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By Israel Shahak and Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Update and Analysis
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On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.” which was led by its Military Chief Mohammed Deif.  On that same day, Netanyahu confirmed a so-called “State of Readiness For War”. Israel has now (October 7, 2023) officially declared a new stage of its long war against the people of Palestine.

Military operations are invariably planned well in advance (See Netanyahu’s January 2023 statement below). Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack” ?

U.S. intelligence say they weren’t aware of an impending Hamas attack.

Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack which has resulted in countless deaths of Israelis and Palestinians.

Was a carefully formulated Israeli plan to wage an all out war against Palestinians envisaged prior to the launching by Hamas of  “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm”? This was not a failure of Israeli Intelligence, as conveyed by the media. Quite the opposite.

Evidence and testimonies suggest that the Netanyahu government had foreknowledge of the actions of Hamas which have resulted in hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian deaths. And “They Let it Happen”:

“Hamas fired between 2-5 thousand rockets at Israel and hundreds of Israeli are dead, while dozens of Israelis were captured as prisoners of war. In the ensuing air response by Israel, hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Gaza.” (Stephen Sahiounie)

Following the Al Aqsa Storm Operation on October 7, Israel‘s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing of the Gaza Strip” (Middle East Eye).

A complete blockade of the Gaza Strip was initiated on October 9, 2023 consisting in  preventing and obstructing the importation of food, water, fuel, and essential commodities to 2.3 Million Palestinians. It’s an outright crime against humanity.

Was “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm” a “surprise attack”? Did Netanyahu and his vast military and intelligence apparatus (Mossad et al) have foreknowledge of the Hamas attack? Was it a false flag?

Netanyahu’s “New Stage” of “The Long War” against Palestine

Netanyahu’s stated objective, which constitutes a new stage in the 75 year old war (since Nakba, 1948, see below) against the people of Palestine is no longer predicated on “Apartheid” or “Separation”. This new stage –which is also directed against Israelis who want peace– consists in “total appropriation” as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

The current Netanyahu government is committed to the “Greater Israel” and the “Promised Land”, namely the biblical homeland of the Jews.

Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing ahead to formalize “Israel’s colonial project”, namely the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands.

His position defined below several months prior to the October 7, 2023 “State of Readiness For War” consists in total appropriation as well as the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland:

“These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.” (January 2023)

History: The Relationship between Mossad and Hamas

“Operation Al Acqsa Storm” (OAAS): Was Hamas acting on behalf of the People of Palestine?

What is the relationship between Mossad and Hamas? Is Hamas an “intelligence asset”? There is a long history.

Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) (Islamic Resistance Movement), was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmed Yassin. It was supported at the outset by Israeli intelligence as a means to weaken the Palestinian Authority:

“Thanks to Mossad, (Israel’s “Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks”), Hamas was allowed to reinforce its presence in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, Arafat’s Fatah Movement for National Liberation as well as the Palestinian Left were subjected to the most brutal form of repression and intimidation.

Let us not forget that it was Israel, which in fact created Hamas. According to Zeev Sternell, historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Israel thought that it was a smart ploy to push the Islamists against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)”. (L’Humanité, translated from French)

The links of Hamas to Mossad and US intelligence have been acknowledged by Rep. Ron Paul in a statement to the U.S Congress: “Hamas Was Started by Israel”?

“You know Hamas, if you look at the history, you’ll find out that Hamas was encouraged and really started by Israel because they wanted Hamas to counteract Yasser Arafat… (Rep. Ron Paul, 2011)

What this statement entails is that Hamas is and remains “an intelligence asset”, namely “an “asset” which serves the interests of intelligence agencies.

See also the WSJ (January 24, 2009) “How Israel helped to Spawn Hamas”.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. (WSJ, emphasis added)

The Nakba

Commemoration on May 13, 2023: The Nakba. 75 years ago on May 13, 1948. The Palestinian Catastrophe prevails. In a 2018 report, the United Nations stated that Gaza had become “unliveable”:

With an economy in free fall, 70 per cent youth unemployment, widely contaminated drinking water and a collapsed health care system, Gaza has become “unliveable”,[in 2018] according to the Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories”

The above UN assessment dates back to 2018. Under Netanyahu, Israel is currently proceeding with the plan to annex large chunks of Palestinian territory “while keeping the Palestinian inhabitants in conditions of severe deprivation and isolation.“

Creating conditions of extreme poverty and economic collapse constitute the means for triggering the expulsion and exodus of Palestinians from their homeland. It is part of the process of annexation.

“If the manoeuvre is successful, Israel will end up with all of the territories it conquered during the 1967 war, including all of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem and most of the Palestinian Territories, including the best sources of water and agricultural land.

The West Bank will find itself in the same situation as the Gaza strip, cut off from the outside world and surrounded by hostile Israeli military forces and Israeli settlements.” (South Front)

Human rights ended at the Palestinian border. The bought and paid for US Congress couldn’t genuflect enough:

“On July 19, 2023 the US Congress convened a special joint session for Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Both Democrats and Republicans bobbed up and down to applaud him 29 times.”

” Watching Palestine Disappear”, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, September 12, 2023

“Greater Israel would create a number of proxy states. It would include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the Sinai, as well as parts of  Iraq and Saudi Arabia.”

“Palestine Is Gone! Gone! راحت فلسطين . The Palestinian plight is savagely painful and the pain is compounded by the bafflingly off-hand dismissal and erasure by Western powers of that pain, Rima Najjar, Global Research, June, 7, 2020 

Michel Chossudovsky,  June 10, 2021, July 19, 2023, September 19, 2023, October 11, 2023

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He is also one of JUST’s International Advisory Panel Members.

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Caitlin Johnstone

To accept the persecution of Julian Assange is to accept the idea that all media everywhere must function as propaganda organs of the US government.

5 Oct 2023 – As the 17th anniversary of the creation of WikiLeaks passes us by, it’s probably worth taking a moment to reflect on Julian Assange and what his persecution means for us and our society.

Because in a very real sense, it’s not just a man locked up in Belmarsh Prison for the crime of good journalism — it’s journalism itself. It’s the idea that anyone should be permitted to expose the criminality of the world’s most powerful and tyrannical people. It’s the idea that the public should be allowed to know what abuses the US empire is committing around the world.

Julian Assange is the world’s greatest journalist. By revolutionizing source protection for the digital age with the creation of WikiLeaks 17 years ago and then going on to break some of the biggest stories of the 21st century, Assange set himself head and shoulders above any other living reporter anywhere on earth. And by showing the world that they can lock up the world’s greatest journalist for revealing inconvenient truths, they are showing the world that they can lock up anyone.

That’s what this case has always been about. It’s not about whether Assange crossed some arbitrary procedural line when working with Chelsea Manning to expose US war crimes. It’s not about the US protecting its national security. It’s not about any of the other justifications people have put forward to excuse their sycophantic support for the persecution of a journalist for doing journalism. It’s about setting a legal precedent that will allow the US empire to extradite anyone anywhere in the world who reveals inconvenient facts about it. It’s about showing all journalists everywhere that if they can do it to the greatest among them, they can do it to any of them. And, like so much else in the world today, it’s about narrative control.

To accept the persecution of Julian Assange is to accept the idea that all media everywhere must function as propaganda organs of the US government. It’s to take it as a given that any journalist anywhere in the world who decides to do real journalism and expose inconvenient facts about the powerful in the public interest should be jailed until they can be extradited to the United States for a show trial, and then left to rot in one of the most draconian prison systems on the planet. It’s to accept that we will never live in a truth-based society guided by facts and information, and must forever resign ourselves to living in a society dominated by the whims of the powerful.

Your position on the Assange case is therefore your position on what kind of society we should hope to live in, and what kind of future we should hope to have. In a very real way, it’s your position on humanity itself.

Should humanity try to create a better world, or should we keep plunging into dystopia until we are driven into nuclear war or environmental catastrophe by rulers we are forbidden to question? Do we want to move into the light, or into the darkness? Your position on Assange shows your answer to these questions, and shows which course you want us to take.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Caitlin Johnstone

Skillful manipulators make frequent use of a cognitive bias known as the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the way human minds tend to operate which makes it hard for us to differentiate between the experience of hearing a well-evidenced fact and the experience of hearing something that we’ve heard repeated multiple times.

8 Oct 2023 – We’re seeing the western political/media class bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison again, this time in reference to the massive multi-pronged operation launched by Hamas against Israel on Saturday [7 Oct] morning which reportedly killed hundreds of Israelis.

“The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” reads a statement from the White House.

“The loss of life in Israel as a result of the violent, calculated and unprovoked attack by Hamas is heartbreaking,” reads a statement by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“The unprovoked terror attack today and the murders of innocent Israeli citizens are a stark reminder of the brutality of Hamas and Iran-backed extremists,” reads a statement by congressman and house speaker contender Jim Jordan.

“This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense,” tweeted presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“This is an ‘unprovoked attack on civilians’: Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg,” reads a recent Fox News report.

“Unprovoked aggression by Hamas terrorists,” reads a tweet by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

“I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” tweeted congressman John Fetterman.

“These attacks by Hamas against Israel were heinous and unprovoked,” tweeted Senator Mark Kelly.

“As a steadfast supporter and ally of Israel, I unequivocally condemn the unprovoked and unprecedented terrorist attack launched by Hamas and stand with the people of Israel as it rightly defends itself,” tweeted congressman Richie Torres.

“The unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas through Gaza and via air and sea, are absolutely a terrorist attack,” tweeted Democratic Party pundit Ed Krassenstein.

“I unequivocally condemn Hamas’ horrific, unprovoked attacks and call on all parties to take steps to prevent civilian harm,” tweeted congresswoman Sara Jacobs.

I could cite many, many more examples, but I think that’s enough to make the point I’m trying to make. Isn’t it strange seeing the same oddly specific word choice inserted over and over and over again about the same event in statements by politicians and pundits, regardless of their political affiliation? When you lay them all out together it starts to sound highly suspicious, like someone always referring to his car as “my car, which I did not steal,” or always introducing his spouse as “my wife, whom I do not beat.”

It’s clear by now that whenever you see the word “unprovoked” being forcefully repeated in a uniform way across the entire political/media class, whatever they’re talking about was definitely massively provoked.

We saw this exact same thing when Russia invaded Ukraine; from the very beginning western politics and media were saturated with the word “unprovoked”, bashing the western public in the face with that message over and over and over again despite the obvious and undeniable fact that the war in Ukraine was most definitely provoked.

As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”

And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked. As Palestinian-American writer and comedian Amer Zahr put it on Twitter, “75 years of ethnic cleansing. 15 years of blockade. Confiscation of Palestinian lands. Pogroms on Palestinian towns. Desecration of Palestinian sacred sites. Daily raids into Palestinian homes. Constant humiliation of a entire people. Nothing about today is ‘unprovoked.’”

Calling Palestinian violence against Israel “unprovoked” is easily even more ridiculous than calling the Russian invasion unprovoked, because the abuses of Israeli apartheid are so well-known by the general public at this point. Multiple mainstream human rights organizations have accused Israel of administering an abusive apartheid regime which treats Palestinians as lesser people. Palestinians who live in the open-air prison known as Gaza are deliberately subjected to undrinkable water, food shortages, energy shortages and bombing campaigns. Those outside Gaza are subjected to racist, violent policing and land seizure and live under a different set of laws than Jewish Israelis. The entire people were forced out of their homes to make way for a new state for reasons that had nothing to do with them, and any attempt to resist this has seen them killed as “terrorists”.

Of course the attack was provoked.

The Illusion of Truth

Isn’t it odd that the western political/media class would begin uniformly asserting something so easily disprovable? So transparently false? Why would they keep choosing over and over and over again in each instance to make use of that specific word “unprovoked” in their condemnations of the attacks by Hamas?

The answer is that this choice is not so much something they are saying as something they are doing. They’re not attempting to communicate with their audiences, they’re attempting to circumvent the critical thinking of their audience and trick them into accepting a blatant falsehood as true.

Skillful manipulators make frequent use of a cognitive bias known as the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the way human minds tend to operate which makes it hard for us to differentiate between the experience of hearing a well-evidenced fact and the experience of hearing something that they’ve heard repeated multiple times. If you want the public to believe something false you won’t be able to use facts and evidence to make your case to them, so what you can do is just repeat something over and over again until it starts sounding like the truth. Repeat the lie enough times and boom, you’ve perception-managed westerners into viewing the world from an understanding that Israel did nothing to provoke Palestinians into their actions.

After the news broke about the Hamas offensive I tweeted,

“Here come days and days of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.”

But even I wasn’t expecting the perception management to be this brazen.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Oren Ziv

In mere months, entire Palestinian communities between Ramallah and Jericho have been chased out by settler violence and state policies — paving the way for a total Israeli takeover of thousands of acres of land.

3 Sep 2023 – There are almost no Palestinians remaining in a vast area stretching east from Ramallah to the outskirts of Jericho. Most of the communities who lived in the area — which covers around 150,000 dunams, or 150 square kilometers, of the occupied West Bank — have fled for their lives in recent months as a result of intensifying Israeli settler violence and land seizures, backed by the Israeli army and state institutions. The near-total emptying of the region’s Palestinian population shows how Israel’s slow but gradual process of ethnic cleansing is continuing apace, effectively annexing large swathes of the occupied territory for exclusive Jewish settlement.

By Brett Wilkins

“Netanyahu made clear with his little map what normalization really seeks: eliminating Palestine… from the region and legitimizing greater Israel, all with the blessing of Arab regimes,” one critic said.

22 Sep 2023 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angered Palestinians and their defenders today after presenting a map of “The New Middle East” without Palestine during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Speaking to a largely empty chamber, Netanyahu—whose far-right government is widely considered the most extreme in Israeli history—showed a series of maps, including one that did not show the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or Gaza. These Palestinian territories have been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, with the exception of Gaza—from which Israeli forces withdrew in 2005, while maintaining an economic stranglehold over the densely populated coastal strip.

Middle East Eye reported Netanyahu also held up a map of “Israel in 1948″—the year the modern Jewish state was established, largely through the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs—that erroneously included the Palestinian territories as part of Israel.

Palestinian Ambassador to Germany Laith Arafeh said on social media that there is “no greater insult to every foundational principle of the United Nations than seeing Netanyahu display before the UNGA a ‘map of Israel’ that straddles the entire land from the river to the sea, negating Palestine and its people, then attempting to spin the audience with rhetoric about ‘peace’ in the region, all the while entrenching the longest ongoing belligerent occupation in today’s world.”

As Middle East Eye noted:

The inclusion of Palestinian lands (and sometimes land belonging to Syria and Lebanon) in Israeli maps is common among believers of the concept of Eretz Yisrael—Greater Israel—a key part of ultra-nationalist Zionism that claims all of these lands belong to a Zionist state.

Earlier this year, Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, spoke from a podium adorned with a map that also included Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria as part of Greater Israel. In the same event, he said there was “no such thing as Palestinians.”

The use of such maps by Israeli officials comes at a time when Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government has taken steps that experts say amount to the “de jure annexation” of the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu used the maps in an attempt to illustrate the increasing number of Arab countries normalizing relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords brokered by the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

“There’s no question the Abraham Accords heralded the dawn of a new age of peace,” the Israeli prime minister said. “But I believe that we are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough, an historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia will truly create a new Middle East.”

Critics have countered that peace between apartheid Israel and Arab dictatorships has come at the cost of advancing Palestinian rights. In the case of Morocco, the United States recognized the North African nation’s illegal annexation and brutal occupation of Western Sahara in exchange for normalization with Israel.

Netanyahu’s props on Friday reminded numerous observers of the time during his 2012 General Assembly speech when he used a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate Iran’s progress on advancing a nuclear weapons program that both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies said did not exist.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Mansoor Durrani

7 Oct 2023 – After 70 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands; after 50 years of Arab-Israeli Yom Kuppar War; and after 9 months of “low intensity” Israeli violence that killed over 250 Palestinian civilians in the Israeli occupied lands in the first 9 months of 2023 alone, something unprecedented happened around 6:00am local time today!

By Matthew Ehret

The recent dissolution of Nagorno Karabakh and the Armenia embrace of a US-led world order represent something much larger than either small country and have everything to do with destabilizing the largest, and arguably most strategic, mega-project in Eurasia connecting the Russian Arctic to Iran and India.

4 Oct 2023 – Efforts to light geopolitical fires across Russia’s underbelly have been relentless in recent years (with a failed color revolution in Kazakhstan in January 2022, a renewed color revolution effort in Georgia in March of this year, clashes between neighboring Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan in 2022, ongoing threats of color revolution in Serbia, threats to blow up Transnistria in Moldova, and the obvious fire in Ukraine).

Amidst all of these arson attempts, one thing is certain, the technocrats managing the collapsing western death cult are obsessed with kicking over the chess board using every dirty trick in the book.

Introducing The International North South Transportation Corridor

Until recently, the primary trade route for goods passing from India to Europe has been the maritime shipping corridor passing through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea, via the highly bottlenecked Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean and onward to Europe via ports and rail/road corridors.

Following this western-dominated route, average transit times take about 40 days to reach ports of Northern Europe or Russia. Geopolitical realities of the western technocratic obsession with global governance have made this NATO-controlled route more than a little unreliable.

On top of that, Russia remains one of the most important global suppliers of oil, natural gas, fertilizers and grain – but with the NATO/EU clown show increasingly sabotaging access to Russian goods, new connections are desperately needed to avoid plunging the world into a chain reaction collapse.

Despite being far from complete, goods moving across the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) from India to Russia have already finished their journey 14 days sooner then their Suez-bound counterparts while also seeing a whopping 30 percent reduction in total shipping costs.

These figures are expected to fall further as the project progresses. Most importantly, the INSTC would also provide a new basis for international win-win cooperation much more in harmony with the spirit of geo-economics unveiled by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013.

Doing Business Without Killing Your Customers

Originally agreed upon by Russia, Iran, and India in September 2000, the INSTC only began moving in earnest in 2002 – albeit much more slowly than its architects had hoped.

This 7,200 km multimodal megaproject involves integrating several Eurasian nations directly or indirectly with rail, roads, and shipping corridors into a united and tight-knit web of interdependency. Along each artery, opportunities to build energy projects, mining, and high tech special economic zones (SEZs) will abound giving each participating nation the economic power to lift their people out of poverty, increase their stability and their national power to chart their own destinies.

Beyond the founding three nations, the other 10 states who have signed onto this project over the years include Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Syria and even Ukraine (although this last member may not remain on board for long). In recent months, India has officially invited Afghanistan and Uzbekistan to join too.

While western think tanks and geopolitical analysts attempt to frame the INSTC as an opponent to China’s BRI, the reality is that both systems are extremely synergistic on multiple levels.

Unlike the West’s speculation-driven bubble economy, both the BRI and INSTC define economic value and self-interest around improving the productivity and living standards of the real economy. While short term thinking predominates in the myopic London-Wall Street paradigm, the BRI and INSTC investment strategies are driven by long-term thinking and mutual self-interest.

It is no small irony that such policies once animated the best traditions of the West before the rot of unipolar thinking took over and the West lost its moral compass.

An Integrated Alternative

The INSTC’s two major bookends are the productive zone of Mumbai, in India’s Southeast region of Gujarat, and the northern-most Arctic port of Lavna in Russia’s Kola Peninsula of Murmansk.

This is not only the first port constructed by Russia in decades, but when completed, will be one of the world’s largest commercial ports with an expected capacity to process 80 million tons of goods by 2030.

The Lavna Port is an integral part of Russia’s Arctic and Far East Development vision and is a central piece to Russia’s current Comprehensive Plan for Modernization and Expansion of Main Infrastructure and its Northern Sea Route which is expected to see a five-fold increase of Arctic freight traffic over the coming years. These projects are integrally linked to China’s Polar Silk Road.

Between these bookends, the INSTC moves freight from India into Iran’s Port of Bandar Abbas where it is loaded onto double-tracked rail to the Iranian city of Bafq and then to Tehran before coming to the Anzali Port on the southern Caspian Sea.

Because the INSTC is based on a flexible design concept capable of adapting to a changing geopolitical environment (very much like the BRI), there are a multitude of connecting lines that branch off the main North-South artery before goods make it to the Caspian Sea.

These include an eastern and western corridor branching off from the city of Bafq towards Turkey and thence Europe via the Bosporus and also eastward from Tehran to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and thereafter into Urumqi in China.

The Strategic Importance Of Railways

From the Anzali Port in the north of Iran, goods may travel by the Caspian Sea towards Russia’s Astrakhan Port where it is then loaded onto trains and trucks for transport to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Murmansk. Inversely, goods may also travel over land to Azerbaijan where the 35 km Iran Rasht-Caspian railway is currently under construction with 11 km completed as of this writing.

Once completed, the line will connect the Port of Anzali with Azerbaijan’s Baku, offering goods a chance to either continue onwards to Russia or westward toward Europe. A Tehran-Baku rail route already exists.

Additionally, Azerbaijan and Iran are currently collaborating on a vast $2 billion rail line connecting the 175 km Qazvin-Rasht railway which began operations in 2019 with a strategic rail line connecting Iran’s Rasht port on the Caspian to the Bandar Abbas Complex in the south (to be completed in 2025). Sergey Pavlov, First Deputy Managing Director of Russian Railways stated in March 2023: “The Ministry of Transport is preparing two intergovernmental agreements: Iran-Russia and trilateral Azerbaijan-Russia-Iran.”

In recent months, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has lobbied to incorporate the joint Iran-India built Chabahar Port into the INSTC which will likely occur since another 628 km rail line from the port to the Iranian city of Zahedan is currently under construction.

Since 2014, a vast rail and transportation complex has grown around the co-signers of the Ashkabat Agreement (launched in 2011 and upgraded several times over the past decade). These rail networks include the 917.5 km Iran-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan route launched in 2014, and Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan rail/energy project launched in 2016 which is currently seeing extensions that could easily go into Pakistan.

In December 2021, the 6540 km Islamabad to Istanbul rail line (via Iran) recommenced operations after a decade of inaction. This route cuts the conventional sea transit route time of 21 days by half. Discussions are already underway to extend the line from Pakistan into China’s Xinjiang Province linking the INSTC ever more closely into the BRI on yet another front.

Finally, June 2022 saw the long-awaited unveiling of the 6108 km Kazakhstan-Iran-Turkey rail line which provides an alternative route to the under-developed Middle Corridor. Celebrating the inaugural 12 day voyage of cargo, Kazakhstan’s President Kasym-Jomart Tokayev stated:

“Today, we welcomed the container train, which left Kazakhstan a week ago. Then it will go to Turkey. This is a significant event, given the difficult geopolitical conditions.”

Under these dynamics the long overdue Southern Armenian Railway could be built providing the missing 316 km link of the North-South Transport Corridor between the Black Sea and Persian Gulf. This project involves an incredible 84 bridges (19.6 km) and 60 tunnels (102.3 km) through the mountainous terrain ultimately connecting the Persian Gulf’s main artery to Europe with vast benefits for all nations and people involved.

The INSTC, BRI, and other great infrastructure projects would not only create new relationships and open up new markets over the course of many years, but would also provide the basis for new industries, increased productive potential and incredible investment potentials for all interests regardless of religious, ethnic, or other differences which imperialists have sought to exploit for eons.

Unfortunately if the Soros puppet president of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan (installed during a color revolution in 2018) is successful at sabotaging the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), while embracing NATO, then these prospects for Eurasian integration might go up in flames.

Matthew Ehret is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, a  journalist, and co-founder of the Rising Tide Foundation.

9 October 2023

Source: transcend.org

By Maung Zarni,

Dear Friends,

I know no rational discussion is conceivable between the Colonized and the Colonizer. There is no shared humanity, nor moral foundations between these two sets of populations.
That much we know from history. Situations of categorical and absolute bondage are no dialogic matters.

As the freedman Federic Douglas pointedly wrote, “power never concedes. It never has, and it never will.”

What is most outrageous and morally most repugnant – far more than another Global Powers are including the brutish Russia and China- is the United States as the most imperialist rogue power has for decades given Israel – now officially The Jewish State – a blanket impunity.

When the Wretched of Palestine fight back their occupying Colonizers, they are “terrorists”, or worse.

I may have lost several close Jewish friends over the last few days, including some genocide scholars and fellow leftists

Friendship (or career or even my life) has never been as important to me as my Conscience.

So, it’s not my loss. I am nobody, in the grand scheme of things, without Power, Influence or Status to shape global public opinion.

But I feel this deep existential need to raise my tiny voice. Whether it’s heard or heeded by any other human is not my concern.

I speak – and live – my conscience. I hope you do too.

Not a good time for the 2-million Palestinians.

11 October 2023

Maung Zarni is a Burmese educator, academic, and human rights activist. He is noted for his opposition to the violence in Rakhine State and Rohingya refugee crisis.

The CIA Sponsored Islamic Insurgency (1979- )

By Michel Chossudovsky

The NeoCons’ agenda is not to “win the war” but to engineer the breakup of sovereign nation states, destroy their culture and national identity, derogate fundamental values and human rights.

The strategic objective is to trigger political and social chaos, engineer the collapse of national economies, appropriate the countries’ wealth and resources, impoverish the entire planet including the American Homeland.

It’s a mesh of weapons of mass destruction, covert intelligence operations, propaganda and “strong economic medicine”. The criminality of the US/NATO hegemonic agenda is beyond description.

This short article focusses on Women’s Rights in Afghanistan “Before” and “After” the conduct of Washington’s “Humanitarian War” against Afghanistan, which commenced at the height of the Cold War in 1979. It was a carefully planned  intelligence operation. The CIA was directly involved from the outset in recruiting and supporting the “Islamic brigades”.

A second war and invasion of Afghanistan under US-NATO auspices was carried on October 7, 2001, four weeks after the tragic events of 9/11.

Prior to the CIA-Sponsored “Islamic Insurgency” against the People of Afghanistan

“Before”

Unknown to Americans, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Kabul was “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs”.

“Prior to the rise of the Taliban [which was instrumented by the CIA], women in Afghanistan were protected under law and increasingly afforded rights in Afghan society. Women received the right to vote in the 1920s; and as early as the 1960s, the Afghan constitution provided for equality for women. There was a mood of tolerance and openness as the country began moving toward democracy.

Women were making important contributions to national development. In 1977, women comprised over 15% of Afghanistan’s highest legislative body. It is estimated that by the early 1990s, 70% of schoolteachers, 50% of government workers and university students, and 40% of doctors in Kabul were women.” (Bureau of Democracy and Human Rights, U.S. State Department, 2001, link no longer functional)

Starting Under Reagan. Derogation of Women’s Rights. Destruction of an Entire Country

“After”

Osama bin Laden, America’s bogyman, was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US-sponsored jihad.

He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA-sponsored guerrilla training camp. The architects of the covert operation in support of “Islamic fundamentalism” launched during the Reagan presidency played a key role in launching the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) in the wake of 9/11.

Under the Reagan adminstration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. In today’s world, the “freedom fighters” are labelled “Islamic terrorists”.

The Soviet-Afghan War

The Soviet-Afghan war was part of a CIA covert agenda initiated during the Carter administration, which consisted  in actively supporting and financing the Islamic brigades, later known as Al Qaeda.

The number of CIA-sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000. USAID generously financed the process of religious indoctrination, largely to secure the demise of secular institutions and the collapse of civil society.

In the Pashtun language, the word “Taliban” means “Students”, or graduates of the madrasahs (places of learning or coranic schools) set up by the Wahhabi missions from Saudi Arabia, with the support of the CIA.

“The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books ….

‘The pictures [in] the texts are horrendous to school students, but the texts are even much worse’ said Ahmad Fahim Hakim, an Afghan educator [working with] a Pakistan-based nonprofit.

An aid worker in the region reviewed an unrevised 100-page book and counted 43 pages containing violent images or passages.

Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university’s education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994.“ (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez  Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)

“Bin Laden recruited 4,000 volunteers from his own country and developed close relations with the most radical mujahideen leaders. He also worked closely with the CIA, … Since September 11, [2001] CIA officials have been claiming they had no direct link to bin Laden.” (Phil Gasper, International Socialist Review, November-December 2001)

Women’s Rights, Poverty and Despair

The media casually blames this on the Taliban, without acknowledging that Islamic Fundamentalism and the koranic schools had been imposed by the CIA.

Public education was destroyed and the rights of women in a predominately secular society which took its roots in the 1920s were DESTROYED.

This destruction is coupled with the massive impoverishment of an entire country.

“Before” and “After”

A Criminal Undertaking. Who’s Behind It?

“A once prosperous country has been precipitated into extreme poverty and despair. It’s a crime against humanity.

According to the UN, Afghanistan is currently experiencing extensive food shortages and famine.

It should be understood that this war started more than 40 years ago in 1979 with the CIA recruitment of jihadist mercenaries (Al Qaeda) funded by the trade in narcotics.

The endgame was to destroy Afghanistan as a progressive and independent nation-state committed to education, culture and women’s rights.”

What the media describes as the “tyrannical policies of the Taliban” bears the footprints of the CIA which imposed Islamic Fundamentalism, while concurrently engineering the collapse and impoverishment of a progressive secular nation-state.

President Ronald Reagan issued (and signed) the National Security Decision Directive 166 (NSDD 166), which de facto authorized  “stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen” as well as CIA support to religious indoctrination.

The promotion of “Radical Islam” was a deliberate CIA initiative (NSDD 166) which in the wake of 9/11 has served as justification to waging a “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) in the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and sub–Saharan Africa.

Our thoughts are with the people of Afghanistan.

5 October 2023

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He is also one of JUST’s International Advisory Panel Members.

Source: substack.com

Normalization with the racist, settler-colonialist, zionist entity of Israel often begins with a U.S. directive aimed at Arab regimes, as evidenced by the first attempt with the Camp David Accords in 1978, which led to a “peace” agreement between Egypt and Israel. In essence, normalization coerces Arab regimes in the region to accept their subjugated status as compliant agents, which serves the zionist agenda and its U.S. imperialist patron. In light of the fast pace of change in today’s world order, the U.S. finds it necessary to push for normalization in order to maintain its global, imperialist dominance over Arab nations and thwart their progress toward independent, modern democracies.

Therefore, the current Saudi Arabian (and previous efforts like the Abraham Accords and others) push towards normalization with the zionist enemy fundamentally signifies a recognition of the settler-colonialist state’s legitimacy and an attempt to erase our people’s historical and national rights in all of Palestine. Any discussion about the so-called “two-state solution” is nothing but an attempt to stall and buy time to create new realities on the ground that will be impossible to reverse. This is when submission, surrender, and betrayal become the inherent traits of Saudi Arabia or any other Arab regime that normalizes relations with Israel. The Saudis and the other normalizers have always supported the repression of the Palestine national liberation movement, and believe that peace deals with Israel will eventually quell Palestinian resistance and bring quiet and “stability” to the region.

Within the normalization context, the zionist entity aims to establish economic, security, and political dominance over neighboring Arab nations, while extending its influence to North African nations as well. All these countries are envisioned as expansive markets for global – predominantly U.S. – capital, perpetuating their dependency and disintegration under the auspices of sell-out regimes, especially that of the most reactionary and traitorous of them all, the criminal kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Although our Arab masses reject normalization, and have been resisting it in the Gulf and other Arab nations like Egypt and Jordan for decades, these deals – brokered by a U.S. government that pays lip service to “democracy,” but promotes all the dictators (who are also, unsurprisingly, the normalizers) in the region – also allow Israel to focus its military firepower on the Palestinian people, as the militaries of the submissive and surrendering Arab states are neutralized.

In addition, it is very clear that the current Palestinian Authority has lost all credibility to represent our struggle and challenge normalization. Instead, it plays the role of one of its many agents.

As for the Palestinian people and our allies everywhere: in a world shaped by this new reality of normalization, we continue to struggle and resist occupation and colonization every day. Israeli attacks against our people in the West Bank, Al Quds (Jerusalem), refugee camps, 1948 Palestine, and Gaza, as well as the criminalization of our resistance inside Palestine and our solidarity work in the West, especially the U.S., makes us more determined than ever to condemn and battle normalization and the Saudi Arabian normalizers, to reassert our narrative, and to reclaim our voice.

And to resist – by any means necessary – until we have defeated the zionist entity, the normalizers, and their U.S.-imperialist patrons; and until we have won the full liberation of all of historical Palestine, freedom for all Palestinian political prisoners, and the Right of Return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Until Liberation and Return,

U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)

October 3rd, 2023

#NoToNormalization