Archives: Articles

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

 

By The Straits Time

DHAKA (AFP) – A Buddhist monastery in Bangladesh is serving food to hundreds of poor Muslims during Ramadan, in a rare example of social harmony between the religions in the South Asian nation.

Dharmarajika, in the capital Dhaka, has become a hit on social media since it started distributing daily food packs for Muslims who break their fast during the Islamic month at sunset, known as Iftar.

“Buddhism taught us that serving humanity is the ultimate religion. We are feeding the poor Muslims who cannot afford to buy proper meals to break their fast,” Suddhananda Mahathero, the head monk of the monastery, told AFP.

When AFP visited on Monday evening, more than 300 Muslims were waiting at the gate of the monastery in Dhaka’s Basabo neighbourhood to receive some Iftar delicacies.

“I can eat some good food served with love and care,” said 70-year-old Ms Amena Khatun, who added that she had walked several kilometres to get there.

As a young monk distributed tickets to hungry Muslims, police were on hand to ensure the process remained orderly.

“This is such a wonderful example of religious harmony: showing respect and affection to the fasting neighbours without thinking of the difference of religions,” said policeman Asad Uzzaman.

Muslims make up around 90 per cent of Bangladesh’s 160 million population, with a tiny community of Buddhists residing mostly in the country’s southeastern districts bordering Myanmar.

In September 2012, tens of thousands of Muslims vandalised and torched nearly a dozen Buddhist temples in the south of the country following allegations that a Buddhist man had desecrated the Quran.

Many Muslims took to social media to thank the Dharmarajika monastery for their food distribution, posting photos on Facebook of the yellow-clad monks handing out supplies. Others praised the monks on Twitter.

“I really appreciate the initiative and thank them,” Mr Nur Hossain, a banker, told AFP.

The monastery was established in 1949 and is home to more than 700 orphans who study at a free school it runs.

7 July 2015
http://www.straitstimes.com/

 

By Richard Falk

There is doubt that President Barack Obama’s visit to Hiroshima this May crossed some thresholds hitherto taboo. Above all the visit was properly heralded as the first time a sitting American president has dared such a pilgrimage, which has already been critically commented upon by patrioteers in America who still think that the Japanese deserved such a punishment for initiating the war or believed that only such ‘shock and awe’ could induce the Japenese to surrender without a costly invasion of the mainland. As well many in Asia believe that Obama by the visit is unwittingly letting Japan off the accountability hook for its seemingly unrepentant record of atrocities throughout Asia, especially given the perception that the current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is doing his conservative best to reinvigorate Japanese nationalism, and even revive imperial ambitions.

Obama is a gifted orator who excels in finding the right words for the occasion, and in Hiroshima his rhetoric soared once more. There he noted “[t]echnological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of the atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Such stirring words would seem to be a call to action, especially when reinforced by a direct challenge: “..among nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.” Obama at Prague in 2009, shortly after being sworn in as president, set forth an inspiring vision along the same lines, yet the small print there and now makes us wonder whether his heart and head are truly aligned. The words flow with grace and even passion, but where are the deeds?

As in Prague, Obama expressed the cautionary sentiment in Hiroshima that “[w]e may not realize this goal in my lifetime.” At which point Obama goes associates himself with the stabilizing agenda of arms control, reducing the size of the stockpile, making the weapons less obtainable by ‘fanatics,’ and implementing nonproliferation goals. Apparently, neither Obama nor the media take note of the tension between eliminating the weaponry and these proposals designed to stabilize the nuclear weapons environment by making it more reliably subject to prudent and rational policies of control. Yet at the same time making proposals to eliminate the weaponry seem less needed, and even at risk of threatening the stability so carefully constructed over the course of decades.

The real reason for skepticism about Obama’s approach is his unexplained reasons to defer the abolition of nuclear weaponry to the distant future. When Obama declares that a world without nuclear weapons is not likely to happen in his lifetime without telling us why he is changing his role from an advocate of the needed ‘moral revolution’ so as to achieve the desired political transformation to that of being a subtle endorser of the nuclear status quo. Of course, Obama may be right that negotiating nuclear disarmament will not be easy or quick, but what is the argument against trying, why defer indefinitely.

The global setting seems as favorable as it is likely to get. We live at a time when there are no fundamental cleavages among leading sovereign states, all of whom seek to benefit from a robust world economy and to live together without international wars. It would seem to be an overall situation in which dramatic innovations of benefit to the entire world would seem politically attractive. In such an atmosphere why could not Obama have said at Hiroshima, or seven years earlier at Prague, “that during the Cold War people dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons, but the tensions, distrust, and rivalry precluded a reliable disarming process, but now conditions are different. There are no good reasons not to convert dreams of a world without nuclear weapons into a carefully monitored and verified disarmament process, and there are many important reasons to try to do so. What holds Obama back? Why does he not table a proposal or work with other nuclear governments to produce a realistic timetable to reach nuclear zero?

Worse than the seeming absence of what the great theologian, Paul Tillich, called ‘the courage to be’ is the worrisome evidence of double dealing—eloquent words spoken to warn us of the menace of nuclearism coupled with deeds that actually strengthen the hold of nuclearism on the human future. How else should we interpret the appropriation by the U.S. Government of $1 trillion over the years until 2030 for the modernization and further development of the existing nuclear weapons arsenal, including provocative plans to develop nuclear weapons with potential battlefield, as opposed to deterrent, missions? Such plans are provocative because they weaken inhibitions on use and tempt other governments to emulate the United States so as offset feared new vulnerabilities to threat and attack. What stands out is the concreteness of the deeds reinforcing the nuclear established order and the abstractness of the words challenging that same order.

Beyond this, while calling for a moral revolution, Obama seems at the same time to give his blessings to nuclear energy despite its profound moral shortcomings. Obama views nuclear energy as a contribution to reducing carbon emissions in relation to global warming concerns and as a way to sell nuclear technology abroad and at the same time satisfy the energy goals of countries, such as India, in the global South. What is not acknowledged by Obama is that this nuclear energy technology is extremely dangerous and on balance detrimental in many of the same ways as nuclear weapons, prone to accidents of the sort associated with the incidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, subject to the hazards of accumulating and disposing of nuclear wastes, vulnerable to nuclear terrorism, and creating the technological capacity for the development of the weapons in a series of additional states.

Obama made a point of announcing before visiting Hiroshima that there would be no apology for the attacks by the United States. Clearly, Obama was unwilling to enter a domain that in America remains inflamed by antagonistic beliefs, interpretations, and priorities. There is a scholarly consensus that the war would have soon ended without an invasion or the atomic bomb, but this thesis continues to be challenged by veterans and others who think that the bomb saved American lives, or at minimum, ended the captivity of captured soldiers far sooner than would have been the case without the attacks.

In fairness, Obama did acknowledge the unspeakable tragedy for Japanese civilians that experienced the Hiroshima bomb, and he showed real empathy for survivors (hibakusha) who were there in the front rows when he spoke in Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, but he held back from saying the use of the bomb was wrong, even the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Obama’s emphasis, instead, was on working together to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. In this sense, Obama was indirectly legitimating the impunity that was accorded to the victors after World War II, which contrasted with the punitive measures of accountability used to deal with the crimes committed by the surviving leaders of defeated Japan and Germany. The main value of an apology is to bring a degree of closure to those directly and indirectly victimized by those terrible, events that took place more than 70 years ago. By so doing the United States would have moved a bit closer to suspending its self-serving insistence on impunity and this would have withdrawn geopolitical legitimacy from the weaponry.

There is something disturbing about America’s unwillingness to live up tothe full horror of its past actions even while making a never again pledge. In another recent development that is freighted with similar moral ambiguities, former Senator Bob Kerrey was named the first Chair of the Board of the new Fulbright Vietnam University, a laudable joint educational project of the two countries partly funded by the U.S. Congress, despite his apparent involvement in a shameful atrocity committed during the war. The incident occurred on February 25, 1969 in the village of Thang Phong where a unit of Navy SEALS was assigned the task of assassinating a Viet Cong leader believed to be in the vicinity. Instead of a military encounter, 20 civilians were killed, some brutally. 13 were children and one a pregnant woman.

Kerrey contends that the carnage was the result of mistakes, while both a fellow member of the SEALS squad and village residents say that the killing of the civilians was deliberate, and not an accident in the darkness. Kerrey received a Bronze Star for the mission, which was reported falsely to his military superiors as resulted in killing 21 Viet Cong militants. What is almost worse, Kerrey kept silent about the incident for more than 30 years, and only spoke about it in public after learning there was about to be a published piece highly critical of his role. Kerrey now says “I have been haunted for 32 years” and explains, “It was not a military victory, it was a tragedy, and I had ordered it.” The weight of the evidence suggests that Kerrey participated as well as ordered the killings, and that although certainly a tragedy it is more properly acknowledged as a severe war crime amounting to an atrocity.

We can only imagine what would be the American or Chines reaction if Japan sent to the United States or China a comparable person to provide an honorific link between the two countries. For instance, sending a Japanese officer to the U.S. who had cruelly administered a POW camp where Americans were held captive and tortured or sending to China a Japanese commander who had participated in some of the grisly happenings associated with ‘the rape of Nanking.’ It is good that Kerrey is finally contrite about his past role and appears to have been genuinely involved in promoting this goodwill promotion of education in Vietnam, yet it seems unacceptably insensitive that he would be chosen to occupy such a position in an educational institution in Vietnam that is named after a prominent American senator who is particularly remembered for his efforts to being the Vietnam War to an end.

What connects these two seemingly distinct concerns is the steadfast refusal of the United States Government to take responsibility for its past crimes, which ensures that when future political pressures push toward immoral and unlawful behavior a similar disregard for minimal decency will be papered over. Obama’s refusal to consider accountability for the unabashed reliance on torture during the presidency of George W. Bush similarly whitewashes the past while unconvincingly promising to do better in the future. Such a pattern makes a mockery of claims made by Obama on behalf of the United States that unlike its adversaries this is a country that reveres the rule of law whenever it acts at home or abroad. From the pragmatic standpoint of governing America, in fairness, Obama never really had a choice. The political culture would have rebelled against holding the Bush administration accountable for its crime, which brings us closer to the truth of a double standard of suspending the applicability of international criminal law with respect to the policies and practices of the United States while championing individual legal responsibility for its adversaries as an expression of the evolution of moral standards in international life..

I believe that double standards has led Obama to put himself forward both as a visionary who seeks a transformed peaceful and just world and also as a geopolitical manager that accepts the job description of the presidency as upholding American global dominance by force as necessary. Now that Obama’s time in the White House is nearing its end we are better able to grasp the incompatibility of his embrace of these two roles, which sadly, and likely tragically, leads to the conclusion that the vision of a world without nuclear weapons was never meant to be more than empty words. What the peoples of the world need to discover over and over again is that the promising words flow easily from the lips of leaders have little significance unless supplemented by a robust movement from below that challenges those who are governing from above. As activists in the 1960s began to understand is that only when the body pushes against the machine will policies incline toward peace and justice, and we in the 21st century will have to rediscover this bit of political wisdom if hope for a nuclear free world is to become a genuine political project.

If more than rhetoric is attached to the call for a ‘moral revolution,’ then the place to start would be to question, prior to abandoning, the mentality that is comfortable with double standards when it come to war making and criminal accountability. The whole idea of impunity for the victors and capital punishment for the losers is morally regressive. Both the Obama visit to Hiroshima, as significant as it was, and the Kerrey relationship to the Fulbright Vietnam University, show that American society, even at its best, is far from prepared to take part in the necessary moral revolution.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. For six years (2008-2014) he acted as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine

06 June, 2016
Richard Falk Blog

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: In a familiar muddying of the waters, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the past week talking up peace while fiercely criticising Friday’s summit in France – the only diplomatic initiative on the horizon.

As foreign ministers from 29 nations arrived for a one-day meeting in Paris, Netanyahu dusted off the tired argument that any sign of diplomatic support for Palestinians would encourage from them “extreme demands”.

France hopes the meeting will serve as a prelude to launching a peace process later in the year. French president Francois Hollande said he hoped to achieve a “peace [that] will be solid, sustainable and under international supervision”.

With astounding chutzpah, Israeli official Dore Gold compared the summit to the “height of colonialism” a century ago, when Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them. He conveniently overlooked the fact that it was the same British colonialism that promised a Jewish “homeland” in place of the native Palestinian population.

Earlier, Netanyahu and his new defence minister, the far-right Avigdor Lieberman, had publicly committed themselves to an “unceasing search for a path to peace”.

In a two-minute interview on CNN, spokesman David Keyes managed to mention the formula “two states for two peoples” no less than five times.

Rather than the French initiative, Netanyahu averred, Israelis and Palestinians should be left to engage in the kind of face-to-face talks “without preconditions” that have repeatedly failed. That is because Israel, as the much stronger party, has been able to void them by imposing its own conditions.

Netanyahu, it seems, is keen on any peace process, just so long as it’s not the current one launched in Paris.

Part of the reason for bringing Lieberman into the government was to provide more diplomatic wriggle room. With Lieberman cementing Netanyahu’s credentials with the far-right, he is now free to spout vague platitudes about peace knowing that his coalition partners are unlikely to take him at his word and bolt the government.

But while the domestic front has been secured, rumbles of dissent reverberate abroad.

Europe is increasingly fearful that an emboldened Israeli government may soon annex all or major parts of the West Bank, stymying any hope of creating even a severely truncated Palestinian state.

The Paris conference is a sign of the mounting desperation in Europe to restrain Israel.

While France is not about to engineer a breakthrough, Netanyahu is nonetheless worried.

It is the first time Israel has faced being dragged into talks not presided over by its Washington patron. That risks setting a dangerous precedent.

Although US secretary of state John Kerry attended, he was decidedly cool towards the summit. Yet Netanyahu worries that this time Washington may not be able – or willing – to watch his back.

If the conference leads to talks later in the year, that will be when Barack Obama is preparing to bow out as president. Netanyahu is afraid of surprises. Israeli officials have been in near-panic that Obama may seek payback for the years of humiliation he endured from Netanyahu.

One way might be for Washington to agree to French oversight of the talks, following a tight timetable and establishing diplomatic “teams” to solve final-status issues.

Even if negotiations fail, as seems inevitable, parameters for future talks might be established.

Netanyahu also knows that the wider atmosphere is likely to leave him singled out as the intransigent party.

A report by the Quartet, due soon, is expected to criticise Israel for its past failure to take steps towards peace. And a report last week by a joint team of US and Israeli defence experts suggested Israel’s “security concerns” about Palestinian statehood are not as intractable as claimed.

Netanyahu wants instead to deflect attention to a “regional peace summit”. The key has been Egypt’s support for a revival of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, based on the Arab Peace Plan of 2002. It promised Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for ending the occupation.

Israel’s sudden interest in the plan is odd, given that it has not been discussed in cabinet since the Saudis unveiled it 14 years ago.

In truth, Netanyahu backs the idea because he knows reaching a region-wide agreement would be impossible with the Middle East in turmoil.

Israeli officials have already insisted that parts of the 2002 plan need “updating”. Israel, for example, wants sovereignty over the Golan, Syrian territory it seized in 1967, and which currently promises newfound oil riches.

At the summit, the Saudi foreign minister said Israeli efforts to “water down” the plan would be opposed. Egyptian officials have hurried to distance themselves from the Netanyahu proposal and throw their weight behind the Paris process.

Still, Israel will try to ride out the French initiative until Obama’s successor is installed next year. Then, Netanyahu hopes, he can forget about the threat of two states once and for all.

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

06 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Dr. Shaik Ubaid

The greatest is dead. Muhammad Ali finally lost his last and the longest fight of his life against Parkinson’s Disease. Some say that it was not the typical Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease but was Dementia pugilistica or boxer’s dementia. Dr. Stanley Fahn, a movement disorders expert from Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, the main campus of my hospital system, had diagnosed him with the umbrella term of Parkinsonism in 1984. Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, two greats of boxing who had preceded Ali by just a decade, died of suspected boxing related neurological degeneration. I had noticed the slurring in Fraizier’s speech a long time before he died.

I, who loved boxing once because of Ali, have started to hate it after I became a neurologist. It should be banned for it is such a cruel sport. People who say that without boxing there would be no Ali are wrong

Believe me there would have been an Ali, the Ali. Ali was born to be the greatest; boxing did not make him great he made boxing popular. He himself claimed to be the savior of boxing more than once.

Ali had all the requirements to be great. He had the sharpest intellect and not just the sharpest tongue. He had a heart made of part titanium and part marshmallow. Joe Frazier said that his punches in Manila would have made walls of cities to fall but they only took Ali closest to death as Ali admitted. Foreman who felled Frazier six times in two rounds threw the best at Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire (Now known again with the old name of Congo) and today he was telling the CNN host that Ali would absorb those punches doing the “rope a dope” and then whisper in his ears, “That’s all you got George”. Foreman realized that yes that’s all he had, he who brought down Norton, the same Norton who had broken Ali’s jaw and claimed that he won the next fight with Ali too, had not lasted against Foreman. Ali told the pundits and the skeptics before the Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire that Foreman was a mummy and just as he had beaten the odds against the dreaded Liston in 1964, he would prove the pundits wrong. In 1964 he was still known as Cassius Clay and the media called him derogatively as the “Louisville Lip” and not yet as the “Greatest” or as the “Champ”. He had the heart of titanium that a lion or a tiger would envy but embedded in that titanium were soft strands that would melt at the suffering of the poor, the exploited and the occupied. The poor black masses in the US and Africa , the people of Palestine, South Africa and Algeria struggling against occupation, all tugged at his heart and he donated generously. His retinue of mostly carpet baggers too exploited his generosity.

Later people found out that he also had steel mandibles. His chin and jaw took the best from the great boxers of the golden period of the heavy weight boxing from 1971 to 81.

He had the confidence that no one else had shown in the world of sports before or since and that is why he bragged. A warmonger president like George Bush admitted that Ali was right when he was honoring the inspirer-in-chief of the anti-war movement-Ali. Ali had said “It is not bragging when you can back it up,” reminded George the 2nd. Only Ali could call Bush crazy at his face as he did that evening

Ali was not just the first champion to win the heavy weight crown three times. Ali was the first rapper, the first celebrity conscientious objector, the first Black athlete to talk back at the racist White America unlike Joe Louis the greatest boxer before Ali and Jackie Robinson, the black base ball legend, who dared not talk back. Yes Ali would have been the greatest even if he had not boxed.

Ali had almost mastered time itself. He was ahead of his times outside the ring when he opposed the Vietnam War when doing so was extremely unpopular and dangerous. Inside the ring, he was the master of timing. He was not the hardest of punchers like Liston, Foreman, Shavers or even Norton and Fraiser, even though he possessed that dreaded right cross. But he had speed and timing.

That sweet timing was seen in his demise too. Ali was humble. His bragging was a show; He told many times that God is the Greatest and not he. God tested him with a terrible disease. He lost his gift of gab not just his left jab. The prime example of male beauty with that handsome face and that “perfectly proportioned sexy” body as his physician, Ferdie Pacheco once described, was turned into a sad figure-hunched (simian posture or ape like posture of Parkinson’s patients). The fastest legs in the universe who would make people gasp when he did the Ali shuffle could only walk in the “shuffling gait” of parkinsonism. Yet Ali never complained. Great men would have complained to God and to fellow men, but not Ali. For, he was indeed the greatest. He said that God was using him to teach humility to human beings and to make people aware of Parkinson’s Disease.

God is using him in his death too. That was the thought that consoled me. I had left Long Island at 1030 PM after meeting my parents. The top of the radio news came as a shock that Ali might be dying. His family has rushed to his bedside. He had given the world scares a few times in the last couple of years. “But this time it looks different, it looks more serious,” said the newsreader on the radio.

The hour and a half drive to upstate was a hard one. Time and again my eyes would tear up adding to the diminished visibility due to the fog that was settling in on the Hudson valley. I had been meaning to visit Ali, along with my close friend, Sohail Ahmed, another neurologist. I wanted to meet him to apologize. All through the long drive I kept thinking of this untendered apology along with all the episodes of his life that I had read about or watched on TV and YouTube.

I always wanted to ask him if he had considered deep brain stimulation. That was in early 2000 when Ali was still physically strong. I was asked to start the deep brain stimulation program for people with advance Parkinson ’s Disease and other tremors, at the New York Presbyterian Hospital, by the Cornell Medical School. I did so in 2001. I always wanted to meet Ali and ask him if he had considered DBS.

Eleven days after joining Cornell as an assistant professor, I watched the Twin Towers come down and my media relations work for the Muslim community had to be revived to fight those who were using this terrorist attack to demonize all Muslims. Five months later a pogrom was unleashed in the Indian state of Gujarat being ruled by Narendra Modi. His supporters were threatening to repeat the “Gujarat experiment” in other states of India. They were sure that in the post 9/11 era, the world will not care. We launched Indian Muslim Alert Network and then Indian Muslim Council-USA to get justice for the victims of the pogrom and to prevent more from being perpetrated. I could not carry out the responsibilities of a faculty member at an Ivy League university as well as the President of IMC-USA. I moved to a lesser demanding job at a community hospital. That wish of going to meet Ali kept getting postponed. Time flew by and in a few years, Ali had become too frail for the DBS.

The emotional roller coaster continued and images, feelings and thoughts kept churning like a tornado in my mind. But I kept coming back to the timings of Ali’s death.

Ali had started out as a polarizing figure, with only a section of the Blacks rooting for him and most Whites hating him. When he joined the Nation of Islam, after coming under the influence of Malcolm X, and adapted a confrontational stand, many Blacks were upset that he was rocking the boat. When he refused to go to Vietnam and called it an unjust war, the hatred of White America intensified. Watching the war-casualties grow and witnessing the steadfastness of Ali who was willing to go to jail and whose title and passport were unjustly confiscated, the tide of public opinion started to turn in Ali’s favor. Ali, deprived of his livelihood through boxing, had taken to speaking on college campuses. He soon won over the hostile young Whites, who realized that it was not worth dying for in Vietnam.

By the time Ali won his title back in 1974 on that steamy hot night in Zaire, he was not only the darling of the world but was being loved and respected by many White Americans.

He was on a tour to India in 1980 and I was looking forward to seeing the greatest in flesh. BY then he was no longer the champion, having lost to old age, Holmes and even the mediocre Trevor Berbick. But he was still the Champ and was attracting tens of thousands for his exhibition bouts. Just before he came to Hyderabad, he was called back by Carter for a special mission. The champ was now donning the mantle of a statesman too.

Ali was very close to Malcolm X, who brought him into the Nation of Islam. Ali always regretted not supporting Malcolm when he left the Nation to become a “mainstream Muslim.” Malcolm was assassinated before he turned 40 in 1965. After Elijah Muhammad died, his son, Imam Warith Deen Muhammad, brought most followers of the Nation of Islam to “mainstream Sunni Islam” (as he called himself). Ali continued to fight for the oppressed but no longer considered the Whites as the devils. His popularity grew not only as the greatest boxer but as a moral leader. Jimmy carter invited him to the White House; and when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Carter sent Ali as his ambassador to the Muslim world to rally support for the Afghan Freedom struggle. I blamed the Russians more than I blamed Carter for not being able to see Ali.

I had to wait another decade and another brutal and genocidal war to meet Ali.

I met him for the first time during my work as a media relations person for the Bosnia Task Force – USA. Ali was part of a small delegation of national Muslim leadership that was visiting the UN. The aim was to rally the UN to intervene in Bosnia to liberate the prisoners of the concentration camps and rape camps, and to end the genocide. I saw the power yielded by Ali. As we walked down the corridors of the UN building, diplomats hurrying up and down would pass us by and a moment later would turn around to take a second look. With mouths open they would then rush to Ali, to shake his hand and ask for his autograph

The thoughts and images kept flashing by and it was midnight when I pulled into my driveway. I took out my phone and my friend Zafar Siddiqui’s post appeared on the facebook that NBC is announcing Ali’s death. I felt a punch in my gut.

To God we belong and to Him we shall Return, I said the Islamic response to the news of death

I told myself that I should not weep. In his death, Ali was going to teach the nation that once hated and later loved and respected him as an icon, forgotten lessons in humanity. For the last six months Donald Trump had brought to the fore the ugly xenophobia and Islamophobia that has been festering, thanks to the campaigns by Evangelical Extremists, the neocons and the Tea Party racists since 2008. Trump was dominating the news cycles and was claiming that he wants to make America Great Again. He wanted to turn the clock back to the times when people like Trump had all the privileges. Blacks were persecuted and poor Whites exploited.

Now the champ was going to trump Trump, “Whup him” as he would say. For the next three days Trump would be relegated to the back pages. I hurried into the house and flipped the TV on. And there it was-all Ali. On MSNBC, CNN, ESPN, BBC. Only Fox was running its “normal schedule”.

Trump would ask where American Muslim heroes are and Ali was saying, “Hey Trump you got any hero greater than me?” Trump had been saying that Muslims don’t belong in the US, they are all foreigners and Ali’s response: “you are dumber than you look.” Trump had been spewing hate as the way to greatness and the news channels were showing Ali’s 1975 speech on love and selflessness at Harvard. Liston did not see the “anchor punch” that hit him from nowhere in his second bout. Ali’s most iconic picture is standing by the downed “Big Ugly Bear”. Ali had again delivered his anchor punch, the second time to knock Trump, “the ugly White Monster” out cold. Trump, the rectal thermometer, that was showing the rising temperature of hate so accurately will reflect the fall in hate temperature for the next 72 hours at the least, I said to myself.

It was only late in the morning that Fox News started to cover Ali significantly. Even then they would get Uncle Toms and House Negros of Malcolm’s speeches, like Ben Carson to give their spin. Ben Carson was being asked” just as Ali became moderate, can we get American Muslims to support moderates today.” I wanted to throw up. Carson, the anti-Ali, with his incoherent speech was mumbling, that it is time that American Muslims denounce ISIS. Duh. American Muslims have been denouncing ISIS even before Carson knew what ISIS was. “It is time Republicans denounce the bigotry of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and John Huckabee,” the images of Ali and his mentor, Malcolm X seemed to be saying.

Thank you Champ for continuing to stand up for justice and for the underdog even in your death. Thank you Malcolm, for giving us Muhammad Ali. Malcolm’s eulogy was historic, the words and the voice of Ossie Davis move me every time I listen to it. It gives me goose bumps to hear Malik Shabbazz being described as “unconquered.. …our living black manhood…our own black shing prince.” “Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes,” Ossie had said about the master. I am hoping that the person delivering the eulogy of the disciple will point out that the world has come to bid farewell to the “unconquered, black manhood, who became the King of the world.”

Dr. Shaik Ubaid is a political commentator, community organizer and a practicing neurologist. He is active in the inter-faith arena and recently presented a panel discussion at the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City on “Sharing the lessons from the intrAfaith struggles against extremism”, where leaders of major religions shared their communities’ struggle against extremism. He had also spoken at The Left Forum, the premier yearly gathering of progressive intellectuals and activists in the US.

06 June, 2016
Countercurrents.org