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By Andre Vltchek

In a powerful short novel by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, “No One Writes to the Colonel” (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) set during the period of “La Violencia”, an old retired colonel struggles to survive, forgotten by the government which promised him a substantial pension some fifteen years earlier. The state is corrupt and brutal, and it had abandoned almost all of those who had fought for the country during the fierce “Thousand Days’ War”.

And so, no one writes to the colonel. No letters, no envelopes with his pension are arriving. The old man and his wife are living alone. Their son had died a few years earlier. Their savings are gone. There seems to be no hope.

The colonel has a rooster. It is a mighty fighting cock. He trains it; the bird is his only chance of survival, it is all that he has left, as well as his pride. At the end of the story, he is approached and offered money for the rooster. He turns the offer down. He would rather go hungry, but he will not be humiliated!

His wife approaches him, asking whether he sold the rooster. He tells her that he did not.

Horrified, she asks: “But what are we going to eat?”

He replies to her, slowly and honestly: “We will eat shit!”

***

The Western mass media is now overflowing with stories about the people of Venezuela, collecting rotten fruit, even garbage, in order to fill their stomachs.

Many of these stories are grossly exaggerated, but it is true that millions in Venezuela are suffering.

Once again, the country has been betrayed by its elites. As Chile was before the 1973 coup, as Brazil was just a short while ago. The elites in Latin America are only loyal to their Western handlers, never to their own people.

There is capital flight, and there is an artificially created deficit of many basic commodities; medicines and food products. The goal of the ‘opposition’ backed by the United States and Europe is simple, and clear: to choke the revolutionary process, to discredit the legacy of Hugo Chavez, and to grab power again, while re-introducing neo-liberal dogma.

But the majority of Venezuelan people do not support the ‘opposition’. Of course, not everyone is in agreement with the policies of President Maduro, but a return to the capitalist past is not what the nation desires.

And that is why Venezuelans are forced to eat shit!

***

I am not sure what the maternal side of my family ate during WWII, during the 900 days of the Siege of Leningrad.

My grandmother and my mom survived, while almost all of our other relatives vanished.

The city was surrounded by German troops. It was bombed day and night, savagely. And the only food supply route was open during the winters, over the thin ice covering the Ladoga Lake.

There was mass starvation in the city. But against all the odds, Leningrad stubbornly refused to surrender.

Everyday, my grandmother went to the frontline, to fight the Germans, and to dig trenches. The Nazis dropped millions of leaflets spiced with disgusting humor: “Dear damsels, stop digging your little holes. Over your holes, our tanks will soon be passing.”

They did not pass! The ‘damsels’, including my grandma, were gentle-looking, opera and ballet going, poetry reading romantics, but in their core, actually, extremely tough and determined Russian women. And they were not going to surrender, until the final victory – after all, they were defending their beloved city, their motherland and humanity.

Almost half of the population of the city was killed, or starved to death. People were collapsing in the middle of the streets. But Leningrad stood tall, defiant and proud. A city of countless theaters and museums, one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, a refined metropolis, suddenly hardened itself and prevented the Nazi hordes from entering its streets and embankments.

“People were forced to eat corpses, grandma?” I asked once, when she was still alive.

“Yes,” she replied. “Your mother and I never did, but some people… yes; they had no choice. We ate plywood and glue, if we were lucky to find some. Or we ate nothing…”

My grandmother was decorated twice, for her extraordinary courage at the front. She was decorated as a soldier, as a Soviet soldier (although she had absolutely no military training), not as a ‘damsel’.

Finally, the blockade, the siege was broken. A few weeks before, my grandmother and my tiny mom were evacuated over the Ladoga Lake. My mother looked like a skeleton, with an enormous belly of a child suffering from malnutrition sticking out. I was told that when she was brought to a first aid center that was full of medicine and food, she began moving, as if possessed, trying to grab and stuff into her mouth all she could put her hands on. Three adults had to hold her and drag her away. Her food intake had to be increased gradually, or otherwise she would have died.

Once, my grandmother told me: “It is no shame to eat shit! It is much better than to betray… But it is a terrible crime to force people to eat it!”

During that same war, in approximately the same period of time, my paternal, the Czech side of the family had full access to sausages, tenderloins and other foodstuffs. The Czechs had been collaborating with the Nazis, and they were generously rewarded for their efforts.

From my early age I was absolutely clear where my allegiances lied!

Leningrad and Russia have always been my love, my identity, and my motherland. Often remote, often hidden far away, over the horizon, but Motherland nevertheless! Just as my Russian, maternal grandmother was perhaps the most important woman in my life.

And whatever I later became, whatever I am now, was formed during those days of determined fight against the evil, during the Siege of Leningrad, which took place decades before I was even born.

***

Last week I was working in the Russian Far East, in Kamchatka, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. I flew there from Tokyo, and stayed longer than I originally planned. I was trying to document the tremendous progress that this part of the country has registered during the last decade.

Just as during my lengthy visit to Brazil in 2015, I refused to meet intellectuals and ‘elites’. I spent time discussing Russia and the world with sailors, fishermen, and truck drivers – the most common folks.

Venezuela was bleeding. Every day, I read the news, and searched for the latest developments in Latin America.

I kept stumbling over the most cynical reports coming from the Western mass media outlets.

They were celebrating! They were openly calling for an invasion to depose the government. They were getting hyperbolic about ‘absolute chaos’ in Caracas.

It was extremely sad reading. It was actually disgusting. These scribes had no higher principles, no understanding of duty or of sacrifice. They were getting paid well and, intuitively, they simply knew what they were expected to write. Their ‘culture’ was extremely low.

They had absolutely no clue that it is much more glorious to eat shit than caviar, if you are doing it in order to defend your ideals and your beloved country.

Because these men and women from the Western mainstream have no ideals left, as they hardly understand the meaning of “love” or pride, anymore.

But those Russian workers I spoke to, they understood perfectly well what was going on more than 10,000 kilometers away, in Venezuela, as the colonel from the novel of Garcia Marquez would understand, and as my grandmother most definitely would.

It is actually all very simple: you stick to your principles, no matter how tough such decisions might be. Or if you don’t, your life is finished, thoroughly meaningless: your life as a person, or the life of the entire society.

In the West, in the epicenter of imperialism, a colonialist mentality and savage consumerism has made all basic ideals of humanism thoroughly irrelevant. Ethical principles have become the laughing stock of the official propagandists who are busy spreading nihilism all over the planet. That is why people are so confused and that is why life is so empty. It is empty in the Empire itself, and in its ‘client’ states that are shamelessly whoring, betraying and selling their own people and all that is above and under the surface of the Earth.

That is why re-visiting the great books written by people like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Maxim Gorki, is so essential, in this dark time and age.

No one wants to eat shit. Nobody wants the people of Venezuela to eat shit!

But if the choice is between tenderloin as a reward for betrayal, and rotten vegetables to sustain you while fighting your treasonous elites and an indirect foreign invasion, in a ‘normal’ society the choice is obvious!

And then, after victory is finally achieved, for those who are forcing their own proud patriots to eat shit, there should be no clemency, and no forgiveness.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist.

9 July 2016

By  Dr Gideon Polya

In another example of outrageous British Establishment mendacity, the inexpert, Zionist-subverted, UK Iraq Inquiry, aka the Chilcot Inquiry, criticized intelligence failures re non-existent Iraqi WMD but whitewashed the US-, UK- and Australia-complicit, 1990-2011  Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust in which 4.6 million Iraqis died from violence (1.7 million)  or from violently-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) by (a) suggesting that about 150,000 Iraqis may have died due to the 2003-2011 invasion and occupation, (b)  ignoring  Coalition war crimes including the  illegality of the invasion per se,  (c) ignoring the real reasons for the invasion (oil, US hegemony and Apartheid Israel) , and (d) implicitly approving such war criminal invasions if done better.

The 12 volume Chilcot Report is 2.6 million words long and has a 145-page executive summary [1-3]. The chairman of the Iraq Inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, launched the Chilcot Report with a 12-page summary statement on 6 July 2016 that included the following extraordinary  example of British Establishment mendacity and understatement “More than 200 British citizens dies as a result of the conflict in Iraq. Many more were injured. This has meant deep anguish for many families, including those who are here today. The invasion and subsequent instability in Iraq had, by July 2009, also resulted in the deaths of at least one hundred and fifty thousand Iraqis – and probably any more – most of them civilians. More than a million people were displaced. The people of Iraq have suffered greatly ([3], page 9).

By way of comparison , it would be useful to read the following 485-word summary from the carefully researched and science-based website “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide” [4]:

“The US Alliance-imposed Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide …  as of December 2011 was associated with post-1990 and post-2003 violent deaths and non-violent avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation  totalling  4.6 million and 2.7 million, respectively, and refugees totalling 5-6 million – an Iraqi Holocaust (noting that a holocaust involves the deaths of a huge number of people) and an Iraqi Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention [5] which states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The UK, the  US and their allies have been variously killing Iraqis since 1914 – there have been 9 million Iraqi deaths from Western violence or Western-imposed deprivation since 1914…

ignoring  Iraqi deaths associated with the US-backed Iraq-Iran War, but including 4.6 million Iraqi deaths  from Western violence or imposed deprivation in the period 1990-2011,  one can estimate about 9 million  Iraqi deaths from UK or US  violence or imposed deprivation in the century after the 1914 invasion of Iraq by Britain – an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide…

According to the 2006 Revision UN Population Division data, medical literature data, and other authoritative sources, the Iraqi Holocaust in the Occupation period of  2003-2011 has been associated with 1.2 million post-invasion non-violent avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation; 1.5 million violent post-invasion deaths (see the eminent  US Just Foreign Policy [6]) ; and 0.8 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths (90% avoidable and due to gross US Coalition violation of the Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demand that an Occupier supplies food and medical requisites to “the fullest extent of the means available to it” [7]. In addition, avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation under Sanctions (1990-2003) totalled 1.7 million, violent deaths in the Gulf War totalled 0.2 million and under-5 infant deaths under Sanctions totalled 1.2 million (90% avoidable and due to US Alliance war crimes). Iraqi refugees (both inside and outside Iraq) total 5-6 million.

The Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide (1990-2011) involves in total 1.7 million violent deaths, 2.9 million non-violent excess deaths, 4.6 million violent and non-violent excess deaths, 2.0 million under-5 infant  deaths, 1.8 million avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths and 5-6 million refugees – an Iraqi Genocide according to the UN Genocide Convention definition of “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” [4].

The gross under-estimate by Sir John Chilcot and by the 2009-2016 Chilcot Inquiry of Iraqi deaths under Coalition Occupation (circa 150,000 as compared to a science-based estimate of 2.7 million) is explained when one turns to Section 17 of the Chilcot Report [2]. The 150,000 estimate derives from Iraqi Body Count which relied on media and government reports – an approach criticized as severely flawed by the top medical  epidemiologist  authors  of successive papers in the top medical journal The Lancet whose expert polling results underpin the estimate of 1.5 million violent Iraqi deaths in the post-invasion period by the US Just Foreign Policy organization and are in agreement with results from independent polling by the UK polling agency Opinion Research Business (ORB).   In short, the Chilcot Committee chose to accept a highly flawed estimate from non-experts, totally ignored the ORB estimates  and those of the  eminent US Just Foreign Policy, and chose to accept ignorant criticism of the work of top US medical epidemiologists.

The Chilcot Report further compounded its holocaust-ignoring by ignoring non-violent Iraqi deaths from violently-imposed deprivation totalling 1.5 million under Sanctions (1990-2003) and 1.2 million under Occupation (2003-2011),  as estimated from UN Population Division demographic data by the straightforward methodology described in my book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” [8]. The horrible reality is that, as recognized by Sir  John Chilcot, most of the victims of violent death in the high technology Iraq War wars are civilians ([3], page 9). However avoidable deaths from  war-imposed deprivation are greatly in excess of violent deaths. Thus Muslim avoidable deaths from deprivation in 20  countries subject to Western military intervention in the US War on Terror (aka the US War on Muslims) since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity (3,000 killed) total about 27 million as compared to violent deaths totalling about 5 million.   These horrendous  estimates demand peace now and ICC prosecutions of those responsible for the ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide and the ongoing  Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide of which it is a part [9, 10].

The Chilcot Report also ignored the estimate from 2006 UN Population Division data of 0.8 million under-5 year old Iraqi infants dying under Coalition Occupation, evidence of an immense US Coalition war crime in gross violation of the Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demand that an Occupier supplies food and medical requisites to “the fullest extent of the means available to it” [7]. All Sir John Chilcot can offer by way of mitigation of the post-invasion disaster in Iraq is as follows: “After the invasion, the UK and the US became joint Occupying Powers… The Government’s preparations failed to take account of the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing  Iraq, of the responsibilities which were likely to fall to the UK” ([3], page 9).

Much of the Chilcot  Report was concerned with intelligence about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that  was used as a case for war. Sir John Chilcot concludes: “The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraqi’s weapons of mass destruction – WMD- were presented with a certainty that was not justified” ([3], page 2) – disingenuous casuistry and weasel words because as we all knew for certain by March 2003 and as many experts had hypothesized  before the invasion  in the absence of any  conclusive evidence – that there were zero (0) WMD in Iraq.  After 7 years of “research” and 2.6 million words,  the Chilcot Report declined to conclude on whether the demonstrably illegal invasion of Iraq was in fact illegal as summarized by more weasel words from Sir John  Chilcot : “ In the absence of a majority in support of military action, we consider that the UK was in fact undermining the Security Council’s authority. Second, the Inquiry has not expressed a view on whether military action was legal,. That could, of course, only be resolved by a properly constituted and internationally recognised Court. We have, however, concluded  that the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory” ([3], page 4).

However International Law is quite clear about the legality of invading another country.  Such invasion can only occur (1) with UN Security Council (UNSC) sanction, (2) if the country to be invaded has attacked or acutely threatens to attack, or (3)  if the government of that country invites invasion –  and then only after extensive discussion. The British imperialist Chilcot Inquiry at least concedes the last point, as stated by Sir John Chilcot: “We have concluded  that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort” ([3], page 1).   Sir John Chilcot further commented on the altered, pro-war  advice of Jewish British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith (appointed in 2008 as an independent non-executive director of the Australian property trust, Westfield Group, co-founded by Israeli-Australian Zionist Frank Lowy): “In mid-January 2003, Lord [Peter] Goldsmith told Mr Blair that a further Security Council resolution would be necessary to provide a legal basis for military action. He did not advise No. 10 until the end of February that, while a second resolution would be preferable, a “reasonable case” could be  made that resolution 1441 was sufficient. He set out that view in written advice on 7 March.  The military and the civil service both asked for more clarity on whether force would be legal. Lord Goldsmith then advised that the “better view” was that there was, on balance, a secure legal basis for military action without a further  Security Council resolution. On March , he asked Mr Blair to confirm that Iraq had committed further material breaches as specified in resolution 1441. Mr Blair did so the next day. However, the precise basis on which Mr Blair made that decision is not clear”([3], pages 4 and 5).

History is written by the victor.

The  5 British Establishment members of the Chilcot Inquiry included Sir John Chilcot ( English and languages graduate of  Cambridge, and subsequent  career civil servant), Sir Lawrence Freedman (Oxford PhD, Blair foreign policy adviser, “dean of British strategic studies”, and  a Jewish Zionist military historian), Sir Roderic Lyne (Etonian,  history  graduate of Leeds University after special entry due to poor A levels, and a career diplomat), Sir Martin Gilbert (history graduate of Oxford, Oxford PhD, pro-Iraq War, and Jewish Zionist historian of Churchill, WW1,  WW2 and Apartheid Israel), and Baroness Usha Kumari Prashar (Kenya-born graduate in politics at Leeds University, PhD in social administration from Glasgow University, and director or chairman of a variety of public and private sector organisations). No scientists, no lawyers, and no international law experts were members of the Chilcot Inquiry but just  the mandatory graduates  from 92-Nobel-Laureate Cambridge University or 64-Nobel-Laureate  Oxford University plus 2 people from the lesser 6-Nobel-Laureate Leeds University.

The Chilcot Inquiry had a Jewish Zionist bias, with 2 out of the 5 members being Jewish Zionists and the remainder being pro-Zionists as evidenced  by the lack of any mention of Apartheid Israel in the  Sir John Chilcot Statement [3]. Despite the reality that Jews represent 0.5% of the British population, and that possibly half of them are not Zionists,  it is apparent that there is overwhelming pro-Zionist position in the British  political Establishment, whether Tory, Liberal Democrat or Labour, and this is reflected in 2 out of the 5 members of the Chilcot Inquiry being Jewish Zionists – an extraordinary  conflict  of interest since Apartheid Israel was actively involved in bombing Iraq in the 20th and 21st centuries  and the ugly reality that the Iraq War was basically about oil, US hegemony and  enhancing Apartheid Israeli security by destroying Iraq.

Jewish Zionist Chilcot Inquiry member Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) was an eminent UK historian in the areas of Jewish history, Zionism, Churchill, WW1, WW2 and 20th century history. He was one of very few UK historians who actually mentioned the 1942-1945  Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death by Churchill for strategic reasons) but must be criticized for hugely under-estimating  this atrocity, excusing the British, eliminating any mention of this from his histories of Churchill, ignoring other holocausts, and grossly exaggerating deaths in the WW2 Jewish Holocaust. To assess the reliability of  Sir Martin Gilbert’s advice to the Chilcot Inquiry, one can turn to in his book “A History of the Twentieth Century. Volume Two 1933-1951” [11] that is remarkable and praiseworthy in British historiography for actually mentioning the Bengal Famine,   but which stated  [my corrections in square brackets]: “In the summer of 1943, as supplies of rice ran out [incorrect, it began in 1942 and rice price rather than rice stores was crucial], famine spread through Bengal. Its ravages were savage and swift. The poor, and villagers in the remoter regions were its main victims [people starved in Calcutta], not only in Bengal, but in neighboring Orissa and distant Malabar [also in Bihar and Assam]. Within a few months, as many as 1,500,000 Indians had died [6-7 million died, 1942-1945]. The Bengal Famine was one of the worst famines of the century (p522)…Between 1939 and 1945 disease and hunger had taken their toll, with war conditions making it much harder to organize alleviation. In Bengal, a million and half Indians died of starvation [6-7 million died in Bengal, Assam and Orissa] (p725)” [12].  Of course Zionist Martin Gilbert is not alone in his ignoring  in his Churchill biographies  of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust for which racist, imperialist, warmonger and mass murderer pro-Zionist  Winston Churchill was responsible. In my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British  History” [13] I catalogue numerous   histories that totally  ignore the WW2 Bengali Holocaust that has been assiduously  kept from public perception in the English-speaking  world by several generations of lying and racist historians.

In a detailed article about the late Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) on the occasion of his death, I wrote: “History ignored yields history repeated and racist  Mainstream holocaust ignoring, holocaust minimizing  and genocide ignoring by the likes of Zionist historian Sir Martin Gilbert has allowed  atrocities such as  Palestinian  Genocide in which 90% of Palestine has been ethnically cleansed by the Zionist  invaders; 2 million Palestinian have been killed through  violence (0.1 million) or violently-imposed deprivation (1.9 million) since 1936 (i.e. in Martin Gilbert’s own lifetime); and of 12 million Palestinians (half of them children) 6 million are prevented from even stepping foot in their own country, 4.3 million are  highly abusively confined without human rights to West Bank mini-Bantustan ghettoes (2.5 million) or the Gaza Concentration Camp (1.8 million) , and only 1.7 million (14%) as Israeli Palestinians are able to vote for the government ruling all of Palestine, albeit as Third  Class citizens under Nazi-style Apartheid laws. It gets worse. Neocon American and Zionist  Imperialist  (NAZI)-perverted Mainstream journalists, editors, politicians and academics continue to ignore the horrendous realities of the ongoing Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide (deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation 4.6 million and 5.5 million, respectively), the ongoing Muslim  Holocaust and Muslim Genocide (12 million Muslim deaths from deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation in the Zionist-backed post-1990 US War on Muslims), the ongoing Global Avoidable  Mortality Holocaust (17 million avoidable deaths annually on Spaceship Earth with the First World in charge of the flight deck), and a worsening Climate Genocide (5 million people already die each year from climate change , 0.5 million, or carbon burning , 4.5 million, but 10 billion people are set to perish this century  if man-made climate change is not requisitely addressed) [13, 14]. The late Martin Gilbert was a member of the UK Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War that has yet to hand down its report – Professor Sir Martin Gilbert may yet keep lying from the grave”. My prediction has been borne out by the lying by omission of the mendacious Chilcot Report” [12].

Sir Martin Gilbert’s apologia for Churchill over the 1942-1945 Bengali Holocaust in which the British allowed 6-7 million Indians to perish: “War conditions making it much harder to organize alleviation” compares with the excusatory statement of Sir John Chilcot in relation  to the Iraqi catastrophe : “After the invasion, the UK and the US became joint Occupying Powers… The Government’s preparations failed to take account of the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing  Iraq, of the responsibilities which were likely to fall to the UK” – in the 2003-2011 Occupation, 1.5 million Iraqis were killed, a further 1.2 million died from war-imposed deprivation, and there  were 0.8 million  post-invasion under-5 Iraqi infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to gross US Coalition violation of the Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demand that an Occupier must supply the Conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical requisites to “the fullest extent of the means available to it” [7]. Just as holocaust denial by Sir Martin Gilbert reduced the Bengali Holocaust  death toll from 6-7 million to 0.7 million, so holocaust denial by the Zionist-subverted Chilcot Inquiry reduced the Iraqi death toll from 2.7 million to 0.15 million [3].

The appalling legacy of a quarter of a century of Western violence against Iraq (1990-2015) – for oil, US hegemony and Apartheid Israeli hegemony – is summarized below, with much of the data being found in “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide” [1], in “Genocide in Iraq” volumes I and II by Iraqi scholars Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani, and in reviews of these works [15-19], noting that about half of the Iraqi population of 30 million are children :

(1). 1.7 million Iraqi violent deaths.

(2). 2.9 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from violently -imposed deprivation.

(3). 2 million under-5 year old Iraqi infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to gross violation of the Geneva Convention by the US Alliance.

(4). 7,700,000 Iraqi refugees.

(5). 5,000,000 Iraqi orphans.

(6). 3,000,000 Iraqi widows.

(7). 1,000,0000 Iraqis missing.

(8). 4,000 Iraqi women (20% under 18) missing and presumed “trafficked”.

(9). 3.5 million Iraqi children living in dire poverty.

(10). 1.5 million Iraqi children are undernourished.

(11). Iraqi cancer cases in cases per 100,000 people were 40 (1990), 800 (1995) and 1,600 (2005).

(12). 40% of Iraqi professionals have left since 2003.

(13). 34,000 doctors (1990) declined to 16,000 doctors (2008).

(14). More than 2,200 doctors and nurses killed.

(15). The Iraqi health budget dropped from $450 million pa (1980-1991) to $22 million (2002),

(16). Most of Iraqi children are traumatized by war.

(17). From high literacy pre-1990 to 74% illiteracy in 2011.

Iraq has been substantially destroyed as a modern state by US state terrorism, with the participation of its state terrorist allies including Britain, France, Australia and Apartheid Israel among others. The same state terrorists have been variously involved in the similar destruction of Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Palestine,  Afghanistan  and Syria.  These are unforgivable crimes and the US Alliance war criminals must be brought to account by the world through international law and through application of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, politicians, parties, corporations  and countries disproportionately   responsible for the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide.

Concluding comments.

Sir John Chilcot’s statement on the Chilcot Inquiry commenced with a highly deceptive assertion about the illegal invasion of Iraq and British innocence: “ In 2003, for the for time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an invasion and full-scale occupation of a sovereign state” ([3], page 1). In reality since the Second World War,  the UK occupied a swathe of countries across the globe and 1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries occupied fully or partly by the UK in the post-1945 era totalled 727 million [8]. Further, post-1945 the UK invaded a number of countries with dire consequences, namely Korea (1950-1953; 28% of the North Korean population was killed by US bombing), Egypt (in 1956 in collusion with France and Apartheid Israel), and Afghanistan (in 2001 in collusion with the US Alliance, with 5.5 million deaths from violence (1.3 million) or from war-imposed deprivation (4.2 million)). In the period of Sanctions (1990-2003) Iraq deaths totalled 1.9 million, this including 0.2 million Iraqi  deaths in the Gulf War  and  1.7 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation [4]. Since the war criminal invasion of Iraq, the UK has participated in the invasion of Syria  (2011; 0.1 million killed, 1 million refugees, and the formerly richest country in Africa destroyed and left riven with sectarian civil war) , resumed bombing Iraq (2014; this representing Britain’s 7th Iraq War in a century ), and commenced bombing Syria (2015; 0.5 million dead and 12 million refugees in the Western-backed civil war ) [4, 8, 20].  Contrary to the thesis of the Chilcot Report, the UK is not a noble country reluctantly forced to invade countries like Iraq for “world peace”, “security” and “freedom” .  The British  have invaded 193 countries in the last 1,000 years, as compared to the UK- and US-lackey Australians 85, France 80, the US 70 (50 after WW2 coupled with ongoing subversion of all nations), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25,  Apartheid Israel 12 and China 2 [21-25]. The state terrorist English Establishment has been a serial invader for 1,000 years and in the 21st century is second only to the US for genocidal state terrorism [21].

Sir John Chilcot’s statement on the Chilcot Inquiry concluded with lavish praise from  the Iraq War Inquiry for its late member Professor Sir Martin Gilbert: “I also want to pay tribute to Sir Martin Gilbert , who died last year. As one of the pre-eminent historians of the past century, he brought a unique perspective to our world until he became ill in April 2012. We have missed him greatly as a colleague and friend” ([3], page 12).   In horrible reality, mendacious British  Zionist historian  Martin Gilbert brought the obscene and deadly baggage of  racism, falsehood, pro-Zionism, pro-Anglo-American imperialism, genocide ignoring, holocaust ignoring, genocide denying and holocaust denying to historiography, to public life and to the Chilcot Inquiry in particular.

In between these egregiously false slies (spin-based falsehoods), the Sir John Chilcot Statement summarizes a 2.6 million word Chilcot Report that has predictably  whitewashed the US-, UK- and Australia-complicit, 2003-2011  Iraq War  in which 2.7 million Iraqis died from violence (1.5 million)   or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million) by (a) suggesting that about 150,000 Iraqis may have died due to the 2003-2011 invasion and occupation, (b)  ignoring  Coalition  war crimes including the illegality of the invasion per se,  (c) ignoring the real reasons for the invasion (oil, US hegemony and Apartheid Israel) , and (d) implicitly approving such war criminal invasion  if there were better pro-war intelligence and peaceful dialogue was exhausted.

Of course a glaring question left unanswered by the 2.6 million word Chilcot Report that took 7 years to research and write is simply this: why did Britain in particular have to invade Iraq? One can well ask: why not Switzerland, Sweden, Cuba, China etc? The Elephant in the Room answer from humane truth-tellers from the Right and the Left is that the Iraq War was about oil, with the corollaries of US hegemony and  Apartheid Israeli hegemony. Thus, for example,  on the Right,  Alan Greenspan (who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades) (2015): ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq  war is largely about oil” [4]. On the Left, Professor Noam Chomsky (famed linguistics professor and anti-racist Jewish American human rights and anti-war activist of 85-Nobel-Laureate Massachusetts Institute  of Technology) (2009): “There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that if we can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world” [4].

The Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted Mainstream media, politician and academic presstitutes have criticized  the 2.6 million word Chilcot Report for  not actually pronouncing on the illegality of the invasion of Iraq, but have praised the Chilcot Report for stating the obvious that the invasion of Iraq was based on untrue intelligence – the absence of Iraqi WMD was apparent to UN inspectors before the invasion and was apparent to everyone by March 2003.

Anti-racist Jewish British writer Harold Pinter declared in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice” [26]. With 1990-2011 Iraqi deaths from US Alliance violence (1.7 million) or violently-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) totalling 4.6 million,  one can in 2015 paraphrase this great humanitarian thus: “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? 4.6 million? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that George Bush (America),  Tony Blair (Britain), John Howard (Australia) and all their accomplices be arraigned before the International Criminal Court”.

However arraignment of Bush, Blair and Howard before the ICC is not enough. The 2003-2011 Iraq War – Britain’s 6th Iraq War out of its 7 Iraqi Wars in a century – was the child of the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted US political Establishment  and backed by the similarly Zionist-perverted British political Establishment. Zionism is genocidal racism and the racist Zionists and their supporters should be sidelined from public life  as have been like racists  such as the Nazis, neo-Nazis, Apartheiders and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The key messages  of the mendacious, genocide-ignoring and holocaust-ignoring  Chilcot Report are  that decent people around the word must (a) inform everyone  they can about these awful realities , and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, politicians, parties, corporations  and countries disproportionately  responsible for the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide.

References.

[1]. “The Iraq Inquiry Homepage”: http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/ .

[2]. The Iraq Inquiry. The Report: http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/ .

[3]. The Iraq Inquiry. Statement by Sir John Chilcot: 6 July 2016:  http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/247010/2016-09-06-sir-john-chilcots-public-statement.pdf .

[4]. “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/home?pli=1 .

[5]. Article 2 of the UN Geneva Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html .

[6]. Just Foreign Policy, “Iraq Deaths”: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq  .

[7]. Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: https://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256739003e636d/6756482d86146898c125641e004aa3c5 .

[8]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country since Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on he web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/body-count-global-avoidable-mortality_05.html  .

[9]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[10]. Gideon Polya, “Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm

[11].  Martin  Gilbert, “A History of the Twentieth Century. Volume Two 1933-1951” (William Morrow, New York , 1998).

[12]. Gideon Polya , “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurrents, 19 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm .

[13]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, now available  for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/2008/09/jane-austen-and-black-hole-of-british.html  .

[14]. “Climate Genocide”:  https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ .

[15]. “Genocide in Iraq Volume I . The case against the UN Security Council and member states” by Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani (foreword by Professor Joshua Castellino; Clarity Press, Atlanta).

[16]. Gideon Polya ““Genocide in Iraq, The Case Against UN Security Council And Member States”. Book review”, Countercurrents, 8 February, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080213.htm .

[17]. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani, “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State” (Clarity Press, 2015).

[18]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The obliteration of a modern state” By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani”, Countercurrents, 15 March 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150315.htm .

[19]. Gideon Polya, “12th anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq: the Anglo-American Iraqi Genocide”, Global research, 27 March 2015: http://www.globalresearch.ca/12th-anniversary-of-the-illegal-invasion-of-iraq-the-anglo-american-iraqi-genocide/5438977 .

[20]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .

[21]. “Stop state terrorism”: https://sites.google.com/site/stopstateterrorism/ .

[22]. Gideon Polya, “The US Has Invaded 70 Nations Since 1776 – Make 4 July Independence From America Day”, Countercurrents, 5 July, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya050713.htm .

[23]. Gideon Polya, “British Have Invaded 193 Countries:  Make  26 January ( Australia Day, Invasion Day) British Invasion Day”, Countercurrents, 23 January, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230115.htm .

[24]. Gideon Polya, “As UK Lackeys Or US Lackeys Australians Have Invaded 85 Countries (British 193, French 80, US 70)”, Countercurrents, 9 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya090215.htm .

[25]. Gideon Polya, “President Hollande And French Invasion Of Privacy Versus French Invasion Of 80 Countries Since 800 AD”, Countercurrents, 15 January, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150114.htm  .

[26]. Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and politics”, Countercurrents, 8 December, 2005: http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-pinter081205.htm .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-complicity-in-iraq-mass-mortality/3369002#transcript

) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/  ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine  ;  Gideon Polya: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/home  ; Gideon Polya Writing: https://sites.google.com/site/gideonpolyawriting/ ; Gideon Polya, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_Polya ) . When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

9 July 2016

By  T Navin

The recent report produced by John Chilcot to look into UK role in US led invasion exposes the hollowness of such actions by allied forces. Some of the key highlights of the report are that a) UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted; b) Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; c) There was no proof of weapons of mass destruction and it was based on ‘flawed information’ produced by British intelligence; d) The decision to invade was made in unsatisfactory circumstances; e) George Bush ignored the UK advice on postwar planning and involving UN; f) UK military were ill equipped for the task; g) US-UK relations would not have been harmed if UK had stayed out of the war; h) Blair ignored warnings on what would happen in Iraq after invasion; i) The government did not try hard enough to keep the tally of Iraqi civilian casualties.

An imperialist psychology rationalizes its actions in the name of serving a larger human purpose, whatever is the actual reality. In response to the Chilcot reportTony Blair states “I believe we made the right decision and the world is better and safer”. This is even echoed by Bush who states that the “world is better off”. It is not surprising that despite lack of public support, Blair went on to say that “I will be with you, whatever” in 2002, much before the misadventure in 2003.

John Chilcot’s war enquiry report into UK role in Iraq war confirms that in a war (in reality invasion) nobody is a victor neither the invader nor the one invaded. While the invaded suffer the most with destruction of thousands of lives, many becoming disabled, infrastructure and social services destroyed and many displaced it also equally affects the normal soldiers of the invader. The damage created continues to affect a generation of the invaded country who as children were directly exposed to war. The soldiers of the invading country also suffer with many years of their lives lost in an alien country, carrying out military activities which benefit none except the commercial elite of the invaders. It may at the most serve and satisfy the imperialist powers who aim to put their own puppet regimes and gain control over oil resources, the multinational companies aiming to enter and capture the markets, the companies which enter the destroyed country in the name of contributing to rebuilding efforts and posing themselves as serving them. While the imperialist powers go on to create a manufactured consent around threat from ‘Islamic terrorism’ (through their ideological media houses such as CNN, Fox news etc) and loss of innocent lives, what gets hidden is the fact of ‘Imperialist genocide’ where loss of lives occur is many times higher.

Navin works with an NGO as a Researcher. He had done his M.Phil from Jawaharlal Nehru University

8 July 2016

By  Professor Francis A Boyle

Way to go America!
Our police shoot to kill Blacks
Just like “unlawful combatants”
In our Global War on Terrorism
GWOT Blowback
On the Streets of these United States.
Military training, weapons, tactics, mentality
Brought to bear
By our White Racist paramilitarized police
Against our Forever Untermenschen Blacks
Our Ku Klux Klan in Blue
Next coming to you.

No end in sight
Not even light
At the end of this tunnel
While Obama’s MIA
And the Media’s Meaningless Parlay
How long will Blacks endure
America’s belligerent occupation for sure
Of their Lives and Destinies
Before they revolt in awesome rage
To save themselves
And their families
I do not know.
This is for them to decide
Black’s right of self-determination
And saving themselves from genocide.

Professor Francis A Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010).

8 July 2016

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

There is a growing movement of applying Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) on Israel just like we did to defeat apartheid in South Africa. Zionist apologists are understandably declaring war on this nonviolent and moral movement. In many countries including several states in the USA,
there are attempts to delegetimize the movement and declare BDS illegal. Of course this is contrary to the principles of free speech and free
association. People’s right to boycott was recognized in key legal precedents but more legal challenges are needed to dispel the myth that
engaging in BDS is somehow illegitimate. Israeli apologists around the world engage in all sorts of dirty tricks to keep the racist system going
(a racket to keep the flow of cash if I may say so). Having faced Israeli apologists in public debates, many do not want to debate again because they
lose badly as they attempt to delegitimize and dehumanize their victims. They have no facts and they are defending injustice. So they resort to
personal attacks and strange racist mythologies (for example that we Palestinians sacrifice our children for publicity or that we “hate Jews”).
This is expected from colonial power to dehumanize their victims.

Elie Wiesel died recently. He spent most of his life defending Israel and dehumanizing Palestinians. He was challenged on many occasions to say
something about the Palestinian victims and all he could muster was regurgitating Zionist lies about colonizers needing to “defend themselves”.
Here is what a real prophetic Jew  (Sara Roy who teaches at Harvard) wrote on September 9, 2014

Mr. Wiesel,
I read your statement about Palestinians, which appeared in The New York Times on August 4th. I cannot help feeling that your attack against Hamas
and stunning accusations of child sacrifice are really an attack, carefully veiled but unmistakable, against all Palestinians, their children
included.  As a child of Holocaust survivors—both my parents survived Auschwitz—I am appalled by your anti-Palestinian position, one I know you
have long held. I have always wanted to ask you, why? What crime have Palestinians committed in your eyes? Exposing Israel as an occupier and
themselves as its nearly defenseless victims? Resisting a near half century of oppression imposed by Jews and through such resistance forcing us as a
people to confront our lost innocence (to which you so tenaciously cling)?

Unlike you, Mr. Wiesel, I have spent a great deal of time in Gaza among Palestinians. In that time, I have seen many terrible things and I must
confess I try not to remember them because of the agony they continue to inflict.  I have seen Israeli soldiers shoot into crowds of young children
who were doing nothing more than taunting them, some with stones, some with just words. I have witnessed too many horrors, more than I want to
describe. But I must tell you that the worst things I have seen, those memories that continue to haunt me, insisting never to be forgotten, are
not acts of violence but acts of dehumanization.

There is a story I want to tell you, Mr. Wiesel, for I have carried it inside of me for many years and have only written about it once a very long
time ago. I was in a refugee camp in Gaza when an Israeli army unit on foot patrol came upon a small baby perched in the sand sitting just outside the
door to its home. Some soldiers approached the baby and surrounded it.Standing close together, the soldiers began shunting the child between them
with their feet, mimicking a ball in a game of soccer. The baby began screaming hysterically and its mother rushed out shrieking, trying
desperately to extricate her child from the soldiers’ legs and feet. After a few more seconds of “play,” the soldiers stopped and walked away, leaving
the terrified child to its distraught mother.

Now, I know what you must be thinking: this was the act of a few misguided men. But I do not agree because I have seen so many acts of dehumanization
since, among which I must now include yours. Mr. Wiesel, how can you defend the slaughter of over 500 innocent children by arguing that Hamas uses them
as human shields?  Let us say for the sake of argument that Hamas does use children in this way; does this then justify or vindicate their murder in
your eyes? How can any ethical human being make such a grotesque argument? In doing so, Mr. Wiesel, I see no difference between you and the Israeli
soldiers who used the baby as a soccer ball. Your manner may differ from theirs—perhaps you could never bring yourself to treat a Palestinian child
as an inanimate object—but the effect of your words is the same: to dehumanize and objectify Palestinians to the point where the death of Arab
children, some murdered inside their own homes, no longer affects you. All that truly concerns you is that Jews not be blamed for the children’s
savage destruction.

Despite your eloquence, it is clear that you believe only Jews are capable of loving and protecting their children and possess a humanity that
Palestinians do not. If this is so, Mr. Wiesel, how would you explain the very public satisfaction among many Israelis over the carnage in Gaza—some
assembled as if at a party, within easy sight of the bombing, watching the destruction of innocents, entertained by the devastation?  How are these
Israelis different from those people who stood outside the walls of the Jewish ghettos in Poland watching the ghettos burn or listening
indifferently to the gunshots and screams of other innocents within—among them members of my own family and perhaps yours—while they were being
hunted and destroyed?

You see us as you want us to be and not as many of us actually are. We are not all insensate to the suffering we inflict, acceding to cruelty with
ease and calm. And because of you, Mr. Wiesel, because of your words—which deny Palestinians their humanity and deprive them of their victimhood—too
many can embrace our lack of mercy as if it were something noble, which it is not. Rather, it is something monstrous.

Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern

Studies, Harvard University.

Max Blumenthal similarly wrote a poignant reflection on the hateful tribalist opportunist Elie Wiesel
http://www.alternet.org/print/grayzone-project/huge-part-elie-wiesels-legacy-being-whitewashed

But our problem is not with Wiesel now, he is gone. Our problem is with those who are around trying to go more right wing hoping somehow that saves
the silly notion of a “Jewish state”. It is not less crazy than an Aryan white state or an Islamic state or a Christian state. All such concepts are
destined for the dustbin of history. Isn’t it also boring to try to create monolithic societies? Isn’t it time people respect other religions and
cultures and learn to share in equality this beautiful earth instead of spoiling it?

From here in Palestine we cry out for justice and for simple human rights. The rights of refugees to return and the right to live in our lands
peacefully regardless of our faiths/beliefs. First do no harm. Here are my reflections on our responsibility (the Savior in each of us) that I wrote
six years ago and is still relevant today http://qumsiyeh.org/thesaviorineachofus/

Stay human and welcome to visit us in Palestine

Mazin Qumsiyeh
Professor and (volunteer) Director

8 July 2016

By Gary Leupp

Everyone’s talking about the future of the European Union after the Brexit. Should we not also be wondering about the future of NATO?

The two organizations substantially overlap. Twenty-two countries are members of both; that is, the twenty-two nations are both military allies of the U.S. (which pays two-thirds of the alliance’s cost and controls its politics) and members of an economic union, which—while it of course does not include the U.S., which is 5000 miles away—is of much interest to the world’s only surviving superpower.

Of course the EU and NATO have very different purposes. As we all know, the EU represents an effort to create a common market throughout the continent, allow for free travel and employment between member-states, the formation of common standards, policies etc. We know there have been major downsides for some member countries, involving reduced sovereignty, uncontrolled immigration, indebtedness and austerity programs, etc. But the stated goal, to spread general affluence, and therefore prevent war, has been stated since the EU’s forerunner, the European Coal and Steel Community, was formed in 1951.

Thus, while it’s arguably none of the U.S.’s business, U.S. leaders express opinions on EU composition. (You might think that, as leaders of a competing trading bloc, with the same relationship to the EU that Boeing has to Airbus, they would maintain a politic silence. But both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have urged the EU to admit NATO ally Turkey’s admission. And Obama recently raised a ruckus in the United Kingdom when he urged its electorate to reject Brexit.)

The purpose of NATO is less clear than that of the EU. Formed in 1949 in line with the “Truman Doctrine” pledging that the U.S. would fight communism wherever it threatened the “Free World,” it was supposed to be a defensive alliance between the U.S. and its European client states versus some future (imagined) Soviet aggression against those states.

That aggression needless to say never happened. In retrospect the Cold War appears a long period of stability, with the exception of the horrific wars the U.S. inflicted on Korea and Vietnam while the Soviets stood aside, and the war the Soviets waged in Afghanistan to suppress the rebels opposed to the secular Soviet-backed government (who were then backed by the CIA, because they were so anti-communist, that being the main thing), who went on to became the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Europe itself was actually remarkably stable during that Cold War, from 1945 to 1989. Since then there’s been horrific violence, especially in southeastern Europe, much of it exacerbated by the U.S. and NATO.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact (formed in 1955 in belated response to NATO, after NATO decided to include West Germany) in 1991, you might have thought that NATO would dissolve too. But no; it redefined its mission as maintaining “security” in a newly insecure situation. Its purpose is in fact stated in the vaguest terms. Its real function is to preserve U.S. hegemony over post-Soviet Europe, expand to surround Russia and ultimately create the conditions for a Yugoslavia-type fracturing of the Russian state—which for some reason U.S. military leaders keep referring to as the “number one threat” or even “existential threat” to the U.S.!

How the U.S. Uses the EU

The U.S. attempts to use the EU for its own geopolitical ends, particularly for this confrontation with Russia.

For example: from late 2013 to February 2014 the U.S. State Department spent $5 billion in Ukraine in order to (in the words of Under Secretary of State for Eurasia Victoria Nuland, a former Dick Cheney aide, neocon married to neocon Robert Kagan and key Hillary crony) “support the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations”—meaning the hopes of many Ukrainians for their country to join the EU.

But what Nuland, the Pentagon and NATO leaders in Europe really wanted to do was to pull Ukraine into NATO, completing the creeping encirclement of Russia that had begun with NATO’s expansion to include Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1999.

NATO now already includes 11 countries formerly part of the Soviet bloc (Warsaw Pact) or Yugoslavia, most added during Bush’s administration but two (Albania and Croatia) admitted since. In all cases, by the way, these states first received admission into NATO, then into the EU.

Bulgaria: joined NATO 2004, EU 2007

Croatia: NATO 2009, EU 2013

Czechoslovakia: NATO 1999, EU 2004

Estonia: NATO April 2, 2004, EU May 1, 2004

Hungary: NATO 1999, EU 2004

Latvia: NATO April 2, 2004, EU May 1, 2004

Lithuania: NATO April 2, 2004, EU May 1, 2004

Poland: NATO 1999, EU 2004

Romania: NATO 2004, EU 2007

Slovakia: NATO, March 29, 2004, EU May 1, 2004

Slovenia: NATO, March 29, 2004, EU May 1, 2004

Notice a pattern? First a country commits itself to an anti-Russian alliance with the U.S., committing 2% of its GDP to military expenses and pledging to go to war against Russia when called upon to do so. Then it gets access to the benefits of EU membership.

Back to Ukraine. Ukraine in early 2014 included the Crimean Peninsula, home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the 1780s, a vital naval port for the Russian state that has only a few warm-water ports. (Crimea had been turned over from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by half-Ukrainian Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. After the break-up of the USSR in 1991, Russia retained its traditional military presence on the peninsula by a treaty with the Ukrainian leaders.)

But the U.S. would like to expel the Russians and make Sevastopol a NATO port. (This is not only Vladimir Putin’s nightmare; it would be a nightmare for any Russian leader. Look at a map.)

In 2013 the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, democratically elected in an internationally monitored election in 2010, negotiated with the EU for his country’s eventual entry into the union. A substantial portion of the population, especially in the western part of the country, favored this. But when Yanukovych realized that steps towards admission would involve accepting an austerity regime comparable to that inflicted on Greece, he opted out, instead accepting a generous Russian aid offer.

Nuland & Co. depicted this as a pro-Russian leader’s capitulation to Russian pressure; again, their talking point was “Ukrainian people’s European aspirations.” (In fact, Ukrainians were divided on the issue, with fewer than 50% in favor of EU membership.)

Ukraine is ethnically divided between ethnic Ukrainians (who speak a language related to Russian, although the two languages are not mutually intelligible) and ethnic Russians who have always spoken Russian. (Russian has always been a recognized official language in the country.) There has been much intermarriage between the two, but among the ethnic Ukrainians there are many Russophobes including neo-fascists who glorify Stepan Bandera, an anti-Russian Ukrainian leader who worked with the Nazis to round up Jews and fight the Soviets in 1941.  (He was declared a “national hero” by Yanukovych’s predecessor Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-U.S. advocate of NATO admission. Yanukovych withdrew this award, but it has been reinstated by the current regime.)

Taking advantage of this Russophobia, the U.S. depicted Yanukovych’s change of mind as a betrayal of “European” dreams. Working with the neo-fascist Svoboda Party, among others, it assisted in the brutal putsch of February 22, 2014, that caused the president to flee for fear of his life. A new, pro-NATO government was immediately installed, with Arseniy Yatsenyev as prime minister.

“Fuck the EU!” …and then Use It!

This is where the story gets interesting, because it reveals what the EU means to the U.S., and what it doesn’t. In an intercepted phone conversation between Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine a month before the coup, they discuss who will succeed Yanukovych once he’s toppled. She favors NATO proponent “Yats.” The ambassador mentions the the EU favors a different candidate, whom she thinks is inappropriate. They discuss how Yatsenyev will be legitimated by a UN official sent by Ban Ki-moon.

“So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and to have the UN help glue it,” she concludes, “and, you know, Fuck the EU.” (In other words, this is not about any European’s aspirations. It’s about ours.)

So the coup comes off as planned. The obviously prominent role of neo-fascists in the new regime, and the immediate revocation of the existing law protecting language rights frightened and angered the primarily Russian inhabitants of the Donbass region (where Yanukovych had his base of support). They refused to accept its legitimacy. (Their resistance is invariably represented by the U.S. press in the service of the State Department as a Moscow-inspired rebellion or even Russian “invasion.”)

Russia refused to recognize the new government and quickly moved to re-annex its historical territory of Crimea. The Russian-majority population of Crimea overwhelmingly voted in a credible referendum to reunite with Russia. The U.S. media often refers to this as another “invasion” although it was nothing of the sort; there were tens of thousands of Russian troops in place by longstanding agreement, who simply secured government buildings and the borders.

Hillary Clinton, among others, likened this move to Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938. That is to say: something that must not meet with appeasement. And so (people are taught to believe), the practical Russian response to U.S. efforts to complete the expansion of NATO is the problem, not NATO’s relentless advance against Russia itself. Russia under Putin is the worrisome aggressor, not the U.S. leaders who invade a new country like clockwork every few years, boasting that they need to do it because theirs is the “exceptional” nation.

Some in the Obama administration favored a military response to the separatists in the east; they wanted to further arm the new regime and encourage it to assert control over the Donbass if not Crimea. It is clear this was the view of U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove, the “Supreme Allied Commander” of “NATO Allied Command Operations” in Europe. We know from intercepted emails exchanged between him and Nuland (whom he refers to affectionately as “Toria”) that he was frustrated by the failure of Obama to order the Ukrainian puppets to more forcefully invade the east. (Initial efforts to do this had resulted in mass desertions, or soldiers retreated in the face of unarmed citizens including old women shaming them into abandoning their mission. It was a tremendous embarrassment to the Kiev regime.)

Obama decided not to heed Breedlove. In place of hot warfare he chose economic warfare. Here is where the EU comes in. In July 2014 the union (that Nuland wanted to fuck) dutifully voted to impose economic sanctions on Russia. (Again, 22 of the 28 EU members are also NATO members; the only ones that aren’t are Austria, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Cyprus and Malta.)

The U.S. is of course not an EU member but it had a reliable surrogate within the union: the United Kingdom, which has strongly argued for sanctions, their expansion and extension to the present. (Frank Holmes, managing editor of US Global Investors, calls Britain “the bloc’s strongest supporter of restrictions.” The conservative Washington D.C. website The Daily Caller calls it the U.S.’s “strongest E.U. ally against Russia”).

The UK, which had far less to lose from the sanctions that many other EU nations, was urging its partners to shoot themselves in the foot. It was asking them to punish Russia (and damage themselves). The continental Europeans went along, some grudgingly.

Regrets (and Maybe Rebellion?)

Many have come to regret it. The Czech and Hungarian leaders have long been questioning the sanctions and expressing displeasure. Of course they want, as new members of the EU and NATO, to be team players. But their people are suffering from lost trade and pressuring them to protest. Thus Czech President Milos Zeman has called the sanctions “not merely inefficient; on the contrary, they are counterproductive.” (Only 35% of Czechs according to a 2015 Gallop poll support the sanctions.)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban calls the sanctions a “risk in the EU…very deep, of a strategic nature.” (European Council president Donald Tusk, a Pole, calls Orban a “Trojan Horse” for Russia while Orban says Tusk is “on the other side” for opposing an easing of sanctions.)

In May, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that his government “definitely cannot accept that a decision [by the EU, on extending sanctions] was made behind the scenes, that is, we are against using an automatic procedure.” (In Hungary, only 29% of those polled favor the sanctions.)

The Polish regime has been among the most supportive of the U.S. position; anti-Russian sentiment is deep in that country for various historical reasons, and 70% of those polled support sanctions. But the Polish farmers are suffering from them. One-third of the apples harvested in Poland two years ago went to Russia; now the trade is forbidden.

Meanwhile in Spain farmers burn EU flags over piles of rotting peaches to protest the collapse of their relations with the Russian marketplace. The European Commission keeps having to pay out millions of euros to partly compensate farmers and merchants for their losses due to sanctions.

French MPs in April this year voted for a resolution to lift EU sanctions on Russia. Minister of Economy Emmanuel Macros has vowed to work towards lifting them. Italian cabinet ministers and the lawmakers in Italy’s Upper House of Parliament also want to rethink them. Maybe they’re all Trojan Horses, but if so, that’s good.

The role of Germany in the EU, as the most populous and wealthiest country in Europe, is more important than ever following the Brexit. While it has been, along with France, a strong supporter of the sanctions and their continuation, public support is waning. In May a German pollster found that 36% of Germans want the sanctions scaled down, while 35% want them scrapped entirely.

The sanctions have had disastrous impact on the German economy. Since they were imposed exports have declined by about 20 billion euros. Alstom has lost a huge contract for the construction of the Beijing-Moscow railway line. The business community generally wants the sanctions dropped.

There appears to be a general feeling that the U.S. (which is feeling few effects from the sanctions it itself imposed on Russia) pressed the EU (especially through Britain) to take measures that are not in Europe’s interest. And some surely realize that what this is all really about is the U.S.’s desire to punish Russia for thwarting its effort to bring Ukraine into NATO—through that cynical device of Victoria (“Fuck the EU”) Nuland of supporting Ukraine’s “European aspirations.

As it happens, 67% of Germans oppose bringing Ukraine into NATO, and 45% oppose bringing it into the EU. Most importantly, German support for NATO has been plummeting; it was 73% in 2009 but was 55% last year. And when asked whether Germany, in the event of a Russian attack on an east European border state that is a NATO member, should fight on the side of that state, only 38% say yes according to a Spring 2015 Pew poll.

According to the same poll, that figure is 40% in Italy, 47% in France, and 48% in both Poland and Spain. In other words, over half the people of these countries oppose the very nature of NATO as “mutual defense” alliance.

This raises the real possibility of countries leaving NATO, as well as the EU. Czech president Milos Zeman has called for referendums on his country’s membership in both. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has criticized the recent joint maneuvers in Poland, in which 14,000 U.S. troops, 12,000 Polish troops, and 800 from Britain participated as “saber-rattling.”

“Whoever believes,” he warns, “that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken. We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation.” In other words, the U.S. is steering NATO towards war with Russia, which the Germans know is not a good idea.

Who would have imagined a few years ago that the UK would ever leave the EU? Imagine the Czech Republic leaving this confrontational NATO alliance, joining its prosperous neighbor Austria by opting for neutrality. Imagine the Germans (who have many reasons to be angry towards the U.S., including the fact that the NSA spies on all of them) becoming fed up enough to hold their own referendum and quitting the bloc.

There is something of a precedent. France shocked the U.S. when it pulled out of the NATO Integrated Military Command Structures in 1966, in order to, as President Charles DeGaulle put it “preserve French independence in world affairs.” (It remained committed in theory to the defense of alliance members but only rejoined with conditions in 2009.)

France, which has military bases all over the world and deploys troops routinely in Africa and elsewhere (it cooperated with the U.S. in overthrowing Aristide in Haiti in 2004, as if to apologize for having opposed the U.S. war in Iraq), is very different from Germany with its stiff constitutional limits on the use of its military and generally pacifistic population. Within the EU, it is likely to replace the UK as its most important hawkish member, while Germany is likely to urge reconciliation with Russia.

There are contradictions within both the EU and NATO. They are interwoven, and some look irresolvable. That again is a good thing.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion.

7 July 2016

By Neha Borkar

While some are trying to spread communal hatred in the country, a Gurdwara organised an iftar party for its Muslim brethren. Gurdwara Shri Guru Tegh Bahadur Sahib Ji,Yahiyaganj in Lucknow served iftar food as their Muslim brothers neatly sat in a queue to break their fast.

With satisfied appetite and smiling faces, the two community decided to strengthen their bonds. Take a look

4 July 2016

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Japan’s Supreme Court has rejected a second appeal by the country’s Muslim community against nationwide surveillance of Muslim groups, mosques and even halal restaurants. This may not be surprising to America’s seven-million-strong Muslim community which has been under real and virtual surveillance since 9/11.

After 15 years of broadly targeting the community and extensively monitoring its activities, the FBI declared an end on June 18, 2016 to its surveillance of Muslim Americans, saying “its exhaustive study of their beautiful culture was finally complete.”

Not surprisingly, on April 15, 2014, the New York Police Department announced that it has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped. The police mapped communities inside and outside the New York city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch­ counter conversations. The Police Department’s tactics, which were the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

Hence the mass surveillance of the Muslims in Japan was not very astonishing, shocking and surprising.

Interestingly, seventeen Japanese Muslim plaintiffs had complained that the government’s security measures constituted “an unconstitutional invasion of their privacy and freedom of religion.”

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal as unconstitutional. The justices concurred with a lower court that the surveillance was “necessary and inevitable” to guard against international terrorism. The Supreme Court also concurred with the lower court that the plaintiffs deserved a total of ¥90 million ($880,000) in compensation because the leak violated their privacy.

However, the justices did not weigh in on the police profiling or surveillance practices.

Police file leaked

The case was brought after a 2010 police leak revealed officials were monitoring Japanese Muslims at places of worship, halal restaurants and Islam-related organizations across the country.

Japanese-born Muhammad Fujita (not his real name), who converted to Islam more than 20 years ago, told Al-Jazeera the Muslim community had been unfairly targeted for surveillance. “They made us terrorist suspects,” he said. “We never did anything wrong.”

Fujita says he and his wife have been spied on since the early 2000s. The police documents revealed that tens of thousands of individual Muslims had been extensively profiled, with files detailing their personal information as well as their place of worship.

114 police files were leaked in 2010. The leaked files revealed profiling of Muslims across Japan. The documents included resumé-like pages listing a host of personal information, including an individual’s name, physical description, personal relationships and the mosque they attended, along with a section titled “suspicions”.

The files also showed by the time the 2008 G8 summit was held in Hokkaido, northern Japan, at least 72,000 residents from Organization of Islamic Conference countries had been profiled – including about 1,600 public school students in and around Tokyo.

Police in the capital had also been surveilling places of worship, halal restaurants, and “Islam-related” organizations, the documents showed.

The Supreme Court decision generated few headlines and little public debate in Japan. Local media outlets had covered the legal proceedings by focusing on the leak of information, tiptoeing around the police surveillance issue.

The most prominent public figure to comment on the Supreme Court decision was NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who spoke via video linkup at a symposium on government surveillance in Tokyo.

“People of the Islamic faith are more likely to be targeted … despite not having any criminal activities or associations or anything like that in their background, simply because people are afraid,” said Snowden.

Muslims have lived in Japan for more than 100 years, with the first mosque constructed in 1935, but they constitute a tiny religious minority.

The government does not compile official statistics, there are believed to be around 100,000 Muslims in Japan, 90 per cent of them foreign-born and the remaining 10,000 or so ethnically Japanese.

There are currently between 30 and 40 mosques in Japan, plus another 100 or more apartment rooms set aside, known as musallahs.

In Japan the government does not take religion into account as part of the demographic concern under religious freedom. As Michael Penn states, “The Japanese government does not keep any statistics on the number of Muslims in Japan. Neither foreign residents nor ethnic Japanese are ever asked about their religion by official government agencies” Michael Penn is the Executive Director of the Shingetsu Institute for the Study of Japanese-Islamic Relations in Kitakyushu, Japan.

Japan’s Muslim population consists mainly of Indonesians and other small expatriate communities, which represent less than 0.08% of the total population, while the estimated Japanese Muslims consist of less than 0.008% of the total population.

There are isolated records of contact between Islam and Japan before the opening of the country in 1853; some Muslims did arrive in earlier centuries.

Early European accounts of Muslims and their contacts with Japan were maintained by Portuguese sailors who mention a passenger aboard their ship, an Arab who had preached Islam to the people of Japan. He had sailed to the islands in Malacca in 1555.

The first modern Muslim contacts were with Indonesians who served aboard British and Dutch ships in the late 19th century.

In the late 1870s, the biography of Muhammad was translated into Japanese. This helped Islam spread and reach the Japanese people, but only as a part of the history of cultures.

Another important contact was made in 1890 when the Ottoman Empire dispatched a naval vessel to Japan for the purpose of saluting the visit of Japanese Prince Komatsu Akihito to Constantinople several years earlier. This frigate was called the Ertugrul, and was destroyed in a storm along the coast of Wakayama Prefecture on September 16, 1890.

The first Japanese to go on the Hajj was Kotaro Yamaoka. He converted to Islam in 1909 in Bombay, after coming into contact with Russian-born writer, Abdürreşid İbrahim, whereupon he took the name Omar Yamaoka.

Another early Japanese convert was Bunpachiro Ariga, who about the same time went to India for trading purposes and converted to Islam under the influence of local Muslims there, and subsequently took the name Ahmed Ariga.

The real Muslim community life however did not start until the arrival of several hundred Turko-Tatar Muslim refugees from Central Asia and Russia in the wake of the October Revolution.

These Muslims, who were given asylum in Japan, settled in several main cities and formed small communities. They are estimated at less than 600 in 1938 for Japan proper, a few thousand on the continent. Some Japanese converted to Islam through contact with these Muslims.

The Kobe Mosque was built in 1935 with the support of the Turko-Tatar community of traders there. The Tokyo Mosque, planned since 1908 was finally completed in 1938, with generous financial support from the zaibatsu. Its first imams were Abdürreşid İbrahim (1857–1944), who had returned in 1938, and Abdulhay Qorbangali (1889–1972). Japanese Muslims played little role in building these mosques. To date there have been no Japanese who have become Imam of any of the mosques with the exception of Shaykh Ibrahim Sawada, Imam of the Ahlulbayt Islamic Centre in Tokyo.

The Greater Japan Muslim League founded in 1930, was the first official Islamic organisation in Japan.

Nationalistic organizations like the Ajia Gikai were instrumental in petitioning the Japanese government on matters such as officially recognizing Islam, along with Shintoism, Christianity and Buddhism as a religion in Japan, and in providing funding and training to Muslim resistance movements in Southeast Asia, such as the Hizbullah, a resistance group funded by Japan in the Dutch Indies.

The Japanese invasion of China and South East Asian regions during the Second World War brought the Japanese in contact with Muslims. Those who converted to Islam through them returned to Japan and established in 1953, the first Japanese Muslim organisation, the Japan Muslim Association under the leadership of Sadiq Imaizumi. Its members, numbering 65 at the time of inauguration, increased twofold before he died in 1959.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)

6 July 2016

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Hyped emotions, and political opportunism aside, the Israel-Turkey normalization deal, signed on June 27 is unfavorable for Palestinians – and for Gazans, in particular.

There is much that is being said to blame Turkey or placate the damage of seeing Turkey – which has for years been  one of the most visible backers of Palestinian Resistance – reaching out to Israel. Yet, no amount of text, statements and press releases can diminish the psychological defeat felt in Gaza following the announcement.

Gazans are emotionally exhausted after ten years of siege, dotted by devastating wars and the lack of any political horizon. Aside from their resistance, undying faith and legendary steadfastness, Palestinians in Gaza have looked up with much hope and anticipation to a few friends. One was Turkey.

The relationship was cemented in May 2010, when Israeli commandos raided the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ in international waters, killing nine Turkish humanitarian activists aboard the ‘MV Mavi Marmara’. A tenth activist died later from his wounds. Since then, many Palestinians, as well as many Turks, have felt that the relationship between Palestine and Turkey entered a new phase, not that of words, but deeds. They had more in common than sentimental gestures of friendship, now, blood and tears.

There is no question that Turkey, an important NATO member and an American ally in the region, has been under much pressure since it demoted its diplomatic ties with Israel in 2011. But the fact is, normalizing ties with Israel without the latter lifting the suffocating and deadly siege on Gaza was not a criterion for Turkey. Neither the Turkish economy, political stability nor national security was exceedingly damaged by the Turkey-Israel rift.

The little known fact is that the rift hardly affected trade between both countries. “Though political relations had hit rock bottom, both Turkey and Israel knew business must go on,” Turkey’s TRT World recently reported.

“Business and politics were separated by a Chinese-Wall like efficiency. Trade not only continued, but expanded by 26% compared to 2010.”

Moreover, 2013 and 2014 were one of the busiest years for Turkish Airlines carrying passengers between Turkey and Israel and, in 2015, trade between both countries had risen to $5.6 billion, according to Turkish Statistics Institute, cited in TRT.

Still, thanks to what seemed like a principled Turkish position on Gaza, Turkey’s status, at least among Muslim nations, has been elevated like never before.

Perhaps, Turkey has felt embattled as a result of the war on Syria, the rise of militant violence, uncertain economic forecast, the flood of refugees, its conflict with Russia and the political crack within its ruling party. But Palestinians have played no part in that.

If Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, felt the need to re-evaluate his political course as a result of whichever political calculation he found urgent and reasonable, what sin did Gazans commit to be disowned in such a fashion?

It is a “stab in the back”, Gaza Professor Haidar Eid wrote. It is a “cheap manipulation of the Palestinian cause,” complained Gaza journalist, Ghada Albardawil. While others tried to maintain conciliatory language, the disappointment in Gaza – in fact, among most Palestinians – is unmistakable.

Gaza-based Dr. Ahmad Yousef refused to blame Turkey for failing to lift the siege. Yousef, who is also the former political adviser to Hamas’ Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, told Al-Monitor that “Hamas believes that, under the Turkish-Israeli agreement, Turkey achieved as much as it can to ease the blockade on Gaza, which has been plagued by economic crises.”

This reasoning, however well-intentioned, is off the mark. Turkey, of course, cannot be blamed for the failure to lift the siege. The siege is an Israeli one, and its deadly outcomes are the moral and legal responsibility of Israel, its regional partners and western supporters.

However, it is still incumbent on Turkey, as it is on every other country in the world, not to do business with a government accused of war crimes, including that of Crime of Apartheid, in addition to its continued violations of international and humanitarian law.

With Israel illegally occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) and imposing a deadly siege on Gaza, what moral justifications can the Turkish government provide to justify its normalization of ties with Israel?

Not only does the agreement ensure the families of the 10 Turkish victims (considered ‘martyrs’ by Palestinians) will be denied the right to legally pursue criminal charges against their Israeli murderers, thousands of Palestinian families, too, will have no such chance.

In other words, business as usual will return to the Turkish-Israeli relations, while Gazans are trapped behind fences, walls and barbered wire.

Those who wish to see the cup half full, cite the fact that Gaza will be receiving tons of Turkish aid, a future hospital with the capacity to hold 200 beds and a water desalination plant – especially when considering that only 3 percent of Gaza’s water is actually drinkable.

But the supplies will be routed via an Israeli seaport – which is exactly what the ‘Mavi Marmara’ activists refused to do. The political move would further validate the Israeli Occupation, and the siege apparatus as well.

Worse, this arrangement – if it is, indeed, fulfilled – would reduce the crisis in Gaza to that of a humanitarian one. But this is not the case. Gaza is not just suffering from an economic embargo, but a politically-motivated blockade following the 2006 democratic elections in Palestine, the result of which was rejected by Israel and its backers.

Gazans are punished purely as a result of a political question and, later, for their resistance and refusal to succumb to pressure and bullying. Neither foodstuff, nor a hospital or cleaner water will resolve any of these dilemmas.

When Israeli commandos violently raided the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ in May 2010, something extraordinary happened in Gaza: a deep sense of loss, but also a sense of pride. It was the first time that this generation experienced real solidarity emanating from a Muslim country, exhibited with such resolution and willingness to sacrifice.

For years, many in Gaza were partly sustained by the hope that Turkey would maintain its support (as Palestinians were promised repeatedly) until the siege is lifted.

This has not been actualized. Moreover, Israel is expected to generate massive wealth as a result of the deal, especially when it is able to export its natural gas to Europe, via Turkey.

But if this is not entirely about money, at least from the Turkish perspective, what is it, then? A Turkish foreign policy realignment? A return to the ‘zero problems with our neighbors’ approach to foreign policy? Whatever it is, seeing the hopes in Gaza dashed under the crushing weight of realpolitik is disheartening.

No matter that some are proposing to sugarcoat the Israel-Turkey rapprochement, the deal was a blow to Palestinian hopes that their siege was about to end, that they were no longer alone facing Israel’s military machine and its powerful western benefactors.

Perhaps the deal is also a wake-up call – that Palestinians must count on themselves first and foremost, achieve their elusive unity and seek solidarity the world over.

Nevertheless, even this unfair deal cannot possibly break the bond between the Turkish and Palestinian people. ‘Blood is thicker than water’, they say. And they are right.

– Dr Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com.

6 July 2016

By George Capaccio

I have walked the streets of Baghdad’s Karrada district when it was safe to do so. Before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, no one worried about car bombs exploding in crowded markets, killing and maiming innocent people. In Karrada, the most recent atrocity committed on Iraqi soil has claimed over 200 lives, and the death toll is expected to rise. As Muslims around the world prepare to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the streets of Karrada are shrines for the dead. Candlelight and the sound of mourners weeping are all that’s left of a once vibrant part of the capital. In the charred ruins of shops and apartments, the search continues for those still missing since a suicide bomber detonated a van packed with explosives, and what would have been a festive occasion ended in tragedy.

Tragedy upon tragedy has visited this ill-fated land between two rivers, land of date palms and stunning, blue-domed mosques, palaces in the sun and silent shepherds guiding their flocks. During Islam’s Golden Age, which lasted from the 8th to the 13th centuries, Baghdad served as the cultural, intellectual, and economic powerhouse of the Muslim empire. From its inceptionin 762 under the guidance and inspiration of Caliph al-Mansur, Baghdad quickly rose in prominence to become one of the most dynamic and prosperous cities of the medieval world. The House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma), Baghdad’s legendary academy and library founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the 8th century, drew together diverse intellectual traditions from the Greeks, Persians, Sumerians, and Indians. Scholars from all parts of the empire came to the House of Wisdom with the common goal of preserving and expanding the world’s trove of knowledge in science, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, and literature.

Originally called the City of Peace (Medinat al-Salaam) during the Abbasid dynasty, which ended with the Mongol invasion in 1258, Baghdad today is anything but peaceful. But there was a time when residents could go about their daily routines without fear of ending up as a pool of blood washed away in the aftermath of one more massacre. There was a time when a Westerner like myself could escort a group of siblings from their home to the shops lining one of Karrada’s busiest streets. The kids needed new shoes for school, and as a friend of the family and would-be Dad, I took them shopping one summer night. We peered into the windows of one shoe store after another in search of just the right kinds of shoes.

And when we found them, all seven of us trooped inside the shop where the owner patiently fitted each child with the perfect pair of shoes. Before leaving, they picked out new socks to go with their shoes, and after I paid the bill, off we went, hand in hand, sprinting down the street like a herd of wild, free-spirited gazelle.

After this past Sunday’s terrorist attack, I called the family and was relieved to hear that no one was hurt, though they dread having to leave the relative safety of their home to shop for food or other necessities. They tell me they want to leave Iraq and hope that as an American, I can somehow help them overcome bureaucratic hurdles to the immigration process.

I have written letters to lawyers and various officials on behalf of this family and other Iraqi families desperate to flee the violence, but I know the letters are only formalities that have little chance of expediting their immigration. But I write them anyway hoping my efforts, however small, will give the families some degree of comfort. It is the least I can do. After all, it was my government that bears the lion’s share of responsibility for the massive suffering that has afflicted Iraq. Yes, Sunday’s suicide bombing was the work of militants. They have killed and tortured thousands of innocents in cities throughout the country. But their bloody rampage is one of the tragic consequences of the war of aggression launched by the Bush Administration in 2003. As the Nuremberg Judgment of 1946 unequivocally states, a war of aggression “is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” I would include the ongoing terrorist attacks in Iraq as one more manifestation of the “accumulated evil” resulting from Bush’s war.

Predictably, our mainstream media are rather miserly when it comes to covering the latest assault against the civilian population of Iraq. The horrendous loss of life in Orlando, Florida when a gunman opened fire in a popular gay nightclub and slaughtered 50 people merited front-page coverage and extensive interviews with survivors. Candlelight vigils to mourn the dead, a sit-in by members of Congress calling for the passage of gun control legislation, meticulous examinations of the shooter’s history, family life, religious and political orientations — these and other appropriate, necessary responses succeeded in keeping the story alive and bringing into focus the need to understand why these mass murders occur and why they are on the rise in this country.

No such attention is given to the latest mass murder in Iraq, though I have unearthed the occasional article, including a story on page 6 of the Tuesday, July 5 edition of The New York Times. But as far as I could tell, an outpouring of grief for the victims did not put a damper on this year’s Fourth of July celebration. In Boston, on the city’s famed Esplanade, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture primed the audience for the spectacular pyrotechnic finale. The bells were tolling throughout the city but not for the dead in Baghdad.

Today, with these words, I light a candle to remember the children who died in Sunday’s firestorm in Baghdad, the families who were obliterated, the individuals burned beyond recognition, the surviving friends and relatives looking for answers in the still-smoldering ruins and weeping in wave upon wave of inconsolable grief. My heart is with you, dear sisters and brothers. My hope is that others will light candles too and be moved to stand beside you and call in one invincible voice for an end to war in all its forms.

George Capaccio is a writer and activist living in Arlington, MA. During the years of US- and UK-enforced sanctions against Iraq

6 July 2016