Settler Harassment and Water Shortages in Beit Ummar
International Solidarity Movement | August 10, 2016
Settler Harassment
Ealier today we visited Abdullah Braigheith, a 54 year old farmer, who with his family are facing the risk of getting their agricultural water tank demolished, any day from now. This is their livelihood, without the water for crops they will lose their income. Abdullah and his brother already had to cut down on their production this year; they went from planting 30 dunums* last year to only 5 dunums this year. This leaves the family facing severe economic problems, and the father can’t pay for his kids’ education in university. They are now fearing losing around 3000 dunums of their land, because the settlers want to connect the settlements Gush Etzion and Beit AlBarakeh to make one settlement. Even though they are surrounded by settlements from all sides, they will not leave their land. This is not only due to the fact that they will lose their income, but the land is also their pride and identity.
Thirty five of the family’s apricot trees were cut down by the settlers. The family filed a complaint to the Israeli police, who did nothing to help. Afterwards, the settlers took revenge by setting three of their tractors on fire.
The family went to the Israeli military, who told them to file a complaint. Abdullah asked the military for a video of what happened, since there are military cameras all over the area. The soldiers refused to let them even see the video, because of ”security reasons”. The purpose of the cameras is not to protect people like Abdullah and his family, but instead the settlers who attack them and their property.
The family were not able a file a complaint since the soldiers did not allow them to see evidence that would make such an action possible. According to Abdullah Braigheith, using Israeli military courts to get justice is futile because the courts are set up to protect the victimizers, not the people who are wronged.
“It’s their own court, we can do nothing about it,” Abdullah said.
Water Shortage
About one year ago, four water tanks were built in Beit Ummar, a project to develop Palestinian water resources and agricultural lands in the West Bank. It was built with funding from the European Union, USAID, UAWC and other NGOs without permission from the Israeli authorities, because they knew that they most likely would not get a permit to built them if they did. Usually they would not receive demolition orders, but they all did, and the farmers, including Abdullah Braigheith, have all been going in and out of court since. This meaning that they are now not only dealing with a huge water shortage and harassment from settlers, but are now also using huge amounts of money in court. The fact that even projects like this, funded by the European Union and other NGOs, are under demolition orders, shows how impossible it is for the people living in Beit Ummar and the rest of the West Bank to receive help.
Since the Oslo Accords in 1995, Beit Ummar was put in the category which covers 60 % of the West Bank, called Area C, which is completely under Israeli civil military control. In these areas, Israeli settlers have higher privileges which are at the expense of the Palestinian population here. This is clear when you look at the fields in Beit Ummar, where Palestinian farmers are either not able to actually use most of their land, or their plants are dying because of the shortage of water.
Close by, you see the settlers’ fields which are green. The difference is very clear.
Palestinian domestic consumption is on average 70 litres per person per day, with Israeli domestic consumption being on average 300 litres per capita per day. A gross inequality exists, however, between Palestinian communities and illegal Israeli settlements*.
*B’tselem, The Gap in Water Consumption Between Palestinians and Israelis, (2007). Available from: http://www.btselem.org/english/Water/Consumption_Gap.asp.
The difficult situation of Beit Ummar, from Abdullah’s point of view
Abdullah standing at the water tank which is in the risk of getting demolished
Abdullah looking at one of the many dr
Paradigm Shift: Europe’s Infatuation for US Democrats Comes to an End
Sputnik | August 10, 2016
As for the United States leadership, the Europeans’ sympathies normally rest with Democratic presidential candidates who are traditionally regarded as more peaceful and reliable than their Republican counterparts. In the upcoming election, however, there are things that may tip the scale in favor of the Republicans.
In Sweden, like its other EU peers, the mainstream media keep touting Hillary Clinton as the preferred candidate, through incessantly painting her Republican rival Donald Trump as an “oddball” and “madcap.” Swedish newspaper Skånska Dagbladet obviously went against the flow as it took a stand against the aspiring Democratic president. According to Skånska Dagbladet’s editor-in-chief Lars Eriksson, Hillary Clinton makes Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi.
By his own admission, Eriksson himself normally would support the Democratic Party, as its presidential candidates used to be more concerned about the welfare system and were less belligerent. Fittingly, many pinned their hopes on Barack Obama as a “peace president,” but the situation only grew worse in comparison to the Bush years.
“During four of Obama’s years in office, the United States had a disagreeably warmongering state secretary in the person of Hillary Clinton, who shares a huge joint responsibility for the continuing chaos in Iraq, the disintegration of Libya, the civil war in Syria and the refugee disaster that followed. To top it all, today there is overwhelming evidence of how the US contributed to the emergence of Daesh,” Eriksson wrote.
“The possibility of the US to get a warmongering president like Hillary Clinton, who also seems to be completely devoid of self-criticism, is a very daunting prospect. No wonder that the US military-industrial complex gives her such a massive support,” Eriksson noted.
Eriksson also pointed out that Europe risks huge refugee flows in view of uncertainty in Turkey as well as the US’ and EU’s attempts to destabilize Russia after the coup in Ukraine, where the democratically elected president was forced to flee. According to Eriksson, a civil war in the mid-Eastern nation of 75 million, which currently serves as a barrier for the migrants, would spell doom for Europe. The same applies for Russia, which is being baited by Washington’s bizarre provocations, such as placing arms near the Russian border.
“In the late 1990s, there was reason enough to be optimistic about the world’s future development. The collapse of Soviet communism made Eastern Europe democratic. After the chaos of pure predatory capitalism in Russia, a strong and determined president in the person of Vladimir Putin emerged, who bet hard on economic growth and peaceful co-existence. Today, only rubble remain of this bright future,” Eriksson wrote, citing American hostility.
According to Eriksson, the Republican line-up for this year’s presidential election was initially more hopeful than the Democratic one, with Hillary Clinton being the tipped favorite from the start. However, hopes for a peaceful development have now faded away by reason of “Trump’s gaffes,” despite his sharp criticism of Obama’s and Clinton’s “dangerous foreign policy,” he noted.
“Today, Hillary Clinton, known for both her choleric temper and trigger-happiness that may get Nixon to appear as Mahatma Gandhi, looks like the likely winner,” Eriksson pointed out.
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Israeli police find no wrongdoing in death of Palestinian minister beaten during protest
Ma’an – August 10, 2016
BETHLEHEM – Israeli police have closed their investigation into the death of Palestinian Minister Ziad Abu Ein — who died in 2014 after being beaten by Israeli forces — concluding that he had died of natural causes, Israeli news outlet Arutz Sheva reported on Wednesday.
According to Arutz Sheva, an autopsy by the police department of internal investigations concluded that Abu Ein, 55, died of a heart attack on Dec. 10, 2014, after an Israeli border police officer beat him in the chest with his helmet and the butt of his rifle during a march to plant olive trees in the village of Turmusayya in the Ramallah district of the occupied West Bank.
Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, which represents Abu Ein’s family in the case, expressed its outrage at the police’s decision to close the case without ever interrogating the border policeman suspected of killing Abu Ein or asking him to testify.
“Most cases of Israeli violence against Palestinians are closed. But we expected that at least a proper investigation would take place,” Yesh Din spokesman Gilad Grossman told Ma’an on Wednesday. “This shows Israeli armed forces’ impunity when committing violence against Palestinian civilians.”
“They closed the case without talking to the border police officer,” Grossman added, despite the fact that “a number of soldiers who were there during the incident said that the border police officer was acting violently even before the altercation” with Abu Ein.
The internal investigations department reportedly justified the decision not to interrogate the policeman.
“Since policemen are authorized to use force and it is expected of them in many cases to use it, Internal Investigations will not summon a policeman for investigation if there is not a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed,” Arutz Sheva quoted the department as saying.
Grossman said that Abu Ein’s family had already filed an appeal to the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
“Our opinion is that internal affairs must investigate the acts of the border policeman during the altercation, even if his actions were not the direct cause of Abu Ein’s death,” he said. “At least, they need to investigate whether his actions were within the proper limits of police action.”
Abu Ein had worked with the Palestinian Authority monitoring Israeli settlements and the separation wall, and was a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council. Abu Ein had also previously served as Palestinian deputy minister of prisoners’ affairs.
The Palestinian Ministry of Civil Affairs said a day after Abu Ein’s death that an autopsy carried out by a Palestinian forensics team revealed he had died after a powerful blow to the diaphragm and heavy use of tear gas, adding that he had also suffered from bruising on his neck, and several of his front teeth had been knocked out by a blow to his face.
At the time, Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said that the case was “a clear example of how the culture of impunity granted to Israel by the international community permits it to continue committing crimes against the Palestinian people.”
The Israeli police’s decision to close its investigation in the case comes days after Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a report revealing that nearly all investigations opened over the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli police in the past ten months were closed “without the unit investigating and questioning the officers.”
Israeli Study: ISIL Destruction ‘Strategic Mistake’
Al-Manar | August 10, 2016
An Israeli think-tank said that the West should seek the further weakening of the Takfiri ISIL group, but not its destruction.
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies considered as a “strategic mistake” the destruction of ISIL, stressing that a weak but functioning ISIL can have many advantages.
“A weak but functioning IS can undermine the appeal of the caliphate among radical Muslims; keep bad actors focused on one another rather than on Western targets; and hamper Iran’s quest for regional hegemony,” Efraim Inbar said in his study published on August 2.
“A weak IS(ISIL) is, counter intuitively, preferable to a destroyed IS. IS is a magnet for radicalized Muslims in countries throughout the world. These volunteers are easier targets to identify, saving intelligence work. They acquire destructive skills in the fields of Syria and Iraq that are of undoubted concern if they return home, but some of them acquire shaheed status while still away – a blessing for their home countries. If IS is fully defeated, more of these people are likely to come home and cause trouble.”
Meanwhile, the study said that the destruction of ISIL could strengthen Russia’s grip on Syria, bolster its influence in the Middle East and enhance Iranian control of Iraq contrary to American objectives in that country, and the two effects are not in the West’s interests.
On the other hand, the study added that the destruction of ISIL could also benefit Hezbollah.
“Furthermore, Hizballah (Hezbollah)… is being seriously taxed by the fight against IS, a state of affairs that suits Western interests. A Hizballah no longer involved in the Syrian civil war might engage once again in the taking of western hostages and other terrorist acts in Europe.”
The Western distaste for ISIL brutality and immorality should not obfuscate strategic clarity, Began-Sadat Center added, noting that ISIL “are truly bad guys, but few of their opponents are much better.”
“Allowing bad guys to kill bad guys sounds very cynical, but it is useful and even moral to do so if it keeps the bad guys busy and less able to harm the good guys.”
Hillary Clinton’s Turn to McCarthyism
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | August 9, 2016
The irony of Hillary Clinton’s campaign impugning the patriotism of Donald Trump and others who object to a new Cold War with Russia is that President George H.W. Bush employed similar smear tactics against Bill Clinton in 1992 by suggesting that the Arkansas governor was a Kremlin mole.
Back then, Bill Clinton countered that smear by accusing the elder President Bush of stooping to tactics reminiscent of Sen. Joe McCarthy, the infamous Red-baiter from the 1950s. But today’s Democrats apparently feel little shame in whipping up an anti-Russian hysteria and then using it to discredit Trump and other Americans who won’t join this latest “group think.”
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin
Within hours, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4, 1992. The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton’s passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted.
Immediately, President George H.W. Bush took to the offensive, using the press frenzy over the criminal referral to attack Clinton’s patriotism on a variety of fronts, including his student trip to the Soviet Union in 1970.
Bush allies put out another suspicion, that Clinton might have been a KGB “agent of influence.” Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times headlined that allegation on Oct. 5, 1992, a story that attracted President Bush’s personal interest.
“Now there are stories that Clinton … may have gone to Moscow as [a] guest of the KGB,” Bush wrote in his diary that day.
Democratic Suspicions
With his patriotism challenged, Clinton saw his once-formidable lead shrink. Panic spread through the Clinton campaign. Indeed, the suspicions about Bill Clinton’s patriotism might have doomed his election, except that Spencer Oliver, then chief counsel on the Democratic-controlled House International Affairs Committee, suspected a dirty trick.
“I said you can’t go into someone’s passport file,” Oliver told me in a later interview. “That’s a violation of the law, only in pursuit of a criminal indictment or something. But without his permission, you can’t examine his passport file. It’s a violation of the Privacy Act.”
After consulting with House committee chairman Dante Fascell, D-Florida, and a colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Oliver dispatched a couple of investigators to the Archives warehouse in Suitland. The brief congressional check discovered that State Department political appointees had gone to the Archives at night to search through Clinton’s records and those of his mother.
Oliver’s assistants also found that the administration’s tampering allegation rested on a very weak premise, the slight tear in the passport application. The circumstances of the late-night search soon found their way into an article in The Washington Post, causing embarrassment to the Bush campaign.
Yet still sensing that the loyalty theme could hurt Clinton, President Bush kept stoking the fire. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Oct. 7, 1992, Bush suggested anew that there was something sinister about a possible Clinton friend allegedly tampering with Clinton’s passport file.
“Why in the world would anybody want to tamper with his files, you know, to support the man?” Bush wondered before a national TV audience. “I mean, I don’t understand that. What would exonerate him – put it that way – in the files?” The next day, in his diary, Bush ruminated suspiciously about Clinton’s Moscow trip: “All kinds of rumors as to who his hosts were in Russia, something he can’t remember anything about.”
But the GOP attack on Clinton’s loyalty prompted some Democrats to liken Bush to Sen. Joe McCarthy, who built a political career in the early days of the Cold War challenging people’s loyalties without offering proof.
On Oct. 9, the FBI further complicated Bush’s strategy by rejecting the criminal referral. The FBI concluded that there was no evidence that anyone had removed anything from Clinton’s passport file.
At that point, Bush began backpedaling: “If he’s told all there is to tell on Moscow, fine,” Bush said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I’m not suggesting that there’s anything unpatriotic about that. A lot of people went to Moscow, and so that’s the end of that one.”
Not Really
But documents that I obtained years later at the Archives revealed that privately Bush was not so ready to surrender the disloyalty theme. The day before the first presidential debate on Oct. 11, 1992, Bush prepped himself with one-liners designed to spotlight doubts about Clinton’s loyalty if an opening presented itself.
“It’s hard to visit foreign countries with a torn-up passport,” read one of the scripted lines. Another zinger read: “Contrary to what the Governor’s been saying, most young men his age did not try to duck the draft. … A few did go to Canada. A couple went to England. Only one I know went to Russia.”
If Clinton had criticized Bush’s use of a Houston hotel room as a legal residence, Bush was ready to hit back with another Russian reference: “Where is your legal residence, Little Rock or Leningrad?”
But the Oct. 11 presidential debate – which also involved Reform Party candidate Ross Perot – did not go as Bush had hoped. Bush did raise the loyalty issue in response to an early question about character, but the incumbent’s message was lost in a cascade of inarticulate sentence fragments.
“I said something the other day where I was accused of being like Joe McCarthy because I question – I’ll put it this way, I think it’s wrong to demonstrate against your own country or organize demonstrations against your own country in foreign soil,” Bush said.
“I just think it’s wrong. I – that – maybe – they say, ‘well, it was a youthful indiscretion.’ I was 19 or 20 flying off an aircraft carrier and that shaped me to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and – I’m sorry but demonstrating – it’s not a question of patriotism, it’s a question of character and judgment.”
Clinton countered by challenging Bush directly. “You have questioned my patriotism,” the Democrat shot back.
Clinton then unloaded his own zinger: “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. He was wrong, and a senator from Connecticut stood up to him, named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”
Many observers rated Clinton’s negative comparison of Bush to his father as Bush’s worst moment in the debate. An unsettled Bush didn’t regain the initiative for the remainder of the evening.
Czech-ing on Bill
Still, the Republicans didn’t give up on the idea of smearing Clinton by highlighting his association with college friends in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, both communist countries in 1970.
Another GOP pre-election ploy was to have Czech newspapers run stories about the communist affiliations of Clinton’s hosts – and then try to blow back those stories to the U.S. news media. Three Czech papers carried such stories on Oct. 24, 1992. The headline in the Cesky Denik newspaper read: “Bill Was With Communists.”
However, without today’s Internet to spread the word and with the right-wing U.S. news media not nearly as large as it is today – Fox News didn’t launch until 1996 – the Czech stories didn’t get the attention that some in the Bush campaign had hoped.
More than a year into Clinton’s presidency, in January 1994, the Czech news media reported that the Czech secret police, the Federal Security and Information Service (FBIS), had collaborated with the Bush reelection campaign to dig up dirt on Clinton’s student trip to Prague. The centrist newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes reported that during the 1992 campaign, FBIS gave the Republicans internal data about Clinton’s Moscow-Prague trips and supplied background material about Clinton’s “connections” inside Czechoslovakia.
In fall 1992, the Bush administration’s nighttime search of Clinton’s passport file had other repercussions. The State Department’s inspector general sought a special prosecutor investigation for a scandal that became known as Passportgate, which wasn’t resolved until after Bush lost to Clinton.
In the end, George H.W. Bush escaped any legal consequences from the passport gambit in large part because a Republican attorney, Joseph diGenova, was named to serve as special prosecutor. DiGenova’s investigation cleared Bush and his administration of any wrongdoing, saying the probe “found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter.”
FBI documents that I reviewed at the Archives, however, presented a more complicated picture. Speaking to diGenova and his investigators in fall 1993, former President George H.W. Bush said he had encouraged then-White House chief of staff James Baker and other aides to investigate Clinton and to make sure the information got out.
“Although he [Bush] did not recall tasking Baker to research any particular matter, he may have asked why the campaign did not know more about Clinton’s demonstrating,” said the FBI interview report, dated Oct. 23, 1993.
“The President [Bush] advised that … he probably would have said, ‘Hooray, somebody’s going to finally do something about this.’ If he had learned that the Washington Times was planning to publish an article, he would have said, ‘That’s good, it’s about time.’ …
“Based on his ‘depth of feeling’ on this issue, President Bush responded to a hypothetical question that he would have recommended getting the truth out if it were legal,” the FBI wrote in summarizing Bush’s statements. “The President added that he would not have been concerned over the legality of the issue but just the facts and what was in the files.”
Bush also said he understood how his impassioned comments about Clinton’s loyalty might have led some members of his staff to conclude that he had “a one-track mind” on the issue. He also expressed disappointment that the Clinton passport search uncovered so little.
“The President described himself as being indignant over the fact that the campaign did not find out what Clinton was doing” as a student studying abroad, the FBI report said.
Bush’s comments seem to suggest that he had pushed his subordinates into a violation of Clinton’s privacy rights. But diGenova, who had worked for the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, already had signaled to Bush that the probe was going nowhere.
At the start of the Oct. 23, 1993, interview, which took place at Bush’s office in Houston, diGenova assured Bush that the investigation’s staff lawyers were “all seasoned prof[essional] prosecutors who know what a real crime looks like,” according to FBI notes of the meeting. “[This is] not a gen[eral] probe of pol[itics] in Amer[ica] or dirty tricks, etc., or a general license to rummage in people’s personal lives.”
As the interview ended, two of diGenova’s assistants – Lisa Rich and Laura Laughlin – asked Bush for autographs, according to the FBI’s notes on the meeting. [For the fullest account of the 1992 Passportgate case, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Red-baiting Tactics
But the ugly history of Red-baiting American citizens, including Bill Clinton, has not deterred Hillary Clinton and her Democratic backers from using similar tactics. In the hard-fought 2008 campaign against Barack Obama, then-Sen. Clinton sought to discredit Obama with McCarthy-style guilt by association.
President Vladimir Putin at his annual Q&A event.
In an April 16, 2008, debate, Hillary Clinton pounced when her husband’s former adviser, George Stephanopoulos, asked one of her campaign’s long-plotted attack lines – raising a tenuous association between Obama and an aging Vietnam-era radical William Ayers.
In his role as an ABC News debate moderator, Stephanopoulos — and Clinton — also injected a false suggestion that Ayers had either hailed the 9/11 attacks or had used the occasion as a grotesque opportunity to call for more bombings.
(In reality, an earlier interview about Ayers’s memoir was coincidentally published by the New York Times in its Sept. 11, 2001, edition, which went to press on Sept. 10, before the attacks. But Stephanopoulos and Clinton left the impression with the public that Ayers’s comments represented a ghoulish reaction to the 9/11 attacks.)
In another guilt-by-association moment, Hillary Clinton linked Obama, via his former church pastor Jeremiah Wright, to Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan and a Hamas representative who had been allowed to publish an essay in the church’s newsletter.
“You know, these are problems, and they raise questions in people’s minds,” Clinton said. “And so this is a legitimate area, as everything is when we run for office, for people to be exploring and trying to find answers.”
Now, Clinton’s 2016 campaign is back wallowing in similar muck, both hyping animosity toward Russia and President Vladimir Putin – and portraying Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as some kind of Manchurian candidate secretly under the control of the Kremlin.
While lacking any verifiable proof, Clinton’s campaign and its allied mainstream media have blamed Russian intelligence for hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s emails and then publicizing them through Wikileaks. This conspiracy theory holds that Putin is trying to influence the U.S. election to put his secret agent, Donald Trump, into the White House.
The parallels to George H.W. Bush’s 1992 smear of Bill Clinton are striking. In both cases, fairly innocuous activities – whether Clinton’s student trip to Moscow in 1970 or Trump’s hosting a beauty pageant there in 2013 – are given a nasty twist with the suggestion that something sinister occurred behind the scenes.
In neither case is any actual evidence presented, just innuendo and suspicion. The burden presumably falls on the victim of the smear to somehow prove his innocence, which, of course, can’t really be done because it’s impossible to prove a negative. It’s like the old tactic of calling someone a child molester and watching the accused flail around trying to remove the stain.
Similar accusations of “Moscow stooge” and “Putin apologist” have been leveled at others of us who have questioned the anti-Russian “group think” pervading Official Washington’s neoconservative-dominated foreign policy establishment and the mainstream news media. But it is noteworthy that the Democrats, who have often been the victim of this sort of smear tactic, are now relishing in its use against a Republican.
The Hillary Clinton campaign might recall the calumnies hurled at Bill Clinton as well as how things ended for Sen. Joe McCarthy after he questioned the loyalty of a young Army lawyer. The bullying senator was famously rebuked by Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief legal representative: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” (McCarthy was ultimately censured by the Senate and died in disgrace.)
As her campaign sinks into its own anti-Russian mud pile of guilt-by-association, Hillary Clinton and her supporters may ask themselves how far are they prepared to go – and whether their ambitions have overwhelmed any “sense of decency.”
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Turkish media: NATO is a bag of snakes
By Martin Berger | New Eastern Outlook | August 10, 2016
The meeting that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin held with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Saint Petersburg has literally attracted the same amount of media attention as the Rio Olympics.
Erdogan arrived to Saint Petersburg in the afternoon hours of August 9 and the initial talks were immediately followed by negotiations with various ministers and a press conference, after which the two leaders met with the representatives of Russian and Turkish business circles.
The meeting had more than 200 media people accredited that crowded the massive press center that was provided to them. Turkish media called it a “massive surprise” that Erdogan brought a number of ministers along with him, including Minister of Tourism and Culture of Turkey Nabi Avci, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak, Minister of Food, Agriculture and Livestock Faruk Çelik, as well as the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey Mehmet Simsek. Erdogan has also been accompanied by the head of National intelligence organization Hakan Fidan, whose presence in the delegation Turkish media sources described as “truly unexpected.”
However, even before Erdogan’s plane touchdowned in Saint Petersburg, various media sources rushed to provide their assessment of the meeting.
In Turkey, all newspapers and sites without exception emphasized the importance of this visit for the further development of the Turkish economy, that suffered a massive blow once Russia introduced travel and trading restrictions in the aftermath of the downing of Russia’s Su-24 over Syria. Journalists have been expressing the hopes of a stable union of the two states being reestablished along with the fruitful cooperation in regional security matters getting a new start, including the fight against terrorism, extremism and organized crime.
Certain analysts stressed the fact that the meeting between Erdogan and Putin is a new milestone in the struggle between the Atlantic and Eurasia. It is important not only in terms of the future of the Turkish-Russian relations, but also in terms of building the international system, the formation of a new world focused on the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia. Those analysts are convinced that the West is terrified by the prospects of Turkey abandoning all cooperation with the US, the EU and NATO and becoming a part of another block of international players.
According to the German magazine Spiegel, what we’re witnessing is a stressful development for the West, since Erdogan has been criticizing Berlin, Vienna and Washington on the daily basis since the failed coup took place, but he’s been speaking highly of Moscow, while referring to Putin as “my dear friend Vladimir.”
The Turkish media source Haber7 has been pretty vocal in criticizing NATO and its states. It would note that NATO is a bag of snakes, a gang of bandits created in the name of protecting Washington’s interests. The North Atlantic Alliance has been used by the West to suppress weaker states of Asia, Africa, South America, in a bid to make obedient servants out of them. NATO is the main sponsor and mastermind behind revolutions and armed coups in Muslim countries and the countries of the third world. Haber7 notes that unless Turkey and the Islamic countries create their own defense organization, they would be unable to evade the pressure, the threats, and the meddling of NATO’s forces of evil. There is no Communist threat, no Soviet Union anymore, the media source argues, but what is the reason then for NATO’s existence?
The change of Turkey’s standing in its relations with the West has been noted by Tayyip Erdogan in his interview with the French Le Monde. Turkey’s President noted that instead of solidarity with Turkey, instead defending the democratic principles, the West chose to leave Ankara alone. He stated that Turkey is saddened by the fact that John Kerry arrived to Ankara 45 days after the failed coup, which means that Washington has abandoned its strategic ally.
The Financial Times, in its turn, would stress the fact that a few hours after the visit of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford to Turkey, Erdogan made the harsh statement that shocked the West, when he stated that there’s no way the US could be Turkey’s strategic partner, if it fails to extradite the man that is acting against Turkey’s interests.
The German Focus notes that the pact of friendship between Putin and Erdogan can seriously shift the balance of powers in the world. Should Turkey side with Russia on all matters, the West will be crashed. German journalists that the United States won’t be able to stomach this fact. For instance, the Wall Street Journal notes that the restoration of bilateral relations between Turkey and Russia, take Erdogan and Putin further away from the West.
Following the talks, the two president adopted a number of decisions aimed at facilitating the development of bilateral relations, in particular on the preparation of the medium-term program of economic, scientific and technical cooperation until 2019. The construction of the first string of the “Turkish stream” pipeline may begin in the near future too.
There’s no doubt that the meeting between Erdogan and Putin will bring the two states closer together, even though the West has been terrified by the possibility of this development all along. And the reason for that was the short-sighted Western policies of pursuing confrontation along with the neglect Washington has shown to both Turkey and Russia.
Obama versus Trump, Putin and Erdogan: Can Coups Defeat Elected Governments?
By James Petras | Dissident Voice | August 9, 2016
Many of our interlocutors have been purged or arrested.
James Clapper, US Director of Intelligence on Turkish Coup, Financial Times, 8/3/16, p. 4
Washington has organized a systematic, global, no holds barred campaign to oust Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump from the electoral process. The virulent anti-Trump animus, the methods, goals and mass media resemble authoritarian regimes preparing to overthrow political adversaries.
Comparable propaganda efforts led to political coups in Chile in 1973, Brazil 1964, and Venezuela in 2002. The anti-Trump forces include both political parties, a Supreme Court judge, Wall Street bankers, journalists and editorialists of all the major media outlets and the leading military and intelligence spokespeople.
Washington’s forcible and illegal ouster of Trump is part and parcel of a world-wide campaign to overthrow leaders and regimes which raise questions about aspects of the imperial policies of the US and EU.
We will proceed to analyze the politics of the anti-Trump elite, the points of confrontation and propaganda, as a prelude to the drive to oust opposition in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
The Anti-Trump Coup
Never in the history of the United States, has a President and Supreme Court Judge openly advocated the overthrow of a Presidential candidate. Never has the entire mass media engaged in a round-the-clock one-sided, propaganda war to discredit a Presidential candidate by systematically ignoring or distorting the central socio-economic issues of their opposition.
The call for the ouster of a freely elected candidate is nothing more or less than a coup d’état.
Leading television networks and columnists demand that the elections be annulled, following the lead of the President and prominent Republican and Democratic Congressional and Party leaders.
In other words, the political elite openly rejects democratic electoral processes in favor of authoritarian manipulation and deception. The authoritarian elite relies on magnifying tertiary, questionable personal judgement calls to mobilize coup backers.
They systematically avoid the core economic and political issues which candidate Trump has raised – and attracted mass support – which challenge fundamental policies backed by the two Party elites.
The Roots of the Anti-Trump Coup
Trump has raised several key issues which challenge the Democratic and Republican elite.
Trump has drawn mass support and won elections and public opinion polls by:
(1) rejecting the free trade agreements which has led major multinationals to relocate abroad and disinvest in well-paying industrial jobs in the US.
(2) calling for large scale public investment projects to rebuild the US industrial economy, challenging the primacy of financial capital.
(3) opposing the revival of a Cold War with Russia and China and promoting greater economic co-operation and negotiations.
(4) rejecting US support for NATO’s military build-up in Europe and intervention in Syria, North Africa and Afghanistan.
(5) questioning the importation of immigrant labor which lowers job opportunities and wages for local citizens.
The anti-Trump elite systematically avoid debating these issues; instead they distort the substance of the policies.
Instead of discussing the job benefits which will result from ending sanctions with Russia, the coupsters screech that ‘Trump supports Putin, the terrorist’.
Instead of discussing the need to redirect investment inward to create US jobs, the anti-Trump junta mouth clichés that claim his critique of globalization would ‘undermine’ the US economy.
To denigrate Trump, the Clinton/Obama junta resorts to political scandals to cover-up mass political crimes. To distract public attention, Clinton-Obama falsely claim that Trump is a ‘racist’, backed by David Duke, a racist advocate of “Islamophobia”. The anti-Trump junta promoted the US-Pakistani parents of a military war casualty as victims of Trump’s slanders even as they rooted for Hillary Clinton, promotor of wars against Muslim countries and author of military policies that sent thousands of US soldiers to their grave.
Obama and Clinton are the imperial racists who bombed Libya and Somalia and killed, wounded, and displaced over 2 million sub-Saharan Black-Africans.
Obama and Clinton are the Islamaphobes who bombed and killed and evicted five million Muslims in Syria and one million Muslims in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
In other words, Trump’s mistaken policy to restrict Muslim immigration is a reaction to the hatred and hostility engendered by the Obama-Clinton million-person Muslim genocide.
Trump’s “America First” policy is a rejection of overseas imperial wars – seven wars under Obama-Clinton. Their militarist policies have inflated budget deficits and degraded US living standards.
Trump’s criticism of capital and job flight has threatened Wall Street’s billion-dollar profiteering – the most important reason behind the bi-partisan junta’s effort to oust Trump and the working class’s support for Trump.
By not following the bi-partisan Wall Street, war agenda, Trump has outlined another business agenda which is incompatible with the current structure of capitalism. In other words, the US authoritarian elite does not tolerate the democratic rules of the game even when the opposition accepts the capitalist system.
Likewise, Washington’s quest for ‘mono-power’ extends across the globe. Capitalist governments which decide to pursue independent foreign policies are targeted for coups.
Obama-Clinton’s Junta Runs Amok
Washington’s proposed coup against Trump follows similar policies directed against political leaders in Russia, Turkey, China, Venezuela, Brazil, and Syria.
Russian President Putin has been demonized by the US propaganda media on an hourly basis for the better part of a decade. The US has backed oligarchs and promoted economic sanctions; financed a coup in the Ukraine; established nuclear missiles on Russia’s frontier; and launched an arms race to undermine President Putin’s economic policies in order to provoke a coup.
The US backed its proxy Gulenist ‘invisible government’ in its failed coup to oust President Erdogan, for failing to totally embrace the US Middle East agenda.
Likewise, Obama-Clinton have backed successful coups in Latin America. Coups were orchestrated in Honduras, Paraguay, and more recently in Brazil to undermine independent Presidents and to secure satellite neo-liberal regimes. Washington presses forward to forcibly oust the national-populist government of President Maduro in Venezuela.
Washington has escalated efforts to erode, undermine and overthrow the government of China’s President Xi-Jinping through several combined strategies. A military build-up of an air and sea armada in the South China Sea and military bases in Japan, Australia, and the Philippines; separatist agitation in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and among the Uyghurs; a US-Latin American-Asia free trade agreement which excludes China.
Conclusion
Washington’s strategy of illegal, violent coups to retain the delusion of empire stretches across the globe, ranging from Trump in the US to Putin in Russia, from Erdogan in Turkey to Maduro in Venezuela to Xi Jinping in China.
The conflict is between US-EU imperialism backed by their local clients against endogenous regimes rooted in nationalist alliances.
The struggle is ongoing and sustained and threatens to undermine the political and social fabric of the US and the European Union.
The top priority for the US Empire is to undermine and destroy Trump by any means necessary. Trump already has raised the question of ‘rigged elections’. But each elite media attack of Trump seems to add to and strengthen his mass support and polarize the electorate.
As the elections approach, will the elite confine themselves to verbal hysteria or will they turn from verbal assassinations to the ‘other kind’?
Obama’s global coup strategy shows mixed results: they succeeded in Brazil but were defeated in Turkey; they seized power in the Ukraine but were defeated in Russia; they gained propaganda allies in Hong Kong and Taiwan but suffered severe strategic economic defeats in the region as China’s Asian trade policies advanced.
As the US elections approach, and Obama’s pursuit of his imperial legacy collapses, we can expect greater deception and manipulation and perhaps even frequent resort to elite-designed ‘terrorist’ assassinations.
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From the Archives
Psychiatric drugs kill 500k+ Western adults annually, few positive benefits – leading scientist
RT | May 13, 2015
Psychiatric drugs lead to the deaths of over 500,000 people aged 65 and over annually in the West, a Danish scientist says. He warns the benefits of these drugs are “minimal,” and have been vastly overstated.
Research director at Denmark’s Nordic Cochrane Centre, Professor Peter Gøtzsche, says the use of most antidepressants and dementia drugs could be halted without inflicting harm on patients. The Danish scientist’s views were published in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday.
His scathing analysis will likely prove controversial among traditional medics. However, concern is mounting among doctors and scientists worldwide that psychiatric medication is doing more harm than good. In particular, they say antipsychotic drugs have been over-prescribed to many dementia patients in a bid to calm agitated behavior.
Gøtzsche warns psychiatric drugs kill patients year in year out, and hold few positive benefits. He says in excess of half a million citizens across the Western world aged 65 and over die annually as a result of taking these drugs.
“Their benefits would need to be colossal to justify this, but they are minimal,” he writes.
“Given their lack of benefit, I estimate we could stop almost all psychotropic drugs without causing harm.”
Gøtzsche, who is also a clinical trials expert, says drug trials funded by big pharmaceutical companies tend to produce biased results because many patients took other medication prior to the tests.
He says patients cease taking the old drugs and then experience a phase of withdrawal prior to taking the trial pharmaceuticals, which appear highly beneficial at first.
The Danish professor also warns fatalities from suicides in clinical trials are significantly under-reported. … continue
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