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A Conversation with Pepe Escobar. Global Research News Hour Episode 143

By Michael Welch, Pepe Escobar, and John Schertow

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As of 12 May, 2016, Dilma Rousseff, 36th President of Brazil has had her powers and duties suspended.

Michel Temer, her vice-President, has taken over those responsibilities while a 180 day impeachment process plays out in the Brazilian Senate.

Once registering personal approval ratings of over 70%, Rousseff popularity started to decline in early 2015 in the midst of accusations of involvement in a corruption scandal known as Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato in Portuguese). This scandal involved the State-owned oil company Petrobras and a collection of construction companies which were using bribes to secure contracts at inflated rates. Elected officials were allegedly receiving kickbacks as part of this operation. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Brazil to make their displeasure known.

The impeachment, however, was instigated not by Car Wash, but by a finding that her use of loans from the public treasury to make the country’s budget surplus seem larger than it was constituted a “crime of responsibility.”

Rousseff, once considered the third most powerful woman on the planet, Ms. Rousseff now must wait out a process which could see her removed from office for good. Meanwhile, her replacement, Acting President Temer has already sparked controversy by appointing all white and male members to the Cabinet, and beginning ushering in health and education cuts.

Ms Rousseff has accused right wing elements within the halls of power of orchestrating a coup against her. And she is not alone.

Pepe Escobar has been outspoken throughout this drama in his belief that not only was the impeachment of Rousseff a coup, but that the entire affair benefits not just comprador elites within Brazil, but Washington’s imperialist ambitions as well. Escobar is our featured guest in this hour.

Filling out the show, Intercontinental Cry’s John Ahniwanika Schertow returns to give us a breakdown of how indigenous rights and indigenous struggles are being affected in the midst of the Brazil’s political turmoil.

 

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The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Michael Welch, Pepe Escobar, and John Schertow, Global Research, 2016
22 May 2016

By Alastair Crooke

BEIRUT — Something significant happened in the last few days of April, but it seems the only person who noticed was Stephen Cohen, a professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University.

In a recorded interview, Cohen notes that a section of the Russian leadership is showing signs of restlessness, focused on President Vladimir Putin’s leadership. We are not talking of street protesters. We are not talking coups against Putin — his popularity remains above 80 percent and he is not about to be displaced. But we are talking about serious pressure being applied to the president to come down from the high wire along which he has warily trod until now.

Putin carries, at one end of his balancing pole, the various elites more oriented toward the West and the “Washington Consensus“ and, at the pole’s other end, those concerned that Russia faces both a real military threat from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a hybrid geo-financial war as well. He is being pressed to come down on the side of the latter, and to pry the grip of the former from the levers of economic power that they still tightly hold.

In short, the issue coming to a head in the Kremlin is whether Russia is sufficiently prepared for further Western efforts to ensure it does not impede or rival American hegemony. Can Russia sustain a geo-financial assault, if one were to be launched? And is such a threat real or mere Western posturing for other ends?

What is so important is that if these events are misread in the West, which is already primed to see any Russian defensive act as offensive and aggressive, the ground will already have been laid for escalation. We already had the first war to push back against NATO in Georgia. The second pushback war is ongoing in Ukraine. What might be the consequences to a third?

In mid-April, General Alexander Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee (a sort of super attorney general, as Cohen describes it), wrote that Russia — its role in Syria notwithstanding — is militarily ill prepared to face a new war either at home or abroad, and that the economy is in a bad way, too. Russia, furthermore, is equally ill prepared to withstand a geo-financial war. He goes on to say that the West is preparing for war against Russia and that Russia’s leadership does not appear to be aware of or alert to the danger the country faces.

Bastrykin does not say that Putin is to blame, though the context makes it clear that this is what he means. But a few days later, Cohen explains, the article sparked further discussion from those who both endorse Bastrykin and do precisely mention Putin by name. Then, Cohen notes, a retired Russian general entered the fray to confirm that the West is indeed preparing for war — he pointed to NATO deployments in the Baltics, the Black Sea and Poland, among other places — and underlines again the unpreparedness of the Russian military to face this threat. “This is a heavy indictment of Putin,” Cohen says of the revelations from this analysis. “It is now out in the open.”

What is this all about? For some time there have been indications that a key faction within the Kremlin, one that very loosely might be termed “nationalist,” has become deeply disenchanted with Putin’s toleration of the Washington Consensus and its adherents at the Russian central bank and in other pivotal economic posts. The nationalists want them purged, along with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s perceived Western-friendly government. Putin may be highly popular, but Medvedev’s government is not. The government’s economic policy is being criticized. The opposing faction wants to see an immediate mobilization of the military and the economy for war, conventional or hybrid. This is not about wanting Putin ousted; it is about pushing him to wield the knife — and to cut deeply.

What does this faction want apart from Russia preparing for war? They want a harder line in Ukraine and for Putin to reject U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s snares in Syria. In short, Kerry is still trying to force Assad’s removal and continues to push for further U.S. support for the opposition. The American government is reluctant as well to disentangle “moderates” from jihadis. The view is that America is insincere in trying to cooperate with Russia on a settlement and more intent on entrapping Putin in Syria. Perhaps this is right, as Gareth Porter and Elijah Magnier have outlined.

What this means at a more fundamental level is that Putin is being asked to side with the nationalists against the internationalists aligned with the Washington Consensus, and to purge them from power. Recall, however, that Putin came to power precisely to temper this polarity within Russian society by rising above it — to heal and rebuild a diverse society recovering from deep divisions and crises. He is being asked to renounce that for which he stands because, he is being told, Russia is being threatened by a West that is preparing for war.

The prospect of the seeming inevitability of future conflict is hardly new to Putin, who has spoken often on this theme. He has, however, chosen to react by placing the emphasis on gaining time for Russia to strengthen itself and trying to corner the West into some sort of cooperation or partnership on a political settlement in Syria, for example, which might have deflected the war dynamic into a more positive course. Putin has, at the same time, skillfully steered Europeans away from NATO escalation.

But in both of these objectives the Obama administration is acting to weaken Putin and Lavrov’s hand, and therefore strengthening the hand of those in Russia calling for a full mobilization for war. It is not coincidental that Bastrykin’s alarm-raising article came now, as the Syria ceasefire is being deliberately infringed and broken. Is this properly understood in the White House? If so, must we conclude that escalation against Russia is desired? As Cohen notes, “the Washington Post [in its editorial pages] tells us regularly that never, never, never … under any circumstances, can the criminal Putin be a strategic partner of the United States.”

Is the die then cast? Is Putin bound to fail? Is conflict inevitable? Ostensibly, it may seem so. The stage is certainly being set. I have written before on, “the pivot already under way from within the U.S. defense and intelligence arms of Obama’s own administration” toward what is often referred to as the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” a set of policies developed by the U.S. in the 1990s and early 2000s. The author of one of those policies, the 1992 U.S. Defense Planning Guidance, wrote that the DPG in essence sought to:

… preclude the emergence of bipolarity, another global rivalry like the Cold War, or multipolarity, a world of many great powers, as existed before the two world wars. To do so, the key was to prevent a hostile power from dominating a ‘critical region,’ defined as having the resources, industrial capabilities and population that, if controlled by a hostile power, would pose a global challenge.

In an interview with Vox, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter was clear that this was broadly the bearing by which the Pentagon was being directed to sail. Then again, there is the rather obvious fact that, instead of the much-touted U.S. military pivot ostensibly being to Asia, the actual NATO pivot is being directed to Central Europe — to Russia’s borders. And NATO is plainly pushing the envelope as hard as it dares, up and against Russia’s borders.

Then there is the rhetoric: Russian aggression. Russian ambitions to recover the former Soviet Empire. Russian attempts to divide and destroy Europe. And so on.

Why? It may be that NATO simply presumes these envelope-pushing exercises will never actually come to war, that Russia somehow will back off. And that continuously poking the bear will serve America’s interest in keeping Europe together and NATO cohesive, its sanctions in place, divided from Russia. NATO is due to meet in Warsaw in early July. Perhaps, then, the Western language about Russia’s “aggression” is little more than America heading off any European revolt on sanctions by stirring up a pseudo-threat from Russia and that the Russians are misreading American true intentions, which do not go beyond this. Or do they?

The extraordinary bitterness and emotional outrage with which the American establishment has reacted to Donald Trump’s probable nomination as a presidential candidate suggests that the U.S. establishment is far from having given up on the Wolfowitz doctrine. So has Putin’s strategy of co-opting America in the Middle East been the failure that the Bastrykin faction implies? In other words, is it the case that the policy of gaining cooperation has failed and that Putin must now move beyond it, because America is not about to cooperate and is, instead, continuing the process of cornering Russia?

As the Texas Tribune reported on May 4, “For the first time since his own presidency, George H.W. Bush is planning to stay silent in the race for the Oval Office — and the younger former president Bush plans to stay silent as well.”

To get a sense of the war within the Republican Party (and the Democrats are no less conflicted), read this reaction to that story by the two-time Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Here’s a small selection:

Trump’s triumph is a sweeping repudiation of Bush Republicanism by the same party that nominated them [the Bush’s] four times for the presidency. Not only was son and brother, Jeb, humiliated and chased out of the race early, but Trump won his nomination by denouncing as rotten to the core the primary fruits of signature Bush policies … That is a savage indictment of the Bush legacy. And a Republican electorate, in the largest turnout in primary history, nodded, ‘Amen to that, brother!’
Buchanan continues in another piece: “The hubris here astonishes. A Republican establishment that has been beaten as badly as Carthage in the Third Punic War is now making demands on Scipio Africanus and the victorious Romans” — a reference to Paul Ryan’s attempts to make Trump adhere to Bush Republicanism. “This is difficult to absorb.”

But here, in this crisis, is an opportunity. America could be heading into recession, corporate profits are falling, huge swaths of debt are looking suspect, global trade is sinking and U.S. policy tools for controlling the global financial system have lost their credibility. And there are no easy solutions to the global overhang of increasingly putrid debt.

But a President Trump — were that to happen — can lay blame for any perfect economic storm on the establishment. America is all knotted up at present, as the presidential nomination melee made clear. Some knots will take time to undo, but some could be undone relatively easily, and it seems that Trump has some sense of this. It could start with a dramatic diplomatic initiative.

Historically, most radical projects of reform have started in this way: overturn a piece of conventional wisdom and unlock the entire policy gridlock — the momentum gained will allow a reformer to steamroll even the hardest resistance — in this case, Wall Street and the financial oligarchy — into making reforms.

Trump can simply say that American — and European — national security interests pass directly through Russia — which they clearly do — that Russia does not threaten America — which it clearly does not — and that NATO is, in any case, “obsolete,” as he has said. It makes perfect sense to join with Russia and its allies to surround and destroy the so-called Islamic State.

If one listens carefully, Trump seems halfway there. It would cut a lot of knots, maybe even untie the policy gridlock. Perhaps that is what he intends?

17 May 2016

By Dmitry Babich

A Russian diplomatic call to outlaw the US-sponsored policy of “regime change” is timelier than ever following recent events in Latin America.
The developments there are now routinely described as ‘institutional’ coups d’état, with popular presidents removed from power and replaced by neoliberal functionaries, enjoying almost unhidden support of the US government and American financial capital.

“What we see in the world now is an attempt by the so-called historic West to preserve its dominance in international affairs,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at a conference on Latin American development, held in Moscow. “Latin America is not an exception to this global trend. We see attempts by the United States to interfere directly into the internal affairs of some countries in the region… Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela are just the most recent examples.”

Last week, Brazil’s leftist President Dilma Rousseff was removed from power by a very unpopular group of senators, despite having the votes of 54 million citizens, who expressed their will a year and a half ago. Rousseff was removed because of accusations of corruption. However, even the mainstream media in the United States did not consider these accusations to be well founded.

The New York Times, on the eve of Rousseff’s ousting, called accusations against her “debatable” and added that “Ms. Rousseff is right to question the motives and moral authority of the politicians who were seeking to oust her.”

In 2014-2015, a similar campaign of personal attacks and ‘character assassination’ took place in Argentina against that country’s leftist president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

In both cases, the US-preferred candidates somehow managed to get to power posing as the only viable alternatives to the ousted women leaders.
In Brazil, the former vice-president Michel Temer took the reins of power without elections. Mr. Temer, whose popularity in Brazil is in single digits, has already started what RT’s expert on Latin America Juan Manuel Karg called a “realignment” of Brazil’s foreign policy. That “realignment” is supposed “to move Brazil closer to the United States and to the EU with or without Mercosur” (a bloc integrating the markets and economies of Latin American countries).

“It is worth noting that the foreign policy program of Temer’s party PMDB from 2015 does not even mention BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – an important bloc of countries which Brazil played an important role in founding in 2009,” Juan Manuel Karg writes on RT’s Spanish page.

PMDB, which stands for the Party of Brazilian Democratic Movement, is a loose union of centrist and rightist forces, which never took more votes than Ms. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party. Temer himself has a disapproval rating of 58 percent in Brazil. New Argentinian President Mauricio Macri also did not seem to be keen on following Fernandez de Kirchner’s policy of discovering new horizons for Argentina in China and Russia. During her tenure between 2007 and 2015, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner several times met with Russian presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, allowed RT Spanish to be included in the set of TV channels accessible for Argentina’s broadest television public, and expanded trade ties with Russia. This policy so far has not been continued under Macri.

In Venezuela, the situation is even clearer: the US makes no secret of its support for the “anti-chavista” opposition to President Nicolas Maduro, the successor to leftist leader Hugo Chavez, who gave his name to “chavizmo,” an ideology combining oil sales to the US with spending the proceeds from these sales on social development.

The American media gives full support to anti-chavista opposition, despite its role in violent street protests, which have claimed the lives of several dozen people. “The US policy of support for violent protests is inexcusable, since Venezuela is not a dictatorship. The country has many anti-Maduro media outlets, people have been given a chance to elect the majority of President Maduro’s critics into parliament,” explains Andres Izarra, a cabinet minister in Mr. Maduro’s cabinet in 2014. “The Venezuelan government suggested dialogue with the government of the United States, we wanted a compromise. But Washington simply has no policy towards Latin America except the so-called regime change.”

But why is Russia concerned with US pressure on Latin American countries? Seemingly, Moscow’s economic interests are not focused on that region. The share of Latin American countries in Russia’s foreign trade, with the notable exception of Venezuela, remains relatively small; it is still dwarfed by Russia’s trade with the EU or with China.

But the point is that in recent years it became absolutely clear to Russian diplomats that the policy of “regime change” in Latin America, Syria, Ukraine and – last, but not least – Russia itself, is conducted by the same people in Washington D.C. and in Brussels, and the same technology is being used for the purpose. Therefore, the events in faraway Brazil may have a direct impact on the developments in Russia.

“Attempts to “seat out” US-led color revolutions in other countries are simply not wise,” says Joshua Tartakovsky, a US-based foreign policy analyst, who recently visited both Venezuela and Ukraine. “Sooner or later, the American enthusiasts of regime change plan to go after all the regimes which even potentially can challenge American domination. First, they will do it in the Western hemisphere, but it won’t take long before they come to Russia, China and India too. The only way to survive for BRICS is to come together and act together – before it is too late.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, unlike the official representatives of India and China, openly says that he sees the West’s attempting to bring about a “regime change” in his country. In Latin America, only the Venezuelan foreign minister has similar courage to face the facts, while the others prefer the Tartakovsky-described tactic of “seating out” the storms of Washington-inspired revolutions.

“I listened to the Western leaders who announced economic sanctions against Russia,” Lavrov said at a meeting with foreign policy experts in autumn 2014. He referred to the aftermath of the US-sponsored Ukrainian coup in 2014, which ousted the centrist Ukrainian President Yanukovich and led to a civil war.

“These Western leaders openly said that sanctions should be applied in a way that would cripple Russia’s economy and lead to popular protests. So, the West is sending us a message: we don’t even want to change the policy of the Russian Federation; we want to change the Russian Federation’s regime. In fact they are not even denying that desire of theirs.”

How far will Russia go in its support for independence of Latin American countries? Who and how can shield them from the policy of “regime change” conducted by their powerful northern neighbor? Obviously, Lavrov is not under the illusion Russian can guarantee such independence alone. At the 69th General Assembly of the United Nations in autumn 2014, the Russian foreign minister suggested making a special UN declaration on the inadmissibility of the policy of “regime change” and on “non-recognition of coups as methods of changing state power.”

At the time, the Brazilian leader Dilma Rousseff did not openly support Lavrov’s suggestion, even though she was present at that UN General Assembly. Earlier, in 2013, she even made an indignant speech at the United Nations about the NSA’s eavesdropping of Brazil’s representatives at the UN and even on the office of the president of Brazil.

Rousseff might regret not seizing the opportunity to act against “regime change” then. Now it appears to be too late – for her and, most likely, for Brazil.

Dmitry Babich was born in Moscow, in 1970. He has worked for various media outlets for 25 years, including The Moscow News and RIA Novosti news agency. He is currently working as a political analyst at Sputnik International, and is a frequent guest on BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN commenting on international affairs and history.

18 May 2016

By Bill Van Auken

Foreign ministers of the major powers, including both Washington and Moscow, ended a meeting of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) in Vienna with no proposal for a date to resume peace talks between the Syrian government and the collection of Western-backed Islamist militias that constitute the “armed opposition.”

The so-called rebels walked out of the last round of talks in Geneva, accusing government forces of continuing to attack their positions in violation of a February 27 cessation of hostilities brokered by the US and Russia.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad and its allies, Russia and Iran, have insisted that continued operations were being carried out against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Al Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate, both of which are designated by the United Nations Security Council as terrorist groups and remain excluded from the shaky cease-fire.

In a communiqué issued at the close of the Vienna meeting, the ISSG member states warned that the consequences of a failure to fully implement the cessation of hostilities “could include the return of full-scale war.”

While the communiqué warned of consequences for any party violating the agreement, including “the exclusion of such parties from the arrangements of the cessation and the protection it affords them,” it gave no indications of what concrete actions would ensue.

What is painfully obvious, however, is that alleged violations by forces loyal to the government of Assad could provoke retaliation from the US, whose warplanes are already engaged in strikes on ISIS targets in Syria. At least 250 Special Operations troops have also been deployed on the ground, without the permission of Damascus and in violation of international law.

A US air strike against the city of al-Bukamal in Dayr al-Zawr province near Syria’s border with Iraq reportedly killed three children and one woman on Monday.

Violations by the so-called rebels, meanwhile, are ignored by their Western sponsors, and would be punished only by the government and its ally, Russia.

This is clearly a formula for an intensification of a conflict that has already claimed over a quarter of a million lives, while driving some 11 million Syrians from their homes. It also creates the conditions for the Syrian conflict to spill over into a wider war pitting the US against Russia.

Washington only entered into the Syrian “peace process” as a means of buying time under conditions in which Russia’s intervention on the side of the Assad government had reversed the tide of battle against the Western-backed Islamist militias and thrown the US-orchestrated war for regime change into disarray.

From the outset, the Obama administration has threatened to resort to a “Plan B” if the negotiations in Vienna and Geneva fail to achieve Washington’s original aim in stoking the bloody war in Syria: the toppling of the Assad government and the imposition of a more pliant Western puppet regime. Last month, unnamed senior US officials let it be known that “Plan B” would include the provision of more sophisticated weaponry to the “rebels,” including MANPADS, portable shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down Russian planes.

Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking to the media alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and UN special envoy Steffan de Mistura at the close of the Vienna conference, issued a direct threat to Syria’s Assad, stating, “He should never make a miscalculation about President Obama’s determination to do what is right at any given moment of time where he believes he has to make that decision.”

For his part, Lavrov charged that Washington’s key regional allies, including Turkey, are pouring more arms into Syria to fuel the conflict. Lately, he said, this has included the provision of tanks to the “rebels.”

The “main supply conduit for extremists,” the Russian foreign minister said, is a 90 kilometer stretch of the Turkish-Syrian border controlled on one side by the Turkish military and, on the other, by ISIS. He charged that there existed “a large, widely-spread network created by Turkey on its side of the border to continue and cover up these supplies.”

Kerry spent the weekend preceding the Vienna talks in Riyadh, meeting behind closed doors with representatives of the Saudi monarchy, a principal US regional ally and main supporter of the Islamist forces in Syria. The Saudi regime was the organizer of the so-called High Negotiations Committee, which was formed to represent these Salafist jihadi militias in talks with the Syrian government.

Speaking at the conference in Vienna, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir advocated a speedy escalation of the war for regime change in Syria.

“We believe we should have moved to a ‘Plan B’ a long time ago,” Adel al-Jubeir told reporters. “The choice about moving to an alternative plan, the choice about intensifying the military support [to the opposition] is entirely with the Bashar regime … He will be removed, either through a political process or through military force.”

Meanwhile, Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally and also a key backer of the “rebels,” threatened Tuesday to carry out a unilateral military intervention in Syria.

President Tayyip Erdogan told a meeting in Istanbul that the Turkish military would act alone, supposedly to deal with ISIS missile attacks coming across the Syrian border and striking the town of Kilis.

“We will solve that issue ourselves if we don’t receive help to prevent those rockets from hitting Kilis,” he said. “We knocked on all doors for a safe zone at our southern border. But no one wants to take that step.”

Erdogan’s statement echoed that made by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu earlier this month: “If necessary, Turkey may launch a ground military operation in Syria by itself.”

Erdogan’s remarks made clear that his concern is not ISIS, which Ankara has armed and supplied, but rather the growing strength of Syrian Kurdish forces near the Turkish border. In a thinly veiled criticism of US backing for these forces, he declared: “States which exercise control over the world’s arms industry give their weapons to terrorists. I challenge them to deny this.”

The Turkish government is committed to the war for regime change in Syria and has demonstrated, with its shoot-down of a Russian jet last November, its willingness to push this conflict into an armed confrontation with Moscow.

There is little doubt that the Saudi and Turkish regimes are openly advocating a policy that is being supported within powerful sections of the US ruling establishment and military and intelligence apparatus.

An escalation of the Syrian bloodbath also has the backing of the leading candidates in both the Democratic and Republican parties, but its initiation is almost certain to be postponed until after November in order to prevent the subject of war becoming an issue in the US presidential election.
18 May, 2016
WSWS.org

By Ramzy Baroud

On May 15th of every year, over the past 68 years, Palestinians have commemorated their collective exile from Palestine. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make room for a ‘Jewish homeland’ came at a price of unrelenting violence and perpetual suffering. Palestinians refer to that enduring experience as ‘Nakba’, or ‘Catastrophe’.

However, the ‘Nakba’ is not merely a Palestinian experience; it is also an Arab wound that never ceases from bleeding.

The Arab ‘Nakba’ was namely the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided much of the Arab world between competing Western powers. A year later, Palestine was removed from the Arab equation altogether and ‘promised’ to the Zionist movement in Europe, creating one of the most protracted conflicts in modern human history.

Despite all attempts at separating the current conflict in Palestine from its larger Arab environs, the two realities can never be delinked since they both go back to the same historical roots.

How Did This Come about?

When British diplomat, Mark Sykes, succumbed to the Spanish flu pandemic at the age of 39, in 1919, another diplomat, Harold Nicolson, described his influence on the Middle East region as follows:

“It was due to his endless push and perseverance, to his enthusiasm and faith, that Arab nationalism and Zionism became two of the most successful of our war causes.”

Retrospectively, we know that Nicolson spoke too soon. The breed of ‘Arab nationalism’ he was referencing in 1919 was fundamentally different from the nationalist movements that gripped several Arab countries in the 1950s and 60s. The rallying cry for Arab nationalism in those later years was liberation and sovereignty from Western colonialism and their local allies.

Sykes’ contribution to the rise of Zionism did not promote much stability, either. The Zionist project transformed into the State of Israel, itself established on the ruins of Palestine in 1948. Since then, Zionism and Arab nationalism have been in constant conflict, resulting in deplorable wars and seemingly perpetual blood-letting.

However, Sykes’ lasting contribution to the Arab region was his major role in the signing of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, also known as the Asia Minor Agreement, one hundred years ago. That infamous treaty between Britain and France, which was negotiated with the consent of Russia, has shaped the Middle East’s geopolitics for an entire century.

Throughout the years, challenges to the status quo imposed by Sykes-Picot failed to fundamentally alter its arbitrarily-sketched borders, which divided the Arabs into ‘spheres of influence’ to be administered and controlled by Western powers.

Yet, with the recent rise of ‘Daesh’ and the establishment of its own version of equally arbitrary borders encompassing large swathes of Syria and Iraq as of 2014, combined with the current discussion of dividing Syria into a federation, Sykes-Picot’s persisting legacy could possibly be dithering under the pressures of new, violent circumstances.

Why Sykes-Picot?

Sykes-Picot was signed as a result of violent circumstances that gripped much of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East at the time.

It all started when World War I broke out in July 1914. At the time, major European powers fell into two camps: the Allies – consisting mainly of Britain, France and Russia – vs. the Central Powers – Germany and Austria-Hungary.

The Ottoman Empire soon joined the war, siding with Germany, partly because it was aware that the Allies’ ambitions sought to control all Ottoman territories, which included the Arab regions of Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.

In March 1915 – Britain signed a secret agreement with Russia, which would allow the latter to annex the Ottoman capital and seize control of other strategic regions and waterways.

A few months later, in November 1915 – Britain and France began negotiations in earnest, aimed at dividing the territorial inheritance of the Ottoman Empire should the war conclude in their favor.

Russia was made aware of the agreement, and assented to its provisions.

Thus, a map that was marked with straight lines with the use of a Chinagraph pencil largely determined the fate of the Arabs, dividing them in accordance with various haphazard assumptions of tribal and sectarian lines.

Dividing the Loot

Negotiating on behalf of Britain was Mark Sykes, and representing France was François Georges-Picot. The diplomats resolved that, once the Ottomans were soundly defeated, France would receive areas marked (a), which include the region of south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq – including Mosel, most of Syria and Lebanon.

Area (b) was marked as British-controlled territories, which included Jordan, southern Iraq, Haifa and Acre in Palestine and the coastal strip between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.

Russia, on the other hand, would be granted Istanbul, Armenia and the strategic Turkish Straits.

The improvised map consisted not only of lines but also colors, along with language that attested to the fact that the two countries viewed the Arab region on purely materialistic terms, without paying the slightest attention to the possible repercussions of slicing up entire civilizations with a multifarious history of co-operation and conflict.

The Sykes-Picot negotiations concluded in March 1916 and was official, although it was secretly signed on May 19, 1916.

Legacy of Betrayal

WWI concluded on November 11, 1918, after which the division of the Ottoman Empire began in earnest.

British and French mandates were extended over divided Arab entities, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement over which a Jewish state was established, three decades later.

The agreement, which was thoroughly designed to meet Western colonial interests, left behind a legacy of division, turmoil and war.

While the status quo it has created guaranteed the hegemony of Western countries over the fate of the Middle East, it failed to guarantee any degree of political stability or engender economic equality.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement took place in secret for a specific reason: it stood at complete odds with promises made to the Arabs during the Great War. The Arab leadership, under the command of Sharif Hussein, was promised complete independence following the war, in exchange for supporting the Allies against the Ottomans.

It took many years and successive rebellions for Arab countries to gain their independence. Conflict between the Arabs and colonial powers resulted in the rise of Arab nationalism, which was born in the midst of extremely violent and hostile environments, or more accurately, as an outcome of them.

Arab nationalism may have succeeded in maintaining a semblance of an Arab identity but failed to develop a sustainable and unified retort to Western colonialism.

When Palestine – which was promised by Britain as a national home for the Jews as early as November 1917 – became Israel, hosting mostly Europeans settlers, the fate of the Arab region east of the Mediterranean was sealed as the ground for perpetual conflict and antagonism.

It is here, in particular, that the terrible legacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement is mostly felt, in all of its violence, shortsightedness and political unscrupulousness.

100 years after two British and French diplomats divided the Arabs into spheres of influence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement remains a pugnacious but dominant reality of the Middle East.

Five years after Syria descended into a violent civil war, the mark of Sykes-Picot are once more being felt as France, Britain, Russia – and now the United States – are considering what US Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently termed ‘Plan B’ – dividing Syria based on sectarian lines, likely in accordance with a new Western interpretation of ‘spheres of influence.’

The Sykes-Picot map might have been a crude vision drawn hastily during a global war but, since then, it has become the main frame of reference that the West uses to redraw the Arab world, and to “control (it) as they desire and as they may see fit.”

The Palestinian ‘Nakba’, therefore, must be understood as part and parcel of the larger western designs in the Middle East dating back a century, when the Arabs were (and remain) divided and Palestine was (and remains) conquered.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

18 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Nick Beams

While the turbulence that hit global financial markets in the early part of this year has subsided somewhat, at least temporarily, the underlying recessionary trends continue to intensify. These trends are clearly seen in the world’s two major economies, the United States and China.

Earlier this week, the Financial Times pointed to the flattening of the yield curve, which measures the difference between the interest rates on higher yielding long-term 10-year treasury bonds and two-year debt, noting that it was down to its lowest level since December. A flattening of the curve, when long- and short-term rates start to converge, signals lack of investor confidence about the long-term outlook for the economy. The yield curve has not inverted—a situation which is regarded as indicating a recession—but there are other indications of slowing growth.

American corporations are in an earnings recession, with profits down for the fourth straight quarter in a row. This is the longest period of lower profit growth since the financial crisis of 2008–2009, with US firms described as struggling under the weight of a strong dollar and “sputtering growth in other developed and emerging markets.”

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the spending and credit stimulus initiated by the Chinese government provided support for the global economy, particularly for emerging markets. But the Chinese economy is now experiencing much lower rates of growth—down from levels of 10 percent a few years ago to below 7 percent—and the expansion of credit has brought fears of a financial crisis.

Earlier this month, CLSA, a leading Hong Kong based brokerage and investment firm, warned that Chinese bad debts were reaching a “crisis level.” The company has released research showing that China’s non-performing loans are as high as 19 percent of bank assets, compared to the official figure of 1.6 percent, with most of the bad debts on the books of loss-making companies. The difference is accounted for the by fact that CLSA used international standards when calculating non-performing loans, rather than looser Chinese benchmarks.

The International Monetary Fund has said that $1.3 trillion of corporate debt in China, around one sixth of business loans made by banks, has been incurred by companies that are bringing in less revenue than they owe in interest payments.

In the first three months of the year, the government and financial authorities undertook a further expansion of credit in order to try to boost the economy in the wake of the stock market crisis of last year and fears that growth could fall sharply.

But these measures appear to have set off a conflict within the ruling Communist Party regime. Earlier this month the official People’s Daily featured a front-page interview with an “authoritative figure” who said that soaring debt levels could lead to a crisis.

“A tree cannot reach for the sky,” the “figure” was quoted as saying. “Any mishandling will lead to systemic financial risk, negative economic growth and evaporate people’s savings. That’s deadly.”

The official also warned that China’s growth rate, which has fallen from 12 percent in 2010 before dropping to 8 percent in 2013 and is now down to below 7 percent, will not return to the previous levels.

The interview is being interpreted in some quarters as part of a conflict between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who is regarded as the leading proponent of increased credit.

In any case, it is clear that credit expansion is not bringing the boost to the Chinese economy it once did. In the year to November 2009, total credit was expanded by an amount equivalent to 34 percent of gross domestic product. This lifted the growth rate from 6.1 percent in the first quarter of the year to a full-year level of 9.2 percent. In the year to February, credit was increased by 40 percent of GDP, but the growth rate has only barely been maintained at the official level of between 6.5 and 7 percent.

Further evidence of the ongoing slowdown in China was provided in the trade figures for April that showed a decline in both imports and exports. Exports fell by 1.8 percent year on year, following an 11.5 percent surge in March. Imports were down by 10.9 percent compared to the same month a year ago, following a 7.6 percent decline the previous month.

The contraction in global markets resulting from the China slowdown is fuelling tensions over currency values. Japan is at the centre of this growing global conflict. Despite the move by the Bank of Japan to introduce negative interest rates at the end of January in the expectation that this would start to bring down the value of the yen, the Japanese currency has risen by around 13 percent so far this year.

This prompted a warning last week from the Japanese finance minister, Taro Aso, that a persistent “one-sided” yen could lead to intervention. “We are determined to stop it,” he said, without proving any specific details as to how that might be achieved.

In an interview with the Financial Times on Monday the vice-minister for finance and international affairs, Masatsugu Asakawa, said the government regarded selling yen in international markets as a legitimate part of its policies. This was despite the commitment at the G20 meeting earlier this year that countries would not resort to devaluing their currencies in response to the downturn in global markets—a move regarded as a return to the kind of beggar-thy-neighbour policies that characterised the 1930s. The US has now put Japan on a watch list of countries that may be seeking to push down their currencies.

This move, however, was dismissed by Asakawa who told the Financial Times that Japan had not been singled out and so “we do not see this as having an immediate impact on Japan’s currency policy.”

Major Japanese manufacturers, including Toyota, which are adversely impacted by a rising yen, have issued warnings that profit levels are falling at the fastest rate since Prime Minister Abe came to power in late 2012 with promises to boost the economy through so-called Abenomics, based on central bank purchases of financial assets and an implicit commitment to ensure Japan remained competitive.

Monetary policy is also the subject of conflict in Europe, where German financial authorities are continuing their opposition to the quantitative easing and negative interest rate policies of the European Central Bank (ECB) under president Mario Draghi. Earlier this year, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Sch uble said Draghi was at least 50 percent responsible for the rise of the right-wing German populist party, the AfD.

The chief economist at Deutsche Bank, David Folkerts-Landau has written a comment for the Financial Times comparing the ECB measures to the German Reichsbank, which printed money to finance government spending in the 1920s, leading to hyperinflation.

“Today the behaviour of the European Central Bank suggests that it too has gone awry,” he wrote. When reducing interest rates to historically low levels did not stimulate growth, the ECB began purchasing sovereign debt and when that did not work, the ECB went to the next extreme and introduced negative interest rates with the result that almost half European sovereign debt is trading at negative yields.

Six years after the financial crisis, European debt keeps rising, the eurozone is as fragile as ever, insurance companies, pension funds and savings banks barely have a positive spread, growth is anaemic and debt levels in some countries, such as Italy, is not sustainable. “Monetary policy has become the number one threat to the eurozone,” he concluded.

The worsening global economic outlook will be one of the key issues at the meeting of the G7 major economies later this month, at least in closed-door discussions. While there will no doubt be efforts made to prevent divisions from erupting into the open, they will be very much present.

18 May, 2016
WSWS.org

By RT News

As Brazil’s left-wing president, Dilma Rousseff, has been suspended from office to face trial for disregarding budget laws, details have emerged on key figures involved in what Rousseff supporters are calling a coup, hinting at a covert plot involving Washington.

Following last week’s vote in the Brazilian Senate that led to the suspension of the country’s first female president, the left-wing politician herself noted that she “never imagined that it would be necessary to fight a coup in this country.”

While Latin America’s modern history is riddled with well-documented examples of US operations aimed at overthrowing regimes, some would argue the situation in Brazil is tied to a popular protest movement that has sprang up due to the corruption scandal and slumping economy. However, profiles of those at the center of current events offer clues as to why Washington’s hand might be at play.

1. From US informant to Brazil’s acting president
After it emerged that Rousseff’s old ally and former vice-president, Michel Temer, would succeed her as an interim head of the country, the murky details from his past have emerged on Wikileaks. The whistleblowing website said it has published proof Temer served as an embassy informant for Washington.

Two cables dated January 11, 2006, and June 21, 2006, obtained by WikiLeaks reveal that Temer, a member of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party party (PMDB), briefed US diplomats on the political process in Brazil and his party’s aspirations to gain power at the time of 2006 elections, which were won by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the Workers’ Party.

Interestingly enough, US consul general in Sao Paolo McMullen, one of the two addressees of the documents marked “sensitive and unclassified,”labeled Temer’s party as an “opportunistic” group with “no ideology or policy framework.” It eventually entered into coalition with the Workers’ Party.

Speaking to RT, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research Mark Weisbrot said that Shannon “has been involved in helping other coups in the region,” including in Honduras in 2009 and in Paraguay in 2012.

Nunes himself repeatedly spoke in favor of closer relations with the US in an attempt to remedy the espionage scandal between Brazil and the US.

3. ‘Coup-experienced’ US ambassador
Not only the former, but also the current US ambassador to Brazil, Liliana Ayalde, might also boast an experience of taking part in overthrowing foreign governments.

Before she was sent to Brazil, Ayalde had served as an ambassador to Paraguay ahead of the 2012 coup, which saw the country’s president Fernando Armindo Lugo Méndez ousted from office through impeachment in a procedure similar to that of Rousseff’s.

“That ambassador acted with great force during the coup that happened in Paraguay and she is in Brazil, using the same discourse, arguing that there is a situation that will be resolved by Brazilian institutions,” said Carlos Eduardo Martins, a sociology professor at the University of Sao Paulo, as cited by teleSUR.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro says the question of who is pulling the strings behind Brazil’s impeachment is not rocket science

“I have no doubt that behind this coup is the label ‘made in USA,’” he said.

The aim of “powerful oligarchic, media and imperial forces” in the Brazilian political crisis was to get rid of “progressive forces, the popular revolutionary leaderships of the continent,” Maduro said.

He described the events in Brazil as “a grave threat for the future stability and peace of all the continent,” expressing concern that the next victim may be Venezuela.
Relations between the US and Rousseff’s cabinet were marred by the scandal that broke out due to the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that showed that US intelligence was spying on Rousseff by intercepting her communications. The scandal resulted in a cooling of ties, with the Brazilian president cancelling her visit to the US in the wake of the revelations. In 2015, WikiLeaks revealed that the NSA was tapping the cell phones of 29 Brazilian top officials, including Rousseff herself.

18 May 2016

www.rt.com

By John Feffer

The victory of Sadiq Khan has “normalized” Muslims in UK politics in much the same way that JFK normalized Catholics in American politics. But American Muslims are still waiting for their JFK moment.

Even his own sister was mortified.

In the recent mayoral race in London, the Conservative Party’s Zac Goldsmith was in many ways the perfect candidate: a young, handsome fellow who possessed full-spectrum appeal.

To win the election, Goldsmith could have focused on all the work he’d done on the environment, as a journalist and former editor of the magazine The Ecologist. To further woo liberals, he could have highlighted his considerable international experience and his support of the rights of indigenous peoples. Conversely, he could have cemented his popularity among conservative populists by emphasizing his skeptical attitude toward the European Union. If he’d played it safe, Goldsmith could have translated an early lead in the polls into a victory at the ballot box.

Instead, the Goldsmith team prompted a huge backlash by suggesting that his opponent, the Labor Party’s Sadiq Khan, was a Muslim extremist because of his associations and his political bedfellows. The rhetoric from the Conservative camp was nothing so blatant or ugly as some of the proposals in the Republican presidential primary, such as prohibiting Muslims candidates from entering the Oval Office (Ben Carson) or prohibiting Muslims immigrant from entering the country (Donald Trump).

Still, the insinuations prompted Goldsmith’s sister Jemima, a prominent journalist and convert to Islam, to write on Twitter: “Sad that Zac’s campaign did not reflect who I know him to be.” Even fellow Conservatives distanced themselves from the candidate. Former Conservative cabinet minister Sayeeda Warsi, for instance, decried the “appalling dog whistle racism,” and the Conservative leader in the London Assembly, Andrew Boff, called the tactics “outrageous.”

Last week, when Londoners went to the polls to elect their mayor, the billionaire conservative suffered a humiliating landslide defeat. Sadiq Khan will be the new face of multicultural London.

What’s most interesting about the handling of Goldsmith’s campaign is the perception, among his advisors, that the instrumental use of Islamophobia would be politically helpful. It wasn’t such a reach, perhaps. On the continent at least, the tactic seemed to work in boosting the fortunes of what should otherwise be fringe parties like the National Front in France, the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, and the Sweden Democrats. And the blatantly anti-Muslim UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been steadily gaining support, nearly doubling its representation in the same local elections.

London, of course, is a city, and a very diverse one at that. What might work in Britain as a whole clearly failed with the more cosmopolitan voters in its capital. Polling at 20 percent across most of the country in the 2014 elections, UKIP managed only 7 percent in London. One UKIP candidate attributed the difference to the “more media-savvy and educated” population of the capital city.

It would be reassuring to believe that Sadiq Khan’s victory will banish Islamophobia from the electoral toolbox, particularly here in the United States. But America is not London. And our billionaire conservative is no tree-hugging friend of indigenous peoples. He doesn’t care about offending liberal sensibilities.

Moreover, anti-Islamic sentiment has been steadily rising in the United States, thanks to a relatively small group of well-funded organizations and individuals. Even if Donald Trump loses in November, as he most assuredly will, Islamophobia will not slink into the shadows along with its mouthpiece, the disgraced reality star.

Astounding Misinformation

Since 2001, the United States has resettled about 800,000 refugees inside its borders. Of that number, five have been arrested on terrorism charges. Two were arrested this January, another in 2013, and the other two in 2011. Five out of 800,000 equals .000625 percent. That’s practically the definition of statistically insignificant.

Yet, as the Brooking Institution’s Robert McKenzie pointed out at a recent panel in Washington, DC sponsored by Brookings and Duke University, 31 out of 50 governors have announced that they want to bar Syrian refugees from entering their states. All but one of these governors is a Republican. It’s an important reminder that the scaremongering of Trump, Carson, and the other erstwhile presidential candidates poisons the party as a whole.

The problem extends beyond individual Islamophobes. Equally troubling is the overall climate of bigotry and fear. Christopher Bail, a Duke University researcher who also participated in the panel, has been documenting the spread of Islamophobia. He presented a series of graphs that revealed that:

Over the past decade, 32 states proposed shariah law bans, controversies about the construction of mosques have increased by more than 800 percent, and the number of Americans with negative opinions of Islam has more than doubled.

To understand how astonishing these results are, imagine if I wrote that 32 states had proposed anti-UFO laws, that controversies over the construction of playgrounds had increased by 800 percent, and that the number of Americans with negative opinions of Judaism had more than doubled. You’d think that the country had been taken over by delusional, child-hating Nazis.

After all, there is zero evidence of a campaign to impose shariah law anywhere in the United States — the only case ever cited is one in which a domestic court judge based his judgment on shariah law, which the appellate court sensibly overturned — just as there’s no evidence of an alien plot to take over the world. Mosque attendance has been definitively demonstrated to reduce extremism, not encourage it. And although anti-Semitism is universally reviled, anti-Islamic sentiment flourishes because many Americans associate the religion with the tiny number of extremists who call themselves Muslims rather than with the 99.9 percent who are not followers of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda.

For information on the negative correlation between mosque attendance and extremism, you can turn to an important 2010 study, also from Duke University. Or you can look at recent polling from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), which Dalia Mogahed also presented at the Duke-Brookings panel.

Muslim Americans who regularly attend mosques are more likely than those who do not frequent mosques to work with their neighbors to solve community problems (49 vs. 30 percent), be registered to vote (74 vs. 49 percent), and are more likely to plan to vote (92 vs. 81 percent).

ISPU also found that Muslims in America are just as likely as members of other religious groups to “oppose the targeting and killing of civilians by individuals or small groups” and far more likely to “oppose the targeting and killing of civilians by the military” (65 percent, versus 45 percent of Jews and slightly less for Catholics and Protestants, say such practices are never justified).

The fact that Americans are so ignorant of the basic facts about Muslims in America isn’t simply the result of a lack of contact (most Americans don’t personally know any Muslims) or the absence of information in school curricula. Much of the ignorance around Muslims, particularly as it relates to security issues, is manufactured.

A relatively small industry of pundits and activists — Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Walid Phares, Robert Spencer, and their associated donors — have managed to inject their views into mainstream organizations (if you consider the Heritage Foundation mainstream) and into the news media (if you consider Fox to be “news”). And from there, these calculated distortions have entered the political discourse (if you consider what Donald Trump says to be “discourse”).

But it’s not just The Donald.

From the Margins to the Center

In her victory speech after the Pennsylvania primary last month, Hillary Clinton gave a shout out to all the various constituencies that make up her voting bloc: women, workers, LGBT, people with disabilities. She also warned of what would happen should candidates “from the other side” prevail:

They would make it harder to vote, not easier. They would deny women the right to make our own reproductive health care decisions. They would round up millions of hardworking immigrants and deport them. They would demonize and discriminate against hardworking, terror-hating Muslim Americans who we need in the fight against radicalization. And both of the top candidates in the Republican Party deny climate change even exists.

At first glance, Hillary is hitting all the right notes. But as Omid Safi, the head of the Duke Islamic Studies Center, pointed out at the above-mentioned panel, only Muslim Americans merited an ominous qualifier: “terror-hating.”

Hillary is implying that, without such a qualifier, Muslim Americans are somehow guilty by association. They are connected in the public mind with the San Bernardino couple who killed 14 people at the end of last year — unless they explicitly say otherwise — in a way that white Christians are not expected to disavow their connection to Dylann Roof, who likewise killed nine people last year.

For most Americans, Muslims are the “other,” a group of people who have to constantly prove the negative: that they’re not terror-loving. Good luck proving the negative. In such an environment, Muslims will never be above suspicion. Muslim organizations have repeatedly decried every terrorist act linked to Muslims, but the mainstream media has just as repeatedly ignored them. And so continues the myth that Muslims secretly approve of what al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are doing.

To defeat Islamophobia, or at least to stigmatize it to the same degree as racism and anti-Semitism, political victories over candidates who use both dog whistles and megaphones to trumpet anti-Islamic sentiment are, of course, essential. But the challenge is greater.

First, as Omid Safi pointed out, you shouldn’t fight intolerance with tolerance. A concept emerging from ancient pharmacology, “tolerance” meant the degree to which a body could put up with a toxin. Muslims are not toxins. They are part of the fabric of American society. Like all other Americans, they deserve to be respected for how they are the same as everyone else — and different.

On the side of difference, they practice a religion that has features in common with other monotheisms as well as quite a few unique features. But whether it’s praying toward Mecca, making annual charitable contributions, or undertaking the hajj (pilgrimage), the essential features of Islam have been part of the American landscape since before even the birth of the country. Difference is what makes America great. Those who prefer cultural uniformity should relocate to, well, Saudi Arabia, for instance.

On the side of similarity, it’s time to stop securitizing Muslims — thinking of them only in terms of terrorism, national security, and “threat.” As the ISPU polling indicates, American Muslims have the same preoccupations as the rest of America: the economy. They identify strongly as patriotic, and the more religiously observant they are, the more being American is important to their identity. They are far more satisfied than any other religious group with the direction the country is currently heading. And they are far more diverse a group than any other religious community. With large numbers of African American, Latino, and Asian adherents, the American Muslim community looks more like America than Protestants, Jews, or even Catholics.

The victory of Sadiq Khan has “normalized” Muslims in UK politics in much the same way that JFK normalized Catholics in American politics. American Muslims are still waiting for their JFK moment. True, for the last seven years, large numbers of Americans have thought that their president is a Muslim, which in Islamophobic America has been just another way of saying that these conspiracy theorists don’t like Obama. So, obviously, that doesn’t count.

The presidential victory of Obama was not the end of racism. But it did serve as a watershed moment in the evolving status of the African American community and represented a significant nail in bigotry’s coffin. Some day in the future, when the grotesqueries of Donald Trump are a fading memory and even the Islamophobia-lite of mainstream politicians will seem as archaic as the anti-Semitic insinuations of polite 1950s America, the occupant of the Oval Office will state that she is proud to be both American and Muslim.

There will be cheers. There will be boos. But we’ll know that the era of Islamophobia has passed when the most common reaction is a shrug and a yawn.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.

11 May 2016

By Ramzy Baroud

There is a witch-hunt in the British Labor Party. Britain’s Opposition party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is being hounded for not rooting out alleged anti-Semitism in his party. Those leading the charge are pro-Israel Zionists and their supporters within the party, members who are mostly allied with the former Prime Minister, the largely discredited pro-war Tony Blair. The Blairites are quite unhappy that Corbyn, who won the party’s leadership election last September with a landslide victory is a non-elitist politician, with a deep-rooted grassroots activist past, and, yes, a strong stance for Palestinian rights.

Corbyn has been subjected to all sorts of attacks and ridicule from his own party, many members of which have been busy plotting to push him out, but remained hesitant because of his popular appeal. The Labor party had, in fact, lost much of its credibility since the days of Blair’s ‘New Labor’ and following the US lead in waging an immoral and illegal war on Iraq. Blair’s supporters changed the priorities of the party, which was ‘labor’ by name only. Corbyn’s advent galvanized young people around fresh ideals, and renewed the shaky faith of the party’s traditional supporters.

But since he became a leader, the man’s agenda of anti-corruption and greater equality in Britain has been slowed down, or even entirely halted, by some most bizarre controversies. He was attacked over such things as his supposed poor sense of fashion, his alleged lack of patriotism, and more. The attacks have been so ridiculous, yet omnipresent, that they became the subject of popular memes and much satire.

And when it all failed, he was hit with another manufactured controversy, that of alleged anti-Semitism within his own party. The recent attacks have been the most organized, yet. They involve Israel supporters, British politicians, the media and other sources.

The media has tried to paint him as an embattled leader who is not able to control the uncontainable Jewish hate oozing from his party members.

British Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, known for his strong support of Israel joined the fray, charging that the lid has been lifted on bigotry within Labor and that investigation into anti-Semitism must be more than a ‘sticker plaster.’

The investigation and the preceding outcry of anti-Semitism, however, targeted those who were critical of Israel, not Jews, in general, or Judaism. Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who was suspended from Labor for suggesting links between the Nazi party and early Zionists, was not making any reference to Jews per se, and certainly not to Judaism. Arguably, if he was wrong, then it is a mere question of history, not race.

In its coverage of the controversy, even the BBC, delinks both concepts:

“Anti-Semitism is ‘hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people’, while “Zionism refers to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East.”

Indeed, the first is a racist ideology, while the latter is an entirely political and historical question, especially since early Zionists were largely atheists. Israel’s Zionist-Jewish contradiction was phrased skillfully by Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, when he wrote:

“The secular Jews who founded the Zionist movement wanted paradoxically both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine; in other words, they did not believe in God but He, nonetheless, promised them Palestine.”

But the Rabbi, and many of those who unscrupulously joined the charge against Labor pretend that Zionism, a late 19th century political movement is the same as Judaism, a religion that dates back millennia.

However, there is nothing new here, and the manufactured ‘controversy’ is hardly limited to Britain or the Labor Party.

The message that Israeli hasbara (propaganda) has been steadily sending to its critics since the establishment of Israel over the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in May 1948: if you are critical of Israel, however slightly, you are a certified anti-Semite. If it happens that you are Jewish, then you are a self-hating Jew, and if you are an Arab, you must abandon the idea that you are, yourself, Semitic and Arab, by merely opposing Israel’s ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians who are all anti-Semites, anyway.

I doubt there is a self-respecting Palestinian intellectual who has not fended against accusations of being anti-Semitic for merely advocating Palestinian rights, and demanding accountability of Israeli violations of human rights and war crimes.

Many independent Jewish voices, too, have found themselves on the defensive, although within a different category. The classification of a ‘self-hating Jew’ has been ever so popular these days, especially as many Jewish activists have righteously joined the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). The once-marginalized voices are now a large and growing crowd.

Unable to defend Israeli action based on logical arguments, international law or common sense, Israel’s supporters use other means, threats, smears and vilifications, and also by fabricating non-existing controversies. And no one is immune.

Daniel Greenfield engaged in a bizarre diatribe in the Jewish Press on March 8, in an article entitled: “Bernie Sanders is NOT a Jew”. In the same familiar tone of distortion and self-pity, Greenfield theorized: “While Bernie Sanders invoked his last few drops of Jewishness and the Holocaust in support of a Muslim anti-Semite’s cry bullying, he didn’t feel the need to do so for the Jewish State when it actually stood on the verge of destruction. Instead, he had called for denying arms to Israel before the Yom Kippur War.”

How about the United Nations, which has failed to enforce a single resolution of the dozens of resolutions passed to demand justice for the Palestinians and accountability from Israel?

It is an “anti-Semitic circus” according to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The novel designation followed the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC’s) decision to compile a list of international and Israeli companies that do business in illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Despite the fact that the UN is yet to reverse the worsening plight of the Palestinians or advance their cause beyond symbolic gestures, one rarely hears the accusation that the UN is anti-Palestinian, or anti-Arab.

On the other hand, for merely censuring Israeli action by words only, the UN, according to Jennifer Rubin writing in the Washington Post on February 16, “tolerates and, by its silence, condones, anti-Semitism.”

The US government has blindly and unconditionally given credence to that notion, marching to the drumbeat of the Israeli government on every occasion and boycotting international institutions whenever Israel raises the frequently false flag of anti-Semitism.

The matter is not only pertinent to Israel and Palestine. Anyone who dares go against Israel’s interest in the region and around the world is a candidate for the manipulation of Israeli terminology.

Following the Iran nuclear deal between Iran and western powers, conservative commentator, Debbie Schlussel, coined new terminology: ‘Jews in the Name Only’ or JINOs. Those alleged JINOs are the 98 prominent ‘Hollywood Jews’, who backed the Iran deal in an open letter.

By completely shutting the door on any form of criticism of Israel, Zionism, and the censure of its military behavior in the region coupled with the daily violence meted out against occupied Palestinians, Israel has expanded the definition of anti-Semitism to include whole countries, governments, international institutions and millions of independently thinking individuals the world over.

However, not even such deliberate distortion should prevent us from making the differentiation loud and clear: anti-Jewish racism should be condemned as loudly and decisively as Islamophobia and any other form of racial discrimination and bigotry.

However, criticizing violent political movements and the behavior of any state that violates international law and human rights is a moral duty. Israel will not be the exception.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

12 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Mili Mitra

March 15 marked the beginning of a landmark human-trafficking trial in Thailand in which 92 defendants are charged with establishing a transnational trafficking network to smuggle refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar into Malaysia. Authorities discovered the network last year when a mass grave containing 36 bodies was unearthed in southern Thailand. The outfit is implicated in widespread kidnappings and killings in the current trial, the results of which may shed light on the lucrative shadow-industry of refugee smuggling and slavery across Southeast Asia.

The human-trafficking networks in the region are remarkably well-organized and ruthless, and this particular cartel was especially infamous for the scale and brutality of its operations. The support of high-ranking army officials, including Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpaen, allowed its members to act with exceptional impunity. Its victims, primarily persecuted Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, were forced on to rickety and overcrowded ships that set sail south from the Bay of Bengal on a notoriously perilous journey: In 2015 alone, an estimated 370 refugees died from starvation, disease and abuse before reaching land. Moreover, instead of being released when they reached the Thai-Malaysian border, the refugees were held captive in inhumane detainment camps in the jungles. The traffickers then demanded ransoms from the refugees’ families, threatening to kill or enslave those whose relatives were unable to pay.

Under fire from the United States and international humanitarian organizations, the Thai government has committed to expediting the trial and reaching a verdict by the end of the year. An accelerated verdict, however, is not enough to guarantee justice or tackle the underlying societal problem. The trial itself has been plagued by questions regarding its legitimacy and comprehensiveness. Although 153 arrest warrants were released, the government is only pressing charges against 92 defendants, sparking concerns that many traffickers have managed to evade punishment. International organizations have also cast doubts over the safety of over 300 Rohingya refugees serving as witnesses in the case; many of these witnesses were placed in government shelters for the duration of the trial, but some have already disappeared. Moreover, the trial should not be heralded as a one-stop solution to the greater issue of human trafficking in the region — despite the size and brutality of this operation, it was just one of many
human-trafficking rings operating in the area.

The traffickers have exploited the distinctively dire situation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The ethnic group has long been persecuted for speaking a little-known Bengali dialect and practicing Islam in the Buddhist-majority country. The Rohingya originally arrived in Myanmar from the neighboring country of Bangladesh, but have lived in Myanmar for generations. There are approximately one million Rohingya living in the country, making up 2 percent of the nation’s population, and yet the vast majority of these people have been forced to live in ghetto-like conditions in the poverty-stricken, northwestern state of Rakhine. With little hope for employment or upward mobility, many have been repressed and imprisoned in internment camps for over thirty years. Based on these apartheid-like conditions, human rights organizations like Amnesty International consider the Rohingya the “most persecuted refugees in the world.”

Yet the Rohingya are not just fleeing persecution; they also seek to escape the obliteration of their identity. Under Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law, Rohingya are not granted citizenship. They are instead classified as Bengali immigrants, allowing for the possibility of deportation. To be considered citizens, these “immigrants” are asked to prove that they have lived in Myanmar for 60 years, which is often impossible given that the Rohingya initially crossed the border into Myanmar without paperwork and were subsequently denied these documents. Furthermore, the Myanmar government has created a hierarchy of citizenship that makes the Rohingya that have been able to obtain non-immigrant citizen status “associate” (or second-class) citizens without voting rights. Therefore, deprived of nationality and unable to cross borders legally to escape persecution, the Rohingya are forced to rely on traffickers.

The issue has come under the spotlight since anti-Rohingya violence spiked in 2012. After the alleged rape of a Buddhist woman by a Rohingya in Rakhine, the state’s dominant Buddhist population retaliated by massacring approximately 200 Rohingya Muslims. The violence then escalated in 2013, leading to a deadly humanitarian crisis. In fact, state forces sent to defuse tensions have been implicated in crimes against the Rohingya, to the extent that Human Rights Watch has accused the government of committing ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This crisis has pushed many Rohingya to flee to the ostensible safety of Malaysia via Thailand, leaving themselves at the mercy of traffickers. The Myanmar government has not undertaken any effort to eliminate trafficking, tacitly perpetuating the exodus of Rohingya Muslims from the nation with their discriminatory policies and lenient treatment of traffickers.

However, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar is only the beginning of the problem since, as the recent trial against the Thai trafficking ring has shown, the Rohingya people are further victimized by the barbaric conditions in ships and border camps. Many survivors of these horrific journeys have spoken out against the merciless behavior of the traffickers: The smugglers are reported to use torture and abuse to subdue the captive refugees while refugees are malnourished and prone to disease from the lack of hygiene in camps.

It is common for the traffickers to extort money from the asylum seekers at camps and on ships as well. They often demand exorbitant fees of around $1,200 for transportation to Malaysia alone, and then extract even more by threatening the refugees with abuse or death. Safe arrival in Malaysia is also not guaranteed: Previously, traffickers have left refugees stranded off the coasts of Indonesia or Malaysia and last May, thousands of refugees were abandoned on the high seas in flimsy wooden boats with limited food and water — the death toll from the incident remains unknown.

And refugees’ troubles don’t end even if they reach their destination safely: although the refugees see Malaysia as a safe haven with opportunities for prosperity and equality, the reality of their reception often fails to meet the expectation. Over 75,000 Rohingya refugees currently live in Malaysia, but they have been relegated to a marginalized existence on the fringes of Malaysian society. As refugees, they are given little recognition or government support: They are unable to register for government schooling or obtain legal jobs, forcing them into subsistence living once again. In particular, the restrictions on education are an egregious violation of the Convention on the Rights of a Child, which protects children against discrimination regardless of immigration status. There are also processing lags at the UN office in Kuala Lumpur, delaying the distribution of refugee accreditation and identification cards needed for job applications, which further sidelines Rohingya refugees from legitimate recognition in Malaysia.

Crucially, in the last year, Malaysia’s response to Rohingya refugees has become even more alarming. The government has taken an exclusionary approach, publicly announcing that the refugees should be “turned back” and returned to their country. The country’s deputy prime minister even claimed that Malaysia has no responsibility to rescue asylum seekers stranded off its coast unless their boat was capsizing. While Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and is therefore not obligated to accept all asylum seekers, its recent turnaround violates the principle of non-refoulement, or not returning refugees to the country of their persecution, which can be argued to be customary international law. Since last May, several Malaysian politicians have made incendiary statements against signing the Refugee Convention to prevent a greater influx of Rohingya; one minister even questioned the refugees’ reasons for fleeing to Malaysia and classified them as “threats” to local businesses. If these trends continue in one of the largest safe havens for the Rohingya in the region, their very existence is likely to come under exceedingly greater risk.

Thus far, the global response has been limited and misguided. While the plight of the Rohingya has come into the media spotlight recently, there has been little coordinated effort to mitigate the crisis. The focus of the international humanitarian community has revolved around assigning blame and censuring the oppressive Myanmar government. Many activists and politicians have called for Myanmar to institute full and equal citizenship for the Rohingya. While this may certainly be the ideal solution, the rhetoric has distracted from the ongoing and immediate consequences of widespread trafficking and exploitation in the region. The reality of this problem extends further than within the borders of Myanmar, which means that other Southeast Asian states must cooperate to find a solution for what is rapidly becoming a regional crisis.

The current trial in Thailand implies that there is some hope for Rohingya who have managed to survive persecution in Myanmar or refugees who have survived their hazardous journey to Malaysia. The Thai government is cracking down on trafficking rings that operate on its borders after a US government report named Thailand one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. The UN and EU have also reported that the flow of Rohingya refugees out of Myanmar has slowed since the election of a new government, as many Rohingya are waiting to judge the policy platform of the newly-elected regime. But unless there is greater security and support for Rohingya in Myanmar and increased rehabilitation of these refugees across Southeast Asia, the Rohingya refugee crisis will continue to be one of the greatest and most overlooked humanitarian disasters of our time.

Mili Mitra ’18 is an International Relations concentrator and a senior staff writer for BPR.

4 May 2016

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