The Academy’s complicity in the Global War of false flag terrorism
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | February 28, 2016
I met Dr. Kevin Barrett as planned at a small bookstore near the Notre Dame Cathedral landmark in Paris France. On that day, December 11, 2015, the Paris bookstore was the site of a significant academic conference entitled “Islamophobia and the Erosion of Civil Society.”
Hours earlier I had exited the last class of the fall term in my third-year Globalization Studies course at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. I had driven to Calgary, hopped a flight to Dallas, and then transferred onto a big American Airlines 777 for the trans-Atlantic flight to the City of Lights now under martial law.
For the second time in 2015 Paris had been rocked by violent episodes attributed to the independent actions of Islamic terrorists. After the first event last January, Dr. Barrett had coordinated the emergency responses of a team of analytic observers, myself included.
Together we uncovered the outlines of an outlandish fraud of an externally-engineered false flag terror event. Dr. Barrett assembled the revelations in his edited book entitled We Are Not Charlie Hebdo. Now a sequel volume was in the making as Kevin and I met up in the Paris bookstore where the inner workings of the “Islamophobia Industry” were the subject of scholarly investigation.
The majority of contributors to Dr. Barrett’s book on the first Paris shooter event of 2015 concluded that the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo cartoon office and on the customers of a Jewish Deli were not as they were made to seem in the mainstream media. The evidence pointed to a continuation of the same type of state-manufactured violence directed at civilian populations in Western Europe during the Cold War by the NATO’s overseers of Project Gladio.
The aim of Project Gladio was to discredit the politics of progressive reform by misrepresenting the nature of NATO-concocted episodes of seemingly arbitrary violence directed at civilian populations.
Violent events were engineered by right-wing agents of NATO’s occupation of Western Europe to make it appear that left-wing progressives were subject to the control of psychopathic extremists intent on foisting their will on society through coercive methods.
A new wave of false flag terrorism is underway with the objective of turning public opinion against groups slated for state-sanctioned assaults, including aggressive warfare.
As demonstrated by the deep state politics of Project Gladio, false flag terrorism has long been a standard psy-op deployed by the Western intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies to affect public perception, attitude, and behaviour.
The deployment of false flag terrorism to bring history’s course into conformity with the objectives sought by strategic planners has become the particular specialty of the Israeli deep state.
The most ambitious false flag terror episode ever occurred on September 11, 2001 in the orchestrated strikes on three World Trade Center Towers, on the Pentagon and on the remnants of integrity in our governing structures. The overwhelming weight of evidence derived from these events points squarely at those in charge of the powerful networks of global influence aligned with the expansionary aspirations of Likudnik Israel.
The lies and crimes of 9/11 provided the pretext for the transition from Cold War’s demonization of socialism, as manifest in the engineered terrorism of Project Gladio, to the demonization of Muslims through what might most accurately be described as the Global War of False Flag Terrorism (GWOFFT).
The 9/11 strikes were central episodes that created the core narrative and imagery for a multi-faceted psychological operation that continues yet. This 9/11 psychological operation has been frequently characterized as a global coup d’état. The 9/11 global coup d’état was engineered to entrench neoconservative agendas aimed at concentrating more power in the world’s dominant banking, military, media and academic cartels together with the plutocrats that control them.
In the Global War of False Flag Terrorism, ruling elites everywhere have attempted to entrench their regimes of fraud and corruption by characterizing their critics and opponents as terrorists, as potential terrorists or as terrorist sympathizers.
Without a doubt it is the Jewish state of Israel that gained most from replacing anti-communism with anti-terrorism as the primary purpose and preoccupation of the world’s dominant military-industrial complex. The key to manufacturing consent for this shift has been the incitement and political exploitation of hatred towards Muslims. This engineered hatred of Muslims is often described as Islamophobia.
Convening in Paris to Shed Light on the Islamophobia
The study of Islamophobia brought together scholars from Europe and North America at the conference in the Paris bookstore. This convention of scholars was organized under the auspices of the Race and Gender Studies Center at the University of California in Berkeley.
The Chair was Prof. Hatem Bazian, Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College in Berkeley. Part of the U of C, Zaytuna College is the first Muslim liberal arts institution of higher learning in the United States.
Prof. Bazian had assembled about a dozen scholars at various stages in their movement through the academic procedures of tenure and promotion. Generally speaking the assembled scholars have taken on some of the most difficult and fraught subjects covered in our university curricula. To study the institutional workings of the cynical business of purposely turning public attitudes against Muslims is an especially difficult academic mission in the poisoned atmosphere of these times.
In spite of our criticism of their work, the dozen or so colleagues who gathered at the Paris bookstore on December 11 deserve much respect and recognition. These colleagues have persisted in following a very contentious line of investigation in spite of the serious professional recriminations often thrown their way by critics who think nothing of destroying academic careers to advance political agendas.
Kevin Barrett and I took part in the proceedings with the anticipation that we would co-host our own alternative conference the following day at a hotel near the Charles De Gaulle Airport.
This plan was a response to the rejection of Dr. Barrett’s paper that was originally accepted as part of their conference.
Dr. Barrett’s proposed contribution highlighted the frequent exclusion of Muslim perspectives from officialdom’s accounts of the originating events triggering the 9/11 wars.
Dr. Barrett’s academic credentials in the subject matter of the conference are of course very strong as evidenced by the initial warm welcome extended to his offer to contribute to the conference’s scholarly proceedings.
Then came the events of Friday November 13th 2015, when the world was told Islamic terrorists had murdered over a hundred victims at a concert at the Bataclan music venue, at the Stade de France and at other Paris locations. In the wake of this development Dr. Barrett was informed by Professor Bazian,
“Due to state of emergency in France and the on-going active operations, the organizing committee is not able to accommodate your paper at this point in time. Our supporters on the ground are under extreme emergency conditions and the whole program is under stress due to it.”
In spite of the declared state of emergency in Paris the organizers had pressed ahead with the conference minus the contribution of Dr. Barrett. No explanation was given of why it was deemed alright to go forward with the other presentations but not the one containing Dr. Barrett’s interpretation of Islamophobia. The exclusion of Dr. Barrett, a Muslim himself with advanced degrees and many publications in Islamic Studies, could be seen as an expression of the very same forces that the Paris event had been convened to identify and analyse.
Rather than step aside without a protest, Dr. Barrett took part in the proceedings. I had joined him with the expectation that the next day we would try to put right the lapse that unfortunately seemed indicative of a more general failure of the academy.
How is it that, generally speaking, professors in our institutions of higher learning have failed so conspicuously to sort out truth from falsehood, accurate reporting from fraud, when it comes to explaining the origins and ongoing impetuses of the 9/11 wars?
Why have we in the academy mostly failed to rise to the responsibility of our higher calling when it comes to the vital job of identifying the thick web of lies and misrepresentations used to justify the post-9/11 surge of aggressive warfare abroad, the betrayal of human rights and civil liberties at home?
How has this treason of the intellectuals been transacted at the very moment society is most in need of evidence-based research to sort out fact from fiction when assessing the claims and assertions of the permanent war economy’s primary protagonists?
Through efforts like those of Dr. Barrett’s in his personal and public truthjihad, there have been significant breakthroughs in illuminating fraudulent reporting by presstitutes that often disseminate the disinformation essential to realizing the subversive agendas of false flag terrorism. Less has been done, however, to highlight the failures of academy to identify the lies and crimes entailed in the wholesale smearing of Muslims essential to the dark objectives of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
Islamophobia is the essential mental ingredient in the atmosphere of fear produced by the psychological geo-engineers pushing forward the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. In the words of Prof. Bazian, Islamophobia has to do with “the construction of an imagined and staged world rooted in the mind.”
The dissemination of the imagery of self-directed, self-financing Islamic terrorists acting autonomously out of no other motivation than their own religious zealotry constitutes the core lie of this malevolent psychological operation. The demonization of Muslim people, Muslim religion, Muslim cultures and Muslim countries forms the basis of the scaffolding on which a global and unbridled police state is being constructed.
This background helps explain how it is that Dr. Barrett and I had converged at the Paris bookstore on the eve of our effort to host our own conference of world-class thinkers expert in deciphering the inner workings of the Global War of False Terrorism. In taking on this responsibility we were moving into the vacuum of truth telling that the academic community has created, for the time being at least, by failing to come up with a viable evidence-based explanation of the origins and ongoing genesis of the 9/11 wars.
On December 11, 2015, the effort to go beyond the issues explored by the academics assembled in the Paris bookstore would take form the next day in a four-hour event entitled “False Flag Islamophobia” broadcast live on No Lies Radio. This event, in turn, helped encourage and hearten some of the contributors to Dr. Barrett’s new book.
Introducing the Islamophobia Industry
Sociology Professor David Miller of the University of Bath in Great Britain was one of the senior contributors to the conference at the Paris bookstore. Miller is a prolific scholar whose work on Islamophobia emerges from his important investigations into the relationship between corporate power and public relations as pioneered by the so-called father of media spin, Edward Bernays.
This approach permeates Miller’s Spinwatch website and his co-authored volume published in 2008, A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power.
In 2011 I had seen Professor Miller offer up a very interesting presentation in the Westminster Parliament in London England. His address in the Mother of All Parliaments helped give rise to his co-authored publication, The Cold War on British Muslims.
Professor Miller’s presentation in Paris on 11 December 2015 continued the development of themes that have brought on significant wrath from elements of the Jewish-Israeli lobby in Great Britain.
For instance the website of the pro-Zionist Gatestone Institute criticized Professor Miller for his work showing the “covert propaganda operations” of several Jewish organizations with preferential access to high-profile media venues. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6677/david-miller-hilary-aked-kevin-macdonald.
Along with Professor Bazian, Miller has been prominent in identifying the financing and workings of an interlinked complex of agencies that Nathan Lean and others have dubbed the “The Islamophobia Industry.”
According to the Legislating Fear report of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the dozens of agencies that make up this hate-inciting industry are funded to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars. In the words of Bazian, the aim of the well-funded endeavour is “to use fear and hate-mongering to lull our intellect to sleep” and “to implant negative and racist ideas about Muslims and Islam in our collective consciousness.”
Prominent among the core institutions of the trans-Atlantic Islamophobia Industry are the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Henry Jackson Society, the Quilliam Foundation, the Gladstone Institute, Daniel Pipe’s Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugs, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s AMCHA Initiative, the Clarion Project, the David Horowitz Freedom Center and CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting.
These and many other agencies whose mission is to incite Islamophobia, derive their funding from a variety of sources including the family foundations of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Sarah Scaife, Harry Bradley, Irving Moskowitz and Canada’s Bronfman dynasty. As noted above, the Gladstone Institute has made the work of Professor David Miller, including the content of his website Spinwatch, a particular target of its pro-Zionist defense of the Islamophobia Industry.
http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/2014/04/16/latent-and-manifest-islamophobia-an-inception-of-ideas/
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2015/02/11/106394/fear-inc-2-0/
http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/tag/islamophobia-industry/
http://www.ijan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/IJAN-Business-of-Backlash-full-report-web.pdf
Much of the work of David Miller and his colleagues in exposing the pro-Zionist activities of the anti-Muslim hate purveyors involves tracing the money fuelling the Islamophobia Industry. This follow-the-money approach could very easily extend to tracking down the sources of financing for the staging of expensive false flag terror events.
Throughout the academic presentations I witnessed at the Paris bookstore, there was a persistent resistance by all the presenters to engage in some sort of reckoning with the anti-Muslim thrust of the false flag terrorism currently imposed upon us.
In every presentation there was the same conspicuous absence of interest in investigating the primary engine of contemporary Islamophobia, namely the engineering of false flag terror events to be blamed on Muslim fundamentalists said to be acting alone for no other reason than their religious extremism.
According to Kevin Barrett’s record of the event, when it came time for questions and answers I posed my query as follows:
“This is all very interesting, but I’m not hearing any of you get to the root of why there is all this Islamophobia. There is now a huge literature on the fact that these big terror attacks are contrived. It was 9/11 and all of the subsequent events that have created the wave of Islamophobia. I know it’s not a good career move, but: Why can’t we talk about this? Why can’t we –”
I emphasized in my question the observation that the dominant forces animating Islamophobia lie in the extravagant media misrepresentations of false flag terror events. Again and again these episodes of false flag terror are presented as the independent, self-directed work of Islamic extremists acting exclusively out of religious zealotry rather than the actions of mercenaries paid to create the political currency of fear necessary for the maintenance of the permanent war economy.
These misrepresentations form the very core of the activities of the Islamophobia Industry as composed by agencies such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. An outgrowth of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the FDD was created a mere two days after the events of 9/11.
It fell to Professor Miller to respond to my question. He began by taking exception to my suggestion that some “psychopaths” might be involved as “assets” in the execution of false flag terrorism. Miller indicated that, in his estimation, Islamic terror events were by and large the product of considered actions on the part of alienated Muslims who had experienced devastating consequences from various forms of hostile invasion into the lives of their own families, communities, and nations.
Their violent responses, he indicated, were often the product of long reflection and preparation by mostly intelligent individuals prone to be especially sensitive to the gross abuses of human rights directed at Islamic populations both within the West and on its resource frontiers.
In retrospect Miller’s response was a classic illustration of the “blowback theory” of 9/11. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire is the name of an iconographic text by a former CIA analyst, Chalmers Johnson.
Although Johnson’s Blowback was first published in 1999, the volume became a bestseller after the events of September 11, 2001. Johnson believed the United States was imperiled by the flood of recriminations that would almost inevitably arise from those most negatively affected by the secret incursions of American empire.
Many seized on the central argument of Blowback to explain what had transpired on 9/11. I include myself in that category. Until my friend and colleague, the late Mohawk activist Splitting The Sky, insisted in 2008 that I look into the evidence of what did and did not happen on 9/11, I adhered to the blowback theory.
I mistakenly believed that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Indigenous peoples resisting repeated rounds of imperial assault on their lands, their persons and their ways of life. I recall it was difficult for me to put this interpretation aside once I began looking at the overwhelming evidence that the various agencies charged to protect us were in fact deeply involved in perpetrating the lies and crimes of 9/11.
The response of Professor Miller to my question seemed to demonstrate the continuing allure of the Blowback theory of 9/11 in spite of the conclusions that have emerged from the elaborate citizens’ inquiry into the events of September 11, 2001. The outcome of the citizens’ inquiry demonstrated long ago that the evidence does not support the thesis that all the destruction on 9/11 can be traced back to the independent actions of 19 Saudi jihadists acting to realize a plan hatched by Osama bin Laden.
I found it very instructive to witness how a group of otherwise courageous and conscientious scholars skated around any direct engagement with the origins and genesis of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. Our collective failure to force on our governments and institutions some basic reckoning with the lies and crimes of 9/11 have made our societies vulnerable to a seemingly endless repetition of the same scenario of manipulation through the incitement of fear towards Muslims. The key to creating these fears lies in the parade of recent false flag terror events in, for instance, London, Madrid, Bali, Ottawa, Paris and San Bernardino to mention only a few.
The event at the Paris bookstore might be characterized as a frontier zone marking the boundary between permitted and prohibited academic discourse. Their proceedings therefore provided an instructive window illuminating the more general failure of the academy to deal in deep and systematic ways with the full extent of the travesty. The potential of humanity is grossly undermined by the absurdity of a never-ending war being waged “on Terror”. The War on Truth is the most essential feature of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
The Islamophobia Industry and the Deep State Operations of the False Flag Terror Industry
I have learned a lot at the Paris conference and in my subsequent research into the leads provided by the scholars who participated. Professor Miller and others called my attention to, for instance, the dual preoccupations of the same funders and lobby groups that simultaneously instigate hatred to Muslims even as they invest in and promote Jewish settlements on the expansionary frontiers of the Israeli warrior state.
I found particular value in the content of a report by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network entitled, The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements of Justice. The document explains in detail the financial, ideological and political community of interests wedding the arms and media industries in the United States to the military and security establishment of Israel.
The channeling of vast treasuries of public funds from the USA to Israel has the effect of creating huge slush funds that end in the coffers of American politicians and in the corporate proprietorships of war profiteers.
The authors go on to explain that this coalition of shared interests is pointed against all manner of progressive movements including environmental groups as well as the decolonization struggles of Blacks, Latinos and Indigenous peoples. It seems the same techniques deployed to cast an aura of criminality over the freedom movement of oppressed Palestinians is being applied more broadly.
Accordingly, the demonization of whole populations by practitioners of the Islamophobia Industry casts a very broad shadow. The hate inciting smear campaigns support oppressive structures of top-down power running contrary to the exercise of even the most fundamental principles of universal human rights.
The Islamophobia Industry’s assault on human rights extended to an attack on the academic freedom of Professor Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, one of the more prominent participants in the proceedings at the Paris bookstore. Abdulhadi is Director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative at San Francisco State University in California. Recently she has was targeted by a formidable array of Islamophobes led by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s AMCHA Initiative.
The attack on Professor Abdulhadi was discussed in The Business of Backlash. Her Zionist detractors accused the Palestinian-American academic of being “a terrorist supporter as well as a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.” She was said to embody “all that is wrong with radical elements of academia who have all but hijacked the social science and humanities fields. Her obsessive focus on Israel and monomaniacal demonization of the Mideast’s only democracy betray a troubling pattern of Judeophobia and overt anti-Semitism.” http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/222457/terrorists-campus-ari-lieberman
A formidable coalition of academic colleagues and civil rights organizations rallied to the defense of Professor Abdulhadi who was represented by the lawyers of the Palestinian Solidarity Legal Support network. Abdulhadi’s participation in the Paris conference as a working professor attests to their success in persuading the administration of San Francisco State University to fend off the malicious attempt to end this important scholar’s academic career.
It seems very strange that those who participated in the academic conference in Paris, like those who authored The Business of Backlash, could make themselves so expert on the relationships between the Islamophobia Industry, Jewish Settlements on the West Bank and the deep state machinations of the Israeli-American power elite but not extend their investigations further.
The evidence has become overwhelming that what is portrayed in the media as self-motivated, self-financing, self-directed Islamic terrorism is rather the outcome of a complex network of connections linking intelligence agencies, paid assets, mercenaries and other private sector contractors connected to the operations and objectives of the pro-Zionist Islamophobia Industry.
As my reading on the Islamophobia Industry progressed I came to see the most visible agencies of public hate mongering towards Muslims as but the tip of the iceberg of far larger structures of deceit and corruption. Beneath the overt activities of the Muslim-bashing agencies lie the covert deep state entities devoted to generating the false flag terror events on which the parasitic Islamophobia Industry feeds.
This connection can be well illustrated in the reincarnation after 9/11 of the Project for the New American Century as the pro-Zionist, anti-Muslim Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The basic aim of this whole sordid complex of deep state and public agencies is to transform Israel’s Arab and predominantly Muslim regional enemies, the Palestinians, into one element of a larger global entity presented as the antithesis of the West’s self-proclaimed “freedoms.”
Composed of the worldwide community of Muslims, the ommah was instrumentalized in public mythology as the aberrant “other” to be guarded against, pacified and sometimes vanquished. The wholesale demonization of Muslims served the purpose of providing the war machine with a new enemy to replace the defunct enemy of the Soviet Union.
The Memes, Symbols and Demonology Deployed in Generating Hatred Towards Muslims
The same banking-military-media establishment that benefited most from the permanent war economy on the capitalist side of the Cold War was reborn, re-energized and refinanced with the launching of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. In this fashion a degree of continuity was maintained as the same national security establishment created to fight communism was re-deployed in a very strange operation involving both the creation of, and opposition to, Islamic terrorism.
In the decade and a half since 9/11 a powerful Islamophobia Industry has set the tone for the entire mainstream media. In the process, the imagery of Islamic jihad has been rendered an essential part of the visual vocabulary of popular culture. The project of generating fear of Muslims in mainstream media draws on many tried and true techniques of the Public Relations Industry.
The integration of Islamophobia into popular culture often invokes archetypes and symbols from religious mythology like, for instance, the stereotypical demonology of witchcraft and devil worship. Resort is made to mental imagery rooted in children’s fables such as Peter and the Wolf.
To convey these messages, instant-made-for-TV “terrorist” experts regularly conjure up terms such as “Lone Wolf Terrorist” even as they warn us against the “Homegrown Terrorists” said to be lurking amongst us. In such theatres of normalized hate speech, whole populations are wedged, divided and turned against each other to grease the gears of fear and distrust as primary lubricants for political and commercial exploitation.
The lies and crimes of 9/11 lie at the origins of a Great Transformation for the worse. To fail to deal with what did or did not happen in the Mother of All False Flag Terror Events is to give credence to the interpretation that the saga of misrepresentation essential to the Global War on Terror’s genesis did not begin until 2003.
According to that gatekeepers version of reality, the administration of George W. Bush was an innocent victim of Islamic attacks until the executive branch began floating the lie that the government of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Much of the responsibility for publicizing the false assertions that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction has been laid at the doorstep of the New York Times and the work of its star reporter Judith Miller.
Miller’s primary sources on this story included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, all prominent Israeli-American members of the Project for a New American Century.
In a major report in 2000, PNAC anticipated the events of 9/11 by proclaiming that the realization of their neoconservative agenda could not be achieved “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event– like a new Pearl Harbour.”
Is it credible that a handful of Saudi Muslims led by Osama bin Laden, armed with nothing but box cutters, a smattering of flight training and intense jihadist zeal, acted independently to bring about the elaborate high-tech crime that took place on 9/11?
Is it credible that the neocon cabal controlling both the Israeli government and the Bush White House was fortuitously presented by self-directed jihadists with precisely the catalytic event it needed to institute its ambitious agenda of police repression at home and military expansion abroad.
Is it credible that the neocon establishment was only a respondent to, rather than an author of, the cataclysmic events of 9/11? If the events of 9/11 were indeed a surprise attack on power symbols of American prowess in warfare and commerce, why was no one responsible for such a stupendous breach of national security fired for such a spectacular failure? How is it that so many of those who accuse the Bush-Cheney regime of lying about so many subjects refuse to explore the extent of the lies whose effect is to protect the actual perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes?
Part of the problem in the official cover story of 9/11 is that the custodians of the fable keep on changing it to suit the changing currents of political expediency. In the early days following 9/11, the culprits were said to be Osama bin Laden and his coterie of Islamic extremists in al-Qaeda.
Then the demonology of 9/11 shifted so that somehow Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi government were made to epitomize the jihadist extremes of Islamic terror. Once Saddam was captured and executed the world was briefly introduced to a person or persons identified by the name Khalid Sheik Mohammed. For a time it seemed that the US executive branch would conduct a show trial in New York of Khalid, the supposed “mastermind of 9/11” to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the infamous day.
The plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed for war crimes was abandoned. This prisoner remains jailed in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. There he has been tortured through water boarding many dozens of times in order to elicit all manner of confessions including some that found their way into the 9/11 Commission report in the United States.
The creation of an official government report, whose conclusions are drawn from supposed evidence obtained from illegal torture, is itself a war crime. Accordingly, those academics, jurists, politicians, journalists, and other public intellectuals who accept the 9/11 Commission report as accurate and satisfactory are rendered complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Instead of conducting a show trial, the government of US President Barack Obama opted to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by announcing that US Navy Seals had hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden at a compound near Abbottabad Pakistan.
In this fashion bin Laden was posthumously returned to the role assigned him by the White House and media agencies within hours of the 9/11 strikes without any formal investigation whatsoever.
According to Seymour Hersh, the White House’s story on bin Laden’s elimination “might have been written by Lewis Carroll.” Bin Laden was supposedly buried at sea. What sense would it make simply to execute the man that would be far and away the world’s foremost authority on international jihadism if the mythological demonology attending the 9/11 psychological operation was actually true.
The elimination by the Democratic Party President of the Republican Party President’s initial 9/11 patsy cleared the way for a new phase in the Global War of False Flag Terrorism overseen by Barack Obama.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
This Democratic Party version of the neocon plan for global domination restored al-Qaeda to a role something like it had played in the 1980s as a part of the mujahadeen proxy army army serving US geopolitical strategies. Where al-Qaeda helped overthrow the US-backed puppet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the second decade of the twenty-first century al-Qaeda was reborn as a mercenary instrument of NATO’s assault on the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The instrumentalization of mercenary armies paid to fight under the banner of Islamic religion has grown in scope so that this historical trajectory lies at the very heart of the international showdown for control of the lands and resources of Syria. Under heavy Israeli pressure, the US government with backing from the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar has built up al-Qaeda’s successor, Jabhat al-Nusra. The aim of this sponsorship of Islamic theocrats hostile to Bashir al-Assad’s more secular and pluralistic Russian-backed Syrian government is to balkanize the region and possibly to prepare the ground for the eastward and northward expansion of Israel.
This US backing of al-Qaeda-related fighters was spun as support for a “moderate opposition” to the Assad government. This scenario unfolded concurrently with the rise, in Iraq and Syria, of the entity known variously as the Islamic State in the Levant, ISIL, ISIS, and more recently Daesh.
The evidence has become overwhelming that this fighting force is financed, armed and organized in part to embody the memes of hatred and extremism essential to the operations of the Islamophobia Industry and the main protagonists of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
The close connection in the international oil business linking governments of Turkey, Israel and the non-state entity dubbed the Islamic State, highlight the many layers of complicity in a very strange operation. The US government presents itself publicly as the world’s leading opponent of Islamic terror while it cultivates, assists and facilitates the very forces it says it is fighting.
In a recent post on his website, Voltairenet, Thierry Meyssen has described the prevalent blindness to what has been really taking place in the region of Syria and Iraq. He lays bare the dynamics of a dangerous game that involves “pretending, like NATO, that these [Islamic fighting] groups are independent formations which have suddenly materialised from the void, with all their salaries, armament and spare parts. More seriously, the jihadists are in fact mercenaries in the service of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar…. to which we must add certain multinationals like Academi, KKR and Exxon-Mobil.”
A Reversion to Old Styles of Imperialism in the Name of Anti-Terrorism?
Since bin Laden was supposedly buried at sea by the US Armed Forces in 2010 the role once assigned to al-Qaeda as the all-purpose boogyman of Islamic terrorism has now been re-assigned to the non-state entity dubbed the Islamic State. When acts of false flag terrorism take place as in Ottawa in October 2014, or in Paris in November of 2015, or in San Bernardino a month later, the authorities in charge of pseudo-investigations are prone to announce almost immediately a connection to ISIS/ISIL Daesh.
The criminal law is thereby put aside and the violent events are immediately elevated to “acts of war” justifying quick retaliation by Armed Forces. Within hours of the Friday the 13th Paris event, for instance, French President Francois Hollande was ordering the French Air Force to intervene in Syria.
While the supposed target was ISIS/ISIL/Daesh encampments and strongholds, there is reason to see the real objective of the supposed anti-terror attacks as the overthrow of the Assad government. This French military intervention could thus be interpreted as a resort to France’s old imperial role in the part of the Middle East assigned it by the Eurocentric Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
The point of this foray into the recent history of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism is to encourage colleagues in the academy to address, document and explain the unfolding patterns of deception so integral to the process of enlarging the unaccountable powers of the covert deep state, diminishing the overt role of the public state. I extend this encouragement especially to the colleagues that Dr. Barrett and I met in the Paris bookstore at the event entitled “Islamophobia and the Erosion of Civil Society”.
These colleagues and their networks of academic collaborators have made a good start in identifying the institutionalization of hate mongering in the Islamophobia Industry. The time has come, however, to connect the visible workings of this Zionist enterprise of anti-Muslim provocation to the deep state operations in the ongoing Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
Moscow Notes Multiple Attempts to Distort Syrian Truce With Fake Reports
Sputnik – 29.02.2016
Moscow has noted a large volume of information fleecing and attempts to disrupt the truce in Syria, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Monday.
“I’d like to say that there are very many dupes and attempts to distort facts and deliberately disrupting the agreements. Our Western colleagues must very carefully approach the task of controlling those groups that for the most part listen to them and Syria’s neighbors. We are strictly fulfilling all the agreements,” Ryabkov said.
‘UK secretly deployed military advisers in Libya to battle ISIS’
RT | February 28, 2016
A “small number” of UK military advisers are secretly operating in Libya along with US special troops, sources told the Telegraph. The aim of the operation is to battle Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIL/ISIS) militants in the conflict-ravaged country.
“Special forces commandos” are reportedly working with their “US counterparts” in the city of Misrata, northwestern Libya, the paper said Saturday.
The Telegraph cited Western officials and sources on the ground who claimed that a “small number” of British troops are currently on a “low key mission” in the city.
Also, the US military in Libya have started “giving tactical training” to several local militias, the sources said.
The paper obtained confirmation that “training” of local rebels had been taking place in recent weeks from separate officials close to Western governments. It is not yet clear which EU countries took part in this “training.”
The British government has so far refused to comment on the Telegraph report.
In January, Jonathan Powell, the UK Special Envoy to Libya, was speaking about battling Islamic State terrorists.
“There are a number of armed groups there sitting next to Isil who have the capacity to deal with it. But they need to be united and have a common cause if they are to do something,” he said.
The UK is not the only country said to be operating in the war-stricken state. On Wednesday, it was revealed that France is also using their special forces and commandos to battle Islamic State there.
“The last thing to do would be to intervene in Libya. We must avoid any overt military engagement, but act discreetly,” a senior military source told Le Monde.
In the meantime, Federica Mogherini, EU top diplomat, said that the EU will only intervene against the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Libya if it receives an official invitation from the legitimate government of the country.
Libya has been in turmoil following the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. Since the spring of 2014, two governing groups are in a war for power over the country. Islamic State took advantage of the situation and seized some territories in the center of the country – including the port of Sirte.
Five years on from the start of the uprising, Libya is in a markedly worse position. Its oil revenues have halved, while it is also facing a growing threat from Islamic State, which is looking to capitalize on the lack of political stability and political infighting.
READ MORE: France waging secret war in Libya – report
Hillary Goes to War
By Diana Johnstone | CounterPunch | February 26, 2016
When voters elected Bill Clinton president of the United States in 1992, they were also electing his wife. Bill announced the fact himself, but after the failure of her health reform plan, Hillary’s only political success was her excellent performance in the role of a faithful wife who “stands by her man”. Her brave defense of her frivolous husband was widely appreciated, but as a qualification for the highest office in the land, it seems a bit skimpy. Having played a part in wars in the former Yugoslavia might seem more presidential.
During the 2008 Democratic Party primaries, Hillary evoked the foreign policy experience she had gained as First Lady by repeatedly regaling audiences with an exciting account of her trip to the Bosnian city of Tuzla in 1996:
“I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia,” she told audiences. “There was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
As word got around of what she was telling audiences, Hillary’s story was rapidly denied by numerous eyewitnesses to the event, as well as by television footage showing Ms. Clinton arriving in Tuzla with her daughter Chelsea and being greeted by little children offering flowers.
Cornered by the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board during an interview in late March, 2008, Hillary Clinton was forced to acknowledge that there were no snipers, but eased her way out:
“I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day – so if I misspoke it was just a misstatement.”
She never had to dodge sniper fire, but she does know how to dodge embarrassing questions. The fact that she utters “millions of words per day” is supposed to give her a generous quota of possible “misstatements”, or to put it more simply, lies.
The claim to have run from snipers was historically absurd and morally pretentious, in addition to being blatantly false. Four months before her visit, the hostilities in Bosnia had been decisively brought to a halt by the Dayton peace accords, signed on November 21, 1995. She could not fail to know that. Indeed, far from being sent to a place that was “too dangerous” for the
President, the visit by the First Lady and her daughter was intended precisely to emphasize that the White House had not lost interest in Bosnia even though peace had been restored. Hillary’s spokesman Howard Wolfson had also added to the “misstatements” by claiming that she was “on the front lines” of “a potential combat zone”. Aside from the fact that there could be no “front lines” or “combat zone” when the war was over, Tuzla had never been either one. Tuzla was a largely Muslim- inhabited industrial center which had been selected as a U.S. military base, probably in part because it was a particularly safe environment.
Lying about Bosnia was nothing unusual, but this was a particularly silly, self-aggrandizing lie. Hillary evidently assumed that a brush with gunfire would be considered by the masses as adding to her qualifications to become Commander in Chief. It also showed a persistent tendency to view conflicts as occasions to display personal toughness, instead of as challenges calling for intelligent understanding of political complexities. Hillary’s claim to have braved sniper fire is not so far removed from Sarah Palin’s claim to understand Russia because she could see it from Alaska.
Hillary’s recorded statements concerning the former Yugoslavia revealed the same tendency to play to the galleries in matters of foreign policy that would mark her subsequent term as Secretary of State.
The Holocaust Pretext
In her star-struck biography of the First Lady, Hillary’s Choice, Gail Sheehy reported Hillary’s plea in favor of bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 as a major point in her favor. According to Sheehy’s book, Hillary convinced her reluctant husband to unleash the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs with the argument that: “You can’t let this ethnic cleansing go on at the end of the century that has seen the Holocaust.”
This line is theatrical and totally irrelevant to the conflict in the Balkans. As a matter of fact, there was no “ethnic cleansing” going on in Kosovo at that time. It was the NATO bombing that soon led people to flee in all directions – a reaction that NATO leaders interpreted as the very “ethnic cleansing” they claimed to prevent by bombing. But Hillary’s remark illustrates the fact that Yugoslavia marks the start of using reference to the Holocaust as the most emotionally-potent argument in favor of war.
It was not always so. At the end of World War II, both the long- suffering survivors and those who discovered the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps wanted only to draw the conclusion that this was yet another powerful reason never again to go to war. But as time passed, by the strange chemistry of the Zeitgeist, the memory of the Holocaust has now become the strongest rhetorical argument for war. It is a sort of imaginary revisionism of past history that gets in the way of facing the present. Hillary’s sentence is a way of saying, “I would have said no to Hitler at Munich”, or “I would have bombed Auschwitz”. The history of World War II, and even world history itself, has been totally overshadowed in recent decades by the tragedy of the Holocaust to such an extent that even Western heads of State may find themselves acting out the dramas of the past instead of facing the realities of the present. The conflict in Kosovo was so obscure, so unfamiliar to Americans and so distorted by deception and self-deception , that the easiest way to think of it was by analogy with a conflict everyone knew about, or thought they knew about. The moral reward seemed immense, especially in consideration of the low cost, since it entailed bombing a country with inadequate air defenses, with no great risk to our side.
It is worth noting that Hillary urged Bill to bomb the Serbs via telephone, while she was in North Africa, touring Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. Her guide on that trip was her new assistant, Huma Abedin, the young daughter of Muslim scholars and her trusted expert on the Muslim world. Many secular Arab nationalists in North Africa sympathized with the Serbs, due to past good relations with Yugoslavia during the days of the Non-Aligned Movement. However, Hillary had become an apprentice in learning to appreciate the fundamentalist Muslim outlook, and the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo enjoyed widespread, even fanatical support, in the Islamic world at this point. Did Huma assure Hillary that Muslims everywhere would applaud the Clinton administration for bombing Serbs?
Nevertheless, there are strong reasons to doubt that Hillary’s moralistic urging was the sole cause of the NATO bombing of what remained of the former Yugoslavia in 1999. Strategists were concerned with less sentimental geopolitical reasons, briefly alluded to above. But there is much less reason to doubt that Hillary did indeed urge Bill to bomb. And there is no reason at all to doubt that she boasted of this to her awed biographer, as a way of proving her “resolve” to use U.S. military power on a “humanitarian” mission. It fits her chosen image as “tough and caring”.
This article is excerpted from Diana Johnstone’s Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton (CounterPunch Books).
The NY Times, Netanyahu’s Stenographer
By Barbara Erickson | TimesWarp | February 27, 2016
The New York Times serves as Benjamin Netanyahu’s stenographer in a story this week that reports his latest rant against critics of Israeli policy, repeating his claims at length but making no attempt to verify or even question the distortions in his response.
The Israeli prime minister was reacting to comments by British Prime Minister David Cameron, who criticized Israel’s settlement construction in and around East Jerusalem during a session in parliament Wednesday, saying that he found the situation “genuinely shocking.” The Times, which made no mention of Cameron’s remarks at the time, now presents us with an article by Isabel Kershner framed around the official Israeli response.
Her story, “Benjamin Netanyahu Rebukes David Cameron for Criticizing Israel,” gives much space to the prime minister’s assertions and allows him the final word. It also quotes Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and allows the comments of both men to stand without challenge.
Netanyahu, speaking at a political meeting Thursday, portrayed Israel as the peacekeeper in East Jerusalem, saying that “only Israeli sovereignty” has prevented ISIS “and Hamas from igniting the holy sites as they are doing all over the Middle East.”
He implied that Israel has brought prosperity to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, citing “roads, clinics, employment and all the other trappings of normal life that their brethren do not enjoy elsewhere in the Middle East.” Mayor Barkat also stated that Israel is building “the newest, most advanced schools” for Palestinian youth and paving new roads for residents.
The Times made no attempt to challenge the veracity of these comments although they grossly misrepresent the situation Palestinians face in occupied East Jerusalem. The data is available for all to see and is certainly familiar to Kershner and Times editors.
For instance, as of January 2011:
- Entire Palestinian neighborhoods were not connected to a sewer system and lacked paved roads and sidewalks.
- West Jerusalem had 1,000 public parks compared to 45 in East Jerusalem.
- West Jerusalem had 34 swimming pools; East Jerusalem had three.
- Nearly 90 percent of the sewage pipes, roads and sidewalks in the city were found in West Jerusalem.
- West Jerusalem had 26 libraries; East Jerusalem had two.
More recent news also belies the claims of Netanyahu and Barkat. Far from working to provide education, health care and road access for Palestinian residents, Israeli policies and actions have made life more and more difficult for the non-Jewish residents of the city:
- In 2015, Israel placed dozens of Palestinian children under house arrest in East Jerusalem, preventing them from attending school.
- The Israeli government has been working with settler groups to dispossess Palestinians of their homes.
- More than a third of East Jerusalem students are unable to complete high school because there are not enough classrooms. (Under an order by the Israeli High Court, some new classrooms are being built, but these will only alleviate the shortage by half.)
- Some 38 percent of East Jerusalem’s planned areas have been confiscated for the development of Jewish settler neighborhoods, while only 2.6 percent is zoned for public buildings—such as schools—for the city’s indigenous Palestinians.
- Israeli invasions of Makassed hospital in East Jerusalem hospital and restrictions on patients attempting to enter the hospital prompted several United Nations agencies to condemn the actions as violations of international law.
- By Feb. 22, Israeli forces had demolished 27 Palestinian-owned structures in East Jerusalem, including a school, since the beginning of this year.
Kershner’s story, however, makes no mention of any of this. The focus here is solely on the Israeli show of outrage. Netanyahu and Barkat’s statements are allowed to stand, even the claim that Hamas and ISIS are working together to foment terrorism. In fact, the two are bitter enemies, but the Times has no interest in disabusing its readers of this inconvenient fact.
Cameron’s statements gave the Times an opening, a chance to examine the settlement enterprise, conditions in East Jerusalem and the attitudes of Palestinian leaders and citizens living under Israeli control. But this was not to be. Only the Israeli narrative was of interest to the Times, and even the prime minister of the United Kingdom could not make his voice heard above its strident demands.
Merkel Asks German Businesses to be Patient With Anti-Russian Sanctions
Sputnik – February 27, 2016
German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked for business representatives reeling from the costly effects of anti-Russian sanctions to remain patient at the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) economic conference, the German news agency DPA reported.
“The sanctions have hit some sectors of the economy hard,” Merkel said in her annual address to the conference in Stralsund, northeast Germany, on Friday.
She told those present that the anti-Russian sanctions, which resulted in a 25 percent (7.5 billion euros, $8.2 billion) drop in German exports to Russia last year, will be lifted in accordance with the Minsk Agreements that the representatives of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia agreed upon in February 2015.
There is no evidence that Russia has not fulfilled the conditions of the agreement, and earlier this month Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Alexander Lukashevich, told the OSCE’s Permanent Council meeting about Moscow’ concern that Kiev is not carrying out its obligations under the agreement.
© Sputnik/ Irina Geraschenko
Breaches of the agreement include the bombardment of residential homes by the Ukrainian military, the shelling of a trip by the Principal Deputy Chief Monitor of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, and Kiev’s failure to pass legislation that would provide a special status to the eastern regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
“One of the key problems is that our colleagues pretend that Kiev is faithfully complying with the Package of Measures. In fact, it’s the other way round,” Lukashevich said.
“The Minsk Package of Measures is the foundation of the peace process via a direct dialogue between the parties to the Ukraine conflict. It provides a framework for a sustainable solution to the crisis, and defines the principles of conserving the Donetsk and Lugansk regions as part of Ukraine with constitutional and legislative guarantees ensuring the rights of the people of Donbass.”
Read more: ECHR to Review 551 Complaints From Donbass Residents on Rights Violations
UN Aid to Deir ez-Zor Lands in Daesh-Controlled Territory
Sputnik — February 25, 2016
The UN World Food Program’s (WFP) aid intended for the besieged Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor has landed mostly in territories controlled by Daesh, a source in the city’s administration said Thursday.
Earlier on Thursday, the United Nations said that the WFP had dropped 21 tons of aid into city on Wednesday.
“Planes dropped the humanitarian help sent by the United Nations into the territory controlled by Daesh. Just two containers ended up in the areas where the Syrian army [is located],” the source told RIA Novosti.
The contents of the containers that landed on the government-controlled territory has been badly damaged due to a parachute system failure, the source added.
According to earlier reports, the WFP has issued a statement admitting difficulties with the operation, adding that necessary adjustments are being carried out.
Some 200,000 people living under the Daesh-imposed siege in Deir ez-Zor are experiencing severe water shortages and a total lack of electricity, according to the United Nations.
Russia has also been providing humanitarian aid to the Syrian people, including through joint efforts with the Syrian government, particularly in Deir ez-Zor.
America’s Plan B: Supporting Terrorists Till the Bitter End
By Martin Berger – New Eastern Outlook – 25.02.2016
At a time when the international community is looking forward to the possibility of putting an end to the bloody conflict in Syria that has dragged on for years, while putting their hopes behind the agreement that was achieved between the US and Russia on February 22 regarding the cessation of all hostile activities in Syria, certain forces in the United States carry on banging the war drum.
As it has been pointed out by the The Wall Street Journal :
Defense Secretary Ash Carter; Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan have voiced increasingly hawkish views toward Moscow in recent White House meetings, calling for new measures to “inflict real pain on the Russians,” a senior administration official said.
Moreover, those gentlemen are somehow convinced that Moscow will break the ceasefire, so they have formulated a “Plan B,” that will imply the strengthening of their support to extremists and the introduction of new sanctions against Russia.
Of course, one could only be amazed by such behavior from Washington’s “hawks” if one did not take into consideration the evidence exposing their direct involvement in the continuous aggravation of the situation in Syria, which makes them directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. Those actions would for sure present the perfect subject for a careful investigation of an international tribunal.
In particular, according to the facts presented by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Nathaniel Barr in the Daily Beast, the CIA is now assisting the terrorist organizations that the United States has been allegedly fighting for 15 years. This program was launched in 2013 to further aggravate the armed conflict in Syria. According to this publication, at least one of these CIA-backed groups severed its ties with the CIA and joined a listed terrroist-led coalition, Later, Associated Press reported that CIA-backed groups are gaining ground in Syria, “fighting alongside more extremist factions.”
The article concludes:
Analysis of the geography of “moderate” rebels’ gains during this period and reports from the battlefield demonstrate that CIA-backed groups collaborated with Jaysh al-Fateh, an Islamist coalition in which Jabhat al-Nusra—al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate—is a leading player…
and
At this point it is impossible to argue that U.S. officials involved in the CIA’s program cannot discern that Nusra and other extremists have benefited. And despite this, the CIA decided to drastically increase lethal support to vetted rebel factions following the Russian intervention into Syria in late September.
The authors are convinced that now it’s more important than ever to organize a public debate in the US about the role that the CIA played in the Syrian conflict and the considerable strengthening of radical groups.
It would be no less interesting to take a look at yet another investigation of the criminal role American intelligence agencies played in the inciting of the Syrian conflict that was published in The New York Times. The authors, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo described in detail how the United States was using Saudi money to provide radical militants in Syria with lethal weapons. Yet, this is but an episode in the continuous and vicious cooperation between Saudi and American security agencies that lasted for decades. The alliance was in place during the Iran-Contra scandal, the hidden fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan and countless proxy wars in Africa.
These forces are actively involved in the Ukrainian conflict, openly opposing any form of peaceful settlement, pushing all the blame on Russia while Turkey is pulling the strings behind the stage and sending radical mercenaries to Ukraine.
Therefore, one shouldn’t be surprised that this Plan B will be put into action regardless of the facts surrounding how the parties actually observe the agreements reached or even before it’s imposed. It would be safe to assume that the CIA will be put in charge of the operation, funded with the money provided by Saudi Arabia, therefore we can await provocations and misleading articles about how it is Russia who is continuing with provocations, not these forces hidden in plain view.
That is why today the international community is tasked with preventing the failure of the recent agreement between the leaders of the US and Russia by exposing those “hawks”, namely the CIA, the Pentagon, and Saudi intelligence services.
Using terrorists as pawns prolongs Middle East crises: Lavrov
Press TV – February 25, 2016
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the crises in the Middle East will not be settled as long as terrorists are used as pawns in pursuit of certain geopolitical agendas.
The fight against terrorism “cannot be successful if attempts are not stopped at using terrorists as pawns in doubtful geopolitical games,” Lavrov said in Moscow on Thursday.
“The further degradation of the situation presents a serious threat for the entire international architecture,” he told a session of the Valdai International Discussion Club.
“Obviously a strong stability of the situation is impossible without the destruction of the center of the terrorist threat, first and foremost Daesh,” he said.
During the session, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said Moscow was concerned about statements from US officials about alternatives to a plan for the cessation of hostilities in Syria.
“We are concerned about claims of certain Western partners, including the United States, about the existence of a certain ‘plan B.’ We know nothing about it, and we are not discussing any alternate plans.”
The United States and Russia announced on February 22 that they had reached a deal for a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria, which would begin on February 27.
The Syrian government said the following day that it accepts the terms of the deal on the condition that military efforts against Daesh and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front continue.
In the lead-up to the agreement, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the US had a “plan B” for military action to enforce if the cessation of hostilities failed.
Bogdanov, who serves as President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy to the Middle East, said Russia expects the US to negotiate the implementation of the agreement with the Syrian opposition.
“Russia is doing the necessary work with Damascus and the legitimate Syrian leadership. We expect the United States to do the same with groups allied with them and supported by them,” he said.
The Russian diplomat also said the notion of setting up a buffer zone in Syria and to launch a ground operation in the war-hit country could only exacerbate the situation.
“Steps that could further worsen the Syria crisis cause our great concerns. In particular, this includes attempts to implement the idea of setting up a buffer zone on the Syrian-Turkish border and putting together some blocs for a land operation.”
Bogdanov was referring to Ankara’s plans to set up a buffer zone and by send ground troops into Syria by Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Why It’s Dangerous to Conflate Hamas and Daesh
Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh
By Belal Shobaki – Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network – February 22, 2016
Overview
While Israel’s efforts to link Palestinian resistance to its military occupation to global terrorism are not new, it has expanded its propaganda to address Arab as well as Western audiences. By so doing, it is clearly seeking to exploit the global aversion to movements that have drifted towards extremism and terrorism while claiming to represent Islam. “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared at the United Nations in 2014. Yet better than anyone else, Netanyahu and the Israeli political establishment know that Hamas and Daesh are not related, as do those Arab regimes that also tar all Islamic movements with the same brush to serve their own ends. 1
Not only are Hamas and Daesh unrelated, they are bitter enemies, and Daesh has denounced Hamas as an apostate movement. Al-Shabaka Policy Analyst Belal Shobaki discusses the major ways in which Hamas differs from Daesh including its approach to jurisprudence; the position vis-a-vis the nature of the state; and relations with other religions. He makes the case that it is especially important for the Palestinian national movement to rebut the attempts to conflate Hamas with Daesh and points out the dangers of not doing so.
Serving Short-Term Political Gain
The conflation of Hamas with Daesh ignores reality on the ground. The political environment in Palestine is defined by the occupation, whereas the political environment in the Arab countries where Daesh emerged is defined by authoritarianism and repression as well as sectarian and religious conflicts, an ideal environment for the emergence of a radical ideology motivated by indiscriminate violence.
For Israel, however, the attempt to link the two may pay off regionally and internationally. Many Arabic media outlets have no qualms about referring to this terrorist organization as an “Islamic” State although it is anything but, while many Western media outlets embrace the Israeli conflation of Hamas and Daesh without scrutiny. Arab regimes are uninterested in defending the image of Hamas. Even the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) does not seem concerned with defending Hamas’s international image given the political division between Fatah and Hamas.
Hamas is considered part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is seen as a threat to authoritarian Arab regimes, particularly in the Arab Mashreq. Thus one way for Arab regimes to fight the Muslim Brotherhood is by claiming it shares common ground or is even synonymous with Daesh, as claimed by the Egyptian regime, and then using this as a justification for excluding the Muslim Brotherhood from participating in political life.
The rapid developments of the past five years in Egypt, the country that provides the only outlet for the Palestinian Gaza Strip, has pushed Hamas into its informal tunnels economy. The official Egyptian stance after Abdel Fattah Sisi’s coup against elected president Mohammad Morsi became tougher against the Gaza Strip, with claims that Hamas was cooperating with Jihadist groups in the Sinai, the same narrative promoted by Israel and its media. However, this narrative is flawed. It is too risky for Hamas to maintain a close relationship with Sinai jihadists, on the one hand, while cracking down on individuals embracing the same ideology in Gaza, on the other. Any links Hamas has established with those groups is limited to securing the needs of the enclave besieged by Israel and Egypt. This interaction is not motivated by a shared ideological identity or shared enmity towards the Egyptian regime. Indeed, Hamas has been eager to keep communication lines open with the Egyptian regime even when accusations conflating Hamas with Sinai’s Salafi Jihadi groups were made in the media. Hamas has also repeatedly said that it is keen on rebuilding the relationship with Egypt in order to ensure the legal flow of goods, services and individuals into Gaza.
It is important to refute this narrative concerning one of the largest Palestinian political movements: Excluding moderate Islamists from political life carries the danger of pushing Palestinian society towards radicalism, in which case both Fatah and Hamas will find themselves fighting takfiri groups. The ensuing discussion will demonstrate the real differences between Hamas and Daesh as well as the very real enmity between them.
Differences in Doctrine
Hamas positions itself as a centrist Islamic movement and an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood, with a rational jurisprudential authority, whereas Daesh adopts a text-based approach that deals with Islamic texts in isolation from their historical context and refuses to interpret them in line with current developments. Hence, for Daesh and other takfiri groups in general, movements like Hamas are secular and un-Islamic, since Hamas is primarily a resistance movement against the Israeli occupation and believes in a moderate Islamic authority. Moreover, Hamas does not take Islamic texts literally; it allows for ijtihad – interpretation and use of discretion. Some scholars have categorized these movements along a horizontal line with the right representing advocates of the text and the left representing advocates of reason. 2 Using this classification, the Muslim Brotherhood can be found a good way down the left of the line, while Daesh is on the far right.
Daesh characterizes Hamas and its discourse as deviant. Hamas for its part has condemned Daesh’s threats and considered these part of a smear campaign that extends beyond Palestine. When threats from Daesh and other takfiri groups materialized into action, Hamas no longer stopped at condemnations. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a prominent Hamas leader, declared “Daesh’s threats can be felt on the ground, and we are handling the situation from a security standpoint. Whoever commits a security offense shall be dealt with in accordance with the law, and whoever wants to debate intellectually shall be debated intellectually; we take this matter seriously”.
Hamas had in fact dealt decisively with a Daesh-like group. In August 2009, Abdul Latif Musa, leader of the “Jund Ansar Allah” (Soldiers of God’s Supporters) armed group, announced the creation of the Islamic Emirate in Gaza at the Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque. The group had previously been accused of destroying cafes and other venues in the Gaza Strip, pushing the Hamas government into a confrontation. Security forces, reinforced by the al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas’ military wing), encircled the Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque and, when Musa’s group refused to surrender, Hamas ended the emirate project in its infancy by killing the members of the group. Hamas was criticized for its use of violence but justified its actions by arguing that the violence that could have been perpetrated by such groups would have been much worse than that used to eradicate extremism in the Gaza Strip.
Daesh’s supporters in Gaza are far fewer than Hamas’s, mainly due to the fact that these groups have not historically contributed to resisting the occupation. Some polls suggest that 24% of Palestinians think positively of jihadist movements, but this percentage is exaggerated. When some Palestinians cheer for the jihadist groups’ hostility towards the US, it is not because they believe in these groups but rather because they see the US, with its infinite support for Israel, as being playing a destructive role.
Different Stances on Statehood
Hamas and Daesh differ in their view of the modern state, in both theory and practice. As noted above, Hamas has always allowed for ijtihad or discretion, evolving its thoughts and opinions. It is thus unfair to assess Hamas’s stance on the civil state and democracy based on the early literature of the mother movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas maintains that it has embraced new convictions in this regard and has come to fully accept democracy and the concept of the civil state. Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood itself has evolved. Qatar-based Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the jurisprudential authority of the Muslim Brotherhood at large, has stated on multiple occasions, including in his book “The State in Islam”, that the concept of the religious state does not exist in Islam. According to al-Qaradawi, Islam advocates for a civil state founded on respect for the people’s Islam-based opinion, and also founded on the principle of accountability and political pluralism. Although the discussion about the relationship between Islam and democracy predates the Muslim Brotherhood, it gained clarity after the 1950s, when numerous Islamic thinkers, including al-Qaradawi, the Tunisian leader and Ennahda co-founder Rached Ghannouchi and the Algerian philosopher Malek Bennabi, affirmed that Islam and democracy were not in contradiction with each other.
At the opposite end, the movement that Daesh represents rejects democracy in its entirety and considers it an apostate system of governance. Although some jihadist groups do not denounce Islamists who take part in the democratic process as apostates, they do consider their discretion flawed. Daesh views any expression of democracy such as elections as a manifestation of apostasy and any movement or individual taking part in elections as apostates. By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood participated in elections from its earliest days, when its founder Hassan al-Banna decided to run in the Egyptian parliamentary elections that El-Wafd Party Government sought to hold in 1942. Although al-Banna could not run because the government rejected his candidacy, the Muslim Brotherhood has served in Arab parliaments and sometimes in the executive branch.
When Hamas decided not to participate in 1996 Palestinian Authority elections its position was based on a political and ideological stance towards the Oslo Accords. However, Hamas allowed its members to run in the elections as independents. When the circumstances changed and the 2005 Cairo Agreement became the governing framework for the PA elections instead of the Oslo Accords, Hamas decided to participate. It nominated many members in the movement and some independents to a Change and Reform list to run for the Legislative Council, winning the majority of votes.
By participating in the elections, Hamas has offered evidence that it is willing to function in a modern state and a democratic system. It has called for coalition governments inclusive of leftist and secular parties. Its government as well as its parliamentary list included women and its first government included Muslim and Christian ministers.
Daesh, on the other hand, has turned against all modern institutions in the areas under its control, refusing to recognize borders or national identity. It rules through chaotic and individual decisions. Although Daesh has been eager to use administrative terms derived from the Islamic tradition such as caliphate and shura (consultation), the essence of its governance contradicts the majority of unquestionable texts in the sources of Islamic legislation in many ways. For example, it does not abide by the conditions established in the Quran and sunna (the Prophet Mohammad’s teachings) to declare war or the protection of civilians and treatment of prisoners in wartime. Another example is its imposition of jizya (a tax that was levied on non-Muslim subjects), which is not supposed to be applied to the indigenous inhabitants even if they are non-Muslim. Moreover, it has attacked places of worship and assaulted the faithful in their homes, in clear violation of the Quran and sunna.
Daesh, to some extent, resembles hybrid regimes in the Third World that use modern and democratic vocabulary to describe their political process, even though they remain authoritarian in essence.
Polar Opposites in Treating the Other
The most significant difference between Hamas and Daesh is their position towards followers of other religions. During its formation, Hamas published a charter that used religious vocabulary to describe the conflict. Following severe criticism, Hamas effectively sidelined this Charter and no longer considers it an authoritative reference as some of its leaders have confirmed.
In his interview with The Jewish Daily Forward deputy head of the Hamas politburo Moussa Abu Marzouk confirmed that the Charter was marginal to the movement and not a source for its policies. He added that many members were talking about modifying it because several of Hamas’ present policies contradict it. Hamas’ politburo leaders abroad were not the only ones to disclaim the charter. Gaza-based Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad went even further in an interview with the Saudi Okaz newspaper in which he said the charter was subject to discussion and evaluation in opening up to the world. Sami Abu Zuhri, a young Hamas leader who was the movement’s spokesperson during the Second Intifada, urged in an interview with The Financial Times that focus be shifted away from the 1988 charter, and that Hamas be judged on the statements of its leaders.
Today, Hamas adopts the Quranic verse that reads: “Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes – from being righteous toward them and acting justly toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly.” This verse urges kindness and justice when dealing with people of other religions. Unlike Daesh, Hamas has applied this in practice. In addition to appointing Christian ministers to its cabinet, it has celebrated Christmas with Palestinian Christians by sending official delegations to visit during the feast. Meanwhile, Daesh has threatened the lives of those who celebrate Christmas across the world.
Some may argue that these steps are ways in which Hamas tries to beautify its authoritarian rule. However, there is little difference between Hamas’ rule and Fatah’s. The human rights violations committed by Gaza’s government cannot be considered an indication of Hamas’ resemblance to Daesh, but rather an indication of misgovernment. The political leadership of Hamas has spoken out against such practices on occasion, for example as those committed by the Ministry of the Interior under Fathi Hammad.
When some individuals were attacked by extremist groups in Gaza, Hamas and the government acted to ensure their safety and punish the aggressors, as in the case of British journalist Alan Johnston who was freed by Hamas from his radical captors and the killing of Italian solidarity activist Vittorio Arrigoni.
The movement’s position towards the Shiites is similar to that towards Christians. At a time when the Middle East is experiencing a media war between Shiites and Sunnis, Hamas refuses to denounce Shiites as apostates, and has interacted with them politically. When the relationship with Iran became strained during the Syrian crisis, the disagreement was political rather than doctrinal. Daesh, on the other hand, not only thinks of Shiites as apostates, but also all other Sunni groups that hold a different ideology, and believes they must be fought.
Even the two organizations’ treatment of the enemy differs. Hamas identifies the Israeli occupation as the enemy, while Daesh considers everyone else its enemy. Daesh has boasted of its numerous crimes against humanity in its treatment of its abductees and the civilians under its rule, including burning Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh alive. It has attempted to legitimize its inhumane conduct by distorting or misinterpreting religious texts. Hamas paid its condolences to al-Kasasbeh’s family and condemned Daesh’s actions. Contrast Daesh’s brutality with Hamas’ treatment of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit during his captivity, as even the Jerusalem Post reports.
Moving Forward in Relations with Hamas
Both Hamas and Daesh are on the list of terrorist organizations in many countries, including the member states of the European Union and the United States. However, the listing of Hamas is clearly politically motivated: Unlike Daesh, Hamas has neither targeted nor called for targeting any entity other than the Israeli occupation. Hamas was added to the list of terrorist organizations following the events of September 11, 2001, even though it had nothing to do with this terrorist attack. The political nature of the position against Hamas is underscored by the fact that the General Court of the European Union issued a decision on December 17, 2014, urging the removal of Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations. The Court argued that the order to list Hamas in 2003 was based on media reports rather than solid evidence.
In addition, many European and American dignitaries that are known for their stance against terrorist organizations worldwide have met with Hamas leaders on more than one occasion. Those include European parliamentarians and former US president Jimmy Carter, who met with Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza in 2009 and Khalid Meshaal in Cairo in 2012.
The bottom line is that Israel’s attempt to exploit a chaotic Middle East by implicating Hamas as a terrorist group linked with Daesh is baseless. Hamas is ideologically, intellectually, jurisprudentially and politically different from Daesh. Media outlets that adopt the Israeli narrative hurt their professionalism and credibility.
Palestinian movements must not allow the disagreement with Hamas to justify the accusations that harm the Palestinian cause internationally and create tensions locally. Hamas must also realize that the differences between them and Daesh do not mean that its rule of Gaza is free of abuses and human rights violations, and must therefore revisit its conduct and be more careful in its political discourse. It should move beyond the approach of having one discourse for local consumption and another for global consumption since every word uttered by any Hamas leader is marketed abroad as a message from Hamas to the world.
When the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Arab regimes, especially in Egypt, do not oppose the efforts to link Hamas with Daesh – or, indeed, occasionally contribute to these efforts – they may “benefit” in the short-term by weakening Hamas as a political opponent. However, this carries the dangers of destabilizing Palestinian society in the medium and long-term. Excluding moderate Islamists could push Palestinian society towards radicalism, in which case both Fatah and Hamas will find themselves fighting takfiri groups.
Notes:
- ISIS: The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Daesh is the Arabic acronym for ISIS. Some commentators use ISIL: The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The group itself began to use IS in 2014.
- Samir Suleiman, Islam, Demokratie und Moderene, Herzogenrath: Shaker Media, 2013, P 302. Tariq Ramadan, Muslimesin in Europa, Marburg: Medienreferat, 2001, p15.
Al-Shabaka Policy Member Belal Shobaki is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Hebron University, Palestine. He is a member of the American Political Studies Association. He has published on Political Islam and identity and is now working on a book on the Palestinian division. Shobaki is the former Editor-in-Chief of Alwaha Newspaper in Malaysia. He was also a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at An-Najah National University and the Head of the studies Unit at the Palestinian Centre for Democracy and Studies.
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