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By Kieran Kelly

The world has suddenly realised that there is a “refugee crisis”. There are more refugees now than at any time since World War II. The number has grown three-fold since the end of 2001. The problem is treated as if it arose just recently, but it has been a long time coming. The pressure has been building and building until it has burst the dams of wilful ignorance.

Death and despair has migrated to the doorsteps of Europe. But tens of millions of people do not simply abandon home and native land for an insecure dangerous future of desperate struggle. The forces that have created this crisis are massive and historic in scale. People are now confronted with a tiny fraction of the horrors that have been visited upon millions and millions in the last 14 years. The refugee crisis is merely a symptom of the far greater and far more brutal reality. This is not just a “current crisis” to last a dozen news cycles, and it will not be resolved by humanitarian support.

The current crisis is similar in magnitude to that of World War II because the events causing it are nearly as epochal and momentous as a World War. Those who leave their homelands now face much greater peril of death than asylum seekers faced 20 years ago, yet despite this their numbers have swollen to the tens of millions.

The crisis has been caused by a new Holocaust, but it is one we refuse to acknowledge. The facts of the mass violence and mass destruction are not hidden. We can see the destruction and death that follows Western intervention, but we have been living in wilful ignorance and denial, just as the Germans denied the obvious fact and nature of German genocide. We don’t want to understand. However, like the Germans under Nazism, our self-serving ignorance is nurtured and magnified by a propaganda discourse that is in our news and entertainment media, and also in our halls of education and the halls of power.

We do not understand the genocidal nature of US-led Western interventions because we do not understand the nature of genocide. We have allowed Zionist and US imperialist elites to dictate that genocide be understood through a lens of Holocaust exceptionalism, Nazi exceptionalism, and Judeocide exceptionalism. But genocide was never meant to be specifically Nazi nor anti-Semitic in nature. The word “genocide” was coined by a Jew, Raphael Lemkin, but was never intended to apply specifically to Jews. It was meant to describe a strategy of deliberately visiting violence and destruction on “nations and peoples” as opposed to visiting it on armies. Lemkin wrote a great deal about genocide against the native people’s of the Americas, but that work went unpublished.

The truth is that there is widespread genocide in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. A new Holocaust is upon us and the refugee numbers are the just tip of a genocidal iceberg. By bombing, invading, destabilising, subverting, Balkanising, sanctioning, corrupting, indebting, debasing, destroying, assassinating, immiserating and even enraging, the US has led “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups….” That is where tens of millions of refugees have come from, but we refuse to see the fact of coordination. We blind ourselves to clear indications of Western agency and intentionality. We twist ourselves in knots to avoid seeing coherence or any pattern in US foreign policy. We are blinded by nonsense from pundits about party-political rhetoric and power struggles in DC, and we ignore the monolithic elephant of coherent imperial strategy that is threatening to crash through the floor and destroy the room altogether.

Westerners don’t want to face the truth of what their governments are doing – particularly NATO governments, and the US government most of all. The millions who died in Iraq were victims of a genocide that was intended to kill Iraqis in such numbers. The victims were not incidental to some other project. The same was true in Viet Nam, but it is also true in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, in Somalia, in the DR Congo, and in many other places. The destruction, the death, the misery and the chaos are not “failures” of “ill-advised” policy. This is not even some sort of “Plan-B” where the US creates failed states when it cannot install the regime it wants. This is Plan-A and it is becoming harder and harder to deny the fact.

Wars no longer end. We cannot simply pretend that there is no reason for that. Wars no longer end because instability and conflict are the deliberate means of attacking the people – the means of destroying their nations as such. That is what “genocide” means, and that is why we avoid the knowledge. This knowledge will destroy comforting delusions and reveal the cowardly false critiques of those who think that the US government is “misguided” in its attempts to bring stability. The US doesn’t bring stability, it doesn’t seek to bring stability. It destabilises one country after another. It infects entire regions with a disease of acute or chronic destruction, dysfunction and death.

This is a Neo-Holocaust. It slowly builds and grinds. It is the gradual, frog-boiling way to commit genocide. And, like the dullard masses of a dystopian satire, we keep adjusting every time it presents us with a new “normal”. It is a postmodern, neocolonial Holocaust of mass death and mass deprivation. It rises and falls in intensity, but will not end until the entire world awakes and ends it in revulsion.

“Crisis”

There are now more refugees than at any time since World War II. It bears repeating. The numbers have tripled since 9/11 and the launch of what has been labelled the “Global War on Terror” and the “Long War”. The situation has become akin to that in World War II, but we seem to be quite comfortable treating it as if it wasn’t a response to a single phenomenon. In WWII it was self-evident that people were fleeing war and genocide, but we apparently accept the tripling of refugee numbers now as resulting from all sorts of different causes. The only factor we are supposed to perceive as linking these crises appears to be Islamist terrorism, even though in the most prominent cases the terrorism arrives after the Western intervention and conflict.

We can no longer excuse the habit of treating each victim of US/NATO intervention as having separate endogenous sources of conflict. Yes, there are ethnic and religious fissures in countries, and yes there are economic and environmental crises which create instability. But, when the opportunity arises weapons flood into these hotspots. There is always an influx of arms. It is the great constant. But many other thing might also happen, particularly economic destabilisation and “democracy promotion”. There is no single playbook from which the US and its partners are making all their moves. There are major direct interventions, such as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the bombing of Libya, and the creation of South Sudan. There are proxy interventions such as the bombing of Yemen, incursions into DR Congo, and fomenting civil war in Syria. Add into this the continuous covert interventions, economic interventions, destabilisations, sanctions, coups, debt crises then you can see a differentiated complex of systematic genocide that very closely resembles the differentiated complex of systematic genocide initially described by Raphael Lemkin in 1944.

The tempo of violence that exists now does not even match that of the bombing during the Korean War, let alone the enormous scale of violence of World War II. However, the difference is that this violence never ends. It seems destined to continue for eternity and the scale of death continues to creep upwards. I cannot shake the feeling that if Germany had not been at war, Nazi genocide policies would have been enacted at the same slowly accumulating pace. The destruction and the violence are often meted out by enemies of the United States, but I think people are beginning to grasp that to some extent the US is often the creator and sponsor of these enemies. Moreover these enemies are often materially dependent on the US either directly or through allied regimes.

Cumulatively, this has still become an historic era of mass death that in some respects resembles the “hyperexploitation” and socio-economic destruction of “Scramble for Africa” and in other respects resembles German genocide policies in occupied Europe. In future, when people come to add up the human cost of this new Holocaust they won’t be trying to prove their credibility by being conservative. Conservatism in such matters is nothing but purposeful inaccuracy and bias. When they calculate all of the excess mortality that has resulted from military, proxy, covert and economic intervention by the West in the post-9/11 era it will be in the tens of millions. It is already of the same order of magnitude as the Nazi Holocaust, and it is far from over.

We see a drowned boy in on a beach and the suffering strikes home. That is a tragedy, but the obscenity is not in the death of a small child. The obscenity is in the fact that it was an act of murder by Western states. Now try to picture what that obscenity looks like multiplied, and multiplied, and multiplied until the boy, Aylan Kurdi, is just a grain of sand on that beach. It seems almost serene, but that is an illusion. We are socialised to lack what is called “statistical empathy” and that lack makes us irrational. Whenever we face the statistics of human pain and loss we must learn to counter this unnatural detachment by making ourselves face the full individual humanity of victims. The key to understanding the Holocaust is not to obsess about the evil Nazi race hatred and cruel machinery of death, it is to picture a child dying in agony in the dark of a crowded gas chamber and to juxtapose that with the callous indifference of Germans, of French, of English and of many others to the fate of that child at the time.

Without compassion, we are intellectually as well as morally stunted. Understanding the ongoing holocaust means you must picture a burned child dying slowly, crying for help that will never come, in the dark rubble of a shelled home next to the corpses of her mother and father. Now juxtapose that with the callous indifference we are induced to feel until we are told that it is officially a crime committed by villains rather than regrettable collateral damage stemming from benignly intended Western acts. After the fact we care, but at that time of the Judeocide almost every country sent Jewish refugees back to certain death. People reacted with callousness and also vile contempt to Jewish refugees, almost exactly like the British tourists who have recently wished mass death on the “tides of filth” that are ruining their playground on the Greek isle of Kos.

To avoid the truth, we select only certain victims as being worthy and fully human. When it becomes officially correct to feel compassion, we create cartoon villains to blame who, by their very conception, are aberrations and departures from a systemic norm. It might be the Zionist lobby, or Netanyahu or Trump or the Kochs or the military-industrial complex, but it must be something other than business as usual. This thinking is cowardice. It is stupidity. It is self-serving. It is morally and intellectually bankrupt. There is a new Holocaust happening now and it is the logical outcome of US imperialism.

In the final analysis, the refugees are the result of years of conflict, destruction and suffering. The scariest thing is that we are incapable of stopping the progress of this plague because we will not face up to the principles behind it. It has become a one-way street. Areas that are lost to civil strife can never find peace. Cities reduced to rubble can never be rebuilt. Communities that are torn apart can never again knit together. Worse will come and it will not end until the US empire is destroyed. Please let us find a way to do that without another World War.

Kieran Kelly blogs at On Genocide.

07 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Gaither Stewart

Europe, the small tail end peninsula of the great Euro-Asian land mass, gears up to receive the brunt of a mass migration of peoples from the South and East fleeing from the wars raging in their worlds. The United Nations Refugee Agency predicts some 800,000 arrivals of “seekers of asylum” in the remaining months of 2015. Estimates of the numbers of people from war-torn sub-Saharan countries like Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, Central African Republic and Congo packing their meager belongings for departure stand at five million. It is already underway. And it is a veritable biblical mass movement of peoples … for the most part headed for Europe.

Countless others are streaming out of the war-ravaged Middle East, primarily from Syria, Libya, and Iraq—the trail of failed states spawned by Washington’s meddling, and more—like Yemen—are in the offing.

From the very start the reader of such statistics must make tremendous mental efforts to keep in mind that these hundreds of thousands, these millions of fleeing masses are made up of individuals. Each person has his own hopes (vague) and dreams (shattered). Each has his own horrors of an unliveable past and fears of an uncertain present. But each imagines what the future may offer him elsewhere. Those thousands of escapees now at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea between Libya and Italy had their dreams too, dreams that vanished with them when their flimsy boat—run by the some 35,000 (according to Europol and reported by Rome’s La Repubblica) traffickers in human beings—sank in nocturnal stormy waters, making a graveyard of dreams at the bottom of that fabled sea.

For some years Europe has known what was happening in the South and East. But then who prepares a Noah’s ark well in advance to face such human tragedies? Who could imagine what is happening before our eyes? But I find it easy to think that the instigators of the wars executing their imperialistic plans of total, world-wide destabilization knew what they were about.

Europe for the most part is already in a state of vassalage to the world’s number one capitalist-imperialistic power, the USA. But there are still unruly people and even countries like Serbia who resist. The “invasion” by millions of non-Europeans is the perfect arm for total subjugation of “Old Europe”. That too is happening while America remains quiet except to say it will accept a few thousand Syrian refugees for whom the USA is responsible in the first place. As one Syrian “migrant” said: “Stop the wars and we will stay at home.” The reluctant countries are loyal US followers, Great Britain, and East Europe which wants no truck with such ragged displaced refugees.

The UK is the outsider. Guided by no values whatsoever and by its parasitic vassalage to the USA, the still imperialistic United Kingdom abandons step by step Europe and moves closer to its master while agreeing to accept 15,000 refugees. At the same time Cameron has announced that in October Britain will begin bombing the same ISIS created by its master, USA. Where the bombs will really fall is anyones guess, but if the past is any guide, it will not be primarily atop ISIL’s militants heads. Damascus army better be prepared. Much obliged!

Now, as continental Europe opens its arms and hastily prepares for the millions to pour in across its borders, Germany has stepped forward to head a movement for reception of this year’s predicted 800,000 asylum seekers. Meanwhile, abandoned structures across West Europe—former hospitals, military barracks, schools, etc.—are being readied. The goal is an equal distribution of refugees among European Union member states. As of today this reception is opposed only by the usual extreme right-wing, nationalistic forces such as Le Pen in France and the Northern League in Italy.

Vocabulary used by the press in various major European countries reflects nuances of attitude toward the challenge of the century. Luciana Bohne was right to call the wide use of the word “migrants” as a euphemism for “refugees”. However, I might add that also the word “refugee” as applied to a mass exodus of biblical proportions is misleading. According to country and/or political stance, the European press varies in the use of the words migrants or refugees,. “Political refugees” have the right of asylum. But this widely predicted mass movement of peoples is not made up of only political refugees. Many are fortunate to have close relatives already in Europe and thus hope for the reunification of their families. Others are clearly economic refugees and as such are welcomed in some of Europe’s ageing countries. The leftist GUARDIAN in the UK uses the word “refugee” as do the left-leaning El PAIS in Spain and LIBERATION in France, while France’s center or center-right LE MONDE seems to prefer “migrants”. The liberal LA REPUBBLICA in Italy uses both: “migrants” when applied to members of the mass and “refugees” (profughi) for asylum seekers. Interestingly, the precise German language press uses for all the word Flüchtling (derived from the word for flight and the verb to flee). And German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced “there are no limits” to the number Germany will accept.

While practical preparations are underway, other voices are reminding Europeans of the moral question involved, and at the same time public figures and average citizens underline that migration is also big business: from the cost of their flight to their hoped for asylum and for their care while getting there. Also, stamping numbers on the arms of refugees to distinguish one from the other in Hungary calls up bad memories in Europe’s past. Nightmares of the past that for extreme rightists and neo-fascists and neo-nazis have a place also in the present.

But I think it out of place to speak of Europe’s lack of preparation as “depravity”. European peoples across the peninsula are well aware of the moral side of this historical moment. Many people are helping on an individual basis.

Europe as a construct is NOT indifferent to this great migration of peoples. Nor are Europeans. This apparent conviction by some writers is simply untrue because they are uninformed. Some Europeans have had enough, true. For example, the university city of Leiden in Holland has become to a great extent Moroccan (like many other Dutch cities) with 3 mosques and people dressed Moslem style crowding the streets. Still, Italy is now housing migrants in abandoned hospitals, army barracks, former schools like the one around the corner from my house in Rome. Today, Sunday, 250 private automobiles of Viennese citizens drove to Budapest to carry refugees back to Vienna, while over in Munich people applauded. Strict Germany is in fact willing to take all the Syrians, hampered chiefly by the extreme rightist, if not neo-fascist President of Hungary, Viktor Orban; Hungary (glad to get the refugees out of the main train station in Budapest) is the only country to attempt building a wall to keep migrants out (along with Serbian workers), while the EU has concluded accords to take on the first 200,000 migrants.

In comparison, the USD, a big country, builds walls to keep others out…and maybe in the future to keep people in, considering the millions of Americans now living abroad. Europe is small and crowded. The task of accepting and placing migrants is arduous. But talk of “European indifference” is off base.
Let’s be clear: the direct, primary, basic, fundamental cause of the migration of peoples of Africa and Middle East is imperialist USA- sponsored, instigated, backed, prompted when not directly conducted wars in Iraq, Syria AND Libya and throughout most of Africa. Europeans are doing an enormous job in trying to deal with the not unexpected situation. But this mass exodus from war and misery is exceptional, something like millions of Mexicans suddenly forcing their way into the USA in one huge wave. Refugees are now camped all over Italy, nearly in my backyard, in the backyards of many. Holier- than- thou talk of European “depravity” is not enlightening and, I fear, based on a lack of cold information.

Yet not long ago imperialist Europe was the very personification of depravity in two world wars that cost the lives of some 100 million persons and untold misery. I still remember when refugee camps dotted Germany in the 1960s. Europe—nationalistic, capitalistic, greedy—is however not yet again imperialist. Europe that still boasts of the last 70 years free of war, forgets or hardly noticed at the time that it supported a war against another European country, Serbia, the year 2000. In my opinion, the European Union, bureaucratic, rich, staffed largely by unelected, self-named officials, is a failure; it has never come even close to living up to the dream of its original founders.

One might hazard that Europe today stands before a last chance test: how it handles the misery described here will be the measure of its vaunted morality.

GAITHER STEWART, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was just published by Punto Press.
07 September, 2015
Greanvillepost.com

By Carolina Saldaña

A review of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Editor, Johanna Fernandez. Foreword, Cornel West. City Lights Books, 2015.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s eighth book written from prison cells in the state of Pennsylvania, USA, is a selection of 107 essays that date from January 1982 to October 2014. They cover practically the entire period of his incarceration as an internationally recognized political prisoner. Most of the pieces were written while he was on death row after being framed for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner on December 9, 1981 in the city of Philadelphia. Some were aired on Prison Radio. The most recent writings date from 2011, when his death sentence was finally ruled unconstitutional and commuted to a term of life imprisonment.

The title of the book brings to mind the traditional gospel song, “Handwriting on the Wall,” based on the bible story told in the Book of Daniel about letters written by a mysterious hand on a wall during a great feast given by the King of Babylon. “Somebody read it. Tell me what it says,” goes the song. “Go get Daniel, somebody said.” When the prophet and former prisoner Daniel was brought in to interpret the handwriting, he told King Belshazzar that his days were numbered and that his kingdom had come to an end. The prophecy was fulfilled that very night.

Somebody trying to make sense out of what goes on in our times might well say, “Go get Mumia.” He is an adroit interpreter of the signs of the times and even in his extremely vulnerable position has never hesitated to speak truth to power. But even though the rich and powerful would do well to pay him heed, he doesn’t write for them. Long ago he began to express his solidarity and share his insights with people struggling to survive in the Black communities, working people, students, teachers, artists, musicians, activists, people who’ve never had a job and probably never will, prisoners, freedom fighters, entire peoples slated for extermination, the subjects of empire who have nothing to lose and everything to gain from resistance, rebellion and revolution. Mumia always writes from the ground up and never bows down to power.

In his prologue to the book, Cornel West speaks of Mumia Abu-Jamal as not only an outstanding writer and journalist, but “a living expression of the best of the Black prophetic tradition.” The philosophy professor defines this tradition as a “principled and creative response to being terrorized, traumatized and stigmatized”––a response to slavery, white supremacy and other manifestations of oppression with “a vision rooted in analysis,” that leads to organization and mobilization. In the field of Black journalism, says West, Mumia follows in the footsteps of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells Barnett, whose courage was incomparable.

In his essay, “The Historic Role of Journalism Among Black People,” Mumia Abu-Jamal expresses his own high regard for the woman who was so successful in exposing the justifications for the lynching of Black people that leaders of civil rights groups at the turn of the century avoided her for being “too militant, too outspoken.” Mumia writes:

…white terrorism, perpetrated through lynching, was the peculiar American custom that wasn’t spoken of in polite society. So, quietly (except for Ida B. Wells), Black bodies hung and burned by the thousands across America, the courts and law deeming it mere local custom, beyond their control.

Editor and history professor Johanna Fernandez, in her Introduction to Writing on the Wall, notes that Mumia Abu-Jamal articulates many uncomfortable truths.

His voice reveals the centrality of black oppression to the project of American capitalism and empire, the unbridled racism of the U.S. justice system, the immediate and rippling horrors of war, the unfinished project of American democracy, and the possibilities of a liberated society not just for Black people at home, but for everyone, everywhere.

In this volume we get a glimpse of the Black Liberation Movement that Mumia comes from and the organizations he is most closely identified with: the Black Panther Party and the MOVE Organization. These pages tell of historic figures who inspired rebellions and movements that, in turn, gave rise to leaders who inspired him, including Papaloi Boukman, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Ella Baker.

The book opens with writings about Mumia’s own arrest, imprisonment and trial in the social context of injustices faced by thousands and the historical context of slavery.

For centuries, people of African descent have entered the courts of their oppressors….Black men paraded before such “tribunals” have come shackled, manacled, chained, imprisoned with slave bracelets. Once there, they are sure to hear lofty principles such as “presumption of innocence,” “innocent until proven guilty,” “due process,” ad nauseam. After lofty words, however comes the bitter truth—slavery by decree of “Judge Hoofinmouth…

Where was the presumption of innocence for Mumia when his $250,000 bail was revoked one day after it was set? Non existent, he says, given that the deceased was a white Philadelphia cop and the accused an outspoken activist and MOVE supporter.

A major courtroom battle centered on Judge Albert Sabo’s denial of Mumia’s right to represent himself in court, with John Africa as his advisor:

“It has become clear that this “court” has no intention to hear from me: its action, pre-planned, no doubt, to revoke my supposed constitutional right of self-representation, was designed to silence, to gag, to muzzle me, to render me ineffective in the defense of my life…”

After he heard the verdict, Mumia told the jury: “Today’s decision comes as no surprise to me…I am innocent despite what you 12 people think, and the truth shall set me free!… On December 9, 1981, the police attempted to execute me in the street; this trial is a result of their failure to do so.”

In the 1970s, as a radio journalist in Philadelphia, Mumia Abu-Jamal had gotten to know the multiracial MOVE Organization when he covered their numerous trials resulting from conflicts with the Philadelphia city government. He was drawn to the anti-authoritarian, communal way of life of these urban revolutionaries who considered all life sacred and defended nature, animals and human beings against a death-dealing system. As Mumia gradually grew closer to MOVE, he gained a tremendous respect for their founder John Africa.

Ever since the City of Philadelphia committed its first act of urban warfare against MOVE in 1978, when nine of their members were taken prisoner, followed by the second military attack in 1985, when their house was bombed and 11 members killed, Mumia has demanded justice for the organization and supported the freedom of the “Move 9.” His earliest writings on MOVE are among the first that we read in Writing on the Wall.

“Philadelphia, try as it might, cannot escape May 13. Nor can Black Philadelphia,” writes Mumia. The MOVE bombing was ordered by Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, Wilson Goode, who does not escape Mumia’s scathing commentaries:

“Today, a mayor who claims faith in Christianity entered U.S. history books as a Black man who ordered the bombardment and obliteration of a home where Black rebels lived. One thing can be said: here was a neo-slave who imitated his malevolent masters well!”

The Black leaders that have inspired Mumia are of a different tradition: one of resistance and rebellion punishable by prison, exile or death.

Pan-Africanist Marcus Mosiah Garvey was accused of “rabble-rousing” for daring to suggest Blacks look to Africa for economic, social and spiritual strength. The charismatic Rev. Nat Turner, who dared rebel against that most un-Christian of American institutions, human slavery, was damned as a fanatic. Martin Luther King Jr. received accolades for his nonviolent ministry, but Malcolm X received assassination for his ministry of militancy. When Rev. King began to emerge as a vocal opponent of America’s genocidal war on Vietnam, his life clock was stopped. In a young nation born in bloody resistance to England’s crown, resistance is still the ultimate offense by Africans.

Mumia’s essay “1967: Year of Fire, Year of Rage,” tells of the flames of rebellion that swept Roxbury, Tampa, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Newark, New Brunswick, Paterson, Elizabeth, Palmyra, Passaic, Plainsfield, Cairo, Durham, Memphis, Minneapolis, and Detroit that summer.

“People didn’t rebel all across America during 1967 for a Black boxing champ. They didn’t rebel because they wanted a Black mayor….They rebelled because they wanted Power: the power to better their lives. They also wanted an end to the violent repression of the cops.”

The urban rebellions that had begun in Watts, Los Ángeles on August 11, 1965, gave rise to Black organizations that sought to channel spontaneous rebellion into coordinated revolutionary action.

The essay titled “Decolonization: The Influence of Africa and Latin America on the Black Freedom Movement,” focuses on the Martinican born psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who had joined the Algerian independence struggle and written two major books on European colonial domination. Fanon had a profound influence on the two founders of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. Mumia cites Kathleen Cleaver on the importance of Fanon’s writings for Black revolutionaries in the United States:

“His books became available in English just as waves of civil violence engulfed the ghettos of America, reaching the level of insurrection in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. Fanon died in 1961, a year before Algeria obtained the independence he had given his life to win, but his brilliant, posthumously published work The Wretched of the Earth became essential reading book for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seems to explain and justify the spontaneous violence ravaging Black ghettos across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement….Fanon explained how violence was intrinsic to the imposition of white colonial domination, and portrayed the oppressed who violently retaliate as engaged in restoring the human dignity they were stripped of by the process of colonization…

Another major influence on the Black Panthers and on Mumia in particular was Malcolm X, who took the civil rights movement to the level of human rights, insisted on the right to self-defense, and argued that instead of being a “minority group,” Black people in the United States were part of the majority of the worlds peoples in Africa, Latin America and Asia seeking liberation.

For me and my generation of that era, to hear him speak was like listening to thunder,” said Mumia. “One could not help but be moved, outraged, energized—radicalized. I became, in my heart, a Malcolmite. That influence, coupled with the April 14, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (his closest competitor for Black America’s heart), would propel thousands of young men and women to join the nearest formation of the Black Panther Party. Indeed, this writer (in his 15th year of life) helped found and form the Philadelphia branch of that group.

At that young age, Mumia learned journalism as a young Black Panther working on the organization’s national newspaper. And at that young age, he became a target of FBI surveillance.

The Panthers’ armed self defense against police violence, their daily Breakfast for Children Program, and their community programs for health, education and housing, mainly led by women, attracted thousands of members in 42 cities in the United States and inspired young people in the Chicano, Puerto Rican and Native American movement and radical white groups. Internationally, the Black Panthers viewed themselves as part of anti-colonial struggles for self-determination and national liberation and sought to build ties with Palestinian and Vietnamese revolutionaries, among others.

Half a century after Fanon’s death, colonial rule is still a reality in Palestine and Puerto Rico, says Mumia, while the most important lesson learned by many African leaders schooled in Eurocentric capitalist thought “was how to re-create colonialism, not how to destroy it.” At the same time, he writes, “The American Empire utilizes force, brutal and terrifying, to intimidate the populations of other nations, and this, when alloyed with the mesmerizing power of the corporate press, serves to whitewash what is actually taking place.”

Moreover, since 9-11, people across the United States have been subjected to an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties, government spying and the exercise of blatant police power as hard-fought workers’ rights have been decimated.

And what is the state of Black America half a century after legal gains made by the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for freedom waged by the Black Liberation Movement? Many Black people in the United States had illusions that things were getting better, that their children would have a brighter future, says Mumia.

Then came Katrina. In a flash, in an hour, in a day, in a week, we saw with our own eyes the loss, the waste, the death, and perhaps worse, the dismissal of Black life by virtually every agency of local, state and federal power, and the media as well…. If U.S. Blacks had any illusions, the dark, fetid waters of Katrina washed them away. Nationalism, citizenship, belonging to the White Nation were lies. The waters of Katrina cleared the crust of sleep from our eyes, and taught us that if you’re Black and poor, you’re utterly on your own.

In Writing on the Wall, Mumia exposes what goes on in the monstrous U.S. prison system, which has the highest incarceration rates in the world and a population of over 2.2 million—10 times greater than in 1972. As schools close in Black communities and jobs are harder to find than ever, thousands of youth swell the prison population.

“When we enter the modern era, we see a panorama of Black pain that is as unprecedented as it is silent. I speak of mass incarceration, the targeting, imprisonment and criminalization of dark people in ways (and in numbers) the world has never seen. For decades.”

During the time that he spent on Pennsylvania’s death row, Mumia Abu-Jamal’s writings against the death penalty fueled an international movement to abolish it. He became the voice of thousands facing this punishment considered barbaric in most of Europe, Latin America and Africa.

But wouldn’t the election of a Black president be a solution to the woeful state of Black America at the beginning of a new millennium? Many had high hopes that Barack Obama would bring much needed change to their communities and to the country as a whole. On January 20, 2009, in Pennsylvania’s Camp Hill prison, this is what happened:

Men were sprayed with hot pepper mace in the face, stripped naked, beaten, stomped, shot with stun guns, insulted and subjected to death threats for having filed suit against the treatment they received in the Special Management Unit. At that very moment, during the inauguration ceremony of the first Black president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama was telling the world: ‘We don’t torture.’

The torture revealed at Abu Ghraib some years before didn’t begin abroad, says Mumia. It can be traced back to “genocide, mass terrorism, racist exploitation (also known as ‘slavery’), land-theft and carnage…in the heart of the Empire,” and especially inside its prisons.

Mumia reports that the U.S. Department of Defense chose a man named Lane McCotter, a private prison company executive, to run the now-notorious Abu Ghraib gulag on the outskirts of Baghdad. At the time, the Management & Training Corporation was under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for brutality charges. McCotter had been the director of the Utah state prison system, until a scandal forced him to resign from his post in 1997. A naked prisoner had been shackled to a chair in one of his prisons for 16 hours, until he died.

“Whatever can be said of McCotter, it can’t be said that he wasn’t qualified for the violence and depredations that would emerge at Abu Ghraib,” writes Mumia. “Who better to run this colonial outpost of barbarity than one who ran internal gulags, both for the State and for the Dollar?”

One of the worst forms of torture practiced in United States prisons is solitary confinement. Mumia Abu-Jamal knows something about it. He experienced it for almost three decades. This is what he says:

“Solitary is torture. State torture. Official torture. Government-sanctioned torture. Some may call that hyperbole, or exaggeration. But I’ve lived in solitary longer than many—most, perhaps—Americans have been alive. I’ve seen men driven mad as a hatter by soul-crushing loneliness. Who have sliced their arms until they looked like railroad tracks. Or burned themselves alive…. As America embarks on its second century of mass incarceration, breaking every repressive record ever made, it’s also breaking every record in regard to solitary confinement: locking up, isolating and torturing more and more people, for more and more years….”

The issue of police terror is addressed in many of the essays in this volume, including the nationally televised beatings of Delbert África and Rodney King and the police killings of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Mike Brown. For Mumia, the murder of unarmed Amadou Diallo was a “harbinger of greater violence against unarmed Black and non-white life by the cops.” The unarmed Guinean immigrant was standing just outside his door when four New York City plainclothes cops fired 41 bullets at him, killing him instantly. All four cops were acquitted.

Have politicians used their political power to stop this terror? Hillary Clinton, a candidate for the U.S. Senate at the time of Diallo’s extrajudicial execution, issued the recommendation that “police officers should work to understand the community, and the community should understand the risks faced by police officers.”

Mumia asks: “Do you really think that this is a promise of safety if and when she gets elected? If this is what she says when she wants and presumably needs Black and Puerto Rican votes, what will be said after the election?”

Fifteen years later, the name of a relatively unknown town in Missouri would become “a watchword for resistance” after people rose up against the murder of Black teenager Mike Brown by white cop Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. In Ferguson, says Mumia,

…the youth—excluded from the American economy by inferior, substandard education; targeted by the malevolence of the fake drug war and mass incarceration; stopped and frisked for Walking While Black—were given front-row seats to the national security state….Ferguson is a wake-up call. A call to build social, radical, revolutionary movements for change.

The publication of Writing on the Wall underscores the failure of the Fraternal Organization of Police and corrupt politicians to silence Mumia Abu-Jamal. In the face of attempts to execute him, smother his voice behind steel walls, slander him in the news media, intimidate supporters, pass laws to try to keep him from speaking out, and most recently, kill him through highly intentional “medical neglect,” Mumia simply refuses to shut up. Like many other political prisoners slated to die in their dungeons, he has what his captors will never have: spiritual strength, dignity, integrity, love for the people, a commitment to revolution –and the ability to read the handwriting on the wall. His message carries the insights of his own generation of Black revolutionaries combined with truths born in struggles in many parts of the world. The time is right. As emerging movements gain strength, vision, and breadth, Mumia finds, in this book a new channel for sharing his ideas with people eager to bring down walls.

Carolina Saldaña is an independent journalist based in Mexico City, who also works with the Amigos de Mumia en México collective.
05 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By B. F. Firos

Voila, who is out there looking for refugees with such messianic grandiosity? It’s Slovakia. The central European country said it is ready to admit 200 Syrians provided they are Christians, because, according to the government, “we don’t have mosques… we only want to choose the Christians.” Fair point; so has the diktat been communicated to the refugees fleeing for their life, probably via satellite communication? And in the unfortunate event of not finding enough Christians to fill its 200-slot, is there any government-sponsored mid-sea baptism bid to pick the willing 200 subjects? Or is there a clergy-man baptize-ready standing along the razor-thin fence along with sniffer dogs and police men who have been deployed to drive the refugees away on the borders of Hungary and Austria? Or are there enough high-sensitive religion-detection machines installed at the border checkpoints to sift the 200 souls?

Amid this religionizing of a human tragedy came the picture of a dead Syrian boy lying face-down on a Turkish beach; it has jolted the world which has hitherto been beauty sleeping in its cozy comforts, refusing to even wink at the biggest catastrophe unfolding right under its nose. No doubt, the image is the defining one à la the heart-breaking image of that Vietnam girl running from a Napalm bomb that went on to encapsulate the horrors of the war.

Indeed, it is not the first such loss of life; people have been fleeing war zones and desolation from conflict-ridden countries in the middle-east and Africa for the past many months. It is just that this dead boy just got lucky enough to have been photographed by a western news agency, prompting TV channels the world over to spare their prime time and newspapers to front-page the image to the accompaniment of such poetic headlines as “Europe couldn’t save him.”
And for the readers of Western tabloids it was a refreshing change as the boy’s body was front-paged. Celebrity bums and boobs, of course, can wait for a day; sorry not more than that.

And we must appreciate the BBC over its journalistic circumspection, for, it says that it has chosen to publish only one photograph of Aylan, in which he is being carried by a Turkish police officer. Oh Aylan. That is the boy name, the enterprising media has found out his name. We don’t know the names of those 2,500 people who were drowned or killed on their way to Europe. They remain faceless.

Amid the cacophony of reactions of European leaders, that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel stands out like that of a real angel, a beacon of hope and humanity as she welcomed these seas of desperate souls into her country with open arms. So is France. Rightwing-ruled countries like Hungary closed their doors to the people with predictable insensitivity. Hungary Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, said Europe is in the grip of madness over immigration and refugees, and that he was “defending European Christianity against a Muslim influx.” But thanks to Aylan effect, countries like Hungary have been forced to change their position.

And we saw the likes of David Cameron going into pedagogic mode with didactic precision, trying to differentiate between the vexatious words like ‘immigrants’ and ‘migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’! Now, he says the UK is ready to accept “thousands more” Syrian refugees. Thanks, again, to Aylan effect.

Hello world, it is very easy to brand people fleeing war zones and catastrophes with such heavily loaded words like ‘migrants’ and ‘illegal emigrants’; in effect bracketing them all in the “bad people” category. And instead of applying the balm of humanity upon these wounded souls, rest of the right-wing world, instead, is poking at their wounds with the poison of religion and xenophobia
.
Yes, the world is made of migrations and cross-migrations; people’s movement has always been the inevitable ingredient of human civilization; each country of the world as we know it today has been peopled by migrations of different kinds. Nobody was air-dropped to countries according to pre-fixed maps based on their skin color, nose size and passports that they possess.

For a change those rightwing leaders in Europe may read history books. Europe has benefitted from migration immensely: when the continent was ravaged by war seven decades ago, rest of the world embraced the refugees with open arms. After the Second World War, Australia, New Zealand and rest of Americas accepted huge refugee population that emanated from Europe.

Even as these human tragedies are being played out, in another part of the world called Swaziland, one of the poorest countries in the African continent, a total of 65 girls were killed in a ghastly road accident. They were traveling in an open truck to take part in the annual reeds festival, where the Swazi king traditionally picks one of the topless girls as his newest bride. Some 40,000 virgin-girls gather in a stadium and dance bare-breasted to attract the attention of this African monarch who already has 15 wives, 13 palaces, a private jet and a fleet of luxury cars. Other facts are: the country has the highest HIV and tuberculosis rate in the world and over 50% of the people are under the poverty line.

These girls, desperate to escape the tyranny of poverty and squalor in their lives, hope to lead a better life as queen. Their condition is no less wretched than those thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives. While those girls were killed on the road, most of the refugees perished in the sea. The difference primarily ends there. Both of them flee their pitiable conditions for a life of dignity.

Until and unless a western news agency photographer meets with his epiphany Aylan-moment, places like Swaziland – and the stark realities of the people’s lives there – will continue to remain off from the radar of our tabloid front-pages and TV primetimes.

(The author is a journalist based out of Dubai)

05 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Niles Williamson

The Pentagon is in the process of finalizing a $1 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia for the delivery of a cache of weapons, consisting primarily of missiles to arm the fleet of F-15 fighter jets it had previously purchased from the US.

While this latest weapons transfer, first reported by the New York Times, is being presented in the media as part of a bid by the administration of President Barack Obama to assuage the Saudi monarchy’s concerns over the US-Iran nuclear deal, it also facilitates the continuation and escalation of the bloody assault on Yemen that Saudi Arabia has been carrying out along with its allies since March.

The deal serves as a green light from the Obama administration for an escalation of the brutal military offensive against the Houthi militias that took control over much of Yemen’s western provinces earlier this year.

According to UN estimates, more than 4,300 people have been killed since the anti-Houthi offensive began March, with more than half of these being civilians, including many women and children. Nearly 1.5 million people have been internally displaced by the fighting, with tens of thousands more fleeing the country.

With American military intelligence and logistical support, Saudi Arabia and its allies have used US-supplied F-15s to drop US-supplied bombs on residential neighborhoods, markets, schools, factories and ports. The Saudi-led forces have repeatedly dropped internationally outlawed cluster bombs, munitions also supplied by the US government.

After months of punishing airstrikes against targets throughout Yemen, thousands of troops from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Gulf state monarchies have entered the country and are preparing for a ground offensive to retake the capital of Sanaa.

Fifty soldiers from the UAE and Bahrain were killed on Friday in the northern province of Marib after a rocket reportedly fired by Houthi forces struck a weapons depot, setting off a massive explosion.

The US weapons transfer, which awaits almost certain approval by Congress, was announced as Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud made his first state visit to the United States since ascending to the throne in January.

For the three-day visit to Washington, DC, the Saudi monarch rented out all 222 rooms at the Four Seasons Hotel in the posh Georgetown neighborhood to accommodate his highness and an entourage of several hundred.

The Four Seasons staff laid out a red carpet in the parking garage and hotel hallways to keep the royal feet of the king and his courtiers from touching the ground. And to further ensure ultimate comfort the hotel’s furniture was replaced with gilded equivalents.

“Everything is gold,” a regular hotel patron told Politico. “Gold mirrors, gold end tables, gold lamps, even gold hat racks.”

King Salman and President Obama’s agenda reportedly included discussions on the Iran nuclear deal, the war in Yemen, the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and energy policy. They also discussed escalating US military training programs for the Saudi armed forces.

On Friday, in a joint press briefing with King Salman held in the White House’s Oval Office, President Obama extended a warm welcome to his “personal friend” whose executioners have beheaded at least 130 people so far this year.

Obama also expressed his “concern” over the situation in Yemen, facetiously calling for the restoration of “a functioning government that is inclusive and that can relieve the humanitarian situation there.”

The President also used the public briefing to press for a “political transfer process” in Syria, where the United States and Saudi Arabia have worked together to stoke a four-year civil war aimed at ousting President Bashar al Assad. Saudi Arabia has been one of the key supporters of Islamic fundamentalist jihadist groups fighting in Syria, including the Al Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, as well as ISIS.

The conflict, fueled by the weapons and fighters funneled into Syria by the Obama administration and its Saudi partners, has killed more than 220,000 Syrians and displaced millions, contributing to the flood of refugees now attempting the perilous trek through Europe.

The deal reported by the Times on Friday is only one of a number of pending arms sales to Saudi Arabia being negotiated by the Pentagon. In 2010 the Obama administration announced a $60 billion, 20-year agreement, the largest-ever US arms deal, which will provide Saudi Arabia with, among other things, 84 new F-15 fighter jets and 70 new Apache attack helicopters.

The Saudi government is currently in discussions with the Pentagon to purchase two frigates being built by Lockheed Martin for more than $1 billion. The US-supplied warships will serve as the cornerstone of the Royal Saudi navy’s upgrade of its eastern fleet. A deal worth $1.9 billion for 10 MH-60R Seahawk helicopters to shore up the Saudi navy’s antisubmarine capabilities is also expected to be signed before the end of the year.

The Pentagon approved a number of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia at the end of July, including a $5.4 billion deal for 600 Patriot Missiles and a $500 million deal for more than a million rounds of ammunition as well as land mines and hand grenades for the Saudi Arabian Army.

Supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia has undertaken a massive effort to upgrade and expand its military forces over the last ten years with military expenditures increasing 112 percent between 2005 and 2014. In 2014, the Saudi monarchy committed approximately $80.8 billion, a whopping 10.4 percent of the country’s GDP, to military expenditures.
05 September, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Karoun Demirjian and Carol Morello

Not since George H.W. Bush was president has the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sustained such a public defeat on an issue it deemed an existential threat to Israel’s security.

But the Iran nuclear deal has Washington insiders wondering if the once-untouchable lobbying giant has suffered lasting damage to its near-pristine political reputation.

In fighting the deal, AIPAC and its affiliates mustered all of its considerable resources: spending tens of millions on television ads in the home states of undecided lawmakers and organizing a fly-in to blitz legislators on Capitol Hill – another is planned for next week when Congress returns from August recess to vote on a resolution of disapproval. But all that noise amounted to a humbling and rare defeat this week, when President Obama secured enough backing in the Senate to protect the pact from efforts to dismantle it.

Many say AIPAC’s efforts were doomed to fail in the aftermath of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s combative speech to Congress in March — an appearance brokered by Israel’s ambassador to the United States along with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) without White House consultation. Many of AIPAC’s supporters also blame Obama and what they see as a process he rigged and a debate he polarized.

But whether the White House won a lasting victory in securing the Iran deal’s fate, AIPAC may have lost its claim to iron-clad influence over lawmakers on issues pertaining to Israel.

“The lesson that lawmakers have learned from this experience is that right-leaning pro-Israel groups are not immortal,” said Dylan Williams, vice president of government affairs for J Street, a more liberal, rival pro-Israel group. “Blood can be drawn. And it is possible to stand up and say “no” to them. And not suffer political consequences.”

AIPAC’s position on the Iran deal lines up with the Republican Party’s, but its efforts thus far have helped persuade only two Senate Democrats, and a handful in the House, while Obama has secured more than the 34 Senate votes needed to ensure that opponents won’t collect a two-thirds, veto-proof majority to block the deal. On Thursday, three more Senate Democrats sided with Obama — Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Cory Booker (N.J.), and Mark Warner (Va.).

Undecided lawmakers found themselves in the crosswinds of a fierce maelstrom of political jockeying as the deal’s architects and opponents pressed their case.

“Vigorous and regular,” is how Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) described it.

Coons, who announced his support for the deal earlier this week, stressed that in Delaware, the lobbying he encountered from the deal’s foes was always respectful – in part because in that small state, the people conveying the anti-deal message were locals he has long known.

“But for other senators who have been comparably torn on this with whom I’ve spoken — where the ads in their states are much more aggressive than the ones here — it has backfired,” Coons said. “Instead of making them feel compelled to vote against the deal, it has made them feel resentful.”

Congress’s Jewish lawmakers came under some of the most intense pressure from anti-deal activists.

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who announced his support for the deal in August, described weathering a barrage of attacks from passionately opposed constituents and others on social media, who questioned his religion, his intelligence and called him a kapo – a term used to describe prisoners of Nazi concentration camps who were assigned to supervise forced labor – as they pressed him against the deal.

While he isn’t sure if AIPAC could have improved the dialogue, Cohen said “the tenor was set when Netanyahu came to speak to Congress without the president’s knowledge and/or approval.”

“Having him come and try to influence the members of the Congress and lobby against what the president was working on set the tenor,” Cohen continued. “Netanyahu should not get himself involved in American politics in the future, and AIPAC played a stronger hand than they should have.”

Other congressional aides pointed out that Israel’s unprecedented direct lobbying efforts against the deal by Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, who once worked for GOP operative Frank Luntz, worsened AIPAC’s position by association.

“There are a lot of people whose reaction to the Israeli ambassador’s lobbying was not a positive one,” said one Democratic aide to a Jewish lawmaker. “It wasn’t ever a harsh tone or bossy or threatening, but if you are looking at the group of Jewish Democrats, there could have been a better understanding of the nuanced approach those members were taking. Not ‘This is it is, take it or leave it, and if you’re on the other side of it you’re wrong.’”

The Israeli Embassy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

While AIPAC and Israel’s activities were not coordinated, some members of Congress felt the group was tacitly endorsing the Israeli government’s increasingly political line.

“They burned their bridges with Democrats before they got into this,” said a Senate aide who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak frankly about AIPAC’s apparent failure.

“They were silent and a little complicit in the Netanyahu debacle. They were just standing by when it happened. They spent down their political capital before they got up to this effort.”

Several Democratic lawmakers pointed to Netanyahu’s speech to Congress as poisoning the political environment surrounding the Iran deal debate even before an agreement was reached. Netanyahu spoke to AIPAC’s annual conference the night before his congressional address, arguing vehemently against the Iran negotiations. Several Democratic members boycotted the speech, arguing that Netanyahu’s appearance was inappropriate as Israel was preparing for national elections.

“The unfortunate problem with Prime Minister Netanyahu is that he prides himself on being the Israeli who knows America the best,” said former Democratic congressman Robert Wexler (Fla.), who now runs the D.C.-based S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace. “Where he’s mistaken is, Prime Minister Netanyahu knows the America that elected Ronald Reagan president. He’s completely unfamiliar with the America that elected Barack Obama president. And they are in fact very different Americas.”

J Street, a rival lobbying group that spent far less money trying to persuade lawmakers to support the deal, said AIPAC’s lobbying tactics simply don’t work anymore.

“It used to be that AIPAC could deliver votes in a situation like this by emphasizing the political cost of going against them. That no longer works as well as it used to, with Democrats in particular, who recognize that the majority of their supporters in the Jewish community support this deal,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street’s executive director. “The days of AIPAC being able to present itself as the sole voice of American Jews on these issues are over.”

AIPAC’s executive director refused interview requests for this story. But AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman said the group was aiming “to achieve the largest possible bipartisan majority that will reject this flawed deal.”

“Many of the deal’s proponents have expressed severe concerns,” he said. “We believe that this strong opposition conveys an important message to the world – especially foreign banks, businesses and governments – about the severe doubts in America concerning Iran’s willingness to meet its commitments and the long-term viability of this agreement.”

And to many AIPAC supporters, the fact that a majority of both chambers of Congress are expected to vote against the deal means the vote can’t be characterized as a “loss.”

Middle East policy experts say that for an experienced lobbying organization like AIPAC, other factors were at play.

“I suspect within AIPAC itself there was probably a low expectation that they would succeed in this,” said Dennis Ross, a former White House Middle East peace negotiator. “So the question is, did they believe they could affect what the administration might do in terms of some of the commitments they might be prepared to make to Israel?”

Obama and Kerry have both said the United States will provide Israel more security guarantees, including military aid.

But others argue that if AIPAC wants to recover from this episode, it needs to mend fences.

“This will be a setback if AIPAC allows itself to become Republican-oriented, and allows the debate to continue in its partisan manner,” said Tom Dine, AIPAC’s former executive director until 1993. “The partisan debate got away from AIPAC, and it lost its bipartisan advantage.”

The Iran deal isn’t the first time that AIPAC has lobbied Congress hard and come up short. But the prior episodes to which experts and former lobbyists often refer – the 1981 sale of AWACS early warning aircraft to Saudi Arabia; and a fight in the early 1990s over loan guarantees to build housing in settlements in the Palestinian territories – all took place in a different political time.

Dine, who has ties to the Democratic Party and supports the Iran deal, said AIPAC mistakenly does not do enough to control members who say Obama’s policies have been bad for Israel.

“I just think it’s the dumbest thing possible,” Dine said. “Get with it, man! Go back to basics, and get those guys off the stage. AIPAC may not be able to control what a person says, but you can keep them off the stage.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to say that Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer once worked for GOP operative Frank Luntz.

Karoun Demirjian covers defense and foreign policy and was previously a correspondent based in the Post’s bureau in Moscow, Russia. Before that, she reported for the Las Vegas Sun as its Washington Correspondent, the Associated Press in Jerusalem, the Chicago Tribune, Congressional Quarterly, and worked at NPR.

Carol Morello is the diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, covering the State Department.

3 September 2015

By Colin Todhunter

UK Prime Minister David Cameron this week said “as a father I felt deeply moved” by the image of a Syrian boy dead on a Turkish beach. As pressure mounts on the UK to take in more of those fleeing to Europe from Syria and elsewhere. Cameron added that the UK would fulfil its “moral responsibilities.”

On hearing Cameron’s words on the role of ‘morality’, something he talks a lot about, anyone who has been following the crisis in Syria would not have failed to detect the hypocrisy. According to former French foreign minister Roland Dumas, Britain had planned covert action in Syria as early as 2009. He told French TV:

“I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business… I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was preparing gunmen to invade Syria.”

Writing in The Guardian in 2013, Nafeez Ahmed discusses leaked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, including notes from a meeting with Pentagon officials, that confirmed US-UK training of Syrian opposition forces since 2011 aimed at eliciting “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

He goes on to write that, according to retired NATO Secretary General Wesley Clark, a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense just a few weeks after 9/11 revealed plans to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to “Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” Clark argues that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources.

In 2009, Syrian President Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets in direct competition with Russia. Being a Russian ally, Assad refused to sign and instead pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran crossing Iraq and into Syria that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe. Thus Assad had to go.

And this is where Cameron’s concerns really lie: not with ordinary people compelled to flee war zones that his government had a hand in making but with removing Assad in order for instance to run a pipeline through Syrian territory and to prevent Iran and Russia gaining strategic momentum in the region.

Ordinary folk are merely ‘collateral damage’ in the geopolitical machinations of bankers, oilmen and arms manufacturers, only to be shown any sympathy when the media flashes images of a dead Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach or people drowned at sea trying to escape turmoil at home. It is then that people like Cameron are obliged to demonstrate mock sincerity in the face of public concern.

It is not only Syrians who are heading for Europe and the UK but also people from Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Countries that Britain has helped to devastate as part of the US-led long war based on the Project for a New American Century and the US right to intervene unilaterally as and when it deems fit under the notion of the US ‘exceptionalism’ (better known as the project for a new imperialism – the ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’).

Cameron said that Britain is a moral nation and would fulfil its moral responsibilities. Large sections of the population – ordinary men and women – are certainly ‘moral’ but that is unfortunately where any notion of morality seems to stop. Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has called the UK a rogue state and a danger to the world. Last year, he told a meeting at St Andrews University in Scotland that the British Government is deeply immoral and doesn’t care how many people its kills abroad if it advances it aims. Moreover, he said the UK was a state that is prepared to go to war to make a few people wealthy.

He added that Libya is now a disaster and 15,000 people were killed when NATO (British and French jets) bombed Sirte, something the BBC never told the public. Murray told his audience what many already know or suspect but what many more remain ignorant of:

“I’ve seen things from the inside and the UK’s foreign interventions are almost always about resources. It is every bit as corrupt as others have indicated. It is not an academic construct, the system stinks.”

Murray was a British diplomat for 20 years. But after only six months, he said that in the country where he was Ambassador, the British and the US were shipping people in order for them to be tortured and some of them were tortured to death. As far as Iraq is concerned, Murray said that he knew for certain that key British officials were fully aware that there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction. He said that invading Iraq wasn’t a mistake, it was a lie.

Back in 2011, 200 prominent African figures accused Western nations and the International Criminal Court of “subverting international law” in Libya. The UN has been misused to militarise policy, legalise military action and effect regime change, according to University of Johannesburg professor Chris Landsberg. He said it is unprecedented for the UN to have outsourced military action to NATO in this way and challenges the International Criminal Court to investigate NATO for “violating international law.” In 2015, the outcome has been to turn Africa’s most developed nation to ruins and run by armed militias fighting one another.

Is this the stability and morality Cameron preaches?

Yet for public consumption, Cameron flags up his ‘morality’ by stating that the UK would continue to take in “thousands” of refugees. But he cautions that this is not the only answer to the crisis, saying a “comprehensive solution” is required. Awash with self-righteous platitudes he hoped would drown out any hint of hypocrisy or irony, Cameron added: “We have to try and stabilise the countries from which these people are coming.”

One year ago, Cameron told the United Nations that Britain was ready to play its part in confronting “an evil against which the whole world must unite.” He also said that that “we” must not be so “frozen with fear” of repeating the mistakes of the 2003 Iraq invasion. He was attempting to drum up support for wider Anglo-US direct military action against Syria under the pretext of attacking ISIS.

At the same time, Cameron spoke of the virtues of the West’s economic freedom and democratic values as well as the horrors of extremism and terror. Cameron’s was a monologue of hypocrisy.

Over a million people have been killed via the US-led or US-backed attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so we were told. It did not. That was a lie and hundreds of thousands have paid with their lives. We were told that Gaddafi was a tyrant. He used the nation’s oil wealth well by presiding over a country that possessed some of the best indices of social and economic well-being in Africa. Now, thanks to Western backed terror and military conflict, Libya lies in ruins and torn apart. Russia is a threat to world peace because of its actions in Ukraine, we are told. It is not. The US helped instigate the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Ukraine and has instigated provocations, sanctions and a proxy war against an emerging, confident Russia.

But how far in history should we go back to stress that the West and Cameron and his ilk have no right to take the moral high ground when it comes to peace, respect for international law, self-determination, truth or democracy? The much quoted work by historian William Blum documents the crimes, bombings, assassinations, destabilisations and wars committed by the US in country after country since 1945. And since 1945 the UK has consistently stood shoulder to shoulder with Washington.

Cameron stood at the UN and talked of the West’s values of freedom and democracy and the wonders of economic neoliberalism in an attempt to promote Western values and disguise imperialist intent. But it’s a thin disguise. The Anglo-US establishment has imposed its economic structural violence on much of the world by bankrupting economies, throwing millions into poverty and imposing ‘austerity’ and by rigging and manipulating global commodity markets and prices. Add to that the mass illegal surveillance at home and abroad, torture, drone murders, destabilisations, bombings and invasions and it becomes clear that Cameron’s ongoing eulogies to morality, freedom, humanitarianism, democracy and the ‘free’ market is hollow rhetoric.

Apart from attempting to legitimise neoliberal capitalism, this rhetoric has one purpose: it is part of the ongoing ‘psych-ops’ being waged on the public to encourage people to regard what is happening in the world – from Syria, Iraq and Ukraine to Afghanistan and Libya, etc – as a confusing, disconnected array of events (perpetuated by unhinged madmen or terror groups) that are in need of Western intervention. These events are not for one minute to be regarded by the public as the planned machinations of empire and militarism, which entail a global energy and trade war against Russia and China, the associated preservation of the petro-dollar system and the encircling and intimidation of these two states with military hardware.

Any mainstream narrative about the current migrant-refugee ‘crisis’ must steer well clear of such an analysis. Instead, we must listen to Cameron talking about the West ‘helping’ to stabilise the countries it helped to destabilise or destroy in the first place. It’s the same old story based on the same misrepresentation of imperialism: the US-led West acting as a force for good in the world and reluctantly taking up the role of ‘world policeman’.

Whether it’s the now amply financially rewarded Blair or whether it is Cameron at the political helm, the perpetual wars and perpetual deceptions continue.

Cameron plays his role well. Like Tony Blair, Cameron’s media-friendly bonhomie is slicker (and cheaper) than the most experienced used car salesman. And like Blair before him, Cameron is the media-friendly PR man who beats the drums of war (or mock sincerity, as the situation dictates), courtesy of a global power elite, who through their think tanks, institutions and financial clout ultimately determine economic policies and decide which wars are to be fought and for what purpose –

“… the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet-flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world, people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid. They are 94 percent male, predominantly white, and mostly from North America and Europe. These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-8, G-20, NATO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military, the academy, nongovernmental organizations, spiritual leaders and other shadow elites. Shadow elites include, for instance, the deep politics of national security organizations in connection with international drug cartels, who extract 8,000 tons of opium from US war zones annually, then launder $500 billion through transnational banks, half of which are US-based.” – David Rothkopf (Project Censored ‘Exposing the transnational ruling class’)

Colin Todhunter is an independent writer and former social policy researcher

04 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Niles Williamson

The Saudi-led, US-backed assault on Yemen, now entering its sixth month, continues to take a devastating toll on the country’s civilian population. At least 36 workers were reported killed Sunday after a Saudi-led coalition jet fighter bombed a water -bottling factory in the Abs District of Hajjah Governorate.

Local residents said that dozens of workers had been killed and reported pulling charred remains from the rubble of the plant. “The process of recovering the bodies is finished now. The corpses of 36 workers, many of them burnt or in pieces, were pulled out after an air strike hit the plant this morning,” Hajjah resident Issah Ahmed told Reuters in a phone interview.

This bloody war crime was the latest in a string of airstrikes that have resulted in mass civilian casualties in the Saudi-spearheaded war against the Houthi militias and allied forces. A bombing raid on a dairy and juicing factory in the western port city of Hodeida in April killed at least 37 workers and injured 80 others. Since the anti-Houthi offensive began in March, more than 4,300 have been killed, at least half of them civilians.

Residential neighborhoods, factories, ports, schools, hospitals and markets have all been the targets of Saudi-led bombing raids as the coalition, fully backed by the US government, seeks to bring President Abd Rabbuh Monsour Hadi back to power.

Amnesty International released a report last month which documented potential “war crimes, by all parties,” including coalition bombing raids on a school being used as a shelter, a food market and a workers’ dormitory.

With the support of military forces loyal to former dictator Ali Abduallah Saleh, the Houthi militias consolidated control over much of Yemen’s western provinces in March, including the southern port city of Aden. They forced Hadi to flee the country for Saudi Arabia, where he established a government-in-exile. The Saudis have charged that Iran is backing the Houthis, though Iran has denied providing military equipment.

Facilitated by US military intelligence, logistical support and air tankers to refuel jets, the campaign of nearly continuous airstrikes has been supplemented in recent weeks by a growing ground invasion involving troops from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as well as Yemeni forces trained by the Saudis.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that troops from the UAE have been secretly leading the fight in southern Yemen since late July. Nearly 100 UAE troops with unmarked armored vehicles were deployed in Aden and have played a key role in pushing the Houthis out of the city.

The coalition is reportedly preparing a bloodbath in northern Yemen by setting up a three-pronged assault from Saada province in the north, Marib province in the east and Jawf province in the northeast. Several thousand UAE and Saudi forces, along with battle tanks and other armored vehicles, have already been deployed inside Yemen.

The Saudi coalition is reportedly calculating that a successful assault on the Houthi stronghold of Saada would deal a fatal blow to the anti-Hadi forces and would facilitate the recapture of Sanaa.

Over the last week, Saudi coalition ground forces have also begun entering Yemen from the northeast and have reached the oil-rich Marib province, which provides Sanaa with electricity and fuel. It is also adjacent to the Al Jawf Governorate, where Houthi forces have reportedly set up trenches and planted mines in preparation for a ground battle.

The Saudi-backed Asharq Al Awsat reported on Monday that Saudi-led ground forces have initiated the third prong of the ground invasion, moving troops into Saada province. The troops have entrenched in tribal areas outside of the city of Saada, while Saudi planes have been dropping leaflets encouraging residents to support the reinstatement of the Hadi government.

The UN and other humanitarian groups have released repeated statements over the last five months warning of a dire humanitarian crisis in Yemen as a result of the unrelenting aerial assault and blockade of the country. The UN envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, warned in June that the country was “one step away from famine.”

More than a million people have been displaced by the fighting. Approximately 21 million people, or 80 percent of the total population, lack access to clean drinking water and are in need of some additional form of humanitarian aid.

International charity Save the Children warned on Sunday that Al Sabeen Hospital, the main women and children’s hospital in Sanaa, is faced with imminent closure due to a shortage of medical supplies and fuel for power generators. The hospital has already run out of IV fluid and ready-made food for malnourished children.

“The situation is absolutely critical. We don’t have time to wait for stocks and fuel to come in. If this hospital closes, children and women will die,” the hospital’s deputy manager, Halel Al Bahri, told Save the Children. “The numbers of those who die will be much higher than those being killed by the bombs and the fighting.”

Since the Saudi-led assault began earlier this year, the number of people in Yemen who lack access to basic health care has increased by 40 percent to 15.2 million. The number of children admitted to Yemeni hospitals for malnutrition since March has skyrocketed by 150 percent. It is estimated that more than half a million children will suffer from severe acute malnutrition by the end of the year.

01 September, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Countercurrents.org

Aylan Kurdi has become the symbol of the refugee crisis in Europe. He was washed up dead on the shores of Bodrum in southwest Turkey. The three year old toddler drowned in the Mediterranean Sea along with his five-year-old brother Galip and mother Rihan. The father, Abdullah, survived. The pictures of Aylan lying dead on the beach went viral on social media and now he has become a symbol of refugee crisis in Europe.

The boys were on one of two boats that departed Bodrum early on Wednesday and were headed for the Greek island of Kos. Both boats sank shortly after leaving the Turkish coast. Twelve bodies have been recovered from the sea, including those of five children. Nine people survived and two are still missing, presumed drowned.

The family, Kurds from Kobane in north Syria, fled their homes after the Islamic State group had besieged their town earlier this year.

Teema said the family had been hoping to eventually reach Canada – after travelling to Europe. Earlier this year the family had a refugee application rejected by Canadian authorities due to complexities around them having already fled from Syria to Turkey.

The United Nations has reported that at least 230,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war, although the actual toll is thought to be much higher. More than 6.5 million people out of a population of 22 million have also been displaced by the conflict.

More than 2,600 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe this year alone

More than 350,000 people have arrived in Europe so far this year seeking sanctuary from war or persecution , mostly from Lybia and Syria, two countries destoryed by USA and its NATO allies.

03 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Afro-Middle East Centre

This article examines Pakistan’s decision to abstain from joining the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and considers the impact of this decision on the future of Pakistani relations with Saudi Arabia. It pointedly asks whether the Yemeni war will result in Pakistan pivoting towards Iran, and weakening its ties to the Saudi kingdom, particularly in the context of the recently-concluded Iran nuclear deal.

Allegedly, the current Saudi-led onslaught on Yemen has already caused destruction that resembles the destruction wrought in Syria over the last four years. However, the war in Yemen, like the Syrian crisis, cannot simply be viewed through a domestic Yemeni lens, for Yemen has become a playground for various regional forces carving out their alliances and rivalries within the matrix of the greater Middle East cold war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. These alliances, rivalries and the intentions of the various actors – including those who are geographically only peripherally attached to this regional system – must be understood within the framework of this confluence of multiple aims and objectives.

Two of those peripherally-attached countries are Turkey and Pakistan. While Turkey straddles the boundaries between the Middle East and Europe and Central Asia, and Pakistan occupies the area separating the Middle East from South Asia, both countries are often inextricably drawn into the conflictual Middle East regional system, usually despite their best efforts. The war in Yemen is illustrative of these dynamics. Pakistan’s response to the Saudi war on Yemen is a good recent case to explore these machinations.

Pakistani-Saudi relations
The history of Pakistan-Saudi Arabia relations is long, and has frequently been described by roleplayers in both countries as strong and dependable. The close collaboration between the two states in the 1980s against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan is often cited to substantiate this point. Additionally, the Pakistani ruling party and its prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, also enjoy exceptionally close ties with the Saudi royal family. When Sharif’s government was overthrown in 1999 by the then-military chief General Pervez Musharraf, Sharif chose Saudi Arabia for his exile, and has since benefited from Saudi largesse, both in his personal capacity and on behalf of Pakistan during his current tenure as prime minister. Examples range from 200 tonnes of dates gifted to Pakistan to a $1.5 billion loan to support the Pakistani economy – both in 2014.

The general Pakistani population also holds the kingdom in high regard, and a recent survey showed that ninety-five per cent of Pakistanis view Saudi Arabia favourably. The prestige that Saudi Arabia claims for itself as the caretaker of the two holiest Islamic sites no doubt plays a significant role in this sentiment. Military cooperation between the two countries is also decades old. Pakistani pilots flew Royal Saudi Air Force jets in 1969 to repel incursions from South Yemen; more than 15 000 Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1980s; and Pakistani troops were deployed to protect the kingdom from Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf war in 1990. Pakistan also assisted Saudi Arabia in providing trainers and anti-aircraft and anti-tank weaponry to Saudi-backed rebels in Syria. And there is much speculation that Pakistan, the only Muslim state with a nuclear arsenal, could include Saudi Arabia under its nuclear umbrella in the event of Iran becoming a nuclear weapons power, or that it might transfer nuclear weaponry or weapons technology to Riyadh.

It was therefore not far-fetched to assume that Pakistan would support Saudi Arabia in Yemen. Expectations for such support were bolstered by Saudi and other Gulf officials, and by a visit of the Pakistani defence minister, Khawaj Asif, to Riyadh as the Sharif government mulled over the level of support it could offer to the Saudis in Yemen. Arab media, especially the Saudi Al-Arabiya channel, were reporting that Pakistan would despatch jet fighters and warships to take part in the Yemeni campaign, Operation Decisive Storm. However, after various high level delegations from Pakistan, including military officials, cabinet members and the Pakistani prime minister had visited and assured the Saudis of Pakistani support, Sharif put the matter to the Pakistani parliament for a decision. In a unanimous decision, the parliament decided to turn down the Saudi request for assistance in Yemen, fearing that it could spark Shi’a-Sunni sectarian violence inside Pakistan. Parliament was also concerned about stretching the army too thinl by engaging in a foreign war while Pakistan itself faced multiple internal insurgencies.

Saudi and Gulf anger
That the Saudis were upset by Pakistan’s stance was obvious to most observers of the two countries, despite Saudi attempts at suggesting that they regarded the Pakistani decision as an issue internal to Pakistan. In contrast, the sharp outburst by the UAE foreign minister, Anwar Gargash, calling Pakistan’s decision to withhold troops ‘contradictory, dangerous and unexpected’ indicated that senior decision-makers within the Gulf Cooperation Council, especially Saudi Arabia, were bitterly disappointed by Pakistan. Thereafter, diplomatic initiatives between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia over the former’s support for the Saudi war in Yemen came to a standstill, despite a meeting between Pakistani president Mamnoon Hussain and the Saudi king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz. The meeting was, at best, symbolic rather than a real effort to evaluate and reinvigorate bilateral relations.

It remains unclear whether Pakistan’s decision on Yemen indicates the country inclining toward Iran as the latter furthers its reconciliation with western countries, and whether a new Pakistani-Iranian relationship will be at the expense of the South Asian state’s previous cosy relationship with Saudi Arabia. It is possible that the decision was simply a demonstration of Pakistan’s desire to chart an independent foreign policy formed solely in its national interests – particularly its concern to contain sectarian tensions internally, as parliamentarians suggested during their five-day deliberations on Yemen. Certain Pakistani commentators would certainly prefer their country to act simply on the basis of its own interests, and not to become embroiled in battles between other Muslim states.

Iran replacing Saudi Arabia?
Caution must be exercised with respect to the question about Pakistan’s allegiances. From the perspectives of the two antagonists – Saudi Arabia and Iran – the battle over Pakistan is most likely azero-sum game, with Pakistan being forced to choose one over the other. After all, Iran freed from sanctions would be able to provide similar kinds of support to Pakistan as Saudi Arabia, especially in terms of oil concessions and economic aid. With Iran expected to receive around $100 billion just from funds held in escrow from past oil sales, it is likely to be able provide cheap oil and aid to Pakistan.

The Pakistan foreign ministry welcomed the Iranian nuclear deal, expressing its desire to expand trade between the two countries, and to continue with the Iran-Pakistan pipeline project, which will likely run from Asalouyeh in the Iranian Southern Pars gas field, through the Pakistani provinces of Balochistan and Sindh, to Karachi and Multan. Multan might also become the site from where the pipeline will extend towards Delhi in India. The pipeline project will go a long way in helping Pakistan solve its energy needs, and will also build on Pakistani collaboration with China, which seems willing to step in and bolster Pakistan in the event of a Gulf or Saudi withdrawal. China is busy constructing the $46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that will link southwestern Pakistan to northwestern China, playing a crucial role in regional integration of China, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Myanmar. Mushahid Hussain, a senior Pakistani political figure and chair of the Pakistan-China Institute, described the project as an integration of South Asia and East Asia into a ‘Greater South Asia’. He provides a window into how the Pakistani foreign policy establishment might be calculating a decreasing dependency on Gulf and Arab partners.

Another, more important, factor that might push Pakistan closer to Iran is security. Pakistan shares a 904 kilometre-long border with Iran which has seen them cooperate in addressing the Balochi insurgency affecting both countries for decades. Further, because of Iran’s influence in Afghanistan and among politicised Shi’a groups in Pakistan, it represents a force that Pakistan would not want to convert into an enemy. The same cannot be said of Saudi Arabia. While it does have influence over certain Sunni militant groups in Pakistan, most of them depend on logistical support from within the Pakistani security establishment. In other words, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the former is more capable of negatively affecting Pakistan’s security. Iran has a ready network of suppliers to funnel weapons into Pakistan through Balochistan, a route that is not available to Saudi Arabia.

It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that Pakistan might begin inclining more towards Iran than in the past. Saudi Arabia could play the card of drying up Pakistan’s foreign remittances – as it has done with Yemenis and Somalis previously – by forcefully repatriating Pakistani workers in the kingdom. Their wages remitted to Pakistan represent nearly one-third of its total remittances. Together with remittances from Pakistanis in the UAE, the combined amount accounts for half of the country’s annual total of $18.4 billion in remittances. But it is doubtful whether Saudi Arabia would be ready for such a shock to its economy; Pakistanis represent the second largest group of foreign workers employed in the kingdom after India.

Another indicator that might give a better sense of how Pakistan is juggling its relationships with Iran and Saudi Arabia is the level of diplomatic activity with Iran. While Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have had no high profile exchanges – except for the meeting between Salman and Sharif – since the Pakistani decision to remain neutral on Yemen, the Iranian foreign minister, Javed Zarif, visited Pakistan in April as well as early August; the April visit was while the Pakistani parliament was deliberating on whether to support the Saudi campaign in Yemen. And, earlier this week, on 25 August, a technical delegation from Iran’s commerce ministry landed in Pakistan to explore the possibility of increasing the bilateral trade between the two countries to $5 billion.

Conclusion
Pakistan’s decision to stay out of the Yemen conflict is not simply based on concerns that Shi’a-Sunni sectarian tensions might increase within its populace, or that it could not afford to distract its security apparatus away from the various insurgencies within its borders. Rather, it represents a larger regional shift that will likely see Pakistan pivot away from Saudi Arabia into Iran’s embrace, a move that will also be supported by China. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies must be sensing this shift. What steps Saudi Arabia will take to counter this possibility in Pakistan and other countries as Iran grows in confidence remains to be seen. Within the Middle East regional system, the Saudis have played on the hackneyed fault lines of Arab-vs-Persian and Sunni-vs-Shi’a in order to rope in countries such as Jordan and Egypt, as witnessed in the Yemen campaign. Is this a viable option, however? Instead of visiting destruction upon a country, as in Yemen, in order to gain the upper hand in its cold war with Iran, Saudi Arabia might be better off engaging Iran directly. Pakistan seems to be choosing a less hostile course – even if it is not a preferred method of Saudis policymakers. If other countries in the region, especially Turkey, follow the same course, Saudi Arabia might quickly find itself running out of options in its bid for regional hegemony over and against Iran.

28 August 2015