Theoretically, it would be a great story for the American press: an autocrat so obsessed with overthrowing the leader of a neighboring country that he authorizes his intelligence services to collaborate with terrorists in staging a lethal sarin attack to be blamed on his enemy and thus trick major powers to launch punishing bombing raids against the enemy’s military.
And, after that scheme failed to achieve the desired intervention, the autocrat continues to have his intelligence services aid terrorists inside the neighboring country by providing weapons and safe transit for truck convoys carrying the terrorists’ oil to market. The story gets juicier because the autocrat’s son allegedly shares in the oil profits.
To make the story even more compelling, an opposition leader braves the wrath of the autocrat by seeking to expose these intelligence schemes, including the cover-up of key evidence. The autocrat’s government then seeks to prosecute the critic for “treason.”
But the problem with this story, as far as the American government and press are concerned, is that the autocratic leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in charge of Turkey, a NATO ally and his hated neighbor is the much demonized Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Major U.S. news outlets and political leaders also bought into the sarin deception and simply can’t afford to admit that they once again misled the American people on a matter of war.
The Official Story of the sarin attack – as presented by Secretary of State John Kerry, Human Rights Watch and other “respectable” sources – firmly laid the blame for the Aug. 21, 2013 atrocity killing hundreds of civilians outside Damascus on Assad. That became a powerful “group think” across Official Washington.
Though a few independent media outlets, including Consortium News, challenged the rush to judgment and noted the lack of evidence regarding Assad’s guilt, those doubts were brushed aside. (In an article on Aug. 30, 2013, I described the administration’s “Government Assessment” blaming Assad as a “dodgy dossier,” which offered not a single piece of verifiable proof.)
However, as with the “certainty” about Iraq’s WMD a decade earlier, Every Important Person shared the Assad-did-it “group think.” That meant — as far as Official Washington was concerned — that Assad had crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons. A massive U.S. retaliatory bombing strike was considered just days away.
But Obama – at the last minute – veered away from launching those military attacks, with Official Washington concluding that Obama had shown “weakness” by not following through. What was virtually unreported was that U.S. intelligence analysts had doubts about Assad’s guilt and suspected a trap being laid by extremists.
Despite those internal questions, the U.S. government and the compliant mainstream media publicly continued to push the Assad-did-it propaganda line. In a formal address to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2013, Obama declared, “It’s an insult to human reason and to the legitimacy of this institution to suggest that anyone other than the regime carried out this attack.”
Later, a senior State Department official tried to steer me toward the Assad-is-guilty assessment of a British blogger then known as Moses Brown, a pseudonym for Eliot Higgins, who now runs an outfit called Bellingcat which follows an effective business model by reinforcing whatever the U.S. propaganda machine is churning out on a topic, except having greater credibility by posing as a “citizen blogger.” [For more on Higgins, see Consortiumnews.com’s “‘MH-17 Case: ‘Old Journalism’ vs. ‘New’.”]
The supposedly conclusive proof against Assad came in a “vector analysis” developed by Human Rights Watch and The New York Times – tracing the flight paths of two rockets back to a Syrian military base northwest of Damascus. But that analysis collapsed when it became clear that only one of the rockets carried sarin and its range was less than one-third the distance between the army base and the point of impact. That meant the rocket carrying the sarin appeared to have originated in rebel territory.
But the “group think” was resistant to all empirical evidence. It was so powerful that even when the Turkish plot was uncovered by legendary investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, his usual publication, The New Yorker, refused to print it. Rebuffed in the United States – the land of freedom of the press – Hersh had to take the story to the London Review of Books to get it out in April 2014. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?”]
The Easier Route
It remained easier for The New York Times, The Washington Post and other premier news outlets to simply ignore the compelling tale of possible Turkish complicity in a serious war crime. After all, what would the American people think if – after the mainstream media had failed to protect the country against the lies that led to the disastrous Iraq War – the same star news sources had done something similar on Syria by failing to ask tough questions?
It’s also now obvious that if Obama had ordered a retaliatory bombing campaign against Assad in 2013, the likely winners would have been the Islamic State and Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which would have had the path cleared for their conquest of Damascus, creating a humanitarian catastrophe even worse than the current one.
To confess to such incompetence or dishonesty clearly had a big down-side. So, the “smart” play was to simply let the old Assad-did-it narrative sit there as something that could still be cited obliquely from time to time under the phrase “Assad gassed his own people” and thus continue to justify the slogan: “Assad must go!”
But that imperative – not to admit another major mistake – means that the major U.S. news media also must ignore the courageous statements from Eren Erdem, a deputy of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who has publicly accused the Erdogan government of blocking an investigation into Turkey’s role in procuring the sarin allegedly delivered to Al Qaeda-connected terrorists for use inside Syria.
In statements before parliament and to journalists, Erdem cited a derailed indictment that was begun by the General Prosecutor’s Office in the southern Turkish city of Adana, with the criminal case number 2013/120.
Erdem said the prosecutor’s office, using technical surveillance, discovered that an Al Qaeda jihadist named Hayyam Kasap acquired the sarin.
At the press conference, Erdem said, “Wiretapped phone conversations reveal the process of procuring the gas at specific addresses as well as the process of procuring the rockets that would fire the capsules containing the toxic gas. However, despite such solid evidence there has been no arrest in the case. Thirteen individuals were arrested during the first stage of the investigation but were later released, refuting government claims that it is fighting terrorism.”
Erdem said the released operatives were allowed to cross the border into Syria and the criminal investigation was halted.
Another CHP deputy, Ali Şeker, added that the Turkish government misled the public by claiming Russia provided the sarin and that “Assad killed his people with sarin and that requires a U.S. military intervention in Syria.”
Erdem’s disclosures, which he repeated in a recent interview with RT, the Russian network, prompted the Ankara Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation into Erdem for treason. Erdem defended himself, saying the government’s actions regarding the sarin case besmirched Turkey’s international reputation. He added that he also has been receiving death threats.
“The paramilitary organization Ottoman Hearths is sharing my address [on Twitter] and plans a raid [on my house]. I am being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to something that tramples on my country’s prestige,” Erdem said.
ISIS Oil Smuggling
Meanwhile, President Erdogan faces growing allegations that he tolerated the Islamic State’s lucrative smuggling of oil from wells in Syria through border crossings in Turkey. Those oil convoys were bombed only last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin essentially shamed President Obama into taking action against this important source of Islamic State revenues.
Though Obama began his bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria in summer 2014, the illicit oil smuggling was spared interdiction for over a year as the U.S. government sought cooperation from Erdogan, who recently acknowledged that the Islamic State and other jihadist groups are using nearly 100 kilometers of Turkey’s border to bring in recruits and supplies.
Earlier this month, Obama said he has had “repeated conversations with President Erdogan about the need to close the border between Turkey and Syria,” adding that “there’s about 98 kilometers that are still used as a transit point for foreign fighters, ISIL [Islamic State] shipping out fuel for sale that helps finance their terrorist activities.”
Russian officials expressed shock that the Islamic State was allowed to continue operating an industrial-style delivery system involving hundreds of trucks carrying oil into Turkey. Moscow also accused Erdogan’s 34-year-old son, Bilal Erdogan, of profiting off the Islamic State’s oil trade, an allegation that he denied.
The Russians say Bilal Erdogan is one of three partners in the BMZ Group, a Turkish oil and shipping company that has purchased oil from the Islamic State. The Malta Independentreported that BMZ purchased two oil tanker ships from the Malta-based Oil Transportation & Shipping Services Co Ltd, which is owned by Azerbaijani billionaire Mubariz Mansimov.
Another three oil tankers purchased by BMZ were acquired from Palmali Shipping and Transportation Agency, which is also owned by Mansimovandwhich shares the same Istanbul address with Oil Transportation & Shipping Services, which is owned by Mansimov’s Palmali Group, along with dozens of other companies set up in Malta.
The Russians further assert that Turkey’s shoot-down of a Russian Su-24 bomber along the Syrian-Turkish border on Nov. 24 – which led to the murder of the pilot, by Turkish-backed rebels, as he parachuted to the ground and to the death of a Russian marine on a rescue operation – was motivated by Erdogan’s fury over the destruction of his son’s Islamic State oil operation.
Erdogan has denied that charge, claiming the shoot-down was simply a case of defending Turkish territory, although, according to the Turkish account, the Russian plane strayed over a slice of Turkish territory for only 17 seconds. The Russians dispute even that, calling the attack a premeditated ambush.
President Obama and the mainstream U.S. press sided with Turkey, displaying almost relish at the deaths of Russians in Syria and also showing no sympathy for the Russian victims of an earlier terrorist bombing of a tourist flight over Sinai in Egypt. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama Ignores Russian Terror Victims.”]
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman expressed the prevailing attitude of Official Washington by ridiculing anyone who had praised Putin’s military intervention in Syria or who thought the Russian president was “crazy like a fox,” Friedman wrote: “Some of us thought he was just crazy.
“Well, two months later, let’s do the math: So far, Putin’s Syrian adventure has resulted in a Russian civilian airliner carrying 224 people being blown up, apparently by pro-ISIS militants in Sinai. Turkey shot down a Russian bomber after it strayed into Turkish territory. And then Syrian rebels killed one of the pilots as he parachuted to earth and one of the Russian marines sent to rescue him.”
Taking Sides
The smug contempt that the mainstream U.S. media routinely shows toward anything involving Russia or Putin may help explain the cavalier disinterest in NATO member Turkey’s reckless behavior. Though Turkey’s willful shoot-down of a Russian plane that was not threatening Turkey could have precipitated a nuclear showdown between Russia and NATO, criticism of Erdogan was muted at most.
Similarly, neither the Obama administration nor the mainstream media wants to address the overwhelming evidence that Turkey – along with other U.S. “allies” such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar – have been aiding and abetting Sunni jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State, for years. Instead, Official Washington plays along with the fiction that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others are getting serious about combating terrorism.
The contrary reality is occasionally blurted out by a U.S. official or revealed when a U.S. intelligence report gets leaked or declassified. For instance, in 2009, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted in a confidential diplomatic memo, disclosed by Wikileaks, that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
According to a Defense Intelligence Agency report from August 2012, “AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq, which later morphed into the Islamic State] supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning, both ideologically and through the media. … AQI declared its opposition of Assad’s government because it considered it a sectarian regime targeting Sunnis.”
The DIA report added, “The salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria. … The West, Gulf countries, and Turkey support the opposition.”
The DIA analysts already understood the risks that AQI presented both to Syria and Iraq. The report included a stark warning about the expansion of AQI, which was changing into the Islamic State. The brutal armed movement was seeing its ranks swelled by the arrival of global jihadists rallying to the black banner of Sunni militancy, intolerant of both Westerners and “heretics” from Shiite and other non-Sunni branches of Islam.
The goal was to establish a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” where Islamic State’s caliphate is now located, and that this is “exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition” – i.e. the West, Gulf states, and Turkey – “want in order to isolate the Syrian regime,” the DIA report said.
In October 2014, Vice President Joe Biden told students at Harvard’s Kennedy School that “the Saudis, the emirates, etc. … were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and Al Qaeda.”
Despite these occasional bursts of honesty, the U.S. government and the mainstream media have put their goal of having another “regime change” – this time in Syria – and their contempt for Putin ahead of any meaningful cooperation toward defeating the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
This ordering of priorities further means there is no practical reason to revisit who was responsible for the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack. If Assad’s government was innocent and Ergogan’s government shared in the guilt, that would present a problem for NATO, which would have to decide if Turkey had crossed a “red line” and deserved being expelled from the military alliance.
But perhaps even more so, an admission that the U.S. government and the U.S. news media had rushed to another incorrect judgment in the Middle East – and that another war policy was driven by propaganda rather than facts – could destroy what trust the American people have left in those institutions. On a personal level, it might mean that the pundits and the politicians who were wrong about Iraq’s WMD would have to acknowledge that they had learned nothing from that disaster.
It might even renew calls for some of them – the likes of The New York Times’ Friedman and The Washington Post’s editorial page editor Fred Hiatt – to finally be held accountable for consistently misinforming and misleading the American people.
So, at least for now — from a perspective of self-interest — it makes more sense for the Obama administration and major news outlets to ignore the developing story of a NATO ally’s ties to terrorism, including an alleged connection to a grave war crime, the sarin attack outside Damascus.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
A public commemoration of Leopold II in Brussels has sparked indignation in Belgium this week for celebrating a man responsible for the Congolese genocide that left over 10 million dead during colonial rule.
A public-funded parade and meeting at the city hall was meant to take place this Thursday to mark 150 years since the crowning of King Leopold II. Outrage over the event forced its cancellation on Tuesday, however. The commemoration is now to be held behind closed doors.
“A tribute to Leopold II in Brussels is a spit on the Congolese people and its diaspora. It is an insult to all colonized peoples,” the groups New Anti-Colonial Way (JOC) and Intal Congo stated in response to the event, according to RTBF.
“In (his) forty year presence in Congo, the bloody King eliminated more than half of the Congolese population; that is over 10 million people. The consequences of colonization are still felt today. Belgium has its hands stained with blood due to its actions in the past but also in the present. We will not silence the cries of our deaths, we will not silence history. We will not let you walk over our dignity. We believe it is our duty to mobilize for the memory, for the recognition of history and to end the hegemony of colonial thinking,” the groups added.
While the commemoration has been cancelled, protests to honor the victims have been organized at the city council on Thursday, where a statue in tribute to the man responsible for the Congolese holocaust still stands.
“(It’s) an unfortunate controversy” said Geoffroy Coomans Brachène, the organizer behind the tribute, who added it was “only to salute the exceptional mark of Leopold II on urbanism, architecture and regional planning in Brussels.”
For decades, Belgium exploited Congolese natural resources and enslaved its people through detention and forced labor camps, where the local population was subjected to bodily mutilations, torture and executions. The Congo did not achieve independence from Belgium until 1960.
Leopold II has become a symbol of western moral hypocrisy for many marginalized racial and ethnic communities. They see the absence of his crimes and colonial legacy in history books and public commemorations telling of whose lives are considered worthy, and whose lives aren’t.
“You see, when you kill ten million Africans, you aren’t called ‘Hitler’. That is, your name doesn’t come to symbolize the living incarnation of evil. Your name and your picture don’t produce fear, hatred and sorrow. Your victims aren’t talked about and your name isn’t remembered,” Liam O’Ceallaigh noted on the blog Walking Butterfly.
What Makes Recep Run? The Making of a Modern Pasha
Erdogan began his ascent to power as a social reformer in opposition to the power elite; he was a rabble-rouser for popular Islam and social welfare. Once he takes political power he enriches his family and the business elite and purges adversaries and rivals.
With political power and economic connections, he amasses personal wealth through illicit business transactions.
With political power and personal wealth, he seeks prestige and status among the Western elites by serving imperial interests: He shoots down a Russian military jet over Syrian territory and thereby threatens hundreds of Turkish businesses and loses a major source of personal enrichment. When the Russians threaten to cut off energy exports to Turkey, Erdogan’s opponents suggest he heat his own palace and villas with cow dung this winter.
The Two Faces of Erdogan
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a long and ignoble history of betraying political associates, trading partners and military allies; of pledging friendship and then bombing his ‘friends’ and murdering citizens; of negotiating ‘in good faith’ and then killing rivals; of playing democrat then behaving like an ordinary demagogic dictator.
Erdogan appeals to the plebian and austere values of the Anatolian provincial petty bourgeoisie, while building the largest luxurious presidential palace in the world – fit for a 21st century Pasha. He repeatedly pronounces his fealty to the ‘Turkish Nation’, while he robs the Turkish treasury by repeatedly accepting bribes and pay-offs from building contractors who then double charge for publically-funded projects.
More recently, Erdogan claims to oppose terrorism and fight ISIS, while the major Turkish and regional newspapers, journalists and most domestic observers document the massive flow of illegal arms across the Turkish-Syrian border to ISIS terrorists.
Erdogan’s ‘Carnal Relation’ with ISIS
Erdogan supports ISIS by bombing the Syrian Kurdish fighters who resist the jihadi mercenaries; by shooting down a Russian military jet defending the Damascus government against the terrorists; by smuggling and selling oil which ISIS had stolen from Iraq and Syria; by providing medical assistance to wounded ISIS fighters; and by training and arming ISIS terrorists in Turkish bases.
There is a reciprocal relationship: Erdogan uses ISIS operatives to terrorize his own domestic opposition, including terror bombing a gathering of Kurdish ‘socialist youth’ in the town of Suruç on July 20, 2015, which killed 33 and the massive bombing in Ankara on October 10 of a ‘peace and justice’ march, which killed over 100, targeting trade unionists, leaders of professional associations, community activists and members of a democratic Kurdish electoral party and wounded many hundreds.
During the legislative election of 2015 ISIS terrorists and thugs from Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) attacked the offices, meetings and candidates of the opposition parties, especially of the Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), to ensure that Erdogan secured a super-majority.
In other words, Erdogan has three uses for ISIS serving his external and internal interests:
(1) To attack and destroy secular Kurdish forces resisting ISIS in Syria and Iraq, thus preventing the formation of an independent Kurdish state on the Turkish border.
(2) To attack and destroy Syria’s independent Baathist government under Bashar Al-Assad, dismantle the multicultural secular state apparatus and install a Sunni Islamist client in Damascus subordinate to Erdogan’s AKP.
(3) To attack and terrorize the Turkish domestic opposition, including the broad-based Kurdish HDP, and the leftist trade union confederation (DISK).
Erdogan has a decade-long strategic alliance with the militant Wahhabi terrorists who now make up ISIS. He intends to ‘remake’ the map of the Middle East to serve his own expansionist ambitions. In part this explains why Erdogan has provided large-scale arms and material to the terrorists, trained thousands of mercenaries and provided medical aid to wounded ISIS fighters. It also explains why Erdogan took the unprecedented and extremely provocative step of shooting down a Russian military jet over Syrian territory, which had been bombing Erdogan’s ISIS allies. Russian and Syrian Army successes against ISIS have threatened his ambitions.
Erdogan’s transformation from ‘Muslim democrat’ to bloody authoritarian Islamist ruler with pretensions of becoming the dominant Middle Eastern Pasha has to be seen in light of his rise to power over the past 40 years.
What Makes Recep Run?
Erdogan, early on, showed his affinity for extremist Islamist politics. In the 1970’s he was head of the youth branch of the Islamist Salvation Party (MSP), a virulent anti-communist, anti-secular party committed to converting Turkey, a huge multi-ethnic secular state, into a theocratic regime (along the lines of contemporary ISIS).
After the military coup of 1980 the MSP was dissolved and reappeared as the Welfare Party. Erdogan became a leader of the new (re-named) Islamist party.
Erdogan and the Welfare Party exploited Turkish mass discontent with the corrupt and authoritarian military. The Welfare Party embraced a populist social welfare program with Islamist religious undertones in order to build a formidable grassroots organization in the working class neighborhoods in Istanbul. Erdogan was elected mayor of Turkey’s largest city in 1994.
As Mayor, Erdogan over-reached his power by preaching militant Islamism and was convicted in 1998 of sedition against the secular state. He served 4 months of a 10-month sentence.
Henceforth he changed tactics: His Islamist fanaticism was disguised. He changed the party name from Welfare to the modern sounding Justice and Development Party (AKP). Erdogan then launched a series of political maneuvers, in which he cleverly manipulated adversaries to gain power and then… stabbed each of them in the back.
Erdogan: Embrace and Back-Stab
Despite his earlier conviction for sedition against the secular state, the ‘reformed’ Erdogan allied with the Kemalist, secular Republican Peoples Party (CHP) to overturn the military’s ban on his participation in politics in 2002. He was elected Prime Minister in 2003. After the AKP won the general election it cut its ties with the CHP. Erdogan was re-elected Prime Minister in 2007 and 2011.
Erdogan allied with the pro-US Islamist leader Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet or Cemaat Movement, which was influential within the judicial system, police and army. Together they launched a purge against secular military and judicial officials, journalists and media critics.
The Erdogan – Gülenist state apparatus arrested and jailed 300 secular military officers, judges and journalists and replaced them with Erdogan and Gülen loyalists – all Islamists.
Dubbed “Operation Sledgehammer” the entire purge was based on fabricated charges of treason and conspiracy. Yet it was described by the Western media in terms that flattered Erdogan’s democratic credentials, calling it an ‘effort to consolidate democracy’ against the military.
It had nothing to do with democracy: The purge consolidated Erdogan’s personal power and allowed him to pursue policies that were more overtly neo-liberal and Islamist. The purge of the judiciary further allowed Erdogan to enrich crony capitalists and family members.
Erdogan: The Birth of a Neoliberal Pasha
Erdogan then embraced an IMF-designed ‘stabilization and recovery’ program, which reduced wages, salaries and pensions while privatizing public sector enterprises and activities. This attracted a large inflow of capital as foreign investors and cronies snapped up the goodies at bargain prices. Most emblematic of this ‘free-for-all cronies’ approach to the economy was the Soma coal mine disaster in May 2014 when over 300 miners were killed in a previously state-owned mine, which had suffered a breakdown of worker safety conditions after it had been privatized to an Erdogan-crony. Despite local and international outrage, Recep ignored the scandal and unleashed police on the demonstrating miners.
Erdogan’s combination of Islam with brutal neo-liberalism attracted support from Brussels, Wall Street and the City of London. Large inflows of speculative foreign capital temporarily inflated Turkey’s GNP and Erdogan’s wealth and ego!
In the beginning of his rule Erdogan’s concessions, tax incentives, government contracts to big capital were broadly distributed to most sectors, but especially to his crony capitalists within the construction and real estate sectors.
As the capitalist boom continued and his power increased, Erdogan became more obsessed with his role as the savior of Turkey. By 2010, a serious difference developed between Erdogan and his Gülenist partners over the division of power. Erdogan moved rapidly and brutally. He launched another massive purge of suspected ‘Gülenist officials’. He arrested, fired, jailed and relocated Gülen sympathizers among judges, police and civil servants despite the fact that these were officials who had served him well during the earlier purge of the secular military.
Erdogan is not willing to share power with any other party, movement or group. Pasha Recep wanted to monopolize power. He has attacked critical newspapers, businesses and conglomerates claiming these were ‘Gülen controlled’. Erdogan ensured that only capitalists completely loyal to him would receive regime patronage. In other words, he strengthened the size, strength and importance of crony capitalists: especially in the real estate and construction sector.
Pasha Recep’s Assault on Civil Society
Turkey, under Erdogan’s absolute power, has seen a geometric increase in corruption and mindless ‘development projects’, leading to the degradation and usurpation of public spaces. His arbitrary and destructive policies have provoked sustained civil society protests, especially in the center of Istanbul – during the Gezi Park demonstrations, which began in May 2013.
In response to civil society demonstrations, Erdogan shed all pretensions, ripping off his ‘modern democratic’ mask and brutally repressing the peaceful protestors in the heart of Istanbul– resulting in 22 deaths, hundreds wounded and more arrested and sentenced to long jail term. Erdogan subsequently targeted liberal critics and business leaders, who had criticized his brutal use of force.
2013, the year of the Gezi Park Movement, was a turning point – Erdogan and family members were implicated in a $100 million-dollar corruption scandal while liberal critics of the regime were purged.
Facing opposition from sectors of the elite as well as popular classes, Erdogan became more rabidly ‘Islamist’, chauvinistic and megalomaniacal – ‘Neo-Ottoman’.
In short order, he re-launched his attack on the Turkish Kurds and increased his support to the Islamist terrorists in Syria, including what would become ISIS. These policies were designed to complement his ongoing war against the secular Kurds in Iraq and Syria.
Erdogan: Backstabbing Secular Syria and “Best Friend” Russia
From the beginning of his rule, Erdogan cultivated the ‘best of relations’ with Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He signed dozens of trade agreements with Damascus and Moscow. Putin was welcomed to Ankara and Erdogan to Moscow where they signed billion-dollar energy deals and mutual co-operative agreements.
Up to 3 million Russian tourists visited Turkish resorts each year, a bonanza for one of Turkey’s major industries.
Erdogan’s regime was ebullient, effusive, embracing Moscow and Damascus while systematically preparing the ground for more backstabbing!
By 2011, Erdogan had been deeply involved in preparing the ground for what would become the bloody Islamist uprising in Syria. Early on, hundreds of armed foreign Islamist terrorists crossed the Turkish border into Syria. Their presence overwhelmed local Syrian dissidents. Armed Islamists seized villages and towns brutally purging them of Christians, Kurds, Alawites and secular Syrians. They took over the oil fields. From one day to the next, Erdogan was transformed from loving friend to deadly foe of neighboring Syria demanding ‘regime change’ through terrorist sectarian violence.
Erdogan embraced the most extreme, sectarian Wahhabi Islamist groups because they were committed to undermining the nationalist aspirations of the Syrian Kurds as well as overthrowing the secular Al-Assad government. Erdogan’s covert alliance with ISIS and other Islamist terrorist groups was motivated by several strategic considerations, which are outlined below:
1) The alliance serves to prevent the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish enclave on the Syrian-Turkish border in the event of a Damascus defeat, which Erdogan fears would then link armed Syrian Kurds with the huge disaffected Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey and lead to the formation of an autonomous secular Kurdish state.
2) Erdogan’s alliance with jihadis in Syria has served Ankara’s ambition to impose a puppet Sunni-Islamist regime in Damascus.
3) The ISIS regime controlling the Syrian and Iraqi oil fields provides Turkey with a source of cheap fuel and lucrative profits for the regime. Recep’s son, Necmettin Bilal Erdogan owns and operates the BMZ Group which buys the contraband Syrian and Iraqi oil in Turkey and sells it overseas (especially to Israel) earning nearly a billion dollars a year for ‘the family’.
It is not a surprise that the Erdogan family directly financed ISIS, which uses the cash from contraband oil, pillaged antiquities and ‘tribute’ taxes, to purchase heavy and light arms, military and transport vehicles and communications equipment in Turkey and elsewhere to support its terror campaign in Syria and Iraq. Well-informed Turkish observers believe that Erdogan’s intelligence officials are directly involved in recruiting ISIS terrorists to operate within Turkey and attack Erdogan’s internal opposition, especially the Kurdish electoral party HDP and the broad-based Turkish left and trade union movements. Observers claim Turkish intelligence operations had a direct role in the ‘ISIS’ bomb attacks in Suruç and Ankara this year, which killed and maimed hundreds of Erdogan opponents and civil society activists.
Erdogan and ISIS developed a co-dependent relation, one of mutual manipulation. Each has publicly declared their tactical enmity to the other, while busily pursuing joint strategic aims.
Ankara uses the pretext of fighting ISIS in order to bomb the Kurds in Syria who are resisting the jihadis. ISIS uses the pretext of opposing the NATO member Turkey in order to cover its massive oil and weapons trade deals with Erdogan’s family and crony business enterprises.
The Pasha Stabs the Bear and the Bear Bites Back – One Stab Too Many
Russia’s highly effective aerial bombing campaign against the jihadi and ISIS terrorist networks in Syria was in response to a formal request for military intervention by the legitimate government of President Bashar Al-Assad. Russia has long-standing ties to the Baathist regime in Damascus. The intervention has threatened to undermine Erdogan’s regional power ambitions and illicit business operations in Syria. First and foremost, it ended Erdogan’s plan to annex a large swathe of Northern Syria and call it a ‘no fly zone’. The Turkish-controlled ‘no fly zone’ in Syria would expand Turkish military training bases for ISIS and other jihadi terrorists and secure the transport routes for ISIS oil shipments smuggled out of Iraq and Syria.
Unlike the US, which had rarely bombed the strategic Erdogan-ISIS oil smuggling operations, the Russians destroyed over a thousand oil trucks and numerous ISIS oil depots and logistical centers in the first month of its air campaign. By reducing the flow of smuggled oil, Russia cut off the main source of massive profit for Bilal Erdogan’s BMZ Company as well as for Turkish arms dealers.
Like gangsters, Erdogan, his family and cronies have been immersed in massive corrupt business activities at home and abroad; he can no longer operate within the context of the larger interests of the Turkish capitalist class with its $40 billion dollar annual trade and investment relations with Russia. Erdogan’s decision to shoot down a Russian jet in Syrian territory, on November 24, 2015, was largely motivated by his fury at Russia’s successful interruption of the ISIS oil convoys. By protecting his own family interests, Erdogan stabbed more allies in the back: The Russians, as well as large sections of the Turkish capitalist class!
Up until Erdogan’s act of war against Russia, he had publicly embraced Putin as an ally, friend and partner. The two leaders had cordial relations for over a decade. The Turkish military was fully informed about Russian military operations in Syria, including its flight paths. Then suddenly in November 2015 he risked a total rupture in relations and invited retaliation against Turkey from Russia by shooting down a Russian jet.
Russia immediately responded by upgrading its most advanced weapons systems to defend its operations and bases in Northern Syria and intensified its bombing of the ISIS – Turkish oil operations.
Russia retaliated by imposing visa restrictions and economic sanctions on Turkey, adversely affecting the multi-billion dollar tourist business. Strategic energy deals were terminated. Large-scale Turkish construction contracts were ended. Turkish agricultural exports to Russian markets virtually stopped.
The Pasha Bites His own Tail
Erdogan’s unilateral actions were clearly against the broad interests of Turkey’s large export sector. From Gezi to Gülen, from one purge to another, Erdogan, the former ‘poster boy’ of neo-liberal Turkish capital, has become a self-centered despot, acting on behalf of a narrowing circle of corrupt family and crony capitalists. Erdogan set himself up as a modern day pasha more in the image of the self-indulgent Ibrahim I (the Madman) than the far-seeing Suleyman I (the Wise).
Once Erdogan realized the damage that his fit of egomaniac fury against the Russians had provoked abroad and his growing isolation within Turkey, he rushed to NATO on bended knee to beg for support. True to his authoritarian personality, Recep Erdogan crawls on his knees before his ‘superiors’ (NATO-US) while grabbing the throats of his ‘inferiors’ (the Turkish people)!
Conclusion
Erdogan’s road to absolutist power is strewn with indiscriminate purges, terror and deceit; violence against environmental and liberal protesters in Gezi Park and moderate Gülen Islamists; jail sentences and firing of journalists and publishers, military officials and judges; repression of workers and capitalists; terror bombing against activists and democrats; and war against Kurds and Syrians.
Erdogan’s paranoid and greed-driven vision of politics precludes any trust and stable relations. He thinks he is very clever with his combination of charm and broken promises, but he fools nobody. He reignites the war against the Kurds in Turkey and Syria but they retaliate!
He attacks Russia and provokes a very costly retaliation so far limited to the Turkish economy.
He increases his personal power, but undermines the interests of the Turkish nation and its people. Erdogan believes he is the rising regional hegemon, indispensable to the West. He blackmails the EU for billions of Euros to control the flood of refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq with his promises to warehouse desperate refugees in Turkish concentration camps. But Europeans must know that their money can never buy trust and loyalty from the Pasha.
His oil deals with ISIS are in tatters. Russian bombs ensure that Erdogan will have to find other sources of illicit profit. Worst of all, Erdogan’s furious actions have lost markets, allies and domestic support. He faces enemies from all sides – liberal professors, students, big business owners and organized workers in Istanbul; small business people in the tourist trade; construction and oil companies in Ankara; farmers in Anatolia, and, above all, the coal miners in Soma Manis.
Who knows under what circumstances Pasha Recep (the ‘Megalomaniac’) will be replaced?
It was the chemical weapons attack that so nearly led to direct war between the US, the UK, France and the Syrian government; a war which most likely would have delivered the whole of Syria to IS and Al-Qaeda extremists.
The horrific Ghouta attack of August 21, 2013, which killed hundreds of civilians, including many children, was blamed on President Assad and his government by Western political leaders and elite media commentators.
Those who dared to question this version of events were predictably denounced as ’conspiracy theorists’ and/or ’Assad apologists’.
Today, however, new evidence has emerged that questions the ‘official’ narrative. Could it be that, as was the case with Iraqi WMDs, we were lied to again by those individuals desperate to launch another ‘regime change’ war in the Middle East?
Interestingly, the US and its allies never publicly produced any hard evidence showing that Syrian government forces had carried out the attacks, but told us that it had to be them because no one else possessed or had the capability to use chemical weapons.
But now Turkish MP Eren Erdem has told RT that Islamic State terrorists, then going under the name of Iraqi Al-Qaeda, received all the necessary materials to produce deadly sarin gas via Turkey.
Erdem, who is now being charged with treason for his comments, revealed that an investigation by Turkish police was started but then the case was closed, and all the suspects were released near the Turkish/Syrian border. He accused the Turkish authorities of a high-level cover up.
The Turkish MP says the evidence shows that IS, and not the Syrian government, was responsible for the Ghouta attacks.
“This attack was conducted just days before the sarin operation in Turkey. It’s a high probability that this attack was carried out with those basic materials shipped through Turkey. It is said the regime forces are responsible, but the indictment says it’s ISIS. UN inspectors went to the site but they couldn’t find any evidence. But in this indictment, we’ve found the evidence. We know who used the sarin gas, and our government knows it too,” Erdem said.
It’s not just Erdem’s testimony that challenges the official version of events.
US experts do too. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report by former UN weapons inspector Richard Lloyd and Professor Theodor Postol challenged the intelligence on which US claims against the Syrian government were made.
They revealed that the range of the rocket which was supposed to have carried the nerve gas was too short to have been launched from government-controlled areas.
“The Syrian improvised chemical munitions that were used in the August 21 nerve gas attack in Damascus have a range of about two kilometers. This indicates that these munitions could not possibly have been fired at East Ghouta from the ‘heart’ or the eastern edge of the Syrian government controlled area in the intelligence map published by the White House on August 30th 2013,” the report concluded.
The report pointed out that all the possible launching points for the rocket were in rebel-controlled areas.
“My view when I started this process was that it couldn’t be anything but the Syrian government behind the attack,” said the report’s co-author, Professor Postol. “But now I’m not sure of anything. The administration narrative was not even close to reality. Our intelligence cannot possibly be correct.”
Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh also countered the ‘administration narrative’ in articles published in the London Review of Books.
“Most significant, he (President Obama) failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin,” Hersh wrote in a piece entitled ’Whose Sarin?’ in December 2013.
Logic and sheer common sense also suggests that President Assad was not responsible for the attacks.
Imagine you were Bashar al-Assad in August 2013. You know that some of the most powerful nations on earth are desperately looking for an excuse to bomb you, as they know that the ‘rebels’ they’ve been backing aren’t strong enough to topple you and your government without air support.
So what do you do? Well, at the very moment when a team of UN chemical weapons inspectors are in Damascus, you order a chemical weapons attack just 12 kilometers from the center of the capital.
Does that sound logical? If we think that’s what Assad did, then we must believe that he is not only a brutal leader but a foaming at the mouth madman. But what evidence do we have that a man who has ruled Syria since 2000 is actually insane? That’s effectively what the neocons/pro-war lobby are expecting us to believe i.e. that Assad would, right when the UN are in town, do the very thing that the US/UK and others want him to do in order to provide them with a pretext for an attack. What a very obliging fellow that Mr. Assad is!
The faulty logic behind the war lobby’s claims was highlighted by George Galloway MP in his memorable speech against bombing Syria in the British Parliament. “To launch a chemical weapons attack in Damascus on the very day a UN chemical weapons team arrives in Damascus must be a new definition of madness,” Galloway declared.
It’s worth noting where the ’evidence’ that Assad’s forces were responsible for the attack originated. “The bulk of evidence proving the Assad regime’s deployment of chemical weapons, which would provide legal grounds essential to justify any Western military action, has been provided by Israeli military intelligence, the German magazine Focus has reported,” announced the Guardian on August 28, 2013.
According to Fox News, an Israeli military intelligence listening unit, called number 8200 “helped provide the intelligence intercepts that allowed the White House last weekend to conclude that the Assad regime was behind the attack.”
Israel did not publicly release these so-called intercepts, and of course that country had, and still has, a very obvious vested interest in toppling a government allied to Hezbollah and Iran.
The Ghouta chemical attack looked as if it would be the shocking event that would give the war-hawks the chance to bomb Syria and topple the Assad government.
But, unexpectedly, the British Parliament threw a spanner in the works and voted against war. It probably didn’t help that even Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that there was “no 100 percent certainty” about who was responsible for Ghouta.
The bitterness and anger of the neocons afterwards, which I detailed here, told us how badly they had wanted their ’regime change’. Ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern revealed how he had been in a TV studio with two uber-hawks, Paul Wolfowitz and Joe Lieberman, and remarked on the “distinctly funereal atmosphere.”
“I felt I had come to a wake with somberly dressed folks (no pastel ties this time) grieving for a recently, dearly-departed war.”
Over two years on, it’s frightening to think what would have happened if the neocons had got their war in 2013. The RAF would effectively have become the air force of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. If the Syrian government had fallen in late 2013 or early 2014, radical Islamists and not non-existent ‘moderate rebels‘ would have been the beneficiaries. The black flag of ISIS would be flying high in Damascus and religious executions would be commonplace.
Yet incredibly, those who pressed so hard for war against a secular government fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in 2013, are still upset that they didn’t get their way. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and fanatical war-hawk George Osborne, said in September that Parliament voting not to bomb Syria in 2013 was “one of the worst decisions ever made.”
In the New Statesman magazine this week, Blairite Labour MP Mary Creagh called the failure to bomb the Syrian government post-Ghouta, “an understandable but unforgivable mistake and the one vote that I deeply regret.”
Yes, you read it right; an MP who voted to bomb ISIS two weeks ago deeply regrets not voting to bomb the government fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates two years ago.
Despite the official narrative on Ghouta unraveling before our eyes, some pro-Establishment Western media, including the BBC’s flagship current affairs program Newsnight, continues to assert that the chemical attack in Ghouta was carried out by the Assad government, as if it was all 100 percent proven.
My fellow RT Op-Edge columnist Dan Glazebrook lodged an official complaint with the BBC over its broadcasting “without comment,” and with an omission of the word “allegedly,” that President Assad had used chemical weapons at Ghouta.
The BBC replied: “You are right to point out that the UN did not establish that the Syrian government was responsible…. Nevertheless a number of governments concluded that the Syrian government was responsible.”
The governments the BBC referred to were of course those who were itching for an excuse to bomb Syria, namely the US, the UK and France.
We will probably never know for sure who were the evil people who fired the rockets on 21st August 2013, but taking everything into consideration, the likeliest explanation of Ghouta is that it was a ‘rebel’ operation, designed to pave the way for Western bombing of the Syrian government.
“As the months have passed… scientific studies amassing an impressive body of evidence have shown that, not only were Washington’s claims of “certainty” that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons in their war with extremist fighters utterly baseless, but in fact the reality was quite the opposite, the rebels were the most likely culprits of the attack,” wrote Eric Draitser on the first anniversary of the attacks.
Now we have the explosive testimony of Eren Erdem too.
As was the case with Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, and Iran’s unproven nuclear weapons program, it looks, once again, as if the real conspiracy theorists were those at the top, and not those plucky souls who dared to question the war party line.
Any serious analysis of mass migration as a phenomena has to provide an in depth study as to the effects of the process, of who benefits and who gains and whether it is a natural phenomena[i] or an organised movement[ii] which serves the neo-liberal agenda.
Greece once more is in the eye of the storm. During 2015 around 750,000 have passed through Greece on their way to Northern Europe. The borders have essentially become non-existent. Another 3 million are expected to arrive in 2016. Is this a natural phenomena (product of wars or economic displacement) or something more sinister? A new world order agenda to reduce wages in the EU as it is now in stark competition with the USA and China? Replacing a century and a half of unionised labour?
Greece suffered extensively as a result of two decades of wars, in the first half of the 20th century as a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and World War I and as a result of World War II and the subsequent Cold War (Truman doctrine was inaugurated in Greece) and civil war. As such it has been prone to mass movements of populations from abroad to Greece and vice versa and two examples stand out. The population transfers as a result of the Asia Minor expedition of the early 20’s that saw a couple of million arrive in Athens from Attaturk’s Turkey and the tens of thousands of Greeks that emigrated after the end of the civil war to find work in the factories and mines of Germany, Belgium and France.
From the mid 1960’s to approximately 1990 no large population movements occurred apart from the displacement of Greek Cypriots from Turkey’s invasion into Cyprus. What did occur and what isn’t mentioned ever is the first wave of globalisation created by the Greek merchant ship owners who had Greek flagged crews on their fleet which was mainly used to carry goods East to West and who developed enormously during the period of the embargo on Saudi Arabia in the 1950s.
They were closely linked to the City of London in terms of insurance and financing of loans for developing the merchant fleets and were at the cutting edge of labour reform. With the advent of new technology and the reduction in manning on merchant shipping, alongside the creation of schools for shipping in the Philippines and Central America, Greek flagged ships became a rarity. Most of the personnel were from the ‘third world,’ unless they were the captains or port engineers. Labour costs were driven to the ground way before the fall of the Soviet Union and in the 1990’s this essentially became the blueprint for neoliberal labour relations worldwide.
The military junta of the late 1960’s early 1970’s pioneered the first wave of cheap labour from Pakistan for agriculture but this was regulated and at the time the Drachma wasn’t a convertible currency so the export of currency was minimal and controlled by the government of the day.
Entrance into the EEC
Greece’s entrance into the EEC in 1981 occurred under the guise that it would develop both its agriculture and its heavy industry. Nearly four decades later its agriculture has been decimated and its heavy industry destroyed. Instead of Greek agricultural products being protected in the EU wide market the opposite occurred. Greek supermarkets were taken over by larger chains and they started to import produce the world over. This destroyed agricultural labour costs which led directly to the mass importation of cheap labour. We recently had the odious situation of Asian farmers living with animals to pick strawberries in Greece and being shot for asking for wages. [iii]
Fall of the Soviet Union
When the Soviet Union fell there was a mass wave of illegals that arrived from Albania.
Statements alluded to the recent leader of New Democracy Samaras, made at the time when Greeks had two homes and multiple cars led to a massive wave of Albanians to arrive. Initially they were few but then they kept on coming and the crescendo reached the Olympic Games building projects of the early 2000.
Greek bosses started to prefer and select Albanian immigrant workers for cost as well as hours worked. Insofar as there was a building boom, they were needed and older Greek workers became foremen. Just as mechanisation in shipping led to smaller shipping crews required with more simple instructions, so the changes in building construction led to less workers required with a smaller skill set. By 2000 there were allegedly around 800,000 Albanians alone, but official figures always underestimate. According to estimates by the police there are currently 94 different nationalities present in Greece. In the first decade of the 21st century around 1.5 million Albanians gained legal status in Greece and this year all children born in Greece can gain nationality.
A Greek Parliamentary Committee was set up in 1993 to analyse the issue of mass migration and the demographic crisis. All the major parties signed it (PASOK, New Democracy, KKE and Sinaspismos – Syriza’s precursor[iv]).
Olympics Building Boom
Between 1999 and 2004 a mass building program of works occurred for the Olympic games. Thousands of companies were created and tens of thousands of new immigrant workers came. “The entrance of the new immigrants in the labor movement, which covers now around one third of the total number of laborers who are occupied in Greece,” explained the Greek TUC Report[v] in 2002.
In other words 33% of the working people are immigrants. From this many have concluded that the borders of Greece are hermetically sealed. Greece is a Fortress inside a European fortress! Someone could ask what percentage should the 33% of cheap laborers be, so as to theoretically accept that borders are open? 100% of all laborers, 200%, 500%, an endless figure? Not that we expect a reply to this
question.
‘Whoever continues to talk about open borders is either consciously lying or doesn’t have a consciousness of reality’ was a common refrain at the time alongside what was written on walls all over Athens: ‘Worker, the bosses like racism.’
Just think about it. More than two million (and more) immigrants who live in Greece, a number which represents 20% of the total population, is a ‘conscious lie’! Whilst truth is that Europe closed its borders a long time ago, stopped immigration, became a Fortress. The simple Greek worker who believes in the opposite doesn’t have a consciousness of reality! As this reality isn’t one which is witnessed daily in their journeys on public transport, in factories, on ships, on building sites and public works, but that which exists in the realms of fantasy.
Is there competition for work amongst Greeks and immigrants?
‘No, jobs are not taken by immigrants.’ That is what we are told by the anti-racist globalists. Greek capitalists didn’t bring them to replace the more expensive and demanding Greek workers but for them to do the jobs which the well fed locals refuse to do! The foreign workers who work in Greece apparently occupy positions that are exclusively those of unskilled laborers such as cleaning duties, cleaners or building work and agricultural work for men.
Allegedly new migrant workers were required for work in occupations that were new in the expanding labor market, such as building sites. Even if we assume that was the case, building sites aren’t new occupations and unemployment always existed between 7-10% during the first decade of the 21st century.
As the ‘reality’ for which we don’t all have a ‘consciousness’ is that before the immigrants arrived in Greece there were no house servants, no building workers, fishermen, no one dug any fields or worked in making furniture!
Let us contemplate the ‘logic’ of the ahistorical globalist: that before 1990 the Greek worker didn’t work; he knitted and waited for the arrival of immigrants to stand upright and become a new labor aristocracy. Now he has found a new occupation: ‘managers of consumerism,’ avoiding every labor intensive activity, just like the writers on immigration in the neoliberal era avoid every intellectual activity, with the end result of creating paper-thin arguments, full of contradictions.
Greek labor fought for labor standards. Ship owners destroyed them.
The whole of the history of the Greek labor movement and of every country is based primarily on one-two militant sections of workers with a history and tradition, with a socialist tradition and perspective for another world. The dockworkers and building workers before they were globalised were the advanced guard of class struggle. They were the example to be copied by all the other sections. Whoever sits to read a little history will see that the dockworkers and sailors were the first in Greece during the 2nd world war that created Workers’ Committees which decided and forced the ship owners onto their regime on the ships. They reached such a level of class militancy and dynamism that the bosses couldn’t recruit or sack who they wanted or when they wanted. Their fame spread in all the significant shipping fleets around the world and the dockers and sailors in many countries followed the example of the Greek dockworkers.
Greece occupied around 25% of the shipping fleet of the Western world and it is no coincidence that the ship owners tried to break the power of the dockworkers and ships crews. This was finally achieved by the rise of PASOK in power (in the early 1980’s) and the policies of the KKE who wrote off the leadership of the dockworkers and supported the party of ‘change’ (which is how PASOK called themselves). The ship owners created schools of sailors in the Philippines and slowly but surely started to replace Greek crews with hungry, politically subdued and educationally backward workers so as to escape from the high labor contracts, and the special provisions regarding unhygienic and dangerous labor, pre-determined hours of work and introducing on the ships a regime of the Roman galleys, once more.
The ship owners from their base in the City of London have in store a future identical to the one above for the whole of the working class. With the use of foreign crews they achieved what they hadn’t in four decades. They gained from the paltry wages they paid. More significantly they achieved a significant strategic defeat on the whole labor movement in Greece opening the path to the subjugation of all sectors, using as a lever neoliberal mass immigration. This task will be undertaken when every relationship with militant and revolutionary traditions of the Greek labor movement are broken with the replacement of the natural carriers of these traditions not by the 33% of the Greek TUC report but by 100%, with the support of the ‘leftist’ globalists.
People don’t ask to whom do the jobs belong. To the Greek workers or to their bosses? If the Greek boss had 5 Greek workers on an X wage and he sacks them recruiting 15 immigrants, he didn’t create 10 new positions but divided 5 wages to 15 people. With such logic (if anyone can call it that) they claim with all honesty that unemployment in Greece has remained stable and during certain periods even been reduced!… What a nice picture for Greek capitalism.[vi]
With 1/3 of the labor force being immigrants, with only 2,000 Greek seafarers left out of an estimated 100,000 in 1970, everything is going fine. For whom? This isn’t really the issue. Due to the immigrants the wages on the building sites –as everywhere else in the private sector – are now under the level of the 1980’s. Hours of work have gone through the roof. Thus the beggar became a ‘strong Greece.’ Greece from being at the bottom of the EU, due to the expansion of immigrant labor, is now somewhere in the middle. First among last, great is its glory (but these borders keep on closing whilst the EU keeps expanding).
We are told that the use of immigrants hasn’t occurred due to the profit collapse of gross sales by companies, but because of the expansion of the market. We needed immigrants in booming capitalism. You see, without them the Greek worker would be lazy. He wouldn’t get off the couch to pick a grape (despite doing this for thousands of years) or to clean a hospital.
Foreign workers do not take jobs from Greeks, this is the common refrain, as the market has developed and unemployment remained the same. But if the market truly developed, would unemployment remain the same? The unemployed remain unemployed in a period of growth of the economy? So who takes all the new jobs (if they truly exist) as they aren’t being taken by Greeks? Whilst some economists present a picture of economic boom of capitalism and the appearance of new jobs, unemployment remains static. In other words development doesn’t equal a drop in unemployment. Immigrants don’t then take the jobs of Greeks. Or are they taking the new jobs and therefore a drop in unemployment is impossible, despite development?
Trying to justify the unjustifiable and to state that the presence of immigrants has no social, political or economic consequences in the neoliberal era, but only brings to the surface the racist nature of Greek people, globalists who justify mass immigration are being led by mathematical precision into the camp of the apologists of capitalism, in its greatest crisis of history, which is attempting to survive transforming the planet into an arsenal of racial conflicts and planetary slavery. The industrial bourgeoisies in globalised capitalism will try to replace the hands it uses with cheaper and cheaper pools of labor, using the endless pools of illegal labor wherever it can on the planet. Not to improve the standard of life of the hungry and dispossessed but to destroy whatever was achieved by struggle by Western workers and to globalize immiseration.
Riots over Illegal Immigration
Two areas, one in the central Athenian working class district of Ag. Panteleomonas, and another in the port town of Patras, have finally broken center-stage in political life. Starting off by people living in the areas, they protested against the mass invasion, occupation and enforced ‘multiculturalism’ of the Greek globalist oligarchy whose starting point is the City of London.
Initially unable to know what to do and frightened of being blamed for racism they complained to the official authorities about the squatter camps of hundreds of illegal immigrants camped in town squares, in children’s play areas, outside churches. The mass number of illegals meant that not having any work, crime skyrocketed in these areas, people were frightened of moving about in their areas, local businesses were forced into closure, property prices catapulted downwards and communal areas were being used by people to defecate, take drugs, drink, even have sex in full public view. Globalization had finally arrived.
The press initially started a mass wave of criticism blaming the victims for the crimes. The authorities provided no facilities for the hundreds thousands of illegals. Why should they? They don’t live in working class areas. After all multiculturalism is for the poor, not the rich. Over a sustained period of six months the protestors were vilified by all: by the media, by the government, by the leftists, but not by the Greek people. They stood on their side, in every conversation on the street, in the markets, even by the first large wave of immigrants. There were Albanians who signed petitions against the multicultural wave from Afghanistan, Somalia, Morocco, Pakistan, Nigeria, Chad, Bangladesh etc. The numbers are now currently standing at around 4 million new immigrants in a country of 10 million, in 2009.
The government’s loyal followers in the form of the leftists started a mass campaign to brand the citizens of the central Athens district of Ag. Panteleomonas as ‘racists,’ ‘fascists,’ and ‘Nazis.’ They held demo after demo in the area trying to hound out the hundreds of local protestors.
The focal point was the biggest Orthodox Church in Greece and the children’s play area in its garden. They would not be cowed or browbeaten though. They fought back, with posters, leaflets, petitions leading up to a national protest in Omonia Square central Athens. After 9 months of struggle and after the disastrous Euroelections for the ruling parties of both right and left, they have finally achieved half their aims.
The square has been cleared and the illegal immigrants have been forced to move on. Of course they haven’t gone to the northern rich suburbs of Athens where the businessmen and politicians live, but the whole country has heard about them now. It’s become a national issue where before, it was a side issue. The KKE and the leftists in tow have stood on the opposite side of the class war with the government.
The fake Left has refused to participate or take up any of the issues. They have been forced to admit like the government that there is a problem. The 3,500-strong petition that was gathered (in November 2008) was of course ignored when circulated.
It will be extremely difficult to justify the current mass waves of sustained illegal immigration that currently number around 200,000 a year (2010 onward). When we had Muslim protests in Athens, this further weakened the position of illegal immigration. The Greek working class has no reason to accept wave upon wave of migrants when it itself cannot survive.
By 2009, the percentage of votes going to extreme rightwing parties was minimal and their representation in the Athens council elections (central districts where most of the immigrants congregated) was minor. The arrival of the Troika meant the parties of the extreme centre (PASOK, New Democracy) which adopted the economic genocide of Greece started to fragment and from a high point of combined votes of 85% of the electorate dropped to around 30% (in the 2012 elections) and the political vacuum created meant people voted for parties of the alleged extreme left and right. Retro-fascists in the form of a party called Golden Dawn gained national prominence and the myth created around this party was that it was fighting for state power, when it had no such intentions. It arrived on the scene due to the political vacuum created.
Just as most of the heavy industries of the EU went to Asia due to high labour costs, so the high cost of Greek labour led to the importation of wave upon wave of immigrants who took over whole industries: farming, catering, building, home care, hotel work and so on. Many bosses preferred cash in hand work with no contractual ties and achieved what they always wanted: a labour movement with no history and zero memory. This they achieved in a majority of sectors and wherever there is some industry left, Greeks remain at most 20% of the labour force.
When New Democracy took over the elections in 2012, it was under pressure, due to another round of riots in central Athens after the murder of a Greek by lumpen Afghanis for a video camera as he was taking his wife to give birth. This forced New Democracy to take emergency measures to limit the globalist inflows of migrants who congregated with nothing to do in all the central town squares. This forced Manolis Glezos (historic leader of the Left who helped tear down the German flag from the Akropolis during the occupation) to make a statement against the Left stating it has adopted mass immigration without any criticisms. [vii]
Anyone visiting Athens between 2008 and 2012 would have noticed the total absence of tourist police (they never existed), hundreds of unlicenced immigrant street sellers everywhere, tens of migrants going round in shopping trolleys taking old metal, hundreds involved in daily muggings and in particular many crimes against old people who couldn’t defend themselves, whilst we also had the arrival of teenage prostitutes from Africa pushed by pimps 50 meters from a central police station, just south of Omonia Square.
This in a country that suffered extensively during the German occupation losing around 10% of its overall population, with such violence being unknown against old people by hungry and starving Greeks. These were the social effects of neoliberal globalisation on the immigration side. It would also be absurd to believe that so many people could survive in an era of de-industrialisation just by arriving in Greece. The export of the Euro (hard currency) is of course the pull factor, but this would have a detrimental effect on the actual economy as wages were pinned to the floor and local companies would face the full weight of global competition as was witnessed by the mass importation of low priced goods from Asia. A return to a national currency would reduce the presence of such large numbers of migrants only because the currency of the country would no longer have a global trading status.
Dublin II and Frontex
Throughout the first decade of the 21st century an agreement was reached called Dublin II which stated that all new immigrant arrivals would have to be registered in the first country of arrival. For a decade this was argued against by the parties from the Left. The argument was that Greece could not become a depository of lost souls. In other words, once in, new migrants should be free to travel anywhere within the EU. So why even bother paying fig leaf to borders. Why not just set up direct flights to Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Congo for example, and ask who wants to fly to Europe? There would a lot less stress and a lot less corporate propaganda, but how could the powers that be sell this process?
Brussels has a no pushback policy implying that at anytime one is in the territory of the EU one has to be processed forwards, everything else is illegal. That also implies that the navy of each country which is in the Mediterranean has to accept anyone at sea. As the states don’t want to openly admit they desire the mass movement of populations from Asia and Africa into the EU, they like the fact that this is organised on a for profit basis by smugglers and hundreds drown every now and again. It serves their globalist agenda.
The unregistered process serves big business well, as a section of workers has no papers, and bosses can use them as a way of lowering wages across the board.
At around the same time another organisation Frontex was set up, based in Poland, whose aim was to process and register the hundreds of thousands that would arrive in the EU.
Syriza’s rise to power with Independent Greeks
If Turkey does not accept repatriation Greece cannot be the EU’s reservoir of lost souls. This was the new common refrain. Without officially abolishing Dublin II, Germany gave the green light for millions to arrive in the EU. Syriza complied.
Tens of thousands have arrived and there seems to be no let up in the situation.
What is the real agenda? Solving Germany’s demographic problem or weakening European elites? Evidence exists for both[viii] options.[ix]
There were indications that this was Syriza’s actual program: opening the borders and facilitating the mass importation of labor. It works insofar as tens of thousands don’t stay in Greece. Each new migrant is given a travel document to leave Greece within 30 days. Priority is only given to Afghanis, Iraqis and Syrians. The non-EU countries bordering Greece like the former Yugoslavia, have been targeted perhaps to bring it into the EU. Immigrants could in theory just go to wherever they wanted via Bulgaria as there are no borders with Greece. Merkel wanted Brussels to centralize the mass movement of migrants and for each member state to receive constant flows and for Frontex to decide who is registered as an asylum seeker so individual states lose control of their own territory.
The future will be explosive, just like the past.
One cannot argue the political elite did not understand the issues related to mass immigration and the demographic problems of Greece or the fact that neighbouring states have laid claim to Greek land. A whole parliamentary committee was set up and it produced a report in 1993 signed by all the major parties.
The open borders regime introduced with the election of Syriza has meant around 1 million have entered the EU via Greece (officially 740,000) in 2015. The EU commissioner on immigration who happens to be Greek (another ‘natural’ phenomenon) Dimitris Avramopoulos stated that “the end of the Schengen Treaty will mean the beginning of the end of Europe. We have thrown down the walls and we are seeing that some people are putting them up again,” reported Kontra newspaper on December 4, 2015.
Turkey is expected to receive 3 billion Euros in order to ship across 3 million more migrants in 2016 whilst Greece has agreed to house and feed 50,000 and set up another 4 processing centers on top of the 11 reception centers created in 2012.
The plan is to reintroduce Dublin II whereby migrants are kept in country of arrival for 18 months before being allowed to leave. The expulsion of Greece from Schengen is the new propaganda tool, just like Grexit before it, to force Greece to accept joint naval operations in the Aegean sea with Turkey, to accept sole responsibility of borders to Frontex and lose all rights of national sovereignty.
A weak state with porous borders: a new – found banana republic, without taking into account the host nation. How will they be housed and fed? Various programs are mentioned with respect to this, housing benefits and a minimal food subsidy. So do they have as an aim to house tens of thousands in empty properties that have been abandoned by owners due to the financial crash in Greece. Who will fix up these properties that are in decay? They will house thousands provisionally in old Olympic stadiums or ones still functioning eg. Galatsi, Faliro or the old Olympic Airport in Athens. Four new processing centres are to be set on Aegean islands but only one so far is functioning. No private housing has yet been set up, reported the ProtoThema newspaper on December 6.
The EU is founded on four core principles: freedom of movement of capital services, capital, and goods. Any logjam in any of them implies the EU starts to unravel. This is what the globalist elites want to avoid at all costs and will try their hardest to achieve.
We had before movements of populations into the EU that were related to decolonization, with Algeria and Vietnam being the two most prominent cases at stake.
Over 100,000 Algerians arrived who were part of the security services of occupied Algeria and a similar situation developed when up to 2 million Vietnamese left Vietnam in the mid-70s when the US occupation collapsed there. Parallels with our times exist in the departure of Iraq’s Kurds in the early 1990’s organized by the then Secretary of the Conservative Party of Great Britain Jeffrey Archer. Nowadays for Western imperialism to gain influence in each society it occupies, priority is given to all these local quislings like the campaigns to allow Afghani translators free access to the UK by the British Army. [x]
All these issues are pie in the sky schemes without taking into account local reactions. One cannot relocate Asia and Africa into the EU under ‘humanitarian’ guises or ‘welcome all refugees’ to justify a globalist neoliberal free for all. One can start a process, attempt to control it by using riot police to stop people’s reactions, but in the long term there will be civil wars. The USA is a special case. It was created from scratch as an area whereby each successive wave of migrants replaced another, creating multi-ethnic ghettoes in a period where stability was guaranteed by America’s global status. In declining capitalism only ethnic ghettoes can be created which are in conflict with each other over declining resources and the idea that a new order can be created which doesn’t resemble the old order of the past is indeed a fantasy by those who have given up hope in another world and support the neoliberal order of the current one.
In John Kerry’s recent visit to Athens, his only visit was to an NGO serving mass immigration called Melissa. There were zero protests against his visit.
Coolies: How Britain Reinvented Slavery tells the astonishing and controversial story of the systematic recruitment and migration of over a million Indians to all corners of the Empire. It is a chapter in colonial history that implicates figures at the very highest level of the British establishment and has defined the demographic shape of the modern world.
A Palestinian flag has been removed from a street display in a town in New York State, after some residents expressed anti-Palestine sentiments.
A Palestine advocacy group condemned the removal Monday, saying it is part of a broader suppression of any recognition of Palestine.
The flag was removed from a major shopping corridor in Yonkers, NY earlier this month, after at least one public complaint. The flag was part of a display that included dozens of international flags, including the Israeli flag.
“At first glance, this incident is typical of the ‘Palestine exception to free speech.’ It exactly fits the pattern we’ve documented throughout the country,” Radhika Sainath, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal (PL) told teleSUR.
Palestine Legal provides legal aid to Palestine solidarity activists in the United States, and has warned of a growing campaign by pro-Israel groups to shut down discussion of Palestinian rights.
“When people express support for Palestine, or even acknowledge its existence, Israel advocates complain and our civic institutions are quick to respond by shutting down (free) speech,” Sainath said.
The flag was singled out by Yonkers residents who allegedly claimed Palestine is an enemy of the United States, according to one local reporter.
“Palestine is certainly not a friend of the United States,” columnist Eric Schoen told local news outlet lohud.com.
“A couple of people who brought it to my attention were quite upset,” Schoen said.
The business group that oversees the shopping corridor, the South Broadway Business Improvement District, has maintained the flag was taken down as it didn’t represent a sovereign state.
However, the corridor also boasts the flag of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory.
Palestine Legal has argued the flag’s removal mirrors similar incidents nationwide.
“Earlier this year, Lincolnwood, Illinois canceled its annual diversity month over the inclusion of a Palestinian flag in the celebration,” Palestine Legal said in a statement to teleSUR.
As far back as 2013, another incident allegedly occurred at a Texas high school, when according to Palestine Legal, “School administrators told Palestinian student Malak Abdallahi she could not carry her flag during a during a traditional ceremony where students carry their nation’s flag.”
“She later won the right to carry the flag,” they noted.
Palestine Legal also recently published a report documenting what it concluded is a nationwide campaign to suppress Palestinian rights advocacy on university campuses.
In an interview with teleSUR ahead of the report’s release, Palestine Legal Director Dima Khalidi warned that Palestine solidarity activists can face “substantial” blowback from institutions and student groups for their advocacy.
“It can harm their reputation, it can harm their employment prospects, it can lead to bullying, racial attacks and even law enforcement scrutiny,” Khalidi said.
US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has implied that Israel is supporting Daesh (ISIL) by “sending massive amounts of money” to the Takfiri terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
Trump made the remarks in a recent interview with the Morning Joe show, shortly before he cancelled his trip to Israel.
“Some of our so-called allies that we work with and that we protect militarily, they are sending massive amounts of money to ISIS and to al-Qaeda and to others,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the terrorist group.
Asked about who he was talking about, Trump said “you know who it is. What do I have to bring it up for? You know who it is.”
He said that he will not mention US allies which support Daesh because of his relationship with Israelis, but noted that no one talks about Israel, even though everyone is aware of support Israel and other states provide to ISIL.
“There are, but I’m not gonna say it, because I have a lot of relationships with people. But there are. And you know that. And everybody knows that. And nobody says it. Nobody talks about it,” Trump said.
The multi-billionaire businessman said the US government knows about it, suggesting checking records to insure his claims are true.
“All you have to do is check your records. Our government knows the countries,” he stated.
On Thursday, Trump cancelled his plan to visit Israel, saying he would reschedule “at a later date after I become President of the US.”
One reason he mentioned why he had called off his visit was that he did not want to put Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “under pressure.”
Trump’s campaign has been marked by controversy from the start, but he leads the GOP field with 33 percent support among Republican primary voters.
According to American writer Mickey Z., “It’s always interesting when Donald Trump peels away a propaganda layer to offer a tiny glimpse at the corporate-political brotherhood.”
In August, 2015, 57 brand new members of the U.S. House of Representatives bowed their heads and promised to obey their Israeli overlords. They allowed themselves to be taken to Israel, plied with good food and propaganda. They then returned home to do Israel’s bidding in the Congressional seats that Israel helped them win. Sixty were invited, but only three decided not to go, for unknown reasons.
But isn’t there a more innocent explanation? Perhaps they just wanted to learn more about the issue and would equally have accepted an invitation to visit Palestine and see it from a Palestinian point of view. Nothing wrong with giving equal opportunity to both sides.
The Free Palestine Movement tested this theory and found it wanting. We sent a personalized invitation to exactly the same members of Congress to come to Palestine at our expense. Not a single one accepted. Although we sent a followup to those who did not respond the first time, the vast majority never responded at all. A few said that they could not make time in their schedule, not even when we suggested that they could wait as long as their next term. Only one, Brad Ashford of Nebraska, said that he was working with some of his constituents to visit Palestine. (We have been able to find no evidence of such an initiative.)
Israel, through its US Lobby, has of course been doing this for more than half a century. There are hardly any members of Congress that have not accepted an invitation at least one time during their career, often more. Can you name any other country with such a devoted following in the U.S. Congress?
The reason, of course, is that the Israel Lobby has a reputation of making or breaking congressional careers, and that members of Congress are x-rayed to assure that they possess no detectable spine before they take office. There is more pushback from some Israeli newspapers than from the US Congress.
And why not? There has never been any price to pay for obeying Israel. In fact, candidates compete to do favors for Israel and to get donations managed by Israel’s Lobby, with little or no consideration of how much they are robbing their constituents.
But this time it’s different. We may not be able to persuade members of Congress to look at both sides of the Israel question, nor to ask why US taxpayer money is supporting an Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians, nor why our roads are not paved nor our bridges repaired nor our children educated. But we can show the depravity of our elected officials. We can demonstrate their hypocrisy and their bias and dishonest treatment of US foreign policy, which results in war, death and destruction for all but the tiny number of super-wealthy profiteers whose hands are covered in blood.
That’s why the Free Palestine Movement is running the ad below on the sides of buses in San Francisco. It is why we are making the same ad available at cost as a 3″ x 9″ sticker to anyone who wants to use it. It’s why we’re ready to share the cost of a display ad on buses or anywhere else with any group that wants to run the ad anywhere in the US, for as long as our funds last.
It is only a start, but we can at least begin to hold our elected officials accountable. We can make them begin to pay a price for selling out both the American and the Palestinian people to Israel.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
On Thursday, December 18, 2014, The Guardian published The race to save Peter Kassig by Ali Younes, Shiv Malik, Spencer Ackerman and Mustafa Khalili. To refresh memories here is the preface to the story:
The American aid worker was killed by his Isis captors on 16 November. Here, for the first time, is the story of an extraordinary effort to secure his release, which involved a radical New York lawyer, the US government, and the world’s most revered jihadi scholar.
Listen to The Guardian team tell of the daring and extraordinary effort to secure Kassig’s release.
The radical New York lawyer in question is Stanley Cohen, ‘one of America’s most controversial lawyers’. In January he begins an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to a charge from the US Internal Revenue Service. The Guardian article tells a gripping tale of how Cohen put together a team of Islamic scholars and al-Qaeda fellow-travellers to negotiate the release of Peter Kassig from Islamic State’s captivity—only to be thwarted at the last minute by an ill-timed intervention by Jordan’s secret service.
Clearly it’s an important story deserving of a wide readership. How curious then that The Guardian first broke the story just before Christmas, when readers are busy with other things, and that since then corporate news media in the United States have ignored it. On Twitter it’s another matter. Cohen is lauded as a hero for selflessly attempting a rescue mission while the authorities did nothing and his prison cell beckoned. There is talk of a film deal. The Pardon Stanley Cohen movement has more of a spring in its step.
All well and good, then.
And yet, to my ears, ‘The race to rescue Peter Kassig’ does not ring true. Lest it be sanctified by Hollywood without the bother of critical evaluation, I want to register some questions and comments so that we might better understand the fate of Peter Kassig. I fear that Guardian readers, the article’s authors, and even Stanley Cohen, have been taken advantage of by altogether more diabolical forces.
1. Let’s start at the beginning: Where is the evidence that Peter Kassig was ever held captive by ‘Islamic State’ or that they decapitated him? This is so widely assumed that the question is seldom asked. It should be. Questioning assumptions should be a starting point for investigative journalists. If he is to be ‘rescued’ we ought to ask, From whom and where?
Surely the 15 minute video ‘Although the disbelievers dislike it’ is all the evidence we need, even if few have seen it? I do not think so. I’ve studied it carefully and can find evidence only of the Tarantino-like film making skills of whoever created this little masterpiece of deception. (See ISIS Lessons in Terror Marketing: How to Change the World by Deception). No one is decapitated in that video; not anyone of those Syrian servicemen; not Peter Kassig. It’s all camera angles, special effects and clever editing.
What about Kassig’s severed head at the feet of ‘Jihadi John’ in the final segment of that video? It certainly looks like a severed head and it resembles Kassig’s and this is proof of what exactly? The props department of most major theatre and opera companies can produce a severed head on demand, even of a specific individual. Here the Royal Shakespeare Company shows how it is done. Props departments have their counterparts in film; they’re called digital artists. Look carefully: ‘Kassig’s head’ is a digitally inserted prop. It’s not proof of Kassig’s death. It’s proof that someone is attempting to deceive us.
Questions such as these are not asked because ‘we are passive consumers of the pornography of violence’ (Will Self, The Guardian, 2014-12-23). Effectively, public opinion defers to the testimony of ‘Jihadi John’. So when he says ‘This is Peter Edward Kassig, a US citizen of your country’ it surely must be true. From this shaky assumption Ali Younes, Shiv Malik, Spencer Ackerman and Mustafa Khalili set forth on their investigation.
2. Strictly speaking, the byline of ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’ should be ‘Stanley Cohen as told to Younes et al’ for the entire account is based on what Cohen told them he recalled, felt and did. The article reads like an extract from a novel, in which Cohen is the protagonist and Younes et al attempt to breath some life into the character by seeing the world through his eyes. For example, Cohen ‘had other things on his mind’; ‘as he returned from court’; ‘To Cohen, it seemed like fate’; ‘Cohen saw something of himself.’ And so on. The entire article is written like this.
Investigative journalism surely calls for more critical distance from those it investigates. This is especially important since three of the central players in this drama are anonymous and we have no way of checking their account: the FBI official (‘Mike’), the federal prosecutor and an ex-Guantanamo, ‘Kuwaiti member of al-Qaida’ (‘Food’). Essentially, Cohen speaks for them and the coauthors document what he says. The article’s rhetorical style leaves readers no room to make up their own minds about what happened.
3. Even fictional narratives must be plausible; this article stretches plausibility to its limit.
(a) Readers are asked to believe that the United States, with its vast intelligence and diplomatic resources, has no one capable of negotiating with Islamic State for the release of one of its citizens—apart from this maverick Jewish soon-to-be imprisoned lawyer. If so, what’s the point of those ‘diplomats’ in that vast US ‘embassy’ in Baghdad?
(b) How plausible is it that Cohen was given a free hand to negotiate with Islamic State? Let’s look at what he so nearly did with it. According to the article, he concluded that the only way to achieve Kassig’s release was to bring about rapprochement between Turki al-Binali and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi; or, put another way, to bring about reconciliation between ISIS and al-Qaeda. No kidding. And this would be a good thing? The life of this one American would be worth this exorbitant price would it? Apparently so. The US intelligence and diplomat community, it would seem, was indifferent to this prospect, which, but for the bungling interference of Jordan’s secret service in arresting al-Maqdisi, would have come about.
(c) How likely is it that Jordan’s secret service would act contrary to the wishes of their American counterparts, especially on a mission of such vital importance?
(d) Why would anyone reasonably expect ‘Islamic State’ to be so magnanimous as to free Kassig just so it could have the pleasure of dedicating his release ‘to Muslim political prisoners around the world, including those in Guantánamo’, as Cohen suggested? What is there in ‘Jihadi John’s’ demeanour that suggests this? Yet this prospect, apparently, was enough for Islamic State to agree that Kassig would not be harmed ‘while Cohen was still engaged on the ground.’
(e) The ‘tentative proposal for Kassig’s unilateral release’ was put together by Cohen with the help of three anonymous characters—the FBI official (‘Mike’), the federal prosecutor and an ex-Guantanamo, ‘Kuwaiti member of al-Qaida’ (‘Food’). Why would they want to conceal their involvement in this noble but tragic rescue mission, when others with more to lose are named?
(f) Turki al-Binali is an elusive character. Just 30-years old, but ‘Isis’s chief scholar’ ‘who has his own English language Facebook page’ and ‘the only person who could stay Jihadi John’s knife with a single edict.’ (‘Jihadi John’, then, is in charge.) Just as ‘Jihadi John’ is a man whose face we have not seen and whose voice is not authenticated, Turki al-Binali is encountered more in the virtual realm than in the flesh. No one actually sees him during these negotiations nor is there any mention of where he is physically located. It’s all done via WhatsApp.
(g) Why would the venerable Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, newly released from 5 years in a Jordanian prison, want to jeopardize his freedom by messaging with al-Binali, Islamic State’s ‘scholar-in-arms’, over such a harebrained scheme and then have his private conversations published in a national newspaper for the whole world to gawp at? Incredibly, he takes the word of Cohen, who he has just met, and his anonymous FBI handler (‘Mike’).
(h) In fact, it’s not clear why al-Maqdisi, ‘who may be the world’s most revered living jihadi scholar’, would agree to meet with Cohen in the first place, let alone immediately invite this stranger into his home. ‘The flat was tidy: on the floor were children’s toys and, on the walls, framed religious quotations.’ This is as close as we come to an explanation:
When Cohen told Mike about his travel plans, the FBI official was surprised. “He said ‘Maqdisi is going to meet with you?’” Cohen recalled. “I said ‘Yeah, he’s waiting for me.’ He said ‘Go’.”
As easy as that then. Could the following help explain this instant cordiality? In an article published in the Arab Daily News, October 28, 2014, one of the authors of ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’, Ali Younes, writes of an interview he conducted with the said Abu Mohamad al-Maqdisi. (There they are together in two photographs, friendly as anything). Younes reveals that he had spoken with al-Maqdisi ‘on several occasions in the past few weeks’. This is the very period that Cohen claims to have been communicating with al-Maqdisi. It surely wasn’t the case that one of the authors of ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’ was a party to these negotiations? We would have been told. Wouldn’t we?
(i) According to ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’ al-Maqdisi and al-Binali tried to reach an agreement on the release of Kassig, not by meeting face-to-face, speaking on the phone or even by writing letters, but via WhatsApp (‘one of Isis’s favoured modes of communication’).
By now it was evening, and for the next two hours or so, Maqdisi and Binali messaged each other on WhatsApp. Their exchange was “very warm,” Cohen says. Maqdisi jokingly called Binali “my ungrateful son” and Binali messaged back and said, “Abu Muhammad [Maqdisi] is my father. All these other sheikhs [in Isis] are my uncles.” Binali was eager to show off: he prefaced some of his messages by saying there was a drone overhead or there had just been an air strike, to impress Maqdisi. He also sent his former teacher a picture of himself wearing an ammunition vest and holding a Qur’an.
Quite touching. These are Cohen’s recollections, mind, not al-Maqdisi’s or al-Binali’s.
Maqdisi told Cohen that he’d had an additional WhatsApp discussion with Binali. They made progress towards a personal rapprochement and had even started to resolve their religious differences. Tomorrow, Maqdisi said, he planned on specifically broaching the subject of Kassig with him.
I cannot even imagine the bookish al-Maqdisi using WhatsApp. Is this really how Jihadi scholars do business these days? They are so trusting. Neither could know for sure who he was messaging with. Having ‘made progress towards a personal rapprochement’ they were to ‘resolve their religious differences’—by WhatsApp. This is how the reconciliation between Islamic State and al-Qaeda was to be achieved? This is how the fate of this young man was to be decided? This is the very best the United States could do to rescue him?
Incidentally, where was al-Binali during these exchanges? This isn’t mentioned in the article. Did Cohen or anyone on his team see him or know where he was? Other than by his appearances on WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, how would the skeptical know that the elusive al-Binali actually exists?
For these and other reasons I am not at all persuaded by ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’. I do, however, have a more plausible explanation of the events depicted in the article. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the suite of Islamic State beheading videos (of Foley, Sotloff, Henning and Haines, along with ‘Although the disbelievers dislike it’) are works of military deception (MILDEC) aimed primarily at Western public opinion. No one dies in those videos. Their immediate objective was to facilitate Anglo-American military reengagement in Iraq (unthinkable only a few months ago) by goading an emotional reaction among Brits and Americans. Mission accomplished. Their broader objective is to disguise the real forces behind Islamic State and their motives. Things are not as they seem. I do not know for sure who is behind these particular Islamic State beheading videos, other than that it is not ‘Islamic State’, but if a faction within US/UK intelligence did not create them they surely know who did.
To return to the fate of Peter Kassig and the ‘race’ to save him.
Whenever an American hostage meets an untimely demise the US feels obliged to tell us of the heroic efforts they made to save him or her, only to be foiled by circumstances beyond their control. It happens every time. For simulated hostages there are simulated rescue attempts. The day after the release of the Foley beheading video, for example, ‘senior Obama administration officials’ told of an unsuccessful secret operation to rescue Foley and several other Americans held captive in Syria. The Syrian government said it never happened. ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’ tells of the diplomatic equivalent of these heroically unsuccessful military rescue missions. Even if some or all of the participants were sincere, it was a simulated rescue that was designed to fail. Jordanian and American intelligence are like heart and lung on these matters. They work in unison. If Maqdisi was arrested just as the deal was about to be sealed it’s because the US wanted it.
No actual diplomats would fall for this pantomime, but an amateur one facing prison might. No seasoned journalists would fall for it either; they would raise questions such as the above. So what happened to these Guardianistas ? The accompanying audio (by Phoebe Greenward) tells us that the ‘race’ began with ‘a series of emails obtained by the Guardian.‘ ‘Obtained’ suggests some active investigation. A more accurate word I suggest is ‘fed’ (given to Shiv Malik). By whom? And why to a British rather than an American newspaper? Mustafa Khalili’s first response when he read them—’disbelief’—was correct. But these journalists were so intoxicated by the romance of what they read that their investigation lapsed into fleshing out a narrative on the bare bones of those emails, the whole lot marinated in sentiment. The name for this is ‘creative nonfiction’, not investigative journalism.
The correct answer to ‘What happened to Peter Kassig?’ is ‘We don’t know’. This is a more honest position than seeing beheadings where there are none and taking ‘Jihadi John’s’ word as gospel. To answer the question, researching how ‘The race to save Peter Kassig’ came to be would be a good start.
Dr. Richard Marsden
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Athabasca University
Alberta, Canada T9S 3A3
Islamic State terrorists in Syria received all necessary materials to produce deadly sarin gas via Turkey, Turkish MP Eren Erdem has told RT, insisting there are grounds to believe a cover up has taken place.
The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) member, Erdem, brought up the issue for public discussion in parliament last week, citing evidence from an abruptly-closed criminal case. He accused Ankara of failing to investigate Turkish supply routes used to provide terrorists with toxic sarin gas ingredients.
“There is data in this indictment. Chemical weapon materials are being brought to Turkey and being put together in Syria in camps of ISIS which was known as Iraqi Al Qaeda during that time,” Erdem told RT.
Sarin gas is a military-grade chemical that was used in a notorious attack on Ghouta and several other neighborhoods near the Syrian capital of Damascus in 2013. The attacks were pinned on the Syrian leadership, who in turn agreed to get rid of all chemical weapons stockpiles under a UN-brokered deal amid an imminent threat of US intervention.
Addressing parliamentarians on Thursday, Erdem showed a copy of the criminal case number 2013/120 that was opened by the General Prosecutor’s Office in the city of Adana in southern Turkey.
The investigation revealed that a number of Turkish citizens took part in negotiations with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) representatives on the supply of sarin gas. Pointing to evidence cited in the criminal case, he said that wiretapped phone conversations proved that an Al-Qaeda militant, Hayyam Kasap, acquired sarin.
“These are all detected. There are phone recordings of this shipment like ‘don’t worry about the border, we’ll take care of it’ and we also see the bureaucracy is being used,” continued Erdem.
Based on the gathered evidence Adana authorities conducted raids and arrested 13 suspects in the case. But a week later, inexplicably, the case was closed and all the suspects immediately crossed the Turkish-Syrian border, Erdem said.
“About the shipment, Republic prosecutor of Adana, Mehmet Arıkan, made an operation and the related people were detained. But as far as I understand he was not an influential person in bureaucracy. A week after, another public prosecutor was assigned, took over the indictment and all the detainees were released. And they left Turkey crossing the Syrian border,” he said.
“The phone recordings in the indictment showed all the details from how the shipment was going to be made to how it was prepared, from the content of the labs to the source of the materials. Which trucks were going to be used, all dates etc. From A to Z, everything was discussed and recorded. Despite all of this evidence, the suspects were released,” he said.
“And the shipment happened,” Erdem added. “Because no one stopped them. That’s why maybe the sarin gas used in Syria is a result of this.”
Speaking to RT, Erdem said that according to some evidence Turkish Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation was also involved, with some unconfirmed reports pointing in the direction of a government cover up, with Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdag’s involvement.
Certain evidence suggests Bozdag wanted to know beforehand from the sarin gas producer when and if the Islamists will use the chemical weapon.
“When I read the indictment, I saw clearly that these people have relationships with The Machinery and Chemical Industry Institution of Turkey and they don’t have any worries about crossing the border. For example in Hayyam Kasap’s phone records, you hear him saying sarin gas many times, saying that the ateliers are ready for production, materials are waiting in trucks which were supposedly carrying club soda,” he told RT.
The parliamentarian said that now he feels like there is a witch hunt against him, after he confronted the justice minister. Bozdag, according to Erdem denied only the part that he wanted to get notified about the operations beforehand.
Furthermore, Erdem argues that the West purposely blamed the regime of Bashar Assad for the August 2013 attacks and used it as part of the pretext to make US military intervention in Syria possible. The MP said that evidence in Adana’s case, according to his judgment, proves that IS was responsible.
“For example the chemical attack in Ghouta. Remember. It was claimed that the regime forces were behind it. This attack was conducted just days before the sarin operation in Turkey. It’s a high probability that this attack was carried out with those basic materials shipped through Turkey. It is said the regime forces are responsible but the indictment says it’s ISIS. UN inspectors went to the site but they couldn’t find any evidence. But in this indictment, we’ve found the evidence. We know who used the sarin gas, and our government knows it too,” he said.
At the same time, Erdem also accused the West and Europe in particular for providing “basic materials” to create such a powerful chemical weapon.
“All basic materials are purchased from Europe. Western institutions should question themselves about these relations. Western sources know very well who carried out the sarin gas attack in Syria. They know these people, they know who these people are working with, they know that these people are working for Al-Qaeda. I think is Westerns are hypocrites about the situation,” he concluded.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump says the Obama administration is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria and Libya.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, the Republican frontrunner pinned blame for the deadly Syrian conflict and the rise of the Daesh (ISIL) Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama.
“She is the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria.”
“You look, she was truly, if not the, one of the worst secretary of states in the history of the country,” he added. “She talks about me being dangerous; she’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.”
Fox News questioned Trump about the claim. “What do you mean, ‘hundreds of thousands?’ ”
“She was secretary of state. Obama was president, the team,” Trump responded. “Two real geniuses.”
Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011. The United States and its regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – have been supporting the terrorists operating inside Syria since the beginning of the crisis.
The foreign-sponsored war against the Syrian state and people has killed more than 250,000 people and driven more than 10 million from their homes.
Daesh terrorists, who were initially trained by the CIA in Jordan in 2012 to destabilize the Syrian government, now control large parts of Iraq and Syria.
A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
On January 25 2018 YouTube unleashed the latest salvo in the war on conspiracy theories, saying “we’ll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”
At first glance that sounds reasonable. Nobody wants YouTube or anyone else to recommend bad information. And almost everyone agrees that phony miracle cures, flat earthism, and blatantly false claims about 9/11 and other historical events are undesirable.
But if we stop and seriously consider those words, we notice a couple of problems. First, the word “recommend” is not just misleading but mendacious. YouTube obviously doesn’t really recommend anything. When it says it does, it is lying. … continue
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On Thursday, December 18, 2014, The Guardian published The race to save Peter Kassig by Ali Younes, Shiv Malik, Spencer Ackerman and Mustafa Khalili. To refresh memories here is the preface to the story:
A Review of Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas by Cass Sunstein (based on an earlier paper co-authored with Adrian Vermeule); In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business by Charlan Nemeth; and Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, edited by Joseph E. Uscinski
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