The Saudi-led coalition which has invaded Yemen over the past two months is now poised to make a direct assault on the country’s capital city, Sanaa, according to press reports Sunday. An estimated 12,000 troops launched an offensive in Marib province, directly east of the capital.
The coalition is nominally led by exiled Yemeni president Abdrabu Mansur Hadi, who was driven from the country earlier this year by Shiite Houthi rebels and forces loyal to the former longtime ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Yemeni army brigadier general Murad Turaiq, commander of the pro-Hadi forces in Marib province allied with the Saudi-led invaders, declared, “This battle is not a battle for Marib, rather it is the battle for Sanaa.”
Turaiq did not attempt to disguise the leading role of the foreign forces, telling the press that troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE were spearheading the offensive against the Houthi-held positions.
Press reports said the attackers were equipped with US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships and armored vehicles, underscoring the key role of the Obama administration in underwriting and authorizing the latest Middle East bloodbath.
There were accounts of troop reinforcements passing through the Wadia border crossing from Saudi Arabia into Yemen in preparation for the latest offensive. The latest large contingent of foreign troops was 1,000 from Qatar, including armored vehicles and helicopter gunships, and arrived last week.
At least 5,000 people have been killed in fighting in Yemen this year, and millions have been displaced from their homes. One humanitarian agency estimated that 80 percent of the population, more than 20 million people, is now in need of some form of aid, including food, shelter and drinking water.
Saudi and UAE warplanes carried out bombing raids against both Marib province and many targets in Saana over the weekend. The city of two million people has been devastated by repeated attacks by the Saudi-led coalition, which enjoys uncontested control of the airspace over Yemen. At least seven civilians were reported killed Saturday in Sanaa, and another 16 across the country, according to preliminary press accounts.
The civil war in Yemen pits the Houthis and forces loyal to Saleh, who ruled the country for three decades until 2012, against a coalition of reactionary Sunni monarchies, led by Saudi Arabia and including the Gulf sheikdoms of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE, as well as Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan.
The Sunni monarchies portray the Houthis as pawns of Iran, although Iranian support is quite limited and played little role in the offensive which ousted the widely unpopular Hadi regime.
The Hadi government was driven out of Sanaa last fall, fleeing to the southern port city of Aden, then leaving the country entirely and seeking refuge in Saudi Arabia after the rebel forces captured Aden in February. A Saudi-led air war began in March and had little apparent effect on the Houthis’ position, though it destroyed much of the impoverished country’s infrastructure.
The entry of ground forces from the Persian Gulf states, beginning in July, has thrown back the Houthi forces from southern Yemen, with a ragged battle line now running from Taiz, on the Red Sea, east and north around Sanaa and ending at the Houthi stronghold of Sadaa, the northernmost portion of the country.
In addition to the main battle east of Sanaa, there was renewed fighting around Taiz over the weekend, as Houthi rebels sought to improve their position in the divided city, where pro-Hadi forces held government buildings in the city center.
Acting under orders from its Saudi patrons, the Hadi government-in-exile announced Sunday that it would not attend UN-mediated peace talks with the Houthis, which had been schedule to begin this week. An official spokesman said the Houthis must first comply with UN Security Council Resolution 2216, adopted in April, which requires their effective capitulation—recognition of Hadi as president and withdrawal from Sanaa, Taiz and other major cities.
The humanitarian group Oxfam said Friday that British weapons supplied to the Saudi-led forces were escalating the crisis and might be in breach of laws prohibiting arms sales to conflict zones. The weapons include cluster bombs, sold to Saudi Arabia, which have been used against civilian areas in the Houthi-controlled zone, according to a report released September 3 by the Cluster Munition Coalition, which seeks to ban the devices.
A key ally of the Saudi-led, US-backed anti-Houthi coalition is Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which now controls much of Hadhramaut province, a huge desert area in eastern Yemen, including the port city of Mukalla. This remarkable arrangement starkly underscores the cynical character of the US claims to be fighting “terrorism” in the Middle East.
An unusually frank article in the Wall Street Journal, published September 10, asked the question, “Is Al Qaeda Winning in Saudi-Iran Proxy War in Yemen?” Writing from Yemen, correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov noted, “Few here deny that al Qaeda has fought alongside the broad alliance that ousted pro-Iran Houthi militias from much of southern Yemen in recent weeks… UAE and Saudi forces in Yemen have maintained an informal nonaggression pact with al Qaeda, abstaining from hitting each other, coalition officials say.”
US and Saudi officials undoubtedly discussed the issue of AQAP when King Salman visited Washington last week and held talks with President Obama at the White House on both Yemen and the Iran nuclear arms deal. Following this meeting, the US carried out drone strikes against alleged AQAP targets in Yemen, reportedly killing at least five fighters on the night of September 12, according to local security officials.
Fourteen years later and do you even believe it? Did we actually live it? Are we still living it? And how improbable is that?
Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy ofrepeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years of a culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks. Fourteen years of the burial of American democracy (or rather its recreation as a billionaire’s playground and a source of spectacle and entertainment but not governance). Fourteen years of the spread of secrecy, the classification of every document in sight, the fierce prosecutionof whistleblowers, and a faith-based urge to keep Americans “secure” by leaving them in the dark about what their government is doing. Fourteen years of the demobilization of the citizenry. Fourteen years of the rise of the warrior corporation, the transformation of war and intelligence gathering into profit-making activities, and the flocking of countless private contractors to the Pentagon, the NSA, the CIA, and too many other parts of the national security state to keep track of. Fourteen years of our wars coming home in the form of PTSD, the militarization of the police, and the spread of war-zone technology like drones andstingrays to the “homeland.” Fourteen years of that un-American word “homeland.” Fourteen years of the expansion of surveillance of every kind and of the development of a global surveillance system whose reach — from foreign leaders to tribal groups in the backlands of the planet — would have stunned those running the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Fourteen years of the financial starvation of America’s infrastructure and still not a single mile of high-speed rail built anywhere in the country. Fourteen years in which to launch Afghan War 2.0, Iraq Wars 2.0 and 3.0, and Syria War 1.0. Fourteen years, that is, of the improbable made probable.
Fourteen years later, thanks a heap, Osama bin Laden. With a small number of supporters,$400,000-$500,000, and 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudis, you pulled off a geopolitical magic trick of the first order. Think of it as wizardry from the theater of darkness. In the process, you did “change everything” or at least enough of everything to matter. Or rather, you goaded us into doing what you had neither the resources nor the ability to do. So let’s give credit where it’s due. Psychologically speaking, the 9/11 attacks represented precision targeting of a kind American leaders would only dream of in the years to follow. I have no idea how, but you clearly understood us so much better than we understood you or, for that matter, ourselves. You knew just which buttons of ours to push so that we would essentially carry out the rest of your plan for you. While you sat back and waited in Abbottabad, we followed the blueprints for your dreams and desires as if you had planned it and, in the process, made the world a significantly different (and significantly grimmer) place.
Fourteen years later, we don’t even grasp what we did.
Fourteen years later, the improbability of it all still staggers the imagination, starting with those vast shards of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan, the real-world equivalent of the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand in the original Planet of the Apes. With lower Manhattan still burning and the air acrid with destruction, they seemed like evidence of a culture that had undergone its own apocalyptic moment and come out the other side unrecognizably transformed. To believe the coverage of the time, Americans had experienced Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima combined. We were planet Earth’s ultimate victims and downtown New York was “Ground Zero,” a phrase previously reserved for places where nuclear explosions had occurred. We were instantly the world’s greatest victim and greatest survivor, and it was taken for granted that the world’s most fulfilling sense of revenge would be ours. 9/11 came to be seen as an assault on everything innocent and good and triumphant about us, the ultimate they-hate-our-freedoms moment and, Osama, it worked. You spooked this country into 14 years of giving any dumb or horrifying act or idea or law or intrusion into our lives or curtailment of our rights a get-out-of-jail-free pass. You loosed not just your dogs of war, but ours, which was exactly what you needed to bring chaos to the Muslim world.
Fourteen years later, let me remind you of just how totally improbable 9/11 was and how ragingly clueless we all were on that day. George W. Bush (and cohorts) couldn’t even take it in when, on August 6, 2001, the president was given a daily intelligence briefing titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” The NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, which had many of the pieces of the bin Laden puzzle in their hands, still couldn’t imagine it. And believe me, even when it was happening, I could hardly grasp it. I was doing exercises in my bedroom with the TV going when I first heard the news of a plane hitting the World Trade Center and saw the initial shots of a smoking tower. And I remember my immediate thought: just like the B-25 that almost took out the Empire State Building back in 1945. Terrorists bringing down the World Trade Center? Please. Al-Qaeda? You must be kidding. Later, when two planes had struck in New York and another had taken out part of the Pentagon, and it was obvious that it wasn’t an accident, I had an even more ludicrous thought. It occurred to me that the unexpected vulnerability of Americans living in a land largely protected from the chaos so much of the world experiences might open us up to the pain of others in a new way. Dream on. All it opened us up to was bringing pain to others.
Fourteen years later, don’t you still find it improbable that George W. Bush and company used those murderous acts and the nearly 3,000 resulting deaths as an excuse to try to make the world theirs? It took them no time at all to decide to launch a “Global War on Terror” inup to 60 countries. It took them next to no time to begin dreaming of the establishment of a future Pax Americana in the Middle East, followed by the sort of global imperium that had previously been conjured up only by cackling bad guys in James Bond films. Don’t you find it strange, looking back, just how quickly 9/11 set their brains aflame? Don’t you find it curious that the Bush administration’s top officials were quite so infatuated by the U.S. military? Doesn’t it still strike you as odd that they had such blind faith in that military’s supposedly limitless powers to do essentially anything and be “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known”? Don’t you still find it eerie that, amid the wreckage of the Pentagon, the initial orders our secretary of defense gave his aides were to come up with plans for striking Iraq, even though he was already convinced that al-Qaeda had launched the attack? (“‘Go massive,’ an aide’s notes quote him as saying. ‘Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'”) Don’t you think “and not” sums up the era to come? Don’t you find it curious that, in the rubble of those towers, plans not just to pay Osama bin Laden back, but to turn Afghanistan, Iraq, and possibly Iran — “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran” — into American protectorates were already being imagined?
Fourteen years later, how probable was it that the country then universally considered the planet’s “sole superpower,” openly challenged only by tiny numbers of jihadist extremists, with a military better funded than the next 10 to 13 forces combined (most of whom were allies anyway), and whose technological skills were, as they say, to die for would win no wars, defeat no enemies, and successfully complete no occupations? What were the odds? If, on September 12, 2001, someone had given you half-reasonable odds on a U.S. military winning streak in the Greater Middle East, don’t tell me you wouldn’t have slapped some money on the table.
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that the U.S. military has been unable to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, its two major wars of this century, despite having officially left one of those countries in 2011 (only to head back again in the late summer of 2014) and having endlessly announced the conclusion of its operations in the other (only to ratchet them up again)?
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that Washington’s post-9/11 policies in the Middle East helped lead to the establishment of the Islamic State’s “caliphate” in parts of fractured Iraq and Syria and to a movement of almost unparalleled extremism that has successfully “franchised” itself out from Libya to Nigeria to Afghanistan? If, on September 12, 2001, you had predicted such a possibility, who wouldn’t have thought you mad?
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that the U.S. has gone into the business of robotic assassination big time; that (despite Watergate-era legal prohibitions on such acts), we are now the Terminators of Planet Earth, not its John Connors; that the president is openly and proudly an assassin-in-chief with his own global “kill list”; that we have endlessly targeted the backlands of the planet with our (Grim) Reaper and Predator (thank you Hollywood!) drones armed with Hellfire missiles; and that Washington has regularly knocked off women and children while searching for militant leaders and their generic followers? And don’t you find it odd that all of this has been done in the name of wiping out the terrorists and their movements, despite the fact that wherever our drones strike, those movements seem to gain in strength and power?
Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that our “war on terror” has so regularly devolved into a war of and for terror; that our methods, including the targeted killings of numerous leaders and “lieutenants” of militant groups have visibly promoted, not blunted, the spread of Islamic extremism; and that, despite this, Washington has generally not recalibrated its actions in any meaningful way?
Fourteen years later, isn’t it possible to think of 9/11 as a mass grave into which significant aspects of American life as we knew it have been shoveled? Of course, the changes that came, especially those reinforcing the most oppressive aspects of state power, didn’t arrive out of the blue like those hijacked planes. Who, after all, could dismiss the size and power of the national security state and the military-industrial complex before those 19 men with box cutters arrived on the scene? Who could deny that, packed into the Patriot Act (passed largely unread by Congress in October 2001) was a wish list of pre-9/11 law enforcementand right-wing hobbyhorses? Who could deny that the top officials of the Bush administration and their neocon supporters had long been thinking about how to leverage “U.S. military supremacy” into a Pax Americana-style new world order or that they had been dreaming of “a new Pearl Harbor” which might speed up the process? It was, however, only thanks to Osama bin Laden, that they — and we — were shuttled into the most improbable of all centuries, the twenty-first.
Fourteen years later, the 9/11 attacks and the thousands of innocents killed represent international criminality and immorality of the first order. On that, Americans are clear, but — most improbable of all — no one in Washington has yet taken the slightest responsibility for blowing a hole through the Middle East, loosing mayhem across significant swathes of the planet, or helping release the forces that would create the first true terrorist state of modern history; nor has anyone in any official capacity taken responsibility for creating the conditions that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, possibly a million or more people, turned many in the Greater Middle East into internal or external refugees, destroyed nations, and brought unbelievable pain to countless human beings. In these years, no act — not of torture, nor murder, nor the illegal offshore imprisonment of innocent people, nor death delivered from the air or the ground, nor the slaughter of wedding parties, nor the killing of children — has blunted the sense among Americans that we live in an “exceptional” and “indispensable” country of staggering goodness and innocence.
Fourteen years later, how improbable is that?
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Tom Engelhardt
08 September, 2015
Tomdispatch.com
Even as hundreds of thousands of refugees stream into Europe from the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans, the NATO powers are preparing to escalate the war in Syria, which has already driven millions to flee their homes. On Monday, Paris and London both announced plans to step up the bombing of Syria, with French President François Hollande calling for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Speaking at a nationally televised press conference, Hollande announced that French fighters would begin flying surveillance missions over Syria. While these missions will ostensibly target Islamic State (IS) militia forces, the central aim of the escalation is the overthrow of Assad.
The Elysée presidential palace let it be known that Hollande’s plan was to “neutralize” Assad. During the press conference, Hollande insisted that Assad’s departure from power was “necessary,” and that “Syrian rebels must play their role” in a post-Assad government.
As the “rebels” are anti-Assad Sunni Islamist militias funded by the CIA and Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, one must assume that the fate Hollande intends for Assad is similar to that of Muammar Gaddafi after NATO-backed Islamists toppled his regime in Libya in 2011. He was tortured and murdered by militiamen in the bombed-out remains of his hometown of Syrte. Libya has since sunk into a horrific civil war between rival Islamist militias.
British Prime Minister David Cameron advanced similar policies to those of Hollande in his address to the House of Commons a few hours after Hollande’s press conference. He announced that British drones had already struck inside Syria, murdering two Britons, Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, who were allegedly fighting with IS units.
In Orwellian fashion, Hollande justified a military escalation that will wreak havoc with the lives of millions of Syrians by claiming he was trying to help the refugees streaming into Europe. He blamed the refugee outflow both on IS atrocities and Assad, whom Hollande denounced for “shooting his own people.”
The main responsibility for the current refugee crisis, the greatest since the end of World War II, lies not with Assad, but with the criminal foreign policy of the NATO powers. They have not only financed and armed Sunni Islamist militias in a proxy war to install a puppet regime in Syria, but have pursued other wars around the world that forced tens of millions to flee their homes. The refugees arriving in Europe are drawn from millions of Syrians, Iraqis, Ukrainians, Afghans and Pakistanis fleeing bloodshed and social collapse resulting from these neocolonial wars.
Hollande’s pose of sympathy for the refugees who have fled these countries, many of whom have died en route to Europe, is a fraud. He is seeking not to shelter, but to deport them. Over 350,000 migrants have fled to Europe in 2015 alone. However, Hollande announced that France would host just 24,000 as part of a European Union (EU) plan to grant asylum to only 120,000 refugees over two years.
Hollande touted the importance of “processing centers,” i.e., concentration camps, which the EU would build in Italy, Greece and Hungary to imprison migrants without giving them access to legal protections and asylum rights guaranteed under international law and the laws of these countries. The ultimate goal, as the figures cited by Hollande make clear, is to reject and deport the vast majority of refugees.
While they trample on the right to asylum, the European powers are moving toward launching a military escalation with unpredictable, potentially catastrophic consequences. The threats from France and Britain come amid discussion of renewed conflict between Russia and the United States, two nuclear-armed powers, over the fate of the Assad regime.
Washington asked Greece to block Russian flights to Syria through Greek airspace yesterday, Greek officials said, after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Moscow this weekend that Russia’s longstanding support for Assad could lead to a confrontation with NATO forces in the region. US and Turkish forces are planning to seize a section of Syrian territory near the Turkish border and help anti-Assad militias hold it as a “safe zone.”
After Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last week that he was trying to assemble an “international coalition” including Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to fight the Islamic State (IS), reports emerged of stepped-up Russian military activity in Syria. Putin indicated, however, that he might consider a “political process” incorporating some factions of the Islamist opposition into the Syrian government.
Citing Syrian sources, the As-Safir daily in Lebanon reported that Russia had launched “a qualitative initiative in the armament relationship for the first time since the start of the war in Syria, with a team of Russian experts beginning to inspect Syrian military airports weeks ago.” The article continued, “They are working to expand some of their runways, particularly in the north of Syria.”
At his press conference, Hollande dangled a quid-pro-quo in front of Putin. He proposed that Moscow accept not only the ouster of Assad, but also autonomy accords specifying that eastern Ukrainian separatists backed by Russia accept the authority of the pro-NATO regime in Kiev that was installed in the February 2014 coup. In exchange, he said that France could support the lifting of international financial sanctions imposed on Russia in the context of the Ukraine crisis.
Hollande said that he did not support sending French ground troops into Syria, but preferred NATO talks with the Gulf state sheikhdoms, Russia and Iran to obtain their consent for Assad’s ouster. Asked if such a policy did not threaten to provoke war with Russia, Hollande replied that Russia would not be an “unshakable supporter” of Assad.
The NATO powers’ war policy, which threatens mass social dislocation and potential conflict with nuclear-armed Russia, testifies to the political bankruptcy of European capitalism. But TV journalists discussing Hollande’s performance generally applauded him, praising his capacity to ignore his rock-bottom poll ratings on domestic policy and instead project an image as a “war chief.”
The use of this term to define the head of state testifies not only to the degeneration of France’s bourgeois democratic institutions, but also to the internal class contradictions driving the militarist hysteria of the European powers. Incapable of offering any tangible improvement to masses of people at home or abroad, governments rely increasingly on militarism and war as the only basis for making right-wing appeals and rallying support in the media and the ruling elite.
As an anonymous member of the Elysée presidential palace staff recently told Victor Nouzille, a journalist investigating France’s targeted killing program, “If he cannot be popular or get results at home, Hollande at least wants to build the image of a real war chief. He is principally influenced by a few neoconservative diplomats and warmongering generals.”
The only substantial domestic initiative Hollande discussed was a reactionary attack on the Labor Code. His proposal would allow employers to negotiate company-level or industry-level agreements with union officials violating terms of the Labor Code and national legislation. This would create the conditions for a virtual bosses’ dictatorship. Any firm could evade the Labor Code and change working hours and conditions at will, as long as it could obtain the agreement of a few union bureaucrats.
08 September, 2015
WSWS.org
Who is a terrorist? Undoubtedly, what comes to mind is Daesh (ISIL), al-Qaeda, MKO, Boko Haram, etc. What is terrorism? The events of 9/11 and the gruesome beheadings carried out by Daesh shape our visual perception of terrorism. What is left unmentioned and unrecognized in our collective psyche is the kind of terrorism that has been deliberately obfuscated: sanctioned terrorism or terrorism with a license – sanctions.
The fact that scholars have identified over 100 definitions of the term terrorism demonstrates that there is no universally accepted definition of the term. There is general consensus that terrorism is ‘viewed as a method of violence in which civilians are targeted with the objective of forcing a perceived enemy into submission by creating fear, demoralization, and political friction in the population under attack.’ [i].
In 1937, the League of Nations Convention defined terrorism as: “All criminal acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of particular persons or a group of persons or the general public.”
Article 1.2 of The Arab Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism signed in Cairo in 1998 describes terrorism as: “Any act or threat of violence, whatever its motives or purposes, that occurs for the advancement of an individual or collective criminal agenda, causing terror among people, causing fear by harming them, or placing their lives, liberty or security in danger, or aiming to cause damage to the environment or to public or private installations or property or to occupy or to seize them, or aiming to jeopardize a national resource”.
In the aftermath of the September 11, the UNSC adopted Resolution 1373 licensing the United States to wage war against terrorism without first defining terrorism. However, Section 1.B of 18 U.S. Code § 2331 on international terrorism includes the following: (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. In spite of these clear definitions, sanctions–sanctioned terrorism is dubbed as ‘diplomacy’, ‘an alternate to war’ etc.
The reality of sanctioned terrorism is denied even by the UN from whence the most important definition terrorism was delivered in a seminal speech by Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations. Annan conveyed the findings of a high level UN panel “A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility”(2004)[ii] as having defined terrorism to be: “[A]ny action intended to kill or seriously harm civilians or non-combatants, with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling action by a government or international organization”.
Shamelessly, even after sanctioned terrorism took the life of one million Iraqis, the UNSC licensed terrorism against Iran – sanctions, without any remorse for the lost lives of 1 million Iraqi victims of sanctioned terrorism and untold numbers or other victims across the globe.
The terror inflicted by way of sanctions could not have been made more clear than what Kofi Annan reported of the 2004 UN panel’s findings stating that opin prevention was a vital part of any strategy to protect people against terrorism’; adding that ‘in today’s world, any threat to one is truly a threat to all. ‘ And that ‘any event or process that leads to deaths on a large scale or the lessening of life chances, and which undermines states as the basic unit of the international system, should be viewed as a threat to international peace and security. Such threats included “economic and social threats”[iii].
Security’ in terms of international relations is understood to be human security. There are six sectors to security: physical, military, economic, ecological, societal and political. Any change from ‘secure’ to ‘insecure’ or a general deterioration in any one or more of these sectors, increases the potential for violence (Buzan 2009). In spite of it all, the UNSC licensed terrorism.
The overall failure to identify and deliberately obfuscate this act of terrorism has enabled this premeditated act of terrorism to continue with impunity. The success of this deception is owed to controlling the narrative with complicity from the media. This has been so effective that even the victims of sanctioned terrorism fail to grasp that they are being subjected to terrorism. As Walter Laquer famously wrote in his 1977 piece “Terrorism”: “The success of a terrorist operation depends almost entirely on the amount of publicity it receives.” Sanctioned terrorism has received no publicity.
Our present day understanding of terrorism was initially introduced by Hollywood that often borrows its story ideas from the U.S. foreign policy agenda and has at times reinforced these policies. Hollywood rarely touched the topic of terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s when the phenomenon was not high on the U.S. foreign policy agenda, in news headlines or in the American public consciousness. In the 1980s, in the footsteps of the Reagan administration, the commercial film industry brought terrorist villains to the big screen, making terrorism a blockbuster film product in the 1990s, painting Arabs (and now Moslems) as terrorists.[iv] Thus the movie industry defined and projected terrorism to the world at large in a manner consistent with US foreign policy. The news media continues to play an even bigger role.
News media has consistently framed terrorism by presenting sudden, shocking scenes of carnage and blood in order to shock the viewer and drive home the narrative of what terrorism should entail –by implication, ruling out all other terrorist acts. So while the imagery creates fear and loathing, and a total rejection of terrorism as identified by the media, a parallel loathing of unidentified terrorism – of sanctioned terrorism has been deliberately precluded. This is propaganda at its finest.
It goes without saying that the aim of propaganda is to change peoples’ opinion and attempt to influence their future actions and decisions. What is common about propaganda is that it seldom shows the situation from different points of view and seldom gives the full picture. Images of sanctioned terrorism are sorely missing from the picture as the culprits make every effort to present sanctions as diplomacy, a tool of statecraft, and have even convinced the general public that it is a better alternative to war. In fact, sanctioned terrorism is the cowardly alternate to war for the victim is deprived of an unidentifiable enemy to fight. Sanctions, like other terrorists, don’t wear military uniforms.
It is incumbent upon every individual opposed to terrorism to take ownership of the falsely presented narrative about sanctions and refer to sanctions as sanctioned terrorism at all times. Terrorism, like pollution, does not recognize boundaries. Russia has learnt this the hard way. By Hillary Clinton’s own admission, the terrorists America is fighting today were created by the US. We cannot send our uniformed men and women to fight unidentified terrorism, sanctions. We must be the champions of this war on terror. Whether we want to speak for yesterday’s victims, or defend today’s victims of sanctioned terrorism, or whether we want to prevent future victims, we must fight sanctioned terrorism today.
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on US foreign policy.
[i] Alex P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, et al., Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988, pp. 5-6.
[ii] www.un.org/secureworld
[iii] Kofi Annan, “Special Report: Courage to fulfill our responsibilities”, The Economist Intelligence Unit, December 4, 2004.
[iv] Helena Vanhala – “Hollywood portrayal of modern international terrorism in blockbuster action-adventure films: From the Iran hostage crisis to September 11, 2001”. Dissertations and theses. University of Oregon; 2005.
07 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org
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.
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
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
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
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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 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
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.
