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By Dr. Elias Akleh

04 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Israel has done it again. Last Wednesday January 30 th Israeli war planes violated Lebanese air space for the nth time in their way to bomb Syrian military research center. The US and the UN had also done it again. The US supported this Israeli raid as Israel’s alleged “right to protect itself”, while the UN denied Israel’s aggression claiming it could not verify it due to “bad weather conditions.”

While Israel kept silent about the raid with some of its officials hinting that Israel could have done it and has the right to do it allegedly in self defense, pro-Zionist media sources claimed that Israeli war planes targeted trucks transporting weapons to Lebanese Hezbollah on the Syrian/Lebanese border. Media outlets, including Qatari Al Jazeera, reported Israel’s fears of Hezbollah getting its hands on Syrian chemical weapons and Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles, as reported by an Israeli security officials’ chief, who spoke on condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Israel’s unfounded claimed fear of having Syrian chemical weapons in the hands of Hezbollah is a total nonsense and smoke screen in the face. If Syria wanted to transport such weapons to Hezbollah it wouldn’t do it in conspicuous convoys crossing the border. Hezbollah had demonstrated its capability to defeat and deter Israeli aggression using conventional weapons during summer of 2006 and does not need any chemical weapons. Such claims are used as a justification for aggressive interventions on the Syrian borders to relieve pressure on the anti-Syrian terrorist groups.

Syrian officials reported that Israeli war planes had violated Syrian air space and bombed the Jamraya research center in the suburbs of Damascus, far from the Lebanese borders. This research center has been the target of attacks by the American/Israeli-Turkey/Qatari supported anti-Syrian terrorists and militias; the so-called Free Syrian Army, al-Qaeda and Annusra Front. For the last seven months these mercenary terrorists were directed to attack Syria’s air defense systems and military bases in order to incapacitate Syria’s military defense capabilities. They had managed to attack one S-200 base and four surface-to-air missile bases. They have also succeeded in assassinating military scientific project managers such as Colonel Dawoud Rajiha, who was managing Syria’s long-range missile project. Yet their many attempts to attack and inflict any damage onto the Jamraya research center had failed since it was heavily protected. This job was left, then, to the Israeli air forces. The Israeli air raid shows very clearly the degree of Israel’s involvement with the anti-Syrian terrorist groups.

No official statement, Syrian or otherwise, had stated exactly what the Israeli planes had targeted. Yet some reports claim that the strike was intended to destroy Syria’s development of advance airspace defensive technology based on nuclear plasma technology developed by Iranian born nuclear engineer Mehran Keshe, known as “Tesla of physics”. It is reported that Iran gave this technology to Syria. This is the same technology Iran used to “pull” down the American spying drones in perfect conditions.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry filed a complaint letter with the United Nations Security Council urging the Council to issue a “clear condemnation of the flagrant Israeli attack on the territories of a sovereign state and the Israeli violation of the UN Charter, the international law, the Disengagement of Forces Agreement in 1974 and the relevant UNSC resolutions.”

The Israeli air raid was also condemned by the Russian government calling it “unprovoked attacks on targets on the territory of a sovereign country, which blatantly violates the UN Charter and is unacceptable, no matter the motives to justify it.” Iran, Syria’s closest regional ally, warned that the “Zionist regime’s attack on the outskirts of Damascus will have grave consequences for Tel Aviv.” Iran has a cooperative defense pact with Syria, and had previously warned that any attack on Syria would be considered an act of aggression against its own country.

The Lebanese President, Michel Suleiman, denounced the Israeli raid as flagrant aggression and accused Israel of “… exploiting the development in Syria to carry out its aggressive policies, indifferent to all the humanitarian and international treaties.”

Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mohamed Kamel Amr, denounced the Israeli attack saying “Such an assault on Arab land is entirely rejected and represents a flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter and international law.” He, also, called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for its attacks on Arab countries, describing the raid as a danger to regional security and to Middle Eastern sovereignty.

When it comes to Israel’s violations of international laws and humanitarian laws, the responses of the American-controlled United Nation are very disappointing and do not hold the international laws. Claiming “unclear weather conditions” the UN stated that it could not confirm the Israeli raid. The only thing Ban Ki-Moon, the Secretary-General of the UN, could offer was his concern over the raid. The deafening silence of the UNSC about the Israeli violations of the sovereignty of its neighboring countries had encouraged Israel to continue its terrorist attacks. The UN always apply double standards when it comes to Israel; the UN either overlooks Israeli terror attacks or considers them self-defense, while Palestinian and Lebanese opposition to Israeli occupation and terrorism is considered terrorist acts. In the case of Syria the UN overlooks the anti-Syrian terrorist supporting states of US, UK, France, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. These terrorist have been involved in grave human right violations and war crimes, the latest was the cold blooded execution of 80 young men in Halab.

The American response to the Israeli raid is also very typically biased towards Israel. American officials as well as media had focused on the alleged transporting Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles to Lebanon. The NBC reported that the missiles “would remove Israel’s critical freedom of flight over Lebanon.” This alleged freedom of flight is a violation of the air space of a sovereign country. Would Israel give this type of freedom to Syrian war plane into Israeli air space?

Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security advisor, warned Syria it should not “further destabilize the region by transferring weaponry to Hezbollah.” This warning implies justification for the Israeli raid and for future such raids. During an interview with French media last Friday the American Defense Secretary Panetta expressed American concern of the increasing probabilities of Hezbollah acquiring advanced weaponry from Syria. In her farewell speech, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused Russia and Iran of “stepping up” military support for Syria and thus adding fuel to possible regional conflict.

Israel is the mad dog in the Middle East attacking all its neighboring countries without any provocation. The Israelis claim that acquiring advanced weapons by any of its neighboring countries means an existential threat to Israel, and thus they consider attacking and bombing that country their right of self defense. So Israel had bombed Iraq’s nuclear facility in the 1970’s, waged aggression wars against Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and lately Gaza Strip. It had bombed in 2009 Sudanese alleged arm smuggling convoys transporting weapons to Gaza, and in 2012 bombed Sudan’s small arms factory. In 2007 Israel bombed Syrian alleged nuclear facility and last week bombed Syrian research center. This twisted logic is somehow supported by the US and the UN. I wonder if this logic gives any Arab country the right to bomb Israel’s nuclear facility in Dimona or any of its chemical and biological weapons facility! Does it also give them the right to bomb any American ships carrying weapons to Israel?

Israel’s perpetual terrorism is a flagrant declaration of war against every country it had bombed. Israel, not Syria or any other Arab country, is the “destabilizing” factor of the Middle East. Israel’s latest terrorist attack on Syria could serve as the beginning of a far wider war to include Iran, driving the whole region into an inferno, whose flame would touch the whole world.

Dr. Elias Akleh is a writer living in Corona, CA., eakleh@ca.rr.com

 

 

By Feroze Mithiborwala

04 February, 2013

Countercurrents.org

I was a little benumbed whilst watching this technically advanced, but socio-politically regressive movie. Kamal Hassan has lied to all of us when he had stated that this movie is his tribute to Indian Muslims & will make them proud.

This movie had me even more worried than earlier!

The message propagated all through the course of this slick production is basically – “One Good Muslim, All the rest – Bad Muslims” .

The hero, Taufik is an Indian Muslim who saves the world, whilst the rest of the Muslims portrayed in the movie, are all committed to destruction & mayhem, all in the name of their religion.

This is the state of the world – Vishwaroopam.

Yet, let me categorically state that I do not support any cuts, or further censorship of the mobs, but will certainly strive to counter this movie & all like it – intellectually & on the ideological plane, where the true battle lies

This movie also justifies the US wars & occupation of Afghanistan in ways that even Hollywood would have felt ashamed of portraying. All this for the NRI audience I would tend to venture. My first opposition to the movie stemmed from the fact that the posters prominently posited the infamous ‘stars & stripes’ in the background & I knew that trouble was brewing. Mind you, the Indian Tri-colour is far less prominent & even missing for the most . . . so much for NRI nationalism, or for that matter that of the RNI’s, the Resident Non-Indians, the chatterati where these communal stereotypes hold sway.

And coming back to the movie, I have never ever seen so many scenes of Namaz in any single film & there is certainly a sickeningly strong overdose of Islamic imagery & the overwhelming majority of it linked to negativity & violence. The movie is one big screenplay of Namaz & Bombs, Namaz & Terror, Namaz & Violence. I wonder as to how Kamal Hassan, who is also the scriptwriter, thought that this would help the cause of Indian Muslims, knowing full well what the community has been through for the past two decades & more. The way the entire community has been ‘terrorized by the terror’ & this has led to their further demonization & isolation.

More so, the script is deeply flawed, lacks intelligence & an honest research. One would have tended to expect a little more from Bollywood after certain good movies dealing with this genre, such as ‘Dhoka’ (Mahesh Bhatt), ‘New York’ (Kabeer Khan), ‘Qurbaan’ (Saif Ali Khan), ‘My Name is Khan’ (Karan Johar & Shahrukh Khan), ‘Agent Vinod’ (Saif Ali Khan) & last but not the least ‘Tere Bin Laden’ (Abhishek Sharma), certainly the best political satire in a generation. It also had a far more genuine Bin Laden look-alike than the ones that appear in the CIA produced videos.

All of the above movies were good honest efforts & there is a common thread as well as a degree of intelligent sensitivity that has gone into researching these scripts & directing these movies, none of which faced any public opprobrium or ire, even though they were far more complex than this ignominious, outrageous ill-conceived prejudiced charade called Vishwaroopam.

Yet, I want no cuts here . . . . . . .

The two lines attributed to Rahul Bose , whom many of us consider to be our own, are the most dangerous & misleading of all the dialogues in the movie.

Rahul Bose, who plays Umar (alluding to Mullah Umar, the leader of the Taliban, I would presume), is facing an assault on his village. The Taliban have captured a few American soldiers & are on the move. The US army, attack the village where they have been led by a trace, with the help of Kamal Hassan, who plays Taufik, a RAW agent. Taufik has infiltrated the ranks of the Taliban to rise to be the ipso facto No. 2.

Wonder what the RAW itself has to comment here.

With the US helicopter gunships blazing away as they did in Vietnam & Iraq, as they do in Somalia, Yemen & Libya – & hope to in Syria – the Taliban are on the run.

Here Rahul Umar Bose makes a statement to assure his fellow Talibani’s – “Don’t worry, the Americans do not kill women & children”.

All I could think of in that Shakespearian moment was – “Et Tu Rahul!!”

To what extent can an artist such as Rahul Bose sell himself, his very moral intellect, is a question that he & many others need to seriously ponder upon.

This dialogue would be considered ridiculous & even blasphemous by the Americans themselves, who always refer to the deaths of civilians as ‘collateral damage’ , but Kamal Hassan in his willful pandering has gone even beyond the worst in Hollywood.

Thus the movie further portrays the US soldier manning the gunship, feeling sorry for killing innocents, whilst the Afghans are all portrayed as dehumanized killing machines. I do not think our immediate neighbours are going to appreciate this movie very much. But who cares, our movies are a reflection of our skewed foreign policy as it does appear. And the Afghans are not exactly a market yet.

The second statement by Rahul Umar Bose is even more dangerous for Indian Muslims & for all the secular activists who have stood by the community as it was demonised, isolated & entrapped into the false-flag terror attacks that we have witnessed since the post-9/11 world. This was the phase of ‘controlled chaos’ & ‘unending perpetual state of wars’ – to use Neoconservative terms.

Here whilst talking to Kamal Taufik Hassan, Rahul Umar Bose smilingly & nonchalantly mentions that “We were also involved in the terror attacks of Malegaon, Bombay & other Indian cities” . In the Tamil & Telegu versions , Coimbatore & Madurai are mentioned.

‘Good God!!’ , I exclaimed to myself, even dropping my popcorn – this movie is basically stating that the Taliban & Al Qaeda are active in India & thus certain sections of the Indian Muslim population are certainly enmeshed with the global terror network. This will prove to be catastrophic in the subconscious perceptions that tend to get ingrained deep into our reality.

This, Mr. Kamal Hassan, is going to be disastrous for Indian Muslims & we can all assure you that.

But where is the research may we ask? Have you not heard of ATS Chief Hemant Karkare , who even served in the RAW? Are you not aware that since 2007 the role of the Abhinav Bharat & Sanatan Sanstha in terror attacks across the country is being probed? Particularly in Malegaon, Nanded, Samjhauta Express, Mecca Masjid, Ajmer, Goa & another 10 more as per the statements of the Home Ministry. Actually there are more than 16 recorded cases, but we will leave that for later. All of which are further linked to the right-wing Manuwadi Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)?

Are you really unaware of these facts? Are you planning to leave the country, or had you already left India & were living in New York & are thus so ill-informed whilst writing the script, which lacks even an iota of honesty & responsibility?

And this is thus a question that we as secular activists must ask ourselves. Many Hollywood movies with a geopolitical strategic agenda are produced in tandem with the Pentagon, so as to further the Imperial agenda of global hegemony & the advancement of the Military-Security-Industrial-Corporate-Media Complex.

The Zionist dominated Hollywood target & portray Palestinians & Arabs in particular & Muslims in general as terrorists & fanatics & thus these societies need to be invaded & civilized – & their resources taken over for good measure.

This movie by Kamal Hassan in my estimation also certainly falls in that category of disinformation & propaganda to serve the cause of the Empire & to justify the wars, occupation & the genocide of the Afghan nation, as well as the people of Pakistan. Thus not even a fleeting reference to the drone attacks & the killings of innocents, of women & children – thus & as to how it continues to create & foster more & more militants & terrorists.

Then comes the part where there is a meeting between the leadership of the Taliban led by Rahul Umar & Al Qaeda-Osama Bin Laden. Here again I would request all those who have been taken in by the recent supposed assassination of OBL at the staged operation at Abbotabad, to read the excellent & well researched book by David Ray Griffin – ‘Osama Bin Laden Dead or Alive?’ ( http://www.globalresearch.ca/osama-bin-laden-dead-or-alive/15601 ). According to many honest experts, OBL has been dead since December 15, 2001.

It is also time, actually high time, for the Indian peace movement to address the issues of the 9/11 false-flag terror attack , which has been central, seminal & defining moment of the 21 st century, changing the very trajectory of international politics & leading to an era of wars, occupation & genocide. ( http://www.ae911truth.org/ ).

Recently more than 12,500 police stations across America received petitions by peace activists stating that the attack on WTC 1, 2 & 7 were an inside job & demanding that the investigation be reopened. This movement is being spearheaded by more than 1700 architects & engineers & they have the support of many prominent intellectuals, scholars, and human-rights activists, whistle-blowers from within the CIA-FBI, as well as vast sections of American society & the numbers are growing. ( http://www.ae911truth.org/downloads/documents/AE911Truth_Police_Letter.pdf )

The reason as to why we will have to grapple with these issues is that, I personally know of Muslim youth who have been quizzed about their positions on 9/11, Bin Laden & Al Qaeda. The youth have been perplexed & horrified & left wondering as to what a job application in the engineering, IT & telecom sectors have to do with their knowledge or lack off, on these issues. With Muslim children who have tried to step out of their ghettoes & seek admission in a multi-cultural milieu, being denied & told to go back where they came from. Of Muslims being denied housing in secular neighbourhoods. All these discriminative practices have also increased in the last decade – thanks to the dominant paradigm of terror.

Now, let us get back to the movie.

Soon after the carnage at Rahul Umar’s village, we are transported into America. Here Kamal Taufik Hassan is working incognito singing & dancing to songs written by Javed Akhtar (Lyricist), as any good Muslim should be. Then a terror network begins to unravel & here we have Rahul Umar now planning to explode a Dirty-Bomb made of waste radioactive material, which the good Muslim does foil, but after saying his Namaz! Whilst in the room inside wherein lies the Dirty-Bomb, is a bad Muslim, an African-American of Nigerian descent, busy offering Namaz before he is to blow the city to kingdom come.

Herein lies another serious problem with this film & that is the tarnishing of African-American Muslims as part of the global terror network . In most Hollywood movies, they are sensitive enough to portray the African American as the FBI boss, under whom the White officers serve. But here the RAW agent is working with only Whites, presumably Anglo-Saxon agents, whilst the African-American Muslim, is in tandem with the Taliban. Another case of out-sourcing I guess.

Yet again, Kamal Hassan fails in his research. The terror attacks portrayed in the film have never occurred. Also the FBI has been entrapping Muslim youth from various ethnic backgrounds & this too is a documented fact. Since there are no serious terror threats to America, the FBI actually manufactures them, as there is no other way to justify Homeland Security & it’s vast gargantuan powers & budget. FBI agents, informers, or ex-convicts working in tandem with the FBI are sent into Muslim communities with an attempt to create terrorists. During the course of the year, a couple of youth, mainly with a criminal background do get entrapped due to intensive indoctrination about the crimes of the American Empire against their people. These youth are then further induced & provided training to carry out a terror attack. Targets are indentified, funds, bombs & ammunition provided & the day that they do carry out the attack, they are apprehended red-handed. The bombs turn out to be fake & so do the guns & that is how stupid this supposed terrorists are.

( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 )

This information is now available in the mainstream corporate media & should have been studied by Kamal Taufik Hassan, before trying to give the FBI a positive image in India.

This movie thus is basically a propaganda tool for the FBI, as well as the US Empire. And now apart from Hollywood, they even have some of the best known names from Bollywood to do their bidding. I wonder as to how much of the financial backing of this movie came from sources such as these & this question must be asked in all seriousness.

The plot foiled, America saved, sorry, the world saved – Rahul Umar & his Taliban cohorts decide to flee to – India for God’s sake!! Thus we end with the inevitability of Vishwaroopam II-India!

Actually Kamal Taufik Hassan, might even consider shifting the next locale to Qatar, where the ‘Good Taliban’ now have a functioning office. Here they will all have ample security as the US has a vast network of naval & airforce bases. ( http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2003-03/20/content_789607.htm ).

So Rahul Umar Bose, the FBI-CIA & Kamal Taufik Hassan can actually sort out all their problems there itself, without dragging India into the picture.

But therein lies the threat, the clear & present danger to all of us. You can imagine the next movie where Mullah Umar is in Mumbai, or Delhi, maybe in Chennai (threatening Jajayalaitha for the way she dealt with Kamal Hassan), or in Malegaon, or in Srinagar, or Hyderabad, or in the Samjhauta Express, or in Ajmer. Thus taking the blame for all the terror attacks, that now are alleged to be the handiwork of the right-wing Abhinav Bharat & Sanatan Sanstha, as per the National Investigation Agency (NIA) & certain Anti-Terror Squads (ATS).

And then, is Osama Bin Laden & his dreaded Al-Qaeda far behind in reaching India?

The fear that it will instill amongst the ordinary masses of India & the further fear & isolation towards which will be driven the Muslim community is apparent to many.

The terror of the politics of terror . . . . . . .

Also a little sincere & not-so-secret advice to film producers, directors, financiers & aspiring writers. In case you are sure that your film (or a book) is going to bomb at the box-office, be sure to include a few scenes that you may think may be offensive to the emotions of the Muslim community. Then arrange a screening prior to the release, even though your film has been cleared by the censor board – & rest assured that a few Muslims will fall prey to your trap & voila – you have your much needed controversy.

My sincere advice to the Muslim community is the following. Islam is to great a religion for one book or a movie to harm our faith. Let us overcome our insecurities & notice that the tide is turning in our favour. The protests against the film have harmed the image of the Muslim community, even more than Vishawaroopam was planned to. We need to learn to ignore certain barbs hurled at us & do not need to fall for the traps laid for us every time.

We have every right to protest & this is our constitutional & democratic right. Our strategy should have been to evoke support & call for a debate on the movie, whilst pointing out its flaws & distortions. Demanding the cuts after the censor board had cleared the movie, has harmed our image & further portrayed the community as extremist & undemocratic.

The problem with Vishwaroopam, is that it has projected only a miniscule part of the reality of the Afghan quagmire over a period of more than three decades. But one cannot deny that today the Taliban & their ilk, do represent a form of a vitiated, extremist & a violent form of Islam. From the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha’s, to the attacks on schools & clinics, to the enforced imposition of a regressive barbaric code on women, to the public flogging & stoning, to the sectarian hatred & killings, to the destruction of Sufi Mazar’s & the genocide of the Shia’s – all this is being waged in the name of Islam. This cannot be denied by any honest God-loving/fearing Muslim.

This form of extremism is indeed alien & against the very letter, grain & spirit of Islam. Let us all stand up in unison & condemn this debasement & defilement of Islam. This we really do not venture into often enough – do we honestly?

In the course of the last 2-3 years, the truth about the terror attacks is being revealed & this is due to the sustained struggle of Muslim organizations, in tandem with our secular allies, despite all the odds, with the entire media & dominant sections of the Government-intelligence-security apparatus ranged against us – but yet we have overcome all these odds. Now is the time to reach out to all the communities that make up this great & dynamic nation & expose the true facts of the terror networks that are now being revealed. ( http://www.indianexpress.com/news/joining-the-dots/1068448/ )

If India is not to go the way of Pakistan, with its assorted Lashkar-Frankensteins, then we have to put a stop to those religious extremist forces that threaten to destroy the unity & social fabric of our nation. Now after the statement by the Union Home Minister, the tide has clearly changed in our favour & thus let’s not undermine our struggle by isolating ourselves any further by taking to the streets in the manner that we have & I was personally both angry & ashamed at the public spectacle. There is a certain degree of double-standards, intolerance & hypocrisy within the Muslim community as well.

Also I would want to appeal here to all those who rightly advised the Muslim community on the values of freedom of expression, democracy & modernity. Kindly stand up, script & produce a movie based on the charge-sheet filed by Hemant Karkare, in a movie that can be titled ‘Bharatroopam’ . I would love to see as to how many takers there would be from Bollywood, especially all the ones shouting ‘cultural terrorism’.

In terms of soft-targets, the Muslim community is far more of a soft-target, than many film makers & writers.

Yet, I will not ask for a cut, even though both my mind & my heart have suffered a few deep searing cuts.

This is because I have immense faith in the great legacy of this country. I have great faith in the teachings of Krativeer Jotiba Phule, Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar & Shaheed Bhagat Singh. I have great faith in the people of India, in our secular democracy.

Feroze Mithiborwala is a peace activist in Mumbai. He led the Asia to Gaza peace flotilla.

By Noam Chomsky

04 February, 2013

@ TomDispatch.com

[This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.]

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources — the main concern of U.S. planners — have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism — mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.” In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Declining because of economic weakness?

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse power centers. At the end of the Second World War, the United States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the world — not unrealistically at the time.

This was called “Grand Area” planning?

Yes. Right after the Second World War, George Kennan, head of the U.S. State Department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and then they were implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and North Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to U.S. hegemony was in 1949. That’s when an event took place, which, interestingly, is called “the loss of China.” It’s a very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess China — and if they move toward independence, we’ve lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin America,” “the loss of the Middle East,” “the loss of” certain countries, all based on the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates, they’re asking, “How do we prevent further losses?”

On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a U.S.-based North American industrial center, a German-based European center, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based East Asian center, which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global economic order has become much more diverse. So it’s harder to carry out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States is entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” That goes beyond anything that George W. Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn’t arrogant and abrasive, so it didn’t cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It’s a core part of American law. You can trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones were, as usual, on the left liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these views. He said they’re “amazingly naive,” silly. Then he expressed the reason. He said that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.” Of course, he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the United States is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the United States violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I’m happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I merely mention that to illustrate that in the intellectual culture, even at what’s called the left liberal end of the political spectrum, the core principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity to implement them has been sharply reduced. That’s why you get all this talk about American decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, “Is America Over?” It’s a standard complaint of those who believe they should have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets away from you, it’s a tragedy, the world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago we “lost” China, we’ve lost Southeast Asia, we’ve lost South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of paranoia, but it’s the paranoia of the superrich and the superpowerful. If you don’t have everything, it’s a disaster.

The New York Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the Arab Spring: how to square contradictory American impulses that include support for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have become a potent political force.” The Times identifies three U.S. goals. What do you make of them?

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favor of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to U.S. orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence into neighboring countries. On the other hand, we “stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy them.

I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favorite illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to “destabilize” Chile in the interests of “stability.” That’s not perceived to be a contradiction — and it isn’t. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favor of stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent development. Anything that’s independent you have to have concern about because it might undermine you. In fact, it’s a little ironic, because traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic state. It has a missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan, funding terror. But it’s the bastion of U.S. and British policy. They’ve consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Iraq, among many others. But they don’t like political Islam because it might become independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that’s about on the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom, democracy, and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of statement you laugh about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely and maybe even with awe when you hear it from their Western counterparts.

If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s even recognized by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded — a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s State Department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every U.S. administration is “schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if you’re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.

Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It’s inconceivable that U.S. leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?

That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the international order is that the United States has the right to use violence at will. So how can you charge anybody?

And no one else has that right.

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills a thousand people and destroys half the country, okay, that’s all right. It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn’t do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military actions until they had achieved their objectives and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too.

But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what it means to own the world. It’s like the air you breathe. You can’t question it. The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds” — which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” — interesting concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including recently Hopes and Prospects and Making the Future. This piece is adapted from the chapter “Uprisings” in his newest book (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).

Excerpted from Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, published this month by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2013 by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Farid Marjai & Mehrnaz Shahabi

03 February, 2013

@ Monthly Review

“Iranian Mothers for Peace,” in an open letter of January 2013 to Mr. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, and Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director General of the World Heath Organization, have alerted the responsible world bodies and human rights organizations to the critical shortage of vital medication due to the US/EU-led sanctions on Iran and their deadly impact on the lives and health of the Iranian population.

“Iranian Mothers for Peace” is a non-profit forum, well known and respected in Iran’s civil society. In 2006 a number of social activists came together to form this forum. “Mothers for Peace” is not a political party and organizationally it has a flexible structure. “Mothers for Peace” takes pride that its 700 participants come from very diverse political backgrounds and different social classes. It affirmatively celebrates diversity which it considers a reflection of the tolerance the group espouses.

With the ideal of peace in mind, “Mothers for Peace” is open to all participants who take a stand against any form of violence, poverty, and oppression.

“In our campaigns to protect the environment, we encourage measures that reduce the impact of human violence against it. We take solid steps to eliminate and mitigate gender inequality. Over the years, our projects have focused on welfare of addicts and prisoners, and publicizing their rights.

The scope of our vision and work is to achieve social security and permanent peace. Hence, this non-profit institution has a wider definition of the concept of ‘peace’; it refutes the narrow perspective of ‘peace’ as mere absence of external military violence and confrontation. And it is precisely in this context that we view the Western-imposed crippling sanctions on the people of Iran as a form of structural violence — a silent, yet a predatory war.

The everyday reality we observe on the ground in Iran has convinced us that the draconian sanctions are victimizing the very fabric of the society we intend to strengthen.

Presently, a number of the core group members of ‘Mothers for Peace’ are suffering from cancer. Sadly, they are having a difficult time obtaining the medicines needed for their treatment, and like many of their compatriots they suffer from unnecessary additional anxiety that might further deteriorates their precarious health condition.”

Below is the text of the open letter (published at mothersofpeace-iran.com/?p=1049) in English.

* * *January, 26, 20013

Dr. Margaret Chan

Director General

World Health Organization

Avenue Appia 20

1211 Geneva 27

Switzerland

Dear Dr. Margaret Chan

As you know, the illegal and inhumane actions led by the US and the EU, targeting the country and the population of Iran, with the stated intention to put pressure on the government of Iran, have intensified in the past two years and increasingly harsher sanctions are imposed almost on a monthly basis. The regulations governing these inhumane and arbitrary sanctions are executed with such strict inflexibility that Iran is now excluded from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) and the sanctions on banking transactions are preventing Iran from even purchasing its needed medical supplies and instruments. On the other hand, to avoid suspicion for dealing with Iran, the European banks are fearful not to engage in any kind of financial transactions with Iran and, therefore, in practice, refuse any transfer of payment for medical and health-related items and raw materials needed for the production of domestic pharmaceutical drugs, even payment for well-recognized drugs for the treatment of Special Diseases, which are not of dual use.

Madam Director,

Are you aware that while American and European soldiers’ lives in Afghanistan are being saved by Iranian anti-snake venom potions and medication, Iranian hemophilic children, cancer patients, and those suffering diabetes, under the pretext of the execution of ‘smart sanctions’, are being deprived of their lifeline medication and face death or irreversible disability? We ask you: What could possibly be the intended target of the wealthy and powerful US and European statesmen’s ‘targeted’ and ‘smart’ sanctions but to destroy the physical and psychological health of the population through the increase of disease and disability?

Madam Director,

We respectfully request from you and from all the relevant international bodies, specially, the World Health Organization and human rights organizations, to act according to their humanitarian and legal responsibilities, and demand the American and European countries leading sanctions on Iran to urgently create the necessary mechanism for opening financial transactions and letters of credit to facilitate the purchase of medicine for Iranian patients.

The right to health and access to medical treatment and medication is one of the fundamental human rights anywhere in the world. Please do not allow the killing of our sick children, beloved families, and fellow Iranians from the lack of medicine, caught in instrumental policies of coercion and power.

Iranian Mothers for Peace

Farid Marjai is a contributor to Reformist newspapers in Iran. Mehrnaz Shahabi is an anti-war activist and independent researcher.

 

 

By Countercurrents.org

03 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Hillary Clinton, former US secretary of state, planned to arm Syrian interventionists. But White House did not accept the plan.

In further development, Munich saw diplomatic moves related to Syria conflict.

A Washington datelined Reuters report [1] said:

A plan developed last summer by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus to arm and train Syrian rebels was rebuffed by the White House, The New York Times reported on February 2, 2013.

The United States has sent humanitarian aid to Syria but has declined requests for weapons by rebels fighting to overthrow the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The White House rejected the Clinton-Petraeus proposal over concerns it could draw the United States into the Syrian conflict and the arms could fall into the wrong hands, the Times said, citing unnamed Obama administration officials.

The plan called for vetting rebels and arming a group of fighters with the assistance of some neighboring countries.

Some administration officials expected the issue to come up again after the November US elections, but the plan apparently died after Petraeus resigned because of an extramarital affair and Clinton missed weeks of work with health issues, the Times said.

Clinton, who stepped down as secretary of state on Friday, declined in a recent interview with the Times to comment on her role in the debate over arming the rebels.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was said by some officials to be sympathetic to the idea, the paper reported.

Petraeus and a spokesman for Panetta declined to comment, the Times said.

Talks

From Munich Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Stephen Brown reported [2]:

The Syrian opposition leader met the foreign ministers of Russia and Iran on February 2, 2013, opening a window to a possible breakthrough in efforts to broker an end to Syria’s civil war.

Russia and Iran have been the staunchest allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad throughout an armed uprising, and any understandings they might reach with Assad’s foes could help overcome the two sides’ refusal to negotiate.

At an annual international security conference in Munich, Syrian National Coalition leader Moaz Alkhatib had talks with Russia’s Sergei Lavrov that may have been made possible by Alkhatib signaling readiness to talk to Damascus.

“Russia has a certain vision but we welcome negotiations to alleviate the crisis and there are lots of details that need to be discussed,” Alkhatib said after the meeting.

After a 45-minute meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, Alkhatib told Reuters: “We agreed we have to find a solution to end the suffering of the Syrian people.”

He also met separately with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and U.N. special envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi.

Alkhatib’s purpose in his meetings was “to discuss finding a way to remove the regime with the least possible bloodshed and loss of life,” he said.

Russia has blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at pushing out Assad out or pressuring him to end the civil war, in which more than 60,000 people have died. But Moscow has also tried to distance itself from Assad by saying it is not trying to prop him up and will not offer him asylum.

“The talks about Syria are intensifying and the Iranians have been drawn in. Let’s see how it all ends,” one diplomatic source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Big Signal”

Alkhatib put his authority within the opposition movement at risk earlier this week when he broke ranks to say he would be willing to meet Syrian officials to discuss a transition if political prisoners arrested during the uprising were freed.

The opposition coalition’s 12-member politburo then told Alkhatib not to respond to any proposals made in Munich without consulting with them first, with one opposition source citing concern that Alkhatib’s move would damage the revolt’s morale.

Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Alkhatib’s apparent readiness to meet Assad envoys outside Syria, calling him “not only courageous but smart”.

She also voiced concern that Iran had recently increased military support for Assad.

While some headway was apparently being made in Munich, Iranian media said that Saeed Jalili of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council had traveled to Damascus to meet officials and help Assad “stand against plots hatched by global arrogance” – an allusion to the United States and other Western powers.

A comment by Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev this week that Assad’s chances of staying in power were getting “smaller and smaller” was regarded in some quarters as a sign of a shift in the Kremlin’s Syria policy.

At the same time, Syrian opposition figure Hassan Bali, in Munich as an independent observer, called Alkhatib’s meeting with Biden “a big signal from the Americans” that they were upgrading support for rebels fighting to topple Assad.

Biden said he had urged Alkhatib “to isolate extremist elements within the broader opposition and to reach out to, and be inclusive of, a broad range of communities inside Syria, including Alawites, Christians and Kurds”.

Lack of leadership

There was little evidence at the Munich conference that the US and Russian positions on Assad were getting any closer.

“The persistence of those who say that priority number one is the removal of Assad is the single biggest reason for the continuing tragedy in Syria,” Lavrov told the conference.

Biden on the other hand said the White House was “convinced that President Assad, a tyrant hell-bent on clinging to power, is no longer fit to lead Syrian people and he must go”.

U.S. Republican Senator John McCain, a long-time critic of the Obama administration’s reluctance to intervene in Syria, said in Munich that the United States and its allies had “stood by and watched the massacre of 60,000 innocent people”.

McCain told reporters Obama should have explained to the American people the need to intervene – but that “requires leadership”, he said. “And so far there is no American presidential leadership.”

Source:

[1] Feb 2, 2013, “White House rebuffed Clinton-Petraeus plan to arm Syrian rebels: report”,

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/03/us-usa-syria-clinton-idUSBRE91201220130203

[2] Reuters, Feb 2, 2013 “Syrian opposition talks with Russia and Iran”,

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/02/us-syria-crisis-idUSBRE9100KV20130202

By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK

03 February 13

@ readersupportednews.org

 

The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation’s contemporary history.

Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.

Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.

Our conventional forces are subject to international laws of war: they are accountable for crimes in courts martial; and they run according to a clear chain of command. As much as the US military may fall short of these standards at times, it is a model of lawfulness compared with JSoc, which has far greater scope to undertake the commission of extra-legal operations – and unimaginable crimes.

JSoc morphs the secretive, unaccountable mercenary model of private military contracting, which Scahill identified in Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, into a hybrid with the firepower and intelligence backup of our full state resources. The Hill reports that JSoc is now seeking more “flexibility” to expand its operations globally.

JSoc operates outside the traditional chain of command; it reports directly to the president of the United States. In the words of Wired magazine:

“JSoc operates with practically no accountability.”

Scahill calls JSoc the president’s “paramilitary”. Its budget, which may be in the billions, is secret.

What does it means for the president to have an unaccountable paramilitary force, which can assassinate anyone anywhere in the world? JSoc has already been sent to kill at least one US citizen – one who had been indicted for no crime, but was condemned for propagandizing for al-Qaida. Anwar al-Awlaki, on JSoc’s “kill list” since 2010, was killed by CIA-controlled drone attack in September 2011; his teenage son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – also a US citizen – was killed by a US drone two weeks later.

 

This arrangement – where death squads roam under the sole control of the executive – is one definition of dictatorship. It now has the potential to threaten critics of the US anywhere in the world.

The film reveals some of these dangers: Scahill, writing in the Nation, reported that President Obama called Yemen’s President Saleh in 2011 to express “concern” about jailed reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye. US spokespeople have confirmed the US interest in keeping him in prison.

Shaye, a Yemeni journalist based in Sana’a, had a reputation for independent journalism through his neutral interviewing of al-Qaida operatives, and of critics of US policy such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Journalist colleagues in Yemen dismiss the notion of any terrorist affiliation: Shaye had worked for the Washington Post, ABC news, al-Jazeera, and other major media outlets.

Shaye went to al-Majala in Yemen, where a missile strike had killed a group that the US had called “al-Qaida”. “What he discovered,” reports Scahill, “were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs … some of them bearing the label ‘Made in the USA’, and distributed the photos to international media outlets.”

Fourteen women and 21 children were killed. “Whether anyone actually active in al-Qaida was killed remains hotly contested.” Shortly afterwards, Shaye was kidnapped and beaten by Yemeni security forces. In a trial that was criticized internationally by reporters’ groups and human rights organizations, he was accused of terrorism. Shaye is currently serving a five-year sentence.

Scahill and Rowley got to the bars of Shaye’s cell to interview him, before the camera goes dark (in almost every scene, they put their lives at risk). This might also bring to mind the fates of Sami al-Haj of al-Jazeera, also kidnapped, and sent to Guantánamo, and of Julian Assange, trapped in asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy.

President Obama thus helped put a respected reporter in prison for reporting critically on JSoc’s activities. The most disturbing issue of all, however, is the documentation of the “secret laws” now facilitating these abuses of American power: Scahill succeeds in getting Senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, to confirm the fact that there are secret legal opinions governing the use of drones in targeted assassinations that, he says, Americans would be “very surprised” to know about. This is not the first time Wyden has issued this warning.

In 2011, Wyden sought an amendment to the USA Patriot Act titled requiring the US government “to end practice of secretly interpreting law”. Wyden warns that there is now a system of law beneath or behind the law that we can see and debate:

“It is impossible for Congress to hold an informed public debate on the Patriot Act when there is a significant gap between what most Americans believe the law says and what the government is using the law to do. In fact, I believe many members of Congress who have voted on this issue would be stunned to know how the Patriot Act is being interpreted and applied.

 

“Even secret operations need to be conducted within the bounds of established, publicly understood law. Any time there is a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly thinks the law says, I believe you have a serious problem.”

I have often wondered, since I first wrote about America’s slide toward fascism, what was driving it. I saw the symptoms but not the cause. Scahill’s and Rowley’s brave, transformational film reveals the prime movers at work. The US executive now has a network of secret laws, secret budgets, secret kill lists, and a well-funded, globally deployed army of secret teams of assassins. That is precisely the driving force working behind what we can see. Is fascism really too strong a word to describe it?

 

By Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh

2 February 2013

@ http://popular-resistance.blogspot.com

Here is where Israeli colonial settlements continue to expand on our lands. Here is where Israeli elites make billions from injustice while nature and people suffer.  Here is the forefront of a global struggle. Here is where western hypocrisy gets exposed.  Rhetoric about democracy and liberty in Syria and Iran is stripped naked when people see Western supported colonialism, racism and subjugation in Palestine. Here is where billions of Western taxpayer money is used to destroy life while enriching land thieves and war criminals.  Here where we lost most of our land to colonial settler activity and suffer regularly from racist settler attacks.  Here is where morality is shed daily because of paranoia and inferiority/superiority complexes (chosen but eternally victimized Jewish “people”).  Here is where immorality has become a norm of society (see good analytic piece in Haaretz below).  Here is where yesterday the Israeli occupation army and racist colonial settlers attacked villagers in Burin.  Several Palestinians were injured (one 16-year old Palestinian was shot by live ammunition from settlers). 18 were brutally arrested/kidnapped including our friend Ashraf Aburahma from Bilin. Ashraf was himself arrested many times in nonviolent demonstrations.  In one videotaped event, he was handcuffed, blindfolded and THEN shot at close range by occupation soldiers.

But here also is where we must and we will change things.  Here the struggle goes on (La Luta Continue, tastimur almasira) to hang on to our humanity. We Palestinians with help of people of conscience from around the world must do better to challenge immorality (including “mental occupation”).  We must work harder to undermine apartheid and repression.  More people come to visit and participate with us in our struggle thus lighting candles in the darkness.  We must accelerate this and be more bold.  Nothing scares the elites in the apartheid state or their Western and Arab/Palestinian collaborators than actions like civil disobedience and BDS (boycotts, divestments, and sanctions) and other forms of practical resistance.  There are signs of a new uprising/intifada. It will be the 13th or 14th wave/uprising on the way to liberty.  We hope it is a global uprising against injustice and that is why many of us talk with internationals on a daily basis about morality, justice, and human rights.  Of course there will be pain along the way (as happened yesterday in Burin) because no freedom is acquired without struggle and sacrifices. May the families of those thousands of martyrs killed in the struggle be comforted.  May the injured heel.  May the prisoners be released (some are now close to death as they engaged in a hunger strike).  May all the suffering end.  May more people shed immorality and join us to work to accelerate the end of injustice.

Do visit Palestine frequently even if only in your mind.

Just one story of thousands in the land of immorality: The struggle of Burin village

http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/14847

http://972mag.com/palestinians-erect-third-west-bank-outpost-are-attacked-by-idf-settlers/65308/

Pictures http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.560035280673447.130173.136633479680298&type=3

Videos before the evictions and arrest but shows settlers throwing stones

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=K5mtU5SPRYU

Video of beating and kicking a Palestinian during the arrests https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVklEywRgUE

Standing defiant. Khalid Daragmah’s family protect their land in a sea of settlements

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/resources/interviews/5144-standing-defiant-khalid-daragmahs-family-protect-their-land-in-a-sea-of-settlements

Follow-up: In my talks and in taking delegations around, I sometimes mention some things which happened in the past like the story of the “fugitive cows” in Beit Sahour or the destruction of a playground in Beit Jala.  Here and in future emails I will send some follow-up on these stories and on stories I had shared in previous emails.  They are not only relevant to those who heard directly from me about these things but to the thousands of others who receive those emails.

The Story of 18 fugitive cows of Beit Sahour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJcfJTELmoM

Video of the Israeli destruction of a playground to build an apartheid wall on Palestinian land http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH5KAvkgoDE

Analytical pieces

Never Again – unconditionally:

“As Jews, with our own painful history of oppression, we are compelled to speak out against human rights violations committed by the State of Israel – in our name – against the Palestinian people.” These are the first words of a group of South African Jews in their public statement in the Mail & Guardian of 14 December 2012. They recognize not only their own wounds and humanity…………

http://marthiemombergblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/never-again-unconditionally/

Big Brother: When secrecy becomes a norm in Israel, it comes as a price premium

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/big-brother-when-secrecy-becomes-a-norm-in-israel-it-comes-with-a-price.premium-1.500560

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He serves as chairman of the board of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Beit Sahour

By Countercurrents.org

02 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

In the Last year, more active-duty US soldiers killed themselves than died in combat. And after a decade of deployments to war zones, the problem seems to get much worse.

“Suicide among service members and veterans challenges the health of America’s all-volunteer force. While any loss of military personnel weakens the US armed forces, the rapid upswing in suicides among service members and veterans during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan threatens to inflict more lasting harm”, said Losing the Battle, The Challenge of Military Suicide, policy brief of Center for a New American Security. The observation was made in October 2011.

The policy brief, at that time, questioned:

“If military service becomes associated with suicide, will it be possible to recruit bright and promising young men and women at current rates? Will parents and teachers encourage young people to join the military when veterans from their own communities have died from suicide? Can the all-volunteer force be viable if veterans come to be seen as broken individuals? And how might climbing rates of suicide affect how Americans view active-duty service members and veterans – and indeed, how service members and veterans see themselves?”

Now, in February 2013, on the issue Ed Pilkington reports* from New York:

Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare’s Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.

“Mom, it won’t wash off,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” she replied.

“The blood. It won’t come off.”

On March 20, last year, the soldier’s striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.

At the age of 23, William Busbee had joined a gruesome statistic. In 2012, for the first time in at least a generation, the number of active-duty soldiers who killed themselves, 177, exceeded the 176 who were killed while in the war zone.

To put that another way, more of America’s serving soldiers died at their own hands than in pursuit of the enemy.

Across all branches of the US military and the reserves, a similar disturbing trend was recorded. In all, 349 service members took their own lives in 2012, while a lesser number, 295, died in combat.

Shocking though those figures are, they are as nothing compared with the statistic to which Busbee technically belongs. He had retired himself from the army just two months before he died, and so is officially recorded as death as a veteran – one of an astonishing 6,500 former military personnel who killed themselves in 2012, roughly equivalent to one every 80 minutes.

‘He wanted to be somebody, and he loved the army’

Busbee’s story, as told to the Guardian by his mother, illuminates crucial aspects of an epidemic that appears to be taking hold in the US military, spreading alarm as it grows. He personifies the despair that is being felt by increasing numbers of active and retired service members, as well as the inability of the military hierarchy to deal with their anguish.

That’s not, though, how William Busbee’s story began. He was in many ways the archetype of the American soldier. From the age of six he had only one ambition: to sign up for the military, which he did when he was 17.

“He wasn’t the normal teenager who went out and partied,” Libby Busbee said. “He wanted to be somebody. He had his mind set on what he wanted to do, and he loved the army. I couldn’t be more proud of him.”

Once enlisted, he was sent on three separate year-long tours to Afghanistan. It was the fulfillment of his dreams, but it came at a high price. He came under attack several times, and in one particularly serious incident incurred a blow to the head that caused traumatic brain injury. His body was so peppered with shrapnel that whenever he walked through an airport security screen he would set off the alarm.

The mental costs were high too. Each time he came back from Afghanistan. Between tours or on R&R, he struck his mother as a little more on edge, a little more withdrawn. He would rarely go out of the house and seemed ill at ease among civilians. “I reckon he felt he no longer belonged here,” she said.

Once, Busbee was driving Libby in his car when a nearby train sounded its horn. He was so startled by the noise that he leapt out of the vehicle, leaving it to crash into the curb. After that, he never drove farther than a couple of blocks.

Nights were the worst. He had bad dreams and confessed to being scared of the dark, making Libby swear not to tell anybody. Then he took to sleeping in a closet, using a military sleeping bag tucked inside the tiny space to recreate the conditions of deployment. “I think it made him feel more comfortable,” his mother said.

After one especially fraught night, Libby awoke to find that he had slashed his face with a knife. Occasionally, he would allude to the distressing events that led to such extreme behavior: there was the time that another soldier, aged 18, had been killed right beside him; and the times that he himself had killed.

William told his mother: “You would hate me if you knew what I’ve done out there.”

“I will never hate you. You are the same person you always were,” she said.

“No, Mom,” he countered. “The son you loved died over there.”

Soldiers’ psychological damage

For William Nash, a retired Navy psychiatrist who directed the marine corps’ combat stress control program, William Busbee’s expressions of torment are all too familiar. He has worked with hundreds of service members who have been grappling with suicidal thoughts, not least when he was posted to Fallujah in Iraq during the height of the fighting in 2004.

He and colleagues in military psychiatry have developed the concept of “moral injury” to help understand the current wave of self-harm. He defines that as “damage to your deeply held beliefs about right and wrong. It might be caused by something that you do or fail to do, or by something that is done to you – but either way it breaks that sense of moral certainty.”

Contrary to widely held assumptions, it is not the fear and the terror that service members endure in the battlefield that inflicts most psychological damage, Nash has concluded, but feelings of shame and guilt related to the moral injuries they suffer. Top of the list of such injuries, by a long shot, is when one of their own people is killed.

“I have heard it over and over again from marines – the most common source of anguish for them was failing to protect their ‘brothers’.

The significance of that is unfathomable, it’s comparable to the feelings I’ve heard from parents who have lost a child.”

Incidents of “friendly fire” when US personnel are killed by mistake by their own side is another cause of terrible hurt, as is the guilt that follows the knowledge that a military action has led to the deaths of civilians, particularly women and children. Another important factor, Nash stressed, was the impact of being discharged from the military that can also instill a devastating sense of loss in those who have led a hermetically sealed life within the armed forces and suddenly find themselves excluded from it.

Busbee

That was certainly the case with William Busbee. In 2011, following his return to Fort Carson in Colorado after his third and last tour of Afghanistan, he made an unsuccessful attempt to kill himself. He was taken off normal duties and prescribed large quantities of psychotropic drugs which his mother believes only made his condition worse.

 

Eventually he was presented with an ultimatum by the army: retire yourself out or we will discharge you on medical grounds. He felt he had no choice but to quit, as to be medically discharged would have severely dented his future job prospects.

When he came home on January 18, 2012, a civilian once again, he was inconsolable. He told his mother: “I’m nothing now. I’ve been thrown away by the army.”

The suffering William Busbee went through, both inside the military and immediately after he left it, illustrates the most alarming single factor in the current suicide crisis: the growing link between multiple deployments and self-harm. Until 2012, the majority of individuals who killed themselves had seen no deployment at all. Their problems tended to relate to marital or relationship breakdown or financial or legal worries back at base.

The most recent department of defense suicide report, or DODSER, covers 2011. It shows that less than half, 47%, of all suicides involved service members who had ever been in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just one in 10 of those who died did so while posted in the war zone. Only 15% had ever experienced direct combat.

The DODSER for 2012 has yet to be released, but when it is it is expected to record a sea change. For the first time, the majority of those who killed themselves had been deployed. That’s a watershed that is causing deep concern within the services.

“We are starting to see the creeping up of suicides among those who have had multiple deployments,” said Phillip Carter, a military expert at the defense thinktank Center for a New American Security that in 2011 published one of the most authoritative studies into the crisis. He added that though the causes of the increase were still barely understood, one important cause might be the cumulative impact of deployments – the idea that the harmful consequences of stress might build up from one tour of Afghanistan to the next.

Over the past four years the Pentagon, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs, have invested considerable resources at tackling the problem. The US Department of Defense has launched a suicide prevention program that tries to help service members to overcome the stigma towards seeking help. It has also launched an education campaign encouraging personnel to be on the look out for signs of distress among their peers under the rubric “never let our buddy fight alone”.

Despite such efforts, there is no apparent let up in the scale of the tragedy. Though President Obama has announced a draw-down of US troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, experts warn that the crisis could last for at least a decade beyond the end of war as a result of the delayed impact of psychological damage.

It’s all come in any case too late for Libby Busbee. She feels that her son was let down by the army he loved so much. In her view he was pumped full of drugs but deprived of the attention and care he needed.

William himself was so disillusioned that shortly before he died he told her that he didn’t want a military funeral; he would prefer to be cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. “I don’t want to be buried in my uniform – why would I want that when they threw me away when I was alive,” he said.

In the end, two infantrymen did stand to attention over his coffin, the flag was folded over it, and there was a gun salute as it was lowered into the ground. William Busbee was finally at rest, though for Libby Busbee the torture goes on.

“I was there for his first breath, and his last,” she said. “Now my daughters and me, we have to deal with what he was going through.”

* guardian.co.uk, Feb 1, 2013, “US military struggling to stop suicide epidemic among war veterans”,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/01/us-military-suicide-epidemic-veteran

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Franklin Lamb

02 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Damascus: There are more than 9000 of them. Predominately young but of all ages. Volunteers everyone. Often risking their lives just to come for a twelve hour work-shift, as many as seven days a week at the Syrian Arab Republic Red Crescent Society (SARCS) Emergency Operation center.

Located at The New Zahera (blooming flowers) Hospital in Damascus just to the south of Yarmouk refugee camp, SARCS has its main emergency response teams HQ. It is here where Syrians, some Palestinians and even a few from the region and the West receive training as qualified para-medics. Maybe two-thirds of those this observer spent a day with a few days ago are students and graduates. Nationalists all, and in the main, but not everyone, supporting the government, but sympathetic towards whomever can end the killing and return life even to “pre-events normalcy”.

In the Operations Center main room, volunteers take phone calls and as they are being spoken to they stare at a large computer screen that shows a Google Earth close up view of the areas where emergency responders are urgently needed. Some of the volunteers, being tech savvy, have outlined and regularly update with a green line, the most recent safest routes to the crisis that their ambulances should take. The dispatchers get input from police, neighbors, even troops and “others” advising them which streets are currently relatively safe for travel. Periodic snipers is a fact of daily life for the responders whenever they are “on mission.

One shift manager told this observer that something the operations room really wants to help them with their work is something he called “google live”. Apparently is can some activity as it happens. His team has two problems as they try to secure this capability. One problem is that GL is forbidden by the US-led sanctions. But frankly, his team could care less and already knows how to hack into something to secure it. The main problem is that they need Syrian government approval to set up Google live and they are hoping to get it soon. This GL capability will help SARCS emergency teams get to their destination faster and safer.

The main emergency operation center is an exciting beehive of activity staffed by friendly people urgently working to help others. Dressed in bright orange overalls plainly marked with “SARCS” in red letters. As are their dozen ambulances and other vehicles. The reason? To emphatically distinguish themselves from the other rescue vehicles operated by the Ministry of Health. The reason this is important is because rebels types of do not histitate to target their ambulances with RPG’s and other weapons whereas the Al Nursa Front and others insist SARCS ambulances will not be targeted. For example, the day Yarmouk Palestinian Refugees camp was bombed three weeks ago leaving many dead and three times the number wounded, SARCS ambulances raced into the camp and pulled out 30 victims in half a day.

 

Volunteers advised this observer that the reason their vehicles are rather less likely to be targeted is that SARCS strictly complies with the Hippocratic oath and keeps politics out of their work as best they can. As this observer witnessed several times first hand, when an emergency call comes in on the # 133 line, the dispatcher asks only the location, injury assessment if available, employing the Red, Yellow, Green system. No questions are asked whether the victim is pro or anti-government, sect, nationality, or political affiliation. If the victim has a weapon the ambulance driver instructs friends of the victim at the scene to take the weapon as none are allowed on the stretcher or in SARCS vehicles. While giving medical care it is prohibited for SARCS volunteers to inquire about political views or details about the circumstances surrounding the injury.

An observer might conclude that this is one of the reasons that SARCS emergency response teams have won the general trust of Syrians and NGO’s, who by Syrian law are obliged to work with and consult with other departments of SARCS, such as Disaster Management, to get the international aid as fast as possible to where it is most needed.

There are places and times that the emergency vehicles cannot go. More than four dozen SARCS volunteers have been reported killed or injured while performing their humanitarian work. Every bombing and disaster in Syria these days brings more applications to join the SARC volunteer teams. Such is the character of the Syrian people, an amalgam of their history, culture, Arab nationalism and resistance stance.

Current shortages for emergency services in Syria include medicines, medical equipment, fuel, food boxes, blankets and cooking utensils. Some of these shortages are the direct and foreseeable result of the US-led sanctions daily targeting the civilian population of Syria with the hope that riots from the cold, malnourished, suffering civilian population will cause the elected Government of Syria to falter and the Western goal of regime change will follow. As the history of sanctions targeting civilian populations makes plane, these inhumane sanctions fail in their political objectives and simply engender the wrath of the civilian population which frankly inures to the political benefit of the government in power.

As current events are demonstrating, the designers of the US-led sanctions, who are housed on the second floor of the US Treasury building in Washington DC, including the Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC) , have once more failed to understand the nature and the quality of the Syrian people.

One wonders if the same process unfolding the past few weeks of whereby foreign interests, now may be realizing they have committed major “assessment errors” in Syria and reportedly reassessing their objectives, may now be willing to come to the negotiating table which currently has on it four serious proposals for discussion.

Only the presence of those currently absent from the dialogue table is needed to end the killing and start rebuilding homes, hospitals, infrastructures of every sort and equally essential, democratic freedoms for everyone in Syria.

 

Waiting also is the Syrian population, and the Syrian Arab Republic Red Crescent Society (SARCS) emergency responders, who 24/7 are doing life-saving national and humanitarian work for their country and for anyone who calls their emergency responders on 133.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and is reachable c/o fplamb@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Bill Van Auken

01 February, 2013

@ WSWS.org

Wednesday’s bombing of a Syrian military site by Israeli warplanes has ratcheted up the danger that the Western-backed civil war in Syria will spill over into a broader regional conflagration.

Unnamed US officials cited by the New York Times claimed that the target of Wednesday’s dawn air strike was a military convoy carrying arms that were supposedly destined for Hezbollah, the Shia political movement and militia in Lebanon.

The Syrian government, however, said that air strikes were directed against a military research center in Jamraya, in the Qasioun mountain range about three miles west of Damascus. It said that two workers at the center were killed in the bombing and five others were wounded.

“Israeli warplanes violated our airspace at dawn today and directly struck one of the scientific research centers responsible for elevating the resistance and self-defense capabilities in the area of Jamraya in the Damascus countryside,” Syria’s military said in a statement published by the official Sana news agency.

The Syrian regime charged that the air strikes had been facilitated by coordinated attacks on the part of the US and Western-backed “rebels” against the country’s radar networks and air defense systems.

“Late Wednesday, a US official said the accounts of two targets—a convoy of weapons and a military site—weren’t mutually exclusive,” the Wall Street Journal reported. The official suggested that the convoy was attacked inside the military facility. How Israel determined that it was carrying weapons bound for Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon has not been clarified.

For its part, the Israeli regime has maintained a complete silence on its act of aggression against Syria. The New York Times late Thursday described this silence as “part of a longstanding strategy to give targeted countries face-saving opportunities to avoid conflict escalation.”

According to this perverse reasoning, Syria’s public statement on the attack—rather than the attack itself—was responsible for “increasing the likelihood of a cycle of retaliation.”

The air strike was reportedly carried out by four Israeli warplanes that flew low over Syrian territory before firing as many as a dozen missiles into the complex.

The Lebanese Daily Star quoted residents of the Jamraya area who said that they were woken by blasts at the military site. “We were sleeping. Then we started hearing rockets hitting the complex and the ground started shaking and we ran into the basement,” a woman who lives next to the complex told the Lebanese newspaper.

Another Syrian, who has a relative working inside the military site, told Reuters: “It appears that there were about a dozen rockets that appeared to hit one building in the complex. The facility is closed today.”

The extreme right-wing government of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that it fears the nearly two-year-old civil war in Syria will lead to advanced weapons falling into the hands of Hezbollah or the Western-backed Islamist militias. In reality, as it begins its third term in office, the Netanyahu government is exploiting the crisis in Syria to carry out military strikes aimed at weakening its potential adversaries and paving the way for a new eruption of open warfare.

According to US officials, the alleged convoy headed to Lebanon was not carrying chemical weapons or any other offensive arms, but rather Russian-made SA-17 anti-aircraft missiles, which would be capable of hitting Israeli fighter-bombers, helicopters and drones.

As NBC News put it, “They would remove Israel’s critical freedom of flight over Lebanon.” The Israeli regime has exercised this “freedom” repeatedly in the last several days. On Wednesday, the Lebanese army reported that Israeli warplanes had carried out two sorties over Lebanese territory, circling for hours on Tuesday and returning before dawn on Wednesday.

More importantly, this unchallenged control over Lebanon’s airspace is critical for Israel if it is preparing yet another war against the country to its north, which it last invaded in 2006, destroying much of its infrastructure with air and sea bombardments and killing over 1,100 people.

This eventuality was strongly suggested by a top Israeli military commander. On the eve of the air strike on Syria, Major-General Amir Eshel, the chief of Israel’s air force, declared that Israel was now engaged in a “war between wars” and that “this campaign is 24/7, 365 days a year. We are taking action to reduce the immediate threats, to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen.”

Eshel said that Tel Aviv was trying “to keep [our] efforts beneath the level at which war breaks out,” but added, “… if there is no alternative—maybe it will.”

The Israeli attack was carried out after prior consultation with the Obama administration in Washington, which, like Tel Aviv, has maintained a guilty silence over the air strikes. Indeed, the only official US response came in the form of a statement by the White House deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, who issued a warning to Syria that it should not “further destabilize the region by transferring weaponry to Hezbollah.”

Israel’s carrying out a so-called preventive military action, i.e., unprovoked aggression, against a sovereign territory was clearly not seen by the US administration as “destabilizing.” This was just the latest in a long line of such criminal actions, carried out by Washington’s ally, including last October’s attack on an alleged weapons factory in Sudan and endless violence against the Palestinian populations in the occupied territories of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The Israeli air strikes were condemned by the Russian government, which called them “unprovoked attacks on targets on the territory of a sovereign country, which blatantly violates the UN Charter and is unacceptable, no matter the motives to justify it.”

Iran, Syria’s closest regional ally, warned that the “Zionist regime’s attack on the outskirts of Damascus will have grave consequences for Tel Aviv.” Previously Tehran had warned that it would treat an attack on Syria as an act of aggression against its own territory.

In Lebanon, President Michel Suleiman denounced the Israeli attack as “flagrant aggression” and accused Israel of “exploiting the developments in Syria to carry out its aggressive policies, indifferent to all the humanitarian and international treaties.”

Debka.com, an Israeli military intelligence web site with close ties to the Israeli secret services, reported that the strike on Syria had “touched off high military alerts across the region,” including on the part of a Russian fleet of 18 warships in the eastern Mediterranean, the Lebanese and Jordanian armies and US forces based at the Incerlik air base in Turkey, as well as US special operations troops deployed in Jordan.

The US-backed Israeli attack on Syria is only the beginning of what threatens to explode into a far wider war, including against Iran, dragging the entire region into a bloodbath and endangering the lives of millions.