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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

 

By Titto Eapen

Prior to landing in Ukraine or before I start glossing the western sanction on Russia, it is important to take the readers through the memory lane into Syria to expound the Pipeline-Geopolitics in the Middle-East. Moreover, without understanding Putin’s love and Obama’s abhorrence for Assad, the whole story of Ukrainian crises and the latest sanction on Russia is incomplete. In the entire Pipelinistan region, Syria plays a pivotal role in connecting Asia with Europe. The same geographical ascendancy in the region has made it an easy victim in the hydrocarbon tussle of domination between Russia & US led Western Allies. This could be elucidated from the fact that the US led NATO forces has already spent close to 50 billion dollars to support the rebels in Syria while Russia keeps pouring arms into Damascus to support Assad’s regime by justifying his alleged war crime against the civilians.

The Kremlin v/s White House Factor in Syria:

Unlike it’s approach towards Iraq & Afghanistan, Kremlin took a very bold step in preventing the White House led western ploy of invading Syria- A move to oust Assad and to install a puppet regime. However, if you have made an opinion that Russia has done this to avert a bloodshed like situation, then you are the victim of erroneous news literature in the same sense that if you think that the US is waging war in Syria to eliminate chemical weapons and ISIS. The rationale behind Russian interference and the American intrusion in Syria revolves around the Pipeline-Geopolitics.

The fact of the matter is that neither the Chemical Weapons nor the ISIS menace or the Sunni-Shia strife has caught the eyes of the West & Russia alike but it is the Mediterranean frontage of Syria which has brought the nation state in between the devil and deep dark ocean of furtive diplomacy. On the one hand, the US-EU wants its closest allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia – which are also the largest exporter of liquid natural gas in the world to supply its natural gas to Europe through Syria. In that pursuit, the greatest evil is Assad who won’t let the west to build a natural gas pipeline through Syria. If yet you are not able to connect the logic of US and its European allies in funding the Salafist Jihadi in Syria through Qatar and Saudi Arabia then let me make a very frank statement that they all want a regime change in Syria who will allow them to build a pipeline which will enable the Qatar and Saudi to sell their abundance of natural gas to Europe. While on the other side, Russia very much prefers the Assad regime for a whole bunch of reasons. One of those reasons is that Assad is helping Russia to block the flow of natural gas out of the Persian Gulf into Europe, thus ensuring higher profits for Gazprom.

It’s a common knowledge amongst most international observers that the European Union has a very long ambition of getting access to the Qatari natural gas through a pipeline channel via Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria on to Turkey which will eventually reduce the dependency of Europe on Russian hydrocarbon companies. Perhaps that could be the reason why Qatar alone- a little nation, has so far spent 3 billion dollars to support the rebels in Syria for deporting Assad. However, the extended Russian rescue operation for Assad to fight the Qatari & Saudi made Salafist-Terrorist outfits and also by blocking a UN sanction on Syria has averted the western premeditated Gadhafi fate for Assad. Furthermore, with the Russians backing Assad, the easy regime change game in Syria has become an impossible task altogether and has compelled the White House to get directly involved in the conflict with drones on the pretext of its fight against Sarin Gas and ISIS. If the US is successful in getting rid of the Assad regime, it will be a great triumph for both the Saudi Arabia and Qatari Regime and sooner or later, it will result into the end of Russian dominance in the European hydrocarbon market. However, without diverting Putin’s eye from Syria, a regime change was really an impossible task for the US and its NATO allies. Now with the Ukrainian crisis and stringent sanction in place against Russia, the drone-ball is back in Obama’s court to dictate his own imperial terms.

Why Assad is bad for West & good for Russia?

Thesis

In 2009 – Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter’s North field, contiguous with Iran’s South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey.

This would have helped Europe to overcome the dependency on Russian hydrocarbon industry and crucially bypass the Russian interest in the region. Assad’s rationale for not complying with the Qatari offer was to protect the interests of his Russian ally, which is Europe’s top supplier of natural gas.

Antithesis

The following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the project was signed in July 2012 – just as Syria’s civil war was spreading to Damascus and Aleppo – and later in 2013 Iraq signed a framework agreement for construction of the gas pipelines.

Synthesis

The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline plan was a direct slap in the face” to Qatar’s plans. In this context, the failed attempt of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan to bribe Russia to switch sides is very crucial to understand the sanction.

According to the leaked classified, the prince told Putin that whatever regime comes after Assad, it will be completely in Saudi Arabia’s hands and will not sign any agreement allowing any Gulf country to transport its gas across Syria to Europe and compete with Russian gas exports. When Putin refused to oblige with the offer, the Prince vowed military action.
Let’s get back to the Sanction via Ukraine:

The outbreak of the Ukrainian unrest that led to the installation of a western dummy government in a span of two months was certainly an outcome of a well-designed clandestine operation. Russia might not have anticipated that the public upsurge & mass upheaval against the pro Russia Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych would result into his sudden ouster through an immediate replacement with a pro-European Government of Petro Poroshenko. Here, the political timing is very crucial to analyze, just recall the fact that this was the time when the US and Russia were lambasting against each other on the question of Assad and Syria. With the installation of Poroshenko’s government in Ukraine, Kremlin’s geopolitical supremacy in Europe were at stakes. Putin’s first response to the Anglo-Zionist sponsored coup d’état in Ukraine was the annexation of Crimea and later he went on to reassure the balkanization of the region by supporting the armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

In order to get a better insight of the current Ukrainian crisis, it is very important to understand that geopolitically Ukraine is the Syria of Europe. Strategically Ukraine is a key region for both Europe Union as well as Russia. For Russia, the concept of grand Eurasian Union is incomplete; without Ukraine it ceases to be a Eurasian Empire. Besides, most of the key gas pipelines from Russia to Western Europe run through Ukraine. Conversely, European Union without Ukraine is like a riffle without bullet especially bearing in mind that shale gas extraction is banned in many European countries due to the ecological dangers associated with it.

This could be well explained by the data available from the Energy Information Administration in the USA Energy Department. According to their data, Ukraine occupies the third position after Poland and France in Europe in terms of the reserves of shale gas. Considering the ban in place for France for extracting shale gas, the only two countries in Europe are Poland and Ukraine which posses’ large shale-gas reserves. That means Ukraine is seen as a potentially important provider of shale gas to Europe which makes Ukraine the centre of attraction in the race of occupying the Black Gold Mountains. So in a nutshell, in the battle of petropolitcs between the West and Russia, Ukraine has become an easy stooge.

The other angle to the Ukrainian crisis as I mentioned earlier is the struggle over the supply of gas and oil to Europe. With the installation of a pro-western government in Ukraine, the US led West has given a clear insignia to Kremlin that they are in hurry to replace the Russian supremacy in the hydrocarbon business in Europe with US, Qatar & Saudi. The United States is looking for market for its surplus natural gas and the US Energy Department has already issued permits to American companies to export natural gas from 2015. It is important to notice the fact that during the political turmoil in Syria and Ukraine, the American companies were busy in submitting applications to build port facilities in the United States to export liquefied natural gas by tanker. Although, the United States has abundant supplies of natural gas but the cost of transient to Europe will take a heavy sum making it less competent with Russian supply so naturally a price slash of crude oil was obvious before the US start supplying its surplus gas in the form of LNG to Europe.

According to many think-tanks, the current crude oil price crash is also a secret US-Saudi war on Russia which will likely to go down to $50 per barrel within six months. This could be drawn from the words of New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman who says the US and Saudi Arabia, whether by accident or design, could be pumping Russia and Iran to brink of economic collapse. According to him, the rationale behind to reach into such a premise is the fact that d espite turmoil in many of the world’s oil-producing countries – Libya, Iraq, Nigeria and Syria – prices are hitting lows not seen in years. He further added that the US wants its Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia to have more bite.

Undoubtedly, the sanction bite is wounding the Russian economy to the core and that could be the reason why Putin has issued a Cold War-style tirade to Western leaders warning them not to ‘blackmail’ major nuclear power Russia. He has also threatened to shut the gas supplies to the EU this winter. If Putin really dares to cut the gas supply to Europe then it will severely affect the European economy which is already on a ventilator mode. However, the current geopolitical reality in Europe is that neither the EU can stop buying Russian gas nor Russia can block the supply to Europe without inflicting pain on each other. So before the US led NATO forces takes any extreme step against Russia, the EU has to safeguard its own energy requirement which will only be possible through toppling Assad and also through balkanization of the entire Middle-East region. The pivot to Europe campaign also needs a complete control over Ukraine to reduce the influence of Russia in the European hydrocarbon market which will ultimately shrink the oil driven Russian economy into sand.

It is also important to note that with the Ukrainian crises, the entire sphere of geopolitical influence in Europe has started shifting from Russia to Europe Union. The political and economic isolation of Russia through sanction, the western media propaganda against Putin and Obama’s recent discovery that Russia is a threat to global peace has really worked in the favor of White House for creating a public opinion in the US and Europe that Russia is malevolent. With the blessing of Zionist media, the package of pivot to Europe campaign has brought the strong man of Kremlin on the brink of realpolitik defeat in Syria. The greatest example of Putin’s loosing geopolitical grip from Syria can be elucidated from the current ongoing US led NATO drone onslaught in Syria to which the Kremlin had earlier expressed his objection. However, the Ukrainian crisis followed by the severe sanction against Russia has really compelled Putin to backpedal from Syria and the focus has now shifted to counterstrike the sanction and improve his position in Ukraine.

Now the question that may come into your mind: When and who will replace Russia from European Hydrocarbon market? Well the answer can be divided into three segments: The short-term, the mid-term and the long-term: In the short term, most of the European country has to still depend on the Russian hydrocarbon stock and to a great extent from Iran. Fitch, a rating agency, does not expect Europe to lessen its reliance on Russia “for at least the next decade and potentially much longer. However, the growing proximity of Iran with the US and Europe and also the bail-talk for the ambitious nuclear program of the Islamic state can be considered as a token gesture of the west to access the Iranian oil & gas.

As far as the mid-term supply is concerned, the option of getting the glut of US natural gas in the form of LNG supply is under progression. The work has begun way back in the US Congress where Anglo-Saxon members are pressing the Obama administration to speed permits for natural gas export terminals to ease Europe’s reliance on Russian supplies. In-fact, even prior to the Ukrainian crisis, many American companies have started their ground work in the US to supply their surplus liquefied natural gas to Europe to replace Russian gas. In the final phase or in the long-term, supply from Qatar and Saudi Arabia through the proposed Qatari pipeline project via Syria will completely condense the Russian reliance.

Prior to that we can think a large element of bloody-proxy-war both in Europe and Middle East. Russia plays an important role in this, and of course equally US is determined to lessen Russia’s role and influence in the geopolitical struggle. This is evident from the role played by the US in the balkanization of Syria & Iraq through sponsoring the Al-Qaeda linked terrorist outfits and the Russian involvement in arming the separatists in Ukraine.

Titto Eapen is Associate Editor | Offshore World Magazine

30 November, 2014
Countercurrents.org

By Eric Zuesse

The United States is a gung-ho supporter of a genocide that it created. (Click on those links, for the verification of these shocking facts — shocking only because they’re covered up by our ‘press.’) Why does Europe tolerate this, and even participate in it? But, they do.

On November 14th, France missed the second deadline for them to supply to Russia the Mistral helicopter-carrier ship that Russia had already paid for in full, and which had been built to Russian specifications, not suitable for use by NATO.

Back on 14 May 2014, Michael R. Gordon — one of the New York Times ‘reporters’ (more-realistically: stenographers for the U.S. Administration) who had ‘reported’ back in 2002 about how horrific were the WMD or Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein was building up, but which actually didn’t exist except in the Administration’s disinformation-agencies — headlined in that propaganda-outlet for the U.S. Government (propagandistically calling itself a ‘news’paper), “France’s Sale of 2 Ships to Russians Is Ill-Advised, U.S. Warns,” and he lambasted the dastardly purveyor of what U.S. nationalists had contemptuously called “freedom fries”; he opened his ‘news report’ as the stenographer to power that he and his newspaper are, with: “In a closed-door meeting in February 2010, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates urged his French counterpart not to proceed with the sale of two amphibious assault ships to Russia because it ‘would send the wrong message to Russia and to our allies in Central and East Europe.’” In other words: Russia is the enemy; don’t deal with them in any other way.

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post, headlined the next day disdainfully, “Europe goes its own way,” and she opened, “France’s attempt to sell warships to Russia is both a ‘sell the rope to hang themselves’ moment and a comment on U.S. stature these days.” She lied: Russia isn’t France’s enemy; the U.S. has become that. And France wasn’t in any “attempt to sell warships to Russia”; those warships had already been sold and built and paid for, but Washington was turning the screws on their ‘friend’ France, to induce them not to deliver what had already been sold and manufactured.

For America’s fascists, and even for our racist-fascists or “nazis,” the Cold War has never ended, not even when the Soviet Union did and when Marxist economics became rejected everywhere but in Cuba and North Korea. Apparently, the Cold War was never really about communism, if one believes these fascists; it was about destroying Russia. For them, it has actually been just a marketing plan for U.S.-made weapons. Now that Russia is a democracy — perhaps more so than the U.S. now is — the old hatred still burns like hot coals in the black hearts of Barack Obama, Republicans, and all other far-rightist, pro-oligarchic, U.S. politicians, who serve the people at Raytheon Corporation and Lockheed-Martin, and other producers for NATO, the Western arms-buying club.

Gutless France isn’t telling Uncle Sam to shove off about that, but is instead setting itself up to pay a very heavy price for today’s peddler of genocide, the U.S. You don’t see this fact — or this, or even this — reported in the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. Those facts come from ‘the enemy.’

I am a European-American who is outraged that my country has taken up what had been one of Hitler’s big objectives, of destroying and subjugating Russians, and that Europe is participating in this moral degradation of America, all for the benefit of an all-too-powerful group of U.S. and a few cooperating European oligarchs, who think that their blood is not on the line if this produces a nuclear war against Russia. But their gated communities and frost-windowed limousines won’t protect even them from the viciousness of the hatreds and psychopathies that they harbor, if they succeed at prostituting ‘democracy’ in this way.

America needs a real press, not an aristocratically controlled ‘news-media,’ that are constantly for sale to the highest bidder, whomever can put up the advertising bucks to buy the ‘news reporting’ and ‘editorial opinions,’ that shape ‘democracy.’

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.

17 November, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Gerry Condon

As a Vietnam era veteran, I paid close attention to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s Veterans Day speech , delivered at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Secretary Hagel, a Vietnam combat veteran, declared that we must learn the lessons of past wars, and not commit U.S. troops to unpopular, unwinnable conflicts. He purportedly referred to the Vietnam War, but he could just as easily have been describing the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. government and military apparently have misled themselves as they were misleading the American people, claiming that these occupations were necessary, had clear objectives and were winnable. As in Vietnam, they lied about their progress in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was light at the end of the tunnel, we were told, if only we allowed one more “surge.”

The U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have come at a huge price. Billions upon billions of dollars, much needed for improvements in the quality of life of the American people, were wasted on corrupt leaders and defense contractors. As many as a million Iraqis and Afghans, mostly civilians, lost their lives. Millions more became homeless refugees and orphans.

Six thousand U.S. troops lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, and an even larger number have taken their own lives since returning from war. Hundreds of thousands of veterans will continue to suffer from physical, psychological and moral wounds, and many are joining Vietnam veterans who are still living on the streets of our cities.

The primary achievements of these U.S. occupations have been the strengthening of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the creation of the fundamentalist army ISIL in Iraq and Syria, and the fomenting of bloody, sectarian civil wars that will persist for years to come.

So have we learned the lessons of history as Secretary Hagel cautioned on Veterans Day? Apparently not. President Obama announced this week that he has authorized sending an additional 1500 troops to Iraq (“at Secretary Hagel’s request”). General Martin Dempsey, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress this week that “we are certainly considering” the deployment of U.S. combat troops to Iraq.

In the meantime, the U.S. is conducting a heavy bombing campaign against ISIL targets not only in Iraq, but in Syria, where over 850 people have been killed by U.S. bombs, including many civilians.

Our civilian and military leaders are clearly ignoring the central lesson of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam: U.S. bombs and troops cannot defeat insurgencies in other countries; only the people of those countries are in a position to determine their own futures. Furthermore, the U.S. has no right, legally or morally, to invade other nations.

If our government refuses to learn these lessons, then the people must make our voices heard loud and clear. We cannot allow our government to continue gambling with our precious blood and treasure, doubling down on failed policies.

Veterans For Peace is sending a message to the White House and the Congress. We are tired of senseless wars. We want an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. We oppose further U.S. involvement in the sectarian war in Syria.

Like millions of veterans of too many U.S. wars, we believe it is high time for our government to learn the lessons of history. Rather than repeatedly resorting to military intervention on behalf of so-called “U.S. interests” (typically the interests of the richest 1%, purchased with the blood of the poorest 1%), we believe that showing respect for the independence of other nations is the way to a better future for all peoples, at home and abroad.

Gerry Condon, Vice President, Veterans For Peace

15 November, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By David Vine

From Carter to the Islamic State, 35 Years of Building Bases and Sowing Disaster

With the launch of a new U.S.-led war in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (IS), the United States has engaged in aggressive military action in at least 13 countries in the Greater Middle East since 1980. In that time, every American president has invaded, occupied, bombed, or gone to war in at least one country in the region. The total number of invasions, occupations, bombing operations, drone assassination campaigns, and cruise missile attacks easily runs into the dozens.

As in prior military operations in the Greater Middle East, U.S. forces fighting IS have been aided by access to and the use of an unprecedented collection of military bases. They occupy a region sitting atop the world’s largest concentration of oil and natural gas reserves and has long been considered the most geopolitically important place on the planet. Indeed, since 1980, the U.S. military has gradually garrisoned the Greater Middle East in a fashion only rivaled by the Cold War garrisoning of Western Europe or, in terms of concentration, by the bases built to wage past wars in Korea and Vietnam.

In the Persian Gulf alone, the U.S. has major bases in every country save Iran. There is an increasingly important, increasingly large base in Djibouti, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula. There are bases in Pakistan on one end of the region and in the Balkans on the other, as well as on the strategically located Indian Ocean islands of Diego Garcia and the Seychelles. In Afghanistan and Iraq, there were once as many as 800 and 505 bases, respectively. Recently, the Obama administration inked an agreement with new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to maintain around 10,000 troops and at least nine major bases in his country beyond the official end of combat operations later this year. U.S. forces, which never fully departed Iraq after 2011, are now returning to a growing number of bases there in ever larger numbers.

In short, there is almost no way to overemphasize how thoroughly the U.S. military now covers the region with bases and troops. This infrastructure of war has been in place for so long and is so taken for granted that Americans rarely think about it and journalists almost never report on the subject. Members of Congress spend billions of dollars on base construction and maintenance every year in the region, but ask few questions about where the money is going, why there are so many bases, and what role they really serve. By one estimate, the United States has spent $10 trillion protecting Persian Gulf oil supplies over the past four decades.

Approaching its 35th anniversary, the strategy of maintaining such a structure of garrisons, troops, planes, and ships in the Middle East has been one of the great disasters in the history of American foreign policy. The rapid disappearance of debate about our newest, possibly illegal war should remind us of just how easy this huge infrastructure of bases has made it for anyone in the Oval Office to launch a war that seems guaranteed, like its predecessors, to set off new cycles of blowback and yet more war.

On their own, the existence of these bases has helped generate radicalism and anti-American sentiment. As was famously the case with Osama bin Laden and U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, bases have fueled militancy, as well as attacks on the United States and its citizens. They have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, even though they are not, in fact, necessary to ensure the free flow of oil globally. They have diverted tax dollars from the possible development of alternative energy sources and meeting other critical domestic needs. And they have supported dictators and repressive, undemocratic regimes, helping to block the spread of democracy in a region long controlled by colonial rulers and autocrats.

After 35 years of base-building in the region, it’s long past time to look carefully at the effects Washington’s garrisoning of the Greater Middle East has had on the region, the U.S., and the world.

“Vast Oil Reserves”

While the Middle Eastern base buildup began in earnest in 1980, Washington had long attempted to use military force to control this swath of resource-rich Eurasia and, with it, the global economy. Since World War II, as the late Chalmers Johnson, an expert on U.S. basing strategy, explained back in 2004, “the United States has been inexorably acquiring permanent military enclaves whose sole purpose appears to be the domination of one of the most strategically important areas of the world.”

In 1945, after Germany’s defeat, the secretaries of War, State, and the Navy tellingly pushed for the completion of a partially built base in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, despite the military’s determination that it was unnecessary for the war against Japan. “Immediate construction of this [air] field,” they argued, “would be a strong showing of American interest in Saudi Arabia and thus tend to strengthen the political integrity of that country where vast oil reserves now are in American hands.”

By 1949, the Pentagon had established a small, permanent Middle East naval force (MIDEASTFOR) in Bahrain. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy’s administration began the first buildup of naval forces in the Indian Ocean just off the Persian Gulf. Within a decade, the Navy had created the foundations for what would become the first major U.S. base in the region — on the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia.

In these early Cold War years, though, Washington generally sought to increase its influence in the Middle East by backing and arming regional powers like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah, and Israel. However, within months of the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s 1979 revolution overthrowing the Shah, this relatively hands-off approach was no more.

Base Buildup

In January 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced a fateful transformation of U.S. policy. It would become known as the Carter Doctrine. In his State of the Union address, he warned of the potential loss of a region “containing more than two-thirds of the world’s exportable oil” and “now threatened by Soviet troops” in Afghanistan who posed “a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.”

Carter warned that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.” And he added pointedly, “Such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

With these words, Carter launched one of the greatest base construction efforts in history. He and his successor Ronald Reagan presided over the expansion of bases in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the region to host a “Rapid Deployment Force,” which was to stand permanent guard over Middle Eastern petroleum supplies. The air and naval base on Diego Garcia, in particular, was expanded at a quicker rate than any base since the war in Vietnam. By 1986, more than $500 million had been invested. Before long, the total ran into the billions.

Soon enough, that Rapid Deployment Force grew into the U.S. Central Command, which has now overseen three wars in Iraq (1991-2003, 2003-2011, 2014-); the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan (2001-); intervention in Lebanon (1982-1984); a series of smaller-scale attacks on Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011); Afghanistan (1998) and Sudan (1998); and the “tanker war” with Iran (1987-1988), which led to the accidental downing of an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 passengers. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA helped fund and orchestrate a major covert war against the Soviet Union by backing Osama Bin Laden and other extremist mujahidin. The command has also played a role in the drone war in Yemen (2002-) and both overt and covert warfare in Somalia (1992-1994, 2001-).

During and after the first Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon dramatically expanded its presence in the region. Hundreds of thousands of troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the war against Iraqi autocrat and former ally Saddam Hussein. In that war’s aftermath, thousands of troops and a significantly expanded base infrastructure were left in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Elsewhere in the Gulf, the military expanded its naval presence at a former British base in Bahrain, housing its Fifth Fleet there. Major air power installations were built in Qatar, and U.S. operations were expanded in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman.

The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent occupations of both countries, led to a more dramatic expansion of bases in the region. By the height of the wars, there were well over 1,000 U.S. checkpoints, outposts, and major bases in the two countries alone. The military also built new bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (since closed), explored the possibility of doing so in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, and, at the very least, continues to use several Central Asian countries as logistical pipelines to supply troops in Afghanistan and orchestrate the current partial withdrawal.

While the Obama administration failed to keep 58 “enduring” bases in Iraq after the 2011 U.S. withdrawal, it has signed an agreement with Afghanistan permitting U.S. troops to stay in the country until 2024 and maintain access to Bagram Air Base and at least eight more major installations.

An Infrastructure for War

Even without a large permanent infrastructure of bases in Iraq, the U.S. military has had plenty of options when it comes to waging its new war against IS. In that country alone, a significant U.S. presence remained after the 2011 withdrawal in the form of base-like State Department installations, as well as the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad, and a large contingent of private military contractors. Since the start of the new war, at least 1,600 troops have returned and are operating from a Joint Operations Center in Baghdad and a base in Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital, Erbil. Last week, the White House announced that it would request $5.6 billion from Congress to send an additional 1,500 advisers and other personnel to at least two new bases in Baghdad and Anbar Province. Special operations and other forces are almost certainly operating from yet more undisclosed locations.

At least as important are major installations like the Combined Air Operations Center at Qatar’s al-Udeid Air Base. Before 2003, the Central Command’s air operations center for the entire Middle East was in Saudi Arabia. That year, the Pentagon moved the center to Qatar and officially withdrew combat forces from Saudi Arabia. That was in response to the 1996 bombing of the military’s Khobar Towers complex in the kingdom, other al-Qaeda attacks in the region, and mounting anger exploited by al-Qaeda over the presence of non-Muslim troops in the Muslim holy land. Al-Udeid now hosts a 15,000-foot runway, large munitions stocks, and around 9,000 troops and contractors who are coordinating much of the new war in Iraq and Syria.

Kuwait has been an equally important hub for Washington’s operations since U.S. troops occupied the country during the first Gulf War. Kuwait served as the main staging area and logistical center for ground troops in the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. There are still an estimated 15,000 troops in Kuwait, and the U.S. military is reportedly bombing Islamic State positions using aircraft from Kuwait’s Ali al-Salem Air Base.

As a transparently promotional article in the Washington Post confirmed this week, al-Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates has launched more attack aircraft in the present bombing campaign than any other base in the region. That country hosts about 3,500 troops at al-Dhafra alone, as well as the Navy’s busiest overseas port. B-1, B-2, and B-52 long-range bombers stationed on Diego Garcia helped launch both Gulf Wars and the war in Afghanistan. That island base is likely playing a role in the new war as well. Near the Iraqi border, around 1,000 U.S. troops and F-16 fighter jets are operating from at least one Jordanian base. According to the Pentagon’s latest count, the U.S. military has 17 bases in Turkey. While the Turkish government has placed restrictions on their use, at the very least some are being used to launch surveillance drones over Syria and Iraq. Up to seven bases in Oman may also be in use.

Bahrain is now the headquarters for the Navy’s entire Middle Eastern operations, including the Fifth Fleet, generally assigned to ensure the free flow of oil and other resources though the Persian Gulf and surrounding waterways. There is always at least one aircraft carrier strike group — effectively, a massive floating base — in the Persian Gulf. At the moment, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson is stationed there, a critical launch pad for the air campaign against the Islamic State. Other naval vessels operating in the Gulf and the Red Sea have launched cruise missiles into Iraq and Syria. The Navy even has access to an “afloat forward-staging base” that serves as a “lilypad” base for helicopters and patrol craft in the region.

In Israel, there are as many as six secret U.S. bases that can be used to preposition weaponry and equipment for quick use anywhere in the area. There’s also a “de facto U.S. base” for the Navy’s Mediterranean fleet. And it’s suspected that there are two other secretive sites in use as well. In Egypt, U.S. troops have maintained at least two installations and occupied at least two bases on the Sinai Peninsula since 1982 as part of a Camp David Accords peacekeeping operation.

Elsewhere in the region, the military has established a collection of at least five drone bases in Pakistan; expanded a critical base in Djibouti at the strategic chokepoint between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean; created or gained access to bases in Ethiopia, Kenya, and the Seychelles; and set up new bases in Bulgaria and Romania to go with a Clinton administration-era base in Kosovo along the western edge of the gas-rich Black Sea.

Even in Saudi Arabia, despite the public withdrawal, a small U.S. military contingent has remained to train Saudi personnel and keep bases “warm” as potential backups for unexpected conflagrations in the region or, assumedly, in the kingdom itself. In recent years, the military has even established a secret drone base in the country, despite the blowback Washington has experienced from its previous Saudi basing ventures.

Dictators, Death, and Disaster

The ongoing U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, however modest, should remind us of the dangers of maintaining bases in the region. The garrisoning of the Muslim holy land was a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks. (He called the presence of U.S. troops, “the greatest of these aggressions incurred by the Muslims since the death of the prophet.”) Indeed, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization” since a suicide bombing killed 241 marines in Lebanon in 1983. Other attacks have come in Saudi Arabia in 1996, Yemen in 2000 against the U.S.S. Cole, and during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Research has shown a strong correlation between a U.S. basing presence and al-Qaeda recruitment.

Part of the anti-American anger has stemmed from the support U.S. bases offer to repressive, undemocratic regimes. Few of the countries in the Greater Middle East are fully democratic, and some are among the world’s worst human rights abusers. Most notably, the U.S. government has offered only tepid criticism of the Bahraini government as it has violently cracked down on pro-democracy protestors with the help of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Beyond Bahrain, U.S. bases are found in a string of what the Economist Democracy Index calls “authoritarian regimes,” including Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Yemen. Maintaining bases in such countries props up autocrats and other repressive governments, makes the United States complicit in their crimes, and seriously undermines efforts to spread democracy and improve the wellbeing of people around the world.

Of course, using bases to launch wars and other kinds of interventions does much the same, generating anger, antagonism, and anti-American attacks. A recent U.N. report suggests that Washington’s air campaign against the Islamic State had led foreign militants to join the movement on “an unprecedented scale.”

And so the cycle of warfare that started in 1980 is likely to continue. “Even if U.S. and allied forces succeed in routing this militant group,” retired Army colonel and political scientist Andrew Bacevich writes of the Islamic State, “there is little reason to expect” a positive outcome in the region. As Bin Laden and the Afghan mujahidin morphed into al-Qaeda and the Taliban and as former Iraqi Baathists and al-Qaeda followers in Iraq morphed into IS, “there is,” as Bacevich says, “always another Islamic State waiting in the wings.”

The Carter Doctrine’s bases and military buildup strategy and its belief that “the skillful application of U.S. military might” can secure oil supplies and solve the region’s problems was, he adds, “flawed from the outset.” Rather than providing security, the infrastructure of bases in the Greater Middle East has made it ever easier to go to war far from home. It has enabled wars of choice and an interventionist foreign policy that has resulted in repeated disasters for the region, the United States, and the world. Since 2001 alone, U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen have minimally caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and possibly more than one million deaths in Iraq alone.

The sad irony is that any legitimate desire to maintain the free flow of regional oil to the global economy could be sustained through other far less expensive and deadly means. Maintaining scores of bases costing billions of dollars a year is unnecessary to protect oil supplies and ensure regional peace — especially in an era in which the United States gets only around 10% of its net oil and natural gas from the region. In addition to the direct damage our military spending has caused, it has diverted money and attention from developing the kinds of alternative energy sources that could free the United States and the world from a dependence on Middle Eastern oil — and from the cycle of war that our military bases have fed.

David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C.

13 November, 2014
TomDispatch.com