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By Ramzy Baroud

There is a witch-hunt in the British Labor Party. Britain’s Opposition party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is being hounded for not rooting out alleged anti-Semitism in his party. Those leading the charge are pro-Israel Zionists and their supporters within the party, members who are mostly allied with the former Prime Minister, the largely discredited pro-war Tony Blair. The Blairites are quite unhappy that Corbyn, who won the party’s leadership election last September with a landslide victory is a non-elitist politician, with a deep-rooted grassroots activist past, and, yes, a strong stance for Palestinian rights.

Corbyn has been subjected to all sorts of attacks and ridicule from his own party, many members of which have been busy plotting to push him out, but remained hesitant because of his popular appeal. The Labor party had, in fact, lost much of its credibility since the days of Blair’s ‘New Labor’ and following the US lead in waging an immoral and illegal war on Iraq. Blair’s supporters changed the priorities of the party, which was ‘labor’ by name only. Corbyn’s advent galvanized young people around fresh ideals, and renewed the shaky faith of the party’s traditional supporters.

But since he became a leader, the man’s agenda of anti-corruption and greater equality in Britain has been slowed down, or even entirely halted, by some most bizarre controversies. He was attacked over such things as his supposed poor sense of fashion, his alleged lack of patriotism, and more. The attacks have been so ridiculous, yet omnipresent, that they became the subject of popular memes and much satire.

And when it all failed, he was hit with another manufactured controversy, that of alleged anti-Semitism within his own party. The recent attacks have been the most organized, yet. They involve Israel supporters, British politicians, the media and other sources.

The media has tried to paint him as an embattled leader who is not able to control the uncontainable Jewish hate oozing from his party members.

British Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, known for his strong support of Israel joined the fray, charging that the lid has been lifted on bigotry within Labor and that investigation into anti-Semitism must be more than a ‘sticker plaster.’

The investigation and the preceding outcry of anti-Semitism, however, targeted those who were critical of Israel, not Jews, in general, or Judaism. Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, who was suspended from Labor for suggesting links between the Nazi party and early Zionists, was not making any reference to Jews per se, and certainly not to Judaism. Arguably, if he was wrong, then it is a mere question of history, not race.

In its coverage of the controversy, even the BBC, delinks both concepts:

“Anti-Semitism is ‘hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people’, while “Zionism refers to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East.”

Indeed, the first is a racist ideology, while the latter is an entirely political and historical question, especially since early Zionists were largely atheists. Israel’s Zionist-Jewish contradiction was phrased skillfully by Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, when he wrote:

“The secular Jews who founded the Zionist movement wanted paradoxically both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a justification for colonizing Palestine; in other words, they did not believe in God but He, nonetheless, promised them Palestine.”

But the Rabbi, and many of those who unscrupulously joined the charge against Labor pretend that Zionism, a late 19th century political movement is the same as Judaism, a religion that dates back millennia.

However, there is nothing new here, and the manufactured ‘controversy’ is hardly limited to Britain or the Labor Party.

The message that Israeli hasbara (propaganda) has been steadily sending to its critics since the establishment of Israel over the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in May 1948: if you are critical of Israel, however slightly, you are a certified anti-Semite. If it happens that you are Jewish, then you are a self-hating Jew, and if you are an Arab, you must abandon the idea that you are, yourself, Semitic and Arab, by merely opposing Israel’s ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians who are all anti-Semites, anyway.

I doubt there is a self-respecting Palestinian intellectual who has not fended against accusations of being anti-Semitic for merely advocating Palestinian rights, and demanding accountability of Israeli violations of human rights and war crimes.

Many independent Jewish voices, too, have found themselves on the defensive, although within a different category. The classification of a ‘self-hating Jew’ has been ever so popular these days, especially as many Jewish activists have righteously joined the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). The once-marginalized voices are now a large and growing crowd.

Unable to defend Israeli action based on logical arguments, international law or common sense, Israel’s supporters use other means, threats, smears and vilifications, and also by fabricating non-existing controversies. And no one is immune.

Daniel Greenfield engaged in a bizarre diatribe in the Jewish Press on March 8, in an article entitled: “Bernie Sanders is NOT a Jew”. In the same familiar tone of distortion and self-pity, Greenfield theorized: “While Bernie Sanders invoked his last few drops of Jewishness and the Holocaust in support of a Muslim anti-Semite’s cry bullying, he didn’t feel the need to do so for the Jewish State when it actually stood on the verge of destruction. Instead, he had called for denying arms to Israel before the Yom Kippur War.”

How about the United Nations, which has failed to enforce a single resolution of the dozens of resolutions passed to demand justice for the Palestinians and accountability from Israel?

It is an “anti-Semitic circus” according to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The novel designation followed the recent UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC’s) decision to compile a list of international and Israeli companies that do business in illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Despite the fact that the UN is yet to reverse the worsening plight of the Palestinians or advance their cause beyond symbolic gestures, one rarely hears the accusation that the UN is anti-Palestinian, or anti-Arab.

On the other hand, for merely censuring Israeli action by words only, the UN, according to Jennifer Rubin writing in the Washington Post on February 16, “tolerates and, by its silence, condones, anti-Semitism.”

The US government has blindly and unconditionally given credence to that notion, marching to the drumbeat of the Israeli government on every occasion and boycotting international institutions whenever Israel raises the frequently false flag of anti-Semitism.

The matter is not only pertinent to Israel and Palestine. Anyone who dares go against Israel’s interest in the region and around the world is a candidate for the manipulation of Israeli terminology.

Following the Iran nuclear deal between Iran and western powers, conservative commentator, Debbie Schlussel, coined new terminology: ‘Jews in the Name Only’ or JINOs. Those alleged JINOs are the 98 prominent ‘Hollywood Jews’, who backed the Iran deal in an open letter.

By completely shutting the door on any form of criticism of Israel, Zionism, and the censure of its military behavior in the region coupled with the daily violence meted out against occupied Palestinians, Israel has expanded the definition of anti-Semitism to include whole countries, governments, international institutions and millions of independently thinking individuals the world over.

However, not even such deliberate distortion should prevent us from making the differentiation loud and clear: anti-Jewish racism should be condemned as loudly and decisively as Islamophobia and any other form of racial discrimination and bigotry.

However, criticizing violent political movements and the behavior of any state that violates international law and human rights is a moral duty. Israel will not be the exception.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include ‘Searching Jenin’, ‘The Second Palestinian Intifada’ and his latest ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story’. His website is: www.ramzybaroud.net.

12 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Mili Mitra

March 15 marked the beginning of a landmark human-trafficking trial in Thailand in which 92 defendants are charged with establishing a transnational trafficking network to smuggle refugees from Bangladesh and Myanmar into Malaysia. Authorities discovered the network last year when a mass grave containing 36 bodies was unearthed in southern Thailand. The outfit is implicated in widespread kidnappings and killings in the current trial, the results of which may shed light on the lucrative shadow-industry of refugee smuggling and slavery across Southeast Asia.

The human-trafficking networks in the region are remarkably well-organized and ruthless, and this particular cartel was especially infamous for the scale and brutality of its operations. The support of high-ranking army officials, including Lieutenant-General Manas Kongpaen, allowed its members to act with exceptional impunity. Its victims, primarily persecuted Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, were forced on to rickety and overcrowded ships that set sail south from the Bay of Bengal on a notoriously perilous journey: In 2015 alone, an estimated 370 refugees died from starvation, disease and abuse before reaching land. Moreover, instead of being released when they reached the Thai-Malaysian border, the refugees were held captive in inhumane detainment camps in the jungles. The traffickers then demanded ransoms from the refugees’ families, threatening to kill or enslave those whose relatives were unable to pay.

Under fire from the United States and international humanitarian organizations, the Thai government has committed to expediting the trial and reaching a verdict by the end of the year. An accelerated verdict, however, is not enough to guarantee justice or tackle the underlying societal problem. The trial itself has been plagued by questions regarding its legitimacy and comprehensiveness. Although 153 arrest warrants were released, the government is only pressing charges against 92 defendants, sparking concerns that many traffickers have managed to evade punishment. International organizations have also cast doubts over the safety of over 300 Rohingya refugees serving as witnesses in the case; many of these witnesses were placed in government shelters for the duration of the trial, but some have already disappeared. Moreover, the trial should not be heralded as a one-stop solution to the greater issue of human trafficking in the region — despite the size and brutality of this operation, it was just one of many
human-trafficking rings operating in the area.

The traffickers have exploited the distinctively dire situation of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. The ethnic group has long been persecuted for speaking a little-known Bengali dialect and practicing Islam in the Buddhist-majority country. The Rohingya originally arrived in Myanmar from the neighboring country of Bangladesh, but have lived in Myanmar for generations. There are approximately one million Rohingya living in the country, making up 2 percent of the nation’s population, and yet the vast majority of these people have been forced to live in ghetto-like conditions in the poverty-stricken, northwestern state of Rakhine. With little hope for employment or upward mobility, many have been repressed and imprisoned in internment camps for over thirty years. Based on these apartheid-like conditions, human rights organizations like Amnesty International consider the Rohingya the “most persecuted refugees in the world.”

Yet the Rohingya are not just fleeing persecution; they also seek to escape the obliteration of their identity. Under Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law, Rohingya are not granted citizenship. They are instead classified as Bengali immigrants, allowing for the possibility of deportation. To be considered citizens, these “immigrants” are asked to prove that they have lived in Myanmar for 60 years, which is often impossible given that the Rohingya initially crossed the border into Myanmar without paperwork and were subsequently denied these documents. Furthermore, the Myanmar government has created a hierarchy of citizenship that makes the Rohingya that have been able to obtain non-immigrant citizen status “associate” (or second-class) citizens without voting rights. Therefore, deprived of nationality and unable to cross borders legally to escape persecution, the Rohingya are forced to rely on traffickers.

The issue has come under the spotlight since anti-Rohingya violence spiked in 2012. After the alleged rape of a Buddhist woman by a Rohingya in Rakhine, the state’s dominant Buddhist population retaliated by massacring approximately 200 Rohingya Muslims. The violence then escalated in 2013, leading to a deadly humanitarian crisis. In fact, state forces sent to defuse tensions have been implicated in crimes against the Rohingya, to the extent that Human Rights Watch has accused the government of committing ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This crisis has pushed many Rohingya to flee to the ostensible safety of Malaysia via Thailand, leaving themselves at the mercy of traffickers. The Myanmar government has not undertaken any effort to eliminate trafficking, tacitly perpetuating the exodus of Rohingya Muslims from the nation with their discriminatory policies and lenient treatment of traffickers.

However, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar is only the beginning of the problem since, as the recent trial against the Thai trafficking ring has shown, the Rohingya people are further victimized by the barbaric conditions in ships and border camps. Many survivors of these horrific journeys have spoken out against the merciless behavior of the traffickers: The smugglers are reported to use torture and abuse to subdue the captive refugees while refugees are malnourished and prone to disease from the lack of hygiene in camps.

It is common for the traffickers to extort money from the asylum seekers at camps and on ships as well. They often demand exorbitant fees of around $1,200 for transportation to Malaysia alone, and then extract even more by threatening the refugees with abuse or death. Safe arrival in Malaysia is also not guaranteed: Previously, traffickers have left refugees stranded off the coasts of Indonesia or Malaysia and last May, thousands of refugees were abandoned on the high seas in flimsy wooden boats with limited food and water — the death toll from the incident remains unknown.

And refugees’ troubles don’t end even if they reach their destination safely: although the refugees see Malaysia as a safe haven with opportunities for prosperity and equality, the reality of their reception often fails to meet the expectation. Over 75,000 Rohingya refugees currently live in Malaysia, but they have been relegated to a marginalized existence on the fringes of Malaysian society. As refugees, they are given little recognition or government support: They are unable to register for government schooling or obtain legal jobs, forcing them into subsistence living once again. In particular, the restrictions on education are an egregious violation of the Convention on the Rights of a Child, which protects children against discrimination regardless of immigration status. There are also processing lags at the UN office in Kuala Lumpur, delaying the distribution of refugee accreditation and identification cards needed for job applications, which further sidelines Rohingya refugees from legitimate recognition in Malaysia.

Crucially, in the last year, Malaysia’s response to Rohingya refugees has become even more alarming. The government has taken an exclusionary approach, publicly announcing that the refugees should be “turned back” and returned to their country. The country’s deputy prime minister even claimed that Malaysia has no responsibility to rescue asylum seekers stranded off its coast unless their boat was capsizing. While Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and is therefore not obligated to accept all asylum seekers, its recent turnaround violates the principle of non-refoulement, or not returning refugees to the country of their persecution, which can be argued to be customary international law. Since last May, several Malaysian politicians have made incendiary statements against signing the Refugee Convention to prevent a greater influx of Rohingya; one minister even questioned the refugees’ reasons for fleeing to Malaysia and classified them as “threats” to local businesses. If these trends continue in one of the largest safe havens for the Rohingya in the region, their very existence is likely to come under exceedingly greater risk.

Thus far, the global response has been limited and misguided. While the plight of the Rohingya has come into the media spotlight recently, there has been little coordinated effort to mitigate the crisis. The focus of the international humanitarian community has revolved around assigning blame and censuring the oppressive Myanmar government. Many activists and politicians have called for Myanmar to institute full and equal citizenship for the Rohingya. While this may certainly be the ideal solution, the rhetoric has distracted from the ongoing and immediate consequences of widespread trafficking and exploitation in the region. The reality of this problem extends further than within the borders of Myanmar, which means that other Southeast Asian states must cooperate to find a solution for what is rapidly becoming a regional crisis.

The current trial in Thailand implies that there is some hope for Rohingya who have managed to survive persecution in Myanmar or refugees who have survived their hazardous journey to Malaysia. The Thai government is cracking down on trafficking rings that operate on its borders after a US government report named Thailand one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. The UN and EU have also reported that the flow of Rohingya refugees out of Myanmar has slowed since the election of a new government, as many Rohingya are waiting to judge the policy platform of the newly-elected regime. But unless there is greater security and support for Rohingya in Myanmar and increased rehabilitation of these refugees across Southeast Asia, the Rohingya refugee crisis will continue to be one of the greatest and most overlooked humanitarian disasters of our time.

Mili Mitra ’18 is an International Relations concentrator and a senior staff writer for BPR.

4 May 2016

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By Max Blumenthal / AlterNet

Chris Mullins’ 1982 political thriller, A Very British Coup, introduced British readers to a Marxist former steelworker named Harry Perkins who sends his country’s political elite into a frenzy by winning a dramatic election for prime minister. Desperate to foil his plans to remove American military bases from British soil, nationalize the country’s industries and abolish the aristocratic House of Lords, a convergence of powerful forces led by MI5 security forces initiate a plot to undermine Perkins through surveillance and subterfuge. When their machinations fail against a resolute and surprisingly wily politician, the security forces resort to fabricating a scandal, hoping to force him to abdicate power to a more pliable member of his own party.

Adapted into an award-winning 1988 television miniseries, Mullins’ script closely resembles the real-life campaign to destroy the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. A left-wing populist with pronounced anti-imperialist leanings, Corbyn is seen by his opponents in much the same light as Perkins was in Mullins’ treatment: “You’re a bad dream. I could always comfort myself with the thought that socialism would never work,” Percy Brown, an aristocratic MI5 chief sworn to the prime minister’s ruin, told his enemy. “But you, Mr. Perkins, could destroy everything that I’ve ever believed in.”

After years as a backbencher in parliament railing against Tony Blair’s business-friendly agenda and mobilizing opposition to the invasion of Iraq, Corbyn emerged last summer as a frontrunner for Labour leadership. Against vociferous opposition, he stunned his opponents with a landslide victory, winning nearly 60% of the vote with help from a grassroots coalition of Muslim immigrants, blue-collar workers and youthful left-wing activists.

Just as Corbyn’s success stunned the party establishment, his rise infuriated the country’s powerful pro-Israel forces. Corbyn’s parliamentary office has served as a hub for the Palestine solidarity movement and his name has been featured prominently on resolutions condemning Israeli atrocities. At an election forum convened last year by the Labour Friends of Israel, Corbyn redoubled his support for key components of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that is pressuring Israel to respect the human rights of Palestinians while Blair’s favored candidate, Liz Kendall, said she would fight it with “every fiber in my body.”

Just after Corbyn’s victory, Chris Mullins predicted that Labour’s new leader would face a blizzard of smears not unlike the kind Perkins confronted. “The media will go bananas, of course,” Mullins told the Independent. “There will be attempts to paint [Corbyn] as a Trot[skyite]. I think that may already have started. Every bit of his past life will be raked through and every position he has ever taken will be thrown back under him. Former wives and girlfriends will be sought out. His sanity will be questioned.”

Distracting from inequality

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron set the tone for the coming smear campaign when he tweeted a day after Corbyn’s election, “The Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.”

It was around this time that allegations about Labour’s “antisemitism problem” began to gain steam. As this week’s local elections approached, the chorus of outrage erupted into the mainstream, with outlets from the Daily Mail—the tabloid still owned by the Rothermere family that supported the British Union of Fascists and expressed admiration for Hitler during the 1930s—to the liberal Guardian howling about a plague of Jew hatred spreading through the ranks of Labour since it opened up to the so-called Corbynistas. Even the Israeli government has gotten in the act, with its ambassador denouncing Corbyn on national TV while Israel’s Labor Party threatens a boycott of its sister party in the UK.

Behind the manufactured scandal is a real struggle over the future course of Labour. The right-leaning elements empowered by Tony Blair are determined to suppress the influence of an increasingly youthful, ethnically diverse party base that views the hawkish, pro-business policies of the past with general revulsion. With the British middle class in shambles after three decades of constant benefit cuts and a new generation in open revolt, Labour’s Blairite wing has embraced a cynical strategy to shatter the progressive coalition that brought Corbyn to power.

By branding the solidarity with the Palestinian cause flourishing among British Muslims and radical leftists as a form of antisemitism, the elements arrayed against Corbyn have managed to manufacture a scandal that supersedes more substantive issues. Right-wing bloggers have been dispatched to trawl through the social media postings of newer Labour members to dredge up evidence of offensive commentary about Israel and Jews or invent it when none exists. In the paranoid atmosphere Corbyn’s foes have cultivated, virtually any fulsome expression of anti-Zionism seems likely to trigger a suspension.

For Prime Minister Cameron, the scandal generated by Corbyn’s intra-party foes provides a chance to distract from the row over his family hiding its wealth in an offshore tax shelter, the chaos over the Brexit debate and the disastrous results of his Islamophobic attacks on the Muslim candidate for London mayor, Sadiq Khan. Among the most eager to join the pile-on was London Mayor Boris Johnson, who claimed “a virus of antisemitism hangs over Labour” just days after ranting that Barack Obama’s “part-Kenyan” heritage gave him “an ancestral dislike of the British Empire.”

Suddenly, Corbyn and allies who launched their careers in grassroots anti-racism struggles find themselves on the defensive about bigotry—and from a few accusers who have actual records of racist rhetoric. With nearly 20 party members already suspended for supposedly antisemitic comments, the witch hunt claimed Jackie Walker, a veteran black-Jewish anti-racism activist and leftwing Labour stalwart. Walker’s sin was harshly condemning the transatlantic slave trade as the “African holocaust.” Filched from her social media postings and publicized by a group called the Israel Advocacy Movement, her comments triggered an immediate suspension. “If they can do this to me,” Walker said, “then they can do it to anyone.”

Those behind the escalating crusade will not be satisfied until they claim Corbyn as well. Indeed, the manufactured scandal around antisemitism appears to be just one step on the way to a bloodless coup.

Fabricating a scandal

Far from the gaze of the mainstream British media, a researcher named Jamie Stern-Weiner has conducted perhaps the most thorough investigation into the claims of an “antisemitism problem” within Labour. Stern-Weiner found that out of 400,000 party members, perhaps a dozen had been suspended for supposedly antisemitic remarks.

Surveying the individual cases, he discovered that many, if not most, of the offending comments related to Israel and Israeli policy, not Jews per se. Stern-Weiner went on to demonstrate that Guido Fawkes, the right-wing gossip blogger responsible for a substantial number of the antisemitism outrages that erupted in the British media, had doctored passages from Labour members’ social media postings to make them appear more offensive than they actually were.

“The chasm between this proffered evidence and the sweeping condemnations which have appeared in the press…is truly vast,” Stern-Weiner concluded. “Even were all the above charges true, what would it prove? The social media postings of a handful of mostly junior party members have no necessary representative significance, and plainly do not demonstrate widespread antisemitism.”

Antisemitism without evidence

Though British press has framed Labour’s “antisemitism problem” as a recently discovered and entirely organic phenomenon, elements in the party have been pushing it since the race for Labour leadership. And many of the offending social media posts were published during Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014, when the party was under the command of Ed Miliband, a Jew who issued stern criticism of Israel at the time.

The issue gained steam in February, when Alex Chalmers resigned last February as the vice-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club. According to Chalmers, Palestine solidarity activists had taken over his school’s Labour chapter and made life unbearable for Jewish students. He rattled off a litany of incidents that constituted antisemitism in his view. Almost all of them related to Israel, from angry remarks about its government and supporters to chants in support of Hamas. Chief among Chalmers’ grievances was “members of the Executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’” — a shorthand for Zionist that he viewed as the very embodiment of antisemitic rhetoric.

Chalmers provided no evidence to support his inflammatory allegations. And none was required for the outrage to make its way across the Atlantic. Within days of Chalmers’ resignation, his claims were repeated in the opinion section of the New York Times by Roger Cohen, a pro-Israel columnist who favors the permanent forced relocation of millions of Palestinians to countries outside their homeland. Rehashing Chalmers’ unsourced accusations, Cohen proclaimed that the Labour Party had become infected with “an antisemitism of the Left” under the watch of Corbyn.

Unmentioned in Cohen’s column were the ulterior sectarian motives Chalmers had deliberately concealed. As journalist Asa Winstanley revealed, Chalmers had been an intern at BICOM, the main arm of the UK’s pro-Israel lobby, which recently published the following call to arms: “Save your pitch fork for Corbyn.” Chalmers’ online bio noting his position at BICOM was mysteriously deleted around the time he publicized his allegations about antisemitism at Oxford. When Winstanley contacted Chalmers about the internship, he set his Twitter account to “private” and went off the radar.

As Perkins reflected in A Very British Coup, “By the time you prove anything, the damage is done.”

Red Ken’s coup de grace

In late April, the mounting witch hunt claimed its first high-profile victims. First was MP Naz Shah, a rising star in Labour and outspoken Muslim feminist. Shah was outed by a right-wing gossip blogger for promoting a tongue-in-cheek Facebook meme that imagined the geopolitical benefits of moving Israel to the United States. Following her suspension, Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, a standard bearer of the British left who helped lead the major anti-racism campaigns of the 1980s, took to the airwaves to defend Shah. (Livingstone was among the figures who inspired the protagonist Perkins in Mullins’ novel.)

During an indisputably counter-productive and possibly alcohol-influenced performance, Livingstone rambled that Hitler had, in fact, provided support to the Zionist movement. Within hours, he too was suspended. As with Shah, the allegations of antisemitism that followed his suspension centered around impolitic commentary related to Israel, not Jews as a whole.

Livingstone might have been guilty of going off script, but he was not necessarily incorrect. The history of Nazi Germany’s robust economic and political collaboration with the Zionist movement throughout the 1930s is widely known and well-documented—even Elie Wiesel has openly reeled at the record of Zionist cooperation with Hitler’s minions.

Ignoring the clear context behind Livingstone’s remarks, the Guardian casually dismissed them as “bizarre,” wondering “what point he was trying to make.” MP John Mann, a backbencher from the right wing of Labour, went a step further, hectoring Livingstone before a gaggle of cameras about his supposed ignorance of Hitler’s evil. “There’s a book called Mein Kampf!” Mann bellowed. “You’ve obviously never heard of it.”

A high-level ‘civil targeted assassination’

Behind the furor over Israel criticism lay a constellation of political forces exploiting the issue to suppress the grassroots insurgency in Labour.

Under Blair’s watch, powerful pro-Israel elements entrenched themselves in the party, reversing the strong support Labour demonstrated for the Palestinian cause during the Thatcher era. Membership in Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), a pro-Israel lobbying faction, became a must for members of parliament seeking ministerial positions under Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown. Among LFI’s most generous funders is Baron Sainsbury of Turville, a reclusive billionaire who is heir to the Sainsbury supermarket fortune. Sainsbury is also a key funder of Progress, the faction established by pro-Blair elements to promote his agenda in the mid-1990s.

Members of both LFI and Progress have led the crusade to paint Corbyn and his allies as a band of raving antisemites. Lord Michael Levy, a former special envoy to the Middle East under Blair and top funder of LFI, has amplified the attacks with a series of media appearances in which he accused Corbyn of weakness in the face of anti-Jewish bigotry. A new and unusual line of attack holds Corbyn responsible for an alleged dearth of donations to Labour from “Jewish donors” like Levy.

The panic that spread through Labour’s right wing on the eve of Corbyn’s election reverberated in Jerusalem, where the Israeli government has vowed a campaign of “targeted civil elimination” (code for character assassination) against Palestine solidarity activists. By taking the helm of Labour, Corbyn became arguably the most high-profile supporter of BDS in the world. The Israeli government had placed him at the top of its political kill list and was bound to open fire at an opportune moment.

The moment arrived on May 1, as the BBC’s Andrew Marr hosted Israeli Ambassador to the UK Mark Regev for a lengthy interview. Anyone who watched international news coverage of any of Israel’s last three assaults on the Gaza Strip will remember Regev as the face and voice of Israeli propaganda, spinning massacres of besieged civilians as acts of self-defense without batting an eye.

Seated across from an exceptionally receptive host, Regev unleashed a tirade against the pro-Corbyn wing of Labour and the left in general, declaring it had “crossed a line” into antisemitic territory, even accusing it of “embracing Hamas.” Playing on the innuendo that has painted Corbyn as a supporter of Islamist insurgents, Regev demanded that Corbyn send an “unequivocal message” rejecting Hamas and Hezbollah. Marr piled on, baselessly claiming that Corbyn’s press secretary, Seumas Milne, had declared “it is a crime for the state of Israel to exist.” It took Marr over half an hour to retract his falsehood. By then, as usual, the damage was done.

The spectacle of a foreign diplomat from a country with one of the world’s worst human rights records injecting himself into a local electoral contest to brand the leader of a major political party as a bigoted cheerleader for terrorism perfectly crystallized the nature of the campaign against Corbyn.

Conceived by failed politicians backed by billionaire Lords and publicized with negligible skepticism by Fleet Street, those leading the charge against Corbyn recalled the devious aristocrats Perkins singled out during his final televised appeal to voters: “You the people must decide whether you prefer to ruled by an elected government or by people you’ve never heard of, people you’ve never voted for, people who remain quietly behind the scenes….”

There has been no such defiant address by Corbyn. Instead, he has convened an independent inquiry into antisemitism within his party, inviting further attacks even as he acceded to political pressure.

Redefining anti-Semitism for political ends

The upcoming investigation will only be the latest in a series carried out in recent years. In January 2015, the Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism published a detailed report outlining its findings on anti-Jewish bigotry in the UK. It was authored by David Feldman, a leading expert on the history of British Jewry and the director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck College.

As soon as he was chosen to serve as vice-chair of the new inquiry, Feldman fell under attack from the pro-Israel press. His opponents were particularly piqued by the working definition of antisemitism he adopted in his 2015 report, which he sourced to Jewish philosopher Brian Klug: “A form of hostility towards Jews as Jews, in which they are perceived as something other than what they are.”

By rejecting the politicized definition introduced by pro-Israel forces, which considers the adoption of “double standards” toward Israel to be a form of anti-Jewish prejudice, Feldman deprived them of their favorite line of attack against sympathizers with the Palestinian cause.

As Stern-Weiner clinically demonstrated, the vast majority of charges against Labour members related to commentary about the state of Israel, not the Jewish people. In order to paint anti-Zionist members of Labour as dangerous antisemites, Corbyn’s opponents have had to resort to conflating Israel with all Jews. Ironically, they have relied on the same conflation that actual antisemites typically employ to indict world Jewry for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.

Jonathan Freedland, a veteran columnist for the Guardian, has been among the most aggressive employers of the conflation tactic. An outspoken liberal Zionist, Freedland has insisted on his right to call out antisemitism as he pleases and without any critical scrutiny from Gentiles—just as “black people are usually allowed to define what’s racism.” By extension, he has sought unlimited license to use “Jews” as a floating signifier for Israel and Zionism, to arbitrarily fuse the Jews of the world with a self-proclaimed Jewish state that only a minority of them inhabit.

Echoing Freedland, Ephraim Mirvish, the chief rabbi of the UK, declared that Zionism “can be no more separate from Judaism than the city of London from Great Britain.” Mirvish insisted that non-Jews were out of bounds by challenging the conflation of Jews with the political project of a Jewish state, ignoring opinion polls showing that a full third of British Jews identity as anti or non-Zionist.

John Mann, the member of parliament who chased Livingstone down a hallway while shouting about Hitler, has said that “it’s clear where the line is” on anti-Jewish bigotry. But during his testimony at an unsuccessful tribunal on “institutional antisemitism” on campus, Mann was harshly criticized for his inability to locate that line.

Even as they avoid putting forward a coherent working definition of antisemitism and exploit identity politics to silence those who do, Labour’s pro-Israel elements are pushing a new rule that could amount to a pro-Israel loyalty oath.

A coming coup?

Back in April, members of the right wing of Labour proposed a rule change that would allow the party to ban members for expressing opinions deemed to be antisemitic. Leading the charge were Jeremy Newmark, chair of the pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement, and Wes Streeting, a member of parliament and former employee of the Blairite Progress faction.

When the furor over Livingstone’s comments about Zionist collaboration with Nazi Germany erupted, the call for a rule change intensified, inadvertently revealing its actual objective: To establish a lever for purging anti-Zionists from the party ranks. If implemented, the rule change could function as a de facto oath of pro-Israel loyalty for new Labour members and might even result in a series of tribunals for those who fail to toe the ideological line.

Though Labour performed far better in the May 5 local elections than a generally hostile media predicted, Corbyn’s opponents are determined to paint him as unelectable, just as they did during last year’s campaign for leadership.

Even before votes were counted, they were dead-set on sacking him. “We have got to get rid of him. He cannot be allowed to continue,” a Labour member described as “moderate” by the Daily Express said on the day of local elections.

The positive results may buy Corbyn some time, but his foes have signaled their intentions. They are determined to bury him in the same way the fictional villain Sir Percy Brown attempted to with PM Harry Perkins. “In South America they’d call this a coup d’etat,” Perkins protested when Brown presented him with scandalous documents forged by his security services.

“But no firing squad,” Brown explained with cool confidence. “No torture, no bloodshed. A very British coup, wouldn’t you say?”

Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project at AlterNet, and the award-winning author of Goliath and Republican Gomorrah. His most recent book is The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. Follow him on Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal.

6 May 2016

http://www.alternet.org/

 

By Eric Zuesse

On May 7th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or German Economic News, headlined, “USA planen mit TTIP Frontal-Angriff auf Gerichte in Europa” or “U.S. Plans Frontal Attack on Europe’s Courts via TTIP,” and reported that, “America’s urgency to sign TTIP with Europe has solid reason: Megabanks must protect themselves from claims by European investors who allege that they were cheated during the debt crisis. … The U.S. Ambassador to Italy has now let the cat out of the bag on this — probably unintentionally.”

In this particular case, the megabank that’s being sued isn’t American but German, Deutsche Bank, which the U.S. Ambassador to Italy has cited as his example to defend, perhaps so as to appeal to Germans to protect their megabanks against lawsuits from foreign investors (such as Italians) who complain. In that case it was investors in the Italian city of Trani, population 53,000. The smallness of the city was an issue the Ambassador raised against the suit’s having been brought there.

Reuters headlined on May 6th, “Italian prosecutor investigates Deutsche Bank over 2011 bond sale”, and reported that, “An Italian prosecutor is investigating Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) over its sale of 7 billion euros ($8 billion) of Italian government bonds five years ago, an investigative source told Reuters. A prosecutor in Trani, a town in southern Italy, is investigating because Deutsche Bank allegedly told clients in a research note in early 2011 that Italy’s public debt was no cause for concern, and then sold almost 90 percent of its own holding of the country’s bonds.” The U.S. bond-rating agencies are also subjects in this suit, because Trani had relied upon their ratings of those bonds.

The Obama Administration (through its Italian Ambassador) seems thus to be saying, in effect, that unless TTIP is passed into law, Europe’s megabanks (and the U.S. bond-rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch) will be able successfully to be sued by cheated investors, just as has been happening with such American banks as JPMorgan/Chase and Goldman Sachs in the United States, which — since TTIP hasn’t yet been in force anywhere, including in the U.S. — were forced to pay billions to cheated investors. Apparently, Obama would be happier if those suits had been impossible in the U.S. The argument here, though only implicitly, seems to be that TTIP is the way to protect megabanks and the bond-rating firms. It concerns specifically the selling of sophisticated derivative investments.

If this is the argument behind the remarks by Obama’s Italian Ambassador, John Phillips, he’s obliquely warning Europeans that unless TTIP gets signed, their megabanks might similarly be forced to pay billions to investors who were cheated. As quoted by Reuters, he said that, in the U.S., it’s “highly unlikely that such a case would be brought outside the major financial centers, where prosecutors have both jurisdiction and expertise in securities fraud prosecutions,” and that megabanks need the protection that’s provided by such prosecutors, since they possess “expertise in securities fraud prosecutions.” Phillips was clearly implying that small-city prosecutors (such as are allowed to prosecute such cases in Europe) aren’t such “experts,” as are needed in order to protect the megabanks. Reuters characterizes Phillips’s argument as asserting, “Italy’s justice system was deterring investors.” However, no clarification of the meaning of that statement was provided by Reuters.

DWN alleges that under the TTIP such a court-issue would probably not even have been raised but would simply have ended before an arbitration panel, in which the aggrieved investors exert no influence and where it would be almost impossible for these investors’ rights to be protected.

Another example is cited, where the German city of Pforzheim successfully sued, at the Federal Court of Justice, the U.S. megabank JPMorgan/Chase, and where that court allowed Pforzheim to seek “accumulated damages of 57 million euros.”

Under TTIP, a megabank fined this way might in turn sue the nation’s taxpayers to restore the megabank’s ensuing loss of profits. If the cheated investors win, taxpayers might thus end up bearing the cheated investors’ losses. Under TTIP, the fined company would be arguing that the law under which it had been fined is in violation of TTIP and thus constitutes a violation of that treaty, so that the violating government is obliged to be paying the fine — the law against fraud would itself be violating the fined company’s rights. If the three-arbitrator TTIP panel rules in the megabank’s favor, the government would need to pay the fine it had assessed against the bank, and no appeals court exists for any of these arbitration-panels’ rulings — these rulings are final. Obama and other proponents of that system, which is called ISDS for Investor State Dispute Settlement, say that it’s a more efficient way of handling such disputes. In international commercial affairs, it not only eliminates appeals courts, it gradually eliminates democracy, by fining the government into ultimate submission to these three-person panels of international-corporate-accountable arbitrators.

On the same basic idea, Benito Mussolini was praised for “making the trains run on time.”
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

08 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Bill Van Auken

Security forces erected heavy concrete blast walls and strung barbed wire across two strategic bridges in the capital of Baghdad Friday as heavily armed troops deployed across the city. The security lockdown was meant to prevent a repeat of the events last Saturday, when thousands of demonstrators stormed the Green Zone, the walled-off seat of the Iraqi government.

On April 30, demonstrators denouncing the Iraqi government’s corruption, failure to provide basic services and inability to prevent terrorist bombings pulled down the massive blast walls surrounding the Green Zone, a high-security enclave created by the US occupation authorities after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They occupied the parliament, breaking up furniture and sending lawmakers fleeing for their lives.

Friday saw no repeat of those dramatic scenes, in large measure because the populist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who called on his supporters to join the siege of the Green Zone last weekend, this time urged them to only protest outside the city’s mosques at the end of Friday afternoon prayers.

Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia waged an insurgency against US occupation troops a decade ago, was called to Iran after the events of last weekend. He had supported the protest ostensibly to further the bid by the US-backed Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, to overhaul the current government with the aim of curbing corruption and introducing more competent governance.

It appeared, however, that Sadr was in less than full control of the protest, which followed a series of largely spontaneous actions demanding that the government provide basic services and denouncing its corruption. Last weekend’s attacks on the parliament and assaults on several legislators expressed the bitter hostility of the masses of Iraq’s impoverished population toward a regime dominated by reactionary exile politicians brought back to the country by the US war of aggression.

The storming of the Green Zone shook the Baghdad regime and has provoked serious consternation in both Washington and Tehran, which are both allied with the Abadi regime in the conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Among the security forces occupying Baghdad’s bridges and major roads on Friday were reportedly three regiments of the elite US-trained counterterrorism police, which had been withdrawn from the battle against ISIS to protect the Iraqi regime from the people of Baghdad. These troops, equipped with armored Humvees armed with machine guns, also took up positions inside the Green Zone itself.

On Thursday night, Prime Minister Abadi delivered a televised speech vowing to prevent any repeat of the storming of the Green Zone. A day earlier, he sacked the officer in charge of security in the fortified enclave, Gen. Karim Abboud al-Tamini, who in an earlier protest had been filmed kissing the hand of Sadr in a sign of loyalty to the Shia cleric.

“We fear that some may take advantage of the peaceful protests to pull the country into chaos, looting and destruction,” Abadi said in his televised remarks. “This is what happened in the attack on the parliament and the MPs.”

At the center of the current crisis is the dispute over the attempt by Abadi to replace incumbent ministers drawn from the various Iraqi political parties with a cabinet of “technocrats.” The proposal is bitterly opposed by the politicians and parties that have benefited from the divide-and-rule system imposed by the US occupation, which accorded political positions and influence based on a religious- and ethnic-based quota system.

Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties all have used their control of different ministries as a means of looting public funds derived from the country’s oil exports, while infrastructure and basic services continued to deteriorate and masses of people were plunged into deepening poverty.

The parliament has blocked Abadi’s appointments, and there are growing calls for his ouster, including from within his own ruling Dawa Party. In one recent parliamentary session, 100 out of the legislature’s 328 members called for the prime minister to resign.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, in large part due to the collapse in oil revenues, which are the source of 95 percent of its budget.

Jan Kubiš, the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Representative to Iraq painted a grim picture of the political situation there in a report Friday to the UN Security Council. He said that the country was engulfed in a “profound political crisis” that will only be worsened by the ongoing escalation of the US-led war against ISIS.

Under conditions in which the government is beset by “paralysis and deadlock,” the envoy said, Iraq’s humanitarian crisis is “one of the world’s worst.”
“Nearly a third of the population—over ten million people—now require some form of humanitarian assistance,” Kubiš said. He warned that the US-led assault now being prepared against the ISIS-held city of Mosul would lead to “mass displacement in the months ahead.”

“In a worst case scenario, more than 2 million more Iraqis may be newly displaced by the end of the year,” the envoy warned.

Adding that “political crisis and chaos” would only strengthen ISIS, the special representative told the Security Council that the “demonstrations are set to continue.”

In apparent anticipation of deepening unrest, the Pentagon rushed an additional 25 US Marines to Baghdad to beef up the security force guarding the US Embassy. Located in the heart of the Green Zone, the heavily fortified embassy is the largest such facility in the world, built at a cost of over $750 million and occupying a space roughly equivalent to that of Vatican City.

The political crisis in Baghdad is unfolding even as the US steadily escalates its military intervention in Iraq. The increasingly direct involvement of US troops in the fighting was underscored by the announcement Tuesday of the death of a Navy SEAL in combat with ISIS fighters in the north of the country. And it was announced Friday that US Apache attack helicopters will be sent into combat imminently.

What the simmering protests make clear is that ISIS is merely one of the symptoms of the catastrophe created by the US war of aggression begun in 2003, which claimed the lives of over a million Iraqis and left an entire society in ruins.

 

07 May, 2016
WSWS.org

By Chandra Muzaffar

Tan Sri Adenan Satem’s huge across the board electoral mandate enables him to form a truly mutl-ethnic government reflective of Sarawak’s rich cultural and religious diversity. In the last two years since becoming Chief Minister many of his policies and pronouncements have borne testimony to his inclusive approach to society. Some of them are a continuation of what his predecessors, especially Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud, had done in their endeavour to preserve inter-ethnic harmony. By giving special emphaisis to ‘respect’ among, and ‘equality’ for, all Sarawakians , Adenan has helped create an atmosphere that is conducive for cohesiveness and solidarity within the state.

In the next five years he has to translate this into action programmes. One of his major challenges is to address the socio-economic situation of the large non-Muslim bumiputra population, a significant segment of whom remain deprived and disadvantaged. Raising their standard of living is a vital prerequisite for strengthening inter-ethnic unity. This calls for concrete measures that go beyond educational opportunities and acquisition of skills and target their low incomes and lack of asset ownership.

Adenan, it is hoped, will also attempt to endow greater meaning to Kuching’s status as ‘Bandaraya Perpaduan’ , the City of Unity’. It would be wonderful if more public parks, and sports and recreational facilities could be built to enhance interaction among the city’s mutli-ethnic inhabitants. Meanwhile, Yayasan 1 Malaysia( Y1M) which had initiated the conferment of the City of Unity title upon Kuching is in the process of seeking global recognition for Kuching’s status as arguably the world’s first City of Unity!

There are other challenges that Adenan faces which are also related indirectly to unity. His pursuit of greater autonomy for Sarawak within the context of the Malaysian Federation which has the overwhelming support of the people of Sarawak will undoubtedly reinforce solidarity among the different communities. The Federal Government has promised to respond positvely to the Sarawakian demand. Devolution of power and the decentralisation of authority will not undermine the unity of the Federation. On the contrary, there are a number of examples which show that devolution and decentralisation properly done within a democratic, constitutional framework will eventually strengthen the bond between Centre and State. Canada is a case in point. It is when the desire for control and dominance expressed through political and bureaucratic centralisation takes precedence over everything else that a federation ceases to function as it should.

If autonomy and concomitant state rights were crucial in the 11th Sarawak state election, so was another underlying factor which perhaps explains to an extent the entire electoral outcome. Adenan showed how important trust in leadership is in any society — especially in a multi-ethnic society. Because Adenan commanded the trust of each and every cultural and religious community in Sarawak he was able to emerge as a rallying-point for the people as a whole. He was, in other words, the glue that held the different communities together. And what gave that glue that unique power was trust.

Retaining and perhaps increasing the people’s trust in him will be Adenan’s greatest challenge in the coming years. In gaining and sustaining the people’s trust, the Chief Minister and his team should never ever compromise their integrity. It is their integrity, their honesty in governance, that the people will use as their yardstick in deciding whether they can continue to trust their leaders or not. Once integrity is gone, the people’s trust will also evaporate.

In order to enhance integrity, various measures — all of which have been proposed before by a number of us — should be undertaken. Apart ensuring through legislation that state leaders declare their assets and liabilities and those of their kith and kin in a register that is accessible to the public, Adenan should also bar close relatives of State Government Ministers and Assistant Ministers from bidding for any state project or contract that requires the approval of the State Cabinet. This rule should also apply to the top brass in the state public services. The role of proxies, agents and middle-men in procurement exercises should also be curbed if not eliminated altogether. Equally important is effective enforcement of whatever laws, rules and procedures that are formulated.

To ensure that integrity triumphs in society, there should be constant vigilance. For that reason, criticism of the powers-that-be should be encouraged. It is the only way to check their wrongdoings. In this regard, preventing certain politicians and activists from entering Sarawak especially during the election campaign period conveyed the impression that the Sarawak state leadership was averse to evaluation and scrutiny.

Now more than ever before scrutiny has become imperative. The ruling Barisan Nasional commands a huge majority in the State Assembly. It has massive, mammoth power.

In this regard, Tan Sri Adenan should perhaps recall the wise words of a Malaysian leader of integrity who sought to curb corruption. After the Barisan Nasional’s 1978 election victory, the then Prime Minister, the late Tun Hussein Onn, remarked, “ Let this victory go to our hearts, not to our heads.”

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Yayasan 1Malaysia.

Petaling Jaya.

9 May 2016.

By Maung Zarni

Myanmar’s Muslim minority, demonised and persecuted for decades, is facing a fresh wave of violence amid media silence.

Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the contemporary world’s most celebrated icons of human rights, non-violence and reconciliation, crossed the line into Myanmar’s world of “Buddhist” Islamophobia. Disturbingly, on BBC Radio Four’s flagship programme, “Today”, she characterised the waves of organised violence and Nazi-like hate campaigns currently being committed by her fellow Buddhists – the lay public and clergy alike – as violence of two equal sides, claiming that Burmese Buddhists live in the perceived fear of the rise of great Muslim power worldwide.

As a revered dissident, Aung San Suu Kyi’s idea of ‘freedom from fear’ inspired millions both in Myanmar and world-wide. I think she herself has succumbed to a different type of fear, namely Islamophobia.

Far from recent waves of violence being horizontal communal violence, the truth is that the country’s Rohingya Muslims – numbering 1.3 million out of the country’s 60 million people – have been the subject of a slowly unfolding genocide. This is the conclusion I have drawn from a three-year study that I have just completed with a researcher colleague at the London-based Equal Rights Trust.

A history of ethnic cleansing

In February 1978, the military-controlled state launched its first large-scale operation in Arakan State (now known as Rakhine) in western Myanmar. This first exodus of an estimated 240,000 into neighbouring Bangladesh, took place long before the West’s “war on terror” against “radical Islam.” The Oxford-educated Nobel Peace Prize laureate whom the majority of Burmese, including Muslims, call “Mother Suu” can only be using what she calls the “great rise of Muslim power” as a convenient excuse.

When Aung San Suu Kyi observed that Myanmar’s Buddhists and Muslims, of diverse ethnic backgrounds, fear one another, she was falsely putting them on a moral parity. Worryingly, she displays deep ignorance of the empirical facts: It is the Muslims that have borne the brunt of death, destruction and displacement. The Rohingya and other Muslims make up more than 70 percent of the victims of violence, which has displaced more than 140,000 in Rakhine State. Anti-Muslim violence spread to 11 different towns elsewhere in the country, resulting in 100 Muslim deaths, displacing 12,000 Muslims, and destroying 1,300 Muslim homes and 32 Mosques.

Since the 1990s, Rohingya Muslims of northern Arakan state have been confined within a web of security grids where they are subject to extreme restrictions of movement, preventing them from accessing adequate healthcare, education and jobs. Summary executions, rape, extortions, forced labour and other human rights atrocities, mostly at the hands of state security forces, are rampant.

Restrictions on marriages and births have resulted in over 60,000 Rohingya children who are not registered or recognised by the Burmese government, in violation of the Rights of Child, hence depriving them of access to basic schooling. In a country that has one of the highest adult literacy rates in Asia, a staggering 80 percent of Rohingya adults are illiterate. The doctor-patient ratio among the Rohingya Muslims is 1 to 75,000 and 1 to 83,000 in the two major ancestral pockets of the Rohingya respectively, as compared with the national average of 1 to 375.

Suu Kyi’s denial of what Human Rights Watch report has called “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity”, deserves international scrutiny. Her wilful silence on the racially-motivated violence against a Muslim minority, that only makes up about 4 percent of the total population, has led to a growing chorus of international criticism.

However, the details of this slow-burning genocide of the Rohingya which has been set in motion as a matter of state policy since 1978, and the more recent anti-Muslim mass violence, again with state impunity, generally play second fiddle in the media, to Suu Kyi’s failure to condemn it.

Media’s silence

The patterns of the systematic elimination of the Rohingya have been largely over-looked by the media over the decades. Even now, it is Suu Kyi, not the ethnic cleansing itself, that the media finds worthy of a headline. Since Myanmar’s military rulers opened up the country – along the Chinese model of capitalism without democratisation – the media and international policy hype has been about Myanmar’s emergence as one of the last remaining lucrative, virgin economic markets. Everything else is secondary to this narrative of Myanmar’s Golden Promise.

The Rohingya and other Burmese Muslims are confronted with threats to their very existence. They are already in a weak position as a very small minority, without leverage in the Burmese economy, polity or society. They pose no existential threat to the Buddhist way of life, national security or sovereignty. Still they are in deep trouble, not only because the country’s “Mother Suu” has, in effect, chosen to side with their societal oppressor, namely well-organised, anti-Muslim racists, at every level of society, but also because governments such as the US and the UK have chosen, out of their own strategic needs and commercial pursuits, to embrace the military leadership that has reportedly backed the Islamophobic perpetrators and hate-preachers.

Maung Zarni, a Visiting Fellow with the Civil Society and Human Security Unit, London School of Economics, is an outspoken critic of neo-Nazi “Buddhist” racism and racist violence in his native Myanmar.

3 November 2013

http://www.aljazeera.com/

By Mary Scully

Aung San Suu Kyi has finally laid her cards on the table. No more bewilderment about why the holder of the Nobel Peace Prize (a worthless honorific most often awarded war criminals), the democracy icon known as “the Mandela of Asia,” the holder of dozens of international honorifics as a champion of human rights has remained dead silent on the genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

Media reports the conflict as primarily a religious one between Muslims & Buddhists but Rohingya have been subject for decades to violent state-sponsored persecution & discrimination conducted by the military, including denial of citizenship (though they have lived in the region for decades), religious persecution, forced labor, land confiscations, arbitrary taxation & various forms of extortion, forced eviction & house destruction, restrictions on travel for health & work, restrictions on marriage, education, & trade. The violence is so extreme & sustained going back decades that hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas flee for asylum to Malaysia & to squalid refugee camps in Thailand & Bangladesh. Myanmar now has forced nearly 150,000 to live in concentration camps.

For years, Suu Kyi dummied up when reporters asked her about the genocide or answered in platitudes urging people to get along with each other or evasions calling for rule of law. Her evasions were taken as diplomacy even though it’s really hard to be a champion of human rights if diplomacy is your schtick. Usually daring & fearlessness are essential qualities of such champions, not cowardice or talking with marbles in your mouth.

But now Suu Kyi is the head of state in what is called (without a hint of sarcasm) ” Myanmar’s first democratically elected government since 1962.” She won that election through a loathsome compromise with the military junta & by supporting their neoliberal policies bringing in foreign investment & mining projects at the expense of farmers & rural workers. Some of those farmers & villagers were way ahead of the rest of the world in understanding her betrayals when they booed her out of town for saying the expropriations of their lands & destruction of the environment were “for the greater good.”

Now the NY Times reports that in a recent meeting, Suu Kyi advised the US ambassador against using the term “Rohingya” to describe the Muslim people of Myanmar because her government does not recognize them as citizens. Using the same kind of marble-mouthed deceits she used to blither to reporters, her representative told the ambassador, “We won’t use the term Rohingya because Rohingya are not recognized as among the 135 official ethnic groups.” He added, “Our position is that using the controversial term does not support the national reconciliation process & solving problems.”

The US government is hardly the champion of human rights in all this. Hillary Clinton & Obama have both made high profile visits to Myanmar & paid homage to Suu Kyi as a human rights advocate. US multinationals are pouring billions of investment into Myanmar. If the US ambassador expresses any concern about genocide against Rohingya, it is only that the genocide not come back to interfere with those investments.

Solidarity with Rohingya Muslims against genocide & for justice means educating about their struggle against genocide & part of that education requires exposing the murderous duplicity & collusion of Suu Kyi.

Mary Scully has fifty years of political activism behind her in the US: antiwar, women’s rights, civil rights, Palestinian solidarity (since 1967), in particular. She is running as an independent socialist candidate for US president 2016.

09 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Paul Craig Roberts

Greenpeace has done that part of the world whose representatives are so corrupt or so stupid as to sign on to the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic “partnerships” a great service. Greenpeace secured and leaked the secret TTIP documents that Washington and global corporations are pushing on Europe. The official documents prove that my description of these “partnerships” when they first appeared in the news is totally correct.

These so-called “free trade agreements” are not trade agreements. The purpose of the “partnerships,” which were drafted by global corporations, is to make corporations immune to the laws of soverign countries in which they do business. Any country’s sovereign law whether social, environmental, food safety, labor protections—any law or regulation—that impacts a corporation’s profits is labeled a “restraint on trade.” The “partnerships” permit corporations to file a suit that overturns the law or regulation and also awards the corporation damages paid by the taxpayers of the country that tried to protect its environment or the safety of its food and workers.

The law suit is not heard in the courts of the country or in any court. It is heard in a corporate tribunal in which corporations serve as judge, jury, and prosecutor.

In other words, the “partnerships” give global corporations the power to overturn democratic outcomes. Allegedly, Europe consists of democracies. Democracies pass laws protecting the environment and the safety of food and labor, but these laws democratically enacted reduce profits. Anything less than a sweatshop, with starvation wages, no environmental protection, no safety legislation for food or worker, can be overturned at will by global corporations under the terms of the “partnerships.”

Only a traitor, a well paid one, could sign such a pact.

In my opinion, corporate taxation can also be overturned as it obviously reduces profits.

The Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific “partnerships” have been conducted in secrecy. The reason is obvious. Had people known how they were being sold out, there would have been a firestorm of protest. The corporate shills and their propagandists in the financial media could deny my revelations, because I had no official documents to release.

The “partnership” agreements are treaties. Under the US Constitution, treaties are the prerogative of Congress, not the prerogative of an executive brance appointed Trade Representative who represents not the people but the corporations seeking the advantage. To avoid the US Constitution, the agreements are defined as non-treaties. You see how the groundwork for corruption is established.

The way it works is that the appointed US Trade Representative “negotiates” with appointed trade representatives of other countries. Any resistance to the deal is overcome with bribes and intimidation. All of the negotiation is conducted in secrecy. When the trade representatives sign on to the deal, it is presented to the legislatures of the countries. The legislators are told that they must approve the pact and not endanger all the hard work that has gone on for so long and that is in everybody’s interest as attested to by all of the bribed and coerced trade representatives.

These “trade pacts” originate in the US, because American global corporations and the American mega-banks are the largest players in the world economy, and the agreements that the corporations walk through the process give the American companies economic hegemony over the countries that sign the agreements. The Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific “partnerships” are tools of US financial imperialism.

Today (May 3, 2016) I debated on Press TV Sean O’Grady, the financial editor of the UK newspaper the Independent. It is extraordinary that O’Grady took a line totally opposite to that of his newspaper. I suggested to him that perhaps he should read his own newspaper.

Today an article in the Independent reported that the leaked “documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US investors the right to sue for loss of profits in their own corporate court system that is unavailable to domestic firms, governments or anyone else. For all those who said that we were scaremongering and that the EU would never allow this to happen, we were right and you were wrong.”

As I understand it, the situation is worse than the article describes. TTIP applies to laws already on the books, such as France’s laws against GMO seeds and food products.

The Independent article continues:

“Today’s shock leak of the text of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) marks the beginning of the end for the hated EU-US trade deal, and a key moment in the Brexit debate. The unelected negotiators have kept the talks going until now by means of a fanatical level of secrecy, with threats of criminal prosecution for anyone divulging the treaty’s contents.

“Now, for the first time, the people of Europe can see for themselves what the European Commission has been doing under cover of darkness – and it is not pretty. The leaked TTIP documents, published by Greenpeace this morning, run to 248 pages and cover 13 of the 17 chapters where the final agreement has begun to take shape. The texts include highly controversial subjects such as EU food safety standards, already known to be at risk from TTIP, as well as details of specific threats such as the US plan to end Europe’s ban on genetically modified foods.

“The leaked texts also reveal how the European Commission is preparing to open up the European economy to unfair competition from giant US corporations, despite acknowledging the disastrous consequences this will bring to European producers, who have to meet far higher standards than pertain in the USA.

“According to official statistics, at least one million jobs will be lost as a direct result of TTIP – and twice that many if the full deal is allowed to go through. Yet we can now see that EU negotiators are preparing to trade away whole sectors of our economies in TTIP, with no care for the human consequences.

“The European Commission slapped a 30-year ban on public access to the TTIP negotiating texts at the beginning of the talks in 2013, in the full knowledge that they would not be able to survive the outcry if people were given sight of the deal. In response, campaigners called for a ‘Dracula strategy’ against the agreement: expose the vampire to sunlight and it will die. Today the door has been flung open and the first rays of sunlight shone on TTIP. The EU negotiators will never be able to crawl back into the shadows again.

“For those of us in the thick of the EU referendum debate, the contempt shown by the TTIP negotiators to the people of Europe is the most potent reminder of the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU institutions.”

You can read the Independent article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ttip-leaks-shocking-what-are-they-eu-us-deal-a7010121.html

The revelations are disconcerting for the British and European peoples. For example, the Independent reports that TTIP could cause the privitazation of the National Health Service and the UK Parliament would be powerless to stop it. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-could-cause-an-nhs-sell-off-and-parliament-would-be-powerless-to-stop-it-says-leading-union-a7006471.html
See also: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-is-ttip-and-six-reasons-why-the-answer-should-scare-you-9779688.html

In our debate Sean O’Grady performed as a shill, a propagandist for the corporate interests behind TTIP. He said that it was a free trade agreement that benefitted everyone just as NAFTA and other such agreements have proved to be the case. Tell that to all the displaced American workers.

He said that it was unfortunate that the secrecy had possibly hurt the agreement’s prospects and that it would have been better if the pact’s provisions had been known as they were negotiated. That way, he said, the agreement would not be threatened by the shock effect of the leaked documents.

O’Grady also claimed that no one has thus far agreed to the pact despite the fact that the representatives have agreed to the pact. Perhaps what he means is that legislatures have not
given their approval.

The headline on the Independent article thinks the leak will prevent approval: “After the leaks showing what it stands for, this could really be the end for TTIP.” If so, O’Grady regards it as a great loss. For the global corporations, of course, not for the peoples it would exploit.

The Greenpeace revelations should deep-six the pact, but I am uncertain. French president Hollande says, provisionally, that France will not sign the pact as it is. In other words, give us some fuzzy language to make it look like we got it fixed.

The EU’s chief negotiator, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, a likely recipient of a large bribe, rushed to the defense of TTIP by declaring Greenpeace to be “flatly wrong.” Bercero’s statement makes no sense. Greenpeace released the official documents. No one denies that the leaked documents are legitimate. So apparently Bercero’s position is that the official documents are wrong. He sounds like a guy working hard for his money.

Bercero, went on to say, according to the BBC, that “it is not correct to say the US is pushing for lowering of the level of protection in the EU.” This is an amazing lie ! Those who are trying to put a good face on the leak themselves admit that this is precisely what the US is trying to do. They claim that the Europeans haven’t yet given in.

It is disingeneous for Bercero or O’Grady or anyone to pretend that TTIP has not been from the very beginning about establishing global corporate hegemony over the governments of democratic countries. I pointed this out when the corporations first made their move. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific “partnerships” are about giving global capitalism immunity from the laws of sovereign countries.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilla Malmstroem is, according to the BBC, “steering the TTIP talks.” Malmstroem, another likely recipient of a large bribe, says: “I am simply not in the business of lowering standards.” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36185746

Her statement is misleading. She is not in the business of lowering standards. She is in the business of making it possible for global capitalism to overthrow all standards, high and low.

From my encounter today with Sean O’Grady, a person whos integrity I no longer respect, I expect the corporate bought-and-paid-for Western financial press and governments to close ranks and discredit the leaked documents as some kind of Greenpeace “conspiracy theory.” Even in my presence, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Wall Street Journal editor, O’Grady had no compunction about misrepresenting to my face the agreement as a good one harmed only by secrecy. If it hadn’t been secret, said O’Grady, it would have been OK.

All of the blather about free trade and tariff reduction is mere cover for the only purpose of TTIP, which is to establish American economic imperialism over the peoples whose governments sold them out for money.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

04 May, 2016
Paulcraigroberts.org

By Eric Zuesse

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books (“Whose Sarin?” and “The Red Line and the Rat Line”) has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the U.S. could invade and overthrow Assad. “By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.” Hersh didn’t say whether these “arms” included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there have been multiple independent reports that Libya’s Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a “rat line” for Gaddafi’s captured weapons into Syria through Turkey. So, Hersh isn’t the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christof Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria” and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that “Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.” And, as if that weren’t enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading U.S. analysts, the Lloyd-Postal report, concluded that, “The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” Obama has clearly been lying.

However, now, for the first time, Hersh has implicated Hillary Clinton directly in this “rat line.” In an interview with Alternet.org, Hersh was asked about the then-U.S.-Secretary-of-State’s role in the Benghazi Libya U.S. consulate’s operation to collect weapons from Libyan stockpiles and send them through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the U.S. invading Syria, as the U.S. had invaded Libya to eliminate Gaddafi. Hersh said:

That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.

This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department’s Libyan operation, Obama’s operation to set up an excuse for the U.S. doing in Syria what they had already done in Libya.

The interviewer then asked:

In the book [Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden, just out] you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets [for the planned U.S. invasion of Syria] provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only — nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure. What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?

Hersh responded by saying that the U.S. tradition in that regard has long been to ignore civilian casualties; i.e., collateral damage of U.S. attacks is okay or even desired (so as to terrorize the population into surrender) — not an ‘issue’, except, perhaps, for the PR people.

The interviewer asked why Obama is so obsessed to replace Assad in Syria, since “The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups”; and Hersh replied that not only he, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “nobody could figure out why.” He said, “Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period.” This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba’ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA coup-plot in 1957 to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA’s first coup had been not just planned but was carried out in 1949 in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds’ oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year. But, there were then a succession of Syrian coups (domestic instead of by foreign powers — 1954, 1963, 1966, and, finally, in 1970), concluding in the accession to power of Hafez al-Assad during the 1970 coup. And, the Sauds’ long-planned Trans-Arabia Pipeline has still not been built. The Saudi royal family, who own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, don’t want to wait any longer. Obama is the first U.S. President to have seriously tried to carry out their long-desired “regime change” in Syria, so as to enable not only the Sauds’ Trans-Arabian Pipeline to be built, but also to build through Syria the Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline that the Thani royal family (friends of the Sauds) who own Qatar want also to be built there. The U.S. is allied with the Saud family (and with their friends, the royal families of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman). Russia is allied with the leaders of Syria — as Russia had earlier been allied with Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and Yanukovych in Ukraine (all of whom except Syria’s Ba’ath Party, the U.S. has successfully overthrown).

Hersh was wrong to say that “nobody could figure out why” Obama is obsessed with overthrowing Assad and his Ba’ath Party, even if nobody that he spoke with was willing to say why. They have all been hired to do a job, which didn’t change even when the Soviet Union ended and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded; and, anyone who has been at this job for as long as those people were, can pretty well figure out what the job actually is — even if Hersh can’t.

Hersh then said that Obama wanted to fill Syria with foreign jihadists to serve as the necessary ground forces for his planned aerial bombardment there, and, “if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’ So, they actually pushed a lot of people [jihadists] to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas.”

However, it’s not actually part of America’s deal with its allies the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic royal families and the fundamentalist Sunni Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, for the U.S. to supply the salaries (to be “paying for them,” as Hersh put it there) to those fundamentalist Sunni jihadists — that’s instead the function of the Sauds and of their friends, the other Arab royals, and their friends, to do. (Those are the people who finance the terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, India, Nigeria, etc. — i.e., anywhere except in their own countries.) And, Erdogan in Turkey mainly gives their jihadists just safe passage into Syria, and he takes part of the proceeds from the jihadists’ sales of stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil. But, they all work together as a team (with the jihadists sometimes killing each other in the process — that’s even part of the plan) — though each national leader has PR problems at home in order to fool his respective public into thinking that they’re against terrorists, and that only the ‘enemy’ is to blame. (Meanwhile, the aristocrats who supply the “salaries” of the jihadists, walk off with all the money.)

This way, U.S oil and gas companies will refine, and pipeline into Europe, the Sauds’ oil and the Thanis’ gas, and not only will Russia’s major oil-and-gas market become squeezed away by that, but Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia, plus the yet-further isolation of Russia (as well as of China and the rest of the BRICS countries) by excluding them from Obama’s three mega-trade-deals (TTIP, TPP & TISA), will place the U.S. aristocracy firmly in control of the world, to dominate the 21st Century, as it has dominated ever since the end of WW II.

Then, came this question from Hersh: “Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?” His interviewer immediately seconded that by repeating it, “So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational.” Hersh replied simply: “I don’t know.” He didn’t venture so much as a guess — not even an educated one. But, when journalists who are as knowledgeable as he, don’t present some credible explanation, to challenge the obvious lies (which make no sense that accords with the blatantly contrary evidence those journalists know of against those lies) that come from people such as Barack Obama, aren’t they thereby — though passively — participating in the fraud, instead of contradicting and challenging it? Or, is the underlying assumption, there: The general public is going to be as deeply immersed in the background information here as I am, so that they don’t need me to bring it all together for them into a coherent (and fully documented) whole, which does make sense? Is that the underlying assumption? Because: if it is, it’s false.

Hersh’s journalism is among the best (after all: he went so far as to say, of Christopher Stephens, regarding Hillary Clinton, “there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel”), but it’s certainly not good enough. However, it’s too good to be published any longer in places like the New Yorker. And the reporting by Christof Lehmann was better, and it was issued even earlier than Hersh’s; and it is good enough, because it named names, and it explained motivations, in an honest and forthright way, which is why Lehmann’s piece was published only on a Montenegran site, and only online, not in a Western print medium, such as the New Yorker. The sites that are owned by members of the Western aristocracy don’t issue reports like that — journalism that’s good enough. They won’t inform the public when a U.S. Secretary of State, and her boss the U.S. President, are the persons actually behind a sarin gas attack they’re blaming on a foreign leader the U.S. aristocrats and their allied foreign aristocrats are determined to topple and replace.

Is this really a democracy?

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

 

01 May, 2016
Strategic-culture.org