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By Lauren McCauley

In the final hours before the Christmas holiday weekend, U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday quietly signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law—and buried within the $619 billion military budget (pdf) is a controversial provision that establishes a national anti-propaganda center that critics warn could be dangerous for press freedoms.

The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, introduced by Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, establishes the Global Engagement Center under the State Department which coordinates efforts to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United Sates national security interests.”

Further, the law authorizes grants to non-governmental agencies to help “collect and store examples in print, online, and social media, disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda” directed at the U.S. and its allies, as well as “counter efforts by foreign entities to use disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda to influence the policies and social and political stability” of the U.S. and allied nations.

The head of the center will be appointed by the president, which likely means the first director will be chosen by President-elect Donald Trump.

The new law comes weeks before the New York billionaire assumes the presidency, amid national outrage over the spread of fake news and what many say is foreign interference in the election, both which are accused of enabling Trump’s victory.

Those combined forces have already contributed to the overt policing of media critical of U.S. foreign policy, such as the problematic “fake news blacklist” recently disseminated by the Washington Post.

And for those paying attention over the holiday weekend, the creation of the a new information agency under the Propaganda Act appears to be another worrisome development.

First published by CommonDreams.org

27 December 2016

By Nauman Sadiq

George Santayana presciently said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The only difference between the Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s, that spawned the Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history, and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Pakistani intelligence agencies, which then distributes those deadly weapons among the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore, this time around, they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which the Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels,” with secular and nationalist ambitions, to the Western audience.

Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terror, therefore, the Western political establishments and the mainstream media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that are operating in those countries: such as, the red militants of the Islamic State, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that more than 90% of militants that are operating in Syria are either the Islamic jihadists or the armed tribesmen, and less than 10% are those who have defected from the Syrian army or otherwise have secular and nationalist goals.

As far as the infinitesimally small secular and liberal elite of the developing countries is concerned, such privileged classes can’t even cook breakfasts for themselves if their servants are on a holiday and the corporate media had us believing that the majority of the Syrian militants are “moderate rebels” who constitute the vanguard of the Syrian opposition against the Syrian regime in a brutal civil war and who believe in the principles of democracy, rule of law and liberal values as their cherished goals?

In political science the devil always lies in the definitions of the terms that we employ. For instance: how do you define a terrorist or a militant? In order to understand this, we need to identify the core of a “militant,” that what essential feature distinguishes him from the rest? A militant is basically an armed and violent individual who carries out subversive acts against the state.

That being understood, we now need to examine the concept of “violence.” Is it violence per se that is wrong, or does some kind of justifiable violence exists? I take the view, on empirical grounds, that all kinds of violence are essentially wrong; because the goals for which such violence is often employed are seldom right and elusive at best. Though democracy and liberal ideals are cherished goals but such goals can only be accomplished through peaceful means; expecting from the armed and violent thugs to bring about democratic reform is incredibly preposterous.

The Western mainstream media and its credulous neoliberal constituents, however, take a different view. According to them, there are two kinds of violence: justifiable and unjustifiable. When a militant resorts to violence for secular and nationalist goals, such as “bringing democracy” to Libya and Syria, the blindfolded liberal interventionists enthusiastically exhort such form of violence; however, if such militants later turn out to be Islamic jihadists, like the Misrata militia in Libya or the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front in Syria, the gullible neoliberals, who have been duped by the mainstream narrative, promptly make a volte-face and label them as “terrorists.”

Notwithstanding, on the subject of the supposed “powerlessness” of the US in the global affairs, the Western think tanks and the corporate media’s spin-doctors generally claim that Pakistan deceived the US in Afghanistan by providing clandestine support to the Taliban and the Haqqani network; Turkey hoodwinked the US in Syria by using the war against the Islamic State as a pretext for cracking down on Kurds; Saudi Arabia and UAE betrayed the US in Yemen by mounting airstrikes against the Houthis and Saleh’s loyalists; and once again Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt went against the “ostensible” policy of the US in Libya by conducting airstrikes against the Tripoli-based government, even though Khalifa Haftar, the military commander of the armed forces in eastern Libya, lived next door to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley, Virginia, for more than two decades.

If the US policymakers are so powerless and naïve then how come they still control the global economic order? This perennial whining attitude of the Western corporate media, that such and such regional actors betrayed them otherwise they were on the top of their game, is actually a clever stratagem that has been deliberately designed by the spin-doctors to cast the Western powers in a positive light and to demonize the adversaries, even if the latter are their tactical allies in some of the regional conflicts.

Fighting wars through proxies allows the international power brokers the luxury of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” in their defense and at the same time they can shift all the blame for wrongdoing on the minor regional players.

Regardless, back in the ‘80s, the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” did not spring up spontaneously out of nowhere, some powers funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized those militants; how else could such ragtag militants had beaten back the super power of its time?

Then in 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in Libya, those same powers once again financed, trained, armed and internationally legitimized the Libyan militants by calling them pro-democracy, “armed” activists against the supposedly “brutal and tyrannical” rule of Gaddafi regime.

Similarly, in Syria, those very same powers once again had the audacity to fund, train, arm and internationally legitimize the Syrian militants; how else could such peaceful and democratic protests have mutated into a full-blown armed insurrection?

And even if those protests did mutate into an armed rebellion, left to their own resources, the best such civilian protestors could have mustered was to get a few pistols, shotguns and rifles; where did they get all those machine gun-mounted pick-up trucks, rocket-propelled grenades and the US-made TOW antitank missiles?

You don’t have to be a military strategist to understand a simple fact that unarmed civilian population, and even the ragtag militant outfits, lack the wherewithal to fight against the organized and professional armed forces of a country that are equipped with artillery, armored vehicles, air force and navy.

Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of the insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle” of the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian insurgencies of today, it is simply beyond the power of minor regional players and their nascent media, which has a geographically and linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them; only the Western mainstream media, that has a global audience and which serves as the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments, has perfected this game of legitimizing the absurd and selling the Satans as saviors.

Notwithstanding, for the whole of the last five years of the Syrian proxy war, the focal point of the Western policy has been that “Assad must go!” But what difference would it make to the lives of the ordinary Syrians even if the regime is replaced now when the civil war has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, created millions of refugees, displaced half of the population and reduced the whole country of 22 million people to rubble? I do concede that Libya and Syria were not democratic states under Gaddafi and Assad, respectively; however, both of those countries were at least functioning states.

Gaddafi was ousted from power in September 2011; five years later, Tripoli is ruled by the Misrata militia, Benghazi is under the control of Khalifa Haftar, who is nothing more than the stooge of Egypt and UAE, and the heavily armed militants are having a field day all over Libya. It will now take decades, not years, to restore even a semblance of stability in Libya and Syria; remember that the proxy war in Afghanistan was originally fought in the ‘80s and today, 35 years later, Afghanistan is still in the midst of perpetual anarchy, lawlessness and an unrelenting Taliban insurgency.

If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies.

Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide training and arms to the Syrian militants in order to battle the Syrian regime with the support of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact, that the bulk of the so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of whom later coalesced together to form the Taliban movement.

Similarly, in Syria, the bulk of the so-called “moderate opposition” is comprised of Islamic jihadists, like the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of the Free Syria Army (FSA.)

Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, the various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in their character than secular or nationalist, as such.

Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces can be compared with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, had been allied with the Shi’a regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014.

At the behest of the American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last couple of years after the United States’ policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014.

It’s very unfortunate that the haughty and myopic politicians and diplomats do not learn any lessons from history, otherwise all the telltale signs are there that Syria has become the Afghanistan of the Middle East and its repercussions on the stability of the energy-rich region and the security threat that the Syrian militants pose to the rest of the world will have far reaching consequences for many decades to come.

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitics’ analyst who has a particular interest in the politics of Af-Pak and MENA regions, energy politics and Petroimperialism.

27 December 2016

By Chris Hedges

This Christmas I mourn the long, slow death of our democracy that led to the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. I fear the euphoria of those who have embraced the atavistic lust for violence and bigotry stoked by him. These nativist forces, part of the continuum of white vigilante violence directed against people of color and radical dissidents throughout American history, are once again being groomed as instruments of mass intimidation and perhaps terror. I know that our civil and political institutions, poisoned by neoliberalism and captured by the corporate state, have neither the will nor the ability to protect us. We are on our own. It won’t be pleasant.

A week ago in New York I spoke with Ellen Schrecker, the country’s foremost historian of McCarthyism and the author of “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” “No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & The Universities” and “The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University.”

“What am I seeing?” she asked about the nation’s political and cultural condition. “Am I seeing a replay of the McCarthy era? To a large extent some of the parallels are stunning. You can look at a figure like [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy, who symbolized a much broader repressive movement. I would say Trump plays the same role today for what really is a right-wing reactionary movement that has taken over the American government.”

“There are a number of fairly superficial comparisons we can make,” Schrecker went on. “I think both McCarthy and Trump are somewhat abhorrent characters—perhaps there’s a little sociopath involved there. McCarthy was a genius at working the press. He understood how to get himself on the front pages. He knew the deadlines that specific reporters had. He knew how to feed them stories. I think the parallels there are pretty obvious. Trump is a genius with regard to the media.”

The Wisconsin senator was, as Trump is now, very opportunistic, she said. McCarthy, a Democrat before he became a Republican, “was just a little bit late” in exploiting the Red Scare, Schrecker said, latching on to it in 1950, “by which time the Un-American Activities Committee had been hounding Hollywood.”

Trump and his Christian fascist minions, sooner than most of us expect, will seek to shut down the small spaces left for free expression. Dissent will become difficult and sometimes dangerous. There will be an overt campaign of discrimination and hate crimes directed against a host of internal enemies, including undocumented workers, Muslims, African-Americans and dissidents. The Christian right will be given a license to roll back women’s rights, insert their magical thinking into school curriculums and terrorize Muslims and the GBLT community. The Trump administration will hand our Christian jihadists a platform to champion a repugnant religious chauvinism that fuses the symbols and language of the Christian religion with American capitalism, imperialism and white supremacy.

Repressive measures, I expect, will be implemented swiftly. Speed blinds a captive population to what is happening. Already anemic democratic traditions and institutions, including the legal system, the two major political parties and the press, will crumble under the assault. Trump will use the familiar tools that make possible the authoritarian state: mass incarceration, militarized police, crippling of the judicial system, demonization of opponents real and imagined, and obliteration of privacy and civil liberties, all foolishly promoted by the political elites on behalf of corporate power.

Schrecker said the rise of Trump has been in the making for four decades. Corporations funded and established institutions to close the cultural, social and political openings made in the 1960s, especially in universities, the press, labor and the arts. These corporate forces turned government into a destructive power. America was pillaged and cannibalized for profit. We now live in a deindustrialized wasteland. This scorched-earth assault created fertile ground for a demagogue.

The late Lewis Powell, a general counsel to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and later a Supreme Court justice, in 1971 wrote an eight-page memo outlining a campaign to counter what the document’s title described as an “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” The memo established the Business Roundtable, which generated huge monetary resources and political clout to direct government policy and mold public opinion. The Powell report listed methods that corporations could use to silence those in “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals” who were hostile to corporate interests.

Powell called for the establishment of lavishly funded think tanks and conservative institutes. He proposed that ideological assaults against government regulation and environmental protection be directed at a mass audience. He advocated placing corporate-friendly academics and neoliberal economists in universities and banishing from the public sphere those who challenged unfettered corporate power—especially Ralph Nader, whom Powell cited by name. Organizations were to be formed to monitor and pressure the media to report favorably on issues that furthered corporate interests. Pro-corporate judges were to be placed on the bench.

Academics were to be controlled by pressure from right-wing watch lists, co-opted university administrators and wealthy donors. Under the prolonged assault the universities, like the press, eventually became compliant, banal and monochromatic.

“He spelled out a need for an alternative to academic knowledge,” Schrecker said of Powell. “He felt the academy had been undermined by the left. He wanted to establish an alternative source of expertise. What you’re getting in the 1970s is the development of things like the American Enterprise Institute [in existence since 1938] , The Heritage Foundation, a whole bunch of think tanks on the right who people in the media can go to and get expertise. But it’s politically motivated.”

“It was unbelievably successful,” she said of the campaign. “It’s pretty bad. What we’re seeing today is an assault on knowledge. What came out of this are the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s which created a set of stereotypes of professors as deconstructionist, raging feminists who hate men, cross-dressers, and, worse, who are out of touch with reality.”

The ideological attack was accompanied by corporate campaigns to defund public schools and universities, along with public broadcasting and the arts. The humanities were eviscerated. Vocational training, including the expansion of the study of finance and economics in universities, replaced disciplines that provided students with cultural and historical literacy, that allowed them to step outside of themselves to feel and express empathy for the other. Students were no longer taught how to think, but what to think. Civic education died. A grotesque kind of illiteracy—one exemplified by Trump—was celebrated. Success became solely about amassing wealth. The cult of the self, the essence of corporatism, became paramount.

Schrecker said that during the McCarthy era most of the Red baiting, blacklisting and censorship emanated from the government, especially J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover and McCarthy, along with Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn, left ruined lives and reputations in the wake of their vicious inquisitions. They effectively shut down freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Cohn, who was a prosecutor in the espionage case that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, was later Trump’s lawyer and close friend for 13 years. Cohn was disbarred in 1986, shortly before his death, for what a court called unethical, unprofessional and “particularly reprehensible” conduct.

“There are … many more private entities” involved in today’s anti-democratic campaign, Schrecker said. “It’s a bit of everything. That’s why it’s so dangerous. It’s not just Trump. Trump is clearly about to become very powerful. Nonetheless, there have been these forces, the climate deniers, the oil people, all of them are coming together at this particular point in time.”

We must begin again. Any hope for a restoration of civil society will come from small, local groups and community organizations. They will begin with the mundane tasks of holding back the expansion of charter schools, enforcing environmental regulations, building farmers markets, fighting for the minimum wage, giving sanctuary to undocumented workers, protesting hate crimes and electing people to local offices who will seek to mitigate the excesses of the state.

“We have to reconstitute a civil society,” Schrecker said. “Intermediary institutions like the academy and the media have been hollowed out. Certainly, journalism is on life support. We have to resuscitate organizations and institutions that have atrophied.”

“There is an attack on the American mind,” she said. “A lot of what we’re seeing with Trump is the product of 40 years of dumbing down.”

A crisis is traditionally used by authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to put a country in lockdown. An economic meltdown, a large domestic terrorist attack, widespread devastation from climate change or the orchestrated escalation of hostilities with another country, perhaps Iran or China, will see Trump and his rogue generals, billionaires and conspiracy theorists plunge the United States into dystopia.

War is the usual vehicle that demagogues use to justify internal repression and wield unchallenged power. If the federal government expands our wars to create new enemies, even local resistance will be impermissible. All dissent will be criminalized. Institutions, fearful and weak, will carry out purges of those few who speak out. Most of society, intimidated by a war psychosis, will be compliant to avoid being targeted. Resistance will often be tantamount to suicide.

The late Rev. Daniel Berrigan declared in a 2008 conversation with me that the American empire was in irrevocable decline. He said that in the face of this dissolution we must hold fast to the non-historical values of compassion, simplicity, love and justice. The rise and fall of civilizations, he noted, is part of the cyclical nature of history.

“The tragedy across the globe is that we are pulling down so many others,” he said. “We are not falling gracefully. Many, many people are paying with their lives for this.”

We must not become preoccupied with the short-term effects of resistance. Failure is inevitable for many of us. Tyrants have silenced voices of conscience in the past. They will do so again. We will endure by holding fast to our integrity, by building community and by spawning new institutions in the midst of the wreckage. We will sustain each other. Perhaps enough of us will endure to begin again.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

First published by Truthdig

27 December 2016

By Bill Van Auken

After meeting in Moscow on Tuesday, top officials of the Russian, Iranian and Turkish governments issued a joint eight-point statement of principles calling for the extension of a ceasefire throughout Syria and a negotiated settlement between the Syrian government and its opponents.

Much of the statement, dubbed by Russian officials as the “Moscow Declaration,” was boilerplate. It declared the three countries’ support for “the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic,” while affirming that “there is no military solution to the Syrian conflict.”

The timing of the statement and the geopolitical alignment of its three signatories, however, make the document extraordinarily troubling for Washington.

The meeting in Moscow was convened on the basis of the stunning defeat delivered to the nearly six-year-old US orchestrated war for regime change in Syria. Last week, Syrian forces, backed by Russia and Iran, retook eastern Aleppo, the last urban stronghold of the Islamist militias that served as US proxy forces in the fight against the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

That Turkey has now joined with Assad’s key allies, Russia and Iran, is an indication of the severity of this defeat. Previously Turkey had served as a key state sponsor of the Al Qaeda-linked militias fighting in Syria, allowing its territory to be used as a conduit for the shipment of CIA-supplied arms and “foreign fighters” into the country, while dispatching elements of its security forces to provide them aid and training.

Within the past week, however, Turkey joined with Russia in brokering a ceasefire with the so-called “rebels” in eastern Aleppo along with their evacuation together with that of thousands of civilians from the besieged enclave.

The Moscow statement declared that the three countries “welcome joint efforts in eastern Aleppo allowing for voluntary evacuation of civilians and organized departure of the armed opposition.” The statement stands in sharp contrast to the position taken by Washington, which has waged a propaganda campaign denouncing the government’s retaking of Aleppo as a “massacre” and even “genocide.”

That Turkey, a key NATO ally for the last six decades, with the second largest army in the US-led military alliance, has joined with the two countries viewed by Washington as the principal obstacles to its drive to assert hegemony over Middle East and Eurasia is a serious blow to US policy.

The Turkish government has sought a rapprochement with Moscow since last May, when it began efforts to assuage tensions that erupted after the Turkish air force carried out an ambush shootdown of a Russian warplane operating on the Turkish-Syrian border in November of last year, raising the threat of an armed conflict between the two countries, potentially drawing NATO into a war with nuclear-armed Russia.

Relations between the two countries grew closer after the abortive military coup against the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan last July, which Erodgan and his supporters blamed on Washington and Berlin.

The Erdogan government has also clashed with Washington over the US alliance with the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia affiliated with the Turkish Kurdish PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which Ankara regards as a “terrorist organization” and against which it has waged a protracted counterinsurgency campaign. Erdogan ordered the Turkish army into Syria last August, ostensibly to join the US campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS), but more importantly to block the YPG from establishing a de facto Kurdish state on its border.

The issuing of the Moscow statement came on the heels of Monday’s assassination in Ankara of the Russian ambassador, Andrei Karlov, by an off-duty member of an elite Turkish police unit. While there was initial speculation that the killing could provoke a crisis between Russia and Turkey, the two governments have insisted that they are united in response to the assassination, while pro-government media and officials in both countries have made statements blaming Washington and NATO for the crime.

The affiliations and motives of the killer, 22-year-old Mevlut Mert Altintas, remain in dispute. Erdogan made a statement Wednesday categorically identifying Altintas as a supporter of the opposition Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-exile in Pennsylvania.

Erdogan and his ruling AKP party blamed Gulen supporters for the abortive July coup, and the government has since launched a massive purge of the military, the police forces and civil service that has seen over 100,000 people sacked and some 37,000 detained.

Meanwhile, Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), the joint command center of Islamist militias dominated by the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, issued a statement Wednesday claiming responsibility for the assassination. Such an affiliation is in line with the statements made by the assassin after pumping nine bullets into the Russian ambassador.

While it has been widely reported that he shouted out, “Don’t forget about Aleppo, don’t forget about Syria,” it was less widely acknowledged that he began his rant in Arabic, proclaiming himself one of those “who give Mohammed our allegiance for jihad,” a slogan used by Al Qaeda.

The Turkish prosecutor’s office has announced that it is investigating why police who responded to the scene of the assassination shot and killed the assassin rather than seeking to capture him. Sections of the Turkish media have also raised questions on the same subject, pointing out that killing Altintas served to impede the investigation into his real motives. Erdogan reacted angrily to the questions, suggesting that failing to kill him could have cost more lives.

The Turkish government has obvious motives for pinning the killing on the Gulenists, which would serve to legitimize its police-state crackdown, while also diverting attention from the deep ties forged between the Turkish security forces and the Islamists in Syria during the war for regime change against Assad.

The editorial reaction to the assassination and the subsequent trilateral meeting in Moscow by the two “papers of record” of the US political establishment Wednesday was telling.

The New York Times noted that “the most important thing to say about Monday’s dramatic assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey by a lone gunman is that it has not ruptured relations between the two countries.” It concluded, “losing Turkey as an ally would be another unacceptable casualty of the Syrian war.”

The Washington Post was more blunt, stating that the assassination “might have been expected to derail a fragile detente between the regimes of Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Instead, it has served to underline a budding alliance that could have the effect of excluding the United States from the endgame of Syria’s civil war and critically weakening U.S. influence across the Middle East.”

The paper described the killing as a “sign that Russia may pay a price in blowback for its intervention in Syria,” but concluded that Washington may be facing “a peace [in Syria] that will empower a string of anti-US strongmen from Damascus and Tehran to Ankara and Moscow.”

These suggestions by the two most influential US newspapers that a political assassination has had the opposite of the desired effect have ominous implications given the level of anti-Russian hysteria whipped up in recent months by both the US government and the corporate media.

This anti-Russian campaign saw the former director of the CIA, Michael Morell, tell a television interviewer last August that the US should respond to the events in Syria by “covertly” telling the “moderate” rebels Washington is supporting “to go after the Russians.” Asked if he meant “killing Russians,” Morell answered in the affirmative.

More recently, President Obama said in an interview last week that Washington would retaliate against Moscow over allegations of Russian interference in the US election “at a time and place of our own choosing.”

Whether or not Washington had a direct hand in the murder of Ambassador Karlov, evidence points to the killing having been carried out by someone affiliated with the US proxy forces in Syria. More fundamentally, the initial reaction to the reversals for US policy in the Middle East suggest that far greater acts of violence are being prepared.

First published by WSWS.org

22 December 2016

By Bill Van Auken

An off-duty Turkish policeman shot and killed the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, Monday in front of a horrified audience at a photo exhibition in Ankara.

The gunman was identified as a 22-year-old member of the Ankara riot police, Mevlüt Mert Altintaş. Dressed in a black suit and carrying his police ID, he entered the art gallery where Karlov was introducing an exhibition of photographs titled “Russia through Turks’ eyes.” He drew a pistol, shot the ambassador repeatedly in the back, and then began shouting at the crowd in both Turkish and Arabic, “Don’t forget about Aleppo, don’t forget about Syria,” along with Islamist slogans.

Heavily armed Turkish police then stormed the gallery, killing the gunmen. At least three other people were wounded in the incident.

The chilling images of the ambassador’s murder and the subsequent ranting by his assassin were captured on video and have been widely circulated.

The assassination has taken place in the context of a ferocious anti-Russian campaign mounted by the Obama administration and the US media, in which Russia’s role in providing military aid to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad in retaking the city of Aleppo from Western-backed Islamist militias has played a major role.

The killing of the ambassador also came on the eve of a scheduled meeting in Moscow between Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and his Russian and Iranian counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Mohammad Javad Zarif, to discuss the ongoing ceasefire in and evacuation of previously opposition-held eastern Aleppo, along with proposals for a more comprehensive settlement of the five-and-a-half-year-old Syrian war.

Anger in the West over the loss of the last urban bastion of the Al Qaeda-linked militias—a strategic defeat in the US-orchestrated war for regime change—has been intensified by the collaboration of Ankara, Moscow and Tehran. Washington was excluded from today’s talks.

The Syrian regime change operation brought Russia and Turkey to the brink of war in November of 2015, when the Turkish air force ambushed and shot down a Russian warplane carrying out airstrikes near the Syrian-Turkish border. The incident resulted in a freezing of relations between Moscow and Ankara and Russia’s imposition of economic sanctions against Turkey.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought a rapprochement with Moscow last June, offering an apology for the downing of the Russian plane. This was followed a month later by an abortive military coup, which supporters of Erdogan blamed on the United States and a movement led by opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania. Relations between Moscow and Ankara became closer following the coup, leading to the recent collaboration in brokering the plan for the evacuation of eastern Aleppo.

Both the Russian and Turkish governments condemned the assassination of Karlov as a “provocation” aimed at disrupting relations between the two countries. Both governments likewise described the killing as a terrorist act, though they appeared to differ in their assessment as to who was responsible.

“A crime has been committed and it was without doubt a provocation aimed at spoiling the normalization of Russo-Turkish relations and spoiling the Syrian peace process which is being actively pushed by Russia, Turkey, Iran and others,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told a televised meeting at the Kremlin. “We must know who directed the killer’s hand,” Putin added, addressing himself to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the SVR foreign intelligence service, and Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the domestic FSB security service, who were also in attendance.

Turkey’s President Erdogan, speaking in a televised address on Monday night, described the killing as a “provocation given our cooperation regarding Aleppo,” adding that he had spoken to Putin and stressed, “We are determined to maintain our ties with Russia.”

Both sides made clear that the planned tripartite meeting between the Russian, Turkish and Iranian ministers in Moscow would go ahead on Tuesday.

The gunmen’s statements about Aleppo and Syria and his shouting in Arabic about jihad strongly suggested that he was acting either in concert with or in support of the Islamist militias that have suffered a stunning reversal in Aleppo over the past several weeks.

According to some reports, the Islamic State (ISIS) denied any connection with the killing, while web sites connected with the Al Nusra Front, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate that has been the backbone of US-backed forces in Aleppo, hailed the killing.

Nonetheless, Turkish officials have indicated that they are pursuing an investigation aimed at proving that the riot policeman was actually a member of the Gulenist movement, which the government charged was behind last July’s coup attempt. Over the past several months, the Turkish government has purged thousands of civil servants, teachers, police and members of the military charged with being connected with the Gulenists.

Government officials have suggested that the slogans shouted by the gunman after the shooting were merely a diversion aimed at concealing his true affiliations. A spokesman for Gulen said that the cleric had condemned the killing and described the suggestions that he was responsible as “laughable.”

The Turkish government has obvious motives for denying that a member of an elite police unit was a sympathizer or operative of the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate. Ankara covertly provided extensive support for the Al Nusra Front and similar Islamist militias, with its security forces collaborating in the funneling of arms and foreign fighters into Syria.

Any disagreements as to who was immediately responsible for the killing notwithstanding, leading political figures in both Moscow and Ankara blamed the US and the West for the assassination.

Ilnur Cevik, chief presidential advisor to Erdogan said Monday: “Growing relations and intensive cooperation in all areas between Turkey and Russia has created anger in the West, especially in the United States and Germany. The latest example has been the joint efforts of the two countries to save the civilian people of Aleppo. It was inevitable that the West would try to sabotage these relations. It is sad that they used a policeman affiliated to Fethullah Gulen’s terrorist organization to assassinate the ambassador.”

In Moscow Alexei Pushkov, a member of the Duma—the Russian legislature—and former chairman of its foreign affairs committee, charged that Western propaganda about Russia organizing a “massacre” and “genocide” in Aleppo served to incite the attack.

“The hysteria around Aleppo raised by the Western media has consequences,” Pushkov told Russian television. “This murder is precisely a consequence of attempts to blame Russia for all the sins and crimes she did not commit. They are completely ignoring the crimes of fighters in Aleppo, and that forms a distorted and false picture of what is happening in this city, which contributed to this terrorist act.”

Senator Frantz Klintsevich, deputy chairman of the Russian upper chamber’s defense and security committee, went further, charging that the assassination was “a planned action.”

“Everyone knew that he was going to attend this photo exhibition. It can be ISIS, or the Kurdish army which tries to hurt Erdogan.” he said. “But [it] may be—and it is highly likely—that representatives of foreign NATO secret services are behind it.”

Whatever the authorship of the assassination, the prospect of it further cementing ties between Russia and Turkey can only serve to heighten tensions with Washington, which, the impending change in administrations notwithstanding, remains committed to asserting US imperialist hegemony over the Middle East.

First published in WSWS.org

20 December 2016

By Rabbi Allen S. Maller

Most college students have at one time or another asked, ‘If there is only one God why are there so many religions?’ This is a good question that I as a Rabbi have often been asked.

This is my answer. The Qur’an declares that Allah could have made all of us monotheists, a single religious community, but didn’t in order to test our commitment to the religion that each of us have been given by God.

“If Allah had so willed, He would have made you a single people, but (God’s plan is) to test you in what He has given you: so compete in all virtues as in a race. The goal of you all is to (please) Allah who will show you on the truth of the matters in which you dispute.” (Qur’an 5:48)

This means that religious pluralism is the will of God. Yet for centuries many believers in one God have chided and depreciated each other’s religions, and some believers have even resorted to forced conversions, expulsions and inquisitions. Monotheists all pray to the same God, and all prophets of monotheistic faiths are inspired by the same God.

So how did this intolerance come about, and how can we eliminate religious intolerance from the Abrahamic religions? Greek philosophy, with its requirement that truth must be unchanging and universal, influenced most teachers of sacred scripture during medieval times to believe that religion was a zero sum game: the more truth I find in your scripture the less truth there is in mine.

Instead of understanding differing texts as complementary, they made them as contradictory as they could; and declared the other religion’s sacred text to be false.

If religion is to promote peace in our pluralistic world we must reject the zero sum game ideology, and develop the pluralistic teachings that already exist within our sacred scriptures.

After all, all prophets are brothers. They have the same farther (God) but different mothers (mother tongues, motherlands and unique historical circumstances that account for all the differences in their scriptures).

Narrated Abu Huraira: “Allah’s Apostle said, “[…] The prophets are paternal brothers; their mothers are different, but their religion is one.” (Source: Bukhari). Again, Abu Huraira narrated: “[…] the Prophets are of different mothers, but of one religion […]” (Source: Muslim)

I am a Reform Rabbi who first became interested in Islam when I studied it at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem 56 years ago. I have continued my study of Islam off and on for many years, and for some time I have considered myself to be a Reform Rabbi and a Muslim Jew. Actually, I am a Muslim Jew i.e. a faithful Jew submitting to the will of God, because I am a Reform Rabbi.

As a Rabbi, I am faithful to the covenant that God made with Abraham—the first Muslim Jew, and I submit to the commandments that God made with the people of Israel at Mount Sinai.

As a Reform Rabbi I believe that Jewish spiritual leaders should modify Jewish tradition as social and historical circumstances change and develop. I also believe we should not make religion difficult for people to practice.

These are lessons that Prophet Muhammad taught 12 centuries before the rise of Reform Judaism in the early 19th century. In many ways, statements in the Qur’an about Orthodox Jewish beliefs and Ahadith relating Muhammad’s comments about Orthodox Judaism, and religion in general, prefigure the thinking of Reform Rabbis some 12-13 centuries later.

I could have written this essay about religious pluralism by using quotes only from the Hebrew Scriptures, such as:

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord God has spoken. All the nations will walk in the name of their gods, and we [Jews] will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever. (Micah 4:1-5)

Or, I could have used a pragmatic argument like a Jewish leader named Jephthah offered when he tried to avoid a war by appealing to an invading king as follows:

Do you not hold what Chemosh, your God, has given you? So we will hold on to all that Adonai, our God, has given us. (Judges 11:24)

Jephthah does not believe in Chemosh, nor does he think that Chemosh is just another name for the Holy One of Israel. He knows that the One God of Israel does not allow Jews to have any other god. But Jephthah recognizes the king’s religious beliefs and wants the king to equally recognize Israel’s.

Thus, Adonai the One God of Israel, is the only God for Jews; but others can have a different view of God that they submit to, as long as this God leads them to practice virtue.

As the Qur’an declares:

For every community We have appointed a whole system of worship which they are to observe. So do not let them draw you into disputes concerning the matter, but continue to call people to your Lord… God will judge between (all of) you on the Day of Resurrection about what you used to differ”.

(22:67&69)

I choose to use Qur’an and Hadith to illustrate that all religions, as well as my own, have statements proclaiming and endorsing religious pluralism. They also have other statements that appear to claim religious exclusivity. These opposing views are the will of God, so that we may be tested.

Choosing between good and evil is a moral choice that even agnostics and atheists can do. Believers should believe in all God’s words (plural), but if we value kindness, humility and peace, we are obligated to choose to understand the seemingly exclusive statements in the context of the accepting statements. The above statement “So do not let them draw you into disputes concerning the matter” of differences between monotheistic religions must and can be resolved, not by seeing truth as relativistic, but by seeing reality as pluralistic.

Thus, the statement that light travels in waves is true. The statement light is made of individual particles called photons is also true. But the greater truth is that light is both a wave and a particle, and how it appears depends on the framework the observer uses to view it.

This complex reality is the will of God, so that believers may be tested in their commitment to kindness, humility and peace.

Rabbi Maller has published more than 200 articles in more than two dozen journals, magazines and websites as varied as Jewish Social Studies, US Catholic, Islamicity and The Journal of Dharma. He is author of a book on Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), and editor of the Tikun series of High Holiday Prayer Books.

Rabbi Maller’s web site is: www.rabbimaller.com

He can be contacted on malleraj@aol.com

20 December 2016

By Jonathan Cook

There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result.

A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts.

But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy softening-up operation by US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA.

According to the prevailing claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on behalf of Trump (apparently by resorting to the US playbook on psy-ops). Trump is not truly a US president, it seems. He’s Russia’s placeman in the White House – a Moscovian candidate.

An assessment of the losing side’s claims should be considered separately from the issue of who won the popular mandate. It is irrelevant that Clinton gained more votes than Trump. For good or bad, the US has operated an inherently unrepresentative electoral college since the 18th century. That has provided plenty of time to demand electoral reform. Concern about the electoral college now, only because it elected Trump, is simply ugly partisan politics, not political principle.

Launching last week what looked like a potential comeback, Clinton stepped up the establishment’s attack on the result. She argued that Putin had personally directed the hacking operation that lost her the presidency. He had sought to foil the wishes of the US electorate in revenge for her claims in 2011, when Secretary of State, that Russia’s parliamentary elections had been rigged.

“Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election,” Clinton told campaign donors at meeting in New York.

CIA’s evidence-free claims

Clinton’s allegations, of course, did not arrive in a vacuum. For weeks the CIA and other intelligence agencies have been making evidence-free claims that Russia was behind the release of embarrassing emails from the Democratic party leadership. The last hold-out against this campaign, James Comey, the head of the FBI, was reported late last week to have caved in and joined the anti-Putin camp.

The Washington Post quoted CIA director John Brennan saying: “Earlier this week, I met separately with [the FBI’s] James Comey and [director of national intelligence] Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election.”

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador turned whistleblower on British government collusion in torture, has said he personally received the leaked emails on behalf of Wikileaks. The data came, he said, not from Russian security agencies, or even from freelance Russian hackers, but from a disillusioned Democratic party insider. Russia experts in the US have similarly discounted the anti-Putin claims, as have former US intelligence agents.

But either way, what is being overlooked in the furore is that none of the information that has come to light about the Democratic party was false. (Though the US intelligence services did indeed try to make that claim initially). The emails are real and provide an accurate account of the Democratic party’s anti-democratic machinations, including efforts to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s challenger.

If Russia did indeed seek to influence the election by releasing truthful information that made Clinton and her allies look bad that would be far more legitimate interference than the US has engaged in against countless countries around the globe. For decades the US has been actively involved in using its military might to overthrow regimes in Latin America and the Middle East. It has also compromised the sovereignty of innumerable states, by sending killer-drones into their airspace, manipulating their media and funding colour revolutions.

The NSA is not archiving every bit of digital information it can lay its hands on for no reason. The US seeks global dominance, whether the rest of the globe wants it or not.

The ‘fake news’ threat

The corporate media have been lapping up the CIA’s evidence-free allegations as hungrily as an underfed kitten. Not only have they been credulously regurgitating the dubious claims of the same US intelligence agencies that knowingly spread lies about Iraq’s WMD, but they have added their own dangerous spin to them.

The media have suddenly woken up to the supposed threat to western democracies posed by “fake news”. The implication is that it was “fake news” that swept Trump to power. A properly informed electorate, on this view, would never have made such a patently ridiculous choice as Trump. Instead, Clinton would have been rightfully crowned president.

“Fake news”, of course, does not concern the systematic deceptions promoted by the corporate media. It does not include the demonstrable lies – like those Iraqi WMDs – spread by western governments and intelligence agencies through the corporate media. It does not even refer to the press corps’ habitual reports – demonstrating a seemingly gargantuan gullibility – that take at face value the endless state propaganda against Official Enemies, whether Cuba, Venezuela, Libya or Syria. Or Russia and now Trump.

No, “fake news” is produced only by bloggers and independent websites, and is promoted on social media. Those peddling “fake news” are writers, journalists and activists whose pay packets do not depend on continuing employment by western state-run media like the BBC, billionaire proprietors like Rupert Murdoch, or global corporations like Times-Warner.

It is worth noting that the leaked Democratic emails, whether the leaking was done by Russia or not, were certainly not “fake news”. They were documented truth. But the leaks are being actively conflated with “fake news”.

Shutting down dissent

There have always been patently ridiculous stories in marginal, and not so marginal, mainstream media, whether it was reports of Elvis coming back from the dead or the millennium computer bug that was going to bring civilisation to an end when we entered the year 2000.  That problem has not substantially changed, it has simply moved on to new platforms like social media.

Much more significantly, the systematic deceptions perpetrated by corporate media for many decades have left swaths of western publics distrustful and cynical. Social media has only added to widespread alienation because it has made it easier to expose to readers these mainstream deceptions. Trump, like Brexit, is a symptom of the growing disorientation and estrangement felt by western electorates.

But the claim of “fake news” does usefully offer western security agencies, establishment politicians and the corporate media a powerful weapon to silence their critics. After all, these critics have no platform other than independent websites and social media. Shut down the sites and you shut up your opponents.

The campaign against a Trump presidency will exploit claims of foreign, hostile interference in the US election as a pretext to crack down on homegrown dissent. Putin is not waging a war on US democracy. Rather, US democracy is proving itself increasingly inconvenient to those who expect to dictate electoral outcomes.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

19 December 2016

By Baran Hines

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has secured control of Aleppo city after more than 4 years of fighting in what is Syria’s most strategically important city, second to the capital Damascus. Western media has chosen to explain this victory to the world as bad news for the interests of peace and humanity in Syria, claiming that thousands of civilians will now die from government retaliation.

The reason the battle for Aleppo is so significant in the Syrian proxy war is because of its strategic importance to the country of Syria as a whole. Controlling Aleppo would give opposition groups leverage in a situation where Syria is broken into pieces. It is also part of the geopolitical concerns over competing natural gas pipelines which would be built partially in Syria.

The battle for Aleppo has been described inaccurately for years and what follows is an explanation of 10 common lies or omissions which still continue today.

1. The city is still under total siege because of the Syrian Army and Russians

Aleppo is an ancient city and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, populated since at least the 3rd millennium BC. Aleppo is both a rural province and an urban city inside of it, which is about the same size as Washington D.C. by land area. Western media reports about the ongoing battle do not account for this and conveys the images that millions of people are trapped in an urban city where the Syrian Army and Russians will not stop bombing them. Aleppo had a pre-war population of over 2 million people. It is a center of commerce and trading with Turkey, as well as a conduit between the Middle East and Europe.

The battle for Aleppo has been intense and has destroyed significant parts of the city’s eastern neighborhoods. However, even at the height of the battle, western media reported claims that 250,000 people may be left in rebel-held areas and might die from starvation, water shortages, and lack of medical care. This number has been disputed and thought to be lower, however Russian officials say over 100,000 people have been escorted to safety from East Aleppo. Videos have shown thousands of people passing through corridors opened by the Syrian Army.

It is unknown how many civilians are left in the areas still under bombardment, but the scale of conflicting information is significant. There are no credible reports of how many casualties have been caused by bombing. The only specific number that western news has consistently reported claims 82 civilians have been executed by Syrian government forces in recent weeks, which comes from the controversial Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

BBC
It is hard to know exactly how many people are in the besieged areas, although UN envoy Staffan de Mistura put the figure at about 50,000. He said there were approximately 1,500 rebel fighters, about 30% of whom were from the jihadist group formerly known as the al-Nusra Front. Other local sources say there could be as many as 100,000 people, many of them arriving from areas recently taken by the government.

Other reports claim what seems to be obvious, that East Aleppo is basically empty and most that are left are part of extremist groups or held hostage by them.

WASHINGTON POST
East Aleppo, which was under rebel control, is destroyed.

Syrian state television broadcast live footage throughout the day on Tuesday showing its reporters roaming through the ruins of the newly reconquered neighborhoods, trumpeting the government’s victory as they climbed over piles of rubble, peered into abandoned homes and sifted through the remains of rebel defenses. There was no other sign of life in the empty streets.

About half of the city was controlled by government forces prior to the major offensive to retake the city began in July. Many civilians have been killed by shelling from opposition fighters who fire randomly into these parts of the city.

Opposition fighters have contributed to the siege over the years by controlling the major highways into the city, especially the two roads leading west towards Turkey and other major cities to the southwest. The opposition-controlled these strategic highways until July 2016 when the Syrian Army was able to make enough gains on the ground to re-open the roads. Fighters used the roads to receive weapons and supplies from Turkey.

Aleppo city was the largest hub for distributing fighters, weapons, and supplies to other parts of Syria. Al Mayadeen recently reported on one of the weapons caches found in an East Aleppo basement after the neighborhood was cleared by the Syrian army. The bunker contained GRAD missiles, which are typically fired from a system mounted on a truck.

There were other military grade weapons found, with English language labels, and enough of each to mean the weapons could have only been shipped in by truck. If the opposition fighters could receive so many weapons and supplies into Aleppo from Turkey, why could the Syrian Army somehow stop critical food and medical supplies as U.S. officials claim?

2. The Syrian Army is blocking humanitarian aid to Aleppo, creating the crisis

TELEGRAPH
A convoy of 20 UN trucks carrying enough aid for 40,000 people is languishing at the Turkish border as diplomats try to secure agreement from both rebels and regime forces to allow the vehicles through.

“Some parties to the conflict are trying to use this for political gain,” said David Swanson, a UN spokesman. “The challenge for us is ensuring that all parties to the conflict are on the same page. If one element of the chain is not there we cannot proceed.”

The UN would not say if the hold was up was being caused by the Assad regime or its rebel opponents but at least part of the problem appeared to be inside east Aleppo itself.

Activists there said they intended to reject the UN aid in protest at the ceasefire agreement which was brokered between the US and Russia without input from the Syrian opposition.

Video from Aleppo showed a large demonstration against the UN had gathered at Castello Road, the key supply route that the aid convoy would have to travel down.

At least some of the demonstrators were waving the black flags of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), an al-Qaeda linked jihadist group formerly known as the al-Nusra Front.

3. The rebels in East Aleppo are ordinary Syrians who are fighting a civil war against government abuse

While it is unclear how many civilians remained in Aleppo, what is known is that most of the fighters are from the official Al Qaeda group in Syria called Al Nusra, and other groups that have formed public alliances with them. There have been dozens of groups under different names that the United States has called “moderate” opposition, however, many of them were either in alliance with or commanded by Al Nusra itself.

Colonel Steve Warren, spokesperson for the U.S. coalition against Islamic State, said “it’s primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo,” in April 2016 prior to the Aleppo offensive.

In 2012, as the intensity of the war grew, thousands of foreign jihadists came to the city and helped take over neighborhoods in the east. Most of these fighters had no ties to Syria before the war and were given support and weapons by wealthy terror financiers from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Qatari foreign minister just pledged to continue sending weapons and assistance to these groups regardless of what Western allies do.

The war crimes committed and infighting with “moderates” became so bad that the U.S. government and the United Nations was forced to declare them terrorists after regional news reporting led the Washington Post to write that Al Nusra was the most effective and influential group on the battlefield. Al Nusra was then declared a terrorist organization by the U.S., other western countries and the United Nations. That was after almost a year of clandestine U.S. support as part of opposition groups.

The November 2012 article describes Al Nusra when they were still part of the popular term “Free Syrian Army” which was used by the U.S. to describe a moderate opposition who should not be bombed.

WASHINGTON POST
The Jabhat group now has somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 fighters, according to officials of an non-governmental organization that represents the more moderate wing of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). They say that the al-Qaeda affiliate now accounts for 7.5 percent to 9 percent of the Free Syrian Army’s total fighters, up sharply from an estimated 3 percent three months ago and 1 percent at the beginning of the year.

The extremist group is growing in part because it has been the most aggressive and successful arm of the rebel force. “From the reports we get from the doctors, most of the injured and dead FSA are Jabhat al-Nusra, due to their courage and [the fact they are] always at the front line,” said a message sent today to the State Department by the moderate Free Syrian Army representatives, warning of the extremists’ rise.

“In some areas, other extreme groups are merging with [Jabhat] al-Nusra, in others many are leaving it because they did not fulfill promises of support,” notes one report sent to the State Department.

In the chaos of the Syrian battlefield, smaller battalions drawn from neighborhoods or small towns are combining forces with larger groups to form brigades, many of them led by extremists. “This means more [mergers] of extreme groups within Jabhat al-Nusra as it becomes more and more franchised,” the report explains. “Their risk is paying off. They are on a high [rate] of growth.”

After this occurred, many groups began to merge and change their names, however, the majority of what became the Free Syrian Army has been proven to be made up of extremist groups who would otherwise be declared terrorists. The largest “moderate” groups in Aleppo, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, and Nour Din al-Zinki have been prevented by the United States from being declared terrorists at the United Nations. The U.S. fought with Russia for months to keep these groups off the list of terrorist groups in Syria. This was a consistent point of failure in Syria peace negotiations. As a result, the groups continued to receive protection from America by including the groups in the Syrian ceasefire.

Ahrar al-Sham was known to consistently have over 20,000 fighters, despite frequent losses.

Jaysh al-Islam grew to 25,000 fighters by some recent estimates. Jaysh al-Islam integrated over 100 smaller groups, and led Syria’s largest remaining alliance, Fatah Halab as they renamed themselves in Aleppo. This alliance also included Ahrar al-Sham and Nour Din al-Zinki.

U.S. and Russian officials have been arguing over whether these groups should be targeted for bombing since they fight in the same areas as Al Nusra. The U.S. has claimed since February 2016 that it would persuade moderate groups to separate from Al Nusra, but it never happened despite the U.S. being in daily contact with them.

In response to this continued trend, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) introduced Stop Arming Terrorists Act last week to ban funding of terrorists groups, whether direct or indirect.

HOUSE.GOV
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said, “Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.[i]

“The CIA has also been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. This support has allowed al-Qaeda and their fellow terrorist organizations to establish strongholds throughout Syria, including in Aleppo.

4. Rebels in East Aleppo are not terrorists. They are “moderate” and do not commit war crimes.

The most unbalanced part of Western news reporting on Aleppo is the deliberate effort to not report the war crimes committed by opposition groups, while confirming unverifiable claims about atrocities by the Syrian Army or from Russian airstrikes. Reporters have brought up this concern multiple times with U.S. officials and specifically when making the claim that Russian airstrikes hit hospitals in Syria but refusing to give evidence, twice.

In April 2016, Jaysh al-Islam admitted to using chemical weapons in the city of Aleppo. They have consistently used civilians as human shields, sometimes locking them in metal cages on the back of trucks.

The US also defended Ahrar al-Sham after they recently massacred an unknown number of people and kidnapped over 100 from the small village of Zaara in May 2016. State Department officials were confronted about specifically on May 24 with one reporter asking “Is this a yellow card? How many villages do they have to massacre before they become bad guys?” in relation to removing them from the protection of being declared a moderate group.

Ahrar al-Sham has was singled out for war crimes by Amnesty International just before the Zaara massacre. The Amnesty report also condemned the group for torture, kidnapping, and rape as well as using chemical weapons on multiple occasions.

Nour Din al-Zinki became most well known for beheading a sick young Palestinian boy on video which went viral on social media. U.S. State Department officials refused to condemn the group and still allowed them protection under Syrian ceasefire agreements.

The United Nations admitted last week that they received reports of opposition fighters shooting at civilians trying to leave East Aleppo, despite months of ignoring these claims. The U.S. State Department has also declined to admit the groups they call moderate have been involved in shooting at civilians.

INDEPENDENT
Take the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. After last week running through its usual – and perfectly understandable – fears for the civilian population of eastern Aleppo and their medical workers, and for civilians subject to government reprisals and for “hundreds of men” who may have gone missing after crossing the frontlines, the UN suddenly expressed other concerns.

“During the last two weeks, Fatah al-Sham Front [in other words, al-Qaeda] and the Abu Amara Battalion are alleged to have abducted and killed an unknown number of civilians who requested the armed groups to leave their neighbourhoods, to spare the lives of civilians…,” it stated.

“We have also received reports that between 30 November and 1 December, armed opposition groups fired on civilians attempting to leave.” Furthermore, “indiscriminate attacks” had been conducted on heavily civilian areas of government-held western as well as ‘rebel’ eastern Aleppo.

Aleppo MP Fares Shehabi also confirmed that terrorists had turned state-run hospitals into command centers in a heated argument on the UK’s Channel 4 News.

The terrorists even had their own prisons and torture centers.

RUPTLY
Soldiers showed what appears to be militant flags, graffiti, and machine tools for making munitions, and even cells and alleged means for torturing captives.

SOT, Muhammad Hamud, Soldier, Syrian Arab Army (Arabic): “We released nearly 15 civilians. That was in a male prison. In Qadi Askar there was another prison which was a joint male and female prison. It was in the headquarters of the Sharia centre.”

5. People are unhappy the Syrian Army has taken over the city again

There is a reason the leader of the Syrian Kurds said it “would be a disaster for everyone” if the Assad government were to fall to the extremist opposition. The alternative to Aleppo city being controlled by Al Nusra, or worse, extremists could fight for control of it and further divide the region.

Western news reports described the victory in different degrees of terror, saying the people of the city were in shock at the army’s victory, ignoring the thousands of people celebrating in Aleppo areas controlled by the government. U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby made the most controversial of the statements saying that he had not seen “any dancing in the streets” as celebrations were ongoing.

“I’ve been many times to Homs, to Maaloula, to Latakia and Tartus [in Syria] and again, Aleppo, four times. And people’s support of their government is absolutely true. Whatever you hear in the corporate media is completely opposite,” Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett described at a United Nations press event.

“And, on that note, what you hear in the corporate media, and I will name them – BBC, Guardian, the New York Times etc. – on Aleppo is also the opposite of reality,” she added.

6. Desperate pleas for help on social media by local Syrians show just how bad the situation is in East Aleppo

Western news media marketed a coordinated campaign of videos claiming to be average Syrian citizens pleading for international action to intervene in the Syrian war as the battle of Aleppo came to an end. A combination of children, social media activists and claimed independent journalists have been featured as genuine accounts from East Aleppo, however, these transmissions have been questioned.

THE FREE THOUGHT PROJECT
But there is one major problem with these well-articulated video pleas: these aren’t simple civilians of Aleppo, but bloggers and filmmakers – who have played active roles in supporting the regime change operation – who are now magically being given prime time slots for worldwide TV coverage. Interestingly, Aleppo has no cell service or electricity, so how these “civilian” videos are being recorded/disseminated is also an open question, which implies less than organic means.

According to Anissa Naouai, host of RT’s ‘In the Now’, a quick search of the Internet reveals the identities of these “civilians.”

A 7-year-old girl named Bana Alabed has become a known Twitter personality during recent months for her videos which are said to be recorded in Aleppo. Confirmed Syrian activist Maytham Al Ashkar contacted the account for Bana on November 27, offering to evacuate her family from eastern Aleppo. According to screenshots of conversations, someone who identified herself as Bana’s mother responded about a month later. The responses received led him to believe the account was fake and being operated by someone who preferred speaking in English instead of Arabic.

SPUTNIK
Bana’s account, designated by Twitter as “verified”, was set up three months ago, and has since gathered over 310,000 followers. The tweets, written by both Bana and her mother, Fatemah, who says she taught her daughter to speak English, depict life under siege in east Aleppo.

Many have called the authenticity of the account into question, pointing to videos where Bana appears to be reading from a prompt. It is also unclear whether Bana’s posts are genuine, since any user, anywhere in the world can post from the account, as long as they have the password.

Pro-government activist Maytham Al Ashkar is originally from Al-Zahraa in northern Syria, currently in Beirut, but often travelling to Damascus and Aleppo. He offered to help evacuate Bana and her family, contacting Bana’s Twitter account on November 27.

“This person was contacted by Bana, who told him she wanted my offer. Once he got my approval, Bana (the account) contacted me directly,” Maytham explains.

“When I got contacted by Bana’s account, I started to chat in Arabic since we are all Syrians and Arabic is our mother tongue. However, it was obvious that the person behind the account preferred English as a language of communication.”

Another problem has been the spread of false images represented as civilian casualties in Aleppo. One fake image of Aleppo violence was actually a screenshot from a 2014 music video.

7. The Syrian Army is now butchering people, executing civilians in the streets

If United States officials are watching the battle of Aleppo so closely, why has it not released any evidence of civilian casualties being caused by Syrian and Russian airstrikes? No satellite imagery, no pictures or video of large-scale casualties, no documentation of the alleged hundreds of bodies in the streets as claimed by news media like the New York Times. In the same article, the New York Times was forced to show pictures of the thousands of civilians being escorted to safety by the Syrian Army. Many pictures showed soldiers helping civilians, even carrying them when needed.

There have been genuine images from hospitals showing innocent civilians wounded in the fighting or people rescued from the rubble of buildings, but where are the images showing the mass casualty events described?

BBC
Syrian pro-government forces in eastern Aleppo have been killing people, including women and children, on the spot in their homes and on the street, the United Nations says. The UN’s human rights office said streets were full of bodies.

Meanwhile, the UN children’s agency cited a doctor as saying a building housing as many as 100 unaccompanied children was under heavy attack.

As noted earlier, the only consistent report of civilian deaths last week was the claim that 82 people were executed by Syrian government forces. The claim was reported as verified fact by most of Western news media, including Reuters, BBC, New York Times.

The common source for these claims is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which sounds like an independent and official source, but is an unaccountable organization made up of sources on the ground who are kept private.

NEW YORK TIMES
Military analysts in Washington follow its body counts of Syrian and rebel soldiers to gauge the course of the war. The United Nations and human rights organizations scour its descriptions of civilian killings for evidence in possible war crimes trials. Major news organizations, including this one, cite its casualty figures.

Yet, despite its central role in the savage civil war, the grandly named Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is virtually a one-man band. Its founder, Rami Abdul Rahman, 42, who fled Syria 13 years ago, operates out of a semidetached red-brick house on an ordinary residential street in this drab industrial city [Coventry, England].

All sides in the conflict accuse him of bias, and even he acknowledges that the truth can be elusive on Syria’s tangled and bitter battlefields. That, he says, is what prompts him to keep a tight leash on his operation.

He does not work alone. Four men inside Syria help to report and collate information from more than 230 activists on the ground, a network rooted in Mr. Abdul Rahman’s youth, when he organized clandestine political protests. But he signs off on every important update. A fifth man translates the Arabic updates into English for the organization’s Facebook page.

8. The Syrian Army prevents civilians from leaving

It is reported that many civilians feared leaving East Aleppo for government-controlled areas because they might be tortured or killed. These reports cannot be verified and will not be trivialized here, however Russian officials noted that more than 100,000 civilians had been evacuated since operations began in November.

Wednesday, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria released a statement confirming it received reports that the opposition was preventing civilians from leaving, holding them hostage as human shields.

UNITED NATIONS
Alongside a pattern of indiscriminate attacks, the Commission has further received allegations of opposition groups, including the terrorist group Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) and Ahrar al-Sham preventing civilians from leaving as well as opposition fighters embedding themselves within the civilian population, thus heightening the risk to civilians of being killed or injured.

Tens of thousands of civilians have been seen on video leaving the areas of battle, being received by Syrian and Russian soldiers. Russia announced it distributed 35 tons of humanitarian aid this week in eastern Aleppo to civilians in need.

9. The “Regime” is slaughtering the opposition

In a show of restraint, Syrian government forces honored an agreement to allow militants in east Aleppo to evacuate the city with some of their light weapons. The deal was reached earlier this week between Turkey and Russia, without the influence of the United States. The evacuation of militants from east Aleppo has begun as dozens of buses were seen lined up on major roads beginning Wednesday.

RUSSIA TODAY
Nearly 3,500 militants from eastern Aleppo have surrendered to the Syrian government, while thousands have seized the chance to leave through special corridors with light weapons. The evacuation was partly halted on Friday after militants tried to leave the city with heavy weapons, which is not permitted under the agreement allowing them to exit eastern Aleppo.

It is also reported that opposition groups fired artillery shells at one of the evacuation routes, causing the process to be delayed.

Aleppo MP Fares Shehabi has been one of the loudest supporters for the Syrian Army clearing the city of terrorists.

10. The Syrian Army is purposely destroying civilian infrastructure

One favorite propaganda lie told by U.S. officials when justifying war is that the dictator’s army is destroying public resources to hurt the civilian population.

As it relates to Aleppo, U.S. officials and allies have said that the Syrian government forces have purposely destroyed drinking water supplies to the city in an effort to hurt opposition fighters and the civilians supporting them.

However, in 2014, Al Nusra sabotaged the entire city’s water system while trying to target government-controlled areas. The Syrian Army recently restored the same water plant destroyed in this attack.

INDEPENDENT – MAY 12 2014
In a botched attempt to stop drinking water reaching government-held districts of Aleppo, rebels managed to cut off water supplies to large parts of the city in northern Syria including their own strongholds. Women and children are being forced to queue up with cooking pots, kettles and plastic bottles to get water from the fountains of mosques and wells that may be contaminated.

The water shortage started 10 days ago when the rebels, who control the two main pumping stations, tried to keep water flowing to their areas in east Aleppo, but stop it reaching the government-held west of the city. Describing the action as “a crime”, Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that the al-Qa’ida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and other rebel groups were responsible for the water shortage.

A member of the Aleppo Water Department told the Beirut paper al-Akhbar that the Sharia Authority, which unites the rebel movements, controls a crucial pumping station in the Suleiman al-Halabi region. He said that there is a “danger of insurgents pumping water only to the neighbourhoods that they control as it might lead to the collapse of the integrated water system”.

The original source of this article is The Free Thought Project

18 December 2016

By Andrew Ashdown

This morning we visited the main IDP Registration centre at Jibrin, for Internally Displaced Persons from East Aleppo. They are registered here for humanitarian reasons and access to services, before they go either to relatives in other parts of Syria if they have them (many do), or to other reception centres where they are provided with accommodation, food and other services. During the past two weeks they have registered 95,000 refugees, but estimate there may be a further 10,000 who have not registered. There were thousands of people there who have arrived within the last couple of days. Let me make clear that we visited in a taxi without Government or Army accompaniment, and without prior notice. We were not expected.

The Centre is well organised. The Syrian Red Crescent have tents available that offer information about all social welfare facilities available, and offer free medical attention. In cases of emergency, ambulances are on hand to transport patients to hospital. Free food is being distributed by the Syrian Red Crescent and the Syrian Army, and we saw a convoy of Russian lorries providing aid. There is also a Russian field hospital on site which offers immediate medical treatment.

The sense of relief amongst the thousands of refugees is palpable.All were keen to talk, and we interviewed several who had arrived only yesterday and today. They all said the same thing. They said that they had been living in fear. They reported that the fighters have been telling everyone that the Syrian Army would kill anyone who fled to the West, but had killed many themselves who tried to leave – men, women and children. One woman broke down in tears as she told how one of her sons was killed by the rebels a few days ago, and another kidnapped. They also killed anyone who showed signs of supporting the Government. The refugees said that the ‘rebels’ told them that only those who support them are “true Muslims”, and that everyone else are ‘infidels’ and deserve to die.

They told us they had been given very little food: that any aid that reached the area was mostly refused to them or sold at exorbitant prices. Likewise, most had been given no medical treatment. (A doctor who has been working with the refugees for weeks told me last night that in an area recently liberated, a warehouse filled with brand new internationally branded medicines had been discovered.) Most of the refugees said they had had members of their families killed by the rebels and consistently spoke of widespread murder, torture, rape and kidnap by the rebels. They said if anyone left their homes, their properties and belongings were confiscated and stolen.

One old man in a wheelchair who was being given free treatment in the Russian Field Hospital said he had been given no treatment for three years despite asking. He said: “Thank God we are free. We now have food. We can now live our lives. God bless the Syrian Army.” They all said they were glad to be out and to be free. All the refugees without exception were visibly without exception clearly profoundly relieved and happy to be free. One woman said: “This is heaven compared to what we have been living.” We asked if the Syrian Army had ill-treated anyone. They said never. One woman said: “They helped us to escape and they provide us with food and assistance.”

I therefore have two key questions:

1. It is now only the Syrian Red Crescent, the Syrian Army, and the Russians who are providing humanitarian aid to the tens of thousands who have fled East Aleppo. Why are none of the international agencies offering to help them now?

2.  Why is it, given that stories about massacres by the Syrian Army are headline news worldwide, and several international media units are in Aleppo, that there is not one international media agency actually at the Registration Centre talking to the refugees themselves? We were the only ones there. Here are people who have lived through it who are keen to talk, yet the media take at face value unverifiable claims by highly dubious sources. The collapse of any form of reliable investigative journalism in a context of global significance is utterly shocking.

Today the agreement for 4000 fighters to leave Aleppo is reported to have collapsed after the fighters had refused to fulfil the agreement. (I don’t know the details, but think about it… There is no reason on earth why the Syrian Government would want this agreement, which would involve the complete liberation of the city, to fail!) It is reported that the fighters refused to leave or let the civilians do so.

The refusal of the western media to report objectively, or to seek informed information from the thousands of civilians from East Aleppo who are keen to share their stories, whilst granting full credibility to terrorists without any on the ground verifiable information on their claims, is nothing short of obscene.

Everything that I have seen and heard in Aleppo; from civilians in East and West from all communities, and from talking with doctors, faith communities and with Army people as well, and witnessing and risking bombardments on both sides, convinces me that the reports in the western media are twisted fabrications of the horrors that are happening in ‘rebel’ controlled areas. And still, the media refuses to listen to the witness of the people themselves.

Postscript: Christmas is coming in Syria. In a country and a city in which people of all faiths are free to worship; where mosques and Churches stand side by side; and where Christmas music is playing in cafes and restaurants. And yet the world is mourning the defeat in Aleppo of extremists who destroy Christian and Muslim places of worship, and slaughter any who do not follow their obscene ideology.

15 December 2016

By rt.com

It was destined to be an iconic image: a small girl holding a teddy bear in a white dress marked by blood splotches with the ruins of Aleppo behind her. But according to Egyptian authorities, it was also a set-up, shot hundreds of miles away in a different country.

Egypt’s Interior Ministry has revealed on its Facebook page that it arrested a group of five people caught in the act of producing images purportedly depicting scenes of suffering in Aleppo that they had planned to pass off as real pictures from Syria.

https://www.facebook.com/MoiEgy/videos/1266875293356131/

The ministry said that the residents of Port Said, a city on the Suez Canal, were caught in the middle of their shoot as the 12-year-old star, Ragd, was posing for 21-year-old Mustafa, who told the authorities that he “normally photographed weddings and ceremonies, but had an idea for something else.”

“In a conversation with them, the suspects revealed that they had shot a series of scenes to be spread on social media, as actual pictures from Aleppo,” said the ministry, which posted a video of the arrest, and interviews with the suspects online.

The stand-in for Aleppo was “the ruins of a house that had been slated for demolition by the authorities some time earlier.” The blood was obtained from a “tin of red paint” that was liberally smeared on the girl, her fake bandages, and her stuffed animal.

The girl herself was known to the photographer beforehand, and came to the session with her mother, the photographer, and three other local men.

Mustafa is being detained in jail for an initial four days, while the others have been set free, and Ragd has been returned to her guardian.

While it is unknown whether Mustafa’s staged photo would have gained social media traction, vivid photographs – some of them fake – have been powerful tools in shaping public opinion since Aleppo was re-captured by Syrian government forces earlier this month.

https://twitter.com/AlkhaterAziz/status/809424481496236032/photo/1

The most notorious hoax picture, which has been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, features a girl running through a debris-filled street. The caption reads “Girl running to survive, all her family have been killed. It’s not in Hollywood. This real in Syria.” In fact, the image was cut from a 2014 Lebanese pop video.

Another video, called “Executions have begun in the middle of the street in Aleppo,” which has also been widely shared, depicts supposed government forces allegedly taking out retribution on civilians. In reality, the video dates back from 2012, and contains unverified images.

20 December 2016