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The indignant global response to the phone hacking and police bribery by UK employees of Rupert Murdoch’s Media Empire obscures the awful major crimes of this Evil Empire: (a) promotion of the War on Terror and genocide-ignoring  non-reportage of the  12 million deaths associated with US and US Alliance wars in Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan and (b) anti-science non-reportage and false reporting about the worsening Climate Crisis that if unaddressed will kill an estimated 10 billion non-Europeans in a 21st century Climate Genocide. Accordingly, all decent people must boycott Murdoch media to save the Planet.

Rational risk management vital for the safety of society successively involves (a) accurate information, (b) scientific analysis (this involving the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses) and (c) informed systemic change  to minimize risk. However this is typically perverted by (a) lies, non-reportage and censorship, (b) anti-science spin involving the selective use of asserted facts to support a partisan position and (c) blame and shame, with the ultimate obscenity being war. The Murdoch Media pervert rational risk management in this fashion, mist notably by (1) promoting the Iraq War and the Afghan War and non-reportage of the  resultant carnage (violent deaths and avoidable deaths from war-imposed carnage now totaling 4.6 million and 5.0 million, respectively) (see “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ and “Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ ) and (2) irresponsible climate change denialism, noting that  unaddressed man-made climate change is set to kill 10 billion people this century (see “Climate Genocide”:   https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ). Decent people must Boycott Murdoch Media as a danger to Humanity but we should also hold other Mainstream media accountable as illustrated below.

The pro-coal, pro-gas, pro-war, pro-US, pro-Zionist, neoconservative Australian Gillard Labor Government has proposed a Carbon Tax-ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) -Ignore Agriculture (CTETSIA) plan that has produced heated public debate and overwhelming, mainly greed-based opposition. Careful analysis of this Carbon Price plan provided by the Australian Government Treasury reveals that, contrary to Labor Government propaganda, it will only reduce (relative to Business As Usual) Australia’s disproportionately huge annual Domestic  greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution rate by 8.5% by 2020 and by 53.2% by 2050. Labor’s plan must be exposed as deceitfully entrenching climate change inaction that will actually increase Domestic and Exported GHG pollution by 2020 – and all this while pretending to “tackle climate change” (see “ Analysis: Australian Labor Government Carbon Price-ETS scheme fails & entrenches climate change inaction ”, Bellaciao, 15 July 2011 : http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article20957 ) .

Nevertheless the extreme right wing, pro-coal pro-gas, pro-war, pro-US, pro-Zionist Gillard Labor Government is apparently unfazed by its slump to 26% of the primary vote in the polls (as of 18 July 2011). A recent poll (13 July 2011) has found that 60 percent of voters are opposed the tax, 29 per cent were in favour and 11 per were cent undecided (see: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/tony-abbott-julia-gillard-dig-in-on-carbon-tax-package/story-e6frf7jo-1226092715231 ) . The Gillard Labor Government has just  launched a $10 million , taxpayer-funded TV propaganda campaign to convince Australians otherwise, no doubt buoyed by the reality that the level of public education and debate on climate change is utterly woeful.

Thus I recently sent Australian mainstream media and all Australian Federal MPs a detailed and documented  account of 25 huge climate change matters that are essentially ignored in the current huge Carbon Tax debate in Australia )(see “Look-the-other-way, climate criminal Australia ignores 25 Elephant in the Room climate change realities”, Bellaciao, 6 July 2011: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article20957 ). However the silence is deafening in science-ignoring, look-the-other-way Australia . The  extreme right wing Coalition Opposition campaign against the Government’s Carbon Tax is based on personal greed and takes advantage of immense ignorance about the seriousness  of the worsening climate emergency due in large measure to the appalling climate change denialist Murdoch media (70% of city daily newspapers in Australia ).

People should boycott the climate denialist Murdoch media for the sake of their children, grandchildren and the Planet. It would be useful if the UK and Australia followed the lead of remote Fiji that recently prohibited foreign ownership of Mainstream media (this necessitating the sale of Murdoch’ Fiji Times to  local Indo-Fijian, Mahendra Patel). However, as the example below illustrates, it is not just the Murdoch-owned Mainstream media that cripple the climate change debate.

On Friday 15 July 2011 The Age (Melbourne, Fairfax-owned)  published an article in its On-line National Times section by Tim Dixon (former speechwriter and economic adviser to prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and now working in the US) and  Matt Browne (a senior fellow at the Centre for American Progress in Washington, and leads the Global Progress network of progressive parties and think tanks) on debate on issues such as climate change policy  and entitled “Mature debate on our future needed, not Tea Party–style militancy” (see: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/mature-debate-on-our-future-needed-not-tea-partystyle-militancy-20110714-1hfra.html ).

These evidently Labor- and Democrat-oriented analysts stated in part: “ A wealth fund set up with oil revenues two decades ago by Norway – a much smaller economy than Australia – now exceeds $500 billion, a magnificent endowment that gives Norwegians a ”Plan B” if the nation’s fortunes suddenly change. Australia could also tackle growing social disadvantage at its roots, with large-scale investment in schools and infrastructure across its city fringes. Each of those steps requires deliberate choices and a sensible national debate… The Tea Party militancy of states such as Kansas is now infecting Australia ‘s Coalition parties and many opinion makers – parochial, inward-looking and uninterested in the economics of the future. Will Australia follow the road to California or to Kansas ? Sometimes we make the best choices by pressing the fast-forward button and imagining ourselves looking back, years from now. The course of events that takes us to 2030 is unknown. But there’s little doubt that the countries best placed will be those who are open, tolerant, diverse, highly skilled and less dependent on carbon fuels. Australia can be all those things – and become the country everyone else wants to be.”

I made 2 unsuccessful attempts at expressing an informed, science-based opinion on the article via its on-line Comment thread. However The Age (which regularly censors my carefully researched, science-based  opinions offered under my professional name, Dr Gideon Polya, a 5-decade career scientists teaching at a major university for 4 decades) evidently again found my credentialled, science-informed opinions unfit to be read by its readers, even if buried in a comment thread of 240 mostly anonymous and accordingly uncredentialled comments. Below is my second unsuccessful attempt (a slightly edited version of the first) and further evidence of what The Age evidently does not want its readers to read or to know (for further details of this censorship see: http://gpolya.newsvine.com/_news/2011/07/14/7085459-oz-mature-debate-on-our-future-needed-not-tea-party-style-militancy ) :

“ For mature debate: the $500 billion wealth fund of Norway (cited in article) is of relevance to Australia and its urgent need to convert to 100% renewable energy ASAP as demanded by top climate scientists.

The Australian Climate Commission’s “The Critical Decade” (launched by PM Gillard) concluded that for a 70% chance of avoiding a disastrous 2C temperature rise (EU and Australian policy) the World has a terminal “carbon budget” in which it can emit no more than 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 before final zero emissions in 2050. Australia ‘s huge Domestic plus Exported greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is such (1,415 Mt CO2-e pa in 2009) that it will exceed its “share” in 1.9 years!!

In contrast, Labor and Coalition policy is for a Domestic GHG target of “5% off 2000 level by 2020” and massive expansion of coal and liquid natural gas (LNG) Exports (increasing annually at 2.4% and 9%, respectively, according to ABARE) so that Australia’s 2020 Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution will be DOUBLE that in 2000.

$370 billion/10 years for 100% Renewable Energy for Australia   (BZE), $253 billion/20 years (Professor Peter Seligman). and $144 billion (260,000 GWh/year wind by 2020).”

For more details of censorship of informed, credentialed, non-anonymous, professional  comment by The Age see “Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/ , and “Censorship by The Age”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/censorship-by-the-age and http://agecensors.blogspot.com/ .

Decent people around the World will be considering a boycott of pro-war, climate change denialist, US Alliance genocide- and war crimes-ignoring, phone hacking and police bribing News Corp media (if they don’t already boycott Murdoch media). But non-reportage and censorship of science-informed opinion is not confined to the appalling Murdoch media. Thus  the example above and numerous other instances of egregious censorship of science-informed opinion by the Australian Fairfax Media Empire newspaper The Age (arguably Australia ‘s most respectable  Mainstream medium, although that is not saying much) illustrates why there is very little science-informed “mature debate” on climate change action in Australia .

Decent people surely must “Boycott Murdoch Media” for the sake of  the women and children in particular of the war- and occupation-devastated Muslim World (12 million dead so far in Murdoch media-promoted wars in Iraq, Somali and Afghanistan) and indeed for the Planet itself that is facing climate catastrophe and a 10 billion-victim climate genocide from man-made global warming. However the genocide complicity, holocaust complicity, genocide ignoring, holocaust ignoring,  genocide denial,  holocaust denial and climate change denial  of  the pro-war, pro-Zionist, pro-fossil fuel, Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-beholden Murdoch media is also found in  the remaining  Mainstream media.

The World is facing an unprecedented climate disaster that top climate scientist predict is set to kill about 10 billion people this century (see “Climate Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ). Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. We can no longer afford lies, spin, non-reportage and censorship over man-made climate change and other huge threats to Humanity. Decent people should boycott Murdoch media (that are evidently  beyond redemption)  thereby helping a transition back to Democracy from Murdochracy and Lobbyocracy in the English-speaking World. However we must also resolutely expose such perversions in the remaining  Mainstream media.so that our societies can apply rational risk management to major  threats to Humanity.

By Dr Gideon Polya

Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has recently published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has just published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot..com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/ bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

 

Bangkok, Thailand July 16, 2011 – No one would honestly suggest that cleaning up politics and holding any given government accountable for their actions is not an honorable, noble cause. It is honorable indeed, however, when such a movement takes to the streets but is funded by a foreign government and led by a servants of foreign interests it becomes obvious it has been hijacked in order to exploit the aspirations of a frustrated public for a self-serving agenda.

Such a movement will ultimately fail to achieve the goals it proclaims to support and will give rise to corruption and tyranny the likes of which its followers could not imagine.

A recent example of this phenomenon is unfolding in the streets and within the political scene of Malaysia where a movement calling themselves “Bersih,” or the “Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections” has captured the minds and imaginations of Malaysia’s youth and progressive enclaves, both in Malaysia and around the world.

While Bersih’s leader Ambiga Sreenevasan claims ad nauseum “we are fighting for free and fair elections,” what she fails to share quite as often with her impressionable, well-intentioned followers is the fact that her movement is also funded and has received training from the United States government and a host of foreign corporate-funded foundations.

The Malaysian Insider reported on June 27, 2011 that Bersih leader Ambiga Sreenevassan “admitted to Bersih receiving some money from two US organisations — the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Open Society Institute (OSI) — for other projects, which she stressed were unrelated to the July 9 march.” A visit to the NDI website revealed indeed that funding and training had been provided by the US organization – before NDI took down the information and replaced it with a more benign version purged entirely of any mention of Bersih.

For funding Ambiga claims is innocuous, the NDI’s rushed obfuscation of any ties to her organization suggests something more sinister at play.

Photo: NDI’s website before taking down any mention to Malaysia’s Bersih movement. (click image to enlarge)

Casting further doubt on Bersih’s real agenda is the involvement of Malaysia’s opposition front Pakatan Rakyat whose coalition members promised to bring in hundreds of thousands of supporters to take part in the July 9th, 2011 Bersih 2.0 rally.

The opposition front is led by Anwar Ibrahim and a coalition of opposition parties with a long history of affiliation with Anwar. That Anwar Ibrahim himself was Chairman of the Development Committee of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1998, held lecturing positions at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was a consultant to the World Bank, and a panelist at the Neo-Con lined National Endowment for Democracy’s “Democracy Award” and a panelist at a NED donation ceremony – the very same US organization funding and supporting Bersih – casts irrefutable doubt on their official agenda for “clean and fair elections.”

Photo: Taken from the US National Endowment for Democracy’s 2007 Democracy Award event held in Washington D.C., Anwar Ibrahim can be seen to the far left and participated as a “panelist.” It is no surprise that NED is now subsidizing his bid to worm his way back into power in Malaysia. (click image to enlarge)

In reality, Bersih’s leadership along with Anwar and their host of foreign sponsors are attempting to galvanize the very real grievances of the Malaysian people and exploit them to propel themselves into power. While many may be tempted to suggest that “clean and fair elections” truly are Bersih and Anwar’s goal, and that US funding via NED’s NDI and billionaire bankster George Soros’ Open Society are entirely innocuous, a thorough examination of these organizations, how they operate, and their admitted agenda reveals the proverbial cliff Bersih is leading its followers and the nation of Malaysia over.

NED, NDI, IRI, & Freedom House are run by warmongering imperialists

We begin our thorough examination of these organizations with a look at the board of directors of NED, which funds NDI and who, judging by their supposed mission to support “freedom around the world,” should be filled with Nobel Peace Prize laureates, accomplished diplomats, and definitive examples of democracy in action.

Instead, we have John Bohn who traded petrochemicals, was an international banker for 13 years with Wells Fargo, and is currently serving as a principal for a global advisory and consulting firm, GlobalNet Partners, which assists foreign businesses by making their “entry into the complex China market easy.”

Surely Bohn’s ability to manipulate China’s political landscape through NED’s various activities both inside of China and along its peripheries constitutes an alarming conflict of interests. However, it appears “conflict of interests” is a reoccurring theme throughout both NED and Freedom House.

Bohn is joined by Rita DiMartino who worked for Council on Foreign Relations corporate member AT&T as “Vice President of Congressional Relations” as well as a member of the CFR herself. Also representing the Fortune 500 is Kenneth Duberstein, a board member of the war profiteering Boeing Company, big oil’s ConocoPhillips, and the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. Duberstein also served as a director of Fannie Mae until 2007. He too is a CFR member as are two of the companies he chairs, Boeing and ConocoPhillips.

We then consider several of the certified warmongers serving upon NED’s board of directors including Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Will Marshall, and Vin Weber, all signatories of the pro-war, pro-corporate, utterly insane Project for a New American Century.

Within the pages of documents produced by this “think tank” are pleas to various US presidents to pursue war against sovereign nations, the increase of troops in nations already occupied by US forces, and what equates to a call for American global hegemony in a Hitlerian 90 page document titled “Rebuilding Americas Defenses.”

As we will see, this warmongering think tank serves as a nexus around which fellow disingenuous “rights advocate” Freedom House also gravitates.

The “Statement of Principles,” signed off by NED chairmen Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Vin Weber, states, “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

Of course by “international order” they mean meddling beyond the sovereign borders of the United States and is merely used as a euphemism for global imperialism. Other Neo-Con degenerates that signed their name to this statement include Freedom House’s Paula Dobriansky, Dan Quayle (formally), and Donald Rumsfeld (formally), along with Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Eliot Cohen, and Elliot Abrams.

A PNAC “Statment on Post-War Iraq” regarding a wholehearted endorsement of nation-building features the signatures of NED chairman Will Marshall, Freedom House’s Frank Carlucci (2002), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Martin Indyk (Lowy Institute board member, co-author of the conspiring “Which Path to Persia?” report), and William Kristol and Robert Kagan both of the warmongering Foreign Policy Initiative.

It should be noted that the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) is, for all intents and purposes, PNAC’s latest incarnation and just recently featured an open letter to House Republicans calling on them to disregard the will of the American people and continue pursuing the war in Libya.

The FPI letter even suggests that the UN resolution authorizing the war in the first place, was holding America “hostage” and that it should be exceeded in order to do more to “help the Libyan opposition.”

An untitled PNAC letter addressed to then US President George Bush regarding a general call for global warmongering received the seal of approval from Freedom Houses’ Ellen Bork (2007), Ken Adelman (also former lobbyist for Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra viaEdelman), and James Woolsey (formally), along with Neo-Con degenerates Richard Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and the always disingenuous demagogue Daniel Pipes.

It is safe to say that the National Endowment for Democracy is not interested in any shape, form, or way in “supporting freedom around the world,” nor Malaysia’s “clean and fair elections,” but rather leveraging these ideals to establish an insidious, self-serving, global corporate oligarchy.

Within the confines of PNAC, and its successors, the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, these supposed “democracy and human rights advocates” have engineered and promoted the continuation of the most obscene and horrendous chapters of mass murder, invasion, occupation, and unrelenting war in recent human history.

Photo: NED’s long reach: Thai protesters in Bangkok rallied at the Malaysian Embassy on behalf of Bersih protesters that were arrested preceding the July 9th rally in Kuala Lumpur. The event was covered by NED-funded Prachatai, featuring NED-funded protesters drawn from the “People’s Empowerment Foundation,” protesting on behalf of NED’s NDI-funded Bersih movement in Malaysia.

In turn, NED, an organization that Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim is an active participant in, funds a myriad of propagandists and sub-funding arms, most notably Freedom House, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute which is on record funding Malaysia’s Bersih movement. Disingenuous, warmonger-infested advocacy groups like Freedom House have been relentlessly campaigning in support of Bersih.

A selection of their “reports” can be read below, and seen cited by the international corporate media to bolster Bersih’s non-existent legitimacy.

A selection of Freedom House’s rhetorical support for Malaysia’s Berish:

“Arrests in Advance of Rally for Electoral Reforms in Malaysia Raise Deep Concerns”

“Malaysian Government’s Brutal Crackdown Violates Fundamental Rights”

“Freedom of Association Under Threat: The New Authoritarians’ Offensive Against Civil Society”

“Letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Re: Malaysian Government Crackdown”

The Council on Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations, a US based think tank that represents the collective interests and agenda of the Fortune 500 corporations that constitute its membership has also weighed in on Malaysia’s Bersih movement, decidedly behind the foreign-funded organization and applauding the division it is creating within Malaysian society.

It should be noted that the CFR praises the “fine” coverage of Bersih by Australian National University’s New Mandala blog run by imposter-academic Andrew Walker. Walker in turn, has been recently caught denying his involvement with the Lowy Institute, yet another collection of fraud academics, fake journalists, and policy wonks all in the employ of the Fortune 500.

George Soros & Open Society Institute (OSI)

George Soros’ Open Society Institute not only was cited by Bersih leader Ambiga Sreenevasan as having funded her opposition street-front, but is also funding a myriad of corporate agenda-serving “democracy and human rights advocacy” groups providing rhetorical support and contrived metrics cited by the corporate media to further lend Bersih legitimacy.

Open Society funds NDI partner organization “Transparency International” which also receives funding from Exxon, General Electric, Shell, Pfizer, British Petroleum, HSBC Holdings, and Procter & Gamble. Soros’ Open Society also funds Amnesty International (page 10) and Human Rights Watch which have both rushed to Bersih’s defense before, during, and after their July 9th street rally.

Soros-funded Human Rights Watch’s support for the Malaysian Bersih movement:

“Malaysia: Investigate Crackdown on Pro-Democracy March”

“Malaysia: End Crackdown on Peaceful Campaigners”

“Malaysia: Free 30 Peaceful Political Activists”

“Joint Letter to Prime Minister on Violations against Bersih 2.0”

It should be noted that the “joint letter” was signed off by fellow Soros and Fortune 500-funded Amnesty International, as well as NED, Soros, and Tides Foundation-fundedInternational Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

Soros-funded Amnesty International’s support for the Malaysian Bersih movement:

“Malaysia: Further information: Repression continues after reform rally”

“Malaysia: Police use brutal tactics against peaceful protesters”

“Malaysia: Hundreds of Peaceful Protesters Arrested”

“Malaysia: Malaysian activists held in secret detention”

“Malaysia: MP, activists detained for protesting”

“Malaysia: End mass repression of pro-reform activists”

“Malaysia: Joint open letter: Human Rights Violations against Bersih 2.0”

Conclusion

If there was any doubt in one’s mind regarding the nature of the National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society, and the myriad of contrived self-appointed international arbiters serving the globalists’ agenda, who they support, and why, reading the signed confession put out by the Project for a New American Century, calling for American global hegemony should lay it to rest.

Just as the British Empire and the Romans before them leveraged the concept of spreading “civilized society” to sell their aspirations of global conquest to an ignorant population, the modern Anglo-American corporate-financier oligarchy is leveraging the concepts of spreading “human rights,” “democracy,” and “freedom” to sell their emerging “international order.”

This is an order described by Neo-Con degenerate Robert Kagan as serving “the needs of the United States and its allies, which constructed it,” and clearly not the liberal democratic utopia many progressive activists believe they are contributing to.

Image: The modern day imperial networks building the Anglo-American corporate-financier “international order.” (click on image to enlarge)

Consider the insidious methods used by the Romans to pacify and conquer entire populations by “integrating” them into their own Roman “international order.”

From HistoryWorld.net:

‘His object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and good houses. He educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared to the trained skills of the Gauls.

The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptation of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization’, when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement.’

Tacitus Annals of Imperial Rome, translated Michael Grant, Penguin 1956, 1975, page 72

Indeed the alleged “free and fair elections,” proposed to Malaysia by the likes of NED and Freedom House to be carried out by foreign-funded Bersih, are nothing more than features of Malaysia’s own enslavement.

For a look into Malaysia’s future, one should consider Egypt’s recent turmoil – turmoil many Bersih supporters eagerly hold up as an inspiration for their current movement.

As Egyptians rallied to “free” themselves, they toppled a nationalist government and ushered in Mohammed ElBaradei, a stooge in full service of the United States via the International Crisis Group, alongside unlikely allies like the President of Israel Shimon Peres, Bank of Israel’s Stanley Fischer, and America’s geopolitical meddler Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Just recently, Senator John McCain, chairman of the International Republican Institute, a NED-funded NGO on record for being behind the “Arab Spring,” took with him members of various Fortune 500 corporations for a tour of newly “freed” Cairo.

Their agenda is “economic liberalization” and the total integration of Egypt’s once sovereign economy into the Anglo-American empire. Like the ancient British, the Egyptian youth are dazzled with their new Western trappings and their new liberal democracy, courtesy of the insidious, unseen tentacles emanating from the globalist oligarchy and led by a known agent of the West.

Malaysia faces similar crossroads and must decide for themselves if they will clean up their government themselves through pragmatism, truly independent grassroots activism, and technical solutions to solve the problems they face as a sovereign nation, or if they will follow a feckless, self-defeating political agenda manipulated and led by foreign interests, dividing and destabilizing their nation so that foreign powers can sweep into power their stooges and once again direct Malaysia’s destiny for them, to the benefit of no Malaysian.

By Tony Cartalucci

Saturday, July 16th, 2011 | Posted by AIDC

For more information please read: “In-depth: Foreign Meddling in Malaysia” & “Globalist Sedition takes to Malaysian Streets“

RAB ENTP.

 

 

 

A large group of Jewish activists opposed to the Zionist ideology are challenging Israel’s occupation, racist and colonial policies against Palestinians and calling for the return of Palestinian refugees.

The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) of organisations and activists in western countries firmly support the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel as a moral tool in response to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.

The state of Israel, the manifestation of Zionism, declares IJAN, is “a colonial project that dishonours the memories of the European Jews who perished in the genocide in Europe”.

Rejecting the Zionist ideology and institutions as “unjust…. leading to further entrenchment of an apartheid system and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people”, the Network further indicates that such policies are implicating every Jew “in the oppression of the Palestinian people and in the debasement of Jewish heritages, struggles for justice and alliances with fellow human beings”.

Along this line, IJAN has been launching campaigns to draw support to its activities, with one targeting and seeking to halt support to the National Jewish Fund, responsible since the early years of the twentieth century for capturing Palestinian lands or seizing their ownership papers.

In June 2010, IJAN hosted in Detroit, USA, the first anti-Zionist gathering, the ‘Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid’. The gathering was declared a success. IJAN activists also joined campaigns in 2009 and 2010 in the USA, held in support of the BDS movement, led by a Palestinian coalition of civil society organisations.

Earlier in February 2009, IJAN published an appeal by an anti-colonialist Israeli citizen calling on Unesco to ‘revoke Israel’s membership’. In fact, when in February, 2011, the Zionist organisations in America and around the world issued a statement condemning the BDS campaign, IJAN’s 34 anti-Zionist Jewish individuals and organisations issued a counter statement declaring: (a) The BDS activities “are a moral tool of non-violent, peaceful response to more than 60 years of Israeli colonialism, and (b) “Rightfully place accountability on Israeli institutions (and their allies and partners) that use business, culture and academic ties to white-wash Israel’s responsibility for continuing crimes against humanity”.

These anti-Zionist Jewish activists and organisations put the blame for ‘crimes against humanity’ on Israel and its colonial structure in order to prevent blaming all Jews for the actions of Israel.

They have categorically rejected the label of anti-Semitism attached by the Zionists to the BDS campaigns, saying such “campaigns the world over are not rooted in anti-Jewish sentiment against the daily, brutal occupation of Palestine and military threat to the region by the state of Israel.”

False claims of anti-Semitism, according to IJAN, “distort the true nature of the Palestinian struggle and are an affront to, and betrayal of the long history of Jewish survival and resistance to persecution”.

Such groups of Jewish activists are asserting the need “for justice in Palestine which does not include the domination and colonisation of the Palestinian people which have made Israel a racist state that is only for the privilege of Jews”.

Law of reciprocity

These groups of Jews around the world have always considered themselves as the voice of conscience that should sound the danger bell against persecution based on gender, race, creed, colour or ethnicity. When a certain community was being persecuted by a racist/colonial system, Jews were the first to oppose it fearing they might be the next in line to face such an action.

Conscientious Jews take to their hearts the certainty of the law of reciprocity, sent down to Moses and which stood behind the ‘Golden Rule’ that says: “Treat thy neighbour as thyself”. The law of reciprocity is commonly known as “what goes around shall come around”.

In the Torah it says: “Who lives by the sword shall die by the sword”. Where the Zionist entity is concerned, it means that who live by dispossessing others of their lives and lands, shall be dispossessed in the same way. Ending the Israeli apartheid system is the strategy of the BDS campaign backed by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, a strategy that once brought an end to South Africa’s racist regime.

Indeed, conscientious Jews are opposed to the Zionist ideology being aware of the fact that its basic principle is racist and discriminatory and is bound to lead to the destruction of the Zionist entity. They are trying to protect Jewish communities from the aftermath of the predicted destruction being anticipated by every Christian fundamentalist in the West, and by Western intelligence agencies.

‘The war against terrorism’ is a battle with multiple fronts designed to prevent the use of mass destruction weapons hitting Tel Aviv and major western cities, especially New York City and Washington D.C.

This is why the safety and survival of the Palestinian people are linked to Jewish survival, both, according to IJAN, are being threatened by Israel’s racist and colonial Zionism.

Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman is the Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia.

9 July 2011

As’ad Abdul Rahman, Special to Gulf News

The International Women’s Alliance (IWA) is waging a fight against widespread hunger, poverty, deterioration of social welfare, unemployment, landlessness, human rights abuses, and militarization, on top of discrimination and different forms of violence against women.

In a historic gathering, more than a hundred women from seven continents representing more than 40 women’s organizations worldwide attended the first general assembly of International Women’s Alliance (IWA) in Manila early this month.

With the theme “Advance global anti-imperialist women’s movement in the 21st century, strengthen the international women’s alliance,” progressive women from 20 countries vowed to fight imperialist attacks against women’s rights and welfare.

IWA is a global alliance that is anti-sexism, anti-racism, anti-patriarchy, anti-feudalism, anti-xenophobia and anti-homophobia grassroots women’s organizations, institutions, alliances, networks and individuals, committed to advancing social and national liberation. Delegates to the IWA pointed out that the global economic crisis made women and the peoples around the world suffer from landlessness, poverty and hunger. In particular, women belonging to the marginalized sectors are the ones most vulnerable to the crisis.

Mari Boti of Women of Diverse Origins and an award-winning film maker from Canada said that the first general assembly of IWA aims to further strengthen the collective voice and actions of women’s rights activists.

Impact on women

Sarojeni Rengam from Malaysia and a member of Asian Rural Women’s Coalition said that monopoly capitalism which resulted to global economic crisis has resulted to debts, unemployment, implementation of neo-liberal policies and huge cutbacks in funding or agriculture and social services such as education, health and housing. Land grabbing is also widespread in countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East to which societies are ruled by landlords, warlords, and oligarchies which are supported by the imperialists.

Emime Ndihokubwayo, an African working for Pan-African organization called Acord said that in Africa, land grabbing is being pushed by multinationals and speculative investors, on one hand, and governments in the South on the other. “All these at the cost of poor rural women who are already vulnerable, and their land rights are further threatened. African women can attest to this land grabbing in the guise of “agricultural development”…[it] means nothing to them but the loss of land and lives.”

Meanwhile, women confront the issue of corporate mining. Lina Solano, a member of a grassroots organization El Frente de Mujeres Defensoras de la Pachamama or Women Defenders of Mother Earth said: “There is a serious social and environmental impact of mining which has not only affected our country but also Africa, Asia, including the Philippines.”

Large-scale mining in Ecuador by the multinational companies did not only cause problems to people’s health but also human rights violations. Solano, for one, has been slapped with fabricated criminal charges by one of the mining companies they had been protesting against.

Women in capitalist countries are not exempted from the impact of the economic crisis.

Joblessness, union busting, homelessness, “austerity measures” and the erosion of an already limited social safety net worsen the exploitation of women in capitalist countries.

Monika Moorehead, an American and a member of Women Fight Back Network said that poor working women are also struggling in the United States. “There is a myth that what is going on with homelessness and the attacks on social services and budget cuts do not apply to the poor working women in the US. In fact, American women are suffering from austerity measures, budget cuts, union busting and attacks on collective bargaining.”

Moorehead added that the US government spends $10 to $12 million dollars for the war in Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan and against the people of Palestine. “We demand that the money being wasted in this war should be spent for housing, education and healthcare.”

In Canada, Kelti Cameron of Ontario Community for Human Rights in the Philippines said that women in Canada also suffer from austerity measures. The Canadian government has also adopted Public-Private Partnership programs which privatized social services making it more expensive and unaffordable resulting to limited access of poor people.

IWA said the crisis of monopoly capitalism has also forced millions of women in exploited semi-colonial and semi-feudal countries to leave their homes to migrate to other countries in search of livelihood, making them vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

The alliance also said that US-led global “war on terror” propels violations of peoples’s basic rights, environmental destruction and plunder, and justifies militarization and state terrorism.

“Under the guise of state security, states carry out extra-judicial killings, and a host of human rights violations and demonization especially of Muslim people. Many people have died because of this war,” said Dr. Azra Sayeed, a Pakistan activist fighting for the rights of women and peasants in her country.

Resistance

IWA was born out of the continuing struggles of women. It aims to unite and organize the world’s oppressed women to fight and resist the economic, political and military aggression of imperialism. The fight against widespread hunger, poverty, deterioration of social welfare, unemployment, landlessness, human rights abuses, and militarization, on top of discrimination and different forms of violence against women will be advanced to liberate women and the people.

“IWA is a unified force among all women to raise common issues and bring it to the global consciousness. I see IWA as a force that will hopefully contribute in helping and supporting our fight,” Solano said.

“It is a difficult struggle because of the black propaganda in the US, especially after the 9/11 attack, citizens are told to fear everyone,” said Moorehead.

Citing the Wisconsin protest where public sector workers protested the cut back in collective bargaining, Moorehead said that people around the world are enlightened. “They can show that they could win. The Wisconsin protest showed the unity between the public and the private sector, and women played a significant role in that struggle.”

The assembly affirmed the Alliance’s basis of unity, drafted their constitution and four-year plan. IWA also elected nine members of their Executive Committee. Former Gabriela Women’s Party Representative Liza Maza and Gabriela secretary general Lana Linaban were elected.

Showing their unity and strength, IWA delegates raised their fists and chanted, “The women united will never be defeated!” “Long live international solidarity” and “Down with imperialism!” IWA vowed to unite and fight reactionary currents as neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, racism, xenophobia and homophobia and patriarchy, and environmental and ecological degradation and exploitation.

By Anne Marxze D. Umil

Published in Bulatlat.com

July 11, 2011

Sources:

http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/07/11/progressive-women-from-20-countries-vow-to-fight-imperialist-attacks-against-women/

 

 

 

North Atlantic Terrorists Will Be Defeated in Libya

The argument in Libya has been won by the Al Fateh revolution. There is now a glaring truth confronting the North Atlantic Terrorist Organization (NATO) – Muammar Qaddafi has handed out over one million kalashnikovs to the Libyan people. If he was the brutal dictator that NATO would have us believe him to be, then the armed population could have turned their guns on him and the revolutionary armed forces by now, especially as they would have NATO’s full backing if they did so.

Instead, on July1st, over a million Libyans, around one third of the Libyan population, were in Green Square and the surrounding streets, to hear Muammar Qaddafi speak and to rally against NATO. Chinese media put the number at 1.7 million and Intifada – Voice of Palestine website called it ‘the largest demonstration ever in world history’. The crowd chanted over and over again ‘We want Qaddafi’ while unveiling a green flag 6 kilometers long.

The Al Fateh revolution has given the Libyan people a taste of the dignity that comes with true independence and real sovereignty. Unlike so many ‘Third World’ nation-states, Libya, under the leadership of Muammar Qaddafi, has been a surrogate of neither the East nor the West. The first thing that hits you when you step off the plane at Tripoli International Airport is that Libyans are firmly in control of their country. Libya is a power unto herself and Libyans are not taking kindly to NATO’s attempts at re-colonization.

What has developed in Libya is a conundrum for NATO. They may have imagined that with such vicious ongoing bombing raids, Qaddafi’s forces would have crumbled. Instead, they have witnessed the opposite. In the face of this all out aggression, over 10,000 bombing raids and into its fifth month, the Libyan patriotic and revolutionary armed forces and the vast majority of Libyans have remained steadfast and loyal, defending their revolution and its leader.

There are even pro-Qaddafi rallies in Benghazi, and constant gun battles between pro-Qaddafi forces and the rebels in Benghazi and Misurata. In villages and towns, reportedly under rebel control, the green flag of the Al Fateh revolution can be seen flying from homes and public buildings. One thing is clear, if Qaddafi did not have mass support he could not be resisting this barbaric onslaught so effectively.

Every day the rebels reveal themselves to be mere surrogates of an imperialist plot to overthrow the Libyan revolution. They cannot call for health-care, housing, free education, subsidized food and a share in the oil wealth because they have all of that. Residents in areas where the NATO backed rebels are in control, have reported that the rebels are looting stores and removing goods and food at gunpoint. There are also numerous reports of torture, rape and execution of captured pro-Qaddafi soldiers, Black Libyans and migrant workers from neighboring African countries.

The nature of the Benghazi rebels is best illustrated by events that occurred after rebels took control of the mountain village of Qawalish in Western Libya. Many of the villagers were forced to evacuate the area since, according to a report carried on July 10th, in the New York Times:

“All of the shops in the town had been ransacked, several homes were burned, and the town’s gas station, in fine condition when Qawalish fell, had been vandalized to the point of being dismantled. In building after building furniture was flipped over, dishes and mirrors shattered, and everything torn apart. Except for a few rebels roaming the streets in cars and trucks, the town was deserted – a shattered, emptied ghost town decorated with broken glass.”

There is no doubt that ‘the Coalition of Demons’, as Minister Louis Farrakhan has called them, has realized their grave mistake – if not out in the open, certainly behind closed doors. Having finally understood that the Benghazi rebels are not now, nor would they ever be in a position to take power in Libya, the ‘Coalition of Demons’ is crumbling, with major differences surfacing amongst members on how to proceed with this ill-fated mission impossible. After spending billions of dollars at a time when their economies are in deep crisis and reeling from the cost of years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Europe and the US are now scrambling for a solution which will allow them to save face.

The French, who were the driving force behind the invasion of Libya, are now pressing for dialogue with Tripoli. On July 11th, in a report carried in Flash News Today, French Defense Minister, Gerard Longuet stated: “We’ll stop the bombing when the Libyans talk to each other and the military forces on all sides return to their barracks. They can talk to each other because we provide the proof that there is no solution by force”.

I wonder sometimes if these people actually hear themselves. No matter what disdainful spin Gerard Longuet tries to put on the situation, he can never convince us that the purpose of this mission was an exercise to prove that this conflict could not be resolved by force. The truth is that the French, British and Americans, in their arrogance and ignorance, believed that toppling Qaddafi and rolling back the Libyan revolution would be a push over and now they are trying everything to avoid admitting an all out defeat.

In addition to the death and destruction caused by this French, British and US barbaric adventurism, an estimated 150,000 people have been forced to flee Libya, many of them African migrant workers. These refugees, who were working in Libya and supporting their families in other parts of Africa, now find themselves sleeping in parks in Italy and France. With an estimated 23 million men and women unemployed in Europe, a figure that is expected to increase in the coming months as the capitalist crisis deepens, the situation for these refugees is disastrous.

NATO picked on a country that has experienced a profound political and social revolution for the past 40 plus years. The majority of Libyans only know life in the  Jamahiriya and have lived in its dignity, comfort and calm all their lives, causing many of them to perhaps become complacent, taking much of what they had for granted. However, there is no doubt that their revolutionary spirit has been reignited by NATO’s bombs and they are standing behind the Al Fateh revolution. As one female student from Al Fateh University put it, “Libya is our mother and Qaddafi is our father.”

NATO – North Atlantic Terrorist Organization

NATO is a terrorist organization. Originally created to check the spread of Soviet Communism into Western Europe, this European organization has now reinvented itself as an enforcer and defender of White supremacy. On a global crusade, NATO brutally enforces neo-colonialism worldwide under the guise of ‘spreading democracy’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. Since the onset of colonialism, hundreds of years ago, West Europeans have carried out a policy of genocide and plunder throughout the world. NATO comprises these same old tribes of Europe organized under a modern day umbrella.

The number of Iraqis slaughtered in the ongoing US war and occupation of Iraq – now in its ninth year, is estimated at 1,455,590, let alone the numbers murdered in Afghanistan, Somalia, Cote d’Ivoire and conflicts all over the world – set in motion either covertly or overtly by these terrorists. No people in the entire history of humanity have made war on all peoples and murdered more people than these North Atlantic Tribes. This is an historical fact.

Qaddafi – African Hero

Only leaders who are determined to live for their people are prepared to die for their people. Young Libyans from the Student Revolutionary Committees in the streets of Tripoli chant ‘Allah, Qaddafi, Libya’.  The overwhelming majority of Libyans – young and old – love him. And then there is the massive outpouring of love and support that has come from every corner of the globe, where people, organizations and liberation movements, all of whom have received assistance from him at one time or other, have raised their voices against NATO’s unprovoked aggression.

But nowhere is Qaddafi loved more than in Africa.  His genuine commitment to our liberation is known to all Africans. African youth support his vision. Rappers have called him ‘African Hero’.  Tuaregs and freedom fighters from all over the continent have joined with the Libyan people to defend Tripoli. The Pan-African movement has been re-energized. It is no accident that it took an attack on the man who said ‘The Black race shall prevail throughout the world’,  to galvanize the movement which is capable of bringing about the dream of Garvey and Nkrumah, a dream which Muammar Qaddafi has pursued at his own peril.

Tingba Muhammad, in an excellent article in The Final Call, made the following indisputable points:

“Since he came to leadership in that oil-rich nation in 1969, Col. Qaddafi has amassed a record of accomplishment for Black Africa unmatched in modern history. Using his nation’s oil revenues, he has set the exploited former Italian colony firmly on the road to true independence… those who take the time to look past the litany of white lies about Qaddafi will be introduced to a man whose progressive record of accomplishments very well may be unmatched by ANYONE who has ever led a nation in modern times. And this is not hyperbole! We will take it further: If this man—Muammar Qaddafi—ever ran for president of America with a résumé like his, we dare say EVERY American would not only vote for him, but would angrily trash the 22nd amendment to the Constitution to allow him to serve forever!”

‘Wathint Abafazi Wathint Imbokotho’ – ‘You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock’

The women of Libya are taking a leading role in defending the gains of the revolution. Under the leadership of Muammar Qaddafi they have been able to realize their own emancipation, which is uniquely Libyan and not based on the Eurocentric notions of Western feminism.  They are amongst the most highly educated female population in Africa and the Arab world. They are free to dress with or without the headscarf, because Qaddafi understands that Islam cannot be enforced by a ‘moral police force’, harassing and beating people in the streets for not dressing in hijab and not praying on time. Adhering to the edict articulated by Prophet Muhammad, stating that ‘there can be no compulsion in religion’, Qaddafi knows that the only way forward is to raise the consciousness of the people. What protects the Islamic tradition and way of life in Libya is that their very liberation is derived from the true emancipatory spirit of Islam. They have been able to hold onto their traditions, while shedding the reactionary pre-Islamic residue that permeates so much of the Muslim world. No one is clearer than the women of Libya about what to expect from the backward, al-Qaeda inspired Benghazi counter-revolutionaries, and they are having none of it.

Sarkozy – the Wicked Pied Piper

NATO is arming and fighting alongside al Qaeda in Libya after telling the world for years that al Qaeda is the single largest threat to their national security. At the same time, they continue to claim that they are fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia. This might seem like a contradictory and confused foreign policy however, it is classical Machiavellian policy at play and nobody plays Machiavellian politics better than Europeans. War criminal, Henry Kissinger, summed it up many years ago when he said: “We do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies – we only have permanent interests.”

Obama, Cameron, Berlusconi and other European leaders were led on a merry dance by French president and white supremacist, Sarkozy.  His real reason for France’s frantic move against Libya was his government’s embarrassing failure to save their minion, Zinedine Ben Ali in Tunisia, in an election year. We know this man Sarkozy by his actions and his words. He is on record as saying, in true Hegelian spirit, that:

“The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has never really entered history. The African peasant has known only the eternal renewal of time via the endless repetition of the same actions and the same words. In this mentality, where everything always starts over again, there is no place for human adventure or for any idea of progress.” He added: “Africa’s problem is that its present is permeated with nostalgia for the paradise of its lost childhood…”

They call it Democracy – we know it as Hypocrisy

Muammar Qaddafi has handed out kalashnikovs to an entire people. Libya is one of maybe only two countries in the world – the other being Cuba – that could arm their people under these circumstances. Why?

Could Sarkozy, Cameron, Obama, or for that matter the Sheikdoms in the Arab world who have lined up against Qaddafi, hand out kalashnikovs like pancakes to their populace under the same circumstances?   I think not. In fact, in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia was called on to invade and brutally suppress the rebellion. The Bahraini ruling family is certainly not arming the people. When the Saudis brutally suppressed the uprising in Bahrain, not a word was uttered from the ‘international community’ – international community being a euphemism for the US and Western Europe. And if a few words were uttered by Hillary Clinton, it was done for the sake of protocol and meant nothing.

Kwame Ture Speaks

The great Pan-African revolutionary, Kwame Ture, was a frequent visitor to Libya. He was a member of the World Mathaba based in Tripoli and a vocal supporter of the Al Fateh revolution. He led a worldwide campaign to break the unjust sanctions placed on Libya in the 90s and worked tirelessly to promote Nkrumah and Qaddafi’s vision of a united and truly independent Africa.

He made an interesting point about the double standards that the West applied when dealing with Africa, which is particularly relevant to what is happening in Libya today. He observed that when sections of society in Europe or the United States disagree, even violently disagree, it is called pluralism and this is said to be a vital ingredient of their democracy. It is never said that the US is undemocratic because they disagree – on the contrary it is, according to them, what makes it democratic. Our people on the other hand are not allowed to have differences or disagreements. When we do, it is called disunity and dissent, never pluralism. When revolutionary leaders defend their revolutions against counter-revolutionary uprisings they are called brutal dictators. The contradiction is that throughout the history of the United States, any uprising against America’s injustice has always been suppressed violently, and Kwame would remind us that he was one that knew this from personal experience.

The Libyan rebels make up an estimated 2 percent of the entire Libyan population. What is the percentage of people who disagreed with George W. Bush or who now disagree with Barak Obama? In fact, Bush only received 50.7 percent of the US citizens’ vote and Obama only 52.9 percent. There is a great deal of dissent there.

In the Green Book, Muammar Qaddafi has this to say:

“Political struggle which culminates in the victory of a candidate obtaining 51 percent of the total votes of the electorate, establishes a dictatorship in the seat of power garbed in the guise of democracy. It is in fact, a dictatorship because 49 percent of the electorate would then be governed by an instrument of government they did not vote for, and which has been imposed upon them. This is the essence of dictatorship…under such systems the people are the victims whose votes are vied for by exploitative competing factions, who dupe the people into political circuses that are outwardly noisy and frantic, but inwardly powerless and irrelevant.”

Western Fallacies

Let us put one fallacy to rest forever – Europeans do not have a monopoly on the theory and practice of democracy. It is not my intention here to enter into what is a huge discussion of what constitutes democracy. Suffice to say, that Western Europe and the US, which continue to this day to brutally enforce their undemocratic systems of colonialism, neo-colonialism and capitalism worldwide, are not in either a moral or historical position to lecture the world on what is or is not democratic. Those who promote democracy, European and US style, must be aware that the Fathers of the American revolution excluded the indigenous peoples and the captured Africans from their ‘democratic’ project. Same with the French revolutionaries, who in 1789 were proclaiming ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, but were not prepared to extend these principles to the captured Africans working their plantations in the Caribbean.

However fallacious the Western notion of democracy may be, the only thing that matters from an African perspective is that the West is prevented from continuing to impose this fallacious notion on us. They can, as far as we are concerned, have whatever political system they choose. The point is, so can we as Africans. This is what we are fighting for – our inalienable right to self-determination – to freely decide our own destiny. That is what it means to finally throw off the yoke of colonialism and imperialism, and that is what Libya dared to do under the leadership of Muammar Qaddafi.  And Qaddafi dared to extend this vision to the entire African continent. In the words of the Afrocentric intellectual warrior, Dr Molefi Kete Asante:

“The work of the Brother Leader, as he is sometimes called, has been to raise African consciousness to the point that some of the nations on the continent of Africa begin to reject the loyalty they hold for their colonial masters…Qaddafi has proposed that Africa do away with travel restrictions, create a common currency and ease trade tariffs and barriers. This African solidarity is not only a threat to the West – some who identify as Arabs have a difficult time accepting the Africanity promoted by Qaddafi.”

 

The battle for African self-determination did not start in Libya or with Qaddafi – it is a very long battle stretching back to the earliest incursions into Africa.  And it is not the first time that Africans have faced such a sophisticated and deadly European attack – we can look way back at the battle of Isandlwana in 1879, where the arrogant British army, one of the most technologically advanced in the world at that time, was humbled by the Zulu fighters under the leadership of the great African king, Cetshwayo.

What this ‘Coalition of Demons’ currently attacking Libya, armed with the most sophisticated weaponry known to humankind, is slowly coming to realize, is that they could well be defeated by the will of the Libyan people armed with their faith, revolutionary consciousness and kalashnikovs.

Fear of a Black Planet

‘Up you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will’ – Marcus Garvey

‘The Black race shall prevail throughout the world’ – Muammar Qaddafi

This is a defining moment for Africa and Africans all over the world. It is a moment in history that we must seize.

Africans on the continent and throughout the Diaspora were recently given a tiny glimpse of the kind of power that Africa can possess, when Jean Ping, speaking on behalf of the African Union, directed all member states to ignore the ICC’s (International Colonial Court) call for Qaddafi’s arrest. Jean Ping stated that “the ICC is discriminatory because it only pursues Africans. The Hague-based court ignores crimes committed by Western powers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan”. Thank you, Jean Ping.

However, it is the African youth on the continent and in the Diaspora that are leading and inspiring us towards true independence. Tendai Wenyika, Deputy General Secretary of the Pan-African Youth Union, addressing the recent AU Heads of State summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea called on African leaders to:

“demand the arrest of the likes of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy, who through their unprovoked war have violated the supreme tenets of the Nuremburg Principles and committed the crime of all crimes…We call for the suspension of all engagements with NATO, and Africa must begin to strengthen its internal ties, security and trade mechanisms in order for us to prosper”

As I have stated in previous articles, there is nothing that White Power fears more than a united Africa. They know that a united Africa would completely alter the balance of power globally. The well-documented fact is that if Africa stopped the flow of all resources and raw materials to the Western nations for just one week, the United States and Europe would grind to a halt.

In 2007, in Conakry Guinea, Qaddafi made a simple observation to a cheering crowd of thousands:

“Whenever I ask people about Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola people immediately say it’s an American or European drink. This is not true. The kola is African. They have taken the cheap raw material from us, they’ve made it into a drink, and they sell it back to us for a high price. We should be producing it ourselves and selling it to them.”

If only Africa could realize its immense power.  Realizing this power is primarily a psychological transition, since the material facts are overwhelmingly clear. Almost every known natural resource needed to run the contemporary industrial economies—such as uranium, gold, copper, cobalt, coltan (for cell phones, video games, laptops), platinum, diamonds, bauxite, and especially large reserves of oil are located in Africa.  Azania (South Africa) alone contains half the world’s gold reserves. Democratic Republic of Congo contains half of the world’s cobalt and 80 percent of the world’s known coltan reserves. One quarter of the world’s aluminum ore is found in the coastal belt of West Africa and the continent is awash in petroleum reserves.

Time for ‘us’ to put sanctions on ‘them’

It is time to stop the flow of these strategic resources to the Western capitals until they meet our demands. Yes, it is time for us to sanction the Western capitals. The Global Pan-African Movement and the African masses are crying out for it – the time is now.  Africans everywhere must exert maximum pressure on their leaders to realize this power, as Muammar Qaddafi dared to, or move aside.

But how would we survive if we were to sanction these Western capitals? I can hear the detractors cry. Answer: there are huge emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil who will be only too happy to pick up the slack.

Already this is the West’s greatest fear: In an article titled, ‘Wen calls for more Access for Africa’, which appeared in 2007 in the Financial Times, W. Wallis and G. Dyer, wrote:

“Western powers real concern is that African States will opt for Chinese deals to free themselves from the punitive conditions of IMF/ World Bank loans and other forms of financial dependence on Europe and the Unites States. As the second largest source of oil in Africa, Angola is now in such a strong position that it is rejecting IMF loans completely. As one consultant put it, with all their oil revenue, they don’t need the IMF or the World Bank. They can play the Chinese off the Americans.”

In another article, ‘China and the USA in a new cold war over Africa’s oil riches: Darfur? It’s the oil, stupid…’ William Engdahl points out:

“Today China draws an estimated 30% of its crude oil from Africa. That explains an extraordinary series of diplomatic initiatives which have left Washington furious. China is using no-strings-attached dollar credits to gain access to Africa’s vast raw material wealth, leaving Washington’s typical control game via the World Bank and IMF out in the cold. Who needs the painful medicine of the IMF when China gives easy terms and builds roads and schools to boot?”

What does all this mean for Africa? Quite simply it means that we now have a choice in trading partners, and although all trading partners drive a hard bargain – some are giving better deals than others.

Black Power – African Power!

This is the moment to put all our efforts into the realization of Nkrumah and Qaddafi’s grand plan for a United States of Africa. A strong and truly independent Africa, with one government, one defense force and one currency based on our African gold standard as Qaddafi has proposed. Only when we can achieve this level of unity and power, will we be able to take our rightful place in the world. Only then can we say that the time is finally over when Africa must run from one power broker to another to do our bidding.  At last we will be able to do our own bidding on our own terms. Backed by a population of 1 billion people, Africa will then be able to make demands that cannot be ignored.

In 2009, at a meeting of the AU in Addis Ababa, Qaddafi, commenting on European and US attitudes to Africa, had this to say: ‘If they do not want to live with us fairly, then they should know it is our planet and they can go to another planet.’

Fair and just is all we are seeking – only the unfair and unjust have anything to fear from a Black planet.

 By Gerald A. Perreira

Gerald A. Perreira is a founding member of the Guyanese organizations, Joint Initiative for Human Advancement and Dignity and Black Consciousness Movement Guyana (BCMG). He lived in Libya for many years, served in the Green March, an international battalion for the defense of the Libyan revolution and was an executive member of the World Mathaba based in Tripoli.

With the Earth’s cropland quickly eroding, a shift to perennials is needed for a sustainable food supply.

The foundation of humanity’s food supply is crumbling.The United Nations now estimates that more than 20 per cent of the Earth’s cultivated soils have been significantly degraded, while in the United States, 28 per cent of cropland is eroding at an unsustainable rate. Research shows that of all human activities, agriculture is the biggest threat to biodiversity and ecosystems.

Solving agriculture’s many problems is not impossible, but the issues involved are complex and the necessary transformations radical. To discuss them is to risk frightening or confusing people. On the other hand, everyone likes good food. So campaigns for more ecologically sound farming practices, especially in the wealthier nations, too often seem to suggest to consumers that with enough effort, we can simply eat our way to a sustainable future.

For example, Organic Valley, the United States’ largest organic-farming cooperative, suggests that “personal food choices affect the health of our bodies and our planet, and drive their future”. Likewise, the British Soil Association says that “the buying decisions we make every day are a simple but powerful form of direct action”, and Naturalnews.com stresses that “by changing what you buy, you change what farmers will grow and how they will grow it”.

But to trust that our personal food-shopping decisions or gardening prowess can push the global food system towards sustainability – to vote three times a day with our forks, as writer Michael Pollan has urged – is to assume that the global agricultural economy operates by the same neighbourly rules that prevail down at the local farmers’ market.

It doesn’t. Eating well-produced food will improve our own health, but not necessarily the health of the Earth’s soils. On the 1.5 billion hectares of cropland around the globe where our staple foods are grown, the profits of agribusiness and the corporate food industry always get fed first.

Those profits depend primarily on a flood of cheap grain, produce, meat, and milk made possible by the exploitation of soil and human labour. And in the past few decades, a variety of industries – heavy equipment, chemicals, food processing, packaging, transport, advertising, restaurant chains, and others – have grown as appendages on agriculture. In the United States, the dollar outputs of those food-related industries are expanding at two to four times the rate of farming’s output. That is creating even more powerful constituencies for policies and practices that turn soil into profit.

Working at it as hard as we can, all of us together cannot chew and swallow enough food to change those corporate priorities. The transformation has to be achieved in practice out on the land, not by depending on the same kinds of supply and demand curves that got us into this mess. After two decades of favourable publicity, growing customer enthusiasm, and rapid market expansion, certified organic food still accounts for only 0.7 per cent of US cropland and 0.5 per cent of range and pasture land.

Every country has its own domestic and global obstacles to overcome. To roll back the damage being done to the United States’ agricultural landscapes, for example, would require passage of bold legislation that challenges entrenched economic interests head on; consequently, the task is often viewed as impossible, but that makes it no less urgent.

Immediately necessary actions include abolishing commodity subsides; paying farmers serious money to conserve land and water; banning toxic chemicals, factory farming of livestock, and industrial mega-dairies; and putting a halt to the cultivation of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of maize, soybean, and sorghum crops for supplying the livestock, sweetener, and biofuel industries. In addition, we must stop exporting cheap wheat and other grains that wreck local markets for family farmers in other countries, and we must stop importing products that distort economies and ruin landscapes around the world.

To do all of that is an ambitious undertaking, to say the least. But those changes are just the beginning of what is needed.

Working with nature

We can correct those problems that are created by industrial forces over the past century, but that won’t fix another, much more fundamental problem that has been plaguing farmers now for a hundred centuries: the dependence of agriculture on annual plants, typically in monoculture.

Before humans invented agriculture, 95 per cent of the Earth’s ice-free surface was covered by diverse mixtures of perennial plants: forests, prairies, wetlands, et cetera. Today, nearly 40 per cent of that land is devoted to agriculture, most of it sown to uniform stands of annual crops that die each season after harvest and must be re-sown.

That “clearcutting” at the soil surface and regular die-out of the roots below makes it impossible for healthy, durable, resilient ecosystems to become established either above or below the surface. Soil erosion, water contamination, and biodiversity loss are the inevitable result.

Landscapes can be compelled to produce harvests of annual monocultures for years or decades, sometimes centuries, but it requires hauling in nutrients, churning the soil, killing weeds, battling pests, and in many places irrigating. And even those heroic efforts cannot sustain soils in the long term.

Since early cultivators first domesticated wheat and barley in the Middle East ten thousand years ago, farmers everywhere have struggled and often failed to compensate for the built-in vulnerabilities of annual crops and monocultures. And as things stand, with 7 billion human beings needing to eat every day and global per-capita food production continuing to decline, we have no choice but to do the best we can in the short term with a combination of conventional and more sustainable agricultural systems incorporating annual crop plants.

As we are keeping our fingers in the dike, so to speak, we also need to begin developing the methods of a new, more resilient agriculture by using the highly integrated diversity of natural ecosystems as a model. But that model and those methods can’t be brought to the farm as long as we are dependent on annual crops and clearcutting. First, we will have to develop perennial grain crops through breeding.

The annual grain crops that perennials will replace now occupy three-fourths of the world’s cropland. Consumer campaigns promoting more eco-friendly food tend to feature fresh produce, sometimes exclusively. That makes sense in a way. Corporate production of fruits and vegetables is especially hard on human workers, ecosystems, and the atmosphere. But those foods account for less than seven per cent of US cropland, and a similar share worldwide. Even if we all ate as much of those foods as we should, the bulk of agricultural soils would still be covered, as they are today, by crops of cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds, not carrots or cucumbers. To save those soils in the long term, we will need perennial counterparts to those staple crops.

In the past few years, plant breeders, geneticists, ecologists, and agronomists in the United States, Canada, China, Nepal, and Australia have begun developing perennial versions of wheat, rice, sorghum, sunflower, and other major grain crops, along with ecologically sound, multispecies cropping systems in which to grow them. The goal is to replace annual grain monocultures worldwide with polycultures of perennial grains and other perennial species. That will require, as a first step, a rapid expansion of such breeding efforts.

The transformation of agriculture, therefore, will require two parallel efforts, one aimed at putting a halt to the ravages of industrial farming and the other at developing the perennial farm ecosystems of the future. Eating better food is not the way to ensure that those efforts succeed, but it will be the result.

By Stan Cox

5 September 2011

Stan Cox is a senior scientist at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, US. His most recent book is Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World. He can be reached at cox@landinstitute.org.

 

An unclassified US State Department cable recently published on the WikiLeaks web site supports reports of a 2006 US massacre of civilians, including women and small children, in Iraq’s Ishaqi district.

The massacre was first reported in Western media in 2006 by Matthew Schofield of Knight Ridder newspapers (subsequently acquired by McClatchy News). Knight Ridder cited reports by Iraqi doctors and investigators at the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit—an Iraqi security office set up with US military assistance and staffed by US-trained Iraqi police officers.

Staff Colonel Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center, wrote: “At [2:30 AM] of 15/3/2006, according to the telegram report of the Ishaqi police directorate, American forces used helicopters to drop troops on the house of Faiz Harat Khalaf situated in the Abu Sifa village of the Ishaqi district. The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people, including 5 children, 4 women, and 2 men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.”

At the time, the US military dismissed the reports of McClatchy and US-trained police, claiming that five Iraqis had been killed in a successful raid against Sunni insurgent forces. A Pentagon spokesman, US Major Tim Keefe, said: “We’re concerned to hear accusations like that, but it’s also highly unlikely that they’re true.… [US forces] take every precaution to keep civilians out of harm’s way.”

Such claims lacked all credibility, however, as reports and pictures emerged from Ishaqi showing execution-style killings of an elderly woman and a baby less than one year old. US officials later admitted that more than five Iraqis had been killed in Ishaqi.

The newly released WikiLeaks cable from the US embassy in Geneva cites findings of a March 2006 investigation by Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Alston’s conclusions matched those of Iraqi police and Knight Ridder.

After coming under fire near the house, according to Alston, US “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF [Multi-National Force, i.e., US coalition] intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house.… Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (i.e., five children and four women) in the morgue in Tikrit. Autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all the corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

The cable notes that “at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Kazzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5), Aisha (aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid.”

Contacted by McClatchy last week, Alston—now a professor at New York University—said that US officials ignored his report on the Ishaqi massacre: “The tragedy is that this elaborate system of communications is in place but the UN Human Rights Council does nothing to follow up when states ignore issues raised with them.”

Nor was this reaction unusual. According to Alston, a lack of response from US officials “was the case with most of the letters to the US in the 2006-2007 period.”

This period, which saw the US “surge” of troops into Iraq and US toleration of killings by sectarian death squads, was one of the most violent in the nine-year US occupation of Iraq. US officials were particularly anxious to end investigations of US group executions of Iraqi civilians due to mass outrage in Iraq at the November 2005 US killing of 24 civilians in Haditha.

The US military has refused to conduct any further investigation of the Ishaqi massacre, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has declared that he cannot fully investigate the killings without more information from the US government.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Colonel James Gregory told the Guardian: “The incident was properly investigated at the time, and no new information has surfaced.”

The only possible conclusion from Gregory’s statement is that the Pentagon attaches no importance to the killing of Iraqi civilians, and intends to continue issuing bogus denials of US responsibility for the massacre.

If the initial US investigation in 2006 indeed had access to the information in Alston’s report, the investigation was clearly a cover-up. It did not publicize Alston’s findings but concluded that US troops had used “appropriate force.” By declaring this to be a “proper” investigation, the Pentagon is making clear that it wants to continue covering up the event to avoid provoking more popular opposition to the war, both in the United States and in Iraq itself.

The new reports on the Ishaqi massacre have already provoked controversy in the Iraqi regime, which is negotiating an accord for US imperialism to maintain permanent military bases in Iraq after the nominal December 31 deadline for US troops to leave the country. The Pentagon is demanding that US troops have legal immunity from prosecution for their conduct in Iraq after December 31.

Such immunity would allow US troops to kill Iraqi civilians without any accountability. These demands are stoking popular anger and opposition in Iraq.

Amman Yousif, the council chairman for Salahuddin province (which contains Ishaqi), said that local officials “reject the extension or the existence of American troops in Salahuddin.… [US troops] have never expressed their apologies. We want them to apologize, to compensate the victims’ families, and withdraw from Iraq.”

By Alex Lantier

6 September 2011

WSWS.org

 

 

Surveying the Libyan wasteland out of a cozy room crammed with wafer-thin LCDs in a Pyongyang palace, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, must have been stunned as he contemplated Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s predicament.

“What a fool,” the Dear Leader predictably murmurs. No wonder. He knows how The Big G virtually signed his death sentence that day in 2003 when he accepted the suggestion of his irrepressibly nasty offspring – all infatuated with Europe – to dump his weapons of mass destruction program and place the future of the regime in the hands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Granted, Saif al-Islam, Mutassim, Khamis and the rest of the Gaddafi clan still couldn’t tell the difference between partying hard in St Tropez and getting bombed by Mirages and Rafales. But Big G, wherever he is, in Sirte, in the central desert or in a silent caravan to Algeria, must be cursing them to eternity.

He thought he was a NATO partner. Now NATO wants to blow his head off. What kind of partnership is this?

The Sunni monarchical dictator in Bahrain stays; no “humanitarian” bombs over Manama, no price on his head. The House of Saud club of dictators stays; no “humanitarian” bombs over Riyadh, Dubai or Doha – no price on their Western-loving gilded heads. Even the Syrian dictator is getting a break – so far.

So the question, asked by many an Asia Times Online reader, is inevitable: what was the crucial red line crossed by Gaddafi that got him a red card?

‘Revolution’ made in France

There are enough red lines crossed by The Big G – and enough red cards – to turn this whole computer screen blood red.

Let’s start with the basics. The Frogs did it. It’s always worth repeating; this is a French war. The Americans don’t even call it a war; it’s a “kinetic action” or something. The “rebel” Transitional National Council” (TNC) is a French invention.

And yes – this is above all neo-Napoleonic President Nicolas Sarkozy’s war. He’s the George Clooney character in the movie (poor Clooney). Everybody else, from David of Arabia Cameron to Nobel Peace Prize winner and multiple war developer Barack Obama, are supporting actors.

As already reported by Asia Times Online, this war started in October 2010 when Gaddafi’s chief of protocol, Nuri Mesmari, defected to Paris, was approached by French intelligence and for all practical purposes a military coup d’etat was concocted, involving defectors in Cyrenaica.

Sarko had a bag full of motives to exact revenge on The Big G.

 

French banks had told him that Gaddafi was about to transfer his billions of euros to Chinese banks. Thus Gaddafi could not by any means become an example to other Arab nations or sovereign funds.

French corporations told Sarko that Gaddafi had decided not to buy Rafale fighters anymore, and not to hire the French to build a nuclear plant; he was more concerned in investing in social services.

Energy giant Total wanted a much bigger piece of the Libyan energy cake – which was being largely eaten, on the European side, by Italy’s ENI, especially because Premier Silvio “bunga bunga” Berlusconi, a certified Big G fan, had clinched a complex deal with Gaddafi.

Thus the military coup was perfected in Paris until December; the first popular demonstrations in Cyrenaica in February – largely instigated by the plotters – were hijacked. The self-promoting philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy flew his white shirt over an open torso to Benghazi to meet the “rebels” and phone Sarkozy, virtually ordering him to recognize them in early March as legitimate (not that Sarko needed any encouragement).

The TNC was invented in Paris, but the United Nations also duly gobbled it up as the “legitimate” government of Libya – just as NATO did not have a UN mandate to go from a no-fly zone to indiscriminate “humanitarian” bombing, culminating with the current siege of Sirte.

The French and the British redacted what would become UN Resolution 1973. Washington merrily joined the party. The US State Department brokered a deal with the House of Saud through which the Saudis would guarantee an Arab League vote as a prelude for the UN resolution, and in exchange would be left alone to repress any pro-democracy protests in the Persian Gulf, as they did, savagely, in Bahrain.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC – then transmuted into Gulf Counter-Revolution Club) also had tons of reasons to get rid of Gaddafi. The Saudis would love to accommodate a friendly emirate in northern Africa, especially by getting rid of the ultra-bad blood between Gaddafi and King Abdullah. The Emirates wanted a new place to invest and “develop”. Qatar, very cozy with Sarko, wanted to make money – as in handling the new oil sales of the “legitimate” rebels.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may be very cozy with the House of Saud or the murderous al-Khalifas in Bahrain. But the State Department heavily blasted Gaddafi for his “increasingly nationalistic policies in the energy sector”; and also for “Libyanizing” the economy.

The Big G, a wily player, should have seen the writing on the wall. Since prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was deposed essentially by the Central Intelligence Agency in Iran in 1953, the rule is that you don’t antagonize globalized Big Oil. Not to mention the international financial/banking system – promoting subversive ideas such as turning your economy to the benefit of your local population.

If you’re pro-your country you are automatically against those who rule – Western banks, mega-corporations, shady “investors” out to profit from whatever your country produces.

Gaddafi not only crossed all these red lines but he also tried to sneak out of the petrodollar; he tried to sell to Africa the idea of a unified currency, the gold dinar (most African countries supported it); he invested in a multibillion dollar project – the Great Man-Made River, a network of pipelines pumping fresh water from the desert to the Mediterranean coast – without genuflecting at the alter of the World Bank; he invested in social programs in poor, sub-Saharan countries; he financed the African Bank, thus allowing scores of nations to bypass, once again, the World Bank and especially the International Monetary Fund; he financed an African-wide telecom system that bypassed Western networks; he raised living standards in Libya. The list is endless.

Why didn’t I call Pyongyang

And then there’s the crucial Pentagon/Africom/NATO military angle. No one in Africa wanted to host an Africom base; Africom was invented during the George W Bush administration as a means to coerce and control Africa on the spot, and to covertly fight China’s commercial advances.

So Africom was forced to settle in that most African of places; Stuttgart, Germany.

The ink on UN Resolution 1973 was barely settled when Africom, for all practical purposes, started the bombing of Libya with over 150 Tomahawks – before command was transferred to NATO. That was Africom’s first African war, and a prelude of thing to come. Setting up a permanent base in Libya will be practically a done deal – part of a neo-colonial militarization of not only northern Africa but the whole continent.

NATO’s agenda of dominating the whole Mediterranean as a NATO lake is as bold as Africom’s agenda of becoming Africa’s Robocop. The only trouble spots were Libya, Syria and Lebanon – the three countries not NATO members or linked with NATO via myriad “partnerships”.

To understand NATO’s global Robocop role – legitimized by the UN – one just has to pay attention to the horse’s mouth, NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. As Tripoli was still being bombed, he said, “If you’re not able to deploy troops beyond your borders, then you can’t exert influence internationally, and then that gap will be filled by emerging powers that don’t necessarily share your values and thinking.”

So there it is, out in the open. NATO is a Western high-tech militia to defend American and European interests, to isolate the interests of the emerging BRICS countries and others, and to keep the “natives”, be they Africans or Asians, down. The whole lot much easier to accomplish as the scam is disguised by R2P – “responsibility to protect”, not civilians, but the subsequent plunder.

Against all these odds, no wonder The Big G was bound for a red card, and to be banned from the game forever.

Only a few hours before The Big G had to start fighting for his life, the Dear Leader was drinking Russian champagne with President Dmitry Medvedev, talking about an upcoming Pipelineistan gambit and casually evoking his willingness to talk about his still active nuclear arsenal.

That sums up why the Dear Leader is going up while The Big G is going down.

By Pepe Escobar

1 September 2011

@Asia Times Online

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Before Palestinian politicians go to the General Assembly of the United Nations to ask for recognition of their nominal state, they have to answer this question: Is this what the Palestinian people want?

In a poll conducted by the Palestine Center for Public Opinion, pcpo.org, (poll number 169, published February 1st, 2010) conducted in Gaza, and available in Arabic and English, question 39 asked the following from a representative sample:

There are lots of strategic concepts for the resolution of the conflict in the region and the self-determination of the Palestinian people. What is your evaluation to each of the following?

1. One democratic state on the soil of the whole historic Palestine, in which all its citizens should enjoy the same rights without religious, racial or gender discrimination. 62.5%.

2. Two states, one Palestinian, the other Israeli, live in peaceful coexistence side by side as good neighbours (in conformity with the resolution of the Palestinian National Council of 1988 and the UN Resolution No 242). 36.8%.

3. I don’t know.0.7%.

Another poll was conducted by Middle East Consulting (middleeastconsulting.com) in the West Bank and Gaza and published on their website in February 2007, asked the following question: “Do you support or oppose a one-state solution in historic Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal rights and responsibilities?” 70.4% approved and 29.6% opposed.

It is reasonable to expect that refugees and Palestinians in Israel would approve the one-state solution with higher rates for reasons we will elaborate below.

Why do Palestinians Support the One Democratic State?

In our discussions with Palestinians, these are some of the responses we received, they ranged from the pragmatic to the moral, and the importance of each varied from one person to another.

First, most people stated the obvious reality: there is no land to have a viable state. There is the geographic separation of the West Bank and Gaza; settlers control much of the West Bank making it non-contiguous. Furthermore, such a state would be economically controlled by Israel and dependent on outside assistance.

Second, even if all the area of the West Bank becomes available, other sources of tension such as Jerusalem and the other holy places, borders, over five hundred thousand settlers, natural resources including water and coastal natural gas, will persist and continue to be a source of tension that may lead to hostilities.

Third, the “two state solution” legitimizes Israel as a racist supremacist state that will continue to be a source of tension in the region and a supporter of international neo-colonialism.

Fourth, a “Palestinian state” considerably weakens the ability of refugees to return to their original homes. This also exposes the Palestinians in Israel to the possibility of being cleansed out, in order to create a truly Jewish state. This puts us in the difficult position of answering the question: “If you want a state for yourselves, why do you deny the same to the Jew?” In asking for two states, are we not contributing to apartheid?

Fifth, some of the Palestinians we discussed this issue with remembered the aim of the revolution in the 1960’s as the “Liberation of Man and Land” not just the creation of an entity no matter how insignificant that maybe. Some recalled the resolution of the fifth congress of the Palestinian National Council in January 1969 that stated: “to establish a free and democratic society in Palestine for all whether they are Muslims, Christians or Jews.” (See Documents for Palestine 1969, Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut, 1970, page 589.) This probably was the only action taken proactively and without capitulation to outside pressure or as a reaction to what Israel did.

Sixth, some of the respondents see the diversity of religions and cultures as a source of enrichment for Palestine and the whole region provided all believe in equality and solidarity. They support the concept of a religious and cultural home for Jews. Such a state would be a source of support of a culture of democracy and human rights for the whole region of West Asia and North Africa that includes all Arab countries together with Turkey and Iran.

Seventh, going with the grain of history.The era of the nation-state is passing; it is changing to the multinational state and regional organizations. Humanity has for long known identity, such as ethnicity and religion, as the source of conflict and solidarity. It is now moving to universal values, such as equality and human rights, as the focus of political contention and solidarity. The One Democratic State will shift the struggle from that over territory to a struggle for values.

Eighth, the political, military and economic elites who are calling for separation are continuously working and will continue to cooperate with their Israeli counterparts. This same stratum wants the mainstream Palestinian and Jewish communities to be separate.

In January 2004, Ahmed Qurae, then prime minister of the Palestine Authority, threatened to call for a bi-national state. A leader of the Democratic Front (name withheld) and its current representative on the executive committee of the PLO was interviewed on Al-Jazeera network for his opinion. He replied that he does not agree because the Palestinian elites are not at the level of the Israelis. This gentleman reminds one of the Roman who would rather be first in a small village than be the second in Rome. He wants to continue exercising his authority in an insignificant quasi-state. However, he needs to answer the question: How can the power-imbalance between two peoples destined to share this small land be corrected? The proposed Palestinian entity is by and for the privileged few and does not serve the interests of most Palestinians.

Addressing the International Community

Some of the peoples and governments who are supporting the two-state solution believe that this constitutes Palestinian independence from Israeli colonialism; however, please recognize that our experience is not the colonialism that many of you experienced. The situation of Palestine/Israeli is that of settler-colonialism. Such conflict has never been and cannot be resolved by separating the indigenous population from the colonialists. Separation can only be done artificially and possibly forcefully and will lead to perpetual tension because the physical and human geography of this small piece of land is totally intertwined. Please understand that this presumed entity is a trap with the flag being the bait. What we would like to you to do is boycott and sanction Israel till it agrees to equal political, social, economic and cultural rights to all who live in historic Palestine and also allow all Palestinian refugees to return to their original homes.

We say to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Those 33 members of your assembly, who are mostly Europeans or Latin American countries who were under the control of the United States, who voted to partition Palestine in November 1947 need to acknowledge that their action brought untold misery to the whole region. You should not persist with this disastrous mistake. Instead, you need to vote for one-state in historic Palestine.

The decision to call for one-state or two-states affects all Palestinians, be they living in the West Bank, Gaza, Israel or are refugees. A referendum should be conducted, after a reasonable period of discussion, on the course to be taken. In the meantime, the Palestine Authority should refrain from acting on behalf of Palestinians.

By Mahmoud N. Musa

14 September, 2011

PalestineChronicle.com

Professor Mahmoud N. Musa teaches global politics at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Paris. His most recent book is Contesting Global Values: Transnational Social Movements Confront the Neoliberal Order ( AuthorHouse, 2011).

As global powers become more interested in Africa, interventions in the continent will likely become more common.

“Kampala ‘mute’ as Gaddafi falls,” is how the opposition paper summed up the mood of this capital the morning after. Whether they mourn or celebrate, an unmistakable sense of trauma marks the African response to the fall of Gaddafi.

Both in the longevity of his rule and in his style of governance, Gaddafi may have been extreme. But he was not exceptional. The longer they stay in power, the more African presidents seek to personalise power. Their success erodes the institutional basis of the state. The Carribean thinker C L R James once remarked on the contrast between Nyerere and Nkrumah, analysing why the former survived until he resigned but the latter did not: “Dr Julius Nyerere in theory and practice laid the basis of an African state, which Nkrumah failed to do.”

The African strongmen are going the way of Nkrumah, and in extreme cases Gaddafi, not Nyerere. The societies they lead are marked by growing internal divisions. In this, too, they are reminiscent of Libya under Gaddafi more than Egypt under Mubarak or Tunisia under Ben Ali.

Whereas the fall of Mubarak and Ben Ali directed our attention to internal social forces, the fall of Gaddafi has brought a new equation to the forefront: the connection between internal opposition and external governments. Even if those who cheer focus on the former and those who mourn are preoccupied with the latter, none can deny that the change in Tripoli would have been unlikely without a confluence of external intervention and internal revolt.

More interventions to come

The conditions making for external intervention in Africa are growing, not diminishing. The continent is today the site of a growing contention between dominant global powers and new challengers. The Chinese role on the continent has grown dramatically. Whether in Sudan and Zimbawe, or in Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria, that role is primarily economic, focused on two main activities: building infrastructure and extracting raw materials. For its part, the Indian state is content to support Indian mega-corporations; it has yet to develop a coherent state strategy. But the Indian focus too is mainly economic.

The contrast with Western powers, particularly the US and France, could not be sharper. The cutting edge of Western intervention is military. France’s search for opportunities for military intervention, at first in Tunisia, then Cote d’Ivoire, and then Libya, has been above board and the subject of much discussion. Of greater significance is the growth of Africom, the institutional arm of US military intervention on the African continent.

This is the backdrop against which African strongmen and their respective oppositions today make their choices. Unlike in the Cold War, Africa’s strongmen are weary of choosing sides in the new contention for Africa. Exemplified by President Museveni of Uganda, they seek to gain from multiple partnerships, welcoming the Chinese and the Indians on the economic plane, while at the same time seeking a strategic military presence with the US as it wages its War on Terror on the African continent.

In contrast, African oppositions tend to look mainly to the West for support, both financial and military. It is no secret that in just about every African country, the opposition is drooling at the prospect of Western intervention in the aftermath of the fall of Gaddafi.

Those with a historical bent may want to think of a time over a century ago, in the decade that followed the Berlin conference, when outside powers sliced up the continent. Our predicament today may give us a more realistic appreciation of the real choices faced and made by the generations that went before us. Could it have been that those who then welcomed external intervention did so because they saw it as the only way of getting rid of domestic oppression?

In the past decade, Western powers have created a political and legal infrastructure for intervention in otherwise independent countries. Key to that infrastructure are two institutions, the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court. Both work politically, that is, selectively. To that extent, neither works in the interest of creating a rule of law.

The Security Council identifies states guilty of committing “crimes against humanity” and sanctions intervention as part of a “responsibility to protect” civilians. Third parties, other states armed to the teeth, are then free to carry out the intervention without accountability to anyone, including the Security Council. The ICC, in toe with the Security Council, targets the leaders of the state in question for criminal investigation and prosecution.

Africans have been complicit in this, even if unintentionally. Sometimes, it is as if we have been a few steps behind in a game of chess. An African Secretary General tabled the proposal that has come to be called R2P, Responsibility to Protect. Without the vote of Nigeria and South Africa, the resolution authorising intervention in Libya would not have passed in the Security Council.

Dark days are ahead. More and more African societies are deeply divided internally. Africans need to reflect on the fall of Gaddafi and, before him, that of Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire. Will these events usher in an era of external interventions, each welcomed internally as a mechanism to ensure a change of political leadership in one country after another?

One thing should be clear: those interested in keeping external intervention at bay need to concentrate their attention and energies on internal reform.

By Mahmood Mamdani

30 August 2011

Source:

Al Jazeera

Mahmood Mamdani is professor and director of Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, New York. He is the author most recently of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War and the Roots of Terror, and Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.