Jews can report on Palestinians, but the other way ’round?
By Ali Abunimah on February 8, 2010
I have been of course following all the absurd defenses and excuse-making from Jeffrey Goldberg, Ron Kampeas, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Klein, etc for Ethan Bronner and the New York Times, as well as your recent comments. They insist that there is no bias in Bronner’s reporting and that his son’s service in the occupation army presents no conflict of interest. Here are the issues they seem to avoid:
-The New York Times has a long history of appointing reporters who are Jewish and/or Israeli to the Jerusalem bureau – Friedman, Sontag, Erlanger, Bronner, Kershner (etc. correct me if I am wrong on any of these). Whether Jewish or not they tend to live as middle class Israelis do, in West Jerusalem (like Bronner in an ethnically cleansed Palestinian neighborhood) or perhaps Tel Aviv, but never in Ramallah, Nazareth, Gaza or Hebron. So they have a structural identification with Israeli Jews — the privileged segment of the population living between the Med and the Jordan River.
Now let me be clear that I do NOT assume that being Jewish, or even having family ties to Israel, or being Israeli, automatically results in bias. Amira Hass of Haaretz is an excellent reporter. She’s an Israeli Jew whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Deborah Sontag of the New York Times was one of the best reporters on the conflict ever – she was there during the second Intifada. So was Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian. So anyone who says that being Jewish automatically leads to pro-Israel bias is wrong. So on this point those criticizing and defending Bronner and the NYT should find a lot of common ground.
But here’s the issue that sticks. Is the NYT really defending some sort of universal principle? Can anyone seriously imagine that if it had been revealed that Bronner’s son had joined the Izzedin al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas), we would be hearing these sorts of defenses? Of course one reason is it’s so hard to imagine is because the New York Times has never had a Palestinian, Palestinian-American or Arab-American reporter of stature report on the conflict.
Yes, recently they have had Taghreed El-Khodary in Gaza — who some like (Weiss for instance), but others (such as As’ad AbuKhalil) have strongly criticized. But here is a crucial point: El-Khodary is allowed to report only on Palestinians. Neither she nor any other Arab reporter is allowed to report on Israeli Jews. While Jews/Americans may report on Palestinians, the converse is not true. Why is this? It must be — I assume — because there is an inherent, perhaps unacknowledged assumption that an Arab/Palestinian is or will be automatically biased against Israelis/Jews. Whereas, we are supposed to accept that in no case is a Jewish reporter who identifies with Israel biased even when his son has joined an occupation army that is raiding Palestinian refugee camps and communities dozens of times per week. Seriously?
To what can we attribute this double-standard? I am afraid it smacks of racism.
I also have a long memory — Back in 1995, NPR fired Maureen Meehan because it was claimed she had not adequately disclosed that her husband had worked as an adviser to the Palestinian Authority. Of course we did not have blogs in those days, but I still do not remember an outpouring in her defense from the mainstream media. Hmmm. I wonder why?
Tel Aviv’s hydra-headed monster
It’s outrageous that in all probability Israel will once again be allowed to get away with committing murder on foreign soil while the world remains silent
By Linda Heard | Gulf News | February 9, 2010
- Government-sponsored Israeli murderers are professional and have decades of experience. It’s highly unlikely that they would leave behind them a trail of hard evidence that would stand up in an international court of law.
- Image Credit: NINO JOSE HEREDIA/Gulf News
It’s surely ironic that the country that complains loudest about terrorism has assassination squads travelling the world in search of prey. The murder of Hamas commander Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room last month is believed to have been carried out by members of the Mossad allegedly using Irish passports. And the fact that the Israeli government has declined to comment other than to falsely claim that Al Mabhouh was in the emirate to meet with Iranian officials speaks volumes.
Dubai’s Police Chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim has warned that an international arrest warrant will be issued in the Israeli Prime Minister’s name if it is proved that the crime was perpetrated by an Israeli hit squad. That would certainly be a logical course of action but it’s easier said than done.
Government-sponsored Israeli murderers are professional and have decades of experience. It’s highly unlikely that they would leave behind them a trail of hard evidence that would stand up in an international court of law.
Moreover, even if Benjamin Netanyahu’s name were to appear on an international arrest warrant there would be very few countries, if any, willing to face Washington’s wrath by putting him behind bars.
Let’s be realistic. It’s just not going to happen! Britain, for instance, regularly tips off Israelis who are wanted for war crimes and is attempting to change its own laws to ensure Israelis are no longer vulnerable.
It’s outrageous that in all probability Israel will once again be allowed to get away with committing murder on foreign soil while the world stays silent. The reaction or rather non-reaction of the international community is unprincipled. It isn’t hard to imagine what an orchestrated outcry there would be if assassins backed by Arab governments were targeting prominent Israelis abroad. Every western television network would have rolling news and commentary centering on ‘Arab terrorists’, while US and European leaders would be issuing warnings and sending condolences.
There will be those who will say ‘good riddance’ upon hearing of the demise of a top Hamas lieutenant but I believe that anyone who takes that stance needs to check their moral compass. Whatever we feel about the victim should be neither here nor there.
Rogue state
Countries that equip assassins with foreign passports — usually acquired using devious means — to violate the sovereignty of a third nation should be censured in the United Nations and isolated. When a nation’s leaders behave like the Sopranos it deserves to be branded a rogue state.
Over the decades, the Mossad, the Shin Bet and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have carried out dozens of targeted assassinations. Several leaders of Hamas, Fatah, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Hezbollah have been killed along with the Egyptian nuclear scientist Yahya Al Mashad, who was murdered in a Paris hotel room in June 1980. By some estimates, the Mossad is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of nuclear scientists and is believed to have been behind the killing of Canadian ballistics expert Gerald Bull shot outside his Brussels apartment in March 1990 while working for Iraq.
The Mossad may be a well-honed killing machine but there are times when it makes mistakes. In 1973, Mossad agents using fake Canadian passports murdered a Moroccan waiter in Norway, whom they mistook for a Black September leader, and were arrested.
In 1997, Canada withdrew its ambassador from Israel after Israeli assassins were caught with Canadian passports in Jordan after a failed attempt on the life of Hamas leader Khalid Mesha’al. Then, in 2004, there was a diplomatic contretemps between Israel and New Zealand when Israelis working for Israeli intelligence fraudulently tried to obtain New Zealand passports.
Al Mabhouh’s killing may be stamped with the Mossad’s trademark but, in the end, the case is likely to be filed away marked ‘unsolved’. The slayers who flew out of Dubai within hours of doing the deed will be given new identities, new passports and new assignments.
Israel’s propagandists will attempt to pin the blame on Arab intelligence agencies and the rest of us will simply yawn and turn the page… until the next time this government-licensed hydra-headed monster strikes. The question is who will be next?
Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She can be contacted at lheard@gulfnews.com
British Government Promises Israeli Official He Won’t Be Arrested During Visit
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – February 9, 2010
After receiving a letter from the British Foreign Ministry promising that he wouldn’t be arrested for war crimes while in England, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon arrived in London on Monday.
He is the first Israeli official to visit Britain since a British judge issued an edict declaring that Israeli officials would be subject to ‘universal jurisdiction’ laws requiring their arrests and trial for war crimes. The ruling included an arrest warrant for Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni.
Since its invasion of the Gaza Strip last year that resulted in 1400 Palestinians killed, 80% of whom were civilians, and 5 Israeli civilians killed, Israeli officials have faced increased scrutiny and criticism abroad. This increased after Israel refused to acknowledge or examine the contents of the United Nations Report examining the Gaza invasion for possible war crimes.
Ayalon spoke Monday at the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, warning of ‘dangerous rhetoric’ emanating from Israel’s neighbors. The event was billed as a public ‘brain-storming session’ with British officials, researchers and diplomats. One of the subjects discussed was the growing boycott and divestment movement aimed at Israel’s apartheid policies. Ayalon considers the boycott movement to be an ‘image problem’ for the state of Israel.
Ashley Perry, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Ministry, said, “This visit takes place against the backdrop of anti-Israeli sentiment among some sectors in Britain and represents an attempt to present the basic elements of current Israeli policy.”
In the British Foreign Ministry’s invitation to Ayalon, the Ministry invited Ayalon to host an event at the Ministry’s office to celebrate an academic exchange program that “sends a clear message of Government support for strengthened links and of opposition to boycotts.”
US rejects EU diplomacy over Iran N program
Press TV – February 7, 2010
Leading US senators Joseph Lieberman and John Kerry inveigh against a top EU official for supporting further diplomatic talks with Iran over its nuclear program.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, the two US officials criticized the European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashto who threw her lot with more dialogue over Iran’s nuclear program.
The two went on to claim that Iran has been ‘explicitly dishonest’ over its uranium enrichment and thus does not deserve further dialogue, or diplomacy for that matter.
“Iran comes to the international conference like this and talks in a way that is simply dishonest,” said Lieberman, who chairs the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and is known for his pro-Israeli stance on international issues.
Rather than dealing with Iran through diplomatic negotiations, Lieberman asserted that the US should try to deal with the Tehran government through other means.
“Dialogues have being going on for last six years, (and) there are always dialogues,” he said. “But the Iranians do not take the chance. I think it simply has to get a tougher economic sanction if any kind of diplomacy is over, and military will never be necessary.”
His remarks were instantly backed by John Kerry, the former US presidential candidate who now heads the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.
“We are united in the congress, senate house, the administration and with our allies here in Europe,” said Kerry.
This comes as Iran is trying to find a middle ground with the West in swapping its low-enriched uranium with more refined nuclear material for the Tehran research reactor.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki expressed hope on Saturday that an agreement on the nuclear fuel proposal will soon be reached with the Western side, but with the changes that Tehran seeks.
His remarks were largely ignored by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates who has instead insisted on the imposition of fresh sanctions.
Washington accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons and has for years levied sanctions and threatened the country with war scenarios to force the Tehran government into halting its nuclear activities.
Iran which has been under various US sanctions after the Islamic Revolution toppled a US-backed monarch in 1979 rejects the accusations as politically motivated.
Iran’s nuclear program was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States as part of the Atoms for Peace program. After the 1979 Revolution, Western companies working on Iran’s program refused to fulfill their obligations even though they had been paid in full.
Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, unlike some of its regional neighbors, has opened its enrichment plants to UN inspection.
The Culture of Cocaine
By Forrest Hylton | February 5, 2010
Cocaine is a central commodity of the neoliberal age; so, too, its re-processed form (“crack”) for the desperately poor in de-industrialized cities of the North and South Atlantic. First announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, the “War on Drugs” predates the rise of cocaine and crack by nearly a decade, but, in the 1980s and ’90s, the “War on Drugs” was redoubled in response to the explosion of the cocaine business. It now ranks as the U.S.A.’s longest running military-police campaign. Thus, if we look at cocaine as a social hieroglyph – not as a thing but as a complex relation between networks and organizations of people, as well as between states and bureaucracies – we may glimpse some of the distinguishing features of the contemporary world.
There is a strong argument to be made for the impact of the cocaine business on architecture, urban design and construction, fashion, media entertainment, sports, and aesthetics, not to mention banking and credit institutions. The war on cocaine producers, sellers, and users has radically changed the shape of states in relation to those who are, at least nominally, rights-bearing citizens, as states have become more militarized, policed, punitive and carceral, and citizens more powerless and less protected by the rule of law. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed in his late work, states do not disappear under neoliberalism: rather, their repressive right wings are strengthened while their progressive, redistributive rights-based wings are weakened or eliminated. This is most notable in cities, where urban space has been re-made in line with the requirements of policing and surveillance to protect capital investment and affluent consumers.
Though it does not advance these arguments, except tangentially, Tom Feiling’s well-researched The Candy Machine: How Cocaine took over the World (Penguin, 2009) makes a similar claim for the importance of its subject.Yet, could not the same be said of any essential commodity: oil, for instance, or cars or clothes? What makes cocaine different? The answer, of course, would depend on whom one asks, but what makes cocaine extraordinarily profitable for its import-export merchants is the fact that it is illegal. The fact that one country – Colombia – supplies 90 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. also makes the commodity different. Ninety per cent of Colombian cocaine enters the U.S.A. through Mexico (and Guatemala); smuggling having been made considerably easier by NAFTA, which de-regulated trucking and shipping.
Plan Colombia and Plan Mérida (Mexico) – based on counternarcotics and counterterrorism – are the two most important U.S. foreign policy initiatives in the Western Hemisphere, with Plan Colombia and its successors costing U.S. taxpayers $8 billion between 2000 and 2008, and Plan Mérida, approved in 2008, costing $500 million in 2009. So, cocaine is not only big business, it is also high politics: Plan Colombia has been held up as a model of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency success for Mexico, Afghanistan and Pakistan. One senior U.S. official told CBS News, “The more Afghanistan can look like Colombia, the better.”
Public debate in the U.S. concerning the suppression of cocaine production and consumption – and the U.S. has determined international drug policy since the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 – is moralistic, due to the weight of conservative strains of Protestantism, even among non-evangelicals, not to mention neoconservative Catholicism: decent, responsible people should not consume drugs, and should not be allowed to consume them, because, if they do, they will become unproductive degenerates.
If supply is reduced, the official argument goes, prices will rise for consumers in the U.S.A., and demand will drop correspondingly. Nevertheless, Plan Colombia and related anti-drug initiatives in the Andes and Mexico have not reduced the supply of cocaine to the U.S., where prices have tended toward secular decline since the early 1980s and domestic demand has fluctuated from generation to generation. The volume of illicit drugs that U.S. citizens consume has not changed significantly over time, but the type of drugs they consume has, with cocaine coming back into fashion, together with pharmaceuticals, among young, affluent people during the Bush II period.
In terms of costs and benefits, fighting cocaine production and consumption is a disaster even by the standards of the Pentagon: according to a 1994 RAND Corporation study, to reduce cocaine consumption by 1 per cent in the U.S., it would be twenty-three times cheaper ($34 million) to spend on treatment and education for consumers than on coca eradication for producers ($783 million).
But the failure to achieve stated objectives has yet to affect policy-making, which is driven mainly by ideology. Empirical data have little bearing on the policy-making process. The logic driving the War on Drugs has been chiefly ideological and political, not economic: domestic politics in the U.S. have determined policy abroad. One of the defining policies of Cold War liberalism, President Johnson’s War on Poverty – which had less than one-tenth of the lifespan of the War on Drugs – took for granted that federal and state governments should take responsibility for improving the plight of the poor in northern cities and represented a semi-coherent response to African-American riots and insurgencies. But what if poor black people in cities could be held responsible for their poverty? What if, as industrial jobs disappeared by the millions, they became addicted to selling or consuming illegal drugs, produced and/or distributed by U.S. government allies in Cold War counterinsurgent campaigns? Then African Americans could be locked up for nonviolent drug offenses and warehoused in prisons at an accelerated rate.
It is to Feiling’s credit to have discovered this larger truth, albeit in bits and pieces: “As long as the focus stayed on drug sales and drug abuse, inner-city residents could be blamed for the poverty they had been driven into … what the politicians had to do was convince the American public that the inner cities deserved to be abandoned.”
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon and Governor Nelson Rockefeller in New York campaigned for office by whipping up hysteria about “crime” and “drugs,” and then criminalized African-American communities, militarized policing, and increased incarceration. After a brief respite under Carter, fighting crime and drugs in urban African-American neighborhoods became the rhetorical coin of the political realm under Ronald Reagan. The idea was to put African Americans back in their place without Jim Crow segregation, and to get elected or re-elected by doing it. Fear was to be one of the most enduring weapons in the U.S. politician’s arsenal. In his diary in 1969, Nixon’s top aide, H.R. Haldeman, provided a succinct summary of the overall strategy: “Nixon emphasized that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that, while not appearing to do so.”
In a letter to Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon wrote, “Ike, it’s just amazing how much you can get done through fear. All I talk about in New Hampshire is crime and drugs, and everyone wants to vote for me – and they don’t even have any black people up here.”
Nixon’s War on Drugs,” Feiling notes, was “politically expedient, since it turned attention away from … Vietnam, while preserving the military culture that had inspired the war in the first place.”
Nearly all of those imprisoned in New York State for drug offenses have been African-American or Latino males, most of them from eight neighborhoods in New York City. Whereas the U.S. had 200,000 prisoners in the 1970s, it currently has 1.8 million in jail and 5 million on probation or parole, making it the largest carceral state-society in world history. The U.S. accounts for 5 per cent of the world’s population and 25 per cent of its prison population; 500,000 people are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses.
Needless to say, the profile of the U.S. prison population does not reflect consumption patterns: whites consume an estimated 80 per cent of cocaine in the U.S.A., while African Americans consume 13 per cent; whites consume cocaine in disproportionate numbers, while blacks do not. Yet 38 per cent of those arrested and 59 per cent of those convicted for drug offenses have been African Americans. And stereotypes notwithstanding, whites account for 46 per cent of all crack use, while African Americans consume 36 per cent and Latinos 11 per cent. That is to say that although African Americans use crack out of proportion to their numbers, probably because it is the least expensive of illicit drugs, they consume considerably less of it than whites do.
Just as Jim Crow succeeded slavery at the end of the 19th century after Reconstruction was reversed, militarized policing and prisons replaced Jim Crow after the civil rights movement was rolled back. Black freedom struggles determined the limits of U.S. democracy from the early 19th century through the 1960s, and the criminalization and incarceration of young African-American males through the War on Drugs at the end of the 20th century represented another dramatic constriction of democratic politics in the U.S., first under President Nixon and accelerating under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. As Feiling and others have stressed, it was through sentencing laws on crack vs. powder cocaine which passed in 1986 under Ronald Reagan – in cooperation with Democratic house majority leader Tip O’Neill – and a revolution in police tactics and organization, that this was achieved.
Such is the domestic context, without which it is impossible to make sense of U.S. foreign policy in producer countries in the Andes (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia) and transport countries in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean (leaving aside Brazil, whose government does not respond to U.S. pressures). After Ronald Reagan was elected, aerial fumigation was undertaken against marijuana growers in Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia in the early 1980s, even as the Pacific Northwest became the leading supplier of the U.S. marijuana market thanks to its competitive advantage in transport costs; the region was soon to find itself subject to similar, if less toxic campaigns. In 1982, President Reagan became the first to appoint a high-level official, then Vice President George H.W. Bush, to run the South Florida Drug Task Force – composed of agents from the DEA, Customs, FBI, ATF, IRS, Army, and Navy – to deal with cocaine trafficking in Miami, by which time the city’s homicide rate had made headlines thanks to the violence that Colombians had unleashed in their bid to take over and maintain distribution networks.
Before launching the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, in 1989 President George H.W. Bush created the Office of National Drug Control Policy, led by “drug czar” William Bennett, militarized anti-narcotics policing in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and doubled the anti-drug budget to $12 billion. Mexico had already become the major transshipment point for Colombian cocaine, but its dominance only increased with the end of U.S. counterinsurgency wars in Central America, the passage of NAFTA, and the fall of the two so-called cartels in Colombia – Medellín and Cali – under President Clinton.
The Candy Machine’s greatest strength may be its presentation of perspectives from former gang members and drug users, drug traffickers and retired narcotics enforcement officials in the U.S. Thus Rusty, a former narcotics officer for the Department of Corrections in Arizona: “When I talk about legalizing drugs, people say, ‘you can’t mean heroin and crack, right?’ But after 30 years of the drug war, spending a trillion dollars … the bad guys still control the price, purity, and quantity of every drug. Knowing that they control the drug trade, which drug are you going to leave under their control? Regulation and legalization is not a vote for or against any drug. It’s not about solving our drug use problem. It’s solely about getting some control back.”
“They” refers to drug barons, many of them large landowners, as well as warlords, in Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the problem with Rusty’s analysis is that U.S. government allies in such countries – the intelligence services, the judicial systems, the military and police, business and political elites – are either complicit with or directly involved in supplying U.S. and European markets with cocaine and/or heroin, generally in order to finance counterinsurgency wars. As Cockburn and St. Clair’s Whiteout [to be reissued, updated, in 2010 by CounterPunch Books] describes, this pattern was set in the 1950s, with opium and heroin in places like Burma, Marseilles and Cuba, repeated in the 1960s and ’70s in Vietnam and Laos, and updated with Colombian cocaine in Central America and Central Asian heroin in the 1980s.
The career path of “Freeway Rick” Ross in the 1980s, is illustrative. Unlike everyone else selling cocaine or crack, Rick Ross was supplied with cocaine at cut-rate prices by Danilo Blandon, a Nicaraguan employee of the CIA in the U.S. government’s war against the revolutionary Sandinista government, as documented in Whiteout and the late Gary Webb’s Pulitzer-prize winning Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Explosion (2003). From prison, Ross explained to Feiling, “Me and Danilo Blandon were really tight. I knew from earlier that he was backing some war, and I knew that he was from Nicaragua, but I had no idea about the Contras. I was illiterate at that time, you know. I never read a newspaper or listened to the news. They say that Danilo was protected, and you can assume from the Feds that I was protected too, but I never knew that. I was just in it for the money, trying to get out of the ghetto.”
Blandon sold cocaine to Ross at a price, of a quality, and in quantities that none of Ross’s competitors could match. As former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who served in El Salvador, told Feiling, “They gave all the coke to Danilo Blandon, who was a CIA asset. He in turn fronted all that stuff to Ricky Ross. Ross became the Walmart of crack, distributing to the Bloods and Crips and everybody else all over the country… Hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango airport in El Salvador were used as a trampoline for drugs coming in from Colombia and Costa Rica. Oliver North and a Cuban exile named Felix Rodríguez [a former CIA agent who supervised the execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia] were running one of them, and the other one was owned by the CIA.
All evidence pointed to Vice President George H.W. Bush’s office as overseeing the operation, but, of course, nothing came of it besides the Kerry Committee Report of 1989, which charged the State Department with making payments to Nicaraguan Contras involved in the cocaine business.
In the neoliberal economy of the 1980s, anchored in financial services, insurance, real estate, and speculative asset bubbles, many African-American males and immigrant males of color saw the cocaine-crack business as the way to achieve material security. Cocaine gave a shot in the arm to street gangs, who handled lower levels of wholesale and retail distribution in the U.S. Rick Ross describes his trajectory: “I was a youngster. Uneducated, uninformed, unemployed. I was looking for opportunities. I wanted to be important in the world, somebody who was respected. Basically, I wanted the American dream, so I guess I was ripe for the picking. The opportunity came in the form of drugs and I latched onto it. I just kept saving my money and buying more drugs. My childhood friends would be walking, but I’d be driving a nice car, and they’d want to know how I got the car. ‘Oh, I’m selling cocaine now,’ I’d say. ‘Teach me how to sell cocaine,’ they’d say. So my friends started to get involved, and, before long, we’re making a lot of money, and I’m eating at McDonald’s whenever I want to. At our height, some days a million dollars would come through our hands in a single day. Next thing I know, the whole neighborhood is selling, people were already gang-banging, but now we were able to afford more expensive weapons, more expensive cars, and better houses and the police started noticing it more.”
The comment about eating at McDonald’s speaks volumes about the depths of poverty from which Rick Ross escaped, only to wind up living most of his life in a prison cell. Indeed, for most of those serving hard time for nonviolent drug offenses, the crack business offered much less distance from poverty than it had for Ross. Marc, from South Jamaica neighborhood in the borough of Queens, N.Y. – currently the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in New York City’s black and brown neighborhoods – described his work as follows: “It was the hardest job I ever had. It’s pure capitalism, you know. Say, you’re selling drugs in the South Bronx, say at 138th and 3rd Avenue, and another crew of guys is selling the same drugs as you two blocks away. The block they’re on is making $2,000 per day, and the block you’re on is making about $2,000 per day. They decide, ‘You know what? You’re a punk. You’re a pussy.’ So they move you.” It’s dog eat dog, to quote the title of a remarkable 2008 film about the cocaine business in Cali, Colombia: a Hobbesian capitalist world of all against all and murder for hire.
This pattern – with gangs as cell forms of organized crime – was repeated among a host of new immigrant groups in the U.S., involved in cocaine distribution and/or smuggling and money-laundering: Colombians, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans in L.A.; Colombians, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago; Colombians, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Albanians, and Russians in New York. These gangs, of course, are bi- and transnational, just like the cocaine commodity circuit, in which they are embedded: in L.A., there are roughly 2,000 gangs; in Medellín, Colombia, there were reportedly 6,300 gangs in 2003; Chicago is said to have 70,000 gang members.
Gangs involved in distribution aim to reproduce the corporate organization of capitalism, from which their members have been excluded. Hip-hop music testifies to this, particularly the Brooklyn variety pioneered by Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z. Lance, a cocaine wholesaler from South Jamaica, Queens, described his outfit as follows: “The structure of the business is like a Fortune 500. We’d have different titles, but it all basically remains the same as in corporate America. You have your CEO, your supervisor, your treasurer. You might be the captain; you have your lieutenants, your soldiers.” Most Fortune 500 companies have different titles for their executives, though; only the Sicilian mafia uses such terms for its employees. This would seem to be an indication of the extent to which poor African Americans – not to speak of Jamaicans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Colombians, Salvadorans, and so forth – have seized upon mafia organization and ideology to justify the pursuit of employment, upward mobility, material abundance, and, most importantly, “respect.” If so, it provides evidence of delusion, desperation, or some combination thereof, for, as anthropologist Phillipe Bourgeois’ In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995) shows, the cocaine-crack business is much like any other low-wage service industry offering no benefits. Feiling found that “street-level sellers earn roughly the federal minimum wage, which at the time of writing stood at $6.55 per hour.” Most top dealers have day jobs and take no more than 25 per cent of total revenues. Only one in six brings home more than $5,000 per month, as 60 per cent of revenues go to wholesalers and retailers on the lower rungs of the distribution chain.
Yet, in spite of the new mafia ideology encapsulated in Jay-Z’s (typically self-glorifying) verse, “even righteous minds go through this” (when contemplating whether to participate in the crack game), the cocaine business offers only marginally more room for upward mobility than the service industries to which African-American and Latino youth are confined in the licit economy – with the added risk, or near-certainty, of prison or violent death at an early age.
For direct producers of tropical agricultural commodities like coffee, neoliberal policies in the countryside – nowhere else applied with greater blood and zealotry than in Colombia – have accelerated a long-term secular price decline: there are no options other than coca for people in isolated rural frontier areas, where there is no state presence or source of employment. A coca grower from the department of Sucre (Monterrey municipality) does the arithmetic: “Getting a sack of potatoes to market will cost a farmer between 3,000 and 5,000 pesos, and it will sell for between 10,000 and 12,000 pesos, depending on demand. Meanwhile, coca is a lot easier to sow and process, and doesn’t need transporting because the traffickers come to the village to buy it. They pay 1,500,000 pesos for a kilo of coca paste.” Making coca paste is and will remain the only option for survival for millions of impoverished peasant families on the Colombian agricultural frontier; the same is true for Peru and Bolivia.
As the experience of the Bolivians Yungas with northern Argentina demonstrates, a legal market for coca dramatically reduces the amount of coca leaf produced for the cocaine business. Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose political base remains the coca growers’ trade union federation in the Chapare that produced him, would like nothing better than to tour the world touting the medicinal benefits of the coca leaf and coca tea, and it is easy to imagine a successful “coca diplomacy” with leaders and consumers in the EU, the U.S., Australia and Japan. But, first, the U.N. Single Convention of 1961 would have to be revised so that companies and firms other than Coca Cola could use the leaf for industrial purposes. Until U.S. domestic politics changes, it will stand.
Decriminalizing Marijuana and Cocaine
Perhaps in recognition of this fact, a number of Latin American countries have de-criminalized personal consumption of cocaine and marijuana. Colombia was the pioneer: in 1994, as head of the Constitutional Court, created in the Constitution of 1991, Judge Carlos Gaviria legalized the personal consumption of up to 20 grams of marijuana, and/or a gram of cocaine, because, he argued, drinkers were much more likely to commit violent crimes, and no one had suggested prohibition of alcohol consumption since the 1920s. Gaviria, who has since moved on to a political career in Colombia’s turbulent electoral Left, said, “Legislators can proscribe certain forms of behavior toward others, but not how a person is behaving toward him or herself, as long as this doesn’t interfere with the rights of others.” Ecuador, Argentina and Mexico have since followed suit, which represents the extent to which Latin American countries have sought and attained greater autonomy from U.S. imperial control, as many of the anti-drug laws in Latin America were drafted under U.S. diplomatic pressure. Latin American countries have now joined the Netherlands in treating drug consumption as a public health problem rather than a police problem.
In the U.S., however, as Feiling points out, “legalization” is a “third-rail issue” for politicians, meaning that most will not mention it for fear of destroying their political careers. As President Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, put it in July 2009, “Legalization is not in my vocabulary nor is it in the president’s.” To understand why, it is helpful to ask who wins and who loses from legalization. The losers, not necessarily in order of importance, would include U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DEA, U.S. Border Patrol, the FBI, the ATF, the IRS, state and local police forces, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. armed forces, to name only some of the agencies whose budgets depend on the drug war for funding, as well as their counterparts in U.S. client states throughout the Americas; arms manufacturers like Sikorsky Helicopters; large pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer; suppliers of chemicals for fumigation like Monsanto; the banking sector as well as off-shore tax havens; the Republican Party; along with warlords, gangs and gangsters. The clearest winners would be consumers, direct producers, and societies that would be less militarized, less carceral, less moralizing, and would have stronger public health and education systems. But, as Jack Cole, who spent 26 years in policing narcotics in New Jersey and is now the executive director of Law Enforcement against Drug Prohibition, stressed to Feiling, “When you train your police to go to war, they’ve got to have an enemy.” Cole considers the War on Drugs a “terrible metaphor” for “policing in a democratic society.” Terrible, alas, but substitute “neoliberal” for “democratic,” and it is nothing if not apt. Predictably, Obama and Kerlikowske have dropped the nomenclature, but the policies remain intact.
Forrest Hylton is the author of Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair Thomson, of Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007). He can be reached at forresthylton@yahoo.com.
Bribery, Indentured Science, PR & Toxic Sludge
By Ronnie Cummins & Alexis Baden-Mayer | Organic Consumers Association | February 4, 2010
Greg Kester, Natalie Sierra and Liz Ostoich, along with municipal governments across the U.S. in need desperately of getting rid of the noxious stuff called sewage sludge, want Americans to believe that that toxic brew is good for you. Specifically, these operators are waging a massive PR campaign to get farmers and gardeners, including school gardens, to “fertilize” their veggies with sewage sludge. Their campaign would have us believe that the chemicals in sewage sludge—thousands of them present in every degree of hazardous and toxic combination—are somehow magically gone from sewage sludge once you “apply” it to your garden.
Before you reach for the science on the practice of “land application” of sewage sludge (and you will not find any science in the hands of the purveyors of this practice), consider the elementary logic: the purpose of sewage treatment being to clean up the sewage that arrives without cease at its doors, sludge will by definition contain everything the sewage treatment plant did in fact take out of the sewage. This means, besides urine and feces from flush toilets, every chemical from every industry, every pharmaceutical, disinfectant, and pathogen from every hospital hooked into the municipal sewer system; it means all the chemicals—tens of thousands of them—produced in our society and flushed or washed into sewers at the industry end or the consumer end: heavy metals, flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains. It also means untold—and unpredictable— new chemicals created by the negative synergy in the toxic soup that sewage is and the toxic stew that sludge is. It means hosts of new pathogenic bacteria also created through horizontal gene transfer in the stress of this same toxic soup and this same toxic stew.
Keep these plain, incontrovertible facts in mind as you read on and when you hear the 1984 talk of “biosolids” (the PR word concocted by the sludge gang), of “land application” of “biosolids” (euphemism for disposal of sludge), of “class A biosolids,” or “EQ” (for “Exceptional Quality”) “biosolids.”
Greg Kester represents the California Association of Sanitation Agencies’ Biosolids Program, Natalie Sierra works for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and Liz Ostoich works for the corporate giant of toxic sludge, Synagro (recently bought by the infamous Carlyle Group). Their job is to make sure that “land application” of toxic sludge on American farmland—the cheapest way to dispose of toxic sludge since ocean dumping was stopped in 1992—remains legal.
Opposition so far comes from people who have been made very sick by sludge “applied” to farmland close to their homes, by those who have had their entire dairy herds wiped out after being fed with hay or silage grown on sludge, and those whose own guts warn them against allowing sewage sludge to be either processed or spread near their homes or their farms. Like Monsanto’s genetically modified organisms (GMOs) polluting the gene pool, once toxic sludge contaminates our farmland, parks, schoolyards, and backyard gardens there is long term—or really, for all intents and purposes, permanent—damage. Growing food organically won’t mean much if the soil is contaminated with the pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and heavy metals contained in sewage sludge. This is exactly why the organic community rose up in 1998 and forced the government to prohibit the spreading of sewage sludge on organic farms and gardens.
Sludge propagandists like Kester, Sierra and Ostoich are the front line troups for municipal governments trying to avoid their responsibility for this noxious product of wastewater treatment: convincing the public that toxic sludge is good for you to have on your land, in your backyard. All three spoke at an industry conference several of us attended last week in San Francisco, “Biosolids: Understanding Future Regulatory Trends and Impacts on Biosolids Management in California.”
Greg “Buy the Science” Kester, California Association of Sanitation Agencies’ Biosolids Program
Greg Kester pitched sewage professionals on a national strategy of getting ahead of the toxic sludge news cycle by “filling in the data gaps” with research funded with what he described as “Congressional funny money” and conducted by organizations like WERF, the Water Environment Research Foundation, a PR think tank and lobbyist for the toxic sludge industry.
What really upsets Kester are reporters who “overlook” what he sees as the “benefits” of toxic sludge. Case in point, the John Hopkins study in Baltimore that examined the possibilities of using toxic sludge “to reduce the impact of lead contamination” in poor black neighborhoods by “tying it up” in the sludge. The plan was to test the blood of the children living in this project—before and after the “application” of the “biosolids”—to see if the lead levels had gone up or down.
The researchers “applied” “sterilized Baltimore sewage sludge mixed and composted with wood chips and sawdust,” along with grass seed, to backyard soil contaminated with lead. After a year, the grass cover was shown to reduce the amount of lead-contaminated soil being tracked from people’s yards to their homes, making it less likely that the lead-contaminated soil would be ingested and absorbed into the blood stream. Kester believes this is really a positive story about how toxic sludge can improve the environment by producing “lush green grass.”
Kester says the industry should have gotten great PR out of this one, but this isn’t how the story played to the media. After all, even contaminated soils can grow grass. The trouble with toxic sludge is that it, too, contains hazardous levels of lead. The “exceptional quality,” “class A biosolids” that were used in the experiment are permitted to have up to 300 mg/kg of lead. The law allows land used to dispose of toxic sludge to cumulatively reach a load of 264 pounds of lead per acre.
The AP reporter who had suggested a comparison with this “study” and the Tuskeegee studies of the 1950s was removed from his post and sent to no man’s land at the United Nations.
A second story Kester thinks could have been played better by the toxic sludge industry is the “application” of toxic sludge to the White House lawn during past administrations. This story made the news again when the First Lady Michelle Obama began growing what she intended to be an organic garden in a piece of that lawn. Kester said the lead contamination caused by use of a toxic sludge product called OrGrow (incidentally, the same thing that was used in the Baltimore study) had left lead contamination of “only” 93 ppm, “lower than expected for urban soils and safe gardens.” Kester is technically, if deceptively, correct: our EPA says that soil with more than 56 parts per million of lead might not provide “adequate protection of terrestrial ecosystems,” but doesn’t suggest worrying about anything below 400 parts per million as a threat to human health. However, some soil scientists advise against feeding children produce grown on soil with more than 100 ppm of lead.
Of course, knowing as we do that that sludge itself contains unpredictable but high levels and thus certainly contributes to the lead contamination of soils, who in their right mind would continue to support the practice of disposing of it on land? And remember also, lead is only one of countless and unpredictable toxins to be found in sewage sludge.
Natalie “Sludge Giveaways” Sierra, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Natalie Sierra has helped the toxic sludge industry score a major victory in the green city of San Francisco, where they’ve actually been able to get city residents to take toxic sludge and dispose of it in their own yards and community gardens. As part of the SF Public Utilities Commission’s contract with Synagro to take its toxic sewage sludge, SF gets a little of it sent back to them in a form that’s very similar to what was used in the Baltimore study and at the White House: pelletized, composted, sanitized beyond recognition. This is given away to community, school and home gardeners as “organic compost.” Since May 2007, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has given away more than 125 tons of toxic sludge to the unsuspecting public at “free giveaway” events.
The sludge giveaways have been successful, either because the recipients think they’re getting real organic compost (how should they know otherwise when the city also gives away OMRI-certified organic, genuine compost made from composted food scraps collected in the green recycling bins), or they trustingly assume that the law regarding the use of toxic sewage sludge as fertilizer must be protective of human health. As Greg Kester emphasized in his talk, the toxic sludge industry is counting on the city to stand their ground against complaints from groups like the Center for Food Safety and RILES (ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems), which filed a legal petition with city in 2009 to stop the disposal of toxic sludge on city lands through the “giveaway” program. Precisely because of its reputation as a green city, San Francisco is the strategic battleground in a national dispute pitting the toxic sludge industry against localities that have decided they don’t want to be toxic sludge disposal sites anymore. In Kester and Sierra’s view, sludge “giveaways” are the best opportunity to convince the public that toxic sludge can be “beneficially reused” as “non-toxic, nutrient-rich organic biosolids compost.”
For the “biosolids” conference, which organizers assumed was attended only by industry insiders (admission to the one day event was $226 for people who aren’t members of the California Water Environment Association, a sewage industry trade association), Sierra gave a presentation on local ordinances in California that threatened to limit efforts to dispose of sludge on rural lands. When I questioned her after the conference as to why it was so important to give sludge away to San Francisco gardeners, she claimed that it was an issue of “social justice”—meaning you shouldn’t dump on someone else’s land what you don’t want on your own; that city dwellers shouldn’t be so cavalier about dumping their wastes on the farmland of rural counties. This was a shock to me, considering that, in her presentation about the “challenge” of anti-sludge rural counties, the only concern she had expressed was to “keep rate payers in mind” and “keep costs down.” But, in this “social justice” comment, it appeared for a moment that, in her view, rural communities should not be forced to receive of a city’s toxic sewage sludge for disposal on their farmland. She quickly disabused me of this illusion, assuring me that this was not what she meant. Perhaps she has not yet got her propaganda logic straight.
Liz “Bribery” Ostoich, Synagro
Liz Ostoich works as a project developer for the “land application”-of-toxic-sludge corporate giant, Synagro. Her presentation began with a cartoon image of a person who had gotten whacked very hard on the nose. She said she was going to teach us what she had learned in the school of hard knocks about how to gain local approval for toxic sludge processing. This is what she’s learned:
1. Poor Neighborhoods, Not Rich Neighborhoods
Ostoich advised us to pick the “right location,” not someplace that’s going to involve “taking trucks through a very exclusive neighborhood.”
2. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
A “remote location” is also key. Ostoich warned us to “be in an area where folks can’t really see you, they smell with their eyes.”
Ostoich gave two examples of projects she’d worked on, one Synagro’s Temescal Canyon facility in Corona, CA, “where it was done wrong,” and the other its South Kern County facility, which she told us was “unanimously supported.”
To hear Ostoich tell it, the closing of Synagro’s Temescal Canyon facility was the result of Synagro’s failure to manage the politics and public relations surrounding toxic sewage sludge, not their failure to properly manage the toxic sludge itself. She shared with us her suspicions that complaints that were phoned in from neighbors (suburban sprawl had placed 7,000 homes within a 4 mile radius of the sludge plant) were “bogus and contrived to get us shut down.”
What Ostoich didn’t share with us was that 37 individual small-claims lawsuits for $5,000 each, the maximum allowable amount, were won against Synagro for creating a public nuisance. This was for 11 years of suffering. One of the plaintiffs, Diana Schramm, told a local newspaper, “We would express our frustration to these people, Synagro, that the odor was so intense that it was burning our eyes, burning our noses, burning our throats. It was so frustrating. They just didn’t seem to care about us.”
As a counterpoint, Ostoich used Kern County as an example of a place where Synagro had done things right: “remote location,” “political involvement,” “proven technology,” and “going into it with the right attitude.” As an example of the community support Synagro received for their project, Ostoich read—in full—a letter from the president of Taft College written to California Senator Florez about Synagro’s generosity: an annual contribution of $25,000 to the college. Oh, and the letter happened to mention that Taft College was of the opinion that Synagro was a superb environmental steward. If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em?
That strategy didn’t work so well with the Taft City Council. As councilman Craig Noble said after the council voted to reject a check from Synagro for $25,000, he felt that accepting the money could have created a conflict of interest.
“I hate to take money from somebody that might try to be buying their way into something later on,” Noble said.
It isn’t easy to go up against a public-private trifecta that is so well-resourced and unscrupulous, but we have to try. If we can’t stop San Francisco, home to the man Organic Style magazine calls the World’s Greenest Mayor, from tricking its citizens into taken poison and growing their food in it, there’s no telling what the toxic sludge industry will try and get away with in other towns. That’s why we’re putting out a national call to all of our members and readers to encourage organic consumers across the country to help us stop San Francisco’s toxic sewage sludge giveaways.
Israel threatens force over Iran nuclear standoff
AFP – 4 February 2010
JERUSALEM – Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon raised on Wednesday the possibility of using force to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, something Tehran vehemently denies it is seeking.
“Iran’s plan will probably be stopped by a regime change or, if there is no other choice, by a recourse to force to deprive Iran of its nuclear arms production capabilities,” Yaalon told a security conference in Herzliya, northern Israel.
“It is important to continue to make clear to the extremist regime in Iran that all options remain on the table and that ignoring the demands of the international community will probably end in bitter tears for Iran,” he added.
Yaalon also called on the international community to impose even harsher sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme.
Iran is already under three sets of sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council for its refusal to stop enriching uranium, a process that can produce fuel for nuclear reactors but also fissile material for an atomic bomb.
Earlier on Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad raised the possibility Tehran might come to an agreement with world powers over its enrichment programme.
“It is important to make Iran understand that the leaders of the international community are determined to the point of putting this matter at the top of their list of priorities, even if they have to pay an economic or even military price.”
Israel, the United States and a number of other Western countries accuse Iran of using what it claims is a purely civilian nuclear energy programme as a cover for developing atomic weapons. Iran denies that.
Yaalon’s reference to force was not new. Both the United States and Israel have consistently refused to rule out the use of force if diplomatic efforts to rein in Tehran are unsuccessful.
Israel has already acted in similar circumstances.
In 1981, Jewish warplanes bombed an Iraqi nuclear plant outside Baghdad. The prime minister Menachem Begin said the attack was necessary because the facility was about to become operational and would have permitted the regime of Saddam Hussein to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Scramble for the Island of Bliss: Socotra!
The island of Socotra is part of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. It is so isolated that a third of its plant life is found nowhere else on the planet.
Photo credit
12 January 2010
Socotra (an Island belonging to Yemen) derives its magic name from the Sanskrit “dvipa sukhadhara” (“Island of Bliss”). Dragon’s blood trees that look like flying saucers perched on trunks, trees that look like elephants’ legs with pink flowers on top, unique song birds such as Socotra’s Starling, Sunbird, and Grosbeak. Bats are its only native mammal. Sokotra! The most beautiful Island on Earth. One third of its plant life is found nowhere else.
And now the USA scrambles for beautiful Socotra, “Island of Bliss”, to make it a base for war?
This uniquely preserved living museum, this surviving Noah’s Ark, this masterpiece of evolution, this escape from extinction, this time capsule of uncommon beauty, this delightful enchanting spirit of tranquility, this island of dreams, this Garden of Eden, a USA military base to wage war on Yemen? To kill more Arab and Moslem people? To kill more shepherds and farmers in these, our ancient, lands?
This most alien-looking island on the planet, a military base?
Since antiquity, the delicate balance established between the ancient people of Socotra and nature has remained undisturbed, preserving indigenous species and delicate eco-systems. Since antiquity, Socotra has been famous for its botanical riches. Cinnabar, resins of Frankincense (Boswellia) and Myrrh (Commiphora), used in medicines and rituals, and the juice of the native Bitter Aloe (Aloe perryi), were exported to the ancient Mediterranean region from Socotra.
Today, the inhabitants of Socotra, all Moslems, preserve an astonishing archaic language called Soqotri. Their occupation: a lifestyle that has changed little since the first settlers thousands of years ago: fishing, livestock rearing, dates, and gathering plant products. Almost all the inhabitants of Socotra, numbered at 50,000, live on the main island. The principal “city” is Hadiboh (pop. 8,545 – 2004 census).
Are the people of Socotra to be turned into servants and prostitutes to Americans?
Until at least 10 million years ago, Socotra was part of the African mainland and, before that, part of the African-Arabian tectonic plate. Today the ancestors of plants from these ancient landmasses can still be found growing on the island. Relics of ancient plant species are so abundant that the island looks like most people’s idea of a prehistoric world.
This living garden museum, a military base?
In a document dating back 3800 years (18 century BC) the Ancient Egyptians identified what was probably Socotra “(Pa’-Ankh)” as as the home of incense. Socotra! Undoubtedly the setting for the famed Egyptian legend called the Shipwrecked Sailor which inspired the story tellers of the Arabian nights to recount the story of Sindbad the Sailor.
Following the Egyptians, reference to an island which could be identified as Socotra, was made by Herodotus (5th century BC), by Indian authors (4th century BC), by Diodorus of Sicily (1st century BC), and by an unknown Greek sailor (1st century AD) who gave a long and detailed description of Socotra referring to it as Dioscorida, and in the Greek navigation aid “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea”. The Yemeni historian al-Hamdani (d. 334 H/945 AD), and his contemporary al-Mas’udi (d. 345 H/956 AD), both recorded that Alexander the Great had sent a small group of Greeks to Socotra to cultivate the famous aloe.
Detailed descriptions of the Island were numerous around the 10th century AD. For example, Socotra was described by Arab historian and geographer Abu Mohammed Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani, and was also mentioned in “The Travels of Marco Polo”, the medieval geographers Al-Idrisi, Ibn Battuta, Yaqut Al-Hamawi, and Al-Muqaddasi. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries an account of Socotra was given by Ahmad Ibn Majid, the great Arab pilot who guided Vasco Da Gama’s ship from the East African port of Malindi to the coasts of India.
Socotra lies strategically at the mouth of the Red Sea, North-Western Indian Ocean at the junction between the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea; some 80 kilometers east of the Horn of Africa (Somalia) and 380 kilometers (240 mi) south of Aden, the Arabian Peninsula, some 380 km south-east of Ras Fartak on the Gulf of Aden coastline of Yemen and about 250 km east of Cape Guardafui, the headland that forms the geographical apex of what is commonly known as the Horn of Africa.
The Socotra archipelago includes the main islands of Socotra (or Soqotra), Abd al-Kuri, Samha and Darsa (also known jointly as “The Brothers”), as well as the smaller islets of Sabuniya and Kal Farun, and other rock outcrops.
The main island is approximately 110 km long and about 40 km wide, with a total surface area of 3625 km2. Its highest elevation is at Jabal Dryet (1526 m) in the central Hagghier Massif. The rocky island of Abd al-Kuri is almost halfway between Socotra and Cape Guardafui (Somalia) at the tip of the Horn of Africa. It is approximately 33 km in length and about 2-5 km across from north to south, with a total area of about 133 sq km. The island of Samha, with a total area of about 41 sq km, is located 60 km east off the western tip of Abd al-Kuri Island. The smaller and uninhabited island of Darsa lies 17 km east of Abd al-Kuri.
In July 2008 Socotra was recognized by (UNESCO), as a World Natural Heritage Site. The European Union supported such a move, calling on both UNESCO and IOPE (International Organization of Protecting Environment) to classify the island archipelago among the world’s environmental heritages, and a natural wildlife refuge.
Socotra a military base?
According to UNESCO, Socotra is one the most well-preserved island eco-systems in the world. A unique assemblage of species and habitats, and representing one of the few surviving examples of local people living in a delicate balance with their natural environment. Distinct for its biodiversity, 37% of Socotra’s plant species, 90% of its reptile species, and 95% of its land snail species do not occur anywhere else in the world. Moreover, its marine life boasts 253 species of reef-building corals, 730 species of coastal fish, and 300 different species of crab, lobster, and shrimp. In addition, Socotra possesses a sizable cave system found within the limestone plateau that stretches over much of the island. A total of over 22km of caves has so far been explored for the first time in recent years.
Socotra a military base?
On January 19, 2009, The Yemen Post, quoting Russian military officials, announced that Russia is set to construct a military base on the Island, but that the timing for the establishment of the base had not yet been determined. These same sources said there was a political decision that had been taken to establish a Russian Navy base on Socotra.
The move came with the goal to protect Russian interests in the region, the officials said, pointing out that the base on the Yemeni Socotra Island would provide security to Russian civil vessels in the Red Sea, and the Gulf of Aden. Piracy had soared off Somalia’s coast and in the Gulf of Aden, with almost 115 ships and vessels having been attacked by Somali pirates. At the same time, however, the official spokesman for the Russian Navy, described the rumors about Russian and US Navy establishing military bases in Yemen as “baseless and incorrect.”
But why not? After all, Rick Rozoff gets it right: “the officially discarded but in fact revived and expanded “global war on (edit: fake) terrorism” is now to be fought in a single theater of war that extends from the Red Sea to Pakistan.”
“The permanent stationing of U.S. military forces in Seychelles is part of a pattern in recent years of basing American troops to man missile batteries, interceptor missile radar sites, air bases, counterinsurgency forward bases, and other installations in countries where their presence would have been inconceivable even a few years ago: Afghanistan, Colombia, Bulgaria, Djibouti, Iraq, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Poland and Romania. A report of January 7 claims that the U.S. plans to establish an air base in Yemen in the Socotra archipelago in the Indian Ocean.”
No wonder there is a scramble for Socotra by the US dogs of war. No wonder the sudden “surge” in threats of al Qaeda in Yemen, as claimed by President Obama in recent weeks. Is it for the USA to walk into Socotra, instead of the Russians?
Yes.
On 7 January 2010, we hear from Press TV (Iran), that Mr. Ali Al-Ahmed, a Saudi political analyst, announced that “his sources” revealed that the Yemeni government decided to let the US military establish an air base on the island of Socotra. “The US can no longer rely on Yemen’s government to fight al-Qaeda alone, because it is losing its legitimacy and becoming weaker.” Ali said. Well Ali aught to know the intentions of the Yemeni government, after all, he is Saudi, and everyone knows how the Saudis are propping up the government of Yemen. And this “decision” comes in the wake of the “crotch bomber” incident over Detroit, whereby a Nigerian Youth is accused of receiving much exaggerated (read fake) al Qaeda training in Yemen.
Socotra a US military base?
Why not? After all, on January 1 2010 General David Petraeus, the chief of the Pentagon’s Central Command, in charge of the wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as clandestine bombings of civilians in Yemen and Pakistan, speaking from occupied Baghdad, said of deepening military involvement in Yemen, “We have, it is well known, about $70 million in security assistance (to Yemen) last year. That will more than double this coming year”. The following day, on January 2 2010, Petraeus was in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, where he met with the country’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, to discuss “continued U.S. support in rooting out the terrorist cells.”
But what does the US really face in Yemen? “It is widely known that Al Qaeda is a subsidiary brand under the control of CIA, MI6 and Mossad with the purpose of spreading fear and terror. When the Western media use “Al Qaeda” to produce war sentiments in the population, then it should be immediately clear to everyone that there is something very suspicious happening. Currently, the mass media are scaremongering using the label “Al Qaeda” to persuade the population of the western world to join a US war in Yemen. But the US is not at war in Yemen against Al Qaeda. It is against the Shia Houthis whose strict anti-Americanism has already been a thorn in the US’s and its lackeys in the Arabian peninsula’s flesh.”
In July 1999 a new airport opened in Socotra. Yemen Airways now provides flights (once a week) to Aden (South Yemen), and (everyday) to Sanaa, the capital of (North) Yemen. Thanks to these flights, there are a number of videos on YouTube about Socotra, taken by tourists who fell in love with Yemen as a place with wonderful people, beautiful country, and amazing architecture, pristine and unpolluted country side and beaches.
In 1507, the Portuguese fleet of explorer and naval commander Tristão da Cunha together with Afonso de Albuquerque (second governor of Portuguese India) landed an occupying force on Socotra to build a fortress base. The intention was to control the lucrative Red Sea commerce from the Indian Ocean to the cities of Venice and Verona, and eventually the ancient traffic through to China. However, they were not welcomed as enthusiastically as they had expected and abandoned the island four years later. In any case, interest in Socotra was soon lost because of the discovery of the alternative trade rout to India and China, round Africa, which had already been discovered by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama in 1488, 1497.
The Socotra islands passed under the control of the Mahra Sultanate of Ghayda and Socotra in 1511. The capitals of Mahra were Qishn in Mahra (east Hadramout on the mainland) and Tamrida (Hadiboh) on Socotra.
After two hundred years of relative tranquility, Socotra’s importance to the Europeans became evident again. Some twenty years prior the opening of the Suez canal, in 1833, the British government wished to reach an exclusive agreement with the Mahra Sultanate to land and store coal for steamships, resupply ships with sweet water, and shelter during the tempestuous monsoon seasons. Actually the island had already been selected by the East India Company as a station for vessels connected with the steam navigation of the Red Sea. To put this into effect Lieutenant Wellsted, of the Bombay Marine, was charged with contacting the Mahra authority at Qishn (Socotora being some 300 KM off shore).
Lieutenant Wellsted writes of his assignment to the Sultan of Qishn:
“I visited its Sheikh, Omar Ibn Tuari, styled by ancient writers “King of Furtak”, in order to make arrangements respecting a sum of money our government had resolved to offer him for ceding to us the island of Socotra. Although possessing scarcely a shadow of authority, or even the means of procuring a scanty subsistence, the old Chief manifested a greatness of soul worthy an emperor. Perfectly blind from extreme age, he was led into the room by a little boy. After listening to my proposals with affected composure, when I had concluded, he sprang on his feet, and exclaimed with bitter energy, “Your (British) Government wish to purchase Socotra, do they?”
“Socotra! which for so many ages has been the heritage of my fathers?”
“Never!”
“Were they to heap this room with gold, they should not obtain a space equal to its floor’s breadth.”
“When the British force landed there without his permission, he collected and headed a body of Bedowins, to cut them off, but want of money prevented his hiring vessels to carry them across the sea; he has however, since seized on two vessels trading under the British flag.”
After all, the Hadramouti’s of Mahra, like Somali sailors, and no doubt pirates as well, must have known Socotra since antiquity.
Five years later, in 1839, the British forcefully and violently occupied the port of Aden and established a colony. They set up a Mafia-like “protectorate” system with the local tribes and sheikhdoms around Aden having to pay for their own “protection” from the British.
By 1886 the Mahra State of Qishn and Socotra became a parcel of the British protectorate system through a formal treaty. For the British, Socotra became a naval base in the matter of “communication between India and the mother country”, as Lieutenant Wellsted put it.
On December 10, 1963 a state of emergency was declared in the Aden Protectorate. The Emergency was precipitated in large part by a wave of Arab nationalism spreading through the Arabian Peninsula and stemming largely from the Socialist and pan-Arabist thinking of Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser. The British, French and Israeli forces that had invaded Egypt following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 had been forced to withdraw, following intervention from both the United States and the Soviet Union.
Anti-British guerrilla groups fighting for the liberation of Aden gained considerable strength. By 1965, the RAF station (RAF Khormaksar) was operating 9 Squadrons. These included transport units with helicopters and a number of Hawker Hunter ground attack aircraft. These were called in by the army for strikes against guerrilla positions when they would use “60 lb” high explosive bombs and their 30 mm Aden cannon. Much like Israeli, Saudi, and American F16s carry on today to kill Arab and Moslem civilians.
By October 1967, some 124 years after they first arrived in full force to impose themselves as colonialists, the British were forced to withdraw “earlier than expected” from Aden.
The independent People’s Republic of South Yemen was proclaimed on 30 November 1967. On that same day, a detachment of the South Yemeni National Liberation Front, which had led the guerrilla struggle for the liberation of their country, landed on Socotra. The sultanate of Mahra and Socotra was abolished. The Island of Bliss became part of the Mahara governorship, which belonged to the new Republic of South Yemen.
North Yemen, on the other hand, had become independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and became a republic in 1962 following an Egyptian supported military coup, against the Zeidi Imam of Yemen. Ironically, the Saudis supported the Zeidi Shia Imam against the Republican forces, by cash and arms, in a bitter war that lasted years.
When the two countries (North and South Yemen) were formally united as the Republic of Yemen on May 22, 1990, the Island of Socotra became part and parcel of the (independent) Republic of Yemen.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh became the first (and only) President of unified Yemen since 1990, and he was/is President of North Yemen since 1978. He was last “re-elected” to office in September 2006. He has held the reigns of power for over thirty years. President Saleh and his family, have a tight grip on Yemen. This concentration of power goes far beyond their control of the instruments of force (military and security forces) but extends also to the national economy of Yemen.
For example (security): Presidential son Ahmed Saleh is head of the Yemen Republican Guard and the country’s Special Forces. The president’s nephews — sons of his late brother — include Amar, the deputy director for national security; Yahye, head of the central security forces and the counter-terrorism unit; and Tarek, head of the Presidential Guard. The president’s half brother is head of the air force. Brigadier General Ali Saleh Al-Ahmar, chief of staff of the general command, is half brother of president Saleh. Brigadier General Ali Mohsen Al-Ahmar, commander of the first tank division , commander of the North Western military zone, half brother of president Saleh. Brigadier General Mehdi Makwala, commander of the Southern military zone, Hashd tribe and Sanhan village of Saleh, Aden Zone. Brigadier General Mohammed Ali Mohsen, Commander of the Eastern Military Zone ( Hadramout ) Hashed Tribe and Sanhan Village of President Saleh. Colonel Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh , Commander of the Republican Guards and Commander of the Special Forces, son of President Saleh. Colonel Yahya Mohamed Abdullah Saleh , commander of the Central Security Forces son of Saleh’s brother. Colonel Tareq Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, Commander of the Special Guards.
Examples (national economy): Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, Special Forces and Republican Guards Commander, eldest son, owner of Al-Haj Company For Heavy Equipments and Cars. Ali Abdullah Saleh, President, Partner of Tawfick Abul-Raheem, Sole Distributor of Gas and Petroleum Products. Ali Mohsen Al-Hamar Military Commander Northern and Western regions, Hawan For Petroleum Services and Alraida Group for Engineering. Khalid Alarhabi Deputy Chief of The Presidential Palaces, son in-law ,Yemen Space Company. Mohamed Saleh Al-Hamar, Air Force Commander, half brother, Alhashidi Petroleum Company. Yahya Mohamed Abdullah Saleh Commander Of Security Central Forces, nephew, Al Mas Company For Petroleum Services and Ha Wi Cable Chinese Company. Tawfick Saleh Abdullah Saleh Chairman of The National Tobacco Company, nephew of President Saleh. Abdul-Khalek Al-Qadi Chairman of Yemen Airways son in-law of the President.
No wonder the people of South Yemen are struggling to get out of their ill-fated union, with that failed state, which is now Yemen.
Propped up by its security forces, and with the financial and ideological (read pro-Zionist) support of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the EU, NATO, and the USA; the Yemeni government (to put it lightly) is often considered to suffer from rampant corruption. It is responsible for arbitrary searches of homes and arrests of Yemeni citizens, especially in the south. It is also responsible for torture, inhumane treatment, extra-judicial executions, and even outright military attacks by warplanes and missiles on its own citizens.
The people of Yemen experience prolonged pretrial detentions, judicial corruption, inefficiency, and executive interference to undermine due process, suppressed freedom of speech, the press, and religion. In short Yemen has become no different from its masters the USA and Saudi Arabia (Zionist Germany and Israel).
In recent years, the Central government of Yemen has waged war against its own people. Yemeni government forces are engaged in the South because the people there want to secede, and in the North the government is fighting its Sixth War with the Houthis, whose battle cry is “Death to America” “Death to Israel” “Curse on the Jews” “Victory to Islam”.
Indeed, under the influence of Wahabi Saudi Arabia (doing the work of the Zionist West to divide Muslims into Sunni and Shia camps, and in particular to isolate Iran, and divide Iraq according to Israel’s plan), the Shia’s of the North Yemen have had a hard time teaching their enlightened and tolerant Zeidi (Shia) Moslem teachings to their children, while the Saudis have funded, inside Yemen, over 1800 centres of their own brand Wahabism.
These squabbles were long forgotten, much like Protestants and Catholics today, had it not been for Saudi Arabia barking the Zionist bark, insulting the clergy of Iran and Zieidi Yemen.
The Houthi war although focused as an internal Yemeni affair of anti-discrimination, and corruption, and hardly reported in the Western press, threatens the very existence of Saudi Kingdom on the Arabian peninsula, because masks have fallen.
Dissent inside the Saudi Kingdom (even among Saudi princes themselves) against the corrupt ruling Saudi family, against Wahabi discrimination, particularly among the Shia’s who represent a sizable population of Saudi Arabia, is now almost out of control.
It is important to note that the Saudi family owes its Kingdom to the Christian West, because they fought alongside the West to destroy the Moslem Caliphate, the faltering (and yes, by then, tired and corrupt) Ottoman Empire.
Today we have this: Satanic alliance between the USA, Al-Qaeda, the Yemen government, and Saudi Arabia, to commit crimes against Humanity and incite religous hate.
The Saudi King, in his gold robes and marble palaces, in a jest of holier-than-thou humility, now calls himself “servant” of the two Holy Shrines (Mecca and Madina). But as servant of the holy shrines, he never once fired a shot for Palestine. Not even to save Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock (first qibla of Islam) from the Zionists. Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia deployed his American and British equipped army in full force (and for the first time in the Kingdom’s history to fire a shot) to attack and kill Moslems. Wahabi fatwas were released calling the Yemeni Houthis “pagan” to justify their blood! Innocent Yemeni citizens killed inside Yemen by Saudi forces. However, having been humiliated (read defeated) on the ground by the Houthis, Saudi troopes and heavy weapons captured, they now attack North Yemen towns and market places, killing civilians, in cowardly fashion using F16s and Apache helicopter gunships. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia called for, and obtained, detachments of special forces from both the King of Jordan, and the King of Morrocco, to reinforce their operations on the ground. To no avail.
On the other hand, the Houthies captured over 130 Yemeni military bases, complete with arms and ammunition, shot down Yemeni aircraft, including a Mig jet and a couple of helicopters, and now some elements of the Yemeni army have defected to fight the Saudis, alongside the Houthis.
In retaliation to the Saudi air attacks on civilian targets, the Houthis occupied two Saudi military outposts inside Southern Saudi Arabia, bordering on North Yemen. Houthis even attacked the Saudi Red Sea port city of Jizzan, some sixty kilometers away from the Yemeni/Saudi border, using Katyusha rockets inflicting direct hits on an important Saudi government building. Houthis have regularly released videos confirming their exploits against Ali Saleh’s forces, and Saudi Arabia.
The debacles of both the Yemeni and the Saudi armies, prompted the United States to intervene (surreptitiously, with not a sound from the Western press) in the effort to suppress the Houthis, who threatened the stability of both the tyrannical regime of Ali Saleh, and the Western puppet Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To save tyranny, US war planes carried out bombing raids on North Yemen citizens and dispatched special forces advisors and intelligence support.
Ali Abdullah Salah, therefore, not only used the Yemeni Army against his own people, he actually invited foreign forces (American and Saudi) to attack defenseless Yemeni towns and villages with F16 warplanes and white phosphorous bombs, to suppress all dissent. Destroying historic mosques and homes. Destroying Saada, the capital city of the North. Thousands of Yemeni civilians have been killed, and many more have been injured or have become displaced refugees. No press has been allowed in to the conflict zone. No humanitarian assistance either. These war crimes are being committed today under the pretext of the trumped-up “Al Qaeda of Yemen” threat, or the accusation that the Houthis are proxies for Iran. Failing to mention that the Houthis fight with captured weapons.
Videos of the American and Saudi F16 criminal attacks on Yemeni civilians are available on the internet. Today, as the world sits silent, we can watch local people, for the most part shepherds and farmers, living in a delicate balance with their natural environment, devastated by poison gas, white phosphorous, F16 attacks, and missiles! Just like in Gaza, these attacks are being carefully documented as war crimes.
Ali Saleh, like Israel and its allies in Iraq and Afghanistan, is fighting a war he cannot win.
By what right, therefore, can President Ali Abdullah Saleh, this illegitimate tyrant of a president, this puppet of Zionism, sign off beautiful Socotra as an enduring military base to a foreign power? An enemy of the people of Yemen? A power that is actually complicit in the suppression and bombing of the Yemeni people, and their beautiful ancient homes? The land of the Queen of Sheba, Arabia Felix (“Happy Arabia”) as Yemen was known to the ancient Romans, site of the Great Ancient Dam of Marib, initially constructed as far back as 2000 BC.
Give away the most beautiful and largest of all Arab Islands to the enemy? Is Socotra, Ali Saleh’s own personal property, for example?
Are the 50,000 inhabitants of Socotra, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s personal chattel? Will the people of Socotra have a say? Will they be in danger of being deported off their Island by the Americans, as potential future threats, just like the poor people of Diego Garcia? Diego Garcia, that other Island base in the Indian Ocean, where American black prison ships hide in shame, where stealth bombers take off to bomb Arab and Moslem cities. Who are they going to kill next, using Soctra as a base?
The Nation magazine, reporting already in October 21, 2002, said that the Pentagon was exploring the possibility of building a signals intelligence base on the Yemeni island of Socotra “that would be used to conduct surveillance on Somalia and the Horn of Africa”. Already in June 2002, a US team had arrived in Yemen to begin installation of a computerized surveillance system designed to link the capital of Sanaa with data flowing from major seas, airports and border crossings.
On Sept. 23, 2007, U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Stephen A. Seche, USA Rear Adm. James Hart, as well as numerous other U.S. and Yemen government leaders attended the ceremony of Socotra’s newly built Usama Bin Zaid Primary School. The fruit of a combined effort of the U.S. military, U.S. State Department, and United States Agency for International Development.
The Usama Bin Zaid school is part of a total U.S. government assistance program in Socotra, Yemen totaling more than $1,900,000 in projects for 2007.
With the U.S.A. and Yemen flag flying atop the school, USA Navy Rear Admiral James Hart, Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa commander, clad in battle fatigues, said at the inauguration: “There’s a significance and value in education – a degree of excellence – one which the youth of Socotra are deserving. It has been stated that every person has a right to an integral education, an education which responds to all of the needs of the human person. We hope that these refurbishments will make this process a little easier,”
Other “civil-military” US projects on Socotra include: the Omar Bin Kattab school, a health clinic for women and children in the Qalansiyah district and nearly 20 water storage tanks completed or nearing completion throughout the island. Civil Affairs Teams are working to fund 374 more water storage tanks to help provide potable water throughout Socotra.
Will the people of Yemen really have a say in the matter of a foreign military base on Socotra?
Will UNESCO have a say, to protect the World Natural Heritage Site of Socotra?
Why must we always accept and believe the work of gangsters and thugs?
Will the new foreign military occupiers of Socotra be welcomed by the people of Yemen? Greeted like the Portuguese in the 14th century?
Will the Americans be thrown out of Yemen after years of armed struggle, just like the British?
How soon will pristine and beautiful Socotra submit to the American SCOURGE?
That SCOURGE that seems to follow Americans wherever they go:
Depleted Uranium.
Blow-back from Saada
Blow-back from Gaza
Blow-back from Baghdad
Kabul, Beirut, Khartoum, Mogadishu, and Darfur
Dresden
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Where is that brave old lion Omar Ibn Tuari ?
Surely he would have spoken for us all
Free Peoples of the World
Surely he would have said to David Petraeus:
“Your (American) Government wishes to purchase Socotra? Do they?”
“Socotra! which for many ages has been the heritage of my fathers?”
“Never!”
“Were they to heap this room with gold…”
– informatron
12 January 2010
_________________________________________________________________
Sources:
Socotra: the most beautiful island on earth!
http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/linzmnm/teachyemen/1212245520/tpod.html#_
The most alien-looking place on Earth: Socotra
http://atlasobscura.com/places/socotra-island
Socotra Archipelago
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1263
Socotra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socotra
Socotra on YouTube Dream Island~~Socotra, Yemen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzDMlFMrle8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG7eioVfIv0
“UNESCO: Socotra World Natural Heritage page”
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1263/documents/
UNESCO 2006 Nomination File: Socotra World Natural Heritage Site (pdf 59mb)
http://whc.unesco.org/p_dynamic/sites/passfile.cfm?filename=1263&filetype=pdf&category=nominations
The Socotra Archipelago Conservation and Development Programme (SCDP)
www.socotraisland.org
Friends of Soqotra
http://www.friendsofsoqotra.org/aboutfos.htm
A british soldiers memories and photos
http://www.soqotra.info/main.html
http://www.soqotra.info/galleries/index.html
Russia To Set Up Navy Military Base On Socotra
http://www.yemenpost.net/64/LocalNews/20082.htm
Yemen Times
http://www.yementimes.com/DefaultDET.aspx?i=1232&p=local&a=3
Yemen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yemen
Aden Protectorate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aden_protectorate
“Yemen Russian Military Deals Continue”
http://armiesofliberation.com/archives/2009/03/03/yemen-russian-military-deals-continue/
“Russia could resume naval presence in Yemen”
http://en.rian.ru/world/20081016/117777066.html
“U.S., NATO Expand Afghan War To Horn Of Africa And Indian Ocean”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=ROZ20100108&articleId=16854
“Yemen to let US set up air base on its soil”
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=115536§ionid=3510
American soldiers complete Usama Bin Zaid school in Socotra
http://www.nelsonguirado.com/index.php/Military/2007/10/16/american_soldiers_complete_usama_bin_zai
Mahra Sultanate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahra_Sultanate
Lieut. J.R. Wellsted FRS, Travels in Arabia (Indian Navy), Vol II, London, John Murry, 1888
For Omar Ibn Tuari, Socotra see page 454.
http://books.google.com/books?id=xWcEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA453&lpg=PA453&dq=Omar+Ibn+Tuari&source=bl&ots=B44EhlcFwk&sig=8JLNhCFL7AyUUeCbeGHw6kk-r1M&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Omar%20Ibn%20Tuari&f=false
Restful music: US troops sent to assist the Satanic alliance between Al-Qaeda, the Yemen government, and Saudi Arabia, to commit crimes against Humanity.
http://article19-videoblog.tumblr.com/post/290312854/restful-music-us-troops-sent-to-assist-the
US troops sent to assist Al-Qaeda, Yemen gov and Saudi Arabia commit crimes against Humanity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EKjz6RSE94
Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda = CIAdea
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:Db-UcxHNVc0J:clips.tojsiab.com/index.php%3Fmv_id%3D-EdCwmvgqAs+%22informatron%22+diego+garcia&cd=19&hl=en&ct=clnk
This desperate Yemeni Government is now “Hiring” al Qaeda as Mercenaries in the Sa’ada War.
http://armiesofliberation.com/archives/2009/10/26/yemeni-govt-hiring-al-qaeda-as-mercenaries-in-saada-war/
US fighter jets attack Yemeni fighters
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=113687§ionid=351020206
Yemen’s Economy is a Family Business
http://armiesofliberation.com/archives/2010/01/08/yemens-economy-is-a-family-business/#more-16313
Houthis capture armoured car
http://www.4shared.com/file/194114086/707ac914/_____.html
Houthis): Capture secret Saudi Orders proving that Saudis were attacking inside yemen borders
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=aa1_1258296125
Huh? Morocco and Jordan send elite troops to assist humiliated Saudis in Yemen
Saudis bomb Yemen
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=471_1257623512
Houthi video: Tank direct hit
http://www.4shared.com/file/194258503/f7c01eae/_______.html
Houthi Resistance Humilliates Saudi Armed Forces inside Yemen: Captured USA tanks and heavy weapons, arms, and ammunition.
http://article19-videoblog.tumblr.com/post/263432620/houthi-resistance-humilliates-saudi-armed-forces
Houthis capture Saudi soldiers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njh00_1Gbow
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=search_videos&search_query=%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%80%D9%80%D9%80%D9%80%D9%80%D8%B1%D9%89+%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%80%D9%80%D9%80%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%8A%D9%86&search_sort=relevance&search_category=0&page=
Houthies capture Saudi weapons and ammunition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXrp3-EO1Y
Stealing a Nation Diego Garcia
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3667764379758632511#
Diego Garcia: Secret “War on Terror” CIA Prison Confirmed
http://article19-videoblog.tumblr.com/search/diego+garcia
Houthi press and video (arabic)
http://sadahonline.org/ar/home.html
Israel junket: ‘live penetration raids in Arab territory’
By Philip Weiss | January 31, 2010
Below is an ad that was in Haaretz lately for the Ultimate Mission to Israel. The trip is a red-meat propaganda trip of a retro-masculine character–”live exhibition of penetration raids in Arab territory”– pitched to American professionals, accountants, doctors, lawyers. The fascination is not just the disgusting events–”observe a trial of Hamas terrorists in an IDF military court”–but that the ad is pitched to wealthy American Jews, and also apparently, the Modern Orthodox. Those groups overlap in the Status Quo Lobby, as it’s called, AIPAC. These are Jews who are deeply enmeshed in the American political process: note the meetings with senior Cabinet officials and the emphasis on Israel’s “struggle for survival.” The ad follows the jump.
Experience a dynamic and intensive eight day exploration of Israel’s struggle for survival and security in the Middle East today: “a military, humanitarian, historical, judicial, religious, and political reality check.”
Mission Highlights
- Briefings by Mossad officials and commanders of the Shin Bet.
- Briefing by officers in the IDF Intelligence and Operations branches.
- Inside tour of the IAF unit who carries out targeted killings.
- Live exhibition of penetration raids in Arab territory.
- Observe a trial of Hamas terrorists in an IDF military court.
- First hand tours of the Lebanese front-line military positions and the Gaza border check-points.
- Inside tour of the controversial Security Fence and secret intelligence bases.
- Meeting Israel’s Arab agents who infiltrate the terrorist groups and provide real-time intelligence.
- Briefing by Israel’s war heros who saved the country.
- Meetings with senior Cabinet Ministers and other key policymakers.
- Small airplane tour of the Galilee, Jeep rides in the Golan heights, water activities on Lake Kinneret, a cook-out barbecue and a Shabbat enjoying the rich religious and historic wonders of Jerusalem’s Old City.
- Five-star accommodations at the Sheraton Plaza Jerusalem (Glatt Kosher);
- Three meals a day (all Kosher);
- Luxury bus transportation and knowledgeable tour guide;
- A dedicated Executive Communications Center at the hotel;
- Personal cell phone for each participant.
Enough is Enough
Gilad Atzmon | January 30, 2010
The UK Jewish Chronicle is apparently stupid enough to unveil the ferocity of Zionist lobbying within the British Government and its corridors of power. The Jewish weekly is happy to outline the relentless measures that are being taken by Jewish lobbyists in order to Zionise the British legal system and its value system.
As one may assume the supporters of Israel in Britain are far from happy about Britain’s magistrates being able to implement ‘universal jurisdiction’ laws, laws that allow local magistrates to issue arrest warrants for high profile foreign visitors accused of war crimes. The rabid Zionist Jewish Chronicle is obviously outraged because universal jurisdiction puts most of the Israeli political and military echelon at a severe risk. Last month ex Israeli Foreign minister Mrs. Tzipi Livini cancelled her visit to Britain over fears that arrest warrants would be issued in connection with accusations of war crimes under laws of universal jurisdiction.
Surely universal jurisdiction is not a bad thing. It is actually an ethically orientated idea that is there to prevent world leaders from abusing their powers and committing crimes against humanity. It is also there to chase war criminals and to stop them from celebrating their freedom. Yet, it is not very surprising that the only political lobby in Britain that acts against such a set of universal laws is the Zionist lobby.
While in the past Zionist activists tried to hide their conspiratorial actions, JC political editor Martin Bright and Chief editor Stephen Pollard are providing us with a glimpse into the Jewish relentless political activity here. “Will the government ever act?” they ask in their latest editorial as if the British government has to act in order to satisfy the Zionist will.
Interestingly enough, the JC editors do not offer a single ideological, ethical or legal argument suggesting what is wrong with laws of universal jurisdiction except suggesting that it is not good for the Jews or Israel.
The JC is rather outraged with Justice Secretary Jack Straw who apparently fails to bow to Israeli pressure. Considering Jack Straw is of Jewish descent, the JC must believe that it is entitled to use some measures to put him in the line of fire. In spite of the fact that Straw is known in Britain for his notorious call for Muslim women to remove their veils and also as a backer of the illegal invasion of Iraq. The JC blames Straw for being too friendly with Muslims. “Mr Straw is known to be highly sensitive to the views of his Muslim constituents in Blackburn and is close to the Muslim Council of Britain, which opposes a change to the law.”
The JC should have also accepted the fact that, bearing in mind Straw’s Jewish origin, it is just natural for him to be reluctant to put a change into British law that is there to solely to serve Israeli interests and stands in total opposition to every universal and ethical value.
According to the JC, the Jews of Britain should not be too worried. The Shadow Middle East minister David Lidington is already in their pockets. ”This has to be sorted and quickly”, says the shadow man. “It is very clear to me that this issue is doing serious damage to relations with Israel”.
The JC also assures its Zionist readers that they have a man within the government who is working hard serving their interests willingly and even enthusiastically. David Miliband, the British foreign minister who is also listed as an “Israeli Propaganda (Hasbara) author” on an Israeli official Hasbara site, already announced his intention to change the law late last year. According to the JC he is “pushing hard within Whitehall for a solution”. Earlier this month, says the JC “the Foreign Office briefed that an announcement of the law change was imminent”. I wouldn’t except less from a listed ‘Hasbara author’
But the JC is taking it even further. In its JC Opinion editorial it says it is “Crystal clear who is to blame” referring to Justice Secretary Straw and PM Brown
“The time for excuses is over”, says the paper. “For weeks the government has been giving every possible off-the-record promise that it would change the law on universal jurisdiction. No longer would unsuitable magistrates be able to issue warrants for the arrest of some of our closest allies”. One may wonder why exactly ‘on the record’ genocidal murderers such as Livni, Barak or Olmert should be considered as ‘Britain closest allies’. In fact these people are primary enemies of humanity and as such they are also the enemy of Britain and any other nation.
Seemingly, the JC, doesn’t just talk on behalf of its editors. For some reason it prefers to talk in the name of the ‘Jewish community’. “Mr Straw must take the Jewish community for mugs if he thinks his behaviour is not transparent”. The only possible interpretation of this statement is that British Jewry wants Britain to give up on universal Jurisdiction just to appease its Zionists.
In case PM Brown is slightly confused and doesn’t know how to react, the JC is there to tell him how he should run Britain just to keep the Jewish community happy. “As for the Prime Minister: all he has ever needed to do is make clear that he backs Mr Miliband, and the issue would have been over”. Considering Miliband is listed as an ‘Israeli Propaganda author’ the message here is clear. Britain better start to work for Israel and even change its laws accordingly so it can easily comply with Israeli unethical conduct.
Britain is heading towards election, and the JC is advising PM Brown that he is about to pay the ultimate political price for his unwillingness to succumb to the Zionist will. “That he (PM Brown) has done precisely nothing since promising action speaks volumes about his own bona fides. If – and now it looks like when – the deadline for action passes and nothing is done, it will be crystal clear who is to blame.”
In plain language the JC is suggesting that PM Brown as far as the Jews are concerned, is basically finished. I wonder how long it will take for British people to wake up and say enough is enough. How long will it take before they say NO to Israeli and Zionist infiltration into their politics, laws and value system.
The Veil, Again
By M. Idrees | January 30, 2010
Yes, some women who cover their heads smile, too.
Some strands of feminism have a long history of serving as adjuncts of Western imperialism. Today they also enable domestic prejudice. Gore Vidal once mocked George Bush’s idea of democracy promotion as being synonymous with: ‘Be free! Or I’ll kill you’. In a similar vein, some feminists today want to ‘liberate’ Arab-Muslim women by constraining their freedoms. These women can’t possibly know what they really want, you see. The European feminists, like Bush, know what’s best for them. What could my sister — who studied at a co-ed university (in Peshawar!) but turned to wearing the hijab after moving to Canada — know about her interests? She must be told by the enlightened Westerner. She must be liberated.
Ignorance and racism combine in this potent form of messianism to sanction prejudice which increasingly targets Europe’s immigrant population. Like the Orientalists of yore, this brand of feminism insists on seeing the brown or black woman in the subordinate role, wistfully awaiting a Westerner liberator. They are childlike, they must be protected in the same manner that a responsible parent protects an unruly nestling. They must be saved from the hijab, or — God forbid! — the veil. To protect their freedom of choice, their freedom to choose must be revoked.
Today more and more assertive Muslim women living in the West are taking up the hijab, as a defiant assertion of their identity and independence. It is no longer a religious symbol, it is a political symbol. But of course, the addled mind of the colonial feminist cannot fathom this, or the idea of diversity. It must cloak cultural supremacism as defence of a presumed universal value; it must elevate its cultural preference into a universal desire. It must erase all other, inferior, aspirations, such as those of the Arab-Muslim woman to choose how she dresses, what she does or does not want to wear. It must enshrine its own preferences in an official ban, and demand that others — the minorities — must assimilate. They must comply, or else be deemed un-emancipated. Prejudice against such unenlightened women thus becomes legitimate. Indeed, it becomes a moral imperative. Racism becomes a virtue.
Today militant disbelief is a far more potent threat than religious radicalism has ever been. It has available to it awesome instruments of mass destruction that religious fundamentalists can only dream of. Its quixotic crusades are more numerous and far bloodier. It is often a short distance from ideals to catastrophe. As, among others, John Gray has shown in Black Mass, children of the Enlightenment — from the Communists, National Socialists, Capitalists, to Neooconservatives — have all rationalized mass-slaughter in the name of progress. Racism, likewise, is always in the service of a presumed noble ideal. As Sven Lindqvist has highlighted in his splendid work on Western colonialism, there was a time when, inspired by Darwinian ideas, the extermination of inferior races was seen as a necessary, indeed moral, imperative by enlightened Europeans. It was necessary for human progress. Natural selection could be expdited by unnatural destruction.
And so — as Kurt Vonnegut would say — it goes. Sarkozy’s government is once again at war with the 367 French women who wear the veil according to a July 2009 report. The Progressive London conference is rightly highlighting this issue to protect womens’ right to choose what they wear. But colonial feminists will have none of this. A reader forwards us this letter sent to the Guardian by one Frankie Green who illustrates all the stupidity and ignorance described earlier.
Let us hope discussion went further than the facile idea that this supposed ‘right’ is primarily about religious symbolism and the need to not embolden right-wing racists, and dealt with the question of what exactly it is about women’s bodies, hair and faces that requires their obliteration, and why women are shamed and blamed for men’s apparent inability to control themselves at the sight of bare female flesh. If conference-goers debated how to best support the brave women worldwide who have campaigned against the gender apartheid and patriarchal inequality of these misogynist practices, that truly would be progressive.
The contempt that this letter shows for the wog needs no elaboration. In this world view the display of ‘bare female flesh’ becomes synonymous with emancipation. But it is the complete immunity of this type of reasoning to irony that makes it most frightening. It is this cast of mind that needs to be liberated from the veil of ignorance and prejudice that so hampers its capacity for empathy.
It’s Not a New Turkey, It’s The Right Time
By Ramzy Baroud | January 28, 2010
Uri Avnery’s assessment of the recent Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and political row – that “the relationship between Turkey and Israel will probably return to normal, if not to its former degree of warmth” – seems sensible and daring. In my view, however, it is also inaccurate.
Simply put, there is just no going back.
In a recent article entitled “Israel Must Get Used to the New Turkey,” Suat Kiniklioðlu, Deputy Chairman of External Affairs for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) wrote, “Israel appears to be yearning for the golden 1990s, which were the product of a very specific situation in the region. Those days are over and are unlikely to come back even if the Justice and Development Party (AKP) ends up no longer being in government.”
This assessment seems more consistent with reality.
One would agree with Avnery’s optimistic reading of events if the recent row was caused by just a couple of isolated incidents, for example, the gutsy public exchange over Gaza between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and Israel’s President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in late January 2009, or the recent premeditated humiliation of Oguz Celikkol, Turkish Ambassador to Israel, by Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.
However, these incidents are anything but isolated. They reflect a clear and probably irreversible shift in Turkish foreign policy towards Israel, the US and the Middle East as a whole.
For decades Turkey was torn between its historical ties to Muslim and Arab countries on the one hand, and the unstoppable drive towards Westernization on the other. The latter seemed much more influential in forming the new Turkish identity in its individual, collective, and thus foreign policy manifestation and outlook.
But even during the push and pull, Turkey grew in import as a political and economic player. It also grew into a nation with a decisive sense of sovereignty, a growing sense of pride and a daring capacity for asserting itself as a regional power.
In the 1970s, when ‘political Islam’ was on the rise throughout the region, Turkey was experiencing its own rethink, and various politicians and groups began grappling with the idea of taking political Islam to a whole new level.
In fact, it was Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, the Prime Minister of Turkey between 1996 and 1997 who began pushing against the conventional notion of Turkey as a second-class NATO member desperate to identify with everything Western.
In the late 1980s Erbakan’s Rafah Party (the Welfare Party) took Turkey by storm. The party was hardly apologetic about its Islamic roots and attitude. Its rise to power as a result of the 1995 general elections raised alarm, as the securely ‘pro-Western’ Turkey was deviating from the very the rigid script that wrote off the country’s regional role as that of a “lackey of NATO.” According to Salama A Salama, who coined the phrase in a recent article in Al-Ahram Weekly, Turkey is no longer this ‘lackey’. And according to Kiniklioðlu, that’s something “Israel must get used to”.
The days of Erbakan might be long gone. But the man’s legacy registered something that never departed Turkish national consciousness. He pushed the boundary, dared to champion pro-Palestinian policies, defied Western dictates and even pressed for economic repositioning of his country with the creation of the Developing Eight (D-8), uniting the most politically significant Arab and Muslim countries. When Erbakan was forced to step down in a ‘postmodernist’ military coup, it was understood as the end of short-lived political experiment which ended up proving that even a benign form of political Islam was not to be tolerated in Turkey. The army emerged, once again, all powerful.
But things have changed drastically since then. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) was elected to power in 2002. The AK Party leadership was composed of savvy, yet principled politicians who aimed for change and even a geopolitical shift in their country’s regional political outlook.
The AK Party began to lead a self-assertive Turkey which was neither pleading for European acceptance nor American validation. By rejecting the use of Turkish territories as a launchpad of a US strike against Iraq in 2003, Turkey was acquiring a voice, and a strong one at that – with wide democratic representation and growing popular support.
The trend continued, and in recent years Turkey dared translate its political power and prowess into action, without immediately severing the political and military balances that took years to build. So, for example, while it continued to honor past military deals with Israel, it also made many successful overtures to Syria and Iran. And, in being willing to be seen as a unifier in the age of Muslim and Arab disunity, it refused to take part in the conveniently set up camps of ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’. Instead it maintained good ties with all its neighbors, and its Arab allies.
Starting in 2007, the US began seeing the emergence of the “New Turkey”. US President Barack Obama’s visit to the country soon after his inauguration was one of many signs that the West was taking notice of Turkey’s ‘special’ status. Turkey is not to be bullied, threatened, or intimidated. Even Israel, which has for long defied the norms of diplomacy, is now becoming more aware of its limits, thanks to Turkish President Abdullah Gül. Following Israel’s belligerent insult of the Turkish Ambassador, he said, “Unless there is a formal apology from Israel, we’re going to put Celikkol on the first plane back to Ankara.” Israel, of course, apologized, and humbly so.
It took Turkey many years to reach this level of confidence and the country is hardly eager to be anyone’s ‘lackey’ now. More, Turkey’s united and constant stance in support of Gaza, and its outspokenness against the threats against Lebanon, Iran and Syria show clearly that the old days of “warmth” are well behind us.
Turkey, of course, will find a very receptive audience among Arabs and Muslims all over the world who are desperate for a powerful and sensible leadership to defend and champion their causes. Needless to say, for the besieged Palestinians in Gaza, Erdogan is becoming a household name, a folk hero, a new Nasser in fact. The same sentiment is shared throughout the region.
– Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London). Source
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Inside Job? Inside What?
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | July 28, 2016
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Sixth part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
In his chapter on “Left Gatekeepers” and the “Shame of Noam Chomsky,” Barrie Zwicker refers to the the “New World Order” as the “diaboligarchy’s” directing agency. Less compelling is Zwicker’s reference to the “New World Order” as the “diaboligarchy’s” directing agency. To me this unfortunate choice of words is much too closely associated with the often crude and chauvinistic populism of Alex Jones and his Infowars media network. Many have come to see Jones’ lucrative media operation as a limited hangout set in place by handlers trying to hold the activities of the 9/11 Truth Movement within manageable constraints.
Due to the important findings over fifteen years of the citizens’ investigation into 9/11, the culprits most deeply implicated in the crime can be identified with much more specificity than an entity vaguely described as a “New World Order.” As Kevin Barrett and many others insist, the time has come to name the names of the probable culprits, Noam Chomsky prominent among them.
While Alex Jones ultimately serves the same masters as Chomsky, the former’s media product is often much closer to the mark of what is really going on than the content of Noam Chomsky’s more magisterial pronouncements. Jones goes at least part of the way into realities of the deep state politics of the twenty-first century. Chomsky, however, sacrificed his capacity to contribute cogently to sensible discourse on contemporary geopolitics by making himself a primary instrument of the most consequential deep state deception of recent times. As a leading agent of disinformation in the psychological trenches of the ongoing Global War of False Flag Terrorism, Chomsky has reduced himself to the level of skeptic pretender Michael Shermer. In the style of Shermer, the elder Chomsky has become an establishment TV professor readily available on Netflix. … continue
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