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By Eric Zuesse

In a remarkable disjunction between voters and their elected (supposed) representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, the members of the House voted on December 4th, by 411 “Yea” to 10 “Nay,” to donate U.S. weapons to the bankrupt Ukrainian Government, which is engaged in trying to eliminate the civilian population of the portion of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the former Ukrainian President whom the U.S. Government (CIA, State Department, USAID, etc.) had overthrown in a violent coup in February of this year .

This 411 to 10 vote margin is 98%, and it contrasts starkly against the 62% of Americans who, in the most recent poll, opposed sending U.S. arms to the Ukrainian Government; 30% favored sending those weapons. (8% had no opinion.) (The above link includes also that poll-result.) So, 67% of those who had an opinion (62% divided by 92% is 67%) shared the view of the 10 members (2%) of the U.S. House who voted against this measure. Only 33% of the surveyed Americans who had an opinion on it shared the view of the 411 House members (98%) who voted in favor of this measure.

This is a war-and-peace issue, so the U.S. Constitution assigns it to the Congress; the President is assigned the executive function of carrying out the will of Congress, as the Commander-in-Chief and U.S. Chief Executive Officer.

However, the situation here is actually even a bit more extreme than that, because the way that the Pew poll of the U.S. public was phrased, it had the U.S. “sending arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government,” and not “donating arms and military supplies to the Ukrainian government.” The Ukrainian Government cannot possibly actually pay back all of the financial obligations that it already has, much less pay those plus interest, and buy more weapons. As was documented in the first of the links within the linked report above, “The only reason that things haven’t totally imploded [for the Ukrainian Government] is because of the $18 billion package of assistance from the IMF and the $9 billion in additional assistance pledged by the United States and the European Union.” All of the weapons that the U.S. will be technically ‘selling’ to Ukraine will now go to the back of the line of creditors for Ukrainian debt — never be paid. U.S. arms-makers will receive payment for those arms from U.S. taxpayers (the sale won’t be merely technical for them, nor for the lobbyists they pay), it won’t be paid actually by the Ukrainian Government. Consequently, the U.S. taxpayer is totally funding Ukraine’s bombing campaign going forward, to eliminate the residents in the area which overwhelmingly supported the previous Ukrainian President.

In fact, on September 18th, when the U.S.-installed new Ukrainian President was greeted with standing ovations by a special Joint Session of the U.S. Congress, he addressed them and the weapons-lobbyists to cheers as if he were a hero; he said that this was “the forefront of the global fight for democracy,” and said “I urge America to help us, I urge America to lead the way.” He was doing a sell-job for them and their financial backers. Of course, those financial backers also fund the sale of these politicians to the public.

His use of the term “democracy” there was interesting. A secretly recorded phone conversation on 25 February 2014, right after the coup , was subsequently uploaded to the Internet, and the discussants were Catherine Ashton, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister, and her appointed investigator into how Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych came to be ousted on February 22nd, Urmas Paet. In it , was revealed that the snipers who precipitated the coup had been hired by “somebody from the new coalition” (perhaps the U.S. CIA) that replaced Yanukovych, and that, “it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, … they don’t want to investigate [since they were its beneficiaries].” Paet told Ashton that, “what was quite disturbing, the same oligarch [Poroshenko — and so when he became ‘democratically elected’ as President of all of Ukraine on May 25th, he already knew this] told [Paet] that well, all the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers, from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, [this will shock Ashton, who had just said that Yanukovych had masterminded the killings] that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides.” So, Poroshenko himself knows that his regime is based on a false-flag (meaning set up so as to falsely blame the other side) U.S.-controlled coup d’etat against his predecessor. So, there can be no reasonable doubt that, despite his rhetoric when speaking before the Special Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on September 18th, Poroshenko actually knew, by no later than February 25th, that the regime that replaced Yanukovych was being appointed by the United States Government, hardly a ‘democratic Maidan’ event (though it is sold as if it were).

Specifically, the new regime had been selected on 4 February 2014, 18 days before the coup, in yet another secretly recorded phone conversation , this one between the U.S. State Department official who is responsible for Europe, Victoria Nuland, and the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt, in which she instructed Pyatt to place “Yats,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk in charge of Ukraine until a new Ukrainian President, acceptable to Washington, would be installed in such a way that it would seem more democratic than merely a coup-regime.

The Maidan demonstrations that were used as a cover for the U.S. operation were actually not for democracy, since Viktor Yanukovych had been as democratically elected as any previous Ukrainian President, but it was instead a movement against Ukraine’s endemic corruption, which was embodied in Yanukovych and every other Ukrainian President. It was not a democracy movement. There is no democratic tradition in Ukraine; it doesn’t exist there. What exists there instead, and has always existed there, is a population who are constantly fooled and exploited by an elite, an aristocracy, which Ukrainians call “oligarchs.” Basically, in the new Ukrainian regime, America’s aristocracy are in control of Ukraine’s aristocracy who are in control of the Ukrainian public. Under Viktor Yanukovych, Russia’s aristocracy were in control of Ukraine’s aristocracy who were in control of the Ukrainian public.

This contrasts with Poroshenko’s address to the U.S. Congress , which presents himself as being the leader of a new democracy. It’s not new, and it’s not a democracy; but only the personnel, and the foreigners who are in ultimate control, have changed. But, of course, any member of the U.S. Congress who even cared about the matter, already knew that; and, presumably, the 421 House members who voted on the bill about donating weapons to Ukraine, knew about it, too. They are insiders; the public are outsiders. Insiders exist in order to exploit outsiders. Outsiders exist in order to be exploited by insiders. That’s the system.

When Poroshenko delivers speeches to Ukrainians, they’re very different. He tells his audiences there that the Ukrainian Army will destroy the residents in the Donbass or rebelling southeastern region , and that those people are “subhumans,” and not merely “terrorists.” “Subhumans” (in addition to “terrorists”) is a commonly used term for them also among the U.S.-imposed regime’s other leaders . (Of course, Germany’s Nazi Party likewise used the term — “Untermenschen” — often.) The regime’s Army (and its mercenaries who are paid per piece for the corpses they produce and dispose of ) treat them as being that (as you’ll see in that video).

This vote in the U.S. House follows less than two weeks after the November 21st U.S. vote at the U.N. in which the U.S. was one of only 3 countries, out of the 173 countries, which three voted against a resolution condemning nazism or racist fascism. The Ukrainian Government voted against it because their ethnic-cleansing operation in the heavily pro-Yanukovych area is clearly nazi , though the proposed resolution doesn’t even so much as mention Ukraine, which is the only nation in the world that is run by nazis and which was installed by nazis. The representative of Canada’s far-right Premier Stephen Harper also voted against it. This was the first occasion in U.S. history in which the U.S. Government was clearly pro-nazi. The verbiage of Obama’s U.N. Representative explaining the vote denied that the U.S. Government is at all pro-nazi . Lying is now routine at the top levels, just as it was for Germany’s Nazis.

In any case, the condition of U.S. ‘democracy’ itself comes into question when 98% of the U.S. House of Representatives vote to donate U.S.-made weapons to the world’s only nazi regime — one right on the border of Russia, moreover — and when 67% of the American public (including the vast majority of the American public who don’t even know that the Ukrainian Government is nazi) oppose not only the donating of these weapons, but even any sort of transmittal or “sending” of them, including selling of them, to that Government.

So, the U.S. House vote about this on December 4th was a reflection of today’s U.S. ‘democracy,’ whatever that is. It displays a pervasive and profound alienation between the U.S. Government and the U.S. people, and this is something that’s impossible in a democracy. It cannot happen in a democracy; it disproves a ‘democracy’; but it’s the case in the United States.

This House vote is one crucial step along the path toward a nuclear war with Russia. (To call it a renewed “cold war,” as some writers do , is dangerously understating and misrepresenting the actual threat. This is not “MAD.” It’s the opposite of that. This is already part of a “hot war,” that could easily get out of control.) Many more steps are yet to go, but now the direction is clear and incontrovertible, and we are already on it.

How can the Russian Government stand by and merely watch while Russia’s supporters right next door to them in Ukraine are being exterminated ? However, now clearly, the U.S. Government seems to be overwhelmingly committed to exterminating them . There are even cluster-bombs , and white phosphorous , and also more-advanced forms of incendiary munitions , that are being used to get rid of the residents there. But mostly, it’s just the routine type of military mass-murder . (Those are the ‘terrorists’ that Ukraine and its sponsors are constantly referring to including in their standard phrase for the extermination-campaign: “Anti-Terrorist Operation,” or ATO for short. That’s the sales-phrase by which they market it to suckers everywhere. And these are the ‘terrorists.’)

The U.S. is laying down the gauntlet to Russia. Perhaps the idea is that if Russia sends in their army and publicly commits to the defense of these people, the U.S. aristocracy and the ones who are in its pay will proclaim this to be a cause by ‘the West’ to attack Russia for its ‘aggression.’ Things might already be out of control.

On the positive side, member-nations of NATO could quit the alliance, which would considerably reduce the U.S. threat. NATO was supposed to have been set up in order to defend against communism. However, now that communism is all but dead, yet NATO has expanded and especially surrounds Russia, NATO is more clearly shown as being instead the international marketing-organization for U.S.-made weapons. It’s not only for invading Syria, etc., but especially for weakening and isolating Russia and all of its allies. Even a third world war could be highly profitable to their financial backers. And perhaps those financial backers have more clout in the U.S. Government now than the American people do. However, if that’s the case, then arms-makers wouldn’t be the only industry — there’s also banking, oil, corporate agriculture, and others, who would also be at the feast — and perhaps Ukraine isn’t more corrupt than the United States after all.

Perhaps Ukraine is America’s future, unless America’s future is World War III. The odd thing is that this time we would be leading the fascist nations, instead of leading their enemies. It could be called “Hitler’s revenge.” In case it seems not possible, consider America’s vote for nazism at the U.N., and the House’s vote for war against Russia. Hitler’s revenge is a possibility. It is not an impossibility. However, this time, the first target is Russia, not Jews. But the conflagration could be world-wide, and far worse than last time.

The December 4th House vote to finance the “ATO”; and the November 21st U.N. vote for nazism; are just two steps along the path toward that conflagration, but they are both steps that are of historical magnitude in that they indicate not just that America’s aristocracy are determined to do everything to destroy Russia, but that they don’t care what the American people think or feel about that, and they have the overwhelming support of the U.S. Government in doing it.

So, the alienation between the rulers and the ruled in the United States is bound to intensify even beyond its current 98%-versus-33% support-level, and its 2%-versus-67% opposition-level. But is that not extreme enough already? How much more would it need to be in order to consider the United States to be a dictatorship?

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

07 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Kumi Naidoo

Many have simply lost faith in global climate negotiations summits such as the COP 20 which started in Lima, Peru this week. But while the process has not delivered the climate action we need, I would argue that this year key things have changed and that we must continue to demand from our politicians that they listen and act and, by that, safeguard the future of next and current generations on this planet.

As nations start this latest global round of climate change negotiations, it is easy to be cynical. Because in the 20 plus years that our governments have been meeting for global climate meetings, emissions have risen more than ever before. This year is already predicted to be the warmest since records began.

And yet, this is a moment of opportunity. Because things are changing, really changing. In the climate movement, in the economy and in the politics of climate change. Today, the climate movement all over the world is reenergised. The largest ever climate march in New York this September was a powerful symbol for the global rise of a movement that is stopping pipelines and coal plants as well as forcing renewable energy solutions all over the world.

In economics, too, we live in a different world: Cost-effective, sensible renewable energy solutions have made quantum leaps. Renewables are the most economical solution for new power capacity in an ever-increasing number of countries. One hundred percent of new power capacity added in the United States in August was renewable and countries such as Denmark and Germany are producing new “clean electricity” records almost every month. China is installing as much solar this year as the US has ever done.

Bilateral agreement

The recent bilateral agreement between China and the United States to cut pollution and drive cleaner energy sources is, in addition, a sign of changing politics. Many said that such an agreement was impossible, that it would not happen in our lifetimes. And yet it did. Only a fool would argue that the action proposed by these two biggest polluters and biggest economies is enough.

It is not enough, experts have already told us, to protect our planet from a potential three or four degree Celsius rise in global temperatures – with all the disastrous consequences that would have for us, our children, and our ecosystems.

But the fact that the world’s biggest emitters have come together moves us from a “you go first” mentality, that had paralysed global climate negotiations for years, to an “I will act if you will act” frame. At Lima, others must now follow and our pressure must speed up the action.

Because we need an agreement to tackle the climate crisis, which meets the needs of the many not the few. Because it is ordinary people living in flood and drought prone areas, dependent for their livelihoods on fishing, farming and forests, or living in cities engulfed by pollution or in housing that cannot protect them from storms or heat waves, who are bearing the brunt of our experiment with the world’s climate.

The United Nations – where every country has a voice, not matter how small, relatively poor or vulnerable – are still the only place where we can hope to secure action that takes full account of these peoples’ rights.

At Lima, we need governments to make sure that the direction is right. They need to agree a goal of ending carbon pollution and deliver renewable energy for all people on this planet by 2050. And in Lima, governments must agree to renew and review their targets every five years, starting in 2025.

Not just to cut pollution, but to help the vulnerable adapt to climate change, and to support poorer countries to provide sustainable energy access for their populations.

Every government should already be preparing their “intended nationally determined contribution” – their offer towards the Paris deal. Before March 2015 we must see concrete, ambitious plans from each and every one of the world’s polluting nations – to phase out coal and nuclear power, to install solar and wind energy, to increase energy efficiency, to build cleaner and more livable cities, and to protect forests.

In Lima, governments must agree to review whether these plans are enough to prevent climate chaos and whether the effort is shared fairly between richer and poorer nations before they meet again in Paris in December 2015.

In Lima, we expect scientists, business people and investors, city mayors, faith leaders and civil society organisations from all over the world to be calling for more ambitious climate action. The climate movement gets broader and more effective day. It is an unstoppable force now – and in Lima and Paris, we will make our voices heard.

Kumi Naidoo is Executive Director of Greenpeace International

06 December, 2014
Al-Jazeera English

 

By Ram Puniyani

Those resorting to communal politics have not only perfected their techniques of polarizing the communities along religious lines, but have been constantly resorting to new methods for dividing the society. On the backdrop of Muzzafar nagar, where ‘Love Jihad’ propaganda was used to enhance the divisive agenda, now in Aligarh an icon of matchless virtues, Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh is being employed for the similar purposes.

The attempt by BJP and associates to hold the memorial function in his honor within campus was successfully deflected by the Vice Chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) University with the plan for a seminar befitting his contribution to the freedom movement of this AMU alumnus. BJP dug up this icon from pages of history and gauzing prevalent respect for him after the lapse of decades after his death. The answer to why now at this particular juncture is very revealing. Mahendra Pratap died on 29 April 1979, and now out of the blues BJP seems to have felt that his Jat, Hindu identity can be pitched as a flag of their politics. Pratap was a freedom fighter extraordinary, a journalist and a writer. He was a humanist, believing in International federation of nations transcending the national and religious boundaries. He was a Marxist who called for social reforms and empowerment of Panchayats. He was president of Indian Freedom Fighters’ Association He was also the first one to form the provisional Indian Government in exile by establishing it in Kabul in 1915. Just to recall the Indian National Congress adopted the goal of complete freedom for India much later in its 1929 session. This Provisional Government was called Hakumat-i-Moktar-i-Hind, and was constituted with Pratap as the President, Maulvi Barkatullah as prime minister and Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi as interior minister.

After independence he also participated in the electoral arena where he defeated Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Mathura in the 1957 Lok Sabha election. His commitment to being opposed to communal forces could not be more evident than this opposition of his to the leader of Bhartiya Jansangh, Vajpayee. Ironically same person is being lifted up as the icon, who opposed their politics. BJP leaders like Yogi Adityanath are claiming that had Mahendra Pratap not donated the land the AMU would not have come up. This is contrary to the facts. The predecessor of AMU, Mohammadan Anglo Oriental College was formed in 1886, with a land bought from British cantonment (Nearly 74 Acres) and much later Pratap had leased 3.04 acres of land, this is called Tikonia ground and is used as a playground by the City High School of AMU in 1929. He joined the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College in 1895, but could not complete his graduation. He left MAO College in 1905. MAO became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, which regards Raja Mahendra Pratap Singh as an alumnus. In 1977, AMU, under V-C Prof A M Khusro, felicitated Mahendra Pratap at the centenary celebrations of MAO.

He wasn’t born when MAO was established, and there is no record of any donation of land from him. Mahendra Pratap’s father Raja Ghanshiam Singh of Mursan had got a hostel room constructed, which continues to stand as Room Number 31 in Sir Syed Hall (South).

BJP demanded that Mahenra Pratap’s birthday should be celebrated as AMU celebrates the birthday of Sir Syed, the founder of the University RSS Functionaries and BJP leaders put pressure on the VC. VC pointed out that AMU cannot celebrate birth day of every donor or alumnus, while recognizing their contribution to the building up of the University. As such already AMU in recognition of Pratap’s contribution to the University has put up his photo in University along with the photo of Sir Syed.

On November 17 (2014), BJP chief of UP Mr. Laxmikant Bajpai and general secretary Swatantra Dev Singh visited Aligarh and directed their district unit to celebrate the birth day of Mahendra Pratap’s within the MU campus. The raja is a also Jat icon, In popular perception AMU is seen as a Muslim institution. The Jat-Muslim conflict instigated by communal forces, which erupted in the form of violence in Muzaffarnagar continues to affect in western part of UP. The BJP through its machinations allegedly wants to restore the glory of a Jat ‘king’. As such the idea is to appropriate one more of icons and in the process if the state government puts curbs on the celebration, the BJP can benefit by accusing the state Government of “Muslim appeasement”.

As the matters stand VC, Gen. Shah’s suggestion of celebrating the birth anniversary of Raja Mahendra Pratap by organizing a seminar on his contribution to freedom movement of India is a welcome initiative. The situation seems to have been diffused for the time being. BJP had planned a rally outside the gate of AMU, which would have precipitated the unwarranted incidents.

This whole episode has many lessons for the society. To begin with, the national icons are being modulated to suit the interests of communal politics. Be it Sardar patel, Swami Vivekanand, Mahatma Gandhi or in this case Raja Mahendra Pratap, they are being presented in the light which suits the communal politics. In case of Mahedra Pratap, who was a Marxist internationalist; is being presented as a mere Jat leader. He was a person who opposed the politics in the name of religion, as is evident by his electoral fight against BJP’s previous avatar, Bhartiya Jan Sanghs’ Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Secondly BJP associates are manipulating people’s identity as primarily being religious identity, Hindu or Muslim. In case of Muzzafarnagar, the Jats who were instigated in the name of ‘love Jihad’ came to stand more for Hindu identity. This identity is then made to stand opposed to the ‘other’ religious identity in particular, the Muslim identity and sometimes Christian identity. Same game is also being experimented in parts of Delhi, where Dalits are being made to pitch against Muslims, in a way two deprived communities being made to fight for’ their’ religion’ on the pretext of some issues related to faith.

The communal politics not only manipulates the identity of the people but also that of the icons, as is clear in the case of Raja Mahendra Pratap. The third major lesson for society to learn is that the search is on to find more and more issues to pitch one religious community against the other to strengthen the politics of a particular type. While the top leadership will talk of moratorium on violence, the associates of the same leadership will stoke the processes which will lead to the process of violence in due course.

A great amount of restraint is needed to ensure that we learn the values of the icons, e.g. the likes of Mahendra Pratap teach us the basic lessons of love and amity, peace and universal humanism. To use the techniques of conflicting religious identities is a gross violation of human morality, irrespective of the religion in whose name it is done.

Ram Puniyani was a professor in biomedical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and took voluntary retirement in December 2004 to work full time for communal harmony in India.

01 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Larry Everest

Sunday, November 30, Ferguson , Missouri . The governor of Missouri declared a state of emergency on November 17, and this is what’s been happening in Ferguson and St. Louis County , Missouri :

You drive past a major traffic and commercial intersection like Chambers and West Florissant and you see the cross-street barricaded by a half-dozen or so police cars with bubble lights flashing, crime scene tape, a military Humvee, armed soldiers, and more police in the Walgreen’s / mini-mall across the street. You often hear helicopters circling overhead, at night sometimes you can see their searchlights sweeping nearby. Meanwhile, the airspace has been closed off to all other traffic, reportedly to prevent news helicopters from providing video and pictures of what is going on below.

You go to a protest—whether in the streets or at a shopping mall—and you see a heavy police presence, often backed up by uniformed military personnel and undercover cops. Nonviolent marches and rallies can be (and have been) declared “illegal assemblies” and then violently shut down on the slightest pretext. Sometimes this means massive riot vehicles firing volleys of teargas—effectively collective punishment of the whole crowd for the alleged actions of one or two. Sometimes military-like riot police line up threateningly, or even charge the crowd. Pepper spray, bean-bag rounds, and clubs have all been deployed and used. Those who speak up in outrage have been pointed out by the police, and then a gang of six or eight cops jump, throw down, arrest, and drag them away.

After claiming to be a democracy that respects the people’s right to assemble, speak, and protest, the government has deployed dozens of police, spies, and military organizations that have been planning for months about how to contain and suppress expected protests. They’ve arrested more than 500 people in the area since August, and have conducted widespread surveillance on political activists, organizers, and journalists—some of whom have then been arrested driving in their cars, or when they come to protests. Revolutionaries and other resisters have been targeted, slandered, and vilified in the media.

If all this was taking place in countries that the U.S. has a conflict with—like Russia, China, or Iran—the same mainstream media that are now supporting the repression of protesters and the people in Ferguson would be condemning those countries as “dictatorships” and “tyrannies.” Well, that is what is going on here.

Ferguson —Epicenter of an Uprising Rocking the Country

This is happening because Ferguson has been the epicenter of a powerful uprising that has rocked the whole country and awakened millions to the fraud of “civil rights progress” and “equal rights,” and to the reality of the vicious oppression and murder of Black and other oppressed people in America today.

Michael Brown was murdered by Ferguson cop Darren Wilson on August 8, triggering a massive rebellion and waves of protest across the country. The system responded with a military deployment in the streets of Ferguson that further outraged millions and exposed the founding lies of America : that this country is a global beacon of freedom, a place unlike any other in the world in its respect for people’s rights, including the right to speak out and to protest.

Since then, authorities in St. Louis County, as well as nationwide up to the highest levels, have been preparing for the day the prosecuting attorney’s office would announce whether Michael Brown’s murderer would even be charged.

Leading up to the announcement, Loyola University law professor and associate legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Bill Quigley, wrote, “Dozens and dozens of different police forces will be surrounding the protesters in Ferguson when the Michael Brown verdict is announced. There will be federal FBI agents, Homeland Security, US Marshals, State Police troopers, County Sheriffs , and local city cops from the dozens of little towns in and around St. Louis .”

This is a system based on white supremacy, one whose functioning and interests are directly contrary to those of the vast majority of people, and one whose rule is maintained by violence. It’s a system that understands that particularly the Black masses—like the people who’ve risen up in Ferguson —pose a threat to its existence—including because when Black people rise up, it calls forward the best of other sections of the people. When they talk about government “of the people, by the people, for the people” they mean violently enforcing oppression.

In the 108 days between Michael Brown’s murder and the announcement that Wilson would walk free, the powers-that-be coordinated and built up their police response, including Governor Jay Nixon’s November 17 announcement of a state of emergency, even as they made a (thin) pretense that they would give protesters “an opportunity to express their first amendment rights,” as St. Louis Mayor Slay put it.

Then came the November 24 announcement that Darren Wilson was getting off free, that a Black person could be murdered in America any time, any place, by law enforcement in particular, without consequence. The rage that erupted was deep and wide. That night the system lashed back and the next day Nixon tripled the National Guard presence to 2,200, escalated its role, and the police adopted even more aggressive tactics.

Police State Ferguson —This Is What American Imperialist Democracy IS Like

On Monday night, November 24, people in front of the Ferguson police station were confronted with huge riot vehicles, were massively tear gassed, and many were forced from the streets. Sixty-one were arrested that night, some with felony charges. And for all the system’s bullshit about “outside agitators”—as if that is a bad thing—these were actually overwhelmingly local residents.

Tuesday night, November 25, the section of West Florissant around Canfield Apartments—where Michael Brown lived and was executed—was blocked off. Police declared illegal and broke up a protest of about 60 at the corner of Chambers and West Florissant without provocation. On South Florissant police tear gassed and dispersed a protest of hundreds in front of the police station.

Wednesday, the 26th, I saw police violently shut down a mass demonstration in central St. Louis , pepper spraying some demonstrators and snatching people just for speaking out.

Intimidation on Black Friday

Friday, the 28th, I saw a big police presence, including undercover cops in Walmart’s parking lot. When I went up to one regular car with a young Black man inside to ask him what he thought of the Black Lives Matter boycott, he said, “Step back from the car.” I thought he just meant to back off a little, but when I tried to ask him a question he began to get out and said more loudly, “No, I mean step back from the car.” I did. He was an undercover pig and there were more nearby. There was also a large police presence at the Galleria in Richmond Heights . (See reports on the Black Friday protests.)

One of the activists who shut down a Walmart in St. Louis County told me:

There were aggressive, armed security and dogs at Walmart. We started chanting, and rallied at the exit. There was a wall of police. Police were yelling at shoppers: “If you’re gonna shop, shop”—as if to warn people, don’t pay attention to them. When we were chanting outside Walmart, police officers put hands on their pistols! I found that shocking, if believable. Almost grotesque in the sense that this is just a store. You have a police presence in a store to protect private property, and this holiday, and these transactions.

The Blinding of Dornella Conners

On Saturday, November 29, Dornella Conners, a young, pregnant Black woman, was in a car with her boyfriend simply trying to drive away from a police clampdown. The police blocked the car, front and back, and fired a bean bag at the window. It shattered the glass, sending shards of glass into her face and blinding her in one eye. “I weren’t looting or anything. I was just out with my boyfriend. We were just riding around respecting Mike Brown,” she told a local radio station. “How can a pregnant person in a car be causing chaos?” her father asked.

A Broad, Countywide, Unconstitutional Pattern of Repression

These are not isolated incidents. Kris Hermes, the National Lawyer’s Guild (NLG) legal worker vice president, described a broad multi-dimensional pattern of repression against the people and those protesting.

“Chasing people out of an area to disperse them, as happened on Tuesday, November 25, near the Ferguson Police Department, because of some property destruction, instead of allowing people to demonstrate—this was violating the constitutional right to assemble and protest.”

So is using weaponry against protesters like rubber and plastic bullets, pepper spray, and tear gas. “This is not individual punishment for breaking the law, this is collective punishment,” Hermes said. “Tear gas is indiscriminate. Shooting rubber bullets into a crowd is indiscriminate. Pepper spray is indiscriminate.”

One particularly egregious example was the tear gassing of people at MoKaBe’s Coffeehouse in south St. Louis in the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 25. This was supposed to be a safe space and people were in the café and outside on the patio having coffee, a popular hangout for people active in the struggle for justice for Michael Brown and VonDeritt Myers Jr., a young Black man who was shot eight times and murdered by St. Louis police on October 8. But around 1:00 am , police fired tear gas at people at the café, and then a little later even tear gassed people attempting to get to St. John’s Episcopal Church, another safe haven. Jennifer McCoy, an NLG legal observer, told me that when people went into the church, there was so much tear gas on their clothes that they were forced back outside.

The NLG’s Hermes said that widespread arrests as well as blocking off streets—a stretch of West Florissant in this case—are also a means of preventing or suppressing protest. One hundred twenty people had been arrested since Monday night when the grand jury decision was announced, 30 of them for felonies. Contrary to all the government and media talk about the uprising being driven by outsiders, Hermes said, “The vast majority were local residents.”

Quigley—the CCR’s constitutional law expert—wrote that the whole notion that the government can tell people when, where, and how to protest—as police have been doing in Ferguson—is unconstitutional. “The government will say people can only protest until a certain time, or on a certain street, or only if they keep moving, or not there, not here, not now, no longer. Such police action is not authorized by the U.S. Constitution. People have a right to protest, the government should leave them alone.”

Quigley points out that police intimidation—showing up in full riot gear—is also an unconstitutional suppression of dissent.

The National Guard—Actively Helping Suppress Protest

The National Guard has been portrayed as playing a passive role in simply protecting property, but Hermes emphasized this is not the case, that they are playing an active role in suppressing protest: “The National Guard has helped block off an entire stretch of West Florissant, preventing vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which is itself a suppression of rights.

“The National Guard,” Hermes added, “has also appeared on the scene at the Ferguson Police Department, an act of intimidation and a form of policing against crowds there to peacefully protest. Friday night, there were a couple dozen or so National Guard there. Together with law enforcement agencies they outnumbered the protesters. This kind of massive show of force is a form of intimidation.”

Widespread Surveillance and Targeting of Activists

Hermes stressed that “heavy surveillance has been a foundation” of what the police have been doing. “They are intensely videotaping activists across the St. Louis area, targeting particular people and picking particular people out of a crowd—often for brutal arrest. They’re going after organizers.”

One example was the arrest of videographer and live-streamer Bassem Masri, who has been very prominent and active in the protests. He was being followed by police and was then arrested and detained on a $15,000 cash bond for allegedly driving a vehicle with a revoked license. This constitutes an act of preventive detention. The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee in St. Louis quickly raised the money through crowdfunding to get Masri out.

Hermes reports that “Some of what is going on is people are being filmed, and if they seem to be leaders or organizers, they are then later targeted at demonstrations. This has been common and has happened over and over again. The protests have been going on weeks and weeks and this has gone on for that time. I would say dozens of times. It’s a practice they’ve been using since August. There have been over 500 arrests since then.”

Three NLG legal observers were illegally arrested on November 21 while monitoring and filming the police.

The Bronx Defenders, a legal group whose mission is to “zealously defend the rights of clients, fight for systemic change and promote justice for the community,” sent a delegation to Ferguson and their Tweets paint a similar picture:

Like in the Bronx , but perhaps even more marked here, it’s clear the legal system as a whole is ground zero for injustice in # Ferguson .

Heard a LOT this evening at county jail from protestors & spectators hauled in on trumped up charges and abused by police in # Ferguson .

The St. Louis County police denying access to counsel here in Clayton to visit with arrested # Ferguson protestors.

NYPD Spying on Protest Leaders

It has also been reported (WNYC, November 25) that the NYPD has sent experts to Ferguson to identify “professional agitators.” “We have a number of our detectives out there, have had them out there for over a week to help out in terms of intelligence we have on some of the professional agitators who are involved in these types of activity,” NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said.

Coming from New York ‘s police commissioner, this is an outrageous self-exposure and admission of illegal actions by the authorities. First, it’s not against the law to be a “professional agitator,” whatever that means. The targeting of “agitators” is not being based on any specific allegations of illegal activity but simply people the NYPD doesn’t think have the right to speak out against police brutality and murder!

Reports seem to indicate this strategy is being put into action: In Ferguson as well as in New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, activists and “agitators,” including communist revolutionaries, have been targeted simply for political speech, and snatched out of crowds and arrested.

What’s described above is, no doubt, just some of the state’s illegitimate violence, violation of rights, and repression being wreaked on the people. Email your stories to revolution.reports@yahoo.com. The whole world needs to know!

Larry Everest is a correspondent for Revolution newspaper / revcom.us, where this article first appeared, and author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (Common Courage, 2004).

01 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dr. Elias Akleh

The slow simmering Palestinian/Israel tension have been lately escalated to a boiling level at many fronts; social, political and religious. This tension has led to many violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli armed security forces, and between Palestinians and armed Israeli mobs. The epicenter of these violent confrontations is Al-Quds/Jerusalem and radiates to all the major Palestinian towns in the West Bank, and to all the 1948 occupied Palestinian towns. These confrontations would ignite a Palestinian Intifada (uprising) that would be different in nature and intensity than the previous Intifadas; 6 years long first Intifada (1978) and the 5 years long second Intifada (2000) known as Al-Aqsa Intifada.

Israelis have taken the opportunity of the world’s attention being diverted away from them and focused on the war against ISIS (Israeli Secret Intelligence Services) terrorists in Syria and Iraq, in order to intensify their oppression of Palestinians, their demolition and occupation of private Palestinian homes, their confiscation of large areas of Palestinian land, the expansion of their illegal colonies (settlements), and lastly, which is more insulting and inciting to Palestinian anger, desecrating and attempting to control the Islamic Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound.

Zionist leaders know very well that in order to accomplish their Zionist project they have to evict the Palestinians out of the land. They use supremacist religious ideology to brainwash and to manipulate naïve Jews to do this dirty job. Thus, Judaism has become the driving force for Zionism. Palestinian forced eviction and ethnic cleansing are the operating mode of Zionism as declared openly by most of their political leaders. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Israeli Prime Minister stated:

“The settlement of the land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlements, we will not fulfill Zionism. It is that simple” (Maariv, February 21st 1997 edition).

Ariel Sharon, another former Israeli Prime Minister, went even further when he was still a Foreign Minister by stating the following:

“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to (Israeli) public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands” (Agence France Presse November 15th 1998)

Religion is an effective way politicians use to control and manipulate people. Through their pro-militaristic educational system, administered by military personnel, intertwined with their supremacist religious ideologies of Jews as god’s chosen people while the rest of humans are merely animal souls born in human bodies only to serve the Jews, and that Palestine is their god’s promised land, the Israeli young generations have been indoctrinated into and brainwashed to become brutally militaristic, extremely racist, and egotistically religiously supremacist.

The Yeshiva system (Jewish religious schools) starting with elementary children through after marriage (from ketana to gedola to kollel Yeshivas) in occupied Palestine (Israel) are the center of supremacist teachings and the producers, the promoters, and the meeting centers for young Israeli vigilante gangs, who descend from their colonies (settlements) into Palestinian villages to harass and assault Palestinian residents and farmers, burn their crops, kill their farm animals, vandalize their schools and assault students, torch their mosques, vandalize their churches, kidnap their children and amuse themselves by torturing and burning them to death. All these and a lot more are done under the watchful eyes and the protection of Israeli soldiers. These young Israeli vigilante gangs have been daily attacking Palestinians even in 1948 occupied Palestinian towns. Such attacks include stabbing, beating, lynching, kidnapping and torturing and burning to death, vehicular hit and run, property vandalism, and even police shooting dead Palestinians for the mere reason of being a Palestinian; a goyim; non-Jew.

Al-Quds/Jerusalem is the epicenter of the Arab/Israeli conflict. The Israelis want to claim the city as their own Jewish-only eternal religious and political capital. They have enforced all kinds of oppressive laws and measures aimed at evicting Palestinians out of the city. Between 1967 and 2013 the Israeli government had revoked the residency status of more than 14,309 Palestinian families of Al-Quds/Jerusalem under dubious justifications that apply only to Palestinians. The Israeli government has been confiscating large areas of Palestinian lands around the city, and have been building their own satellite colonies for the long run of claiming them as Jerusalem suburbs in order to claim a Jewish majority in the city.

Israeli extremists, including what is called Temple Mount Faithful, are encouraged to harass and terrorize Palestinian Jerusalemites in an attempt to force them out of the city. Large scores of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem suburbs, such as Silwan and Jabal Al-Moukaber, had been forcefully occupied by these extremists after assaulting and evicting their Palestinian owners. Muslim Palestinian prayers below the age of 50 are denied entry to the Old City and cannot pray in Al-Aqsa Mosque. They end up praying in the streets at the closest point, usually a check point, they can get to Al-Quds/Jerusalem. Orthodox Jewish religious extremists have been, for many years, marching towards the Al-Aqsa Compound calling for the destruction of the Mosque and the erection of their alleged temple.

It is worth noting that for the last 47 years, since Israel occupied the West Bank, Israeli archeological teams had been digging beneath and around Al-Aqsa Compound looking for evidence to prove the existence of their alleged Solomon Temple on the Compound. None have been found. The only discovered artifacts have been Romans and Islamic.

The violence was ignited by the assassination attempt of religiously extremist Yehuda Glick, an American born Rabbi who is the leader of religious HaLiba; a coalition of religiously extremist groups calling for the rebuilding of the Temple on the Al-Aqsa Compound. This group had in many occasions attempted forced entry to the Compound and had clashed with the Muslim watch-guards and prayers. Violent clashed between Muslim prayers and armed Israeli security forces erupted, where Israeli forces attacked prayers in the Compound with tear gas and stun grenades, and forcefully evacuated Muslim prayers from the Compound while allowing Israeli extremist settlers entry to perform their dancing rituals on the Compound.

Some Israeli politicians took this opportunity to score electoral political points. In three consecutive days three Knesset Members; Netanyahu’s sole competitor Moshe Feiglin, with mayor Nir Barkat, Miriam “Miri” Regev, and Chuli Rafeili, forced their way through Al-Aqsa Compound accompanied with scores of extremist settlers , under the protection of heavily armed Israeli security forces. At the same time Israel’s Public Security Minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, threatened to close Al-Aqsa Compound completely if Jews cannot visit the Compound.

It seemed that these politicians had forgotten that the 5 years long Al-Aqsa Intifada started as a response to Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Compound under heavy police protection. Under fear of such Intifada, and under pressure from Jordan, the official custodian of the Al-Aqsa Compound, and from international community, Netanyahu stated that he will keep the status quo of the Compound as it was. Yet, despite his statement, extremist settlers are still routinely force their way through the Compound.

While Palestinians have been under brutal occupation for the last 66 years, most of the Arab regimes and the international community have provided only lip service for their aid. Others had supported Israeli terror while calling Palestinians terrorists. Initially Arab regimes seemed to oppose Israeli occupation, later on some of them turned out to become Israeli collaborators and anti-Palestinians. Jordan and Kuwait are helpless and weak militarily. Saudi Arabia is covertly agreeable and exerting pressure on the rest of Arab states to stay silent. Qatar is virtually an American occupied military base and is a full economic and political partner to Israel. Egypt has been a partner to Israel since Sadat. Its president, el-Sisi, has turned out to become a big disappointment to his people and to the rest of the Arabs. He continued his predecessor’s; Mubarak, siege against Gaza Strip in full partnership with Israel. He even went further by demolishing the houses on the Rafah Egyptian side to create a 5km long buffer zone, and virtually had declared Hamas as a terrorist group because of its remote association with the Muslim Brotherhood. Arab states that had supported Palestinian cause (Saddam’s Iraq), and those that are still supporting Palestinians (Syria and part of Lebanon – Hezbollah) are busy defending their territories against terrorist groups, such as Al-Nusra and ISIS, that had been created, armed, and financed by some Arab states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia in partnership with Israel and USA.

One should not be surprised by these Arab regimes, who consider Palestinians a foreign nation and not Arabs, when the Palestinian president himself, and his Palestinian Authority, who are supposed to protect and Palestinians, are themselves partners with Israeli security to protect Israelis, and could not raise a finger to protect one single Palestinian citizen. On the contrary the Palestinian security forces arrest Palestinian freedom fighters, and suppress any form if resistance or insurrection. When Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank towns, especially in Al-Khalil/Hebron attempted to travel to Al-Quds/Jerusalem to protest Israeli settlers’ desecration of Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Palestinian security forces stood in their way.

After 20 years of futile peace negotiations with Israel the PA still follow this path knowing very well that it will lead to nothing. Abbas keeps raising his empty threats of going to UNSC to enforce its many resolutions against Israeli occupation, and to go to International Criminal Court against Israel, but does not follow threats with actions. He is afraid of being assassinated like Arafat, and prefers to keep the illusion of authority and his hefty American/Israeli paid salary plus the millions in perks that he passes on to his son to buy real estate properties in Amman, Jordan.

The Arab League had decided in its latest meeting, Saturday 11/29, to authorize Jordan; a UN member, to present a draft resolution to the UNSC calling for the implementation of UN Resolution 242 of 1967 for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. However the Arab League did not decide on a time for the delivery of such draft.

The Western leaders are so hypocritical when it comes to the Palestinian cause. They talk about their commitment to a two-state solution but are so complicit, and many are supportive, to the on-going Israeli occupation and gradual ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They justify occupying Israel’s terror as self-defense while denying the occupied Palestinians the same right. Many of them go further than that by providing Israel with billions of dollars and with the latest devastating military armaments. Although some claimed they would support and recognize a Palestinian state yet when the UN, on Saturday 11/29, drafted 6 resolutions against Israel demanding its withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Syrian Golan Heights according to Resolution 497 of 1981, 57 of these European countries abstained from voting.

Throughout 66 years of occupation, expulsion, mass imprisonment and torture, brutal terror attacks, destruction of homes and properties, theft of their land and livelihood, extremist settlers’ terror attacks, all types of persecution, and international neglect, the Palestinians have been patient and steadfast in their mostly peaceful resistance against Israeli occupation. They had sacrificed a lot in lives and property; loss of family members and loss of 87% of their homeland, in order to live in peace. They offered Israel peace treaties many times. They entered into 20 years of peace negotiations. Yet Israel, understanding only the language of brutal force, kept on stealing more Palestinian land and kept on oppressing Palestinians.

Nature’s laws proved that pressure produces violent explosions, and that for every action there is a reaction. Israelis think that they could conquer and demolish Palestinian resistance spirit through their brutal terror. They thought old Palestinians would die and the young would not remember. Palestinians proved them wrong. Palestinian young cherish the memory of the old. Palestinian resisting spirit is still alive and stronger. Just observe how the unarmed Palestinian young generations courageously face the heavily armed Israeli forces in the streets.

Palestinian patience has run out. They understand now that they cannot depend external help. Their fate is in their hands. The Israeli pressure has produced an explosion. Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinian villages are producing Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers. Israeli vehicular hit and run is producing Palestinian similar hit and run. Israeli attacks on Palestinian Christian and Muslim holy places is producing Palestinian attacks on Synagogues.

Israelis have sewn only terror in Palestine, and terror they will definitely reap.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent, born in the town of Beit-Jala.

01 December, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Jean Shaoul

The agreement by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet to present a Jewish nation-state bill to the Knesset at the beginning of December has provoked a major political crisis.

The bill seeks to anchor Israel’s definition as an explicitly Jewish state in the country’s Basic Laws. While civil rights are theoretically still to be accorded to everyone, “according to the law”, communal or national rights will only be extended to Jewish Israelis. It, in effect, ends the state’s formal commitment to democracy and equality, rendering non-Jews—the Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin, as well as the 300,000 Russian immigrants who are not Jewish according to rabbinical law, and who together account for more than 1.5 million, or nearly 20 percent of Israel’s 8.2 million population—second class citizens.

The bill calls on the judiciary to utilize Jewish law, meaning rabbinical law, “as a source of inspiration”, and enshrines the national anthem, Jewish holy days and the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel in the Basic Laws.

The Zionist state is now preparing to adopt the institutional arrangements for an apartheid system to ensure Jewish supremacy under conditions where Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Syria’s Golan Heights will soon together have a Palestinian majority. The move follows inexorably from the establishment of the Zionist state as a “safe haven” for the Jews via the dispossession of the Palestinians and the commitment of successive governments to an expansionist policy.

Netanyahu claimed that the law was necessary because “There are many who are challenging the notion of Israel as a Jewish homeland. The Palestinians refuse to recognise this and there is also opposition from within. …” Whereas all would have equal civil rights, he said that, “There are national rights only for the Jewish people—a flag, anthem, the right of every Jew to immigrate to Israel and other national symbols.”

The proposals also discriminate in favour of Jewish heritage and history, stating, “The state will work to preserve the heritage and the cultural and historical tradition of the Jewish people and to instil and cultivate it in Israel and the Diaspora.”

The cabinet agreed by a majority of 14 to six to back several private member’s bills going through the Knesset, provided that the final version of the laws is in accordance with Netanyahu’s 14 requirements—which are a slightly less extreme form of the other bills. Those bills demote Arabic from its already weakened status as an official language and include a commitment to the construction of new Jewish communities, without requiring similar construction for the Palestinian Israelis.

The proposals prompted a furious debate, whose noisy exchanges could be heard outside the cabinet meeting room. But none of the ministers, including Justice Minister Tzipi Livni from the Tenua Party and Finance Minister Yair Lapid from the Yesh Yatid party, opposed the bill as a matter of principle. Lapid called the proposed change a “bad law, which is badly worded”.

Their main concern was to reach some agreement on voting against the measure in the Knesset and remaining in Netanyahu’s coalition.

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein claimed that Netanyahu’s proposals maintain the principle of equality, but opposed the bill because it was essentially a constitutional amendment that should be introduced by government, not by a private member.

Palestinians, both within Israel and the occupied territories, denounced the bill as racist, crowning the raft of discriminatory legislation passed over the last decade and currently under discussion.

The government has just reinstated house demolitions as a punitive measure and is proposing to strip Palestinian attackers of their residency rights in occupied East Jerusalem. Netanyahu said, “It cannot be that those who harm Israel, those who call for the destruction of the state of Israel, will enjoy rights like social security.”

Others have opposed the bill, fearing it would further isolate Israel internationally. Labour Party leader Isaac Herzog called it “an unnecessary, reactionary provocation”, while Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin, a right winger and member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, argued that it was unnecessary and gave ammunition to Israel’s critics internationally.

They voiced their concerns after opposition was expressed by the United States. On Monday, a US State Department spokesman said that it expected Israel to “continue [its] commitment to democratic principles”. He added, “The United States position, which is unchanged, has been clear for years—and the president and the secretary [of state] have also reiterated it—is that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state in which all citizens should enjoy equal rights.”

Washington’s concern is that the bill reveals that Israel has already created much of the constitutional and legal framework for an apartheid state. The physical separation of the two communities is assured by the Security Wall between the Occupied West Bank and Israel, and the military control of Area C in the West Bank, by far the largest area that is home to the Israeli settlements. Now the new arrangements set the scene for far greater discrimination than that already endured by the Palestinian population within Israel itself.

In addition, it jettisons any pretence of reaching an agreement with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—for whom the recognition of Israel as an explicitly Jewish state is a step too far. Any Palestinian state based on this definition of Israel is publicly revealed for what it always was—the equivalent of a South African Bantustan.

The pretence that an agreement on some Palestinian statelet is possible at some future date is the necessary fig leaf to cover the Arab leaders’ support for the US’s predatory wars to control the region’s rich energy resources. As such, the Jewish-nation bill threatens to fuel not only an uprising in Israel/Palestine that is already well developed, but also an international protest movement that would cut across Washington’s plans for military action in Iraq and Syria.

The US intervention has led to a delay in the bill’s ratification, with both of Netanyahu’s right wing partner coalition partners, Israel is Our Home and the Jewish Home Party, calling for a postponement of the Knesset vote.

Nevertheless, the bill, amid heightened tensions in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, gives the green light to the ultra-nationalists to mount further provocations. Religious zealots have sought increased access to the Al Aqsa mosque compound, with provocative marches by prominent Israeli politicians escorted by armed guards, reminiscent of Ariel Sharon’s visit that sparked the second Intifada in October 2000. There are also moves from the security establishment to ban Palestinian guards stationed on the compound, which is subject to Jordan’s control under Israel’s 1994 treaty with Jordan, to block entry by Jews.

Netanyahu is promoting the bill in large measure as a means of shoring up his support among the most rabid nationalist layers. His shaky coalition, which faces crises on the economic and political fronts, is on the point of collapse, presaging an early general election after just two years. Netanyahu represents an isolated and demoralised ruling class that has lost its head and has no answer to the crisis it confronts except increased authoritarianism, brutality and war.

Notwithstanding the nationalist propaganda—that the Zionist state represents all those of the Jewish faith—Israel is a capitalist society, divided by class and beset with massive social antagonisms, serving to preserve the rule of a handful of billionaires and their venal politicians. The turn to measures associated with both apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany will only deepen the revulsion and hostility toward Zionism throughout the Middle East, around the world, and among Jewish workers and youth in Israel itself—in the process discrediting Israel’s backers, the US and European imperialist powers.

01 December, 2014
WSWS.org

By Mike Faulkner

“Cuba and the United States have quite a curious – in fact, unique status in international relations. There is no similar case of such a sustained assault by one power against another – in this case the greatest superpower against a poor, Third World country – for forty years of terror and economic warfare.” — Noam Chomsky. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. 2000.

Chomsky wrote that more than fourteen years ago. Nothing much has changed since then. The punitive US blockade of Cuba is still in place. In October 2014, for the 23rd successive year the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Cuban draft resolution calling for the lifting of the blockade. Unsurprisingly for the 23rd year the United States voted against the resolution. Perhaps more surprisingly for those uninformed about this annual event, will be the fact that the US casts its vote against Cuba in almost complete isolation.

Since 1992 no more than three member states have ever voted with the US against the Cuban resolution, but until the late 1990s significant numbers abstained. There were, for example, 71 abstentions with 59 in favour in 1992. In recent years there have been only a handful of abstentions – between 1 and 3 – and since 2012 a consistent voting pattern has emerged: 188 for the Cuban resolution: 2 against: 3 abstentions. The only ally the US now has in its vindictive hostility towards Cuba is Israel. Even lickspittle lackeys such as Albania, Romania and Uzbekistan have deserted. Israel, however, has never faltered, standing steadfast with Goliath against David every year since 1992.

If one needed an object lesson in imperial arrogance, hypocrisy and impunity one need look no further than the US treatment of Cuba since 1959. Actually, the bullying started much earlier than that – as far back as the beginning of the 20thcentury. But after the triumph of the revolution in 1959 US hostility became remorseless, aimed at the overthrow of the new government and restoration of the status quo ante. The US has never been reconciled to the Cuban revolution. Failure to destroy it by armed intervention and terrorist assassination plots against its leaders during the 1960s and 1970s did not lead to abandonment of the mission. US power has been used relentlessly to impose the most draconian economic blockade, to deny the country its sovereign right to trade freely, and to intimidate and penalise national states, commercial companies and individuals who are deemed to be in breach of the policy of extra-territorial sanctions imposed unilaterally by the US in the 1960s and still in force. The extraterritoriality underpinning the blockade violates the United Nations Charter, the Organization of American States and the fundamentals of international law. All US administrations invoke “The International Community”, in whose interests they claim to act. Yet in this vicious and vindictive exercise of overweening power by one state against another (which is without parallel in modern history) the United States has persistently ignored the wishes of the overwhelming majority of member states of the United Nations. And the allies of the United States who vote to lift the blockade of Cuba, do nothing to take their disagreement with the superpower beyond the politics of pain-free gesture. Annually for the past 47 years US presidents have extended the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) against Cuba. The TWEA dates back to 1917 when it was enacted by President Wilson on the eve of US entry into the First World War, in order to prohibit or regulate trade with a wartime adversary. It is the basis of all the sanctions against Cuba, a country with which the US has never been formally at war. In September of this year President Obama extended TWEA for another year. It is estimated by the Cuban government that over the past 55 years the economic sanctions, measured in current prices, have cost the country US$116.8 billion in lost trade. When the depreciation of the dollar against the price of gold is taken into account, the figure is US$1.11 trillion. This reality reveals the purpose of the economic blockade- to cripple Cuba economically.

Ronald D. Godard, US Senior Area Adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs, opposing the Cuban draft resolution at the UN, stated bluntly that the Cuban economy would not thrive until the government “permits a free and fair labour market, freely empowers Cuban entrepreneurs….opens state monopolies to private competition and adopts the sound macro-economic policies that have contributed to the success of Cuba’s neighbours in Latin America”. This means that the economic blockade will not be lifted until Cuba abandons its efforts to build a socialist society and submits to the untrammelled operation of the neo-liberal “free market”. In referring to Cuba’s Latin American neighbours, he evidently did not have in mind countries such as Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela that have in recent years rejected that model. He must have been referring to those like Cuba’s close neighbours in Central America who have not: Guatemala and Honduras, the two countries suffering from the most extreme social inequality in the hemisphere.

But in spite of the crippling impact of US sanctions, Cuba, with a population of 11 million has once again provided the world with a glowing example of selfless internationalism. In early October Cuba sent 63 doctors and 102 nurses to Sierra Leone in response to the Ebola crisis. They joined a team of 23 Cuban doctors who were already working there. Another 300 health workers are being trained and will soon join their colleagues. The WHO has praised the Cuban contribution, pointing out that while other countries have offered money, no other country has matched the numbers of health professionals sent from Cuba to work in the most difficult circumstances. Soon the Cubans plan to have an aid presence in Guinea and Liberia. The 461 selected for the task were from a larger group of 15,000 health care workers who volunteered. Cuba’s response to the Ebola crisis is the latest in a long record of aid given to other nations at time of need. 2,465 health workers went to Pakistan to provide emergency care in the wake of the Kashmir earthquake; in 2010 Cuba was the first country to responds to the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti. The Independent reported (26. December 2010) that Cuba’s “doctors and nurses put the US effort to shame.” “A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti as part of Fidel Castro’s international medical mission which has won the socialist state many friends but little international recognition…Amid the fanfare and publicity surrounding the arrival of help from the US and UK, hundreds more Cuban doctors, nurses and therapists arrived with hardly a mention.”

As far as the British media is concerned the same may be said of Cuba’s response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Apart from an early report in the Observer , which echoed the New York Times, there has been almost no mention of Cuba’s involvement. It is difficult to believe that this is not deliberate. Either that or the equally damning conclusion that so deeply ingrained is the anti-Cuban bias in the consciousness of supposedly objective journalists that they do not consider the extraordinary contribution of this small Caribbean island in the face of a humanitarian crisis to be worthy of mention.

Because most of the communications media in Britain, together with the British government, are so subservient to the US government, particularly in matters of foreign policy, it is worth recalling a few of the pivotal episodes in the 55 year history of implacable US hostility towards Cuba. This will draw largely on an account (Cuba and the United States: A Personal Reflection on Thirty-Five years of Conflict) by this writer, published in Monthly Review in February 1996:

“In the distorted account of the breakdown of US-Cuba relations it is suggested that Eisenhower’s administration broke off relations with Cuba as a consequence of Castro’s embracing Marxism-Leninism. This turns the truth on its head. In 1960 Fidel’s ‘26th July Movement’ had no organizational links with the small Communist Party and the members of that movement, formed during the guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship, explicitly denied that they were communists. But Fidel was branded a communist on his first and only visit to Washington in 1959; a visit undertaken to win US aid. He was snubbed by Eisenhower and virtually ignored by Vice-President Nixon, who, when told about the planned agrarian reform concluded that Castro was ‘obviously a Red.’ Nixon, who a year earlier had warmly embraced the butcher Batista on a visit to Havana to boost US arms supplies to the embattled dictator, thus set the scene for his government’s future relations with Castro.

“The land reform which was the most thorough and the most popular ever undertaken in Latin America, was denounced as ‘Communist.’ In the spring of 1960 the Cubans purchased cheap Soviet crude oil in the teeth of hostility from the Western oil companies. When the Western-owned refineries refused to refine the Soviet oil, Castro, with mass popular support for his actions, took over the refineries. This was the decisive turning point which put Cuba on a collision course with the United States. The Eisenhower administration responded to this exercise of sovereignty by a small, poor country by cancelling the sugar quota, which meant that 70 percent of Cuba’s sugar production was left without a market. The intention was clear: to cripple Cuba economically in the shortest possible time and to bring down Castro.

“I was in Cuba shortly after this episode. The tension was palpable. Khrushchev…agreed to buy the sugar that the US had refused to take. The USSR became very popular overnight, but still, for the majority of Cubans, this didn’t mean that they had chosen Communism, or that they considered that it was being imposed upon them. A popular expression of sentiment in Cuba at the time was ‘Sin Cuota; Sin Amo’ (without quota; without bosses). At the time US newspapers were still available in Havana. I recall in Early August of 1960 reading the most crude distortions of what was happening in Cuba. Most of the US press was claiming that Castro was clamping a Communist dictatorship upon an unwilling, oppressed people.

“One of my most vivid recollections from that time was attending a mass rally on August 6. (1960) in the Havana Sports stadium Fidel addressed a crowd of about 70,000. There was nothing dragooned (or restrained) about the audience. It was composed of people of all ages; workers’ and peasants’ militia, students’ militia, men and women – many armed. The rally marked another decisive stage in the radicalization of the Cuban revolution and in Cuba’s relations with the United States. cubaFidelSpeech-098It was the occasion on which he announced the expropriation of all US companies and assets in Cuba. The crowd went wild with delirious excitement. The next day (or rather, later the same day, as the rally didn’t end until 5 am on August 7), the streets of Havana were thronged with thousands of people celebrating their freedom from ‘Yanqui imperialism.’ Numerous buildings were festooned with banners announcing that ‘this company is the property of the people of Cuba.’ Young militia women, rifles slung over their shoulders, stood guard in front of the buildings. Feeling somewhat apprehensive about how Uncle Sam might react to this demonstration of sovereignty by its small and ‘uppity’ Latin neighbour, we frequently asked people whether they were worried that the marines might come ashore soon. The response was almost always immediate and uniform: ‘Let ‘em come! We’ll deal with them!’

“In late August the United States tightened the screws further. At a conference of the Organization of American States in Costa Rica, the State Department, through its manipulation of many Latin American delegations, secured Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS and demanded in the so-called ‘Declaration of San Jose’ that Castro open his country to an OAS inspection. The Cubans, aware of the debacle that had just occurred in the newly independent Congo, supposedly under the auspices of the U.N., had no intention of complying.

“While working [as members of the first ever international work brigade to visit Cuba] with picks and shovels in the Sierra Maestra [on the construction of the first residential school in that remote area] we read reports in the New York herald Tribune of a State Department document presented to the Cost Rica conference claiming that our work brigade was in fact a Soviet trained international communist guerrilla force, smuggled into Cuba to reinforce the supposedly demoralized Castro militia and help to spread red revolution throughout the hemisphere. It was, the statement claimed, a common Soviet ruse to disguise such contingents as ‘work brigades’. This was the kind of ‘evidence’ the State Department invented in order to swing their Latin American client states into line against Cuba.

“On September 2 the Cuban government answered the accusations emanating from the State Department via the OAS meeting. Fidel spoke at a rally in Havana attended by 1 million peoplewho enthusiastically packed the Plaza Civica [now the Plaza de la Revolution]. From that historic meeting came the first ‘Declaration of Havana’ which was essentially a declaration of independence and an assertion of the right to formulate a foreign policy without pressure or interference from the United States or anyone else. Each clause of the declaration was submitted for the approval of the ‘assembly of the Cuban people.’ In this fashion Cuba’s foreign policy alignment changed overnight. I remember listening to that address, relayed from Havana, in a Cuban army barrak near the top of the highest mountain in the Sierra Maestra. The proceedings went on until the elrly hours of the morning, depriving us of much needed sleep.

“Our work schedule at the Camilo Cienfuegos site was frequently interrupted whether by invitations to this or that celebration or by visits from this or that delegation. The most memorable of these events was a visit by Che Guevara, who was at that time Minister of Industry. Representatives of a dozen or more countries packed into a fairly small building to listen to him and to ask questions. My impression was that he differed from all the other political leaders I had listened to in Cuba (and by that time I had heard many) in his less volatile delivery, and the cool, completely undemagogic way he dealt with questions. I did not know then that he was an Argentinian and not a Cuban, though whether this in any way accounted for his style, I have no idea.

“We met hundreds of young people, mainly women, from Santiago, Havana and elsewhere, enrolled as ‘agrarian instructors’ in the first stage of the albeto campaign, which resulted a few years later in the virtual elimination of illiteracy in Cuba – many years short of the time the UN predicted it would take. It was almost inconceivable that anyone but the most bone-headed reactionary bigot could have failed to be impressed and deeply moved by the Cuban revolution in those early years. But few of its achievements were reported in the western world.

“Successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic, have treated Cuba’s attempts to break free from US tutelage and build a socialist society as a criminal offense to be punished with the utmost severity. The catalogue of real offenses perpetrated against Cuba is endless. Distortions of fact, lies and chicanery have been the commonplace accompaniments of the thirty-five year old vendetta against Castro and his country. In 1961 the Bay of Pigs invasion organized by the CIA was preceded by a clumsy provocation involving the mendacious claim that the Cuban air force had rebelled; CIA terrorism and sabotage against Cuba was routine in the 1960s and the numerous well-documented attempts to assassinate Castro sit uneasily with the US public opposition to terrorism; the so-called missile crisis of 1962 seems to have had its immediate origin in a secret planned invasion of the island that became known to the Cubans; the retention to the present day of the provocative base on Cuban soil at Guantanamo is in blatant violation of Cuban sovereignty and against the expressed demand of the Cuban government for its removal. But worst of all perhaps is the 34 year old blockade of the country, which, until 1990 guaranteed Cuba’s heavy dependence on the Soviet bloc.

“The US treatment of Cuba doesn’t differ in any essentials from its treatment of other cases of radical nationalism in the hemisphere. Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1963, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Chile and Grenada – all examples of what happens when attempts are made to overthrow oppressive puppet regimes. Radical reforming governments or movements in these countries have, like Cuba, been subjected to political and economic destabilization, murderous terrorism by US armed and trained death squads, sabotage, embargo, blockades, US backed military coup and outright invasion. In each case the pretense has been to ‘restore democracy’.

That was written nearly twenty years ago. Much has changed since then. But if the prospects of real, radical change in the Latin America now seem brighter than they were then, it is no thanks to any change of heart on the part of the United States. Changes in the balance of class forces in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador and less radical, but nonetheless encouraging signs of resistance on the part of countries such as Brazil and Argentina encourage the hope that the tide is turning and that the challenge to the neo-liberal model imposed on so many countries will permanently weaken the economic hegemony of US imperialism in the hemisphere. And, for all the difficulties it still faces, Cuba is no longer alone. Its example has been an important factor in stimulating the determination of millions to fight for the better world which is possible. Viva Cuba!

Senior Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002.

07 December, 2014
Greanvillepost.com

 

By Ludwig Watzal

Sixty six years after the establishment of the State of Israel, even the most ubiquitous term employed to describe the political nature of Israel, namely as a “Jewish democratic state,” is becoming obsolete. The Netanyahu government and its right-wing coalition partners are preparing a law, which will exclusively define Israel as a “Jewish State” for the benefit of what they define as the “Jewish people”. For independent observers, who do not wear Zionist propaganda glasses, Israel was never a democracy in the classical Western sense of the term, but always a Jewish democracy or a democracy sui generis, i. e. full democratic rights for Jews only. Jewish and democratic just does not fit. It’s an oxymoron. Nonetheless, the Zionist propaganda (hasbara) has left no stone unturned in order to hammer this conceptual contradiction into the Western public mind. The Israeli Palestinians have always been treated as second class citizens. The Israeli political class regards them as a “fifth column” that cannot be trusted.

The proposed Basic Law shows that Israel, after 66 years of its existence, is in the dark about its identity. It is a proof of Israel’s shortcomings. From the Israel’s very foundation there existed a built-in contradiction: On the one hand, Israel was declared at its establishment as a “Jewish State in Eretz Yisrael” (Eretz Yisrael in Hebrew is equivalent to historical Palestine), on the other hand, the same Declaration promised to “ensure complete equality of (…) political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion”. It has turned out that Israel could not be both.

According to the “Law of Return” every bona fide Jew in the world could immigrate to Israel and automatically obtain Israeli citizenship. Other laws were enacted in parallel to prevent the return of expelled Palestinians and their right to their land. The contradiction was reestablished by the “Nationality Law” of 1952, which reads: “A person who, immediately before the establishment of the State, was a Palestinian citizen (…) shall become an Israel national”.

Under the presidency of former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the Basic Law “Human Dignity and Freedom” was passed, which coined the phrase “Jewish and democratic state” for Israel. The right-wing parties are now up in arms about this construction and consider the High Court of Israel (HCI) in general far too liberal. Some extremists even want to abolish this institution and replace it by a religious court. Due to the significant Palestinian population within Israel, former Israeli governments downplayed the Jewish component in that formula. But since right-wing parties now dominate Israel’s political landscape and parliament, the public was led to accept and even approve of racism and open discrimination of Israel’s Palestinian minority.

As a consequence of popular racism, the Netanyahu cabinet has discussed several versions of a new Basic Law that will finally establish Israel as what has been termed a racist pariah state. The cabinet version was approved by 14 against 6 votes. Should this bill become law, Israel will be an overt ethnocracy. The question which would then arise for Israel’s friends in the US and Europe is, how to reconcile Israel’s self- definition as a Jewish State with democratic values. The West will probably also manage to explain this anachronism, as it has previously justified Israel’s human rights violations, colonialism, violations of international law and closed its eyes on war crimes and atrocities by the Israeli army against Palestinians. Western political elites will find ways to justify or at least explain away this institutional racism.

In Israel, the draft presented by the government caused an outcry by the liberal spectrum. Even President Reuven Rivlin spoke out against Netanyahu’s “Jewish state bill”. He called for a referendum and said “democracy and Judaism must remain equal”. He asked at a conference in Eilat: “Does promoting this law, not in fact, question the success of the Zionist enterprise in which we are fortunate to live?” Rivlin is a former Knesset member of Netanyahu’s Likud party with political scores to settle with the Prime Minister. Rivlin decried the elevation of Israel’s Jewish dimension over its democratic one, proposed in some versions of the intended new law.

The tainted atmosphere that led to this proposed law will neither vanish in the Knesset nor in the Israeli public mind. If the “Jewishness” of the State of Israel will prevail over the democratic one, the “Nation-State of the Jewish people” is going to admit that it is a theocracy guided by racist ideology. In future, the political discussion will have to revolve around the racial aspect of Jewishness and Jewish culture in Israel and less around colonial Zionism, that has hitherto served as a vehicle for Israeli Jewish expansionism. Israel has always been a Jewish state. It finally appears to admit that it has no interest in democracy. How will the US Empire and Israel’s European friends react to this new definition of the State of Israel?

At the end of the day, Israel has to choose between a Jewish state with some democratic embedded particles or a democratic state with a Jewish preponderance. It cannot have the cake and eat it, too. The critics of the term “Jewish democratic state” asked for a “Jewish state”. For some a “Jewish state” might be the solution of the Israeli dilemma, but for others this might be the nail in the coffin for the Zionist enterprise. As a state for all its citizens, the land is light years.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany.

30 November, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Alan Hart

If a non-Jew had coined the phrase “Judeo-Nazism” he or she would have been verbally crucified by Zionism’s attack dogs and the mainstream Western media. The actual inventor of it was Yeshavahu Leibowitz, one of the most outspoken and controversial Jewish intellectuals of modern times. He was once described as “the conscience of Israel.” Before he died in 1994 he said “Judeo-Nazis” were on the rise in Israel. If he was alive today I imagine he would say, “They are now in control.”

The question awaiting an answer in the coming days and weeks is whether or not those who do Judeo-Nazism’s bidding in the U.S. Congress will succeed in sabotaging the comprehensive agreement-in-the-making with Iran over its nuclear program.

When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced that more time was needed to reach an agreement he said, “We would be fools to walk away.” He then appealed to Congress not to act in a way that could sabotage the prospects for a successful negotiation. He said, “I hope they will come to see the wisdom of leaving us the equilibrium for a few months to be able to proceed without sending messages that might be misinterpreted and cause miscalculation.”

The immediate response was a statement issued by three senators – John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte. It said:

“We have supported the economic sanctions, passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, in addition to sanctions placed on Iran by the international community. These sanctions have had a negative impact on the Iranian economy and are one of the chief reasons the Iranians are now at the negotiating table. However, we believe this latest extension of talks should be coupled with increased sanctions and a requirement that any final deal between Iran and the United States be sent to Congress for approval. Every Member of Congress should have the opportunity to review the final deal and vote on this major foreign policy decision.”

Unless they are totally ignorant and completely stupid McCain, Graham and Ayotte must be aware of the certainty that increased sanctions will cause Iran’s negotiators to walk away saying they will not be intimated, blackmailed and humiliated by America.

On the assumption that the three senators are not totally ignorant and not completely stupid, the conclusion has to be that they really do want to kill the deal-in-the-making even though it is in America’s own best interests. (In his analysis of the situation the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen said the reason why none of the negotiators wanted to walk away was that“the alternative to a deal might in the end turn out to be war“. I’ll add to that by saying it may well be war that McCain and other would-be deal wreckers really want).

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the leading Zionist lobby group which drafts the scripts from which many in Congress speak, came out with its own statement.

“Congress delayed enacting additional sanctions over the past year to give negotiations a chance. It is now essential that Congress take up new bipartisan sanctions legislation to let Tehran know that it will face much more severe pressure if it does not clearly abandon its nuclear weapons program. We urge Congress to play its traditional and critical role to ensure that a final agreement truly eliminates any path for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.”

THE FACT THAT IRAN DOES NOT WANT TO POSSESS NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS OF NO INTEREST TO ISRAEL’S JUDEO-NAZIS AND THEIR ALLIES IN AMERICA.

The possibility of war with Iran is obviously in the minds of other elements of the Zionist lobby.

In its statement following the announcement of the extension of negotiations the Iran task force of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which is co-chaired by Dennis Ross who held the Iran portfolio at the White House during a part of Obama’s first term, said this. “In addition to increasing economic pressure Washington should provide weaponry to Israel that would make its threats to attack Iran more credible.”

JINSA, a Washington-based, neo-conservative, pro-Israel right or wrong think-tank, was founded in 1976. Its advisory board includes Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and James Woolsey; and before they entered the Bush administration Dick Cheney, Douglas Feith and John Bolton were on its Board of Advisors. The collective term I would use to describe that lot is war mongers.

Then came the contribution of the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI). It was founded in 2010 and its board members include William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard. He is second to none in his unconditional support for Israel’s policies and actions. The ECI’s main mission seems to be intimidating critics of Netanyahu and damaging Obama.

Its statement included this.

“There’s no point waiting seven months for either another failure or a truly terrible deal. Congress should act now to re-impose sanctions and re-establish U.S. red lines that will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. To that end, such legislation must limit the president’s authority to waive sanctions, an authority the president has already signaled a willingness to abuse in his desperate quest for a deal with the mullahs.”

But the most anti-Obama, anti-Iran and anti-Palestinian rhetoric was that which spewed from the mouths of the idiots who addressed the gala dinner of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt near Grand Central Station in Manhattan.

The audience of more than 1,000 cheered wildly when ZOA president Mort Klein pointedly referred to the president as “Barack HUSSEIN Obama.” They all knew he was implying that Obama is a Muslim and not an American.

Klein also said “Mahmoud Abbas is a terrorist like his predecessor Yasser Arafat” and “Hamas is a Nazi-like terrorist group whose charter calls for the murder of every Jew.” (There is no space in Klein’s deluded mind and the minds of all who think like him for the truths of history. One of them is that Arafat prepared the ground on his side for peace on terms any rational Israeli government would have accepted with relief 35 years ago. Another is the Hamas’s leaders have long been on the public record with the statement that Hamas would live in peace with an Israel withdrawn to its pre-1967 borders IF a two-state solution was available and IF Palestinian acceptance of it was confirmed by a referendum).

There was more wild applause for the description of Obama offered by Bernie Marcus, one of the founders of Home Depot, America’s biggest home improvement retailer with stores in all 50 states, across Canada and beyond. He described Obama as “A Chamberlain in the White House.” (Neville Chamberlain was the British prime minister who thought that appeasing Hitler was the best thing to do. Today there’s a case for saying that all Western prime ministers and presidents think it is in their best interests to appease Judeo-Nazism).

According to Chemi Shalev’s report of the ZOA’s gala dinner for Ha’aretz, it was Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), who brought the audience “close to rapture.” He did so by describing Obama as “The most anti-Semitic president ever.” (That’s nonsense but it, nonsense, is what CUFI is all about).

In Shalev’s view the real star of the evening was Republican senator Ted Cruz who, in 2012, became the first Cuban American or Latino to be elected to Congress from Texas. He devoted much of his speech to what he asserted were his own accomplishments in defense of Israel, but his main point, contrary to the assessment of Israel’s own security chiefs as Shalev noted, was that “The threats to Israel have never been greater.” He added: We do not need leaders who speak empty words, we need leaders who will act.” (He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that the biggest real threat to Israel is its self-righteousness and its on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank).

Cruz is entertaining the hope that he will be the Republican frontrunner for 2016 race to the White House so his whole speech was a pitch for Zionist support, campaign funds especially. He must have been pleased when many in the audience rose to their feet chanting “Go, Ted, go!” (They meant go for the White House. I imagine Iranians and Palestinians would say go to hell).

My conclusions?

If the history of Zionism’s success to date in more often than not imposing its will on American foreign policy for the Middle East was the only guide to the future, there would be a case for saying it is possible, even probable, that the deal-in-the-making with Iran will be sabotaged. (According to a usually well informed source the main reason for the failure to conclude a comprehensive agreement by the 24 November deadline was that Iran was not satisfied with Kerry’s assurance as given that Obama would be allowed to deliver).

But there’s also a case for saying that the would-be deal wreckers in Congress have good cause to be very careful about what they actually do as opposed to what they say to remain in Zionism’s good books. This case rests on the fact that polls have been indicating that a majority of Americans are not only fed up with Congress and tired of war but that they want an agreement with Iran. As does American big business according to my sources.

One obvious implication is that if it was successful a Republican-led effort in Congress to kill the deal-in-the-making with Iran could seriously damage Republican election prospects in 2016. There’s much a rejected Iran could do to add to America’s problems in the Middle East, in Syria and Iraq especially and possibly even Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and many Americans would blame the deal wreckers in Congress.

Republican party leaders must be aware of what the future could be if there is no deal with Iran, and that’s why I believe that when Obama push comes to Zionist-driven Republican shove, there’s a chance – I put it no higher than 55 to 45 – that Obama will get his way and a comprehensive agreement will be concluded.

Footnote

If the deal is sabotaged, and if I was an Iranian, I would want my government to develop and possess a nuclear bomb or two for the purpose of deterrence. My logic would be that if Saddam Hussein had possessed nuclear weapons Iraq would not have been attacked and invaded. And that’s a logic that might well prevail in Iran if an agreement with the P5+1 is sabotaged.

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

30 November, 2014
Alanhart.net

 

By Karen Armstrong

As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the pre-modern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.

Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.

During the 18th century, revivalist movements sprang up in many parts of the Islamic world as the Muslim imperial powers began to lose control of peripheral territories. In the west at this time, we were beginning to separate church from state, but this secular ideal was a radical innovation: as revolutionary as the commercial economy that Europe was concurrently devising. No other culture regarded religion as a purely private activity, separate from such worldly pursuits as politics, so for Muslims the political fragmentation of their society was also a religious problem. Because the Quran had given them a sacred mission – to build a just economy in which everybody was treated with equity and respect – the political well-being of the Ummah (“community”) was always a matter of sacred import. If the poor were oppressed, the vulnerable exploited or state institutions corrupt, Muslims were obliged to make every effort to put society back on track.

So the 18th-century reformers were convinced that if Muslims were to regain lost power and prestige, they must return to the fundamentals of their faith, ensuring that God – rather than materialism or worldly ambition – dominated the political order. There was nothing militant about this “fundamentalism”; rather, it was a grass-roots attempt to reorient society and did not involve jihad. One of the most influential of these revivalists was Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-91), a learned scholar of Najd in central Arabia, whose teachings still inspire Muslim reformers and extremists today. He was especially concerned about the popular cult of saints and the idolatrous rituals at their tombs, which, he believed, attributed divinity to mere mortals. He insisted that every single man and woman should concentrate instead on the study of the Quran and the “traditions” (Hadith) about the customary practice (Sunnah) of the Prophet and his companions. Like Luther, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab wanted to return to the earliest teachings of his faith and eject all later medieval accretions. He therefore opposed Sufism and Shiaism as heretical innovations (Bida’h), and he urged all Muslims to reject the learned exegesis developed over the centuries by the ulema (“scholars”) and interpret the texts for themselves.

This naturally incensed the clergy and threatened local rulers, who believed that interfering with these popular devotions would cause social unrest. Eventually, however, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab found a patron in Muhammad Ibn Saud, a chieftain of Najd who adopted his ideas. But tension soon developed between the two because Ibn Abd al-Wahhab refused to endorse Ibn Saud’s military campaigns for plunder and territory, insisting that jihad could not be waged for personal profit but was permissible only when the umma was attacked militarily. He also forbade the Arab custom of killing prisoners of war, the deliberate destruction of property and the slaughter of civilians, including women and children. Nor did he ever claim that those who fell in battle were martyrs who would be rewarded with a high place in heaven, because a desire for such self-aggrandisement was incompatible with jihad. Two forms of Wahhabism were emerging: where Ibn Saud was happy to enforce Wahhabi Islam with the sword to enhance his political position, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab insisted that education, study and debate were the only legitimate means of spreading the one true faith.

Yet although scripture was so central to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s ideology, by insisting that his version of Islam alone had validity, he had distorted the Quranic message. The Quran firmly stated that “There must be no coercion in matters of faith” (2:256), ruled that Muslims must believe in the revelations of all the great prophets (3:84) and that religious pluralism was God’s will (5:48). Muslims had, therefore, been traditionally wary of Takfir, the practice of declaring a fellow Muslim to be an unbeliever (Kafir). Hitherto Sufism, which had developed an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions, had been the most popular form of Islam and had played an important role in both social and religious life. “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest,” urged the great mystic Ibn al-Arabi (d.1240). “God the omniscient and omnipresent cannot be confined to any one creed.” It was common for a Sufi to claim that he was a neither a Jew nor a Christian, nor even a Muslim, because once you glimpsed the divine, you left these man-made distinctions behind.

Despite his rejection of other forms of Islam, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself refrained from Takfir, arguing that God alone could read the heart, but after his death Wahhabis cast this inhibition aside and the generous pluralism of Sufism became increasingly suspect in the Muslim world.

After his death, too, Wahhabism became more violent, an instrument of state terror. As he sought to establish an independent kingdom, Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muhammad, Ibn Saud’s son and successor, used Takfir to justify the wholesale slaughter of resistant populations. In 1801, his army sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala in what is now Iraq, plundered the tomb of Imam Husain, and slaughtered thousands of Shias, including women and children; in 1803, in fear and panic, the holy city of Mecca surrendered to the Saudi leader.

Eventually, in 1815, the Ottomans despatched Muhammad Ali Pasha, governor of Egypt, to crush the Wahhabi forces and destroy their capital. But Wahhabism became a political force once again during the First World War when the Saudi chieftain – another Abd al-Aziz – made a new push for statehood and began to carve out a large kingdom for himself in the Middle East with his devout Bedouin army, known as the Ikhwan, the “Brotherhood”.

In the Ikhwan we see the roots of IS. To break up the tribes and wean them from the nomadic life, which was deemed incompatible with Islam, the Wahhabi clergy had settled the Bedouin in oases, where they learned farming and the crafts of sedentary life and were indoctrinated in Wahhabi Islam. Once they exchanged the time-honoured Ghazu raid, which typically resulted in the plunder of livestock, for the jihad, these Bedouin fighters became more violent and extreme, covering their faces when they encountered Europeans and non-Saudi Arabs and fighting with lances and swords because they disdained weaponry not used by the Prophet. In the old Ghazu raids, the Bedouin had always kept casualties to a minimum and did not attack non-combatants. Now the Ikhwan routinely massacred “apostate” unarmed villagers in their thousands, thought nothing of slaughtering women and children, and routinely slit the throats of all male captives.

In 1915, Abd al-Aziz planned to conquer the Hijaz (an area in the west of present-day Saudi Arabia that includes the cities of Mecca and Medina), the Persian Gulf to the east of Najd, and the land that is now Syria and Jordan in the north, but during the 1920s he tempered his ambitions in order to acquire diplomatic standing as a nation state with Britain and the United States. The Ikhwan, however, continued to raid the British protectorates of Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait, insisting that no limits could be placed on jihad. Regarding all modernisation as bidah, the Ikhwan also attacked Abd al-Aziz for permitting telephones, cars, the telegraph, music and smoking – indeed, anything unknown in Muhammad’s time – until finally Abd al-Aziz quashed their rebellion in 1930.

After the defeat of the Ikhwan, the official Wahhabism of the Saudi kingdom abandoned militant jihad and became a religiously conservative movement, similar to the original movement in the time of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, except that Takfir was now an accepted practice and, indeed, essential to the Wahhabi faith. Henceforth there would always be tension between the ruling Saudi establishment and more radical Wahhabis. The Ikhwan spirit and its dream of territorial expansion did not die, but gained new ground in the 1970s, when the kingdom became central to western foreign policy in the region. Washington welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Nasserism (the pan-Arab socialist ideology of Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser) and to Soviet influence. After the Iranian Revolution, it gave tacit support to the Saudis’ project of countering Shia radicalism by Wahhabising the entire Muslim world.

The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the US to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.

A whole generation of Muslims, therefore, has grown up with a maverick form of Islam that has given them a negative view of other faiths and an intolerantly sectarian understanding of their own. While not extremist per se, this is an outlook in which radicalism can develop. In the past, the learned exegesis of the ulema, which Wahhabis rejected, had held extremist interpretations of scripture in check; but now unqualified freelancers such as Osama Bin Laden were free to develop highly unorthodox readings of the Quran. To prevent the spread of radicalism, the Saudis tried to deflect their young from the internal problems of the kingdom during the 1980s by encouraging a pan-Islamist sentiment of which the Wahhabi ulema did not approve.

Where Islamists in such countries as Egypt fought tyranny and corruption at home, Saudi Islamists focused on the humiliation and oppression of Muslims worldwide. Television brought images of Muslim suffering in Palestine or Lebanon into comfortable Saudi homes. The gov­ernment also encouraged young men to join the steady stream of recruits from the Arab world who were joining the Afghans’ jihad against the Soviet Union. The response of these militants may throw light on the motivation of those joining the jihad in Syria and Iraq today.

A survey of those Saudi men who volunteered for Afghanistan and who later fought in Bosnia and Chechnya or trained in al-Qaeda camps has found that most were motivated not by hatred of the west but by the desire to help their Muslim brothers and sisters – in rather the same way as men from all over Europe left home in 1938 to fight the Fascists in Spain, and as Jews from all over the diaspora hastened to Israel at the beginning of the Six Day War in 1967. The welfare of the Ummah had always been a spiritual as well as a political concern in Islam, so the desperate plight of their fellow Muslims cut to the core of their religious identity. This pan-Islamist emphasis was also central to Bin Laden’s propaganda, and the martyr-videos of the Saudis who took part in the 9/11 atrocity show that they were influenced less by Wahhabism than by the pain and humiliation of the umma as a whole.

Like the Ikhwan, IS represents a rebellion against the official Wahhabism of modern Saudi Arabia. Its swords, covered faces and cut-throat executions all recall the original Brotherhood. But it is unlikely that the IS hordes consist entirely of diehard jihadists. A substantial number are probably secularists who resent the status quo in Iraq: Ba’athists from Saddam Hussein’s regime and former soldiers of his disbanded army. This would explain IS’s strong performance against professional military forces. In all likelihood, few of the young recruits are motivated either by Wahhabism or by more traditional Muslim ideals. In 2008, MI5’s behavioural science unit noted that, “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” A significant proportion of those convicted of terrorism offences since the 9/11 attacks have been non-observant, or are self-taught, or, like the gunman in the recent attack on the Canadian parliament, are converts to Islam. They may claim to be acting in the name of Islam, but when an untalented beginner tells us that he is playing a Beethoven sonata, we hear only cacophony. Two wannabe jihadists who set out from Birmingham for Syria last May had ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon.

It would be a mistake to see IS as a throwback; it is, as the British philosopher John Gray has argued, a thoroughly modern movement that has become an efficient, self-financing business with assets estimated at $2bn. Its looting, theft of gold bullion from banks, kidnapping, siphoning of oil in the conquered territories and extortion have made it the wealthiest jihadist group in the world. There is nothing random or irrational about IS violence. The execution videos are carefully and strategically planned to inspire terror, deter dissent and sow chaos in the greater population.

Mass killing is a thoroughly modern phenomenon. During the French Revolution, which led to the emergence of the first secular state in Europe, the Jacobins publicly beheaded about 17,000 men, women and children. In the First World War, the Young Turks slaughtered over a million Armenians, including women, children and the elderly, to create a pure Turkic nation. The Soviet Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Guard all used systematic terrorism to purge humanity of corruption. Similarly, IS uses violence to achieve a single, limited and clearly defined objective that would be impossible without such slaughter. As such, it is another expression of the dark side of modernity.

In 1922, as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rose to power, he completed the Young Turks’ racial purge by forcibly deporting all Greek-speaking Christians from Turkey; in 1925 he declared null and void the caliphate that IS has vowed to reinstate. The caliphate had long been a dead letter politically, but because it symbolised the unity of the Ummah and its link with the Prophet, Sunni Muslims mourned its loss as a spiritual and cultural trauma. Yet IS’s projected caliphate has no support among ulema internationally and is derided throughout the Muslim world. That said, the limitations of the nation state are becoming increasingly apparent in our world; this is especially true in the Middle East, which has no tradition of nationalism, and where the frontiers drawn by invaders were so arbitrary that it was well nigh impossible to create a truly national spirit. Here, too, IS is not simply harking back to a bygone age but is, however eccentrically, enunciating a modern concern.

The liberal-democratic nation state developed in Europe in part to serve the Industrial Revolution, which made the ideals of the Enlightenment no longer noble aspirations but practical necessities. It is not ideal: its Achilles heel has always been an inability to tolerate ethnic minorities – a failing responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. In other parts of the world where modernisation has developed differently, other polities may be more appropriate. So the liberal state is not an inevitable consequence of modernity; the attempt to produce democracy in Iraq using the colo­nial methods of invasion, subjugation and occupation could only result in an unnatural birth – and so IS emerged from the resulting mayhem.

IS may have overreached itself; its policies may not be sustainable and it faces determined opposition from Sunni and Shia Muslims alike. Interestingly Saudi Arabia, with its impressive counterterrorist resources, has already thwarted IS attempts to launch a series of attacks in the kingdom and may be the only regional power capable of bringing it down. The shooting in Canada on 22 October, where a Muslim convert killed a soldier at a war memorial, indicates that the blowback in the west has begun; to deal realistically with our situation, we need an informed understanding of the precise and limited role of Islam in the conflict, and to recognise that IS is not an atavistic return to a primitive past, but in some real sense a product of modernity.

Karen Armstrong is the author of “Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence”.

27 November, 2014