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By Jeffrey Sachs

In the Milwaukee debate, Hillary Clinton took pride in her role in a recent UN Security Council resolution on a Syrian ceasefire:

But I would add this. You know, the Security Council finally got around to adopting a resolution. At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012 in Geneva, which set forth a cease-fire and moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring the parties at stake in Syria together.

This is the kind of compulsive misrepresentation that makes Clinton unfit to be President. Clinton’s role in Syria has been to help instigate and prolong the Syrian bloodbath, not to bring it to a close.

In 2012, Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated by UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan. It was US intransigence – Clinton’s intransigence – that led to the failure of Annan’s peace efforts in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton’s insinuation in the Milwaukee debate, there was (of course) no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.

As every knowledgeable observer understands, the Syrian War is not mostly about Bashar al-Assad, or even about Syria itself. It is mostly a proxy war, about Iran. And the bloodbath is doubly tragic and misguided for that reason.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the leading Sunni powers in the Middle East, view Iran, the leading Shia power, as a regional rival for power and influence. Right-wing Israelis view Iran as an implacable foe that controls Hezbollah, a Shi’a militant group operating in Lebanon, a border state of Israel. Thus, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran’s influence in Syria.

This idea is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power for a long time–in fact, for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not going away. There is no way, and no reason, to “defeat” Iran. The regional powers need to forge a geopolitical equilibrium that recognizes the mutual and balancing roles of the Gulf Arabs, Turkey, and Iran. And Israeli right-wingers are naïve, and deeply ignorant of history, to regard Iran as their implacable foe, especially when that mistaken view pushes Israel to side with Sunni jihadists.

Yet Clinton did not pursue that route. Instead she joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and right-wing Israelis to try to isolate, even defeat, Iran. In 2010, she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrest Syria from Iran’s influence. Those talks failed. Then the CIA and Clinton pressed successfully for Plan B: to overthrow Assad.

When the unrest of the Arab Spring broke out in early 2011, the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory. Clinton became the leading proponent of the CIA-led effort at Syrian regime change.

In early 2011, Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the US allies were organizing an armed insurrection against the regime. On August 18, 2011, the US Government made public its position: “Assad must go.”

Since then and until the recent fragile UN Security Council accord, the US has refused to agree to any ceasefire unless Assad is first deposed. The US policy–under Clinton and until recently–has been: regime change first, ceasefire after. After all, it’s only Syrians who are dying. Annan’s peace efforts were sunk by the United States’ unbending insistence that U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany a ceasefire. As the Nation editors put it in August 2012:

The US demand that Assad be removed and sanctions be imposed before negotiations could seriously begin, along with the refusal to include Iran in the process, doomed [Annan’s] mission.

Clinton has been much more than a bit player in the Syrian crisis. Her diplomat Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi was killed as he was running a CIA operation to ship Libyan heavy weapons to Syria. Clinton herself took the lead role in organizing the so-called “Friends of Syria” to back the CIA-led insurgency.

The U.S. policy was a massive, horrific failure. Assad did not go, and was not defeated. Russia came to his support. Iran came to his support. The mercenaries sent in to overthrow him were themselves radical jihadists with their own agendas. The chaos opened the way for the Islamic State, building on disaffected Iraqi Army leaders (deposed by the US in 2003), on captured U.S. weaponry, and on the considerable backing by Saudi funds. If the truth were fully known, the multiple scandals involved would surely rival Watergate in shaking the foundations of the US establishment.

The hubris of the United States in this approach seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led regime change is so deeply enmeshed as a “normal” instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly noticed by the U.S. public or media. Overthrowing another government is against the U.N. charter and international law. But what are such niceties among friends?

This instrument of U.S. foreign policy has not only been in stark violation of international law but has also been a massive and repeated failure. Rather than a single, quick, and decisive coup d’état resolving a US foreign policy problem, each CIA-led regime change has been, almost inevitably, a prelude to a bloodbath. How could it be otherwise? Other societies don’t like their countries to be manipulated by U.S. covert operations.

Removing a leader, even if done “successfully,” doesn’t solve any underlying geopolitical problems, much less ecological, social, or economic ones. A coup d’etat invites a civil war, the kind that now wracks Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. It invites a hostile international response, such as Russia’s backing of its Syrian ally in the face of the CIA-led operations. The record of misery caused by covert CIA operations literally fills volumes at this point. What surprise, then, the Clinton acknowledges Henry Kissinger as a mentor and guide?

And where is the establishment media in this debacle? The New York Times finally covered a bit of this story last month in describing the CIA-Saudi connection, in which Saudi funds are used to pay for CIA operations in order to make an end-run around Congress and the American people. The story ran once and was dropped. Yet the Saudi funding of CIA operations is the same basic tactic used by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s (with Iranian arms sales used to fund CIA-led covert operations in Central America without consent or oversight by the American people).

Clinton herself has never shown the least reservation or scruples in deploying this instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Her record of avid support for US-led regime change includes (but is not limited to) the US bombing of Belgrade in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Iraq War in 2003, the Honduran coup in 2009, the killing of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, and the CIA-coordinated insurrection against Assad from 2011 until today.

It takes great presidential leadership to resist CIA misadventures. Presidents get along by going along with arms contractors, generals, and CIA operatives. They thereby also protect themselves from political attack by hardline right-wingers. They succeed by exulting in U.S. military might, not restraining it. Many historians believe that JFK was assassinated as a result of his peace overtures to the Soviet Union, overture he made against the objections of hardline rightwing opposition in the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government.

Hillary Clinton has never shown an iota of bravery, or even of comprehension, in facing down the CIA. She has been the CIA’s relentless supporter, and has exulted in showing her toughness by supporting every one of its misguided operations. The failures, of course, are relentlessly hidden from view. Clinton is a danger to global peace. She has much to answer for regarding the disaster in Syria.

14 February 2016

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

The Syrian military’s resilience should not be dismissed—nor should its support.

By Kamal Alam

Four years ago, Turkey’s then prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that within in a few weeks he would be praying in Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque, as Assad was about to fall. Similarly, Israel’s most decorated soldier, former Defense Minister Ehud Barak, predicted that Assad and his military would be toppled within weeks. That was at the beginning of 2012, when there were no Iranian soldiers on the ground or Russian planes in the skies.

As another round of Geneva peace talks collapses and the world wonders what’s next for Syria, it is time to begin with the warnings of Henry Kissinger and Zbignew Brzezinski. Kissinger and Brzezinski, the most seasoned and influential U.S. policymakers on the Middle East since World War II, havegone against popular opinion and stated that President Bashar al-Assad hasmore support than all the opposition groups combined.

It is no secret that the Saudis and Qataris, with full U.S. support, have tried to bribe some of Assad’s innermost circles to defect. The all-important professional military cadre of the Syrian Arab Army, however, has remained thoroughly loyal.

The Syrian Arab Army was mostly a conscript force with only about eighty thousand professionals in its ranks. At the start of the war, much was made of the “defections” of thousands of officers, but these were mere conscripts who never wanted to be in the army in the first place, and would also have done anything to escape conscription in peacetime. The professional ranks, meanwhile, are still very strong and religiously pluralistic. When the Syrian opposition talks about a future pluralistic Syria, they fail to realize that while they may theoretically be pluralists in Geneva, Washington and Vienna, their representatives on the ground are allied with the most sectarian terrorist groups the Middle East has ever seen.

The Syrian Arab Army has held its own for more than five years. Its numbers might have been depleted, as is normal for any wartime military, but a close glance at its military reveals that its core, perhaps unexpectedly to many, is Sunni. The current minister of defense, Fahd al-Freij, is one of the most decorated officers in Syrian military history and hails from the Sunni heartland of Hama. The two most powerful intelligence chiefs, Ali Mamlouk and Mohammad Dib Zaitoun, have remained loyal to the Syrian government—and are both Sunnis from influential families. The now-dead and dreaded strongman of Syrian intelligence, Rustom Ghazaleh, who ruled Lebanon with an iron fist, was a Sunni, and the head of the investigative branch of the political directorate, Mahmoud al-Khattib, is from an old Damascene Sunni family. Major General Ramadan Mahmoud Ramadan, commander of the Thirty-Fifth Special Forces Regiment, which is tasked with the protection of western Damascus, is another high-ranking Sunni, as is Brigadier G
eneral Jihad Mohamed Sultan, the commander of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade that guards Latakia.

The history of the Syrian Army that Hafez al-Assad built is instructive today. As president, the elder Assad brought senior members of the Syrian Air Force into the military high command. Naji Jamil (another Sunni) served as air force chief from 1970 to 1978 and was promoted to the General Staff committee overseeing defenses on the Iraqi border. Another air force commander was Muhammad al-Khuli, who until 1993 held coveted logistical positions between Damascus and Lebanon. Other prominent officers above the rank of Brigadier in military and civil defense positions post-2000 were Sunnis, including Rustom Ghazaleh, Hazem al Khadra and Deeb Zaytoun. Since 1973, the strategic tank battalions of the Seventieth Armored Brigade, stationed near al-Kiswah near Damascus, have had rank-and-file Alawis under the command of Sunni officers. As well, two of the most decorated officers who rose to be Chief of General Staff under Bashar al-Assad were Sunnis: Hassan Turkmani and Hikmat Shehabi.

From the 1970s until the 1990s, the Syrian Arab Army had a mandate to stabilize Lebanon. During these years, it worked to outmaneuver both the IDF and the U.S. Marines by supporting various proxies in Lebanon. In post-Saddam Iraq, the Americans could never understand which elements of both the Sunni and Shia insurgencies were supported by Syrian military intelligence, much of this owing to the stealth with which the Syrian Army controlled various Iraqi agents dating back to the Lebanese civil war.

The Syrian Arab Army is also the only Arab army with multiple Christians serving as generals. The most famous of these was Daoud Rajha, the Greek Orthodox army chief of staff. The two most influential Lebanese Christian leaders, now on the verge of becoming the next president of Lebanon, are Michel Aoun and Suleiman Franjieh, who are also allies of the Syrian Arab Army and President Assad. Deir al-Zour is an entirely Sunni city which has held out against ISIS encirclement for two years—and is commanded by the Druze General Issam Zahreddine.

The fact remains: The moderate Syrian opposition only exists in fancy suits in Western hotel lobbies. It has little military backing on the ground. If you want to ask why Assad is still the president of Syria, the answer is not simply Russia or Iran, but the fact that his army remains resilient and pluralistic, representing a Syria in which religion alone does not determine who rises to the top. The military also represent as challenge against the spread of terrorism, which is why three of the top British generals of the last five years have openly called for the recognition that the Syrian Arab Army, loyal to President Assad, is the only force capable of defeating ISIS and Al Qaeda in the Levant.

Kamal Alam is a Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a Syrian Military Analyst advising several Damascus-based family offices.

12 February 2016

By Vacy Vlazna

To be an effective activist it is important for me to understand the nature of human evil. In that endeavour, I was drawn to read Hannah Arendt’s own discoveries about what she coined, ‘the banality of evil’ in her book, ’Eichmann in Jerusalem’ , reporting on the zionist trial of Adolph Eichmann who oversaw the deportation of Jews to ghettoes and concentration camps.

Arendt concluded that unspeakable evil is not committed by human monsters but by normal people in a systematic unthinking manner devoid of moral qualms and codes.

‘The banality of evil’ i.e. bureaucratic psychopathy is rendered acceptable through what Albert Bandura terms, moral disengagement achieved by perverse moral justification, minimising/ hiding cruelty and dehumanising and blaming the victims.

The concentration and repetition of this faux information on the masses leads to the normalisation of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, torture, extrajudicial killings and genocide.

Today, moral disengagement is the corrupted norm of most governments, whether democratic or totalitarian, and the zionist government has, ironically, out-mastered the Nazi mechanisms of moral disengagement or in a word, Hasbara.

Here’s a small insight into how it works; take MK Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid party that is in coalition with Netanyahu’s Likud party. Lapid recently spruiked to 30 EU ambassadors,

“We will never be like them [Palestinians], because Israel’s power comes first of all from its morality. The difference between us and our enemies is our values. That is why we can ask the world: Why are you continuing to embrace those who support vile murderers?”

Of course any intelligent person knows that in the laying waste of the rights of indigenous people of Palestine, zionist ‘values’ are void of morality: the zionist values of imprisoning and torturing children, of unjustified mass incarcerations, the zionist value of apartheid, of demolishing homes, of stealing Palestinian land, of testing high-tech weaponry on Palestinian families trapped in the zionist siege of Gaza.

Then there are the zionist values of immolating a teenager and a sleeping Palestinian family, of destroying Palestinian agriculture and livelihoods, of the extrajudicial killings of youth throwing stones and carrying invisible knives, of deliberately blocking ambulances and paramedics to treat the wounded, of calculatedly bringing hunger striking Palestinian prisoners, such as Mohammed Al-Qiq, to the brink of death before granting, if at all, a release from imprisonment for crimes never committed.

According to non-practising Israeli, Dr Marcelo Svirsky, moral disengagement is rife among the occupiers,

“The majority of Jewish-Israelis do not critically reflect on their lasting commitment to their collective beliefs, ideas and practices and hence they do not take notice that these are vehicles of privilege and oppression. In other words, most Jewish-Israelis choose, unconsciously or not, to live in peace with the misery they cause.” After Israel:Towards Cultural Transformation

And when Palestinians show true values of sumoud – steadfast and courageous resistance to zionist ‘values’ and violence, they are falsely labelled ‘terrorists’ or ‘vile murderers’.

On reading Arendt, I wonder if the zionist deprecation of Palestinian resistance is rooted in deep shame. Arendt points out that the Eichmann trial revealed the shocking extent of the collaboration of Jewish leaders (Judenräte) with Eichmann and the Nazis and their knowingly withholding from fellow Jews the horrific consequences of deportation to the concentration camps.

“What was new and especially provocative in Arendt’s account was the insistence on challenging Jewish communal leadership. What might they have done differently? Her answers, offered only tentatively, derived from her view of the function of truth in politics. Should the Judenräte have told the Jews the truth, when they knew it, about where they were being deported to? How many might have been able to save themselves somehow had they known the truth? Why were the Judenräe notables so disciplined and servile to authority?”

“Insofar as they had moral authority, why didn’t they advise the Jews to run for their lives or try to go underground? If there had been no Jewish organizations at all and no Judenräte, Arendt suggested, the deportation machine could not have run as smoothly as it did.”

“If the Judenräte had not been so “Germanically” disciplined, if they hadn’t compiled detailed lists of potential deportees, if they hadn’t supplied the Nazis with these lists, if they had refrained from collecting the keys and detailed inventories of vacated apartments for the Nazis to hand over to “Aryans,” if they hadn’t summoned the deportees to show up on a certain day, at a certain hour, at a certain railway station with provisions for a three- or four-day journey, would fewer people have died? Others had asked such questions before. But Arendt went further, implying that Jewish leaders had inadvertently allowed themselves to fall into a fiendish trap and become part of the system of victimization.”

In effect, the Judenräte’s, i.e. mainly zionist Jews, collaboration with the Nazis contributed to Jewish dearths and crushed resistance like the undermining the Jewish boycott in the USA of Nazi products which was undermined by,

“There existed in those first years a mutually highly satisfactory agreement between the Nazi authorities and the Jewish Agency for Palestine—a Ha’avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival. It was soon the only legal way for a Jew to take his money with him (the alternative then being the establishment of a blocked account, which could be liquidated abroad only at a loss of between fifty and ninety-five per cent). The result was that in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of goods “made in Germany.””

Nevertheless Jews resisted the Nazi scourge by way of armed Jewish partisan groups, uprisings in the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, rebellions in ghettoes including the famous Warsaw Ghetto ( wherein, shock-horror, food was smuggled through underground tunnels! ),

“The glory of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the heroism of the few others who fought back lay precisely in their having refused the comparatively easy death the Nazis offered them—before the firing squad or in the gas chamber. And the witnesses in Jerusalem who testified to resistance and rebellion, to “the small place [it had] in the history of the holocaust,” confirmed once more the fact that only the very young had been capable of taking “the decision that we cannot go and be slaughtered like sheep. “

The glorious resistance of the young calls to mind the present Palestinian youth Intifada against 68 years of zionist brutality at the hands of holocaust survivors and worshippers and against the 21 years of Palestinian Authority/PLO collaboration ( like the Judenräte) with the zionists that has facilitated the growth of zionist colonial expansion and the crushing of Palestinian resistance.

Undaunted, Palestinian resistance is in the breath of daily life under the zionist jackboot; going to school is an act of resistance where children are harassed by the savagery of the deviant zionist colonists who prey on them like wild jackals. These deviants reflect the pathological sickness that is zionism.

Resistance illuminates the dignified ultimatum of Palestinian hunger-striking prisoners, al-Issawi, Adnan and Al-Qiq, for freedom or death, resistance is heard in the dangerous digging of life-blood tunnels, resistance raises money by impoverished Palestinians to rebuild the demolished homes of martyrs, it is smelt in the baking of bread and felt in the shaking of olives from ancient trees, in the indefatigable care and courage by doctors, paramedics and rescuers during the 51 day zionist onslaught of Gaza and in the soothing of terrified children traumatised by drones, bombs and ubiquitous death.

There was a tremendous uplift of pride for the young Gazan men who valiantly resisted the military might of Operation Protective Edge in 2014. That spirit is being acted on by Palestinian youth today while the leaders squander Palestinian dignity and the crucial strategy of unity by either collaborating with the zionists or crawling on their knees to Arab states that don’t give a damn about Palestine.

So how can we resist the banality of evil to protect the rights of Palestinians and further peace in Palestine for all?

Zionist values and the hasbara machine dread empathy. Empathy engages with suffering and survivors of Nazi atrocities and their descendants have the privileged capacity to realise there is no difference between suffering under the Nazi or the zionist jackboot – both of which made and make strides because the machinations of moral disengagement duped the German people back then, just as the Jewish people are duped today along with British, Canadian, American, European, Australian citizens whose governments grant impunity to the zionist scourge in Palestine.

Empathy is power. Empathy’s identification and connection with the Other evokes profound understanding of the interdependence of humanity which transforms moral concern into actions, like BDS, that, individually and communally, can defeat moral disengagement and the banality of evil.

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

11 January, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Isra Saleh el-Namey

Umaimah Zamalat assumed her papers were in order.

The 52-year-old woman from Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip had already undergone one radiation session at the Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem for her aggressive breast cancer.

But when she got to the Erez checkpoint at the boundary between Gaza and Israel, ready to go for a second treatment, she was stopped.

“My permit allows me to travel to Jerusalem until I finish four [radiation therapy] sessions. But when I tried to cross Erez for my second session they told me I am no longer allowed,” Zamalat told The Electronic Intifada.

The Israeli military authorities at Erez gave no explanation when they turned her back. Patients from Gaza are not allowed to stay in Jerusalem or Israeli hospitals for the duration of their treatment and must return between sessions. This leaves them at risk of sudden, unexplained and apparently inexplicable permit revocations.

That, in turn, has inevitable consequences on patients’ health.

“I am extremely worried. Doctors told me that my case is very sensitive to delays,” Zamalat said.

Little hope

Zamalat has reapplied to get another permit to complete her radiation therapy. But she holds out very little hope.

“Our problem is not just being cancer patients. It is with the bitterness of an occupation that we feel in every tiny detail of our lives, even in our illnesses,” she said.

Health care professionals in Gaza have documented a disturbing rise in incidences of cancer in the impoverished strip of land.

Dr. Mohammed Abu Shaban is a Palestinian oncologist who works at different hospitals in Gaza. Over the last two years, he said, citing statistics from the Gaza ministry of health, the number of cancer diagnoses reached some 14,600.

“Every month, we see at least 120 new cancer patients in Gaza,” the doctor told The Electronic Intifada.

Abu Shaban alleged a direct relationship between the increase in the number of patients with cancer and the three wars launched on Gaza over the last eight years. Doctors in Gaza and foreign health professionals have long suspected that Israel has used new forms of weaponry over Gaza, including Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) or ammunition laced with radioactive material.

“Israeli forces have used illegal weapons with lethal radioactive materials that transfer to the soil,” Abu Shaban said. “People who live next to areas that have been shelled risk being exposed to these materials. That enhances the risk of cancer for these people.”

Leukemia is the most pervasive cancer in Gaza, according to the doctor. Abu Shaban estimates that some 25 percent of cancer-related deaths among children are due to the condition.

In addition to the difficulty of gaining access to treatment is the cost. With poverty and unemployment rates both near 40 percent, Palestinians in Gaza rely on government assistance.

“People cannot afford the exorbitant prices of health care services,” Abu Shaban said. “We are in acute need of more funds to cover extra expenses for our patients.”

Rafah not an option

Amina Ahmad’s condition dramatically deteriorated eight months ago. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 2012, the 46-year-old from Gaza City applied for referral to one of the specialized hospitals in the West Bank or inside Israel six months ago.

But she needs the permit.

“I have my medical reports and all the necessary papers to enable me to move to the West Bank as an urgent humanitarian case. But I have not gotten Israeli approval yet,” Ahmad said.

A delay in obtaining a permit to enter Israel can have dire consequences. If appointments are missed, patients will have to go through the whole application process again. “We are left to die in silence,” Ahmad said.

The situation would be different if the Rafah crossing to Egypt was open, she said. Egypt offers care that Gaza hospitals cannot and, if nothing else, she said, at least she would not be hostage to “the whims of the Israelis.” But Egypt has kept the crossing closed, with only a few dozen days of partial opening, since late 2014.

The siege Israel has imposed on Gaza since 2007 has depleted a health care system that was already under pressure from poverty, overcrowding and rapid population growth.

Under the blockade, said Dr. Ahmed El Shorafa, head of the tumor clinic at the European Hospital in Rafah, the situation can only be described as “catastrophic.”

Gaza suffers a serious shortage of medicine, medical supplies and equipment as well as trained and specialized personnel. “We use the same machines and the same protocols as we did 14 years ago. We have not been able to develop anything,” El Shorafa said.

As a direct result, Gaza’s hospitals are unable to offer radiation or chemotherapy treatments — hence the need for the many referrals to West Bank or Israeli hospitals.

Fear and anger

“What we have observed in the last five years is that the annual referrals of Gaza patients have only risen by only 1.3 percent despite a significant increase in the number of patients,” El Shorafa said. “The very restricted movement has reduced the options open to Gaza patients for specialized care.”

In the first 10 months of 2015, the administrative arm of the Israeli military occupation administration — the body known as the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT — denied 1,035 Palestinians in Gaza permission to exit so that they could receive necessary medical treatment in the occupied West Bank, Israel or Jordan.

This represents almost twice as many denials as were issued the entire previous year.

Six-year-old Sahar Abd al-Aal was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She is currently undergoing radiation treatment at the al-Rantisi pediatric hospital in Gaza City. Hafiza, her mother, waited anxiously for her doctors’ verdict on treatment going forward.

“My daughter has to undergo the last session before doctors assess her case and whether she will need to be transferred,” Hafiza said.

“I am afraid that my daughter will have to be transferred and the Israelis will not allow us,” she added.

In January, dozens of female patients staged a protest to voice their anger over the draconian restrictions, which Israel threatens to tighten, on patient movement.

One of the protesters, Rawan Lubad, has lived with breast cancer for 10 years. The 61-year-old is in constant pain. She has twice applied to get a permit for referral. She was twice denied.

“I am dying here. I feel that I have been sentenced to death,” she said.

Isra Saleh el-Namey is a journalist from Gaza.

11 February, 2016
The Electronic Intifada

By Andrea Germanos

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed a plan to encircle his entire country with a fence as protection against “wild beasts,” referring to those in neighboring Arab states.

He made the comments Tuesday while visiting an 18-mile stretch of fence already under construction on the Israel-Jordan border.

“At the end of the day, in the State of Israel as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding its entirety,” he said, according to a statement on the Prime Minister’s website.

“They tell me: Is this what you want to do, defend the villa? The answer is yes. What, are we going to surround the entire State of Israel with a fence, a barrier? The answer is yes, unequivocally. In the environment in which we live we must defend ourselves from the wild beasts.”

He added that it would be a multi-year project, multi-million dollar project.

“Perhaps the most notorious of Israel’s walls built for ‘security purposes’ runs within the occupied West Bank,” as Al Jazeera reports. It was deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004.

Haaretz columnist Asher Schechter argues that “Israel is already not even trying to function like a democracy,” and writes that Netanyahu’s statement is “a display of everything wrong with Israel under his leadership. Israel circa 2016 is fearful, hateful, and paranoid, self-involved to a degree even Donald Trump would find distasteful, and soon it might have big walls surrounding it from every which way, quarantining it, and a political system where only Jews need apply.

On Wednesday Netanyahu also spoke to the Israeli parliament and referred to the existing fence along the border with Egypt, saying that it prevented Israel from being “overrun” with migrants.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

11 February, 2016
Commondreams.org

By Uri Avnery

IT IS not easy to be an Arab in Israel.

It is not easy to be a woman in Arab society.

It is not easy to be an Arab in Israeli politics.

And even less easy to be an Arab woman in the Knesset.

Haneen Zuabi is all these together. Perhaps because of this she wears a perpetual smile – the smile of somebody who has won, after all.

It can be very annoying, this smile. Annoying and provocative.

These days, Zuabi has achieved something no Arab woman in Israel ever dreamed of: the whole country is talking about her. Not for an hour, nor for a day, but for weeks on end.

The vast majority of Jewish Israelis hate her guts. Zuabi’s smile is triumphant.

HANEEN BELONGS to a large Hamula (extended family) that dominates several villages near Nazareth. Two Zuabis were members of the Knesset in its early days – one was a vassal of the (then) ruling Zionist Labor Party, the other a member of the left-wing Zionist Mapam party. It was he who coined the memorable phrase: “My country is at war with my people!”

Haneen Zuabi is a member of the Balad (“homeland”) party, an Arab nationalist party founded by Azmi Bishara, an Israeli-Palestinian intellectual. Bishara was an admirer of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser and his pan-Arab vision. When the Shin-Bet was about to arrest him on some pretext or other, he fled the country, asserting that because of a severe kidney disease, prison would endanger his life.

He left behind a three-man Knesset faction, one of three Arab factions of similar size. All of them were a constant irritation to their Jewish colleagues, so they invented a remedy. A new law was enacted denying Knesset membership to any party that did not gain enough votes for a four-member faction. (A larger minimum could have endangered the Orthodox Jewish party.)

The logic was simple: the three small Arab factions hated each other’s guts. One was Communist (with one Jewish member), one Islamist and one nationalist (Balad).

But lo and behold, under threat of annihilation even Arabs can unite. They formed a “Joint List” (“Joint”, not “United”) and together gained 13 seats – three more than before. They are now the third largest faction in the Knesset, right after Likud and Labor, an eyesore to many of their colleagues.

 

THIS IS the background of the latest outrage.

For months now, Israel has been in the throes of a mini-intifada. In the two former intifadas, “terrorists” acted in groups under the orders of organizations, which were easily infiltrated. This time, individuals act alone, or together with cousins who could be trusted, without any prior signs. The Israeli forces (army, police, Shin Bet) have no information whatsoever and are therefore unable to prevent these acts.

Moreover, many of today’s “terrorists” are children – boys and girls who just pick up a knife in their mother’s kitchen and, on the spur of the moment, run out and attack the nearest Israeli. Some of them are 13, 14 years old. Some of the girls wield scissors. All of them know that in all probability they will be shot dead on the spot by soldiers or passing armed civilians.

The preferred victims are soldiers or settlers. Lacking these, they attack any Israeli, man or woman, in sight.

The mighty Israeli security forces are admittedly helpless against this kind of “infantifada” (as my friend Reuven Wimmer calls it). In their distress, the security forces do what they always do in such situations: use methods that have already failed many times.

Apart from summary executions on the spot (justified or unjustified, these methods include the demolition of the family’s home, to deter others, as well as the arrest of parents and other family members.

Frankly, I detest these measures. They remind me of a Nazi term I remember from my youth: “Sippenhaft” (“kin liability”. It is barbaric. It is also highly ineffective. A boy who has decided to sacrifice his life for his people is not deterred by such things. Not a single piece of contrary evidence has ever been produced. On the contrary, it stands to reason that such barbaric acts increase hatred and provide motivation for more attacks.

BUT THE most atrocious and stupid measure is the withholding of dead bodies. I am almost too ashamed to bring this up.

After almost any “terrorist” act, the body of the perpetrator – adult or child – is picked up by the security forces. Under Muslim law and usage, dead bodies must be buried the same day or the next one. Withholding them is a supreme act of cruelty. Our security services believe that this contributes to prevention. For Muslims, this is a supreme act of sacrilege.

This is the background of the latest scandal. The three Balad members of the Arab faction visited the families of the perpetrators of a “terrorist outrage”, whose bodies had been withheld. Their version is that they came to discuss how to retrieve the bodies. The security forces insist that they also expressed their condolences and even stood in silence for a minute.

The Knesset, “from wall to wall”, was outraged. How dare they? Extolling murderers? Showing sympathy for their families?

The Balad members of the Joint Faction are, apart from Zuabi and her smile, Bassal Gatas, and Gamal Zahalka. I have never met Gatas personally. He is 60 years old, a Christian Arab, a doctor of engineering and a businessman. He was for a long time a member of the Communist Party but was thrown out when he insisted on his right to criticize the Soviet Union. Azmi Bishara is his cousin. On TV, he makes a very sensible impression.

I consider Gamal Zahalka a personal friend. Once we both attended a conference in Italy and undertook some hikes together with our wives. I like him very much.

The three Balad members were banned from the Knesset for several months, except for the right to participate in Knesset votes (a right that cannot be denied). Now a new bill proposes that the Knesset can, by a majority of three fourths, expel members from the Knesset altogether.

This means that – unless the Supreme Court declares this bill unconstitutional – the Knesset will soon be Araber-rein, free from Arabs. A purely Jewish Knesset for a purely Jewish state.

THIS WOULD be a disaster for Israel.

Every fifth Israeli is an Arab. The Arab minority in Israel is one of the largest national minorities, per capita, in the world. Pushing such a minority out of the political process will weaken the very structure of the state.

When the state came into being, we believed that after a generation or two the gulf between the two communities would close, or nearly so. The opposite has happened.

In the early years, political cooperation between Jews and Arabs in a joint peace-camp was strong and getting stronger. These days are long past. The gulf has widened.

There was – and is – an opposite trend, too. Many Arabs are integrated in important professions, such as medicine. The last time I was hospitalized, I could not guess if the chief doctor of my department was Jewish or Arab. I had to ask my (Arab) male nurse, who confirmed that the very gentle doctor was Arab. I have found that Arab medical personnel are generally gentler than Jewish ones.

In several professions, Arabs are more or less integrated. But the general trend is the opposite. Where once there were cordial relations between neighborhoods, or between political organizations, contacts have loosened or disappeared altogether.

There were times when my friends and I visited Arab towns and villages almost every week. Not anymore.

This is not altogether an one-sided process. Insulted and rejected for so long, Arab citizens have lost the appetite for cooperation. Some of them have become more Islamist. The happenings in the Occupied Territories affect them deeply. A third and fourth generation of Israeli Arab citizens is becoming more proud and self-reliant. They are very disappointed by the failures of the Jewish peace movements.

To throw the Arab members out of the Knesset is, as a French politician once famously said, “This is worse than a crime – it is a mistake!”

It would cut the ties between the Israeli state and more than 20% of its citizens. Some Israelis may dream of evicting the Arabs altogether from the historical country – all six million of them in Israel proper, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – but that is a pipedream. The world in which this was once possible does not exist any more.

What is possible, and indeed already exists, is a creeping apartheid. It is already the reality in the West bank and East Jerusalem, and – as this episode shows – it is becoming the reality in Israel proper, too.

The hysteria that has engulfed the country after the “visit to the ‘terrorists’ families” has touched the Labor party, and even Meretz, too.

I am putting “terrorists” in quotation marks because they are terrorists only to the Jews. For Arabs they are heroes, shaheeds, Muslims who sacrifice their lives to “testify” to the greatness of Allah.

The question is, of course, what is the job of an Arab MK? To upset the Jews? Or to narrow the gap and convince Israelis that Israeli-Palestinian peace is both possible and worthwhile.

I am afraid that Zuabi’s smile does not help with the second aim.
IF ANYTHING, this affair has reinforced the arguments for the Two State. Let each of the two states have a parliament of its own, where they can commit all the stupidities they want, and a serious joint Coordination Council, where serious decisions can be taken.

Henry Barkey’s piece entitled “Erdogan’s Foreign Policy Is in Ruins” is a good read. The title speaks for itself.
As Barkey points out in the beginning, “Turkish foreign policy was the talk of the town” a few years back. “Turkey aimed to both improve relations with its neighborhood and slowly emerge as the dominant regional power. It was a classic case of enhancing soft power through democratization and economic reforms at home, coupled with shrewd diplomacy aimed at establishing Ankara as a mediator in the region’s conflicts.”
In his view, this foreign policy is in ruins today, mostly due to the “unpredictable turnabout in the Arab Spring” and “miscalculations in domestic and foreign policy.” And he lays the responsibility for this dramatic change of fortunes clearly at President’s Erdogan’s door. “President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grandiose ideas of his role in the world, his desire to transform Turkey into a strong presidential system, and the collapse of the Kurdish peace process, itself a casualty of the Syrian crisis, all have contributed to damaging Ankara’s once-promising foreign policy.”
Barkey concludes with an unforgiving judgment: “Turkish foreign policy is no longer about Turkey but about Erdogan. Floundering at home and abroad, the Turkish president has embarked on an illiberal course at home undermining what are admittedly flawed institutions and reconstituting them in his image. His omnipresence and unchallenged position mean that foreign policy is the product of his worldview, whims, and preferences.” And this is quite a familiar slippery road and pitfall: so many leaders before him have simply – and miserably – failed in pursuing personal whims and preferences instead of more common-sensical national interests of their own countries.

******
Erdogan’s Foreign Policy Is in Ruins
BY HENRI J. BARKEY | FEBRUARY 4, 2016

It wasn’t long ago that Turkish foreign policy was the talk of the town. Defined by the catchy phrase of “zero problems with the neighbors,” Turkey aimed to both improve relations with its neighborhood and slowly emerge as the dominant regional power. It was a classic case of enhancing soft power through democratization and economic reforms at home, coupled with shrewd diplomacy aimed at establishing Ankara as a mediator in the region’s conflicts.

This policy lies in ruins today. It is the victim of the unpredictable turnabout in the Arab Spring, especially in Syria; hubris; and miscalculations in domestic and foreign policy. With the exception of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, Turkey’s relations with almost all of its neighbors have soured. At the same time, tensions with the United States, European Union, and Russia have all dramatically increased. If Ankara has any sway today, it is mostly because of its geography — which gives it proximity to Syria and the refugee calamity — and its willingness to use strong-arm tactics in diplomatic transactions.

So how did Turkey’s international ambitions fall apart? It’s a question with multiple answers. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grandiose ideas of his role in the world, his desire to transform Turkey into a strong presidential system, and the collapse of the Kurdish peace process, itself a casualty of the Syrian crisis, all have contributed to damaging Ankara’s once-promising foreign policy.

Turkey and the Arab Spring

Even before the Arab Spring, there were signs that Turkish foreign policy was faltering. In 2009, after almost seven years of conservative rule, Turkey’s accomplishments were noteworthy: rapid economic growth, the transformation of Istanbul into an international hub, democratization at home, and the domestication of the powerful military establishment. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) went from electoral victory to electoral victory, as ordinary citizens were seduced by his accomplishments and turned off by a hapless opposition.

Having consolidated his position at home, especially after the 2007 elections, Erdogan became more of a risk-taker. He initiated a calculated public showdown with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the 2009 World Economic Forum, in which he angrily castigated Israel’s policy in Gaza, which threw relations between the two countries into a tailspin. However, it also paid off tremendous dividends in the Arab world, as Erdogan and Turkey’s popularity skyrocketed, and Arabs flocked to Turkey for tourism and in search of investment opportunities. This was followed by a pro-AKP Turkish NGO’s decision to charter a boat and sail to challenge the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the disastrous Israeli response, which ended with the deaths of nine Turks and saw relations with Israel collapse further.

The advent of the Arab Spring also pushed the United States and Turkey to work together closely. They appeared to synchronize their public statements on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in an effort to push him out and later worked together on supplying arms and supplies to the Free Syrian Army. Turkey once again emerged as a regional model country that had successfully married Islam and democracy in the person of Erdogan and his AKP. As early as 2010, Obama declared Turkey to be a “great Muslim democracy” and “a critically important model for other Muslim countries in the region”; in 2012, he even named Erdogan among the top five leaders with whom he had forged a close relationship.

Turkey, however, wanted to be more than a model. The rise in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which the AKP leadership had had close relations, opened the possibility of an active role for Ankara as the movement’s most powerful regional ally. The Arab Spring in effect allowed for the Turkish leadership to imagine itself as the region’s leading power: As then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu put it, Turkey “will lead the winds of change in the Middle East … not just as a friend but as a country which is seen as one articulating the ideas of change and of the new order.”

Turkey’s moment had arrived. But it wouldn’t last long: Davutoglu’s hoped-for “new order” was dealt a setback when Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government was overthrown by a combination of public protests and the army, and Erdogan’s relations with the new military-led regime disintegrated rapidly. But it was in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad’s regime stubbornly persisted in the face of an insurgency that Turkey helped support, where Turkish foreign-policy objectives were ultimately upended.

How Syria changed everything

Before the 2011 uprising, Syria had been the ultimate successful example of Turkey’s “zero problems” foreign policy. Soon after the AKP’s rise to power, Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and Erdogan established a close working and even personal relationship. This was a remarkable turnabout, considering that in 1998, Turkey threatened Syria militarily due to its support of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which was then waging an insurgency against the Turkish state. Erdogan helped launch indirect negotiations between Israel and Syria, and went on to support the Baathist regime against a U.N. effort, led by the United States and France, to pressure Syrian troops to leave Lebanon.

When the peaceful protests started in Syria, Erdogan at first maneuvered to prevent Assad from succumbing to the same fate as the Egyptian and Tunisian leaders. He counseled Assad to introduce reforms — in fact, he reportedly suggested that these did not have to be very profound — but to no avail. As Assad gave a free rein to his military to crush the protests, Erdogan turned on his former ally and friend.

A number of factors contributed to Erdogan’s decision: anger that Assad would not heed his counsel, the common perception that Assad would not survive anyway, the belief that he could shape the new Syria, and finally the dramatic escalation of violence during the holy month of Ramadan in 2011 on what Erdogan saw as Sunni protestors. He called for Assad’s removal and publicly proclaimed that the Syrian dictator had only months left in power. Soon, he said in September 2012, “we will be going to Damascus and pray freely with our brothers at the Ummayad Mosque.”

Assad, however, would not fall so easily. The divergence between Erdogan’s wishes to see Assad replaced by a friendly Sunni-based alliance and the reality of the Syrian dictator’s stubborn hold on power frustrated the Turkish leader and pushed him toward a go-it-alone policy. Deep splits started to emerge with the United States, as Erdogan expressed disappointment in Obama’s unwillingness to enter the fray despite massive civilian casualties at the hand of regime forces.

Erdogan’s break with Assad also heralded the beginning of a sectarian Sunni policy that became more pronounced as the Syrian regime endured. Turkey’s policy of encouraging foreign fighters to flow across its border into northern Syria has also helped radicalize the opposition and has raised tensions with Ankara’s U.S. and European partners. The Turkish government knew that many of these foreign fighters would join jihadi militias, such as the al Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, but allowed them to do so because the homegrown “moderate” rebels had proved unsuccessful in bringing about the demise of the Assad regime. Jihadi fighters, some of whom were battle-hardened and more willing to die for the cause, would presumably complete the task that other Syrian rebels could not.

The unintended consequences of tens of thousands of foreign fighters converging on Syria soon became apparent. Many of the foreign fighters gravitated toward the Islamic State, helping it become the power it is today. In May 2013, during a visit to Washington, Obama urged Erdogan to stop supporting jihadi elements, specifically al-Nusra Front, and prevent their access through the Turkish border. But by then, a jihadi infrastructure within Turkey had materialized that bedevils Turkish security officials to this day.

The prime beneficiary of the loose border controls has been the Islamic State. The infrastructure in Turkey that developed to support the jihadis would ultimately be used to strike against Turkish towns, starting with Diyarbakir, Suruc, Ankara, and lastly Istanbul. The first three bombings targeted Kurds and leftists, leaving more than 135 dead, and the last attack in Istanbul’s tourism district killed 11 German tourists. The Islamic State has also executed its Syrian opponents inside Turkey with impunity and set up exchanges for Syrians and others to ransom their loved ones held by the Islamic State on Turkish soil.

The Kurdish Question

The empowerment of the Syrian Kurds has been the most important consequence of Syria’s spiral into chaos. Disenfranchised and repressed by successive Syrian regimes, the Kurds were able to take advantage of the country’s fracturing to lay claim to territory where they constituted a majority. They soon found a powerful ally in the United States: When the Islamic State advanced on the Kurdish-held town of Kobani in October 2014, the U.S. Air Force pounded the jihadi group, launching an extraordinary and successful relationship that has proved to be the most successful effort at dislodging the Islamic State from territory it has conquered.

But this deepening alliance came at the expense of the Turkish government. The dominant Syrian Kurdish movement, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), is a close ally if not a subsidiary organization of the PKK, which trained and nurtured it, making it into a formidable fighting force. Washington has made it clear that it distinguishes between the PKK and the PYD, despite the umbilical relationship between these two organizations. From a legal perspective, while the PKK is on the U.S. terrorism list, the PYD is not — and has been the recipient of American military support in its war against the Islamic State. As the United States has deepened its relationship with the PYD, Washington’s only concession to Ankara has been to give in to Turkish ultimatums not to invite the PYD to participate in recent Syria peace talks in Geneva.

In retrospect, the Syrian Kurds’ victory in Kobani proved to be the deathblow for Turkey’s domestic peace process with its Kurdish population. At the time, Erdogan was harshly critical of the American intervention in Kobani as he and his party perceive the PYD to be a greater scourge than the Islamic State. In February 2015, he repudiated the agreement his lieutenants had negotiated with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party and the PKK. New documents suggest that the breaking point was his fear that Syrian Kurds would duplicate the Iraqi Kurdish experiment of creating an autonomous region on Turkey’s southern border.

By last summer, the war by and against the PKK at home had resumed with a vengeance. Since the June 7 election, some 256 security personnel have been killed; the casualties on the side of the PKK, while harder to pin down, have also been high. The destruction in Kurdish towns such as Silopi, Cizre, and the Sur district of Diyarbakir, where Turkish tanks have fired on homes and the youth wing of the PKK has decided to put up stiff resistance, has also been devastating.

Erdogan correctly understood that the Kobani siege represented a possible turning point for the Kurds’ fortunes in the region. He had two choices, co-optation or suppression. He chose the latter.

Even as the Kurds undermined Erdogan’s domestic and international position, the Turkish president found his hands tied even further in Syria by the Russian intervention on behalf of Assad. In a careless move, Turkish fighters in November 2015 shot down a Russian bomber that had briefly intruded into Turkish airspace, an action that triggered a rash of costly economic, political, and military actions in retaliation by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Erdogan had misjudged Putin: The shoot-down was born in the frustrations emanating from his failures in Syria and from watching the Russians and Iranians succeed in bolstering the much-battered Syrian army against Turkey’s allies in the country.

The ripple effects from Syria have put Turkey at odds with Iran. From the beginning of the Syrian conflict until the end of 2015, when the Russians intervened directly and the role of Iran’s Quds Force became more obvious, Turkey and Iran had agreed to disagree on this issue. The extensive business ties between Erdogan’s government, including large-scale gold sales, Turkey’s dependence on Iranian gas, and Iran’s need for the foreign exchange revenues created by these exports have helped the two countries avoid a public shouting match. This is in the process of changing because the confluence of forces on the ground has turned the tide in favor of Assad.

Erdogan has not given up on his dream of Turkish influence in the region. Ankara recently announced that Turkey would open up a naval base in Qatar and set up training facilities in Somalia. When convenient, the Turkish president also has proved capable of altering his policies at a moment’s notice — most recently by warming relations with Israel. A rapprochement with Jerusalem opens the lucrative possibility of constructing gas pipelines from the eastern Mediterranean fields through Cyprus to Turkey.

What’s next for Erdogan

Erdogan faces three interlinked challenges. He is relentlessly pursuing a constitutional change that would allow him to centralize executive powers in the presidency, allowing him to run the country unconstrained by its institutions; the escalating conflict with the Kurds threatens to lead to their complete break with the Turkish state; and the deterioration of the Syrian situation promises not only to exacerbate the Kurdish conflict at home but also weaken relations with the United States, as Washington strengthens its ties with the Syrian Kurds.

Erdogan may well get his way on some of these issues — particularly the creation of a presidential system — but the price will be even greater divisions within Turkish society, and between Turkey and its traditional allies. Erdogan is confident that his approach toward the Kurds is succeeding and is banking on the disillusionment of some in the Kurdish community, especially the more pious elements, to turn on the PKK. In the meantime, however, the suffering in Kurdish-majority cities is likely to have an indelible impact on the Kurdish community. Changing international conditions, primarily in Iraq and Syria, suggest that a military victory now may turn out to be a Pyrrhic one.

As for Syria, there is clearly a major divergence in priorities between Turkey and the United States and Europe. For Turkey’s Western partners, the No. 1 priority is to defeat the Islamic State — whereas in Ankara, the overthrow of the Assad regime and the prevention of a Kurdish autonomous region in Syria are the overriding concerns. The continuation of the Kurdish strife at home will further push Ankara away from its allies on Syria.

The crux of the matter is this: Turkish foreign policy is no longer about Turkey but about Erdogan. Floundering at home and abroad, the Turkish president has embarked on an illiberal course at home undermining what are admittedly flawed institutions and reconstituting them in his image. His omnipresence and unchallenged position mean that foreign policy is the product of his worldview, whims, and preferences. There is no one who can challenge him. The systematic approach of the early years has given way to indulgence; this more than anything explains the ups and downs of Turkish foreign policy.

Henri J. Barkey is the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Erdogan’s Foreign Policy Is in Ruins

By Thomas Gaist

A United Nations arbitrator suspended international negotiations over the war in Syria on Wednesday. New talks have been scheduled to begin in three weeks.

According to UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura, the cancellation of the talks was immediately prompted by the advance of Russian-backed Syrian government forces into key areas surrounding the city of Aleppo, breaking a three-year-old “rebel” siege of two Shia villages and cutting a supply line for the US-backed Islamist militias from Turkey.

Mistura said that the continuing fighting on the ground and the lack of progress after two days of talks had convinced him of the need for “preparatory work” by the “stakeholders.”

“I’m not prepared to have talks for the sake of talks,” de Mistura said.

The official purpose of the now-suspended talks was to reach terms for an end to the war and for a political transition process that would install a new and US-approved leadership in power.

The prospect of any settlement appears increasingly distant as fighting continues to escalate on the ground. Russia’s deployment of advanced fighter planes has, in fact, enabled the government to win a series of successes against the US-backed “rebel” militias, including the seizure of strategic areas in central and northern provinces.

The anti-Assad forces have been rolled back along several fronts through joint military actions involving Russian air forces and military advisors, in support of government ground forces and pro-Assad militias as well as Hezbollah fighters from neighboring Lebanon. The Obama administration strategy of relying on proxy militias, composed of fighters who are essentially mercenaries, has left the “Syrian revolution” vulnerable to the government offensive waged with close air support from Russian planes over the past four months.

The cancellation of the talks has produced a redoubled chorus of demands for Assad’s removal and bitter denunciations against Russian involvement.

“How can you … enter negotiations when you have unprecedented military pressure?” an unnamed “senior Western diplomat” told Reuters. “The Russians and regime want to push the opposition out of Geneva,” he said.

According to the narrative advanced by the corporate media, Russia’s military campaign is the main obstacle to a political deal that could end the war. In reality, it is the unswerving determination of the US and European ruling elites to remove Assad, a close ally of Russia, that is fueling a dynamic that leads squarely toward further escalation in Syria and direct confrontation between the major powers.

Throughout the “peace process,” the US and NATO have continued to escalate their military and covert operations in Syria, deploying Special Operations troops, building up conventional forces and war planes in neighboring Turkey and Jordan, and increasing their support for an array of Al Qaeda-linked and mercenary militias, including the same forces that are directly targeted by Russia’s air war.

Russia’s moves in Syria, essentially defensive in nature, are calculated to improve the bargaining position of Russia’s ruling oligarchy and its state apparatus in relation to imperialism. Moscow cannot accept the removal of such a critical ally, and has already signaled its own commitment to greater military support for Damascus.

A postwar Syria that is completely dominated by the US and NATO would deny Russia access to its strategic naval base on the Mediterranean, a strategic objective of Washington as it seeks the military encirclement and ultimate dismemberment of the Russian Federation.

Nonetheless, Moscow has already signaled its readiness to press forward with its operations, responding to the false start in Geneva by insisting that it will continue its offensive.

Russia’s top diplomat said Wednesday that the campaign will proceed until it has defeated the al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, which is one of the largest armed groups challenging the Syrian government and one of the main beneficiaries of the arms and funding funneled in by the US and its regional allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

“Russian strikes will not cease until we really defeat terrorist organizations like Jabhat al-Nusra,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “I don’t see why these air strikes should be stopped.”

US Army General Sean MacFarland told the media on Monday that ISIS is “beginning to demonstrate conventional warfare capabilities in places like Syria, Iraq and Yemen,” and has become “really more of a conventional force.”

In response, the US military is preparing to assist the Iraqi state to conduct larger and more sophisticated war operations, involving the full complement of modern heavy weaponry.

“We have shifted from a pure counterinsurgency focus and are now preparing the [Iraqi government forces] to conduct combined arms operations,” MacFarland said, speaking from Iraq.

“The ability to integrate infantry, armor, artillery, air power, engineers and other assets on the battlefield, provides the Iraqis with a decisive advantage over a static enemy dug in behind complex obstacle belts,” he said.

04 February, 2016
WSWS.org

By Jerry White

General Motors announced yesterday that it made a record $11 billion in pre-tax profits in 2015. The Detroit-based auto giant, the third largest auto company in the world, made $6.3 billion in profits in the fourth quarter alone, beating Wall Street expectations.

Once again, GM made the bulk of its income from its North American manufacturing operations, where the corporation’s decades long cost cutting campaign, carried out with the full backing of the United Auto Workers, was accelerated during and after the 2009 restructuring of the company by the Obama administration.

GM had a North American profit margin of 10.3 percent, reaching its 10 percent goal a year early and surpassing the margins at its joint ventures in China. This was accomplished through the UAW-enforced exploitation of workers, which includes relentless speedup, forced overtime and poverty level wages to a new generation of workers who cannot afford the cars they build. On the same day it reported its profits, a skilled trades worker fell to his death at a GM plant in Defiance, Ohio.

The world economic crisis led to a lowering of profits for GM in China and substantial losses in South America and Europe. The car company has shut plants and eliminated the jobs of thousands of production and white-collar workers in Brazil and Germany, along with Russia, where it is ending manufacturing operations.

Record US car sales were spurred by pent up demand following the 2008 crash, falling fuel prices and low car loan rates. This pushed up GM’s revenue, particularly from highly profitable pickup trucks and SUVs. Big investors, however, anticipate that the boom in car sales will dry up in 2016 and lead to falling profit margins. This led to a sell-off of GM stock Wednesday, driving shares down 2.5 percent and 13 percent over the past year.

“We understand we are in a cyclical business, and it’s very difficult for anyone to predict a downturn,” CEO Mary Barra told investors in a conference call Wednesday, “but we will maximize earnings through the cycle.” She said the automaker expects to cut operating costs by $5.5 billion by 2018 and hand over $16 billion to shareholders in dividends and share buybacks over that period.

The government restructuring of GM in 2009 and the relentless UAW-backed attack on the jobs, wages, health benefits and pensions of autoworkers was designed to guarantee a steady flow of cash to big investors under virtually any market conditions. A large portion of workers’ income is based on “profit-sharing,” which can be sharply reduced in a downturn. The UAW has also given the company a free hand to slash jobs and close plants in response to “market conditions.”

Last fall, the UAW pushed through a new four-year contract on GM’s 49,600 hourly workers in the US, over mass opposition. The contract, like similar deals at Fiat Chrylser and Ford, maintains the two-tier wage and benefit system, expands the use of low-paid temporary workers, imposes first time co-payments on older workers for health benefits and holds overall labor cost increases below the rate of inflation.

While the company is paying out billions to its richest investors, residents in Flint, Michigan—the birthplace of GM—have been poisoned by lead, largely due to decades of toxins the automaker dumped into the Flint River. While state and local officials ignored resident complaints about the taste, color and odor of the tainted water, in December 2014 GM quietly stopped using the river-supplied water at its local engine plant because of corrosion to its parts. The company’s employee drinking fountains and ice machines, however, continued to use the poisoned water.

While Flint needs a massive marshaling of resources to address the irreparable damage done to children and other residents by the neurotoxins, the $80 million the Obama administration has committed to Flint amounts to less than three days of GM’s profits last year.

GM’s record profits follow similar announcements by Ford and Fiat Chrysler (FCA) last week. Ford made $7.4 billion in 2015, including $1.9 billion in the fourth quarter. FCA reported a profit of $410 million for 2015, a decrease from 2014 because of higher recall and investment costs.

During its earnings call, FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne told investors that the company would end production of its smaller and less profitable Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200 models and concentrate on larger vehicles. Marchionne said FCA might “partner” with other automakers to continue selling smaller cars. In the new labor agreements, the UAW sanctioned the shifting of small car production to lower wage plants in Mexico, while pledging to reopen local contracts and impose “competitive” agreements to continue small car production at US plants.

The enormous profit making at GM is an expression of the corporate-government-union conspiracy against the working class and the domination of the financial aristocracy over virtually every aspect of life in the US.

In 2009, the Obama administration essentially handed GM and Chrysler to Wall Street “turnaround” specialists. Last year, hedge fund manager Harry Wilson, a former member of Obama’s Auto Task Force, pressured the GM board to hand over $5.7 billion to shareholders, including $3.5 billion in stock buybacks and $2.2 billion worth of dividend payments. GM has now told investors it would expand a stock repurchase program from $5 billion to $9 billion through the end of 2017. The payout was hailed by the UAW, which owns the largest block of GM shares.

While these financial parasites are reaping vast fortunes, the company has left a trail of devastation behind it—not only for autoworkers and their families, but hundreds of car-buyers who were killed or injured due to defective ignition switches.

During the 2009 restructuring, the Obama administration essentially immunized the company and its richest stockholders from the consequences of the criminal decisions of its top executives. The Treasury Department broke up the company into two entities—an “old” GM, which was responsible for the bulk of the company’s liabilities stemming from lawsuits over defective parts and pollution caused by GM factories, and a “new” GM, which could funnel profits to big investors with as few deductions as possible.

Last year, the Obama administration hit GM with a wrist-slap fine of $900 million for the defective ignition switch scandal and no top executives involved in the cover-up have been prosecuted.

The mass struggles of autoworkers, including the Flint sit-down strikes in the 1930s that established the UAW, led to a significant increase in living standards for workers, and by 1960 Flint had one of the highest per capita incomes in America. The transformation of the “Vehicle City” into one of the poorest cities in the nation was the product of the betrayals by the UAW, which, starting in the late 1970s, suppressed any resistance by workers to plant closings, layoffs and wage cutting in the name of boosting the international “competitiveness” and profitability of the US automakers.

05 February, 2016
WSWS.org

By Andre Vltchek

Friends and Comrades, it is a great honor to be standing here – at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament.

***

One year ago I was driving through the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, monitoring the situation in the refugee camps there. Winter was approaching and the mountains on the Lebanese–Syrian border were covered by snow. It was cold, very cold.

Some 20 minutes, after leaving Baalbek, I spotted an extremely humble makeshift refugee camp, growing literally from the road, in the middle of nowhere.

I stopped. Together with my interpreter, I walked inside and engaged several people in conversation.

The situation was desperate. Children were hungry and could not register for schools through the UNHCR or through the Lebanese government, which, by that time, had almost collapsed. Many electronic food cards that were issued to the migrants did not function. Work permits were not offered, and without proper paperwork, local social services could not be used. In brief: a total disaster.

I was told that in this area, some Syrian migrants had already been starving.

This was Bekaa Valley, a tough place to start with, and full of ancient traditions, clans, gangs and narcotic-business. Refugees were expected to keep their heads down, or else…

Before I left, two little girls, two sisters, approached me. Both had swollen bellies, suffering from malnutrition. Both were dressed in rugs. Both looked deprived.

But after spotting my cameras, they were mesmerized, smiling at me, showing tongues, laughing.

Their country was in ruins, their future uncertain.

But these were just two little girls in the middle of the mountains, two girls excited about each and every little detail of life. Such innocence! Such hope! People are people, and children are children, everywhere, even during wars.

Unfortunately, I have witnessed too many of them; too many wars. Too many barbarities performed by NATO, by the Empire, by the United States and Europe.

Later, working on the Greek island of Kos and in Calais in France, I kept thinking about those two girls, again and again.

The West (or call it NATO, or anything you like – we all know what I mean!) has, in the most cynical manner, destabilized and destroyed the entire Middle East. As it has in virtually all the continents of the world, it ruined tremendous cultures, plundered all it could put its hands on, turned proud people into slaves. Libya and Iraq are no more! I can testify, as I work all over the Middle East.

And then the West enclosed itself into its gold-plated bunker, slowly and disgustingly digesting its booty!

How many refugees are there that Europe says: “it cannot accept”? 1 million? Tiny, miniscule Lebanon has 2 million, and it is coping; badly but coping!

And Lebanon did not destroy Syria, Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq.

You know how it all feels like? Like observing a woman who was gang-raped, whose husband was murdered in front of her own eyes, and whose beautiful house was looted. Now this woman, just in order to save her starving children from the rubbles, is forced to go to Europe, to the rapists and thieves who destroyed her life, asking for shelter and food. And they spit into her face! They say: “It is too much for us, too difficult to accommodate you and others like you! Woman, you came to take advantage of us. You came to have a better life at our expense!”

This is how it looks from the outside. This is how I see it.

And I want to puke. But there is no time… One has to work, day and night, to stop this madness.

The West, of course including Europe, is too hardened by its own crimes, too cynical, and too unrepentant.

It remains blind, because it simply does not pay to see!

***

There is no Left Wing in Europe, anymore. Not the Left as we understand the term in Cuba and other revolutionary nations.

To us, true left means “Internationalism”, solidarity!

True left is global, egalitarian, and color-blind.

European so-called Left is only concerned with the benefits of its own citizens. It does not care at all where the funds are coming from.

As long as French, Greek, Spanish or Italian farmers get their subsidies and perks, who cares that agriculture in Africa or Asia gets thoroughly ruined. The most important is that European farmers could drive their latest BMW’s, for producing something or not producing anything at all.

I saw absolutely grotesque concepts implemented in countries like Senegal, and other former French colonies: heavily subsidized French food produce flooded West Africa, supermarkets opened, local production collapsed. Then the prices spiked to 2-3 times higher levels than those in Paris. And so, in Senegal where incomes are perhaps only 10% of those in France, a yoghurt costs 3 times more than in Monoprix.

Who pays for those 35-hour workweeks? Who pays for socialized medical care and free education in the European Union? Definitely not the Europeans themselves! Most of the funds used to come from the colonies, from that unimaginable plunder of the world performed by the West.

Colonialism and imperialism are still there, but they often changed forms, although the toll on people in non-white countries continues to be the same.

The Belgian King Leopold II and his cohorts, in what is now Congo, massacred 10 million people, at the beginning of the 20th Century. Between 1995 and now, the West plundered the Democratic Republic of Congo once again, mercilessly, by using its closest allies in Africa – Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya. Again, between 7 and 10 million people died there, in just 20 years, and these are not some inflated numbers, these are numbers provided by the United Nations and its reports, including the so-called “Mapping Report”. All that horror, only so the West could have access to coltan (used in our mobile phones), to uranium, and other strategic materials. I compiled the evidence in my feature documentary film “Rwanda Gambit”.

All those ruined lives and countries, so that European citizens could have their benefits, long vacations, and social services.

When I discussed the issue with my friend, an Italian filmmaker from Naples, he snapped at me: “We don’t want to be like the Chinese. We don’t want to work hard like them!”

I replied: “Then live within your means! Do not allow your corporations and governments to massacre tens of millions of people, so that the companies could have their insane profits, and citizens those outrageous benefits.”

Recently, in Thailand, I overheard a group of unemployed Spaniards laughing about having a vacation in Southeast Asia, paid for by their unemployment benefits.

I know many countries, dependencies of the West, where losing one’s job is synonymous to a death sentence! But we are asked to feel sorry for Spaniards, Italians and Greeks. We are expected to see them as victims.

***

I am saddened to say, but it is not only the United States, but also Europe, which is totally, blissfully ignorant about its role in the world, and about the harm, about the horrors that it is spreading all over our Planet.

This discovery shocked me so much, that I spent 4 years crisscrossing the world, compiling the evidence and testimonies that illustrate the colonialist, neo-colonialist and imperialist legacy of the West, as well as the current neo-colonialist barbarities. The book is 840-pages long and it is called “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. I hope, one day, it will be available in the Italian language!

The book has been receiving enthusiastic reception, but for me, this thick volume is not the end. Now I am compiling the second installment. The topic is just too enormous. The crimes, genocides, holocausts committed by the West on the people of our Planet, are too enormous.

Everything is linked to them! The entire arrangement of the world uses them as pillars.

In our book “On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare”, written together with my friend Noam Chomsky, I was asked whether the Europeans actually realize what they have done to the world, during the last centuries.

(Just a side note – this book is now available in the Italian language “Terrorismo Occidentale”).

I replied to Noam: “They definitely don’t!”

And I repeat here, again: most of them, the great majority of them, do not realize it! They don’t want to see, to admit, that their opera houses, hospitals, museums, parks and promenades, are all constructed on the corpses of those who were robbed of everything: from Latin America and its open veins, to Asia and Africa. Slavery, unimaginable extermination campaigns, tremendous lists of horrors!

Before Noam and I began our discussion, I spent some time with several top statisticians, and our conclusion was chilling: directly or indirectly, the West massacred between 40 and 50 million people, between the Hiroshima A-bomb explosion, and the time of my long dialogue with Noam – in 2012.

The number of people, who were murdered throughout history, directly or indirectly, by European empires, all over the world, can only be calculated in hundreds of millions, and one of my statistician friends believes that the total accumulative number actually exceeds 1 billion.

***

When I was recently speaking at the China Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, and later in Moscow, having been invited by Russian philosophers and by several members of the Russian Academy of Science, I publicly declared that I am fundamentally against “free medical care and free education in Europe”.

When asked “why?” I explained that the cost is too high, and those robbed and destroyed people, all over the world, are almost exclusively expected to cover it.

But I continued: “I am totally, decisively, supportive of universal free medical care, education and essential social benefits. Or as we say in Cuba: everyone dances, or nobody does!”

Of course I also can tolerate and support free medical care, education and benefits in those countries that do not plunder the world, like Cuba, China, Venezuela, Bolivia, South Africa or Ecuador.

***

Not only the West refuses to face its responsibility for, by now, the almost absolute total destruction of the world, it is also using all sorts of smoke screens and propaganda tactics to divert the attention of the people; it is spreading nihilist economic concepts, propaganda and outright lies.

It is using education as a weapon, offering scholarships to children of elites in the countries it is robbing and controlling. After being indoctrinated, they return home and continue violating their own countries on behalf of the United States and Europe.

And so the vicious cycle continues!

I encountered so many grotesque moments, when for instance, an Indonesian upper class family returning from its vacation in Holland, begins a long litany, about how great are the theaters, trains, museums and public spaces in Netherlands, compared to those in Indonesia.

Of course they are! All built from centuries of Dutch plunder of Indonesia, like those Spanish cathedrals stuffed with gold, growing from corpses.

As Noam Chomsky often says: “not to see all this truly takes great discipline!”

***

The brutality of the Western Empire is unmatchable. Its cynicism is monumental!

Look at those so-called “terrorists” in Muslim countries, scarecrows that Western governments and media keep waving in front of our eyes!

Islamic culture is greatly socialist and socially oriented. After World War II, secular, socialist, revolutionary and anti-Western governments ruled the most important Muslim nations: Egypt, Iran and Indonesia.

Within two decades, the West overthrew them all, implementing fascist regimes.

It then invented the Mujahideen and injected them into Afghanistan, in order to finish with the Soviet Union.

And once it felt the need for some monumental enemy to replace Communism, it manufactured and then armed, trained and educated groups like al-Qaida, al-Nusra and ISIS.

This move served two important goals: to justify astronomical military and intelligence budgets, and to portray the Western/Christian civilization as “culturally superior”, fighting “Arab terrorist monsters”.

Of course, the great majority of the people in Europe and North America are so indoctrinated, intellectually self-righteous and defunct, that they remain blind when faced with those Machiavellian pirouettes.

For the European public, there are plenty of “good reasons” to stick to those inherently racist beliefs, and to protectionism. There are even better reasons for hiding those millions of heads in the sand!

And so it goes.

***

I am here, in Italy, and today I do not want to discuss the United States, Israel, or other colonies and client states of the West. We can do it some other time, if I am invited back.

I spoke about Europe.

And I spoke about those two Syrian girls I met in Lebanon.

They are your responsibility, too, Italy! They suffer from malnutrition because your part of the world is ruining their country. It is because your country is a member of NATO, and NATO is behaving like a fascist thug with some clear mafia behavioral patterns.

I know you have heart!

I grew up on your films, on Fellini and de Sica, Rossellini, Antonioni and others. I greatly admire your poetry and music. They had tremendous influence on my work, and on how I see the world.

But your heart, it seems, lately goes only to your own people. It is not an internationalist heart. It does not believe that all people are equal.

I came here to say this, because not too many people dare to.

I came here because I still care for your country.

But as a determined socialist realist, I care about Italy as it “could and should be”, not “as it is” at this moment.

Thank you!

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries.

05 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org