US defense establishment believes Putin must be ‘defeated’
By Bryan MacDonald | RT | March 3, 2016
Russian President Vladimir Putin. © Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik
Certain people in America’s defense establishment believe that only governments that do Washington’s bidding are “truly legitimate.” Others have ideological reasons to stir up tensions with Russia. This fuels discord and creates an unstable world.
Imagine if a major Russian media outlet carried an article with the headline, “How We Can Defeat Obama.” It’s pretty certain that within minutes various pro-NATO analysts would be all over Twitter labeling it as “hybrid warfare,”“Russian aggression” or even, heaven forbid, “hot war.” Or whatever this month’s agreed catchphrase is.
Let’s take it a step further. Ponder what would happen if the same pundits then realized the author was a recently redundant Russian Defense Department official. Without any doubt, the concern-o-meter would reach the stratosphere. Soon, the topic would be trending on Neocon Twitter. Neocon Twitter, by the way, is different than normal Twitter. In this version, all dissenting voices are blocked.
Last week, Newsweek published Evelyn Farkas, the former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia (who vacated the post only last October). In her incredibly aggressive op-ed, Farkas explained “How We Can Defeat Putin.” The same Putin who is the popularly elected President of Russia. The world’s second strongest military power.
Farkas is now an employee of the pro-NATO Atlantic Council, which the formerly venerable Newsweek appears to have partnered with. The Atlantic Council is funded by the US State Department, the US Army, the US Air Force, the UAE & Bahraini governments and various other vested interests. None of them are particularly supportive of Russia. On the other hand, most would directly benefit from increased NATO spending.
Throwing Money At NATO
How does Farkas propose “defeating” Putin? By spending more money on NATO, of course. Also, she suggests sending more weapons to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Of course, it was American meddling in the first two that created the current tensions. The latter country is currently enduring a political crisis and mass protests. This is ignored in the western media, because the corrupt incumbent regime is pro-Washington.
Farkas suggests arming the Syrian opposition, the loose coalition that includes the Al-Nusra front, which is part of Al Qaeda, the same folks who attacked New York on September 11, 2001. Not to mention, that such a course of action would destroy the nascent ceasefire in that unfortunate country.
Reading between the lines, Farkas is essentially suggesting that Washington use Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia (and anti-Assad forces in Syria) as pawns against Russia. With no concern for the economic wellbeing, or safety, of the people who live in those countries (or those in Russia). The complicated ethnic situation in those regions also seems to be irrelevant. The only priority is ‘American interests.’ Which are sacrosanct.
The fact that Farkas is the daughter of a Soviet-era Hungarian dissident is very relevant here. Charles Farkas fled Budapest, for America, following the abortive 1956 uprising. That embryonic freedom movement was brutally oppressed by Nikita Khrushchev’s USSR. Thus, it’s understandable that Evelyn has an axe to grind with Russia, even if many of its current leaders weren’t even born at that time.
Indeed, it seems almost certain that Farkas’ rhetoric projects her own deeply embedded distrust of Russia. Naturally, that hasn’t harmed her career. Hawkish anti-Russian views are attractive to the US military industry, which requires a tangible enemy to maintain funding levels. A glance at her biography shows a meteoric rise, which includes top positions at NATO.
The Big Prize
However, Farkas’s perspective outlines all that’s wrong with how the US interacts with the rest of the world today. She’s calling for the defeat of a leader with 80 percent approval ratings, because he doesn’t support US foreign policy objectives. If Putin prevents America taking over the world, he must be removed. It’s Doctor Evil stuff.
This fanatical analyst believes that Russia is a threat to America. However, it’s NATO which has been expanding during the past two decades, while Moscow has taken a defensive, often highly reactionary posture. For example, in Syria, Assad’s forces had the upper hand in Aleppo and would surely have taken the city, but Putin agreed a ceasefire rather than continue the bloodshed there. A real-life expansionist warmonger would have kept the fighting going.
In reality, it’s America which has been aggressive in this century. Illegally invading Iraq, destroying Libya, facilitating the collapse of Yemen and the Syrian Civil War. In Russia’s backyard, Washington has openly fomented uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine, the results of which have subsequently been rejected at the ballot box. The US-backed regimes in Kiev and Tbilisi were both eventually voted out after the “Orange” and “Rose” revolutions. The current ‘Maidan’ administration in Kiev now has lower approval ratings than the democratically elected, if corrupt, government it replaced.
This indicates that they were never popular upheavals to begin with, but rather driven by capital city liberals, without mass backing in the provinces.
The Washington elite believes that it can dictate to Russians about how they should be governed. They also present fringe opposition figures, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Garry Kasparov, as realistic alternatives to Putin. In the real world, serious Russia experts know that these characters have almost no support inside the country.
Russia After Putin?
As it happens, should Putin be removed as President, or voluntarily resign, it’s much more likely that his successor would be far more hardline in their attitude to the West. By Russian standards, Putin is a moderate. The vast majority of Russians are far less tolerant of America’s behavior than their President.
Another Neocon obsession is with NATO expansion. Their argument is that countries wish to join the alliance and that it’s not Russia’s business. That fails to take into account how poor these states are. The likes of Montenegro and Albania can choose to use their own meager resources to maintain a military or (https://www.nationalpriorities.org/campaigns/us-military-spending-vs-world/) have their defense spending largely looked after by America. The same America that spends as much on its army as the next nine countries combined.
With NATO, comes money. Lots of it. Dollars are attractive to impoverished nations. Doubtless, if Russia could match US largesse, the situation would probably be very different. Thus, America buys loyalty and these nations become little more than US military bases in Washington’s eyes.
The problem with Farkas’ Newsweek diatribe, and other similarly bellicose American discourse, is how downright dangerous it is. These people believe that any leadership, no matter how popular at home, with an agenda contrary to Washington is invalid and must be removed or defeated. They don’t acknowledge the absurdity that if Russia followed the same logic, there would be an apocalypse. This is because they believe that only the US is allowed to have – and pursue – ‘interests.’
A certain cabal in Washington thinks that only America, and countries that do its bidding are “truly legitimate.” They can only countenance the US agenda, at the expense of all others. This is a recipe for disaster.
Bryan MacDonald is a journalist. He worked in Dublin for many years, for Ireland on Sunday and the Evening Herald. He was also theatre critic of The Daily Mail for a period and a news, features and opinion writer. He now mainly covers Russia.
The Academy’s complicity in the Global War of false flag terrorism
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | February 28, 2016
I met Dr. Kevin Barrett as planned at a small bookstore near the Notre Dame Cathedral landmark in Paris France. On that day, December 11, 2015, the Paris bookstore was the site of a significant academic conference entitled “Islamophobia and the Erosion of Civil Society.”
Hours earlier I had exited the last class of the fall term in my third-year Globalization Studies course at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. I had driven to Calgary, hopped a flight to Dallas, and then transferred onto a big American Airlines 777 for the trans-Atlantic flight to the City of Lights now under martial law.
For the second time in 2015 Paris had been rocked by violent episodes attributed to the independent actions of Islamic terrorists. After the first event last January, Dr. Barrett had coordinated the emergency responses of a team of analytic observers, myself included.
Together we uncovered the outlines of an outlandish fraud of an externally-engineered false flag terror event. Dr. Barrett assembled the revelations in his edited book entitled We Are Not Charlie Hebdo. Now a sequel volume was in the making as Kevin and I met up in the Paris bookstore where the inner workings of the “Islamophobia Industry” were the subject of scholarly investigation.
The majority of contributors to Dr. Barrett’s book on the first Paris shooter event of 2015 concluded that the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo cartoon office and on the customers of a Jewish Deli were not as they were made to seem in the mainstream media. The evidence pointed to a continuation of the same type of state-manufactured violence directed at civilian populations in Western Europe during the Cold War by the NATO’s overseers of Project Gladio.
The aim of Project Gladio was to discredit the politics of progressive reform by misrepresenting the nature of NATO-concocted episodes of seemingly arbitrary violence directed at civilian populations.
Violent events were engineered by right-wing agents of NATO’s occupation of Western Europe to make it appear that left-wing progressives were subject to the control of psychopathic extremists intent on foisting their will on society through coercive methods.
A new wave of false flag terrorism is underway with the objective of turning public opinion against groups slated for state-sanctioned assaults, including aggressive warfare.
As demonstrated by the deep state politics of Project Gladio, false flag terrorism has long been a standard psy-op deployed by the Western intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies to affect public perception, attitude, and behaviour.
The deployment of false flag terrorism to bring history’s course into conformity with the objectives sought by strategic planners has become the particular specialty of the Israeli deep state.
The most ambitious false flag terror episode ever occurred on September 11, 2001 in the orchestrated strikes on three World Trade Center Towers, on the Pentagon and on the remnants of integrity in our governing structures. The overwhelming weight of evidence derived from these events points squarely at those in charge of the powerful networks of global influence aligned with the expansionary aspirations of Likudnik Israel.
The lies and crimes of 9/11 provided the pretext for the transition from Cold War’s demonization of socialism, as manifest in the engineered terrorism of Project Gladio, to the demonization of Muslims through what might most accurately be described as the Global War of False Flag Terrorism (GWOFFT).
The 9/11 strikes were central episodes that created the core narrative and imagery for a multi-faceted psychological operation that continues yet. This 9/11 psychological operation has been frequently characterized as a global coup d’état. The 9/11 global coup d’état was engineered to entrench neoconservative agendas aimed at concentrating more power in the world’s dominant banking, military, media and academic cartels together with the plutocrats that control them.
In the Global War of False Flag Terrorism, ruling elites everywhere have attempted to entrench their regimes of fraud and corruption by characterizing their critics and opponents as terrorists, as potential terrorists or as terrorist sympathizers.
Without a doubt it is the Jewish state of Israel that gained most from replacing anti-communism with anti-terrorism as the primary purpose and preoccupation of the world’s dominant military-industrial complex. The key to manufacturing consent for this shift has been the incitement and political exploitation of hatred towards Muslims. This engineered hatred of Muslims is often described as Islamophobia.
Convening in Paris to Shed Light on the Islamophobia
The study of Islamophobia brought together scholars from Europe and North America at the conference in the Paris bookstore. This convention of scholars was organized under the auspices of the Race and Gender Studies Center at the University of California in Berkeley.
The Chair was Prof. Hatem Bazian, Professor of Islamic Law and Theology at Zaytuna College in Berkeley. Part of the U of C, Zaytuna College is the first Muslim liberal arts institution of higher learning in the United States.
Prof. Bazian had assembled about a dozen scholars at various stages in their movement through the academic procedures of tenure and promotion. Generally speaking the assembled scholars have taken on some of the most difficult and fraught subjects covered in our university curricula. To study the institutional workings of the cynical business of purposely turning public attitudes against Muslims is an especially difficult academic mission in the poisoned atmosphere of these times.
In spite of our criticism of their work, the dozen or so colleagues who gathered at the Paris bookstore on December 11 deserve much respect and recognition. These colleagues have persisted in following a very contentious line of investigation in spite of the serious professional recriminations often thrown their way by critics who think nothing of destroying academic careers to advance political agendas.
Kevin Barrett and I took part in the proceedings with the anticipation that we would co-host our own alternative conference the following day at a hotel near the Charles De Gaulle Airport.
This plan was a response to the rejection of Dr. Barrett’s paper that was originally accepted as part of their conference.
Dr. Barrett’s proposed contribution highlighted the frequent exclusion of Muslim perspectives from officialdom’s accounts of the originating events triggering the 9/11 wars.
Dr. Barrett’s academic credentials in the subject matter of the conference are of course very strong as evidenced by the initial warm welcome extended to his offer to contribute to the conference’s scholarly proceedings.
Then came the events of Friday November 13th 2015, when the world was told Islamic terrorists had murdered over a hundred victims at a concert at the Bataclan music venue, at the Stade de France and at other Paris locations. In the wake of this development Dr. Barrett was informed by Professor Bazian,
“Due to state of emergency in France and the on-going active operations, the organizing committee is not able to accommodate your paper at this point in time. Our supporters on the ground are under extreme emergency conditions and the whole program is under stress due to it.”
In spite of the declared state of emergency in Paris the organizers had pressed ahead with the conference minus the contribution of Dr. Barrett. No explanation was given of why it was deemed alright to go forward with the other presentations but not the one containing Dr. Barrett’s interpretation of Islamophobia. The exclusion of Dr. Barrett, a Muslim himself with advanced degrees and many publications in Islamic Studies, could be seen as an expression of the very same forces that the Paris event had been convened to identify and analyse.
Rather than step aside without a protest, Dr. Barrett took part in the proceedings. I had joined him with the expectation that the next day we would try to put right the lapse that unfortunately seemed indicative of a more general failure of the academy.
How is it that, generally speaking, professors in our institutions of higher learning have failed so conspicuously to sort out truth from falsehood, accurate reporting from fraud, when it comes to explaining the origins and ongoing impetuses of the 9/11 wars?
Why have we in the academy mostly failed to rise to the responsibility of our higher calling when it comes to the vital job of identifying the thick web of lies and misrepresentations used to justify the post-9/11 surge of aggressive warfare abroad, the betrayal of human rights and civil liberties at home?
How has this treason of the intellectuals been transacted at the very moment society is most in need of evidence-based research to sort out fact from fiction when assessing the claims and assertions of the permanent war economy’s primary protagonists?
Through efforts like those of Dr. Barrett’s in his personal and public truthjihad, there have been significant breakthroughs in illuminating fraudulent reporting by presstitutes that often disseminate the disinformation essential to realizing the subversive agendas of false flag terrorism. Less has been done, however, to highlight the failures of academy to identify the lies and crimes entailed in the wholesale smearing of Muslims essential to the dark objectives of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
Islamophobia is the essential mental ingredient in the atmosphere of fear produced by the psychological geo-engineers pushing forward the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. In the words of Prof. Bazian, Islamophobia has to do with “the construction of an imagined and staged world rooted in the mind.”
The dissemination of the imagery of self-directed, self-financing Islamic terrorists acting autonomously out of no other motivation than their own religious zealotry constitutes the core lie of this malevolent psychological operation. The demonization of Muslim people, Muslim religion, Muslim cultures and Muslim countries forms the basis of the scaffolding on which a global and unbridled police state is being constructed.
This background helps explain how it is that Dr. Barrett and I had converged at the Paris bookstore on the eve of our effort to host our own conference of world-class thinkers expert in deciphering the inner workings of the Global War of False Terrorism. In taking on this responsibility we were moving into the vacuum of truth telling that the academic community has created, for the time being at least, by failing to come up with a viable evidence-based explanation of the origins and ongoing genesis of the 9/11 wars.
On December 11, 2015, the effort to go beyond the issues explored by the academics assembled in the Paris bookstore would take form the next day in a four-hour event entitled “False Flag Islamophobia” broadcast live on No Lies Radio. This event, in turn, helped encourage and hearten some of the contributors to Dr. Barrett’s new book.
Introducing the Islamophobia Industry
Sociology Professor David Miller of the University of Bath in Great Britain was one of the senior contributors to the conference at the Paris bookstore. Miller is a prolific scholar whose work on Islamophobia emerges from his important investigations into the relationship between corporate power and public relations as pioneered by the so-called father of media spin, Edward Bernays.
This approach permeates Miller’s Spinwatch website and his co-authored volume published in 2008, A Century of Spin: How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of Corporate Power.
In 2011 I had seen Professor Miller offer up a very interesting presentation in the Westminster Parliament in London England. His address in the Mother of All Parliaments helped give rise to his co-authored publication, The Cold War on British Muslims.
Professor Miller’s presentation in Paris on 11 December 2015 continued the development of themes that have brought on significant wrath from elements of the Jewish-Israeli lobby in Great Britain.
For instance the website of the pro-Zionist Gatestone Institute criticized Professor Miller for his work showing the “covert propaganda operations” of several Jewish organizations with preferential access to high-profile media venues. http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6677/david-miller-hilary-aked-kevin-macdonald.
Along with Professor Bazian, Miller has been prominent in identifying the financing and workings of an interlinked complex of agencies that Nathan Lean and others have dubbed the “The Islamophobia Industry.”
According to the Legislating Fear report of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the dozens of agencies that make up this hate-inciting industry are funded to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars. In the words of Bazian, the aim of the well-funded endeavour is “to use fear and hate-mongering to lull our intellect to sleep” and “to implant negative and racist ideas about Muslims and Islam in our collective consciousness.”
Prominent among the core institutions of the trans-Atlantic Islamophobia Industry are the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the Henry Jackson Society, the Quilliam Foundation, the Gladstone Institute, Daniel Pipe’s Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, Pam Geller’s Atlas Shrugs, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s AMCHA Initiative, the Clarion Project, the David Horowitz Freedom Center and CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting.
These and many other agencies whose mission is to incite Islamophobia, derive their funding from a variety of sources including the family foundations of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Sarah Scaife, Harry Bradley, Irving Moskowitz and Canada’s Bronfman dynasty. As noted above, the Gladstone Institute has made the work of Professor David Miller, including the content of his website Spinwatch, a particular target of its pro-Zionist defense of the Islamophobia Industry.
http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/2014/04/16/latent-and-manifest-islamophobia-an-inception-of-ideas/
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/religion/report/2015/02/11/106394/fear-inc-2-0/
http://www.islamophobiatoday.com/tag/islamophobia-industry/
http://www.ijan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/IJAN-Business-of-Backlash-full-report-web.pdf
Much of the work of David Miller and his colleagues in exposing the pro-Zionist activities of the anti-Muslim hate purveyors involves tracing the money fuelling the Islamophobia Industry. This follow-the-money approach could very easily extend to tracking down the sources of financing for the staging of expensive false flag terror events.
Throughout the academic presentations I witnessed at the Paris bookstore, there was a persistent resistance by all the presenters to engage in some sort of reckoning with the anti-Muslim thrust of the false flag terrorism currently imposed upon us.
In every presentation there was the same conspicuous absence of interest in investigating the primary engine of contemporary Islamophobia, namely the engineering of false flag terror events to be blamed on Muslim fundamentalists said to be acting alone for no other reason than their religious extremism.
According to Kevin Barrett’s record of the event, when it came time for questions and answers I posed my query as follows:
“This is all very interesting, but I’m not hearing any of you get to the root of why there is all this Islamophobia. There is now a huge literature on the fact that these big terror attacks are contrived. It was 9/11 and all of the subsequent events that have created the wave of Islamophobia. I know it’s not a good career move, but: Why can’t we talk about this? Why can’t we –”
I emphasized in my question the observation that the dominant forces animating Islamophobia lie in the extravagant media misrepresentations of false flag terror events. Again and again these episodes of false flag terror are presented as the independent, self-directed work of Islamic extremists acting exclusively out of religious zealotry rather than the actions of mercenaries paid to create the political currency of fear necessary for the maintenance of the permanent war economy.
These misrepresentations form the very core of the activities of the Islamophobia Industry as composed by agencies such as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. An outgrowth of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the FDD was created a mere two days after the events of 9/11.
It fell to Professor Miller to respond to my question. He began by taking exception to my suggestion that some “psychopaths” might be involved as “assets” in the execution of false flag terrorism. Miller indicated that, in his estimation, Islamic terror events were by and large the product of considered actions on the part of alienated Muslims who had experienced devastating consequences from various forms of hostile invasion into the lives of their own families, communities, and nations.
Their violent responses, he indicated, were often the product of long reflection and preparation by mostly intelligent individuals prone to be especially sensitive to the gross abuses of human rights directed at Islamic populations both within the West and on its resource frontiers.
In retrospect Miller’s response was a classic illustration of the “blowback theory” of 9/11. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire is the name of an iconographic text by a former CIA analyst, Chalmers Johnson.
Although Johnson’s Blowback was first published in 1999, the volume became a bestseller after the events of September 11, 2001. Johnson believed the United States was imperiled by the flood of recriminations that would almost inevitably arise from those most negatively affected by the secret incursions of American empire.
Many seized on the central argument of Blowback to explain what had transpired on 9/11. I include myself in that category. Until my friend and colleague, the late Mohawk activist Splitting The Sky, insisted in 2008 that I look into the evidence of what did and did not happen on 9/11, I adhered to the blowback theory.
I mistakenly believed that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Indigenous peoples resisting repeated rounds of imperial assault on their lands, their persons and their ways of life. I recall it was difficult for me to put this interpretation aside once I began looking at the overwhelming evidence that the various agencies charged to protect us were in fact deeply involved in perpetrating the lies and crimes of 9/11.
The response of Professor Miller to my question seemed to demonstrate the continuing allure of the Blowback theory of 9/11 in spite of the conclusions that have emerged from the elaborate citizens’ inquiry into the events of September 11, 2001. The outcome of the citizens’ inquiry demonstrated long ago that the evidence does not support the thesis that all the destruction on 9/11 can be traced back to the independent actions of 19 Saudi jihadists acting to realize a plan hatched by Osama bin Laden.
I found it very instructive to witness how a group of otherwise courageous and conscientious scholars skated around any direct engagement with the origins and genesis of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. Our collective failure to force on our governments and institutions some basic reckoning with the lies and crimes of 9/11 have made our societies vulnerable to a seemingly endless repetition of the same scenario of manipulation through the incitement of fear towards Muslims. The key to creating these fears lies in the parade of recent false flag terror events in, for instance, London, Madrid, Bali, Ottawa, Paris and San Bernardino to mention only a few.
The event at the Paris bookstore might be characterized as a frontier zone marking the boundary between permitted and prohibited academic discourse. Their proceedings therefore provided an instructive window illuminating the more general failure of the academy to deal in deep and systematic ways with the full extent of the travesty. The potential of humanity is grossly undermined by the absurdity of a never-ending war being waged “on Terror”. The War on Truth is the most essential feature of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
The Islamophobia Industry and the Deep State Operations of the False Flag Terror Industry
I have learned a lot at the Paris conference and in my subsequent research into the leads provided by the scholars who participated. Professor Miller and others called my attention to, for instance, the dual preoccupations of the same funders and lobby groups that simultaneously instigate hatred to Muslims even as they invest in and promote Jewish settlements on the expansionary frontiers of the Israeli warrior state.
I found particular value in the content of a report by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network entitled, The Business of Backlash: The Attack on the Palestinian Movement and Other Movements of Justice. The document explains in detail the financial, ideological and political community of interests wedding the arms and media industries in the United States to the military and security establishment of Israel.
The channeling of vast treasuries of public funds from the USA to Israel has the effect of creating huge slush funds that end in the coffers of American politicians and in the corporate proprietorships of war profiteers.
The authors go on to explain that this coalition of shared interests is pointed against all manner of progressive movements including environmental groups as well as the decolonization struggles of Blacks, Latinos and Indigenous peoples. It seems the same techniques deployed to cast an aura of criminality over the freedom movement of oppressed Palestinians is being applied more broadly.
Accordingly, the demonization of whole populations by practitioners of the Islamophobia Industry casts a very broad shadow. The hate inciting smear campaigns support oppressive structures of top-down power running contrary to the exercise of even the most fundamental principles of universal human rights.
The Islamophobia Industry’s assault on human rights extended to an attack on the academic freedom of Professor Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, one of the more prominent participants in the proceedings at the Paris bookstore. Abdulhadi is Director of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative at San Francisco State University in California. Recently she has was targeted by a formidable array of Islamophobes led by Tammi Rossman-Benjamin’s AMCHA Initiative.
The attack on Professor Abdulhadi was discussed in The Business of Backlash. Her Zionist detractors accused the Palestinian-American academic of being “a terrorist supporter as well as a supporter of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.” She was said to embody “all that is wrong with radical elements of academia who have all but hijacked the social science and humanities fields. Her obsessive focus on Israel and monomaniacal demonization of the Mideast’s only democracy betray a troubling pattern of Judeophobia and overt anti-Semitism.” http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/222457/terrorists-campus-ari-lieberman
A formidable coalition of academic colleagues and civil rights organizations rallied to the defense of Professor Abdulhadi who was represented by the lawyers of the Palestinian Solidarity Legal Support network. Abdulhadi’s participation in the Paris conference as a working professor attests to their success in persuading the administration of San Francisco State University to fend off the malicious attempt to end this important scholar’s academic career.
It seems very strange that those who participated in the academic conference in Paris, like those who authored The Business of Backlash, could make themselves so expert on the relationships between the Islamophobia Industry, Jewish Settlements on the West Bank and the deep state machinations of the Israeli-American power elite but not extend their investigations further.
The evidence has become overwhelming that what is portrayed in the media as self-motivated, self-financing, self-directed Islamic terrorism is rather the outcome of a complex network of connections linking intelligence agencies, paid assets, mercenaries and other private sector contractors connected to the operations and objectives of the pro-Zionist Islamophobia Industry.
As my reading on the Islamophobia Industry progressed I came to see the most visible agencies of public hate mongering towards Muslims as but the tip of the iceberg of far larger structures of deceit and corruption. Beneath the overt activities of the Muslim-bashing agencies lie the covert deep state entities devoted to generating the false flag terror events on which the parasitic Islamophobia Industry feeds.
This connection can be well illustrated in the reincarnation after 9/11 of the Project for the New American Century as the pro-Zionist, anti-Muslim Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
The basic aim of this whole sordid complex of deep state and public agencies is to transform Israel’s Arab and predominantly Muslim regional enemies, the Palestinians, into one element of a larger global entity presented as the antithesis of the West’s self-proclaimed “freedoms.”
Composed of the worldwide community of Muslims, the ommah was instrumentalized in public mythology as the aberrant “other” to be guarded against, pacified and sometimes vanquished. The wholesale demonization of Muslims served the purpose of providing the war machine with a new enemy to replace the defunct enemy of the Soviet Union.
The Memes, Symbols and Demonology Deployed in Generating Hatred Towards Muslims
The same banking-military-media establishment that benefited most from the permanent war economy on the capitalist side of the Cold War was reborn, re-energized and refinanced with the launching of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism. In this fashion a degree of continuity was maintained as the same national security establishment created to fight communism was re-deployed in a very strange operation involving both the creation of, and opposition to, Islamic terrorism.
In the decade and a half since 9/11 a powerful Islamophobia Industry has set the tone for the entire mainstream media. In the process, the imagery of Islamic jihad has been rendered an essential part of the visual vocabulary of popular culture. The project of generating fear of Muslims in mainstream media draws on many tried and true techniques of the Public Relations Industry.
The integration of Islamophobia into popular culture often invokes archetypes and symbols from religious mythology like, for instance, the stereotypical demonology of witchcraft and devil worship. Resort is made to mental imagery rooted in children’s fables such as Peter and the Wolf.
To convey these messages, instant-made-for-TV “terrorist” experts regularly conjure up terms such as “Lone Wolf Terrorist” even as they warn us against the “Homegrown Terrorists” said to be lurking amongst us. In such theatres of normalized hate speech, whole populations are wedged, divided and turned against each other to grease the gears of fear and distrust as primary lubricants for political and commercial exploitation.
The lies and crimes of 9/11 lie at the origins of a Great Transformation for the worse. To fail to deal with what did or did not happen in the Mother of All False Flag Terror Events is to give credence to the interpretation that the saga of misrepresentation essential to the Global War on Terror’s genesis did not begin until 2003.
According to that gatekeepers version of reality, the administration of George W. Bush was an innocent victim of Islamic attacks until the executive branch began floating the lie that the government of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Much of the responsibility for publicizing the false assertions that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction has been laid at the doorstep of the New York Times and the work of its star reporter Judith Miller.
Miller’s primary sources on this story included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, all prominent Israeli-American members of the Project for a New American Century.
In a major report in 2000, PNAC anticipated the events of 9/11 by proclaiming that the realization of their neoconservative agenda could not be achieved “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event– like a new Pearl Harbour.”
Is it credible that a handful of Saudi Muslims led by Osama bin Laden, armed with nothing but box cutters, a smattering of flight training and intense jihadist zeal, acted independently to bring about the elaborate high-tech crime that took place on 9/11?
Is it credible that the neocon cabal controlling both the Israeli government and the Bush White House was fortuitously presented by self-directed jihadists with precisely the catalytic event it needed to institute its ambitious agenda of police repression at home and military expansion abroad.
Is it credible that the neocon establishment was only a respondent to, rather than an author of, the cataclysmic events of 9/11? If the events of 9/11 were indeed a surprise attack on power symbols of American prowess in warfare and commerce, why was no one responsible for such a stupendous breach of national security fired for such a spectacular failure? How is it that so many of those who accuse the Bush-Cheney regime of lying about so many subjects refuse to explore the extent of the lies whose effect is to protect the actual perpetrators of the 9/11 crimes?
Part of the problem in the official cover story of 9/11 is that the custodians of the fable keep on changing it to suit the changing currents of political expediency. In the early days following 9/11, the culprits were said to be Osama bin Laden and his coterie of Islamic extremists in al-Qaeda.
Then the demonology of 9/11 shifted so that somehow Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi government were made to epitomize the jihadist extremes of Islamic terror. Once Saddam was captured and executed the world was briefly introduced to a person or persons identified by the name Khalid Sheik Mohammed. For a time it seemed that the US executive branch would conduct a show trial in New York of Khalid, the supposed “mastermind of 9/11” to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the infamous day.
The plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed for war crimes was abandoned. This prisoner remains jailed in the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba. There he has been tortured through water boarding many dozens of times in order to elicit all manner of confessions including some that found their way into the 9/11 Commission report in the United States.
The creation of an official government report, whose conclusions are drawn from supposed evidence obtained from illegal torture, is itself a war crime. Accordingly, those academics, jurists, politicians, journalists, and other public intellectuals who accept the 9/11 Commission report as accurate and satisfactory are rendered complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Instead of conducting a show trial, the government of US President Barack Obama opted to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by announcing that US Navy Seals had hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden at a compound near Abbottabad Pakistan.
In this fashion bin Laden was posthumously returned to the role assigned him by the White House and media agencies within hours of the 9/11 strikes without any formal investigation whatsoever.
According to Seymour Hersh, the White House’s story on bin Laden’s elimination “might have been written by Lewis Carroll.” Bin Laden was supposedly buried at sea. What sense would it make simply to execute the man that would be far and away the world’s foremost authority on international jihadism if the mythological demonology attending the 9/11 psychological operation was actually true.
The elimination by the Democratic Party President of the Republican Party President’s initial 9/11 patsy cleared the way for a new phase in the Global War of False Flag Terrorism overseen by Barack Obama.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden
This Democratic Party version of the neocon plan for global domination restored al-Qaeda to a role something like it had played in the 1980s as a part of the mujahadeen proxy army army serving US geopolitical strategies. Where al-Qaeda helped overthrow the US-backed puppet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in the second decade of the twenty-first century al-Qaeda was reborn as a mercenary instrument of NATO’s assault on the Libyan government of Muammar Gaddafi.
The instrumentalization of mercenary armies paid to fight under the banner of Islamic religion has grown in scope so that this historical trajectory lies at the very heart of the international showdown for control of the lands and resources of Syria. Under heavy Israeli pressure, the US government with backing from the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar has built up al-Qaeda’s successor, Jabhat al-Nusra. The aim of this sponsorship of Islamic theocrats hostile to Bashir al-Assad’s more secular and pluralistic Russian-backed Syrian government is to balkanize the region and possibly to prepare the ground for the eastward and northward expansion of Israel.
This US backing of al-Qaeda-related fighters was spun as support for a “moderate opposition” to the Assad government. This scenario unfolded concurrently with the rise, in Iraq and Syria, of the entity known variously as the Islamic State in the Levant, ISIL, ISIS, and more recently Daesh.
The evidence has become overwhelming that this fighting force is financed, armed and organized in part to embody the memes of hatred and extremism essential to the operations of the Islamophobia Industry and the main protagonists of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
The close connection in the international oil business linking governments of Turkey, Israel and the non-state entity dubbed the Islamic State, highlight the many layers of complicity in a very strange operation. The US government presents itself publicly as the world’s leading opponent of Islamic terror while it cultivates, assists and facilitates the very forces it says it is fighting.
In a recent post on his website, Voltairenet, Thierry Meyssen has described the prevalent blindness to what has been really taking place in the region of Syria and Iraq. He lays bare the dynamics of a dangerous game that involves “pretending, like NATO, that these [Islamic fighting] groups are independent formations which have suddenly materialised from the void, with all their salaries, armament and spare parts. More seriously, the jihadists are in fact mercenaries in the service of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar…. to which we must add certain multinationals like Academi, KKR and Exxon-Mobil.”
A Reversion to Old Styles of Imperialism in the Name of Anti-Terrorism?
Since bin Laden was supposedly buried at sea by the US Armed Forces in 2010 the role once assigned to al-Qaeda as the all-purpose boogyman of Islamic terrorism has now been re-assigned to the non-state entity dubbed the Islamic State. When acts of false flag terrorism take place as in Ottawa in October 2014, or in Paris in November of 2015, or in San Bernardino a month later, the authorities in charge of pseudo-investigations are prone to announce almost immediately a connection to ISIS/ISIL Daesh.
The criminal law is thereby put aside and the violent events are immediately elevated to “acts of war” justifying quick retaliation by Armed Forces. Within hours of the Friday the 13th Paris event, for instance, French President Francois Hollande was ordering the French Air Force to intervene in Syria.
While the supposed target was ISIS/ISIL/Daesh encampments and strongholds, there is reason to see the real objective of the supposed anti-terror attacks as the overthrow of the Assad government. This French military intervention could thus be interpreted as a resort to France’s old imperial role in the part of the Middle East assigned it by the Eurocentric Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.
The point of this foray into the recent history of the Global War of False Flag Terrorism is to encourage colleagues in the academy to address, document and explain the unfolding patterns of deception so integral to the process of enlarging the unaccountable powers of the covert deep state, diminishing the overt role of the public state. I extend this encouragement especially to the colleagues that Dr. Barrett and I met in the Paris bookstore at the event entitled “Islamophobia and the Erosion of Civil Society”.
These colleagues and their networks of academic collaborators have made a good start in identifying the institutionalization of hate mongering in the Islamophobia Industry. The time has come, however, to connect the visible workings of this Zionist enterprise of anti-Muslim provocation to the deep state operations in the ongoing Global War of False Flag Terrorism.
Dr. Hall is editor in chief of American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
Why Are Neocons so Desperate to Rescue al-Qaeda in Syria?
By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | February 11, 2016
Reading Dennis Ross and David Ignatius is a good reminder that the neocons live in a different world than the rest of us. They do not conform their analysis to reality, but rather they conform reality to their view of the world. Where most people would be encouraged to read that Aleppo in Syria was about to be liberated from its 3.5 year occupation by al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, the neocons see a disaster.
On the brink of al-Qaeda’s defeat in Aleppo, the Washington Post’s Ignatius is furious that, “President Obama won’t approve military tactics that could actually shift the balance.” Yes, he wants to shift the balance toward al-Qaeda because like the other neocons he is so invested in the idea of regime change in Syria that he would even prefer turning the country into another Libya than to see government forces defeat his jihadist insurgents. Failing to “shift the balance” toward al-Qaeda fighters in Aleppo only brings “greater misery for the Syrian people,” in the world of Ignatius.
Ignatius’s Washington Post, which has never seen a potential war it did not want to see turned into an actual war, thinks it a tragedy that the Syrian army’s advance on al-Qaeda occupied Aleppo has “cut off all vital routes of supply from Turkey to the rebel-held areas of the city.” Those would be Turkish supplies in support of al-Qaeda and ISIS rebels, but the Post is too deceptive to mention that fact.
It is as dishonest an inversion of reality as anything printed in Pravda of old.
In the same vein as Ignatius, former Bush/Clinton/Obama Administration Middle East “expert” Dennis Ross writes to tell us, “what Putin is really up to in Syria.” In the above-linked article, The Los Angeles Times does not reveal that Ross is hardly an objective observer of the situation. As one of the founders of AIPAC‘s Washington Institute for Near East Policy — and a current counselor to that organization — Ross strongly supports AIPAC’s position in favor of regime change in Syria and Israel’s active role in assisting jihadist rebels from al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front in their efforts to overthrow the Assad government.
So what does regime change neocon Dennis Ross want us to believe is happening in Syria? The Russians, he asserts, are playing a dirty game by stepping up their bombing campaign against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and affiliated rebels instead of pushing for a ceasefire. How funny that when the US/Turk/Saudi/Israeli-back jihadists were on the verge of taking over all of Syria not that long ago there was no talk from neocon quarters about a ceasefire or a negotiated political solution. Only now that al-Qaeda’s stronghold in Aleppo is on the verge of liberation by government forces are the neocons screaming that diplomacy should be given a chance.
Russian operations are “designed to strengthen the Assad regime and weaken the non-Islamic State Sunni opposition in different parts of the country,” writes Ross. He doesn’t mention that particularly when it comes to Aleppo, the “non-Islamic State Sunni opposition” means al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and affiliated forces.
By relentlessly bombing Islamic State and other jihadist groups seeking to introduce Sharia law into secular Syria, “Putin is… undercutting our aim of isolating Islamic State and having Sunnis lead the fight against it.” Read that again. By attacking ISIS he is preventing the US from isolating ISIS. Doublespeak.
What is Putin really up to in the world of Dennis Ross? He is not sincere about defeating Islamist extremism in Syria or even helping Assad’s forces win the war. No, Putin “aims to demonstrate that Russia, and not America, is the main power broker in the region and increasingly elsewhere.” Ah yes, the old argument about Russian expansionism. Baltic invasion, restoration of the USSR. All the neocon tripe.
Ah but here is where Ross plants his seed, whispers in the Administration’s neocon power brokers’ ears:
“Certainly, were Russia’s costs to increase, Putin might look for a way out.”
Hmm, now we see what he’s getting at:
… it is time we make it clear to the Russians that unless they impose a cease-fire on Assad and Hezbollah and insist that humanitarian corridors are open, we will have no choice but to act with our partners to create a haven in Syria — for refugees and for the organization of the Syrian opposition.
In other words, tell Russia if you do not stop fighting al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria we will face-off in a WWIII-threatening stance to establish a “jihadistan” in part of Syria from where the hundredth or so version of a rebel fighting force can be re-assembled.
Ross’s plan is not for the weak of heart. “[W]e cannot threaten to create a haven without following through if Putin refused to alter his course,” he writes. Meaning of course that we must be willing to actually go through with WWIII if Putin does not blink, back down, and pull out of Syria just as Russia’s intervention is meeting its objective. Surrender when on the verge of victory in Syria or face a nuclear war with the United States.
No one ever accused the neocons of thinking small. But with much of the Middle East a smoldering ruin due to the disastrous interventions they lied us into, no one should count out even their most insane-sounding plan being seriously considered somewhere in Washington.
Citing Terrorism Concerns, John Kerry Supports Saudi Bloodbath in Yemen
Sputnik – 25.01.2016
US Secretary of State John Kerry has expressed his support for Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen, a conflict that has killed over 2,400 civilians. As justification, the secretary reiterated false claims that Riyadh is battling al-Qaeda.
Over the weekend, the White House stated its concern over the rising civilian death toll in the Yemen conflict.
“We are deeply concerned about recent reports of escalating violence in Yemen and resulting deaths of civilians…” White House National Security Council spokesperson Ned Price said in statement on Saturday.
But while the Obama administration is ostensibly worried about the amount of violence, it also fully supports the Saudi campaign that is creating the chaos. One day after the release of Price’s statement, US Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated his full support for Riyadh’s actions.
“Let me assure everybody that the relationship between the United States and the GCC nations ([Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council) is one that is built on mutual interest, on mutual defense and I think there is no doubt whatsoever in the minds of the countries that make up the GCC that the United States will stand with them against any external threat,” Kerry told reporters.
Kerry claimed that the war was necessary since it is partially aimed at targeting “al-Qaeda operatives.” Those motivations are highly suspect, however, given that Riyadh failed to go after al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) during the first nine months of fighting.
In April, the Saudi government also looked the other way as AQAP seized the port city of al Mukalla. By gaining control of the central bank, the terrorist group gained over $17 billion from the city’s capture.
In addition, Kerry cited the need to combat Iranian “interference.”
“The United States remains concerned about some of the activities that Iran is engaged in other countries,” he told reporters.
Riyadh has provided little evidence to suggest that Tehran is providing any assistance to Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Riyadh’s intervention began last March, and the Saudi naval blockade of Yemen has left approximately 1 million people internally displaced, and as many as 20 million people in need of food, water, and medical supplies.
The United Nations estimates that as many as 2,400 Yemeni civilians have been killed by coalition bombing. Most airstrikes have utilized cluster munitions sold by the United States. Worth an estimated $1.2 billion, this could partially explain Kerry’s support, but it also implicates Washington in Yemen’s civilian deaths.
“We should be culpable for the crime of killing civilians as well, as we produce and sell the weapons when we know the use they will be put to,” retired US Army Major Todd Pierce told Sputnik.
“Our indivisibility with our ‘allies’ inculpates us in their crimes…”
Saudi-led airstrike kills family of 8, incl. Yemeni judge who presided over Pres. Hadi treason case
RT | January 25, 2016
A Houthi-appointed national security court judge and seven members of his family were killed in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike in the Yemini capital Sanaa, according to local residents.
The Sunday bombing partially destroyed the home of Yahya Rubaid, a judge who had prosecuted cases against militant groups including Al-Qaeda. He had also presided over treason cases against President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi and other ousted opponents of the Houthis.
Seven members of Rubaid’s family – everyone except one of his sons – were also killed in the bombing, residents told Reuters.
Supported by the US, the Saudi-led coalition has been bombing the Houthi rebels – who control Sanaa – since March 2015.
The coalition sides with exiled President Hadi, while the Houthis are aligned with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned in 2012 following a popular uprising against his rule.
Nearly 6,000 people have been killed since the bombing began in March, around half of them civilians, according to UN figures. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told the UN Security Council in December that although all parties to the conflict were responsible, “a disproportionate amount” of attacks on civilian areas “appeared to be the result of airstrikes carried out by coalition forces.”
The coalition has been criticized numerous times for the way it conducts airstrikes. Earlier this month, it was blamed for hitting a hospital in the southern Bayda province, just one day after one of its missiles killed four people at a Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital. The coalition was also blamed for targeting a center for the blind.
Just last week, MSF stated that hospitals in Yemen are seen as targets, noting that over 100 facilities have witnessed attacks since the Saudi-led coalition began its bombing campaign.
“People still consider hospitals a target and try to avoid them as much as possible. The only cases that we are receiving are emergencies and mass casualties following attacks,” Juan Prieto, general coordinator of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) projects in Yemen, said in a statement.
US Role as State Sponsor of Terrorism Implied in US Congressional Research Service Report on Syria Conflict
By Stephen Gowans | what’s left | January 10, 2016
The implication of a report written for the US Congress is that the United States is a state sponsor of terrorism in Syria. At the same time, the report challenges widely held beliefs about the conflict, including the idea that the opposition has grass-roots support and that the conflict is a sectarian war between Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect and the majority Sunnis.
Written in October 2015, the report was prepared by the Congressional Research Service, an arm of the United States Library of Congress. The Congressional Research Service provides policy and legal analysis to committees and members of the US House and Senate.
Titled “Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and US Response,” the report reveals that:
1. The Syrian conflict is between Islamists and secularists, not Sunnis and Alawites.
Media reports often emphasize the dominant Sunni character of the rebels who have taken up arms against the Syrian government, while depicting the Syrian government as Alawite-led. What is almost invariably overlooked is that the largest Sunni fighting force in Syria is the country’s army. Yes, the rebels are predominantly Sunni, but so too are the Syrian soldiers they’re fighting. As Congress’s researchers point out, “most rank and file military personnel have been drawn from the majority Sunni Arab population and other (non-Alawite) minority groups” (p. 7). Also: “Sunni conscripts continue to fight for Assad” (p. 12). Rather than being a battle between two different sects, the conflict is a struggle, on the one hand, between Sunni fundamentalists who want to impose their version of Islam on Syrian politics and society, and on the other hand, Syrians, including Sunnis, who embrace a vision of a secular, non-sectarian government.
2. The Syrian Opposition Coalition is dominated by Islamists and is allied with foreign enemies of Syria.
According to the report, the Syrian National Council (whose largest member is the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood) is the “largest constituent group” of the Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC). The SOC is based “in Turkey and considered to be close to foreign opponents of Assad.” (p. 14) The Muslim Brotherhood seeks to base political rule on the Quran, which it sees as divinely inspired, rather than on a secular constitution.
3. “Political opposition coalitions appear to lack…grass roots support” (p. 27).
This is consistent with the findings of a public opinion poll taken last summer by a research firm that is working with the US and British governments. That poll found that Assad has more support than the forces arrayed against him.
Syrians rally for Assad, October, 2011.
The survey, conducted by ORB International, a company which specializes in public opinion research in fragile and conflict environments, found that 47 percent of Syrians believe that Assad has a positive influence in Syria, compared to only 35 percent for the Free Syrian Army and 26 percent for the SOC. [1]An in-country face-to-face ORB poll conducted in May 2014 arrived at similar conclusions. That poll found that more Syrians believed the Assad government best represented their interests and aspirations than believed the same about any of the opposition groups. [2]
According to the poll, only six percent believed that the “genuine” rebels represented their interests and aspirations, while the ‘National Coalition/transitional government,” a reference to the SOC, drew even less support, at only three percent.
Assad has repeatedly challenged the notion that he lacks popular support, pointing to his government surviving nearly five years of war against forces backed by the most powerful states on the planet. It’s impossible to realistically conceive of his government’s survival under these challenging circumstances, he argues, without its having the support of a sizeable part of its population. [3]
4. A moderate opposition doesn’t exist. The United States is trying to build one to act as its partner.
The report refers to US efforts to create partners in Syria, a euphemism for puppets who can be relied upon to promote US interests.
“Secretary of Defense Carter described the ‘best’ scenario for the Syrian people as one that would entail an agreed or managed removal of Assad and the coalescence of opposition forces with elements of the remaining Syrian state apparatus as U.S. partners ….” (emphasis added, pp. 15-16).
Also: The Pentagon “sought to…groom and support reliable leaders to serve as U.S partners…” (emphasis added, p. 23).
To create partners, the United States is engaged in the project of building a “moderate” opposition. According to the report:
“On June 18, Secretary of Defense Carter said, ‘…the best way for the Syrian people for this to go would be for him to remove himself from the scene and there to be created, difficult as it will be, a new government of Syria based on the moderate opposition that we have been trying to build…” (emphasis added, footnote, p. 16).
In the report summary the researchers write that US strategy seeks to avoid “inadvertently strengthening Assad, the Islamic State, or other anti-U.S. armed Islamist groups” (emphasis added.) What’s left unsaid is that armed Islamist groups that are not immediately anti-U.S. may be looked upon favorably by US strategy. However, that “political opposition coalitions…appear to lack grass-roots support,” and that Washington can’t rely on an already-formed moderate opposition but needs to build one, shows that the set of rebels on which the US can rely to act as US partners who will rule with elements of the existing Syrian state in a post-Assad Syria is virtually empty. The conclusion is substantiated by the failure of a now-abandoned Pentagon program to train and equip vetted rebel groups. Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the top American commander in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that despite the Pentagon spending $500 million training and equipping “moderate” rebels, only “four or five” were “in the fight.” [4] As the Wall Street Journal observed in late December, moderate rebels don’t exist. They’ve either been absorbed into Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrah al-Sham and ISIS—the extremist terrorist groups which dominate the opposition—or were Islamist militants all along. [5]
5. The United States is arming sectarian terrorists indirectly and possibly directly and covertly.
The report points out that not only has the Pentagon openly trained and equipped rebels, but that the United States has also covertly armed them. According to the Congress’s researchers:
“Then Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said in a September 2013 hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Administration was taking steps to provide arms to some Syrian rebels under covert action authorities” (p. 23).
Also:
“Secretary Hagel said, ‘it was June of this year that the president made the decision to support lethal assistance to the opposition….we, the Department of Defense, have not been involved in this. This is, as you know, a covert action’” (footnote, p.23).
If the United States was prepared to overtly arm some rebel groups, why is it covertly arming others? A not unreasonable hypothesis is that it is arming some rebel groups covertly because they have been designated as terrorist organizations. To be sure, a number of press reports have revealed that rebels who have received training and arms from the United States are operating with terrorist groups in Syria. According to the Wall Street Journal, “insurgents who have been trained covertly by the Central Intelligence Agency…are enmeshed with or fighting alongside more hard-line Islamist groups, including the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syria affiliate” [6]. Another report from the same newspaper notes that “al-Nusra has fought alongside rebel units which the U.S. and its regional allies have backed” [7]. A third report refers to collaboration between “CIA-backed Free Syrian army factions and extremist elements such as Nusra Front and Ahrar al Sham” [8]. Let’s be clear. Anyone who is enmeshed with and fighting alongside Al-Qaeda is a terrorist.
According to Congress’s researchers, weapons the US furnished to selected groups have made their way to jihadists. “Some Syrian opposition groups that have received U.S. equipment and weaponry to date have surrendered or lost these items to other groups, including to extremist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra” (p. 23).
When you consider that, as The Washington Post reported, “the CIA has trained and equipped nearly 10,000 fighters sent into Syria over the past several years” [9] and that, at best, there are 700, and more likely only 70 “moderate” rebels in Syria [10], then the bulk of the large rebel force the CIA has trained and equipped is very likely made up of Islamist extremists. Concealing this shameful reality from the US public is probably the principal reason the program is covert.
6. Washington wants to contain ISIS, but not eliminate it, in order to maintain military pressure on the Syrian government.
Based on the US coalition’s less than vigorous air campaign against ISIS, many observers have questioned whether the United States is at all serious about eliminating ISIS just yet, and is simply trying to contain it, to keep pressure on the Syrian government. For example, veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk says: “I don’t think the U.S. is serious. Very occasionally, you can hear the rumble of American bombs. But they’re certainly not having much effect.” [11]
One day, soon after Russia began air operations in Syria, journalist Patrick Cockburn noted that “Russian planes carried out 71 sorties and 118 air strikes against Islamic fighters in Syria over the past two days compared to just one air strike by the US-led coalition – and this single strike, against a mortar position, was the first for four days.” [12] After ISIS captured Palmyra, and pushed into Aleppo, the US coalition did nothing to push back the ISIS advance, leading even rebels to question “the U.S.’s commitment to containing the group.” [13] Assad too has expressed scepticism about whether the United States is serious about destroying ISIS, pointing to the terrorist organization’s continued successes in Syria, despite the US coalition’s presumed war against it. “Since this coalition started to operate,” observed the Syrian president, “ISIS has been expanding. In other words, the coalition has failed and it has no real impact on the ground.” [14]
A tepid approach to fighting ISIS in Syria would fit with US president Barack Obama’s stated goal of degrading the Al-Qaeda offspring organization. Destroying it may be an ultimate goal, to be achieved after ISIS has served the purpose of weakening the Syrian government. But for now, the United States appears to be willing to allow ISIS to continue to make gains in Syria. The Congressional Research Service report concurs with this view: It concludes that “U.S. officials may be concerned that a more aggressive campaign against the Islamic State may take military pressure off the” Syrian government (p. 19).
By contrast, Moscow has pursued a more vigorous war against ISIS, and for an obvious reason. Unlike Washington, it seeks to prop up its Syrian ally, not give ISIS room to weaken it. It should be additionally noted that Russia’s military operations in Syria are legal, carried out with the permission of the Syrian government. By contrast, the US coalition has brazenly flouted international law to enter Syrian airspace without Damascus’s assent. It has, in effect, undertaken an illegal invasion and committed a crime of aggression, compounded by its training and arming of terrorists.
Conclusion
The report says that in the absence of grass-roots support for political opposition coalitions in Syria, the United States is relying on a number of tactics to pressure the current government in Syria to step down, including:
• Keeping ISIS alive as a tool to sustain military pressure on Damascus.
• Arming jihadist groups indirectly and (we can assume) directly (albeit covertly) to pressure Assad.
• Seeking to create a moderate opposition that will act as a US partner.
• Trying to co-opt parts of the existing Syrian state to take a partnership role in governing a post-Assad Syria.
The implication of points 1 and 2 is that the United States—as the trainer of, and supplier of arms, to rebels who are enmeshed with and fighting alongside Al-Qaeda in Syria, and in keeping ISIS alive, in order to use these terrorist organizations to achieve its political goal of installing a US-partner government in Syria—is a state sponsor of terrorism.
1. http://www.opinion.co.uk/perch/resources/syriadata.pdf
2. http://www.opinion.co.uk/perch/resources/syriadatatablesjuly2014.pdf
3. “President al-Assad: Russia’s policy towards Syria is based on values and interests, the West is not serious in fighting terrorists,” Syrian Arab News Agency, December 11, 2015, http://sana.sy/en/?p=63857
4. Philip Shishkin, “U.S. weighs talks with Russia on military activity in Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2015.
5. Stuart Rollo,“Turkey’s dangerous game in Syria,” The Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2015.
6. Anne Barnard and Michael R. Gordon, “Goals diverge and perils remain as U.S. and Turkey take on ISIS,” The New York Times, July 27, 2015.
7. Farnaz Fassihi, “U.N. Security Council unanimously votes to adopt France’s counterterrorism resolution,” The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2015.
8. Sam Dagher, “Syria’s Bashar al-Assad Tries to Force the West to Choose Between Regime, Islamic State,” The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2015.
9. Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung, “Secret CIA effort in Syria faces large funding cut,” The Washington Post, June 12, 2015.
10. Robert Fisk, “Is David Cameron planning to include al-Qaeda’s Jabhat al-Nusra in his group of 70,000 moderates?”, The Independent, December 1, 2015.
11. Thomas Walkom, “Journalist Robert Fisk explains why Canada should abandon ISIS war,” The Toronto Star, September 25, 2015.
12. Patrick Cockburn, “Russia in Syria: Air strikes pose twin threat to Turkey by keeping Assad in power and strengthening Kurdish threat,” The Independent, October 28, 2015.
13. Raja Abdulrahim, “Islamic State advances further into Syria’s Aleppo province,” The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2015.
14. “President Assad’s interview with Russian media outlets, Syrian Arab News Agency, September 16, 2015 http://sana.sy/en/?p=54857
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How Europe’s New Political Class Began Rejecting Reality
By Glenn Diesen | October 26, 2024
Russia considers NATO’s incursion into Ukraine to be an existential threat, and NATO has openly stated its intention to make Ukraine a member state after the war. Without a political settlement that restores Ukraine’s neutrality, Russia will therefore likely annex the strategic territories it cannot accept ending up under NATO control and then turn what remains of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state. As the war is being lost, the rational policy for the Europeans would therefore be to offer an agreement based on ending NATO’s eastward expansion to save Ukrainian lives, territory and the nation itself. Yet, no European leader has been able to even suggest such a solution publicly. Why? … continue
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