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By Dr Paul Larudee

13 January, 2013

@ Counterpunch.org

Amazing stuff, India ink. A few drops spread vigorously with a roller for several minutes on an iron plate are enough for eight sets of fingerprints and two sets of handprints on four ancient double-sided and folded Indian police fingerprint forms. By contrast, the mug shot was taken with a digital camera. After that, I was issued an official deportation order, for which I signed to acknowledge receipt. My passport remained in police custody until I got to the security check at the airport, when it was returned to me.

My crime? I had spoken to an audience of 22,000 youth at a Student Islamic Organization conference in Kerala State without having a visa that authorized public speaking or conference participation. India is perhaps the only “democracy” where free speech for foreigners depends upon the visa they are carrying. In fact, it is probably the only such country that has no visit visa category at all, and which has one of the most convoluted, bureaucratic and invasive visa application procedures this side of North Korea.

Not that the visa restrictions are always enforced. However, the myriad regulations and procedures (“for public protection”) permit the security apparatus to control individuals and events at their discretion without having to cite the true reasons for their enforcement. Every effective police state knows the drill.

In my case, I used a tourist visa, because the conference visa is a truly onerous procedure unless it is a state-sponsored event. In fact, that is the only type of conference participation permitted, because even private groups must seek state sponsorship in order to bring speakers from outside. In today’s India, however, state sponsorship is hardly a routine bureaucratic procedure.

It shouldn’t have been this way. India was supposed to have been the model for tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-confessional societies. And when India was a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, carefully balancing its relationships among great and small powers and supporting those who might otherwise be a mere pawn in world affairs, this promise seemed plausible.

Regrettably, India has now become a home-grown Raj, choosing sides and fomenting discord between competing interests as a means of governing and controlling, in the best traditions of its colonial past. Thus, for example, conservative Salafist clerics are welcome when they attend conferences on tourist visas, while human rights speakers like David Barsamian, John Esposito, Yvonne Ridley, Wilhelm Langthaler and myself are unwelcome, and are denied visas or expelled, and/or their hosts are prosecuted.

The Salafist treatment is part of a Machiavellian formula hatched by India with its newest partner, Israel. Salafists deserve free speech as much as anyone, but the reason India accords more of it to them is on the advice of Israel. Israel promotes Islamophobia as part of its strategy of demonizing Palestinians and Arabs, a majority of whom are Muslims, and the Salafist brand of Islam fits Israel’s agenda of portraying Islam as an extremist ideology. This stokes the flames of the more extreme nationalist Hindu groups in India and plays on the fears of many other non-Muslim groups, as well. Since Pakistan is an external Muslim enemy, such demonization helps to unify non-Muslim India and permit popular tolerance of greater government control as well as encroachment of security forces on civil rights and privacy.

In fact, India has its own version of the U.S. Patriot Act, curbing the rights of its people. It is called the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), and while the title is more honest than “Patriot”, it is also a bit scary. It implies that people can be snatched from the edge of a sidewalk on the pretext that they were intent on jaywalking. No need for the infraction to happen first.[i] UAPA is an illustration of the degree to which human rights have been marginalized in the land of M.K. Gandhi and Abdulghaffar Khan.

Not that India doesn’t have real security concerns. Communal strife is as old as India itself and has sometimes risen to the level of genocide, which drove the 1947 Pakistan secession. However, it is one thing to use law enforcement to prevent fighting and quite another to use it to drive a wedge between communities with a view towards playing them off against each other.

A case in point is the role that Israel is playing. The self-proclaimed Jewish state is selling itself to India as a worthwhile ally on the basis that it is a) an experienced and effective leader in the fight against Islamist extremism and terrorism, b) a supplier of high-tech weapons and intelligence, and c) a means of access to U.S. support and cooperation. In effect, Israel is saying that both states have common friends and enemies and that Israel is in a position to provide what India needs.

India appears to be buying, and is currently the largest customer for Israeli military arms systems and services. Never mind that the expensive Iron Dome systems are effective less than 50% of the time against rockets from Gaza that use 16th century technology. Like most governments, India has been seduced by the promise of omniscient surveillance systems and the prospect of winning battles rather than preventing them.

This is obviously a devil’s bargain. True to the nature of such contracts, however, are the surprises that await the unwary. It is instructive to remember that Israeli agents once planted bombs in Baghdad synagogues to encourage Iraq’s Jews to emigrate to Israel. (It worked, and encouraged Iraqi thugs toward violence, as well.)

Since then, Israel has stolen nuclear weapon technology and weapons grade fissionable material from the U.S., conducted the most massive spying operation in U.S. history against its “ally”, and staged numerous assassinations and “black ops” actions outside its borders, including friendly countries. Questions currently surround the killing of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria and the putative assassination attempt on Israeli diplomats in India. Israel blamed both of these on Iran on the basis of flimsy evidence, possibly fabricated in collaboration with its allies, the violent Mujahedin-e-Khalq Iranian exile group.

India would do well to be more circumspect toward friends like this. Vilifying Iran is high on Israel’s current agenda, and Israel reportedly provided “evidence” and pushed the Indian government to prosecute the case. The result was the arrest of journalist Syed Mohammed Ahmed Kazmi, who anchors a news program on West Asia providing alternative views of events in the region. His open advocacy of better relations with Iran and his Iranian contacts were enough make him an Israeli target and an Indian suspect. After seven months of incarceration, however, the Indian government had to release him for lack of evidence.

Kazmi and I shared the podium at the SIO conference in Kerala and I was able to chat with him privately just prior to the event. He is a courageous man, willing to accept the risk of speaking in public so soon after his release, but appears to hold no bitterness. Peaceful dissent of this kind needs to be encouraged in India, which is well advised to heed John F. Kennedy’s warning that, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Sadly, Israel sees violent revolution in foreign countries to be in its national interest, under the “divide and conquer” principle. However, one would think that India’s principle would be the opposite if it wants to remain a successful unified nation with a highly diverse population seeking assurance that all their voices are heard in a national consensus. Furthermore, there is no need for India to acquire the same enemies as Israel. It may be in Israel’s perceived interests, but is it in India’s?

My few days in Kerala were an inspiring glimpse of what is possible. I saw thousands of young Indian Muslims whose religious and social mission is to benefit all mankind, to alleviate the social ills of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to promote interfaith cooperation and to create an umbrella that is inclusive of everyone.

Although this was a Muslim event, many who attended were not Muslim and were invited directly by their Muslim neighbors. I was invited to be the keynote speaker even though I am not Muslim and spoke more generally about human rights and about Palestinian issues, which are not specifically Muslim or Indian. Roughly 40% of the attendees were young women, in a society not always known for its success in promoting women’s rights.

These young people were politically aware, committed, well organized and motivated. Society is supposed to create models for young people, but in this case it was the young that created a model for their society.

Dr. Paul Larudee is a human rights advocate and one of the co-founders of the movement to break the siege of Gaza by sea. He was deported from India on 31st December, 2012.

[i] For a fictional treatment illustrating the absurdity of this proposition, see the film Minority Report (2002).

By Eileen Fleming

13 January, 2013

@ Eileenfleming.org

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this year coincides with the inauguration of President Barack Obama’s second term.

To bring attention to the urgent need for action on climate change, leaders and individuals from Buddhist, Christian [Catholic, Evangelical and Protestant], Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and other faith traditions will unite with the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate for “A Pray-in for the Climate” in front of the White House on Tuesday, January 15th, the 84th birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

On January 19, the Jewish Voice for Peace, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace will lead a Rally and March to the White House calling for “No Blank Check for Israel” which can be signed onto here: http://www.obamaletter.org

Inspired by Rev. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, which directly challenged his “fellow clergymen” I seized the liberty to spin it as a Citizens of Conscience Manifesto for my 2012 run for US House of Representatives:

I am on the Internet because injustice can be expressed here. I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in comfort and not be concerned about what happens in Israel Gaza Palestine.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives in the world can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; examining one’’s motives and acting on conscience with direct action.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community, which has constantly refused to negotiate, is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension, which is necessary for growth.

Too long has The Peace Process been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. We must come to see that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but also a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine “an unjust law is no law at all.”

A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Segregation [Translates to Apartheid in Afrikaner] distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.

Hence segregation; apartheid, conscription and military occupation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound; it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and it was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’’s Germany.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever and if repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. -End of Letter from Birmingham Jail [1]

In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King reminded his fellow clergymen that Jesus was an extremist for love who taught his follower’s to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

King recalled to his fellow clerics that the Hebrew prophet Amos was an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”

The world is pulled to change by extremism and our only dilemma is what will we be extremists for? Hate or love? God or State? The preservation of injustice or the extension of justice; equal human rights?

The clinging to the status quo is a form of extremism for all around US are the deep groans from the oppressed, as King addressed from his jail cell:

Few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.

Too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

There was a time when the church was very powerful——in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”

Small in number, they were big in commitment and by their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch defender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent——and often even vocal——sanction of things as they are.

If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twenty-first century.

King wondered if organized religion was too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world.

He knew that “Any nation that year after year continues to raise the Defense budget while cutting social programs to the neediest is a nation approaching spiritual death.”

We who claim to be Christian are called to love our enemies and that the daughters and sons of God are the peacemakers. The last words Jesus spoke to his follower’s before his martyrdom was to “put down the sword” and his first words after his resurrection was “My peace be with you.”

During one of my seven trips to occupied Palestine since 2005, Mohammad Alatar, film producer of “The Ironwall” addressed my group on an Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions tour through Jerusalem and to the village of Anata and the Shufat refugee camp, in the very area where the prophet Jeremiah in the 6th century B.C. critiqued the violent conflicts in the Mid East, which were already old news:

“I hear violence and destruction in the city, sickness and wounds are all I see.” [Jeremiah 6:7]

The remains of a 7-story Palestinian apartment building, one of over

22,000 Palestinian homes that Israel has demolished

After we broke bread and ate a typical Palestinian feast prepared by the Arabiya family in the Arabyia Peace Center, Mohammad Alatar said:

“I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it.

“What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues.

“Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel. After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. It is a moral issue that the churches must address.” [IBID]

While he lived the FBI placed wiretaps on Reverend King’s home and office phones and bugged his hotel rooms throughout the country. By 1967, King had become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic.

In his “Beyond Vietnam”speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 [a year to the day before he was murdered] King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

In 1986 the federal government ‘honored’ King with a national holiday.

I IMAGINE if we the people of this homeland would honor King by following his example, it would be a very different world.

1. Vanunu’s WAIT for LIBERTY, Remember the USS LIBERTY and My Life as a Candidate of Conscience for US HOUSE 2012

By Glen Ford

13 January, 2013

@ BlackAgendaReport

A long-planned U.S. escalation of its military presence in Africa will soon get underway, with the permanent deployment of a 3,500-strong brigade. The heavy combat team will make itself at home in African bases in 35 countries. “This is a very different kind of invasion – more like an infiltration-in-force.”

2013 is the year the U.S. kicks off its wholesale military occupation of Africa. The escalation should come as no surprise, since the Army Times newspaper reported, back in June, that a U.S. brigade of at least 3,000 troops would become a permanent presence on the continent in the new year. On Christmas Eve, the Pentagon announced that 3,500 soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, in Fort Riley, Kansas, will be sent to Africa, supposedly to confront a threat from al-Qaida in Mali, where Islamists have seized the northern part of the country. But the 2nd Brigade is scheduled to hold more than 100 military exercises in 35 countries, most of which have no al-Qaida presence. So, although there is no doubt that the U.S. will be deeply involved in the impending military operation in Mali, the 2nd Brigade’s deployment is a much larger assignment, aimed at making all of Africa a theater of U.S. military operations. The situation in Mali is simply a convenient, after-the-fact rationale for a long-planned expansion of the U.S. military footprint in Africa.

The Pentagon’s larger purpose in placing an army brigade on roving duty all across the continent is to acclimate African commanders to hosting a permanent, large scale U.S. presence. This is a very different kind of invasion – more like an infiltration-in-force. The Pentagon’s strategy is designed to reinforce relationships that the U.S. Africa Command has been cultivating with African militaries since the establishment of AFRICOM during George Bush’s last year in office. As an infiltrating force, AFRICOM has been a phenomenal success.

Militarily speaking, the African Union has become an annex of the Pentagon. The AU’s biggest operation, in Somalia, is armed, financed and directed by the U.S. military and CIA. The 17,000 African troops on so-called peace-keeping duty in Somalia are, for all practical purposes, mercenaries for the Americans – although poorly paid ones. Ethiopian and Kenyan forces act as extensions of U.S. power in the East Africa. U.S. Special Forces roam the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic – ostensibly looking for the fugitive warlord Joseph Kony but, in reality, establishing a web of U.S. military infrastructures throughout center of the continent. Uganda and Rwanda keep the eastern Congo’s mineral riches safe for U.S. and European corporations – at the cost of 6 million Congolese lives. Their militaries are on the Pentagon’s payroll.

In northwest Africa, the 16 nations of the region’s economic community await the intervention of the United Nations – which really means the United States and France – to expel the Islamist forces from Mali. Militarily, the West Africans are totally dependent. But, more importantly, they show no political will to escape this dependency – especially after the demise of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

The creeping, continental U.S. expeditionary force, soon to be spearheaded by the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, will bunk down in African military bases throughout the continent, not as invaders, but as guests. Guests who pay the bills and provide the weapons for African armies whose mission has nothing to do with national independence and self-determination. Three generations after the beginnings of decolonization, the African soldier is once again bowing to the foreign master.

Black Agenda Report executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

By Fil Munas

13 January, 2013

@ Countercurrentsorg

They made her kneel and extend her neck, severing her young head with an unmerciful swish of a sword, shortly before noon on Wednesday, January 9, 2013. The forlorn woman was publicly beheaded by the pitiless Saudis in the town square of Dawadmi in Saudi Arabia, slaughtered like an animal for everyone to see, her separated head dropping to the ground with a muffled thud. Her name was Rizana Nafeek and she was from Muttur in Sri Lanka.

The tragedy of Rizana Nafeek is a gruesome story of innocence betrayed, the ghoulish tale of a precious life destroyed. It began in 2005 when Rizana, hardly seventeen, left her impoverished homeland of Sri Lanka to work as a servant maid in the oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia. She had embarked on this ill-fated journey to support her penurious family at home — they lived in a decrepit shack, her father scavenged and sold firewood from the surrounding jungle for their sustenance, her desperate parents could not adequately provide for the children. Young Rizana, fired by the dreams and the innocence of youth, aspired to make a difference for her family with the relatively handsome wages she hoped to earn as a servant in Saudi Arabia.

Rizana arrived in Riyadh on May 4, 2005. She was immediately sent to work in the household of her sponsoring employer in the town of Dawadmi in central Saudi Arabia. Besides her numerous housekeeping tasks, she was ordered to care for her employer’s infant child who was about four months old at the time. While tending the infant on May 22, 2005, the baby choked while feeding and died as the maid frantically tried to save the child’s life.

Rizana and the baby were in a room by themselves when this happened. As the distraught maid shrieked in horror, the infant’s absent mother who did not witness any of the antecedents, now rushed into the room and instantly accused Rizana of murdering the child.

Rizana was arrested on the spot. She was forced to confess to a crime she did not commit by the Saudi police using inhuman duress, then convicted of murder without any access to due process or the presumption of innocence. On June 16, 2007, the authorities sentenced the miserable maid to death by public beheading. Rizana subsequently stated she was threatened and beaten by the local police into signing the “confession.” No reason was given at the time of the one-sided trial to explain why someone who had worked hardly two weeks in a brand new country should suddenly develop a motive to murder her employer’s child. No autopsy was ever performed to ascertain the cause of death.

Rizana was abandoned by the authorities of her native Sri Lanka who did nothing to help her legally. At great financial expense, the Asian Human Rights Commission based in Hong Kong appealed the sentence to the highest Saudi tribunals, but without success. Upon confirming her execution last Wednesday, the Saudi Interior Ministry added that Rizana was beheaded because she “strangled the baby” after “a dispute with the mother.” To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no revelations of any dispute with the mother or evidence that the baby was strangled, was ever offered by the Saudi authorities during the seven years they had her incarcerated. This cynical dissembling by the Saudi government in the post-execution statement, besmirching an innocent person they had killed in cold blood, is beyond mind-boggling. Rizana’s grieving parents requested her body returned home for a decent burial. The Saudis refused and buried her in a derelict’s grave.

Rizana had many supporters around the world pleading for her young life, yet none could save her from the immoral actions of a Saudi government oblivious to human rights and natural justice. Inexplicably, the modern world leaves unchallenged the odious behavior of an irrational and medieval regime riddled with self-righteous sanctimony and intolerance, possessing no respect for human rights or gender equality. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights must publicly denounce this monstrous abuse of a person and the unlawful death inflicted on an innocent fellow human by the custodians of a sordid system. High Commissioner Navanethem Pillay should speak out boldly against this abomination for her to have any credibility among fair-minded people around the world, and if she wishes to demonstrate that her Commission has a conscience.

Fil Munas, M.D. is a psychiatric physician and hobby bee-keeper living in Southern Illinois, USA. He may be reached at 1american.muse@gmail.com

By Ismail Salami

13 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

The ethnic cleansing in Pakistan has reached an alarming point, with over 120 Shia people killed and several severely wounded in the recent bombings across the country.

The families of the victims decline to bury the bodies of their loved ones unless they hear at least a word of condemnation from the Pakistani government.

In spite of a salvo of ethnic killings in the country, the government turns a blind eye to the tragedy and refuses to take any measures whatsoever in curtailing the inhumane trend. The reason may be tracked down to the fact that militancy has been implicitly backed by government-affiliated organizations such as ISI and the intelligence agencies for the past two decades. There is a purported claim that the ISI is not in the least affiliated to the government and that it operates out of its own volition in eliminating the Shia population which forms at least one-fourth of the population.

Human rights activists said on Thursday that the police and the security forces had failed to protect the vulnerable community. “The callousness and indifference of the authorities offers a damning indictment of the state, its military and security agencies,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, the Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch.

The assassination attempts in Pakistan initially included the Shia elites such as doctors, professors, engineers, and lawyers. However, in recent months, the appalling assassinations have come to encompass any Shia gatherings regardless of their social ranks. Unfortunately, the Pakistani government has constantly tried to put a lid on these crimes, attribute them to sectarian violence and refuse to arrest the guilty parties. As usual, the West has chosen the ‘wise’ policy of media blackout on the inhumane issue. And if there is, the Western media tries to depict the tragedy in the light of a sectarian violence between the Sunnis and the Shias. Their choice of words in this regard well attests to their deliberate manipulation and misreporting of this horrific incident which springs from nothing but blind ignorance and prejudice. In a report by BBC, the network said “Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi said it carried out the deadliest of Thursday’s attacks killing at least 85”, sought to attribute it to sectarianism and shrewdly avoided siding with the victims or condemning the terrorist attack.

The epicenters of these Shia killings include Quetta, Gilgit-Baltistan, Parachinar, lower Punjab and several regions in North West. However, recent months have witnessed Shia killings in large cities such as Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi and Rawalpindi.

The root causes of religious extremism in Pakistan are traceable to the time when the US government sought to oust the Soviet forces from Afghanistan. In those days, the ISI was heavily mobilized by the US and funded by the Saudi Wahhabis to achieve this goal. No wonder, the only countries that recognized the Taliban with the green light of Washington were Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and United Arab Emirates.

A prominent Harvard researcher Nawaf E. Obaid says a former high-ranking Pakistani civil servant with close ties to his country’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), told him that “the US provided the weapons and the know-how; the Saudis provided the funds; and we provided the training camps and operations bases for the mujahidin in the early 1980s, then for the Taliban.” According to Obaid, the Saudi political Mogul Sheikh Mohamed bin Jubier, who is known to be the `exporter’ of the Wahhabi creed in the world, was a strong advocate of aiding the Taliban.”

Henry Kissinger writes that although the US and the Taliban had nothing in common, they shared a common enemy and that made them allies. Michael Semple of the Kennedy School of Government also says they shared a common enemy with the United States and both the Carter and Reagan administrations gave the Mujahadeen $3 billion in military aid to fight the Soviets.

After the exit of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the US government decided to continue using these forces in a new direction, a direction which could pave the way for political inequilibrium and religious extremism in Pakistan in particular and in the region in general.

In the meantime, a large number of Shia groups reacted strongly to this new-fledged radicalism which threatened to hurl the country deeper into chaos and commotion. Instead, the US government discerned a strong necessity to curb this fighting force. Therefore, it embarked on a series of complicated and comprehensive plans: to smother this political and intellectual resistance. In the course of time, the US started strengthening radical groups such as al Qaeda, Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Sepah Sehabeh, Jundallah and other fledgling extremists in Pakistan. All this was accomplished with the financial assistance of Saudi Arabi and some Arab states in an effort to promote religious extremism and counter the burgeoning influence of Iran in the region.

The assassinations in Pakistan are in fact products of that twisted ill-defined mentality systematically promoted and funded by the US and its puppet Arab regimes.

No matter what labels we use to describe the tragedy, the fact is that what is happening in Pakistan to the Shia minority is an ugly truth, an indelible human stain and an act of genocidal ideology the bitter memory of which will rankle in the minds for many years to come.

Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages.

By Alan Hart

13 January, 2013

@ Alanhart.net

Moshe Feiglin, one of the most deluded and racist of those who make up the extreme right of Israeli politics and who is guaranteed his first seat in the Knesset after the upcoming election, has proposed what I imagine he regards as a nice way to complete Zionism’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

At a recent settler-organized conference in Jerusalem, he said Israel should pay Palestinian families to leave the West Bank, using funds earmarked for security measures. “We can give every family in Judea and Samaria $500,000 (USD) to encourage them to emigrate… This is the perfect solution for us.”

I imagine he regards it as a “perfect” solution because it would save Israel from having to create a pretext to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank by military means.

The question somebody should ask him is this. “For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that such an offer is made to the Palestinians on the West Bank and they reject it, what then?”

Feiglin lives in a West Bank settlement and heads Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction. He believes that the Bible, interpreted literally, should form the basis of Israel’s legal system. “This is just the beginning. Eventually, we will build the temple and fulfill our purpose in this land.” And his credentials as a racist are impeccable. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg for New Yorker, he said:

“Why should non-Jews have a say in the policy of a Jewish state? For two thousand years, Jews dreamed of a Jewish state, not a democratic state. Democracy should serve the values of the state, not destroy them. In any case, you can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach an Arab to be democratic. You’re dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. Muhammad, their prophet, was a robber and a killer and a liar. The Arab destroys everything he touches.”

Just imagine what the reaction would be if an Arab politician running for office expressed similar vile thoughts about Israeli and other Jews and their prophets!!! (Zionism’s unquestioning supporters would call it a blood libel. Feiglin’s statement is that plus).

During the conference at which Feiglin made his proposal there was also a most interesting and, I think, very revealing contribution from Yuli Edelstein, currently the Minister of Information and Diaspora in Netanyahu’s coalition government. (I stopped using the term diaspora to describe the collective of the Jews of the world when my very dear friend Ilan Pappe explained to me why it was wrong to do so. Diaspora means, is the consequence of, the movement, migration or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral home. The term “Jewish diaspora” implies that all the Jews of it are from the same established or ancestral home, and that is nonsense. Edelstein’s original homeland, for example, is the Ukraine in what was part of the Soviet Union when he was born there in 1958).

Edelstein told the conference that the lack of Israeli sovereignty over Area C – the 60% of the occupied West Bank under full Israeli military control and in which most of Israel’s illegal settlements are situated – “strengthens the international community’s demand for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines.”

I think he was doing more than calling in code for the formal annexation of Area C. He was also signalling the need for Zionism to pre-empt any possible international pressure for withdrawal by going ahead with annexation without too much further delay. This would see Zionism resorting to its tried and tested way of defying international law. Effectively Israel’s leaders say to the world: “We know we should not have done this, but we’ve done it. What are you going to do about it?” On the evidence of history to date Zionism knows the answer to that question, “Nothing.”

Edelstein is not alone. As the battle for rightwing votes intensifies, more and more members of the Likud-Beiteinu election alliance are using the “a” (annexation) word.

What Feiglin, Edelstein and others said at the conference was seized upon by Tzipi Livni, the former Kadima leader and foreign minister, as an opportunity to advance the election prospects of her own newly formed “centrist” party, Hatnua. She said the conference had “removed the masks” of the Likud-Beiteinu alliance.

She went on:

“Likud-Beiteinu is extreme right wing and will make Israel into a boycotted, isolated and ostracised state” and “lead to the destruction of Zionism and the establishment of a bi-national state.”

Those of us who are concerned with the need for justice for the Palestinians and peace with equal rights and security for all have to hope that her prediction will not be proved wrong by events.

Update

I wrote this piece shortly before hundreds of thousands of Palestinian supporters of Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction were allowed by Hamas to rally in Gaza to mark Fatah’s 48th anniversary. If that’s a sign that there is now a real prospect of a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation for the sake of Palestinian unity, the probability is that the Israeli right will be strengthened in its conviction that the ticking demographic time-bomb of occupation must be defused by any means, including, if necessary, a final ethnic cleansing by military means, not the nice way Feiglin proposed.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor

By Alan Hart

13 January, 2013

@ Alanhart.net

I would like the headline to be a statement but it has to be a question.

As I write it looks as though the Zionist lobby realises that it overplayed its hand in smearing Chuck Hagel in the hope of causing President Obama to back off nominating him for the post defense secretary. The implication is not that the lobby’s stooges in the Senate will refrain from giving Hagel a hard time at his confirmation hearing, but that they will not risk, at least for a while, further public exposure as Israel Firsters by causing the nomination to be rejected.

How much Obama himself is to be credited with outflanking the Zionist lobby on this occasion is a good question. There is certainly a case for saying that by authorising the leaking of Hagel’s name well in advance of the presidential nomination, Obama was deliberately provoking the Zionist lobby (and its neo-con associates) confident in the knowledge that there would be enough eminent and respected Americans, including some Jewish Americans, who would come forward to defend Hagel and rubbish the Zionist lobby’s smear campaign.

There were and Justin Raimondo put it this way. “When the ultra neo-cons of the Emergency Committee for Israel launched their propaganda offensive to cleanse the body politic of Hegelian revisionism, they took their campaign to ‘Criticize Hagel, Criticize Obama’ to such ridiculously vicious lengths that they inspired a vigorous pushback from the sort of people who had put up with their nonsense for too long: grizzled veterans of the diplomatic, political, and military corps who had sat in silence during the Bush years as the neo-cons played havoc with the country’s foreign policy.”

If as seems most likely Hagel is confirmed, it will be a defeat for the Zionist lobby, but how significant will that actually be? Will it be an indication that the lobby is beginning to lose its grip and, if it is, that we can look forward to a second-term Obama making best use of his greater freedom by doing whatever is necessary to get a real Middle East peace process going?

It all depends, I think, on why, really, Obama wanted the Republican Hagel as his top man in the Pentagon.

There are some who believe that Obama sees in Hagel a man who will assist him to put America’s own best interests first by ending the Zionist lobby’s control of policy for Israel-Palestine. In this way of interpreting Obama’s motivation, great attention is paid to one particular statement Hagel made when he was a senator and which, some like to believe, inspired the president to conclude that he, Hagel, was the best man for the job. This was Hagel’s statement:

“The political reality is that … the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here … I’ve always argued against some of the dumb things they do, because I don’t think it’s in the interest of Israel … I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator. I support Israel, but my first interest is, I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States, not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel.”

But the prospect of having a much respected Republican ally for second-term effort to break free from the Zionist lobby’s controlling grip may not have been the main reason, or even a reason, for Obama’s decision to nominate Hagel. It could be that David Brooks hit the nail on the head in an op-ed analysis for the New York Times.

Under the headline Why Hagel Was Picked, Brooks opened up with this observation:

“Americans don’t particularly like government, but they do want government to subsidize their health care. They believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. In a Quinnipiac poll, typical of many others, Americans opposed any cuts to Medicare by a margin of 70 percent to 25 percent.”

Brooks then noted that the line tracing federal health care spending “looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia,” and that Medicare spending “is set to nearly double over the next decade.” This, he added, is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years. “There are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise.”

In my view what Brooks went on to say contains the key to real understanding of not only why Obama wanted Hagel, but also what we can and cannot expect from a second-term Obama presidency on policy for Israel-Palestine.

So far, Brooks noted, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the ever rising demand for expenditure on Medicare. (The military budget has more than doubled since 9/11). “But that is about to change.”

To set up his main argument Brooks drew off one advanced by Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher (1880 – 1936) who wrote The Decline of the West. Spengler, Brooks said, “was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn’t do both.”

Brooks continued:

“Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 1990s, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further.

“The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

“As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history. Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be. According to the Government Accountability Office, if we act on entitlements today, we will still have to cut federal spending by 32 percent and raise taxes by 46 percent over the next 75 years to meet current obligations. If we postpone action for another decade, then we have to cut all non-interest federal spending by 37 percent and raise all taxes by 54 percent.

“As this sort of crunch gradually tightens, Medicare will be the last to go. Spending on things like Head Start, scientific research and defense will go quicker. These spending cuts will transform America’s stature in the world, making us look a lot more like Europe today.

“Chuck Hagel has been nominated to supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks. If a Democratic president is going to slash defense, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot.”

For absolute clarity, “to boot” in the sentence above means “as well” or “also”. It does not mean that Hagel was selected for the prime purpose of assisting Obama to put the boot into the Zionist lobby!

The conclusion I think the Brooks analysis invites is this. Throughout of all his second term, Obama’s main focus will be on his legacy – “How will I be seen in history?” His priority will therefore be oversight management of America’s economy, to prevent it collapsing on his watch and possibly provoking at some point a revolution of rising discontent which could see America burning; and that is not going to allow Obama the time and the mind space to do what is necessary to cause (or try to cause) the Zionist state to be serious about peace on terms most Palestinians could just about accept. I also think this is most likely to be the case even if in his head and his heart Obama would like to read the riot act to Israel.

My guess is that Obama will content himself with the thought that Israel is becoming more and more of a pariah state because of its own actions and that Zionism is on the road to self-destruction.

The alternative speculation, as outlined by Raimondo, is that it’s because of the Legacy Factor that Obama will make resolving the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel a top priority. Raimondo put it this way:

“The domestic economic situation is not going to improve much over the next four years, and I think the President knows that this will be an uphill battle. So where does that leave his legacy?

“Most Presidents move on the foreign policy front in their second terms, and this one will be no exception. And where this President is likely to make his move is where two of his Democratic predecessors tried, and failed, to make their respective marks, and that is in finally forging a lasting peace accord in the Middle East.”

It is, of course, true that if Obama became the peacemaker he would go down in history as not only a great president but, most probably, the greatest president in American history. But could that really be his legacy?

For the sake of discussion let’s assume that Obama can break the Zionist lobby’s iron grip on policy (an awesome assumption), and does become free to use the leverage any American president has to press Israel to be serious about peace on terms most Palestinians could just about accept, what then? Does it automatically follow that Zionism’s in-Israel leaders would say, “Okay, Mr. President, we’ll do what you want.”?

No! No! No!

In my view there is a very strong possibility, even a probability, that if a second-term President Obama did turn some real heat on Israel to back a demand that it end its defiance of international law and its occupation of the West Bank and its siege of the Gaza Strip, its leaders would say to him, “Go to hell!” There would also be a possibility that they would demonstrate their fury and teach him a lesson by creating some havoc in the region. What do I mean?

When President Carter worked with the Soviet Union to produce a joint superpower declaration of principles on the way to peace, all Arab governments and Arafat’s PLO agreed to co-operate, only Israel rejected this superpower initiative..Prime Minister Begin sent his foreign minister, General Moshe Dayan, to Washington for a conversation with Carter. Very shortly after it, the joint US-Soviet Declaration was torn up and replaced with a new memorandum of US-Israel understanding. What happened? Dayan said to Carter: “Mr. President, you must understand that my prime minister is mad. If you push him too far he could bomb the Arab oil wells.” (If Obama did put real pressure on Israel, it’s not impossible that Netanyahu would send his foreign minister to Washington to say to the president: “You must understand that my prime minister is crazy. If you push him too far he could bomb Iran.”)

Obama is not stupid. He knows that if he did seek to put real pressure on Israel, it could all go horribly wrong and leave him with a legacy that was not worth having.

For that reason I believe (I would love to be proved wrong by events) that there is almost no chance of a really serious and sustainable push for peace during Obama’s second term.

Back to my headline question. Hagel’s confirmation by the Senate will be a defeat for the Zionist lobby (and its non-Jewish neo-con associates), but whether or not it will be seen in the future as the beginning of a process that ended the lobby’s iron grip on policy for Israel-Palestine is a very big, open question.

There is, however, a sign, a very small one but still a sign, that such a process might (repeat might) be getting underway.

An important red line was crossed by those veterans of the diplomatic, political, and military establishments who dared to go public with their criticism and condemnation of the campaign by the Zionist lobby (and its neo-con associates) to demonize Hagel.

 

That crossing put the issue of America’s “special relationship” with Israel on the agenda for open debate. As Raimondo noted: “That has never happened before. The issue of Israel was always considered to be beyond debate, the most recent example of this uniformity of opinion being the last presidential debate between Obama and Romney in which the candidates spent a great deal of time competing with each other to see who could be more effusive in their undying support for the Jewish state.” (I do wish Raimondo and others would stop using the term “Jewish state”. How could it be that when one nearly one quarter of its citizens are Arab and mainly Muslim? Israel is a Zionist state).

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Roger Cohen was refreshingly honest about the need for debate. He wrote:

“President Obama’s decision to nominate Chuck Hagel, a maverick Republican with enough experience of war to loathe it, as his next secretary of defense is the right choice for many reasons, chief among them that it will provoke a serious debate on what constitutes real friendship toward Israel. That debate, which will unfold during Senate confirmation hearings, is much needed because Jewish leadership in the United States is often unrepresentative of the many American Jews who have moved on from the view that the only legitimate support of Israel is unquestioning support of Israel, and the only mark of friendship is uncritical embrace of a friend.”

If Jewish Americans in growing numbers end their silence on Israel’s behaviour (as a non-Jew I can say criminal behaviour) and participate in open debate, there will then be a real prospect of transforming the Zionist lobby’s temporary defeat into a permanent one.

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor

By Linh Dinh

12 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

With the Asia Pivot, the US wants to encircle China, and supplies old and new allies with missiles aimed at its main rival. An amped up arms race means cash flow for the world’s biggest death dealer. If all these Asian nations buy as many American fighter planes as Taiwan, US armament workers can knock down a few more Bud Lites, and take their wives and kiddies to Ruby Tuesday twice a week even.

So far, Japan is going along with this plan. The Sensaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute was dormant until stirred up recently by Tokyo. As tension heated up, the US then shipped missiles to Japan, with the lame explanation that it was meant to deter North Korea. Newly elected Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe lost no time declaring that Japan will increase defense spending, that China is “wrong” in this dispute and there’s nothing to negotiate. By contrast, Abe said he could sit down with South Korea over another sea breeze stare down, since “both nations share liberal and democratic values, and have respect for basic human rights and the rule of law,” unlike China, that is.

Such a verbal reverse kick won’t soon be forgotten, especially from an adversary whose meat and bone crimes are still fresh. Three quarters of a century ain’t ish in Asia. The chiefs of Honda, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Sony and Sanyo, etc., must be gagging at Abe’s posturing, for it’s never wise to give your best customer the finger, and over what, a few symbolic rocks, with a fistful of tuna thrown in, wasabi not included? It’s understandable that Japan is reluctant to yield its primacy in Asia to China, but these provocations surely won’t reverse the tide, only yield dire consequences.

A chunkier China is certainly something to dread, as it has already knocked aside its first victims, the Southeast Asian flyweights bordering the South China Sea, or what is called “the East Sea” by Vietnamese. This oil rich and strategically important territory has been claimed entirely by China, including islands just off the Vietnamese coast, explored, mapped and exploited by the Nguyen Dynasty since the 17th Century. By contrast, the official Chinese map from 1904 still showed Hainan, much further North, as China’s southernmost point. Whatever. With its much improved navy, China sees precious oil within reach, so it simply shoves Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei out of the way. No profit sharing agreement here. Everything will go to the new boss, same as the old boss, what East Asia has had to contend with for millennia.

If the American Empire can claim the Persian Gulf as a key territory to be defended and exploited, what’s stopping China from doing the same to the South China Sea? But this is not really about logics, only might. One does what one can get away with. America has also inserted itself into the South China Sea fracas, and has even conducted joint military exercises with its former enemies, Vietnam and Cambodia, all to counter China.

Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was groomed by the Vietnamese to be their ally, after an invasion to dislodge Pol Pot, who was backed by the Chinese. For smoking Pot, Vietnam was invaded by China in 1979, during a 28-day war that caused 6,000 Chinese deaths, with Vietnamese casualties unknown. (In 1995, locals in Sapa told me everyone just ran for the hills, and the Chinese simply destroyed everything in their paths, including the church in the middle of town, and bridges they had themselves built during the Vietnam War.) Sen, once dubbed “The One-Eyed Lackey of the Vietnamese,” then became friendlier towards the deeper-pocketed Chinese, and even allowed a Chinese navy ship to dock in Sihanoukville in late 2008. Now he’s getting chummy with the US, thus pissing off China, but not totally. A very corrupt man, Sen will hug anyone or anything if you shove enough bills into his pocket, but these strange maneuvers are also not untypical of the complicated flirtation, hedging and whoring of many small countries. To survive, they must latch on to various patrons, even those who have screwed them royally not long ago.

Which brings us to Vietnam. For the last month or so, the Vietnamese blogosphere has been howling over a leaked tape by one Colonel Tran Dang Thanh, of a rambling speech he gave to Hanoi’s university professors. In it, Thanh revealed Vietnam’s stance towards Russia, Iran, North Korea and, most interestingly, China and the United States.

Thanh praised Iran and North Korea, “someone we must emulate,” for standing up to a super power, the US, but went at extreme length to explain why Vietnam must yield to China, whom he waxed poetically as “a friend whose mountain joins our mountain, whose river joins our river, who shares with us the East Sea, a mutual friendship,” then added this joke as coda, “though our hands may shake, our legs still kick furiously,” prompting chuckles from his audience. The bottom line, though, is that Vietnam can’t go to war against China because it will get its ass kicked. China is simply too big, Thanh said, stating the obvious. As for leaning on the US, Thanh declared that America is simply an unreliable ally, that it will only use Vietnam as a pawn against China. Further, “They have never been truly good towards us [!], their crimes the heavens won’t forgive, and the earth won’t pardon.” Evoking Vietnam’s struggle against the West, Thanh reminded his audience of China’s contributions, “During our four-year fight against the French, our 21-year fight against the Americans, the people and government of China had sacrificed their rice and torn from their own shirts to give us each grain of rice, each gun, each pair of sandals so that we could be victorious against the French and Americans.” Thanh did admit that China has invaded Vietnam about twenty times altogether, and is encroaching now, but still, it is a neighbor, a huge and permanent nuisance that Vietnam must forever deal with, and it would be foolish to expect help from America, a distant pseudo friend that not so long ago tried to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

Soon enough, though, we’ll see Chinese oil rigs erected off Vietnamese coastline. Humiliated by China, and pressured by domestic disgust at governmental, or rather, national impotence, Vietnam may just turn to the US to help it deal with its recurrent foe.

Such is the fate of a small country. To be born small is to have a handicap one must live with. Collectively, Americans are spared from this condition, hence our swagger, although individually, we can feel pee wee enough, especially as we are jettisoned, individually, from all collective aims that make any sense. Our economy is illusory, our government puffed up by slogans and lies, and there’s no national agenda beyond boundless corruption and endless war, against much of the world, and even ourselves.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate . . He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Bill Moyers

12 January 13

@ Bill Moyers and Company

BILL MOYERS: There’s a chapter called “The Second Gilded Age” in Paul Krugman’s book where he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. But after accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23 cents.

Big money, as Krugman writes in this book, buys big influence. And that’s why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change – because their cash brings both parties to heel. So, the policies that got us where we are today – in this big ditch of chronic depression – have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.

But those at the top are not satisfied with having only most of it – they want it all. And if he were writing his book today, Krugman could find plenty of evidence in the deal that supposedly kept us from going over the fiscal cliff. Behind closed doors, Congress larded it with corporate tax breaks worth tens of billions of dollars – everything from tax credits for NASCAR racing and the railroads to subsidies for Hollywood. Rebates for the rum industry and loopholes for off-shore financing that could help giant multinationals like General Electric avoid billions of dollars in corporate income taxes.

Writing in “The Washington Examiner,” columnist Tim Carney says many of these expensive giveaways were “spawned by a web of lobbyists, donors and staffers surrounding Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana” – chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. As we know from the Obamacare fight, Baucus is a connoisseur of revolving door corruption. “Pick any one of the special-interest tax breaks extended by the cliff deal,” Carney wrote, “and you’re likely to find a former Baucus aide who lobbied for it on behalf of a large corporation or industry organization.” Even the pro-business “Wall Street Journal” was appalled. They called it a “Crony Capitalist Blowout.”

CEO’s and lobbyists were tripping over themselves as they traipsed up and down Pennsylvania Avenue between Congress and the White House, privately protecting their interests as they publicly urge austerity on everyone else. Here’s Lloyd Blankfein, CEO and chair of the global investment giant Goldman Sachs, when asked by CBS News’ Scott Pelley about how he would reduce the federal deficit:

LLOYD BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to they’re not going to get it.

SCOTT PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?

 

LLOYD BLANKFEIN: Some things. And you know, you can go back and you can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. Entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

SCOTT PELLEY: Because we can’t afford them going forward?

LLOYD BLANKFEIN: Because we can’t afford them.

BILL MOYERS: Ah, yes, but Goldman makes sure their entitlements aren’t touched. Here’s the story. After 9/11 Congress created tax-exempt Liberty Zone bonds to help small businesses rebuild near Ground Zero. Turns out Goldman’s friends in high places consider it a small business, too, although it made $5.6 billion dollars in profits last year. As the fiscal cliff fiasco was playing out over New Year’s Eve, faster than the ball dropped in Times Square, a deal was struck in Washington that will extend the subsidies for Goldman’s fancy new headquarters in lower Manhattan. In their 43 stories of glass and steel, and a footprint two city blocks long, Goldman Sachs reigns supreme, thanks to a system rigged by and for the powerful rich.

And then this. Just hours before the fiscal cliff deal’s higher individual tax rates kicked in, Goldman handed Lloyd Blankfein and his top lieutenants “a total of $65 million in restricted stock,” bonuses awarded a month earlier than usual so they could all beat the coming tax hike from which they have been spared for more than 10 lucrative years. It will not surprise you, I am sure, to learn that “corporations announced more special dividends last month than in any other December since at least 1955.” Doing everything they can to avoid helping pay off the debt their CEOs have been urging Congress to cut.

As for working people, tough luck. Because the fiscal cliff deal ends the cut in payroll taxes, the average worker this year will take home about a thousand dollars less.

LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III: Hey, when Paul gets really bummed out, that’s when I get scared. But when Paul says there’s a glint of home, I feel we’ve all been spar

By Franklin Lamb

12 January, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Damascus: This observer has learned from time in this region that if one wants to learn what is happening on the ground politically and socially it is fine to speak with government officials, journalists, long tenured academicians, NGO’s, and people on the street. But I have learned that one of the best sources of objective information comes from university students. As explained to one official the other day, if one sit with half a dozen graduate students one is sure to witness and benefit from a spirited, challenging exchange with varying points of view and few expressed without having to justify to the others one’s positions or interpretation of events.

It is for this reason that when this observer gets the chance he heads for a college in Damascus.

Today in Syria, from the streets and cafes to the Universities, a main subject of discussion and one that is nearly universally judged immoral and illegal are the US-led sanctions that in effect, are targeting the civilian population.

Partly as result of these brutal sanctions, today four million people in this country need of some type of humanitarian aid and as of today, there are 637,958 registered refugees inside Syria who are in need of emergency help, a 57,000 person increase from last year at this time.

The fighting here has obviously contributed to the continuing crisis faced by the civilian population. For example, the increasingly dangerous situation means that the World Food Program has evacuated its staff from Homs, Aleppo, Tartus Qamisly and other areas. The reason is that the past three months saw a sharp rise in the number of attacks on WFP aid trucks, which have also been hit by fuel shortages. Meanwhile, the UN refugee agency has just reported that the number of refugees fleeing the violence in Syria has leapt by nearly 100,000 in the past month. Both the Syrian Arab Republic Red Crescent Society and other NGO’s-foreign and domestic- are stretched beyond their limits and are struggling with approximately 10,000 more people in the areas they are able to assist every month being added to those in desperate need of help.

Virtually all the NGO’s here attest to the fact that if the US-led sanctions are lifted or even suspended until the spring, it would be a humanitarian gesture consistent with American claimed values. To continue to allow the dying and suffering under the weight of these sanctions suggests that we in America have learned nothing from the results of similar sanctions imposed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The deeply inhumane US-led sanctions prevent businesses from re opening, investments from being made, financial transactions, re-supply, and other necessary economic activities which means the basic necessities such as mazot fuel to heat homes, is very hard to come by as well as bread in many areas. These shortages are the direct and foreseeable results of the sanctions and rebel sabotage, as to a lesser extent of Lebanese, Turkish and other smugglers buying up the supplies and spiriting them across the borders to cash in on black market price gauging.

As a result of the sanctions, food prices have soared beyond the means of much of the Syrian civilian population. Too many of the young, old, infirm, and impoverished are dying monthly, according to Nizar, an English literature major, as a direct and foreseeable consequence of these sanctions.

The single rational foreigners visiting Damascus hear from Washington, and what the Obama administration is telling EU countries that are becoming concerned, is that the sanctions are vital to achieve regime change in Syria and when the government falls–to be replaced but who knows what or who– the US will then lift the sanctions and remove its boot from the throats of Syria’s students and civilian population.

Nizar takes another view. “If terrorism is the killing of innocent civilians for political goals, then your government, the world’s claimed expert on terrorism is very guilty of massive terrorism and doesn’t need to lecture anyone on this subject because this is exactly what they are doing with their sanctions in my country.”

The fervent wishes of the US-Israel and certain other governments to the contrary, regime change is not likely to happen anytime soon in Syria according to most of the students this observer meet with, and it’s the next four months that are critical they insist-starting today.

Syrian students follow local and regional events closely and a common view is that from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Jordan and even some on capitol hill in Washington, are coming multiple signals that all are in consultation via their intelligence services with Syria’s government in order to reach a solution because they finally concede that, despite funding and aiding the rebel panoply with guns, money and training, these countries, including Egypt, that the regime will survive and that the al Nusra type salafists would not be satiated by the fall of Syria but would quickly turn on Doha, Riyad, Amman, the UAE and other countries in the region.

History instructs us those sanctions do not cause regime change and those affected are not the ones wielding power. It’s the wretched, the poor, the huddled refuge seeking to survive, to paraphrase Lazarus’ inscription on our Statute of Liberty who we are being ground into early graves by American government imposed sanctions.

The political goals of the sanctions imposed on Syrian civilian are one thing. The reality, quite another. US sanctions, some still in place against Cuba, after more than 53 years were a failure, as were US sanctions in China, Vietnam Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya and now Syria, to name a few.

“They are all about unbridled vengeance, not rational consequences as offered in press releases from US government agencies” explained Samer, a business major from Aleppo.

Once more, much of the world including this region, as well as history will condemn the United States for these brutal economic crimes against a defenseless civilian population. Equally, among American citizens and others I have met recently in Lebanon, Egypt and Libya, who know what is happening on the ground in Syria. The overwhelming percentage does not accept and will never accept targeting innocent civilians, whether by drones or sanctions. They express feelings of shame, not just for the past 11 years of unnecessary, criminal wars of choice in this region but for the current and continuing sanctions crime against the Syrian people.

The hatred that our government has brought to itself over more than 15 years of targeting civilians is intensifying daily because those suffering and dying here in Syria due to starvation and the effects of the now freezing temperatures in Syria, do not blame their government nearly as much as our American policy makers apparently hoped for. Rather, they blame, quite correctly, our government.

As one observer noted this week, “The tents are drenched. Kids are crying. Puddles of water are all over…I am walking; my shoes are covered with rainwater. I can’t remember being so cold. I don’t even want to think about more than half of those living in my area. Something has to be done.”

We American are demonstrating yet again to the world that we have the power to destroy civilian populations. But we are better than that as a people. And in the words of Oregon’s late Senator Wayne Morse, “each one of us has a personal obligation to change, by all legal means necessary, our governments criminal acts.”

Sitting at our table in the student union refectory at Damascus University on 1/9/12, Rana, a passionate and, on that occasion indignant, history student majoring in American history and culture may have reflected accurately the views of many on Syrian campuses these days.

Rana wished out loud to us that she could tell Barack Obama face to face: “Mr. President, in 1987 on the 750th anniversary of Berlin, your predecessor Ronald Reagan, spoke about the importance of human dignity and challenged Russian leader Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall.” In 2013, we students and our families from Damascus, the city of Jasmine, which was inhabited as early as 8,000 BC, and whose livelihood, opportunities and hope you are destroying today for no sane reason, urge you to ‘tear down these sanctions’, come to Syria, visit our campus, and engage in dialogue with us.”

The Syrians are a great people. Rana, and her student colleagues, are a credit to Syria and to all humanity.

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