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By Kathy Kelly

“If they would just confirm to us that my brother is alive, if they would just let us see him, that’s all we want. But we can’t get anyone to give us any confirmation. My mother dies a hundred times every day. They don’t know what that is like.”

In July of 2018, an Amnesty International report entitled “God Knows If He’s Alive,” documented the plight of dozens of families in southern Yemen whose loved ones have been tortured, killed, or forcibly disappeared by Yemeni security forces reporting to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition that, with vital US support, has been bombarding and blockading famine and disease-ravaged Yemen for three brutal years. The disappearances, and torture, can sadly be laid at the doorstep of the United States.

One testimonial after another echoes the sentiments of a woman whose husband has been held incommunicado for more than two years. “Shouldn’t they be given a trial?” she asked. “Why else are there courts? They shouldn’t be disappeared this way – not only are we unable to visit them, we don’t even know if they are dead or alive.”

The report describes bureaucratic farces in which families beg for information about their loved ones’ whereabouts from Yemeni prosecutors and prison officials, but the families’ pleas for information are routinely met with silence or intimidation.

The families are appealing to an unelected Yemeni exile government whose president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, (when “elected” president in 2012, he was the only candidate) generally resides in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The UAE has, so far, supported Hadi’s claim to govern Yemen. However, the Prosecutor General of Hadi’s government, as well as other officials, told Amnesty International the government of Yemen has no control over operations “spearheaded by the UAE and implemented by the Yemeni forces it backs.”

When months and years pass and families of people who are missing still have no news about their loved ones, some try to communicate unofficially with prison guards or with former detainees who have been released from various detention sites. They repeatedly hear stories about torture of detainees and rumors about prisoners who died in custody.

The Amnesty report implicates UAE-backed local forces in Yemen, as well as the UAE military, in the crimes of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees. Of seven former or current detainees interviewed by Amnesty, five said they were subjected to these abuses. “All seven witnessed other detainees being tortured,” the report adds, “including one who said he saw a detainee held in a cell next to him being carried away in a body bag after he had been repeatedly tortured.”

In June 2017, Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press exposed a network of clandestine prisons operated by the UAE in Yemen. Their reports described ghastly torture inflicted on prisoners and noted that senior US military leaders knew about torture allegations. Yet, a year later, there has been no investigation of these allegations by the Yemeni government, by the UAE, or by the UAE’s most powerful ally in the Yemen war, the United States.

“It is shocking, to say the least,” the Amnesty report states, “that one year after a network of secret prisons operated by the UAE and the Yemeni forces it backs was exposed, these facilities continue to operate and that there has not been a serious investigation undertaken into credibly documented violations, including systemic torture in custody.” The Amnesty report calls on the US to “facilitate independent oversight, including by the US Congress, over US military or intelligence cooperation with Yemeni and UAE forces involved in detention activities in Yemen.” It further calls for investigating any involvement of US military or intelligence personnel in detention-related abuses in Yemen.

To date, the US continues selling weapons to the UAE and to its coalition partner, Saudi Arabia, despite several Congressional debates and a few increasingly close votes demanding a full or partial end to US weapons sales considering the terrible practices being carried out as part of the Yemen war.

Since March of 2015, a coalition of nine countries led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE and relying on crucial U.S. logistical aid, has bombarded Yemen while blockading its major port, despite Yemen’s status as one of the poorest countries in the world. Targeting transportation, electrical plants, sewage and sanitation facilities, schools, mosques, weddings and funerals, the vicious bombing has led to starvation, displacement, and the spread of disease including cholera.

On the same day that the Amnesty report was released, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman pardoned “all military men, who have taken part in the Operation Restoring Hope of their respective military and disciplinary penalties, in regard of some rules and disciplines.” It seems likely that the Amnesty report precipitated this royal decree.

Along with three countries in North Africa’s “Sahel” desert region, Yemen has been cited as part of the worst famine crisis in the 70-year history of the UN. In the past three years of aerial and naval attacks, Yemen’s key port of Hodeidah has remained partially or fully closed despite the country’s vital need for relief supplies. And, while Yemenis suffer the chaos and despair characteristic of war, the Saudis and UAE refer to the war as “Operation Restoring Hope.”

Many thousands of Yemenis, subjected to consistent bombing and threats of starvation and famine, have fled their homes. Many seek refuge out of Yemen. For instance, close to 500 Yemenis have traveled nearly 500 miles to reach a visa-free port on South Korea’s Jeju Island. On July 21, during an international phone call hosted by young friends in Afghanistan, listeners heard Kaia, a resident of Jeju Island, describe the “Hope School.” She explained how she and several other young people are trying to help welcome Yemenis now living in their village of Gangjeong. The young people are already committed to peacefully resisting U.S. and South Korean military destruction of their shoreline and ecosystem. Now, they have started an informal school so Yemeni and South Korean residents can learn from one another. Small groups gather for conversational exchanges translated from Arabic to English to Korean. Many South Koreans can recall, in their own familial history, that seven million Koreans fled Japanese occupation of their land. Their Korean forebears relied on hospitality from people in other lands. The Catholic Bishop of the Jeju diocese, Monsignor Kang Woo-il, called on Koreans to embrace Yemeni refugees, labeling it a crime against human morality to shut the door on refugees and migrants.

Kaia’s account of the newly launched school describes an effort that truthfully involves restoring hope. The cynical designation of Saudi and UAE led war in Yemen as “Operation Restoring Hope” creates an ugly smokescreen that distracts from the crucial need to investigate war crimes committed in Yemen today.

US citizens bear responsibility for the US government’s support of these crimes.
The Yemenis mean us no harm and have committed no crime against us. Congressional votes have come quite close, with bipartisan support, to ending US participation in and support for the Saudi and Emirati led Coalition war against Yemen. Ending arms sales to the UAE and Saudi monarchies, supported by both sides of the aisle, will signal to the UAE and Saudi Arabia the US will no longer assist their efforts to prolong war and siege in Yemen. On cue from the initiative and energy shown by young South Koreans, people in the US can and should organize campaigns to educate their communities, educational institutions, and media outlets about the plight of people in Yemen. Conscious of the nightmare faced by Yemenis whose husbands, brothers, fathers and sons have been disappeared or detained by shadowy military enforcers, US people can work toward implementing each recommendation in Amnesty’s devastating report.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

24 July 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/24/god-only-knows/

By Dr Elias Akleh

After 70 years of Israeli colonization of Palestine and discrimination against the Palestinians treating them as subhuman goyims, Israelis; the racist self-proclaimed holy people, light on all nations, and chosen by a racist god, have just crowned their racist ideology with a new law; Jewish Nation-State Law, that was passed last Thursday night of July 19th. This law defines the Zionist Israeli colony in Palestine as a state that belongs exclusively to the “Jewish people”. It totally disregards and cancels the citizenship of the indigenous Palestinians numbering more than 50% of all the recent population and whose roots in the land go back thousands of years in history even before the alleged existence of ancient Israel.

This law considers the “land of Israel” (all historical Palestine) as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, where they can fulfill their alleged cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination that is unique and exclusive to the Jewish people. It stipulates that al-Quds (known as Jerusalem), complete and united, as the capital of Israel. It grants automatic citizenship to world Jewry and encourages all Jews, and only Jews, to immigrate to Israel. To accommodate these new immigrants this law views the expansion and development of new Jewish settlements (colonies) as a national value. To make this Jewish Zionist Israel more unique and more exclusive than the rest of the world this law paints it with Hebrew language and Hebrew calendar as the official language and calendar of the state.

All these privileges for the Jews come on the expense and nullification of the rights of the indigenous Palestinians. This law violates international laws, UN resolutions, peace process and political agreements, and most importantly human morality. It totally negates the existence of Palestinians; the rightful owners of the land. It cancels the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their own homes and towns as guaranteed by international laws. It negates their history, their language, their culture, their religion and their humanity. What is most dangerous is that it paves the way for more ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and more theft of their land to build more Jewish colonies.

In short, this law is a flagrant discrimination against Palestinians. This Jewish discrimination has a long history that started 100 years ago and gradually grew in intensity until it culminated with this Jewish National-State Law. Israel does not allow Palestinians to buy or rent any land because the Israeli government claims the whole Palestine as Jewish owned granted by divine land deed. Palestinian towns are considered contaminants on sacred Jewish land that need to be extricated. Thus, Israeli governments pursued a policy of graduated demolition of Palestinian homes and villages. The recent demolition of Palestinian Khan el-Ahmar village last week is the latest example. Palestinian existence is tolerated as long as they are perceived as slaves; animal souls born in human bodies whose sole existence is to serve the god’s chosen people; the Jews.

Israel has finally admitted what all the world has known since the beginning of its illegal colonial establishment as the ultimate racist apartheid in the whole world. Israel is a colonial project based fundamentally on the racist religious faith of Judaism with a genocidal real estate racist god, who favors one alleged nation over the rest of his creations to be the light on nations and assigns them a promised piece of land as a homeland. Let us remember that Judaism is a religion not a nationality, and that “Jewish people” is just a religious farce, for modern Jews came from different nationalities, and Israeli Jews are Jews, who adopted the Zionist colonial ideology.

This law openly declares that Israel is an apartheid regime that is worse even than the old South African apartheid regime. It clearly exposes the fallacy that Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East for in actuality Israel has been the only racist and Jewish exclusive state in the Middle East. The region does have some Arab democratic regimes such as that of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt where government is elected in as a democratic fashion as the American elections. Unlike Israel that considers itself Jewish only, these Arab countries have citizens who are members of different religions and creeds and are from different ethnicities.

This Israeli law embodies the ugliest form of racism far worse than the Nazi’s motto of “Deutchland über alles” (Germany above all). Jews claim to be the victims of Nazi racism and hatred, yet they are the ultimate racists and haters of all goyims without any exception. An examining look at the Judaic holy books exposes their ugly racist character. Racism and hatred are not the exception in Israel but are the social and religious norm.

Racism is the most fundamental building block of Judaism/Zionism/Israel and is an intrinsic characteristic of the Zionist colony so much so that Zionist Jews do not just discriminate against all goyims; non-Jews, but they also discriminate against different factions of Jews among themselves, and segregate each faction from the others; Ashkenazim, Haredim, Sephardim, Mizrahim, and black African Jews, Oriental Jews, Russian Jews European and American Jews. This intra-racism is so strong that white Jewish Israelis regularly commit hate crimes against black Ethiopian Jewish Israelis and refuse to have them live in the same neighborhood or shop in the same grocery stores, or work in the same office, or even buried in the same grave yards. This racism is implanted early in the minds of their children in public schools, where black Jewish Israeli children are segregated from white Jewish Israeli children.

This intra-racism is not restricted to individual Jews, Jewish gangs, or certain Jewish Israeli neighborhoods or cities, but it is also a governmental policy adopted by governmental as well as civil and private institutions. The well-publicized cases of forcibly injecting Jewish African immigrant women with birth control on their first entry to the state, building walls isolating Ethiopian communities from white communities, the dumping in trash of donated black Jewish blood believing it is religiously unfit for white Jews, the theft of thousands of African Jewish new-born babies from their newly immigrated mothers claiming them as born dead while giving them to white Jewish families, among other similar cases of extreme intra-racism and discrimination are examples of racist policies perpetrated by the Zionist governments.

This racism and segregation breed hatred and violence that is encouraged in the Israeli educational system since kindergarten classes. Students are taught that the Jewish race is a special race, a holy race, light upon all nations; god’s chosen people, while the Others are defiled races, who contaminate this world and needs to be eliminated (destroyed) as one of the prerequisites for the Jewish Messiah to come down to earth. Israel’s god is a genocidal god, thus there is no wonder that present day Israel is also genocidal. Their history reveals this undeniable fact.

This racist apartheid law is the major premise in the Zionist colonial ideology. The Israelis did not dare to declare it in the past for fear of global reprimand. But now with the American support at its zenith with Trump’s administration declaring al-Quds (Jerusalem) as the Israeli capital, and with the timid objections from global communities, who seem to be unwilling to hold Israel responsible for its many crimes, Israeli leaders are emboldened to despise all international laws and to pursue their brutal racist colonial project of Greater Israel in the Middle East.

It is still not clear to many nations and their political leaders that the ultimate goal of this Greater Israel Project is not just to colonize and control only Palestine, but also the whole Middle Eastern region as its second phase, and finally the whole world as its ultimate goal. If we don’t put a stop to this satanic scheme now all our future children would become slaves for this racist terrorist state in the future.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab American from a Palestinian descent.

24 July 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/24/israel-the-ultimate-racist-colony/

By Baqir Sajjad Syed

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and Iran on Monday pledged to further deepen their military cooperation.

This was the upshot of Iranian Chief of General Staff Maj Gen Mohammad Bagheri’s visit to Pakistan.

The top Iranian commander’s three-day trip is being attached great importance because bilateral military exchanges between Pakistan and Iran have been very rare due to their mutual mistrust that kept them divided till recently.

Gen Bagheri visited caretaker Foreign Minister Abdullah Hussain Haroon at the foreign ministry and then went to the General Headquarters (GHQ) for a meeting with army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa.

The public affairs division of Pakistan military said Gen Bajwa underscored the need for intensification of military-to-military cooperation and noted that such cooperation would have a “positive impact on peace and security in the region”.

In related development, Afghan president assures Islamabad of enhanced border security on election day

Reciprocating Gen Bajwa’s offer, the visiting Iranian commander “pled­ged to keep working for better relations between the two brotherly countries”, said the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

Gen Bajwa is believed to be the architect of improvement in Pakistan-Iran ties particularly the military relations. Last year he had made an unprecedented visit to Iran setting the stage for improved cooperation. Later, Chief of the General Staff Lt Gen Bilal Akbar visited the country in June.

As the improvement in military relations was predicated on the basis of border security cooperation, discussion on border management was also on top of agenda during Gen Bagheri’s meeting with Gen Bajwa. Another key issue on the agenda of their meeting was regional security.

The journey towards improvement in military ties had not been free of irritants and problems but both the countries worked together to overcome those challenges and prevented nascent cooperation from falling apart, a diplomatic source said.

Recently the Iranian spymaster was in Islamabad to attend a rare meeting of the spy chiefs of the regional countries that involved Pakistan, Russia and China. The meeting reportedly focused on the threat posed by the growing footprint of the militant Islamic State group in Afghanistan.

Mr Haroon during his meeting with the Iranian commander expressed Pak­istan’s desire for strengthening cooperation with Iran for the benefit of both countries and ensuring peace and stability in the region. He also appreciated the Iranian leadership’s strong and consistent support on the issue of Kashmir.

Ghani condoles deaths in terror attacks

Meanwhile, Afghan Pre­sident Ashraf Ghani assured Pakistan of heightened security along the Pak-Afghan border during the July 25 general elections.

President Ghani exten­ded the assurance during a telephonic conversation with Gen Bajwa on Monday.

He also called caretaker Prime Minister Nasirul Mulk to condole the deaths in recent attacks on election rallies in Peshawar, Bannu, and Mastung.

President Ghani “assured COAS of enhanced border security measures on Afghan side as assistance to Pak security forces during election period,” military spokesman Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor tweeted.

Gen Bajwa thanked Mr Ghani for his concern, according to the ISPR.

Pakistan has long alleged that terrorists having sanctuaries in Afghanistan have been carrying out terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

Although Mastung attack was claimed by the militant Islamic State, Daesh, and its local affiliate Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, other attacks are believed to have been carried out by Afghanistan-based TTP and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. It is feared that the two terrorist groups were planning further attacks.

Earlier during the 2014 presidential elections in Afghanistan, Pakistan Army had also undertaken special border security arrangements for smooth conduct of polling process. On the elections day, Pakistan had increased patrols along the border areas, besides stepping up aerial surveillance.

In his conversation with caretaker PM Mulk, President Ghani “expressed deep sorrow and sympathy on the tragic loss of precious lives”, the PM Office said in a statement.

The two countries agreed to work together to defeat the common enemies for peace and security in the region, the statement added.

While talking to Mr Ghani, Mr Mulk reaffirmed caretaker government’s commitment to hold the general elections on time. He said the attacks by the enemies were aimed at derailing the democratic process in Pakistan. “Such actions would not deter government’s resolve,” he vowed.

Published in Dawn, July 17th , 2018

Source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1420539/pakistan-iran-vow-to-improve-military-ties

Dear friends,

Big news! The General Convention of the Episcopal Church, with more than 3 million members, just voted to divest from companies involved in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights!

The Episcopal Peace Fellowship Palestine Israel Network (EPF PIN) put in amazing work over many years to make the Episcopal Church the 10th Christian denomination in the US to take economic action for justice in Palestine. Thanks in large part to their mobilization, the church also passed ground-breaking resolutions:

• Asserting the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination

• Condemning Israel’s violence against protesters in Gaza

• Calling on the US government to reinstate funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)

• Supporting the rights of Palestinian children

• Demanding equal access to Jerusalem and opposing Trump’s move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

I was proud to be on the ground with USCPR at the General Convention supporting EPF PIN. So many other Palestine solidarity groups were there, too!

We were all working together to organize powerful testimonies (like this one from FOSNA’s Tarek Abuata) from Palestinian refugees, students, elders, clergy, and others,  strategize outreach, and share why the church taking economic action is so important.

We’ve come a long way. In 2014, the Presbyterian Church (USA) became the first mainline church to divest from companies profiting from the occupation and just last month, they voted in ten pro-Palestine resolutions.

Now, divesting from Israel’s abuses of Palestinians’ rights is the norm – even in institutions like the Episcopal Church, which had previously voted down such measures more than once.

As icing on the cake, we recently learned that the Quaker Friends Fiduciary Corporation – which has more than $400 million in holdings and has already divested from Hewlett Packard, Veolia, and Caterpillar – will now screen out all companies contributing to the occupation of Palestine and other occupations around the world.

These institutional shifts are a sign of changing times, and confirmation that years of hard work are producing results. The movement’s strategy to mainstream the struggle for Palestinian rights is paying off. Folks are understanding that being progressive means standing with Palestine!

We put a lot into supporting church divestment efforts for justice in Palestine, including sending staff to big annual meetings like this year’s Presbyterian and Episcopalian assemblies, sharing lessons learned, supporting church groups, and putting together delegations of Palestinians and allies to give powerful testimonies at assemblies.

As we celebrate, we are mindful of the reason these milestones matter: Israel’s continued violence, oppression, discrimination, and exile of the Palestinian people everywhere, every day. This win reminds us of our power, and the necessity to continue working until the Palestinian people achieve full freedom, justice, and equality.

ANNA BALTZER
Director of Organizing & Advocacy

P.S. Dear friends, please support this work by making a tax-deductible donation, at any amount right for you, so that we can continue to help make possible these historic victories with our partners. Your support today will lead to more wins and get us closer to our shared goal of freedom, justice, and equality for Palestinians.

14 July 2018

Dear Friends and Family,

I am due to join the al-Awda (The Return) Freedom Flotilla to Gaza this week on its last leg from Europe to Gaza. She has started her journey from Norway on the 70 Anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba and this journey is highly symbolic. The Nakba is the Arabic word for Catastrophe which started in 1948 when 50% of the population of Palestine was driven out to live in refugee camps and Palestine was erased from the map of the world. Please look at the links about the Awda and the other Freedom Flotilla she is joining.

https://sgf.freedomflotilla.org/news/al-awda-freedom-flotilla

https://jfp.freedomflotilla.org/

I am highly honoured to be invited on board. It is important to explain to you why I chose to do this. Among the queries is why I have overstepped my role as a doctor to do this. My answer is simple. A doctor, a surgeon is a human being with a conscience and a compassionate heart, much more than just a skilled technician. The very fact that I can do operations and fix broken bones will not stop me from losing my humanity. A robot might turn the other way, but a child of God does not.

Most of you know that I am going to seventy come the end of the year and I would like to make this my birthday present to the people of Gaza and Palestine. Please read my statement below which will soon be included in the Freedom Flotilla website. You will know from what I wrote that even if Awda is kidnapped and all of us are put in prison, it is not a failed mission. The Palestinians will know that we have not forgotten them, and that we, like them, live out our lives with hope and love with faithfulness.

Statement:

“When invited to come on board Al-Awda, the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, I know I must join them. This summer marks the thirty-sixth year of my journey with the Palestinians. It began in 1982 when as an ignorant Pro-Israel Christian doctor I first stepped foot as a volunteer surgeon in Gaza Hospital in Beirut’s Sabra Shatilla Palestinian refugee camp. There I fell in love passionately with a generous, kind, honest and gentle people – the Palestinians. They were forced out of Palestine in 1948, and found themselves refugees. Despite the dispossession, persecution and injustice they remained human. About 3 weeks after my arrival, more than three thousand of them were cruelly massacred. My heart was broken and trampled on, and would have remained dead and buried in the rubble of their bulldozed homes. But the survivors even while burying their own loved ones nurtured me back to life with their tears and love. The children filled with courage, hope and dignity inspired me and gave me strength to walk on with them. “We are not afraid Doctora come with us”. It is now 70 years since the Palestinian Nakba and Diaspora in 1948. When will their journey home begin? Today, six million Palestinians dispersed in various refugee camps are denied the right of return to their ancestral Palestine; the other six million lived under occupation in Gaza and West Bank.  For twelve years, two million Palestinians have been imprisoned under a brutal land and sea military blockade in Gaza. During this time there were three major military assaults where Gaza was relentlessly bombed for weeks. Recently, since 30 March 2018, unarmed Gaza demonstrators calling for the Right of Return are shot at with high grade military assault rifles leaving more than 124 dead and 13,000 severely wounded with hundreds of amputees and potential amputees. The Flotilla brings hope to the besieged Palestinians. They are praying for us in their mosques and churches in the Gaza Strip. They know we are making this journey for them. Even if we are to be abducted, imprisoned and deported, may we remain faithful in solidarity and love for the people of Palestine and Gaza.

Dr Swee Ang, Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon; author From Beirut to Jerusalem.
July 2018”

Please remember Palestine and the people of Gaza, and all on board the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.

Love you all and God bless
Swee

By Robert J. Burrowes

While the world watched and waited with bated breath for the outcome of the substantial global effort – involving over 100 cave divers from various countries, 1,000 members of the Thai Army and 10,000 others in various roles – to rescue a team of 12 young football players and their coach, who were trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand for 17 days, 850,000 children were killed by human adults in other parts of the world, many of them simply starved to death in Yemen or other parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

But other children were killed in ritual sacrifice, many children were killed after being sexually trafficked, raped and tortured, many were killed in wars (including in Yemen), many were killed while living under military occupation, many died as child soldiers or while working as slave laborers, and vast numbers of other children suffered violence in a myriad other forms ranging from violence (including sexual violation) inflicted in the family home to lives of poverty, homelessness and misery in wealthy industrialized countries or as refugees fleeing conflict zones. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.

Why did the world’s corporate media highlight the flooded Thai cave story so graphically and why do so many ordinary people respond with such interest – meaning genuine emotional engagement – in this story? But not the others just mentioned?

And what does this tell us about human psychology and geopolitics?

Needless to say, a great deal.

During the Thai cave drama, major corporate media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the BBC, were routinely releasing ‘breaking news’ updates on the status of the rescue effort. At high points in the drama, reports on this issue were overshadowing major political and other stories of the day. At the same time, there were no ‘breaking news’ stories on any of the many myriad forms of violence against children, which were (and are still) killing 50,000 children each day.

So why the corporate media interest in this essentially local (Thai) story about a group of 12 children trapped in a cave? And why did it attract so much support, including foreign cave divers, engineers and medics as well as technology billionaire Elon Musk, who flew in to investigate rescue options and assist with the rescue effort. They and their equivalents are certainly not flying in to rescue children in a vast number of other contexts, including where the provision of simple, nourishing meals and clean water would do wonders.

Well, in essence, the story was a great one for the corporate media, simply because it reported on something of little consequence to those not immediately impacted and enabled the media to garner attention for itself and other (western) ‘heroes’ drawn into the story while engaging in its usual practice of distracting us from what really matters. And it was an easy story to sell simply because the media could use a wide range of safe emotional triggers to draw people into the dramatized story without simultaneously raising difficult questions about the (appalling) state of the world and responsibility for it.

In simple language: like sports events and other forms of entertainment, the cave rescue provided a safely contained time and space for people to feel emotionally engaged in (this case) a real-life drama (with feelings like fear and relief allowed an outlet) while carefully reinforcing their unconscious feeling of powerlessness to do anything about it and their acceptance of this. This is why it was so important that expert rescue efforts were highlighted: the key media message was that ‘there is nothing you can do’.

Of course, in this context, this was largely true. The problem is that the corporate media coverage wasn’t aimed at this context. It was aimed at all those other contexts which it wasn’t even discussing, let alone highlighting: the vast range of issues – including the many ongoing wars and endless military violence, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and innumerable threats to our biosphere posed by such activities as rainforest destruction, the refugee crisis, military occupations, as well as the ongoing violence against children in so many contexts as touched on above – that need a great deal of our attention but for which the elite uses its corporate media to distract us and reinforce our sense of powerlessness.

Another aspect of the story was the way in which it highlighted the ‘accidental’ nature of the incident: no one was really responsible, even the hapless coach who was just trying to give his young players an interesting excursion and whom, according to reports, none of the parents blamed.

By focusing on the logistical details of the story (the distance into the cave, the narrowness of certain passages, rescue possibilities, equipment, the threat of monsoon rains…), without attributing blame, the media could reinforce its endless message that ‘no-one’ is responsible for the state of the world. Hence, no individual and no organization is responsible for doing anything either. Again, this message is designed to deepen a sense of powerlessness and to make people disinclined to act: to make them powerless observers rather than active participants in their own fate.

As an aside, of course, it should be noted that in those contexts where it serves elite interests to attribute blame, it certainly does so. Hence, elites might contrive to blame Muslims, Russians, Palestinians or the other latest target (depending on the context) for some problem. However, in these contexts, the story of ‘blame’ is framed to ensure that elites have maximum opportunity to act as they wish (often militarily) while (again) engendering a sense of powerlessness among the rest of us.

The tragedy of the Thai cave incident is that one man died and many boys spent 17 days in a situation in which they were no doubt terrified and suffering genuine physical privation. But elite media cynically used the event to distract us from vitally important issues, including ongoing grotesque violence against children in a large number of contexts, and to reinforce ‘The Delusion “I Am Not Responsible”’.

In short, while the 12 boys and their coach were rescued after 17 days trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand which required a sophisticated and expensive international effort, during the same period around the world, 850,000 children were killed by human adults. Even in Thailand during this 17-day period, apart from those children violated and killed as a result of sex trafficking and other violence, 119 children drowned (at the rate of seven each day). See ‘Swim Safe: Preventing Child Drowning’. Obviously, these children were ignored because there was no profit in reporting their plight and helping to mobilize an international effort to save them.

So what can we do?

Well, for a start, we can boycott the corporate media and certainly not spend any money on it. What little truth it contains is usually of even less value (and probably gets barely beyond a good sports report). Instead, invest any money you previously spent on the corporate media by supporting progressive news outlets. They might not have reported events in relation to the Thai cave rescue but they do report on the ongoing violence inflicted on children in more grotesque circumstances such as the war in Yemen. They will also report and analyze important global events from a truthful and life-enhancing perspective and will often offer strategies for your engaged involvement.

If you want to understand why most people are suckered by the corporate media, whose primary function is to distract and disempower us, you will get a clear sense from reading how adults distract and disempower children in the name of ‘socialization’. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you want to nurture children to be powerful agents of change who will have no trouble resisting attempts (whether by the corporate media or any other elite agent) to distract and disempower them, you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you are easily conned yourself, you will vastly enhance your capacity to discriminate and focus on what matters by ‘Putting Feelings First’ which will, among other things, restore your conscience, intuition and ‘truth register’, vital mental functions suppressed in most people.

You are also welcome to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which maps out a fifteen-year strategy for creating a peaceful, just and sustainable world community so that all children (and everyone else) has an ecologically viable planet on which to live.

And for the vast range of other manifestations of violence against children touched on above, you might consider using Gandhian nonviolent strategy in any context of particular concern to you. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

You might also consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which explicitly identifies the role of the corporate media, among many other elite agencies, in promoting violence.

Am I pleased that the 12 children and their coach in Thailand were rescued? Of course I am. I just wish that an equivalent effort was being made to rescue each of the 50,000 children we will kill today, tomorrow, the next day and the day after that….

11 July 2018

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence.

By Peter Koenig

In June 2018 alone, more than 500 refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Their boatswere refused access to land in either Malta, or Italy. They were force-driven back by gun-boats to the North African shores they came from, mostly Libya, but many boats capsized and countless refugees didn’t make it.

These are de facto murders, high crimes against humanity, committed by the very European Union. The same “leaders” (criminals, rather), whose forebears are known to have raped, exploited, tortured,ravaged peoples and their lands of Asia, Africa, Latin America over the past 1000 years of abject colonization. Europeans have it in their genes – to be inhuman.This can possibly be extended to the ‘superior’ greedy white race in general. At least to those who make it to political or corporate high office in the formidable EU or exceptional US, or to those who appoint themselves into the European Commission. We should call them “The Heartless Bunch”.

This is the so-called West, now led by the United States of America – basically the British empire transplanted across the Atlantic, where they felt safer between two shining seas, than as a rickety island in the Atlantic, just in front of the enormous, contiguous land mass called Eurasia.The Old Continent, alias Europe, was given by the new trans-Atlantic empire, the new masters of the universe, a subservient role.And that was in the making for at least the last 100 years, when the new empire started weakening Europe, with two World Wars.

Today’s European (EU) leaders are puppets put in place by the Atlantist elites, to make sure that the rather educated Europeans do not go on the barricades, that they are debilitated regularly by free market corporatism creating unemployment, taking their hard worked-for social safety nets away, saturating them with fake news – and gradually oppressing them with growing police states, with a massive militarization – and finally using the articulately planned flood of refugees from the very US-EU-NATO destroyed countries – destroyed economically and by wars – as a further destabilizing weapon. Greece should serve as a vivid example of what’s really going on and is planned, starting with “inferior” southern EU states, those bordering on the strategic and economically important sea way – the Mediterranean Sea.

You think I’m crazy? – Start thinking again and connect the dots.

The refugee death toll in the Med-Sea in 2017 was about 3,200, 40% down from 2016, and more than 600 up to end of April 2018, and another more than 500 in June. This figure is bound to increase drastically, given the European closed-border policy – and more. The EU is contracting among others, the Libyan Coast Guard with gun boats to chase refugee vessels back to the Libyan shores, many sink – and saving those thrown into the sea is ‘forbidden’ – they are simply left to die. That’s the rule. Malta, a little island-appendix to Brussels, but important as a refugee transit, has issued strict bans on private fishing boats and NGOs trying to rescue refugees.

As a consequence, the by now well-known German NGO “Lifeline” boat with 234rescued refugees and migrants on board from Africa and the Middle East – miserably poor, sick, desperate people – struggling for sheer survival, many with small kids, who wanted nothing more than their children to have a better life – was rejected by Malta, turned back into the sea, under guidance of NATO and EU hired military-type private contractor gun-boats.Eventually Portugal offered her safe shores for the refugees. Malta has a Partnership for Peace (PfP) Agreement with NATO, i.e. obeys NATO orders. NATO, a killer organization, has, of course, not a shred of humanity in its structure, nor in the blood of the people at its helm – anywhere in the world.

Imagine – in this context, an EU summit took place at the end of June 2018 to “arrange” and agree on howtohandle the refugee crisis in the future, in other swords, how to keep them out of Europe. None of the countries, other than Germany, were even considering accepting some of these poor souls out of sheer humanitarian reasons, to give them shelter, food and medication. The discussion even considered where to build a wall – yes, fences were discussed to keep them out – Europe a xenophobic free-port for the rich, acting in questions of migration as a carbon copy of Trump. They deserve each other, Trump and Brussels, trade wars not withstanding – let them shred each other to pieces.

Well, this almost happened during, before and after the now-called “mini-summit”, with Madame Merkel almost losing her Chancellor’sjob, as she, against all odds, represented the most humanitarian view of all the 28 neolibs.This did not go down well with her partner party, the ultra-conservative Bavarian CSU. Calls for her resignation abounded. The GermanInterior Minister, Horst Seehofer, was about to resign over Merkel’s alleged refugee ‘generosity’ – in which case the highly fragile right-left coalition would have collapsed – and who knows how Germany may have continued to govern. Perhaps new elections would have had to be called, and then only god knows what might have happened. The empire could not allow this uncertainty to prevail, because Washington needs Germany as the chief-slave driver to lead Europe into total disarray and serfdom. It worked. Germany is alive and saved – and ticking.

Instead, the European refugee / migrant policy is in shambles. The EU are literally out to kill refugees, as a means of dissuasion? – Mass-murder as a means of discouraging the desperate toseek shelter in those very countries that were instrumental in destroying their livelihoods, their families, their towns, theirinfrastructure, their education and health facilities – their youth? Generations of young Middle Eastern and African people are gone, destroyed.

Did these high-ranking EU officials in Brussels mention their own huge responsibilityforthe refugeefloods with one single word? – No, of course not. Not with one breath. Has the conscience in one single head of these fake, neolibs-neonazis, as it were, self-serving EU heads of state been awakened by this very fact of guilt for what they are to confront? – Has it caused sleepless nights? I doubt it. They are far from this level of human compassion, they are monsters.

Then, there was and is Italy, with her strange new coalition, a coalition of convenience. The leftish 5-Star Movement in alliance with the right-wing Lega Norte, selling their human conscience to be able to reign, giving away their responsibility for migration to the xenophobic, narcissistic, and yes, close to fascist Lega Norte – which is adamant not to receive migrants. They would boycott any result that would force Italy to take in refugees, or even build border transit camps. In the end, they reached a toothless agreement; a non-agreement, rather; an accord that obliged none of the parties to do anything. Everything is voluntary. Period. And Macron said that this was the best refugee summit the EU ever had. So much for dismal brainlessness.

All was voluntary. The only agreement they could book for themselves, is to build refugee camps in North African countries for the shipped-back survivors. Fortunately, every North African country, from Egypt to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco said no. Having seen what happened in such literal slave camps in Libya, they had at least the compassion for these desperate human beings to prevent this from reoccurring.Compassion, a term, a feeling orsensation, the Europeans are devoid of.

However, no Israeli- Trump- Brussels-type wall or barbed-wire fence will keep the desperate in their economically, or by war, or western terrorism destroyed countries. The west, and only the west, is responsible for the endless destructive chaos, torture and lawlessness in these nations that the west wants todominate, for myriad reasons – to steal their energy, minerals; for their strategic location, and finally on the way to total fullspectrum world hegemony. This, the west will notachieve. That’s for sure. Evil will not prevail in the long run. Darkness will eventually cede to light. That’s the way nature works. But on its way to collapse, Evil will maim and kill millions of lives. Countless children will have no future, no parents, no education, no health services, no drinking water. They will be made toslaves as a means for their survival, to be raped and exploited or eventually killed. The European crime is of infinite dimension and nobody sees it, let alone stops it.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst.

7 July 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/07/mediterranean-sea-the-largest-graveyard-in-modern-history/

By Eric Zuesse

And then, by the time of December of 2012, Obama’s team were relying mainly on Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch to lead the tens of thousands of the U.S.-Saudi alliance’s boots-on-the ground ‘moderate rebels’ in this overthrow-Assad war, fighters who have actually been fundamentalist Sunnis recruited from all over the world to come to Syria in order to replace the secular President of Syria, the Alawite Shiite, Assad. Propaganda in the U.S. portrays U.S. Government policy as being driven by a concern for the welfare of the Syrian people: to ‘protect their human rights’ — not to overthrow a government that refuses to cooperate with U.S. oil companies and other corporate interests in the U.S.But even with the anti-Obama Donald Trump in the White House, there has been nothing really new about any of this U.S. Government scam, any of this attempted-but-never-publicly-acknowledged conquest against the Syrian people. The U.S. Government — along with the U.S.-aristocracy-allied fundamentalist Sunni Saud family, the world’s wealthiest family, who own Saudi Arabia, and who finance the fundamentalist-Sunni Al Qaeda and similar Sunni jihadist organizations — has been trying ever since 1949 to control Syria, and still tries. The main difference between now and 1949 is that the Saud family have become more brazen about conquest than they were, back in 1949, when they had wanted merely that the Syrian Government approve an American-built pipeline for their oil to go into Europe. In the present day, the Sauds are openly at war against Shiites everywhere, even inside Saudi Arabia itself, and are bombing the hell out of the Shiite (Houthi) areas of Yemen, basically trying to take over the entire Middle East, and to destroy Iran, which is the leading Shiite country. The U.S. is allied with the Sauds in all of this.

On 30 March 1949, the CIA, in a coup planned by James Hugh Keeley Jr. and Miles Copeland Jr., replaced the democratically elected Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli, replaced him with France’s stooge, General Husni al-Za’im, who displeased King Saud of Saudi Arabia, and so got overthrown and killed on 14 August 1949, by a different France-stooge General, Sami al-Hinnawi. Za’im had left his mark on Syria, however: “The pro-Western Za’im remained in power for three months — long enough to grant [the Saudi-American] Aramco’s Tapline concession to pipe Saudi oil to the Mediterranean.” But Hinnawi pleased the CIA and Sauds even more than Za’im did, so got the Presidency, and Za’im simply got killed. (The CIA and the Saud family are very demanding of their stooges.)

In December 1949, the CIA, in a coup planned by Miles Copeland (Syria’s third and final coup that year), carried out the desire of King Saud, and installed as Syria’s leader, Adib Shishakli. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia implemented a new policy towards Syria by giving financial support amounting to six million dollars.” Shishakli’s barbarism was so great that four years later, Syria’s generals formed the secular Ba’ath Party and on 6 September 1955, restored to power Syria’s democratically elected President, Quwatli, who in 1958 joined Syria into the United Arab Republic, which lasted till 1971. However, while Quwatli was still Syria’s President, the CIA, yet again, in 1957, tried to oust him via a coup, but that coup-attempt had to be called-off.

A permanent result of that brazen attempt in 1957 was to cause Syria to sever relations with the U.S.

; so, from that time forward, the U.S. regime works in Syria mainly by its agents and allies, such as King Saud who owns Saudi Arabia, and Emir Thani who owns Qatar. Both families are fundamentalist Sunni Arabs — the Saud family being Al Qaeda’s main financial backer, and the Thani family being the Muslim Brotherhood’s main financial backer. (Both Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood are fundamentalist Sunni organizations, whereas Syria, at least after 1957, is strongly secular, anti-sectarian.) But now that King Saud wants to overthrow Emir Thani and take Qatar, and is trying to blockade Qatar, the U.S. regime has stayed with King Saud, but not to such an extent as to jeopardize Emir Thani’s willingness to host in Qatar America’s biggest Middle Eastern military base, Al Udeid Air Base, which the Thanis see as essential to their staying in power. So: the U.S., under Donald Trump, is mildly supportive of King Saud’s aggressions against Qatar, but not to such an extent as to withdraw from Al Udeid.As a result of the Sunni Sauds’ attacks against the Sunni Thanis, the Thanis have turned away from the Sauds, who hate Iran and all Shiites. Thus, the Thanis now are non-partisan in the Sauds’ longstanding efforts to conquer Iran and other Shiite-majority areas; the Thanis have become more pan-Arabic than when they were allied with the Sauds; they’re no longer dedicated to war against Shia. They are no longer allies of the Sauds against Shia.

The U.N. ‘peace’ talks on Syria are between Syria’s Government and Saudi Arabia’s Government, not between Syria’s Government and any authentically representative native Syrians versus the Syrian Government. The Saud family selected the “High Negotiations Committee” who are negotiating against Syria’s Government there, as  ‘representatives’ of ‘the opposition’. Even the U.S. subscription-only GlobalSecurity.org site admits “The High Negotiations Committee is a Saudi-backed coalition of Syrian opposition groups. The High Negotiations Committee (HNC) was created in Saudi Arabia in December 2015.”

Non-sectarian — even secular — Syria is the odd-man-out, insisting on its own national sovereignty, and secularism, no matter what, and willing to do whatever they must in order to maintain their independence. And the majority of the Syrian people thus support Assad (55% did, even at the very height of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings throughout the Arab world), and 82% of Syrians blame the U.S. Government for the presence of ISIS and other jihadists in their country.

This is history. What can the U.S. regime credibly present to the world as being justification for continuing its decades-long effort to conquer Syria? The U.S. regime condemns Syria’s non-sectarian Government for ‘humanitaian violations’ fighting against the U.S.-Saudi imported terrorists who are trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government. The U.S. has thousands of its own troops in their invasion and military occupation of Syria, and condemns Assad for leading the fight against that invasion-occupation.

As regards Ukraine, you can either see this terrific video-compilation documenting how Obama perpetrated a bloody coup which in February 2014 overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, or you can read my “Are Michael Isikoff And David Corn CIA Agents?” which documents the lies by those two ‘investigative journalists’, who spread the falsehoods about Ukraine that the U.S. aristocracy want to be spread against Russia, and which lies go against the realities that that video shows.

Incidentally, on 10 February 2017, in the video shown here, Isikoff interviewed Bashar al-Assad, who took his stenographed transmission of quite possibly fabricated ‘evidence’ against Assad, and turned it instead against the regime whose agent Isikoff so clearly does represent.

Obama’s coup destroyed Ukraine. The World Happiness Reports, from the U.N. and Columbia University, have been published for 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018. Each year’s report covers, generally speaking, the surveys that were done worldwide during the preceding year. The American coup in Ukraine occurred in February 2014. So, the only pre-coup survey done was the 2013 publication, which covered the year 2012. As internationally ranked for happiness by the World Happiness Report, Ukraine went from #87 out of 156 nations, or 87/156 (the bottom 45%) in 2013, to 111/138 (the bottom 20%) in 2015, to 123/157 (the bottom 22%) in 2016, to 132/155 (the bottom 15%) in 2017, to 138/155 (the bottom 12%) in 2018. So: before the coup, Ukraine was in the worst 45%, but by 2018 it reached the worst 12%. That’s an enormous plunge. Barack Obama wanted the coup, he got it, and it destroyed Ukraine. The U.S. claims to be trying to save Ukraine from Russia, but the reality is the exact opposite: that the U.S. destroyed Ukraine in order to become enabled to bring Ukraine into NATO and position U.S. nuclear missiles less than ten minutes flight-time from Moscow. Ukrainians have every reason to hate the U.S. Government, for what it did to them. Like what it did to Afghans, and Iraqis, and Yemenese, and Hondurans — and Chileans, and Guatemalans, and so forth. And like what it’s doing to anyone who wants to avoid World War III — including the American people, who nominally (but not really) are represented by this rapacious Government, controlled by this rapacious aristocracy.

So: the documentation is unequivocally clear, that the U.S. Government lies shamelessly about both Syria and Ukraine — and Russia, and Iran, and much else.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

7 July 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/07/has-the-u-s-government-been-lying-about-syria-about-ukraine/

By Peter Koenig

During the recent meeting in Caracas of the Venezuelan Presidential Economic Advisory Commission, in mid-June 2018, President Maduro said something extremely interesting, but also extremely disturbing – nonetheless highly important for the region to be aware of. Mr. Maduro mentioned Yugoslavia, the foreign induced local conflicts, the breakup and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, starting with the “Ten Days War” on Slovenia in 1991, the Croatian War (1991-95); the Bosnia War (1992-95); the Kosovo War (1998-99), culminating with the Clinton induced 69-day NATO bombing of Kosovo, under then European NATO leader Wesley Clark (today the Repentant – in retrospect it’s easy to be sorry), pretending to save the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian Milosevic’s atrocities. How Milosevic served as a patsy for the imperial forces is another story.

All of this would not have been possible without a decade long preparation by several Fifth Columns infiltrated and trained in and outside of Yugoslavia, the only country in Europe that in the 1980s and 90s flourished, with general wellbeing above that of the average Europeans, who were suffering recessions and increasing inequality, the beginning of xenophobia in the age of nascent neoliberalism. There was no extreme poverty in Yugoslavia, but prosperity without excesses for everybody. There was economic growth under a loose Mao-model socialism which could, of course, not be allowedto persist, lest it might serve the world as an example. Besides – the breakup of Yugoslavia into chaos was needed to create mini-states that are in conflict with each other, some of them still today, and that could be ‘accommodated’ against a hefty ‘fee’, of course, to accept the installation of NATO bases – ever an inch closer to Moscow’s door step.

Well, Mr. Maduro saw and sees it clearly. History repeats itself all too often, especially when it comes in the form of western neoliberal-neofascist atrocities, as people’s memories are dulled with lie-propaganda. In fact, there is hardly any real news, only ‘fake news’ in the western mainstream media. Mr. Maduro envisions that “their” plan for Latin America is similar to what “they” did to Yugoslavia. He is probably right. All signs point into this direction.

A pact between Colombia and NATO, a so-called “Security Cooperation Agreement” was first signed in June 2013 – but prepared way before. Records of first communications to this effect, by Juan Manual Santos, then President of Columbia – and Peace Laureate in 2016 for his traitorous Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and FARC (vaya-vaya! Doesn’t this speak volumes by itself?), can be traced back to the early 2012.

President Hugo Chavez was the first one to warn his Latin American partners of the imminent clandestine infiltration of NATO into South America. Nobody listened. Today it’s a fact – too late to fight against. NATO troops are occupying gradually all seven American military bases in Colombia. They are just simply converting from US to NATO bases – sounds more palatable than US bases – for sure. In the minds of unfortunately still most uninformed or mal-informed people, NATO stands for security. NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – in South America, what an oxymoron! – Well, it is the same ‘security’ farce as is NATO in Afghanistan and bombing the Middle East.

Venezuela is full with Fifth Columnists. They are the ones that facilitate the highly speculative and inflationary manipulation from Miami of the black-market US dollar rate in the streets of Caracas; they are the ones that emulate the food shortages in Chile 1973, successfully disappearing duly paid-for imported merchandise, mostly food and medical supplies, ending up as smuggle-ware in Colombia, leaving empty supermarket shelves in Venezuela. All meant to instigate people to stand up against their government.

So far, this strategy has failed bitterly. On 20 May 2018, President Maduro has been overwhelmingly re-elected, under the most internationally observed elections the world has ever experienced – and the result was “the cleanest, most democratic elections we have witnessed in our history of worldwide 92 election observations” – so the US-based Carter Institute.

Yet, the Fifth Columnists are relentless. Worldwide. They are immersed in the government apparatus, institutions, military, police – even Parliament – and very important in the financial system, possible in the central bank. They “allow”, or rather promote, the manipulation of the US-dollar black market, causing sky-rocketing inflation and lack of food and medicine on supermarket shelves. They disrupt electricity, internet and water services. The approach is similar in every country that refuses to bend to the empire’s dictate. In Russia, Iran, China, Syria, South Sudan, possibly even in Cuba – they are in control of the financial system – that’s also how they are easily being financed, through the dollar-based monetary fraud of the west, to which most countries still have some links – fortunately every day less.

Take Russia, the Central Bank is still largely run by the Fifth Columnists, whose ‘chief’ is Putin’s just recently re-appointed Prime-Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, an arch-Atlantist. The structure of the Russian Central Bank is even today mainly a remnant of the Russian Reserve Bank, designed by the FED after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the help of the UN-masked Bretton Woods crooks, the IMF, World Bank.

Similarly, part of the masked international promoters of instability, are the Bretton Woods regional associates, the so-called regional development banks, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), African Development Bank (AfDB) and their sub-regional cohorts. In the nineties, the Gang was joined by WTO – the World Trade Organization. And here they are, the world’s three most hated international UN-backed financial and trade organizations, IMF, World Bank and WTO. All three are promoting fundamentalist “free-marketeering” across the globe, especially throughout the southern hemisphere (though Greece and southern Europe do not escape), indebting and enslaving countries to the western corporate oligarchs. All well-structured to control the world’s financial system – so as to march towards world hegemony of a One World Global Economy. We are almost there, though not quite yet. There is always hope. Man’s last shred to hang on to life is HOPE. And only Man can translate hope into reality. So, as long as we have life, it’s not too late.

Why is it so difficult, say – impossible to get rid of them, the Fifth Columnists, the vermin of any unaligned political system? – Why did President Putin re-assign Medvedev as his PM? – Mr. Putin knows that he supports a network of Atlantist oligarchs that seek nothing more than to ‘putsch’ him, Mr. Putin – and ultimately to destroy the rather egalitarian, though capitalist-based, economic system Russia has enjoyed for the last almost 20 years – becoming self-sufficient in agriculture, food, industry, high-tech science, pharmaceuticals. – Russia has developed herself into an exemplary “Resistance Economy”, ready to be emulated by any western-named ‘rogue’ state that is sick and tired of the Empires boots and bombs and forced ‘democracies’ through ‘regime change’.

There are many western countries that just wait for a leader – one that moves head-on. Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, are shining examples. They are gradually escaping the yoke of the dollar-dominated western economy.

So, why are countries like Russia, Iran and maybe Venezuela afraid to get rid of their Fifth Columnists? For fear of a civil war, of a blood bath? Yes, we have seen the violent unrest they caused in preparation of the two major democratic elections in Venezuela in the last 12 months, the National Constituent Assembly (30July 2017) and the Presidential Elections on 20 May 2018, when altogether close to 200 people died. The media immediately blamed the death on police and military oppression and violence – but the only armed protesters were those armed and funded by Washington, and responsible for more than 80% of the death. Chavistas cheered for their Government with their bare fists.

The question remains in the room – why does Mr. Putin not get rid of them, the Fifth Columnists? – Would they cause a civil, war? –  It seems to me they wouldn’t have sufficient supporters in Russia, but they could disrupt the internal economy, as the Russian internal financial systems – especially private banking – is still in the hands of these Atlantists. They are also in China, but it appears that President Xi Jinping has better control of them.

How about Iran? Why are they still able to hold on to and fight for ‘western deals’, i.e. the upholding of the Nuclear Deal that Trump has stepped out from and now is sanctioning Iran ‘with the most severe sanctions the world has ever seen’ – sounding similar to what he said to Mr. Kim Jong-un, the ‘Little Rocket Man’, with whom Trump then made peace a few weeks later? – Or something like it. One never knows with the Donald, what’s the meaning of Trump’s trumpeting, other than screwing up alliances and creating physical and sociopsychological chaos. He is also threatening European corporations, mostly oil companies, with heavy sanctions if they dare maintaining their contracts with Iran.

Many cave in. Among them, the French-UK owned Total, Italy’s Eni and Saras, Spain’s Repsol and Greece’s Hellenic Petroleum. In the case of Total, according to the director of the Venezuelan branch, instead of filling their contracts with US-“fracking” oil, as Trump would expect, they are negotiating with Russia, to fulfill their obligations in Europe and elsewhere. “We cannot trust Brussels to fend for us, therefore we have to fend for ourselves”, the Total representative said.

Iran doesn’t really need the Europeans to buy their oil. Europe constitutes only about 20% of the Iranian hydrocarbon market – an amount easily taken up by China. The same with other European corporations that may choose similar ways of self-protection – cutting ties with Iran – like the Peugeot-Citroen automobile giant – Iran doesn’t need them. That these sanctions and EU corporate reactions to the US sanctions, are causing hardship and unemployment in Iran – is just western propaganda, a vast exaggeration, at worst a temporary affair. As Mr. Rouhani said – we might go through a short period of difficulties but will recover rapidly by becoming self-sufficient. And that’s true. Iran is well embarked on their “Economy of Resistance”, aiming at self-sufficiency through import-substitution and orienting themselves towards eastern markets.

In fact, Iran is already part of the Eurasian Economic Community and will soon become a full-fledged member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). – So – why can Iran not get rid of their Fifth Columnists? – This is a question I can only answer with “fear from bloody civil unrest, prompting possibly western military intervention”.

Back to Venezuela – it could be similar fears that prevent the Maduro Government from taking drastic actions, like declaring a temporary state of emergency and drastic measures of de-dollarization to stop inflation and speculation, and strengthen the local currency, the Bolivar, by backing it with their internationally accepted cryptocurrency, the Petro.

On 20 May 2018, six million Venezuelan’s mostly Chavistas, voted overwhelmingly for President Maduro and his Government, a 68% majority, representing a solid block of people supporters. If you have the choice between an artificially made-to-starve population and a crumbling what used to be a solid block of 6 million Chavistas behind you – but gradually disappearing because of lacking actions by the government – what do you do? – Perhaps the only way is to economically isolate the Fifth Columnists or Atlantists, despite their apparent control of the economic system. What Atlantists are actually controlling is the dollar-based economy. Quitting the dollar-base, they may become rather powerless.

Venezuela faces a dire dilemma: Die or be killed. Venezuela has already started moving out of the dilemma, with the creation of the totally dollar-detached Petro, the government controlled blockchain currency based on hydrocarbons and precious minerals. Today, Venezuela imports about 70% of their food, and guess from where? – You guessed right – from the US of A. Thus, de-dollarization at first sight is a challenge.

Therefore, a massive diversification of imports, and efforts to become food self-sufficient, is in the order. Venezuela has the agricultural potential to become 100% food self-sufficient. In the meantime, Russia, China and other Eurasian countries will substitute. Venezuela may apply for SCO membership. Why not? After all, China has already about 50 billion dollars’ worth of investments in Venezuela, mostly in hydrocarbons, and just declared making another 5-billion-dollar equivalent loan to refurbish the Venezuelan petrol industry. China and Russia have big stakes in Venezuela, an excellent defense strategy. Now, Venezuela’s membership in the SCO would be another big step away from the dollar economy.

The Balkanization of Latin America is already happening. When Mr. Maduro referred to the 7 US bases in neighboring Colombia, aka, now NATO bases, with a porous 1,500 km (out of a total of 2,000 km) uncontrollable jungle border with Venezuela, and even open and welcoming borders with Peru, Ecuador and Brazil, he said it all. It will be easy to suffocate any uprising – NATO will do it, by now the generally accepted world police, as generally accepted as the recently intact, totally unelected and self-appointed world government, the G7. They are now crumbling, thanks heaven for Mr. Trump’s egocentric pathology, his “Let’s make America Great Again”; and thanks to Mr. Putin’s non-intervening but strategic sideline observance.

Will Trump continue to provide majority support for NATO? He recently warned the Europeans to contribute their share, i.e. increasing their NATO contribution to 2% of their GDP – or else. Well, what is “else”? – Reducing NATO, an enormous cost to the US? – And counting on the CIA-trained and NED-funded destabilizing insurgents (NED = National Endowment for Democracy, a state department financed “regime change’ and “democratization” NGO) throughout the world? – Insurgents in alliance with the local Atlantists? Will this be enough in a rapidly changing international monetary and payment system
The US scheme for Balkanizing Latin America, and by extension the world, is as porous as the 1,500 km long tropical forest border between Colombia and Venezuela. The hegemony of the dollar-economy hangs in the balance. Only drastic actions by victimized but courageous countries, like Venezuela, Iran and Russia can break the balance and destroy the western monetary hegemony.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst.

6 July 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/06/the-balkanization-of-south-america-and-the-role-of-fifth-columns-throughout-the-world/

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Five year after the overthrow of first democratically elected President Mohammad Morsi on July 3, 2013, Egyptian President, Field Marshall Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi’s government continues to rule with worst human rights violations as police systematically used torture, arbitrary arrests, and enforced disappearances to silence political dissent.

Egypt’s human rights crisis continued unabated, says Amnesty International. “The authorities used torture and other ill-treatment and enforced disappearance against hundreds of people, and dozens were extrajudicially executed with impunity.”

The crackdown on civil society escalated with NGO staff being subjected to additional interrogations, travel bans and asset freezes. Arbitrary arrests and detentions followed by grossly unfair trials of government critics, peaceful protesters, journalists and human rights defenders were routine, the Amnesty International said adding: Mass unfair trials continued before civilian and military courts, with dozens sentenced to death. Women continued to be subjected to sexual and gender-based violence and were discriminated against in law and practice. The authorities brought criminal charges for defamation of religion and “habitual debauchery” on the basis of people’s real or perceived sexual orientation.

Morsi spends his fifth year in prison

Egypt’s first democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi spends his fifth year behind bars since he was ousted by the military in a coup in 2013.

He was tried in six cases; a mass jailbreak, murder, spying for Qatar, espionage with Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanese group Hezbollah, insulting the judiciary and terrorism.

“Verdicts against Morsi are politically-motivated,” Alaa Abdulmunsif, head of Salam Organization for Protection of Human Rights, told Anadolu Agency.  “The regime wants to get rid of him,” he said.

In June 2016, an Egyptian court placed Morsi on the country’s official list of “terrorists” for three years.

In the same year, the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest appellate court, upheld a 20-year jail term against Morsi on charges of murder during deadly clashes between supporters and opponents outside the Ittihadiya presidential palace in 2012.

Morsi, along four other Brotherhood leaders, was also sentenced to death for alleged involvement in a mass jailbreak in 2011 during a popular uprising that swept former autocrat Hosni Mubarak from power.

However, the Court of Cassation overturned the verdicts and ordered a retrial in 2016.

Morsi was slapped with a life sentence for allegedly spying for Qatar. He was also sentenced to three years in prison for offending the judiciary.

The former president is also standing a retrial on charges of a mass jailbreak and espionage with Hamas.

Saeed Sadek, professor of political sociology at the American University in Cairo, was quoted by Anadolu Agency as saying that Morsi’s trials are the result of “political competition”. “How come those who overthrew him would set him free” he asked.

Sadek ruled out any reconciliation between the Egyptian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood in the near future. “The regime now is very strong and will not look into reconciliation with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.

Egyptian Kangaroo Courts

Hundreds of anti-government people are on death row while thousands sentenced to long-term jail by Egypt’s Kangaroo Courts.

On March 10, 2018, an Egyptian Kangaroo court sentenced 10 people to death and five others to life in prison for allegedly forming a “terrorist group” to plot attacks on security forces and other institutions.

Egypt has cracked down on anti-government elements since the overthrow in July 2013 of Mohammad Mursi by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who later assumed the title of Field Marshall. Mursi was the first democratically elected President of Egypt.

Hundreds of anti-government people, including Muslim Brotherhood supporters and members, have received death sentences since 2013, and Egypt has carried out dozens of executions, according to security sources and rights groups.

According to Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide database, in recent years there has been a sharp increase in Egyptian courts’ use of capital punishment, with the number of death sentences jumping from 109 in 2013 to at least 509. Since the beginning of 2015, there have been reports of at least 354 death sentences.

The Cornell Center believes there are at least 1,700 people under sentence of death, but no official figures are available due to intense state secrecy surrounding capital punishment. Amnesty International indicates that at least 1,413 death sentences were issued between 2007 and 2014.

Human rights defenders

The authorities continued to curb the work of human rights defenders in an unprecedented manner as part of their relentless efforts to silence all critical voices, according to Amnesty Internatonal.

In May 2017, US client President al-Sisi signed a draconian new law giving the authorities broad powers to deny NGOs registration, dissolve NGOs and dismiss their boards of administration.

Between January and May 2017, courts sentenced at least 15 journalists to prison terms ranging from three months to five years on charges related solely to their writing, including defamation and the publication of what the authorities deemed “false information”.

Security forces arrested at least 240 political activists and protesters between April and September 2017 on charges relating to online posts the authorities considered “insulting” to the President or for participating in unauthorized protests.

Security forces continued to arrest hundreds of people based on their membership or perceived membership of the Muslim Brotherhood, rounding them up from their homes or places of work or, in one case, from a holiday resort, the Amnesty International pointed out adding:

The authorities used prolonged pre-trial detention, often for periods of more than two years, as means to punish dissidents.

Forces of the Ministry of the Interior continued to subject to enforced disappearance and extra-judicially execute people suspected of engaging in political violence. According to the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, security forces subjected at least 165 people to enforced disappearance between January and August 2017 for periods ranging from seven to 30 days.

Thousands of civilians were tried by military courts, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says adding: “By introducing new restrictive NGO legislation, detaining journalists, and prosecuting human rights defenders and subjecting them to travel bans, the government is working to eradicate independent civil society in the country.”

Activists arrested in dawn raids

Egyptian police and National Security forces have carried out a wave of arrests of critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in dawn raids since early May 2018, Human Rights Watch said. The charges against them appear to be solely based on their social media posts and peaceful activism. Security briefly held several of the detainees incommunicado.

Those arrested include Hazem Abd al-Azim, a political activist, on May 27, and well-known journalist and rights defender Wael Abbas on May 23. Security forces blindfolded him and kept him for almost 36 hours in an unknown location before taking him before prosecutors. Others include Shady al-Ghazaly Harb, a surgeon; Haitham Mohamadeen, a lawyer; Amal Fathy, an activist; and Shady Abu Zaid, a satirist.

“The state of oppression in Egypt has sunk so low that al-Sisi’s forces are arresting well-recognized activists as they sleep, simply for speaking up,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The message is clear that criticism and even mild satire apparently earn Egyptians an immediate trip to prison.”

Prosecutors hold broad power in Egyptian law, in violation of international law, that allow them to hold those suspected of major offenses in pretrial detention for up to five months without bringing them before a judge, which judges can extend up to two years without proper hearings or substantive justification. Tens of thousands of prisoners remain in jail without trial in Egypt.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net) email: asghazali2011 (@) gmail.com

5 July 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/07/05/egypt-five-years-after-president-morsis-overthrow-by-military-junta/