‘US not interested in defeating ISIS’
By Sharmine Narwani | RT | November 9, 2015
The US is not interested in defeating ISIS but would want to control its movements to create a geopolitical balance on the ground and provide the US-led coalition with leverage at the Vienna talks, said Middle East geopolitics analyst Sharmine Narwani.
RT: There are more than 60 countries in the coalition fighting against Islamic State. How hard is it for the US to keep them all united?
Sharmine Narwani: I think the US is playing loose with international law. To start off with, this coalition is illegitimate. The reason to have signed up 60 countries is more to create some kind of cover, some kind of legitimacy for these illegal operations in Syria. The main struggle is probably with the key Arab members of the coalition who were the starting members of the coalition – five Persian Gulf countries and Jordan included – because they have quite disparate objectives from the US.
RT: How many countries in the coalition are actually contributing to its goals?
SN: That is a very interesting point, because even though there are 60 countries listed in the coalition, there are only 11 who have contributed in Syria. There are two groups: like I mentioned, the Arab states – I call them the Sunni states, because they provide some kind of Arab Sunni legitimacy for the Americans; the other states are the UK, the US and France – three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Canada and Australia.
What is interesting about this is – of those five Western countries it is only Canada that stepped in relatively early, when things kicked off last year. It was the US mainly with the Arab States, and the UK, France and Australia have only come in the last three months, as well as Turkey, who is a new entrant in this coalition of 11, not 60.
RT: It’s been more than a year since the US-led bombing campaign started. Why has the coalition failed to prevent ISIS from seizing new territory?
SN: Again, interesting that Turkey is a new entrant in this coalition of 11 bombing Syria. It only came on board around I think two months ago, in August, when it launched strikes against ISIL. Now, about a month ago we, after Turkey launched its airstrikes, we’re looking at still only about three airstrikes against ISIL – the rest were against Kurdish targets. So Turkey is an example of another Sunni state in this coalition of 11 that has disparate objectives from the US. So Turkey’s interest may be on the Kurdish issue, but for instance, in the other Arab Sunni states – their interests diverge from the Americans, because they are interested in regime change in Syria, whereas the Americans have taken a back seat on that in recent months. So it is very, very hard to keep this coalition together, because there are no common objectives among its 11 partners.
RT: What are the reasons, do you think the coalition is breaking apart? How can the coalition increase the efficiency of its actions?
SN: I see the coalition breaking apart or being redundant for two reasons. One is the lack of common objectives among the 11 actors participating in the coalition, but the other is more in line with military strategy in fighting any war or conflict, anywhere. We’ve heard this over and over again in the Syrian conflict – you need a coordination of air force and ground power. The US-led coalition does not have this. Part of the reason it doesn’t have this is because it entered Syrian air space and violated international law in doing so against the wishes of the Syrian government. So it cannot coordinate with the Syrian government who leads the ground activities, whether it is the Syrian army or various Syrian militias that are pro-government; or Hezbollah – a non-state actor from Lebanon; or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and their advisory capacity. The Russians of course do enjoy that relationship, so their airstrikes are not only both valid and legal, but also useful – a coordinated effort to target ISIL and other terrorist organizations.
RT: Do you think the US doesn’t have real intentions to fight ISIS, and that is the main reason of instability of its coalition?
SN: Absolutely. The US-led coalition has failed in attaining goals to defeat ISIS, not just because it cannot lead a coordinated military effort in air, land and sea in Syria, or because it lacks legality, or because the member states of the coalition have diverging interests. But I think the US interest as well has to be called into question. I mean: does the US want to defeat ISIS? I would argue very strongly based on what we’ve seen in the last year that the US is not interested in defeating ISIS. The US is interested in perhaps controlling ISIS’ movements, so that it helps to create a geopolitical balance on the ground that will provide the US government and its allies with leverage at the negotiating table. So they don’t want ISIS to take over all of Syria [because] that poses threats to allies in the region. They don’t want ISIS and other terrorist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, and others, and the various coalitions they have formed to lose ground, because at the end of the day the only pressure they are going to be able to apply on the Syrian government and its allies is what is happening on the ground. And they need something; they need advantage on the ground that they can take with them to the negotiating table in Vienna.
Sharmine Narwani is a commentator and analyst of Middle East geopolitics. She is a former senior associate at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and has a master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University. You can follow her on Twitter at @snarwani
READ MORE: ‘US-led coalition disjointed in fighting ISIS as some members have own plans’ – Iraq’s ex-PM
Is Charlie Hebdo a Western Hate-Machine?
By Ahmed RAJEEV | Oriental Review | November 6, 2015
On Thursday French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo published another insulting cartoon on the tragic incident of Russian plane crash in Sinai, Egypt. Charlie Hebdo ridiculed the plane crash in two cartoons. The first cartoon shows parts of the aircraft and a passenger falling toward the ground, while an Islamic State militant, armed with a gun, ducks for cover to avoid the falling debris. Underneath the caricature is the caption: “Daesh: Russia’s aviation intensifies its bombardments.” The second cartoon shows a skull and a destroyed plane on the ground, with the caption: “The dangers of low-cost Russia. I should have taken Air Cocaine.”
From the very beginning, Charlie Hebdo has been intentionally injecting inhumane hatred in traditional societies worldwide. It published cartoons of Prophet Mohammad (PUBH) who has a following of more than 1.5 billion, to pump up religious hatred worldwide. It published a cartoon after the discovery of plane wreckage confirmed to belong to missing Malaysian Airline flight MH370. The cover of the edition showed a pair of hands groping what appeared to be at first glance coconuts, but was actually a pair of breasts. And the caption says, “We’ve found a bit of the pilot and the air hostess,” as two onlookers celebrate in the background. Another publication mocked the drowning of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi who died during a perilous journey across the Mediterranean to try and reach Europe along with his family. The poster showed Jesus walking on water with the dead Muslim boy next to him. And the caption said, “Welcome migrants, you are so close to the goal.” There was another cartoon with captioned “Christians walk on water… Muslims kids sink,” They have kept their unacceptable offensive satirical reporting despite the global wave of empathy after their office suffered a deadly terrorist attack in January 2015.
Charlie Hebdo never criticizes liberalism or liberal ideologies. It works irresponsibly as a fascist’s tool for the liberals. It recklessly attacks any kind of anti-liberal, anti-western establishments. On the other hand, on the disguise of liberalism or freedom or freedom of expression they are being used as a tool of social-psycho oppression for the West. Western geopolitical aims to destroy the organic social harmony and install puppet governments in resilient states, are very aligned to Charlie Hebdo’s editorial policy. So Charlie Hebdo is a direct threat to traditional cultures and lifestyles. It is a hate-machine! It is a Western tool to promote psychopathic hatred among different racial and cultural groups in the name of “freedom of expression” to serve geopolitical purposes of their masters.
Ahmed Rajeev is the Executive Editor of Bangla Hunters News web-site.
Kerry’s Bleeding Heart – Give Us a Break!
By Finian Cunningham – Sputnik – 02.11.2015
America’s top diplomat John Kerry appears to have developed a bleeding heart of emotional concern for Syria. So too have his British and French counterparts.
After nearly five years of relentless killing, destruction and suffering in Syria, the Western leaders are saying it’s now time for peace – and hence the talks in Vienna, convened primarily at the behest of Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy last week.
“It’s time to stop the bleeding and to start the building,” said the US Secretary of State in the Austrian capital. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov featured prominently at the summit, which was also attended by arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Delegates are to meet in the next two weeks to pursue, allegedly, a political resolution of the Syrian conflict.
Anyone with an informed understanding of the war in Syria will not buy Kerry’s “bleeding heart” for peace. Nor that of Washington’s lackeys, including Britain, France, Turkey, or the Gulf Arab monarchies Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
These countries have been responsible for instigating and fuelling a covert war for regime change in Syria. An entirely criminal enterprise that has been instrumented by funding, arming and training an array of foreign mercenary armies comprising some of the most blood-thirsty terror groups on the planet. The notion peddled by the Western news media of “moderate rebels” is an execrable fiction that belies the truth of how Washington and its allies have attempted to destroy Syria and terrorise the population into submitting to their objective of overthrowing the elected government of President Bashar al-Assad.
“World powers in quest for peace,” intones the BBC, with the typical whitewashing service of the incredulous Western media.
The Western powers have drenched Syria in blood since March 2011. The regime-change conspiracy has been well documented. Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas disclosed in 2013 that he was approached by British officials back in 2009 – two years before the conflict erupted – with the proposition of a secret plot to overthrow Assad. To his credit Dumas refused, knowing that it was a criminal interference in a sovereign state.
British-based academic Sharmine Narwani, reporting from Syria, has compiled how the initial protests were infiltrated by armed agents who shot down protesters and Syrian state forces – thus sparking what the Western media mendaciously refer to as a “civil war” and “pro-democracy uprising”. There was no such thing. It was a US-led subversion from the outset, the kind of black ops that the Western imperialist powers specialise in. A relevant recent example is the CIA-sponsored coup in Ukraine which was consummated by the notorious sniper massacre in Kiev on February 20, 2014.
American, British, French and Turk special forces have been embedded in Syria from the get-go. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have funnelled billions of dollars worth of weapons into the country to fuel the “jihadists”. The CIA has delivered anti-tank TOW missiles, as well as the finest Toyota jeeps to transport the mercenary armies, who openly wave Al Qaeda and Islamic State flags. We could go on. The ratlines have been well covered elsewhere.
So, are we to seriously believe that at this late hour, Washington and its minions are suddenly overcome with humanitarian concern for Syria? Only perhaps if you rely on the New York Times, CNN, BBC, the Guardian and so on for “news” – which translated from Orwellian speak into plain language means “shameless propaganda”.
This, by the way, is why the US and its lackeys are gunning for Russian media outlets. Because the Russian media are actually providing a proper journalistic information service, exposing the criminal fraudulence and terror-sponsorship of Western governments in the Syria mayhem.
Anyway, back to the bleeding hearts of Kerry, Hammond and Fabius. What is really jerking this triumvirate of rogues into convening “peace talks” is this: Russia’s military intervention in Syria, beginning on September 30, is wiping out the Western-sponsored terror armies. Over 1,600 targets smashed over the past month. Russia is doing what the Western powers claimed that they were doing for the past year (another cynical ruse laundered by the Western media.)
This is why the Western terror masters are all of a sudden running to Vienna for “negotiations”. Their covert war in Syria is being eviscerated on the ground by the combined forces of Russia, the Syrian national army and Iranian military advisors. The West’s billion-dollar terror assets are being annihilated.
Kerry wants to stop the bleeding alright – the bleeding of regime-change mercenaries that the West and its Turk and Arab clients have invested in over the past five years.
In desperation, the Western powers are now turning to the political lever, as opposed to their soon-to-be defunct covert military lever.
The “political process” that the West has belatedly adopted is being pursued now to achieve their objective of regime change in Syria by other means, because the military means are being pulverised by Vladimir Putin’s bold intervention.
Washington and its cronies are pushing for a ceasefire, elections and a “political transition”. Saudi Arabia and Qatar advocating elections?
Come off it. These despots behead and crucify anyone calling for elections in their own feudalistic Western-backed fiefdoms.
This weekend, John Kerry’s subordinate at the US State Department, Tony Blinken, announced, hot on the heels, of the Vienna summit that Washington is to ply $100 million into Syria to “support the moderate opposition.”
According to Voice of America, Blinken said the money “would be given to help the Syrian opposition boost local governments and civil societies… for keeping schools open, restoring access to clean water and electricity, and supporting an independent media.”
This hoary formula is straight out of the US State Department’s manual for inciting “colour revolutions” as we saw in Ukraine, Georgia and several other countries.
The despicable difference in Syria is that the “civil society” and infrastructure supposedly being repaired with $100 million has been destroyed in the first place by Washington’s nefarious regime-change war. The apparent generous largesse of the US government in Syria is not just about infiltrating the country politically, it is also a disgusting bribe dangled before a war-torn, devastated nation.
Washington and its state-sponsoring terrorist cronies are reaching for the political lever not out of concern to broker peace, but out of necessity to engineer regime change through political subversion because Russia has nullified their covert violent methods.
The Western powers are endeavouring to co-opt Russia and Iran to contrive a political framework aimed at achieving their core goal – ousting President Assad.
Russia and Iran are not buying this ruse, insisting that the political future of Syria is the sovereign prerogative of the Syrian people.
There is no need for a “new political process”. The principle of sovereignty in Syria was already established in the Geneva Communiqué three years ago.
What Russia and Iran should do is defeat the Washington-led axis politically, as they are doing militarily. Peace in Syria will be achieved when Washington, principally, desists from its criminal scheming and finally abides by international law.
As for John Kerry’s “bleeding heart”. The blood-soaked hands of Washington, Britain, France, and the other criminal states, are the far more real and pertinent issue.
Rebuffing Peace Chances in Syria
By Jonathan Marshall | Consortium News | October 23, 2015
Seeking to disrupt the lethal cycle of foreign intervention and military escalation in Syria, a group of 55 House Democrats recently sent a letter to President Barack Obama, calling for a change in U.S. policy.
“[I]t is time to devote ourselves to a negotiated peace, and work with allies, including surrounding Arab states that have a vested interest in the security and stability of the region,” they wrote. “Convening international negotiations to end the Syria conflict would be in the best interests of U.S. and global security, and is also, more importantly, a moral imperative.”
No one — except neoconservative die-hards who view diplomacy as the last refuge of wimps — can argue with their sentiment. But previous failed attempts to promote peace negotiations suggest that Syrian rebels want to talk only about the terms of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s surrender — or they won’t talk at all. Unless their foreign backers start turning the screws on these clients, the key players may simply refuse to sit down at the peace table.
The first Geneva conference on Syria was initiated by the United Nations peace envoy Kofi Annan in April 2012. Although the great-power participants agreed on the usual niceties — a transitional government, participation of all groups in a meaningful national dialogue, free elections, etc. — the process foundered quickly when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that Assad could not participate in the transition government. In August 2011, President Obama had rashly demanded that Assad step down as a precondition for political change in Syria.
Who’s to Blame?
Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari later blamed the United States, Britain and France for derailing a huge opportunity for peace. Norwegian General Robert Mood, who led a military observer mission into Syria that spring to monitor an abortive cease-fire, said after the breakdown of Geneva I, “it would have been possible to lead Syria through a transition supported by a united Security Council with Assad as part of the transition. . . . The insistence on the removal of President Assad as a start of the process led them into a corner where the strategic picture gave them no way out whatsoever.”
Contrary to the caricature presented in many Western media, the Russians did not then or later insist that Assad remain in power.
Rather, as President Vladimir Putin emphasized in late 2012, Russia’s “position is not for the retention of Assad and his regime in power at any cost but that the people in the beginning would come to an agreement on how they would live in the future, how their safety and participation in ruling the state would be provided for, and then start changing the current state of affairs in accordance with these agreements, and not vice versa.”
Or as two former members of the State Department’s policy planning staff put it, “For Russia, the Geneva process is about achieving a political settlement in Syria, not about great powers negotiating the end of the Assad regime. . . . Russia’s primary objective in Syria is not to provide support for Assad but rather to avoid another Western-backed effort at coercive regime change, and all of Russia’s actions are consistent with that objective. . . .
“Better US-Russian cooperation on Syria depends on demonstrating to Moscow that Assad and his cronies — rather than the opposition, US policy, or other states in the region — are the main obstacle to a settlement and to stability in Syria, as the US has long argued. That requires pushing ahead with a good-faith effort at a political settlement.”
Another Setback
Chances for peace were set back in spring 2013, however, when the political leader of the non-Islamist opposition, Moaz al-Khatib, resigned after failing to get support for a mediated end to the conflict. His interim successor, a Syrian-American named Ghassan Hitto, reportedly enjoyed strong backing from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and “distanced himself from Al-Khatib’s willingness to negotiate with elements of the Assad regime in a bid to bring an end to the civil war.” Secretary of State John Kerry, who had replaced Secretary Clinton, was reported to be “sanguine at the news of the resignation.”
In May 2013, Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed to give peace another chance and try to bring the government and opposition to the negotiating table. This time, significantly, Kerry did not demand that Assad step down as a precondition for talks. Then came the huge diversionary controversy over Syrian chemical weapons, with the White House claiming that the Assad regime had crossed the “red line.” Instead of peace, a vast escalation of the war loomed, until Russia helped broker Syria’s agreement to destroy all of its chemical weapons stocks.
Peace efforts suffered another setback that fall when Syrian opposition forces and their backers in Saudi Arabia and Gulf States balked after the UN envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Bahimi, said that Iran should be part of any settlement talks.
The Beirut Daily Star reported that “Many of Syria’s main rebel brigades … rejected any negotiations not based on Assad’s removal and said they would charge anyone who attended them with treason.” A coalition of 19 Syrian Islamist groups called attempts to restart the Geneva talks “just another part of the conspiracy to throw our revolution off track and to abort it.”
In November 2013, under pressure from Washington and London, the main Syrian exile opposition group voted to attend a new round of peace talks — but only if Assad and others with “blood on their hands” were guaranteed to have “no role” in a transition government or Syria’s future — a non-starter.
The pro-Western National Coalition finally yielded and reluctantly agreed in January 2014 to join a new round of talks, but the more powerful Islamist rebel alliance continued to reject them. The negotiations quickly foundered, with Western powers blaming Damascus for refusing to get serious about a transition government, and Syria’s government insisting that it was committed to “stopping the bloodshed.”
The Ukraine Putsch
Soon, the Western-supported putsch against the Russian-backed government of the Ukraine caused a dramatic setback in U.S.-Russian relations, putting all progress in Syria on hold. Seeking to appease neoconservative critics who demanded even tougher interventions in both theaters, President Obama requested huge new sums of money to arm and train Syria’s rebels — and to beef up the U.S. military presence in Central and Eastern Europe.
In January 2015, Kerry finally began warming again to multilateral negotiations, with Russia’s participation. CIA Director John Brennan made the startling announcement that “None of us, Russia, the United States, coalition, and regional states, wants to see a collapse of the government and political institutions in Damascus.”
The French, longtime hardliners against Assad, also came around. Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told a radio station, “The political solution will of course include some elements of the regime because we don’t want to see the pillars of the state fall apart. We would end up with a situation like Iraq.”
These were huge changes in the stance of Western interventionist powers, aligning them closely to Russia’s longstanding position based on the original Geneva principles. But of course these changes came too late. Aside from some modest-sized regions held by Kurdish forces (and thus opposed by Turkey), the Syrian opposition today is dominated by Islamic State and by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front.
Forcing Russia’s Hand
Continuing military gains by those extreme Islamist forces prompted Putin’s decision to send additional military aid to Damascus and begin for the first time bombing targets in Syria. As usual, domestic U.S. politics forced a reframing of the Syrian issue back into Cold War-era stereotypes as a contest between the United States and Russia. And the French have once again reverted to their intransigent position that “there can be no transition without [Assad’s] departure,” in the words of President Francois Hollande.
Most important, some 75 military factions operating under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army this month reached an unprecedented political consensus: They rejected plans for a peaceful transition of power put forth by UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura. Their political stance confirms that the FSA has become an ally, if not a wholly owned tool, of the Nusra Front.
Pursuing peace remains a worthy — indeed, the only sensible — goal of U.S. foreign policy in Syria. No one should be surprised, however, if Washington’s embrace of that goal comes too late. By pursuing regime change so long and so adamantly, the United States, Western Europe and various Arab powers fostered the rise of the radical Islamist opposition, which has absolutely no interest in peace. Foreign leaders can meet all they want in Geneva, Moscow, or wherever, but facts on the ground will determine the political future of Syria.
If there is to be any hope of an outcome short of a bloodthirsty Islamist victory, it will require a total commitment by foreign powers to halt their supply of money and arms to opposition forces that, for now at least, reject participation in the peace process.
France signs deals worth €10bn with Saudi
MEMO | October 14, 2015
France has signed deals worth €10 billion with Saudi Arabia, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said yesterday.
Valls, who is visiting the gulf kingdom, announced the deal on his official Twitter account saying it aimed to “mobilise our companies and employment”.
Saudi King Salman Bin Abdulaziz met Valls in his palace in Riyadh yesterday.
The Saudi Press Agency said the two leaders discussed bilateral relations and ways of enhancing them as well as the latest developments in the region.
Meanwhile, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced during a press conference in Riyadh that the kingdom intends to purchase 30 French naval corvettes before the end of this year. France’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the deal includes the start of negotiations to provide Saudi Arabia with its own communication and observation satellites.
Valls arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday after a regional tour that included visiting Egypt and Jordan.
The Death of Free Speech in France?
By GEARÓID Ó COLMÁIN | CounterPunch | September 25, 2012
Every year the French communist Party ( PCF) organizes the Fête de l’Humanité in Paris, a left-wing festival where concerts are held and communist parties from all over the world erect stands to exchange books, pamphlets and ideas. Many authors, journalists and intellectuals are invited every year to participate in debates on philosophy, culture, politics and current affairs.
But this year will probably be remembered for the important debates the attendees of the festival were not allowed to have. Two authors, Belgian theoretical physicist Jean Bricmont and French author Caroline Fourest, were forced to cancel their talks due to intimidation and threats from organisations calling themselves “Antifa” and “Indigènes de la République”, respectively.
Caroline Fourest is a pro-Israeli reactionary who masquerades as a “left-wing” feminist. Her invitation to the festival to discuss the rise of Islamic extremism and the French far right upset many on the left.
Reactionary and islamophobic Fourest most certainly is, but preventing her from speaking not only gives credence to her erroneous theories but violates her constitutional right to freedom of speech.
When Fourest was about to speak the dangers of Islamic extremism and the rise of the Front National, France’s far right party, a group calling themselves “lesIndigènes de la République” entered the tent where Fourest was speaking and began to throw objects on the stage. Some protestors even attempted to assault her.
Soon the tent was occupied by the protestors who shouted slogans against racism and islamophobia. The protestors proceeded to occupy the stage whereupon the audience shouted back “liberté d’expression!” (freedom of expression). The confrontation between the conference attendees and protestors continued for about 20 minutes with each side calling the other “fascist”.
The “Indigènes de la République” protestors won out, however, when the debate was cancelled and Caroline Fourest was escorted by bodyguards to a nearby vehicle.
The following day Belgian physicist, author and intellectual Jean Bricmont was due to give a far more important talk on the crisis in Syria and the specious discourse of “humanitarian intervention” propagated by the mainstream media to justify wars of aggression.
For many years, Bricmont has been a critic of the politics of military interventions undertaken under the pretext of protecting “human rights”. Bricmont’s heresy on this issue and his anti-Zionism has made him a pariah in the fashionable salons of France’s “respectable” intelligentsia.
The Belgian physicist’s unequivocal anti-imperialist stance has also made him the target of a vile defamation campaign on the internet and in the mainstream French media where he has been called a “rouge-brun” , a brown-shirt red, a “confusioniste” etc.
Furthermore, the more extremist fringes of the internet’s thought-police have singled out Bricmont for special attention. A few days prior to the fête de l’Humanité, an “anti-fascist” anarchist organization called Antifa launched a campaign on Indymedia against Bricmont’s attendance at the festival, where they threatened to assault him if he spoke about humanitarian intervention. In the insane world of Antifa activism, Bricmont’s opposition to NATO-fomented terrorism in Libya and Syria makes him a “fascist”.
Antifa is just one of the international anarchist groups currently being used by the intelligence agencies of imperialist states to sow confusion and chaos among the ranks of disaffected youth, inciting them to mindless, violent acts that serve the agenda of an ever- encroaching police state. This organization, in particular, targets intellectuals who denounce Zionism as well as alternative media outlets which expose the mechanisms and institutions that promote US imperialism throughout the world. It does all this under the guise of “anti-fascism”.
Due to the simple-mindedness of their beliefs and stupidity of their actions, Antifa tend to attract naïve and angry youths who turn up at demonstrations in black hoodies in order to provoke police crackdowns and sabotage any meaningful resistance to the current political order. In other words, Antifa are a group of useful idiots, whose real agenda is to promote fascism under the guise of “anti-fascism”.
Bricmont was informed of their campaign and asked the management of the festival to provide him with appropriate security. The festival managers assured the Belgian scientist that he would have protection. However, one hour before Bricmont was about to speak, he received notification that the talk was cancelled. The violent threats of the Antifa agents provocateurs provided Pierre Laurent, general secretary of the PCF with the perfect pretext to cancel Bricmont’s heretical lecture. Allowing Bricmont to speak would have shown up the PCF for the right-wing, imperialist sham that they are in the eyes of their ever dwindling supporters.
The festival management had decided they could not provide security for Belgian physicist in the event of an attack by the “Antifa” protestors. However, the pro-war, pro-Israeli pundit Caroline Fourest was provided with full protection by the festival management, in spite of similar threats having been made against her.
This was hardly surprising, considering that the l’Humanité newspaper was the organizer of the festival. L’Humanité has given full support to NATO’s destabilization of Syria since violence broke out there last year, publishing the same war propaganda as its “right-wing” competitors.
According to the PCF’s international affairs spokesman Jacques Fath, the only solution for peace is Syria is the fall of Assad. Fath, of course, made no mention of NATO’s death squads, who have been killing both innocent civilians and security forces since March 2011, facts that have even been verified by many independent journalists and admitted by the Arab league’s observer mission.
Neither of Syria’s communist parties was invited to the festival. Both the Communist Party of Syria(Bakdash) and the Communist Party of Syria (Faisal Aka Unified) won 11 seats in the parliamentary elections that followed the implementation of Syria’s new democratic constitution in May this year.
Both parties have consistently denounced NATO and Gulf-state fomented terrorism against their country since the outbreak of violence in Daraa in 2011. Neither party was allowed to erect a stand at the French communist festival. Instead representatives of the pro-war Syrian opposition were represented.
Those who believe that Jean Luc Melanchon’s Front de Gauche (the French “far left” party which one 11 percent of the vote in last year’s parliamentary elections) represents some form of alternative to the status quo, would do well to remember that Melanchon and the Front de Gauche SUPPORTED NATO’s intervention in Libya last year. This is an organization which claims to oppose NATO. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The supporters of Melanchon- a demagogue who likes to prop up his left-wing credentials by pretending to support president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and other centre-left governments in Latin America- do not seem to realize that the ALBA countries all supported Libya’s colonel Gaddafi last year and now openly declare their support for President Bachar al-Assad in his struggle against NATO, and Gulf-state funded terrorism.
While President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela sought to mediate in the Libyan crisis in 2011 in order to prevent military aggression against the country, a mediation welcomed by the Libyan government- and which could have prevented war- they received absolutely no help from Jean Luc Melanchon, who now vaunts himself as an anti-imperialist. Melanchon is a dastardly liar and a political fraud of the highest order.
One would not have to be a physicist like Jean Bricmont to see and understand the horrible reality of NATO’s proxy war in Syria, but what an inconvenient interruption it would have been if the would-be communists of this year’s festival were to be confronted with the naked, mephitic truth about NATO’s humanitarian wars, and the left-wing dupes who support them. Bricmont had to be silenced.
France’s “extrême gauche” are nothing more than a contemptible, motley crew of cowards, liars and fools, whose inflated egos and vacuous slogans adequately reflect the all-pervasive cynicism of the corrupted petty-bourgeois class they represent.
But there is another reason for Bricmont’s ostracism from respectable French society; he is a scientist who is capable of applying critical thought to everyday issues that affect the common citizen. In other words, unlike his elitist and conformist colleagues in academia, for whom, peer –reviewed papers, tenure and social respectability count more than epistemic truth, Bricmont represents the type of scientist capable of applying his microscope to the laws that govern civil society; laws whose flagrant violation by Western governments the neo-scholastic monks of postmodern academia conveniently ignore.
In the days following the festival Caroline Fourest’s expulsion was widely bruited in the French mainstream media, who vociferously denounced the violation of her “freedom of expression”.
Fourest is one of the most prominent propagandists for the New World Order, and such is her ubiquity across the French media complex, that she has become a household name. The war-mongering Fourest has been presented as a martyr of human rights, feminism and free speech, thanks to the useful idiots of Antifa. Needless to say, the war-mongering harpies of France’s mainstream media made no mention of the violation of Jean Bricmont’s freedom of speech.
If Fourest, Antifa, the PCF, Front de Gauche and the entire pseudo-leftist French establishment had their way, Bricmont and his ilk would never again be allowed to speak in a public platform. For what he has to say would expose them for the fakers, imperialist collaborators and loud-mouthed nincompoops that they are.
Those activists who admire and those who detest Caroline Fourest can scream “fascist” to one another to their heart’s content in their zany, infantile theatre of the absurd. But it is they who are opening the path for a seizure of power by the extreme right in this country, as the real fascists in Marine Le Pen’s Front National will easily capitalize on their buffoonery. For, who can blame a simple working class voter for being seduced by the mendacious arguments of Marine Le Pen when there are none but prattling fools to oppose her?
This is not the first time genuine anti-war activists were prevented from speaking in France. Michel Collon, a Belgian journalist, author and editor of a news and analysis website InvestigAction was prevented from speaking at the Bourse du Travail in Paris on November 9th 2011 by the Antifa agents provocateurs. These groups serve the imperialist state by preventing the public from engaging in serious debate about France’s foreign wars.
Other political organizations which have been attacked by the “Antifa” agents provocateurs are the URCF, l’Union de Révolutionaires -Communistes de France and the PRCF, Pole de la Renaissance Communiste en France.
These organizations have some former heroes of the French Resistance among their members, real fighters against fascism. The president of the PRCF is Léon Landini, a combatant in the French resistance during the Second World War, who was responsible for the killing of over 40 Nazi soldiers, the destruction of 300 Nazi vehicles and dozens of attacks against Nazi railway carriages. The URCF and PRCF are now the main political organizations in France militating for the construction of a real communist party.
Unlike the fakers in the Front de Gauche, PCF, NPA and other organizations, the URCF and PRCF have given their full support to the Syrian communist parties of Syria in their fight against fascist aggression by NATO and the Petro-monarchies of the Gulf states and have unequivocally denounced the lies and disinformation against Syria of the reactionary French press.
It is one of the most egregious propaganda achievements in recent history that those who expose the lies that trick the public into perceiving wars of aggression as humanitarian operations are denounced as “fascists”, while those who bang the drums of war are considered to be “left-wing” and “progressive”. This is the general pattern set by the French media complex and genuine anti-imperialist intellectuals have paid the price.
The censorship of Jean Bricmont by the left liberal establishment is deeply indicative of the perilous direction French society is currently taking. It is the road to a new form of totalitarianism, where critical thought is murdered by platitudes,empty, effete slogans, and the meaningless newspeak of the ruling group mind.
The unconscionable, dishonest and dastardly behavior of the petty bourgeois leftists, if unchecked, will inevitably lead to a grim dénouement in this tragic-comic farce that is contemporary France.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin can be reached at: gaelmetro@yahoo.ie.
France’s Government Aims to Give Itself—and the NSA—Carte Blanche to Spy on the World
By Danny O’Brien | EFF | September 30, 2015
The United States makes an improper division between surveillance conducted on residents of the United States and the surveillance that is conducted with almost no restraint upon the rest of the world. This double standard has proved poisonous to the rights of Americans and non-Americans alike. In theory, Americans enjoy better protections. In practice there are no magical sets of servers and Internet connections that carry only American conversations. To violate the privacy of everyone else in the world, the U.S. inevitably scoops up its own citizens’ data. Establishing nationality as a basis for discrimination also encourages intelligence agencies to make the obvious end-run: spying on each other’s citizens, and then sharing that data. Treating two sets of innocent targets differently is already a violation of international human rights law. In reality, it reduces everyone to the same, lower standard.
Now France’s government is about the make the same error as the U.S. practice with its new “Surveillance des communications électroniques internationales” bill, currently being rushed through the French Parliament. As an open letter led by France’s La Quadrature du Net and signed today by over thirty civil society groups including EFF, states, France’s legislators’ must reject this bill to protect the rights of individuals everywhere, including those in France.
By legalizing France’s own plans to spy on the rest of the world, France would take a step to establishing the NSA model as an acceptable global norm. Passing the law would undermine France’s already weak surveillance protections for its own citizens, including lawyers, journalists and judges. And it would make challenging the NSA’s practices far more difficult for France and other states.
The new bill comes as a result of France’s Constitutional Council review of the country’s last mass surveillance bill, which passed with little parliamentary opposition in July. The Council passed most of that bill on the basis of its minor concessions to oversight and proportionality, but rejected the sections on international surveillance, which contained no limits to what France might do.
France already spies on the world. In July, the French newsmagazine L’Obs revealed a secret decree dating from at least 2008, which funded a French intelligence service project to intercept and analyze international data traffic passing through through submarine cable intercepts. The decree authorized the interception of cable traffic from 40 countries including Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, China, India and the United States. The report states that France’s intelligence agency, the General Directorate for External Security (DGCE), spent $775 million on the project.
Given that the Constitutional Council implied that such practices are almost certainly unlawful as is, the French government has now scrambled to create a framework that could excuse it.
Under the new proposed law, France’s intelligence agencies still have an incredibly broad remit. The law concentrates the power to grant wide-ranging surveillance permission in the office of the Prime Minister, who can sign off on mass surveillance of communications sent or received from overseas. Such surveillance can be conducted when in the “essential interests of foreign policy” or “[the] essential economic and scientific interests of France”, giving the executive the widest possible scope to conduct surveillance.
The original surveillance law included limits on data retention when spying on French nationals (30 days for the content of communications, four years for metadata, six years for encrypted data). The new international limits are much longer—one year, six years, and eight years respectively. The law’s authors do not justify this longer period, nor do they explain how the intelligence agencies will be able to separate data from each class of target without collecting, analyzing and filtering them all.
The collapsing divide between the lawful, warranted surveillance of ordinary citizens, and the wide-ranging capabilities of the intelligence services to collect signals intelligence on foreign powers and agents, has ended up corroding both domestic and global privacy rights. The U.S. has taken advantage of the lesser protections for non-U.S. persons to introduce the dragnet surveillance of everyone who uses the Internet outside the U.S. Because unprotected foreigners’ data is mixed up with somewhat more protected communications of Americans, the U.S. government believes that it can “incidentally” scoop up its own citizens’ data, and sort it out later under nobody’s oversight but its own.
If the French Parliament passes this bill, it will mean that France has decided to embody and excuse the same practices as the NSA in its own law. It is a short-sighted attempt to cover France’s existing secret practices, but the consequences are far-reaching. The limited protections that were included in the original surveillance bill—including assurances that French journalists, judges and lawyers would be protected from dragnet surveillance—will be undermined by their inevitable inclusion in the vacuuming up of all international traffic.
Any attempt by the EU countries to rein back the NSA’s surveillance plan by calls for the United States to respect international human rights standards, and data protection principles, will provoke the response that the U.S. is simply exercising the powers that an EU member has already granted itself.
By creating and excusing a double standard France’s government dooms everyone to a single, lower standard. It cannot simply shrug off its responsibilities to human rights, its partners in Europe, and the privacy rights of foreigners. If it does so, it will end up undermining the French people’s privacy and security as much as it undermines that of the rest of the world.
Russia Should Ignore Washington’s Blind Arrogance on Syria
By Finian Cunningham – Sputnik – 17.09.2015
The trouble with arrogance is that it is intellectually blinding; and the trouble with being intellectually blind is that you fail to see your own contradictions – no matter how preposterous those contradictions may be.
The arrogant ones we are referring to here are the United States and its Western allies. In the past week, Washington has been up in arms about Russia’s decision to step up its military support for the government of Syria. The Americans are calling on Moscow for “clarification” and are getting all hot under the collar about what they say is unwarranted Russian support for the “regime” of Bashar al-Assad.
This finger-wagging from Washington comes at the same time that a US-led military coalition continues to bomb Syria for nearly 12 months.
This week, US warplanes striking Syria were joined by fighter jets from Australia for the first time in those operations, which are allegedly aimed at hitting the Islamic State terror group within the country. France and Britain are also expected to soon join the bombing runs inside Syrian territory.
Now hold on a moment. Let’s get this straight. The US and its allies have appointed themselves to carry out air strikes on a sovereign country – Syria – without having approval from the government of that country, or without a mandate from the UN Security Council.
Thus, the legality of these US-led air strikes – which have resulted in numerous civilian casualties – is therefore of highly dubious status, if not constituting flagrant violation of international law.
Yet the arrogant Western powers, led by the US, have the temerity to lecture Russia about its decision to supply weapons to the government of Syria.
As Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pointed out, the military equipment being sent to Syria is consistent with long-standing and legal bilateral agreements between the two allied countries. Russia and Syria have been allies for nearly 40 years.
There is nothing untoward going on – unlike the Western aerial bombing campaign.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin went further in defending the military aid to Syria by saying that it was necessary to help its ally “fight against terrorist aggression”.
For the past four years, the Syrian national army has been battling against an array of foreign mercenaries whose main formations comprise al Qaeda-linked terror groups, such as Al Nusra Front and Islamic State. Putin is correct when he says that the Syrian government forces are the primary fighting front against the jihadist terror networks.
If Western countries are serious about defeating these same terror groups – as they claim to be – then they should be supportive of the Syrian government, as Russia is.
America’s top diplomat John Kerry says that Russia’s support for Syria will “exacerbate and extend the conflict” and will “undermine our shared goal of fighting extremism”. His Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov rightly dismissed Kerry’s objection as “upside-down logic”.
Arrogance not only blinds to contradictions; it evidently leads sufferers of the condition to speak nonsense.
Here’s how the New York Times this week reported the Russia-Syria development:
“The move by Russia to bolster the government of President Bashar al-Assad, who has resisted Mr. Obama’s demand to step down for years, underscored the conflicting approaches to fighting the Islamic State terrorist organisation. While Mr. Obama supports a rival rebel group to take on the Islamic State even as he opposes Mr. Assad, Russia contends that the government is the only force that can defeat the Islamic extremists.”
Note the arrogance laden in those words. With breezy casualness, the Western view is that the Syrian leader has “resisted Mr. Obama’s demand to step down for years”.
Again, just like the presumed “right” to bomb a sovereign country, it is an American presumed right to decide whether a leader of another state should stand down.
Who are the Americans or any other government to decide something that is the prerogative of the Syrian people? At this point, it should be mentioned by the way that the Syrian people voted to re-elect President Assad by a huge majority – nearly 80 per cent – in the country’s last election in 2012.
But here is the fatal contradiction in the logic of the US and its Western allies. According to the New York Times, Obama “supports a rival rebel group to take on the Islamic State even as he opposes Mr. Assad”.
That proposition is simply not true. In fact, it is delusional. Even the Americans have elsewhere admitted that there is no “rival rebel group” in Syria. After years of pretending that the West was supporting “moderate rebels” in Syria, the reality is that the war against the Syrian state has been waged by jihadist extremists covertly armed and bankrolled by the US and its allies, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Former director of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, in an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel back in July, candidly admitted that Washington was well aware that it was supporting the Islamic State and other terror groups as the main anti-government forces. It was a “willful decision” said Flynn because Washington wanted regime change in Syria.
Regime change, it needs to be emphasized, amounts to criminal interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. And regime change is something that Washington and its European allies are all too habitually complicit in, as with Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014, to mention just a few.
From that “willful decision” by Washington, Syria has been plunged into four years of unrelenting war with a death toll of some 240,000 people. Over half its 24 million population has been displaced, with hundreds of thousands surging towards Europe in desperation. Terrorism has now become an even greater regional security problem threatening to tear other countries asunder through sectarian violence.
So, when Washington and its Western allies pontificate to Russia about terrorism and what to do or not to do in Syria, they are best ignored with the contempt they deserve. Arrogant, blind and criminal are not qualifications for international leadership.
Third-Reich-sur-Seine: the French collaborationist tradition
It is everyone’s duty to expose as much as possible this new Occupation of Paris by an entity if not hostile, at least foreign, colonial and terrorist, whose most characteristic seal is infanticide.
By Sayed Hasan | 13 août 2015
On August 13th, 2015, Paris-plages (Paris-beaches) will become, for 12 hours, Tel Aviv-sur-Seine. A brilliant idea, and, let us not doubt, a very brave one on the part of the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. It is especially timely in that it commemorates the Israeli massacre in Gaza in the summer of 2014, in which more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed, including 551 children, and while the ashes of the Palestinian baby Ali Dawabcheh, burned alive by Israeli settlers, are still smouldering. It is true that this time, it was not white phosphorus, but simple Molotov cocktails, and they caused only two victims: one must definitely be blind not to see that Israel is really committed to a sane process of moderation in its Palestinian policy.
According to official voices, it is not a case of whitewashing the Israeli regime or becoming a mouthpiece for its propaganda, on the contrary : Bruno Julliard, the glorious Deputy Mayor of Paris, warned against “amalgams between the brutal settlement policy of the Israeli government and the city of Tel Aviv which is a progressive city, a symbol of peace and tolerance.” Indeed, this project would be nothing short of an initiative for peace, highlighting Tel Aviv not as the internationally recognized capital of Israel, and thus archetypal symbol of its policy, but rather, according to the words of Anne Hidalgo, as “a city open to all minorities, including sexual” (yes, the Palestinians who are not shot down or incinerated are expropriated daily, but homosexuals around the world do come there to celebrate the Gay Pride, is it not so? …), and even nothing less than “the first opposition city in Israel… hated in Israel itself as such by all intolerants”, a statement as meaningless as it is grotesque. And it would be unfair, says Ms Hidalgo, to “make a city or population accountable to the policy of its government. It would be to scorn local democracy and thus democracy itself” – let us not mention the fact that more than 90% of the Israeli public supported the last operation against Gaza, or, in strictly rational terms, the very principle of international sanctions against a country, a supposedly democratic one to boot. Faced with such falsifications, such impudence, such contortionism and such abjection, words fail and nausea stirs in the heart. And from the elected officials, we can only find a semblance of refuge in this statement from Danielle Simonnet, Paris Councillor (Left Party), who denounced “the cynicism of the organization of such a day [that] reaches the heights of indecency”, calling for its cancellation or a radical modification of its program.
Apart from the appalling political sphere, a storm of voices in France have arisen to condemn this event, and social networks are running riot so that the day promises to be incredibly tense, and will certainly bring to Parisians an impression that is a little more faithful to the reality of life in occupied Palestine than the originally scheduled “festive atmosphere”. Because democracy requires it, no question of modifying a program meant to meet the desiderata of a tiny minority of the population at the expense of the vast majority of French who legitimately say they are shocked by such an event (over 90% according to a survey by RMC / BFM).
Everything has been said elsewhere about the ins and outs of this ignominious day, so for our part, we will ask this: does France disown itself by arbitrarily making its capital an auxiliary in the service of propaganda for Israel’s Zionist and terrorist regime, so as to polish up its bloodied image and to promote its sluggish tourism? Does France violate its traditions by becoming a vassal of the all-powerful Zionist lobby, not to say the gay lobby, two infinitesimal cliques who now dictate their most extravagant wishes to the “mother of arms, arts and laws” of yesteryear and see it invariably bow to them? Certainly not. Two telling examples are enough to indicate that collaborationism is deeply rooted in a certain “republican” French elite, and that there would be room for talk of, beyond the famous Stockholm Syndrome, a veritable “Paris Syndrome” to describe this historical “French fin’amor” for foreign Occupants.
You want to see the sea? Hear the sound of waves?
Play on the beach? Admire my beautiful wall! #TelAvivSurSeine
In 1870, after the debacle of Sedan and the fall of the Second Empire, the Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris, to the great fear of the propertied. Despite the state of war and the presence of Prussian troops on national soil, the French political and economic elite did not fear the outside enemy as much as the inside, fearing with a holy terror a victory of the French people in arms which could cause a disruption of economic and social structures. Thus the effort of the “Governmentof National Defence” which was formed by the Jules brotherhood – Favre, Simon, Ferry, capped by Trochu and (Adolphe) Thiers – consisted mainly of sabotaging all impulses of popular resistance and of seeking an armistice with Bismarck as quickly as possible and at any price. The loss of Alsace and Lorraine seemed very insignificant in comparison with “Social Defence”, of preservation of the privileges of the established order, and after the treason of Bazaine and the simulacrum of the Siege of Paris, it could finally be imposed on the Nation. It was then time, finally, to turn the French cannons against the real enemy, namely the suburbs of Paris, under the approving eye of Bismarck. The historian Henri Guillemin, has demonstrated this in minute detail in his trilogy The Origins of the Commune (This curious war of 1870, The Heroic Defence of Paris and The Surrender), synthesized in his series of eponymous conferences .
In 1940, it more or less went the same way. The French political and economic elites saw in Nazi Germany a danger infinitely less great than the socialist threat (at that time this doctrine had not been perverted and carried genuinely progressive values), and, more importantly, considered that a military “disaster” might enable France to reconnect with its reactionary traditions and repeal many heresies introduced by the Popular Front. This was in particular a special effort of Petain, who worked in that direction at least from 1936. And around him, many are they who opted for The choice of defeat, in the words of the historian Annie Lacroix-Riz. Again, Henri Guillemin has established these facts in his works Nationalists and Nationals (1870 – 1940) and The Truth About the Petain Case, condensed into his corresponding series of conferences .
In one case as in the other, Paris was occupied by the enemy, Bismarckian Prussia in 1871, Nazi Germany in 1940. It is difficult to talk about anything other than high treason by the French elites, although the political and historiographical tradition continues to praise most of its protagonists to the skies – except Petain, who some would like to rehabilitate: they are right in the sense that Petain only perpetuated a tradition of collaborationism firmly rooted in the Republic, but by targeting the republican regime itself and the Jews, and not only the French proletariat. It cannot be otherwise, as our elites remain deeply engaged in these infamous ways.
But if it is established that the French elites, corrupt and stateless, have been constantly trampling the interests of the people and of the Nation at least since the Third Republic, then what about the French people? How did it welcome foreign Occupation in 1871 and in 1940?
Henri Guillemin reports that “The Prussians entered Paris on March 1st [1871], and Paris behaved in a very noble way. We must remember what happened at the entrance of the Allies – particularly the Cossacks – in Paris in 1815. There had been hideous scenes. When they had entered the working-class neighbourhoods, nothing moved, but when they arrived in the rich neighbourhoods, on major boulevards, there were ovations. Socialite women rode on the horses behind the Cossacks, who were the ‘Liberators’, the foreigners who came to bring back the King. On 1st March 1871, we see nothing of the kind, while this time, the Germans came through the chic districts of Paris – they came by Neuilly, the 16th and the 8th arrondissements, the Champs-Elysées. Everybody had closed the windows, all the shops were closed: they entered in a deathly silence.” Then, when the mystification of the pseudo-starvation – that would have imposed an armistice – and high treason of the elites were revealed to the people of Paris, there was a general outburst of indignation which culminated with the Commune, to which Parisians of all social classes committed themselves on the 26th of March 1871 by voting overwhelmingly for the “reds”: these had been crushed in the 1870 elections, but now triumphed as the only genuine defenders of the Fatherland.
In 1940, when even a small country like Holland, conquered and occupied by the Nazis, could boast of the appointment of the German Seyss-Inquart to lead them (Queen Wilhelmina proclaimed that “the red of shame would have come to our faces if the invader had chosen for this position someone of our nationality. At least we have been spared this ignominy.”), France did not have that luck. It was the only country to engage in the path of the most disgraceful surrender, collaboration and even frenzied collaborationism with the Occupation through its highest legal representative, what’s more a Marshal of France, crowned with a (false) aura as a hero of the First World War. He was followed by the great majority of the French, who cheered him until April 26th, 1944, during his last visit to Paris, while De Gaulle was long a marginal figure. Only a tiny minority of the French engaged in the fight against the Nazis. Two million French fled Paris before the Germans arrived, but the remaining million coexisted peacefully with the Occupying forces.
If Paris is, as coined by Louis Veuillot, “the cancer of France and the scandal of the world” in the eyes of “worthy people”, that is the propertied (Veuillot was then expressing his hatred for the Commune), it is for Parisians to return the title against their unworthy and corrupt elites who flout democracy and “ride” on the Zionist tanks, giving an “ovation” to the massacres of the Israeli Occupier. Will we go the way of De Gaulle, of Petain or of the majority of the wait-and-sees? It is everyone’s duty to expose as much as possible this new Occupation of Paris by an entity if not hostile, at least foreign, colonial and terrorist, whose most characteristic seal is infanticide. Today’s resistance certainly will not express itself using force or violence as was required in 1940, but if not by protest and civil disobedience, at least by withdrawal. Parisians must at the least, rather than answer to the call from Anna Hidalgo-Collabo to “come in great numbers”, boycott Paris-plages that day and meet this outrage with a “deathly silence”. And for those in whom the flame of resistance and dignity is still burning, may they infiltrate and disrupt this event as much as possible, individually or in groups, at any time, from all sides, by any peaceful demonstration, making the voice of the French people and that of the Palestinian people heard – shouting, slogans (Israel Terrorist! Hidalgo Collabo! Gaza, Warsaw Ghetto, innocent children facing barbarism!…), leaflets and pictures, flags, banners, burned dolls in memory of Ali Dawabcheh, the Bakr children and the 547 other children killed in Gaza last summer, etc. Let them show inventiveness: the French people, and Paris in particular, have always had enough to spare. This has been shown again during summer 2014, when tens of thousands of Parisians defied the ban of the Paris Prefect of Police (the only one in the world!) to demonstrate in solidarity with Gaza.
I am Ali, 18 months, burned alive by a Jewish Israeli settler
Indeed, in this Charlie-pseudo-democracy, a little courage is also required, because we should expect to be bluntly arraigned by police – even beaten by the militiamen of the Jewish Defense League, considered as terrorist and banned in Israel and the United States, but having a storefront in France along with total impunity; anyone who wants to strike back for honour’s sake must make sure not to be dealing with police officers in civilian clothes, which won’t be easy – and then suffer up to 48 hours of police custody. These can even be embellished with false charges of outrages, violence, etc., which will nevertheless be solemnly attested by sworn-in liars – I speak with experience: I have not been in prison or appeared before a judge because the lies were too big and contradictory, but I could well have done; we must know that we are dealing with unscrupulous people without honour (they handed over the Jews and hunted and tortured the Resistance fighters with zeal to please the occupier, and if needed will do it again), but hardly shining lights… But Gaza does deserve that, and this is the price of dignity. I’ll be there, and I hope that many of us will make our voices heard.
Translated from French by Jenny Bright
Zionists provocatively dance over corpses in Paris:
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Conspiracy Denial
Lies are Unbekoming | January 27, 2026
In honour of Michael Parenti (1933–2026), who passed away on 24 January 2026 at the age of 92. He spent his life naming what power prefers to leave unnamed.
In 1837, Abraham Lincoln remarked: “These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people.”
Today, he would be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
That dismissal—reflexive, automatic, requiring no engagement with evidence—is not a mark of sophistication. It is a tell. The question worth asking is not whether conspiracies exist (they are a matter of public record and a recognised concept in law) but why acknowledging their existence provokes such reliable hostility. What work does the label “conspiracy theorist” actually do?
The late political scientist Michael Parenti spent decades answering that question. His conclusion was blunt: “’Conspiracy’ refers to something more than just illegal acts. It serves as a dismissive label applied to any acknowledgment of ruling-class power, both its legal and illegal operations.” The term functions not as a descriptor but as a weapon—a thought-terminating cliché that protects the powerful from scrutiny by pathologising those who scrutinise them.
Conspiracy denial, in Parenti’s analysis, is not skepticism. It is the opposite of skepticism. It is credulity toward power dressed up as critical thinking. As he wrote in Dirty Truths: “Just because some people have fantasies of conspiracies does not mean all conspiracies are imaginary.” … continue
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