China’s NGO Law: Countering Western Soft Power and Subversion
By Eric Draitser – New Eastern Outlook – 25.07.2015
China has recently taken an important step in more tightly regulating foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) inside the country. Despite condemnation from so called human rights groups in the West, China’s move should be understood as a critical decision to assert sovereignty over its own political space. Naturally, the shrill cries of “repression” and “hostility toward civil society” from western NGOs have done little to shake the resolve of Beijing as the government has recognized the critical importance of cutting off all avenues for political and social destabilization.
The predictable argument, once again being made against China’s Overseas NGO Management Law, is that it is a restriction on freedom of association and expression, and a means of stifling the burgeoning civil society sector in China. The NGO advocates portray this proposed legislation as another example of the violation of human rights in China, and further evidence of Beijing’s lack of commitment to them. They posit that China is moving to further entrench an authoritarian government by closing off the democratic space which has emerged in recent years.
However, amid all the hand-wringing about human rights and democracy, what is conveniently left out of the narrative is the simple fact that foreign NGOs, and domestic ones funded by foreign money, are, to a large extent, agents of foreign interests, and are quite used as soft power weapons for destabilization. And this is no mere conspiracy theory as the documented record of the role of NGOs in recent political unrest in China is voluminous. It would not be a stretch to say that Beijing has finally recognized, just as Russia has before it, that in order to maintain political stability and true sovereignty, it must be able to control the civil society space otherwise manipulated by the US and its allies.
‘Soft Power’ and the Destabilization of China
Joseph Nye famously defined ‘soft power’ as the ability of a country to persuade others and/or manipulate events without force or coercion in order to achieve politically desirable outcomes. And one of the main tools of modern soft power is civil society and the NGOs that dominate it. With financial backing from some of the most powerful individuals and institutions in the world, these NGOs use the cover of “democracy promotion” and human rights to further the agenda of their patrons. And China has been particularly victimized by precisely this sort of strategy.
Human Rights Watch, and the NGO complex at large, has condemned China’s Overseas NGO Management Law because they quite rightly believe that it will severely hamper their efforts to act independently of Beijing. However, contrary to the irreproachable expression of innocence that such organizations masquerade behind, the reality is that they act as a de facto arm of western intelligence agencies and governments, and they have played a central role in the destabilization of China in recent years.
Undoubtedly the most highly publicized example of just such political meddling took place in 2014 with the much hyped “Occupy Central” movement in Hong Kong, also known as the Umbrella Movement. The Western media fed uninformed news consumers story after story about a “pro-democracy” movement seeking to give voice to, as White House spokesman Josh Earnest cynically articulated, “…the aspirations of the Hong Kong people.” But such vacuous rhetoric was only part of the story.
What the corporate media in the West failed to mention were the deeply rooted connections between the Occupy Central movement and key organs of US soft power. The oft touted leader of Occupy Central was a pro-Western academic named Benny Tai, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. Though he presented himself as the leader of a grassroots mass movement, Mr. Tai has for years been partnered with the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a nominal NGO which is actually directly funded by the US State Department via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In fact, the NDI has been one of the leading advocates (and financial backers presumably) of the Center for Comparative and Public Law at the University of Hong Kong, a program with which Benny Tai has been intimately connected, including as a board member since 2006. So, far from being merely an emerging leader, Tai was a carefully selected point person for a US-sponsored color revolution-style movement.
Two other high profile figures involved with Occupy Central were Audrey Eu, founder of the Civic Party in Hong Kong, and Martin Lee, founding chairman of the Democrat Party of Hong Kong. Both Eu and Lee have long-standing ties to the US government through the NED and NDI, with Eu having been a frequent contributor to NDI sponsored panels and programs, and Lee having the glorious distinction of having both been a recipient of awards from NED and NDI, as well as meeting with US Vice President Joe Biden in 2014 along with anti-Beijing advocate Anson Chan.
It does not take exceptional powers of deduction to see that, to varying degrees, Tai, Eu, Lee, and Chan each act as the public face of a US Government-sponsored initiative to destabilize the political situation in Hong Kong, one of China’s most economically and politically important regions. Through the intermediary of the NGO, Washington is able to promote an anti-Beijing line under the auspices of “democracy promotion,” just as it has done everywhere from Ukraine to Venezuela. Luckily for China, the movement was not supported by either the bulk of the working class in Hong Kong and China, or even by many of the middle class who saw it as little more than an inconvenience at best. However, it required swift government action to contain the public relations and media fiasco that could have resulted from the movement, a fact of which Beijing, no doubt, took note.
As a spokesperson for the National People’s Congress explained in April, the NGO law is necessary for “safeguarding national security and maintaining social stability.” Indeed, in late 2014, in the wake of the Occupy Central protests, Chinese President Xi Jinping traveled to Macau and spoke of the need to ensure that Macau walked on the “right path.” In a thinly veiled reference to Hong Kong, Xi praised Macau for continuing to follow the “one country, two systems” policy under which the special administrative regions of Macau and Hong Kong have greater autonomy but are still subject to Chinese law. Essentially, Xi made it quite clear that, despite the foreign NGO-manufactured movement in Hong Kong, Beijing remained firmly in control. And this is precisely the issue: control.
NGOs, Soft Power, and Terror in Xinjiang
The NGO ‘soft power’ weapon is not relegated solely to Hong Kong however. In fact, the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, one of the most volatile regions in the country, has seen active destabilization and subversion by soft power elements consistently over recent years. Home to the majority Muslim Uighur ethnic group, Xinjiang has been repeatedly attacked both with terrorism and vile propaganda that has sought to paint to China as the oppressor and enemy of Uighurs, and Muslims generally.
Xinjiang has been victim to a number of deadly terrorist attacks in recent years, including the heinous drive-by bombings that killed dozens and injured over 100 people in May 2014, the mass stabbings and bombings of November 2014, and the deadly attack by Uighur terrorists on a traffic checkpoint just last month which left 18 people dead. Were such attacks, which claimed the lives of scores of innocent Chinese citizens, to have been carried out against, say, Americans, the western media would be all but declaring holy jihad against the entire world. However, since they’ve happened in China, these are merely isolated incidents that are due to the “marginalization” and “oppression” of the Uighur people by the big bad Chinese authorities.
Such a sickeningly biased narrative is in no small part due to the NGO penetration of the Uighur community and a vast public relations network funded directly by the US Government. The same National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which has disbursed funds to the NDI and other organizations involved in the Hong Kong destabilization of “Occupy Central,” has been a primary funder of the Uighur NGO complex.
The following organizations have each received significant financial support from the NED through the years: World Uighur Congress, Uighur American Association, International Uighur Human rights and Democracy Foundation, and the International Uighur PEN Club, among others. These NGOs are quite often the sources cited by western media for comments on anything related to Xinjiang and are almost always quick to demonize Beijing for all problems in the region, including terrorism.
Perhaps the best example of just such propaganda and dishonesty came in the last few weeks as western media was flooded with stories making the spurious allegation that China had banned the observance of Ramadan in Xinjiang. Indeed, there were literally hundreds of articles condemning China for this “restriction of religious freedom,” portraying the Chinese government as repressive and a violator of human rights. Interestingly, the primary source for the claim was none other than the NED-funded World Uighur Congress.
Moreover, in mid July, on the day of Eid al-Fitr (the final day of Ramadan), the Wall Street Journal ran a story covering the media push-back from China which has sought in recent weeks to publicize the fact that Xinjiang, and all of China, has celebrated openly for Ramadan. And, as one should come to expect, the anti-China source cited is, as usual, a representative of the World Uighur Congress. It seems that this organization, far from being merely a human rights advocate, is in fact a mouthpiece for US propaganda against China. And when the propaganda is challenged and discredited by China, well that just invites new and more blistering propaganda.
The Geopolitical Footprints
All of this demonization has taken on a clear geopolitical and strategic significance as Turkey has stepped into the fray condemning China for its alleged “persecution” of Uighur Muslims, whom Ankara sees as Turks from its neo-Ottoman revanchist perspective. The Turkish Foreign ministry said in a statement that “Our people have been saddened over the news that Uighur Turks have been banned from fasting or carrying out other religious duties in the Xinjiang region… Our deep concern over these reports have been conveyed to China’s ambassador in Ankara.”
China responded to what it deemed to be inappropriate comments from Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, especially in light of Turkey’s absurd characterization of the Uighurs (who are Chinese citizens) as “Turks.” China’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying stated, “China has already demanded that Turkey clarify these reports and we have expressed concern about the statement from the Turkish foreign ministry… You should know that all the people of Xinjiang enjoy the freedom of religious belief accorded to them by the Chinese constitution.”
While the Chinese government, as it almost always does, used decidedly muted language to express its displeasure, the implications of the statement were not lost on keen political observers with some understanding of the China-Turkey relationship. Although the two countries have many aligned interests, as evidenced by Turkey’s repeatedly expressed desire to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the little known fact is that Turkey is one of the major facilitators of terrorism in China.
Though it received almost no fanfare from international media, in January 2015 Chinese authorities arrested at least ten Turkish suspects alleged to have organized and facilitated the illegal border crossings of a number of Uighur extremists. It has further been revealed that these extremists were planning to travel to Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to train and fight with fellow jihadis.
The story is still further evidence of a well-funded, well-organized international terror network operated and/or facilitated by Turkish intelligence. According to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, the ten Turkish citizens were arrested in Shanghai on November 17, 2014 for facilitating illegal immigration. While the formal charges against them range from forging documents to actually aiding illegal migration, it is the larger question of international terrorism that lurks beneath the surface. Because of course, as the evidence seems to indicate, these Uighur immigrants were not merely traveling to see loved ones in another country. On the contrary, they were likely part of a previously documented trend of Uighur extremists traveling to the Middle East to train and fight with the Islamic State or other terror groups.
It is these same extremist networks that carried out the aforementioned deadly bombing in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang. In fact, precisely this trend was exposed two months earlier in September 2014 when Reuters reported that Beijing formally accused militant Uighurs from Xinjiang of having traveled to Islamic State-controlled territory to receive training. Further corroborating these accusations, the Jakarta Post of Indonesia reported that four Chinese Uighur jihadists had been arrested in Indonesia after having travelled from Xinjiang through Malaysia. Other, similar reports have also surfaced in recent months, painting a picture of a concerted campaign to help Uighur extremists travel throughout Asia, communicating and collaborating with transnational terror groups such as the Islamic State.
So, Uighur terrorists with forged documents provided by sources inside Turkey are implicated as being part of the same terror networks that carried out a series of deadly attacks on Chinese citizens and police. No wonder China is not exactly bending over backwards to dry Erdogan’s and the Turkish government’s crocodile tears. And yet, despite the terror war, the US-funded Uighur NGOs continue to portray China as responsible for the terrorism.
The destabilization of China takes many forms. From a manufactured protest movement in Hong Kong sponsored by NGOs connected to the US government, to a fabricated propaganda war peddled by other NGOs sponsored by the US government, to a terror war fomented by a NATO member, China is a nation under assault by soft and hard power. That Beijing is finally taking steps to curb the pernicious influence of such NGOs, and the forces they represent, is not only a positive step, it’s an absolutely necessary one. The national security and national sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China requires nothing less.
These are the U.S. Representatives who voted to ban GMO labeling and deny your right to know what you’re eating
By Julie Wilson | Natural News | July 23, 2015
“We should not raise prices on consumers based on the wishes of a handful of activists,” said Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), who just became consumer enemy number one after he decided to author a bill that destroys any chance Americans have of knowing what’s in their food, specifically whether or not they contain genetically modified ingredients, or GMOs.
What Pompeo isn’t telling you, and in fact is deliberately covering up, is that Americans overwhelmingly support GMO labeling (we’re talking in the 90th percentile); you can view proof of that support here, here and here.
Pompeo, who has likely been paid VERY well by Big Food lobbyists to spearhead this initiative, has made it his mission to make sure that you and your family continue eating foods made from crops that are genetically engineered to withstand high doses of Monsanto’s Roundup, which by the way, its primary ingredient, glyphosate, was labeled as being “probably” carcinogenic to humans by the World Health Organization last spring.
Scientists also concluded that glyphosate is “genotoxic,” meaning that it damages DNA and there’s actually no safe level of exposure.
But Pompeo doesn’t want you to know any of that. In fact, he’s worried that GMO labeling will only confuse you. Are you insulted? Well, you should be.
Named the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 by a bunch of politicians who know next to nothing about GMOs, and the DARK Act (Denying Americans the Right to Know) by passionate food activists and consumer groups who have practically dedicated their lives to bringing awareness about the dangers of GMOs, the legislation that was recently passed in the House Committee prevents all states from enacting their own GMO labeling laws, ever.
It also strips states like Vermont, which already passed GMO labeling, their right from doing so.
Below is a list of politicians actively working to keep you and your family in the dark regarding the dangers of GMOs. Click here for their contact information.
Alabama
Byrne, Bradley (R-AL)
Roby, Martha (R-AL)
Rogers, Mike (R-AL)
Aderholt, Robert (R-AL)
Brooks, Mo (R-AL)
Palmer, Gary (R-AL)
Sewell,Terri (D-AL)
Young, Don (R-AK)
Kirkpatrick, Ann (D-AZ)
McSally, Martha (R-AZ)
Gosar, Paul (R-AZ)
Salmon, Matt (R-AZ)
Schweikert, David (R-AZ)
Sinema, Kyrsten (D-AZ)
Arkansas
Crawford, Eric (R-AR)
Hill, French (R-AR)
Womack, Steve (R-AR)
Westerman, Bruce (R-AR)
California
LaMalfa, Doug (R-CA)
Garamendi, John (D-CA)
McClintock, Tom (R-CA)
Bera, Ami (D-CA)
Cook, Paul (R-CA)
Denham, Jeff (R-CA
Costa, Jim (D-CA)
Valadao, David (R-CA)
Nunes, Devin (R-CA)
McCarthy, Kevin (R-CA)
Knight, Steve (R-CA)
Royce, Ed (R-CA)
Calvert, Ken (R-CA)
Walters, Mimi (R-CA)
Rohrabacher, Dana (R-CA)
Issa, Darrell (R-CA)
Hunter, Duncan (R-CA)
Colorado
Buck, Ken (R-CO)
Tipton, Scott (R-CO)
Lamborn, Doug (R-CO)
Coffman, Mike (R-CO)
Delaware
Carney, John (R-DE)
Florida
Miller, Jeff (R-FL)
Graham, Gwen (D-FL)
Yoho, Ted (R-FL)
Crenshaw, Ander (R-FL)
Brown, Corrine (D-FL)
DeSantis, Ron (R-FL)
Mica, John (R-FL)
Webster, Daniel (R-FL)
Nugent, Richard (R-FL)
Bilirakis, Gus (R-FL)
Jolly, David (R-FL)
Castor, Kathy (D-FL)
Ross, Dennis (R-FL)
Rooney, Thomas (R-FL)
Hastings, Alcee (D-FL)
Diaz-Balart, Mario (R-FL)
Curbelo, Carlos (R-FL)
Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana (R-FL)
Georgia
Carter, Buddy (R-GA)
Bishop, Sanford (D-GA)
Westmoreland, Lynn (R-GA)
Price, Tom (R-GA)
Woodall, Rob (R-GA)
Scott, Austin (R-GA)
Collins, Doug (R-GA)
Hice, Jody (R-GA)
Loudermilk, Barry (R-GA)
Allen, Rick (R-GA)
Scott, David (D-GA)
Graves, Tom (R-GA)
Idaho
Labrador, Raul (R-ID)
Simpson, Mike (R-ID)
Illinois
Kelly, Robin (D-IL)
Lipinski, Daniel (D-IL)
Roskam, Peter (R-IL)
Davis, Danny (D-IL)
Duckworth, Tammy (D-IL)
Dold, Bob (R-IL)
Foster, Bill (D-IL)
Bost, Mike (R-IL)
Davis, Rodney (R-IL)
Hultgren, Randy (R-IL)
Shimkus, John (R-IL)
Kinzinger, Adam (R-IL)
Bustos, Cheri (D-IL)
Indiana
Walorski, Jackie (R-IN)
Stutzman, Marlin (R-IN)
Rokita, Todd (R-IN)
Brooks, Susan (R-IN)
Messer, Luke (R-IN)
Bucshon, Larry (R-IN)
Young, Todd (R-IN)
Iowa
Blum, Rod (R-IA)
Loebsack, David (D-IA)
Young, David (R-IA)
King, Steve (R-IA)
Kansas
Huelskamp, Tim (R-KS)
Jenkins, Lynn (R-KS)
Yoder, Kevin (R-KS)
Pompeo, Mike (R-KS)
Kentucky
Whitfield, Ed (R-KY)
Guthrie, Brett (R-KY)
Rogers, Hal (R-KY)
Barr, Andy (R-KY)
Louisiana
Scalise, Steve (R-LA)
Richmond, Cedric (D-LA)
Boustany, Charles (R-LA)
Fleming, John (R-LA)
Abraham, Ralph (R-LA)
Graves, Garret (R-LA)
Maryland
Harris, Andy (R-MD)
Ruppersberger, A. Dutch (D-MD)
Michigan
Benishek, Dan (R-MI)
Huizenga, Bill (R-MI)
Moolenaar, John (R-MI)
Upton, Fred (R-MI)
Walberg, Tim (R-MI)
Bishop, Mike (R-MI)
Miller, Candice (R-MI)
Trott, Dave (R-MI)
Lawrence, Brenda (D-MI)
Minnesota
Walz, Timothy (D-MN)
Kline, John (R-MN)
Paulsen, Erik (R-MN)
McCollum, Betty (D-MN)
Emmer, Tom (R-MN)
Peterson, Collin (D-MN)
Mississippi
Kelly, Trent (R-MS)
Thompson, Bennie (D-MS)
Harper, Gregg (R-MS)
Palazzo, Steven (R- MS)
Missouri
Clay, Lacy (D-MO)
Wagner, Ann (R-MO)
Luetkemeyer, Blaine (R-MO)
Hartzler, Vicky (R-MO)
Cleaver, Emanuel (D-MO)
Graves, Sam (R-MO)
Long, Billy (R-MO)
Smith, Jason (R-MO)
Montana
Zinke, Ryan (R-MT)
Nebraska
Fortenberry, Jeff (R-NE)
Ashford, Brad (D-NE)
Smith, Adrian (R-NE)
Nevada
Amodei, Mark (R-NV)
Heck, Joseph (R-NV)
Hardy, Cresent (R-NV)
New Hampshire
Guinta, Frank (R-NH)
New Jersey
Norcross, Donald (D-NJ)
LoBiondo, Frank (R-NJ)
MacArthur, Tom (R-NJ)
Garrett, Scott (R-NJ)
Pascrell, Bill (D-NJ)
Frelinghuysen, Rodney (R-NJ)
New Mexico
Pearce, Steve (R-NM)
New York
King, Pete (R-NY)
Donovan, Daniel (R-NY)
Stefanik, Elise (R-NY)
Hanna, Richard (R-NY)
Reed, Tom (R-NY)
Katko, John (R-NY)
Collins, Chris (R-NY)
North Carolina
Butterfield, G.K. (D-NC)
Ellmers, Renee (R-NC)
Jones, Walter (R-NC)
Foxx, Virginia (R-NC)
Walker, Mark (R-NC)
Rouzer, David (R-NC)
Hudson, Richard (R-NC)
Pittenger, Robert (R-NC)
McHenry, Patrick (R-NC)
Meadows, Mark (R-NC)
Adams, Alma (D-NC)
Holding, George (R-NC)
North Dakota
Cramer, Kevin (R-ND)
Ohio
Chabot, Steve (R-OH)
Wenstrup, Brad (R-OH)
Jordan, Jim (R-OH)
Latta, Robert (R-OH)
Johnson, Bill (R-OH)
Gibbs, Bob (R-OH)
Turner, Michael (R-OH)
Fudge, Marcia (D-OH)
Tiberi, Pat (R-OH)
Joyce, David (R-OH)
Stivers, Steve (R-OH)
Renacci, James (R-OH)
Oklahoma
Bridenstine, Jim (R-OK)
Mullin, Markwayne (R-OK)
Lucas, Frank (R-OK)
Cole, Tom (R-OK)
Russell, Steve (R-OK)
Oregon
Walden, Greg (R-OR)
Schrader, Kurt (D-OR)
Pennsylvania
Kelly, Mike (R-PA)
Perry, Scott (R-PA)
Thompson, Glenn (R-PA)
Costello, Ryan (R-PA)
Meehan, Patrick (R-PA)
Fitzpatrick, Michael (R-PA)
Shuster, Bill (R-PA)
Marino, Tom (R-PA)
Barletta, Lou (R-PA)
Rothfus, Keith (R-PA)
Dent, Charles (R-PA)
Pitts, Joseph (R-PA)
Murphy, Tim (R-PA)
South Carolina
Wilson, Joe (R-SC)
Duncan, Jeff (R-SC)
Gowdy, Trey (R-SC)
Mulvaney, Mick (R-SC)
Clyburn, Jim (D-SC)
Rice, Tom (R-SC)
South Dakota
Noem, Kristi (R-SD)
Tennessee
Roe, Phil (R-TN)
Fleischmann, Chuck (R-TN)
DesJarlais, Scott (R-TN)
Cooper, Jim (D-TN)
Black, Diane (R-TN)
Blackburn, Marsha (R-TN)
Fincher, Stephen (R-TN)
Texas
Gohmert, Louie (R-TX)
Poe, Ted (R-TX)
Johnson, Sam (R-TX)
Ratcliffe, John (R-TX)
Hensarling, Jeb (R-TX)
Barton, Joe (R-TX)
Culberson, John (R-TX)
Brady, Kevin (R-TX)
Green, Al (D-TX)
McCaul, Michael (R-TX)
Conaway, Michael (R-TX)
Granger, Kay (R-TX)
Thornberry, Mac (R-TX)
Weber, Randy (R-TX)
Hinojosa, Ruben (D-TX)
Flores, Bill (R-TX)
Jackson Lee, Sheila (D-TX)
Neugebauer, Randy (R-TX)
Smith, Lamar (R-TX)
Olson, Pete (R-TX)
Hurd, Will (R-TX)
Marchant, Kenny (R-TX)
Williams, Roger (R-TX)
Burgess, Michael (R-TX)
Farenthold, Blake (R-TX)
Cuellar, Henry (D-TX)
Green, Gene (D-TX)
Johnson, Eddie (D-TX)
Sessions, Pete (R-TX)
Veasey, Marc (D-TX)
Babin, Brian (R-TX)
Utah
Stewart, Chris (R-UT)
Chaffetz, Jason (R-UT)
Love, Mia (R-UT)
Virginia
Wittman, Robert (R-VA)
Rigell, Scott (R-VA)
Forbes, Randy (R-VA)
Hurt, Robert (R-VA)
Goodlatte, Bob (R-VA)
Brat, Dave (R-VA)
Griffith, Morgan (R-VA)
Comstock, Barbara (R-VA)
Washington
Herrera Beutler, Jaime (R-WA)
Newhouse, Dan (R-WA)
McMorris Rodgers, Cathy (R-WA)
Reichert, David (R-WA)
West Virginia
McKinley, David (R-WV)
Mooney, Alex (R-WV)
Jenkins, Evan (R-WV)
Wisconsin
Ryan, Paul (R-WI)
Sensenbrenner, James (R-WI)
Grothman, Glenn (R-WI)
Duffy, Sean (R-WI)
Ribble, Reid (R-WI)
Wyoming
Lummis, Cynthia (R-WY)
New York Times: Outcry Over Susiya Nothing but Clever PR
By Barbara Erickson | Times Warp | July 24, 2015
Susiya, a West Bank village under threat of demolition, has now made it into the pages of The New York Times news section, and we are permitted a view of how Israel wants us to see this disturbing story: All the fuss about Susiya is little more than the result of clever marketing on the part of the villagers.
Thus we find a story today by Diaa Hadid titled (in the online version) “How a Palestinian Hamlet of 340 Drew Global Attention.” This primes readers from the start to expect a tale of simple villagers who devised a winning media strategy, and it distracts from the real issue, which is nothing less than ethnic cleansing: Susiya is to be destroyed to make way for Jewish settlers.
High in her story Hadid writes, in a telling phrase, that “the cause of [this] tiny village” has become “outsized,” in other words overblown, as if Susiya, with its population of 300 or so, is not worth the fuss.
The village first got notice when “sympathetic” foreigners visited Susiya some 20 years ago and took up its cause, Hadid states. By that time the residents had been forced out of their original homes and were living near the centuries-old site that had belonged to their ancestors.
Jewish settlers had taken over the original village in 1986, she writes, and Israeli forces made them move on again them in 1990 “for unknown reasons.” They were expelled once more in 2001, according to Hadid, “as collective punishment over the shooting death of a Jewish settler.”
Her story omits a crucial detail: The authorities knew that the villagers were innocent of the killing but used the incident as an excuse to harass the Susiya residents once more. The Times account leaves the impression that a Susiya resident was responsible for the settler’s death.
Hadid quotes a staff member of B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, who notes that residents “have managed to place Susiya on the international agenda in ways that other villages have not managed to do,” and her story goes on to say that “years of advocacy appeared to pay off when Susiya’s residents began warning early this month that their village was under threat.”
As a result, the story reports, Susiya received visits from a European Union delegation, Israeli activists and American consular officials. Then, a week ago, the U.S. State Department mentioned Susiya in a press briefing and urged Israel to spare the village.
The Times story suggests that Susiya has received this backing because of its skill in winning attention, and by imposing this angle on the story, the newspaper is attempting to divert readers from the real issues at play: the fact that Israel’s treatment of the villagers is blatantly racist and defies the norms of international and humanitarian law.
Also missing is the context of occupation and dispossession that is crushing Susiya and other villages. Hadid fails to give any sense of this. She writes only that activists have used the village as a symbol of how Israel “has sought to maintain control over large parts of the occupied West Bank.”
We find the word “occupied” here, as usual in Times reporting, but it is devoid of meaning. Readers do not hear that the West Bank is Palestinian territory; that Israel is there as an invading military force; and that the settlements violate international law, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its own population into the foreign territory.
The Times story makes no reference to international law, but it does quote an Israeli military spokesman who says Susiya “was built illegally.” Thus Hadid emphasizes the pretext of legality Israel draws over its defiance of international norms while she ignores the flagrant breaches of the Geneva Convention and other standards.
Readers can pick up some revealing details in the story: the ousted villagers’ descriptions of sleeping outside “in the wild, in the rain,” the fact that they can no longer access two- thirds of their original land because of the settlers, the expectation that if Susiya goes, other vulnerable villages will also fall to Israel’s greed for Palestinian land.
But the story glosses over these details to present the Susiya’s case as above all a successful publicity effort. The Times would have us believe that the real story here is how the village became an “outsized” international cause, through “years of advocacy.”
Susiya is just one of many villages in Israel’s Negev and in the occupied West Bank where Israel is determined to ethnically cleanse certain areas of their indigenous inhabitants and install Jewish residents in their place. Times readers are finally learning about Susiya only because international attention has forced the newspaper to acknowledge the issue.
The village should have been known to readers long before now, just as they should also know of dozens more facing annihilation: Al Araqib, Umm Al Kher and Khirbet Yarza, to name just a few. In the South Hebron Hills alone, where Susiya is located, some 30 villages are faced with demolition.
But even now the Times can’t just tell the story of a village nearly helpless under the weight of Israeli might, a community faced with extinction after centuries of living on the land. Instead we find an effort to play down the tragedy, to present it as an overblown cause, not really worth our concern.
George Clooney Opposes War Profiteering While African
By David Swanson | World Beyond War
George Clooney is being paid by the world’s top two war profiteers, Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, to oppose war profiteering by Africans disloyal to the U.S. government’s agenda.
Way back yonder before World War II, war profiteering was widely frowned on in the United States. Those of us trying to bring back that attitude, and working for barely-funded peace organizations, ought to be thrilled when a wealthy celebrity like George Clooney decides to take on war profiteering, and the corporate media laps it up.
“Real leverage for peace and human rights will come when the people who benefit from war will pay a price for the damage they cause,” said Clooney — without encountering anything like the blowback Donald Trump received when he criticized John McCain.
Really, is that all it takes to give peace a chance, a celebrity? Will the media now cover the matter of who funds opponents of the Iran deal, and who funds supporters of the wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc.?
Well, no, not really.
It turns out Clooney opposes, not war profiteering in general, but war profiteering while African. In fact, Clooney’s concern is limited, at least thus far, to five African nations: Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, though these are not the only nations in Africa or the world with serious wars underway.
Of the top 100 weapons makers in the world, not a single one is based in Africa. Only 1 is in South or Central America. Fifteen are in Western allies and protectorates in Asia (and China is not included in the list). Three are in Israel, one in Ukraine, and 13 in Russia. Sixty-six are in the United States, Western Europe, and Canada. Forty are in the U.S. alone. Seventeen of the top 30 are in the U.S. Six of the top 10 mega-profiteers are in the U.S. The other four in the top 10 are in Western Europe.
Clooney’s new organization, “The Sentry,” is part of The Enough Project, which is part of the Center for American Progress, which is a leading backer of “humanitarian” wars, and various other wars for that matter — and which is funded by the world’s top war profiteer, Lockheed Martin, and by number-two Boeing, among other war profiteers.
According to the Congressional Research Service, in the most recent edition of an annual report that it has now discontinued, 79% of all weapons transfers to poor nations are from the United States. That doesn’t include U.S. weapons in the hands of the U.S. military, which has now moved into nearly every nation in Africa. When drugs flow north the United States focuses on the supply end of the exchange as an excuse for wars. When weapons flow south, George Clooney announces that we’ll stop backward violence at the demand side by exposing African corruption.
The spreading of the U.S. empire through militarism is most often justified by the example of Rwanda as a place where the opportunity for a humanitarian war, to prevent the Rwanda Genocide, was supposedly missed. But the United States backed an invasion of Rwanda in 1990 by a Ugandan army led by U.S.-trained killers, and supported their attacks for three-and-a-half years, applying more pressure through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and USAID. U.S.-backed and U.S.-trained war-maker Paul Kagame — now president of Rwanda — is the leading suspect behind the shooting down of a plane carrying the then-presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on April 6, 1994. As chaos followed, the U.N. might have sent in peacekeepers (not the same thing, be it noted, as dropping bombs) but Washington was opposed. President Bill Clinton wanted Kagame in power, and Kagame has now taken the war into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with U.S. aid and weapons, where 6 million have been killed. And yet nobody ever says “We must prevent another Congo!”
What does George Clooney’s new organization say about the DRC? A very different story from that told by Friends of the Congo. According to Clooney’s group the killing in the Congo happens “despite years of international attention,” not because of it. Clooney’s organization also promotes this argument for more U.S. warmaking in the DRC from Kathryn Bigelow, best known for producing the CIA propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty.
On Sudan as well, there’s no blame for U.S. interference; instead Clooney’s crew has produced a brief for regime change.
On South Sudan, there’s no acknowledgement of U.S. warmongering in Ethiopia and Kenya, but a plea for more U.S. involvement.
The Central African Republic gets the same diagnosis as the others: local ahistorical spontaneous corruption and backwardness leading to war.
Clooney’s co-founder of the Sentry (dictionary definition of “Sentry” is “A guard, especially a soldier posted at a given spot to prevent the passage of unauthorized persons”) is John Prendergast, former Africa director for the National Security Council. Watch Prendergast find himself awkwardly in a debate with an informed person here.
Clooney’s wife, incidentally, works for U.S.-friendly dictators and brutal killers in places like Bahrain and Libya.
More nations could soon be spotted by The Sentry. The President of Nigeria was at the U.S. Institute of “Peace” this week pleading for weapons. U.S. troops are in Cameroon this week training fighters.
If the peace organization I work for had 0.0001% the financial support of The Sentry, perhaps the debate would change. So, one thing you can do is support the right antiwar efforts.
Another is to let The Sentry know what it’s missing. It asks for anonymous tips when you spot war profiteering. Have you ever turned on C-Span? If you see something, say something. Let The Sentry know about the Pentagon.
Revelations in the Maidan Massacre trial in Ukraine go unreported in the west
By Ivan Katchanovski, on Facebook, July 22, 2015
A delayed trial of two Berkut police members in the Maidan Massacre case [1] have produced striking new revelations providing further confirmations of major findings of my Maidan “snipers’ massacre” study about Maidan snipers killing both police and protesters and subsequent cover up and falsification of the official investigation.[2] But these striking revelations have not been reported by the Ukrainian and Western media, even though the trial proceedings were open to the media, were streamed live over the Internet and their recordings were posted on YouTube.
On July 15, 2015, the prosecution made public in court for the first time its charges alleging that two arrested members of the Berkut special company massacred 39 out of 49 killed protesters on February 20, 2014.
However, the prosecution’s case unraveled on July 17 when the brother of one of the victims stated during his questioning by the prosecutors that Andrii Saienko was killed not from Berkut positions but from a top floor of the Maidan-controlled Hotel Ukraina. He made this conclusion on the basis of his brother’s position as shown in a video at the moment of his killing and an entry wound location in upper right chest area and a steep wound channel to the backbone. The prosecutors and relatives of some of the victims reported during the trial that technical expert reports in the investigative file established that Saienko and at least 9 other protesters were killed from the same exact 7.62mm caliber weapon.
This revelation alone means that a significant proportion of the protesters were shot from this Maidan-controlled hotel, since this caliber bullets were extracted from bodies of 16 protesters. But the prosecution charged two Berkut members with their killings, even though Saienko’s brother and his lawyer officially handed to investigators the aforementioned video file in October 2014.
His brother identified the moment when Saienko was killed on Instytutska Street, at 9:08:34am in the video, which was initially filmed from the Hotel Ukraina by Radio Svoboda and then synchronized and time-stamped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IQkB0jZ39k. This video also shows the moment when Bohdan Solchanyk was killed at 9:08:16am, less than 20 seconds before Saienko in the same area, reportedly with a 7.62mm bullet. His apparent position, the blood on the right side of the neck, and louder and different sounds of several shots in rapid succession, compared to the AKMS shots fired by Berkut at the same time, indicate that Solchanyk was most likely shot dead from the Hotel Ukraina. At that time, the Berkut policemen were in front and somewhat to the left from Solchanyk and the other protesters; and a specific shot, which was presented in the video synchronization, made by his acquaintance, as the evidence of his killing by Berkut, was from a 12mm caliber Fort pump rifle.
In the same video, Ihor Zastavnyi is seen in a yellow helmet falling nearby several seconds after Solchanyk was killed. Zastavnyi said in various interviews that he fell to the ground after he was wounded there third time and his leg was severed. He stated that the prosecution informed him earlier this year that they lost a bullet extracted from his body: http://hromadskeradio.org/…/slidchi-prokuraturi-zagubili-ku….
The analysis of the content of the same video and photo compilation indicates that Maksym Shymko was killed in the same area at about the same time, since he was last seen alive at 9:07:15am and by 9:07:46am he was shot and his stick was on the pavement near a wooden shield. Although the exact moment of his killing is missing from the video, his mother in her court testimony confirmed this location and indicated that the investigation found that he was killed from the same weapon as 9 other protesters, including Saienko.
Another bullet, which was stuck in Shymko’s neck and which was publicized as evidence of government snipers, was not of 7.62mm caliber. His mother supported the prosecution charges that Berkut killed her son, but she stated that he was wounded in his neck with an exit wound below his shoulder blade. This indicates a sharp angle, which is consistent with the similar location of the Saienko’s killer and an announcement from the Maidan stage at 9:10am about two or three “snipers” on the pendulum floor of the Hotel Ukraina. This announcement relayed reports of Maidan protesters concerning the killings of Shymko, Solchanyk, and Saienko, since they were a part of the first group of the protesters that came under deadly live ammunition fire. One of the charged Berkut members indicated during the trial that the investigative file contained testimonies of protesters about Maidan “snipers” at the Hotel Ukraina.
The list of the 39 protesters whose killing the prosecution attributed to Berkut was only released nearly one and a half years after the massacre. The killings of the other 10 protesters were simply omitted from the charges, even though 8 of them were shot dead at the same time and place as these 39 protesters. The special Council of Europe investigative panel reported that the Ukrainian investigation had evidence that ten protesters were killed by “snipers” from top of the buildings, but that investigation did not found any evidence that these were snipers from the Security Service of Ukraine Alf unit and other government units. [See here for an April 2015 news report. And here is the 188-page report of the panel, dated March 31, 2015.]
The omitted list confirmed information that the investigation omitted the killings of Oleh Unshnevych, Evhen Kotliar, Ustym Holodniuk and Oleksander Kharchenko because of clear evidence they were killed from the Maidan-controlled locations, such as Hotel Ukraina. In addition, the prosecution charges also omitted the killings of Vasyl Aksenyn, Vladyslav Zubenko, Volodymyr Chaplynsky and Volodymyr Melnychuk. My study presents various evidence that these protesters were also killed from the Maidan-controlled buildings, mostly Hotel Ukraina, starting from about 9:18am till almost 5pm. For instance, the much publicized Zelenyi Front video shows at 10:26am (32:13) that Chaplynsky was shot dead when he was running away from the massacre area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdFHNE8WxOA. A Spline TV recording of its live broadcast, which is now removed from a list of its videos on the Internet, shows sparks flying from the Hotel Ukraina when a loud gunshot killed this protestor. Zubenko was killed in the same area at 9:49am, reportedly with a 5.45 caliber bullet.
The prosecution charges confirmed earlier reports that the investigation did not find specific evidence linking specific Berkut members to specific killed protesters. But these charges also revealed that the prosecution did not specify the exact time of killing of specific protesters and policemen, although such information can be determined from live broadcasts and synchronized and time-stamped videos, and it is presented in my study. These charges deliberately omitted various evidence, including videos, interviews, and public admissions, of Maidan “shooters” of the police.
The prosecution case for the first time de facto admitted an absence of a specific top government order to massacre the protesters on February 20. The prosecution stated that after an unspecified escalation of the conflict around 8am on February 20, the Berkut commander himself ordered the commander of the special Berkut company to disperse the protesters on the Maidan and block them from advancing to the parliament and presidential administration. It would have been irrational for the Berkut commander to issue such an order on his own and use only about two dozen members of a special company. The prosecution itself stated that then-president Viktor Yanukovych and the Minister of Internal Affairs ordered to disperse the protesters on the Maidan by force close to midnight on February 18. The attempt to storm the parliament on February 18 was presented by the prosecution as a peaceful rally, and subsequent clashes, the killing of some 30 policemen and protesters and a computer technician at the office of the Party of Regions were omitted.
The charges stated that following the Berkut commander order, the Berkut special company commander ordered the use of AKMs and Fort 500 pump guns with lead pellets, although no evidence was presented as to why this elite police unit would start using hunting ammunition. Contrary to the prosecutor charges account, various evidence cited in my study and later confirmed by BBC and other sources show that the Maidan protesters forced Berkut and Internal troop units, which did not have then live ammunition, to flee from the Maidan around 8:50am by killing and wounding about 20 of them, specifically with pellets and 7.62mm bullets, from the Music Conservatory and Trade Union buildings. The Berkut special company was first filmed being deployed and shooting with live ammunition on Instytutska street at 9:05am and then briefly moving to Zhovtnevyi Palace to allow remaining policemen there to flee.
The prosecution claimed that around 9am on February 20, 2014, unidentified persons of unknown allegiance started to shoot at the police and that they killed from an unknown weapon one member of the Berkut special company and wounded another. In response to this, the accused from the Berkut company and unidentified members of this company and other law enforcement units became hostile to protesters and started to shoot in the direction of the unarmed protesters with AKMS and Fort 500 with lead pellets in order to kill them. This timeline is also deliberately misleading, because recordings of live broadcasts, time-stamped and synchronized videos, cited in my study, show that at least five protesters were killed starting at exactly 9:00 am before the member of the special Berkut company was shot dead with pellets at 9:16am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYjEp1C4hzI.
The prosecution charged two Berkut members with being a part of an organized group that killed 39 protesters with 7.62mm caliber AKMS during the assault of the Maidan and from two barricades on Instytutska Street from 9am till 1pm. During the testimonies and cross-examination of relatives of six killed protesters, only one single direct witness of the killing of one of these protesters (Eduard Hrynevych) was identified. This witness now happens to serve in a paramilitary unit of the Right Sector, which was involved in the massacre. My study cited videos of protesters referring at 10:25am to the killing of Hrynevych by a shot to his head several meters from them and referring to “snipers” on the pendulum floor of the Hotel Ukraina: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUingq7eyI. This and other videos show many protesters and journalists witnessing and recording shooting of these protesters.
Remarkably, a recently posted video, which shows “snipers” on the top floors of the Hotel Ukraina shooting at the Maidan protesters was referred to during the trial as evidence of the killing of Ihor Kostenko by Berkut. This video shows Kostenko seconds before and after (0:59) when he was shot at 9:29am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVXLbkJsX0. At least seven other protesters were killed within less than three minutes in the same area.
My study presents various evidence, such as videos and eyewitness testimonies, indicating that these and almost all other 39 protesters were also killed from the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings, and that the Right Sector, Svoboda, and Fatherland parties were involved in the “snipers” massacre. There are a few protesters whose location and time of the killing are still publicly undisclosed.
A Google News search shows that none of these revelations during the Maidan Massacre trial have been reported by the media in Ukraine and the West. In contrast, there were numerous reports in the Ukrainian media about each of these protesters. Similarly, The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Associated Press previously published articles, respectively, about the killings of Solchanyk and Saienko and wounding of Zastavnyi. The ‘Maidan’ documentary film by Sergei Loznitsa, shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year, included the above-mentioned excerpts of the Radio Svoboda live Internet video stream showing the killings of Shymko, Solchanyk, and Saienko. In media reports and in this documentary, these and other killings of the protesters were typically directly or indirectly attributed to Berkut or government snipers.
In contrast, the Maidan stage announcements concerning the “snipers” at the Hotel Ukraina and other various evidence of the concealed Maidan shooters there and in other Maidan-controlled areas were omitted. The failure to report the striking new revelations from the ongoing trial suggests that the misrepresentation in Ukraine and the West of the Maidan mass killing is driven not by lack of information but by politics.
Notes:
[1] The two Berkut policemen currently on trial were arrested last year. Three other policemen were arrested on similar charges this year but their trial has not yet started.
[2] See: The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine (revised and updated version), by Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D, published on Academia.edu, Feb. 20, 2015.
Read also:
Investigation of Snipers Massacre on Maidan Square: Interview in Danish newspaper with Ivan Katchanovski, June 19, 2015
View:
BBC reports on neo-Nazi rally in Kyiv on July 21. Its reporter fails to mention their role in the Sniper Massacre in Kyiv on February 20, 2014 and the Odessa Massacre (May 2, 2014). BBC News, ten minute video, July 22, 2015
Deputy Lied About Drugs to Illegally Obtain Warrant Leading to Raid that Blew Apart Baby’s Face
By Matt Agorist | The Free Thought Project | July 22, 2015
Habersham County, GA — In May of last year, Bounkham “Baby Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, 19-months-old, was asleep in his crib. At 3:00 am militarized police barged into his family’s home because the sheriff’s department claimed that an informant had purchased $50 worth of meth from someone who once lived there. During the raid, a flash-bang grenade was thrown into the sleeping baby’s crib, exploding in his face.
Baby Bou sustained severe injuries and may have possible brain damage.
Prior to obtaining the warrant, Nikki Autry, a Habersham County sheriff’s deputy and a special agent with the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team, claimed a confidential informant “was able to purchase a quantity of methamphetamine from Wanis Thonetheva at Thonetheva’s residence,” which she identified as the house where the Phonesavanhs were staying.
Autry claimed that she “confirmed that there are several individuals outside of the residence standing ‘guard.’”
However, it has come to light that these were lies. The informant never purchased meth at the residence, and there were never armed guards out front.
In a press release on Wednesday, the US Attorney’s Office stated that Autry has been indicted for her insidious role in the horrifying raid.
According to the report, Autry has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of providing false information in a search warrant affidavit and providing the same false information to obtain an arrest warrant. Providing false evidence to a judge to obtain a warrant is a federal civil rights violation.
“Our criminal justice system depends upon our police officers’ sworn duty to present facts truthfully and accurately—there is no arrest that is worth selling out the integrity of our law enforcement officers,” said Acting U.S. Attorney John Horn.
“In this case, Autry is charged with making false statements to a judge in order to obtain search and arrest warrants. Without her false statements, there was no probable cause to search the premises for drugs or to make the arrest. And in this case, the consequences of the unlawful search were tragic,” Horn continued.
According to the report:
The federal indictment alleges that Autry knew the NCIS informant had not purchased any methamphetamine from anyone at the residence and the NCIS informant had not proven himself to be reliable in the past. Additionally, the indictment alleges that Autry had not confirmed that there was heavy traffic in and out of the residence. Based on this false information, the magistrate judge issued a “no-knock” search warrant for the residence and an arrest warrant for W. T., who allegedly sold the methamphetamine. The warrant obtained by Autry was executed approximately two hours later, during the early morning hours of May 28, 2014.
What made this woman lie about drugs being at this residence is unknown. What kind of vile person would make up fake information to send officers barging into a family’s home in the middle of the night?
Despite the fact that Habersham county jurors in the local case found the warrant to have been obtained in a “hurried and sloppy” manner, lawyers for the sheriff and the other officers denied that “false and misleading information was used in the search warrant application.” This is also in spite of the fact that no drugs were found during the raid.
No one was charged by the local grand jury, but, fortunately, federal prosecutors launched their own investigation in October.
It is bad enough that a baby had his face blown apart by cops attempting to stop someone from selling an arbitrary substance to willing customers. However, seeing that a federal grand jury indicted one of the deputies for falsely obtaining the warrant in the first place, makes the raid nothing more than an armed home invasion, in which thugs in militarized attire terrorized a family and attacked a baby.
Obama regime moves to block release of Guantanamo force feeding tapes
Reprieve | July 23, 2015
The Obama administration last night asked a federal judge to reconsider her order to release the Guantánamo force-feeding tapes.
In the ongoing First Amendment battle by 16 press organizations seeking to publish the video tapes of former detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab being force-fed, Judge Gladys Kessler issued an order on July 10th that the government complete key redactions and prepare the tapes for release by September 30th.
Last night, however, the Obama administration filed a motion for reconsideration of that order with Judge Kessler. Justice Department lawyers claim in their filing that releasing the footage will aid extremist groups and say the press have no First Amendment right to the evidence.
The tapes were first filed to court as classified evidence in a legal challenge to prison conditions at Guantanamo Bay, Dhiab v Obama. 16 press organizations, including Associated Press, the Washington Post and the New York Times, intervened seeking the videos’ release to the public on press freedom grounds. Judge Kessler ordered them to be released; the Obama administration then appealed in what Judge Kessler called “as frivolous an appeal as I’ve seen.’
Meanwhile, the military nurse who objected to brutal force-feeding at Gitmo is today being presented with the Year of Ethics award by the American Nurses Association (ANA). The nurse, who has chosen to remain anonymous, previously faced dismissal from the military after he refused to force-feed detainees because of the suffering it was causing men held without charge or trial at the prison.
Commenting, Reprieve director and attorney for Abu Wa’el Dhiab, Cori Crider, said: “Judge Kessler said the Obama administration’s initial appeal was as ‘frivolous’ as she’d ever seen – well, the government decided to top that with another frivolous request for a do-over. Yet it has put no fresh evidence before the Court that would justify censoring the force-feeding tapes. Once again, the government’s argument boils down to the same old tripe: if people see the truth about Gitmo today, the ‘terrorists’ will win. We don’t deny the footage is upsetting stuff – some of it deeply so – but that’s precisely why it should be released. Americans deserve to see what is being done in their name. Releasing crucial parts of this footage will provide yet more reason the President should fulfil his promise to shut Gitmo down.”
Wrong on the Facts, Wrong on the Law: Israeli’s False Claims of “Self-Defense” in Gaza War
By James Marc Leas | CounterPunch | July 23, 2015
Although the facts, the law, and admissions by Israeli government officials all pointed otherwise, during the July-August 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza, the Israeli government was successful in promoting its self-defense claim with western news media and in persuading certain U.S. politicians that Israel was implementing its right to defend itself.
Claims of “self-defense” against Hamas rocket fire were invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and the United States Senate, and not only as justification for the Israeli assault. “Self-defense” against the rockets also served to deflect allegations that Israeli forces committed war crimes by targeting civilians and civilian property in Gaza.
Public relations campaigns based on self-defense have been critical to Israeli officials avoiding accountability after each of the six major assaults on Gaza since Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza in 2005. Notwithstanding the reports of war crimes committed by Israeli forces, the remarkable success of those self-defense based public relations campaigns continued to provide Israeli officials with impunity: the freedom to strike militarily again.
That impunity may come to an end if the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) decides to open an investigation into the situation in Palestine and prosecutions follow. However, immediately after the Prosecutor announced that she was launching a “preliminary examination” on January 16, 2015, Netanyahu launched a multi-pronged “public diplomacy campaign to discredit the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) recent decision to start an inquiry into what the Palestinians call Israeli ‘war crimes’ in the disputed territories.” The public diplomacy campaign is based entirely on Israel’s claim that it acted in self-defense. The Israeli campaign also included a threat to disregard the decision of the court, a threat to the funding of the court, and the announcement that Israel was freezing transfer of more than $100 million a month in taxes Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority in retaliation for the State of Palestine joining the ICC and requesting the ICC inquiry.
A new 63 page report, “Neither facts nor law support Israel’s self-defense claim regarding its 2014 assault on Gaza,” submitted to the ICC Prosecutor on behalf of the Palestine Subcommittee of the National Lawyers Guild (“the ICC submission”), uses both authoritative contemporaneous Israeli and Palestinian reports and newly released reports and documents to demonstrate that Israeli claims of “self-defense” for its 2014 attack on Gaza are unsupported in both fact and law. The ICC submission notes that the unusual strategy implemented by Israeli officials to publically discredit the court inquiry demonstrated a distinct departure from the traditional method of respectfully presenting evidence and persuasive arguments to the court.
The facts don’t fit Israel’s self-defense claim
Among the material considered in the ICC submission is the 277 page Israeli government report, “The 2014 Gaza Conflict: Factual and Legal Aspects” that was released by the Israeli government on June 14, 2015. Although the Israeli government report builds its case around self-defense, to its credit, the Israeli government report openly acknowledges that Israeli military forces (a) had been striking Gaza during 2013 and early 2014, (b) had launched a massive attack on the West Bank in mid-June 2014, and (c) had launched an aerial strike on a tunnel in Gaza on July 5, 2014. However, the Israeli government report omits mention that all these dates were before the night of July 7, 2014, the date a contemporaneous report from an authoritative Israeli source said “For the first time since Operation Pillar of Defense [November 21, 2012], Hamas participated in and claimed responsibility for rocket fire” (emphasis in the original). The contemporaneous report was issued by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), a private Israeli think tank that the Washington Post says “has close ties with the country’s military leadership.”
While the Israeli government report acknowledged the aerial strike on the tunnel in Gaza, it omitted mention of the extent of Israeli attacks on Gaza during the night before Hamas participated and claimed responsibility for its first rocket fire since 2012: The contemporaneous ITIC July 2 – July 8, 2014 weekly report states that on July 7 “approximately 50 terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip were struck,” by Israeli forces, including strikes that killed six Hamas members in the tunnel.
The Israeli government report states:
On July 7, 2014, after more than 60 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip on a single day, the Government of Israel was left with no choice but to initiate a concerted aerial operation against Hamas and other terrorist organisations in order adequately to defend Israel’s civilian population.
Thus, the Israeli government report claims that the government was acting to defend Israel’s civilian population notwithstanding the fact that it had just admitted to an Israeli government attack that preceded the Hamas rocket fire on July 7. The attack on the tunnel that the ITIC reported killed the six Hamas members.
In a minute by minute timeline of events that day, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz reported the Israeli attacks that began during the night of July 6 and continued in the early morning hours of July 7 that showed that the Israeli attack on the tunnel preceded the Hamas rockets:
at 2:24 a.m. on July 7:
Hamas reports an additional four militants died in a second Israeli air strike in Gaza, bringing Sunday night’s death total to six. This is the biggest single Israeli hit against Hamas since 2012’s Operation Pillar of Defense.
at 9:37 p.m. on July 7 Ha’aretz reported:
Hamas claims responsibility for the rockets fired at Ashdod, Ofakim, Ashkelon and Netivot. Some 20 rockets exploded in open areas in the last hour.
Thus, an authoritative contemporaneous Israeli report acknowledged the fact that Hamas started firing its rockets some 20 hours after Israeli forces launched the attack on Gaza and killed the six Hamas members.
The Israeli government report couches the more than 60 rockets launched at Israel on the night of July 7 as giving the government of Israel no choice but to escalate aerial operations. But the report fails to mention that Israel actually had a choice as to whether or not to launch its prior lethal attack on the night of July 6 and the early morning hours of July 7. By omitting mention of the timing and the lethal effects of its attack on the tunnel, the Israeli government report avoids recognizing that its killing of the six Hamas members provoked the Hamas rocket fire.
While the Israeli government report mentions strikes on Gaza during 2013 and 2014, it omits mention of the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks during 2013 and the increased rate of such killing during the first three months of 2014.
According to a report issued by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, “PCHR Annual Report 2013:”
The number of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli forces was 46 victims in circumstances where no threats were posed to the lives of Israeli soldiers. Five of these victims died of wounds they had sustained in previous years. Of the total number of victims, there were 41 civilians, 33 of whom were in the West Bank and eight in the Gaza Strip, including six children, two women; and five non-civilians, including one in the West Bank and the other four in the Gaza Strip. In 2013, 496 Palestinians sustained various wounds, 430 of them in the West Bank and 66 in the Gaza Strip, including 142 children and 10 women.
An escalation of Israeli violence against Palestinians in early 2014 compared to the rate for the entire year 2013 is evident from PCHR’s “Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 1st Quarter of 2014.”Among the violations presented in the report, 20 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces during the first three months of 2014, including 11 civilians of whom two were children; 259 were wounded, of whom 255 were civilians, including 53 children. “The majority of these Palestinians, 198, were wounded during peaceful protests and clashes with Israeli forces.”
Nor does the Israeli government report mention any of the lethal Israeli government attacks on the West Bank and Gaza in the days and weeks before three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed on the West Bank on June 12, 2014:
* Israeli forces shot 9 teenagers demonstrating on the West Bank on May 15, killing two.
* Israeli forces wounded nine Palestinian civilians, including a child during the week of June 5 to June 11.
* Israeli forces launched an extrajudicial execution on June 11 in Gaza that killed one and wounded three.
Nor does the Israeli government report describe the extent of casualties inflicted by the June 13 to June 30 military offensive on the West Bank, Operation Brothers Keeper, in which Israeli forces killed 11 Palestinians and wounded 51, according to the contemporaneous weekly reports issued by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
In addition, the Israeli government’s 277 page report omits mention of admissions by Prime Minister Netanyahu of other military and political purposes for its assault on the West Bank, described in a contemporaneous report in the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, on June 15, 2014: to capture Hamas members (some of whom the Israeli government had previously released in a prisoner exchange and some of whom were Parliamentarians in the new Palestinian unity government), create “severe repercussions,” and punish the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for forming a unity government. Importantly, although he accused “Hamas people” of carrying out the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers, Netanyahu made no mention of stopping rocket fire. The non-mention of rocket fire by Netanyahu is consistent with the ITIC report of no rocket fire at that time.
Similarly, after describing the Israeli operations that caused Hamas to pay a “heavy price” on the West Bank, as shown in a video of his speech at the US Ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv on July 4, Netanyahu acknowledged that “in Gaza we hit dozens of Hamas activists and destroyed outposts and facilities that served Hamas terrorists.” Thus Netanyahu himself acknowledged major Israeli military operations in Gaza preceding the launching of Hamas rockets on July 7.
Media collaboration
Facilitating the Israeli and U.S. government campaign to pin responsibility on Hamas and support an Israeli self-defense claim, certain western news media, including the New York Times, published an incorrect timeline. The timeline published by the New York Times dated the start of the war to July 8, the first full day of Hamas rocket barrages, and more than a day after Israeli forces had escalated their aerial attack on Gaza killing the six Hamas members. The Times timeline simply omits mention of the lethal Israeli attacks on the night of July 6 and early morning hours on July 7 that Ha’aretz said preceded the Hamas barrage of rockets on the night of July 7. The New York Times timeline also omits mention of the 24 days of “Operation Bring Back Our Brothers,” that began on June 13, the June 11 extra-judicial execution of a Hamas member in Gaza, the June 13 attack on the “terrorist facility and a weapons storehouse in the southern Gaza Strip,” and the killing of the two Palestinian teenagers and wounding of seven other Palestinians who were demonstrating on May 15. The New York Times timeline also omits mention of the lethal Israeli attacks in 2013 and the escalation of those attacks in early 2014 that the Israeli government report admitted under the euphemism “targeted efforts to prevent future attacks.”
The law doesn’t fit Israel’s self-defense claim
Not just facts and admissions stand in the way of Israel’s self-defense claim. In a 2004 decision rejecting Israel’s self-defense claim for the wall, a relatively passive structure crossing occupied Palestinian territory, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held that, under the UN Charter, self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter is inapplicable to measures taken by an occupying power within occupied territory. While the ICJ recognized Israel’s right and its duty to protect its citizens, it said “The measures taken are bound nonetheless to remain in conformity with applicable international law.” While the Israeli government report includes mention of a law review article that relies on an ICJ holding favorable to an Israeli position on another issue, the Israeli government report omits mention of the directly on point ICJ case regarding applicability of self-defense to Israel as occupying power in Gaza.
But even if Israel could overcome the facts showing that Israeli forces initiated the combat, and even if Israel was not the occupying power in Gaza and did not have to address the law regarding self-defense for an occupying power presented in the ICJ decision, Israel’s claim to self-defense would still be invalidated if its assault extended beyond what was necessary and proportionate to deal with an armed attack it was purportedly facing, as more fully described in the ICC submission.
Necessity was contradicted by the data provided by the ITIC showing that Israel had been wildly successful at stopping and/or preventing rocket fire by agreeing to and at least partially observing a ceasefire, while Israel consistently dialed up rocket fire with each of its major assaults on Gaza since 2006. By contrast, as shown in the ICC submission, hundreds of times more rockets were falling on Israel during each day of each of the major assaults on Gaza than were falling in the periods before Israeli forces attacked or after the assault ended with a new ceasefire.
Necessity was also contradicted by an article in the May 2013 Jerusalem Post, “IDF source: Hamas working to stop Gaza rockets,” quoting the IDF General who commands the army’s Gaza Division who said that Hamas had been policing other groups in Gaza “to thwart rocket attacks from the strip.” The Hamas observance of the ceasefire and its policing of other groups to prevent rocket fire demonstrated an effective alternative to an Israeli assault. The Israeli attacks on the West Bank and Gaza during the period between June 13 and the early morning hours of July 7, 2014 put that ceasefire and that Hamas policing of other groups at risk. Israel could have more effectively protected its citizens from rocket fire by continuing to at least partially observe the successful cease-fire in place before Israel escalated its assaults on the West Bank and Gaza. So the necessity for the escalation on June 13 and the further escalation on July 7 to protect Israeli citizens from rocket fire has not been shown.
The necessity and proportionality requirements for a self-defense claim were also contradicted by evidence that actions by Israeli forces during the assault on Gaza went outside the laws of war by directly targeting Palestinian civilians and Palestinian civilian property. The proportionality requirement was further contradicted by evidence of widespread Israeli attacks that harmed civilians or civilian property disproportionate to the military advantage Israeli forces received from the attacks. The evidence for such war crimes cited in the ICC submission comes from reports of investigations conducted by the UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry (June 22, 2015); the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Lawyers for Palestinian for Human Rights (LPHR), and Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) (June 26, 2015); the UN Human Rights Council (December 26, 2014); Defense for Children International Palestine (April 2015); Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) (January 20, 2015); Al-Haq (August 19, 2014); the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) (September 4, 2014); Breaking the Silence (May 3, 2015); The Guardian (May 4, 2015); The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) (March 27, 2015), and contemporaneous and periodic reports issued by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
Along with support from top U.S. officials, the enormously successful public relations campaigns based on claimed self-defense that Israeli officials mounted during and after each of the Israeli assaults on Gaza allowed Israel to avoid accountability, maintain impunity, and launch subsequent attacks. In view of that successful record, the effectiveness of Israel’s “public diplomacy campaign to discredit the ICC inquiry” based on the same self-defense claims should not be underestimated. Widespread recognition that Israel’s self-defense claim is deeply flawed is needed to counter the intense pressure Israeli officials and their allies are exerting on the ICC so the court may resist that pressure and base its decisions strictly on the facts and law.
James Marc Leas is a patent attorney and a past co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Palestine Subcommittee. He collected evidence in Gaza immediately after Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 as part of a 20 member delegation from the U.S. and Europe and authored or co-authored four articles for Counterpunch describing findings, including Why the Self-Defense Doctrine Doesn’t Legitimize Israel’s Assault on Gaza. He also participated in the February 2009 National Lawyers Guild delegation to Gaza immediately after Operation Cast Lead and contributed to its report, “Onslaught: Israel’s Attack on Gaza and the Rule of Law.”
Gays who swallow unverified anti-Iran propaganda will be partly responsible if Iran is turned into another Iraq
Uprooted Palestinians | July 23, 2015
Gay hanging in Iran: Atrocities and impersonations
By Scot Long
Everybody on earth knows that last week a deal on Iran’s nuclear program was announced. Everybody also knows that this apparent step toward peace launched a new stage in an old war: of propaganda. Proponents praise the possibility of a historic opening. Opponents — who include Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Republican Party — warn of disaster. Both sides want to expand their constituencies. In Western countries, gay communities — small but politically influential — are more and more the target for just this courtship and recruitment.
The right-wing pundit Amir Taheri greeted the nuclear deal with a storm of tweets and screeds condemning it. One 140-character charge drew special attention.
Anyone’s first reaction would be some version of “My God.” It sounded horrible. I wrote to Taheri asking for more information — and so, judging from Twitter, did at least three other people.
But the story quickly began to show cracks. Taheri didn’t reply to me, or anybody. I sat down that night with a Farsi-speaking friend and began searching for the story in the Iranian press: under the youth’s name, under various other key words. It didn’t turn up anywhere. I wrote to the Toronto-based Iranian Queer Organization (IRQO), a diaspora-based group of LGBT Iranian activists with which I’ve worked closely over the years. They searched the media as well and found no sign of it. They also reached out to contacts in Isfahan. On Friday morning, they told me no one there had heard of the story, either.
Amir Taheri lies a lot. Eight years ago, Jonathan Schwartz called him “one of the strangest ingredients in America’s media soup,” adding, “There may not be anyone else who simply makes things up as regularly as he does, with so few consequences.” An arch-conservative protege of the Pahlavis, an editor of the Tehran daily Kayhan under the Shah, he repeatedly fabricates stories about Iran to please right-wingers in his adoptive West. Most famously, in 2006 he claimed in Canada’s National Post that a new dress-code law in Iran would impose special clothes on religious minorities, including yellow badges for Jews. Many conservatives swallowed the story; even the Canadian Prime Minister repeated it. But it was a complete falsehood, and after a huge furor the National Post retracted it and apologized: “It is now clear the story is not true. … We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused.” (The Post also noted that Taheri went “unreachable” after his fiction was exposed, rather as he did on Twitter.) Undeterred, in 2008 Taheri concocted a quote from Ayatollah Khomeini, complete with a fake citation of an invented source; American neoconservative luminaries duly repeated it. In 2002, Taheri claimed that “Osama bin Laden is dead …. the fugitive died in December and was buried in the mountains of southeast Afghanistan.” The list of his duplicities goes on and on. In 1989, an academic reviewing one of Taheri’s books
detailed case after case in which Taheri cited nonexistent sources, concocted nonexistent substance in cases where the sources existed and distorted the substance beyond recognition when it was present. … [The reviewer] concluded that Nest of Spies was “the sort of book that gives contemporary history a bad name.”
Larry Cohler-Esses condemns Taheri as a “journalistic felon,” part of a “media machine intent on priming the public for war with Iran.”
There are ample grounds for skepticism about stories Taheri spreads.
But skepticism doesn’t make headlines. Propaganda’s best friend is the ambition of the press. On Thursday, a reporter for the UK-based Gay Star News also tweeted to Taheri.
Taheri didn’t answer him, either. I know this because the reporter didn’t wait for a source. About 25 minutes later, his story — “GAY TEEN, 14, ‘HANGED FROM TREE’” — topped the website of Gay Star News, and it said Taheri hadn’t told them anything. In other words, their entire account was based on one single tweet with no evidence behind it. This tweet was special, though. The topic of gay killings in Iran has shown its passionate drawing power over a decade, its ability to keep queers clicking. GSN wanted the clicks for itself.
The reporter clearly never asked Iranian LGBT activists or groups for their take. It was more important to get the headline out there. I wrote to Tris Reid-Smith, GSN’s editor, and asked “Is this standard practice — to run a story based on a single, unsourced, unconfirmed tweet from someone who declines to answer follow-up questions?” Tris rather cannily refused to reply in writing; he wanted to talk by phone. My phone in Cairo is tapped; I declined. I wanted this on the record, but not State Security’s record. If Tris still wants to answer my question, he is welcome to do so here. GSN has since added a few sentences to its story, saying:
we should note Iranian LGBTI networks have not confirmed the story. Some critics have questioned Taheri’s reliability. … UPDATE: For clarity, GSN has noted from the outset this report has not been independently verified. Taheri is yet to reply to our questions seeking to substantiate his claims. We urge caution but feel it is in the public interest to report the claims, given they are gaining traction on social media.
Let that final sentence revolve in your mind. What defines news these days isn’t truth. It’s traffic. (I’ve saved a screenshot of GSN’s original article, prior to the caution-urging, here.)
And of course the story spread. Neoconservative propagandist Ben Weinthal tweeted it manifold times:
Weinthal is a lobbyist for the right-wing, pro-Israel Foundation for Defense of Democracies. One of his jobs is to drum up support in gay communities for hardline policies against Iran. I’ve detailed some of his many misrepresentations here. His desperate drive to ensure Taheri’s tweet gets coverage suggests what the motives at work are.
No one should ever minimize the real, documented, and terrible human rights abuses in Iran. But credulity for suspicious stories devalues the true ones. Given Taheri’s record, and the tangled political context, there is no reason to credit this tale without corroboration.
And here’s the thing: we’ve been through this before, and learned nothing. Look at the photo GSN attached to its article.
That famous image, exactly ten years old, reverberates with misery and horror. And cynics and opportunists know it as proven clickbait. In fact, the two youths were not executed simply for “being gay.” They were convicted of the rape, at knifepoint, of a 13-year-old boy. Claims that they were gay lovers circulated widely among Western activists; but no clear evidence materialized to confirm them.
International tension shaped the context, then as now. In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected President of Iran. The religious hardliner’s victory intensified foreign fears of Iran’s nuclear plans; Ahmadinejad moved quickly to quash negotiations with European powers and smear reformists as appeasers. Western conservatives stoked those fears, and rumors roiled. Immediately after the vote, a website affiliated with the Mujahedin e Khalq claimed Ahmadinejad had participated in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran. The Mujahedin is a wealthy, cult-like Iranian exile group widely despised in the diaspora, but closely tied to many Western politicians. Amir Taheri leapt in; he alleged in print that that Javad Zarif — then Iran’s UN ambassador, now its foreign minister — had joined the hostage-taking. (Another fabrication: Zarif was studying in the US at the time.) That summer, a charged, familiar storm-cloud of fact, anxiety, and speculation swirled round the subject of Iran.
On July 19, 2005, the two teenagers were hanged in Mashhad. Reports in the local and national Iranian media said clearly they had been tried for tajavoz (rape) or lavat beh onf (“sodomy by force,” or male rape); the Quds newspaper in Mashhad quoted both the 13-year-old victim and his father. Another website of the Mujahedin e Khalq, however, published a piece on the execution aimed at Western audiences, and omitted the rape charge. Almost certainly the Mujahedin pointed out the story to lone-ranger UK activist Peter Tatchell — who had a record of publicity-seeking animosity to Iran and political Islam — and proposed the “gay” angle. On July 21, Tatchell’s OutRage website blared, “IRAN EXECUTES GAY TEENAGERS,” above the pictures taken from the Iranian press. Tatchell claimed, falsely, that Iranian media had not mentioned the rape, and that the pair were originally charged with consensual sex: setting in motion a stream of fictions that didn’t stop for months.
With panic over Iran already in the air, the photos went vastly viral. If politics motivated some to promote the story, for others it was publicity. (Doug Ireland, a gay US writer with no prior knowledge of Iran who nonetheless rode the story to a new journalistic job, told me his blog got 60,000 hits the first day he carried the pictures.) As more facts came out and the tale seemed less plausible, its proponents got aggressive: not only with doubters, but with the protagonists. Tatchell, for instance, belittled the alleged rape and suggested the victim wanted it: “It could be the 13-year-old was a willing participant.” Meanwhile, the story’s popularity led to a desperate search for sequels, for new “gay victims,” that stretched for years. Virtually any execution for rape reported in the Iranian media — even of male rapists of women — could be arrogated or mistranslated as a punishment for consensual gay sex. In a grim and grotesque irony, the quest helped produce the dead. In 2007, Tatchell intervened in the last-ditch appeal of an Iranian prisoner on death row, also for the rape of a 13-year-old. Makwan Mouloudzadeh had been framed in a village vendetta; there was no real evidence he’d had sexual relations with the child, much less any other male. Instead of maintaining Makwan’s innocence, though, Tatchell falsely alleged the child was Makwan’s “partner.” Allies of Tatchell started a letter-writing campaign to Ahmadeinjad pleading for the “young homosexual Makvan,” arguing explicitly that he was “‘guilty’ of having loved a peer when he was 13 and having sexual intercourse with him.” They incriminated the man they were trying to save. Makwan, neither homosexual nor a rapist, was hanged.
The Mashhad story survives, immune to its malign consequences. Taheri certainly knows it — he surely suspected a 14-year-old victim would make his tweet go viral. The youths’ images are memed and manipulated everywhere. Sometimes the uses are political:
Sometimes they’re mythological figures, as if the kitsch of Shi’ite religious iconography melded with the preoccupations of San Francisco.
But they remain, always, “the sacred gay martyrs of Iran.”
An hour or two after the Gay Star News story appeared, Tatchell seized the opportunity, announcing a “vigil” to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the youth’s deaths.
“On 19 July, we stand for life, liberty and love,” Tatchell said at the demo. But think what that rhetoric obliterates. If their 13-year-old victim’s story was true, what would he say about those words? Most human rights activists know that you can oppose grave abuses, like the appalling execution of children, without spinning narratives of absolute innocence or “love.” But to do that requires abjuring sentimentality, and acquiring maturity.
A deep narcissism lies pooled here. What does “never forget” them mean, when you never knew anything about them in the first place? No one has ever seriously sought to learn facts (rather than weave romances) about the youths’ lives; no one ever showed the least interest in the 13-year-old they allegedly brutalized; no one has ever tried to find their families, and hear what they think of their sons’ pictures being broadcast in this way, or inserted into a foreign story about “gayness.” The boys are silent. Their muteness is their appeal. They offer a clean field for Western political and erotic fantasies; they’ve withered to ventriloquist’s dolls for Western voices. The indignities they suffered before death have been succeeded by a further descent, the indignity of being erased in the imperial name of memory. What Tatchell wants remembered is not the murdered youths. It’s himself.
II.
Strangely, I took two different tacks with Amir Taheri. The day after I politely asked him for information, you could have found me on Twitter writing in quite a different tone:
Except that wasn’t me. It was an account someone set up under my name about a week ago, which has been firing off tweets to Egyptians and various right-wing Westerners ever since. It says I’m a pro-Iran Islamist. It uses an old picture of me, and the inevitable photo of the hanged Iranian youth.
The account isn’t a “parody.” Not just that it isn’t funny: it’s trying to get me arrested. It makes out that I support banned insurgent movements and want the Egyptian government overthrown. These messages it forwards to Egyptian tweeters, including government accounts.
That one tweet could easily lead to a few decades in prison here. And the person who put my name to it appears quite conscious of the fact.
Who’s behind this thing? I have no idea. But I know who likes it. Here are the account’s followers when I checked it on July 16:
The third person who’d followed the account — out of seven at the time — was “All Equal.” That’s the Twitter of Pliny Soocoormanee, who happens to be the personal assistant of Peter Tatchell, director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation. How he found out about this obscure account when no one else knew of it, and why it interested him so much, is a fascinating question. I can’t imagine the answer.
The morning after I criticized the Taheri story on Twitter, the account exploded with vengeful drivel, directed at people inside and outside Egypt (the one at top went to the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs):
But this BS is merely typical. Apparently I work for the Brotherhood, an illegal organization here:
My motives appear to be erotic as well as pecuniary.
I’m also an informer.
But mostly the account just strives to identify me with vicious anti-Semitic ravings, marking the intrinsic fascism of its maker’s mind. (Fascism is the politics of a cynical, corrosive narcissism. The mark of fascism is that it imagines all other opinions are as fascist as itself.)
The account is pretty much coeval with the nuclear deal with Iran. Its first three tweets:
I wouldn’t pay attention to this crude fakery if it weren’t trying explicitly to incriminate me to Egypt’s government — which is arresting gay foreigners, and may not know the difference, or want to. I never cease to be surprised by the retributory malice of the Iran- and Islam-obsessed crowd, whether driven by ideology or the sheer love of headlines. They never stop.
Back in 2006, when Amir Taheri’s lies about Iran’s dress-code law were exposed, The Nation spoke to his PR agent. Accuracy on Iran is “a luxury,” she said. “As much as being accurate is important, in the end it’s important to side with what’s right. What’s wrong is siding with the terrorists.” You see? It’s us or them. Loyalty trumps truth. To expose useful lies is to take the terrorists’ side. And by that standard I am, of course, a terrorist.
Why does it matter? Because LGBT Iranians shouldn’t be exploited for propaganda. They lead lives seamed by danger, distinguished by courage; they deserve better than to be backgammon pieces, passive tokens stacked and shifted in a great-power political game. LGBT people should speak in their own voices, be masters and heroes of their own lives. That is what the liberation struggle is about.
The fact that nobody — not Tatchell, not Ben Weinthal, not Gay Star News — bothered to ask LGBT Iranian activists or groups what the truth was, or whether they wanted a demonstration, is appalling. But it’s typical. The story of Western engagement with LGBT rights in Iran has been one of occupation and ventriloquism, not freedom. It’s long past time for the sick game to stop.
NOTE: The fake account seems to have been taken down not long after I posted this: I don’t know whether by its maker or by Twitter (of course I complained). But, in some form or another, they’ll be back.
Sirens of the Potomac: Think Tanks and Torture
By Emma Briant | CounterPunch | July 23, 2015
Recent findings of the independent report into the American Psychological Association ‘collusion’ in torture are not shocking. This is a symptom of a larger infestation that is eating away at the independence of social science. Think tanks played an important role in pulling senior academics into supportive relations with the defense establishment and must not be able to slink off into the shadows. The report indicates that Stephen Behnke, a DOD contractor and APA ethics director helped ensure the APA rules did not restrict psychologists from collaborating with interrogations and made changes to ‘curry favour with the DOD’.
But some think tanks also act as the pseudo-academic sirens of the DOD tasked with luring academic associations into increased cooperation. Think tanks played a key intermediary role after 9/11, reassuring academics who initially felt uncomfortable with military involvement. No strangers to ‘influence’, the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies are a think tank who were contracted in the propaganda effort to the Office of Strategic Influence, a propaganda office of the DOD in the early ‘War on Terror’. In interviews for my book Propaganda and Counter-terrorism: Strategies for Global Change Potomac Institute Director Dennis McBride complained to me about academics’ concern saying,
things’ve changed a little bit but there’s still this attitude that … we get from academic social science in particular that comes across as they’re above, they’re better than soldiers and … they’re not gonna participate in what we call here ‘baby-killing’. (Interview: 5th June 2009)
When I met McBride in 2009 he told me about a meeting he arranged ‘a few years ago’ to deepen military involvement luring in key figures from Social Science Discipline Associations including ‘the American Anthropological Association … Executive Director’ and Lee Herring who is now Director of Public Affairs at the American Sociological Association. McBride’s allegiances lie firmly with the US military but he got himself ‘deputised by the American Psychological Society to be in this meeting’ to enhance his credibility (Interview: 5th June 2009).
He described the pitch that he said pulled them in:
I basically said, look … the Pentagon’s … number 1 mission, is to prevent war, by being so damn strong, so smart, that no one would dare, mission number 2 is that if we fail that one, to get it over with, OK? I said, your communities have a role to play in mission number 1 … The Pentagon is engineering, it doesn’t understand other cultures … We’re not good at that. We wanna be good at it and we don’t know how, absent your help. And I went through this and they said, absolutely, you know what? We’re changing our minds, we’re gonna support this. (Interview: 5th June 2009)
The conditions of funding for academic research preference research governments deem ‘useful’, preferencing uncritical research and the think tank culture which fed the blurring of academic boundaries. There has been a proliferation of well-funded ‘yes-men’ factories. McBride described how heavily involved Potomac were in ‘War on Terror’ planning, work that went beyond propaganda – for example he disclosed that Dan Gallant ‘yet another Potomac person who was working for Rumsfeld’ came up with the idea for using Guantanamo Bay for detainees (Interview: 5th June 2009). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, McBride was dismissive of public distrust of the military on the topic of torture:
‘so-called torture … this is I think the most overblown thing I think I have experienced. People need to do their research and find out that enhanced interrogation techniques, as they are being called, are done as any coercion, or any interrogation is done, with the presence of the Inspector General. … no nation can stand next to the United States in terms of its torture rules and regulations. Do you honestly think in Somalia when one faction grabs another they don’t torture the hell out of ’em? I mean I’m not justifying it, I’m just saying … We’ve got a process of self-inspection that is, is er, so motivated and everything is on video … at Guantanamo and so the [laughs] I’ve talked to people a lot who do that and … the [chuckles] waterboarding … I’m sure you know what it is … and noone’s ever drowned, there’s never been any tissue damage but I guess it could scare the hell out of them … but I’m told that the mode number of dunks is one … ‘mmm, OK, whaddya wanna know!’ (original emphasis)
This flies in the face of independent evidence, and international legal judgements condemning torture practices. Of course, as a former military public servant, McBride was confident that ‘it’s not my job to evaluate that sort of thing’, but in his view it did mean that ‘it’s important the Strategic Communication thing here is very big’ – spinning an unpalatable story.
McBride calls himself a social scientist and yet dismissed the notion that anyone outside the institutions of government can make sound value judgements on torture, since those on the military’s ‘list’ are officially ethical, determined through ‘the fastidiousness of the five-sided building’ This McBride felt was a more scientific approach to torture ‘Whereas civilian reaction has been all about being judgemental as opposed to critical’. (Interview: 5th June 2009). An unquestioning faith in the Pentagon of course leaves little room for personal responsibility and critical judgement.
A primary responsibility of social science should be to critically evaluate the practices used by government and facilitate fuller debate of policy and practice. It is crucial that there is a dialogue between industry and academia, but this must be a dialogue that allows for criticism and is not solely aimed at recruiting academics to ‘enable’ already-determined strategies or unethical practises. The sacking of the APA’s leadership is welcome, but what needs to happen now is not just a redrawing of ethical boundaries at APA but a rethink of the government manufacture of supportive ‘expertise’. Rather than shackling research funding to pre-determined government objectives and reinforcing programmes of questionable worth, if independent academic work is to be ‘impactful’ or ‘relevant’ government needs simply to acknowledge its existing relevance and allow critical academic research to have impact on policy.
Dr Emma L Briant is a Lecturer in Journalism Studies from University of Sheffield in the UK. She completed her PhD in Sociology at University of Glasgow, Scotland in 2012 which examined Anglo-American counter-terrorism propaganda since 2001, which is now the subject of her new book. Her other recent published research includes analyses of media coverage of disability and also asylum in the UK with the Glasgow Media Group where she worked and studied prior to moving to Sheffield in 2013. She is the author of Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change (Manchester University Press) and co-author of Bad News for Refugees (Pluto Press).
Germany must ‘throw off remains’ of allied occupation
RT | July 21, 2015
NSA spying scandals are being discussed by the public now, said Elsa Rassbach, anti-war activist from Code Pink. And this is a positive step towards throwing out the remains of having been occupied, she added.
WikiLeaks has published an intercept suggesting that the National Security Agency kept an eye on German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and many other senior German officials for years.
RT: Do you believe the NSA spying scandals have a significant effect on relations between Germany and the US?
Elsa Rassbach: I think the very fact that they are being discussed shows a huge shift, because this spying has been going on heavily during the whole Cold War. But the thing is that it continued after Germany supposedly received its sovereignty through the Two plus Four Agreement in 1990 and 91. Germany has allowed this whole time this spying, and has known about it, and has also allowed the bases here to be used for wars that Germany has said that they did not agree with, I mean the US military bases. The fact that now it’s even being discussed is already a very positive step.
RT: So why do you think the German government’s outrage publicly hasn’t been greater?
ER: I think that the new story that “Oh [Angela] Merkel’s cell phone was being listened to,” was really a ploy. It’s well known what the NSA was doing the whole time, and was set up to do, was to spy broadly on everyone around the world, except US citizens. What they changed in 2001 after the attack on the World Trade Center is that they decided, or four people decided: President [George] Bush, Vice President [Dick] Cheney, and the heads of the CIA and the NSA, that they would throw out the US Constitution and allow also the spying upon US citizens.
I’m absolutely certain that Adenauer’s [Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war Chancellor of Germany from 1949 to 1963] staff, his telephones, and all were spied upon. But at that time Germany was occupied. My question is: Why has it taken so long since Germany achieved sovereignty and was reunified in 1991; why has it taken so long since then? There are some reasons for it, but still think that the way the things are now, it’s almost like an anachronism and Germany does need to throw off the remains of having been occupied.
RT: How much pressure is Merkel under because of these revelations? Does it have an effect on the domestic politics in Germany?
ER: We do see that even some members of the CDU [Christian Democratic Union, Merkel’s party] are making comments and making demands. I think that a lot of the pressure is a big shift in public opinion in Germany. There was recently a Pew study in 2008 where they were asking many countries in Europe: “What’s your opinion of the freedoms that the US gives its citizens. Germans said in 2008, 70 percent had a positive view of this. In 2013, just prior to the Snowden revelations, Germans were 80 percent in favor of their view of the US attitude toward personal freedoms.
It’s now plunged to 43 percent in the last two years, which is the lowest number of any of the major European countries. So there is a big shift on the ground. There is a peace movement, there is a lot of talk now about Ramstein [US Air Force base situated in south-west Germany], drones, and that this surveillance has to end. This was not happening two years ago, or three years ago in the peace movement here. How much that will ultimately relay into sufficient parliamentary pressure and so forth on Chancellor Merkel to do something, I don’t know. And I also wonder whether there would be any pressure from the different corporations who have also been spied upon, whether they will also put pressure on the government about this.
READ MORE: German intelligence cooperated with NSA as Merkel denied knowledge – report
Kiev Secrecy on Report Boosts Suspicions Ukraine Shot Down MH17
Sputnik – 22.07.2015
The refusal of the Ukrainian government to release the results of the official international investigation into the Malaysia Airlines crash a year ago will increase concerns it may have been shot down by Ukrainian fighters, US experts told Sputnik.
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board, mostly Dutch citizens, died.
Forces seeking independence in eastern Ukraine were widely blamed in the West for the attack.
On Tuesday, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister for European Integration Olena Zerkal told a briefing in Kiev that the results of the international inquiry would remain classified.
“Responses to the MH17 incident have been suspect from the first,” veteran International Herald Tribune correspondent and European affairs analyst Patrick Smith told Sputnik.
“There has been a worrisome absence of hard evidence made public, apart from Russia’s report that it had satellite imagery indicating two Ukrainian fighter jets had been following the airliner prior to the explosion. This report, was of course, ignored among the Western powers.
“The latest determination by the Kiev government to classify results of an international investigation adds significantly to the concerns of many that the Ukrainian air force may have been responsible for the fatal mistake.”
The analyst also criticized the administration of President Barack Obama for its refusal to demand that the findings of the new report be published at once.
“The State Department’s silence on this development, given its energetic assertions in the past, is still more worrisome. It is no longer defensible to dismiss the thought that blame lies precisely with those who were first and readiest to point fingers.”
Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute pointed out that evidence available over the past year threw doubt on the US and Ukrainian claims that the aircraft had been shot down by the independence militants.
“The Ukrainian government kept open a commercial air corridor through a war. That is the first problem. Therefore, the only way a crime could be committed is if those who shot down the aircraft knew it was a civilian aircraft and shot it down anyway.”
New York-based foreign policy analyst and Eurasia Review columnist Michael Averko told Sputnik, the Ukrainian government’s decision to keep the new report under wraps was bound to boost suspicions around the world that they were trying to cover up a conclusion that would damage Kiev’s narrative.
“The ‘classified’ designation plays into the reasoned notion of a cover-up, relating to the belief that the rebel side shot down the MH17.”
Prior to the MH17 tragedy, Averko pointed out, the Kiev regime forces were attacking their adversary from the air in action which led to civilian deaths.
The Kiev regime had the responsibility to report on airspace within their domain which is unsafe for civilian flights, Averko added.
The Ukrainian government’s reluctance to completely disclose all ground control correspondence on this matter is suspicious, he concluded.
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From the Archives
Confronting the Threat of Ethnic Bioweapons
By Tony Cartalucci – New Eastern Outlook – 29.11.2017
The United States Air Force’s 59th Medical Wing’s molecular biology branch recently was revealed to have been collecting specifically Russian RNA and synovial (connective) tissue samples, prompting fears in Russia of a possible US directed ethnic-specific bioweapons program. … continue
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