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By Marianne de Nazareth

The horror hit like a jack hammer, while we sat through a UNFCC Congress of the Parties event in Copenhagen a few years ago. Dwarfed by the massive stage she was standing on, a little girl brought the crisis being faced by her country to the world stage. ” Why must my country, The Solomon Islands be submerged and swallowed up by the sea? ” she asked, ” just because you richer nations do not want to cut back on your carbon emissions? What have we done to lose our country? I want my own country, I do not want to have to run away from it, incase it is swallowed up by the rising seas.” He voice rang out clear and true, and I am sure many in the audience squirmed at her questions. Images of her drowning country flashed behind her and it is only then we, who do not face her problem got shaken out of our complacency.

The new Global Environment Outlook report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)says, Governments and the world at large are being confronted by accelerating climate change and environmental challenges to their economies and society. For many Small Island Developing States (SIDS), the experience is even more dramatic and is felt more rapidly because of their small physical scale, geographic isolation, unique biodiversity, exposure to natural hazards and disasters, high population growth coupled with outmigration and significant seasonal in-migration from tourism, limited resource base, remoteness from global markets and small economies of scale.

There are multiple drivers and pressures, beyond global economic stagnation and population growth, affecting the outlooks for SIDS. These include vulnerability to climate change, local access to water, nutrition and food security, energy and transport demand, exploitation of natural resources, local sectoral development, poor management of waste and pollution, coastal squeeze and loss of ecological resilience. SIDS are also threatened by a range of emerging issues, such as social disintegration, and in some instances the disappearance of their national territory.

SIDS in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and South China Sea region, range from the volcanic archipelago of Cape Verde with a semi-desert climate, the savannah and mangrove swamps of Guinea Bissau and the rugged volcanic rocks of São Tomé and Principe located off the west coast of Africa, to the coral islands of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, to the urbanized-tropical rainforest mix of Singapore. All face significant threats from climate change, sea level rise and natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, heavy rains, floods and drought. Many have globally high endemism, and are home to important marine resources including sea turtles and dugongs. With the exception of the wealthy Singapore, these are among the poorest countries in the world.

Invasive species

Marine invasive species have become a focus of concern in many SIDS. In less than a decade, the Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois volitans) has become widely established in the southeast United States and throughout the Caribbean. This highly predatory fish is spreading rapidly and reducing the abundance of key herbivores, thus altering fish communities in reefs. Lionfish occupy the same trophic position as economically important species (e.g. snapper and grouper) and may hamper stock rebuilding efforts and coral reef conservation measures. Longer-term impacts of lionfish abundance could be growth rate reduction of the wave breaking reef crests, which help to protect coastlines from erosion. Across the Caribbean, people are being encouraged to consume lionfish as a means to lower their numbers.

The blue-green economy

Small Island Developing States Need ‘Blue-Green Economy’ Innovations to Adapt to Climate Change Island Nations at a Crucial Turning Point, says the new Global Environment Outlook report released by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). SIDS have in short to learn to help themselves and the report brings out various measures which are critical to SIDS self sufficiency.

According to the report, a blue-green economic strategy, that targets resource efficiency and clean technology, is carbon neutral and socially inclusive, will stimulate economic stability, facilitate job creation, provide a clean and healthy environment and help conserve resources. By focussing on balanced development and the linkages between small-scale fisheries and aquaculture, water, tourism, renewable energy and waste, some of the most critical challenges facing SIDS, such as land and water scarcity, dependence on imported energy, high costs of waste management and the vulnerability of the key sectors, can be addressed.

Cultured pearl farming

Today, cultured pearl farming in the Pacific offers an economic activity in which sound environmental management and conservation are prerequisites to economic success. Pearl oysters are remarkably sensitive organisms and environmental deterioration or sudden ecological changes affect the oyster and hamper its potential for producing a high-quality pearl.

Estimates suggest that 95% of a pearl farm’s income comes from only 2% of its pearls. The more pristine an environment, the healthier the oysters are and the higher the likelihood of harvesting valuable, high-quality pearls.

Pearl farming can be carried out in isolated islands where there are otherwise very limited economic opportunities. Cultured pearls have become important economic pillars in French Polynesia and the Cook Islands as a major source of export revenue. In French Polynesia, pearl farming has reduced pressure on fish stocks, stemmed outer-island emigration, and provided economic alternatives for an economy otherwise heavily reliant on French financial assistance and tourism. At its peak in 2000, the pearl sector provided employment to 7,000 people in French Polynesia. In the Cook Islands, black pearl production is carried out within existing forms of indigenous socio-economic organization.

Small-scale pearl farming contributes so effectively to ecosystem health that it has been sanctioned inside of marine protected areas, such as off Pakin in the Federated States of Micronesia. Now a new integrated marine plan is being implemented in which pearl farming is compensating for the lost income that artisanal reef fishing communities have incurred due to the introduction of no-fishing zones and marine protected areas. This new source of income has created an incentive for conservation by reducing pressure on reef fish stocks, and is increasing the resilience of these communities in the face of climate change.

“Small Island Developing States presently face a number of major challenges and hardships,” said UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. “Many suffer from isolation and high costs associated with long distances from global markets, and lag behind in the adoption of new technologies and innovation. Growing populations concentrated in urban areas are putting stress on island resources and the health effects of unsafe water, poor sanitation and increasingly unhealthy diets. Meanwhile, climate change threatens biodiversity, livelihoods and even the very existence of some island nations.”

“As the world enters the post-2015 era, significant changes both in global policy and on islands themselves were identified by the GEO expert teams from SIDS. Improvements in line with the blue-green economy would include, among other things, economic diversification, economic approaches to improve the management of biodiversity, resource efficiency, and sustainable consumption and production,” he added.

Along with the blue-green economy outlook, the report recommends an ensemble of three other island-centric elements: “technology leapfrogging”, priority to island community and culture and reconnecting with nature.

A blue-green economy outlook requires the development of economic tools to improve the management of biodiversity, using indigenous and local knowledge in decision-making and monitoring. Such tools as the UN System of Environmental and Economic Accounting, natural capital accounting, payment for ecosystem services and carbon trading schemes would contribute to establishing the “right” market prices for natural resources.

information and communication technologies

The report also suggests that SIDS should envisage rapid technological innovation, especially in information and communication technologies, that will help overcome island isolation, create new ways of maintaining social and cultural ties across the island diaspora and help evolve new economic activities.

Some of the hallmarks of technological leapfrogging in the context of SIDS include Information and Communication Technology (ICT) enablement for the benefit of society, phasing out of inefficient technologies and increasing the penetration of renewable sources of energy and materials, as well as the use of traditional knowledge to create scale-appropriate technologies.

Digital technologies have enormous potential to benefit everyday life in SIDS and to tackle disaster risk management and a variety of social challenges. A digital agenda, focused on ICT capabilities to support social cohesion and connectivity, will help improve access to information, reduce energy consumption, support citizen’s lives, revolutionize health services and deliver better public services.

Brain circulation

SIDS will continue to face many challenges when dealing with climate change. For example, in the western Pacific –where the rates of sea level rise on islands such as Tuvalu and Funafuti have been recorded up to 3 times the global average of 2.8-3.6 mm/year – islands are susceptible to extreme sea level events such as storm surges and tidal waves.

In order to deal with such challenges, a very high level of skill and education will be required. Therefore, policies should encouraging “brain circulation”, or the return of skilled people who have emigrated away from the island. In addition, traditional knowledge and activities such as fishing can be combined with other sectors to create new business opportunities.

Healthy traditional and modern elements

There is great potential among SIDS to encourage a healthy island culture combining traditional and modern elements, evolving with the times while maintaining roots in island heritage. Each island community and culture should select what it wants from globalization within island limits, without being passive consumers.

Giving priority to island community and culture involves the promotion of participatory community and indigenous conservation and management; communities that are resilient; widespread collective action and partnership and the development of an island-centric demand side in the global marketplace; and education that has sustainability at its core.

Among participatory and community approaches described in the report is that of building community resilience as a key element in successful climate change adaptation and risk management.

This involves four critical strategies: building coping capacities to withstand and counteract shocks; strengthening existing and developing new early warning systems; strengthening disaster risk reduction capacity in SIDS, for example, through ecosystem-based adaptation such as restoring beaches and mangroves; and actively engaging the international community in reducing the anthropogenic causes of the increased frequency of extreme events, including global warming and environmental degradation.

Reconnecting with nature

Connections with nature have long been important to island peoples. In a blue-green economy outlook scenario, traditional knowledge of the environment would be combined with modern science to increase the integration and harvestable capacity of island ecosystems to restore biodiversity. Coral reef growth could be maintained by careful management and supported by citizen science and monitoring.

A number of SIDS have emphasized improving management and expansion of protected areas (PAs) as a strategy for dealing with biodiversity loss. Between 1990 and 2009, however, only a handful of SIDS showed an increase of over 4 per cent in protected areas. A related strategy is the promotion and implementation of community or indigenous conservation and management areas, which respect and incorporate local and indigenous knowledge.

Similarly, empowering local communities and devolving power to them for managing and restoring forested areas has proven effective in places like Palau and Vanuatu.

The report recommends investments in organic agricultural policies and agritourism – which connects sustainable agriculture with tourism – as ways to increase food self-sufficiency, and notes that many SIDS are already successfully investing money in improving and developing water and wastewater treatment infrastructure. It also stresses that, as part of a blue-green economy outlook, SIDS should place themselves at the forefront of sound coastal zone management policies.

Hopefully all this does help SIDS recover and not just slip under the sea and be a lost home to that little girl forever.

( Marianne de Nazareth is a Freelance science and environment journalist, registered PHD scholar and adjunct faculty, St Joseph’s College of Media studies, Bangalore. )

02 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Gaither Stewart & Paul Carline

Putin’s matter-of-fact statement over last weekend that “If I wanted to I could take Kiev in two weeks”, following his mid-week reminder of Russia’s sometimes forgotten nuclear capacity, was most certainly startling to European Union leaders gathered in Bruxelles to shuffle around EU functions in such way that the bureaucrats—who have made non-elected careers in Bruxelles running as much as possible the lives of Europeans—can keep their jobs.

Putin’s softly spoken words plastered across newspaper headlines shook them out of their reveries. They had hoped the Ukrainian problem would just go away. Now they don’t know what to do. Several countries-members—Slovakia, Hungary and Cyprus oppose sending arms to the Chocolate King Poroshenko’s forces getting whipped by the separatists-terrorists in the Southeast Donbass and losing huge quantities of military hardware and yesterday losing also the Luhansk airport. No one in fact is really sincere about the whole US idea of sanctions. Europe, afflicted by uncertainty about its own identity and the centrifugal forces at work to tear it apart (anti-Europeanists, the secession referendum in Scotland this month, similar movements in Cataluna and the Basques country) has the nerve to give Russia seven days to withdraw its troops from inside Ukraine (which Russia denies) to which Putin responds laconically that “it’s impossible to foresee when the crisis will end.” Putin has repeated a paraphrased version of US East European policymaker Nuland’s words to the EU: “Fuck off!” Merkel is meanwhile really pissed with the Kremlin but can’t do much about it, and probably would not even if she could: half of Russia’s foreign trade is with her Germany.

Restraint? I firmly believe Russia could take back Kiev in much less than two weeks. Maybe overnight. The Ukrainian army might even join in with Russian forces. And the Nazi-Fascist militias? What would they do? Oh, they would fight a bit, but would be overwhelmed by events and quickly melt away. The US/NATO would face exactly the same situation as when Russia quietly took back the Crimea.

But, as Putin intimates in the conditional tense, “ … if he wanted to,” why should he? That is what he is saying. Why should he? He knows. Russians will drink Russian beer instead of Heinekens and wait. Let Poroshenko’s ragged army and any Westerners who join in walk straight into Russia’s arms. The US/NATO has already suffered defeat after defeat in Ukraine: Crimea, the Donbass, Novorossiya, the ignominy of a banana republic political clique trying to manage to stay afloat in Kiev and ridiculously requesting admission into the European Union and NATO. In whose name, anyway, one wonders? The Bandera-Nazi militia whom every Russian and most Ukrainians detest?

While Putin waits patiently, right on Ukraine’s eastern borders, if one even exists, which I doubt. Let NATO or their proxies walk into another Stalingrad.

In this chiefly verbal conflict for everyone except those doing the fighting in southeastern Ukraine, Europe plays the roll of patsy for both the US and Russia. Obama in Washington can incite Europe to violent words and sanctions and expressions of solidarity for which it then must pay the bill. Russia can direct its political maneuvering, its solidarity with the Ukrainian people, its opposition to the US-backed puppet government in Kiev, and direct its counter-sanctions against a vulnerable Europe still in the throes of economic crisis.

Putin’s restraint. Russian patience. America’s unknowing.

Gaither Stewart serves as a Senior Editor and European correspondent at The Greanville Post and Cyrano’s Journal Today. A retired journalist, his latest novel is The Fifth Sun (Punto Press). He’s also the author of several other books, including the Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Malena. Gaither can be contacted at gaithers@greanvillepost.com

Paul Carline – writer, critic, democracy activist, and regular contributor to New Review and Senior Contributing Editor of The Greanville Post

02 September, 2014
Cjournal.info

 

By Souad Mekhennet

No, the enemy of our enemy is not our friend.

In recent years, President Obama, his European friends, and even some Middle Eastern allies, have supported “rebel groups” in Libya and Syria. Some received training, financial and military support to overthrow Muammar Gadhafi and battle Bashar al Assad. It’s a strategy that follows the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and it has been the American and allied approach for decades in deciding whether to support opposition groups and movements.

The problem is that it is completely unreliable — and often far worse than other strategies. Every year there are more cases in which this approach backfires. The most glaring and famous failure was in Afghanistan, where some of the groups taught (and supplied) to fight the Soviet Army later became stridently anti-Western. In that environment, Al Qaeda flourished and established the camps where perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were trained. Yet instead of learning from its mistakes, the United States keeps making them.

Washington and its allies empowered groups whose members had either begun with anti-American or anti-Western views or found themselves lured to those ideas in the process of fighting. According to interviews with members of militant groups, such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s Al Nusra Front (which is aligned with al Qaeda), that is exactly what happened with some of the fighters in Libya and even with factions of the Free Syrian Army.

“In the East of Syria, there is no Free Syrian Army any longer. All Free Syrian Army people [there] have joined the Islamic State,” says Abu Yusaf, a high-level security commander of the Islamic State, whom The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola wrote about last week.

The Islamic State is the most successful group for now, controlling the main areas of Syrian oil and gas fields. It has also acquired large amounts of cash, gold (from banks in the areas they control) and weapons in its fight against the armies in Syria and Iraq. “When the Iraqi Army fled from Mosul and the other areas, they left behind all the good equipment the Americans had given them,” Abu Yusaf says.

“From IS to the Mahdi army you see groups that basically are not our friends but who became more powerful because we have handled the situations wrong,” says a senior U.S. security official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity.

Some European and Arab intelligence officials also voiced their worries and frustration about what they call the mistakes the United States has made in handling the uprisings in Arab states. “We had, in the early stages, information that radical groups had used the vacuum of the Arab Spring, and that some of the people the U.S. and their allies had trained to fight for ‘democracy’ in Libya and Syria had a jihadist agenda — already or later, [when they] joined al Nusra or the Islamic State,” a senior Arab intelligence official said in a recent interview. He said that often his U.S. counterparts would say things like, “We know you are right, but our president in Washington and his advisers don’t believe that.” Those groups, say Western security officials, are threats not only in the Middle East, but also in the United States and Europe, where they have members and sympathizers.

The official’s account has been corroborated by members of the Islamic State in and outside the Middle East, including Abu Yusaf, the military commander. In several interviews conducted in the last two months, they described how the collapse of security during Arab Spring uprisings helped them recruit, regroup and use the Western strategy – to support and train groups that fight dictators — for their own benefits. “There had [also] been … some British and Americans who had trained us during the Arab Spring times in Libya,” said a man who calls himself Abu Saleh and who only agreed to be interviewed if his real identity remained secret.

Abu Saleh, who is originally from a town close to Benghazi, said he and a group of other Libyans received training and support in their country from French, British, and American military and intelligence personnel — before they joined the Al Nusra Front or the Islamic State. Western and Arab military sources interviewed for this article, confirmed Abu Saleh’s account that “training” and “equipment” were given to rebels in Libya during the fight against the Gadhafi regime.

Abu Saleh left Libya in 2012 for Turkey and then crossed into Syria. “First I fought under what people call the ‘Free Syrian Army’ but then switched to Al Nusra. And I have already decided I will join the Islamic State when my wounds are healed,” the 28-year-old said from a hospital in Turkey, where he is receiving medical treatment. He had been injured during a battle with the Syrian Army, he said, and was brought to Turkey with false documents. “Some of the Syrian people who they trained have joined the Islamic State and others jabhat al Nusra,” he said, smiling. He added, “Sometimes I joke around and say that I am a fighter made by America.”

For a long time, Western and Arab states supported the Free Syrian Army not only with training but also with weapons and other materiel. The Islamic State commander, Abu Yusaf, added that members of the Free Syrian Army who had received training — from the United States, Turkey and Arab military officers at an American base in Southern Turkey — have now joined the Islamic State. “Now many of the FSA people who the West has trained are actually joining us,” he said, smiling.

These militants are preparing for the day that Western governments catch on. “We do know the U.S. will go after the Islamic State at some stage, and we are ready for it. But they should not underestimate the answer they will get,” said an IS sympathizer in Europe who goes by the name Abu Farouk. He added that the “unconditional support” of the United States toward the government of outgoing premier Nuri al-Maliki, which he says has oppressed Iraqi Sunnis, and America’s “pampering Iran,” which is mainly Shia, made the Islamic State a more attractive alternative for some Sunnis who felt angry about double standards.

“Thanks to the Arab spring and the West fighting all these rulers for us, we had enough time to grow and recruit in the Middle East, Europe and the U.S,” Abu Farouk said. Then he paused for some seconds and smiled. “Actually, we should say, thank you, Mr. President.”

Souad Mekhennet, co-author of “The Eternal Nazi,” is a visiting fellow at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and the Geneva Centre for Security policy.

18 August 2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

By Stefan Steinberg

With a handful of exceptions, a shroud of silence has been drawn by the international media regarding the fate of Malaysian Airlines MH17, which crashed over Ukraine nearly six weeks ago.

Immediately after the plane crash on July 17, leading US officials, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the fore along with sections of the US and European media, alleged, without a shred of evidence, that the passenger jet had been shot down by a Russian missile fired by pro-Russian separatists operating in eastern Ukraine. The completely unfounded allegations were then used to create a frenzied political climate to justify the imposition of wide-ranging sanctions by the US and the European Union against Russia.

Since the crash there has been deliberate stalling on the part of Western authorities in releasing relevant information. At the start of this month Dutch investigators leading the inquiries announced they would release a preliminary report “in a few weeks.” Now, with only days before the end of the month, no such report has been issued. This is despite the fact that the Dutch co-ordinator for the struggle against terrorism admitted in parliament that the Dutch authorities already have extensive data from the black boxes and other sources in their possession.

One article which has raised questions regarding the silence surrounding the crash appeared recently in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The magazine has played a particularly vile role in the US-led propaganda campaign to blame Russia for the crash. On the cover of its July 28 edition Der Spiegel featured photos of MH17 victims with the prominent red lettered text “Stop Putin Now!”. In its latest edition, the magazine again raises the banner of German militarism in a lead article deploring the state of the German army and arguing for a massive increase in military sending.

However, in one article on the crash, headlined “The strange silence of the investigators”, the magazine attempts to backtrack somewhat and at least intimate there are good reasons to doubt the official line put out by Washington and Brussels. The article refers to a letter sent to Barack Obama at the end of July by a group of former US intelligence officers. In their letter the group, known as VIPS, accused Secretary of State Kerry of attempting to use the crash to blacken Russia, recalling other blatant provocations by the Obama administration, such as the claim that Syria was responsible for chemical weapon attacks. The Obama administration has never responded to the allegations made in the VIPS letter.

The Spiegel article then goes on to quote reports in the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times, which charge Ukraine with responsibility for the crash, citing one journalist who writes: “It is farcical that the country known for overseeing the world’s most sophisticated and far-reaching surveillance capabilities has sunk to citing grainy YouTube videos to justify its policy decisions.”

Noting that Dutch authorities already have considerable information about the details of the crash which they have undoubtedly shared with their German counterparts, the Spiegel article warns that it is unlikely that the black box recordings will ever be released in full. The Dutch investigation team recently announced that there were alleged legal grounds for withholding evidence from the boxes.

The failure of the media to raise the issue of the fate of MH17 prompted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to query on Monday why the plane’s black box recordings had not been released publicly. It appears, Lavrov said, that apart from Russia, “everyone else has lost interest in the investigation.”

Lavrov also asked why Ukraine had not yet provided recordings of conversations between air traffic controllers in the nearby airport of Dnepropetrovsk. Kiev has up until now persistently refused to publish the recordings of the conversations between the MH17 pilot and Ukrainian air traffic controllers.

Lavrov noted that Russia had contacted the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the United Nations aviation agency, and offered to provide its own information on the crash, but noted that “so far there is nothing transparent to be seen there either.”

Lavrov concluded: “We must not allow the investigation of the MH17 crash to be manipulated into oblivion as already happened to investigations of many Ukrainian tragedies, including the sniper assault against civilians in Kiev in February, massacres in Odessa and Mariupol in May, and others.”

Bearing in mind the leading role played by the US in utilizing the crash of MH17 to create the conditions for a confrontation with Russia, there can be no doubt that the administration in Washington and US intelligence services are in close contact with the Dutch authorities and are complicit in the efforts to bury the truth about what really took place on July 17.

29 August, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Niles Williamson

The Obama administration and NATO officials on Thursday escalated threats against Russia over the alleged incursion of two columns of Russian tanks and troops into eastern Ukraine. Moscow has denied accusations that its troops are actively involved in the country.

In an afternoon press conference, US President Barack Obama declared that Russian actions were further confirmation that Moscow was fomenting the unrest and has “routinely violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” While he refrained from characterizing Russia’s actions as an invasion, he said that it was a “continuation” of the sort of Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine that has been occurring for the last several weeks.

“These separatists are backed, trained, armed, financed by Russia,” Obama declared. “Throughout this process we’ve seen deep Russian involvement in everything that they’ve done.” The US president pledged “additional steps” to punish Moscow for supporting the separatists, including new economic sanctions coordinated with Europe.

In fact, it was not Russia that stoked the conflict in Ukraine but rather the United States, along with Germany, which funneled billions of dollars to opposition groups, backing a right-wing coup in February with the support of fascist forces. The White House is strongly backing the Ukrainian government of President Petro Poroshenko as it carries out a brutal war against predominantly Russian-speaking cities in the east.

More than 2,249 people have been killed and more than 6,000 injured in military operations in the Donbass region of Ukraine. The American government has supported the military siege of two major European cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, cutting off electricity and running water to hundreds of thousands of civilians. Residential neighborhoods and hospitals have been subjected to artillery fire from Ukrainian armed forces.

The shelling of the eastern cities of Donetsk by Ukrainian forces continued on Thursday, injuring 15 people and destroying several homes and businesses. Over the course of the previous day, 16 civilians were killed and a further 22 injured by continued shelling.

The latest developments in eastern Ukraine have opened up a new front in the conflict in eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian armed forces and further raised the possibility of war between the United States and Russia.

While stating that “we are not taking military action to solve the Ukrainian problem,” Obama provocatively declared that “a number of those states who are close” to Ukraine and Russia are members of NATO, “and we take our Article Five commitments to defend each other very seriously—and that includes the smallest NATO members as well as the largest.”

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, many former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe joined NATO, including Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Since the coup in February, the US and NATO have moved to increase their military presence in all these countries. Article Five of the treaty states that an armed attack on any NATO country is considered an attack on all members.

As a means of justifying a further military buildup of NATO forces in Eastern Europe and the imposition of ever more harsh economic sanctions, the United States and its European allies have very consciously sought, at every point, to force Russia to respond.

The United States is seeking to turn Ukraine into a NATO outpost for threatening Russia. This is highlighted by the fact that Poroshenko will be the only non-NATO head of state attending the NATO summit in Wales next week. Proshenko is also scheduled to meet with President Obama at the White House next month.

These military moves have been coupled with the implementation of harsh austerity measures in Ukraine itself, targeting the entire working class.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Thursday for pro-Russian separatists to open up a corridor to allow Ukrainian troops to flee into Russia. Putin called on the rebels to, “avoid meaningless victims and provide them with the opportunity to freely withdraw from the battlefield area.” At least five Ukrainian National Guard battalions were reported to have been surrounded since Tuesday, when pro-Russian separatists engaged in a fierce battle to retake the town of Ilovaisk.

NATO released satellite images that it claims shows Russian artillery and other equipment well inside Ukrainian territory. A senior NATO officer, Brigadier General Nico Tak, stated that the images, “provide additional evidence that Russian combat soldiers, equipped with heavy weapons, are operating inside Ukraine’s sovereign territory.”

One image purportedly shows Russian self-propelled artillery moving on a road near Krasnodon, Ukraine on August 21 just across the border from the Russian city of Donetsk. Another image shows the same artillery set up in firing positions outside of Krasnodon, while the several other images released by NATO show artillery and military units deployed on the Russian side of the border.

Tak also said that NATO had evidence that more than 1,000 Russian soldiers were fighting with the rebels in Ukraine. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, said on Thursday that between three and four thousand Russian volunteers are fighting alongside the Ukrainian separatists, and that many of these were military men on leave. He stated, “There is no secret that among the volunteers from Russia there are many military men. They are fighting together with us because they understand that it’s their duty.”

Poroshenko responded to the developments in the east by canceling a scheduled trip to Turkey. “The situation is certainly extremely difficult and nobody is going to simplify it. Still, it is controlled enough for us to refrain from panic,” Poroshenko said.

Ukrainian security council spokesman Andriy Lysenko accused Moscow of sending troops and tanks across the border in a bid to create a land bridge to the territory of Crimea, which Russia annexed in March. Lysenko also announced that the security council had made a decision to reintroduce compulsory military service starting in the fall.

29 August, 2014
WSWS.org

 

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

The Coming Helium-3-Based Fusion Power Economy

August 2014—When the authors of this study decided last year to set out a new concept for peace in the 21st Century, by producing a revised version of the World Land-Bridge program—23 years after the first proposal for the Eurasian Land-Bridge—it was their intention not only to provide a concept for reconstruction of the world economy, but to present a war-avoidance strategy in the context of an acute strategic crisis at the same time. For in the intervening years, the danger of an intentional—or even an accidental—thermonuclear world war has grown dramatically. The attempt, fed by geopolitical motives, to associate Ukraine with the EU, and thus bring it, de facto, into the NATO sphere of influence, has triggered a series of escalating confrontations, which, in the worst case, could end in the extinction of the human race.

But in addition, nearly the entire Near and Middle East is burning; set off by wars built on lies, against so-called rogue states, the seeds of violence were sown which have called to life a million-headed hydra, which has not only leveled the Cradle of Civilization to the ground, and created there a Hell on Earth, but has also become an existential threat to the West.

The consequences of this policy of “regime change” have long thrown large parts of Africa into chaos, and overrun the continent with wars of terror and civil wars. But there are also geostrategic conflicts breeding in the Pacific, which have the potential to set loose regional wars and beyond. And since absolutely nothing has been done to remedy the causes for the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the TBTF (too-big-to-fail) banks are, on average, 30-40% bigger today than they were then, the indebtedness still more massive, and the derivatives bubble grown to nearly $2 quadrillion; so that a new systemic crisis could result at any moment, this time, given the strategic situation we have sketched here, with the danger that chaos will be triggered, making a strategic catastrophe unavoidable.

The entire world thus finds itself in such an alarming condition that one can only wonder how those responsible for the so-called Western community of values could have let things get to this point.

Pope Francis, who has characterized the global financial and economic system as “intolerable,” recently put it this way, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia: “In order for the system to continue, wars must be waged, as great empires have always done. But mankind cannot bear a third world war, and so it seizes on regional wars.”

Though one could not put it better than the Pope has done, in this case, he underestimates the satanic energy of the system of globalization, which is ready to defend its privileges with all weapons available. One hundred years after the First World War, we find ourselves in a very similar geopolitical situation, except that this time there are thermonuclear weapons whose use would wipe out the human race.

There Is an Alternative
Meanwhile, an alternative to the collapsing trans-Atlantic system has been created; the attempts of that system to use supranational institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, TTP, TTIP, and similar monetarist instruments of globalization, to extend a worldwide imperium, have produced an opposition which might not have been expected to manifest itself as it has.

In less than one year, an alliance of nations has been created, which has built a parallel economic order with giant steps, one which is dedicated exclusively to the building of the real economy, in opposition to the maximization of speculative monetary profit, and which now includes more than half of mankind. This new community of nations represents a power center based on economic growth, and above all, on leading-edge technology, one which belongs to the future, as shown above all by the success of the Chinese lunar exploration program, focused on the idea of bringing large quantities of helium-3 from the Moon back to Earth, for the future economy of thermonuclear fusion power. It points the way to a scientific and technological revolution which will increase, by orders of magnitude, the energy-flux density, both in production processes on Earth, and in fuels for space travel, and thereby introduce a completely new phase in the evolution of the human species.

The first step in the direction of a new economic world order was the announcement by Chinese President Xi Jinping at a conference in Kazakstan in July of last year, that China would build a new Silk Road Economic Belt, through Central Asia to Europe, in the tradition of the ancient Silk Road. Then, in October, in a trip to Indonesia and Malaysia, Xi took the initiative to involve all of Southeast Asia in the construction of the Maritime Silk Road.

At the summit meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi, on May 20 in Shanghai, and Putin’s state visit to China on the occasion of the 4th Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Shanghai on May 21, extensive plans for collaboration of the two great powers were signed, including a 30-year natural gas agreement, and 46 additional bilateral accords. At the end of the summit, the two heads of state published a common declaration of intent, stating that both countries wished to create a new economic architecture in the Asia-Pacific region, oppose interference in the internal affairs of other nations, and intend to coordinate, as much as possible, their responses to important foreign policy questions on which they agree.

They named, among others, one goal of this collaboration as follows: “Increasing the effectiveness of collaboration in high-technology areas, priority projects in the international use of nuclear energy, civil aviation, and a program of cooperation in basic research on space flight, satellite observation of the Earth, satellite navigation, and research into deep space and manned space travel.” A further militarization of space should, on the contrary, be prevented, and the unilateral stationing of missile defense installations was judged to be a “destabilizing factor for the world.” Other goals include innovative research, improvement of agricultural techniques, and increasing agricultural production. They also expressed the intention to reform the international financial architecture.

The 30-year Russia-China natural gas treaty, with a total value of $400 billion, can be called historic. The two countries’ cooperation in the petroleum field is also to be deepened; coal mines in Russia will be jointly developed; additional power plants will be built in Russia to supply electricity to China; and there will be collaboration on many other projects in infrastructure, transportation, water, and nature conservation.

Of still greater importance is President Putin’s support for President Xi’s strategic initiative to expand the New Silk Road. Their common statement says:

“Russia recognizes the enormous significance of the Chinese initiative for the building of the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt,’ and particularly appreciates the readiness of the Chinese side to take Russian interests into account in its development and realization. Both sides will seek further opportunities to combine the perspective of the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ with the conception of the ‘Eurasian Economic Union.’ Toward this purpose, they intend to deepen the cooperation of the relevant agencies in the realization of both projects, especially in the development of transportation routes and infrastructure.”

The BRICS Summit
Other nations were then drawn into this collaboration at the May 20-21 4th Summit Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia in Shanghai. On July 16, the 6th BRICS Summit was held in Fortaleza, Brazil; on the following day, the Latin American heads of state and government joined the conference, and thus, 48% of humanity was represented at this meeting.

At the BRICS Summit itself, and in a series of multilateral and bilateral discussions within and around this summit, the heads of state agreed on the creation of an entirely new economic and financial system, representing a fundamental alternative to the casino economy of the present system of globalization, which is based on maximized profit of the few, and impoverishment of billions of people. Included in the 72 points of the “Declaration of Fortaleza” is the real thunderbolt: the announcement of the creation of a new financial architecture. The new architecture was launched with the formation of a New Development Bank with an initial capitalization of $50 billion, and a Currency Reserve Agreement (CRA) with an initial capacity of $100 billion to help participating nations defend themselves against capital flight and other forms of financial warfare.

China had already previously decided to found an “Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,” the AIIB, to have an initial capitalization of $100 billion, with the invited participation from the start of more than 30 countries. Xinhua quoted Jin Liqun, under whose direction the Chinese Finance Ministry placed the founding of the Bank:

“The means of the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank fall far short of satisfying the hunger for more infrastructure…. The Bank will open a new financing channel for developing countries, especially for those with low income…. In October 2013, during a visit to Indonesia, China’s President Xi Jinping proposed an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to support economic integration.”

The general secretary of the Chinese Center for International Economic Exchanges emphasized that the AIIB is to be an open and freely accessible platform, welcoming not only nations in Asia, but also others, such as the United States and the European countries. Up to this point, the nations of ASEAN, at a summit in Myanmar, on Aug. 9, agreed to deepen their cooperation with China on “New Silk Road” development projects, while Thailand and Singapore agreed to join the AIIB as charter members, as has Bangladesh. South Korea, despite direct U.S. pressure not to join, is considering charter membership, and requested that Seoul be considered as a possible location for the Bank.

In the course of this series of summits, collaboration was decided upon, among the various states, in a large number of projects, above all, the development of nuclear energy in Russia, China, India, Brazil, Argentina, and South Africa, and also, such groundbreaking projects as a second Panama Canal to be built by China through Nicaragua, and a transcontinental high-speed rail connection from Brazil to Peru.

The multiplicity of projects decided on among this community of nations in the areas of infrastructure, energy, industry, agriculture, research, and education, has reached a dimension which dwarfs the investments made by the U.S.A. and Europe in the same spheres over the past 30 years. The claims that Russia is only a “regional power,” and China only a “cheap-production country,” as was said at hastily arranged seminars at various thinktanks on the theme of the allegedly minor significance of the BRICS nations, have rather the character of whistling past the graveyard.

For in reality, there are now two economic and financial systems built on completely different principles. One, the trans-Atlantic system, as an imperial structure, seeks constantly to extend the boundaries of its sphere of power through supranational structures which threaten the sovereignty of other nations. It forces regime change against governments it disapproves of, insists on submission to a “consensus,” and in the process, uses methods which do indeed produce an aura of domination for a while, and the feeling of powerlessness among the populations dominated in this way, but it ultimately goes the way of all empires. The moment this aura of power fades, whether because the imperial financial system is bankrupt, or because the people realize the hollowness of the values handed down, then the capability for intimidation disappears.

The newly arising system of the BRICS nations and the countries associated with them, bases itself on entirely different principles. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi formulated it most expressively at the plenary session of the summit: “BRICS is unique as an international institution. In the first instance, it unifies a group of nations, not on the basis of their existing prosperity or common identities, but rather their future potentials. The idea of the BRICS itself is thus already aligned with the future.”

Modi stressed that the high percentage of young people, in India for example, represents an enormous potential for the future, and proposed forming a BRICS forum for young scientists, and a school of languages “offering language training in all of our languages.” Modi made an appeal: “Excellencies, we have an opportunity to define the future—not only for our countries, but for the entire world…. I conceive that as a great challenge.”

The Future Lies in Outer Space
Nicholas of Cusa, the founder of modern natural science and a revolutionary scientific method, came to the conclusion, in the 15th Century, that every human being who strives to do so must be capable of reproducing virtually the entire evolution of the universe in its essential qualitative levels of development, and that this standpoint makes it possible to determine the necessary next step in scientific progress.

Today, this necessary next discovery, which defines the future for the entire world, is the conquest of the energy source that will bestow energy and raw materials security on mankind for thousands of years into the future: the utilization of thermonuclear fusion power on the basis of helium-3.

Therefore, the success of the Chinese Chang’e-3 mission this past December, in achieving a soft landing of the “Jade Rabbit” rover on the Moon, was a milestone in achieving this goal. The Chang’e-4 mission will follow immediately this year, in preparation for Chang’e-5 in 2017, which can start the phase of flight back and forth between the Earth and the Moon, in preparation for the future industrial exploitation of the Moon. This will bring within reach, the separation of the helium-3 found on the Moon in great quantities, for the nuclear fusion economy on Earth.

In the scientific collaboration among the BRICS nations, but above all, among Russia, China, and India, helium-3 plays a prominent role, because as a fuel for fusion, in contradistinction to deuterium-tritium, it does not produce energetic neutrons, which are very problematic for the reactor materials, but instead produces positively charged protons, which makes possible a revolution in energy generation. Instead of producing energy through the customary method via steam and turbines, in which there is a great energy loss, it will become possible to convert the energy of fusion reactions directly into electricity, at much higher efficiencies.

But Russia, too, according to the Russian space agency Roskosmos, plans a mission between 2016 and 2025, which is intended to create the basis for the industrial exploitation of the Moon. In the first phase, this involves robotic infrastructure for work on the Moon, thus, among other things mobile cranes, dredges, and cable-laying machines. After the landing probe “Luna Globe 1” in 2015, and the orbital module “Luna Globe 2” in 2016, then in 2017 the hard-landing apparatus “Luna Resource,” developed together with the Indian Space Research Agency, will reach the lunar surface and, among other tasks, convey the Indian lunar vehicle onto the Moon.

The collaboration among China, Russia, and India is paradigmatic for the new area of mankind, in which we—instead of plunging ourselves into geopolitical wars—will concentrate on the common aims of mankind. With the attainment of energy security for at least 10,000 years on the basis of helium-3-fed thermonuclear fusion power, and with the technologies associated with this, such as the fusion torch technique which will enable raw materials security by reducing waste and all types of materials into isotopes which can be recomposed as needed, mankind will reach a completely new economic platform on the basis of a very high energy-flux density. This new economic platform begins a new age of mankind. The utilization of helium-3 sources for the fusion economy will be the game-changer which will revolutionize all relationships in science, economy, and politics on the Earth and in the Solar System.

It is obvious that a continuation of the geopolitical thinking which already led to two world wars in the 20th Century, into a third, and this time, a thermonuclear world war, will cause the extinction of mankind. Instead of seeing the rise of China as a threat to the West’s supposed geopolitical interests—and thus, as the American Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey has repeatedly warned, groping around in a new “Thucydides Trap”—we need a new conception, a new paradigm which considers the development perspective of mankind as a whole.

A New Economic Order
The late German-American space pioneer Krafft Ehricke described the long arc of evolution as an upward development, in which, at first, life spread from the sea to the continents by means of photosynthesis in plant world, and then led gradually to the rise of biological species of high complexity and metabolism with higher energy-flux density. He described how the human species, as the highest expression of this evolution up to now, initially settled on the coasts and the shores of rivers, and then along roads and canals, and finally along railroads and modern infrastructure, making the landlocked regions of the continents more and more accessible.

This process is still not completed—and exactly this is the goal of the World Land-Bridge presented in this study, to achieve the infrastructural development of the continents of the Earth. krafft Ehricke saw, in space travel and the colonization of the universe, the natural next phase of the evolution of mankind, and saw in the industrialization of the Moon, in particular, the springboard for excursions of human beings into the Solar System and potentially beyond. He was convinced that the evolution of the human species would only effectively reach adulthood with manned space travel; that only the “great challenge of the extraterrestrial imperative,” as Krafft Ehricke called it, will raise mankind to its true purpose and destiny: namely, representing through its power of reason, the only creative species (known up to now), to act on verifiable universal principles, and not on the illusory world of sense-perceptions

By doing so, the human species will achieve a considerable advance in bringing its relationships to this planet and to near-Earth space, into harmony with the cosmic order. Perhaps the most important contribution of Lyndon LaRouche consists in that by the further development of the Leibnizian term “physical economy,” he has created a theory of scientific economy which corresponds to the real laws of development of the physical universe.

One of its basic concepts is that it is indispensable for the continuously sustained existence of the human race that its relative potential population density should increase on the basis of rising energy-flux densities in the production process, because at any arbitrary stage of economic development, there is a relative exhaustion of resources. The entire history of human development, particularly the most recent 10,000 years, in which the population potential has risen from a few millions to presently over 7 billion, demonstrates the correlation of the anti-entropic character of human creativity with the knowable universal principles of the physical universe.

The use of the helium-3 resources on the Moon for the fusion economy on the Earth also recalls in an interesting way the controversy between Plato and Nicholas of Cusa, over whether ideas possess an existence already effectively present in the objective universe, independent of mankind, or whether it is only with human creativity that these ideas are created. Helium-3 supplies on the Moon are, in the first instance, only deposits in the upper layer of the regolith. Only human creativity, in mastering thermonuclear fusion power, makes these isotopes into the fuel which can even exceed the power of nuclear fusion in the Sun!

But mankind has reached a phase-change not only from the scientific standpoint, but also from that of universal history; that is, the end of geopolitics is necessary for the survival of the species. Shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, LaRouche proposed the “Productive Triangle Paris-Berlin-Vienna” infrastructure program, and thereby, the plan to make this triangle the scientific motor and starting point for development corridors for the transformation of the Comecon states (the then-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe).

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, and thus the Iron Curtain disappeared, Schiller Institute teams further elaborated this program into the conception of the Eurasian Land-Bridge. Thus the idea was developed of linking the population and industrial centers of Europe with Asia by so-called development corridors, and thus providing the landlocked regions of Eurasia with the same site-characteristics which the regions with ocean or river access already had.

In the 23 years which have passed since then, this idea has not only been presented in innumerable conferences and seminars in cities around the world, but also further filled out into the idea of the World Land-Bridge. The linking of peoples through this World Land-Bridge is now the realistic perspective emerging from the collaboration of the BRICS nations, Latin America, and the ASEAN nations, and in which the U.S.A., Europe, and Africa must urgently participate.

A new strategy for mankind means the ability, from now on, to see the human species as a unity, and to see that unity in the process of mutual development. Thus, along with Friedrich Schiller, we see no contradiction whatsoever between the inviolability of national sovereignty, which is guaranteed by the law of nations and by the United Nations Charter, and the rationality of the world citizen who has in view the interests of mankind as a whole. For this unity lies in the higher development of all; the concordance of the macrocosm requires the maximal development of all microcosms to their reciprocal benefit, as Nicholas of Cusa said.

This also signifies a new model of cooperation among the nations of the world. It means that all potential treaty organizations and alliances must be inclusive, that they cannot be for the security and economic interests of some nations, while excluding others. While the support of mutual development is the premise, they must nonetheless respect the different levels of development, history, culture, and social systems, and above all, respect national sovereignty. That is Cusa’s idea of unity in multiplicity, and it must be inspired by a tender love for the idea of the community of nations, for the idea of mankind as the creative species.

We must learn to view this mankind from the same perspective as the astronauts, cosmonauts, and Taikonauts have seen it, as so wonderfully expressed by one of the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon:

“The fact is that evolution is now taking place in space, as much as on Earth. Man has shown that as a species mankind was willing to commit itself to living in environments that were completely different than those in which the species evolved—with a shield of life around ourselves in order to protect the life within. But the willingness to go out there, is there. We’ve shown that. The curve of human evolution has been bent.”[1]

Translated from German by Paul Gallagher

 

By Roman Baudzus

In the aftermath of the downing of the Malaysian airliner in Ukraine, the Western media followed Washington’s lead and manipulated reports in order to make Europeans believe that Russia and Russian-supported separatists in eastern Ukraine were responsible for downing the airliner. In Germany, the press was an extension of Washington’s propaganda machine despite the lack of evidence from both Washington and Kiev to support their irresponsible claims.

It was not long, however, before the public mood in Europe began to turn. A pivotal factor was openly voiced U.S. threats in a law that had been passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate of the U.S. Congress that could eventually result in an invasion of the Netherlands by United States army forces. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/internationales-strafgericht-us-kongress-droht-niederlanden-mit-invasion-a-200430.html

When this was learned outrage was expressed not only within the Dutch government, but also among the population of the country. According to the law, if it should ever happen that American citizens are brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and accused at The Hague, Washington would exercise the preemptive right to invade the country in order to prevent prosecution.

Remember that Malaysia’s government had permitted a tribunal in 2011, whose judges in the tradition of British court proceedings condemned both George W. Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111128105712109215.html Some Europeans are asking if there could be a connection between the ruling of this tribunal and the loss of two Malaysian airliners.

In addition, alert and intelligent Europeans have caught on to Washington’s campaign to demonize Russia. A Dutch group of professors sent an open letter to Russian president Vladimir Putin on August 12 in which the signatories officially apologized for the propaganda lies sprewed by Western media. http://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/an-open-letter-from-the-netherlands-to-putin-we-are-sorry/

The former “quality media” in Europe have lost the confidence of readers. A growing number of Europeans relying on Internet sites such as www.paulcraigroberts.org are quite well informed about the propagandistic nature of the Western mainstream media.

The chart recently published by a leading German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) indicates that for one reason or the other, Germans have turned away from German newspapers. The cumulative sales of German newspapers reached their climax back in the year 1983 – with a circulation of 30.1 million copies.

Ever since, things have been deteriorating. In 2013, the circulation shrank to only 17.3 million sold copies – a significant decline of 42.5%, which really hurts many publishers. Persistent cost-reduction programs, massive job cuts and the demise of daily newspapers such as the Financial Times Deutschland are the consequence of newspapers in vassalage to Washington. Many excuses are made for the decline, but the real reason is that German newspapers no longer take
their readers seriously

Germans wonder why their reunited country is still occupied by US troops 69 years after the end of World War II, why their country has no foreign policy independent of Washington, and why the German media provides no public discussion of these highly unusual characteristics of an allegedly sovereign state.

During the last several years the media’s propagandistic character has led to massive resistance among newspaper readers, especially in Germany. You only have to take a look at the comments published on Internet sites of the mainstream media to see angry and disappointed readers turn away from their once favorite newspapers that are accused of actively participating in Washington´s propaganda campaign. Readers see propaganda instead of investigative journalism. In place of evidence and honest reports, there are insinuations and ridiculous accusations. The German newspaper Die Welt even blamed the outbreak of the ebola virus on Russia! http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article131459175/Russland-hat-Ebola-zur-Waffe-gemacht.html

Given the danger of Washington pushing Europe into war with Russia, one can be glad that so many Europeans see through the perfidious propaganda lies spread by the mainstream media. Internet sites now perform the role abandoned by newspapers. These mainly independent internet media refer to themselves as alternative media, which have the goal to provide objective and truthful information in place of propaganda.

Some of the large German newspapers destroyed what little credibility they had left when they used social media to spread their claim that the negative comments on their websites were written by people on the payroll of Vladimir Putin. One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry over this grotesque assertion.

The unanswered question is why does German mainstream media serve Washington instead of Germany? Does Washington pay well for propaganda services?

If we now come to the recent events in Ferguson, these incidents made us realize that the U.S. police state is not just on the rise, but is already in place! Scenes on TV and Internet videos of brutal militarized police equipped for battlefield combat applying extreme violence to protesters and journalists alike has raised the question in Europe whether America is a democracy or a police state. The continuing American massacre of people in the Middle East, together with Washington’s support for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians and now the massacre of Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine by the government that Washington installed in Kiev have changed the image of America from white hat to black hat. America no longer reassures us; America frightens us.

In a recent story Die Welt journalist Ansgar Graw wrote: “The day when the U.S. police became my enemy.”

Even Washington’s German media vassals reporting for Die Welt have now experienced firsthand the full brunt of American police violence. See http://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article131363772/Der-Tag-an-dem-die-US-Polizei-mein-Feind-wurde.html and http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/krawalle-in-ferguson-panzer-gegen-protestler/10356412.html

German journalists who have been living in the United States for 15 years are telling their readers that they have come to the decision to leave the US. They report that things have changed for the worse in the “land of the free” since 9/11, and that they were threatened, handcuffed and arrested for covering the protests in Ferguson.

The policeman who killed the 18-year old black man set off protests, the response to which opened the world’s eyes to the transformation of America into a police state. A country whose military bases occupy much of the world in the name of human rights and freedom, a country that violently interferes in internal affairs of sovereign nations and fights wars at its leisure is now perceived as waging war against its own oppressed propulation. By arrogantly exempting itself from the standards it applies to everyone else, the US has destroyed its credibility.

Now the Dutch wait for the appearance of US troops to show up at the Hague should international law ever be applied to Washington’s war criminals. As one German magazine put it recently, “with friends like America, we don’t need enemies.”

Roman Baudzus is co-founder of German finance and economics blog “wirtschaftsfacts.”

26 August, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Eric Zuesse

Regarding what caused the downing of the Malaysian airliner MH-17 in Ukraine on July 17th, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN, reported in a brief Russian-language news story on August 12th , that four days earlier (August 8th) a representative of that nation’s Prosecutor General office, Yuri Boychenko, had said that (as auto-translated by google), “the results [of the investigation] will be announced upon completion of the investigation and with the consent of all the parties who signed the corresponding agreement.” This UNIAN report said that, “As part of the four-party agreement signed on August 8 between Ukraine, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia [all of which nations are allies of the United States and are cooperating with its new Cold War against Russia ], information on the investigation into the disaster Malaysian ‘Boeing-777′ will not be disclosed.” In other words: the official ‘investigation’ is being carried out by four nations that, as U.S. allies, are hostile toward Russia. One of those four nations, Ukraine, is not only a prime suspect in possibly having shot this airliner down , but is currently waging a hot war to ethnically-cleanse the pro-Russian population out of southeastern Ukraine ; and the initial ‘news’ reports in Western ‘news’ media regarding the downing of MH-17 had stenographically repeated the Ukrainian Goverhment’s line that said that this airliner was probably downed by the local rebels there, who were trying to shoot down the Ukrainian Government’s bombers that are constantly bombing them . Some Western ‘news’ reports even speculated that perhaps Russia itself had shot this airliner down. If the UNIAN news-report is correct, then there is no way that the ‘investigation’ will be able to be released to the public if it indicates that the Ukrainian Government (which, according to that news-report has veto power over the making-public of the study’s findings) is blamed for having shot the airliner down.

On August 12th, another pro-Ukrainian-Government ‘news’ site, gordonua.com , headlined, as auto-translated by google, “GPU: The results of the investigation [into the] crash [of] the Boeing 777 will be released with the consent of the parties,” and said, “Information about the accident MH17 in the Donetsk region will be published in obtaining the consent of all the parties that are involved in the investigation.” UNIAN was cited there as gordonua’s sole source. ‘News’ media didn’t probe the matter further.

Until 23 August 2014, that seems to have been the last of the matter, as far as news reports were concerned, and both of those two news reports were just tiny squibs in the Russian language, published only in Ukraine, by supporters of the Obama-installed Ukrainian Government. The news was ignored both inside and outside Ukraine.

Then, on 23 August 2014, Global Research News published the first English-language news-report on this matter; it was based on the second Russian-language news-report, the one that had appeared at gordonua.com on August 12th. Global Research concluded from it that, “The Causes of the MH17 Crash are ‘Classified’.” Of course, this way of phrasing the matter is a slight oversimplification, because, actually, the findings will remain ‘classified’ only if, and to the extent that , the Ukrainian Government is found to have caused the airliner’s downing. In other words: this ‘investigation’ will not be published unless the Ukrainian Government and the other three nations that are performing it agree unanimously to publish it.

So: imagine a murder-case in which 298 innocents are slaughtered, and in which there are only three suspects (here: Ukraine, the pro-Russian rebels, and Russia itself), and one of those three suspects has veto-power on the making-public of the ‘investigation’ into that crime. Well: this is that murder-case, and the veto-holding ‘investigator’ and suspect is Ukraine. Neither of the other two suspects holds any such veto-power over this ‘investigation.’

In a sense, whether the official investigation into the downing will ever be made public is insignificant, just as would be any ‘investigation’ that is carried out by, or with veto-power from, one of the prime suspects in the crime that is being investigated.

The international public would obviously need to be fools in order for them to trust such an ‘investigation’ as that. Case closed?

President Obama got the economic-sanctions-increase against Russia, that he had wanted out of this shoot-down. Who needs any ‘investigation’ to determine this mass-killing’s actual perpetrator? Certainly not Obama. Ultimately, it is he who caused it, because he was the person behind this ethnic-cleansing campaign, without which ethnic-cleansing campaign the airliner itself wouldn’t have been downed.

The downing of this airliner goes straight back to the U.S. White House , which has already won what it wanted from it.

Those 298 corpses are just casualties of this U.S.-caused war , like the Ukrainians are casualties of it who live in the portions of Ukraine that had overwhelmingly elected in 2010 the Ukrainian President whom Obama ousted from office in 2014. Obama doesn’t want a President like that elected ever again in Ukraine; so, those voters are being gotten rid of, and ethnic cleansing is how it’s being done. And the residents there are likewise not being heard from in Western ‘news’ media, and nobody in the West is asking these victims what they think of the Ukrainian Government that Obama installed . Perhaps that’s because they are increasingly becoming a guerilla army to defeat the regime that Obama installed.

As to the specific operation that downed the plane, there is already a lot more information about that than the official ‘investigation,’ if that’s ever published, is likely to reveal, and it points clearly to the Ukrainian military as the perpetrator, in yet another of their ‘false flag’ operations. And unlike the Ukrainian Government’s charges that rebels shot it down by mistake, Ukraine shot it down with deadly purpose and knowing full well what they were doing.

 

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 .

26 August, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Alan Hart

This is the most controversial article the gentile me has ever written or is ever likely to write, but I believe that what I am going to say needs to be said and should be widely debated if the rising, global tide of “anti-Israelism” (I prefer the term anti-Zionism) is not to be transformed into anti-Semitism on a scale that could lead, in a foreseeable future, to Holocaust II, my shorthand for another great turning against the Jews.

I am, of course, aware that anti-Semitism is more than prejudice against and loathing even hatred of Jews just because they are Jews. Arabs are Semites, too. So anti-Semitism is prejudice against Arabs as well as Jews. In other words, Islamophobia, a monster on the prowl across America and Europe and licking its lips, is also a manifestation of anti-Semitism. That said my use of the term anti-Semitism in this article relates only to prejudice against and loathing even hatred of Jews just because they are Jews.

A clear, early warning that anti-Israelism could be transformed into anti-Semitism was given by Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Director of Israeli Military Intelligence, in his book ISRAEL’S FATEFUL HOUR, first published in Hebrew in 1986 and in English two years later. (He started out as a rabid right-winger and a supporter of Menachem Begin, arguably the most successful terrorist leader of modern times. But he, Harkabi, subsequently broke with Begin and launched a blistering attack on the ideological mindset of the proponents of Greater Israel and the expansionist policies of the Begin and Shamir governments. Instead of the policy of not yielding an inch and waiting for the Palestinians to surrender, he advocated negotiations with the PLO to establish an independent Palestinian state. “Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories with their growing Arab population” is the first sentence on the back cover of his book).
The following is the text of Harkabi’s warning.

QUOTE

Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism. It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world.

UNQUOTE

In my opinion the flaw in Harkabi’s argument is that Israel is a Zionist not a Jewish state (how could it be a Jewish state when about a quarter of its citizens are Palestinian Arabs and mainly Muslims?); and that raises the question of how much, actually, Israel is an example of the Jewish character. But that doesn’t detract from his main warning point that Israel’s behaviour could be a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism.

More than a quarter of a century on from Harkabi’s warning, the impression conveyed by mainstream Western media reporting and comment while the IDF was (and still is) delivering death and destruction to the Gaza Strip was not that a transformation of anti-Israelism/anti-Zionism into historical anti-Semitism might be underway, but that the anti-Israel protests and demonstrations across the world, in Europe especially, were manifestations of naked anti-Semitism. In other words, what used to be called the “sleeping giant of anti-Semitism” is awake again.

The most dramatic headline that came to my notice was over an article in The Guardian by Jon Henley on 7 August. It read: Antisemitism on rise across Europe “in worst times since the Nazis”. And underneath that there was a secondary headline, Experts say attacks go beyond Israel-Palestine conflict as hate crimes strike fear into Jewish communities.

One of the “experts” Henley quoted was Dieter Graumann, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews. He said: “These are the worst times since the Nazi era. On the streets you here things like ‘Jews should be gassed, Jews should be burned’. We haven’t had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn’t criticising Israeli policies, it’s just pure hatred against Jews; nothing else. And it’s not just a German phenomenon. It’s an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it’s very clear.”

Some demonstrators and protestors were using Israel’s latest war on the Gaza Strip as a cover for expressing their inherent anti-Semitism, but most were not. Most were criticising and condemning Israel’s actions, not expressing hatred of Jews just because they are Jews.

I agree with Christopher Dickey who made this comment. “Can you criticise Israel’s military actions and a lot of its policies without being anti-Semitic? Yes. Can you do it without having some people accuse you of anti-Semitism? No, you can’t.”

In passing I want to add that in my opinion the global reaction against Israel was driven not only by visual evidence of the death and destruction the IDF delivered to the Gaza Strip but also the absurd statements of justification made by all who speak for Israel right or wrong from Netanyahu down. (“Hamas is engaging in child sacrifice” etcetera, etcetera). Their statements were in my view an insult to the intelligence of all sane people who could see for themselves what was happening as Israel unleashed its fire power. Avi Shlaim put it this way. “The terms in which Netanyahu and his right-wing colleagues frame the conflict with Hamas is a mixture of half-truths, outright lies, deliberate deception and mind-boggling double-standards.”

The key to understanding is, I submit, in the following paragraph.

Yes, it’s true that the giant of real anti-Semitism has been present throughout history, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and on the rampage. But after the Nazi holocaust, and because of it, the giant not only went back to sleep, IT ALMOST CERTAINLY WOULD HAVE DIED IN ITS SLEEP IF THERE HAD BEEN NO ZIONISM.

That last statement is, of course, speculation on my part but I believe it is fully supported by the completeness of the assimilation of the Jewish citizens of the Western nations as the second half of the 20th century unfolded. Also to be noted is that in the last decade or so about one million Israeli Jews said goodbye to the Zionist state to start new lives in the Western nations; and in the months before the European protests and demonstrations against Israel’s latest war on the Gaza Strip, more of those who took their leave of Israel resettled themselves in Germany rather than America.

To the extent that the transformation of anti-Israelism/anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism is underway today, the factor, not “a” factor as in Harkabi’s warning, is Israel’s “misconduct”, which I define criminal behaviour justified by sickening self-righteousness.

According to Harkabi self-righteousness is Israel’s biggest enemy.

QUOTE

There should be discussion of the dangers that religious extremism pose to the state, to the status of the Jewish people in the world and to Judaism. The dangers of Messianism must be presented candidly, with full exposure of the catastrophes produced by false messiahs in the past.

All these lessons can be summed up as the pressing need for self-criticism. Certainly Israel is not guilty of everything that has gone wrong in the occupied lands. But self-criticism is imperative in order to counter balance the tendencies to self-righteousness and self-pity that stem from basic Jewish attitudes, from the historical experience of persecution and from the ethos fostered by Menachem Begin. No factor endangers Israel’s future more than self-righteousness, which blinds us to reality, prevents a complex understanding of the situation and legitimizes extreme behaviour.

UNQUOTE

If Harkabi was alive today (he died in 1994) I would suggest to him that in 2014 there is no chance of Israel opening itself to self-criticism because the vast majority of its Jews have been brainwashed by Zionist propaganda to the point where they are beyond reason on the matter of justice for the Palestinians.
If the notion that there is a real danger of another great turning against the Jews provoked by Zionism in action was only my gentile view, I probably would not have written this article. But I have a number of very dear Jewish friends who fear that it could happen. One of them is Nazi holocaust survivor Dr. Hajo Meyer, the author of An Ethical Tradition Betrayed: The End of Judaism.

And then there is Tony Learman. I don’t know him but I respect him enormously. (He is a British Jewish writer who specialises in the study of anti-Semitism, the Israel-Palestine conflict, multiculturalism and the place of religion in society. From 2006 to early 2009 he was Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a think tank on issues affecting Jewish communities in Europe). He recently wrote this:

QUOTE

If Israel continues its attitude of defiance of international legal norms and of the wishes of the international community as regards settlements, then this is almost inviting a real resurgence of a form of historical anti-Semitism.

UNQUOTE

In conversation with Tony I would say something like the following. Israel’s leaders are not “almost inviting” a real resurgence of anti-Semitism. They are actually inviting it. They need it to justify their crimes in general and, in particular, their determination to keep for ever most if not all of the occupied West Bank, even if that requires a final ethnic cleansing of it.

Another British Jewish writer who captured my attention was Blake Ezra. The following was the opening paragraph of an article on his web site which was carried by The Times of Israel. on 9 August.

“Dear world, I’m writing to you from a place of despair and confusion. When I say ‘world’, I don’t simply mean the planet upon which we all live but I address personally whoever is reading this. As a Jewish person, I have a question for you. It’s a genuine question to which I can’t find a suitable answer through my own thoughts… What do you want from us?”

He went on to say that as a Jew he, like many of his co-religionists, didn’t feel safe in his own city (London). And he insisted that “the hatred being indiscriminately hurled in our direction today” was not a response to Israel’s military action.

Other gems from his article included the following.

“The Jewish people have never insisted that whichever country they inhabit becomes kosher, Jewish people have never insisted that their fellow non-Jewish citizens keep the laws of the Jewish Sabbath, Jewish people have never insisted that their Synagogues dominate the skyline of towns across the diaspora. We mean no harm, we come in peace, please stop threatening to kill us… Sometimes, world, I wonder if your plan is to make Jewish people feel so uncomfortable in the countries they inhabit that they all move to Israel, all the Jews in one place would certainly make it easier for a fanatical group to wipe us all out in one fell swoop. Are you really working towards this mass International ghettoization?… World, I’m still desperately trying to decipher what we could have done differently, in order to avoid this deep-seated hatred that is seemingly coming to the fore this year… Can we EVER do enough to be accepted by you? World, I ask you in the hope that one day I’ll understand… What do you want from us?”

The answer to that question ought to be obvious to all but those who are suffering from paranoia and can be simply stated.

What the world wants from Israel’s Jews and Jews everywhere is an acknowledgement that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism in the name of all Jews and that the wrong must be righted.

Without such an acknowledgement I can see no hope for peace based on an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians and security for all and, if Israel remains on its present course, not much hope for preventing the transformation of anti-Israelism/anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism on a scale that could lead, in a foreseeable future, to another great turning against the Jews.

In my analysis the key to preventing Holocaust II at some point in a foreseeable future is in the hands of the Jews of the world themselves, European and American Jews in particular. What I mean is that it’s in their own best interests to distance themselves from the Zionist state in order in order to rob accusations of their complicity in its crimes of any credible substance. In addition to acknowledging the wrong done to the Palestinians and the need for that wrong to be righted, they could say, publicly, that they cannot and will not support an Israel that demonstrates contempt for international law and Jewish moral values.

It is true that a growing but still smallish number of European and American Jews are speaking out, not only in support of some justice for the Palestinians but also to condemn Israel’s policies and actions. Those who speaking out have taken Harkabi’s advice. Here is what he wrote on the need for open and honest debate.

QUOTE

What we need in Israel is not a united front behind a wrong policy, but searching self-criticism and a careful examination of our goals and means, so that we can differentiate between realistic vision and adventurist fantasy.

Jews in the West, particularly in the United States, should participate in this debate. They should not be squeamish and discouraged by the fear that the arguments they air may help their enemies and those of Israel. The choice facing them, as well as Israel, is not between good and bad but between bad and worse. Criticising Israeli policies may be harmfully divisive, but refraining from criticism and allowing Israel to maintain its wrong policy is incomparably worse. If the state of Israel comes to grief (God forbid), it will not be because of a lack of weaponry or money, but because of skewed political thinking and because the Jews who understood the situation did not exert themselves to convince the Israelis to change that thinking.

What is at stake is the survival of Israel and the status of Judaism. Israel will soon face its moment of truth. The crisis that faces the nation will be all-consuming. It will be bitter because many will have to acknowledge that they have lived in a world of fantasy; they will have to shed conceptions and beliefs they have held dear.

UNQUOTE

One implication of that part of Harkabi’s analysis is that if the Jews of the Western world who understand the situation exerted themselves, they could convince Israelis to change their thinking. In theory that might be so but in reality it can’t happen as things are

for the simple reason that the majority of the Jews of the Western world do not understand the situation; and that in turn is because they have been conditioned to believe a version of history, Zionism’s version, which is simply not true.

The majority don’t know, for example, that Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force. And they don’t know, another example, that it’s not Israel that has lacked a Palestinian partner for peace but the Palestinians who for the past 34 years have lacked an Israeli partner. (As I have previously written, there’s a case for saying they might have had one in Prime Minister Rabin, but he was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic who knew exactly what he was doing – killing the peace process Arafat made possible, in 1979, by persuading the highest decision making bodies on the Palestinian side that they had to be ready for unthinkable compromise and peace with an Israel confined to its borders as they were on 4 June 1967).

And there’s an awesome complicating factor. It’s not only that most Jews of the Western world don’t know the truth of history as it relates to the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, MANY DON’T WANT TO KNOW IT. In my book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews I illustrate this point by telling of a conversation I had with a Jewish gentleman who after my dear wife is my second best friend in the world and has been for more than 40 years.

Shortly before the publication of the first volume of the UK edition of my book way back in 2005 I said the following to him. “Like many if not most Jews you believe that when Israel went to war in 1967 it was either because the Arabs attacked or were about to attack. If I can prove to you, using only Israeli sources, that what you believe is Zionist propaganda nonsense and that the Arabs had no intention of striking first, and that it was actually a war of Israeli aggression, what…?”

My friend was silent for about a minute. Then, in a voice not much above a whisper, he said, “If what I believe about that war is not true, everything crumbles.”

Since then we have remained best friends but we do not ever discuss Israel.

I thought long and hard about the meaning of “everything crumbles” and I came to the conclusion, endorsed in private by other Jewish friends, that what it means can be summarised as follows. Many and perhaps even most Jews need to believe they always were, are and always will be VICTIMS.

And that, I believe, assists real and true understanding of why most Jews of the world are silent on the matter of Israel’s crimes. Deep down, if only in their sub-consciousness, they fear that Holocaust II is probably inevitable at some point in the future and that they will need Israel as their refuge of last resort. So, they tell themselves, say nothing and do nothing that could assist Israel’s enemies. (It’s also the case that criticism of Israel can and does tear Jewish families apart).

What I believe to be the most tragic irony in all of human history to date is that most Jews of the world can’t see that if the rising, global tide of anti-Israelism/anti-Zionism is transformed into anti-Semitism on a scale that could lead to Holocaust II, it will be because of Zionism in action.

In that light my gentile appeal to the Jews of the world, American and European Jews in particular, is this. The key to preventing Holocaust II is in your hands. Use it to unlock your minds that have been closed by Zionist propaganda. (I mean its lies and deceptions).

Because I have faith in the potential goodness of human nature, a potential that has to be liberated by the truth of history, I want to end this article by pointing to an alternative scenario to the one indicated by my headline.

As I wrote in my book and say on public platforms, I truly believe that, generally speaking, the Jews are the intellectual elite of the Western world and the Palestinians are by far the intellectual elite of the Arab world. Together in peace and partnership in One State for all (yes, that does mean the end of Zionism), they could change the region for the better and by doing so give new hope and inspiration to the whole world.

To put it another way, in peace and a partnership of equals, the Jews minus Zionism could become, with the Palestinians, a light unto nations. Surely that’s a better option than allowing Zionism to put the light out?

R.I.P. DEAR HAJO

I sent a draft of this article to Hajo Meyer for his comments and suggestions. His wife Chris called me to say that a week after celebrating his 90th birthday, Hajo had passed away peacefully. He will rest in peace because he was at peace with himself in his life. I know that because of his answer to a question I asked him over a meal in London some years ago.

I said: “You’re well into your eighties and despite the fact that you lived through the hell of Auschwitz, you are vilified by supporters of Israel right or wrong for your anti-Zionist stance and campaigning. You don’t need this hassle in what remains of your life. Why do you carry on campaigning?”

He replied, “The first person I see when I wake up in the morning is me.”

He meant that he needed above all to be able to live with himself. (As I write I find myself wondering how many of our so-called leaders, President Obama in particular, can do that).

In one of our last conversations Hajo said that he no longer had any hesitation about describing Israel’s leaders as “the new Nazis.”

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

 

By Adri Nieuwhof

I mourn the loss of Hajo Meyer, a friend who fearlessly raised his voice to combat Zionism and to express his support for the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom and equality. Hajo passed away in his sleep on 23 August just days after his ninetieth birthday.

Hajo was born in 1924 and had to flee alone from Nazi Germany at the age of 14 because the Nazis would not allow him to attend school any more. His parents sent him to the Netherlands in January 1939.

A year later, the Netherlands was occupied by the Germans. In 1943, Hajo went into hiding but was captured by the Gestapo in March 1944 and deported to the Auschwitz death camp where the Nazis tattooed number “179679” on his arm.

After the war, Meyer returned to the Netherlands where he had a long career as a physicist. He also took up making violins in his retirement.

In a previous interview with The Electronic Intifada, Hajo said: “For as long as I can, I will continue to utter my criticism of inhuman Zionist behavior.”

On 29 July, I traveled to Meyer’s home in Heiloo in the Netherlands, to discuss the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, where the tired Hajo gave The Electronic Intifada his last interview.

I asked Hajo how he felt. “I can’t answer you positively, due to old age which prevents me from any activity in supporting the Palestinians,” he replied. “To be that old comes with such great loss of capacities, it is quite a task,” he said.

He reflected on how lucky he was to survive Auschwitz with some comrades.

Reber Dosky, a Kurdish refugee residing in the Netherlands, made My Good Fortune in Auschwitz (2012), a short documentary about Hajo’s survival with his comrade Jos Slagter. In the documentary, Hajo plays one of the melancholic Yiddish tunes he used to test the sound of the violins he had made (watch it below — with English subtitles).

“Nazi criminals”

When I spoke to him, Hajo denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s accusations that the large demonstrations against Israel’s attacks on Gaza are an expression of an increasing hatred against Israel.

“If we want to stay really human beings, we must get up and call the Zionists what they are: Nazi criminals,” Meyer said. The hate of the Jews by the Germans “was less deeply rooted than the hate of the Palestinians by the Israeli Jews,” he observed. “The brainwashing of the Jewish Israeli populations is going on for over sixty years. They cannot see a Palestinian as a human being.”

While discussing Europe’s response to Israel’s policies, Hajo said that Europe should respond with “a much more large scale boycott of Israel” than a ban on settlement products. If we Europeans pretend to hold high the flag of humanity with what is happening in Gaza, Israel should be outcasted by us.”

I asked him if he had a message for the Palestinians, Israelis or human rights activists.

“My message for the Palestinians is that they should not give up their fight,” he replied. “If they give up, they might lose their self-esteem with the ongoing humiliations by the Israeli Nazis. Fight with human means. It is justified to show to the Israeli Zionists that you are a force to reckon with. Fight with stones, with weapons. Yes, also with weapons. If you don’t fight, you lose your self-esteem and will not be respected by the Israelis.”

“If we Western democratic societies don’t support the Palestinians in their fight, we must feel ashamed if the Palestinians are annihilated. The US and the European Union must show their teeth,” he added.

Hajo was one of more than forty survivors of the Nazi genocide who recently signed a letter condemning Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

In May, Hajo Meyer’s letters to his family written between July 1939 and 1945 were published in Germany.

Hajo Meyer, thank you for your humanity, your dignity, your love and your consistent support to defending human rights.

Adri Nieuwhof is a human rights advocate based in the Netherlands and former anti-apartheid activist at the Holland Committee on Southern Africa.

26 August, 2014
Electronicintifada.net