Archives: Articles

By Chris Hedges

I know you. I met you in the dense canopies in the war in El Salvador. It was there that I first heard the single, high-pitched crack of the sniper bullet. Distinct. Ominous. A sound that spreads terror. Army units I traveled with, enraged by the lethal accuracy of rebel snipers, set up heavy .50 caliber machine guns and sprayed the foliage overhead until your body, a bloodied and mangled pulp, dropped to the ground.

I saw you at work in Basra in Iraq and of course Gaza, where on a fall afternoon at the Netzarim Junction, you shot dead a young man a few feet away from me. We carried his limp body up the road.

I lived with you in Sarajevo during the war. You were only a few hundred yards away, perched in high rises that looked down on the city. I witnessed your daily carnage. At dusk, I saw you fire a round in the gloom at an old man and his wife bent over their tiny vegetable plot. You missed. She ran, haltingly, for cover. He did not. You fired again. I concede the light was fading. It was hard to see. Then, the third time, you killed him. This is one of those memories of war I see in my head over and over and over and never talk about. I watched it from the back of the Holiday Inn, but by now I have seen it, or the shadows of it, hundreds of times.

You targeted me, too. You struck down colleagues and friends. I was in your sights traveling from northern Albania into Kosovo with 600 fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army, each insurgent carrying an extra AK-47 to hand off to a comrade. Three shots. That crisp crack, too familiar. You must have been far away. Or maybe you were a bad shot, although you came close. I scrambled for cover behind a rock. My two bodyguards bent over me, panting, the green pouches strapped to their chests packed full of grenades.

I know how you talk. The black humor. “Pint sized terrorists” you say of the children you kill. You are proud of your skills. It gives you cachet. You cradle your weapon as if it is an extension of your body. You admire its despicable beauty. This is who you are. A killer.

In your society of killers, you are respected, rewarded, promoted. You are numb to the suffering you inflict. Maybe you enjoy it. Maybe you think you are protecting yourself, your identity, your comrades, your nation. Maybe you believe the killing is a necessary evil, a way to make sure Palestinians die before they can strike. Maybe you have surrendered your morality to the blind obedience of the military, subsumed yourself into the industrial machinery of death. Maybe you are scared to die. Maybe you want to prove to yourself and others that you are tough, you can kill. Maybe your mind is so warped that you believe killing is righteous.

You are intoxicated by the god-like power to revoke another person’s charter to live on this earth. You revel in the intimacy of it. You see in fine detail through the telescopic sight, the nose and mouth of your victim. The triangle of death. You hold your breath. You pull slowly, gently on the trigger. And then the pink puff. Severed spinal cord. Death. It is over.

You were the last person to see Aysenur alive. You were the first person to see her dead.

This is you now. And now no one can reach you. You are death’s angel. You are numb and cold. But, I suspect, this will not last. I covered war for a long time. I know, even if you do not, the next chapter of your life. I know what happens when you leave the embrace of the military, when you are no longer a cog in these factories of death. I know the hell you are about to enter.

It starts like this. All the skills you acquired as a killer on the outside are useless. Maybe you go back. Maybe you become a gun for hire. But this will only delay the inevitable. You can run, for a while, but you cannot run forever. There will be reckoning. And it is the reckoning I will tell you about.

You will face a choice. Live the rest of your life, stunted, numb, cut off from yourself, cut off from those around you. Descend into a psychopathic fog, trapped in the absurd, interdependent lies that justify mass murder. There are killers, years later, who say they are proud of their work, who claim not a moment’s regret. But I have not been inside their nightmares. If this is you then you will never again truly live.

Of course, you do not talk about what you did to those around you, certainly not to your family. They think you are a good person. You know this is a lie. The numbness, usually, wears off. You look in the mirror, and if you have any shred of conscience left, your reflection disturbs you. But you repress the bitterness. You escape down the rabbit hole of opioids and alcohol. Your intimate relationships, because you cannot feel, because you bury your self-loathing, disintegrate. This escape works. For a while. But then you go into such darkness that the stimulants you use to blunt your pain begin to destroy you. And maybe that is how you die. I have known many who died like that. And I have known those who ended it quickly. A gun to the head.

Between 1973 and 2024, 1,227 Israeli soldiers committed suicide according to official statistics, but the actual number is believed to be far higher. In the U.S. an average of 16 veterans commit suicide every day.

I have trauma from war. But the worst trauma I do not have. The worst trauma from war is not what you saw. It is not what you experienced. The worst trauma is what you did. They have names for it. Moral injury. Perpetrator Induced Traumatic Stress. But that seems tepid given the hot, burning coals of rage, the night terrors, the despair. Those around you know something is terribly, terribly wrong. They fear your darkness. But you do not let them into your labyrinth of pain.

And then, one day, you reach out for love. Love is the opposite of war. War is about smut. It is about pornography. It is about turning other human beings into objects, maybe sexual objects, but I also mean this literally, for war turns people into corpses. Corpses are the end product of war, what comes off its assembly line. So, you will want love, but the angel of death has made a Faustian bargain. It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. You will carry this death inside you for the rest of your life. It corrodes your soul. Yes. We have souls. You sold yours. And the cost is very, very high. It means that what you want, what you most desperately need in life, you cannot attain.

Then one day, maybe you are a father or a mother or an uncle or an aunt, and a young woman you love, or want to love as a daughter, comes into your life. You see in her, it will come in a flash, Aysenur’s face. The young woman you murdered. Come back to life. Israeli now. Speaking Hebrew. Innocent. Good. Full of hope. The full force of what you did, who you were, who you are, will hit you like an avalanche.

You will spend days wanting to cry and not knowing why. You will be consumed by guilt. You will believe that because of what you did the life of this other young woman is in danger. Divine retribution. You will tell yourself this is absurd, but you will believe it anyway. Your life will start to include little offerings of goodness to others as if these offerings will appease a vengeful god, as if these offerings will save her from harm, from death. But nothing can wipe away the stain of murder.

Yes. You killed Aysenur. You killed others. Palestinians who you dehumanized and taught yourself to hate. Human animals. Terrorists. Barbarians. But it is harder to dehumanize her. You know, you saw it through your scope, she was no threat. She did not throw rocks, the paltry justification the Israeli army uses to shoot live rounds at Palestinians, including children.

You will be overwhelmed with sorrow. Regret. Shame. Grief. Despair. Alienation. You will have an existential crisis. You will know that all the values you were taught to honor in school, at worship, in your home, are not the values you upheld. You will hate yourself. You will not say this out loud. You may, one way or another, extinguish yourself.

There is a part of me that says you deserve this torment. There is a part of me that wants you to suffer for the loss you inflicted on Aysenur’s family and friends, to pay for taking the life of this courageous and gifted woman.

Shooting unarmed people is not bravery. It is not courage. It is not even war. It is a crime. It is murder. You are a murderer. I am sure you were not ordered to kill Aysenur. You shot Aysenur in the head because you could, because you felt like it. Israel runs an open-air shooting gallery in Gaza and the West Bank. Total impunity. Murder as sport.

You will, one day, not be the killer you are now. You will exhaust yourself trying to ward off demons. You will desperately want to be human. You will want to love and be loved. Maybe you will make it. Being human again. But that will mean a life of contrition. It will mean making your crime public. It will mean begging, on your knees, for forgiveness. It will mean forgiving yourself. This is very hard. It will mean orientating every aspect of your life to nurturing life rather than extinguishing it. This will be your only hope for salvation. If you do not take it, you are damned.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.

17 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

Israel launched a coordinated terror attack throughout Lebanon Tuesday, triggering tiny bombs which it had hidden in thousands of pagers that exploded simultaneously, killing nine people and wounding 2,750 others.

The pagers were given out to members of Hezbollah, the Lebanese political party and military group, US officials told the New York Times. Thousands of the pagers exploded indiscriminately in homes, hospitals, schools and shops, killing and injuring bystanders. Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was among the injured in the attack.

“Around 3:30 p.m. today, a very large number of wounded people with pager communication devices in their possession began arriving at hospital emergency rooms in the following areas: the suburbs, Beirut, the south, especially Tyre and the Bekaa,” said Dr. Firas Al-Abyad, Lebanon’s Minister of Public Health.

He added, “So far, the health emergency room at the Ministry of Public Health has recorded about 2,800 wounded, about 200 of whom are in critical condition and require surgery or admission to intensive care units. More than 150 units of blood have been provided. A preliminary toll has recorded nine martyrs, including an eight-year-old girl.”

He continued: “The majority of the injuries recorded were distributed between the face, abdomen, hands and eyes.”

The Israeli attack included the commission of multiple war crimes, including violating the laws of war regarding assassination, treachery and the prohibition of indiscriminate bombing.

Commenting on the attack, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote, “What Israel has just done is, via *any* method, reckless. They blew up countless numbers of people who were driving (meaning cars out of control), shopping (your children are in the stroller standing behind him in the checkout line), et cetera. Indistinguishable from terrorism.”

Responding to global revulsion to the mass killing, Eylon Levy, Israel’s former government spokesman, defended the mass bombing, declaring, “It was literally an attack on personal devices given only to operatives of a terror organization. That’s the definition of a targeted counterterror attack.”

The bombing spree was likewise endorsed by Democratic US Senator John Fetterman, who wrote in a post on X, “I fully support efforts to target and neutralize any existential threat like Hezbollah” after sharing a screenshot of the news report of the attack.

The New York Times, citing US officials, said that “Israel hid explosive material in a shipment of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon.”

The Times continued, “The explosive material, as little as one or two ounces, was inserted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from the Gold Apollo company in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials.”

The attacks occurred just 24 hours after Israel’s security cabinet met to declare that it had “updated the objectives of the war” that had previously targeted Hamas following the October 7 attacks to include returning Israeli residents to Northern Gaza—a euphemism for escalating Israel’s war on Lebanon.

In August, Israel launched its largest attack on southern Lebanon since 2006, involving over 100 air force fighter jets. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that the attacks involved over 40 targets.

Israel’s strikes on Lebanon are part of a US-backed military escalation throughout the Middle East, with the central target being Iran. The US is simultaneously sponsoring Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of over 40,000 people.

In April, an Israeli strike killed a group of Iranian military officers meeting in Damascus, to which Iran responded with a strike on Israel with 300 missiles and drones, nearly all of which were intercepted.

In July, Israel assassinated Fuad Shukr, senior member of Hezbollah, with a strike in Beirut, followed by the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh at a military guesthouse in Iran.

These attacks followed the visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, where he vowed to expand the Gaza genocide into a war targeting Lebanon and Iran.

Following Netanyahu’s address to Congress, he met with Vice President Kamala Harris, who vowed, “I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

In this month’s presidential debates, both Harris and former US President Donald Trump expressed their unequivocal support for the Gaza genocide and threatened both Iran and Lebanon.

Even as Israel expands its targeting of Lebanon, its ongoing mass killing, starvation and ethnic cleansing of the population of Gaza continues and intensifies.

On Monday, Gaza’s health ministry published the names of 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israeli massacres since the start of the genocide—a figure that includes neither those missing nor those who died of hunger and disease.

The first 14 pages of the document list 710 infants under the age of one. All told, the list includes 11,355 children under the age of 18.

In October 2023, James Elder, spokesperson for the UN children’s agency UNICEF, warned that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children.”

He added, “Our gravest fears about the reported numbers of children killed becoming dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands were realized in just a fortnight. The numbers are appalling. Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.”

With the publication of the list of the thousands of children killed by the Israeli military, these warnings have been horrifyingly confirmed.

18 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad

It is compellingly said that the Zionist genocide in Gaza is the moral issue of our lifetimes. That is, regardless of your strong stands on other social issues of our day – ignoring Gaza is profoundly and unacceptably immoral. This is why, in the United States, a large chunk of the Democratic Party base is turning towards the Green Party. While the Democratic Party and its most recent presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, may have some semi-progressive views on certain domestic issues, the fact that the Party establishment is silent, nay complicit, in the Israeli genocide is the red line that the Party has crossed.

In a similar vein, arguably the moral issue today for the people of Pakistan is a new phase of extreme barbarism of the national security state in Islamabad.

In the US, this has been an ‘unmasking’ moment of elite American institutions such as the universities, the corporations, and, of course, the Biden administration. In order to please the Zionist billionaire class, these power centers have dispensed with any pretense of commitment to liberal values such as freedom of speech and the right to peacefully protest. Similarly, whatever shred of a democratic facade the Pakistani military-civilian regime has tried to sell to the world, has been replaced by a ‘gloves off’ brutal repression of even an iota of democratic expression.

The most egregious of the state actions took place last week against Pakistani parliamentarians of the ‘Movement for Justice’ (MFJ/PTI), who were manhandled, detained, and disappeared by the security state. Unable to eradicate the most popular political tendency by far in the country, the generals have removed any mask of restraint and instead are now, once again, engaging in unashamed state terror, this time directed toward the democratically-elected ‘troublemakers.’

The resurgence of mass protests of the MFJ are led by those who remain uncompromisingly resolute in their struggle against the military establishment and its kleptocratic friends in the political class. Most of these protestors are critical – not blind – supporters of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, which places them in good company with 75% of Pakistan’s population.

However, what has been most unfortunate is that the ideological section of society that one would expect to be at the forefront of solidarity and struggle at this moment, i.e., the Left, is nowhere to be found. The Pakistani Left admirably organizes around labor issues, but doesn’t see ordinary MFJ workers as a part of the struggle. The Left commendably advances women’s rights, though does not consider the thousands of MFJ women horribly abused and jailed as a part of that endeavor. The Left impressively opposes state repression against political expression in provinces such as Balochistan, but becomes somewhat reticent about the repression of anyone having anything to do with the MFJ or Khan.

A constant refrain reiterated by sections of the Pakistani Left is that these people resisting and being repressed – especially those from the dominant province of Punjab – never condemned the horrendous state violence meted out to the people of Balochistan. It is correctly pointed out that the Baloch people, like those in former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), have been victims of unrelenting exploitation, routine disappearances, torture, and cold-blooded murder.

This accusation by the Left, not necessarily against all but definitely many in the current mobilizations, has legitimacy. But it is sadly far too frequently deployed to avoid serious and committed solidarity and support for victims of the most recent manifestation of the Pakistani state’s campaign of mass terror. For principled progressives, this seems to be a grave ethical and strategic blunder.

The ethical component of such politics is rooted in how we approach the question of solidarity. We can invoke innumerable examples of solidarity that clarify this issue. The most recent example is the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza. The constant demand of anyone in solidarity with the Palestinians is to first condemn Hamas, and then these apologists of genocide may possibly bewiling to hear what they have to say. The global Left, for the most part, finds this logic utterly contemptible. Whether the people of Gaza are supporters or not of Hamas is categorically irrelevant. In the face of the most savage wholesale violence in our lifetimes, much of the Left makes their solidarity with Palestinians unconditional.

Similarly, since the 7^th of October 2023, the factions forming the Palestinian Authority, never having any love loss with Hamas, have stood firmly with the Islamic Resistance Movement in its armed struggle against Zionism. Quite surprisingly, even the factions of the PA that reject armed struggle have not been willing to condemn the prison revolt of Hamas/the Gazans and their military operation against Israel on Oct. 7th.

Some other cases may further illustrate this point. In Turkiye, there was an attempted military coup against President Erdogan and his AKP party in July of 2016. It probably would have succeeded had it not been for the solidarity of millions of other Turks of drastically different ideological orientations than the AKP. In some cases, many of these political parties detested Erdogan. But these oppositional political forces clearly understood that the Turkish people have been waging a decades-long struggle to rid the country of military rule and usher in a new period of democracy. Hence, they felt that at that particular moment, the moral issue at hand was to confront head-on the Turkish military establishment from once again butchering any democratic process, regardless if this would lead to the victory of a political party with whom they vehemently disagreed, the AKP.

Another well-documented instance of state savagery was that of Saddam Hussein and his particular targeting of the Kurds and the Shia. The ruthless attack on the Kurds, using chemical weapons, was one of the most heinous instances of state violence against an internal ethnic group in modern times. What was disappointing was that the majority – not all – of Iraqi Shia did not show much solidarity with the Kurds and refused to condemn what happened. However, shortly thereafter, the Shia themselves faced a sadistic, cold-blooded campaign of terror against them by Saddam. While it was definitely lamentable that not more Shia vocalized their condemnation of what was done to the Kurds, nevertheless, no serious individuals and groups on the Left deemed the brutalized Shia unworthy of their full support and solidarity.

Closer to home, the Left may not like various Baloch political factions for a variety of reasons, including both collaboration with the state apparatus as well violent militant actions that kill civilians. Nevertheless, this correctly does not prevent general solidarity with the historically oppressed Baloch.

Hence, we can see the utter immorality, in light of some people within MFJ who have shown indifference in the past (but are now beginning to see the parallels), of making the present victims of state brutality effectively unworthy of solidarity. The most disconcerting rhetoric by some Pakistani progressives is the insinuation that it’s essentially good that members of the MFJ can now feel what the Baloch have felt.

Though the moral basis of standing shoulder to shoulder with students, workers, and women of the MFJ should be self-evidently obvious, there is also the strategic question. While the Left is usually on the mark on the question of strategy, it has been regrettably amiss with regards to popular mobilizations against state barbarity over the past few years.

Indeed, is there a shadow of a doubt that the principal target of Pakistani state terror has been and are the MFJ/Khan supporters? Of course, that is not to deny the ongoing assault against the Baloch and the Pashtuns, and the harassment of the Left.

In this period of Pakistan’s vicious crackdown, is it possible for the Left to acknowledge that there are at least some MFJ activists who are not part of any cult, who are not suffering from overbearing ‘false consciousness,’ and who actually might be interested in radical change and are yearning for a politics that can achieve that? One can certainly argue whether Khan or the MFJ represents a movement for such radical transformation. But it is only by engaging with people sympathetic to the MFJ and Khan can this healthy political discussion advance. These encounters would undoubtedly benefit both the existing Left as well as MFJ constituents in becoming more cognizant of how progressive politics, strategy, and vision can facilitate the latter’s desired sea change in the social, political, and economic life of Pakistan. Such political engagement would immensely boost the credibility of the Left, with these discussions taking place in the real-life context of solidarity and struggle. The time-tested Marxist adage applies here, the notion that the most rapid transformation of political consciousness occurs while standing arm in arm in struggle at the barricades, fighting one form of oppression or the other together and collectively.

The Left assuming a ‘vanguard’ role in providing direct, militant support for those battling state tyranny would teach activist-minded young people and others what solidarity looks like in practice.

We are hopeful that the Left’s former condescension towards young people involved in the MFJ, callously and mockingly calling them ‘youthias’ (connoting a deeply vulgar and despicable characterization in Urdu), has been expunged from their discourse today, representing a higher level of political maturity.

Thus, the moral issue of our time in contemporary Pakistan is fighting a reinvigorated violent, fascist military-intelligence apparatus on steroids. Pakistan’s predicament has degenerated to such an extent that even old neocon of note, Zalmay Khalizad, is now publicly expressing the indignation of the American foreign policy establishment. Washington planners are exasperated by the inability of the generals in Islamabad to ‘manage’ the situation even with the employment of massive violence against the people of Pakistan. Recently, and practically out of the wilderness, the New York Times has woken up and also is also articulating the position of the State Department and US intelligence. The latter seem to be incensed at their thoroughly illegitimate Pakistani regime changer clients’ incompetence in quashing the ongoing revolt from below.

Many Pakistanis remain optimistic and confident that the Left’s denunciation of the country’s new phase of totalitarianism will hopefully come before when even the US State Department would feel compelled to reprimand its minions in Islamabad. Hopefully, the Left and its indefatigable and deservedly well-respected young leaders in Pakistan recognize that, while all of the important social struggles in the country must continue, directly confronting the present oppressive regime, in solidarity with activists of the MFJ, is the moral issue of their time.

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.

16 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

On September 18th, the UN General Assembly is scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling on Israel to end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within six months. Given that the General Assembly, unlike the exclusive 15-member UN Security Council, allows all UN members to vote and there is no veto in the General Assembly, this is an opportunity for the world community to clearly express its opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

If Israel predictably fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further.

It could convene an Emergency Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.

The September 18 resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.”

The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.

Israel’s President Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is  exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories, or make them part of Israel.

While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too. 

Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.

Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed at least 700 people, including 159 children.

The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations.

In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre were to end soon.

Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”

President Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.

By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.

This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while in fact remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.

In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.

China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.

Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.

As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.

Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.

The ability of one Permanent Member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system.

When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”

The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.

Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.

For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people.

In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.

The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.

The U.S. role is greater than complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.

And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.

Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.

It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action.

But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

17 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Latheef Farook

At the turn of the last century Palestine was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. About 95 percent of the population in 1896 were Arabs who owned ninety percent of the land.   Palestine was brought under British power after World War 11. Both British mandatory power and Zionist Jews decided to kill and kick out Palestinians and establish in Palestinian lands a state for Jews brought from outside.

Once sufficient Jews were brought in, US and Zionists turned to United Nations to partition Palestine and create a separate state for Jews. There was fierce opposition in the United States for partitioning Palestine.

Zionists resorted to deception, bribery, and blackmail and brought pressure on United Nations General Assembly to pass the resolution to partition Palestine. Haiti, Liberia,   Philippines, China, Ethiopia and   Greece opposed the partition.  Zionists used intense pressure, through American channels, to force these countries to vote in favor,

Robert Nathan, a Zionist who had worked for the US government and who was particularly active in the Jewish Agency  wrote, “We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any country that did not vote the right way.

Financier and longtime presidential advisor Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition. Top White House executive assistant David Niles organized pressure on Liberia; rubber magnate Harvey Firestone pressured Liberia.

Latin American delegates were told that the Pan-American Highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition.

Longtime Zionist Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with ten senators and Truman domestic advisor Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress).

Before the vote on the plan, the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable “primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land…”

He went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.”

Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the delegate voted in favor of partition.

The U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged when US President Truman insisted that they support partition that the State Department director of U.N. Affairs was sent to New York to prevent the delegates from resigning en masse.

Despite fierce opposition on November 29, 1947 the partition resolution, 181, was passed. USA voted for Zionist State in Palestine and paved the way for the creation of Israel which turned the region into a killing field.Israel came into being on 78 per cent of Palestinian lands. Palestinians were thrown into refugee camps including Gaza where they are slaughtered now.

According to the Chicago Daily Tribune of 9 February 1948, “President Truman cracked down harder on his State Department than ever before to swing the United Nation’s vote for the partition of Palestine. Truman called Acting Secretary Lovett to the White House   warning him he would demand a full explanation from nations which usually line up with the US, who failed to do so on Palestine”.

At least 33 massacres of Palestinian civilians were perpetrated, half of them before a single Arab army had entered the conflict, hundreds of villages were depopulated and razed, and a team of cartographers was sent out to give every town, village, river, and hillock a new, Hebrew name. All vestiges of Palestinian habitation, history and culture were to be erased from history, an effort that almost succeeded.

However U.S. Officials fiercely Opposed Partition Plan.

The U.S. State Department opposed partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and US interests. Loy Henderson, Director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, wrote a memo to the Secretary of State warning:   that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and emphasized that it was “not based on any principle.”

Henderson wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by “nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems. “Henderson wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism. “

President Harry Truman, ignored all advice and supported Zionists in the way President Joe Biden supporting Israel in its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza today.

Truman’s Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II General and author of the Marshall Plan, condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would cause ” the great dignity of the office of President [to be] seriously diminished.”

Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. He was “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another Author, John Munhall, records Acheson’s warning: “…to transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”

The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:

“U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent.  Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction. An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:

“…the Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN…In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.”

The ideologically divided United States and the Soviet Union stood together like   comrades-in-arms in solidarity in creating the Zionist state in Palestine – showing to what extent the Jews had control over the two super powers and effectively the world at large. Thus, on November 29 1947, the UN voted in favour of a partition of Palestine violating its own charter. Of the total population of 1,008,900 in the proposed Jewish state, the Arab-Jew ratio was 509,780 to 499,020. In other words, at the outset, the Arabs had a majority in the proposed Jewish state too.

Palestinians rejected the UN resolution to partition their country into two halves because that would be tantamount to cleaving their own motherland.  There was more widespread condemnation of this injustice from all right thinking people.   Today Israel remains the most condemned country in the UN.

Latheef Farook is a journalist from Sri Lanka

16 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

In April 2021, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree postponing parliamentary and presidential elections, which were scheduled to take place in May and July respectively.

The then-85-year-old Palestinian leader justified his unwarranted decision as a result of a ‘dispute’ with Israel over the vote of Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian city of East Jerusalem.

But that was just a pretense. Though contrary to international law, Israel considers Palestinian East Jerusalem as part of its “eternal and undivided capital’, the cancellation of the elections stemmed from a purely internal Palestinian matter: fears that the outcome of the elections could sideline Abbas and his unelected political apparatus.

Marwan Barghouti, though a member of Abbas’ Fatah party, had decided to throw his hat in the ring, entering the elections under a separate list, the Freedom List. Opinion polls showed that, if Barghouti entered the fray, he could have decisively beaten Abbas. Those numbers are, in fact, consistent with most Palestinian public opinion polls conducted in recent years.

However, Barghouti, the most popular Palestinian figure in the West Bank, is a prisoner in Israel. He has spent 22 years in Israeli prisons due to his leadership of the Second Palestinian Intifada, the uprising of 2000.

Neither Israel nor Abbas wanted Barghouti, known as the Mandela of Palestine, to acquire any more validation while in prison, thus putting pressure on Israel to release him.

One can only speculate regarding the possible outcomes of the canceled May and July 2021 elections should they have taken place as scheduled. A democratically elected government would have certainly addressed, to some extent, the question of legitimacy, or lack thereof, among all Palestinian factions.

It would have also allowed the incorporation of all major Palestinian groups into a new political structure that would be purely Palestinian – not a mere platform for the whims and interests of specific political groups, business classes or hand-picked ruling elites.

That is all moot now, but the question of legitimacy remains a primary one, as the Palestinian people, more than ever before, require a unified, truly representative leadership that is capable of steering the just cause of Palestine during these horrifically difficult and crucial times.

This new leadership could have also understood the changing global dynamics regarding Palestine and would be compelled, per the will of the Palestinian people, to refrain from utilizing growing international support and sympathies with Gaza for financial perks and limited factional interests.

True, elections under military occupation would never meet the requirements of true democracy. However, if a minimal degree of representation was acquired in the now-canceled elections, the outcome could have served as a starting point towards widening the circle of representation to include the PLO and all Palestinians, in occupied Palestine and in the shatat as well.

Palestinians in the shatat, the diaspora, have also confronted the question of legitimacy and representation. However well-intentioned, many of these attempts  faced, and continue to face, many obstacles, including the impossible geography, increasing political restrictions and limited funding, among other problems.

As the vacuum of truly representative leadership in Palestine remains in place, Washington and its western allies are left to contend with the question themselves: who shall rule the Palestinians? Who shall govern Gaza after the war? Who are the ‘moderate’ Palestinians to be included in future US-led western schemes and the ‘extremists’ to be shunned and relegated?

The irony is that such thinking, of picking and choosing Palestinian representation, has led, in large part, to the current crisis in Palestine. Segmenting Palestinians according to ideological, geographic and political lines has proved disastrous, not just to the Palestinians themselves but to any entity that is interested in achieving a just peace in Palestine.

The question of representation should be resolved by the Palestinian people and no one else. And, until that task is achieved, we must invest in centering Palestinian voices in every political, legal and social platform that is relevant to Palestine, to the struggle of the Palestinians and to their legitimate aspirations.

Centering Palestinian voices does not mean that any Palestinian is a legitimate representative of the collective Palestinian experience. Indeed, not any Palestinian, regardless of his political views, class orientation, background, and so on can be a worthy ambassador for the Palestinian cause.

Even without organized general elections, we already know so much about what Palestinians want. They want an end to the Israeli occupation, the dismantlement of the illegal settlements, the honoring of the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees, social equality, end to corruption and democratic representation, among other shared values.

These are not my own conclusions, but the views of the majority of Palestinians as indicated in various opinion public polls. Similar sentiments have been expressed and repeated year after year.

It follows that any true representative of the Palestinian cause should adhere to these ideals; otherwise, he or she either represents the narrow interests of a faction, a self-serving class or merely reflects his own personal views.

Only those who truly reflect the wider collective Palestinian experience and aspiration deserved to be centered, listened to or engaged with. Doing so would help protect the Palestinian cause of the self-seeking few, who use the Palestinian struggle as an opportunity for personal or factional gains.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

16 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jake Johnson

Gaza’s Ministry of Health on Sunday released a document containing the names and ages of Palestinians killed by Israel’s assault since the Hamas-led October 7 attack, an incomplete list that nonetheless runs 649 pages—the first 14 of which are filled with the names of babies.

The list, published to the health ministry’s Telegram account, is limited to those for whom Gaza officials had information—over 34,000 people—and the count stops on August 31. The current death toll, according to the ministry, is close to 42,000, but experts believe that figure is likely a gross undercount.

The new document is a testament to the devastating impact Israel’s U.S.-backed war has had on Gaza’s population, particularly children. According to Gaza officials, children make up a third of those killed since October 7.

“This is a genocide of children. 14 pages of babies. Babies,” Heba Gowayed, a sociology professor at the City University of New York’s Hunter College, wrote on social media in response to the list. “This is nothing short of an attempt to expunge a people.”

[https://twitter.com/sharifkouddous/status/1835292186818056667]

The Gaza Health Ministry’s statistics are considered credible by independent watchdogs and have been cited internally by U.S. officials, notwithstanding President Joe Biden’s public questioning of the data. In June, the U.S. House approved an amendment that would bar the State Department from using statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH).

But after examining an earlier list of names published by the ministry, the research group Airwars found “a high correlation between the official MoH data and what Palestinian civilians reported online.” The group acknowledged that gathering data has become increasingly difficult “as Gaza’s health infrastructure has been decimated by the war.”

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote that the newly published list highlights “what differentiates Gaza.”

“It’s a genocide of children since their proportion is unprecedented,” Parsi wrote, adding that the “U.S., U.K., and Germany arm and support the genocide.”

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

16 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Francisco Dominguez

Preparations for the  US-led coup attempt
The people of Venezuela have defeated a high-tech US-led coup. The nation’s electoral authority was able not only to hold election 31st but, despite facing a colossal attack against the nation’s computerised electoral system, it was able to announce the July 28 election results that showed the people of Venezuela, by re-electing President Maduro for the 2025-2031, resulted victorious against, yet another nasty US-run ‘regime change’ push.

The coup plot involved a massive and sustained, months-long, world corporate media campaign spewing an unusually homogenous message that president Maduro would be electorally defeated, quoting ‘polls’ that gave US-supported, extreme right-wing candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez (fielded by the Unitary Platform coalition, PUD), 80% of the vote. Thus, for instance, on July 20 the FT published Is the game up for Venezuela’s ruling party after 25 years?, stating that “most opinion polls suggest the opposition would crush Maduro by a margin of 20 to 30 points.” The mainstream media repeatedly quoted Maria Corina Machado ‘hoping’ “Nicolas Maduro accepts a negotiation process that allows an orderly and sustainable transition,” intended to persuade readers of the inexorability of Gonzalez’s victory.

The line taken by the world corporate media (including, among many others, The Guardian, El Pais, NYT, Washington Post, Le Monde, France 24, BBC, Corriere de la Sera, and so forth ad nauseam) was pretty much identical in predicting Gonzalez’s victory. Did they know something we didn’t? There is only one centre of power in the world with the might to command the blind obedience of the world corporate media and it is in Washington DC.

Additionally, for several months previous to the election, Venezuela was subjected to a string of terrorist attacks that targeted food storage facilities but mainly the country’s electricity system with the obvious intention to sufficiently damage it so as to also disable the computerised electoral system. It is almost axiomatic that, every time there is an election in Venezuela, terrorist attacks target the country’s electricity system (as it happened in December 2021, a month after Chavismo massively won the November regional and municipal elections).

This mainstream media propaganda was spiced up with a campaign of fear (began as early as April 2024) maintaining that in the ‘unlikely event’ of president Maduro winning (contending, only possible by rigging the election), a greater proportion of the population would leave the country, quoting ‘polls’ that asserted that up to 40% of Venezuelans, that is about 12 million people, would leave.

The coup attempt’s key ingredients
The world corporate media terror bombardment was ‘supplemented’ by an extreme right-wing media campaign of vicious hatred and threats not only against Chavistas but also other opposition presidential candidates and their families. For this presidential election the extreme right-wing verbal violence in the social media was already in full swing months before election day and, giving numerous instances of previous verbal and physical violence by them. An article in May 2024, prophesied that:

This scenario of violence, exacerbated by political polarization and hate propaganda, creates a perfect breeding ground for social instability. The possibility of a scenario where violent groups try to sabotage the electoral process and impose their agenda by force is a latent threat that requires forceful measures to protect the peace of the country.

In Venezuela, opposition digital verbal violence always around elections they lose, has in the past 25 years unavoidably led to wanton physical violence, including burning people alive, and the murdering many: about 20 in their 2002 failed coup, 11 in 2013, 43 in 2014, and 28 in 2017, all events producing hundreds of people wounded, traumatized, with many crippled for life. More on this, later on.

All of the above was supplemented by another novelty component, the cherry in the cake: a monumental cyberattack on election day, primarily on the CNE computerised electoral system but also on other state services. It was one of the worst such attacks against Venezuela.

According to Venezuela’s minister of science and technology, Gabriela Jimenez, the first phase of the cyberattack targeted CANTV (Venezuela’s main internet service provider) starting at about 6 pm, just as polling centres began to close. The attack severely delayed the transmission of polling centres’ results to the CNE totalising centre, hence the several hours it took to announce the results. CANTV services are contracted with the US company Columbus that reported to its client, CANTV, of the deliberate cyber delay of the transmissions.

Technically, the delay occurred due to the colossal increase in cyber-attacks directed to the CNE, Jimenez stated it was 30 million per minute, about which she asks, who has the technical infrastructure and expertise (algorithms, etc.), equipment, energy sources and resources, to unleash such volume of attacks per minute and sustain it for up to 20 uninterrupted hours? Jimenez also reported that the Caracas stock exchange, the science and technology ministry and other ministries, the Central Bank, the Identification and Migration service, Inland Revenue, and other public services, that is, outfits critical for the functioning of the state, were targeted. Thus, for instance, no digital payment can be processed (deliveries, purchasing of everyday items such as food, medicine, or payment of mobile phone bills, and much more) and no taxes can be collected because of the cyber-attacks.

The cyber-attacks have also involved the stealing of public institutions’ data and their publication, making public the names and full data of pensioners, and even the domicile of military officers with the slogan “Go for them”! In short, the cyber-attacks are terrorist attacks. Jimenez also explained that the source are accounts with disguised IPS, but that most though not all (unsurprisingly), are from the United States (see full interview with minister Jimenez here, mins 16:10 to 29:18 and see here list of institutions affected by the cyber-attacks).

The cyber-attacks intended not just to wreck the computerised electoral system of transmission of the elections results so as to totally prevent the CNE from announcing any results at all, but also to disable as many other services essential for everyday activities aimed at creating generalised chaos and maximum pandemonium.

The other key component of the US-led coup attempt was the well-prepared wave of violence launched in the aftermath of their electoral defeat. Maria Corina Machado and her combo unleashed thousands of paid-up thugs who went on the rampage on July 29, attacking anything that smacked of public property with the most intense hatred directed at the symbols of Chavismo (statues of Hugo Chavez, of Coromoto, an emblematic 17th century indigenous chieftain, and everything else that came within their reach; see details here), and, also, Chavistas of  flesh and blood, leading to the death of 25 people.

Foreign minister, Yvan Gil, informing the accredited diplomatic corps (23 Aug 2024,) told them there was clear evidence that Venezuela’s extreme right wing, “backed by the US government … had hired the organized criminal gangs Tren de Aragua and Tren del Llano to initiate the coup d’etat” and deploy them “to generate post-electoral violence.” These gangs had engaged in the “purchase of votes in favour of the candidacy of Edmundo González Urrutia in areas with a strong territorial and political presence of Chavismo.” So, “how is it that criminals who charge you a fee offer you to vote for a certain option in exchange for 50, 100, or 200 dollars?” (see the evidence of these links here, and details of the criminal gangs involved).

The coup strategists expected that the wave of wanton violence in many key cities, following the ensuing chaos and confusion caused by the generalised cyber-attacks, would force the authorities, as it actually did, to deploy the national guard to the many opposition-created points of violence as a diversion manoeuvre to facilitate the attack on the presidential palace. This last phase was conceived as a lethal blitzkrieg on the presidential palace. An armed mob attacked with a “bath of bullets” 60 international observers who were at the CNE HQ in Caracas. President Maduro reported to the nation that on July 29 there had been two attempts to storm the Miraflores (presidential) palace by armed mobs.

Yvan Gil also explained that the coup model had been “designed by the CIA and the United States.” (in this regard, watch Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada’s lecture about this which he characterized as a new US coup d’etat modality, whose details give you the shivers). Up to 14 August 2024, 30 members of such groups had been arrested with an arsenal that included “13 firearms (four of which are rifles), 302 cartridges, a grenade, two telescopic sights, eight radio transmitters, ten flashlights, seven chargers, 35 Molotov cocktails, 12 cell phones, and six motorcycles.” These were professionals who, taking advantage of the melee created, were entrusted with the task to assault the presidential palace, in preparation of the coup’s final phase, a ‘mass march of on the palace’, proclaim Edmundo Gonzalez president and probably request immediate international (military) assistance.

Maduro’s constitutional solution
The failure of the July 28 cyber-attack to destroy the CNE digital system (and that of almost every other public institution) did delay the polling stations’ transmission results, leading the CNE first bulletin to be issued nearly at midnight with 80% of the results which, in an irreversible trend, gave the victory to president Maduro (51.2% against Edmundo Gonzalez’s 44.2%; result confirmed with the CNE second bulletin with 97% of the results, with Maduro getting 51.95% against Gonzalez’s 43.18%). Literally seconds after the CNE’s first bulletin, Maria Corina Machado appeared on television rejecting the results, alleging fraud and proclaiming Edmundo Gonzalez the winner. This claim, in an amazingly homogenous chorus was, almost immediately, echoed by the world corporate media. Machado et al have claimed to have had 40%, then 73%, 80% and even 100% of the voting records, which they followed by posting, in an illegal website, false results giving Gonzalez 67% to 30% to president Maduro.

Though the issuing of results by the CNE on July 28 had substantially dislocated a key component of the coup d’etat, the extreme right-wing launched the planned wave of violence anyway. Confronted with such a lethal US-led operation, on July 31 president Maduro filed an appeal before the Supreme Court to summon all candidates and representatives of all the parties “to compare all the evidence and certify the results of July 28 through a technical appraisal.” On the very same day, US State Secretary, Antony Blinken, literally moments after Maduro’s appeal, stated that “given the overwhelming evidence … that Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia won the most votes”, he extended US recognition to Gonzalez as the winner. However, a few days later, Blinken backtracked, withdrawing such recognition. This is unprecedented, the US has never backtracked on such an important decision, especially considering US’s obsessive, decades-long, fixation with Venezuela.

The Supreme Court carried out an expert-technical investigation and analysis of the election as requested by president Maduro and it summoned all the candidates and all 38 political parties participating in the July 28 election, to submit all the election information they had. Most candidates complied, except Edmundo Gonzalez. Worse, the PUD parties supporting Gonzalez as a candidate did not submit any election material or evidence, “arguing that they do not have documentation [i.e.] they do not have witness records of the polling stations.” They were the only parties not to submit anything; the other 33 did.

The CNE submitted all the election material in its possession, that is, 100 percent of everything. Furthermore, Edmundo Gonzalez, has failed to comply with Supreme Court summons, three times. And the ‘combative’ Maria Corina Machado, comic-fashion, has pretended to have gone into clandestinity. Thus, on August 22, the Supreme Court ruled that bulletins issued by the CNE were supported by the voting records transmitted by each of the voting machines and are in full agreement with the data provided by the national aggregation centres, therefore, “We certify, in an unobjectionable manner, the electoral material examined and validate the results issued by the CNE indicating that Nicolás Maduro Moros was elected.”

The reason is the crass election fraud perpetrated by Machado and others in the extreme right-wing coalition behind Edmundo Gonzalez’s candidacy. The election information they published in an illegal and fraudulent website includes 9,472 images of election records that represent 30% of the total election records (of over 30,000 polling places). Worse, 83% of them do not have metadata, which means they went through editing software, that is, they “are not faithful copy of the original.” The striking feature of Machado-Gonzalez election victory claims is the level of manipulation of the false results published in the illegal website whose dominion was created on July 27. This leads to the very pertinent question “If María Corina Machado and Edmundo González won the elections and have the records to prove it, then why would they post these fake records?”

No wonder Blinken backtracked and not a single government in the world has recognised Edmundo Gonzalez as ‘president-elect’. Yet, from the White House to Southcom, EU’s gardener Josep Borrel, right wing governments in Latin America including Boric, infamous Almagro and the OAS, the Carter Centre, the UN Panel of Experts, and everybody else all the way down the world political food chain, including, of course, the world corporate media, that as it is to be expected, have questioned the validity of president Maduro’s re-election.

Som Left intellectuals
Last but definitely least, this food chain includes leftist intellectuals and academics such as Alejandro Velasco, Gabriel Hetland and Mike Phips (there are a few others, but these three, due to the similarity in their messaging, are perhaps an emblematic sample).

All three, with no evidence whatsoever, penned articles definitely concluding that Gonzalez had won and Maduro had lost. They seem to have been persuaded by the ‘data’ posted in the illegal website set up by Maria Corina Machado et al, which has been irrefutably debunked from every imaginable angle. Velasco bluntly stated “On July 28, Maduro lost.” (The Nation, 8 August, 2024). Hetland is worse, the title of his screed is Fraud foretold? (Sidecar, 21 August, 2024), in it he bullishly concludes that “Socialists, of any stripe, should not provide cover for a government that fixes elections and then clings to power by brutally punishing its poorest citizens when they protest.” Phipps’ piece (Labour Hub 21 August, 2024) states that Venezuela’s government response to the crisis caused by US sanctions was “repression and electoral fraud.” Probably, in their zeal to condemn the Bolivarian government, all three hastily depict the paid-up thugs unleashed by Machado et al as a working-class rebellion against the government.

All three questioned the cyber-attacks, depicting them as a ruse of sorts to justify fraud, arguing that the alleged hacking did not stop the CNE counting the votes between July 28 and August 2. Yet, they know the CNE informed in detail that the hacking had not stopped the counting but instead it had drastically delayed the transmission of results. As late as 19 August, science and technology minister reported that the CNE and 120 Venezuelan state sites were suffering cyberattacks., which have continued. This was followed by a terrorist attack against the extreme right-wing’s favourite target, the electric system on August 30, which affected 21 states, including “Táchira, Mérida, Barinas, Zulia, Falcón, Nueva Esparta, and partially sectors of La Guaira, Miranda, and Caracas.” Then, in September 2, the Libertador Simon Bolivar Terminal railway station suffered deliberate fire sabotage in its electrical room. There had been similar attacks in December 2021 which affected various parts of 19 states by the blackout, and which, in turn, had been preceded by yet another in March 2019 that affected 80% of the country. The cyber and terrorist attacks were and are real, no matter what these three may say.

All three depict president Maduro’s government as neoliberal or implementing neoliberal policies, claiming his administration represents a break with the revolutionary legacy of Hugo Chavez and all three blame the government as the key contributory cause of the misery millions of Venezuelans have endured. And although all three garnish their arguments by bemoaning US sanctions and reproaching the opposition for repeatedly crying out fraud in the past, they (un)wittingly parrot imperialism and the right-wing arguments of election fraud. All three argue for a ‘left’ or ‘democratic’ alternative to Chavismo, and in the case of Hetland for stop ‘covering’ (i.e., stop supporting) president Maduro’s government. All the contentions of this troika are either prejudiced distortions of reality, or simply false. On this, Nino Pagliccia, when referring to Velasco’s plea for an alternative to Chavismo, hit the nail on the head, by correctly asserting that such stance “is not an affirmation of the ideals of the Bolivarian Revolution, but a capitulation to the US and its sponsored opposition in Venezuela.”

What has substantially contributed to confuse the whole issue, perhaps unintendedly adding credence to the extreme right-wing, US imperialism and the world corporate media’s fake propaganda about a ‘July 28 CNE-rigged election’ narrative, has been the equivocal and unjustified views of Lula and Petro who, without any solid evidence, seemed to have taken for granted there was fraud in the elections. On August 15, president Maduro responded by saying the Venezuelan government will never intervene in the internal affairs of those two countries. And, he went on that as in Brazil’s case, Bolsonaro’s allegation of fraud in the 2022 election Lula won, and his refusal to accept the results, was decided by the Brazilian Judiciary, and “no one from Venezuela or our government went public to intervene in this affair.”

Conclusion
So, to the question, was there election fraud in the July 28 presidential elections in Venezuela? The answer is a categorical YES, but perpetrated by Maria Corina Machado, US-backed candidate Edmundo Gonzalez and operatives in the PUD (as investigations are revealing). Clearly, the fake PUD website with the false election results which does not bear even the most basic scrutiny, was created on the premise of successfully disabling the CNE election system, so that the United States, its EU accomplices, its Latin American lackeys and Venezuela’s extreme right-wing could point to theirs as the only site with voting results. It was a central plank of the US-led coup plot. A coup plot the US could apply against any government anywhere (it makes me nervous to think of Brazil and Colombia in this connection).

President Maduro, confronted with a US-led coup including a gigantic cyberattack aimed at disabling the CNE and as much as possible of state services, plus generalised violence throughout the nation, including two armed assaults against the presidential palace, could have opted for declaring a state of exception and restrict civil rights (Art.338 of the constitution). Instead, he chose to resort to the Supreme Court’s Electoral Section to resolve the electoral dispute (Art.297), whose result, as we have examined above, demolished the gigantic pack of lies and fake news around election fraud claims. That is, president Maduro resorted to the democratic mechanisms of the rule of law as stipulated in the constitution. The Supreme Court’s verdict contributes to the consolidation of democracy. Conversely, the PUD, Maria Corina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez are left politically naked and morally exposed (about which no much effort is required), which explains why the former went into ‘clandestinity’ and the latter went AWOL.

More importantly, the Chavista movement’s maturity and discipline, steered by President Maduro, was able to successfully defeat the coup by political means instead of force, and strictly within the rule of law and constitutional principles stipulated in the Bolivarian Constitution. As more details of the US-led coup plot come out, the strength and people’s support for the Bolivarian process gets sturdier. Conversely, the pathetic efforts by Maria Corina Machado and her US mentors to stage a massively promoted ‘great international protest’ which, despite mobilizing an army of influencers and paid journalists on social media, it dismally failed to even fill 4 blocs in Caracas (in other cities, it was worse).

Just a month after president Maduro’s election victory and the subsequent defeat of the US-led coup, there was a massive terrorist sabotage to the Venezuelan National Electric System plunging almost the whole country into darkness. It was a rearguard action aimed at disabling state institutions in the hope of resuscitating the defeated US-led coup. On its part, the United States, with the complicity of the Dominican Republic authorities, hijacked a Venezuelan plane. The plane is used primarily by Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez. Is it sour grapes, or just an intensification of US aggression seeking to reverse Chavismo’s robust defeat of their coup plot? The US Dept of Justice stated (2nd September) it had “seized an aircraft we allege was illegally purchased for US$13 million through a shell company and smuggled out of the United States for use by Nicolas Maduro and his cronies.”

Unlike some intellectuals, as in the sample in our piece, the US, its global accomplices and the world corporate media, do not ask what next for Chavismo? They don’t because they are part of a global US-led machinery aimed at overthrowing the Bolivarian Revolution to destroy all its achievements. The troika ask this question as though they have the answer when they seem unable to even spot a US-led coup even as it unfolds in front of our own eyes. However, president Maduro has answered that question by announcing mega-elections in 2025, which will elect 23 governors, 355 mayors, 23 legislative councils and 355 municipal councils, elections whose only requirement to participate is to comply with Venezuela’s laws.

From the previous 31 electoral processes (and the July 28 presidential election), we know the 2025 elections will be fair, but they are unlikely to be free from US interference and US sanctions. The troika of our sample, though recognising the devastating consequences of US sanctions in the cited articles, seem to accept them as a fact of life (“The prospects of the US lifting sanctions appears remote”, Hetland) and noticeably fail to demand their lifting. Perhaps, for the coming 2025 elections the troika may craft well written pieces to demand the US does not interfere. We, in the solidarity movement, will continue to call for the immediate and unconditional lifting of all US illegal sanctions and for a stop to US criminal interference in its internal affairs. The president of Venezuela is elected by the people of Venezuela not hand-picked by the US State Dept. US Hands off Venezuela!

Francisco Dominguez, a former refugee from Chile in the UK, is Head of the Centre for Brazilian and Latin American Studies at Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom.

11 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Suresh Khairnar

Today marks 24 years since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in America. And to take revenge for these attacks, America has forced war on eight countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and in return for the deaths of its own 37,000 people, it has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, killing more than 2.5 million people. And more than half of them are from Iraq alone. Of these, 1.5 million lives have been lost. And more than three-fourths of them are children under the age of 15. And due to economic sanctions, most of the lives of children have been lost due to lack of food and medicines. This is more than the number of children who died due to the atom bombs dropped by America on two Japanese cities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, on 6-9 August 1945, during the last phase of the Second World War.

After the 9/11 attacks, in the name of eliminating Al-Qaeda, America attacked Afghanistan as well as Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt in the name of terrorism! And 9-29 lakh people were killed by spending Rs 585 lakh crore! Among them were a total of 84 terrorists!

After the US action, instead of Al-Qaeda ending, more than ten terrorist organizations with different names were born! ISIS, Boko-Haram spread to 17 countries from Iraq to Nigeria! 35 groups including Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Haqqani are associated with it!

In 24 years, these groups have carried out 34 thousand attacks! In which more than one lakh people have lost their lives! And it has been less than a month since the US attacked the Afghan terrorist organization Taliban for handing over Osama bin Laden and kept Afghanistan under its control for twenty years! The same Afghanistan has been captured by the Taliban immediately after the US withdrew its troops! Doesn’t this look like WWF wrestling? The world’s most powerful army was busy having fun in the Bagaram area of ​​Afghanistan for twenty years? And under the nose of three and a half lakh Afghan soldiers and the US army itself, only seventy thousand Talibanis, who were claimed to have been removed twenty years ago! Then they come to power again? After looking at the historical background of this, you will know what is the reason behind it? That is why I have titled my article as ‘If you sow the seeds of acacia, where will you get mangoes?’

In 1985, on the White House lawn, President Ronald Reagan presented a group of Afghans, all Mujahideen leaders, to the media and praised them, saying, “These gentlemen are on a moral level with the founding fathers of our country!” It was a moment when America tried to present a new form of political Islam to continue its struggle against the Soviet Union.

Half a decade after the Vietnam debacle, American foreign policy was on a second losing streak. This trend was most dramatically illustrated in 1979, when popular revolutions toppled two US-backed dictatorships: one in Nicaragua and the other in Iran. Later that year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Who would have guessed that the Soviet Union would collapse just a decade later?

If the 9/11 incident dampened America’s happiness for a while, then this incident also raised the question, “At what cost was the Cold War won?” To answer this question, you have to look at the reign of President Reagan. Ronald Reagan claimed that “the defeat of pro-American dictators in the Third World was clearly due to the Soviet Union!” After this, Reagan called for, “We should put all our strength to push back the Soviet Union, whatever measures we have to take for this!” Afghanistan was the high point of the Cold War compared to other countries.

The Afghan war relatively weakened the counter-revolutionary campaign in Nicaragua. The methods used to win both wars were seriously considered for their subsequent effects. The Soviet Union had about one lakh ground troops fighting in the war. The Afghanistan war gave America the opportunity to hand over Vietnam to the Soviet Union. Reagan turned it into a strategic objective, because his view towards the Afghan war was more global than regional. The Reagan administration dragged this war for ten years. Thus the Afghan war turned into the most dangerous regional war in the world. This was also the largest paramilitary operation of the CIA since the Vietnam war. Which turned into the longest war in Soviet history.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 had a major impact on the policy of the Afghan war. The Iranian Revolution brought about a new form of relations between America and political Islam. Prior to this, America had understood the world very simply – on one side was the Soviet Union and the militant third world nationalism, which America called Soviet tools, and on the other side was political Islam, which America supported through Sarikat-e-Islam against Sukarno in Indonesia.

Similarly, in Pakistan, it supported Jamaat-e-Islami against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and in Egypt, it supported Society of Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser. The hope was that political Islam would create a local resistance against secular nationalism. This idea appealed to other American friends in the region, from Israel to conservative Arab governments. But this plan failed completely.

Israel hoped to foster an Islamic political movement in the occupied territory and use it against the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Israeli intelligence gave Hamas full freedom of movement during the first intifada, allowing it to open a university and a bank account, and even supported it financially, so that it could counter a strengthened Hamas as a component of the second intifada.

In Egypt, after the death of Nasser, Anwar Sadat emerged as a liberator of political Islam. Between 1971 and 1975, Anwar Sadat released supporters of Islam from jail, who had been in jail for years. Not only this, for the first time they got the freedom to express their views openly in front of the people, and organize themselves. It is a different matter that they were supported by Israeli and American intelligence agencies. And what kind of trouble can the unexpected result of such crazy and selfish actions be?
Secret American assistance to opponents of the pro-Soviet government in Kabul began before Soviet forces had even invaded Afghanistan. CIA and State Department documents seized during the hostage-taking of the American embassy in Tehran revealed that “the US had begun secret meetings with Afghan rebel leaders in Pakistan in April 1979.” This incident took place eight months before Soviet forces entered Afghanistan. This was confirmed by Zbigniew Brzenczyk, who was President Carter’s national security adviser. He revealed this in an interview given to a Paris newspaper ‘Le Nouvel Observateur’ (January 15-20, 1998). The question and answer of the interview was something like this.

Question-Former CIA Director Robert Gates has written in his memoirs (From the Shadows) that “American intelligence agencies had started providing assistance to the Mujahideen six months before the Soviet forces entered Afghanistan.” During this time you were President Carter’s National Security Advisor. Thus you played an important role in this matter. Is this correct?

Brenzenskey- According to the official statement recorded in history, the assistance given by the CIA to the Mujahideen started in 1980! That is, much after the Soviet forces attacked Afghanistan on 24 December 1979! But the reality is just the opposite! In fact, on 3 July 1979, President Carter signed the first order! Under which there was a provision to provide assistance to the opponents of the communist government in Kabul! And on the same day I wrote to President Carter and made it clear “that our assistance will make the path of military intervention difficult!”

From Carter to Reagan, American foreign policy had changed a lot. Now it was turning from cantonment to roll-back. In Afghanistan, as in Nicaragua, the Carter administration thought it appropriate to adopt two paths. Liberal level covert support should be given to anti-communists. Be it a government or a group. Along with this, efforts should continue to find a solution through dialogue.

Cantonment, in this sense, was meant to be a search for coexistence. The Reagan administration, by contrast, had no interest in finding a way out through compromise. Instead of coexistence, the central focus of Reagan policy was pay-bank: everything that would make the Afghan war a Vietnam for the Soviet Union. The goal was one: “to defeat the Soviet Union at all costs.” The CIA was determined to do so. “Nothing would stand in the way of the real objective in Afghanistan.” That is, to kill the Russians was their main goal. Richard Pearl, Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense, was one of Washington’s most high-profile assassins. He was given greater responsibility under George W. Bush, especially after the 9/11 incident.

If the Reagan administration was initially allied with groups with strong anti-Soviet ideology and had no interest in a negotiated solution, Afghan nationalism was a matter of mistrust for successive Pakistani governments. This became more evident when the Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was forced to leave the country in July 1973 by his nephew and former prime minister, Mohammed Daud. Daud had allied the military’s Republican Alliance with a wing of the Communist Party, which he had named after his newspaper, Parcham. The new nationalist government took up the popular cause of Pashtunistan, half of Afghanistan’s population, and millions of Pashtuns living in Pakistan’s North East Frontier region, and hence gave a free hand to the Pakistani government. “That it should help the non-nationalist forces of Afghanistan! And in this matter Zia-ul-Haq also got a great opportunity. Due to the growing public opposition against Dawood’s rule, another military coup took place. Which is known as Saur Revolution. Which brought both the wings of the Communist Party, Parcham and Khalq, to ​​power together. With this revolution of April 17, 1978, the internationalization of the communists became officially respectable. And the internationalization of Islamists was declared subversive. Liberal and radical Islamic reactionaries left Kabul University and went to Pakistan. Where they were given a warm welcome.

The communist collapse of 1978 marked a decisive change in US policy towards Pakistan. The Carter administration reduced economic aid to Pakistan in 1977. The reason given was that Pakistan had a “poor human rights record!” On one hand, the military had plotted the unconstitutional assassination of an elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and on the other hand, its growing nuclear program had become increasingly influential globally.

But the coup and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan changed everything. In fact, just a few days after the Soviet invasion, Carter had made this offer to Zian over the phone that “if he helps the rebels against the communists, America will give him economic and military aid worth ten million dollars.” But Zian’s demands were higher. Therefore, the Zian-Carter friendship could not flourish. The relations between the two countries became warmer during the Reagan administration, when Pakistan was offered a huge economic and military aid. And thus, Pakistan became the third country to receive American aid, after Israel and Egypt.

It was during Reagan’s presidency that a close relationship developed between the American intelligence agency CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agency. And both the agencies jointly worked to deal with the Soviet powers. To supply as many weapons as possible to the Mujahideen and to recruit Islamic terrorists against the communist opponents. And from here, in an organized manner, to create fertile ground for the terrorist organization. Not only from Muslim countries, but also from countries like America, France, Britain, Islamic terrorists came to various madrassas of Pakistan and took training. A very famous example of this is Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. Whom a journalist named Lawrence Wright had given the title of the watchman of Jihad in The New Yorker in the eighties. He was a Palestinian theologian. And he had done his PhD in Islamic law from Al-Azhar University. After that, he was appointed to teach at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah. And Osama bin Laden was also among his disciples. Azzam has toured the whole world under the protection of the CIA. He has appeared as a speaker on Saudi television and in rallies held in America. And as a crusader, he was the asset of the CIA. And he kept travelling to every part of America in the eighties to recruit crusaders. And he kept recruiting fighters for the war in Afghanistan. Azzam was one of the founders of Hamas.

Azzam’s message was clear: “Participating in Jihad is not only a global responsibility today, but it is also a religious duty! This Jihad does not only mean killing the enemies i.e. the Russians, but also a journey to heaven after attaining martyrdom! Where 72 extremely beautiful virgin girls are standing ready to welcome you!” Azzam’s formula for Jihad was very simple: “No talks, no conferences, no discussions, only the gun was the answer!” And this formula effectively reflected the common objective of the IAS and the CIA.

It was against this backdrop that the US organized the Afghan Jihad and outlined its primary objective as: “To unite a billion Muslims through a crusade.” Crusade highlights the intellectual framework within which these actions were conducted, more than the Christian crusades on Afghan soil against the Soviet Union. Another objective was to further divide the two Islamic sects (Shia and Sunni). The Afghan Jihad was essentially an American Jihad, but it reached its climax when Reagan returned to power in March 1985. Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166, which authorized “to increase covert aid to the Mujahideen.”

The entire responsibility of the newly defined war was handed over to CIA chief William Casey, who took three important steps in 1986. First, to get Congress to agree that American high-speed anti-aircraft missiles would be made available, and to expand guerrilla warfare beyond Afghanistan to Muslim-populated Soviet republics like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and third, to recruit reactionary Islamists from all over the world and bring them to Pakistan, and after giving them military training, intensify them as a crusade against the Kafirs of the second and third world. And this formula took a more serious form in Afghanistan than in Nicaragua. The entire world’s Islamic people were in the dock of the war. So ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Boko Haram are his creations.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that the Taliban will return to power in Afghanistan. That those who liberated them from slavery are calling them freedom fighters!” This is the same Pakistan! Whose all eastern rulers have, to a greater or lesser extent, given the opportunity to flourish to all kinds of terrorist organizations! And Imran Khan is also no exception! From Zia to Musharraf, and from Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Imran Khan! They may claim to have been elected! But because no election in the seventy-five year history of Pakistan has been free and fair! All the Prime Ministers cannot have the confidence to do anything in front of ISI and Pakistan’s army! And that is why none of their decisions are independent! And to give birth to Taliban, ISI has played all the roles under the protection of CIA! Musharraf himself has published this in his autobiography ‘In the Line of Fire: A Memoir’ from Free Press America! And in 350 pages, in the fifth chapter, from 199 to 275 stanzas i.e. approx. 76 pages, written only in the name of “The War on Terror”! What has been Pakistan’s role in terrorist activities? This is clearly written! And he himself has narrowly escaped terrorist attacks three times! Terrorist attacks in his own country!

To organize the Afghan Jihad, they tried to meet the shortage of money through the drug trade. And this was organized and centralized under the CIA. As the Mujahideen began to take over the land of Afghanistan, they called on the peasants to grow opium as a revolutionary tax. As a result, “the price of opium rose five times that of wheat.” In addition, there was no shortage of factories to produce drugs. Across the border in Pakistan, hundreds of laboratories were being run by Afghan leaders and local businessmen under the protection of the ISI. In 1988, Lawrence Lifshuls pointed out in The Nation that “the heroin factories located in the North-West Frontier Province were being run under the protection of General Fazal Haq, a close associate of General Zia-ul-Haq.”

And most importantly, the transport of these drugs was being done by the National Logistics Cell of the Pakistani Army! Weapons supplied by the CIA were transported to Karachi in these trucks! And heroin too! Due to the ISI documents, the police did not check these trucks!

Pakistan’s newspaper ‘The Herald’ published a report in September 1985 that “the drugs are transported by the National Logistics Cell (NLC) in sealed trucks and they are not searched by the police. And this work has been going on unhindered for the last three-three and a half years. Finally the CIA gave it legal protection. Otherwise such a growth in this illegal trade could not have been imagined.”

During this decade, during the height of the open drug trade in Islamabad, the US Drug Enforcement Administration failed to seize any major shipments or arrest any traffickers. US officials dismissed allegations of drug trafficking by Afghans so that they could “be of use in the war against the Soviet Union.”

Before the Afghan Jihad, heroin was not produced in Afghanistan. Opium was cultivated there. Which was sold in small and regional markets of the villages there. By the time the Afghan Jihad ended, the picture had changed dramatically. The Pakistan-Afghanistan border area became a major center for the production of opium and heroin. 75% of the world’s opium began to be produced there. The value of which reached several billion dollars. A report released in early 2001 stated that “the United Nations International Drug Control Program recorded the highest increase in Afghan opium production around 1979.” This was the year the American-sponsored jihad began. The illegal drug trade that began in 1979 continues even today. And in the area where only 5% opium was produced in 1980, it reached 71% within ten years. Afghanistan’s future bears similarities to Burma. This was another mountainous region which was the victim of CIA intervention at the start of the Cold War. The CIA promoted opium production in Burma in the 1950s to aid the Nationalist Chinese troops in the Shan State.

Alfred MacKoy concludes that such CIA activities expanded opium production in Afghanistan in the 1980s to arm mujahideen guerrillas and linked heroin laboratories inside Pakistan to the world market.

The heroin-based economy that has corrupted Afghanistan and Pakistan has given it even more prestige, said President Reagan, adding that the mujahideen are morally equal to the founding fathers of America.

The worst example was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received half of the secret sources provided by the CIA, worth a total of two billion dollars over ten years, and quickly began to dominate the Afghan mujahideen.

Although after 9/11, America took a turn and threatened Pakistan (the then Pakistan chief General Musharraf himself has written this in his autobiography ‘In the Line of Fire – A Memoir’, “How the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell had said on the phone in a threatening tone, ‘Are you with us or not?’, immediately after the 9/11 incident!)

Whatever statement Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has given today regarding the Taliban of Afghanistan, let’s see how long he will stick to it. Because it has been 75 years since Pakistan separated from India. And because of the sole agenda of Pakistan’s ISI and Pakistan’s army to hate India, Pakistan’s progress is negligible. And Pakistan’s economy runs on American puppets. This kind of rhetoric, or this too is likely to be a part of a well thought out strategy, at the behest of ISI. Because American soldiers had to leave Afghanistan one day or the other. And in my entire article on Taliban, I have explained what role America has played in preparing Al Qaeda to Taliban due to its anti-communism. And for this, this monster has been created by spending 83 thousand billion dollars with the help of Pakistan. So will America just hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban and sit quietly? And I don’t think there is any possibility of leaving Afghanistan at the mercy of China and Russia! Maybe they are using Pakistan for this purpose! Because there is never any such thing as an enemy or friendship established at the international level!

This article is mainly based on my personal experiences and I have used some books in it. First of all (1) Mahmood Mamdani, A Good Muslim Bad Muslim . Permanent Black, (2) Ahmed Rashid, Descent in to Chaos, published by Penguin books, (3), Inside Global Network of Terror Al Qaeda, Rohan Gunaratna published by Roli Books, (4), Parvez Musharraf’s, In the Line of Fire A Memoir published by, Free Press, (5) Mohammed Hanif, A case of Exploding Mangoes published by Random house India
Dr. Suresh Khairnar, 11 September 2023, Nagpur. If you sow acacia seeds, where will you get mangoes?

Dr Suresh Khairnar is Ex. President of Rashtra Sewa Dal

11 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

You must drive up a hill to get to Birzeit University, which is just outside Ramallah (West Bank, Occupied Palestine Territory or OPT). It is a beautiful campus, established in 1924 as a school for girls by the remarkable Nabiha Nasir, 1891-1951, and then converted in 1975 into a university. I spent an afternoon talking with students there about their classes and their ambitions, most of them fiercely committed to both their academic work and their political hope for a free Palestine.

Politics is not far from the minds of the students. Israel had occupied and shut down Birzeit University between 1988 and 1992, and since 2002 has raided the campus over 30 times. The most recent raid was on September 3, 2024, when Israeli forces focused their attention on the Student Council and the offices of the student organizations. The Israeli soldiers “[confiscated] flags, flyers, and materials belonging to the student movement,” complained Birzeit’s Right to Education Campaign. This invasion of the campus, illegal by the agreements made between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, follows a pattern set by the Israeli occupation forces: to come onto the campus with a great display of force and then target the student leaders of political organizations either through arrest or intimidation. This is precisely what happened on the campus in early September.

It is clear to the students that what happened to them is part of a broad policy pushed by the Israeli government to inflict immense pain on the Palestinian population, cause Palestinians to flee their land, and then annex all of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Indeed, in one of his recent presentations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu displayed a map of the region with Israel encompassing these areas. Netanyahu later demurred and said that the West Bank was not demarcated because the presentation was about Gaza, seemingly designed to mollify the United States government.

Part of this immense pain has been to attack the basis of Palestinian life in the OPT, with the destruction of homes, hospitals, and educational institutions a feature of the attacks on the Palestinians for decades. This is why the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury calls Israeli policy the “permanent Nakba,” the Arabic word referring to the “catastrophe” of 1948 when at least 700,000 Palestinians were cleansed to make way for the new Israeli state.

Following the 2008-09 Israeli bombing of the Ministry of Education in Gaza and then the bombing of a range of educational institutions (including the prestigious American International School), Oxford University Professor Karma Nabulsi coined the term “scholasticide.” The term refers to the systematic destruction of educational institutions and an educated population. In 2009, Nabulsi said that the Israelis conducted scholasticide because “deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.” When I asked Nabulsi what she now thinks of the genocidal war in Gaza, she responded: “Today’s vicious and unconscionable destruction of our beloved universities, schools, museums, libraries, ancient churches and mosques, along with other cultural landmarks in Gaza all form part of scholasticide. It is a clear intent to remove our capacities and abilities to study, to learn, to read and think, to stay united. Of course, it will not succeed.”

In April 2024, a group of UN special rapporteurs and other experts known as the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council accused the Israelis of “scholasticide.” They reported that the destruction of most of Gaza’s schools and universities constituted “persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza.” “These attacks are not isolated incidents,” they wrote, “[t]hey present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.” “When schools are destroyed,” the experts noted, “so too are hopes and dreams.” Two respected professors at Birzeit University—Ibrahim Rabaia (assistant professor of Political Science) and Lourdes Habash (Director of the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies)—went through the same evidence and suggested that what is happening is “educide.” Whether scholasticide or educide, the phenomenon is ghastly; it is nothing less than the attempt to erase the culture of Palestinians, “to erase the collective memory, cultural heritage, intellectual growth of the Palestinian people.”

Sundos Hammad, the coordinator of the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University, reflects on her commitment to education. When she was nine years old in Al-Bireh (north of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank), she “came to understand the profound connection between education and survival under occupation.” This was in 2000, during the Second Intifada. Getting to her primary school was not easy since there were Israeli tanks near the school gate and little children would be harassed by the Israeli soldiers. Inspired by the uprising, children like Sundos would throw stones at the tanks. The Israelis shot at them with live fire. Sundos would run back home and tell her mother what had happened and wondered aloud if she should continue to go to school. Her mother was firm. “Education is not an option,” she recounts her mother having said. “It’s your future and the future of your generation.”

Since October 2023, Israel has been trying to erase that future. It has killed two university presidents in Gaza—Professor Sufian Tayeh (Islamic University of Gaza) and Professor Said Alzebda (University College of Applied Sciences)—and several deans and over 100 professors. Many of these teachers were under the age of 50, such as Professor Nesma Abu Shaira (age 36). Professor Abu Sharia was from Gaza and taught visual arts at Al-Aqsa University. I met Professor Abu Sharia a few years after she won a prize at the Gaza Contemporary Art Festival in 2011. A common friend told me that she was interested in illustrations and design and wanted to do a project that she later called “Documenting Palestine.” All that I remember of our meeting is that she was very happy about teaching her students, particularly the young women who came to learn how to draw. “We must tell Palestinian stories,” she told me. On October 28, 2023, an Israeli aircraft bombed her home. She died along with her family. Her Instagram account is her gallery. After her death, one of her students, Zeinab, remembered her teacher for the “sparkle in her eyes and her pride in her [students].”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

11 September 2024

Source: countercurrents.org