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By Vandana Shiva

01 November, 2013

@ The Guardian

An obsession with growth has eclipsed our concern for sustainability, justice and human dignity. But people are not disposable – the value of life lies outside economic development

‘Water extracted beyond nature’s capacity to renew and recharge creates a water famine’. (Photograph: Joe McNally/Getty)

Limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians. It is seen as a measure of progress. As a result, gross domestic product (GDP), which is supposed to measure the wealth of nations, has emerged as both the most powerful number and dominant concept in our times. However, economic growth hides the poverty it creates through the destruction of nature, which in turn leads to communities lacking the capacity to provide for themselves.

The concept of growth was put forward as a measure to mobilise resources during the second world war. GDP is based on creating an artificial and fictitious boundary, assuming that if you produce what you consume, you do not produce. In effect , “growth” measures the conversion of nature into cash, and commons into commodities.

Thus nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined into nonproduction. The peasants of the world,who provide 72% of the food, do not produce; women who farm or do most of the housework do not fit this paradigm of growth either. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut down and sold as timber, we have growth. Healthy societies and communities do not contribute to growth, but disease creates growth through, for example, the sale of patented medicine.

Water available as a commons shared freely and protected by all provides for all. However, it does not create growth. But when Coca-Cola sets up a plant, mines the water and fills plastic bottles with it, the economy grows. But this growth is based on creating poverty – both for nature and local communities. Water extracted beyond nature’s capacity to renew and recharge creates a water famine. Women are forced to walk longer distances looking for drinking water. In the village of Plachimada in Kerala, when the walk for water became 10 kms, local tribal woman Mayilamma said enough is enough. We cannot walk further; the Coca-Cola plant must shut down. The movement that the women started eventually led to the closure of the plant.

In the same vein, evolution has gifted us the seed. Farmers have selected, bred, and diversified it – it is the basis of food production. A seed that renews itself and multiplies produces seeds for the next season, as well as food. However, farmer-bred and farmer-saved seeds are not seen as contributing to growth. It creates and renews life, but it doesn’t lead to profits. Growth begins when seeds are modified, patented and genetically locked, leading to farmers being forced to buy more every season.

Nature is impoverished, biodiversity is eroded and a free, open resource is transformed into a patented commodity. Buying seeds every year is a recipe for debt for India’s poor peasants. And ever since seed monopolies have been established, farmers debt has increased. More than 270,000 farmers caught in a debt trap in India have committed suicide since 1995.

Poverty is also further spread when public systems are privatised. The privatisation of water, electricity, health, and education does generate growth through profits. But it also generates poverty by forcing people to spend large amounts of money on what was available at affordable costs as a common good. When every aspect of life is commercialised and commoditised, living becomes more costly, and people become poorer.

Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same roots – “oikos”, the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognised and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was also women-centered. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of creating growth, poverty and dispossession has increased. While being non-sustainable, it is also economically unjust.

The dominant model of economic development has in fact become anti-life. When economies are measured only in terms of money flow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And the rich might be rich in monetary terms – but they too are poor in the wider context of what being human means.

Meanwhile, the demands of the current model of the economy are leading to resource wars oil wars, water wars, food wars. There are three levels of violence involved in non-sustainable development. The first is the violence against the earth, which is expressed as the ecological crisis. The second is the violence against people, which is expressed as poverty, destitution and displacement. The third is the violence of war and conflict, as the powerful reach for the resources that lie in other communities and countries for their limitless appetites.

Increase of moneyflow through GDP has become disassociated from real value, but those who accumulate financial resources can then stake claim on the real resources of people – their land and water, their forests and seeds. This thirst leads to them predating on the last drop of water and last inch of land on the planet. This is not an end to poverty. It is an end to human rights and justice.

Nobel-prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have admitted that GDP does not capture the human condition and urged the creation of different tools to gauge the wellbeing of nations. This is why countries like Bhutan have adopted the gross national happiness in place of gross domestic product to calculate progress. We need to create measures beyond GDP, and economies beyond the global supermarket, to rejuvenate real wealth. We need to remember that the real currency of life is life itself.

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is author of numerous books including, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

By Nile Bowie

1 November, 2013

@ RT.com

Despite the mutual economic benefits of normalizing ties with Cuba, the unceasing and immoral embargo further emboldens the Obama administration’s diplomatic incompetence.

It is no exaggeration to say that the world is opposed to the crippling economic embargo unilaterally imposed on Cuba by the United States. 188 nations approved a resolution calling for an end to the blockade at this year’s annual vote on the issue at the UN General Assembly, with only 2 countries opposing – the United States and Israel. The outcome was unsurprising, as Washington has refused to waver from its policy for over five decades, despite immense opposition from the international community that it so often claims to represent. As a result of the embargo, Cuba cannot sell its products on the US market and cannot use dollars in its transactions, hindering foreign trade, the establishment of joint ventures, and international investment. Third countries have been aggressively fined and pursued by the US to stop them from trading with Cuba, while fines against embargo violators have risen totaling $2.5 billion to date. Cuba is also prevented from accessing medical and surgical equipment, and drugs needed for the effective treatment of tumors, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and cancer.

According to Havana, the cost of the embargo to the Cuban economy is estimated at $1.1 trillion dollars. China and Venezuela railed against the US for its reactionary stance following the recent vote, while Russia criticized Washington’s policy as being “reminiscent of the Cold War.” The rationale behind the US embargo has remained essentially unchanged since the 1960s, and is best described by Lester D. Mallory, former deputy assistant Secretary of State. “The majority of the Cuban people support Castro. There is no effective political opposition… The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection and hardship… every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba… a line of action which… makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government,” wrote Mallory, during the height of the Cold War. The stance of every US president since Kennedy has effectively been, “give it time.”

Perestroika in Havana

In an apparent justification of Washington’s defiant policy on Cuba, US envoy Ronald Godard slammed Havana as for maintaining “one of the most restrictive economic systems in the world.” It is wholly insincere of the US to maintain this position when it refuses to scale back the decades-long climate of economic hostility, which remains a critical obstacle to Cuba’s own reform process.

President Raúl Castro, who is seen to be more pragmatic and less ideological than his brother Fidel, unveiled an ongoing series of reforms in 2010 aimed at moving the island’s stagnant Soviet-style economy toward a mixed economy, with market functions similar to that of China or Vietnam. In an effort to reduce dependency on a bloated state-bureaucracy, Havana laid off some 500,000 state workers, while significantly relaxing prohibitions on small business activity and the individual hiring of labor. Former state-employees were encouraged to go into business for themselves by driving taxis, opening barbershops, clothing shops and restaurants. Farmers were allowed to sell their goods for a profit, while state-owned companies were permitted to keep 50 percent of their after-tax income to reinvest in productivity, indicating measures to attract foreign investment capital.

Recent reforms are bolder, aimed at establishing a tax-free special development zone just west of Havana where foreign companies will be able to transfer tariff-free profits abroad; contract lengths will be extended to 50 years, while full ownership will be allowed for firms operating in the zone. The zone will allow foreign companies to import raw materials, relying on cheap Cuban labor to assemble finished products for export. Companies operating in the zone will pay salaries directly to the Cuban government rather than to workers themselves. Labor will be sold at market rates, while workers are paid on a Cuban scale, allowing the state to appropriate the difference.

Critics see this as a closer integration with an exploitive capitalistic business model that will widen existing income disparities. Income inequality between those employed in the party bureaucracy or tourism sector and those who struggle to earn enough to buy goods in state-run shops has deepened in recent times. If the government is perceived as being the biggest benefactor of foreign investment without earnings being adequately channeled to efforts to foster nascent entrepreneurialism and social welfare programs, it will have negative social – and political – ramifications.

No shock therapy – we promise!

Another significant development is the announcement of an ambitious currency reform that would unify Cuba’s two-currency system. Cuba uses low-valued national pesos alongside convertible pesos tied to the US dollar, introduced for use in the tourism sector and foreign trade to protect the domestic economy from cash influxes, although many would argue these measures had the opposite effect – enriching those who had access to foreign capital while emboldening the shadow economy. State-run shops sell goods in convertible pesos, while most salaries are paid in national pesos – valued at 24 to a convertible peso – which offers much weaker purchasing power. Havana is attempting to converge the exchange rate gradually between the two peso currencies, and the government – acknowledging the potential for volatility in light of the task’s complexity – and promised to avoid imposing “shock therapy” on Cubans.

President Raúl has confirmed plans retire at the end of his current term in 2018, and these policies can be interpreted as his efforts to establish a bridge between Fidel’s central planning and the hybrid socialist-market economy that a new generation of Cuba’s Communist Party will inherit. The success of that transition depends on how effectively these experimental new policies are implemented. Raúl’s socialist-austerity policies will come to find more enemies than proponents if a privatized growth model undermines socialized health and education services – the jewels of Fidel’s revolution – and produces oligarchs who have more loyalty to foreign investors than to the values of egalitarianism promoted by the state for so long.

Despite severe sanctions and scant resources, Cuba has achieved 99.8% literacy levels through free universal education, and is one of the world’s leading exporters of teachers and doctors. Cuba’s universal health-care is among the best in the developing world; services are freely provided to citizens, and public health indicators surpass that of the United States in many areas.

The resilience of the Cuban people is astounding, and if reform policies are sensibly implemented, there will be much room for optimism. A rapprochement between Washington and Havana is not unthinkable, and would foster significant economic benefits, the beginnings of which can be seen through informal trade between Cuban-Americans in south Florida and their families in Havana.

Despite campaigning on reassessing ties with Cuba, the Obama administration has proved its diplomatic ineptitude by continuing policies that history will scorn – the world’s sole military superpower shaking its closed fist at this resilient little island.

Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He can be reached on Twitter or at nilebowie@gmail.com

By Franklin Lamb

01 November, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Damascus: Additional easing of Syrian sanctions is expected by mid-November according to staff at the US Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Asset Control (OFAC).

Pressure on Obama from Putin is part of the ‘price tag’ for Russia’s role in bailing out the American president, whose chemical weapons ‘redline’ became something of an albatross. But another reason for the relaxation is that the White House believes it needs to communicate to Damascus that prospects for better relations, and possibly even some cooperation, are not completely dead, despite the 32-month crisis still raging in the Syrian Arab Republic.

This second easing of sanctions will show more balance and neutrality than those of last June, which were perceived as supporting Saudi and Gulf aid to the rebels while weakening the Assad government just as the Syrian Army had begun gaining back ground from the rebels. At that time, licenses for exports of certain goods related to reconstruction of infrastructure were allowed in areas held by the rebels. Specifically, OFAC indicated that license applications would be accepted for commodities, technology and software related to water supply and sanitation, agricultural production and food processing, power generation, oil and gas production, construction and engineering, transportation, and educational infrastructure. Most benefited would be rebel-controlled areas.

No doubt it is with a deep patriotic spirit of wanting to help out their fellow Americans, that the US Treasury Departments heavily pro-Zionist OFAC asks US citizens to “consult our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to find answers to your most commonly-asked questions about how Syrian and Iranian sanctions may affect your own families and your business.”

That is unlikely to be easy given the obfuscatory legalize of the sanctions texts.

There are currently three types of sanctions that the U.S. government has imposed against Syria. The most comprehensive sanction, called the Syria Accountability Act (SAA) of 2004, prohibits the export of most goods containing more than 10% U.S.-manufactured component parts to Syria. Another sanction, resulting from the USA Patriot Act, was levied specifically against the Commercial Bank of Syria in 2006. The third type of sanction contains many Executive Orders from the President that specifically deny certain Syrian citizens and entities access to the U.S. financial system due to their participation in proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, association with Al Qaida, the Taliban or Osama bin Laden; or destabilizing activities in Iraq and Lebanon.

Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act

In May 2004, the President signed E.O. 13338 implementing the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SAA) which imposes a series of sanctions against Syria for its support for terrorism, involvement in Lebanon, weapons of mass destruction programs, and the destabilizing role it is playing in Iraq.

In addition, the Treasury Department’s Statement of Policy indicated that OFAC would consider on a case-by-case basis applications to permit certain services in the agricultural sector, as well as in the Syrian telecommunication industry, enabling private citizens better access to the Internet, while certain petroleum transactions benefiting rebel forces were also authorized. OFAC also revised Syria General License 11 and replaced it with General License 11A authorizing NGOs to engage in activities to preserve the cultural heritage of the country, including museums, historic buildings and archaeological sites.

The new lifting of sanctions, tentatively scheduled to be announced next month, will help the Assad government because international banking and trade prohibitions are expected to be reduced. At the same time, US officials are discussing with their Russian “partners” a number of proposals that would acknowledge the right of the Syrian people to choose who to support in next year’s Presidential elections without Washington insisting that Syrian President Bashar Assad step down as part of a “transition to democracy.”

In addition, the White House is telling Congressional leaders, loudly enough for all to hear, that the president’s recent waiving of restrictions on supplying arms to Syrian rebels was much more limited than depicted in mainstream media reports. In fact, the waiver—on certain portions of the Arms Export Control Act—authorizes only specific transfers to “vetted” members of the opposition and to NGOs in Syria. The defense items to be provided are described as those “necessary for the conduct of …operations inside or related to Syria, or to prevent the preparation, use, or proliferation of Syria’s chemical weapons.” Who was to be responsible for “vetting” the opposition members was not specified, nor were the particular articles detailed. But significantly the White House claims this is not a general waiver, but rather one with regard to a single specific contemplated transaction. Defense companies do not now have a blanket license to ship their wares to the Syrian opposition. This is because Section 40(g) of the Arms Export Control Act, 22 U.S.C. § 2780 (g), specifically gives the President authority to waive the provisions of the Act with respect to a specific transaction should he find that the waiver is “essential to the national security interests of the United States” and should he make the requisite report on the waiver to Congress. His determination on that finding directs the Secretary of State to make the required report to Congress.

The main opposition to White House plans to lessen the civilian targeting sanctions comes, as usual, from the US Congressional Zionist lobby. Israel’s supporters in Congress seek to prevent any lessening of US sanctions—against Iran first, and Syria second. Two days of talks are about to begin in Vienna between experts from the P5+1 (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany) and their Iranian counterparts, who will discuss technical issues relating to Tehran’s nuclear program and international sanctions. The meeting will help lay the groundwork for the next round of diplomatic negotiations, scheduled to take place in Geneva on November 7-8, and it is anticipated that the White House will accede to EU and Russian proposals to send a reciprocal good faith response to Tehran by lifting some of the sanctions targeting Iranian civilians. Although the P5+1 and Tehran have agreed to keep the contents of their negotiations secret, the general aim of the talks has been for Iran to reduce its capacity to enrich uranium and certain other nuclear activities in return for relief from the sanctions regime, which is strangling the nation’s economy. The main hurdles include verification of any concessions Iran makes and the sequencing of any reduction in sanctions.

Signs of progress were visible earlier this week in comments made after separate talks between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. In a rare joint statement, both sides called the talks “very productive”—a significant departure from eleven previous meetings in recent years, all of which failed to achieve progress in resolving what the IAEA has called the “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear program. The new joint statement also indicates that a document discussed in past meetings has been set aside and a new approach taken.

Eager as it is for negotiations to succeed, the Obama administration has also echoed the Zionist lobby’s contention that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” Yet if the talks fail, international support for sanctions will likely begin to fall apart, reducing U.S. leverage even further.

The world is watching, particularly U.S. allies in Europe and Asia, as well as regional “friends” like Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Though reportedly interested in lifting some of the sanctions on Syria and Iran, the White House is facing stiff opposition from Tel Aviv and Riyadh, with both governments criticizing the US for its lack of resolve in Syria and its presumed conciliatory attitude toward Iran.

Secretary of State John Kerry is reportedly slated to continue meetings with Saudi-Israeli officials in an attempt to tamp down their growing angst.

Franklin Lamb volunteers with the Sabra-Shatila Scholarship Program (SSSP) in Shatila Camp (www.sssp-lb.com) and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

By Peter Symonds

01 November, 2013

@ WSWS.org

Already mired in a diplomatic crisis in Europe over National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance operations, Washington—as well as Canberra—is facing a backlash in Asia over the latest revelations that the NSA, working in tandem with Australian agencies, intercepted phone calls and data from embassies throughout the region.

The Fairfax media yesterday reported on the involvement of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) in the NSA program, codenamed STATEROOM, which gathers electronic intelligence from covert facilities inside diplomatic missions. According to a former Australian intelligence officer, the ASD operates “from Australian embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili, and High Commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, as well as other diplomatic posts.”

Details of the STATEROOM program are contained in an NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden and originally published by Der Spiegel in Germany. US diplomatic missions and those of other members of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance, including Canada and Britain, are involved. The document noted that the highly secretive “collection sites” are small in size and “their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff” where they are located.

Angry reactions yesterday to the Fairfax and Der Spiegel articles give a glimpse of the diplomatic storm that is brewing throughout Asia. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated: “China is severely concerned about the reports and demands a clarification and explanation.” Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea expressed serious concerns.

Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa declared that his government “strongly protests” over the spying operation, which, if confirmed, would be “not only a breach of security, but also a serious breach of diplomatic norms and ethics.” Teuku Faizaisyah, a senior adviser to the Indonesian president, branded the “illegal ways of collecting information” as “highly unacceptable.”

While Washington has exploited the “war on terror” as the pretext for its massive spying operations on rivals and allies alike, the NSA operations are clearly broad in scope. The former Australian intelligence officer explained that the “main focus” of surveillance at the Australian embassy in Jakarta was “political, diplomatic and economic intelligence.” He explained: “The huge growth of mobile phone networks has been a great boon and Jakarta’s political elite are a loquacious bunch.”

The Fairfax press reported that a classified briefing of Australian MPs several years ago had incorporated details of “a series of intelligence scoops that included a recording of an intercepted video conference call between Malaysia’s most senior military commanders.”

A top secret NSA map published by Der Spiegel on Tuesday displayed 90 surveillance facilities in US diplomatic missions worldwide, run by a joint CIA-NSA group known as the “Special Collection Service.”

* China is the major target in East Asia, with surveillance facilities in the US embassy in Beijing, as well as US consulates in Shanghai and Chengdu, and in the unofficial US diplomatic office in Taiwan.

* The US has eight listening posts in South Asia, including in US embassies in India and Pakistan.

* In South East Asia, there are listening posts in embassies in Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia. The embassy in Bangkok also features a technical support team and monitors a remotely operated facility in the US consulate at Chang Mai in northern Thailand.

The latest revelations are a blow to the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia”—a diplomatic offensive and military build-up aimed at undermining China’s influence and strategic position throughout the region. A standard element of American propaganda has been the accusation that Beijing is engaged in large-scale cyber espionage against the US and other countries. What has now been exposed is that the NSA is engaged in illegal spying operations of unprecedented size and scope, on governments and the broader population alike, throughout Asia and the world.

The Obama administration risks alienating key allies and strategic partners that form part of its plans for the strategic encirclement of China. According to the Diplomat, news last week that the NSA was spying on world leaders prompted “some Asian nations, notably South Korea, to demand information on whether their leaders were among the 35 being monitored.” India has already announced a new policy for official emails, following revelations that it was the fifth most spied-on country by the NSA.

The latest exposures underline the central role of Australian spy agencies and bases to the NSA surveillance operations in Asia. Just as the present Coalition government, like the previous Labor government, is committed to opening Australian military bases to American forces in their build-up against China, so the ASD is completely integrated into the vast US electronic spy network.

Leaked NSA documents previously revealed that four Australian sites contribute data to an NSA program codenamed X-Keyscore, which separates data into streams of phone numbers, email addresses, log-ins and user activity for storage in massive data banks. These sites are the US-Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, and three ASD facilities—the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station at Geraldton in Western Australia, and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra.

The Sydney Morning Herald today exposed the existence of a fifth electronic surveillance facility, known locally as “the house with no windows,” on the remote Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. According to former Australian defence officers, the ASD post is “devoted to maritime and military surveillance, especially Indonesian naval, air force and military communications.” Australia’s Cocos Islands outpost, which has been earmarked as a potential base for US drones and warplanes, is adjacent to key strategic shipping lanes to South East Asia.

Australia also hosts vital listening posts plugged into the major undersea cables that carry the vast amounts of Internet traffic between North America and Asia. Kyodo News reported a month ago that the Japanese government rejected NSA requests in 2011 to establish similar cable facilities in Japan, citing “a lack of legislative authority.” Australian governments, however, had no such qualms about integrating the ASD and other spy agencies into the NSA’s illegal activities.

In 1999, amid the Australian military intervention in East Timor, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard notoriously acknowledged to an interviewer that Australia functioned as the US “deputy sheriff” in Asia. His remark provoked outrage throughout the region. Commenting on yesterday’s revelations, Chinese professor Zhu Feng declared: “Australia follows the US without principle and unconditionally. Australia doesn’t even deserve to be called ‘deputy sheriff’—they’re more like a subordinate.”

Despite Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s bland denials, Australia’s intimate involvement in the America’s spying operation in Asia will only reinforce the widespread view that Canberra operates as the flunkey of US imperialism in its predatory operations, not only against rival governments, but the working class of Asia and the world.

By Ian Johnson

30 August 2011

www.nybooks.com

The tenth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington will be accompanied by the usual solemn political pronouncements and predictable media retrospectives. Pundits will point out that the West’s own economic mismanagement of the past decade has done more to weaken Europe and North America than the Islamists’ attacks. Some others will note how radical Islamists are still strong in Afghanistan and point to the recent downing of a military helicopter with dozens of US troops dead. Still others will use the anniversary to pontificate on how our concerns about Islamism have given racists an excuse to tarnish an entire religion. We will also hear about how the democratic uprisings in the Arab world—Libya being the latest—have undermined Islamists (by providing the region’s disgruntled masses with examples of positive, instead of destructive change).

All of these points are well and good and worth hearing again. But they shouldn’t distract us from a very precise and practical problem that hasn’t been addressed: the refusal of the CIA to disclose the details of its involvement with Islamist groups. In recent weeks, the agency has tried to block sections of a new book that deals with its handling of al-Qaeda before and after September 11. But this is only one part of a large-scale cover-up that Western governments have been perpetrating about decades of ties to Islamist organizations. Until we clarify our murky history with radical Islam, we won’t be able to understand the background of the September 11 attacks and whether our strategies today to engage the Muslim world are likely to succeed.

Of course some of this history is well known. The blowback story—how the US armed the mujahedeen, some of whom morphed into al-Qaeda—has been told in book and film. We are also getting a sense now of how parts of the US-backed Pakistani military-intelligence complex have actively supported radical Islamists. Collusion between Britain and Islamist movements over the past century has also been explored. And of course, Israel’s support for Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization has gone down as one of the great diplomatic miscalculations of recent history.

But compared to the full scope of the issue, these insights are meager. To date, the Central Intelligence Agency continues to block access to its archives relating to radical Islam or cooperation with Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. In the course of researching my book on the Brotherhood’s expansion into the West, I applied numerous times under the Freedom of Information Act to see documents concerning events in the 1950s, some of which had been confirmed by already declassified State Department cables. Inevitably the CIA responded with the blanket exception of “national security” to justify denying access to any files.

Despite the CIA’s information blockade, it is clear from interviews with CIA operatives and other countries’ intelligence archives that the CIA was courting groups like the Brotherhood as allies in the US’s global battle against communism. In Egypt, the charge was often made by the government of Gamel Abdel Nasser that the Muslim Brotherhood was in the CIA’s pay. This was also a view of some Western intelligence agencies, which flatly declared that Said Ramadan, the Swiss-based son-in-law of the group’s founder, was a US agent. The agency may have—but for this we need access to its archives—colluded with Ramadan in attempting a coup against Nasser.

The CIA certainly did help the Brotherhood establish itself in Europe, helping to create the milieu that led to the September 11 attacks. The mosque in Munich that Ramadan helped found, for example, became a hotbed of anti-US activity. The man convicted as a key perpetrator of the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center had sought spiritual counseling at the mosque before leaving to carry out his attacks. And in 1998, the man believed to be al-Qaeda’s chief financial officer was arrested near the mosque and also sought spiritual counseling from the mosque’s imam. An investigation based on this arrest traced radical Islamists right to a second mosque—the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg—where three of the four 9/11 pilots worshipped, it but failed to make the final link. This isn’t to say that the CIA was behind the September 11 attacks but that US collusion with Islamists in the Cold War bore bitter fruit in later years—making it imperative that we understand exactly what happened in those seemingly distant years of the 50s, 60s and 70s of the last century.

More recently, despite Washington’s sometimes hostile public rhetoric toward to the Brotherhood, it is clear that the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have tried to court the movement. Internal CIA analyses from 2006 and 2008, which I obtained, show that the Brotherhood was viewed as a positive force and potential ally—this time not against communism but Islamist terrorism: the Brotherhood was considered a moderate Islamist group and thus able to channel grievances away from violence toward the United States (even if Brotherhood theoreticians did not renounce violence against Israel or US soldiers). The State Department also used US Muslims close to the Brotherhood to reach out to Islamists in Europe. Such support has given these groups legitimacy in the United States and Europe.

The CIA is blocking the release of information because the subject remains sensitive—both for the West and the Muslim world. In Washington, the CIA could come under fire if its own archives would confirm and fill out the current sketch view of history. For the Brotherhood, amid its current re-emergence as a major political force in Egypt and other countries, it would be extremely damaging to know that illustrious figures in its history were working for the country that most exemplifies the decadent, imperialist forces it has struggled against for decades.

Revealing this history could be painful but necessary to strip away the doublespeak that both sides have used to describe their dealings with each other. This isn’t to say that releasing information should be used to bash cooperation with Islamists. Clearly the United States and other Western countries need to deal with groups like the Brotherhood, and perhaps in some situations even to support them: for example if the Brotherhood really were to come to power democratically in Egypt, the United States would be obliged to deal with such a government. For the Brotherhood a case could be made that in past decades, when its members were so badly repressed by authorities in the Middle East, that some sort of help from the West was necessary to avoid destruction by the authoritarian governments that persecute it.

These are legitimate arguments. But they can only be made if the full history of these relationships is made known rather than kept hidden. To do this will require action from Congress. The CIA did not release documents concerning US intelligence dealings with Nazi officials, for example, until it was forced to by the passage of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. This piece of legislation compelled US government agencies to release all files on their dealings with the Nazis during and after the war. It lead to an incredible flood of information on the topic, helping us understand, for example, US collaboration with ex-Nazis after the war.

We need a similar law today. This is not to draw a parallel between Islamism and Nazism—an argument that is tendentious and counter-productive. The only parallel is that the US government has dealt with these questionable organizations and is so unwilling to admit this that it will take specific instructions from Congress to make these dealings public. Whatever the merits of these policies they are based on a long-standing, but still mostly secret, strategy. As Western governments seek to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or between the Muslim Brotherhood and more radical groups in the Middle East, understanding this strategy—and its efficacy—has never been more urgent.

August 30, 2011, 2:15 p.m.

© 1963-2013 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/imploding_the_myth_of_israel_20131103/

Nov 4, 2013

By Chris Hedges

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens—1 million of them—have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy.

And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories. Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country’s parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.

There are very few intellectuals or writers who have the tenacity and courage to confront this reality. This is what makes Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” one of the most fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal burrows deep into the dark heart of Israel. The American journalist binds himself to the beleaguered and shunned activists, radical journalists and human rights campaigners who are the conscience of the nation, as well as Palestinian families in the West Bank struggling in vain to hold back Israel’s ceaseless theft of their land. Blumenthal, in chapter after chapter, methodically rips down the facade. And what he exposes, in the end, is a corpse.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, including months in Gaza and the West Bank. I lived for two years in Jerusalem. Many of the closest friends I made during my two decades overseas are Israeli. Most of them are among the Israeli outcasts that Blumenthal writes about, men and women whose innate decency and courage he honors throughout his book. They are those who, unlike the Israeli leadership and a population inculcated with racial hatred, sincerely want to end occupation, restore the rule of law and banish an ideology that creates moral hierarchies with Arabs hovering at the level of animal as Jews—especially Jews of European descent—are elevated to the status of demigods. It is a measure of Blumenthal’s astuteness as a reporter that he viewed Israel through the eyes of these outcasts, as well as the Palestinians, and stood with them as they were arrested, tear-gassed and fired upon by Israeli soldiers. There is no other honest way to tell the story about Israel. And this is a very honest book.

“Goliath” is made up of numerous vignettes, some only a few pages long, that methodically build a picture of Israel, like pieces fit into a puzzle. It is in the details that Israel’s reality is exposed. The Israeli army, Blumenthal points out in his first chapter, “To the Slaughter,” employs a mathematical formula to limit outside food deliveries to Gaza to keep the caloric levels of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside its open air prison just above starvation; a government official later denied that he had joked in a meeting that the practice is “like an appointment with a dietician.” The saturation, 22-day bombing of Gaza that began on Dec. 27, 2008, led by 60 F-16 fighter jets, instantly killed 240 Palestinians, including scores of children. Israel’s leading liberal intellectuals, including the writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, blithely supported the wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians. And while Israelis blocked reporters from entering the coastal Gaza Strip—forcing them to watch distant explosions from Israel’s Parash Hill, which some reporters nicknamed “the Hill of Shame”—the army and air force carried out atrocity after atrocity, day after day, crimes that were uncovered only after the attack was over and the press blockade lifted. This massive aerial and ground assault against a defenseless civilian population that is surrounded by the Israeli army, a population without an organized military, air force, air defenses, navy, heavy artillery or mechanized units, caused barely a ripple of protest inside Israel from the left or the right. It was part of the ongoing business of slaughtering the other.

“Unarmed civilians were torn to pieces with flechette darts sprayed from tank shells,” Blumenthal writes. “Several other children covered in burns from white phosphorous chemical weapon rounds were taken to hospitals; a few were found dead with bizarre wounds after being hit with experimental Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs designed to dissolve into the body and rapidly erode internal soft tissue. A group of women were shot to death while waving a white flag; another family was destroyed by a missile while eating lunch; and Israeli soldiers killed Ibrahim Awajah, an eight-year-old child. His mother, Wafaa, told the documentary filmmaker Jen Marlowe that soldiers used his corpse for target practice. Numerous crimes like these were documented across the Gaza Strip.”

By the end of the assault, with 1,400 dead, nearly all civilians, Gaza lay in ruins. The Israeli air force purposely targeted Gaza’s infrastructure, including power plants, to reduce Gaza to a vast, overcrowded, dysfunctional slum. Israel, Blumenthal notes, destroyed “80 percent of all arable farmland in the coastal strip, bombing the strip’s largest flour mill, leveling seven concrete factories, shelling a major cheese factory, and shooting up a chicken farm, killing thirty-one thousand chickens.”

“Twelve [years old] and up, you are allowed to shoot. That’s what they tell us,” an Israeli sniper told Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass in 2004 at the height of the Second Intifada, Blumenthal writes. “This is according to what the IDF [Israel Defense Force] says to its soldiers. I do not know if this is what the IDF says to the media,” the sniper was quoted as saying.

The 2008 murderous rampage is not, as Blumenthal understands, an anomaly. It is the overt policy of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who advocates “a system of open apartheid.” Israel, as Blumenthal points out, has not lifted its state of emergency since its foundation. It has detained at least 750,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 women, in its prisons since 1967. It currently holds more than 4,500 political prisoners, including more than 200 children and 322 people jailed without charges, Blumenthal writes, including those it has labeled “administrative detainees.” Israel has a staggering 99.74 percent conviction rate for these so-called security prisoners, a figure that any totalitarian state would envy.

Blumenthal cites a survey of Jewish Israeli attitudes on the Gaza bombing, known as Operation Cast Lead. The survey, by Daniel Bar-Tal, a political psychologist from Tel Aviv University, concluded that the public’s “consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering.” Bar-Tal tells Blumenthal “these attitudes are the product of indoctrination.” And Blumenthal sets out to chronicle the poison of this indoctrination and what it has spawned in Israeli society.

The racist narrative, once the domain of the far right and now the domain of the Israeli government and the mainstream, demonizes Palestinians and Arabs, as well as all non-Jews. Non-Jews, according to this propaganda, will forever seek the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Holocaust, in which Israeli victimhood is sanctified, is seamlessly conflated with Palestinian and Arab resistance to occupation. The state flies more than 25 percent of Israeli 11th-graders to Poland to tour Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps a year before they start army service. They are told that the goal of Arabs, along with the rest of the non-Jewish world, is another Auschwitz. And the only thing standing between Israelis and a death camp is the Israeli army. Israeli high schools show films such as “Sleeping With the Enemy” to warn students about dating non-Jews, especially Arabs. Racist books such as “Torat Ha’Melech,” or “The King’s Torah,” are given to soldiers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, the authors of the 230-page book, inform soldiers that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and may have to be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [of Noah] … there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira and Elitzur write. The rabbis claim that under Jewish law “there is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

These narratives of hatred make any act of deadly force by the Israeli army permissible, from the shooting of Palestinian children to the 2010 killing by Israeli commandos of nine unarmed activists on the Turkish boat the Mavi Marmara. The activists were part of a flotilla of six boats bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The Israeli propaganda machine claimed that the small flotilla was a covert terror convoy. Never mind that the Mavi Marmara was in international waters when it was attacked. Never mind that no one on the boat, or any of the five other boats, was armed. Never mind that the boats were thoroughly searched before they left for Gaza. The Israeli lie was trumpeted while every camera, video and tape recorder, computer and cellphone of the activists on board was seized and destroyed—or in a few cases sold by Israeli soldiers when they got back to Israel—while those on the boats were towed to an Israeli port and detained in isolation. The ceaseless stoking of fear and racial hatred—given full vent by the Israeli government and media in the days after the Mavi Marmara incident—has served to empower racist political demagogues such as Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, a camp follower of Meir Kahane. It has also effectively snuffed out Israel’s old left-wing Zionist establishment.

“In Israel you have three systems of laws,” the Israeli Arab politician Ahmed Tibi observes in the Blumenthal book. “One is democracy for 80 percent of the population. It is democracy for Jews. I call it an ethnocracy or you could call it a Judocracy. The second is racial discrimination for 20 percent of the population, the Israeli Arabs. The third is apartheid for the population in the West Bank and Gaza. This includes two sets of governments, one for the Palestinians and one for the settlers. Inside Israel there is not yet apartheid but we are being pushed there with … new laws.”

As Blumenthal documents, even Israeli Jews no longer live in a democracy. The mounting state repression against human rights advocates, journalists and dissidents has reached the proportions of U.S. Homeland Security. The overtly racist cant of the political elite and the masses—“Death to Arabs” is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches—has emboldened mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, to carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of ‘suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.’ ” And all who denounce the steady march of Israel toward fascism—including Jewish academics—are attacked in organized campaigns as being insufficiently Zionist. They are branded as terrorists or collaborators with terrorists. As a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz read: “The settlers are the real government of Israel.”

“Woody [a law school graduate from New York] became my initial liaison to Tel Aviv’s radical left, introducing me to a loose-knit band of a few hundred anarchists, disillusioned ex-soldiers, disaffected children of ultra-Zionists, queers, academics, and generally idealistic and disillusioned young people who came of age during the Second Intifada when the liberal Zionist ‘peace camp’ closed ranks with the militaristic right wing,” Blumenthal writes. “This tiny band of social deviants comprised the only grouping of people I met who sincerely embraced multiculturalism and who took concrete action against the discriminatory foundations of their country’s political apparatus. Right-wingers and many Jewish Israelis who considered themselves part of the social mainstream referred to members of the radical left as smolinim, which simply means ‘leftists,’ but the word carried a deeply insulting connotation of an unacceptable caste, an Other. As branded social outcasts, inflexible in their principles, disdainful of ordinary politics, and brazen in their racial liberalism they resembled nothing so much as the pre-Civil War abolitionists.”

The late Amnon Dankner, the former editor of Maariv, one of Israel’s major newspapers, Blumenthal notes, denounced “neo-Nazi expressions in the Knesset” and “entire parties whose tenor and tone arouse feelings of horror and terrifying memories.” David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, has called on Israelis to boycott the Knesset “to stand against the wave of fascism that has engulfed the Zionist project.” And Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, says: “Israel’s very existence is threatened by fascism.”

The disillusionment among idealistic young immigrants to Israel dots the book. As one example, Canadian David Sheen is recorded as saying that everything he had known about Israel and Palestinians was, in Blumenthal’s words, “a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination.” But perhaps what is saddest is that Israel has, and has always had, within its population intellectuals, including the great scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who sought to save Israel from itself.

Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel,” warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.

“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of the Jewish state and any hope of democracy. “Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution.” He foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.” He warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn “concentration camps” for the occupied and that, in his words, “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

But few, then or now, cared to listen. This is why Blumenthal’s new book is so important.

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion   Publisher, Zuade Kaufman   Editor, Robert Scheer

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By Dr. A. K. Merchant*

19 October, 2013

There is a conviction deep in every human heart that life has meaning beyond the struggle for survival.  But what exactly is the purpose of our existence? To understand the purpose of our existence, we need to first understand the true nature of a human being.  When we think about the phrase “human nature”; what images come to mind?  Is it something positive or negative?  Are we simply a collection of instincts, appetites, urges and emotions, or are we something more?  Is there anything that distinguishes us from animals?

We share with the animal world many characteristics related to our material existence.  However, we also have a spiritual nature, what some would call in India, the soul (ruh or atman), and it is this spiritual nature that determines our true purpose.  The purpose of life for the individual is to develop spiritual qualities and perfections, and to advance towards Divinity.  Such development does not take place through idle worship.  Nor can it be achieved in a life dedicated to the pursuit of worldly desires.  Fulfilling the purpose of one’s life—which is to know and worship the Divine—requires activity in the arena of the collective life of humanity; it calls for selfless service to society.

The growing interdependence and the intensifying interaction among diverse peoples pose fundamental challenges to old ways of thinking, believing and acting. How we, as individuals and communities, respond to these challenges will, to a large degree, determine whether our communities become nurturing, cohesive and progressive, or inhospitable, divided and unsustainable?  To address this deepening crisis of values so rampant throughout the world people of goodwill, governors of human institutions, anguished citizens in every country of the globe, leaders of different religious communities, and all who care for a just and sustainable future of our planet must come forward and unitedly battle against the evils that seem to be throttling our very existence.  In India, we are striving based upon the foundational principles of our civilizational ethos to transform the society—acutely aware that the sacrifices and struggles of the past six-and-half decades since our Independence has only yielded in some superficial advances in terms of poverty alleviation, technological progress and greater awareness of the rights of the ordinary citizens.

A recent survey of the world conditions appeals for “a complete reconceptualization of the relationships that sustain society.  The deepening environmental crisis, driven by a system that condones the pillage of natural resources to satisfy an insatiable thirst for more, suggests how entirely inadequate is the present conception of humanity’s relationship with nature; the deterioration of the home environment, with the accompanying rise in the systematic exploitation of women and children worldwide, makes clear how pervasive are the misbegotten notions that define relations within the family unit; the persistence of despotism, on the one hand, and the increasing disregard for authority, on the other, reveal how unsatisfactory to a maturing humanity is the current relationship between the individual and the institutions of society; the concentration of material wealth in the hands of a minority of the world’s population gives an indication of how fundamentally ill-conceived are relationships among the many sectors of what is now an emerging global community.” The unfettered cultivation of needs and wants has led to a system fully dependent on excessive consumption for a privileged few, while reinforcing exclusion, poverty and inequality, for the majority.  Each successive global crisis—be it climate, energy, food, water, disease, financial collapse—has revealed new dimensions of the exploitation and oppression inherent in the current patterns of consumption and production.  Stark are the contrasts between the consumption of luxuries and the cost of provision of basic needs: basic education for all would cost US$ 10 billion; yet $82 billion is spent annually on cigarettes in the United States alone.  The eradication of world hunger would cost $30 billion whilst some $92 billion are spent in the United States for combating obesity; water and sanitation–$10 billion, i.e. as reported by the UN Department of Public Information, “the estimated cost of closing the gap between current trends and what is needed to meet the target ranged from $10 billion to $18 billion per year.”  By comparison, the world’s military budget, unaffected by recession, has risen to $1.70 trillion in 2012 of which approximately 45% is by the United States.

The purpose of the collective life of humankind is “to carry forward and ever-advancing civilization.”  Civilization has two essential components, material and spiritual.  Both of these have to advance simultaneously if humanity is to achieve prosperity and true happiness.  “No matter how far the material world advances, it cannot establish the happiness of mankind… Only when material and spiritual civilization are linked and coordinated will happiness be assured.”

Building individual capabilities and institutional capacities, therefore, is the biggest task facing all who are in decision making positions, leaders of communities (whether religious or secular), the heads of governments, heads of states et al. Indeed, the opportunities in the 21st century make possible to lay the foundations for an ethical system based on the concept of unity, as revolutionary in its implications as the Christian notion of love was to Greek ethical systems. “Truth is One, the Wise describe it differently,” (Ekam Sat Viprah Bahuda Vedanti) is India’s civilizational principle of Divine unity. The pursuit of unity—creating it, strengthening it, and broadening its scope—will require a personal transformation on the part of everyone involved, and the world itself will have to examine in the context of present-day advances of our civilization, the full implications of another profound Indian concept: “the World is a Family” (vasudhaiva kutumbakkam) and begin to look for ways for bringing it about.

Thus, we can see that we have a twofold purpose in our lives: knowing and realizing the Divine, and walking the path of collective service for the advancement of civilization, as we know it. To this end, knowledge, volition and action play a central role in fulfilling both these purposes.  Knowledge is the foundation of civilization; the will to act and the deeds we perform moves us forward. The principle of the oneness of humankind implies, then, an organic change in the very structure of present-day society.

Since knowledge is so fundamental to both personal growth and the advancement of civilization, every human being should have access to knowledge and have opportunities to play a contributory role in its generation, diffusion and application for the betterment of society.  Knowledge that helps to discover the workings of nature is accumulated in science.  At the same time, insights into the spiritual nature of reality have been organized in the system of knowledge, we may term as dharma or religion.  To grow intellectually and spiritually and to be able to contribute to the transformation of society, each individual has to acquire both scientific and spiritual knowledge.  This seems to me to be only way for present-day humanity to move forward to the next stage in human evolution.  Thus, for such an enterprise to succeed profound changes in the minds of people and in the structures of society, primarily the nature of the educational process will need to be re-thought.  As a starting point, the programme of capacity building must be based on a clear vision of the kind of society that we wish to live in; and the kind of individuals that will bring this about.  It needs to help learners reflect on the purpose of life and help them to step out of their cultural realities to develop alternative visions and approaches to the problems at hand and to understand the manifold consequences of their behaviours and to adjust these accordingly.

Aggressive forms of behavior must give way to more gentle ideals.  The need for a binding agreement among nation-states demarcating the international frontiers in a just and fair manner, and proportionate reduction of national armaments so that weapons of war throughout the world may be converted into instruments of reconstruction and release enormous resources, currently being diverted for destructive purposes, for education, health, environmental restoration and conservation and sustainable development.  The benefits worldwide would be incalculable, while the consequences of failing to appropriately respond to the challenges of an ever-contracting world will surely prove disastrous and in the long run even suicidal.  The cultural shifts resulting from such actions would lead to a greater capacity to carry out collective action, to see oneself as an agent of change in the society, as a humble learner, as an active participant in the generation, diffusion and application of knowledge.

“Every truth,” said the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, “passes through three stages before it is recognized.  In the first stage it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, and in the third stage it is regarded as self-evident.”  Therefore, it behooves those spiritually-minded and socially-conscious inhabitants of India, be they politicians, leaders, scientists, intellectuals, or students and other ardent and sincere workers who are passionately striving for the fulfillment of the ideals of their respective belief systems to work for the betterment of the world and contribute substantially to the advent of that universal and divine family sung throughout the ages by seers and sages and poets and foretold by the prophets and messengers of the past.  For, “the earth is but one country, and humankind its citizens.” (1,555 words)

*The author is Chairperson, Sarvodaya International Trust—Delhi Chapter; General Secretary, The Temple of Understanding—India [an Interfaith NGO accredited to the UN]; Associate Secretary General of Global Warming Reduction Centre.  He can be contacted via cell phone: +9810441360 or email akmerchant@hotmail.com. Mailing address: S – 28, Greater Kailash Part I, New Delhi 110 048, India

By Kourosh Ziabari

31 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

It all started on March 15, 2011, when groups of the Syrian people took to the streets of Damascus to protest what they considered to be the government’s unfavorable social and economic policies. The Western powers tried to portray the scattered demonstrations as a continuation of the revolutionary wave in the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring. However, there was a major difference, that Syria was simply dissimilar to all the other countries where the people had taken to streets to demand a regime change: Syria was not a U.S. puppet regime!

Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain and Yemen where the core of the “Arab Spring” had taken shape and come to existence were all countries which were in some ways politically allied with the United States and ruled by quisling politicians ready to sacrifice the rights and interests of their own people at the expense of the satisfaction of their American lords.

Shortly after the first anti-government protests spread throughout the Syrian cities, the supporters of President Bashar al-Assad, who won more than 11 million votes in the 2007 presidential elections and grabbed 97.62% of the votes, poured into the streets to respond to the discontented and unhappy anti-government demonstrators and show that if there are some people who may have objections toward the government and the way it runs the country, there are a greater number who approve of the government policies and support the president.

The fact that the government of President Assad, like every other government in the world, has domestic opponents and critics is undeniable. Some of the social, cultural and political decisions of President Assad since 2000 that he has been in office don’t sound appealing to his critics and certain factions of people, especially the Arab-Sunnis and Kurd-Sunnis who aggregately comprise 69% of the Syrian population and believe that are being treated in a discriminatory manner, which is in turn subject to debate.

However, what country in the world can claim that it has met the demands of all its citizens to the full? Even the United States that ranks third in the 2013 list of the world countries by the Human Development Index is accused to have been a major violator of the rights of the African-Americans and Muslims for a long time. To digress for a while, it’s noteworthy that the United States lived with the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination for several decades. From 1620 to 1865, 597,000 slaves were imported to American colonies from Africa. Although the American academics try to put a lid on this vivid reality that the United States has been an unconditional accomplice in what is known to be slave trade, the U.S.-based Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database reports that the United States absorbed around four percent of all slaves carried off from Africa. And racial discrimination against the blacks in the United States continues to this day. Moreover, the modern United States is facing the throbbing phenomenon of Islamophobia. Since the commencement of the so-called War on Terror, the political establishment, interest groups, mainstream media and multinational corporations in the United States began to launch a war against the American Muslims. It means that the United States government has failed to provide a safe, secure and tranquil environment for the living of its tiny Muslim population: there are only around 5 to 7 million Muslims in the United States.

So, to return to the main argument, it can be logically concluded that discrimination and inequality exists everywhere, only to different extents, and any political leader who claims that he has eradicated all forms of social discrimination and inequality is a big liar, and of course President Assad has never made such a promise, and even has said in an interview that democracy in Syria needs time to emerge, that it’s “a tool to a better life” and that Syria is striding on this path.

And there’s one more thing which cannot be disputed. Those who have taken up arms against the Syrian government, are identifying the supporters of Bashar al-Assad on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other social networking websites to assassinate them in the daylight, and in their own calculation, reduce the number of the “pro-regime forces” are not the ordinary citizens, the Sunni or Kurd citizens who are somewhat dissatisfied with the state of affairs in their country. They are rebels, Al-Qaeda terrorists, the Al-Nusra Front fighters and other extremist mass-killers from across the world and the Arab world who are pouring terrorists into Syria. The Syrian Minister of Interior Mohammad al-Shaar once said, “Currently more than 80 countries send terrorists to Syria.”

A similar statement was made by the Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem who spoke to BBC World Service’s Jeremy Brown and revealed that “terrorists from 83 countries” are fighting against the Syrian soldiers and civilians and wreaking havoc on the crisis-hit country.

In his speech to the 68th session of the UN General Assembly on September 30, Mr. Muallem said, “In Syria… there are murderers who dismember human bodies into pieces while still alive and send their limbs to their families.”

“Political hypocrisy increases to intervene in the domestic affairs of States under the pretext of humanitarian intervention or the responsibility to protect.” And when those aggressive policies did not prove beneficial for some countries, like Syria, those well-known States “reveal their true face and threaten with blatant military consensus,” he added, saying that those same countries are supporting terrorism in Syria.

And of course Mr. Muallem is right. The war on Syria is not a suppression of the anti-government protests by President Assad’s forces, as some Western states simplistically and childishly claim. The clichéd statement that President Assad “is killing his own citizens” is a blatant lie parroted by those who want to lay the groundwork for a “humanitarian” military intervention in Syria.

As the Syrian Foreign Minister noted, the double standards and hypocrisy of the world powers know no boundaries and limits. It was announced after August 21 when the reports on the chemical attack in the Ghouta district of Damascus were published that the U.S. government has waived anti-terrorism provisions to arm Syrian rebels. “The Obama administration waived provisions of a federal law which ban the supply of weapons and money to terrorists. The move is opening doors to supplying Syrian opposition with protection from chemical weapons,” reported Russia Today on September 17. According to the Russia Today, President Barack Obama ordered such a waiver for supplying chemical weapons-related assistance to “select vetted members” of Syrian opposition forces.

There’s a consensus among the world’s truthful, honest political observers that the United States and its European and regional allies are making efforts to maintain the chaos and crisis in Syria with the final objective of disintegrating the government and turning the arch-foe Syria into a new stalwart ally in the Middle East where the allies are being lost one after the other.

The only parties which will benefit from the prolongation and protraction of the crisis and conflict in Syria are those powers – and their proxies – who are accustomed to meddling in the internal affairs of other countries through political propaganda, sanctions regime and military force. Otherwise, the government of President Assad and those who really seek peace and justice in the region, like Iran which has long called for a political solution to the crisis in Syria, have been demanding comprehensive dialog between all sides of the conflict for at least two years. They are the separated, indecisive opposition factions who don’t accept these calls, or have failed to reach a consensus among themselves and don’t know what they really want.

Again, nobody claims that President Assad is a 100% perfect and untainted leader. He has his own flaws and does his own mistakes like any other politician in the world. But the war he is fighting is not a war “against” his people as the corporate media tend to propagate; rather, it’s unquestionably a war “for” his people.

Those who have ceased to critically assess the situation in Syria as a result of the Western mainstream media’s indoctrinations had better refer to a YouGov Siraj poll commissioned by the Doha Debate, funded by the Qatar Foundation – under the supervision of the Qatari government which is hell-bent on removing President Assad from power and has pulled out all the stops to achieve this goal through funding the foreign-backed mercenaries and sending arms and terrorists to the country – which show that the majority of Syrians (more than 55% of them) support the government of President Assad. Let’s not forget about the more independent polls which report higher numbers.

Kourosh Ziabari

Journalist, writer and media correspondent

www.KouroshZiabari.com

October 31st, 2013

LaRouche PAC issued the following statement, for mass circulation, on Oct. 30, 2013.

The entire trans-Atlantic financial system is hopelessly bankrupt, and the only solution to this crisis is the immediate reinstatement of Glass Steagall in the United States. Unless the Congress passes Glass Steagall in the coming days and weeks, with a veto-proof majority, breaking the power of Wall Street and restoring a commercial banking system free from the quadrillion dollars in derivatives and other gambling debts, the American people will soon be facing a mass kill, far beyond the genocidal horrors that have been imposed on Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Cyprus and Spain. Wall Street must be bankrupted before they bankrupt us all.

Every month, the Federal Reserve, with the full backing of President Obama, pumps $85 billion in fresh bailout money into Wall Street and the major European banks. At the same time, the White House and Congress have agreed to impose killer austerity cuts on the vast majority of Americans. In the coming months, the body count will skyrocket, as health insurance costs triple, as the health care delivery system is vastly scaled back, and vital social safety net programs, from Medicare and Medicaid to Social Security and Food Stamps, are stripped down to a minimum.

Already, under Obamacare,14 million Americans have lost their existing health insurance, thousands of doctors have been fired by the major HMOs, critical care hospitals are to be shut down all across the American heartland, and home health care services are being cancelled. Whether you can afford health insurance or not, the doctors, nurses, hospitals and research facilities are not going to be there unless you are among the wealthiest handful of Americans.

To be blunt: This is how it was in Nazi Germany under the Hitler T-4 euthanasia program, and this is how it is in Great Britain today with the Tony Blair-initiated N.I.C.E. program, under which medical care is denied to those deemed to be lives not worth living.

In order to feed Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for bailouts, hard-working Americans are being told that their pensions can no longer be paid and they are facing a brief life of abject poverty, despite decades of contributions to their pension plans. City workers in Detroit have been told that their pensions will be cut by 90 percent, which is nothing less than a death sentence. What is happening in Detroit today is in the near-future for every city in America. In New York City, the home of the Wall Street too-big-to-fail banks, the official poverty rate is 46 percent.

Under Title II of the Dodd-Frank bill, not even your household savings accounts are secure. As in Cyprus, your savings will be looted as part of the so-called bail-in scheme to save the banks at all costs.

The message coming from Washington is clear: If you are old, sick or disabled, you are as good as dead. If you are young, you have no future. The message is coming from President Obama and from Congressional Republicans, who are fully complicit in plans to vastly reduce Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So far, the vast majority of Democrats in Congress have been cowed into accepting Obama’s diktats.

The only serious fight-back is coming from those in Congress who are backing the return to Glass Steagall. With two bills in the Senate (S. 985 and S. 1282) and one in the House (HR. 129) with 75 co-sponsors, Glass Steagall could be restored now. It is no exaggeration to say that this is a life or death issue. Under Glass Steagall, the United States can return to a Constitutionally-mandated credit system and launch an era of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity for all. Without Glass Steagall, we are facing mass kill.