There Goes the Guardian, Lying About Ukraine… Again!
By Eric Draitser | CounterPunch | February 20, 2015
The western media is busily trying to prop up their failed narrative of “Russian aggression” in Ukraine in a desperate attempt to legitimize their consciously deceitful reporting. To do so, they are now relying not on experts or western intelligence reports, but a discredited blogger and his corporate media chums.
On February 17, 2015, The Guardian ran a story with the headline “Russia shelled Ukrainians from within its own territory, says study.” The title alone is enough to convince many casual observers that yes, the mainstream media reporting on the civil war in Ukraine has been correct all along. You see, it’s all because of Russian aggression, or so the meme would go. But closer analysis of this story, and the key players involved, should cause any reasonably intelligent and logical person to seriously doubt the veracity of nearly every aspect of the story.
Let’s begin first with the headline and subhead which, as anyone in media knows, is often all that will be read by many readers. The headline leads with a conclusion: Russia shelled Ukraine from within Russian territory. Simple. Clear. Why bother reading further? Well, in reality, the article both overtly and tacitly admits that the so called “study” (more on that later) has not reached that clear conclusion, not even close. Here are some key phrases sprinkled throughout the piece that should give pause to any serious-minded political observer or analyst.
Despite the declaration in the headline, a close reader encounters phrases such as “near conclusive proof,” “estimated trajectories,” “likely firing positions,” and other ambiguous phrases that are more suggestive than they are declarative. In other words, these are mere rhetorical flourishes designed to lead casual, uninformed readers to make conclusions that are simply not backed up by the evidence.
The so called study relied heavily on “crater patterns from satellite photos of three battlefields,” and it is from these crater patterns, and the equally dubious “tyre tracks” that the authors of the study drew their conclusions. However, even the independent military forensics expert contacted by The Guardian “warned that the accuracy of crater analysis in determining direction of fire on the basis of satellite photography was scientifically unproven.”
Indeed, conveniently buried at the end of the long article is the key quote from Stephen Johnson, a weapons expert at the Cranfield Forensic Institute, part of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom who said quite clearly that crater analysis is “highly experimental and prone to inaccuracy.” Mr. Johnson added that “This does not mean there is no value to the method, but that any results must be considered with caution and require corroboration.”
Wait a second. I thought that our dear expert authors of the study had “near conclusive proof” according to the lead paragraphs of the story. When you actually read what the real expert, as opposed to the non-experts who conducted the “study,” has to say, it immediately casts a long shadow of doubt on the entire narrative being propagated by the article. Is The Guardian here guilty of clear manipulation of the story for political purposes? It would seem at best unprofessional and dishonest reporting, at worst it’s outright lying in the service of the agenda of those at the top of the western political establishment.
Now of course we know that The Guardian has repeatedly been taken to task by highly respected journalists and analysts for its biased and one-sided reporting of issues ranging from its coverage of Russian President Putin and Russia’s actions in Crimea, to its shamefully biased (here, here and here for three of the many examples) coverage of Israel-Palestine conflict, and a number of other important issues.
Perhaps most germane to this discussion is The Guardian’s own reporting last summer, which it references in this article, of Russian military vehicles crossing the border into Ukraine – a significant charge that would be taken seriously if there were one shred of tangible proof. But alas there isn’t. There is only the word of The Guardian’s reporter Shaun Walker, who conveniently could not get a photograph or video of the alleged military vehicles crossing into Ukraine. One would think with mobile phones all equipped with cameras and the vast resources of a major western media outlet, not to mention the seemingly all-encompassing global surveillance architecture at the disposal of western governments, at least some credible, verifiable evidence would have emerged. But no, we just have to take the Guardian’s word for it.
There’s a lot of that going around when it comes to Ukraine. We just have to “take their word for it,” as we were supposed to with regard to the charges of Russian military shooting down MH17, a baseless charge that has since disappeared from the headlines, with the actual results of the investigation being buried or suppressed entirely.
Not only should The Guardian’s reporting be scrutinized, but so too should their darling “expert” blogger Eliot Higgins, aka Brown Moses, the author of this inconclusive “conclusive report.”
Fifty Shades of Brown
Aside from the deceptive language and misleading statements, there is a broader issue that must be addressed, namely the reliability of the source of this so called study. Perhaps first we should dispense with the use of the term “study” as that would imply experts using objective facts, data, etc. Rather, what we are dealing with is a politically motivated report by a source that has already been discredited numerous times.
The report comes from an organization called Bellingcat, purportedly an independent citizen journalism platform that uses social media and other open source information to draw conclusions about everything from military hardware movements to the firing of missiles and artillery. Of course it should immediately raise questions that The Guardian’s article is co-authored by one Eliot Higgins, a self-proclaimed “military expert” who founded the “Brown Moses” blog. Why is this important? Because Bellingcat is a creation of the same Eliot Higgins. Indeed, Bellingcat’s Kickstarter page made no secret of the fact that “Bellingcat is a website founded by Brown Moses… the pseudonym for Eliot Higgins, a laid-off government worker turned blogger turned weapons analysis expert and leading source of information on the conflict in Syria.”
A close look at some of the blurbs noted on the Kickstarter page reveals that this “independent blogger” has been touted by The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, UK’s Channel 4, The Daily Beast, and many other corporate media outlets. Anyone with an understanding of how hard it is to actually be an independent analyst knows that such establishment outlets do not simply promote independent media that provides thoughtful analysis. Rather, Brown Moses and Bellingcat have been seized upon as a convenient foil to true alternative media, spinning the establishment narrative under the guise of “independent reporting.” However, let us not simply deride this obvious sham. Let us evaluate Brown Moses’ own record, which for an “expert” is dismal.
Higgins aka Brown Moses aka BM claimed to have proven that the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta, Syria on August 21, 2013 could only have been carried out by the Syrian military and government. His claims are based on his own “expert” analysis of missile trajectories and other “evidence” he claims to have obtained through videos and other open source information. Of course, in making this claim, Higgins places himself in direct opposition to former UN weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and Prof. Theodore Postel of MIT, the authors of an actual report from the MIT Science, Technology, and Global Security Working Group entitled “Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013.” The report, conducted by real experts, not armchair bloggers, concluded that the Syrian government could not have carried out the attack, and that such intelligence was nearly used as justification for yet another aggressive war.
Also debunking BM’s spurious charges is the report from Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh which revealed the existence of a classified US Defense Intelligence Agency briefing which noted unequivocally that the Al Nusra Front had its own chemical weapons, not to mention deep ties to Saudi and Turkish intelligence and chemical arms suppliers. Hersh’s reporting finally firmly established the fact that the rebels were indeed capable of carrying out the attack on East Ghouta, and that they had help from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and possibly other regional actors. And so, not only did they have the motive (to blame Assad for using chemical weapons while international investigators were in Syria, thereby justifying a military intervention and regime change), but also the means and opportunity. This is an essential point because the entire ‘case’ against Assad relied on the fact that only Damascus was technologically and logistically capable of carrying out such an attack.
But BM contended that he was right, Hersh, Lloyd, and Postel were wrong, and that the narrative should reflect that. So, on the one hand we have a blogger with no formal training in ballistics, physics, or any relevant scientific or military field, and on the other we have a Pulitzer Prize winner with decades of experience and high-level contacts and sources all over the world. We have the word of some guy in an apartment in the UK, or the scientifically arrived at findings of a former chemical weapons inspector (read actual expert) and an internationally respected Professor of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, a world renowned academic and research institution. And which do you think The Guardian chose to promote?
But BM’s noxious odor also pervades the reporting on the downing of MH 17, yet another story that The Guardian utterly distorted, before mostly dropping it from the headlines when the western narrative was discredited. In an August 2, 2014 article written by Higgins entitled “MH17 Missiles Can’t Hide From These Internet Sleuths,” Higgins claims to have concluded that Russia or the anti-Kiev rebels must have shot down the plane with a Buk missile launcher – a weapons system also in the possession of Kiev’s military. What is his evidence? It’s a series of photographs published in various media outlets that he cannot corroborate in any way. Instead, this “sleuth” is making his case based on faith – faith that the photographs were taken where and when they claim to have been, and show what they claim to show.
Of course, it has since been publicly acknowledged on more than one occasion that photographs purporting to show Russian military incursions into Ukraine have been fabricated and/or misrepresented causing tremendous embarrassment for US and European governments that have repeatedly claimed to have such evidence. But our dear BM is unfazed by such revelations. Instead, he seems to simply shriek louder. Rather than leaving analysis of MH 17 to aviation and military experts, he peddles his “opinion.” Rather than acknowledging the bias in his own reporting, to say nothing of the limitations of armchair technical analysis, he continues to grow his image, and with it, the lies, omissions, and distortions he propagates.
And so we return to the new “study” by Higgins and his Bellingcat group of “digital detectives.” They are obviously front-and-center in the western media because their conclusions are aligned with the US-NATO political agenda. They are a de facto arm of the western corporate media and military-industrial complex, providing the veneer of “independent analysis” in order to penetrate the blogosphere and social media platforms where the mainstream narrative is being questioned, scrutinized, and discredited. Bellingcat and Higgins’ names should be known to everyone, but not because their analysis is worthwhile. Rather, they need to become household names so that those who understand how western propaganda and soft power actually works, will be on the lookout for more of their disinformation.
Perhaps The Guardian should also be more careful in how it presents its information. By promoting Higgins and his discredited outfit, they are once again promoting disinformation for the purposes of selling war. The US almost went to war with Syria (which it is doing now anyway) based on the flawed intelligence and “analysis” of people like Higgins. Naturally, everyone remembers how The Guardian, like all of its corporate media brethren, helped to sell the Iraq War based on complete lies. Have they learned nothing? It would seem so.
But those interested in peace and truth, we have learned something about propaganda and lies used to sell war. We who have called out these lies repeatedly – from Iraq in 2003, to Syria and Ukraine today – we once again repudiate the false narrative and the drumbeat for war. We reject the corporate media propagandists and their “alternative media” appendages. We stand for peace. And unlike The Guardian and Higgins, we stand on firm ground.
Eric Draitser can be reached at ericdraitser@gmail.com.
Hamas says no militants crossed into Egypt from Gaza
MEMO | February 21, 2015
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri
Palestinian faction Hamas on Saturday denied reports of militants crossing into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula from the Gaza Strip.
“There haven’t been any militants crossing [into Egypt from Gaza], especially after the destruction of all underground tunnels and the deployment of [Egyptian and Palestinian] security forces on border,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement.
Abu Zuhri called on Arab parties to shoulder their responsibility in standing against any form of “slander and incitement” against the Palestinian people.
He also went on to appeal to scholars and intellectuals to organize a major media campaign to expose what he described as “pro-Israel media”.
On Friday, the United Arab Emirates-based Sky News Arabia reported that the Egyptian army raised the alert level in the country’s eastern Sinai Peninsula following reports that militants from self-styled “Army of Islam” group crossed into Egypt from Gaza.
The Egyptian army has not commented on the report.
Last month, an Egyptian court declared the military wing of Hamas, Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, a “terrorist organisation.”
Abu Zuhri had described the court verdict as “politically-motivated”, and reiterated that his movement does not interfere in Egypt’s internal affairs.
Defending Ukraine From Russian Imperialism?
By Jason Hirthler | CounterPunch | February 20, 2015
In Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, the philosopher delivered his summarization of the writings of Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas thusly, “Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.”
American foreign policy is determined in much the same fashion. Valuable objects are desired. Noble justifications are manufactured. Trusting populations are deceived. War is made. Empires do their special pleading on a global scale. For instance, the U.S. and its allies know precisely how they want to portray the Ukrainian conflict to their deluded Western populations. They need only apply the false flags and fashion the nefarious motives—like so many brush strokes—to the canvas of geopolitics.
Both the government and their corporate media vassals know their conclusions in advance. They are simple: Russia is the aggressor; America is the defender of freedom; and NATO is a gallant security force that must counter Moscow’s bellicosity. As the chief pleader in the construction of this fable, the Obama administration has compiled a litany of lies about the conflict that it disseminates almost daily to its press flacks.
One lie is that Putin has a feverishly expansionist foreign policy. No evidence exists for this claim, repeated ad nauseum in the West. The annexation of Crimea hardly seems like an example of such a policy. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to secede from Ukraine. Russia was quite content with its long-term agreements with Kiev over the stationing of its Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol. It was the Kiev putsch that forced its hand.
There are plenty of signals that Putin has sent a stream of conscripts across the border to battle alongside the besieged “rebel separatists” in the East of Ukraine. But is this a crime of imperialism, sending soldiers to defend communities of ethnic peers under attack? Seems a difficult argument to make.
Moreover, Moscow has long stated that it wouldn’t permit NATO bases on its border—a purely defensive stance. The West knows this, but that is precisely its plan. It also surely knew that by capsizing Kiev and installing a few Westernized technocrats, it would provoke Russia into taking Crimea rather than sacrifice its Black Sea outpost. This cynical baiting permitted Washington to frame its aggression as self-defense, and Moscow’s self-defense as aggression. For context, consider how the U.S. might react if China suddenly toppled Mexico City using local drug lords with the aim of stationing hypersonic glide missiles in Tijuana. For once, Washington’s contempt for diplomacy would be justified.
Another lie is that we know Russia was behind the downing of MH17. Obama repeated this outlandish claim in the pulpit of the United Nations, no less. No proof exists, but plenty of circumstantial evidence seriously undermines the charge—missing air traffic controller (ATC) transcripts, the absence of satellite evidence of Buk anti-aircraft missile launchers in rebel territory, shelling traces on cockpit material, and Ukrainian ATC worker tweets pointing the finger at Kiev, and so on. Yet within hours of the crash, Barack Obama had told the world that Russian-backed separatists were responsible, and that Moscow must be punished. Nobody owns the narrative better than the USA.
A third lie is that the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych was a democratic uprising. Interesting how these always seem to occur wherever America has “strategic interests” in peril. Only then does the fever for representative government seize upon the minds of the rabble. Setting fantasy aside, the most reasonable conclusion, judging not least by admissions from Victoria Nuland and Obama himself, is that the U.S. engineered a coup using fascist thugs in the vanguard, and false flag shootings to drive Yanukovych into hurried exile. Odd how it all occurred when Yanukovych, after prevaricating for a time, discarded his association agreement with the EU for a better Russian offer. (Note likewise how Syria erupted in violence immediately following Bashar al-Assad’s decision to reject a Western-backed Qatari pipeline deal in favor of an Iranian one. In both cases, the inciting incidents were examples of an imperial province defying the diktats of Rome.)
A fourth lie is that Western sanctions against Russia are merited, since they are based on Russian aggression. However, a State Department run by his rhetorical eminence, Secretary of State John Kerry, would never phrase it so bluntly. Instead, we were informed that Russia was being chastened for “violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” and because it had worked to, “undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets.” One can just imagine the media flacks in speechless submission as this decree was sonorously recited from on high. None of this puffery removes the fact that the coup was a contemptuous move to bring NATO to the edges of Russia.
Bootlickers Anonymous
My, how the media lemmings fall in line with the official rhetoric. Dutiful to a fault, Western corporate media have performed their servile tasks with aplomb this month. A Thursday Times edition earlier in the month led with the headline, “U.S. and Europe working to end Ukraine fighting.” Saturday morning’s edition led with “U.S. faults Russia as combat spikes in East Ukraine.” A lead in the Economist put it rather more bluntly, “Putin’s war on the West.” Beneath the headline was a Photoshopped image of the Russian President, looking resolute, hand extended with puppet strings dangling from each digit. The op-ed pages of the Washington Post teemed with vitriol, continuing efforts to portray Obama as a latter-day Neville Chamberlain, arch appeaser of transparent tyrants. The “alarmingly passive” White House should be more concerned about how “to keep Vladimir Putin in line.”
This isn’t nuanced propaganda. It isn’t hedging or garden variety bias. It’s flat-out mendacity. Surely these publications have, as none of the rest of us does, the resources to know that the United States, trailed by its milquetoast EU lackeys, is trying to provoke a conflict between nuclear powers in eastern Ukraine. It either wants Russia to quit backing eastern rebels and permit NATO to establish bases on its border, or allow itself to be drawn into a resource-sapping proxy war. The end goal of the former is to divide Moscow from Europe. The goal of the latter is to vastly diminish the federation’s capacity to support its Shiite and Alawite allies in the Middle East, all of who stand in the way of Washington’s feverish dream of regional hegemony. Neither option holds much hope for residents of Donetsk, Luhansk and the surrounding oblasts, or provinces.
Yet the Times leads the Western world in disseminating, in every Starbuck’s in America, the folderol that our high-minded, hand-wringing, and munificent leaders are pursuing peace. This despite the unquenchable imperial ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will not cease his provocations until he has resurrected the former glory of the Soviet Union, circa the Stalin era. How soon before the term “Hun” starts circulating? We’ve already got warmongering Senators releasing fake photos and cantankerously arguing that Obama is weak in the face of a world-historical threat.
Howitzers for Peace
Despite hysterical claims that Obama is a dove and tremulous fears that Putin will roll unopposed across the European mainland, the U.S. Congress approved new sanctions on Russia just before Christmas. The Orwellian, “Ukraine Freedom and Support Act” was intended to make sure that Vladimir Putin, “pays for his assault on freedom and security in Europe,” according to co-author of the bill, Senator Larry Corker, the Republican who will soon chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
But what are sanctions without a little lethal aid thrown in? The bill also provided $350 million in such aid to Kiev. That means “anti-tank and anti-armor weapons, crew weapons and ammunition, counter-artillery radars to identify and target artillery batteries, fire control, range finder, and optical and guidance and control equipment, tactical troop-operated surveillance drones, and secure command and communications equipment.”
Now President Obama, tired of the pretense of diplomacy, is said to be weighing a recommendation from the always-helpful Brookings Institute to speed some $3 billion more in military aid to Kiev, including missiles, drones and armored Humvees. Look at this stern-faced collection of the pale and pious, spines erect as they advocate more slaughter in East Ukraine, where the U.N. has condemn both sides of the conflict—Western-backed Ukrainian government and the Russian-supported Novorossiya Army in the East—of indiscriminate shelling, which no doubt accounts for the hundreds of civilian deaths in just the last few weeks. A million have already fled to Russia as shelling from their own nation’s army has destroyed power and medical infrastructure, one of the first steps toward the impoverishment of a region. Couple that physical distress with the economic stress being implemented through Kiev’s agreement with the European Union.
The U.S. has also promised energy aid to Kiev to counter—as the media generally puts it—Russian threats to cut gas supplies. It is rarely noted that Kiev has refused to pay or even schedule payments on its $2 billion past-due invoice on previous deliveries. This is no doubt a Western prescription or precondition of assistance.
Note the staggering disparities here. Kiev owes Russia $2 billion in back payments. Vice President Joe Biden promises $50 million in energy relief, none of which will make it to Moscow. Then the president weighs in with $350 million in military aid and contemplates a staggering $3 billion more. He also offers a piddling $7 million for humanitarian purposes alongside some 46 million in the same bill for border security and the like.
That’s some $3.35 billion to further destroy a fractured Ukrainian society and $57 million to help repair it. Forgive me for being obtuse, but how is this peacemaking? Yet Secretary of State Kerry, Senator John McCain and others in Congress have continuously cast the conflict in defensive terms, producing all manner of fabrication to support the conceit. In the next sound byte, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says the alliance wants to double its Response Force to some 30,000 troops. France’s Hollande has called for Ukrainian entry into NATO.
Peace Before the Thaw?
Amid all this belligerent posturing, cameras crisply flashed when Angela Merkel and Francoise Hollande, Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko concluded a second Minsk ceasefire agreement last week, implemented Sunday. It was perhaps a last ditch effort by a temporizing EU to prevent a vicious proxy war, or possibly more insincere diplomatic posturing to provide cover for Western aggression. In any event, Washington was notably absent, but surely it loomed large over the meetings. The core points of the accord include a withdrawal of heavy weapons behind the nominal buffer zone; amnesty for prisoners; withdrawal of foreign militias and disarming of illegal groups; decentralization of areas controlled by Novorossiya Armed Forces, supposedly in the form of constitutional reform; but also Ukrainian control of the Russian border by year’s end. Despite the agreement, the battle for city of Debaltseve continued, with the rebels—or “terrorists” in Kiev parlance—finally emerging victorious yesterday and driving the Ukrainian Army into retreat.
Betting on peace isn’t a smart call in this circumstance. Already radical voices have flared up in Kiev and also in rebel circles declaring their contempt for the agreement. None of the contracting parties in Minsk seem to have control over these groups. Poroshenko himself said he agreed to the first Minsk agreement to let his troops regroup, and he has evidently refused the stipulation of constitutional reform this time around. Nor has Washington shown any serious interest in implementing a peace plan. In fact, the financial outlay by the White House suggests this is no token conflict, but part of a larger imperial strategy that many pundits claim doesn’t exist.
But it does. Look at Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s strategic master plan, laid out in his book The Grand Chessboard, among others. Then see how that plan found its apostles in the neoconservative movement, re-articulated in Paul Wolfowitz’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance for the Clinton administration, and later in the Bush administration’s madcap blueprint for reshaping the Middle East. As ever, the objective is full-spectrum dominance, an arcadia or nightmare, depending on which side of the imperial fence you find yourself.
Jason Hirthler can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
French Media Documents Israeli Reporter’s Fraudulent Paris Walk on Muslim “Wild Side”
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | February 18, 2015
Though Israeli “journalist” Zvika Klein’s Paris “walk on the wild side” through allegedly Muslim Paris neighborhoods aroused indignation in Israeli and western media, the story aroused skepticism in French media. The French publication Les Inrocks published an investigative piece and interview with Klein which undermined many of the claims and assumptions on which his video was based. Thanks to reader Deir Yassin for bringing the article to my attention.
As I noted in an earlier post, Klein claims he walked through Paris for “ten hours,” yet the entire video is 1:36. Almost half of the video shows him walking with no interaction with anyone (let alone being insulted). So there is less than one minute of negative interaction with Parisian Muslims.
At one point, Klein claims a woman spat at him. Yet you cannot see what he claims on the video itself. He admits in his NRG article that he also was accompanied by a “security guard” because of “tense conditions” in the city. One wonders if Klein half expected or hoped that he would be attacked by an Islamist in order to get a really good story.
In an interview with Les Inrocks, Klein claims to have walked through the 23rd Arrondissement. There are only 20 in Paris. He also claims he walked through Barbes in the Parisian suburbs when it’s in the city center. He claimed he was constantly harassed in Saracelles, but one-third of this neighborhood is itself Jewish. Apparently, Jewish residents have figured out a way to live with their Muslim neighbors.
As you read him, Klein’s fear and racist assumptions about Paris’ Muslims becomes ever clearer:
At times, it feels like wandering around Ramallah. Most of the women wore veils and hijabs and the men had distinctively Muslim faces. Arabic was heard everywhere… I would be lying if I didn’t say I was frightened.
Klein’s own video puts the lie to his claims about the dress of women he passed. In only one short section are the heads of women covered at all and no women wear hijabs in all the video footage he displays. In fact, the hijab is legally prohibited in France.
A French reader who walks in Paris daily says the last time she saw anyone wearing a hijab was months ago. As for “distinctively Muslim faces” you can see many such faces in Israel, and they are the faces of Mizrahi Jews, not Muslims. She lives in the 19th Arrondissement, a popular new neighborhood where Orthodox Jews have flocked since they were driven out of the Marais by gentrification. She sees scores of kippot each day on the streets and in the Metro. Apparently these French Jews don’t face the problems Klein found.
The Les Inrocks article also displays a tweet Klein published during Operation Protective Edge in which he quotes Meir Habib, a member of the French legislature who represents overseas French voters in Israel. Habib is also the former Likud Party spokesperson in France.
French MP Meyer Habib to http://www.nrg.co.il : “Unfortunatley, I don’t think there is a future for Jews in France”.
Read the interview Klein published with Habib in NRG. None of the quotations he included in the article have Habib saying what he claimed in the tweet. At no time does he say there is no future for Jews in France. And even if he did, Habib is little more than a Likud appointee dutifully representing the views of his master, the Israeli prime minister, who’s called publicly for all Jews to leave not just France, but all of Europe. I asked Klein to explain the discrepancy, but he hasn’t responded.
Klein’s foray into the heart of the Paris’ Muslim beast is an extension of the Robert Spencer fake “No-Go” claims about UK cities like Birmingham. The truth is that there are no No-Go neighborhoods in any European city where Jews may not walk without being in fear of their lives. If you create a provocation and act suspiciously as Klein did taking a cameraman and security guard with him into such a neighborhood, then of course you will arouse suspicion. And why wouldn’t you?
The French publication also researched Klein’s background, job history, and previous social media activity. Earlier in his career, he served in the IDF spokesman’s unit responsible for outreach to the Orthodox community. After that, he did similar work for Bnai Akiva, the Orthodox Zionist youth organization. You’ll remember that the world leader of B’nai Akiva, Rabbi Noam Perel, urged the IDF to avenge the kidnap-murder of three Israeli youth by collecting the foreskins of 300 Palestinians, just as David had offered 200 Philistines foreskins as a bride price to King Saul for his daughter. That should tell you quite a bit about Klein’s own views of “Arabs.”
Consider also this distinguished part of Klein’s journalistic oeuvre: a profile of an American motorcycle gang, Defenders of Liberty, which boasts on its Facebook page that it will demonstrate in Washington in favor of Bibi Netanyahu’s speech.
On a related subject, the leader of a distinguished French Jewish organization fighting anti-Semitism has roundly condemned Netanyahu’s pandering to French Jews. This is a translation by Walid of an article in Le Figaro :
In an interview of Alain Jakubowicz, the President of the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism by Le Figaro, he said Jews in France have a future there since they have a past and that he has asked Netanyahu to stop encouraging French Jews to return to Israel. Jakubowicz said that it was to be expected for Israeli leaders to do it but that Netanyahu’s repeated calls to do so are devastating. There is a way that this should be asked but the way Netanyahu is doing it is menacing and cataclysmic. Netanyahu conveys to French Jews that they are second class citizens that their country can no longer protect.
Jakubowicz went on to say that Netanyahu is re-asserting that Jews have dual loyalties and that they aren’t really French, which feeds anti-Semitism. He also said that the reunification of all the world’s Jews in Israel to create a village worthy of Asterix would be a disaster for the world and for the Jews. It is often thought there is an exodus of French Jews, which is an exaggeration. In fact, thousands have chosen to go to Israel and elsewhere; some of these had problems living their Judaism according to the Torah in neighbourhoods of a secular society, but this is not an exodus and it shouldn’t become one. There is a difference between what happened with Merah (Toulouse) and Charlie Hebdo; this must be deconstructed to show that it’s a matter of French citizens.
Zvika Klein might’ve done better to publish an interview and profile of Jakubowicz than gallivant around Paris needlessly provoking a harsh Muslim response.
German TV Channel in Trouble After Being Caught in Ukraine War Lie
Sputnik News | 17.02.2015
The German federal television channel ZDF got into a bit of trouble recently after a citizens’ media monitoring group called them out over false reporting on the presence of Russian tanks in eastern Ukraine.
A German media monitoring organization has filed a complaint against federal channel ZDF over false reporting on the situation in eastern Ukraine, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten has reported.
The complaint, filed by a citizens’ group known as the Permanent Open Committee of Media Monitoring, revolves around a photo accompanying a recent news segment airing on ZDF about alleged Russian military presence in eastern Ukraine.
The segment, which described the alleged movement of Russian tanks and missile systems into eastern Ukraine, featured a photo with the caption “Russian armored vehicles moved through Isvarino in the Lugansk region, February 12, 2015,” citing “Ukrainian army spokesman Andrei Lysenko in Kiev.” The only problem is that the image in question was actually taken several years earlier, in 2009, and in South Ossetia, not Ukraine.
In their complaint to ZDF, one of Germany’s largest broadcasters, the Open Committee notes that “it would be interesting to know why such an image, which has nothing to do with the news in question, is being repeated, meant as it is to convince a third party of the truthfulness of assumptions about an “invasion by [Russian] armor.”
Maren Mueller, one of the founders of the Open Committee and a former media worker herself, believes that much of German coverage of events in eastern Ukraine is tainted by distortions, half-truths and outright lies. Mueller says that “the coverage of events in Ukraine by the media has reached the height of fantasy, and is not worth taking seriously.” She notes that the tank story is just one example of the kinds of distortions that regularly occur. Recently, German media watchers forced an ARD correspondent to retract his words on the deaths of two civilians in Krasnoarmeysk, after the latter had erroneously claimed that the deaths were caused by “the bullets of the new rulers,” meaning the anti-Kiev rebels. The channel has since been forced to issue an apology over the mistake.
Ms. Mueller believes that among the biggest problems of the German media’s coverage of events is the “dangerous closeness” between the media’s line and that of the description of the conflict being provided in the government.
Last week a senior American official faced embarrassment on the Senate floor after it turned out that photos of Russian tanks he was presenting as proof of Russian involvement in Ukraine were also from the war in South Ossetia. After finding out that the photos weren’t from the Ukraine war, Inhofe stated that “the Ukrainian parliament members who gave us these photos in print form as if it came directly from a camera really did themselves a disservice. We felt confident to release these photos because the images match the reporting of what is going on in the region. I was furious to learn one of the photos provided now appears to be falsified from an AP photo taken in 2008.”
Iran Denies Claims on New Khamenei Letter to Obama
Al-Akhbar | February 16, 2015
Iran has denied reports that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote to US President Barack Obama in response to an October letter mooting cooperation against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Khamenei, who has the final say in all matters of state in Iran, had sent a secret but noncommittal letter to Obama in response to his overture.
But in a statement released late on Sunday, the foreign ministry denied there had been any new correspondence.
“The US president has already previously written letters and in some cases there have been replies,” ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said.
“There has been no new letter.”
The Journal reported that Khamenei had raised an array of historic grievances against the United States in his response to Obama’s letter, which suggested cooperation against ISIS if Iran reaches a deal with world powers on its nuclear program.
Tehran is an ally of both Baghdad and Damascus in their fights against ISIS but has kept its distance from the US-led coalition carrying out air campaigns in the two countries.
Iran and other critics opposed to US involvement in the conflict with ISIS have pointed out that Washington, in partnership with its Gulf allies, played a role in the formation and expansion of extremist groups like ISIS by arming, financing and politically empowering armed opposition groups in Syria.
Iran also believes the US and Britain are using the Islamist threat to justify their renewed presence in the region.
Iran and the US have not had diplomatic ties since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
However, there has been a growing recognition that Iran could play a role in helping to restore stability in countries such as Iraq and Syria.
Since the election of President Hassan Rouhani in June 2013, Iran-US relations have entered a new phase. In November 2014, for the first time since the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s foreign minister and the US secretary of state had a direct bilateral meeting in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear program.
(AFP, Al-Akhbar)
Why Jonathan Freedland Isn’t Fit to be the New Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian
By Blake Alcott | CounterPunch | February 13, 2015
Should Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s Executive Editor, Opinion, take over the editor-in-chief’s post from Alan Rusbridger? Freedland’s instalment is rumoured to be a condition set by the New York Times if the two enlightened North Atlantic papers are to merge, but even without this his chances seem good.
A central topic for both papers, as for the world in general, is Palestine, Israel, the Middle East. The topic is said by Freedland himself to have been his specialty for some twenty years. I have read through 100 of his writings on the subject in the Guardian, the Jewish Chronicle and the New York Review of Books and conclude that their content should worry the Guardian staff, its readers and his employer The Scott Trust. His support for Israel is unbalanced, violates the Guardian’s commitment to liberalism and is rooted in an ethnocentricity that enables him to alternatively ignore Palestinians and justify their forced transfer out of Palestine.
In order of decreasing importance:
* He justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
* His writing is Israel-centric and biased towards Israel.
* His Mideast world is largely free of Palestinians.
* He conflates criticism of Israel with ‘anti-semitism’.
* His narrative is largely that of Israeli hasbara.
Ethnic cleansing condoned
Freedland’s friend and Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit made a stir in 2013 with his portrayal of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, by murder and expulsion, of the Arab-Palestinian town of Lydda in July 1948. In one of his reviews of Shavit’s story Freedland correctly writes that Shavit “meticulously reconstructs events in the mainly [sic] Arab town of Lydda in July 1948, when soldiers of the embryonic [sic] Israeli army emptied the place [sic] of its Palestinian inhabitants and… killed more than 300 civilians”. He confirms Shavit’s admission that “Zionism carried out a massacre”; it resolved that the Arabs of Lydda be “expelled quickly”: “if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine an Arab Lydda could not exist…”
In another review of Shavit his claim is incorrect, however, that Shavit only “touches on the question of justification too” and “avoids a direct answer”. Shavit’s ‘shoot and weep’ approval is very clear. He writes that “the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda… I will not damn the brigade commander and the military governor and the 3rd Battalion soldiers. On the contrary, if need be, I’ll stand by the damned, because I know that if not for them the State of Israel would not have been born… They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.” Shavit harbours righteous anger towards the “critics of later years who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deed.” His final solution is the status quo: “Do I wash my hands of Zionism? Do I turn my back on the Jewish national movement that carried out the destruction of Lydda? No.”
Freedland concurs. As Ben White shows, already in 2004 in a book chapter Freedland wrote, “I have long believed Israel should be strong enough to admit the reality of 1948 – and to defend it all the same.” White demonstrates that while Freedland has passionately condemned ethnic cleansing in Darfur and Kosovo, he not only does not condemn the Zionist actions of 1948 (and since) but, as in his book Jacob’s Gift as well, he condones the ethnic cleansing; the “flight, expulsion and dispossession, the emptying of 400 villages and the creation of around 700,000 refugees” was all right because “the creation of a Jewish state was a moral necessity”, the Jews had “the right… of the drowning man” to force the Palestinians off Palestinian land. As Shavit says, “If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.” Both Shavit and Freedland choose Zionism. In the same breath and in bad taste, Freedland exhibits his cleverness by joking that Shavit is “a Wasp, a White Ashkenazi Supporter of Peace”.
Further hard evidence against Freedland is found in a 2008 Guardian ‘Sounds Jewish’ podcast wherein he says, “I’m of the view that says admit the price that was paid but then say to the world, tragically, it was necessary, given the place the Jews were in given the calamity of their own, the slaughter in the holocaust. So I think you have to, you can be cleared-eyed and honest about this. It doesn’t actually compromise the moral need that Israel had 60 years ago, to admit that in order to implement that moral need there were terrible sufferings for other people involved.” As he preaches in his August 2014 review, while the blood of Operation Protective Edge was flowing, “the Jewish state had become a mortal [sic] need” and a “moral necessity”.
To understand the endorsement of how Israel was ‘born’ by ‘left Zionists’ such as Shavit, Freedland and Benny Morris it is necessary to read Shavit’s seminal 2004 Ha’aretz interview with Morris, reprinted in full in Counterpunch. In Freedland’s own critical yet friendly 2009 Guardian interview of Morris, Freedland eschews any expression of his personal opinion on Morris’ derogatory generalisations about Arabs, but instead uses rhetorical displacement to note merely that Morris’ language will make “liberal Israelis, liberal Jews, just liberals… squirm”; “people would [say] that’s… racism”. Compare Shavit’s relatively bold reply to Morris’ approval of Ben Gurion’s “purification” of Israel of gentiles: “I don’t hear you condemning him.”
Readers who like to read between the lines will like Freedland’s review of three biographies of Ariel Sharon, the ‘Butcher of Beirut’, Israel’s main post-1947 purifier who “embodied [Zionism’s] determined quest for land and its readiness to use brutal force.” Notwithstanding some ambiguity, Freedland is an admirer. Sharon may be an “enigma” to Freedland – less so, one suspects, to Palestinians – and have left an “uncertain legacy” – a view that would induce bafflement amongst Palestinians and Lebanese – but he was a “warrior” whose life was “rich in the raw material from which myths are made”, a “soldier… who… chased away enemies” and debriefed his own soldiers “even as a bullet remained freshly lodged in his leg”, a “new breed of Jewish warrior” who was “ruthless in the pursuit of safe and generous borders for the Jewish state”.
In an example of his amoral attitude towards Palestinian issues, Freedland judges Sharon’s building of “the separation barrier”, his decision that the Palestinians must be “bombed, harassed and intimidated” and his “pursuit of the settlement project” not on ethical grounds but rather on the grounds that these undermine Israel’s true interests. Sharon is nothing worse than “a weak strategist” who failed to see “the problem” of the demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish nature of equal numbers of Palestinians – in Freedland’s words, the need to leave “fewer Palestinians on Israel’s books, so to speak”. In violation of a central liberal tenet, Zionism and Israel have always manipulated demographics for political ends.
Back to the present. In his piece last summer ‘Liberal Zionism after Gaza’ Freedland’s writes, “Privately, people admit to growing tired of defending Israeli military action when it comes at such a heavy cost in civilian life, its futility confirmed by the frequency with which it has to be repeated.” One reads and gasps: murder “has to be” done. Freedland is by the way neither emotionally nor intellectually able to regard Gazans’ firing of rockets using the same lifeboat ethics used by the “liberal Zionists” [sic] regarding Lydda: a question of survival, either you or me.
Freedland’s support for ethnic cleansing is by itself enough to disqualify him from not only the chief editorship but his present job. Condoning the Nakba is out of bounds. It is a moral failing to believe Palestinians should pay for crimes committed by Christians in Europe. The message that two wrongs don’t make a right is beneath every standard for which the Guardian otherwise battles day in and day out.
Israel-centrism
Freedland is strongly and openly biased towards Zionism/Israel in this century-old conflict. He takes sides, is both personally and ideologically bound up with Israel, admittedly looking for its name in any list of countries, quickening at any sight of its flag. Outside of New York and London his time is spent in Israel, not Palestine or other Arab places. As he wrote in 2013, “My views [are] rooted in the firm desire to see Israel survive and thrive…” However, because Israel’s thriving is at the expense of the lives and dignity of the Palestinians his personal, understandable bias becomes relevant to one of the leading liberal newspapers of the world.
Freedland admits to following Israeli politics “obsessively”. What little he writes about Palestinian or Arab politics is superficial, and even columns about recent events in Syria or Egypt, or the Arab Spring, are analysed almost exclusively in their relation to Israel. “Where those watching from afar can afford to feel only hope for Arab democracy, it is understandable that Israelis feel mainly fear.” While noting that Zionism “was all about” a similar quest for “self-determination”, he “understands” Israel’s lack of joy at the prospect of the Arab spring and Arab democracy, cynically if circumspectly endorsing Moshe Aren’s dictum that “Peace you make with dictators.” Israel’s support for anti-democracy in its region is “understandable”. Freedland is using a double standard, and his allegiance to democracy less than full.
As with democracy, so with pluralism. Simultaneously downplaying and confirming the strength of the Israel lobby in the US, Freedland once warns AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) to be more tolerant of opposing views. AIPAC’s intolerance “is not just an offence against pluralism, it also hurts the very cause AIPAC purports to serve: Israel.” The bottom line is not ethics or liberalism, it is Israel.
When in May 2013 Stephen Hawking joined the academic boycott by cancelling a planned appearance in Israel, Freedland directed his concern not to the reasons why Hawking might adhere to the boycott call, and much less to the arguments of the Palestinian academics making the call, but to the frightful prospect that the boycott’s endorsement by people of the calibre of Hawking might lead to Israel’s being “shunned and vilified” as a “pariah state” by the “mainstream”. As so often Freedland addresses “those who wish the best for Israel”, evidencing no interest in the meaning for Palestinians of Hawking’s employing this peaceful method of pressuring Israel. Similarly, at the height of the bloodshed in Gaza he used the Tricycle Theatre’s refusal to host films financed by the Israeli government as a chance to once again arrive at his bottom line, namely Israel’s “strategically calamitous situation”, its “pariah status that is looming”, and the damage to its “standing in the world”.
Even the funeral of Nelson Mandela interests Freedland only because Netanyahu and Peres did not attend. It cast shame on Israel to be absent “when the family of nations gathered”; Zionism, after all, had fulfilled the need for “the Jewish people to re-join the family of nations”. He even cannot resist calling the funeral “a shambolic affair”, and his blindness to Israel’s apartheid-like characteristics prevents him from seeing that it might have been bad taste for it to show up at the ultimate honours for a man who spent 27 years in jail for fighting apartheid.
Even his support for Palestinian statehood stems from his support of Israel. In arguing for recognition of Palestine he writes that such recognition would “support the idea of ‘Israel alongside a Palestinian state, thereby entrenching Israel’s legitimacy and its permanence’. Having the general assembly… vote for such a resolution would amount to de facto recognition of Israel – and reassure those who fear the country’s ‘delegitimisation’.” He praises Peter Beinart for “distinguishing democratic [sic], pre-1967 Israel from the post-1967 territories” and for Beinart’s “goal of simultaneously ‘delegitimising the occupation and legitimising Israel’ – all for the sake of securing Israel’s own future.” What matters is the well-being of Israel; the intrinsic rights of Palestinians are not even an afterthought.
Freedland’s narrow focus becomes callous in a column about ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in January 2009 entitled ‘Gaza after a Hamas rout will be an even greater threat to Israel’. His concern is much less with the fate of dead and wounded Palestinians than with the war’s “damage to [Israel’s] international reputation” and the “dangers” for Israel of weakening Fatah’s position over against that of Hamas. He once similarly wrote that while the IRA always accepted Great Britain as such, Hamas doesn’t accept Israel, and that “Israel could truthfully cite the Ulster precedent when it says it cannot sit down with Hamas until it renounces violence.” He just cannot see that most Palestinians refuse to sit down with Israel until it renounces its decades of violence.
Writing “as the war in Gaza wound down” from his Greek holiday in summer 2014, Freedland reflects that although the Greek economy is in the doldrums Greece is not at war, but “Ashdod and Israel are not so lucky.” Aha, it is all a matter of luck. Gaza City, Jabalia City and Rafah – with rubble and corpses not to be found in Ashdod – are not worth mentioning. For Freedland the problem with last year’s Gaza war is that it is “self-defeating” – for Israel; it “will give Israel no security”.
Throughout, Freedland elides Jewishness and Zionism, for instance routinely calling Israel “the Jewish state”. One example is a piece in which he rejects the idea of one democratic state (supported he says only by “diehard Arab rejectionists” and “old-school student lefties from the 1980s”) his paragraphs use the terms “Zionism”, “Israel”, “the Jewish state” and even “the Jews” interchangeably. It is therefore more accurate to describe his starting-point as ‘Jewish-Israel-centric’.
Freedland’s characterisation of Israel in ethno-religious terms could be ignored. We could see its conflict with the indigenous population as purely political, economic, military. Unless, as is Freedland’s tendency, we want to let the twenty percent of Israel’s citizens who are not Jewish disappear conceptually altogether, making their second-class status easier to ignore. Freedland overwhelmingly does neglect them, a consequence of his elision of Israel and Jewishness.
The conflation has the further consequence of enabling Freedland in his 2004 book chapter ‘Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?’ to regard it as “not an absurd claim” to say that “to attack Israel is to attack Jews”. He argues for this by claiming that “Jewish affinity with Israel is now so widespread and entrenched, across the political and religious spectrum, that it has indeed become a central part of Jewish identity.” This shows his sympathy for the (absurd) idea that Israel criticism is ‘anti-semitic’ (correctly: judophobic), and in co-opting all Jews for Zionism it is factually wrong: many Jews are anti-Zionists. But this group, with the exception of Norman Finkelstein, earns little of Freedland’s attention.
Perhaps the cruelest aspect of Freedland’s conflation is the conflation of Jewish suffering in Europe with the geographical and political area of the Middle East known as Palestine. Zionism always chose the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as those who must pay for the pogroms of Eastern Europe, the Dreyfus scandal, or the Holocaust, in willful ignorance of the fact that the Palestinians had absolutely nothing – zero – to do with it.
His quasi-equation of Israel and “Jewish identity” led him to intervene as well in the controversy over London’s Tricycle Theatre’s attempt to not screen films sponsored by the Israeli regime: “The Tricycle’s insistence that the festival was only welcome if it cut all financial ties with the Israeli Embassy… seemed a realisation of long-held Jewish fears. Did this mean that Jewish participation in the cultural life of the country… would now be conditional on our first issuing a public disavowal of Israel?” Like a magician, Freedland in two sentences has changed the Theatre’s objection to “Israel” into opposition to “Jewish” participation – surely not the result of a reading difficulty. Similarly eliding gracefully between Israel, Jewish culture, the Israeli embassy in London, and ‘anti-semitism’ is an anonymous piece most likely written by Freedland which ends with non-sequiturs about attacks on French synagogues – but rhetorical analysis of this masterpiece is over my head.
Although Freedland often brings his own Jewishness into his political columns about Palestine and ‘anti-semitism’, it is not relevant to the points just made showing that the conflation of Israel and Jewishness is necessarily disadvantageous to Palestinian citizens of Israel, critics of Israel, Jewish anti-Zionists and Palestinians in general. Scores of gentile journalists, commentators and politicians share his outlook putting Israel, Jewish Israelis and worldwide “Jewish identity” at the centre of the Palestine question.
Finally, there is a nice teapot-kettle irony in Freedland’s “singling out” of Israel for journalistic and literary attention, for he often insinuates that ‘anti-semitism’ motivates those who “single out” Israel for criticism, as opposed for example to Syria or Darfur. He once feigns bafflement as to why people “single out” Israel; we who do so are even a “mob”. Whereby Freedland himself week in, week out singles out Israel for loving criticism, naming “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” his journalistic specialty. Is he therefore guilty of the inverse racism of ‘philo-Semitism’? No.
Daphna Baram quotes Freedland in her 2004 book (pp 227-228) as follows: “Some Guardian people might wish it were otherwise, but it is a fact that the vast majority of Jews in the world today identify themselves with Israel, and see any attack on it as an attack on themselves. The result is that much of what we publish can and does offend our Jewish readers. My view is that if we are regularly offending most members of an ethnic minority, then that has to be a cause of concern…. [S]upport of Zionism is part of the Guardian’s own history. This is our heritage and we cannot break from it lightly.” That is, the Guardian should tailor its coverage of Israel to its Jewish, rather than its Arab or Palestinian, readership. And anyway, pro-Zionism is in the Guardian’s DNA.
When the desire for the well-being of any group, whether Jews, Christians, Moslems or Hindus, leads to justification of political privilege, it is relevant both to those discriminated against and, I believe, to what the Guardian should be. But even without this ethno-religious aspect, hiring Freedland as editor-in-chief will strengthen the Guardian’s pro-Israel bias.
The unimportance of Palestinians
The other side of the coin is that in Freedland’s world Palestinians are nearly absent. After distilling 100 of his articles I claim that he sees Israelis at the expense of seeing Palestinians. Like previous Zionists who saw the solution to the European ‘Jewish problem’ in Palestine, a purportedly literally or culturally empty place, they are his Oriental Other. Only once did I find him putting himself in the Palestinians’ shoes for longer than a half sentence, conceding that “the Palestinians feel exactly the same way [as the Jews]. They too have nowhere else.”
In the one column where I found general sympathy for Arab self-determination – he compares it to that achieved for Jews by the Zionists – my joy was short-lived. Lo and behold, he was referring only to self-determination in the surrounding Arab spring countries, excluding Palestine, that is, the group of Arabs in front of his nose, of which there is no mention whatsoever.
Palestinian refugees make up around 60% of the Palestinian population, but Freedland has devoted not more than perhaps three entire sentences to them. His moving article on Jewish refugee Otto Dov Kulka has never to my knowledge been balanced with more than a paragraph on any of the millions of ethnically cleansed Palestinians who lost their homeland 67 or 47 or 5 years ago or yesterday.
He does see Palestinians when they fire rockets. One description of the situation at the time of Cast Lead reveals his bias: “the Israelis of Sderot cowering in shelters from the Qassam rockets launched from Gaza; and the Palestinians, whose suffering only seems to deepen”. That is, Palestinians are the agents of Israeli suffering, while the Palestinians’ suffering simply happens, somehow, with no agent in sight.
Baram (p 197) mentions that Freedland characterised as “some of the most important on the topic…” the Guardian’s interviews in one year “with Ariel Sharon, the leftwing activist Uri Avneri, Rabbi Sacks, the refusnik Rami Kaplan, the Palestinian politician Sa’eb Arikat, Yossi Beilin,… and Shimon Peres.” Amongst these seven people exactly one is a Palestinian who, to boot, is a collaborator in the ‘Oslo process’ and the Zionist two-state-solution project supported by Freedland.
In the few columns in which Palestinians do appear, Freedland is advocating (in Israel’s self-interest of course) Israeli recognition of Palestinian suffering. But this “recognition” is all they get – no land, self-determination or permission to return. Freedland doesn’t even manage the word ‘apology’. He once hopes Israel will “acknowledge” that the Palestinians “suffer[ed] a nakba.” He asks: “If Israel could one day make such an admission, who knows what accommodation might follow?” Accommodation on the part of the Palestinians, that is.
In another piece he fantasises a similarly biased deal of “Israelis finally acknowledging the plight of the refugees created by the birth of the state of Israel, and Palestinians finally deciding whether they can accept a Jewish state.” Again, in return for “acknowledgement” the Palestinians give 80% of Palestine to the Zionists. He then sweetens the deal by reassuring the Palestinians that they will not be “asked… to reject the entire narrative of their recent history.” This is magnanimous: they can evidently retain half their narrative of the recent part of their millennia of history.
Similarly, his take on the “liberal Zionist” [sic] two-state solution is that “Jews could have a state of their own, without depriving Palestinians of their legitimate national aspirations.” [Some] Jews get a state, while Palestinians get “aspirations” – moreover only their “legitimate” ones, not their ‘illegitimate’ ones.
In his 2004 book chapter he goes farther when saying that “Israel should make amends [for the Nakba] – through compensation, restitution, and commemoration. Let those four hundred villages that were emptied be named and marked, and let Palestinians remember what they see as the naqba, the catastrophe, their way.” The generosity of the vague offer of “restitution” notwithstanding, what the Palestinians get is naming, marking, commemoration and memories – no return to present Israeli territory, which is the elephant in this paragraph’s room – while Israel keeps Palestine. And as Ben White adds, “It is unclear why Palestinians need this permission.”
Standing over against and of course outweighing these “aspirations” are what Freedland dozens of times calls the Jewish “need” for a state (in Palestine), or even “the craving for a place the Jews could call their own… Whatever view you ultimately take on the Israel-Palestine question, you cannot hope to understand that conflict unless you also understand this need.” Martin Buber might have given equal time to the needs of the Palestinians, but not Jonathan Freedland.
This theme of a state of their own – which Freedland also deceptively calls a “homeland” – recurs starkly combined with the theme of the Nazi Holocaust: The Israelis “are a nation formed by those who had no other place to live. The Holocaust, inevitably, looms large in this: the establishment of a Jewish state just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz was no coincidence” because “the world” saw it as a “basic right” for Jews to have “a place of their own”. In his description elsewhere of Holocaust survivors he writes that “it’s useful to know the harrowing past of loss and violent bereavement – often but not only in the Holocaust – that shaped so many of them, the fear that transformed itself into a desperate longing to survive.”
But Freedland is making a very large and visible logical mistake: The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Neither could they take part in pre-Holocaust pogroms in Europe, since they didn’t live in Europe. The leap from persecution in Europe to Jewish ‘self-determination’ in Palestine is not only an obvious misuse of the term ‘self-determination’ but takes the corpses of the indigenous and the ruins of their houses in stride.
Even granting the legitimacy of the desire of many Jews (not “the Jews”, as Freedland repeatedly has it) for a Jewish state, the practical question facing the Zionists ever since the turn of the twentieth century has been where. It is embarrassing to have to mention, much less belabor, this point – which Freedland only briefly touches upon in his 2004 essay, but never in his columns. But if no empty land is found (or desired), the question of where? turns into the question of on whose land? The practical issue becomes a moral one. The beef the world has with Zionism is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Freedland sees this only hazily, because he does not really see Palestinians, because he identifies with Israel.
Is criticism of Israel ‘anti-semitic’?
In a 2012 column entitled ‘We condemn Israel. So why the silence on Syria?’ Freedland claims that focussing on Israeli crimes more than on those of Bashar al-Assad is judophobic. After accusing Caryl Churchill of not writing a play called ‘Seven Syrian Children’ and Lindsey German of Stop the War Coalition of not organising a demonstration against Assad, he states: “It’s not simply a bias against Jews that regards an Arab or Muslim death as only deserving condemnation when Israel is responsible.” That is, the positions of Churchill and German do stem from “bias against Jews”, but not only therefrom.
He loathes the Stop the War NGO German leads, writing recently, tastelessly and perhaps libellously of the “comforting hope that what we are up against [in the Charlie Hebdo case] is not a fanatic death cult but rather the armed wing of the Stop the War Coalition”. Sweeping more broadly and with X-ray insight into the hearts of his leftist enemies, he elsewhere emits the proclamation that “the suffering of… hundreds of millions of Arabs… has [not] stirred the compassion of left-leaning liberal types…”, and of “activists who can barely stir themselves to deplore the slaughter in Congo, Darfur or Sri Lanka.” Hopefully such slurs, leftist-bashing and impugning of motives, without evidence or rational argument, contradicts the job profile of a Guardian chief editor.
In 2013 he repeated the theme. After playing the numbers game showing that in a certain period of time Assad had killed more Syrians than Israel had Palestinians – perhaps the murderer of two people must be jailed, while the murderer of one person can walk – he writes, “I’m especially tired that so many otherwise smart, sophisticated people apparently struggle to talk about Israel-Palestine without reaching, even unwittingly, for the dog-eared lexicon of anti-Jewish cliché…” Apparently reference to “Israel/US ‘global domination’” was enough for Freedland to hang his case on. In any event “Israel’s shift to the right” will alienate “those it needs most” – and oh yes, perhaps also some Palestinians.
In a final slur in late 2013 he asserts, again with X-ray vision, that “the loss of [Syrian] lives failed to touch the activists who so rapidly organised the demos and student sit-ins against Israel.” I infer that Freedland’s license to haughtiness derives from his organisation of anti-Assad demonstrations.
In his chapter ‘Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?’ Freedland concludes that it isn’t necessarily, but usually is. He places the burden of proof (of innocence of ‘anti-semitism’) on those who reject Israel or Zionism. His main argument for the Yes answer to the essay’s question is however not defended “intellectually” but by feeling, by listening to “tones of voices”, to “how” rather than “what” is said. Even worse: evidence of ‘anti-semitism’ lies not so much in the “singling out” of Israel but rather in the “fervor” with which this is done. To avoid even this vague, emotional charge of ‘anti-semitism’ critics should I suppose tone things down, observe persecution of Palestinians with appropriate coolness. By this criterion the present critique of Freedland stems from my ‘anti-semitism’, done as it is with considerable effort, dedication, perhaps “fervor” – even if I have shown that exactly the same criticism could be made of the views of anybody applying for this Guardian job.
He thus concedes that much of the argument that anti-Zionism is ‘anti-semitic’ has no basis “intellectually”. For instance in a Jewish Chronicle round table he asks regarding some Israel-critical points “made in any of the plays we have talked about… why [it is] we feel somehow this is about us, rather than just about this country and the Middle East?” The judophobia is felt “somehow”. He also explicitly judges Israel criticism on the basis not of what is said, but who levels it. If it is Peter Beinart or Howard Jacobson, writing “from within, not without, the Jewish family”, it is OK. Coming from the likes of Norman Finkelstein – a Jewish “outsider” – it is “wicked”. He even throws the “self-hating Jew” epithet at Finkelstein before seamlessly connecting him to David Irving and claiming he “is closer to the people who created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it”.
Not only should this provide work for the Guardian’s libel lawyers, but while it is good enough for the odd column, it is not good enough for editorial decisions affecting the entire paper. Remember that gentiles make identical arguments and that obviously for most Guardian readers and staff, conflating issues of human, civil and political rights with any ethnic and religious belonging is contrary to the Guardian’s liberalism.
After the Daily Mail’s attack on Ralph Miliband as a disloyal communist, Freedland squeezed five paragraphs of ‘anti-semitism’ out of single clause of a single sentence in which the paper denies its intent – unlike “the jealous God of Deuteronomy” – to hold David and Ed Miliband responsible for their father’s purported sins.
His take on the Charlie Hebdo murders dismisses as motives pride in Islam, piety towards Allah and the Prophet, French and Western foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s decades of subjugation of Palestinians in favour of the single explanatory variable ‘anti-semitism’.
Freedland’s stance on this issue is relevant to the near future due to the present government’s intention of passing its Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill which regards criticism of Israel as prima facie evidence of ‘anti-semitism’. In a 2011 JC column he makes the hyperbolic claim that the academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian rights is “anti-semitic”. Furthermore, he has found it necessary to deny that fear of the charge of ‘anti-semitism’ sometimes silences criticism of Israel before it is uttered, or waters it down.
In the coming debate the interests of neither the Palestinians nor the Guardian are served by a chief editor who does not look at criticism of Zionism on its merits and without a presumption of guilt. And in the interests of fighting real ‘anti-semitism’ the Guardian editor in chief should not see it behind every bush. One wishes a Guardian editorial stance that instead starts with universal human rights, equal rights, indigenous rights and refugee rights and places the Palestinian and Israel perspectives on equal footing. Freedland starts with Israel.
Tropes of the Israel-Palestine discourse
Two myths of the dominant discourse about the Zionist-Palestinian conflict are (1) there are two morally and militarily equivalent sides and (2) Israel will permit a Palestinian state. Two of the discourse’s ‘silences’ are that Israel liquidates and ethnically cleanses Palestinians and that it wants maximum territory. Jonathan Cook adds to these Israel’s claims for its robust democracy and the need for a safe haven for Jewish people (in Palestine). Freedland follows this narrative in spades.
The false picture of symmetry imbues Freedland’s report of his participation in a role-playing event between ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’ where “the two [equally angry] sides” are negotiating – two teams out on the pitch. The goal is to find out where “the midpoint between the two sides lies.” The successful outcome, in his view, was agreement on two “states” or “nations”. The conflict is moreover reduced to one between two equally strong perceptions: the Israelis [he means of course Jewish Israelis] are only “cast as” the stronger party. Israelis “have a narrative involving dispossession and suffering too, but it tends to relate to the past, even if it is the relatively recent past.” In addition to ignoring the reality of Palestinian military and diplomatic inferiority Freedland here again misses the brightly illuminated sign announcing that the Jewish suffering was in Europe, not at the hands of the Palestinians.
In the same vein he argues for an “honourable draw” between the two teams, who are “fated to fight”. That is, Zionism did not throw the first stone; it was fate wot done it. “Two peoples” are in a sort of marriage needing a “divorce”. From this false premise of symmetry Freedland derives the shabby two-state solution, twice arrogantly and incorrectly asserting that “everyone knows” this is the only answer. Conveniently, this mythical ‘solution’ leaves his beloved Israel permanently in control of eighty percent of Palestine, treating its Palestinian citizens as second-class and locking the refugees out for good. The “two sides” narrative has served its purpose.
Somewhat improbably, Freedland evidences ignorance of the fact that Israel will never stop short of ruling all of Palestine from the river to the sea, romantically but falsely claiming, contrary to the empirical record of a whole century, that “two states is the destiny Israel envisages for their shared future.” He does not comprehend the meaning of the Israeli regime’s rule of always calling the West Bank ‘Judea and Samaria’. The myth of Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian statelet continues to serve the oppressive status quo.
Another baffling departure from reality is Freedland’s fantasy about “an Israeli peace with the Egyptian people [rather than Egypt’s dictators], one underpinned by their genuine consent.” Who else among us does not grasp that the consent of Arab people is conditional upon Palestinian sovereignty over Palestine?
Regarding democracy, Freedland supports Israel’s party line that it is both democratic and Jewish, stating for instance that “the two-state solution [is] the only guarantor of an Israel that is both Jewish and democratic.” He repeatedly upholds this mainstay of the Israeli narrative, once speaking of “the Israel we love [which] is the Jewish, democratic state established in the Declaration of Independence.” The jury has long been in with the verdict that the ‘Jewish, democratic’ state is an oxymoron – as are conceptions of ‘Christian’, ‘Moslem’, or ‘Hindu’ democracies. Again, a worrying inability to approach issues logically.
The corollary is his often expressed outright rejection, in favour of two (ethnically-defined) states, of a bog-standard democracy in Palestine. That vision of a single state, a proportional, multi-ethnic democracy as we know it in Europe, is a “sobering vision”. Why? The answer is creepy. Because therein “Jews will fast become a minority”. This implicit endorsement of Israel’s racist policy of maintaining at all costs the majority status of one ethno-religious group appears as well in the pages of the Guardian: Prevention of “a Palestinian Arab population that would one day be its numeric equal” is a necessary precondition of the dominant ethno-religious group of the Israel he so believes in.
Elsewhere as well Freedland’s democratic credentials fall short of Guardian standards. He for instance writes, “The success of Hamas in Palestinian elections in January apparently confirmed the notion on which unilateralism was predicated: that there is no partner on the Palestinian side.” Fact is that in January 2006 Hamas achieved a majority, but because Hamas rejects Zionism more than Fatah, the government fairly elected by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza is illegitimate and can be rejected as a “partner”. For both Tony Blair’s Quartet and Freedland, Palestinian self-determination is worth nothing.
In a 2007 history lesson Freedland wrote that in 1948 “Israel had done something remarkable, defeating the armies of three nations that had vowed its destruction.” This is official, debunked Israeli history, unenlightened by either Palestinian or Jewish-Israeli ‘new historians’. Freedland and Israel thereby blank out the Mandate, US support, collusion with the ruler of Jordan, land confiscation, murder of Palestinians returning to their fields, and crucially early 1948’s Plan Dalet, which, to my knowledge, Freedland has never mentioned. Even an opinion editor should read up on the history of his region of specialisation.
Freedland even makes an original contribution to hasbara. Like all winners, he argues that the victims must sometimes forget the past; that is, forget the injustice done to them. Resourcefully mobilising the example of Northern Ireland IRA victims’ need for truth, justice and peace of mind, he first sympathises. But then he has news for them, paternalistically whispered: “It is this. In places torn by war, there is all too often a choice to be made between justice and peace… But the bleak truth is, we cannot have both.”
Moving on to the actual subject of the piece, “the battle of Israelis and Palestinians”, he is urging Palestinians to let bygones be bygones, to give up on justice in order to gain peace. This lets Israel off the hook, although even he must know that in Israel there is no Adams, no McGuiness, no de Klerk willing even to apologise. He even cynically throws in the observation that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission omits the word ‘justice’. Truth will however within twenty years be demanded of Zionism and its Western apologists such as Freedland.
The title of one tenderly critical piece is “This is Israel? Not the one I love.” Freedland loves Israel, and again and again appeals to the “true friends of Israel” or “those who care about Israel” to adopt this, that, or the other viewpoint. The Guardian arguably needs a Middle East expert, but Freedland is not in a position to fulfil this role: he is party to the Zionism-Palestinian conflict. An Israel loyalist, he would make a competent successor or assistant to the man he says is “a frequent visitor to the Guardian offices”, Mark Regev.
Summary
In 2009, two weeks after the momentarily last Gazan child had been killed during Operation Cast Lead by an Israeli rocket, or bomb, or gun, Freedland wrote an article in which he describes that three-week long Israeli attack simply as “mayhem in Gaza”. Mayhem: a disorder, chaos, without named cause. That is, Freedland cannot even name Israel as the destroyer.
A novelist who researches well, there are few errors in Freedland’s columns: a wrong depiction of the sequence of events in a pro-Israel animated cartoon; wrongly saying Israel’s jocular phrase ‘mowing the lawn’ refers to the West Bank rather than Gaza; a slight misquote here and there. A polemicist to be sure, he has activists getting “feverishly… excited” when Israel commits a crime; he has his opponents “lazily brand” Israel a colonial project (he denies any resemblance of Israel to a “western imperialist”, British/Ashkenazi colony). A liberal, he gets some basics right, opposing for instance the oath of allegiance by non-Jews to the Jewish state, outlawing mention of the Nakba and bans on Jews’ renting rooms to non-Jews.
However, my objections are mainly ethical. One can perhaps understand Freedland’s admiration for Holocaust survivors seeking “justice and revenge” for Nazi crimes, avengers he celebrates in his Sam Bourne novel The Final Reckoning. Nazi crimes against Jews were monumental. But again, Freedland first of all morally fails to concede that the crimes had nothing to do with the Palestinians: as the novel’s Jewish-resistance hero says, in 1945 after the work in Europe “we were to put down our guns and grenades and head off to the next front in the war for Jewish survival: Palestine.” But two wrongs don’t make a right. Furthermore it is factually untrue that all European Holocaust survivors desired or needed to emigrate to Palestine, as Freedland implies.
In any case, his novel and his column on the avengers, together with his love of Passover, celebrating Jews not only as “victims” but as “victors” and ending in the death of masses of Egyptians, reveal his attraction to a certain kind of bloodiness. In this there is irony anew, for the same columnist who revels in vengeance and extra-legal assassinations feels it incumbent upon himself to advise the Palestinians not to throw stones but choose the path of non-violence.
Freedland shows little ability to apply principles universally. He for instance knows that George Habash as a twenty-one-year-old witnessed death and destruction in his home town of… Lydda, but he is oblivious to the possibility that Habash might have sought vengeance. Or another instance: if he embraces lifeboat ethics he must at least condone rockets from Gaza as an attempt by Palestinians to survive.
By coincidence Freedland would be chief editor on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 2017. Finally, in isolated columns, like Shavit and Morris he has seen that the story did not begin in 1967 but goes back to 1948. His insight to be sure is mainly theoretical. Still stuck in ‘1967’ is for instance his offer to the vanquished of a West Bank/Gaza ‘Bantustine’, with six million refugees wiped from consciousness, and as recently as last summer he relapsed into the narrative that it is mainly the second occupation of 1967 that has to be solved. But the racist, ersatz-settler-colonial episode of Mandatory Britain, which will soon be debated in the UK in connection with the Balfour Declaration’s anniversary, took up the three decades before 1948. Like Freedland it was both Zionist and British, and Freedland may not be able to deal with it with any objectivity.
After averaging one column on Israel/Palestine every 2 months for the last ten years, since last summer Freedland has gone strangely silent. Since 26 July 2014 there is only one Guardian piece (on new president Reuven Rivlin) and only two in the Jewish Chronicle. Whether this has to do with an internal announcement of Rusbridger’s resignation, I don’t know.
Again, today’s apologists for Zionism – the Freedlands, Remnicks, Frasers, Beinarts, Jacobsons, whose self-depiction as ‘liberals’ is of zero interest to Zionism’s victims, the Palestinians – will eventually be forced to apologise. As so often in history, they will have to retrospectively ‘explain’ their support for an ethnocracy. The Guardian can now avoid this fate by correcting its century-long pro-Zionism, by applying basic ethical and political standards to Mr Freedland’s job application.
Freedland’s refusal to honour the right of self-determination to the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine is undemocratic and thus inconsistent with the liberal principles of the Guardian’s owner, the Scott Trust Limited. And to my mind his justification of ethnic cleansing is sufficient reason for the Guardian to reject him. To maintain this position Freedland cannot afford to pay much attention to, or develop empathy for, one of the “sides” in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, the conflict that has so vexed the world and the Guardian for a century.
Blake Alcott can be reached at: blakeley@bluewin.ch.
‘Minsk II’ – What About Foreign Troops in Ukraine?
By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | February 12, 2015
After a marathon 17 hour negotiation session, the leaders of Russia, Germany, France, and Ukraine agreed on an upgraded ceasefire plan, “Minsk II,” that lays out 13 points to be implemented by the west-backed government in Kiev and the independence-seeking regions in eastern Ukraine.
While there is much to be skeptical about in such an agreement — the devil is always in not just the details but especially in the interpretation of the agreement — there is one point of the plan that appears very much worth pondering.
According to a translation of the 13 points, point number ten reads:
All foreign troops, heavy weapons and mercenaries are to be withdrawn from Ukraine. Illegal armed groups would be disarmed, but local authorities in Donetsk and Lugansk would be allowed to have legal militia units.
There are two very significant points to ponder in this statement to which all sides agreed. First, it is most likely that when proposing this point, France and Germany, along with Kiev, were thinking of what they claim are as many as 10,500 regular Russian soldiers fighting inside Ukraine. For this point to be implemented and thus the plan carried out in good faith, the “10,500 Russians” as well as a handful of French and other volunteers for the breakaway regions must return home.
But the statement is unequivocal: All foreign troops must leave Ukraine.
What about US troops, including CIA and Special Forces, that are said to be assisting the US-backed government in Kiev? Would Kiev not have the same obligation to expel these foreign troops? And, most importantly, what of the 600 US paratroopers that are to be sent by President Obama to train the Ukrainian military starting next month?
Would it not be a violation of “Minsk II” ceasefire agreement for the US to go through with sending 600 troops into Ukraine?
The second important issue to consider about point ten of the agreement is the 10,500 regular Russian army troops that Kiev claims are fighting in the breakaway east. Russia has always maintained that this claim is a fiction and has called on Kiev and Washington to produce some evidence for the claim. Surely a satellite photo would easily prove such a claim.
However, something significant will happen either way on point ten of the agreement. There are three possibilities: either, 1) Russia will initiate a massive withdrawal of troops that will be easily visible to anyone watching; 2) Russia will not initiate a massive and easily visible withdrawal of troops from eastern Ukraine because it chooses to violate the “Minsk II” agreement; or, finally, 3) Russia will not initiate a massive withdrawal of troops from eastern Ukraine because there are no regular Russian army troops in eastern Ukraine.
In other words, point ten of the agreement is key to determine who is lying about Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.
Indeed, point ten appears a make or break issue in the agreement. Will Kiev break the agreement by allowing in 600 American troops — or even American weapons? Will Russia finally prove or disprove the claims made about the Russian military in Ukraine?
Something interesting is bound to happen soon. Don’t count on the western mainstream media to report it, however.
Washington Wastes No Time to Sabotage Minsk
By Finian CUNNINGHAM | Strategic Culture Foundation | 14.02.2015
With their noses out of joint and egos bruised, the United States and its European lieutenants immediately got to work to undermine the Minsk ceasefire deal by twisting the terms of the accord and seeking to frame Russia for its imminent failure.
A Washington Post headline set the pace with this headline hours after the Minsk negotiations wrapped up in the Belarus capital. ‘Putin announces ceasefire with Ukraine,’ declared the Post, mendaciously implicating Russia as a protagonist in the year-old conflict, which, it is inferred, is now suing for a peace settlement.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, along with trusty British and Polish allies, warned Russia of more sanctions if the Minsk truce was not “fully implemented”.
“The United States is prepared to consider rolling back sanctions on Russia when the Minsk agreements of September 2014, and now this agreement, are fully implemented,” Kerry said in a statement.
In other words, Washington is still peddling the hoary narrative that Moscow is an aggressor and is to blame for the conflict. Rolling back sanctions “when” Minsk is “fully implemented” is the US giving itself a licence to covertly sabotage the ceasefire at every turn and to maintain its unwarranted sanctions on Russia, as well as following up on promised supply of weapons to the Kiev regime.
There seems little doubt that the Americans are reeling from the diplomatic coup that Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled off in Minsk this week, along with German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande.
Amid threats from the US last week that it was going to flood Ukraine with more heavy weapons, Putin and his European counterparts managed to broker a ceasefire to the conflict after marathon 17-hour negotiations. The truce is to be implemented this weekend and, it has to be said, constitutes only a slim prospect of bringing the civil war in Ukraine to a halt. It is fraught with many thorny issues, such as withdrawal of fighting units on both sides and the accepted definition of a demarcation line. The autonomous status of the separatist Donbas region is also far from clear, or whether Kiev is prepared to follow up with mutual negotiations with the breakaway ethnic Russian population.
Nevertheless, the mere agreement, in principle, by the Kiev regime and the pro-separatist rebels of the eastern Ukrainian region is a welcome chance for a cessation in violence that has cost nearly 5,500 lives and more than one million refugees. That Putin, along with Merkel and Hollande, managed to achieve this tentative breakthrough is something of a feat in diplomatic skills and commitment. The development also tends to negate the official Western narrative that purports to paint Russia as an aggressor and threat to European peace.
The Minsk deal properly frames the conflict as a civil war between the Kiev regime and the Donbas separatists, which Russia is trying to dampen by acting as a facilitator of negotiations between the warring sides.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was on the mark when he said after the Minsk talks that Russia is a guarantor of the peace deal, not a party obliged to fulfil its implementation. He reiterated that Moscow is not a participant in the conflict, as Western media have, and continue, to assert.
“Russia is the country that was called by the parties of the conflict,” said Peskov. “This is the country that called on the parties of the conflict to sign a complex of measures to fulfil the Minsk agreements. But Russia is not one of the parties to fulfil these measures. This is the country that is acting as the guarantor, that comes forward with a call, but, obviously, it’s not a party that needs to take any actions for [the fulfilment]. We simply can’t do this physically because Russia is not a participant in the conflict,” added the Kremlin spokesman.
It was left to the British premier David Cameron and the ex-Polish president Donald Tusk to undermine the latest Minsk chance for peace by casting aspersions on Russia and re-framing the conflict as one of external aggression on Ukraine.
Cameron talked, with typical British haughtiness, of Putin needing to change his behaviour, while Tusk added to the narrative of demonising the Russian leader by insinuating that he is not trustworthy.
Cameron, speaking at an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday, said: “If this is a genuine ceasefire, then of course that would be welcome. But what matters most of all is actually actions on the ground rather than just words on a piece of paper. I think we should be very clear that Putin needs to know that unless his behaviour changes, the sanctions we have in place won’t be altered.”
Tusk, who is now the European Council President, said: “If [the Minsk agreement] does not happen we will not hesitate to take the necessary steps. Our trust in the goodwill of President Putin is limited. This is why we have to maintain our decision on sanctions.”
Given that the Western-backed Kiev regime has serially violated past ceasefires, which led to the latest escalation of violence, it would be naive to expect that the latest peace bid will be honoured. The Kiev junta has been emboldened to prosecute its criminal war against the Donbas population because of the unswerving political, financial and military support that Washington has indulged. Massive, systematic war crimes by Kiev have been whitewashed and absolved by Washington with spurious, unfounded claims of “Russian aggression”.
This is because the US-backed regime-change operation in Ukraine that brought the Kiev junta to power last February is fundamentally predicated on Washington’s long-term objective of destabilising Russia. That is why the prospects of a ceasefire being implemented are something of an oxymoron. A peace settlement in Ukraine would only be an impediment to Washington’s geopolitical objective of undermining Russia.
The criminal regime in Kiev has become something of a specialist in committing false flag terrorist atrocities, which it and its Western sponsors then duly attribute to “Russian-backed rebels”. The massacre in Donetsk on January 21, in Mariupol on January 24, and this week in Kramatorsk, in which up to 17 people were killed from Smerch rockets, have all the hallmarks of false-flag operations perpetrated by the US-backed, trained and equipped Kiev regime forces.
In the Kramatorsk incident, on the eve of the Minsk summit, the Kiev regime claimed that the Smerch rockets were fired from separatist-held Gorlovka, which is 80 kilometres away, and the outer limit of the munition’s range. The separatists denied the attack, saying that they do not target civilian areas. Hours after the massacre, Kiev President Petro Poroshenko arrived in Kramatorsk for photo-opportunities with victims lying on hospital beds. That Poroshenko would hurry to a town that is under fire is doubtful if the rebel threat was real. Also speaking as if from a script, he said: “It is savages who use cluster bombs against civilians. It is a crime against humanity when civilians are killed by Russian weapons in their homes.”
The next day, the “outraged” Poroshenko was in Minsk warmly shaking hands with Putin. So much for Russia war crimes.
To say that the latest ceasefire will be easily sabotaged is an understatement, given the past conduct of the Kiev regime. All it has to do is to keep fighting and committing crimes and that will be “evidence” of Russia not implementing Minsk. That will then allow Washington and its dutiful British and Polish allies, along with the obliging Western news media propagandists, to blame Russia for the failure in “fully implementing” the ceasefire. More American weapons can then be funnelled into Ukraine and more sanctions ratcheted up.
Russian President Vladimir Putin deserves huge credit for showing statesmanlike leadership over the Ukraine crisis. The trouble is that the Americans are playing a very different and dirty game in which there are no rules to abide by.
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On ‘conflict’, ‘peace’ and ‘genocide’: Time for new language on Palestine
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | June 12, 2021
On 25 May, famous US actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
“I have reflected and wanted to apologise for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding: “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of “hyperbole”? … continue
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