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By Nicola Nasser

Overtly, the Israeli superpower of the Middle East has been keen to posture as having no role whatsoever in the four-year old devastating conflict in Syria, where all major regional and international powers are politically and militarily deeply involved and settling scores by Syrian blood.

In his geopolitical weekly analysis, entitled “The Islamic State Reshapes the Middle East,” on November 25 Stratfor’s George Friedman raised eyebrows when he reviewed the effects which the terrorist group had on all regional powers, but seemed unaware of the existence of the Israeli regional superpower.

It was an instructive omission that says a lot about the no more discreet role Israel is playing to maintain what the Israeli commentator Amos Harel described as the “stable instability” in Syria and the region, from the Israeli perspective of course.

Friedman in fact was reflecting a similar official omission by the US administration. When President Barak Obama appealed for a “broad international coalition” to fight the Islamic State (IS), Israel — the strongest military power in the region and the well – positioned logistically to fight it — was not asked to join. The Obama administration explained later that Israel’s contribution would reflect negatively on the Arab partners in the coalition.

“Highlighting Israel’s contributions could be problematic in terms of complicating efforts to enlist Muslim allies” in the coalition, said Michael Eisenstadt, a senior fellow at AIPAC’s arm, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Covertly however Israel is a key player in prolonging the depleting war on Syria and the major beneficiary of neutralizing the military of the only immediate Arab neighbor that has so far eluded yielding to the terms dictated by the U.S. – backed Israeli regional force majeure for making peace with the Hebrew state.

Several recent developments however have brought the Israeli role into the open.

First the latest bombing of Syrian targets near the Damascus international civilian airport on December 7 was the seventh major unprovoked air strike of its kind since 2011 and the fifth in the past 18 months on Syrian defenses. Syrian Scientific research centers, missile depots, air defense sites, radar and electronic monitoring stations and the Republican Guards were targeted by Israel.

Facilitating the Israeli mission and complementing it, the terrorist organizations operating in the country tried several times to hit the same targets. They succeeded in killing several military pilots and experts whom Israeli intelligence services would have paid dearly to hunt down.

Foreign Policy on last June 14 quoted a report by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki – moon as saying that the “battle – hardened Syrian rebels … once in Israel, they receive medical treatment in a field clinic before being sent back to Syria,” describing the arrangement as a “gentleman’s agreement.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu in February this year visited this “military field hospital” and shook hands with some of the more than 1000 rebels treated in Israeli hospitals, according to Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF).

Foreign Policy quoted also Ehud Yaari, an Israeli fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as saying that Israel was supplying the rebel – controlled Syrian villages with medicines, heaters, and other humanitarian supplies. The assistance, he said, has benefited civilians and “insurgents.” Yaari ignored the reports about the Israeli intelligence services to those “insurgents.”

Israel facilitates war on UNDOF

Second, the latest quarterly report by the UN Disengagement Force (UNDOF) to the UN Security Council (UNSC) on December 1 confirmed what eight previous similar reports had stated about the “interaction … across the (Syrian – Israeli) ceasefire line” between the IOF and the “armed members of the (Syrian) opposition,” in the words of Ki-moon’s report to the Council on December 4.

Third, Ki-moon in his report confirmed that the UNDOF “was forced to relocate its troops” to the Israeli side of the ceasefire line, leaving the Syrian side a safe haven zone for the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front, which the UNSC had designated a “terrorist group.”

UNDOF’s commander Lieutenant General Iqbal Singh Singha told the UNSC on October 9 that his troops were “under fire, been abducted, hijacked, had weapons snatched and offices vandalized.” Australia was the latest among the troop contributing countries to pull out its forces from UNDOF.

UNDOF and the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) operate in the buffer zone of about 80 km long and between 0.5 to 10 km wide, forming an area of 235 km². The zone borders the Lebanon Blue Line to the north and forms a border of less than 1 km with Jordan to the south. It straddles the Purple Line which separates the Israeli – occupied Golan Heights from Syria. The west Israeli side of this line is known as “Alpha”, and the east Syrian side as “Bravo.”

Speaking at the U.S. military base Fort Dix on Monday, President Obama warned those who “threaten America” that they “will have no safe haven,” but that is exactly what Israel is providing them.

Israeli “interaction” has practically helped the UNDOF “to relocate” from Bravo to Alpha and to hand Bravo as a safe haven over to an al-Nusra Front – led coalition of terrorist groups.

Al-Nusra Front is officially the al – Qaeda affiliate in Syria. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate Committee on Foreign relations on this December 9 that his administration considers the IS to be a branch of al – Qaeda operating under a different name. Both terrorist groups were one under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and only recently separated. Whoever accommodates either one is in fact courting the other.

“The 1,200-strong UN force is now mostly huddled inside Camp Ziouani, a drab base just inside the Israeli – controlled side of the Golan Heights. Its patrols along the de facto border have all but ceased,” the Associated Press (AP) reported on last September 18.

Israeli air force and artillery intervened several times to protect the al-Nusra Front’s “safe haven” against fire power from Syria, which is still committed to its ceasefire agreement of 1974 with Israel. Last September for example, Israel shot down a Syrian fighter jet that was bombing the Front’s positions, only three weeks after shooting down a Syrian drone over the area.

Israel is not violating the Syrian sovereignty only, but violating also the UN – sponsored ceasefire agreement and the UNSC anti-terror resolutions. More important, Israel is in fact undermining the UNDOF mandate on the Israeli – occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

This situation could only be interpreted as an Israeli premeditated war by proxy on the UN presence on the Golan Heights.

“Israel is the most interested in having (UN) peacekeepers evacuated from the occupied Golan so as to be left without international monitoring,” Syria’s permanent envoy to the UN, Bashar al- Jaafari, told reporters on September 17.

The UNSC seems helpless or uninterested in defending the UNDOF mandate on the Golan against Israeli violations, which risk the collapse of the 1974 ceasefire arrangements.

Syrian Foreign Ministry was on record to condemn these violations as a “declaration of war,” asserting that Syria reserves its right to retaliate “at the right moment and the right place.” Obviously a regional outbreak is at stake here without the UN presence as a buffer.

Upgrading unanimously Israel’s status from a “major non – NATO ally” to a “major strategic partner” of the United States by the U.S. Congress on December 3 could explain the UNSC inaction.

The undeclared understanding between the Syrian government and the U.S. – led coalition against the self – declared “Islamic State” (IS) not to target the latter’s forces seems to have left this mission to Israel who could not join the coalition publicly for subjective as well as objective reasons.

The AP on September 18 did not hesitate to announce that the “collapse of UN peacekeeping mission on Golan Heights marks new era on Israel – Syria front.” Aron Heller, the writer of the AP report, quoted the former Israeli military liaison officer with UNDOF, Stephane Cohen, as saying: “Their mandate is just not relevant anymore.” Heller concluded that this situation “endangers” the “status quo,” which indeed has become a status quo ante.

Israeli strategic gains

The emerging fait accompli seems very convenient to Israel, creating positive strategic benefits for the Hebrew state and arming it with a pretext not to withdraw the IOF from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian territories.

In an analysis paper published by The Saban Center at Brookings in November 2012, Itamar Rabinovich wrote that, “Clearly, the uncertainty in Syria has put the question of the Golan Heights on hold indefinitely. It may be a long time until Israel can readdress the prospect of giving the Golan back to Damascus.”

Moreover, according to Rabinovich, “the Syrian conflict has the potential to bring the damaged Israeli – Turkish relationship closer to normalcy … they can find common ground in seeking to foster a stable post – Assad government in Syria.”

The hostile Turkish insistence on toppling the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, the concentration of the IS and other rebel forces in the north of the country and in central, eastern and southern Syria are diverting the potential and focus of the Syrian Arab Army northward and inward, away from the western front with the Israeli occupying power on the Golan Heights.

The protracted war on the Syrian government is depleting its army in manpower and materially. Rebuilding the Syrian army and the devastated Syrian infrastructure will preoccupy the country for a long time to come and defuse any military threat to Israel for an extended time span.

On the Palestinian front, the rise of the IS has made fighting it the top U.S. priority in the Middle East, which led Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to several U.S. administrations on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, to warn in Foreign Policy early in September that the rise of the IS would pose “a serious setback to Palestinian hopes of statehood.”

The expected fallback internally of the post – war Syria would “hopefully” relieve Israel of the Syrian historical support for the Palestinian anti – Israeli occupation movements, at least temporarily.

Netanyahu on Sunday opened a cabinet meeting by explicitly using the IS as a pretext to evade the prerequisites of making peace. Israel “stands … as a solitary island against the waves of Islamic extremism washing over the entire Middle East,” he said, adding: “To force upon us” a timeframe for a withdrawal from the Israeli – occupied Palestinian territories, as proposed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the UN Security Council, “will bring the radical Islamic elements to the suburbs of Tel Aviv and to the heart of Jerusalem. We will not allow this.”

Israel is also capitalising on the war on the IS to misleadingly portray it as identical with the Palestinian “Islamic” resistance movements because of their Islamic credentials. “When it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas,” Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly on September 29.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories

17 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Maryam Sakeenah

The Peshawar school attack is a tragedy that sends senses reeling, an enormity that confounds the senses. It does not help however, to dismiss the people who committed this foul atrocity as ‘inhuman’, or to say they were not really Muslims. It is a convenient fiction that implies a most frustrating unwillingness and inability to understand how human beings are dehumanized and desensitized so they commit such dastardly acts under the moral cover of a perverted religiosity. This unwillingness and inability to understand is deeply distressing because it shows how far away we are from even identifying what went wrong, and where- and hence, how far we are from any solution.

The international media has reflected- not surprisingly- a superficial, flat and ludicrously shallow grasp of the issues in Pakistan. The CNN (and other channels) repeatedly portrayed the incident as ‘an attack on children for wanting to get an education. ’ In fact, the UK Prime Minister himself tweeted: “The news from Pakistan is deeply shocking. It’s horrifying that children are being killed simply for going to school.” It actually reeks of how the media’s portrayal and use of Malala’s story has shaped a rather inaccurate narrative on Pakistan.

Years ago shortly after 9/11, former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer had lamented Western politicians’ dim-witted understanding of terrorism and the motives behind it. Scheuer highlighted how dishonestly and dangerously Western leaders portrayed that the terrorists were ‘Against Our Way of Life’; that they were angry over the West’s progress as some deranged barbarians battling a superior civilization out of rank hatred. This rhetoric from Western politicians and the media ideologized terrorism and eclipsed the fact that terror tactics were actually a reaction to rapacious wars in Muslim (and other) lands often waged or sponsored by Western governments. It diverted focus from the heart of the problem and created a misleading and dangerous narrative of ‘Us versus Them’, setting global politics on a terrible ‘Clash of civilizations’ course.

Today, I remembered Scheuer again, browsing through responses to the Peshawar tragedy both on local social media as well as from people in positions of power- most reflected a facile understanding of the motives of terrorism. The Taliban spokesman Umar Khorasani states: “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females. We want them to feel the pain.”

Certainly, this is twisted and unacceptable logic. What is most outrageous is his attempt to give religious justification to it by twisting religious texts.

Certainly, the leadership of the TTP is guilty of a criminal abuse of religious sources to legitimize its vile motives and sell it to their conservative Pashtun following who are on the receiving end of Pakistan’s military offensive in the tribal areas. The TTP leaders have hands drenched in innocent blood. Even the Afghan Taliban have rejected the use and justification of such means by the TTP as unacceptable by any standards in an official statement.

But I wonder at those human beings chanting Arabic religious expressions who blew themselves up for the ‘glorious cause’ of taking revenge from innocent unsuspecting school children. I wonder how they had gone so terribly, terribly wrong in their humanity, their faith. Certainly, they were taken in with the TTP’s malevolent ideological justification for the rank brutality they committed. Certainly, they allowed themselves to be taken in because they perceived their miserable lives had no intrinsic worth except in being given up in order to exact vengeance.

I understood too when I heard a victim student writing in pain, vowing revenge. ‘I will grow up and make their coming generations learn a lesson’, he said. In that line, I understood so much about human psychology and the psychology of victimhood, and the innate need for avenging wrongdoing.

The problem with the public perception of the war in Pakistan is that we see only part of it: we see the heartrending images from Peshawar and elsewhere in the urban centres where terrorists have struck. But there is a war that we do not see, hidden from public view. This is the war in the tribal north. The familiar images we see from the war divide the Pakistani victims of this war into Edward Herman’s ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims- both, however, are innocent victims- the ones we see and the ones we do not. But because some victims are unworthier than others, the unworthy victim claims worth to his condemned life in dying, misled into thinking that death by killing others can be a vindication.

But sometimes the ones we are not allowed to see, make themselves visible in horrible, ugly ways; they become deafeningly loud to claim notice. And in the process, they make other victims- our own flesh and blood… And so it is our bloody burden to bear for fighting a war that was not ours, which has come to haunt us as our own.

The work of some independent journalists has highlighted the war we do not see in Waziristan- their work, however, has not made it to mainstream news. Such work has brought to light enormous ‘collateral damage’ figures. Some independent journalists have also focused on the plight of IDPs who feel alienated and forgotten by the Pakistani state and nation. It must be noted, however, that there is no access to the media in the areas where the army’s operation is going on. The news we get from the war zone is solely through the Pakistan Army- there is, hence, absolutely no counternarrative from Waziristan. And hence our one-sided vision eludes a genuine understanding.

This unwillingness and inability to understand reflects in our uninsightful militarist approach to the problem in Waziristan. While the necessity of using military means to combat a real and present danger is understood, the need for it to be precisely targeted, limited in scope and time, and planned to eliminate or at least substantively minimize collateral damage is equally important. The need to efficiently manage the fallout of such an operation and rehabilitate affectees cannot be overemphasized. On all these counts, we need to have done more.

But perhaps the most vital understanding is that military operations are never the enduring solution. They may be needed to achieve specific necessary targets, but only with the aforementioned conditionalities to minimize the fallout. Moreover, the bigger, deeper problems have to be dealt with through a wider, more insightful non-military approach: listening and understanding, dialogue, mutual compromise and reconciliation, rehabilitation and peacebuilding. There are numerous examples in the past- even the recent past- of how war-ravaged communities drenched in the memory of oppression and pain, seething with unrelenting hate, have successfully undertaken peacebuilding. There have been temporary respites in this war in Pakistan whenever the two sides agreed to a ceasefire. That spirit ought to have lasted.

I understand that this sounds unreasonable on the backdrop of the recent atrocity, but there is no other way to give peace a chance. Retributive justice using force will prolong the violence and make more victims.

Since religion is often appealed to in this conflict, its role in peacebuilding has to be explored and made the best of. To break this vicious, insane cycle, there has to be a revival of the spirit of ‘Ihsan’ for a collective healing- that is, not indiscriminate and unrelenting retributive justice but wilful, voluntary forgiveness (other than for the direct, unrepentant and most malafide perpetrators). This must be followed by long-term, systematic peacebuilding in Pakistan’s war-ravaged tribal belt in particular and the entire nation in general. Such peacebuilding will involve religious scholars, educators, journalists, social workers and other professionals. Unreasonable as it may sound, it is perhaps the only enduring strategy to mend and heal and rebuild. The spirit of ‘Ihsan’ has tremendous potential to salvage us, and has to be demonstrated from both sides. But because the state is the grander agency, its initiative in this regard is instrumental as a positive overture to the aggrieved party.

But this understanding seems to have been lost in the frenzy, just when it was needed most pressingly. I shudder to think what consequences a failure to understand this vital point can bring. The Pakistani nation has already paid an enormously heavy price.

Maryam Sakeenah is a Pakistan-based independent researcher and freelance writer on International politics, human rights and Islam.

17 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Hassanal Noor Rashid

The International Movement for a Just world (JUST) joins together with many other organizations, enraged individuals and communities in condemning the Taliban in Pakistan (TTP) for the barbaric and mindless massacre of 145 people in a Pakistani school in Peshawar on the 16th December 2014. The vast majority of the victims—132 to be exact— were school children between the ages of 12 and 16. This is what makes the cruel massacre — the worst in Pakistani history — utterly reprehensible.

The actions of the gunmen who had committed these vile atrocities, which have notably been criticised by the Taliban in Afghanistan, are representative of a virulent ideology and a perverse view of Islam which utilizes the religion to justify the actions of brutal murderers.

The misrepresentation of the Islamic faith by these groups is an increasingly worrying trend that has resulted in many unwarranted tragedies, but like in many instances of events such as these, religion is not the core driving motivation.

The rationalization given by the group responsible for this heinous act was to avenge the killings of hundreds of innocent tribesmen in provinces such as South Waziristan, North Waziristan and the Khyber Agency according to a spokesperson of the TTP.

The military actions by the Pakistani government within these provinces are reflective of its flawed approach to the fight against terrorism, an approach continuously found within the rhetoric of various Washington pundits that persists in the post- 9/11 political environment, 13 years later.

The government’s response to these perceived terrorist threats has been one where laws are introduced which curtails civil rights, and legitimizes the use of torture and assassinations.

All these have created a political and social environment which in fact diminishes security and endows extremists with a sense of perceived legitimacy to carry out their morally disengaged and ill-conceived actions.

The injustices that have befallen the Palestinian people which have also been a large part of the Muslim world’s conscious reality, have served to be an ideological focal point for many militants and has contributed further to the rise of militancy.

These terrorists’ worldview is ultimately an ideological response to the invasive activities of countries like the United States of America and its allies, who are seeking to dictate and influence how the structures of power in the region benefit their own interests and agendas.

These countries and their nefarious hegemonic agendas are as much responsible for facilitating the rise of extremist militancy, as they are in many ways responsible for the brutal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of the extremists.

The victims of this ideological dogma however, as this incident has shown, are rarely Western civilians. They tend to, more often than not, be other Muslims, who are seen by these militants as colluding with the foreign aggressor and therefore traitors to the nation and the religion.
So long as these policies and practices continuously persist, and alternative actions are not implemented to engage with these threats more effectively and sustainably, atrocities like these may well become a political-social norm.

Justice demands we never let that happen, and Muslims all over have a responsibility to not allow Islam to be hijacked by peddlers of violence.

20 December 2014.

Hassanal Noor Rashid is the programme coordinator of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

 

By Jean Bricmont

There at least two things that are easier to start than to end: a love affair and a war. No participant in WWI expected it to last as long as it it did or to have the consequences that it had. All the empires that participated in the war were destroyed, including eventually the British and French ones.

Not only that, but one war leads to another. The British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell remarked that the desire of the European monarchs to crush the French Revolution led to Napoleon; the Napoleonic wars produced German nationalism that itself led to Bismarck, the French defeat at Sedan and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. That in turn fueled French revanchism that gave rise, after World War I, to the Versailles Treaty, whose inequities gave a strong boost to Nazism and Hitler. Russell ended the story there, but it continues. Hitler’s defeat gave rise to the Cold War and the creation of Israel. The Western “victory” in the Cold War led to the current desire to crush Russia once and for all. As for Israel, its creation produced endless strife and an intractable situation in the Middle East.

What is the way out of this dialectic? I would suggest the idea of institutional pacifism. Not pacifism in the sense of refusing violence under any circumstance, or as amoral exhortation, but in the sense of building institutions that can help the preservation of peace. The United Nations and its charter, at least as it was originally conceived, is probably the best example of such an institution.

The very starting point of the United Nations was to save humankind from “the scourge of war”, with reference to the two World Wars. This goal was to be achieved by defending the principle of the equal sovereignty of all states, in order to prevent Great Powers from intervening militarily against weaker ones, regardless of the pretext. But since there is no international police to enforce international law, it can only be enforced by a balance of power and, most importantly, by the pressure of the citizens of the various countries to constrain their governments to adhere to common rules.

However, the way the end of the Cold war was interpreted in the West, as an unilateral victory of Good against Evil, led to a total disregard for international law or even for caution and diplomacy in the West. This was a consequence of the ideology of human rights and of the right of humanitarian military intervention that was developed by influential Western intellectuals, starting from the mid-70’s, who were often supporters of Israel, which may seem odd given Israel’s human rights record.

This “right” of humanitarian intervention has been universally rejected by the majority of mankind, for example at the South Summit in Havana in April 2000 or at the meeting of the Non Aligned Movement in Kuala Lumpur in February 2003, shortly before the US attack on Iraq, which issued the following declaration: “The Heads of State or Government reiterated the rejection by the Non-Aligned Movement of the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention, which has no basis either in United Nations Charter or in international law” and “also observed similarities between the new expression ‘responsibility to protect’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ and requested the Co-ordinating Bureau to carefully study and consider the expression ‘the responsibility to protect’ and its implications on the basis of the principles of non-interference and non-intervention as well as the respect for territorial integrity and national sovereignty of States.” But in the West, this right of intervention is almost universally accepted.

The reason for this opposition of views is probably that the rest of the world has a very different memory than the West about the latter’s interventions in the internal affairs of other countries.

US intervention is multi-faceted but constant and always violates the spirit and often the letter of the United Nations charter. Despite claims to act on behalf of principles such as freedom and democracy, US intervention has repeatedly had disastrous consequences: not only the millions of deaths caused by direct and indirect wars, in Indochina, Central America, Southern Africa and the Middle East, but also the lost opportunities, the “killing of hope” for hundreds of millions of people who might have benefited from progressive social policies initiated by people like Arbenz in Guatemala, Goulart in Brazil, Allende in Chile, Lumumba in the Congo, Mossadegh in Iran, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or Chavez in Venezuela, who have been systematically subverted, overthrown or killed with full Western support. But that is not all. Every aggressive action led by the United States creates a reaction. Deployment of an anti-missile shield produces more missiles, not less.

Bombing civilians – whether deliberately or by so-called “collateral damage” – produces more armed resistance, not less. Trying to overthrow or subvert governments produces more internal repression, not less. Encouraging secessionist minorities by giving them the often false impression that the sole Superpower will come to their rescue in case they are repressed, leads to more violence, hatred and death, not less. Surrounding a country with military bases produces more defense spending by that country, not less. The possession of nuclear weapons by Israel encourages other states of the Middle East to acquire such weapons.

The ideology of humanitarian intervention is actually part of a long history of Western attitudes towards the rest of the World. When Western colonialists landed on the shores of the Americas, Africa or Eastern Asia, they were shocked by what we would now call violations of human rights, and which they called “barbaric mores” – human sacrifices, cannibalism, women forced to bind their feet. Time and again, such indignation, sincere or calculating, has been used to justify or to cover up the crimes of the Western powers: the slave trade, the extermination of indigenous peoples and the systematic stealing of land and resources. This attitude of righteous indignation continues to this day and is at the root of the claim that the West has a “right to intervene” and a “right to protect”, while turning a blind eye to oppressive regimes considered “our friends”, to endless militarization and wars, and to massive exploitation of labor and resources.

The West should learn from its past history. What would that mean concretely?

Well, first of all, guaranteeing the strict respect for international law on the part of Western powers, implementing the UN resolutions concerning Israel, dismantling the worldwide US empire of bases as well as NATO, ceasing all threats concerning the unilateral use of force, lifting unilateral sanctions, stopping all interference in the internal affairs of other States, in particular all operations of “democracy promotion”, “color” revolutions, and the exploitation of the politics of minorities. This necessary respect for national sovereignty means that the ultimate sovereign of each nation state is the people of that state, whose right to replace unjust governments cannot be taken over by supposedly benevolent outsiders.

Proponents of humanitarian intervention claim that this is interventionism is done by the international community. But nowadays, there is no such thing as a genuine international community. Actually, nothing can better illustrate the hypocrisy of the the human right ideology than the contrast between the West’s reaction to Kosovo’s demands for independence and to the Eastern Ukrainian’s demand for autonomy. There is refusal to negotiate in both cases, but with total support for independence in one case and total opposition to autonomy in the other.

The promoters of humanitarian intervention present it as the beginning of a new era; but in fact it is the end of an old one. The major social transformation of the 20th century has been decolonization. It continues today in the elaboration of a genuinely democratic, multipolar world, one where the sun will have set on the US empire, just as it did on the old European ones.

The viewpoints expressed here are shared by millions of people in the “West”. This is unfortunately not reflected in our media. In the recent anti-Russian hysterical campaigns, our media seem to have totally abandoned the critical spirit of the Enlightenment that the West claims to uphold. The human rights ideology, which portrays us as being good versus them being bad, has the characteristic of all religious faiths, and is particularly fanatic. Let us not forget, among all the criticisms of secularism that I have heard here, that in World War I, all sides thought that they had God on their side, although, a far as I know, the Almighty was not kind enough to let us know on which side he was. Maybe he was too busy putting in heaven and hell the souls of the deceased soldiers who died invoking his name. The human rights ideology has replaced the old faiths, but it functions as a religion, and is the basis of a new nationalism, the one of the US and of the EU.

Some people think that all this ideological agitation and warmongering is due to rational economic calculations by cynical profiteers. I think this view is too optimistic and ignores, to quote Russell again, “the ocean of human folly upon which the fragile barque of human reason insecurely floats”. Wars have been waged for all kinds of non-economic reasons, such as religion or revenge, or simply to display power.
If the citizens of the West do not manage to mobilize themselves against their governments and their media in order to stop the current madness, it will be up to other countries to fulfill that role. It is to be hoped that they can achieve that task without adding another bloody chapter to the history that started with the desire of the European monarchs to crush the French Revolution.

Jean Bricmont teaches physics at the University of Louvain in Belgium.
14 December 2014
Counterpunch.com

 

By Alan Hart

It’s Israel’s Jews NOT the Palestinians who are trapped in their public narrative

In recent months nothing has made me more angry than an article written and posted on 11 December by Alon Ben-Meir with a headline that described the occupied and oppressed Palestinians as being Trapped In Their Public Narrative. It included this statement. “The Palestinians haven’t learned that they cannot have it both ways: demand a state of their own and threaten Israel’s very existence.”

My immediate response was this.

The only threat to Israel’s very existence is its on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank (ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth) and the sickening Zionist self-righteousness that justifies it.

The anger provoked in me by Ben-Meir’s article was accompanied by surprise at what he wrote because this Baghdad-born, Jewish gentleman, currently a professor of international relations and Middle East studies at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, is internationally respected and not without influence in the corridors of power. He is a passionate supporter of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and an outspoken critic of Israel’s leaders for ignoring it. (His post before the one I am debunking here was headlined How Netanyahu Committed Political Suicide, and the following was its opening sentence. “Prime Minister Netanyahu’s insistence on passing a bill that will define Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people is as disgusting as his denial that Israel is an occupying power.”)

The main purpose of Trapped In Their Public Narrative was to convey this message.

“Not withstanding the growing support of the international community, the Palestinians will be mistaken to assume that the international community will solve their conflict with Israel… Neither the Europeans nor the U.S. who enjoy certain leverage with Israel will be able to force the hand of any hardcore right wing Israeli leader… Only the Palestinians themselves can change the Israeli public perception.”

The flesh Ben-Meir put on those bones included the following.

QUOTE

The Palestinians’ constant acrimonious public narrative against Israel has and continues to damage their credibility in the eyes of many Israelis…They are now increasingly focused on evoking international sympathy for their cause, but have failed time and again to appeal to the Israeli public, which matters the most to realize their stated objective of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinians appear to be trapped in their rancorous public narrative against Israel, even during the peace negotiations. Coupled with widespread anti-Israeli teaching in schools, regular media attacks and indoctrination in many public and private institutions, this is what Israelis see, hear, fear and believe.

The Palestinians fail to understand that they have nurtured persuasive anti-Israeli sentiment among the Palestinians and strong anti-Palestinian feeling among the Israelis, which is to the detriment of peace.

It is time for the Palestinians to re-examine the shifting political landscape in Israel and change course now, however incongruous that may be, because it is indispensable to their overall objective.

The Palestinians need to recognize that there is a psychological dimension to their conflict with Israel, traced back through decades of mutual hatred and mistrust. The frequent verbal attacks and the characterization of Israel as a racist and apartheid state only reinforce the Israelis’ resentment and distrust of the Palestinians.

The PA seems to ignore the fact that their constant anti-Israeli public sentiments play into the hands of the powerful right constituency while weakening the hands of the center and left-of-center, which represent the majority of Israelis.

The Israeli political parties from the center and left want to hear a language of reconciliation…The Palestinians cannot expect the Israelis to dismiss their public onslaught as empty rhetoric… Only the Palestinians themselves can change the Israeli public perception – not by mere political slogans but by demonstrating that they can be trusted and are a worthy negotiating partner.

The Palestinians must separate (draw a distinction) between the Israeli government and people. Every single Palestinian leader must carefully think about how his or her public utterances affect the Israeli electorate, especially during national elections. There is a steady shift to the right and maligning Israel during the campaign will only further strengthen the right and weaken the center and the left.

I am not naive to suggest that by merely changing their public narrative positively the Palestinians will instantly and dramatically alter the political map in Israel in favour of the left and center. But if the Palestinians want to realize statehood, they must change their rancorous narrative sooner rather than later, and the Israeli elections offer a unique opportunity to begin this shift.

UNQUOTE

I agree with Ben-Meir to the extent that between now and Israel’s election in March it would be a good idea for the Palestinians to remind Israel’s Jews, constantly and explicitly, that the ground on their side for peace on terms which a sane government of Israel would have accepted with relief was prepared 35 years ago by Yasser Arafat.

But also to be said is that the idea (implicit in Ben-Meir’s article) that only the occupied and oppressed Palestinians can bring Israel’s Jews to their senses and get them to understand the extent to which they have been brainwashed by their leaders is ridiculous.

In my view the most awesome flaw in Ben-Meir’s logic can be summarised as follows.

It assumes by obvious implication that Israel’s Jews are the victims in the story of Palestine that became Israel when, actually, and as the whole world is beginning to understand, they are the oppressors.

From that it follows, it seems to me, that it’s Israel’s Jews not the Palestinians who have got to make the first major move if there is ever to be peace based on justice for the Palestinians and security for all. And what does that first major move have to be?

AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THAT A TERRIBLE WRONG WAS DONE TO THE PALESTINIANS BY ZIONISM IN THE NAME OF ALL JEWS AND THAT THIS WRONG MUST BE RIGHTED.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent.

14 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

ByEric Zuesse

On Saturday, December 13th, Russian media reported that U.S. President Obama evidently can’t wait to sign the congressional authorization for war against Russia (which has already been passed in draft form by 98% of U.S. House members and 100% of U.S. Senate members), and that he is already shipping military supplies into Ukraine for use against Ukraine’s ethnic Russians that the Ukrainian Government is trying to eliminate.

Mikhail Emelyanov, a leading Russian parliamentarian, was quoted as saying on Saturday, Russia “cannot calmly watch as the US arms Ukraine with the most modern lethal weapons. In this regard, we should not appear weak. The situation is very alarming. Judging by US intentions, they want to turn Ukraine into a fighting platform against Russia.”

The popular Russian website “Colonel Cassad” reports that the reason why Ukraine’s airports in Zaporozyhe, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk mysteriously shut down for other traffic on Saturday was to unload weapons-shipments from the U.S. Specifically, it said that, at Zaporozyhe, “one of the airport workers replied that the airport has to be prepared to accept military aircraft with equipment, including Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk. The equipment is expected from the United States.” For the time being, civilian traffic at all three of those airports is being reduced during the next few days, in order to unload that U.S. freight.

Also reported Saturday at fortruss.blogspot was that, “Right now at Zaporozhye airport they are unloading two transport planes from USA. Cargo is in boxes. According to additional information two more planes are expected to arrive.”

Just one day prior, Foreign Policy had bannered on Friday, “Who Will Foot the Bill in Ukraine?” and their reporter naively claimed that, “little aid is forthcoming for Ukraine as its government faces a shortfall.”

The “aid” is actually already coming, in the form of U.S. military cargo shipments, gratis from U.S. taxpayers (though hardly gratis from the U.S. armaments-makers, whose business is booming from this). And the Ukraine “government faces a shortfall” thing is actually far worse than that: as Forbes’s Mark Adomanis headlined on April 15th, “Ukraine’s Economy Is Nearing Collapse.” He reported, “The central bank was forced to take such desperate measures because the currency has been in free fall, losing more than 35% of its value against the dollar this year. The Hryvnia has been the world’s worst performing currency in 2014.” And: “The only reason that things haven’t totally imploded is because of the $18 billion package of assistance from the IMF and the $9 billion in additional assistance pledged by the United States and the European Union. This financial assistance is desperately needed and will obviously help the Ukrainian government keep the lights on. The problem is that Ukraine’s funding needs aren’t a static target but are directly influenced by changes in its economic outlook. Since that economic outlook is darkening, Ukraine’s already large funding needs have grown commensurately.”

Forbes’s Kenneth Rapoza then noted on November 12th, “The nation’s currency, the hryvnia, has lost 91.5% of its value so far this year.”

On December 11th, Ukraine’s new Minister of Economic Development admitted, “By and large, the state is bankrupt.”

So: U.S. and European taxpayers will be funding all of those ‘loans,’ which will never be paid back, they’re actually donations instead of loans, because Ukraine was already tens of billions of dollars in debt even before the West took over; and none of these additional ‘debts’ will be able to be paid back one cent unless and until those earlier debts are, which will never be possible in that spiraling-downward country, which is now designing a military graveyard with a capacity for 250,000 fresh corpses of Ukrainian soldiers, and that’s not a very productive “investment” for any country to be making. America’s ‘investment’ in Ukraine is an ‘investment’ in corpses; and far more of those will be of the millions of residents in the targeted region than of the soldiers on either side of the conflict.

One of Russia’s loans to Ukraine has a provision saying that if Ukraine’s ratio of debt to GDP exceeds 60%, then Russia can demand and Ukraine must pay in cash the full due amount. The ratio has already exceeded that, but the official figure won’t be announced until March 2015, and, as Britain’s Economist noted, “That could trigger a default on all Ukraine’s other international bonds (which are worth about $16 billion up to 2023).” So: all of the money that is being ‘loaned’ to Ukraine now is purely a donation, since Russia will certainly pull the plug and flush Ukraine down the toilet this coming Spring. Then, all of a sudden, that $16 billion in cash will need to be put up by the Ukrainian Government, and whatever there is to put up, practically all of it will have to be paid to Ukraine’s old chief lender: Russia. The West will get little or nothing of it.

Washington isn’t out to help the Ukrainian people; it’s solely using Ukraine as a launching-pad for WW III against Russia. That’s all it’s “good for” now. And that’s what Obama is using it for: to slaughter, first, the residents in the parts of Ukraine that refuse to be ruled by the regime that Obama put in place; and, then, everybody else.

If this sounds crazy (and of course it does), then please ask your two Senators and your one Representative in the House: “Why did you vote to approve sending weapons to the Ukrainian Government?” (Mine refuses to answer.)

Please then report back here, in the reader-comments below, what the answer to that question is. Everyone who reads this article here will be interested to know what the answer to that question is.

Here is the list of the only 10 members of Congress who voted no on that bill, and all of them are in the House:

California’s George Miller (D)

California’s Dana Rohrabacher (R)

Florida’s Alan Grayson (D)

Florida’s Alcee Hastings (D)

Kentucky’s Thomas Massie (R)

Michigan’s Justin Amash (R)

North Carolina’s Walter Jones (R)

Tennessee’s John Duncan (R)

Texas’s Beto O’Rourke (D)

Washington’s Jim McDermott (D)

If any of those Representatives happens to be yours, then don’t ask him why he voted for the bill; he voted against it.

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

By Thomas Gaist

The US is legally obliged to prosecute all high-level government officials involved in organizing the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) torture programs, top UN human rights officials said Wednesday. The torture programs violated international law, UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights Ben Emmerson said.

Responding to the release of the Senate report on CIA torture, Emmerson said in an official statement Wednesday that the report left no doubt that systematic torture programs set up by the US government led to massive violations of the 1994 UN Convention Against Torture.

Emmerson called on the US Attorney General to “bring criminal charges against those responsible” for torture. There is “no excuse for shielding the perpetrators from justice any longer,” he said.

“As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice,” said Emmerson. “The UN Convention Against Torture and the UN Convention on Enforced Disappearances require States to prosecute acts of torture and enforced disappearance where there is sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction. States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.”

Bush administration policies, “orchestrated at a high level,” led to “systematic crimes and gross violations of international human rights law,” he added.

The involvement of officials at the highest levels only makes criminal prosecutions all the more necessary, the UN official said.

“The fact that the policies revealed in this report were authorized at a high level within the US government provides no excuse whatsoever,” Emmerson said. “Indeed, it reinforces the need for criminal accountability.”

Individuals involved in torture at all levels must be held accountable. “It is no defense for a public official to claim that they were acting on superior orders,” he said.

“However, the heaviest penalties should be reserved for those most seriously implicated in the planning and purported authorization of these crimes, Emmerson said. “Former Bush administration officials who have admitted their involvement in the programme should also face criminal prosecution for their acts.”

In a separate statement, UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein similarly called for US government officials involved in torture to be prosecuted. Top US officials “cannot simply be granted impunity because of political expediency,” al-Hussein said.

“The Convention lets no one off the hook – neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders.”

An opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times Tuesday, “Prosecute the torturers: It’s the Law,” by Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor and dean at the UC Irvine School of Law, similar argued that the CIA’s torture programs violate US and international law.

“Torture is a federal crime, and those who authorized it and engaged in it must be criminally prosecuted.” Chemerinsky writes, citing the Federal Torture Act (FTA). The Senate report “leaves no doubt” that the torture programs also violate the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Chemerinsky wrote.
The FTA states that even if the acts are committed “outside the United States,” anyone who commits torture should receive a 20-year prison sentence at minimum, and possibly the death penalty, Chemerinsky notes.

In light of the new report, President Obama’s decision not to prosecute officials from the Bush administration is now “clearly unacceptable,” he wrote.

“The debate should not be about whether the torture worked. The federal criminal law and the treaty have no exception for effective torture,” Chemerinsky wrote. “Those responsible should be held accountable, and President Obama should announce that criminal investigations and prosecutions are beginning immediately.”

These reports, coming from pillars of the political and academic establishment, confirm that the entire US ruling elite, including both big business parties and their representatives in Congress, is implicated in historic and unspeakable crimes.

Within the US official political and media circles, such demands for criminal prosecutions against US government torturers are nowhere to be found. Neither Senator Feinstein nor any other member of the Senate Intelligence Committee saw fit to demand criminal prosecutions against officials they know to have organized torture. The 528-page executive summary proposes not a single action or punishment for the crimes it documents exhaustively.

The Obama administration has extended and deepened the open repudiation of international law by the Bush administration. The failure of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Obama administration to hold accountable torturers who acted on behalf of the US government is itself a violation of international law.

By shielding officials who have admitted to setting up torture programs, including then-President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and adamantly refusing to carry out any investigations of officials involved in torture, the Obama administration and leading senators now act as direct accomplices of torture.

11 December, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Countercurrents

California’s suffering with deadly drought is now old news. The news now is: The drought is the worst in 1,200 years. California is the world’s 8th largest economy and the source of a substantial amount of US produces. Surface water supply shortages in California have impacts well beyond the state’s borders.

Daniel Griffin and Kevin Anchukaitis, two climate scientists from the University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have shown that the California drought of 2012-2014 has been the worst in 1,200 years.

As soon as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released climate data for the summer of 2014, the two scientists sprang into action.

Using their blue oak data, they reconstructed rainfall back to the 13 th century and, calculated the severity of the drought by combining NOAA’s estimates of the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), an index of soil moisture variability, with the existing North American Drought Atlas, a spatial tree-ring based reconstruction of drought developed by scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. These resources together provided complementary data on rainfall and soil moisture over the past millennium.

Griffin and Anchukaitis found that while the current period of low precipitation is not unusual in California’s history, these rainfall deficits combined with sustained record high temperatures created the current multiyear severe water shortages. “While it is precipitation that sets the rhythm of California drought, temperature weighs in on the pitch,” says Anchukaitis.

Griffin, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota, and Anchukaitis, an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, asked the question, “How unusual is the ongoing California drought?”

Watching the severity of the California drought intensify since last autumn, they wondered how it would eventually compare to other extreme droughts throughout the state’s history.

To answer those questions, Griffin and Anchukaitis collected new tree-ring samples from blue oak trees in southern and central California. “California’s old blue oaks are as close to nature’s rain gauges as we get,” says Griffin. “They thrive in some of California’s driest environments.” These trees are particularly sensitive to moisture changes and their tree rings display moisture fluctuations vividly.

“We were genuinely surprised at the result,” says Griffin, a NOAA Climate & Global Change Fellow and former WHOI postdoctoral scholar. “This is California–drought happens. Time and again, the most common result in tree-ring studies is that drought episodes in the past were more extreme than those of more recent eras. This time, however, the result was different.” While there is good evidence of past sustained, multi-decadal droughts or so-called “megadroughts”‘ in California, the authors say those past episodes were probably punctuated by occasional wet years, even if the cumulative effect over decades was one of overall drying. The current short-term drought appears to be worse than any previous span of consecutive years of drought without reprieve.

Tree rings are a valuable data source when tracking historical climate, weather and natural disaster trends. Floods, fires, drought and other elements that can affect growing conditions are reflected in the development of tree rings, and since each ring represents one year the samples collected from centuries-old trees are a virtual timeline that extend beyond the historical record in North America.

So what are the implications? The research indicates that natural climate system variability is compounded by human-caused climate change and that “hot” droughts such as the current one are likely to occur again in the future. With an exceptionally wet winter, parts of California might emerge from the drought this year. “But there is no doubt,” cautions Anchukaitis, “that we are entering a new era where human-wrought changes to the climate system will become important for determining the severity of droughts and their consequences for coupled human and natural systems.”

Story Source:

The story is based on materials provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Journal Reference :

Daniel Griffin, Kevin J Anchukaitis. How unusual is the 2012-2014 California drought? Geophysical Research Letters , 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL062433

Source:

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “California’s drought is the worst in 1,200 years, evidence suggests.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 December 2014. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141205124357.htm>.

09 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents.org

Globally, an estimated 230 million children now live in countries and areas affected by armed conflicts, said the UNICEF.

As many as 15 million children are caught up in violent conflicts in the Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, the State of Palestine, Syria and Ukraine – including those internally displaced or living as refugees, informed UNICEF. “Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality”, said Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director.

A New York/Geneva, December 8, 2014 datelined UNICEF press release said:

The year 2014 has been one of horror, fear and despair for millions of children, as worsening conflicts across the world saw them exposed to extreme violence and its consequences, forcibly recruited and deliberately targeted by warring groups.

Yet many crises no longer capture the world’s attention, warned the global organization.

“This has been a devastating year for millions of children,” said Lake. “Children have been killed while studying in the classroom and while sleeping in their beds; they have been orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped and even sold as slaves.”

In 2014, hundreds of children have been kidnapped from their schools or on their way to school. Tens of thousands have been recruited or used by armed forces and groups. Attacks on education and health facilities and use of schools for military purposes have increased in many places.

Facts

A few of the facts provided by the UNICEF include:

# In the Central African Republic, 2.3 million children are affected by the conflict, up to 10,000 children are believed to have been recruited by armed groups over the last year, and more than 430 children have been killed and maimed – three times as many as in 2013

# In Gaza, 54,000 children were left homeless as a result of the 50-day conflict during the summer that also saw 538 children killed, and more than 3,370 injured.
# In Syria, with more than 7.3 million children affected by the conflict including 1.7 million child refugees, the UN verified at least 35 attacks on schools in the first nine months of the year, which killed 105 children and injured nearly 300 others.

# In Iraq, where an estimated 2.7 million children are affected by conflict, at least 700 children are believed to have been maimed, killed or even executed this year. Women and girls have suffered physical and sexual assault, sexual slavery, trafficking and forced marriage. Some have been sold in open markets. Children have been tortured by ISIL and many have been forced to watch and take part in executions and torture.

# In Syria and Iraq, children have been victims of, witnesses to and even perpetrators of increasingly brutal and extreme violence.

# In South Sudan, an estimated 235,000 children under five are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. An estimated 1.7 million children are internally displaced mainly as a result of conflict and more than 320,000 are living as refugees. According to UN verified data, more than 600 children have been killed and over 200 maimed this year, and around 12,000 children are now being used by armed forces and groups. According to UN verified data, nearly 100 were subjected to sexual violence and 311 were abducted.

# In Ukraine, the number of internally displaced children is estimated at 128,000. At least 36 children were killed and more than 100 were injured in Donetsk and Luhansk regions between mid-April and end of October.

Adding further suffering of the children, in countries stricken by Ebola, at least 5 million children aged 3-17 are unable to go back to school because of the outbreak. Thousands of children have lost one or two parents to the disease

Forgotten

The UN organization said:

The sheer number of crises in 2014 meant that many were quickly forgotten or captured little attention. Protracted crises in countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, continued to claim even more young lives and futures.
This year has also posed significant new threats to children’s health and well-being, most notably the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which has left thousands of children orphaned and an estimated 5 million out of school.

Hope

The world is still struggling to save the children. There is still hope.

The UNICEF SAID:

Despite the tremendous challenges children have faced in 2014, there has been hope for millions of children affected by conflict and crisis. In the face of access restrictions, insecurity, and funding challenges, humanitarian organizations including UNICEF have worked together to provide life-saving assistance and other critical services like education and emotional support to help children growing up in some of the most dangerous places in the world.

In Central African Republic, a campaign is under way to get 662,000 children back to school as the security situation permits.

Nearly 68 million doses of the oral polio vaccine were delivered to countries in the Middle East to stem a polio outbreak in Iraq and Syria.

In South Sudan, more than 70,000 children were treated for severe malnutrition.

In Ebola-hit countries, work continues to combat the virus in local communities through support for community care centers and Ebola treatment Units; through training of health workers and awareness-raising campaigns to reduce the risks of transmission; and through supporting children orphaned by Ebola.

“It is sadly ironic that in this, the 25th anniversary year of the Convention on the Rights of the Child when we have been able to celebrate so much progress for children globally, the rights of so many millions of other children have been so brutally violated,” said Lake. “Violence and trauma do more than harm individual children – they undermine the strength of societies. The world can and must do more to make 2015 a much better year for every child. For every child who grows up strong, safe, healthy and educated is a child who can go on to contribute to her own, her family’s, her community’s, her nation’s and, indeed, to our common future.”
The New York Times report by Rick Gladstone said:

“The report was basically a summation of the well-documented afflictions that affected children in 2014. But taken in their entirety, they presented what Unicef called a devastating picture.”

Citing the UNICEF report the NYT report added:

“The nearly four-year-old war in Syria, which spilled into Iraq this year with the ascendance of the militant group the Islamic State, was a leading contributor of trauma to children.”

09 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Bill Van Auken

Israeli air strikes conducted against Syria on Sunday constitute a provocative and criminal act of military aggression that poses the threat of widening the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria across the region.

The Syrian government accused Israel of sending warplanes to bomb targets near the Damascus international airport as well as the Dimas area near the Lebanese border.

State-owned Al Ikhbariya television charged “the Israeli enemy committed a heinous attack by targeting two peaceful areas in the Damascus countryside.” It said that there were no casualties in the air strikes.

The Syrian foreign ministry called upon the United Nations Security Council to condemn the attacks and to impose immediate sanctions against Israel, actions which Washington, with its veto power on the council, is certain to block.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad charged that the Israeli strikes represented direct support for the Islamist militias in Syria such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front.

“Syria calls for imposing deterrent measures against Israel, which didn’t hide its pro-terrorism policies and its premeditated intentions against Syria,” the ministry’s letter to the UN stated.

Israel, following its standard policy, refused to comment on “foreign reports,” neither confirming nor denying the attacks. The bombing raids represented at least the eighth time that Israeli warplanes have struck inside Syrian territory since the Western-backed war for regime change began in 2011.

These attacks have been justified by Israeli officials in the name of destroying missiles and other weaponry supposedly bound for Hezbollah, the Shia-based movement in Lebanon, or in retaliation for shells fired across the disputed Syrian-Israeli border in the Golan Heights. While this fire has generally come from the Islamist anti-government militias, Israel has invariably directed its own fire at government troops.

Israel occupied Syria’s Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war, and in 1981 illegally annexed the area.

There have been varying accounts of what the Israeli strikes were targeting. Pro-Israeli and Syrian “rebel” sources have claimed that it was Iranian missiles and other weaponry destined for Hezbollah. Lebanese television, however, said that one of the facilities struck was a Syrian intelligence facility that was being used by Iran.

Syrian state media said that the strikes were aimed at Russian anti-aircraft weaponry. Tel Aviv had previously warned that it would prevent Syria from deploying Russia’s advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. While Moscow agreed to sell the systems to Syria in 2007, earlier this year it announced that it was canceling further delivery of the weapons.

The DEBKA web site, which has close ties to the Israeli military intelligence complex, cited “Middle East military and intelligence sources” as describing the raids as “Israel’s first overt military clash with Russia in the course of the more than three-year Syrian war.”

“Those sources assert that the strikes demolished components of Russian SA-25 or other types of top-line anti-air missile systems that Moscow had destined for Syria and” Hezbollah, the report stated. “Russian transport planes are said to have shipped these consignments in the last few days to the military section of Damascus international airport.”

The Russian government sharply condemned the attacks, denouncing Israel’s “aggressive action” in a letter to the United Nations and insisting that such attacks should not be reported.

“Moscow is deeply worried by this dangerous development, the circumstances of which demand an explanation,” Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said.

Iran’s and Syria’s foreign ministers met in Tehran Monday and publicly denounced the attacks. “This move is [aimed at] boosting the morale of terrorist groups which are suffering very serious blows from the resistance of the Syrian and Iraqi people,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said.

He warned that the entire Middle East is confronting a “big regional and global crisis.”

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem charged that Israel was attempting to offset defeats on the ground suffered by the Western-backed “rebels.”

Israel is clearly banking on the ongoing conflict within Syria preventing Damascus from striking back over the attacks. It nonetheless has placed its forces on Israel’s borders with Syria and Lebanon on a state of alert.

In a comment published in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Amos Harel wrote that the latest raid was “exceptional from at least three aspects: It is done after Hezbollah had made effort to define new game rules opposite Israel in the northern front, it takes place after the international community had changed its order of priorities in relation to the war in Syria (from toppling Assad first to defeating his opponents from ISIS now) and this is the first time that Israel seemingly acts in Syria since Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared his intention to go for elections.”

Syrian officials have charged that Netanyahu launched the attack in part to boost his prospects for reelection in the vote scheduled for March.

The Syrian and Iranian charges that Israel is actively seeking to aid the ISIS and Al Nusra Front forces inside Syria have received substantiation from the United Nations, which made public reports issued by the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which patrols the cease-fire line in the Golan Heights, indicating continuous Israeli contact with and aid to the so-called rebels.

A report issued by UNDOF in June 2014, for example, cited 59 incidents at a Syrian-Israeli crossing point known as Position 85 in which the UN forces “observed armed members of the opposition transferring 89 wounded persons from the Bravo [Syrian] side across the ceasefire line to IDF and IDF on the Alpha [Israeli] side handing over 19 treated and 2 deceased individuals to the armed members of the opposition on the Bravo side.”

Nor is the contact limited to medical aid. The report added that “on one occasion, UNDOF observed IDF on the Alpha side handing over two boxes to armed members of the opposition on the Bravo side.”

Israel’s i24news web site cited records from the country’s Ministry of Health revealing that at least 1,000 Syrians have been treated at four hospitals in the north of Israel, many of them fighters.

The news network added that last month Israel’s Druze minority carried out a public protest against the country’s aid to ISIS and the Al Nusra Front fighters, which are viewed as a mortal threat to Druze communities in both Syria and Lebanon.

The Israeli action could have other motives as well. Tel Aviv is strongly opposed to the negotiations to reach a nuclear settlement with Iran and can only be further agitated over the fact that US and Iranian warplanes are simultaneously attacking the Islamist forces inside Syria. The latest intervention may well be aimed at provoking a conflict that could disrupt any rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.

It is certain that the raids have been watched closely by the Pentagon, serving as a means of gauging Syria’s air defense systems in advance of any move to impose a much-debated no-fly buffer zone in northern Syria on the Turkish border.

09 December, 2014
WSWS.org