Public bodies in Britain are to be prevented from boycotting “unethical” goods, such as those from illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine, under a plan expected to be announced later Monday, local media reported.
Publicly funded institutions such as local municipalities and universities will face “stiff penalties” if they bar products from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco or West Bank settlements, The Independent newspaper reported, citing ministers.
The proposals – due to be announced by Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock – are being put forward on the grounds that bans on products are harming community relations and fuelling anti-Semitism.
“The new guidance on procurement combined with changes we are making to how pension pots can be invested will help prevent damaging and counter-productive local foreign policies undermining our national security,” Hancock told The Independent.
Some public bodies around the U.K. have refused to buy goods from Israeli settlements in recent years and they would have to reverse those decisions under the plans.
In Leicester, a city in the East Midlands, elected officials agreed in 2014 that the municipality would not buy settlement produce. That year the devolved government in Scotland issued a notice discouraging trade and investment with settlements by Scottish councils.
The government’s plan was criticized as an attack on local democracy.
Amnesty International’s Economic Relations Program Director Peter Frankental said the proposal could encourage human rights abuses.
“All public bodies should assess the social and environment impacts of any company with whom they choose to enter into business relationships,” he told The Independent. “Where’s the incentive for companies to ensure there are no human rights violations such as slavery in their supply chains, when public bodies cannot hold them to account by refusing to award them contracts?”
Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights — lands occupied by Israel in 1967 — are considered illegal by the international community and a major impediment to peace with Palestinians.
February 15, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism | Human rights, Israel, Israeli settlement, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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Officials with the Israeli regime, which is already widely accused of supporting Takfiri militants wreaking havoc in Syria, have called for the partition of the Arab country along sectarian lines.
Ram Ben-Barak, the director general of Israel’s Intelligence Ministry, said the proposed breakup was “the only possible solution” to the conflict in Syria.
“I think that ultimately Syria should be turned into regions, under the control of whoever is there – the Alawites where they are, the Sunnis where they are,” Ben-Barak told Israel’s Army Radio on Sunday.
Israel’s Minister of Military Affairs Moshe Ya’alon, who was in Munich to meet with European counterparts and Jordan’s King Abdullah, also echoed Ben-Barak’s remarks.
“Syria as we have known it will not be united anew in the foreseeable future, and at some point I reckon that we will see enclaves, whether organized or not, formed by the various sectors that live and are fighting there,” he said in a statement on Sunday.
Ya’alon also voiced doubt that a ceasefire plan for Syria agreed upon recently would succeed.
After negotiations in Munich, diplomats from a working group of 17 countries, including the US, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, agreed Thursday to establish a temporary “cessation of hostilities” in Syria within a week.
The International Syria Support Group (ISSG) also called for rapid humanitarian access to besieged Syrian towns.
The Israeli officials’ statements come as reports say Israel has been supporting the militants fighting the government of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.
The Israeli regime has set up hospitals near the border with Syria to treat the injured militants coming in from the battlefield there. Locals in the occupied Golan Heights have also intercepted Israeli vehicles transporting injured militants on the road between al-Sheikh Mountain and the village of Majdal Sham.
The Israeli calls for dividing Syria was raised as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, two regional sponsors of militant groups in Syria, have in recent weeks voiced their interest in launching a ground operation inside the country.
On February 12, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told CNN that Riyadh is ready to deploy special forces to Syria if the US-led coalition, carrying out airstrikes in the country since September 2014, decides to take such a move.
The idea of a possible participation in ground operations in Syria was first raised on February 4 by Ahmed Asiri, a spokesman for the Saudi Defense Ministry.
Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has dispatched warplanes to the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, claiming that the move is in line with the fight against Daesh terrorists in neighboring Syria.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has said Ankara and Riyadh could launch a ground operation in Syria “if there is a strategy.”
The United States has welcomed the Saudi offer, while it has been met with strong criticism from Syria and its allies.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem has said that any “ground intervention on Syrian territory without government authorization would amount to an aggression that must be resisted.” He has also warned that potential aggressors would return home in a “wooden coffin.”
Russia, Iran and Iraq have also warned against the deployment of foreign ground forces in Syria.
The foreign-sponsored conflict in Syria, which flared up in March 2011, has killed some 470,000 people and left 1.9 million injured, according to the so-called Syrian Center for Policy Research.
February 15, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Da’esh, Israel, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United States, Zionism |
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Coercive Engineered Migration: Zionism’s War on Europe (Part 8 of an 11 Part Series)
It is particularly ironic that the Zionist-controlled media are pushing the agenda of multiculturalism in Europe while insisting on the right of Israel, the world’s only racist, apartheid state, to exist. At the same time, the conditions for this artificial, dystopian form of multiculturalism involve the destruction of some of the world’s most successful multi-racial states such as Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and, if they succeed, possibly Eritrea.
What we are witnessing here is a process of engineered acculturation where people are being uprooted, displaced and abandoned to the limitless tyranny of the market and commodity fetishism. The boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea are, to quote Freisleben again, ‘Rothshild’s slaughterships’, the slave-boats of Zionism’s New World Order.
Jacques Attali is one of France’s most respected Zionist penseur, and has been an advisor to successive French governments. He has referred to globalisation’s war against the nation-state as the ‘Somalisation of the world’. Attali has predicted that the Westphalian state will be destroyed during the epochal chaotic transition to a ‘gouvernement mondial’, a global state with Jerusalem as its capital. The idea might appear as utterly far-fetched to a reasonable person but Zionists are not reasonable people and it should be of deep concern that the world’s most powerful governments are being advised by such influential racist fanatics with overtly global ambitions.
At a meeting of World Jewish Congress in 2014, Attali referred to the Jews in France as a privileged class. Therefore, in order to prevent Muslim immigrants from developing resentment of this ethnocentric class rule, Attali suggested that rich Jews should help create a French Muslim petite-bourgeoisie. They should also, he argued, finance the Imams in order to prevent objections to Zionism. In other words, an elite of French Muslims should be groomed by Zionist Jews so that they can keep the proletarian Muslims driven from North Africa and the Middle East by Zionism from overthrowing their Jewish overlords, both at home and in their countries of exile.
As the mass media drum up Islamophobia while glorifying Al-Qaida terrorists in Syria in the service of Zion, the ancillary regimes of the Jewish state, namely Qatar and Saudi Arabia, are zealously implementing Attali’s suggestions. Giulio Meotti for the Israeli National News reports:
A few days ago, the president of the Sorbonne, Philippe Boutry, signed an agreement with the attorney general of the state of Qatar. Within the next three years, the Islamic monarchy will finance the studies of hundreds of Syrian immigrants at the Parisian academic jewel. The Sorbonne has accepted 600,000 euros per year for three years.
Jacques Attali is on record stating the he does not consider non-Jews as human beings. The view that non-Jews are subhuman comes from Talmudism and does not necessarily represent the views of secular or Orthodox Jews. There IS a difference.
In France, the rise of the Marine Le Pen’s Front National is increasing steadily. Le Pen’s party appears to have the backing of a considerable portion of Zionism, which may account for why Le Pen’s image and stature has dramatically improved in the French press. The Front National is now being courted by prominent public intellectuals as the party of the oppressed. Its reactionary agenda is being marketed as ‘left-wing’ and ‘anti-globalisation’. Although Marine Le Pen opposed the war against Libya-as opposed to the Trotskyite Jean Luc Melanchon, who supported it- Le Pen has supported all other French wars of aggression in Africa, such as the French bombing and invasion of Mali and the French invasion of the Central African Republic. Nor has Le Penn ever called into question the French financial control of many Francophone neo-colonies in Africa. Le Pen is a populist playing up to popular discontent, exploiting the despair of the masses with empty slogans and a hefty dose of xenophobia, adroitly eschewing any reference to the real problem in France: capitalism.
The Europe depicted by Michel Houellebecq in his nightmarish novel Soumission– submission- where a French Muslim community led by a Muslim Brotherhood political party faces Marine Le Pen, is inexorably becoming a reality.
The French and European political scene is being irrevocably set for a Huntingtonian ‘clash of civilisations’. The clichéd theory of the ‘Jewish conspiracy’ against all non-Jews appears so crude and essentialist, so simple and vulgar in its implications, as to pass for irrational, urban and ‘anti-Semitic’ folklore, which, of course, it is. But objective and rational analysis of the centrality of the “Jewish question” and Zionism in the context of the current, global power-configuration is more urgent than ever. For if we do not bring Zionism under control, Zionism will eventually control us. This also applies to Jews. As Professor Yoakov Rabkin in his book Comprendre L’Etat d’Israel: Ideologie, Religion et societe, argues:
Paradoxically, Jewish nationalism is conceptually compatible with anti-Semitics theories, for it also postulates the impossibility of the Jew becoming a full and equal member of European society. History shows that the attraction of Zionism augments with the intensity of anti-Semitism or of economic difficulties, which explains the fact that relatively few British, American or French Jews have accepted the Zionist project since its inception up to to today and rarely leave their countries to settle in Israel. (p. 49)
In 2013, the European Jewish Parliament was set up by Jewish Ukrainian billionaire and (ironically) neo-Nazi Ihor Kolomoyski. While the organisation claims to be an NGO, it functions according to the structures of a veritable parliament. Why does an ethnic minority in Europe have its own parliament? Will other ethnic minorities in Europe receive their own parliament too? Perhaps Jews deserve their own European parliament because they are officially recognised as ‘Europe’s chosen people’, as its ‘constitutive minority’. That is what was said in the opening remarks of a conference held in Israel in 2013, sponsored by the Konrad Adenhauer Foundation.
Since the counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe of 1989, Jewish supremacy has accompanied the triumph of neo-liberalism and globalisation in Europe and the United States. This racial supremacy is being stealthily enshrined in US law. In 1991, the 102nd US Congress passed a resolution on the Noahide Laws. These are seven laws which Jewish rabbis believe should rule the lives of non-Jews, while Jews are to be ruled by a special set of laws.
The aforementioned racist Rabbi Manachem Mendel Schneerson, of the Lubavitch Movement, is praised in the resolution.
In 1995 Professor Ernest S. Easterly of the Southern University Law Centre presented a paper entitled “The Rule of Law and the New World Order” to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
An expert in Jewish law, Easterly is a zealous proponent of the Noahide Laws. He referred to the passing of the laws by the US congress in 1991 as “the first rays of dawn” which “evidence the rising of a yet unseen sun”. According to Micheal A. Hoffman: The Jewish Encyclopedia envisages a Noahide regime as a possible world order immediately preceding the universal reign of the Talmud.
While it is possible to simply ignore these policy documents as aberrant and marginal manifestations of ruling class ideology, they nonetheless constitute a sinister form of racism and religious bigotry, one which has, to a large extent, been unperceived.
Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont was ostracized and branded an ‘anti-Semite’ by the French media after he argued that it is high time Zionism was discussed and debated by non-Jews. Pro-Zionist and ostensibly ‘anti-Zionist’ literature and discourse tends to be dominated by Jews. And many Jewish ‘leftists’ tend to ignore the primacy of the Jewish Lobby in the formulation of US foreign policy. Instead, they advance the theory that Israel is simply a colony of the US empire, a tool with which to control the Middle East. This is patent nonsense to anyone who has studied what sociologist James Petras refers to as the ‘Zionist power-configuration’ in the United States, a power-configuration that extends to Europe and beyond.
During the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003 Jewish ‘leftists’ blamed the US ‘neo-cons’ and their desire to control Iraq’s oil for the drive towards war. Little or no mention was made of the fact that the real driving force behind the propaganda campaign for the war on Iraq came from the Jewish Lobby. This is amply documented in James Petras’ book The Power of Israel in the United States.
The strategic imperatives of the Zionist entity require the division and conquest of all Arab lands, so as to clear the Middle East in preparation for expanded Israeli colonisation, as stipulated in the Yinon Plan and the project of Eretz Israel-Greater Israel. Yet we were being told by many Jewish leftists that the Iraq invasion was a ‘war for oil,’ in spite of the fact that Western corporations had already acquired as much Iraq oil as they could manage.
Most anti-imperialist intellectuals in the Middle East will tell you that the war against Syria is a proxy-war waged by the Jewish state in order to create the conditions of a ‘New Middle East’ a euphemism for Greater Israel. Yet, many Jewish critics of US policy in Syria insist that it is the United States (plus Israel). An historical analogy might be helpful here. For centuries Ireland was colonised by the British Empire. Irish farmers paid rent to British aristocrats who had dispossessed them. Ireland was impoverished from debt. Although some Irishmen played an important role in the British army and served in high office throughout the empire, no one could claim that it was the ‘Irish Lobby’ in London who persuaded the British to conquer India, Hong Kong or Kenya or that the Irish nation somehow benefited from those conquests. Empires exploit colonies. Colonies do no exploit empires. If Israel were a colony of the United States, then we would surely see the emergence of an Israeli national liberation movement from US exploitation and colonisation! No such movement exists.
Zionist and crypto-Zionist Jews, through their control of both the corporate and much of the ‘alternative’ media, have managed to play down the centrality of the Jewish state’s role in America’s foreign wars and the importance of Jewish ‘hasbara’-propagandists and ‘sayonim’- helpers in that war effort. They ignore the fact that the only state which is really benefiting from America’s wars is Israel.
One might object to the thesis of Israel’s power over US foreign policy by citing the very clear differences expressed by Washington and Tel Aviv regarding Iran’s nuclear programme. Here, surely, one might argue, the United States is not following Israel’s agenda. While Israel’s Likudniks oppose the deal with Iran, more ‘moderate’ Zionists agree with the compromise. For Israel and the United States, the deal with Iran is but a stepping stone towards an infiltration and destabilisation of the Islamic Republic. Diplomatic and business contacts with the West will inevitably facilitate greater ideological and intelligence penetration of Iran by the US and Israel, while the proxy- terrorist groups fighting against Iran in Yemen, and Syria will continue to receive support from the Mossad and the CIA. In fact, the Zionist destabilisation of Iran has already begun. The Kurdish social movement in Iran is supported by Israel.
The litmus-test for distinguishing the genuine anti-Zionist from the crypto-Zionist is the question of Israel’s relationship to the United States and Europe. As for the independent
media, one will often find that the bullying and derisive techniques of the corporate media to discredit dissidents are employed to discredit those who would dig too deeply into the Zionist machinations of US imperialism. The fallacy of reductio ad absurdum is a particularly common technique. This usually involves discrediting an anti-Zionist theory by falsely implying that the proponent of that theory believes in the supernatural, that he is a deranged simpleton who believes the world is run by goblins and such like. Another technique is the reductio ad Hitlerum, whereby those who discuss the problem of Jewish supremacy are compared to racists such as Adolf Hitler.
Jewish ‘anti-imperialist’ pundits regularly become ‘leaders’ and ‘gurus’ of ‘leftist’ movements and often use their credibility to police how issues of ethnicity, class and nationalism are conceptualized and discussed. Once people among their ‘ranks’ probe too deeply into Zionist intrigue, Zionist racial supremacy, warning signals are promptly sent out of a ‘far right’ and ‘fascist’ infiltration of the ‘movement’, this in spite of the fact that ‘fascism’ is precisely what genuine anti-Zionists are denouncing.
Such techniques sometimes work but more often than not, they only draw more attention to the suspicion among non Jewish critics of Zionism that an attempt is being made by ‘leftist’ Jews to deflect attention from the real sources of power in the capitalist world order, namely the Zionist power configuration.
It is therefore important for such individuals to occasionally re-emphasise their ‘opposition’ to Israel. In this sense, the Jewish ‘anti-imperialist’ bears a striking resemblance to the spokesmen of the Islamic State.
For what is the Islamic State or Da’esh other than the foreign legion of Israel. They have achieved in little time what no other Israeli proxy-force could have achieved. They have cleared vast territories of Iraq and Syria, have attacked Hamas in Gaza and have conveniently occupied the Sinai peninsula in Egypt. It is perhaps more apposite than ironic that security experts also refer to the Mossad as ISIS, Israel’s Secret Intelligence Service. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that official UN documents confirm Israel is covertly supporting Da’esh.
Like the Jewish pseudo anti-imperialists, the spokesmen of the Islamic State always refer to their hatred for “America” and the “freedoms of Americans” as the reason for their crusade. They do not seem to be too concerned about Israel, except, of course, when they miraculously manage to stage terrorist attacks on European soil, which often take place in formerly Jewish owned properties. Such attacks foment Islamophobia and the notion that Jews are hated and in danger, an agenda which serves Zionist regional and global hegemonic ambitions. In this sense one could argue that both the Islamic State and crypto-Zionists serve the same purpose: constantly deflecting attention from Zionism by blaming Israel’s giant, stultified Leviathan — the United States of America.
• Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven,
February 14, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Africa, Da’esh, European Union, France, Israel, Libya, Middle East, Multiculturalism, New World Order, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yinon Plan, Zionism |
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WASHINGTON — On Sunday, Bernie Sanders endorsed President Barack Obama’s violent, expansive foreign policy in an effort to distance himself from accusations of inexperience in matters of war.
At the beginning of an interview on CBS’ “Face The Nation” between John Dickerson and the Vermont senator, Dickerson noted:
Senator, while you were in New York, North Koreans launched a long range missile. As President, you’d face that kind of thing all the time, very often. And what Secretary Clinton is saying is that you don’t have the experience to be ready for those kinds of challenges on day one.
Sanders responded:
Well, that’s what she said about Barack Obama in 2008, and it turned out not to be true. I am impressed by the quality of his foreign policy.
Sanders also emphasized his vote against the Iraq War, which he said was “most important foreign policy issue in modern history.”
Under Obama, the U.S. military has expanded its presence throughout the globe, with bases or military advisors found in over 100 countries. Africa, in particular, has been transformed into what military scholar and journalist Nick Turse called a “laboratory for a new kind of war.”
Sanders has also been clear that he supports Obama’s use of drones, despite the weapons’ track record of killing mostly civilians.
While he claims to be against income inequality and wasteful spending, the U.S. spends $3.1 billion annually on aid to Israel, despite the occupation of Palestine, and Sen. Sanders has supported this deadly conflict with his votes.
In another echo of Obama’s foreign policy, Sanders made it clear during the interview that he won’t seek to end the wars in the Middle East, but rather would shift more of the burden of fighting them to foreign forces.
“We’ve got to learn the lessons of Iraq,” Sanders told Dickerson, “and that is that the United States of America cannot do it alone. We have to work in coalition with major countries and with Muslim countries whose troops will be on the ground.”
He added: “My main concern, in terms of the Middle East, is the United States does not get involved in perpetual warfare.”
However, Obama’s military aid to the Middle East has supported a number of deadly conflicts that show no signs of ending, and may even contribute to the rise of extremism. Saudi Arabia, one of Washington’s closest Middle Eastern allies and a buyer of billions of dollars worth of U.S. arms annually, is embroiled in a deadly conflict in Yemen that’s killed over 6,000 people, including more than 2,800 civilians.
The Obama administration aided local forces in the destabilization Libya, leading to the rise of extremism in that country. Last month, the Pentagon began laying the groundwork for new military actions in Libya, in order to quell the rise of Daesh (an Arabic acronym for the group commonly known in the West as ISIS or ISIL), which has flooded into the power vacuum left after the overthrow of the Gadhafi government.
And in Syria, U.S. aid has gone to so-called “moderate” rebels that were often allies of Daesh or al-Qaida. These rebel allies helped destabilize the nation, leading to one of the worst refugee crises the world has ever seen.
Sanders’ remarks reflect his consistent and familiar approach to foreign wars. Shadowproof’s Dan Wright, in a recent analysis of Sanders’ proposed foreign policy, noted:
If it sounds like another term of Obama’s foreign policy, at least rhetorically, that’s because it is. Minus the inclusions of fair trade … it is nearly identical to the principles espoused by President Obama.
February 14, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Bernie Sanders, Israel, Libya, Middle East, Obama, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Israel’s frantic cocoon-weaving entered a new phase last week, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government stepped up efforts to stifle the last vestiges of dissent.
The military censor’s office, a draconian 70-year-old hangover from British rule in Palestine, extended its powers over Israeli press and TV to prominent blogs and social media.
The government has also threatened to revoke the press cards of “journalists and editors who are negligent in their work” – aimed at those who depart too obviously from the official line.
These moves follow culture minister Miri Regev’s announcement of a “loyalty law” that will deny state funding to artists and cultural institutions that are not sufficiently patriotic.
The education minister, settler leader Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, is reportedly preparing a raft of measures: a ban on access for pupils to literature and theatre not in line with government thinking, cuts to already very limited pluralism education and a new civics textbook vilifying the Palestinian minority.
In this atmosphere of inculcated ignorance and prejudice, it is easy for Mr Netanyahu to persuade public opinion that the recent wave of Palestinian protests and attacks, which have left more than 160 Palestinians and 29 Israelis dead, is solely the result of “incitement” from Palestinian officials and media. The Israeli right suggests that Palestinians who stab or drive cars at their oppressors, most often soldiers and settlers, are easily inflamed into action by words that appeal to ancient prejudice.
As the Israeli public discourse grows ever more detached from reality, Israel’s military commanders sound like an oasis of sanity – at least, by comparison.
The Israeli army actually has an operational interest in understanding what drives the Palestinian attacks – both to better counter them and to quieten growing government pressure for drastic responses, ones that could trigger the collapse of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority.
The military have sent intelligence officials into Israeli prisons to interview Palestinians who were not killed during their attacks, including children as young as 13.
What the army has found should surprise no one. Palestinians feel desperate and hopeless about a situation in which their own and their families’ freedoms are tightly restricted by a seemingly endless Israeli occupation.
The Palestinians behind the attacks – “lone wolves”, as Israelis call them – are often also facing extreme personal crises: suicidal thoughts, financial troubles or grief from a relative or friend’s death at Israel’s hands.
Few have had any experience of Israelis beyond the soldiers who mistreat them at checkpoints and during raids on their villages, and the settlers who lord it over them.
These findings have provoked a widening rift between the government and military.
Mr Netanyahu and his allies, drawing on the Israeli right’s traditional “iron wall” philosophy of ruthlessly crushing Palestinian dissent, have demanded greater privations for those under occupation to make them submit.
Last week, the government responded to an attack on a checkpoint by a Palestinian security official that injured three Israeli soldiers by locking down Ramallah, the Palestinians’ current economic and political capital.
The army effectively overruled that decision the next day. Gadi Eisenkott, the chief of general staff, has repeatedly warned that collective punishment will only fuel Palestinian anger and increase attacks.
He argues that more permits for Palestinian labourers to work in Israel, improving the Palestinian economy, is “an Israeli interest and a restraining factor”. He also prefers nurturing existing ties with the Palestinian security forces.
The military doves, however, are no less deluded than the political hawks.
The politicians want a collective stick to beat the Palestinians, one that will only intensify the conflict. The military, on the other hand, want individual perks for good behaviour to perpetuate the status quo a little longer.
What neither side wishes to talk about is the framework that creates Palestinian despair and anger: the occupation.
The personal crises identified by the military that spur Palestinians to violence – debt, depression and the killing of a friend or relative – are not a stroke of bad luck befalling individuals. They are an inevitable by-product of the systematic abuses inflicted on an entire occupied population.
Lawlessness from land-hungry Jewish settlers, severe movement restrictions, home demolitions and “policing” by a hostile army ensure Palestinians live as a subjugated people, slaves to ever harsher repression.
Anyone who challenges Israelis’ bubble of illusions faces the Israeli government’s wrath, as UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon found last month. When he pointed out the obvious – that it was “human nature to react to occupation” – Mr Netanyahu accused him of “stoking terror”.
Worse vitriol rained down on Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, when she made much the same point – and urged an investigation into the apparent executions of some of the Palestinians recently killed by the army. She was accused of “defamation” and officially barred from visiting Israel.
The blinkered assumptions of both Israel’s politicians and its generals mean neither can find a way out of the current mire.
Those who wish simply to perpetuate Palestinian suffering may triumph over those who would prefer to intensify it. Either way, Palestinians will continue to resist.
February 13, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Israel, Israeli settlement, Palestine, Zionism |
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BETHLEHEM – US President Barack Obama intends to sign a sweeping trade agreement including provisions that fail to differentiate between Israel and illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as discourage the boycott of Israeli goods.
The agreement — H.R. 644: Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 — was passed 75-20 on Thursday, and includes a provision that no US court can enforce judgement from a foreign court on a US citizen who “conducts business operations in Israel, or any territory controlled by Israel.”
The provision in effect allows US citizens immunity from conducting trade with illegal Israeli settlements, while its terminology fails to distinguish Israeli settlements from the state of Israel, violating the US’ official line against the construction of settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The White House in a statement released Thursday regarding the agreement said: “As with any bipartisan compromise legislation, there are provisions in this bill that we do not support.”
Of those provisions that the Obama administration did not support was a provision that “contravenes longstanding US policy towards Israel and the occupied territories, including with regard to Israeli settlement activity,” the statement said.
Despite the contravention, Obama plans to sign the agreement into law “to help strengthen enforcement of the rules and level the playing field for American workers and businesses.”
The agreement also includes a provision that in creating commercial partnerships with foreign countries, the US should “discourage politically motivated boycotts of, divestment from, and sanctions against Israel.”
The US government opposes the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and while US law requires that products made in illegal Israeli settlements may not be labeled “Made in Israel,” the law is rarely enforced.
Israel has been struggling to tackle a growing Palestinian-led boycott campaign which has had a number of high-profile successes abroad.
The BDS movement aims to exert political and economic pressure over Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in a bid to repeat the success of the campaign which ended apartheid in South Africa.
However, BDS initiatives have also faced pushback abroad, notably in France, where a court ruled in October that a group of activists advocating for BDS were guilty under French hate speech legislation.
February 13, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | Israel, Israeli settlement, Obama, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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The Syrian Army and its allies have clearly turned the tide in the Syrian war. The “facts on the ground” have changed dramatically for all the major players, and constitute a major reversal for all the forces that have tried to institute “regime change” in Syria, in violation of its sovereignty. The Geneva “Peace Conference” opposition delegation, composed of marginal figures representing a tiny fraction of the armed anti-government factions but ostensibly speaking for all of them, is now largely irrelevant. As the terrorists and foreign mercenaries and their families flee Aleppo, thousands or tens of thousands of Syrian civilians are returning to their homes in secure government held areas.
Given the reversal of fortunes for Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the US, NATO and their allies and mercenaries, what’s next? The sensible thing would be for all the actors to declare victory by finishing off the ostensible terrorist enemy and accepting a face saving solution that includes a Syrian government commitment to reform, with expertise provided by a friendly international team of experts that puts Russia, the US, Europe, Iran and perhaps even Saudi Arabia on the same side.
But this is not the advice we are hearing from the advisers that got us into this mess in the first place, and who are disappointed that Syria might not go the way of Iraq, Libya and Somalia after all. They are suggesting that a more and bigger war is the way to complete the job of turning Syria into a failed state. Such a war would involve an invasion of Turkish forces amassed and poised on the border, direct intervention by Saudi forces, US and perhaps other NATO ground forces, and potentially Israeli forces as well.
Such a plan risks putting these forces directly in confrontation with Syrian and Russian units and objectives. It is a recipe for great power confrontation on a scale rarely seen since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Rarely, but not totally. When Turkey shot down a Russian aircraft on November 24, 2015, only very cool Russian heads prevented the unthinkable by deciding that the Russian response might best be served cold.
That dish is now on the table, and it is for the Turks and bigger warmongers to decide if they want to risk Armageddon by unleashing even greater forces of destruction. There are players that would love to do so; they profit from death, misery and cataclysm, and would never miss such an opportunity. Chief among them are the arms merchants that dominate in the US and Israel, the neoconservative movement, also heavily subsidized by Israel and its Zionist lobbies in other countries, and by Israel’s investment in weakening all potential adversaries. Saudi Arabia has decided that it has much the same adversaries and has therefore thrown its lot in with Israel. The Erdogan administration in Turkey finds that its interests, including territorial aggrandizement, are congruent, and US objectives are defined by the neoconservative movement and the Israel Lobby, which have kidnapped US strategic policy in this regard, to the dismay of the Foreign Service, intelligence and military professional core of the American government.
The Syria Solidarity Movement suggests that further escalation is not a solution, but that the application of international law can bring the hostilities to a close. Astonishingly, this a war in which there are few declared enemies. Of the many parties and their sponsored combatants, only the armed groups and the Syrian government have declared themselves to be enemies, unless you count the insincere protestations that “terrorist” groups are also enemies of the same nations that are aiding and abetting them.
Syria is still recognized universally and diplomatically as a sovereign state, and under international law no power may interfere in its security considerations except by invitation from the recognized government of that state. To seek “regime change” (overthrow) is strictly illegal under international law, and prohibited by the United Nations. Governments that are pursuing such an objective should be sanctioned by the UN, although there is no realistic possibility of such action.
The Syria Solidarity Movement believes that it is time to complete the expulsion of the terrorist and mercenary forces that have been attacking Syria for the last five years. This can be accomplished by denying all support of arms and funding from the US, Europe, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel and other countries. In addition, these countries can choose to either cooperate with the Syrian government and its allies to rid Syria of this scourge, or at least not interfere while Syrian, Russian and other allied forces complete the job. In this case, Syria can resume its role of providing government services and representation for its people, and its people can resume shaping their own government without outside interference.
It is time to end this ill-advised adventurism, and to put to flight the rascals and criminals, not only in Syria but also inside the countries whose strategic policies have been hijacked by gangs who are in many respects worse than those who bring beheadings and crucifixions to our computer screens.
The Syria Solidarity Movement
ILLEGAL USE OF OUR NAME: Counterpunch recently published an article from an individual claiming to be from “Syria Solidarity UK”. This constitutes infringement of the use of the name of the Syria Solidarity Movement and a misrepresentation of who we are. We wish to caution all persons and organizations against the fraudulent use of our name, even if published in good faith as a result of information provided by third parties. We are pursuing legal remedy and would not wish anyone to unnecessarily incur liability.
Paul Larudee is one of the founders of the Free Gaza and Free Palestine Movements and an organizer in the International Solidarity Movement.
February 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Israel, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United States, Zionism |
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MEMO | February 11, 2016
A delegation from the European Parliament was blocked by the Israeli authorities from entering Gaza on Tuesday, the EU said in a statement.
The lawmakers, who are part of the working group of the European Parliament Delegation for relations with Palestine, arrived in Jerusalem on Monday and was due to visit Gaza to assess the destruction caused in the 2014 conflict and the reconstruction efforts funded by the European Union.
According to the statement, a copy of which was sent to MEMO’s reporter in Gaza, no justification was given to explain the refusal.
Delegation Chair Irish MEP Martina Anderson stated: “The systematic denial by Israel of access to Gaza to European Parliament delegations is unacceptable. The European Parliament has not been able to access Gaza since 2011.”
Anderson added: “This raises questions: what does the Israeli government aim to hide? We shall not give up on the Gazan people.”
The Delegation was led by Anderson and included six other lawmakers: Margrete Auken (Vice-Chair of Delegation, Greens), Roza Thun (EPP), Eugen Freund (S&D), Patrick Le Hyaric (GUE/NGL), Rosa D’Amato (EFDD) and Konstantinos Papadakis (NI).
February 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | European Union, Gaza, Israel, Palestine |
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Benjamin Netanyahu pets his dog Kaia, a biter, at the Prime Minster’s residence in Jerusalem. (Credit: Facebook)
“Anyone who approaches the Zionist problem in a moral aspect is not a Zionist.” – Moshe Dayan, quoting David Ben-Gurion
Ha’aretz correspondent Barak Ravid reported yesterday:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a tour to the construction site of a barrier on the eastern border on Tuesday that he wishes to surround the country with fences and barriers “to defend ourselves against wild beasts” that surround Israel.
Dehumanization of one’s real or perceived adversaries, often in the form of animalization, has long been a hallmark of propaganda. As Netanyahu reinforces Israel’s garrison mentality, he continues building a literal fortress by extending the apartheid wall further around the Zionist state, promising more division, segregation, discrimination, and violence.
“For most human beings, it takes an awful lot to allow them to kill another human being,” Anthony Pratkanis, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told ABC News back in 2003, as the United States was gearing up to invade Iraq. “The only way to do it is to justify the killing, to make the enemy look as evil as possible.”
The report also quoted Hayward communications professor James Forsher, an expert on propaganda films. “The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize,” Forsher explained. “When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it. That is why during World War II, a lot of caricatures became animals… You can kill a monkey a lot more easily than you can kill a neighbor.”
Nazi dehumanization of Jews as “vermin” to be exterminated and American anti-Japanese caricatures of rats and snakes from the 1940s are especially grotesque, but the phenomenon was around long before that. Anti-Tsarist and, subsequently, anti-Soviet propaganda often employed the image of an octopus, spreading its imperial tentacles across the globe. During World War I, Germany was depicted a crazed, club-wielding gorilla in a U.S. Army poster encouraging enlistment.
In their 1994 book, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam note that the common colonial/racist trope of “animalization” was “rooted in a religious and philosophical tradition which drew sharp boundaries between the animal and the human” and “renders the colonized as wild beasts… projected as body rather than mind.”
Zionist colonists and Israeli officials have for years employed this type of rhetoric to dehumanize those they seek to forcibly displace, dispossess, disenfranchise, oppress, occupy and subjugate. The Zionist project is always presented as a bulwark of civilization against the savagery and barbarism of the brutish Eastern, Arab, and/or Muslim hordes; the settlement on the hill; the light amidst the darkness; the “villa in the jungle,” as Ehud Barak once said.
“At the end, in the State of Israel, as I see it, there will be a fence that spans it all,” Netanyahu fantasized yesterday. “I’ll be told, ‘this is what you want, to protect the villa?’ The answer is yes. Will we surround all of the State of Israel with fences and barriers? The answer is yes. In the area that we live in, we must defend ourselves against the wild beasts.”
The animalization of Palestinians, and other perceived enemies, in Israeli rhetoric goes back decades.
Dogs, Animals, Roaches, Grasshoppers and Worms
Shortly after Israel seized military control over the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan told officials in his center-left political party, Rafi, that unless Palestinians in the newly-occupied territories make “peace” with Israel, they “shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.”
On June 8, 1982, two days after the Israel invaded Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivered remarks before the Knesset justifying the military assault as a defense of Jewish lives worldwide. Begin insisted that the widespread rallying cry of terrorists around the globe was that “there is no innocent Jew. Every Jew is doomed – he must be killed.” In response, he declared, “This terror must be eradicated.” Setting Jewish people apart from the rest of humanity, Begin said:
The fate of a million and half a million Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.
In April 1983, outgoing Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan (who was losing his post due to his responsibility for the 1982 Sabra-Shatila Massacre) reportedly told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “The Arabs will never win over us by throwing stones. Our response must be a nationalist Zionist response. For every stone that’’s thrown, we will build ten settlements. If 100 settlements will exist, and they will, between Nablus and Jerusalem, stones will not be thrown. If this will be the situation, then the Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged roaches in a bottle.”
During the First Intifada, on March 31, 1988, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told reporters at the ruins of an ancient Herodian fortress in the occupied West Bank, “Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls,” adding that Palestinians who resist the Israeli occupation “are like grasshoppers compared to us.”
In late 2004, Yehiel Hazan, a Likud minister and leader of the biggest settler lobbying group, declared on the floor of the Knesset, “The Arabs are worms. You find them everywhere like worms, underground as well as above,” adding, “Until we understand that we’re doing business with a nation of assassins and terrorists who don’t want us here, there will be no let up. These worms have not stopped attacking Jews for a century.”
On June 30, 2012, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party posted a Facebook message that identified “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and calling for the total elimination of Palestine, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” The post, alleged written years ago by now-deceased settler leader Uri Elitzur, added that Palestinian mothers should be executed for giving birth to “little snakes,” that is, Palestinian children. Less than a year later, Netanyahu appointed Shaked to be Israel’s Minister of Justice.
Netanyahu, too, has a penchant for animal allusions when speaking about those he despises most, be they Palestinians, Iranians, or Muslims, in general.
Insatiable Crocodile
While a possibly apocryphal quote has then-Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak saying in August 2000, “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more,” Netanyahu brought the reptilian analogy up to date when, during a typically verbose and combative speech before the UN General Assembly in September 2011, he said:
[Israel’s] critics continue to press Israel to make far-reaching concessions without first assuring Israel’s security. They praise those who unwittingly feed the insatiable crocodile of militant Islam as bold statesmen. They cast as enemies of peace those of us who insist that we must first erect a sturdy barrier to keep the crocodile out, or at the very least jam an iron bar between its gaping jaws.
Netanyahu probably didn’t realize he was channeling his fellow apartheid champion, P.W. Botha, who led South Africa from 1978 to 1989, and is credited with complaining that “the free world wants to feed South Africa to the red crocodile [Communism], to appease its hunger.” Botha, incidentally, was widely known by the Afrikaans nickname Die Groot Krokodil, or “The Big Crocodile.”
Nuclear Duck
The following March, in one of his most tedious diatribes about the non-existent threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu told attendees at AIPAC’s annual conference that Iran’s fully safeguarded uranium enrichment facilities and medical research reactor were actually a cover for a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
Ladies and Gentlemen, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then what is it? That’s right, it’s a duck – but this duck is a nuclear duck. And it’s time the world started calling a duck a duck.
Quack.
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Appearing on Face The Nation on July 14, 2013, Netanyahu decried Iranian president-elect Hassan Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” whose devious Persian strategy is to “smile and build a bomb.” He repeated this description to a group of U.S. lawmakers the following month.
On October 1, 2013, Netanyahu returned to the UN General Assembly and accused Rouhani of being a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“Rouhani doesn’t sound like Ahmadinejad,” Netanyahu wailed. “But when it comes to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the only difference between them is this: Ahmadinejad was a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Rouhani is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a wolf who thinks he can pull the eyes — the wool over the eyes of the international community.”
Fittingly, Netanyahu’s faithful lapdog, Yuval Steinitz, also took to the media in July and September that year to describe Rouhani the same way.
February 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Seeing the government in Damascus as too far to the left, Washington has been trying to orchestrate a regime change in Syria since at least 2003
Documents prepared by US Congress researchers as early as 2005 revealed that the US government was actively weighing regime change in Syria long before the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, challenging the view that US support for the Syrian rebels is based on allegiance to a “democratic uprising” and showing that it is simply an extension of a long-standing policy of seeking to topple the government in Damascus. Indeed, the researchers made clear that the US government’s motivation to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is unrelated to democracy promotion in the Middle East. In point of fact, they noted that Washington’s preference is for secular dictatorships (Egypt) and monarchies (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.) [1] The impetus for pursuing regime change, according to the researchers, was a desire to sweep away an impediment to the achievement of US goals in the Middle East related to strengthening Israel, consolidating US domination of Iraq, and fostering free-market, free enterprise economies. Democracy was never a consideration.
The researchers revealed further that an invasion of Syria by US forces was contemplated following the US-led aggression against Iraq in 2003, but that the unanticipated heavy burden of pacifying Iraq militated against an additional expenditure of blood and treasure in Syria. [2] As an alternative to direct military intervention to topple the Syrian government, the United States chose to pressure Damascus through sanctions and support for the internal Syrian opposition.
The documents also revealed that nearly a decade before the rise of Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra that the US government recognized that Islamic fundamentalists were the main opposition to the secular Assad government and worried about the re-emergence of an Islamist insurgency that could lead Sunni fundamentalists to power in Damascus. A more recent document from the Congress’s researchers describes a US strategy that seeks to eclipse an Islamist take-over by forcing a negotiated settlement to the conflict in Syria in which the policing, military, judicial and administrative functions of the Syrian state are preserved, while Assad and his fellow Arab nationalists are forced to leave office. The likelihood is that if this scenario plays out that Assad and his colleagues will be replaced by biddable US surrogates willing to facilitate the achievement of US goals.
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In 2005, Congress’s researchers reported that a consensus had developed in Washington that change in Syria needed to be brought about, but that there remained divisions on the means by which change could be effected. “Some call for a process of internal reform in Syria or alternatively for the replacement of the current Syrian regime,” the report said. [3] Whichever course Washington would settle on, it was clear that the US government was determined to shift the policy framework in Damascus.
The document described the Assad government as an impediment “to the achievement of US goals in the region.” [4] These goals were listed as: resolving “the Arab-Israeli conflict;” fighting “international terrorism;” reducing “weapons proliferation;” inaugurating “a peaceful, democratic and prosperous Iraqi state;” and fostering market-based, free enterprise economies. [5]
Stripped of their elegant words, the US objectives for the Middle East amounted to a demand that Damascus capitulate to the military hegemony of Israel and the economic hegemony of Wall Street. To be clear, what this meant was that in order to remove itself as an impediment to the achievement of US goals—and hence as an object of US hostility—Syria would have to:
o Accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state on territory seized from Palestinians, and quite possibly also Syrians and Lebanese, possibly within borders that include the Golan Heights, annexed from Syria by Israel in 1987 and occupied by Israel since 1967.
o End its support for militant groups seeking Palestinian self-determination and sever its connections with the resistance organization Hezbollah, the main bulwark against Israeli expansion into Lebanon.
o Leave itself effectively defenceless against the aggressions of the United States and its Middle East allies, including Israel, by abandoning even the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction (while conceding a right to Israel and the United States to maintain vast arsenals of WMD.)
o Terminate its opposition to US domination of neighboring Iraq.
o Transform what the US Congress’s researchers called Syria’s mainly publicly-owned economy, “still based largely on Soviet models,” [6] into a sphere of exploitation for US corporations and investors.
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US government objections to Syrian policy, then, can be organized under three US-defined headings:
o Terrorism.
o WMD.
o Economic reform.
These headings translate into:
o Support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups.
o Self-defense.
o Economic sovereignty.
Terrorism (support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups)
The researchers noted that while Syria had “not been implicated directly in an act of terrorism since 1986” that “Syria has continued to provide support and safe haven for Palestinian groups” seeking self-determination, allowing “them to maintain offices in Damascus.” This was enough for the US government to label Syria a state sponsor of terrorism. The researchers went on to note that on top of supporting Palestinian “terrorists” that Damascus also supported Lebanese “terrorists” by permitting “Iranian resupply via Damascus of the Lebanese Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah in Lebanon.” [7]
US Secretary of State Colin Powell travelled to Damascus on May 3, 2003 to personally issue a demand to the Syrian government that it sever its connections with militant organizations pursuing Palestinian self-determination and to stop providing them a base in Damascus from which to operate. In “testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 12, 2004, Powel complained that ‘Syria has not done what we demanded of it with respect to closing permanently of these offices and getting these individuals out of Damascus’.”
The Syrian government rejected the characterization of Hezbollah and Palestinian militants as “terrorists,” noting that the actions of these groups represented legitimate resistance. [8] Clearly, Washington had attempted to discredit the pursuit of Palestinian self-determination and Lebanese sovereignty by labelling the champions of these causes as terrorists.
WMD (self-defense)
“In a speech to the Heritage Foundation on May 6, 2002, then US Under Secretary (of State John) Bolton grouped Syria with Libya and Cuba as rogue states that… are pursuing the development of WMD.” [9] Later that year, Bolton echoed his earlier accusation, telling the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Bush administration was very concerned about Syrian nuclear and missile programs. By September 2003, Bolton was warning of a “range of Syrian WMD programs.” [10]
Syria clearly had chemical weapons (now destroyed), though hardly in the same quantities as the much larger arsenals of the United States, Russia and (likely) its regional nemesis, Israel. [11] Citing the Washington Post, Congress’s researchers noted that Syria had “sought to build up its CW and missile capabilities as a ‘force equalizer’ to counter Israeli nuclear capabilities.” [12] It should be noted, however, that the idea that chemical weapons can act as a force equalizer to nuclear weapons is not only untenable, but risible. In WWI it took 70,000 tons of gas to produce as many fatalities as were produced at Hiroshima by a single US atom bomb. [13] To have any meaning at all, the concept of WMD must include weapons that kill massive numbers of people (nuclear weapons) and exclude those that don’t (chemical weapons.) Otherwise, it is a propaganda term used to magnify the non-threat posed by countries seeking independence outside the US orbit which have CW and biological weapons, but which weapons are no match for the United States’ nuclear weapons and are dwarfed by the Pentagon’s own CW and BW arsenals. Deceptively labelling these weapons as WMD, makes a non-threat a large threat that must be dealt with through military intervention and thereby provides a public relations rationale for a war of aggression.
As to the substance of Bolton’s assertion that Syria had a wide range of WMD programs, the CIA was unable to produce any evidence to corroborate his claim. Alfred Prados, author of a 2005 Congressional Research Service report titled “Syria: U.S. Relations and Bilateral Issues,” listed CIA assessments of Syrian nuclear and BW programs but none of the assessments contained any concrete evidence that Syria actually had such programs. For example, the CIA noted that it was “monitoring Syrian nuclear intentions with concern” but offered nothing beyond “intentions” to show that Damascus was working to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. Prados also noted that Syria had “probably also continued to develop a BW capability,” this based on the fact that Damascus had “signed, but not ratified, the Biological Weapons Convention.” Prados conceded that “Little information is available on Syrian biological programs.”
US president George H.W. Bush is responsible for rendering the concept of WMD meaningless by expanding it to include chemical agents. Before Bush, WMD was a term to denote nuclear weapons or weapons of similar destructive capacity that might be developed in the future. Bush debased the definition in order to go to war with Iraq. He needed to transform the oil-rich Arab country from being seen accurately as a comparatively weak country militarily to being seen inaccurately as a significant threat because it possessed weapons now dishonestly rebranded as being capable of producing mass destruction. It was an exercise in war propaganda.
In 1989, Bush pledged to eliminate the United States’ chemical weapons by 1999. Seventeen years later, the Pentagon is still sitting on the world’s largest stockpile of militarized chemical agents. US allies Israel and Egypt also have chemical weapons. In 2003, Syria proposed to the United Nations Security Council that the Middle East become a chemical weapons-free zone. The proposal was blocked by the United States, likely in order to shelter Israel from having to give up its store of chemical arms. Numerous calls to declare the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone have also been blocked by Washington to shelter Israel from having to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Bolton, it will be recalled, was among the velociraptors of the Bush administration to infamously and falsely accuse Saddam Hussein’s Iraq of holding on to WMD that the UN Security Council had demanded it dismantle. In effect, Iraq was ordered to disarm itself, and when it did, was falsely accused by the United States of still being armed as a pretext for US forces to invade the now defenceless country. Bolton may have chosen to play the same WMD card against Syria for the same reason: to manufacture consent for an invasion. But as Congress’s researchers pointed out, “Although some officials… advocated a ‘regime change strategy’ in Syria” through military means, “military operations in Iraq… forced US policy makers to explore additional options,” [14] rendering Bolton’s false accusations academic.
Since the only legitimate WMD are nuclear weapons, and since there is no evidence that Syria has even the untapped capability of producing them, much less possesses them, Syria has never been a WMD-state or a threat to the US goal of reducing WMD proliferation. What’s more, the claim that Washington holds this as a genuine goal is contestable, since it has blocked efforts to make the Middle East a chemical- and nuclear-weapons-free zone, in order to spare its protégé, Israel. It would be more accurate to say that the United States has a goal of reducing weapons proliferation among countries it may one day invade, in order to make the invasion easier. Moreover, there’s an egregious US double-standard here. Washington maintains the world’s largest arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but demands that countries it opposes should abandon their own, or forswear their development. This is obviously self-serving and has nothing whatever to do with fostering peace and everything to do with promoting US world domination. One US grievance with Assad’s Syria, then, is that it refused to accept the international dictatorship of the United States.
Economic reform (economic sovereignty)
In connection with Syria impeding the achievement of US goals in the Middle East, the Congressional Research Service made the following points in 2005 about the Syrian economy: It is “largely state-controlled;” it is “dominated by… (the) public sector, which employs 73% of the labour force;” and it is “still based largely on Soviet models.” [15] These departures from the preferred Wall Street paradigm of free markets and free enterprise appear, from the perspective of Congress’s researchers, to be valid reasons for the US government to attempt to bring about “reform” in Syria. Indeed, no one should be under the illusion that the US government is prepared to allow foreign governments to exercise sovereignty in setting their own direction economically. That this is the case is evidenced by the existence of a raft of US sanctions legislation against “non-market states.” (See the Congressional Research Service 2016 report, “North Korea: Economic Sanctions,” for a detailed list of sanctions imposed on North Korea for having a “Marxist-Leninist” economy.)
+++
To recapitulate the respective positions of Syria and the United States on issues of bilateral concern to the two countries:
On Israel. To accept Israel’s right to exist as a settler state on land illegitimately acquired through violence and military conquest from Palestinians, Lebanese (the Shebaa Farms) and Syrians (Golan), would be to collude in the denial of the fundamental right of self-determination. Damascus has refused to collude in the negation of this right. Washington demands it.
On Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the principal deterrent against Israeli territorial expansion into Lebanon and Israeli aspirations to turn the country into a client state. Damascus’s support for the Lebanese resistance organization, and Washington’s opposition to it, places the Assad government on the right side of the principle of self-determination and successive US governments on the wrong side.
On WMD. Syria has a right to self-defense through means of its own choosing and the demand that it abandon its right is not worthy of discussion. The right to self-defense is a principle the United States and its allies accept as self-evident and non-negotiable. It is not a principle that is valid only for the United States and its satellites.
On opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. The 2003 US-led aggression against Iraq was an international crime on a colossal scale, based on an illegitimate casus belli, and a fabricated one at that, and which engendered massive destruction and loss of life. It was the supreme international crime by the standards of the Nuremberg trials. Applying the Nuremberg principles, the perpetrators would be hanged. US aggression against Iraq, including the deployment of “sanctions of mass destruction” through the 1990s, which led to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and was blithely accepted by then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “worth it,” was undertaken despite the absence of any threat to the United States. The deliberate creation of humanitarian calamities in the absence of a threat, as a matter of choice and not necessity, in pursuit of economic gain, is an iniquity on a signal scale. What, then, are we to think of a government in Damascus that opposed this iniquity, and a government in Washington that demands that Damascus reverse its opposition and accept the crime as legitimate?
Whatever its failings, the Assad government has unambiguously adopted positions that have traditionally been understood to be concerns of the political left: support for self-determination; public ownership and planning of the economy; opposition to wars of aggression; and anti-imperialism. This is not to say that on a spectrum from right to left that the Assad government occupies a position near the left extreme; far from it. But from Washington’s point of view, Damascus is far enough to the left to be unacceptable. Indeed, it is the Syrian government’s embrace of traditional leftist positions that accounts for why it is in the cross-hairs of the world’s major champion of reactionary causes, the United States, even if it isn’t the kind of government that is acceptable to Trotskyists and anarchists.
+++
In 2003, the Bush administration listed Syria as part of a junior varsity axis of evil, along with Cuba and Libya, citing support in Damascus for Hezbollah and groups engaged in armed struggle to achieve Palestinian self-determination. [16] An invasion of Syria following the US take-over of Iraq in 2003 was contemplated, but was called off after the Pentagon discovered its hands were full quelling resistance to its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. As an alternative to direct military intervention to topple the Syrian government, the United States chose to pressure Assad through sanctions and by strengthening the opposition in Syria, hoping either to force Assad to accept Israel’s territorial gains, end support for Hezbollah and Palestinian militant groups, and to remake the economy—or to yield power. However, as Congress’s researchers reveal, there were concerns in Washington that if efforts to bolster the opposition went too far, Assad would fall to “a successor regime (which) could be led by Islamic fundamentalists who might adopt policies even more inimical to the United States.” [17]
On December 12, 2003, US president George W. Bush signed the Syria Accountability Act, which imposed sanctions on Syria unless, among other things, Damascus halted its support for Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance groups and ceased “development of weapons of mass destruction.” The sanctions included bans on exports of military equipment and civilian goods that could be used for military purposes (in other words, practically anything.) This was reinforced with an additional (and largely superfluous) ban on US exports to Syria other than food and medicine, as well as a prohibition against Syrian aircraft landing in or overflying the United States. [18]
On top of these sanctions, Bush imposed two more. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the US Treasury Department ordered US financial institutions to sever connections with the Commercial Bank of Syria. [19] And under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the US president froze the assets of Syrians involved in supporting policies hostile to the United States, which is to say, supporting Hezbollah and groups fighting for Palestinian self-determination, refusing to accept as valid territorial gains which Israel had made through wars of aggression, and operating a largely publicly-owned, state-planned economy, based on Soviet models. [20]
In order to strengthen internal opposition to the Syrian government, Bush signed the Foreign Operations Appropriation Act. This act required that a minimum of $6.6 million “be made available for programs supporting democracy in Syria… as well as unspecified amounts of additional funds (emphasis added).” [21]
By 2006, Time was reporting that the Bush administration had “been quietly nurturing individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar Assad.” Part of the effort was being run through the National Salvation Front. The Front included “the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization that for decades supported the violent overthrow of the Syrian government.” Front representatives “were accorded at least two meetings” at the White House in 2006. Hence, the US government, at its highest level, was colluding with Islamists to bring down the Syrian government at least five years before the eruption of protests in 2011. This is a development that seems to have escaped the notice of some who believe that violent Islamist organizations emerged only after March 2011. In point of fact, the major internal opposition to secular Syrian governments, both before and after March 2011, were and are militant Sunni Islamists. Syria expert Joshua Landis told Time that White House support for the Syrian opposition was “apparently an effort to gin up the Syrian opposition under the rubric of ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘election monitoring,’ but it’s really just an attempt to pressure the Syrian government into doing what the United States wants.” [22]
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The US Congress researchers noted that despite “US calls for democracy in the Middle East, historically speaking, US policymakers” have tended to favor “secular Arab republics (Egypt) and Arab monarchies (Jordan and Saudi Arabia.)” [23] They noted too that since “the rise of political Islam as an opposition vehicle in the Middle East decades ago, culminating in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, US policymakers have been concerned that secular Arab dictatorships like Syria would face rising opposition from Islamist groups seeking their overthrow.” [24] “The religiously fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood,” which the Bush administration enlisted to pressure the Assad government, had long been at odds with the secular Syrian government, the researchers noted. [25]
Today, Islamic State operates as one of the largest, if not the largest, rebel groups in Syria. A 2015 Congressional Research Service report cited an “unnamed senior State Department official” who observed:
[W]e’ve never seen something like this. We’ve never seen a terrorist organization with 22,000 foreign fighters from a hundred countries all around the world. To put it in context—again, the numbers are fuzzy—but it’s about double of what went into Afghanistan over 10 years in the war against the Soviet Union. Those Jihadi fighters were from a handful of countries.” [26]
Islamic State differs from other militant Islamist opponents of the Syrian government in seeking to control territory, not only in Syria, but in Iraq and beyond. As such, it constitutes a threat to US domination of Iraq and influence throughout the Middle East and north Africa. In contrast, ideologically similar groups, such as Jabhat al-Nusra, limit the scope of their operations to Syria. They, therefore, constitute a threat to the Syrian government alone, and have proved, as a consequence, to be more acceptable to Washington.
The US government has publicly drawn a distinction between Islamic State and the confined-to-Syria-therefore-acceptable rebels, seeking to portray the former as terrorists and the latter as moderates, regardless of the methods they use and their views on Islam and democracy. The deception is echoed by the US mass media, which often complain that when Russian warplanes target non-Islamic State rebels that they’re striking “moderates,” as if all rebels apart from Islamic State are moderates, by definition. US Director of Intelligence James Clapper acknowledged that “moderate” means little more than “not Islamic State.” He told the Council on Foreign Relations that “Moderate these days is increasingly becoming anyone who’s not affiliated with” Islamic State. [27]
The rebels are useful to the US government. By putting military pressure on Damascus to exhaust the Syrian army, they facilitate the achievement of the immediate US goal of “forcing a negotiated settlement to the conflict that will see President Assad and some his supporters leave office while preserving the institutions and security structures of the Syrian state,” [28] as Congress’s researchers summarize US strategy. Hence, Islamic State exists both as a useful instrument of US policy, and as a threat to US domination and control of Iraq and the broader Middle East. To Washington, the terrorist organization is a double-edged sword, and is treated accordingly. US airstrikes on Islamic State appear calculated to weaken the terrorist group enough that it doesn’t gain more territory in Iraq, but not so much that pressure is taken off Damascus. A tepid approach to fighting the hyper-sectarian terrorist group fits with US president Barack Obama’s stated goal of degrading and ultimately destroying Islamic State, which appears to mean destroying it only after it has served its purpose of exhausting the Syrian army. In the meantime, the anti-Shiite cut-throats are given enough latitude to maintain pressure on Syrian loyalists.
Congress’s researchers concur with this view. They conclude that “US officials may be concerned that a more aggressive campaign against the Islamic State may take military pressure off the” Syrian government. [29] This means that the US president is moderating efforts to destroy Islamic State to allow a group he decries as “simply a network of killers who are brutalizing local populations” [30] continue their work of brutalizing local populations. If he truly believed Islamic State was a scourge that needed to be destroyed, the US president would work with the Syrian government to expunge it. Instead, he has chosen to wield Islamic State as a weapon to expunge the Syrian government, in the service of building up Israel and fostering free market and free enterprise economies in the Middle East to accommodate US foreign investment and exports on behalf of his Wall Street sponsors. [31]
REFERENCES
1. Alfred B. Prados and Jeremy M. Sharp, “Syria: Political Conditions and Relations with the United States After the Iraq War,” Congressional Research Service, February 28, 2005.
2. Prados and Sharp.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Alfred B. Prados, “Syria: U.S. Relations and Bilateral Issues,” Congressional Research Service, March 13, 2006.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Israel signed the global treaty banning the production and use of chemical weapons, but never ratified it.
12. Ibid.
13. Stephen Gowans, “Rethinking Chemical Weapons,” what’s left, August 14, 2015.
14. Prados and Sharp.
15. Ibid.
16. Steve R. Weisman, “US threatens to impose penalties against Syrians,” The New York Times, April 14, 2003.
17. Prados and Sharp.
18. Prados.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Adam Zagorin, “Syria in Bush’s cross hairs,” Time, December 19, 2006.
23. Prados and Sharp.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Christopher M. Blanchard and Carla E. Humud, “The Islamic State and U.S. Policy,” Congressional Research Service, December 28, 2015.
27. James Clapper: US Director of Intelligence: http://www.cfr.org/homeland-security/james-clapper-global-intelligence-challenges/p36195
28. Blanchard and Humud.
29. Christopher M. Blanchard, Carla E. Humud Mary Beth D. Nikitin, “Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and U.S. Response,”Congressional Research Service,” October 9, 2015.
30. Blanchard and Humud.
31. Virtually every member of the Obama administration, past and present, is a member of the Wall Street-dominated Council on Foreign Relations, or additionally, has spent part of his or her career on Wall Street. Wall Street was a major source of Obama’s election campaign funding. The strong interlock between Wall Street and the executive branch of the US government is not unique to the Obama administration. See my “Aspiring to Rule the World: US Capital and the Battle for Syria,” what’s left, December 15, 2015.
February 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Hezbollah, Israel, Jabhat al-Nusra, Lebanon, Libya, Middle East, Palestine, Syria, United States, WMDs, Zionism |
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‘The politics of deflection’ (shoot the messenger, ignore the message) exposed
With obvious relish Richard Falk, former professor of international law at Princeton and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, has issued a well deserved slap on the wrist to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for his naivety. It follows Israel’s furious reaction to Ban’s remark to the Security Council that “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half-century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process”.
The usually timid Ban, suddenly emboldened, also called Israel’s illegal settlement building “an affront to the Palestinian people and to the international community”. He added: “Security measures alone will not stop the violence. They cannot address the profound sense of alienation and despair driving some Palestinians – especially young people.” Whereupon Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu, fresh from approving another 150 squatter homes on stolen Palestinian land, accused the Secretary General of giving a “tailwind to terror”.
Falk penned an open letter to Ban reminding him of his earlier attempts to get Falk dismissed from his UN job for speaking the same truths. “Having read of the vicious attacks on you for venturing some moderate, incontestable criticisms of Israel’s behaviour, I understand well the discomfort you clearly feel. What intrigues and appals me is that while I was Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine during the period 2008-2014, you chose to attack me personally in public on several occasions, joining with US and Israel diplomats calling for my dismissal and doing the utmost to undermine my credibility while discharging this unpaid UN job under difficult conditions.
“At the time, I was doing my best to bear witness to some of the same truths about Israel’s unlawful and immoral behavior that recently got you in similar hot water. My UN mandate was to report upon the reality of Israeli violations of international law while sustaining their apartheid regime of oppressive control over the Palestinian people.”
Referring to Ban’s concern that we are reaching “a point of no return” for the two-state solution and his reminder to the Security Council that the UN will “continue to uphold the right of Palestinians to self-determination”, Falk warns that, given present realities, self-determination must be understood as something more than just “another delusionary embrace of a diplomatically negotiated two-state solution”.
He points out that Israel’s leaders want the idea of a Palestinian state abandoned altogether and that reliance on such a discredited diplomatic path [a two-state solution] has resulted over and over again in severe encroachments on occupied Palestine and intense suffering for its people. “Clinging to the two-state mantra is not neutral. Delay benefits Israel, harms Palestine. There is every reason to believe that this pattern will continue as long as Israel is not seriously challenged diplomatically and by the sorts of growing pressures mounted by the international solidarity movement and the BDS campaign.”
February 9, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Ban Ki-moon, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Around 90,000 Palestinians remain displaced in the Gaza Strip, almost 18 months after the ceasefire that ended Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ offensive in 2014. Furthermore, the reconstruction or repair of homes of 74 percent of displaced families is yet to even start.
According to UN OCHA, living conditions for the more than 16,000 displaced families are characterised by “overcrowding, limited access to basic services, lack of privacy, tensions with host communities, risks due to unexploded ordnance and exposure to adverse weather.”
By the end of January 2016, only 15 percent of displaced families had been able to return to repaired or reconstructed homes. The repair and reconstruction of an additional 2,000 homes is ongoing, with many of these homes nearing completion.
Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip in July-August 2014 destroyed 11,000 homes and severely damaged or rendered uninhabitable an additional 6,800 homes.
February 9, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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The report also quoted Hayward communications professor James Forsher, an expert on propaganda films. “The secret in propaganda is that when you demonize, you dehumanize,” Forsher explained. “When you dehumanize, it allows you to kill your enemy and no longer feel guilty about it. That is why during World War II, a lot of caricatures became animals… You can kill a monkey a lot more easily than you can kill a neighbor.”
Nazi dehumanization of Jews as “vermin” to be exterminated and American anti-Japanese caricatures of rats and snakes from the 1940s are especially grotesque, but the phenomenon was around long before that. Anti-Tsarist and, subsequently, anti-Soviet propaganda often employed the image of an octopus, spreading its imperial tentacles across the globe. During World War I, Germany was depicted a crazed, club-wielding gorilla in a U.S. Army poster encouraging enlistment.
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