fund (or the Quebec Pension Plan fund in that province). Large public-sector workplace plans in Canada, many of which deliver consistently-high returns and are in positions of funding excesses, should also be levied. These plans hugely benefit from large public subsidies. Canada has by far the greatest tax breaks for private pensions in the OECD. In 2013, Canada reported spending 2.0% of GDP on tax breaks for workplace plans, five times the OECD average. Imposing a levy on workplace plans in the service of social investment could reduce some of the resentment of public-sector pensions, while leaving benefit security untouched.

With the Kinder Morgan fiasco, the Liberal government has spilled the beans about the CPPIB, and reminded the Left to think ambitiously and creatively about socializing investment. Let’s seize the chance.

In a recent article titled ‘Challenges for Resolving Complex Conflicts’, I pointed out that existing conflict theory pays little attention to the extinction-causing conflict being ongoingly generated by human over-consumption in the finite planetary biosphere (and, among other outcomes, currently resulting in 200 species extinctions daily). I also mentioned that this conflict is sometimes inadequately identified as a conflict caused by capitalism’s drive for unending economic growth in a finite environment.

I would like to explain the psychological origin of this biosphere-annihilating conflict and how this origin has nurtured the incredibly destructive aspects of capitalism (and socialism, for that matter) from the beginning. I would also like to explain what we can do about it.

Before I do, however, let me briefly illustrate why this particular conflict configuration is so important by offering you a taste of the most recent research evidence in relation to the climate catastrophe and biosphere annihilation and why the time to resolve this conflict is rapidly running out (assuming, problematically, that we can avert nuclear war in the meantime).

In an article reporting a recent speech by Professor James G. Anderson of Harvard University, whose research led to the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to mitigate CFC damage to the Ozone Layer, environmental journalist Robert Hunizker summarizes Anderson’s position as follows: ‘the chance of permanent ice remaining in the Arctic after 2022 is zero. Already, 80% is gone. The problem: Without an ice shield to protect frozen methane hydrates in place for millennia, the Arctic turns into a methane nightmare.’ See ‘There Is No Time Left’.

But if you think that sounds drastic, other recent research has drawn attention to the fact that the ‘alarming loss of insects will likely take down humanity before global warming hits maximum velocity…. The worldwide loss of insects is simply staggering with some reports of 75% up to 90%, happening much faster than the paleoclimate record rate of the past five major extinction events’. Without insects ‘burrowing, forming new soil, aerating soil, pollinating food crops…’ and providing food for many bird species, the biosphere simply collapses. See ‘Insect Decimation Upstages Global Warming’.

So, if we are in the process of annihilating Earth’s biosphere, which will precipitate human extinction in the near term, why aren’t we paying much more attention to the origin of this fundamental conflict? And then developing a precisely focused strategy for transcending it?

The answer to these two questions is simply this: the origin of this conflict is particularly unpalatable and, from my careful observation, most people, including conflict theorists, aren’t anxious to focus on it.

So why are human beings over-consuming in the finite planetary biosphere? Or more accurately, why are human beings who have the opportunity to do so (which doesn’t include those impoverished people living in Africa, Asia, Central/South America or anywhere else) over-consuming in the finite planetary biosphere?

They are doing so because they were terrorized into unconsciously equating consumption with a meaningful life by parents and other adults who had already internalized this same ‘learning’.

Let me explain how this happens.

At the moment of birth, a baby is genetically programmed to feel and express their feelings in response to the stimuli, both internal and external, that the baby registers. For example, as soon after birth as a baby feels hungry, they will signal that need, usually by crying or screaming. An attentive parent (or other suitable adult) will usually respond to this need by feeding the baby and the baby will express their satisfaction with this outcome, perhaps with a facial expression, in a way that most aware parents and adults will have no difficulty identifying. Similarly, if the baby is cold, in pain or experiencing any other stimulus, the baby will express their need, probably by making a loud noise. Given that babies cannot immediately use a cultural language, they use the language that was given to them by evolution: particularly audibly expressed noise of various types that an aware adult will quickly learn to interpret.

Of course, from the initial moments after birth and throughout the next few months, a baby will experience an increasing range of stimuli – including internal stimuli such as the needs for listening, understanding and love, as well as external stimuli ranging from a wet nappy to a diverse set of parental, social, climate and environmental stimuli – and will develop a diverse and expanding range of ways, now including a wider range of emotional expression but eventually starting to include spoken language, of expressing their responses, including satisfaction and enjoyment if appropriate, to these stimuli.

At some vital point, however, and certainly within the child’s first eighteen months, the child’s parents and the other significant adults in the child’s life, will start to routinely and actively interfere with the child’s emotional expression (and thus deny them satisfaction of the unique needs being expressed in each case) in order to compel the child to do as the parent/adult wishes. Of course, this is essential if you want the child to be obedient – a socially compliant slave – rather than to follow their own Self-will.

One of the critically important ways in which this denial of emotional expression occurs seems benign enough: Children who are crying, angry or frightened are scared into not expressing their feelings and offered material items – such as food or a toy – to distract them instead. Unfortunately, the distractive items become addictive drugs. Unable to have their emotional needs met, the child learns to seek relief by acquiring the material substitutes offered by the parent. But as this emotional deprivation endlessly expands because the child has been denied the listening, understanding and love to develop the capacity to listen to, love and understand themself, so too does the ‘need’ for material acquisition endlessly expand.

As an aside, this explains why most violence is overtly directed at gaining control of material, rather than emotional, resources. The material resource becomes a dysfunctional and quite inadequate replacement for satisfaction of the emotional need. And, because the material resource cannot ‘work’ to meet an emotional need, the individual is most likely to keep using direct and/or structural violence to gain control of more material resources in an unconscious and utterly futile attempt to meet unidentified emotional needs. In essence, no amount of money and other assets can replace the love denied a child that would allow them to feel and act on their feelings.

Of course, the individual who consumes more than they need and uses direct violence, or simply takes advantage of structural violence, to do so is never aware of their deeply suppressed emotional needs and of the functional ways of having these needs met. Although, I admit, this is not easy to do given that listening, understanding and love are not readily available from others who have themselves been denied these needs. Consequently, with their emotional needs now unconsciously ‘hidden’ from the individual, they will endlessly project that the needs they want met are, in fact, material.

This is the reason why members of the Rothschild family, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim, the Walton family and the Koch brothers, as well as the world’s other billionaires and millionaires, seek material wealth and are willing to do so by taking advantage of structures of exploitation held in place by the US military. They are certainly wealthy in the material sense; unfortunately, they are emotional voids who were never loved and do not know how to love themself or others now.

Tragically, however, this fate is not exclusive to the world’s wealthy even if they illustrate the point most graphically. As indicated above, virtually all people who live in material cultures have suffered this fate and this is readily illustrated by their ongoing excessive consumption – especially their meat-eating, fossil-fueled travel and acquisition of an endless stream of assets – in a planetary biosphere that has long been signaling ‘Enough!’

As an aside, governments that use military violence to gain control of material resources are simply governments composed of many individuals with this dysfunctionality, which is very common in industrialized countries that promote materialism. Thus, cultures that unconsciously allow and encourage this dysfunctional projection (that an emotional need is met by material acquisition) are the most violent both domestically and internationally. This also explains why industrialized (material) countries use military violence to maintain political and economic structures that allow ongoing exploitation of non-industrialized countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

In summary, the individual who has all of their emotional needs met requires only the intellectual and few material resources necessary to maintain this fulfilling life: anything beyond this is not only useless, it is a burden.

If you want to read (a great deal) more detail of the explanation presented above, you will find it in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So what can we do?

Well, I would start by profoundly changing our conception of sound parenting by emphasizing the importance of nisteling to children – see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ – and making ‘My Promise to Children’.

For those adults who feel incapable of nisteling or living out such a promise, I encourage you to consider doing the emotional healing necessary by ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you already feel capable of responding powerfully to this extinction-threatening conflict between human consumption and the Earth’s biosphere, you are welcome to consider joining those who are participating in the fifteen-year strategy to reduce consumption and achieve self-reliance explained in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and/or to consider using sound nonviolent strategy to conduct your climate or environment campaign. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

You are also welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

As the material simplicity of Mohandas K. Gandhi demonstrated: Consumption is not life.

If you are not able to emulate Gandhi (at least ‘in spirit’) by living modestly, it is your own emotional dysfunctionality – particularly unconscious fear – that is the problem that needs to be addressed.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

TruePublica Editor: I spoke to some influential Brexiteers just before the decision was made by the electorate to Brexit. The reasoning by one was not that he thought the EU was bad for Britain but that everybody in the EU thought the EU was bad and when the EU27 started to break down, Britain would be in the premier league once again – on its own to benefit from the fallout.

This may still prove right as the EU is now facing some terrible decisions and dilemma’s as a result of defying an angry electorate across the bloc, especially as 2019 will be holding the EU’s MEP elections. Italy, is just one more of quite a few member states who have spawned anti-EU political parties getting into power. More on that another time.

Since the divisive referendum decision was given by a Conservative party bent on saving itself from implosion, more than thinking of Britain’s economic welfare, there’s been talk of a second EU referendum. Well, now we have confirmation that a real effort is underway.

The campaign for a second Brexit referendum will start next week according to none other than – George Soros, who has pumped £700 million into the ‘Best for Britain’ campaign. Best for Britain is registered with The Electoral Commission.

The campaign starts with demanding that MPs recognise its right to see another vote on EU membership:

“Regardless of how people voted in 2016, it’s become clear that there is growing public demand for a new chance to decide our country’s path as new facts come to light.”

Speaking at an event held by the European Council for Foreign Relations think tank in Paris on Tuesday, Soros described Brexit as an example of “territorial disintegration” and blamed it for impairing the workings of the EU, according to the Times that is.

“Most of the damage is felt right now when the European Union is in an existential crisis, but its attention is diverted to negotiating a separation agreement with Britain. That’s a lose-lose proposition, but it could be converted into a win-win situation,” Soros said.

Got that. The European Union is in an “EXISTENTIAL CRISIS.” The billionaire investor has described the EU as being in disintegration mode.

Soros confirms that Brexit will, and I quote cause a “hard-to-fill hole in the European budget.”

“The EU needs to transform itself into an association that countries like Britain would want to join, in order to strengthen the political case,” Soros also said.

Soros has, in no uncertain terms confirmed that without a major political transformation, a massive financial hole is about to appear in the EU’s budget, that the bloc is in disintegration mode and the worst crisis it has ever faced, an existential one, is just months away.

Finally, Soros said:

“The economic case for (Britain) remaining a member of the EU is strong, but it will take time for it to sink in.”

About £700 million he thinks will be needed for that to sink in.

From the man who blatantly attacked Britain’s currency through the raid against the Bank of England in September 1992, that taxpayers had to be replace from the treasury and walked off with the equivalent of one thousand million pounds for personal gain – Isn’t all that a bit contradictory George?

His campaign is not about Britain’s welfare, it’s about the EU’s welfare – clearly.

It’s all very confusing now. Many people I have spoken to have changed their minds in both camps but make no mistake, Soros will be joined by others, £700 million is just the start. By this time next year, could Britain be back in Europe’s biggest club?

In the meantime, as has just been pointed out to me since posting this article, a campaign started a month back to achieve the same – it’s called The People’s Vote and it’s being organised by a coalition of about 9 pro-EU groups (see: this).  They all work closely together and as one group they will NOT work with ‘Best for Britain’ because it is funded by Soros.  That doesn’t mean that ‘Best for Britain’ supporters won’t be welcome to march with the everyone on June 23rd, but they cannot claim it is ‘their’ march.

The People’s Vote campaign has two aims; first, that the people must have a vote on the ‘final’ deal (whatever May’s mess of a government comes up with) and, second, one of the options  must be to remain with the EU.  The plan is to press for the vote first because that will bring those who voted to leave on board (a lot of them aren’t happy with what’s going on) and then insist on the remain option being included.

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Featured image is from TruePublica.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), allied Palestinian militias, and the government of Syria deserve high praise for the recent liberation of Yarmouk refugee camp from ISIS.

Anti-war activists took a lot of flak from some people in North America and Europe, describing themselves as Palestine solidarity activists and “leftists”, when, in 2012, Yarmouk was invaded and occupied by proxy armies of western powers and Arab monarchs. Because we condemned the US-led attack on Syria and defended the Syrian government’s resistance to the terrorist occupation of Yarmouk, we were among the activists denounced by the misguided persons above as being “Assad apologists.”

This would be a good time to set the record straight and reaffirm our position that Palestinians and Syrians have strong common national aspirations. The aspiration of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Palestine is recognized as part of the common struggle of all Syrians. And both nations seek to reclaim from the State of Israel all the territories in Syria and Palestine which it currently occupies.

Background

Yarmouk was originally a refugee camp for Palestinians who had been displaced by the “Nakba”, the catastrophe of the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of historic Palestine which accompanied the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. It was a .81 hectare of land which, in 1957, was outside the boundaries of Damascus but which, by 2011, had turned into a lively suburb of the city housing about one million people of whom about 160,000 people were Palestinians. It was the largest and most prosperous settlement of Palestinians anywhere in Syria.

It is important to note that the government of Syria treated its hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees better than most Arab countries and as equals to Syrian citizens themselves. Palestinians in Syria received the same levels of free health care and education as Syrians and were allowed to rise in all areas of employment as high as their abilities carried them. There was only one formal legal distinction between Syrians and Palestinians. Palestinians were not given Syrian citizenship – in order to maintain their internationally-recognized right of return to their homes in Palestine – and therefore were not allowed to participate in Syrian elections.

Finally, the Syrian government, along with Iran and Hezbollah, was part of the Coalition of Resistance against Israel for many years. It was no accident therefore that, before the US-led aggression against Syria in 2011, the Palestinian factions chose to locate their headquarters in Damascus.

In short, the Assad government was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause.

The proxy war on Syria

In 2011, a group of western countries and Arab monarchies, led by the USA, unleashed scores of proxy armies of terrorist mercenaries on Syria with the purpose of achieving regime change, a scheme clearly illegal under international law. Importantly, the State of Israel participated heavily in this regime change operation, supporting terrorist mercenaries using the illegally-occupied Golan Heights as their base to fight against the Syrian government inside of Syria. Israel also used its air force to bomb Syria more than one hundred times during the course of the seven-year long war and supplied aid and weapons to separatist Kurdish elements in eastern Syria with a view to aid the USA in trying to partition that country.

In this context, negotiations took place for the Palestinians in Syria to remain neutral in the war. The Syrian government supported this view but the terrorists didn’t.

Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk

In 2012, the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) invaded and occupied Yarmouk. Some Palestinian factions facilitated their entry. The FSA was soon joined by al Qaeda and other militant factions. In 2015, ISIS entered the camp and, after some internecine warfare, drove out the other terrorist factions.

As they did in many other pockets of Syria, the terrorists evicted many Palestinians from their homes, looted and plundered everything of value, arrested anyone with known sympathies for the government and/or religious beliefs different from theirs and proceeded to torture and execute them, sexually assaulted and/or kidnapped women and girls, turned Yarmouk into a fortified camp, and hoarded all the foodstuffs for themselves. As in every other terrorist enclave, the vast majority of the inhabitants promptly fled to government-held areas.

The Syrian government did not directly attack Yarmouk until just a few weeks ago. Instead, it patiently armed and supported the courageous fighters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC) who, for many years, led the unremitting struggle against the terrorists inside the camp. In other words, the Syrian government respected the neutrality requested by the Palestinian organizations.

The Syria Solidarity Movement notes,

“the patience of the Syrian hosts in allowing the Palestinian refugee population to try to reconcile its differences and take the lead in expelling ISIS and al-Qaeda and their affiliates from Yarmouk since early in the conflict is especially remarkable. In the end, the SAA took over responsibility for eliminating these terrorist groups from neighbouring Hajar al-Aswad, which allowed the Palestinian militias and their Syrian allies to remove the remainder from Yarmouk, the last remaining source of terror attacks on the civilian population in Damascus. We send our sincerest congratulations to all the people of Damascus and the surrounding metropolitan area for their liberation from fear of such attacks, which they endured for seven long years.” ¹

Lies and distortions about Yarmouk

In 2012, certain self-styled Palestine solidarity activists and western “leftists” sought to twist the facts about the second displacement of the Palestinians – this time from their homes in Yarmouk. They sought specifically to lay the blame for this second victimization of the Palestinians in Yarmouk on the Syrian government and effectively gave left cover and support to the western regime-change operation. According to the nay-sayers, the Syrian government was simply to cave in to the armed militants and ignore its duty to protect its citizens and the Palestinian refugees, who lived under its protection, from foreign aggression.

From personal experience in Canada, we can attest to the fact that the Left cover provided by these misguided people for the attempted US regime-change operation in Syria was poisonous to the Canadian anti-war movement. It made it hard to organize people against the illegal war. In fact, it became difficult, thanks to threats by anarchists and other intervenors, even to find a venue to hold a public meeting in Canada for outspoken and courageous opponents of the war on Syria, such as Mother Agnes Mariam and Eva Karene Bartlett. In a few short years, because some of these misguided people, specifically members of the International Socialists (IS), were in positions of authority within the pan-Canadian anti-war movement, the movement dried up and died.

We note that many people got it wrong at the time. It’s heartening that some of them, such as journalists, Max Blumenthal, Rania Khalek, and Ben Norton have publicly acknowledged that their earlier analysis and criticisms were wrong.² Others, such as UK professor Gilbert Achcar, who travelled to the World Social Forum in Montreal in 2016 to villify the Syrian government, will probably dance to empire’s tune until they die. It has taken seven years but the recent string of victories of the Syrian government over the terrorists have forced many honest people on the left to open their eyes wide and realize that what has transpired in Syria is not a popular uprising and or a “revolution”, but a deadly plan by the US, its western allies, and regional clients criminally to interfere in the domestic affairs of Syria and to target Iran and the Coalition of Resistance.

Thankfully, with the help of its international allies – Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and several Palestinian popular militias – the Syrian Arab Army and government, after much sacrifice, has finally gained the upper hand and has driven the terrorists out of many of the enclaves they seized and occupied, including Yarmouk, thus defeating the US regime change plan.

In response to the failure of that plan, the USA moved to its Plan B: direct attacks on, and the occupation of, a large swath of Syria with a view to partition the country. On April 13, 2018, in response to a fraudulent “chemical attack” staged by the White Helmets³, the USA, UK, and France launched 100+ missiles against Syria. Interestingly, the Palestinian peak organizations immediately condemned the missile attack, and came out strongly in support of the government in Damascus, thereby abandonning any pretence at neutrality.

Fatah (the majority faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]) declared that it

“stood unreservedly with the unity of Syrian territory and rejected efforts at destroying it or harming its unity and sovereignty.”

Palestinian Islamic Jihad “condemned the Western aggression against Syria” and “expressed solidarity (to) stand by Syria and its people and with all Arab and Islamic peoples in the face of all threats and challenges to their security, stability and unity.” The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) “considered the aggression of America and its allies on the Syrian territory as a blatant aggression against the nation, aimed at confiscating its lands and destroying its capabilities in order to preserve the existence of the Israeli entity and (to advance) its schemes.” The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “strongly condemned the American-British-French aggression, which targeted Syria with their missiles.” The Front added that

“the aggression and its objectives will be destroyed on the rock of the steadfastness of the Syrian people and the Syrian state” for whom it expressed its support and solidarity.⁴

Syrian and Palestinian struggles indivisible

The liberation of Yarmouk and the angry Palestinian reactions to the April 13 missile attacks put a satisfying end to a chapter of disunity in Palestinian and Syrian history. They show that the Palestinian and Syrian struggles are one and the same. There can be no ultimate victory for Palestine if Syria is destroyed. There can be no ultimate victory for the Syrian people without also freeing the Palestinians from the tyranny of occupation in Palestine.

The moral of the Yarmouk story can be summed up thus: if you are for Palestine, you must also be for Syria!

Those self-styled Palestinian solidarity activists and “leftists” in Europe and North America who slammed the Syrian government for resisting the terrorist proxy armies of the West need to reflect on the consequences of their de facto support of the US empire’s meddling in Syria: half a million deaths, millions of injured people (both physically and emotionally), enormous destruction of civilian infrastructure (including housing, schools, and hospitals), the transformation of 12 million Syrians into displaced persons and into a wave of refugees that swept over Europe, the descent of thousands of Syrian women and girls into the international human trafficking trade, and much much more… Will there ever be a day of reckoning for these apologists of empire?

Conclusion

The liberation of Yarmouk refugee camp is a significant milestone in Syria’s struggle to regain its national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Eventually, all of Syria will be liberated from the terrorists and from the direct occupations of the USA (east of the Euphrates), of Turkey (in the north), and Israel (in the south). In the meantime, the Palestinian residents of Yarmouk will soon be able to return to their homes in southern Damascus. And, when Syria is completely liberated, they will be able to organize once again – with the help of the Syrian government – for the Day of Return to Palestine.

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Ken Stone is a veteran antiwar activist, a former Steering Committee Member of the Canadian Peace Alliance, an executive member of the SyriaSolidarityMovement.org, and treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition To Stop The War [hcsw.ca]. Ken is author of “Defiant Syria”, an e-booklet available at Amazon, iTunes, and Kobo. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Notes

1 “Statement… on the liberation of Yarmouk”, Syria Solidarity Movement, May 27, 2018, syriasolidritymovement.org;

² Blumenthal and Khalek recant their previously held views on Syria:

https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebelsradio/syria-rania-khalek-episode-17

https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebelsradio/syria-palestine-salafism-wahhabism-islamophobia-rania-khalek-episode-18

Ben Norton recants: http://bennorton.com/syria-war-views/

³ Vanessa Beeley on the Douma incident: http://21stcenturywire.com/2018/05/11/syria-vanessa-beeley-speaks-to-uk-column-about-eastern-ghouta/

⁴ Palestinian News & Info Agency (WAFA), April 16, 2018

Contemporary Australia is a case of dependent, high-technology liberal militarization, but with distinctive characteristics pointing to a model that must look beyond standard concerns with increasing national defense budgets, more and better weapons systems, an “exceptionalist” approach to immigration security and a predilection for use of military force in international affairs.

In a world and time where militarization is a global norm embedded in globe-spanning military alliances and world-wide networks of foreign military bases, discerning the lineaments of one particular national instance can be both difficult and potentially misleading. In liberal democracies, national self-conceptions resist identification with the harsh implications of reliance on, or valorization of, military force, unless it can be viably represented as defense of freedom, just war, or wars against unspeakable Others. And in the case of liberal democracies originating in a settler state with ongoing unrecognized conquest of indigenous peoples – think Australia, the United States, Canada and Israel – the racially inflected violence at the foundations of state-formation and national identity continues to ramify through the default settings of contemporary foreign policy. All three qualities distinguish the contemporary pattern of Australian militarization from the standard versions of either exceptionalist or liberal militarization.

US F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in flight testing. The Australian government has approved the purchase of a further 58 of the warplanes at a cost of $12.4bn. Photograph: Lockheed Martin/AAP.

By the standard indices of national-level militarization, Australia is now a serious instance, albeit an unusual one. The world’s sixth-largest arms importer, post-9/11 Australia embarked on a large capital expenditure program on defense that will see virtually all major weapons systems and support platforms replaced or upgraded in the next two decades.

Defense spending has been growing continuously since 2000, reaching $27.3 billion in the current fiscal year, a 6.5 percent increase in real terms over the previous year, including a billion dollars for current overseas deployments in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Current government planning to bring defense spending from 1.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to a sustained 2.0 percent in coming years will involve annual real increases of 4.7 percent, meaning that defense spending will have doubled in real terms from 2005-2025, including $153 billion for increased defense materiel capacity.

Over the past half century or more, the standard historical parameters of Australian defense policy have focused on oscillations around a set of policy-polar tensions:

• self-reliance vs imperial or super-power dependence;
• confidence in sufficient warning time to prepare for emerging major threats identity rooted in fear of invasion;
• acceptance of limited resources and influence borrowed grandiosity by association with imperial allies; and
• force structure designed for the defense of continental Australia and the immediate region “operations in distant theatres.”

These tension-sets derive at root from the anxieties of a small, settler-colonial state, uneasily occupying a conquered continent, identifying deeply with its imperial origins on the other side of the world, and fearfully anxious about its relations with its geographical and cultural environment. Identity powerfully structures how the map is read for strategic interests. On the standard Australian reading, “help” looks far away. Serious pursuit of “self-reliance” is seen as a brave gamble.

With a nod to the shade of past self-reliance policy, the essence of Australian defense policy post-9/11 and in renewed fear of China today is an intensified, broadened and tightened version of the alliance relationship with the United States. Now in its seventh decade, the Australia-US alliance is an historical chameleon, shape shifting from its original rationale as a US guarantee against post-Second World War Japanese remilitarization, to an imagined southern bastion of the Free World in the global division of the Cold War, on to a niche commitment in the global war on terror, and now a new, if slightly hesitant, role in a US-led faux containment revenant against a rising China.

The century-long tradition of deployment of Australian armed forces in distant theaters in service of its alliance protector – first Britain, then the US – continues today, with substantial Australian ground, sea and air force elements still deployed in the US-led wars in Afghanistan (almost continuously since 2001 to the present), Iraq and the Western Indian Ocean (2003-2009; and 2014 – present ) and Syria (2015 – present ), and large support elements in Persian Gulf bases (2002 – present ).

Servicing alliance requirements has meant that Australian force structure reflects these underlying tensions, as can be seen, for example, in the roles assigned in theory and practice to Australia’s range of new major weapons-platforms upgraded in recent years, in all three services.

To take the example of advanced military aircraft, Australian doctrine today still nominally emphasizes the defense of the sea-air gap surrounding the continent, immediate South Pacific and archipelagic Southeast Asia. Accordingly, defense planners have always sought a “knowledge edge” over neighboring armed forces rooted in preferential access to US military technology denied even to other close US allies such as Japan as the “reward” for a US-deputed sheriff role in the region and in constant support for US-led wars.

Accordingly, the Royal Australian Air Force’s large but aging F/A-18 fighter-bomber force, mainly deployed to the continent’s northern approaches, are to be replaced in coming years by more than 70 F-35 Lockheed-Martin Joint Strike Fighters. But RAAF Hornets and Super-Hornets have also long been deployed to Iraq and now Syria in high-tempo alliance operations. For the US, the bombing contribution of the Australian F/A-18s, while politically helpful, has been outweighed by the utility of the accompanying deployment of a technologically advanced US-sourced RAAF Wedgetail E-7 airborne early warning and control aircraft, based on a Boeing 737, and designed to be highly interoperable with US forces.

A similar set of defense doctrine contradictions was embodied in the protracted and intense intra-government debate about replacing an ageing small submarine fleet. This was eventually resolved in 2016 with the decision to commit $39 billion to build 12 4,000 tonne conventional diesel-electric submarines based on a DCNS-Thales design derived from the French Barracuda-class nuclear submarine. Once again, doctrinal concerns for a submarine capability designed for defense of the continental sea/air gap and archipelagic Southeast Asian areas of direct strategic interest to Australia appeared to be trumped by advocacy rooted in alliance concerns for capacity to conduct very long-range coalition-support operations centering on a blockade of Chinese waters – a choice with considerable consequences for design requirements and for the Australian strategic relationship with China.

Antennas of Pine Gap Richard Tanter, “Antennas of Pine Gap image gallery”, Australian Defence Facilities Pine Gap, (Source)

Australia hosts a number of US-related military facilities. Today, none of these are solely US bases, but are joint facilities, each with a greater or lesser extent of US access, although in important cases such as the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, the degree of “jointness” is highly asymmetrical, with Australian staff sharing operations of a facility built and paid for by the US and only operating as part of global US space-based surveillance systems.

Outside Australia, perhaps the best-known example involves the initiative of former US President Barack Obama’s administration to deploy up to 2,500 marines to Darwin in the Northern Territory and US Air Force fighters, refueling tankers and B-52 and B-2 bombers to Northern Territory air bases. The Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) is on permanent rotation for half of each year, avoiding the tropical wet season where major military ground activity becomes all but impossible, when its core elements from the 31^st Marine Expeditionary Unit return to Okinawa aboard a US Navy Expeditionary Strike Group. The number of marines in Darwin is small compared with their presence in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, and in some respects the significance of their Australian presence is as much political as military. However, with their ADF counterparts increasingly highly integrated with US forces through training, doctrine, logistics pre-deployment, interoperability, and combined operational planning, including for coalition operations in Korea, the military significance is becoming clearer. The MAGTF and USAF aircraft utilize large ADF ground and air weapons-training ranges in northern Australia – one of which, Bradshaw Field Training Area, is the size of Cyprus – which are densely electronically connected by optical fiber in real time to both ADF headquarters and Pacific Command in Hawaii to facilitate training activities and evaluation. The clear US intention is to develop the Darwin hub into a combined contribution to US-led regional rapid deployment capability for East and Southeast Asia.

Australia in a networked alliance

To best understand the important implication of not only hosting US facilities in Australia but also the more general Australian national pattern of militarization, a wider vantage point is needed, shifting the focus of militarization from the essentially standalone characteristics of an individual nation-state to the implications of that state’s place in a networked alliance system. These networks involve US and allied military bases and deployed personnel, globally distributed elements of US-controlled but coalition-accessed space and terrestrial surveillance sensor systems, communications and computing systems – all tied to US and coalition military operations.

The physical manifestations of these systems include not only easily recognizable conventional military bases with large numbers of military personnel, logistics and transport facilities and weapons platforms, but also US-controlled but coalition-accessed and hosted bases for space and terrestrial surveillance sensor systems and worldwide communications and computing systems that are essential to US and coalition military operations, and that are technologically dense, but personnel light. These make up a globally distributed, materially heterogeneous landscape of digital technology, much of which exists in an invisible Hertzian landscape constituted by the electromagnetic spectrum operated through all-too-material antennas, advanced computing facilities, sensors, data banks, communications satellites and globe-spanning webs of dedicated optical fiber.

Two essentially US facilities in Australia regarded by both governments as “joint facilities” and governed by agreements under which they operate with “the full knowledge and concurrence of the Australian government” exemplify this alliance-induced global aspect of Australian militarization: the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap in Central Australia and the Harold E. Holt Naval Communications Station at North West Cape in Western Australia.

Between the two of them, Pine Gap and North West Cape are now operationally closely involved with – and indeed for the most part critical for – US nuclear-war targeting, US-Japanese missile defense, US drone and special forces extra-judicial counter-terrorism killings, the rapidly growing US capacity for space warfare, and direct support for ground and air operations in the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and for US combat operations in any outbreak of armed conflict on the Korean Peninsula.

The idea that an intelligence facility in the center of Australia will be central to US planning and operations for a Korean war, nuclear or conventional, may appear exaggerated from the outside. This is far from the case. Pine Gap’s longstanding primary role involves its massive signals intelligence capabilities in space and on the ground, listening to a vast range of radio signals, cell phones, and radars over more than half the world from the west of Africa to the mid-Pacific, and all areas of current US military interest and operations.

For half a century, one essential role of Pine Gap has been to provide US strategic planners with the locations and characteristics of enemy radars and air defenses, the better to evade, jam, or destroy them as a prelude to airborne nuclear or conventional attack.

In preparation for a possible Korean war, Pine Gap’s signals-intelligence tasking schedules will have been in overdrive contributing to updates to the North Korean Electronic Order of Battle – the key to the effectiveness of US attacks on enemy assets. This will include listing the locations and characteristics of every North Korean radar, missile launcher, command center, tank and artillery array, logistics hub, ship and aircraft, and political leadership cell phones and bolt holes.

Pine Gap’s secondary nuclear role involves downlinking data from US infrared surveillance early-warning satellites detecting enemy nuclear missile launches, giving the US a few minutes of warning of nuclearattack – and also priming a second strike by establishing which enemy ICBM silos have fired, and which remain to be targeted. But beyond this, through these same infrared satellites, Pine Gap detects the first seconds of enemy missile launches and calculates the missiles’ likely trajectories, passing the information to US and Japanese and South Korean missile defense systems, cueing their fire radars to search a tiny portion of the sky where the missiles are gathering enormous speed. If cued by Pine Gap, and if the missile defense system works as the Pentagon and the manufacturers advertise, US missile defenses might, just might, have a chance of firing their own missiles to hit and destroy the enemy missiles. Without Pine Gap’s contribution, at the current stage of US missile defense technology, the chances of successful interception are probably not much more than zero.

North West Cape, once vital for communications with submerged US Polaris nuclear submarines, has a new critical role in an ever-more important area of US military planning, with enthusiastic Australian acquiescence. The US has installed two ground-based space surveillance systems at North West Cape under a Space Surveillance Partnership Agreement with Australia, as part of its worldwide collaborative Space Surveillance Awareness network. A refurbished Cape Canaveral Missile Range C-Band space radarhas been transferred to Australia, now operated by the RAAF to monitor space objects in low earth orbit. And a new highly advanced US space surveillance telescope to take advantage of Australia’s southern location for observation of objects in geosynchronous orbit. Both the radar and the telescope are dual purpose. Great public emphasis is given to their utility as an undoubted global good to track space debris threatening the use of congested space. Rather less publicly, great importance is attached by both the US Space Command and the ADF to the role of both in determining the locations, characteristics and behavior of adversary satellites – a critical requirement for US planning for space dominance. What is striking in this pattern of militarization is the dramatic upgrading of alliance operational integration at the heart of US planning.

A third “joint facility” confirms this pattern of militarization of Australia through its willing insertion into a wider global pattern. The Australian Defense Satellite Communications Station (ADSCS) at Kojarena near Geraldton in Western Australia was originally a solely Australian facility, and still functions together with Pine Gap and a companion Australian satellite communications interception station at Shoal Bay outside Darwin as a major Australian contributor to the US-led Five Eyes global signals intelligence network. However, in the past decade, two new compounds at Kojarena have been constructed to house two ground stations for US global military communications systems. One houses three giant antennas to uplink and downlink to the satellites of the Mobile User Objective System, or MUOS, the US military’s ruggedized 3G smart phone system providing worldwide access for individuals’ narrow-band (limited volume and speed) voice, data and video communications, and military-auspiced internet-capacity military communications. The four worldwide MUOS satellite ground stations, including Kojarena, are linked by a dedicated 18,000 mile-long optical fiber network.

Another new Kojarena compound also houses three antennas as ground terminals for a different kind of US communications system, the equally important Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) system. Australia paid for one of ten WGS satellites to gain global access to the entire WGS network, especially for operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and two Australian WGS ground access terminals have been built for ADF use.

Wideband communications networks transport huge amounts of data, and are critical operating and downlinking data from long-range armed and surveillance drone aircraft. In mid-2014, the US Defense Department informed Congress that “warfighters” would be denied access to the WGS system for “months or years” without construction at Kojarena of a communication gateway known as a teleport, for which there was “a desperate need” in the region (in addition to those in Hawaii and Okinawa). A DoD Teleportenables both the WGS and MUOS communications satellites’ ground terminal to connect to the terrestrial optical fiber network known as the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN), and through that to the “network of networks” the US military calls the Global Information Grid (GIG).

Such “joint” facilities indicate a new globalizing dimension to alliance structures and to what had previously been considered as standalone national patterns of militarization, in this case of liberal democratic states. Cooperation with and reliance on US-led planet-wide communications and surveillance systems produce a type of dependent militarization that is rather different from, and deeper than, dependence derived from, say, force structure dependent on imported weapons systems.

“Entanglement” takes on quite new and binding dimensions of linkage multiplicity, complexity andpotentially unavoidable consequences. The implications of such globally organized alliance drivers of national militarization may vary in time and place, but as the Australian case shows, warrant serious consideration as a new dimension of liberal militarization, and its attendant dangers.

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This is a slightly revised version of an article that first appeared in Global Asia, Spring 2018, Vol.13 No.1.

Our thanks to Asia Pacific Journal Japan in Focus for bringing this study to our attention

Richard Tanter is a Senior Researcher at the Nautilus Institute and Honorary Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

Tensions between the local population and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are growing. Protests against the SDF have recently erupted in the cities of Manbij, Hasakah and Raqqah.

The predominantly Arab local population protested against behavior and policies, including forced conscription, implemented by the SDF. Forces of the US-led coalition were even forced to intervene into the situation in Raqqa in order to stop infighting between the Kurdish YPG and local Arab units.

The SDF and the SDF-held area is de-facto dominated by Kurdish YPG/YPJ militias and their political wing PYD. This is also one of the factors triggering tensions with the local population.

11 militant groups, including Faylaq al-Sham and the Free Idlib Army, have merged in the Syrian province of Idlib forming a new Turkish backed force entitled Jabhat al-Wataniya lil-Tahrir (the National Front for Liberation). According to local observers, the formation of this military group is a part of the Turkish plan to increase its influence in the militant-held parts of the provinces of Idlib, Latakia and Aleppo.

From May 29 to May 30, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) struck at least 65 targets in the Gaza Strip. The targets were allegedly belonging to Hamas and the Islamic Jihad Movement and included facilities allegedly manufacturing rocket launchers and rocket engines. The IDF also claimed that its forces are operating in Gaza.

This round of escalation started with mortar shelling from Gaza early on May 29. Throughout the day, Palestinian forces launched at least 70 mortar shells and rockets at Israeli targets. The situation is developing.

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Today, Canada’s government announced that it will pay $4.5 billion to Kinder Morgan to buy both the 65-year-old Trans Mountain pipeline and the controversial Trans Mountain Expansion Project. The government also announced that it will assume liability for construction costs of the project, which could cost Canadian taxpayers billions more. In response, experts with Oil Change International released the following statements:

Adam Scott, Senior Advisor at Oil Change International, said:

“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is making a historic mistake in buying the doomed Kinder Morgan project. At a critical moment in history, the government is indeed doing ‘whatever it takes’ to undermine our transition to a safe, clean, renewable energy future.

“Like other proposed export pipeline projects before it, Kinder Morgan will not be built. Public opposition, legal challenges, and failing economics have stopped all new tar sands export to date. This government is using taxpayer money to buy a doomed asset with no value.”

Hannah McKinnon, Director of the Energy Futures and Transitions Program at Oil Change International, said:

“As Maya Angelou said, ‘When people show you who they are, believe them.’ Prime Minister Trudeau is not a climate champion – he is a shill for an industry that knows its days are numbered. This absurd miscalculation threatens the climate, jeopardizes the economy, and strips Canada of its commitment to First Nations rights and any remaining credibility it had on climate. This pipeline will not be built, but Trudeau’s legacy as a disgraced climate leader is set in stone.”

Alex Doukas, Director of the Stop Funding Fossils Program at Oil Change International, said:

“Canada has repeatedly committed to end fossil fuel subsidies alongside other G7 leaders. Now, just days before Canada hosts the G7 Leaders’ Summit, the Trudeau government has wasted billions of dollars in Canadian taxpayer money by taking on a doomed pipeline project and all of the liabilities that come along with it, which is effectively a massive fossil fuel subsidy.

“It’s not surprising that Kinder Morgan – the successor to fraud-plagued Enron – would try to unload this boondoggle onto the shoulders of taxpayers. What’s surprising and disappointing is that the Trudeau government fell for it.”

As we have previously revealed, the Democratic Republic of Congo government is attempting to reclassify swathes of two UNESCO protected World Heritage Sites – Salonga and Virunga National Parks – to allow oil exploration to take place. In our new investigation, we shine a light on the opaque ownership and secret deals of one company that potentially stands to gain from government attempts to open up the area to oil, COMICO, which was allocated an oil block that partially overlaps Salonga National Park.

Download the full briefing here: Not For Sale – Congo’s forests must be protected from the fossil fuels industry.

We expose how individuals involved in the original deal to purchase these controversial oil rights include a politically connected individual, a convicted fraudster, a businessman embroiled in the Brazilian ‘Car Wash’ scandal and mysterious shell companies.

Moreover, the details of the contract remain unknown, in contravention of Congo’s own oil law. The opacity surrounding both the company and the terms of the deal raises serious concerns.

The prospect of oil work represents an urgent threat to Salonga’s important and fragile ecosystem, while the lack of transparency is especially concerning as the country remains embroiled in a political crisis.

World’s second largest tropical rainforest under threat

One of the three oil blocks assigned by the government to COMICO, a part UK-owned company, encroaches on Salonga National Park, the world’s second largest tropical rainforest and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984. The park is home to up to 40 percent of the world’s Bonobo population and many other endangered and rare species such as forest elephants, Congo peacocks, hippopotamuses and giant pangolins.

At the heart of the Congo basin, Salonga National Park stretches over 36,000 square kilometres – an area larger than Belgium. Its size means it plays a fundamental role in climate change mitigation and carbon storage.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee is clear that any form of mineral, oil and gas exploration or exploitation is incompatible with World Heritage status. If even World Heritage status cannot protect fragile ecosystems from oil work, it sends a message that the entire planet is up for sale to the fossil fuels industry, with potentially devastating environmental consequences.

Amid current news headlines about North Korea and related nuclear issues, it is important not to ignore the potential schism that could occur in the G7 world as a consequence of the practical fallout from Donald Trump’s decision on May 8 to exit the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

What Will Happen to European Investments in Iran?

One practical issue is what is going to happen to European investments in Iran. The most high profile example is French energy company Total’s investment in a giant Iran gasfield. Total said this month it would pull out of Iran and its development of the giant South Pars gasfield unless it is specifically protected from US penalties and related sanctions (see Financial Times article “Total threat to pull out of Iran dents EU hopes of saving accord”, May 17, 2018).

Obviously, some form of compromise may be negotiated. But if Washington takes a hard line, such as claiming US jurisdiction as regards dollar transfers between two sovereign countries as was the case in 2014 with the US$9 billion fine levied on French bank BNP, then a confrontation is seemingly inevitable and, as a result, a growing questioning of the US hegemony implied by the US dollar paper standard, a concern which has long been shared by both China and Russia.

Questioning the US’ Role as the “Economic Policeman of the Planet”

In this respect, the most interesting reaction to the Iran issue since Donald Trump made his announcement on May 8 was that of the French finance minister Bruno Le Maire when he said on May 9 that it was not acceptable for the US to be the “economic policeman of the planet”.

In this respect, France is the European country to watch since it has a history of being willing to stand up to Washington in the post-1945 world. That cannot really be said of Germany and certainly not of Britain.

Pompeo Warns Iran of Escalating Sanctions

Staying on the subject of Iran, US Secretary of State and former CIA boss Mike Pompeo made an ultra-aggressive speech on Monday threatening Iran with escalating sanctions. In his first major foreign policy address as Secretary of State, Pompeo stated:

The above rhetoric hardly suggests a willingness to compromise with the European position. The significance of all of the above is that Europe and the US remain on a collision course.

Iran’s Exports Booming Since Sanctions Ended

The importance of Europe for Iran can be seen in the fact that Iran’s exports to Europe have surged almost ninefold since the end of sanctions in January 2016.

Thus, Iran’s exports to the EU have risen from US$1.3 billion in 2015 to US$11.4 billion in the 12 months to January, according to the IMF Direction of Trade Statistics (see following chart).

There is also of course the growing trade between Iran and China. Iran’s total trade with China rose by 18%YoY to US$27.5 billion in the 12 months to January (see following chart). All this makes Iran a good example of the increasingly multipolar world where American influence or interests appear to be fading.

Iran Annualized Exports to EU

Source: IMF – Direction of Trade Statistics

Iran Annualized Total Trade with China

Source: IMF – Direction of Trade Statistics

Iran’s Currency Takes a Hit

Meanwhile, Iran’s currency has been hit hard in recent months as a result of the uncertainty created by Trump’s previous repeated earlier threats to pull out of the nuclear deal and now subsequent follow-through decision.

The rial has depreciated in the black market by 33% against the US dollar year-to-date (see following chart). This followed a period of comparative stability where the currency traded in a 13% range for two years, helped by the optimism created by the nuclear deal as well as by very high real interest rates. Iranian treasury bill yields peaked at 27% in early 2017 and bottomed at 16% late last year. They are now back at 19% as a result of the market pressure created by the threat of renewed American sanctions.

Iranian Rial/US$ (Inverted Scale)

Note: Based on black market rate after Iran unified its dual exchange rates on 9 April. Source: Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, Bonbast.com

Substantial Foreign Investment in Iran

With a classic bullish emerging market demographic profile, in terms of a population of 80 million, 60% of whom are under the age of 35, Iran has, naturally, attracted a lot of foreign direct investment in recent years, most particularly following the 2015 nuclear deal.

The biggest of late was the previously mentioned Total’s US$4.8 billion investment signed in July 2017. But Total says it has only invested under €40 million so far, according to the above mentioned FT article, which is precisely why the French company wants to know if it can get a specific waiver from the sanctions.

In terms of the aggregate data, Iran’s actual FDI inflows surged by 64%YoY to US$3.37 biilion in 2016, according to United Nations data. While an Iranian government report published last year disclosed that Iran has approved US$11.8 billion in FDI during the 12 months to December 2016, with Spain and Germany accounting for US$3.2 billion and US$2.9 billion of that total respectively.

Iran FDI Inflows

Source: UNCTAD World Investment Report 2017

Will We See a Retreat from Pax Americana?

The point, therefore, remains that a confrontation between the US and the Eurozone on this issue is potentially a landmark development in the retreat from Pax Americana.

But for now it is probably the case that most of Europe, in the spirit of appeasement, will be content to fudge the issue in the hope that Donald Trump may not be re-elected to the US presidency for a second term and life will return to “normal”.

Iran’s Economy

Turning away from geopolitical issues, Iran’s economy and financial markets spring some positive surprises. The country has an open capital account, while there is no tax on capital gains or dividends. The Tehran Stock Exchange celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.

But if FDI has been coming into the country in recent years, foreign portfolio investment activity has been much more limited, with estimates of only US$100 million invested in aggregate. This is the consequence in terms of equities of both a lack of inclusion in benchmark MSCI indices and, of course, of sanctions.

No Foreign Banks in Iran

There is still no foreign bank in Iran and therefore a lack of familiar custodians acceptable to international portfolio investors. Indeed, despite the 2015 nuclear deal, it is still not possible to use foreign credit cards to pay for hotel bills or any other transaction.

Foreign credit rating agencies are also absent which may not surprise given the three biggest are owned by the Americans. This is a pity for the Iranian Government given that, with minimal foreign currency debt and total government debt to GDP of only 35% of GDP, it would make a lot of sense to do a landmark sovereign bond issue. Total external debt is now only US$10.8 billion or just 2.5% of GDP, according to the Central Bank of Iran (see following chart).

Iran External Debt as % of GDP

Source: Central Bank of Iran, IMF

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Chris Wood is internationally renowned for his weekly institutional research newsletter GREED & fear. He has correctly identified all major global financial bubbles over the last 3 decades (US sub-prime crisis, Nasdaq technology bubble, Asian financial crisis, and the Japanese financial meltdown). He’s also the author of three highly acclaimed books: Boom and Bust, The Bubble Economy, and The End of Japan Inc.