War, Abuse and Other Peoples: A Personal Account
By Tim Anderson | American Herald Tribune | April 17, 2018
Why support other peoples, especially during conflict? Some explanation seems necessary because wartime debates often degenerate into simplistic clichés, personal abuse and confusion. I am one of many who have been subject to this abuse. Even the sanity of the critics of war is attacked, in attempts to disqualify opposing voices. Confusion is sown through the extreme nature of war propaganda, and its invented pretexts.
In the most recent half dozen Middle East wars, all driven by Washington and its minions, it has become common to dismiss dissenters as ‘apologists’ for this or that enemy. In reality, whatever the virtues or flaws of these ‘regimes’, they are all independent, and targeted precisely for their independence. For this same reason they are branded ‘dictatorships’. Consequently the loyal western corporate and state media, on a war footing, replaces reasonable discussion with abuse and shows little interest in respect for other peoples under attack.
The clichés and abuse replicate the aggression of war mentality. People abandon their normal rules of verbal engagement, reducing discussion to combative point scoring. Having been subject to some of these attacks in recent years, mainly for my defence of Syria, here is a personal account of motives and some of that abuse.
As I see it, human society is founded on cooperation and reinforced by communities determining their own affairs and building their own social structures. We are social beings and our natural human urge is to help others. Social dysfunction comes after social cooperation, and the most toxic of all such dysfunctions is imperialism. Those outside interventions are always disastrous, destructive and tainted with the ambitions of the interveners. That is why uninvited interventions are rightly banned, these days, under international law.
I believe that support for popular self-determination, and the defence of peoples under attack, is an essentially human urge. In my opinion this comes before the pathological drive to dominate. The natural sense of support for other human communities must especially include support for formerly colonised peoples. That is consistent with human values such as respect for others, and not putting one’s voice in the place of others.
At any rate, that is the thinking behind my support for independent peoples under threat or attack. In my experience of recent decades this has included support for the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Syria. However I have refused to be part of the multi-billion dollar aid industry, remaining an independent writer, academic and volunteer.
This is not only altruism. Engaging with other peoples in this way is a rewarding learning experience, indeed a privilege. I believe in and remain open to learning from other cultures.
Yet imperial pathology is also a reality. Its demands, the refusal to listen, domineering, interventions and outright war represent a fundamentally anti-social mentality. From that perspective I came to see the wars of the 21st century – propaganda, economic and real wars – as a continuation of the older politics of imperialism, while often adopting the contemporary language of ‘human rights’.
I saw such abuses in my own country’s intervention in neighbouring East Timor, in 2006. There an internal conflict attracted Australian intervention, largely on false pretexts. Australian state media gave prominence to claims that East Timor’s then Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri had killed dozens of political opponents (Jackson 2006). The Prime Minister was deposed, the journalists involved were given awards; but the claims turned out to be quite false (Anderson 2006).
I spent years defending Cuba and Venezuela from a barrage of fake ‘human rights’ propaganda, including from supposedly independent agencies such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (Anderson 2005; Anderson 2010, Anderson 2013).
Amnesty International, for example, attacked Cuba in 2003 for arresting several dozen US-paid agents (dubbed ‘dissidents’ in the US media), just as Havana anticipated that the mad emperor George W. Bush, having just invaded Iraq, was about to invade Cuba (Amnesty 2003). In fact, Cuba had documented US payments to these people as part of a Washington program to overthrow the Cuban government and its constitution (Elizalde and Baez 2003). There is virtually no state in the world that would not criminalise such activity.
Yet these agents became the ‘Cuban dissidents’ of Amnesty, which used ‘human rights’ as the pretext to back US aggression against its island neighbour (Barahona 2005; Anderson 2008; Lamrani 2014). That same human rights group took several years to say anything about the torture prison President Bush established at an illegally occupied part of Cuba, in Guantanamo Bay (Anderson 2009). The prisoners there (unlike the US agents in Cuba) faced no charges or trial, abuses that used to be the substance of Amnesty International’s activity.
Human Rights Watch (HRW), for its part, made repeated savage political attacks on Venezuela and Cuba, while saying next to nothing about the appalling human rights violations by Washington and its close allies. Many western liberals went along for the ride, but the partisan nature of HRW was obvious to any serious observer. A group of academics and writers assailed HRW over its heavily politicised reports on Venezuela (NACLA 2009). Later several Nobel Prize winners condemned HRW for its refusal to cut ties with the US Government (Alternet 2014).
So when this ‘human rights’ industry (Anderson 2018) turned on Libya and Syria I was half-prepared. I had already written on my own country’s shameful involvement in the aggressions against Afghanistan and Iraq, detailing Australian involvement in war crimes in both countries (Anderson 2005b; Kampmark 2008; Doran and Anderson 2011). [I would go on to document Australian war crimes against Syria (Anderson 2017a).]
However in early 2011 I did not have detailed knowledge about Libya or Syria. In March 2011 I had to look on a map to find Daraa, the border town where the violence in Syria began (Anderson 2013a). Further, I did not then know that the petro-monarchy Qatar – owner of the successful Al Jazeera media network – was funding and arming sectarian Islamist terrorists in both Benghazi (Libya) and Daraa (Syria) (Khalaf and Smith 2013; Dickinson 2014).
Once President Gaddafi was murdered and the state was destroyed, Amnesty International (France) would admit that most of the claims they had made against the Libyan President were baseless (Cockburn 2011). US analysts confirmed the fakery (Kuperman 2015).
The violence in both countries deserved scrutiny, especially when Washington, the main aggressor in the world, was urging ‘regime change’, and most independent countries were urging caution. I wrote a dozen articles against the war on Libya, over the NATO ‘double speak’, ‘regime change’ motives and NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ missile attacks (Anderson 2011a, 2011b). Yet that little country, with the highest living standards in Africa, was rapidly destroyed.
My first article on Syria in May 2011, ‘Understanding the Syrian Violence’, simply urged people to read more widely. The conflict was clearly not just ‘demonstrators v. police’ (Anderson 2011). After that I searched on a wider range of sources, of course including Syrian sources. I began to document the ‘propaganda war’, the deceptive doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’, the failures of the western ‘left’, and ‘the lies that fuel regime change’. I shared a detailed list of sources for ‘Reading Syria’ and began to explore several ‘false flag’ massacres (Anderson 2011c, 2012, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c).
There was very little western critical discussion of the conflict in Syria so, in 2012, a number of us, mainly Syrian-Australians, formed the group ‘Hands Off Syria’. Later that year I wrote of a ‘malignant consensus’ which had been created over Syria, one which supported a foreign-backed insurgency and a drive to wider war (Anderson 2012d). It was clear to me that a campaign of lies was afoot, just as there had been with the attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
The official war narrative – from Washington and its minions – was that ‘peaceful protestors’ were being slaughtered by the forces of a ‘brutal dictator’ intent on ‘killing his own people’. This was said to be a ‘civil war’, with no foreign aggression (see Anderson 2016: Chapter 3). It was an extraordinary claim, with little reason, but reliance on jihadist-linked sources and repetition of the claims made it effective, at least amongst western populations.
Yet sectarian Islamist insurrections, linked to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, had a long history in Syria. Since the 1950s such violence had always been backed by Syria’s enemies, particularly Washington and Israel. There was virtually no recognition of this in the loyal western media. Their governments demanded an extreme, fabricated story which could serve as a basis for ‘humanitarian’ intervention.
However the ‘peaceful protestor’ lie was contradicted by independent witnesses and fatally undermined by multiple admissions of US Government officials. The witnesses spoke of sectarian violence from the beginning, which drove political reform rallies off the streets. The leaked documents showed that Washington knew, from the beginning, that extremists were fomenting the violence, with the aim of imposing a religious state.
Regardless, Washington, Israel and the former colonial powers Britain and France armed these extremists, both directly and indirectly, through allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar (Anderson 2016: Chapters 2, 4, 6 and 12). The ‘peaceful protestors v regime’ fiction served as the basis for arming terrorists, while imposing a cruel economic blockade on the entire Syrian nation.
In late 2013 I helped organise an Australian delegation to Syria, to meet with government and non-government people to find out more about Syria and to express solidarity with a people under attack. Most of us stayed on after the official tour to meet new friends, exploring Damascus. On our return we were attacked by much of the Australian state and corporate media, in particular for a meeting we had with President Bashar al Assad, the principal target of mindless western demonization (Worthington 2013). I had expected criticism from those who backed the war, but the Murdoch media made some special efforts.
In January 2014 Christian Kerr from The Australian newspaper rang me up for a very brief interview about the trip. It lasted less than one minute. The next day Kerr published a 1,600 front page article ‘Academic with a murky past stirs fresh controversy with trip to Damascus’ (Kerr 2014). This was mainly a personal attack, with little reference to the actual visit. The reporter dishonestly claimed that I was on “a pilgrimage to honour a dictator”. The hit piece says I was an ‘extremist’ for supporting Cuba, Venezuela and Palestine, for opposing Aboriginal deaths in custody and for writing about the destructive role of the World Bank in the Pacific.
The Murdoch paper called on then then Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, to “remind” universities that they “should be partners” to the government in the goal to “build revenue … by growing the international student market … and ensure that their reputations support rather than hinder that ambition”. This meant that universities should distance themselves from controversy. Pyne presented a nice summary of the commercial imperatives placed by successive Australian governments on universities. These days that same commercialisation is regarded by an overwhelming majority (84%) of academics as at the root of a decline in the quality of Australian tertiary education (Evans 2017).
Soon after that the Channel Seven television program Today Tonight invited me into their studio for an interview with presenter Nick Etchells. However, once there, the Chanel Seven people placed me in a separate room of the same building, so that I could not hear Etchells’ introduction, which was a vicious personal attack on me. They had only pretended an interest in the Syria visit. They cut out any answers they did not like. The Australian and Channel Seven personal attacks show how closed the Australian corporate media was to hearing another side to the war in Syria.
Over 2014-2015 I wrote a book ‘The Dirty War on Syria’ (Anderson 2016), to address the western myths and to begin a documented history of the conflict. The book was published in Canada in January 2016 and, over the next two years, was translated into and published in ten languages (English, Arabic, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Bosnian, Swedish, Farsi and Icelandic). Over 2016-2018 I did an average of 4 or 5 interviews per week, from media in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Korea, Italy, China, Canada, Germany, Russia and the USA. I was invited to speak at conferences in Greece, Iraq and Germany. There was less interest in my own country.
After September 2015, when Russia and Iran began a more direct involvement in the conflict, in defence of Syria, the tide of the war began to turn in Syria’s favour. But the propaganda war remained strong. Personal attacks against me and other prominent defenders of Syria became more organised. Dissident voices were seen as a threat to the war’s legitimacy.
Independent journalists Eva Bartlett (Canada) and Vanessa Beeley (England), in particular, attracted hostile attention for helping expose the grossly distorted western media coverage of the liberation of the city of Aleppo, in late 2016. The UK Guardian for example – a strong backer of the ‘humanitarian war’ against Syria – commissioned a long hit piece from a San Francisco based journalist with no experience in the Middle East (Solon 2017). Britain’s Channel 4 (Worrall 2016) and self-appointed ‘fact checkers’ – like the US family business ‘Snopes’ – pretended to debunk the consistent critical reports from Bartlett and Beeley. The would-be gatekeepers backed the Washington-led ‘humanitarian’ war story on Syria: this was a ‘civil war’ in which ‘we’ had to help the people of Syria overthrow their ‘brutal dictator’.
In early 2017 the new US President Donald Trump ordered a missile attack on Syria’s Shayrat airbase, after a chemical weapon provocation had been carried out by terrorist groups in Khan Sheikhoun (Idlib). This happened just as we were preparing an academic conference on the Syrian conflict at the University of Sydney (CCHS 2017). On social media I called Trump, Obama and Bush ‘the masterminds of terrorism in the Middle East’ (Anderson 2017).
The Murdoch media responded with another personal attack, running front page smears against myself and a colleague. This abuse began with a Daily Telegraph article by Kylar Loussikian (2017), titled ‘Sarin Gasbag: academic claims Trump a terrorist and tyrant Assad didn’t launch chemical attack’, next to a picture of me in Syria. This was a response to my assertions – based on detailed research – that chemical weapons claims against the Syrian Army were baseless (Anderson 2016: Chapter 9). There was not the slightest corporate media interest in evidence over the chemical weapons allegations. When we criticised journalist Loussikian on social media, he ran to university authorities, complaining he was a victim of a ‘personal attack’.
Underlining the absurdity of Trump’s 2017 attack, in 2018 the US Secretary of Defence admitted that, while ‘others’ were saying it, ‘we do not have evidence’ of Syria’s use of sarin gas (Wilkie 2018; Graphic 1). This had been one of the key pretexts for US aggression against Syria, over several years. But war propaganda was never concerned with evidence.
Graphic 1
A similar media attack occurred after I visited North Korea, in July 2017. By this time I had begun studying several countries subject to Washington-led ‘sanctions’. These included Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea (DPRK). Not that the loyal western media was interested in any such study.
On seeing some social media photos, Murdoch reporter Loussikian penned another smear story, titled ‘Sydney University’s Tim Anderson praises North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a solidarity visit’. An introductory paragraph read:
“A controversial Sydney University lecturer who backed Syria’s murderous al Assad regime has travelled to Pyongyang and pledged “solidarity with the North Korean dictatorship against “aggression” from the west (Loussikian 2017a).
It certainly was a solidarity visit, but the lie behind the headline and its sub-head should have been obvious. There was no quote in Loussikian’s article to justify that claim that I had praised any North Korean leader. I did not even mention them. Nor had I mentioned solidarity with the government (‘dictatorship’). In principle, solidarity is always with peoples.
Further, the night before the article Loussikian had asked me, by email: “It was unclear whether you were expressing concern about warfare … or whether you had a view in supporting the North Korean Government”. Because of his previous dishonesty over Syria I did not reply.
This sort of abuse, mostly launched because of my defence of Syria, also came from some of the western ‘left’; or rather what many of us now call ‘the imperial left’. These are small groups of Trotskyists and Anarchists who swallowed the Washington line that the conflicts in Libya and Syria were popular ‘revolutions’. They repeated the western state and corporate media clichés that the highly internationalised conflict in Syria was a ‘civil war’, and that the fanatical jihadist-terrorists were ‘revolutionaries’ (e.g. Karadjis 2014; and in Norton 2014).
Some of these people – having observed that some extreme right wing figures also questioned the war on Syria, or supported Russia, or opposed Israel – decided to smear me with the lie that I ‘work with’ or am ‘friends’ with fascists. The ‘evidence’ they show for this is that some extremist and right figures attended some of my many public talks; and that those figures and I both attended a funeral wake for the murdered Russian Ambassador to Turkey, at the Russian consulate in Sydney. On that basis I was said to ‘work with Nazis’ (see Graphic 2).
Graphic 2
My first response to this sort of childish abuse was to just ignore it. Now I think there might be some educational value in showing others the worst cases.
Such attacks do not mean much from tiny groups, barely relevant except when they oppose imperial wars. Yet many western liberal-leftists today join with Washington, NATO, the Saudis, Israel – and their fanatical, reactionary mercenaries – against the remaining independent states of the Middle East.
What these left-liberals miss is that the new fascism in the world is precisely that chain of wars aimed at destroying independent African, Arab and other West Asian states. Western cheer squads for these wars are necessary to minimise opposition and keep imperial plans alive.
This century’s military, economic and propaganda wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya and Syria have successfully conscripted western liberals, leftists, NGOs and of course the corporate and state media. Very few question the war narrative; and those who do are abused.
But that is not the future. The world is changing. BRICS and other regional groupings and states, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are on the rise. In my opinion, support and respect is due to all independent peoples. It is not about whether we agree with everything they do. It is about respect for other peoples. Their self-determination is also our human responsibility.
Sources:
Alternet (2014) ‘Nobel Peace Laureates Slam Human Rights Watch’s Refusal to Cut Ties to U.S. Government’, 8 July, online: https://www.alternet.org/world/nobel-peace-laureates-slam-human-rights-watchs-refusal-cut-ties-us-government
Amnesty International (2003) ‘Cuba: Massive crackdown on dissent’, April, AMR 25/008/2003, online: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/104000/amr250082003en.pdf
Anderson, Tim (2005) ‘Contesting ‘Transition’: the US plan for a Free Cuba’, Latin American Perspectives, Vol 32, No 6, November, pp.28-46
Anderson, Tim (2005a) ‘Cuba: the propaganda offensive’, Online Opinion, 15 March, online: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3243&page=0
Anderson, Tim (2005b) ‘Indictment and prosecution of John Winston Howard’, The Guardian, Sydney, 17 August, p.2, online: http://www.cpa.org.au/guardian-pdf/2005/Guardian1241_17-08-2005_screen.pdf
Anderson, Tim (2006) ‘Timor Leste: the second Australian intervention’, Journal of Australian Political Economy, December, pp.62-93
Anderson, Tim (2008) ‘Cuba and the ‘independent journalists’, Green Left Weekly, 24 May, online: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/cuba-and-independent-journalists
Anderson, Tim (2009) ‘Hypocrisy over Cuba’s ‘political prisoners’, Green left Weekly, 19 September, online: https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/hypocrisy-over-cubas-political-prisoners
Anderson, Tim (2010) ‘How Credible Is Human Rights Watch on Cuba?’, MRonline, 16 February, online: https://mronline.org/2010/02/16/how-credible-is-human-rights-watch-on-cuba/
Anderson, Tim (2011) ‘Understanding the Syrian violence – check your sources’, 7 May, Facebook, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/understanding-the-syrian-violence-check-your-sources/10150186018711234
Anderson, Tim (2011a) ‘The Double Speak on Libya: conflict resolution or regime change?’, Facebook, March 19, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/the-double-speak-on-libya-conflict-resolution-or-regime-change/10150125374666234
Anderson, Tim (2011b) ‘Humanitarian attack on Libya – first volley, 112 tomahawk missiles hit two cities’, Facebook, 20 March, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/humanitarian-attack-on-libya-first-volley-112-tomahawk-misiles-hit-two-cities/10150126117161234
Anderson, Tim (2011c) ‘Propaganda war rages over Syrian violence’, Facebook, 8 August, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/propaganda-war-rages-over-syrian-violence/10150273915031234
Anderson, Tim (2012) ‘Humanitarian Intervention and the Left in Imperial Cultures’, Facebook, 1 March, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/humanitarian-intervention-and-the-left-in-imperial-cultures/10150603967576234
Anderson, Tim (2012a) ‘The lies that fuel intervention and ‘regime change’ – Iraq, Timor Leste, Libya, Syria’, Facebook, 8 May, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/the-lies-that-fuel-intervention-and-regime-change-iraq-timor-leste-libya-syria-/10150806025926234
Anderson, Tim (2012b) ‘Reading Syria’, Facebook, 24 May, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/reading-syria/10150862173381234
Anderson, Tim (2012c) ‘Massacres in Syria: the awful truth’, Facebook, online: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tim-anderson/massacres-in-syria-the-awful-truth/10150895942696234
Anderson, Tim (2012d) ‘The malignant consensus on Syria’, The Conversation, 19 September, online: https://theconversation.com/the-malignant-consensus-on-syria-9565
Anderson, Tim (2013) ‘Hugo Chávez, Venezuela and the Corporate Media’, Online Opinion, 9 April, online: http://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14882&page=0
Anderson, Tim (2013a) ‘Syria: how the violence began, in Daraa’, OpEd Opinion, 13 May, online: https://www.opednews.com/articles/Syria-how-the-violence-be-by-Tim-Anderson-130513-875.html
Anderson, Tim (2016) The Dirty war on Syria, Global Research, Montreal
Anderson, Tim (2017) ‘Masterminds of terrorism in the Middle East.’, Twitter, 7 April, online: https://twitter.com/timand2037/status/850516689036861440
Anderson, Tim (2017a) ‘Implausible Denials: The Crime at Jabal al Tharda. US-led Air Raid on Behalf of ISIS-Daesh Against Syrian Forces’, Global Research, 17 December, online: https://www.globalresearch.ca/implausible-denials-the-crime-at-jabal-al-tharda-us-led-air-raid-on-behalf-of-isis-daesh-against-syrian-forces/5623056
Anderson, Tim (2018) ‘Syria: the human rights industry in ‘humanitarian war’’, Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, Research Paper 1/18, online: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/humanitarian-war-rp-1-18/
Barahona, Diana (2005) ‘Reporters Without Borders Unmasked’, Counter Punch, 17 May, online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/05/17/reporters-without-borders-unmasked/
CCHS (2017) ‘Syria Conference 2017’, online: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/category/conf/sc-2017/
Cockburn, Patrick (2011) ‘Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war’, The Independent, 23 June, online: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html
Dickinson, Elizabeth (2014) ‘The Case Against Qatar’, Foreign Policy, 30 September, online: http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/30/the-case-against-qatar/
Doran, Chris and Tim Anderson (2011) ‘Iraq and the case for Australian war crimes trials’, Crime, Law and Social Change: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23 August, online: http://www.mapw.org.au/files/downloads/doran-anderson-war-crimes-2011%20%282%29.pdf
Elizalde, Rosa Miriam and Luis Baez (2003) “The Dissidents”, Editora Política, La Habana; partially online here: http://www.redandgreen.org/Cuba/Disidents/index.html
Evans, Michael (2017) ‘State of the Uni Survey: Thousands of uni staff have their say’, NTEU Advocate, online: https://www.nteu.org.au/article/State-of-the-Uni-Survey%3A-Thousands-of-uni-staff-have-their-say-%28Advocate-24-03%29-20157
Jackson, Elizabeth (2006b) ‘E Timor Prime Minister denies new ‘hit squad’ claims’, ABC
Radio, AM, 10 June, online: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1660023.htm
Kampmark, Binoy (2008) ‘John Howard and War Crimes’, CounterPunch, 26 June, online: https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/06/26/john-howard-and-war-crimes-2/
Karadjis, Michael (2014) ‘Why the Syrian rebels oppose U.S. air strikes’, Socialist Worker, 6 October, online: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105044008/https://socialistworker.org/2014/10/06/why-syrian-rebels-oppose-us-air-strikes
Kerr, Christian (2014) ‘Academic with a murky past stirs fresh controversy with trip to Damascus’, The Australian, 4 Jan 2014
Khalaf, Roula and Abigail Fielding Smith (2013) ‘Qatar bankrolls Syrian revolt with cash and arms’, FT, 16 May, online: http://ig-legacy.ft.com/content/86e3f28e-be3a-11e2-bb35-00144feab7de#axzz5BBZYAcu2
Kuperman, Alan J. (2015) ‘Obama’s Libya Debacle’, Foreign Affairs, March/April, online: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/obamas-libya-debacle
Lamrani, Salim (2014) Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality, Monthly review Press, New York
Loussikian, Kylar (2017) ‘Sarin Gasbag: academic claims Trump a terrorist and tyrant Assad didn’t launch chemical attack’, Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 10 April
Loussikian, Kylar (2017a) ‘Sydney University’s Tim Anderson praises North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a solidarity visit’, Daily Telegraph, 4 September
NACLA (2009) ‘Critics Respond to Human Rights Watch’s Defense of Venezuela Report’, North American Congress on Latin America, 13 January, online: https://nacla.org/news/critics-respond-human-rights-watchs-defense-venezuela-report
Norton, Ben (2017) ‘Michael Karadjis whitewashes Syrian al-Qaeda as “decent revolutionaries”’, 10 May, online: https://bennorton.com/michael-karadjis-syrian-al-qaeda-jabhat-al-nusra/
Solon, Olivia (2017) ‘How Syria’s White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine’, The Guardian, 18 September, online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories
Wilkie, Ian (2018) ‘Now Mattis admits there was no evidence Assad used poison gas on his people’, Newsweek, 8 February, online: http://www.newsweek.com/now-mattis-admits-there-was-no-evidence-assad-using-poison-gas-his-people-801542
Worrall, Patrick (2016) ‘Eva Bartlett’s claims about Syrian children’, 20 December, 4 News, online: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-eva-bartletts-claims-about-syrian-children
Worthington, Kerri (2013) ‘Australian delegation condemned for Syria visit’, SBS, 2 January, online: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-delegation-condemned-for-syria-visit
Dr. Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, human rights and self-determination in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. He has published dozens of articles and chapters in academic journals and books, as well as essays in a range of online journals. His work includes the areas of agriculture and food security, health systems, regional integration and international cooperation.
Russian lawmakers plan to meet Syria’s President Assad
Press TV – April 11, 2018
A group of Russian lawmakers have announced a plan to meet Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while denying claims that the Syrian leader has left the Arab country.
Dmitry Sablin, a deputy in the Russian lower house of parliament, known as the State Duma, told Russia’s Interfax news agency that the lawmakers would meet Assad to discuss latest developments in Syria.
“We plan to meet him to discuss the situation and support the people of Syria in its fight against terrorism,” said Sablin without elaborating on the specific date of the planned meeting.
Sablin, who serves as the coordinator of a Russian parliamentary group for ties with Syria’s parliament, arrived in Damascus on Wednesday at the head of a delegation which seeks talks with the Syrian leadership and businessmen while on a mission to carry out a number of humanitarian efforts.
The announcement for meeting with Assad came hours after some reports suggested that the Syrian president had left Syria out of fears that the United States might launch a massive military attack on the country.
US President Donald Trump took to his Twitter page and called on Russia, which maintains a military presence in Syria to help Assad fight terror, to be ready for a potential US missile attack.
However, Sablin rejected claims that Assad had left the country with his family.
“Syrian President Bashar Assad is in Damascus,” said Sablin, reiterating that Assad has repeatedly resisted calls for leaving the country in the past.
The Russian lawmaker added that he “has met with Assad several times, including in 2014, when the situation in Syria was much worse.”
“Then, Assad said he would never leave Syria and would share his people’s fate,” said the lawmaker, adding, “His (Assad’s) family is also now in Damascus with their people.”
Pentagon Capitalism and Silicon Valley: Google’s Drone War Project Shows Big Data’s Military Roots
By Elliott GABRIEL | Mint Press News | April 6, 2018
Google — the advertising and search engine monolith that once touted its official commitment, “Don’t be evil” — has thrown its full weight behind the U.S. military-industrial complex’s fast-advancing unmanned drone program – and more than three thousand of its employees will have none of it.
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, over 3,100 employees invoked the now-discarded slogan in an appeal demanding that the company not allow its artificial intelligence technology to be used to improve the targeting capabilities of the United States’ deadly drone fleet. Google’s Project Maven is an AI surveillance engine that uses footage captured by the U.S. Armed Forces’ unmanned aerial vehicles to detect and track objects such as vehicles, while combing through, organizing, and feeding the processed data to the Pentagon.
Watch | Project Maven: The Pentagon’s New Artificial Intelligence
The letter, which is fast making the rounds on Google campuses and internal communication servers, demands the cancellation of the project and the public adoption of a policy pledging that neither Google nor its contractors produce technology for warfare. The letter states:
“This plan will irreparably damage Google’s brand and its ability to compete for talent. Amid growing fears of biased and weaponized AI, Google is already struggling to keep the public’s trust. By entering into this contract, Google will join the ranks of companies like Palantir, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. The argument that other firms, like Microsoft and Amazon, are also participating doesn’t make this any less risky for Google. Google’s unique history, its motto Don’t Be Evil, and its direct reach into the lives of billions of users set it apart.”
However, journalist and author Yasha Levine has explained in his new book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet that Google has long been a leading Silicon Valley vendor to the U.S. repressive state:
“Over the years, [Google] supplied mapping technology used by the U.S. Army in Iraq, hosted data for the Central Intelligence Agency, indexed the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence databases, built military robots, co-launched a spy satellite with the Pentagon, and leased its cloud computing platform to help police departments predict crime. And Google is not alone. From Amazon to eBay to Facebook … Some parts of these companies are so thoroughly intertwined with America’s security services that it is hard to tell where they end and the U.S. government begins.
The grim calculus of remote-controlled warfare
An Air Force RPA reconnaissance drone is retrofitted for use in attack squadron. (Photo: U.S. Air Force)
Thousands of alleged “combatants” have been killed in U.S. drone strikes since the start of the post-9/11 “War on Terror.” Former President Barack Obama ramped up the targeted killing program using drones in 2009, pledging that the use of unmanned aerial platforms was part of a “just war—a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.”
Reports have shown that the use of drones in such locales as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and other theaters of operations have claimed a vast number of civilian lives — over 15,000 in 2017, according to surveys. According to New York Times Magazine, which surveyed 150 Coalition drone strikes carried out in Iraq over an 18-month period, one out of every five strikes kills civilians.
Watch | Suffering in Silence: a documentary about the war on terror in Pakistan
The American Civil Liberties Union has denounced the use of such tactics as contrary to international law:
“A program of targeted killing far from any battlefield, without charge or trial … violates international law, under which lethal force may be used outside armed conflict zones only as a last resort to prevent imminent threats, when non-lethal means are not available.
There is very little information available to the public about the U.S. targeting of people far from any battlefield, so we don’t know when, where and against whom targeted killing can be authorized … The secrecy and lack of standards for sentencing people to death, resulting in a startling lack of oversight and safeguards, is one of our prime concerns with this program.”
In 2007 at the height of George W. Bush’s “troop surge” in Iraq, Google enlisted in the “Global War on Terror” in a discrete partnership with Lockheed Martin. While enhanced versions of Google Earth were already at the disposal of government agencies, the tech firm helped to design a Google Earth product for the Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that displayed a visual representation of U.S. and Iraqi military bases in Iraq as well as the location of Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, allowing occupation forces to oversee and manage the bloody fratricidal warfare between the groups as well as the possible location of insurgent organizations within their ranks.
It was during this same year that the development and use of Air Force drones in the Iraqi quagmire dramatically increased, nearly doubling between January and October of 2007.
Google defends its public image (and low-profile military ties)
Claiming that it values the input of its employees as an “important part” of its company culture, Google has promised to address the AI-drone issue without making specific comments on the employees’ demands. In a statement Tuesday, the company said:
“Any military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively engaged across the company in a comprehensive discussion of this important topic and also with outside experts, as we continue to develop our policies around the development and use of our machine learning technologies.”
Google has also defended its participation in the Pentagon program with the claim that its usage is specifically for non-offensive purposes and uses open-source object-recognition software based on non-classified data that’s freely available to any users of the Google Cloud, and could in fact save lives while saving labor through the use of AI.
Google’s own top corporate chiefs are quite close to the Pentagon: Google vice president Milo Medin serves on the Department of Defense’s tech advisory body, the Defense Innovation Board, which is also chaired by former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who remains an executive board member at Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc.
Google itself has long been interested in developing its own line of drone products, including private delivery drones.
The company is also a leader in AI and machine-learning technology. Its subsidiary DeepMind Technologies, Inc. has recently developed a program based on Google Street View that allows AI-based platforms to take part in long-range navigation and cross complicated urban environments. The navigator AI system is capable of steering everything from autonomous, self-driving cars to robotic vacuums and even unmanned drones.
Watch | Eric Schmidt at the Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Summit
Last November in a keynote address on artificial intelligence in warfare before Washington-based think-tank the Center for a New American Security, Schmidt pinned anxiety about his company’s acquisition of DeepMind on “a general concern in the tech community of somehow the military-industrial complex using their stuff to kill people incorrectly, if you will.”
“It comes from a, it’s essentially related to the history of the Vietnam War and the founding of the tech industry,” Schmidt added.
Indeed, Levine argues:
“In the 1960s, America was a global power overseeing an increasingly volatile world: conflicts and regional insurgencies against U.S.-allied governments from South America to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. These were not traditional wars that involved big armies but guerrilla campaigns and local rebellions, frequently fought in regions where Americans had little previous experience. Who were these people? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In military circles, it was believed that these questions were of vital importance to America’s pacification efforts, and some argued that the only effective way to answer them was to develop and leverage computer-aided information technology.”
Surveillance capitalism’s military-industrial roots
In a 2014 essay for Monthly Review magazine titled “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,” authors John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney coined the phrase surveillance capitalism, tracing its origins to the inception of a post-World War II “new Pentagon capitalism” that came to be known as the military-industrial complex.
Under the model – revolutionized by then-Army Chief of Staff and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower – the U.S. technological, scientific research and industrial capacity were to become “organic parts of our military structure” in conditions of national emergency, effectively giving the civilian economy a dual-use purpose. In a 1946 memorandum, Eisenhower noted:
“The future security of the nation… demands that all those civilian resources which by conversion or redirection constitute our main support in time of emergency be associated closely with the activities of the Army in time of peace.”
The model became a permanent feature of the U.S. economy, giving birth to a sprawling military-civilian economic base Eisenhower famously criticized in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. Civilian industry, science, and academia were used alongside an exorbitant and perpetually-expanding war budget to underwrite the Defense Department’s never-ending state of conflict with Cold War enemies and unruly populations, making the world safe for the unchallenged reign of U.S. monopoly capitalism (imperialism) and “pump-priming” the economy whenever an additional surge of “military Keynesian” government spending was required.
Watch | Richard Wolff On Trump’s Defence Spending
According to the popular history of the internet’s origin, it was conceived in 1969 by scientists at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), who sought to create a means of “internetworking” Pentagon-sponsored computer mainframes belonging to government agencies, universities and defense contractors across the United States and NATO bloc. Known as Arpanet, the decentralized system allowed for military nodes – down to a battlefield level – to network and share data quickly and wirelessly. In the event of a nuclear strike or major war where swathes of the network were destroyed, the Arpanet would remain operational.
Levine posits that a primary purpose of conceiving the “information superhighway” was the need for a computerized counterinsurgency tool that could predict and check the “perceived global spread of communism” and provide real-time surveillance of potential threat groups:
“The Internet came out of this effort: an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. Some even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft. In other words, the Internet was hardwired to be a surveillance tool from the start. No matter what we use the network for today — dating, directions, encrypted chat, email, or just reading the news — it always had a dual-use nature rooted in intelligence gathering and war.”
The Arpanet system formed the backbone of U.S. military communications from 1969 until 1989, when the World Wide Web was introduced to civilian consumers. The unveiling of the World Wide Web opened the floodgates to the use of the internet by users across the globe, as well as its subsequent commercialization and the resulting dot com boom of the mid-to-late 1990s, when Google was founded.
Watch | Yasha Levine on why we lost our fear of computers as tools of social control
The rapid advance of digital technology has ensured that the U.S. economy — and social life itself — is now dominated by big-data giants like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (GAFA), as well as Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. This new technology-dominated market environment, where private user info is parsed, monetized, packaged and sold, has been encapsulated by the well-worn cliché: “data is the new gold.”
Vast strides in biometrics, analytics research, AI, and deep-learning technology – perfected not only by Google but by academic researchers and technology firms across the globe – have vastly boosted the state’s ability to surveil and control populations and police dissent across the globe. Many of the technologies developed by global arms, surveillance, and data-analysis firms are supplied to countries requiring tailor-made solutions to unrest such as India, China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan.
The extent of Silicon Valley’s integration with the U.S. government was laid bare to the public in 2013, when Edward Snowden provided evidence proving that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had direct access to the internal servers of nine major tech firms – AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, YouTube, and Yahoo – each of which provided direct access through major internet service providers to the NSA through its secret projects like Boundless Informant and Prism.
Foster and McChesney explained:
“These monopolistic corporate entities readily cooperate with the repressive arm of the state in the form of its military, intelligence, and police functions. The result is to enhance enormously the secret national security state, relative to the government as a whole.
Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s Prism program, together with other leaks, have shown a pattern of a tight interweaving of the military with giant computer-Internet corporations, creating what has been called a ‘military-digital complex.’ Indeed, Beatrice Edwards, the executive director of the Government Accountability Project, argues that what has emerged is a ‘government-corporate surveillance complex.”
Information superiority and the modern battlefield
At present, the digitalization of the military-industrial complex gives the United States a commanding edge in terms of military technology and high-tech warfare, which is augmented by optical spy satellites capable of capturing remarkably detailed ground-level imagery, successive generations of wireless networking technologies, pattern-recognition and machine-learning systems, and unmanned warfighting platforms.
As a matter of survival, however, all modern militaries – both regular and irregular, large and small – are being forced to adapt to the digitization of warfare. China, Russia, and even non-state actors like Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah are fast making technological advances to keep pace in the informationized battlefield.
The weaponized nature of digital technology is a pandora’s box that may prove impossible to close. Be that as it may, Google’s employees are livid about their participation in these developments:
“We cannot outsource the moral responsibility of our technologies to third parties … Building this technology to assist the U.S. Government in military surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes – is not acceptable.”
While the tech conglomerate workers’ attempt to decouple Google from the Pentagon may be in vain, one can only applaud their efforts to protest the tech conglomerate’s complicity in the bloodshed wrought by U.S. imperialism through its array of increasingly high-tech implements of death.
Haneyya: Return March battle of awareness
Palestine Information Center – April 7, 2018
GAZA – Head of Hamas’s Political Bureau Ismail Haneyya on Saturday said that the Palestinian people are capable of challenging the Israeli occupation even under the most difficult circumstances.
Speaking at the funeral of the Palestinian photojournalist Yaser Murtaja in Gaza, Haneyya said that the Great March of Return represents a battle of awareness to emphasize on national constants, most importantly the right of return.
Haneyya praised the courage of journalist Murtaja who sacrificed his life for the sake of conveying truth to the world.
Murtaja died earlier Saturday after he succumbed to a serious injury he sustained after being deliberately shot in the abdomen by an Israeli sniper while covering peaceful protests near the border fence east of Khuza’a town in the southern Gaza Strip.
Hundreds of Palestinian citizens and dozens of journalists took part in Murtaja’s funeral chanting slogans calling for prosecuting Israel’s leaders over their crimes against the Palestinian people.
BDS Movement Calls on Netflix to Remove Series ‘Sanitizing’ Israeli Occupation
teleSUR | April 3, 2018
Pro-Palestinian groups including the Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement along with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) have called on Netflix to discontinue the series ‘Fauda’ (Chaos in Arabic) for “sanitizing and normalizing war crimes” and “promoting and justifying these grave human rights violations.”
Originally produced by a network named, Yes, the series depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and justifies the crimes against humanity by the Israeli intelligence.
Calling the series, “racist propaganda material for the Israeli occupation army,” the BDS movement wrote a letter to Netflix, the United States-based entertainment company to remove the series.
The series produced by the two former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) officers is scheduled to be broadcast in May, which also marks the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) of the Palestinian people.
“The two authors [of the series], who are graduates of one of these teams, without any ambiguity have collaborated with the occupation, colonization and the Apartheid regime,” the letter noted, referring to the series’ creators, Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff’s former service in elite IDF units.
The series has won over 11 awards at the Israeli Academy for Film and Television awards in March, after which it was picked up by Netflix.
Netflix needs to “stop broadcasting and not to produce the third season of the series and remove the previous seasons” as “the series promotes and legitimizes the war crimes committed by death squads disguised as people pretending to be Arabs,” the BDS movement said in a statement.
“Fauda promotes and legitimizes violent acts committed against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory by Israeli army death squads — the so-called “Mistaravim.” The show’s writers, who were members in these units, have based the series on the war crimes committed by these squads against Palestinians,” PACBI said in a press release.
Adding that if Netflix fails to pay heed to the call of Palestinian social movements, it will face “nonviolent grassroots pressure and possible legal accountability.”
Return marches are humanitarian and a holy duty, insists senior Christian official
MEMO | March 31, 2018
The secretary of the Episcopal Commission for Islamic-Christian Dialogue in Lebanon insisted on Friday that the Palestinian return marches are humanitarian activities and a holy, ethical and national duty, Al-Resalah has reported.
“Any Palestinian resistance action aimed at protecting the country and human dignity is a religious duty guaranteed by all religions,” said Father Antoine Daou. He noted that the aim of the return marches is to achieve freedom and regain rights. “These are spiritual goals also guaranteed by all religions.”
Israel’s fear of such marches, suggested Daou, reflects the aggressive face of the state. “This was evident in its brutal treatment of the unarmed civilians.” Gaza’s residents, he added, are looking for salvation for all oppressed Palestinians. “They are taking the path of freedom which aims to end persecution and oppression.”
The senior Christian official said that such action corrects the moral compass of the Arab nations, which has been lost recently.
7 Palestinians killed, dozens injured as Israel suppresses massive protest in Gaza
Ma’an – March 30, 2018
GAZA CITY – Six Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and dozens more injured since early Friday morning, as thousands of Gazans took to the borders with Israel as part of “The Great March of Return” taking place across the besieged coastal enclave to mark the 42nd Land Day.
In 1976, Israeli police shot and killed six Palestinian citizens of Israel as they were protesting the Israeli government’s expropriation of thousands of dunums of Palestinian land. Since then, Palestinians have commemorated March 30 as Land Day with mass protests across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Gaza, and inside Israel.
A Palestinian farmer was killed around dawn and another was injured as Israeli forces targeted the southern Gazan district of Khan Younis with mortar shells.
Spokesperson of the Gaza Ministry of Health, Ashraf al-Qidra, identified the slain farmer as Omar Sammour, 31, adding that another Palestinian, whose identity remained unknown, was injured during the shelling.
Israeli media reported that Sammour and the other man with him were targeted for approaching the border fence with Israel in a “suspicious manner,” though local sources reported that Sammour was simply gathering crops from his land to sell later in the day.
On Friday afternoon, medical sources confirmed to Ma’an that two more Palestinians were killed during the protest along the border.
One of the slain Palestinians was identified as Amin Mahmoud Muhammar from Rafah in southern Gaza. His age remained unknown.
The other slain Palestinian was identified as Muhammad Kamal al-Najjar, 25, from eastern Jabaliya in northern Gaza.
Around 2:20 p.m. medical sources told Ma’an that a fourth Palestinian had been killed. He was identified as Muhammad Abu Omar, 19.
Fifteen minutes later, the Gaza Ministry of Health confirmed that a fifth Palestinian had been killed. He was identified as 16-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim Odeh from the northern Gaza Strip.
Around 3:15p.m. the ministry reported that Jihad Freineh, 33, from Gaza City was killed.
Minutes later, the ministry reported that the seventh Palestinian had been killed by Israeli forces. He was identified as Mahmoud Saadi Rahmi, from Gaza City.
Leading up to the march, the Israeli army released a statement saying it had declared the border area along Gaza a “closed military zone,” meaning that any Palestinian who got close to the border fence could risk getting shot.
The Israeli army released statements on Twitter describing the protests as “violent riots.”
“17,000 Palestinians are rioting in 5 locations along the Gaza Strip security fence. The rioters are rolling burning tires and hurling firebombs & rocks at the security fence & IDF troops, who are responding w riot dispersal means and firing towards main instigators,” the statement said.
Despite the Israeli army’s claims, Palestinian activists and leaders in the Gaza Strip have maintained that the “March of Return” was organized as a massive non-violent, weeks-long protest advocating for the return of Palestinian refugees to their original homelands in historic Palestine, now present day Israel.
Leading up to Friday, the first official day of the march — which will continue until the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, in May — Palestinians set up tents along the border with Gaza, where protesters plan to stay until the Nakba anniversary.
Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas politburo, gave a speech at the March of Return, saying it “demonstrates that there are no alternatives to Palestine and the right of return (for the Palestinian people),” praising the people who left their homes to attend the march.
When speaking about the goal of the march, Haniyeh said it constitutes “the beginning of a return (of the Palestinian people) to the entirety of the land of Palestine.”
“We will not give up and we will not bargain with the Zionist entity over even a small piece of the land of Palestine,” Haniyeh continued, stressing that the Palestinians will reject any deal proposed by the Trump administration.
“Our people went out today to make it clear that we will not give up Jerusalem and that there is no alternative to Palestine and the right of return. We will not accept the right of return staying only a slogan.”
Return March organizers: Israel’s terrorism will not intimidate us
Palestine Information Center – March 28, 2018
GAZA – National committee for the March of Return, during a press conference held near the Great March of Return’s tent east of Gaza city which was targeted by Israeli gunfire on Wednesday morning, said that Israel will not succeed in terrorizing the Palestinian people.
The committee affirmed that preparations for the Great March of Return are ongoing, calling on the world nations to support this popular movement.
Head of the committee Khalid al-Batsh said that the Great March of Return is a purely peaceful event and that Palestinians are entitled to demand their right of return which is guaranteed by international law.
The PIC reporter said that the Israeli tanks stationed near Gaza’s eastern border fence fired two missiles on Wednesday morning at two sites east of al-Zaitoun neighborhood in Gaza city. No injuries were reported.
Member of the committee Ismail Ridwan warned the Israeli occupation against using violence against the protesters participating in the Great March of Return.
The Islamic Jihad leader Ahmad al-Modallal said that the Israeli occupation is in a state of confusion and trying to thwart this popular movement by various means. He continued to say that Israel will never be able to break the Palestinian will or kill the Palestinian dream of return.
The coordinating committee of the Great March of Return in February announced its intention to launch popular mass demonstrations toward the Palestinian territories occupied since 1948 in demand of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.
Trinity College Dublin students overwhelmingly back BDS in referendum
MEMO | March 23, 2108
Students at Trinity College Dublin have overwhelmingly voted to support the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, with the referendum result announced to cheers and chants.
Asked whether Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) should “accept a long-term policy on Palestine and in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)”, 64.5 per cent of students voted in favour (1,287 students of a total of 2,050).
The referendum reportedly saw the highest turnout in recent years. As BDS is a “long-term policy”, it required that 60 per cent or above of the students balloted voted in its favour. The referendum was held after students gathered the necessary 500 signatures to put the vote to the student body.
According to The University Times, the long-term policy mandates the union to support the movement and “comply with the principles of BDS in all union shops, trade, business and other union operations”, as well as to lobby the college and the government to adopt a BDS policy.
“The long-term policy would also see the introduction of a boycott, divestment and sanction implementation group within the union,” the paper added.
The incoming TCDSU President Shane De Rís and President-elect of the Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) Oisín Vince Coulter had both urged students to vote in favour of BDS.
“It isn’t uncommon for students and students unions to campaign for the rights of oppressed people at home and around the globe,” De Rís said.
If we can help make a difference by boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning those organisations complicit the oppression of the Palestinian people, then I think it worthwhile to do so.
Vince Coulter added: “We need to show solidarity again with the struggle of the Palestinian people for peace, justice and human rights.”
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Hamas gets one step ahead of ‘deal of the century’ with five-point strategy
Head of the Political Bureau of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh delivers a speech during a press conference in Gaza City, Gaza on 23 January 2017 [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency]
MEMO | March 9, 2018
Palestinian sources said that the Chief of the Political Bureau of Hamas movement, Ismail Haniyeh, outlined a five pronged strategy to counter the US-led ‘deal of the century’, in a meeting of various Palestinian factions in Cairo.
The first principle of this strategy is to take on the ‘deal of the century’ by holding all Palestinian factions together – including Fatah movement – to a unified position.
The second prong is “the implementation of reconciliation agreements,” especially the comprehensive agreement which was signed on 4 May 2011, and the executive agreement which was signed on 12 October, 2017.
The third axis is “building strength and resistance until the liberation of Palestine.”
The fourth element is based on “establishing open political relations” with the Arab and Islamic countries to develop an Arab-Islamic safety network that includes especially “Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran, Turkey” as well as other countries.
The fifth aspect consists of “holding an inclusive national conference” following which there would be “an agreement to adopt a joint political program,” then organising the presidential and legislative elections (inside Palestine) and the National Council.
The sources also stated that the representatives of factions present, including those of Fatah, agreed on two points, confronting the ‘deal of the century’ and the need for reconciliation and national unity.
Convention provokes rage against NDP machine
By Yves Engler · March 1, 2018
They came, mostly young people, to fight for justice. They came to support the rule of international law, to help solve a longstanding injustice through non-violent means; they came to tell an oppressed people you have not been forgotten; they came to do what is right for a left wing political party; they came to speak truth to power.
And how did the left wing party respond? By using the “machine” — orders from on high, backroom arm-twisting, opaque block voting and procedural manoeuvring — to prevent debate. Silence in class!
While NDP insiders probably feel they dodged the “Palestine Resolution” bullet at their recent convention, many party apparatchiks may come to regret their undemocratic moves. Their naked suppression of debate might stir rage against the machine they’ve proved to be. At a minimum it has provoked many to ask why.
Why, when the Palestine Resolution was endorsed unanimously by the NDP youth convention and by over 25 riding associations, did the powers that be not want it even discussed?
Given the resolution mostly restated official Canadian policy, except that it called for “banning settlement products from Canadian markets, and using other forms of diplomatic and economic pressure to end the occupation” one can only assume that the party machine either supports the indefinite Israeli occupation of Palestinian land or has some sort of problem with boycotts and economic sanctions. Clearly the NDP is not against boycotts and economic sanctions in principle since they’ve recently supported these measures against Russia, Venezuela and elsewhere.
If, after a half-century of illegal occupation, one can’t call for boycotting Israeli settlement goods, then when? After a century? Two?
Or is the problem the particular country to be boycotted? Does the NDP hierarchy believe that anti-Semitism can be the only possible motivation for putting economic pressure on Israel to accept a Palestinian state? Or perhaps it is simply a worry that the dominant media would attack the party?
Whatever the ideological reason the bottom line is the Palestine Resolution was buried to ensure it wouldn’t be discussed. When its proponents sought to push it up the priority list at an early morning session before the main plenary, the party hierarchy blocked it. In a poorly publicized side room meeting they succeeded 200 to 189. NDP House Leader Guy Caron mobilized an unprecedented number of current and former MPs, including Murray Rankin, Randall Garrison, Craig Scott, Tracey Ramsey, Alexandre Boulerice, Hélène Laverdière, Nathan Cullen and others, to vote against debating the most widely endorsed foreign policy resolution at the convention (Niki Ashton was the only MP to support re-prioritizing the Palestine Resolution.)
Apparently, the party leadership discussed how to counter the resolution at two meetings before the convention. In a comment on a Guardian story about the need for the NDP to move left, Tom Allen, a staffer for Windsor Tecumseth NDP MP Cheryl Hardcastle, describes “panicked” planning to defeat the resolution. “As for the part about the ‘party establishment (being) easily able to deflect challenges from the left.’ I would respectfully submit that this is wrong. As an NDP staffer I can tell you that it wasn’t easy at all this time and, especially with regards to the ‘Palestinian Resolution,’ which required a great deal of panicked last minute organizing to defeat (and only then by a close margin).”
Why would the party establishment risk turning off so many young activists, exactly the sort of member new leader Jagmeet Singh claims he wants to attract?
A quick look at some of the more prominent supporters of shutting down debate suggests an answer.
Victoria area MPs (defence critic) Randall Garrison and (justice critic) Murray Rankin who voted against debating the Palestine Resolution are members of the Canada Israel Inter-Parliamentary Group and took a Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs paid trip to Israel in 2016. After the IDF slaughtered 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza in the summer of 2014, Rankin offered words of encouragement to an emergency fundraiser for Israel.
Party foreign critic Hélène Laverdière, who voted to suppress the Palestine Resolution, took a paid trip to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s conference in Washington in 2016 and participated in a Jewish National Fund event in Israel.
British Columbia liaison and critic for democratic institutions, Nathan Cullen also voted against debating the Palestine Resolution. “I am strongly in support of Israel”, Cullen bellowed in a 2016 statement about how people should be allowed to criticize that country. In 2014-15 Cullen’s office took in Daniel Gans through CIJA’s Parliamentary Internship Program, which pays pro-Israel university students $10,000 to work for parliamentarians (Gans then worked as parliamentary assistant to NDP MP Finn Donnelly). In 2014 Cullen met representatives of CIJA Pacific Region to talk about Israel, Iran and other subjects. According to CIJA’s summary of the meeting, “Mr. Cullen understood the importance of a close Canada-Israel relationship.”
Maybe the loudest anti-Palestinian at the convention was former president of the Ontario NDP and federal council member Janet Solberg. Unsatisfied as a settler in Toronto, Solberg pursued a more aggressive colonial experience when she moved to historic Palestine as a young adult.
Just before the convention the President of the Windsor-Tecumseh Federal NDP, Noah Tepperman, sent out an email to all riding associations calling on them to oppose Palestine resolutions. In it he claimed, “boycotts based on religion, nationality or place of origin directly contravene the spirit of inclusiveness to which we in the NDP are committed.” He further alluded to an anti-Jewish agenda by connecting the different solidarity resolutions to “a backdrop of already-high-and-rising antisemitism here in Canada as well as abroad.” But, Tepperman sits on the board of the Windsor Jewish National Fund, which is an openly racist organization.
The truth is pro-Israel-no-matter-what-it-does NDP members in positions of power within the party won a narrow battle. How the war goes will depend on the lessons learned by those seeking a party that’s an instrument of real change, that fights against all forms of racism and oppression.
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