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By Andrew Fowler

George W. Bush wore a suitably sombre grey suit to deliver his “axis of evil” speech, which began laying out the case for the US invasion of Iraq. Few could have faulted his performance on that day in January 2002, just four months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. He told the applauding joint sitting of the US House of Representatives and Senate that Iraq was allied with terrorists, and posed “a grave and growing danger” to US interests through possession of “weapons of mass destruction”.

What we now know is that Bush’s performance was just an act.There was nothing to link Iraq to terrorism.

Yet more than 10 years later the leaders who took us to war are still in denial. Just this week former British prime minister Tony Blair issued what amounted to a non-apology as he tried to spin his way out of the trouble he expects from the findings of the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq War. But what has been forgotten is the role of many journalists who led the charge to war.

Eight months after Bush’s address with the drumbeat of war growing ever louder, /The New York Times /reporter Judith Miller, who often boasted the Pentagon had given her clearance to see secret information, crossed the line from journalist to pro-war activist. On September 8, 2002, Miller wrote about “Mr Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions”. It was a bald statement of fact without any attribution.

The story, “US says Hussein intensified quest for A-bomb parts”, quoted not a single person by name, and relied entirely on US government sources.

Miller and /The New York Times/, with its uncorroborated, unquestioning reporting, had provided the perfect vehicle for the White House. Over the following 24 hours they saturated the airwaves stirring fear of a nuclear Armageddon. On NBC’s /Meet the Press/, vice-president Dick Cheney cited /The New York Times/ article and accused Saddam of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons.

On CNN, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that “there will always be some uncertainty” in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but, in a phrase as polished as it was hollow, added: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” On CBS, Bush cited satellite photos that showed “unexplained
construction” at Iraqi sites that weapons inspectors had previously searched for indications Saddam was trying to develop nuclear arms. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” Bush said. The news flashed around the world that the White House had “confirmed a report in /The New York Times/” that Saddam Hussein had been attempting to get equipment to produce nuclear weapons.

Australian prime minister John Howard added to the misleading game,saying the intelligence that had come out of the United States “if accurate confirms the intelligence that we have been given”. The fact is it was the same intelligence that the United States had already given to Australia.

Howard made great play of the possibility that “Iraq has not abandoned her aspiration for nuclear capacity”. By suggesting /The New York Times/ story added yet another layer of confirmation, Howard was taking part in the Australian version of the style of journalism that Miller and the White House specialised in: the story leaked to Miller and published in /The New York Times/ had been confirmed by the very people who leaked it in the first place. Iraq’s nuclear ambitions were now accepted as fact. Even the BBC’s prestigious
/Panorama/ program, “The Case Against Saddam”, broadcast on September 23, 2002, embraced this “evidence”, suggesting Saddam was trying to get systems to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons production.

The program acted as a reinforcement of Blair’s claim that Saddam’s missiles could hit British territory in Cyprus with only 45 minutes warning.

The /Panorama/ report formed the basis of a /Four Corners/ broadcast two weeks later but the bald assertions of “fact” were balanced by other interviews in the ABC version, bringing a swift letter of rebuke to the program. /Panorama/ was not happy that /Four Corners/ had not accepted its editorial line.

While Miller had given the White House exactly what it wanted on the nuclear story, she now shared the spoils of a second report. It involved Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri who told CIA interrogators that he had personally visited 20 weapons of mass destruction sites in Iraq. The fact that a CIA lie detector test showed the whole story was fabricated had little impact on what the White House wanted. Miller’s story quoting al-Haideri ran in /The New York Times/, while the exclusive TV rights went to a little-known
Australian journalist Paul Moran who was working for the Australian ABC.

Moran was well placed to get the story. He had been employed by a CIA-funded organisation, the Washington-based Rendon Group, whose main role was to manipulate the media to support the war. The Rendon Group had even created the Iraqi National Congress, the anti-Saddam organisation which had delivered up al-Haideri to Miller. Now Moran’s
al-Haideri interview, packed with disinformation and fabrication, went around the world, picked up by dozens of TV stations.

When US troops reached Baghdad, /The Australian/ published an editorial, “Coalition of the Whining Got it Wrong”, which ended with words that gave perfect meaning to irony: “Never underestimate the power of ideology and myth, in this case anti-Americanism, to trump reality. But at least we know for sure it is not love, but being a left-wing intellectual, that means never having to say you’re sorry.”

The disinformation war claimed the reputations of many journalists who either failed to question their governments, or worse still deliberately championed the case for the invasion which led to the deaths of an estimated half a million Iraqis. There was at least one other casualty of this war created by fabricated news: Moran died in a car-bomb attack in northern Iraq.

This article contains excerpts from Andrew Fowler’s book The War on Journalism: Media Moguls, Whistleblowers and the Price of Freedom (Penguin Random House, 2015).

2 November 2015

By Afro-Middle East Centre

The recent uprising in East Jerusalem and the Palestinian West Bank points to a clear disillusionment among Palestinian youth, largely caused by Israel’s occupation, its Judaisation of Jerusalem, and the complicity of certain Palestinian political parties.

The intensification of the conflict since the beginning of October, which has caused the deaths of over sixty Palestinians and ten Israelis, was ignited by increased Israeli government sanctioning of visits of nationalist, religious Jews to the Aqsa Mosque, many of whom seek the compound’s destruction. Israel has also severely restricted Muslims access to Al-Aqsa, and increased its monitoring of Muslim groups operating at the compound. In late August and September, Israeli police prevented Palestinian women and men under fifty from visiting the mosque before noon, and in September the Murabitun and Murabitat, informal groups of men and women who offer religious classes and attempt to ensure the ban on Jewish prayer is observed, were declared illegal.

These measures have contravened the ‘status quo’, a situation that has been in place since the eighteenth century, and in terms of which the Aqsa compound will be controlled by Muslims; people of other faiths will be allowed access to the compound but will not be allowed to pray there. This status quo has been repeatedly ratified and upheld over the past two and half centuries – even after Jerusalem was occupied by Israel in 1967, and annexed to Israel in 1980. The 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan commits Israel to ‘respect the special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem’. Currently, by mutual agreement between Jordan and Israel, the Aqsa Mosque compound is administered by the Jordanian Waqf. This body also, supposedly in consultation with Israel, monitors Jewish access to the site. Israeli Jewish groups entering the compound are supposed to be accompanied by police, and Waqf guides are to ensure no Jews pray on the site.

The status quo has been violated by Israel numerous times in recent years. For example, Israel often restricts Muslim access to the Aqsa Mosque compound, ranging from completely closing the Old City for Muslims to imposing age limits on those wanting to attend Friday prayers. There are also certain permanent restrictions that are less well-known. A recent privately commissioned report claims that the Israeli government has instructed that when there are Jews present in the compound, Muslim men and women under the age of 50 should not be allowed to enter. Since Israeli groups tour the compound throughout the week, this means that Muslims under 50 are not allowed access to the site every morning from Sunday to Thursday.

Further inflaming the situation, cabinet ministers, including agriculture minister Uri Ariel, who previously advocated the building of the Third Temple on the cite, visited the compound in recent weeks. This raised the ire of many Palestinians who fear the mosque is threatened with partition, as happened to Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque after Zionist fundamentalist Baruch Goldstein massacred twenty-nine worshippers in February 1994 while they were praying. The latest Israeli violations resulted in protests, then running battles inside the compound between Palestinian defenders and Israelis, and culminating in a series of into lone wolf knife attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers.

The Israeli army responded in its usual, heavy-handed way, and Israel’s defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called for a shoot first policy on ‘stabbers and stone throwers’. Neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem have been blockaded by Israeli occupation forces; extra police reservists and civil and border police have been deployed; and the homes of alleged attackers have been destroyed. This further worsened the situation, and the protests and attacks on soldiers have spread to other areas in the West Bank.

These incidents take place within a context of Israel’s increased and intensified control over East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Settler numbers have increased from 150 000 during the Oslo negotiations in 1993 to over 500 000 in 2015, and, to protect these, Israel has instituted measures such as restrictions on Palestinian movement and a minimum ten year jail term for Palestinian’s convicted of stone throwing. Palestinians in the West Bank have also increasingly become victims of settlers’ ‘price tag’ attacks, with little or no repercussions for the perpetrators. The Israeli NGO Yesh Din reports that convictions are obtained in less than two per cent of cases and that over eighty-five per cent of cases are closed before the indictment stage.

Adding to Palestinian frustration, the Palestinian Authority has become increasingly ineffective. Corruption, a lack of political will, and security coordination with Israel (a requirement of the Oslo Agreement), mean that many Palestinians view the PA as part of the problem. Many Palestinian youth – born around the time of the Oslo negotiations or thereafter– have become disillusioned with the PA’s broken promises, causing them to seek different means of articulating their dissatisfaction. This has been compounded by a cynicism among Palestinians about the role of the international community and Arab states. With negotiations non-existent, Palestinians see no end in sight for the Israeli occupation as the region’s and the world’s attention is consumed by the growth of the Islamic State group (IS), and conflicts in Syria, Libya and Ukraine.

Most major Palestinian parties have responded in a haphazard and even contradictory manner. Fatah has called for calm, and deployed its security apparatus to quell the protests in some areas, leading many to accuse it of complicity. Later, it attempted to co-opt the protests, arguing that they were against the occupation. Hamas, on the other hand, expressed support for the protests, advocating the formation of a unified Palestinian position to defend and escalate the uprising. There is little chance, however, that Hamas will want to militarise the uprising from Gaza. It has been accused by some Palestinians of wanting to benefit from the crisis, and its hands-off approach – while repeatedly calling for unity – is likely so that it does not give the impression that it wants to take control of the uprising. It is noteworthy that no party has yet sought to take the lead and formally support the protests, especially the stabbings of Israeli soldiers and settlers. The uprising, thus, is largely a leaderless revolt of Palestinian youth.

Questions over whether this may herald the beginning of the Third Intifada abound, particularly since the people’s anger is similar to that which preceded the first two intifadas, and the lives of Palestinians are more miserable now, especially considering the dire socio-economic conditions of ordinary Palestinians. Compounding this is the hopelessness caused by the lack of leadership. However, the absence of a coherent national movement and established party support raises questions about the sustainability of the protests. It is debatable whether Palestinians will be able to continue the current protest actions and endure its consequences long enough to realise substantial change without the support of established political parties. Furthermore, political fragmentation and the impact of neoliberalism have prevented ordinary Palestinians from being able to formulate a unifying vision.

The Israeli government, supported by Jordan and the Middle East quartet (the USA, EU, Russia and UN), has announced that the status quo at Al-Aqsa will remain in force, and that surveillance cameras will be installed at the compound in an attempt to prevent the protests from spreading. However, this is a disingenuous attempt to deflect attention from the fact that Israel has already been working to alter facts on the ground.

In 2014, over 11 000 Jewish religious nationalist visitors were allowed into the compound, twenty-eight per cent up from the previous year and almost double the 2009 figure. Further, the frequency of these visits increased from bi-weekly in 2012 to around twice or thrice a week in 2014. In August, the head of the notorious Third Temple Movement, Yehuda Glick, privately met with Netanyahu, and subsequently claimed the government was attuned to the needs of fundamentalist Jews regarding Al-Aqsa. The struggle over protection of the compound is thus likely to further intensify and these provocations will ensure that protests endure. This is especially since the protests over Al-Aqsa are a reflection of dissatisfaction with the larger problem of Israel’s occupation, the corruption of the PA, and the lack of political leadership.

2 November 2015

Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC)

What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire

By Howard Zinn
[Republished from April 1, 2008]

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However, the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the “Good War,” even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American “Empire.”

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called “The Age of Imperialism.” It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period of “imperialism.”

I recall the classroom map (labeled “Western Expansion”) which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called “The Louisiana Purchase” hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes — what we now call “ethnic cleansing” — so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging “civilization” and its brutal discontents.

Neither the discussions of “Jacksonian democracy” in history courses, nor the popular book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson, told me about the “Trail of Tears,” the deadly forced march of “the five civilized tribes” westward from Georgia and Alabama across the Mississippi, leaving 4,000 dead in their wake. No treatment of the Civil War mentioned the Sand Creek massacre of hundreds of Indian villagers in Colorado just as “emancipation” was proclaimed for black people by Lincoln’s administration.

That classroom map also had a section to the south and west labeled “Mexican Cession.” This was a handy euphemism for the aggressive war against Mexico in 1846 in which the United States seized half of that country’s land, giving us California and the great Southwest. The term “Manifest Destiny,” used at that time, soon of course became more universal. On the eve of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Washington Post saw beyond Cuba: “We are face to face with a strange destiny. The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle.”

The violent march across the continent, and even the invasion of Cuba, appeared to be within a natural sphere of U.S. interest. After all, hadn’t the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere to be under our protection? But with hardly a pause after Cuba came the invasion of the Philippines, halfway around the world. The word “imperialism” now seemed a fitting one for U.S. actions. Indeed, that long, cruel war — treated quickly and superficially in the history books — gave rise to an Anti-Imperialist League, in which William James and Mark Twain were leading figures. But this was not something I learned in university either.

The “Sole Superpower” Comes into View

Reading outside the classroom, however, I began to fit the pieces of history into a larger mosaic. What at first had seemed like a purely passive foreign policy in the decade leading up to the First World War now appeared as a succession of violent interventions: the seizure of the Panama Canal zone from Colombia, a naval bombardment of the Mexican coast, the dispatch of the Marines to almost every country in Central America, occupying armies sent to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. As the much-decorated General Smedley Butler, who participated in many of those interventions, wrote later: “I was an errand boy for Wall Street.”

At the very time I was learning this history — the years after World War II — the United States was becoming not just another imperial power, but the world’s leading superpower. Determined to maintain and expand its monopoly on nuclear weapons, it was taking over remote islands in the Pacific, forcing the inhabitants to leave, and turning the islands into deadly playgrounds for more atomic tests.

In his memoir, No Place to Hide, Dr. David Bradley, who monitored radiation in those tests, described what was left behind as the testing teams went home: “[R]adioactivity, contamination, the wrecked island of Bikini and its sad-eyed patient exiles.” The tests in the Pacific were followed, over the years, by more tests in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, more than a thousand tests in all.

When the war in Korea began in 1950, I was still studying history as a graduate student at Columbia University. Nothing in my classes prepared me to understand American policy in Asia. But I was reading I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Stone was among the very few journalists who questioned the official justification for sending an army to Korea. It seemed clear to me then that it was not the invasion of South Korea by the North that prompted U.S. intervention, but the desire of the United States to have a firm foothold on the continent of Asia, especially now that the Communists were in power in China.

Years later, as the covert intervention in Vietnam grew into a massive and brutal military operation, the imperial designs of the United States became yet clearer to me. In 1967, I wrote a little book called Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. By that time I was heavily involved in the movement against the war.

When I read the hundreds of pages of the Pentagon Papers entrusted to me by Daniel Ellsberg, what jumped out at me were the secret memos from the National Security Council. Explaining the U.S. interest in Southeast Asia, they spoke bluntly of the country’s motives as a quest for “tin, rubber, oil.”

Neither the desertions of soldiers in the Mexican War, nor the draft riots of the Civil War, not the anti-imperialist groups at the turn of the century, nor the strong opposition to World War I — indeed no antiwar movement in the history of the nation reached the scale of the opposition to the war in Vietnam. At least part of that opposition rested on an understanding that more than Vietnam was at stake, that the brutal war in that tiny country was part of a grander imperial design.

Various interventions following the U.S. defeat in Vietnam seemed to reflect the desperate need of the still-reigning superpower — even after the fall of its powerful rival, the Soviet Union — to establish its dominance everywhere. Hence the invasion of Grenada in 1982, the bombing assault on Panama in 1989, the first Gulf war of 1991. Was George Bush Sr. heartsick over Saddam Hussein’s seizure of Kuwait, or was he using that event as an opportunity to move U.S. power firmly into the coveted oil region of the Middle East? Given the history of the United States, given its obsession with Middle Eastern oil dating from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic Mossadeq government in Iran in 1953, it is not hard to decide that question.

Justifying Empire

The ruthless attacks of September 11th (as the official 9/11 Commission acknowledged) derived from fierce hatred of U.S. expansion in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even before that event, the Defense Department acknowledged, according to Chalmers Johnson’s book The Sorrows of Empire, the existence of more than 700 American military bases outside of the United States.

Since that date, with the initiation of a “war on terrorism,” many more bases have been established or expanded: in Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, the desert of Qatar, the Gulf of Oman, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else a compliant nation could be bribed or coerced.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew — what we had in common was that we both read books — that he considered this “an imperialist war.” Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of “The American Century.” The time had arrived, he said, for the United States “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit.”

We can hardly ask for a more candid, blunter declaration of imperial design. It has been echoed in recent years by the intellectual handmaidens of the Bush administration, but with assurances that the motive of this “influence” is benign, that the “purposes” — whether in Luce’s formulation or more recent ones — are noble, that this is an “imperialism lite.” As George Bush said in his second inaugural address: “Spreading liberty around the world is the calling of our time.” The New York Timescalled that speech “striking for its idealism.”

The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project — Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it, extolling it, justifying it. President Woodrow Wilson told graduates of the Naval Academy in 1914 (the year he bombarded Mexico) that the U.S. used “her navy and her army… as the instruments of civilization, not as the instruments of aggression.” And Bill Clinton, in 1992, told West Point graduates: “The values you learned here will be able to spread throughout the country and throughout the world.”

For the people of the United States, and indeed for people all over the world, those claims sooner or later are revealed to be false. The rhetoric, often persuasive on first hearing, soon becomes overwhelmed by horrors that can no longer be concealed: the bloody corpses of Iraq, the torn limbs of American GIs, the millions of families driven from their homes — in the Middle East and in the Mississippi Delta.

Have not the justifications for empire, embedded in our culture, assaulting our good sense — that war is necessary for security, that expansion is fundamental to civilization — begun to lose their hold on our minds? Have we reached a point in history where we are ready to embrace a new way of living in the world, expanding not our military power, but our humanity?

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) was a historian, playwright, and activist. He wrote the classic A People’s History of the United States and A People’s History of American Empire, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle. He taught at Spelman College, a black women’s college in Atlanta, where he became active in the civil rights movement. After being fired by Spelman for his support of student protesters, Zinn became a professor of political science at Boston University. He was the author of many books, including an autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He received the Lannan Foundation Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Eugene V. Debs award for his writing and political activism.

(Reprinted from TomDispatch by permission of author or representative)
4 October 2015

By Franklin Lamb

Damascus: Increasing numbers of Syria’s women and men, considered by this observer as this war-torn country’s ‘Monument Citizens’ have recently expanded the scope and range of cultural heritage site protection and preservation on behalf of humanity.

In addition to documenting heritage site damage through 3-D photography at the scene, many reconstruction projects are also underway. A few have been nearly restored including in Lattakia al Mahalbeh Castle, in Old Homs, and nearby Crac des Chavaliers, the 11th Century Crusader Castle, al Khawabi Castle , Tartous, Al Omari Mosque, Bosra, Tell Mozan, Al Hassakeh and the Citadels of Salah ad-Din, Masyaf, and the Damascus Citadel to mention a few.

Archeological site access remains the major impediment for Syria’s ‘Monument Citizens” according to archaeologist Mayassa Deeb, who put on hold her doctoral dissertation at Damascus University in order to supervise groups that photograph and then carefully package artifacts from around the country. Limited access may remain unchanged for the foreseeable future given current conditions in 2/3 of this war-torn country, now in its 5th year of conflict with displacement of more than half of its pre-conflict population of 23 million, including at least 120,000 more people just this month (between Oct. 5 and Oct. 22). This latest refugee exodus occurred in the Aleppo, Hama and Idlib governorates where terrified citizens fled toward the Turkish border as most people in Aleppo moved toward villages and towns in the government controlled countryside west of the city.

There are many impediments to the work of Syria’s irrepressible Monument Citizens given the vast archeological damage here. Some1,300 sites have been documented using recent, high-resolution satellite imagery technology. Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in more than 25% of more than 10,000 archaeological sites in Syria have also been targeted by looters with the frequency and severity of looting varying significantly depending of which faction in the conflict controls the specific area. As of 10/25/2015, more than 16,000 looter pits have been photographed just in the ancient city of of Apamea. A Dartmouth University study published last month in Near Eastern Archaeology confirms that at least a quarter of Syria’s archaeological sites have been looted in the past four years with the Islamic State (Da’ish) being the worst offender. But there have also been extensive losses from sites under the control of other forces and no group involved in the Syrian conflict has clean hands. This organized plunder has dwarfed the thefts by desperate civilians who continue to mine Syria’s heritage sites to pay for food. Looted objects are arriving in neighboring countries including Lebanon brought in by militia seeking to trade them for weapons. Among those reportedly active in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley are organized crime agents and middle men on behalf of ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra and Free Syrian Army brigades.

Syria’s numbers of Monument Citizens are increasing and they come from all walks of life, local shopkeepers, youngsters whose nearby archeological sites have been an important part of their childhood, older Syrians who often feel a strong, seemingly genetic bond with this cradle of civilization, archeologists, some military personnel, museum staff, and people from the general population who cherish their and our cultural heritage and are adamant about protecting and preserving it. They sometimes work individually, but more frequently in pairs or groups, sometimes under the watchful eyes of friendly ‘lookouts.’ But youngsters sometimes take unnecessary risks from this observer’s fatherly perspective.

Syria’s ‘Monument Citizens’ insist that they eschew politics. “While I would admit to you that archeology can get political, governments come and governments go but our cultural heritage, who we are, remains for millennia. “one graduate from Damascus University’s Archeological college, who describes herself as a “cultural warrior” explained to this observer, adding, “If we allow our cultural heritage to be destroyed, given all the hegemonic invaders these days seeking advantages in our country, we may be destroying the only bond the Syrian people have left that can help heal this country once this war is over.” Her roommate added before beginning to sob, “Our children will never have the chance to see Syria the way we did growing up. Our neighborhood in Palmyra was our museum. This insanity must be stooped!”

As Der Speigel’s Katrin Elger, commented recently after a visit with some of Syria’s Monument Citizens: “From an archaeologist’s vantage point, all the major players in Syria’s proxy war are but a blip on history’s radar. Islamist fundamentalists, even superpowers like Russia and the United States are newcomers compared even to the youngest monuments in Syria.” I believe most Syrians would agree.

A major inspiration and role model for many of Syria’s Monument Citizens is the international patriot, archeologist Dr. Maamoun Abdel-Karim, Director-general of Syria’s Museums and Antiques. Shortly after conflict began, this tenured Damascus University Professor was summoned to take the lead in preserving Syria’s antiquities. As much of the world has come to know, Dr. Maamoun has been indefatigable is his work. His devotion has helped develop many unique contacts across Syria as he monitors and reports the latest damage while at the same time planning-and in several locations when security conditions permit, he is actually beginning and completing some restoration projects with his staff and Monument Citizens. His colleagues across Syria, often under the watchful eyes of ISIS or other Islamist groups in off-limits areas, use everything from WhatsApp or Skype when available, word of mouth or anonymous scribbled messages to advance their Monument Citizens work. In many areas, Dr. Maamoun has mobilized local Monument Citizens to protect heritage sites and in some cases, locals have persuaded rebels themselves to help. In others, his fellow Monument Citizens have documented and where possible, photographed the destruction creating a database for researchers,.

In Deir Ezzor, now an Islamic State stronghold on the Iraq-Syria border, volunteers aided staff of Dr. Maamoun and wrapped 16,000 cuneiform tablets in paper towels, packed them in plastic boxes, and shipped them to Damascus.: Each one was individually photographed, added to a and then carefully wrapped them in linen and placed in small Tupperware containers, which were then packed in wooden crates lined with thick foam for storage in a safe location.

The continuing invaluable work of Syria’s “Monument Citizens” reminds one of the global cultural heritage protection projects during WW II when in 1943 on orders from Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower approximately 400 service personnel and countless civilians in Germany and elsewhere in Europe labored to safeguard historic and cultural monuments from war damage. The mandate of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program (MFAA) was to protect and preserve cultural heritage sites and to stop the looting of antiquities. As the conflict came to a close, the ‘Monuments Men” primary mission evolved to locating and returning works of art and other items of cultural importance that had been looted, hoarded and in many cases sold by the Nazis and their collaborators. Earlier this month, the United States Congress granted the Congressional Gold Medal, collectively, to the WW II Monuments Men, in recognition of their heroic role in the preservation, protection, and restitution of monuments, works of art, and artifacts of cultural importance during and following World War II. They are the subject of George Clooney’s new film by the same name.

New teams of Syrian ‘Monument Citizens” are today forming dozens of 5-member 3-D digital camera photography teams to record every possible damaged and not yet damaged site wherever and whenever possible. Scores of Syrian nationalists have just begun an approximately 3-4-month key project known widely as the Oxford University Institute of Digital Archeology’s Million Image Database. This relatively new application of recently developed technology is a large-scale scholarly project targeting both object documentation, and trafficked object identification. Scores of Syria’s ‘Monument Citizens’ will use easy-to-use 3-D cameras to document archeological sites and objects in their area. Images and videos collected in the nearly 14,000 images capacity memory cards will be send for processing to the project’s technical team in the United Kingdom via uploads to the project’s website. Some of these images will be used to create detailed maps of Syrian sites, and to create 3-D models of buildings and artifacts that will be useable as blueprints for full-scale reconstruction. The project website is closed to the public to protect volunteer’s anonymity and also to ensure that the initiative remains a purely scholarly venture, not a social media platform for activists, according to Alexy Karenowska, the project’s director of technology. But Ms. Karenowska assures that as this project progresses through the work of Syria’s Monument Citizens, it will soon be available to the public. The images are to be collated in a huge, publically accessible database, available to all and under development in collaboration with UNESCO. Syria’s ‘Monument Citizens’ are helping create an ever-growing archaeological catalogue which brings together scholarly information about sites and artifacts, raises awareness of cultural heritage and cultural heritage preservation, and provides a new platform for the identification of trafficked objects. The database will be integrable with existing catalogues and lists of known missing or stolen items and employ the latest image comparison and feature recognition based search technology, removing the need for those inspecting suspect cargos or objects to have specialist knowledge.

There are also Monument Citizens operating outside of Syria. Examples include several who operate back and forth between southern Turkey and northern Syria who have done major work and have achieved an emergency preservation of the Ma’arra museum in northern Syria’s Idlib province, famous for its world-class collection of Roman and Byzantine mosaics from the 3rd to 6th centuries A.D. They have also placed more than 1,700 ancient artifacts in secured places.

A couple of other examples of ex-pat Syrian Monument Citizens. The Aleppo Project, also based outside Syria, released on 10/20/2015 its first 3D modeled reconstructions of this under siege former economic hub of Syria. Its website is an open collaboration among Monument Citizens who are planning for the future of a city torn apart by war. Its objectives include gathering as much information as possible about the past of the city, and plan for restoration projects to the day security conditions allow.

Another is the New Palmyra Project, which released its first 3D modeled reconstructions on October 20, 2015 of the ISIS (Da’ish) seriously damaged cultural heritage treasure. Three more Triumphal columns were destroyed this month as three ISIS victims were murdered at their base when they were blown up.

The Non-profit CyArk has digitally preserved scores of the world’s most famous cultural sites, this month announced its most ambitious effort yet – Project Anqa, a joint project with the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) to digitally document and preserve dozens of at-risk sites in Syria.

Another example of ‘Monument Citizen” self-directed initiatives across Syrian borders is a lovely Syrian refugee couple who this observer crossed paths with the other day in a muddy rain-drenched camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley and who explained their personal “Monument Citizen” work. The couple poses as buyers of looted antiques entering Lebanon from Syria and then they photograph and catalogue the photos. An American interested in the subject of Syria’s Endangered Heritage was pleased to be able to present these Syrian ‘Monument citizens” with a 3-D digital camera and accessories, pictured below, in aid of their stellar “cultural triage,” work protecting when possible and documenting Syria’s Endangered Heritage.

None of the Monument Citizens this observer has been honored to meet in Syria gainsay the reality of our globally shared cultural heritage crisis in their country nor the urgent work and planning that needs to be done now.

May they succeed in their work and leadership in protecting and preserving our joint heritage and may we all hail Syria’s Monument Citizens as they work to save the future of our past.

Franklin Lamb is the author of the just published volume, Syria’s Endangered Heritage.He is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com
31 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Justin Podur

Many vicious attacks have been reported. On Friday October 23, a rabbi named Arik Ascherman was chased by a masked man trying to stab him, near the Itamar Israeli settlement. On October 22, a Jerusalem man named Simcha Hodedtov was shot and killed by police as a terrorist. On October 18, a twenty-nine year old named Haftom Zarhum was shot and then beaten to death by a mob in Beersheba. On October 13, Uri Rezken was stabbed in the back while shopping. He screamed “I am a Jew, I am a Jew”, to his attacker, but was stabbed four times anyway.

This list of incidents above is selective, though not exhaustive. It consists solely of attacks by Israelis against Israelis who were mistaken for (or in Ascherman’s case thought to be too close to) Palestinians. It does not include the vast majority of deaths and injuries in this latest round of violence, deaths and injuries of Palestinians attacked by Israeli security forces, accompanied by horror stories of children shot while seeking help; children imprisoned without trial; planted weapons after shootings. Nor does it include massive, organized attacks by mobs of settlers against Palestinian villages. It also does not include the deaths and injuries of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the knife attacks that are much more thoroughly covered in the Western media than the much larger numbers of Palestinians killed.

What started this round of violence? Israel’s armed settler movement is attempting to change the way that Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque is run. In fact, they want the mosque torn down, like the Babri Mosque was torn down in India in 1992. The Israeli government, which the settler movement has largely taken over, has a strategy that probably involves ultimately dividing the mosque site and banning Palestinians from it, as has been done in Hebron. As with the second intifada in 2000, Israel put pressure on the al-Aqsa site until Palestinians resisted. When Palestinians resisted, Israel escalated with lethal force, and now continues to escalate with no end in sight.

In the midst of this violence, Israel’s political leaders are attempting to suppress what a George W. Bush advisor called the “reality-based community” and replace it with a set of racist fantasies. The Israeli Justice Minister who last year brought you the genocidal comment that Palestinian children were “little snakes”, this month has said “there never will be a Palestinian state.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu topped this all off with a rehabilitation of Hitler. Offering a denialist version of history, Netanyahu made a speech claiming that Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews until the Mufti of Jerusalem gave him the idea. German government spokespeople attempted to correct the record, emphasizing that Germany spends time and energy on Holocaust education and does not wish to see politically convenient revisionism undermining those efforts. Max Blumenthal, who has documented Israel’s descent into chaos in his book Goliath, writes about the effects of Netanyahu’s incitement:

“By blaming a Palestinian for the Final Solution, Netanyahu has helped his countrymen adjust to the macabre reality. He reassured them that they were not settler overlords or vigilante brutes, but Inglorious Bastards curb stomping SS officers in the woods outside Krakow. And he sent them the message that those Palestinians lurking behind concrete walls and under siege in ghettoes were not an occupied, dispossessed people, but a new breed of Nazis hellbent on Jewish extermination. Netanyahu’s comments about the Mufti were much more than a hysterical lie; they were an invitation to act out a blood soaked fantasy of righteous revenge.”

Israel was founded to be a refuge for Jews who were persecuted in Europe. Some of its founders had democratic and socialist aspirations that were contradicted by their militarist and colonizing plans and methods. After decades of failure to reconcile these, Israeli society has abandoned pretense, and embraced racism and violence from the highest levels of government to the settler masses celebrating attacks on social media.

It is obvious why such politics and such fantasies would be appealing to right-wing politicians and their constituencies in the West, like the outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the 5.6 million people who voted for him, or the Democrats and Republicans in the US who support Israel.

What is more difficult to understand is how those who espouse liberal politics can continue to hold on. Some no doubt see Israel as it was decades ago, in some kind of struggle between different kinds of Zionism, one of which sought a two-state solution. Having out-of-date information can be a problem, but refusing to update one’s information is a political decision.

Two months ago when the Canadian election had just begun and the New Democrats were purging pro-Palestine candidates, I argued that they were playing a game they were guaranteed to lose. I strive to stay in the reality-based community: I do not think that being pro-Israel cost them the election. But backing down in the face of right-wing bullying, and declaring unconditional support for a society that is sliding into fascism, form political habits. They broadcast either a lack of courage or the support of a racist and violent project. Julian Assange wrote that “every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.” Could it be that people so trained make uncompelling candidates for progressive voters?

One reason Westerners find themselves with an out-of-date idea of Israel’s society and its trajectory is that we are not allowed to talk about it anywhere, including university campuses. A report called The Palestine Exception, by Palestine Legal, documents 292 incidents of the suppression of free speech on campuses, used against advocates of human rights for Palestinians. The report groups the incidents into nine categories of tactics: 1. False accusations of antisemitism and terrorism; 2. Official denunciations; 3. Bureaucratic barriers; 4. Administrative sanctions; 5. Cancellations and alterations of events; 6. Threats to academic freedom; 7. Lawsuits and legal threats; 8. Legislation; 9. Criminal investigations and prosecutions. The report is important, especially for student activists who are starting out and should know what to expect.

The Palestine Exception reveals many things. One of them: the unconditional defense of Israel regardless of what it does and what it becomes, has political consequences. The more indefensible Israel’s behaviour, the more debate has to be avoided, the more taboos have to be established, and the more those who speak about it have to be punished. This is true on campuses, where the freest possible research is supposed to take place and where students are supposed to be taught to think critically and contribute their knowledge to society. It is also true in the media, which is supposed to inform our decisions about what to do in the world. It is true in democratic politics, in which we are supposed to be able to deliberate with the widest possible range of discussion in order to make decisions. The farther Israel slides down its current path, the more unfree we will all have to be, the more disconnected from reality we will have to become, in order to continue to accept it.

Justin Podur is the author of Haiti’s New Dictatorship (Pluto Press 2012). He has contributed chapters to Empire’s Ally: Canada and the War in Afghanistan (University of Toronto Press 2013) and Real Utopia (AK Press 2008). He is an Associate Professor at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.
31 October, 2015
TeleSUR English

 

By Bill Van Auken

The announcement by the Obama White House that up to 50 US Special Forces troops are being deployed on the ground in Syria represents a qualitative escalation of Washington’s illegal intervention in the war-ravaged country.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest confirmed the deployment of what he described as the “special operators” at a press conference Friday. Earnest spent most of the conference attempting to deny the obvious: that this latest military escalation stands in direct contradiction to repeated promises made by Obama since 2013, when he pledged in an address to the American people that he would not “put American boots on the ground in Syria.”

Earnest claimed that the earlier statements were “related to what we were prepared to do to ensure that our concerns about the Assad regime and the need for regime change were implemented,” while the latest escalation was directed against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

This is all nonsense and obfuscation. Washington has intervened over more than four years in Syria with the principal objective of toppling the government of President Bashar al-Assad and imposing a puppet of US interests in his place.

Initially, it waged its campaign for regime change under the banner of “human rights,” while the CIA coordinated efforts with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to funnel billions of dollars worth of arms and funding to al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias like ISIS and the al-Nusra Front to foment a bloody sectarian civil war against the government in Damascus.

When ISIS headed eastward from Syria and overran roughly a third of Iraq, including its third-largest city, Mosul, the Obama administration launched its direct intervention in both countries, conducting air strikes and redeploying some 3,500 US troops to Iraq. Now the intervention has morphed into a war against ISIS dubbed “Operation Inherent Resolve.”

More than a year after that “war” was launched, the grip of ISIS over large swathes of both Iraq and Syria remains virtually unchanged. The desultory character of the US campaign is explicable only from the standpoint that Washington has no desire to destroy the Islamist militia, which it still counts as one of the main fighting forces in the war for regime change, which remains the principal US objective.

What has now prompted the deployment of combat troops in Syria, along with the recent flurry of diplomatic activity in Vienna, is Russia’s military intervention in support of the Assad government. In just one month of air strikes, the Russian military has done far more damage to ISIS and other Islamist militias than the US and its so-called coalition inflicted in the course of over a year.

It is in response to this Russian campaign, which is beginning to turn the tide against the al Qaeda-linked militias backed by Washington and its regional allies, that the US is sending in the Special Forces.

Simultaneously, it is trying to achieve through negotiations in Vienna with Moscow and Tehran, Assad’s principal backers, what the US and its allies have been unable to impose through the protracted slaughter in Syria itself.

Outside of initiating a far broader US military deployment in Syria, it is difficult to discern any coherent strategy underlying the deployment of 50 Special Forces troops. It is widely reported that they are being sent to the northeast of the country to train, advise and coordinate the further arming of the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG, and a significantly smaller allied Syrian Arab tribal force.

The YPG operates in the area with the tacit approval of the Assad government. Its main objective is to link up the area it controls in the northeast near the Turkish border with the border city of Kobani, further west, in order to carve out an autonomous Kurdish enclave.

Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally, acknowledged this week that its forces had twice carried out attacks on the YPG, and has made it clear that it is prepared to intervene militarily to prevent the Syrian Kurdish militia from achieving its aims.

Thus, the US Special Forces unit faces the possibility of coming into armed conflict not only with ISIS, Syrian government forces and their Russian backers, but also with America’s ally, Turkey.

In addition, utilizing the YPG as a proxy army for retaking territory from ISIS is complicated by the fact that the Kurdish militia was accused by Amnesty International earlier this month of carrying out “war crimes” against Arabs and Turkmens in the areas under its control. In some cases, it has razed entire villages and driven out their residents with the threat of calling in US air strikes against them.

Under these conditions, it is difficult to see how an advise-and-train mission with the YPG would prove any more effective in resolving the Syrian conflict than the notoriously failed Pentagon bid to train “vetted rebels.”

Its purpose is a show of force directed first and foremost against Russia. As such, it can only be the precursor to an increasingly substantial and dangerous escalation of the US intervention, carrying with it the threat of an armed confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

US imperialism is responsible for the ravaging of Syria, with a quarter million dead and half of the population displaced. Backing and arming the Islamist militias, it sought to repeat the “success” of its regime change operation in Libya that ended with the overthrow of the government, the murder of Muammar Gaddafi and the descent of the country into chaos and civil war that continues four years later.

The escalation of the US intervention is a crime under international law. It has been authorized by neither the United Nations nor the Syrian government and represents a continuation of the militarist aggression launched by the Bush administration with the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Neither the deployment of US troops on the ground in Syria nor the bombing of the country from the air has ever been debated, much less approved, by the US Congress, and there is every indication that the launching of a new ground war in the Middle East is bitterly opposed by the vast majority of the American people.

The target of the US intervention is not ISIS and not merely the Syrian government. Washington seeks regime change in Damascus as part of a wider strategy of asserting hegemony over the Middle East and preparing for even bloodier military conflicts with Syria’s main allies, Iran and Russia.

The US announced the deployment of ground troops in Syria during the same week in which plans were made public for the stationing of 4,000 NATO troops on Russia’s borders, and as provocative US naval operations in the South China Sea raise the threat of a military confrontation with China.

Barack Obama, elected on promises to end US wars in the Middle East, is presiding over an unprecedented eruption of American militarism that threatens to drag the entire region and potentially the whole world into a military conflagration.

31 October, 2015
WSWS.org

By Dr Vacy Vlazna

The reprehensible draft ‘resolution’ circulated by New Zealand (NZ), the present chair of the UN Security Council, is so blatantly biased against the Palestinian people that it proffers, in this instance, the correct diplomatic protocol to mind it’s own business….. particularly as NZ is an on-the-record, apologist and morally blind supporter of Israel. On July 22, 2014 as Israel’s vicious war on the people of Gaza raged savagely and relentlessly, Prime Minister John Key, repeated the zionist mantra that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

In June this year, during a visit to Israel, NZ’s Foreign Minister Murray McCully ran the idea of the resolution by Netanyahu. So, sure enough, NZ, like all western governments, obsequiously replicated zionist propaganda in the ‘resolution’:

NZ normalises Israeli atrocities by falsely presenting Israel and Palestine as equal perpetrators and equal victims and

by pushing the demand that Palestine gives up its endeavour for justice in the International Criminal Court thus letting Israel off scott free for its monstrous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While NZ demands that Israel freezes its rapacious settlement expansion (in which NZ invests..see below), it absurdly promotes the farce of negotiations that expand settlements. There is no demand by NZ that the zionist infiltrators leave the present settlements that have illegally expropriated half of the remaining Palestinian West Bank.

NZ obediently keeps up the pretence of a two state solution when Netanyahu has repeatedly ruled out Palestinian sovereignty:

“At the height of the 2014 Gaza war, Netanyahu revealed that he doesn’t envision Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank any time soon. “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan,” he said at a press conference in Jerusalem. In other words: no withdrawal and no Palestinian sovereignty, which means no state of Palestine.

A few months later, Netanyahu said, in a much quoted interview on the eve of the March 17 election, that, “indeed,” no Palestinian state would be created under his leadership.”

To add insult to hypocrisy, NZ does not act on its recommendations – it will not “make a move to first recognise the Palestinian state.”

Then loading more inanity on the ridiculous, NZ calls on the same incompetent clowns “the Quartet (United States, Russia, United Nations and European Union), Security Council members and Arab states” to maintain the posturing of the nihilistic negotiations.

So what can the people of Palestine expect from a flunkey state that belongs to the Impunity- for- Israel’s- War- Crimes Club?

A state furthermore that owns a government body, the New Zealand Super Fund that invests in and profits from a number of Israeli companies integrally connected to the illegal settlements and/or Israel’s arms industry such as Israel Chemicals which supplies white phosphorus to the USA which in turn sells its white phosphorous munitions back to Israel which then fires them illegally on innocent Gaza children such as little Hamza Almidani, 3.

Palestinians can expect the same old bystander impunity that exacerbates their suffering caused by the ongoing betrayal of NZ’s own obligations as a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions to protect and uphold Palestinian political and human rights.

This dishonourable ‘resolution’ comes at a crucial time when Palestinian children and youth are being extrajudicially executed in the street for their courageous efforts to uphold their rights while NZ fails them and, in doing so, shames the decency of the people of New Zealand.

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.

30 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Stuart Smith

As the hysterical outpourings of the Western media and their relentless anti-Putin narrative becomes ever more ridiculous. Let’s look at why.
Vladimir Putin wants to cut off your internet. At least, if you are a reader of the New York Times, you may well believe this. The NYT recently reported that “Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications.”

The NYT didn’t bother to expand on how a submarine might go about acting ‘aggressively’ in the presence of inert under sea cables in international waters. Indeed, later in the article they admit that there is “no evidence of any cable cutting.” So the real story here is in fact: Russian submarine in the sea.

That doesn’t sound like a terribly catchy headline though does it?

If you are a Mail on Sunday reader of the print edition, you were recently treated to a two page headline declaring “Putin’s bombing of the innocents.”
Curiously, the online version of that story omitted that headline.

The Mail is good at this. They can find a reason to blame Russia (quoted from someone else of course) in almost any story. The UK telephone company Talk Talk recently suffered a database hacking. The Mail ran a story about it. Sure enough, in that story we find a quote by someone called Ewan Lawson: “this could be part of a wider pattern of activity encouraged or even supported by the Russian state as part of an effort to destabilise the West.”

Colour me sceptical, but I can’t really see the West being destabilised because someone hacked the database of a minor mobile telephone company.

It must have been a quiet day at the Daily Express this week; they are again suggesting Russia is set to start WW3. Apparently, the Express “laid bare” Putin’s “imperialist ambitions”. The reason? Russia plans to build a military base – in Russia.

We see such nonsense in the Western media more than usual right now. When the editors want to keep a narrative alive, or bury some inconvenient actual news, they will publish something, anything, which allows them to use the headlines that apply to that narrative.

Often these stories are essentially made up, but they allow the use of the words and phrases the narrative dictates, and the narrative remains in the ‘news’.

Continual hyperventilating about so-called (and usually non-existent) ‘Russian aggression’ keeps things like the US bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan off the front pages. Certainly it will keep out of the news the US tank that crashed through the gates of the same hospital destroying evidence less than two weeks later.

That is what is happening here. The Western media have had nothing credible to bash Russia with for some time. There’s not a lot being published about American bumbling in the Middle East, Ukraine is yesterday’s news while Petro Poroshenko decides how to further eviscerate the country that he is, nominally, the leader of. Few in the Western media really want to run stories about how Russia is obliterating ISIS positions in a matter of weeks where the US failed over a year and a half.

So instead, we get silly pieces that enable writers and thought leaders to keep the anti-Russian meme going with their audiences. Make something up, quote an unnamed source, add a stock photo of Putin with no shirt, and the anti-Putin propaganda train keeps on rumbling down the tracks.

Why the Western media misunderstand Russia

Much of the Western media fundamentally misunderstand Russians and Russia. Many blame Putin’s 89 percent popularity rating in Russia on a ludicrous notion that people answer poll questions while gripped with fear. US News recently reported that “Russians that truly do support Putin form their opinions in a virtual information vacuum. The Russian public’s news and information is overwhelmingly created, or at least vetted, by the Kremlin.”

The very idea that – in the internet age – the government of a country such as Russia could control the media to such an extent that 127 million people (89 percent) could be hoodwinked en masse is frankly, preposterous.

A better approach for Western hacks might be to take a look at why Putin has such high support in Russia rather than trying to pretend he hasn’t. From that, politicians elsewhere might learn something.

If one judges a politician’s credibility by what they do, compared to what they say they will do, Putin is credible, honest and honourable. He has a long track record of doing what he said he would do. On the whole, when he says a thing, it will be so. If he does not say a thing, then you can be sure that what you are hearing is speculation. Voters like that. In the West, we have almost no experience of this.

On foreign policy, the Western media glibly overlooks the fact that the US has invaded over a dozen countries and tried to overthrow the elected governments of many others since just 1990. Yet Russia is criticised for allowing Crimea to reunify with hardly a shot fired, which undoubtedly saved many lives while following the will of the people.

Russia is somehow ‘aggressive’ when it expresses concern that the US and the EU are surrounding it with missiles placed in FSU countries, but continual US aggression across the world – this week with China – is meant to be seen as somehow ‘spreading democracy’ and a harbinger of some kind of ‘freedom’.

The Western media is confused. To find a president that actually leads, one who puts the national interest first and does what he says he will do is somewhat disturbing for them. Such behaviour is beyond their domestic sphere of experience. So they extrapolate from this that it cannot actually be so. The polls must be faked, people must be rigid with terror and afraid to speak out or they must have no access to news.

How to report what you do not understand?

If so few Western hacks understand Russia, and cannot be bothered to learn, how do they fill their column inches? Rather than critical analysis, investigating a variety of viewpoints or perhaps even talking to some Russians, many just follow the herd and make it up.

Cue another story on ‘Russian aggression’, Russia being poised to invade [choose any country here], Russia encroaching in someone’s airspace or the latest media misrepresentation: Russia killing moderate terrorists (helpfully called ‘rebels’ for that purpose), presented as if eradicating terrorists is a bad thing.

Reading the Western media can easily conjure up an image of Putin that has him cackling in his volcano, stroking a white cat with a control panel of missile launch buttons at his elbow. It is also amusing to note that every decision made at any level of government in Russia is always personally attributed to Putin. The media imagines that he somehow personally approves every piece of media output, every article and every minor decision. He must have some time management skills!

With such an anti-Putin narrative now the norm in the Western media for so long, it becomes quite easy to see how lazy hacks will use him as the default baddie for almost anything that happens. Mobile phone company hacked? Blame Russia. Found a Russian submarine in the sea someplace? See what is nearby and accuse Russia of being aggressive towards it. Facts are irrelevant if you are able to twist words or modify their intent by quoting them out of context. Find someone who is ‘worried’ and sprinkle in the word ‘Kremlin’ here and there for a sinister overtone.

It seems unlikely that the mainstream Western media will ever go back to honest and fair journalism as they have now travelled so far in the other direction. But a good start would be having the hacks who diligently churn out negative content about Russia each and every day to actually go to Russia and learn something.

Better still; send them to Syria to watch the 800,000 refugees returning home thanks to Russia’s efforts to crush ISIS. It’s hard to put a negative spin on that.

Stuart Smith, for RT

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

30 October 2015

www.rt.com

By Seyed Hossein Mousavian

Archrivals Saudi Arabia and Iran are experiencing their first regional talks in Vienna on the Syrian conflict. Since assuming office in August 2013, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has initiated several overtures to Saudi Arabia, attempting to mend what has steadily devolved into a dangerously adversarial relationship in the years since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Rouhani, who called for better ties with Saudi Arabia shortly after his inauguration, made his first diplomatic outreach to Saudi Arabia at a critical juncture. He dispatched his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, to visit several of the Arab Persian Gulf states shortly after the November 2013 interim nuclear deal was reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of nations.

“I believe that our relations with Saudi Arabia should expand as we consider Saudi Arabia as an extremely important country in the region and the Islamic world,” Zarif said at the time. “We believe that Iran and Saudi Arabia should work together in order to promote peace and stability in the region.”

Zarif was in effect signaling that Iran was willing to take proactive steps to ease any concerns its southern neighbors had about a post-nuclear deal regional environment.

Rouhani followed this move with numerous other attempts at détente: Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian visited Riyadh in August 2014, Zarif met with his Saudi counterpart during the 2014 United National General Assembly, and Zarif went to Saudi Arabia to attend the funeral of the late Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz in January 2015.

After the new Saudi king, Salman bin Abdulaziz, appointed U.S. Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir as foreign minister earlier this year, Zarif also congratulated him and announced that he hoped “relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Saudi monarchy will develop.”

Zarif reached out al-Jubeir to meet during this year’s UNGA, but was shunned. Nonetheless, at a recent press conference with Arab reporters in Tehran, Zarif reiterated that Iran and Saudi Arabia “have the same interests” and should “work together.”

For its part, Saudi Arabia has rebuffed all of Iran’s attempts at engagement. To be sure, the Saudi government has not shied from making faux offers of cooperation, predicated on senseless preconditions like Iran ending its “interference” in Arab countries. The unfortunate reality is that Saudi Arabia, doubly so since the ascension of King Salman, has overtly opted for a more confrontational approach towards Iran. As the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney has said: “Saudi leaders have adopted a more aggressive diplomatic, economic and military campaign aimed both at marginalizing Iran and reasserting its own ambitions for regional dominance.”

There are multiple reasons why Saudi Arabia is not ready for serious negotiations with Iran at present. For one thing, the hothead son of the King Salman, Mohammed bin Salman, is battling for power and to move up in the succession line. The Saudi war in Yemen is largely his design, and the sensational extent to which supposed Iranian intervention in Yemen has been hyped up has helped bin Salman consolidate power, much to the derision of other members of the royal family.

Furthermore, as one member of the House of Saud told me in New York City during this year’s UNGA, the Saudis do not want come to the table with Iran because they believe Iran has the upper hand in the region. They feel that if they did engage Iran, it would be tantamount to accepting Iran’s position the region. However, if this is indeed the case, the Saudis have fundamentally misread Iranian strategic thinking in this regard. Iran’s history since the revolution demonstrates that whenever it feels it is in a position of strength, it becomes more flexible, and whenever it comes under increased pressure, it becomes obstinate and acts in ways to increase the cost of pressuring it.

By opting to increase rather than ameliorate tensions with Iran, Saudi Arabia has brought itself and the rest of the region to a dangerous precipice. Dialogue and broad cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the only way forward and imperative if the various crises in the region, whether in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen or elsewhere, are to be resolved. Saudi Arabia and Iran can either jumpstart negotiations or continue down the path of escalation, practically ensuring a devastating war becomes an inevitability.

There are three paths Saudi Arabia and Iran can take to bridge their differences. The first is formal, official high-level talks between foreign ministers and other senior representatives of the respective governments. Unfortunately, the Saudi government does not appear receptive of this option at this stage. Another alternative is for the two countries to engage in track one-and a-half or track-two diplomacy — contacts between former officials and prominent non-government figures and experts — to discuss a package to build trust and move towards official dialogue. There have been some efforts made on that front, but it is crucial that they be significantly expanded.

One other way of escaping the pressures of public negotiations is for Saudi Arabia and Iran to confidentially exchange special envoys. These meetings would be strictly off the record and allow for the two sides to engage in high-level talks and more effectively hash out their differences. During the mid-1990s, I engaged in precisely this type of diplomacy with Saudi Arabia in my capacity as a senior diplomat and advisor to then-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Back then, Saudi Arabia and Iran both sought to take steps to reconcile with one another after more than a decade of hostilities. I negotiated and agreed on a “peace package” with then-Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, during that time. After four nights of intense negotiations, we reached agreements which paved the road for amicable relations between our countries that would last until the mid-2000s.

Rather than trying to constrain Iran and isolate it in its own region, the leaders of Saudi Arabia should acknowledge that Iran is their neighbor and that they can and should live in peace with each other. Negotiations should be done without preconditions and both sides should act to understand and address one another’s concerns. Cooperation between Saudi Arabia, Iran and the other Persian Gulf states is vital and will fill the vacuum causing much of the conflicts raging in the region today. Détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia can indeed be the first step in creating a formal regional cooperation system that makes this goal a reality and helps stabilize the region.

Seyed Hossein Mousavian is Head of Foreign Relations Committee of Iran’s National Security Council (1997-2005)

30 October 2015

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

By Indian Writers Forum

Romila Thapar, at the launch of the two websites of the Indian Writers’ Forum Trust, speaks on the recent attempts at the rewriting of history to suit the purposes of a Hindu India. The proponents of this theory claim that history must not only be rewritten, but corrected – a more dangerous proposition than rewriting.

https://youtu.be/STXzvkO6bZ4

She does not find the approach – inspite of its absurdity -, the working of some fantasy, but a very systematic approach to suit history for the argument of a Hindu state. Most of these claims are based on the work of colonial scholarship such as the historians James Mill, Max Mueller, and Colonel Olcott. The irony of the fact remains that those who oppose the secular history as Western must fall back on colonial scholarship of Indian history done by – to borrow the vocabulary of the Hindu Right – Westerners. “It is colonial scholarship which is at the foundation of this new so-called indigenous history”, says Thapar.

She concludes by saying that there may be various versions of history, but pleads for a space where these versions can be debated and discussed in public or in institutions. What must be opposed is the reduction of all knowledge to a single narrative and the grounding of that knowledge on a ingle ideology.

Romila Thapar is a distinguished Indian historian whose principal area of study is ancient India. She is the author of numerous books including the popular classic, A History of India, and is currently Professor Emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.
28 October, 2015
Countercurrents.org