Millions of people have rallied in Yemen to voice their strong support for a political body recently formed to run the country in the face of a Saudi military campaign to reinstate a former president.

People took to the streets in the capital in their millions before converging on a main square to support the Supreme Political Council, formed after peace talks with the Saudi side broke down recently.

They waved national Yemeni flags and chanted slogans like “We will sacrifice our souls and blood for the sake of Yemen,” as patriotic songs played.

Yemenis hold a demonstration to support the Supreme Political Council in the capital, Sana’a, August 20, 2016.

Yemenis hold a demonstration to support the Supreme Political Council in the capital, Sana’a, August 20, 2016.

They also carried placards with messages reading, “Reforms are the most efficient popular force in the face of enemies” in Arabic in an apparent reference to Saudi Arabia and Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Hadi resigned as president in January 2015 and then fled to Saudi Arabia which launched a ferocious military campaign against Yemen two months later to restore him to power.

 

Yemenis walk through the rubble of a house destroyed by the Saudi Arabian military in the capital, Sana’a, August 11, 2016. (Photo by AFP)
 

 

The formation of the Supreme Political Council prompted Yemen’s parliament to hold its first session earlier this month since the outbreak of the conflict. The lawmakers endorsed the new council and formally stripped Hadi of any responsibility.

The decision to establish the council was made by Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement and former President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s General People’s Congress party back in late July. It was formally launched on August 6, when the Houthis and Saleh’s faction announced that they both had an equal share in the 10-member body.

Saudi raids on Yemen continue

The decision has prompted Saudi Arabia to step up its airstrikes on Yemen, especially the capital Sana’a.

On Saturday, Saudi warplanes launched separate aerial attacks on the Baqim, Saqayn and As Safra districts in the northern Sa’ada province, leaving several people injured.

An unspecified number of civilians also lost their lives and sustained injuries when Saudi military aircraft conducted five airstrikes against an area in the Usaylan district of the Shabwah province.

In the northern Sana’a Province, Saudi jets attacked the Arhab district, leaving at least three people dead.

A Yemeni man stands near the grave of a relative killed in the Saudi war on Yemen, at a cemetery in Sana’a, July 6, 2016. (Photo by AFP) 

Elsewhere, in the Lawdar district of the southern Abyan province, pro-Hadi militiamen opened fire on a car at a security checkpoint, killing a civilian and injuring three others.

Two Yemeni civilians were also killed and three others injured in Saudi strikes against the Harf Sufyan district of the northwestern Amran province.

Yemen has seen almost daily military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March 2015, with internal sources putting the toll from the bloody aggression at about 10,000.

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Canada’s Mining Industry and Popular Resistance

August 21st, 2016 by Socialist Project

Canada is one of the world’s centres of the mining and extractive sector. Toronto is the centre of the trade in mining stocks and in financing mining operations. Canadian mining capital operates in more than 100 countries and is among the top five world producers of potash, uranium, nickel, gold, platinum, aluminum, diamonds and steel-making coal.

The Canadian state supports the accumulation of the mining industry at home and abroad. Indeed, it is impossible to separate out the history of Canadian colonialism and the building capitalism in Canada from the mining sector, from the original mining of fish and furs by Europeans to the modern mining of the tar sands, forests, precious metals, and many other sectors. The extractive sector remains at the centre of the Canadian state’s colonial – and often coercive, and extra-legal – relationship with the First Nations, and the ecological destructiveness of the Canadian developmental model.

Relations with workers and unions in the mining sector remain turbulent and chaotic – extract the resources and labour-power, and the devil of the consequences for the workers, communities, and environment. Both the Harper and Trudeau governments have pursued strategies to help mining companies expand their exploration and extraction activities around the world.

The Canadian provinces share the same agenda, whatever the political complexion of the government in power. In pursuing international trade and investment treaties, Canadian governments have had the protection of the extractive sector at the core of their bargaining. Signing investor protection deals with foreign countries and pushing consulates and embassies to promote Canadian mining projects are two of the main modalities by which Canadian imperialism operates. Canadian royalty regimes are, perhaps, the most generous in the world among large countries for mining capital.

Confronting Canadian capitalism necessarily means a confrontation with the Canadian mining sector. Solidarity with First Nations people requires support for struggles with the mining corporations. Ecologically-responsible production can only occur with democratic and social control of the mining sector.

More information:

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Today, on its French-language web site CBC Radio-Canada published an article announcing the United Nations’ decision not to compensate the victims of the cholera bacterium its soldiers had introduced to Haiti since October 2010. The UN-caused epidemic has so far claimed over 8000 lives.

Radio-Canada’ s French article is accessible via the link provided below:

This is an English translation of the comment I entered, now awaiting moderator green light :

Adding ” which hit Haiti after the earthquake in 2010″ in the subtitle of your article is superfluous and feeds unnecessary confusion.

Several scientific studies have now unequivocally clarified this point. There is no link whatsoever between the earthquake and the cholera epidemic. It was UN Soldiers who infected the Haitian population with cholera by dropping their defecation into the river Mielle.

The UN is evading its legal and moral responsibility in this situation as it has also done in the face of multiple documented cases of rape, killings and brutality conducted by its  illegally deployed “peacekeepers” who are in Haiti for geopolitical reasons having nothing to do with the welfare of Haitians.

The victims of these foreign troops are considered too impoverished and too African to enjoy fundamental rights in a world ruled by unscrupulous multinational bandits.

Important references on the Cholera epidemic: No public outcry

http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/International/2013/02/21/005-haiti-onu-cholera.shtml

L’ONU rejette une demande d’indemnisation de victimes du choléra en Haïti

   |  Radio-Canada avec Agence France-Presse

L’ONU décline toute responsabilité dans l’épidémie de choléra qui a frappé Haïti après le tremblement de terre en 2010.

See also:

UN rejects damage claim for Haiti cholera victims

By EDITH M. LEDERER | Associated Press

http://news.yahoo.com/un-rejects-damage-claim-haiti-cholera-victims-203706299.html

 

The word of Science

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/08/whole-genome-study-nails-haiti-n.html

 

FLAGRANT DÉLIT (Caught in the Act)

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Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s decision granting Judicial Watch permission to submit interrogatories to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and to depose the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-IRM”) John Bentel:

We are pleased that this federal court ordered Hillary Clinton to provide written answers under oath to some key questions about her email scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  “We will move quickly to get these answers. The decision is a reminder that Hillary Clinton is not above the law.

The court order reads:

[T] the State Department shall release all remaining documents responsive to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request by no later than September 30, 2016; and it is FURTHER ORDERED that, consistent with Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Judicial Watch may serve interrogatories on Secretary Clinton by no later than October 14, 2016 … Secretary Clinton’s responses are due by no later than thirty days thereafter … Judicial Watch may depose Mr. Bentel by no later than October 31, 2016.

In his opinion Judge Sullivan writes:

The Court is persuaded that Secretary Clinton’s testimony is necessary to enable her to explain on the record the purpose for the creation and operation of the clintonemail.com system for State Department business.

On July 8 Judicial Watch submitted a request for permission to depose Clinton; the Director of Office of Correspondence and Records of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-CRM”) Clarence Finney; and Bentel.  The request arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before Judge Sullivan that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton.  The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system. (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)).

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Critics have often blamed President Rouhani of Iran for blindly following the neoclassical-neoliberal model of capitalism. The critical problem with Mr. Rouhani’s economic policies, however, is more than just following the dominant economic model of neoliberalism; more gravely, it is following the worst aspects of that model.

One such disturbing aspect is the unregulated and out-of-control financialization of Iran’s economy: the banking/financial sector is given a free rein to engage in all kinds of parasitic, speculative activities. As this practice has robbed the manufacturing sector of the economy of the productively-investible finance capital, it has thereby led to a severe economic stagnation and high rates of unemployment.

It is now common knowledge that the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S., which has since spread to other parts of the capitalist world, was precipitated largely by a disproportionately high degree of financialization, that is, by an unsustainable financial bubble on top of a much narrower base of real values. It is equally well-known that systematic deregulation of the financial sector in the U.S., especially of the dismantlement of the Glass-Steagall Act (in 1998), which had fairly well regulated the financial sector in the aftermath of the Great Depression, was a major contributing factor to the creation of the financial bubble that burst in 2008.

Regrettably, President Rouhani and his economic team seem to be altogether oblivious to the bitter experiences of the financialization disaster in the U.S. and other core capitalist countries around the world. This blatant inattention to the devastating consequences of a bloated financial sector at the expense of a cash-strapped real sector, combined with a trade policy which has effectively replaced domestic products with foreign products through a policy of unhindered importation of foreign goods and services, has greatly contributed to Iran’s economic stagnation.

While the real/manufacturing sector of the country’s economy is in dire need of investment funds, its financial sector enjoys an abundance of liquidity that, according to Iran’s Central Bank, amounts to nearly 900,000 billion tumans, or almost $260 billion dollars ($1 = 3500 toomans), which is approximately equal to 65% of its 2015 GDP of barely $400 billion [1]. Unfortunately, the major bulk of this plethora of liquidity is used for speculation purposes instead of lending to manufacturers for productive investment.

The fact that the financial sector prefers the more lucrative speculation to real production is not surprising—it is simply in the nature of a profit-driven economic system. What is surprising is a total lack of an economic policy that would channel the nation’s financial resource away from speculation to production.

The abundance of domestic liquidity belies President Rouhani’s frequent pleading with foreign investors on the grounds that Iran’s economy is suffering from illiquidity, and that foreign direct investment could serve as a panacea to Iran’s ailing economy. It also shows why foreign investors tend to be skeptical of the president’s pleas, and continue to be reluctant to invest in Iran’s manufacturing sector. After all, why would foreign manufacturers invest in a country where its market is saturated by unhindered imports of foreign products, and its own manufacturers are thereby driven out of market?

The persistent economic stagnation in Iran is largely due to a dire lack of an effective macroeconomic policy. Lack of economic policy is, in turn, mostly due to President Rouhani’s and his economic advisors’ blind faith in an economic model that is unfeasible in the real world; a model that, while simple and even elegant, is dangerously misleading. It is misleading because it maintains that if the government abstains from making macroeconomic policies and leaves all economic matters to microeconomic activities of private individuals and businesses, the invisible hand of the market mechanism would in a magical fashion lead to efficiency, development and prosperity.

According to this doctrine, called supply-side or neoliberal economics, solutions to economic stagnation, poverty and under-development lie in unhindered market mechanism and unreserved integration into world capitalist system. Recessions, joblessness and economic hardship in many less-developed countries are not so much due to economic mismanagement or the nature of global capitalism as they are because of government intervention and/or exclusion from world capitalist markets [2].

Unimpeded importation of foreign products into Iran’s open-door market, unregulated and out-of-control financialization of its markets, and devastating stagnation of its economy are mainly due this misguided economic doctrine.

It is now widely acknowledged that the disproportionate growth of the financial sector has been a major contributing factor to the ongoing financial turbulence and economic stagnation in many core capitalist countries. What is relatively less known outside of Iran is that the parasitic growth of the financial sector in that country is among the highest in the world: per capital number of banks, shadow banks and other financial institutions (called moasesaat-e atebaari) is certainly the highest in the world. Parasitic activities of the financial players include speculation in foreign exchange or foreign currency market, in gold and other precious metals market, in all kinds of imports (both legal and illegal), in real estate, and the like [3].

Returns to speculative activities in the financial sector are so high that a number of major manufacturing corporations such as Iran Khodrow (the country’s largest auto manufacturer) have established their own banks in order to partake in the lucrative financial sector by diverting funds from their manufacturing operations to this sector. Likewise, many civil, military, and governmental organizations (such as municipalities), as well as pension funds and charity foundations (such as Bonyad-e Mostazafan) have also created their own banks in pursuit of a share in the lucrative financial sector.

The perils of the commercial banks’ and other financial institutions’ speculative activities are dangerously magnified by their ability to create money! Following the Anglo-Saxon model of fractional reserve banking (explained below), which is today practiced in most capitalist countries, the power of money creation in Iran rests not so much with the government as it does with commercial banks. When commercial banks make loans or extend credit to their clients they, in effect, create money, which is called debt/credit money, or bank money, as opposed to sovereign or real money created by the government. Although in essence bank money is not real money, in practice it functions just as real money.

The ability of the commercial banking system to create money explains why the all-important power of controlling or manipulating money supply, of financing and, therefore, of influencing or controlling national economies in most capitalist countries has increasingly come to rest with commercial banks, often mediated by central banks and treasury departments that are frequently headed by the proxies of the financial oligarchy.

In theory, the ability of the banking system to create credit or debt money is determined or limited by two factors: (a) the savings/deposits by households and businesses, and (b) the central bank policy that determine reserve requirements and the money supply—the so-called fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking means that, for the sake of financial safety and stability, commercial banks ought to always keep a legally-determined fraction of their deposits (for example, 20%) on hand, either in their own coffers or in their accounts with the central bank. This fraction of bank deposits is called required reserves, or capital requirement/base. Only the rest (80% in our example), which is called excess reserves, can be loaned out.

In practice, however, the ability of the banking system to create credit, or bank money, is not much constrained by the amount of savings/deposits they receive or by central bank regulation of money supply through fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking implies that, based on the amount of their loanable deposits, or excess reserves, as determined by reserve requirements, the commercial banks first determine their lending capacity and then go around for customers. In the real world, however, they often behave the other way around: they first extend credit and look for reserves later. In one way or another, central banks would accommodate them. This explains why the actual bank reserves, or capital requirement, are often much smaller than required reserves, especially during optimistic periods of asset price inflation, or expanding financial bubbles.

What has made the ability of the commercial banking system to create money—of course, debt money—especially more dangerous in recent years is that, as the financial sector has systematically freed itself from traditional rules and regulations, most of the debt money they now create is increasingly geared towards speculation, not production. This explains the exponential growth of parasitic finance in most capitalist countries. As noted, parasitic growth of the financial sector in Iran represents an extreme case of this ominous development—a developments that has made the country’s economy/market akin to a nationwide casino, more or less.

What is to be done?

It follows from this brief discussion that the inordinate financialization of Iran’s economy is largely due to two major factors: (1) the ability and/or freedom of commercial banks and other financial institutions to create money, and (2) their ability and/or freedom to engage in non-banking activities, including speculation in commodities market, especially in precious metals, in foreign currency market, in real estate market, in imports market, and the like.

Policy implications of this diagnosis are unmistakable: to cleanse Iran’s economy of the poisonous effects of parasitic finance requires (1) ending the commercial banks’ and other financial institutions’ ability to engage in non-banking activities, and (2) ending their ability to create money.

Aside from destabilizing and destructive economic effects, private banks’ ability to create money is also problematic on legal and/or constitutional grounds. As a most, or perhaps the most, important economic decision or policy of any nation, money creation is logically a sovereign prerogative or national right; it belongs to the public, not private, domain. The right of creating money ought to exclusively be granted to the publicly-owned central bank as the monetary authority of the state. This would replace sovereign money system for the currently corrupt bank or debt money system based on fractional reserve banking.

It must be pointed out that the formal or nominal ownership of a central bank by the state does not necessarily or automatically replace the sovereign money system for debt/bank money system. Currently a number of central banks, including Iran’s Central Bank, are formally owned by the state, but their ability to control national money supply is undermined by the prevalence of the fractional reserve banking. This means that the ability of a publicly-owned central bank to control the stock of national money requires effective curtailment of the power of commercial banks to create money.

Commercial banks would still be free to finance businesses’ and consumers’ borrowing needs, but not with debt money based on the fractional reserve system. In other words, they cannot lend money without having actually received it first, that is, without having taken it before (from depositors, from other banks, from money or capital markets, or, under certain circumstances, from the central bank). This requires replacing the present fractional reserve system of banking with the 100% reserve system. The 100% reserve system means that when “people make deposits and thus think they have money in the bank,” argues William Hixson, “they would actually have legal tender money in the bank, not 94 percent (more or less) of their money loaned by the banker” [4]. Writing in support of the 100% reserve plan, Professor John Hotson at Ontario’s University of Waterloo notes:

The 100 percent reserve plan . . . would end the debt-money. . . . Government money [legal tender money] . . . is “Good Money” because it can be spent into circulation interest and debt free, and ever after perform the useful functions of money for the minor cost of replacing worn out bills and coins. . . . Money produced by commercial banks is “Bad Money” because it must be lent into circulation at interest, and it only remains in existence so long as someone is willing to pay interest and the banks are willing to continue to lend” [5].

Under sovereign money system, additions to the stock of money supply, or creation of new money, will be issued by the central bank and transferred to the treasury. The treasury will then spend, not lend, the new money into circulation. This will represent genuine seigniorage, which is akin to the historical prerogative of coinage, free of interest and redemption, and thus debt-free. (The central bank may occasionally and for the smaller part lend some of the new money to commercial banks, if required. This creates interest-borne seigniorage.) The profit from seigniorage, or the issuance of new money, will no longer go to the pockets of the privately-owned central banks, or the commercial banking system. Instead, it will go to the public purse and benefit taxpayers.

How should the central bank decide on and keep control of the right or optimal quantity of money in circulation so that there would be neither too much nor too little of it? The answer is that the stock of money in circulations should be based on the volume of national output, or gross national product (GNP), or its money equivalent gross national income (GNI).

Specifically, the quantity of money in circulation (M) would be determined by this simple equation: MV = GNI, where V is the velocity of money circulation, or the number of times that, on the average, a dollar changes hands during a fiscal year. For example, if GNI is equal to $100 billion, and V is equal to one, then M also needs to be $100 billion in order to be sufficient to circulate the $100 billion worth of goods and services. But if V is equal to five, then the amount of M needed to circulate the $100 billion of GNI would be only $20 billion. And if V is 10, then the required M would be only $10 billion—and so on.

Based on this simple equation, injections of new money into circulation (or, more generally, changes in M one way or the other) would also be determined by changes in GNI and in V. If, for instance, GNI goes up by five percent and V remains constant, then M needs to go up by five percent as well. But if at the same time that GNI goes up by five percent, V also goes up by five percent, then M should remain constant—and so on.

By creating the money they need interest-free, instead of borrowing it from commercial banks and other private financial entities interest-borne, governments can strengthen their budgets and save taxpayers huge sums of money. For example, evidence shows that the U.S. federal government paid in 2011 a sum of $454 billion in interest on its debt—the third highest budget item after the military and Social Security outlays. This figure amounted to nearly one-third of the total personal income taxes ($1, 100 billion) collected that year. This means that if the federal government created the money it needed, instead of borrowing it at interest, personal income taxes could have been cut by a third [6]. Alternatively, the savings could be invested in social infrastructure, both human and physical, thereby drastically augmenting the productive capacity of the nation, creating millions of jobs and elevating the standard of living for all.

In brief, there is no shortage of finance capital in Iran. The problem is that it is used largely for speculation, not production, purposes. To divert its financial resources from speculation to production, Iran needs to (a) prevent the commercial banks from engaging in non-banking activities; (b) prevent the commercial banking system from creating debt money, based on fractional reserve system; (c) confer the prerogative of creating real, sovereign money solely to the state-owned central bank; and (d) mandate that the real, tender money thus created is spent into the economy/circulation through its outlays on social, developmental, infrastructural, and other vital national projects. Only through such a drastic overhaul of money and banking policies, along with a vigorous support for its manufacturers through an effective policy of import-substitution, can Iran rekindle its dormant economy and chart a new path of industrialization, development and real independence.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

References:

[1] World Bank, http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/iran/overview.

[2] For a fairly detailed discussion of this point please see: “Why President Rouhani’s ‘Economic Package’ is Empty”.

[3] See, for example, Dr. Mohammad Soleimani,

تولید همچنان در رکود؛ اما بازدهی برخی بانک ها در بورس به 80 درصد رسیده است

[4] William F. Hixson, A Matter of Interest: Reexamining Money, Debt, and Real Economic Growth, New York: Praeger, 1991, p. 242.

[5] John Hotson, “Ending the Debt Money System”, Challenge, March-April 1985, pp. 48-50.

[6] Ellen Brown, It’s the Interest, Stupid! Why Bankers Rule the World.

 

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Photographs and video of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh have rapidly become ubiquitous in the media in the US and Western Europe after being distributed by a group aligned with the CIA-backed Islamist “rebels” in Syria.

The toddler is shown sitting somewhat dazed in the orange seat of a new and well-equipped ambulance, his face covered in dust and tinged with what appears to be dried blood from what was reportedly a cut to his scalp. Video shows him waiting unattended as a number of photographers and videographers record his image to be broadcast around the world. Clearly, those in charge sensed that the boy, with a mop of hair covering his brow and a cartoon t-shirt, provided a marketable image.

CNN proclaimed the child “the face of Syria’s civil war,” while the anchor-woman theatrically burst into tears recounting his story. The New York Timescalled him “a symbol of Aleppo’s suffering,” while USA Today published a short editor’s note reading, “This Syrian boy is Omran. Will you pay attention now?”

More direct in its approach was the British daily Telegraph, which headlined an article: “For the sake of Aleppo’s children, we must try again to impose a no-fly zone in Syria.”

Among the most obscene pieces was one penned, predictably, by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who conflated the plight of Syria’s children with the death of his family dog. He went on to invoke a statement by Secretary of State John Kerry that ISIS is engaged in genocide as a rationale for the US to launch cruise missile attacks on the Syrian government, which is fighting ISIS. The effort to obliterate rational thought in the name of human rights is stunning.

What we are witnessing is a carefully orchestrated war propaganda campaign, designed to appeal to the humanitarian sentiments of the population in order to corral it behind a new escalation of imperialist violence in the Middle East. Whether the incident with Omran was itself staged by the “rebels” and their CIA handlers, or Washington and the corporate media are cynically exploiting the real suffering of an innocent child, is an open question.

What is indisputable is that the feigned concern over this one child is being foisted upon the public with very definite and undeclared political and geo-strategic motives that have nothing to do with protecting the lives of innocent children. They have died by the hundreds of thousands over the last quarter century of US-led invasions, bombings and proxy wars throughout the region.

The image of Omran was chosen because it comes from the eastern sector of Aleppo, where roughly one-sixth of the northern Syrian city’s population lives under the domination of US-backed Islamist militias. The most important of these is the Fateh al-Sham Front, which, until last month, called itself the al-Nusra Front and was Al Qaeda’s designated affiliate in Syria.

Syrian children killed by the Al Qaeda militia’s “hell cannons,” fired indiscriminately into the government-controlled neighborhoods of western Aleppo, do not have the same effect on the tear ducts of newspaper editorialists and media talking heads. Nor, for that matter, do the imagescoming out of Yemen of children slaughtered by Saudi airstrikes carried out with US-supplied bombs and the Pentagon’s indispensable logistical support. The horrific video of US-backed “moderate” Syrian “rebels” sawing off the head of a ten-year-old Palestinian boy likewise provoked no significant outrage.

The driving forces underlying the renewed propaganda campaign are two-fold. In the first and most immediate instance, the “rebel” offensive—armed and funded by the US and its regional allies—to break the government siege of eastern Aleppo and intensify the war against the civilian population in the west of the city has stalled, and the Syrian army, backed by Russian air power, is again making significant gains on the ground. Hence the renewed demands for an immediate ceasefire.

More far-reaching in its implications is the development of closer collaboration between Russia, Iran, China and Turkey in relation to the five-year-old war for regime-change in Syria. Iran has over the past week allowed Russia to use Iranian bases to attack Syrian targets, while Beijing has announced an increase in military aid to Damascus. Meanwhile, in the wake of last month’s abortive US-backed military coup, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought a rapprochement with both Moscow and Tehran.

Washington views this potential alliance with increasing disquiet, seeing it as an impediment to its military drive to assert US hegemony over the Middle East and its vast energy reserves. It cannot accept such a challenge and will, inevitably, prepare a military response. It is to this end that the “humanitarian” propaganda campaign to “save the children” of Syria—and rescue Washington’s Al Qaeda-linked proxies in the bargain—has been mounted.

The methods employed in this campaign are well-worn to say the least. Twenty-five years ago, the first Gulf War against Iraq was prepared with a chilling tale, told to the US Congress, of invading Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals and leaving babies to die. The supposed eyewitness to this atrocity, a woman identified as a nurse, was subsequently exposed as the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and a member of the emirate’s royal family. The entire story was a propaganda hoax.

In the years that followed, the US imposed punishing sanctions on Iraq that claimed the lives of half a million Iraqi children, about which then-US ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright infamously declared, “The price was worth it.” Subsequent US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria have killed hundreds of thousands more.

In reviewing these 25 years of violence and bloodshed, the newly published book A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016 by David North states:

The scope of military operations continuously widened. New wars were started while the old ones continued. The cynical invocation of human rights was used to wage war against Libya and overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The same hypocritical pretext was employed to organize a proxy war in Syria. The consequences of these crimes, in terms of human lives and suffering, are incalculable.

The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.

The flood of war propaganda presaging an imminent escalation of the US intervention in Syria threatens to hasten such a confrontation, and with it, the real danger of a global nuclear war.

 

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Jean-Guy Allard, oriundo de Shawinigan, Quebec, falleció en  La Habana, amada ciudad que adoptó como suya, el 16 de agosto, a la edad de 68 años, a raíz de una enfermedad.

Yo, al igual que sus demás amigos y colegas de Quebec, lo visité en varias ocasiones, tanto a él como a su hijo, en su modesto hogar de La Habana. De hecho, no se trataba de meras visitas informales, sino de una especie de peregrinaje secular. Se enorgullecía en particular del objeto enmarcado en su pared: uno de los escritos de Fidel Castro, en el que el líder cubano resaltaba la obra de Jean-Guy. Espero que Jean-Guy haya tenido la oportunidad de ver en la televisión las actividades organizadas en Cuba en ocasión del 90 aniversario del natalicio de Fidel el 13 de agosto.

Nuestras visitas a la casa de Jean-Guy siempre eran ocasiones solemnes para nosotros, tal era el impacto que nos causaba su integridad ante la supuesta libertad de prensa en Quebecor. Este último, como es bien sabido de todo habitante de Quebec, es un monopolio enorme que controla el periódico  Journal de Québec para el cual Jean-Guy trabajaba.

Jean-Guy no escondía, como se desprende de las entrevistas, el control férreo que ejercía la prensa capitalista sobre sus puntos de vista políticos y sus valores periodísticos. Por supuesto que él se resistía a tal presión en la medida de sus posibilidades. No es de sorprenderse que haya decidido dedicar su jubilación y su pensión de jubilado a la causa de Cuba y América Latina. Por lo tanto es un ejemplo para los periodistas que viven y laboran dentro del sistema capitalista. Nos muestra que los principios siempre deben primar sobre la carrera.

Además de esta cualidad que nos ha legado, hay otra que quisiera mencionar. Jean-Guy fue un opositor acérrimo del imperialismo estadounidense y sobre todo de su injerencia desenfrenada y terrorismo en Cuba y América Latina. No se hacía ilusiones para nada sobre los círculos dirigentes estadounidenses y sus intenciones a largo plazo. Parecía vivir y escribir en función de este rechazo intransigente. Lo animaba y nos sigue animando. La oposición al imperialismo estadounidense en el mundo, que se puede ver en lugares tales como Quebec o Canadá, a menudo es algo que no se comprende muy bien en el Sur. La vida y la obra de Jean-Guy son testimonio de esta tradición que muchos de nosotros honramos.

Tanto sus principios periodísticos como su aversión al imperialismo estadounidense constituyen un ejemplo que perdurará para siempre.

Arnold August, Montreal, agosto 17, 2016

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On August 15 in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, 908 people sat in rows of chairs and waited for their heads to be shaved as an act of protest against the U.S.-South Korean decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in their hometown. Even Confucian scholars, who regard all parts of the human body as a gift from one’s parents and their hair as precious as their lives, sat stoically, willing to join the symbolic act against the deployment of the controversial weapons system. As the ceremony began and clumps of hair fell to the ground, onlookers gasped and even dabbed tears from their cheeks.

But the moment of anguish was brief. As soon as the ceremony concluded, everyone quietly tied their headbands behinds their heads and shouted “No THAAD!” as they headed to a demonstration.

Petition to White House Surpasses 100,000

Since a U.S. and South Korean joint working group announced the small agricultural town of Seongju as the designated site for THAAD deployment on July 13, the people of Seongju, mostly melon farmers, have become the front line in the fight against missile defense in Korea. And in just a few weeks, they have organized themselves into a force to be reckoned with.

The online “We the People” petition against THAAD deployment surpassed its goal of 100,000 signatures on August 10. The Seongju residents gathered for their 29th nightly candlelight vigil that evening were beaming with joy. The emcee shouted, “What day is today?” and the residents shouted back in unison, “The day we reached 100,000!” According to the White House petition website, any petition that garners 100,000 signatures in 30 days triggers an official response from the White House within 60 days of the date that the goal is reached.

To be sure, waging an online petition campaign in Seongju was no easy task. Most residents don’t have computers nor read English. The petition requires an email verification step, but most didn’t have email accounts. College students set up booths at the nightly candlelight vigils and patiently helped older residents through the process, starting with opening an email account.

Week 5 of THAAD Opposition – “Seongju is Korea and Korea is Seongju”

The residents made clear that they are not appealing for sympathy from the White House. The petition campaign was a process of organizing the entire country beyond Seongju to demand that the United States rescind its THAAD decision and exert pressure on the White House.

“Until when do we hold the rain ceremony?” asked Lee Jae-dong, the chair of the Seongju branch of the Korean Peasants League and the emcee of the nightly candlelight vigils.  “Until it rains!” replied the crowd. “Until when do we fight THAAD deployment?” he asked. “Until it’s rescinded!” replied Seongju residents in unison.

Defending Seongju for Future Generations

Sign reads: "Lying Ministry of Defense stop cheating the people and tell the truth"Defense Minister Han Min-koo must not have read the Seongju residents’ resolution released on August 15. Had he read it, he would have known better than to try to appease the Seongju residents with offers to discuss a new site for the THAAD deployment. In the collective declaration, the Seongju residents remembered the struggle of their ancestors against Japanese occupation and vowed to pass down a land of peace to their next generation –

In 1905, the Japanese colonizers opened the Seoul-Busan railway. Colonial Japan used the railway as a transport line to expropriate materials from Joseon, and wherever the railway passed, traditional  societies collapsed. With the same sense of urgency as we feel today, countless Seongju residents, including Confucian scholars, stood up and ultimately defended their hometown from foreign imperialists.

Today, the residents of Seongju face yet another challenge from foreigners. The foreign power that our ancestors faced was not easier than what we face today. Our forebears did not kneel or retreat  in the face of the terrifying might of the foreign power and defended their hometown. We are the residents of that land that our forbears defended and their proud descendants. We have a duty to defend this precious land and pass it down to our future generations.

We cannot give Seongsan, the sacred land of Seongju, to be forever used as a military base by foreigners. Nor can we pass down the disgraceful THAAD to our children. Just as our forebears did, we will defend Seongsan and Seongju even if it means putting our lives on the line. We will stop the THAAD deployment, make Seongsan a symbol of peace and proudly pass it down to our future generations.

THAAD Fight Calls into Question US-ROK Alliance

As the THAAD fight wages on, scholars and lawmakers are openly raising questions about the uneven nature of the U.S.-South Korean alliance.  At a forum at Yonsei University on August 18, Professor Lee Nam-ju of Sungkonghoe University warned that a regional arms race and military confrontation could become unavoidable if China considers South Korea the key cause of a strategic threat.

“Pointing to the so-called Iranian threat, the United States tried to construct missile defense in Eastern Europe, and this became the cause of marked deterioration in relations between Europe and Russia. That should be a lesson to us,” Lee said. “The attitude that we have no choice but to accept all the negative side-effects of the THAAD deployment decision in the interest of the US-ROK alliance is the ultimate obstacle in the THAAD fight,” he added, “The THAAD issue begs the question – should the US-ROK alliance always be considered unconditional?”

Representative Seol Hun of the Minjoo Party agreed. “Until now, anything carried out in the name of the US-ROK alliance was given an automatic green light,” he said, “But the THAAD issue clearly demonstrates that U.S. and South Korean interests are not always aligned.”

The scholars and lawmakers at the forum also agreed that the decision to deploy the THAAD system in Korea should go through a ratification process in the National Assembly.

Professor Song Gi-chun of the North Jeolla University School of Law denounced the Park Geun-hye administration for railroading a unilateral decision without the consent of the National Assembly and refuted the administration’s argument that the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and South Korea gave it the right to do so. Song referenced article 60 of the South Korean constitution, which states that the National Assembly has the right to “consent to the conclusion and ratification of treaties pertaining to mutual assistance or mutual security” and “treaties which would incur grave financial burden on the state or people,” and argued that the THAAD deployment decision needs to be ratified by the National Assembly.

“The THAAD deployment decision is an agreement between two countries that would significantly transform the security environment of South Korea,” Song noted,  “It goes beyond the framework of the Mutual Defense Treaty and is an agreement of serious import that will cause fissures in the balance of military powers in the Northeast Asian region. An agreement that goes beyond the framework of the existing treaty and outlines new rights and responsibilities between countries should, of course, be approved by the National Assembly.”

People’s Party Representative Choi Gyeong-hwan, who served as the last secretary to the late President Kim Dae-jung, agreed. “Through a ratification process in the National Assembly, we have to empower the Assembly to oversee military matters,” he said and committed to do all he can in the National Assembly to oppose the THAAD deployment, including calling for a ratification process and the impeachment of the Defense Minister, as well as creating a special committee of all opposition parties.

Seongju is Korea and Korea is Seongju

As the fight against THAAD enters its sixth week, Seongju residents are appealing for candlelight vigils around the country to oppose the THAAD deployment.  “You don’t have to come to Seongju to give us support,” said Park Su-gyu, the publicity coordinator for the Seongju Task Force, “We, the residents of Seongju, will defend Seongju.  You can raise your candles wherever you are. Whether it’s three people or five people, raise your candles.  That way, we can be unified in the fight to stop the THAAD system from being deployed anywhere in Korea.”

145 civil society organizations came together on August 18 to form the National Action to Oppose THAAD Deployment in Korea and announced plans to answer Seongju’s call. It plans to hold simultaneous candlelight vigils in 50 cities around the country on August 26, which marks the 50th nightly candlelight vigil in Seongju, then 100 cities on October 20, the 100th candlelight vigil in Seongju. The newly formed coalition embraced the slogan that has become the battle cry of the anti-THAAD struggle – “Seongju is Korea and Korea is Seongju.”

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Towards a Kurdish-Arab War in Syria?

August 20th, 2016 by South Front

The Kurdish police, Asayish, loyal to the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) loyal to the Syrian government are engaged in intense clashes for control of Hasakah city in eastern Syria. A series of street clashes with usage of small arms, that started on Wednesday has turned into full-scale clashes, with usage of heavy military equipment and artillery. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), which are also linked with the PYD and the core of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces), are supporting the Asayish attempts to advance on the pro-government forces. In turn, the Syrian Arab Forces have launched a series of air strikes on YPG and Asayish military sites and HQs over the province. By August 19 morning, all attempts to implement a ceasefire agreement has failed.

The pro-PYD forces have been implementing a long-standing strategy of putting pressure on the predominantly Arab NDF in order to push pro-government militias from Hasakah province. However, the situation has gone out of control this week when the pressure turned into firefights and then into intense clashes. Furthermore, a significant part of Arab, Christian, Assyrian and other fighters defected from the US-backed SDF to the NDF as result of this escalation, expanding the breach between PYD-linked Kurdish fighters and the non-Kurds in the area.

The main reason of these tensions is the PYD’s will to set an independent state in the whole northern Syria. The move is not supported by majority of Syrian population. Furthermore, the ethnic composition in northern Syria, that includes major non-Kurdish populated areas, sets the ground for constant conflicts between the PYD and other local groups of influence. The proclamation of the “Northern Syria Federation” by the PYD (without any consideration with the Syrian government) has not contributed to stability of the situation.

It’s clear that the solution of the so-called “Kurdish issue” with peaceful means can be found only via diplomatic negotiations on the international level. BUT the PYD main sponsor, the United States, along with Turkey is blocking the involvement of the Kurds in the international negotiations on the Syrian crisis. An important fact is that the statements of Russian Ministry of Foreign affairs that the PYD should be involved in the negotiations remain ignored in Washington.

Such a situation paves the way for further escalations between the Syrian government forces and the US-backed PYD. This contributes to the US interests in the region because will allow Washington to turn its public image from “the state that supports terrorists against the Assad government” to “the state that supports the ‘democratic’ Kurdish forces against the Assad government.” The problem is that such developments will not contribute to the long-awaited peace in Syria, for sure.

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Washington’s media presstitutes are using the image of the child to bring pressure on Russia to stop the Syrian army from retaking Alleppo. http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/17/world/syria-little-boy-airstrike-victim/ 

Washington wants its so-called moderate rebels to retain Aleppo so that Washington can split Syria in two, thereby keeping a permanent pressure against President Assad.

As for the little boy in the propaganda picture, he does not seem to be badly injured. Let us not forget the tens of thousands of children that Washington’s wars and bombings of 7 Muslim countries have killed without any tears shed by CNN anchors, and let us not forget the 500,000 Iraqi children that the United Nations concluded died as a result of US sanctions against Iraq, children’s deaths that Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said were worth it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omnskeu-puE

Let us not forget that Washington’s determination to overthrow the Syrian government has brought many deaths to Syrians of all age groups. Washington alone is responsible for the deaths. The evil Obama regime has stated over and over that “Assad must go” and is prepared to destroy the country and much of the population in order to get rid of him.

According to the Obama regime, Assad must go because he is a dictator. Washington tells this lie despite the fact that Assad was elected and re-elected and has far higher support among Syrians that Obama has among Americans. Moreover, whatever Washington accuses Assad of doing to Syrians is nothing compared to the death and destruction that Washington brought to Syria.

Perhaps the tragedy of Aleppo could have been avoided if the Russian government had not prematurely declared “mission accomplished” in Syria and withdrawn only to have to rush back after the Russian government was again deceived by Washington.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the WestHow America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

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Growing Up Insane in America

August 20th, 2016 by William Hawes

The current state of American politics must make us question whether any of our leaders in the Beltway can be described as “grown-ups”, i.e., fully mature and sane individuals. Between the endless war crimes, corporate corruption, lobbyists who bribe congressmen and write legislation, and the ineptitude of federal entities who are supposed to protect our health such as the FDA, EPA, and CDC, it would appear that leaders in all three branches of government, as well as the leaders of the corporate world, are either insane, suffer from various psychological disorders, as well as suffering from a type of collective hallucination, the common denominator being an utter lack of empathy for others humans, or respect for the Earth.

Further, we must at least question whether collectively, we the citizenry, are as susceptible to mass delusions as our psychopathic leaders are. Our society can be effectively generalized as forming what Paulo Freire calls a culture of silence, many of whom see no problems with exploiting and despoiling other countries, looting wealth, and killing millions; and many more that are simply afraid to speak out against the indignity of the US empire, in fear of socio-cultural reprisals. This culture of silence, which we are taught at a young age, indoctrinates and effectively eliminates the ability of people to form critiques of our rotten political and economic systems. This is who Richard Nixon was really referring to, when he spoke of the “Silent Majority”: citizens too naïve, dumb, childlike, and afraid to confront the injustices inherent to our system were exactly who Tricky Dick was appealing to.

While many of us pretend that something as silly as “American exceptionalism” exists, and fall victim to the myth of rugged individualism that permeates all aspects of civic life and economics, the sad truth is that we’ve become a nation of petulant children. While we fantasize about Jeffersonian notions of small businesses and republicanism guiding our way of life, transnational conglomerates control our agricultural output (killing us slowly with GMOs and pesticides) and our media landscape (brainwashing us with neoliberalism and black propaganda).

Marx and Engels tuned us into the ideological war imposed by capitalism, which distorts and confuses workers’ belief systems, alienates workers from themselves and their work, and attempts by subterfuge to shift the blame of ruthless exploitation away from the ruling class. This was called false consciousness, and later, Sartre used the term mauvaise foi (“bad faith”). Gramsci defined the ideological control of capitalists over the socioeconomic system as cultural hegemony. Many readers are intimately familiar with these ideas. So why does this critique of the left from John Steinbeck still ring so true:

I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.

As Paul Goodman explained so lucidly, we’ve all been Growing Up Absurd for generations, trapping many in the chrysalis of adolescence for their entire lives. As he pointed out:

The accumulation of the missed and compromised revolutions of modern times, with their consequent ambiguities and social imbalances, has fallen, and must fall, most heavily on the young, making it hard to grow up.

There is no mystery why Goodman entitles his chapter on missed revolutions in the fields of the physical environment, the socioeconomic model, political and constitutional reform, morality, and reforms dealing with children and youth, “The Missing Community”. For youth today, just as in his day, have few responsible role models, a repressive and prison-like atmosphere in schools, with consumerism and technology determining every aspect of a child’s search for joy and wonder, and now, the artificial edifices of social media and “augmented reality” is replacing genuine interaction. Indoctrinated to fit into a system of war, corporate monopolies, vapid pop culture, and not encouraged to think critical about their country or world cultures, children become jaded as soon as they realize that the notions of freedom, equality, and sharing that their parents and teachers taught them were based on lies. We must reverse this tide, lest we forget Walter Benjamin’s saying that:

Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.

As Derrick Jensen says, our society suffers from a form of complex PTSD:

PTSD is an embodied response to extreme trauma, to extreme terror, to the loss of control, connection, and meaning…Faced with any emotionally threatening situation, these people may freeze, failing to resist even when resistance becomes feasible or necessary. (1)

This condition permeates every aspect of society, and reinforces our deepest ideological confusions: the line between personal property and coercive private property is purposely blurred by the bourgeoisie, fulfillment is replaced by “fun”, civic duty is replaced by retreating into the shell of private life, and diplomacy is usurped by war. Brought up in such a totality of fear and violence, it is no surprise that many never progress psychically beyond the stage of the child, or to seek out fulfillment instead of base entertainment.

The wit of the novelist Trevanian is instructive when addressing the Western symptoms of ennui and anomie:

It’s not Americans I find annoying, its Americanism: a social disease of the post-industrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called ‘American’ only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu…Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experience. In the latter stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of activities: fun. (2)

This is corroborated by Jean Liedloff, whose experiences with the Yequana and Sanema tribes of Venezuela allows her to contrast their indigenous traditions and child-rearing with the failure of civilized parents, and the resulting insipid, infantile behavior of Western adults and general culture:

Novelty…is so much a part of the present phase in our culture that our natural resistance to change has been distorted…Nothing is ever allowed to be good enough, nothing ever satisfactory. Our underlying discontent is channeled into desire for the latest things…Among the things high on the list are those that save labor…When success as a passive baby has not been experienced, there is a penchant for button-pushing, for labor-saving, as an assurance that everything is being done for, and nothing expected of, the subject…The impulse to work, necessarily a strong one in a healthy continuum, is stunted…Work becomes what it is to most of us: a resented necessity. And the labor-saving gadget gleams with a promise of lost comfort. In the meantime, a solution to the discrepancy between the adult desire to utilize one’s abilities and the infantile desire to be useless is often found in something aptly called recreation. (3)

The implications are clear: our culture does not allow us to grow up, because to do so would invoke a critical response and a revolution against the forces of tyranny. Recently, Henry Giroux asked:

Where are the agents of democracy and the public spaces that offer hope in such dark times? What role will progressives play at a time when the very ability of the public’s ability to translate private troubles into broader systemic issues is disappearing? How might politics itself be rethought in order to address the pedagogical and structural conditions that contribute to the growing intensification of violence in all spheres of American society? What role should intellectuals, cultural workers, artists, writers, journalists, and others play as part of a broader struggle to reclaim a democratic imaginary and exercise a collective sense of civic courage?

First, we must accept the fact that each of us is an agent of democracy, and we must reclaim the public spaces, and smack down the harmful myth regarding “The Tragedy of the Commons”. The answers to Giroux’s plea lie in our ability to raise healthy, strong children who are not seduced by the siren calls of capitalism and patriotic-approved state violence. This should be supplemented by alternative education programs for children and adults, and basic life and practical lessons passed down from parents, grandparents, etc.  This doesn’t mean each parent has to teach their kid trigonometry. It means each town has to model itself to promote a viable village atmosphere, and foster a sense of community, with renewable energy, grassroots arts and music, and small to medium scale organic agriculture. It will mean embracing the truth that industrial civilization is destroying the world, and rather than wallowing in self-pity at having our illusions destroyed, rising up and embracing a culture based on ecology, enlightenment, and virtuous edification of our youth.

William Hawes is a writer specializing in politics and environmental issues. His articles have appeared online at Global Research, Countercurrents, Dissident Voice, The World Financial Review, Gods & Radicals, and Counterpunch. He is author of the ebook Planetary Vision: Essays on Freedom and EmpireYou can reach him at [email protected]

Notes:

1.) Jensen, Derrick. Endgame: The Problem of Civilization, Vol. 1. Seven Stories Press, 2006. p. 69-70.

2.) Trevanian. Shibumi. Three Rivers Press, 1979. p. 306

3.) Liedloff, Jean. The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost. Da Capo Press, 1975. p. 114-115.

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Things have not been going well for the US government’s (and friends’) 5-year-long attempt to use proxy terror forces to overthrow the Assad government. The first death-knell came last September when the Russian air force entered the fray to great effect (and applause from all sensible people). The shoot-down of the Russia bomber in November by some NATO fifth-columnist was the Empire’s response to the Russian intervention and was designed to destroy Turkish-Russian relations, making Russia’s air war against Washington’s terrorists more difficult. But Erdogan and Co. were disinclined to ‘take one for the team’ in that way (especially since Turkey was never really allowed to be part of the team) and eventually conceded to Russian demands for a public apology over the shoot-down and restitution to the families. 

Faced with such an insolent and uncooperative reality, the State Department pulled out what they thought was their trump card: an old-fashioned coup d’etat in Turkey in mid-July. But that back-fired in a spectacular way, and now looks set to achieve exactly the opposite of what the Empire wanted: hard-wired (or piped) ties between not just Russia and Turkey, but Iran and China too.

In response to these painful setbacks, the Empire seems to be out of ideas, and when they’re out of ideas, they usually fall back on what they do best: telling lies and manipulating public opinion against their chosen enemy. In the most recent example of an ‘iconic image’ being used to further demonize both the Assad government and Russian actions in Syria, a cameraman from the ‘Aleppo Media Center’ was on the scene after a bomb hit an apartment building in Aleppo. He filmed the now ‘iconic’ image of a boy – Omran Daqneesh – as he was rescued from the rubble and placed in an ambulance.

Recognizing a propaganda opportunity when they see one, within hours most Western media outlets had headlined the image along with emotionally-manipulative screeds penned by media hacks who couldn’t care less about Omran or Syria. When the US military killed 73 civilians in Syria last month, images of the carnage, like the one below, didn’t make the cut, for some strange reason.

Aftermath of US bombing of Manbij last month

But the Omran video was gold, because it could be exploited to falsely demonize Russia and Assad. This is how CNN capitalized on young Omran’s brush with death:

The truth is that the image you see today is repeated every day in Aleppo,” said Mustafa al Sarouq, a cameraman with the Aleppo Media Center, who filmed the video. He spoke to CNN’s Nima Elbagir via Skype.” Every day we cover these massacres and these war crimes in Aleppo. When we go to the places that have been bombed, regime planes circle around and bomb it again to kill rescue workers that are helping civilians. They kill these people who are trying to rescue people.

Activists blame the Syrian regime and Russia for the bombings. [The] footage shared on Aug. 17 by the Aleppo Media Center, reportedly show[s] the immediate aftermath of an apparent Syrian government or Russian airstrike in a rebel-held.

So there ya have it: Russia (or Assad) is responsible for doing that to Omran, and for making you feel so sad, helpless and angry. And according to the “activists” behind the Aleppo Media Center, Russia and Assad are also responsible foreverything bad that happens in Syria (and most other places too). So now that you’ve got that message, with the face of Omran imprinted on your mind for good measure (Time magazine says “it cannot be unseen”), it’s time for you, Western reader, to support your government in sorting out the mess in Syria by funneling more of your tax dollars to your government’s foreign terrorist proxy army in Syria.

Alternatively, you could do just a little research, and a little critical thinking. You could, for example consider the source of this image and the claim that Russia or Assad is to blame: the Aleppo Media Center. The Aleppo Media Center is a project of the Syrian Expatriates Organization (SEO). The SEO is what it sounds like, a group of American citizens of Syrian extraction who have their offices on K Street in Washington, D.C., a street that is famous for being the center of the American political lobbying industry, with numerous think tanks, lobbyists, and advocacy groups based there. The SEO received generous funding over the past few years (to the tune of $4-500,000) from unknown donors, although government agencies like USAID and NED are likely sources. The SEO appears to have played a prominent role in fostering the carnage in Syria from the outset. On their website they list ‘Freedom Messages’ (sort of like ‘Freedom Cookies’) as one of their operations that debuted in 2011:

This was one of SEO’s very first projects. SEO created the “Freedom Message” campaign to inform the Syrian citizens who lived in the areas that were not yet involved in the civic movement at that time, mainly concentrated in the two largest cities of Damascus and Aleppo.

SMS campaigns send in tens of thousands were sent to the cellphone numbers talking about the revolution and its unifying purpose of freedom and prosperity to all Syrians. mainly concentrated in the two largest cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Text message and robo call campaigns reaches about 100,000 people each.

“Robo calls” was where residents of the inactive cities received a call from a local activist or a parent of one of the child victims asking for their support and encouraging them join the public movement against the tyrant regime. Abdulbaset Al Sarout, Dani Abduldayem, the mother of the young victim Hakam Drak, and the activist known for imitating the voice Bashar Al-Asad, Songa Yonga, were all featured on our robo call campaigns.

In June 2012 SEO succeeded in sending 400,000 messages supporting the uprising and a general strike organized in Damascus and Aleppo.

In short, from their cozy offices in Washington, D.C., this gang of quislings did everything they could to whip as many Syrians in Syria as possible into a revolutionary fervor against their elected government. And after 5 years of carnage, they still think this is a good idea. Syria has a population of about 20 million, or 16 times less than the USA. Imagine if a group in Syria were to do the same thing, sending 6.5 million text messages to Americans encouraging them to take to the streets in rebellion, and then encouraging the descent into war by flooding the country with armed groups from abroad. That’s exactly what this group, and many other like it in league with the US government, did. Of course, the US does not allow foreign organizations to exert influence on politics in the USA, but a bunch of what are effectively foreigners are allowed to live in the USA and exert political influence in other countries, as long as it’s in line with the US’ foreign policy objective of total world domination.

Back in 2012, representatives of the “main Syrian opposition organizations”, including the SEO, and members of the so-called Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (CRA) of Miami, signed an “agreement to coordinate their efforts” to undermine the democratically-elected governments of both Cuba and Syria in what was clearly a US State Department/CIA-funded seminar in Miami. “This offers an extraordinary opportunity: a united front bringing the peoples of Syria and Cuba together to fight for freedom and democracy,” said Silvia Iriondo, the “president” of Mothers and Women Against Repression, an organization funded by USAID. Iriondo’s real name is Silvia Goudie and she is the daughter of a mercenary who took part in the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion (old habits often stay in the family).

But the SEO is just one of five similar Syrian ex-pat quisling warmonger groups in the USA collectively called The Coalition for a Democratic Syria.

The Coalition for a Democratic Syria is a group of five Syrian-American non-profit organizations working together in Washington, DC to bring about a swift end to the conflict in Syria and support the establishment of a free and democratic Syria. The Coalition for a Democratic Syria is a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, andnon-partisan organization that includes the Syrian American Council, the Syrian Emergency Task Force, United for Free Syria, Syrian American Alliance, and Syrian Expatriates Organization.

The Wikipedia page for the above-mentioned Syrian Emergency Task Force says:

The Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF) is a United States-based organization that advocates for the armed overthrow of the government of Syria.

SETF is indirectly funded by the U.S. State Department through contracting firms including Chemonics International and Creative Associates International

Chemonics International is a private “international development” company that works for bilateral and multilateral donors and the private sector to “manage projects in developing countries.” Of course, if there aren’t enough “developing countries”, the US government can always bomb them back to the “developing country” stage. The organization bids primarily on contracts from USAID and “manages projects” (read: gets a foothold in the target country for Western corporations) that cover a variety of technical sectors, including “health”. Perhaps now it makes sense why the board of the Syrian Expatriates Organization is made up of US medical doctors. Perhaps they plan on opening a few for-profit hospitals in Syria once the dust settles on the war they helped to start there. For sure there’ll be plenty of patients available. But let’s take a closer look at SEO’s sister organization, the Syrian Emergency Task Force.

SETF’s executive-director, Mouaz Moustafa, is a former field organizer for the U.S. Democratic National Committee and previously served as executive-director of the Libyan Council of North America. The Libyan Council of North America is one of several US lobby groups that were set up to do exactly what the SETF, SEO, etc., are doing in Syria. So Moustafa comes with some experience. In fact, he’s pretty well connected. I trust that most readers have stumbled across this image at some point:
Friends in low places: Moustafa, jihadis and McCain

That’s Moustafa on the right, with some jihadis behind John McCain on his May 2013 visit to Syria, which was organized by Moustafa and Elizabeth O’Bagy, who also works for the SETF.

Elizabeth O’Bagy, political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a U.S.-based nonprofit providing support to the opposition, said in a phone interview from Turkey that McCain’s office approached the task force two weeks ago about visiting with rebel leaders.

Elizabeth O’Bagy: professional liar

While warmongering for SETF, O’Bagy was also a senior analyst a the Institute for the Study of War, which was founded by Kimberly Kagan, wife of Frederick Kagan, who is the brother of Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland. If you don’t know who these people are, you need to look them up (or just watch this documentary). Like many other similar ‘institutes’, the Institute for the Study of War is funded by grants and contributions from large defense war contractors, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, DynCorp and others. So it’s no surprise that the people who establish and work for such institutes are tasked with making the ideological case for war, or are directly involved in inciting wars; they’re being paid directly by weapons manufacturers.

Anyway, O’Bagy was eventually dumped from the Institute for the Creation Study of War because she claimed she had a PhD when she did not. While lying comes easily to such people and could be said to be a sought-after skill by such warmongering ‘think-tanks’, appearances still have to maintained, and there’s no hard feelings. Commenting on her dismissal, Kimberly Kagan stressed that the termination was not related to O’Bagy’s affiliation with SETF. “I had no problem with her affiliation, I approved it.” No doubt. Two weeks after her dismissal from the Institute for the Study of War, O’Bagy was hired as a legislative assistant by John McCain.

Just before her dismissal, O’Bagy’s testimony was used by John McCain and John Kerry as they testified before Congress in September 2013, in an attempt to gain approval to wage all-out war on Syria and Lebanon’s Hizb’allah, the latter at the specific request of the “Syrian rebels”, who must have been paid by the Israelis to include that stipulation. Readers may remember that this was the tense period just before Russia intervened and brokered the deal to destroy Syria’s “chemical weapons” that the US had falsely accused the Assad government of using against civilians (it turned out to be McCain’s rebels who were – and still are – using them).

I’ve just scratched the surface of this den of vipers masquerading as ‘freedom and democracy’ groups, but it gives you an idea of the complex nature of the ramified networks of psychopathic individuals that exist in the USA to promote war on foreign nations. The methods used are many and varied, but they clearly include the use of ‘iconic’ images of dead or injured children to lie to and manipulate Western public so that they will support the continued warmongering that gave rise to the ‘iconic images’ in the first place. It’s a self-perpetuating system, run by psychopaths, fueled by greed and greased by the blood of dead children in foreign nations.

For those interested in objective reports about what is really going on on the ground in Syria, you might like to keep up with Eva Bartlett’s regular dispatches for SOTT.net.

Joe Quinn is the co-author of 9/11: The Ultimate Truth (with Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 2006) and Manufactured Terror: The Boston Marathon Bombings, Sandy Hook, Aurora Shooting and Other False Flag Terror Attacks (with Niall Bradley, 2014), and the host of Sott.net’s The Sott Report Videos and co-host of the ‘Behind the Headlines’ radio show on the Sott Radio Network.

An established web-based essayist and print author, Quinn has been writing incisive editorials for Sott.net for over 10 years. His articles have appeared on many alternative news sites and he has been interviewed on several internet radio shows and has also appeared on Iranian Press TV. His articles can also be found on his personal blog JoeQuinn.net.

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“We are not the old Left. It is more than clear if you look at our faces, our age, the way we speak and our new way of making politics”. In ultra-conservative Poland, something is moving. We meet some of the founders of Razem (“Together”) a new political party emerging from social movements and strongly inspired by the experience of Podemos in Spain. We discuss their project and the Polish scenario: from the surprising social policies of the current authoritarian government to the liberal opposition defending freedom of information but forgetting about inequalities. And the meaning of launching  a new party from the bottom-up today.

Why a new party in Poland? Why did you make the shift from social movements to party politics?

There was no real left party in Poland. There is the so-called Socialist or post-Communist party, which is just bureaucrats of the late Communist government that became the new establishment after the transition – basically neoliberal, socially conservative, not leftist at all, but they took the place of the left in the country and our objective was to re-open that space. Nobody trusts parties anymore here, and this is why we were very sceptical regarding the success of this operation. But if parties are in distress, social movements are not in a better situation: small, fragmented groups, incapable of having a strong impact, chronically divided.

And so you thought a solution would be to have all this forces come together to form a single political group?

We wrote an open letter to all movements. We received two thousand signatures in a few days, almost all of them – and this was the real surprise – from people we didn’t know and who never took part in organised mobilisations. We really wanted to know who they were! We met them, and to our surprise we learnt they were not interested in traditional left-wing organisations or movements. They reputed those political forms to be old and useless.

This is a story we’ve heard before. When talking with Podemos’ founders they say that to launch a new political project they had to leave the world of organised movements, who at the beginning were even against them, in order to intercept the energy coming from the 15M and only after that, they could go back and include organised movements. Is it something like that?

Exactly. The organised left has been in conflict with us since the beginning. But now many left the traditional movements or organisations and decided to join Razem instead, to come out of their small bubble. We decided to be part of the trail of the new European left, moving from the base.

At last elections there was a coalition of the United Left, post-communists, Greens, left-liberal… Why didn’t you join it but decided to run by yourself?

We have our own agenda and a new way to conceive politics itself together with its organisation. The old way of doing politics is dead and is represented by the same names and the same politicians and power groups that, election after election, try to found a new coalition, a new alliance, just to win again their seat in Parliament. We are talking about the political class as a whole. It simply doesn’t work anymore and it isn’t what we want to do. Moreover, these parties, when elected, passed laws permitting evictions, perfectly fitting in the mainstream “there is no alternative” narrative.

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And they eclipsed. The post-communist party was at 40% and now is not even in Parliament. But what makes your model work? What are your flagship methods or policies?

Our program is somehow not so radical, we could define it as social democratic. But this, in Poland, is something new. Nobody ever talked about progressive taxation, redistribution… And now, when statements concerning workers or poverty are needed by the media, they come to us. The same happens with social issues: we are the ones asking for the decriminalisation of abortion, still an illegal practice in Poland. And when the government tried to pass an even more restrictive law, making abortion illegal even in case of rape, we organised a rally in Warsaw, with more than 10 thousand people. The biggest demonstration ever on this matter in Poland.

Talking about social policies, the current government – led by Kaczyński’s party Law and Justice – is quite an interesting case. It is for sure an authoritarian, xenophobic, illiberal government, on a collision course with the EU. But it is, nevertheless, passing some measures that could be seen as traditionally leftist: reduction of the retirement age, maternity allowance, social housing. What do you think about it? Is this a new kind of nationalist socialism?

We must say we are surprised as well. We thought the social agenda mentioned during the political campaign would be forgotten once elected, as it had happened when the same party had the chance to govern previously. But now they are really doing it! They are way more nationalistic and authoritarian than the first time, but they are also way more social. For the first time we have assisted to a growth, rather than to a reduction in welfare provisions. The new maternity law will drastically reduce child poverty from 28% to 10%, an issue closely linked to large families here in Poland. And for the first time, the most of public spending will go to the poorest: 6 billion szloty to the poorest 10% of the country, only 300million to the richest 10%.

So, for the first time there are redistributive policies.

And we will not be the ones criticising them. A social housing program was launched, not giving resources to banks or big building companies, but giving resources for controlled rents. And there is more: the taxation system is undergoing a modification that will make it more progressive, flat tax is being abandoned together with regressive taxes for the richest. But at the same time, the government is extremely authoritarian. A militia with semi-automatic weapons is about to be created, mostly made by components of far-right groups. A bill against terrorism is about to pass, creating a permanent state of emergency. Not to mention the gag that has been put on the press or all attacks to the independence of the Constitutional Court. It is quite frightening.

And it is against this authoritarianism that we have seen so many demonstrations in Poland. But you have chosen not to join KOD, the organising platform. Why is that?

Well, the governing party is in fact terrible, but this demonstrations are mostly organised by previous governments’ élite [Civic Platform, the party of today’s President of the European Council, Donald Tusk – Ed].

They demonstrate for freedom of speech, but then attack the government’s social policies reputing them a way to “buy” votes. They don’t understand that this money is incredibly important for many people. They tell the poor they should go out in the streets, fighting to save our constitutional system and at the same time that by accepting 500 zsloty per month as maternity benefit they are selling themselves. And all this while a majority of the low-middle class only earns 2.000 zsloty per month! They are completely out of touch with reality. And this is how in Hungary Viktor Orban obtained an absolute majority in Parliament, by having only one opposition representing only the élite.

We want to kick out this government, but to do it we believe that just to gather liberals in big cities is not enough. You have to reach out to those people who now vote for Law and Justice [the governing party – Ed]. If no one has the courage to create a social agenda, then the space is open for authoritarian forces.

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What is the social base of the governing party?

They have a cross-cutting base. Many vote them as they are thought to be against the establishment and the people had enough of the previous government. A government that chose to ignore completely all social issues. Civic Platform talks about those Poles who had to emigrate as “lucky” people who had the opportunity to have a working experience abroad. They didn’t realise how much suffering was brought by family separations nor that 2 million people couldn’t find a job in their own country. These oppositions – KOD, Civic Platform – are part of the post-transition elites that now would love to just go back to previous business as usual. All without realising inequality levels are way higher in Poland than the European average.

You just received considerable public funding because of your result in the last elections. You have three more years until the next one: what now? What will be your next steps?

We are trying to open 25 social spaces all around Poland. They won’t be just normal party offices, but community places where everyone can come and utilise the space, organise a dance lesson, classes for children, legal assistance and so on. This is something the socialist party of Poland used to do before WWII. We do have a strong tradition of  political parties as social entities, working with cooperatives, unions, even sport clubs, way more than just an election to election machine. We didn’t call ourselves “something-left”, as nobody here know what left is anymore. We called ourselves Razem, “Together”. But our origins are clear, and we want to start anew from there.

Find out more about leftist political circles in Poland

Copyright European Alternatives 2016

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Translated from Chinese

August 15 marked the 71st anniversary of Japan’s unconditional surrender during World War II. However, on this special day when Japan should spend time reflecting on its history of militaristic aggression, its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sent a ritual offering to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine.

The Yasukuni Shrine, which honors 14 Class-A convicted war criminals among 2.5 million Japanese war dead from WWII, is regarded as a symbol of past Japanese militarism.

The honoring of war criminals, no matter what form it takes, only serves to further hurt those Asian neighbors that Japan once invaded. Such perverse acts to whitewash its crimes of military aggression runs contrary to the pursuit of peace in Asia and the world at large.

It’s common knowledge that the Yasukuni Shrine is a source of spiritual inspiration for Japan to start another war of aggression. Yet, the country’s new Defense Minister Tomomi Inada has tried to associate such a notorious place with the mourning of soldiers belonging to Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.

She claimed at a recent seminar that “the Yasukuni Shirine is not the place to vow not to fight. It needs to become a place where we vow to desperately fight when our Motherland is at risk.” Her words shocked even the Kyodo News.

The 71-year-peace after WWII was hard-won. Born from the victory over fascism, this peace has been the foundation for post-war international order. This conclusion is not something that can be ignored, denied or overturned by any country.

World peace and the post-war order, which came at the cost of the blood and lives of the peoples of Allied countries, is closely tied to justice.

Last year, the world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of the World Anti-Fascist War, but some countries, looking out for their own interests, have turned a blind eye to the wrongdoings of Japan and have even urged Japan to abandon its pacifist constitution. The world today is witnessing the negative impact brought about by this short-sighted strategy.

By erasing its invasion history, Japan is on one hand attempting to lock away memories of the war and on the other hand setting the stage for future action. In the House of Councillors election in July, lawmakers pushing for Constitution amendments won more than two-thirds of seats. This has led to forward-thinking people in Japan to also begin worrying about the “return of war.”

In order to strengthen military power and shake off the post-war order, the Abe administration usually uses the so-called “China threat” as an excuse to deceive the Japanese public and other parts of the world.

After Japan adopted its new security laws that lifted a decades-old ban on collective self-defense, the Abe administration has been making every effort to contain China by instigating disputes between China and other countries.

On the day when the so-called arbitral decision on the South China Sea dispute was announced in July, Japan, a non-party in the issue, immediately pressured China to accept the arbitration. At the following 11th Asia-Europe Summit and foreign ministers’ meetings on East-Asia cooperation held in last month, Japan reiterated its stance again and again.

In the country’s annual defense white paper issued in early August, Japan pointed fingers at China over the South China Sea issue once again. The paper also made irresponsible remarks concerning China’s armament, military expense and transparency. These actions by the Abe administration has triggered alarm and concern throughout the international community.

Japan’s tribute at the Yasukuni Shrine on Monday once again reminds us that world peace is not that should be taken for granted, it demands continual justice and also the capability to defend it.

 

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Turkey — Let Us Not Celebrate Yet!

August 19th, 2016 by Andre Vltchek

So many would like this to happen – to see Turkey go, to leave NATO, to break its psychological, political and economic dependency on the West. Now that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies are quarreling with the United States and the EU, there is suddenly great hope that Turkey may thoroughly re-think its position in the world, strengthen its ties with Russia and China, renew the historic friendship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, improve its relationship with Iran, and join the increasingly powerful anti-imperialist alliance.

Could this be really happening, so suddenly and so unexpectedly? If only Turkey were to join BRICS, if it decided to leave NATO and wrestle itself out of that deadly embrace of the West, the entire world would change!

Many people around me are already celebrating. But I am not joining them. I’m still waiting. I know Turkey well. I have worked closely with Turkish people for more than 20 years. Five of my books were translated and published there, and in Istanbul, I have appeared on countless television talk shows.

And honestly: the more I know Turkey, the less I understand it!

It is one of the most complex countries on Earth. Turkey is unpredictable, full of contradictions and shifting alliances. Nothing is really what it appears to be on the surface. And even under the surface, the currents are often merging, separating, and even reversing their course.

To write about Turkey, to write fairly and in-depth, requires jogging through a minefield. In the end, you always get it wrong! You make a huge amount of Turkish people unhappy, no matter what you say. It is mainly because there seems to be no simple, objective truth. And various ‘camps’ disagree with each other, fundamentally and passionately.

That is why I am surprised how many foreign analysts are suddenly daring to pass (often patronizing) judgments on the recent events in Turkey. How certain many of them sound!

Many of people who don’t know Turkey well are now indeed celebrating. Everything seems to be clear to them: ‘The Turkish President changed his course and decided to apologize to Russia for downing its jet near the Syrian/Turkish border. Then the West orchestrated a deadly military coup. Erdoğan said: “Enough is enough,” exposed the plot and went to St. Petersburg to embrace President Putin and Russia.’

I wish it were that simple. I wish I could be now joining in the celebration!

Instead, I am sitting down in front of my computer and writing this essay about Turkey, a country which I love, but for so many years have failed to comprehend.

*

I met Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the Istanbul headquarters of his (then) party – Refah Partisi, RP – when he was the Mayor of this the largest Turkish city. It was the end of the 90’s and in that period I was busy trying not to get killed while covering the ‘Yugoslav War’, moving between Sarajevo, Pale, Belgrade and the frontlines. While most of my comrades-journalists would travel by train to Vienna (there were no flights and foreigners were not allowed to drive) to get a break, I always opted for Istanbul, taking slow trains through Bulgaria and Edirne. I felt that I had to learn about and get to understand the Ottoman Empire, if I truly wanted to comprehend the Balkans.

In those days, Mr. Erdoğan managed to horrify many of the middle and upper class pro-Western and secular dwellers of Istanbul. He belonged to an Islamist party in a city that was always looking towards Europe. But in the end, he introduced some sweeping social reforms and dramatically improved its infrastructure, from the garbage recycling system, to transportation. UN-HABITAT gave him a double thumbs-up. I wanted to talk to him, to hear what he had to say. And he agreed.

Instead of a religious fanatic, I found a self-centered, highly driven and pragmatic politician, a populist.

“Do you speak Turkish?” he asked me instead of greeting.

“Not well,” I replied. “Just a few words.”

“You see!” he shouted, triumphantly. “Your Turkish sucks, but you can pronounce the name of my party, Refah Partisi, perfectly, without any accent! Isn’t that already proof of how important, how indispensable we are?”

I wasn’t sure about that… I was trying to comprehend, to follow his logic. I have to admit that I felt more comfortable in a trench in Yugoslavia, than being there, in Istanbul, facing this overpowering man who was obviously on his great ego trip.

But he kept ‘delivering’. And the Turkish people, many of them, kept voting for him, until in 2003 he became the Prime Minister, and in 2014, Turkey’s President.

*

Islamist or not, and since 2003, Erdoğan has not been rejected by the West; he was the de facto leader of the country which has been a staunch and unapologetic member of the mightiest Western alliance – NATO. And he made no attempts to break the ties.

Periodically, Turkey had some minor quarrels with the West, its partners and ‘client’ states, but nothing that would really jeopardize the alliance. After the 2010 deadly raid on a Turkish ship headed for Gaza, Erdoğan confronted Israel, but mainly just verbally. The military ties were not severed: for instance, Turkey did not stop training Israeli combat pilots at its military airport outside Konya.

Were there too many contradictions? Most definitely!

*

In Turkey, it is actually extremely difficult to figure out ‘who is who?’ Allegiances are shifting and the positions of individuals and organizations keep changing.

During one of her visits to Turkey as Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton allegedly asked the Turkish government to shut down Aydinlik Gazetesi, this important socialist and nationalist newspaper. On several occasions, Aydinlik interviewed me. I also interviewed its Chief Editor and other staff members. I worked closely with its affiliated television station, Ulusal Kanal, the home base to one of the most prolific Turkish documentary filmmakers (and my friend) Serkan Koc.

Serkan and his comrades helped greatly during the filming of my documentary for the South American television station TeleSUR: on the 2013 Gezi Park uprising in Istanbul, and on ISIS being trained and supported in the ‘refugee’ camps and in the border area with Syria, around the city of Hatay.

I was explained to how the terrorists were trained at Apaydin refugee camp, as well as at a notorious NATO facility right outside the city of Adana – the Incirlik Air Base. On three occasions, I managed to film and photograph both facilities, often risking my life.

But ask the hard-core left in Turkey, particularly Communists, about both Aydinlik and Ulusal Kanal, and the answers you will get would be very far from being unanimous!

And ask the Aydinlik people about the plight of the Kurdish people and about the PKK, and you would get some derogatory, or at least extremely critical declarations.

Of course most of the Kemalists, and almost all nationalists, are against the Kurdish struggle for independence or even for some sort of autonomy. They believe that there should be one strong, secular Turkish state, full stop, and that the PKK is just a terrorist group.

On the other hand, many Turkish Communists have embraced the Kurdish plight, and are very critical of the nationalists and their media.

But where does the PKK really stand, politically? Well, it all depends on who you ask! Some say that it is the Kurdish nationalist movement, and that it is indisputably ‘left wing’. Others strongly disagree, openly defining it as the ‘fifth-column’, and even as a CIA implant.

But the “Kurdish Issue” is not the only one on which almost no one in Turkey seems to agree. Ask about the Armenian genocide, and you will soon realize that you have just parachuted yourself right into the middle of (already mentioned above) a minefield. Even most of the Turkish left wing will decisively reject the “genocide” definition. You may lose most of your friends by just bringing the Kurdish and Armenian “issues” into the conversation, in one single night.

Confusing? Not yet, it gets much worse. If you were to drive, before 2014, to Silviri Prison, some 80 kilometers from Istanbul, on the European side, you’d understand what real confusion is! This high-security facility used to hold hundreds of Turkish high-level military generals and officers, as well as some intellectuals and activists. All of them were there because of the so-called Operation Sledgehammer (in Turkish: Balyoz Harekâtı), an alleged failed military secularist coup dating back to 2003.

But who were the generals, and what was really behind their arrest? I met the families of some of them, and I filmed their testimonies. Several of them were strongly opposed to Mr. Erdoğan and his AKP Party. Some believed in Turkish “Eurasianism”, while others (although very few and not always openly) were opposed to Turkey’s membership in NATO.

Whatever it was, the government found the generals and their allies ‘uncomfortable’, even dangerous. The case against them was most likely fabricated and was heavily criticized at home and abroad. But it had a strong backer, the Cemaat movement, which is an Islamist movement led by the exiled cleric and (then) AKP’s close ally, Fethullah Gülen!

Not surprisingly, after AKP and Gülen had fallen out with each other in 2014, the accused were released from prison, and on 31 March 2015 all 236 suspects were acquitted.

And now President Erdoğan accuses Fethullah Gülen of being behind the latest, aborted bloody coup, demanding his extradition from the United States back to Turkey! How quickly, how fundamentally things change in this country!

To make it all even more complicated, my left wing Turkish colleagues  – investigative journalists – asked me as early as in 2012 to help them to investigate the activities of Cemaat Movement in general and of Fethullah Gülen in particular, in Africa (where I was then based), mainly in connection with them building schools and spreading all sorts of dangerous forms of an extremist religious teaching. In those days, Fethullah Gülen was still seen in Turkey as a close ally of both the United States and AKP!

At some point, AKPs’ ‘New Ottomanism’ went a ‘bit out of control’, as far as the West was concerned, but overall Turkey stayed on course, supporting the West and its imperialist policy in the region. And in the recent past, the main ally of the AKP (although its arch-enemy now), Fethullah Gülen, was part of that ‘good course’.

My friend, Yiğit Günay, an author, historian and journalist educated in Cuba, explained several months before the latest coup:

“The policy was called the Neo-Ottoman-ism. The idea was that the AKP government, or Turkey itself, would work as a sub-contractor of the Western imperialism in the region, and as a sub-contractor it would expand its own zone of influence, in those regions that you had just defined. In those days there was also the Gülen movement based in the United States. Right now the government and they are enemies, but back then they were allied. The Gülen movement was particularly active in Africa, because their main claim to fame is opening schools and universities. And they have a huge amount of money. I read a report that in 2013, the movement had some 130 “chartered schools”, in the United Sates alone… And if you have chartered schools, you get millions of dollars paid to you by the US tax payers. They are also very well organized; they have huge companies; they are wealthy. And they use this wealth to increase their influence.

Practically, when the Arab Spring began, the current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP were very skeptical. They didn’t understand what really was going on, until the Americans told them…

“Don’t worry: it is us who are doing it…”

There was a point when the NATO jets began bombing Libya, and Erdoğan made a speech, basically saying: “What the fuck is NATO doing, bombing Libya?” And two days later, Turkey became part of the mission. The Americans told him “Are you stupid? Don’t you see what’s going on?” And he promptly changed his mind.

But the main idea behind all this was: The Arab Spring was basically pro-AKP. It was what is called the “regime change”, all over the region. The new regimes were predominantly Islamist, and so the AKP had a chance to gain influence inside them.”

All that I have written above is just to illustrate the complexity of the Turkish political labyrinth.

There is almost nothing constant here; shifting sands come to mind as the most suitable metaphor.

*

Now where is Turkey actually heading?

Is it really possible that it may finally turn east?

Of course there are great hopes! Of course such hopes could at least, partially, be justified. But I am cautious, and not yet ready to celebrate.

The West is perfectly aware that “losing Turkey” would be a mighty blow to its geopolitical interests, read: to its totalitarian imperialist designs. It is highly unlikely that it would let this enormous country with one of the most strategic geographical locations on Earth, go easily and peacefully.

If the Turkish President does not yield to the West, if he decisively pulls his country out of NATO, if he shuts down the Incirlik Air Base (with its 50 or so nuclear warheads), and especially if he then shares Turkish military facilities with the Russians, the West will definitely act forcefully, even brutally. What would be on the ‘menu’ this time: an assassination attempt, another military coup or some externally provoked unrest? We don’t know, but we can guess: there would be appalling bloodshed.

And where, on what side would the Turkish intellectuals stand: all those renowned journalists, artists and academics? They are often very brave (Chomsky and I called them, in our recent book, ‘some of the most courageous on Earth’), but where are their real political allegiances? Some of them are pure socialists, even Marxists, but definitely not all. Many are actually looking straight towards the West: Paris, London, New York and Berlin.

One of my Turkish publishers and a friend, now deceased, the internationally renowned Turkish physical chemist and molecular biophysicist Oktay Sinanoğlu (often called the “Turkish Einstein”), was one of the most outspoken critics of Western imperialism. But he was also, for many years, a professor at Yale University, and his last years were spent mainly at his beachfront property in Florida. His love for Turkey was, for my taste, too ‘long distance”, too “platonic”.

Turkish intellectuals cannot even agree which writers to admire. Two most famous contemporary Turkish novelists, a Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Orhan Pamuk, and Elif Shafak, are seen by many as just two mediocre literati who totally sold out to the West, portraying Turkey as has been expected from them by their foreign publishers and public.

Many young and educated Turks have lately been heading to Latin America, to learn about the new revolutionary trends, governments and movements there. Others are travelling to Asia. For instance, Istanbul-based intellectuals are much more cosmopolitan than their shockingly Euro-centric and provincial counterparts in Athens. But European secularism and liberalism are still the main reference point and even the goal for most of the urban Turks.

They may be ‘against NATO’ and ‘against US foreign policy’, but it’s often uncertain what are they actually for.

Would they support the government, if it were to decide to kick out NATO and embrace Russia and China instead? Would they want Turkey to join BRICS?

Mr. Erdoğan is a shrewd, pragmatic politician. He knows all about trading and ‘bargaining chips’. He knows what his country is worth – to the West and its imperialism, and to those who are opposing it!

His popularity at home is soaring, reaching almost 70%. He has a clear ‘moral mandate’ when criticizing the West for either supporting (or even triggering) the recent coup, or at least for doing nothing to protect the Turkish ‘legitimate government’ in a time of great crisis.

And the West is now taking his threats seriously, for the first time!

Based on past experience, Erdoğan may now begin extremely hard bargaining with Washington, Berlin and other Western capitals. The recent ‘shifting towards the East’ could just be an extremely effective bluff.

Both Obama and Putin know that. That is why US officials are not really ‘concerned’ about the nukes stored in Turkey. That is why Putin was very polite, while meeting Erdoğan in St. Petersburg; polite but not much more.

Everyone is waiting for Turkey’s next move. And Mr. Erdoğan may take his time to actually make one. Time is on his side. He may now play both – imperialist and anti-imperialist – camps against each other. Whatever works!

Russia and China (apart of being on the right side of history) can offer a lot, practically: The new Silk Road all the way from the Pacific Ocean to Istanbul, complete with high-speed rail links, IT corridors, pipelines, as well as the total revamp of the troubled Turkish energy sector, just to mention some of the ‘goodies’.

Turkey would expect the West to offer more, much more, to match and to beat what is on the offer from the East.

Unfortunately, it seems that all this has nothing to do with ideology, or even with simple ‘right and wrong’, it is just some cold pragmatism and practical calculations.

But as I wrote at the beginning of this essay: I still don’t feel that I really understand Turkey! And even some of my Turkish comrades are now writing to me, telling me that ‘they cannot understand it, either!’

Anything can change there. People can change. The pragmatic father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was a true Turkish nationalist, but strongly influenced by the ‘secular West’. Furthermore, in order to keep his nation strong, united, and independent, he had to fight the Western powers, and accept a great amount of military and economic help from the Soviet Union.

The President of Turkey is now holding the future of the region and the world in his hands. He is well aware of it. He can make history with a single stroke of the pen.

Just in case he makes a good decision, I am keeping a bottle of good champagne in my fridge. It is well chilled and ready to be popped open, at any moment. I hope; I truly hope that soon there will be an occasion for the cork to hit the ceiling!

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western TerrorismPoint of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

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Could Trump Pull Off a Post-Party Coalition?

August 19th, 2016 by Sputnik

Hillary Clinton, Queen of Chaos, Queen of War, Golden Goldman Girl, for all practical purposes is by now the official bipartisan candidate of US neocons and neoliberalcons alike.

Certified add-ons include Wall Street; selected hedge funds; TPP cheerleaders; CFR(Council on Foreign Relations) interventionists; media barons; multinational corporate hustlers; in fact virtually the whole exceptionalist US establishment, duly underwritten by the bipartisan, mega-wealthy 0.0001%.

That does leave Donald J. Trump in the astonishing position of egomaniac billionaire outsider who somehow dreams he can game the whole system on his own, moved by his inexhaustible chutzpah.

It’s under this dynamic that Trump has been demonized with medieval fervor by US corporate media. His non-stop motormouth – and motortweet – certainly does not help, conveying the impression he’s in the business of antagonizing multitudes non-stop. For the establishment, his billions mean nothing; he’s treated like a bum. He may be impervious to empathy; on the other hand that kind of treatment keeps earning him widespread sympathy among the angry, semi-destitute, non-college educated white masses.

A US industrial renaissance?

Underneath all this sound and fury, something else is (quietly) going on. Powerful business interests discreetly supporting Trump – and away from the media circus — are convinced he’s got the road map to victory. The question is whether he may be able to tame his erratic behavior to seal the deal.

His key message, according to these backers, must revolve around the destruction of US industries by rigged currencies, and the “destruction of the wages of American workers by importing illegal cheap labor from dollar-a-day wage nations.”

And that comes with an all-important military angle as a surefire selling point. As Trump’s backers outline it, “the Pacific Ocean cannot be used for transporting the vital and essential components of our military industrial complex, for in the event of war withRussia or China their advanced silent submarines equipped with advanced anti-ship weapons will block all of our ocean transport, collapsing our military industrial production in any war with catastrophic consequences. These component factories for Intel and others must be repatriated at once through currency adjustments or tariffs.”So Trump should hammer the message that all new bank credit must be tied to rebuilding destroyed US industries, “either by ending currency rigging or applying tariffs.” Bank credit, Trump backers argue, “should not be used for currency manipulation, or for cash settlement market rigging. There should be no bank credit for speculation and absolutely none for hedge funds. Let’s wipe these speculative vehicles out by huge taxes on short-term trading profits, ending tax concessions on borrowing, and ending all bank credit for speculation. Let these people go to do real work.”

That, in a nutshell, explains Wall Street’s visceral aversion to Trump – from the Bloombergs to the Lloyd Blankfeins. Anyone familiar with Wall Street knows every market, commodity and indexes are rigged by cash settlement manipulations. As a New York-based Trump backer puts it, “This alone is sufficient reason to support Donald J. Trump. We should make the Carl Icahans and George Soroses do real work by taxing away their speculative profits. We need Henry Fords in this nation who create and build industries, and not Wall Street looters, where they rig everything as in 2008 then used their political power over bought politicians for bailouts, after throwing tens of millions of American out of their homes.”According to this road map, which is already on Trump’s desk – but no one knows whether he read it in full, or will implement it – fighting illegal immigration and rigged currencies side by side would create nothing less than an industrial renaissance in the US to rebuild the devastated Detroits. Essentially, the road map calls for replacing millions of illegal immigrants with millions of unemployed US citizens; Trump’s backers consider the real unemployment rate to be a whopping 23% today, based on the 1955 Bureau of Labor Statistical Methodology, “and not the rigged statistics of today.”

The bottom line is this road map calls for Trump, if elected, to create a cross-party, or trans-party coalition – as once happened in the House and Senate when Jesse Helms on one side and John Conyers and Chuck Schumer on the other side actually did real business.

This all implies Trump should become well versed in the national economy ideas of Friedrich List – whose tariff-protected Zollverein League was essentially the founding method of Prussia to build the German nation.

Some of the above has already filtered out in Trump’s announced economic agenda. Now comes the hard part for a man with an exceedingly short attention span who gets into the groove by tweets and sound bites; to coherently sell the plan without picking up unnecessary fights along the way.

But Vlad has already won it anyway

Polls at the moment seem to be pointing to a Hillary landslide. Trump’s backers tough “would not rely on the polls. Everything is rigged.”And then there’s the all-enveloping “Russian aggression” hysteria. Hillary went as far as equating President Putin to Hitler. Trump insists he’s ready to do business with Moscow – starting with a joint operation to end ISIS/ISIL/Daesh for good.

Why bother? The Stupidity-o-Meter as applied to US mainstream media has gone on interstellar overdrive anyway – as the presidential election winner has already been christened: it’s – who else? – the omniscient Vladimir Putin.

A business source familiar with the designs of the real Masters of the Universe cuts seriously to the chase: “As far as Russia is concerned, the issue is decided from above, and that is where the battle has been. The decision is above Hillary and Donald, and Hillary will be ordered to create a rapprochement if she is elected, if that is what is decided. If Trump wins, it is easy; and if he doesn’t, then the fact he brought it up will be used as a catalyst for policy changes toward Russia. The fight is behind the scenes now.”

As much as currency rigging “will be ended, as we already saw Jack Lew give out the orders to Germany and Japan”, a new geoeconomic  map – possibly under Trump — would swing towards the end of the oil price war as well. As a Trump backer puts it, “this is a national objective of the United States, as a higher price will make the United States energy independent. This is part of the significance of the Trump revolution.”According to a source close to the House of Saud, Saudis and Russians are already involved in tortuous pre-negotiations on the possibility of engineering an oil pricearound $100.00 a barrel; “There should be enough mutuality of interest between the Saudis betrayed by the US under the neocons, and to be destroyed by the neocons eventually, and the Russians who can prevent that.”

An end to the oil price war may be something the Pentagon won’t be able to argue about. As a Trump backer notes, “it is in the vital interest of the military-industrial complex to achieve complete energy independence, and repatriate all its military industries to the shores of the United States.”

Compared to the current, 24/7 mud-wrestling match, all this may seem straight from Alice in Wonderland. There’s no evidence such an ambitious – and contentious – agenda can be sold to movers and shakers from JP Morgan to the Koch brothers. Trump creating a cross-party, trans-party or even post-party movement will only succeed if substantial players in the Power Elite are behind it, and there are no signs of this happening.

What proceeds relentlessly is a massive disinformation campaign – a ghastly remix of those good ol’ Cold War anti-USSR avalanches. The Clinton Media Machine is even vilifying Michael Flynn, former head of the DIA, who supports Trump. Trump was conceptually right when he said Obama and Hillary were the founder and co-founder of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. That’s exactly what Flynn admitted in that notorious interview when he stressed that the expansion of the phony Caliphate was a “willful decision” taken in Washington.

The bottom line, as it stands, is that Trump is not raising enough cash to offset the formidable Clinton cash machine. Now comes the time when he must really take no prisoners to gain maximum exposure – while trying to sell the road map outlined above, one tweet at a time.

And of course there will be a surprise – October and otherwise. Nothing has been decided – yet. Disraeli’s Coningsby was never more appropriate; “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.”

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This pic is making the rounds in “western” media together with a tearful story from “activists” in a neighborhood in al-Qaeda occupied east-Aleppo.

A boy, seemingly wounded, sits quietly in a brand new, very well equipped ambulance. At a point he touches what looks like a wound on his left temple. He shows no reaction to that touch.


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The two minute video (also here), from which the pic is taken, shows the boy being handed from the dark above to some person in a rescue jacket and carried into the ambulance. There he sits quietly, unattended, while several people take videos and pictures of him. One other kids, not obviously wounded, is then carried to the ambulance.

As the story is told:

Mahmoud Raslan, a photojournalist who captured the image, told the Associated Press that emergency workers and journalists tried to help the child, identified as 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, along with his parents and his three siblings, who are 1, 6 and 11 years old.”We were passing them from one balcony to the other,” Raslan said, adding: “We sent the younger children immediately to the ambulance, but the 11-year-old girl waited for her mother to be rescued. Her ankle was pinned beneath the rubble.”

An internet search for “Mahmoud Raslan”, the claimed “photojournalist”, finds no other pictures or videos attributed to that name.

There are about 15 men standing around the scene and doing nothing. (Next to a “just bombed” site in a warzone? No fear of a double-tap strike?) At least two more men, besides the videographer, are taking pictures or videos.

Another kid is carried into the ambulance. In the background there is someone with a white helmet wearing a shirt of the U.S./UK financed “White Helmets” propaganda group.

An animated wounded man is walked towards the ambulance.


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Like the boy, the man seems to have a wound at the upper head. But like the boy he is not bleeding at all. There is some red colored substance on his face but no blood is flowing. That is astonishing. When I rode ambulances as a first-responder, people with head wounds always bled like stuck pigs (they often messed up the car which I then had to clean). As WebMD notes:

Minor cuts on the head often bleed heavily because the face and scalp have many blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. Although this amount of bleeding may be alarming, many times the injury is not severe …

The amount of red colored substance on the boy and the man do not correspond to the amount one would expect from even a minor head wound. There are also no bandages applied or anything else that could have been used to stop an actual head wound from bleeding.

Compare the above to this recent picture from a boy in west-Aleppo. (No “western” media showed this boy and his suffering. He is not on “our side”.) The boy suffered a head wound after an improvised missile from al-Qaeda and its associates hit his neighborhood. He is in care, the bleeding has been stopped. The amount of blood on his body and soaked into his cloth is a multiple of that seen in the above pictures. The blood is also mixed with the other dirt on his face, not painted over. This looks like those patients in my ambulance. This looks real.

All attributes of the “boy on orange seat” scene and of the video are the same that can be found in dozens of “White Helmets” videos. It is the same theme that occurs over and over again in our picture collection Dramatic Rescue! Man With Kid Runs Towards Camera!.

I am inclined to believe that the video above is just as staged as the other “White Helmets” videos and pictures. The look of the boy’s wound is a bit more realistic than usual but the lack of bleeding, that no one attends to the boy, his non-reaction to touching the “wound” and the general setting of the video scene lets me believe that it is staged.

This new, widely distributed propaganda item comes again at a moment where al-Qaeda and its associates in Syria are in trouble. The Russian air force is hitting them in the rear area of their attack on west-Aleppo and it is hurting them badly. A “humanitarian ceasefire”, which can then be used to reorganize and resupply, is urgently needed. The propaganda helps to increase the pressure for such a demand.

Some of its sponsors want the “White Helmets” nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization itself lobbies for it on its website. Has anyone else ever done such?


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Have they no shame asking themselves for the prize? This right above another version of their main corporate brand attribute, a “Dramatic Rescue! Man With Kid Runs Towards Camera!” picture. Asking for a Nobel right above another staged scene?

But why not? Obama was nothing more than a marketed product when was handed the Peace Nobel. He then bombed people in seven Muslim dominated countries to dust. There is no good reason then to not give that prize to yet another propaganda tool which also wants more war.

Then again, I find a nomination for the Academy Awards, maybe in the category of “Best Marketed Fakes”, more appropriate.

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Syria: China and Iran Join Russia in Larger Role

August 19th, 2016 by Ulson Gunnar

Several developments this week mark an increase of activity from Syria’s allies, Russia, Iran and now China.

These include a Russian-Iranian agreement to use Iranian territory to position Russian Tupolev Tu-22M strategic bombers as well as Iranian and Iraqi airspace for both the bombers and Russian cruise missiles to pass through on their way to militant targets in Syria.

It also includes China’s recent pledge to provide humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people as well as military support for Syrian government troops in their fight to restore order nationwide.

The Details

The BBC would report in its article, “Syrian conflict: Russian bombers use Iran base for air strikes,” that:

Russia’s defence ministry says it has used a base in western Iran to carry out air strikes in Syria.

Tupolev-22M3 long-range bombers and Sukhoi-34 strike fighters took off from Hamedan on Tuesday, a statement said.

Targets were hit in Aleppo, Idlib and Deir al-Zour provinces, it added.

The BBC would also report:

Last week, Russia asked Iran and Iraq to allow Russian cruise missiles to fly through their airspace for attacks on terrorist targets in Syria.

It should be noted that Russian Tu-22Ms have already been used during Russia’s operations in Syria, however they have been based in southern Russia. Moving them forward west of Tehran, allows for shorter and more frequent missions, saving fuel and time. This further strengthening of Russian-Iranian ties come amid the delivery of Russian S-300 anti-air defense systems to Iran as part of an $800 million contract signed in 2007.

In addition to this, Reuters would report in its article, “China says seeks closer military ties with Syria,” that:

“China and Syria’s militaries have a traditionally friendly relationship, and China’s military is willing to keep strengthening exchanges and cooperation with Syria’s military,” the news agency paraphrased Guan [Guan Youfei, director of the Office for International Military Cooperation of China’s Central Military Commission] as saying.

Both also talked about personnel training and “reached a consensus” on the Chinese military providing humanitarian aid, Xinhua added, without elaborating.

Reuters would also make mention of Uyghur militants operating in Syria alongside other Western-backed militant groups, suggesting this as a possible motive for China’s interest in the conflict.

The Implications

The presence of Uyghur militants operating in Syria helps illustrate the wider implications of the Syrian conflict. While characterised as a “civil war” by the Western media, it is in fact a proxy war waged against Syria and its allies by a US-led multinational coalition.

Should this coalition succeed in replicating the scenario that unfolded in Libya in 2011, Western-backed militants would have a staging ground significantly closer to Iran, southern Russia and western China. The presence of large, well-funded and armed militant groups in Syria has already helped bolster peripheral networks in North Africa and Central Asia.

Should this coalition fail in the face of joint Syrian-Russian-Iranian-Chinese efforts, these militant groups can be exposed and liquidated and joint efforts in turn shifted to eliminate peripheral networks beyond Syria’s battlefields.

China and Iran’s increased involvement in the Syrian conflict raise pressure on the US-led coalition and its ongoing proxy war, making it increasingly unlikely that Western ambitions will be realized. The growing concentration of forces in and around Syria may eventually pose a danger to many of the coalition members working with the US in the region.

With Russian forces staged in Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states are now at a greater disadvantage vis-a-vis Tehran. Should China be forced deeper into the conflict, this may compound the already tenuous position of US allies in the region even further.

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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Poor Haiti. 

It is not enough to be the poorest country in the world and to be in the sphere of corruption from the Clinton Foundation after suffering a devastating earthquake in 2010, now the UN has admitted that its peacekeeping troops literally imported cholera bacteria in its efforts to help the nation 

The only problem is those efforts have now cost the country thousands of deaths throughout the last six years.

According to the New York Times,

“the office of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged that the United Nations played a role in the initial outbreak and that a “significant new set of U.N. actions” will be needed to respond to the crisis.”

Great. So after admitting that your help efforts actually were detrimental, you offer more of the same help. As a reminder, cholera victims suffer from dehydration caused by severe diarrhea or vomiting.

The NYT continues by stating,

“The statement comes on the heels of a confidential report sent to Mr. Ban by a longtime United Nations adviser on Aug. 8. Written by Philip Alston, a New York University law professor who serves as one of a few dozen experts, known as special rapporteurs, who advise the organization on human rights issues, the draft language stated plainly that the epidemic “would not have broken out but for the actions of the United Nations…

But it represents a significant shift after more than five years of high-level denial of any involvement or responsibility of the United Nations in the outbreak, which has killed at least 10,000 people and sickened hundreds of thousands.”

Perhaps it is time for more Clinton crony capitalism and intervention in the name of saving lives.

The cost, as we now know, is about 10,000 bodies every six years.

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Donald Trump has backtracked — sort of — on his assertion that President Obama and Hillary Clinton are “the founders” of ISIS, or the “most valuable players” on the Islamic State team. “Obviously, I’m being sarcastic,” said the self-styled “America-Firster” – quickly adding, “but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you.”

Trump cannot articulate or fully grasp the horrific truth of his original statement because that would require a much more fundamental indictment of U.S. imperial policy in the Muslim world since the last days of 1979, when Zbigniew Brzezinski convinced President Jimmy Carter to set the jihadist dogs loose in Afghanistan.

As stated in his memoir From the Shadow, Brzezinski advised Carter to aid the right-wing Muslim resistance to the leftist, secular government in Afghanistan in order to “induce a Soviet military intervention” and thus embroil the USSR in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Brzezinski viewed the so-called Mujahadeen as potential foot soldiers of U.S. global policy. “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” Brzezinski asked, rhetorically, decades later.

Having acted in accordance with Brzezinski’s counsel, President Carter can accurately be described as a founding “creator” of al Qaida, along with fellow “most valuable player” Ronald Reagan, whose CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia to spend billions drawing Muslims from around the globe into the war in Afghanistan. Together, the U.S. and the Saudis gave birth to the international Islamic jihadist movement – a phenomenon that had not previously existed in world history. The jihadists would become an essential weapon in the U.S. imperial armory, a ghastly tool for regime change in the Muslim world which also doubled as justification for the never ending American quest for planetary dominance, now that the Soviet boogeyman was gone.

“In 2011, Obama launched the Mother of All Proxy Wars.”

Brzezinski became Barack Obama’s foreign policy guru, with consequences that should have been predictable for U.S. Middle East policy but were largely ignored by liberals and so-called progressives in their euphoria at the exit of George W. Bush.

Clearly, the U.S. public would not tolerate another episode of massive, direct U.S. troop involvement in the region; that was no longer an option. But what force, then, was available to execute Washington’s unfinished agenda for conquest in this part of the world? In 2011, Obama launched the Mother of All Proxy Wars, first against Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya, then swiftly mobilizing the totality of the international jihadist network that had been created out of whole cloth under Carter and Reagan nearly 30 years before. Washington and its NATO partners in the Libya aggression, in close concert with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, turned Syria into a cauldron of death, funneling billions of dollars in weapons to literally hundreds of Salafist and outright mercenary militias, with Al Qaida’s regional affiliate, al Nusra, at the core. This was Obama’s idea of a “smart” war: a frenzied terror offensive cloaked in lies and deception.

The criminal foreign policy pursued by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is rooted in the same worldview arrogantly articulated by Brzezinski when he derided those who fretted over the blowback that might result from deploying “some stirred-up Moslems” as foot soldiers of imperialism. As the U.S. and its allies literally competed with each other to flood Syria with the weapons, funds, intelligence resources and diplomatic and media cover to bring down the government in Damascus, they collectively created both the material basis and political space for the jihadists to pursue their own ideological objectives. ISIS emerged, to establish a caliphate of its own in Syria and Iraq. No one should have expected otherwise.

“This was Obama’s idea of a ‘smart”’war: a frenzied terror offensive cloaked in lies and deception.”

Back in July of 2014, we at Black Agenda Report described the rise of ISIS as signaling “the final collapse of U.S. imperial strategy in the Muslim world — certainly, in the Arab regions of Islam.” We wrote:

“Think of it as a Salafist declaration of independence…from the Arab monarchies and western intelligence agencies that have nurtured the international jihadist network for almost two generations. The Caliphate threatens, not only its immediate adversaries in the Shiite-dominated governments of Syria and Iraq, but the potentates of the Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and the Mother of All Monarchist Corruption in the Arab Sunni heartland, the Saudi royal family. The threat is not inferential, but literal, against ‘all emirates, groups, states and organizations’ that do not recognize that ISIS in its new incarnation is the embodiment of Islam at war.’”

ISIS did not exist when President Obama took office and put Hillary Clinton in charge at Foggy Bottom. His (and her) regime change in Libya and massive, terroristic pivot to Syria “created” ISIS. And, let’s get the history right, on this score: the U.S. did not reject the jihadist death cult that became ISIS; rather, the Islamic State divorced itself from the U.S. and its European and royal allies. Yet, it still took the Russian intervention in Syria in September of last year to push Washington to mount more than token air assaults against ISIS. Apparently, the U.S. wants to avoid killing too many Islamic State fighters, in hopes that there will be lots of them left to join U.S.-sanctioned jihadist outfits when it gets too hot for ISIS. (Al Nusra has changed its name and resigned from al Qaida — with the blessing of al Qaida’s leadership in Pakistan — so as to better blend in with the other jihadist outfits on western payrolls.)

“U.S. military intelligence saw clearly the imminent rise of ISIS.”

You don’t need to take Donald Trump’s word for it, that Obama and Clinton have been “most valuable players” for ISIS. The U.S. military’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) came to much the same conclusion, back in 2012. The military spooks’ reports, declassified last year, showed the DIA had warned that “the West, Gulf countries, and Turkey [which] support the [Syrian] opposition” believe “there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

The DIA was alarmed that

“…the deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows:

“This creates the ideal situation for AQI [al Qaida in Iraq, which became ISIS] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters [meaning, Shia Muslims]. ISI could also declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.”

Thus, a year after Obama and his European and Arab friends brought down Libya’s Gaddafi and shifted their proxy war of regime change to Syria, U.S. military intelligence saw clearly the imminent rise of ISIS — and that “this is exactly” what “the West, Gulf countries and Turkey…want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

Yes, Obama created ISIS, with the enthusiastic assistance of Hillary Clinton, and he is still nurturing al Nusra, the erstwhile affiliate of al Qaida, which was mid-wifed into existence by Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski. In the intervening years, the jihadists have become indispensable to U.S. imperial policy, but especially so since George W. Bush’s defeat in Iraq, which soured the American public on “dumb” wars – meaning, in Obama-Speak, wars in which large numbers of Americans die. Proxy wars are ideal — “smart,” because only Arabs and Africans and people that Americans have never heard of, die. Libya wasn’t even a war, according to Obama, since no U.S. personnel perished.

“The jihadists have become indispensable to U.S. imperial policy.”

The truth about ISIS and the Obama administration is so obvious that even Donald Trump has a hazy idea of what happened in Syria and Libya. However, the spoiled man-brat white nationalist billionaire from Queens is incapable of putting the Obama/Clinton/ISIS connection in the historical context of U.S. imperial policy. Sadly, most “liberals” and far too many “progressives” (including Black ones) are afflicted with the same disease as Trump: extreme imperial chauvinism — which is practically inseparable from white supremacism.  Extreme imperial chauvinism allows Americans to send to the White House people that should, instead, be sent to the gallows or a firing squad (after a trial, of course). It allows Americans that claim to be on the “left’ side of the spectrum to recoil in horror at Donald Trump (who hasn’t killed anybody that we know of, and who says he will not engage in regime change as president), yet will vote for a woman whose career is soaked in the blood of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East and the northern tier of Africa, and whose husband set in motion a genocide that has killed six million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One candidate, Trump, most resembles the late Alabama governor George Wallace with a “let’s make a deal” foreign policy. The other, Clinton, is a genocidal maniac, whose crimes as president will be Hitlerian in scale.

What is scarier than Clinton or Trump, is that Americans seem to have no visceral aversion to genocide (of non-white peoples). But, unless you’re a Green or some shade of Red, genocide isn’t even an election issue.

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

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What Became of the American Left?

August 19th, 2016 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Acquaintances of my generation are puzzled by the disappearance of the American left.  They remember when there was far less war, far less monopoly capitalist theft, a less rich and powerful elite, less police violence against civilians, less militarization, less privatization and deregulation, fewer attacks on the social safety net, less propaganda from the media, and yet, despite the milder state of affairs, the leftwing was present raising hell about it all.

For fifteen years, and more if we go back to the Clinton regime’s destruction of Yugoslavia, the US has been engaged in wars on populations in seven—eight counting Yugoslavia/Serbia—countries, causing millions of deaths, disabled, and dislocated peoples. A police state has been created, the US Constitution stripped of its protective features, and massive crimes committed under both US and international law by three administrations.  These crimes include torture, transparent false flag events, naked aggression (a war crime), spying without warrants, and murder of US citizens.  Yet, the leftwing’s voice is barely heard.

Clearly, my acquaintances are beginning to miss the challenge to explanations and the country’s direction that the left formerly provided.  I know how they feel.  We used to be pushed along by biases and stereotypical thinking, and the left was there to rattle our cage.  Now we are pushed along by propaganda and there is no countervailing force except a few Internet voices.

I remember telling the audience in the Q&A session after my Frank M. Engle Lecture in 1992 that I never realized how much we would miss US Supreme Court Justices Brennan and Marshall.

Today we need a leftwing far more desperately than we did when we had one.  Today governments considered democratic have the powers of a dictatorship. In the United States, for example, habeas corpus has been erased from both law and Constitution.  Even worse, White House officials can create lists of citizens to be murdered without due process of law.  These are the powers of a dictator.  Yet, these attributes of dictatorship are now institutionalized and go unremarked.

One would think that the dispossessed American workers, whose jobs and financial security have been moved offshore and given to foreigners, would be protesting in the streets like the French do.  But not a peep.  When presidential candidate Ross Perot warned American workers of what was about to happen to them, they did not have enough confidence to vote for him. Have the dispossessed American workers gained enough sense—or is the problem a lack of leadership—to vote for Trump who acknowledges the job loss that is eroding the prospects of the 99 percent? If Trump does not intend to deliver or is incapable of delivering, we are still better off because a failure to deliver raises the awareness of the people.

From the standpoint of the left, there is a perfect environment for them in present day America.  So where is the left?

Here is my answer to the question.  The left suffered a tremendous blow when the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Soviet collapse deprived the left of its belief that there was an alternative to American “democratic capitalism.”  The Soviet collapse also disheartened the left because the collapse removed any constraint on Washington’s unilateralism. With China shaking off Mao and moving into the capitalist camp, there was no one to pick up the torch.

People are puzzled why the left goes along with the government’s explanations of what appear to be orchastrated false flag terror events.  If people of no political persuasion, such as architects and engineers, physicists, nano-chemists, firemen and first responders, airline and military pilots, challenge on the basis of evidence the official account of 9/11, why does the leftwing defend the account of a government that in other circumstances the left distrusts 120%?  The left knows that Tonkin Gulf was an orchestration for war, that Saddam Hussein had no “weapons of mass destruction,” that Iran had no nukes.  The left knows that the government lies through its teeth, so why does the left believe the government’s improbable conspiracy theory of 9/11?

The answer, I think, is that with the demise of Marxism, the left’s only hope is that the peoples oppressed by the West will rise up.  The left finds huge emotional satisfaction in 9/11 as blowback of the oppressed against the oppressor.  This is why the left clings to the official story of 9/11.  And to the stories of other “terrorist events,” such as Orlando and Nice despite the lack of any real evidence in behalf of the stories.

I can remember when the Amerian left, if told that a large truck travelling at a reported 56 miles per hour had mowed down 185 people and, then, being shown in the immediate aftermath the truck devoid of a spot of blood, clothing, human flesh, or even a small dent, would have shouted down the obviously false account.

Ask someone who has hit a dog at 56 mph about the blood and damage to the car. Ask someone who has hit a deer and the car is totalled. Ask experts if a large truck hit a person at 56 mph if the person’s body would remain intact and could be viewed lying without any apparant damage or blood in the street.

You don’t need to ask, do you?  You see the point. The force of a large truck moving at 56 mph that hits a human is going to splatter that human all over the street.  Yet, the Nice photos show no such event.

I can remember when the American left, if told by a Nice police official that the French Minister of the Interior in Paris had ordered Nice authorities not to release and to immediately destroy the entire filming of the alleged terror event from security cameras posted along the entire street where allegedly 185 people were hit by a truck and, additionally, to falsify the police report of the event, the left would have been demanding blood from the authorities, not calling those who do demand explanations “conspiracy kooks.”

Today the American left wants to shut down those who do raise questions about such very strange events in which a few Saudis who could not fly airplanes prevailed over the American National Security State and in which 185 people are allegedly hit by a large truck but the photos show no such results and the Paris officials order the destruction of the recorded evidence and the falsification of the report.

The official story of 9/11 is the justification for the wars. It is difficult to oppose wars when you accept the reason for them.  By accepting the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, the leftwing killed the antiwar movement.

Why does the left trust the government precisely on those matters that the government uses to justify war and a police state?  The answer is that those who challenge the official story deprive the left of the emotional satisfaction that comes from the belief that oppressed peoples are capable of striking back and do strike back.  Alexander Cockburn once explained this to me himself.  He said that when I report the challenges of experts to the official 9/11 story, I am taking away the dignity of oppressed peoples by assuming that they do not strike back against their oppressors.  Alex could not accept the truth, because it meant that the oppressed acquiesced in their oppression.

I understand how Alex saw it. I understand the importance to any movement of hope, and I regret that the left has positioned itself such that facts undermine hope, causing the left to come out against facts.

I offer the left, or the simulacrum that remains, a different hope:  trust the power of truth.  Don’t defend the oppressor, attack him, and as you attack him your might will grow. People are not forever fools.  A time comes when their personal situation contradicts the story fed to them.  But if there is no leadership, awareness cannot graduate into revolt.

The West needs a strong leftwing movement with the strength to challenge the lies that are leading the world to a war of extinction of life.  I would prefer a reformist left to a revolutionary one, but this is not to say that a revolutionary left is not preferable to what exists today, which is revolutionary neoconservatism without opposition from a countervailing force.

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The Day Before Deraa: How the War Broke Out in Syria

August 19th, 2016 by Steven Sahiounie

The day before September 11, 2001 was like any normal day in New York City.  September 10, 2001 was unaware of the earthshaking events which would happen the next day.

Similarly, one might think the day before the violence broke out in Deraa, Syria in March 2011 would have been an uneventful day, unaware of the uprising about to begin.

But, that was not the case.  Deraa was teaming with activity and foreign visitors to Syria well before the staged uprising began its opening act.

The Omari Mosque was the scene of backstage preparations, costume changes and rehearsals.  The Libyan terrorists, fresh from the battlefield of the US-NATO   regime change  attack on Libya, were in Deraa well ahead of the March 2011 uprising violence.  The cleric of the Omari Mosque was Sheikh Ahmad al Sayasneh . He was an older man with a severe eye problem, which caused him to wear special dark glasses, and severely hampered his vision.  He was not only visually impaired, but light sensitive as well, which caused him to be indoors as much as possible and often isolated.  He was accustomed to judging the people he talked with by their accent and voice. The Deraa accent is distinctive.

All of the men attending the Omari Mosque were local men, all with the common Deraa accent.  However, the visitors from Libya did not make themselves known to the cleric, as that would blow their cover.  Instead, they worked with local men; a few key players who they worked to make their partners and confidants. The participation of local Muslim Brotherhood followers, who would assist the foreign Libyan mercenaries/ terrorists, was an essential part of the CIA plan, which was well scripted and directed from Jordan.

Enlisting the aid and cooperation of local followers of Salafism allowed the Libyans to move in Deraa without attracting any suspicion.   The local men were the ‘front’ for the operation.

The CIA agents running the Deraa operation from their office in Jordan had already provided the weapons and cash needed to fuel the flames of revolution in Syria.   With enough money and weapons, you can start a revolution anywhere in the world.

In reality, the uprising in Deraa in March 2011 was not fueled by graffiti written by teenagers, and there were no disgruntled parents demanding their children to be freed.    This was part of the Hollywood style script written by skilled CIA agents, who had been given a mission: to destroy Syria for the purpose of regime change.  Deraa was only Act 1: Scene 1.

The fact that those so-called teenaged graffiti artists and their parents have never been found, never named, and never pictured is the first clue that their identity is cloaked in darkness.

In any uprising there needs to be grassroots support. Usually, there is a situation which arises, and protesters take to the streets.  The security teams step in to keep the peace and clear the streets and if there is a ‘brutal crackdown’ the otherwise ‘peaceful protesters’ will react with indignation, and feeling oppressed and wronged, the numbers in the streets will swell.   This is the point where the street protests can take two directions: the protesters will back down and go home, or the protesters can react with violence, which then will be met with violence from the security teams, and this sets the stage for a full blown uprising.

The staged uprising in Deraa had some locals in the street who were unaware of their participation in a CIA-Hollywood production.  They were the unpaid extras in the scene about to be shot.  These unaware extras had grievances, perhaps  lasting a generation or more, and perhaps rooted in Wahhabism, which is a political ideology exported globally by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Royal family and their paid officials.

The Libyans stockpiled weapons at the Omari Mosque well before any rumor spread about teenagers arrested for graffiti.  The cleric, visually impaired and elderly, was unaware of the situation inside his Mosque, or of the foreign infiltrators in his midst.

The weapons came into Deraa from the CIA office in Jordan.  The US government has close ties to the King of Jordan.   Jordan is 98% Palestinian, and yet has a long lasting peace treaty with Israel, despite the fact that 5 million of the Jordanian citizen’s relatives next door in Occupied Palestine are denied any form of human rights.   The King of Jordan has to do a daily high-wire balancing act between his citizens, the peace and safety in his country and America’s interests and projects in the Middle East.   King Abdullah is not only a tight-rope walker, but a juggler at the same time, and all of this pressure on him must be enormous for him, and Queen Rania, who is herself Palestinian.  These facts must be viewed in the forefront of the background painted scenery of The Syrian Arab Republic, which has for the last 40 years had a cornerstone of domestic and foreign policy carved and set in the principle of Palestinian human rights and Palestinian freedom and justice.

The US policy to attack Syria for the purpose of regime change was not just about the gas lines, the oil wells, the strategic location and the gold: but it was about crushing that cornerstone of Palestinian rights into dust.  To get rid of President Bashar al Assad was to get rid of one of the few Arab leaders who are an unwavering voice of Palestinian rights.

Deraa’s location directly on the Jordanian border is the sole reason it was picked for the location-shoot of the opening act of the Syrian uprising.    If you were to ask most Syrians, if they had ever been to Derra, or ever plan to go, they will answer, “No.”  It is a small and insignificant agricultural town.  It is a very unlikely place to begin a nationwide revolution.  Deraa has a historical importance because of archeological ruins, but that is lost on anyone other than history professors or archeologists.    The access to the weapons from Jordan made Deraa the perfect place to stage the uprising which has turned into an international war.  Any person with common sense would assume an uprising or revolution in Syria would begin in Damascus or Aleppo, the two biggest cities. Even after 2 ½ years of violence around the country, Aleppo’s population never participated in the uprising, or call for regime change.   Aleppo: the large industrial powerhouse of Syria wanted nothing to do with the CIA mission, and felt that by staying clear of any participation they could be spared and eventually the violence would die out, a natural death due to lack of participation of the civilians.

However, this was not to play out for Aleppo.  Instead, the US supported Free Syrian Army, who were mainly from Idlib and the surrounding areas, invited in their foreign partners, and they came pouring into Aleppo from Turkey, where they had taken Turkish Airlines flights from Afghanistan, Europe, Australia and North Africa landing in Istanbul, and then transported by buses owned by the Turkish government to the Turkey-Aleppo border.  The airline tickets, buses, paychecks, supplies, food, and medical needs were all supplied in Turkey by an official from Saudi Arabia.  The weapons were all supplied by the United States of America, from their warehouse at the dock of Benghazi, Libya.  The US-NATO regime change mission had ended in success in Libya, with America having taken possession of all the weapons and stockpiles formerly the property of the Libyan government, including tons of gold bullion taken by the US government from the Central Bank of Libya.

Enter the Libyans stage right. Mehdi al Harati, the Libyan with an Irish passport, was put in charge of a Brigade of terrorists working under the pay and direction of the CIA in Libya.  Once his fighting subsided there, he was moved to Northern Syria, in the Idlib area, which was the base of operation for the American backed Free Syrian Army, who Republican Senator John McCain lobbied for in the US Congress, and personally visited, illegally entering Syria without any passport or border controls.  In Arizona, Sen. McCain is in favor of deporting any illegal alien entering USA, but he himself broke international law by entering Syria as an illegal and undocumented alien.  However, he was in the company of trusted friends and associates, the Free Syrian Army: the same men who beheaded Christians and Muslims, raped females and children of both sexes, sold girls as sex slaves in Turkey, and ate the raw liver of a man, which they  proudly videoed and uploaded.

Previously, Syria did not have any Al Qaeda terrorists, and had passed through the war in neighboring Iraq none the worse for wear, except having accepted 2 million Iraqis as refugee guests. Shortly before the Deraa staged uprising began, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were in Damascus and being driven around by the President and First Lady. Pitt and Jolie had come to visit and support the Iraqi war refugees in Damascus.  Brad Pitt was amazed that the Syrian President would drive him around personally, and without any body guards or security detail.  Pitt and Jolie were used to their own heavy security team in USA.  Pres. Assad explained that he and his wife were comfortable in Damascus, knowing that it was a safe place.  Indeed, the association of French travel agents had deemed Syria as the safest tourist destination in the entire Mediterranean region, meaning even safer than France itself.

However, the US strategy was to create a “New Middle East”, which would do away with safety in Syria; through the ensuing tornado, aka ‘winds of change’.

Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and then Syria were the stepping stones in the garden of the “Arab Spring”.  But, the scenario in the Syrian mission did not stay on script.   It went over deadline and over budget.  The final credits have yet to be rolled, and the curtain has yet to fall on the stage.

We can’t under estimate the role that mainstream media had to play in the destruction of Syria.  For example, Al Jazeera’s Rula Amin was in Deraa and personally interviewed the cleric Sayasneh at the Omari Mosque.   Al Jazeera is the state owned and operated media for the Prince of Qatar.  The Prince of Qatar was one of the key funders of the terrorists attacking Syria.  The USA was sending the weapons, supplies and providing military satellite imagery, however the cash to make payroll, to pay out bribes in Turkey, and all other expenses which needed cold cash in hand was being paid out by the Prince of Qatar and the King of Saudi Arabia, who were playing their roles as closest Middle East allies of the United States of America.  This was a production team between USA, EU, NATO, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and the Persian Gulf Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar primarily.  The CIA has no problem with covert operations in foreign countries, and even full scale attacks, but the matter of funding needs to come from a foreign country, because the American voters don’t care about killing people in Syria, but they would never agree to pay for it.  As long as the Arabs were paying for the project, that was OK by Mr. John Q. Public, who probably was not able to find Syria on a map anyway.

Rula Amin and others of the Al Jazeera staff, and including the American CNN, the British BBC and the French France24 all began deliberate political propaganda campaign against the Syrian government and the Syrian people who were suffering from the death and destruction brought on by the terrorists who were pretending to be players in a local uprising.   Some days, the scripts were so similar that you would have guessed they were all written in the same hotel room in Beirut.  Onto the stage stepped the online media personalities of Robert Fisk, from his vantage point in Beirut and Joshua Landis from his perch in Oklahoma.  These 2 men, sitting so far removed from the actual events, pretended to know everything going on in Syria.  British and American readers were swayed by their deliberate one-sided explanations, while the actual Syrians living inside Syria, who read in English online, were baffled.  Syrians were wondering how Western writers could take the side of the terrorists who were foreigners, following Radical Islam and attacking any unarmed civilian who tried to defend their home and family. The media was portraying the terrorists as freedom fighters and heroes of democracy, while they were raping, looting, maiming, kidnapping for ransom and murdering unarmed civilians who had not read the script before the shooting began in Deraa.  There was one global movie trailer, and it was a low budget cell phone video which went viral around the world, and it sold the viewers on the idea of Syria being in the beginning of a dramatic fight for freedom, justice and the American way.   From the very beginning, Al Jazeera and all the rest of the media were paying $100.00 to any amateur video shot in Syria.  A whole new cottage industry sprang up in Syria, with directors and actors all hungry for the spotlight and fame.  Authenticity was not questioned; the media just wanted content which supported their propaganda campaign in Syria.

Deraa was the opening act of tragic epic which has yet to conclude.  The cleric who was a key character in the beginning scenes, Sheikh Sayasneh, was first put under house arrest, and then he was smuggled out to Amman, Jordan in January 2012.  He now gives lectures in America near Washington, DC. Just like aspiring actors usually find their way to Hollywood, which is the Mecca of the film industry, Sheikh Sayasneh found his way to the Mecca of all regime change projects.

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It all goes back to April, when the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court found the Manus Island detention facility, ostensibly directed and run by the Australian government, in breach of the PNG Constitution.

By the order of the court, “Both the Australian and Papua New Guinea governments shall forthwith take all steps necessary to cease and prevent the continued unconstitutional and illegal detention of the asylum seekers or transferees at the relocation centre on Manus Island and the continued breach of the asylum seekers or transferees constitutional and human rights.”

PNG’s Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill, did not wait long before announcing that the machinery would be put in place to close the centre. He had already been making utterances in March that “we cannot hold the refugees here forever.”[1]

The Australian response to this grim affair had always been crude yet consistent: the asylum seekers housed at the detention centre were not the responsibility of Canberra, despite being there precisely because of its draconian non-settlement policy. Dark, and deeply unsuccessful outcomes, have greeted those few who have resettled in PNG itself.

It all constituted the grand deflection of state obligation, an outsourcing of duties characteristic in its approach to the UN Convention on Refugees. The persistent, gruesome alibi in this awful mess has been the good Samaritan nonsense of preventing asylum seekers and refugees from drowning on route to Australia.

Even as the offshore detention system crumbles, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton insists rather mechanically on that broken theme. “The Labor legacy of the failed border protection policy, not only did it result in 1,200 people drowning at sea, but it resulted in billions of dollars being spent on this program.”[2] Keep them in indefinite detention, in other words, for their own, deeply misunderstood good.

Within Australia, unprecedented moves are being suggested. The West Australian Premier, Colin Barnett, has broken ranks with the Fortress Australia mentality, expressing his willingness to accommodate asylum seekers from Australia’s other place of detention pain, Nauru. With regards “families, as long as they don’t present a security risk or safety risk, I do welcome them being in Australia.”[3]

Of particular concern to Barnett has been the persistent problem of child detention, something which remains in clear violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “The one thing I find unacceptable is children in detention.”

Unfortunately, Australian officials and law enforcement authorities across various states have shown a certain enthusiasm, even hunger, for youth detention. In the Northern Territory and Queensland, instances of brutality against juveniles in detention centres have been common and publicised of late. The zeitgeist is very much against the child in such instances.

In the puzzle of outsourced responsibilities, the Australian approach is bound to entail finding a third country for resettlement. In Dutton’s words, “We’re talking to third countries at the moment, to look at settlement options.”

The dogma of never accepting asylum seekers accept via the official humanitarian channels means identifying a state with the appropriate developing status. Poor countries, in other words, are always going to be more attractive in the game of passing the refugee than wealthier ones, despite the standing invitation by New Zealand to accept more of Australia’s forsaken cargo. Suffering, in short, must be emphasised.

For all that, Dutton is not brimming with ideas. True to form in his portfolio, he has refused to clarify when the closure of the detention centre in PNG will take place. There are no schedules, not time tables in the offing. “I’m hoping it can happen as soon as possible but it’s an issue for the PNG Government to work through and we’ll support them in that decision.”

The Labor opposition has decided to monetise the issue, hoping that figures, rather than compassion, will win the day. Instead of focusing on the central premise of international refugee law, the government in waiting has found a different, noble alibi: the Australian tax payer.

“We’d like the minister,” stated Shadow Immigration Minister Shayne Neumann, “to tell us how much is a substantial amount of money. We need to know and the Australian public need to know because these are tax payers’ dollars.”

Neumann, taking the low pragmatic ground, has also sought to speed up negotiations on finding another country willing to accept Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker cargo while working more closely with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

On costing matters, he would be on even better ground suggesting something unthinkable to policy hacks within his party: closing the centres would achieve staggering savings for the commonwealth government, somewhere in the order of $3 billion. The figure comes straight from the Parliamentary Budget Office, though critics prefer to regard them as contingent at best.

Neither the Turnbull government, nor Labor opposition, accept that the offshore detention system is beginning to implode. The central premise to its existence is not one of facilitating, but detaining. The operating rationale is one of punishment, not processing.

Closing such centres would save billions and achieve something remarkable in Australian foreign policy: upholding international conventions it has long flouted with a sneer. It will also allow individuals kept in detention for over three years to taste something absent in their emotional diet for some time: the prospect of freedom.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

 

Notes

[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-03/png-pm-calls-for-manus-island-centre-eventual-closure/7217774

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-17/manus-island-to-close-png-prime-minister-confirms/7759810

[3] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-18/wa-govt-opens-door-to-nauru-refugees-ahead-of-manus-closure/7760854

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Trolling-in-real-life has become the State Department’s favourite pastime, and recent developments on the Korean peninsula have given the State Department the perfect impetus to further political agitation.

Whilst rightfully acknowledging that the deployment was “a very sensitive issue for the partners throughout the region”, US Defence Secretary Ash Carter enthused that the US was “working closely to ensure the swift deployment of THAAD”, a Defence News article noted.

Regional superpowers Russia and China have also rightfully expressed concerns over the THAAD systems citing America’s Asian Pivot strategy—which feeds off of Pyongyang’s oscillation between brinkmanship and detente—which advanced immediately following the UNCLOS arbitration over the South China Sea.

Many shortsighted Western newspapers even admonished Park’s pivot to American defences, rather than focusing on the long-term specifics of doing so. “The appearance of elements of the US global missile defence system in the region […] can provoke an arms race in Northeast Asia and complicate the resolution of the nuclear problem on the Korean peninsula,” the Russian Foreign Ministry mentioned.

He Yafei of the China Daily also referenced two neocon American professors who cheerleadered for America’s Asian pivot and hailed it as “a superior ‘grand strategy’ to be applied seriously by the US in East Asia and Europe in order to contain the two rising powers”, namely by relying “on local powers to contain China’.

If unsuccessful, the report advises the US to “throw its considerable weight behind them’”. That “considerable weight” was reallocating defence funds from backing the Syrian “moderate Mafia” and the Turkish pivot back to Russia, to creating mischief in the South China Sea in order to counteract increasing rapprochement between Japan and Russia, as well as China and the Philippines.

As weapons, THAAD system are relatively useless against North Korea. Throughout 2016, the DPRK tested several Rodong 1-2 medium-range missiles and a Taepodong-2 ICBM in order to launch a Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4 satellite into orbit.

This was verified by Pentagon experts as a harmless experiment, where “Vice Admiral James Syring, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told reporters that North Korea’s launch was ‘provocative, disturbing and alarming,’ but could not be equated with a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile,” Reuters stated.

Chinese and Russian officials are also well aware that THAAD systems are ineffective against North Korean Nodong missiles, which travel at lower altitudes. “THAAD is incapable of intercepting Rodong and Scud missiles targeting South Korea as the DPRK missiles travel at an altitude of 20-30 km.

The U.S. anti-missile system is designed to shoot down missiles at a much higher altitude of 40-150 km,” a Xinhua analyst remarked. This was echoed by Chang Young-Keun, professor at the Korea Aerospace University, in who stated “if North Korea launches a medium-range Rodong missile near Mount Paekdu […] it is found that the THAAD missile may not be capable of intercepting it.”

This reveals several discrepancies: (1) that North Korea is wholly capable of using low-altitude (and low cost) missiles to turn Seoul into a “sea of flames”, (2) that short-range nuclear attacks against Seoul, which would share Seoul’s nuclear fallout,  go against Pyongyang’s existential interests, and finally (3) that the expensive THAAD systems are painfully vulnerable to primitive low-altitude attacks from Rodong-1 and Hwasong-series missiles.

Conversely, THAAD technology has tested more successfully since 2005 against terminally-high altitude threats such as nuclear-capable ICBMs and Multiple Independently Targeted Re-Entry Vehicles (MIRVs); weapons that only Russia and China possess.

Adding to this, 38 North analysed THAAD system inefficiencies, such as taking an hour to reload, which North Korea could facilitate by simply launching over 96 missiles.

They are also unable to track more than 20 missiles simultaneously, which effectively overwhelms the radar. Furthermore, the Aegis anti-ballistic systems the ROK Navy already possesses are adequate to deter low altitude missiles, yet Americans insisted on delivering THAAD units to the peninsula on the premise of yet another Pentagon lie.

Speaking of MIRVS, America’s thirsty attitude towards the Asia-Pacific is not rooted in North Korean antics, but in the American War on Terror. No longer bound by the 1972 USSR-US Anti-Ballistic Missile Defence Treaty or the wisdom attained from the Cuban missile crisis, both the Bush and Obama administrations have sought to advance NATO towards Beijing and Moscow by strategically proliferating missile defence systems in Europe, Asia, and the MENA region via their vassal states.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, gains made through negotiations between then-US President Richard Nixon and USSR General Secretariat Leonid Brezhnev were dismantled.

Notably, Article V of the treaty stated that “each Party undertakes not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or components which are sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based”, which Lockheed and Martin’s mobile THAAD batteries in Guam and sea-based Aegis units in Japan and South Korea clearly violates.

On 13 June, 2002, George Bush struck gold in the post-9/11 environment when “[…] the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and recommenced developing missile defense systems that would have formerly been prohibited by the bilateral treaty.

The action was rationalized under the need to defend against the possibility of a missile attack conducted by a rogue state. The next day, the Russian Federation promptly dropped the START II agreement, intended to completely ban MIRVs,” a National Defence University publication expressed.

Shortly after renouncing participation in the long-held treaty, NATO allies led by George Bush held the Nov. 2002 Prague Summit in order to cement cooperation on missile defence systems’ within Eastern Europe as well as the Baltics. Poland and Czech Republic accepted Bush’s proposals, but acting President Barack Obama scrapped it in 2009, then reinstated it in Deveselu, Romania in May 2016, citing the usual “Russian aggression” mantra.

Currently, North Korea is that “rogue threat” for the US bureaucracy, but just how much of a threat, in what capacity, and how to neutralise it has proven how woefully misguided and ignorant the Obama administration is.

Russia and China have every right to counteract America’s THAAD systems in the Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe, and in the process, South Korea may pay a bigger price than the 1.25 billion USD spike in its military budget by risking 25 million people in the Gyeonggi-do province with a false sense of security.

Following the disastrous review of the F-35, THAAD technology may prove a much larger headache for America than its allies and rivals.

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On August 14, in commemoration of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial occupation in 1945, 1,000 people from all sectors of the movement for peace and reunification gathered in Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Plaza for an outdoor “roundtable conference.” People from all sectors, including workers, farmers, women, youth and students, urban poor, scholars, media, elected officials and faith-based communities, from all regions between Seoul and Jeju sat around 100 round tables in the plaza to discuss peace and reunification. During this assembly, the 1,000 participants discussed the following questions:

  • What will we do in the face of threats against the peace of the Korean Peninsula?
  • What would a joint reunification movement between South and North Korea look like?
  • What must we do to build a truly mass movement for reunification?

Opposition to the recent U.S.-South Korean decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea was the subject of much discussion at all the tables.  There was also broad consensus on working towards realizing an inter-Korean conference of government officials, political parties and civic groups as a step towards peace and unification.

Participants agreed to step up pressure on the South Korean government and all political parties to work towards – restoring communication channels between the leadership of the two countries; facilitating talks between the two countries (particularly around military tensions); resuming operations in the Kaesong Industrial Zone and tourist areas of Mount Kumgang; finding solutions for issues surrounding separated families; and guaranteeing people-to-people exchanges between Koreans on both sides of the peninsula.

South Koreans from all sectors of peace and reunification movement join together to make appeal for dialogue and meeting between Koreans.
1,000 South Koreans gather around roundtables to discuss peace and reunification of Korean Peninsula.

The 1,000 people roundtable conference event came a few days following a meeting between North, South, and overseas Koreans, who resolved to work together to realize the Inter-Korean Conference, which North Korea proposed at the end of June. Representatives of the North Korean Preparatory Committee for the Inter-Korean Conference, the Overseas Korean Preparatory Committee for the Inter-Korean Conference, and the June 15th South Korean Committee for Reunification of Korea gathered in China from August 11 to August 12 to discuss how to coordinate efforts in preparation for the proposed Inter-Korean Conference.

Representatives of North, South, Overseas Koreans in meeting in China to discuss coordination of Inter-Korean Conference
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Botswana’s war on its indigenous population, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, has reached a new pitch, writes LEWIS EVANS. No longer content to arrest and intimidate them as they engage in subsistence hunting on their own land, the state has begun to shoot them from aircraft. These illegal, genocidal acts must stop!

Botswana police scour the Kalahari, looking for people hunting with spears to intimidate and arrest. Planes with heat sensors fly over the Bushmen’s lands looking out for ‘poachers’ – in reality Bushmen hunting antelope for food.

In a healthy democracy, people are not shot at from helicopters for collecting food. They are certainly not then arrested, stripped bare and beaten while in custody without facing trial.

Nor are people banned from their legitimate livelihoods, or persecuted on false pretenses.

Bushmen have hunted at subsistence levels in the Kalahari for millennia. Photo: Survival International.

Bushmen have hunted at subsistence levels in the Kalahari for millennia. Photo: Survival International.

Sadly in Botswana, southern Africa’s much-vaunted ‘beacon of democracy’, all of this took placelate last month in an incident which has been criminally under-reported. Nine Bushmen were later arrested and subsequently stripped naked and beaten while in custody.

The Bushmen of the Kalahari have lived by hunting and gathering on the southern African plains for millennia. They are a peaceful people, who do almost no harm to their environment and have a deep respect for their lands and the game that lives on it. They hunt antelope with spears and bows, mostly gemsbok, which are endemic to the area.

According to conservation expert Phil Marshall, there are no rhinos or elephants where the Bushmen live. Even if there were the Bushmen would have no reason to hunt them. They hunt various species of antelope, using the fat in their medicine and reserving a special place for the largest of them, the eland, in their mythology. None of these animals are endangered.

A shameful history of state persecution

Despite all this the Botswana government has used poaching as a pretext for its latest round of persecution. The increasingly authoritarian government of General Ian Khama sees the Bushmen as a national embarrassment. It wishes to see them forcibly integrated with mainstream society in the name of ‘progress’.

There are huge diamond deposits on, or close to, the Bushmen’s lands, as well as natural gas which is soon to be fracked out of the soil. Botswana would rather see wealthy foreign tourists on the Bushman’s lands – many of them western trophy hunters – as well as foreign corporations digging for resources underneath it. In their eyes, ‘primitive’ hunter gatherers are an inconvenience.

Between 1997 and 2002, hundreds of Bushman families were brutally evicted from their land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Their homes were destroyed, their wells were capped, their possessions were confiscated, and they were moved to government eviction camps en masse. Any who tried to resist were beaten, or even shot with rubber bullets.

There are close ties between the Botswana government and the infamous De Beers diamond corporation, and both have grown rich from the gemstones. Nevertheless, the government was savvy enough to know that diamonds alone would be an ugly excuse for wiping out an entire people, so they circulated absurd rumors.

The Bushmen were ‘poachers’, they said. They rode around in jeeps, they shot game on a massive scale with rifles, and posed a threat to the environment they had been dependent on and managed for millennia. They had to change, for the sake of ‘civilization’.

Despite a landmark court ruling in 2006 which the Bushmen won with the support of Survival International, the situation is still pretty terrible. Most of the Kalahari Bushmen are still living in government camps, and access to the Reserve has only been granted to a limited number of individuals. It is enforced under a brutal permit system, which sees children born in the reserve forced from their homes and family at the age of 18.

The permits are not heritable, and so when the present generation of Bushmen dies, their people will have effectively been legislated into extinction. The system was compared to the apartheid-era South African pass laws by veteran anti-apartheid activist and former Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake.

The annihilation of a people – genocide in open sight

As if that wasn’t bad enough they aren’t even allowed to hunt to eat. In 2014, Botswana introduced a nationwide hunting ban, but gave a special dispensation to fee-paying big game hunters, who flock to the northern Kalahari and the Okavango Delta in the extreme north of the country to shoot animals for sport.

Such a dispensation was not extended to the tribal peoples who actually live in these territories, who are accused of ‘poaching’ and face arrest, beatings and torture while tourists are welcomed into luxury hunting lodges.

And now they are being shot at from helicopters. Botswana police scour the Kalahari, looking for people hunting with spears to intimidate and arrest. The government has introduced planes with heat sensors to fly over the Bushmen’s lands looking out for ‘poachers’ – in reality Bushmen hunting antelope for food.

Police and wildlife officials then use whatever brutality they consider to be necessary to enforce the ban.

This is an urgent and horrific humanitarian crisis. An entire people’s future is at stake. If the Bushmen cannot enter their land or find food there, they will have no option but to return to the government camps, where vital services are inadequate and diseases like HIV/AIDS run rampant.

Policies like this have been used by governments all over the world. It is easier and less shocking than simply exterminating people, but in the long-term it has a similar outcome. By denying people their land and basic means of subsistence, viable ways of living are abolished, and peoples’ land, resources and labor are stolen.

In a world of larger-scale and more headline-friendly crises, the plight of the Kalahari Bushmen risks being largely ignored. Nevertheless, the Bushmen – portrayed as backward and primitive simply because their communal ways are different – could face annihilation if the brutal shoot on sight policy is left in place.

Lewis Evans is an author, and a campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights.

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A half-century of African American struggle poses challenges to national oppression

A rebellion erupted on August 13 on the north side of Milwaukee in the aftermath of the police killing of 23-year-old Syville Smith. The outbreak is a clear reflection of the mounting discontent on the part of African American working class youth who are heavily victimized by law-enforcement profiling and state-sponsored violence.

These rebellions have been occurring over the last three years after being triggered by the shooting death of Michael Brown, 18, gunned down on August 9, 2014 by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, right outside St. Louis City. Unrest in Ferguson attracted national and international attention shattering the false notions of the United States having become a “post-racial society.”

Nearly five decades ago, on July 30, 1967, the African American community in Milwaukee had also exploded in rebellion. The unrest prompted the-then local and state officials to deploy the Wisconsin National Guard. Private property was targeted for the acquisition of consumer goods and food as well as arson attacks. There were reports of snipping on the part of African American residents angered over decades of substandard segregated housing, systematic discrimination in the workplace and the persistent harassment by the police.

The rebellion in Milwaukee started after police were summoned to a social establishment ostensibly to break up a fight. It appeared as if it was a tactic that attracted the cops who were pelted with rocks and bottles. The violence against the police and private property quickly spread and after a few hours Mayor Henry W. Maier declared a state of emergency requesting the National Guard and imposing a curfew which lasted for nine days. During the course of the rebellion four people were killed including one police officer and 1,500 were arrested. Property damage was extensive although not on the same level as what occurred in Newark and Detroit earlier that same month.

This city had witnessed an exponential increase in African American migration during and after World War II. Between 1940 and 1960, Wisconsin’s African American population skyrocketed by nearly 600 percent, from 12,158 in 1940 to 74,546 in 1960. African Americans from the southern U.S. were drawn to the city in search of jobs which were prevalent in industrial cities during the war.

Consequently, many African Americans made Wisconsin’s cities their homes. Many of these migrant residents were born in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee. An expanding demand for labor in manufacturing jobs and the payment of much higher wages than they received in the South, served as a magnet for African American migrants to Milwaukee in the 1940s and 1950s.

Nonetheless, the newly-arrived Wisconsin residents faced legalized segregation in housing, employment, and quality education. As a result the community organized in various groups to fight the unequal social and exploitative conditions.

The question of housing was a precipitating factor in fueling the unrest of July 1967 and its aftermath. Milwaukee Common Council members refused to pass ordinances guaranteeing open housing despite the signing into law federal civil rights legislation in 1964 by the-then President Lyndon B. Johnson.

According to an article summarizing these developments: “In August 1967, after five years of inaction by city officials, the NAACP Youth Council marched to Kosciuszko Park (in a predominantly white neighborhood) to protest the Common Council’s refusal to pass an open housing ordinance. Alderperson Vel Phillips had first introduced open housing legislation in March of 1962 and continued to submit it to the council for approval despite being repeatedly voted down. The August 1967 march expressed the frustration of the Black community but also drew the wrath of three to five thousand white residents, who shouted obscenities and threw objects at the marchers, particularly focusing on the march’s leader, Father James Groppi. Groppi, a white Catholic priest, was an important figure in the civil rights movement, playing an instrumental role in dramatizing the segregated housing situation in Milwaukee through his frequent demonstrations and arrests. Daily demonstrations continued throughout the winter of 1967-68.” (wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints)

It was not until April 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) co-founder Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee that a Federal Fair Housing Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. Nevertheless, the real estate firms and banks found ways to undermine the legislation which represented the last of a series of such civil rights bills extending from 1957 to 1968. The Milwaukee Common Council then grudgingly passed a local ordinance guaranteeing open housing although the problem of residential segregation and inadequate housing remains up until today.

High Tide of Black Resistance: African Americans in Rebellion During 1967

The situation in Milwaukee in 1967 was by no means isolated. A study issued by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder, the so-called Kerner Commission Report, was actually impaneled by President Johnson amid the Detroit rebellion of July 23-28, the largest of such forms of resistance in urban areas in the history of the U.S. up until that time period, indicated that over 160 incidents of civil disorder occurred that year.

This report’s finding which called for massive federal spending to address the dual and exploitative character of U.S. society was rejected by the Johnson administration. Since 1968, the social conditions in many African American communities in the U.S. are far worse than what existed when the Kerner Commission was in existence.

James Forman, the former Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the-then Director of International Affairs, described the situation prevailing in 1967 through an essay entitled “High Tide of Black Resistance.” SNCC had made the call for Black Power the year before through Chairperson Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Field Secretary Willie Ricks (now named Mukasa Dada). By 1967, the mood was shifting strongly in favor of urban rebellion and guerrilla warfare.

In this essay published as a pamphlet by Forman, which was originally delivered before an United Nations conference on the liberation of Southern Africa in Zambia in July 1967, says of the period that: “The year 1967 marked a historic milestone in the struggle for the liberation of Black people in the United States, the year that revolutionaries throughout the world began to understand more fully the impact of the Black movement. Our liberation will only come when there is final destruction of this mad octopus–the capitalistic system of the United States with all its life-sucking tentacles of exploitation and racism that choke the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. To work, to fight, and to die for the liberation of our people in the United States means, therefore, to work for the liberation of all oppressed people around the world.

Liberation movements in many parts of the world are now aware that, when they begin to fight colonialism, it becomes imperative that we in this country try to neutralize the possibilities of full-scale United States intervention as occurred in Santa Domingo, as is occurring in Vietnam, and as may occur in Haiti, Venezuela, South Africa or wherever. While such a task may well be beyond our capacity, an aroused, motivated, and rebelling Black American population nevertheless helps in our indivisible struggles against racism, colonialism and apartheid.”

This timely contribution by Forman makes the case for the internationalization of the African American struggle. In the 1960s, figures such as Malcolm X, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Stokely Carmichael, among others, articulated the position that not only were African Americans in solidarity with the liberation struggles and revolutionary governments in Africa and throughout the world but that Africans in America were part and parcel of the African Revolution which is interwoven with the global movement for socialism.

Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister and president of the West African state of Ghana, who served as the chief strategist and tactician of the African Revolution from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, said in the book entitled “Class Struggle in Africa”, that: “Each historical situation develops its own dynamics. The close links between class and race developed in Africa alongside capitalist exploitation. Slavery, the master-servant relationship, and cheap labor were basic to it. The classic example is South Africa, where Africans experienced a double exploitation- -both on the grounds of color and of class. Similar conditions exist in the USA, the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in other parts of the world where the nature of the development of productive forces has resulted in a racist class structure. In these areas, shades of color count–the degree of blackness being a yardstick by which social status is measured.” (panafbooks, 1970)

Therefore, in its most revolutionary form, the African American movement for self-determination and social transformation is consistent with all progressive struggles for national liberation and socialism. These principles of the ideological orientation of the masses of workers and youth must be continued into the present period of globalized capitalist production, divisions of labor and political power.

Will Liberation Still “Come From a Black Thing”?

SNCC, the Black Panther Party (BPP), the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and other organizations which emerged from the 1960s and 1970s, viewed the African American struggle as being in the vanguard of social transformation in the U.S. The LRBW advanced the notion of the African American role as being related to their strategic position at the point of capitalist production. Hence, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a key element of the LRBW, was able to shut down one of the main auto plants for Chrysler Corporation in 1968 through a wild cat strike due to the fact that so many African American workers were employed at the facility.

Since the mid-1970s there has been a major re-structuring of industrial production within the capitalist world. Large-scale structural unemployment and poverty has been institutionalized within this economic framework. The “recovery” from the Great Recession of 2008 has been carried out utilizing low-wage labor even within the auto industry which in the post-bankruptcy period imposed two and three tier wage scales designed to maximize profit and undermine solidarity between younger workers and their veteran counterparts. African Americans communities in urban centers have been devastated through the razing of public housing complexes, the loss of meaningful employment and business opportunities, and the disproportionate impact of the foreclosure and eviction crisis caused by the major banks emanating from their predatory lending practices in housing and municipal finance.

The labor participation rate remains at its lowest level in four decades meaning that the monthly jobless statistics are skewed to advance the propagandistic aims of the ruling class in the U.S. This has been aggravated by the failure of the Obama administration and its predecessors to develop policy initiatives that address the special oppression of the African American and Latino communities. African American labor power has been incarcerated where people are forced to work for free producing goods and services that are exported around the world.

Despite these changes it is still the African American masses that are taking the lead in the struggle against racism, national oppression and economic exploitation. The African American working class although suffering from super-exploitation, remains a force to be reckoned with. The millions in prison and under judicial and law-enforcement supervision are no lesser workers than those punching a clock for the enemy every morning, afternoon and night.

The anti-racist movement often self-identified and misidentified as “Black Lives Matter” has shaken up the image of U.S. imperialism in the present epoch. Many within the African American community realize that there is no future for them under the capitalist and imperialist systems. People under normal circumstances do not take militant action against the state and private property. It appears that the African American people are moving into a renewed era of revolutionary resistance, mobilization and organization.

A rejuvenated movement must not only develop a political program in line with the contemporary crises but also build organizations that speak directly to the needs and aspirations of the people. No other sectors of the working class are in a better position today than African Americans to set the stage for a broader struggle to overturn capitalist exploitation and relations of production.

 

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Slobodan Milosevic: The Killing of an Innocent Man

August 18th, 2016 by Alexander Artamonov

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague quietly acknowledged the innocence of former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic. Ten years after the very suspicious death of the Serbian leader in a Dutch prison, the 1,300th page of the 2,000-page document on the case of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, acknowledged that Milosevic had not committed crimes against humanity, nor had he organized any mass killings or deportations of Croats and Bosnians. In other words, it was an innocent man who died in a UN prison. French journalist Dimitri De Koshko was working in Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic’s arrest. Koshko was closely following the parody of the trial in The Hague. In an interview with Pravda.Ru, Dimitri De Koshko talked about circumstances of the possible murder of the Serbian leader in prison.

Today, we are talking about the trial in The Hague that has seen its legal ending only now. Milosevic was posthumously and very quietly acquitted by the Tribunal.

I’m a journalist and I can not judge on the legal side of the case, but I can assure you that a whole sea of lies was created to destroy Milosevic. His name was stained in the era of the Dayton Accords, in 1995, during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The American administration used to have its own approach to the problem. The US used to be most interested in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the three main ethnic groups that had entered into civil strife there, namely the Croats, the Bosnians and the Serbs. The massacre that erupted in that region was especially brutal.

Slobodan Milosevic: The killing of an innocent man. 58646.jpeg

AP photo

One can say that an entire ocean can be reflected in a drop of water. All elements of the Yugoslavian conflict could be found in the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milosevic was strongly opposed to the division of the territory.

Milosevic continued to insist on his position even when he was taken into custody for the trial in The Hague, where he died ten years ago. It should be noted that he died under very strange circumstances.

Without his knowledge, Milosevic was given a drug that neutralized the effect of the medicines against high blood pressure that the Serbian leader was taking. This is absurd, but the Dutch government refused to share details of Milosevic’s treatment. According to the data made available through Wikileaks, it turns out that the judges in The Hague were discussing details of Milosevic’s treatment with employees of the US Embassy in the Netherlands. This is a direct violation of medical confidentiality. It turns out that Milosevic did not know what medications he was taking in prison. All this is strange, to say the least.

Ten years ago, Milosevic was charged with genocide against Albanians. He refused to acknowledge that he was involved in the crime. According to the Court, 250,000 Albanians were killed in Kosovo. FBI agents and agents from other, so-called Western democracies, went to Kosovo to investigate. Those people found no traces of mass graves there. They did find the remains of Serbs and Roma tortured by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army. The latter used to enjoy NATO’s full support at the time.

Let us not forget that all those terrible events began with the bombings of Yugoslavia, at NATO’ own initiative. It turns out that Milosevic had not succumbed to the provocations. When the judges failed to prove Milosevic’s guilt, they switched to Bosnia. I must say here that Milosevic’s position was very different from that of Karadzic. Milosevic’s entire life was very closely connected with the  principles of the so-called “Yugoslav socialism.” He had been following those principles in Yugoslavia and in his native land, Serbia. At that time, Serbia was the only republic of the former Yugoslavia, where there was no ethnic cleansing. This comes contrary to what my dear colleagues from Western publications were saying.

Additionally, everyone ignores the fact that the Serbs were expelled from Krajina (Croatia) in a brutal way. I mean the crimes committed by pro-Croat Nazi gangs. By the way, they use the same techniques in the East of Ukraine now. It just so happens that the world will learn the truth about the current events in Ukraine in about a decade. The West, including Western media, used to be silent about Iraq and then about Libya. They did not say anything about the blatant crimes that were committed in Yugoslavia.

Milosevic was acquitted on the 1,303rd page of the document against former head of the Croatian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic. One needs to bear in mind the fact that the position of Milosevic was very different from that of Karadzic. Yet, the Western media was hysterically screaming about their common guilt. Western journalists used to call Milosevic another Hitler, but Milosevic had never built any form of dictatorship in his country. Yet, the journalists had to follow the mainstream, to build their careers. Independent journalists would be accused of working for Milosevic. Nowadays, they accuse us, independent journalists, of working for Putin.

We saw the hanging of Saddam Hussein and then the lynching of Muammar Gaddafi. It appears that the crimes that the West has committed during the last 10-15 years were part of the plan to destabilize the state of affairs in the world.”

We were all following the course of the USA. One should give then-French President Jacques Chirac credit for refusing to follow the Americans in Iraq. As for Gaddafi, he was a dictator, but he managed to reconcile different tribes in his country to ensure peaceful life for people.

Now the USA is obsessed with the idea to topple Bashar Assad, who is a member of the Alawite minority. Assad is the key to the rights of minorities in Syria, even though his rule does have certain dictatorial traits.

Now the West has to deal with refugees from Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, a whole region of central Africa and Afghanistan. These days, we can see the Western media demonizing Russia, just like they were demonizing Milosevic and Serbia.

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Eric Zuesse, commentary on ‘news’ reporting

As part of their campaign for Hillary Clinton to become President, Huffington Post bannered their home-page on the night of Tuesday August 16th, “TRUMP BRINGS KREMLIN APOLOGIST TO INTEL BRIEFING!”, and linked to their news story that’s headlined against Trump, “Donald Trump To Bring Adviser With Russia Ties To Classified Briefing: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will join Trump at Wednesday’s top-secret session.” Those “Russia Ties” consist of Flynn’s having appeared as a commenter at Russia’s international television network, RT, which is Russia’s equivalent of Britain’s BBC. This was the day’s big news? Really? Is there an editorial agenda here — or only a low-news day, when the Olympics are on, records are being broken, and the Presidential contest is getting under way?

This is not only a HuffPo problem; and, so, on July 28th, Ireported (with contemporary examples) that, generally, “America’s press cover the Trump campaign with barely concealed hostility toward it, and with an obsessive emphasis upon the candidate’s positions regarding Russia; they’re attacking Trump as being (wittingly or unwittingly) an agent of Russia — and portraying Russia as being America’s enemy.”

How much of this blatant intellectual abuse can America’s news-readers take? No one reasonably alleges that today’s Russia is a dictatorship, such as the Soviet Union unquestionably was. Today’s Russia is perhaps more of a democracy than the U.S. is. Russia’s President shows, even in Western-respected polls, as having an approval-rating of over 80% from the Russian public, whereas our own President has an approval-rating of only more than 40% from the U.S. public. Given the heavy ‘news’-slant of Huffington Post and other major American ‘news’ sources, a reasonable question can be raised as to which of these two nations actually has the freer press, and the more representative government. Is the reason why America’s leader is so low-approved, and Russia’s is so high-approved, that America’s top leader does what the American people want, while Russia’s top leader doesn’t do what the Russian people want? Hardly. The American Establishment want us to believe that our government — the one they control — represents us, more than Russia’s government represents the Russian people. The American Establishment still hate the Russians, and want the American masses (the people who read such media as Huffington Post and the Washington Post) to hate the Russians too. Regardless of whether Russia’s government is trying to destroy America, America’s government (and the aristocracy that control both it and the nation’s newsmedia) is still trying to destroy Russia. The ideologues for this American ideology are commonly called “neoconservatives,” and now neoconservatives represent the mainstream amongst America’s oligarchs. They’re not at all ashamed of pumping it.

The American Establishment has lost the excuse of there being an ideological reason for their hostility against Russia; so, scare-tactics are used, such as that “Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe.” That “red scare” used to be the particular demagoguery of Republicans — back when there was an ideological excuse for it. But now, it’s even the way of the U.S. press, as it presses forward with the Hillary Clinton campaign, to make her the next U.S. President. With her as the candidate, they’ve got to make it ‘respectable’.

Western media-watchdog organizations demand U.S.-government-approved standards of ‘press freedom’. However, slanting the ‘news’ as HuffPo and other major U.S. ‘news’ media do, is being treated by those organizations as if it were okay, and were a ‘free press’, when perhaps it isn’t, really. Thus, for example, wikipedia’s article on “Media Freedom in Russia” notes that ‘According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, ‘All three major television networks are now in the hands of Kremlin loyalists.’” Aren’t all television networks in the U.S. now in the hands of U.S. loyalists? There’s no more media-diversity here than there. America has its own issues regarding freedom of its press, and is in no valid position to use its standards to evaluate other nations’ standards. America’s main agencies to evaluate ‘press freedom’ in nations around the world are Freedom House, and National Endowment for Democracy. Robert Parry reported, on 8 January 2015: “Documents from the Reagan presidential library reveal that two major institutions promoting ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ — Freedom House and National Endowment for Democracy — worked hand-in-glove, behind-the-scenes, with a CIA propaganda expert in the 1980s.” And there’s lots from other U.S. Presidencies that still hasn’t been released; cover-ups are instead the norm, in our ‘democracy’ — if we have one.

25 years after the communist Soviet Union and its military alliance the Warsaw Pact ended, General Flynn’s serving RT as an expert commentator about American national-security concerns was the day’s big news on August 16th? Really? Would things have been lots better for HuffPo’s management if Flynn were instead serving as a commentator on the BBC? Really? The ‘Big News’ of the day?

In true 1950s Joseph R. McCarthy fear-mongering form — but now after the end of communism — HuffPo opened this, their top news story, of the day:

Donald Trump will bring Michael Flynn ― a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was paid by a Russian state-funded television network to speak at its 10th-anniversary gala ― to his first national security briefing on Wednesday.

Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and high-profile adviser to Trump, has attracted attention since he was pushed out of government in 2014 for criticisms of what he says is the Obama administration’s failure to confront “radical Islam,” his role as an analyst on the Russian network RT, and his embrace of Trump.

ABC News reported on Tuesday that Flynn, along with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, would accompany Trump to his first top-secret briefing, heightening critics’ fears that the Trump camp would gain access to secrets it could potentially leak to contacts in the Kremlin. But former intelligence officials familiar with the the briefings process said it’s unlikely that the presidential nominees or their advisers will be looped in on critical secrets until after the election in November.

What this supposed skullduggery is actually about is Huffington Post’s attacking Trump for his wanting to focus American military expenditures away from the old Cold War, and instead toward the current problem, of overcoming jihadism — a refocus so as to fit a world in which the present and future threats to U.S. security are coming from invasions (such as 9/11, and the other, even lone-jihadist, acts) by Islamic terrorists, and not from any invasion by communists, the Soviet Union, or any part of the former Soviet Union,including Russia.

Under U.S. President Obama, and especially inspired and led by his neoconservative former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, America’s refocus away from killing jihadists, to now battling Russia, as our “number one geopolitical foe”, is what Huffington Post’s management apparently want to focus America’s bloated military budget upon. We don’t have enough nuclear weapons? Today’s Joseph R. McCarthys want us to spend more to kill Russians (and heads-of-state who ally with them), and less to kill jihadists. When did Russia ever attack America? Not even when it was part of the communist Soviet Union, did it do any such thing. But jihadists are doing it all over the world.

Hillary Clinton favors the overthrow of Russia-friendly leaders, especially Gaddafi in Libya, Assad in Syria, and Yanukovych in Ukraine. (So far, we’ve finished two of those three jobs.) Thus, we’ve now had the burgeoning rise of ISIS in Syria and Libya, and a thoroughly unproductive and bloody civil war in the until-then-peaceful nation of Ukraine, following the bloody U.S. coup there that overthrew the nation’s democratically elected President Yanukovych, who had won the votes of 90% of the people in its far-eastern Donbass region, and 75% of the votes of the people in its far southern Crimean peninsula, both of which regions then rebelled against, and refused being ruled by, Obama’s imposed Ukrainian fascist regime, which was selected by Hillary’s friend and protégé Victoria Nuland, who had been Vice President Dick Cheney’s foreign-affairs advisor. Huffington Post is a mouthpiece today for Dick Cheney’s brand of neoconservatism? That’s right — it’s actually far right: it’s the ‘liberal’ Huffington Post, to steer liberal fools to vote for the hard-line neoconservative Hillary Clinton. (Of course, in order to do this, they have to placate the Democratic Party’s traditional liberal base by reporting the domestic U.S. injustices against Blacks and other minorities, but those aren’t the issues that could blow up the world — andDemocrats have done virtually nothing for those groups, in reality, anyway.)

Hillary’s neoconservatism has been fought against by her successor at the State Department, John Kerry; but, when he tried to rein-in her protégé (and now Kerry’s subordinate) Nuland, who was exceedingly eager to press for war against Russia, President Obama sided with Nuland against Kerry, in perhaps the most embarassing incident in Kerry’s entire career. And now, HuffPo’s management want the hyper-neoconservative Hillary to become the U.S. President, and are campaigning against Trump as if he and not she is the traitor to the American people. It’s as if the U.S. ‘news’ media were agents of America’s manufacturers of bombs and bombers and submarines etc., to pump for increasingAmerica’s bloated military budget, which drowns out spending for highways and other infrastructure that serves the public. Melvin Goodman in his terrific book about that, asks trenchant questions (p. 371):

Why did the United States have more than one and a half million men and women in uniform two decades after the end of the Cold War? Why was the end of the Cold War considered a triumph instead of a challenge and an opportunity? Why are so many troops stationed in Europe and Japan more than six decades after the end of the Second World War? Why are so many troops stationed in South Korea sixty years after the end of the Korean War? Why are there still hundreds of U.S. bases and operational facilities in Europe and Asia, particularly in view of the overwhelming U.S. ability to project power? Why did the United States spend more than a trillion dollars on military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost so much blood and treasure but contributed nothing to American national security?

How corrupt has America become? Isn’t that the basic question here. Can the ‘news’ media really deal with it if they are themselves part of it?

Huffington Post’s point in emphasizing Trump’s being ‘soft on Russia’, is that Trump’s plan to refocus U.S. national-security priorities upon the threats coming from international terrorist organizations, must be blocked, at all costs, and that the current increasing U.S. military focus against Russia (and against the leaders of any nation who are friendly toward Russia) must increase and bring us closer-and-closer to the nuclear brink with Russia, instead of ending this counterproductive anti-Russian conflict by means of a negotiated mutual withdrawal, of NATO-U.S. forces, from Russia’s borders — and also ending U.S. anti-Russian invasions, such as of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and ending U.S.coups such as of Ukraine, on and near Russia’s borders.

Trump’s basic message is: Get over the Cold War; it ended 25 years ago; instead, let’s rebuild America’s infrastructure, and focus national defense on the challenge of defeating jihadists and their ideology. However, America’s Establishment is invested in the Cold War, and they won’t feel that they have won that war until both Russia and China have become conquered by them — are controlled by them.

That’s what the 2016 U.S. Presidential election will really be about.

How would Americans feel if, 25 years after ending its NATO alliance, the Warsaw Pact continued, and were now massing its forces on America’s borders? Would that be “provocative”? Would we tolerate it? Huffington Post’s management apparently think that it’s what the U.S. government ought to be doing to Russia. America’s moving forces right up to Russia’s borders is happening right now, and how much opposition to that is there in America’s ‘free press’?

This is Hillary Clinton’s campaign; it’s not journalism; it is propaganda. Maybe ‘Freedom House’ and the ‘National Endowment for Democracy’, would give it top marks — forherding ‘liberals’ into fascism.

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.

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The World Wildlife Fund tells us that there are only 3,890 tigers left in the entire world. Due to exploitative capitalism, which destroys the environment in behalf of short-term profits, the habitat for tigers is rapidly disappearing. The environmental destruction, together with hunting or poaching by those who regard it as manly or profitable to kill a magnificent animal, is leading to the rapid extermination of this beautiful animal. Soon tigers will only exist as exhibits in zoos.

The same is happening to lions, cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, elephants, bobcats, wolves, bears, birds, butterflies, honey bees. You name it.

What we are witnessing is the irresponsibility of the human race, a Satan-cursed form of life that does not belong on the beautiful planet Earth. The cursed humans are even capable of launching a nuclear war which would destroy the livability of Earth.

God made a mistake when he gave to humans, infected as they are with evil, jurisdiction over Earth. He should have given jurisdiction to animals. Consider what humans do to animals. For example, Defenders of Wildlife report that the corrupt state of Alaska is currently slaughtering wolves and grizzley bears so that the state can sell more hunting permits to hunters to slaughter moose. Every moose taken by a wolf pack or a grizzley is not there to be murdered by a hunter. So the state is killing off the predators that reduce its hunting license fees.

Quail hunters want the bobcats killed so that hunters can shoot more birds. The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department voted to establish a hunting and trapping season for bobcats but had to overturn its decision when it became clear that the endangered lynx would be caught in the same traps. Humans regard animals as worthy of protection only when they are on the verge of extinction.

Murder and death appeal to Americans and not only to hunters. How many Americans do you know who are distressed by their government’s murder, maiming, and dislocation of millions of Muslims in seven countries over the past 15 years?

A few years ago there was a scandal involving a NBA star who was a patron of dog fights in which Americans brought dogs to kill or be killed. Americans attend cock fights in which roosters kill or die. The British enjoyed fights to the death between bears and dogs and bred a special dog to fight the bears. The Spanish like to see the death of the bull or of the bullfighter. The blood sport of the Roman Colosseum is very much a part of the human race.

Badly raised little boys tie cans to the tails of dogs and cats and laugh as the terrified animals run, often to their death under the wheels of cars.

Sometimes I go to a gun club with a friend to shoot at paper targets. On one occasion our concentration was disturbed by bursts from a superweapon. I watched the person flinch each time he shot. I suggested that he needed a less powerful weapon with which to practice.

If only, he said. His son had gone to Africa and paid $25,000 to murder a lion. The son had pressured the father to live up to his feat, and the father was adding bruises to his shoulder every time he fired a round of the .375 H&H Magnum. He began to flinch when he pulled the trigger, and his aim was worse by the shot.

He said that he was trying to sight-in the rifle. I offered to do that for him so that the rest of us could go about our business of eye-hand coordination. Observing our disapproving looks, he blurted out that he didn’t really want to shoot a lion, but that his friends and his son were enculturated into a hunting culture in which killing animals was proof of manhood. He felt that he had to do it in order to be accepted.

Then he described the process by which the great lion hunter killed the dangerous beast.

First, he said, you shoot a hippo. Then parts of the dead animal are hung as bait on posts a mere 60 yards from a 20-foot high platform where there are gun rests in the event you are unable to shoulder your own rifle for a shot at such a large animal as a lion a mere 60 yards away. And if you miss, the Great White Hunter guide shoots and you can claim the victory over the dangerous beast.

I remarked that he didn’t seem inclined to participate in this fake hunting scenario. He said that he wasn’t but that he had paid his $25,000. I suggested that he cancel the trip and consider the 25K as the cost of avoiding the shame of participating in cowardly murder.

Elephants are magnificient creatures. Their intelligence is higher than many humans, and their life span, if they are not murdered, can be longer than the human life span. Yet elephants are being murdered at astonishing rates. Nick Brandt documents with his photographs, Across The Ravaged Land, the disappearing animals of East Africa.

The Guardian, a once stong but today weak and Washington-intimidated UK newspaper, reports that in 2014 20,000 African Elephants were killed by poachers. Tanzania and Mozambeque have lost over half of their elephant populations with the same devastation of elephants across east and central Africa.

Faced with the extermination of elephants, what did the corrupt European Union do? The EU refused a ban on Ivory trade! The ban might interfere with capitalist profits.

Free market ideologues have concocted a theory that the way to save animals is to make it profitable to kill them. Therefore, people raise the animals to be killed by hunters. In other words, animals only exist for the pleasure of humans to kill them.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/06/african-wildlife-officials-appalled-as-eu-opposes-a-total-ban-on-ivory-trade

What we are left with is a “western civilization” that is no longer a civilization but an existential threat to all life on Earth. Obama has announced a one trillion dollar US nuclear modernization program.

http://billmoyers.com/story/the-trillion-dollar-question-the-media-have-neglected-to-ask-presidential-candidates/

This huge sum, spent for death, could instead be spent for life. It is enough money to fund many large and well protected wildlife preserves around the world.

The evil represented by nuclear weapons is inconsistent with the continued existence of life on Earth. Washington, crazed by desire for hegemony over others, is recklessly courting war between nuclear powers. Only Putin among world leaders warns that Washington is setting an unpromising course for everyone.

Yet regardless of all fact, deluded Americans still regard themselves as the salt of the earth, the “exceptional people,” the “indispensable people.” If this delusion is incurable, humans will murder Earth.

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“Crisis is an Opportunity”: Engineering a Global Depression to Create a Global Government

One World Governance and the Council on Foreign Relations.“We Shall have World Government… by Conquest or Consent.”

By Joachim Hagopian, August 18 2016

The fact is the Council on Foreign Relations has been controlling US foreign policy for almost a century, and chief among its most obvious agendas has been building and maintaining US Empire’s global unipolar hegemony and military strength at all cost.

Middle-East-Map-460x319

Failed Coup in Turkey, Escalating War in Ukraine, The Battle For Aleppo, Freedom for Saif al-Gaddafi in Libya

By Hugo Turner, August 18 2016

Sometimes events speed up and begin to spiral out of control. This is definitely one of those times. So much has happened since my last article on Syria that I’ll never be able to do it all justice. The Battle for Aleppo continues of course a brutal struggle for the future of Syria and the world. There was the failed coup in Turkey. There was good news from Libya where Saif Gaddafi was finally released raising hopes that Libya may someday regain it’s independence. In Crimea there was a failed terror plot that was narrowly foiled.

TPP-Obama

Obama Pushing for TPP: Misinformation and Big Lies His Strategy

By Stephen Lendman, August 18 2016

US trade deals are jobs-killing weapons of mass destruction. They destroy fundamental economic and social structures. They ignore eco-sanity. Preventing TPP’s enactment into US law is crucial for all working-age Americans and their families. Obama intends going on the offensive publicly to get Congress on board for its passage. Last October, he touted it in his weekly radio address – featuring a litany of Big Lies, one of many examples of how he consistently betrayed the public trust throughout his tenure.

pills_white_pain_735_350

Kris Kristofferson’s Dramatic Cure of his “Incurable” Alzheimer’s Disease

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, August 18 2016

The term “iatrogenic” means doctor, drug or surgery-caused disease. It is a taboo subject in America today. Apparently Kristofferson had been mis-diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia about three years ago, which started more than one medical misadventure for he and his neurologists involving neurotoxic medication trials with drugs.

Hillary_Clinton_(24338774540)

Clinton Transition Team Headed by Anti-Climate ‘Powerbroker’

By Nadia Prupis, August 18 2016

Hillary Clinton has named her transition team should she be elected in November, and the roster—as many feared—is a who’s-who of establishment figures, including former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who has a maligned track record on climate. The team will also include former national security adviser Tom Donilon, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, president of the Center for American Progress (CAP) Neera Tanden, and director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics Maggie Williams. Two of the campaign’s policy advisers, Ed Meier and Ann O’Leary, will also serve as co-executive directors.

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Russian Military Options in Syria and the Ukraine

August 18th, 2016 by The Saker

The past two weeks have been rich in military developments directly affecting Russia:

Syria:

1) Russia has announced that she will transform the Khmeimim airfield into a full-fledged military base with a permanently deployed task force.

2) Russia will deploy her heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser (often referred to in the West as an “aircraft carrier”) Admiral Kuznetsov to the eastern Mediterranean to to check the combat capabilities of the ship and its strike group and to engage, for the very first time, the state-of-the-art Ka-52K Katran helicopters.

ID1974 / Shutterstock.com

ID1974 / Shutterstock.com

The Ukraine:

1) Following the failure of the Ukronazis to infiltrate saboteurs on the Crimean Peninsula ,which President Putin called “stupid and criminal”,Poroshenko has now ordered a reinforcement of his military forces on border with Crimea and eastern Ukraine and placed its military on its highest alert.

2) The authorities in Kiev decided not to accept the credentials of the new Russian ambassador to the Ukraine.

3) President Putin declared that in this context, negotiations with Kiev are “pointless”.

While not directly connected, all of these news items point to a possible military escalation which could result in Russia having to engaged her military in combat operations in Syria, Crimea and Novorussia. Thus is makes sense at this point to review the Russian options in all these theaters of war.

The Syrian theater:

There is a great deal of misunderstanding about the Russian military options in Syria. Just as the major Russian military intervention which was initially expected failed to materialize (the actual Russian intervention was very limited in both size and time), the reinforcement of the Khmeimim airbase will not result in a major strategic shift in the regional balance of power. A couple of reminders:

First, the Russian naval base at Tartus is not really a “naval base” at all. It is a port which the Russian Navy has been using, but it lack the capability to dock large ships and it is not defended in a way a normal Russian military base would be. In fact, the Russian refer to it as a “пункт материально-технического обеспечения“ or “material-technical supply point”. It is possible, even likely, that in time Russia will expand and reinforce Tartus, but for the foreseeable future Tartus will not be a major military outpost for the Russian Navy.

Second, the airbase in Khmeimin is located in a very dangerous spot: roughly 1000km from the Russian border and only 50km from the Turkish border. It is also nicely wedged right between the CENTCOM “area of responsibility” and NATO. This is most definitely not a location you want to try to threaten US forces from. Finally, this is also not a location which Russia would defend with nuclear forces.

Defense Minister Shoigu did, in fact, clearly spell outwhat the purpose of the Russian presence in Khmeimim will be: a) to attack terrorists and b) to defend Russian nationals. Again, these are very limited goals which will be attained by using limited means. To be sure, Khmeimim will also become a crucial intelligence hub for Russia and, once the airbase is expanded, the Russian search and rescue capabilities will be dramatically enhanced. For both of these task Russian special forces will be permanently stationed at the airbase. Finally, the Russians will increase the size of the runways to make it accessible to the heaviest Russian transport aircraft. But the fundamental characteristic of the Khmeimim airbase will always remind that it will remain vulnerable due to its location and long distance from Russia.

As for the deployment of the Kuznetsov, which is primarily a formidable air defense ship, it will allow the Russians to get a much fuller signal intelligence picture of the region and will provide solid protection for both Tartus and Khmeimim. The first-time deployment of the Ka-52K (which were initially commissioned to be deployed on the French “Mistrals”) will be a testing side show but not a crucial game changer in the war.

All in all, the Russians are most definitely increasing their capabilities and the range of options to chose from different options depending on the evolution of the situation. At this point, there are no signs of a major shift in the Russian position: ever since the “semi-withdrawal” of Russian Aerospace forces from Syria, Russia is still counting primarily on her long-rage bombers (Tu-22M3). These can, if needed, be supplemented by Su-34/Su-30/Su-35 strike groups flying out of southern Russia.

The Ukrainian theater:

The situation in the Ukraine is much more unpredictable than the one in Syria and it has been so for a long while now. Almost every week we saw warnings about a possible Ukrainian attack, sometimes even announced as “imminent” and then that attack fails to materialize. The dangerous thing about these false warnings is that they were not false at all and that these attacks truly could have happened almost any week. Worst of all, there is now a “boy who cried wolf” phenomenon taking place where everybody is becoming bored with the endless warnings about an imminent Ukronazi attack. The problem is that, of course, such attack is becoming more and more likely with every passing day.

There are those who argue that an Ukronazi attack against Crimea would be suicidal, and they are absolutely correct, and that an Ukronazi attack against Novorussia would be exceedingly unlikely to succeed, and they are correct again. The assumption here is that the regime in Kiev is capable of rational calculation and that the purpose of such an attack would be victory. But, in reality, victory was never a Ukronazi goal. Instead, the goal was always to draw Russia into a open war. The Ukronazis themselves are deluding themselves in the hope that they will get to do what the Croats did in 1995 when they, backed by the full airpower of NATO, attacked the (disarmed) Croatian Serbs in the so-called “Krajinas”. In reality, the situation in the Donbass is totally different: not only are the Novorussians not disarmed like the Krajina Serbs were (all their “heavy weapons” were in UNPROFOR controlled depots), but unlike the poor Serbs (who were betrayed by Milosevic), the Novorussians know that if things get tough Russia will back them, including by deniable long-range artillery strikes (as she did in July 2014). As for Crimea, even the most deluded Ukrainians must realize by now, even if they don’t admit this, that they will never re-take Crimea.

The problem for Russia is that while the regime in Kiev is slowly rotting into irrelevance, there is only one thing which the Ukraine can offer the AngloZionist Empire: to become the sacrificial lamb in a desperate effort to provoke Russian into an intervention and thereby make the current “tepid war” between NATO and Russia fully irreversible or even “hot”. An overt Russian counter-attack in the Donbass, or even from Crimea, is every Neocon’s dream come true.

So far, all the Ukronazis were capable of doing is constantly shelling the civilians of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics which, being 100% dependent on Moscow, had to put up with this infamy even though scores of innocents civilians have been killed every day. There is also a lot of indirect evidence that the military capabilities of the Novorussians have dramatically increased over the past year or so and that makes it even more frustrating for them to put up with the constant provocations and murders of civilians. The Kremlin, however, has evidently decided that a small and steady stream of murdered civilians in the Donbass is still preferable to a full-scale military operation followed by, and this is often overlooked, the occupation of some part of the Ukrainian territory. Indeed, once you occupy it – you own it and you are responsible for it. Nobody in Russia is willing to shoulder the costs of a war and the subsequent occupation and reconstruction of a territory currently under Ukronazi control. Finally, why give the regime in Kiev a life-saving distraction when it does such a world-class job of slowly but surely destroying itself?

The paradox here is that the Russian strength is also the Russian weakness: chances are that the Novorussians are capable of not only stopping a Ukronazi attack, but even of an operationally deep counter-attack. Thus, it is most likely that Russia herself would not be pulled into an overt war over the Donbass. But in Crimea there are no Novorussians, no Donetsk or Lugansk people’s republics. In Crimea there are only Russians and Crimea is Russia. Thus any Ukronazi attack on Crimea would be a direct act of war against Russia which Russia could not ignore or reply to by using a “voentorg” + “northern wind” combo (voentorg: covert supplying of weapons; “northern wind” covert supplying of military specialists). If Crimea is attacked, the Russians will have to strike back, whether they want it or not.

If that happens, the Russian counter-strike will most likely be limited and will probably focus on the forces directly responsible for the attack. But if the Ukronazis use their artillery from well-entrenched positions to unleash a steady barrage on the towns of northern Crimea or if, God forbid, the Ukronazis use ballistic missiles to target major urban centers in Crimea, the Russians will have no choice but to counter-attack swiftly and decisively. And since 8/8/8 it is become clear that the West will *always* blame Russia, even if she is first attacked by another party.

In purely military terms, any conflict between the Russian armed forces and the Ukronazis would be a massacre: all the Ukrainians can bring to the battlefield are numbers, but they are completely out-gunned, quantitatively and, even more so, qualitatively by the Russians. The Russian artillery is currently the most capable on the planet, it is even far superior to anything in the West, and its effects on the Ukrainian military have been absolutely devastating in the past. Russia has an unique combination of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and EW (Electronic Warfare) capabilities which are directly plugged-in into the targeting systems of Russian multiple-rocket launchers which can reach as far as 90km into the enemy’s rear. Finally, the Russians have been working for years on advanced submunitions and thermobaric warheads which can be used with devastating effect on armored forces and fortified positions.

This combo of UAV and advanced multiple-rocket launchers form what the Russians call a “reconnaissance-strike complex” or RSC (разведывательно-ударный комплекс) which is a concept first developed by the Soviets as far back as the 1960s. The RSC fully integrates all the following elements: reconnaissance, guidance, electronic counter-measures, navigation and engagement of high-precision weapons.

Now, with the advent of new UAV and counter-battery radars, this concept has reached its full maturity and is now the cornerstone of Russian combined-arms operations. What this all means in practical terms is that the Russians now have the capability completely destroy several mechanized battalions in only 2-3 minutes. And there is nothing, nothing at all, which the Ukrainians could do against this.

The Russians also have vastly superior armor, electronic warfare capabilities, aerospace forces, intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, training – you name it. The Ukrainians don’t stand a chance.

One big canard is the notion that US deliveries of “lethal weapons” to the Ukraine would somehow tip the balance. In reality, no amount of weapons would make any difference. Russian capabilities today are as far superior to the Ukrainian ones as the capabilities of the US military were superior to the Iraqi military in 1990 during Desert Storm. While in 1991 the Ukrainian military was nominally larger than the Russian one (the Ukraine inherited the entire Soviet strategic 2nd echelon forces), it did not have a war in Chechnia to force it to begin reorganizing like the Russian one had to, nor did it have a President like Putin who as soon as he came to power embarked on an immense military reform whose fruits are now finally showing. As a result, the Russians have now achieved several generational breakthroughs while the Ukrainians are basically stuck with 1980s gear and a completely disorganized, corrupt and incompetent military. It will take the Ukraine decades to catch-up to the Russians, and that only if some kind of highly improbable economic miracle happens.

Conclusion:

The wars in the Syria and the Ukraine are, as is so often the case, largely predetermined by geography. There is really nothing Russia could do to meaningfully and directly oppose the US military in the Middle-East or the Mediterranean. Likewise, there is nothing the US can to meaningfully and directly oppose the Russian armed forces in eastern Ukraine. This is why both sides will try to act indirectly, on the margins, via proxies but without getting directly exposed. While this strategy is fundamentally sound, it is also dangerous because indirect warfare by proxy is harder to control and leaves both sides open to provocations, false flag operations and the covert involvement of third parties. This is why both wars are so frustrating to follow: on one hand all sorts of highly speculative scenarios cannot be simply dismissed, but on the other hand, nothing much seems to be happening. And when something finally does happen, it is unclear as to what the possible consequences might be. Finally, both wars involve highly ideological and fundamentally irrational actors (the Ukronazis, the Daesh crazies, the Neocons) who cannot be counted on to act rationally. Alas, all the theories of deterrence always assume a rational actor. But how do you deter a delusional maniac?

The Russian options in both of these conflicts are limited by objective circumstances and by larger political considerations. I would argue that Russia has done an absolutely amazing job in Syria with very limited means and in a supremely dangerous environment. As for the Donbass, I would be much more nuanced. And while I do believe that Russia took the right decision by not overtly sending her armed forces in the eastern Ukraine, I also have to admit that she also showed poor timing and even indecision in dealing with the Nazi crazies in Kiev: it took the Russians a long time to get the Voentorg and “Northern Wind” up and running and while this was the correct response, it was also one which took a long time to become fully effective. Then there is the issue of the (now former) Russian ambassador to Kiev, Mikhail Zurabov, who was totally ineffective in getting anything done at all (while he was left in place for so long is still a mystery to me). True, Zurabov had nobody to speak to, but that does not justify him cozying up and playing buddies with Poroshenko as he reportedly did. Now that the Russians have finally appointed a competent person to this role, Mikhail Babichthe Ukrainians are refusing to accredit him which, apparently, the Kremlin is accepting with bizarre equanimity. In December, Putin also appointed another very powerful figure, Boris Gryzlov, a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, as the plenipotentiary representative of the Russian Federation in the Contact Group on settlement of the situation in Ukraine. It took Russia a very long time, but now with Gryzlov and Babich involved, Russia is finally involving some high octane personalities in the negotiations process dealing with the war in the Ukraine. Again, a good decision, but a very belated one.

Could this also indicate that the Russians have information that something major will happen with the Ukraine? Possibly. I sure don’t know, but it does look to me that they are preparing for something.

As for Syria, the Russian are trying to increase their options, but it is unlikely that anything major happens before the next US administration comes in. Besides, with Erdogan still busy with his crackdown on any opposition, it is also unclear what course Turkey will take once the purges are completed.

And then this, just in:

According to al Masdar news (https://www.almasdarnews.com), Iran has just granted Russia the right to use the Hamedan Air Base in western Iran. The original article entitled “Russia deploys jets at Iranian Airbase to combat insurgents in Syria (Pictures)” (https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/russia-deploys-jets-iranian-airbase-combat-insurgents-syria-pictures/) even claims to show pictures of Russian Tu-22M3s already deployed in Iran. IF this is true, this is very significant. Unlike Khmeimim, Hamedan is safe and is perfectly located to conduct military strikes in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle-East. One problem though: al Masdar is an Israeli project, part the Israel Project, a “pro-Israel public diplomacy organization founded in the United States at the height of the second intifada”. I checked with a well-informed Iranian source, and it is not confirming any of this at this time. The Russian blogger “Colonel Cassad”, however, did some investigating of his ownand seems to consider that information as plausible. Other Russian sources are confirming that Russia has asked Iran to allow Russian cruise missiles to fly through Iranian airspace. It does appear like the collaboration between Iran and Russia is strengthening which is, of course, very good news.

Finally, if Erdogan is serious about collaborating with Russia and Iran against Daesh, then one way for Turkey to do that would be to open the Turkish airspace to Russian air and missile strikes against Daesh. If that happens, Russia will have the choice of four locations to launch strikes: Crimea, southern Russia (Abkhazia), Khmeimim in Syria and, hopefully, Hamedan in Iran.

Bombora Military Airport

Bombora Military Airport

A place to keep a special eye on is the Bombora military airfield near Gudauta, in Abkhazia. According to Lentra.ru, the length of the main runway is 4km (this is a mistake, the actual length is 3km) and this runway ends right on the seashore allowing aircraft to take off at very low altitudes and thereby remain under enemy radar coverage (see image next page). This airfield is currently protected by some 4’000 Russian soldiers deployed in Abkhazia who are equipped by the newest Russian weapon systems and who form the backbone of the Russian 7th Base [for more on this base, see here (from and anti-Russian source) and here (including some pretty interesting photographs)]. This airfield is ideally located to become a major hub for the operations of Russian Aerospace forces.

UPDATE:

Firstas Aram Mirzaei correctly pointed out, I made a mistake and confused two websites called Al-Masdar (the source):One is the Israeli project mentioned in this article, led by chief editor Shimrit Meir. This website is called Al-Masdar.net. The other page is a pro-Syrian-Iranian-Russian news website calledalmasdarnews.com. I apologize for this mistake.

Second, it seems that almasdarnews.com is correct. Several Iranian websites are now also reporting the Russian deployment at the Hamedan Air Base:

http://www.eghtesadonline.com/بخش-جهان-29/140628-استقرار-بمب-افکن-های-روسی-در-پایگاه-هوایی-همدان-عکس

http://www.akharinnews.com/آخرین_اخبار/item/112646-بمب-افکن-های-روسیه-وارد-فرودگاه-نظامی-همدان-شدند.html

http://damadam.ir/۲۴-آنلاین-24onlinenews/اخبار-سیاسی/title/بمب-افکن-های-روسیه-وارد-فرودگاه-نظامی-همدان-شدند/id/3321242

RT is now also quoting the Al Masdar article thus indirectly confirming it:https://www.rt.com/news/356098-russian-bombers-iran-hamadan/

This is an extremely important and positive development which shows that the military cooperation between Russia and Iran has now reached a new level and which will have a major impact upon this war. This is very, very good news.

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Proof: US and NATO-backed ‘Rebels’ Are NOT Fighting ISIS

August 18th, 2016 by 21st Century Wire

Aside from the standard list of lies which US-led ‘Coalition’ representatives regularly spout regarding their so-called ‘moderate rebels’ (terrorists) in Syria, there is another key lie which is only barely holding Washington and London’s house of cards together – that is the idea that some of these ‘moderate rebels’ (terrorists) are somehow engaged in the grand crusade against ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh (all terms apply equally to ISIS). For all intents and purposes, this spurious western claim is a lie – one of many lies about Syria constantly being fed to the public by western politicians and media functionaries.

The reality, outside of the Washington-London “classified” reality bubble is that these US-NATO-GCC-backed ‘moderate rebels’ (terrorists) have, more or less, the exact same objectives as ISIS,and unless they are fighting over control of money or illicit black markets, their shared collective goal is the overthrow of the Syrian government in Damascus via ‘regime change’ and an end to a secular, multi-religious nation-state of Syria. Put simply: their flag designs and online brands may differ, but they are effectively one in the same. So it only stands to reason that if the US-NATO allies are wholeheartedly backing this rebel-terrorist ‘armed opposition’ conclave, then despite their highfalutin rhetoric, US-NATO allies are also supporting an end to the secular multi-religious nation-state in Syria.

Furthermore, as western-backed terrorist rebels share the same objectives as ISIS, then by extension – this also means that the US-NATO allies share the exact same goals as ISIS. Yes, that’s right: US-NATO forces have positioned themselves as natural allies of ISIS, alongside the ‘moderate rebel’ terrorists who have already received billions in western taxpayer-funded arms, equipment, training, intelligence support and cash.

The entire US-NATO justification for having thousands of special forces and military trainers currently deployed in Turkey, Jordan and inside Syria – is that the NATO member states are training these ‘moderate rebels’ (terrorists) to fight against ISIS.” Seeing that this is not actually happening, and thus can be written off as another major lie and key propaganda line being disseminated by Washington and its NATO functionaries – then the US and its NATO partners are effectively undermining the war against the terrorists – and conveniently extending the Syrian Conflict in the process. Based on this, the obvious conclusion would be for the US and NATO forces to cease all military activities in and around Syria – and leave the fighting against terrorist groups… to those entities legally inside Syria of whom we can safely say are definitely notsupporting or enabling jihadi terrorists groups in the region and those entities are: the Syrian government forces, the Russian military, Iranian forces and the Hezbollah militia.

Add to this, the disconcerting fact that ISIS terrorists in both Syria and Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan – are using United States-issued weapons and equipment. Despite categorical US denials, this is becoming an all too familiar occurrence.

It shouldn’t be complicated, and yet, this is how Washington and London like to operate – within a fog of maximum confusion, and of Gangs and Counter-gangs, while also cynically changing the names of known terrorist groups the US-led ‘Coalition’ has been supporting both militarily and financially for at least the past four years, and also by using its corporate media assets like CNN who are now trying to rehabilitate jihadist terrorist groups for these fighters to gain favor from western audiences.

Does anyone still believe that “the ‘moderate rebels’ are fighting ISIS,” like Washington has insisted for years now? According to the evidence, that’s just another lie – and here is even more damning proof that it’s a lie…

US-backed ‘rebels’, under the watchful supervision of US drones, have just let ISIS walk away…

Syrian-Rebels

US-backed forces give hundreds of ISIS fighters safe passage

Several hundred vehicles containing 100 to 200 Islamic State fighters were given safe passage by US-based forces, out of the northern Syrian city of Manbij, after surrendering their weapons, according to defense officials.

US Army Col. Carver, a spokesman for the US-led coalition fighters, told Pentagon reporters the decision to let Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) convoys leave the city was made by commanders of the Syrian Democratic Force.

Col. Carver described how IS had civilians in each of the vehicles, and the military wanted to avoid casualties. He didn’t know how many of the civilians had been in the cars voluntarily but said some were likely hostages.

The 100 to 200 fighters left the city of Manbij last Friday under watch of  [US-controlled] Coalition Drones to ensure the militants didn’t regroup and try to return to the city.

It was the first such agreement with the terror group. IS fighters were allegedly using civilians as human shields to escape.

“They kept throwing civilians to basically walk into the line of fire, trying to get them shot to use that potentially as propaganda, we think,” said Col. Chris Garver.

Associated Press reported US military officials said some of the IS fighters had already made their way into Turkey, and many were still in Syria.

US-led coalition forces had sustained three months of aerial bombardment and fighting on the northern Syrian city of Manbij, an IS stronghold…

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Sometimes events speed up and begin to spiral out of control. This is definitely one of those times. So much has happened since my last article on Syria that I’ll never be able to do it all justice. The Battle for Aleppo continues of course a brutal struggle for the future of Syria and the world. There was the failed coup in Turkey. There was good news from Libya where Saif Gaddafi was finally released raising hopes that Libya may someday regain it’s independence. In Crimea there was a failed terror plot that was narrowly foiled.

First I’ll deal with Libya. Last year Saif al-Gaddafi was sentenced to death by the Libyan Dawn faction of Libya’s then 2 competing governments locked in civil war. This provoked protests by supporters of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya the government overthrown by NATO’s criminal 2011 war that installed Al Qaeda death squads as the new de facto government. Thousands of loyal Libyan’s were killed thousands more rounded up imprisoned and tortured in the wake of NATOs victory. There are still over 7000 people being held at the mercy of the death squads. But since 2011 the forces loyal to the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya known as the Green Resistance have only grown in strength. Thus last year’s attempt in July 2015 to sentence Saif to death resulted in massive protests by supporters of the Green Resistance as I discussed in my August 2015 “Wars on Syria Libya Yemen” They risked death and a more then a dozen were killed protesting the unjust sentence against Saif whose only crimes were his refusal to betray his family and nation during NATO’s war on Libya. Now a year later not only has Saif not been sentenced to death he has been freed a victory greeted by thousands of green resistance supporters with protests in celebration. The Green Flags of the resistance were displayed all over the country as people came out to celebrate.

All over Libya millions now hope for the return of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Meanwhile the US/NATO have stepped up their attacks on the country as part of their phony war on the very terrorists they still back. Alexandra Valiente of Jamahiriya news, and Libya 360 calls it the most sophisticated psychological warfare campaign in history. The US has also continued it’s phoenix program style assassination campaign aimed at supporters of the green resistance and the Libyan National Army. The war in Libya continues but the fact that Saif is now free gives reason for hope that one day all of Libya may be liberated from the terrifying occupation by the Empire of Chaos. Meanwhile in Lebanon Hannibal Gaddafi who was kidnapped by Hezbollah is still being held for a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed since he was only 2 years old at the time of the mysterious assassination of Musa Sadr in 1978. Sadr’s real killers were the Ed Wilson Theodore Shackley “Secret Team”. The world must demand Hannibal’s release. He was finally supposed to be freed last week when the court invented new trumped up charges to hold him.

While Saif’s release was met by a deafening media silence the whole world has by now heard of the failed coup in Turkey. NATO and the CIA foolishly tried to overthrow their unpredictable ally Erdogan. Unfortunately for them the wily and paranoid Erdogan was expecting something like this after attempting to entice Russia into re-establishing the economic ties they broke after Turkey shot down the Russian fighter last fall and turkish grey wolves killed the pilot and blew up the rescue copter killing another.

Rumor has it that Russian intelligence warned him of the impending coup worried that the CIA had an even worse candidate in mind. In any case their was a brief hope that Erdogan would reduce his support for the war on Syria but that seems unlikely. Instead yet again Erdogan has managed to play his unpredictable balancing act between Russia and the West. Turkey is a sort of swinging pendulum first swinging towards Russia over the turkish stream pipeline, then towards the west by shooting down the fighter and now back to Russia. Meanwhile the war on Syria remains as intense as ever. At most there will be increased trade between the two countries Erdogan seems as unwilling as the US to end the war on Syria. Thus his recent visit to Russia failed to produce any agreement on Syria. Back in Turkey Erdogan is busy purging all his opposition in a massive crackdown. The one consolation is that in crushing the coup Erdogan also killed some of those responsible for planning the dirty war on Syria.

Crimea is now reunited with Russia due to the votes of the vast majority of it’s citizens and the heroic actions of the spetsnaz “polite men in green” back in 2014 in the wake of the fascist coup in Ukraine. Officially a part of the Russian federation it’s citizens have been largely spared the fascist terror campaign that Novorossia (Donbass) has been subjected to in the east. The main exception was last winter when Ukrainian fascists and their Tartar allies blew up the electricity pylons to the island plunging the people of crimea into darkness and cold. Now with the empire of chaos upset over the recently intensifying Russian support for Syria they gave their fascist allies in Ukraine the green light to launch more terror attacks on Crimea.

A team of commando infiltrators was sent into Crimea but luckily the locals were able to tip off the authorities in time. In the town of Armyansk the Russian FSB surrounded a team of 20 people unloading weapons and explosives. The fascists opened fire killing an FSB agent but were eventually captured with at least one of them kill and several wounded. Two more teams of infiltrators were caught trying to enter Crimea and a Russian soldier was killed by the Ukrainian army which was giving them covering fire with an APC. They were plotting to blow up infrastructure and also had a plan to blow up a bridge assassinating both local officials and federal authorities. Ukraine also attempted to assassinate the President of the Lugansk peoples republic Igor Plotnitsky who was injured when a bomb exploded near his car. Ukraine has also been escalating the war on Donbass continually shelling civilians and probing for weak spots in their defenses. Clearly the war in Ukraine is intensifying.

Meanwhile in Syria the epic battle for Aleppo continues. For a while things were going well for the Syrian forces they achieved their goal of capturing the Castillo highway cutting off the terrorists supply route after weeks of hard fighting. The terrorists laying siege to the city in Eastern Aleppo had their supplies cut off. The terrorists desperate attempts to recapture the road failed. However the terrorists were able to launch a massive counter-attack with 7,000 men in south west Aleppo breaking through Syrian defenses seizing the Ramoosa artillery base, an air force technical base and the 1070 apartment blocs. Now Southwest Aleppo is the scene of brutal fighting as the SAA have slowly been recapturing these sites from the terrorists.

Thus the terrorist victory may lead to a disastrous defeat as they are being heavily bombed by the Russian and Syrian air forces losing 1000 men according to the Russians. The death squads and their NATO advisers staked a lot on this counteroffensive opening a narrow path into the city. Now they will hopefully be cut off, surrounded and destroyed. However the battle for Aleppo is far from over all we can do is wish the SAA another Victory in Aleppo. Russia has thankfully continued to increase it’s support bombing the terrorists besieging the heroic defenders of Deir Ezzor from bases in Iran and moving it’s naval forces in position for an attack on the NATO death squads. In fact Lavrov even publicly admitted that the ceasefire was a mistake that allowed the terrorists to rearm.

With the provocations in Crimea and treachery in Syria hopefully Russia will get it’s revenge by helping Syria crush this NATO terrorist invasion. Syria is on the offensive seizing back the most of the 1070 apartments and the air force technical college. They made other important gains in Damascus, Latakia, and Deir Ezzor but of course the war continues. In Libya the power of the green resistance continues to grow despite the dirty war being waged on the country by NATO. In Turkey Erdogan is on the rampage purging his opponents. In Crimea the situation is tense but thankfully the people have been spared a wave of terror bombings and assassinations thanks to the quick response of the FSB and the Russian military. Donbass remains under fire it’s plight forgotten by the outside world which continues to ignore the menace of fascism in Ukraine. America continues it’s war on the planet spanning at least 4 continents not counting the low intensity counter-insurgency it has waged on it’s own territory for hundreds of years. For now though it’s schemes in Libya, Turkey, Ukraine, and Syria have all met humiliating setbacks.

Sources

Dan Glazebrook on the release of Saif al-Gaddafi
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/07/30/a-green-tide-rising-the-return-of-the-libyan-jamahiriya/

Alexandra Valiente on Hannibal Gaddafi
https://vivalibya.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/the-urgent-case-of-hannibal-gaddafi/

Sibel Edmonds on the failed coup in Turkey
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-cia-fethullah-gulen-and-operation-gladio-b/

An episode of Porkins Great Game on the failed coup in Turkey
https://porkinspolicyreview.com/2016/07/21/porkins-great-game-episode-15-turkey-coup-special/

An In depth account of Erdogan’s visit to Russia
http://russia-insider.com/en/erdogan-attacks-syria-crimea/ri16006

The foiled fascist terror plot in Crimea
http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/ukrainian-terror-squads-break-through-crimean-border-liquidated-fsb/ri16009

The attempted assassination of Igor Plotnitsky
http://sputniknews.com/europe/20160806/1043995691/explosion-car-head-luhansk.html

A Great analysis of the Battle for Aleppo
https://www.sott.net/article/325616-Heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-The-Great-Battle-of-Aleppo

The Battle for Supply lines in Aleppo
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/understanding-battle-supply-lines-aleppo-city-map-update/

Recent Victories in Aleppo 
http://syrianperspective.com/2016/08/decisive-week-in-aleppo-terrorists-losing-ground-all-over-damascus.html

The Latest victory in Aleppo
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/field-report-syrian-army-storms-technical-base-southern-aleppo/

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One of the stranger sights in international relations is that of a defeated State seeking to commemorate its fallen in a country whose affairs it sought to disrupt.  Australia is particularly adept at this, having obtained near exclusive entitlements to commemorate the landings at Gallipoli in Turkey on an annual basis, thereby inculcating successive generations with the notion that the wasteful engagement in April 1915 was in the name of “freedom.”

The singular nature of the treatment granted Australian families, veterans and officials by successive Turkish governments has had a spoiling effect.  (It would be inconceivable for similar privileges to be afforded German and Japanese war veterans.)  Australian politicians have come to expect authorities in another country, even the victorious ones, to be sweet on the survivors and veterans of the defeated.  When that welcome carpet is taken away, much fuss ensues.

This was what unfolded over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday regarding planned commemorations to be held at Long Tan, where 18 Australians lost their lives in an engagement in August 1966.

The battle has had a peculiar resonance in the Australian tale of valour – a small contingent of David-like warriors battling an insidious communist Goliath; a formidable ratio, by some estimates, of one to ten.  (A Fairfax journalist chose the term “crushing defeat” to describe the fate of the Viet Cong-North Vietnamese force in the Long Tan battle.)[1]

In the broader context of Australia’s role specifically on Vietnamese soil, that particular tale loses its lustre, specifically in the invasive presence of Australian soldiers.  The official tale about fighting godless communism as it threatened to make its winding way down Indochina to Australia is not one that has entirely vanished from the school books.

In what was a mixture of bureaucracy, administration, and last minute politicking, the Vietnamese authorities decided that cancelling scheduled 50th anniversary commemorations at Long Tan was in order.

The far from irrelevant matter of “local sensitivities” was cited, though some of the Australians had reason to be miffed by the sudden gesture, given that this had been ongoing for eighteen months.  Money had also changed hands.  What subsequently transpired was that the initial cancellation was prompted by sheer numbers.  Previous contingents travelling to the Long Tan Cross site have numbered 30 to 40.

The Veteran Affairs’ Minister, Dan Tehan, spoke of his disappointment, telling reporters that a thousand Australians had made the journey, and families would be left aggrieved.  “For us to be given such short notice of the cancellation is to put it, in frank terms, a kick in the guts.”[2]

What Tehan then decided to do was employ the friendship line, one so dangled and haggard in these situations it should be scrapped. “I do not think this is the way that you should treat a friend.”  Countries having, not so much friendships but interests, evidently did not spring to mind.

Mental fragility, with its psychologically wearing prospects of not attending such a ceremony, was also cited.  Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia president Ken Foster spoke of scenes of emotional devastation, those family members and veterans “told at the last minute to sit in their hotel or to sit in a bar because they can’t go where they want to go”.

Ken Aspinall of Tamworth, New South Wales, was less inclined to be mournful. War remained in the blood, and it was boiling indignantly.  “I should have brought my bloody gun over… Bugger them. We came all this way.”[3]

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull also joined in the diplomatic melee.  On Wednesday, he held talks with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, urging “empathy and compassion towards our veterans”.[4] None, evidently, for the Vietnamese veterans.

What ensued were overnight negotiations, with Vietnamese authorities giving some ground.  On Thursday, Finance Minister Mathias Corman informed ABC radio about the change of heart.  “As I understand there has been some arrangement put in place where there will be a wreath laying at the site where groups of up to 100 are able to visit the site and pay their respects.”[5]

Australian veterans have also been told that the ceremonial garb will be restricted: no medals or uniforms will be permitted when visiting the site.  There were also injunctions against a media presence, speeches and music. Such striking sensibility is bound to rile the medal wearing obsessives, though it emulates precedent.

Little heed at these Long Tan services has been paid to the catastrophic, impairing nature of the wars that shook Vietnam from the Second World War to the 1970s.  Aspinall’s comment about ignoring any Vietnamese ban on travelling to the site is typical.  “We’ll see what happens tomorrow… maybe we’ll walk right over them.”

For centuries the country has endured and beaten back invasions by larger powers, never itself being particularly interested in vast imperial enterprises.  Causes have tended to be local affairs.  When it came to colonial powers, the Vietnamese weren’t particular good in being walked over, preferring to fight to the point of existential desperation.

An entire population, strafed, torched, incessantly bombed and poisoned by Agent Orange, could have done with some post-war counselling about their trauma. But the Vietnamese response to such matters remains strikingly phlegmatic.  Their understanding is sagacious: old bullies will always stick to tradition.

While Australian forces did play a smaller part in the degenerate slaughter, sometimes expressing concern at the techniques employed by their US partners, they were complicit. Crude as it can be, all remains fair in love and war.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/world/why-vietnam-objected-to-the-long-tan-commemoration-20160817-gqv9aw.html
[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-17/vietnam-police-block-access-to-long-tan-site/7756984
[3] http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/kick-in-the-guts-as-vietnam-abruptly-bans-long-tan-battle-service-20160817-gquwka.html
[4] http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/australias-vietnam-war-veterans-shocked-over-long-tan-ban/news-story/63c6d353b36436e4afc6afb23eb0f30a
[5] http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/vietnam-changes-heart-on-long-tan-commemoration-after-lastminute-highlevel-consultations-20160817-gqv4r2.html

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The Associated Press Smears Trump

August 18th, 2016 by Eric Zuesse

The Associated Press issued, on Wednesday August 17th, a news story of possible corruption implicating both the campaign manager of the Trump campaign (Paul Manafort) and the campaign manager of the Clinton campaign (Tony Podesta), but headlined their news report only with the Trump-campaign’s connection, and included in the report’s lead-sentence, mention of only the Trump campaign, and buried until the news report’s 14th sentence, its first mention of the Clinton-campaign’s connection in this reported affair.

Furthermore, the AP’s ‘news’ article raised the question of whether a U.S. lobbying firms’ “accepting money to advocate the interests of foreign governments — especially if those interests conflict with America’s” is ethical, and it also implied (but did not assert this outright) that “those interests conflict with America’s” interests in this particular case. However, the AP’s ‘news’ writers provided no evidence that this “conflict with America’s” interests was actually so — that there was actually any such “conflict.” Only the hint of it was provided by the AP’s ‘news’ writers.

The AP’s article also avoided mentioning that the U.S. government overthrew, in a bloody coup which ended this lobbying campaign, the Ukrainian government that those lobbyists had been representing in Washington, and that that overthrown Ukrainian government actually constituted the “those interests” which the AP’s article was implying to have been unethical for these lobbyists to have been representing.

Actually, that Ukrainian government was the democratically elected government of Ukraine at the time, and its leader Viktor Yanukovych, was, in fact, Ukraine’s legally elected President at that time, and the U.S. overthrow of Yanukovych was a violation of the Ukrainian Constitution. None of that essential information is mentioned in this AP ‘news’ article. And this information places into an entirely different light the question of whether this lobbying was unethical as the AP’s report insinuates it to have been.

In fact, nothing is said in that ’news’ article regarding any such coup, and therefore no mention is made, either, about the possible unethical nature of America’s coup in Ukraine, which took place in February 2014, but which started to be prepared in the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine by no later than 1 March 2013, a year prior to the ultimate event, the bloody climax, the coup.

Hillary Clinton’s friend and former top aide at the State Department, Victoria Nuland, masterminded the coup, and instructed the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev whom to have appointed to replace the man, Yanukovych, whom they would be overthrowing. Nuland told Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt not to select Vitaly Klitchko (whom Pyatt evidently had been expecting her to name) nor Oleh Tyahnybok, but instead to select Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Here is that portion of their conversation:

Nuland: Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. I just think Klitsch going in… he’s going to be at that level working for Yatseniuk, it’s just not going to work.

Pyatt: Yeah, no, I think that’s right. OK. Good.

That conversation occurred on 4 February 2014, and Yatsenyuk became officially appointed 22 days later, on February 26th. The coup itself climaxed during February 20-22. “Yats” promptly replaced Ukraine’s top three generals with ones who would be committed to preparing Ukraine for war against ethnic Russians in Ukraine, and against Russia itself if Russia were to send troops in to protect them. The leading general, Mikhail Koval, drew up a plan for ethnic cleansing of the residents in the most ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine’s far eastern portion, called “Donbass.”Also at around that time, a TV station in Ukraine that had been set up with money from the U.S. Embassy, the Netherlands Embassy, and George Soros’s International Renaissance Fund, telecast a journalist alleging that:

“Donbass, in general, is not simply a region in a very depressed condition, it has got a whole number of problems, the biggest of which is that it is severely overpopulated with people nobody has any use for. Trust me I know perfectly well what I am saying. If we take, for example, just the Donetsk oblast, there are approximately 4 million inhabitants, at least 1.5 million of which are superfluous. That’s what I mean: we don’t need to [try to] ‘understand’ Donbass, we need to understand Ukrainian national interests. Donbass must be exploited as a resource, which it is. I don’t claim to have a quick solution recipe, but the most important thing that must be done — no matter how cruel it may sound — is that there is a certain category of people that must be exterminated.”

Almost immediately after Yatsenyuk became the leader of Ukraine, he sacked the existing three Deputy Defense Ministers, on March 5th. That’s when he replaced them with the three rabidly anti-Russian neo-Nazis, who were committed to this bombing-policy. The new Minister of Defense, Mikhail Koval, soon announced his intention to ethnically cleanse from southeastern Ukraine the “subhumans” who voted for Yanukovych, who will “be resettled in other regions,” meaning either Russia (if Russia accepted these Ukrainian refugees) or else concentration-camps inside Ukraine (and then perhaps death). “There will be a thorough filtration of people,” he promised. (That English translation has since been taken down; so, instead, try this and this.) Their property would be confiscated, and “Land parcels will be given out for free to the servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and other military formations, as well as to the employees of Interior Ministry and the Security Service of Ukraine that are defending territorial integrity and sovereignty of the country in eastern and southeastern regions of Ukraine.” That’s the euphemism for the ethnic cleansing, and mass-theft. In other words, Obama’s rulers of Ukraine were offering their Ukrainian soldiers the opportunity to grab legally the property of their ethnic-Russian victims. Ukraine didn’t have the money to pay for all the soldiers that would be needed to do this ethnic cleansing; so, these men were being promised war-booty, instead.

At least as soon as 22 April 2014, strong indications already existed that the populations in those areas were very worried about the rabidly racist statements coming from the new government in Kiev. These people also were worried by the new government-run TV ads comparing ethnic Russians with the type of beetles that farmers then were exterminating with insecticides.

Koval’s plan didn’t go fully into effect before the Minsk agreements ended the bloodiest phase of the war. However, enough of the ethnic cleansing was achieved so as to basically destroy Donbass. Obama got rid of lots of the voters he didn’t want to be in future Ukrainian elections. But he also lost both Crimea and Donbass. On 17 September 2014, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin announced that Donbass, unlike Crimea before it, would not be allowed to become a part of Russia — Russia would assist the now-wrecked region, but would not absorb it into the Russian Federation. Obama and the West continued to say that “Russia is invading Ukraine.”

This AP article is extremely vague about what it is alleging, or who was behind the allegations, but it does provide several hints regarding whether its main sources were from the Trump campaign, or from the Clinton campaign, or both equally. One hint is: “Among those who described Manafort’s and Gates’s [the two named Trump operatives] relationship with the nonprofit are current and former employees of the Podesta Group.” (More will also be quoted here subsequently, indicating that the Podesta Group are the main source of the AP’s ‘news’ story.)

That “nonprofit” is described by the AP’s report as follows:

“The nonprofit, the newly created European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, was governed by a board that initially included parliament members from Yanukovych’s party.  The nonprofit subsequently paid at least $2.2 million to the lobbying firms to advocate positions generally in line with those of Yanukovych’s government. That lobbying included downplaying the necessity of a congressional resolution meant to pressure the Ukrainian leader to release an imprisoned political rival.”

The AP carefully avoids naming that prisoner, but it was Yulia Tymoshenko, who was widely recognized by Ukrainians to be at least as corrupt as was Yanukovych, and whom Yanukovych had beaten in the latest, the 2010, Presidential election, in which she  had received almost all of her votes from Ukraine’s anti-Russian northwest, and Yanukovych had received almost all of his votes from Ukraine’s pro-Russian southeast — including both Donbass and Crimea, the two regions that broke away from Ukraine when Obama hired fascist and nazi paramilitaries to overthrew Yanukovych. When Yanukovych became President in 2010, he had Tymoshenko tried on corruption charges, which were widely thought by Ukrainians to be true, but which the U.S. government always claimed were trumped-up. She was declared guilty and imprisoned. She was set free immediately after the coup.

Manafort and Gates (if they were involved) were Republican lobbyists for the Yanukovych government, and Podesta Group (by its own testimony) was the Democratic one. In addition, Mercury LLC were apparently bipartisan lobbyists for the Yanukovych government, and all three of these firms (if Manafort and Gates were involved at all) were assigned to reduce (essentially, buy-off) the number of members of Congress who would vote on the U.S. bills to free Tymoshenko from prison. Also, federal agencies were being directly lobbied by one or more of these firms to stop pushing for Tymoshenko’s release from prison.

In other words: Ukraine, even under Yanukovych, was already largely a U.S. client-state. Obama just wanted that to be total — an American colony (intended to be a new NATO member) on Russia’s doorstep.

Obama’s Victoria Nuland chose “Yats” to lead the interim government because Obama’s hope was for Tymoshenko to become elected President in the first election after the coup. “Yats” was Tymoshenko’s top political operative, and he wasn’t in prison like Tymoshenko was; so, he was available to serve as an appropriate interim leader. The U.S. plan was for Tymoshenko to be released from prison at the coup, and then to run for the Presidency again, but this time without having to deal with the voters in Donbass and Crimea, who loathed her: those voters would by the time of the first post-coup election, have been exterminated and/or become refugees in Russia. Obama wanted to have an elected post-coup regime that would remain in the American orbit.

During the coup a massacre occurred, on February 20th, of uncounted numbers of Crimeans who opposed the overthrow, and Russia quickly came to the aid of Crimeans to enable them to hold a plebiscite on whether they wanted to remain as part of this new Ukraine or else return to Russia, of which Crimea had been a part until the Soviet dictator Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. That plebiscite was held on March 16th (just weeks after the coup), and over 90% voted to return to being Russians. Then, the U.S. White House’s agents in Kiev planned and carried out on 2 May 2014 a massacre of over a hundred anti-coup demonstrators in the Odessa Trade Unions Building, Odessa being in Ukraine’s south and just as much pro-Russian as was Crimea. That massacre was intended to create a widespread rebellion in the ethnic Russian areas, so as to provide a pretext for bombing there in order to get rid of as many anti-Tymoshenko voters as possible before the new Presidential election would be held, which took place on May 25th. The winner of that election was Petro Poroshenko, because he seemed to be less corrupt than Tymoshenko.

Obama failed to obtain the President he had wanted, and therefore Yatsenyuk remained in his post as Ukraine’s #2, the Prime Minister, until his political support in the country reached well below 5% at the end of 2015, at which point, Poroshenko was able to force him out and replace him in 2016 with his own chief operative.

The AP article additionally says: “The nonprofit also paid $1.07 million over roughly the same period to Mercury to lobby Congress. Among other issues, Mercury opposed congressional efforts to pressure Ukraine to release one of Yanukovych’s political rivals from prison. One former Podesta employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because of a non-disclosure agreement, said Gates described the nonprofit’s role in an April, 2012 meeting as supplying a source of money that could not be traced to the Ukrainian politicians who were paying him and Manafort. In separate interviews, three current and former Podesta employees said disagreements broke out within the [Podesta] firm over the arrangement, which at least one former employee considered obviously illegal. Podesta, who said the project was vetted by his firm’s counsel, said he was unaware of any such disagreements.”

Furthermore, the AP’s reporters did manage to communicate a bit with Manafort’s colleague Gates. However, buried in the report is the following, which raises serious question as to whether Manafort and Gates were actually involved in the lobbying activities of the “nonprofit” at all:

“The director of the European Centre, Ina Kirsch, told the AP her group never worked with Manafort or Gates and said the group hired the Washington lobbyists on its own. She said she had met with Manafort twice but said neither Manafort nor Gates played a role in its lobbying activities.”

All that the AP’s report states clearly is that: “The nonprofit subsequently paid at least $2.2 million to the lobbying firms to advocate positions generally in line with those of Yanukovych’s government.”The phrase “the lobbying firms” there has no clear referent. But then the article, at a distance away from that passage in the story, does asert that “After being introduced to the lobbying firms, the European nonprofit paid the Podesta Group $1.13 million between June 2012 and April 2014 to lobby Congress, the White House National Security Council, the State Department and other federal agencies, according to U.S. lobbying records. The nonprofit also paid $1.07 million over roughly the same period to Mercury to lobby Congress.”

$1.13M + $1.07M = $2.2M. So, all of that money went to only two of the three lobbying firms: Podesta Group, and Mercury LLC.

In other words: the AP was here taking anonymous allegations from the lobbying firm headed by Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and creating from those anonymous Clinton-campaign sources a ‘news’ report that is cast (and headlined) as if it’s incriminating against the campaign manager of the Trump campaign. Yet, the ‘news’ report doesn’t even give any indication that Manafort and Gates received any money at all. And virtually all of the headlines that are likely to be published based upon and about that ‘news’ ‘report’ (except for this one) will probably be identifying Manafort and Gates as being the one firm that has some explaining to do — as if the AP’s team did any real explaining at all, instead of having done merely propaganda against Trump.

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.

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Sanctions on Russia Erode Away

August 18th, 2016 by Alexander Mercouris

Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is currently touring European capitals calling on the EU to maintain its sanctions against Russia.  This is in the face of what even Yatsenyuk admits is growing opposition to sanctions in Europe and growing EU “Ukraine fatigue”.

What is being little said is that the actual effectiveness of the sanctions has already eroded significantly.

The sectoral sanctions which the EU imposed in July 2014 – the sanctions which matter – come in three groups: (1) a prohibition on the supply of sophisticated technology to the Russian oil industry, (2) limits on the sale of “dual use” technology (ie. technology that can be used in military design and development), and (3) a ban on borrowing by certain designated Russian banks and companies in European financial markets via debt instruments of a period of more than 30 days.

Of these sanctions only the third group of sanctions is important.

The halving of oil prices since mid 2014 has rendered the first group of sanctions essentially irrelevant since exploration and investment in new oil fields everywhere in the world has basically come to a stop.  The Russians can in time anyway develop analogous technologies for themselves.

The same is also certainly true of so-called “dual use” technologies covered by the second group of sanctions, which the Russians would certainly anyway want to develop for themselves.

Both the first and second groups of sanctions ultimately rest on the fallacy that Russia is a technologically primitive country.  This is a fallacy that has been repeatedly proved to be untrue but which no amount of contrary evidence ever seems able to shake.  As it is what the first and second groups of sanctions actually do is play into the hands of those in Russia who insist on the country pursuing an import substitution policy.

By contrast the third group of sanctions, the ones that limit borrowing Russian banks and companies, has made a real difference.  Not only have Russian banks and companies been unable to raise additional funding in the West but the sanctions have prevented them from rolling over their existing external debt, obliging them to pay off their debt more quickly.

In the context of reduced cash flows caused by the fall in oil prices that has undoubtedly led to investment being cut, and to greater pressure on the rouble as Russian companies have been forced to convert their rouble earnings into dollars and euros to pay foreign debt.

It is this third group of sanctions which however are now eroding away.

The Central Bank has said that after falling rapidly in 2014 and 2015 from a peak of $733 billion in July 2014 to $518 billion in January 2016, aggregate Russian external debt increased from $518 billion in January 2016 to $521 billion in July 2016.  This despite the fact that debt repayments for the whole of 2016 are in the order of $67 billion, with March being the heaviest month for repayment.

The fact that Russia’s aggregate foreign debt is now essentially stable is probably down to two factors.  Firstly, it is believed that as much as half of the total debt repayments by Russian corporates which are due in 2016 are repayments of ‘intra-group’ debts, where Russian firms borrow from closely-linked Russian owned entities registered offshore for the purpose of tax efficiency.

Such ‘debts’ obviously are not real debts at all and are not affected by the sanctions, and can be easily rolled over, and it is likely that most of them are.  However it seems that there has also been a small increase in actual borrowing by Russian companies, some of it in the form of bonds.

That this may indeed be the case, with foreign investors returning to the Russian market, is suggested by figures the Central Bank has released for Foreign Direct Investment (“FDI”) into Russia.  Before sanctions this was running as of 2014 at roughly $6 billion to $15 billion a quarter.  It then fell to zero after sanctions were imposed.  However in the second quarter of 2016 FDI was again $6 billion.

This does not mean that the effect of the sanctions has entirely ended.  However they are not as heavy a burden on the Russian economy as they once were.

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The risk of nuclear war has never been greater and it is partly because of NATO rearmament of European countries bordering on Russia. However, these countries will also be targeted if Putin decides to strike back. Thus write three Swedish doctors in an article in Göteborgsposten on Friday August 12 .

During the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy discussed with his advisors the various  options available. One involved a limited attack on  Soviet missile bases. Moscow was supposed to accept such a response rather than fight back in a way that would result in the devastation of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

During the years from 1950 into the 1980s there was a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy known as MAD (mutual assured destruction). MAD means that if a great power attacks first, it will always be possible for the attacked nation to retaliate. The ability to strike back served as a sufficient deterrent.

The relative security that the MAD doctrine created no longer exists. The U.S. and Russia now mutually accuse each other openly of constituting an “existential threat”. The military-strategic balance is becoming increasingly uneven.

The U.S. nuclear rearmament and NATO’s encirclement of Russia have created a highly insecure and dangerous situation. The advantages of having the “first strike” becomes harder to resist. With the support of NATO, Romania and Poland are now installing a new American “defense” robot system called “Aegis Ashore”. President Putin has warned the two countries that in case of a military conflict, they will now become the primary objectives. Russia’s concern for a disarming first attack appears to be genuine. Whether the concern is well-founded, we can not know. What is crucial to our security are the actual thoughts and plans of each superpower.

The risk has never been greater

Former US Defense Secretary William Perry has warned that the risk of a nuclear war is now greater than  ever. The reasons are, among other things, the following:

  • The breaking of the agreement after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1990) not to expand NATO. The number of NATO nations has since increased from 13 to 28.
  • NATO’s illegal intervention in Yugoslavia (1999) with the separation of Kosovo.
  • The termination of the ABM Treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty) in 2001.
  • The establishment of anti-missile bases in Romania and Poland (see above) – bases  that can easily be reprogrammed to serve for attack robots.
  • The upgrading of the US nuclear weapons system at a cost of a trillion (12 zeros) dollars.
  • The illegal US-backed coup (2014) in Ukraine.
  • NATO strategic military superiority in terms of ability to strike first.
  • The demonization of Putin, including comparisons to Hitler. (A “Hitler” is not someone you can negotiate with – but someone who has to be eliminated).

Independent American security analysts such as VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) consider NATO war games in Russia’s neighborhood as extremely provocative and dangerous. More and more European politicians are publicly distancing themselves from NATO’s aggressive policies – such as the Greek Prime Minister Tsipras, the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French President François Hollande.

Opposite effects

NATO is strong globally. Compared to Russia, NATO spends ten times more money on weapons. Many countries assume that becoming a member of NATO provides protection. But when there is an asymmetric military balance, the logical consequence will be the opposite. Should US / NATO strike from bases bordering on Russia, the Russian military leaders will not have time to react.

Russia has made it clear that such a situation will not be tolerated. Therefore, Russia currently applies a nuclear doctrine that allows for a nuclear strike with restrictions (“The Concept of De-escalation”). The intention of this doctrine is that with a limited first attack, the strike will make continued warfare less likely. By not fighting back, the U.S. will avoid the risk of an extension of the conflict to its own territory. Would an American president be willing to devastate his own country in order to retaliate against a Russian strike on bases in Europe?

The military-strategic situation is thus extremely unstable. Countries bordering on Russia that have allowed the installation of NATO bases are at an increasingly greater risk of becoming prime objectives. The outcome of the US presidential election brings no relief – whatever will be the outcome.

Cause and effect

When Western politicians do not distinguish between “cause and effect”, provocation and reaction, the consequences can be devastating. Russia now faces three choices, in terms of dealing with NATO:

  1. Giving up, and accepting the role of an American vassal
  2. Waiting for NATO to strike first and thus be neutralized
  3. Strike first with tactical nuclear weapons against European missile bases which constitute a direct threat and expect the U.S. not to retaliate, risking a counter-attack on its own territory. (Donald Trump has already implied that the United States will not unconditionally retaliate militarily to protect its NATO allies.)

President Putin has indicated that it is the third military scenario that Russia is now considering. The only question is when. The loser, in whichever case, will be Europe.

Sweden’s rapprochement to NATO has increased the risk of our country being drawn into a war. Therefore, it is particularly important to Sweden and other European countries to support all initiatives aimed at détente and disarmament – and thus create a public opinion that will distance us from NATO.

Translated from Swedish by Siv O’Neall.

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Hillary Clinton has named her transition team should she be elected in November, and the roster—as many feared—is a who’s-who of establishment figures, including former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who has a maligned track record on climate.

The team will also include former national security adviser Tom Donilon, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, president of the Center for American Progress (CAP) Neera Tanden, and director of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics Maggie Williams. Two of the campaign’s policy advisers, Ed Meier and Ann O’Leary, will also serve as co-executive directors.

Salazar, whose career includes positions both in government and corporate Washington, D.C. firms, has previously pushed for projects that are reviled among environmental activists, such as fracking, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the Keystone XLpipeline.

Just a year ago, Clinton and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) penned an op-ed for the Huffington Post decrying the cyclical nature of Capitol Hill institutions that enable lawmakers and lobbyists to jump in and out of the private and public sectors.

“[I]ncreasingly, Americans’ trust in government is eroding. And a big reason for that is the so-called revolving door between government and the private sector,” they wrote.

But as David Sirota noted Tuesday at International Business Times, putting Salazar in charge of Clinton’s transition team only empowers more of the same:

Salazar served as Colorado’s Attorney General, U.S. Senator and Interior Secretary before traveling through that revolving door and taking a job in 2013 as a partner at WilmerHale—a law and lobbying colossus that has been calledone of the most influential forces in Washington. Salazar’s biography says that he “provides legal, strategic and policy advice to national and international clients, particularly on matters at the intersection of law, business and public policy.” He is one of 39 former public officials now working at WilmerHale, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The firm has recently been the subject of a ProPublica investigation that showed one of its partners gave a personal loan to Gene Sperling, then President Obama’s economic adviser, as the firm represented major financial institutions.

Salazar is not a registered lobbyist but he appears to fit the description of the kind of powerbroker that Clinton has criticized.

The former interior secretary has also previously said, “The TPP is a strong trade deal that will level the playing field for workers to help middle-class families get ahead. It is also the greenest trade deal ever,” and has claimed that “there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone.”

According to Politico, Salazar is also opposing an anti-fracking ballot measure in his home state of Colorado.

The team was announced just days after 15 progressive groups published an open letter calling on Clinton to appoint personnel that would prove her commitment to issues such as ending economic inequality and stopping the TPP.

“Historically, too many Wall Street executives and corporate insiders have traveled through the revolving door between private industry and government,” the letter stated. “The result of this practice is that the interests of elites are over-represented in Washington.”

The signatories included advocacy groups Public Citizen, RootsAction, and MoveOn.org. They urged Clinton to “publicly state that, should you win the presidency, you will appoint personnel from backgrounds in public interest advocacy, academia, and public service to influential positions within your administration, rather than merely drawing from the usual set of corporate insiders.”

“Personnel is policy,” they wrote.

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The base was impacted significantly by the events of July 15 and their aftermath. Former base commander Gen. Bekir Ercan Van was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the plot, while the Turkish authorities cut the base’s electricity supply off and prohibited US planes from taking off.

“It’s not easy to move 20+ nukes,” a source told the EurActive news website.

Another source confirmed to the media outlet that arms are being transferred from Turkey’s Incirlik air base to the Deveselu air base in Romania due to Washington’s lack of trust in the Turkish authorities in the wake of the thwarted coup attempt in the country.The Romanian foreign ministry denied the reports in a written answer to the media outlet.

On Monday, the Stimson Center think tank warned that the United States was running the risk of losing control over some 50 US tactical nuclear weapons deployed at Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base, just 70 miles from the Syrian border, to terrorists. In a statement to accompany the report’s publication, the think tank stressed that a protracted civil conflict in Turkey would make the fate of the weapons uncertain, referencing the attempted coup in Turkey on July 15.

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The wagon wheels are already coming off of the NATO-GCC ‘regime change’ road show in Syria.

Now, foreign policy buffoons in Washington are resorting to some of the most desperate tactics seen yet, including more semantic maneuvers to try and conceal their lethal aid for jihadist terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

Washington’s latest PR thrust began last week when it was proudly announced in the US media Al Nusra Front (Al Qaeda in Syria) was ‘rebranding’ itself into a newer, supposedly kinder and gentler terrorist moniker, “Syrian Conquest Front.” Charming.

Washington spin doctors are now desperately back-pedaling, following an embarrassing challenge by Donald Trump to both President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – claiming it was they who “founded ISIS” (see article below). Contrary to all facts and multiple previous admissions, Washington are now claiming that it has never backed and armed terrorists, but rather ‘non-Jihadist Salafists’ (an oxymoron). The other popular lie that Washington and the other NATO governments have been pushing is that the Syrian ‘rebels’ are actually from Syria.The reality is that the overwhelming majority of terrorist ‘rebel’ fighters are from outside Syria – soldiers of fortune and paid privateers from as many as 81 different countries of origin.

It’s clear now that Washington has dug such a deep hole with regards to its sponsorship of the dirty war in Syria that it simply cannot get out without losing face internationally – and domestically.

The domestic side is particularly worrisome for Democratic Party leaders Obama and Clinton, because it is an election year and Clinton has built most of her campaign on her ‘foreign policy credentials’ which now includes the prenatal and pediatric development of ISIS and Al Nusra Front. To say that Clinton was one of the architects of the current conflict is no exaggeration, as she was actively promoting ‘regime change’ by any means in Europe and the Middle East in 2011 and 2012.

Turkey-Syria-Diplomac_Horo2
FRONT: Hillary Clinton fronted the “Friends of Syria” tour through 2011-2012, in order consolidate Gulf and other support for ‘regime change’ and the present dirty war in Syria.

To those who have been reading between the western spin on Syria over the last 4 years, the truth about this Washington-led Dirty War in Syria should come as no surprise: that the Obama Administration’s policy of supporting extremist armed terrorist “opposition” groups in Syria was part of a deliberate strategy explicitly designed to topple the government in Damascus and its elected president Bashar al-Assad. By doing this, Washington and its allies have facilitated the creation of Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, IS or ‘Daesh’) ‘caliphate’ in Syria and Iraq.

A recent Sputnik article confirms how Hillary Clinton pressed through the policy of backing the myriad of known extremist terrorist groups by just referring to them as “moderate rebels”:

In December 2012, only months after the defense intelligence report, President Obama caved to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the more hawkish wing of the national security establishment saying the United States considered the opposition to be “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.”

By maintaining a strict policy of media deception regarding Syria, the US State Department believed that it could avoid any responsibility and obfuscate its own sponsorship audit trail by playing a sophomoric and highly cynical name game between ‘moderate rebels’ and known terrorist organizations like Jabhat al-Nusra Front (Al Qaeda in Syria), Jaysh al-IslamAhrar al-ShamHarakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, the Turkmen Brigades and many more. Aside from those living in the reality bubble that is Washington and its media stable, most people are now well aware that there are no ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria – and no matter how many name changes are announced by operatives at CNN or SITE Intelligence – they are still all terrorists and they are all fighting (including ISIS) together to overthrow the government in Syria.

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21WIRE
 previously covered CNN’s sordid role in running PR for the jihadist terrorists groups in Syria, led by CNN’s star ‘journalist’, Clarissa Ward (pictured above, in her ‘Undercover Muslim’ costume), who has become one of the corporate media’s leading apologists for US-NATO and GCC-sponsored violent militant extremists presently running amok in Syria, as CNN and Ward have gone out of their way to try and rehabilitate US-NATO and GCC-backed terrorist suicide bombers in Syria.

Interestingly, CNN’s media operative Ward even took the PR roadshow to the UN, using her CNN-Pentagon profile to push out Washington’s new pro-Al Nusra (Al Qaeda) PR campaign. Sputnik added here:

Perhaps embodying the confusing about face of America’s foreign policy in Syria was when a member of the press, CNN’s senior international correspondent Clarissa Ward, testified before the UN Security Council on the situation in Aleppo that “the only ones who have emerged as heroes on the ground… are the Islamist factions, even to those who hate fundamentalism.

LEADING FROM BEHIND: Obama kept insisting that, “Assad Must Go.”

For years now, US President Obama, Secretaries of State John Kerry and Hillary Clinton et allhave been clamouring in unison that, “Assad Must Go”. Now it looks as if Assad might outlast all of them.

While the blatant distortion of reality continues by the US State Department and its media functionaries like Clarissa Ward and CNN, the West’s dirty war in Syria rages on – and with Washington, NATO and Saudi-Qatari money and arms still flowing -there is no end in sight…

The Obama administration’s policy in Syria of opposing Assad at all costs has led the United States to make strange bedfellows arming non-Jihadist Salafist groups who are unfortunately led by a cadre of fighters from the former al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front.

This week Republican nominee Donald Trump caused an uproar by insisting that his Democratic rival former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her former boss President Barack Obama “founded ISIS” – a charge that led to an counter assault by Hillary surrogate Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) on Sunday who levelled a mirror accusation against Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While a Pentagon memo supports the allegation that in 2012 the United States was willingly aiding al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) that subsequently metastasized into Daesh, the more immediate conflict of interest in Washington’s foreign policy in the Middle East is the support of the current so-called “moderate rebels” opposing Assad who, by their own admission on social media, are led by al-Nusra Front.

Al-Nusra Front, who just changed their name to the Syrian Conquest Front and renounced affiliation with al-Qaeda, with the open acceptance of the terror network, in a bid to garner new support from the West were the leading force in the surprise bid to break the Syrian government’s siege in Aleppo…Sputnik

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US trade deals are jobs-killing weapons of mass destruction. They destroy fundamental economic and social structures. They ignore eco-sanity.

Preventing TPP’s enactment into US law is crucial for all working-age Americans and their families.

Obama intends going on the offensive publicly to get Congress on board for its passage. Last October, he touted it in his weekly radio address – featuring a litany of Big Lies, one of many examples of how he consistently betrayed the public trust throughout his tenure.

He claimed (then and now) TPP is “the best possible deal for American workers.”

Fact: It’s an abominable jobs, wages and benefits destroyer. Obama, of course, knows it but lied claiming the opposite of what’s true.

Obama: TPP lets “American businesses…sell more of their products (abroad so) they can expand and support good jobs here at home.”

Fact: “American business” want TPP enacted to offshore more jobs than already, accelerating the nation’s race to the bottom.

Obama: “Outdated trade rules put our workers at a disadvantage. And TPP will change that.”

Fact: TPP is anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-vital freedoms too important to lose.

Obama: TPP will hold “partner countries to higher standards and rais(e) wages across a region that makes up nearly 40% of the global economy.”

Fact: TPP lowers the fairness and equity bar in all signatory countries, notably America if it’s enacted into law here.

Obama: TPP “means to level the playing field for American workers and businesses (under) rules (that) are fair…”

Fact: TPP prioritizes corporate profits at the expense of worker rights and fundamental freedoms.

Obama claims TPP will undo sins of past trade deals. It’ll exacerbate them on steroids. “It includes the strongest labor rights in history,” he said. FALSE!!

“It includes the strongest environmental standards in history.” FALSE!!

“Without this agreement, competitors that don’t share our values, like China, will write the rules of the global economy.” FALSE!!

He blamed China and other low-wage countries for the sins of corporate America offshoring millions of US jobs abroad.

TPP will greatly accelerate the process – transforming America into a nation of maids, waitresses, bellhops, fast-food workers, janitors, bus and cab drivers, along with other poverty wage service jobs for most workers able to have any employment.

Obama intends taking his destructive TPP-touting message on the road to various US cities. He’ll deceitfully lie about the most destructive deal in history if it becomes US law – economic and financial warfare against the rights, welfare and futures of working-age Americans and their families, already suffering under neoliberal harshness he and his successor will maintain with or without TPP.

At an August 2, East Room White House press conference, Obama shamelessly said “I’m president and I’m for” TPP. He intends formally submitting legislation to Congress later this year.

It faces stiff opposition, hopefully enough to kill it. Progressive groups like Global Trade Watch lead the fight against it.

GTW highlights its enormous danger, saying enacting TPP “will expand corporate power over our daily lives and our government.”

It’ll “make it easier for corporations to ship jobs overseas.” It’ll “flood US markets with unsafe food.”

It’ll “cause a pay cut for 90% of American workers.” It’ll “undermine critical environmental and climate policies.”

It’ll “raise medicine prices (much more than already) and give expanded powers to Big Pharma corporations.”

It’ll “tie the US closer to known human rights abusers.” TPP is “a partnership between governments and big corporations” against the interests of the vast majority of their citizens.

It’s outrageous unfair trade legislation too destructive to permit.

“#STOP TPP,” GTW stresses!

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

 

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Feminist-Graphic

The “Hatred of Life”: The World System which is Threatening All of Us

By Prof. Claudia von Werlhof, August 16 2016

I only have a few minutes to convince you of the usefulness of a new term; a term that will help us understand the dangerous times we are living in as well as the related struggles on a deeper level, that is, from the roots. The time for lighthearted jokes and uncertainties is over. The “storm” predicted by the Zapatistas is approaching faster than expected. Our confusion needs to end.

War-Soldier-Gun

Drones in the Sky: Operating the Mechanized Kill Machine

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 16 2016

Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war. Lt. Gen. Frank Benson (Alan Rickman), Eye in the Sky(2015)All it takes is a boffin on the trigger, then goodnight all.  That is the gist of Horace Rumpole’s words in John Mortimer’s legal creation by that name – the ever direct barrister who finds himself acting in a court martial in Germany on behalf of a British soldier, member of the famed Seraphs.

PoliceBrutality

Milwaukee Explodes During Summer of Demonstrations Targeting Police Brutality

By Abayomi Azikiwe, August 17 2016

African American community demands end to racial profiling and law-enforcement killings Once again another city in the United States is hit by racial unrest prompted by the brutal and lethal force of the police. This time Milwaukee, Wisconsin erupted on August 13 after the cop killing of Sylville Smith, a 23-year-old African American.

Israel_Palestine_Flag

The Birth of Agro-Resistance in Palestine

By Jonathan Cook, August 17 2016

For decades Israel has been driving Palestinian farmers off their land by imposing restrictions on agriculture. But one company, Canaan Fair Trade, has found an innovative way to resist. Across the West Bank, olive trees can be found that have survived from the time of Herod, a legacy of the Romans’ cultivation of the tree throughout its empire, including in Palestine. The trees are easily identified. In Arabic, they are known as “amoud” – or column – distinguished by the enormous girth of their gnarled, twisting trunks. They have a place in most Palestinians’ affections. Hatim Kanaaneh, the Galilee physician and writer, observes that the amoud symbolises “stability, permanence and stature – physically, figuratively and economically”.

Puerto Rico

The Humanitarian Crisis in Puerto Rico. The Voice of Playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda

By Matt Peppe, August 16 2016

As the economic and humanitarian crisis has worsened in Puerto Rico in recent months, playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, has given voice in interviews and Op-Eds to the severity of the crisis among ordinary Puerto Ricans. Miranda called the island’s debt crisis a matter of “life and death,” saying, “I have a lot of family who are struggling in Puerto Rico, that’s not an abstract issue to me.” He humanizes what the statistics – $73 billion in debt, $19,500 median household income, 11.5 percent sales tax, 64,000 people leaving per year – can not. Puerto Rico is a debt colony whose function as a political entity is to service its creditors. Ironically, Miranda achieved the celebrity he’s now using to advocate for the Puerto Rican people by glorifying and aggrandizing the most ruthless champion of creditors in American history.

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US “Colour Revolution” Haunts Cambodia

August 17th, 2016 by Joseph Thomas

Washington’s friends in Southeast Asia, with only a few exceptions, have had a difficult time in recent years. Their favourite billionaire-politician Thaksin Shinawatra has been repeatedly ousted from politics in Thailand, Anwar Ibrahim now resides in jail in Malaysia and prospective friends in The Philippines and Indonesia appear more interested in doing business, or at least in smoothing over relations with Beijing, than investing too deeply in Washington’s various and risky regional projects.

Washington’s Man (Sometimes) in Phnom Penh

Then there is opposition leader Mr. Sam Rainsy of Cambodia. The US State Department’s VOA (Voice of America) media platform describes him as “self-exiled.” He has been an opposition politician in Cambodia for decades, and in between inciting unrest and subsequently fleeing abroad to France before being regularly pardoned and allowed to return home, he has served as a constant contributing factor to the nation’s instability.

Rainsy plays a balancing act between tapping into Cambodian nationalism, thus co-opting popular government stances such as cultivating greater ties with China, as well as seeking Western backing to weaken, even topple the government to pave his own way into power.

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VOA’s recent article on Rainsy, “Cambodian Opposition Leader Says Europe Considering Sanctions,” does much in explaining the vector he serves through which pressure is exerted upon the ruling circles in Phnom Penh by the West.

The article claims:

Self-exiled opposition leader Sam Rainsy is lobbying the European Parliament (EP) to impose measures on Cambodia in the wake of a concerted government crackdown on dissent and the murder of a prominent government critic last week.

For a political leader to seek foreign sanctions against his own nation, especially in light of the demonstrable damage they have incurred elsewhere around the world, seems to indicate Rainsy’s motivation is less in serving the Cambodian people, and more in serving himself. For the Cambodian voters he seeks to court in upcoming elections, the fact that he has attempted to seek favour among the nation’s former colonial rulers in order to place economic pressure on the nation in a bid to place himself into power, seem to chaff against his own previous attempts to use nationalism politically.

In particular regards to “the murder of a prominent government critic,” VOA admits it is only “believed” to be a government-sponsored killing.

The Guardian in an article titled, “Cambodian PM orders ‘vigorous’ investigation into critic’s killing,” reported:

Kem Ley, a 46-year-old grassroots campaigner, was shot three times at a petrol station in Phnom Penh on Sunday while drinking his morning coffee. His attacker, arrested by police shortly afterwards, was filmed confessing and said the high-profile activist had failed to repay a US$3,000 (£2,322) loan.

It also reported that:

 Large crowds gathered at the petrol station on Sunday to accompany his body, covered by the Cambodian flag, through the streets of Phnom Penh, the capital.

It is curious that the opposition gathered at the crime scene so quickly, and with equal haste, turned his death into a public spectacle, all but preventing a proper forensic investigation from taking place.

That the opposition consisted of members of the National Rescue Party, headed by Rainsy himself, suggests at the very least, crude political opportunism at work, and at worst, invites much more sinister theories surrounding the possible role of the opposition itself in Kem Ley’s death, side-by-side theories promoted by VOA against Cambodia’s sitting government.

Triggering a Colour Revolution 

Prime Minister Hun Sen has recently made comments regarding what he called “colour revolutions,” or, instability orchestrated by Washington across  MENA (Middle East and North Africa). It may have been a hint toward his own suspicions that similar manoeuvres are now being aimed at Southeast Asia and Cambodia itself.

These colour revolutions in the MENA region usually reached critical mass after particularly dramatic developments which included, in Tunisia the self-immolation of a street vendor, or sniper fire targeting demonstrations as was the case in Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Sam Rainsy, currently lobbying the European Union for support, which includes measures as drastic as sanctions, along with street demonstrations seeking critical mass, may be further warning signs of a planned colour revolution in the making, and one Prime Minister Hun Sen himself seems to allude to as being driven by the US.

Of course, protesters in the streets are only one element of any potential colour revolution. Armed elements are the other. These elements are usually prepared and deployed covertly, acting as snipers to escalate street protests into increasingly violent confrontations with government security forces until finally, these armed elements can pose as “armed resistance” fighting against government violence they themselves provoked.

For Southeast Asia whose economic rise is rooted in relative regional stability, Cambodia’s political crisis transforming into such a “colour revolution” would jeopardise peace and prosperity for both itself and its neighbours. It would also greatly complicate the developing row between Beijing and Washington, which has so far been neutralised by nations like Cambodia who have refused to side with Washington and drag Asia into a costly conflict with China. Many suspect this is one of the primary driving factors behind the West’s support of opposition figures like Rainsy and various attempts to put protesters in the streets.

However, as has been seen elsewhere around the world, if the opposition can be thoroughly exposed in both means and motivation, and violent elements quickly identified and neutralised before such a “revolution” begins, the destructive destabilisation Prime Minister Hun Sen referred to in recent comments, which consumed the Middle East, can be avoided in Southeast Asia and in Cambodia in particular.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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US Targeted Killing Rules Conflate Legality and Politics

August 17th, 2016 by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

In January 2013, President Barack Obama promised to make the rules for the United States’ targeted killing program “more transparent to the American people and the world” because “in our democracy, no one should just take my word for it that we’re doing things the right way.”

Three and a half years later, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the ACLU and resulting court order finally forced the administration to make public the Presidential Policy Guidance regarding the program. But much of it is redacted, or blacked out. That is the opposite of transparent.

The 18-page Presidential Policy Guidance document purports to outline procedures for the use of lethal force in locations outside “areas of active hostilities.” In other words, it does not cover Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. It does cover Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya (although now that the Obama administration is officially bombing Libya, it might now include that country as an “area of active hostilities”).

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A protester holds a sign in front of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, on October 4, 2014, to oppose an exhibition glorifying the use of unmanned military aircraft known as “drones.” (Photo: Stephen Melkisethian / Flickr)

Several layers of bureaucracy are required to approve the targeting of individuals. Although the document gives lip service to the law, it skirts the legal requirements for the use of force. It appears to elevate political and policy considerations above the law.

Presidential Policy Guidance and Legal Requirements

The document states that “international legal principles, including respect for a state’s sovereignty and the laws of war, impose important constraints on ability of the United States to act unilaterally.” That means the United States must comply with the UN Charter, which allows the use of military force only in self-defense after an armed attack by another country, and with approval by the Security Council.

But none of the countries where people are targeted, including Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, has attacked the United States or another UN member nation. Under international law, the 9/11 attacks constituted a crime against humanity, not an armed attack by another state.

The Presidential Policy Guidance would sanction targeting a person who poses a “continuing, imminent threat,” not just to “U.S. persons,” but also to “another country’s persons.” A 2011 Department of Justice (DOJ) white paper, leaked in 2013, said that a US citizen can be killed even when there is no “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” This makes a mockery of the “imminence” requirement. The administration presumably sets an even lower bar for non-citizens.

There must also be “near certainty that an identified HVT [high-value terrorist] or other lawful terrorist target” is present before using lethal force against him. Yet the administration engages in “signature strikes” that don’t necessarily target individuals but rather target all males of military age present in an area of suspicious activity. And the Presidential Policy Guidance does not define “high-value terrorist.”

In addition, there must be “near certainty that non-combatants [civilians] will not be injured or killed.” Given the large number of civilian casualties from drone strikes and other targeted killings, the administration does not appear to be complying with this requirement either.

The Presidential Policy Guidance says “the United States prioritizes, as a matter of policy, the capture of terrorist suspects as a preferred option over lethal action” because capture offers the “best opportunity for meaningful intelligence… and disruption of terrorist threats.” Thus, there must be “an assessment that capture is not feasible at the time of the operation.” The document does not define “feasible.”

It also specifies, “In no event will additional detainees be brought to the detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.” Since the Obama administration rarely sends people to US courts for terrorism trials, its default action is apparently killing rather than capture.

According to the Presidential Policy Guidance, there must also be assessments that “the relevant governmental authorities… cannot or will not effectively address the threat to U.S. persons” and “no other reasonable alternatives to lethal action exist to effectively address the threat to U.S. persons.” The document contains no definition of “threat to U.S. persons.” And how would there be a threat if US persons were not present in countries where they do not belong?

The list of minimum criteria to be considered in the “individual profile” of each suspect is totally redacted, leaving us to guess at the requirements for targeting an individual.

In order to target a “U.S. person,” the operation must be “consistent with the laws and Constitution of the United States.” But the targeting of all persons, whether “U.S. persons” or not, must comply with US law. Ratified treaties constitute part of US law under the Supremacy of the Constitution. They include the UN Charter and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The covenant, which protects the right to life, mandates due process — or fair trial — before taking a life. The rules set forth in the Presidential Policy Guidance do not comply with due process.

Moreover, the Presidential Policy Guidance allows for waivers from the rules in “extraordinary circumstances” or “extraordinary cases,” both left undefined. Nothing in the UN Charter permits a waiver of the use of force provisions in “extraordinary” cases or circumstances.

Authorization for the Use of Military Force

The administration released four additional documents along with the Presidential Policy Guidance. One of them, titled Report on Process for Determining Targets of Lethal or Capture Operations, states that “the principal domestic legal basis for [Department of Defense] direct action operations is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force.”

The 2001 Authorization allows the president to use “force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

But that authorization is limited to those connected with the 9/11 attacks. Islamic State did not even exist on 9/11. And when George W. Bush asked for authority “to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States,” Congress refused. Thus, the 2001 Authorization does not accord with Obama’s targeted killings.

More Transparency or Politics as Usual?

It wasn’t until July 2016 that the administration publicized its numbers of civilian deaths from targeted killings “outside areas of active hostilities.” The administration’s figures were vastly lower than those documented by the leading non-governmental organizations. And besides omitting figures for Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, they left out the locations, dates, numbers and names of civilians and combatants that would enable us to accurately assess their claims.

The Presidential Policy Guidance states that officials considering an operational plan proposed by the US military or the CIA shall evaluate “the broader regional and international political interests,” the “policy objectives,” and the counter-terrorism strategy of the United States. Political and policy considerations apparently trump compliance with the law.

Under the guise of increased transparency, the administration has revealed partial information about its targeted killing program. But much remains classified. And what we do know does not comply with the law.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild and on the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. Visit her website: MarjorieCohn.com. Follow her on Twitter: @marjoriecohn.

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Video: Russian Military Build up in and around Syria

August 17th, 2016 by South Front

On August 15, commenting various proposals of “humanitarian ceasefires” in Aleppo city, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that short-term truces had helped terrorists resupply munition and get reinforcements. “The main results of those pauses was an insignificant relief in the humanitarian situation, while terrorists added 7,000 people to their ranks, not to mention huge amounts of arms and munitions they received,” he said.

The very same day the Russian Navy started drills in the Mediterranean Sea and in the Caspian Sea that will last until August 20 and involve six vessels armed with the sophisticated “Kalibr” cruise missiles. Last week, the Russian Ministry of Defense requested has sent requests to the flight of cruise missiles on the territory of Iraq and Iran. Last year through these countries flying missiles launched at terrorist positions in Syria.

The Russian aircraft-carrying missile cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov, with about 15 Su-33 and MiG-29K/KUB fighter aircraft and more than a dozen of Ka-52K, Ka-27 military helicopters and Ka-31 airborne early warning & control rotorcraft aboard, is also expected to be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to conduct air strikes on terrorist targets in Syria and ensure the air defense of the Russian military grouping located at the Khmeimim Air Base.

In its turn, the Khmeimim Air Base will be transformed into a full-fledged military base and a permanent contingent of the Russian Aerospace Forces will be deployed there. The existing air base structure and defenses will be expanded, creating opportunities for deployment of additional military helicopters and aircraft. New radio equipment, including air traffic control systems, will be also deployed to the base. Additional sites for the Pantsir-S2 surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon systems will be arranged on the base and a special area, assigned for loading, unloading and servicing of the Antonov An-124 transport jets will be created.

All these developments came amid the start of Russia’s usage of the Iranian Hamedan Air Base to conduct air strikes on targets in Syria. On August 16, Russian Tu-22M conducted first air strikes from the base. On August 15, AlMasdarNews released photos of Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bombers allegedly deployed there. The Hamadan Air Base was already used by the Russian military on November 23, 2015 when a Russian Su-34 “Fullback” landed and remained there for at least two days, according to AllSource analysts. An Il-76 transport aircraft arrived on November 24 and they both departed the base.

The deployment of Russian Tu-22M bombers in Iran is a significant step that will change the military politic situation in Syria and in the whole Middle East, pushing Moscow and Tehran to deeper cooperation over crucial issues in the region. On the other hand, Iran is a state that evaluates its independence above anything else. This is why a long-term deployment of Russian aircraft in the Islamic republic will be in question.

In any case, the military political developments show that Moscow is not going to soften its anti-terrorist stance and will continue to increase military pressure on the Western-backed illegal armed formations in Syria.

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The Birth of Agro-Resistance in Palestine

August 17th, 2016 by Jonathan Cook

For decades Israel has been driving Palestinian farmers off their land by imposing restrictions on agriculture. But one company, Canaan Fair Trade, has found an innovative way to resist

www.ameu.org/Current-Issue/Current-Issue/2016-Volume-49/Agro-Resistance.aspx – August 2016

For a PDF version, click here

Across the West Bank, olive trees can be found that have survived from the time of Herod, a legacy of the Romans’ cultivation of the tree throughout its empire, including in Palestine. The trees are easily identified. In Arabic, they are known as “amoud” – or column – distinguished by the enormous girth of their gnarled, twisting trunks. They have a place in most Palestinians’ affections. Hatim Kanaaneh, the Galilee physician and writer, observes that the amoud symbolises “stability, permanence and stature – physically, figuratively and economically”.

The olive tree roots Palestinians in a tradition and identity as deeply as the trees themselves are rooted in the soil. When the first heavy winter rains wash away the dust of the summer drought from the leaves and fruit in late October or early November, extended families hurry out to their fields to harvest the crop. Erecting ladders, they reach into the grey-green foliage to pick the abundant fruit. The distinctive, gentle patter of an olive rainfall can be heard on the tarpaulins below.

For a few weeks, the hills and valleys of Palestine are filled with families, young and old, sharing a simple life outdoors together under the trees – one their great-grandparents would have recognised. With an estimated 10 million trees growing in the valleys and on the hillsides of the West Bank, it is huge undertaking that much of the society mobilises for. It is a moment of familial and communal solidarity, of a celebratory communion with nature and its bounty, and of connection to a heritage barely changed over millennia.

During the olive harvest, every Palestinian embodies “sumud”, or steadfastness – a value whose significance has intensified under decades of belligerent Israeli occupation. The harvest represents the ultimate kind of resistance by Palestinians: an individual refusal to be moved, and a collective refusal to be ethnically cleansed.

The olive continues to play a central part in the Palestinian economy too. More than 100,000 families are believed to depend on the trees as their primary source of income. The rural economy – much of it dedicated to olive oil production – is worth $500 million, and accounts for about 13 per cent of the Palestinians’ GDP.

Israel has done much to try to weaken Palestinians’ connection to the olive tree, understanding that the “amoud” is the Palestinians’ defence against Israeli guns, bulldozers, settlers and ill-will. Since the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza began in 1967, Israel has waged a relentless assault on Palestine’s olive groves and the way of life they support.

Swaths of fertile land have been confiscated and reclassified as “state land”, later transformed into army firing ranges and national parks or incorporated into the illegal Jewish colonies spreading across Palestinian territory. Water resources have been stolen too, starving farmers of the primary fuel needed to ensure a good yield. The army has uprooted or cut down hundreds of thousands of olive trees on security pretexts, claiming they can conceal stone-throwers or snipers. Settlers regularly inflict additional damage, burning down trees and attacking families when they try to reach their fields for the annual harvest. And over the past decade, hundreds of thousands more trees have been lost, cut off behind Israel’s concrete and steel “separation barrier” from the families that tended them for generations.

Some threats to the Palestinian farming community are more insidious, though no less menacing. In the lands around the city of Jenin, in the northern West Bank, a new kind of long-term war against the ancient olive groves is playing out. Ostensibly a struggle between two competing economic models of the future, the battle is, in truth, one for Palestine’s soul.

The first model derives from the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s, and represents the culmination of a decades-old story of Palestinian dispossession. It offers unskilled work to an impoverished population in a series of industrial zones, removing them from their agricultural traditions and their lands, and snaring them into economic subordination to Israel. It ensures the Palestinians a future of both food and employment insecurity. This colonial vision of economic dependence and exploitation – it goes without saying – is being promoted by Israel and the international community.

The second model, of self-sufficiency and dignity, is being championed by a cooperative farming project known as Canaan Fair Trade. It has grown rapidly, and now assists some 2,000 small-hold farmers in the West Bank. It offers them help to grow organic crops that can withstand water shortages and other privations of a hostile occupation; buys their products at above-market prices to ensure farming families can make a sustainable living; and finds local and foreign markets for the produce, as a way to bypass Israeli control and to raise prices. Staff have nick-named their approach “agro-resistance”.

Canaan is receiving little more than ambivalent support from the compromised Palestinian national leadership.

Nasser Abufarha, who founded Canaan little more than a decade ago, after he returned from the United States, eloquently expresses what is at stake. “The olive is the number one crop for Palestinians. This is the land of the olive, and it has always been central to our diet,” he tells me in Canaan’s offices in the village of Burqin, just outside Jenin. “The olive is important for our food security and our cultural representation. It is a symbol of our identity. The trees connect us to our land, to a place, to a history and to past generations. They also link us to future generations, to our children and grandchildren. They represent the continuity of a nation and our rootedness in the land.”

Economic re-engineering

To understand why these two models of the Palestinians’ future are fighting it out, we need to examine the ways Israel re-engineered the Palestinian economy after it began aggressively settling the Palestinian territories post-1967. It wanted to destroy farming as a way of life for Palestinians and thereby weaken their passionate attachment to their ancestral lands.

At that time, much of the Palestinian population outside the main cities depended on agriculture, working their small holdings as peasant farmers. But they soon found themselves targeted by the hundreds of new military orders issued by the occupation authorities. As well as seizing large tracts of territory, Israel severely limited the types of crops Palestinians could grow to prevent them from competing with Israeli farmers. It further rigged the market by taxing Palestinian exports while allowing Israeli produce to enter the territories tax-free.

Figures today show how economically dependent on Israel the Palestinians have become: more than 60 per cent of imports into the Palestinian territories come from Israel, while Palestinian businesses export 80 per cent of their products to Israel.

As the settlements began expanding through the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinian farmers found themselves in an ever-more desperate struggle to hold on to their lands. The settlers, unlike the Palestinians, had the might of a modern state – and one of the most powerful armies in the world – on their side. The settlers not only came to dominate more and more of the best agricultural land, but often controlled the water sources too. It was a battle few Palestinians could afford to fight for long.

 

A Palestinian harvesting olives in the West Bank [copyright: Jonathan Cook]

The olive harvest in the West Bank. [copyright: Jonathan Cook]

By the time the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat returned from exile to the occupied territories under the terms of the Oslo Accords in 1994, many Palestinians – especially the younger generations – had abandoned farming. At least 160,000 Palestinians had become directly dependent on the Israeli economy, working as a casual labourers. Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians – a sizeable chunk of the occupied population – relied on these workers’ incomes.

Some members of this newly urbanised Palestinian proletariat worked in the settlements, building homes or working in greenhouses on land that had been stolen after 1967 from families much like their own. Other Palestinians travelled into Israel each day to work in the most unskilled and dangerous parts of the Israeli economy. They cleaned dishes in Tel Aviv’s restaurants, worked on construction sites in Israel’s burgeoning towns and cities, or picked tomatoes and cucumbers in Israel’s agricultural communities, the kibbutzim, that had grown fat and lazy on the abundance of land stolen from the Palestinian refugees after 1948.

Israel had engineered a system of industrialised humiliation.

The success of the settlement project in transforming the Palestinian population from farmers into unskilled labourers can be gauged by considering the dramatic demographic changes effected in the most fertile parts of the West Bank over the past five decades of occupation.

Under Oslo, 62 per cent of the West Bank came to be designated as Area C – chiefly the rural areas where Palestinians had practised agriculture and which were being actively targeted by Israel for settlement. Area C was to be under full Israeli control for the duration of the intended five-year period of the Oslo process, though, of course, Israel is still in charge more than two decades later. Meanwhile, the Palestinian towns and cities and their environs, identified as Areas A and B, fell under varying levels of control by the newly created Palestinian Authority, a Palestinian government-in-waiting.

Although there are no precise data, in the late 1960s, shortly after the occupation began, there were many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in what would later come to be classified as Area C. Without the disruption of the settlements, natural Palestinian growth might have ensured that as many as a million lived in Area C today. But, according to the best estimates, only around 100,000 Palestinians have remained there. The rest, we can assume, were gradually forced off their land in a process of what the Israeli general Moshe Dayan termed “creeping annexation”. The loss of agricultural land and the increasing difficulty of farming sustainably were the main drivers of these momentous demographic changes.

The employment paradox

The Oslo accords were designed to modify – though certainly not end – this form of economic exploitation. Premised on the idea of a minimalist Palestinian state, Oslo sought physical separation between Israel and the occupied Palestinians. The slogan of the time was: “Us here; them there.” Separation was never mutually observed, however. During the official five-year Oslo period of the late 1990s, Israeli Jews poured into the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank, in larger numbers than ever. As a consequence, the settlements grew at an unprecedented rate. Israel left it intentionally unclear where the separation line would eventually be drawn. But for Palestinians, separation was soon being strictly enforced – and on the worst possible terms.

From the early 1990s Israel introduced a system of permits and checkpoints that would eventually harden into the steel and concrete barriers that surround Gaza, eat into significant parts of the West Bank, and carve up East Jerusalem. The goal was to keep out as many Palestinians as possible. Those hit hardest were the Palestinians who had formerly laboured in Israel. From the 1990s onwards, they began being replaced by a new cheap labour force: immigrant workers from China, Nigeria, Thailand and the Philippines.

In parallel, employment opportunities in the occupied territories grew scarcer. As diplomats celebrated the imminent arrival of a Palestinian state, Israel aggressively stepped up its takeover of land on the far side of the “separation barrier”, in the West Bank. In a memorable analogy provided by American-Palestinian lawyer Michael Tarazi, as the two sides negotiated over their respective share of the pizza, Israel set about devouring it. The settlements’ control rapidly expanded in Area C. Increasingly, Palestinians farmers were forced to abandon their land and head towards the Palestinian towns and cities in the territorial archipelago of Areas A and B.

Even those Palestinians who managed to stay in agriculture found themselves in ever harsher economic straits. Even though the West Bank sits atop aquifers that supply most of the water to Palestinians and Israelis, Israel decides how much goes to the Palestinians. Typically Palestinian households receive less than a fifth of the supply to Jewish settlers living close by. With water for domestic use hard to come by, many Palestinians in Area C collect winter rainwater in large underground storage tanks. Those who need additional water for agriculture usually have to truck it in privately at great expense.

The result was that many farmers in the West Bank concentrated on a single crop, the olive, because mature trees can survive through a dry summer, even if the yield and size of the fruit are greatly reduced. But the laws of supply and demand cannot be ignored. If most Palestinians farm olives, there is an abundant oversupply. With most farmers unable to export their produce outside the limited markets of Israel and the occupied territories, prices fell. Olive farmers found it increasingly hard to make ends meet, adding to the pressure on them to abandon agriculture – and with it, their ancestral lands.

The architects of the Oslo process recognised these dual pressures, and the potential danger they posed to Oslo’s success. Israel had transformed Palestinian farmers into a causal labour force by stealing their land and resources. These Palestinians had joined what economists now call the “precariat”, a proletariat class living in economically precarious conditions. They had been made entirely dependent on unskilled work in the Israeli economy. But if Israel then denied them access to Israel and jobs as part of a new policy of “separation”, it risked stoking a dangerous social and political instability. A new kind of employment option was needed – and so was born the idea of free-trade industrial zones.

This solution had been actively promoted for decades by Shimon Peres, the Israeli politician most closely identified with the Oslo process. He argued for creating a series of such zones between Israel and the occupied territories. Here they would serve as a bridge between separated territory: readily accessible both to the Israeli companies searching for a cheap labour force and to the Palestinian labourers who would have few other economic choices but to work on Israel’s terms in these industrial areas. The zones would serve a dual function: both to continue the transformation of Palestinians farmers into an industrialised labour force; and to ensure they were kept economically pacified.

Industrialised labourers

The creation of industrial zones became official Palestinian policy in 1998. As part of the Oslo process, the PA signed a law to create a series of zones that would take as their template an industrial park called Erez, established by Israel just outside the Gaza Strip in the 1970s. Nearly 200 businesses, from carpentry workshops and garages to textile factories, had been attracted to Erez by the cheap labour and low taxes. The inherently degrading treatment of Palestinians at Erez only intensified after Israel erected an electronic fence around Gaza in the early 1990s, in line with its new “separation” philosophy. Many thousands of workers from the tiny coastal enclave had to queue daily, in the hours before dawn, in what looked like cattle grids to be collected and transported to Erez’s high-security businesses.

The breakdown of Oslo and the eruption in 2000 of a renewed Palestinian uprising – the second intifada – posed problems both to Erez and to the plan for more industrial zones. In 2004, as the intifada intensified, Erez was closed and hopes for further industrial zones went into abeyance.

Paradoxically, the plan has been revived under the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu, an outspoken opponent of Oslo. Rejecting the idea of a Palestinian state, Netanyahu focused instead on what he called “economic peace”, especially for those Palestinians who had abandoned agriculture and moved into the more urban Areas A and B. Netanyahu adopted a hybrid model designed to pacify “good” urbanised Palestinians through economic incentives. His approach has incorporated three main economic elements:

  • Limited numbers of Palestinian workers, currently a few tens of thousands, receive permits to enter Israel. Most are middle-aged men with families and considered a low security risk.
  • Restrictions on Israelis entering Palestinian Areas A and B have been lifted for the country’s 1.7 million-strong Palestinian minority. They are now encouraged to shop and buy services in the Palestinian cities as a way to inject extra money into the urban economy of the territories.
  • The plan for free-trade industrial zones is again being advanced, with the backing of third parties such as the United States, Germany, Japan, France and Turkey.

This summer the largest such zone was due to open outside Jenin, financed by Turkey and Germany. Palestinian officials say it will create 5,000 jobs in Jenin and 15,000 in the surrounding area. The Israeli media trumpeted Jenin’s industrial zone as a triple victory for Israel: thawing ties with Turkey, bolstering security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, and benefiting Israeli businesses. The benefits for Jenin and the surrounding population are far less clear.

The Jenin industrial zone is part of a wider economic programme called the Valley of Peace Initiative that has begun developing zones near the Palestinian urban populations of Jericho, Bethlehem, Gaza, Hebron and Tulkarm. Like similar industrial parks in neighbouring Jordan and Egypt, all will be eligible to export goods to the United States under a free-trade agreement between Israel and the US, without tariff or quota restrictions. In Jenin’s case, businesses will be able to access Haifa’s port in Israel without paying Israeli taxes and customs. To qualify, however, exported products must have significant Israeli input.

Notably, the Jenin zone required the mass expropriation of agricultural lands in the villages of Burqin and Jalameh, over the opposition of many farmers. George Kurzum, a development and environmental expert at the Ma’an Development Center in Ramallah, has observed that the location of these industrial zones on fertile land in Area C is a criminal waste of Palestinian agricultural resources.

Further, most of the industrial zones’ factories will be owned by foreign and Israeli companies, making it even less likely that these lands in Area C – temporarily assigned to Israel by Oslo – will ever be handed over to Palestinian control. In fact, says Iyad Riahi, a researcher on economic and social policies at Al-Marsad in Ramallah, the zones are likely to encroach on the sovereignty of the neighbouring Palestinian cities too. “The [Jenin zone], for instance, will be under the supervision and control of the Turkish developing company, which will contract with a private security company to preserve stability in the city, regardless of the Palestinian security or police.”

Figures suggest that by 2025 the zones are ultimately intended to employ anywhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Palestinians. But crucially as Palestinian businessman Sam Bahour observes: “Because the zones will depend on Israeli cooperation to function, and because they will exist within an Israeli-designed economic system that ensures Palestinian dependence on Israel, they cannot form the basis of a sovereign economy. Relying on them will perpetuate the status quo of dependency.” He, like others, expects them to “host ‘dirty’ businesses – those that are pollution-prone and sweatshop-oriented.” Palestinians fear that Israel will be able to shut down the zones at a whim to punish Palestinian misbehaviour – whether strikes against poor pay and conditions, or protests against the occupation.

Bahour concludes: “Donor funds and Palestinian efforts would be better placed if such investments targeted Palestine’s natural economic comparative advantages, for example, tourism and agriculture.”

The birth of agro-resistance

Opposition to the industrial zones is not likely to come from the Palestinian leadership. With the PA accepting the neo-colonial parameters of Oslo, it has as much incentive as Israel to keep ordinary Palestinians economically pacified. It has therefore fallen to Palestinian grassroots movements to identify a model other than neoliberal economic exploitation. The most significant is Canaan Fair Trade, its offices based in the village of Burqin, just a few kilometres outside Jenin and close to the new industrial zone. It is the brainchild of Nasser Abufarha, whose family has farmed this corner of Palestine for generations.

The inspiration for Canaan came shortly after the turn of the millennium while Abufarha was conducting research for his doctorate in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Travelling back and forth between the US and the West Bank, he was struck by the premium prices American students were prepared to pay on campus to enjoy coffee that was organic and fair trade. It offered a clue as to how Palestine’s olive farmers, battling to stay on their lands and maintain the olive as a viable economic crop, might change their fortunes.

Sitting in his office above Canaan’s modern processing plant, Abufarha, aged 52, relates a business success story that would be impressive in ordinary circumstances – but is astonishing given the conditions of belligerent occupation Palestinians live under. In little more than a decade, Canaan has become the largest fair-trade business in the Middle East, as well as the largest fair-trade supplier of olive oil in the world. It is now selling some 800 tonnes of oil each year, with a turnover of $9 million last year. It has clients, based in 18 countries, including Ben and Jerry’s, LUSH cosmetics, Dr Bronner’s soaps, the US retail chain Whole Foods and the UK supermarket Sainsbury’s. In recent years Canaan has rapidly expanded into other fair-trade products, including almonds, freekeh, zaatar, olive pastes and sun-dried tomatoes.

Abufarha makes the challenges the company faced sound far easier than they must have appeared in 2004, when he returned to the West Bank and abandoned a promising academic career. He had just completed his doctorate on the “human bomb” – the suicide bombers that had grabbed most attention during the early stages of the second intifada as they extinguished their own lives and those of others by detonating their explosives in Israeli buses and restaurants. Jenin and the surrounding villages had earnt a reputation for dispatching many of these suicide bombers.

Abufarha’s inspiration came not from the nihilistic human bombs he had studied but the life-affirming traditions of “sumud”, or steadfastness, he had experienced as a child during the annual olive harvest in his parents’ villages of Burqin and Jalameh, both just outside Jenin. Palestinian farmers, he concluded, could defy Israel’s efforts to evict them from their land by taking a central place in the burgeoning global movement supporting fair trade and organic agriculture. They could open a new kind of front of non-violent resistance to the occupation.

“When I came back from the US, it was clear that the farmers I had grown up around were economically in trouble. Prices had plummeted to a level that made olive farming unsustainable.” The figures told the story: olive trees accounted for 40 per cent of Palestinian land under cultivation, but supplied only 18 per cent of the earnings from agricultural production. “If we lost this crop, it would be both a cultural disaster and leave our communities in a situation of extreme food insecurity. Remember, most Palestinian children start the day with a breakfast of bread and olive oil before going to school. If the trees were lost, ultimately so too would most of these villages.”

In response, Abufarha founded the Palestine Fair Trade Association in 2004, quickly followed by Canaan Fair Trade, which served as a production, marketing and export company. He began with only a handful of farmers, selling abroad to Dr Bronner’s soaps. In 2008 he used the profits, his savings, as well as donor money from the Palestinian Authority and the Dutch government, to install a state-of-the-art Swedish press, and a storage and bottling plant at Burqin.

The problems facing Abufarha and the farmers were manifold. They could not change the environment created by the occupation or Israel’s deep-seated hostility to Palestinian farming. After all, Zionism’s early ideologues had been inspired by the idea that land could be “redeemed” only through Jewish colonisation and Hebrew labour. “Making the desert bloom”, in the movement’s favourite slogan, was integral to its redemptive strategy.

Instead, Abufarha identified the Palestinian farmers’ biggest weakness as a potential strength. Agriculture in the West Bank was still largely a family affair. Each family had a small plot of land on which its members depended economically. That made them extremely vulnerable to Israel’s abusive military and economic policies. It meant, for example, that Israeli buyers of olive oil could play Palestinian farmers off against each other, waiting them out after the late autumn’s harvest until the price fell so low it barely justified cultivating the land. But if the farmers organised and worked together, Abufarha concluded, they had enormous power. They could become an army of amoud – as steadfast as their olive trees.

An evangelist for his revolutionary idea, Abufarha began travelling across the Jenin area, trying to persuade the farmers that they would be best served by establishing co-operatives and pooling their resources. It was no accident that the model took hold quickly in the Jenin region. The settlements had never managed to get real purchase in the northern West Bank, and the few that did were dismantled by Ariel Sharon during his Gaza disengagement in 2005. The farmers in the Jenin area were in a relatively privileged position, suffering the lowest levels of interference from the occupation authorities.

Today Canaan has 52 villages set up as separate cooperatives, representing some 2,000 farmers. The model’s efficiency can be gauged by recent production figures: Canaan’s farmers constitute about 2 per cent of those farming olives in Palestine, but produce some 7 per cent of the total crop.

Canaan Fair Trade's range of products keeps on growing

Canaan Fair Trade’s range of products keeps on growing.

The second stage was simpler. The family-run farms already largely respected fair trade practices, and they used techniques that often accorded closely with organic cultivation. The PFTA developed the first internationally recognised fair-trade standard for olive oil, and started certifying farmers who qualified.

“Before the cooperatives, the [olive oil] buyers had been able to drive down prices and, of course, with it standards,” says Abufarha. “There was no government around to protect the farmers by insisting on minimum standards or price tariffs. So our job was to create the standards, adding quality and value, and thereby empower the farmers. We ensured that there was a business model that rewarded the farmers’ traditional production methods. It recognised not only the economic value of their labour but also its deeper cultural value. It understood that the Palestinian farmer is the care-keeper of a treasure we inherited, of traditions that date back thousands of years.”

Canaan Fair Trade provided the final piece of the jigsaw. It offered a central address to which the village cooperatives could sell their olive oil, guaranteed a premium price. The famers would not be selling individually to Israeli buyers but collectively to Canaan. Foreign markets eager for fair trade and organic products meant Canaan could pay the farmers a much higher price for the oil. And Canaan would act as the international face of the farmers’ cooperative movement, developing and investing in new markets.

The wider changes on the marketing of Palestinian olive oil have been dramatic. Where once only 15 per cent of oil sold abroad was labelled as extra-virgin grade, today 80 per cent is.

“There is a market abroad that identifies with the Palestinians and their struggle but it is not the biggest one for us,” he says. “Increasingly, people understand that there has to be a proper relationship between people and land, one that nurtures rather than ruins our planet. We have to be guardians, protecting and supporting the treasure we have here in Palestine by encouraging biodiversity.”

The name, Canaan Fair Trade, he explains, refers to the name of this region more than 3,000 years ago, one that precedes Israel’s political claims based on a presumed Biblical birthright. In fact, the Canaanite culture is frequently referenced in the Bible. “We have inherited here a paradise that dates back to the time of Canaan,” he says. “We must not live exclusively in reaction to Israel and the occupation. We must draw on our own traditions and cultivate our own strengths. They are to be found in our natural environment, which is why the settlements are so intrusive and corrosive – they disrupt our sense of home.”

A convert to fair trade

A decade ago, Khader Khader was one of the youngest farmers to help establish a Canaan Fair Trade village cooperative – and one of the most sceptical. Then aged 25, he had little faith in the future of Palestinian farming. His village of Nisf Jubeil, with a mixed Muslim and Christian population of 400, nestles on the lower slopes of one of the many dome-shaped hills characteristic of this area of the central West Bank. Concealed behind the hills south of the village lies the city of Nablus. Nisf Jubeil is relatively fortunate. Close to Nablus and located in Area B, it rarely sees incursions by Israeli soldiers and there are no settlers nearby. Nonetheless, for Khader the relentless decline in the price of olive oil had made agriculture – following in his father’s footsteps – an unappealing prospect. “Like many of the young people here, I was looking for a way to leave the village,” he says.

Khader never finished school. Instead he went in search of work in Israel and what he thought would be a better life. His dreams quickly ran up against reality. For several years he laboured in an Israeli plastics factory, working more than 12 hours a day. Unable to make the journey daily, he often slept for days on end away from home, in the manufacturing plant. In 2001, after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, Israel withdrew his entry permit and he was left without work.

 

The entrance to Nisf Jubeil [copyright: Jonathan Cook]

The entrance to Nisf Jubeil. [copyright: Jonathan Cook]

A few years later, when Abufarha came to Nisf Jubeil to speak to the local inhabitants, only six of the village’s 40 farmers turned out. Khader tagged along with his father out of curiosity. He thought the man from Canaan Fair Trade was selling snake oil – and told him so. “It just didn’t sound plausible,” he told me as we sat in the courtyard of his farm, enjoying the small, sweet orange fruit from his loquat trees.

At the time, a litre of olive oil sold for 8 shekels [$2.20]. “It was hardly worth the effort of harvesting it,” said Khader. Abufarha was offering them at least double – 16 or 17 shekels [$4.50]. “It was too good to be true. We could respect the environment and grow organic produce, increase our yields, and get paid a price over the market rate. To be honest, I thought Nasser was going to steal from us. He would take our oil and we would never see a shekel for it.”

Nonetheless, Khader had few other options. He could no longer work in Israel, and selling on the open market would leave him without a profit. So he started attending Canaan’s workshops, learning the steps needed to increase his yields and win organic and fair trade certification. If oil is to be certified extra-virgin, Canaan insists on the farmers picking the fruit by hand, not rakes, and transporting the crop carefully to avoid bruising. Nisf Jubeil’s farmers also learnt that, if they pooled their harvest, they would have enough olives to press each day, ensuring that the oil was fresh and less acidic.

“It was like a dream coming true. I could work my land, live with my wife and children, and make a better living than I had ever done before,” says Khader. He and the six other farmers were soon prospering, and others from Nisf Jubeil came to ask about joining the cooperative. Prices have continued to rise, with Khader now receiving as much as 25 shekels [$6.50] a liter. He used the early profits to buy a tractor and found extra work helping other farmers with spreading manure and ploughing fields. “My village is also my family. We help each other,” he says.

It is not just Canaan’s farmers benefiting. The price of olive oil more generally has risen, improving the incomes of Palestinian farmers outside the fair-trade system. “Because we sell abroad, we reduce the local supply, and that raises the price of the oil here,” notes Khader.

Connections overseas

Canaan hosts an annual festival called a jaru’a, where hundreds of farmers meet in its grounds in Burqin to celebrate the end of the olive harvest. To accompany the tasting of the first pressed oil, taboun bread is baked in ovens fired with olive twigs and crushed pits. Together, the families enjoy traditional dishes, like maftoul, the Palestinian version of couscous, or a smoked cracked green wheat called freekeh. A Palestinian folk dance, dubka, rouses everyone to enthusiastic clapping in time to the beat.

Khader’s first jaru’a at Canaan was a revelatory moment. He had the chance to meet members of the other village cooperatives, as well as buyers from abroad and international solidarity activists who attend to offer their support. “For the first time I made all sorts of connections outside my village and realised I was part of a much larger struggle to change our situation here. It was very empowering.”

After one jaru’a, he was invited to Germany to give a series of talks on fair-trade and organic farming. He smiles as he remembers. Early on, he was introduced to someone in a business suit who looked vaguely familiar. “Suddenly, I realised he was a volunteer who had stayed with us the previous year picking the olives. He was very hard working, lived with us, and didn’t mind getting dirty. I was delighted to see him. ‘You’re looking very smart,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’ He told me he was the boss of the company that imports Canaan products into Germany! It made me realise that there really are people out there who want to help us.”

Khader points out that the cooperatives have benefits beyond simply improving the farmers’ economic situation. Nearly 2 per cent of the price consumers pay for a bottle of olive oil is a social premium that is invested in improving the infrastructure of villages in the Canaan cooperatives, as a way to strengthen the community. In Nisf Jubeil, they have recently completed the renovation of a kindergarten and built a community centre. “It is something truly life-changing for us,” says Khader, sounding as evangelical about the project as Abufarha. “It gives us a sense of security about our community and our future here.”

 

Khader Khader is experimenting with trees like apricot and plum [copyright: Jonathan Cook]

Khader Khader is experimenting with trees like apricot and plum. [copyright: Jonathan Cook]

Canaan has helped Nisf Jubeil’s farmers in other ways. The workshops encouraged Khader to use the garden next to his parents’ farm buildings to plant fruit trees like loquat and citrus that were once an integral part of the dietary self-sufficiency of these isolated rural communities. Canaan offers micro-loans to farmers’ families to set up small businesses and has established women’s cooperatives helping more than 200 women. Khader’s wife, Ransees, now specialises in growing the local herb zaatar and raising goats. The farmers’ children are eligible for scholarships to further their education. After 10 years’ service, Canaan’s administrative staff can apply for an interest-free loan of up to $100,000 to start their own social innovation projects. And a Trees for Life program hands out 10,000 saplings a year, either to new farmers or to those needing to replace trees the Israeli army or settlers have destroyed.

Unlike many other villages, Nisf Jubeil has not suffered in the past from severe water shortages. On Khader’s family farm is a spring that supplies the village’s domestic and basic agricultural needs. But he says in the past few years the flow of water has reduced, in what he assumes to be a sign that Israel has started extracting water close by. “If we had more water, we would grow other, more water-intensive crops like cucumbers, tomatoes and courgettes. We just don’t have enough water to do it.”

With Khader’s profits, he has bought his own plot of land further down in the valley, separate from his father’s land. He is already experimenting with other fruiting trees, including plum and apricot. “My goal is to revive the many fruit trees that used to flourish in this valley but which are much harder to grow now, with water restrictions and climate change. I want to see how the trees do down here in the valley compared to the others up on the hill.”

Reviving an ancient grain

Abufarha is not resting on his laurels. When we meet, he has just returned from a discussion with farmers in Iksal, a Palestinian village just over the other side of the Green Line, in Israel, close to Nazareth. He has been exploring ways to get farmers there involved in his latest scheme: to create a sustainable market for fair-trade Palestinian almonds. To encourage farmers to plant the new crop, he installed at Burqin an almond production facility last year, the first of its kind in the Middle East. It is another major undertaking, but one he is confident will succeed.

With Canaan’s help, Nisf Jubeil’s cooperative has planted 30,000 almond trees in recent years. Abufarha says the almond is an ideal crop for this part of Palestine. The climate is right. The tree can survive without irrigation after the first year. And it begins bearing fruit three years after planting, meaning the farmers do not have to wait long to receive an income. “We have a found a variety that is large and flat and has an excellent taste,” he says. “It thrives as a rain-fed tree, which is important when the farmers are denied access to water by Israel.”

Canaan already has 4,000 dunams [400 hectares] of almond trees under cultivation, with more than 200 farmers in the Jenin area participating. He hopes to add another 1,000 dunams by the end of this year. Canaan harvested 100 tonnes last year and he expects to nearly triple that figure this. In another five years, he expects to be producing as much as 2,000 tonnes annually of raw almonds. “We select a crop only if it is likely to be beneficial for the farmers and the local community. We are thinking about its social impact.”

Another international market he hopes to create is for freekeh, a wheat grain that has been cultivated in the Middle East for millennia. Once freekeh was a staple of the local diet, though in recent decades it has been largely replaced by rice.

 

Nasser Abufarha, of Canaan Fair Trade, is adding new crops like the ancient grain, freekeh, [Courtesy: warscapes.com]

Nasser Abufarha, of Canaan Fair Trade, is adding new crops like the ancient grain, freekeh. [copyright: warscapes.com]

Each spring, three weeks before the wheat harvest is complete, an unusual production ritual can be seen at freekeh farms in the West Bank. Men in flameproof clothing fire propane blow-torches to burn the immature husks, which are then removed – freekeh derives from the Arabic word for “rub” – to reveal the roasted green wheat kernels inside. Freekeh has a delicate nutty, smoked flavor.

For decades Syria was famed for its freekeh, but with a civil war raging there production levels have fallen. Now West Bank farmers have stepped in to fill the void. Ten years ago, Abufarha says, only a few farms in the West Bank produced freekeh. Last year 60 tonnes were harvested, and he expects that figure to keep on growing. Canaan believes that a strong market can be developed in Europe and the US for the ancient, healthful grain, especially if it is produced in accordance with fair-trade and organic principles. Freekeh is high in protein and fiber, while low in calories.

Abufarha emphasises that it is vital to market the strengths of Palestinian agriculture. “We have hundreds of thousands of people who know how to farm the land. We have a wonderful soil and climate. The airflow is good. We have tasty varieties.” Such self-declared pride reflects a new confidence in Palestine’s global image. Once the small amounts of Palestinian olive oil exported abroad were labelled “From the Holy Land” or even as from Israel. Canaan, on the other hand, proudly declares on its labels: “From Palestine, the land of milk and honey”.

All of this, however, must take place in the context of a hostile occupation. Dozens of military orders are designed to make life as difficult as possible for farmers in Area C, where most of them reside. One of the biggest obstacles is Israel’s severe restrictions on irrigation. Installing water pipes is illegal without Israeli permission, but the military authorities rarely issue such permits. “The farmers ignore these orders because we have no choice if we are to survive here,” says Abufarha.

But in turn, that has created other problems. “There is no oversight of irrigation, which means lawlessness reigns. The danger is that every farmer extracts as much water as he can to improve his own yields. And that means that, if a farmer can dig deeper for water, he will destroy the prospects of his neighbors by over-extracting and drying up their wells. And because covert digging is expensive and has to be done secretly, it becomes impossible to organise water extraction as an organised national infrastructure project or to recruit investors. Illicit well-digging means an unstable supply and a wasteful use of a key resource. And ultimately that limits our agricultural potential.”

He notes that Palestine’s current annual olive crop is worth $200 million. “If we had access to water, it would be worth $500 million. And that is just from one crop. Palestinians were once famous for their citrus industry, but that is long gone. As are other crops like apricots and plums. And the reason is our lack of access to water. We can’t solve that problem without first ending the occupation, so we have to mitigate its effects by developing other crops, like almonds, that can survive as rain-fed rather than irrigation-fed.”

The other major difficulty – in an export-driven business – are Israeli-imposed movement restrictions, creating delays and dramatically adding to Canaan’s expenses. Trucks are loaded in Jenin and then driven a short distance to an Israeli checkpoint, where they are inspected and then off-loaded to trucks bearing Israeli number plates. The trucks then drive to the port of Haifa where they are subjected to another security inspection. Only then are they loaded on to ships for export. Shipments can be delayed at any stage, with products in constant danger of being damaged.

The extra burdens and costs make it hard for Canaan’s farmers to compete with either the global agri-businesses or with the artisanal farmers of France and Italy.

Innovation and tradition

Abufarha would like to see his model being adapted to other areas of the Palestinian economy to pull it out of its extreme dependence on international aid. “Too many civil society organisations in Palestine are chasing after donor money, worrying about what the donors want rather than developing their own ideas rooted in the reality here.”

His latest innovation is the establishment of CORE, the Canaan Organic Research and Extension center, which supports farmers developing new ideas and matches them with companies that can market their produce. CORE has already created a model farm in the village of Zababdeh, south-east of Jenin, to train farmers and agricultural students in organic crop production, sheep-rearing and bee-farming. Another project converts the engines in the farmers’ tractors to run on used felafel oil.

Canaan is not alone, either in developing Palestinian cooperatives or in selling premium products abroad – though it has produced the most successful model to date. The small Christian village of Taybeh, outside Ramallah, for example, has developed a beer – manufactured according to German purity standards – that it exports to Japan, Germany and the UK. And cooperatives in areas like Jericho harvest and export dates, overseen by the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee.

Another project very much in sympathy with Canaan’s aims is the recent creation of a Palestinian “seed bank” to preserve Palestine’s ancient agricultural heritage. Called the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, it is designed to identify crop varieties that are suited to local Palestinian conditions but threatened by the aggressive selling of hybrid varieties by agri-businesses. It seeks to educate Palestinian farmers about practices that have been almost forgotten.

The project is being led by Vivien Sansour, who served for many years as Canaan’s product relations manager. She hopes to revive once-famous varieties of cucumber, marrow and watermelon that have disappeared. She told the Guardian newspaper in April: “There is a kind of huge watermelon, known as jadu’i, that was grown in the northern West Bank. Before 1948, it was exported around the region. It was famous in places like Syria. It has almost disappeared. One of the most exciting discoveries so far is that we found some seeds for it. They are seven years old, so we need to see if they are viable.”

Like Abufarha, she sees in traditional agricultural practices the key to holding on to an identity and way of life. “I realised that what was also under threat was something deeper – the connection to a sense of cultural identity. The songs women would sing in the fields. Phrases, even the words we use. So it is about preserving the local biodiversity, but it is also about the importance to Palestinian culture of traditional agricultural methods.”

Canaan is still innovating, even with olive oil. Its new lines include Raw Extra-Virgin Olive Oil, which is unprocessed and unfiltered, and Crush Fusions, infused with a range of herbs like zaatar, basil, chilli, or garlic and lemon.

Diane Adkin, who was until recently Canaan’s longtime agent in the US and is active in the Land of Canaan Foundation, which supports Canaan’s work with Palestinian farmers, says that 10 years ago the company had little more than a website in the US and a handful of activists buying its oil online. “Since then our loyal customer base from our website and through our interfaith partners has grown tremendously. They are a big part of our success.”

She adds: “We always knew to really help Palestine we had to expand beyond the ‘choir’ and get into stores. We attended our first trade shows in 2008 and now we are in natural food stores and fair-trade stores across the country, as well as Whole Foods. The last few years Canaan Fair Trade has sold to even more retailers through national distributors. That means we are on the shelf in stores that are buying because we are superb olive oil – and this so pleases our farmers. … The social trend nowadays is towards foodies who look for simple artisan foods produced organically, sustainably and fairly.”

Abufarha is equally hopeful about the future, and Palestine’s place in it. “People are tired of the modern world’s garbage, its wars, its damage to the environment and its threats to the social fabric. These things are all connected. People want better governments and policies. Through food, Palestinians can gain a voice in this global movement for change. Palestine is part of these efforts to forge new kinds of solidarity across borders. We have the chance to let people see Palestinians in a different light, and see that we are not ‘the foreigner’. We can be a partner in a wider struggle for global justice.”

 

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African American community demands end to racial profiling and law-enforcement killings

Once again another city in the United States is hit by racial unrest prompted by the brutal and lethal force of the police. This time Milwaukee, Wisconsin erupted on August 13 after the cop killing of Sylville Smith, a 23-year-old African American.

Immediately the police and local authorities sought to criminalize Smith in his death saying he had fled from the cops and later pointed a gun towards an officer. A high-profile Milwaukee County Sheriff said Smith had an extensive criminal record and therefore attempting to justify the police actions.

The sheriff later went on to talk about the purported “pathologies” in existence within the African American community adding further insult to injury and death. The family of Smith rejected these allegations about his criminal record. The Smith family said that Sylville had a license to carry a firearm because he had been a victim of crime himself.

Unrest erupted in the aftermath of the killing where youth targeted police vehicles and private property. Gun shots were heard when police and firefighters attempted to respond to a blaze at a BP gas station on the north side of the city. The rebellion continued for a second night on August 14 while Republican Governor Scott Walker placed the National Guard on alert.

The mother of Sylville, Mildred Haynes, said of the incident “My son is gone due to the police killing my son. I am lost.”

In an article published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel it notes that “Haynes said her son does not have a felony record but acknowledged he had been arrested. Online court records show Smith has one prior conviction for carrying a concealed weapon, a misdemeanor. The rest of the arrests did not result in charges or were dismissed.” (Aug. 15)

This same article also reports “Smith’s younger sister, Sherelle Smith, 22, said her brother carried a gun because he was scared and needed to protect himself, not because he was violent. He didn’t even like to argue, she said. He was known around the neighborhood for his style and thing about him, she said.”

On Sunday evening, August 14, reports indicated that an 18-year-old man was wounded in the Sherman Park area, where the shooting of Smith took place and the center of the unrest. Police claimed they utilized an armored vehicle to rush the victim to the hospital. The 18-year-old was said to have been shot in the neck at 11 p.m. and was still receiving treatment for his injuries.

Additional details about the extent of the rebellion revealed by news reports said that seven Milwaukee-area police officers suffered injuries during the disturbances on Sunday (Aug. 14) and into Monday.  One of these officers was taken to hospital for treatment.

At least two of the officers were said to have had glass fragments in their eyes after concrete was thrown through the front of a patrol vehicle according to Edward A. Flynn, the Milwaukee police chief. Flynn claimed as well that three Milwaukee county sheriff’s deputies were struck by bricks and rocks tossed at them during confrontations with people demonstrating against the killing of Smith.

Altogether reports say that six buildings were burned on the evening of August 14. Those businesses set alight included the BP gas station at Sherman and Burleigh, Jet Beauty at 35th and Fond du Lac, BMO Harris Bank at 36th and Fond du Lac, O’Reilly Auto Parts at Fond du Lac and Burleigh, MJM Liquor at Fond du Lac and North and a second liquor store near 21st and Hopkins.

Milwaukee: A Case Study in African American and Working Class Oppression

The city of Milwaukee has been described as both the worse place in the U.S. for African Americans to live as well as the most segregated municipal area in America. These conclusions were reached based upon first-hand accounts of African Americans themselves along with statistical data which reveal astronomical rates of unemployment, poverty and residential divisions.

These conditions have been exacerbated over the last five years due to the austerity and anti-people legislative initiatives launched by the state house in Madison and backed up by Republican right-wing Governor Walker. In 2011, the state of Wisconsin became a focus in the struggle against monumental cutbacks in benefits for public employees. An occupation of the State Capitol in Madison lasted for several weeks involving tens of thousands of workers, youth and community people.

Nonetheless, the draconian legislation was signed into law only to be followed by additional bills that instituted right-to-work. Wisconsin, which had a legacy of social democratic policies emanating from the populist movements of the early 20th century, was now leading the way in the opposite direction with attacks on public employee unions and funding for education.

In a March 9, 2015 commentary by Miles Brown, a student at the University of Wisconsin studying political science and history, he cited “Business Insider compiled data that shows how Milwaukee is divided along color lines. Blacks live on the north and west side, whites live on the east side and far north. Hispanics live on the south side, and Asians live in a pocket on the north central side of town.” (progressive.org)

This same essay continues saying “According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s data for 2013, the gap between Black and white students in eighth-grade math was a giant 30.8 percentage points. When it comes time for high school graduation, Black kids are almost one-third less likely to make it to the stage. The Annie E. Casey Foundation reports that children of color face immense barriers to success in key categories of well-being. Black people are less likely to be in school or working, have two-parent homes, delay childbearing, or gain at least an associate’s degree. Thirty percent of Wisconsin’s white children live in households below 200 percent of the poverty level, compared with about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s Latino and American Indian kids. For African American kids, the rate is 80 percent.”

From Mass Demonstrations and Urban Rebellions to Independent Organization

Since 2013, there has been an upsurge in mass demonstrations and rebellions against racism and police brutality. The level of political consciousness among youth and workers within the African American community has risen exponentially. This growing intolerance towards law-enforcement impunity and the failure of the prosecutorial agencies and courts to hold these errant officers accountable has been reflected in a series of rebellions led by African American youth from Ferguson, Missouri to Baltimore, Maryland and now Milwaukee.

Although this is an election year in the U.S. neither of the two ruling class parties have addressed the burgeoning crises in the cities and suburbs across the country. The administration of President Barack Obama has not undertaken any policies that specifically address the oppression of African Americans.

Obama is supporting the candidacy of Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, his former secretary of state. There is very little enthusiasm for the Clinton candidacy among African Americans even in light of the openly extreme right-wing propaganda of Republican candidate Donald Trump. Consequently, the African American question will not be a focus of the campaign unless the people themselves escalate the level of mass mobilization and unrest on a national level.

Between Trump’s racist xenophobia and Clinton’s patronizing approach to the African American and oppressed communities, there is no alternative outside of independent political organization and actions. This is the major challenge facing the African American people to take the lead in developing tactics and strategies that extend beyond spontaneous demonstrations and urban rebellions.

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It is time to assess the legacy that President Obama bequeaths us. Two timely books contribute to this; namely, The End of the Republic and the Delusion of Empire by James Petras, (Clarity, 2016) and Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Jeremy Hammond, (Worldview, 2016) with Hammond focusing on the “special relationship”, Petras, more broadly on US imperialism. Both are pessimistic about the possibility of any change without an active, articulate citizens’ movement that has staying power, thereby creating the conditions for a political renewal.

Hammond’s work is detailed, documenting the period starting with Obama’s 2008 victory and Israel’s immediate response: its invasion of Gaza in December. Throwing down the gauntlet, which president-elect Obama refused to pick up.

There were more such attacks to come, involving seizing aid flotillas headed for Gaza, culminating in a repeat of that full scale invasion of Gaza in 2014, both killing thousands of innocents. Hammond’s main point is to separate Obama’s weak, nice words — “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines” — with his inability to move towards fulfilling them.

The gap between word and deed is really an abyss here. Either Obama is helpless, cowardly or cynical. Perhaps he will tell us someday — when it’s too late to make any difference.

Hammond realized he had to document this ‘legacy’ and he does it well. He writes with a quiet passion which makes the ugly reality more bearable. The Palestinians arguably have it worse than any other victim of imperialism, being under daily, direct imperial attack, not just the “soft power” behind-the-scene manipulation of local politicians, etc. “We are all Palestinians now” is increasingly the credo of anyone with a heart.

‘A word means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less’*

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war of conquest that Israel launched (Menachen Begin agrees). Hammond is a ‘two-stater’: advocating some kind of binational state or independent states based on 1967 borders. He reveals the confusion that the hurried, chaotic UN negotiations in 1947 leading to Resolution 181 produced. The UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended an Arab state be set up on 44% of Palestine, expropriating land to redistribute to Jews.

No Arab delegate or nation was included in UNSCOP, but even so, UNSCOP realized “the partition proposal was a violation of the rights of the Arabs, as well as contrary to the very Charter under which they were acting.” But they recommended the partition anyway. Sounds fishy.

The UN General Assembly rejected it and supported the Arab Higher Committee’s call for the recognition of a Palestinian state “which would respect human rights, fundamental freedoms and equality of all persons before the law, and would protect the legitimate rights and interests of all minorities.”

But, like UNSCOP, the General Assembly backed down, adopting Resolution 181–now it sounds like a conspiracy–and the Zionists began deporting and killing Arabs, seizing land, leading up to the end of the British Mandate on May 14, 1948.

The result was called the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, and recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem. Hammond argues that the resolution “neither partitioned Palestine nor conferred upon the Zionist leadership any legal authority to declare the state of Israel.”

Sounds to me like it did–after arm-twisting by the US. That’s certainly what Humpty Dumpty would say. The Arabs clearly agree with Hammond. That’s why they dared take on the state-of-the-art Israelis, armed by the US, British and Soviets, facing a rag-tag, pathetic multi-national force using WWI discards and donkeys.

So it looks like Resolution 181 was indeed a “partition plan”, which Israel was able to massage into its ‘facts on the ground’, leaving behind a “frozen war”. Until 1967, when Israel seized what was left and began to settle it with new Jewish immigrants.

What about ‘infamy’ and ‘uniqueness’?

Hammond documents Israeli policy over the past decade. Richard Falk, a committed anti-Zionist, wrote the foreword. Hammond tries to ward off cries of “anti-Semitism” with an introduction by a more neutral Gene Epstein, asserting his “pride in being Jewish and American, and identification with many Israelis”.

Falk makes Hammond’s central point that “the US has been an essential collaborator in a grotesque double deception: falsely pretending to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state, while doing everything within its power to ensure that Israel has the time it needs to make such an outcome a practical impossibility.”

Epstein denounces Israel’s crimes as “heinous’, but “that hardly makes them unique … nor does it make the history of Israel very different from that of many other nations, including the US.” Okay, the US committed a holocaust against the native people. That is something that Zionists like to throw in your face to change the subject of their crimes.

But Epstein nonetheless turns around and concludes that the Palestine-Israel conflict is “the most infamous of the world’s longstanding international conflicts.” So which is it? Doesn’t “most infamous” mean “unique”?

He agrees with Hammond that “‘Jewish state’ [is] a racially-tinged statement that seems to codify the second-class status of Israel’s non-Jewish citizens”. More proof of infamy and uniqueness.

Hammond doesn’t take the one-state proposal seriously, what Falk describes in the foreword as, “a unilaterally imposed Israeli one-state solution combined with either Palestinian Bantustanization or third-class citizenship in an enlarged Israel.” Falk reluctantly endorses some version of it “based on the equality of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples” to resolve “overlapping claims of self-determination”.

There is no ‘happy ending’ here. Both one and two state solutions are ugly with the massive wall enclosing the West Bank, and the unending siege of Gaza. The Palestinians will accept any reasonable solution based on pre-1967 borders. They would “recognize Israel by whatever name it applies to itself in accordance with international law,”** based on the 1967 borders and an end of the Israeli occupation. What more could a sensible enemy ask for?

But the words coming from Washington and Tel Aviv having nothing to do with reality. (Correction: Israel is more honest at times. Netanyahu flatly vowed during the 2015 election campaign that there would be no two-state solution if he was re-elected.)

We can’t rely on the Obamas and Netanyahus, or even the well-meaning others. The only hope is to mobilize world opinion to pressure governments to bring Israel to account. It has been done before to other “unique” states: South Africa and Nazi Germany, though it was not an easy road. The world came to recognize the racist danger that both those nations posed to their people and fought it to end the scourge of racism back then.

Resistance is not “terrorism”, just as the partisans who blew up bridges and exploded bombs in occupied Europe in WWII were not terrorists. It is the invaders who are by definition the terrorists. Despite their legitimate right to resist, the Palestinians have disavowed further violent resistance, in line with the South African anti-apartheid struggle, though there will always be hot-heads as long as the crimes continue.

What role do Jews with a conscience have? Again, not an easy road. Shlomo Sand and Gilad Atzmon are the two most prominent Israelis who realized that having “Jew” on their Israeli passports was racist, wrong, and refuse to call themselves by this now sullied signifier. For this courageous few, it is the real ‘obstacle to peace’.

Rather than “identification with many Israelis”, as Epstein claims, why not “identification with many Palestinians”, as Atzmon and Shlomo do?

Zionist Power Configuration

petrasPetras doesn’t write much about Israel, per se; his speciality is the Israeli-Jewish-Zionist–call it what you like–lobby, and he has written extensively on this in the past. His most recent books are more focused on the US.

This one is more a collection of essays, using the election year as a hook for reviewing Obama’s term, timed for election reading. Sharp brush strokes for anyone still needing convincing that both Trump and Clinton are bad news. In polls, 60% of both Republican and Democratic voters say they are disgusted with both candidates, and The End of the Republic will only add to their nausea.

Petras exposes again “the Zionist Power Configuration … embedded in the US state apparatus.” US policy has been to destroy Islamic and Arab-nationalist structures and institutions of power”, parroting “Israeli-settler policy of ‘erasure’”. Together, they have made the Middle East ever-more unstable.

Petras knows his South American politics well. That part to me was the most revealing: even when left wing governments are elected, despite US meddling, they are hounded, the right wing forces, ably assisted by Washington, biding their time and then pouncing. Sometimes with the military upfront, sometimes just using Washington’s minions.

The latest casualties are the Kirchner-Fernandez government in Argentina (2015), the Lula-Rousseff government in Brazil (2014–16), and the Chavez-Maduro government in Venezuela (2015).

Hillary’s War and Peace

Petras is most of all worried that Hillary will launch WWIII, citing her promotion of all US military adventures since the days of ‘Billary’ from 1992–2000. Then it was Iraq and Yugoslavia, where US pressure following the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed the various ethnicities to form independent pseudo nations under US-EU tutelage.

Her love of killing continued as a senator under Bush, with her loud support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and went into high gear as secretary of state under Obama, with overthrows of progressives in Honduras, Paraguay, Libya and (still in progress) Syria. Her support for the putsch in Ukraine in 2014, and loud cries to overthrow Iran and prevent negotiations for normal relations continue. The Clinton Foundation’s biggest donors 1999–2014 were Ukrainian oligarchs.

It Takes a Village (1996) is a particularly jarring instance of what bugs Hammond — the gap between word and deed among politicians, although even motherly Hillary can’t hide her warmongering record. Perhaps, if by some miracle, the less imperialist Trump wins, she can retire and write a sequel It Takes Bombing a Village.

Trump and other rebels

How could Trump be worse? He’s actually much better on almost all international issues. ‘Withdraw from foreign bases’, ‘Make the allies cough up’, ‘Friends with Russia’, ‘Jobs for Americans’… But his gaffes are catching up with him. He taunts Obama (and Clinton) as “the founder of ISIS”, which is spot-on, but serves no purpose without context. We can’t expect Trump to launch into a lecture on the evils of imperialist scheming, so he is merely scoffed at as loony. Alas, we must suffer Clinton II, just as we suffered Reagan.

I have a bit more hope than Petras, who paints a gloomy picture of both the imperial reality and the frustrated grassroots opposition to the madness we must put up with. He sees the most likely scenario as US collapse and the remnants of the working class movement taking greater prominence to provide a way forward. Recall that the Roman Empire took 300–400 years to collapse. I’m not holding my breath.

And where is the working class struggle anymore? Between China and technology, our working class is shrinking, and as it becomes more middle class, is losing its militancy, increasingly supporting, at best, grassroots environmental campaigns. We are ‘citizens’ now, more than class conscious. The ruling class is still very much alive and well, and ‘citizens’ with ambition and few scruples struggle to join it.

Hammond’s earnest attempt to educate in the hope that some of it will sink in, and to reach out, makes me think of the great flowering of the peace movement in the late 1950s, when the Cold War began to thaw, empowering Americans to question the nuclear war scares. The best of US society joined in, from Linus Pauling to Stanley Kubrick.

No one can outdo Dr Strangelove, and that committed mass movement effectively dismantled the nuclear button. I never really believed anyone would destroy the earth, and I still don’t think Clinton would do that. She will continue to carry out the empire’s will, just as Obama did before her. Bush-lite (no Obama-lite, given Clinton’s track record).

Where’s the Legacy?

The 1960s legacy is that mass movements are important, in fact, the most important form of democracy. Campaigns to save whales and seals captured the public’s imagination and achieved bans on hunting. Today, environment apocalypse is pushing people to organize on many fronts, from fuels to song birds and frogs. “We will overcome,” will never go out of style.

Which brings us back to the Great Dissimulator’s legacy. Both Hammond and Petras are bitterly disappointed with his lack of legacy, his willingness to follow the ‘yellow brick’ road. Yet he promised so much.

He has left an environmental imprint, refusing the oil pipeline and lobbying to commit the US to a world agenda on climate change. He has also had a profound social impact, promoting greater black dignity, pushing through a national medical insurance plan, pardoning hundreds of prisoners, more than any other president. He is a conflicted person, and we will all look back on his checkered term nostalgically, at least as long as the Clinton dynasty continues to do what the empire requires.

Americans can go to Cuba now, and maybe even Iran, or at least trade with them. There is no room for all this in Petras’s book as it is a polemic. There is none in Hammond’s as his deals solely with US-Israeli relations, where Obama’s distaste for Netanyahu is kept out of sight, and Israeli settlement activity and mass killing of Palestinians goes on on schedule.

However, Obama did defy the Zionist Power Configuration in his final year in office. He not only did not invade Iran, but negotiated an end to sanctions. He is breaking away now on Syria. Perhaps freeing Pollard in 2015 (done very quietly, thanks to the discretion of the mainstream media) was to massage bruised Zionist egos.

Obama’s inability to do very much to dent the stranglehold the banks and the super rich have on us, is sad, if not frightening. Neoliberalism is deeply entrenched and is proving resilient despite its obvious disastrous effect on the 99%. Obama will go down in history as a tragic figure, the last hope that wilted on the vine. Is it to be Petras’s apocalypse or Hammond’s hopeful enlightenment?

Eric Walberg is a journalist who worked in Uzbekistan and is now writing for Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo. He is the author of  From Postmodernism to Postsecularism and Postmodern Imperialism. His most recent book is Islamic Resistance to ImperialismRead other articles by Eric, or visit Eric’s website.

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Israeli institutions and organizations are reportedly awaiting the regime’s go-ahead for the construction of a so-called “third temple” in place of al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in the Israeli-occupied Jerusalem al-Quds.

The Palestinian-run International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) independent news organization carried the report on Monday, citing Israeli television channels.

Israeli Zionists claim they have the right to build a third temple in line with “scriptural prophecies” to follow the tradition of the first and second ones built in ancient times.

A view of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem al-Quds’s Old City on August 14, 2016

http://www.presstv.us/Detail/2016/08/16/480238/Israel-Third-Temple-Aqsa-Dome-of-Rock-Temple-Mount

Back in June, Israeli Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Uri Ariel said “the first temple was destroyed in 586 BCE, the second temple in 70 CE,” adding that he wished to see a third one built.

The Israeli media, IMEMC reported, alleged that the Israeli bodies favoring the construction of the temple had received “wide political and popular support.”

These organizations explained that they are ready to bring the equipment and tools to start building the temple in the place of both the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque,” it added, citing Al Ray Palestinian Media Agency

They further stated that the total time needed to accomplish the building is three years, according to their plans.

The al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock are situated in Haram al-Sharif or Temple Mount in Jerusalem al-Quds, which was occupied by Israel in 1967.

The mosque is the third holiest site in Islam after Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Masjid al-Nabawi in Medina. The site is also holy to Christians and Jews.

In August 2015, Israel imposed restrictions on the entry of Palestinian worshipers into the compound, which is under the administration of Jordan, sparking a fresh wave of tensions with Palestinians. Over 230 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis in recent months.

According to the agreement signed between the Tel Aviv regime and the Jordanian government after Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem al-Quds in 1967, visits to the compound by Israelis are permitted, but non-Muslim worship is prohibited.

 

 Israeli forces stand guard as a group of Israelis leave after visiting the al-Aqsa Mosque compound on August 14, 2016, in Jerusalem al-Qud’s Old City. ©AFP

On Sunday, fresh clashes erupted near the mosque after over 300 Israeli settlers entered the compound and performed rituals inside in violation of the agreement.

Muslims consider the trespass into the al-Aqsa Mosque yard as part of an Israeli Judaization campaign that targets the holy city of al-Quds and a provocation.

Jordan strongly denounced Israel for attacking Palestinian worshipers at the site and allowing “Zionist extremists” to enter the compound.

Over the past decades, Tel Aviv has been trying to change the demographic makeup of Jerusalem al-Quds by constructing illegal settlements, destroying historical sites and expelling the local Palestinian population.

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Russia’s long-range Tu-22M3 bombers delivered their first airstrikes on terrorist targets in Syria operating from an Iranian airbase. Moscow and Tehran cooperation in Syria is “strategic,” confirmed the head of Iran’s National Security Council.

The long range bombers with full bomb payload took off from Hamadan Airfield to attack Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front facilities in Aleppo, Deir-ez-Zor and Idlib provinces.

The strikes have eliminated five major terrorist weapons depots and training compounds in the area as well as three command posts and a significant number of terrorists, the Russian Defense Ministry said.

The long-range bombers were covered by Su-30sm and Su-35s jet fighters which took off from Russia’s Khmeimim Airbase in Syria.

Russia notified the US-led coalition about its operation involving the use of an Iranian airfield and passing through the coalition-controlled territory in time, which was “enough” to maintain safety in the airspace over Iraq and Syria, the US Defense Ministry spokesman said during a briefing following the Russian air strikes.


A Tupolev Tu-22 M3 strategic bomber of the Russian Aerospace Force © Ministry of defence of the Russian Federation

A Tupolev Tu-22 M3 strategic bomber of the Russian Aerospace Force © Ministry of defence of the Russian Federation / Sputnik

The number of military aircraft deployed at Hamadan Airbase has not been disclosed.

The Al-Masdar website was the first to publish photos of at least three Tu-22M3 bombers and Il-76 military transport jets in Iran.

Moscow and Tehran signed a military agreement allowing Russian aircraft to station at Hamadan Airport in western Iran. Tehran has agreed to share its military facilities and capacities with Moscow, confirming dedication to strategic cooperation in fighting against terrorism in Syria, Iran’s Secretary of Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani told Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) in an exclusive interview on Tuesday. The core benefit for the Russian Air Force is a drastic reduction in flying time to terrorist targets in Syria. Russian long-range bombers delivered airstrikes in Syria from a base in Mozdok, Russia, and had to cover a distance of about 2,000km to get to Syrian airspace. Now that distance is reduced to some 700km, so time-sensitive airstrikes can be delivered immediately and more cheaply.

 

As for Khmeimim Airbase in Syria’s Latakia province, used by Russian task force since September 2015 to deliver airstrikes against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) – its airstrip is not suitable for the heavy Tu-22M3. But that is subject to change, as Damascus granted Moscow permission to station a permanent military airbase at Khmeimim, and the Russian Air Force is preparing to thoroughly refurbish and modernize the airfield, so it will be able to accommodate all types of military aircraft in the near future.

 

Military cooperation between Iran and Russia is developing rapidly.

In January this year, Moscow and Tehran signed military cooperation deal that implies wider collaboration in personnel training and counter-terrorism activities. Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and his Iranian counterpart Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan signed the document during a visit by Russia’s top brass to the Iranian capital.

On Monday, Russian media reported that Moscow has once again requested Iran and Iraq to allow cruise missiles to fly through their respective airspace to deliver strikes on terrorist targets in Syria.

Also on Monday, Russia launched tactical naval drills in the Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The warships taking part in the exercise are to engage in live artillery and missile fire “under simulated battlefield conditions.” The Mediterranean force includes two fast attack guided missile craft, both armed with Kalibr-NK cruise missile complexes equipped with eight missiles each.

Simultaneously, a group of four attack guided missile craft (each armed with 8 Kalibr-NK cruise missiles) has been deployed in the southwestern part of the Caspian Sea, also to perform live artillery and missile strikes.

On October 7, 2015, four Russian Navy warships in the Caspian Sea fired a total of 26 missiles at positions in Syria held by IS, Shoigu announced. The missiles traveled some 1,500km, changing route several times, and eliminating 11 targets.

On November 20, warships of Russia’s Caspian Fleet launched 18 cruise missiles at seven targets in the Syrian provinces of Raqqa, Idlib and Aleppo. All of the targets were said to have been successfully hit

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SEC and Wall Street Stock Frauds: Can This Dog Hunt?

August 17th, 2016 by Pam Martens

A dubious search engine company trading over-the-counter on Wall Street, with a felon as a “General Design and Marketing Strategist” who was banned from the industry for previous stock frauds, and with the craziest SEC filings and disclosure documents you’ll ever read in your lifetime, was finallyhalted from trading yesterday by the SEC – but only after reaching a market value of $35 billion.

The SEC said in its announcement of the trading halt of the company, NeuroMama, Ltd., Inc., that it had “concerns” about “the identity of the persons in control of the company’s operations and management, false statements to company shareholders and/or potential investors that the company has an application pending for listing on the NASDAQ Stock Market, and potentially manipulative transactions in the company’s stock.”

Yesterday’s SEC statement simply does not do justice to the insanity of what has been going on under its nose while it was engaging in a polite letter writing campaign with the company in a futile attempt to obtain granular operational details.

The SEC had plenty of warnings that things were amiss at NeuroMama. On September 2, 2014, Edward Schneider, a Certified Financial Analyst, reported at Seeking Alpha that NeuroMama’s General Design and Marketing Strategist (which sounds a lot like a stock promoter to Wall Street veterans) was Vladislav Steven Zubkis, who had previously been barred by the SEC from association with any broker or dealer or offering of penny stocks because of his past schemes that “generated more than $12 million in illegal proceeds.” A bizarre disclosure on NeuroMama’s web site takes the reader through a 68-page narrative of how Zubkis is now on a charitable mission for children, to the eventual disclosure that subsequent to his bar by the SEC, Zubkis went to prison for five years. Zubkis’s take on why he went to prison is far different than what prosecutors alleged at the time.

In 2005, Zubkis was arraigned on charges that he defrauded investors out of more than $1.8 million during 2003 and 2004 over a promised construction of a storage facility and purchase of an ownership interest in a Las Vegas casino, according to the San Diego Union Tribune at the time. The newspaper quoted the prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sanjay Bhandari, calling Zubkis a “professional, hard-boiled con man” who moved from one bogus scheme to another.

A June 13, 2013 company filing with the SEC by NeuroMama was an equally glaring red flag. The filing used hyperbolic words like “sensational design” and “breathtaking opportunities” more characteristic of a carnival barker than a formal filing of business prospects with the SEC. In the same filing, the company said that its new search engine, the NeuroMama Content Distribution Platform, “had created the most comprehensive portal for the most discriminating investors and professionals in the financial industry, who are doing their research for themselves and for others. We have assembled the best research tools in the world in one place and are ready to make it available to everyone who is willing, ready and able to take advantage of our implementation.”

Since researchers at Wall Street On Parade are a perfect target market for such a search engine, we attempted to do some searches last evening at the NeuroMama search engineto check out its prowess into financial history.

We typed in Glass-Steagall Act. We received an answer, “Whoops, looks like something went wrong.” Since both the Democrat and Republican party platforms have just recently added restoring the Glass-Steagall Act to reform Wall Street and were all over the news for doing so, this gap in the search engine looks decidedly odd. We next tried a famous name during the era of enacting the original Glass-Steagall Act, Ferdinand Pecora. We got the same “Whoops” message. We tried some famous cases from the 2008 crash and its aftermath, like Goldman Sachs Abacus. More “Whoops” messages.

Read complete article on Wall Street on Parade

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As the economic and humanitarian crisis has worsened in Puerto Rico in recent months, playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda, has given voice in interviews andOp-Eds to the severity of the crisis among ordinary Puerto Ricans. Miranda called the island’s debt crisis a matter of “life and death,” saying, “I have a lot of family who are struggling in Puerto Rico, that’s not an abstract issue to me.” He humanizes what the statistics – $73 billion in debt, $19,500 median household income, 11.5 percent sales tax, 64,000 people leaving per year – can not. Puerto Rico is a debt colony whose function as a political entity is to service its creditors. Ironically, Miranda achieved the celebrity he’s now using to advocate for the Puerto Rican people by glorifying and aggrandizing the most ruthless champion of creditors in American history.

Miranda has become an elite pop-culture sensation as the creator and star of the award-winning and immensely popular Broadway play Hamilton. The hip-hop musical has been as successful with critics as it has with Broadway theatergoers, dominating the Tony awards and selling out months in advance. The Harvard Business Review argues its $849 tickets are priced too low.

The show’s namesake is, of course, Revolutionary War commander, George Washington adviser, and first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Miranda focuses on the rags to riches story of Hamilton – a poor immigrant who triumphed against all odds by using his intelligence and relentless hard work to fight British oppression and guide his new country to independence and greatness. In My Shot, Miranda’s title character raps:

Hey yo, I’m just like my country
I’m young, scrappy and hungry 
And I’m not throwing away my shot! 

Miranda has praised Hamilton and the other “Founders” for their ability to translate a revolutionary vision into a nation that embodied the liberal principles it supposedly stood for.

“They did a remarkable thing in sticking the landing from revolution to government. That’s the hardest thing to do. You can go across the ocean to France, where they totally fucked it up and then got stuck in a cycle of revolution and tyranny,” Miranda told Rolling Stone.

Miranda also praised Hamilton’s financial program of creating a national debt by assuming the debts of individual states: “His thinking was, if we are entrenched in each other’s finances, we’re stuck with each other.”

The problem with Miranda’s reading of history is that he assumes the liberal notion of a united nation, devoted to the common goals of freedom and equality, was any more real 225 years ago than it is today. Post-revolutionary America was never a utopia where everyone shared financially in the spoils of independence. It was a political association organized along the lines of feudal societies and their stark divisions between creditors and debtors.

A wealthy, colonial elite had managed through a massive propaganda campaign to enlist the poor to fight to overthrow British rule. The masses slogged through years battling horrid conditions in the woods and back country to survive combat, hunger, and the elements. They were paid in worthless paper they would later sell to speculators for a fraction of its face value after returning to their farms and their families upon gaining their “freedom.”

The landholders and mercantile class had sat by idly as the “exceedingly dirty and nasty people” (in George Washington‘s words) did the real work of putting their lives on the line. The financiers then used their political connections to try to turn their investments into a profit by not only receiving interest on the paper debt but getting payment on its full value. There was no one more willing to oblige this massive transfer of wealth from common workers and peasants to the elite, ruling class than Hamilton.

The concentration of economic power into the hands of the few was the desired outcome, and the reason for Hamilton’s dedication to the federalist political system. As the political battles raged between the federalists (Hamilton, James Madison and others) and the Republicans (Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who would later kill Hamilton in a duel), Hamilton sought to consolidate power into a centralized state that could enforce the feudal relationship between those who would pay and those who would collect.

As University of Massachusetts Amherst historian Leonard Richards writes in Shay’s Rebellion,

“(Hamilton) intended to strengthen the national government at the expense of the states by diminishing the ties of state creditors to the states and binding them to the central government. If their future wealth and well-being was linked to the success of the federal government, rather than to the states, their hearts and minds would follow.” [1]

Hamilton was not trying to unite citizens together through mutual financial responsibility, as Miranda claimed. He was trying to unite the elites in dependency to the national state. To accomplish this, Hamilton “wanted to reduce – or, better yet, eliminate – the power of states. He also wanted to diminish the influence of farmers and artisans and enhance the power of landlords and merchants,” Richards writes. [2]

What became known as Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts, in which a popular “regulation” revolted against the state’s new political system which had taken power out of the hands of local councils and removed the influence of citizens distant from the financial and political center of Boston, provided a pretext for the Federalists to ram through their centralized national organization of government in order to crush potential future insurrections.

Installed as Treasury Secretary in the new federal government, Hamilton immediately implemented his policy of creating an astronomical federal debt. His solution for providing the money to actually pay these financial promises was the Whiskey Tax.

This excise tax had further aims that would help reorganize American social and economic life. William Hogeland writes in The Whiskey Rebellion that Hamilton designed the law to favor large producers over smaller ones. The tax would undercut the prices of independent distillers and self-employed farmers, driving them out of business and “into the factories of their creditors.”  Hogeland writes:

The goal was industry consolidation. Hamilton had learned from the English that commercial agriculture and large industry, when publicly chartered, given tax breaks, and financed by large loans, might turn the United States into an industrial empire to compete with England’s. The labor power dissipated on small family farms and in artisan shops could be gathered up, deployed at factories and diversified commercial farms, and boosted through efficient organization. [3]

It is not clear whether Hamilton intended to provoke an insurrection, so he could then use the military power of the newly formed government to crush it and serve as an example to others who sought to challenge its dictates. But if Hamilton did indeed want the revolt that logically followed by those impacted by the tax, he was rewarded soon thereafter.

Hamilton not only argued for a military response to the uprising, the Treasury Secretary actually took command of a militia led by George Washington to the mountains of western Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Valley. His goals were more far-reaching and strategic than merely to implement compliance and enforce the law. He sought to make an example of the organizations and protesters of the consequences of challenging federal authority. As Hogeland writes, “Hamilton was out to remove the hear of the people’s movement he’d been struggling with for more than a decade, not to prosecute individuals.” [4]

As commander of the military force that sought to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion, Hogeland writes that Hamilton sanctioned large-scale plunder:

He made theft legal. The quartermaster corps, he announced would impress civilian property along the way. Now families watched helplessly as bayonet-wielding soldiers – no longer freelancing thieves but officials, authorized by the president – commandeered hard-won winter supplies of grain, meat, firewood, and blankets on behalf of the government of the United States. A steady, freezing rain meant the arrival of winter. Families whose sustenance was carted away faced grim months ahead. [5]

When Hamilton’s forces reached the rebels, they terrorized the local population with night raids that resulted in mass arrests. Prisoners were threatened with hanging and left shackled, freezing and nearly starved. In the end, only 20 prisoners were brought back to Philadelphia for trial. All except one were found innocent. The one conviction was later overturned.

Naturally, this history is absent from Miranda’s sanitized version of Hamilton. Instead, there is a feel-good, liberal version of Hamilton that fits the propaganda needs of the present-day American empire.

As Paul Street wrote recently in his CounterPunch article “Miranda, Obama, and Hamilton: an Orwellian Menage a Trois for the Neoliberal Age“, Miranda’s Broadway spectacle is a “brilliant ahistorical monument to Orwellian, fake-progressive bourgeois identity politics in service to the very predominantly Caucasian financial elite and ruling class hegemony.”

Miranda also ignores the structural social and economic forces that, since the founding of the United States, have kept the elite rich and the landless poor. Instead, he propagates the illusion that a person’s success (or lack thereof) are based on meritocracy. This is a convenient narrative for apologists of inequality.

“Adding to the ‘valorization’ of the American System,” Street writes, “Hamilton’s ‘Bootstraps Immigrant Narrative’ (McMaster) feeds Caucasian capitalism’s timeworn victim-blaming story line on why some few folks succeed in climbing up the nation’s steep racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic pyramids while most fail.”

The reality in Puerto Rico is that the population is suffering due to the same financial empire Hamilton was instrumental in designing and implementing. Like the small farmers and artisans whose livelihoods were crushed by Hamilton’s policies that transferred their wealth to the financial elites, Puerto Ricans are being forced to keep paying their ever-shrinking incomes to service the claims against them.

One can imagine Hamilton delighting in the privatization of Puerto Rico’s highways and airports, as well as the stipulation in the PROMESA bill that would allow an un-elected junta appointed by the U.S. Congress to lower the minimum wage.

While Miranda advocates for more flexibility for Puerto Rico to restructure its debt and help stabilize social life on the island, he doesn’t seem able to recognize that Puerto Rico’s problems are rooted in its political status as a colony conquered by the U.S. empire.

The fiction that Puerto Rico is anything other than a colony was put to rest recently when the Supreme Court’s Sanchez Valle ruling acknowledged Puerto Rico does not have sovereignty and the U.S. Congress holds all political authority over the island. As a colony ruled by outsiders for their own benefit, the population of Puerto Rico is powerless to change the socioeconomic system imposed on them through the political process. This is exactly how Hamilton would have wanted it.

For Miranda, who talks eloquently of the problems facing his family and the people of Puerto Rico, there should be no greater symbol of the dispossession and social destruction that appear to be reaching a breaking point in Puerto Rico than Alexander Hamilton and his feudal politics that stripped people of their livelihoods and turned them into little more than commodities whose station in life was to produce wealth for others.

Notes 

[1] Richards, Leonard L. Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Kindle edition.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty. Simon and Schuster , 2015. Kindle edition.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.

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The “Hatred of Life”: The World System which is Threatening All of Us

August 16th, 2016 by Prof. Claudia von Werlhof

I only have a few minutes to convince you of the usefulness of a new term; a term that will help us understand the dangerous times we are living in as well as the related struggles on a deeper level, that is, from the roots.

The time for lighthearted jokes and uncertainties is over. The “storm” predicted by the Zapatistas is approaching faster than expected. Our confusion needs to end.

The world system that is threatening all of us is based on a strange phenomenon I was only recently able to fully grasp, namely a “hatred of life”. (2) This hatred has indeed become a system, society, global civilization. It is embodied in all of modern civilization’s institutions: in economics as much as in politics, in science as much as in gender relations, and, especially, in modern technology. There no longer exists a place where the hatred of life has not, literally, been poured into concrete as the basic idea and sensation of our existence. The hatred of life is no fleeting emotion or a mere individual or personal experience of a certain situation or moment. It is nothing less than hostility to life itself, which – and this is my thesis – has become the main foundation, driving force, and defining criterion for a patriarchal civilization dating back almost 5000 years.

After a virtual ban of 30 years, the term “patriarchy” is now re-emerging. It was commonly used by radical feminists whose movement was destined to be destroyed with the arrival of neoliberalism.

The appearance of so-called “gender studies” was a consequence of this. The term “patriarchy” was shunned and the advocates of gender studies soon rallied behind demands for “equality” within the present system. The goal was integration and a share of power – something the Left had been propagating for a long time.

But the challenge lies in moving beyond a system driven by the hatred of life instead of (voluntarily!) turning into an ever more loyal accomplice in the massacres it is responsible for.

It has been repeatedly suggested here that the patriarchal system is a system of death. That is not entirely correct. The patriarchal system is a system of killing, that is, of artificial death: ecocide, matricide, homicide in general, and finally “omnicide”, the killing of “everything”.

Omnicide is already appearing on the horizon in the form of so-called “geoengineering”. Geoengineering has begun with the destruction of the planet itself, of Mother Earth and of her living order. Geoengineering intends to turn planet Earth into a gigantic weapon of war. (3) It uses new, “post-nuclear”, technologies of mass destruction intended to take control of the planet and its energies to employ “weather warfare” and “plasma weapons” among others.

The military geoengineering we are facing is an “art of war against the earth” that has been developed during 70 years of experimentation with the planet. It cloaks itself in “civil” and “scientific” clothing and claims to protect us from “climate change” and “global warming”. However, climate change and global warming are the results of the named experimentation and not of greenhouse gas emissions, as we are falsely led to believe in order to hide the crimes of the military. (4)

In this context, I would like to announce the publication of Planeta Tierra – la Nueva Guerra, the Spanish edition of Dr. Rosalie Bertell’s book Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, which will be released by La casa del mago, based in Guadalajara. (5)

We always knew that the military was no institution expressing a love of life. But until recently we didn’t know that our civilian institutions were poisoned by the same perverse, illogical, and, in the words of Ivan Illich, “counterproductive” hatred of life.

How can you hate life when you are a part of it? How can you hate yourself? And why?

It is this scandalous secret that needs to be revealed. It is self-evident that the hatred of life cannot be acknowledged or openly named, supported, or propagated. It is never mentioned. Practically no one would want to partake in a project driven by a hatred of life. The love of life is still ours; it is deeply human. It is still with us from the times of non-patriarchal civilization, so-called “matriarchy”. Matriarchal civilization is based on a love of life. It is a civilization that cooperates with life, that celebrates life, and that cherishes the “good life” of communities, without the state and hierarchies, without the police and banks. (6)

The sinister motive of hating life needs to be hidden. The unspeakable crimes that all patriarchies have committed against life itself, against children, women, and all human beings, against the earth, animals, and plants must not be revealed. The hatred of life is the reason and the rational justification for the violence against it; a violence that intends to prevent any rebellion or uprising of those not believing in the system it protects; a system that many would see as a grave assault on their dignity if they only recognized it.

We are told that this violence is necessary for development, progress, and a better life for all of us. It is usually only understood and recognized by those who are directly affected by it. Even then, the promise of a better life is supposed to be a consolation, although any chance for a better life has, in fact, been sacrificed!

Why do we so seldom recognize how flawed this logic is? Why do we so seldom recognize the blatant contradiction of sacrificing life in order to improve it?

The reason is patriarchy’s utopian project. This was already laid out in ancient texts, during the times of the early patriarchies. The project’s purpose is to turn the natural order upside down and to establish an unnatural, and anti-natural, order instead. (7)

The origins of this can be found in the wars of conquest against the world’s matriarchal civilizations. Establishing control over those conquered required a system able to administer control: the state. It began to control life itself: humans, nature, and matriarchal culture. (8) The system based on a hatred of life was developed in order to prevent any challenge to patriarchal rule. It culminated in the desire to replace the natural order with an artificial one to dispose of the “problem of life” once and for all. All dependency on nature, women, mothers, and the earth was to be overcome. A male, patriarchal system of creation was invented that had no room for nature’s cycles, webs, and motions. The Goddess was replaced by “God the Creator” and, finally, by today’s “worldly gods”, the managers of an artificial life supposedly “post-human” and “trans-human”, a life of cyborgs, robots, artificial uteri, test tubes, and global industries of reproduction. (9)

The project of replacing life with non-life could only be realized with the help of modern patriarchal-capitalist civilization and its machine technology. All of the earlier “alchemist” attempts to produce better, higher, and more divine forms of life had failed. Only modern technology allowed for the monstrous manifestation of the patriarchal project we are witnessing today. This is why I call modern patriarchy: “the Monster”!

The Monster is not only characterized by exploitation, extraction, and appropriation. It is, first and foremost, characterized by transforming its possessions into their opposites, that is, into everything we call “capital”: value, money, machines, and hierarchical structures (following Marx).

In this civilization, true democracy is impossible. We are up against a totalitarian system that does not care for its subjects, that can not (or no longer) be stopped, and that is constantly becoming faster and more efficient in its attempt to end life on this planet – while turning even this very process into a tool for further accumulation of profit and power…

Supposedly, everything that exists today derives from so-called fathers; each origin is patriarchal and no longer maternal, deriving from a mother, from Mother Earth, matri-archal. Patriarchy is a new “technological formation” that produces and transforms everything that exists violently. It will not stop before everything has been annihilated.

Capitalism is the modern form of materializing this utopian project of total transformation. When “pure” patriarchy arrives and even the tiniest matriarchal remnants have disappeared, we will all be dead.

*

I hope that the men among you who before had difficulties with the term “patriarchy” can now see that it concerns you, too. I hope that you will decide to switch sides and join nature and women. Women are (still) closer to life, since life emerges from them. They are always the first victims of the hatred of life, but they are also closer to the truth of life.

When women rise up, they rise up in the defense of life. It has always been like that. Today, women are rising up again against violence and for life, massively and all over the world. Everyone ought to follow them, embrace them, and love them for it. It is not them who are the threat, it is the Monster, the patriarchal “hydra”, an all-encompassing combination of capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, globalization, and militarism.

Patriarchy is a historical project that has reached its peak with capitalism. Because of its hatred of life it inevitably will collapse. It cannot replace the life it continuously destroys. Capital cannot return anything to life. The process of “patriarchization” is irreversible. It is a religion. And the patriarchs cannot stop believing in it, because they would otherwise be forced to return to matriarchy…

What a great idea that would be! What joy it would bring! We could leave the patriarchal deception behind us and revive human dignity by rejecting this monstrous system. Without our participation and cooperation it cannot be maintained.

Mother Earth or death! This is the alternative we are confronted with today. (10) From a common house to a common cause: liberating ourselves from the ludicrous hatred of life, a collective disease buried in our collective unconscious.

Life is not here to be killed; it is here to be loved and defended!

Translation from German: Gabriel Kuhn

Notes:

  1. Claudia von Werlhof: El „odio a la vida“ como característica central del patriarcado, Mex. Nov 20, 2015a
  2. _____: El secreto inefable de la civilización moderna, man. Mex. 2015b
  3. Cf. Rosalie Bertell: Planet Earth: The latest weapon of war. London 2000, Women’s Press
  4. Cf. Planetare Bewegung für Mutter Erde, www.pbme-online.org; Claudia von Werlhof: La destrucción de la Madre Tierra como último y máximo crimen de la civilización patriarcal, Mex. 2015c, in: DEP, no. 30, Venice, Feb 2016
  5. Rosalie Betell: Planeta Tierra – la Nueva Guerra, Guadalajara 2016, La casa del mago
  6. Heide Göttner-Abendroth: Das Matriarchat, several volumes, Stuttgart, from 1988, Kohlhammer
  7. Cf. BUMERANG – Zeitschrift für Patriarchatskritik, no. 0, 2015, www.fipaz.at
  8. Cf., for example, Doris Wolf: Was war vor den Pharaonen?, Zurich 1994, Kreuz
  9. Cf. Claudia von Werlhof: Der unerkannte Kern der Krise. Die Moderne als Er-Schöpfung der Welt, Arun 2012, Uhlstädt-Kirchhasel; BUMERANG, no. 1: Mutterschaft im Patriarchat, 2015, www.fipaz.at
  10. Claudia von Werlhof: Madre Tierra o Muerte! Reflexiones para una Teoría Crítica del Patriarcado, Oaxaca 2015d, El Rebozo
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Drones in the Sky: Operating the Mechanized Kill Machine

August 16th, 2016 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Never tell a soldier that he does not know the cost of war. Lt. Gen. Frank Benson (Alan Rickman), Eye in the Sky(2015)

All it takes is a boffin on the trigger, then goodnight all.  That is the gist of Horace Rumpole’s words in John Mortimer’s legal creation by that name – the ever direct barrister who finds himself acting in a court martial in Germany on behalf of a British soldier, member of the famed Seraphs.

Such is the ethics of modern affair: the lethal trigger instead of the bloody sword; the weapon fired at a safe distance against a human opponent with little if no chance to retaliate in fair play.  Gone are the days of empty headed light brigades charging foolishly yet breathtakingly against strong positions.

Mortimer’s reflection was penned some decades ago, primarily on the issue of potential nuclear extinction. The button of contemplation (watch those nuclear keys!), the bomb, the nuclear deterrent, had done away with the traditional players, who were essentially frustrated thespians uniformed for life’s great show.

From triggers to sticks, the emergence of the drone system, remote, piloted warfare, has further given cause to the soldier actor, where simulation has greater significance than what is being simulated.  What matters now is that the computer addled actor is a true killer, a veritable Xbox-trained murderer.  The soldier in that setting becomes a games operator framed by a world of piloted projections. Never mind that these simulations somehow disperse themselves into the effulgent destruction of a target, in all its carnage.

The ethical question of using such trigger-based, remote controlled weapons, is swiped away by their ever enthusiastic deployment. In many cases, targets can be eliminated with little international fuss; Security Council resolutions from the UN need not be sought; and killing can take place in a manner less than disrupting for domestic audiences.

Poor men and women in body bags in a distant country rarely make the newsworthy stage.  What prevails are utilitarian notions of about using Hellfire missiles against populations where the insidious idea of “collateral damage” is employed with impunity seem to prevail with ubiquity.

A series of ponderings often follow in such war, if it can even pass as that.  To kill in order to avert the incalculable (fictional casualties arising from a suicide bomber in a shopping mall, for instance), thereby asserting certainty in the face of probability; to take life from remote positions on the globe, linked via an international collaborator network of mechanised slayings.

A recent exploration of such a theme is undertaken in Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky, based on a tight screenplay by Guy Hibbert.  Brought to the screens is a coldly accurate yet reflective depiction about imminent death from the air and strained moral acrobatics on the ground.

The language portrays the chilling artificiality about human life as it is reduced before a range of variables wedded to a bureaucratic rationale: a young girl Alia (Aisha Takow) with her hula hoop and selling bread baked by her mother; attempts to rationalise the action whether a strike on a building in Nairobi housing future terrorist attackers should take place.

The Al-Shabaab figures gather with weapons and their suicide vests, among them UK and US nationals. They are being witnessed by an assortment of devices, notably a robotic, metallic fly that keeps eye with its camera, all part of a UK-US-Kenyan enterprise.  While this is happening, discussions are taking place in Britain and Kenya as to whether the strike should take place, with Washington eventually prodded into an irritable response.

On seeing the prospect of what she regards as an imminent attack, Col. Katherine Powell, played by Helen Mirren, seeks an alteration of the original mission, one of capture of the suspects, to that of kill. An extrajudicial act, in short, is being embraced over that of a legal procedure.

What follows is a form of kill chain morality, the referring up to the higher command that requires confirmation from an even higher placed command that such a strike passes muster.  Powell’s commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Frank Benson (Alan Rickman), has little issue giving in to his subordinate’s examination of the facts.  The next in line to receive the order is drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), based in Las Vegas.

Some of the Brits seem squeamish and wobbly, concerned whether such a strike would be militarily proportionate, even against a terrorist group in a friendly state.  Only Powell comes across as cold, cutting steel in the face of rubbery indecision, be it the vacillating foreign secretary, who has the runs while attending an arms conference, or the prime minister, who feels that the issue of killing US citizens needs Washington’s clearance.

The US contingent, by way of contrast to their allies, can’t see what all the fuss is about, berating their British counterparts for stalling over such moral issues, even matters of US nationality.  As valuable allies, it was important that Britain do its part in the business of deracinating and liquidating such groups, despite their constitutional protections.

This clanking of killing chains is triggered by the drone pilot’s insistence that confirmation be made that launching such a strike might give Aisha, who finds herself selling bread beside the compound in question, a chance of survival.

We are back in the kingdom of speculations and superimposed calculations: would hitting the compound minimise casualties within a certain radius?  Should the girl be encouraged on the ground to disperse by the Somali agent who seeks to buy her bread?  All of this comes to naught.  The resolute Powell eventually gets her way, forcing anunderestimation of the potential damage to be recorded in the discussions.

That attitude, in particular, speaks volumes to the sorrows of empire. Neat killings exacted with forensic accuracy are somehow taken to be substitutes for diplomacy and development. But consequences beget more consequences; wars waged at such distances, globally, irrespective of sovereign lines and geopolitical wisdom, provide a rotten harvest.

It may very well be that certain states have eyes in the sky with marked sight, capable of a global gaze and acting with impunity.  Such high bound activity, however, encourages blindness to those matters of a more terrestrial kind.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email:[email protected]

 

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Selected Articles: Donald vs. Hillary: A Still Uncertain Election

August 16th, 2016 by Global Research News

US-election-2016

Donald vs. Hillary: A Still Uncertain Election. Both Candidates Remain Unpopular with the Majority of Americans

By Jack A. Smith, August 16 2016

Is it possible that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will self-destruct well before the election?  It certainly looked that way, given one major blunder after another in the days after his nomination at the July 18–21 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Here’s another question: Or is it possible he can win? Both options are still on the table because despite voting polls both candidates continue to remain unpopular with the majority of Americans.

Détroit

Election Reflections 2016 – Trump and Clinton Visit Detroit

By Abayomi Azikiwe, August 16 2016

During the week of August 8 both Republican Party nominee Donald Trump and his Democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton made policy speeches in the Detroit metropolitan area. Trump addressed the Detroit Economic Club on August 8 where he put forward his program for the revitalization of the United States. The presidential candidate delivered the address at Cobo Conference Center in downtown Detroit.

Donald_Trump_by_Gage_Skidmore_3_(cropped)

Trump’s Aggressive Foreign Policy

By Stephen Lendman, August 16 2016

His August 15 foreign policy address in Youngstown, OH showed he’ll govern as an establishment leader if elected in November – continuing dirty geopolitical business as usual vital to end once and for all. He’ll wage endless wars to “defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” he said – without explaining its US creation and support at least since the 1980s in Afghanistan against Soviet Russia.

Flag-map_of_Syria.svg

America’s Illegal Wars of Conquest. Terrorist Embedded Propagandists, Demonizing the Target Countries

By Mark Taliano, August 16 2016

Patterns have long since emerged.  We know that each illegal war of conquest is prefaced by a Public Relations campaign that demonizes the target country’s leader and its government as it lies about on-the-ground realities.  Muammar Gaddafi, for example, was presented to Western media consumers as a lunatic and despot. The Western narratives, however, were contradicted by the fact that he earned broad-based support from Libyans, all of whom enjoyed public services such as free healthcare and schooling, and a high standard of living.

2016_G20_logo

China Hosts G20 Summit: Innovation, Structural Reform, “Towards an Inclusive World Economy”

By Carla Stea, August 15 2016

China’s Presidency of the G20 culminates next month with the Hangzhou Summit, a gathering of world leaders and an extraordinary opportunity to steer the world economy toward a more equitable, stable and productive architecture which achieves the goal of “win-win” cooperation, long advocated by China, and ultimately benefiting both developed and developing countries alike.  The theme of the Hangzhou Summit is: “Toward an innovative, Invigorated, Interconnected and Inclusive World Economy.”

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Pentagon Cannot Account For $6.5 Trillion Dollars

August 16th, 2016 by Jay Syrmopoulos

Adding to the appearance of impropriety is the fact that thousands of documents that should be on file have been removed and disappeared without any reasonable explanation.

A new Department of Defense Inspector General’s report, released last week, has left Americans stunned at the jaw-dropping lack of accountability and oversight. The glaring report revealed the Pentagon couldn’t account for $6.5 trillion dollars worth of Army general fund transactions and data, according to a report by the Fiscal Times.

The Pentagon, which has been notoriously lax in its accounting practices, has never completed an audit, would reveal how the agency has specifically spent the trillions of dollars allocated for wars, equipment, personnel, housing, healthcare and procurement’s allotted to them by Congress.

pentagon-money-missing

Audit Reveals the Pentagon Doesn’t Know Where $6.5 Trillion Dollars Has Gone.

Beginning in 1996 all federal agencies were mandated by law to conduct regular financial audits. However, the Pentagon has NEVER complied with that federal law. In 20 years, it has never accounted for the trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds it has spent, in part because “fudging” the numbers has become standard operating procedure at the Department of Defense, as revealed in a 2013 Reuters investigation by Scot Paltrow.

According to the report by the Fiscal Times:

An increasingly impatient Congress has demanded that the Army achieve “audit readiness” for the first time by Sept. 30, 2017, so that lawmakers can get a better handle on military spending. But Pentagon watchdogs think that may be mission impossible, and for good reason…

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), the behemoth Indianapolis-based agency that provides finance and accounting services for the Pentagon’s civilian and military members, could not provide adequate documentation for $6.5 trillion worth of year-end adjustments to Army general fund transactions and data.

The DFAS has the sole responsibility for paying all DOD military and personnel, retirees and annuitants, along with Pentagon contractors and vendors. The agency is also in charge of electronic government initiatives, including within the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Energy and the Departing of Veterans Affairs.

While there is nothing in the IG’s report specifying that the money has been stolen, the mere fact that the Pentagon can’t account for how it spent the money reveals a potentially far greater problem than simple theft alone.

For every transaction, a so-called “journal voucher” that provides serial numbers, transaction dates and the amount of the expenditure is supposed to be produced. The report specifies that the agency has done such a poor job in providing documentation of their transactions, that there is no way to actually know how $6.5 trillion dollars has been spent. Essentially, the government has no way of knowing how the Pentagon has spent the trillions of taxpayer dollars allocated by Congress for national defense.

In turn, employees of the DFAS were routinely told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” commonly referred to as “plugging” the numbers. These “plugs” – which amounted to falsifying financial records – were then used to create the appearance that the military’s financial data matched that of the U.S. Treasury Department’s numbers when discrepancies in the financial data couldn’t be accounted for, according to the Reuters investigation.

According to the Reuters investigation:

For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars.

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio DFAS…. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s…. And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from.

While many of the problems occurred due to bookkeeping errors rather than actual financial losses, the DFAS has failed to provide the necessary tracking information essential to performing an accurate audit of Pentagon spending and obligations, according to the IG’s report.

“Army and Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in year-end adjustments made to Army General Fund data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation,” wrote Lorin T. Venable, the assistant inspector general for financial management and reporting. “We conducted this audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.”

The Pentagon has a chronic failure to keep track of its money – how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen. Adding to the appearance of impropriety is the fact that thousands of documents that should be on file have been removed and disappeared without any reasonable explanation.

DFAS “did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System . . . removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during Q3 FY 2015. As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail,” according to the IG’s report stated.

The accounting errors and manipulated numbers, though obviously problems in their own right, highlight a far greater problem for the Defense Department than only bad recording keeping and wasteful spending habits. In reality, they are a representation of the poor decision making, and lack of oversight and accountability that plague our nation’s government as a whole.

While the Department of Defense can’t account for $6.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer funds, in 2014 there were 47 million people, including over 15 million children, living in poverty in the U.S. – %15 of the U.S. population, which is the largest total number in poverty since records began being kept 52 years ago.

Please share this story if you are appalled by the fact that there are Americans that are homeless and hungry, including U.S. combat veterans — while the government is unable to account for $6.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer money.

A little reminder: On September 10, 2001 Donald Rumsfeld spoke about $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon budget.


Jay Syrmopoulos writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.

 

 

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Police State Fascism in America

August 16th, 2016 by Margaret Kimberley

Black people live under a fascist system, whether the occupant of the White House is a “fascist” or not. For Blacks, the “rule of law” does not exist. “It matters not whether a victim complies, or has hands up, or is armed, or is unarmed, or opens a door, or speaks, or doesn’t, or flees, or stays put, or does or doesn’t resist arrest.” None of the supposedly “non-fascist” politicians will “dare lay a finger on the modern day slave system.”

The word fascism has reappeared in the American popular lexicon thanks to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The word is used to keep progressive Democrats in a state of fear should he win, but its existence in this country right now is rarely discussed.

If Trump became president and was indeed a fascist he wouldn’t bring anything to the country that is not already in existence for black Americans. Fascism is practiced against them on a daily basis. They are at risk of police interaction, arrest and even death for committing the most minor infractions or for no infraction at all.

Korryn Gaines was shot to death by police in her own home near Baltimore, Maryland. Her five year-old son was also shot and injured. Ms. Gaines came into contact with police initially because of a traffic violation and a dispute with her boyfriend. Every day thousands of people are given tickets or make accusations against one another but rarely do they have an expectation of ending up dead as a result.

Arrest warrants are the first line of defense for the police, who are the 21st century embodiment of the slave patrol. If black people are lucky they may have to pay a fine or suffer some inconvenience, if unlucky they are killed.

The Baltimore police used maximum force and disregarded accepted police practice meant to de-escalate such situations. They broke down Gaines’ door and cut off her Facebook feed. As is typical, their much vaunted body cameras were turned off and the dead woman was deprived of any means of defense or telling of her story. The only version of events comes from the people who killed her.

Death is the worst result but not the only means of keeping black people under physical control and in a state of humiliation. A recent video from a Kentucky courtroom shows an unidentified black woman suffering the cruelties of the police system. She was arrested for not completing a diversion program after a 2014 shoplifting charge. The only logic to arresting someone for this violation is cruelty for its own sake and the proof of that played out in the courtroom.

The woman arrived at court wearing only a pair of shorts. She reported that she had been denied feminine hygiene products and clean pants.  The judge dismissed the charges but not before lecturing the woman. “The fact that you’re in custody is your fault. You gotta come to court. But once you were arrested, the rest of this is completely inhumane and unacceptable and I’m very sorry that you had to go through this.” She added, “This is not normal. I’ve never seen this.” Of course this treatment is normal and happens all the time. Her arrest for a minor offense was normal and so was the denial of her human rights in an American jail. Actually the humiliated woman may be considered lucky. It was recently revealed that 6,900 people died in custody in Texas jails and prisons in the last ten years.

All of the tools which are supposed to protect the public from this system are useless. Paul O’Neal (*link O’Neal) was summarily executed by Chicago police while driving a stolen car. Again their cameras were turned off during the shooting. But once they felt safe, they recorded themselves rejoicing over their kill, giving one another high fives. One complained, “Fuck, I’m going to be on desk duty now for 30 days.”  The nonchalance is logical. The officer has no reason to fear anything worse.

Body cameras and other “reforms” won’t save black people’s lives because they are meant for public relations purposes only. The system in this country spends large sums of money, passes legislation and empowers the police to do what they like to black people. The suffering is quite intentional.

All the videos in the world won’t upend the brutality of the laws enforced against black people. It matters not whether a victim complies, or has hands up, or is armed, or is unarmed, or opens a door, or speaks, or doesn’t, or flees, or stays put, or does or doesn’t resist arrest. The police are a constant threat to black lives because the system demands it.

There will be no end to the body count without serious discussion about the ways in which racism is supported and encouraged. None of the supposedly non-fascist politicians dare lay a finger on the modern day slave system. Occasionally white people die at the hands of police, too. But that is considered a small price to play to keep the racial hierarchy in order. There is no hope of ending the carnage without first understanding the system we have and calling it what it is. Black Americans have always lived under fascism.

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

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Is anyone else as upset as I am that the SYRIAN swimmer, Yusra Mardini, is being recognized as a refugee, not as a Syrian national, and that, if she wins a medal, the members of the Olympic Committee have decided they will raise a special flag they made for refugees, instead of her Syrian flag?

It would seem that the Olympic Committee wants to hide that Yusra has become a great swimmer due to the fact that the Syrian Government financed her training. And now that she has become so successful — thanks to Syrian money — the Olympic Committee are stealing that glory from the Syrian people.

What no newspaper or magazine or TV or radio report will tell you, is the following. Yusra Mardini did not flee a civil war in Syria. There is no civil war in Syria. Syrians are not fighting one another. Syrians are fighting foreigners who are entering Syria mostly through the northern border with Turkey. These fighters are Western pawns, and too stupid to realize that they are mere pawns. They think they are establishing an “Islamic State”. What they are really doing, is destroying Syria, so that Westerners can divide and rule the country. As soon as these pawns have destroyed Syria sufficiently, their funding from Saudi Arabia — a Western puppet state and a long-time enemy of Syria — will end within a millisecond. As will the funding from Qatar — another Western puppet state and long-time rival of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi rulers, themselves American pawns, want to destroy secular Syria and the secular Baath Party, which is headed by President Bashar Al Assad. The Saudi rulers, are not democratically elected by the people of Saudi Arabia, but are one family, which was given power to rule in the time of Lawrence of Arabia, who wanted to “unite Arabs” so that they could be more easily and efficiently ruled by the English. Today, this British-backed Saudi family is still ruling the country, calling themselves “royals”. They are brutal, ignorant, backward dictators. And they are useful to the West, mostly Europe and America, so they continue to enjoy Western support. They know nothing about Islam and have invented their own perverted set of beliefs, known as “Wahhabism”, and claim this is Islam.

Wahhabism is not Islam. Wahhabism is for sick men who want to rape and exploit women. Everyone knows that the Saudis have oil money…. lots and lots of oil money. But what everyone does not know is that they use their money to establish and fund Wahhabi schools in Islamic countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as in Europe. Many mosques in Europe are Saudi-funded, which means they are teaching Wahhabi nonsense, and calling this Islam. Western politicians are well aware of this fact, and let this continue. Now we are seeing the results of years of Wahhabi schools in Europe. European youths who attended these Wahhabi mosques, and who know they have no prospects and future in a Fascist, racist Europe, and who know nothing about Islam, are fighting in Syria, killing Syrians. They grew up in secular Europe and turned their back on it (after Europe turned its back on them) to go destroy secular Syria where they think they will re-establish an Islamic state, re-establish the “Ummah”. European secularism has not been good to them, and they think that the Ummah will be. This fits in well with the desires of the brutal Saudi rulers, who also want to destroy Syrian secularism and replace it with their perverted Wahhabism. And it fits in well with Western — that is, American and European — politicians’ plans of putting Syrian lands and resources in the hands of the West. Western politicians know that Americans and Europeans no longer want colonialism, imperialism and dead soldiers coming home. So they use these disheartened, ignorant migrant youths to get the job done. It really is a brilliant plan.

As for the rulers of Qatar, they too are a corrupt family; mere useful Western pawns, who would fall off the map and be nobodys, were it not for their fight in Syria. Like the Saudis, they too have lots of oil money, but no interest in Syria; their fight in Syria is merely to rival their big, overbearing Saudi neighbours –“ if you can do it, so can we”. They are like the man with a small penis and a big car. They give financial support to the Muslim Brotherhood for one reason only — to rival Saudi Wahhabism. But the Muslim Brotherhood are also not Muslims.

They are interested only in money and power, and will stop at nothing to get it. They are not interested in Islamic history, Islamic art, Islamic teachings, or Islamic countries. They only want money, money, money. And if they have to kill to get it, well, then, they will kill without any scruples, even killing Muslims, and tell themselves this is Islam. This is how messed up these youths are. These days, Turkey is being destroyed by Erdogan, who is also a Muslim Brotherhood supporter. Erdogan enjoys majority support from Turks in Turkey, not because of his extremism, but because he has made a financial deal with the Devil that has raised the standard of living in Turkey. Erdogan also wants Syria destroyed because it is ruled by a secular party. He wants the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Syria and in Egypt. In Egypt he almost got his wish, until the Egyptian army intervened and got rid of the corrupt, destructive Muslim Brotherhood that briefly ruled the country under Mohamed Mursi. Had the army in Egypt not removed Mursi, Egypt today would be like Turkey today.

Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini

Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini

Finally, a word on the legal status of our Syrian Olympic swimmer, Yusra. What editors will not print, publish and air on TV or radio, is the fact that Yusra has not been given refugee status by any country, and is therefore not a refugee. Which means the Olympic Committee members have no basis on which to label Yusra a refugee. If they do not know that she does not have refugee status, then they should not be on the Olympic Committee having powers to make such decisions. But I suspect they do know, and don’t care. To them, it is about denying Syria its rightful moment of Olympic glory.

It is no longer just about sports, but is now also a political issue. The world must not know that Syria is a kaleidoscope of ethnicities, that is SUCCESSFULLY ruled by a secular party — the Baath Party, headed by Bashar Al Assad, and established by his father, Hafez Al Assad.

The world must not know that Yusra did not flee from her government, but that she was helped by her government. The world must not know that she did not flee from a civil war, and that there is no civil war in Syria. The world must not know that Yusra fled from foreign fighters in her country who are killing her countrymen, women and children. The world must not know that Yusra is a proud Syrian, not a grateful refugee.

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Shredding the oft- and self-propagated notion the Islamic State is comprised of radical Muslims, the vast majority of the group’s recruits have only superficial knowledge about the religion of Islam — some even purchased the book “Islam for Dummies” just prior to joining.

An analysis of leaked Islamic State documents obtained by Syrian opposition site Zaman al-Wasl and undertaken by the Associated Press found 70 percent of recruits at the height of the group’s push for members only possessed basic knowledge of Shariah, laws derived from verses in the Quran, and “hadith,” the words and actions of the prophet Mohammed.

While 24 percent had attained an intermediate understanding of the religion, a mere 5 percent were considered advanced students of Islam.

That exact ignorance of the religion’s true tenets likely helped inflate Islamic State numbers. As the outlet explains:

“At the height of the Islamic State’s drive for foot soldiers in 2013 and 2014, typical recruits included the group of Frenchmen who went bar-hopping with their recruiter back home, the recent European convert who now hesitantly describes himself as gay, and two Britons who ordered ‘The Koran for Dummies’ and ‘Islam for Dummies’ from Amazon to prepare for jihad abroad. Their intake process complete, they were grouped in safe houses as a stream of imams came in to indoctrinate them, according to court testimony and interviews by the Associated Press.”

Recruits like these, largely unaware of what violent extremism entails, can be facilely manipulated by actual radicals once family ties have been severed and means of communication with the world, like cellphones, have been taken away. Once in the clutches of the group, either full indoctrination into ISIL’s perverted interpretation of Islam occurs, or the realization its terrorist ways go too far still leave a recruit without means of escaping easily.

“I realized that I was in the wrong place when they began to ask me questions on these forms like, ‘when you die, who should we call?’” a 32-year-old European recruit, who thought he was joining a group to fight Pres. Bashar al-Assad and help Syrians, told the AP on the condition of anonymity.

Based on the analysis, it would seem religious ignorance — not thorough understanding of Shariah and Islam — makes the perfect background for potential Islamic State fighters.

For example, Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel — the driver who plowed a truck through a crowd of people, killing 85, on Bastille Day in Nice — “was described by family and neighbors as indifferent to religion, volatile and prone to drinking sprees, with a bent for salsa dancing and a reported male lover,” the AP described.

In the 4,030 entry documents for ISIL’s foreign recruits for Syria from 2013 and 2014 examined by the AP were those of Karim and Foued Mohammad-Aggad — both shortly returned to France, and Foued eventually participated in the Paris attacks on the Bataclan nightclub in November that left 130 people dead.

“Islam was used [by the Islamic State] to trap me like a wolf,” Karim told the court prior to sentencing.

According to the documents analyzed by the Associated Press, Karim and Foued Mohammad-Aggad were both listed as having only “basic” knowledge of Sharia.

This proved to be true in court. Under questioning by the judge concerning his grasp of Shariah and Islam, Karim repeatedly intoned, “I don’t have the knowledge to answer the question.”

Undoubtedly, some who join or vow allegiance to the terrorist group, do so for misguided religious reasons. However, as Patrick Skinner — a former CIA case officer who specialized in extremist organizations in the Middle East — explained, most who join are “reaching for a sense of belonging, a sense of notoriety, a sense of excitement.”

Indeed, he added, “Religion is an afterthought.”

Skinner also told the AP the thousand-year-old seat of learning for Shariah and Quranic studies in Cairo, Al-Azhar, came under sharp criticism in the Islamic State’s recent issue of its English-language magazine, Dabiq, which said Al-Azhar is part of an “approach to subdue Muslims through appeasement” with the West.

Al-Azhar Islamic scholar, Mohammed Abdelfadel, said ISIL propaganda videos heralding fighters’ supposed martyrdom directly contradict ‘Islamic laws that forbid terrorism, the murder of non-combatants in war, the imposition of Islam on non-Muslims and other criminal activity,’ as the AP paraphrased.

Further still, those with the most thorough understanding of Shariah were far less inclined to want to ‘martyr’ themselves as suicide bombers, a study by the U.S. military’s Combating Terrorism Center found, quoted by the AP:

“If martyrdom is seen as the highest religious calling, then a reasonable expectation would be that the people with the most knowledge about Islamic law (Shariah) would desire to carry out these operations with greater frequency.”

But, despite ISIL’s claims of religious motivations for its attacks, “those with the most religious knowledge within the organization itself are the least likely to volunteer to be suicide bombers.”

Though these points have been argued and championed by a number of Muslims in an attempt to grow understanding of Islam and fight bigotry and prejudice, Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan urged Muslim scholars to demonstrate that what ISIL teaches isn’t Islam.

“The people who are doing this are not experiencing martyrdom, they are criminals. They are killing innocent people,” Ramadan implored. “Nothing in Islam, nothing ever can justify the killing of innocent people, never, ever.”

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