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By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

In Egyptian mythology, gods were considered heroes.  In more modern times, it is men who are the heroes.   Without a doubt, General Gamal Abdul Nasser has secured his legacy as a hero – a revolutionary who fought for Egypt and strived for Arab unity against Israel and Western imperialism. This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; a pre-planned war of aggression and expansion by Israel against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, aided by the US and Britain.

Israel’s cronies assisted in the planning and execution of the war which led to  the seizure and occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Syria Golan (Golan Heights) and the Sinai Peninsula.  Prior to the start of the war, as early as May, Lyndon Johnson who assumed the presidency after the tragic assassination of JF Kennedy, authorized air shipment of arms to Israel[i].  Furthermore, the United States facilitated Israeli air attacks and advances by sending reconnaissance aircraft to track movement of Egyptian ground forces and American spy satellites provided imagery to Israel [ii].   According to reports American and British carrier-based aircraft flew sorties against the Egyptians and U.S. aircraft attacked Egypt.   Judging by their cover-up, the American leadership had as little compassion for American blood as it did for Arab blood.   The Israeli attack against USS Liberty that killed and injured American servicemen was buried in a sea of lies.

Fifty years on, the war rages on and Israel has a different set of cronies.  In sharp contrast to Nasser, el-Sisi, Egypt’s antihero has thrown his lot in with Israel and Saudi Arabia against his Arab brethren.   El-Sisi’s betrayal has been so outlandish and stark that even the neocon leaning New York Times published a scathing article titled: “Egypt’s Lost Islands, Sisi’s Shame” by Adhaf Soueif.    This is a remarkable piece rarely seen in the pages of the NYT given its reputation (see LOOT for example).

Soueif rightly calls el-Sisi’s to task for handing over the Tiran and Sanafir Islands at the mouth of Gulf of Aqaba to Saudi Arabia.  More telling is the fact that the transfer had been discussed with, and had received the blessings of Israel,  according to Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon.   The implications of an Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian alliance are enormous; though hardly the first act of treason by el-Sisi.

In his article Soueif also touches on the dam being built by Ethiopia (the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam) which was opposed to by former President Mohamed Morsi who was ousted in a coup by el-Sisi.  It is crucial that this project be further explored as it relates not only to Egypt, but also the past and future politics and geopolitics of the region.

Before moving on however,  it is important to recall that Morsi was democratically elected to office in the aftermath of the Egyptian ‘revolution’.  His support of the Palestinians and his opposition to the dam did not sit well with Israel.  Morsi had even called “Jews descendants of pigs and apes”.    Both HAMAS and the U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed Morsi’s election.  Abbas called Morsi “the choice of the great people of Egypt” while one of his senior aides, Saeb Erekat, said the democratic vote for Morsi “meant the Palestinian cause was the Number One priority for all Egyptians“.  Though perhaps the greater concern for Israel was Morsi’s opposition to the construction of the dam.  A construction favored by  Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In 2012, it was reported that Saudi Arabia had claimed a stake in the Nile.   Israel’s ambitions went much further back.  First initiated by Theodore Herzl in 1903, the diversion plan was dropped due to British and Egyptian opposition to it only to be picked up again in the 1970s.  At that time, Israeli’s idea was to convince Egypt to divert Nile water to Israel.  In 1978, President Anwar Sadat “declared in Haifa to the Israeli public that he would transfer Nile water to the Negev. Shortly afterward, in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Sadat promised that Nile water would go to Jerusalem.  During Mubarak’s presidency, published reports indicated that Israeli experts were helping Ethiopia to plan 40 dams along the Blue Nile.”[iii]

On May 30, 2013, The Times of Israel reported that the construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (on the Blue Nile) had sparked a major diplomatic crisis with Egypt.  The article also reported (citing Al-Arabiya) that Major General Mohammed Ali Bilal, the deputy chief of staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces, had said Egypt was not in a position to confront the project (countries).  “The only solution lies in the US intervening to convince Ethiopia to alleviate the impact of the dam on Egypt.”  No such solutions from the U.S.

On June 3rd,  Morsi met with his cabinet to discuss the dam and its implications.  Cabinet members were surprised to learn that the meeting was aired live.   During the meeting, a cabinet member said: “Imagine what 80 million of us would do to Israel and America if our water was turned off”.  Morsi contended that “We have very serious measures to protect every drop of Nile water.”

With el-Sisi’s “democratic coup” which was handsomely rewarded, the dam project is on schedule to be completed by year’s end.   As Israel has expands and accelerates its wars of aggression, the wider implications of el-Sisi’s will reverberate throughout the region as serve-serving Arab leaders fight their own to execute Israel’s agenda.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the influence of lobby groups.

[i] Camille Mansour. “Beyond Alliance: Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy”  Columbia 1994, p.89

[ii]  Stephen J. Green. “Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With A Militant Israel”.  William Morrow and Co., NY 1984

[iii] “Will Nile water go to Israel? North Sinai pipelines and the politics of scarcity”, Middle East Policy  (Sep 1997): 113-124.

28 june 2017

By Binu Mathew

Junaid this is for you. Junaid this is to assure you that your death will not go in vain. You are a martyr for the idea of India. You are not a martyr in the conventional sense, that you laid down your life with full consciousness of what you are doing. But your life was snatched away from you in the flower of your youth. But we, who are alive know that you are a martyr for India, the idea of India we all stand for.

Junaid (16) was returning from Delhi to his village in Kandhawal in Haryana after Eid shopping along with his brothers Hashim, Mausim. and and Sakir  in the crowded  Delhi-Mathura passenger. As the train reached Ballabgarh  station on Thursday, June 22 some passengers called them “beef-eaters” and “anti-nationals”. According to news reports the men, man handled the brothers and some of them stabbed them. Junaid succumbed to his injuries.

Hashim told Hindustan times “What did we do to deserve this treatment? I do not understand why they started calling us names. I know nothing about nationalism. All I know is that I am an Indian. This is my home.”

Mausim who was also attacked told HT “Why were we cornered like that? To escape their blows and knife stabs, I hid under the seat of the train. I will never be able to forget helplessly looking at my brothers getting thrashed and then stabbed. There were so many people on the train, but not a single person stood up to help us. The men instead kept saying that we were beef eaters and deserved to die.”

After two hours of violence on the train, Hashim was allowed to get off at Asota with Junaid’s dead body and his two brothers, who too were badly injured.

When Narendra Modi government put restrictions on the sale of cattle for slaughter on the third anniversary of his government, this was my worst nightmare. This is what the beef ban has done to India. It has given the Sangh Parivar elements to lynch innocent people for their beliefs, identity and food habits.

The lynching of Muslims by branding them as beef eaters started with the lynching of Mohammad Akhlakh in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, a stone’s throw away from the national capital New Delhi in 2015, a few months after Narendra Modi assumed charge as Prime Minister of India. Since then dozens of Muslim and Dalit men have been lynched allegedly for eating or transporting beef.

I don’t generally celebrate religious festivals. But this Eid I went out with my son to have an Eid lunch. In the hotel menu, beef steak was mentioned. I ordered it. The boy was puzzled. Soon the manager came out with an anxious look and explained that they don’t serve beef and also that they never served beef in the hotel. It was a Momos shop and the guys were from Darjeeling, West Bengal. I told them beef is not banned in Kerala and there is nothing wrong with serving beef here.  An untold fear is gripping the country from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Some say it is an undeclared emergency, recalling the 1975 Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. I think it is worse than that. Then we knew who the enemy was. Now, nobody knows who is your enemy. As it happened with Junaid the man sitting next to you could stab you to death. This is the slow emergence of fascism. India is diving headlong into a deep fascist state. Unless the conscious people of the country rise up, India as we know it will be gone.

The blood soaked picture of Junaid lying on the lap of Hashim reminded me of Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ in which body of Jesus is lying on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion. This picture must torment every heart of India. The blood that Junaid shed should not go in vain. It is our duty to make sure that from each drop of blood that Junaid shed, a thousand flowers of resistance shall bloom. In the resurrection of Junaid we will see the resurrection of India.

Binu Mathew is the Editor of www.countercurrents.org.

27 June 2017

By crcs.ugm.ac.id

The two largest followers of religion in Southeast Asia are Muslims and Buddhists. From around 618 million of its total population, 42 per cent are Muslim and 40 per cent are Buddhist. Twenty-five percent of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and 38 per cent of the world’s 350 million Buddhists live in Southeast Asia. Yet Muslim-Buddhist interreligious dialogue between the two is rare today. Discussing this issue, CRCS staff member Azis Anwar interviewed Professor Imtiyaz Yusuf, director of the Center for Buddhist-Muslim Understanding at Mahidol University in Thailand. Earning his PhD at Temple University where he studied with Ismail Raji al-Faruqi, Professor Yusuf has written numerous encyclopedia entries and journal articles and been a regular columnist for Thai newspapers. Some of his works can be accessed on his academia.edu account. During intersession at CRCS  from May 15 until July 31, Prof. Yusuf is teaching the course Muslim-Buddhist Relations.

When and how was the first encounter between Muslims and Buddhists?

Before I answer that question I would say, Indonesia is the land of the Buddha. Yogyakarta and the Borobudur, which was built in the 9th century during the reign of the Sailendra Dynasty, represent the Mahayana tradition. The two Buddhist traditions that came to Java are Mahayana and Vajrayana. Theravada didn’t come to Indonesia. Theravada went from India to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia. The Mahayana tradition came to Indonesia directly from Nalanda in India. The Sailendra kings always paid tribute to the famous Buddhist university of Nalanda in India. And, just look at the language you use everyday. Now you’re doing puasa (fasting), right? Puasa is from upavasa, which is a Sanskrit word. You use many words which are from Sanskrit. Indonesia has a strong Hindu-Buddhist culture. But unfortunately, people forget or neglect it.

Now, you asked me the question when the first encounter took place. It took place in the seventh century when Muslims came to the area called Sindh, which is now Pakistan. They came across the Buddhist temples and monks. Muhammad ibn Qasim (a general from the Umayyad dinasty) was the first to come there. He wrote to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (an Umayyad governor): What should I do to the people who are non-Muslim? The first thing Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf said was: Treat them as Ahl al-Kitab (the People of the Book, a category commonly applied to Jews and Christians—ed). Second instruction was: don’t attack their monks. Third, don’t destroy their temples. Fourth, take jizyah from them (jizyah is a per capita tax on free adult non-Muslim males under Muslim rule in compensation for protection and exemption from military service—ed). This is how Muslims treated Buddhists, long before the West came to know the Buddha.

Three important Muslim scholars of history and comparative religion spoke very highly about the Buddha. Al-Tabari (838-923 C.E.) reported that Buddhist statues were sold at a Buddhist temple next to the Makh mosque in the market of the city of Bukhara in now modern Uzbekistan. Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karim Al-Shahrastani (1086-1153 C.E.) in a section called Ara’ al-Hind (The Views of the Indians) in his classic Kitab al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects), identifies the Buddha with the Qur’anic figure al-Khidr as a seeker of enlightenment. Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318 C.E.) of the Persian Ilkhanid court, wrote an introduction to Buddhism in his monumental Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) aiming to make Buddhism accessible to Muslims.

The 12th-15th centuries’ encounters between Islam and Hindu-Buddhist civilization in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand were of a mystic orientation. The pondoks or pesantrens (Muslim religious schools of Southeast Asia), seem also to have been influenced by the Hindu and Buddhist temple schools of the region.

Some mufassirs (Quranic exegetes) say the Buddha is mentioned in the Quran.

Dhul-Kifli?

(Dhul-Kifli is mentioned in the Quran and commonly interpreted as referring to the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. But some say it may refer to the Buddha, as it could mean “of Kafil”, which may mean ‘of Kapilavastu’, the ancient city where Siddartha Gautama was born and raised.—ed)

Dhul-Kifli and Wat-tini (the 95th surah/chapter of the Quran)! Wat-tini waz-zaytun; wa turi sinin; wa hadhal-baladi ‘l-amin (By the fig and the olive; and by Mount Sinai; and by this secure city [Mecca]). This surah is more important than Dhul-Kifli. There are four symbols in this surah. Az-zaytun is ‘Isa (Jesus). Sinin is Musa (Moses). Al-balad al-amin is the Prophet Muhammad. What about the “tin”? There is no tin in Arabia. The Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree, which is a tin, a type of fig, the botanical name of which is ficus religiosa.

If you go to some scholars, like Muhammad Hamidullah (1908-2002, an Indian-born scholar of Islamic law and author of more than 250 books); they said the Buddha was mentioned symbolically in the Quran. Allah says in the Quran, “Laqad arsalna rusulan min qablika”. “We have sent messengers before you, some I mention, some I don’t mention” (lam naqsus ‘alayk, referring to QS 40:78). And Allah says they (messengers) came in the lisan of their qawm; they came to their people speaking their language.

Lay Muslims today, seeing Buddhists do rituals in front of a statue, perceive Buddhists as worshipping the statue, which can be seen as a shirk or idolatrous practice. Your comment on this perception?

The whole idea of tawhid and shirk is an Islamic concept. In Buddhism, there is no shirk. You go and ask Buddhists, and I’ve asked them million times: What do you do when you’re paying respect to the statue? They say: we pay respect to the teachings of the Buddha; we don’t pay respect to the statue. The Buddha himself said, “I’m not god,” just like Nabi Muhammad. They don’t worship the statue or the stone. The idea of shirk is from the monotheistic concept of religion. So, they are not idol worshippers. The Buddha rejects the Hindu gods.

Buddhists have no god, right?

Buddhists are not atheistic. The Buddha only said God is not important; the human being is important. He was in India where there is a caste system. He had no problem with the concept of God. The most important issue is help human beings who are suffering under the exploitation of the Brahmin system. The issue is how you are going to save humanity. The Buddha himself, again, said he is not god. He was a teacher, a guru.

In one of your papers on Islam and Buddhism, you talked about the concept of the Ultimate Reality in Buddhism, and you treat it as something like parallel to the concept of God in monotheistic religions.

The Buddha says there is the Eternal, the Unborn. Without the Unborn, nothing can exist. That is called the Dharma, which means the Eternal Law, the Ultimate Reality. The Dharma and God are the same. Allah is also eternal. Dharma is not a person. Allah is not a person. The problem with the Muslims is that they think Allah as a person, because they are reacting to the Christians who have personified God.

Allah has sifat (attributes) that are part of His dhat (essence). And His sifat are bila kayfa: they have no identical quality of that of human beings. Now if you come to Buddhism, it also says there is the Dharma, the Eternal Teaching that is learned by the resis, the teachers. The Dharma is God for them, just Allah is for Muslims.

Our problem is that we have abandoned studying Buddhism. In the past, in Java, Muslims and Buddhist could talk together because of tawhid and sunyata (nothingness). In tawhid, Allah has no form. Sunyata also has no form. This is why Javanese could become Muslim, not because of jihad or anything; it is because of the compatibility between tawhid and sunyata. The Quran also talks about ummatan wasatan (the middle nation); our sharia is wasatiyya (being moderate). Buddhism also has majjhima-pattipada (the middle way).

Come down further, the Buddhism that came to Indonesia was that of the Mahayana tradition. In Mahayana, the concept of bodhisattva is very important. Bodhisattva is the one who is going to be enlightened, but he holds his enlightenment to help the people. In Islam we have the same concept: al-insan al-kamil. Another similarity is the concept of Nur Muhammad and the concept of Tathagata, the enlightened Buddha.

So there are many similarities. The problem is that Muslims don’t study Buddhism. Muslims have a long history of relationship with Christianity and there is not much peace among them, while here in Southeast Asia, in ASEAN countries, Muslims and Buddhists make the majority population, around 40-40 percent, but we don’t know each other. In 900 years of Islam and Buddhism coexistence, from the 12th century to the 21st century, there is, I’m sorry to say, not one Muslim scholar of Buddhism in Southeast Asia.

Continuing your explanation, why have Southeast Asian Muslims abandoned studying Buddhism?

Since colonial times, Muslims have gotten into the problem of power struggle. Muslims who ruled, including here in Southeast Asia, suddenly lost power to the Dutch, to the British, to the French, etc. That tradition of learning the other could not develop because the space was lost, occupied by outsiders who disrupted Muslims’ culture and educational institutions. Muslims then abandon studying Asian religion of Buddhism, of Shivaism, of Confucianism, of Taoism, because we don’t have time; we have lost power. The Buddhists also lost their power. The last dhammaraja in Myanmar, which was an important Buddhist kingdom, was exiled by the British to India. Other dhammarajas of Buddhist kingdoms were also either removed or exiled. The only dhammaraja who remained was in Thailand; it was not colonized and still has a tradition of a Buddhist king. Thailand is the largest Buddhist country in Southeast Asia.

On the other hand, those colonizers made religion into ethnic identities. Religion gets ethnicized. If you’re a Malay, you’re a Muslim. If you’re a Siamese, you’re a Buddhist. If you’re a Burman, you’re a Buddhist.

So, our problem is that on one hand there is abandonment of interreligious studies, and on the other there is an ethnification of religion.

Would you tell us briefly about the history of Muslims in Thailand? The thing that we mostly heard is only about Pattani Muslims.

Let me first tell a little bit about Pattani. The Pattani conflict is basically between orang Siam and orang Melayu. If you go to Pattani today, and I stayed five years in Pattani, they say we are orang Melayu and we are under orang Siam. The conflict was between two kingdoms: the big kingdom of Siam and the Pattani kingdom.

Now, in the historical Siam, there were Muslim immigrants from Persia, India, and parts of Malaysia (Kedah and Perlis). I divide the types of Muslims in Thailand in the following way.

In the deep south (Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat), which was annexed by Siam hundred years ago, they are Malay-speaking Muslims of Southern Thailand. They identify themselves as Malay and they don’t speak Thai. So there are multiple layers in the Pattani conflict: the issue of ethnic identity (Siam and Malay), language (Thai and Malay), and religion. The Pattani problem is basically a problem of two ethno-religious identities.

In the upper south, there are Malay but Thai-speaking Muslims. They were people from Kedah and Perlis who migrated to Thailand for economic reason; no border at that time, and they didn’t have a kingdom. They came into Nakhon Sithammarat, Phuket, Phanga, Krabi, etc.

Up in Bangkok, you have Persians, who have been there for four hundred years, from the time of King Narai (in reign 1633-1656). You have the Cham Muslims, who migrated from the Champa kingdom and they worked as soldiers for King Chulalongkorn (in reign 1868-1910). In Bangkok, there is an area called Makkasan, near the Indonesian embassy, in which there are Makassari Muslims and every year they celebrate the birthday of King Chulalongkorn, because he gave them protection and they are very grateful of him.

There is another area in Bangkok called Kampong Jawa in which there are Javanese. If you want to eat Javanese foods, go there. You know what, one son of Ahmad Dahlan (the founder of Muhammadiyah, one of the largest Indonesian Muslim organizations—ed) lived in Masjid Jawa in this kampong. This man came not as a son of a kyai; he came first as a cleaner of the masjid. Slowly they found out that this man is son of Ahmad Dahlan. He then influenced some of the prominent Thai Muslim businessmen and reformers, one of them is my brother in law, who translated the Quran into Thai.

The Salafiyyah in Thailand—and I’ve written a paper about this—is not that Salafi-Wahhabism. Salafi reformism arrived in Bangkok in 1926 with the arrival of an Indonesian Muslim scholar by the name of Ahmad Wahab, who had studied in Mecca before his return to Indonesia and subsequent exile to Thailand. Ahmad Wahab was exiled to Thailand by the Dutch authorities due to his involvement with the reformist Muhammadiyah movement and its political movement in Sarekat Islam.

In Bangkok, Ahmad Wahab along with like-minded Thai Muslims such as Direk Kulsiriswad and others formed the Ansorusunnah association in 1930s and also Jamiyatul Islam in 1950s. The religious influence of Ahmad Wahab’s reformist activities within Thai Islam extended to the north and south of Thailand within the Thai-speaking Muslims of Chiangmai and Chiangrai in the north and Pak Prayoon in Phatthalung province and Nakorn Sithammarat in the upper South.

In Bangkok there is also the Indian Muslim community, made up of Keralites and Tamils. And they also came at the time of King Chulalongkorn.

Now let’s go up again, to Northeast Thailand. Here you have the Pathan Muslims. They were coming from Afghanistan. They are Hanafi in fiqh. They were warriors, soldiers, brought there by the British. There are a lot of livestock businesses there. Most of the halal industry in Thailand is in the hands of these Pathan Muslims.

Now we go to further north, to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. There you’ll find two types of Muslims. The majority are Chinese Muslims who came from Yunan, southern part of China. They were part of the Kuomintang party and loyal to Sun Yat Sen who fled to Taiwan. When Mao Tse Tung came into rule in China, these Muslims fled first to Burma, and then to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. They are Hanafi in fiqh. And they are the most developed among the Muslim communities in Thailand. The other are Bengalis, who came seeking livelihood and were migrating from Bengal to Burma, then to Thailand.

People often think about Pattani, while only 44 percent of Muslims in Thailand live in Pattani. The rest are spread all over the country. In the last parliament from the 2007 election, we had 23 Muslim members of the parliament and only eleven of them are from Pattani.

Can we say that the Pattani conflict is an insurgency?

It is an insurgency, like in Kashmir, Papua, Palestine; and it’s an ethno-religious conflict. They are nationalists. They want their Malay-Muslim identity to be recognized. There are separatists, but most just want autonomy. The leader of this movement is Haji Sulong who, during the time of Phibunsongkhram, delivered seven demands to the Thai government. Only one of these seven demands is related to religion. The rest are about ethnic identity, language, governorship, administration, and other political demands.

Whenever there is an insurgency like that, and the insurgents are Muslims, terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS usually come in taking advantage. Do they come to Thailand?

No, they can’t. Many of the Westerners after 9/11 came searching for terrorists or jihadists in Southern Thailand, they didn’t find anybody. The Pattani Muslims don’t want an Islamic state. They are very clear about this. They say: ours is a nationalist struggle. Read their narrative. Their narrative is about their history of the past Pattani kingdom, not about an Islamic state. The Pattani kingdom had seven females as sultanahs (queens) of Pattani. In an Islamic state, will you have a queen? No.

Moving to the country next to Thailand, I expect there is a similar case as Thailand’s in the case of Myanmar’s Rohingya issue.

On the Rohingya issue, there is, first, an element of racism. The Rohingya people are ethnically Bengalis. They are South Asian like me, not Mongoloid like you. Myanmar is located at the geographic border where Aryan race stops and the Mongoloid begins. Most of the Rohingya people were from the Arakan/Chittagong area which is now part of both Myanmar and Bangladesh. They migrated to Myanmar for economic reason. When they come to Myanmar, they become an economic burden. The local people don’t want outsiders to come.

Earlier there was a state called Arakan. The Arakan state was bordering Chittagong that is part of Bangladesh. There was no border at that time. There was an Arakan Buddhist king and there were Arakan Muslims. They lived together for a long time because there were no borders. Then a Burmese Buddhist king attacked Arakan state and defeated that Arakan Buddhist king. This Arakan Buddhist king then fled to Bengal, to Bangladesh as we call it today. The Bengali people then helped him to win back his throne. The Arakan king was sympathetic to Bengalis. Many Bengalis then migrated to Arakan. And then Arab traders came in. There emerged a new group in Arakan whom we know as Arakan Muslims. Muslims and Buddhists lived side by side. If you go to writings of that period, you’d find that the Buddhist king had an Arabic title. His coin was made in Arabic. He admired the Muslim culture. What happened then is the Burmese king attacked Arakan again and he ended the kingdom.

Then came the British, controlling Arakan. The British rule ended with the independence, from which a problem emerged: Arakan Muslims were under the pressure of the Burmans. The Burmans are the majority race in Burma. They wanted to rule over all ethnic groups in Burma, so they wanted to take control over the Arakan state.

Before independence, the Arakan Muslims at that time thought that if they were under the Burmans, they were going to be oppressed. So Arakan Muslims’ leader talked to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. There are East Pakistan and West Pakistan. East Pakistan is next to Burma, which is Bangladesh. The Arakan Muslims’ leader said they wanted to migrate to East Pakistan. Muhammad Ali Jinnah then talked to General Aung San, the father of Aung San Su Kyi, who was an integrationist like Sukarno. General Aung San said to Ali Jinnah: No, these people don’t need to go to Pakistan; they’re protected under Burma, which will be independent soon. Unfortunately, General Aung San was assassinated before the independence of Burma. The army then took over Myanmar, and they changed the name of Arakan to Rakhine state. They wanted to remove the Buddhist-Muslim historical identity of coexistence.

Myanmar is a hard country. There is always a tension between the Burmans and other ethnic groups. The army made Buddhism as the national identity. They also wanted Rakhine to be Buddhist. The Rakhine people actually don’t like the Burmans. There was a war going on between the Rakhine Buddhist army, which wanted to separate from Myanmar, and the Burman army. Now they have been brainwashed that Arakan state was a Muslim state, which is not true. So they are against the Rohingya. Here comes the identity of Rohingya. The Muslim people start saying we are Arakan Muslims; we are legitimate natives of this land, and we are Rohingya. The word “Rohingya” comes into existence.

So the Burman army declared Rakhine people as the only legitimate inhabitants of the Rakhine state. This led to the rise of Rakhine nationalism against the Rohingya. The Rakhine nationalists started saying to the Rohingya: You are Bengalis. The Burman army divide and rule; they created a conflict between the Arakan Buddhists and the Arakan Muslims. They didn’t give citizenship to the Rohingya.

So, there is an element of racism, the issue of history, and of citizenship legitimacy.

Can we simplify or summarize that the root of the Pattani and Rohingya problems has more to do with modern nation-state building?

Yeah, very good. They are missed out in the nation-state building. In Pattani, religion is not an issue. In Myanmar, Buddhism is exploited by the Burmese for their racism. Bhikkhu AshinWirathu (the spiritual leader of anti-Muslim movement in Burma—ed.) said: protect the Burmese race from the Rohingyas.

I haven’t told you this: The British brought many Indians to Burma, because Burma was part of the British empire. The British brought Indians to manage the colonial administration. Fifty-four per cent of Rangoon’s (later Yangon) population were Indians. There were two ethnic riots in Burma because of this, in 1930 and 1938, against the Indians. These Indians, among them were Muslims, were traders and owners of textile and farming industries. The Burmans hate the Indians. When Burma came into independence, about 700,000 Indians were told to go back. So, there is this element in the conflict over Rohingya.

What now Wirathu does is that he collectively takes all of them as Muslims, all of them are a threat to Myanmar. All of them: the Rohingyas, the Indian Muslims, the Chinese Muslims, and the Zarbadi (children from intermarriage between the Burmese and the Muslims). This is racism in the name of religion.

It seems that in terms of inclination toward violence, Buddhism is not an exception.

I have a copyrighted term for that. I call it “non-violent extremism”. Monks don’t attack; they don’t engage in violence. They are trained not to be violent. But people like Wirathu can incite others to do violence.

How do the Buddhists justify that? I mean, like in Islam, the concept of jihad can be used to justify violence.

They can’t. They legitimize it on the grounds of nationalism. There is nothing available in the Buddhist tradition to legitimize violence.

King Ashoka, who is recognized as the model of a Buddhist king, said that he will use violence to protect his land, and he had bodhisattva warriors. But it was more of nationalism; you may call it religious nationalism. My recent article in Thailand’s newspaper The Nation (which has been republished on the CRCS website—ed) talks about nationalism that has now turned religious.

Last question, what would you suggest, particularly for us in Indonesia, to bridge the gap between Muslims and Buddhist?

I like Indonesia very much. As a Muslim I breathe freely in democratic Indonesia. It has a rich culture and it is a leading Muslim democratic country; the largest Muslim country. Indonesia has a role to play: You have to teach in your educational institutions about your historical cultural background, which is Hindu-Buddhist. You should help Muslims in Southeast Asia how to live with other cultures. It is a challenge for you already. You have to promote cultural studies, which talks about cultural configuration of Southeast Asia, and you have to do it through your local knowledges, not Western theories. You need a local social studies developed for Nusantara, for coexistence between Islam and Asian religions and cultures, especially in ASEAN. It will help a lot, and Indonesia has a big responsibility to do that.

One last thing, I met Cak Nun the other day; we were invited, and I spent three hours with him. He told me a very interesting thing; you can put this on your transcript later. I asked the question why Indonesian Muslims don’t know their Hindu-Buddhist cultural background. He said to me: Indonesians are Muslims by adoption, not continuation. Meaning, they have adopted Islam but forgotten their Hindu-Buddhist cultural identity. They have so many Hindu-Buddhist words, but they don’t know the cultural content of them.

Such as?

Such as puasa. What does this word mean? They don’t know. Pesantren is based on the Buddhist model of school; I said this somewhere in my paper. You have sembahyang, surau, langgar—langgar is a Hindu word and it means temple where people go to pray. So, they have adopted Islam, but they stop continuing their own past. This throws you out of the ground. Indonesians have to keep their feet on the soil of Indonesia; soil of Prambanan, soil of Borobudur, soil of Srivijaya.

26 June 2017

By Kim Hjelmgaard

The European Union’s competition watchdog slapped Google with a record-breaking $2.72 billion fine on Tuesday for breaching antitrust rules with its online shopping service.

The announcement marks the latest clash between European regulators and large U.S. technology companies, including Apple and Amazon, which have been ensnared in lengthy antitrust, tax and privacy-related investigations by European officials.

Regulators said Google “abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.”

The European Commission said the technology firm “gave prominent placement in its search results only to its own comparison shopping service, whilst demoting rival services. It stifled competition on the merits in comparison shopping markets.”

The Commission, which oversees EU competition rules, gave the Mountain View, Calif., company 90 days to stop or face fines of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of parent company Alphabet.

Last year, Alphabet had a turnover, or annual sales, of just over $90 billion, meaning the additional daily fine would amount to about $12.3 million per day.

RELATED:

A look back at the EU’s 7 years of legal battle with Google

Google has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Kent Walker, a senior vice president for the firm, said it would review the Commission’s findings, and may appeal.

“When you shop online, you want to find the products you’re looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That’s why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both,” he said.

Google’s share price fell 2.5% to $948.09, with losses buffered by investor expectations that the EU was preparing a fine.

The fine follows a seven-year investigation by EU regulators and is the largest ever handed out by the Commission. European regulators have two other antitrust cases against Google outstanding. One is related to the dominance of its Android mobile operating system and the other concerns its search advertising platform.

It also represents a stark contrast to the U.S, where large technology firms are often seen as innovators, job creators and do not attract the same suspicion as they do in Europe, according to legal experts. Jan Oster, a professor of EU law and institutions at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, said that the approach toward regulation in Europe is much more “paternalistic and less laissez-faire than in the U.S.”

He said that the EU perceives markets and consumers as requiring more protections than in the U.S., where the broader legal environment has different interpretations of competition, free speech, privacy and tax standards. He said the EU’s case against Google and other U.S. firms was unlikely to be replicated at home in any form.

The Commission fined Silicon Valley chip maker Intel $1.2 billion in 2009 for anti-competitive practices. Apple was hit by a $14 billion tax bill last year after the EU concluded Ireland provided the firm with improper tax benefits. Amazon has been under the microscope over allegations it used its dominant position in the e-books market to keep prices artificially low while also structuring its sales in a way that allowed it to underpay taxes in Luxembourg the EU claimed amounted to state aid.

“Microsoft fought similar battles with the Commission around the turn of the millennium so we’ve been here before,” said Oliver Fairhurst, a competition law specialist at legal firm Lewis Silkin in London. “The decision shows the exceptionally high standard that dominant businesses such as Google can be held to where otherwise lawful activity can become unlawful simply by virtue of the market share they have.”

Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner in charge of competition policy, nevertheless maintained that what Google has done is illegal under EU rules.

“It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation,” she said in a statement explaining the decision.

Oster said that it was not a “case of animosity, that Europe in some way targets its laws against American companies. It’s more coincidence. Usually, to the best of my knowledge, the companies that get caught in this web are exclusively U.S. technology companies simply because they are the ones that are the biggest and most influential. There is, quite, simply, no alternative to Google or Facebook in Europe.”

Kim Hjelmgaard , USA TODAY

27 June 2017

By myanmarobserver.com

Maungdaw- A Rakhine gang accompanied by the army and BGP have been patrolling around the village of Taung Pyo in Northern Maungdaw since the dawn hours of Tuesday, according to our correspondent in the area.

The gang is carrying sharp weapons including machetes and other tools that have traditionally been used by Buddhist nationalist forces. They are being well protected by a huge army and BGP detachment.

Their activities have led to terror among the local populace who are fearing a massacre in the tensed locality.

Tensions have reached a high since an army backed gang attacked the nearby village tract of Kya Maung following Eid prayers, leading to possible fatalities.

There are rumours that Buddhist nationalists and the Tatmadaw are planning a 2012 style massacre.

28 June 2017

By Nick Turse

The tabs on their shoulders read “Special Forces,” “Ranger,” “Airborne.” And soon their guidon — the “colors” of Company B, 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group — would be adorned with the “Bandera de Guerra,” a Colombian combat decoration.

“Today we commemorate sixteen years of a permanent fight against drugs in a ceremony where all Colombians can recognize the special counternarcotic brigade’s hard work against drug trafficking,” said Army Colonel Walther Jimenez, the commander of the Colombian military’s Special Anti-Drug Brigade, last December.  America’s most elite troops, the Special Operations forces (SOF), have worked with that Colombian unit since its creation in December 2000.  Since 2014, four teams of Special Forces soldiers have intensely monitored the brigade.  Now, they were being honored for it.

Part of a $10 billion counter-narcotics and counterterrorism program, conceived in the 1990s, special ops efforts in Colombia are a muchballyhooed American success story.  A 2015 RAND Corporation study foundthat the program “represents an enduring SOF partnership effort that managed to help foster a relatively professional and capable special operations force.”  And for a time, coca production in that country plummeted.  Indeed, this was the ultimate promise of America’s “Plan Colombia” and efforts that followed from it.  “Over the longer haul, we can expect to see more effective drug eradication and increased interdiction of illicit drug shipments,” President Bill Clinton predicted in January 2000.

Today, however, more than 460,000 acres of the Colombian countryside are blanketed with coca plants, more than during the 1980s heyday of the infamous cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.  U.S. cocaine overdose deaths are also at a 10-year high and first-time cocaine use among young adults has spiked 61% since 2013.  “Recent findings suggest that cocaine use may be reemerging as a public health concern in the United States,” wrote researchers from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in a study published in December 2016 — just after the Green Berets attended that ceremony in Colombia.  Cocaine, the study’s authors write, “may be making a comeback.”

Colombia is hardly an anomaly when it comes to U.S. special ops deployments — or the results that flow from them.  For all their abilities, tactical skills, training prowess, and battlefield accomplishments, the capacity of U.S. Special Operations forces to achieve decisive and enduring successes — strategic victories that serve U.S. national interests — have proved to be exceptionally limited, a reality laid bare from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to the Philippines.

The fault for this lies not with the troops themselves, but with a political and military establishment that often appears bereft of strategic vision and hasn’t won a major war since the 1940s.  Into this breach, elite U.S. forces are deployed again and again. While special ops commanders may raise concerns about the tempo of operations and strains on the force, they have failed to grapple with larger questions about the raison d’être of SOF, while Washington’s oversight establishment, notably the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, have consistently failed to so much as ask hard questions about the strategic utility of America’s Special Operations forces.

Special Ops at War

“We operate and fight in every corner of the world,” boasts General Raymond Thomas, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM).  “On a daily basis, we sustain a deployed or forward stationed force of approximately 8,000 across 80-plus countries.  They are conducting the entire range of SOF missions in both combat and non-combat situations.”  Those numbers, however, only hint at the true size and scope of this global special ops effort.  Last year, America’s most elite forces conducted missions in 138 countries — roughly 70% of the nations on the planet, according to figures supplied to TomDispatch by U.S. Special Operations Command.  Halfway through 2017, U.S. commandos have already been deployed to an astonishing 137 countries, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw.

Special Operations Command is tasked with carrying out 12 core missions, ranging from counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare to hostage rescue and countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  Counterterrorism — fighting what the command calls violent extremist organizations (VEOs) — may, however, be what America’s elite forces have become best known for in the post-9/11 era.  “The threat posed by VEOs remains the highest priority for USSOCOM in both focus and effort,” saysThomas.

“Special Operations Forces are the main effort, or major supporting effort for U.S. VEO-focused operations in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, across the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, and Central/South America — essentially, everywhere Al Qaeda (AQ) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are to be found…”

More special operators are deployed to the Middle East than to any other region.  Significant numbers of them are advising Iraqi government forces and Iraqi Kurdish soldiers as well as Kurdish YPG (Popular Protection Unit) fighters and various ethnic Arab forces in Syria, according to Linda Robinson, a senior international policy analyst with the RAND Corporation who spent seven weeks in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries earlier this year.

During a visit to Qayyarah, Iraq — a staging area for the campaign to free Mosul, formerly Iraq’s second largest city, from the control of Islamic State fighters — Robinson “saw a recently installed U.S. military medical unit and its ICU set up in tents on the base.”  In a type of mission seldom reported on, special ops surgeons, nurses, and other specialists put their skills to work on far-flung battlefields not only to save American lives, but to prop up allied proxy forces that have limited medical capabilities.  For example, an Air Force Special Operations Surgical Team recently spent eight weeks deployed at an undisclosed location in the Iraq-Syria theater, treating 750 war-injured patients.  Operating out of an abandoned one-story home within earshot of a battlefield, the specially trained airmen worked through a total of 19 mass casualty incidents and more than 400 individual gunshot or blast injuries.

When not saving lives in Iraq and Syria, elite U.S. forces are frequently involved in efforts to take them.  “U.S. SOF are… being thrust into a new role of coordinating fire support,” wrote Robinson. “This fire support is even more important to the Syrian Democratic Forces, a far more lightly armed irregular force which constitutes the major ground force fighting ISIS in Syria.”  In fact, a video shot earlier this year, analyzed by the Washington Post, shows special operators “acting as an observation element for what appears to be U.S. airstrikes carried out by A-10 ground attack aircraft” to support Syrian Democratic Forces fighting for the town of Shadadi.

Africa now ranks second when it comes to the deployment of special operators thanks to the exponential growth in missions there in recent years.  Just 3% of U.S. commandos deployed overseas were sent to Africa in 2010.  Now that number stands at more than 17%, according to SOCOM data.  Last year, U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed to 32 African nations, about 60% of the countries on the continent.  As I recently reported at VICE News, at any given time, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and other special operators are now conducting nearly 100 missions across 20 African countries.

In May, for instance, Navy SEALs were engaged in an “advise and assist operation” alongside members of Somalia’s army and came under attack.  SEAL Kyle Milliken was killed and two other U.S. personnel were injured during a firefight that also, according to AFRICOM spokesperson Robyn Mack, left three al-Shabaab militants dead.  U.S. forces are also deployed in Libya to gather intelligence in order to carry out strikes of opportunity against Islamic State forces there.  While operations in Central Africa against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal militia that has terrorized the region for decades, wound down recently, a U.S. commando reportedly killed a member of the LRA as recently as April.

Spring Training

What General Thomas calls “building partner nations’ capacity” forms the backbone of the global activities of his command.  Day in, day out, America’s most elite troops carry out such training missions to sharpen their skills and those of their allies and of proxy forces across the planet.

This January, for example, Green Berets and Japanese paratroopers carried out airborne training near Chiba, Japan.  February saw Green Berets at Sanaa Training Center in northwest Syria advising recruits for the Manbij Military Council, a female fighting force of Kurds, Arabs, Christians, Turkmen, and Yazidis.  In March, snowmobiling Green Berets joined local forces for cold-weather military drills in Lapland, Finland.  That same month, special operators and more than 3,000 troops from Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom took part in tactical training in Germany.

In the waters off Kuwait, special operators joined elite forces from the Gulf Cooperation Council nations in conducting drills simulating a rapid response to the hijacking of an oil tanker.  In April, special ops troops traveled to Serbia to train alongside a local special anti-terrorist unit.  In May, members of Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Iraq carried out training exercises with Iraqi special operations forces near Baghdad. That same month, 7,200 military personnel, including U.S. Air Force Special Tactics airmen, Italian special operations forces, members of host nation Jordan’s Special Task Force, and troops from more than a dozen other nations took part in Exercise Eager Lion, practicing everything from assaulting compounds to cyber-defense.  For their part, a group of SEALs conducted dive training alongside Greek special operations forces in Souda Bay, Greece, while others joined NATO troops in Germany as part of Exercise Saber Junction 17 for training in land operations, including mock “behind enemy lines missions” in a “simulated European village.”

#Winning

“We have been at the forefront of national security operations for the past three decades, to include continuous combat over the past 15-and-a-half years,” SOCOM’s Thomas told the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities last month.  “This historic period has been the backdrop for some of our greatest successes, as well as the source of our greatest challenge, which is the sustained readiness of this magnificent force.”  Yet, for all their magnificence and all those successes, for all the celebratory ceremonies they’ve attended, the wars, interventions, and other actions for which they’ve served as the tip of the American spear have largely foundered, floundered, or failed.

After their initial tactical successes in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, America’s elite operators became victims of Washington’s failure to declare victory and go home.  As a result, for the last 15 years, U.S. commandos have been raiding homes, calling in air strikes, training local forces, and waging a relentless battle against a growing list of terror groups in that country.  For all their efforts, as well as those of their conventional military brethren and local Afghan allies, the war is now, according to the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, a “stalemate.”  That’s a polite way of saying what a recent report to Congress by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found: districts that are contested or under “insurgent control or influence” have risen from an already remarkable 28% in 2015 to 40%.

The war in Afghanistan began with efforts to capture or kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.  Having failed in this post-9/11 mission, America’s elite forces spun their wheels for the next decade when it came to his fate.  Finally, in 2011, Navy SEALs cornered him in his long-time home in Pakistan and gunned him down.  Ever since, special operators who carried out the mission and Washington power-players (not to mention Hollywood) have been touting this single tactical success.

In an Esquire interview, Robert O’Neill, the SEAL who put two bullets in bin Laden’s head, confessed that he joined the Navy due to frustration over an early crush, a puppy-love pique.  “That’s the reason al-Qaeda has been decimated,” he joked, “because she broke my fucking heart.”  But al-Qaeda was not decimated — far from it according to Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent and the author of Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State.  As he recently observed, “Whereas on 9/11 al-Qaeda had a few hundred members, almost all of them based in a single country, today it enjoys multiple safe havens across the world.”  In fact, he points out, the terror group has gained strength since bin Laden’s death.

Year after year, U.S. special operators find themselves fighting new waves of militants across multiple continents, including entire terror groups that didn’t exist on 9/11.  All U.S. forces killed in Afghanistan in 2017 have reportedly died battling an Islamic State franchise, which began operations there just two years ago.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq, to take another example, led to the meteoric rise of an al-Qaeda affiliate which, in turn, led the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — the elite of America’s special ops elite — to create a veritable manhunting machine designed to kill its leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and take down the organization.  As with bin Laden, special operators finally did find and eliminate Zarqawi, battering his organization in the process, but it was never wiped out.  Left behind were battle-hardened elements that later formed the Islamic State and did what al-Qaeda never could: take and hold huge swaths of territory in two nations.  Meanwhile, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch grew into a separate force of more than 20,000.

In Yemen, after more than a decade of low-profile special ops engagement, that country teeters on the brink of collapse in the face of a U.S.-backed Saudi war there.  Continued U.S. special ops missions in that country, recently on the rise, have seemingly done nothing to alter the situation.  Similarly, in Somalia in the Horn of Africa, America’s elite forces remain embroiled in an endless war against militants.

In 2011, President Obama launched Operation Observant Compass, sending Special Operations forces to aid Central African proxies in an effort to capture or kill Joseph Kony and decimate his murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), then estimated to number 150 to 300 armed fighters.  After the better part of a decade and nearly $800 million spent, 150 U.S. commandos were withdrawn this spring and U.S. officials attended a ceremony to commemorate the end of the mission.  Kony was, however, never captured or killed and the LRA is now estimated to number about 150 to 250 fighters, essentially the same size as when the operation began.

This string of futility extends to Asia as well.  “U.S. Special Forces have been providing support and assistance in the southern Philippines for many years, at the request of several different Filipino administrations,” Emma Nagy, a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Manilla, pointed out earlier this month.  Indeed, a decade-plus-long special ops effort there has been hailed as a major success.  Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, wrote RAND analyst Linda Robinson late last year in the Pentagon journal Prism, “was aimed at enabling the Philippine security forces to combat transnational terrorist groups in the restive southern region of Mindanao.”

A 2016 RAND report co-authored by Robinson concluded that “the activities of the U.S. SOF enabled the Philippine government to substantially reduce the transnational terrorist threat in the southern Philippines.” This May, however, Islamist militants overran Marawi City, a major urban center on Mindanao.  They have been holding on to parts of it for weeks despite a determined assault by Filipino troops backed by U.S. Special Operations forces.  In the process, large swaths of the city have been reduced to rubble.

Running on Empty

America’s elite forces, General Thomas told members of Congress last month, “are fully committed to winning the current and future fights.”  In reality, though, from war to war, intervention to intervention, from the Anti-Drug Brigade ceremony in Florencia, Colombia, to the end-of-the-Kony-hunt observance in Obo in the Central African Republic, there is remarkably little evidence that even enduring efforts by Special Operations forces result in strategic victories or improved national security outcomes.  And yet, despite such boots-on-the-ground realities, America’s special ops forces and their missions only grow.

“We are… grateful for the support of Congress for the required resourcing that, in turn, has produced a SOCOM which is relevant to all the current and enduring threats facing the nation,” Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May.  Resourcing has, indeed, been readily available.  SOCOM’s annual budget has jumped from $3 billion in 2001 to more than $10 billion today.  Oversight, however, has been seriously lacking.  Not a single member of the House or Senate Armed Services Committees has questioned why, after more than 15 years of constant warfare, winning the “current fight” has proven so elusive.  None of them has suggested that “support” from Congress ought to be reconsidered in the face of setbacks from Afghanistan to Iraq, Colombia to Central Africa, Yemen to the southern Philippines.

In the waning days of George W. Bush’s administration, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed to about 60 nations around the world.  By 2011, under President Barack Obama, that number had swelled to 120.  During this first half-year of the Trump administration, U.S. commandos have already been sent to 137 countries, with elite troops now enmeshed in conflicts from Africa to Asia.  “Most SOF units are employed to their sustainable limit,” Thomas told members of the House Armed Services Committee last month.  In fact, current and former members of the command have, for some time, been sounding the alarm about the level of strain on the force.

These deployment levels and a lack of meaningful strategic results from them have not, however, led Washington to raise fundamental questions about the ways the U.S. employs its elite forces, much less about SOCOM’s raison d’être.  “We are a command at war and will remain so for the foreseeable future,” SOCOM’s Thomas explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee.  Not one member asked why or to what end.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept.

26 June 2017

By Pepe Escobar

24 Jun 2017 – Considering the impenetrability of that desert petrodollar family oligarchy impersonating a nation it’s up to a few foreigners granted access to make sense of the latest Arabian Game of Thrones. It also does not help that the “largesse” of Saudi – and Emirati – lobbies in Washington reduces virtually every think tank and hack in sight to abject sycophancy.

A top Middle East source close to the House of Saud, and a de facto dissident of the Beltway consensus, minces no words; “The CIA is very displeased with the firing of [former Crown Prince] Mohammad bin Nayef. Mohammad bin Salman is regarded as sponsoring terrorism. In April 2014 the entire royal families of the UAE and Saudi Arabia were to be ousted by the US over terrorism.  A compromise was worked out that Nayef would take over running the Kingdom to stop it.”

Before the Riyadh coup, an insistent narrative had been pervading selected Middle East geopolitical circles according to which US intel, “indirectly”, stopped another coup against the young Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim al-Thani, orchestrated by Mohammad bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, with help from Blackwater/Academi’s Eric Prince’s army of mercenaries in the UAE. Zayed, crucially, happens to be MBS’s mentor.

Our source clarifies, “the events are connected. Prince is CIA, but he probably stopped any coup attempt on Qatar. The CIA blocked the coup in Qatar and the Saudis reacted by dumping the CIA selected Mohammed bin Nayef, who was to be the next King. The Saudis are scared. The monarchy is in trouble as the CIA can move the army in Saudi Arabia against the king. This was a defensive move by MBS.”

The source adds, “MBS is failing everywhere. Yemen, Syria, Qatar, Iraq, etc. are all failures of MBS. China is also displeased with MBS as he has been stirring up trouble in Xinjiang. Russia cannot be happy that MBS was and is behind the lower oil price. Who are his allies?  He has only one and that is his father, who is hardly competent.” King Salman is virtually incapacitated by dementia.

The source is adamant that, “it is very possible the CIA will move against the monarchy in Saudi Arabia.” That would qualify as the war between President Trump and selected sectors of the US deep state reaching a whole new level.

And to add to the charade, there’s the Jared of Arabia factor. There’s no way any serious inside player would confirm anything about the (aborted) coup in Qatar. But if that coup attempt really happened, and was squashed, Jared Kushner may have had inside information, considering his connections.

According to the source, “Jared Kushner is essentially bankrupt at 666 Fifth Avenue, and needs Saudi financial help. So he is doing everything the Saudis want. 666 Fifth is in such bad financial shape that even his father-in-law cannot bail him out.”

Operation Desert Hubris

This convoluted trail of events does corroborate the famous December 2015 memo by the BND – German intelligence, according to which the House of Saud had adopted “an impulsive policy of intervention”, with then Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince MBS, a “gambler”, bound to cause a lot of trouble.

The BND memo detailed how the House of Saud, in Syria, bankrolled the creation of the Army of Conquest – basically a revamp of Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria — as well as ideological sister outfit Ahrar al-Sham. Translation; the House of Saud aiding, abetting and weaponizing Salafi-jihadi terrorism. And this from a regime that now charges Qatar of doing the same (Doha supported different outfits).

In Yemen, the BND worried that MBS’s war against the Houthis and the Yemeni Army was only profiting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Now MBS’s war – conducted with American and British weapons — has also provoked a horrendous humanitarian catastrophe.

How come an arrogant, sloppy, hubristic ignoramus like MBS has come so close to set the whole of Southwest Asia on fire? And not only Southwest Asia; waves of despair are flowing in Western investment circles to the effect that MBS is such a loose cannon his actions will destroy retirement accounts all over the spectrum.

Some essential background is in order. What we have today is the Third Saudi kingdom — founded by Ibn Saud in 1902, keeping the same, previous noxious alliance with troglodyte Wahhabi clerics. Ibn Saud only ruled Najd in the beginning; then, in 1913, he annexed Shi’ite Eastern Arabia (that’s where the oil is), and up to 1926 Hejaz, on the Red Sea coast. A “united” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed only in 1932.

Ibn Saudi died in 1953. Arguably the most influential of his harem of wives was Hassa al-Sudairi. They had 7 sons together. (Demented) King Salman, Nayef and MBS are all Sudairis. MBS is the first of Ibn Saud’s grandsons within striking reach of the throne.

Quite a few other princes are more competent that MBS. Nayef, who spent a long time in the Interior Ministry, was the Saudi counterterrorism czar (thus being a CIA darling). There’s Mitab bin Abdullah, minister of the Saudi Arabian National Guard; notorious Prince Turki, former intel chief, former ambassador to the US, and former best pal of Osama bin Laden; and Khaled bin Faisal, governor of Mecca and former education minister.

MBS is betting everything on his Vision 2030 – which in theory might propel the Saudi economy beyond oil monoculture, but implies a virtually impossible political aggiornamento; after all the House of Saudi Cards is un-reformable. Take the risible list of 13 demands now imposed on Qatar – that’s MBS’s work – including the bellicose virtual  excommunication of Iran and shutting down al-Jazeera.

No wonder every major geopolitical player is now gaming war scenarios – although only Germany stated its concerns on the record. Qatar is a NATO observer. Doha is adamant; it won’t fold to the absurd Saudi demands. What next; will MBS – the most dangerous “leader” in geopolitics today – lose face or launch yet another, demented, unwinnable and this time globally-convulsing war?

Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian independent geopolitical analyst.

26 June 2017

By Richard Falk

23 Jun 2017 – The following interview with Abdo Emara, an Arab journalist was published in Arabic; it is here republished in slightly modified form. The changes made are either stylistic or clarifying. There are no substantive changes from my earlier responses. I think it worthwhile to share this text because the questions asked by Abdo Emara are often directed at me in the discussion period after talks I have given recently.
*
Many believe that all Jews are completely biased in favor of Israel. Since you are Jewish this raises some questions. Why have you supported the grievances of the Palestinians? And why does not Israel welcome you on its territory since you are a Jew?

It is a rather well kept secret that from the very outset of the Zionist movement there were many Jews, including some who were prominent in their countries who opposed or strongly criticized Zionist ideology, as well as the way Israel was established and subsequently developed. After 1948, and even more so, after 1967, Israeli supporters, strongly encouraged by Zionist leaders and Israeli diplomats, have increasingly claimed that the Israeli government speaks for all Jews regardless of whether or not they reside in Israel. If this claim of universal representation is denied or resisted that person will be identified by Zionists/Israelis either as an anti-Semite or as bad, a self-hating Jew, or some combination of the two. I have increasingly supported the grievances of the Palestinian people from two perspectives, in my capacity as an international law specialist and as a human being opposed to the oppression and suffering of others regardless of whether or not I share the ethnic and religious background of such victims of abuse. I have taken these positions without any feelings of hatred toward Jews or alienation from the Jewish people, or toward any people due to their ethnicity or brand of faith. My understanding of identity is much more bound up with common humanity and action in solidarity with victims of abuse than with worrying about whether or not they happen to be Jewish. I have drawn wisdom and insight from Jewish traditions, especially by heeding Old Testament biblical prophets, but as well from contact with the great texts of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. At the same time I am appalled by some passages in the OT that appear to counsel and even celebrate genocidal onslaughts against the ancient enemies of the Jewish people.

How is the pretext of anti-Semitism used to silence critical voices in Israel and throughout the Western world? And what are the most influential institutions that try to silence and discredit academic voices that reject Israel’s repressive policies?

With the support of Israeli lobbying groups and ultra Zionist pressure groups and activists, there is a concerted campaign in Europe and North America to defame critics of Israel by calling them ‘anti-Semites.’ Especially since the Nazi genocide, to be called an anti-Semite whether or not there is any responsible basis for such accusations has become one of the most effective ways to discredit and distract. Even when accusations do not silence a critic, as in my case, they have detrimental and hurtful effects. Above all, they shift the conversation from the validity of the message to the credibility of the messenger. In the Israel/Palestine context this takes attention away from the ordeal experience by the Palestinian people on a daily basis. Thus, allegations of anti-Semitism function as both sword (to wound the messenger) and shield (to deflect and inhibit criticism and opposition).

How do you interpret the Egyptian policies toward Gaza since the Sisi coup? How can these policies be changed? What is their legal status?

I interpret Egyptian policies toward Gaza since the Sisi coup of 2013 as primarily an expression of renewed collaboration with Israel with respect to Gaza as intensified by the Cairo view that Hamas is inspired by and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is enemy number one of the current Egyptian government. I am not familiar with the details of the Egyptian policy toward Gaza, although I know it imposes arbitrary and hurtful restrictions on entry and exit. Egyptian policies toward Gaza seem clearly to involve complicity with Israel’s worst abuses in Gaza, and entail potential criminal responsibility for Egyptian leaders and implementing officials. Israel seems clearly guilty of inflicting collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and for aiding and abetting the implementation of the unlawful blockade of Gaza that has been maintained by the state of Israel since 2007 with many cruel consequences for the Palestinians, including those needing to leave Gaza for lifesaving medical treatments.

How do you evaluate Hamas’ new policy document?

I believe the Hamas document moves toward the adoption of a political approach to its relations with both Israel and Egypt. By a political approach I mean a willingness to establish long-term interim arrangements for peaceful coexistence with Israel and normalization with Egypt. Hamas expresses this willingness by indicating a readiness to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state on territory occupied by Israel since the end of the 1967 War. Such a shift by Hamas does not acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel as a state nor does it involve a repudiation of the 1988 Hamas Charter, although it does abandon the anti-Semitic rhetoric and seems more disposed to pursue its goals diplomatically and politically rather than by reliance on armed struggle, without giving up in any way rights of resistance, including armed resistance.

Did it became impossible for Palestinians to obtain their legitimate rights throughout international organizations in the light of the latest UN refusal of UN ESCWA report your good-self drafted?

The reaction to our ESCWA report, “The Practices of Israel Toward the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” did reveal a lack of independence and objectivity within the UN when placed under severe geopolitical pressure by the United States Government. It seemed clear that when the UN Secretary General ordered ESCWA to remove our report from their website, he was succumbing to pressure exerted by the United States, whose ambassador to the UN denounced the report without giving reasons as soon as it was released, presumably without it ever being read, and demanded its repudiation. Of course, the outcome was mixed. On the positive side, Rima Khalaf, the highly respected head of ESCWA resigned on principle rather than follow the directives of the SG, and the firestorm generated by the release of the report resulted in the text being far more influential and widely read than it might otherwise have been if treated appropriately. On the negative side, was the strong evidence that the UN is often unable to act effectively in support of the Palestinian people and their long struggle for their basic rights. The UN is geopolitically neutralized as a political actor even when Israel acts in flagrant and persisting defiance of international law and its own Charter.

Talk about the Trump-sponsored Century Deal between Palestinians and Israelis is increasing now … what are your expectations for such a deal? Will include what is said to be a “resettlement” of the Palestinians in Gaza and Sinai ?

Nothing positive for the Palestinian people can emerge from the wave of speculation that Trump will soon broker the ultimate peace deal. Israel is content with managing the status quo while gradually increasing its territorial appropriations via settlements, wall, security claims, and various demographic manipulations. Palestine lacks credible leadership capable of representing the Palestinian people. This partly reflects the low credibility and poor record of the Palestinian Authority and partly the deep split between Hamas and Fatah. Palestinian unity and credible leadership is a precondition for the resumption of genuine diplomacy. Geopolitical pressure should not be confused with diplomacy, and will not produce a sustainable peace even if the PA is force fed a one-sided outcome favorable to Israel that is disguised as a solution.

How does Israel see the current Egyptian regime? and to what extent did it feel comfortable towards Mohamed Morsi?

Israel seems quite content with the current government in Egypt, and the policies that Cairo is pursuing at home and in the region. This contrasts with its thinly disguised dislike of and anxiety about the Morsi government, and worries that Morsi’s Egypt would increasingly challenge Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and possibly alter the balance of force in the region in ways contrary to Israel’s interests.

Does Israel hate the existence of a democratic regimes in the Arab region, especially the neighboring countries? And why?

Israel opposes the emergence of democracy in the Middle East for several reasons. The most obvious reason is that Arab governments to the extent democratic are more likely to reflect in their policies, the pro-Palestinian sentiments of their citizenry. As well, Arab governments that adhere to democratic values are more likely to act in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Also, it is easier for Israel to work out pragmatic arrangements with authoritarian leaders who have little accountability to their own people and have demonstrated a cynical readiness to sacrifice the Palestinians for the sake of their own national strategic interests. This has become most evident in the kind of diplomacy pursued by the Gulf monarchies in recent years, dramatically evident during the three massive attacks on Gaza by Israel during the past decade that have devastated a totally vulnerable civilian population.

Why do the far right think tanks- like Gatestone Institute and Middle East Forum which is known by its absolute support of Israel praise President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Why do these centers deeply praise him?

My prior responses make it clear that the Israeli policy community is pleased with Egypt governed by an authoritarian leader who adopts an agenda giving priority to the suppression of political Islam, taking the form in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egyptian governance under Sisi is precisely what Israel would like to see emerge throughout the region, and if not, then the second option, is prolonged chaos of the sort that exists in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. As well, the reinforced sectarianism of Saudi Arabia is consistent with Israel’s view that Iran poses the most dangerous threat, not so much to its security, but to its agenda of regional influence.

In your opinion, what is the most Arab country supporting the Palestinian issue?

I would say that none of the Arab countries is genuinely supportive of the Palestinian struggle at the present time. With a note of irony the most supportive countries in the region are non-Arab: Turkey and Iran, and their support is extremely limited. It is a sad commentary on the drift of regional politics that the Palestinians are without governmental support in the Arab world, a reality magnified by the fact that if the publics of these countries were in a position to make policy, the Palestinians would be strongly supported. In this regard, including in the West, Palestinian hopes for the future are increasingly tied to the interaction of their own resistance in combination with a growing solidarity movement in Europe and North America. The UN and traditional diplomacy, as practiced within the Oslo framework for more than 20 years have proved to be dead ends when it comes to protecting Palestinian rights.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author, co-author or editor of 40 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs.

26 June 2017

By www.rt.com

US President Donald Trump ignored reports from US intelligence that said they had no evidence Syria had used sarin to attack a rebel-held town, Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says.

Hersh is most famous for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. He also uncovered the abuse of prisoners by US personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In a report published by the German newspaper Die Welt on Sunday, he describes how the Trump administration mishandled the media frenzy after the Syrian bombing of the rebel-held town Khan Sheikhoun in April.

Trump chose to ignore reports compiled by American intelligence and the military that contradicted the prevailing media narrative accusing Damascus of using sarin gas to kill civilians, the report says, citing accounts by anonymous US military advisers. Instead, he ordered his military to prepare options for a response, which they did.

The subsequent Tomahawk attack on the Syrian Shayrat Air Base did less damage that the White House claimed, as was apparently intended by the military planners of the operation, Hersh said. The US mainstream media failed to question the government’s narrative of the situation, instead giving Trump what appears to be the pinnacle achievement of his presidency so far.

“None of this makes any sense,” one US officer told colleagues upon learning of the White House decision to retaliate against Syria. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack… the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth… I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.”
Special weapon

Hersh’s report is based on interviews with several US advisers and evidence they provided, including transcripts of real-time communications that immediately followed the Syrian attack on April 4. According to the advisers, the Syrian Air Force’s attack on Khan Sheikhoun targeted a meeting of several high-value leaders of jihadist groups, including Ahrar al-Sham and Al-Nusra Front, which has changed its name to Jabhat al-Nusra.

The US was informed of the operation in detail beforehand as part of a conflict prevention arrangement with Russia. The two-way information sharing in place in Syria at the time helped the US-led coalition and Russia-backed Damascus to avoid accidental encounters in the air, protect intelligence assets on the ground, and coordinate with each other when planning missions.

“They were playing the game right,” a senior US adviser is cited by Hersh as saying regarding the pre-mission notice from Russia.

“It was a red-hot change. The mission was out of the ordinary – scrub the sked,” the adviser said. “Every operations officer in the region” – in the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, CIA, and NSA – “had to know there was something going on. The Russians gave the Syrian Air Force a guided bomb and that was a rarity. They’re skimpy with their guided bombs and rarely share them with the Syrian Air Force. And the Syrians assigned their best pilot to the mission, with the best wingman.”

The special weapon used in the bombing was mentioned in Syrian communications collected before the attack by a US ally. The interception was widely reported in the Western media as an indication that Damascus had used a chemical weapon.

“If you’ve already decided it was a gas attack, you will then inevitably read the talk about a special weapon as involving a sarin bomb,” the adviser told Hersh. “Did the Syrians plan the attack on Khan Sheikhoun? Absolutely. Do we have intercepts to prove it? Absolutely. Did they plan to use sarin? No. But the president did not say: ‘We have a problem and let’s look into it.’ He wanted to bomb the shit out of Syria.”
Fertilizers & decontaminants

The target of the Syrian bombing was described as a two-story cinder-block building. According to Russian intelligence, the jihadists used the second floor as a command and control center. The first floor housed a grocery store and other businesses. The basement was used as a warehouse for weapons, ammunition, and goods, including chlorine-based decontaminants and fertilizers.

“The rebels control the population by controlling the distribution of goods that people need to live – food, water, cooking oil, propane gas, fertilizers for growing their crops, and insecticides to protect the crops,” a senior adviser to the American intelligence community told Hersh.

According to a US assessment of the morning airstrike cited by Hersh, the 500-pound Russian bomb triggered secondary explosions. The heat could have evaporated the chemical products in the basement, producing a toxic cloud that spread over the town, pressed close to the ground by the dense morning air.

The scenario is consistent with the accounts of patients who reported a chlorine odor in interviews with Medecins Sans Frontieres. It could also explain the symptoms of nerve agent poisoning that were attributed to sarin, but may have been caused by organophosphates used in many fertilizers, Hersh said.

Meanwhile, US intelligence had no evidence to indicate the presence of sarin gas at or near the Shayrat Air Base, from which the bombing mission was launched.

“This was not a chemical weapons strike,” the journalist cites a source as saying. “That’s a fairy tale. If so, everyone involved in transferring, loading and arming the weapon – you’ve got to make it appear like a regular 500-pound conventional bomb – would be wearing Hazmat protective clothing in case of a leak. There would be very little chance of survival without such gear.”

“Military grade sarin includes additives designed to increase toxicity and lethality. Every batch that comes out is maximized for death. That is why it is made. It is odorless and invisible and death can come within a minute. No cloud. Why produce a weapon that people can run away from?” the adviser added.
The Trump Show

The Trump administration quickly adopted the rebel narrative, which accused President Bashar Assad’s government of conducting a sarin gas attack on Khan Sheikhoun. Top US officials went on to condemn Damascus and accuse Russia of complicity in the bombing. Trump ordered the national defense apparatus to prepare a response within hours of seeing photos of poisoned children on TV, Hersh’s report cites a senior adviser as saying.

“No one knew the provenance of the photographs. We didn’t know who the children were or how they got hurt,” the adviser said. “Sarin actually is very easy to detect because it penetrates paint, and all one would have to do is get a paint sample. We knew there was a cloud and we knew it hurt people. But you cannot jump from there to certainty that Assad had hidden sarin from the UN because he wanted to use it in Khan Sheikhoun.”

“The president saw the photographs of poisoned little girls and said it was an Assad atrocity,” he added. “It’s typical of human nature. You jump to the conclusion you want. Intelligence analysts do not argue with a president. They’re not going to tell the president, ‘if you interpret the data this way, I quit.’”

At a national security meeting at Mar-a-Lago on April 6, Trump was offered four options for responding to the Syrian incident, ranging from doing nothing and to assassinating President Assad, the report said. Eventually, the US president chose to attack the Syrian air base, which Hersh’s source described as “the ‘gorilla option’: America would glower and beat its chest to provoke fear and demonstrate resolve, but cause little significant damage.”

Of the 59 Tomahawk missiles fired at Shayrat, as many as 24 missed their targets because the initial strikes hit gasoline storage tanks, triggering a huge fire and a lot of smoke that interfered with the guidance systems of the following missies. Only a few actually penetrated the hangars, and these only destroyed nine aircraft that were apparently not operational and could not be moved during the window of opportunity between the US warning of the looming attack and the strike itself.

“It was a totally Trump show from beginning to end,” the senior adviser told Hersh. “A few of the president’s senior national security advisers viewed the mission as a minimized bad presidential decision, and one that they had an obligation to carry out. But I don’t think our national security people are going to allow themselves to be hustled into a bad decision again. If Trump had gone for option three [a massive attack on Syrian military facilities], there might have been some immediate resignations.”
Trump trapped by own mistake

The reaction to the show of force in the US media was probably everything the Trump administration could have hoped for. MSNBC anchorman Brian Williams described the sight of Tomahawks being launched at the Syrian base as “beautiful.” CNN host Fareed Zakaria reacted by saying that Trump finally “became president of the United States.”

According to Hersh, of the top 100 American newspapers, 39 published editorials supporting the bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Five days later, the White House briefed the national media on the operation and the US response to Russia’s assertion that Syria has not used sarin gas. The Trump administration’s insistence that a chemical attack actually did happen was not challenged by any of the reporters present.

The following US coverage of the situation accused Russia of trying to cover up the alleged chemical attack, Hersh says. The New York Times described “declassified information” released during the press briefings as coming from a “declassified intelligence report,” though no formal report from US intelligence stated that Syria had used sarin, Hersh notes.

“The Salafists and jihadists got everything they wanted out of their hyped-up Syrian nerve gas ploy,” the senior adviser told him. “The issue is, what if there’s another false flag sarin attack credited to hated Syria? Trump has upped the ante and painted himself into a corner with his decision to bomb. And do not think these guys are not planning the next faked attack. Trump will have no choice but to bomb again, and harder. He’s incapable of saying he made a mistake.”

25 June 2017

By Gerald A Perreira

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Delcy Rodriguez, recently tweeted that the“US State Department deployed its ambassadors in the region to attack Venezuela. We come with renewed vigor to defeat them at the OAS.”

So said, so done. Last week, the US Ambassador to Guyana, Perry Holloway, spewed the US false narrative regarding Venezuela in our local newspapers. US ambassadors in a number of other Caribbean countries did the same. It was a coordinated attempt to mislead the people of Guyana and the region about what is really happening in Venezuela, and to apply pressure on members of CARICOM (Caribbean Community) and the OAS (Organization of American States) to succumb to US calls for intervention,with the aim of overthrowing the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro.

US diplomats in Guyana, and for that matter throughout the Global South, are not diplomats in the strict sense of the word, and can be better described as political activists.  They are constantly meddling in the internal affairs of the country they are stationed in, giving directives to the compliant neo-colonial regimes and actively undermining and destabilizing independent and anti-imperialist governments, such as the government in Venezuela.

This latest US psy-ops came just after the May 31st meeting of the OAS in Washington DC and just prior to the June 19th OAS meeting in Cancun, Mexico, where CARICOM member states took a firm and united anti-interventionist position in relation to the current situation in Venezuela, delivering a resounding defeat to the interventionist approach advocated by the US, Mexico, Peru and Panama,

Following the June 19th OAS meeting, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Delcy Rodriguez, said:“Today we come with the strength of our people who took to the streets to denounce the interventionism of the Organization of American States, we come with the force of the rain of our commander Hugo Chavez. Independence and sovereignty triumphed today over the United States of America, with its brutal pressure, with its gross extortion, with its maneuvers…”

She added that the call for intervention encourages the “most violent, anti-democratic factions in our country,”and she thanked the Caribbean nations for their“deeply principled stand.”
In his letter and articles, US ambassador, Perry Holloway, had the temerity to lecture Guyana and other member-states of the OAS about their obligation to democracy and human rights.

He stated that:“The diverse family of nations in the Americas recognizes democracy is a part of our collective DNA. Sixteen years ago in Peru, we underscored this principle with the adoption of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, affirming the right of the peoples of the Americas to democracy and obligating our governments to defend that right.”

I suggest that before US Diplomats in the Caribbean and the Americas offer any criticism or advice to Venezuela or any member-state of the OAS on issues of democracy and human rights, they should first examine the behavior of their own government in relation to their undemocratic practices and policies, both internally and around the world, and their endless list of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Trump Lays Bare Sham Democracy

The only positive aspect of Trump’s presidency is that it is exposing, once and for all, the sham that parades as US democracy and concern for human rights.The entirely undemocratic nature of US internal and foreign policy is clear to all in 2017. Even that minority of citizens on this planet who still held out some hope that the US resembled anything close to a democracy, have now seen through the façade. American political philosopher, Sheldon S. Wolin, in his brilliant work, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,renders a devastating critique of US democracy and is a vital read for anyone who wishes to understand the latent fascism that underpins the politics of this Empire.

Former US Attorney-General, Ramsay Clark,had this to say: “We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy, a government by the wealthy.”  He compared President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, and is on record as saying at the outset of the US invasion of Iraq, that it “will be genocide again”, adding that “the greatest crime since World War 2 has been US foreign policy”.

As I watch the hue and cry over Trump’s actions, it reminds me of Adolph Hitler’s response to Europe’s criticism of his policies. He told them:“I am only doing out in the open what you have been doing behind closed doors for centuries”.

A meme that was circulated at the end of Obama’s presidency said it best:“Only in shallow, self-absorbed, privileged America could a leader drop 26,000 bombs on seven  countries in a single year, and have citizens mourn the end of his term because he looked and sounded classy while doing it.”

The illusion highlighted in this meme picks up on the public relations stunt that has become a hallmark of the US establishment, and which Sheldon Wolin identifies as a major feature of the “inverted totalitarianism” that exists in the US today. He describes “inverted totalitarianism”as a state of affairs where a small ruling elite (the 1%) have established an authoritarian society which benefits them exclusively. In this society, corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy, and natural resources and labour are seen as mere commodities to be exploited for huge profits. This status quo is maintained by a sophisticated propaganda machine that lulls the majority of people into apathy. Central to reinforcing this hegemon is a tightly controlled corporatized media, a mouthpiece for the establishment, that is constantly spinning fake news and false narratives,and emphasizing rabid consumerism, individualism and the politics of personality and sensationalism. Wolin, like Clark, compares modern day USA to Nazi Germany, pointing out that the form is different but the essence, that is, fascism, is the same.
Friendly Fascism

37 years ago, political scientist, Bertram Gross,coined the term “friendly fascism”and predicted the Orwellian reality we are witnessing today in the US. His thesis converges with the conclusions reached by Wolin, Clark and others.

In his farewell address at the end of his presidency in 1961, Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, warned the American people about the dangers of the “Military Industrial Complex”, the control it exerted and its ability to,in his words,“weaken or destroy the very institutions and principles it was designed to protect”.  This has surely come to pass.

So,before US diplomats such as Perry Holloway attempt to discredit the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, initiated by one of the most revered freedom fighters in the Americas, the late Hugo Chavez, and led today by President Nicolas Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela with the support of the majority of the people of Venezuela, they would do well to take a long and hard look at the crisis of democracy in their own country.

Let Mr. Holloway explain to Guyanese and the citizenry of all member-states of the OAS why, in 2017, Africansin the US continue to be gunned down in the streets on a regular basis.

Let him explain to us why the US has the largest number of persons imprisoned per capita in the world, and why the prisoners are disproportionately made up of Africans, Indigenous and other people of colour, before he points the finger at a revolution that has lifted African and Indigenous Venezuelans out of debilitating discrimination and poverty.

Let Mr. Holloway address the situation of US political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jamil Al-Amin (formerly Rap Brown), Leonard Peltier and so many others who are languishing in US prisons before he speaks of Venezuela’s human rights record.

Let the US Ambassador focus on the shocking poverty and illiteracy statistics emerging from his own country, before he points the finger at the Bolivarian revolution which has made unprecedented gains in eradicating poverty and illiteracy amongst the masses of Venezuela’s poor. Anyone who visited oil rich Venezuela prior to the Bolivarian revolution can testify to the abhorrent conditions and the repressive measures used to subjugate the majority of Venezuelans, and in particular, African and Indigenous Venezuelans.

Does the Ambassador truly believe that his letters and articles, full of the usual delusional and empty rhetoric, would convince any of us that his government is concerned about democracy and human rights in Venezuela,or anywhere in the world for that matter, after we have witnessed the apocalyptic events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the list goes on.

Does Mr. Holloway think we have forgotten our own history in the Americas and the Caribbean, including the US orchestrated coups that overthrew the democratically elected governments of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, President Salvador Allende in Chile, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop in Grenada, President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras and the constitutional coup against President Dilma Rousseff in Brazil? What about the removal at gunpoint of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by US military personnel in Haiti? There is not the space in a single article to even list the US crimes in our region. Just to chronicle them warrants a book. If we were to list US crimes against the whole of humanity, we are looking at a library of books. The US Empire and the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch Empires that preceded it, have been without doubt the worst examples of terrorism in all of human history.

In his letter and article, Mr. Holloway advises that“when a government breaks with democracy, we must act in solidarity with its people, not through intervention or interference, but with diplomacy and mediation among all parties to help find a peaceful, democratic, and comprehensive solution”.Tell us Mr. Holloway: Are the examples listed above your idea of diplomacy and mediation?

These governments were not removed because of their lack of democracy or abuse of human rights. They were removed, like countless others throughout the Global South, because they were attempting to free their country from the clutches of the Empire, and liberate their wealth and resources so that they might benefit the masses of their people. Our own founding fathers in Guyana, Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham were subjected to the same destabilization tactics at the hands of the US government and its CIA.

Empire Loses its Grip

The US and its diplomats need to understand that with the advent of the internet and the availability of information in this day and age,the Empire has lost all credibility. There is no one left on earth who can be misled by their hollow and hypocritical rhetoric. Do not be fooled by those who dare not speak openly – they are afraid of losing their visas and even worse reprisals. Regardless of their cowardice and silence, everyone knows that the Emperor is naked. Behind closed doors, even those satraps who publicly profess their allegiance, such as the Saudis, snigger and jeer at the hideous state of affairs in the United States of America.

As the US Empire crumbles, its vampires, who have sucked the blood of the sufferers for so long, are in panic mode because, despite their descent into blatant authoritarianism and fascism, they continue to lose their grip on the terrifying world they have created, as it spins more and more out of control. The ugly death squads such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, the very Frankensteins of their own making, are turning right back on them. As Malcom X observed so long ago, the chickens must come home to roost. One cannot keep up with the number of attacks in the US and Europe.

One of the vampires, largely credited with creating Al Qaeda, a former US National Security Advisor, and founder of the Rockefeller-controlled Trilateral Commission, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a speech to British elites at Chatham House in 2008, spoke volumes when he said:

“…new and old major powers face still yet another novel reality, in some respects unprecedented, and it is that while the lethality of their power is greater than ever, their capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at an historical low…I once put it rather pungently, and I was flattered that the British Foreign Secretary repeated this… namely, in earlier times, it was easier to control a million people than physically to kill a million people. Today, it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people.”
The current US administration, like its predecessors, whether Democrat or Republican, is involved in just that, killing millions of people all over the worldin its bid to control, and trying desperately to convince us of the absurdnotion that that they are doing this in the name of democracy and human rights. Trouble is, no one is buying it?The majority of CARICOM countries are governed by neo-colonial political outfits and even they voted against US plans for regime change in Venezuela. The playbook is old and tired. Donald Trump just tied up an arms deal worth 350 billion US dollars with the corrupt and entirely undemocratic regime of Saudi Arabia, a regime that is without doubt the main proliferator of the ideology of Wahhabism and the movements intent on imposing this ideology worldwide, such as Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al Nusra Front and ISIS.All these weapons to a government that is funding terrorism worldwide and committing genocide in Yemen. And,when the power struggle between the Saudis and the Qataris surfaced, Trump paid lip service to the manufactured war on terrorby publicly condemning Qatar’s support for terrorism, and days later sold the Qataris US military hardware worth 12 billion dollars. In light of this hypocrisy and blatant disregard for the victims of these rogue states and their global terrorist network, can you really expect us to believe that your concern with Venezuela is about lack of democracy and human rights?
No Shame

Finally,to Mr. Holloway and his cohorts throughout the region, your expressed shock and horror about the so-called spillover from Venezuela’scurrent predicament was perhaps the most shameful part of your missive:“The spillover effects from Venezuela’s crisis are serious and growing, whether it is irregular migrant flows to countries in our region or the increasing flow of arms and criminal activity that affect the Caribbean in particular.”

This is rich coming from the people who illegally invaded Libya, murdered the Libyan leader and freedom fighter, Muammar Qaddafi in the street, and in so doing, destroyed the most prosperous and democratic nation on the African continent, causing a migration crisis of a magnitude never seen before. Your government handed over the nation of Libya to a conglomerate of thugs, criminals, terrorists and reactionary warlords, and this spillover continues to wreak havoc throughout Africa and the Arab Region six years on. Before you concern yourself with any spillover in the Caribbean, please deal with the spillover from your criminal invasion of Libya, a spillover that only this month reached Manchester, England.

In Guyana, the Americas and throughout the Global South, the masses of people are sick and tired of the same old playbook – the one that is in fact the cause of the current situation in Venezuela. But then, that is part of the devil’s own script, cause the problem and then come to us as saviour, with a solution. It plays like this: the US, through its infamous web of security agencies, NGOs, Aid Agencies, think-tanks and other Trojan horses,destabilize, sow confusion and do everything in their power to overthrow any government and subjugate any people that refuse to obey Empire. Recently, more than 300,000 Venezuelans took to the streets in support of President Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution. The opposition held a demonstration that attracted 50,000. Of course, in your United States, the corporate media is reporting just the opposite.By the admission of your own president they are the purveyors of fake news and this is just another example of your country’s lack of democracy. The bottom line is this Mr. Holloway: your country and its government is no way fit to point the finger at anyone when it comes to infringement of democracy, democratic values and human rights.

In your letters and articles you ask:“if these things were happening in our own countries, would we not want the rest of our American family of nations to speak out, and reach out, to help restore fundamental democratic freedoms and respect for constitutional institutions?”

In your own words you proclaim that:“The Organization of American States has for decades provided a forum to discuss our greatest challenges and take action together to address them. The challenge before us today is the death spiral of democracy in Venezuela.”

What you say in the two quotes above is correct except for one thing,the challenge before us today is not the death spiral of democracy in Venezuela, it is the death spiral of democracy in the United States and an evil Empire spinning out of control.

You are right – the OAS should take immediate action to prevent further terrorism and turmoil because the spillover worldwide from the crisis in the United States is serious and growing.

Gerald A. Perreira is chairperson of the Guyanese organizations Black Consciousness Movement Guyana (BCMG) and Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP) and an executive member of the Caribbean Chapter of the Network in Defense of Humanity.

25 June 2017