Syria’s envoy to the UN has called on the international community to draw up an effective mechanism to end Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and its continued exploitation of the natural resources of the territory.
Speaking at a UN Security Council session on Tuesday, Bashar al-Ja’afari said Israeli forces continue to arbitrarily detain Syrian nationals and loot water and petroleum resources in the Golan Heights in flagrant violation of international law and regulations.
He urged the UN to force Israel to end its occupation of the Golan Heights and withdraw from the area in compliance with the Security Council Resolution 497, which was adopted unanimously on December 17, 1981, and which declares Tel Aviv’s annexation of Golan as “null and void and without international legal effect.”
The top Syrian diplomat also pointed to Israel’s land expropriation policies in the Golan Heights, arguing that Israeli officials have created 750 farms and accommodated 90 settler households there since the beginning of the current year, and are planning to lodge 150 families every year in a bid to change the demographic identity of the area.
Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and later occupied and annexed it.
Ja’afari further criticized the international community’s inaction toward Israel’s subversive acts, and its support for al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.
He also lashed out at some European countries over their support for Takfiri terrorism, highlighting that they have fallen victim to acts of terror themselves.
Russia ‘to continue assisting Syria in terror fight’
Meanwhile, Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, has said his country is set to provide Syria with all necessary assistance in the campaign against terrorism.
“For our part, we are going to continue providing the Syrian government with assistance in fighting terrorist groups, led by Daesh and the Nusra Front. Undoubtedly, there should be neither delays nor concessions in this struggle,” Churkin said at the Tuesday’s Security Council meeting.
He further described the free movement of terrorists through borders, the flow of weapons and money to terrorist outfits as well as access to chemical warfare agents as the main challenges in the anti-terror fight.
Syria UN envoy ‘shirking responsibilities’
Separately, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has criticized UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura, saying the envoy has failed to fulfill his responsibilities and convene a new round of peace talks for Syria.
“We are concerned that the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura has been shying away from his duties recently, not calling another round of intra-Syrian talks, and starting to make public statements on the need for Russia and the United States to agree on how to proceed with the political settlement in Syria, and then the UN will convene a new round of intra-Syrian talks. This is the wrong approach,” Lavrov said.
“Replacing the intra-Syrian dialogue with a Russia-US duet is impossible and I believe this is a very harmful signal that is being sent to the irreconcilable opposition in the so-called High Negotiations Committee, which just keeps voicing ultimatums on [Syrian President Bashar] Assad’s resignation and some sort of deadlines. This is not helping the case,” Lavrov said, referring to a Saudi-backed group of Syrians opposing Assad.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011.
De Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict. The UN has stopped its official casualty count in Syria, citing its inability to verify the figures it receives from various sources.
A report has revealed an April meeting in the United States between Nader Bakkar, a senior Salafist from Egypt, and former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
Reporting on Tuesday, The Middle East Eye said Bakkar, who was the deputy chairman of Egypt’s Salafist Nour Party, met Livni at Harvard University at the former’s request.
It cited Egyptian paper Youm7 as reporting, “Nader Bakkar’s meeting with Tzipi Livini lasted around 40 minutes, in which Bakkar talked about the strength of the Nour Party and its popularity.”
The Nour Party has been unashamedly supportive of the Egyptian government’s 2013 military coup that overthrew democratically-elected President Mohamed Morsi. It has remained committed to the coup’s leader and current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi despite a deadly government crackdown on dissent.
The party has also been cited as an instrumental force behind the anti-government protests that preceded the putsch.
Nour Party had had its candidate, Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, disqualified in the 2012 presidential election that brought Morsi to power.
Former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni
Salafism is often equated with Wahhabism, the ideology of the Takfiri terror groups that kill people from other religions, accusing them of being “infidels.”
Israel has been supportive of the Takfiri terrorists fighting the Syrian government. In December 2015, Britain’s Daily Mail said Israel has saved the lives of over 2,000 Takfiri militants at the cost of about USD 13 million by treating them at its hospitals since 2013.
Relations between Egypt and the Israeli regime have been growing since Sisi took power in the Arab country in 2014.
Egypt sent an ambassador to Tel Aviv in January. Hazem Khairat was the first residing Egyptian ambassador in Tel Aviv since Morsi recalled Cairo’s previous ambassador to Israel in November 2012. The Israeli regime also opened its embassy in Cairo in September 2015 after a four-year closure.
Earlier, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry traveled to Israel and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – First part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
Looking back with hindsight fifteen years after the transformative events of September 11, 2001, the quality of life for most people has significantly declined since 9/11. Beginning immediately on the very day of infamy, the forces of authoritarian reaction began to ramp up the power of unbridled militarism abroad and greatly expanded police powers at home, all in the name of combating Islamic terrorism. But what really happened on 9/11? Who did what to whom? Who is telling the truth and who is lying?
In the fifteen years since 9/11 a vast and multi-faceted citizens’ movement has done much of the investigative work that our thoroughly corrupted governments refused to do on our behalf. Why have there been no genuine investigations by officialdom into the originating event of the Global War on Terror? How was the federal investigation of the 9/11 crime transformed into a federally orchestrated cover up?
The outcome of the people’s inquiry points compellingly to the conclusion that the real culprits behind the 9/11 attacks were not a group of Islamic jihadists acting alone out of no other motivation than religious zealotry. Rather, the dominant group directing the 9/11 false flag event was composed primarily of Israel First neoconservatives who sought to demonize Muslims in order to create the necessary malleable enemy required for their purposes. The real culprits of 9/11 used the event to create a replacement enemy meant to revitalize the vast military and national security apparatus that was fast becoming obsolete following the end of the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union.
One of the objectives of the 9/11 criminals was to traumatize whole populations thereby making them more compliant and subject to manipulation. From the opening hours of the 9/11 debacle, the murder and mayhem was immediately blamed, without any forensic investigation whatsoever, on Muslim extremists said to be hostile to the West. The event was thereby framed within a pre-existing geopolitical concept already dubbed by Samuel Huntington as “a clash of civilizations.” The effect of the instant interpretation was to cast the Jewish state’s regional enemies as part of a larger Islamic conspiracy to undermine “the West.”
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was meant to signal that the core political economy of the USA, the so-called permanent war economy, should continue even though the Cold War had ended. The fabricated story line introduced on 9/11 was consistent with Huntington’s assessment that the new post-Cold War conflicts would cut across religious and cultural spheres of human interaction. With Huntington and Bernard Lewis as their guides, the authors of the 9/11 psychological operation have developed a false concept of “the West” as an exclusively Judeo-Christian construct. This post-9/11 interpretation has involved the creation of a false assumption that the history of Islamic religion, culture and philosophy is entirely external to the history of Western Civilization.
The characterization of Islam as a new and aberrant strain of influence in Europe and throughout the so-called “West” misrepresents the deep history of cross-cultural interaction. The Zionist-directed campaign to mischaracterize Muslims as a recent and alien injection into Western Civilization fails to take into account the importance of Islamic advances in mathematics, architecture, medicine and art in the genesis of the European Renaissance. As Edward Said has reminded us, there is an especially rich heritage in the Iberian peninsula of cross-fertilization between Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars. Their collaborative exchanges flourished especially in Cordoba, the Iberian jewel of the Islamic caliphate of Al-Andalus.
Since 2001 the culprits of 9/11 have hired, armed, organized, and directed various mercenary proxy armies that fight under Islamic flags. With assistance being channeled especially through the CIA and Mossad safe haven of Saudi Arabia, these mercenary forces have done the bidding of their Zio-American patrons. Western-supported mercenary forces, including al-Qaeda and its supposed antagonistic cousin the “Islamic State” [ISIL, ISIS, IS, Daesh], have been deployed in a series of false flag terror events designed to keep alive anti-Muslim fear and loathing in Western minds.
Moreover, units of the so-called “Islamic State”, which funnel stolen oil to the European Union through Turkey, are regularly deployed throughout the Grand Chessboard of Eurasia. The aim is to give justification for Western military operations aimed ultimately at preparing the ground for the expansion of Greater Israel. The world’s dominant military-industrial complex has been covertly harnessed to this project of expansion. A crucial part of this network of military-industrial power lies in the Zionist-controlled mainstream media and institutions of higher education. These agencies have been co-opted to become instruments of the Islamophobic propaganda so crucial to preparing Western public opinion for aggressive invasions of Muslim countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and most recently Syria.
The deceptive façade of the Global War on Terror is meant to disguise this military and psychological system of aggressive warfare combined with engineered pollution of the mental environment with the toxin of hyped up Islamophobia.
Dr. Kevin Barrett has characterized the Global War on Terror as a global war on Muslims for Israel. Noam Chomsky disagrees. He has made himself a very significant nemesis to Kevin Barrett. Barrett is one of the most unrelenting researchers and publicists in the 9/11 Truth Movement. So far Chomsky has been quite effective in deploying his enormous prestige to prevent the citizens’ investigation on 9/11 from receiving a fair hearing, but especially in the foundation-funded platforms of progressive, Left, and anti-war activism.
This opening part introduces my essay, “9/11 and the Zionist Question: Is Noam Chomsky a Disinfo Agent for Israel?” In due course the larger paper will be published in its entirety here at American Herald Tribune. This essay explores the antagonisms between Kevin Barrett and Noam Chomsky with particular emphasis on the research and scholarship on false flag terrorism and especially on the contested events of 9/11. The argument is advanced that Prof. Chomsky has quite purposely promoted an agenda of cover up on 9/11, reducing himself to the level of crude propagandists and paid proponents of the dominant 9/11 narrative such as Jonathan Kay and Michael Shermer.
In the fifteen years since 9/11 the concerted and continuing cover up of the truth has become an enormous element of the overall 9/11 crime. Growing understanding of the role of mass media and institutions of higher learning in maintaining this cover up is fast eroding the credibility of these strategic agencies. The health of free and democratic societies depends on an informed citizenry who more often than not are deceived by the very agencies supposed to be responsible for public education.
You will read “Noam Chomsky as the Left’s Trojan Horse” in the next part.
Yediot Achronot: “New Army Chief Rabbi: Rape in Wartime is Permitted”
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new defense minister, has announced a series of military promotions. The most glaring one is the religious figure elevated to be the army’s new chief rabbi. He is Eyal Krim. His main claim to infamy is that in a religious publication (Hebrew), he was asked if the Book of Deuteronomy permits an Israelite to rape women of an enemy tribe, how does this correspond to modern military policy.
He told readers that it would be permissible for Jewish soldiers to rape attractive Arab women (Krim’s statement is translated into English here) among the enemy because it would improve military morale and redound to the greater good of the nation in pursuing its military objectives:
It is permitted to break the bounds of modesty [a series of halachic injunctions governing prohibited sexual relations] and training. So it’s permissible to eat treif and to satisfy evil [sexual] urges through having sexual relations with attractive non-Jewish women against their will, out of consideration for the hardships of war and for the good of the whole [army’s objectives].
In comparing treif to rape, it seems the holy rabbi struck a nice balance between consuming treif and “consuming” women (sarcasm intended).
IDF chief rabbi Krim, advocate of rape as tool of war (Nir Arieli)
The key to Krim’s reasoning is that most nations fight wars of choice whereas Israel’s wars are always wars of “obligation.” In other words, wars in which the entire life of the Jewish people is at stake (his thinking, not mine). Because the survival of the whole is paramount, then traditional religious commands concerning sexual relations may be abrogated to encourage the troops to fight their best. It goes without saying that the holy rabbi has no consideration for the woman involved as she is not Jewish and hence of no value or significance except as an object to satisfy the Jewish soldier’s “evil urge.”
Krim denounced the enlistment of “girls” (his word, not mine) in the IDF and said it was “absolutely forbidden,” because the harm done to the modesty of the woman and to the nation (as a result of women fighting) is the deciding factor.
Haaretz also reports that Krim told his Orthodox audience that wounded Palestinian attackers were not human, but rather animals who should be summarily executed. This is a criminal act for which Elor Azarya is now being prosecuted.
He also said homosexuals should be treated mercifully as if they were “sick or deformed.” Jews should hope that gays can redeem themselves from their unnatural behavior and return to a natural approach to sexuaity, meaning a relationship between man and woman. Homosexuality, he found, “destroyed” the natural order. Man, he believed, had free choice to behave according to nature and should choose to do so.
The ruling that women could not testify in court was intended to protect them, since their “sentimental” nature would not permit them to withstand the rigorous nature of cross examination.
When asked his views about the “Jewish jobs” movement which attempts to force businesses to employ Jews only, he responded that it was not racist since it’s intent was to help Jews.
If a Jew found a copy of the New Testament he should burn it. treating it with “extreme brutality.” Doing so was right and just since Christian doctrine was considered “idolatry” and harmed the world.
He was asked whether Druze or Bedouin should serve in the IDF. He replied that those who serve loyally were permissible, but that the lives of Jewish soldiers always “came first.”
The IDF Responds
When Haaretz asked the IDF public affairs office whether these statements represented the policies and values of the army, it refused to respond.
It’s worth nothing that when Yossi Gurvitz wrote his 972 post on the rabbi’s earlier statements and sought a response from the IDF public affairs unit, the response was that Krim made these statements when he was not in military service. Therefore they do not reflect on the army at all. Given the response below, that strategy seems to have changed. Now, they simply claim he didn’t mean what he said.
The official army response was that the rabbi’s statements were “taken out of context.” Krim doesn’t support the rape of women on the field of battle and affirms that the Torah does not sanction such an act. Anyone who says otherwise is mistaken. But there is the wee small problem of what he actually wrote on the printed page and what an army spokesperson now says second-hand in his name. Who’re you gonna believe? the IDF or your lyin’ eyes?
The IDF’s typical posture above is simply to lie and claim, against the evidence, that Krim doesn’t believe what he actually said. It’s been able to get away with such cynical obtuseness for decades and seems to be prepared to continue in this fashion indefinitely.
The army also notes in Krim’s favor that he’s ruled that male soldiers do not have to abandon military ceremonies at which women’s voices would be heard singing (a ruling proposed by other Orthodox rabbis), as long as the male soldiers don’t see the singers. But this distorts what he actually said: that IDF choirs performing at public ceremonies should be male and not female in order to respect the feelings of (male) Orthodox soldiers. He added that if such an arrangement was not practical, that male soldiers should be permitted to listen to a female choir.
His predecessor, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, authorized war crimes including the murder of civilians in pursuit of IDF objectives. Rontzki was his rabbinic teacher and they both attended the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva. It appears Krim is in excellent company. One of Ateret Cohanim’s goals is to restore the sacred priestly rite of animal sacrifice and rebuild the Holy Temple, a project which would require demolition of the Muslim holy sites of Haram al-Sharif.
One way that the far-right Orthodox transform the army into an ideological-theocratic tool to advance their political interests is by founding military preparatory schools which feed directly into the officer corps. In this way, rabbis like Krim produce thousands of hard-right future officers who fill the ranks and determine the future strategy and orientation of the military. So it is no accident that IDF soldiers refuse to protect Palestinian civilians from the pogroms of settlers.
As far as I’m concerned, Meir Kahane in death has succeeded far beyond his wildest dreams. The Kahanist slogan: “Kahane was right” is wrong. The new slogan should be: “Kahane won.” He commands the IDF. The State is his. His followers have triumphed and they are positioned in almost every position of power and influence. They are turning Israel into a monstrous parody of a Jewish state. In which Kahanist racialism and ethnic cleansing are state policy. This isn’t a Jewish state. It’s a Judean state–of, by and for the settlers. It’s a form of idolatory where, instead of worshipping traditional Biblical prophetic values of tolerance, justice, and equality, it worships land and power.
While appointing a rabbi who endorses battlefield rape, Lieberman has made even more important appointments in the vital sector of Israeli defense industries. He just appointed a Yisrael Beitenu Party hack, Uzi Landau, as CEO of Rafael Industries. This will be a huge gravy train for the Party and its machine. Imagine the jobs the Party can dole out to the faithful, the contracts it can also distribute to businesses allied with the Party! This is the way business is conducted in a corrupt garrison state like Israel. If any of you are so naïve as to doubt this will happen, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
Palestinian youth activist and former prisoner Hassan Karajah was arrested this evening, 12 July, by Israeli occupation forces at Beit Ur checkpoint west of Ramallah, reported family sources to Samidoun. They are concerned about his situation, especially because he spent 22 months in Israeli prisons after being targeted for his work as a human rights defender.
He was arrested on 23 January 2013 and freed on 19 October 2014, facing an Israeli military court on allegations of participation in a prohibited organization (all Palestinian political parties are prohibited organizations) and contact with an enemy state (frequently used to target Palestinians who travel to Lebanon for conferences and other events.)
Karajah, well known for his work in a number of civil society organizations, including the Stop the Wall Campaign and the Partnership for Development Project, and his advocacy for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, was the subject of an international campaign for his release, which highlighted the Israeli targeting of Palestinian human rights defenders.
A letter Karajah wrote from prison was widely distributed: “Here, we draw our energy to continue from you. We, the newly detained prisoners, our hearts are full of happiness when, while being transported from prisons to court, we meet prisoners we have heard about for decades, whose photos and posters we have carried in the streets, prisoners from whom we learned our readiness to struggle since childhood.
In conclusion, I affirm to you that they will never be able to bring about our end. We are stronger than they are able to weaken us. We are higher than they are able to lower us. We are deeper than they are able to reach us. We continue.
I say to you at the end of this message – I will see you soon. I will come out as you have known me and better, and I will greet you with the single word, ‘Freedom.’”
The white working class in the US has been decimated through an epidemic of ‘premature deaths’ – a bland term to cover-up the drop in life expectancy in this historically important demographic. There have been quiet studies and reports peripherally describing this trend – but their conclusions have not yet entered the national consciousness for reasons we will try to explore in this essay.
Indeed this is the first time in the country’s ‘peacetime’ history that its traditional core productive sector has experienced such a dramatic demographic decline – and the epicenter is in the small towns and rural communities of the United States.
The causes for ‘premature death’ (dying before normal life expectancy – usually of preventable conditions) include the sharply increasing incidence of suicide, untreated complications of diabetes and obesity and above all ‘accidental poisoning’ – a euphemism used to describe what are mostly prescription and illegal drug overdoses and toxic drug interactions.
No one knows the total number of deaths of American citizens due to drug overdose and fatal drug interactions over the past 20 years, just as no central body has kept track of the numbers of poor people killed by police nationwide, but let’s start with a conservative round number – 500,000 mostly white working class victims, and challenge the authorities to come up with some real statistics with real definitions. Indeed such a number could be much higher – if they included fatal poly-pharmacy deaths and ‘medication errors’ occurring in the hospital and nursing home setting.
In the last few years, scores of thousands of Americas have died prematurely because of drug overdoses or toxic drug interactions, mostly related to narcotic pain medications prescribed by doctors and other providers. Among those who have increasingly died of illegal opioid, mostly heroin, fentanyl and methadone, overdose, the vast majority first became addicted to the powerful synthetic opioids prescribed by the medical community, supplied by big chain pharmacies and manufactured at incredible profit margins by the leading pharmaceutical companies. In essence, this epidemic has been promoted, subsidized and protected by the government at all levels and reflects the protection of a profit-maximizing private medical-pharmaceutical market gone wild.
This is not seen elsewhere in the world at such a level. For example, despite their proclivity for alcohol, obesity and tobacco – the British patient population has been essentially spared this epidemic because their National Health System is regulated and functions with a different ethic: patient well being is valued over naked profit. This arguably would not have developed in the US if a single-payer national health system had been implemented.
Faced with the increasing incidence of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans dying from overdose and suicide to prescription opioids and mixed drug reactions, the Armed Forces Surgeon General and medical corps convened ‘emergency’ US Senate Hearings in March 2010 where testimony showed military doctors had written 4 million prescriptions of powerful narcotics in 2009, a 4 fold increase from 2001. Senate members of the hearings, led by Virginia’s Jim Webb, cautioned not casting a negative light on ‘Big Pharma’ among the largest donors to political campaigns.
The 1960’s public image of the heroin-addicted returning Vietnam War soldier that shocked the nation had morphed into the Oxycontin/Xanax dependent veteran of the new millennium, thanks to ‘Big Pharma’s’ enormous contracts with the US Armed Forces and the mass media looked away. Suicides, overdoses and ’sudden deaths’ killed many more soldiers than combat.
No other peaceful population, probably since the 1839 Opium Wars, has been so devastated by a drug epidemic encouraged by a government. In the case of the Opium Wars, the British Empire and its commercial arm, The East India Company, sought a market for their huge South Asian opium crops and used its military and allied Chinese warlord mercenaries to force a massive opium distribution on the Chinese people, seizing Hong Kong in the process as a hub for its imperial opium trade. Alarmed at the destructive effects of addiction on its productive population, the Chinese government tried to ban or regulate narcotic use. Its defeat at British hands marked China’s decline into semi-colonial status for the next century – such are the wider consequences of having an addicted population.
This paper will identify the (1) the nature of the long-term, large-scale drug induced deaths, (2) the dynamics of ‘demographic transition by overdose’, and (3) the political economy of opioid addiction. This paper will not cite numbers or reports – these are widely available. However they are scattered, incomplete and generally lack any theoretical framework to understand, let alone confront, the phenomenon.
We will conclude by discussing whether each ‘death by prescription’ is to be viewed as an individual tragedy, mourned in private, or a corporate crime fueled by greed or even a pattern of ‘Social-Darwinism-writ-large’ by an elite-run decision making apparatus.
Since the advent of major political-economic changes induced by neoliberalism, America’s oligarchic class confronts the problem of a large and potentially restive population of millions of marginalized workers and downwardly mobile members of the middle class made redundant by ‘globalization’ and an armed rural poor sinking ever deeper into squalor. In other words, when finance capital and elite ruling bodies view an increasing ‘useless’ population of white workers, employees and the poor in this geographic context, what ‘peaceful’ measures can be taken to ease and encourage their ‘natural decline’?
A similar pattern emerged in the early ‘AIDS’ crisis where the Reagan Administration deliberately ignored the soaring deaths among young Americans, especially minorities, adopting a moralistic ‘blame the victim’ approach until the influential gay community organized and demanded government action.
The Scale and Scope of Drug Deaths
In the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of working age Americans have died from drugs. The lack of hard data is a scandal. The scarcity is due to a fragmented, incompetent and deliberately incomplete system of medical records and death certificates – especially from the poorer rural areas and small towns where there is virtually no support for producing and maintaining quality records. This great data void is multi-faceted and hampered by the problems of regionalism and a lack of clear governmental public health direction.
Early in the crisis, medical professionals and coroners were largely in ‘denial’ and under pressure to certify ‘unexpected’ deaths as ‘natural due to pre-existing conditions’ – despite overwhelming evidence that there had been reckless over-prescribing by the local medical community. Fifteen to twenty years ago, the victims’ families, isolated in their little towns, may have derived some short-term comfort from seeing the term ‘natural’ attached to their loved-one’s untimely death. Understandably, a diagnosis of ‘death by drug overdose’ would evoke tremendous social and personal shame among the rural and small-town white working class families who had traditionally associated narcotics with the urban minority and criminal populations. They thought themselves immune to such ‘big city’ problems. They trusted ‘their’ doctors who, in turn, trusted ‘Big Pharma’s’ assurances that the new synthetic opioids were not addicting and could be prescribed in large quantities.
Despite the local medical community’s slowly growing awareness of this problem, there was little public attempt to educate the at-risk population and still fewer attempts to rein in the over-prescribing brethren physicians and private ‘pain-clinics’. They, or their nurse practitioners and PA’s, did not counsel patients on the immense dangers of combining opioids and alcohol or tranquilizers. Many, in fact, were not even aware of what their patients were prescribed by other providers. It would not have been unusual to see healthy younger adults with multiple prescriptions from multiple providers.
Through the last few decades under neo-liberalism, rural county heath department budgets were stripped through business-promoted austerity programs. Instead, the federal government has mandated that they implement expensive and absurd plans to confront ‘bio-terrorism’. Often, health departments lacked the necessary budget to pay for the costly forensic toxicology testing required for documenting drug levels in suspect overdose cases among their own population.
Further compounding this lack of quality data, there was no guidance or coordination from the federal and state government or regional DEA regarding systematic documentation and the development of a usable database for analyzing the widespread consequences of over-prescribing legal narcotics. The early crisis received minimal attention from these bodies.
All official eyes were focused on the ‘war on drugs’ as it was being waged against the poor, urban minority population. The small towns, where over-prescribing doctors formed the pillars of the local churches or country clubs, suffered in silence. The greater public was lulled by media mis-education into thinking that addiction and related deaths were an ‘inner city’ problem, one that required the usual racist response of filling up the prisons with young blacks and Hispanics for petty crimes or drug possession.
But within this vacuum, white working class children were starting to dial ‘911′… because, ‘Mommy won’t wake up…’. Mommy with her ‘prescribed Fentanyl patches’ took just one Xanax too many and devastated an entire family unit. This was a prototype of a raging epidemic. All throughout the country these alarming cases were growing. Some rural counties saw the proportion of addicted infants born to addicted mothers overwhelm their unprepared hospital systems. And the local obituary pages published increasing numbers of young names and faces besides the very elderly -never printing any ’cause’ for the untimely demise while devoting paragraphs for a departed octogenarian.
Recent trends demonstrate that drug deaths (both opiate overdose and fatal mixed interactions with other drugs and alcohol) have had a major impact on the composition of the local labor force, families, communities and neighborhoods. The traditional support systems, which provided aid to workers damaged by these trends, such as trade unions, public social workers and mental health professionals, were either unable or unwilling to intervene before or after the scourge of drug addiction had come into play. This is reflected in the lives of workers, whose personal life and employment has been severely impaired by corporate plant relocations, downsizing, cuts in wages and health benefits.
The Dynamic Demography of Drug-Induced Death
Almost all publicized reports ignore the demography and differential class impacts of prescription-related drug deaths. The majority of those killed by illegal drugs were first addicted to legal narcotics prescribed by their providers. Only the overdose deaths of celebrities manage to hit the headlines.
Most of the victims have been low wage, unemployed or under-employed members of the white working class. Their prospects for the future are dismal. Any dream of establishing a healthy family life on one salary in ‘Heartland America’ would be met with laughter. This is a huge national population, which has experienced a steep decline in its living standards because of deindustrialization. The majority of fatal overdose victims are white working age males, but with a large proportion of working class women, often mothers with children. There has been little discussion about the impact of an overdose death of a working age person on the extended family. This includes grandmothers in their 50’s. In this demographic, women often provide critical cohesion and stability for several generations at risk.
Apparently the US minority population has so far escaped this epidemic. Black and Hispanic Americans had already been depressed and economically marginalized for a much longer period – and the lower rate of prescription drug deaths among their populations may reflect greater resilience. It certainly reflects their reduced access to the over-prescribing private-sector medical community – a grim paradox where medical ‘neglect’ might indeed have been ‘benign’.
While there may be few class-based studies looking at comparative trends in ‘overdose deaths’ among urban minorities and rural/small town whites from sociology, public health or minority-studies university departments, anecdotal evidence and personal observation suggest that minority urban populations are more likely to provide assistance to an overdosing neighbor or friend than in the white community where addicts are more likely to be isolated and abandoned by family members ashamed of their ‘weakness’. Even the practice of ‘dumping’ an overdosed friend at the entrance of an emergency department and walking away has saved many lives. Urban minorities have greater access and familiarity with the chaotic big-city emergency rooms where medical personnel are skilled at recognizing and treating overdose. After decades of civil rights struggles, minorities are possibly more sophisticated in asserting their rights regarding use of such public resources. There may even be a relatively stronger culture of solidarity among the marginalized minorities in rendering assistance or an awareness of the consequences of not taking someone’s neighbor to the ER. These urban survival mechanisms have been largely absent in the white rural areas.
Nationwide, US doctors had long been dissuaded from prescribing powerful synthetic opioids to minority patients, even those in significant pain. There are various factors here, but the medical community has not been immune to the stereotype of the Hispanic or black urban addict or dealer. Perhaps, this widespread medical ‘racism’ in the context of the prescription opioid epidemic has had some paradoxical benefit.
Whatever the reason, urban minority addicts, while experiencing overdose in large numbers are more likely to survive an opiate overdose than small town or rural whites, unfamiliar with narcotics and their effects.
In the rural and small-town (deindustrialized) US heartland there has been an enormous breakdown in community and family solidarity. This has followed the destruction of a century-old stable employment base, especially in the manufacturing, mining and productive agricultural sectors. Only post-Soviet Russia experienced a similar pattern of declining life expectancy from ‘poisoning’ (alcohol and drugs) following the nationwide destruction of its socialized full employment system and the breakdown of all social services. Furthermore the loss of the tough Soviet police apparatus and the growth of an oligarch-mafia class saw the tremendous in-flooding of heroin from Afghanistan.
The growth of opioid addiction is not based on ‘personal choice’, nor is it the result of shifts in cultural life styles. While all class and educational levels are included among the victims, the overwhelming majority are younger white working class and the poor. They cover all age groups, including adolescents recovering from sports injuries, as well as the elderly with joint and back pain. The surge of addiction is a result of major shifts in the economy and the social structure. The regions most affected by overdose deaths are those in deep, prolonged and permanent decline, including the former ‘rust belt’ regions, small manufacturing towns of New England, Upstate New York, Pennsylvania and the rural South and agricultural, mining and forestry regions of the west.
This is the product of private executive decisions to (1) relocate productive US companies overseas or to distant, non-union regions of the country, (2) force once well-paid employees into lower paid jobs, (3) replace American workers with skilled and unskilled foreign immigrants or poorly paid ‘temps’, (4) eliminate pension and health benefits and (5) introduce new technology – including robots- which cuts the labor force by rendering human workers redundant. These changes in the relationship of capital to labor have created enormous profits for senior executives and investors, while producing a surplus labor force, which puts even greater pressure on young first-time workers and workers with seniority. There have been no effective job protection/ sustainable job creation programs to address the decades of declining well-paid employment. Good jobs have been replaced by minimum wage, service sector ‘MacJobs’ or temporary poorly paid manufacturing jobs with no benefits or protections. All across this devastated heartland, expensively touted programs, such as ‘Start-Up New York’, have failed to bring decent jobs while spending hundreds of millions of public money in free PR for state politicians.
The drug addiction epidemic has been most deadly precisely in those regions of industrial job loss and working wage decline, as well as in the depressed, once protected, agricultural and food processing sectors where union jobs have been replaced by minimum wage immigrants. The loss of stable employment has been accompanied by a slashing of social services and tremendous cuts in benefits – just when such services should have been bolstered.
Precisely because the so-called ‘drug problem’ is linked to major demographic changes resulting from dynamic capitalist shifts, it has never been the focus of elite-run government and corporate foundation grant research – unlike their fixation on the ‘radicalization of Muslims’ or ‘trends in urban crime’. Research tended to focus on ‘minorities’ or merely nibbled at the periphery of the current phenomenon. Good studies and data would have provided the rationale and basis for major public programs aimed at protecting the lives of marginalized white workers and reversing the deadly trends. The decade-long, nation-wide absence of research and data into this phenomenon has justified the glaring absence of an effective governmental response. Here the ‘neglect’ has not been ‘benign’.
In parallel with the increase in opioid addiction, there has been an astronomical increase in the prescription of psychotropic drugs and anti-depressants to the same population – also highly profitable to ‘Big Pharma’. The pattern of prescribing such powerful, and potentially dangerous, mood altering medications to downwardly mobile Americans to ‘treat’ or numb normal anxieties and reactions to the deterioration in their material condition has had profound consequences. Such individuals, often on unemployment assistance or MEDICAID, may be expected to follow a complex daily regimen of up to nine medications – besides their narcotic pain medications, while trying to cope with their crumbling world.
Where a dignified job with a decent wage would effectively treat a marginalized worker’s despair without unpleasant or dangerous ’side effects’, the medical and mental health community has consistently sent their patients to ‘Big Pharma’. As a result, post-mortem toxicological analyses show multiple prescribed psychotropic medications and anti-depressants in addition to narcotics in cases of opioid overdose deaths. While this may constitute an abdication of the medical provider’s responsibility to patients, it is also a reflection of the medical community’s utter helplessness in the face of systemic social breakdown – as has occurred in the marginalized communities where drug overdose deaths concentrate.
Demographic studies, at best, identify the victims of drug addiction. But their choice to treat their despair as an ‘individual problem’ occurring in a ’specific, immediate context’ overlooks the greater political and economic structures, which set the stage for premature death.
The Political Economy of Overdose Deaths
When the remains of a young working class overdose victim is wheeled into a morgue, his or her untimely demise is labelled ’self-inflicted’ or ‘accidental’ opioid overdose and a great cover-up machine is turned on: The sequence leading up to the death is shrouded in mystery, no deeper understanding of the socio-cultural and economic factors are sought. Instead, the victim or his/her culture is blamed for the end-result of a complex chain of elite capitalist economic decisions and political maneuverings in which a worker’s premature death is a mere collateral event. The medical community has merely functioned as the transmission belt in this process, rather than an agent for serving the public.
The vast majority of overdose fatalities are, in reality, victims of decisions and losses far beyond their control. Their addictions have shortened their lives as well as clouded their understanding of events and undermined their capacity to engage in class struggle to reverse this trend. It has been a perfect solution to the predictable demographic problems of brutal neoliberalism in America.
Wall Street and Washington designed the macro-economy that has eliminated decent jobs, cut wages and slashed benefits. As a result millions of marginalized workers and the unemployed are under tremendous tension and resort to pharmacologic solutions to endure their pain because they are not organized. The historical leading role of trade union and community organizations has been eliminated. Instead, redundant workers are ‘charged by Big Pharma’ to dig their own graves and class leaders are nowhere to be found.
Secondly, the workplace has become much more dangerous under the ‘new economic order’. Bosses no longer fear unions and safety regulations: many workers are injured by the acceleration of the pace of work, longer hours, faulty job training and lack of federal supervision of working conditions. Injured workers lacking any judicial, trade union, or public agency protection rightly fear retaliation for reporting their work injury and increasingly resort to prescription narcotics to cope with acute and chronic pain while continuing to work.
When employers allow workers to report their injuries, the low coverage and limited treatments available, encourage providers to over-prescribe narcotics on top of other medications with potentially dangerous interactions. Many pain clinics, contracted by employers, are eager to profit from injured clients while pharmaceutical companies actively promote powerful synthetic narcotics.
A vicious chain is formed: The pharmaceutical industry’s mass production of narcotics has been among its most profitable products. Corporate pharmacy chains fill the prescriptions written by tens of thousands of ‘providers’ (doctors, dentists, nurses and physician assistants) who have only a limited amount of time to actually examine an injured worker. The deteriorating work conditions create the injury and the workers become consumers of Big Pharma’s miracle relief – Oxycontin or its cousins – which a decade of drug salesmen had touted as ‘non-addicting’. A long line of highly educated professionals, including doctors and other providers, pathologists, medical examiners and coroners carefully paper over the real cause, the corporate decision makers, in order to protect themselves from corporate reprisals should they ‘blow the whistle’. Behind the scientific façade there is a Social Darwinism that few are willing to confront.
Only recently, in the face of incredible numbers of hospitalizations and deaths from narcotic overdose, the federal government has started to release funds for research. Academic-medical researchers have started to collect and publicize data on the growing epidemic of opiate deaths; they provide shocking maps of the most affected counties and regions. They join the chorus in urging the federal and state agencies to become more actively involved in the usual panacea: ‘education and prevention’. This beehive of activity has come two decades too late into the epidemic and reeks of cynicism.
Funding for research into this phenomenon will not result in any effective long-term programs for confronting these small community-based ‘crises of capitalism’. There is no institution willing to confront the basic cause: the devastation of capitalist– labor relations in post-millennial America, the corrupt nature of state-corporate-pharmaceutical linkages and the chaotic, profit-driven character of our private medical system. Very few writers ever explore how a national, public, single-payer, health system would have clearly prevented with epidemic from the beginning.
Conclusion
Why does the capitalist-state and pharmaceutical elite sustain a socio-economic process, which has led to the large-scale, long-term death of workers and their family members in rural and small town America?
One ready and convincing hypothesis is that the modern dynamic corporate elite profits from the results of ‘demographic change by overdose.’
Corporations gain billions of dollars in profits from the ‘natural decline’ of redundant workers: slashing social and job benefits, such as health plans, pension, vacation, job training programs, allowing employers to increase rates of profits, capital gains, executive bonuses and raises. Public services are eliminated, taxes are reduced and workers, when needed, can be imported – fully formed – from abroad for temporary employment in a ‘free labor market’.
Capitalists profit even more from the technology gains – robots, computerization, etc. – by ensuring that workers do not enjoy reduced hours or increased vacations resulting from their increased productivity. Why share the results of productivity gains with the workers, when the workers can just be eliminated? Dissatisfied workers can turn inward or ‘pop a pill’, but never organize to retake control of their lives and future.
Election experts and political pundits can claim that white American workers reject the major establishment parties because they are ‘angry’ and ‘racist’. These are the workers who now turn to a ‘Donald Trump’. But a deeper analysis would reveal their rational rejection of political leaders who have refused to condemn capitalist exploitation and confront the epidemic of death by overdose.
There is a class basis for this veritable genocide by narcotics raging among white workers and the unemployed in the small towns and rural areas of American: it is the ‘perfect’ corporate solution to a surplus labor force. It is time for American workers and their leaders to wake up to this cruel fact and resist this one-sided class war or continue to mourn more untimely deaths in their own drug-numbed silence.
And it is time for the medical community to demand a ‘patient-first’ publically accountable national health system that rewards service over profit, and responsibility over silent complicity.
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Please note James Petras new collection of essays with Clarity Press:
THE END OF THE REPUBLIC AND THE DELUSION OF EMPIRE
The administrative detention of two Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails was renewed on Sunday, 11 July; they are among nearly 750 Palestinians imprisoned without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders. Both former prisoners who have spent years in Israeli prison, their detentions without charge or trial were extended by military order.
Shadi Jarrar, 37, was ordered to four additional months in administrative detention; a former prisoner released in 2014 who has spent 13 years in Israeli prisons, he was arrested by Israeli occupation forces at a military roadblock near Nablus on 19 March and ordered to four months administrative detention without charge or trial.
Mohammed Al-Tabeesh of Dura, near al-Khalil, was also ordered to four additional months of administrative detention, the third renewal of the detention order against him. He has been jailed since 11 November 2015, also arrested by Israeli occupation forces at a military roadblock in Nablus.
Atabah is a student of Information Technology at An-Najah University in Nablus; he has spent seven years in Israeli prisons over various arrests. He is the brother of Ayman al-Tabeesh, former administrative detainee and long-term hunger striker who has spent 11 years in Israeli prisons, and participated in a previous hunger strike alongside his brother.
Administrative detention orders are issued for one to six months at a time without charge or trial, based on secret evidence. They are indefinitely renewable. Currently, Palestinian prisoner Bilal Kayed is on hunger strike to demand his freedom from administrative detention. Kayed finished his 14.5 year sentence in Israeli prisons on 13 June; instead of being released, he was ordered to administrative detention. Kayed, striking since 15 June, is being supported by hundreds of fellow prisoners, who fear that his case represents a new precedent of indefinite detention of Palestinians who complete their sentences in Israeli prison.
Palestinian resistance movements Islamic Jihad and Hamas have denounced remarks made by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, saying such remarks serve the Zionist occupation.
Faisal, who in the past served as Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief, said at a conference of the Iranian opposition over the weekend that the Iranian regime supports Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine in order to cause instability in the region.
The Islamic Jihad said Faisal’s remarks serve the Israeli agenda that seeks to eliminate the Palestinian cause and open all the Arab and Islamic capitals to the Zionist entity.
“We tell those people: if you can’t stand up for Palestine and its people at least don’t stand by the Zionist entity to condemn the victim,” the Islamic Jihad movement said in a statement on Sunday.
“The Saudi Muslim people won’t accept to pave the way for the Israelis to reach Mecca and Medina.”
For its part, Hamas condemned the remarks, saying they were “baseless.”
“Everyone knows that Hamas is a Palestinian movement fighting the Zionist occupation in the land of Palestine, and has only a Palestinian agenda … and it adopts the concept of moderate Islam,” said a statement by the group.
Hamas further accused Faisal of saying things that serve the “Zionist occupation and provide it with further pretexts to carry out aggression against the Palestinian people.”
Terrorist attacks, an unprecedented refugee influx and other problems with which Europe is struggling to cope are the result of wrong decisions made by European leaders, Syria’s president Bashar Assad told a European Parliament delegation.
“The situation in Syria and the whole region naturally affects Europe a lot due to its location and social ties. The problems Europe faces today of terrorism, extremism and waves of refugees are caused by some western leaders’ adoption of policies which do not serve their people,” Assad told the delegation headed by Javier Couso, Vice Chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the European Parliament, who had been visiting Damascus, Syrian state news agency SANA reported.
This is especially true “when those leaders give support and political cover to terrorist groups inside Syria,” the president added.
He stressed the role that the European Parliament should play in fixing the policies of some of European countries which had let terrorism evolve. Economic sanctions imposed against Damascus have impacted the Syrian people, who were forced to leave their homeland, Assad also said.
Couso noted that the delegation is planning to take steps that would help change western countries’ rhetoric and will call for the lifting of sanctions, which he described as “unfair”.
He promised to “inform the Europeans on the real state of affairs in Syria and on how people suffer from terrorism,” the report said.
Syria plunged into chaos in 2011, when public protests escalated into an armed uprising as foreign powers warned the Assad government against cracking down on the protest. As violence expanded, radical groups and criminal gangs hijacked the process, turning Syria into the bloodiest battle zone of the modern world.
Foreign nations opposing Damascus, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United States and the United Kingdom, have been providing various Syrian opposition groups with aid, saying that only by supporting armed groups trying to topple the Syrian government can the conflict be stopped.
The US and other western countries aided so-called ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria with weapons and training, saying this would help them defeat both the Syrian army and terrorist organizations, which capitalized on the turmoil in Syria. The effort led to some embarrassing moments, for instance when the initial training program for the moderates produced only a handful of fighters after months of recruiting.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the key providers of Syrian rebel groups with military and financial assistance, including some powerful Islamist groups seeking to turn Syria into a country governed by the Sharia law.
Turkey, which was hit most among Syria’s neighbors by the refugee crisis, hosting almost two million asylum seekers, is among the vocal opponents of Damascus too. Critics accuse Ankara of turning a blind eye on rebel activities in its territory, including recruiting, arms shipments and getting medical assistance.
Jihadists from terrorist groups like Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front are among those benefiting from such policies. IS staged a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Turkey since its rise to power in Iraq and Syria, killing hundreds of people. The organization also claimed responsibility for several high-profile attacks in Europe and the US.
The European delegation arrived in Damascus on Saturday. The group visited refugee center in the Syrian capital and met soldiers undergoing treatment in the Hamish hospital.
A French court has sentenced to eight years in jail a tycoon, who previously made unrelated donations to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over a massive fraud scheme.
Arnaud Mimran was convicted of fraud on Thursday and sentenced to eight years in prison and one million-euro fine for the 2008-2009 fraud, which French authorities say resulted in a major tax shortfall.
Mimran has been on trial as a key suspect in a 283 million-euro scam in the trade and taxation of carbon emissions permits.
Ten other defendants were also given prison terms ranging from one to eight years and six were also fined 1 million euros. All the defendants were convicted of aggravated fraud and money-laundering.
Half of the defendants were tried in absentia and one person was acquitted.
The tax scam case has been described as “the heist of a century” by French authorities.
During his trial, the French magnate also testified that on another occasion he had gave 1 million euros to Netanyahu’s election campaign.
Netanyahu’s office has denied any campaign payments and said the contribution was made in 2001 to a fund used while he held no office.
Mimran was convicted of tax offenses in France in the late 1990s as well.
Meanwhile, Israel’s police are reportedly probing whether the prime minister had received illegal contributions from foreign businessmen during his current tenure.
Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, have become embroiled in a series of controversies about how their wealthy lifestyle is funded.
BETHLEHEM – Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett advocated on Thursday for Israel to kidnap Palestinians to be used as leverage to obtain the release of two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two soldiers held in the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli media reported.
In an interview with Radio Darom, Bennett — who leads the far-right Jewish Home party — discussed the issue of releasing Palestinian prisoners as part of a deal to obtain the return of Israeli citizens Avraham Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed, as well as the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, two soldiers killed during Israel’s 2014 offensive on Gaza.
“My policies are consistent over the years: complete opposition to disproportionate deals to free terrorists, and certainly in exchange for bodies,” The Times of Israel quoted Bennett as saying.
According to Israeli news outlet The Jerusalem Post, Bennett then advocated for the kidnapping of Palestinians to pressure for the release of the slain soldiers and missing Israelis.
“We should do what the State of Israel once did,” he said. “What we once did in such situations was we would go and kidnap from the other side, and create new leverage against the other side, rather than releasing more and more terrorists.”
The Jerusalem Post quoted Bennett’s spokesperson as specifying that the far-right political leader was suggesting kidnapping “terrorists,” not Palestinian civilians.
It remained unclear from Bennett’s statement whether he advocated the kidnapping of Palestinians to use as a bargaining chip to exchange with Israelis, in contradiction of his earlier statement, or as an intimidation tactic to coerce those holding the Israelis in Gaza into releasing them.
It was also unclear whether Bennett was pushing for Israel should detain more Palestinians in addition to the 7,000 currently held in Israeli prisons, or hold them completely extrajudicially.
Spokespeople for the Education Ministry and Bennett’s office were unavailable for comment on Friday, the weekend in Israel, to clarify the minister’s statements.
Bennett is well known for his incendiary rhetoric vis-a-vis Palestinians.
In the wake of several attacks last week which killed two Israelis, including a 13-year-old girl, and three Palestinians, Bennett advocated for a number of measures which have been denounced by rights groups as constituting collective punishment.
These proposed measures, many of which have been implemented, included increased settlement construction; stepping up Israel’s policy of demolition of Palestinian property built without permits; full Israeli military control over the entirety of the occupied West Bank; military closures of suspected attackers’ hometowns; the detention of suspected attackers’ family members; and cutting off internet and cellular access to the southern West Bank district of Hebron.
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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The administrative detention of two Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails was renewed on Sunday, 11 July; they are among nearly 750 Palestinians imprisoned without charge or trial under indefinitely renewable administrative detention orders. Both former prisoners who have spent years in Israeli prison, their detentions without charge or trial were extended by military order.
Mohammed Al-Tabeesh of Dura, near al-Khalil, was also ordered to four additional months of administrative detention, the third renewal of the detention order against him. He has been jailed since 11 November 2015, also arrested by Israeli occupation forces at a military roadblock in Nablus.
Palestinian resistance movements Islamic Jihad and Hamas have denounced remarks made by Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, saying such remarks serve the Zionist occupation.
Ten other defendants were also given prison terms ranging from one to eight years and six were also fined 1 million euros. All the defendants were convicted of aggravated fraud and money-laundering.
Aletho News
