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By Ian Johnson

30 August 2011

www.nybooks.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nov 4, 2013

By Chris Hedges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.

By Dr. A. K. Merchant*

19 October, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Kourosh Ziabari

31 October, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kourosh Ziabari

Journalist, writer and media correspondent

www.KouroshZiabari.com

October 31st, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jeffrey Heller

24 October 2013

@ www.reuters.com

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia and Israel are united in their opposition to Iran, but they cannot cooperate as long the Palestinian conflict continues, Israel’s chief peace negotiator said on Thursday.

“When you hear the Saudis talking about what needs to be done in order to prevent a (nuclear-armed) Iran, I mean it sounds familiar,” said Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister who is leading talks with the Palestinians.

“I think that you can hear that Arabic sounds familiar to Hebrew when it comes to Iran,” she said, making a rare public linkage between the goals of Israel and Saudi Arabia, which have long been enemies and have no diplomatic ties.

Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, a Sunni Muslim regional rival of Shi’ite Iran, fear that Tehran is developing atomic weapons and looking to change the balance of power in the Middle East. Iran says its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful.

Saudi Arabia has grown increasingly frustrated with perceived U.S. weakness in confronting Syria’s civil war and with Washington’s recent diplomatic engagement with Tehran – concerns Israel shares.

Three years ago, diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks said that Saudi King Abdullah had frequently urged the United States to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear programme. Israel has also hinted at military action, saying it was prepared to stand alone to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing parliament last week, hailed the rare commonality of Israeli-Arab interests as something that could help advance decades-old peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Livni, however, suggested that was unrealistic, telling a conference organised by the Jerusalem Post that Arab states first wanted to see progress in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking before contemplating any change of policy toward Israel.

“In order to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, we need to cooperate with those (who) understand that Iran is a threat to them as well,” she said, speaking in English.

“But unfortunately, the open conflict with the Palestinians makes it impossible or very difficult for them to act with Israel.”

Last week, Saudi Arabia cited international failure to grant Palestinians a state as one of the reasons it had renounced a coveted seat on the United Nations Security Council.

“It is now very clear that the interests of the State of Israel (and) the moderates or the pragmatic in the region are the same,” Livni said. “So we need on one hand to continue putting pressure on Iran … and simultaneously to move forward in the peace process.”

Both issues were on the agenda of a lengthy meeting between Netanyahu and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday in Rome that exposed differences over the Iranian issue.

Israel has repeatedly called for the effective dismantling of Iran’s nuclear programme, while the United States has suggested better safeguards are needed to ensure it is peaceful.

CORE ISSUES

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, revived in July after a three-year hiatus, have shown few signs of progress.

“I cannot share with you today what we are doing exactly in the negotiations room, but the basic idea is the need to end the conflict,” Livni said.

“In order to do so, we need to address all the core issues,” she added, in a reference to the borders of a Palestinian state, security arrangements, the future of settlements and Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees.

Livni said both sides had decided “that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, effectively ruling out any interim accord that many Israeli leaders are believed to favour.

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, a senior Palestinian official described the talks as very difficult.

“There is a long road ahead but we are following the instructions from President (Mahmoud) Abbas and are very keen to reach peace,” the official said.

(Editing by Crispian Balmer and Alistair Lyon)

By Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez

23 October 13

@ Democracy Now!

New research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. A new report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with industry ties. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. The report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles widely touted as the weapon of choice for bombing Syria. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative, a co-author of the report.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we move on now to a very interesting study that has just come out. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, new research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. The report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with the industry. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. Let’s take a look at how some of those pundits were identified during recent television appearances.

JAKE TAPPER: For insight into this high-stakes diplomatic mission, I’m joined by former secretary of state to the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, let’s analyze all this now with our panel of experts. Former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright.

GREGG JARRETT: General Jack Keane joins us, Fox News military analyst, served as four-star general and Army vice chief of staff. General, good to see you, as always.

JAKE TAPPER: I want to bring in two former generals to talk about this. Anthony Zinni is the former commander-in-chief of CENTCOM, and Michael Hayden is the former CIA director. He’s now a principal with the Chertoff Group, a risk management firm.

FOLLY BAH THIBAULT: Well, joining me now, live from Washington, D.C., is former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen. Secretary Cohen, thank you for being on Al Jazeera.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Joining us is Ambassador John Negroponte. He served as the first U.S. director of national intelligence, as well as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, and many more posts, I should add. Nice to see you, sir.

JOHN NEGROPONTE: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: A sampling of recent TV coverage on Syria. All the pundits interviewed currently have ties to military and intelligence contractors, investment firms with a significant defense or intelligence focus, or ties to consulting firms with a focus on defense or intelligence. General Jack Keane, for example, is on the board of General Dynamics. General Anthony Zinni is on the board of BAE Systems. General James Cartwright is on the board of Raytheon.

Joining us now from San Francisco, Kevin Connor, director and co-founder of the Public Accountability Initiative, co-author of the report called “Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate.”

Lay out what you found, Kevin.

KEVIN CONNOR: Sure. The report really maps out the extent to which the policy conversation on the airwaves around Syria was really dominated by individuals with ties to the defense industry. And these ties, as you laid out there, really were never disclosed – rarely disclosed, only 13 times out of 111 appearances that we identified during the Syria debate.

Now, the importance of that is that readers and viewers at home, who are, you know, seeing these people comment, are introduced to them as having gravitas and credibility – former secretaries of state, diplomats, generals with expertise. You would think these are independent experts who probably retired with a healthy pension, when in fact they’re representing interests that would profit from heightened military activity abroad in Syria. So that has a corrupting effect on the public discourse around an issue like Syria that’s so – so important. And it really goes back to the responsibility of media outlets to disclose these ties and also the individuals here who are implicated in the culture of corruption and the revolving door in Washington.

Anjali mentioned earlier, on the first segment, about the jobs program for the defense industry. And there’s a jobs program in place for the foreign policy establishment as they move out of their public positions onto the boards of these corporations. These aren’t – these are part-time positions, but they’re very high-paying positions. They have financial incentives and fiduciary responsibilities to companies that are profiting from war, profiting from current levels of defense spending. And this is something that viewers at home should be notified of. And it perhaps should preclude their involvement in debates like this, or perhaps they should not get the podium and platform they’re given for their views, given the fact that they have these conflicts of interest that are quite serious in some cases.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Kevin, your report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as a national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. Here’s Stephen Hadley being interviewed by Greta Van Susteren on Fox News about the so-called red line on Syria.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Did he, or didn’t he? And does it matter who did, as we sort of fuss about this red line? Joining us is Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to the Bush administration. Doesn’t – does it – did he set the line? And does it matter?

STEPHEN HADLEY: He did set the line, and it probably doesn’t matter, because the line is set, and the credibility of the country is on – is on the line. And in some sense, the Congress needs to act in such a way so as not to undermine the credibility of President Obama. You know, we only have one president at a time, and he embodies the United States. So if his credibility is undermined, the country’s credibility is undermined. And I think that’s an argument that people are beginning to think about on the – on Capitol Hill.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Stephen Hadley. And, of course, the Tomahawk missile that Raytheon produces was the one that was going to be used in the attack on Syria. Kevin, your response?

KEVIN CONNOR: Well, this is just a really egregious, significant conflict of interest that people should have been notified of. When Hadley was making the rounds to the outlets you mentioned, he also published an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing strenuously for war, and at the time, as you mentioned, serves on the board of Raytheon, has nearly $900,000 worth of stock in that company, makes $130,000 a year in cash compensation, actually chairs the public affairs committee for Raytheon, which means that he has oversight of sort of the company’s public profile and image in the media and in policy circles. So this is really a quite clear conflict of interest, and it should have been disclosed to readers and viewers. The fact that –

AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post has also been criticized for failing to inform its readers about Stephen Hadley’s defense ties. On September 8th, as you said, Kevin, the paper published an op-ed by Hadley that was headlined “To Stop Iran, Obama Must Enforce Red Lines with Assad.” The article described Hadley simply as a former national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration. Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at the Post, defended the paper’s move. Hiatt said, quote, “More disclosure is generally better than less, but I’m confident that Hadley’s opinion piece, which was consistent with the worldview he has espoused for many years, was not influenced by any hypothetical, certainly marginal, impact to Raytheon’s bottom line.” That was Hiatt’s statement. Kevin Connor, your response?

KEVIN CONNOR: Well, first, you know, I would like to say kudos to The Washington Post for actually covering the report and really requiring Hiatt to respond. But his response is really absurd. It demonstrates a really fuzzy understanding of conflicts of interest and ethical issues. This is a clear conflict of interest. The conflicts of interest actually raise the possibility of corruption, the corruption of one’s motives. There are relationships that might call into question one’s motives, and this clearly does. And nothing Hiatt said really, you know, defends against that. Hiatt might, you know, have special insight into Hadley’s inner thinking, given that they are perhaps in the same foreign policy circles. Hiatt has written glowing articles about Hadley in the past, so, you know, this is fairly standard for him in terms of his worldview and his sort of milieu.

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Connor, we want to thank you for being with us, and we’ll certainly link to your report. Kevin is director and co-founder of the Public Accountability Initiative, co-author of the report called “Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate,” which was released last week.

By Robert Reich,

23 October 13

@ Robert Reich’s Blog

Conservative Republicans have lost their fight over the shutdown and debt ceiling, and they probably won’t get major spending cuts in upcoming negotiations over the budget.

But they’re winning the big one: How the nation understands our biggest domestic problem.

They say the biggest problem is the size of government and the budget deficit.

In fact our biggest problem is the decline of the middle class and increasing ranks of the poor, while almost all the economic gains go to the top.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that only 148,000 jobs were created in September – way down from the average of 207,000 new jobs a month in the first quarter of the year.

Many Americans have stopped looking for work. The official unemployment rate of 7.2 percent reflects only those who are still looking. If the same percentage of Americans were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, today’s unemployment rate would be 10.8 percent.

Meanwhile, 95 percent of the economic gains since the recovery began in 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. The real median household income continues to drop, and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.

So what’s Washington doing about this? Nothing. Instead, it’s back to debating how to cut the federal budget deficit.

The deficit shouldn’t even be an issue because it’s now almost down to the same share of the economy as it’s averaged over the last thirty years.

The triumph of right-wing Republicanism extends further. Failure to reach a budget agreement will restart the so-called “sequester” – automatic, across-the-board spending cuts that were passed in 2011 as a result of Congress’s last failure to agree on a budget.

These automatic cuts get tighter and tighter, year by year – squeezing almost everything the federal government does except for Social Security and Medicare. While about half the cuts come out of the defense budget, much of the rest come out of programs designed to help Americans in need: extended unemployment benefits; supplemental nutrition for women, infants and children; educational funding for schools in poor communities; Head Start; special education for students with learning disabilities; child-care subsidies for working families; heating assistance for poor families. The list goes on.

The biggest debate in Washington over the next few months will be whether to whack the federal budget deficit by cutting future entitlement spending and closing some tax loopholes, or go back to the sequester. Some choice.

The real triumph of the right has come in shaping the national conversation around the size of government and the budget deficit – thereby diverting attention from what’s really going on: the increasing concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top, while most Americans fall further and further behind.

Continuing cuts in the budget deficit – through the sequester or a deficit agreement – will only worsen this by reducing total demand for goods and services and by eliminating programs that hard-pressed Americans depend on.

The President and Democrats should re-frame the national conversation around widening inequality. They could start by demanding an increase in the minimum wage and a larger Earned Income Tax Credit. (The President doesn’t’ even have to wait for Congress to act. He can raise the minimum wage for government contractors through an executive order.)

Framing the central issue around jobs and inequality would make clear why it’s necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy and close tax loopholes (such as “carried interest,” which enables hedge-fund and private-equity managers to treat their taxable income as capital gains).

It would explain why we need to invest more in education – including early-childhood as well as affordable higher education.

This framework would even make the Affordable Care Act more understandable – as a means for helping working families whose jobs are paying less or disappearing altogether, and therefore in constant danger of losing health insurance.

The central issue of our time is the reality of widening inequality of income and wealth. Everything else – the government shutdown, the fight over the debt ceiling, the continuing negotiations over the budget deficit – is a dangerous distraction. The Right’s success in generating this distraction is its greatest, and most insidious, triumph.

By Robert Fisk

24 October, 2013

@ The Independent

The Muslim world’s historic – and deeply tragic – chasm between Sunni and Shia Islam is having worldwide repercussions. Syria’s civil war, America’s craven alliance with the Sunni Gulf autocracies, and Sunni (as well as Israeli) suspicions of Shia Iran are affecting even the work of the United Nations.

Saudi Arabia’s petulant refusal last week to take its place among non-voting members of the Security Council, an unprecedented step by any UN member, was intended to express the dictatorial monarchy’s displeasure with Washington’s refusal to bomb Syria after the use of chemical weapons in Damascus – but it also represented Saudi fears that Barack Obama might respond to Iranian overtures for better relations with the West.

The Saudi head of intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan – a true buddy of President George W Bush during his 22 years as ambassador in Washington – has now rattled his tin drum to warn the Americans that Saudi Arabia will make a “major shift” in its relations with the US, not just because of its failure to attack Syria but for its inability to produce a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

What this “major shift” might be – save for the usual Saudi hot air about its independence from US foreign policy – was a secret that the prince kept to himself.

Israel, of course, never loses an opportunity to publicise – quite accurately – how closely many of its Middle East policies now coincide with those of the wealthy potentates of the Arab Gulf.

Hatred of the Shia/Alawite Syrian regime, an unquenchable suspicion of Shia Iran’s nuclear plans and a general fear of Shia expansion is turning the unelected Sunni Arab monarchies into proxy allies of the Israeli state they have often sworn to destroy. Hardly, one imagines, the kind of notion that Prince Bandar wishes to publicise.

Furthermore, America’s latest contribution to Middle East “peace” could be the sale of $10.8bn worth of missiles and arms to Sunni Saudi Arabia and the equally Sunni United Arab Emirates, including GBU-39 bombs – the weapons cutely called “bunker-busters” – which they could use against Shia Iran. Israel, of course, possesses the very same armaments.

Whether the hapless Mr Kerry – whose risible promise of an “unbelievably small” attack on Syria made him the laughing stock of the Middle East – understands the degree to which he is committing his country to the Sunni side in Islam’s oldest conflict is the subject of much debate in the Arab world. His response to the Saudi refusal to take its place in the UN Security Council has been almost as weird.

After lunch on Monday at the Paris home of the Saudi Foreign Minister, Saud al-Faisal, Kerry – via his usual anonymous officials – said that he valued the autocracy’s leadership in the region, shared Riyadh’s desire to de-nuclearise Iran and to bring an end to the Syrian war. But Kerry’s insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime must abandon power means that a Sunni government would take over Syria; and his wish to disarm Shia Iran – however notional its nuclear threat may be – would ensure that Sunni military power would dominate the Middle East from the Afghan border to the Mediterranean.

Few realise that Yemen constitutes another of the Saudi-Iranian battlegrounds in the region.

Saudi enthusiasm for Salafist groups in Yemen – including the Islah party, which is allegedly funded by Qatar, though it denies receiving any external support – is one reason why the post-Saleh regime in Sanaa has been supporting the Zaidi Shia Houthi “rebels” whose home provinces of Sa’adah, al Jawf and Hajja border Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are – according to the Sunni Saudis – supported by Iran.

The minority Sunni monarchy in Bahrain – supported by the Saudis and of course by the compliant governments of the US, Britain, et al – is likewise accusing Shia Iran of colluding with the island’s majority Shias. Oddly, Prince Bandar, in his comments, claimed that Barack Obama had failed to support Saudi policy in Bahrain – which involved sending its own troops into the island to help repress Shia demonstrators in 2011 – when in fact America’s silence over the regime’s paramilitary violence was the nearest Washington could go in offering its backing to the Sunni minority and his Royal Highness the King of Bahrain.

All in all, then, a mighty Western love affair with Sunni Islam – a love that very definitely cannot speak its name in an Arab Gulf world in which “democracy”, “moderation”, “partnership” and outright dictatorship are interchangeable – which neither Washington nor London nor Paris (nor indeed Moscow or Beijing) will acknowledge. But, needless to say, there are a few irritating – and incongruous – ripples in this mutual passion.

The Saudis, for example, blame Obama for allowing Egypt’s decadent Hosni Mubarak to be overthrown. They blame the Americans for supporting the elected Muslim Brother Mohamed Morsi as president – elections not being terribly popular in the Gulf – and the Saudis are now throwing cash at Egypt’s new military regime. Assad in Damascus also offered his congratulations to the Egyptian military. Was the Egyptian army not, after all – like Assad himself – trying to prevent religious extremists from taking power?

Fair enough – providing we remember that the Saudis are really supporting the Egyptian Salafists who cynically gave their loyalty to the Egyptian military, and that Saudi-financed Salafists are among the fiercest opponents of Assad.

Thankfully for Kerry and his European mates, the absence of any institutional memory in the State Department, Foreign Office or Quai d’Orsay means that no one need remember that 15 of the 19 mass-killers of 9/11 were also Salafists and – let us above all, please God, forget this – were all Sunni citizens of Saudi Arabia.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.