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By Vacy Vlazna

In April, President Abbas, true to form, buckled under international pressure to sacrifice the integrity of the land of Palestine on the altar of another bogus ‘peace’ initiative by friends of Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) had been circulating to UN Security Council members a draft resolution condemning Israeli settlements when the French government effortlessly convinced Abbas to cease and desist the demand to protect diminishing Palestinian land being razed for settlement expansion until after France held its Paris talkfest.

Well, the Paris shindig, attended by foreign ministers from Europe, Arab States and the US has come and gone with notable diplomatic irrelevance. It ended, heedless of the French request for urgent deadlines, with no set timetable for yet another pointless peace stunt later in the year.

Inevitably, Paris impotently administered CPR to the dead two state solution, tokenly stated that the status quo is not sustainable while maintaining the status quo, purposely minimised criticism of Israel, mouthed empty alarm at the violence on the ground, dodged the Right of Return, fantasised about a mythical peace à la Arab Peace Initiative. A further dead giveaway of the inanity of the Paris pretence. was its acknowledgement of the key role of the failed quisling Quartet.

And Paree was flush with anti-Palestine quislings. Of the 26 countries represented, 11* have not recognised the State of Palestine. The host, yes, was the very same France that has no diplomatic relations with the State of Palestine, and is tied with Germany as ‘Europe’s largest exporter of arms to Israel’ (Halper). Not one French bullet nor air-to-ground missile, not one Rafaele fighter jet, nor Mistral helicopter carrier was sold to Palestine. In 2014, during Israel’s monstrous assault on Gaza, France was the first in the world to ban pro-Palestine rallies, even posting details of rallies could incur a year’s imprisonment or a 15,000 Euro fine. France has criminalised BDS under the Lellouche law as an incitement to hatred and anti-semitism which violates the right to freedom of expression once defended popularly and hypocritically by the Charlie Hebdo issue.

Seemingly unfazed by Israel’s destruction (this year alone) of 150 European funded projects at a loss of a mere $74 million, EU foreign policy head, Federica Mogherini, ‘stressed that the aim of the summit was not to impose terms’. This fits snugly with the EU’s overlooking the terms of the settlement funding ban in the Horizon 2020 agreement with Israel involving, according to Halper, ‘the biggest single R&D budget in the world, which will make €80 billion of funding available over seven years (2014–20)’

The Arab turncoat delegation included the Arab League, Saudi Arabia (of killing Yemeni children and bombing MSF hospital fame), Egypt, Jordan, Morocco all of which are US pawns thereby no friends of the Palestinian people. The Saudis are France’s top arms client and Jordan, UAE and Egypt (plus Israeli defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman) are manoeuvring for Death-Squad-Dahlan to succeed Abbas ignoring that prison not presidency is Dahlan’s rightful fate.

Double-dealer Ban Ki Moon jibber-jabbered about the need for courageous leadership- a concept that is beyond his ken. UN leadership should have booted out Israel from the UN decades ago for violating international law and ignoring dozens of UN resolutions particularly UNSC Resolution 242 calling for the withdrawal of Israel armed forced from territories in the 1967 war and 446 that “Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

The cherry on the top of the quisling pie, was the absent PA (Palestinian and Israeli officials were not invited – go figure!) carrying on the Arafat tradition of fiddling perks while Palestine dwindles. In the mere 6 weeks from the PA suspension of its anti-settlement initiative to the end of the French sham, the Zionists pushed on airbrushing, dunum by dunum, Palestine from the face of the world;

Early April Plan No. 901/20 ‘which states the construction of a new bypass road on lands of Beit Ummer, Halhul and Al Arroub’ was begun.

23-4-16 ‘The Israeli authorities delivered notices to the Palestinian village of Jalud in the northern occupied West Bank, alerting residents that 5,000 dunams (1,250 acres) of private land were slated for confiscation in what appeared to be the retroactive legalization of illegal outposts in the area.’

26-4-16 ‘The committee of sit-inners in Occupied Jerusalem warned on Monday of the seriousness of the Israeli settlement project to build 1,690 new housing units over Qalandya town’s confiscated lands in Occupied Jerusalem.’

1-5-16 ‘Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s plan to apply Israeli laws to Jews living in West Bank settlements,opens way to annex the settlements.’

9-5-16 ‘Israeli ministry of security decided to establish a new settlement close to Shilo settlement for those settlers who will be evacuated from Amona outpost.’

23-5-16 ‘Israeli bulldozers from Bado’il settlement on Sunday leveled Palestinian plots of land belonging to Deir Ballut town, west of Salfit province. ‘

24-5-16 ‘Israeli Meyashvei Zion association revealed that a new settlement project is scheduled to be built at the expense of the public park in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Occupied Jerusalem.’

26-5-16 Extremist settler, Yehuda Glick who aims to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque enters the Knesset.

26-5-16 ‘Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said that her government will continue settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank and that more settlers will reside there.’

31-5-16 ‘The Israeli Civil Administration re-mapped over 15,000 acres in the occupied West Bank in an attempt at justifying illegal settlement expansion inside the re-designated areas.’

31-5-16 ‘President Reuven Rivlin ..vowed the West Bank settlement of Ariel would forever remain under Israeli control, despite its location deep inside the West Bank.’

6-3-16 ‘Israeli government endorsed, in a session held in Occupied Jerusalem, the investment of 220 million dollars in settlement projects in Jerusalem over five years under the pretext of “city development”.’

Don’t fool yourself that the Abbas gang are naive or victims of a Zionist-international conspiracy to obliterate Palestine. Victims they are not. They are co-conspirators since signing the Oslo Accords and Paris Protocols in the early nineties.

The PA, intimately familiar with Western and Arab quislings, knew the French farce was doomed to fail the Palestinian people, though cynically on cue Mansour, Erekat, Ashrawi, al Maliki moaned and shed crocodile tears. Yet, a few days before Paris, on 28 May, at the Arab League meeting in Cairo, Abbas agreed in principle to land swaps which he knows are illegal even though there’s precious little left of Palestine to swap thanks to years of two-state negotiations that Abbas and Netanyahu are keen to resume.

Abbas knows that for 100 years to this very day (and beyond ) the Zionist goal, which has never been compromised, is a Zionist state on the whole of Palestine. It is this goal that drives the settlement facts on the ground rendering the two state solution an illusion, a deception.

And Abbas and Co hang in there by directing their vicious security militia to protect Zionist interests and expansion by crushing Palestinian resistance and fending off the main threat to Israel, and to fat-cat-PA self-interests— reconciliation i.e. Palestinian unity.

You may wonder why Palestinians in the West Bank don’t stage a coup against the the corrupt PA/PLO and bring them to trial for treason under the PLO Revolutionary Penal Code 1979 that still applies:

Article 144: Any person who provides the enemy with documents, or is considered to have harmed military actions, or the security of military sites and centres, or any other military institutions shall be punished by death,

Article 148: Any person who leads the enemy to the sites of the revolutionary forces, or the allied forces, or misleads these forces shall be punished by death.

Well, you can ask Hamas affiliated prisoners in Zionist gaols due to PA intelligence sharing with Israel. Or ask the grieving parents of Adel Jaradat, 19 who was killed on 7th June during a PA raid in Silat Harithya near Jenin. PA security forces, trained by the US, conduct raids identical to Zionist Occupation Forces- and kill identically. Or ask the widow of Omar al-Nayef conveniently assassinated in the Palestinian embassy in Bulgaria. Or ask Kefah Quzmar tortured and held in solitary confinement without legal representation by the PA for daring to dissent on Facebook, “Do you know why the mukhabarat [intelligence service] is a rotten agency? Because the entire PA is rotten. Seif al-Idrissi is under arrest! #FreedomforSeif”

Nevertheless, the 6.2 million Palestinians isolated and trapped in the Zionist and PA pincers of brutal oppression have friends. The Palestinian civil society call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel which champions Palestinian rights and freedoms is activated by international grass roots activism that has rapidly evolved into a powerful resistance structure that Israel is desperate to destroy.

A pan-Palestine BDS joining Palestinians inside historic Palestine with the 6.2 million free diasporan Palestinians, in the spirit of the Palestinian ‘rejectfenchinitiative’ , could achieve what the PA/PLO has abrogated.

*France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, UK, USA, Canada

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.

14 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

In the winter of 1941, a Jewish gravedigger from Chelmo, the western province of Poland, appeared in Warsaw and desperately sought a meeting with Jewish leaders.

He told them the Nazis were rounding up Jews, including the old, women and children, and forcing them into what looked like tightly sealed buses. The buses had the exhaust pipes redirected into the cabins. The Jews were killed with carbon monoxide. He had helped dig the mass graves for thousands of corpses until he escaped.

On the way to Warsaw, he had gone from village to village, frantically warning the Jews. Scores of Jews, in the villages and ultimately in Warsaw, heard his testimony of horror and dismissed it.

A handful of listeners, however, including Zivia Lubetkin, who two years later would help lead the uprising by 500 armed Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, instantly understood the ultimate aims of the Nazi state.

“I don’t know how we intuitively shared the same horrible conviction that the total annihilation of all the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe was at hand,” she wrote in her memoir, “In the Days of Destruction and Revolt.”

She and a handful of young activists started planning a revolt. From that moment forward, they existed in a parallel reality.

“We walked along the overcrowded streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, hundreds of thousands of people pushing and rushing about in fright, antagonistic and tense, living the illusion that they were fighting for their lives, their meager livelihood, but, in reality, when you closed your eyes you could see that they were all dead …”

The established Jewish leadership warned the resistance fighters to desist, telling them to work within the parameters set by the Nazi occupiers. The faces of the established Jewish leaders, when they were informed of the plans to fight back, she wrote, “grew pale, either from sudden fear or from anger at our audacity. They were furious. They reproached us for irresponsibly sowing the seeds of despair and confusion among the people, for our impertinence in even thinking of armed resistance.”

The greatest problem the underground movement faced, she wrote, was “the false hope, the great illusion.” The movement’s primary task was to destroy these illusions. Only when the truth was known would widespread resistance be possible.

The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses.

Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.

The promises made by the corporate state and its political leaders—we will restore your jobs, we will protect your privacy and civil liberties, we will rebuild the nation’s infrastructure, we will save the environment, we will prevent you from being exploited by banks and predatory corporations, we will make you safe, we will provide a future for your children—are the opposite of reality.

The loss of privacy, the constant monitoring of the citizenry, the use of militarized police to carry out indiscriminate acts of lethal violence—a daily reality in marginal communities—and the relentless drive to plunge as much as two-thirds of the country into poverty to enrich a tiny corporate elite, along with the psychosis of permanent war, presage a dystopia that will be as severe as the totalitarian systems that sent tens of millions to their deaths during the reigns of fascism and communism.

There is no more will to reform, or to accommodate the needs and rights of the citizens by the corporate state, than there was to accommodate the needs and rights of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. But until the last moment, this reality will be hidden behind the empty rhetoric of democracy and reform. Repressive regimes gradually institute harsher and harsher forms of control while denying their intentions. By the time a captive population grasps what is happening, it is too late.

The elaborate ruses set up by the Nazis that kept Jews and others slated for extermination passive until they reached the doors of the gas chambers, usually decorated with a large Star of David, were legend. Those taken to death camps were told they were going to work. Unloading ramps at Treblinka were made to look like a train station, with fabricated train schedules posted on the walls and a fake train clock and ticket window. Camp musicians played. The elderly and infirm were escorted from the cattle cars to a building called the infirmary, with the Red Cross symbol on it, before being shot in the back of the head. Men, women and children, who would die in the gas chambers within an hour, were given tickets for their clothes and valuables.

“The Germans were quite courteous when they led people to be slaughtered,” Lubetkin noted acidly.

Jews in ghettos, awaiting deportation to the death camps, were divided by those who worked for the Nazis and therefore had certain privileges, and those who did not. This division effectively pitted the two groups against each other until the final deportations. And collaborating with the killers, in the vain hope that they would be spared, were Jews themselves, organized into Jewish Councils, or Judenrat, and formed into units of the Jewish police, along with what Lubetkin called “their cronies, the spectators and profiteers, the smugglers.”

In the death camps, Jews, to stay alive a little longer, worked in the crematoriums as sonderkommandos. There are always those among the oppressed willing to sell out their neighbor for a few more crusts of bread. As life becomes desperate, the choice is often between collaboration and death.

Our corporate masters know what is coming. They know that as the ecosystem breaks down, as financial dislocations create new global financial meltdowns, as natural resources are poisoned or exhausted, despair will give way to panic and rage.

They know coastal cities will be covered by rising sea levels, crop yields will plummet, soaring temperatures will make whole parts of the globe uninhabitable, the oceans will become dead zones, hundreds of millions of refugees will flee in desperation, and complex structures of governance and organization will break down.

They know that the legitimacy of corporate power and neoliberalism—as potent and utopian an ideology as fascism or communism—will crumble. The goal is to keep us fooled and demobilized as long as possible.

The corporate state, operating a system Sheldon Wolin referred to as “inverted totalitarianism,” invests tremendous sums—$5 billion in this presidential election alone—to ensure that we do not see its intentions or our ultimate predicament.

These systems of propaganda play on our emotions and desires. They make us confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge. They get us to identify with the manufactured personality of a political candidate. Millions wept at the death of Josef Stalin, including many who had been imprisoned in his gulags. There is a powerful yearning to believe in the paternal nature of despotic power.

There are cracks in the edifice. The loss of faith in neoliberalism has been a driving force in the insurgencies in the Republican and Democratic parties. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, of course, will do nothing to halt the corporate assault. There will be no reform. Totalitarian systems are not rational. There will only be harsher forms of repression and more pervasive systems of indoctrination and propaganda. The voices of dissenters, now marginalized, will be silenced.

It is time to step outside of the establishment. This means organizing groups, including political parties, that are independent of the corporate political machines that control the Republicans and Democrats.

It means carrying out acts of sustained civil disobedience. It means disruption.

Our resistance must be nonviolent. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, condemned to imminent death and alienated from a Polish population steeped in anti-Semitism, had no hope of appealing to the Nazi state or most of the Poles.

But we still have options. Many who work within ruling class structures understand the corruption and dishonesty of corporate power. We must appeal to their conscience. We must disseminate the truth.

We have little time left. Climate change, even if we halt all carbon emissions today, will still bring rising temperatures, havoc, instability and systems collapse to much of the planet.

Let us hope we never have to make the stark choice, as most of the ghetto fighters did, about how we will die. If we fail to act, however, this choice will one day define our future, as it defined theirs.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
© 2016 TruthDig

14 June, 2016
Truthdig.com

The air strikes also destroyed public and residential areas, historical and religious monuments, schools, hospitals, and many economic infrastructures. Even the food consignments have been attacked by Saudi fighters. As you are already aware, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has added the Saudi-led coalition to an annual blacklist of countries and armed groups that have violated children’s rights in conflict for “killing and maiming” children in Yemen. According to a UN report, the Saudi-led military coalition is responsible for 60 percent of the total number of children killed or wounded in Yemen during the current year. During the attacks of the coalition forces 510 children have been killed and 67 maimed. According to the same report, the Saudi-led coalition is responsible for half of the attacks on schools and hospitals in Yemen.

The Islamic World Peace Forum (IWPF) has always endeavored to preserve human values, peace and justice in the region and the world. , Dr. Davoud Ameri, the Secretary General of the IWPF All global humanitarian organizations are earnestly asked to collectively support the rights of the people of Yemen against the Saudi Arabia’s aggressions and war crimes to really safeguard world peace and security.

The Islamic World Peace Forum (IWPF) takes an exclusive interview with Professor Richard Falk of International Law at Princeton University and the UN Human Rights Council Special Reporter on the situation of human rights in Palestine in 2008 and 2014 and Professor Chandra Muzaffar Head of the International Movement for a Just Peace and Dr. May El Khansa PHD in International Law, human rights activist the Islamic world.

Flowing is the text of this interview:

IWPF: Why the United Nations, despite slamming Saudi Arabia for its war crimes, does not take a serious action to prevent their war crimes?

Richard A Falk: The UN can pass judgment on a powerful member such as Saudi Arabia, but it lacks the geopolitical capability to impose its will on the behavior of such a state, which is an important Western ally, protected by the United States and influential as a source of UN funding and a leading energy producer and supplier. Except for the Secretary General the UN has not condemned the Saudi intervention in Yemen or the crimes against humanity committed during these military operations.
In essence, the UN is important for purposes of symbolic approval or disapproval, but not to reshape the behavior of a resisting state. The pattern with respect to Israel is very much the same. Condemnation of policies and practices, but no capacity or political will to challenge behavior in accordance with UN consensus. Here the people of Yemen suffer while the UN is silent on the abuses being endured.

Chandra Muzaffar: The UN seldom acts even on the issues raised by its own agencies and outfits. This is mainly because it cannot ignore the interests of the nation-states that comprise the UN. The more powerful a state, the greater its ability to thwart a report that may go against its interests. This is why the UN often appears to be impotent.

May El Khansa: It must be reminded that the beginning of the UN headquarters is inside the United States and is considered a hostage or less modified under house arrest and is therefore subject to the policy of the United States.
As for the great crime that the United Nations committed against human rights, and led to the write-off (Saudi Arabia’s )name from the black list for states committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, it is not the first crime committed by UN under its blue flag, through staying silent about the massacres committed against humanity, such as crimes against Palestinian people, and the crimes that occur in African countries, Syria and Iraq … and even un is blind sometimes so it does not see the great countries who participates in the crimes, but major powers sometimes be the decision maker.

IWPF: Isn’t it time for the UN Security Council to send the Saudi Arabian case to the International Criminal Court?

Richard A Falk: It is time from the perspective of a well functioning legal order committed to promoting justice. The UN Security Council, subject to the veto by any one of the P-5, is a geopolitical actor that can only reach a decision if these states support such a referral to the International Criminal Court. Up to this point, the United States, in particular, has ‘a special relationship’ with Saudi Arabia that protects it against adverse action in the UN, and especially in the Security Council. As a practical matter, it would require a state that is a member of the ICC to submit evidence to the Office of the Prosecutor that Saudi Arabia’s alleged criminal conduct should be investigated with an eye toward prosecution.
To overlook the Saudi crimes in Yemen, especially toward children, civilians, medical facilities, is to weaken the authority of international criminal law.

Chandra Muzaffar: I agree that there must be bold action against nations and institutions that oppress the people, especially if they are children. One cannot expect the UN Security Council to act in the case of Saudi Arabia because veto wielding members of the Council such as the US and Britain, who are ‘protectors’ of Saudi Arabia will kill any such move. What this means is that there is no chance of Saudi Arabia being hauled up to the International Criminal Court (ICC).

May El Khansa: The UN scandal was a loud this time, and this thing came clear from the Secretary-General, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, who stressed that the international organization had bowed to pressure and financial threats that dangled by Saudi Arabia, which led to write-off ( Saudi Arabia )from the list of committed countries to crimes against humanity, especially in the Yemen, the killing of children.
Thus, because Saudi Arabia has the money, it was able to impose a “veto” or the right of veto against all who dared demanded he held them accountable. And that we are already at a sensitive and critical situation because how can any longer resort to the United Nations to protect innocent people, especially children, and we know that money is the master of the decision and not the law or international agreements, and of course UN under the pressure of money will not send Saudi Arabian to ICC COURT.

IWPF: Why are the Western countries, particularly the United States, silent vis-à-vis the Saudi crimes and even support this country by sending weapons to them?

Richard AFalk: As indicated, the West, and especially the United States, has developed a multi-dimensional special relationship with Saudi Arabia that accords the Kingdom impunity for its criminal practices and policies. Part of this relationship is based on arms sales, which bring both profits and dependency, and Saudi Arabia has long been a valued customer. For this reason and others the West turns a blind eye toward both violation of fundamental human rights in Saudi Arabia, and even more surprisingly, major Saudi financial and diplomatic support for extremist versions of Islam that produce political violence in Western countries.
It should be appreciated that in the sectarian struggles in the Middle East, the West has sided with the Saudis, and this alignment applies to Yemen. It is regarded geopolitically in the Middle East as a war justified for the purpose of containing the spread of Iranian influence. Thus, the West supports the political goals of the Saudi intervention, and supplying weapons and engaging in arms sales is consistent with both the political and economic interests of the West.

Chandra Muzaffar: Saudi leaders are allied and aligned to Washington DC. This is why Western leaders as a whole are silent when it comes to Saudi crimes. For protecting the Saudi elite, the rulers of the US, Britain and other such countries are guaranteed control over Saudi oil. They are also in control of the strategic sea- routes in the vicinity of Saudi Arabia and some of the other states in that region. Besides, the Saudi and some of the other elites in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) also purchase a lot of sophisticated weapons from the US, Britain and other Western states. How can we expect Western leaders to speak up against Saudi crimes when there is such an incestuous relationship between the Saudi elite and some Western leaders?

May El Khansa: The reasons is Saudi is paying money so that the US arms aids the Saudi-led coalition, against Yemen, also a coalition of Western allies and traditional imperial powers — including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey, armed by the US and UK — is carrying out a brutal war on the poorest country in the Middle East.

IWPF: How can the Islamic Cooperation Organization (OIC) and other Islamic organizations help the settlement of this crisis?

Richard AFalk: The OIC can give greater weight to Saudi wrongdoing, both from perspective of law and morality and from the viewpoint of upholding the reality of Islam as a foundation of peace and tolerance. The OIC has the authority and stature to establish for world public opinion the contrast between Islamic values and Saudi behavior, which suggests that condemnation by the UN should be reinforced by effective actions. Whether the impact on world public opinion is sufficient to alter the approach taken by the West is uncertain, but it is worth the effort.
The OIC could produce an influential report on the Saudi intervention in Yemen giving specific information on the means of warfare that violate international criminal law.

Chandra Muzaffar: The OIC as an organization will not take action against Saudi Arabia since the OIC is actually under the sway of the Saudi elite. Other Islamic organizations have neither the clout nor the resources to help settle the crisis.

May El Khansa: The OIC can do a lot if it was united, but as some Islamic countries are funding this organization it will not be able to be effective and helpful.

IWPF: Why the United Nations Saudi Arabia to immediately be removed from the black list?

Richard A Falk: “I was not familiar with this development, but it is consistent with earlier answer. The UN to survive must accommodate member states that possess relevant geopolitical leverage. Saudi Arabia is one of those states, and although it has lost some of its influence due to the falling price of oil, it is still important to the West as an ally, as a purchaser of arms, and in relation to the regional balance of forces.” Ban Kimonos shocking admission that Saudi Arabia was removed from the blacklist after it threatened to deprive the UN of funding for emergency humanitarian assistance to Palestinians trapped in Gaza tells the world both that he is unfit to serve as Secretary General, and quite literally that Saudi Arabia getsa way with murder at the UN. For the world and its peoples it is sad to realize that the UN to survive must accommodate member states that possess relevant geopolitical leverage no matter how far their behavior falls beneath thresholds of minimal decency. Saudi Arabia is one of those states, and although it has recently lost some of its influence due to the falling price of oil, it is still accorded impunity by the West and even much of Islamic world because of its status as an ally, as a purchaser of arms, and in relation to the regional balance of forces in the Middle East.”

Chandra Muzaffar: It is alleged by diplomats in New York that “Muslim allies of Saudi Arabia piled pressure on UN chief Ban Ki-Moon over the black-listing of a Saudi-led coalition for killing children in Yemen , with Riyadh threatening to cut Palestinian aid and funds to other UN programs.” This is why the UN Secretary-General removed the coalition from the black-list “pending a joint review by the world body and the coalition of cases of child deaths and injuries during the war in Yemen.”
Apart from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Bangladesh also complained to Ban, according to various sources. They threatened the UN Secretary-General that if the Saudi-led coalition was not removed from the black-list, aid from Saudi Arabia and its allies for Palestinian refugees channeled through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) would cease. Saudi Arabia is a big donor to UNWRA, providing it with almost 100 million US dollars in 2015. Kuwait and UAE together supplied 50 million to UNWRA last year.
By threatening the UN in this manner, Saudi Arabia and its allies were actually blackmailing the UN. This is despicable. It is immoral to force the UN to alter its well-researched report on the killing of Yemeni children by exploiting the vulnerable position of Palestinian refugees. It is a travesty of justice.
It is worth recalling that the UN decided not to blacklist Israel in 2015 over the massacre of children in Gaza largely because of pressure from Israel and the United States. Now a number of Arab and Muslim states have also joined them in the “Hall of Shame.”The least the world can do is to condemn Saudi Arabia and its allies for attempting to erase the truth about an immoral act through blackmail. At the same time, global citizens should express deep disappointment over Ban’s succumbing to such blackmail.

May El Khansa: The international organization had bowed to pressure and financial threats that dangled by Saudi Arabia, which led to write-off (Saudi Arabia) from the list of committed countries to crimes against humanity, especially in the Yemen, the killing of children.

IWPF: What role should the Muslim elites and ulama (scholars) play regarding this crisis?

Richard A Falk: I would suppose that Muslim elites and ulama have a strong interest in setting the record straight as to the nature of and limits on acceptable behavior from an Islamic point of view, and questioning Saudi Arabia on the basis of such an assessment.

Chandra Muzaffar: Muslim elites and ulama should raise the awareness of Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere about what is happening in Yemen and other countries The UN’s report on children could serve as a trigger for organized, systematic awareness raising, networking and campaigning. Awareness raising and campaigning will be effective only if those who are leading the process are perceived as women and men of integrity. They should not be biased against one side or the other. Unfortunately, there are very few such individuals in the Muslim world today.

May El Khansa: True hope to solve the problems is the Muslim Elites, by union of Muslims (Sunni and Shia) they must work in earnest to fight fanaticism and terrorism and to stop corruption and waste of money the Islamic countries, and put an end to the rulers of the Muslims who use the money for sectarian incitement and terrorism feed.

14 June 2016

By David Brunnstrom

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has a moral responsibility to try to ease tension between majority Buddhists and minority Rohingya Muslims, her fellow Nobel laureate, the Dalai Lama, said on Monday.

The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had stressed the issue in meetings with Suu Kyi, who came to power in April in the newly created role of state counselor in Myanmar’s first democratically elected government in five decades.

“She already has the Nobel Peace Prize, a Nobel Laureate, so morally she should … make efforts to reduce this tension between the Buddhist community and Muslim community,” he told Reuters in an interview in Washington.

“I actually told her she should speak more openly.”

Violence between Buddhists and Muslims in recent years has cast a cloud over progress with democratic reforms in Myanmar. Rights groups have sharply criticized Suu Kyi’s reluctance to speak out on the Rohingya’s plight.

The Dalai Lama said Suu Kyi, who won worldwide acclaim and a Nobel Peace Prize as a champion of democratic change in the face of military persecution, had responded to his calls by saying that the situation was “really complicated”.

“So I don’t know,” he said.

There is widespread hostility towards Rohingya Muslims in the Buddhist-majority country, including among some within Suu Kyi’s party and its supporters.

More than 100 people were killed in violence in western Rakhine state in 2012, and some 125,000 Rohingya Muslims, who are stateless, took refuge in camps where their movements are severely restricted.

The Dalai Lama said some Buddhist monks in Myanmar “seem to have some kind of negative attitude to Muslims” and Buddhists who harbored such thoughts “should remember Buddha’s face.”

“If Buddha happened, he certainly would protect those Muslim brothers and sisters,” he said.

Suu Kyi said during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry last month that the country needed “enough space” to deal with the Rohingya issue and cautioned against the use of “emotive terms”, that she said were making the situation more difficult.

“It’s very important for the international community to realize the sensitive situation of Rakhine State, and avoid doing anything that would make matters worse and more difficult for the new government to handle it,” Zaw Htay, a spokesman for Suu Kyi’s office, said when asked about Dalai Lama’s comments.

Zaw Htay said Suu Kyi had been trying to “sort out this problem to the best of her ability”, referring to a newly formed committee led by Suu Kyi to bring peace and development to Rakhine State.

The government offered no details on how the new committee would address Rakhine State’s problems.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom, additonal reporting by Aung Hla Tun in YANGON; Editing by David Gregorio, Robert Birsel)

14 June 2016

By Noam Chomsky

[This essay is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]

In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin’s statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.” The call condemned world leaders, who “have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe,” endangering “every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty — ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.

As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of “unchecked climate change.” Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, “broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat,” an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier “holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it’s on a crash diet, losing 5 billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.”

Yet there was little expectation that world leaders in Paris would “act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.” And even if by some miracle they had, it would have been of limited value, for reasons that should be deeply disturbing.

When the agreement was approved in Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who hosted the talks, announced that it is “legally binding.” That may be the hope, but there are more than a few obstacles that are worthy of careful attention.

In all of the extensive media coverage of the Paris conference, perhaps the most important sentences were these, buried near the end of a long New York Times analysis: “Traditionally, negotiators have sought to forge a legally binding treaty that needed ratification by the governments of the participating countries to have force. There is no way to get that in this case, because of the United States. A treaty would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill without the required two-thirds majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate. So the voluntary plans are taking the place of mandatory, top-down targets.” And voluntary plans are a guarantee of failure.

“Because of the United States.” More precisely, because of the Republican Party, which by now is becoming a real danger to decent human survival.

The conclusions are underscored in another Times piece on the Paris agreement. At the end of a long story lauding the achievement, the article notes that the system created at the conference “depends heavily on the views of the future world leaders who will carry out those policies. In the United States, every Republican candidate running for president in 2016 has publicly questioned or denied the science of climate change, and has voiced opposition to Mr. Obama’s climate change policies. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, who has led the charge against Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda, said, ‘Before his international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this is an unattainable deal based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that Congress has already voted to reject.’”

Both parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period of the past generation. Mainstream Democrats are now pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” Meanwhile, the Republican Party has largely drifted off the spectrum, becoming what respected conservative political analyst Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein call a “radical insurgency” that has virtually abandoned normal parliamentary politics. With the rightward drift, the Republican Party’s dedication to wealth and privilege has become so extreme that its actual policies could not attract voters, so it has had to seek a new popular base, mobilized on other grounds: evangelical Christians who await the Second Coming, nativists who fear that “they” are taking our country away from us, unreconstructed racists, people with real grievances who gravely mistake their causes, and others like them who are easy prey to demagogues and can readily become a radical insurgency.

In recent years, the Republican establishment had managed to suppress the voices of the base that it has mobilized. But no longer. By the end of 2015 the establishment was expressing considerable dismay and desperation over its inability to do so, as the Republican base and its choices fell out of control.

Republican elected officials and contenders for the next presidential election expressed open contempt for the Paris deliberations, refusing to even attend the proceedings. The three candidates who led in the polls at the time — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson — adopted the stand of the largely evangelical base: humans have no impact on global warming, if it is happening at all.

The other candidates reject government action to deal with the matter. Immediately after Obama spoke in Paris, pledging that the United States would be in the vanguard seeking global action, the Republican-dominated Congress voted to scuttle his recent Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions. As the press reported, this was “a provocative message to more than 100 [world] leaders that the American president does not have the full support of his government on climate policy” — a bit of an understatement. Meanwhile Lamar Smith, Republican head of the House’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, carried forward his jihad against government scientists who dare to report the facts.

The message is clear. American citizens face an enormous responsibility right at home.

A companion story in the New York Times reports that “two-thirds of Americans support the United States joining a binding international agreement to curb growth of greenhouse gas emissions.” And by a five-to-three margin, Americans regard the climate as more important than the economy. But it doesn’t matter. Public opinion is dismissed. That fact, once again, sends a strong message to Americans. It is their task to cure the dysfunctional political system, in which popular opinion is a marginal factor. The disparity between public opinion and policy, in this case, has significant implications for the fate of the world.

We should, of course, have no illusions about a past “golden age.” Nevertheless, the developments just reviewed constitute significant changes. The undermining of functioning democracy is one of the contributions of the neoliberal assault on the world’s population in the past generation. And this is not happening just in the U.S.; in Europe the impact may be even worse.

The Black Swan We Can Never See

Let us turn to the other (and traditional) concern of the atomic scientists who adjust the Doomsday Clock: nuclear weapons. The current threat of nuclear war amply justifies their January 2015 decision to advance the clock two minutes toward midnight. What has happened since reveals the growing threat even more clearly, a matter that elicits insufficient concern, in my opinion.

The last time the Doomsday Clock reached three minutes before midnight was in 1983, at the time of the Able Archer exercises of the Reagan administration; these exercises simulated attacks on the Soviet Union to test their defense systems. Recently released Russian archives reveal that the Russians were deeply concerned by the operations and were preparing to respond, which would have meant, simply: The End.

We have learned more about these rash and reckless exercises, and about how close the world was to disaster, from U.S. military and intelligence analyst Melvin Goodman, who was CIA division chief and senior analyst at the Office of Soviet Affairs at the time. “In addition to the Able Archer mobilization exercise that alarmed the Kremlin,” Goodman writes, “the Reagan administration authorized unusually aggressive military exercises near the Soviet border that, in some cases, violated Soviet territorial sovereignty. The Pentagon’s risky measures included sending U.S. strategic bombers over the North Pole to test Soviet radar, and naval exercises in wartime approaches to the USSR where U.S. warships had previously not entered. Additional secret operations simulated surprise naval attacks on Soviet targets.”

We now know that the world was saved from likely nuclear destruction in those frightening days by the decision of a Russian officer, Stanislav Petrov, not to transmit to higher authorities the report of automated detection systems that the USSR was under missile attack. Accordingly, Petrov takes his place alongside Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who, at a dangerous moment of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, refused to authorize the launching of nuclear torpedoes when the subs were under attack by U.S. destroyers enforcing a quarantine.

Other recently revealed examples enrich the already frightening record. Nuclear security expert Bruce Blair reports that “the closest the U.S. came to an inadvertent strategic launch decision by the President happened in 1979, when a NORAD early warning training tape depicting a full-scale Soviet strategic strike inadvertently coursed through the actual early warning network. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was called twice in the night and told the U.S. was under attack, and he was just picking up the phone to persuade President Carter that a full-scale response needed to be authorized right away, when a third call told him it was a false alarm.”

This newly revealed example brings to mind a critical incident of 1995, when the trajectory of a U.S.-Norwegian rocket carrying scientific equipment resembled the path of a nuclear missile. This elicited Russian concerns that quickly reached President Boris Yeltsin, who had to decide whether to launch a nuclear strike.

Blair adds other examples from his own experience. In one case, at the time of the 1967 Middle East war, “a carrier nuclear-aircraft crew was sent an actual attack order instead of an exercise/training nuclear order.” A few years later, in the early 1970s, the Strategic Air Command in Omaha “retransmitted an exercise… launch order as an actual real-world launch order.” In both cases code checks had failed; human intervention prevented the launch. “But you get the drift here,” Blair adds. “It just wasn’t that rare for these kinds of snafus to occur.”

Blair made these comments in reaction to a report by airman John Bordne that has only recently been cleared by the U.S. Air Force. Bordne was serving on the U.S. military base in Okinawa in October 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a moment of serious tensions in Asia as well. The U.S. nuclear alert system had been raised to DEFCON 2, one level below DEFCON 1, when nuclear missiles can be launched immediately. At the peak of the crisis, on October 28th, a missile crew received authorization to launch its nuclear missiles, in error. They decided not to, averting likely nuclear war and joining Petrov and Arkhipov in the pantheon of men who decided to disobey protocol and thereby saved the world.

As Blair observed, such incidents are not uncommon. One recent expert study found dozens of false alarms every year during the period reviewed, 1977 to 1983; the study concluded that the range is 43 to 255 per year. The author of the study, Seth Baum, summarizes with appropriate words: “Nuclear war is the black swan we can never see, except in that brief moment when it is killing us. We delay eliminating the risk at our own peril. Now is the time to address the threat, because now we are still alive.”

These reports, like those in Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control, keep mostly to U.S. systems. The Russian ones are doubtless much more error-prone. That is not to mention the extreme danger posed by the systems of others, notably Pakistan.

“A War Is No Longer Unthinkable”

Sometimes the threat has not been accident, but adventurism, as in the case of Able Archer. The most extreme case was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the threat of disaster was all too real. The way it was handled is shocking; so is the manner in which it is commonly interpreted.

With this grim record in mind, it is useful to look at strategic debates and planning. One chilling case is the Clinton-era 1995 STRATCOM study “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence.” The study calls for retaining the right of first strike, even against nonnuclear states. It explains that nuclear weapons are constantly used, in the sense that they “cast a shadow over any crisis or conflict.” It also urges a “national persona” of irrationality and vindictiveness to intimidate the world.

Current doctrine is explored in the lead article in the journal International Security, one of the most authoritative in the domain of strategic doctrine. The authors explain that the United States is committed to “strategic primacy” — that is, insulation from retaliatory strike. This is the logic behind Obama’s “new triad” (strengthening submarine and land-based missiles and the bomber force), along with missile defense to counter a retaliatory strike. The concern raised by the authors is that the U.S. demand for strategic primacy might induce China to react by abandoning its “no first use” policy and by expanding its limited deterrent. The authors think that they will not, but the prospect remains uncertain. Clearly the doctrine enhances the dangers in a tense and conflicted region.

The same is true of NATO expansion to the east in violation of verbal promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev when the USSR was collapsing and he agreed to allow a unified Germany to become part of NATO — quite a remarkable concession when one thinks about the history of the century. Expansion to East Germany took place at once. In the following years, NATO expanded to Russia’s borders; there are now substantial threats even to incorporate Ukraine, in Russia’s geostrategic heartland. One can imagine how the United States would react if the Warsaw Pact were still alive, most of Latin America had joined, and now Mexico and Canada were applying for membership.

Aside from that, Russia understands as well as China (and U.S. strategists, for that matter) that the U.S. missile defense systems near Russia’s borders are, in effect, a first-strike weapon, aimed to establish strategic primacy — immunity from retaliation. Perhaps their mission is utterly unfeasible, as some specialists argue. But the targets can never be confident of that. And Russia’s militant reactions are quite naturally interpreted by NATO as a threat to the West.

One prominent British Ukraine scholar poses what he calls a “fateful geographical paradox”: that NATO “exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

The threats are very real right now. Fortunately, the shooting down of a Russian plane by a Turkish F-16 in November 2015 did not lead to an international incident, but it might have, particularly given the circumstances. The plane was on a bombing mission in Syria. It passed for a mere 17 seconds through a fringe of Turkish territory that protrudes into Syria, and evidently was heading for Syria, where it crashed. Shooting it down appears to have been a needlessly reckless and provocative act, and an act with consequences.

In reaction, Russia announced that its bombers will henceforth be accompanied by jet fighters and that it is deploying sophisticated anti-aircraft missile systems in Syria. Russia also ordered its missile cruiser Moskva, with its long-range air defense system, to move closer to shore, so that it may be “ready to destroy any aerial target posing a potential danger to our aircraft,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced. All of this sets the stage for confrontations that could be lethal.

Tensions are also constant at NATO-Russian borders, including military maneuvers on both sides. Shortly after the Doomsday Clock was moved ominously close to midnight, the national press reported that “U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War.” Shortly before, a Russian warplane came within seconds of colliding with a Danish civilian airliner. Both sides are practicing rapid mobilization and redeployment of forces to the Russia-NATO border, and “both believe a war is no longer unthinkable.”

Prospects for Survival

If that is so, both sides are beyond insanity, since a war might well destroy everything. It has been recognized for decades that a first strike by a major power might destroy the attacker, even without retaliation, simply from the effects of nuclear winter.

But that is today’s world. And not just today’s — that is what we have been living with for 70 years. The reasoning throughout is remarkable. As we have seen, security for the population is typically not a leading concern of policymakers. That has been true from the earliest days of the nuclear age, when in the centers of policy formation there were no efforts — apparently not even expressed thoughts — to eliminate the one serious potential threat to the United States, as might have been possible. And so matters continue to the present, in ways just briefly sampled.

That is the world we have been living in, and live in today. Nuclear weapons pose a constant danger of instant destruction, but at least we know in principle how to alleviate the threat, even to eliminate it, an obligation undertaken (and disregarded) by the nuclear powers that have signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The threat of global warming is not instantaneous, though it is dire in the longer term and might escalate suddenly. That we have the capacity to deal with it is not entirely clear, but there can be no doubt that the longer the delay, the more extreme the calamity.

Prospects for decent long-term survival are not high unless there is a significant change of course. A large share of the responsibility is in our hands — the opportunities as well.

Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A TomDispatch regular, among his recent books are Hegemony or Survival and Failed States. This essay is from his new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books, the American Empire Project). His website is www.chomsky.info.

13 June, 2016
Tomdispatch.com

By Binu Mathew

The Orlando shooting in a LGBT bar which left 50 dead and 53 injured is an American tragedy of momentous proportions. America with its gun culture and the dominant, vociferous and influential gun rights advocates, Orlando was a tragedy waiting to happen. Let’s mourn the victims. More than that let’s take it as a moment to make sure that no such tragedy happens in the future.

Is that what’s happening right now? I doubt. The CNN headline screams “Orlando shooting: 50 killed, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance”. Within hours of the tragedy President Obama addresses the nation and says “We know enough to say this was an act of terror and act of hate”.

Let’s take Obama’s statement first. How does he know, that too within hours of the shooting, with the alleged shooter shot dead by the police “enough to say this was an act of terror”? Well, the public doesn’t know ‘enough’ to know that it was an act of terror. How did the police gather ‘enough’ information within hours and pass on to Obama to say that it was an act of terror? According to police sources, as reported by the media, the alleged shooter is Omar Mateen a 29-years-old of Afghan descent. Is that enough to say that it “was an act of terror”? Does Obama has more information on the alleged shooter that he doesn’t want to share with the public? Now that the alleged shooter is dead isn’t it in public interest that he shares that information with the world so that we should avoid any such tragedy in future?

Obama further said that there was no definitive judgment on the killer’s motives, including whether he was affiliated with any terrorist groups. “What is clear is he was filled with hatred”. Filled with hatred? How did Obama read the mind of a dead shooter? This speech of Obama is irresponsible and is deliberately fanning hatred. This is only going to raise further the tempo of Islamophobia in American society and elsewhere which Donald Trump raised to a crescendo in his campaign speeches.

Now coming back to the CNN headline “Orlando shooting: 50 killed, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance”. All that one can say is that ‘how convenient’! It’s like so many similar ‘terror attack’ stories where the alleged ‘terrorist’, in 99.99% cases a Muslim, leaves his I.D in the spot for the investigative agencies just to pick up and prove the identity of a Islamist terror network behind the attack. In the Pulse Night Club Omar Mateen didn’t leave an I.D card, but called 911 to ‘pledge allegiance to ISIS’. It was a very kind of the shooter to have called 911 while he was busy shooting down people at random, holding at least 50 people hostage and being surrounded by hundreds of police men firing at him.

The same CNN report says,

Omar Mir Seddique Mateen was born in 1986 in New York. Most recently he lived in Fort Pierce, about 120 miles southeast of Orlando. Fearing explosives, police evacuated about 200 people from the apartment complex where he lived while they looked through his residence for evidence.

Mateen’s parents, who are from Afghanistan, said he’d expressed outrage after seeing two men kiss in Miami, but they didn’t consider him particularly religious and didn’t know of any connection he had to ISIS.

He was married in 2009 to a woman originally from Uzbekistan, according to the marriage license, but he filed documents to end the marriage in 2011.

Sitora Yusufiy, interviewed by CNN in Boulder, Colorado, said she and Mateen were together about four months, though it took a long time to complete the divorce because they lived in different parts of the country after separating.

Mateen was a normal husband at the beginning of their marriage but started abusing her after a few months, she said. She said Mateen was bipolar, although he was not formally diagnosed. She also said Mateen had a history with steroids. He was religious but she said she doesn’t think his religion played in to the attack.

The same CNN report further says,

At a Sunday afternoon news briefing, FBI Assistant Special Agent Ronald Hopper said the agency was aware of Mateen. The FBI interviewed him in 2013 and 2014 after he expressed sympathy for a suicide bomber, Hopper said.

“Those interviews turned out to be inconclusive, so there was nothing to keep the investigation going,” Hopper said.

Well, the NSA which keeps a tab on our every fart, as revealed by Edward Snowden, couldn’t keep track on a potential ‘terrorist’! Does it sound credible?

Why can’t Obama see the obious? It’s as clear as day light that the act was a homophobic attack on LGBT community. The responsibility of President of America is to find out where lies the origin of homophobia in American community and work towards ensuring the protection of rights and life of LGBT community rather than putting blame on a particular community by calling it a terrorist attack before clear evidences emerge.

To conclude, it’s the responsibility of President Obama and FBI to make their story credible and not put a whole community under suspicion.

Binu Mathew is the editor of www.countercurrents.org and can be reached at editor@countercurrents.org

13 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Richard Cockett

For the Rohingya, Burma’s new democratic government is little better than the old dictatorship.

As Burma’s new government gets down to business, one thing is increasingly clear — there won’t be much to look forward to for the country’s one million or so Rohingya people.

The West has rejoiced at the election of a new government dominated by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and headed, in effect, by the party’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prize winner. But for the Muslims of western Rakhine state — described by the United Nations as the “most persecuted minority in the world” — Burma’s new era is already turning out to be a disappointment. There is almost certainly worse to come.

The Rohingya have endured decades of harassment, marginalization, and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Burma’s old military regimes (and the local Rakhine people), amounting, some argue, to genocide. Everyone knew that Burma’s new leader, Suu Kyi, has also been ambivalent towards their plight. She has refused to even call them by their own name, for fear of offending the country’s often Islamophobic Buddhist majority in the run-up to last November’s general election, which she won by a landslide. But surely Burma’s first civilian government since the 1960s would be better than the murderous, kleptocratic rule of the generals?
Maybe not. First came the news, in mid-May, that the Burmese foreign ministry (now headed by Suu Kyi) had asked the American embassy not to use the term Rohingya on the spurious grounds that it was “controversial” and “not supportive in solving the problem that is happening in Rakhine state.” The Americans refused. The request was utterly disingenuous. The Rakhine people might indeed prefer to call the Rohingya “Bengalis” (implying that they are illegal immigrants from what is now Bangladesh), but this is an essential part of the exclusion of the Rohingya from the mainstream of Burmese life that constitutes the problem in the first place.

Prompted by the visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Suu Kyi returned to the theme on May 22, saying that her government would be firm about not using “emotive terms” like Rohingya or Bengali. Yet, as has been pointed out, she has never asked anyone — chauvinist Buddhist monks, soldiers or legislators — to refrain from using the term “Bengali.” The Rohingya will also have been disappointed that President Obama recently relaxed sanctions against Burma as a reward for its shift towards democracy, without mentioning the fact that nothing has changed in the authorities’ mistreatment of the Rohingya.

Furthermore, it is evident that the Rohingya will be excluded from the formal “peace process” that the new government intends to take up with the rest of the country’s ethnic minority groups, such as the Kachin, Karen, Chin, Shan and more. This process, inherited from the last government of President Thein Sein, is an attempt to find a lasting resolution to the civil conflicts that have plagued the country virtually since its independence from Britain in 1948. Suu Kyi has called for a second “Panglong-style” peace conference, invoking the memory of an agreement her father, General Aung San, negotiated with indigenous ethnic groups in 1947 before he was assassinated.

The recent peace process, however, has involved only those groups defined as indigenous peoples under the terms of the controversial, military-inspired 1982 Citizenship Act. The Rohingya are not citizens under that act, and they have never been included in any such process.

In all likelihood, the new government will simply try to park the Rohingya issue, which is viewed as marginal. Burma’s new president, Htin Kyaw, has set up a grand-sounding “Central Committee for Implementation of Peace and Development in Rakhine State,” which consists of 27 officials, including the members of the cabinet and representatives of the Rakhine state government, to be chaired by Suu Kyi herself. But the Rohingya fear that this is merely a bureaucratic device meant to postpone taking any firm decisions, and they also worry that they may not even have any input into the committee. Meanwhile, the government will get on with drawing up the federal-style constitution that is needed to satisfy the political aspirations of other ethnic minority groups. There is a lot of sympathy among members of Suu Kyi’s party, the NLD, for the suffering of the Karen, Kachin, and others over the past decades. So the party can be expected to negotiate in good faith with these groups, who are also represented institutionally at the higher levels of the NLD. There is very little sympathy, however, for the Rohingya among party ranks — the NLD is only marginally less riddled with Islamophobia and prejudice against the Rohingya than the last military government. Neither do the Rohingya have any voice or representation in the NLD.

Indeed, for the first time in recent years, since last November’s election there is not a single Muslim legislator in the entire country, despite the fact that the Muslim population of Burma numbers up to three million. Suu Kyi knows that that there is no political constituency in Burma for helping the Rohingya, just as she also knows that they do not have an armed wing (as most of the other ethnic groups do), so their capacity to make life difficult for the authorities has always been correspondingly less. In other words, apart from the demands of her own conscience, Burma’s de facto leader has little domestic incentive to do anything at all for the Rohingya.

The risk is that pushing the issue to the margins will have a devastating effect on the already desperate situation of the Rohingya. Separated from the rest of the population in refugee camps, or cooped up in their villages, their movement is tightly restricted. They have been cut off from their former sources of livelihood and live under an apartheid system in their own land. Ambia Preveen, a Rohingya doctor working in Germany, estimates that 90 percent of the Rohingya are denied access to formal healthcare. A recent study of poverty and health in Rakhine state by Mahmood Saad Mahmood for Harvard University shows vast disparities between the Rohingya and the Rakhine: There is only one physician per 140,000 Rohingya, but in the parts of Rakhine state dominated by the Rakhine, there is one doctor per 681 people. Acute malnutrition affects 26 percent of people in the Rohingya-dominated area of northern Rakhine state, whereas the figure is just 14 percent in Rakhine-dominated areas, and so on.

If the Rohingya give up on any prospects of change from this new NLD government — and well they might — then they will probably take to the boats again, as they did last year, fleeing in the thousands to other Muslim countries in South-East Asia. They will risk drowning in flimsy craft provided by unscrupulous human traffickers, and the crisis will merely spread abroad once again.

What can be done? Since there is no domestic imperative to help the Rohingya, it’s up to countries like the United States and Britain to exert all the pressure that they can on Suu Kyi’s government over this issue. The Western powers have helped enormously in rebuilding the NLD as a functioning political party, in providing Suu Kyi and her ministers with technical expertise and practical advice, and in beefing up the institutions, such as the national parliament, that have been at the fore of the democratic transition. Given this leverage, it must be made clear that the one million Rohingya are an essential part of that new democracy, and that even if they are not technically “citizens” under the present constitution (one which Suu Kyi herself rejects, albeit for different reasons) the government will be judged by how far it protects and gradually includes them. And even if the NLD balks at giving the Rohingya citizenship — as the United Nations, for one, has demanded — it could at least repeal repressive legislation passed by the last military government, such as the four so-called “Race and Religion Protection Laws.”

Passed in 2015, these laws were inspired by the nationalist, sectarian monks of the Ma Ba Tha movement, and are aimed squarely at restricting the personal freedom and choices of Burma’s Muslims. If enforced with any vigor, these laws could provoke even more tension, especially between the Rakhine and Rohingya. The NLD stood against these laws when it was in opposition. Now it is in power, the party should repeal them, sending a clear signal that the new government is genuinely concerned with the human and civil rights of all those who live in the country, and that the Rohingya are part of the wider reform process.

But the country’s other minority ethnic groups, as do the Rohingya themselves, also have a role to play. The latter have long been isolated from their fellow minorities, politically as much as geographically, and this has added to their marginalization. Although the plight of the Rohingya is now well advertised outside Burma, little is known about them in their own country. Rather than investing all their hopes for change in the international community, the Rohingya should now take the initiative to build bridges with the Kachin, Karen, Mon, and others, who have also suffered at the hands of the Burman-dominated central governments, to strengthen their political position and to make their case more visible.

It is in their interest of these other groups to overcome their own prejudices against the Rohingya, as the latter bring considerable international goodwill, diplomatic support, and potentially money, to the negotiating table. As much good as the international community can do, real change will not come until the political dynamics of the Rohingya issue change within Burma itself.

Richard Cockett is former Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Economist and the author of Blood, Dream and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma (Yale University Press, 2015).

9 June 2016

 

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

“It appears that political power and diplomatic clout have been allowed to trump the UN’s duty to expose those responsible for the killing and maiming of more than 1,000 of Yemen’s children.”- Sajjad Mohammad Sajid, Oxfam Director in Yemen, Jun 7, 2016

It is such cases that give the United Nations a bad name. And if heads and decay say something about the rest of the body, Ban Ki-Moon says all too much in his role as UN Secretary General. Always inconspicuous, barely visible in the global media, his presence scarcely warrants a footnote. This has been a point of much relief for various powers who have tended to see the UN as a parking space for ceremony and manipulation rather than concrete policy.

A most sinister feature of the latest UN reversal is the role played by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia behind the move. Other powers have previously attempted to prejudice the various organs, and functions of the UN, exerting various pressures. In March, Morocco made its position clear when it expelled 84 UN staffers from a UN peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara region after Ban deemed the disputed territory “occupied”.

The Kingdom is engaged in an enthusiastically bloody campaign in Yemen against the Shia Houthi insurgents, one that can scant be described as compliant with the laws of war. This was one of the subjects of a 40-page report, written primarily by the UN chief’s special representative for children and armed conflict Leila Zerrougui.

In an expansive document spanning several countries and regions, it was found that the Saudi-led coalition had been implicated in the deaths of some 60 per cent of the 1,953 child deaths and injuries in Yemen last year. A policy of systematic targeting of hospitals and schools was also noted. In Aden alone, six facilities were attacked 10 times.

On Monday, the UN announced that the Saudi-led coalition had been removed from the child’s rights blacklist. This sent a flurry through various diplomatic channels. The Secretary-General found himself red faced and crestfallen. According to Ban’s spokesman Stephane Dujarric, “Pending the conclusions of the joint review, the secretary-general removes the listing of the coalition in the report’s annex.”

Ban expressed a sense of helplessness. Before reporters at UN headquarters, he explained how, “This was one of the most painful and difficult decisions I have had to make.” Before him was the “very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would de-fund many UN programmes.”

Hoping to salvage tattered credibility, Ban still insisted that he stood by the contents of the report, warning that the coalition might make an ignominious reappearance depending on the findings of an investigation. In UN-speak, those findings can always be tinkered with. Given that Saudi Arabia will front that investigation along UN officials, the result is as good as decided.

The response by Saudi Ambassador Abdullah al-Mouallimi on Thursday gave a true sense of implausible deniability. “We did not use threats or intimidation and we did not talk about funding.” A slew of aggressive calls from coalition countries suggested otherwise. On Tuesday, Foreign Policy reported that the Kingdom had dangled the threat of severing ties with the UN and cut hundreds of millions of dollars in counterterrorism and humanitarian aid if it was not removed from the list.

The Monday warning involved senior Saudi diplomats threatening UN officials with their powers of conviction, stretching across other Arab governments and those in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to similarly sever ties.

What, then, could Ban have done? From the start, the role of the secretary-general was unclear. A US Department of State meeting prior to the Preparatory Commission in London (Aug 17, 1945), recorded that the SG “should be a man of recognized prestige and competence in the field of diplomacy and foreign office experience. He should be between forty-five and fifty-five years of age and be fluent in both French and English.”

In 1985, that noted doyen of international law, Thomas Franck, emphasised that the SG was an official best disposed to fact-finding, peacekeeping initiatives and good offices. He surmised in a Hague Academy of International Law workshop that, till that point, the office had been occupied by those “completely successful in drawing a line between their role and the role played by political organs at the behest of member States.”

All in all, combative, engaged UN secretary-generals remain a distant murmur, one initially built by such figures as Dag Hammarskjöld and Trygve Lie. The last of any note to push the buttons of various powers, notably that of the US, was the late Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who brought a sustained arrogance to the office.

It was, to a degree, a fair call. The Cold War had thawed, thereby providing the body the prospect for a more active role. It was not to be, though Boutros-Ghali became one of the main celebrity hates for US politicians.

What we have gotten since is weak will and pliability, best reflected by Ban’s decision. To be fair, the organisation’s effectiveness has tended to suffer at stages because of an inability to collect back dues, or keeping the line of revenue flowing. The greatest violator of that tendency has been Washington itself. Again, the money card has been played, with all too predictable results. Human rights remain the playthings of the powerful.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

10 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Eresh Omar Jamal

Anyone who is even barely informed knows by now that the “official 9/11 story” is a complete fantasy. The event did, however, provide the US government with a “catastrophic and catalysing event like a new pearl harbour,” which the Project for the New American Century — co-written by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz along with seven other individuals, who went onto serve for the Bush administration — said was needed, 9 months before 9/11 happened, to bring about “revolutionary changes” and “secure energy supplies” for the US.

From having the only skyscrapers in history anywhere in the world to ever even fall down from a fire, let alone vertically on its own footprint, which thousands of engineers and experts from other fields say is impossible, to having “3 skyscrapers fall vertically down on its own footprint after being hit by 2 planes”, the official 9/11 story is one of the most imaginative, yet, hard to believe fairy-tales of our time. That is right. Remember building 7? It also collapsed vertically down on its own footprint after NOT being hit by a plane in the same fashion as the twin towers did, in the same way that buildings come down during controlled demolitions as confirmed by engineers and other experts.

Pointing out the many holes in the official 9/11 story, however, is not the point of this article. All I want to point out to the reader before proceeding any further is that whatever happened, the “official story is a lie” and that the “US government was surely involved” in it somehow, as the world’s most sophisticated aerospace defence system — the North American Aerospace Defence Command — which protects North America from any such attacks completely, had stood down on September 11, 2001, and many whistleblowers have even said that the orders to stand down came from the highest levels of government. Despite all of this and more, there is no way, as of yet, to confirm what really happened — all we can do is speculate. That may, however, well be changing.

Speculating

First, let me speculate based on my research of the event and from testimonies of various whistleblowers as to what really happened. What I believe happened was that the US government had funded various elements within Saudi Arabia (among others) to carry out many aspects of the 9/11 attack (for example, 15 out of the 19 hijackers were allegedly from Saudi Arabia), so that it can invade other countries to serve the interest of the Anglo-American elite, based on false allegations against those innocent countries. 9/11 was a false flag attack, just like hundreds of others carried out by various governments around the world, throughout history.

It is already well known that the US government and the CIA have had close ties with various groups in Saudi Arabia, including the Saudi royal family, for years. Various sources within the US establishment has even suggested that the attackers of 9/11 were funded by members close to, or even belonging to, the Saudi royal family. But that aside, I believe that the US government had primarily ran the whole show, hoping that they would be able to bury the evidence implicating the various elements within Saudi Arabia to the events of 9/11 so as to eradicate the trail, which would eventually lead to them. That is precisely why the establishment had tried so hard, and continues to, to keep 28-pages of the 9/11 Commission Report classified, as according to some within the US government who has looked at those pages, “it clearly implicates the Saudi regime”. And it is the push to declassify those 28-pages that is blowing the lid anew, on the “official 9/11 story”.

Turning on each other

Given the talks of declassifying those 28-pages along with the US government allowing the 9/11 victims’ families to sue the Saudi government for damages through the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act which was passed by the Senate on May 17, 2016, the Saudi press recently claimed what is, perhaps, already well known, that the 9/11 attacks were a false flag operation run by the US government. On April 28, 2016, the London-based Saudi daily Al-Hayat published an article written by Saudi legal expert Katib Al-Shammari, arguing that “The US itself had planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, placing the blame on a shifting series of others — first Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and now Saudi Arabia (“Article In Saudi Daily: US Planned, Carried Out 9/11 Attacks — But Blames Others For Them”, Middle East Media Research Institute, May 19, 2016).”

Al-Shammari’s article states that:

“Those who follow American policy see that it is built upon the principle of advance planning and future probabilities. This is because it occasionally presents a certain topic to a country that it does not wish [to bring up] at that time but [that it is] reserving in its archives as an ace to play [at a later date] in order to pressure that country. Anyone revisiting… [statements by] George HW Bush regarding Operation Desert Storm might find that he acknowledged that the US Army could have invaded Iraq in the 1990s, but that [the Americans] had preferred to keep Saddam Hussein around as a bargaining chip for [use against] other Gulf states. However, once the Shi’ite wave began to advance, the Americans wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, since they no longer saw him as an ace up their sleeve.

September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyse the images and the videos [of 9/11] agree unanimously that what happened in the [Twin] Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the US. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings… Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing [into them] only gave the green light for the detonation — they were not the reason for the collapse.”

It further says that the events of 9/11 gave the US government the ability to do certain things. For one, “The US [government] created, in public opinion, an obscure enemy — terrorism — which became what American presidents blamed for all their mistakes, and also became the sole motivation for any dirty operation that American politicians and military figures desire to carry out in any country.” Second, that it allowed the US government to launch “a new age of global armament”. And third, it made the American people “choose from two bad options: either live peacefully [but] remain exposed to the danger of death [by terrorism] at any moment, or starve in safety, because [the country’s budget will be spent on sending] the Marines even as far as Mars.” Concluding that, “the nature of the US is [such that] it cannot exist without an enemy”.

Only a few days later, on May 21, 2016, The New York Times ran an article titled, “How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS”, which said:

“Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a front of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists. Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam… Kosovo now has over 800 mosques, 240 of them built since the war and blamed for helping indoctrinate a new generation in Wahhabism. They are part of what moderate imams and officials here describe as a deliberate, long-term strategy by Saudi Arabia to reshape Islam in its image, not only in Kosovo but around the world… Saudi diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2015 reveal a system of funding for mosques, Islamic centres and Saudi-trained clerics that spans Asia, Africa and Europe.”

The article then goes onto grave details about Saudi involvement with extremists and the spread of extremism. Now, the question is, given that the US government has tried so hard to protect its close allies from being implicated with the 9/11 attacks before — both Saudi Arabia and Israel — especially through its propaganda machine, why did The New York Times run such an article? Dr Paul Craig Roberts, who was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan, writes:

“One possible answer is that the public’s confidence in the 9/11 story is eroding as a result of growing expert opinion that challenges the official line. In order to redirect the public’s scepticism, a red herring is being pulled across the trail. The Saudi angle satisfies the belief that some sort of government coverup is involved but ‘redirects’ [emphasis mine] the suspicion from Washington to the Saudis… We are probably experiencing a deep state disinformation play designed to protect the false 9/11 story. The public’s scepticism is now directed at Saudi Arabia, and the public’s outrage is directed at the US government for covering up for the Saudis.”

Interestingly enough, the NYT in an editorial on May 27, 2016, wrote that “Saudi Arabia has frustrated American policy makers for years”. This was because the Saudis have sponsored “extremist clerics” who are “fostering violent jihad”, creating a “fertile ground for recruitment to radical ideology”. What is interesting is that, even if all of that is true, it was the US that had turned Kosovo into a failed state to begin with, prompting for its secession from Serbia in 2008. So if Washington is now willing to scapegoat Saudi Arabia for the disaster (or part of it) that it brought to Kosovo, there is no reason to believe that it will not do the same when it comes to the events of 9/11. As Finian Cunningham pointed out in a piece for RT, “Dishing the dirt on the Saudis over Kosovo is but one aspect of a larger emerging narrative in Washington. One which seeks to offload responsibility for international terrorism, instability and conflict on to America’s Arab allies… Washington is setting the Saudi rulers up to take the rap for a myriad of evils that arguably it has much more responsibility for. The question is: how much can the strategic alliance between the US and its Saudi partner bear — before a straw breaks the camel’s back? (“US stabs Saudi ‘ally’ in the back — again — with terror scapegoating”, RT, June 2).”

Breaking the camel’s back

It seems that Washington is clearly setting the Saudis up to take the fall should the 9/11 cover-up start to unravel even further, as evident from the New York Times’ “new narrative” (which had already been popularised by the alternate media). The Saudis, it seems, can already see the guns being pointed at its direction. That is why the Saudi press had published that piece in the first place. All of this has the potential to finally bring an end to the strategic alliance between Washington and Saudi Arabia which has brought so much death and destruction to the world and, with it, bring the official 9/11 story come crashing down on its head. So, is the “official 9/11 story” coming apart at the seams? Given the amount of suffering that has been brought to so many innocent people around the world based on that false story by its authors, one can only hope so. For those of you who feel the same way, please spread the word, and share this article, and help the “official 9/11 story” come apart at the seams, as it should have, a long time ago.

Eresh Omar Jamal is an editorial assistant at New Age, a leading English daily newspaper in Bangladesh. He has done a Specialised Honours in Financial and Business Economics from York University, Canada. He can be reached at eresh17@hotmail.com.

10 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Robert Barsocchini

Robert Parry says in his latest piece that while the Democrats have been “a reluctant war party” since 1968, by nominating Hillary Clinton, they have once again become an “aggressive war party”.

Noam Chomsky notes that indeed, Hillary Clinton would be more “adventurous”, ie aggressive, than Trump or Sanders in terms of foreign policy, but he and other analysts, like John Pilger, disagree with Parry that the Democrats were, during the period Parry suggests, and perhaps any other, what a rational person would call “reluctant” to kill.

Looking back briefly at a couple of examples of Democratic initiatives, as well as who formed the Democratic party, we see that when it comes to butchering people, the Democrats have never been shy.

John Pilger points out in a recent article that “most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.”

Kennedy began the US genocide against the people of Vietnam, demanding bombings and attacks with chemical weapons like napalm, and began a terrorist campaign against Cuba that continues to date.

Johnson, who viewed the Vietnamese people as “barbaric yellow dwarves”, continued the genocide in Vietnam and Indochina.

Carter supported numerous genocides and terrorist campaigns.

Bill Clinton, among many horrific acts, committed a major genocide against the people of Iraq, and helped lay the foundation for today’s nuclear war tension by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders.

One of Hillary Clinton’s many crimes was to continue this expansion by supporting a US-backed, neo-Nazi and neo-con integrated coup in Ukraine while referring to the president of Russia as “Hitler” – by far the most aggressive stance towards Russia of any US candidate.

See Pilger’s article for some of Obama’s crimes, which in several ways are uniquely extreme.

Truman defied his military advisers and many others and carried out mass nuclear executions of civilians as a way to influence the government of Japan (and likely the Soviet Union), then followed his nuclear attacks by further targeting Japanese civilians with the biggest TNT-based mass-execution of civilians in human history up to that point. Executing civilians was a prominent part of his ‘Democratic’ philosophy. He publicly stated that “the German people are beginning to atone for the crimes of the gangsters whom they placed in power and whom they wholeheartedly approved and obediently followed.” His logic, an example of the standard definition of “terrorism”, would suggest that Israelis, who support almost entirely their state’s illegal annexation and massacres of Palestine, should be targeted and killed until they “atone” for what their government is doing, and that US civilians who supported the sanctions against or invasion of Iraq (etc.) should likewise be punished until they “atone”. This is also the principle behind the 9/11 attacks, though US citizens who support terrorism committed by their own state are quick to engage in the “wrong agent” – genetic– fallacy when this is pointed out.

Looking back further than Truman, we find the Democrats comprised the bulk of the pro-chattel-slavery bloc. As noted at Pbs.org, “after the Civil War, most white Southerners opposed Radical Reconstruction and the Republican Party’s support of black civil and political rights. The Democratic Party identified itself as the “white man’s party” and demonized the Republican Party as being “Negro dominated,” even though whites were in control. Determined to re-capture the South, Southern Democrats “redeemed” state after state — sometimes peacefully, other times by fraud and violence. By 1877, when Reconstruction was officially over, the Democratic Party controlled every Southern state. The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats.”

Backing up again, we see that in fact the Democratic party was founded by supporters of the sadistic genocidaire Andrew Jackson, who enjoyed making clothing from the skin of people who were exterminated in service of expanding the un-free world.

Are Republicans therefore a superior ogranization? Of course not. The two parties check and balance each other to maintain and expand the world’s leading terrorist state.

As we can see, it is nothing new or different for the Democrats to be a party of expansionist gangsters. What is remarkable of Clinton, then, is that even against this gory and tyrannical backdrop, she stands out as especially evil, corrupt, and extremist in her US religio-national supremacism. As Professor Johan Galtung notes, two countries today (and occasionally their proxies) continue to wage aggressive war, thanks to their belief that they have been anointed by their gods: the US and Israel. And Hillary Clinton is as fundamentalist as they come.

As Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky, among others, have recently noted, US elections are “a carnival… a way of making people passive, submissive objects”. Rather than petering out and cowering to the Democratic party, Chomsky says, Sanders supporters should “sustain the ongoing movement, which [should] pay attention to the elections for 10 minutes but meanwhile do other things.” However, at the moment, “it’s the other way around. It’s all focused on the election. It’s just part of the ideology. The way you keep people out of activism is get them all excited about the carnival that goes on every four years and then go home, which has happened over and over.”

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter. Author’s pamphlet ‘The Agility of Tyranny: Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter’.

10 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org