The Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and its Syrian spinoff, the YPG, are cult-like radical movements that intertwine Marxism, feminism, Leninism and Kurdish nationalism into a hodge-podge of ideology, drawing members through the extensive use of propaganda that appeals to these modes of thought.
*(PKK Propaganda. Image Credit)
Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the PKK, took inspiration from American anarchist Murray Bookchin in creating his philosophy, which he calls “Democratic Confederalism.”
The PKK spin-off group YPG represents most of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Syria. With Western political support, they have gained popularity and garnered an impressive amount of support from anarchists and military veterans in the West, some of whom have left the comfort of their home countries to fight with the group.
One of their most productive marketing tools has been to use young, attractive female fighters as the face of the guerrillas. During their fight against Daesh, the PKK has saturated the media with images of these young female “freedom fighters,” using them as a marketing tool to take their cause from obscurity to fame. These female fighters in the YPJ are fighting alongside their male counterparts under the direction of the U.S. in the SDF.
Stephen Gowans writes more about this topic in his superb article titled: The Myth of the Kurdish YPG’s Moral Excellence. Here is an excerpt:
In Syria, the PKK’s goal “is to establish a self-ruled region in northern Syria,” [8] an area with a significant Arab population.
When PKK fighters cross the border into Turkey, they become ‘terrorists’, according to the United States and European Union, but when they cross back into Syria they are miraculously transformed into ‘guerrilla” fighters waging a war for democracy as the principal component of the Syrian Democratic Force. The reality is, however, that whether on the Turkish or Syrian side of the border, the PKK uses the same methods, pursues the same goals, and relies largely on the same personnel. The YPG is the PKK.
Child Soldiers forced recruitment, kidnapping, and murder by the PKK and YPG
*(Young YPJ Kurdish fighter. Image Credit)
Within the past few years Kurds have gone from almost total obscurity to front page news. What doesn’t get reported however is how these terrorist groups under the guise of being a revolutionary movement for independence have carried out numerous atrocities including kidnappings and murder – not to mention their involvement in trafficking narcotics.
Kurdish families are demanding that the PKK stop kidnapping minors. It started on April 23, the day Turkey marked its 91st National Sovereignty and Children’s Day. While children celebrated the holiday in western Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) kidnapped 25 students between the ages of 14 and 16 on the east side of the country, in the Lice district of Diyarbakir.
Although the PKK has kidnapped more than 330 minors in the last six months, the Bockum family was the first in the region who put up a tent near their home to start a sit-in protest, challenging the PKK and demanding that it return their son. Sinan was returned to the family on May 4. Al-Monitor reported this incident from the beginning in great detail.
As Bebyin Somuk reported in her article, the PKK and PYD still kidnap children in Turkey and Syria. She states: “As I previously wrote for Kebab and Camel, the PKK commits war crimes by recruiting children as soldiers. Some of the PKK militants that surrendered yesterday were also the PKK’s child soldiers. The photos clearly show that these children are not more than sixteen years old. The Turkish army released video of the 25 PKK militants surrendering in Nusaybin.”
Thousands of children are serving as soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. In 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 38, proclaimed: “State parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of 15 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Since then, UNICEF and the UN Security Council took steps to end the recruitment of children in conflict and war.
(Young Kurdish fighters. Image Credit)
The PKK, recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S. , E.U. , and Turkey
The PKK often recruits children. In the past, the PKK even recruited children as young as 7-12 years. In 2010, a Danish national daily newspaper, Berlingske Tidende, published a story about the PKK’s child soldiers. According to that report, there were around 3,000 young militants in the PKK’s training camps. The youngest child at the PKK training camps was eight or nine years old. They were taught Abdullah Öcalan’s life story (the jailed leader of the PKK) and how to use weapons and explosives.
*(Martyrdom notice for a PYD/YPG child soldier Image Credit)
Despite the Deed of Commitment, the PKK continues to recruit minors.
After that story was published, the PKK encountered strong reactions from human rights organizations worldwide. The same year, UNICEF released a statement voicing its “profound concern” about the PKK’s recruitment of child soldiers. In October 2013, the PKK, represented by HPG (the PKK’s military wing) commander Ms. Delal Amed, signed the Deed of Commitment protecting children in armed conflict. This document, drawn up by the Geneva Call NGO, is dedicated to promoting respect by armed non-state actors for international humanitarian norms in armed conflict. Despite this commitment, the PKK continued to recruit minors.
The People’s Defence Forces is the military wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Image Credit
The PKK abducted children while the peace process was continuing
On March 21, 2013, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan called for a cease-fire that included the PKK’s withdrawal from Turkish soil and an eventual end to armed struggle. The PKK announced that they would obey, stating that 2013 would be the year of conclusion, either through war or through peace. But that did not happen. Instead, the PKK abducted 2,052 children aged between 12 and 17 while the peace process was still going on, according to Turkish security records. The PKK took these children and trained them. After that, because those childrenwere not involved in any criminal activities, when they were captured by, or surrendered to, Turkish security forces, Turkish courts did not prosecute them, so most of them were released. It was the Turkish state’s goodwill gesture for the sake of the peace process.
However, once released, most of these children joined the YDG-H, the PKK’s new youth wing, and began to perpetrate illegal and/or violent events in Kurdish populated cities and towns. The YDG-H began to emerge in early 2013 and spread rapidly after the peace process’ beginning. Then, after the 7 June 2015 election, the YDG-H began to attack security forces and civilians in cities and towns such as Cizre, or in Diyarbakır’s Sur neighborhood, with heavy weapons, and to dig trenches and erect barricades in side streets.
*(YDG H. Image Credit)
A growing number of Kurdish families in Turkey are calling for the return of their children, who they say have been abducted by the Kurdish rebel group, the PKK. The PKK denies the claim, but with the Turkish prime minister stepping in, the issue is putting pressure on an already stalled peace process. Dorian Jones reports from Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.
The HDP assaulted the mothers demanding their children
In May 2014, mothers from across Turkey whose children had been recruited by the PKK held a sit-in protest in front of the Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality building and called on the PKK to release their children. Their children were mostly 14-15 years old at that time. Some families claimed that their sons and daughters were kidnapped by the PKK against their will. The Diyarbakır Municipality, administered by the HDP, used water cannon to disperse the mothers. HDP Co-Chair Selahattin Demirtaş even claimed that these mothers were hired by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization. Despite the resistance coming from the PKK and the HDP, the families continued their protest, and some families’ children were released by the PKK.
The PKK established a child-wing called YPS-Zarok
Another photo from the Yüksekova district shows the child-wing recently established by the PKK called YPS-Zarok (Child) with the headline “YPS-Zarok announcement from the children of the resistance.” The PYD, the PKK’s Syria branch, is also known for its recruitment of child soldiers.
*(YPS. Image Credit)
U.S.’s “reliable partner” the YPG also recruits children
A Human Rights Watch report, “Syria: Kurdish Forces Violating Child Soldier Ban” provides a list of 59 children, ten of them under the age of fifteen, recruited for YPG or YPJ forces since July 2014. International humanitarian law and the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court classify the recruitment of under-15-year-olds as a war crime. While the Obama Administration does not recognize the YPG as a terrorist organization, and supports them as a local partner in the region, the YPG continues to recruit child soldiers.
It’s clear that the U.S. sees the PYD as a “reliable partner” in the fight against ISIS. However, the Obama Administration should notice the fact that the PYD is not an independent organization. It is linked to the PKK and recruiting minors under 18. The decision to found the PYD was made in 2002 during a PKK congress in Qandil. The PYD also has a bylaw stating that “Abdullah Öcalan is the leader of the PYD.”US Special Forces Delta Force, training PYD (Image Credit)
In summary, the YPG is the Syrian wing of the PKK, and recruits children just like the PKK. Regardless of what acronym they go by, whether it be the YPG, PKK, PYD, YPJ or any of the other alphabet soup combinations, they commit crimes against civilians in both Syria and Turkey all with the arms, funds, and training received from the United States.
Female PKK Killing Turkish Soldiers
SouthFront reported on female PKK fighters who have killed Turkish soldiers. “The women fighters command of the Kurdistan Worker Party (PKK) have released a statement, claiming PKK female fighters killed 160 Turkish military servicemen in 2016. According to the statement, the women fighters command of the PKK carried out 115 operations against Turkish government forces in 2016. The group also vowed to ‘proceed the struggle during the new year for a life of freedom and until victory is achieved.’”
*(Hundreds of people protest against the PKK in Istanbul on 7 September after the PKK killed 16 soldiers and wounded six others in Daglica, Turkey. Image Credit)
The PKK is also killing Kurds under the guise of protecting their rights
“Senior PKK leader Cemil Bayık, in an interview with the Fırat News Agency (ANF) on Aug. 8, said, ‘Our war will not be confined to the mountains like it was before. It will be spread everywhere without making a distinction between mountains, plains or cities. It will spread to the metropolises.’ Terrorist Bayık’s statement signaled that the PKK would take increasing aim against civilians, targeting civilian areas more than ever. And it is happening.
Since July 15, the day when the Gülenist terror cult, FETÖ, launched its failed military coup attempt to topple the democratically-elected government, the PKK perpetrated dozens of terrorist attacks, killing 21 civilians and injuring 319 others – most of them Kurdish citizens.”
According to The Washington Institute:
On November 18, FBI Director Robert Mueller met with senior Turkish officials to address U.S.-Turkish efforts targeting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), also known as Kongra-Gel. A press release from the U.S. embassy in Ankara following the meeting stressed that U.S. officials ‘strongly support Turkey’s efforts against the PKK terrorist organization’ and highlighted the two countries’ long history of working together in the fight against terrorism and transnational organized crime.
The PKK: Terrorist Organization and Foreign Narcotics Trafficker
These discussions are timely. Despite Ankara’s recent bid to alleviate the Kurdish issue — a bid referred to as the ‘democratic opening’ — the PKK is one of a growing number of terrorist organizations with significant stakes in the international drug trade.
In October, the U.S. Treasury Department added three PKK/Kongra-Gel senior leaders to its list of foreign narcotics traffickers. The PKK, along with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), is one of only a few organizations worldwide designated by the U.S. government as both a terrorist organization and a significant foreign narcotics trafficker.” Drug smuggling is reported to be the main financial source of PKK terrorism, according to the organization International Strategic Research, whose detailed report can be seen here.
Western Veterans Blindly Supporting Kurdish Independence
Their exaggerated triumphs against Daesh have helped them evolve from a radical militia to an alleged regional power player. Have they been successful in fighting against Daesh in Syria? Yes – but while the Syrian Arab Army has been more effective, it does not receive a fraction of the praise or recognition that the PKK does.
Pato Rincon, a U.S. military veteran, recently wrote about his experience training with the YPG in Syria.
Although initially interested in their desire for autonomy, he soon got to know a different side of the group.
An Exclusive Eyewitness Account of an American who Trained with the Kurdish Syrian Rebels
Getting retired from the United States Marine Corps at age 23 with zero deployments under my belt was a huge blow to what I figured to be my destiny on this planet. That “retirement” came in 2010 after three years on convalescent leave, recovering from a traumatic brain injury sustained stateside. I got my chance to vindicate myself in 2015 by volunteering to fight in Syria with the Kurdish Yeni Parastina Gel (YPG), or the “People’s Protection Units” in Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish language).
The YPG is the military apparatus of the Partiya Yekitiya Democrat (PYD), the Democratic Union Party, and one of the main forces of the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting ISIS and Bashar al-Assad’s regime. While they are a direct ideological descendant of the Soviet Union, their take on Marxism has a much more nationalistic bent than that of their internationalist forebears. At their training camp that I attended, they constantly spoke of their right to a free and autonomous homeland–which I could support. On the other hand, they ludicrously claimed that all surrounding cultures from Arab to Turk to Persian descended from Kurdish culture. One should find this odd, considering that the Kurds have never had such autonomy as that which they struggle for. All of this puffed up nationalism masquerading as internationalism was easy to see through.
The Westerners were treated with respect by the “commanders” (they eschewed proper rank and billet, how bourgeoise!), but the rank and file YPGniks were more interested in what we could do for them and what they could steal from us (luckily, my luggage was still in storage at the Sulaymaniyah International Airport in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq). By “steal from us,” I mean they would walk up to a Westerner/American and grab their cap, glasses, scarf and whatever else they wanted and ask “Hevalti?” which is Kurmanji for “Comraderie?” and if you “agreed” or stalled (a non-verbal agreement) then they would take your gear and clothing. “Do not get your shit hevalti-ed,” the saying went.
Not only was their idea of Marxism fatuous, their version of feminism was even worse. We had to take mandatory “Female World History” classes in which some putrid fourth or even fifth wave feminist propaganda was espoused. Early on in my brief stay with this “military unit”, I was told not to ever brush my teeth in front of a woman as that might “sexualize” her… … something to do with preparing one’s self for sex or something.
They insisted that we chicken-wing our elbows while sighting in on targets–the same targets that were fired on by everybody in the class, thus making an assessment of individual strengths and weaknesses rather impossible. This was on the ONE day that we went to the range–one day with the AK-47 out of about a month of training. Another day was Some of these guys were straight from civilian life, with only their blood composition to act as a reason for them to be there. Little boys and little girls as young as 13 or 14 were there–reason enough for me to leave.
During one long “Female World History” class, we were taught that if a man had a Dragonov (sniper rifle) and he was elevated from his female comrade’s position and she had a Bixie, then the male in the scenario should not cover his female comrade, but instead should find something else to do lest she lose self esteem, not feeling capable of carrying out the task by herself.
When a student from Kentucky asked, “What if the situation is reversed–can a woman cover a man?” the female instructor smiled and said, “Yes, that’s okay.” I didn’t end up firing a shot in combat for the YPG. After seeing their half-baked ideology, poor level of training, and the child soldiers, I had had enough. They were nice enough to arrange for me to go back to Iraq where I could catch a ride to Turkey.
*(Pat Rincon with YPG fighters in Syria. Image Credit)
Accounts such as this will certainly not make it to mainstream media, as they do not fit the narrative that the Kurds and their sponsors promote.
In another example of Western support for the YPG, Joe Robinson, an ex-soldier and UK national, recently returned to the UK after spending five months in Syria fighting with the group. He was detained and arrested by Greater Manchester Police officers on suspicion of terrorism offenses as soon as he returned. He joined the British military when he was 18 and toured Afghanistan with the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment in 2012.
*(Joseph A. R. (right) in a military outfit with flag patches of Kurdistan and the UK, while men who appear to be Kurdistan Region’s Peshmerga forces are seen in the background in this undated social media picture. Picture Credit).
He left the UK when an arrest warrant was issued after he failed to appear in court. Robinson is pictured here in Syria with YPG fighters.
Robinson, at left, holding his weapon while fellow YPG comrades hold Daesh flag. The writing on the wall speaks volumes about the relationship between Israel, the Kurds and the US.
During a trip to Turkey Joe Robinson was arrested for having been part of the YPG.
*(Turkish police arrested Joesph A.R. (center) along with two Bulgarian women in the city of Aydin, July 28, 2017. Photo Credit)
“I received arms training from the YPG [People’s Protection Units] for three months but never engaged in combat,” said the foreign fighter during an interrogation.
The information contained in this article serves the purpose of balancing all of the propaganda and romanticization that these Kurdish terrorist groups have received in mainstream media. The bottom line is they are armed, dangerous, and committing crimes with international support. Support for these terrorist groups needs to end immediately before further division, chaos and death spreads in the region.
September 25, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iran, Iraq, Israel, PKK, Syria, Turkiye, United States, YPG, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Let me preface what I am about to say by stating that I have the utmost esteem for mainstream medicine’s skill in emergency situations — the do or die surgeries, the dispensing of powerful life-saving drugs necessary in that setting are second to none; and its mastery of cosmetic surgery in cases of deformities and the advances made in prosthetics are nothing less than spectacular. These are what make mainstream medicine great.
I would also like to add that I am not an expert of any kind. I hold no degrees or certifications, and neither do I represent, belong to, or work for any party, organization or corporation. I speak for myself, a sixty-two year old woman, and from my experiences with, and extensive research of, a topic I find fascinating, intriguing and bothersome — mainstream medicine and how the belief in its infallibility harms us in so many ways.
The pompous certainty of mainstream medicine’s powerful proponents — be they multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies, medical associations, disease-specific charities, government agencies, Madison Avenue selling the diseases and the pills, TV or magazines, the news media parroting its cash cow’s every claim — combined have most people, hook, line and sinker, believing in the impeccable record of mainstream medicine. No questions asked.
Here, I would like to throw out some alarming statistics — ones that can be easily found in a variety of journals from Forbes to JAMA to CounterPunch, etc.
The estimated annual mortality rate for adverse drug reactions to “correctly” prescribed drugs is the 5th leading cause of death in the U.S.1 Over the counter (OTC) cold medications are among the top twenty substances causing death in children.2 Used according to direction, NSAIDs (Non-Steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs) are responsible for more than 20,000 deaths every year.3 There are over 400,000 deaths each year from drug and medical errors and tens of thousands more deaths from unnecessary procedures.4 Add those together and mainstream medicine is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.
So, why is it that most people trust, without question, the omnipotence of mainstream medicine in the same way religious zealots believe in their chosen religion or atheists in theirs? When well over 200,000 people die in the U.S. each year from prescription drug use alone — not abuse, but use; when we spend more, per capita than any other nation on earth and yet our health indices and life expectancy are near the bottom of all other developed nations5 why is there no sense of outrage (except for price gouging!) or, at the very least, a sense that something is not right, that something is terribly wrong?
Yet, as has happened many times, should a doctor, a scientist, a researcher or a curious layperson question conventional medical creed the herald is quickly battered down with jeers of derision, and swiftly “discredited” and shunned by the medical community. The media then parrots what they are told and soon everyone is asking, “How dare they question science? Haven’t they heard of collateral damage? Every war (and they are constantly reminding us of the war we are fighting against diseases) has collateral damage”. Yet when a few people die from dirty spinach, improper use of some herbal product, or a handful of people (some even vaccinated) catch the measles (and live to tell about it!) panic overruns the media.
Does anyone remember or know of the ad campaigns telling us that “nine out of ten doctors smoke Camel cigarettes” or that DDT pesticide spray is “good for you!”? We may laugh now but what about the more recent debacles such as HRT (hormone replacement therapy), Vioxx, swine flu vaccines and GMOs — all of which received the seal of approval from industry scientists, government agencies and all were pushed by Madison Ave. — just like the cigarettes given to my father for heart disease and the DDT sprayed on everything in sight, including children.
The number of TV commercials for drugs, medical clinics, hospitals, and doctor-related reality TV shows is mind blowing. It is a constant barrage of “a pill for every ill” and “don’t forget to ask your doctor about it”, while people with vapid eyes move in slow motion through white rooms or a meadow filmed through gauze, while a voice, soft and soothing, tells you of the pill’s benefits and then the same voice, just as soft but at breakneck speed, spews a partial list of possible side effects and a series of unwanted symptoms, some of which sound, and are (such as death) worse than the “disease” itself.
And interspersed between the ad for an over-the-counter (OTC) medication that had not long ago been given “by prescription only” and another ad for the new six story billion dollar specialty clinic are yet more commercials inviting us to join in what has become a celebration of you fill in the blank disease. There’s a “walk” or a “run”, even a paddle! for this disease and a different colored “ribbon” for that disease. It is almost as if having a disease has become the new “in” thing — fashionable, admirable, heroic even. Are we being groomed to embrace our diseases, while at the same time being told to give, give, give to find a “cure”? According to Dr. Robert Sharpe, author of The Cruel Deception, a book about animal testing in medical research,” . . . in our culture treating disease is enormously profitable, preventing it is not.”
We have been told we are living longer but the sad fact is that the trend has reversed and now for the first time in decades life expectancy has dropped in the U.S.6 Even more alarming is that, along with adults, the number of children with chronic diseases has risen sharply. Think about it. How many of us make it past seventy (hell, even sixty!) without some major medical catastrophe (or two) requiring surgery and/or special apparatuses to help us do what used to come naturally and/or prescribed no less than three or four drugs? And how many “new” (iatrogenic) diseases do we then acquire from taking those drugs or undergoing those procedures that require even more drugs and/or more procedures?
And just what is conventional medicine’s track record for curing disease — any disease — not palliation or suppression or masking (all of which suppress and weaken the immune system) — but curing? Forty years ago I knew one woman with breast cancer while today I know dozens, all of whom underwent tortuous procedures, surgeries and drugging, and yes, some of them died. And why is it that when people die after making use of conventional medicine — surgery, chemotherapy, drugs, etc. — there are no cries of foul against their choice of healthcare? Instead they are hailed as heroes who fought a courageous battle, but when someone dies after trying an alternative medicine the cries against their choice are nothing less than vitriolic, as if no one ever dies using mainstream medicine, when in actuality many thousands die each year from mishaps alone, never mind the many hundreds of thousands who die from the diseases that have remained rampant — heart disease, cancer and diabetes, etc.7
Despite unprecedented technical and scientific advances, mainstream medicine’s only answer to disease is to destroy—with toxic substances, ingested or injected, with life-threatening procedures and with the removal of diseased (and often times healthy) body parts. Kill germs, fight cancer, destroy cells, kick (name a disease)’s ass, crush, terminate, rub out, blast; never build up, heal, cure. Are we, as a society, even capable of imagining alternatives to mainstream medicine? I once told an MD I knew that a friend’s kidney stone passed with relative ease after drinking a herbal tea prescribed by an Acupuncturist. “If there was something out there that can do that,” he told me, “we would know about it”. Not with that attitude!
When contemplating all that led up to the economic debacle of 2008, I would venture to guess that most people would be leery now (if they weren’t already!) of any advise given by the banking industry and Wall Street concerning, let’s say, home loans. And the same wariness would prevail when listening to the oil or coal industries’ take on environmental issues, or the weapons makers’ spin on whether to go to war or sell arms, or the pesticide- producing conglomerates on the safety of their products. The conflict of interest in each case should be obvious because when one considers that the very ones who profit by limiting the field of allowable research, who selectively choose among research papers to discredit alternative theories or boost their own are the very ones who control the message, it becomes obvious that we are seeing conflict of interest on a massive scale.
And, what of the research done by pharmaceutical companies that tell us a certain drug, or procedure, or vaccine is safe and effective? Does it make you comfortable to know that President Obama’s pick for FDA (Food and Drug Administration) Commissioner, Robert Califf, had received research funds from twenty-five drug companies while director of Duke University clinical research department where a major research fraud scandal had erupted under his watch8 or that Julie Gerderding, former head of the CDC (Center for Disease Control) concealed and then destroyed evidence of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism in African-American boys9, and yet congress refuses to subpoena her and the whistleblower from the CDC and the media never mentions it, and that this same Julie Gerderding left the CDC to become the president of Merck’s vaccine division and then executive VP of Merck, the sole manufacturer of the MMR vaccine? These examples are just two of many that are not only about a colossal conflict of interest but also about a dangerous threat to true scientific discovery affecting millions of lives.
So, why is it that pharmaceutical companies (which, by the way, have more lobbyists than there are members of congress and the senate combined) and which have a woeful track record when it comes to conflict of interest in medical research, drug research and alternative medicine viability research, are given a pass, a green light, a pat on the back of confidence and, besides, are vehemently defended and vociferously cheered on? What marketing magic do they spin that makes people overlook their complicity in fraudulent research, their over-the-top demonizing of opposing viewpoints, and above all their abhorrent safety record?
Why can’t we question the effectiveness, the safety or the necessity of some vaccines without being rudely shouted down? I wonder if those who shout the, “Shut up! They are safe!” mantra have ever taken the time to study the long history of infectious disease and the history of vaccine use? Do they know there are no long-term studies on the effects of vaccines, or that vaccinated people are not necessarily protected from the diseases they are vaccinated against, or that the pharmaceutical companies and the government agencies refuse to do a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated population study as to their overall health indices, that vaccines, unlike other drugs are not tested against a placebo but against another vaccine, or that childhood infectious diseases had been on a downward trend for many years (measles deaths had declined by almost 100 percent!) well before vaccines were introduced as had many of the other infectious diseases — running their course, improving as our sanitary conditions and treatment of the illness improved? So, why not let them continue to decline until they naturally disappear? Why introduce crude disease substances and a mixture of lethal chemicals (of which no one knows or bothers to test their long-term effects) into our bodies in an attempt to eradicate diseases that seemed to be doing a fine job of doing just that naturally?
Could there be a connection between the plethora of “new” or increasing diseases and the crude drugs (including vaccines) we have been putting into our bodies for decades now? If we stop to think about it does it make sense to inject ourselves with hazardous material we know nothing about to prevent diseases like the measles, mumps and the flu and others that are now so simple to treat?
But we are told, ad nauseam, to, “Shut up and just get your shots! All your questions have already been answered!” However, when you look behind the scenes of medical research and find the pharmaceutical companies paying the bills, writing the reports and working closely with government agencies, research colleges, medical journals and the media to get their message out, it should raise a red flag.
What is the great harm brought about by this absolutism of the proponents of mainstream medicine? There are many but two are outstanding. One is that freedom of choice in one’s healthcare decisions can and will be taken away — it has begun already and is picking up momentum. I do not use conventional medicine except in some emergency situations, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t fight for the right of others to choose to use it exclusively if they believe it to be their best or only option. Being comfortable with one’s healthcare choice is, I firmly believe, of utmost importance. Yet if it were up to many people I should not be allowed to choose the kind of healthcare I want for my family and me.
And secondly, that same vitriolic certainty and insular thinking is truly harmful to the very essence of scientific inquiry. Great discoveries could be ignored simply because of a refusal to look beyond what we are told is scientifically acceptable today, the realm of inquiry having been limited by the greed of those in power and their manipulation of the masses by way of the fear factor.
September 24, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Scientism, United States |
Leave a comment
The announcement in Tehran on Saturday regarding the successful test of a ballistic missile with a range of 2000 kilometers and capable of carrying multiple warheads to hit different targets phenomenally shifts the military balance in the Middle East.
Israel and the roughly 45,000 US troops deployed to the Middle East – Jordan (1500 troops), Iraq (5200), Kuwait (15000), Bahrain (7000), Qatar (10000), UAE (5000), Oman (200) – fall within the range of the latest Iranian missile. Iran has demonstrated a deterrent capability that deprives the US and Israel of a military option.
The missile test signals Tehran’s strategic defiance of the US, after President Donald Trump’s outrageous remarks against Iran in his address to the UN GA. From this point, Trump has to be very careful about tearing up the Iran nuclear deal. Any such rash act by Trump or the lawmakers in the Congress (imposing new sanctions) can be seized by Tehran to resume its previous nuclear program, which would have far-reaching implications, given its missile capabilities.
President Hassan Rouhani took a tough line after returning to Tehran from New York. He warned that if Trump violated the nuclear deal, “we will be firm and all options will be before us.” Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif told New York Times tauntingly that if the US wanted to re-negotiate the nuclear deal, Tehran too will insist on re-negotiating every single concession it made – “Are you prepared to return to us 10 tons of enriched uranium?”
Rouhani made a strident speech at a military parade on Friday in Tehran underscoring that Iran did not need any country’s permission to bolster its missile capability. He added, “The Iranian nation has always been after peace and security in the region and the world and we will defend the oppressed Yemeni, Syrian and Palestinian people whether you like it or not.”
“As long as some speak in the language of threats, the strengthening of the country’s defense capabilities will continue and Iran will not seek permission from any country for producing various kinds of missile,” Defence Minister Amir Hatami said in a statement Saturday.
What emerges is Iran’s determination to consolidate its influence in Syria. The US will have to carefully weigh the repercussions before making any intervention (which Israel is pressing for.) Again, Iran may establish a long-term presence in Syria. The Iran-supported battle-hardened Shiite militia fighting in Iraq and Syria is a veritable 100,000-strong army and Iran is in a position to force the eviction of US forces from Iraq and Syria.
The Trump administration must take with the utmost seriousness the thinly veiled threat by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari on Wednesday (while reacting to Trump’s UN speech) – “The time has come for correcting the US’ miscalculations. Now that the US has fully displayed its nature, the government should use all its options to defend the Iranian nation’s interests. Taking a decisive position against Trump is just the start and what is strategically important is that the US should witness more painful responses in the actions, behavior and decisions that Iran will take in the next few months.”
The ballistic missile test followed within 3 days of Gen. Jafari’s threat. Equally, the timing of the missile test can be seen against the backdrop of the referendum being planned for September 25 by the Kurds of northern Iraq, seeking an independent Kurdistan. Tehran is in no doubt that the Kurdistan project is a US-Israeli enterprise to create a permanent base in the highly strategic region with the objective of destabilizing Iran and undermining its regional surge in Syria and Iraq.
Unsurprisingly, Israel is furious about Iran’s missile test. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman called it a “a provocation and a slap in the face for the United States and its allies — and an attempt to test them.” Clearly, Israel is in panic that Iran is steadily, inexorably outstripping it as the number one regional power in the Middle East. However, beyond rhetoric, Israel cannot do much about Iran’s surge.
Israel foolishly instigated Trump to provoke Tehran just at this juncture when he is barely coping with the crisis in Northeast Asia. A containment strategy against Iran is no longer feasible. Wisdom lies in the Trump administration engaging Iran in a constructive spirit to influence its regional policies. Threats never worked against Iran. Time and again they’ve proved to be counterproductive.
September 24, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Kurds, Middle East, Palestine, Sanctions against Iran, Syria, Yemen, Zionism |
Leave a comment
The term ritual defamation was coined by Laird Wilcox to describe the destruction of the reputation of a person by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. The defamation is in retaliation for opinions expressed by the victim, with the intention of silencing that person’s influence, and making an example of him so as to discourage similar “insensitivity” to subjects currently ruled as taboo. It is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by a representative of a special interest group, such as, ironically, the Anti-Defamation League.
Ritual defamation is not called “ritual” because it follows any prescribed religious or mystical doctrine, nor is it embraced in any particular document or scripture. Rather, it is ritualistic because it follows a predictable, stereotyped pattern which embraces a number of elements, as in a ritual.
Laird Wilcox enumerated eight basic elements of a ritual defamation:
First, the victim must have violated a particular taboo, usually by expressing or identifying with a forbidden attitude, opinion or belief.
Second, the defamers condemn the character of the victim, never offering more than a perfunctory challenge to the particular attitudes, opinions or beliefs the victim expressed or implied. Character assassination is its primary tool.
Third, the defamers avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed. Their goal is not discussion but rather condemnation, censorship and repression.
Fourth, the victim is usually someone who is vulnerable to public opinion, although perhaps in a very modest way. It could be a schoolteacher, writer, businessman, minor official, or merely an outspoken citizen; visibility enhances vulnerability to ritual defamation.
Fifth, an attempt is made to involve others in the defamation. In the case of a public official, other public officials will be urged to denounce the offender. In the case of a student, other students will be called upon; in the case of a professor, other professors will be asked to join the condemnation.
Sixth, in order for a ritual defamation to be most effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a manner which distorts his views to the point where they appear at their most extreme. For example, a victim who is defamed as a “subversive” will be identified with the worst images of subversion, such as espionage, terrorism or treason.
Seventh, the defamation tries to bring pressure and humiliation on the victim from every quarter, including family and friends. If the victim has school children, they may be taunted and ridiculed as a consequence of adverse publicity. If the victim is employed, he may be fired from his job. If the victim belongs to clubs or associations, other members may be urged to expel him.
Eighth, any explanation the victim may offer is dismissed as irrelevant. To claim truth as a defense for a tabooed opinion or belief is treated as defiance and only compounds the offense. Ritual defamation is often not necessarily an issue of being wrong or incorrect but rather of “insensitivity” and failing to observe social taboos.
Ritual defamation is not used to persuade, but rather to punish. It is used to hurt, to intimidate, to destroy, and to persecute, and to avoid the dialogue, debate and discussion that free speech implies. Its obvious maliciousness is often hidden behind the dictates of political correctness and required sensitivity to established myths.
Ritual Defamation at Hobart and William Smith Colleges: A Textbook Example
In the September 2009 I wrote an op-ed for the local newspaper, The Finger Lakes Times, defining “Holocaust Denial.” It was submitted in response to the media frenzy and demonization of Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who was scheduled to address the UN General Assembly. After several delays, it was published on September 27 under a quarter-page picture of Ahmadinejad and under the headline “What do deniers really mean? (See Appendix 1)
Although the definition I presented has been widely accepted, both by those who affirm and by those who contest or “revise” the current narrative of the Holocaust, and although the facts I presented were not challenged, the op-ed sparked a classical case of ritual defamation. Questioning the Holocaust narrative, or even defining what it means to question it, is arguably the most serious taboo in the United States today. It is considered “beyond the pale” and even touching the subject is like touching the third rail on the subway – instant death to your career.
First Blood
On October 3 a “colleague” from the Education Department, James MaKinster, “facilitated” a smear letter, signed by six additional colleagues, and circulated it by email to over 300 other professors and people in the Hobart and William Smith Colleges community. Their letter was addressed to the colleges’ President Mark Gearan; it denounced me with lies and insidious innuendos and demanded the revocation of my status as a faculty emeritus.
I heard about the MaKinster letter quite by happenstance soon after it was circulated, but neither the President nor any of the original seven who signed it was willing to provide me with a copy. It was not until May 2011 some 20 months later that I finally got a copy of the email version, not of the final letter with all the signatures. (See Appendix 2)
My Response
In a vain attempt to clear my name and set the record straight I sent a message to the entire community rebutting the charges made in the MaKinster smear letter. I stated that:
1. Contrary to the feigned outrage of my ritual defamers as to the date of publishing the op-ed, I had nothing to do with the timing of the article and make no apology for when it appeared vis-à-vis a Jewish holiday.
2. My ritual defamers’ egregious claim to know my “personal beliefs” and their claim that I used my title to give them credence was untrue. Nowhere were my personal beliefs stated. Moreover, my article included an exceptionally long disclaimer showing The Colleges neither condone nor condemn what I had written.
3. My ritual defamers’ claim that “Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever” was also untrue. There are a number of scholars who dare to criticize the typical Holocaust narrative and are willing to fight the slime hurled at them by ardent Zionists who feel it their duty to protect the current version that serves as the sword and shield of apartheid Israel. (As a footnote, our former provost and former dean of women (both Jewish) demanded that I not use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel. Although the term was used in the Israeli press and later by ex-President Jimmy Carter, they did not consider it to be “suitable discourse” on our campus where, ironically, we routinely claim to support free speech and diversity of opinion.)
4. My ritual defamers said that “denying undisputed facts of the holocaust (sic) is not a way to show support for the Palestinians.” First, the three tenets of Holocaust revisionism are clearly not “undisputed.” To the contrary, these taboos are hotly and passionately disputed; people’s lives are ruined when they dispute these “facts” or even mention them. In fourteen countries you can get jail time for disputing “facts” surrounding the Holocaust.
Second, disputing purported facts is what science and historical analysis are all about. We academics have no problem discussing and disputing whether or not Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, or if President Obama’s birth certificate is real, or if Jewish slaves built the Egyptian pyramids, or if Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack on Hawaii was imminent, but we are not allowed to discuss or dispute the six-million figure, which was bantered about before World War I. (Yes, before World War I; see for example, “Dr. Paul Nathan’s View of Russian Massacre”, The New York Times, March 25, 1906.) To question the six million figure on most American campuses is simply taboo.
Finally, what gives these ritual defamers the credentials to pontificate on what supports or hurts Palestinians? None of them are experts on Palestine and none are activists for Palestinian human rights. To the contrary, some of them have been responsible for feting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges anti-Palestinian demagogues including Elie Wiesel and even Benyamin Netanyahu. They have also endorsed giving Madeleine Albright our highest humanitarian award, which was not only ironic, but disgraceful in light of her statement that the deaths of over 500,000 Iraqi children were “worth it”.
5. Labeling Holocaust revisionism “Holocaust denial” is unwarrantedly pejorative. It might be fine for Fox News, but it is not conducive to, and often precludes, intelligent discourse. To call Holocaust revisionism “thinly veiled anti-Semitism” is simply untrue and it defames scholars and others, including Jews, who question the Holocaust doctrine as we are fed it in hundreds of films, books, articles, and commentaries. Terms like Holocaust Industry, Holocaust Fatigue, Holocaust professional, Holocaust wannabes, and Holocaust High Priest were not coined by “deniers” or anti-Semites; they were coined by Jews. (The High Priest quip is an obvious reference to Elie Wiesel; it was made by Tova Reich in her book My Holocaust. Tova’s husband, Walter Reich, was the former director of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.)
In 1946 the US government told us that 20 million people were murdered by Hitler. Now that figure is said to be 11 million; it has been “revised” downward and literally carved in stone at the US Holocaust Memorial. For years we were told that over 4 million were killed at Auschwitz alone, but by the early 1990s that figure was “revised” downward to 1.5 million. Wiesel tells us that people were thrown alive onto pyres; he claims to have seen it with his own eyes; today even Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz say that is not true. They have already “revised” his narrative. These are but a few examples of historical revisionism, examples that not inherently anti-Semitic and no longer considered taboo.
6. It is most interesting to see academic colleagues say, “(a)s we all know … the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.” That means they either deny that Palestinians have been (and continue to be) ethnically cleansed or they agree that Israel is performing genocide on the Palestinian people.
7. While the ritual defamers found my piece to be “abhorrent,” they seemed unable to find fault with a single fact I presented. So they resorted to name-calling and labeled the piece “hate speech” and “unsupported vitriol” and smeared my name to hundreds of people. I am surprised that the Anti-Defamation League or the Mossad did not come knocking on my door.
8. The ritual defamers genuinely were concerned about the op-ed’s impact on our Jewish students, staff, and faculty. But maybe it is time for all members of the community to see the Holocaust for what it really was and not the unquestionable, unimpeachable, doctrine that makes Jewish suffering superior to that of other people. Maybe it is time to recognize that Zionism as a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine began long before the Holocaust and that Zionist discrimination, dehumanization, and dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be excused by it. Maybe it is time to see that since over half the population (within the borders controlled by Israel) is not Jewish, the dream of creating a Jewish state has failed. Walling in the non-Jews or putting them in Bantustans or driving them into Jordan will not make Israel a Jewish state. Nationalistic allegiance to “blood and soil” has been a failure in Germany and in Israel. That should be the real lesson of the Holocaust.
9. To say that my op-ed “does not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse” is pure nonsense. The piece is well written, well substantiated, and quite humane.
10. The ritual defamers are quite right about one thing; they were deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith Colleges’ title attached to it, even with a lengthy disclaimer. Diversity and perspectives outside the mainstream are to be encouraged, but not if they question Jewish power, Israel, or Holocaust doctrine. Apparently those topics are totally taboo.
11. The demand to President Gearan to remove my title of Professor Emeritus is both classic and stupid. Would it save Hobart and William Smith Colleges from being associated with my writings? Of course not; I would simply become “Former Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges” with no disclaimer.
But what it would really do is to cast me into the briar patch with Norman Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Paul Eisen, Henry Herskovitz, Gilad Atzmon, Rich Siegel, and Hedy Epstein (a Holocaust survivor), all friends of mine and all anti-Zionists.
Lest I seem irreverent or unscathed by this widely-circulated smear letter from my ritual defamers, allow me to admit that I have been hurt by it. Many faculty and other HWS folks now shun me as a persona non grata largely because they only read the slime and never my rebuttal. My former student and long-time friend, David Deming, who is now the Chair of the HWS Board does not answer my letters. President Gearan does not answer them either. Board member Roy Dexheimer, disparages me and wonders if I fell “off my meds.” Another Board member, Stuart Pilch, took it a step further and made a threatening phone call to my home with a promise “to hunt me down.”
Recourse? Most Doors are Closed
For twenty months I did not know the contents of the MaKinster email. When I discovered it as an email draft, my first inclination was to sue him and the other six faculty members who circulated it. I wanted to sue for libel and defamation of character. I knew it would be expensive, but I was determined to correct the lies they had spread about me. The problem was that in New York State the statute of limitations for libel is one year from the date it was committed, not one year from the date it was discovered.
I went to the Provost, who is the head of our faculty, and asked her to get me a copy of the final letter as it was sent to President Gearan. (I had seen only the email draft of it shown in Appendix 2) I wanted a copy of the final letter including the names of all those ritual defamers who had signed it — MaKinster and the six other “facilitators” and any others of the 300 they sent it to who might have also signed). She refused on the grounds of “confidentiality”.
I went to the President and asked for a copy; he refused. I asked MaKinster; he refused to give me a copy of the letter and refused to meet with me to discuss it. I asked the other six “facilitators”. Three agreed to meet with me, but were unable to give me a copy of the final letter. They all told me that they thought additional people had signed, but they could not or would not name a single one for sure. Like MaKinster, the remaining three “colleagues” refused to meet with me or give me a copy of what they had collectively written in their smear letter.
I went to The Grievance Committee, but I was told that I could not bring the issue before it, since that committee does not hear such matters. I asked to address the faculty at large, but I was told that only faculty can attend an HWS Faculty Meeting and not those who are retired, with or without emeritus status.
I tried a market approach and publicly offered a $1,000 contribution to Hobart and William Smith Colleges in return for a final copy of the MaKinster ritual defamation letter with the names of all signatories. The offer was made by email to all current faculty members. No response. I raised the offer to $1,500. Some faculty called on me to stop; some even charged me with smearing MaKinster. Others counseled me to “turn the other cheek” and “get over it.”
But others thought that withholding the letter and the names of those who signed it was “cowardly,” “inappropriate,” and “unethical.” They asked rhetorically if my critics should not “openly stand by their words and acts?” They supported my right to peacefully and non-violently discover the smears and slime thrown at me by “colleagues” who now piously claim their right to anonymity.
Via college email to all members of the faculty I raised the public offer to $2,000, then $2,500, then $3,000, and so forth. At $5,000 the current acting Provost and long-time friend, Pat McGuire, came to my home (11/22/11) to discuss the “situation” and to advise that my email offers were annoying some people and that Hobart and William Smith Colleges was considering restricting or terminating my email privileges. I raised the offer to $10,000, not by campus-wide email, but in specific offers to several alumni.
Resolution?
Not yet. But I am optimistic. I have been a part of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges community for almost 40 years. I am proud of my record of teaching and activism on behalf of Palestinian human rights. And I am proud of having fought against academic hypocrisy and cowardice, especially when it comes to Israel.
I am also proud that Hobart and William Smith Colleges did not completely roll over to the ritual defamation initiated (or facilitated) by otherwise well-meaning “colleagues,” especially by those who are too cowardly to reveal or defend their participation in this injustice. And I am eternally thankful that the institution has allowed me to keep my emeritus status and my walking pass at the gym.
Appendix 1
Finger Lakes Times, September 27, 2009, Section D, p.1+ (not available on line)
What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?
In April 2007 the European Union agreed to set jail sentences up to three years for those who deny or trivialize the Holocaust.1 More recently, in response to the remarks of Bishop Richard Williamson, the Pope has proclaimed that Holocaust denial is “intolerable and altogether unacceptable.”
But what does Holocaust denial really mean? Begin with the word Holocaust. The Holocaust2 (spelled with a capital H) refers to the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. It is supposed to be the German’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish problem. Much of the systematic extermination was to have taken place in concentration camps by shooting, gassing, and burning alive innocent Jewish victims of the Third Reich.
People like Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, and Bishop Williamson who do not believe this account and who dare to say so in public are reviled as bigots, anti-Semites, racists, and worse. Their alternate historical scenarios are not termed simply revisionist, but are demeaned as Holocaust denial. Rudolf and Zundel were shipped to Germany where they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to three and five years, respectively.
Politicians deride Holocaust revisionist papers and conferences as “beyond the pale of international discourse and acceptable behavior.”3 Non-Zionist Jews who participate in such revisionism, like Rabbi Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, are denounced as “self-haters” and are shunned and spat upon. Even Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors and who wrote the book, The Holocaust Industry, has been branded a Holocaust denier.
But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to three simple contentions:
1. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination.
2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.
3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the 55 million who died in WWII.
Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?
Is it sacrilegious to ask, “If Hitler was intent on extermination, how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?” Wiesel claims that people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz refute this claim.
Is it really “beyond international discourse” to question the efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers? If other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as Allied war propaganda, why is it “unacceptable behavior” to ask if the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials?
For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis were German, obsessed with paperwork and recordkeeping. Yet only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of natural causes. So why is it heresy to doubt that fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Second World War?
“Holocaust Denial” might be no more eccentric or no more criminal than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even today over half the population is not Jewish.
The Holocaust narrative allows Yad Vashem, the finest Holocaust museum in the world, to repeat the mantra of “Never Forget” while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. It allows Elie Wiesel to boast of having worked for these same terrorists (as a journalist, not a fighter) while refusing to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the war crimes his employer committed. It makes Jews the ultimate victim no matter how they dispossess or dehumanize or ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinian people.
The Holocaust story eliminates any comparison of Ketziot or Gaza to the concentration camps they indeed are. It memorializes the resistance of Jews in the ghettos of Europe while steadfastly denying any comparison with the resistance of Palestinians in Hebron and throughout the West Bank. It allows claims that this year’s Hanukah Massacre in Gaza, with a kill ratio of 100 to one, was a “proportionate response” to Palestinian resistance to unending occupation.
The Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel in what the Jewish scholar, Marc Ellis, has called the ecumenical deal: you Christians look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our Jewish state and we won’t remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic, a confirmed “soldier of Christ,” long before he was a bad Nazi.
The Holocaust narrative of systematic, industrialized extermination was an important neo-conservative tool to drive the United States into Iraq. The same neo-con ideologues, like Norman Podhoretz, routinely compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler and Nazism with Islamofascism with the intent of driving us into Iran. The title of the Israeli conference at Yad Vashem made this crystal clear: “Holocaust Denial: Paving the Way to Genocide.”
“Remember the Holocaust” will be the battle cry of the next great clash of good (Judeo/Christian values) and evil (radical Islamic aggression) and those who question it must be demonized if not burned at the stake.
Daniel McGowan
Professor Emeritus
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Geneva, NY 14456
September 24, 2009
Because of admonishment by the administration, it is hereby stated that the above remarks are solely those of the author. Hobart and William Smith Colleges neither condone nor condemn these opinions. Furthermore, the author has been instructed to use his personal email address of moc.oohay@leinadnawogcm and not his college email at ude.swh@nawogcm for those wishing to contact him with comments or criticisms.
Appendix 2This is a draft of the letter “facilitated” by James MaKinster, signed by six other “colleagues,” and circulated to over 300 others in the Hobart and William Smith Colleges’ community.
October 3, 2009
President Gearan,
This letter is a response to Daniel McGowan’s defense of Holocaust deniers published in the Finger Lakes Times on September 27. The content of the essay and its publication on the eve of Yom Kippur was appalling. We are writing to you because of the disgrace to Hobart and William Smith caused by McGowan’s continued use of the institutional imprimatur and his honorary title of “Emeritus Professor” to lend credence in disseminating his personal beliefs. He has every right as a private citizen to hold and spew forth whatever beliefs he may happen to have, but we ask you to prevent the use of his title and the name of Hobart and William Smith from contributing to its effects in the future.
It should be clear that while McGowan is claiming to raise legitimate historical and free speech issues, Holocaust denial has a history of being no more that thinly veiled anti-Semitism. When historians talk about the Holocaust what they mean is that approximately six million Jews and several millions of others were killed in an intentional and systematic fashion by the Nazis using a number of different means, including death by shooting and in gas chambers. This is the position held universally by scholars. The Holocaust deniers reject the historicity of the Holocaust based on three types of assertions. They reject the number of 6 million, the existence of killing camps, and the element of intentionality.
Professor McGowan’s article is an example of denying the reality of the most studied and documented event in history. Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever. Additionally, denying the undisputed facts of the holocaust is not a way to show support for the Palestinians. For example, his argument denying the intentionality of the Nazi’s execution of Jews is that there is not sufficient proof that it was designed to exterminate the Jewish population. Rather, he asserts, it may have been merely a program of “ethnic cleansing.” The suggestion that this somehow makes it less morally reprehensible speaks for itself, as we all know that the term “ethnic cleansing” was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.
Professor McGowan’s position is a classic case of blaming the victims for their own victimization. Promo Levi wrote in The Drowned and the Saved that what he most feared was echoed in a remark by one of his SS guards: That if he somehow managed to live through this hell no one would believe his descriptions of Auschwitz. Sadly, for some, that day has arrived.
Freedom of speech is a right for citizens in a democracy that should be vigorously protected, especially when we find the content of that speech to be abhorrent. Colleges and universities have an educational obligation to encourage scholarship that reflects perspectives outside the mainstream of public political discourse, and we encourage that. Hate speech, on the other hand, is a trickier issue for campuses to wrestle with because while free speech has a special value, we have a duty to protect members of our diverse community from unsupported vitriol being espoused under the name of our colleges and its professors. We faculty of all persuasions, Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists, are deeply offended and also share a special concern about the impact of such hateful messages (and its association with us) upon our Jewish students, staff, and faculty.
Professor McGowan’s actions do not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse. As human beings who see the transparent motivation and effects of such writing, we are deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. We therefore request the removal of Professor McGowan’s honorary title of “Emeritus Professor.”
Sincerely,
Scott Brophy, Professor of Philosophy
Michael Dobkowski, Professor of Religious Studies
Khuram Hussain, Assistant Professor of Education
Steven Lee, Professor of Philosophy
James MaKinster, Associate Professor of Education
Lilian Sherman, Assistant Professor of Education
Charles Temple, Professor of Education
Notes
Daniel McGowan is a Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Because of admonishment by the administration, it is hereby stated that the above remarks are solely those of the author. Hobart and William Smith Colleges neither condone nor condemn these opinions. Furthermore, the author has been instructed to use his personal email address of mcgowandaniel@yahoo.com and not his college email at mcgowan@hws.edu for those wishing to contact him with comments or criticisms.
September 23, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | ADL, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Human rights, James MaKinster, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.
The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The registry has been regularly criticized for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.
According to government data, some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship are likely to suffer problems gaining citizenship too.
Human rights groups have severely criticized Israel for violating its own laws, as well as international conventions to which it is a party, in carrying out such revocations.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper: “This policy is illegal and in contravention to international law because you cannot leave someone stateless.”
Harsh treatment
Palestinian citizens, one in five of Israel’s population, are descended from Palestinians who survived a mass ethnic cleansing campaign waged during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Today, some 200,000 Bedouins live in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as the Naqab (Negev).
One of the two fastest-growing groups in Israel’s population, the Bedouins have faced especially harsh treatment. Israel continued expelling them to Jordan, Egypt and Gaza through the 1950s and to this day tightly limits the areas in the Naqab where the Bedouins can live.
Revelations of the revocations emerged as Ayelet Shaked, the far-right justice minister, warned Israel’s judges to prioritize demographic concerns and maintenance of the state’s Jewishness over human rights. She called growing numbers of non-Jews in the state “national challenges” that risked turning a Jewish state into “an empty symbol.”
According to Adalah, Bedouins typically learn that they have been stripped of citizenship when they approach the interior ministry for routine services such as renewing an identity card or passport, obtaining a birth certificate, or declaring a change of address.
Some have discovered their loss of status when seeking a passport to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the obligations for Muslims.
Tip of the iceberg?
Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, said the policy of revocations had intensified over the past 18 months.
“I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” she told the Haaretz newspaper.
The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have been stripped of citizenship, but have yet to learn of the fact.
She said she believed that the government was in part targeting Bedouins with revocation of citizenship to weaken long-standing land claims against the state.
Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been mired in legal action for decades trying to claim back the title deeds to ancestral lands seized from them by military officials in the first years after Israel’s creation.
Israel has declared the surviving communities as “unrecognized,” effectively criminalizing their inhabitants and denying them basic services such as water and electricity. Officials have also been trying to revive the Prawer Plan, which seeks to evict some 40,000 Bedouins – Adalah puts the figure at 80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor “townships”. The original plan was ostensibly frozen in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.
Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them.
Endless foot-dragging
Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the al-Azazme tribe, was one of several Bedouins who spoke to Haaretz in August during a protest rally in the Naqab village of Bir Hadaj.
He was told his citizenship had been revoked when he applied for a new identity card in 2000. “Since then I’ve applied 10 times [for renewed citizenship], getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext,” he said. “I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no citizenship.”
Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to Haaretz said: “No one explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless process of foot-dragging begins.”
Zaher pointed out that many of those recently stripped of citizenship had been voting in parliamentary elections for years, even though it is a right available solely to citizens.
Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not only illegal according to Israel’s own laws, but violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed in 1961.
The group has appealed to Israel’s interior ministry and attorney general, demanding that they cancel the policy. Israeli officials have justified the revocations on the grounds that bureaucratic errors made in the state’s early years meant that the affected Bedouin’s parents or grandparents were not properly registered.
Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing citizenship for non-Jews – until 1952. The legislation’s primary purpose was to strip some 750,000 Palestinians who had been made refugees by the 1948 war, and their millions of descendants, of a right to live in Israel.
A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship.
Martial law
The failure to register many Bedouins in Israel is related to a draconian period of martial law imposed on the Palestinian minority during Israel’s first 18 years.
Bedouins, like other Palestinian citizens, were not allowed to leave their communities without a special permit. But the remoteness of their communities and Israel’s continuing efforts to expel them through the 1950s mean that officials may have preferred to avoid registration in many cases.
According to reports by the United Nations and others, thousands of Bedouins were secretly expelled into neighboring Egypt and Jordan during the early years of the military government.
Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were often evicted from their ancestral lands and forced into overcrowded “townships.”
This intentionally murky period in Israel’s history has made it hard for the Bedouins to prove many decades later what happened to their parents or grandparents.
Adalah’s Zaher told The Jerusalem Post : “Basically, we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are now affected and don’t know what happened under military rule. And then suddenly in 2010 they were told that because their grandparents were granted citizenship by mistake, now they will be stripped of their citizenship.”
The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins stripped of citizenship to “permanent residents” – the same status accorded to Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
However, in practice, Israel does not treat “permanent residency” as permanent. Figures show that Israel has voided the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem since the city’s occupation began in 1967.
Treated as foreigners
Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply for citizenship again through a naturalization process, treating them effectively as foreigners.
However, according to Adalah, many have found that when they apply they continue to be denied citizenship, often on grounds that documents cannot be located or they lack sufficient proficiency in Hebrew.
There is no Hebrew language test for foreigners seeking citizenship, either Jews immigrating under the Law of Return, or non-Jewish spouses of Israeli citizens naturalizing under the Citizenship Law.
According to Haaretz, other Bedouins have found the interior ministry so unresponsive they have given up in despair.
The only provision allowing citizenship to be canceled is for recent arrivals who provided false information in their applications. Even then, the interior ministry is required to act within three years – otherwise it has to make an application for revocation through the courts.
Adalah has complained that those affected were not given a hearing before their citizenship was rescinded or the chance to appeal. Zaher said the policy was also blatantly discriminatory as no Jews had been denied citizenship because of errors in their parents’ or grandparents’ registration under the Law of Return.
Equal rights for equal burden?
The treatment of Bedouins gives the lie to one of Israel’s most familiar claims: that Palestinian citizens will receive the same rights as Jewish citizens if they share an equal burden. Avigdor Lieberman, the defense minister, has repeatedly campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship.” He argues that Palestinian citizens who do not serve in the Israeli army or perform an equivalent form of national service should lose their citizenship.
However, a proportion of those stripped of citizenship are from Bedouin families that have served in the Israeli army as desert trackers.
Several unrecognized villages, home to some 100,000 Bedouins, have a tradition of military service, but have still been denied services. Their homes are all under threat of demolition.
Some of the residents of Umm al-Hiran, which is currently being demolished to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community of Hiran, served as trackers for the Israeli army.
Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, told Haaretz he had been stripped of his citizenship in 2002 when he applied for a passport, even though his father was a tracker for the Israeli army. After 13 years of struggle, he eventually managed to regain citizenship, but three of his brothers were still stateless.
‘No harm intended’
The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a meeting last year at which officials for the first time gave details of the revocation policy.
The head of the interior ministry’s citizenship department, Ronen Yerushalmi, submitted a report stating that as many as 2,600 Bedouins were affected. He admitted, however, that the data was not precise and the figure could be even higher.
At another meeting, the committee’s legal adviser, Gilad Keren, warned that the ministry was most likely breaking Israeli law. He said he could not “understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”
In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, the interior ministry denied the evidence heard by the committee, claiming that only about 150 people had been affected. “No one means to harm them,” a spokesperson said. “Now the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain citizens.”
Revelations of the mass revocations came as an Israeli court last month approved for the first time stripping of citizenship a Palestinian convicted of carrying out an attack.
The interior ministry gave Alaa Zayoud, from the town of Umm al-Fahm in present-day northern Israel, the status of temporary resident after he was sentenced to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last October on Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured in that incident.
The revocation was made on the basis of a 2008 amendment to the Citizenship Law that allows citizenship to be rescinded for “breach of loyalty” to the state.
Double standard
Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision, pointed out a double standard in not applying the amendment to Israeli Jews. It cited recent cases such as that of a Jewish man and two Jewish juveniles who burned alive a 16-year-old Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Khudair, in Jerusalem in 2014, and that of Jewish settlers behind an arson attack a year later that killed three members of the Dawabsha family in the occupied West Bank village of Duma. None had citizenship revoked.
In 1996, Israel’s high court also refused a request to rescind the citizenship of an Israeli Jew, Yigal Amir, who a year earlier had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister. The judges ruled that such offenses should be dealt with in the criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.
Previous revocations, though rare, have solely targeted Palestinian citizens. In 2002, Eli Yishai, then interior minister, stripped Nahad Abu Kishaq and Kais Obeid of citizenship.
Zayoud’s case was different because the interior ministry needed to seek court approval, therefore setting what Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel have called a “dangerous precedent.”
The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify many more such revocations or conditions of citizenship for the Palestinian minority on loyalty.
Ethnic cleansing
The question of whether Palestinians should have been awarded citizenship in the state’s early years is one that has exercised the Israeli leadership for decades. Many have feared that a growing Palestinian population in Israel poses a “demographic threat” to the state’s Jewishness.
Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris suggested that Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, should have “gone the whole hog” in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the newly founded state of Israel.
Research has shown that Ben Gurion gave citizenship only reluctantly to the 150,000 Palestinians who survived the mass expulsions. They were initially assigned residency, chiefly as a way to aid in identifying and expelling Palestinian refugees trying to cross back into the new state of Israel to reach their villages.
Only in 1952, under international pressure, did Israel award the Palestinian minority citizenship through the Citizenship Law, legislation separate from that for Jews.
However, scholars have noted that for more than a decade Israeli leaders repeatedly attempted to find ways to expel Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to encourage them to leave.
Israeli scholar Uri Davis has noted that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained stateless until 1980, when Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law belatedly awarding them citizenship.
Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the percentage of Palestinians in Israel at no higher than 15 percent of the population. But with the proportion of Palestinian citizens now at one in five, Israeli politicians have been seeking ever more desperate ways to rid Israel of sections of the minority.
In July, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was reported to have urged the Trump administration in the US to agree to a land swap that would move an area that is home to some 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel to Palestinian control.
The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing plan to redraw Israel’s internationally recognized borders as a way to deny hundreds of thousands of Palestinians their citizenship.
In early 2014, the Maariv newspaper reported that Netanyahu had first posited a land and population exchange as a quick fix to reduce Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the population.
September 22, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
Leave a comment
The real Rwanda genocide story has no Canadian heroes.
Canadian commentators often claim more Tutsi were killed in the genocide than lived in Rwanda. Since it aligns with Washington, London and Kigali’s interests, as well as liberal nationalist Canadian ideology, the statistical inflation passes with little comment.
A Tyee story last month described the “slaughter of over 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda” between April and July 1994. An earlier Globe and Mail profile of Roméo Dallaire cited a higher number. It noted, “over the next few months, Hutu activists and militias, supplemented by police officers and military commanders, killed an estimated 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis.”
Even self-declared experts on the subject cite these outlandish statistics. In the Globe and Mail and rabble last year Gerald Caplan wrote that, “despite his [Dallaire] best efforts, perhaps a million people of the Tutsi minority were slaughtered in 100 days.” With ties to the regime in Kigali, Caplan pulled this number out of thin air. It’s improbable there were a million Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and no one believes every single Tutsi was killed.
While the exact figure is unknown and somewhat contested, Rwanda’s 1991 Census calculated 596,387 Tutsi. Initially sponsored by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the GenoDynamics project by the Dean of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia Allan Stam and University of Michigan political science professor Christian Davenport put the number slightly lower at 500,000. Others claim the Hutu-government of the time sought to suppress Tutsi population statistics and estimate a few hundred thousand more Rwandan Tutsi.
But, a significant number of Tutsi survived the hundred days of killing. Tutsi survivors’ umbrella group IBUKA (“Remember”) initially concluded that 300,000 survived the genocidal killings, which they later increased to “nearer to 400,000.”
For 800,000 to 1 million Tutsi to have perished there would have had to been at least 1.1 million and probably closer to 1.4 million Tutsi. That’s twice the official calculation.
Notwithstanding the three examples mentioned at the top, the most commonly cited formulation of the number of deaths in 1994 is the more vague “800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu.” A 1999 UN report concluded, “approximately 800,000 persons were killed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.” As time passes, however, the regime in Kigali increases the death toll. In 2004 the Rwandan Ministry of Local Government, Community Development and Social Affairs claimed 1,074,017 died and in 2008 the government-backed Genocide Survivors Students Association of Rwanda put the number at 1,952,087.
But, the higher the death toll one cites for the genocidal violence the greater the number and percentage of Hutu victims. In the 2014 BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story Stam explains, “if a million people died in Rwanda in 1994 — and that’s certainly possible — there is no way that the majority of them could be Tutsi… Because there weren’t enough Tutsi in the country.”
The idea there were as many, or even more, Hutu killed complicates the “long planned genocide” narrative pushed by the regime in Kigali and its Anglo-Saxon backers. So does the fact that overwhelming evidence and logic points to the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as culprits for blowing up the plane of the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, as well as much of the Hutu-led Rwandan military command, which sparked the mass killings.
Washington and London’s support for the RPF, as well as Paul Kagame’s more than two-decade long control of Kigali, explains the dominance of a highly simplistic account of Rwanda’s genocide. But, a tertiary reason for the strength of the fairy tale is it aligns with the nationalist mythology of another G7 state. A wealthy, educated, population speaking the world’s two main colonial languages, Canadians have pumped out innumerable articles, books, songs, plays, poems, movies, etc. about our noble General’s effort to save Rwandans. Yet the Romeo Dallaire saviour story largely promoted by Left/liberals is based on a one-sided account of Rwanda’s tragedy.
Two of the articles mentioned at the top celebrate Dallaire. One of the stories that inflates the Tutsi death toll was a Globe and Mail profile upon the former general’s retirement from the Senate and in the other Caplan writes, “the personal relationship so many Canadians feel with Rwanda can be explained in two words: Roméo Dallaire… [who] did all in his limited power to stop the killings.”
A Monthly Review article I discovered recently provides a stark example of how Left Canadian nationalists have warped understanding of Rwanda’s tragedy to fit their ideology. The third paragraph of the venerable New York-based Marxist journal’s 2003 review of When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda and A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide begins: “A Canadian, General Roméo Dallaire, is the hero of the Rwandan tragedy.”
Canadian reviewer Hugh Lukin Robinson’s main criticism of Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers is that he downplays the importance of the Canadian commander of the UN military force. Robinson writes, “[Mamdani’s] disinterest in the international betrayal of Rwanda is illustrated by his single reference to General Dallaire, whose name he misspells and whom he refers to as ‘the Belgian commander in charge of UN forces in Rwanda.’ In contrast, Linda Melvern marshals the evidence which amply justifies the title of her book.”
But, Melvern is a leading advocate of the Kigali sponsored fairy tale about the genocide. Drawing on Dallaire’s purported “genocide fax,” she promotes the “long planned genocide” narrative. Simultaneously, Melvern ignores (or downplays) the role Uganda’s 1990 invasion, structural adjustment policies and the October 1993 assassination of the first ever Hutu president in Burundi played in the mass killing of Spring 1994. Melvern also diminishes RPF killings and their responsibility for shooting down the plane carrying Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana and the Rwandan military high command.
Robinson was impressed with Melvern’s praise for Canada’s military man. “Dallaire had trained and risen through the ranks of an army proud of its tradition of peacekeeping,” Robinson quotes from Melvern’s writing. “He was a committed internationalist and had first hand experience of UN missions. He was a hard worker. And he was obstinate.” But, the “committed internationalist” admits he didn’t know where Rwanda was before his appointment to that country. Nor did Dallaire have much experience with the UN. “Dallaire was what military people call a NATO man,” explained CBC journalist Carole Off in a biography of the General. “His defence knowledge was predicated almost exclusively on the needs of the NATO alliance.”
More significantly, a number of the UN officials involved in Rwanda — head of UNAMIR troops in Kigali Luc Marchal, intelligence officer Amadou Deme, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, etc. — have challenged Dallaire’s interpretation of events, contradicted his claims or criticized his actions. Dallaire’s civilian commander on UNAMIR published a book accusing the Canadian General of bias towards the Uganda/US/Britain backed RPF. In his 2005 book Le Patron de Dallaire Parle (The Boss of Dallaire Speaks), Jacques-Roger Booh Booh, a former Cameroon foreign minister and overall head of UNAMIR, criticizes Dallaire’s actions in Rwanda and challenges his interpretation of events.
In one of two footnotes Robinson ended his Monthly Review article on a Canadian nationalist note. The former labour researcher writes: “There is another account of the Rwanda tragedy for which two Canadians can take a great deal of credit. In 1997, the Organization for African Unity (OAU) appointed an International Panel of Eminent Persons to report on what had happened. Stephen Lewis was a member of the Panel and Gerald Caplan was its principal writer and author of the report, Rwanda –The Preventable Genocide. It confirms all the main facts and conclusions of Linda Melvern’s book.”
While paying lip service to the complex interplay of ethnic, class and regional politics, as well as international pressures, that spurred the “Rwandan Genocide,” the 300-page report is premised on the unsubstantiated claim there was a high level plan by the Hutu government to kill all Tutsi. It ignores the overwhelming evidence (and logic) pointing to Paul Kagame’s RPF as the culprit in shooting down the presidential plane, which sparked the genocidal killings. It also emphasizes Dallaire’s perspective. A word search of the report finds 100 mentions of “Dallaire,” five times more than “Booh-Booh,” the overall commander of the UN mission.
Rather than a compelling overview of the Rwandan tragedy, the OAU report highlights Canada’s power within international bodies. In a Walrus story Caplan described, “waiting for the flight back to Toronto, where I would do all my reading and writing” on a report “I called…’ The Preventable Genocide.’” Partly funded by Canada, the entire initiative was instigated by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Caplan is a staunch advocate of the noble Canadian general story. In 2017 Caplan, who started an organization with Kagame’s long-standing foreign minister, Louise Mushikiwabo, called Dallaire “surely among Canada’s most admired citizens, if not the most admired.”
Praise for Dallaire’s role in Rwanda is based on a highly simplistic account of what transpired in 1994. In their haste to promote a Canadian saviour in Africa, left/liberals have confused international understanding of the Rwandan tragedy, which has propped up Kagame’s dictatorship and enabled his violence in the Congo.
When commentators are claiming more Tutsi were killed than lived in the country it’s time to reevaluate popular discussion of Rwanda’s tragedy.
September 22, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Canada, Rwanda |
Leave a comment
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, “The Vietnam War,” has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam War in an entirely new way.”
An American soldier walks by a burning Vietnamese home
(From the PBS’ series, “The Vietnam War.”)
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its “exceptionalism,” Burns’s “entirely new” Vietnam War is presented as an “epic, historic work.” Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to “the entire Bank of America family” which “has long supported our country’s veterans.” Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war “was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings.”
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of “false flags” that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be for many Americans – it is difficult to watch the film’s jumble of “red peril” maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences. In the series’ press release in Britain — the BBC will show it — there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans.
“We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy,” Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the Twentieth Century: from “The Green Berets” and “The Deer Hunter” to “Rambo” and, in so doing, has legitimized subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while “searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy.” Cue Bob Dylan: “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
What ‘Decency’ and ‘Good Faith’?
I thought about the “decency” and “good faith” when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as “termites.”
General William C. Westmoreland. (Wikipedia)
In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers “killings”). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an “American tragedy” (Newsweek). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American “free fire zones.” Mass homicide. This was not news.
To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly “South Vietnam,” the country America claimed to “save” and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
The “meaning” of the Vietnam War is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the leveling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
Quoting Robert Taber’s The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, “There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert.”
Nothing has changed. When Donald Trump addressed the United Nations on Sept. 19 – a body established to spare humanity the “scourge of war” – he declared he was “ready, willing and able” to “totally destroy” North Korea and its 25 million people. His audience gasped, but Trump’s language was not unusual. His rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, had boasted she was prepared to “totally obliterate” Iran, a nation of more than 80 million people. This is the American Way; only the euphemisms are missing now.
Returning to the U.S., I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
Missing What Trump Means
There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist,” but almost none at Trump as the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism. Where are the ghosts of the great anti-war demonstrations that took over Washington in the 1970s? Where is the equivalent of the Freeze Movement that filled the streets of Manhattan in the 1980s, demanding that President Reagan withdraw battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe?
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987 Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret NATO documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as “nuclear targeting planning is increased.” The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against “repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War. … All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this.”
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s “revolution” in last year’s presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of America’s violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama’s overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led NATO forces on Russia’s western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in 2011 signaled the transfer of the majority of America’s naval and air forces to Asia and the Pacific for no purpose other than to confront and provoke China. The Nobel Peace Laureate’s worldwide campaign of assassinations is arguably the most extensive campaign of terrorism since 9/11.
What is known in the U.S. as “the Left” has effectively allied with the darkest recesses of institutional power, notably the Pentagon and the CIA, to prevent a peace deal between Trump and Vladimir Putin and to reinstate Russia as an enemy, on the basis of no evidence of its alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister war-making vested interests for which no American voted. The rapid ascendancy of the Pentagon and the surveillance agencies under Obama represented an historic shift of power in Washington. Daniel Ellsberg rightly called it a coup. The three generals running Trump are its witness.
All of this fails to penetrate those “liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics,” as Luciana Bohne noted memorably. Commodified and market-tested, “diversity” is the new liberal brand, not the class people serve regardless of their gender and skin color: not the responsibility of all to stop a barbaric war to end all wars.
“How did it fucking come to this?” says Michael Moore in his Broadway show, Terms of My Surrender, a vaudeville for the disaffected set against a backdrop of Trump as Big Brother.
I admired Moore’s film, Roger & Me, about the economic and social devastation of his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and Sicko, his investigation into the corruption of healthcare in America.
Filmmaker Michael Moore
The night I saw his show, his happy-clappy audience cheered his reassurance that “we are the majority!” and calls to “impeach Trump, a liar and a fascist!” His message seemed to be that had you held your nose and voted for Hillary Clinton, life would be predictable again.
He may be right. Instead of merely abusing the world, as Trump does, Clinton, the Great Obliterator, might have attacked Iran and lobbed missiles at Putin, whom she likened to Hitler: a particular profanity given the 27 million Russians who died in Hitler’s invasion.
“Listen up,” said Moore, “putting aside what our governments do, Americans are really loved by the world!”
There was a silence.
September 22, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | United States, Vietnam War |
Leave a comment
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has condemned the U.S. for threatening the option of military intervention in Venezuela.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Lavrov criticized the illegitimate application of “unilateral sanctions” by certain Western countries, in reference to the restrictions imposed by the U.S. against Iran, Cuba and Venezuela.
Lavrov said it is unacceptable to instigate unrest and launch military threats in order to ‘democratize’ Venezuela, as are actions aimed at undermining the country’s legitimate authorities.
He insisted that in any internal conflict, the international community must urge all parties to commit to reconciliation.
“The policies of the West are based on the principle of ‘who is not with us, is against us,” said the Russian foreign minister, referring to the threats made by the U.S. President Donald Trump.
He also made reference to Cuba and said the blockade should be lifted, “Almost all UN member states have called for the immediate lifting of the economic, financial and commercial blockade imposed on Havana for several decades.”
On the subject of North Korea, Lavrov said he did not support Pyongyang’s position but he objected to the “military hysteria” which could lead to “disaster.”
He urged the UN to consider the roadmap for talks with the North put forward by Russia and China to defuse the crisis on the Korean peninsula by diplomatic and peaceful means.
Both Moscow and Beijing are proposing the suspension of Washington’s joint military maneuvers with South Korea but the White House has rejected the plan.
Lavrov also condemned U.S. unilateral sanctions on Iran – he said they would undermine the nuclear deal with Tehran
“Using unilateral sanctions … is illegitimate and undermines the collective nature of international efforts. Everyone is witnessing with alarm today the newer and newer restrictions by the U.S. against Iran.”
“They threaten the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” he added, referring to the 2015 international accord between Iran and six world powers.
Trump has suggested he is leaning towards withdrawing from the deal, but several international allies are trying to dissuade him.
September 21, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Russia, Sanctions against Iran, United States, Venezuela |
Leave a comment
NATO is currently seeking to revive the Cold War climate instead of building a dialogue with Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York.
Russia has honestly walked along a long path of getting rid of the legacy of the Cold War but received no support in its efforts from its partners in the West, the minister said, expressing his regret over the fact that “some countries still prefer force to dialogue.”
“The West constructed its policy on the basis of a principle, ‘If you are not with us, you are against us’ and proceeded with hideous expansion of NATO to the east,” the Russian diplomat said, adding that such policy ultimately led only to “instability” in the post-Soviet republics and increased tensions in the region.
At the same time, the minister said that Russia is ready to cooperate with its western partners and work together in a constructive way to find mutually acceptable solutions of the pressing issues, including the Ukrainian crisis in particular.
He also expressed his hope that the Russian initiative that involves sending a UN peacekeeping mission to Eastern Ukraine would ultimately help to resolve the crisis, adding that the relevant draft resolution had been already submitted to the UN Security Council.
‘Unilateral sanctions – illegitimate’
“Centuries of history have shown that a lasting settlement of difference can only be [achieved] through dialog and balancing of the core interests of the conflicting parties,” the minister said, adding that, “unfortunately, the arsenal of many western states does not include diplomacy but only rough pressure.”
“Any unilateral sanctions imposed aside from the sanctions approved by the UN Security Council are illegitimate and undermine the collective nature of the international efforts,” Lavrov said.
He then expressed concern over the new rounds of sanctions imposed by the US against Iran and warned that they threaten the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, which earlier greatly contributed to the restoration of the regional and global stability.
‘War hysteria around North Korea could lead to disaster’
Lavrov denounced the escalation of tensions around the Korean Peninsula by calling it a “very dangerous confrontational spiral.” The minister stressed that Russia condemns the North Korean nuclear tests conducted in violation of the UN resolutions, but added that war hysteria stirred up by the West around Pyongyang’s actions could end up in a “disaster.”
The minister then called on all the parties to the Korean crisis to start a dialogue, and said that there is “no alternative to the political and diplomatic settlement of the nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula.”
He also urged the international community to support the joint Russian-Chinese roadmap of resolving the crisis that involves the “double freeze” initiative, envisaging Pyongyang stopping its nuclear and missile program in exchange for the US and South Korea abandoning their joint military exercises near the peninsula.
At the same time, Lavrov praised Tuesday’s statement by US President Donald Trump, in which he stressed the importance of respecting the principle of sovereignty in international relations. “We are pleased to see that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, … unilaterally stated that it is important to abide by the principle of sovereignty in the international affairs, that it is more important to lead by an example than dictate to other peoples,” the minister said.
‘Attempts to topple undesirable regimes only open way to terrorists’
It is unacceptable to incite riots and to threaten to use force to enforce “democratization” or undermine legitimate authorities in any country, Lavrov said. The attempts to ignore the opinions of others and to issue ultimatums without the UN approval “never led to anything good,” he added.
“The upsurge of international terrorism, millions of refugees and waves of illegal immigrants have come to a significant extent as a result of reckless attempts to remove some undesirable regimes, particularly through military intervention,” the minister said, adding that such actions brought only “chaos and destruction” to the Middle East and North Africa as well as “opened a way for terrorists.”
He then urged the international community to make additional efforts aimed at restoring stability in Syria and Iraq, adding that what has been done so far is still not enough, despite the success achieved in fighting Islamic State (IS, former ISIS/ISIL) in the region.
“A string of bloody terrorist acts in the world shows that it is an illusion to try and create separate islands of security. Extremism and terrorism is something that we need to combat together, without using double standards and hidden agendas,” Lavrov said as he once again drew attention to what he called an “ambiguous” situation in Syria, where the US-led coalition seems to be sparing Al Nusra terrorists in its airstrikes while fighting another terrorist group, Islamic State.
‘No militarization of cyberspace’
Russia rejects the idea of militarization of cyberspace, Lavrov said, adding that this field should not be allowed to become “an area of military confrontation.” He went on to say that cyberspace should be prevented from being used to inflict economic damage or spread extremist propaganda.
He called on the international community to work out rules of “responsible behavior” in cyberspace that would be in the interests of all states. The diplomat also said that Russia drafted a universal convention on prevention of cybercrimes, including hacking attacks, and urged the General Assembly to discuss it during this year’s session.
September 21, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, Russia, United States |
Leave a comment
According to the magazine Israel-Kurd based in Erbil, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Massoud Barzani, the self-appointed President of the future independent Kurdistan, have reached a secret agreement.
Tel-Aviv is committed to installing 200,000 Israelis of Kurdish origin in Kurdistan.
The announcement has been widely repeated in the Turkish, Iranian and Arab press. The plan to create a South Sudan and a Kurdistan has been an Israeli military objective following missile development at the end of the nineties. These territories, largely administered by the Israelis, have enabled a rear attack on Egypt and Syria.
Out of the 8.5 million Israelis living in Israel, around 200,000 are of Kurdish origin. In March 1951, “Operation Ezra and Nehemiah” (named after the biblical persons that organized the flight of the Jewish people from Babylon) permitted 11,000 Jewish Kurds to emigrate from Iraq to Israel. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee of New York funded this operation. The planes used for this air lift were made available by the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
The Barzani family that governs the Iraqi Kurdistan with an iron fist, is historically connected to Israel. Mullah Mustafa Barzani, father of the current president Massoud Barzani, was one of Mossad’s high official.
The Israeli Prime Minister is the only head of government to have publicly declared his support of the creation of an independent Kurdistan outside the historic Kurdish territory (which would also be to the detriment of the indigenous populations).
Despite the prohibition declared by the Iraqi Constitutional Court, a referendum will take place on 25 September 2017 with a view to declaring this new State.
Translation
Anoosha Boralessa
September 21, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Iraq, Israel, Kurdistan, Middle East, Zionism |
Leave a comment
“As a responsible nuclear weapons state, our republic will not use a nuclear weapon unless its sovereignty is encroached upon by an aggressive hostile force with nuclear weapons. The DPRK will faithfully fulfill its obligation for non-proliferation and strive for global denuclearization.” – Kim Jong Un, May 8, 2016
Attention: António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations
Sir,
I am writing in regard to a speech given by US President Donald Trump to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) earlier this week, in particular the following excerpt:
“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
As Secretary-General you are sworn to uphold the principles enshrined in the United Nations charter.
Article 1:
[The Purposes of the United Nations are:] [1.] To maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.
Article 2, paragraph 4:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the THREAT or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Article 33:
The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
[Emphasis in bold and capitals added]
I refer you to a statement made by President Kim of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on July 4th:
“[T]he DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.”
[Emphasis added]
As Mr. Kim’s statement clearly demonstrates a road forward for negotiation, as well as the perfectly reasonable pre-condition that hostile statements, actions and overall policy towards his nation cease, and given further that the US party is well aware of this position, Mr. Trump’s statement at the United Nations is in clear violation of the principles of the UN charter. I further add that the DPRK has ample cause for fear of the capabilities and will of the United States after the complete destruction of Pyongyang in the early 1950s.
I am writing therefore to inquire as to the date upon which you will hold an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to discuss punitive sanctions upon the United States for the reckless and illegal statement of its highest representative. For context, I invite you to imagine the international response to, say, Russian President Vladimir Putin making an identical statement with regard to the United Kingdom. [We would have no choice but to destroy it if we perceive a threat]. Given recent tragic history, of which you will surely be aware, ‘threats’ can easily be invented via unnamed intelligence sources, amplified globally in major media organs, then later justified as ‘intelligence failures’ down the road once the damage is done.
Failure to censure the United States for this threat of force against a nation which – as all do – has the right to defend itself from clearly stated intentions of attack will only increase the suspicion held by many world citizens that the United Nations is powerless to impede or control powerful nations.
Faithfully,
Simon Wood
Twitter: @simonwood11
September 21, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Donald Trump, United Nations, United States |
Leave a comment
One war can hide another
This map was published by Robin Wright nine months before the offensive by Daesh into Iraq and Syria. According to this Pentagon researcher, it rectifies the map published in 2005 by Ralf Peters for the reshaping of the Greater Middle East.
While the Syrian Arab Army, the Russian aviation and Hezbollah are preparing to finish off Daesh, the Pentagon is planning a new war against Syria, this time with Kurdish troops. Just as the mission of the Caliphate was to create a Sunnistan straddling Iraq and Syria, so the mission of « Rojava » is to create a Kurdistan straddling the two states, as the Pentagon has been publicly stating for the last four years.
According to US grand strategy, as defined by Admiral Cebrowski in 2001, and published in 2004 by his assistant Thomas Barnett, all of the Greater Middle East must be destroyed except for Israel, Jordan and Lebanon.
Consequently, the imminent victory against Daesh will change nothing of the Pentagon’s intentions.
President Trump is against the manipulation of the jihadists. He has stopped the financial and military support that his country was giving them, and has managed to convince Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to do the same. He has modified NATO policies in the matter. However, nothing yet hints as to whether or not he will also oppose the Pentagon’s grand strategy. As far as the US Interior is concerned, the whole of Congress is in league against him, and he has no possibility of preventing a procedure for destitution other than negotiating with the Democratic Party.
Donald Trump has composed his administration of ex-senior civil servants from the Obama administration, a number of opportunistic politicians, many improvised representatives, and very very few trustworthy personalities.
His special representative against Daesh, Brett McGurk, is an ex-collaborator of President Obama, and is supposed to serve Trump’s new policy. On 18 August, he organised a meeting with the tribal leaders to « fight Daesh ». However, the photographs he published attest to the fact that, on the contrary, several of Daesh’s leaders also participated in the meeting.
In the same vein, helicopters of the US Special Forces exfiltrated two European leaders of Daesh and their families from the outskirts of Deiz ez-Zor, before they could be taken prisoner by the Syrian Arab Army on 26 August. Two days later, they also exfiltrated about twenty more Daesh officers.
Everything looks as though the Pentagon were storing away its jihadist structure and conserving it for other operations elsewhere. Simultaneously, it is preparing a new episode against Syria with a new army, which, this time, will be composed around Kurdish forces.
This war, like the war against the Caliphate,was announced four years ago in the New York Times, by Robin Wright, a researcher at the US Institute of Peace (equivalent to the NED for the Pentagon). It also planned to divide the Yemen into two states, potentially shared between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – and finally, last but not least, to dismember Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, the « Rojava » project corresponds to Israëli strategy, which, since the end of the 1990’s and the development of missiles, is no longer concentrated on controlling its border regions (the Sinaï, the Golan and South Lebanon), but on taking its neighbours from behind (hence the creation of South Sudan and eventually, Greater Kurdistan).
The recruiting drive for European soldiers for the « Rojava » project has only just begun. A priori, it could assemble as many combatants as there were for the jihad, insofar as the members of the anarchist groups which provide manpower are as numerous in Europe as common law prisoners.
Indeed, the jihadist network began in French prisons before becoming a generalised « crusade ». It is probable that the recruitment within the anarchist movement will also spread as the conflict goes on. Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, who organised this recruitment, planned in the long term. I use the word « crusade » deliberately, because these wars in the Middle Ages, like the one we have just experienced, were in fact European imperialist operations against the people of the Greater Middle East. It is just as grotesque to claim that there is a link between the message of Christ and the crusades as to claim a link between the Prophet and jihadism. In both cases, the commanders were « Westerners »[1], and these conflicts exclusively served Western imperialism. The successive crusades bled across two centuries, and the majority of Christians in the Levant fought alongside their Muslim compatriots against the invaders.
Not long ago, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, Laurent Fabius, publicly declared that President Assad « did not deserve to be on Earth », and confirmed that the jihadists were doing a « good job ». Many young people answered his call by joining Al-Nusra (Al-Qaïda), then Daesh. Today, the French ex-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bernard Kouchner, publicly announced that France would support the creation of state which would include Iraqi Kurdistan and the corridor to the Mediterranean via Syria. A few young Europeans have already answered this call, and many others will follow.
Today, as in 2011-12, the Western Press has taken the side of this new anti-Syrian army, supported by their governments. It will never question the treachery of Abdullah Öcalan, who renounced Marxist-Leninism for anarchy. It will repeat that Kurdistan has already been recognised by the Sèvres Conference, in 1920, but it will avoid looking at the documents which specify its boundaries. It will believe it to be legitimate in Iraq and Syria, although it is currently situated in Turkey. It will ignore the fact that the frontiers in fact correspond to nothing other than the plans developed by the Pentagon.
The referendum for the independence of the Iraqi region of Kurdistan and the territories annexed with the help of Daesh will launch the beginning of this operation, on 25 September. As in 2014, it will be intended to simultaneously destroy Iraq and Syria, this time without creating a « Sunnistan » from Rakka to Mossul, but a « Kurdistan », on a territory linking Erbil and Kirkuk to the Mediterranean.
Translation Pete Kimberley
[1] This term is poorly chosen insofar as « Westerner » is not opposed to « Oriental », but to « Soviet ». I could find no other term to describe collectively the Europeans, the North-Americans and the Israelis. Author’s note.
September 21, 2017
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | France, Middle East, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
