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By Ramzy Baroud

The population of Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camp, Yarmouk – whose population once exceeded 250,000, dwindling throughout the Syrian civil war to 18,000 – are a microcosm of the story of a whole nation, whose perpetual pain shames us all, none excluded.

Refugees who escaped the Syrian war or are displaced in Syria itself, are experiencing the cruel reality under the harsh and inhospitable terrains of war and Arab regimes. Many of those who remained in Yarmouk were torn to shreds by the barrel bombs of the Syrian army, or victimized by the malicious, violent groupings that control the camp, including the al-Nusra Front, and as of late, IS.

Those who have somehow managed to escape bodily injury are starving. The starvation in Yarmouk is also the responsibility of all parties involved, and the “inhumane conditions” under which they subsist – especially since December 2012 – is a badge of shame on the forehead of the international community in general, and the Arab League in particular.

These are some of the culprits in the suffering of Yarmouk:

Israel

Israel bears direct responsibility in the plight of the refugees in Yarmouk. The refugees of Yarmouk are mostly the descendants of Palestinian refugees from historic Palestine, especially the northern towns, including Safad, which is now inside Israel. The camp was established in 1957, nearly a decade after the Nakba – the “Catastrophe” of 1948, which saw the expulsion of nearly a million refugees from Palestine. It was meant to be a temporary shelter, but it became a permanent home. Its residents never abandoned their right of return to Palestine, a right enshrined in UN resolution 194.

Israel knows that the memory of the refugees is its greatest enemy, so when the Palestinian leadership requested that Israel allow the Yarmouk refugees to move to the West Bank, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a condition: that they renounce their right of return. Palestinians refused. History has shown that Palestinians would endure untold suffering and not abandon their rights in Palestine. The fact that Netanyahu would place such a condition is not just a testimony to Israel’s fear of Palestinian memory, but the political opportunism and sheer ruthlessness of the Israeli government.

The Palestinian Authority (PA)

The PA was established in 1994 based on a clear charter where a small group of Palestinians “returned” to the occupied territories, set up a few institutions and siphoned billions of dollars in international aid, in exchange for abandoning the right or return for Palestinian refugees, and ceding any claim on real Palestinian sovereignty and nationhood.

When the civil war in Syria began to quickly engulf the refugees, and although such a reality was to be expected, President Mahmoud Abbas’s authority did so little as if the matter had no bearing on the Palestinian people as a whole. True, Abbas made a few statements calling on Syrians to spare the refugees what was essentially a Syrian struggle, but not much more. When IS took over the camp, Abbas dispatched his labor minister, Ahmad Majdalani to Syria. The latter made a statement that the factions and the Syrian regime would unite against IS – which, if true, is likely to ensure the demise of hundreds more.

If Abbas had invested 10 percent of the energy he spent in his “government’s” media battle against Hamas or a tiny share of his investment in the frivolous “peace process”, he could have at least garnered the needed international attention and backing to treat the plight of Palestinian refugees in Syria’s Yarmouk with a degree of urgency. Instead, they were left to die alone.

The Syrian Regime

When rebels seized Yarmouk in December 2012, President Bashar al-Assad’s forces shelled the camp without mercy while Syrian media never ceased to speak about liberating Jerusalem. The contradictions between words and deeds when it comes to Palestine is an Arab syndrome that has afflicted every single Arab government and ruler since Palestine became the “Palestine question” and the Palestinians became the “refugee problem”.

Syria is no exception, but Assad, like his father Hafez before him, is particularly savvy in utilizing Palestine as a rallying cry aimed solely at legitimizing his regime while posing as if a revolutionary force fighting colonialism and imperialism. Palestinians will never forget the siege and massacre of Tel al-Zaatar (where Palestinian refugees in Lebanon were besieged, butchered but also starved as a result of a siege and massacre carried out by right-wing Lebanese militias and the Syrian army in 1976), as they will not forget or forgive what is taking place in Yarmouk today.

Many of Yarmouk’s homes were turned to rubble because of Assad’s barrel bombs, shells and airstrikes.

The Rebels

The so-called Free Syria Army (FSA) should have never entered Yarmouk, no matter how desperate they were for an advantage in their war against Assad. It was criminally irresponsible considering the fact that, unlike Syrian refugees, Palestinians had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. The FSA invited the wrath of the regime, and couldn’t even control the camp, which fell into the hands of various militias that are plotting and bargaining amongst each other to defeat their enemies, who could possibly become their allies in their next pathetic street battles for control over the camp.

The access that IS gained in Yarmouk was reportedly facilitated by the al-Nusra Front which is an enemy of IS in all places but Yarmouk. Nusra is hoping to use IS to defeat the mostly local resistance in the camp, arranged by Aknaf Beit al-Maqdis, before handing the reins of the besieged camp back to the al-Qaeda affiliated group. And while criminal gangs are politicking and bartering, Palestinian refugees are dying in droves.

The UN and Arab League

Cries for help have been echoing from Yarmouk for years, and yet none have been heeded. Recently, the UN Security Council decided to hold a meeting and discuss the situation there as if the matter was not a top priority years ago. Grandstanding and concerned press statements aside, the UN has largely abandoned the refugees. The budget for UNRWA, which looks after the nearly 60 Palestinian refugee camps across Palestine and the Middle East, has shrunk so significantly, the agency often finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy.

The UN refugee agency, better funded and equipped to deal with crises, does little for the Palestinian refugees in Syria. Promises of funds for UNRWA, which frankly could have done much better to raise awareness and confront the international community over their disregard for the refugees, are rarely met.

The Arab League are even more responsible. The League was largely established to unite Arab efforts to respond to the crisis in Palestine, and was supposed to be a stalwart defender of Palestinians and their rights. But the Arabs too have disowned Palestinians as they are intently focused on conflicts of more strategic interests – setting up an Arab army with clear sectarian intentions and aimed largely at settling scores.

Many of Us

The Syrian conflict has introduced great polarization within a community that once seemed united for Palestinian rights. Those who took the side of the Syrian regime wouldn’t concede for a moment that the Syrian government could have done more to lessen the suffering in the camp. Those who are anti-Assad insist that the entire evil deed is the doing of him and his allies.

Both of these groups are responsible for wasting time, confusing the discussion and wasting energies that could have been used to create a well-organized international campaign to raise awareness, funds and practical mechanisms of support to help Yarmouk in particular, and Palestinians refugees in Syria in general.

But we ought to remember that there are still 18,000 trapped in Yarmouk and organize on their behalf so that, even if it is untimely, we need do something. Anything.

Ramzy Baroud – www.ramzybaroud.net – is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. He is currently completing his PhD studies at the University of Exeter.
15 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Niles Williamson

The UN Security Council voted on Tuesday to impose an arms embargo on leading members of the Houthi militia as well as Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, the son of former longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The resolution was passed with 14 votes in favor and Russia abstaining.

The text of the embargo was drafted by Jordan, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council. The Jordanian monarchy is actively participating in the anti-Houthi air assault in Yemen being spearheaded by Saudi Arabia.

The Salehs have given support to the Houthi militia that seized control of Yemen’s capital in September, ousting President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and placing him under house arrest. Hadi fled for the southern port city of Aden in February before leaving the country in March for Saudi Arabia in the face of a Houthi-led assault on his compound.

While the Security Council resolution calls for the Houthis to “immediately and unconditionally end violence,” it says nothing about the airstrikes being carried out on a daily basis by a coalition of Arab Gulf States headed by Saudi Arabia.

Since March 26 Saudi coalition air forces have launched more than 1,200 airstrikes against targets throughout Yemen, with some strikes killing scores of civilians. A bomb dropped on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in northern Yemen on March 30 killed at least 30 civilians. An airstrike on a dairy factory in the port city of Hodeida on April 1 killed at least 37 workers.

The Saudi monarchy, with US backing, has launched a widespread air assault against Houthi-controlled military targets as well as major urban areas. Street fighting in Aden between Houthi forces and armed forces opposed to them has left hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded, littering the streets with corpses.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, released a statement Tuesday warning about the destruction of infrastructure and the high rate of civilian casualties in the three-week-old campaign. “Every hour we are receiving and documenting disturbing and distressing reports of the toll that this conflict is taking on civilian lives and infrastructure,” he said. “Such a heavy civilian death toll ought to be a clear indication to all parties to this conflict that there may be serious problems in the conduct of hostilities.”

Hussein noted that coalition airstrikes have hit residential areas and homes throughout the country, including in the provinces of Taiz, Amran, Ibb, Al-Jawf and Saada. An airstrike that hit a residential area in Taiz on Sunday killed ten civilians and injured seven others.

Schools and hospitals throughout the country have been damaged or destroyed by airstrikes. Eight hospitals in the provinces of Aden, Dhale, Sanaa, and Saada have been hit by coalition bombs.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Monday, Ivan Simonovic, UN Deputy Secretary General for Human Rights, warned about the growing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, saying that a majority of those killed so far have been civilians. “Over 600 people killed, but more than half of them are civilians.” Of the civilian deaths counted by the UN, at least 84 have been children and 25 were women.

While the United States has provided intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi coalition from the onset of the assault, it has been gradually increasing its involvement in the conflict. American imperialism has long sought to maintain its control over Yemen, which lies next to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a major oil choke point.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration has a direct hand in the selection of targets for airstrikes. Pentagon war planners at a joint operations center are directly approving every target selected by the Saudi military. The US military planners also provide the Saudis with the specific locations where they should drop the bombs.

“The United States is providing our partners with necessary and timely intelligence to defend Saudi Arabia and respond to other efforts to support the legitimate government of Yemen,” Alistair Baskey, White House National Security Council spokesman told reporters on Sunday.

US warships stationed off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea have also begun assisting the Saudi-led coalition in enforcing a blockade of the country. On April 1, US sailors boarded a Panamanian-flagged ship in the Red Sea in search of weapons supposedly bound for the Houthis. The search did not turn up any weapons.

American drones continue to fly over Yemen in support of Saudi operations against the Houthi militia and the targeting of members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

An apparent drone strike on the southeastern port city of Mukalla Sunday killed senior AQAP leader Ibrahim Al Rubaish and as many as six other people. Rubaish, a Saudi national, had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp from 2002 until his release back to Saudi Arabia in 2006. He reportedly fled to Yemen in 2009 and joined AQAP, and the US recently placed a $5 million bounty on his head.

While neither the CIA nor the Pentagon have claimed responsibility for the attack, it was likely carried out by the US, since Mukalla, which was seized by AQAP fighters earlier this month, has yet to be targeted by Saudi airstrikes. If confirmed, the attack would mark the first US drone strike in Yemen in nearly six weeks.

It has been three weeks since US Special Forces evacuated the Al Anad airbase north of Aden. Al Anad had served as the main hub for the officially secret American air war, which has killed more than 1,000 people in Yemen since 2009.

Meanwhile, both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are actively preparing a possible ground invasion of the country. The Egyptian military dictatorship reported that it and the Saudi monarchy are discussing a “major military maneuver” along with other Gulf states in the coming days.
15 April, 2015
WSWS.org

 

To Remain in Africa For Decades

By Nick Turse

For three days, wearing a kaleidoscope of camouflage patterns, they huddled together on a military base in Florida. They came from U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and U.S. Army Special Operations Command, from France and Norway, from Denmark, Germany, and Canada: 13 nations in all. They came to plan a years-long “Special Operations-centric” military campaign supported by conventional forces, a multinational undertaking that — if carried out — might cost hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of dollars and who knows how many lives.

Ask the men involved and they’ll talk about being mindful of “sensitivities” and “cultural differences,” about the importance of “collaboration and coordination,” about the value of a variety of viewpoints, about “perspectives” and “partnerships.” Nonetheless, behind closed doors and unbeknownst to most of the people in their own countries, let alone the countries fixed in their sights, a coterie of Western special ops planners were sketching out a possible multinational military future for a troubled region of Africa.

From January 13th to 15th, representatives from the U.S. and 12 partner nations gathered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa for an exercise dubbed Silent Quest 15-1. The fictional scenario on which they were to play out their war game had a ripped-from-the-headlines quality to it. It was an amalgam of two perfectly real and ongoing foreign policy and counterterrorism disasters of the post-9/11 era: the growth of Boko Haram in Nigeria and the emergence of the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL. The war game centered on the imagined rise of a group dubbed the “Islamic State of Africa” and the spread of its proto-caliphate over parts of Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon — countries terrorized by the real Boko Haram, which did recently pledge its allegiance to the Islamic State.

Silent Quest 15-1 was just the latest in a series of similarly named exercises — the first took place in March 2013 — designed to help plot out the special ops interventions of the next decade. This war game was no paintball-style walk in the woods. There were no mock firefights, no dress rehearsals. It wasn’t the flag football equivalent of battle. Instead, it was a tabletop exercise building on something all too real: the ever-expanding panoply of U.S. and allied military activities across ever-larger parts of Africa. Speaking of that continent, Matt Pascual, a participant in Silent Quest and the Africa desk officer for SOCOM’s Euro-Africa Support Group, noted that the U.S. and its allies were already dealing with “myriad issues” in the region and, perhaps most importantly, that many of the participating countries “are already there.” The country “already there” the most is, of course, Pascual’s own: the United States.

In recent years, the U.S. has been involved in a variety of multinational interventions in Africa, including one in Libya that involved both a secret warand a conventional campaign of missiles and air strikes, assistance to French forces in the Central African Republic and Mali, and the training and funding of African proxies to do battle against militant groups like Boko Haram as well as Somalia’s al-Shabab and Mali’s Ansar al-Dine. In 2014, the U.S. carried out 674 military activities across Africa, nearly two missions per day, an almost 300% jump in the number of annual operations, exercises, and military-to-military training activities since U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2008.

Despite this massive increase in missions and a similar swelling of bases, personnel, and funding, the picture painted last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee by AFRICOM chief General David Rodriguez was startlingly bleak. For all the American efforts across Africa, Rodriguez offered a vision of a continent in crisis, imperiled from East to West by militant groups that have developed, grown in strength, or increased their deadly reach in the face of U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

“Transregional terrorists and criminal networks continue to adapt and expand aggressively,” Rodriguez told committee members. “Al-Shabab has broadened its operations to conduct, or attempt to conduct, asymmetric attacks against Uganda, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and especially Kenya. Libya-based threats are growing rapidly, including an expanding ISIL presence… Boko Haram threatens the ability of the Nigerian government to provide security and basic services in large portions of the northeast.” Despite the grim outcomes since the American military began “pivoting” to Africa after 9/11, the U.S. recently signed an agreement designed to keep its troops based on the continent until almost midcentury.

Mission Creep

For years, the U.S. military has publicly insisted that its efforts in Africa are negligible, intentionally leaving the American people, not to mention most Africans, in the dark about the true size, scale, and scope of its operations there. AFRICOM public affairs personnel and commanders have repeatedly claimed no more than a “light footprint” on the continent. They shrink from talk of camps and outposts, claiming to have just one baseanywhere in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in the tiny nation of Djibouti. They don’t like to talk about military operations. They offer detailed informationabout only a tiny fraction of their training exercises. They refuse to disclose the locations where personnel have been stationed or even counts of the countries involved.

During an interview, an AFRICOM spokesman once expressed his worry to me that even tabulating how many deployments the command has in Africa would offer a “skewed image” of U.S. efforts. Behind closed doors, however, AFRICOM’s officers speak quite a different language. They have repeatedly asserted that the continent is an American “battlefield” and that — make no bones about it — they are already embroiled in an actual “war.”

According to recently released figures from U.S. Africa Command, the scope of that “war” grew dramatically in 2014. In its “posture statement,” AFRICOM reports that it conducted 68 operations last year, up from 55 the year before. These included operations Juniper Micron and Echo Casemate, missions focused on aiding French and African interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic; Observant Compass, an effort to degrade or destroy what’s left of Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army in central Africa; and United Assistance, the deployment of military personnel to combat the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

The number of major joint field exercises U.S. personnel engaged in with African military partners inched up from 10 in 2013 to 11 last year. These included African Lion in Morocco, Western Accord in Senegal, Central Accord in Cameroon, and Southern Accord in Malawi, all of which had a field training component and served as capstone events for the prior year’s military-to-military instruction missions.

AFRICOM also conducted maritime security exercises including Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea, Saharan Express in the waters off Senegal, and three weeks of maritime security training scenarios as part of Phoenix Express 2014, with sailors from numerous countries including Algeria, Italy, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.

The number of security cooperation activities skyrocketed from 481 in 2013 to 595 last year. Such efforts included military training under a “state partnership program” that teams African military forces with U.S. National Guard units and the State Department-funded Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance, or ACOTA, program through which U.S. military advisers and mentors provide equipment and instruction to African troops.

In 2013, the combined total of all U.S. activities on the continent reached 546, an average of more than one mission per day. Last year, that number leapt to 674. In other words, U.S. troops were carrying out almost two operations, exercises, or activities — from drone strikes to counterinsurgency instruction, intelligence gathering to marksmanship training — somewhere in Africa every day. This represents an enormous increase from the 172 “missions, activities, programs, and exercises” that AFRICOM inherited from other geographic commands when it began operations in 2008.

Transnational Terror Groups: Something From Nothing

In 2000, a report prepared under the auspices of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute examined the “African security environment.” While it touched on “internal separatist or rebel movements” in “weak states,” as well as non-state actors like militias and “warlord armies,” there was conspicuously no mention of Islamic extremism or major transnational terrorist threats. Prior to 2001, in fact, the United States did not recognize any terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and a senior Pentagon official noted that the most feared Islamic militants on the continent had “not engaged in acts of terrorism outside Somalia.”

In the wake of 9/11, even before AFRICOM was created, the U.S. began ramping up operations across the continent in an effort to bolster the counterterror capabilities of allies and insulate Africa from transnational terror groups, namely globe-trotting Islamic extremists. The continent, in other words, was seen as something of a clean slate for experiments in terror prevention.

Billions of dollars have been pumped into Africa to build bases, arm allies, gather intelligence, fight proxy wars, assassinate militants, and conduct perhaps thousands of military missions — and none of it has had its intended effect. Last year, for example, Somali militants “either planned or executed increasingly complex and lethal attacks in Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, and Ethiopia,” according to AFRICOM. Earlier this month, those same al-Shabab militants upped the ante by slaughtering 142 students at a college in Kenya.

And al-Shabab’s deadly growth and spread has hardly been the exception to the rule in Africa. In recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, AFRICOM commander Rodriguez rattled off the names of numerous Islamic terror groups that have sprung up in the intervening years, destabilizing the very countries the U.S. had sought to strengthen. While the posture statement he presented put the best gloss possible on Washington’s military efforts in Africa, even a cursory reading of it — and under the circumstances, it’s worth quoting at length — paints a bleak picture of what that “pivot” to Africa has actually meant on the ground. Sections pulled from various parts of the document speak volumes:

“The network of al-Qaeda and its affiliates and adherents continues to exploit Africa’s under-governed regions and porous borders to train and conduct attacks. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is expanding its presence in North Africa. Terrorists with allegiances to multiple groups are expanding their collaboration in recruitment, financing, training, and operations, both within Africa and trans-regionally. Violent extremist organizations are utilizing increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices, and casualties from these weapons in Africa increased by approximately 40 percent in 2014…

“In North and West Africa, Libyan and Nigerian insecurity increasingly threaten U.S. interests. In spite of multinational security efforts, terrorist and criminal networks are gaining strength and interoperability. Al-Qaeda in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Murabitun, Boko Haram, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and other violent extremist organizations are exploiting weak governance, corrupt leadership, and porous borders across the Sahel and Maghreb to train and move fighters and distribute resources…

“Libya-based threats to U.S. interests are growing… Libyan governance, security, and economic stability deteriorated significantly in the past year… Today, armed groups control large areas of territory in Libya and operate with impunity. Libya appears to be emerging as a safe haven where terrorists, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant-affiliated groups, can train and rebuild with impunity. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is increasingly active in Libya, including in Derna, Benghazi, Tripoli, and Sebha…

“The spillover effects of instability in Libya and northern Mali increase risks to U.S. interests in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, including the success of Tunisia’s democratic transition…

“The security situation in Nigeria also declined in the past year. Boko Haram threatens the functioning of a government that is challenged to maintain its people’s trust and to provide security and other basic services… Boko Haram has launched attacks across Nigeria’s borders into Cameroon, Chad, and Niger…

“…both the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo are at risk of further destabilization by insurgent groups, and simmering ethnic tensions in the Great Lakes region have the potential to boil over violently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

All this, mind you, is AFRICOM’s own assessment of the situation on the continent on which it has focused its efforts for the better part of a decade as U.S. missions there soared. In this context, it’s worth reemphasizing that, before the U.S. ramped up those efforts, Africa was — by Washington’s own estimation — relatively free of transnational Islamic terror groups.

Tipping the Scales in Africa

Despite Boko Haram’s pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State and scareheadlines lamenting their merger or conflating those or other brutal terror outfits operating under similar monikers, there is currently no real Islamic State of Africa. But the war game carried out at MacDill Air Force Base in January against that fictional group is far from fantasy, representing as it does the next logical step in a series of operations that have been gaining steam since AFRICOM’s birth. And buried in the command’s 2015 Posture Statement is actual news that signals a continuation of this trajectory into the 2040s.

In May 2014, the U.S. reached an agreement — it’s called an “implementing arrangement” — with the government of Djibouti “that secures [its] presence” in that country “through 2044.” In addition, AFRICOM officers are nowtalking about the possibility of building a string of surveillance outposts along the northern tier of the continent. And don’t forget how, over the past few years, U.S. staging areas, mini-bases, and airfields have popped up in the contiguous nations of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and — skippingChad (where AFRICOM recently built temporary facilities for a special ops exercise) — the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. All of this suggests that the U.S. military is digging in for the long haul in Africa.

Silent Quest 15-1 was designed as a model to demonstrate just how Washington will conduct “Special Operations-centric” coalition warfare in Africa. It was, in fact, designed to align, wrote Gunnery Sergeant Reina Barnett in SOCOM’s trade publication Tip of the Spear, with the “2020 planning guidance of Army Maj. Gen. James Linder, commander of Special Operations Command Africa.” And the agreement with Djibouti demonstrates that the U.S. military is now beginning to plan for almost a quarter-century beyond that. But, if the last six years — marked by a 300% increase in U.S. missions as well as the spread of terror groups and terrorism in Africa — are any indicator, the results are likely to be anything but pleasing to Washington.

AFRICOM commander David Rodriguez continues to put the best face on U.S. efforts in Africa, citing “progress in several areas through close cooperation with our allies and partners.” His command’s assessment of the situation, however, is remarkably bleak. “Where our national interests compel us to tip the scales and enhance collective security gains, we may have to do more — either by enabling our allies and partners, or acting unilaterally,” reads the posture statement Rodriguez delivered to that Senate committee.

After more than a decade of increasing efforts, however, there’s little evidence that AFRICOM has the slightest idea how to tip the scales in its own favor in Africa.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.

14 April, 2015
TomDispatch.com

 

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

BBC live report of the collapse of WTC building 7, more than minutes before the collapse took place. Building Seven in the background is still intact.

The 9/11 narrative in the mainstream media has taken on a new slant. The FBI is now accused of whitewashing Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

The alleged Saudi involvement in supporting Osama bin Laden, not to mention the classified 28 pages of the 9/11 joint Congressional inquiry pertaining to the insidious role of Saudi Arabia in supporting the hijackers is part of a propaganda ploy.

When the report of Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 was released in December 2002, it was met with considerable skepticism. That skepticism grew for a period of time but then was reduced to speculation about what was contained in the 28 pages that had been redacted by the Bush White House.

Various U.S. government leaders have since suggested that the missing 28 pages point to Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the 9/11 crimes. However such musings fail to discuss other important issues, like the links between the Saudi regime and the Western deep state, or the fact that, from the start, even the Saudis were calling for the 28 pages to be released. Discussion of the missing 28 pages also omits mention of the highly suspicious nature of the Inquiry’s investigation and its leaders. (Kevin Ryan, The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 28 Missing Pages, Global Research, March 14, 2014

The report of the FBI 9/11 Review Commission (25 March 2015) has revealed circumstances which allegedly were withheld by the FBI from both the 9/11 Commission headed by former Jersey Governor Thomas Kean as well from the joint Senate House inquiry committee chaired by former Senator Bob Graham. Graham.

And now agencies of the US government including the FBI are being accused of protecting the Saudis. This alleged Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attacks has served to precipitate segments of the 9/11 Truth movement into an erroneous and contradictory discourse. On the part of the US government and its intelligence apparatus, the objective is to ultimately to build a narrative which will weaken the 9/11 Truth movement.

The purpose of this new propaganda ploy is ultimately to sustain the legend that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks and that Saudi Arabia relentlessly supported Al Qaeda, namely that Saudi Arabia acted as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

In this regard, the media reports intimate that if the Saudi connection is confirmed by the 28 classified pages, this “would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government.”

There is, however, an obvious hiccup in this reasoning: if the Saudis were indeed the State sponsors of 9/11, why on earth did the US and the Atlantic Alliance (under the doctrine of collective security) choose to wage a “Just War” of retribution against Afghanistan. Did they get there countries mixed up?

9/11 Truth

Many 9/11 Truthers across America are now calling for the release of the 28 classified pages. They are also accusing the FBI of coverup and complicity.

All eyes are on the classified 28 pages, which document Saudi support for the alleged hijackers. Meanwhile, the irrefutable evidence of controlled demolition of the Twin Towers –not to mention the mysterious collapse of WTC 7 which was announced by CNN and the BBC more than 20 minutes before it occurred– no longer constitutes the centrefold of the 9/11 Truth movement: ’The Saudis are behind 9/11 and our government is protecting them.”

Framed in a “Tele Novela” style scenario featuring wealthy Saudis in the plush suburban surroundings of Sarasota, Florida two weeks before 9/11, the New York Post describes the circumstances of Saudi involvement (quoting the FBI 9/11 Review Commission Report) in an article entitled How the FBI is whitewashing the Saudi connection to 9/11: .

“Just 15 days before the 9/11 attacks, a well-connected Saudi family suddenly abandoned their luxury home in Sarasota, Fla., leaving behind jewelry, clothes, opulent furniture, a driveway full of cars — including a brand new Chrysler PT Cruiser — and even a refrigerator full of food.

About the only thing not left behind was a forwarding address. The occupants simply vanished without notifying their neighbors, realtor or even mail carrier.

The 3,300-square-foot home on Escondito Circle (see image right) belonged to Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of then-King Fahd. But at the time, it was occupied by his daughter and son-in-law, who beat a hasty retreat back to Saudi Arabia just two weeks before the attacks after nearly a six-year stay here.

Neighbors took note of the troubling coincidence and called the FBI, which opened an investigation that led to the startling discovery that at least one “family member” trained at the same flight school as some of the 9/11 hijackers in nearby Venice, Fla.

… The Saudi-9/11 connection in Florida was no small part of the overall 9/11 investigation. Yet it was never shared with Congress. Nor was it mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Now it’s being whitewashed again, in a newly released report by the 9/11 Review Commission, set up last year by Congress to assess “any evidence now known to the FBI that was not considered by the 9/11 Commission.” Though the FBI acknowledges the Saudi family was investigated, it maintains the probe was a dead end.

The panel’s report also doesn’t explain why visitor security logs for the gated Sarasota community and photos of license tags matched vehicles driven by the hijackers, including 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta.

The three-member review panel was appointed by FBI Director James Comey, who also officially released the findings.

Former Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, who in 2002 chaired the congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, maintains the FBI is covering up a Saudi support cell in Sarasota for the hijackers. He says the al-Hijjis “urgent” pre-9/11 exit suggests “someone may have tipped them off” about the coming attacks.

Graham has been working with a 14-member group in Congress to urge President Obama to declassify 28 pages of the final report of his inquiry which were originally redacted, wholesale, by President George W. Bush.

….

Sources who have read the censored Saudi section say it cites CIA and FBI case files that directly implicate officials of the Saudi Embassy in Washington and its consulate in Los Angeles in the attacks — which if true, would make 9/11 not just an act of terrorism, but an act of war by a foreign government. The section allegedly identifies high-level Saudi officials and intelligence agents by name, and details their financial transactions and other dealings with the San Diego hijackers. It zeroes in on the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi Embassy, among other Saudi entities.

The [FBI] review commission, however, concludes there is “no evidence” that any Saudi official provided assistance to the hijackers, even though the panel failed to interview Graham or his two key investigators — former Justice Department attorney Dana Lesemann and FBI investigator Michael Jacobson — who ran down FBI leads tying Saudi officials to the San Diego hijackers and documented their findings in the 28 pages. (emphasis added)

The key figure behind this new wave of propaganda is former Senator Bob Graham, who led the joint inquiry of the Senate and the House intelligence committees together with Rep. Porter Goss, a career CIA official who was subsequently appointed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by the Bush administration. Graham coordinated the drafting and editing of the report including the 28 classified pages on Saudi Arabia.

While Graham is now heralded by the mainstream media as a 911 Truther, the evidence suggests that immediately in the wake of 9/11, he was involved (together with Porter Goss) in a coverup on behalf of Bush-Cheney. According to Kevin Ryan, “in the months following 9/11, both Goss and Graham rejected calls for an investigation”:

The Senate voted for one anyway, however, and that led both Bush and Cheney to attempt to stop it or limit its scope. Apparently the best they could do was to make sure that Goss and Graham were put in charge. That seemed to work as the Inquiry began in February 2002, more than five months after the attacks, and the approach taken was one of uncritical deference to the Bush Administration and the intelligence community.

Goss immediately made it clear that the Inquiry would not be looking for guilt or accountability with regard to 9/11. Saying he was “looking for solutions, not scapegoats,” Goss continued to defend the White House with regard to warnings the president had received about an impending attack, saying it was “a lot of nonsense.” The FBI did not cooperate but that didn’t seem to bother Goss and Graham. (Kevin Ryan, The 9/11 Joint Congressional Inquiry and the 28 Missing Pages, Global Research, March 14, 2014

Both the joint inquiry led by Graham and the 9/11 Commission were part of a Big Lie. And now Bob Graham and 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean are accusing the FBI of camouflage and the Saudis of collusion in the 9/11 attacks, while failing to acknowledge coverup and complicity at the highest levels of the US government.

According to Bob Graham in an interview with the Miami Herald,

’The FBI has served America through most of its history. There were stumbles by the agency before 9/11 and since the tragedy there has been a consistent effort to cover up the extent of Saudi Arabia’s involvement.’ (emphasis added)

And because Bob Graham accuses the FBI and the federal government, the 9/11 Truth movement applauds without realizing that these accusations directed against the FBI are “framed” with a view to sustaining the mainstream 9/11 narrative. What is at stake is a desperate ploy to uphold the legend that Muslims were behind 9/11 and that Saudi Arabia was behind the terrorists giving them money, with the FBI involved in a coverup, George W. Bush protecting his Saudi cronies because the Bushes and the bin Ladens were “intimo amigos”.

Former Senator Graham ”smells a rat” and that rat is the FBI and complicit government agencies:

“This is a pervasive pattern of covering up the role of Saudi Arabia in 9/11 by all of the agencies of federal government which have access to information that might illuminate Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11.”

“The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” he said, adding, “I am speaking of the kingdom,” or government, of Saudi Arabia, not just wealthy individual Saudi donors.

But who is the rat? The FBI or Senator Bob Graham who is visibly involved in a coverup on behalf of US intelligence? He accuses US government agencies of negligence, which serves to arouse protest against the FBI by many 9/11 Truthers.
Graham’s staged accusations thereby serve to distract the American public’s attention from the real evidence, amply documented that the WTC towers were brought down through controlled demolition and that Islamic terrorists were not behind the 9/11 attacks. The issue of Saudi financial support of al Qaeda is not only known and documented since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war, it is irrelevant in establishing who was behind the terror attacks. Moreover, the contents of the 28 classified pages are known.

In a bitter irony, Graham’s track record (mentioned above) in supporting the official 9/11 narrative on behalf of Bush-Cheney is not mentioned:

Former Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who co-chaired a congressional inquiry into 9/11 — separate from the 9/11 Commission — stated, as though now it was obvious, “None of the people leading this investigation think it is credible that 19 people — most who could not speak English and did not have previous experience in the United States — could carry out such a complicated task without external assistance.”

Now, Graham says, a breakthrough may finally be around the corner with the upcoming declassification of the 28 pages of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Calling for the official release and publication of the 28 page classified section of the joint inquiry report pertaining to Saudi Arabia is an obvious red-herring. The objective is to confuse matters, create divisions within the 9/11 Truth movement and ultimately dispel the fact that the 9/11 attacks were a carefully organized False Flag event which was used to declare war on Afghanistan as well as usher in sweeping anti-terrorist legislation.

Both the Congressional inquiry as well the 9/11 Commission report are flawed, their objective was to sustain the official narrative that America was under attack on September 11, 2001. And Graham’s role in liaison with the CIA, is “damage control” with a view to protecting those who were behind the demolition of the WTC towers as well sustaining the Al Qaeda legend, which constitutes the cornerstone of US military doctrine under the so-called “Global War on Terrorism”.

Without 9/11 and the “Global War on Terrorism”, the warmongers in high office would not have a leg to stand on. In turn, 9/11 Truth is an encroachment which undermines war propaganda and the US-led campaign of Islamophobia, which is sweeping the Western World.

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

13 April 2015

Home

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

Pakistan has virtually declined Saudi Arabia’s request to join the Arab coalition fighting its current military operation in to restore the deposed Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. After days of discussion in media and parliament, a joint session of parliament passed a resolution on Friday (April 10) saying that Pakistan “should maintain neutrality in the conflict so as to be able to play a proactive diplomatic role to end the crisis”.

The joint session was summoned after the Saudi government approached Islamabad for Pakistani warplanes, warships and soldiers to assist in the conflict and join the Saudi-led military coalition that began conducting air strikes last month against Houthi forces in Yemen.

The resolution further said that the crisis in Yemen could “plunge the region into turmoil”, calling upon the warring factions in Yemen to resolve their differences “peacefully and through dialogue”. The resolution noted that while the war in Yemen was not sectarian in nature, it had the potential of turning into a sectarian conflict and thereby having a critical fallout in the region, including within Pakistan.

It urged the government to initiate steps to move the UN Security Council and the Organization of Islamic Conference to bring about an immediate ceasefire in Yemen.

Brig. Gen. Ahmad Al-Assiri, consultant in the office of the Saudi defense minister told newsmen at his daily press conference Friday that the Pakistani government had not yet announced its official position. However, he added “Pakistan’s participation is in the interest of the Yemeni people and the operation but there are other forces already with the coalition that are well trained for the terrain.” Tellingly, hours after the Pakistanis parliament’s resolution, Saudi Arabia refused permission to a Pakistani aircraft on the plea that the Shaheen Air plane did not have an entry permit to the Kingdom’s airspace.

On the other hand, the reaction of the United Arab Emirate was very sharp. The UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dr Anwar Mohammed Gargash Garhash warned Pakistan of having to pay a “heavy price” for an “ambiguous stand.” He told Khaleej Times: “The vague and contradictory stands of Pakistan and Turkey are an absolute proof that Arab security — from Libya to Yemen — is the responsibility of none but Arab countries.” He added that Pakistan should take a clear position “in favor of its strategic relations with the six-nation Arab Gulf cooperation Council”.

Islamabad finds itself in an awkward position on Yemen, reluctant to offend oil-rich Saudi Arabia with which it has long enjoyed close military and economic ties but also not wanting to get involved in a war that could fan sectarian tensions at home. At the same time, Pakistan needs to build better ties with its immediate neighbour Iran that offers huge prospects of trade and energy imports once sanctions are lifted against Tehran.

Iranian Foreign Minister visits Islamabad

Pakistan parliament stance to be neutral on the Yemeni conflict came after weeks of media campaign to highlight the risk for Pakistan to join the Saudi-led coalition. It came days after the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s visit to Islamabad.

Commenting on Zarif’s visit, the Daily Times emphasized that history testifies that Iran cannot be solely blamed for the ongoing civil war in Yemen. Rather other factors are equally responsible for the crisis. In fact, the nature of the civil war in Yemen is not completely sectarian as is being projected by the media. Other factors including the presence of conflicting groups like Zaidi Shiitte rebels called Houthis, separatists from South Yemen and political loyalists are equally responsible for the ongoing civil war that actually started in 2011 when government loyalists and opposition tribesmen clashed during protests in Yemen.

The Daily Times argued that Iran has been acting responsibly and its role is not as bad as portrayed by the media. It is backing a political solution to the Yemen conflict through a ceasefire. On this basis, it has heightened its diplomatic moves for stopping the civil war in Yemen while safeguarding its own interests. “The visiting Iranian top official has stressed the need for finding a political solution to the Yemen conflict. The Iranian stance can be termed appropriate because it carries all the ingredients that can be applied for bringing back regional stability. The statement is sensible and negates the propaganda against Iran’s intentions in the Yemen conflict.”

Yemen’s quagmire

On April 9, the daily Dawn, the largest English newspaper of Pakistan, published an article under the title Yemen’s quagmire, launching a scathing attack on the Saudi-led air strikes against targets in Yemen. The paper said:

“Simply put, it looks like the Saudis have launched an ill-conceived campaign that has plenty of precedents from the recent past. Air campaigns against militia forces on the ground have not yielded results to brag about. The Americans tried it in Libya and look at what they created. They tried it in Kosovo, but ultimately had to settle for an agreement the terms of which were practically identical to the terms offered by Milosevic before the start of the campaign. The Saudis don’t have the military wherewithal to sustain this type of a campaign for very long, and no clear exit strategy either. It would be folly of tremendous proportions to join in. Going in with overwhelming force, and committing to a large state-making function has been tried by the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and hasn’t worked.”

Another leading English daily The News columnist wrote, the Saudis could have played a more imaginative game by trying to influence developments in Yemen from a distance. With their eyes closed they are walking into a quagmire, although with Yemen’s history intertwined with their own who should know better than them that much like Afghanistan, Yemen has been a graveyard of invading armies?

“If Pakistan is a true friend of the Saudis it should point out these dangers, forcefully and without mincing words, and together with Iran and Turkey throw its weight behind a peaceful end to the fighting. This will be the greatest favor that anyone can do to the House of Saud. Forget about the dangers to Pakistan. Sending troops to Yemen will only mean reinforcing the disaster that the Saudis are creating for themselves,” The News concluded.

Yemen war has more in common with 19th-century Europe

Foreign Policy in Focus columnist Conn Hallinan believes that the coalition that Riyadh has assembled to intervene in Yemen’s civil war has more in common with 19th-century Europe than the 21st-century Middle East. The 22-member Arab League came together at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt last month to draw up its plan to attack the Houthi forces currently holding Yemen’s capital. And the meeting bore an uncanny resemblance to a similar gathering of monarchies at Vienna in 1814. The leading voice at the Egyptian resort was the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal. His historical counterpart was Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister who designed the “Concert of Europe” to ensure that no revolution would ever again threaten the monarchs who dominated the continent.

More than 200 years divides those gatherings, but their goals were much the same: to safeguard a small and powerful elite’s dominion over a vast area.

The Independent of UK’s writer Patrick Cockburn believes that foreign states that go to war in Yemen usually come to regret it. In practice, a decisive outcome is the least likely prospect for Yemen, just as it has long been in Iraq and Afghanistan. A political feature common to all three countries is that power is divided between so many players it is impossible to defeat or placate them all for very long.

It may be pointed out that the Houthis fought six wars with former military strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced out of the presidency in 2012. Hadi, his vice president, took over and largely ignored the Houthis — always a bad idea in Yemen.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net)

12 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

It is one of history’s ironies that the Lincoln Memorial is a sacred space for the Civil Rights Movement and the site of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Lincoln did not think blacks were the equals of whites. Lincoln’s plan was to send the blacks in America back to Africa, and if he had not been assassinated, returning blacks to Africa would likely have been his post-war policy.

As Thomas DiLorenzo and a number of non-court historians have conclusively established, Lincoln did not invade the Confederacy in order to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation did not occur until 1863 when opposition in the North to the war was rising despite Lincoln’s police state measures to silence opponents and newspapers. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure issued under Lincoln’s war powers. The proclamation provided for the emancipated slaves to be enrolled in the Union army replenishing its losses. It was also hoped that the proclamation would spread slave revolts in the South while southern white men were away at war and draw soldiers away from the fronts in order to protect their women and children. The intent was to hasten the defeat of the South before political opposition to Lincoln in the North grew stronger.

The Lincoln Memorial was built not because Lincoln “freed the slaves,” but because Lincoln saved the empire. As the Savior of the Empire, had Lincoln not been assassinated, he could have become emperor for life.

As Professor Thomas DiLorenzo writes: “Lincoln spent his entire political career attempting to use the powers of the state for the benefit of the moneyed corporate elite (the ‘one-percenters’ of his day), first in Illinois, and then in the North in general, through protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for road, canal, and railroad corporations, and a national bank controlled by politicians like himself to fund it all.”

Lincoln was a man of empire. As soon as the South was conquered, ravaged, and looted, his collection of war criminal generals, such as Sherman and Sheridan, set about exterminating the Plains Indians in one of the worst acts of genocide in human history. Even today Israeli Zionists point to Washington’s extermination of the Plains Indians as the model for Israel’s theft of Palestine.

The War of Northern Aggression was about tariffs and northern economic imperialism. The North was protectionist. The South was free trade. The North wanted to finance its economic development by forcing the South to pay higher prices for manufactured goods. The North passed the Morrill Tariff which more than doubled the tariff rate to 32.6% and provided for a further hike to 47%. The tariff diverted the South’s profits on its agricultural exports to the coffers of Northern industrialists and manufacturers. The tariff was designed to redirect the South’s expenditures on manufactured goods from England to the higher cost goods produced in the North.

This is why the South left the union, a right of self-determination under the Constitution.

The purpose of Lincoln’s war was to save the empire, not to abolish slavery. In his first inaugural address Lincoln “made an ironclad defense of slavery.” His purpose was to keep the South in the Empire despite the Morrill Tariff. As for slavery, Lincoln said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” This position, Lincoln reminded his audience, was part of the 1860 Republican Party platform. Lincoln also offered his support for the strong enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to hunt down and return runaway slaves, and he gave his support to the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, already passed by Northern votes in the House and Senate, that prohibited any federal interference with slavery. For Lincoln and his allies, the empire was far more important than slaves.

DiLorenzo explains what the deal was that Lincoln offered to the South. However, just as empire was more important to the North than slavery, for the South avoiding large taxes on manufactured goods, in effect a tax on Southern agricultural profits, was more important than northern guarantees for slavery.

If you want to dislodge your brainwashing about the War of Northern Aggression, read DiLorenzo’s books, The Real Lincoln, and Lincoln Unmasked.

The so-called Civil War was not a civil war. In a civil war, both sides are fighting for control of the government. The South was not fighting for control of the federal government. The South seceded and the North refused to let the South go.

The reason I am writing about this is to illustrate how history is falsified in behalf of agendas. I am all for civil rights and participated in the movement while a college student. What makes me uncomfortable is the transformation of Lincoln, a tyrant who was an agent for the One Percent and was willing to destroy any and every thing in behalf of empire, into a civil rights hero. Who will be next? Hitler? Stalin? Mao? George W. Bush? Obama? John Yoo? If Lincoln can be a civil rights hero, so can be torturers. Those who murder in Washington’s wars women and children can be turned into defenders of women’s rights and child advocates. And probably they will be.

This is the twisted perverted world in which we live. Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is confronted with Washington’s overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine, a Russian ally and for centuries a part of Russia itself, while Putin is falsely accused of invading Ukraine. China is accused by Washington as a violator of human rights while Washington murders more civilians in the 21st century than every other country combined.

Everywhere in the West monstrous lies stand unchallenged. The lies are institutionalized in history books, course curriculums, policy statements, movements and causes, and in historical memory.

America will be hard pressed to survive the lies that it lives.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

13 April, 2015
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Taj Hashmi

Yet another blogger was hacked to death for alleged blasphemous postings against Islam, in Bangladesh. Islamist fanatics killed Oyasiqur Rahman (27) with meat cleavers for his vitriolic anti-Islamic postings on 30th March in broad daylight, on a crowded street in Dhaka. This happened five weeks after the killing of blogger Avijit Roy, in the similar manner, for the similar reason. While police (who were in close proximity) miserably failed to save Roy’s life and arrest his killers, this time they managed to arrest two of the three assailants with the help of bystanders.

Two other Bangladeshi freethinkers got killed at the hands of Islamist zealots-cum-terrorists in the past – Humayun Azad and blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider (aka Thaba Baba) – for blasphemous writings against Islam in 2004 and 2013, respectively. Islamist fanatics in Bangladesh would have killed Daud Haider and Taslima Nasrin for their anti-Islamic writings. As the Bangladesh Government could not ensure their safety, both of them had to leave the country in absolute haste, Haider in 1973 and Nasrin in 1994.

However, we just cannot single out Bangladeshi Muslims to be the most intolerant in this regard. Unlike Pakistan, despite Islamists’ and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s persistent demands, there is no Blasphemy Law in Bangladesh. However, thanks to the persistent Islamization and Arabization of the popular Islamic culture in Bangladesh, many Bangladeshi Muslims have tacit support for killing for blasphemy against Islam. The prevalent media fatigue and the lack of mass protest against killing for blasphemy in the country may be mentioned in this regard. Pakistan and several Muslim-majority countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan and Iran have draconian Blasphemy Law. A brief appraisal of the Blasphemy Law in Pakistan may be an eye-opener for many.

Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law is a legacy of a British colonial law introduced in 1860, but very different from the original act. While Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law carries a potential death penalty for anyone who insults Islam, the maximum punishment under the 1860 law ranged from one year to 10 years in jail, with or without a fine. The British law made it a crime to disturb a religious assembly, trespass on burial grounds, insult religious beliefs and intentionally destroy or defile a place or an object of worship. General Zia’s Islamist military regime in Pakistan took full advantage of the Hate Speech Law, which was an amendment to the 1860 Act (Section 295 – A) made in 1927.

Zia ul-Haq’s administration added a number of clauses to the Law between 1980 and 1986 to further Islamicize Pakistan, marginalize the Ahmadiyya community, and persecute opponents in the name of Islam. More than 1300 people – mostly non-Muslims – were accused of blasphemy during 1987 and 2014 for alleged desecration of the Qur’an and insult of the Prophet; more than 100 people were killed for committing “blasphemy”; 50 “blasphemers” got killed during their trials; and fanatics also killed Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and a Federal Minister Shahbaz Bhatti for their opposition to the Blasphemy Law in the recent past. Further amendments to the Law provided life sentence for desecration of the Holy Qur’an, and death penalty for blasphemy against the Prophet of Islam. The Law provides protection to only Islam and its scripture. In sum, many Pakistanis – especially members of non-Muslim minority communities and liberal Muslims – are potential victims of the draconian Blasphemy Law or murder by over-enthused “protectors of Islam”.

We know millions of Muslims throughout the world came out on street, publicly demanding death for Salman Rushdie for his grossly offensive and blasphemous writing against Prophet Muhammad, his family, and the Holy Qur’an in The Satanic Verses, soon after the publication of it 1988. In February 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued the famous – or “infamous”, as one might take it – fatwa-to-kill not only Rushdie but also all those involved in the publication of the book for blasphemy against Islam. Although Rushdie escaped violent death for blasphemy (and the Iranian government withdrew the fatwa years after Khomeini’s death), Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, was not that lucky. Fanatics killed him and two other translators survived murder attempts, narrowly.

Despite worldwide condemnation of the fatwa, intolerant Muslims throughout the world welcomed the proclamation, killed many “blasphemers” and have not since looked back. However, considering the fatwa unjust for not allowing the accused an opportunity to defend himself in a court of law, some Muslim scholars opined that a Muslim could kill anyone who insulted the Prophet only in his presence – while he was alive – not after his death. However, as Khomeini has spelled out, the supporters of the fatwa believe that even if a blasphemer repents and becomes a pious Muslim, it is incumbent on every Muslim to kill a blasphemer of the Prophet.

Meanwhile, Islamist zealots have killed several European writers, filmmakers and cartoonists for defiling Islam, its Prophet and the Holy Qur’an, their latest victims being people associated with the Leftist satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, for publishing satirical and offensive cartoons of the Prophet during 2006 and 2012. On 7th January 2015 two Islamist gunmen entered the Paris headquarters of the magazine and killed 12 people, including the cartoonist. During the attack, the gunmen shouted, “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is Great” in Arabic) and “The Prophet is avenged”.

In the backdrop of growing intolerance among uneducated and highly educated Muslims globally – having no qualms with killing blasphemers of Islam – we must not misconstrue this bigotry as a post-Rushdie or post-9/11 development. One is tempted to cite the example of the killing of Rajpal, the Hindu publisher of Rangeela Rasool (The Promiscuous Prophet), a book written in Urdu (and later in Hindi) by an anonymous Hindu writer in Lahore, in 1929. One Ilm-uddin, an illiterate Muslim carpenter, killed Rajpal in April and was hanged in October 1929. Around 60,000 Muslims attended his funeral in Lahore, and Poet Iqbal carried the funeral bier and placed the body into the grave. He and several Muslim leaders glorified Ilm-uddin as a hero, martyr, and defender of Islam.

Although killing for blasphemy of Islam was allegedly sanctioned by Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), as we find in numerous so-called Sahih or “authentic” hadises by Bukhari, Muslim and Abu Dawood (many of them contradict the Qur’an and the spirit of Islam); and as evident from the Rangeela Rasool episode in British India, Muslim support for killing for blasphemy predates Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie. However, the Qur’an does not prescribe any punishment for blasphemers of Islam in this world, let alone death penalty. And we know the Qur’an supersedes the Hadis literature and Shariah law. One may cite the following Qur’anic verses in this regard:

“Indeed, those who abuse Allah and His Messenger – Allah has cursed them in this world and the Hereafter and prepared for them a humiliating punishment [after death]” [33:57]; “…when you hear people denying and mocking the signs of Allah, do not sit with them until they engage in a talk other than that …” [4:141]; “And do not insult those whom they [idol worshippers] worship beside Allah, lest they, out of spite, revile Allah in their ignorance.…” (6:109).

In sum, insensitivity to killing for blasphemy is a sign of weakness, not strength. Those who favour killing for blasphemy are incapable of engaging the critics of their religion with reason; people devoid of respect for dissenting views are not yet ready for liberal democracy. Blasphemy could inspire people to defend one’s faith with reason, which could be a bold step toward the “Dialogue among Civilizations”, as former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami introduced the concept in response to Huntington’s provocative theory of the “Clash of Civilizations”.

The writer teacher security studies at Austin Peay State University. Sage has recently published his latest book, Global Jihad and America: The Hundred-Year War Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.

11 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Andre Vltchek

It is much easier to rule over those people who have lost all their dignity.

There is no reason to fear resistance where cynical consumerism, lack of knowledge, and constant anxiety are shaping the behavioral patterns of a nation; of most of its citizens.

The West made an art form out of controlling the world. Its once rough and simple ‘divide and rule’ tactics have reached, with time, greatvirtuosity. What Richter, Rostropovich or Argerich did for the art of Western classical music, people like Brzezinski, Kissinger and Negroponte matched with their brilliance in the art of destruction and terror.

In today’s world, everything is upside down. Brothers fear brothers, guerilla fighters are made to spy on each other, and heroes who are fighting forthe survival of the planet are labeled by Western regime as demagogues, strongmen or even terrorists.

The Empire successfully mobilized the most regressive elements in each society that it controls.It upheld religions, archaic family compositions and feudalist power structures in order to make rebellion almost impossible.

Albert Camus, a French philosopher, made one of the most important statements of the 20th Century, when he declared: “I rebel, therefore I exist!”

Rebellion is the engine that propels societies and individuals forward.To take it away, to shut it off, means to condemn people and entire nations to stagnation, even to regression.

Which is, of course, the main goal of the Empire. Which is why it employs and grooms entire armies of local collaborators.

*

The Empire created some amazing sights, all over the world: depressing, gore-filled scenes. For much of the planet, it is Halloween every day, every day and every night.

The West has many allies, many collaborators!

Bizarre bearded dudes with machineguns and portable missile launchers, decapitating infidels and blowing up the world heritage sites. That is what the Empire has been trying, painstakingly, to turn Islam into, with full-hearted support of its deranged and blood-drenched allies in the Gulf. First they murdered, sidelined or overthrewprogressive, socialist Islamic leaders, and later they manufactured the most fundamentalist brands, from Al-Qaida to ISIS. Bravo! Great success. As long as the oil flows, as long as the Western weapons are sold and ‘defense budgets’ remain above one trillion. As long as there is always someone people can be told to be scared of, someone who can be used as a justification for new weaponry, and a new post-colonialist and imperialist arrangement of the world.

Or look at those weird preachers and priests in Surabaya, Manila, or in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The poor are poor because God hates them. The rich are rich because God loves them”, I heard the other day in Indonesia, whilefilming one huge Christian gathering that was taking place in a mall. Pentecostal implants from the West, ‘prosperity gospel’,Evangelicals; fanaticsresembling the Inquisition-era bigots – there is an entire panoptic of monstrous Christian freaks available in the client states. If destabilizing China is the main goal, of course they are always there and ready! Ukraine, Uganda, Indonesia, Egypt, Oceania? No problem: always ready, always there, always handy!

Or those brands ofmilitant Buddhism, in countries like Thailand, where religion beganlosing its grip on power many decades ago, but was reintroduced just in time to join the ideological and real warfare during the Vietnam War! It is once again“big” now, as it used to be centuries ago, and ‘suspiciously’ fully supportive of the feudal elites and the throne, all those staunch allies of the West! And what about that brand of horrid feudal usurpers, the Lamas, paid directly by the US government and fully and continuously supported by the Western liberals?

Then there are all those monarchs reigning over the territories from the Gulf to Southeast Asia.Many of them were directly implanted, watered and groomed by the West, or at least upheld, armed and if needed, turned into deities.

Extreme forms of religion and feudalism are essential for effective control of the population. The Brits were well aware of it, and that is why they gave full support to Wahhabis and other local extremists and bigots.“Caste is often thought of as an ancient fact of Hindu life, but various contemporary scholars argue that the caste system was constructed by the British colonial regime”, argues Frank de Zwart from Leiden University.That is also why the Brits were the most effective of all the colonizers: they knew how to get the worst from the locals!

Ancient forms of oppression, from the caste system in India to family oppression, even terror, in Africa, Indonesia or Pakistan, keep people from learning, from becoming individuals, from daring, from mobilizing and fighting for the better world.

And to make sure that the oppression imposed and upheld by the West in foreign countries, is not challenged even at home, the West’s propagandists invented so-called “political correctness” which was soonturned into sacrosanct dogma. This is how it works, in summary: Attack those extreme religious implants from the West, in some poor country controlled by Washington or London, and you will be branded as intolerant, patronizing or at least as insensitive. Attack some brutal monarchy that is surviving only because the West needs it and supports it, and you will be accused of not respecting local culture and the way of life of local people. Say or write honestly, that in some country, after a Washington-administered coup, and after several decades of continuous brainwashing campaign, that the majority of people were successfully converted to idiots, and you will be described as a racist and bigot.

The collaborators, mainly consisting of the top brass military, of business elites, of religious gurus, ‘academics’ who were indoctrinated and bought while on the scholarship abroad, journalists and pop artists, are fully protected by political correctness. They represent the culture of some destroyed culture, “they are the culture”. Mad monarchs, religious freaks, merciless feudal patriarchs – they cannot be touched, because ‘people love them’, ‘people revere them’. Of course, after hundreds of millions of dollars were spent by the West to uphold the most regressive theories, afterthe children of the elites were put through the standardized brainwashing ‘education’ and afterthe poor majority was put through almost no education at all, little wonder that everybodyis thinking the same, that people “love” what they are suppose to “love”, from abusive husbands and fathers, to military mass murderers, insane religious fanatics and ruthless robbers repainted and rebranded as CEO’s.

*

If a spaceship filled with advanced, refined and objectively thinking beings coming from outer space would visit our planet, the visitors would be surely horrified by observing those individuals who are ruling such countries as Indonesia or Uganda, or those in the Gulf. They would most likely ask: “What kind of Empire is it, that is employing such vile butlers and servants?”

Nobody is laughing or puking, only because all of us, even the most outspoken critics of the regime, were already somehow conditioned. We are all behaving, and to some extent playing the game.

None of us starts rolling on the floor, in total amusement, pointing fingers at the television screen that is showing dozens of former Indonesian generals and officers, responsible for the genocides of 1965, or those in East Timor and Papua, now holding some of the highest positions in their land.

Nobody is throwing up when the UN Secretary General of the United Nations flies to Kampala or Kigali and begs countries responsible for genocide of millions of innocent people in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (according to his own UN staff which produced several detailed reports on the subject), to please not withdraw their ‘peacekeeping forces’ (operating and getting royally paid) from their missions all over Africa.

Nobody is fuming and drawing political cartoons depicting the horrific nature of the Saudi regime and its arch-henchmen, who are giving orders to blast Yemen, killing hundreds and most likely thousands of innocent people, simply because they are Shi’a and because they are demanding social justice.

No Hollywood horror film could match the monsters that are ruling many corners of the globe, controlling, raping, robbing and brainwashing their own people, on behalf of the Empire.

Collaborators…

How many of those cars, those Ferraris and the latest BMWs, in some miserable country that is being fully plundered by Western mining and oil companies, are running on gas, and how many on blood?

How many of those “proud” professors holding doctorates from Western universities, are actually teaching – giving knowledge – and how many are infiltrating the education systems all over the world, as China’s Minister of Education, Mr. Yuan Guiren, wrote recently in a Communist Party journal “Seeking Truth”? “Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces,” Mr. Yuan argued on Feb. 2, 2015.

They are. All over Africa, Asia, the Middle East. Fortunately, at least in Latin America, the enemy forces have been mostly identified.

How many magazines, newspapers and television stations in the Middle East, Southeast Asia or East and West Africa are actually there to inform people, and how many are serving, dutifully, the propaganda apparatus of the Empire? It is enough to check the sources of the foreign news coverage, incountries like Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the entire Gulf, or even India, and the answer becomes obvious.

*

The level of collaboration with the West is scandalous; it is shocking.

The most notorious forms of collaboration and spite towards the people can be found in what I lately call “the Belt”, which consists of the client states and semi-colonies, spreading from Southeast Asia, to East and West Africa, with the sub-Continent and the Middle East in between. In that part of the world, countries that refused to collaborate (Indonesia before 1965, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Congo under Patrice Lumumba, to name just a few) were muzzled, raped, destroyed, annihilated and leveled with the ground.

In that ‘belt’, there is no shame left, and no dignity.

For those of us who worked during the racist anti-Muslim massacres in Gujarat, in 2002, the fact that Mr. Modi(Chief Minister of Gujarat during the mass murder) became the Prime Minister of India, is not only outrageous, it is monstrous. But he is, in his heart, a neocon, a neoliberal, a “nationalist”, not unlike his counterpart in Japan, whose allegiances are more towards the global capitalism and Washington, than towards his own impoverished, humiliated and robbed people. And that is why the Empire supports him.

And what should be said about Egypt, Bahrain, Thailand or Rwanda, to mention just a few client states?

Intellectual cowardice, repulsive egoism and servility in the countries like Malaysia or Indonesia are beyond obscene. They are grotesque, perverse. Almost entire, pathetically shallow, art establishments in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are living from Western handouts, from so-called “funding”.“Artists” and “intellectuals” say and write and film what is expected of them, what the West pays them to produce, and then of course, what sells. In the meantime, corporate gangsters are plundering land with absolutely no obstacles, murdering indigenous people if they cross their way, and then build their palaces abroad from the booty, all in the plain daylight, with no fear and no shame. There is no real ‘opposition’ in Indonesia and Malaysia. Intellectuals, with some rare exceptions of people like Djokopekik( theMarxist Indonesian painter), in both countries, were turned into spineless cowards.

It gets even worse in Uganda and Rwanda, countries that are murdering millions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on behalf of Western governments and companies. It gets equally bad in India, whose modern history is dotted with genocides, including the ongoing one in Kashmir.

Most of the countries of that “Belt” are treating their citizens (particularly poor ones) with absolute spite. Most of them, including India, are police states. But they are hailed as “democracies” by Western media and regime, because they are allies, client states and because they collaborate.

In almost all countries of The Belt, collaborators hold power. Without exception, these horrible regimes are mixtures of capitalism, feudalism and fascism.

*

Since WWII, the panoptic of the pro-Western puppets is truly horrifying. It would take an entire book to list at least the most “important”, the most bloodstained names of the collaborators with Western regime. Let us recall just a few, those responsible for the most repulsive atrocities:

Trujillo in Dominican Republic, ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier and ‘Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, the military junta in Brazil, Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina, Stroessner in Paraguay, the South African apartheid “governments”,Moi in Kenya, Kagame in Rwanda, Museveni in Uganda, Mubarak in Egypt, Zine Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hadi of Yemen, present-day rulers of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan and Oman, Mobutu SeseSeko of Congo, Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran, Lon Nol and Pol Pot of Cambodia, almost entire Thai leadership after the WWII, Marcos of Philippines, Osama bin-Laden of Saudi Arabia, a series of pro-US dictators in South Vietnam, Suharto in Indonesia…

And what about the other side? As horrible as those individuals were, mentioned above, people who resisted and fought for freedom of the mankind were some of the greatest human beings of the 20th Century but that did not spare many of them from being murdered, and then smeared by the Empire and its lackeys. Many of them were aided by the Soviet Union and China in their efforts to break shackles of their people:

Nasser of Egypt, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Ernesto “Che” Guevara of Argentina, Salvador Allende Gossens of Chile, DilmaVanaRoussef of Brazil, Nelson Mandela of South Africa, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Ho Chi Ming of Vietnam, Mao Zedong of China, Fidel Castro of Cuba, Mosaddegh of Iran, Thomas Isidore Noël Sankara of Burkina Faso.

To compare two lists would, if one werereally willing to see and to compare, destroy all remaining illusions about the West “supporting and aiding democracy”. For years, decades and centuries, the West was actually aiding the most extreme forces of oppression, of terror and nihilism.

*

Direct support given by the West to fascist governments, to right-wing militaries, to religious zealots and feudal family and power structures, is actually something that is visible and easily detectable, at least if one wants to see and to notice.

The West operates in concealed ways,while creating and sustaining an enormous and complex group(or call it army) of collaborators in all its client states, as well as in those countries that have been selected for destabilization and destruction.

It is done through “support for arts and culture”, by funding those artists who are willing to produce empty pop, to put form over substance, refusing to address social and political problems of the country and to bring them to the masses.

It is done through the UN and countless international NGO’s thatare, in many loyal and servile countries (like Kenya), hiking salaries and benefits of the local staff, and this way are helping to manufactureand sustain the new elites. These elites (well paid and therefore loyal), instead of serving their people, are actually enjoying the tremendous gap created between them and the impoverished, often starving masses.

It is done through corrupting journalists, by sending them on all-paid ‘training courses’ to London, New York, Paris or Tokyo.

It is done through “education”, through scholarships given to the selected groups of young people who are willing to accept “Western democratic values” and fully abandon revolutionary struggle at home. These people, after returning “home”, are usually joiningthe ‘fifth column’, infiltrating government offices, academia, and mass media. Be it in business or in the state sector, they are serving their foreign masters and their own pockets, instead of their nations.

It is done through direct corruption, because corruption, as was described by John Perkins in his “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”, is one of the main tools utilized by the Western imperialism. The more corrupt, the more pampered are the elites in a client state, the more reliablethey become.

The Western colonialist establishment knows perfectly well “how to deal with the locals”, how to tickle the vanity of the elites in the Middle East, the sub-Continent, Africa and Southeast Asia. How to make them feel “exceptional”, “enlightened”, “sophisticated”, oceans away from that “brutal and ignorant” majority. Deep rifts are created, in order to prevent nations from unitingagainst external enemies.

Elites are sipping cafe lattes, reading books that made it to the New York Times bestseller lists;they are boozing up, watching CNN or BBC or Al-Jazeera and doing all they can, to live “normal life”, as they see it in commercial films imported from the West.

What is grotesque is that it is actually those members of the collaborating elites all over the poor world that are “mass produced”, desperately gray, tugging the same line. They think the same, reason in the same way, and live a similarly empty existence. It is because, no matter on what continent they live, the Empire injects them with the same doctrines, makes them desire same things. Their dreams are mass-produced, and so are their loves and even their betrayals. They shop in the same malls for the same brands, eat in the same chain restaurants, watch the same stupid films and listen to similar crappy music. They use the same social media;the same phones and they succumb to the same extreme individualism. It is “me time” and “me-me-me goes first”, while millions of their compatriots are forced to live in a gutter.

Most of the collaborators support similar political ideas – almost all of them are right wing, pro-Western and neoliberal. Almost all of them are nationalists, but to them nationalism means, as they were taught by Western-style political correctness,a boastful admiration for their horrid failed states that imperialism and neoliberalism turned their exploited countries into. To them, nationalism definitely does not mean a determined fight, a struggle against the foreign dictates, for true freedom and social justice!

After working and living in many client states of the Empire, I now clearly see that even the most ‘uneducated’ farmers in the countryside are more creative, have more dignity and understanding of the world, than the collaborating urban “elites”. Simple people have their individual views, and they have at least some basic human instincts, like compassion and kindness.

The Empire is manufacturing emptiness, nihilism. It is an extremely depressing Empire. Those who are serving it, or more precisely those who are prostituting themselves with it, are actually very sad, even pathetic individuals, lacking character, integrity, and diversity.

In the same time, they are extremely brutal and selfish, and they are looting their own countries, oppressing their own people. But even power does not seem to bring them much joy.

They are scared. They don’t know exactly why, but they sense that they are doing something wrong. The more scared they arethe more power they think they need; more power and more wealth. In order to be ‘protected’, in order to be able to build fences and to hire guards, and eventually disappear to their mansions and condominiums abroad, if things explode at home.

*

In India, Indonesia, all over Africa, colonialist empires used to employ local people to control and to terrorize masses. It was more effective that way, more practical. Locals knew locals better. They spoke the languages and they knew “where it hurts” when pain was administered.

Nothing changed. The Empire still gives orders to its servants, to the elites inside the client states. It intervenes directly only when the local cadres become ‘unreliable’ and fail to oppress their people, as happened in Iraq, Libya or Syria.

The organizations like IMF and the World Bank employ great numbers of members of the elites from sub-Continent, Africa and Southeast Asia, as it is understood that they will beextremely effective and brutal towards their own people, stripping them of everything, on behalf of the Empire. They do it in order to impress their masters, or simply out of deep spite for their own people.

This arrangement will not last forever. “The Belt” is gaining a notorious reputation all over the world. Hardy anyone would want to follow its example voluntarily.

Now there isa great number of countries fighting for a better arrangement of the world. Almost all Latin America, Russia, China, South Africa, Eritrea, and Iran, refuse to succumb to the Empire. Others are joining.

No matter how brilliant the masters of the horror scenarios, no matter how well they play their flutes, no matter how many millions of servants are licking their boots, it is certain that their violent art will not be allowed to dominate the world stage for much longer.

*

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book:Exposing Lies of the Empire, “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.

11 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ben Beaumont

Amnesty International

Raif Badawi is serving a 10-year prison sentence in Saudi Arabia, mainly for setting up a website. We talk to another local blogger – who has to remain anonymous for their own safety – about different tactics the authorities use to silence people online.

1. Gagging anyone with an independent opinion

“Overall, the situation in Saudi Arabia is very bad, particularly from the point of view of people with independent opinions who go against the grain. Recently, there have been investigations, arrests and short-term detentions of journalists, athletes, poets, bloggers, activists and tweeters.”

2. Blaming everything on terrorism

“The authorities are fragile. They seek to gag and stifle dissent using various means, including the shameful Terrorism Law that has become a sword waved in the faces of people with opinions. Courts issue prison sentences of 10 years or more as a result of a single tweet. Atheists and people who contact human rights organizations are attacked as ‘terrorists’.”

3. Personal attacks on bloggers

“I have been harassed in many ways. The authorities approached the internet providers hosting my personal website and asked them to block it and delete all the content. They also dispatched security officers to tell me to stop what I was doing in my own and my family’s best interests. I was later officially banned from blogging and threatened with arrest if I continued. I succumbed and stopped in order to protect my family.”

4. Bans, false accusations and being fired from your job

“There are many cases of bloggers being restricted or banned. Some of them – whom I know – are still being investigated about blogs they wrote in 2008, even though they aren’t involved in blogging anymore. Saudi bloggers can also be fired from their jobs and prevented from making a living. Many face false allegations that they are ‘atheists’ or ‘demented’. Restrictions are imposed on almost every aspect of the blogger’s life.”

5. Far-reaching online surveillance and censorship

“Censorship is at its maximum, especially after passing the Terrorism Law. A poet was arrested as a result of a single tweet which indirectly criticized King Abdullah using symbolic language. With millions of web users in Saudi Arabia, this means the authorities are keeping an eye on everything that’s being written. We have also received reports through international newspapers that Saudi Arabia uses surveillance to hack and monitor activists’ accounts.”

6. Deploying an electronic army

“The authorities have powerful cyber armies which give a false impression of the situation in Saudi Arabia to deceive people overseas. They launch websites, YouTube channels and blogs to target activists and opponents, and depict them as atheists, infidels and agents who promote disobedience of the Ruler. By contrast, these websites, channels and blogs often praise the state and its efforts. I have personally been the victim of such state orchestrated campaigns that harmed my reputation.”

7. Brutal punishments

“Raif Badawi’s case further demonstrates the brutality of a state that still rules through punishments from the Middle Ages, like flogging, hefty fines and exaggerated prison terms. The Saudi government needs to know that it doesn’t own the world and that it can’t silence the world’s voice with its money.”

This blog first appeared as an article in the November-December 2014 edition of Wire, Amnesty’s global magazine.

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Sign our petition to #FreeRaif and discover five other ways you can help him.

More than 1 million people worldwide have so far signed our petition to #FreeRaif. © Jorn van Eck
10 April 2015

 

By Eric Zuesse

As I reported yesterday, the Security Bureau of Ukraine, on April 7th, had seized and disappeared two Odessa bloggers, who were trying to get an independent investigation, and ultimate prosecution, of the individuals who participated in the 2 May 2014 massacre of regime opponents, and who burned, shot, and clubbed to death perhaps over 200 in the Odessa Trade Unions Building — the event that precipitated the breakaway of Donbass from the rest of the former Ukraine, the country’s civil war.

And I also reported that April 7th saw the official announcement that, “The security service of Ukraine … has discontinued operation of a number of Internet sites that were used to perpetrate information campaigns of aggression on the part of the Russian Federation aimed at violent change or overthrow of the constitutional order and territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine.”

The follow-up to that story is the news on April 9th, which was reported in the courageous independent Kiev newspaper, Vesti, that “SBU has blocked more than 10,000 websites.” It says that, “Law enforcers seized the servers,” and that one SBU official told the newspaper, “‘We have made the decision of the court and confiscated equipment.’ He promised to return the servers in two months.”

Another news report on April 9th in Vesti tells of seizures of that day’s edition of newspapers by far-right toughs at news stands throughout the city, and the story even shows a video of Right Sector toughs raiding and emptying a Vesti delivery van headed out for distribution. The report also said:

“On Thursday, April 9, machines [coin-operated distribution boxes] that were transporting part of the circulation of the Kiev edition of the newspaper ‘Vesti’ were attacked. The attacks occurred around the metro stations ‘Heroes of Dnepr’ and ‘Vasylkivska.’ In both cases, the scenario was the same: the circulation machine was blocked by two cars that emerged containing unidentified men wearing symbols of the ‘Right Sector’ who illegally seized the circulation. In the case near the metro station ‘Vasylkivska,’ a driver was beaten, and the attackers threatened to burn his car.”

Back on 5 July 2014, Vesti had headlined, “Masked men smashed and fired into ‘Vesti’: broke windows, spread tear gas.” A video accompanied that news report, too. The video showed a man outside the newspaper’s office, opening the door, being suddenly attacked by approximately a hundred men who rushed at him from hiding and beat him.
The accompanying news report from a witness said:

“I first heard several shots. Then stones and Molotov cocktails were hurled at windows on the first and second floors. After that, the room filled with tear gas, which quickly spread throughout the office, and it’s still very hard to breathe. One of the guards who tried to stop the thugs was beaten.”

The video shows all of this from the outside of the building.

There are accompanying photos of the ransacked office.

That news report, in turn, linked to an earlier one, on 27 June 2014. That report had said: “Suddenly, four dozen masked strangers came, headed by the controversial deputy of Kyiv City Council, Igor Lutsenko.” These men “began to shout anti-Putin slogans, and then climbed onto the improvised stage” where there was to be presentation of a Constitution Day award. “Finally, radicals tried to throw bricks at our editors, but Maidan volunteers blocked that.”

The head of the Security Bureau of Ukraine, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, the man who closed 10,000 online sites on April 7th, was reported, a week earlier, on April 1st, (translation here) saying:

“SBU does not need to invent anything new. It is necessary only to build on the traditions and approaches that were set forth by the Security Service of the OUN-UPA in the 1930-1950 years. They battled against the aggressor [Russia] during the temporary occupation of the territory [Ukraine, which ‘temporary’ period was already 350 years], had a patriotic education, military counterintelligence, and relied on the peaceful Ukrainian population, using its unprecedented support.”

This video recounts and shows the history of “OUN-UPA in the 1930-1950 years” and documents that it carried out most of Adolf Hitler’s extermination program in Ukraine during World War II — including 80% of the Babi Yar massacre of Jews, which the Russian poet Yevtushenko memorialized. To the people that the Obama Administration has placed in power in Ukraine, it was a heroic achievement. And yet, far-right Jews are part of it — ideological brothers-under-the-skin, and it also has the support of 98%+ of the U.S. Congress.

The head of the Security Bureau of Ukraine lied about the ‘temporary’ inclusion of Ukraine as part of Russia, and also about how ‘peaceful’ was the reign of Ukraine’s and Germany’s nazis over Ukraine during 1940-1944. But at least he was honest that he is returning to those “traditions and approaches.”

Barack Obama reigned over the entire process and installed these people into power over Ukraine. He has almost 100% congressional support for that within both the Republican and Democratic Parties, even though over two-thirds of Americans who have an opinion on the matter are opposed to his policy. America’s Establishment wants him to pursue this policy more aggressively. And the West’s newsmedia blame Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Here is a video of Ukraine’s troops shelling the Donbass village of Slavyansk and joking that they’ll turn it into a “crematorium.”

As I reported earlier, the founder of Right Sector, Dmitriy Yarosh, was the leader of the thugs who perpetrated the May 2nd massacre, and who also carried out the February 2014 coup that brought these people to power in Ukraine. Starting on April 20th (Hitler’s birthday), his men will be receiving military training and weapons from U.S. troops, whom Obama is sending in to help them and other exectuioners with their program of exterminating the residents in Donbass — the region that rejects the coup-imposed government. So, Yarosh helps Obama not only by terrorizing the few remaining independent news media in Ukraine, but also by installing Obama’s regime there, and now, increasingly, by fighting his war there. Yarosh is already the most powerful person in Ukraine, and yet his power is still increasing there. He’s a man to watch. He wants Putin dead, so Putin is probably watching him carefully. Obama meanwhile, is watching Putin’s ‘aggression.’
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

11 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org