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By Fazal M. Kamal

The recent murders of three Israeli and one Palestinian teenagers—and the merciless torture of another Palestinian-American teen) are unquestionably barbaric, beyond tragic and comprehensively reprehensible. No rational person can even come close to condoning any such brutality. But if one follows the trail it leads directly to the door of Israel’s leaders and primarily to Benjamin Netanyahu who, partially but not wholly, to appease his extremist supporters has been for months spewing hatred utilizing constantly the language of violence, intransigence and belligerence while punishing an entire people.

It’s merely natural that when the relentless greed for land overwhelms all including the urge for peace and when an entire population is subjected ferocious repression apart from being hounded out of their homes to spend their lives in total indignity and uncertainty, there can be precious little expectation of peaceable solutions. At present though, it appears, the Tel Aviv regime continues to believe that brutal force will bring the kind of peace it wishes, regardless of the inhuman price that is being extracted from the Palestinians.

Here’s only one instance how recent events were provided opportunities. Shortly after it was confirmed that the three Israeli teens were killed Netanyahu, as is his predilection, reacted with words of incitement. Twenty-four hours later, an AFP report states, more than 200 Jewish extremists took to the streets of Jerusalem, screaming “Death to Arabs!”, dragging people out of cars and storming the light rail system in what one witness described as “a pogrom”. Several hours later, the Palestinian youth Abu Khdeir was snatched before dawn as he went to the mosque to pray, with his burnt body found by police shortly afterwards.

And now this is the consequence: “The diabolical murder of 16-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Abu Khdeir is the Shin Bet’s nightmare scenario,” commented Yossi Melman in Maariv newspaper, referring to Israel’s internal security agency. And more to the point and much more significant: “It is a scenario in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turns into a tribal battle between two communities according to the biblical formula of an eye for an eye, which is likely to leave in its wake destruction, ruin and scorched earth on both sides.” The world is now therefore witnessing more horrors unfold and more deaths as Israel opts for all-out military assaults.

According to the French wire service, two particular extremist groups are also believed to be behind a growing wave of racist, anti-Arab vandalism, euphemistically termed “price tag” attacks which initially began as a reaction to state moves against the settlements but has morphed into a much broader expression of xenophobia. The report goes on to elaborate, “Ideologically, such groups take their inspiration from Kahanism, a racist anti-Arab ideology espoused by Rabbi Meir Kahana whose Kach party and another offshoot were banned in 1994 after one of its members gunned down 29 Muslims in a Hebron mosque.” And even though for months, ministers and former intelligence chiefs have been pushing the government to clamp down on Jewish extremists, and declare those responsible for “price tag” violence “terrorists” their calls have fallen on deaf ears, with the government agreeing only to declare the perpetrators as being in an “illegal organization”.

Explaining the extant situation Ludwig Watzal writes: “Nobody should be surprised at the outbreak of racism towards the Arabs in Israel. From the kindergarten to the grave, the Israelis are indoctrinated by Zionism, which is an exclusivist ideology. After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israel Shahak has in his groundbreaking book ‘Jewish History, Jewish Religion. The Weight of three Thousand Years’ elucidated the political implications of this belief system. But the real roots of racism in Israel and the hatred of the goyim can be found in ‘Classical Judaism’, which is used ‘to justify Israeli policies that are racist, as totalitarian and as xenophobic’. And Shahak continues: ‘Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in Jewish attitudes to the non-Jewish peoples of Israel and the Middle East.’ ”

Dr. Watzal goes on to observe: “The crocodile tears of Netanyahu for the murder of the young Palestinian are hypocritical. For the record: Netanyahu and his extremist predecessor Ariel Sharon did not moderate a mob at a demonstration in Jerusalem, which slandered Rabin as a ‘traitor’ and carried Rabin dummies in Nazi uniform, one of the most despicable symbols in Israel. Shortly after, Rabin was assassinated. Not without reason, Lea Rabin refused Netanyahu’s condolences at the state funeral. Therefore, one should not believe the political arsonist who calls for the fire brigade.” Evidently, one of the major hurdles in that conflict is the absence of rational leadership in Israel; especially a leadership that doesn’t equate religion with land.

It’s not that there are no sagacious people in Israel; it’s only that, as in most cases, their voices of sanity are drowned by the always vociferous screeching of the extremists. In this context it has also to be noted that while Israel is touted as a democracy by many of its promoters, to the oppressed Palestinian people the Tel Aviv leadership, naturally and especially because of events since the days of al Nakba, can only be viewed as tyrannical, despotic and murderous. That shouldn’t surprise anyone capable of thinking in logical and secular terms as opposed to cogitating using xenophobic and chauvinistic vocabulary.

For example, soon after the deaths of the teenagers Sima Kadmon commented in a top-selling Israeli newspaper, “And perhaps the incitement we have been seeing for the past week on the social networks, and the tens of thousands of ‘likes’ received by each call for revenge, for murdering Arabs — maybe that is our face…Perhaps something bad has happened to us as a society, and without having noticed, hatred, racism, violence and extremism have taken over our lives like a malignant disease, from the price tag actions to the calls on the streets and on the social networks to murder Arabs.” But at the moment, obviously, the violence-prone and those who have an interest in ensuring that a perennial war persists are winning. What’s even more obvious is that those with a vested interest in this status can’t be moved aside easily.

On the other side Adie Nistlerooy wrote from Gaza: During its military assaults on Gaza, the Israeli army sometimes rings people to tell them; ‘leave your house; we are going to bomb it in a few minutes’. People then have to rush their children out of the house and run for their lives, and wait for that terrible moment when their homes are reduced to rubble. Today, the Al Qaware family received that dreaded phone call. In response, their neighbors gathered on the rooftop, to prevent the airstrike from happening. Since the many drones hovering above their heads can read even the prints on their t-shirts, they would certainly be able to see them (civilians, including children) collectively standing on the rooftop. What happened; the house was bombed anyway. At least 7 people were killed including at least 2 very young children in this attack and over 25 were injured. Rescue workers are still digging through the rubble….”

This then is today’s Palestine. By the time this article is published it’s anybody’s guess how many would be dead, how many would be maimed, how many would lose their homes, how many would lose their livelihood, how many would be rendered orphans…And so the unrelenting massacre continues as the prospect for a peaceful resolution recedes further into the distance. Who in the right frame of mind can even ponder about peace under these circumstances? Still, the aggressive Tel Aviv leadership declares, unabashedly, it wants peace. Clearly, mere pieces of Palestine won’t satisfy their hunger; total subjugation is the objective.

The writer has been a media professional, in print and online newspapers as editor and commentator, and in public affairs, for over forty years

10 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By PIEF

Justice and security are two sides of the same coin. Israel’s security can never be an excuse for denying justice to the Palestinian people.”

In the spirit of the living God who sanctifies all life and in keeping with our faith and its teachings we appeal to all people across the world to work with their fellow citizens and governments to end Israel’s Operation Protective Edge and the brutal military siege that has been going on for the past seven years which includes a naval and economic blockade. Gaza has no port or airport thus no way to import or export its products.

This is not an escalation or a war. Gaza has no military or ability to protect itself other than to fire some homemade rockets. The 1.7 million people, mostly children (2/3 of the population) are also mostly refugees (1.1 million) from areas of 1948 and 1967. Furthermore under the 4th Geneva Convention Palestinians, as a militarily occupied people, have the right to defend themselves.

Our justice loving God demands us to speak out on behalf of the security for all people. In the name of the Advocate Spirit, we ask you to speak out now to call a halt to this long term offensive operation which aims to wipe out a legally elected government and its people. Whether you think the new unity government is viable or not, or if Hamas is a terrorist organization or not, or whether you think they might have been behind the death of the three Israeli teens murdered near Hebron, it is against international law to collectively punish or target them. It is not only inhumane. It is a war crime.

As of July 10th, the date of this Appeal Israeli military struck 430 targets across the Gaza Strip. 77 people have been reported dead and more than 500 wounded.. The majority of the dead are civilians. 18 are children including a baby one month old.

We pray for the memory of those killed. Each of them has a name and a family who is suffering great loss. We also pray for all those wounded or injured in body, mind, or spirit. We pray for solace and comfort also for the families whose homes, businesses, agricultural fields, or fishing boats that have also been destroyed. We pray for the people of Gaza and ask that God be with them.

Support Palestinian’s right to life by joining with Christians throughout the world in their call for a just peace in this land that all call holy. We have been down this road one too many times and know what will happen if we fail to act. Please join us through letters and petitions to your government officials to raise awareness about this offensive military operation and Gaza’s ongoing siege. Ask them to pressure Israel to stop its brutal assault or face sanctions from the international community.

Support Palestinian’s right to life by joining with Christians throughout the world in their call for a just peace in this land that all call holy.

“Who Mourns for Palestine.”(Quote from article by Jeremy Corbynn)

11 July 2014

 

By Robert J. Burrowes

Human beings stand at the edge of extinction and yet few of us are mobilized in defense of human existence. Why is this? And what can we do about it?

Unless someone lives in a cave secluded from all news, the evidence that human beings are in deep trouble – with violence in its many forms intruding on all aspects of our lives and threatening our very existence – is readily available. Of course, you won’t necessarily hear the news this
bluntly from the mainstream media but even they must convey at least occasional and/or muted reports of military violence in many parts of the world and the threat of nuclear war over Ukraine, ongoing massive deaths by starvation in many parts of the world, vanishing ecosystems and species under our combined and unrelenting assaults on the natural environment and violence in many other forms, including in our homes and on our streets. The information might not always be in the headlines but it is a recurring feature of 21st century news if someone takes the slightest interest in checking it. Given the threats, an aware person might ask ‘Why so little action in response?’

Of course, the usual answers include such explanations as these: people don’t necessarily ‘know’ (for one reason or another) and elites make considerable effort to manipulate people into believing one or more of these three things: it is the responsibility of governments (not ordinary people) to act, people can do nothing to make a difference and/or anything they do will be ineffective. Having people passive and dependent, rather than powerful agents of change, suits governments and corporations nicely: Social control is easiest in this circumstance.

However, explanations such as this, truthful though they may be, are superficial and obscure the deeper, psychological reasons why most people are so powerless.

At birth, a child is genetically programmed to use their many capacities, including their senses (such as sight, hearing and touch), feelings (such as thirst, hunger, fear, anger, sadness, happiness, pain and sexual arousal), memory, ‘truth register’, intuition, conscience and intellect to explore, learn about, understand and interact with their natural and social world. Evolution intended children to become powerfully Self-aware individuals by doing this.

However, if you want obedient adult subjects who passively accept social control, then it is simpler to work on rendering individuals powerless by stifling the development of their innate capacities during childhood. Human socialization processes, which I call ‘terrorization’, including parental practices and school, do this superbly: see ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ http://anitamckone.wordpress.com/articles-2/fearless-and-fearful-psychology/ Let me give some simple examples.

If a child is crying and you comfort them, you will (presumably unintentionally) scare them out of feeling their sadness when, in fact, their crying is a functional response to something not working out as the child wanted and for healing from this event. The same applies to fear, anger and all other feelings. Unfortunately, if we scare a child out of feeling their natural responses to events (by ignoring, comforting, reassuring, distracting, laughing at, ridiculing, terrorizing or violently controlling them when they express their feelings), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings and they will not be able to identify the appropriate way forward: this reduces their power to respond unctionally and powerfully to events in their life. And helps to create the passive slaves that elites want.

Another way in which we adults make children powerless is by endlessly thwarting the child’s initiatives so that they learn that ‘nothing works’ or even that ‘Mum/Dad doesn’t want it to work’. If a child is thwarted often enough, it will unconsciously internalize the message that trying to investigate things for themself and trying to do anything in response to their own initiative is a waste of time and they will progressively suppress their awareness of the evolutionary urges to investigate and ‘keep trying’.

So have a look around you and ask yourself this: ‘Who do I perceive as being powerfully able to respond to what is happening in the world?’ If you are like me, you see a lot of scared and powerless people (even though I spend considerable time identifying powerful people and working with them). If you are one of these powerful people, then consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ http://tinyurl.com/flametree or an equivalent sustainability initiative. You might also consider joining the worldwide movement to end all violence by signing online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

Powerful individuals must play the central role in shaping a human future that nurtures life on Earth. And while we are heavily outnumbered and under-resourced for now, as Gandhi once said ‘A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history’.
Do you feel powerfully able to help ‘alter the course of history’?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence.
09 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Alan Hart

In a recent article with the headline Charting A New Course, Alon Ben-Meir made the statement that “Only the Palestinians can modify and subsequently change the Israelis’ mindset.” The modification and subsequent change he hopes for would climax with a majority of Israel’s Jews insisting that their leaders stop being the victims of their own propaganda and make peace on terms the Palestinians could accept.

As those familiar with my work know, I think most Israeli Jews have been brainwashed by Zionist propaganda to the point where they are and will most likely remain beyond reason on the matter of justice for the Palestinians. But in this article and for the sake of discussion I am going to take Ben-Meir’s argument a big step forward and explore how, perhaps, the Israeli mindset could be changed.

For those not familiar with the Baghdad-born, Jewish-American Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, he is a widely respected expert on the Middle East. He is also a self-declared “passionate proponent” of the Arab Peace Initiative, of which more later.

The essence of his case is that the Palestinians must recognize that the average Israeli believes they do not seek real peace and are still committed to Israel’s destruction.

That is indeed what most Israelis have been conditioned to believe, so the key question seems to me to be something like this. What could be done and by whom to open Israeli minds to the truth?

The essence of the truth to which all Israeli Jews need to be exposed is in two parts.

Leaving aside the fact that despite some stupid rhetoric to the contrary the Arab regimes never, ever, had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine, the first is that the pragmatic Arafat prepared the ground on his side for peace on terms which any rational Israeli government would have accepted with relief as far back as the end of 1979 – more than 35 years ago! He did it by persuading the Palestine National Council (PNC), then the highest decision-making Palestinian body, to endorse by 296 votes to four his policy of politics and what until then had been unthinkable compromise with Israel.

From then on the deal available to Israel was peace based on an end to its occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to create the space for a viable Palestine state with East Jerusalem its capital or the whole of Jerusalem an open, undivided city and the capital of two states. Arafat subsequently informed Israeli leaders through secret emissaries that he and his senior Fatah leadership colleagues accepted that the Palestinian right of return would have to be restricted to the land of the sovereign Palestinian state. (It took Arafat 10 long years to sell the idea of unthinkable compromise with Israel to first his Fatah leadership colleagues and then the PNC. At the beginning of this demonstration of real leadership he knew he was putting his credibility with his own people and perhaps even his life on the line. Israel’s response was an invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut where the PLO was then based with the aim of exterminating its entire leadership and destroying its infrastructure).

The second part of the essence of the truth to which all Israeli Jews need to be exposed is that there is on the table, and has been since 2002, an Arab peace plan. Because I am going to suggest that a massive promotion of it offers perhaps the only hope for changing the Israeli mindset, let’s now take a look at it.

Formally known as the Arab Peace Initiative (API), it was first presented on 27 March 2002 at the Beirut Summit of the Arab League by then Crown Prince and today King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. (Arafat was unable to attend the summit because Sharon’s government told him that if he left the occupied West Bank he would not be allowed to return). The API has since be re-endorsed by Arab leaders on a number of occasions.

What’s in the API for Israel?

An end to the conflict and with the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement the establishment of normal relations between Israel and the entire Arab world (and also, although the API does not say so, the establishment of normal relations between Israel and the entire Muslim world including Iran).

What does Israel have to do to secure this deal?

It has to end its occupation of all Arab land (including the Syrian Golan Heights) grabbed in 1967. It has to accept the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem its capital. And it has to agree to a just solution of the Palestinian refugee problem in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 194 of 11 December 1948.

This resolution states that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest possible date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for the loss or damage of property which, under principles of international or in equity, should be made good by the governments or authorities responsible.”

One of several given reasons for the instant, knee-jerk rejection by Israel’s leaders of the API when it was first presented was that the return of Palestinian refugees would swamp the “Jewish state” and turn it into an Arab state. From Zionism’s pathological perspective that fear was well grounded, but…… If Israel’s leaders had been interested in peace on terms other than their own, terms which require a Palestinian surrender to Zionism’s will, they could have discovered through back-channel exploration that the API was open to negotiation so far as Arab leaders were concerned. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, subsequently said so.

In particular Israel’s leaders could have discovered that if they engaged in good faith negotiations for a comprehensive peace arising out of the API, the Arabs would effectively endorse Arafat’s pragmatism by accepting that the return of Palestinian refugees would have to be restricted to the territory of the Palestinian state – not Israel inside its borders as they were on 4 June 1967.

As I have pointed out in previous articles, Arafat was well aware that if his pragmatism on the matter of the return of the refugees had become public while he was preparing the ground on his side for peace, he would have been accused by some Palestinians of betraying their cause. When I discussed this with Arafat he made two comments. One was to the effect that it was better for the Palestinians to have “some justice rather than none.” The other was an expression of his hope that a two-state peace might lead eventually to a one-state by mutual consent. So he did not regard his compromise on the return of the refugees as necessarily closing that door for ever.

The other thing Israel’s leaders could have discovered about the flexibility of the API is that its requirement for East Jerusalem to be the capital of the Palestinian state is not a take it or leave it option. If Israel’s leaders were prepared to negotiate for a real peace, Arab leaders would be very open to the idea that Jerusalem should be an undivided, open city and the capital of two states.

To sum up so far: In return for an end to its occupation of all Arab land grabbed in 1967 (in a war of Israeli aggression not self-defense) the API offered and still offers Israel a comprehensive peace with the governments and therefore the vast majority of the peoples of the entire Arab and wider Muslim world. (Within that context it’s reasonable to assume that violent Islamic fundamentalism in all its manifestations could be isolated, contained and defeated).

The main reason why Israel’s leaders are not under any internal pressure to take the API seriously is, as indicated by public opinion polls, that the vast majority of (Jewish) Israelis have not been informed about it.

That being so the question arising is this.

Would knowledge of the API, I mean a real and true understanding of what it offers Israel, be enough to change the mindset of a significant majority of Israelis to the point where they insisted that their leaders responded positively to it in order to get good faith negotiations for a comprehensive peace underway.

For the sake of discussion I am going to assume that the answer is “Perhaps”.

In that light the question that needs to be asked and answered is this.

What can be done to inform all Israelis about what is on offer to them in the API?

My answer is that the Arab League should call and push for the convening of a special session of the UN General Assembly to focus on the API.

The UN Charter (Chapter IV, article 20) provides for the General Assembly to meet in special sessions. It states: “The General Assembly shall meet in regular annual sessions and in such special sessions as occasion may require. Special sessions shall be convoked by the Secretary-General at the request of the Security Council or of a majority of the Members of the United Nations.”

So if the Obama administration blocked a request for a special session on the API from the Security Council to the Secretary General, it could be made to happen by a majority of all the member countries.

At the special session the foreign ministers of each and every country in the Arab and wider Muslim world would re-endorse the API, spell out what is in it for Israel and indicate that if Israel was prepared to negotiate in good faith, a final agreement for a comprehensive peace would state that the return of Palestinian refugees is to be restricted to the territory of an independent and sovereign Palestine (with compensation for those unable to return), and, that Jerusalem would be an undivided, open city and the capital of two states.

In their own and various ways Arab and other Muslim foreign ministers could also take the opportunity to speak directly to all Israeli Jews. The main message to them would boil down to something like this. “If you really want peace on terms that guarantee your security and wellbeing and an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians, it’s time for you to stop believing the propaganda of your leaders and insist that they negotiate in good faith. Peace and security for all is there for the taking so far as the Arab and wider Muslim world is concerned.”

Media coverage of such an event ought to guarantee that most if not all Israelis were made aware of what they had to gain from a real peace process kick started by the API. No doubt some writers, broadcasters and other commentators in the Israeli media would assert that it was all an Arab and other Muslim confidence trick, and that Arabs and all Muslims were never to be trusted. But the message from such an event would be clear to all but those whose minds have been closed and locked by decades of Zionist propaganda

Question. Would such an event be enough to change the mindset of a majority of Israeli Jews and cause them to insist that their leaders be serious about negotiating a comprehensive peace on terms that would provide an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians and security for all?

My answer is….. Probably not but it’s well worth a try.

Last question. Does the Arab League have the political will to take such an initiative?

My answer is….. Probably not but it should.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent.
09 July, 2014
Alanhart.net

 

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: Shock and anger have engulfed Israeli and Palestinian societies since they learnt last week of the barbarous murder of children from their communities. Hours after three Israeli teenagers’ bodies were located, long after their abduction, a Palestinian youth, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was kidnapped, beaten and burnt to death, apparently as revenge.

These horrifying events should serve as a lesson in the obscene futility of vengeance. As a relative of one of the murdered children observed: “There is no difference between blood and blood.”

Sadly, that was not the message implicit in much of last week’s coverage. On social media, a juxtaposition of pictures from the same day’s New York Times showed how easy it is to forget not only that our blood is the same but that grief is too.

A headline about Israelis’ “heartbreak” was illustrated movingly by the families of the three Israeli teenagers huddled together, overwhelmed by their loss. A report on the killing of 16-year-old Abu Khdeir, on the other hand, was accompanied by an image of masked youths throwing stones.

These contrasting depictions of mourning were entirely misleading. True, Palestinian youngsters have been violently protesting in Jerusalem and communities in Israel since Abu Khdeir was buried. But so have groups of Israeli Jews. They have rampaged through Jerusalem and parts of Israel, calling out “Death to the Arabs” and attacking anyone who looks Palestinian.

Nonetheless, Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a US Jewish organisation that claims to fight bigotry, was peddling an equally divisive message. In the Huffington Post he wrote of a Palestinian “culture of hatred”.

According to Foxman, Palestinian and Israeli societies are fundamentally different. Palestinian discontent is “fanned and incited into hatred by a widespread, unfettered support for violence against Jews and Israel”.

He was echoing a sentiment common in Israel, and famously voiced in the late 1960s by the then prime minister, Golda Meir. She suggested that even harder than forgiving the Arab enemy for killing Israel’s sons would be “to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons”.

In a bout of similar self-righteousness, many Israelis berate Palestinian parents for putting their children in danger’s way by allowing them to throw stones at Israeli security forces. The implication is that Palestinians – as a result of either culture or religion – value life less than Israelis.

Strangely, Israelis rarely question the implication of the decision taken by one in 10 of their number to live in illegal colonies on stolen Palestinian land. The settlers choose to put themselves and their children on the front lines too, even though they have far more choices than Palestinians about where to live.

In fact, neither Israelis nor Palestinians can claim to be above a culture of hate. As long as Israel’s belligerent occupation continues, their lives together in one small patch of the Middle East will continue to be predicated on bouts of violent confrontation.

But that does not mean Israeli and Palestinian culpability is equal. The reality is that Israelis, unlike Palestinians, have a sovereign state that represents them and protects them with a strong army.

Last week, the Israeli army announced that it had arrested several soldiers who posted online photographs of themselves vowing revenge against “Arabs” – part of a flood of calls for vengeance on ­Hebrew social media. The arrests played well with Israel’s image as a country that enforces the rule of law, but they concealed deeper truths.

The first is that the Israelis thirsting for reprisals are simply echoing their politicians and religious leaders whose statements for vengeance surpassed even the ugly grandstanding of Hamas, which had praised the Israeli teenagers’ abduction.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the way, citing a famous line of Hebrew poetry: “The devil himself has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a small child.” His economics minister, Naftali Bennett, urged Israel to “go mad”, while a former legislator vowed that Israel would turn Ramadan into a “month of darkness”. An influential and supposedly moderate rabbi hoped for “an army of avengers”.

Last week, left wing Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv to castigate the Netanyahu government for “incitement to violence”. But even this underestimated the problem.

Israeli leaders’ threats are not simply stoking an ugly mood on the street. The huge muscle of the Israeli security apparatus is flexing at their behest too. That was given graphic illustration in video footage of armed police in Jerusalem relentlessly kicking and punching a child – a 15-year-old American relative of Abu Khdeir – as he lay cuffed and helpless on the ground.

The cabinet is plotting a more subtle revenge. It plans to build new settlements – violence against Palestinian life on the little slivers of territory left to them – specifically to honour the three teenagers. Guarded by the army, settlers have already set up a new encampment in the West Bank.

The army, meanwhile, launched a series of strikes on Gaza, culminating in a new large-scale attack dubbed Operation Protective Edge. It has also revived a policy of demolishing the homes of relatives of Palestinian terror suspects. Backed by the courts, soldiers blew up the family homes of two men it accused of being behind the teenagers’ abduction.

As Human Rights Watch warned, Israel’s recent actions – mass arrests; armed raids; the killing of Palestinians, including minors; lockdowns of cities, house demolitions; and air strikes – amounted to “collective punishment”, international law’s euphemism for revenge, against Palestinians.

In the face of the enduring violence of Israel’s occupation, and the licence it provides soldiers to humiliate and oppress, ordinary Palestinians have a stark choice: to submit or resist. Ordinary Israelis, on the other hand, do not need to seek revenge on their own account. The Israeli state, military and courts are there every day doing it for them.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

09 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Maureen Clare Murphy

Less than two weeks after concluding its largest military assault on the occupied West Bank in more than a decade, Israel has relentlessly pounded the besieged Gaza Strip since Monday.

The ongoing bombing campaign is the most severe violence inflicted by Israel on Gaza since its eight-day assault in November 2012, during which more than 150 Palestinians were killed, 33 of them children.

More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in Gaza, including 350 children, during Israel’s three consecutive weeks of attacks from air, land and sea during winter 2008-09.

Twenty-five lives have been claimed by Israel in Gaza since Monday, including at least eight children, as warplanes bombed areas across Gaza, whose 1.7 million Palestinian residents live under a tightly-enforced siege and are unable to flee and have nowhere to seek shelter.

Islamic Jihad commander Hafiz Hamad (30) and five members of his family — Ibrahim Hamad (26), Mahdi Hamad (46), Fawzia Hamad (62), Mehdi Hamad (16) and Suha Hamad (26) — were killed in an Israeli air strike on their Beit Hanoun home in the northern Gaza Strip Tuesday evening, according to a Gaza health ministry spokesperson, the Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency reported.

On Tuesday afternoon, six children were killed when an Israeli missile struck the home of an alleged Hamas activist in the southern city of Khan Younis.

The human rights group Defence for Children International Palestine reports:

The five families that reside in the building evacuated immediately after an Israeli aerial drone fired a warning missile. A number of neighbors, however, gathered on the roof in an effort to prevent the bombing. Shortly after 3 p.m., an Israeli airstrike leveled the building, and killed seven people, including five children, on the spot and injured 28 others.
Hussein Yousef Hussein Karawe, 13, Basem Salem Hussein Karawe, 10, Mohammad Ali Faraj Karawe, 12, Abdullah Hamed Karawe, 6, and Kasem Jaber Adwan Karawe, 12, died immediately, according to evidence collected by Defense for Children International-Palestine. Seraj Abed al-Aal, 8, succumbed to his injuries later that evening.

DCI-Palestine confirmed two other Palestinian teenagers died in strikes across Gaza. An Israeli attack killed Ahmad Nael Mahdi, 15, from Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, and wounded two of his friends, one of which remains in critical condition. Ahmad Mousa Habib, 16, from Gaza City’s Al-Shujaiyah neighborhood, and his 22-year-old cousin were killed while riding a motorcycle, DCI-Palestine sources said.

DCI-Palestine is confirming reports of at least three other children killed in the strikes on Tuesday.

Rockets

Israel’s stated objective for its intensified assault on Gaza is to halt the fire of rockets from Gaza.

But armed groups in Gaza retaliated by firing rockets aimed as far north as Haifa in the north of present-day Israel.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reports:

Meanwhile, for the first time since Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, rocket sirens rang in central Israel. Iron Dome interceptor missiles were able to shoot down the rockets. However most of the rockets from Gaza targeted southern Israel, with more than 100 projectiles fired.

The eight-day assault on Gaza in November 2012, codenamed Operation Pillar of Defense, was widely viewed as a military defeat for Israel as Hamas’ armed wing was able to show deterrent strength, for the first time firing long-range rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Rocket sirens were heard in both cities on Tuesday, warning residents to take shelter.

A video uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday appears to show worshippers at al-Aqsa mosque in occupied Jerusalem chanting in praise of Hamas’ armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, in response to rocket sirens sounded in the city.

Haaretz reported that a rocket exploded “in an urban area in Hadera, north of Tel Aviv, further than had previously been reached,” causing no reported damage.

Meanwhile, the Israeli army claims its forces killed several Palestinian fighters who had attacked a military base inside present-day Israel via the sea.

Haaretz added: ”The government approved call-up of up to 40,000 reserve soldiers in preparation for further escalation, after the security cabinet decided on Monday to intensify attacks against Hamas.”

The Qassam Brigades on Tuesday set the conditions for the return of a ceasefire with Israel: an end to the offensive on Gaza and a commitment to the ceasefire agreement signed in November 2012, the release of all prisoners who were freed in a 2011 prisoner exchange and were since re-arrested, and an end to interference in the new Palestinian unity government formed after a reconciliation agreement was signed in April following seven years of impasse between the Fatah party in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

Last weekend senior Hamas official Ahmad Yousef told the Ma’an News Agency that his party was no longer responsible for preventing rocket fire toward Israel.

Ma’an reported:

Asked about increased rocket fire on Israel in recent weeks, Yousef told Ma’an Hamas was not responsible for preventing attacks.
“From a political point of view, [Prime Minister in Ramallah] Rami Hamdallah is responsible and he can give orders to security services to intervene. Hamas is not ruling the Gaza Strip and so it’s not responsible for protecting borders.”

He said Palestinian security forces had attempted to prevent rocket fire, but had not been very successful.

“Israeli aggression motivates some response, and we can’t ask these bereaved people to stop,” Yousef said.

As the Israeli army launched a massive search campaign in the West Bank [for three Israeli youths who went missing while hitchhiking], arresting hundreds of Palestinians and killing at least six, militant factions in Gaza increased rocket fire on Israel.

The Israeli air force has responded with near-nightly airstrikes on the besieged coastal enclave.

Last month Israel resumed its extrajudicial execution operations in the Gaza Strip when its air force targeted a member of an armed group traveling on a motorcycle in the northern Gaza Strip, instantly killing the man. A ten-year-old bystander died of his injuries three days later. The 11 June operation was the first of its kind since early March.

Israel extrajudicially executed two additional Palestinian fighters in the occupied Gaza Strip in late June, and warplanes hit Gaza throughout the month.

Maureen Clare Murphy is the managing editor of The Electronic Intifada and lives in Chicago.

09 July, 2014
Electronicintifada.net

 

By Alternative Information Center (AIC)

Hundreds of protestors living in Palestinian towns within Israel have been met with violent crowd control and dispersion methods used by police in an attempt to prevent demonstrations, which have been gathering momentum in the last three days.

Demonstrations spread across the country in protest of the abduction and murder of Palestinian child Mohammad Abu Khdeir, who was burned to death by Israeli extremists in response to the kidnapping and murder of three Israelis last month, as well as the ongoing onslaught of attacks against Gaza and Israel’s racist policies in the area as a whole.

As of Monday evening, 277 Palestinian citizens had been arrested, 110 of whom were minors. The arrests were carried out during dawn raids as part of a search operation by Israeli forces in many Palestinian towns; arrested individuals were primarily charged with breaching public order and participating in illegal demonstrations. It is reported that Israeli courts will consider police requests to extend the detention of Palestinian youth arrested in the clashes and that 50 demonstrators were due to appear in court yesterday.

Middle East Monitor reported numerous clashes between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli forces: Demonstrations took place in Nazareth, Kafr Kanna, Arraba, Deir Hanna, Al-Muthalath, Shefa Amr, Taybeh, Baqa Al-Gharbiya, Tira, Jaffa, Exsal, Freidis, Jisr Az-Zarqa, Hura, Tel As-Sabi, Lakiya and Arara.

In Nazareth, it was reported that Mayor Ali Salam urged demonstrators to return home. A day earlier he had expressed his opposition to the demonstrations, citing that commerce, economy and tourism in the city could be damaged as a result. He further criticised leadership of the demonstrations, although his comments were met with scorn by several local Arab politicians. The Nazareth chapter of the National Democratic Assembly, a secular Arab-nationalist party with three seats in the Knesset, called his comments “miserable” and “dangerous,” and demanded an apology. Hadash, the communist front with four parliament members, condemned Salam for exonerating the Netanyahu government and “blaming Arab leaders for what had happened.”

Hanin Zoabi, an MK who lost Nazareth’s municipal elections to Salam last year, called his comments “irresponsible and unpatriotic for a person wishing to fulfill his official leadership role toward his city.”

“This is Israeli language, not Palestinian language,” she wrote on her Facebook page on Sunday, “and we will never recognize it as Palestinians.”

It is speculated that the clashes may escalate further as Israeli forces continue to operate with violence and aggression in the West Bank and Gaza. The situation for Palestinians living within Israel is different, but they also suffer daily the effects of Israel’s racist policies; unemployment rates are high, many live under the poverty line and their identity as Palestinians is not recognised.

The wave of continuing protests in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory reveal increasing frustration and righteous anger at the policies and practices of Israel, and that events and people in Palestinian towns within Israel are intimately connected to the people and events unfolding in the West Bank and Gaza.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/

8 July 2014

By Robert Barsocchini

Just as the USA lied and said it was illegally invading Panama, Grenada, and other tiny, weak countries and barbarically massacring thousands of people to “protect US citizens”, Russia lied and said it re-accepted Crimea into Russia to “protect Russian-speaking people”.

The real reason for re-accepting Crimea was military strategy: to secure one of Russia’s twelve foreign military bases, the Black Sea fleet. (Russia has twelve foreign bases; China has zero; the USA has approximately a thousand in its global empire , the most of any group in history.)

Russia’s Black Sea fleet was used as a piece on the chess board to help deter and prevent the USA from committing overt violent aggression to overthrow and conquer one of Russia’s two Middle East allies, Syria (the other being Iran, though Maliki’s Iraq government is a new contender thanks to US war crimes, including aggression and genocide , against Iraq).

If protecting Russian-speaking people was the true top reason for re-accepting Crimea, then Russia would also staunchly and overtly support independence for Donetsk and Slavyansk, where civilians are being bombed by the fully US-backed, junta-integrated Ukrainian government’s military and neo-Nazi paramilitaries, to which Obama has given full diplomatic and material support, including tens of millions of our dollars, after assisting in the neo-Nazi led overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine.

Evidence illustrates that civilians are intentionally being targeted by US-backed Kiev. Italian Journalist Christian Malaparte :

I kept hearing about these things going on, that the Ukrainian army is targeting civilians and hitting civilian homes over and over. I really didn’t believe it. I thought it was just East propaganda, but once I came here…I see these enormous apartment buildings in the centre just bombarded over and over again.

However, even if we believe that civilian areas are being targeted by US-backed Ukrainian terrorists because rebels might be there, it is still terrorism and war crimes. No one thinks it is okay when Assad targets civilian areas because rebels might be there, even though Assad faces an aggressive and incomparably more brutal, US-backed threat, whereas Eastern Ukrainian regions are simply defending themselves.

Despite the proof of civilians and/or civilian areas being intentionally targeted by US-backed, Kiev-based terrorists, Russia has done very little, if anything, to support the “Russian speakers”, anti-fascist protesters, and others in the East of Ukraine.

This is not because Putin cares about Russian speakers in Crimea but not Russian speakers a few miles away. It is because of military strategy.

Putin and Russian leaders remember the USA’s Afghan Trap, set by Jimmy Carter and continued by Reagan, which drained and collapsed the Soviet Union.

From 1979 , and possibly from the mid 70s , the USA sponsored and trained Islamic jihadist terrorists, the Mujaheddin (holy warriors), and sent them into Afghanistan to commit terrorist atrocities against civilians and force the Soviet Union to invade the country to help its client government, under which Afghan women actually had rights .

Here is National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski , on the USA’s sponsorship of terrorism, using Islamic jihadists, to provoke the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.

That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap… The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

In addition to training militants, the USA also propagandized Afghan children into lives of violent jihad by printing violent jihadist literature in the US and distributing it in Afghanistan to schoolchildren.

After many calls from Afghanistan for Soviet help against the US-sponsored terrorists, the Soviet Union finally invaded and fought a long, costly war against them that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as the destruction of human and women’s rights in Afghanistan, as the USA then brought its terrorist extremists into power in the form of the Taliban.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is one of Obama’s mentors, and a major, open proponent of aggression against Russia.

Obama and the USA are currently repeating the Afghan Trap strategy in Ukraine, sponsoring terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and at least near-genocide there to do what Carter did and provoke Russia into invading and fighting a costly war that will weaken Russia and allow US propagandists to further demonize it and prepare the minds of the US population for new instances of US and Western aggression against Russia and, ultimately, as in Brzezinski’s stated vision, the US-forced break-up of Russia into small parts that can be easily dominated by the US.

If Putin continues to distance himself from the Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine, as he has done publicly, he is also at risk of losing support within Russia, where he enjoys far higher popularity than Obama does in the US. Putin’s distancing is also good news for the US and US-funded banking organizations like the IMF, which vowed to cut its austerity-based funding for Ukraine if the gas-rich Eastern regions were not re-taken by the Western military so they could be exploited by Western fossil fuel companies.

For crucial perspective, it must be noted that, contrary to what Western propaganda would have us believe, Eastern Ukraine has been integrated with Russia for hundreds of years as a defense against Western European imperialism, which (including its US offshoot) has been by far the most brutal and ruthless in dominating the globe:

In 1653 the greater portion of the population [of Ukraine] rebelled against dominantly Polish Catholic rule, and in January 1654 an assembly of the people (rada) voted at Pereyaslav to turn to Moscow, effectively joining the southeastern portion of the Polish-Lithuanian empire east of the Dnieper River to Russia. – Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1963). A History of Russia. Oxford University Press. p. 199.

Those are the exact regions that today have declared independence from the US-backed junta and Nazi-integrated terrorist forces in Western Ukraine.

Robert Barsocchini is an historical researcher, investigative journalist , and writer for the film industry.
07 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Alex Lantier

Over the weekend, after indiscriminate artillery bombardments, forces of the US-backed Ukrainian regime retook the cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, which had been strongholds of armed opposition to the government that emerged from February’s fascist-led putsch in Kiev.

Amid a virtual blackout in the American media, Ukrainian regime forces are now threatening a bloodbath as they march on the major cities of southeastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk. “The main strategic plan of the Ukrainian army is to besiege Lugansk and Donetsk,” Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Deputy Secretary Mikhail Koval said, adding that the goal was to force anti-regime troops to surrender.

On Saturday, there was heavy shelling of both Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, which occupy strategic positions along roads from western Ukraine to Donetsk, and Ukrainian tanks entered the center of Kramatorsk. There were also reports of shelling in Lugansk and Donetsk, where pro-Kiev forces apparently tried to seize the Karlovka district and march on the Donetsk airport.

Pro-Russian “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR) forces in Slavyansk announced a retreat Saturday, leaving only a skeleton force of local militiamen to face Ukrainian troops. DPR official Aleksandr Borodai said: “Due to the overwhelming numerical superiority of the enemy, our men were forced to abandon their positions.”

Yesterday, heavy fire was reported in both Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, as Kiev’s troops crushed remaining resistance. Videos of Slavyansk that had emerged in Russian media in recent weeks prior to the seizure of the town by Kiev already showed heavy damage from artillery bombardments.

In a sinister remark, Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko made clear that Kiev does not intend to take any prisoners among opposition fighters. Dismissing any possibility of creating a corridor allowing DPR forces to leave the region, he absurdly claimed that opposition fighters were being killed by their own commanders: “Rebel leaders are keeping a close watch on the situation and killing those wishing to surrender to Ukrainian law enforcers.”

In the ruins of Slavyansk, units of the National Guard, a force set up by the Kiev regime together with fascist militias that had led the February putsch, are overseeing a reign of terror. There are reports of National Guard reprisals against Slavyansk inhabitants who stayed in the city, and that all remaining Slavyansk police and male residents between the ages of 25 and 35 are being rounded up.

Deputy Interior Minister Sergei Yarovoy announced an investigation into the Slavyansk police, which largely sided with DPR forces. “An internal investigation of each member of the local police force will be launched,” Yarovoy said. “During these official investigations, we will determine if police officers in Slavyansk collaborated with the separatists or remained faithful to the oath to the Ukrainian people.”

Yesterday, regime forces attacked Lugansk, a city of a half million people, shelling targets in the center of the city and launching missile strikes from warplanes overflying the suburb of Aleksandrovka. Health authorities reported that 80 wounded, including 56 civilians, had been treated on Saturday. An initial tally of victims in yesterday’s attacks was one dead and four injured. Lugansk local authorities have told the city’s inhabitants not to leave their homes.

As the fighting escalates, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are now fleeing the Kiev regime’s offensive. According to UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) figures, as of June 27, 110,000 people had fled to Russia and 54,000 had been internally displaced within Ukraine. It is believed that these figures are well below the current reality. Since June 27, the Kiev regime’s offensive has intensified and shifted towards attacks on major cities.

In Donetsk, a city of one million people before the February putsch, tens of thousands of residents have fled as surviving DPR forces regrouped for a stand inside the city. “We will fight to the end because we have nowhere left to retreat. I don’t want to fall into the hands of the Ukrainian authorities, those fascists,” a 32-year-old former miner said in Donetsk, identifying himself only as Artyom. He said the anti-regime rebels were awaiting aid from Russia, “but the hope grows weaker with every day.”

Donetsk resident Nina Yakovleva, a 45-year-old accountant, said, “We are afraid that Donetsk will be left in ruins like Slavyansk.”

The war being waged against the people of southeastern Ukraine by the Kiev regime is an indictment of the politically criminal policy of Washington, Berlin and their European allies, who encouraged a far-right putsch to topple a pro-Russian government and install a pro-Western government. Now, in a major European country with a population of nearly 50 million, the government is employing heavy weaponry to destroy cities in an attempt to annihilate popular opposition.

Having publicly backed the February putsch and funded the Ukrainian opposition to the tune of $5 billion over a period of decades, according to US State Department official Victoria Nuland, Washington, along with its European allies, is now working closely with its puppet regime in Kiev.

On Friday, the day before the final assaults on Slavyansk, multibillionaire chocolate oligarch and now Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, discussed the situation in east Ukraine in a telephone call with US Vice President Joseph Biden.

There have been repeated reports that Ukrainian armed forces and fascist militias such as the Right Sector work closely with mercenaries from Greystone, a division of the US military contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater that carried out massacres during the US occupation of Iraq.

The hypocrisy of the imperialist powers in backing the Kiev regime’s war against the Ukrainian people is monumental. In 2011, Washington, London and Paris insisted that the risk that the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya might suppress protests in Benghazi justified a NATO war to destroy the Gaddafi regime, in the name of a “responsibility to protect” civilians. But when, as in Ukraine, the Western powers want to preserve a regime, they endorse the military repression of entire cities and regions.

After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the United States and Germany encouraged separatist movements in the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia. The Yugoslav army in these regions found itself denounced and internationally branded as a criminal force when it tried to stop the breakup of the country—culminating in a 1999 US-NATO war in Yugoslavia and the bombing of Belgrade. Today, however, Washington, Berlin and their allies champion the army of the Ukrainian government and support its attacks on separatist forces, denouncing entire populations that oppose the far-right regime in Kiev as “terrorists.”

The ruthlessness of the policies the imperialist powers are pursuing in Ukraine was highlighted by the leak of a document purporting to be a report of the US intelligence-linked RAND Corporation offering policy proposals to the Kiev regime. The document calls for a “swift crackdown,” based on the view that “anyone who has stayed behind [in eastern Ukraine] should be regarded as complicit in the unrest, or supportive of it.”

In Hitlerian fashion, the document proposes to impose martial law in eastern Ukraine until at least the beginning of 2015, and to relocate fighting-age males “into internment camps.” It states, “Anyone who attempts to resist shall be executed on the spot.”

Russia’s state-owned Russia Today broadcaster subsequently took down its article after the RAND Corporation denied it had prepared such a document and alleged that the report that it had was a fraud.

While it is currently impossible to tell whether this particular document is a forgery, such a proposal is entirely plausible and consistent with the criminal and homicidal methods being employed by the imperialist puppet regime in Kiev against its internal opponents.

07 July, 2014
WSWS.org

 

by Dennis Small

In a decision written by Aristotelian idiot Justice Antonin Scalia, the United States Supreme Court on June 16 sided with the bloodiest of vulture funds, NML Capital and Aurelius Capital Management, in their effort to use American courts to gain discovery of all Argentine financial movements worldwide, in order to seize that country’s assets in payment for defaulted bonds. The Supreme Court simultaneously upheld a lower court ruling by Federal Judge Thomas Griesa, that Argentina had to immediately pay $1.5 billion to NML Capital and other “holdouts” against Argentina’s 2005 sovereign debt restructuring, and that Argentine assets anywhere in the world could be seized to execute that payment—including the $900 million that Argentina must pay on June 30 to its other creditors who renegotiated in good faith.

Argentina has repeatedly warned that such a ruling could lead to an overall default on its debt. In point of fact, the ruling threatens to bring down the entire trans-Atlantic financial system in an orgy of predatory looting of nations, their populations and their resources—precisely the deadly “bail-in” policy loudly trumpeted by the British Empire as its “final solution” to the bankruptcy that is sinking their system.

Lyndon LaRouche stressed this point in his opening remarks to the June 23 LaRouchePAC Policy Committee weekly discussion. “The bailout/bail-in policy is in full play now, and this attack on Argentina set this into motion.” Wall Street is about to go bankrupt, LaRouche said, and the situation is ripe to “explode or implode immediately. So what we’re headed for is a world war.” In this life or death battle, LaRouche said, Argentina “cannot capitulate, it cannot possibly. Uruguay has joined them—they’re going to block. We probably will have, throughout the entirety of South America, more or less the totality is going to block. This is going to be an international block,” LaRouche stated.

“Because Argentina cannot submit: it would become extinct,” LaRouche stressed. “Most of South America realizes that. They must support Argentina. Not for the sake of Argentina, but for the sake of the entire continent…. Russia is not going to capitulate. Eurasia is not going to capitulate! So, in one sense, you’re headed toward a very early thermonuclear war, globally!

“The only solution is, throw Obama out of office now; let Wall Street go bankrupt, which is what it really is in principle. And we can proceed, immediately, in the United States, to set forth a new program, a new set of relations, and the whole mess will be under control.”

Sovereignty at Stake
Two additional court actions over the last 72 hours, on top of the Supreme Court atrocity of June 16, point to the scope of what is actually at stake.

* On June 17, Economy Minister Axel Kicillof had announced that the Argentine government was considering a bond swap for existing bondholders, to allow them to be paid on identical terms, only in Argentina and under Argentine jurisdiction, and not in New York, thereby avoiding the danger of seizure of assets. Kiciloff explained that this option had been “studied in depth” by the government since August 2013, adding: “If a ruling asks us to commit suicide, we’re not going to commit suicide.”

Judge Griesa promptly issued a court order on June 20 stating that “the Republic of Argentina is prohibited from carrying out the proposal of the Economy Minister.” That ruling of Griesa’s is an attempt to wipe out the very existence of “sovereign debt” as a category, in fact eliminating the sovereign nation-state as such, and replacing it with supranational jurisdiction over all financial flows. This would spell the end of the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states altogether—a longstanding policy objective of the British Empire that stands behind both Griesa and the U.S. Supreme Court.

* Also on June 17, NML Capital, which is owned by Republican Party billionaire Paul Singer, went before California’s District 9 Appeals Court to demand that international business partners of Argentina’s YPF oil company—including Chevron Corp. Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, and Apache Corp.—provide information about where YPF’s assets may be located.

Argentine Cabinet Chief of Staff Jorge Capitanich responded on June 22 that, behind the legal battles and the vulture funds, there are “dark interests whose perspective is to seize real and financial assets of the Argentine Republic.” Two days earlier, an outraged President José Mujica of neighboring Uruguay, had told an audience at Argentina’s La Plata National University that the vulture funds are going to come after Argentina’s oil, particularly the Vaca Muerta shale oil and gas deposits in the Patagonia region, one of the largest such reserves in the world, for whose exploitation Argentina’s YPF oil firm has signed a $1.25 billion partnership with Chevron Corp. “They will want to swallow Argentina’s oil for nothing,” Mujica said, “and they’ll end up proposing that the debt be paid with natural resources.”

Argentina and the BRICS
One of the British Empire’s problems in ramming through such a bail-in Brave New World of asset seizure and pillage, is that the Argentine government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has no intention of rolling over and playing dead. Moreover, she has given indications that she is aware of what is at issue strategically, and that Argentina has other options available to it, including alliances with the surging Asia-Pacific nations of Russia and China, and with the broader BRICS grouping that also includes India, South Africa, and Brazil. In fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin, no stranger to threats of financial warfare against his country, has invited President Fernández to attend the upcoming BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil on July 15, where he will also hold a bilateral meeting with the Argentine head of state. Will their agenda include establishing the basis for Argentina to become the first nation in the bankrupt trans-Atlantic sector to abandon that sinking Titanic?

Argentina is well-suited for such a role, being singularly focused, among the nations of South America, on the role of science and advanced technology in fostering economic development, especially in the fields of nuclear energy, space exploration, etc.—a perfect match with the strategic policies now emerging from the Asia-Pacific region. The Fernández government has repeatedly stressed that the success of the country’s 2005 debt restructuring was based on its rejection of IMF austerity conditionalities, and adoption of its own policies of growth. As the Argentine Presidency stated in a full-page advertisement placed in the Sunday, June 22 editions of the New York Times and the Washington Post: “The fundamental principle of all negotiations conducted with creditors was always the same: in order to be able to pay, Argentina must first grow, so as to generate the resources that will enable it to honor its commitments.”

Not only will President Fernández be discussing these matters with Russian President Putin at the upcoming BRICS summit. Chinese President Xi Jinping will also take advantage of the BRICS summit to hold a state visit with Brazil, followed by state visits to Argentina, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

If the British Empire, their assets in the U.S. judicial system, and the vulture funds go too far—which they may already have done—they may indeed produce their own worst nightmare.

Fernández Defines the Issue
The same day that the U.S. Supreme Court announced its ruling, President Fernández delivered a nationally televised speech in which she stated:

“I wasn’t surprised by this ruling. I expected it … because this isn’t an economic or financial problem, or even a legal one.” The U.S. Supreme Court has defended “a form of global domination of financial derivatives intended to bring nations to their knees,” Fernández explained. Should this global economic model continue to operate unhindered, it will “produce unimaginable tragedies,” as it is fed by the “blood, hunger, and exclusion of millions of youth worldwide who are jobless, with no access to education.”

In a speech delivered one day earlier at the closing session of the G77 summit in Bolivia, just before the Supreme Court ruling, Fernández had explained what the actual issue is with the vulture funds:

“In this kind of anarcho-capitalism, where a small group of financiers runs the rest of humanity, a group known as ‘vulture funds,’ obtained debt instruments at absurdly low prices—if the value was 100, they paid 5 pesos, or perhaps less—financiers who don’t even pay taxes because their official headquarters are in tax havens, and which only represent 1 or 2% of Argentina’s total debt.” Fernández continued that these funds threaten to cut off Argentina’s access to capital markets, but “for us, to go to the capital market with interest rates of 14 or 15% is frankly usurious and prohibitive.

“And yet this small group of vulture funds is endangering not only Argentina—because if it were only Argentina it might not matter much to the world, a country lost at the bottom of the South American continent wouldn’t matter much to them. But in reality what is at stake is the international financial system, and the international economic system more than the financial system…. [This is] financial capitalism and the appearance of what is called financial derivatives, which began to generate, or at least make the world believe that they were generating, money without going through the cycle of the production of goods and services, which is impossible and obviously generate astronomically high profits, but also the existence of fictitious money.”

Bail-in on the Ropes?
The Argentina government has explained the specific implications of the Griesa/Supreme Court rulings very clearly, in the June 22 full-page ad: “7% of bondholders did not accept the restructuring. The vulture funds that secured a ruling in their favour are not original lenders to Argentina. They purchased bonds in default at obscenely low prices for the sole purposes of engaging in litigation against Argentina and making an enormous profit. Paul Singer’s NML fund, for example, in 2008 paid only 48.7 million US dollars for bonds in default. Judge Griesa’s ruling now orders that it be paid an amount of 832 million U.S. dollars, i.e., a gain of 1,608% in only six years.

“Argentina has appealed against New York District Court Thomas Griesa’s ruling, which orders payment of 1.5 billion dollars to be made on June 30, which is the due date of the next payment related to the restructured debt. However, it is estimated that the total bonds in default that did not enter the restructuring processes amount to 15 billion US dollars, i.e., over 50% of Argentina’s foreign currency reserves. Judge Griesa’s ruling would push the country to a new default. This is so because if Argentina does pay the 1.5 billion, it will have to pay 15 billion in the immediate future. To make matters worse, under the laws of Argentina and the clauses governing the restructured instruments (RUFO), if the vulture funds were to be paid, all other bondholders would demand equal treatment, involving an estimated cost of over 120 billion US dollars. If, on the other hand, Argentina does not pay the vulture funds, Judge Griesa’s ruling forbids Argentina to make payments to 92.4% of the bondholders who did accept the restructuring, as the judge has issued orders to the Bank of New York and to the settlement agencies for them not to pay.

“In other words: paying the vulture funds is a path leading to default, and if they are not paid, Judge Griesa’s order entails jeopardizing the right of the bondholders to collect their debt restructured in 2005 and 2010.”

But there are further-reaching consequences of the Griesa/Supreme Court rulings. The International Monetary Fund, for example, is deeply concerned that this will set a precedent for all future bond renegotiations, that will de facto make the British Empire’s intended bail-in operations impossible. The bail-in, or Single Resolution Mechanism, entails drastic reorganization of insolvent financial institutions by forcibly seizing the assets of “unsecured creditors,” including depositors and certain categories of bondholders. The latter would be forced to swallow major write-downs on their holdings, and/or conversion of bonds into worthless stocks in the bankrupt bank. If a small minority of such bondholders is able to file suit and can maintain the face value of their bonds, a precedent just upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, then any and all such renegotiations will be scuttled.

In a statement issued June 16, right after the Supreme Court decision, the IMF stated: “The Fund is considering very carefully this decision,” because it could undermine sovereign debt restructurings around the globe. The IMF said it is “reassessing” how it handles debt crises internationally. And then again on June 20 the IMF issued a report protesting that the Supreme Court decision “will give holdout creditors greater leverage and make the debt restructuring process more complicated,” and that the IMF is therefore studying “a more robust form of collective action perspective than those currently in existence.”

Mobilize to Defend Argentina
Argentina is indeed facing an existential crisis. In her June 16 address, President Fernández stated that the U.S. Court decisions, if implemented, would mean that Argentina’s successful 2005 debt restructuring would “collapse like a house of cards, and along with it, obviously, the Argentine Republic.” She warned: “No president of a sovereign nation can subject their nation and people to extortion.”

Argentina has quickly found support among its sister republics of South America. Uruguayan President Mujica has been most explicit:

“From the countries of the region, we have to come up with something to lend Argentina a hand, allowing it to launch a countercoup, so that the confrontation becomes a global one, not just one involving Argentina.” Pointing to Judge Griesa’s original ruling favoring the vulture funds, he warned “today they come for you, but tomorrow they’ll come for me!”

Already Argentina has received statements of solidarity from the Common Market of the South (Mercosur), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Nations (CELAC), other regional bodies, and even the broader G77, which pronounced on June 14: “We reiterate that the vulture funds cannot be allowed to paralyze the restructuring activities of developing nations or deprive the State from protecting its people in accordance with international law.”

Another critical strategic force that the British Empire has to reckon with, is Pope Francis, who is not only Argentine himself and a regular interlocutor of President Fernández, but has also given strong voice to rejection of the current global financial system in terms not unlike those employed by President Fernández. In a mid-June interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, Pope Francis stated: “75 million young Europeans under 25 years of age are unemployed. That is an atrocity. But we are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up anymore, a system that, to survive, must make war, as the great empires have always done.”

Within the United Kingdom itself, a group of 106 British Parliamentarians, organized by the Vatican-linked Jubilee Network, issued a statement in early June warning that the vulture funds were trying to drive Argentina into default, and calling on the British government to put forward a bill that would “prevent the vulture funds from ignoring the restructuring of the Argentine and Greek debt.”

The reference to Greece is telling. Among that country’s principal creditors, for which the country and its population is being torn limb-from-limb by savage Troika-imposed austerity policies, are the same vulture funds involved in the Argentine assault. Among them are Singer’s Elliott Associates, and the infamous Dart Management, whose owner Kenneth Dart gave up his U.S. citizenship to take up residence in the British overseas territory of the Cayman Islands to more easily direct his predatory activities.

In fact, all of Europe is ripe for bolting from the bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system. The Auschwitz-like conditions that submission to the European Union and the Troika has created, have led to the political earthquake expressed in the recent European Parliament elections, in which anti-euro parties achieved dramatic gains against the agents of the British Empire, such as the French Socialist Party of François Hollande. Many of those newly victorious forces will recall that in June 2012, EIR published a study commissioned by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, entitled “ There Is Life After the Euro! Program for an Economic Miracle In Southern Europe, The Mediterranean Region, And Africa,” which contained a chapter called “ What Europe Can Learn from Argentina.”

Two years later, that issue is now back on the table with renewed urgency.

But what Europe, the BRICS nations, and others must register, is that well-meaning solidarity will not suffice to defeat an enemy as evil and entrenched as the British Empire. In a response to a question sent to him about whether or not “the countries of South America have the ability to unite into a union, which maybe might work within a BRICS alliance, to begin development,” LaRouche responded: “Yes, but only under appropriate new conditions among those respectively sovereign nation-states…. There can not be any alien imperialist intrusion among the members. In other words, the individual partners must not be subject to a monetarist tyranny of economic relations among those nations which intended themselves to be sovereign, such as the virtually globalist British imperial tyranny which presently dominates the planet as a whole, or nearly so”.

23June 2014