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By Asa Winstanley

A campaigning research group says Israeli companies are making healthy profits from the siege their government has imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006.

In a new briefing document published last week, Corporate Watch details its conclusions based on a recent research trip to Gaza. The Electronic Intifada published an interview with the team while they were there.

Gaza is a “captive market” for Israeli pharmaceutical companies, the report says, based on interviews with Palestinian health professionals there.

Palestinians are effectively forced to buy Israeli products, since Israel dictates almost all the products that enter.

In addition, the terms of the Paris protocol of 1994 opened the floodgates for Israeli products – tax free. In practice, Palestinian exports are heavily curtailed, as well as imports from other countries.

Israel bans many medicines from entering Gaza, and shortages abound. “We have a shortage of drugs, especially for chronic illness,” one doctor from the Union of Health Work Committees told Corporate Watch. A Ministry of Health spokesperson told the researchers that 141 out of a list of 470 essential drugs cannot be found in Gaza.

A complex system of Israeli “coordination” and hurdles means that basic medicines and medical equipment can be delayed for months. For example:

When health services in Gaza purchase drugs from the international market they come into Israel through the port of Ashdod but are not permitted to travel the 35 km to Karam Abu Salem [crossing, in the south] directly. Instead they are transported [80 km] to the Bitunia checkpoint into the West Bank and stored in Ramallah, where a permit is applied for to transport them to Gaza, significantly increasing the length and expense of the journey.

In addition, transport and storage costs with Israeli companies also have to be paid for – increasing the profits to Israeli companies.

Egypt’s military regime has been a junior partner in the siege, intensifying its involvement since the military coup of July 2013. Not long after, it destroyed many tunnels under the Egypt-Gaza border, which had been a vital lifeline.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza told Corporate Watch that 30 percent of its medicines used to be brought in via the tunnels.

Boycotting where possible

Despite all this, Palestinian health workers in Gaza told Corporate Watch they “were uniformly enthusiastic about the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel … All of the health workers that we spoke to told us that their organizations had a policy of boycotting Israeli medicines except where they needed that medicine in order to protect life and were not able to procure it from another source.”

The Palestinian heath workers suggested action that could feasibly be taken by those outside Palestine. These ideas included boycotting the Israeli Medical Association. “If they see that there is a growing campaign in Europe maybe they will think twice about launching new military operations in Gaza,” explained Dr. Bassem Zaqout of the Palestine Medical Relief Service.

Another idea was for Europeans in general, and British citizens in particular to work on a boycott of Teva, a giant Israeli drug corporation – the largest company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Corporate Watch says Teva is the world’s largest supplier of generic drugs. As such, it would be safe to ethically advocate a boycott of Teva, since its products can easily be replaced, the group argues. Palestinian professionals they interviewed were in favor of a boycott of Teva.

Asa Winstanley is an associate editor with The Electronic Intifada. He is an investigative journalist who lives in London.

http://electronicintifada.net/

24 February, 2014

By Franklin Lamb

Damascus: Since around Valentine Day and aided by truly magnificent warm weather for this time of year, the dozens of parks in Damascus have been receiving unusually large numbers of visitors, not least of whom are Syrian soldiers on leave, enjoying the green space with girlfriends, families and friends. At the large garden with dozen of benches and sculptures, called Al-Manshia (Presidents Bridge) public park, and located between two five-star hotels, the Dama Rose and the 4-Seasons, some soldiers, presumably from out of town and with many appearing utterly exhausted, can be seen simply laying on the grass fast asleep under the warm healing sunshine.

Soldiers joke, laugh and seem pleased when citizens approach them to offer their thanks for the army’s service to the Syrian Arab Republic and to inquire about how things are going personally and if there is some help the citizen might offer the soldier. Such is the nature of Syrian nationalism and connection with Mother Syria that this observer has remarked about before and is strikingly rare from his experience. I love my country but frankly do not feel the pride and deep connection that Syrians appear to exhibit about their country’s 10,000 year history as the cradle of civilization. I would defend my country and fight for it if there were to be a legitimate war which frankly has not been the case in my lifetime.

Over the past 30 months of frequent visits to Damascus, the city has never appeared more ‘normal’ Last night this observers was up all night reading and there was not one bombing run or mortar or artillery fire to he heard, a first for more than two years. For many months, I used to avoid the historic Al-Hamidiyah Souk, the largest and the central souk in Syria located inside the old walled city of Damascus next to the Umayyad Mosque, despite its hundreds of interesting shops. The reason I tended to stay away was because I was one of very few people meandering among the warren of stalls and felt self-conscious when shopkeepers would plead with me to buy something-anything to help feed their families many of whom lived near the labyrinth warren.

Today, Al-Hamidiyah Souk, if not frequented with the numbers of shoppers and visitors as it was before March 2011, it is nonetheless very crowded such that foreigners can pass unnoticed…well, sometimes for at least the first hundred yards or so. In Damascene neighborhoods, no longer do citizens quickly disappear into their homes at the first sign of dusk but the streets and cafes are these days and many crowded well past 9 p.m.

“Quo Vadis Syrie”, (‘where is Syria heading’) one Damascus University student asked this visitor as we both sat on the steps of the Law Faculty while enjoying a bit of sun yesterday afternoon. “Is our crisis nearly over so we can start re-building Mother Syria or do our enemies have other plans to destroy us? I worry that today’s calm will soon disappear with an arriving hurricane.” His comment was perhaps triggered by a certain sense here and widely elsewhere that a forming “coalition of the willing” are pressing for a ‘humanitarian’ No Fly Zone. Some American allies envisage and are making plans to implement a no-fly zone stretching up to 25 miles into Syria which would be enforced using aircraft flown from Jordanian bases and flying inside the kingdom, according to Congressional sources.

Any NFZ would be very different from what is currently being promoted and advertised by certain war-mongers in Washington, Tel Aviv and several European capitals as well as among elements of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the League of Arab States. Post Round Two of Geneva II, the White House and the usual group of war mongers in Congress and among the US Zionist lobby, are said to be re-thinking the idea of a No Fly Zone (NFZ) for Syria. It would be planned and executed with US and a yet to be specified, “Coalition of the willing” using aircraft positioned at bases in Jordan and Turkey to begin with.

Ranking with the fake “non-lethal aid” concept, in terms of cynical deception (virtually all “non-lethal” aid is indeed lethal for its facilitates certain forces killing others including night goggles, telecommunication equipment, GPS equipment, salaries, fake IDs and much else), a limited, ‘humanitarian’ NFZ would almost certainly became a bomb anything/person that moves ‘turkey shoot’ as was the case in Libya in 2011 as was studied and witnessed first-hand by this an many other observers. What we observed in the then, but no more, Al Jamahiriya (state of the masses), was that the misnomer ‘limited humanitarian Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) promoted by Obama Administration UN Ambassador Susan Rice for Libya and now by her predecessor Samatha Power for Syria was that a NFZ means essentially an all-out war for regime change at all costs in terms of expendable lives and treasury.

The Libya experience, conceding many differences between the two countries and their governments and quality of each country’s military, may be prologue for Syria. Backed by a U.N. Security Council mandate, NATO charged into Libya citing its urgent “responsibility to protect” civilians threatened by claimed bloody rampages occurring across the country. Within days, we witnessed the ‘limited carefully vetted’ targets bank turn from a promoted ‘several dozen purely military targets” into more than 10,000 bomb runs using over 7,700 ‘precision guided bombs” and from the ground and what we saw during weeks in Libya by victims and eye-witnesses it seemed at times that the targets were basically anything that moved or looked like it might have a conceivable military purpose of some sort.

Human Rights Watch documented nearly 100 cases of civilians being bombed and killed as part of the R2P campaign. Other estimates are several times the HRW published figures. To this day Libyan civilians and demanding to know from NATO, Why did you destroy my home and kill my family?” No answer were even provided to the Libyan victims’ families despite investigations that some showed NATO pilots disregarded instructions and “we essentially bombed at if we were playing video games” according to post-conflict contrite airman.

Susan Rice, now Obama’s national security adviser, met with Saudi officials last week to discuss a NFZ and related strategy despite White House claims that it is still skeptical. Rice told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee late last month that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are working together again on Syria policy after a year of occasional bitter disagreement.

Among those currently petitioning the Obama Administration for a NFZ, which would quickly devolve into thousands of bomb runs across Syria that would likely decimate its air force and tank corps are the so-called rebels. They tend to agree with France that problems lay ahead for them given April’s fast approaching Presidential election, in which the incumbent President, Bashar Assad, is likely to seek and win re-election.

In addition, Israel, according to a Congressional source, has offered to help ‘behind the scenes” with airbases if needed and certain activities along the southern Syrian border with still occupied Palestine. A majority of Arab League countries, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) plus Turkey, France, the UK and some members of the EU also support the NFZ idea. Saudi Arabia has already approved large quantities of Chinese man-portable air defense systems or Manpads as well as antitank guided missiles from Russia and more cash to help rebels oust the Assad regime, according to an Arab diplomat. Meanwhile, the US has upped its contribution to pay the salaries of preferred rebel fighters.

Ominously, the U.S. has already moved Patriot air defense batteries and F-16 fighter planes to Jordan, which could be integral to any no-fly zone. U.S. planes have air-to-air missiles that could destroy Syrian planes from long ranges. But officials have advised Congress that aircraft may be required to enter Syrian air space if threatened by advancing Syrian planes. This could easily lead to all-out war with Syria and if Russia decides to provide advanced, long-range S-300 air defense weapons to Syria, it would make such a limited no-fly zone far more risky for U.S. pilots and it’s anyone’s guess what would happen next.

President Obama so far is keeping his own counsel as his Secretaries of Defense and State, current and former, and many other officials and politicians offer their advice for the White House ordering a NFZ. Hilary Clinton and General David Petraeus reportedly both favor a NFZ to ‘end this mess” in the words of the retired CIA Director.

To his great credit, Barack Obama appears to many on Capitol Hill reluctant to give formal approval to another NFZ as he was last summer when he resisted calls to launch a war against Syria as well as Congressional war-monger demands to go to war with Iran on behalf of the Netanyahu government. This week Mr. Obama acknowledged that diplomatic efforts to resolve the Syrian conflict are far from achieving their goals. “But the situation is fluid and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue including diplomacy.”

If President Obama extends his record of putting American interests first to three key decisions over the past six months, and if he sticks with diplomacy rather than launch all-out war with Syria, and potentially the allies of Damascus, via a NFZ, he just may be on his way to earning his per-maturely awarded Nobel Prize.

Franklin Lamb is a visiting Professor of International Law at the Faculty of Law, Damascus University and volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (sssp-lb.com).

22 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

Interview With Prof Francis Boyle

It is a fact that since 9-11-2001, the US Government has been in the business of destroying countries and using NATO as it principle instrument. That was stated more than a decade ago by then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and later by General Wesley Clark. The Pentagon drew up a list of 7 states that were to be destroyed: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria and they have systematically proceeded to destroy all of the Countries on the list. The strategy in Ukraine is the same, US/NATO/EU are promoting the destabilization and the breakup of Ukraine in order to achieve the NATO goal of moving into Ukrainian territory closer to Russia. Harvard Professor Francis Boyle, a US based Russian expert who was invited to the Soviet Union to lecture spoke on these issues and more in an interview with the Voice of Russia. While Russia was distracted into believing that the US wanted a reset US foreign policy was being planned and dictated by rabid Russia haters like Zbignew Brzezinski and Richard Pipes. Brzezinski wants to breakup Russia into approximately 68 parts and has placed his protégés in key US foreign policy posts. According to Mr. Boyle, Brezezinski has staffed the Obama administration with his acolytes and protégées, including the US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a specialist in color revolutions. At the end of the day the US plan is to see the breakup of the Russian Federation, that is the goal.

This is John Robles, you are listening to an interview with Professor Francis Boyle. He is a Professor in International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, Illinois. This is part 1 of a longer interview. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com

Robles: Hello Sir! How are you this evening?

Boyle: Very fine. Thanks for having me on, John, and my best to your listening audience.

Robles: Thank you Sir! And thanks for agreeing to speak with us. News of the day is Ukraine. Now you’ve recently made some statements and done some work regarding Syria. I’d like to ask for your correlations between what is going on right now in Syria and what is going on right now in Ukraine. Do you see a connection? Some people are saying that Ukraine, the push there was because the US was not allowed to carry out military operations against Syria. Do you see a relationship between them?

Boyle: Well I wouldn’t say that is “necessarily” the reason. As we know, Ukraine has for a long time been a strategic objective of the United States and trying to get Ukraine into NATO. And this EU plan was simply a first step in that direction. The EU wasn’t really offering anything to Ukraine. But it was very clear, if they could move Ukraine closer to the EU, that would be a step closer to NATO. In fact, I regret to say over the years, even though I have EU citizenship and carry an EU passport, the EU now has become nothing but an anteroom to NATO.

So, I think this really has to be understood in terms of the gradual movement of NATO further to the east in violation of the pledge that George Bush Senior and Jim Baker gave to then President Gorbachev that if he agreed to the reunification of Germany, NATO would move no farther east, towards Russia’s boundaries.

Robles: Well, we’ve seen those promises, similar promises were made to President Gorbachev – the first and last President of the Soviet Union – those were also ignored. And regarding …

Boyle: The problem was – he never got them in writing.

Robles: That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Boyle: That is incredibly naive on his part not to get them in writing. And I would point out, right now the United States is trying to do the exact same thing on the deployment of BMDs (ballistic missile defense) into Europe and around the borders of Russia saying “you have to accept our assurances, but we are not going to give you anything in writing.”

You know, it is preposterous. In fact, we had something in writing and that was the Anti-ballistic Missile System Treaty of 1972 that prevented all of this. And then Bush Junior pulled out of that treaty. So, as it stands now, really anything goes, these verbal assurances mean nothing.

Robles: Getting away a little bit from the ABM system now, you mentioned NATO and Ukraine; there is a military objective, if you could tell us about that? And is there a similar military objective for Syria? Or what is the objective of the US Government in Syria?

Boyle: Since 9/11 2001, as publicly admitted by then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the United States Government would be getting into the business of destroying states. And that was later confirmed by General Wesley Clark, as you know in his memoirs, his meeting there at the Pentagon where they had the list of seven states they were going to proceed to take over.

Afghanistan was first, Iraq was second, Sudan was on the list, Libya was on the list and Syria was on the list, Iran was on the list. So, they are proceeding systematically down that list of destroying states. Syria is now near the top, Iran might be next. And it also appears now the same strategy is being applied to Ukraine to promote the crackup of Ukraine between east and west and, I would hate to say it, the dissolution of Ukraine as a state.

Robles: Can you repeat that quote again? He said…

Boyle: Yes Wolfowitz said… I have the citation in my book “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence”, where Wolfowitz said: “We are going to get into the business of destroying states”. And then, soon thereafter General Wesley Clark (head of NATO) was in the Pentagon and can confirm they drew up a list of seven states that they were systematically going to go after.

So, that’s really, the objective here of Syria, against Syria, is as they did to Libya: to crackup Syria as a state into its constituent, religious and ethnic units not only for the United States but also for the benefit of Israel.

As you know, Israel has been a long time opponent to Syria. They headed a plan there, the Yi Nolan Plan to crackup surrounding states in order to better manage them and keep them under control. So, here you see a congruence of interests certainly between the United States and Israel.

And I regret to say it, but pretty much they have cracked up Syria in its constituent units, as they had done to Iraq. We now have basically three mini states in Iraq. The same has been done to Afghanistan and also Libya, where you have, you know it is hard to say there is a meaningful state there anymore. I have a new book out called “Destroying Libya and World Order” where I have all these citations in there and an analysis. And then, I tried to extend this to Syria near the end of the book.

And it does appear we are seeing a similar pattern of behavior here on Ukraine: to destabilize Ukraine, promote a crack up, some type of civil war or who knows what. And I guess the theory is, well if NATO-EU can get western Ukraine – fine! – they can extend the borders of NATO, the EU that far.

So, it is a very dangerous situation, because, as you know, Ukraine is of utmost strategic significance to Russia. And second, Russia believes that Ukraine is the cradle of its civilization.

Robles: Well it is, that’s not a belief. Ukraine is the mother of Rus.

Boyle: I’ve been to Ukraine and I’ve been to where Nestor wrote his chronicles, and I have studied Russian and Ukrainian history, sure, at Harvard. And I went through the same PhD program at Harvard that produced Zbigniew Brzezinski before me and Richard Pipes, both of whom were, are ardent Russia haters, there is no question at all about it. And that is really part of the problem here in the United States, when it comes to Russian studies, that so much of it is biased against Russia inherently.

Robles: Why is that, please, if you could? You’ve been through the system, you know the system. Why does the US hate Russia so much? Why?

Boyle: Well I spent ten years at the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School studying Russian history, Russian literature, Soviet politics, Russian politics. Indeed I even offered Soviet politics and Russian history on my PhD General Exams at Harvard, which qualified me to teach both those subjects to undergraduates at Harvard. But I never learned the language because that was not what I was intending to do.

And all those years, ten years of studying, I only had two professors who I thought were fair, reasonable and balanced when it came to Russia and the Soviet Union. And understand Harvard and Chicago are two of the leading centers in the United States for training Russian experts. They train professors and experts, government officials and things of that nature.

Robles : Diplomats…

Boyle: So, and again, you had Brzezinski, I went through the same PhD program that produced Brzezinski and Kissinger. You know Brzezinski is an expatriate Pole who hates the Russians with a passion.

Robles : Oh God yes, yeah…

Boyle: Indeed Brzezinski wants to crackup Russia into its constituent units.

Robles : Right, I think it was 68 autonomous regions, if that’s what it was.

Boyle: It’s more dangerous than that! In that Obama’s mentor at Columbia was Brzezinski. And Brzezinski ran the foreign affairs apparatus for Obama’s campaign and he has staffed the Obama administration with his acolytes and protégés, like McFaul – the recently resigning ambassador.

Robles: I’m sorry, can you expand a little bit on McFaul? You said he is one of Brzezinski’s protégé .

Boyle: Yes, he is from the Hoover Institute at Stanford, which is a neo-conservative operation out there, and Brzezinski is one of these people.

Robles : Was McFaul chosen by Brzezinski?

Boyle: I think all the high-level appointments in the Obama administration in foreign affairs have been run by Brzezinski. That is my personal feeling looking at it. Yes, Brzezinski decided not to take a position himself, but all these people that have surrounded Obama, not just on Russia, but other areas, are Brzezinski protégés and indeed that goes back in the Democratic Party I think since Carter came to power and Brzezinski was his National Security Advisor. You know, he was the one who started the Afghan Mujahidin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and bragged about it.

So, within the Democratic Party Brzezinski is considered to be their foreign affairs guru and he was Obama’s mentor at Columbia, and it is a matter of public record that Brzezinski was running the foreign affairs apparatus for the Obama campaign.

Robles: Wow!

Boyle: So, I certainly believe he helped staff this administration on foreign affairs matters.

Robles: People are thinking about a reset and trying to improve relations. And I don’t think anyone knew that it was all Brzezinski, because people knew who Brzezinski was a long time ago.

Boyle: Right. Well, this I think is part of their plan to see the crackup of the Russian Federation, at the end of the day. Sure, that’s I think what his objective is.

You know, if you want to get credentialed as an expert on Russia, you have to go to somewhere like Columbia or Harvard, or Chicago and get your Master’s degree or PhD from people like that. At Harvard they also had Richard Pipes, he was the Reagan’s top guru on the Soviet Union, The Committee on the Present Danger.

I had Pipes for imperial Russian history, again, another expatriate Pole who hates the Russians with passion. Pipes was so bad in his course on Imperial Russian history, he used to break into sweat when he was lecturing on Peter the Great or Catherine the Great and had to take a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipe his brow. So, he is another fanatic against the Russians, only prominent in the Republican Party.

So, we don’t really have … you know Professor Cohen at NYU I think is fair, balanced and reasonable when it comes to Russia. He just wrote something in The Nation on Ukraine. And I think he wrote a very good book on Russia. But you know, he is really the exception to a pretty abysmal rule here in the United States when it comes to training and credentialing what were Soviet and now Russian experts.

Robles : So, why are you fair-minded Sir?

Boyle: I try to come at Russia and the Soviet Union with an open mind. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis and I concluded that probably the most important issue of my time would be to learn to understand Russia across the board and the Soviet Union. So, that’s why I spent the ten years studying at the University of Chicago and Harvard and getting formally credentialed in these areas.

And I have to say I was pretty appalled. I did have Professor Edward Keenan at Harvard who was my teacher, mentor and friend. And he was Director of the Russian Research Center. And he is very fair, balanced and reasonable, and Professor Harold Berman at Harvard Law School, again, very fair, balanced and reasonable. But that was pretty much about it.

I was invited over twice by the Soviet Government to lecture, once around the country in 1986 and then in 1989. And I guess they just figured I was a reasonable American to talk to. And I was open, I met with people and lectured and I seemed to get along with everyone. We didn’t necessarily agree about everything, but at least we could try to talk it out.

But that’s not what we are seeing now. That’s for sure! As we know from the Nuland tape here with the Ambassador in Kiev, she admits they had spent at least $5 million right away now trying to promote opposition to the democratically elected government in Ukraine. Whatever you think of Yanukovych, he is democratically elected and so far I think he’s shown a remarkable restraint.

You were listening to an interview with Professor Francis Boyle. He is a Professor in International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. That was part 1 of a longer interview. You can find the rest of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com

22 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

 

 

By Taj Hashmi

It’s him. One who is familiar with Ayman al Zawahiri’s voice, tone and his heavy Egyptian accent (he prefers to use Egyptian to classical Arabic of the Arabian Peninsula) is certain about the authenticity of the podcast, “Bangladesh: A Massacre behind a Wall of Silence”, which was released on January 14th and surfaced in the Bangladesh media, a month after, on February 14th. While some people think it is unauthentic, a young pro-Jamaati activist has already been arrested for his alleged circulation of the audio in certain blogs.

Ever since the circulation of the podcast in Bangladesh, the over-polarized and politically hyperactive Bangladeshis have again been stirred up. As rival politicians are blaming each other and their parties for their alleged involvements in the creation and/or circulation of the podcast that contains al Zawahiri’s audiotaped vitriol against the Western “Crusaders”, and Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes for their “designs” against Islam and Muslims, the media is full of ill-informed gossips and conspiracy theories about the podcast. Some analysts are coming up with new theories – rather, conjectures and wild guess – questioning the authenticity of the audio or as to which political groups in Bangladesh are “responsible” for “manufacturing” it to the detriment of democracy in Bangladesh.

As some ruling party leaders are finger pointing their political rivals in the BNP-Jamaat camp for “manufacturing” the tape to organise an ant-Government movement with the help of Islamist militants, some BNP-Jamaat leaders, on the other hand, are blaming the Awami League Government for “fabricating” this “unauthentic” tape to draw American support and sympathy for the Government, and thus get a stamp of legitimacy to the controversial Elections that brought the Awami League to power. BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia’s ridiculously over-simplified assertion that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s son Sajib Wazed Joy “masterminded” the al-Qaeda message is highly irresponsible, provocative, and hence counterproductive.

Sections of Bangladeshi politicians, intellectuals and media are again exposing their lack of objectivity along with their level of ignorance about al Qaeda, its global terror network and its methods of waging “jihad”. They have no reasons to undermine al Qaeda as a spent force. The death of Osama bin Laden did not signal the death of al Qaeda, which is very much alive and active in many parts of the world. Although bin Laden was the most charismatic leader of al Qaeda, the wily al Zawahiri has been the mastermind of the terror outfit. Then again, bin Laden is a martyr to his followers, who want to avenge his killing, and consider him an ever-lasting inspiration.

Most importantly, al Qaeda is neither just an Islamist terrorist group like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, HUJI or JMB, nor is it an Islamist political organization like the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e-Islami. It is a global movement and a franchise like McDonald’s. It can open new branches anywhere. No country, including Bangladesh, is off limits to its operators. It loves to explore new opportunities to recruit fighters from trouble spots, especially from Muslim underdogs within and beyond the Muslim World. From al Qaeda perspective, politically turbulent and socially fractured Bangladesh is an “attractive” place. The trial of War Criminals (and the execution of Abdul Quader Molla in December 2013), and the killing of several Deobandi-Wahhabi Islamist activists (there are contradictory figures of casualty) belonging to the Hefazat-e-Islam by law-enforcers in May 2013, may be mentioned in this regard. Given the opportunity, al Qaeda would love to exploit the resentment of the aggrieved people who think the Government, only because of their Islamist ideology, has unjustly victimized them.

It is noteworthy that although al Zawahiri has singled out America and its “allies” among the ruling classes of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar as the main enemies of Islam and persecutors of Muslims, his main focus is on the “ongoing” killing of “thousands” of Muslims by Bangladeshi law-enforcers. He wants Bangladeshi Muslims to embark on their own Intifada, which stands for rioting, protest and resistance to shake off tyranny. Ominously, even though Intifada is not identical to terrorism or “violent jihad”, nevertheless this audio reminds us of the video-podcast he issued in February 2012, which was an appeal to Syrian, Turkish, Iraqi and neighbouring Muslims to fight and topple the Assad regime in Syria. And we know what followed the appeal. Al Qaeda and its Islamist associates have been fighting the Assad regime, Syria is bleeding, and so far more than a hundred thousand Syrians have died in the ongoing civil war.

In the backdrop of what al Qaeda has been doing in various trouble spots in the Muslim World; Bangladeshis have no time for complacence, let alone playing the blame game against each other. Unless Bangladesh resolves its political crisis by holding fresh elections to stabilize the country and institutionalise democracy, people having a soft corner for terrorism and anarchy are likely to be drawn to al Qaeda and similar terror outfits in the coming days.

Pragmatism demands a line be drawn between various Islamist organizations and movements. Instead of painting every Islamist organization with a broad brush, politicians must stop harping on the old and stale theme that a) the Jamaat-e-Islami is synonymous with al Qaeda; and b) nothing short of proscribing the party will stabilize Bangladesh. As it happened in Egypt, Syria, Gaza and West Bank, members of proscribed and marginalised Islamist parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, went underground, joined al Qaeda and similar terror outfits. And the rest is history. Bangladesh must not follow these bad examples.

Last but not least, Bangladeshis should not waste time debating the credibility of the Zawahiri podcast, and blaming each other for “doctoring” the audio for reason X or reason Y. In the backdrop of the Zawahiri message, there is no room for complacency in Bangladesh only because the overwhelming majority of Bangladeshi Muslims hate religious extremism. Al Qaeda never terrorises and bleeds nations with the support of the majorities. A handful of al Qaeda activists are more than enough to destabilize a country for decades

The writer teaches security studies at Austin Peay State University at Clarksville, Tennessee.

20 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Tom Engelhardt

Here, at least, is a place to start: intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June. Brace yourself: 1.7 million. At least they claim that as the number he or his web crawler accessed before he left town. Let’s assume for a moment that it’s accurate and add a caveat. Whatever he had with him on those thumb drives when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSA’s classified documents. Not by a long shot. He only downloaded a portion of them. We don’t have any idea what percentage, but assumedly millions of NSA secret documents did not get the Snowden treatment.

Such figures should stagger us and what he did take will undoubtedly occupy journalists for months or years more (and historians long after that). Keep this in mind, however: the NSA is only one of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community. Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all of them generate their own troves of secret documents, undoubtedly stretching into the many millions.

And keep something else in mind: that’s just intelligence agencies. If you’re thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include places like the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and the Pentagon. In other words, we’re talking about the kind of secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers, and historians wouldn’t have a hope of getting through, not in a century.

We do know that, in 2011, the whole government reportedly classified 92,064,862 documents. If accurate and reasonably typical, that means, in the twenty-first century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance. Of those, thanks to one man (via various journalists), we have had access to a tiny percentage of perhaps 1.7 million of them. Or put another way, you, the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen — in what we still like to think of as a democracy — are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name. That’s unless, of course, its officials decide to selectively cherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely and securely absorbing, or an Edward Snowden releases documents to the world over the bitter protests, death threats, and teeth gnashing of Washington officialdom and retired versions of the same.

Summoned From the Id of the National Security State

So far, even among critics, the debate about what to make of Snowden’s act has generally focused on “balance”; that is, on what’s the right equilibrium between an obvious governmental need for secrecy, the security of the country, and an American urge for privacy, freedom, and transparency — for knowing, among other things, what your government is actually doing. Such a framework (“a meaningful balance between privacy and security”) has proven a relatively comfortable one for Washington, which doesn’t mind focusing on the supposedly knotty question of how to define the “limits” of secrecy and whistle-blowing and what “reforms” are needed to bring the two into line. In the present context, however, such a debate seems laughable, if not absurd.

After all, it’s clear from the numbers alone that the urge to envelop the national security state in a blanket of secrecy, to shield its workings from the eyes of its citizens (as well as allies and enemies) has proven essentially boundless, as have the secret ambitions of those running that state. There is no way, at present, to limit the governmental urge for secrecy even in minimal ways, certainly not via secret courts or congressional committees implicated and entangled in the processes of a secret system.

In the face of such boundlessness, perhaps the words “whistleblower” and “leaker” — both traditionally referring to bounded and focused activities — are no longer useful. Though we may not yet have a word to describe what Chelsea (once Bradley) Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden have done, we should probably stop calling them whistleblowers. Perhaps they should instead be considered the creations of an overweening national security state, summoned by us from its id (so to speak) to act as a counterforce to its ambitions. Imagine them as representing the societal unconscious. Only in this way can we explain the boundlessness of their acts. After all, such massive document appropriations are inconceivable without a secret state endlessly in the process of documenting its own darkness.

One thing is for certain, though no one thinks to say it: despite their staggering releases of insider information, when it comes to the true nature and extent of the NSS, we surely remain in the dark. In the feeling that, thanks to Manning and Snowden, we now grasp the depths of that secret state, its secret acts, and the secret documentation that goes with it, we are undoubtedly deluded.

In a sense, valuable as they have been, Snowden’s revelations have helped promote this delusion. In a way that hasn’t happened since the Watergate era of the 1970s, they have given us the feeling that a curtain has finally, definitively been pulled back on the true nature of the Washington system. Behind that curtain, we have indeed glimpsed a global-surveillance-state-in-the-making of astounding scope, reach, and technological proficiency, whose ambitions (and successes), even when not always fully achieved, should take our breath away. And yet while this is accurate enough, it leads us to believe that we now know a great deal about the secret world of Washington. This is an illusion.

Even if we knew what was in all of those 1.7 million NSA documents, they are a drop in the bucket. As of now, we have the revelations of one (marginal) insider who stepped out of the shadows to tell us about part of what a single intelligence agency documented about its own activities. The resulting global debate, controversy, anger, and discussion, Snowden has said, represents “mission accomplished” for him. But it shouldn’t be considered mission accomplished for the rest of us.

In Praise of Darkness, the Dangers of Sunshine

To gain a reasonable picture of our national security state, five, 10, 20 Snowdens, each at a different agency or outfit, would have to step out of the shadows — and that would just be for starters. Then we would need a media that was ready to roll and a Congress not wrapped in “security” and “secrecy” but demanding answers, as the Church committee did in the Watergate era, with subpoenas in hand (and the threat of prison for no-shows and perjurers).

Yes, we may have access to basic information about what the NSA has been up to, but remind me: What exactly do you know about the doings of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, with its 16,500 employees, which has in recent years embarked on “an ambitious plan to assemble an espionage network that rivals the CIA in size”? How about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, with its 16,000 employees, its post-9/11 headquarters (price tag: $1.8 billion) and its control over our system of spy satellites eternally prowling the planetary skies?

The answer is no more than you would have known about the NSA if Snowden hadn’t acted as he did. And by the way, what do you really know about the FBI, which now, among other things, issues thousands of national security letters a year (16,511 in 2011 alone), an unknown number of them for terror investigations? Since their recipients are muzzled from discussing them, we know next to nothing about them or what the Bureau is actually doing. And how’s your info on the CIA, which takes $4 billion more out of the intelligence “black budget” than the NSA, runs its own private wars, and has even organized its own privatized corps of spies as part of the general expansion of U.S. intelligence and espionage abroad? The answer on all of the above is — has to be — remarkably little.

Or take something basic like that old-fashioned, low-tech form of surveillance: government informers and agents provocateurs. They were commonplace in the 1960s and early 1970s within every oppositional movement. So many decades later, they are with us again. Thanks to the ACLU, which has mapped scattered reports on situations in which informers made it into at least the local news nationwide, we know that they became part of what anti-war movements existed, slipped into various aspects of the Occupy movement, and have run riot in local Muslim-American communities. We know as well that these informers come from a wide range of outfits, including the local police, the military, and the FBI. However, if we know a great deal about NSA snooping and surveillance, we have just about no inside information on the extent of old-style informing, surveilling, and provoking.

One thing couldn’t be clearer, though: the mania for secrecy has grown tremendously in the Obama years. On entering the Oval Office in 2009, Obama proclaimed a sunshine administration dedicated to “openness” and “transparency.” That announcement now drips with irony. If you want a measure of the kind of secrecy the NSS considers proper and the White House condones these days, check out a recent Los Angeles Times piece on the CIA’s drone assassination program (one of the more overt aspects of Washington’s covert world).

That paper recently reported that Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Carl Levin held a “joint classified hearing” with the Senate Intelligence Committee on the CIA, the Pentagon, and their drone campaigns against terror suspects in the backlands of the planet. There was just one catch: CIA officials normally testify only before the House and Senate intelligence committees. In this case, the White House “refused to provide the necessary security clearances for members of the House and Senate armed services committees.” As a result, it would not let CIA witnesses appear before Levin. Officials, reported the Times, “had little appetite for briefing the 26 senators and 62 House members who sit on the armed services committees on the CIA’s most sensitive operations.” Sunshine, in other words, is considered potentially dangerous, even in tiny doses, even in Congress.

A Cult of Government Secrecy

In evaluating what may lie behind the many curtains of Washington, history does offer us a small hand. Thanks to the revelations of the 1970s, including a Snowden-style break-in by antiwar activists at an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, that opened a window into the Bureau’s acts of illegality, some now-famous reporting, and the thorough work of the Church committee in the Senate, we have a sense of the enormity of what the U.S. national security state was capable of once enveloped in a penumbra of secrecy (even if, in that era, the accompanying technology could do so much less). In the Johnson and Nixon years, as we now know, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and other acronymic outfits committed a staggering range of misdeeds, provocations, and crimes.

It’s easy to say that post-Watergate “reforms” made such acts a thing of the past. Unfortunately, there’s no reason to believe that. In fact, the nature of that era’s reforms should be reconsidered. After all, one particularly important Congressional response of that moment was to create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, essentially a judiciary for the secret world which would generate a significant body of law that no American outside the NSS could see.

The irony is again overwhelming. After the shocking headlines, the congressional inquiries, the impeachment proceedings, the ending of two presidencies — one by resignation — and everything else, including black bag jobs, break-ins, buggings, attempted beatings, blackmail, massive spying and surveillance, and provocations of every sort, the answer was a secret court. Its judges, appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court alone, are charged with ruling after hearing only one side of any case involving a governmental desire to snoop or pry or surveil. Unsurprisingly enough, over the three and a half decades of its existence, the court proved a willing rubber stamp for just about any urge of the national security state.

In retrospect, this remedy for widespread government illegality clearly was just another step in the institutionalization of a secret world that looks increasingly like an Orwellian nightmare. In creating the FISA court, Congress functionally took the seat-of-the-pants, extra-Constitutional, extra-legal acts of the Nixon era and put them under the rule of (secret) law.

Today, in the wake of, among other things, the rampant extra-legality of the Global War on Terror — including the setting up of a secret, extrajudicial global prison system of “black sites” where rampant torture and abuse were carried to the point of death, illegal kidnappings of terror suspects off global streets and their rendition to the prisons of torture regimes, and the assassination-by-drone of American citizens backed by Justice Department legalisms — it’s clear that NSS officials feel they have near total impunity when it comes to whatever they want to do. (Not that their secret acts often turn out as planned or particularly well in the real world.) They know that nothing they do, however egregious, will be brought before an open court of law and prosecuted. While the rest of us remain inside the legal system, they exist in “post-legal America.” Now, the president claims that he’s preparing a new set of “reforms” to bring this system under check and back in balance. Watch out!

If tomorrow a series of Edward Snowdens were to appear, each from a different intelligence agency or other outfit in the national security state, one thing would be guaranteed: the shock of the NSA revelations would be multiplied many times over. Protected from the law by a spreading cult of government secrecy, beyond the reach of the citizenry, Congress, or the aboveground judicial system, supported by the White House and a body of developing secret law, knowing that no act undertaken in the name of American “safety” and “security” will ever be prosecuted, the inhabitants of our secret state have been moving in dark and disturbing ways. What we know is already disturbing enough. What we don’t know would surely unnerve us far more.

Shadow government has conquered twenty-first-century Washington. We have the makings of a thug state of the first order.

Tom Engelhardt, a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.

20 February, 2014

TomDispatch.com

 

By Ramzy Baroud

On Friday, Feb 14, 92 prisoners escaped from their prison in the Libyan town of Zliten. 19 of them were eventually recaptured, two of whom were wounded in clashes with the guards. It was just another daily episode highlighting the utter chaos which has engulfed Libya since the overthrow of Muammar Ghaddafi in 2011.

Much of this is often reported with cliché explanations as in the country’s ‘security vacuum’, or Libya’s lack of a true national identity. Indeed, tribe and region seem to supersede any other affiliation, but it is hardly that simple.

On that same Friday, Feb 14, Maj. Gen. Khalifa Hifter announced a coup in Libya. “The national command of the Libyan Army is declaring a movement for a new road map” (to rescue the country), Hifter declared through a video post. Oddly enough, little followed by way of a major military deployment in any part of the country. The country’s Prime Minister Ali Zeidan described the attempted coup as “ridiculous”.

Others in the military called it a “lie.” One of those who attended a meeting with Hifter prior to the announcement told Al Jazeera that they simply attempted to enforce the national agenda of bringing order, not staging a coup.

Hifter’s efforts were a farce. It generated nothing but more attention to Libya’s fractious reality, following NATO’s war, branded a humanitarian intervention to prevent imminent massacres in Benghazi and elsewhere. “Libya is stable,” Zeidan told Reuters. “(The parliament) is doing its work, and so is the government.”

But Zedian is not correct. His assessment is a clear contradiction to reality, where hundreds of militias rule the country with an iron fist. In fact, the prime minister was himself kidnapped by one militia last October. Hours later, he was released by another militia. Although both, like the rest of the militias, are operating outside government confines, many are directly or loosely affiliated with government officials. In Libya, to have sway over a militia is to have influence over local, regional or national agendas. Unfortunate as it may be, this is the ‘new Libya.’

Some will find most convenient ways to explain the chaos: ‘East Libya is inherently unruly’, some would say; ‘it took a strong leader like Ghaddafi to maintain the national cohesion of a country made of tribes, not citizens,’ others would opine. But the truth is oftentimes inconvenient and requires more than mere platitudes.

Libya is in a state of chaos, not because of some intrinsic tendency to shun order. Libyans, like people all over the world, seek security and stability in their lives. However, other parties, Arab and western, are desperate to ensure that the ‘new Libya’ is consistent with their own interests, even if such interests are obtained at the expense of millions of people.

The New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick reported on the coup from Cairo. In his report, “In Libya, a Coup. Or Perhaps Not,” he drew similarities between Libya and Egypt; in the case of Egypt, the military succeeded in consolidating its powers starting on July 3, whereas in Libya a strong military institution never existed in the first place, even during Ghaddafi’s rule. In order for Hifter to stage a coup, he would need to rely on more than a weak and splintered military.

Nonetheless, it is quite interesting that the NYT chose to place Hifter’s ‘ridiculous’ coup within an Egyptian context, while there is a more immediate and far more relevant context at hand, one of which the newspaper and its veteran correspondents should know very well. It is no secret that Hifter has had strong backing from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for nearly three decades.

The man has been branded and rebranded throughout his colorful and sometimes mysterious history more times than one can summarize in a single article. He fought as an officer in the Chadian-Libyan conflict, and was captured alongside his entire unit of 600 men. During his time in prison, Chad experienced a regime change (both regimes were backed by French and US intelligence) and Hifter and his men were released per US request to another African country, then a third. While some chose to return home, others knew well what would await them in Libya, for reasons explained by the Times on May 17, 1991.

“For two years, United States officials have been shopping around for a home for about 350 Libyan soldiers who cannot return to their country because American intelligence officials had mobilized them into a commando force to overthrow Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader,” NYT reported. “Now, the Administration has given up trying to find another country that will accept the Libyans and has decided to bring them to the United States.”

Hifter was then relocated to a Virginia suburb in the early 1990’s and settled there. The news is murky about his exact activities living near Washington D.C., except for his ties to Libyan opposition forces, which of course, operated within a US agenda.

In his thorough report, published in the Business Insider, Russ Baker traced much of Hifter’s activities since his split from Ghaddafi and adoption by the CIA. “A Congressional Research Service report of December 1996 named Hifter as the head of the NFSL’s military wing, the Libyan National Army. After he joined the exile group, the CRS report added, Hifter began ‘preparing an army to march on Libya’. The NFSL, the CSR said, is in exile ‘with many of its members in the United States.”

It took nearly 15 years for Hifter to march on Libya. It also took a massive war that was purported to support a popular uprising. Hifter, as Baker described, is the Libyan equivalent of Iraq’s Ahmed Chalabi, a discredited figure with strong allies in Washington D.C. Chalabi was sent to post-Saddam Iraq to lead the ‘democratization’ process. Instead, he helped set the stage of the calamity underway in that Arab country.

It is no wonder why Hifter’s return was a major source of controversy. Since the news of his CIA affiliation was no big secret, his return to Libya to join the rebels in March caused much confusion. Almost immediately, he was announced by a military spokesman as the rebels’ new commander, only for the announcement to be dismissed by the National Transitional Council as false. The NTC was largely a composition of mysterious characters that had little presence within Libya’s national consciousness. Hifter found himself as the third man in the military ladder, which he accepted but apparently grudgingly so.

Despite the coup failure, Libya will subsist on uncertainty. Arab and Western media speak of illegal shipments of weapons arriving into various Libyan airports. The militias are growing in size. The central government is growing irrelevant. Jail breaks are reported regularly. And Libyans find safety in holding on tighter to their tribal and clan affiliations. What future awaits Libya is hard to predict, but with western and Arab intelligence fingerprints found all over the Libyan bedlam, the future is uninviting.

– Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com.

20 February, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Oliver Campbell & Peter Symonds

Violent clashes between police and protesters yesterday in Kiev mark an escalation of the campaign by the pro-Western opposition to oust Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The opposition, backed by the United States and German governments, aims to install a far-right regime committed to integrating Ukraine within the European Union and implementing its demands for austerity measures.

Bloody street-fighting erupted when opposition protesters marched on parliament, demanding it pass a planned law to decrease Yanukovych’s powers. When the vote went against them, the opposition supporters attacked the headquarters of the ruling Party of the Regions. Clashes between police and protesters erupted and spread throughout the city.

The unrest has been the bloodiest since the pro-EU protests began some three months ago. Latest reports indicate that at least 19 people have been killed, including police and protesters. Hundreds, possibly thousands, have been injured, at least 200 people seriously.

The opposition demonstrators, many of whom are affiliated with the neo-fascist Svoboda party and other extreme right-wing groups, appeared to be heavily armed. One of the fascistic organisations involved, Right Sector, called for all those with arms to take them to Independence Square and engage in combat with the authorities.

Media footage shows anti-government protesters, some wearing helmets emblazoned with fascist symbols, firing rifles and small arms at riot police, as well as throwing molotov cocktails. During the storming of the Party of Regions headquarters, they killed at least one office worker. Several interior troops were reportedly taken as “prisoners” before government forces secured control of the building.

Opposition leaders called on supporters to continue fighting. Vitali Klitschko, head of the UDAR (Punch) party, which has close ties to the German state, demagogically told demonstrators: “We will not leave here. This is an island of freedom. We will defend it.” Violent clashes continued throughout the night and early Wednesday morning, paralysing the city.

The bloody scenes in Kiev are the direct result of the campaign waged by the US and Germany to oust Yanukovych after he rejected proposals for closer EU ties and signed a deal with Russia accepting financial aid. In their efforts to prise Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and isolate Russia, the Washington and Berlin are openly working with the extreme-right parties.

Top US State Department official Victoria Nuland has repeatedly visited opposition leaders in Ukraine, including the head of the Svoboda party, Oleh Tyahnybok. Leaked phone calls between Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, exposed the extent of Washington’s micro-management of opposition leaders as it seeks to install a new client regime. (See: “Leaked phone call on Ukraine lays bare Washington’s gangsterism”)

The protests and violence in Kiev followed a meeting in Berlin on Monday in which opposition leaders Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk called on top German officials, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, for greater support, including to press for sanctions on the Ukrainian government.

Also on Monday, Russia agreed to purchase $2 billion in Ukrainian bonds, giving the Yanukovych regime a financial breathing space that would have been unwelcome in opposition circles as well as in Berlin and Washington.

In the wake of the clashes in Kiev, the US, Germany and the EU immediately blamed Yanukovych and ratcheted up the pressure for his removal. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier declared: “Whoever is responsible for decisions that may lead to further bloodshed in the center of Kiev and other parts of Ukraine should expect Europe to reconsider its previous reservation on imposing sanctions on individuals.”

According to a White House statement, Vice President Joe Biden contacted the Ukrainian regime to express Washington’s “grave concern” over the violence, and “made clear that the United States condemns violence by any side, but that the government bears special responsibility to de-escalate the situation.”

The US and German responses signal an intensification of the imperialist drive to install a puppet regime in Kiev and transform the Ukraine into a bastion for further provocations and intrigues aimed at dismembering Russia itself and reducing it to a dependent semi-colony. The promotion of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists is part of a broader strategy of exploiting the many ethnic, national and religious divisions within the former Soviet Union to secure dominance over the region.

The subordination of Ukraine is one of the longstanding geo-strategic ambitions of German imperialism, stretching back to World War I. Germany’s current aggressive policy toward Ukraine coincides with the revival of German militarism. At the recent Munich Security Conference, top German officials stated that the time had come when Berlin had to abandon the post-war restraints and restrictions on the use of military force.

US imperialism has pursued a relentless strategy of weakening and isolating Russia for more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Starting with the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Washington has encouraged and supported so-called colour revolutions in the former Soviet republics. It invaded Afghanistan to establish a base of operations into Central Asia and sought, through sanctions and military threats, to carry out regime-change in Iran and Syria, Russia’s closest allies in the Middle East.

The ability of imperialism to intervene aggressively is the direct outcome of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the restoration of capitalism and the opening up of the former Soviet republics to the plunder of global transnational corporations. In opposing the present imperialist intervention in Ukraine, no political support should be given to Yanukovych or Russian President Vladimir Putin, who represent corrupt, grasping oligarchs who have enriched themselves at the expense of the working class.

The only social force capable of opposing the imperialist intrigues, military threats and drive to war is the international working class. The starting point is a rejection of all forms of nationalism and a political fight to unify workers in Ukraine with their class brothers and sisters throughout Europe, Russia and internationally. That requires a common struggle to abolish the bankrupt profit system and establish a planned world economy to meet the pressing social needs of all.

19 February, 2014

WSWS.org

 

 

 

 

By Palestine News Network

More than 120 Irish academics have signed a pledge to boycott Israeli institutions until Palestinian rights are respected, Academics for Palestine said in a press release Friday.

It added, the number is expected to increase as more lecturers learn about the growing campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel – a campaign led by Palestinians that is gaining global support.

“The conflict in Palestine has now reached its ‘South African moment’ – the point at which Israeli apartheid has been recognised as such by the international community,” Prof Haim Bresheeth, a noted London-based film-maker and academic from Israel, said Friday.

Prof Bresheeth and Dr. Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian doctor of medicine, scholar and lecturer at the University of Exeter, will be in Belfast and Dublin next week to help launch a new Irish campaign to support the academic-boycott pledge, Academics for Palestine declared.

Dr. Karmi emphasised that the boycott does not target Israeli individuals but institutions. Far from being a threat to academic freedom, she said, BDS affirms its importance for Palestinians.

“Israel’s well-documented repression of Palestinian academic life and victimisation of Palestinian teachers and students is a scandal to be denounced by all those who claim to care about academic freedom,” she said.

Dr. Conor McCarthy, lecturer in English in NUI Maynooth and a long-time campaigner for Palestinian rights, welcomed the initiative.

“The recent endorsement of the boycott campaign by the 5,000-member American Studies Association in the US, along with positive moves by the Modern Language Association and the controversy over Scarlett Johansson, showed that BDS is now very much part of a mainstream international debate,” Dr McCarthy said.

Nearly a year ago the Teachers Union of Ireland, which represents lecturers at institutes of technology across the State, became one of the first academic unions in the world to endorse the boycott.

“The TUI’s historic decision was the impetus for building a broader academic-boycott campaign in Ireland,” AFP chair Jim Roche said today. Roche, who teaches architecture at DIT, was instrumental in securing passage of the TUI motion.

EU-funded research partnerships involving Israeli institutions and worth billions of euro mean that this boycott campaign is not mere posturing: many Irish researchers are involved in such projects, including ones with military/security applications. AFP will be providing detailed information about these partnerships.

“The US, EU and other states have protected Israel and financed its occupation ever since 1967, making it impossible to resolve the conflict through the UN or international diplomatic channels,” Prof Bresheeth said. “It puts a special responsibility on international civil society, and BDS is its main tool to resolve the conflict in a just and peaceful way.”

The text of the boycott pledge reads:

“In response to the call from Palestinian civil society for an academic boycott of Israel, we pledge not to engage in any professional association with Israeli academic, research and state institutions and with those representing these institutions, until such time as Israel complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.”

14 February 2014

 

 

Deutsche Bank includes Israeli bank on a list of companies whose conduct is ethically questionable, Israeli website Walla reports.

By Haaretz

Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, has included Israel’s Hapoalim Bank on a list of companies who are ethically questionable for investment, Israel’s Walla website reported on Monday.

According to the report, the bank launched a “moral investment plan” for investors who wish to make sure their funds are not put to unethical use, and which includes companies who are involved in problematic areas such as mines production and nuclear weapons manufacturing.

Estimates in Israel, the report adds, are that Hapoalim was targeted because of its activity in the settlements.

Earlier this month, Denmark’s largest bank decided to blacklist Hapoalim because of its involvement in the funding of settlement construction.

Danske Bank added Bank Hapoalim to its list of companies in which the company cannot invest due to its corporate accountability rules.

In January, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance announced that it decided to exclude Israeli firms Africa Israel Investments and Danya Cebus from its Government Pension Fund Global.

According to the announcement, the Ministry of Finance received a recommendation on November 1 from the Council of Ethics to exclude the two companies from the fund “due to contribution to serious violations of individual rights in war or conflict through the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem.”

Likud MK Ofir Akunis called on the German bank to reverse its decision. “A German bank boycotts Jews? Could it be? These things have happened before,” he wrote in his Facebook account. “In light of history, this bank better reverse its unethical decision!”

17 February,2014

 

By Nile Bowie

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has placed himself at the helm of countries that seek to counter China’s rise, as Tokyo’s right-wing leadership looks intent to ramp up its aggressive nationalistic stance with US support.

Since returning to power in late 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has emerged as one of Japan’s most influential prime ministers in decades.

Abe has attempted to put an end to the cycle of weak executive leadership with his long-standing nationalist vision of a more militarily assertive Japan, in addition to his efforts to pull the country out of a two-decade-long economic slump with an array of neoliberal reforms collectively referred to as ‘Abenomics.’ He has played upon nationalistic sentiment to accumulate an unusually strong grip on power in contrast to former Japanese prime ministers, leading his right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to gain unified control of parliament last year.

His visit to the Yasukuni war shrine last December, to a memorial site honoring convicted war criminals that died for the cause of Imperial Japan, strained ties with neighboring countries that once bore the brunt of a ruthless and unyielding Japanese occupation. Under Abe’s watch, high-level diplomatic contact with China has virtually dried up since Tokyo has more assertively defended its claims over the disputed chain of islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Shinzo Abe has also extended his support for a controversial state secrets law that could punish leakers, whistleblowers, and journalists with hefty prison sentences if the state determines wrongdoing. More than half of Japanese voters oppose the law and its negative effects on press freedom, while others have likened it to Imperial Japanese laws that ruthlessly curbed dissent.

One of his key goals is a national education overhaul designed to more effectively propagate government-sanctioned views onto young generations, including an emphasis on Japan’s territorial claims and a shamelessly sanitized wartime history. Abe has purchased advanced weapons systems, ramped up military spending for the first time in a decade, and has called for revising Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution that may see the omission of Article 9, which forbids the use of force to settle international disputes.

Abe has put himself at the forefront of regional efforts to counter China’s rise with the full backing of the Obama administration, which views Japan as an indispensible asset in the strengthening of an anti-China security regime in Asia.

Hostages of history

The growing tension in northeast Asia today is linked to national identities that have been founded upon varying perspectives and interpretations of historical narratives. China endured well-documented atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking and a brutal occupation that saw the mass slaughter and enslavement of civilians, and territorial annexations linked to present-day conflicts, such as the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute. Beijing has routinely accused Japan of whitewashing its record of atrocities and revising its imperial history to suit Tokyo’s present day political ambitions.

The four-decade occupation of the Korean peninsula by Japanese forces and the country’s anti-colonialist resistance play a central role in the foundational narratives of both Korean nations, which remain in strong opposition to Japan. Throughout the occupation, tens of thousands of Korean women and girls were used as sex slaves to Japanese forces, leaving an indelible stain on Korea-Japan relations even in the present day. Shinzo Abe’s visit to Yasukuni shrine and his previous calls to revise Japan’s 1995 war apology can only be seen as a deeply offensive and reckless provocation from the perspectives of countries that that suffered most under Japanese imperialism.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the defeat in World War II have allowed Japan to cultivate a victim complex, which is used in contemporary politics to downplay atrocities and dismiss perceptions of it being an aggressor.

Nobusuke Kishi – Abe’s grandfather – was a former prime minister and was detained as a candidate for Class A War Criminal status until his release in 1948; his LDP government relied heavily on US support, while subsequent LDP governments have only very reluctantly issued formal apologies for Japan’s war crimes. Abe’s nationalist agenda is a revival of this legacy, which is today championing views that are usually relegated to the right-wing fringe. His administration’s willingness to take control over major media outlets to promote a distorted and bigoted view of history can only deepen ongoing regional tensions.

An illustration of Abe’s hubris is his promotion of four hard-right figures to the board of governors of Japan’s public broadcaster NHK. Katsuto Momii, the new NHK chairman, made waves by justifying the systematic abuse of comfort women and for his refusal to retract his remarks. Naoki Hyakuta, another Abe appointee, declared that the Rape of Nanking “never happened,” and that the atrocity was fabricated in order to cover up the crimes of the US atomic bombing.

Abe’s political gamble

Japan’s historical revisionism and the prevalence of high-profile atrocity deniers are as odious as the hypothetical equivalent of German leaders honoring Nazi war criminals and denying the Holocaust. Much like the resurgence of right-wing and fascist movements in present day Europe, jingoistic nationalism is a product of Japan’s deepening economic stagnation and population demographic crisis. Wages have been on the decline since 1998, and Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP levels in the developed world.

Abe’s solution is quantitative easing, currency inflation, the deregulation of energy and financial sectors, the privatization of public assets and industries, tax-free havens to lure in multinationals, and structural reforms that serve big business. ‘Abenomics’ has caused the Japanese stock market to soar because money is being injected into the financial sector, but money velocity remains low because it is not trading hands in the real economy; demand and activity remain stagnant. Abe’s nationalism can be relied upon to assuage the masses as tax hikes, belt-tightening, and austerity measures are introduced to assist the Japanese government in servicing its massive debt.

Abe has not tried to obscure his intentions to revive Japanese military muscle and despite tarnishing his image abroad, the visit to the Yasukuni shrine went ahead anyway with the principle intention being to generate an aggressive response from China. Fanning the war of words with China and Korea serves Abe’s interests by heightening the Japanese public’s sense of threat from abroad, allowing Abe to build greater support for revising his country’s constitution.

The Yasukuni visit also boosted Abe’s credentials among parliamentarians and hard-liners that may have accused him of being too soft on foreign policy issues. For further context, it should also be noted that even Japan’s current Emperor Akihito has abstained from visiting the Yasukuni shrine precisely because of the inclusion of war criminals after 1978 and the ensuing politicization of the site.

 

The Obama administration has publicly expressed disappointment over Abe’s visit to the shrine, but remains steadfast on supporting its security commitments to Japan, including support for Tokyo’s disputed territorial claims. Washington’s consent for Japan to play a more assertive military role in the region ties into the Obama administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ intentions to maintain dominance in the Asia-Pacific by encircling China and curbing its growing influence.

The new 1914?

Shinzo Abe told audiences at the recent Davos conference in Switzerland that present-day tensions between China and Japan reflect circumstances between Germany and Britain prior to World War I.

Abe challenged notions that strong economic ties between Japan and China would decrease the possibility of confrontation, citing how the strong trade relationship between Germany and Britain failed to negate a cataclysmic conflict. Parallels to 1914 certainly exist with growing naval antagonisms between China and Japan, the increasing propagation of hostility and nationalism, and in a rise of inequality amid unfettered international trade.

However, such similarities can only go so far. The German leadership under the Kaiser and his military cabal bares little similarity to the non-interventionist policies and meritocratic governance of modern China, which is focused primarily on reform and reducing corruption; there is also no clear modern comparison to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The current scenario – the hyper-modern reemergence of a civilizational state like China – is unprecedented in history, making 1914 comparisons lopsided and superficial at best.

Unlike the relationship between Germany and Britain in 1914, the present-day tension between China and Japan has its roots in history. Since resistance to colonialism (especially Japanese colonialism) is so deeply interwoven into Chinese and Korean nationalistic narratives, overcoming the present day challenges are all but impossible in the midst of an unrepentant and chauvinistic Japan.

If the leadership in China and South Korea were seen as yielding to Japanese pressure on territorial disputes, the domestic political consequences would be staggering; likewise, it would be political suicide for Shinzo Abe if Japan’s leadership to lose face by taking a soft stance on disputes.

Despite the war of words, there is no immediate indication of a hot war over Japan’s territorial disputes with China and South Korea; its potential to spark a large-scale military conflict is still hypothetical. The United States is in a position where it could be a mediator, but instead has opted to take sides by supporting Japan while letting an odious brand of nationalism fester unchecked. If a misstep occurs, the US administration could set in motion a security crisis that it cannot easily control.

Nile Bowie is a Kuala Lumpur-Based political analyst and columnist with Russia Today. He is also a Just member.

February 18, 2014