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By Abdullah Al-Ahsan

The decision by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt on June 5 to sever diplomatic and commercial relations with Qatar has created an unprecedented political uproar in the region. Similar crises had emerged before too, but this time the assault seems more severe. It is more severe this time not only because some other small players such as Maldives, Mauritania and Yemen have joined the group, the unpredictable President Trump has come forward with his support for the action. With the closure of Qatar’s air, sea and land links disrupting its exports and imports particularly affecting food supplies the situation has turned grave. A gleeful Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's defense minister is also reported to have praised the measures against Qatar because he finds “many possibilities of cooperation in the struggle against terror" in the action. Is Qatar so dangerous for the rest of the world? What has tiny Qatar done to cause such a “security threat” to neighboring countries and beyond?

What is Qatar’s Fault?

Qatar has been accused of supporting terror groups and the Palestinian Hamas has been identified as one of those groups. But what kind of assistance has Qatar really provided to Hamas? Has Qatar provided Hamas with arms to fight Israel? The fact is that Israel and Egypt have jointly blocked Gaza, causing a huge humanitarian crisis for the people in the Strip. Yes, Qatar has sent humanitarian assistance to Gaza and perhaps granted visa for some Hamas leaders to temporarily reside in the country. But is it Qatar’s fault that the people of Gaza have elected Hamas to represent them? Should Qatar then have ignored the sufferings of the people of Gaza? In this context one should remember that King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, founder of modern Saudi Arabia, was a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. He protested against President Truman’s decision to recognize Israel in 1948 and rejected an American grant for Saudi Arabia. He strongly believed that the US had violated the rights of Palestinians by supporting the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine. The King’s position on the issue was no different from the position that Hamas holds today on the question of Palestine.

Qatar has also been accused of supporting the Egyptian Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). What sort of assistance has Qatar provided to MB other than humanitarian? More than half a century ago when Egyptian MB encountered persecution at home, many of its members sought shelter in Saudi Arabia. Wise leaders in Saudi Arabia did provide them with shelter but as a result Saudi Arabia benefitted a lot too. At a time when Saudi Arabia had very few educated and trained manpower, highly professional and qualified MB members made significant contributions to what is Saudi Arabia today. Why have the MB members lost Saudi goodwill? The answer to this question may be connected to the current crisis.

What is the Real Reason behind the Crisis?

According to an analyst, “The real reason behind the diplomatic fallout may be far simpler, and once again has to do with a long-running and controversial topic, namely Qatar's regional natural gas dominance.” But this may be too simplistic. David Hearst of the Middle East Eye in an
article “Three potential motives behind the tension between Qatar and its Gulf neighbours,” identifies “to finish the job started in June 2013 when Morsi was toppled” as one of the motives and to us this makes sense. Morsi was a MB member who is the only civilian in Egypt’s history who was elected by the people. If a terrorist is defined as “a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims” as has been defined by the English dictionary, then who is a terrorist? Morsi, the only civilian who was elected president of the country in a credible election; or Sisi, who usurped power from Morsi by force? Fundamentally the ancien regimes in the region didn’t seem to have been happy about 2011 uprisings and seem to hold Qatar responsible for educating people to stand for their rights. Therefore Qatar’s fault was to establish Aljazeera news networks, bringing BBC’s Doha debate to the country, setting up think-tanks and a number of American universities in Qatar to educate not only Qataris but also everybody in the region. Why are the accusers against Qatar so afraid of education? Do they consider the people in the region foolish? Don’t the people understand what is good and what is harmful for them?

Harassment of Pilgrims in the Holy Mosque

Saudi authorities are reported to be preventing Qatari nationals from entering the Grand Mosque. If this is true, the Saudi authorities are not only violating the teachings of Shari’ah, they are also breaking the commitment that King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud made to representatives of Muslims from all over the world. After capturing Hijaz, where the holy mosques are located, in 1924 from the Hashmites the King declared the territory as the trust of Islam and in 1926 in a conference he received mandate from Muslim leaders to administer facilities for pilgrims. At a time when most Muslim nation states had not yet emerged, these Muslim leaders were the real representatives of the Muslim world.

It should be noted that this could not have been achieved without the support of the British colonial administration which originally favored the Hashimite Sharif Hussain. However, Muslims all over the world were very critical of the Hashimites because of latter’s support for the British against the Ottomans and the British were trying to pacify particularly their Indian subjects. The Khilafat Movement was very strong at that time. Ibn Saud’s diplomacy succeeded: he was able to secure not only British patronage; he also secured long term financial support for his Kingdom in exchange for providing services to pilgrims.

Timing of the Action against Qatar

The timing of the action by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE is important. Why have they taken this rather extreme step now? These countries were already concerned because of the Arab uprisings of 2011 but became furious since the Egyptian MB received people’s mandate in 2012. While holding Qatari news media for such developments, they perhaps thought that Trump presidency would facilitate them achieving their mischievous objective to eliminate the popular movement. However, they don’t seem to know the fact that the United States has a constitution which ensures checks and balances. No matter how unpredictable a president may be, the President can’t impose his whimsical utterances upon the nation. More than a week has passed and there is no sign that the embargo against Qatar is receiving US support. In fact Trump’s tweets and statements have been challenged by a number of government institutions including the State Department and the Pentagon.

Role of the Muslim World

In this context it is painful to see the statement by the General Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) asking Qatar “to honor its previous commitments and agreements signed within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), particularly with regard to ceasing support for terrorist groups and their activities and ending media incitement.” Does the OIC want Qatar to abandon its commitment to humanitarian causes? Particularly in this month of Ramadan? Such an act will not only violate the teachings of Shari’ah, but also OIC’s Cairo Declaration of Human Rights and the UN declaration of Human Rights. It should be remembered that when the OIC was established, its general secretariat was supposed to be located in Jerusalem. But since Jerusalem was under Israeli occupation, the Saudi King Faisal persuaded OIC member states to temporarily host the OIC headquarters in Jeddah. Now Saudi Arabia seems to have made the OIC its home property. Recently it has fired its Secretary General reportedly on the recommendation of Egypt without even consulting other members of the organization. In this context one must note that Al-Azhar’s fatwa on the role of Qatar is shameful.

As for other Muslim countries, on top of the vassal governments in Yemen and Libya tiny Maldives and Mauritania have declared their support for the Saudi/ UAE gang. But heavy weights such as Turkey and Iran have come forward with their strong support for Qatar. Turkey has even come forward with military assistance for Qatar. This is a very timely gesture on the part of Turkey. It is unfortunate that Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan are almost silent on the crisis. Does one need to take sides in such conflicts? Haven’t Kuwait and Oman, GCC member countries, declared their position? Can’t one declare a position on the basis of principles? Has it been ethically and Islamically correct to declare such a war-like embargo against the brotherly country of Qatar during the month of Ramadan? The Saudi led action against Qatar is wrong because the blockade seems to have been mainly against food supplies to Qatar. It is almost unimaginable for a common Muslim to force any individual to starve to death in such a mischievous manner.

The Israeli Connection

The leaked email correspondence of UAE’s ambassador in Washington has demonstrated “that there is a growing axis between some of the Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Israel.” Therefore Avigdor Lieberman’s gleeful desire for cooperation by using security as the excuse should not surprise observers of ongoing developments in the region. Many other Israeli leaders also have also been hopeful about the possible outcome of the Qatar crisis. According to the Jerusalem Post “Israel benefits when it is not the center of attention and certainly when it is not under pressure. This is a boon for the government.” Zionism’s greater Israel project has already succeeded in splitting Iraq and Syria into many sectarian pieces, the Gulf crisis will perhaps extend that sectarianism and tribalism to the extended region. This is not to suggest that Israel alone is responsible for the civil war in Iraq and Syria but Israel knows very well how to take advantage of the youth that have lost hope and suffers from severe economic difficulties. And Qatar’s failure as a moderate force in the region is bound to create despair, hopelessness and frustration among the youth, not only in the region but throughout the world. This will create opportunities for conspirators to recruit potential extremists to carry out seditious activities.

David Hearst in the article quoted above has predicted that, “out of the havoc they are wreaking, a new, autonomous and modern Arabia will, eventually, emerge.” We would like to add that this new modern Arabia will be based on principles of caring for one another, human dignity and self-respect; not on the basis of superiority of race, tribe or lineage. Qatar has survived similar attacks in 2014 and came out strong. This time too it is expected to demonstrate its resilience. Enemies of Qatar perhaps had designed to create food shortage in Ramadan thinking that the country would succumb to pressure immediately. However, they must have miscalculated the level of spiritual strength that Ramadan brings to believers. One must not underestimate the strength of spirituality of Qataris.

It is interesting to note that the social media in these countries seem to have reacted sharply against the measures imposed upon Qatar. That is why they have now banned people even from publishing expressions of sympathy towards Qatar in the social media. This is a sign of desperation and usually defeated parties adopt such measures. There is a strong possibility that Qatar will come out much stronger from this crisis.

Dr. Abdullah Al-Ahsan is an academic and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

15 June 2017

By Seyed Hossein Mousavian

Since the advent of nuclear weapons, nations and grassroots movements across the world have sought to eliminate the risk they pose to life on Earth through nuclear prohibition and disarmament.

The foundation for these efforts has been the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Article VI of which calls on its 190 signatories for “a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”.

Last autumn, 123 states issued a call on the United Nations for a nuclear ban treaty, which lead to a draft of a legally-binding text to prohibit nuclear weapons on 22 May 2017.

Now, from 15 June-7 July, representatives from roughly 130 nations will negotiate the final text and try to make the treaty a reality. Sadly, all the recognised nuclear-weapons states and their allies have voiced strong opposition to the historic talks.

Though the five recognised nuclear powers are signatory to the NPT and have been obligated to pursue disarmament for nearly 50 years, they have not only failed to do so but now have far-reaching plans to upgrade and extend the lifespans of their nuclear weapons.

Even more egregious, they have de facto supported the proliferation of nuclear weapons by establishing strategic relations with countries like India, Pakistan and Israel, which have rejected the NPT and amassed sizeable weapons arsenals.

All told, there exist about 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, of which the US and Russia possess around 7,000 each. America’s nuclear modernisation program alone is estimated to cost the country $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

Since the NPT went into effect, the reality has been that the world has been split between the haves and have-nots of nuclear weapons, and the haves have been able to selectively agree on the new haves. This longstanding status quo has now led to a majority of nations – cognisant that the world has been held hostage to the weapons stockpiles of the nuclear-armed states – to push for a prohibition treaty, to put political and legal restraints on the possession of nuclear weapons.

One state supporting the ban treaty negotiations, Iran, can play a unique role in making the talks a success. Three chief reasons explain why Iran can and should be a strong advocate to advance the causes of nuclear non-proliferation and the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

First, the July 2015 nuclear deal agreed to by Iran and six major world powers – formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – sets a new global nuclear non-proliferation standard far stronger than the NPT. As President Obama has stated, the deal cuts “off every single one of Iran’s pathways to a […] nuclear weapons program,” and establishes the “most comprehensive and intrusive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated”.

Consequently, the JCPOA can serve as a new basis for the verification and enforcement provisions of the disarmament treaty that the prohibition treaty will call for. To this end, Iran can play an instrumental role in pushing for the globalisation of the JCPOA’s principles, and can even position itself as a regional nuclear fuel hub as part of future prohibition and disarmament treaties.

Second, Iran’s long-established track record of seeking to advance the cause of nuclear non-proliferation gives it a responsibility to continue its role of spearheading non-proliferation initiatives.

In 1974, Iran first proposed a Middle East nuclear-weapon-free zone (ME-NWFZ) at the UN General Assembly, which was passed by the body and has been renewed annually since 1980. The ban treaty negotiations provide Iran and other regional states the opportunity to realise a ME-NWFZ.

Third, Iran is the only country that at the highest religious levels has issued religious edicts banning WMDs. Iran’s position in this regard was shaped during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, during which it was the victim of WMDs in the form of chemical weapons attacks, but refused to retaliate in kind due to religious considerations.

This was due to a fatwa, or religious decree, by Iran’s revolutionary father Ayatollah Imam Khomeini, against the production or use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Iran’s current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has upheld this fatwa, uniquely binding Iran to be unequivocally against WMDs of all kinds and making it a sincere voice in any WMD-prohibition debate.

The ban treaty negotiations represent a potential major historical turning point, where a majority of the world’s nations will act to safeguard humanity’s future from the threat of nuclear holocaust. While the nuclear-weapons states argue that they need their weapons for reasons of deterrence and strategic balance, their logic does not hold in a world where their nuclear-weapons monopoly is unsustainable.

Increasingly, other countries may seek the same status relying on the same logic as the five-recognised nuclear-weapons powers. The North Korean case serves as an example of how an NPT member may leave the treaty and develop nuclear weapons.

If global peace and stability is to be ensured for future generations, a new model for international security must be created, one that does not rely on WMDs of any kind.

Iran, given its longstanding commitment to the non-proliferation of WMDs, must play a decisive role in ensuring the success of the nuclear ban treaty negotiations to bring about such a world.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian is Middle East Security and Nuclear Policy Specialist at Princeton University and former head of Foreign Relation Committee of Iran’s National Security Council.

14 June 2017

By Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — The dispute between Saudi Arabia/United Arab Emirates and Qatar has added major new developments and regional dynamics to existing dramatic situations across the Middle East — especially in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine. Diving deep into any of these situations inevitably leads one to some of the others, confirming again and again the interconnections between the many actors and issues that have generated so much violence and uncertainty in the Arab region.

So it might be useful to step back from examining any one conflict and instead simply try to identify larger historical and political patterns that help us understand the players and the issues at stake. The latest dispute in particular, focused on Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has generated a flurry of speculation about new alliances coming into being. The most popular one is a possible alliance between Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Russia to face off against the Saudi-Emirati-led group of half a dozen countries that have lined up against Qatar. While nothing can be ruled out in the modern Middle East, this kind of instant alliance-formation seems more reflective of a Western tradition of toying with Arab lands and peoples like a handful of putty, rather than any serious analysis of realistic expectations.

We can, however, survey the region and identify notable new political dynamics and actors in the Arab World’s past several hundred years of colonial entanglements, state formation, and foreign military interventions. However the Qatar-GCC, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya situations are resolved, I suggest that we can see in them the beginning of a new era that has taken a quarter century to come into focus — since the end of the Cold War around 1990.

I see this as a new era because of several novel developments. One is the phenomenon of two very small and very young Arab states — Qatar and UAE — playing much bigger regional and global roles militarily and politically than their geography and demography would normally suggest. Another is the spectacle of several Arab energy-producing wealthy states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE ganging up against a third, Qatar, using siege tactics that cause havoc regionally and seek to bludgeon it into submission to their will — despite their having spent several decades trying to create a GCC regional block that values stability and security above all else. A third is the direct military, strategic, political, and economic involvement of two regional non-Arab powers — Turkey and Iran — in both participating in and trying to resolve the disputes. And a fourth is the role of the two big global powers — the United States and Russia — who promote a mediated resolution to the Qatar-GCC and Syria conflicts, but often also are vexingly imprecise on their bottom lines.

Two important things about these phenomena are that they all reached maximum impact and clarity in the last six years since the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, even though their roots sprouted during the post-Cold War years; and, they include within them a relatively clear scorecard of actors, identities, and ideologies that now battle in the open to define the Arab region, whether through the policies of the existing states or large non-state actors like Hizbollah and Hamas.

Perhaps this clarifies the major forces at work that now compete for the soul, spirit, and sovereignty of the Arab region and its many smaller components. I would list the following as the players to watch in this respect: Foreign big powers (U.S., Russia, for now), regional non-Arab powers (Iran, Turkey, for now), Arabism even in its faded state, Islamism even in its subjugated state, oil-anchored materialistic patriarchy (the energy producers and their dependents, like Egypt), and remnants of former socialist-nationalist-military states in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other places.

These actors and a few other smaller ones now wage battle in the open to shape the identities and policies of the existing Arab countries. It is unlikely that any one or two will achieve full victory and dominate the region, as imperial powers did in history. More likely is that most of them will coexist in uneasy truces, as the region gets back to a developmental phase in a no-war context that can resume the socio-economic growth needed to respond to people’s basic needs and thus achieve lasting security and stability.

The most striking thing about this situation is that the ordinary Arab citizen is not among the powerful forces battling it out for the soul and sovereignty of the Arab region, which has been the case for centuries, unfortunately. One day, who knows when, the final battle of the modern Arab era will take place and witness the will of the citizenry struggle to achieve supremacy over the stultifying power of autocratic local elites and foreign powers that have subjugated hundreds of millions of men, women and children for hundreds of years. The Arab uprisings of 2010-11 hinted at that eventuality; but they were quickly put down by local and foreign forces of autocracy and control that have stepped out into the open more clearly this week in the Qatar-GCC crisis.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative.

14 June 2017

By James M. Dorsey

Saudi Arabia and the UAE appear to be contemplating engineering a military coup in Qatar with the stakes in the Gulf crisis so high that a negotiated solution may prove difficult, if not impossible.

Neither side in the Gulf divide can afford to back down or be seen to have failed in achieving its objectives.

Caving in to Saudi and UAE demands that it break its ties to Islamists and militants and curb, if not shutter, Qatar-funded media like Al Jazeera, would amount to Qatar surrendering its ability to chart its own course, and like Bahrain becoming a Saudi vassal.

Bahrain has been walking in step with the kingdom since Saudi Arabia and the UAE with Qatari support helped its minority Sunni Muslim ruling family brutally squash a popular uprising in 2011.

Similarly, neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE can tolerate a repeat of 2014 when Qatar appeared to put on public display the limits of their power by refusing to bow to the two states’ demands after they and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have this time raised the stakes by not only breaking off diplomatic relations but also declaring an economic embargo. The longer tiny Qatar with a citizenry of only 300,000 people resists Saudi and UAE pressure, the more embarrassing it is for the two Gulf states.

Amid indications that Qatar may have the political will and economic backbone despite the economic obstacles and commercial losses to hold out for some time to come, Saudi Arabia and the UAE will likely look for ways to increase pressure on the recalcitrant Gulf state.

Increased economic pressure could involve the withdrawal of Gulf deposits from Qatari banks, the closure of a partly UAE-owned pipeline that pumps Qatari gas to the UAE and Oman, and pressure on other Muslim states like Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan to join them in taking punitive economic measures.

The majority of Muslim and non-Muslim nations, except for the economically dependent six nations, including Bahrain, Egypt, the Maldives and Mauritania, who joined Saudi Arabia and the UAE in acting against Qatar have sought to remain on the side lines of the dispute. States like Pakistan and Bangladesh are, however, vulnerable because they rely to a significant extent on migrant workers’ remittances in the Gulf for their foreign currency reserves.

US President Donald J. Trump has come closest among outside powers to endorsing the Saudi-UAE-led action, but even he has so far refrained from turning words into deeds that would exert real pressure on Qatar.

Turkey and Iran are helping Qatar meet its food and water needs after Saudi Arabia closed the two countries’ land border, preventing one third of the Gulf state’s food and water imports from reaching it. Turkey, moreover, is sending troops to Qatar, which is home to the largest US military base in the Middle East, a possible reason why the US has not gone beyond words in its support for the Saudi-UAE campaign.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of predominantly Shiite Iraq appeared to also come to Qatar’s defense by countering some of the allegations that the Gulf state had funded militants. Mr. Al-Abadi told Shiite militias, according to Al Jazeera and other Qatar-controlled media, that a ransom paid by Qatar for the release of 26 members of its ruling family who were kidnapped in December 2015 while hunting in Iraq remained in Iraq’s central bank. News reports suggested that the ransom had been paid to Syrian militants and Iraqi security officials and was one straw that broke the Saudi and UAE camel’s back.

Oman, one of two Gulf states to have refrained from joining the Saudi-UAE campaign, has opened its ports to Qatari shipping that no longer can access key Saudi and UAE ports. Qatar maintains its access to international shipping lanes and can refuel its LNG vessels at alternative ports, including Singapore.

The UAE, with Qatar’s ability to retain its energy exports, its main source of revenue, undeterred would be damaging itself if it closed the partly Abu Dhabi pipeline from Qatar that supplies Dubai with 40 percent of its natural gas requirement.

International ratings agency Standard& Poor (S&P) reported that Qatari banks were strong enough to survive a withdrawal of all Gulf deposits plus a quarter of the remaining foreign funds the banks keep.

Deposits and other funding sources from Gulf countries represent about eight percent of total liabilities of Qatari lenders or $20 billion, S&P said. It said that in a worst-case scenario, only two lenders of Qatar’s 18 lenders would have to dip into their investment securities portfolio.

Failure to force Qatar on its knees any time soon would force Saudi Arabia and the UAE to look at other ways of forcing Qatar to comply, including regime change, either by invading the tiny Gulf state or engineering an internal coup.

UAE state minister for foreign affairs Anwar Gargash insisted last week that the Saudi-UAE campaign was “not about regime change — this is about change of policy, change of approach.”

Saudi and UAE media reports nonetheless suggest that the Gulf states may be gunning for a coup given that unlike in the case of Bahrain and the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in 2015, the legitimate, internationally recognized government of Qatar is unlikely to seek their military assistance.

In the latest episode of the Gulf  media war, Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah-based Arab News, in the clearest sign yet that, the kingdom and the UAE were fishing in Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim’s military backyard, this week published an interview with retired General Mahmoud Mansour, an Egyptian military officer whom Saudi and Egyptian media described as the father of Qatari intelligence.

General Mansour has long been on the war path against Sheikh Tamim, and his father, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who abdicated as emir in 2013. General Mansour asserted that Sheikh Hamad and his long-standing prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber bin Mohammed bin Thani Al Thani, had attempted to foment unrest across the globe in the Gulf, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Russia.

Speaking separately to Al Arabiya, the Saudi tv network established to counter Al Jazeera, General Mansour accused Qatar of aiding and abetting Iranian efforts to penetrate the Arab world. “Iran needed to penetrate some Arab countries, needed an Arab force to introduce them more and more within the Arab fabric, so it addressed her intentions through the friend who lost their mind, Qatar,” General Mansour said.

UAE newspapers reported earlier that a little-known member of Qatar’s ruling family, Sheikh Saud bin Nasser Al-Thani, who lives in Europe was forming an opposition party in exile.

Despite criticism of the emir, Qataris largely appeared to be rallying around the government in rejection of the effort to force their country to surrender its ability to graft its own policies.

It was not clear whether General Mansour maintains close contacts within the Qatari military and intelligence community.

An effort to replace Sheikh Tamim with a member of the ruling family more amenable to Saudi policies would not be the first time the kingdom has tried to influence who rules Qatar. In a gesture to former Saudi King Abdullah, Sheikh Hamad pardoned in 2010 a group of Saudis for their involvement in an attempted coup to overthrow him in 1996.

Qatar by holding out against Saudi Arabia and the UAE and garnering international support for a negotiated solution to the crisis is raising the stakes in what increasingly amounts to a risky poker game. Both the kingdom and the emirates feel emboldened and believe they need to strike while the iron is hot.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and three forthcoming books, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Creating Frankenstein: The Saudi Export of Ultra-conservatism and China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom.

12 June 2017

By Prof. Alon Ben-Meir

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu,

Since you celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the victory of the Six Day War, did you ponder what this triumph has done to the Palestinian people and to the moral character of the state of Israel? I am not sure how harshly history will judge you, but one thing is certain—I, like millions of Jews around the world, deeply believe that no prime minister of Israel has done more damage to the country’s future security and well-being than you have. The sad irony is that for you, the facts on the ground are freely expungable in your morally distorted universe.

Fifty years have passed, and as the longest serving prime minister, you have not yet articulated any vision about Israel’s future and the fate of the Palestinians. Instead, you find comfort in hypocrisy, pretending to do what is right and defending your ceaseless lying and twisted logic, making a virtue out of falsehood. Remember Mr. Netanyahu, a moral leader does not cheat or mislead, but takes a clear positon regardless of how unpopular it may be—but you have pursued policies where nothing is beyond the pale.

You profess to support a two-state solution and that you are ready to negotiate unconditionally, but everything you have said or done over the years stands in total contrast to that notion. How do you reconcile a two-state solution with your statement,

“I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state today, and evacuate areas, is giving radical Islam an area from which to attack the State of Israel”?

And when you were asked during the last elections in 2015 if no Palestinian state would be created under your leadership, you said:

“Indeed.”

In your speech to Congress in May 2011, you stated that

“This is the land of our forefathers, the Land of Israel, to which Abraham brought the idea of one God, where David set out to confront Goliath, and where Isaiah saw a vision of eternal peace.” During the same speech, you fervently proclaimed that “In Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.”

Tell me, how do these statements conform with the idea of a Palestinian state to be established on the same land, when you have no intention of ever evacuating any settlement? You reconfirmed that in September 2016, stating:

“The Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one pre-condition: No Jews. There’s a phrase for that: It’s called ethnic cleansing.”

You use national security as a blank check to spread fear by portraying the Palestinians as the greatest danger that faces the nation.

“In order to assure our existence,” you stated, “we need to have military and security control over all of the territory west of the Jordan [River].”

How much weight should the Palestinians put on your presumed readiness to negotiate a two-state solution, when in the same breath you emphatically demand from Abbas that he must first recognize Israel as a Jewish state? As you said,

“the real core of this conflict… is not this or that settlement, or this or that community, it’s the persistent and enduring [Palestinian] refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary.”

Both claims are untrue and unfounded.

If the negotiations were to start without any pre-conditions, how could you claim that

“Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people”?

On another occasion, you stated that:

“[Israel] didn’t occupy Jerusalem fifty years ago, it liberated it…I want to the tell the world in a loud and clear voice: Jerusalem has always been and always will be the capital of Israel.”

If you remove the future of Jerusalem from the negotiating table, isn’t that a pre-condition?

You continue to proclaim that the settlements are not an obstacle to peace. Can you explain by what miracle the settlements will not prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state with a contiguous landmass, especially when you continue their expansion and rule out the evacuation of existing settlements?

To be sure, Mr. Netanyahu, your desperate need for reaffirmation of your dubious schemes and bigoted attitude leads you to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and a sense of vulnerability among the Israelis so you can rally the political support to stay in power. If this is not the trademark of a demagogue, then what is? Aristophanes put it well when he stated that:

“You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way, it’s only in troublous times that you line your pockets.”

You demand the Palestinians behave and dare not resist the occupation, but what have you offered in return? You refuse to release political prisoners; you refuse to halt the expansion of settlements; you refuse to provide the Palestinians permits to build, and you refuse unrestricted mobility of Palestinians, not to speak of the daily ordeal to which they are subjected. If you wanted real peace, Mr. Netanyahu, shouldn’t you have used the fiftieth anniversary to make at least a good-will gesture, such as releasing a few hundred Palestinian political prisoners to give hope that new, brighter, and happier days may dawn?

You ought to recall what Frederick Douglas once observed:

“where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

To blame the Palestinians for the lack of peace is hypocritical at best. What is it that you want from them? They are at Israel’s mercy; they have nothing left to give. You, Netanyahu, have the power to propose a framework for peace. No country or combination of countries in the Middle East can expect to defeat Israel militarily for the foreseeable future. If you do not negotiate peace from strength now, then when?

Peace based on a two-state solution is not a favor to the Palestinians—it is fundamental to Israel’s long-term national security. Without peace, you jeopardize the Jews’ nationhood for which so many have suffered and died.

Remember this, Mr. Netanyahu: nearly 80 percent of Palestinians and roughly 70 percent of Israelis were born under occupation. What sort of Jewish state are you creating? A state which is in the business of oppressing other people, because people like you portray them as the eternal enemy?

Haven’t the Jews lived long enough to know the meaning of being persecuted, incarcerated, segregated, expelled, and sentenced to death? Are you suggesting that the Palestinians are an irredeemable foe, and we the Jews must oppress and humiliate them to be safe and secure?

No, Mr. Netanyahu. What you are subjecting the Palestinians to day in and day out defies Jewish values, defies what is moral and right, defies logic, and defies the very reason why the Jews struggled to survive for millennia to have a home of our own.

You and your blind zealots are utterly ignorant of what we must stand for. They are destroying brick-by-brick the only country that offers a refuge to every Jew who seeks to live in a free, democratic Jewish state. The occupation does not make Israel a free, safe, and independent state, but a prison with fences and wall and bunkers and shelters, with tens of thousands of soldiers on the ready to kill, to raid, to destroy.

Why?

Because you want to make the Palestinians the eternal enemy, only to support a warped ideology that wantonly ignores their unmitigated reality. Yes, the existence of the Palestinian people is a fact that you cannot wish away. Does it ever occur to you that they want to live a normal life without fear, without dread, and without anxiety and concerns? Does it ever occur to you that the continuing occupation feeds into the frenzy of extremism? Would we the Jews have acted any differently under brutal occupation?

As one who claims to represent not only Israel but world Jewry, don’t you have the obligation to offer a vision as to where you are leading the people of Israel? And what should Jews around the world, in whose name you claim to speak, expect five or ten years down the line?

Given the continuing tense and dire situation in the territories, it is only a matter of time when the next bloody conflagration will happen. The blood of every Israeli and Palestinian man, woman, and child will be on your hands. No one else is to blame for your paralysis to act but you.

You cannot blame your lunatic and outrageous hardcore ideologues partners like Bennett, Shaked, and Lieberman, who refuse to see the light and choose to live in the dark, not knowing what’s in store for them. They put a leash around your neck and you welcome it because you hypocritically use them to provide you with the political cover you need to pursue your twisted scheme. It is you, and only you, who can change direction by getting rid of them and forming a new government committed to peace, if you only will it. But you don’t.

I wonder, Mr. Netanyahu, what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind? To reap the real fruits of the Six Day War is to make peace. Nothing short of peace will make the Six Day War a triumph, because the war is continuing. You, more than any other human living in Israel, will be responsible and accountable to the next generation who will be asking, why? Why must we live in a prison of our own creation when the state of Israel was created to liberate us?

History will not be kind to you, Mr. Netanyahu, unless you change course. It is time to reflect, because the destiny of the nation of Israel is in your hands.

This letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu will be followed next week with an open letter to Palestinian President Abbas.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

13 June 2017

By Richard Falk

7 Jun 2017 – The abrupt announcement that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, UAE, Yemen, the Maldive Islands, and the eastern government in divided Libya have broken all economic and political ties with Qatar has given rise to a tsunami of conjecture, wild speculation, and most of all, to wishful thinking and doomsday worries. There is also a veil of confusion arising from mystifying reports that hackers with alleged Russian connections placed a fake news story that implicated Qatar in the promotion of extremist groups in the region. Given Russian alignments, it makes no sense to create conditions that increase the credibility of anti-Iran forces. And finally the timing and nature of the terrorist suicide attacks of June 7th on the Iranian Parliament and on the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini adds a particularly mystifying twist to the rapidly unfolding Qatar drama, especially if the ISIS claim of responsibility is substantiated.

Four preliminary cautionary observations seem apt:

1. The public explanation given for this rupture is almost certainly disconnected from its true meaning. That is, the break with Qatar is not about strengthening the anti-ISIS, anti-extremist coalition of Arab forces. Such an explanation may play well in the Trump White House, but it is far removed from understanding why this potentially menacing anti-Qatar regional earthquake erupted at this time, and what it is truly about.

2. Any claim to provide a clear account of why? And why now? should be viewed with great skepticism, if not suspicion. There are in the regional context too many actors, crosscurrents, uncertainties, conflicts, mixed and hidden motives and contradictions at play as to make any effort at this stage to give a reliable and coherent account of this Qatar crisis bound to be misleading.

3. Yet despite these caveats, there are several mainly unspoken dimensions of the crisis that can be brought to the surface, and sophisticate our understanding beyond the various self-serving polemical interpretations that are being put forward, including the centrality of Israeli-American backing for a tough line on Iran and the realization that Gulf grievances against Qatar have been brewing for recent years for reasons unrelated to ISIS, and led to an earlier milder confrontation in 2014 that was then quickly overcome with the help of American diplomacy.

4. The anti-Iran fervor only makes sense from the perspective of the Gulf monarchies (other than Qatar) and Israel, but seems radically inconsistent with American regional interests and counter-ISIS priorities—Iran is not associated with any of the terrorist incidents occurring in Europe and the United States, and ISIS and Iran are pitted against each other on sectarian grounds. Intriguingly, neither Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), nor Israel, that is, the principal antagonists of Qatar, have been ever targeted by ISIS.

The main contention of the anti-Qatar Arab governments, led by Saudi Arabia, is that this coordinated diplomatic pushback is motivated by anti-terrorist priorities. On its face this seems to be a ridiculous claim to come from the Saudis, and can only make some sense as part of a calculated effort to throw pursuing dogs in the hunt for ISIS off a course that if followed would inevitably implicate the Riyadh government. It has long been known by intelligence services and academic experts that it is Saudi Arabia, including members of its royal family, that have been funding Jihadi extremism in the Middle East and has for many years been spending billions to spread Salifist extremism throughout the Islamic world.

By comparison, although far from innocent or consistent of terrorist linkages, as well as being internally oppressive, especially toward its migrant foreign workers, Qatar is a minor player in this high stakes political imbroglio. For the Saudis to take the lead in this crusade against Qatar may play well in Washington, Tel Aviv, and London, but fools few in the region. Trump has with characteristic ill-informed bravado has taken ill-advised credit for this turn against Qatar, claiming it to be an immediate payoff of his recent visit to the Kingdom, ramping up still further the provocative buildup of pressure on Iran. To claim a political victory given the circumstances rather than admit a geopolitical faux pas might seem strange for any leader other than Trump. It is almost perverse considering that the al-Udeid Air Base is in Qatar, which is the largest American military facility in the Middle East, operated as a regional command center actively used in bombing raids against Iraq and Afghanistan, and serviced by upwards of 10,000 American military personnel.

Netanyahu warmongers will certainly be cheered by this course of events and Israel has not hidden its support for the anti-Qatar moves of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It achieves two Israeli goals: its longtime undertaken to encourage splits and disorder in the Arab world and its campaign to maximize pressures on Iran.

Interestingly, Jeremy Corbyn at the start of the week when the momentous British elections are scheduled to take place, called on Teresa May to release a report (prepared while David Cameron was prime minister), supposedly an explosive exposure of Saudi funding and support for Islamic extremism in the Middle East. All in all, a first approximation of the Qatar crisis is to view it as a desperate move by Riyadh to get off the hot seat with respect to its own major responsibility for the origins and buildup of political extremism in the Middle East, which has indirectly produced the inflaming incidents in principal European cities during the last several years. Such a move to isolate and punish Qatar was emboldened by the blundering encouragement of Donald Trump, whether acting on impulse or at the beckoning of Israel’s and Saudi leaders, confusing genuine counter-terrorist priorities with a dysfunctional effort to push Iran against the wall. Trump seems to forget, if he ever knew, that Iran is fighting against ISIS in Syria, has strongly reaffirmed moderate leadership in its recent presidential elections, and if Iran were brought in from the cold could be a major calming influence in the region. True, Iran has given support to Hezbollah and Hamas, but except in Syria not with much effect, and on a scale far smaller than what other actors in the region have been doing to maintain their control and push their agendas. In effect, if Washington pursued national interests in the spirit of political realism, it would regard Iran as a potential ally, and put a large question mark next to its two distorting ‘special relationships,’ with Saudi Arabia and Israel. In effect, reverse its regional alignments in a way that could replace turmoil with stability, but this is not about to happen. The American media, and thoughtful citizens, should at least be wondering ‘why?’ rather than staring into darkness of a starless nighttime sky.

But this is not all. The Saudis, along with the UAE and Egypt, have long resented and maybe feared the early willingness of Qatar to give some sanctuary and aid and comfort to various elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. It is hardly farfetched to assume that Israel is outraged by the Emir of Qatar’s friendship and earlier support for the Hamas exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal. Saudi Arabia strives to obscure its incoherent approach to political Islam. It loudly proclaims Sunni identity when intervening in Syria, waging war in Yemen, and calling for confrontation with Iran, while totally repudiating its sectarian identity when dealing with societally or democratically oriented Islamic movements in neighboring countries. Such an anti-democratiing orientation was dramatically present when Riyadh and Abu Dhabi scolded Washington for abandoning Mubarak’s harsh authoritarian secular rule in Egypt back in 2011 and then welcoming the anti-Morsi coup led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi two years later, even welcoming its bloody suppression of Sunni adherents of the Muslim Brotherhood. As has been long obvious to close and honest observers of the Kingdom, the Saudi monarchy has become so fearful of an internal uprising challenging its oppressive rule that it will oppose any liberalizing or democratizing challenge anywhere in its neighborhood. The Kingdom is particularly wary of its Shia minority that happens to be concentrated in locations near where the main Saudi oil fields are located. Similar concerns also help explain why Bahrain behaves as it does as it also fearful of a domestic Shia led majority opposition, which has made it a strategically dependent, yet ardent, adherent of the anti-Qatar coalition.

Also far more relevant than acknowledged is the presence of Al Jazeera in Doha, which at various times has voiced support for the Arab Uprisings of 2011, criticism of the Israeli practices and policies toward the Palestinians, and provided an Arabic media source of relatively independent news coverage throughout the region. Qatar is guilty of other irritants of the dominant Gulf political sensibility. It has arranged academic positions for such prominent Palestinian dissidents as Azmi Bashara and more than its neighbors has given welcome to intellectual refugees from Arab countries, especially Egypt. Given the way the Gulf rulers close off all political space within their borders it is to be expected that they find the relative openness of Qatar a threat as well as consider it to be a negative judgment passed on their style of governance.

Qatar is very vulnerable to pressure, but also has certain strengths. Its population of 2.5 million (only 200,000 of whom are citizens), imports at least 40% of its food across the Saudi border, now closed to the 600-800 daily truck traffic. Not surprisingly, this sudden closure has sparked panic among Qataris, who are reportedly stockpiling food and cash. The Doha stock market dropped over 7% on the first day after the Gulf break was announced. Qatar is the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and is a major source of Turkish investment capital. Western Europe is wary of this American project to establish an ‘Arab NATO,’ and sees it as one more manifestation of Trump’s dysfunctional and mindless impact on world order.

What this portends for the future remains is highly uncertain. Some look upon these moves against Qatar as a tempest in a teapot that will disappear almost as quickly as it emerged. The U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and the Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, have urged mediation and offered reassuring comments about anti-ISIS unity remaining unimpaired. It is true that the existence of the Udeid Air Base in Qatar may in time dilute deference to the Saudi-led desire to squeeze the government in Doha, possibly to the point of its collapse. A more fearsome scenario is that the Trump encouraged confrontation sets the stage for a coup in Qatar that will be quickly supported by Washington as soon as Riyadh gives the green light, and will be promoted as part of the regional buildup against Iran. The notorious ceremony in which King Salmon, Trump, and Sisi were pictured standing above that glowing orb with their arms outstretched can only be reasonably interpreted as a pledge of solidarity among dark forces of intervention. Many of us supposed that George W. Bush’s policy of ‘democracy promotion’ that provided part of the rationale for the disastrous 2003 attack on Iraq was the low point in American foreign policy in the Middle East, but Trump is already proving us wrong.

While this kind of ‘great game’ is being played at Qatar’s expense in the Gulf, it is highly unlikely that other major players, especially Iran, Russia, and Turkey will remain passive observers, especially if the crisis lingers or deepens. Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Mohammed Zarif, has non-aggressively tweeted to the effect that “neighbors are permanent; geography can’t be changed,” stating his view that the occasion calls for dialogue, not coercion. If the isolation of Qatar is not quickly ended, it is likely that Iran will start making food available and shipping other supplies to this beleaguered tiny peninsular country whose sovereignty is being so deeply threatened.

Russia, has been long collaborating with Iran in Syria, will likely move toward greater solidarity with Tehran, creating a highly unstable balance of power in the Middle East with frightening risks of escalation and miscalculation. Russia will also take advantage of the diplomatic opportunity to tell the world that the U.S. is seeking to raise war fevers and cause havoc by championing aggressive moves that further the ambitions of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel. Such Russian diplomacy is likely to play well in Europe where Trump’s recent demeaning words in Brussels to NATO members made the leading governments rethink their security policies, and to view the United States as an increasingly destabilizing force on the global stage, such feeling being reinforced by the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

Turkey seems to believe that its immediate effort should be similar to that of the Tillerson and Mattis approach, having tentatively offered to mediate, and advocates finding a way back to a posture of at least peaceful co-existence between Qatar, the Gulf, and the rest of the Arab world. Turkey has had a positive relationship with Qatar, which includes a small Turkish military facility and large Qatari investments in the Turkish economy.

To cool things down, the Foreign Minister of Qatar, Sheik Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, while denying the allegations, has also joined in the call for mediation and even reconciliation. Bowing to Gulf pressures, Qatar has prior to the current crisis withdrawn its welcome from Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood exiles, and seems poised to yield further to the pressures of the moment, given its small size, political vulnerability, and intimations of possible societal panic.

While the civilian population of Yemen is faced with imminent famine as an intended consequence of the Saudi intervention, the Saudis seems to be again using food as a weapon, this time to compel Qatar to submit to its regional priorities and become a GCC team player with respect to Iran—joining in the preparation of a sectarian war against Iran while maintaining a repressive hold over political activity at home. One preliminary takeaway is that ISIS dimension is serving as a smokescreen to draw attention away from a far more controversial agenda. The Saudis are deeply implicated in political extremism throughout the region, having likely paid heavily for being treated, temporarily at least, as off limits for Jihadi extremism. Qatar, too is tainted, but mainly by being a minor operative in Syrian violence and in 2015 paying ISIS an amount rumored to be as high as $1 billion to obtain the release of 26 Qataris, including members of the royal family, taken hostage while on a falcon hunting party, of all things, in Iraq. We can gain some glimmers of understanding of what is motivating these Arab governments to act against Qatar, but little sympathy. In comparison, the new U.S. foreign policy in the region defies any understanding beyond its adoption of a cynical and unworkable geopolitical stance, which certainly does not engender any sympathy from the victimized peoples of the region, but rather fear and loathing.

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.

12 June 2017

By Jonathan Cook

The Trump administration is using unprecedented threats and financial “blackmail” against the United Nations and its agencies to end their focus on human rights abuses by Israel, according to analysts and Palestinian leaders.

They accuse the United States of joining Israel in a campaign of intimidation against the UN secretariat and member states to forcibly rehabilitate Israel’s international standing.

The offensive comes after the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu had faced several years of criticism in diplomatic circles for refusing to engage in a peace process with the Palestinians.

An early indication of the new campaign’s success, analysts noted, was the election last week of Danny Danon as a vice-president of the UN’s main representative forum, the General Assembly.

Danon has been Israel’s ambassador to the UN since 2015.

He is known as an arch-opponent of the two-state solution and, before heading to the UN in New York, had repeatedly called for Israel to annex most of the West Bank.

US ‘attorney’ for Israel

It is views like Danon’s, which are increasingly dominant inside the Israeli government, that have driven a swelling boycott movement, as well as increasing comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa.

“The US and Israel are now jointly engaged in ‘street fighting’ at the UN,” a Western diplomat, who wished to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera. “Washington is throwing its weight around and bullying people. The old rules of diplomacy have been thrown out of the window.”

That view was confirmed by Hanan Ashrawi, a former Palestinian negotiator and member of the PLO Executive Committee.

“The Trump administration has become a very vocal and aggressive attorney for Israel,” she told Al Jazeera. “It threatens consequences for anyone seen to be supporting the Palestinians or criticising Israel.”

Danon will take up his new post in September, chairing sessions of the General Assembly, helping to set its agenda and overseeing enforcement of rules and decorum during its meetings.

New sheriff in town

The increasingly overt alliance between Israel and the US at the UN was highlighted this week when Danon escorted Nikki Haley, Trump’s envoy to the UN, on a visit to Israel.

In a speech to the US pro-Israeli lobby group AIPAC in March, Haley promised to be “a new sheriff in town” at the UN.

On the way to Israel, Haley stopped in Geneva to berate one of the UN’s chief agencies, the Human Rights Council (UNHRC), for what she termed its “chronic anti-Israel bias”. Its behaviour “makes a mockery not of Israel, but of the Council itself,” she added.

She threatened that the US would pull out of the UNHRC if it did not rein in its criticism.

In April, Haley issued a similar warning when she took over the rotating presidency of the UN’s most powerful body, the Security Council. She told members that their monthly Middle East debates would now focus on Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, not Israel.

Apartheid report retracted

Israel and the White House have been leaning on other key UN agencies.

In March, the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia was forced to retract an expert report after it concluded that Israel had established an apartheid regime ruling over the Palestinians.

And last month the US condemned a resolution by the UN’s cultural agency, UNESCO, after it called on Israel to uphold international law and end policies that were changing the religious and cultural character of occupied East Jerusalem.

Although the resolution passed, most European countries either abstained or voted against it. Afterwards, Netanyahu crowed: “The number of countries who support this absurd UNESCO resolution is getting smaller.”

Threat to UN budget

All this has been occurring against the drumbeat of threats from the Trump administration that it is ready to impose drastic cuts to the UN budget. Washington is the UN’s biggest contributor, covering nearly $13.5bn of the world body’s funding.

“The main factor behind Danon’s promotion is blackmail by the Trump administration,” said Ashrawi. “It is threatening to withhold UN funding and it is clear member states are scared.”

Nathan Thrall, author of a new book on Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, The Only Language They Understand, said the campaign had forced the Palestinians to back off from diplomatic initiatives at the UN.

Over the past seven years, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas placed an emphasis on the struggle to win recognition of Palestinian statehood at the UN. That included joining a UN agency, UNESCO, in 2011. The US responded by suspending its UNESCO’s funding.

“The Palestinians are afraid what Trump might do,” Thrall told Al Jazeera. “If the US starts making global institutions collapse, the Palestinian leadership are worried they will get the blame from other countries.”

Peacekeeping operations and humanitarian assistance would be among the UN operations expected to suffer. “The Palestinians don’t want to lose friends when they need them most,” added Thrall.

Right’s enfant terrible

Danon, aged 46, was selected for the role of General Assembly vice-president by a regional faction at the UN known as the Western European and Others Group. It includes most European countries, plus Israel, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The election of vice-presidents is organised on a regional basis to ensure fair geographical representation.

Salah Bardawil, a senior Hamas official, tweeted that Danon’s elevation was “a mark of Cain on the UN’s forehead.”

Israel has been the subject of dozens of resolutions condemning its violations of the UN charter – far more than any other member state. But in particular, the choice of Danon has disturbed Palestinian leaders. Until recently, his was widely seen as the enfant terrible of the Israeli right.

Netanyahu sacked Danon from his post as deputy defence minister in summer 2014, during Israel’s attack on Gaza, in which some 500 Palestinian children were killed. He called Danon “irresponsible” for describing Israel’s military operation as too lenient.

Salam Fayyad blocked

When Netanyahu announced Danon’s posting as ambassador a year later, Israeli analysts described the decision as a “cruel joke”.

Ashrawi noted that Danon’s treatment at the UN contrasted strongly with that of Salam Fayyad, the former Palestinian prime minister.

Efforts by the US Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, to appoint Fayyad, a Palestinian moderate, as the UN envoy to Libya were blocked by the US in February. Haley described the move as against Israel and added: “The United States will act, not just talk, in support of our allies.”

Even before Trump, there were signs that Israel’s fortunes at the UN were changing.

Last year, Danon made history becoming the first Israeli ambassador to chair a permanent committee – dealing, paradoxically, with international law, the subject on which Israel has faced most criticism. Again, Danon received the backing of the Western European and Others Group.

However, Danon’s relations with the previous US administration were strained. In late 2012 he accused President Barack Obama of being “no friend of Israel”.

Security Council seat?

By contrast, Danon has been enthusiastically embraced by the Trump administration, observed Thrall.

“Israel is doing well diplomatically, at the moment. There are rumours that it aspires to a seat in the Security Council. The climate is such that some Israeli politicians even seem to think that might be achievable.”

Interviewed by the settlers’ news agency Arutz Sheva last month, Danon said there was a “new spirit” at the UN. “They no longer focus only on Israel. The UN is no longer the Palestinian playground. Something is changing here.”

Of his relationship with Haley, he told the Orthodox Jewish magazine Mishpacha in April: “When it comes to Israel, we share the same views.”

Making new friends

Although the world body has been viewed as traditionally hostile to Israel, experts have cited several factors that explain Israel’s changing fortunes.

In recent years, Israel has made strategic alliances with powerful states at the UN, in addition to its main ally in Washington. Israel has won favour often through arms sales and intelligence sharing.

The diplomat, who has worked in Israel, said: “Israel has been reaching out to emerging economies in BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] as well as Mexico. That is starting to pay a diplomatic dividend.”

Also, Europe, which is in growing disarray, has abandoned even the pretence of acting as a counterweight to Washington. That has made it easier to win over European countries to Israel’s side.

Thrall noted: “The apparent calculus in countries like the UK is that the best way to ingratiate themselves with the US is to be good to Israel.”

And the UN, mired in financial difficulties, is reeling from the threat of further penalties from the US and its allies if it continues to be seen as anti-Israel.

“Israel and the US are ready to break the international order to get their way,” said the diplomat. “People are scared of what they might be capable of doing.”

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

12 June 2017

By Bill Van Auken

8 Jun 2017 – The latest in a long series of bloody terrorist attacks attributed to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) unfolded in Iran early Wednesday with coordinated armed assaults on the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) and the mausoleum of the late supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Imam Khomeini. At least 12 people were killed and 43 wounded.

The reactions of the US government and the Western media to the attacks in Tehran stand in stark contrast to their response to the May 22 bombing that killed 22 people at the Manchester Arena and the London Bridge attacks that claimed nine lives last Saturday.

The Trump White House released a vicious statement that effectively justified the killings in Iran, declaring, “We underscore that states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote,” an attitude that found its reflection in the relative indifference of the media to the loss of Iranian lives. It is clearly understood that terrorism against Iran serves definite political aims that are in sync with those of US imperialism and its regional allies.

For its part, Tehran’s reaction to the attacks was unambiguous. It laid the responsibility at the door of the US and its principal regional ally, Saudi Arabia. “This terrorist attack happened only a week after the meeting between the US president (Donald Trump) and the (Saudi) backward leaders who support terrorists,” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement, published by Iranian media. The attack was understood in Tehran as a political act carried out in conjunction with identifiable state actors and aimed at furthering definite geostrategic objectives.

The same can be said of the earlier acts of terrorism carried out in Manchester and London, as well as those in Paris, Brussels and elsewhere before them.

The Western media routinely treats each of these atrocities as isolated manifestations of “evil” or religious hatred, irrational acts carried out by madmen. In reality, they are part of an internationally coordinated campaign in pursuit of definite political objectives.

Underlying the violence on the streets of Europe is the far greater violence inflicted upon the Middle East by US, British and French imperialism, working in conjunction with right-wing bourgeois regimes and the Islamist forces they promote, finance and arm.

ISIS is itself the direct product of a series of imperialist wars, emerging as a split-off from Al Qaeda, which got its start in the CIA-orchestrated war by Islamist fundamentalists against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. It was forged in the US war of aggression against Iraq that killed close to a million Iraqis, and then utilized in the 2011 war to topple Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi. Fighters and arms were then funneled with the aid of the CIA into the war for regime change in Syria.

The latest round of terror has its source in growing dissatisfaction among Washington’s Middle Eastern allies and its Islamist proxy forces over the slow pace of the US intervention in Syria and Washington’s failure to bring the six-year war for regime change to a victorious conclusion.

The people giving the orders for these attacks live in upper-class neighborhoods in London, Paris and elsewhere, enjoying close connections with intelligence agencies and government officials. Far from being unknown, they will be found among the top ministers and government officials in Damascus if the US-backed war in Syria achieves its objectives.

Those who carry out the terrorist atrocities are expendable assets, foot soldiers who are easily replaced from among the broad layers enraged by the slaughter carried out by imperialism in the Middle East.

The mass media always presents the failure to prevent these attacks as a matter of the security forces failing to “connect the dots,” a phrase that should by now be permanently banned. In virtually every case, those involved are well known to the authorities.

In the latest attacks in the UK, the connections are astonishing, even given the similar facts that have emerged in previous terrorist actions. One of the attackers in the London Bridge killings, Yousseff Zaghba, was stopped at an Italian airport while attempting to travel to Syria, freely admitting that he “wanted to be a terrorist” and carrying ISIS literature. Another was featured in a British television documentary that chronicled his confrontation with and detention by police after he unfurled an ISIS flag in Regent’s Park.

The Manchester suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was likewise well known to British authorities. His parents were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), who were allowed to return to Libya in 2011 to participate in the US-NATO regime-change operation against Muammar Gaddafi. He himself met with Libyan Islamic State operatives in Libya, veterans of the Syrian civil war, and maintained close connections with them while in Manchester.

What has become clear after 16 years of the so-called “war on terrorism”—going all the way back to the hijackers of 9/11—is that these elements move in and out of the Middle East, Europe and the US itself not only without hindrance, but under what amounts to state protection.

When they arrive at passport control, their names come up with definite instructions that they are not to be stopped. “Welcome home, sir, enjoy your vacation in Libya?” “Bit of tourism in Syria?”

Why have they enjoyed this carte blanche? Because they are auxiliaries of US and European intelligence, necessary proxies in wars for regime change from Libya to Syria and beyond that are being waged to further imperialist interests.

If from time to time these elements turn against their sponsors, with innocent civilians paying with their lives, that is part of the price of doing business.

In the aftermath of terrorist actions, governments respond with stepped-up measures of repression and surveillance. Troops are deployed in the streets, democratic rights are suspended, and, as in France, a state of emergency is made the overriding law of the land. All of these measures are useless in terms of preventing future attacks, but serve very well to control the domestic population and suppress social unrest.

If the mass media refuses to state what has become obvious after more than a decade and a half of these incidents, it is a measure of how fully the linkage between terrorism, the Western intelligence agencies and the unending wars in the Middle East has become institutionalized.

Innocent men, women and children, whether in London, Manchester, Paris, Tehran, Baghdad or Kabul, are paying the terrible price for these imperialist operations, which leave a trail of blood and destruction everywhere.

Putting a stop to terrorist attacks begins with a fight to put an end to the so-called “war on terrorism,” the fraudulent pretext for predatory wars in which Al Qaeda and its offshoots are employed as proxy ground forces, operating in intimate collaboration with imperialist intelligence services and military commands.

12 June 2017

By Jonathan Marshall

Police investigations and media reports have confirmed that two of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in Western Europe — the coordinated bombings and shootings in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130 people, and the May 2017 bombing of the arena in Manchester, England, which killed 23 — trace back to an Islamic State unit based in Libya known as Katibat al-Battar.

Since those attacks, a number of analysts, myself included, have characterized them as a form of “blowback” from NATO’s disastrous campaign to depose Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. By turning Libya into an anarchic staging ground for radical Islamist militants, that intervention set in motion the deadly export of terror back into Western Europe.

But such a Eurocentric critique of NATO’s intervention misses the far greater damage it wreaked on Syria, where nearly half a million people have died and at least 5 million refugees have had to flee their country since 2011. U.S., British, and French leaders helped trigger one of the world’s great modern catastrophes through their act of hubris.

A decade ago, Libya was a leading foe of radical jihadis, not a sanctuary for their international operations. A 2008 State Department memo noted that “Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism.” It gave the Gaddafi regime credit for “aggressively pursuing operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows,” particularly by veterans of jihadist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

All that came to an end in 2011, when armed rebels, including disciplined members of al-Qaeda and Islamic State, enlisted NATO’s help to topple Gaddafi’s regime. Western leaders ignored the prescient warnings of Gaddafi’s son Seif that “Libya may become the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean. . . .You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.” Gaddafi himself similarly predicted that once the jihadis “control the Mediterranean . . . then they will attack Europe.”

Subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe certainly vindicated those warnings, while discrediting the so-called humanitarian case for waging an illegal war in Libya. But the predicted jihadi efforts to “control the Mediterranean” have had far graver repercussions, at least in the case of Syria.

A recent story in the New York Times on the genesis of recent terror attacks on France and Britain noted in passing that the Islamic State in Libya, composed of “seasoned veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan,” was “among the first foreign jihadist contingent to arrive in Syria in 2012, as the country’s popular revolt was sliding into a broader civil war and Islamist insurgency.”

A former British counter-terrorism analyst told the newspaper, “some of the baddest dudes in Al Qaeda were Libyan. When I looked at the Islamic State, the same thing was happening. They were the most hard-core, the most violent — the ones always willing to go to extremes when others were not. The Libyans represented the elite troops, and clearly ISIS capitalized on this.”

Extremist Violence in Syria

These Libyan jihadists leveraged their numbers, resources, and fanaticism to help escalate Syria’s conflict into the tragedy we know today. The mass murder we now take for granted was not inevitable.

Although Syria’s anti-government protests in the spring of 2011 turned violent almost from the start, many reformers and government officials strove to prevent an all-out civil war. In August 2011, leaders of Syria’s opposition wisely declared that calls to arms were “unacceptable politically, nationally, and ethically. Militarizing the revolution would . . . undermine the gravity of the humanitarian catastrophe involved in a confrontation with the regime. Militarization would put the revolution in an arena where the regime has a distinct advantage and would erode the moral superiority that has characterized the revolution since its beginning.”

Largely forgotten today, the Assad regime also took serious steps to deescalate the violence, including lifting the country’s state of emergency, disbanding the unpopular National Security Court, appointing a new government, and hosting a national dialogue with protest leaders.

But on August 18, 2011, the same Western leaders who were bombing Gaddafi announced to the world that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” Further energizing Syrian militants, Libyan rebels were just then in the midst of conquering Tripoli with NATO’s help.

“That is an ominous sign for Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “Already there are signs Libya is giving inspiration to the rebels trying to oust Mr. Assad. . . . Syrian protesters took to the streets chanting ‘Gadhafi tonight, Bashar tomorrow.’ . . . The Libyan episode may serve simply to sharpen the conflict in Syria: both spurring on the dissidents and strengthening Mr. Assad’s resolve to hold on.”

Stoking war in Syria was not an unintended consequence of the Libyan campaign, but a conscious part of the longstanding neoconservative ambition to “remake the map of the Middle East” by toppling radical and anti-American regimes. The same Journal article described the grandiose aims of some Washington interventionists:

“Beyond Syria, a new dose of energy provided by Libya’s uprising could ripple out to other nations in the region. In particular, U.S. officials hope it will reinvigorate a protest movement that arose inside Iran in 2009 to challenge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election. . . Syria has served for 30 years as Iran’s closest strategic ally in the region. U.S. officials believe the growing challenge to Mr. Assad’s regime could motivate Iran’s democratic forces.”

Instead of motivating Iran’s democrats, of course, the Syrian conflict motivated Iran’s hardliners to send Revolutionary Guard units and Hezbollah proxy forces into the country, further destabilizing the region.

Following the gruesome murder of Gaddafi in the fall of 2011, Libyan zealots quickly began fueling other terrorist conflicts, ranging from Mali to the Middle East, with arms looted from Gaddafi’s vast stocks.

“The weapons proliferation that we saw coming out of the Libyan conflict was of a scale greater than any previous conflict — probably 10 times more weapons than we saw going on the loose in places like Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan,” observed an expert at Human Rights Watch.

A United Nations investigation determined that “Transfers of arms and ammunition from Libya were among the first batches of weapons and ammunition to reach the Syrian opposition.” It also stressed that Libyan weapons were arming primarily “extremist elements,” allowing them to gain territory and influence at the expense of more moderate rebel groups.

Spreading the War

As early as November 2011, Islamist warlords in Libya began offering “money and weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashar al-Assad,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Abdulhakim Belhadj, commander of the Tripoli Military Council and the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al-Qaeda affiliate, met secretly with Syrian rebel leaders in Turkey to discuss training their troops. (In 2004, he had been the victim of a CIA kidnap plot and rendition from Malaysia to Libya.)

The commander of one armed Libyan gang told the newspaper, “Everyone wants to go (to Syria). We have liberated our country, now we should help others. . . This is Arab unity.”

In April 2012, Lebanese authorities confiscated a ship carrying more than 150 tons of arms and ammunition originating in Misrata, Libya. A U.N.-authorized panel inspected the weapons and reported finding SA-24 and SA-7 surface-to-air missiles, anti-tank guided missiles, and a variety of other light and heavy weapons.

By that August, according to Time magazine, “hundreds of Libyans” had flocked to Syria to “export their revolution,” bringing with them weapons, expertise in making bombs, and experience in battlefield tactics.

“Within weeks of the successful conclusion of their revolution, Libyan fighters began trickling into Syria,” the magazine noted. “But in recent months, that trickle has allegedly become a torrent, as many more have traveled to the mountains straddling Syria and Turkey, where the rebels have established their bases.”

A Syrian rebel told the newsweekly, “They have heavier weapons than we do,” including surface-to-air missiles. “They brought these weapons to Syria, and they are being used on the front lines.”

A month later, the London Times reported that a Libyan ship carrying more than 400 tons of weapons bound for Syria, including SAM-7 anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades, had docked in Turkey. Such weapons particularly compounded the suffering of civilians caught up in the war.

As France’s foreign minister told reporters that October, rebel-held anti-aircraft missiles were “forcing (Syrian government) planes to fly extremely high, and so the strikes are less accurate.”

According to later reporting by journalist Seymour Hersh, most such Libyan weapons made their way to Syria via covert routes supervised by the CIA, under a program authorized by the Obama administration in early 2012. Funding and logistics support came from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The CIA supposedly avoided disclosing the program to Congress by classifying it as a liaison operation with a foreign intelligence partner, Britain’s MI6.

Word of the operation began leaking to the London media by December 2012. The CIA was said to be sending in more advisers to help ensure that the Libyan weapons did not reach radical Islamist forces.

Of course, their efforts came too late; U.S. intelligence officials knew by that time that “the Salafist(s), the Muslim Brotherhood, and (al-Qaeda)” were “the major forces driving the insurgency.” The influx of new arms simply compounded Syria’s suffering and raised its profile as a dangerous arena of international power competition.

Libya’s arms and fighters helped transform the Syrian conflict from a nasty struggle into a bloodbath. As Middle East scholar Omar Dahi noted, “the year 2012 was decisive in creating the present catastrophe. There were foreign elements embroiled in Syria before that date . . . but until early 2012 the dynamics of the Syrian conflict were largely internal. . . . Partly in . . . appropriation of weapons pumped in from the outside and partly in anticipation of still greater military assistance, namely from the West, the opposition decided to take up arms.

“The decision—militarization—had three main effects. First, it dramatically increased the rate of death and destruction throughout the country. . . . By mid-2012, the monthly casualties were almost in excess of the total in the entire first year of the uprising. Militarization gave the Syrian regime a free hand to unleash its full arsenal of indiscriminate weaponry. . . Perhaps most fatefully, the advent of armed rebellion placed much of the opposition’s chances in the hands of those who would fund and arm the fighters. . . . It was then that the jihadi groups were unleashed.”

The collateral victims of NATO’s intervention in Libya now include 6 million Libyans attempting to survive in a failed state, millions of people across North Africa afflicted by Islamist terrorism, 20 million Syrians yearning for an end to war, and millions of innocent Europeans who wonder when they might become targets of suicidal terrorists. There is nothing “humanitarian” about wars that unleash such killing and chaos, with no end in sight.

Jonathan Marshall is a regular contributor to Consortium News.

12 June 2017

By Eva Bartlett

9 Jun 2017 — On the evening of Aug. 17, 2016, an event that has yet to be adequately explained occurred in the Qaterji District of the Syrian city of Aleppo. Four-year-old Omran Daqneesh, as well as his siblings and parents, were injured in media alleged was an attack by the Russians – or the Syrian military, depending on what source one chose to believe. People in Aleppo suggested it could have been a strike by the US-led coalition. The reality is not yet known. The attack also claimed the life of Omran’s 11-year-old brother, Mohammad Ali Daqneesh.

Overnight, the world was introduced to Omran, who became the poster child of suffering in Syria due to extensive coverage by Western corporate media. The al-Qaeda-affiliated White Helmets, and subsequently the media, made the child’s injuries out to seem far more serious than they actually were.

CNN anchor Kate Bolduan “broke down” over a photo of the boy that was likely taken and propagated precisely to elicit such emotion. Video footage of Omran showed him seated in an ambulance, blank-faced and barefoot with blood drying on his face. The world was collectively heartbroken at seeing Omran – but was also misled about his story.

Most Western media blamed the Russians for Omran’s injuries – but some media outlets, including The Guardian, claimed that he’d been hit by a Syrian airstrike.

For its part, the Russian Defense Ministry denied allegations regarding Russia’s involvement in the incident. As Tim Anderson wrote at the time, ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said the Russian Air Force “never work[s] on targets within residential areas … [especially not in] al-Qaterji, mentioned by the Western media, as it is adjacent to the exit corridors for locals which were opened in the framework of the Russian humanitarian mission.”

Related: Hell Cannons – The Homegrown Horror of Syria’s Terrorist Invaders

Both Western and Gulf media would rehash the story of his injury in the coming weeks and months, but also omit some key facts in the process.

The source of the video footage showing Omran being put in the ambulance was the Aleppo Media Centre (AMC), which is funded by the West and promotes the “rebel opposition” narrative in Syria, relying on al-Qaeda sources. The journalists who took the video and photos are embedded in al-Qaeda-controlled areas.

Father speaks out – Omran is happy and healthy

Omran’s father, Mohammad Kheir Daqneesh, had six children, including Omran and the late Mohammad Ali. In the year following the attack that injured Omran and his family, Mr. Daqneesh became sick of the way Gulf and Western media used the image of his son as propaganda to garner public support for further intervention in Syria.

He chose to speak out on June 5, 2017, giving interviews to Syrian media in which he gave his side of Omran’s story. He pointed out the ways in which Omran had been made into an icon without his knowledge or his family’s consent, as well as the false premises under which this was done.

Mohammad Daqneesh recalled scrambling to find Omran and his other children in the dark, moving them to safety before rescuing the rest of his family. At one point, Omran was taken to an ambulance by a White Helmets “volunteer,” with the iconic photo to be taken shortly thereafter while Daqneesh was still inside his home.

Mr. Daqneesh denied any knowledge of a Russian or Syrian airstrike, saying that he had not heard any airplanes at the time. He added that his son’s injury was mild, but had been exaggerated in the news, adding that Omran was at ease and had since returned to normalcy in his home in Aleppo.

On June 6, I met with Omran and Mr. Daqneesh at their Aleppo home to inquire about the incident. In a small sitting room outside their apartment, Mohammad Daqneesh was able to provide some more answers.

On the August evening of the attack, Mohammad Daqneesh and his family were inside the first-floor apartment they had been renting since fleeing their original Aleppo neighborhood when “rebels” came into their district. Daqneesh described their area of Qaterji as having been calm, with “nothing happening” for most of the three years they’d been there.

“We were at our home in the Qaterji neighborhood when the strike happened. What caused it, I don’t know – we didn’t hear any sound[s] of airplanes or bombing. Suddenly everything went dark. Thank God, [Omran’s] injury was a light injury, very light. But they exaggerated and made a big deal out of it. I was also lightly injured on my head and arm, but [they were] very mild injuries,” Daqneesh said.

“My son Mohammad Ali was taking the trash out when suddenly the incident occurred and he was hit by rubble. His hands were injured and he suffered internal bleeding,” he said.

Ali ended up at the same hospital as Omran, where he stayed for three days before passing away. “I went there to find them and take them out of there. I needed some stitches, but I didn’t get it done there, I didn’t trust them. I asked a nurse elsewhere to do it,” Daqneesh said.

But the hospital in question had a dark side to it. Pierre Le Corf, a French citizen who has lived in Aleppo for over a year, looked into the hospital after eastern Aleppo was secured.

“The [hospital] was held and managed by [al-]Nusra and the Tahrir Party. It was funded and supported by SAMS (Syrian-American Medical Society), and there were SAMS posters all over the hospital. Doctors there were more like interns, not actual doctors but they received intensive training for a period,” Le Corf told me in Aleppo.

As the White Helmets are lauded with having had a widely-loved presence in eastern Aleppo (and other al-Qaeda occupied regions of Syria), I asked Omran’s father whether he had had any interactions with them prior to the August 2016 evening. He replied that he hadn’t and added:

“I saw nothing of them, but I heard a lot from other people. Some said they do help people and others said they steal their money, mobiles, etc from those they help.”

Related:  John Pilger: The White Helmets Are A “Complete Propaganda Construct”

British journalist Vanessa Beeley, in her investigations into the White Helmets, heard far more sordid first-hand accounts when she visited the Jibreen reception center for displaced Syrians from eastern Aleppo areas in December 2016.

In the corporate media frenzy which followed that August 2016 night, Mahmoud Raslan—the star photographer of Omran in the ambulance—at one point described crying for Omran. I asked Mohammad Daqneesh about this, knowing of Raslan’s close affiliation with al-Zenki.

“If he cried and felt sorry for my child, that’s up to him. But if he cried to manipulate others feelings, that’s a different story. We see a lot of cases on the television which we cry for. But not like this slight injury,” Daqneesh said, touching Omran’s forehead.

To my question of whether the militants had attempted to intimidate or otherwise coerce Daqneesh into corroborating the narrative around Omran, he said:

“They tried to pressure us to say that the Russian and the Syrian air forces hit us, but I can’t be a witness to something I didn’t see. They offered me money, travel out of Syria, residency, citizenship, employment, health insurance, and things like that. And they offered us their protection on the way out of Syria because the road, the Ramouseh road, was very dangerous. They wanted to put us inside an armored vehicle which would take us to the Turkish borders, through Bab Salame, with the help of the armed men.”

Assuming that Daqneesh is being “held under house arrest” as pro- “rebels” media have claimed, why then would he refuse this offer? I asked why he hadn’t left with them and what he thought of claims he was being forced to speak as he has done.

“Firstly, I am a Syrian citizen and my children have every right to live in this country. Also, it was simple (injury), why would I leave? I’ve gone back to my work. Some media have said that I live in Turkey now and my family and I left Omran alone. That’s all a lie.

I didn’t ask them to put us in the media and to trade with our blood. I didn’t ask them to take photos and write stories about us. They imposed themselves on us and did all that. Now they are saying that I’m a traitor, that I betrayed the country and that I’m sitting with a criminal.

I stay only where I am convinced is right for me, and I recommend that they return to their senses. Enough damaging this country, they came here and caused us all this damage and harm, I am asking them to back off and to leave this country and people alone. Enough is enough.”

“Rescuers” Traded Blood for Photo Op

Syrian journalist Khaled Iskef is largely responsible for bringing the true story of Omran Daqneesh to light. Through months of dialogue with Mohammad Daqneesh, Iskef’s urging him to talk to the media, eventuated on June 5th.

In meetings with Iskef in Aleppo, he told me about something even more disturbing than the exploitation of Omran Daqneesh: according to Iskef’s investigations through talking with Daqneesh and his friends, the White Helmets “rescuers” first grabbed one child for their “rescue” photo op, but when they saw undeniably adorable Omran, they took him instead, leaving the first child aside. Trading blood, as Daqneesh said.

Iskef spoke of why Daqneesh changed his mind about speaking to press.

“He refused any media because of what’s happened with his child. When you think of how Western media treated the child, his reaction to any media was to refuse. I kept telling him you must talk to the media.”

Mahmoud Raslan, the photographer of that famous photo, is now in Idlib, after having left in December 2016 with the terrorists occupying eastern Aleppo districts when the Syrian army and allies liberated Aleppo.

According to Iskef, Raslan recently bragged anew about photographing Omran. “This made his father crazy.” Daqneesh never gave permission to Raslan or anyone to photograph his son, and ensured no one would do so after the initial photograph was used as war propaganda. “This is what made him open up and talk, he was so angry.”

In his article for al-Mayadeen, in Arabic, Khaled Iskef wrote (on-line translated):

“According to Omran’s father, some journalists close to the Nusra Front told him that 26 million Muslims depended on him …and said they were waiting for his statement that the bombing was the Syrian regime.”

The foreign journalists he referred to, he told me, included Bilal Abdul Kareem, who is perhaps known to some readers for having been embedded with al-Qaeda, praising the White Helmets, and fawningly interviewing Saudi terrorist, Sheikh Abdullah Muhaysini.

In our conversations and in a series of recent tweets, Iskef mentioned that Daqneesh is being threatened for having spoken out against the media lies and manipulations. One such tweet read:

“Threats that now reach me, and my family’s because I have exposed the lies of the gunmen who were controlling eastern parts of #Aleppo.”

Aleppo, Former al-Qaeda Hot-Bed: From Occupied to Liberated

While the entire details of the August 17 2,016 evening are not yet clear, what is clear is that the White Helmets, the AMC, and the corporate media lied and exploited Omran Daqneesh and his family in their concerted war propaganda efforts to demonize the Syrian and Russian governments.

Khaled Iskef raised a good, if not basic, point: “Can they prove it was a Syrian or Russian airstrike?”

In our June 6th interview, Mohammad Daqneesh likewise said: “We asked the journalists to bring out the pieces of the weapon we were hit by, to see it. They refused, they refused.”

After hearing what Mohammad Daqneesh had to say that afternoon, I chatted with one of his neighbors in the same area. The neighbor mentioned a day in 2014, two days prior to the Presidential elections, in which he said “96 gas bombs on Sulimaniyeh and Midan. My house was destroyed to rubble. The government didn’t retaliate because where the terrorists were and fired from there were civilians.”

Indeed, in a September 2014 article on mortar and rocket terrorism, I wrote about the bombings prior to the Presidential elections in the Damascus region alone. These bombings hit government-secured cities throughout Syria:

“According to political analyst and Damascus resident Mazen al-Akhras, in the three-month period of April, May and June 2014, terrorist-insurgents fired 994 mortars on Damascus and environs, 426 of which were fired in June (see a list of locations hit and a number of mortars below). On June 3, Election Day in Syria, the terrorist-insurgents fired 151 shells on Damascus, killing 5 and maiming 33 Syrians, Akhras said.”

In December, 2016, all of Aleppo city was liberated of the Nusra, Zenki, and other terrorist factions which had occupied eastern areas (and formerly northern) for years. Syrian and friendly media showed the celebrations which lasted well beyond Christmas, which was celebrated for the first time in years in the overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim city, with Muslims celebrating with their Christian friends and neighbors.

After the liberation of Aleppo, Western and Gulf media, and most of the many concerned human rights groups went silent on Aleppo—as they had been utterly silent on the near-daily murders of civilians and bombings of hospitals on the government side of Aleppo by militants they dubbed ‘rebels’. The number of civilians who died as a result of terrorist snipings, explosive bullets, Hell-Cannon-fired gas cylinder bombs, Grad missiles and other powerful munitions, was nearly 11,000, according to the head of Forensics in Aleppo by late 2016. The media shifted their attention to other areas occupied by al-Qaeda where atrocities could be claimed and White Helmets could perform for their payments.

Western and Gulf media have propagated relentlessly against the Syrian army, and Syria’s allies, distorting realities on numerous occasions, and completely fabricating allegations on numerous others, all with the sole intent of demonizing those who have actually fought terrorism in Syria since this began in 2011. Unsurprisingly, the same Western media which distorted, exploited and lied about Omran Daqneesh is striving to discredit the words of his father, Mohammad.

Mohammad Daqneesh, an unwilling party to the war propaganda, had the following to say about Syria and its army:

“Syria comes before anything. I don’t belong to any side. Syria comes first. The Syrian Army protects the country and the people. I served in the Syrian army. The army is the people, and the people are the army.”

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian activist/freelance journalist covering the Middle East, especially the Syrian conflict.

12 June 2017